In this episode, John Miles discusses how to unlock your potential and strategies for intentional living. He shares his journey of personal growth and resilience, drawing upon pivotal moments that shaped his path. John delves into the profound impact of intrinsic motivation and the pursuit of finding true significance that leads to a deeper understanding of our own purpose.
Struggling to stick to your goals? In the upcoming 6 Saboteurs of Self-Control Workshop, we’ll uncover the six hidden obstacles that sabotage your progress and teach you how to overcome them. From breaking free of autopilot habits to tackling self-doubt and emotional escapism, this live session offers practical tools and strategies to help you make better choices and stay aligned with your values. Join us on Sunday, January 12 at 12pm ET and take the first step toward lasting change.
Key Takeaways:
- Embracing change and finding personal growth in challenging environments
- Learning from experiences in confronting authority and navigating power dynamics
- Adapting to change and cultivating personal growth in the face of uncertainty
- Finding purpose through meaningful service and the impact of making a difference
Connect with John Miles: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | TikTok
John R. Miles is a is a worldwide expert on intentional behavior change, leadership, and personal mastery. He is a keynote speaker, top-rated show host, and is the founder and CEO of Passion Struck(R). Miles is devoted to promoting personal mastery, fostering an intentional mindset, enhancing health and wellness, and building meaningful relationships. His globally renowned podcast, Passion Struck with John R. Miles, has garnered tens of millions of downloads and consistently tops the charts as the number one alternative health podcast on iTunes. Miles is committed to inspiring people worldwide to believe in their ability to push beyond limits and achieve their aspirations. His book is called Passion Struck: Twelve Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life
If you enjoyed this episode with John Miles, check out these other episodes:
Small Steps to Happiness: The Science of Mindful Living with Laurie Santos
Learning to Take Action for a Meaningful Life with Gregg Krech
By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!
If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon! Click here to learn more!!
Episode Transcript:
00:00:25 – Chris Forbes
Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is John Miles, bestselling author, keynote speaker, CEO of Passion Struck, and host of the podcast Passion Struck with John R. Miles. Today, John and Eric discuss his new book, 12 Powerful Principles to unlock your purpose and ignite your most intentional life.
00:01:43 – Eric Zimmer
Hi John. Welcome to the show.
00:01:45 – John Miles
Eric, it’s really a profound honor to be on your show.
00:01:48 – Eric Zimmer
I’m really happy to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book, which is called passion struck, 12 powerful principles to unlock your purpose and ignite your most intentional life. But before we get to that, we’ll start in the way that we always do, with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild. They say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. There’s a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
00:02:37 – John Miles
Yeah, Eric, thank you. And I have always found when I listen to your episodes, it’s such a profound opening. I like to use a question that I gave to you about defining moments, but both of them elicit a tremendous response. So when I think about that and I look back at my own life, I guess I come to this vision of what I thought a man of courage was when I was younger compared to what I think a man of courage is today. And I grew up very similar to you, where much of my inner self was suppressed. I was kind of aimed at becoming the best I could be with parents who really drove me to perfection. And that perfection was something that I battled for years. And it ended up leading me to chasing all the wrong things in life. I was chasing alcohol, I was chasing fame, I was chasing accolades, I was chasing money. And I found myself living in what Henry David Perrault termed quiet desperation and profoundly stuck. And when I think about it now, I think the path that I’m down now, which is focused on intrinsic motivation, it makes me think of what men of courage really should be. They should be strong willed, independent thinkers who have the compassion and courage to take on societal issues and to try to make change. And that is what I am trying to do with my book. And my own personal movement that I’m on is to try to show to many of the listeners out there what it really means to be a man of courage, because I think it’s different from what’s getting portrayed on social media.
00:04:37 – Eric Zimmer
You mentioned your childhood. Your father was fairly angry. You went on then to be in the military. How many years were you in the military?
00:04:45 – John Miles
I was in for a total of about 11 years.
00:04:48 – Eric Zimmer
Okay, talk to me about what sort of things you learned there about courage and which of those things you carry forward and which of those things you’ve left behind.
00:04:58 – John Miles
Eric My life has been defined by many defining moments. And one of the most defining happened when I was a senior, or what we call a firstie at the Naval Academy. And I had been selected for this prestigious role of becoming one of the brigade honor officers. Now, each company and at the battalion level, you have honor officers, but I was part of the overall committee. And typically this is kind of a cake job because how many people in any given year are committing honor offenses and having to go in front of this board? But when I was there, it was a pretty much black or white type of thing. If you committed an honor offense and you were found guilty, you were expelled. So there was a high threshold of pain that people would feel. And so my year, first half of it started out really well. We didn’t have many honor boards. But coming back from Christmas break, I walk into this situation where two midshipmen had come forward to their electrical engineering professor, and these were students who were at the top of their class saying that their personal values couldn’t allow them not to speak up. But that they had gotten the exact version of the test before the test. And what I came back to was the largest cheating scandal in the Naval Academy’s history. So I went from having a sleepy type of role to now having one of the most arduous tasks in front of me. And something that we came upon very early on was that this wasn’t just a handful of shipment implicated. There were hundreds upon hundreds. And the daunting idea that we were going to have to bring all of these people in front of this tribunal, where how do you even do it when half the tribunal is filled with people from their class, was really becoming a daunting challenge. And so NCIS was brought in, et cetera, et cetera. And I could write a whole book on this. The petty officer who gave the test away to the midshipmen who then ended up spreading it throughout the academy, his car blows up just before these trials begin to happen. But the superintendent at the time, who was a big football player from the Roger Staubach era, made the decision that he was only going to try 25 midshipmen and about half of them were football players. And long story short is we argued with him over the validity of that. We tried to stand up to him, saying that this really needed to go through the Uniform Code of Military justice because it was too big for us to handle, etc. And he really threatened us that if you don’t do this, you’re not going to graduate and I’m going to take away your privileges, everything else. And it ended with us finding the vast majority of these 25 guilty and then him making the decision to then basically reject every single one of those convictions if they were a football player. So this whole thing ends up going beyond us because at the time, somehow the Baltimore sun was getting information about this incident and it was on the front page. So the superintendent is getting more and more mad and blaming us and taking away our privileges. And everyone who was on the board is saying we had nothing to do with it. So I end up graduating the now Navy Investigator General has been brought in to look at this and has come to the conclusion, like we did at the beginning, that there are hundreds and hundreds of people involved, this is a huge deal, and that there was a cover up. And I’m about ready to go to my first duty station after I went through master’s training and I’m called up to my admiral’s office, who runs my whole, I guess you could say the whole group of officers that I was part of the community. And he goes, I don’t know why you’re supposed to go to the Naval Academy, but the Secretary of Defense has requested your presence on Monday morning, and you’re supposed to show up in summer white uniform. So I get there, I’m met by two JAG officers who are there representing me, and they tell me that I am being accused of undermining the boards and allowing the football players to get off and other things. So I go in, and the superintendent started to try to cover his own tracks by putting the blame on me because he thought it was me who had been giving the information away to the Baltimore Sun. And so now I walk into this session where the table is filled with admirals and attorneys, and I am basically fighting for my survival. I didn’t even know walking out of that if I would lose my commission, if I would have a future in the military or anything else. So for me, I learned a ton of tremendous lessons from that. I learned about the abuse of power. I learned about what it took to stand up for things that you believe in, even if that meant that it could cost you everything. But standing up was better than just taking it on the chin. I learned during the process that you sometimes have to challenge authority when you see things not going in the way that you think they should and believe that they should. So that was a real tremendous learning for me. And then I think the other thing that really hit me was when I went out to the fleet, you’re given a bunch of ideals of what that’s going to look like. And I think that this segment with this cheating scandal really prepared me well for the idea that getting out in the real world wasn’t like the ideal situation that we were taught we were walking into. There was a lot more gray areas once you got out there, and I kind of went into it now with more open eyes.
00:11:16 – Eric Zimmer
Did you always have that sort of courage to stand up to authority? Where did that come from, or how do you think you were able to find it in that situation?
00:11:25 – John Miles
Well, I think I always had this feeling of being taught right and wrong. And I had a really deep Catholic upbringing. I went to parochial schools my entire childhood and was taught very clear between what is good and what is bad. But I think a defining moment before I went to the Naval Academy is we had the cross country state championships earlier in this day, and I ended up going to this big party where I had been drinking, and the friend who was driving, on our way back, his car spun out of control, and we ended up almost going over a cliff where we would have all died. And at that scene, and I’m not proud of it, I walked away because I had a very demanding father who I was afraid of. He’s a prayer marine, and he would physically put you to the test. And so I did not want him to find out about this. And I got home and I lied about the whole situation. And unbeknownst to me, the police officer had already called them and told them everything. And so not only did I let my parents down, but I let myself down from not speaking the truth and having the courage to. To come forward in that moment. And I think from that learning moment, I just kind of made this promise to myself I wasn’t going to let that happen again. I wasn’t going to let people down like I did in that situation and especially let myself down. So I think that is where a lot of it stems from.
00:12:59 – Eric Zimmer
Thanks for sharing all of that, your book and your podcast. Your platform is called Passion Struck. What does that word mean to you?
00:13:08 – John Miles
Oh, it’s so interesting. You know, the podcast has been around now for coming on four years. I came up with this concept maybe a little under five years ago, and I knew this emotion that I was trying to convey, meaning you see something that’s a challenge in the world, a problem so big that you will invest it, every bit of you, to solve it for the benefit of others, to serve others. And this means sacrificing your reputational risk, sacrificing your financial situation, sacrificing at times your relationships to go after it. And I happened to be talking to a friend of mine. I mentioned kind of this concept to him, and he said, you know, it sounds to me like you’re going from being stuck to becoming passion struck. And it kind of just hit me at that moment that this is it. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s this ignition inside that comes when you have clarity over an issue that you’re bound to solve and will do anything it takes to do so.
00:14:21 – Eric Zimmer
And what was that issue for you?
00:14:23 – John Miles
I think we are best positioned to serve the person we once were. And so for me, it was really, I had been getting these messages for a long time that I was not on the right path with where my career was heading. And my career was going fabulously well. I had become a CIO of a Fortune 50 company by the time I was 39 years old. I mean, things were going well. And at the height of all of this, I felt the emptiest I ever did in my life. And other aspects of my life were falling apart, my relationships were falling apart. I wasn’t exercising as much. I had high stress levels. And I really just found this emptiness where I felt extremely apathetic and broken inside and just craving for meaning. And so what it really showed me was that we have this innate needing to belong, and when we don’t, we face a crisis of unmattering. And so to me, that’s what the whole thing that I’m trying to do with passionstruck is all about. It’s how do you start addressing the disease of disconnection that is plaguing so many people today? Because we’re not only disconnected on social media and other things for from others, we’re most importantly disconnected from ourself. And so how do you take yourself back and gain that sense of belonging and mission and ignition to do something with your life that God put you here to do?
00:16:03 – Eric Zimmer
You used the word mattering there. What does that mean to you?
00:16:07 – John Miles
So, Eric, this whole question of mattering is something that I have been diving deeply into for the past four years. It’s interesting because I went out and I started to look for the science around mattering. When you start looking at behavior science, there’s a ton of information on choice, bracketing and nudges and self determination theory, which is really all about our intrinsic motivation. There’s positive psychology, there’s neuroscience. But when I really started asking the experts, and I’m talking experts like Max Bazerman and Bob Sutton and Angela Duckworth and Ethan Cross, and the list goes on and on, no one could tell me any work that was being done on mattering. And I did more and more research and found one gentleman, Gordon Flett, who’s at the University of York up in Canada, who’s really been the only one who’s been studying this. And I just had this epiphany. How can something so essential not be further understood in science? And so I have been trying to spend as much time as I can interviewing people researching and writing about what does mattering really mean? And I am now working on a book about this, so you’ll be the first person I’m talking to about it. But as I describe this, I think that mattering has four fundamental components. There’s self mattering, the belief that we matter. There’s mattering to others, there’s making others feel like they matter. And ultimately they’re spreading mattering beyond ourselves and our community to the world. So if you think about this and people have asked me, well, how do you apply this to a sales team? Well, I mean, it’s very easy when you start thinking about it. I’ll tell you a story about it. I was a young buck out of the military. I had been at Booz Allen as a consultant for maybe nine months, and I wouldn’t have considered myself great at sales in any means. And I happened to be at this conference and I saw a gentleman across the room who was wearing a Corvette jacket, had no idea who this person was. But I ended up approaching him simply because I was on a break and I wanted to talk about Corvettes because I was bored about what we were talking about at this conference. And I started talking to him and he was driving a Stingray and we both started to talk about our passion for Corvettes. Well, the more I got into this and made him feel like what he had to tell me mattered, it opened up a side of him that leaned in on me. And suddenly he said, well, after we exchanged names, he said, what do you do? I work for Booz Allen. I said, well, what do you do? He goes, I’m the top civilian instructor for Top Gun. And he then said, do you guys have any distance learning capabilities? And I said, well, a matter of fact, we just delivered the most comprehensive one to the Army National Guard. And he goes, that’s fundamental to everything I want to do. I want to create this program called Strike fighter online. Well, 18 months later, after nurturing this relationship, we get awarded the contract and it became $150 million a year contract for Booz Allen. My whole point of that is by making him feel that he mattered, he reciprocated. And so in order to do that though, you have to feel that you matter yourself. So really that’s the first step is if you don’t matter to yourself, if you don’t hold self compassion for yourself, coming back to that compassion word and really believe in your innate capabilities, you’re never going to be able to spread mattering onto someone else. So that’s kind of the framework that I’m exploring.
00:20:28 – Eric Zimmer
So mattering is a pretty ambiguous term. You know, mattering, do I matter? How do we go about answering that question? Because I think a lot of the ways that we think about whether we matter is in comparison to outside things, right? Some of it is, do I matter because I matter to other people? But what’s the base element of mattering that goes deeper than because I did this or I do that, or I’m responsible for this or I help with that like what’s the base layer for people of mattering for everyone?
00:21:08 – John Miles
Well, I think people are approaching this the wrong way. There’s been a lot of research that’s come out about employee disengagement, meaning when you look at what Gallup’s produced, what it’s really showing is that there are 900 million people in over 140 countries who are unfulfilled in what they do in life. And when you think about that, I mean that’s a huge thing. And when you look at people like Thomas Frey, who’s predicting that 2 billion jobs are going to be displaced by automation and AI, it’s creating an existential crisis that people have that for most people who work, their work drives a lot of how they self identify of the meaning that they have. And when that feels threatened, suddenly you have this pervasive disconnect that’s permeating modern life. We’re ensnared in this relentless cycle of chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing all the time. And yet in this pursuit, more and more people are encountering a profound emptiness that I described earlier as quiet desperation. So if you have this deficit feeling inside of you, how are you going to be able to show up to others in a meaningful way when you feel so disconnected from yourself and your own identity? And to me that’s what it really comes down to. And I know you love Zen practices. There’s this Buddhist philosopher, Desaku Ikeda, who has this quote, what is defeat in life? It’s not merely making a mistake. Defeat means giving up on yourself in the midst of difficulty. What is true success in life? True success means winning your battle with yourself. And to me that’s what mattering is. It’s winning that battle with yourself of overcoming stuff that I talk about in the book of self doubt, imposter syndrome, everything else. And really seeing that you can become a winner in life. And the winners in life are those who went over their weaknesses and learned that they matter and that they’re able to make other people matter and they’re able to conduct change in the world.
00:23:27 – Eric Zimmer
So is mattering connected to achievement?
00:23:30 – John Miles
I want to really change that whole model. I think that’s the easiest way we think about mattering is achievement. I think of mattering more of service. I feel that we are most alive and we feel like we matter the most when we perform acts on behalf of other people or when we witness them. And some of this is really backed up by research that Dacher Keltner has done on a term that I Love he created called Moral Beauty. He found more people experience awe not in seeing majestic arts or pieces of beauty, but in seeing the moral beauty in others. So to me, mattering equates to service. It’s serving yourself in some ways, but more importantly, it’s serving others. And I just had this recent conversation with Alison Wood Brooks, who’s a professor at Harvard Business School, and she’s got this book coming out called Talk. Her focus is on the science and art of communication. And when you think about communicating, communicating with another person is really a form of mattering. Because the way that we listen, the way that we immerse ourself in another person’s story shows not only that they matter, but it reverberates on ourself because we self reflect and see ourselves through them. And this is something that you must have seen when you were going through your own recovery from addiction, that the more you started to storytell your story, other people would lean in on it and support you more because of it, because they understood they had been there. You were being vulnerable with them. And to me, mattering isn’t just this small thing. It permeates every aspect of our lives. And when it’s out of sync, I believe it’s at the core of why so many people feel helpless, lonely, bored, battered, broken, whatever you want to call.
00:25:36 – Eric Zimmer
It, because they don’t feel that they matter. And that disconnect is fundamentally one of. By helping others, you see that you have a place in things that is important. Am I saying that more or less the way you would say it?
00:25:53 – John Miles
Yeah. I mean, by helping others, by serving others, by having that, I call it in my book, creative amplifier. I mean, you’re trying to amplify the fruits in people’s lives. It brings you an inherent sense in turn that you matter and that you matter to others. And the more you feel that, the more you are going to make other people matter. And there’s work that Emile Bruno did, but he was really working on dehumanization. And the way that he was trying to address conflicts was he saw most of the time when people had deep rooted conflicts like we’re seeing in Israel right now. It all comes down to each side’s mattering, if you think about it, and the other side not feeling that they matter. And so he was trying to use compassion and empathy and helping to see the other side, see the person as they are, as a means to close the gap and try to create a path forward. So that’s another way that you can think of Mattering?
00:27:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It makes me think of it’s a Buddhist practice, but it doesn’t really matter. I think it’s called commonalities practice, but it’s the practice of seeing in what ways are others like me. And it fights dehumanization because if you do, and you and I have talked about this separately, about how to each individual, their interior world matters and their family matters and their kids matter, those things matter to them every bit as much as those things matter to me. And when I can see that, I think it helps avoid that dehumanization because we see that at its base, we all are very, very similar at the base level. Now, the further you go up the stack, the more different we get. But at a base level, we all want, in essence, what you’re saying. We all want to matter.
00:27:58 – John Miles
Yeah. And we all want safety. We all want to feel that we can be who we are without being told we have to be something different. I mean, it really. I mean, it gets into body dysmorphia, it gets into overcoming trauma, it gets into how we’re showing up for our kids. It permeates everything. And I didn’t realize how much it was like water until I really started to think about how much it applies existentially in our lives.
00:28:27 – Eric Zimmer
Let’s go back to you working in a job, you’re very successful in your career, you’re managing lots of people. So in a sense you matter to a lot of people because you’re helping direct and guide what they’re doing. So you mattered then, but I get the sense you didn’t feel it. So how do we connect those dots? Right. Because if we look at any of our lives, we can see in what ways we matter. Let’s say I’ve got a job and I go to work, and if I have six other coworkers, I matter because the person I am among those six people has a lot to do with the quality of their day to day life. Right. I can make being at work an enjoyable thing or an unenjoyable thing, depending on what I bring. So I matter if we’re parents of children. Right. We deeply matter because we have children that we’re raising. And yet there still seems to be a disconnect where people do matter but don’t feel like they matter. How do you connect these dots up in your mind?
00:29:30 – John Miles
Yeah. And I don’t want people, when I go into this to feel sorry for me or to say, you know, you know, this guy had it all, and what’s he talking about when I go into this. But when you think about senior executives of anyone who’s, who’s listening, a lot of the employees below them think that they’re completely out of the loop on what’s going on below them. And for much of my career, I didn’t feel that way. I felt like I had an extreme pulse on what was going on within my teams. I have a concept in my book that I talk about speaking with your feet because I believe that the best leaders are very present in showing up and talking and being present and explaining things to employees. But I was finding that the more senior I was getting, inherently the things that I felt mattered most to leading people were slowly and progressively evaporating from what I was able to do on a day to day basis. And I was reaching a point where I had so many fires that I was trying to fight. And the vast majority of these fires were employee issues because I had employees now in 15 countries on four or five continents, and they were in the politics of the day. There was so much infighting going on between the different presidents at Dell and who was partnered with who and what was happening and who was trying to do this and that, that my entire life was starting to be focused on putting out fires and not doing what I thought was the most meaningful thing in my job, which was learning all this acumen that I had had from the military and growing up on how do you properly lead people? And so I found myself becoming more and more out of tune what was happening on the front line. I used to be able to know when I was the head of software development at Lowe’s, what a developer was working on and how it pertained to that solution and was able to strategize and put myself into their position. And I found myself further and further from that. And then on top of that, I was traveling overseas two weeks out of the month. So here I’m absent half the time from a lot of the people. I’m absent from my family. And I’m seeing those relationships have impact. I’m absent from myself because when you’re traveling like that, you’re not keeping a healthy regimen in place and your schedule is constantly changing. And then I’m doing a whole bunch of things that I don’t enjoy doing. And I just felt empty. And I can’t even describe it. I just felt so fricking numb inside that I’m not even sure if you stuck a pin in me, I would have felt it because I was seeing myself just wasting away And I was completely stuck. And I felt like there was no hope to get myself out of it because look at all the stuff I had built up. I was going to be a let down to my parents. I was going to let my family down. I now had this house and the possessions and everything else. I couldn’t even comprehend what it was like to close that gap. I describe it when I think of stuck, stagnant. I lacked the confidence. I was timid. I was uncertain of where to go. I was conflicted, torn between what I felt I should be doing and what I really want to do. And I was knotted inside because I was entangled in habits and beliefs that were preventing progress. So I hope I’m making that vision clear because it’s important for me to do so, because I think there are a lot of people who feel how I felt.
00:33:44 – Eric Zimmer
I think a lot of people do feel how you felt. Something I think about a lot is when do we need to outright make a dramatic change? And when can we change our approach, our attitude, our beliefs, and work within a place we are? And I think a lot of people have this with their work life because they feel a lot of what you’re describing. And the question is, is there a way within their existing role for them to start to reconnect to what matters, to find a way to look at their situation differently? Can we make it good enough by staying? Or do we really need to blow it all up and try something different? And you and I talked about this a little bit before when I was talking with you about how there’s something to be said for people who hit rock bottom, right? Because, you know, in my case, like, I burnt all of my life to the ground. There was no decision about what parts of it I keep and what parts I don’t keep. Most of the time for people, though, the choices aren’t that clear. So how did you get to a point where it became clear to you that this isn’t a matter of me realigning how I think or feel or orient, but, like, fundamentally, I need to have the courage to make a change? Was there a defining moment that you knew it?
00:35:08 – John Miles
You’re going to have to let me explain this. And it may take a couple minutes to give the full impact because I want listeners to really understand that I’m not just here pontificating. I have lived this. And it is myself pulling myself out of the depths of doom and what I thought was the bottom that kept getting even deeper, that has taken me to where I’m at now. So I had this calling for a long time. I remember when I was living in Mooresville and I was working at Lowe’s, I started to get very deeply involved in our local church, which was a Methodist church. So it was one of the first times I wasn’t attending Catholic church. And they had this program called Discipleship, which, if anyone’s been through it, it’s not a trivial thing. You study the Bible for 36 weeks and you go through discipleship one is the Old and New Testament discipleship two is the New Testament discipleship three is the Old Testament. But it was the closest I had ever felt to our maker. And it was the first time I had really read the Bible end to end and had a teacher who was really trying to showcase, because he had a PhD in history, in addition to theology, of how these things that were happening, these metaphors that Joseph Campbell talks about, were playing in our lives. And during this time, I started to pray and reflect more and more about my life and what I inherently should be doing. And I started to get these visions that I wasn’t doing what I was called to do. And inherently, I knew this when I left the military. I left because I got an appointment to go to the FBI. And it was kind of my childhood dream to do this. And then my class got canceled and I was forced into another path. And I was well down this path and doing well in it, but it wasn’t lighting me up inside. But instead of using this as a cue that at that point I needed to change and the change would have been easier, I doubled down. And instead I led my family out of Charlotte. I went for money. I took this job at Dell for the title and everything else. And things started going worse. So behind the scenes, as my job is becoming less and less meaningful, I am in this temporary apartment. I go home for the first time in a few weeks. I get back. Apartments flooded, water main breaks, everything is lost. They move me to this other apartment. And Eric, like, three weeks later. I keep hearing these visions, keep ignoring them. And I’m in the shower, and all of a sudden I feel this stinging on me. And I look up and there’s scorpions dropping from the ceiling on me.
00:38:02 – Eric Zimmer
I was about to wonder whether frogs started dropping from the sky or locusts. But scorpions will do. Scorpions will do.
00:38:09 – John Miles
And I go to this company whose running the apartment complex, and they say, we don’t have scorpions. No one’s reported it. They can’t find them. Then my family comes to visit the Kids, beds end up both being infested with bed bugs. Then we get bit by scorpions more. And this time actually had video to show them of all the scorpions that were coming out at night. Oh, we end up buying a house. So even though my wife is begging me not to move, I push forward.
00:38:40 – Eric Zimmer
With very good reason, I might add.
00:38:43 – John Miles
With very good reason. We buy this house and we find out after we buy it that it had termite damage that extended around the whole back half of the house and up into throughout our kitchen and upstairs. So now, because it wasn’t picked up on the inspection, I got a quarter million dollar issue. I end up leaving Dell. We moved to Florida. We buy this house because we don’t want to have to fix it. So we get a relatively new house and we’re only in it for about three months when a storm comes and it turns out our roof had a hole in it. And we end up having mold and other damage and having to spend another 200,000 to rip it apart. It led me to getting divorced, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And still I am not listening. And it finally took me going to. I dropped my daughter off from school. At the time, I was going to Orange Theory four or five times a week. And this day there’s a fire at Orange Theory in the electrical room. I end up going to my house early and I walk in on an in home robbery where the person who’s robbing me ends up pointing my own gun at me. I end up evading from that, starting to have this existential crisis on top of everything else that’s going on. And four days later, my best friend jumped off the Skyway bridge and committed suicide. And coming out of this, I just went into the deepest and darkest despair. And I looked back at all these opportunities along the way. I had to change. And I started to realize that I was. It went from me being pushed to being kicked, to being batted over the head, to losing pretty much everything, including my physical and psychological safety and unearthing tons of PTSD and past trauma that I finally made the decision that I’m going to break away from this. I am going to dedicate as long as it takes to relearning myself, relearning what’s most important to me, getting my life back into order and using this as an opportunity to help other people get out of this shithole that I found myself in.
00:40:59 – Eric Zimmer
Wow, that is quite a story. Thank you for sharing all of that.
00:41:03 – John Miles
Well, it’s hard for me to Even believe now, looking back, that it even happened. I’m right. I mean, it’s something that you think you can’t even make up. It also reminds me of the stories you read about in the Bible of these things that happen to people that weren’t following their inherent path until they woke up and started to do it. And it also brought me to this really fundamental belief that I think we’re all put here for a very specific reason and we have inherent talents inside that make us so unique. And back to this mattering that make us matter in the world. And when we’re not using them in the right way that we were put on earth to do it, I think our life ends up going off the path. Gabby Bernstein has talked about this and Mel Robbins has talked about this, but I saw that show up in my own life. And the more I started to go down the path of what I inside knew I should be doing, my life started to turn around immensely.
00:42:07 – Eric Zimmer
What are those things that you knew you should be doing? What are the big changes?
00:42:12 – John Miles
This is like the million dollar question to me when we look at this. And when you and I spoke earlier, I mentioned Bob Sutton, who’s an amazing organizational psychologist, but Bob is well known for a book he wrote about closing the knowledge versus doing gap. And that’s what this is really about. You know, you need to change. Like if you have a drinking issue, you know you need to stop, but you keep going along with it and make excuses to yourself instead of dealing with it. Well, kind of the same thing here. I knew I had to figure out what was the biggest block that was keeping me stuck. And I think that’s why in cognitive behavioral therapy they refer to it as stuck points. So I immersed myself in taking steps to get over the past trauma and that most recent trauma that I had had. And it was extremely painful because it had been something that I had been suppressing for years and years and years. And it all started all the way back to when I was 5 years old and got pushed through a basement window playing tag. And I had a traumatic brain injury and went all the way back to that. I had sexual trauma, I had physical assault trauma, I had combat trauma, and I had to deal with it. And so I went through cognitive processing therapy and that helped somewhat. I went through prolonged exposure therapy. I went through emdr, and it was this work on myself and really battling through those stuck points that were causing me to not get over these fundamental psychological hurdles, that by doing so they started to release confidence in me that I could tackle other areas of my life. It opened the door that I could get myself into better shape. It opened the door that some of these issues that I had had from traumatic brain injuries, I didn’t need to be a victim to them and I could tackle these. And the thing I like to tell people is the journey of a thousand miles. And Robin Sharma says this too starts with a single act. And, and that act then opens up tons of doors that you don’t even expect, where all of a sudden you’re working on one thing, but it starts propagating into a myriad of things and then compounds, which really gets into. The core concept that I like to talk about is the microchoices or micro decisions that we make are the things that lead to either a waterfall of happiness and fulfillment or to a valley of despair.
00:44:52 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it’s interesting because we talked earlier a little bit about defining moments. You and I talked about defining moments at a different time. And there are moments that are defining, but as you say, it’s the thousands of micro moments that actually allow those defining moments to mean anything.
00:45:11 – John Miles
Yeah, absolutely.
00:45:12 – Eric Zimmer
And so, couple of questions that I’d like to just kind of dive into your book here a little bit. And one of them is talking about in your passion struck framework, you’ve got these different mindset and behavioral shifts and one of them is called Brand Reinventer. But there’s a line in there that you talk about where you say comfort is the enemy of adaptability. So first, what is adaptability? Why is it important? And talk to me about how comfort gets in the way.
00:45:41 – John Miles
Yeah, I remember as a senior executive, one of the things that was so top of mind and it is today, is emotional intelligence or eq. And I think that that is extremely important in our lives. And it’s extremely important the more senior you get in anything you do, because so much more of your responsibility is in dealing with others. But I think we’re missing a bigger opportunity in how much a role adaptability plays both professionally and personally. And professionally, it’s something that I think people have to get used to. I mean, the amount of change that is coming upon us has gone from a trickle I remember when I started my career to now a waterfall. And I can’t even predict what it’s going to be like 10 to 15 years from now. But if you are not able to adapt to the tsunami of change, you are going to be in a very hurtful place. So that’s one way to look at adaptability, but I think another way to look at it is throughout life, I think we go through different phases, through the transition points that make up our life. And it’s having that inner fortitude to understand that at times we have to adjust and adapt to our surroundings, adapt to how we treat people, adapt to how we show up in the world, adapt to changing times as our kids get older and our role as a parent adapts to the different stages of their life, the same thing. We have to adapt as our parents get older. So that’s kind of two different lenses of what I meant about the ability to adapt.
00:47:31 – Eric Zimmer
I agree. I think there’s a Darwin quote. I won’t get it right. But it’s not like the strongest survive. It’s like the most adaptable survive. Right? That’s the key thing, you know, can you adapt to your environment? And I think you’re right that things keep changing on us. There’s the external pace of change, which is accelerating, as you’re saying. But our lives change. Right. Like you mentioned kids. Your kids are two. You’ve got a different set of challenges. And when your kids are 8 versus when they’re 15, and we have a different set of challenges in our own physicality from the age of, say, I’m not the same as I was at 25 physically, right? So how do I adapt? How do I change? And if we keep dragging what worked before and trying to force it into different situations, we end up in trouble. So what role does comfort play in us not being adaptable?
00:48:23 – John Miles
Well, for me, the easiest way to explain it would be through Carol Dweck’s work and the difference between mindsets and having a growth mindset or not having one, because that’s where comfort really comes into place when you become complacent. A way I describe this later on in the book is people all the time say you live your life on autopilot. And I think it’s an okay way to talk about this opposite of having a growth mindset, because you’re kind of just going through the motions and things seem to be going well, but you’re kind of just bopping down the street. I think the analogy is wrong, though. I think so many of us today are living more what I call a pinball life. We are acting as if we are the ball in the game of pinball instead of the player learning how to play the game and the underlying sub games that make up pinball, which is kind of like life. And so from the lens of this, when you’re comfortable being a pinball, you just Allow yourself to bounce off of things. You are a complete victim of the circumstances around you. Whereas when you start really adapting and forcing yourself to take a deeper look at your core values, at the most important things of your life, you start being more intentional about how you want that ball to start navigating its surroundings. And to me, that’s a good metaphor to describe it.
00:49:53 – Eric Zimmer
I like that analogy a lot. And I think, you know, autopilot’s an interesting thing because autopilot can be really good if you’re heading in the right direction. A self driving car is kind of a lovely thing if it’s going where you want it to go. Because then you can be like, all right, well, that’s working. I can now pay attention to this or I can pay attention to that. The problem is that either we don’t know where we’re going or the road conditions are changing rapidly enough that we can’t leave it on autopilot. And I think that’s where we get stuck. The human ability to habituate and do certain things without thinking about them is actually an evolutionary advantage for us. It’s just that life is changing too quickly to remain on autopilot. And if you try, you end up being, as you’re saying, the pinball it is.
00:50:42 – John Miles
And Angela Duckworth is really known for her work on grit. But what I think her more profound work has been on is self regulation. And to me, what you’re talking about is a lot of self regulation. Self regulation means self reinvention. It’s a reminder that when your old ways set in, you can either choose to accept it or you can reinvent yourself and push your own boundaries from further. Which to me is all about what intentionality, self control, or self regulation is all about. It’s recognizing that you have to adapt to your surroundings. And it’s kind of where the threat mechanism comes in. Because if you don’t, there are going to be consequences.
00:51:27 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. John, thank you so much for coming on. I’ve enjoyed this conversation. We’ll have links in the show, notes to your book, and where can people find you?
00:51:38 – John Miles
Yeah, you can find the podcast Passion Struck wherever you listen to shows just like yours. And I have two websites. If you want to learn more about the Passion Struck movement, go to passionstruck.com, you can sign up for my Live Intentionally newsletter. If you want to learn more about me or hire me to speak, go to Johnrmiles.com wonderful.
00:51:56 – Eric Zimmer
Thanks so much, John.
00:51:57 – John Miles
Thank you such an honor to be on your show.
