Here's something I've been thinking about. Most of us are walking around with stories worth telling from our own lives and their own experiences, and we talk ourselves out of sharing them. Sometimes we think no one will care about that, that's just my story. But Daniel Coyle has spent his career proving that instinct wrong. Daniel is the best selling author of The Talent Code and The Culture Code, and his new book Flourish is probably what are the most
dogg eared books I've read in a while. In this conversation, we get into how he finds and constructs stories that pull people in. We also get into the specific questions that create real connection, ones you can pull out the next time you're stuck in a sea of small talk. And he also gives me a concrete structure for building local community when you're craving something more than surface level friendships. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies.
For optimizing your date.
I'm your host, doctor, Amantha Imber Daniel. When I sat down to read your book, I feel like often with business books, you kind of go okay, I can kind of skim through the stories, and I'm just going to get to, you know, the practical stuff here. But I was so sucked in by your storytelling, as I have been with all your books, but particularly in Flourish, and I actually want to start with asking how do you
find such great stories to tell? And then my second part is how do you actually construct them in a way that really just sucks in the reader like it certainly did for me.
Ah, those are good questions. Thank you and thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here with you, And what a good way to start. I guess I pay attention to my own reaction to story. Like certain stories and they always end up being mysteries, but they contain a couple of ingredients. The first is a deep, deep mystery. They're getting it something that really has call to us some deep question. Why do some groups combine in ways
that seem allst magical and other groups fall apart? And those and I have a sucker like everybody for a good underdog story are a good unlikely story. So you kind of start with some structure where there's some surprise emerging. In the middle of that surprise is some mystery that is not abstract but is really just like relatable some mystery. That's the best mysteries are the ones that are right in front of your nose, Like you stir your cream
into your coffee and you see a pattern. It's like, why is it like that and not like some other way? Or why was Thanksgiving dinner so wonderful this year that it wasn't last year? Some kind of basic thing right there. And then the third thing I look for is access, Like I need to be able to have access to the people who are in this story. I can find out what really happened when those elements are there. When I'm responding, I find myself I'm leaning into this. Why
am I leaning into it? I have to ask that? And then is that a really a one time thing? Or is that something that is a present in everybody's life? Is everyone struggling with this issue? So every story has got somebody you're rooting for, some big obstacle on some transformation. Those three elements, and if the person we're rooting for is relatable, if the obstacle is also kind of mysterious and relatable, and the transformation is real, that's something to explore.
But then often some of the stories don't work out. I'd hate to show you my notebooks for this book. I mean, the book is maybe an inch thick, but I've got several feet of notebooks with stories that like, oh, that one doesn't quite fit, or that one's too much like this one.
I recently had a guest on that talked about some research from LinkedIn that said that storytelling is one of the five most important skills that people are going to need for the next few years. And you share a lot of stories from your own life in the book, and I'm wondering, how do you mind your own life for stories? Like are you constantly just recording things that happen in your day? What's your process around that?
It starts, I think with a process of reflection. There's such power in zooming out, Amantha. There's such power in sort of having a regular reflective practice, but also a practice that might let you look further than just the day that just passed to the weeks that just passed.
And at some point in this for some reason, I found myself drawing on a piece of paper like the shape of my life, and I ended up drawing you know, something that was a little bit like that, like, and it just got me thinking, is that that exercise got me thinking why did I end up here? So again we end up in that question of finding mysteries that don't really have a clear answer, and then using that energy of that question and that mystery, Well, I was going to be a doctor. How did I end up
being a writer? And so the surreality of that and the mystery of that is what got me to think about it. So that's one piece of it, and the other piece of it is kind of a courage thing. There's a reflexive response. We all have to say, oh, that's just my story. Nobody will care about that, you know, we all sort of feel and I feel that in a big way. Like at the end of this book, I tell a story about friendships that came about as a result of some of the things that I learned
through the process of writing this book. You know, every book changes you, and this book changed me. And so I really resisted that for a long time. I thought, Oh, that's just my story. Those are just my friends. That's not a big deal, right, We're kind of it's imposter syndrome,
you could call it. That we don't tend to look at our own lives the way other people would and to actually get yourself in a headspace where you can zoom out and say, wait a minute, that really is I'm not just sort of going down my belly button to sort of celebrate something. There really is something there. There's something that other people could relate to about being
in midlife and finding a new group of friendships. And so I guess my process was sort of like coming to grips with it myself, realizing there's something there, there's something worth telling, there's something universal about my experience, and then kind of testing it out like verbally, like I think, you don't know what's in a good story until you actually have to put it in the air and tell
it to someone. It can look good in your journal, it can look really pretty and transformative, but actually go tell someone and see how they respond. Tell it, Tell it again, see what is resonating. Stories are kind of these beautiful little machines, and they function on mystery and on tension, and locating those moments will help you tell the story better and your relationship with the story will change.
You'll start out thinking, oh, this is a story about friendship, and you'll realize that it's about a story about maybe truth or a story about fear.
So how then do you construct a story to I guess optimize the tension and mystery and those elements.
I think it was Aristotle who talked about it. For first, you begin at a question. You try to begin at some kind of juncture where there's a mystery. And it's like all movies, this is you. You begin at some moment, some moment where things are coming together, find that moment, and then back off and then show a even bigger mystery, right, And then so you've got two things happening at once. You've got what's going to happen at this moment, but
then you've got that's embedded in some larger story. Every story is a little bit different, but they all have that same internal structure of saying, here's a protagonist, here's an obstacle, and here's a transformation. And your last tool that you have is your sand paper to take away
everything that's not essential. So there's a temptation when we're telling a story to include everything, to include extras, to talk about this, but really, in the end you want to be very kind of ruthless and just put in the parts of the machine that are going to advance your story. Figure out what you're responding to. Are you responding to the fear in the story? Are you respire, you're rooting for someone in the story. What are you responding to? Name that and that will help you tell
it too. You know, if you want to get good to telling a story, the world has got a lot of places for you to go to school. Find your ten favorite stories and outline them and figure out what makes them tick and reduce them to bullet points, and then read it and then try to write it yourself by memory as much as you can put yourself in a position of constructing the stories you love. I know some writers that will just take their favorite passages and just type them, and it sounds kind of crazy and
woo woo. But to actually take your favorite passage and then type it and slow it down and write it, it gives you a feeling for how the story's moving and where the camera's going, and where the obstacle is and where your mind.
Is I reckon. The same could be said of asking good questions. And something that struck me about Flourish is that there were so many brilliant, reflective questions for readers to learn about and getting on like I just I made so many marks and underlinings and doggie as when I was reading Flourish. I would love to know which of the questions stayed with you.
It's been a slow journey. Like a lot of people, I have a lot of belief in answers and what this book taught me, I think the same as you. It's like, it's not about the answers, especially in an age when answers are like as cheap as tap water. It's like the question, like a great question, a question that I think about a lot, is what does your perfect day look like? I find myself thinking about that
a lot. My wife and I are newly empty nesters, so we have got this extra time in our schedule, and that question itself just inspires such deep thought and collaboration around it. You know, the question sends us out on this journey. And there's one that someone asked in the book, which was what would someone need to know about you in order to be your best friend? That's got me thinking too about like what do I really value?
What would I say? The question I end up using the most is one that I learned through the book, which is what's energizing you right now. Questions like that create this. You know, there's that phrase that you know, we've all heard a lot creating space, like we're going to create space. I never used to like that phrase, Amantha. I always felt kind of woo woo, And as a science journalist, I'm like, oh, come on, you're not creating space. Actually I was totally wrong. Creating space is so real
and what does that is a great question. So when I say what's energizing you right now, I'm really giving you this zone that you can play in, that you can share if you like, you can not share if you want. But it's creating the space for us to have a different kind of encounter than if I said what are you working on right now? Or if I said here's what I'm doing. What's made me realize what a precious resource and what a powerful tool those small, deep questions are. And the last one that I found
myself using is why does this matter to you? If you can carve out these little islands, these little places to stand with other people to ask, why does that matter to you that relationships happen in those moments? Life is not a productivity contest. It's a not a learning contest, and it's not an IQ test, it's a moment's thing. Relationships aren't machines. They happen in moments, and those moments are questions. There's spaces that people are creating to say,
why does this matter to you? What's your perfect day look like? What's energized right now? That's where relationships grow. And that's what I saw these flourishing places do with such virtuosic skill to say, we're going to carve out these places where we're going to interact in this way and form deep relationships and create meaning together.
I love those questions, and it's funny I think about those times, like you know, I think about how much I hate going to anything that resembles a networking event or a conference or something like that. And I'm sure
listeners can relate. I'm sure anyone can relate. And I think those questions of man their gold for just having in your pocket to make the event a whole lot more interesting, certainly for yourself, but probably for the other people that you meet, because so much of the time we're on the receiving end of such dull, uninspiring questions.
I know, I know it. We're not taught to ask questions in that way. Like we're in school, we're usually taught it's some more important to have an answer than to have a great question. And yet it's those questions that we end up. I don't know, they form relationships, They formed that kind of the shape of our lives. To encounter a great question is such a powerful energy source. It's like great question is like an engine.
Now. When I was reading the book, I was thinking about it's kind of a goal I guess that I have for myself this year, or a theme where I was thinking about my friendship groups and none of my friends actually live in the same suburb as me. And for some reason, you know, I've just been really craving local community and having that group of people locally, and I think, you know, it doesn't help that my daughter goes to a school that's a couple of suburbs away.
And you know, I think there was so much inspiration in Flourish, and you looked at a lot of different communities that were indeed flourishing. I would love to know, like, what advice would you give me to help create that sense of community or some kind of structure that I could use to build a little local community for myself.
You know, I guess a couple things I'd say right off. The first is that it's not as hard as it looks. It looks like it's very far away, right, But all the science and a lot of the case studies that I would were all the stories not of some massive new construction or massive new lift. They were like little rechannelings of existing things. To have a small event with the people around you, to create a small habit with people who are already around you, whether that's a meal,
whether that's an interest to group. One of my favorite stories in the book is from the Paris neighborhood where everybody was disconnected and they put a table down the middle of the street, and then they started to self organize into interest groups. We're into hiking, and we're into biking, and we're into the museums, and we're into history. And at first when they started that, they thought that people
were helplessly naive. They thought the organizers they called them teddy bear kissers because it sounded so far off to do something like this. But you fast forward a year or so, in the group, the place feels like a village. So I guess the habit that helped me do that a couple of things. One was like to be very intentional about having a daily random encounter in my neighborhood, like one encounter a day, just one conversation a day, that's it. Maybe it's at the checkout of the local stand,
maybe it's at the post office. And the second thing was to pay attention to yellow doors. In the book I write about yellow doors, it's from Columbia University psychologist
Lisa Miller. The idea is that we usually go through life attuned to red doors that are closed like don't go here, or green doors that are open, like go here, and life becomes infinitely more interesting when we start paying attention to signals that are neither go nor stop, neither red nor green, but that are a mixed signal, like a chat with a coworker who you haven't really gotten along with, or an invitation to a party that you don't really want to go to, or an invitation to
try a new skill that you never were really good at. The courage and curiosity and those are the qualities that I always saw driving community curiosity. On the front end, say I'm going to give that a tribe. And though I don't really like it, and the courage to do that, I can say it's changed my life in a huge way. Having you know, there's a whole group of new friends. I was invited one day to go indoor climbing rate of heights. I don't really like to climb, but that
I went, I yellow door in it. And now that's a group that we go on traveling with. Our friends are our families, are really good friends. We're playing music together. It doesn't take much like if you can sort of groupify the things you do alone. If you like to jog, find people a job with it. At every turn, try to add people to what you're doing. My wife does a thing whenever she's running an errand she has her friends that she calls and says, does anyone want to
just come with me? I mean, I'm just going to the store to get something. Who wants to come with me? Do you need anything? The thing you would do alone just make that sideways, reach just yellow door and bring people along and then see where it leads. The other thing I would say is that be prepared to be annoyed,
Like annoyance is the price of community. And I think we're sold a lie in the culture now that everything should be frictionless and happy all the time, that all our friends should always be great to us, but no community is really annoying at times. It's also transcendent, and to sort of prepare for that annoyance and to humbly realize that you're probably annoying too sometimes like I am, like you are, like we all are, ends up being a very liberating stance.
I did love the concept of yellow doors in your book, and I want to know, Daniel, like, how do you or have you become better at identifying yellow doors in your life.
I'm still the same person, That's the thing. I'm like, I haven't really changed. I'm still kind of grumpy and skeptical. And you know, if somebody says, oh, you should do this, one of my first reactions to be a little opposition to go like, man, I don't think so. I don't think so. But it just gives you a little microsecond, especially after you have a few of these experiences, to
just go, huh, I wonder if I'm wrong. Like I have a story in my head that I'm not going to like that, but I wonder if I'm wrong I tell you one thing that really unlocked it for me was understanding the difference between complicated things and complex things. Does that ring a bell? Like complicated and complex like we normally think those are the same. We normally think, oh, we use those as interchangeable, like it's complicated, it's complex.
In fact it's not. And not to get super deueby here, but this is almost like a systems theory truth about the world. Complicated things come together the same way every single time. If you're going to build this microphone, and I give you all the parts and you put it together, you'll get the microphone. Complex things are different every time. Complex things are alive, they change when you interact with them.
So the changes the difference is, is this problem more like building this microphone or more like raising a teenager. You can't have an instruction sheet. It's not a to B, two C to dfer teenager. It's complex, it's alive. And so when you realize that a lot of times in life we go under the illusion that our lives are complicated. We go into the usion that A goes to B goes to cegos. If I go to the party, I won't have a good time right, In fact, we're wrong.
Life is complex. You don't know you're in interaction with it. It's complex. So when you understand that it's not a straight line, that it's not always a to B two C. That in fact, when you're dealing with complex system the best thing to do is to experiment your way into them, like to try something to probe and see, oh that yellow door. It didn't look good on the outside, but actually once I got into it, I kind of enjoyed it, Like that's interesting. And in our life we hate to fail, right,
we hate to have that feeling of failure. But you know what, relationships are exactly the same. You're trying to grow something, you're trying to create something. So having conversations that go really great and having conversations who go really poorly teaches you things.
When we are back, we are going to get into talking about building twenty a structure at MIT that accidentally became one of the most inventive places in history, and what the lesson there actually means for how leaders run teams today. Daniel also is going to be tackling something I hear constantly now, the pain of leading through relentless change. AI included and his advice is not what you would expect.
And we are going to finish with one of the most simple exercises I've come across in a long time, one that just takes thirty seconds and can immediately reconnect you to what actually matters. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way you work can live. I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally. You can sign up for
that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot Com. One of the stories that I really loved in the book was you talk about building twenty at MIT, and one of the concepts you explore is these speed launches that they had as a ritual. I'm wondering if you could tell me, tell me more about that, because I just think there's so much inspiration there for workplaces to take from that.
Oh, that place is incredible. It was a building that was built by accident. They were not by accent entirely, but inhabited by accident. It was built to build the US radar system for World War Two. It was built in almost in just a matter of weeks, and when the war effort was over. It was kind of left alone, and different groups from a nearby college MIT sort of colonized this building, almost like a coral reef, groups from all sorts of different disciplines, and all of a sudden,
these new inventions started coming out of this building. Some of the first video games, some of the first sound works, bows electronics came out of there. And they had so much agency in this building. That's the thing in the book I call it the rule of the Beautiful mess. We tend to go through life thinking we want to have things tightly organized, sort of complicated, if you might put it that way. We want to have the lunch room over here, and we want to have the lunch
hours right here. And what these people did is if they wanted more room in their laboratory, they took out a saw and caught a hole in the wall. And they didn't have to call engineering or anything. They did
whatever they wanted. When it came to their lunch room, they had cut a hole in the wall too, and they had people making sandwiches on one side, and they would hand the sandwich out through the hole in the wall and they would gather in the hallway to eat it, and then they would have these impromptu sort of lecture lunches where people would share what they were working on,
whether it was from sociology or from electrical engineering. This incredibly fertile cross pollination that happened, and it happened because they self organized. It happened because they had agency as human beings. We've constructed a world that doesn't have as much agency as would be ideal. I think when you give people that space so that they can control what they're making, so that they can have clear autonomy over
what they're working on. When you talk about flourishing, what you're talking about is whole human beings coming together and saying, Hey, what do you want to do? What do you want to do? And that's what community is, when peer groups decide to make their world better. I don't know why I've got me thinking about this right now, but one of the things that I remember most about having two brothers and now being the parent to four daughters are those days when they decide to build a fort in
their room. Does that happen in Australia where kids decide we're going to build a fort, right? I think that's like the ultimate, like little rehearsal for community. Right, they already have beds to sleep in. They don't need beds. But the idea that I'm going to put a blanket here, and I'm going to put pillows here, and we're going to create this world together. The energy that kids get from that is through the roof. It's the most fun thing they do. We built a fort. We built a fort,
and that's the same energy that building twenty had. We built a fort. We built this. This is ours. We're going to teach each other to do things. We're not at the university. We'ren't building twenty. That is ours. And so that is such a precious and I think rare thing. And that's what you have in all the places that I visited, this sense of real ownership, real agency, and this is probably the key point leaders who are willing and who encouraged that kind of behavior.
There was something you wrote in I think I was in the context of the rule of surprise, and you write that change often happens slowly, then in a surprising bloom. And I reflected on that because I found that so interesting. I think that's kind of counter to how we think
about change. And I thought that really rings true to me, Like, in twenty twenty four, my company's culture went through a really bad time and then you know, there was sort of some changes in the combination of the people and the team, and then it's like it just sprung back within weeks in twenty twenty five. And I'd love you to explain a bit more about like what that means and why why does you know it happened slowly then bang it like it blooms.
No, No, it's true, isn't it. Think about you know, when you think about our own lives, I think we start to recognize that pattern, whether we're talking about physical fitness or new habits or adopting change. I think it's because we are naturally built to sort of resist change, especially in social situations. It is risky, it's deeply risky to change, especially when things are even average right, because we're taking a risk to make that change, and so
we almost have to convince ourselves by living it. I forget who said this, but life is lived forward, but it must be understood backwards. We're living through life, but we're constantly sort of renarrating our past to say, oh, this is why this is happening. This is why this is happening. So I think that's partly true too, that we're our storytelling is just catching up to our reality. When we say, oh, it happened all at once, Well, you know, maybe it didn't. Maybe it didn't, but it
certainly feels that way. It certainly feels that way. The flywheel is an example that I hear a lot right when it takes a lot of energy to start it spinning, and it takes time, but once it starts spinning, a flywheel has got a ton of energy to keep going. So you feel that energy at the end, almost like it's happening magically, but it's not. You put in all the energy in the front to make it change. You put that in. So it is a tribute to how complex the world is, I think, because that's a shape
of complexity. If the world was complicated, you could just go, well A went to B, goes to C, gooes to D, and now we have change. Right, it's easy. We just have to put it together the pieces. But it's a living thing. So because it's so complex, complexity takes a little time. But that's also what makes it very very powerful. That's also what makes it very I don't know, so beautiful when it does come together like that, because when you have that flywheel type energy, then you can grow
even more things. It is funny, you know, some days you look out and it's the same thing we see in nature. Spring's never going to come this year. It's been so snowy here in America, Springs never going to come. But you know what, in like three weeks, the daffodils are going to be blooming and they're going to come out. They're going to astonish us all.
I'd love to know how that might apply to advice the leaders. I feel like every week I am speaking to different leaders that are talking about, you know, change fatigue, and particularly the change that ali transformations are having on workplaces. And you know, with this knowledge that change happens slowly then in a surprising bloom, Like, what's the advice there for leaders that feel like they are stuck in a world of pain because of change that's going on.
Think like a gardener, I would say, you know a lot of leaders like to think like I certainly the captain of the ship, you know, like I'm the one who decides the direction. That's how we understand leader. I think we kind of misunderstand leader in that way. Most organizations are not actually work like that. What do gardeners think about They think about creating space for things to happen, planting seeds and then nurturing those changes in small ways.
And gardeners also have to be incredibly patient, so being that that level of patience is not an extra, that's absolutely at the core. The skill set that I've seen work very effectively in this case is is locating culture champions, locating champions of that change and really helping them broker those ideas, selling those ideas with an house, franchising those idea in house, identifying people who you feel like ken champion those changes, and then when you start to see
something bloom. The good leaders I've seen are really good at radiating their delight, their happiness, broadcasting spotlighting that story. At Pixar, they have a different team take on each movie, and the head of Pixar is named ed Catmill, and he would always watch with very worriedly because he's a guy who tends to worry. Is the team getting it? Is the team coming together? That was his question, because he knows you can give a good idea to a
bad team and you'll get a bad movie. You can give a bad idea to a good team and you get a good movie. So is the team coming together? So he'd be watching them, he'd be very, very worried. And there was one movie they were doing. I forget which one it was. It was maybe it was something about camping, and he saw that the team. He was really worried about team. But then he saw the team had set up a tent on Pixar's lawn and they were camping together, and then he saw it. Then that
was it. He was waiting for that to happen. So he couldn't make it happen. He couldn't order them to go do that, he couldn't coerce them. But what he could do is create space, you might say, asking questions, trying to get the team to navigate itself. And another tool that is useful to do that is a team intent process. To have a team intent process to make sure you as a leader. You can't be the one to say this is what I want your team to do, but you can't say, hey, you guys should get together
and talk about three things. Talk about what your desired end state is. Where do you want to go. What's this going to look like in six months? You guys decide what your desired end state is. How do you want to work together? I mean, talk about how you want to work together, that's the second thing, and then have regular meetings along the way to see how that's going. Are you still being energized by this? And then another thing that they could talk about was what do we
not want to do? Let's name really clearly what we would call our via negativa, like the place we don't want to go right, do a pre moor in them. If this goes horribly, If this goes absolutely horribly, what happened? That's a good question to ask. So getting the team to ask those questions can be really powerful. And the reason those questions are powerful is that what you're trying
to do as a leader is establish three things. Establish a really clear horizon, establish very clear guardrails, and then you want a spark agency those three things, and then let the team self navigate.
I want to finish with actually where your book starts, which is talking about awakening cues, which I love that part of the book. Can you share what an awakening queue is?
It's an awakening to meaning it's we go through life typically just kind of focused on what's in front of us and doing our day and staying in the moment in what I would say task awareness, where we're sort of working on that task Awakening queues are moments where we zoom way out and we see meaning, we see what matters, and they happen when you sort of I would say that the idea of mattering, where you see the inherent value in the people across from you and
the inherent value of the project you're involved with. So there's sort of these moments of living into questions. They arrive as questions awaken Accues are all questions. I'll give you an example of one that I thought was really really powerful. We all think that middle school is famously difficult. Everybody knows middle school is a nightmare no matter what country you're in. But there was an experimenter who had
the idea, does it have to be this way? And so he gave every middle schooler a letter from a kid who had just graduated that same grade. So they're in the first day of middle school. You and in our first day middle school. We both get a letter from someone who just graduated middle school. And the letter has a couple of quick themes. It says, sixth grade is really hard, and everyone gets through it, and teachers are there to help you. That's it. They just get
that little thing. And the kids who got that little letter outperformed kids who got a whole module of social emotional learning, that little signal of belonging, that little signal of connection of being seen and seeing the larger project of zooming out, an awakening attention and creating meaningful relationships. That's what awakening queues do. They activate and awaken meaningful relationships.
I love that study. I've actually written about that study myself, but yes, it was nice to be reminded of it in your book. I'd love to know, like for listeners that you know, thinking, well, that all sounds really good, but like, what is one thing I can do today to kind of to have that zooming out moment and you know, to tap into that sense of really mattering. What are one or two simple things that people could do today?
Well, you could do your council exercise. This is one of my favorite ones from Lisa Miller again at Columbia, where it's very simple. He just takes thirty seconds. But you close your eyes and you picture a wooden table, and you picture the people on that table who have your best interest in mind, who truly are on your side, people living or deceased in your life, and you picture them taking a seat there, and you take your time picture them, and then you ask them if they love you.
Then you come and take a seat at the table, and then you ask them what do I need to know right now about the path? About my path? What is important for me to know right now? And it's just like a little grounding exercise. Again, I'm not wou wu person at all, But when you actually take your time and do that picture, figure out who's at your table, Who shows up there? Who surprisingly shows up there? When I did it, I had some My little league baseball
coach showed up for some reason. Who shows up there? These are the people that are with you all the time, and they're your counsel and you can lean on them if you need to. You can ask them those questions they're around. Another thing I would encourage people to do is to just ask yourself these litmus test questions, who do you feel most alive with? And the second question is what are you growing with other people? What are you growing together? What project? What thing? What are you growing?
Those questions can be a guide. And a third thing I would say is think about making a bit of an energy calendar, Like take the last week and write down the times where you felt most alive, most activated by meaning most connected to something. And a good way to think of it is where did you feel like you disappeared, where you kind of disappear into your task, disappear into your flow. Where did that happen for you? Locate those points and that's kind of your map, like
that will teach you something important. The thing about all of this is in a world where so often we're given these three steps, this four recipes, I mean, there's no sort of nice, neat perfect recipe because it really
depends on you. It really depends on your ability to sort of sense where you're at, to think deeply about your values, to think about where you're headed, to think about the people in your life, and to carve out space for these kind of grounding pauses that let you see yourself and your life more clearly.
I love that, Daniel, Thank you so much for joining me on how I work. I've been such a fan of your books for many years, and so it's just been such a joy to have this conversation. Thank you for putting so much great work into the world.
Thank you for having me. This has been a total delight. I really appreciate what you're doing.
So one of the things that's stuck with me from this conversation is that annoyance is the price of community. Like I saw this idea that the right friendship should be frictionless, but every real community is irritating sometimes, and expecting that and even welcoming that is actually I think, what let's you stay in it long enough for something meaningful to grow. Now, if you're looking for one thing to try this week, I highly recommend Daniel's yellow door idea.
So the next time you get an invitation you'd normally decline, just pause for a second and ask whether your no is a real no or just to have it. I love that Daniel went indoor climbing despite being afraid of heights, and that those people are now some of his closest friends. Now, if you're looking for more inspiration, maybe about human connection, I highly recommend going back and checking out my interview
with Lael Stone. There is so much good stuff there about how to build human connection, and there is a link to that in the show notes. If you like today's show, make sure you get follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Coulan nation.