Finding your creative spark: AJ Jacobs on curiosity, gratitude & reinvention

And well, serendipity was on my side and I got to meet the illustrious wise and delightful. AJ Jacobs, if you are not familiar with aj, he's been someone I've followed and admired for at least a decade. He is, in my very humble opinion, the master of all things, curious and quirky and wise, so much so. He's made a career out of these traits.

And I just wanted to learn more about how he's managed to do so, how he's had the courage to follow whimsy, how he's been resilient enough to pursue ideas that on the surface did not scream success. And how we can all infuse more of these ways of being and doing into our everyday work experiences. We talk about following curiosity about being brave and resilient and so much more. I hope you enjoyed Okay, AJ Jacobs, author, podcaster extraordinaire. Welcome to the Modern Mentor Podcast.

I am so over the moon to have you here today.

I saw your name on an, on a guest list, and I said to my husband, I am gonna meet this guy and I'm gonna get him on my show. 'cause I have been a fan of his for definitely at least a decade at this point. So I am so excited that you're here. And for fans that don't know you, I described you as an author and you are, uh, by the letter of the law. But I would also say that there is very little traditional about the way that you author. How would you describe what you do for a living?

And then I write about what I've learned. So I've done that with several topics. Everything from religion. I tried to follow the Bible as literally as possible for a year. I tried to be the healthiest person for a year. I tried to, uh, be the most grateful person for a year, which, uh, I think we, we, we have many overlaps in the way we think, but one of them is gratitude. And I also became, uh, the most obsessive puzzle, uh, solver for a year. Jigsaws, crosswords, et cetera. So I love it.

I love my job and I feel lucky that I can do it. And that enough people buy my books that I can continue doing it

of like people bringing their dogs to dog shows, or he goes into this really narrow slice of the world, any highlights, all of the quirks that are in there that nobody's ever looked at that closely. And he helps you see the levity and the humor, but not at anybody's expense. And I kind of feel like that's a little bit of what I have experienced you doing with your books. I think the first one that I read was called Drop Dead Healthy.

And it was fascinating because you spoke to all of these experts across, right, the entire health spectrum. I remember there was one doctor who had never washed his hands, ever, and another one who washed her hands after literally every exchange. And you are trying to figure out kind of what's what here

Um, but yeah, I, uh, I, I also love what you say about, I like to be the every man and try to learn everything, uh, and talk to all these experts and then try to bring back what I think is the wisdom to the reader.

Um, they are bored, they are disconnected, they are lonely, they feel stuck. There's a lot of, um, they are burned out, they're overwhelmed. And I just, I feel like people are struggling to find their spark these days. Hmm. That's what I feel like I'm sharing over and over. And you are like a walking spark plug. And so at least that's my experience of you. And so that is really what I wanna explore with you today.

I wanna talk about your relationship with, with creativity and whimsy and risk taking, because I feel like these are some of the missing elements, uh, that people are struggling to find. So I probably should have done that setup in the beginning, , but I'm doing it now better late than never. So with that said, I would love to hear a little bit from you about where your ideas come from.

Like, we're all walking down the same streets, but you just seem to see things or your eye seems to get caught by things that other people's don't. And I'm curious what you can share about that.

And I just, I have some magazines around me and I come up with ideas. And as I say, most of them are terrible. I actually am, I've opened up my list of ideas. I have list of thousands of ideas, good and bad. And I'll just read you, and you can see most of them. I'll read like four or five. And you'll see, I saw a picture of Mona Lisa, and I thought, well, what if Mona Lisa came alive? They made a movie about, it's like Splash with the Mermaid, but Mona Lisa comes outta the Frame .

Uh, and uh, I don't think that's a great movie idea, but it was interesting. I enjoyed coming up with it. Uh, I was thinking about meat that you can make in a laboratory, and now there's no boundaries. So what if you made, took a little meat from every species on earth, a little, little cheek swab, and you had an everything burger, like an everything bagel of ev . So yes, your face is making, and uh, you are looking absolutely grossed out, which is the point.

As I say, most of these are bad ideas, we're never gonna, but then I thought sometimes they lead to something. Like, for instance, I was thinking, I don't know, I saw a picture of a cat and I thought of the word caddy, and are cat's actually caddy? And that led to a puzzle that I'm gonna do on my podcast, which is about puzzles, about adjectives and verbs related to animals. So that idea, it was just a seed that planted something.

It may not be the greatest puzzle ever, but I thought it was interesting enough to pursue. So that is, um, I come up to me and I've talked to creativity experts, uh, because I, I've written about creativity and, and the general consensus among the scientists is it's a numbers game. You know, you don't see a lot of Picasso's terrible stuff, but he made it, he made terrible stuff and he might turn it away.

So it is a lot about being okay with coming up with bad ideas because that's the only way you're gonna get to the good ideas.

Agreed. Um, and I have heard, I think it was Seth Godin who said that people with the most good ideas are just the ones with the most bad ideas, right? So love that. There's definitely something about just generating volume and, and letting it flow. I love that you have that daily practice. But I also heard, and maybe I'm, I am intuiting this and you can call me out and say that it's wrong, but what I hear you saying is you're not necessarily thinking of ideas in service of something.

You're just thinking of stuff like you're just letting ideas come. You're not necessarily, it doesn't sound like you were trying to come up with a puzzle. You were just letting ideas come out and be what they need to be. And you turned one of them into a puzzle, right? And so from a creativity standpoint, I feel like discipline and volume is one thing. And then what I'm hearing is it doesn't have to be a purpose or a so what to it. It's just a creative exercise.

Is that any of that fair and reasonable?

But again, it is a lot about the discipline, which you mentioned and carving out a half hour, making an appointment with your creative self, as some people say, a little cheesy, but there you go. Like, you do have to. So I, I, that's not true for everyone. Some people get their best ideas in the shower, and I've heard scientists talk about how that releases the, uh, frontal cortex. So to let you make connections.

Honestly, for me, it is much more productive to do the half hour and no, even like that first five minutes, you may not get anything good 'cause you gotta let your brain warm up. And then the other question, which I think you implied, but uh, was how do I know are which ideas are good? Yeah. And that is very tricky. Uh, I'd say I have two or three heuristics that I really rely on. One is, does this idea stick around in my brain for a couple of months? And I'm thinking, oh, remember that idea?

That was actually interesting. And I do like to tell my ideas good and bad to people so I can see their reaction. So I saw your reaction to the everything Burger . So I know not to pursue that, but if you can tell, you know, friends will often say, oh, that's a good idea, but you could kind of see it in their eyes whether they really believe it or not.

And I've, I've seen this, this is an example from many years ago, but my friend was on Facebook and he posted, I wish there was a book called Go the F to Sleep, or he said, I, I'm writing a book. He said it jokingly, and everyone on his Facebook feed was like, that's a great idea, you should really do that. And, and that became the book. So, uh, which sold millions of copies. It was called Go the F to Sleep, but it, the F was spelled out.

And it was a great way to humorously address the frustration of trying to get kids to sleep.

And, and you have some freedom around that. And yet, you know, to your point, books are business. Your work is business. And so how do you kind of find that balance between being creative and letting your imagination roam, but also thinking about, um, maybe the commercial value of an idea and, and creating the discipline to actually sit down and, and write the book or do the work. Any tips in that realm you can share with us? Oh,

I, a few years ago, I was like, this is a huge part of being a writer is the marketing. So I'm gonna reframe it as something creative instead of this chore that I dread. And that made a huge difference. And I was able to, I, I realized you can be incredibly creative in marketing. Uh, and so when I wrote the book about the Bible where I lived by every rule in the Bible from the 10 Commandments on down to growing a huge beard that came out.

And I said, alright, well I, how can I reach those markets that normally wouldn't be interested in this book? And I, the Bible talks about sex. There's a lot of sex in the Bible, then the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon is quite racy. So I did a, uh, an article, I pitched a glamor magazine, which at the, it's still pretty big, but at the time was much bigger. I said, what if I wrote an article, sex tips from the Bible? And they said, we, you know, yeah, that's great.

We'll do it. So I was able to get that, and then I did the same thing, you know, business tips from the Bible, uh, and, uh, I was able to market it to both atheists and religious people because they were part, the book was about how there are good parts to religion and bad parts to religion. So for those who wanted to focus on the skepticism, I was there for those who wanted to look at the good parts. I was there. And that was super fun and creative.

Uh, and uh, so I think that's it a lot about framing and focusing on how anything can be creative if you, uh, if you look at it a certain way.

There are certain outcomes you need to get to, but finding the, the activities that give you joy, that light you up thinking about your job through a particular lens or context can really shift your experience of it, right? And so I think there's something really powerful in that If you are a person who is a great talker and a great connector and a great researcher, you can really harness that and leverage that.

If you're somebody who loves spreadsheets, like you can always find a way to, to choose the activities that give you joy and find a way to bring them into the, um, the path of delivering an outcome that you are accountable to.

And you've been, I will say, you've been very successful just by the measure of, I definitely fall into more of the atheist bucket. And I read that book and I loved it, and I thought it was hilarious, and I couldn't wait to meet your wife because she is definitely the hero of it. As we, as we have discussed, , um, I couldn't imagine having had to live with you through that year long experiment, but

And one of the quotes he said, I still think about it because it's a little paradoxical, but I totally got it. And he said, I'm curious about everything, even those things that don't in interest me, I'm curious about everything, even those things that don't interest me. And what I think he meant is it's a way of looking at the world and realizing that those topics that might on the surface seem dull, are actually almost always fascinating, because they almost always deal with human life.

So when I was writing that book on coffee, I had to do a section on logistics, how do the coffee gets to me? And I had never thought about pallets, those wooden sort of crates that, and I was like, how am I gonna write even a sentence on that? But once I started looking into it, I read a quote, the world runs on pallets. So my, everything I am looking at right now, this microphone, this computer, this table has been on a pallet. So without pallets, I would have nothing. Okay?

So you've gotta look,

See how does it affect my life? Because almost we're so interconnected that almost everything does affect our lives. Whether that's accounting, which is seemingly people make fun of it for being boring. Or even, I've heard podcasts about concrete and how important concrete is to the world. It's like, I think it's one, perhaps the most common manufactured substance. And uh, and I wouldn't be sitting here without it. So how does it affect your life?

And then going from there, I think that's an entry point to pique your curiosity.

But if you work in finance, if you work on the janitorial staff, sometimes having some curiosity about how a task that you have to manage in your day can, will ultimately have that impact. It might be a, a way to sort of leverage that principle in a different context. I love that. Yeah. Thank you.

So I love a quote from Quincy Jones who's the music producer who says his philosophy of life. He just died recipes. He said, I don't have problems, I have puzzles. So he said, when you look at life, try to see it as a puzzle at work, you know, and with, in your relationships, because it's so much more, uh, invigorating and empowering. You know, a problem or a crisis makes you wanna curl up in the corner, but a puzzle, you're like, okay, let's roll up our sleeves and see how we can solve this.

How do you, first of all, does that, does that resonate with you? And second of all, if you're willing to accept my description, how do you strike that balance of, of being humble and being able to laugh at yourself, but being able to channel the confidence to take these risks and put these ideas out there?

But it's also a modern idea because a lot of cognitive behavioral psychology, which I'm a big fan of, rests on this idea. So I will pretend that I'm confident, uh, until I become a little more confident. So, for instance, you mentioned the health book. I had to call sort of the top doctors and experts on health in the world. And, uh, I was like, I, you know, who am I? I don't have a PhD. And so I would wake up sometimes despairing, this topic is too big.

I, but I would act as if I were confident and I would call up my publisher. I'd say, now when this is published, let's have a big party where we serve kale martinis. And, you know, I, I would had all these, so I would act as if I was confident that this was gonna be a mega hit. And that gave, eventually after a couple of hours every, every day, I found I had to restart it every day.

Uh, and I would eventually become more confident and have the confidence to call up anyone in the world, uh, and also be okay with being rejected. That's, um, that's part of it. So yes, I do feel you need confidence, but you can sort of fake that confidence until you gain the real confidence.

And I really felt that because I, when I forced myself to be grateful, I actually was, uh, uh, ha I would become happier. And I'll give you just one example of this. The idea of the book was to call or thank in person. Every single person. Not every single, oh, a thousand people who had anything to do with making my morning cup of coffee.

So that meant the obvious, like the barista, I flew to South America and I thank the farmers of the beans, but I also thank the truck driver and, uh, who carried the coffee beans or the, the people who made the road for the truck driver. 'cause he couldn't have done it. So the idea was it's all interconnected. And I remember one day calling the woman who did pest control for the warehouse where the coffee beans were stored.

And I said, I know this is a strange call, but I'd like to thank you for helping to keep the insects out of my coffee. And she said, well, that is a little weird, but thank you. The, I don't get a lot of positive feedback in my line of work, and this has kind of made my day, which in turn made my day. So it was this virtuous cycle where you actually become happier by thanking other people. And that was a huge lesson.

And I, and I like to tell people, not just thank you for, for the heroes and not just thank you for the big wins, but thank you for just behaviors that you appreciate that you wanna see repeated, you know, expressing gratitude to somebody because they poked a hole in your plan when nobody else had the courage to do it right. Or somebody gave you a piece of advice that you didn't ask for. Like the things that we thank people for, they wanna repeat.

Right? And, and to your point about that virtuous cycle, it, it sort of, you say thank you, it triggers dopamine and the other person, they wanna do it again. And then they wanna say thank you. And so, you know, I think for anybody who's, who's not feeling appreciated or, or recognized in their own lives, they should be mindful of how can you express that gratitude and recognize somebody else? And you, you should start the practice and create a little bit of a positive contagion around that.

And it's got, it's all about curiosity, it all about solutions, which I think we need to have a solution mindset instead of a problem mindset. So I'm a huge fan of puzzles and we'll have on celebrities, often they're celebrities in quotes, but sometimes real celebrities like Joseph Gordon Levitt is coming up next week and he's a real celebrity. Yeah. And audio puzzles that are meant to just keep you sharp and get your brain going in the morning or at night whenever you listen.

And I'll give you a couple of quick examples just so that it makes more sense. One is this puzzle we came up with where it is, uh, I give a hint of a word, I'm gonna say a word, but it is occluded, a two word phrase and you've gotta figure out what that two word phrase is by the way that I say the first word. So for instance, if I say tide, then that answer is gonna be rising tide. 'cause they said it in a rising way.

So if I said for instance, if I said like a takeover, then that is a clue to hostile

And coming back to this whole idea of creativity, I am a really big believer in the power of just engaging different parts of our brains throughout the day, right? I'm a big believer in, I love reading. Um, I read a lot of nonfiction, I read a lot of business, thank you. But I also, I read a lot of fiction and I think that there's power in that. And I do, I have not listened to a podcast about concrete, but I do try to listen to things that are kind of out of my comfort zone.

Not necessarily things that I'm listening to specifically to learn something, but just to engage parts of my brain that I wouldn't necessarily engage otherwise. I just think the more spots we can light up, the more interesting ideas and the, the more captivating connections I think we can make throughout a day. That's

Whereas in the old days, which were not perfect, I don't wanna say we gotta go back, but there, there was more serendipity in our media. So if you were looking at the, at the paper and look reading about something you're interested in, what, whatever that is, finance, maybe on that same page, there was an article about India and you would never get that on your feed, but you'd say like, oh, this is interesting and it expanded your mind.

So IJI try to do that in my information intake is to not just focus on things I agree with or that I am, uh, immediately in interested in.

And they'll show you what the liberal media is covering. That's a blind spot for the conservatives. And I find it very helpful to just have more of a, a finger on the pulse of what is going on, not just in my bubble, but everywhere.

Um, I have some really strong perspective on that, but I, I would love to get yours. So, you know, you and I have talked, I know you've got three kids, um, you and your wife have what I can only describe as some pretty unconventional career paths. You both do some really interesting things. And I'm curious, as you think about your kids as they're growing up and them having watched you, both of you navigate these very interesting career paths, what do you hope, what do you hope they've seen?

What do you hope they've taken away from watching the two of you do what you've done? Well, thank you for that. First of all. I do, before we go, I do wanna hear some of your insights on this question. Uh, but I will say a couple of things. One is, yes, my wife, by the way, just for context, she has a company that puts on scavenger hunts for team building. So you, you talked about whimsy and how whimsy can be helpful in business. And so that's sort of the, the premise of her.

Uh, they do these scavenger hunts in museums and, and neighborhoods, uh, where you, you answer fun questions and it's team building. But yes, we both have slightly unusual, i i, we both work very hard. I mean, I, I am working maybe too much that is, uh, I don't, but, but when my kids, I will say when my kids are there and wanna do something with me, whatever time of day it is, I put the work away and I focus.

So I do hope that that's a lesson that they take away is to be fully present in whatever you're doing, whether that's being fully present while working or being fully present in your relationships. I mean, I always, I once read a biography of JFK and it talked about how, you know, he was president of the United States, but if a 8-year-old asked him a question, he would, you know, lean down. So he was eye level and really focus on them as if they were the most important person in the world.

And I lo I mean, if the president of the United States can do that, then I can do that. So I love the, I try to set as a model really focusing, put the phone away, like look them in the eyes and be focused on your family or your friends when you're with them, and be focused on work. You know, I'm not, don't, I, I I don't really phone in my work, I, I do pay a lot of attention. So that might be one big, uh, lesson that I want to impart to them. Nice. But I wanna hear your insight.

You said you had strong thoughts on this.

You know, if you at age 18 know with certainty you want to be a physician, an architect, like there are certain jobs that if you know, those are what you want, there probably is a technical path you should start pursuing sooner than later. But I think for most of us, what we study and what we end up doing professionally don't necessarily have to relate. And I personally think that the, the best, you know, to your point, you said earlier, let's, let's look at problems as puzzles.

I think the most important skill we can all bring into the workplace is, you know, being a good thinker. And so I think if you've taken a course of study that has really engaged your brain in whatever it is, I don't care. It could be drumming or renaissance poetry or business , if you were engaged, if you cared enough to learn and think and question and explore whatever the topic, I think you're gonna be successful. I think you will find a way to be successful.

And so that's always my advice to parents or kids who are asking, study something that really captivates you and that's gonna ready you to do whatever you choose to do someday.

So even if it's just like, I'm gonna commit to writing by hand for 10 minutes a day, that's an experiment that anyone can do. And, and it might have big benefits. It could be I'm not gonna gossip for a week and see what that's like. So I'm a big fan of experimenting, whether it's big experiments or small experiments, I just think it keeps your brain fresh, it keeps life fresh, and it in the end, uh, hopefully it improves your life.

Join me next week for another great episode. Until then, visit my website, lead above noise.com. If your workplace could use an activation boost, whether it's a bootcamp, a keynote, a pulse check, you choose, you can follow Modern Mentor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks so much for listening and have a successful week. Modern Mentor is a quick and Dirty Tips podcast. It's audio engineered by Dan Fand. Our director of podcasts is Brandon Getches.

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