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Episode Transcript:

James Beshara 00:00:00  What’s the thing that you would do? Where the only reward is that you got to do more of it. No financial reward, no validation, no fame status. Your only reward is that you’ve got to do more of it. What is that thing?

Chris Forbes 00:00:21  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. In this episode, Eric and James Bishara explore a fundamental inattention that shapes nearly every decision we make.

Chris Forbes 00:01:13  The pull between what we want right now and what we want. Most drawing from the ancient philosophy of Vedanta, James shares a powerful framework for understanding this inner battle, describing how we each have a body, a mind and intellect, and how real growth comes from strengthening the part of us that can see beyond immediate desires and short term rewards. Eric and James discuss how this tension shows up in everyday life, from habits and work to purpose and identity, and why so much of lasting change comes down to learning how to pause, reflect, and choose differently in those moments. They also explore the role of daily practices like reflection and repetition. The importance of aligning with your natural tendencies and why meaningful growth doesn’t have to come from escaping life’s challenges, but from engaging with them more fully. If you’ve ever felt caught between competing impulses or struggled to follow through on what matters most, this conversation offers both timeless wisdom and practical insight you can begin applying right away. This is the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:17  Hi James, welcome to the show.

James Beshara 00:02:19  Eric, thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:21  I’m excited to talk with you about a bunch of things. You’re a philosopher, really into, Vedanta. We’re going to talk a lot about that. You’re a very successful investor, businessman. You own a company called Magic Mind. So we’re going to get into all of that. But we will start first, like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild. And they say, in life, there are two roles inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. 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.

James Beshara 00:03:18  Well, Eric, it’s such a beautiful parable, and I’ve heard you say it in, in episodes before, and, and obviously it’s the theme of, of your podcast. So when our friend Pete Holmes put us in touch, I was delighted to have the chance to chat with you, because I knew the topics and the surface area that you and I could cover. It’s going to be different than most podcasts that that I do. And as we noted just before hitting record, it’s it really is the subject matter I think about most much more than business. But the parable as I’m hearing it, almost with fresh ears for the first time today. It reminds me distinctly of within Advaita Vedanta, which goes back to the four oldest philosophical textbooks on the planet the, the Vedas and Vedantas, the end of the Vedas mean Vedanta means end of the Vedas. So it’s the Upanishads. And if there was a branding agency back then, they’d say, hey, you guys have so many names for the same thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:21  The Vedas

James Beshara 00:04:22  Vedas, Sanatana Dharma which means eternal principles. But perhaps the most, I’d say the most practical. The central practical contribution of this philosophy is that we have three equipments to navigate the world, and I had never heard this explicitly before, but the two wolves is such a beautiful metaphor for this, and that you have these three equipments. You have the body which everybody is not going to. That’s not going to blow anybody away. They’re going to be like, yeah, I’ve got a body, I understand that. Then you have a mind also not. Not groundbreaking. People will be like yes, that sounds familiar. Mind and a body. But Vedanta introduces this, this unique concept of an equipment that’s even more subtle than the mind, which is the intellect. So you have these three equipments the intellect, the mind and the body. The mind is the emotions, our seat of our feelings. It’s the ego. It’s the seat of what I feel, what I desire, what I prefer.

James Beshara 00:05:20  It’s my thoughts and the intellect is this subtle equipment right above it. In the same way the mind is right above and guides the body, the intellect can guide the mind. And what is the right decision? In the midst of all of these preferences, you might prefer to laze on the couch, but is that the right decision? Or the capacity to discern is another way of describing the intellect that might feel great for a few minutes, maybe a few hours, but that’s not the right decision. Perhaps to feel great this week or feel great tomorrow. So I’m going to get up and and I’m going to go walk around or get up and do that project I’ve been putting off. And the way it’s talked about in Vedanta is it’s like a muscle and you either develop it or atrophies the same way that you develop the body or it atrophies or you develop the mind or it atrophies. And so I think about the mind and the intellect and the constant dialogue that they have within us, that now modern psychology is kind of scratching out of, oh, it’s not just one linear line of thoughts. There seems to be a dialogue within us. They call it system one, system two thinking.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:20  Yeah.

James Beshara 00:06:20  And so I think about that. Which one do you feed. Do you feed the preferences for the here now or or do you? My favorite definition of wisdom comes from Vedanta of the capacity to see the end in the beginning. And do we feed that capacity to see the end of the beginning? Do we look beyond these preferences or feelings that we might be feeling right now? And do we feed that side of ourselves, the intellect? I’ve never made that connection until you’re talking today. I was like, oh yeah, feeding the intellect is feeding the wolf that you want to win.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:52  There’s so many directions we could go off of what you just said. I had a conversation with someone yesterday. she wrote a book called Little Addictions, and it’s about the ideas that, you know, everybody is wrestling with something. Mainly this thing, you know, our phone. But she talks about that.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:08  In essence, what you’re talking about is about this is an oversimplification and a battle between sort of the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. When you’re trying to decide what the way I like to say it is, decide what you want most versus what you want now. But one of the things we were talking about is how in addicts, it’s very clear, you see, that that physical equipment in the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is not as syntactically dense in people who have addiction issues, literally the very equipment that allows it. Maybe it is the intellect to a certain degree isn’t there as much. And I think that’s what makes addiction such a challenging thing. I also love that “See the end in the beginning.” That’s a great, great phrase. I want to dig a little deeper on this idea though, which is there is a way of being in which we do see the end in the beginning. Or to use your words, the intellect is kind of guiding where we go. I call it my wiser, truer self, right? My wiser, truer self.  Is is much better than the self that shows up at 9 a.m., both a bad night’s sleep and hungry.

James Beshara 00:08:18  And for the wisest of us, we discover this equipment and we we have so many different names for it. I mean, our modern society talks about things like mindset or frame of mind, and we think about it in terms of a high. Or we say things like higher self, lower self. And what I love about this Vedantic, this philosophical contribution is giving you an explicit name and, and says like, well, what is setting the mind? If you’re thinking about mindset, what are you doing? What are you using to set your mind and. And that is the intellect or and your and your phrase that that wiser self. And it’s there for all of us. But it is it is as undeveloped as any muscle that we don’t give attention to. So for for really all of us, it’s quite undeveloped until we extremely, explicitly and deliberately say, you know what? I’m going to develop this capacity to see the end of the beginning, or this capacity to discern or this higher self.  I love your articulation of that. That does what I really want versus what I want right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:25  Yeah. So what does Vedanta tell us about how to train that capacity, how to make that muscle stronger?

James Beshara 00:09:34  Great question. It’s and it’s so simple. In the oldest Veda it’s called the Rigveda. There is this famous quote of truth is one sage is called by many names, and we we touched on that as just before we hit record. When you were talking about Zen in so many parallels. And Vedanta are often called crypto Buddhists, and Buddhists are often called Crypto Vedantans because it is so. They’re so similar. So I think a lot of this will will resonate with you. But the three daily practices within Vedanta are really, really simple. One is question everything. Two is don’t take anything for granted, and three is study and reflect daily. And if you’d allow me 30s, I’ll say why it’s it’s in this order question. Everything is a bit self-evident. It’s the unexamined life is not worth living. we have these concepts in the West, and but it calls it out as the number one, the first daily practice. Because all of the things that we think are good for us. The Bhagavad Gita, a canonical text within Vedanta in the 18th chapter, has a great principle where it says that that which is like nectar in the beginning is like poison in the end. That which is like poison in the beginning is like nectar in the end. And I see you kind of nodding. An addict knows that really, really well.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:52  I mean, that is basically a very ancient description of the process of addiction.

James Beshara 00:10:57  And all of us have addictions. It might not be a substance that you can put in a bag or in a bottle, but I know my addiction was 6 to 7 cups of coffee a day, stimulants and and luckily I went. I would take Adderall in my 20s. It would give me such bad headaches, but had that not give me headaches, I would have gone off the deep end with that stimulant.

James Beshara 00:11:21  Yeah, I was prescribed it. I had all of like the validation that I could, and it was I’m thankful that my body just didn’t agree with it. But the other addiction that I had was workaholism. And and it’s a really sad one in that our culture, there are very few addictions that we collectively endorse and encourage, but seems to be caffeine and ambition. Society is like, go for it. You get into some of the other substances societies like, but you get into caffeine and it’s like, let’s go get coffee. You get into, ambition, personal egoistic engineering, and your own father might be like, yeah, keep going seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And and it was for me, it was compulsion. It was not disciplined even though thought people thought I was working hard. It was compulsion. And Vedanta is a I think this, these three daily practices question. Everything really helped me say are these. Am I doing this for the right reasons? Why am I doing this? When did it? When did I get started on this entrepreneurial path that, that I’m like talking publicly about being a mission for other people, but really, it’s why am I doing this? And it was a self-discovery of dude.

James Beshara 00:12:38  This is good old fashioned ego engineering. Financial engineering. This is just savvy selfishness. And then the second daily practice is to not take anything for granted. I had three failures in my 20s. It was my 20s. Just filled with failure. Failure after failure to failure. Luckily, I was failing forward. I was gaining some education, but I had a big blow up with my last company, where two years in was worth $400 million and deserves $385 million, and then four years later, we’d sell it in a fire sale to the skin of our teeth to Airbnb. And I couldn’t spin it into like, look what we did. We did something great. It was we didn’t get even anywhere close to all of the dreams, hopes, expectations that people around us, that we ourselves had. And I’m so thankful that I couldn’t spin it into some, hey, look, we sold a company. It was like cover of every tech website. Like what happened? Wheels fell off. And with what the company is called tilt.

James Beshara 00:13:40  And I’m so thankful that there was no hiding or reframing. It was man. We had everything in the palm of our hands, hands and and I really let it slip. I had to take full responsibility. And I’m so, so thankful. Eric, maybe this maps to your experience, but when you see folks that can hide behind, well, we got screwed by some investor or something bad happen in my life or my. My parent did this to us when we were young. And and as a recovering addict, you probably and as a recovering addict myself with my own addictions, I see those stories and I, and I kind of, wince of like, that’s like nectar to hide behind, kind of, this is someone else’s fault. But then the last one is study reflect daily because the virus of attachment, if you go 2 or 3 days, you need a ground. We need a grounding wire. There’s no cure for it. And Vedanta. So I’ve got a daily podcast on this 510 minute episodes called The Daily Vedantic.

James Beshara 00:14:40  I did an episode, a handful of episodes on this, but but recently I did an episode on the fact that the virus of attachment, if we do not inoculate it daily, you’ll just catch it with a coffee with a friend or lunch with a friend. And the friends got like some of the epic going on in their life and you’re like, oh shit, I want that. So we need a daily grounding wire to these timeless truths.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:00  Let’s recap those three, question everything. What’s number two?

James Beshara 00:15:06  Don’t take anything for granted, even if it’s a cancer diagnosis.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:10  Yeah. And three.

James Beshara 00:15:12  Study and reflect daily.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:14  You teed me up for a thousand different directions to go.

James Beshara 00:15:18  I know that was long winded. Apologies.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:20  No no no no. It’s great. So study and reflect. What does that look like for you in your life? Right in in in Zen. The practice is sitting meditation. Yeah, you can study. That’s all good. But the heart of it, the thing that they say is zazen.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:35  Sit down. Sit down and do that. How do you structure your daily practice and reflection? What does that look like?

James Beshara 00:15:41  Yeah. The secret key for Vedantic center reflection, that’s that’s talked about over and over again within the philosophy. And now if you’re familiar with Arthur Brooks, the Harvard scientist around happiness, he talks a lot about this as well. Brahma mortem is what it’s called time of God. And it’s this time before the sun comes up, this quiet stillness. And and I know this is revered in the, the zazen and the Zen tradition as well of this time before the world pulls you out of yourself. When the sun rises, we naturally just feel like, okay, the day is getting away from me. I got to start moving out to get going. But that time before the sun comes up, it is a beautiful stillness where you don’t have to be anywhere. No one expects you to do anything. No one expects you to reply to any texts or emails. You got no meetings.

James Beshara 00:16:33  So I get up at 430 and spend about 90 minutes, 60 minutes of listening to a lecture. Within the Vedantic philosophy, there’s there’s three classical yogas karma yoga, Bhakti yoga and Yana yoga, which just means service for others. Karma yoga is it, you know, fancy Sanskrit words, but it’s really simple. Bhakti devotion, devotion to a practice, devotion to your family, devotion to your work. It’s devotional yoga. Yoga just means reunion. And the West. We think yoga is Hatha yoga, which that’s a very valuable part of a day of the postures and standing on your head downward dog. It’s a valuable maintenance of the body. But classically in in India, that’s, you know, 10% of what people think of in terms of Yoga Yoga’s reunion with the divine. And that is primarily through these three classical yoga’s service karma yoga, bhakti devotion. And then yoga is words of the masters, Guyanese knowledge. It’s where we get enosis. Ignorance is lack of knowledge. So we have this same, shared route in, in Latin and in the west.

James Beshara 00:17:36  But Nana Yoga is studying the words of the masters. So for 60 minutes, it’s typically a lecture from my teacher, who’s now 98, and I can tune in every day to the lectures in the ashram in India that I study with, that people can find on my Instagram. You’ll you can find these resources, but I tune in to a 60 minute lecture. Then from there I’ve got about 30 minutes of stillness. So sit in stillness and reflect on what was being, what was said, which what notes hit me. And and in this philosophy, there’s a phrase that, reflection is 100,000 times more powerful than listening, meaning that if something hits us and you probably know this really well, if something hits you but you don’t reflect on it, you don’t journal on it. You don’t discuss it with, you know, Asanga, a satsang, a community that’s also pursuing these timeless truths. If you don’t reflect on it, then it’s like it never happened. It stops you in your tracks on a Tuesday, and then two days later, it’s like it never happened.

James Beshara 00:18:35  So then it’s 30 minutes of reflection, quiet stillness and reflection and meditation on those those words in the master.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:58  Some days I’ll be like, how much time did I spend today reading something? Substack or a newsletter that I like? I guess Substack and newsletters are close to the same thing. I guess that’s my general way that I get information. I read different newsletters, and then I think to myself, what did I read today? And I’m like, I have no idea. Like, I literally don’t know what that hour and a half went to, right. Because I’m just kind of going and it’s enjoyable. It’s a little bit of a flow state learning for me. But that pause and then going, okay, how does this apply to me? Where would this fit in my life? What would this look like? That’s hard in comparison. It’s easy to just consume. It’s hard to pause, reflect and implement. I talk about it all the time as sort of the knowledge to action gap.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:52  Right. And I have a book coming out in March that really is to a large extent about this very thing. How do we change? How do we change the way we think, for example, like what is a way that we let the intellect, to use your words, run more of the show than the mind? And so, yeah, I think you’re right. That idea of of reflection now in that 30 minutes of stillness, you’re, you’re reflecting. Is there any method to that or do you catch your mind wandering? Like, how do you keep that from being 30 minutes of just your brain repeating its list of grievances and ideas and things to do next?

James Beshara 00:20:31  Well, the mind certainly is doing that. Yeah, it’s doing a hefty amount of that. The mind is so ancient, so ancient, and it is so good at scanning, looking for problems, magnifying issues, creating issues of nothing out of nothing. Anatomy of fear is just you’re going to lose something that you that you want, that you have.

James Beshara 00:20:56  And this desire and attachment is just. The mind is so sticky. Yes. And as the Buddhists say, there’s 10,000 things. There’s 10,000 things on our mind that we want. We think it might be one that Amazon package that’s going to get here in two days, and it’s going to be the last thing. But then we realize like, oh, no, that was kind of just part of the other things that I wanted. I interviewed someone once. I was like, so what do you want in life? That’s one of my favorite interview questions, just to see what. Honestly, it’s just the entertainment in the midst of a lot of interviewing for different roles for Magic Mind. And I interviewed this gentleman once and he said, I want $10 million. I said, well, why do you want $10 million? And he said, well, at $10 million, then I’d be able to make on interest, just on interest enough to do whatever I wanted. And I was like, so you want to be able to do whatever you want to do? What what do you want to do? He said, oh, well, I mean, a lot of things.

James Beshara 00:21:55  And we didn’t I didn’t belabor it. And with him and but it was very clear that what he wanted was the freedom to do what he wanted. But he didn’t know what he wanted. Yeah. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. None of us do. Everything that we’re chasing is just a symbol of what we think we want. And so, so much of the time. And so during that 30 minutes, my mind is definitely doing that. And the intellect is also described kind of like the adult in the room. You invite the intellect in to guide the child like mind. That can sometimes be childish. We’ve got three young girls. Oh wow, three, five and eight. And I love having children in the room. It’s the it is the best that one might bust in here in any moment and it will be a delight. But I would never leave them home alone. That would be extremely irresponsible. The adult in the room is what really gives the long term joy of of having a child around.

James Beshara 00:22:50  So the intellect during those 30 minutes is stepping in, and oftentimes it’s journaling. Oftentimes it is just sitting there still just reflecting on what I just wrote down. Maybe it’s a specific line. And then reflecting on that line over and over and over again. My journal is in the the next room. And and so here’s a perfect example of why reflection is so powerful is I did that this morning for one line for 30 minutes, and now it would actually take me ten or 20s to remember what that line was. I spent 30 minutes on one line. Yeah, I remember it. It is on the fact that attach you gained attach you lose. I’m sorry attach you lose. Detach you gain. Even then, 30 minutes of reflection took me about 10s to remember and then I still misquoted it. This is an exercise for anybody. Spend a few minutes reflecting on something that, let’s say the next time Instagram, an Instagram quote, or TikTok reels stops in your tracks, just mark it down and see if you remember two hours later what it was.

James Beshara 00:23:57  If you could tell somebody, tell your spouse, tell a significant other, tell a coworker or a friend something that, that stopped you in your tracks. And it’s so hard. So reflection in Vedanta has and this this tradition has so many explicit, precise definitions on all of these things you’re asking about, what are the daily practices, what does reflection look like? The rankings of the forms of reflection of Vedanta are. The lowest form is actually to sit in stillness with it. Higher than that is to write about it. Higher than that is to reflect on it with a group which reflection with other people. That’s a in Buddhism called sangha and in Vedanta, satsang and it’s community and truth. Before I had exposure to this philosophy, I would have I would have always thought reflection. Oh, reflection is what you do on like a quiet walk on your own, or you sit in stillness. And that’s the lowest form of reflection within this tradition, because once you have to talk about it and then you realize like, oh shit, I don’t, I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

James Beshara 00:25:00  And that was I thought, I kind of really discovered a truth. And then now I’m talking about it with a spouse and fumbling over my words. And and it’s a good thing. So it’s a humbling exercise. And I go through a daily including this one where I misquoted. And it’s a reminder that’s going to require maybe 100,000 times more reflections for that principle to hit.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:21  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at one eufy and take the first step towards getting back on track.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:09  I’m sort of promoting my book, so it’s like always on my mind. But so many things you said tie right back into there. I use a quote in there. It’s a it’s an old Chinese quote that read a book a thousand times and you will begin to understand it. And I talk about how when I got sober in 12 step programs, they would read the same thing at the beginning of every meeting. They would read the 12 steps, they would read the 12 promises again and again and again. And I went to a lot of meetings in the beginning. So sometimes 2 or 3 times a day I’m hearing this and, and at that time, and there’s so many cliches in 12 step programs that I just would be like, And then I was reflecting on when I was working with my Zen teacher in a really intense period a few years ago, I spent seven months on 165 page book for my job doing this. It was the book. It was Appreciate Your Life by Izumi Roshi. For this podcast, I cover a lot of ground.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:10  Right. I’ll talk to you today. I mean, I’m interviewing two people a week. I’m getting a lot of stuff, and there’s an enjoyment and there’s a value and a purpose in that. But I also have to have this other part of my life that’s like you’re describing that says like, let me just pick an idea and stay with it. Like, if we were to try and build a virtue, something like, let’s just pick gratitude. It’s an easy one. That is a long process of of building it as a virtue, building it as a state of mind, as a default. This is what you’re talking about. You keep coming back to these ideas again and again and again, because that’s how we actually change. That’s how one mindset gets shifted into another. And I just love that idea of also the group. Right. I got sober in 12 step programs. We run communities here and I agree with you. It’s that discussion with other people that is so, so valuable. So I run this program called Wise Habits.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:17  And one of the things I teach on Sunday, which is arguably the least important part of the program, and we pick a principle and we devote a week to it. But what we do is we divide the big group up into small groups that meet together by themselves on Wednesdays, and that is far more valuable, I think, than the 90 minutes with me.

James Beshara 00:28:37  It’s almost like one is really just the container for the other.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:41  Yeah. So, so many great things in what you said there.

James Beshara 00:28:46  You touched on one idea and, and I remember, Rick Rubin, the famous music producer, he said in an interview 3 or 4 years ago, he said, right now in life, I’m not reading anything that isn’t a thousand years old and finding those those things that are that have lasted longer than any human empire and then adding in those timeless truths and then adding in the repetition. Repetition is power. That reflection is worth. It is 100,000 times more powerful than reading it once listening to it once, hearing it once is is basically nothing if we don’t reflect on it.

James Beshara 00:29:22  And and Charlie Munger, the famous investor, he was Warren Buffett’s partner and second best investor of all time, right behind Warren Buffett. And and he has this great quote on this. He said, take a simple idea and take it seriously.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:34  Yes. Yeah. I mean, my book is called How a Little Becomes a Lot, and the heart of it is a little by little philosophy. And what you just said, it’s a simple idea. We all know it. We all know we’ve got all kinds of phrases. Rome wasn’t built in a day. And you eat an elephant, a bite at a time and all that. But taking it seriously as an approach to the way you solve challenges in your life is an entirely different thing. I like that. Pick one idea and take it seriously. So you do this morning reflection. And then when that’s over, you’re a busy guy. I mean, you run magic mind. You’re an investor in a bunch of other companies. I now know that you have three children, which is a whole other animal to contend with.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:19  You do a daily podcast on Vedanta. How do you keep that stillness that you get in the morning? What are the things that you try to do to keep that as you go throughout your day? That’s a challenging transition. It’s like, we’ve got my morning time. It’s really special. And then the sun comes up, to use your phrase, and I’m off and running. How do you carry some of the morning with you?

James Beshara 00:30:43  It’s a great question. You know, by the way, this is satsang and this is so beautiful because the way that that you’re even thinking is so different than and I think listeners, that’s why they love your podcast is, just the line of questions is from someone that’s pursuing truth themselves. And so asking about the specifics, these are the questions. Like when I was hardcore. All of the content I would ever digest a startup related for the first 15 years of my career. So it was like, give me the specifics. What is a fast growing startup actually look like? What are the numbers? Right.

James Beshara 00:31:19  And and you really want to know the specifics when it’s something that that you truly care about. And so it’s just beautiful that you care about these specifics because like I said, a lot of the podcasts like, yeah, this is all well and good, but how did you raise the series a how did you end? And I wish people asked more about The Roots, because I think if you see a life that, for anybody listening, let’s say you see someone on the cover of a magazine or you see someone that you look up to in the neighborhood, that you want their life, look at their roots, not the fruits. Don’t look at a milestone or an achievement. Look at their roots. What do they do on a daily basis? What are their non-negotiables? What are their boundaries? What are the things that are most important to them that allow these things to stack up. And to your question, I think it’s a reverse. It’s not how do I find the stillness for these things to take place? It’s because of the stillness.

James Beshara 00:32:08  All of these take place that my life is summed up in effortless effort. It feels so effortless. And and it’s because through this stillness, there is this framework that is 5000 plus years old framework on how to live a life in the most beautiful, optimized way. But it’s so individual, so specific to each person. And it’s a discovery of, okay, what is like one principle within Vedanta? And by the way, there’s only about 25, 26 principles in this philosophy that another word for it is sonata and dharma, which means eternal principles. One of the principles is dharma, your nature. And it is better to die into your nature than it is to live in a foreign nature. This also comes from the Bhagavad Gita where it’s it’s saying like, you think you might be a starving artist going, you know, becoming a musician, it is better to do that than to seemingly thrive as an investment banker. What you’re not wired for or doing this other thing that maybe satisfies what your parents want of you, but not what you want of yourself.

James Beshara 00:33:14  And if you did that music thing and some people like you and I, we play music on the side. You can also find outlets where it’s just fun. But if you’re nature, I know my nature is not music all the time there. I meet those musicians and I’m like, yes, yeah, that’s a freak of nature. Thank God for all of us. They dive into that. You think it might be a death of some sort of like, I’m going to become a starving artist, I guess, but you’re going to be so fulfilled by that alignment with your nature and nature itself that not only will but feel effortless, you will thrive. It’s like the surfer that learns to surf, and then after a while, it’s just a few paddles and boom, they’re going down the line traveling 300 yards and the wave is just carrying them. It’s it’s effortless because they know which waves to pick. They, they, they are built to be a surfer. They put in the first three paddles and boom.

James Beshara 00:34:05  It’s a metaphor I talk about quite a bit on on the daily Vedantic is 100 people listening to the podcast. So it’s a small podcast that literally I’m like, I had a startup podcast and I was like, I just, I don’t care if ten people listen. I’m going to just talk about philosophy. I’m switching gears. And, and one metaphor that I use a lot is the, the albatross can go up to 600 miles on a single flap of its wings, and that’s because it it is surrendering into its natures, which is to fly. It understands barometric pressure and understands air pressure. It understands wind patterns, has these massive wingspans. And that isn’t an anomaly. That’s how we all should live, is we find what we’re wired for. It might be music, it might be athletics, it might be business, it might be community building. It might be philosophy. It might be teaching. Find what you’re wired for. And it’s a single flap of the wings. Once you know how to fly, single flap the wings.

James Beshara 00:35:02  And then 600 miles later, you’re just gliding. That same albatross could be in the water saying like, no, no, no, flying is not my thing. I got a paddle. It’s in its wrong nature and it might die before it goes a mile, much less 600 miles. Paddling against a current versus gliding with with the wind. So when you find that Sudama, your nature and a lot of introspection, and one of the best ways to to do it is through reflection where it’s asking yourself a question, what’s the thing that you would do, where the only reward is that you got to do more of it? No financial reward, no validation, no fame status. Your only reward is that you’ve got to do more of it. What is that thing? As you cultivate an idea of what that is, maybe it goes back to what you’re into when you’re five, six, seven, eight years old? When you do that, it is energy generating. It is not energy dissipating its energy generating.

James Beshara 00:36:00  The definition of right action within Vedanta is that which generates energy. The definition of wrong action is that which dissipates energy. So you align your nature with nature itself. You generate energy, and you go into parenting at 5 p.m. when you kind of close the laptop, the work you’re doing, and you’re energized going into the night shift, so to speak, instead of former me would have been just so exhausted. I mean, inform me sent me to the E.R. with a heart condition because I was overworking myself. So much so that stillness in the morning, that’s still point those first 90 minutes. That is the reorientation back to these principles, back to my dharma, back to duty, service, surrender. That then allows me to work for 7 or 8 hours effortlessly, it feels like. And then I’m energized going into the night shift with the three kids, going into the podcast, going into a conversation like this.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:06  Surely there have to be times that it’s hard?

James Beshara 00:37:10  I don’t know. I cannot tell you in the last ten years a day where I have been stressed. There have been moments. So to answer your question, technically, yes, there’s an hour here or there where I’m like, I gotta go on a walk. There was an hour in April of last year where I was like, I got a call from our landlord, three kids, and we had been told for months that we’re going to be able to buy the home that we’re renting. And and he they were going through a divorce and he said, hey, James, he’s a good family friend. He goes, James, I got some bad news. His ex-wife. She wants to buy the house, and you’re not going to be able to buy it. This has been like 16 or 17 months of of, like, oh, next month, once the divorce finalized. What? So that was so unexpected. And, The hallmark of intelligence, by the way, is how infrequently you have unexpected news and how infrequently you’re surprised is tied to our intelligence. So I was surprised. I was just and I was like, I need to close my laptop and I’m going to go for a walk and went for a walk for an hour.

James Beshara 00:38:18  That was, last not last. April was April before last, so about two years ago. So technically answering a question, there are hard moments, but spiritually answering a question, it’s so unrecognizable versus my 20s where I’m almost 40 now. So my 20s, there was a point in time where it was so hard, where I, I had PTSD of just opening up my email inbox so much. Yeah, I just couldn’t handle any more work, any more bad news. And it was bad news all day long, but now there aren’t many hard times.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:49  Well, that’s a testament to do. You say you do two hours of practice every morning or one hour?

James Beshara 00:38:53  An hour and a half

Eric Zimmer 00:38:54  That’s a testament to what an hour and a half of practice will give you is a much greater resilience. I think about this a lot because I think I’m doing what I’m. I don’t love this phrase because it makes it sound like there’s somebody out there designing the way things are.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:10  And I don’t want to get into a question about the divine, but what I meant to do, having these conversations, teaching the things that I teach. And there are moments where I find it challenging. Some of that I think is getting older. My energy isn’t quite what it what it once was, but there are moments that I find it’s hard, and I also find that motives are so mixed. You talk a lot about this. It’s one of the things you say. You say that it’s not what you do. It’s what you do it for. Which is a beautiful idea of intention. And so when I look at just this podcast, let’s just take let’s keep it simple. The producing of this podcast, I know the main motivating thing that I do it for, right? It was because I loved having these conversations. I needed the wisdom. And then over time it became that I know it helps a lot of people. And so that’s the thing, right? And it’s also how I make a living.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:14  It’s also the way. And when it doesn’t go well, that means that that could be challenge. And so what I find is I get these two things wrapped up. Then there’s a third. Then the ego jumps in. Right. There’s the more pure intention. There’s the practical. Like, this is how I make money. This is important. And then the ego jumps in and that’s the one that’s like, you know, how many downloads do I have? Why? You know, why am I not as good as X? You know, why am I not as popular as ex podcast? So all three of those things get wrapped into one bundle of I’m doing the podcast, and I agree with you that the thing that keeps the ship straight the most is going back to what I would call the wiser higher self motives. The more that I do that, the easier it does get indeed.

James Beshara 00:41:07  I know there’s some overlap with Zen on this, so I’d love to to hear from you on this.  Within Vedanta, it’s 97% of the philosophy is action, action, action. I touched on that service. service is just action for the higher. So it’s action for the higher. Constantly. And when in doubt, act. That’s what, that’s what the the Krishna, the charioteer and and the guitar. Gita is the most famous poem on the. On the planet is a 30 minute conversation between super short read, 30 minute conversation between this charioteer and this warrior prints on right before the the beginning of this of the most epic battle of this great civil war. That’s 13 years in the making. And the warrior prince is the most famous warrior prince in the land. He should be so jacked up. And yet he is like, hey, Krishna, take me to the middle of the battlefield because I want to survey both sides. I want to see from a different perspective, strategically how we line up and what we should do. Really, he’s just kind of, like, balking at at the thought of this.

James Beshara 00:42:11  He wants to get some separation from his side. He goes in the middle of battlefield, sees just how just how outnumbered they are. This is kind of this metaphor of righteousness and unrighteousness, just how un outnumbered they are. The the lower wolf, the lower self seems to be so much stronger, so much louder than the higher self. And he goes to the middle of the battlefield and he sees how outnumbered they are. And then he has a complete meltdown. He can’t stand up. He throws his bow on the ground, falls to his knees, and he’s like, Krishna, help me! I can’t fight this battle. We should we shouldn’t even be doing this. And he comes up with this famous spiritual bypass where the first chapter is just him reeling, saying we should go to the forest and and study philosophy. We should not be doing this. This is our kith and kin because that’s a civil war. These are our cousins. His own, his own guru is on the other side, and he’s called to kill his gurus.

James Beshara 00:43:10  Like this isn’t right. And Krishna, who you’d think is Christian, is the symbolic embodiment of of God. And so you’d think God would be like, yes, you’d, you figured it out. Violence isn’t the way we should be practicing philosophy. But, and not so many words. Krishna is like, no, you had your chance to seek peace instead of violence. You chose this battle. Now you got to get the fuck up and fight and you’ve got to kill all of them. And it’s like, whoa. From a spiritual. Textural perspective that’s so unexpected for for us in the West.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:47  Yes.

James Beshara 00:43:48  That it’s like, wait, whoa whoa whoa. What? Like, this is supposed to be the spiritual embodiment. God. And he’s telling this warrior prince that he’s got to get up and kill everybody. And he’s right, like it’s the spiritual bypass to say, you know what? Unrighteousness might win, but I’m gonna go peace out. I’m gonna go to the ashram. I’m gonna go on a ten day, ten day retreat.

James Beshara 00:44:08  I’m going to go meditate. I’m going to go on an infinite walk where I’m kind of shying away from, I’m going to close my laptop, go for a walk instead of an hour. You’re just constantly looking away from the battle at hand instead of, yeah, take your time. Gather yourself. Arjuna, the warrior prince has to gather himself, but then get up and kill everybody. Kill all of the unrighteousness. And what Krishna says to Arjuna is you’re a righteous warrior. This is a gift. You’ve been given a righteous war. This isn’t an unrighteous battle. You’re not seeking to to pillage and plunder for your own aggrandizement. You’ve been given a battle to fight and defeat unrighteousness. And you are equipped to that. Your whole life has been leading up to this, this moment, this challenge. But you’re equipped to. So I think in those moments of challenge where I feel challenged for an hour, it’s a hard conversation or it’s a it’s an investment that’s going poorly and it’s a conversation with a founder on, on maybe shutting it down or fighting on because sometimes it is not Sudama.

James Beshara 00:45:14  This, this thing that I might be working on might not be my nature. And I have to tell myself, you know what? That was a indulgence. And now I need to move over towards my nature, towards generating energy over time. And that was an indulgence for the ego or an indulgence for, I don’t know, whatever reason, status and money and validation. Okay, now I can diagnose with a lot of reflection. That wasn’t for the right reasons. And it’s not what you do, it’s what you do it for that matters. And that I wasn’t doing that for the right reasons. Let me reorient my resources over here and you wind something down or it’s no, I’m doing this for the right reasons. This is my dharma. I would do this even if I have retired a thousand times in my head. I can’t stop myself from doing this. So this is my so Dharma. And it’s a challenging hour, afternoon, day, week, month. But this is the work.

James Beshara 00:46:08  This is the work. And it’s to rise above it and go into it and yet might kill me, but I’m going to do this whether it’s, you know, the a podcast or, or whatnot. But even then it’s a reorientation towards gliding towards like, okay, let me stop thinking about the fruits, the outcomes, the financial, the practical side and only reorient towards the service, the surrender and that that aspect of what am I doing this for? It’s for the two people that might get changed by an episode. And Swami will say that quite often our teacher will say that on the teaching side of things, you show up and and to, let’s say you offer to, to teach for a co-working space. It’s like, hey, James, I really want you to teach this co-working space. Tell them all about Vedanta. Show up. You put five hours into it. When you get into the things you couldn’t do before the commute, over the hour long talk, you know that it might extend into another hour.

James Beshara 00:47:07  So you block off the hour after, then the commute back and it’s five hours and two people show up and Swami will say, our teacher will say, yeah, that’s the work.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:16  Yep.

James Beshara 00:47:17  So it’s a kind of disconnection from any of the trappings that lower self might attach to. And it’s a recognition that all of this work might be to for that one soul that shows up and has nothing to do with the numbers, doesn’t pay the rent, doesn’t support on any egoistic level. And then it’s a reorientation too. Yeah. That is that is the work. And man, by doing that it’s a great healthy elimination of the ego. It’s a great healthy reinforcement of the the wisdom, the path, the the soft song. And I’m continually astounded by the things that I would have never thought were the thing I needed was delivered on a silver platter by that kind of divine logistics, by the one person that shows up not even to or the no people that show up. And I’m like, man, had I made this about a startup, how to raise $100 million for a startup, how to sell a company, how to build a company that I could use all of these superlatives that that magic mind has, it could have filled the room, but it wouldn’t have been my my true Sudama or my service.

James Beshara 00:48:22  And in terms of supplying something that that no one’s really talking about in this corner of Venice, Los Angeles on this Saturday morning.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:30  So what stops you, then from chucking all of the rest of it? Magic. Mind the investments. The time you spend on all that. Forget it. I’m out of here. I’m going to teach Vedanta.

James Beshara 00:48:45  This is the. I love this every.

James Beshara 00:48:48  Single question.

James Beshara 00:48:49  Eric.

James Beshara 00:48:49  You’re asking. I’m like, hell yes. I put my hands up because about three years ago went to the ashram that I studied with. And I never get to tell this story. I probably told this story four times. And I went to, our teacher, Swamiji is kind of the the, nickname. He’s he’s got in. And I said, Swamiji, I’ve just loved the last at this point. It was three years ago. So maybe ten years into this wisdom, I was like, I’ve loved diving into this wisdom. And the first three years was listening to these titans of questioning Alan Watts, Ram Dass.

James Beshara 00:49:26  Terence McKenna. Endlessly on on online. And then discover that the philosophy they were studying each day, like the philosophy Alan Watts was studying each day, was advice to Vedanta. These kind of Sanskrit words I had never heard. So I was like, I want to study. What if that’s what he’s studying? 35 years in, I want to just go to the end of the movie and study that stuff.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:45  It’s like when your favorite musician talks about who their favorite musician is. Exactly. I got to go check that out.

James Beshara 00:49:51  Exactly. It was like, yeah, that’s so it it was like my favorite philosopher’s favorite philosophy. So let me let me check it out for a month or two, and then I’ll probably go back to this beautiful articulation. And then that started, the deep dive strictly into, the, the text of Vedanta was a decade ago, still on that trip. And, and so three years ago, I had digested enough to I was like, I’d spent months, about four months disentangling from all of my worldly endeavors.

James Beshara 00:50:20  I brought on a co-founder and said, hey, you should be the CEO of of Magic Mind After a few months had wound down. All of my angel investing. It’s like I’m not going to start anymore things, and we’ve done financially well enough to where I can. Just enough is as good as a feast, don’t need anymore, and I’m going to devote all of my time to philosophy and do all this and go to the ashram to tell Swamiji that he’s 95 at this time. And I tell him this, and he shakes his head in such an unexpected fashion, shakes his head in disappointment. He says, why would you do that? This is a 95 year old Indian man that says, I loved his use of of this, this language. He’s so unexpected. In addition to the point, he said, why would you do that? You’ve got a good thing going. Keep it rolling. And it’s just such a funny way for such a casual way for a 95 year old Indian person to say, keep doing what you’re doing.

James Beshara 00:51:14  But he said, keep it rolling. And I was like, wait, what? I mean, my head was spinning for two weeks after this. Yeah. But certainly in that moment I was like, I thought I’d get like a pat on the back or some some kudos for this. at least for the the height of my devotion to this philosophy and diving into it even more full on and, and, and what’s so interesting, Eric, is that, like I was saying, like one of the canonical texts of this philosophy, I keep it on my desk every day is the Gita. And if people want a really digestible, 30 minute read, the no nicknames Bhagavad Gita that takes out the 72 nicknames that the two characters give to each other back and forth. It takes out the nicknames because it can be kind of kind of confusing to be like, Who is Maharaj who is.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:04  Old Buddhist texts are the same way. It’s like they repeat the same thing again. And I don’t mean like the same valuable idea.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:11  I mean like the same line. It’s just this weird format that that it’s all in that is very hard for the modern mind.

James Beshara 00:52:19  And all of these nicknames. If you know Sanskrit, you’re like, oh, wow. the, the easy to please like Krishna, the symbolic embodiment of God. One of his nicknames is easy to please. If I knew Sanskrit then I would be like, man, he’s also easy to please. I would they would be like an additional identifier, but because I don’t know Sanskrit. Yeah. Hearing all 72 nicknames that they give each others is quite disorienting. So I so I took my favorite translation of the Sanskrit Gita into English, but then I took out the 72 nicknames and just kept it. Arjuna, Krishna, Arjuna, Krishna. So you can buy that on Amazon for like ten bucks. And and it fits in your pocket. So I keep it on my desk, read it all the time, and it’s a, a continual, just rediscovery of, well, really all of these principles that we’re talking about because it is it’s not like the, the New Testament where you have 27 books and they triangulate with each other and they kind of like tell part of the story.

James Beshara 00:53:14  Every Upanishad, that might be 13 verses or the Gita, that’s 700 verses. It’s all self-contained. The whole philosophy in those 13 verses or 700 verses, just with varying degrees of explicitness. There’s a beauty in reading. Reading it over and over again and rediscovering it. And what’s so funny and what’s so needed tied to this story. Why didn’t I just. Why don’t I just cut all ties with the world and and and go into, I don’t know, go to the Himalayas? Is that when I try to do that? And he said that to me the next two weeks, I, my head was spinning and then it hit me. The canonical text of this philosophy, the Gita, the whole first chapter, as we discussed, is this warrior prince trying to get out of the battle. And I was seeking the ashram for relief. I was not seeking philosophy for. All right. This is going to be the epic dialed up challenge. I’m going to go into more dynamic living. It was man start ups fucking suck a lot of the time.

James Beshara 00:54:15  They’re hard. Yeah, they’re not nearly as peaceful sounding as sitting in an ashram with my family. Bring them over. I’d already looked at homes that we’d rent houses right around the property that you could rent and study each day. It sounded so nice. Yeah. And then I realized, oh, this is the spiritual bypass. I am built for these things. I should go into them even if they kill me. So, yeah, that was the reorientation.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:40  I think there’s something really important in there, because it’s easy to hear this idea of what do you do something for and think, I’ve got to go do something different than what I do, and sometimes that is the right choice. Sometimes you’re like, okay, I am in a situation that I should try and find what’s the right thing for me to do. And a lot of times, like I, there was a time in my life where when I looked, when I added it all up, I was like, okay, a career in software is paying the mortgage.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:13  It’s taking care of the kids and I generally like it. It’s not my deepest passion in life, but I generally like it. It’s good. It’s challenging. It’s interesting. I don’t dread it, you know? And instead of thinking, okay, well, what I really need to be doing is being a guitar player. This idea of not, you know, what am I doing? But what am I doing it for is a really powerful way to really embody our values in what we’re already doing, right? Like, I think about this a lot, this idea we get into this mindset of I have to with a lot of things. Life starts to be one big obligation. I have to, I have to. And the reality is, for most things, we actually don’t have to. You know, I use this example all the time, but it hit me one day when I was complaining about driving two kids to their various practices. I was like, I don’t have to do this.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:04  There’s no law on the books that say, I have to take my kids to soccer practice. And then I went, well, okay, well what? Then? Why? And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, it’s because I think that A, B and C it’s good for them. They like it. It’s important. And now all of a sudden, the very same activity of driving kids to soccer practice is imbued in a different way because I’ve connected it back to go all the way back to your terms, back to my intellect, back to what really matters. And so I think so much of life is that constant reconnection, that constant. How does what I’m already doing in the world, what I’m going to go do today, how do I imbue that with this spirit of effortless effort, with the spirit of service, with the spirit of love, with the spirit of devotion? I’m assuming that’s what when you processed your two weeks with your Swami, after that, you came back and you said, okay, if I’m not going to change all that, how do I continue to take what I’m doing and make it an expression of my deepest values.

James Beshara 00:57:11  The cascade of reorientation was around, and I’ll mention a few of, of the other favorite principles within this philosophy that I love that that it’s it’s almost like 26 golf clubs in the bag of the game of life. And so you got to know which one to hit. What? You can’t just get up on the, the driving range and, and hit the putter and expect, well, this is a golf club. I’m doing the right tool. Using the wrong way becomes the wrong tool. But once you have a recognition of like, oh, this principle applies right here and that principle applies, I’d say if 97% of this philosophy is about action and action action and then 3% is about these, these really higher minded aspects, these higher minded things like 3% of the day, spend it in reflection, 97% of the day. Action, action, action. Not in like I’m going to sit in Lotus position for 15 hours and then I won’t be able to relate to anybody. I actually won’t ever put it to the test.

James Beshara 00:58:05  You know, it’s the adage goes, if you can’t, if you cannot meditate in a boiler room, then you cannot meditate that it’s it’s actually you need to be able to apply this in the midst of the aisle six, with the two year old melting down, screaming for the 35th minute at the grocery store. And can you find stillness there? That’s can you find it in the midst of a five month straight, the company, revenue is going in the wrong direction and people are quitting and leaving and and all of these things. Yeah. This is a this is a a week. It is a day for me to seeing these things happen and, and then feeling like, wow, this isn’t that hard. This is one like I was saying that around expectations setting and a few of these principles that I’ll kind of rattle off, that you can fit together is the root of nearly all frustration is mismanaged expectations. So expect profits and losses. Expect a the the world is defined is as opposites within Vedanta.

James Beshara 00:59:02  The world is opposites. Yep. Good or bad. Pleasure. Pain. Heat. Cold.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:06  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at one you net. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. Oneyoufeed.net/ebook 

Buddhism. They call it the 10,000 Joys and the 10,000 sorrows. And you have all of it at the same time.

James Beshara 00:59:56  Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:58  Yeah.

James Beshara 00:59:58  Expect it. And the, you know, aim to be a realist where you have the optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel. The pessimist sees the tunnel, but not the light.

James Beshara 01:00:08  But the realist sees the light and the next tunnel. Be the realist. You will have profits and losses. You will have pleasure and pain. You will have all of these things. And then you don’t suffer. You got the pain, but you expected it. You shit. You went out and saw it. You went out to the gym once, once a day to voluntarily take on some pain so that you don’t have that three years of lower back pain because of bodily neglect for the ten years prior, and that voluntary pain, that expectation of either I take it now or I’m going to get it later. The what is like poison in the beginning is like nectar. In the end, it ends up being like nectar and you’re like, yeah, that daily chewing on a little bit of a little bit of poison and bam, no wonder I don’t have back pain. And and you kind of mix these things together and it’s, it is just a really beautiful harmony where you have all these different notes playing, but they play beautifully.

James Beshara 01:01:07  And in those 26, golf clubs get used in the right way where you’re you’re freaking scratch golfer of life hitting, you know, one under on that par five. That would have been really challenging had you hit the putter off the driving range. Had you had you hit the driver when you were eight feet out and you use the wrong clubs in the wrong way. So to kind of put it in a bow, there are these different principles. You, you, you become aware of them, you reflect on them. You know that none of this might speak to someone. There are as many paths to the divine as there are people on earth, so it might not speak to them. But if these do speak to someone you reflect on, you internalize them, and then they become golf clubs. Then it’s like, oh yeah, that guy said, can’t remember the last time he’d had a hard day. But that’s because every hour I’m like, chewing on what is the poison that I should chew through right now.

James Beshara 01:01:56  That’s going to be like nectar in the end. We know this neuroscientific actually. Andrew Huberman, the neuroscientist, he he said this once. I was so powerful. I wrote it down, learned it word for word, and and have said this in various various settings because it’s so I’d say it’s one of the most powerful things that I’ve ever heard in neuroscience. And this is his verbatim words, is one of the most powerful things we’ve learned around the science of motivation is that you can train your neurochemistry to reward you when you do something challenging. One of the most powerful things we’ve learned around the science of motivation is that you can train your neurochemistry to reward you when you do something challenging, and it gives it an example of for six weeks, it might feel like you’re lying to yourself by telling you that I’m going to the gym and it’s going to feel good, I’m going to the gym. It’s going to feel I’m going to go on a run. It’s going to feel good. I’m going to go on a run.

James Beshara 01:02:48  It’s going to feel good. I’m going to do 6 to 10 sprints for 50 yards. It’s one of the most efficient ways to work out. By the way, I’m going to sprint 50 yards six times and it’s going to be awesome. I’m gonna feel amazing, he said. For six weeks, it’ll feel like you’re lying to yourself. Then it starts to reward. It starts to become self-fulfilling that you really do feel it. You feel the reward. You look forward to it like a best friend, and you don’t want to miss it. Not because you’re disciplined, but it’s just nothing feels as good as doing what you ought to do. Feel that reward and you can program that neurochemical reward. That’s this, that’s this, this principle of it feels like poison in the beginning, and then it becomes like nectar in the end, and we know it. Like I said, neuro chemically, it’s very easy to six weeks goes by like that where you start doing these quote unquote hard things. And then ten years in, someone says like, man, isn’t that workout really hard? You know, like, I haven’t thought about it that way for the three hours leading up to it.  I’m like itching to go do it because I love it so much.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:50  Thank you James. That is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. We didn’t even get to talk about what Magic Mind is your company? We’re going to have a brief post-show conversation where we do that. Listeners, if you’d like access to that and all the other goodies you get, go to oneyoufeed.net/join and there will be links in the show notes. Also to all ways to find James, to find magic mined, to find his wonderful daily Vedanta podcast. Thanks, James.

James Beshara 01:04:18  Thank you so much. Eric, thank you for the time and for what you put out into the world.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:22  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a talk show, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Erich Zimmer 00:00:00  You may have heard me mention my new book a few times, and I can assure you, you will certainly hear it a few more. But now we are offering some pre-order bonuses. One of them is the still Point method, which I believe is the only systematic way to interrupt negative thought patterns often enough for them to change. There’s a lot out there about what you should think and not think, but there’s very little that gives you a small and portable system to actually do it. You get the guide to the method, and three free months of a new app designed to help you implement it. There are other bonuses too. You can learn more and claim them at one you feel. Net book.

James Patterson 00:00:42  Imagine life is a game in which you’re juggling five balls in the air. You name them work, family, health, friends, and spirit and you’re keeping them all in the air somehow. And hopefully you soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, believe it or not, it will bounce back.

James Patterson 00:01:00  But the other four bowls family, health, friends, spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of those, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, knick damaged, or even shattered. They’ll never be the same.

Chris Forbes 00:01:22  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Erich Zimmer 00:02:07  One thing that feels true about the moment we’re living in is that disruption isn’t optional anymore.

Erich Zimmer 00:02:13  Technological shifts, economic changes, artificial intelligence. So many forces are reshaping the world around us, and it can feel like the ground is constantly moving beneath our feet. My guest today is James Patterson, one of the most widely read authors in the world. In this conversation, we explore how he thinks about disruption, not just in writing and business, but in life. How do we respond when the world changes around us? Do we resist it or learn how to work with it? His latest book is Disrupt Everything and When, where he looks at how individuals and organizations can adapt to change and even use it to their advantage. I’m Erich Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, James, welcome to the show.

James Patterson 00:03:02  Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here.

Erich Zimmer 00:03:05  We’re going to be discussing all kinds of things, but we’ll be spending a fair amount of time with your latest book, which is called Disrupt Everything in Win Take Control of Your Future. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable.

Erich Zimmer 00:03:19  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. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And grandchild stops and 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.

James Patterson 00:03:51  Well, I think it just means that everyone is complicated, and I wish we could kind of look at the world that way. It’s very logical to me. It’s exactly what you see in life that people have, you know, in the writing. I always want highest common denominator. I mean, that’s just me, I want it, I want a common denominator, but I want the highest and in life.

James Patterson 00:04:11  You know, you do your best or I do my best. And most people, I think, do to, to sort of, feed your better side. It’s always worked out better for me to be a straight shooter as much as you can. to try and avoid spending too much time with people who aren’t that way. You know, if you have business to try to not deal with people, that the wrong side is coming out all the time. One of the things to me about negotiation is I always felt this way, and people have different ideas about it, but my thing is I want to walk away from a negotiation with the other person, feeling, okay, maybe I could have done better, but I feel okay about this and I want to walk away the same way. I want to leave money on the table if it involves money.

Erich Zimmer 00:04:55  Speaking of negotiation, we, I think, may share a literary agency. I’ve got my first book coming out, and Richard Pyne at Inkwell is my agent.

James Patterson 00:05:05  Yeah. No, Richard was early on. He and his father, Arthur and Richard and. Yeah, they were terrific. Very. I’m sure they’ll do a nice job for you. Yeah, or he will. I’m sorry. Yeah.

Erich Zimmer 00:05:17  Yeah. His father has passed. Before we get into the book I saw on your Substack, you have a Substack right now called Hungry Dogs, where you’re doing lots of interesting things. One of them is that you showed books on your bookshelf, the books that have helped shape you, that you’ve read. And I was struck by two things. One is you seem like a very positive person, very upbeat person. And yet when I looked at that bookshelf, there’s some pretty heavy stuff on there, Write a fan’s notes on naive.

James Patterson 00:05:51  Yeah, a lot of people think it positive. To me. It’s just a logical thing if you can do it to be positive.

Erich Zimmer 00:05:57  So some of the books that were on your list when you Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Bell Jar.

James Patterson 00:06:04  And Ken Kesey, even for Ken Kesey, who wrote that sometimes a Great Notion is another book that he wrote, which a lot of people think is better than One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I love that title. Sometimes, yeah, a great notion. That’s a really it’s a really cool title if you think of it. A great notion, yeah. Notion. An interesting word to use. I’m sorry, but go ahead. Ken Kesey yeah, yeah.

Erich Zimmer 00:06:27  Well, one of the things I thought was interesting is you’re going through the books and some of these books, like we said, The Bell Jar, those books, they’re pretty heavy books. And then you get to The Day of the Jackal and you say, you know, you had been very serious about your reading before you read that book. And it occurred to you that while you may not be able to write something like 100 Years of Solitude. You could write in that direction. Was that a real landmark? Was that a big change moment for you?

James Patterson 00:06:55  Yeah, I think it was.

James Patterson 00:06:56  I wanted to write for a living. It seemed to me that if you want to write for a living, to some extent, it probably has to be commercial. A and B, I thought I probably was capable of writing a literary novel, but I didn’t particularly want to write for those people, and I didn’t think I had anything, you know, incredibly profound. I thought I could write something that, you know, probably could get published and do okay, and I didn’t want to tell stories for it. For the people that read those books in particular, I was in graduate school at Vanderbilt just before that. And, and I started writing mysteries, which I didn’t read much. I had only read a few mysteries, but I thought de the Jackal and the other one was The Exorcist, and I didn’t read a lot of Pi. I was a little, you know, literary snob, right? You know, grad graduate English student on a, you know, and and I read those and I went, oh, these are pretty cool.

James Patterson 00:07:48  And maybe I can do something like that and keep writing and tell stories, which I love to do. And, you know, and part of it for me anyway, is when I do a project, when I do a book, it’s something that I’m that I’m passionate about when I, when I get into it, and I hope it will turn out really well. And that’s all that matters to me, that it does turn out that I can do the best I can. And at the end of the project I go, I’m really glad I did. That doesn’t always happen.

Erich Zimmer 00:08:14  I heard you on a previous podcast sometime in the past, talking about what you wanted to to do a book where there’s a detective, his wife dies, she comes back as a hummingbird. And you were you were doubting yourself on that one. Has that gotten any? I was going to say legs. But wings.

James Patterson 00:08:29  Yeah, I still like that story. I think it’s a cool story. reincarnation. Play around with that a little bit fantasy.

James Patterson 00:08:36  There’s certain things, certain kinds of books I can write a love story that I have. I couldn’t write a romance novel, you know, the old. Nothing against him, but I couldn’t write one. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t get that. I could not write a book about a general. I don’t kind of get them. I don’t get the way they talk. I don’t get the way they think. I just couldn’t do it. I’m actually writing now, which I’m loving a romantic. And I had written a few, you know, Yaris and a few of those, and I kind of liked them, I mean, and they were and, and I liked the idea of fantasy and world building, and I hadn’t done it. And I thought, well, that would be a cool challenge, and I think I can do it, and I’m loving doing it a lot. It’s it’s really exciting and fun and, and a challenge.

Erich Zimmer 00:09:17  What is it that keeps you moving forward? You’ve written, I mean, God only knows how many books.

James Patterson 00:09:24  It’s that that next book is going to be the best I’ve done, or at least that it’s going to be as good as I hoped it would be. I just finished a book with Viola Davis, a novel which is coming out in March, I believe, and I think it’s the best sort of legit novel that I’ve ever done. I think it’s very dramatic. You know, it’s interesting with viola because she said she said, James, you know, you would think I’m Viola Davis and I’m watching. The minute you would think that I’m getting all these great parts to play with great characters. He said, I don’t. And she said, what I love about this novel that we’re doing is I love this character. I want to play this character. But she says it’s rare. It just doesn’t. And, you know, people always go, well, oh. James’s style is in short chapters. It really isn’t. Every book that I do, whether it’s non-fiction, even even with Disrupt Everything or I just did a book about the Idaho murders out there.

James Patterson 00:10:19  You’re looking for a voice. I am, and they’re all different. Alice Cross’s voice is very different from the Viola Davis novel that I just finished. David Ellison sort of suggests that he’s Skydance or whatever. Very terrific reader, and he’s very interested in entertaining people, and he wanted to do something on it I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do the book initially. And then I talked to Vicky Ward, who I did that with. She’s a wonderful reporter, really, you know, digs up all sorts of information and, you know, very just fabulous to work with. But we didn’t want to write about, you know, this, this killer as much. But but we wanted to write about is to capture those two college towns, Moscow, Idaho and the Pullman, Washington, and what it would be like to have this incredibly sad, tragic, scary thing happen in your town. What would be the effect on the town? What would be the effect on the students? What would be the effect on the police who may never handle anything even close to that? Yeah.

James Patterson 00:11:22  What would be the effect? As you see the the all these terrible. Not not at all. But some terrible people on the internet who will expose people and go, well, that’s the killer and it’s not the killer, and you just put it out to, you know, half a million people that that person is a killer. What a horrifying thing to do. Yeah. You know, and that became the voice of it. The voice of if you lived in one of those towns, this would it be like, this is this is how you might feel.

Erich Zimmer 00:11:50  What is the co-writing process like? You’ve co-written with lots of.

James Patterson 00:11:54  Depends on who it’s with. Yeah. Do you want to try the. No. You’re too slow. We alternate words. Just kidding.

Erich Zimmer 00:12:01  Hang on. I was hoping we’d end this interview with us co-writing a book. Now, you didn’t warn me that was coming.

James Patterson 00:12:06  Never know. You never know the one you feed. You know, it really depends. With President Clinton, it’s very different.

James Patterson 00:12:13  And he likes mysteries and thrillers, and so he likes the genre anyway, and he brings authenticity to it. And he’s a good writer on top of everything else. The only trick with President Clinton is he wants every book to be like a thousand pages. And that’s that’s a little hard in that mystery world. But I mean, if the stories are a little far fetched and they are a little, the president would say, well, if it happened, here’s what the Secret Service would do or if something happened. Here’s what here. Here’s what it’s like in the white House. Here’s what it’s like to be the president or the most recent one, the first gentleman he didn’t get to be. He wanted to be the first gentleman. That didn’t happen with Hillary as president. so he would bring authenticity. Dolly Parton also brought incredible authors. So it really depends on who you’re working with. some of them, you know, want to do a fair amount of the writing by Olha did a lot of, of rewriting dialogue, which was great because she’s thinking of, of of what it would be like in the movie and how the dialogue might work better.

James Patterson 00:13:15  And there was one young character in there who she was particularly attached to, and she wanted to make sure that we got it right with that 13 year old. But it’s all over the life.

Erich Zimmer 00:13:47  Keeping up with your catalog is is a full time job. So I don’t know if the fact that you wrote an autobiography, then a book about being an advice for dads and now this book about disrupt everything. Is this your first real foray into, for lack of a better word, the advice world?

James Patterson 00:14:06  Yeah, I you know, I don’t give advice as much as sort of lay out some thoughts that I’ve had. And I did a thing online and it had to do with the way I write. And I say, I don’t give advice. I’m going to tell you what I do. You might find some of it useful. Yeah. The only thing I said about it is that the stuff that you’re nodding at don’t pay attention to because you’re already doing it. The stuff that you shake your hand at, that’s the stuff you ought to think about because you’re not doing that.

James Patterson 00:14:33  And maybe you should. Maybe you shouldn’t. But that’s that’s the interesting stuff. But but yeah, in terms of, you know, what’s disrupt everything. Maybe there have been others, but it is both a little bit of self-help and a business advisor. And I think I’m in a position to talk to people about that because I had two careers. I was in advertising, and I was the youngest CEO ever at the J. Walter Thompson, which at that point was the biggest ad agency in the world. But everything I did there was about disrupting. I went there, I was in grad school at Vanderbilt and what it was there in Vietnam, and it was during the lottery, and I had a high lottery number, but you had to leave school. So I left after one year there, but I needed to get a job and I didn’t. I had no marketing courses, no advertising. So I went to J. Walter Thompson and said, you got you need a portfolio of it. So I quickly I did a portfolio of ads and that was supposed to be the deal.

James Patterson 00:15:23  But the second week I brought him another portfolio, and the third week I brought him another portfolio, and they said, okay, well, these portfolios are pretty good. And this guy seems hungry and whatever. And we like him up to a point. And so they hired me. But everything there was a disruption when I took over the New York office. A lot of their offices were quite good. But Newark, New York was terrible and nobody wanted to go work there. And I did this thing right. If you want work, did an ad on the back page of the New York Times, it was eight questions like, here are the ingredients on a can of beans, oil, vinegar, whatever make it sound delicious. And what you could do when you read these eight answers that people wrote in was you could tell A whether they could write and be whether they could solve problems. That actually was the most important thing. In ten minutes, you could tell. And over the course of a couple of years, I hired over 40 writers on that.

James Patterson 00:16:17  One of them went on to be the showrunner on cheers. Another one has written a couple of movie scripts that got produced and, you know, whatever. But once again, another disruption in the book business. You know, as I went over and I had been involved in because I wrote a book when I was 26, a novel, I got turned down by 31 publishers, and they went on to win an Edgar, which is bizarre, so turned down by everybody. And then it’s the best first novel of the I don’t know, whatever that’s all about. In those days, it was sort of like you do the one book a year, and that’s the rule. I’m going, well, I mean, why is that the rule? I don’t understand. It’s fine to do one a year or one every five years or whatever, but why is that a rule? I don’t quite get it. And I remember going to the publisher and I and the Alex Cross series that was going on and that was successful, and they said, okay, well, this year I really like to do three books and I want to do Alex Cross.

James Patterson 00:17:11  I said, yeah, that’s great. And then and then I had another idea for a mystery novel. I said, oh, okay, that sounds okay. And then I had a love story, Suzanne story for Nicholas. And when I told them the story, the the CEO actually cried while I was telling the story. And then when I was done he said, oh, well, we want to do the Alice Cross and we’ll do the other mystery, but we don’t want to do the love story because that’s not your brand. And I go like, okay, I don’t know. I was in advertising, I kind of, I don’t think of myself as a brand, but if I did, I think what it would be that James will keep you turning the pages. So if you want to read a love story that kind of moves along, you might like this. Yeah. And so reluctantly, they published it and it’s now, I think, the section of the third most popular book I have ever published.

James Patterson 00:17:53  But once again, it’s just this thing of disrupting positive disruptions, which is basically been the secret of my whole life, just, you know. Well, why is that? And and I think I can help other people to deal with it. And what that can do immediately is remove a lot of stress from their lives immediately. And anybody you talk to your doctor, they will all agree stress kills. Stress is not good. So if we can remove some stress or if, you know problem comes in the late. Whatever the hell happened this week or today, whatever it is. And it’s like, oh my God, you know, artificial intelligence. They’re bringing it into our company. It will help you to make the first step in terms of, okay, how do you deal with that? Let’s suppose that your job is threatened. What are some of the skills that you have? What are some things that you could do. So it’s a useful thing if for no other reason just to calm you down, you know, or if you have a product that you think you believe in in terms of, okay, here’s a lot of steps to figure out how to maybe deal with that product and ultimately bring it to market.

James Patterson 00:18:56  So depending on whether you want a little or a lot, that’s what the book is, is about. And we also we have a series with Franklin Covey. They, they do a lot of courses around the country, businesses, and they’re doing one based on the book. And I think that’s very exciting too, because if you’re in a business, one, you need a mission. Obviously the one you feed you need is a mission for that. What are we going to do? What’s the sort of style of it? How is it going to work? So disrupt everything helps you to make sure that that mission is as tight as it can be. But then you need buy in for the mission. So for our publisher, for for Hachette, they had some new people in there and they had a new mission. And for that to work, it meant that all the editors need to disrupt the way they’ve been editing and the way they’ve been buying books. The sales department would need to disrupt the way they’ve been selling books in the receptionists maybe has to disrupt the way they greet people and talk to people.

James Patterson 00:19:53  So and insofar as you get in a company or in your at your team, in a company, insofar as you get buy in, the mission can work. If you don’t get buy in, the mission doesn’t work right. You know so so the book does that. And that’s what the Franklin Covey, that’s a lot of it, helping companies to make sure that their missions are, are going to operate at optimum or closer to optimum.

Erich Zimmer 00:20:15  So what caused you to decide writing a book about disruption. And that was just a writer.

James Patterson 00:20:22  Yeah, it was a fluke. I got invited, I said, I went to undergraduate, I got invited to do a little lecture for their business school, you know, one one hour lecture. And they said, you can write anything you want. And I did about the power of disruption and doctor laden. It was his course. And afterward he said, I’d love to do a book with you. Would you consider it? And I said, well, I don’t know, but maybe.

James Patterson 00:20:46  And he started doing disruption. And over the course of three years, actually, Patrick did a lot of research on it in terms of disruption and how it might work. The book has a lot of tools and things that you can you can work on in there, and that’s very useful for a lot of people. I’m not as tool oriented as some people. And so the research was really, really, really valuable. And then I sort of insisted that it not be a boring business book and that we went out and we just did a lot of talking to people. And then the book is full of stories. it’ll tell a story. And then which kind of illustrates whatever the point is to be made. You know, one of them was about a young guy, and he had just he was about to go off in business, and he had a brother who was on the spectrum, and he wanted to take care of his brother. And he decided on this car wash company where, where people with autism could work.

James Patterson 00:21:40  And now they have four and they have I think they have 100 employees, but 80 of them have, you know, autism. And that’s driven his life. And Patrick said to him, you know, if you hadn’t done this, where do you think you’d like to be? And he said, I like to be right where I am now with these companies and my brother and, you know, so the stories kind of illustrate the different points, but they make the book more interesting. I don’t know, a lot of business books to me are unreadable.

Erich Zimmer 00:22:05  Yeah. There’s certainly a lot of frameworks in this book as well as a lot of stories. If I name a story or two. Let’s see if you remember the story.

James Patterson 00:22:14  You know we talked about.

Erich Zimmer 00:22:15  How about.

James Patterson 00:22:15  That.

Erich Zimmer 00:22:16  You’re here. All right. How about.

James Patterson 00:22:17  I mean, one thing that I particularly love is, is the posse. And I know the people who were involved in it. And this is a great thing in terms of having an idea, but then executing it.

James Patterson 00:22:27  There are two pieces here. The idea was especially when the posse started, that a lot of colleges wanted to bring in kids from inner cities and whatever, but the problem was that they would arrive at a Brandeis or whatever, and there wouldn’t be many other kids from the inner cities, and some of the kids would be lost. And so they came up with the notion of the posse, where at a Brandeis or Vanderbilt actually is one of the schools that the school would bring in 5 to 10 every year, kids who had been trained to deal with and to get ready for it because you’re going to go to a college, it’s going to be like this here are going to be some of the things you’re going to have to deal with, and you will have your posse to help you get through it, which is brilliant. And then they sold it into, I don’t know what, they’re 40 or 50 schools at this point, and it was a great way to solve that problem for a lot of colleges, which is how do we bring these kids in and then keep them right and also make it a good environment for them.

James Patterson 00:23:25  So that’s one that I particularly love.

Erich Zimmer 00:23:27  Yeah, I loved that story. Also, how you were helping people to make connections with people, and then the whole of them was much stronger than any of its parts.

James Patterson 00:23:38  Yeah, yeah. And solving problems. It’s you have an idea and it’s kind of a cool idea, but okay, I don’t know what to do with it. Well, we can help you. Not always, but but we can. We can help you with that. Or even if you have an idea at work, there’s something that you know would make your group or the company. And to help you to be able to frame that and make it more concise so that when you bring it in, people are going to listen more rather than, oh, I get this idea and it’s all over the place and blah blah, we help you to focus it, which which is important in terms of getting people to listen and take what you’re saying seriously.

Erich Zimmer 00:24:12  Right? So this is a question I talk with a lot of guests about, and I love your perspective on it, because I think there’s two sort of things that we could get caught in.

Erich Zimmer 00:24:23  We’re not caught in. I guess I’m going to ask the question more simply, how do you balance ambition and striving with being content with what you have right the way it is?

James Patterson 00:24:34  I don’t know if they balance. Yeah. You know, I mean, one of the things that’s really big that I write about, actually, most of the novels, the Alice Cross novels, even, it’s about balancing your work life and your home life. And I think that’s huge. Alice. Crossing people, whatever. What it’s really all about is Alex has this, you know, over the top work life as this detective and then a home life. There’s a series now with Alex Cross on Amazon, and Aldis Hodge is a perfect person because in terms of an actor to play that part, because he’s very intense and as a detective, he’s very believable and very intense, and that works in terms of this terrible day job that he has, and then he’s great with the kids. And we all have not not all of us, but on some level, most of us have that thing of like, how do I balance that? You know, difficult work, life, very demanding at times.

James Patterson 00:25:26  And then I got to go home and deal with my family and somehow keep it in balance. And that’s a big thing. I have another series, Michael Bennet, and it’s complicated how it happened, but Michael winds up with, you know, 8 to 10 kids. They’ve all been adopted. He’s a New York homicide detective. How do you balance that crazy bit of, you know, but. And people identify with it. Which which is which is really important. The dad. The dad book you mentioned. Yeah. How to be a better dad in an hour. And that’s not meant to be a joke. It’s a very serious thing that a lot of what a lot of dads, young dads especially, are being overwhelmed, totally overwhelmed. And there’s a lot being written about that now. And most of them will not read a 400 page book about being a dad. So this thing is like one hour. And my promise about that book is if you spend an hour with it, what I’m going to make it engaging and it would be some comedic at times or whatever, you know, you’ll be able to read it in a good way.

James Patterson 00:26:22  And I guarantee that if you invest one hour in it, you will be a better dad. Period. Absolutely. You know, and it’s not an advice book. It’s just I, I interviewed a lot of dads and whatever and read everything I could read about it. And here’s a whole lot of shit to think about. And if that doesn’t work for you, go to the next page. And if that’s, you know, but I guarantee you you will walk away from that book. If you’re at any age that a young dad or even an older, then go and people love it. I mean, it’s amazing kind of thing when you write a book and people go, that’s really great to read. And it’s and it’s useful.

Erich Zimmer 00:26:57  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show.

Erich Zimmer 00:27:16  Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend. You also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one you feed. That’s one you get and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. How old was your child when you wrote that book?

James Patterson 00:27:50  The dad book? Jack was probably 25.

Erich Zimmer 00:27:53  Okay, so he’s around that age.

James Patterson 00:27:55  Jack’s 27. Yeah.

Erich Zimmer 00:27:56  Okay. Oh, my son is 27, actually. we have sons the same age. How did you balance in Jack’s childhood.

James Patterson 00:28:05  Was easier for me with Jack because we had Jack, I was 50. Yeah. First. First marriage, whatever. And Sue was 40. Second marriage for her. But she didn’t have kids in her first. But we didn’t have financial issues. Yeah, we had time. If we needed help, we could get help.

James Patterson 00:28:23  We didn’t. I mean, we were very. I think we were good parents. And really, you know, we were there. Yeah. And I was there because I was I was home every every day. I’m home. I work at home. So there it is. Here’s Jack. You know, so we had a lot of advantages. And then there are tricky things with when we’re in a town that’s wealthy. You’ve got a dad who’s been successful, a mom who’s been successful in other ways. And how do you make sure that Jack or your son or whatever, they’re going to be okay with that? And I was always like, you know, I write a lot of books. Who cares? So it’s not a big thing. And trying to keep Jack where he’s comfortable with that and trying not to. Where he feels he has to compete. Yeah. Insofar as you can help.

Erich Zimmer 00:29:34  How do you work with that idea of kind of going with the river as best you can? Swimming upstream is often a bad idea, and yet disruption is a sort of swimming upstream.

Erich Zimmer 00:29:45  Or do you think of it differently?

James Patterson 00:29:46  Well, for starters, the disruptions are coming at us. We have no control of that. It’s never been, to me more overwhelming than it is right now. Yeah, it’s just really very disconcerting and overwhelming and I think difficult for people. So I don’t think you can get out of the way of that. But once again, part of it is having some perspective on things. That’s sort of the sky, the river, it’s the river. It just go with the flow a little bit, try not to go crazy on things that aren’t going to necessarily help the problem, but maybe we’ll drive you a little crazy. Just try to get sync with this stuff a little bit if you can do it. Tiger woods would always say he’s never concerned about a bad shot, so he just moves on to the next shot. Yeah, with the confidence that you’re very good at what you do, you’re very smart, you’re very logical and just have that confidence and go on to the next the next day.

Erich Zimmer 00:30:42  Yeah. In the book, you talk about a baseball player, Dansby Swanson, who talks about compartmentalizing failure, which is critical in baseball because even great hitters fail 70% of the time.

James Patterson 00:30:55  Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Or strike out three times in the same game? Yeah. Danby. He was. He was a Vanderbilt. They had very good baseball teams. Yeah. This really actually of a good football team, which is unprecedented.

Erich Zimmer 00:31:07  A lot of this stuff, I think is the discernment. It’s one of the sections in the book is around learning to discern. It’s the discernment. Like, do I compartmentalize that failure? Move on. It’s just a bad shot going in the next one. Or do I learn or do I spend a little bit more time with this thing? Right? In order to learn the lessons it has to teach?

James Patterson 00:31:27  Yes. And both. I’m still learning about the novel business. You know, as I look back in the beginning. I mean, one of the things I did early on is I want to do a block book.

James Patterson 00:31:37  So I had a half assed idea about destroying Wall Street, which seemed like an attractive idea at the time. blowing up Wall Street. Cool. I didn’t do the research, and I didn’t think about the characters. The book I published. But I mean, it’s not a good book if you do the research and please don’t fill the book with it. At least not my kind of book. But if you’ve done the research, you’ll be much more confident in terms of writing about that particular scene or that character. And then and then the character. And now, you know, when I’m doing an outline for a book, I’ll also have a side thing where I’m just everything I can think of about this character. What does a character do? What is a character like? What happened to why does the character think this way? Why does the character act this way? What was the effect of this on the character? What’s going to differentiate this character? You know, because the last thing that I want is here’s the typical, you know, detective who goes home and drinks himself to sleep and blah, blah, blah, blah.

James Patterson 00:32:35  Unless you’ve got some new twist on that. Right.

Erich Zimmer 00:32:37  Right. It’s a.

James Patterson 00:32:38  Little.

Erich Zimmer 00:32:38  Bit of a played out theme.

James Patterson 00:32:40  Yeah, it’s a cliché, 100%. Yeah.

Erich Zimmer 00:32:42  So you mentioned that in addition to outline. So you’re known to do a lot of outlining of your book.

James Patterson 00:32:49  And a lot of writers don’t. David Baldacci, who I interviewed, David doesn’t doesn’t align, and he’s very good and very successful at it, but he doesn’t outline at all. I have a suspicion that James Joyce did not outline Finnegans Wake. I don’t know, it’s just a guess.

Erich Zimmer 00:33:07  How about Ulysses?

James Patterson 00:33:08  You know what I think he did kind of outline Ulysses. Or at least in his head he did. Yeah. It’s very I mean, it’s very, very, very complex, but the pieces kind of fit together. You know, they they follow certain things about story, you know. So who knows? Yeah. I’d like to ask him, but. Yeah.

Erich Zimmer 00:33:27  Yeah, yeah. So when you create an outline for a book and you’ve written so many books, there’s not going to be any like, I always do it this way.

Erich Zimmer 00:33:34  Right. Because it’s so many different books. You evolve, you change. How do you outline what you want to have happen and yet allow yourself to have room to surprise yourself? How does how does that process unfold?

James Patterson 00:33:47  Oh, because one of the nice things about the outline is you sit down. You never sit down to a blank page. This is the the notion for that chapter. That’s a useful thing. But I never labeled the outline. And what happens? You’re writing the book and all of a sudden the character gets much more interesting than you thought. Yeah. And suddenly you’re writing a lot more about that character than you thought you would in the Michael Bennet novels. It was a sort of a sidekick, and he just kept getting more and more and more interesting. So you write more about that and or this was going to happen and you go, hey, this is here’s a much cooler ending for that. Yeah. And that sort changes what goes after that. And I never, not, never almost never know how it’s going to end.

James Patterson 00:34:28  I think I do in the outline, but it’s almost never that’s what happened.

Erich Zimmer 00:34:31  Really? Really.

James Patterson 00:34:33  Yeah. Yeah yeah. So so so the key is for me the outline helps me to keep moving forward also. I mean, for me, and I think this is useful for a lot of people writing a lot of kinds of books is if I’m stumped, I just move on to the next chapter. I’m not going to sit there and torture myself and it’d be TBD. I’m not going to drive myself crazy and create all sorts of psychological problems, because I can’t solve this thing. And eventually, in fiction, at least you can. Okay, you know what? I can’t solve this problem. And it becomes two paragraphs in the next chapter. Yeah. It’s just like I couldn’t really solve it. Solve it. I need it to happen. But I don’t need that. I don’t need that scene. I can move forward without it. Yeah, but the main thing is don’t sit there and drive yourself crazy because that’s not going to be useful.

James Patterson 00:35:22  And when you come back to it and you should always be rewriting anyway, when you come back to it, you got a new mind. You refresh and sometimes you go, oh, I know what to do with that now. You also will have written a lot more about the character of the story.

Erich Zimmer 00:35:35  I would imagine you’re a fast writer. You would almost have to be. Do you kind of go all the way through and then go back and start editing? Or how is the process? Yeah, you just kind of plow through.

James Patterson 00:35:46  And once again, the co-writers and some of the co-writers are not famous. They’re just, you know, good at what they do. And with the co-writers, I will write a long outline, and sometimes they’ll have to do a lot of rewriting, sometimes not.

Erich Zimmer 00:35:58  So I’d like to turn a little bit to the number one dad book. And what I’m interested a little bit in is how you were parented, how that drove part of the desire to do this book.

James Patterson 00:36:13  I’d just give you a jolt about my family. The only time as an adult that I ever hugged my dad was on his deathbed. He was a bright guy, and he was very lucky in the sense that the people who ran the poorhouse liked him a lot. And they took him under their wing, and they lived near the high school. So. So once he got into high school, he would stay in their house during the week and then go back to his mom on the weekends. And he wound up getting a scholarship to Hamilton’s very good school and coming out of Newburgh, that that was a jump for anybody.

Erich Zimmer 00:36:48  Yeah.

James Patterson 00:36:48  In a lot of ways it helped that he was, you know, homeless because that was part of his story. But he didn’t have a dad, so he he didn’t know how to be a dad. And, he was about to go off into World War two, and he got this call from this guy, and the guy said, my name is George Hazleton.

James Patterson 00:37:04  I live in a nearby town. Just bear with me a little bit. And George Hazleton said to my dad, he said, I’m about to go off and into the Pacific Theater. And after dinner, my parents took me downstairs to the living room and they said, George, you know, we love you so much, but because you’re going off to the war, we have to tell you we’re not your natural parents. And then George Hazleton said over the phone to my father, he said, I’m your brother. And, you know, George had been adopted when George was a little boy baby. And my dad stayed with with the mother. And that’s the first time my father knew that they had a brother. And they both survived the war and came back. And a few years after they got back, my uncle called again and they became great, great, great friends, my father and my and my uncle. But he said, I found our father and he said, he’s tending bar in Poughkeepsie.

James Patterson 00:37:54  Let’s go see him. My father said, I don’t want to go see the bastard. And so my uncle went up by himself. My uncle was kind of a shy guy, very smart, but shy. So he goes to this crummy little bar under the Poughkeepsie Bridge. And, here’s his father, bartender, and he orders a Coke. He doesn’t drink, and he’s watching this guy. He watches him for about 20 minutes, and he leaves. He’s so turned off by this guy, he doesn’t introduce himself. He just leaves. So, yeah, all of that, I think, has something to do with the dad book. Yeah, it can be tough. It can be tough. And I think, you know, as I say, and you know this, there are so many guys out there that are struggling, you know, how do we fit in? We’re not, you know, the breadwinner, all these these things that sort of people assume they don’t kind of work that way anymore.

James Patterson 00:38:43  Ergo, who am I? How do I forget? Who’s making the rules up? Are there rules? And I thought that between talking to a lot of dads, reading a lot of stuff in my own experiences, I could throw out some ideas that that guys would find useful. And as I said, I do. And anybody that’s listening, you can’t read this book and not become a better dad. It’d be a struggle. You’re going to pick up some stuff that’s useful.

Erich Zimmer 00:39:13  We have insight. We might read something in a book and have insight. And then there’s the challenge of sort of application. how is your book deal with that sometimes gap between like, okay, now I know better, but I don’t know how to do better.

James Patterson 00:39:28  Well, it tries to help a little bit in terms of how this might work, how it might.

Erich Zimmer 00:39:32  Work.

James Patterson 00:39:33  Yeah. And it’s just a whole lot of things for people to think about here. And as I’ve said, if 1 or 2 of these are paid for for people, that’s that’s great.

James Patterson 00:39:42  Yeah. You kind of encourage people to do things that aren’t necessarily natural. Do the hard thing a little bit. Yeah. Put in the work a little bit. It’s worth it when we talk about that a lot in terms of how important this job is, that you’ve undertaken this job of being a parent for mom and dad.

Erich Zimmer 00:39:59  Yeah.

James Patterson 00:39:59  It’s crucial. And instead of the monster effect on these kids, and insofar as you can, to help them to take it as seriously as they can, try to make it as enjoyable for them as you can empathize with the fact that a lot of days there are things you’d rather do. There’s some tough love in there for sure.

Erich Zimmer 00:40:20  Yeah. I thought maybe we could pull out a couple of the items in here and just see what you might have to say about them. And this sort of ties to what you just said, which is tell your children your story and help them discover who they are. Yeah. And it sounds like your dad telling the story of him growing up Actually, was him helping you do that? That’s a way in which he was a good father.

James Patterson 00:40:44  Yeah, he you know, look, he he did the best he could. Yeah. I have a friend, teacher all his life, and, he had a religion doing the best I can. Religion? Yeah. And if people are doing that, I give him credit. Yeah. You know, I think my dad did the best he could. I think my mom did the best she could. They were both functioning alcoholics, for whatever the reasons. But I think they did the best they could. So, you know, I’m not going to blame them for it just. Okay, that’s the deal. And, you know, once again, here it is. You know, the river is life. And we just kind of move on hopefully.

Erich Zimmer 00:41:20  Yeah. There’s a real theme also in this book, progress versus perfection. Right. There’s no way to be a perfect father.

James Patterson 00:41:27  I don’t know what the perfection thing is. Yeah, it’s a thing we need to get out of our systems or be able to handle a little better.

James Patterson 00:41:35  I mean, you see it in these people that write about and complain about athletics and whatever. Oh, it’s not perfect. Oh, Buffalo, the football team. Give me a break. This team, for years they were the second best team in the NFL. And people are like beating them up. No, they’re the second best team. This is really cool. It’s Buffalo. You know what do you expect. You’re the second best team. And nothing against Buffalo. But I mean come on celebrate it. Yeah yeah. You you want it. You try. You try. I mean, maybe maybe we can, but but you can’t really control okay. Here’s Tom Brady and Tom Brady is this incredible quarterback. You had an unfortunate thing that you know you had to go up against Tom Brady and stuff. He’s going to win very often.

Erich Zimmer 00:42:18  That seems to be the case. Before you check out. Pick one insight from today and ask how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you, even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change.

Erich Zimmer 00:42:42  Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again one you feed net letter you talk about being willing to admit when you’re wrong. Can you think of any times in your parenting where you had to admit you were wrong? None. Never. Never. Okay.

James Patterson 00:43:00  Yeah yeah yeah. One of my weaknesses is not wanting to go to the Galapagos, do some of these things. So a lot of times Sue and Jack would go and I wouldn’t. I don’t even know why this is, but, you go to Italy or you go to Vilnius, Lithuania, where we went. And after about two days, I don’t want to be there anymore. I feel like I’m in, like a two day documentary movie and I’m in it. You were talking about 48 hour documentary movie. I don’t want to see any more churches. I don’t want to see any more things with the with the arrow in Jesus’s heart or whatever. Yeah, I’ve you know, I kind of like I’m, you know, so.

James Patterson 00:43:42  And that’s a weakness. I didn’t do as much of that as I could of and I should have I should have done more of that.

Erich Zimmer 00:43:48  What do you like to do for vacation?

James Patterson 00:43:50  Right.

Erich Zimmer 00:43:52  Well, that would make sense. You know.

James Patterson 00:43:53  I love I love beautiful locations. Sue and I, my wife and I did a book, mother Daughter Book Club, which is coming out next year. Novel. And it’s set in Lake Como. So we went to Lake Como and it’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous, unbelievably pretty. They’re unbelievable, you know. And that was great. And we wandered around the streets and you know all that and and that’s fine. And it’s Italy. So of course the food is excellent. And that was good. And you know we took some boat rides and you know walked. Yeah. Whatever. So so you know that that was okay. I’d like to go to South Africa. Still I’ve been a lot of places the best vacation for me. And it was before I was with Sue was the Kenya.

James Patterson 00:44:34  I spent two weeks there. You know Safari. Not a camera. Safari. Spectacular. Yeah. It’s just so much better than I thought it was going to be.

Erich Zimmer 00:44:42  What would be the one thing from the book about fathers that you would want to leave somebody with?

James Patterson 00:44:48  I read one thing from it, and we mentioned this thing about balancing and keeping things in balance. And I don’t know where this came from, but I’ve lived by to some extent. And this is the five balls. Imagine life is a game in which you’re juggling five balls in the air. You name them work, family, health, friends, and spirit, and you’re keeping them all in the air somehow. And hopefully you soon understand that work is a rubber ball if you drop it. Believe it or not, it will bounce back. But the other four balls family, health, friends, spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of those, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nick damaged, or even shattered.

James Patterson 00:45:33  They’ll never be the same. And if you remember that, it does help you to balance your life.

Erich Zimmer 00:45:39  Well, that is a beautiful piece of advice to end on. Thank you, James, for coming on. It’s been a pleasure to meet you. I’ll be in touch soon about our co-writing project, but until then. Okay, well. All right.

James Patterson 00:45:51  Okay, thanks. Bye bye.

Erich Zimmer 00:45:53  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.