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This is The Art of Charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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The Art of Charm is where ordinary guys become extraordinary men.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm, I m Jordan Harbinger.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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Imagine having a mix of experienced mentors teaching you their expertise.
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and packing decades of research, testing, and tough lessons into a curriculum.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the questions.
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Make sure to stay up to date with AOC and get some great stuff that we don t or can t share on the show by signing up for the newsletter at theartofcharm.com.
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That s where we ll email you our Fundamentals Toolkit, covers topics like body language, nonverbal communication,
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dating, attraction, persuasion, business networking, public speaking, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
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And we ve got our live programs running in L.A.
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here every week.
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We ve got guys from all over the world, which shows that no matter where you are right now, you can make it here if you re committed to learning and growing.
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We re sold out several months in advance, so if you re thinking about it, get in touch.
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Call us in the office, email me.
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I m jordan at theartofcharm.com.
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Get some info from us now so you can plan ahead.
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Looking forward to meeting you here at the Art of Charm.
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Today we re talking with my friend Jeff Goins.
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We re gonna talk about why our fear keeps us from taking risks, why we re born knowing how to dance, but we learn shame.
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And there s a metaphor in there somewhere.
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And of course, how to make yourself more afraid of not trying than failing, why everyone has a calling, and how to listen to your own life and lessons therefrom to find that calling.
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So enjoy this one with Jeff Goins.
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Well, I know somebody named Lisa Cummins.
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So if you guys were together, it would be Cummins and Goins.
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Would be like yin and yang.
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Yeah, at least in the South.
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Otherwise, it just wouldn t make any sense.
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Cummins and Goins, whatever.
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Whatever.
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So tell us what you do in one sentence.
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I am a podcaster who helps men live charming lives.
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Oh, God.
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Good, I m a writer.
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from Nashville, Tennessee.
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I ve been studying this show, and I ve never heard a right answer, and I thought that might be the right answer.
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It is.
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It is.
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You win.
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You win the art of charm.
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I think that I am a writer who writes books, of course, and helps other writers.
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I think that s the simplest version of what I do.
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When you were little, you grew up and you re like, I need to be a writer when you were a kid, right?
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No, I wasn t.
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I never thought that.
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How did this happen?
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How did this happen?
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I don t know.
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I woke up one day and my hand was just moving.
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So, I was 27 years old, and I was working for a marketing, I was working as a marketing director for a non-profit, and I wasn t unhappy with my life, but I didn t feel like I was doing anything that was great, and I sort of like had this anticipation of a midlife crisis, like 10 years later, and I was like, I had this job for five years, it was a good job, I was doing good work, and I knew that I could just coast.
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and it really, really messed with me.
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And so I started going to conferences and started talking to people, and through a lot of reflection, because I wasn t an English major in college, I never wanted to write as a kid, writing was always something that I did on the side, but just through, I don t know, some self-awareness, I realized the thing, amongst all the other things that I ve done that has always been consistent in my life, is I ve always liked writing, and I realized,
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my life is telling me that I m supposed to be a writer.
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Well, let s get into this topic a little bit more.
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One of the emails that I can never answer is, how do I figure out what to do with my life?
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Because I never figured that out.
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I mean, I guess I should say, look, I think I found it, but I didn t figure it out.
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If you can see the subtle or not so subtle difference here.
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As everyone knows, I was a lawyer on Wall Street and then started this as a hobby and then dot, dot, dot, business, but I didn t go, alright, this is clearly something I m meant to do.
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I was just like, I got nothing else to do.
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And so far, this is fun.
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And that s not very convenient because if you work at Citibank and everything s kind of fine but probably not your calling, you don t then thrust yourself into the unknown hoping that you figure out
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the magic secret key to your life, because that s stupid.
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I don t say that about a lot of things, but that would be stupid to do that.
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You know the analogy, throw a square peg through the round hole or the round peg?
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It would be like throwing the peg from across a hallway and hoping it just slides in perfectly.
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That s not going to happen.
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You could do that a thousand times and it wouldn t happen.
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Yeah, I totally agree with that.
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I started this
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project, this book that I think we re gonna talk about at some point, really because I had had a similar experience as yours where I kind of fell into this thing that I never quite anticipated, and I thought that s weird, like, you need to have a plan.
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And so I wrote this book, The Art of Work, sort of anticipating
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people asking that question, how did you do it?
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You know, you just sort of ask that question.
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And like, here s how you do it.
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You have a plan, and here are the seven steps.
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And literally, I wrote that book, and when I was done with it, I was like, these are all lies.
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This is not actually how it happened for me.
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But I thought, like, that s how, like that s the kind of book that you have to write to be, you know, a self-help author, and this is what people want to hear.
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And so I started, I just put it down, and I started interviewing people.
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who would tell me stories about how they found their calling.
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People who were not famous, but who were doing pretty cool things.
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Like I got to interview the first doula in Singapore.
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A doula is a birth coach.
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Wait, what?
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That was you?
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I heard about that.
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I know what a doula is, it just doesn t make any sense knowing what I know.
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Well, okay, continue.
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Her name is Ginny Pong, she s a national celebrity, because being a single mother, and she s a single mother, being a single mother in Singapore is still pretty taboo, and so she s really outspoken about that, and so she kind of became this celebrity being an outspoken single mom, and the rights that single moms deserve that they actually don t get in Singapore.
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And so she does this, and she has this TEDx talk where she talks about, here s how I found my calling, and what basically happens is everything in her life goes absolutely wrong.
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And then she realizes, well, I have nothing else left, so I guess I m supposed to do this, and she starts taking a class, and she wasn t a kid going, I wanna be a doula, but she becomes a mom, she realizes how hard it is, she realizes how hard it is to be a single mother, and at the time, no moms were doing
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natural births, everybody was doing cesareans, and so she wanted to do it all naturally, it was really, really hard, because nobody would walk her through this, and so she saw a demand, and wanted to meet that need, and so 10 years later, she s running this company, teaching all these doulas.
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And she said, I never could have planned any of this.
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And I think we think that s the exception, not the norm to how you find your purpose.
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In my experience, it is the norm.
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Can I just tell you that made a lot more sense knowing that it was somebody else who was the first doula in Singapore and not yourself?
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I don t know how I missed that.
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Oh, sorry, I met the first, yeah, so.
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I thought you became the first doula.
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I was the first doula in Singapore.
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That s like a Tim Ferriss thing, right?
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Yeah, totally.
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I won the Argentine tango contest.
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I was the first doula in Singapore.
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Especially the first white male doula in Singapore.
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I m like, how did they let you, you know.
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I think I m just gonna pretend that I am and lead with that.
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I think you should lead with that next time, definitely.
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The juice here is that she kind of, she definitely had to swim upstream to get that.
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This industry didn t exist over there and she was kind of, it s not like she was the Manny Pacquiao of Singapore and she can do whatever she wants.
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She was already starting from kind of a taboo position, but that turned into her advantage somehow.
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Yeah, I mean, it didn t feel like an advantage at the time, and she didn t have some great plan.
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I think when we talk about calling and purpose, these sound like questions of privilege, and I think in a way they are, you know?
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I mean, our ancestors weren t thinking, man, how can I self-actualize, right?
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They were thinking, how can I survive?
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But incidentally, that s what Ginny Pong was trying to do.
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She was just trying to survive.
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She was trying to pay her bills and not go broke.
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And the longer version of the story is she gets pregnant.
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Her boyfriend says, I want you to have an abortion.
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She says, I don t actually want to do that.
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I want to be a mom.
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And so he says, well, if you don t have an abortion, I m going to leave you.
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And so he leaves her.
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And then her parents say, if you don t have an abortion, we re kicking you out of her house.
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and so she goes, well, I wanna have this baby, so they kick her out of the house, and she s homeless, she doesn t have a job, she did really poorly on her exams, and so she s 23 years old, just doesn t have many prospects, and so, yeah, she s completely disadvantaged, and so she s forced to figure out another way, and yeah, as you said, it kind of becomes an advantage, but it s really like, she s gotta learn grit, she s gotta learn perseverance,
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do all these things just to make it, and what emerges from that struggle is something very
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meaningful that ends up helping a lot of people.
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That s actually kind of a really tragic story in the beginning.
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Jeez, talk about, so it was out of desperation that this became a thing for her, right?
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Absolutely.
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But what happens to us when we re more or less happy and suddenly we find ourselves like, hey, look, Citibank is great, I m picking on Citibank because they just sent me like an annoying notice in the mail for like, you know, one of those stupid card advertisements, so now they re gonna take one on the air.
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If I m working there and everything s all fine and dandy, but it s not quite my, how do I break out of that shell?
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Or is there a need to do so?
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Because yes, when you re homeless and pregnant and lonely,
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you might try to think of survival and finding your calling by accident doing this, finding something you re passionate about, but when you re at home playing Xbox and your rent s paid three months in advance and you just bought a new car, you re not thinking, wow, this is so awful, I ve gotta break out of here and figure out what to do with my life.
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Yeah, and I think that for most of us who are
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a part of this conversation, whether you re listening to it or you have the privilege of getting to listen to Jordan, that s not our life.
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Our life is, things are pretty good.
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And that s where I was at.
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At 27 years old, anticipating this midlife crisis, my life was good but not great.
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And I knew, I knew I could coast.
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And I think for most of us, the greatest temptation, the greatest danger is not failure.
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So we talk about dreams, we talk about vocation, we talk about how I m gonna find my purpose and do meaningful stuff someday.
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A lot of people I talk to are afraid to fail.
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What if I fail?
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I don t think that s the biggest risk right now.
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I think the biggest risk today, if you don t live in Singapore,
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If you live in a western country or you re listening to this from a laptop, you have some position of privilege.
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The biggest danger for us is not to fail, but to succeed at the wrong thing.
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And I think we just need to be honest about that.
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If where you re at right now is where you re gonna be in 50 years, or you re gonna look back 50 years from now, are you gonna be proud of this moment?
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Are you gonna be proud of the things that you re building right now?
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Or are you gonna ask, are you gonna tell yourself, man,
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I missed it.
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I played it safe.
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And at 27 years old, that s how I felt.
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I was like, when I m 50, I m gonna look at the 27 year old me and go, you wimped out.
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You settled for a secure career where you could do just good enough to not get fired.
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And that scared me enough to do something uncomfortable.
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Yeah, so how do we scare ourselves if we find ourselves in that happy situation?
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I think there s good fear and bad fear.
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I think a lot of people talk about why fear is always bad, and I think there are some good fears.
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If a lion is about to eat you and you feel afraid, that s a pretty good fear.
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But most of our fear, if we live in some sort of civilized area, is not, my fear is gonna keep me alive today.
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It s just this primal thing that s preventing us from taking risks that actually won t result in us dying.
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But some fear is good.
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So, you know, I ve got a three-year-old son.
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I want him to be afraid of crossing the street by himself because if he s not afraid of that, like, he could get hurt.
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But I don t want him to be afraid of, like, he s three years old, you know, this little white dude, right?
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He s my son.
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And I don t want him to be afraid of dancing like I was afraid of dancing because there s something really
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Cool, it s kind of beautiful about a three-year-old kid.
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When he hears the music, when he s watching a television show, when he s watching Mickey Mouse and the music comes on, he just dances.
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There s no shame to it.
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Now, he s starting to get embarrassed.
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He s starting to go to school and he s starting to see that kids make fun of you when you do things that other people don t approve of, and he s learning how to feel afraid and feel shame for certain things.
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I think that it s fascinating that we re born knowing how to dance, but we have to learn shame.
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Now, good fear, bad fear, what does that mean?
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I think that there is a good fear that moves you in the direction of your dreams.
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For my friend Jodi Nolan, who at 58 years old found her calling, which was to start this organization helping people write letters to their loved ones before they die, because we all want to say these things to people that we love, and we never make time to do it, and so she helps
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people do this, she started helping people who were terminally ill, and now she helps anybody do it.
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She runs these workshops helping people do this.
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At 58 years old, she started doing this.
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That s a point where you can just kind of start coasting.
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And I said, what made you do this now?
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And she said, for years I thought about doing this, and I was afraid of failing, and things just started to happen in my life where I realized people around me were dying, I realized I didn t have as much life as I thought I had left necessarily, and all of a sudden I became afraid not to fail, but I became more afraid not to try.
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I think the good fear is the fear of not trying.
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Now, I could tell you, hey, whatever you wanna do, you re guaranteed success, but that s just not true.
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At the same time, I don t think it has to be true.
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So when I was 27 going, I think maybe I wanna be a writer, but I m not sure, and can I make it, all these fears, I thought, I don t know.
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But right now, I m more afraid of not trying than of failing.
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And I think that has to flip, that scale has to tip before you re willing to actually take the next step.
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Over the last 17 years, we have launched our fair share of online courses, coaching programs, and finding the right platform has always been a challenge.
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They say if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life.
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But if you re an entrepreneur, you know the hard work that comes with it.
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That s why you need Kajabi.
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Kajabi makes it easy to run your entire online business from one platform so you can focus on what you love, creating.
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No matter your niche, Kajabi makes it easy to turn your skills, passions, and experiences into enriching online courses, exclusive membership sites, subscription podcasts, thriving communities, personalized coaching, and more.
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The best part, Kajabi doesn t cut into your revenue because everything is owned and controlled by you.
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So keep 100% of what you earn.
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And with Kajabi, you also get robust analytics, easy payment options, email marketing tools, and customizable website templates, all built in.
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You don t even need a huge audience to make sustainable income.
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There are thousands of creators on Kajabi making six and seven figures with less than 50,000 followers.
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Right now, Kajabi is offering a free 30-day trial to start your business.
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If you go to kajabi.com slash charm, that s K-A-J-A-B-I.com slash charm.
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Go to kajabi.com slash charm and join the creators and entrepreneurs who have made over $7 billion.
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Hey, Art of Charm listeners, I m excited to share a new podcast I ve been absolutely binging.
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Winning is an everyday mindset, and Craig Robinson and John Calipari are here to help.
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On Ways to Win podcast, Craig and Coach Cal use their on-court wisdom to solve your off-court problems.
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Whether it s trouble at home or a workplace dilemma, the coaches will help you find a winning formula for success.
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You ll hear from prominent athletes, business leaders, and celebrities who reveal insights that made them into the leaders they are today.
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And don t miss President Obama sharing how he deals with pressure by projecting confidence, believing in your team, and taking criticism.
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Listen to Ways to Win wherever you get your podcasts.
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Is there anything we can do to tip the scale in that direction?
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Because I can see, I totally agree with your point, that you have to be more afraid of not trying than you do of failing.
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But it s kind of like with your son being, is he more afraid of not being a good dancer or is he more afraid of kids throwing, you know, paste at him because he s dancing and that s not cool or something, right?
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And the answer s probably not the first thing, right?
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He s probably not worried about being a good dancer.
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He s probably more worried about having friends that don t make him feel bad.
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So we as adults are the same way.
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Am I more afraid of not writing that book, not starting that business and that startup that I have a vague idea for, or am I more afraid that if I quit Citibank, my parents will disown me and I ll be homeless in Manhattan?
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Because I feel like
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especially once you ve invested a lot into something, maybe you, for example, went to law school and got a job on Wall Street, it can be harder to then go, well, that s all sunk cost, it doesn t matter now, and I had good experience otherwise, and dot, dot, dot, rationalization, you go, whoa, man, I just spent like 140 grand going to school here, I just got this job, I don t care if it sucks, I m gonna tough it out.
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Yeah, I think we dichotomize these things.
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We think that there s one extreme or the other.
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There s the extreme of being on Wall Street for the next 25 years and hating it and going, well, yeah, but this is kind of what I did and I ve gotta stick with it.
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Or the extreme of I m gonna quit it all because I read Jeff Bezos  story and I m just gonna go for broke.
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And it seems to me that those are not representations of the reality that most of us live in.
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So for example, how does Aiden, who loves dancing at home but is kind of, you know, afraid in some circumstances at school to be as vulnerable around other classmates.
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You re absolutely right.
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He s afraid they re gonna make fun of him.
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He doesn t know if he s good or bad.
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he just moves to the music.
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And he s quite good.
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So how do you do that?
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Well, I think as a parent, what I want to do is I want to condition him that when you do these things in embarrassing circumstances, they re not as bad as we think they are.
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And you can actually toughen up and get used to people saying bad things about you, and if it doesn t phase you, they ll eventually quit.
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Because I can t teach him how to avoid every situation that s going to hurt him.
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This is kind of one of the fun things about being a parent.
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very much wants to protect him from pain, and I want to expose him to pain, because as a father, I feel like it s my job to build in him resilience.
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I think similarly, we can condition ourselves to the things that we re afraid of, and realize they re not as scary as we might think they are.
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Or if they are, the consequences aren t death.
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So for example, you re on Wall Street, and maybe you go, I don t know if I wanna do this, I actually don t know what I wanna do,
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Maybe you re listening to podcasts or reading books about entrepreneurship, maybe not.
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The first step is not to quit everything and go do that.
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The first step is to go, I m gonna try something.
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I m gonna start a podcast and interview other people about this thing that I m fascinated learning myself just because I m curious.
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And I think a lot of times we go, I m afraid of becoming a writer.
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Therefore, I can t quit my job and do all this.
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And that s exactly what happened for me.
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I go, I m afraid.
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What did I do?
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So I was having a conversation with my friend.
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He goes, what s your dream?
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I said, I don t know.
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Because I was so afraid to mention it.
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Because if I had to say it, I would be accountable to it.
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I d be responsible.
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And so I was like, well, I don t know.
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I just kind of pretended to be ignorant.
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And everybody would go, good luck with that one.
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So he looked at me, and he d been through a lot of therapy, so there was no BS, and he knew how to say things that were questions that weren t really questions, and he said, really?
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Because I thought you would have said writer, but I guess you don t know what your dream is.
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And as soon as he said that, that hit me, I felt it, it almost felt tangible, and I felt like the wind was knocked out of me,
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, fine.
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I d like to be a writer someday, but that ll probably never happen.
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And he said, Jeff, you don t have to want to be a writer, because I was blogging and doing stuff on the side, but it wasn t my vocation.
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He said, you don t have to want to be a writer.
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You are a writer.
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You just need to write.
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And so the next day, I did not quit my job.
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I did not pull a Jerry Maguire moment.
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The next day, I got up at 5 a.m., because I heard that was the magical writing hour, and I wrote.
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And that s it, I wrote 500 words.
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And then the next day, I did it again.
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And I did it for an entire year, and I started blogging every day, and I just started practicing.
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And two years later, that s when I quit my job, because I had built up enough income, and my wife was supporting it, and I had a book deal, and I had all these things that had happened over the course of two years.
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But the first step is not to go for broke, in my opinion.
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The first step is to just take the next step.
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We love talking about taking the leap, but in reality, I think what it takes to find your dream
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is not to take the leap, but to build a bridge.
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And bridges aren t sexy, and they don t happen overnight, but if you do it consistently over time, it gets you to the other side.
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SPEAKER_00
That s true, right?
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And it s a lot less scary to build the bridge than it is to take the leap.
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It s just not as much of a dramatic, buy my e-book about taking the leap type of idea.
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Yeah, and honestly, like, everybody I talked to who quote-unquote took the leap, like I interviewed somebody in the book about this, who moved to South Africa.
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They moved their entire family from the US to South Africa.
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They did non-profit development work there.
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And then they moved to Burundi, which is the second poorest country in the world.
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What s the poorest country in the world now that, is it like Central African Republic or Congo or something like that?
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Yeah, probably.
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They moved to Burundi and they start a coffee company.
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because they realize that coffee is a commodity in Burundi, as it is in most of Africa, where a bunch of rich people are making money off of these super poor farmers by exporting it, selling it to roasters, kind of being the middleman.
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So they see this and they go, this isn t right, we love coffee, we want to kind of do the next thing, and they move to Burundi, they move their whole family there, and they do it, and I said, how did you do that?
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And they said, we took a leap.
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And I said, okay, cool, how long did that leap take?
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And they said, it took about 10 years.
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And so I think that we like to say, I took a leap, without understanding what that actually means.
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In my opinion, a leap is not, that s a slow motion leap.
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It doesn t take 10 years.
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What they did was they built a bridge.
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These things are a lot less sexy than we like to, you know, talk about in sound bites on podcasts and on Twitter.
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It s hard work, but I mean, most people I talk to who are doing amazing things, it took a lot of hard work over time to get there.
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Do you still get up at 5 a.m.
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because it s the magical writing hour?
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Uh, sometimes.
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What happened in between then and now is I had a kid.
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So now, when you get up at 5 a.m., it s because, it s not by choice.
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It s because somebody woke you up.
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I still write every day, but I ve had to shuffle some schedule things around.
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But you know, what s interesting is when I m writing a book, when I really have to get a lot of writing done, and I m like, what s going on?
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I m a full-time writer, I should have all the time in the world to write, and I don t.
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I ve got interviews, and I run a business, and I do all these other things that take up the real hours of the day.
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When I really have to get writing done, I usually get up at 5 a.m.
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to knock it out.
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By the way, the poorest country in the world is Malawi, and Central African Republic is the third.
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Burundi s right in between the two, just in case people are like, I can t listen to this until I Google it, and they re in the car, and they can t.
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I like that you do active fact-checking.
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I listened to an episode where somebody said, my dad made $15,000 that year, and it was like 1961, and you re like, hang on, let me do the inflation calculator, and you re like, I know people are gonna check this, I m gonna check it for you, and fact-check it live, so appreciate that.
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Because otherwise, it means less, right?
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He made $15,000 that year, and this is 1971, and you re like, okay, it still sounds like, I mean, I don t know, is it a lot?
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Is it little?
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How does that relate to me?
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And basically, you re just thinking, did I make more than your dad last year?
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Or did he make more than me?
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Because if so, I don t feel bad for you, right?
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There s that.
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SPEAKER_00
By the way, I ve been sitting on this joke for like eight minutes, so I m gonna let it go.
2
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If you want to expose your son to pain, have him listen to Jason s show.
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It s called Grumpy Old Geeks.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there you go.
2
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Now that I got that out of my system, we can continue.
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It seems like everyone these days, it s kind of trendy, and I don t mean for once, I don t mean that in a pejorative way.
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People are thinking about their work in terms of meaning and not just the paycheck.
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For the first time kind of ever that we ve heard about this, even when I was
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looking for work, nobody cared about doing something that you enjoyed, at least not where I was from.
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Everybody was just talking about money, and work was work, and you just sucked it up, and you got the highest paying job you could in the field that you kind of thought was neat.
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That was it.
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Now it seems like it s the opposite.
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You re thinking, hey look, if you re making enough money to survive, you don t have to worry about anything.
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Just do what you love and dot, dot, dot, money.
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And to an extent that s not really true, but
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If you re doing something you don t like and you feel like you do have another dream and it s quote-unquote at least a little bit realistic, like people do make a living as a writer, if you wanted to be a professional hip-hop dancer or something like that, you might have to have a talk with yourself, especially if you were just learning then, right?
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But being a writer, it s not totally unrealistic.
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Or are you in the school where it s like, screw it, do whatever you want, realistic or not.
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Where do you draw the line?
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I m not in that school.
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I like that school.
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I appreciate it.
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I listen to it when I need it to pick me up.
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Maybe it s because we re from the Midwest.
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I don t know.
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I grew up blue collar, and we sort of had this idea that you just needed to do your job.
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There was sort of this understanding that you kind of had to complain about it, like you couldn t like it too much, but it was work, and you did it, and you worked really hard, and you made a living for yourself and or your family, and that was life, and then you kind of complained about it and drank a few beers every night, and that was it.
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when I made this transition, I was like, what am I doing?
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I have a pretty good job.
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Is this greedy?
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Is this selfish?
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What is this?
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And that s one of the reasons why it took two years.
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And my friend Mark said to me, who was a mentor of mine, he said, what s happened to you is rare.
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He said, I didn t see it coming.
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I know you.
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He said, I don t think anybody saw this coming.
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You need to consider that this is more than just a good idea, that this might be your calling.
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And I think that it is, in some ways,
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Asking the question, does what I do matter, is a universal question.
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I know that it is more trendy now with lots of millennials going, ah, I want to do something that matters, man, I don t care about the money.
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And I think that s more abundant now.
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I mean, that is the question of philosophy, right?
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Like, what really matters?
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Who am I?
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What is the universe?
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Why does this all exist?
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And philosophy is very, very old.
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I love the work of Viktor Frankl.
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people don t know who Viktor Frankl is, he was a psychologist who was a Nazi concentration camp survivor.
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He was not a millennial, this is not the 21st century, this is the 1940s, and he realized that the key to happiness is to realize that when you can t change your external reality, you have to change your internal reality.
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You have to change the way that you respond to something like, you know, a bunch of evil Nazis burning your friends around you every day.
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And he wasn t happy, you know, in, you know, maybe most popular or the normal sense of the word, but he learned how to live a meaningful life in like the most despairing situations.
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Similar to Ginnie Pong, where he realized, if I don t do this, if I don t find meaning in being stuck in a concentration camp, facing death every day,
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I will die, it is just, I have to survive.
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In a way, it s a question of privilege.
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In another sense, I think meaning is what we need to survive.
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And it just so happens that we live in an age where we have the option, we have the option to go, oh, I could do this job, or I could probably figure it out, like, you know, I read a couple of books, I could probably start an online business, like, I have options.
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And I think any time you re faced with privilege,
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Many of us have privileges that other people don t have.
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The question is not should I feel bad about this, because the world doesn t need your guilt, it needs your action.
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So when I look at, realize that I have some privilege that somebody else doesn t have, do I go, well, I should feel bad about this, or feel bad that this is something that previous generations didn t have, or do I look at that and go, I have a responsibility to do something with this.
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I have an opportunity to make the most of this privilege,
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and hopefully, you know, use it to bring opportunity to other people.
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So if you re facing a situation where you go, hey, I don t have to do this work-a-day thing.
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I could do something different.
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I think the normal, you know, cultural message that I take issue with, which is that you re a beautiful, unique sunflake, or snowflake, and you should, I said sunflake.
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We ll pretend that s a thing.
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I just wanted to acknowledge that.
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Otherwise, people are gonna start tweeting hashtag sunflake everywhere.
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That d be very unique, a sunflake.
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Well, let s stick with that.
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So you re a beautiful, unique sunflake.
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Like, and the world owes you your dream, and I don t think that s true, but I think if you re lucky or privileged enough to see an opportunity, and more and more of these opportunities are opening up every day, to live out your dream, you have a responsibility to share that with the world.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I kind of agree with that.
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I mean, for me, not only do you have a responsibility, but it will kind of drive you crazy if it doesn t.
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For me, yes, I feel some sort of responsibility to share all the things that we learn on the podcast and everything with the world, and I enjoy doing that, but I also think if I didn t, I would go nuts.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I love that.
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I have a friend who says that your calling is the thing that you can t not do.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think what I did before was I tortured my girlfriends and close friends with just talking about stuff nonstop, and they would humor me like, uh-huh, body language, whatever, dude.
3
SPEAKER_00
Are you hungry yet?
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SPEAKER_00
Are we gonna go?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you know you told me this before, and like 5,000 times also.
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still don t care.
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So now I have to do it for the good of other people, not just from what I m teaching them, but to spare the people that don t care from my never-ending stream of thoughts when it comes to this type of stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, does everybody have a calling?
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, are there some people that are just cut out for mediocrity or to, you know, not do what they love, or maybe they don t have something like that?
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Because I feel like there s people sitting here going, yeah, yeah, but I don t have one of those, I m good.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well the next book will be The Art of Mediocrity and we ll talk about that, about how some people just need to settle for the status quo.
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SPEAKER_01
No, I think everybody has a calling.
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Now my caveat to that is it doesn t look like what you probably think it does.
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Most people are probably not going to plan their purpose like you and me and the hundreds of people I interviewed and the hundreds of biographies that I read, the underlying theme was you don t plan this.
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You can prepare for it.
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do the most to respond when the opportunities present themselves, but you don t plan it.
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You don t wake up when you re 12 years old or whatever and go, I m gonna do this.
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Some people do that, and we hear those stories, and we watch those documentaries, and I think we ve sort of normalized that and said, this is the way it has to happen.
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And most of us, frankly, I think feel left out.
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I don t know, I just kind of have a normal life.
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I have a pretty good job and good family, and things are fine, or I don t know what I want to do, and maybe that s okay.
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SPEAKER_01
I think that your calling is not one thing,
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but it s many things, and it s not just something that you find and then your life is a dream afterwards.
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It s your body of work.
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It is the accumulation of all the things that you do, but it s a portfolio.
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It s not just a big mess.
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Think of it like if most of our lives are just, if we re not thinking about what we re doing and how we re being intentional.
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kinda looks like a trash can, like you re just throwing all this crap in there and going, oh, it kinda makes sense, man.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t think that s the best way to live your life, but I think a portfolio is a pretty realistic way of saying, I ve got these skills and I ve got these gifts and I ve got these things that I can do, and I ve got these burdens, like you, Jordan, you go, man, I just couldn t shut up about this stuff, and, you know, in some cases, it s kind of like weird to other people, or they just, like, I had to keep talking about it until I could finally do something
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SPEAKER_01
with it, and I think we tend to have burdens that feel very heavy to us that aren t heavy to other people, and I think that s that, like, you need to do something with this, because as a form of self-care, you re gonna drive yourself crazy if you don t, and there s a reason for that.
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There s somebody who needs that, and there s a reason that you have that burden.
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It could be your environment, you know, who knows what the cause is.
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I think there s some mystery to that, but I think the point is you have to act on that, and I think a portfolio is curating
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those things that you re good at, your passions, your skills, the things that you can use to help other people.
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And so it doesn t have to be one thing, and it doesn t have to be some big epiphany, but I think we can take intentional action, we can make decisions that move us closer to our purpose, which is just this thing that you do that adds value to the world and makes you come alive.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now back to Jeff Goins.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, what is the way that you think about failure that stops you from going, uh, but what if I fail?
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SPEAKER_00
Because that s what a lot of people, I mean, that s the real fear, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
What if I quit Citibank and I do this and then I end up just coming back with my tail between my legs, I won t have a job, I m screwed.
3
SPEAKER_00
You obviously have a different way of thinking about building this bridge and failing at some of the steps.
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SPEAKER_01
I think of failure as pivot points.
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I was talking to some people who read the book recently, and I was just like, hey, give me feedback on this, because when you write a book over a year or two or five or however long it takes, it took me about a year to write this book, I said, you know, what resonated with you?
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And a lot of people said this idea of pivot points, which is sort of reframing failure.
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I think most of us think failure
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is the end, or it s sort of like a period, not a comma.
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And I think that we have this idea that failure is the thing that prevents you from success.
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But what I ve come to understand is I think failure actually leads you to success.
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SPEAKER_01
I ll pick another company.
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SPEAKER_01
Groupon is kind of an interesting story about how Groupon came to be.
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SPEAKER_01
I didn t realize this until recently, but Groupon started out as basically a charity.
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SPEAKER_01
It started in Chicago.
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and there s this grad student who had a lot of time on his hands, as grad students do apparently, and he met this VC and he had this idea and they started this website where they basically used social media to get people to vote on things that they could do that would go out and help the community.
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hey, we re gonna go give away t-shirts, or we re gonna go to the soup kitchen, or whatever.
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It was philanthropic is what it was.
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And it failed.
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They lost a million dollars, and this was right around 2008 incidentally.
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They lost a million dollars, the recession had just hit, and they were going, what are we gonna do?
3
SPEAKER_01
And the VC said, what if we just try to make money?
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SPEAKER_01
We ve been trying to help people, what if we just try to make a profit and see what happens there?
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SPEAKER_01
And they did it, and lo and behold, several years later, Groupon had an IPO for $13 billion, and all they did was they took their failure, they set out to accomplish one thing and they failed.
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SPEAKER_01
And if they didn t set out to accomplish that thing,
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SPEAKER_01
they wouldn t have run into this failure that was an opportunity to pivot, to just kind of course correct a little bit, take that same technology, point it towards a different end, and that was, you know, a $13 billion pivot.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so, I think we re afraid of failure, but the reality is, failure, as long as you fail forward and all these cliches that we ve heard,
3
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If you use it to learn and kind of take the next step, often it s an opportunity to get to the next thing.
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And when you talk to people who have succeeded, you go, how did it start?
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SPEAKER_01
And they re like, well, I did this thing and then I failed and I did this thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And all along the way, they re course correcting.
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SPEAKER_01
Most failures, you don t kind of go down this road and then you turn around and go all the way back home and then have to go somewhere else.
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SPEAKER_01
Typically, you re just kind of, you re pivoting.
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You re going to the right or the left.
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SPEAKER_01
You re finding a way to work around the obstacle and continue going and the obstacle changes
3
SPEAKER_01
the path, it changes the way that you go and you end up someplace different that you never would have imagined, that I think ultimately ends up being better.
3
SPEAKER_01
As long as you don t hit a failure and go, well, I m done, I m gonna go back home and go get another degree or go do this or go do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Not to say that those things, you don t need to do those things sometimes, but I think often we need to use failure to find the success that we just don t have the vision to see when we set out to start.
3
SPEAKER_00
You mentioned that you practice your skill every day, you practice writing every day, and that you advocate that.
3
SPEAKER_00
What s the difference between, say, trying to be a writer and practicing writing every day?
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SPEAKER_00
For writers, it s talking about writing versus writing.
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SPEAKER_00
When I started this, four, five years ago now, I used to get together with writers in coffee shops and we would talk about writing for two hours, talk about our favorite writers and our books and how we re gonna do this and what we re gonna do.
4
SPEAKER_00
I did this with this guy like three Saturdays in a row.
4
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We would get together at Panera and we would spend two hours in the morning talking about writing.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it was fun, like when you re dreaming together with somebody, it s fun.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the third Saturday, I looked at him, I said, you know, we basically just spent six hours over the past few weeks talking about writing, when we could have been spending those six hours writing.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I didn t meet with him again.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I think that it s easy, business is this way too, it s easier to talk about business than it is to look at a profit and loss statement.
4
SPEAKER_00
Or hire and fire, that s hard, that s really hard.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I think talking about it versus doing it is very different.
4
SPEAKER_00
I also think that we think of practice as this thing that you do, you just do it every day and then you get really good.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s not what it takes to become great.
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SPEAKER_00
It s hard, I think it hurts to become great.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think practice should be, this sounds sort of sadistic, but I think it should be a little bit painful
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you think about athletics, you think about any skill that it requires you to become great, even to be in the arena, it hurts.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, if I m gonna get into shape, which I m resisting all opportunity to do that, but if I ever, you know, enter into that arena to actually get in really good shape, it hurts, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, it doesn t feel good to, you know, increase, you know, the weight size every time, it doesn t,
4
SPEAKER_00
feel good to do that extra pushup or push passing and run that next mile.
4
SPEAKER_00
But that s where growth happens, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
That s where muscle is grown, is in the pain.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think the same thing is true with practice.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, we ve heard all the stories about 10,000 hours.
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What people miss about that study that Malcolm Gladwell popularized is that the amount of time is one of three characteristics.
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Another characteristic
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is that you have to do the activity to the point of exhaustion, where you can t lift another rep, where you can t write another word, because that s how you become great.
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You do it like that as hard as you can do it for 10,000 hours, and then you can become great.
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Trying.
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Doesn t sound like that to me.
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Trying doesn t sound painful.
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Trying sounds like I tried and then I quit.
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When I was in sixth grade, I tried to play the saxophone and I quit.
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Because it s hard with the reed and all the spit and stuff.
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And I was like, ah, it s boring, I don t want to do it.
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And my parents bought this $300 saxophone and they wasted that money because I tried.
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I said I tried.
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and I failed or I quit or whatever just because I wasn t interested in pushing past the pain.
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I think every skill and certainly your calling is not always going to be easy, but it s important to push through that pain, which could be thought of as discomfort.
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Again, I m not trying to be a sadist here, but it s hard and you have to push through that if you really want to become great.
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Before the show, we were talking about paying attention to the lessons you can learn from your life, and you mentioned it earlier as well.
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How do we do that?
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How do we start to pay attention to lessons learned in our life to find what might be our calling, quote unquote?
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What are we looking for?
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I read this book a while ago called Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer, which is an incredible book.
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Parker Palmer was a Quaker.
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He worked in a bunch of different fields, but he was like an administrator for a college for a while, and I think like in his 40s, he basically had a crisis where he was like, I m successful, and I don t know who I am.
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I don t know what my life is about, and I want what I m doing to have meaning, and I just keep choosing the thing that s going to make me
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really cool or successful or famous or whatever, he became a Quaker and he discovered this saying that Quakers have, and here s kind of how he summarizes it.
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He says, before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I need to listen to my life telling me who I am.
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And so, when I was 27 years old, I didn t really know who I was, and I was just kind of pursuing other people s definition of success, and then I would get it, you know, and I would go, oh, I got the job.
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Okay, what now?
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And I was like, oh, I got some money.
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Okay, what now?
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And it s reminiscent of that scene from Fight Club where he s talking about calling his dad every year and he s like, what now, what now?
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Do this, do this.
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And you re doing all these steps and you re getting to this end.
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where basically the next clueless person is telling the next generation, we ll do all these things, but for what?
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And so I anticipated being that 50-year-old man telling my son to do all these things, but not knowing why.
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And so, yeah, I started listening to my life, which sounds kind of...
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ethereal, but I think practically it means talking to your friends.
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I was talking to my wife and saying, man, I wanna do something more, and she s like, well, you always read books and you always talk about writers and you like writing, so you should write a book.
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And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, not that, but I wanna do something.
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Years later, when I had that conversation with that friend, where he says, you are a writer, and I came home and I told my wife, I was like, I m a writer.
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She was like, I ve been telling you this for years.
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So I think there are people around us who are influencing us, who are seeing us and saying, and have the insight to say, here s what I see you doing.
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And we just have to have the discipline to listen.
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I also think when you look at your life, you can see certain themes emerge.
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And for me, I know I m never gonna be an accountant.
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That s never been a skill.
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I ve never been good at math.
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I ve never been good at science.
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It would be an uphill battle to acquire those skills.
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I think I could.
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I think that we can acquire a lot of skills, but it probably wouldn t be worth the time, whereas I ve had all this experience and writing and all these things that I just took for granted.
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My mom used to read me the dictionary when I was six years old when we were bored driving these cross-country trips in the car going on vacation.
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I thought that was normal.
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So when I was a 12-year-old kid in sixth grade and I won the school spelling bee with the winning word acquiescence, I just thought that was normal.
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And I love that Derek Sivers quote where he says, what s obvious to you
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is amazing to others.
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So I think one of the ways that you figure out what s next, what am I supposed to do next?
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Not what s the big grand picture for my life, but what s the next step?
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If I m feeling like there s more to life, which is really what I think calling is about, it s this understanding that you have more to offer, that there s more to be done than just going to college, getting a job, and then retiring, that you can
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do great things and have a lot of fun doing them, I think the first step is to listen to your life, and that really begins that question of who am I, who have I always been, and what does that mean about who I m becoming?
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And it s not that the past dictates your future, but I think it should inform it.
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Excellent, thank you so much.
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In your book, The Art of Work, you get into depth on a lot of this stuff, I would imagine, as well.
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Absolutely, yeah.
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Well, thanks.
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Is there anything I haven t asked you that you want to make sure you convey to the AOC listening audience?
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No, I just want to say thank you, Jordan and Jason, and I saw how successful your podcast was, and so I figured, you know, Art of Charm, I didn t want to take that, but I figured I could just change one of the words and have,
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like a percentage, like two-thirds of the success.
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I do wanna acknowledge the incredible work that you re doing and just thank you for that.
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I m a fan and appreciate you having me on.
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Yeah, excellent.
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Good job.
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Bye-bye.
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Jeff Goins, good dude, man.
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Always knew this was gonna be a good one.
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Took a long time.
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I think we rescheduled like 87 times.
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But this is a guy we should listen to.
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He was working the crappy job, then suddenly he became a writer.
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And his website is ginormously popular, it s no joke.
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If you go to goinswriter.com, which we ll have linked in the show notes as well, I mean, it s like, it s popular.
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I remember people telling me about this a long time ago.
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I think he s got like 100,000 readers or, you know, it s very much out there and a known thing.
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And even Seth Godin likes it.
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Show feedback and guest suggestions, the show s a fanarchy, it s run by you, unless you give us a crap idea, in which case I just delete the email.
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But we rely on you to help keep our finger on the pulse, so if you know someone who s a good fit for the show, let us know.
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Guests at theartofcharm.com, and if you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Jeff on Twitter, we ll have that linked in the show notes as well.
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We ve got his book linked there, we ll have his website linked there, as well as his Twitter.
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and you can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the show notes right on your phone.
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I m also on Twitter, at theartofcharm, and I post lots of stuff that your life just is not gonna be complete without, like funny cat pictures and articles here and there.
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Bootcamp details, bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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Remember, we sell out in advance, so plan ahead, get in touch now, get the info, make it happen.
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Subscribe on iTunes, write us a nice review.
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We got our iPhone and Android apps, if that s easier for you as well.
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Special thanks to the Jasons for their help in production of the Art of Charm podcast.
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Tell your friends, dang it, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else either in person or shared on the web.
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Now have a great week and leave everything and everyone better than you found it.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and everything for the extraordinary man at theartofcharmpodcast.com.