The podcast episode discusses the book "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius and its relevance to leadership and wisdom. The book emphasizes the importance of having principles and applying them in all aspects of life. It highlights the need for constant practice and reminders to do the right thing. The conversation also touches on the challenges of being a leader and the tendency to forget or ignore principles during crises. Ultimately, the book serves as a guide for leaders to navigate challenges and make ethical decisions.
My name is Haasan Serels and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number two, with my guest host today, Andrew Fiala. Hello Andrew. Hi, glad to be with you, Haasan. Glad to have you here. In my father, I observed his meekness, his constancy without wavering in those things, which after due examination and deliberation, he had determined. How free from all vanity he carried himself in matter of honor and dignity as they are esteemed.
His laboriousness and assurity, his readiness to hear any man that had ought to say, tending to any common good. How generally and impartially he would give every man his due, his skill and knowledge when rigor or extremity or when remissiveness or moderation was in season. How he did abstain from all unchaste love of youth. His moderate condescending to other men's occasions as an ordinary man, neither absolutely requiring of his friends that they should wait upon him at his ordinary meals, nor that they should have necessity accompany him in his journeys.
And that when so ever any business upon some necessary occasions was to be put off and omitted before it could be ended, he was ever found when he went about it again, the same man that he was before. His accurate examination of things in consultations and patient hearing of others, he would not hastily give over the search of the matter as one easy to be satisfied with sudden notions and apprehensions. His care to preserve his friends, neither at any time he would carry himself towards them with disdainful neglect and grow weary of them, nor yet at any time be madly fond of them.
His contented mind in all things, his cheerful countenance, his care to foresee things afar off and to take order for the least without any noise or clamor. Moreover, how all acclamations and flattery were repressed by him, how carefully he observed all things necessary to the government and kept an account of the common expenses, and how patiently he did abide that he was reprehended by some for this his strict and rigid kind of dealing. How he was neither a superstitious worshipper of gods, nor an ambitious pleaser of men, or studious of popular applause, but sober in all things and everywhere, observant of that which was fitting.
That was a selection from the ancient book, truly ancient book actually, Meditations by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. This work of philosophy, and it is a work of philosophy for all you leaders out there, undergirds all leadership philosophies really that came after it. And it has influenced countless individual leaders, philosophers, theologians, military people, and others over about the last 1900 years or so. And now, I'm going to riff a little bit here, 20 years into the 21st century, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, written some say in a camp by hand, in essence the micro-blogging or tweeting of his day, such as it were, is now being revisited by many folks as, particularly in Silicon Valley, Stoicism is now being picked back up again.
And this has been going on for about the last 5 or 10 years. Stoicism is now a popular thing again, and he is considered to be, if not necessarily the grandfather of Stoicism, at least an individual who has had a lot of influence on that piece of philosophical thought. I want to talk about Meditations because there is a sense that real wisdom, like we talked about in our first episode when we discussed the book of Nehemiah, and as we will continue to visit in this podcast series, real wisdom is on the wane in the West.
Sure, we have more knowledge than ever before about the behavioral mechanisms, the biological functions, the psychological motivations, heck, even the outcomes that we can observe better than ever before in not just leaders, but also just regular people, but there is a nagging sense, and we don't know how to really put our finger on it, I think, that for all that knowledge, there is something we are missing. I would argue that that would be real wisdom. Which gets me to my guest host today for this episode of this podcast.
I don't want to read his introduction very clearly here. Dr. Andrew Fiala. Dr. Andrew Fiala is an expert on ethics and political philosophy. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books and more than 50 scholarly articles. He has published hundreds of op-ed essays and newspaper columns. The man is a prolific writer. We were just talking about that before we came on today, how he's written things that even he's forgotten he wrote. Fiala is a professor of philosophy, and director of the Ethics Center at Fresno State.
He gives frequent public lectures on topics related to ethics, ethical decision making, ethical leadership, peace, politics, and religion. It's interesting because, me riffing again here, my background is in conflict management and conflict resolution and reconciliation, and my degree in conflict resolution and reconciliation came out of Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. And so, ideas of peace, politics, ethical decision making, ethical conflict resolution, these are areas where Dr. Fiala and I, Andrew and I, probably have a lot of overlaps, and you're going to hear that in this conversation today.
Fiala is the past president of Conserved Philosophers for Peace. He is an internationally respected expert on the philosophy of peace, nonviolence, and pacifism, and a strong advocate for civility, which is something that I'm interested in, religious liberty, and freedom of thought, which again are bulwarks that seem to be threatened right now in the West, at least. He also wrote the introduction to the version of Meditations, the Barnes and Noble Library of Essential Reading, that I picked up a few weeks ago ahead of this episode.
And I was so intrigued by his ideas and thoughts around meditations, around Marcus Aurelius' work, that I reached out to him, and I invited him to come on today. So just like we did when we were talking with our past guests, our past guest hosts on this podcast, we're going to go back and forth. We're going to talk about meditations. We're going to talk about probably ethical decision-making, ethical leadership, philosophies of peace. I'm going to ask Dr.
Fiala questions. He's going to ask me questions. And we're going to have a robust conversation for the next couple of hours. So please welcome Dr. Andrew Fiala. Welcome, Doctor. Thank you for having me. Glad to join you. And obviously, this is an important topic in 2020 to talk about wisdom and leadership. We are in an election year. But as you said, this is a perennial set of issues. And Marcus Aurelius was struggling with some of the same stuff we're struggling with.
And we don't have all the answers either. So I think when you tell us that wisdom is kind of fading away, that's always been a problem. And each generation has to confront that question themselves about how to promote wisdom, how to promote virtue, how to do the right thing, how to live well. So anyway, I'm excited to be with you. Hopefully, we'll have an interesting conversation about Marcus and about philosophy and the state of the world.
Well, and this is the other thing. Like, when we think about how – you talk about how every generation has wrestled with this, right? And Americans – the sky is always falling, right? I mean, the sky is always falling in America, right? You know, the politicians are always screwing us. The culture is always in decline. Hollywood's always a mess. You know, we're not reading the Bible enough. Like, it's always – right, I mean, it's always been that way in America.
And I don't know if that's something that's necessarily unique to Americans, but I can only speak out of an American context because that's what I am. I don't know if this is the way that it works in Canada or Nigeria or Brazil, right? I don't know if the sky is always falling in Brazil. But I know that in America, we are uniquely obsessed with this idea that the end is always near. Well, you know, I think it's perennial.
I think – my guess is that even the Canadians are worried about things. You know, I mean, because we go back to Marcus and the Roman Empire. I mean, there was tumult and transition, and the frontier was – either was expanding or contracting. You know, there were barbarians at the gate, worries about power, worries about virtue. I mean, my view of history is that every generation thinks that the previous generation was better than them, and the next generation is worse.
You know, there's a sort of sense of – I mean, it's biographical, it's psychological, it's sociological, it's – we feel like we've lost something important and that the younger folks are going to screw it up even worse than it is. I think that's just sort of a kind of a common human experience. And that's part of the project of wisdom is, well, can we hold on to stuff that's important from the past? Can we teach the next generation to be better? How do we do that? And how do we ride through the storms and the crises that the moment, you know, thrusts us into? I mean, here we are in a pandemic.
I mean, these are crazy times, but in a sense it's always been crazy times because, you know, there were world wars, and then there was a civil war, and the Reformation, and I mean, the Black Plague. I mean, we could go back and back. It's the human problem, the human condition, you know. Try to make things better in the middle of crisis, in the middle of chaos. In the middle of chaos. That's interesting that you brought that up because, you know, the barbarians are always at the gate, right? You know, the end is always near, the barbarians are always at the gate, the barbarians are always here.
And when I was reading through Meditations, and it's a short reading, it's only 100 pages, you know, depending on which translation you get, but it's short. One thing that jumped out to me overall was just how practical some of the things were in there. Like, we have this idea that wisdom is somehow esoteric, right? It's somehow this thing that is only available to a few folks, and it's not really available to us, and or we have this idea that it's something that can be dismissed, right? It's something that can be put in a box, right? You talk about, you know, the generation before being great and the generation coming up being garbage.
And you already see that happening. I mean, I do a lot of training in my other life with businesses and organizations, and you know, the top module, the top training workshop that's always asked for is managing the multi-generational workforce. And every time I leave that, when I go into small and medium-sized businesses that are usually owner-operated, invariably, you know, those damn kids and, oh, okay, boomer. Like, invariably, it's always that. And the thing that you get from meditations, besides the philosophical sentiment overall that overlays the whole thing, is this idea that there is practical application here.
There's a practical thing that can be taken from here that can be used and applied in your life, that can be executed on almost immediately. But you have to be paying attention in order to comprehend that. Yeah, well, you know, as you said, this book is fairly short and actually repetitious. I mean, the same thing keeps getting repeated throughout, which is kind of common for the wisdom literature, whether it's in Buddhism or the ancient Hebrew texts or, you know, Daoism, wherever we look in the world's traditions.
There's this kind of writing, this kind of style of discourse that we call wisdom literature. And it's kind of simple, you know? Tell the truth, do the right thing, work hard. I mean, in a sense, there's nothing profound about this. But here's why we need it, why we need wisdom literature and why books like this are important, is we just need constant reminders about all of that simple stuff. Because it's too easy to get distracted. It's easy to be corrupted by the crises of the moment.
It's easy to fall into bad habits. We know that this is a common human problem, you know? And so, I mean, like what we see in this book and some of this other wisdom literature is it's like having a personal coach, personal trainer, you know? Your workout is not complicated. I mean, a typical workout is like five exercises, maybe ten if you're lucky. But you need to get the trainer to say, now do it again. And one more time, you know? So the reality of being a good person is it's just constant practice and you're going to screw it up and you're going to have lazy days and you're going to have bad days and then tomorrow the trainer says let's do it again.
And so a book like this is really helpful in that regard. And it does even, what's going on with Marcus Aurelius himself is one of the stories about the authorship of his book is he's just writing these notes to himself to remind himself to do the right thing to be a good person. We all benefit from that kind of practice. It's interesting that you brought up this idea of exercise, right? It's interesting that you brought up this idea of, you know, putting in your reps, right? So, you know, I just started working out about, well, went back to working out like a month and a half ago because I was like, a little COVID, whatever.
And I'm a fairly youngish fellow. I don't feel young all the time, but I'm told by other people who are older than me, you're young, you got tons of years ahead of you, which is now what I say to like 20 year olds. But, you know, in the course of working out, you know, I injured myself, injured my wrist or whatever, and I'm rehabbing my wrist now. And you're right, it is only about four or five exercises that I do repetitiously.
And yeah, it gets boring. And at 530 in the morning, you know, you got to get up and you got to recommit and you got to be like, okay, yeah, I can't lay in my bed. And actually, Aurelia says this, or Marcus says this, you know, in the book, you know, laying in your bed and basically being a layabout, basically being a laggard, you know, it's not really going to help you. You need to go out and as Jocko Willick would say, or anybody else, you need to go out and get after it, right? You need to go chase the game.
And as an entrepreneur, I found that to be true. As a business owner, I found that to be true. As an advisor and a consultant, I found that to be true. I've done a fair bit of teaching myself, you know, in organizational behavior and those kinds of dynamics and found that to be true. And so you're right, this book reflects that. But it is that idea of doing the repetitions, right, putting in the reps, putting in the work so that you don't forget.
Because human beings, I don't care whether they are enamored of Facebook or Twitter, or whether they're not. And I firmly believe that people of the past, if they had had what we have now, would have been the exact same mess that we're in now. And my grandma could have ordered like, detergent off of Twitter from a tweet, she would have done it. And my grandma was the least like computer oriented person ever. She didn't have an email address.
And, and you know, it's, it's, it's not the technology, it's the human being. Human beings forget, human beings have to be reminded. It's not the tech that corrupts us, it's not the tools that corrupt us. They tend to reveal what we already were, or what we are becoming. So let me get into the book because I want to read from I want to read from the book and sort of set a set our table here a little bit for for where we want to go.
And I'm going to read from I'm going to kind of switch back and forth because I've got my notes written here. But I've also got the Barnes and Noble library edition, which I would encourage folks if you're watching this on the video, this is the edition of the Dr. Fiala wrote the introduction to. And it was incredible. I encourage you to go out and read it if you're on the video. If not, you all can Google or Amazon or whatever, and go get the edition and look at Dr.
Fiala's writing and see, see what he is, see what I'm talking about there. So I'm going to go into meditations, I'm going to read from book 313, actually here. As physicians always have always their instruments and knives ready for cases, which suddenly require their skill. So do thou have principles ready for understanding of things divine and human. And doing everything even the smallest with a recollection of the bond, which unites the divine and human to one another.
For neither will thou do anything well which pertains to man, without at the same time having a reference to things divine, nor the contrary. A couple of things from that right off bat, it just jumped out at me. And of course, Andrew, you can you can riff back and forth with me as we go. A couple of things that jumped out to me about that right away. And really the first big one is this idea that leaders must have principles, right? And that leadership acts of leadership, even before you have wisdom, because you can't get wisdom without being a leader, you can't get wisdom without doing the act that you're trying to get wisdom at.
Leaders have to have principles, they have to have a foundational beginning, right? And that's why I opened up with the long piece that I read, because he talked about, you know, being with his father and being in his family, and he had a really interesting family tree which you can go into if you would like. But these kinds of things begin at home. They don't begin the second you get to the academy, right? They don't begin the second you show up to your first day of work, they really begin at home.
And it's this laying in of principles I found that sometimes leaders struggle with, they struggle to define their principles, they struggle to articulate their principles. And when crises come along, and when they are challenged, whether it's a military crisis, or a pandemic crisis, or just any kind of any kind of Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Black Swan kind of thing that like, flies in their window, when those principles are challenged, it's usually the first thing to go out the window.
And so the ability to wield those principles with precision, like a surgeon, I think that's what that's what, what Marcus is talking about here. Do you see the same thing? Or, or do you see something different here? Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, obviously, principles are fundamental for the stoic worldview, this really says stoic. And it's worth noting that Marcus and the stoics believe that the universe is constructed in a reasonable way. So things happen for reasons.
And the strategic use of reason can actually move the world in a good direction. And when things go wrong, is when we don't quite understand the principles of things, right, either like the physical, the psychological, the social. I mean, if we're going to fix a problem, we have to have a little bit of knowledge about the way the world works, and the world works according to principles. And then we have to have a set of moral principles that guide our actions.
And like one of the big things that the stoics caution against is random haphazard activity. And almost anyone that's that's gone anywhere in life, you know, not I mean, like the general of the army, but also a student who gets an A in a course, I mean, at whatever level, you have to understand the way things work, you have to understand human nature, you have to understand your own human nature, your own tendencies. And then you have to have some values and principles that you apply consistently through the whole thing.
I mean, in a sense, like we all know this intuitively, you know, and it's the harder thing, as you point out, is when a crisis happens, or something goes wrong, or I don't know, you get in a car crash, you fail a class, there's a war, you know. If you haven't prepared in advance, and you haven't thought through what those principles are, and haven't done some science to try to figure out what the world is like, if you haven't prepared, everything can fall apart.
You know, it's preparation for life, really. And that's back to this idea of practicing and rehearsing and going back and back over and over and over your principles, your understanding of the universe, the way you understand yourself, because there will be a crisis at some point, and you have to respond. Has science fooled us, though? Like, this is the thing, right? So, you know, it's interesting to me that stoicism is something that Silicon Valley has sort of taken on, right? These individuals who are wizards of smart at delivering the bandwidth that allows me to have this conversation with you.
I mean, we're separated by a continent, right? But we can have this conversation. Technology that, if Marcus Aurelius were alive today, he'd be stunned beyond belief what we've got. So has science fooled us? This is something that really, I've had a hard time wrapping my brain around, and I kind of equate it to decision making, and I equate it to decision making around principle things that matter. And we've built a society, I wonder, if we've built a society where, because we can get speed to knowledge and speed to a knowledge-based outcome because of what science has built for us, that now our expectation level of other individuals and how soon they will change has also been warped.
So if you are bigoted, and you are leading my team, and you make bigoted statements, I want you to change as fast as a Google search. But you can't do that, right? That's not how bigotry works, right? Or anything, right? And we're talking about a negative here in this example. And I think Marcus would say, well, you know, I mean, there's principles that underlie that, and you're going to have to grind on it. But when you say that to people, they don't want to hear that.
That's a non-starter 1,900 years after he has passed away. So I guess it's a long, sublimated way of me asking this question. Has science fooled us? Did the Enlightenment basically spoil us for Stoicism? Yeah. Well, it's a very interesting point about what kind of science and how much knowledge and what kind of knowledge. I think you're right. I think there are some of the technologists in the world want to view everything as it's just an algorithm.
If we could just tweak the formula, you know, we'll solve all... Sorry, that's just not going to work, right? And the reality is, and you see this even in Marcus and in the Stoics also, that we need to be wise about our knowledge. So the world is not constructed as we want it to be. Fundamental point in Stoicism. The world is what it is, and it's up to us to figure out the way it is. And sometimes it's never going to satisfy us.
I mean, you know, you mentioned Silicon Valley. What I love, these people in Silicon Valley that are dreaming of extending human lifespan to like 150 years or longer, it's a pipe dream. I mean, the human lifespan is about, I don't know, 70 to 90 years when you're healthy and coherent, and then it's time to retire and let other people live. And there's a sort of reality check about the way the world is. Also, like say it within an organization, because you point out, you know, we're talking about leadership and so on.
Human beings can only change so fast. There's a... The wet work of the human brain, you know, social networks are limited in the way that they work. We're not robots. We're not computer programs. And you're going to be beating your head against the wall if you expect humans to respond like little mini robots, you know. So it's about self-understanding. It's about biological understanding, social understanding. All that stuff has to be woven in, and we have to accept the things we can't change.
Fundamental Stoic point. And again, that's where it's interesting to me that this is the philosophy that the head of Base Camp, right, the guys who run Base Camp, they've taken that on, or Mark Zuckerberg has taken on, or the Google guys, you know, have taken on. You know, it's interesting to talk about life extension. The only people who are usually talking about life extension are people who don't want to go. Well, of course. You know, nobody who I know in my granted limited sphere, and all of our spheres are limited, in my granted limited sphere, nobody who I know is talking about hanging around more than, like you said, 90 years.
You know, I often joke, you know, I made a deal with the Lord before I got here. I said, listen, you give me 100 years, anything else after that, you know, and I'm holding up my end of the deal. I'm going to stay healthy, and I'm going to hold up my end of the deal, and you've got to hold up your end of the deal. I think I'll get my century. I think I'm well on my way.
But my point is this, right, after that, it's, I've done enough, you know, and the Ray Kurzweil's of the world, and the Project Calico stuff that Google does, and you're out in California, you probably know way more about it than what the rest of us know about it in the rest of the country, because you see it first before we do. But all of that stuff just strikes me as being fundamentally arrogant, and placing the arrogancy of science in a spot that, in a spot where wisdom should probably be.
Yeah, yeah. Well, let's connect this to retirement, in the business world, in the leadership world. You know, this idea of a succession plan, right, so good organizations eventually develop a succession plan. And so many people refuse to do that. And, you know, I see this in the academic world, and I work in business, we do professional ethics training stuff. And the reality is, you may die tomorrow. The reality is, your business may collapse tomorrow. I mean, life involves these just fundamental losses, right? And we actually have an obligation to prepare for that, and even step out of the way when it's our time to step out of the way.
You know, there's some mantra that I remember hearing, like, you know, the way to live a good life is to learn, lead, teach, retire. You know, and the retirement part, people often want to, they don't want to do it. And there's a kind of a, like it's an obligation to the youth to let the youth have a chance. And we're seeing this in the presidential election with, you know, these old timers, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
No offense, maybe we don't want to get too political, but, you know, at some point, the next generation deserves a chance to have their moment, you know? Well, and it's interesting, so I think of the William Shatner song that he did on his Spoken Word album, Has Been, which was great. It's, I can't remember the name of the song, but one of the lines of it is, you know, he talks about you're going to die, that's basically the song, you're going to die.
And he said, you know, by the time you hear this recording, I might be dead. And he says, you know, at the end, by the way, he says it's happened to everybody, everybody that I've known, you know, my love, the Pope, all those guys on the street, you're going to go. And at the end, you'll just be like all of them. You'll say, maybe I won't go. And I always crack up when I hear that. And fundamentally, you're right, this idea of, and I know people who do succession planning, you know, in my field.
And succession planning and this idea, particularly in startups, that you should have an exit, that things should end, there should be a beginning, middle, and an end, is fundamental to how I think we lead well, but it's also fundamental to how we live well. And it's not popular to talk about retirement. It's also not popular, interestingly enough, and again, we're recording this during a time of COVID-19 and lockdowns and all this kind of stuff, in order to flatten the curve and do a whole bunch of other things, which fundamentally, this disease impacts who the most.
It impacts the elderly, which is really interesting in a society and culture that worships youth. So there's a dichotomy here, just like there's a dichotomy between, you know, I run this really highfalutin life extension company in Silicon Valley, and I also believe in stoicism. I believe in the philosophies of Marcus Aurelius, right? And I'm trying to follow that, I'm trying to follow the ancient Stoics while I run this company. And then fundamentally, we have a disease that impacts elderly people who we, and we do a lot of work in our business organization, we do a lot of work with long term care, we spend a lot of time in that space, right, long term care leaders.
So we see a lot of that, right? Fundamentally, and you're talking about it even in politics, but fundamentally, we have this idea that youth will be served. If you're not in if you're not in the space where the youth are, somehow you're missing things out, you're missing out on something. But then there's this idea that no one can ever die ever. Right? So these two weird counterbalances. And by the way, with the life extension, just to close out on that for just a second, there's also this idea that if we're going to life extend, we can't life extend with you looking like you're 70.
We're going to life extend with you looking like you're 35. Right, right. Well, yeah. Yeah, this is this is really a typically modern problem. I think, you know, this is this is a matter of technology. And, and maybe maybe really just a blip here in the last 50 to 100 years, this youth culture issue. You back to wisdom. Most of the world's wisdom traditions, including the ancient Stoics, venerate old people, because they're wise. There's a beautiful idea that maybe this is not beautiful, maybe it's really disturbing.
But, you know, Socrates hints somewhere that one of the beautiful one of the wonderful things about getting old is that your libido slows down. And if you're not pulled around by libido, you can actually now think about other more important things, you know. And here we are in an era of Viagra and there's something to be said for the fact that we grow up and we grow out of certain things. When that happens, we can start thinking about other more important things, you know.
Yeah, this is one last thought about this, this old age and dying process, which is that Marcus Marcus really is when we start we started reading from Marcus. He's talking about his father. And at the beginning, he also talks about his teachers. And they're all dead. Important point. We owe something to the dead, just like the dead or the preceding generation owes something to us to leave the world as good as they can for us. This multi generational view, really important that I think we kind of missed that in the America of the 21st century.
We all are elders, all kinds of respect, but they also owe it to the next generation to make the world better off for us. So the thing is, we're all in it together and it's natural. It's part of the natural process of things. You know, the forest dies and then the new trees grow from that, you know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, all this metaphors, hugely important. We don't live forever and we can't solve all the problems.
Right. And on and on and on. Well, and it would be a lot better if we established a set of principles first in order to navigate what are really sometimes problematic and upsetting shoals, right, of not only of conflict, but just also ideas in general. How do you make decisions about the world? How do you make decisions about what's what's the best? Right. How do you make decisions about what is a good right? And having that having those principles just even at the beginning can be hugely helpful to to getting there.
OK. Back to the book. Once again, reading from reading from meditations, let's see. Yeah, there we go. All right. Yeah, we go. If then everything else is common to all that I've mentioned. There remains that which is peculiar to the good man to be pleased and content with what happens. And with the thread which is spun for him and to not defile the divinity which is planted in his breast, nor disturb it by a crowd of images, but to preserve it, tranquil, following obedient, following it obediently as a god, neither saying anything contrary to the truth nor doing anything contrary to justice.
That is a huge one right there. That would hit me like right between the eyes, particularly in our current moment when we are consumed with this idea of social justice. Which I think. If the good emperor were here, he would be confused by what that even means. And of course, there's philosophical history that, you know, washes past his era to our own fundamental conceptions of democracy. Fundamental conceptions of expanding the agency of women and minorities, fundamental conceptions of freedom as the ultimate good.
So here's a challenge question because I think that leaders have to, leaders obviously have to not get caught up in the world, right? They did not get caught up in the world. They have to make sure that their principles are aligned. But, and we're going to revisit this a little bit later too, but should leaders pursue justice? And what exactly does that mean? I'm going to, and I'm going to kind of kind of frame this for you a little bit in terms of what another leader during the Roman empire said to another famous individual who had no money, no founding, and yet spread the Christian tradition through his death.
Jesus. Pontius Pilate says to him in one of the gospels, I think it's in Matthew, but says, looks at him and says, what is truth? Which is a stunningly, amazingly deep question coming out of the mouth of a guy who up until that point in the story wasn't really heard from. What is truth? What is justice? How should leaders pursue that, right? What does that actually mean when you're in a leadership position? And by the way, you know, not just in a heady philosophical fashion, what does that actually mean in a practical way? Like if you're leading your business and there are some fundamental inequities that you didn't build, how do you get to justice there when your employees are screaming at you about that? How do you do that? So let's start with, and those are three big questions right there.
So start off with the small one, you know, the more manageable one. What is justice? What is that? What would the good emperor have to say about that? Yeah, well, these are, we need a whole lifetime to figure this out. Well, you know, I mean, this passage that you read, it's been paraphrased and he says it in different places. I mean, the gist of his advice is if it's not true, don't say it. And if it's not right, don't do it.
That's like the bumper sticker version of Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius. If it's not true, don't say it. And if it's not right, don't do it. Of course, how do we know if it's true? Right? That's the problem. And how do we know if it's right? So, you know, it's one thing to, you know, have the bumper sticker and then it's a whole another can of worms to figure out what it means. Here's what, you know, I'm a philosophy professor.
I do, I write philosophy books and articles. It turns out from my standpoint that all we, what we get out of this is more questions. And I think there's so much value in questioning. And I think sometimes we avoid asking the questions. So I think, you know, Beth, now for a leadership lesson, man, don't we want our leaders to be asking questions of themselves, of the constituents in their organization, of the world itself. We want leaders to be asking what's true, what's just, what's right, what's wrong.
I mean, we need them to be asking. And in my, when we teach, when I do professional ethics work with organizations or whatever, often things go wrong when people don't ask the right questions. Right? So in fact, you can't get away with that. You know, it's called negligence. You'll go to jail if you don't ask the right questions. Certain people have an obligation within an organization to ask certain questions. And if we avoid that. I pay a lot of money for insurance in case I ask the wrong questions or don't ask the right ones.
Yeah. No, it's, I mean, we, the part of the, part of justice is, is knowing which questions to ask. You know, it's about fairness. It's about equity. It's about inclusivity. All of these things are actually questions that you have to ask of your organization, of yourself. And it's complicated. You need to ask about what does the law require? You need to ask about what does the, what does your customer expect? What do you, what do your employees deserve? I mean, all of these questions of justice.
Again, my point is the first thing, let's ask those questions. And you see this in Marcus Aurelius too, like a lot of, every so often he's like, wow, big question. And he leaves it like that, you know, which is perfectly okay. And I think, I think good leaders are really good at formulating the right questions and even guiding their organization in a process, in a project of thinking about those questions. So, you know, I mean, our organization is small, but mighty, and we spend a lot of time talking about the right answers to these questions, whatever those, those questions may be, right? And sometimes the questions are very practical, like, you know, should we work with this vendor? Should we not work with them? Do they match what our ethics are? Do we have a, do we have a simpatico here? That kind of stuff.
I find though that leaders very often will tell me, I can't ask those kinds of questions because I don't know where the answers are going to go. And if I don't know where the answers are going to go, I can't lead. So it's just a little hole in the boat and the water, you know, goes out and I don't think about it. And I say to them, yeah, but it's not a little hole in your boat.
It's like the size of a glidden paint can. It's a huge hole in your boat and the water is draining out as fast as you're trying to get it out of the boat. What's a leader to do if they're afraid of even asking the question, even formulating the thought? What is a leader to do then? You know, what does Marcus say about if you're afraid to formulate the thought? You know, because fear is a genuine thing.
I mean, I opened up by saying, you know, we know more about the neurobiology of how the brain works now than ever before in the course of human history. You know, if I wanted to put you in an MRI machine and show you a picture of a spider, I can see which part of your brain lights up. Now I can't see why you have an association or maybe don't have an association of fear with a spider.
I can't see that why. That's what psychology does. But I can see it neurobiologically. I can see the spots go. I can see like you're popcorn. Right. And so from that, it's that battle with science again. With that knowledge, I can now backwards engineer potentially a biological solution to your fear, which we're getting closer and closer to that every day. But what do you do if you're afraid to ask the higher order question because you don't know where it will go.
What do you do if you're afraid to ask? What does Marcus say? What do you do if you're afraid to ask, if you're afraid to even formulate the question? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, there's several kinds of leadership. Let's start with that for once. Some versions of leadership, it's like the Mussolini version of leadership. There's an assumption that the wise leader knows everything and that his job is usually a him. It's a male dominant view.
The job of the male dominant Mussolini leader is to just push the buttons of the human beings and make human beings do certain things. Right. This version of leadership is un-American and ultimately, I think, not productive. It might work. You know, I mean, you know, if you view human beings as wolves or dogs that just have a pack structure and, you know, need to be bossed around. But look, human beings are not like that for the most part.
The phrase I love to use and think about leadership is transformational leadership, where what we want to do is get people to work on the same team and have the same values. And this means that the values of the team have to be legitimate values. I mean, if we're going to get everybody to play along on our team, we have to have something ethical, something virtuous, something true that guides our team. And if you're not willing to ask the questions about the values of the team, I think that's a sign of something dysfunctional in your organization or in your leadership strategy.
You know, the goal of asking those questions is let's get together and figure out what we believe. And hopefully what we believe lines up with the way the world is, you know. I think that's something, you know, I've learned this myself, you know, that I've been, played lots of team sports, been involved in all kinds of team sports. And sometimes I wanted the coach to just tell everybody what to do, you know, just tell everybody to shut up and we're going to take care.
Ultimately, those teams don't last long because everybody gets grumpy and angry. You know, the Phil Jackson model of, you know, Zen coaching where we get everybody to agree to that, that to me is more humane and it's more productive. Well, I don't know, did you see the last dance? I'm almost done. Oh, you're almost done. Okay. All right. Okay. So in that, it's either the second to last episode or the third to last episode with Michael Jordan at the end where he says, I love this quote, he says, you know, are people going to watch this thing and think I'm a tyrant? I was a tyrant.
And he kind of leaves it there, right? And he goes, well, you know, leadership is about pulling people along where they didn't want to be pulled along. He said, winning has a price. Leadership has a price or has a cost. Let's see, that's the term we use. It doesn't say price, it's cost. Leadership has a cost. Winning has a cost. You know, the people who are calling me a tyrant, you've never, that's fine. You never won anything.
So did I have to get into people's, and I'm going to use the word here, did I have to get into people's asses a little bit? Yeah. Did I have to pull them along when they didn't want to be pulled along? Yeah. And it's interesting you bring up Phil Jackson because there was, there were two leaders on that team, fundamentally two alphas on that team. And Phil was confident enough in his approach to managing the other alpha that he was able to subsume that.
Which I'm sure, and it doesn't really get into this in the last dance, but I'm sure there were times in his 15 years with Michael Jordan where he was like, oh my God, this guy, what are we, oh my God, what are we doing? I can't believe he just said that. And, and, and, you know, there were times in practices where he had to like pull him down, right? Like you're, you're at a, as I tell my kids sometimes, you're at a 10, you need to be at a two.
Turn the volume down, you know, or I'm going to go up to 20 and I don't think you want me to go up to 20. And, but, but Michael Jordan was, was the guy who, you know, I won't say fought his teammates. He did do a little bit of that, but he did, he pulled people along when they didn't want to be pulled along. Because he said the value was winning. Right? And, and I'm a child of the nineties too.
So like I saw this stuff up close, so like it's, it's one of those things where like I watched it, I was like, yeah, okay. How do you, how do you lead if your internal drive is so strong towards one goal, which might be winning, right? How do you lead other people when you're not thinking about asking the question because your internal drive is so strong? Like you don't need to ask it. You've already, you've already absorbed it.
You've already dealt with it, but you've got this crew of people that haven't absorbed it, haven't dealt with it. And by the way, your drive is so strong, you're now behaving unempathetically. How do you, how do you even set the value container for them? Because it's interesting you brought up value. So how do you set the value container for them? Well, now we're, you know, we, we really have to dig into like the meaning of life kind of questions, you know.
This, the, the Michael Jordan, that I, I saw that part of that episode where he says, I might've been a tyrant, but we won. So if winning is the thing that matters, maybe that's what it takes. You know, it could, I don't want to second guess Michael Jordan because he did win. I mean, he's, you know, he knows what he's doing. Let's put it that way. But the, the real, the deepest question of all is whether winning's the only thing that matters.
And I think, you know, I have a couple of thoughts about this. One is in our world in the 21st century United States, we are, we're, we're hyper competitive. It's all egoistic. It's about self-promotion. You know, this is the era of Facebook and I mean, everyone's a celebrity and everyone's got to outshine everyone else. We've, we've, we've drank the Kool-Aid of competitive cutthroat capitalism, I think. And I think that's maybe not the right Kool-Aid to be drinking.
You know, maybe there's something else. And the part of the, part of the issue is that most of the games we play, most of the practices we're engaged in are not like the NBA. You know, there, there just, it just doesn't work that way in, in academic life, in business life. There's so much more collaboration than there is cutthroat competition. There's not the finals. I mean, I mean, what would that even mean in, you know, what's, what's the, the NBA, what's the equivalent of the NBA finals in life? Not clear to me that that's, that there is anything remotely like that.
And I'm talking about, doesn't work that way in family relationships, in love affairs, in friendships, in science, in art. There is some competition. Yeah, of course, you know, there's, there's, there's scarce resources and we compete a little bit, but we actually do much better through cooperative endeavor, you know? And so back to, you know, what the kind of questions the leader needs to be asking is, you know, what's the point of doing what we're doing? Is it that we're going to be the Chicago Bulls of whatever? Or is it that we're going to try to enjoy ourselves, be happy, have a lifelong pursuit, make a little profit? Yeah, of course, because profit's good.
Make some friends, have a few laughs, you know? Those are the questions. Those are, those are meaning of life kind of questions. And this gets to something that I was discussing with a colleague of mine who's in another business, basically kind of doing similar stuff to what we do in our business. She focuses more on the coaching end and her business focuses more on the coaching end. But she said that she has trouble getting funding or had had trouble in the past getting funding because, yeah, there's a software piece underneath and that's interesting and that scales.
But the, the fundamental piece is the actual human to human coaching interaction piece, because that's where people actually do the behavioral change, right? And she said she had a hard time showing VCs that because the first question they wanted to ask was, well, is this a winner take all industry, right? Like can one social network rise to the top? Can one podcast network rise to the top? Can one, I don't know, oil and gas company rise to the top and will invest in that because it's a winner take all.
And she said something to me that stuck with me, stuck with me for a long time. She said, this is leadership development. There's no winner take all here. There's not, there's too many perspectives, there's too many ideas. And she said she couldn't get funded because VCs would hear her say that and they'd be like, I don't want to be involved in this, it's not a winner take all. Because, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned the term cutthroat capitalism.
I don't necessarily know that it's the capitalism that's cutthroat. I think it's the, the rewarding of either the perception of or evidence of competency, the over rewarding of competency. So, and the metrics for what that means, particularly if you're talking about business culture, the metrics for competency are, are the stockholders happy? And are, and then, and then every other metric happens after that, particularly if you're a big public company, every other metric happens after that, which is why when a company's go public, the service always kind of goes south because you stop paying attention to what got you to being able to go public.
And you start paying attention to a bunch of people who, quite frankly, don't really care if your company collapses or not, this is as long as they get their, their stock options coming in at the rate of growth, incremental growth that they, that they demand. Right. And you see guys like Elon Musk pushing back on this, you know, intensely. Right. And don't get me wrong, he's as cutthroat as they get. And as competitive as, he's the Michael Jordan of like electric cars, he's competitive as they get, right.
He's no Wilton Violet. And at the same time, you know, he doesn't really care what Tesla shareholders care about. And he's like, okay, cool. I mean, that's why he got in trouble with the SEC. You forget Joe Rogan and, you know, blow and smoke and all this other kind of nonsense. He got in trouble because he basically told the SEC to go away. Like, I don't care that you're the clearing house for the shareholders. I don't care what they want.
And I'm never going to care what they want. I care about what I want first, which is interesting from a leadership perspective. But I care about what I want first. I care about solving a hard problem. And I'm bringing along, and I think you would probably agree with what Michael Jordan said, I'm bringing along all these people to solve a hard problem that maybe they're not interested in solving. That's what I care about. And this vehicle of Tesla or this vehicle of SpaceX is just a vehicle to solve a hard problem, which is going to space or building an electric car or saving, as I've heard him talk, saving the planet.
By the way, I think he's also a proponent of stoicism. I think longevity, super longevity, too. Yeah, exactly. Super longevity. You know, so these questions are fascinating to me because, you know, and I don't work with the big, giant public companies. I work with the small, medium-sized business folks, right, who, you're right, it's not winner-take-all. It is collaborative. It is, it is, how can we all get there together? And if you don't have principles, if you don't know how to, how to express those principles, how to articulate those, or if you haven't thought through, meditated, in essence, over what those things should be, then even if you're leading a small manufacturing company with 50 people, you're going to struggle.
It's going to be a struggle every day to lead. Yeah, you'll get the short-term, get the production out the door kind of stuff done. You'll get that done. You'll get the day-to-day supervisory stuff done. But fundamentally, at the end of your five years, 10 years, two years, 20 years, however long it is, you're going to look back over the course of your career. I'm convinced of this. You're going to look back over the course of your career and go, could I have done more? And it's going to be that nagging question.
And you may not be able to articulate that either, but it is going to pop up at some point, which is why we've got this podcast and why we're trying to do all these things in leadership, because it's fundamentally about giving people the tools to be able to sort of think about these big hairy, like you were saying, life questions. Yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, another worry I have about all of this is that we really get misled by thinking about Elon Musk and Michael Jordan.
I mean, there are a few extraordinary geniuses with incredible talent and opportunity. Do things happen? To be Michael Jordan, you have to have a lot of things go right. To be Elon Musk, you have to have a bunch of stuff happen for you in the right way. And those are not the models for most people. I mean, I'm sorry, but I'm not the Michael Jordan of anything nor will I ever be. I'm just a normal person living a normal life.
And I think that's true. I think that's true for everyone at some point in their life, because even Michael Jordan gets old and slows down and then Steph Curry comes along. The thing is, we need, again, this goes back to this larger picture of the world and our place within it. Not even Michael Jordan stays Michael Jordan forever. And there has to be a succession plan. There has to be a picture of the overall life trajectory.
It's multigenerational. It's connected to the natural world. It's connected to the social world. You know, I think a real recipe for unhappiness is if people believe that they should be the Michael Jordan of whatever they're doing and then just beat their heads against the wall forever. And, you know, you may get a little success here and there, but, you know, at some point, even Michael Jordan needs to retire. That's the beautiful thing about that last dance is he's thinking about retirement even when he's winning.
For me, that was like eye-opening, you know, because the guy was at the peak of his career and deeply unhappy. And he was ready to be done at some point. And that's reality, you know. And back to the stuff about justice and truth and the big questions, we all need to ask those questions of ourselves all the time. Is what I'm doing honest? Is what I'm doing fair? Does it represent my best picture of myself in the world? And if not, it's time to think about moving on, you know, or change what you're doing.
Change the nature of the organization. Change the values of the organization. Make people in the organization have those conversations so that we can all be happy, you know, ultimately. Change your own backyard. This is something that I tell leaders all the time, right? But so, you know, you're right. Like, you're not most people are not going to run into Elon Musk. He's over there. And I just use those names because they're big names and people know them.
Bob, you know, Murphy, down the street, you know, he's the he's the probably the only example that his team is going to see of leadership. And it's just like this idea of politics, right? All politics is local. Yeah, it's interesting what's happening with the presidency. Okay, fine. It's more interesting what's happening with your school board. It's more interesting what's happening with your state assembly. It's more interesting what's happening with your county seat or your mayor. That's what's more interesting.
Same thing at work. It's more. Yeah, Elon. Yeah, Toyota. Yeah, whatever. It's more interesting what's happening in your company locally, because that's the place where individuals who you should be role modeling leadership for. Fundamentally, I believe that people learn leadership from what they see less from what they hear. But hearing is good. Well, you know, you're, you got to put on a good show. And you've got to put on a show that's meaningful, a show that matters, a show that has impact, a show that is collaborative, and fundamentally a show that moves the needle in your local business, because that's the place where you have the most power.
That's the place where you have the most impact. The way you just put that is really, Marcus Aurelius puts it this way in a couple places where he says, we need to understand our role in the drama. We're putting on a show. I mean, in a sense, all of life is a show. And you have been cast in a certain role. You know, you don't get to choose really what your role is. You know, some are born Michael Jordan, some are born Bob Murphy down the street, right? You're thrown into this role, and your job is to be the best you that you can be in light of all the parameters of the role.
And in a sense, and what you said I think is really, really important, it almost makes us remember that we're all leaders in a way, because we all are demonstrating to other people what it means to be me, what it means to be a person in this capacity, what it means to be a person in the organization who does these things, right? We set the model. We create the model as we live. And that's, you know, it's there in Stoicism.
And by the way, again, in all the other parts of the world's traditions that, you know, we see this especially in Confucian traditions, which really emphasize relationship, right? So the younger brother has obligations to the older brother. The older brother has obligations and so on. And in all these relationships, we don't get to choose them. You're either born an older brother or a younger brother. And if you're a younger brother, you have to behave a certain way.
And if you're an older brother, you have to behave a different way. And to live well is to actually affirm that. And people go crazy when they wish they were the other brother. Or when they're in competition with the other brother. And that's true within an organization, too. You know, it's like, you know, I'm sorry to keep going back to the bulls. But, you know, this Scottie Pippin, Michael Jordan dynamic, you know, Pippin needs to be the best Pippin.
And Jordan needs to be the best Jordan. And when they're both doing their thing, they win. I was going to go back to the book here. But let me let me close with this. And we'll mark this in the podcast. We'll mark these moments in the podcast. We talk about Michael Jordan. I'll put it in the show notes. That'll get us some SEO juice. This idea of being a good and effective number two is something that is hugely important, right, for people to understand.
So, yes, there are the Jeff Bezos of the world and there are the Elon Musk of the world. There are the Bill Gates of the world. There are the Warren Buffett of the world. People who, well, Warren Buffett and Charlie Unker, never mind. But who have good, who are so outsized in their whatever their talent is. Like Jeff Bezos talent was not in building Amazon. I hate to tell people that. Jeff Bezos talent was in convincing venture capitalists for 20 years to let him ride on debt.
That was his talent. On the off chance that if he could ride on debt long enough, he would have enough runway to build his vision. That was his skill. People forget this. The other thing that people forget is if you have it, you're so outsized, that's fine, but you can't do everything yourself as you need a good number two and a good number two, just like on Star Trek, a good number two is someone who doesn't want to sit in the captain's chair.
It's perfectly comfortable being Scottie Pippen or being, being, you know, Jonathan Frakes, you know, on Next Generation, perfectly comfortable in sitting in the number two chair because there's two and by the way, understand that their role is to make sure the number one can do the things that only the number one can do. The trouble you get is when someone who's a number two wants to be number one. That's the trouble you get, or you get in trouble when the number one can't let go enough to let the number two be a good number two.
You see this in the Jordan Pippen dynamic. You saw it on the Utah Jazz and their dynamic. You see it on sports teams, you know, all the time. Well, sports teams that are more team focused. You don't see it so much in baseball anymore because baseball is a team sport played by individuals, but, but you definitely see it in football. You definitely see it obviously in basketball. You need a good one-two punch. How can somebody be a good number two? Yeah, well, you know, the thing you're making me think of, there was this television commercial, I think it was for Avis and Avis and Hertz and Hertz was number one, but Avis' motto was we're number two, we try harder, if I remember.
Yeah, well, there's something to be said for, and that's different. Actually, number two, that claim said that number two is going to try harder so they can defeat number one, right? It's set up as a competitive scheme. But back to the Confucian model, which I think is very, very instructive here. You know, there's number one, there's number two, there's number infinity. Everything is structured. The universe is structured and there are roles. And in fact, there's more than one set of hierarchy, you know, so there's number one and number two in this.
And then there's a cross purposes, the number two over here, maybe the number one somewhere else, you know. And part of the goal of the Confucian tradition, and it's in Stoicism too, because the Stoics and Confucians, ancient traditions of virtue. Find your place and do your job. It's as simple as that. Find your place and do your job. And that means when you're in the number two job, do what number two has to do. When you're number one, you can no longer be number two, right? So it may be you're in a different organization or a different structure.
And this is a real, real challenge, right? Because now you have to constantly figure out where you are, where you belong, and what your obligations are. And the thing is, you can't be the same person in every relationship. That's a recipe for unhappiness. It's going to be dysfunctional. You know, I mean, you may have friends like this, right? They always insist on being this kind of person, whatever it is, center of attention, underdog, you know. Sometimes the relationship demands that you behave differently.
And I think, again, the whole challenge that we started talking about wisdom and knowledge and principles, we have to really do the research, both internal and external, to figure out who we are, what our capacities are, what do we do well, what are we not so good at, where can we help, where do we get in the way, and let nature take its course, in a sense, right? Know where you belong in the natural order of things.
That can sound very passive, like just letting nature take its course. And this is another motto in Stoicism, like follow nature, they say. But it turns out it's very hard to follow nature, right? Sounds paradoxical, but to follow nature means to understand it. Yeah, understand it, and understand, you know, the dichotomies when you need to challenge nature, understand when you need to push back against nature, but also understand when you need to let nature be. And that is a case-by-case, moment-by-moment, day-by-day, I'm going to use the word grind here, grind, or struggle, that I would argue too many leaders don't tell other people about.
So we'll tell the grand survivorship, the survivor bias story about how I did this thing with this team and grew from this to this, and you see this all over the internet, and grew from this to this in this amount of time, and aren't I a genius? Let me stand on stage and tell you how to be more of a genius like me. Okay. But I'm not you. So really what I need to know is not how to be more like you.
I really probably need to know how you overcame the challenges and the struggles of, as you put it, nature, how you, in moments of decision-making, made the correct decision, how you did that. And then you can set it down for me. And then talk to me about the unsexy sausage-making parts, because that's what I'm going to do. And then you can talk to me about the getting to the stage part. But no one wants to do that.
No one wants to do that, because you feel like you're, or I won't say you feel like, but that doesn't sell. Right? That doesn't get to that, again, going back to the idea of cutthroat capitalism. That's not the get-rich-quick thing. That's not the direct root thing. Right? And we have a concept in our company called the 10-year overnight success. And it comes from this idea of the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hour rule, kind of that, a little bit of that too.
But also this idea that I've carried for many, many years that, and I have a background in fine arts, right? And I drew comic books and did a whole bunch of other different stuff back in the day. And there's this concept in art that you have 200 bad pages in you, in comic book. You're going to draw 200 bad pages. They're going to be crap. By the time you get to that 200 first page, if you make it, by the time you get to that 200 first page, you won't care what anybody else thinks about your pages.
You won't be chasing the approval of an editor or a illustrator or an organization. You'll be chasing your own talent. Right? So there's this idea that it takes you 10 years to become an overnight success. For every single person that you see that's overnight success, that just exploded out of nowhere. They were putting in 10 years of work when you weren't looking. They were putting in 10 years of gathering the wisdom and having the experiences and getting the knowledge through success and failures, through small things they can never tell you about.
And by the time you show up to them, they've already put in the 10 years of work. We actually have a whole video series about this, the 10 year overnight success. And you see it in sports, you know, so you see it in, we've been picking a lot of Michael Jordan. Let's talk about Kobe Bryant for a minute. Kobe Bryant put in 10 years of work to be able to premiere himself in the late nineties on a court next to Michael Jordan.
And by the way, that was just the dues he had to pay just to be able to stand there, not to win anything, just to stand there. The entry ticket. The entry ticket, exactly. The 10,000 hours, the 10 years of learning Italian and traveling around with his family and playing with basketball all the time and, you know, getting injured and coming back and all of it. Right. That was all just so he could earn the ticket so he could stand there.
That's it. That's all I bought him. And then after that, he's a real work kicked in. And then it gets harder. Right. Exactly. It's not like it's getting easier. Right. This gets dynamically harder because now you're competing against people who also put in their 10 years and another 10 years and another 10 years and another 10 years. And so. Yeah, it's. Well, you know, this I mean, we're talking about stoicism in this connection. And let's go even deeper back to Plato and Socrates.
Oh, yeah. Let's open up. Yeah, there you go. There's this beautiful story in Plato's Republic about the leader, the philosopher, the king, the person who becomes king. And Plato very clearly says you have to be at least 50 years old. There's just no way you can lead a city if you're 25 because of all that, the discipline, all that practice, all the loss, all the mourning, all the grief, all the tenacity, all the resilience. I mean, you know, you have to have lost a lot and then dug yourself back out before you can lead a city.
Exactly. Well, and you know what? You see this in startups. I mean, not to pull this too much in, but I mean, like the myth of the 18 year old in the hoodie is just exactly that. It's a myth. Mark Zuckerberg is an outlier, just like Elon is like everybody else. They're all out. There's a few very, very few, very little. The vast majority of startup founders are between the ages of 45 and 54. Interesting. Statistically speaking.
They've had at least two failed startup ventures beforehand and usually they don't get funded to their third. And usually those third ones fail too. So the myth is the youthful, the myth that's pushed in society, a culture of this youthful, like I said, founder in a hoodie who's going to change the world is exactly that. It's a myth. Most startup founders look like me and you. Most startup founders have tons of business experience behind them. And most startup founders are, they've got the wisdom, some of them anyway, the wisdom to be able to lead this thing that has been developed over the course of time, because it takes time to figure out what's wrong.
It takes time to figure out how to fix it. And then here's the last piece. It takes time to have the guts to be able to throw yourself at that thing, knowing that you probably won't make a dent in the universe, but what the hell else are you going to do? Isn't that the wisdom that comes from failure? The more you fail, the more you realize it doesn't matter if you fail. I mean, there's a paradox there.
My career is about writing and publishing and I've had the good fortune to publish a dozen books and bunches of articles and stuff. And I have many more words written that have never been published. You know, I mean, you wouldn't believe the rejection. And it is, it's brutal. Rejection is awful. And I tell my junior colleagues and other people who are interested in getting things published, it's like, you're going to be rejected. The end. Like, don't expect to have anything published.
And then once you can toughen yourself up and persevere, you know, then it doesn't even matter if they reject it. Well, it's their fault, not your fault. I mean, you have to learn. There's learning and you can improve through criticism and so on. But it's something about tenacity that is the key to all of this. And if you never failed, you've never learned that lesson. I mean, the only way to learn that, those lessons, is to really, really flame out.
Yeah, there's a whole bunch of research that's being developed right now on the science of resiliency, right? And on the science of grit. Angela Duckworth, she has an interesting institute and she's probably somebody that you might be interested in taking a look at further. But she's looking at and studying this entire science of grit, resiliency, failure. You know, we used to know, I mean, whenever I talk about this, whenever this is brought up, I think of the John Wayne version of true grit.
You know, when Maddie Ross shows up, she's, you know, I'm looking for a man of true grit. And by the way, everybody in the 1960s or that 70s or that was made knew what that meant. That meant a person who was, you know, who had gained hard wisdom. And it was probably a little bit, a little bit like sandpaper, but gained hard wisdom through failure, through falling down multiple times and just getting up and throwing themselves back at it.
And the reason why Angela Duckworth is really researching this and looking at this is because, quite frankly, the way we raise our children, you know, has reduced opportunities for them to grow in resilience over the last couple of generations. And when you have people over the last couple of generations who are raised without resilience, then when a difficulty comes along, they collapse or they wilt in the face of that. And it doesn't have to be a big calamity.
We're not talking about a plague here. Ironically enough, we're just talking about... The year to class can devastate some. Yeah, you're an academic. Yeah, you know, exactly. Yeah. And we're not going to talk about grade inflation here. We're not going to move into that. But, you know, how do you... I mean, you're a philosophy professor. Like, you're asking people to write about hard things that they don't have the answers to when they're 18 and 19 and 20 and 21.
And you're probably the first interaction they've had with those kinds of hard things. And maybe, maybe, maybe not. Maybe at Fresno, you know, you're dealing with a bunch of folks who are coming from backgrounds where they have had to deal with those questions. And so maybe it's easy. But I suspect, because I've been an academic, too, I suspect that you're probably reading a lot of bad writing. You've probably been doing that for many years. And you're trying to mold folks into even, like we were saying before, even being able to articulate the hard question.
Not get an answer for it, because they think you need to get the answer. But be able to articulate the hard question, which is what philosophy does for us, which is why philosophers should actually have jobs. And I say that because it's not a job. But we should be employed everywhere, right? Like, y'all should be competing with me over here. Because that's what philosophy does, right? I mean, that's the core of it. You know, that's the core thought process in there.
Yeah. Well, no, this idea of hitting a wall in your thinking, you know, in your life course, in your writing, you know, philosophers are notorious for doing this, right? We'll ask them, you know, just unanswerable questions, you know, like, what is a round square? You know, like, I mean, paradoxes, right? We talk about paradoxes. Or, you know, the Zen tradition with koans. I mean, the idea is to, like, just slap you down and toughen you up, really, frankly, you know, and help you figure out what really matters.
And this resilience and the grit stuff with Angela Duckworth, I want to go back to that for a second. You know, she, I've seen her speak before and went to a workshop where she was presenting on character education and grit. And it turns out what she's saying is very similar to what the Stoics were teaching. This is perennial wisdom that's fundamental to success in life and leadership are key values and key virtues. Grit used to be called integrity, in a sense, right? Like, to have a sense of stick-to-itiveness and to have constancy in your values and persevere, right? It's there in the ancient Greek tradition.
It's there in the Confucian tradition. It's also in the developed tradition, the Christian virtue tradition, on into the Enlightenment and now George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Those guys all had the same value set. And the idea of integrity is to move this to integrity, right? You have to have something around which you organize your life, some set of principles, some anchor, some, actually I don't like anchor as a metaphor. I prefer a sail. Some sail that's pulling you or pushing you in a constant direction, you know? Not so much to weigh you down but to keep you moving.
Maybe, what's the word, a tiller, something on the, a keel. You need a keel. That's what you need, a keel to keep you going. Because without that, like, your ship keels over. It just crashed. You know, there's nothing, there's no reason for it to go in any direction. So the wind blows it, the tides, my metaphor is getting away from you here. But then, you know, and then, like, let's take this back to Michael Jordan and these sports analogies again and the practice and the effort that goes into it.
You have to believe in yourself enough to think that if you practice, you can get better. So now I'll bring in something else from educational theory which is called the growth mindset. I don't know if you've come across this. The growth mindset, the idea is that we're malleable enough that we can improve, right? That the brain can be manipulated, that the body can be manipulated. We can build our muscles, we can build our brains, we can build habits.
And if you believe that about yourself, it turns out you actually do improve, right? So the data about growth mindset, the research shows that if you can convince people, something that's true, if you can teach them that the brain is programmable and malleable, then they will put more effort into the programming and then their brains will improve actually. Same is true with physical, you know, physical fitness. If you teach people about how muscles work, that the soreness that they're feeling is actually productive of strength and endurance, then they're going to embrace it.
And so they'll train harder and train better, you know? Exactly, exactly. Yeah, no, this is, oh yeah, I'm very familiar with growth mindset work. I mean, it's, gosh, it's, I mean, the work of leadership development is interdisciplinary, right, in its nature. And so, you know, from Duckworth all the way to growth mindset, you're talking about habits, this concept of habit stacking, you know, the power of habitual thinking and how to break that and reform that, all the way to, you know, the kinds of things that Malcolm Gladwell has written about so brilliantly, and has really distilled down for the public.
And, you know, all my training comes out of, you know, conflict resolution, which the whole idea of conflict resolution and conflict management is, peace is not the absence of conflict. Peace, or conflict is, it needs to be handled well. And that conflict is the process of change. Without change, or without conflict, you cannot have change, you just can't, you have stasis and you die. So shifting people's mindsets from a, from a negative view to a positive view, shifting leaders' mindsets from a negative view to a positive view, that's at the core of what we do here.
And, you know, you can have people with a fixed mindset who are highly educated, which is, which is sometimes stunning to watch. And you can have people with a growth mindset who aren't necessarily highly book educated, but have that wisdom of, wait, no, I actually can improve. And you're correcting your, what you're saying, you know, I actually can improve, I actually can move forward, I actually can grow and become better. Okay. We've covered a lot. I'm going to move forward, I'm going to move forward a little bit.
Yeah, we're just coming back from failure. Yeah. Ah, here we go. All right, so back to the book. This also, among other things, may serve to keep thee from vain glory, if thou shalt consider that thou art now altogether incapable of accommodation of one who all his life long, or from his youth at least, hath lived a philosopher's life. Leaders should avoid displays, and we kind of talked about this a little bit, but leaders should avoid displays of vanity and false humility.
This is tough in a world, as we've already mentioned, you know, that's driven by social media and YouTube and the desires for the dopamine hit that instant gratification, you know, creates. Part of it is functionally the fact that our platforms were built by people who understand our biology better than we do. And they were built, they were designed to keep us engaged and to keep us putting all these vain displays. But leaders have a responsibility to stay away from vanity, to stay away from even, and on the other side of vanity, false humility, right? When we think about this, now we get into drivers for success, right, for leaders.
Doctor, what would we say should be the drivers for a leader? What should a leader be driven by? I tell my team, and I tell this to other leaders as well, and I try to role model in my own company, I'm not driven by avoiding blame or by taking credit. I don't care about credit. You can have all the credit, and when you screw up, I'll take all the blame. Because my name is on the front of the building, which we had a building, my name would be on the front of the building.
And I'm not driven by looking good. I'm driven by taking the company to the next step or taking the company to the next thing. That's the thing I'm driven by. And blame and credit to me are uninteresting. When something goes wrong, we're going to do the things that the Navy SEALs do. We're going to look at what went wrong. We're going to look at why it went wrong. We're going to look at how we can make it better the next time, and then we're going to go out and do that.
At no time in the air is there going to be finger pointing, like you did this, you did that. At no point in time is there going to be that. When something goes right, we'll do the exact same thing. We'll look at how did that work? How did it go right? We'll have a party. I tell my team, we'll have a party. And then we'll go out after we're, you know, done partying. We will go out, and we will try to repeat that tomorrow.
I find that many leaders are driven by either avoiding blame or taking credit. Particularly as leaders go up, you talked about hierarchies a little bit earlier. As they go up that positional hierarchy, and when you're talking about executive leaders in particular, I'm talking about C-suite folks who are making $20,000, $30,000 a month and have gigantic plates that comes with that kind of compensation. They're not necessarily always concerned with the drivers. So how can a leader be driven? What should leaders be driven by? Blame, credit, truth, justice? What would Marcus say? Yeah.
Well, this is an interesting question. It may be easier to answer for Marcus Aurelius than for us, because he's the emperor. Exactly. He's at the top of the, any hierarchy, a buddy of mine in college said this, any system, it's good to be at the top. It doesn't matter whether it's communism, monarchy, democracy, doesn't matter. Any system, it's good to be at the top. It's good to be king. You want to be at the top of the system.
Yeah. You know, in a sense, in old, you know, 2,000 years ago in the Confucian-Stoic worlds, the roles were kind of similar. You know, if you're a slave, you're just a slave. If you're an emperor, you're an emperor. You don't have much choice in the matter, right? That makes it easier, because if I'm the emperor, now my job is to figure out what emperors have to do and do it well. And the Stoics approved of slavery.
Slavery was woven into the system. If you're a slave, your job is to figure out what slaves do and do it well. You know, Marcus Aurelius's counterpoint, his partner in a sense, when we teach this in the history of philosophy, is a Roman philosopher named Epictetus. And Epictetus was a slave. And what's really interesting is that Epictetus and Marcus both teach the same thing. The slave says, I just have to find a way to be the best slave I can be.
And the emperor says, I have to find a way to be the best emperor I can be. Now you do realize that we're going to mark this at the moment where you just said that, because that's going to get us a lot of hits. No, that is something that is so antithetical to today, because of democracy, right? There are no slaves. The mob is in charge. So in a sense, this worldview, the Stoic worldview, also the Confucian worldview we talked about, these only take us so far.
I mean, we've changed our opinions about this stuff in significant ways in the last 200 to 300 years, especially in the last 100 years, right? You know, social justice issues, equity issues, all this stuff is obviously, we don't want to lose that. So this is why it's harder for us to answer that question that you're asking about what is the thing that motivates us and drives us. And, you know, nobody can tell us. That's the problem.
We're free. The problem of being free. So it's up to us, each one of us, to figure out which role we want to occupy, which set of goods we want to pursue, which companies we want to work for, which, I mean, in a sense, we can choose everything, right? You can leave the country. You could leave the state. You could change your identity. You could change your gender. I mean, everything's on the table. We're free. We're radically free.
And this makes this question very difficult, right? So I think part of the answer is going to be with the Stoics in the background is first we need to figure out what's possible for us. Again, with like Michael Jordan, I'm just never going to be in the NBA. So my freedom is limited to a certain degree. So we need to understand the limitations of our freedom. And then whatever we choose to do, we need to do it with integrity, with commitment, with effort, tenacity, grit, all the rest of that stuff we were talking about.
And let me say one thing about vanity. One more one just to go back to that issue about vanity. And this the Stoics can really help us about because vanity means that other people are determining our worth, right? So vanity means that my value is reflected back to me by all the applause, by all the accolades, by the big salary that I get paid if I'm a CEO. It means I'm dependent on everyone else for my value.
And the Stoics clearly say that's wrong. The value is internal, not external. And I think even in the modern world with all of this freedom, that's a lesson we can learn, right? That we don't want to put ourselves, we don't want to make ourselves dependent upon the judgments of others. So we find something more permanent because the judgments of others vary. It's trendy. It's fast, you know? Yeah, I mean, you know, Abraham Lincoln, you know, you can appease some of the people some of the time and most of the people none of the time.
I mean, I'm not going to be the Hayes-Sons-Sabelles version of Abraham Lincoln. Okay, but here's the pushback, though. If I'm 35, what my business matters. If I'm 26, there's a reason they're called influencers on TikTok. If I'm 40, what happens in my Facebook feed matters, right? Part of the reason why we're doing this podcast is, you know, I got fed up with Facebook. I'm fed up with it, you know? And yeah, we use it for business, blah, blah, blah.
I've always had a love-hate connection with it. I wrote a long open letter that if you want to go to my, you want to go to my Facebook page and connect with me, you can. You can take a look at it. This is just anybody who's listening, you can take a look at it. But it's basically this open letter about like how we're lacking wisdom. You know, we've got, we've got these, we've got these places where, these arenas, I want to use this term, because we're talking, or really, this is right, we're talking, we're talking meditation.
So let's use the Roman word, arenas. We've got these arenas that we have set up that are designed to push our buttons, to get us to engage in a certain way, so that our eyeballs stay on the platform. And so that we are consistently ginned up in our dopamine processes, so that we, we stick, and it becomes a deeper and deeper habit inside of us, so that more ads for more crap can get into our feeds.
Okay. So what matters to me? So I'm going to push back on that. It matters to me. It matters to me what people say. Like, you know, some dead philosopher 2,000 years ago, he never had Facebook. It matters to me. Like, I can just, I can hear your 19-year-old students walking out going, who does this guy think he is? And by the way, they don't even think that really consciously. They just, they pull out their iPhones.
I'm sure 99% of them have iPhones. They pull out their iPhones, and they go right back to TikTok, Snapchat, because it matters to them. How do we get this younger generation of leaders who have been raised, now we have a couple of generations now, raised in this milieu where that is the thing that matters? Because it used to be TV. Now it's not. TV's gone. TV is, I would love to do a podcast episode on that just to load the sunset of the philosophy of television.
I'd love to dig up Marshall McLuhan and talk to him. But, you know, how do you convince people, young leaders, who don't maybe necessarily have wisdom yet, but they've had a ton of dopamine hits, they're addicted to the feed? And by the way, they're addicted to the freedom. Because you're right, freedom is the, it's the utmost thing. How do we get them to recognize that the vanity is the thing they have to move away from? Yeah.
Well, you're obviously right that there's a developmental story here, too. I mean, we can really dig into like the life course, kind of, you know, what is optimal development for human life? And at some point, when we're young, we have this intense social need. You know, it's middle school. I mean, like the most important thing that anyone learns in middle school is who's the popular kid, you know? They don't remember what happens in the classroom. They remember the crush they had on, you know, the person standing next to them.
And that's appropriate, because what's happening is the brain, the social brain is developing and all that dopamine and the rest of it that you're talking about, we're being programmed to be social creatures. That's perfectly natural, right? The developmental course, though, I would suggest pushes past that towards something else, which is not just a dependence on the crowd. Now, it turns out a lot of people don't make it that far. And, you know, the ancient Greeks complained about this.
And teachers still warn us, be careful of peer pressure, you know, stay off the bandwagon. I mean, all this stuff. But the developmental trajectory that almost every one of the world's traditions teaches us is to move away from the crowd. Here's a great example from the biblical tradition. It's the book of Job. And in Job, what happens is his life goes wrong, and he sits and he just listens to all of his friends. And his friends convince him of something that he should never have listened to them to begin with.
And so one of the lessons of the book of Job is not only will bad things happen to good people, but smart people don't listen to everything their friends tell them. I was waiting for you to bring this book of Job. Yes, exactly. Yes. Don't listen to your friends. Your friends are terrible. They don't know any more. I tell my children all the time, I've got four of them, they don't know any more than you do.
They're your age. Well, I mean, yes, so that's obviously, the ancient Hebrews knew this, the ancient Greeks knew this. And back to Marcus and this thing about vanity and the vanity of the appeal to the crowd. And here's actually why this is important to say, is that people need to be reminded of this because we fall into the bad habit. The bad habit we fall into is to think that just because everyone else says it's true, it's true.
The bad habit is to think just because everyone else believes it's valuable, it's valuable. We teach our kids this. In school, they talk about this all the time. But we can't help ourselves because when we were 12 years old, we were intensely social. And we're kind of preconditioned because the 12-year-old brain, we're intensely, deeply conditioned to be moved by the crowd. And it turns out the crowd is a bunch of other 12-year-olds. So like, what's the point of that? We're going to put the 12-year-olds in charge? I don't think so.
So Marcus is counseling us, this warning about vanity. We need to separate ourselves from the crowd because the crowd doesn't have wisdom. I love there's a line in this movie from back in the day, The Devil's Advocate with Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves. And Keanu Reeves plays a suckered lawyer. And Al Pacino has a great line in there that the writers wrote and then he said as the devil. He says, you know, vanity is definitely my favorite sin.
And he just smiles at the end. And you know, to sin in archery means to miss the mark. And that's basically what it is, right? And I think you're correct. Like, the mark that we are seeking to get is not the mark where the crowd wants us to go as a leader, but the mark where we know the crowd should go. That's what leading means. And when we miss that, when we begin to appeal to the crowd, when we begin to appeal to the vainglory of the crowd, when we begin to appeal to, well, the dopamine hits and what's in my feed and that kind of stuff, when we start to do that, and it's really hard, by the way, I want to be, I want to give, you know, the benefit of the doubt to people as well.
It's hard to break your own biology. You know, this is why addiction is such a problem. It's hard. Not impossible, just hard, which then requires grit and resilience to be able to overcome. So missing the mark for a leader has, has deleterious, has really damaging outcomes for the crowd. And this is, this is something that politics is too easy to pick up, so I won't go there. This is something that we see in, let's talk about warfare for just a minute, World War I, right? Probably the most useless major land war in the last, I would argue, 200 years, with the exception maybe the summer of 1870 in Europe, right? And yeah, you know, the Franco-German, Prussian nonsense that didn't have to happen in that summer, right? But, you know, if you really look at it, it was a precursor to the nonsense that didn't have to happen in World War I.
And the trouble with World War I and the generals of World War I was that they failed to lead. They failed at massive levels to lead, other than, you know, to, to stand at the back of the line and have people yell forward and, you know, just Pink Floyd famously said, forward, they cried from the rear and the front rank died. And that's exactly it, right? And I would argue that was sinful. And they were doing it for vain glory.
They weren't doing it for, to get land. They were getting inches. They weren't doing it to advance a strategic goal. They may have said they were, but that's not why they were doing it, right? They were doing it because honor and, and, and martial spirit demanded it. And besides, you know, the trains were running on time. So like they got us here. So we might as well shoot some, we might as well shoot some Germans and the Germans had their trains running on time.
So they might as well shoot some French folks. And it's, it, it, it adds up to strategic mistakes, tactical mistakes, a war going on that didn't have to go on. And leadership that was really exposed and in times of crisis, leadership gets exposed. Leadership's vanity gets exposed. Leaders show who they are in times of crisis. Well, this, now we've opened a whole nother can of worms, which is, yeah, what do we do when, what do we do when the world is going mad? What do we do in moments of insanity when wars break out and, and good people should be saying, we're not going to fight this war.
This, this is, this is another level of leadership that it's like leadership in a crisis, you know. I think, I mean, I think it's always important to distinguish, there's ordinary leadership, right? That's one thing. And it needs to be principled and it needs to have integrity and you need to have grit and all this stuff. And then stuff hits the fan. And part, I think one, one worry I have is that sometimes we only focus on the crisis as if that's leadership.
God forbid we, I mean, wouldn't it be nice if there were no crises, right? You should live a life where there are no crises. Like, please, you know, you don't want to wish a crisis on someone. But when the crisis happens, I mean, when it literally is you against the hierarchy, you against the military industrial complex, you against the insanity of a world gone mad, what do you do? This, this is, this is very, very difficult.
Marcus Aurelius, by the way, wasn't really great at this. He was not, in my understanding, he was not fully on board with the project of the Roman Empire. He didn't want to go to fight in the northern campaigns of the Roman Empire, but his obligation as an emperor was to do this. And there was a whole bunch of political intrigue and he found himself up on the front lines. And my sense of Marcus is that he would have preferred not to have fought in that war.
And stoicism is a kind of do your duty and won't ask questions theory. So this, you know, Marcus Aurelius and stoicism really only takes us to the edge of the kind of question you're asking. And the kind of question you're asking is about, you know, the Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, civil disobedience, conscientious refusal level of a whole different kind of leadership. And what that is, that's tough. And are you willing to stand up against the entire crowd? We were talking about the crowd before.
I mean, the person who is willing to go to jail because of their convictions, the person who's willing to be martyred, the person who's willing to tell the generals to go to hell. I mean, that's a whole different thing. That's a whole kind of privilege and self-certainty. And maybe there's just a leap of faith at that point. Like, you know, how do you know? Right, exactly. How do you know? Well, and, you know, the thing is, you don't know, right? You have no idea.
So, you know, you talk about two different levels of leadership. What we see very often when we work with leaders in our company is leaders do wind up in sometimes in situations where that ethical piece where I've got to tell the executive to go to hell. And by the way, I've got, you know, three kids and two mortgages and retirement's on the line. And if I tell them to go to hell, I might as well pack up my boxes because I'm out.
I'm not going to tell them to go to hell. And that's their World War I moment, right? That's their, that's their, not to be too dramatic about it, that's their Flight 93 moment. And every leader, I would argue, gets to this. And I would say that during a time of, during our time of pandemic, the reason why you're seeing, one of the many reasons why you're seeing small businesses of all kinds fail left and right is not necessarily because of the lockdowns and the economic shutdowns in states, although that is a, that is a precursor to these kinds of things.
But you're seeing, this is not condemning or convicting. This is just a factual observation. You're seeing the impacts of lack of, of lack of leadership at all levels when, well, when, like we said at the beginning of our recording today, we said at the beginning of our podcast, when chaos shows up. And when chaos shows up, are you going to tell chaos to go to hell? Or are you going to crumble and collapse? When chaos shows up in the form of, let's make it something smaller, more manageable.
When chaos shows up in the form of, oh, we've been cooking the books for a while. And by the way, you're in charge. When chaos shows up in the form of, oh, yeah, we've been sexually harassing folks for years here. When chaos shows up in the form of, oh, yeah, we've just been casually racist or casually discriminatory in our language and waiting in meetings. And that's just the culture that we have here. That's just, I love this one.
That's just the way things happen here. Right? I love that one. That's just our culture. And you're a leader, you're standing around there going, wait a minute, I have my principles in mind. I thought when I got here into the C-suite or got here into this new leadership position or got here into this new position, period, that I wasn't going to have to face this. And now, you know, the oxygen has left the plane and we are rapidly descending.
And you have to make a decision as a leader at that moment. Are you going to tell the organization to go to hell? Are you going to engage in some of that conscientious objecting at a practical level in your life? Because remember, I said earlier, you know, where your role modeling really happens is in that 50 person company that's up the road from you. It ain't in the big places. It's at that place. I mean, 60% of employees in this country still work for small to medium sized business entities.
I mean, that's who employs people. It isn't the big boys. Or when COVID-19 comes along and you haven't told them to go to hell and now you have to, you know, because, you know, you don't want to work remotely or you do want to work remotely or, you know, you don't want to make the policy change or you do want to make the policy change. There's all these moments, I'm convinced, actually, I'm convinced, we see it all the time.
I don't have to be convinced, I see it all the time, of leaders having to make these kinds of decisions in ethical areas. And it feels like we're consciously, we're conscientiously objecting to going to war. That's how it feels for people. It feels like a gigantic risk that they didn't want to take. And now they're shoved into a corner. And it's just easier to go along with the crowd. Yeah. Well, the reality of whistleblowers is that they get blown up.
Right. I mean, we've seen, I mean, some terrible lessons about this during the Trump years, too, where, you know, the folks that were involved in impeachment and the rest of it, they basically they got screwed. The people that spoke up, this Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, the guy who was one of the people talking about this Ukrainian. Yeah, so it could be that you will at some point in your life confront the conscientious objector moment. Again, hopefully not.
But when you get there, what are you going to do and how are you going to negotiate that? If we go back to stoicism, you know, the one thing that one really important lesson from Marcus and the Stoics is to have no fear. There's a kind of kind of deep courageousness that is woven through this, this approach. The universe has structure and order. And in the long run, the truth comes out and justice comes out. And so, you know, I said earlier, maybe it takes a leap of faith, a kind of faith.
The Stoic faith, one of the features of the Stoic faith is faith in the trajectory of justice in the universe. You know, Martin Luther King picks this up, the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. That's a Christian idea. It's a Stoic idea, too. And in a sense, you know, there's this kind of idea in Stoicism that if you do what you must do, if you speak the truth and do the right thing, the universe will take care of it.
Of course, you might be dead. So there's that, you know. Part of this, there's a kind of cold-hearted realism to this that sometimes the people that do the right thing do get screwed in the short run. But history will remember those who do the right thing, and certainly, you know, your descendants will remember and your friends will honor you. And there's no guarantee in the Stoic worldview that good people are rewarded. The universe doesn't work that way, you know.
Good people get sick and die. You know, meteors hit. There are forest fires and earthquakes. The world is such that the world's indifferent to our happiness. But what matters is not only our happiness but also our integrity, our character, the mark we leave in terms of virtue. And, you know, I think if you went to Marcus Aurelius or a Stoic and asked, well, should I blow the whistle on corrupt behavior or should I leave this company because they're doing terrible things, the answer is obvious.
Of course. You tell the truth and you do the right thing. And you need to have courage. And part of that courage is connected to faith. And the Stoics use the word providence. There's providence. And providence means that justice is woven through the whole thing. I think that's a good spot for us to wrap up at. I would like to thank Dr. Andrew Fiala for coming on our podcast today. We didn't touch as much into the great book, Meditations, as I maybe I had planned.
However, part of this podcast is about getting lessons, right? Things you can apply as we go forward and in our upcoming books, we're going to be reading, you know, City of God by Augustine. We're going to be talking about Julius Caesar. We're going to be talking about Thomas Aquinas. And we're going to be talking about Hobbes and Locke. We're going to be talking about John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather and others. Nathaniel Hawthorne and my personal favorite, favorite author, favorite American author, Herman Melville.
The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. We often don't talk about how the moral arc of the universe, what is the heat that causes that bend to occur? What is the impetus for the bend to occur? If there's no courage, there's no heat. Then there's no bending. And then the moral arc of the universe, which may be indifferent to us, doesn't bend at all. We have to act. And I think that Emperor Marcus Caesar would say acting is the key thing.
Not acting without intentionality, not acting without courage, not acting out of a sense of vanity or revenge, but acting in a studied, contemplative, intentional manner and acting nonetheless. And will there be times for active passivity? Yes. Will there be times for passive activity? Yes. The job of the leader is to determine what that is, to lead courageously from the front, and to let all that moral arc bending kind of happen on its own. We didn't really talk too much about role modeling, and we didn't really talk too much about what people see.
And I'll close with this idea. People only change their opinions, their ideas, their thoughts by what they see a leader do. And a leader can talk a good game, but if there's no actual practical follow-up, if there's no idea of demonstration, if there's no demonstration in and of itself, then the leader is bereft, and the crowd will go find another leader. People follow what they see. You want the moral arc of the universe to bend towards justice? Great.
Do that. You want to object to something that your company is doing that you know is unethical? Great. Object. You want to change your local community? You want to change your family? Great. Do that. It doesn't always have to be big things. Small things. Small acts of courage, small acts of commitment, small acts of consistency, and I think the emperor would appreciate this, small acts of discipline build into big acts over time and then get bigger and bigger until the ball is rolling and you can't stop it.
Leaders lead. Leaders lead by understanding their principles, understanding their values, and understanding where they came from and fundamentally where they are going. And if you don't know where you're going, well, then it doesn't really matter which direction you go in, right? Like the Cheshire Cat said in Alice in Wonderland. So we've talked a lot about a lot of things today. We've talked about Michael Jordan. We've talked about the moral arc of the universe. We've talked about life extension.
We've talked about fixing your own backyard. We've talked about conscientious objecting. Once again, I'd like to thank Dr. Andrew Fiala. Go and check out his blog. Just Google Professor Fiala. Go check out his blog. I am now a subscriber. He's writing something, writing an article every week that you may agree with, you may disagree with, but at least it gives you something to think about, which is something that we are, we need more of. We need more of.
We need more thinking, more engaging, more focus. He's also got a couple of books and columns and things like that out there, and I'm going to let him talk a little bit about that. But go check him out. Connect with him all the ways you possibly can on social media and all these other kinds of fashions, because we need to be promoting thinkers. Yes, we need to be promoting doers as well, but we need to be promoting thinkers, because before you can do, you must think, and you must think clearly and candidly and courageously.
And Dr. Fiala, whether you always agree with him or not, is irrelevant, is definitely doing that. He's molding young minds and molding old minds and molding our minds. And I want to give him an opportunity to talk about all the ways in which he's doing that right now. Yes. Thanks, Hassan, and thanks for having me on the show. And good luck with this project. So you're going to be doing all these other great important books. That's cool.
I will throw out at you that Phil Jackson has, we talked about coach of the Chicago Bulls, this great book, Sacred Hoops, which is his coaching philosophy connected to the world's philosophical traditions. It's quite a great book. If it's OK, I'm going to give a couple of plugs for a couple of new books that I have coming out. Absolutely. Well, we can't. I don't know if you can see this on our podcast video. But anyway, I published two books in 2020.
They're both short and easy to read. One is called Simplicity, and this is a book of nature writing. So it's it's my attempt to take the world's wisdom traditions and weave it around my own experience in the mountains here in California, the Sierra Nevada. And if I could share a quote from Marcus Aurelius, this one, there's a chapter in the book Simplicity where I talk about this quote. Marcus says, The time you have left is short.
Live it as if you were on a mountain. Let others observe a true man living in accordance with nature. It's a wonderful image of, you know, the sage on the mountaintop. But as you point out, you can't just stay on the mountaintop. So the other the other book that I have that's come out this year is a short primer on nonviolence called Nonviolence, A Quick Immersion. And it's about the nonviolent tradition and the kind of impact that it's made on the world.
And it has the world has been changed in profound ways by the advocates of nonviolence from Gandhi to Martin Luther King and dozens and dozens of others. So if you're interested in sort of putting philosophy to work in the world, I think in a sense nonviolence is one of the places that that that happens. So anyway, that's enough for me. Thanks again for having me on. And what a wonderful conversation. I quite enjoyed it. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you, Dr. Fiala. Check out both of his books. Go ahead and grab both of those. You know, we need more philosophies of nonviolence. It's easy to throw a brick in the window. It's hard to love your enemies. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that. Jesus. Now, Dr. Fiala is saying it. I mean, that's a good line. That's a good line to be to be in there. But, yeah, go pick up both of those books. Connect with Dr.
Fiala. Support this man. Support the work that he's doing. Check out his his center on ethical leadership and the work that he's doing. Read his writings. And connect with him in all the different ways that matter. For my bit. If you would like to get more of this, right, if you would like to get more practical application of the kinds of things that we've talked about for the last couple of hours. You can always check us out and check out our webinar products, our training solutions, even our leading keys product.
Just head on over to WWHSconsultingandTraining.com. And you can check out our leading key solution at WWW.leadingkeys.com. Look, sometimes you need micro learning. Sometimes you need small bite sized learning moments. Sometimes you don't have time to listen to a two hour podcast. Sometimes you need it like right now. And that's what leading keys is for. However, if you want something a little bit more long term, you want customized training solutions delivered remotely, video first on demand. Check us out at WWW.HSConsultingandTraining.com.
Talk to us. Give us a call. Drop us a line. Fill out our contact page. And we'll get in touch with you. Our trainers have a combined 20 plus years of experience in all of these areas that we have been talking about today. Everything from developing a growth mindset to adapting to change to growing in accountability, even dealing with conflict and, of course, building better teams. Finally, I have a couple books out there myself. I'll just talk about the big one.
So my big organizational behavior book, My Boss Doesn't Care. If you're stuck in a situation where you feel like you're back against the wall, right, you're in a World War One trench situation, right? And you've got to tell the general to go to hell. You probably want to have some philosophy underneath that. You probably want to have some ideas underneath that. And the book, My Boss Doesn't Care, is a collection of about 100 essays that I wrote over the course of five years answering those questions.
Not necessarily in a philosophical manner, but more in a practical manner. This is beyond business writing. This is the next step up. This is the place where philosophy and business meet. So go ahead and head on over to HaysanSorrells.com, my personal site, and you can pick up a copy of My Boss Doesn't Care on Amazon or all these other places that you may want to buy books. It's literally everywhere. Finally, if you want to check out our other podcast, The Haysan Sorrells Audio Experience, just a few snippets and clips of my entrepreneurial journey in building a business, building a brand, managing and juggling everything.
It's that process part we were talking about. And you can check all that out at The Haysan Sorrells Audio Experience in all of the places where you listen to podcasts, from Apple iTunes all the way to Spotify and everywhere in between. Finally, you can check me out on all my YouTube channels, okay, and connect with me there. You can watch all of our videos focusing on tenure overnight success, becoming a better leader, enjoying the entrepreneurial journey, and occasionally having fun and having a laugh.
So head on over to YouTube and you can just put my name in the search bar, Haysan Sorrells Presents, and check out our videos. Look forward to hearing from you. Look forward to hearing feedback from you about this episode. And of course, you can always send me an email, fill up my inbox, and you can always connect with me in all the different places that matter, from Instagram to LinkedIn to Twitter and to Facebook. Yes, I am still on Facebook, so you can still connect with me there.
All right. Once again, thank you to Andrew, thank you to Dr. Fiala for coming on. Really appreciated this conversation. Got a lot out of it. I hope that all of you did too. And so, Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, out.
