322: Tom Morris | Learning from the Wisest People

Speaker A: Coming up next on Business Minds Coffee Chat.

Speaker B: The Iliad taught me about the power of partnership. So did Aristotle. People in partnership for shared purpose is his ideal of how to make great things happen. People, plural. In partnership, a certain relationship for a shared purpose. People in partnership for a shared purpose. Boom. Things happen. Well, guess what I've come to realize. We should partner not just with other people. Yes, wonderful creative partnerships. We should partner with our problems rather than running from our problems. We should say, what does this problem have to teach me? What can this problem help me make happen that wouldn't have happened had I not encountered it? We can partner with our problems. A good book should become your partner in how to make great things happen in life. If you don't just read it, let it read you. As you read it, let it become your partner in wisdom and you can make some brand new things happen.

Speaker A: The fact that you're listening to this podcast tells me that you're someone who values their time and is interested in improvement and growth. I've learned over the years that those who want to get better, who want to sharpen their skills, hire coaches. I started my coaching business because I saw firsthand how having the right coach transformed, uh, a family member's business and life. This had a profound impact on me, and it's my mission to help others have a similar positive experience. If you've ever thought about hiring a business coach, check this out. Working with me as your coach, you'll gain more clarity on your goals and priorities, be held accountable, learn and apply the tools to maximize your potential, build a rock solid foundation for your business and achieve the results and success you deserve. Warren Buffett said, the best investment you can make is in yourself. If you're ready to commit to your personal and professional development, let nothing hold you back. To apply to my coaching program and to schedule a call with me to learn more, just visit jshearbusinessconsulting.com and click the Book now button at the top. I look forward to hearing from you. And now enjoy the latest episode.

Speaker B: Hi, this is Tom Morris, fortunately best selling author and public philosopher, and you're listening to Business Minds Coffee Chat with Jay Shear.

Speaker A: This is Business Minds Coffee Chat, where those interested in personal and professional growth come to listen to and learn. Learn from extraordinary business leaders, thought leaders, best, uh, selling authors, renowned psychologists, neuroscientists, and others who are changing the world through the work they do. I'm your host, Jay Shear. Welcome to the conversation. Heraclitus said, no man ever steps in the same river twice for it's not the same river. It's. And he's not the same man. You got to think about that one. Well, uh, on today's episode, we're going to talk about philosophy. What we can learn about living from the wisest people who've ever lived, practical applications of stoicism, the art of achievement, and more. My guest is a best selling author of over 30 books, a, uh, legendary keynote speaker, and one of the world's top public philosophers and pioneering business thinkers. He holds two master's degrees and a double PhD in philosophy and Religious studies from Yale University, and was a professor of philosophy for 15 years at the University of Notre Dame. His work has been profiled on NBC, abc, cnn, cnbc, and npr, and in the New York Times, Fast Company, USA Today, and many other media outlets. His clients have included Ford Motor, bank of America, Toyota, Target, Walmart, and so many others. Please welcome the man who's a firm believer that ideas rock the world, Tom Morris. Tom, it is so good to see you. Thank you so much for being here today.

Speaker B: Uh, it's great to be with you, man. We're gonna have some fun talking today.

Speaker A: Yes, we are. And I am so excited about our conversation, so let's dive right in. I thought a good starting point for us, Tom, would be for you first, first to share with all of us what your favorite thing is about yourself and why.

Speaker B: I love it that I'm a philosopher because as my first philosophy professor said to the class, uh, freshman year, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he said, I love being a philosopher because it's the only job I can think of when you can lie on the beach all day with your eyes closed, tell people you're working, and maybe get away with it. So I love the freedom that comes with being a philosopher. There's a sense in which I'm always on the job, but there's another sense in which I can follow my own rhythms. Um, you noticed earlier as we were chatting before the show, guitars surrounding me here in my study and amplifiers. And I know you're a drummer. And I love the fact that being musical gives us a sense of the rhythm of life. It gives us a sense of what reaches people deep down in their hearts as well as their minds. And I think that's helped me to be a better person and a better philosopher.

Speaker A: You know, I love that so very much. So I want to stay on that topic of the rhythm of life. And, you know, since we're talking about music and how, how important that is for arts, culture, humanities, etc. And just L. Life in general. How, when you think about that rhythm of life and what. How you're able to implement playing the guitar, what impact does that have on you? What does it mean to you? And when you decide to pick up the guitar, is it. Is it for. For reasons of calming the mind, for creativity? What is it for you specifically?

Speaker B: What's funny? I got to, uh, Yale University as a graduate student, and somebody came into the religious studies department, which was my original home department. They came in and said, hey, the, uh, the dean of the graduate school wants to see you. I thought, oh, no, I didn't know anybody who had been called to see the dean of the graduate school. Very famous scholar, um, Yaroslav Pelikan was his name. Famous historian. So I go with trepidation into his office. He says, have a seat, Mr. Morris. He said, I hear you're a musician. And I said, well, I used to be. He said, what do you mean, used to be? I said, I used to play in rock bands and in soul bands. I was a guitarist. But I gave it up for the sake of academia and the intellectual life. And he raises his finger up heavenward and says, as dean of the graduate school at Yale University, I, uh, hereby command you to play your guitar again. And I said, why? And he said, look, if I were just a historian, if I had nothing else in my life, I think I'd go crazy. He said, you can't just have an intellectual life without other counterbalancing facets of your life. He said, I play piano. That gives my soul rest. It gives me restoration. It, uh, revives me when I'm wading through ancient texts. He said, I want you to play your guitar again. So I said, yes, sir. I'll. I'll do it. I hooked up with a studio guitarist from New York City who lived in New, uh, Haven. And, uh, the next two years, I played five hours a day, every day. And I got. I got a lot better, thanks to Yaroslav Pelican. Even today, when I'm writing a new book, I'm writing what may be my 32nd. I don't know. I've kind of lost count now, but I need to take breaks. I need to take breaks and play fast, play slow, bend a few strings. Uh, just do something that speaks to me in a different way, way. It's like a meditative practice. Although it's probably the noisiest meditation known to mankind with Fender Amplifiers here in the office. Nonetheless, it is a soul soothing Enterprise I think more of us need in our lives, we can't just do one thing, whether it's a startup business, whether it's serving in a corporate role, uh, no matter what we're doing, we tend to do it so intensely these days, uh, because the competition is so great. But unless we have something else in our lives, something counterbalancing, something very different, we'll burn out. And I see that all around me. I see people who are shells of their former selves because they've just devoted their lives to one thing. We're not meant to be monomaniacal in this world. Aristotle taught me we're all multi dimensional creatures. Nobody has just one dimension of their lives. I see it all the time. Uh, a little kid will find out he's a good soccer player and all of a sud. It's soccer, soccer, soccer, nothing but soccer. He drops his other friends, just his soccer friends or a musician like you or me, Jay, drummer or guitarist, just hangs out with other musicians. He drops his other friends. Socially, he focuses on the one thing. We're not meant to be one dimensional creatures. So the more we can develop many sides of ourselves, the better. I mean, I launched my first non academic book on the show Live with Regis and Kathie Lee in 1994 when that was the top morning show in America. And Regis said to me, he said, you know what, I've just been learning how to play piano myself. And he said, just bringing some music into my life has made all the difference in the world. I think everybody who tries it will have the same feeling about how it balances their lives.

Speaker A: I agree with you on that point. And whether it's music or something else that can create that same sense, that same feeling, but being able to explore whether some other talent, something that's within you that can create that multidimensional view of you as a human being, I think is so important. And you know, just speaking of music again for a moment, have you read Rick Rubin's book?

Speaker B: Oh yeah, I just got it.

Speaker A: Rick Rubin, the producer.

Speaker B: I just started it. Yeah, yeah, it's great stuff.

Speaker A: It is such a great book. But what I find interesting about Rick and you know, as you read that book or if you're familiar with his, his work in general, you know, he, he is also a student of stoic philosophy. And you see it woven within his vernacular, the way he writes, his level of creativity. And so much of that comes from being able to explore different areas and not getting so locked into one specific area. Exploring different, different Avenues. And so I think it's so important. So I thank you for sharing your story about your musical escapades. I love that.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I think it does. In Rick's case, I think it probably does this in your life as well as it does in mine. It cultivates a kind of an intuitiveness in our approach to everything. We're not just rational in whether we're approaching business, whether we're approaching something intellectual. We have that going for us. But we've also cultivated some art that draws on the intuitive and that gives us an edge in everything we do.

Speaker A: Absolutely, for sure. So I would love it if you would share part of your backstory. So what I'd like to do is wind the clock back a bit. So in researching you, which I have just thoroughly enjoyed, spending some time doing my due diligence to get to know you better. Um, so of course I discovered that you are a first generation college student and you grew up in an 800 square foot home and your father had a high school education. So share with us a bit about that story because I want to find out more about how, what shaped the person who you are today. So tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker B: Well, it was funny. I had this interesting childhood where I never felt poor. Although we had, uh, that 800 square foot house was a rented house. And we lived on a street that was at first a dirt street that got paved eventually. No sidewalks or anything like that. Almost everybody on the street, uh, the dads worked at the American Tobacco Company or Liggett Myers, the cigarette companies in Durham. And they came home in their khaki uniforms every day after work. And you know, we didn't have people up and down the street having university experiences. Um, I think one kid older than me got, uh, a chance to go to college. But I grew up in that small house. The only books in the house, in addition to about three or four family Bibles, the Southern Baptist tradition, there were lots of philosophy books. There were books by Plato and Aristotle and Emerson. And there were books of philosophy by Aquinas and Nietzsche and Descartes. And my dad collected philosophy books. One of his favorites, uh, was Emerson, the great American philosopher. And I now have his volumes with my childhood scribbles in the backs of the books. And I think to myself, I grew up surrounded by philosophy books and here I become a philosopher. It makes me wonder. I go into kids rooms now and see things like SpongeBob SquarePants and purple dinosaurs. And I'm thinking, okay, where is this leading? But you know, it is interesting how our environment can shape us. I was, uh, an only child, and my mother, when we were raising our children, my mother heard my wife talking to the children. She said, I didn't know I was supposed to talk to them when they were little. Well, I got a lot of chance to be on my own. I got a lot of chance to live in my own head, to be creative, to be imaginative, uh, to become a thinker. And, you know, I have this strange career, Jay. I mean, I'm either in front of 500 or 5,000 or 10,000 people, or I'm by myself hour after hour, day after day, writing a book. I'm either in a huge crowd, in front of the crowd, or I'm, um, all alone. And those all alone periods when I get all these amazing books written, and I can call them amazing because they are feats of thinking for me. I write to think. I write to participate in conversations. I told my graduate students at Notre Dame, I said, there are two models of writing books. One model is the National Gallery of Art model, where you're trying to create a masterpiece that will be hung in the National Gallery forever. The people who have this model of writing get very little written in their lives because they're never convinced it's good enough to hang in the National Gallery. There's another approach to writing, which is the conversational model. If there's an interesting topic that you've thought about and you think you have something to say, well, say it, publish it. Not to be the last word, not to be the masterpiece in the National Gallery, but to spark other people who may be smarter than you to get involved in the conversation so you can continue to learn. Uh, I write to think because I bet everybody watching this podcast has had an experience. You've come away from a conversation and you've learned something not necessarily from what you heard the other person say, but maybe from what you heard yourself saying in that conversation. At its best, talking isn't just communicating. Talking is a form of thinking. Probably the originator of this was Socrates. Well, so is writing. We think of writing as a form of communication. Like, okay, I've got it all figured out about topic X, so I'm going to write a book on it. For me, it's the other way around. If I get really interested in a topic like how to deal with disruptive change, the reason I'll write a book about it is to figure out what I think using, uh, the disciplined borders of language to clarify the otherwise vague thoughts that we have can be one of the most powerful forms of thinking. So I write a book first to get clear in my own head, and then to contribute to a conversation with other people that leads to amazing discoveries. So that's why I write so much. That's why I talk so much. That's why I can't shut up. Because either I'm thinking or I'm, um, entering into a conversation where I want to hear other people's thinking, or both.

Speaker A: This is so good. And, you know, as you're telling me this, I'm thinking that thinking. I take a lot of notes, right? So as you and I are having this conversation, I'm taking notes because there's certain things that I want to commit to memory, right? You may say something that sparks an idea that I want to explore a little bit more deeply. Maybe I want to pull on a certain thread. And by the way, for all of you that are watching and listening right now, you've heard this from me before. I would encourage everybody to make sure that you're taking notes as you're listening to this as well. Listen. Active listening. But also note taking, I think, is. Is another component to learning that helps to reinforce the message and commit it to memory. So with all that said, you know, as you're talking about your writing process, which I absolutely love, do you ever get to that point when you're, let's say toward the end or you finished writing something where you have a difficult time ending and saying, it's good enough, I'm moving on.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's right. You can always add another sentence, right? Sometimes I drive my literary agent crazy because every three days she gets the new version of my book, right? Which one of these should I read? She'll say, I don't know, you know, the latest one, but maybe wait till tomorrow, there'll be a new version. It's real hard. I mean, there's a book, uh, I did on difficult change, um, called Plato's Lemonade Stand. Because I grew up in North Carolina hearing the old saying, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. I must have heard that a hundred times growing up. It occurred to me as an adult. Nobody ever said how I thought, wow, that's interesting. I wonder if any of the great philosophers had anything to say about this. Because think about for a second the metaphor, when life hands you lemons something sour, something bitter, make lemonade, something sweet. For years, we've been told to be resilient. When something bad happens, bounce back. Or we've been told in More recent years. Uh, be gritty. Have grit. This determination, this passion that no matter what life throws your way, you're just going to soldier on, right? You're going to slog on through it. And I thought, wait a minute, this Lemons to Lemonade is not about just bouncing back. And it's not just about soldiering on. It's about being transformative. Taking something from difficulty to delight. That's a different transformative process. So I want to investigate that. So the book Plato's Lemonade stand took me 15 years. I rewrote it 24 times. It had six different titles. It was rejected along the way 44 times. Never with a criticism, only with the comment, we're not sure this would be big enough for us. That was almost, uh, they could have had that stamped on all the letters from the editors who were looking at the book at a certain period in time. I wrote my first book when I was in college. It was rejected 36 times. And when I thought I was done, it ended up, I was halfway done. And every time a book was turned down along the way, even if there was no criticism, I had to meet and change the book because this person said I did too much of this or too little of that. No, no, no. Every delay gave me a chance to rethink it and to see if I could make it better. So over time, it's sometimes hard to let go because you think, could I still make this better? Could I still make this better? But I've developed now, I've been able to turn into the wild over 30 books. So I've developed, uh, an ability to know when to stop on something. But I know that even, like with the Art of Achievement that I wrote 25 years ago, a new silver anniversary edition just came out. And I got a six month period to completely rewrite it and bring it up to our time. And that's a great joy. So, you know, you know, even when I'm sending those little birds out of the nest, it's not like I'm never going to see them again. I may have a chance to do a 10th anniversary edition or a 5th anniversary or 25th anniversary. Um, and so maybe I can, maybe I can let go of it now because I think it's about as good as I can make it now. And I get to re, I get to revisit it later on.

Speaker A: Yeah, that, that is so, so beautiful. But so I've got to ask you, because I think this is a very, very important point here that you're hitting on. You talk about resilience, we talk about grit, right? So you just gave two great examples of your ability to persevere, to have resilience, to reframe a situation. So as I'm listening to you, right, the very first book that you wrote when you were in college, that you were turned down over 30 times, why did you keep going? So what, what was it within you? What did you. Let's try to get a bit tactical here if we can, because this is something I want to be able to share with our audience that they can take away. What were you telling yourself? How did you reframe the situation? Where did that perseverance come from and that resilience to keep going after 30 plus times?

Speaker B: Yeah, it is funny. I tend to be a crazy optimist. And I have a friend who's in sales. He's in food sales. He calls on restaurants and sells the ingredients that they use, um, for their dishes. And he says to me, he's got this lifetime thing that the word no never really means. Absolutely not. It means not yet. Um, and so people who've chosen his competitors over him, he will continue to call on them on a monthly basis. How's it going? How are you doing? How's, uh, the company you've gone with for food service? How are they doing for you? Are they serving you well? And he says, eventually the owners of these restaurants will say, I see you more than the guy I'm paying. I think I should be paying you. So he doesn't give up. He takes the no as the not yet. I take the no as it's maybe not right for them right now, and maybe it wouldn't be best for me if they don't get excited about the project, then maybe they're not the people to publish it. So I kind of feel like I've made a great escape. I haven't somehow gone with the publisher who thought, okay, we'll do this, but we're not excited about it. Well, who wants to bury your book like that, right? So I want people to be equally excited. When I was an undergraduate, I was writing about a guy. I, um, was doing a philosophical critique of a guy who had sold 6 million books in maybe six languages, and there hadn't been a study of his work, and I was going to be the first one. I thought, the world needs this critique of this guy's work. He's become very popular and he's done some good stuff, but there's some limits to his arguments, his way of thinking, too. That need to be pointed out. So I kind of felt like I'd be doing people a service if I got this book out into the world. So no matter, uh, how many people said no, I would try again. I would try again. The guy himself, his publisher wanted to publish my book. The head of the company called me and said, we really want to publish your book. We think it's really great. But the guy you're writing about, he's our best selling author. And he said, no, don't do this guy's critique. But he calls me in my student apartment at Chapel Hill and says, but we love your book. Now here I am, 22 years old, the head of a publishing company loves my book. He can't do it. He gives me his reason. Boy, was that encouraging. So I kept at it. And then finally, by the time I was a first year graduate student, I'm m getting checks in the mail from a book that the first year, I think, uh, it sold over 20,000 copies in the first year out. Uh, and who was I? I was a 22 year old kid, you know, nobody had ever heard of. So I thought, okay, I can do this.

Speaker A: That's incredible. What an incredible story. So I want to, I want to go back again to your early years because I, I want to understand something that we, that I didn't ask and I'm curious about.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure.

Speaker A: You had all these books, your father had all these books on that he collected books on philosophy. Did he actually. Was he a collector and a consumer of. Or was he a collector and there was a reason why he was collecting them? M. Um, give me some clarification on that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think he grew up on a. He grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina, 250 acres. And he had a sister who died, ah, from a childhood illness. When he was, um, old enough to really experience the grief of that, he grew up, ah, roaming the woods. He grew up wanting something more for his life than just being on a small farm in the middle of what he considered at the time in the middle of nowhere. He thought of life as a series of adventures. Now this is one. So he read these philosophy books, he read all of them over and over again. And he used to tuck me in bed at night and give me a little piece of wisdom about the world. When I was a little kid, he would tuck me in bed and say things like, he'd say, tommy, life is supposed to be a series of adventures. The ones you've already been on are preparing you for the ones yet to come in ways that you sometimes can't even imagine. Or he would say to me when I was in, uh, junior high school, he would say, you know what? You should do something. As long as you love it and you think you have something distinctive to contribute. If either of those things changes, you should make a change. He would tuck me into bed at night when I was 8 years old and tell me how to relax every part of my body, how to make my mind go blank. He would, uh, tell me stories from his life, where he left the farm at age 17, went to Baltimore, Maryland, went to Martin Aircraft Company and applied for a job. And they said, what do you want to do? He said, everything. And they said, well, nobody's ever said that before. What do you mean? He said, I don't care where you start me. Start me in any department. As soon as I'm as good as anybody in that department, send me to another department. I want to learn how to make airplanes. And they said, okay. So by the time he was 19 or 20, he had gone through every department. Sheet metal, riveting, everything. He was in experimental design at the age of 19 or 20, making a fantastic salary helping to design the new airplanes for World War II. My mother was one of the women called Rosie the Riveter. She had a rivet gun in hand, and she would yell at the other people, you know, do your best work on this plane. Our boys lives depend on it, or else, get yourself another job. And so my, my daughter and granddaughter are now in the Rosie the Riveter Society, because it's the kind of thing that you have to have genetically. You have to be descended from somebody who was one of these remarkable women. Well, my dad went over, went to war and came back and built the early radio stations throughout the south, in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida. Then he invented toys. He invented, uh, all kinds of things. He managed radio stations. He started a real estate company. He was living his own advice about life being a series of adventures. And so when he would tell me these things, I knew they were always coming from his heart and his life as well as his head. What a great way to learn philosophy from anybody.

Speaker A: That is, uh, so beautiful. So as you think about, uh, all that you, you took from your mother and your father, what would you say is the greatest gift that you received from your father and the greatest gift that you received from your mother?

Speaker B: Yeah, for my dad was this adventurous spirit. And just follow your nose, you know, follow your heart, follow your instincts, always do your best. And for My mother. It was just. There are more possibilities out there than you're even aware of at any given time. Uh, never give up. Always know that around the next corner, there should be. There could be something new waiting for you. So when I was experiencing those rejections in my writing life, um, hey, it never. It never. I don't remember ever being bothered by it. I mean, sometimes I would say, wow, I don't get it that they don't get it. You know? How could you not get this? This is a great idea. Plato's Lemonade stand, for example. I use so many great philosophical techniques in helping people to deal with difficult change and helping people to launch difficult change. Because the book is in two parts. The first part of the book is about the change that happens to us, and the second part of the book is about the change that will happen only because of us. Uh, either of those things can involve life's lemons. And we have to know the different techniques of turning lemons into lemonade when things happen to us or when we need to make something happen. So when a company would turn that down, we don't think it would be big enough for us. I'm thinking, really, I mean, they don't get. And the book came out, uh, In January of 2020, right before the pandemic issued the most disruptive change in modern history. And people were saying to me, what are you, this genius who, two months before the shutdown, you've got this book about how to handle difficult change? I said, no, listen, I just made it through 44 rejections, and it happened to finally come out at just the perfect time. Because that in itself is a lesson, isn't it? Because I didn't give up. Yeah, because I didn't give up. Uh, the book ends up coming out at the perfect time to be of help across industries. Because, Jay, as you might imagine, people knowing of the existence of the book, in the early weeks and months of the shutdown, I was getting calls every week across industries. Can you help our. Our executive team deal with difficult change? Uh, can you help us deal with all this? We don't know how to. And I would say, sure. We don't have a budget, though, for virtual speakers. I said, that's all right. I didn't get into this, first and foremost, as a business. I got into. Look, if you go into philosophy to make money, you're probably not smart enough to be in philosophy. So I said, look, it's first and foremost a mission. If I could have a business doing it, too, that's great, but right now, you guys need me to just come and serve you. So while all the other public speakers I knew were sitting home waiting for the in person meetings to be rescheduled, I don't know if you remember those days, everybody was saying, yeah, two or three months, we'll be back on schedule, we'll have our meetings, you know. And so I was doing three, four, five zoom talks a week. I was getting really good at zoom talks while everybody else was sitting back waiting for the in person. And so, yeah, I did a bunch of free freebies, I did a bunch of pro bono's, which made me a great zoom presenter. So that when people did get budgets, they wanted to come to me about the same topic or different topics. But I had sort of mastered the medium as you have for podcasting. You have to do it a lot. Aristotle said we learn by doing. So it was by being thrown into that virtual format where there could be hundreds of people on a call, there could be thousands of people on a zoom call. But you know, you know, you just see a few people on the screen and you have to sort of judge how things are coming across. Well, I got to the point I could do it practically in my sleep because I had been doing it a lot and learning as, as I went. So again, my parents gave me this great advice. Home life was not always easy for me. My mother had grown up in an orphanage. Even though her mother was alive, she had been put in an orphanage. And those were difficult years for her. And so she was a real perfectionist. I had to make it. I had to be the one to get out of the, uh, chains of poverty she felt herself to be in. And so those kind of pressures on a little kid could be tough. So I got that side from my upbringing as well as all the good stuff. I got all the pressure as well. I had to learn later in life how to benefit from all the good and how to manage all those stresses and pressures and to know what to let go of. In fact, when I recently did the book Stoicism, uh, for Dummies with one of my former graduate students who's a great philosopher in his own right, I, uh, opened the book by saying half of wisdom is about knowing what to embrace and what to release. Most people embrace what they should be releasing, and they release what they should be embracing. They suffer as a result. It's easy to say, hard to do.

Speaker A: Yes. So give us a, give us an example, whether it could be from your own life or what you've seen from some of the executives or others that you've worked with.

Speaker B: Well, you know, we could just use that example of rejections. You know, whether it's a job, uh, you've applied for a job and you've been rejected, or you've submitted a book for publication and it's been rejected. Are you going to embrace that rejection? Are you going to squeeze it? Are you going to hold on into it? Are you going to walk around with it attached to you? You can't even see around it, it's so big. Or are you just going to release it? Are you going to let it go and move on? So many of us carry through life so much negative baggage from stuff that isn't even a reality in our lives anymore. It happened five years ago, that happened 10 years ago. The stresses of my childhood, why should I drag those through all the decades with me now? It wasn't until I was in my 50s that I learned about some of the baggage I was carrying with me from my childhood that I had to let go. Because there were things, there were nuggets from my early years that I really wanted to embrace throughout my career here on earth. But there were other things. I should just put them aside because they're not doing me any good at all. So that can function for any of us. Whether it's a negative experience in your life or anything like that, it's up to you whether you're going to hold on to it, whether you're going to let go. You know, we need to hold on to the great people around us and we need to let go other things that would interfere with our best and highest relationships and best and highest personal development. Sometimes an opportunity could look like a golden opportunity, but pursuing it could destroy everything in your life. I just, uh, wrote a book we're showing to publishers now called the Frankenstein Factor. Mary Shelley is a brilliant 18 year old. You know, her famous novel Frankenstein was about a super smart guy who did everything the motivational speakers tell you to do. Had a clear goal, had strong confidence, a focus, concentration, uh, uh, you know, consistency, blah, blah, blah. He, he did it all and succeeded in unleashing a monster into the world he couldn't control. Now isn't this a metaphor for so much in modern life? There are some goals we set for ourselves that sound good, but in doing it, I mean, Mr. Zuckerberg never sat around saying, I want to destroy democracy around the world. Never. Never occurred to him. He had other things in mind. You can replay that over and over and over. We got some really creative, um, investment vehicles we're discovering and inventing. People were saying in the finance world back before their financial investment vehicles almost blew up the world economy several years ago. Uh, you know, it's repeated on a big scale in American politics. It's repeated on a small scale in people's lives, where in pursuing this great idea, I'm going to alienate everybody I care about. Wait a minute. Is that what I want to do? Know what to release and know what to embrace? Deep wisdom from the philosophers.

Speaker A: Wow, that is very deep wisdom, and I truly appreciate that. And this is something that I know all of us can relate to. Um, now, you mentioned that it wasn't until the age of 50, let's say, that you realize that you. There were some nuggets maybe of some baggage that you were carrying. So what was it specifically, Tom, that was the, uh, the impetus that led you to discover what that baggage was?

Speaker B: I realized that sometimes I was getting in my own way and being so geared to success and being so geared to excellence and being so geared to reaching the most people for great ideas. I was neglecting the people closest to me. This is a very common thing, right, in any, uh, startup business, any business founder. And I realized, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why do I have this pressure in me to always do more for more people? Uh, where's balance to be had? And so, um, I started reassessing what's causing me to feel all this stress, what's causing me to feel all this pressure. And I realized it came from my childhood. It was just entangled with so many good things, though, that I couldn't at first pick out what it was that caused all these inner pressures and inner stresses that are so common. First, to have you end up my Frankenstein Factor manuscript. The subtitle is Monster Success and Massive Failure. I think one of the things we see unfurling around us is it Elon? Is Elon having this problem these days? Monster Success and massive failure. The philosophers have always advised us, um, to be discerning at every step along the way. Don't just set a goal and then pursue it all out, regardless of what you see in the periphery of your vision happening left and right. Wait a minute. Am I doing this in a way that's more destructive than it is creative? We're here to live full and balanced lives. Like we were talking about music earlier, and art and sports can play a balancing role. And yet I see people who are extreme overachievers in business. I need to balance my life so they become extreme overachievers in sports and that, uh, they get every sports injury you can possibly imagine, right? They bring the same bad habits to this thing that's supposed to balance them out, but they keep unbalanced because they're doing everything to an extreme. And the philosophers have given me this perspective on, um, my own life and on our endeavors in this world. I call it spiritual math. Uh, sometimes little things add up to being hugely important and the big things end up being not so big after all. We have to learn. See, Socrates, probably his greatest gift to us is his insistence that we engage in self knowledge at every step in our lives. Um, his student Plato, probably his greatest bequest to us is his insistence that we engage in situational knowledge. So here's Socrates and know yourself. Here's Plato saying, know your situation. The Plato's image of the cave, he said, imagine all of humanity as men living in a cave, chained down to the floor. You can't turn around, you're just staring at a wall and there's shadows dancing across that wall that you mistake as realities. He said, the philosopher is the person who breaks his chains, leaves the cave, goes out into the light of the true sun and finds out what's real and then goes back into the cave to tell everybody else. Guys, you're being misled by illusions dancing across a wall. Here, let me take you out where the true sun will show you the reality. So Plato's idea was we all live lives of illusion. And then along comes later on Epictetus who says, look, I was a slave, but guess what, so are you. We're all enslaved to illusions. If I can help be your liberator, if I can free you from the illusions that hold you back, that take you down the wrong roads in life, you can become your best self. So the great philosopher. So know yourself from Socrates, know your situation from Plato. And Aristotle comes along as Plato's student and says, know your strength. And the word in Latin that meant strengths is the word virtue. Virtus or virtu meant strength or power or prowess. So the Stoic philosophers end up putting virtue at the center of everything because they're putting strength at the center of everything. The inner strength that's always responsible for outer strength and outer results. So the first book I wrote about Stoicism, uh, back in the 90s when nobody was interested in Stoicism, was called the Stoic Art of Living, subtitled Inner Resilience and Outer Results. It was always about this move from inside to outside based on self knowledge, Situational knowledge and knowledge of your strengths. So know yourself, know your situation, know your strengths. That's the package. And the philosophers who have helped us understand that more and more deeply over the centuries have been the one to do so much, the ones to do so much good. The Stoics happen to be pretty central amongst those philosophers. And that's why I've been on and off throughout my life, uh, studying the Stoics and trying to bring them into people's business lives as very helpful guides in everything.

Speaker A: I love this so much. So at the beginning of the episode, I had read a quote, a very famous quote that obviously you've heard millions of times, uh, by Heraclitus. First of all. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Speaker B: Yes, you're the only person I've ever heard pronounce it right.

Speaker A: Okay, well, I. I'll. I'll tell you what I did. I actually. Because I was pronouncing it for years as Heraclitus. And what I did. What I did is I used. I did a Google search and pulled up some YouTube videos of different ways of the pronunciation, hearing different leaders, let's say. And anyway, the majority of them who are, you know, uh, well schooled, let's say, in this area, we're pronouncing it Heraclitus. So the quote, one more time for thank you for, for everyone else that's watching and listening is no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and he's not the same man. So there's a book on of Stoic philosophy that I read every single morning. And I've read the same book year after year after year. I'm probably on my seventh or eighth year of reading it, and people will ask me, well, Jay, why are you. Why would you read the same book more than once? And it is for this particular reason, because I'm not the same person I was when I read the book the first time. I think differently. I'm interpreting the information differently. And it is for those that may be new to Stoicism or philosophy in general. I'll be candid. I mean, it can be intimidating at first, but I think it is. It is absolutely worth taking the time to explore and to really ask yourself deeper questions. The better questions we ask ourselves, the better quality of life we can ultimately have. So what I would love for you to share with all of us, if you will, because you released a fantastic book, uh, Stoicism for Dummies. And I'm sure Many people are familiar with the Dummies series of books. And these are not for Dummies, by the way. Right.

Speaker B: There's.

Speaker A: I mean, this is great, important, applicable information. But for somebody who may be new to this, that may have no experience, they've heard about it, but they're trying to figure out, hey, is this something I should get into? And if so, why? What would you say to somebody if you were sitting across from them right now?

Speaker B: I would say, first of all, first of all, let me not let this pass without a comment. You're. You show true genius, uh, as, uh, you often do in applying Heraclitus, uh, metaphor, uh, to reading a book more than once, because you're the first person I've ever heard do that. And, you know, Heraclitus would say, hats off to you, maybe even toga. Off to you. I don't know, uh, you know, a dip of the toga. But, um, that's a great. That's a great piece of insight. Uh, three years ago, I reread the Iliad and the Odyssey. I reread the Odyssey four times that year in three different translations. I reread the Iliad twice that year in two different translations. And I came to understand them for the first time in my life. I had read them each once or twice before, but it was only the repeated readings over a short period of time. I said, oh, the Odyssey is about the power of purpose. The Iliad is about the power of partnership. And once I understood that, which nobody had ever told me, uh, everything in the books fell into place. I could understand so much that I hadn't understood before. And Stoicism is the same way, whether it's the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or whether it's the Handbook or the Manual of Epictetus, or whether it's some of Seneca's amazing essays, uh, or letters. If you read these things repeatedly, I mean, sometimes an author took, like, me. It took me 15 years to write, uh, Plato's Lemonade Stand. It took me 20 years to write the Frankenstein Factor. I have a book at my computer that I've been working on for 30 years now. By contrast, I've written a book in 89 days. I've written a book in probably, um, three weeks. Um, but an author who works on a book repeatedly for over a long period of time, we read it once, and we think we're going to get everything in there. C.S. lewis once said, if a book is not worth reading twice, it wasn't worth reading once, because if it's any good, it'll have a depth that you can't possibly discover the first time through. It's like riding through a neighborhood. The first time you ever drive through a neighborhood, are you going to notice everything about every house, about every person you see? No. You know, but once you've been through the neighborhood five times, 10 times, it's going to feel familiar to you. You will pick out a lot more of the detail. A book is the same way. And stoicism holds up like this because the Stoics tended to write their books, their letters, uh, out of the living of their lives. And so we can relate to so much that we come across in their writings. But some of the stuff you have to be ready for, right? Like stepping into that same stream twice. The man, the first time he steps into the stream, he's in a different situation in his life from the next time. I had a guy once hire me to give us a speech on the same topic. True. The art of achievement in times of Change. He hired me to give that speech, I think he says, over 35 times in a period of just a few years for different groups of people that he did business with. He was represented a major financial firm, and he always went with me or always met me there. And about the 19th time, I said, hey, man, aren't you sick to death of hearing me talk about the same thing? He said, uh, two things, Tom. First, you never. You don't memorize speeches. You never give the same speech twice. You're always improvising. You're always bringing in new books and movies, new experiences you've had. So it's never the same speech twice. But secondly, I'm always at a different time in my life. And maybe something you have said before, I didn't really hear it the way I need to hear it now because of what I'm going through right now. Other new things going to leap out at me that I just, you know, I just passed me right by, uh, the previous times. Same thing with a book. Same thing with the Stoics. The Stoics because they're all about wealth. People come to the Stoics for one of two reasons. People come to the Stoics because they want to learn to cope with the difficulties of life, or they come to the Stoics because they want to learn to conquer. You know, in sports, in business, in some m facet of life. Well, the interesting thing about coping and conquering is that to do either you have to do a measure of the other. You Never conquer unless you've learned to cope. You never truly cope unless there are things you have conquered. So if the Stoics can bring us insight about both those things that we all need, why wouldn't they be worth reading twice? Three times, four times, seven times. I probably read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 20 times. Um, that may be the most I've read any book. I've read Gilgamesh probably 15 times. I've read Beowulf probably 12 times. People would say, what? Well, Gilgamesh is the oldest book we have, is the world's oldest epic tale. It's about a bad leader, a terrible leader who becomes a good leader. Now how does that ever happen? Well, it's a great story about that. It's the first buddy caper ever written and it takes place in 2700 BCE. I mean, this is a long time ago and it still reaches us where we live right now. Beowulf from, from kind of early Middle Ages, which a lot of people refer to as the Dark Ages, although there were, there were pinnacles of light even then. Beowulf is about an amazing first line performer. He's like the Michael Jordan of warfare, you know, leaping high above everybody else. He's unconquerable. He becomes a leader and he doesn't understand that he needs to change the way he operates to be a great leader. And so he sets himself up for his own demise. There are lessons, so many lessons in Gilgamesh and Beowulf, and it's hard to find anybody who's read either of those books at all. And, uh, I'm fortunate to have discovered both of them and knew to keep going back, keep going back, keep going back until get the real lessons. Deep, deep, deep in the book. It's like, it's like you're going to dig. It's like you're going to drill for oil and give up after the first foot or two, uh, down below the dirt, or you're going to go panning for gold in the mountains of North Carolina. And if, if you don't, if you don't get any in your pan, you're going to give up in the first 10 minutes. We, uh, need to keep coming back. A guy once said to me, um, I met some novelists. One year when I was teaching at Notre Dame, I met several famous novelists and I said to one of, uh, them, man, I wish I could do what you do. And he said, you do. We do the exact same thing. I said, what are you talking about? Because before at that point, I hadn't written any novels. I've written eight now, but I hadn't written any novels. He said, we do the same thing. I said, what are you talking about? He said, we're both trying to understand the human condition. We just do it in different ways. I said, oh, okay. Say some more about this. He said, well, you know, the literature that's considered classic, any book that's considered a classic is never just because of the beauty of the language, how great the storytelling is. He said, it's always going to be about the ideas in the book. And sometimes you read a book like Pride and Prejudice for the first time. You just. The language is so scintillating and the storytelling is so great. That's what you focus on. You miss the great ideas. And that's why it pays to go back and read it again and read it again, because all of a sudden you're used to the beauty of the language, you know how the story is going to develop, and you start paying attention to the ideas. He said, there are very few classics that have become classics without bringing to us across the years and the centuries, great ideas that we need to live great lives. Now, isn't that something.

Speaker A: That is something m. You know, it's like you begin to see what you didn't see before. It was always there, but you didn't see it right. It took change. It took repetition. It took you changing and becoming someone different than you were the first time you turn those pages. It is so remarkable. So I'm curious, what is one or two of the most important books that you've read that allowed you to discover more about yourself? So you talked about Socrates and Knowing Thyself. What are one or two of those books that, as you read them, you learned more about you. Tom Morris?

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. Um, one would be certainly a book. I just mentioned the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, because what's so great about that book is he didn't write it to be a book. He was emperor of Rome. He's one of the five great emperors of Rome. And he wasn't writing a book for publication. He was writing. He was his own journal. It was his spiritual biography. It was his spiritual diary. It was kind of a existential workbook where he would remind himself of the things he needed to keep in mind that day to make the day great. Or he would look back on mistakes he had made during the day and correct himself. You know, I should have done this a little differently. So he's not pretending to know everything. He's not pretending to be perfect. He struggles. He's like the rest of us. And that's why people relate to Marcus Aurelius meditation so well. Um, is that he's showing us what it's like to struggle to get better and actually to make progress in that struggle. And we say, okay, okay. You know, he was a guy full of flaws, and he got better and better to the point that his words are inspiring us. You know, almost 2,000 years later, wow, maybe I can make a difference in the world despite all my flaws. So you get that in Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, Blaise Pascal. He took notes for a book he wanted to write. He died before he could write it. So all we have are the notes, and they're called the penses, which is French for thoughts. Uh, I read Pascal with a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar for eight summers at Notre Dame. Um, some of the best school teachers in America would come and live with me for a month, and we would read Pascal's thoughts and try to figure out what he was talking about. Pascal was the first to spot how we use distraction and diversion in our lives to keep ourselves from thinking about the things we really, truly need to grapple with. But we divert ourselves into fun things instead. We entertain ourselves to death. To play on the title of one book years ago, uh, and Pascal was so good at what he talked about. The greatness and the wretchedness of the human condition. We are so great. We're the greatest creatures, creature in the universe in so many ways. And sometimes we can be the worst, too. How is this possible? And it brings me back to a Greek principle that, uh, I call the functionality principle. You don't come across this stated clearly in the Greeks, but once you realize what they're doing, this is a good way to say it. Many of the Greek philosophers believe that most things in life are not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Their value is a function of how we use them in our lives. I call it the functionality principle. How does it function in your life? Um, that's going to determine its value. And there's something I call the double power principle related to this. Almost anything that has power for good has equal and opposite power for ill or harm. It's up to us how we use it. So Pascal talks about the greatness and wretchedness of humanity. He's talking about, well, some of us use our, our talents and our resources really well, and others use them really badly. And if we have that lens through which to view the world. We can figure out often what's going on. A certain kind of institution can be used really badly, but maybe that just reflects the fact that it could be used very well. In addition, it's up to us. How so? Too often the old expression, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Too often we see, uh, a human activity or human institution misused for bad, and we say, say, get rid of it. We don't realize, whoa, whoa, whoa. Maybe the very fact that it can be used to do such harm in the world reflects the fact that it could be used to do great good in the world. It's up to us to take charge, and it's up to us how we use it. So I get a lot of that from, from. From Pascal. So it's funny. Socrates, we know only through Plato's writings. And Socrates didn't write anything. Neither did Epictetus, the great Stoic philosopher. He just gave lectures, and he had a student who took great notes, and we have that student, Arrian's notes on his lectures. We have Plato's notes on Socrates. And so I have my students read the short little thing called the apology, which in Greek meant the defense. It was when Socrates was falsely accused of crimes he had not committed. And, um, he was put to death. He was convicted and put to death, ah, by a jury of 500 and some people, his peers, um, but he was unpopular in, uh, puncturing people's balloons of ego, of purported knowledge. And he was given a way out. If he would just stop doing philosophy on the streets of Athens, uh, he'd be left alone. He wouldn't be punished. But he said, as long as I live and breathe, I shall never cease to philosophize. And when my students at Notre Dame would read that, they would. They would say to me, I've never known an adult for whom anything was so important that he would insist on continuing to do it, even at the cost of death. This is amazing. So he's convicted and he's given the death penalty. But under the Greek justice system at the time, he could have suggested an alternative penalty short of the death penalty. Anything serious, A, uh, big fine, go into exile for two years. Anything serious at all. And the practice was, okay, we'll go with that instead. So we want you to know how seriously we think of this crime you've been convicted of. But if you can suggest an alternative that's serious but not quite as serious as the death penalty, we'll go with that one. So when he was Asked, okay, you've been condemned to death. What do you think you deserve as a result of what you've been doing? And he said, oh, I deserve to be, to live in the apartments that the, uh, Olympic athletes live in, and I deserve to be fed banquets every day for every meal. And I deserve. And they were thinking, what? So he ended up, uh, being put to death, but they asked him what he thought he deserved, and that's what he, that's what he thought. He was a guy who was going to tell the truth no matter what.

Speaker A: Unbelievable. This is. This is so incredible. So, Tom, I have all of your social handles everywhere we can go to consume your incredible content, to purchase your books. Obviously, we're going to put all of that in the show notes for sure. So for my final question to you, I would love it if you would give all of us a challenge, including me. What would you challenge us to do?

Speaker B: Make sure that the next book you read is some book of philosophy. Start with a small one like the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, or one we haven't even mentioned today. My little first novel, the Oasis within. 180 pages, a fairly big print. It's a very simple book that people have told me, launch the greatest conversations in the life of their family ever. One guy, a CEO of an international company, said that for the first time in a difficult negotiation, he was not yelling and screaming at people because of page five in that book. He wrote me an email and said, the Oasis within your new book, page five changed my life. And I wrote it back. I said, I want to hear the whole story, but keep reading. There's other stuff in there too. So whether it's the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, whether it's Stoicism for Dummies, if you find a book of philosophy, especially a short book, especially one that you can read in a fairly brief period of time to spark all kinds of thoughts. Somebody the other day told me about the Oasis Within. They said the kind of book always says within. You know, sometimes you read a book and it was worth reading 200 or 300 pages for one or two great ideas in that book. You get one or two great edits on almost every page of this book. Well, that's like Marcus Aurelius. So if I've accomplished that with the Oasis within, um, I'm really grateful because people are saying, boy, talk about time management. I don't have to read book five minutes and I get like three new ideas I should be using at work or at Home or so. So I challenge people to pick up a book of philosophy. Don't just find a TV show that's philosophical or a movie that's got philosophical ideas in it. Those are. They're good, too. Begin a book, whether it's an ebook or one that's made out of paper, and use it as a partner for steering your life forward at this particular moment. Uh, the Iliad taught me about the power of partnership. So did Aristotle. People in partnership for shared purpose is his ideal of how to make great things happen. People plural in partnership, a certain relationship for shared purpose. People in partnership for a shared purpose. Boom. Things happen. Well, guess what I've come to realize. We should partner not just with other people. Yes, wonderful creative partnerships. We should partner with our problems rather than running from our problems. We should say, what does this problem have to teach me? What can this problem help me make happen that wouldn't have happened had I not encountered it? We can partner with our problems. A good book should become your partner in how to make great things happen in life. If you don't just read it, let it read you as you read it, let it become your partner in wisdom, and you can make some brand new things happen.

Speaker A: Wow. That is so incredible. Can I ask you one more question? I said that was my last. Okay, here's one more question that's just on my mind. What is one big question that you are contemplating today? What is just one big one that just seems to vibrate within you, that, that you are working on a solution or thinking very deeply about?

Speaker B: Uh, at the beginning of the pandemic, everybody called me wanting to help them with disruptive change. The conversation has itself changed in the last two years. Now they're all calling me to help them deal with uncertainty. Uncertainty. So the new challenge for me is how can we best use uncertainty in our lives? See, we're looping back to a theme of functionality, of use. We can't escape uncertainty. There's everyday uncertainty, like the air for the birds, the water for the fish. It's all around us all the time. You never know when the phone's going to ring. You never know when that surprising thing's going to happen. But then there's enhanced uncertainty, which is going on around the world right now, politically and in other ways. Then there's extreme uncertainty. Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, sometimes in our own lives, right? A medical diagnosis, a problem, all of a sudden, extreme uncertainty. How can we best use uncertainty? I have been thinking about that recently, and I just sat down a month ago and wrote 67,000 words in my first attempt to answer the question. Let's hope I get it right.

Speaker A: I have a feeling you will. And it may be volume one of several, but we look forward to that. So, Tom, I want to thank you so very much for joining us today on Business Minds Coffee Chat. You have just shared a wealth of information with us, definitely sparking ideas within me and for all of you, I'm sure it's doing exactly the same. But I want you to know how grateful I am for you. Thank you for bringing all your amazing work, your wisdom, and bringing the wisdom of the ages forward so we can all learn from it as well. And I'm so.

Speaker B: Well, you know, it was a joy. You, uh, are have this distinctive greatness in this format that, uh, is pretty much unrivaled. Uh, even the Heraclitus, uh, application itself, if your microphone weren't so well attached, it would have been the perfect mic drop. Right? You have made me think about things and talk about things that I haven't done in any other podcast. So, uh, I thank you for that. It's great to be your partner in exploring wisdom and let's do it again sometime.

Speaker A: Hey, it's Jay. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that one as much as I did. I do have a quick favor to ask. Would you please take a moment to subscribe rate and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts that helps the podcast grow, expand its reach and attract amazing guests that allow us to continue to bring you incredible content and to enjoy more episodes. All you need to do is Visit jshear business consulting.com, click that podcast button and until next time, keep learning and growing and I look forward to catching up with you on the next Business Minds Coffee Chat. Take care, everybody.