That orientation became a thread through his education and career. Alec studied mathematics, anthropology, law, and business because he was interested in the structures beneath each discipline and the different rules governing nature, culture, institutions, and human interaction. His education taught him to look at problems from multiple angles rather than assuming that one framework could explain everything.

That distinction becomes especially important when the environment itself changes. A person can have tremendous intelligence, emotional intelligence, discipline, and determination, yet still apply those strengths within the wrong frame. Alec captures the danger through an analogy from his years competing in Ironman races: you can be swimming quickly alongside a group of people and still discover that everyone is moving rapidly in the wrong direction. Adaptability is the capacity to lift your head, examine the course, and ask whether your effort is actually aligned with reality.

Why Adaptability Became the Meta Skill

Alec’s argument for adaptability begins with a distinction between navigating a known environment and recognizing when the environment has changed. IQ and EQ can help us operate effectively within a particular framework, but they do not necessarily tell us whether the framework itself remains useful. His concept of the Adaptability Quotient, or AQ, addresses that higher-order question: Are you applying your abilities in a direction that still corresponds with the world as it is?

This is why Alec describes adaptability as the “meta skill.” A person may possess grit and intelligence and know how to collaborate exceptionally well, but those abilities still need somewhere productive to point. When conditions shift, the more important question becomes whether the assumptions underneath our decisions remain valid.

The Blockbuster and Netflix example makes the distinction tangible. Blockbuster could continue improving its existing model, becoming more efficient at operating physical stores and serving customers within that structure. Netflix recognized that the relevant frame had changed. The lesson is not simply that one company adapted faster than another. It is that execution becomes increasingly irrelevant when the underlying model of reality has shifted. As Alec puts it, “Adaptability is what says you’re touching true reality as it is right now.”

This applies far beyond business. Careers change. Technologies alter the skills that matter. Institutions evolve. Relationships enter new seasons. Even our understanding of ourselves develops as we gather experience. Becoming more adaptable therefore requires a willingness to distinguish between what deserves persistence and what deserves revision.

AI and the Second Cognitive Revolution

The conversation takes an even more consequential turn when Alec describes artificial intelligence as part of what he calls the second cognitive revolution. His concern is not simply whether AI can perform particular tasks better or faster. The deeper question is what happens when a technology becomes part of the environment in which human beings think.

Alec argues that AI differs from ordinary tools because it can participate in cognition itself. Rather than simply helping us execute a task, it can interpret a question, compress information, generate possibilities, and present an answer that may feel more complete than our own thinking. “It changes the water in which you swim and think,” he says. “That is more than a tool.”

That creates a subtle tension between augmentation and agency. Technology can expand what we are capable of doing, but it can also encourage us to surrender portions of the thinking process itself. Alec describes the danger through a remarkably candid observation: “I think I’m thinking, but I’m not really. I’m offloading it, and I’m getting a thin version back.”

For me, this is one of the most important ideas in the conversation because it reframes the question surrounding AI. The challenge is not simply learning how to use increasingly powerful tools. It is learning how to use them while preserving the human capacities that give those tools direction. Alec sees his book as a “repair kit for agency,” a framework designed to help people make decisions in an environment where the technology itself is changing how decisions are made.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• Why adaptability may matter more as environments change faster than our established mental models.
• How Alec Litowitz’s concept of the Adaptability Quotient helps us recognize when we are operating within the wrong frame.
• Why artificial intelligence represents a cognitive and environmental shift that can either expand or diminish human agency.
• How attaching your identity to an outcome can make it harder to update your beliefs when reality changes.
• Why feedback loops are essential for knowing when to persist, revise a strategy, or change environments.
• How to create stability through enduring values while allowing your mission, strategy, and decisions to evolve.

How Feedback Loops Tell You When to Change Course

Alec’s framework becomes especially practical when he turns to feedback loops. Adaptability is not simply a willingness to change. Without a way to determine what should change and when, constant change can become its own form of confusion. Feedback provides the information that allows an adaptive system to distinguish between persistence and revision.

Alec explains that an adaptive system is governed by feedback. When your actions produce information that helps you refine your understanding, the loop remains alive. When you receive no meaningful feedback, however, the absence itself can become information. Perhaps the strategy needs to change. Perhaps the mission has become disconnected from reality. Perhaps, as Alec points out, “sometimes you’re not getting feedback; you’re asking the wrong question.”

This is where the metaphor of finding the right “room” becomes useful. You can work extremely hard within an environment that simply does not fit the direction you need to go. Alec describes the adaptive process as learning when to leave that room while carrying your values and your capacity for adaptation with you. The goal is not to abandon everything whenever circumstances become difficult. It is to distinguish productive difficulty from evidence that the surrounding conditions have fundamentally changed.

This also creates a healthier relationship with failure. Instead of interpreting every unsuccessful outcome as a verdict on our identity, we can treat experience as information. The question becomes less about proving that we were right and more about understanding what reality is teaching us.

A Practical Framework for Making Adaptive Decisions

Alec’s book grew directly out of this concern with how people make decisions when the world is moving faster than their established mental models. In the conversation, he describes the book as a “how-to kit” for making adaptive decisions under uncertainty. Its purpose is deliberately different from giving readers a fixed collection of answers. Instead, Alec wants to provide a process that remains useful as the circumstances change.

There is an anecdote behind that philosophy that stayed with me. Alec explains that when he built Magnetar, he spent considerable time thinking about the values that would define the organization. He eventually identified integrity, insight, and passion as central values. His definition of integrity was especially revealing: how do you act when no one is looking? His definition of passion was equally connected to agency, because he sees passion as an internal drive rather than something that can simply be manufactured through external rewards.

That same distinction appears in his thinking about adaptability. Values can provide continuity while strategies remain flexible. Alec describes purpose as something rooted more deeply, mission as something that can move more slowly, and strategy as something that may need to change quickly when circumstances demand it. He compares mission to glass, which appears solid but moves incredibly slowly over long periods of time.

That is the central idea behind The Adaptability Quotient. Alec is trying to give readers a structure for deciding when to persist, when to explore, when to change course, and when to recognize that they are operating in the wrong environment. He describes the book as an “updating mechanism” rather than a prescription for one particular answer.

And perhaps the most human part of his argument comes at the end of our conversation. Alec believes adaptability is a capability people possess naturally and can exercise deliberately. “Humans can adapt in our lifetime,” he tells me. “It’s an incredible gift.” His hope is that we use that gift consciously as AI, social media, and other technologies reshape the environments in which we live and think.

When Your Identity Becomes Attached to an Answer

Adaptability becomes much harder when changing your mind feels like changing who you are. Alec connects the current experience of social and technological uncertainty to a deeper psychological need for stability. When people feel unmoored, they often look for something that can give them an immediate sense of belonging and certainty. In the modern environment, that stabilizer can become an identity attached to a group, an ideology, a community, or an answer.

The problem emerges when an answer that once provided stability becomes something we must defend regardless of what new information appears. Alec describes the distinction clearly: “If you have an identity stuck to an outcome, you will defend that answer. If you have an identity stuck to adaptability, you’ll update when the world changes.”

That idea changes the meaning of personal identity. Instead of defining ourselves entirely through a particular profession, worldview, achievement, role, or conclusion, we can develop a deeper identity around our capacity to learn and update. This does not require becoming endlessly uncertain about everything. It requires knowing which parts of ourselves should remain stable while allowing our interpretations and strategies to evolve.

In a period of rapid technological and cultural change, that distinction can become a source of psychological stability. We may not know exactly what the next environment will demand, but we can cultivate confidence in our ability to learn what it demands when we encounter it.

SPONSORED DEALS

FODZYME

We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.

SHOPIFY

It’s time to turn those “What Ifs” into SFX: CHA-CHING with Shopify today. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.

Vinted

Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn.

About Today’s Guest, Alec Litowitz

Alec Litowitz is an investor, entrepreneur, and thinker whose career has been shaped by a sustained interest in how people make decisions under changing conditions. He founded Magnetar and later turned his attention toward the broader questions surrounding adaptability, agency, uncertainty, and the cognitive changes brought about by artificial intelligence. His multidisciplinary background includes mathematics, anthropology, law, and business, an unusual combination that reflects his longstanding fascination with the structures and rules underlying different systems.

In his work and writing, Alec explores what happens when the assumptions that once helped us navigate the world begin to lose their usefulness. His book, The Adaptability Quotient, develops a framework for making adaptive decisions in uncertain environments, with particular attention to feedback, identity, agency, and knowing when to change course. He describes the book as an effort to help people preserve their capacity for independent thought while navigating a period of accelerating technological and societal change.

How Can You Become More Adaptable in the Age of AI? | Alec Litowitz

Learn More and Connect

👉 All episode links, my books You Matter, Luma, and The Mattering Effect, The Ignited Life newsletter, and the Start Mattering store are here: linktr.ee/John_R_Miles

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

What does it mean to become more adaptable?

Becoming more adaptable means developing the capacity to recognize when circumstances have changed and then update your assumptions, strategies, or decisions accordingly. Alec Litowitz frames adaptability as a higher-order capability that helps us determine where to direct other strengths such as intelligence, emotional intelligence, grit, and judgment.

What is the Adaptability Quotient?

The Adaptability Quotient, or AQ, is Alec Litowitz’s framework for thinking about our ability to recognize whether we are operating within the right frame as conditions change. In his explanation, AQ involves lifting your head from the immediate task and asking whether your effort is still aligned with the reality of the environment.

Why is adaptability important in the age of AI?

Alec argues that AI changes more than the tools available to us because it can become part of the environment in which we think. That creates an important question about agency: whether we are using AI to expand our cognitive range or gradually transferring parts of our thinking to it.

How does identity affect adaptability?

When identity becomes attached to a particular answer or outcome, changing that answer can feel personally threatening. Alec argues that identifying with adaptability creates a different relationship with uncertainty because updating your understanding becomes part of who you are rather than evidence that you were previously wrong.

How do feedback loops help with decision-making?

Feedback loops provide information about whether a strategy, mission, or environment is producing useful results. Alec emphasizes that when feedback disappears, the problem may be the strategy itself, the mission, or even the question being asked.

What should remain stable when everything else changes?

Alec places stability primarily in values and in the identity of being adaptable. Strategies can change quickly, missions can evolve more slowly, and circumstances can force us into entirely different environments. The enduring foundation is the set of values we carry with us and our ability to keep adapting to what comes next.

That is why understanding why kids need more freedom matters. Peter Gray sees free play, autonomy, and independence as developmental necessities rather than luxuries that can be added when children have finished their more serious responsibilities. When adults organize too much of childhood around supervision, academic performance, structured activities, and future achievement, they may unintentionally remove many of the experiences through which children learn to direct their own lives.

In this episode of Passion Struck, Peter and John R. Miles explore what happens when childhood gradually becomes something adults manage rather than something children experience. They examine the disappearance of independent play, the rise of intensive parenting, the connection between agency and mental health, the pressure surrounding academic achievement, and the surprising relationship between childhood freedom and the discovery of passion and purpose.

What Is Childhood Actually For?

Peter begins with a deceptively simple question: what is the purpose of childhood?

From his perspective as an evolutionary psychologist, childhood is the human version of a juvenile period whose central developmental task is to move from dependence toward independence. Children gradually take greater responsibility for their own lives, learn the skills required to function in their culture, and become capable of making decisions without someone else constantly directing them.

This perspective changes the meaning of behaviors that adults sometimes interpret as inconvenient or oppositional. Peter points to the familiar insistence of a young child saying, “I want to do it myself.” Rather than treating that impulse as something to extinguish, he describes it as part of a healthy developmental drive toward autonomy.

The tension arises when the structures surrounding children increasingly interfere with that process. Peter argues that contemporary childhood gives children fewer opportunities to exercise independence and take meaningful responsibility for their own lives.

Why Free Play May Be One of Childhood’s Most Important Teachers

Think about what happens when children disappear from adult supervision and begin playing together. They have to negotiate disagreements, invent rules, decide what is fair, solve practical problems, manage minor conflicts, and figure out how to keep a shared activity going.

For Peter, those experiences constitute an informal education in how to live.

He describes free play as an environment where children repeatedly practice taking charge of their own activities. When adults intervene in every disagreement or transform spontaneous games into highly managed activities, children lose some of those opportunities to develop judgment for themselves. Peter uses the contrast between an informal pickup game and organized Little League to illustrate the difference: the children in the first setting have to create and negotiate much of the experience themselves, while the adults increasingly determine what happens in the second.

That distinction matters because the lessons learned through play extend far beyond childhood. Learning how to negotiate with peers, create rules, respond to setbacks, resolve disagreements, and make decisions becomes preparation for the responsibilities of adult life. Freedom gives children a place to practice those skills before the consequences become larger and more consequential.

How Childhood Lost Its Independence

One of the most striking parts of the conversation is Peter’s description of childhood as something that has changed gradually rather than through one dramatic event.

Drawing on historical research and his own experience growing up in the 1950s, Peter describes a period when children generally had much more unstructured time to explore their neighborhoods, play with other children, get into trouble, and figure out how to get themselves out of it. He points to the period around the middle of the twentieth century as an important turning point and describes a series of societal changes that progressively reduced children’s opportunities for independent outdoor play.

The significance of this argument extends beyond nostalgia. Peter connects the disappearance of childhood freedom with changes in how children experience responsibility, agency, and psychological well-being. The central question becomes whether children can develop confidence in their own capacity to navigate life when they have comparatively few opportunities to practice navigating it.

This is also where the conversation begins to connect childhood development with a much larger question: what happens to a person’s sense of agency when other people repeatedly make the important decisions for them?

Agency Begins Earlier Than We Think

John connects Peter’s ideas to his conversation with Martin Seligman and asks where agency actually begins. Peter’s answer is strikingly direct: children demonstrate agency from the beginning.

He describes watching his young grandchildren explore their environments and take charge of their activities. Agency, in his view, does not need to be installed in children through a special lesson. It is already present. What adults and institutions can do, however, is either create opportunities for that agency to develop or suppress it through excessive control.

That distinction has important implications for parenting. If children are consistently told what to do, where to go, how to play, what to study, and how to spend their time, they may become increasingly practiced at following directions while becoming less practiced at directing themselves.

The conversation also connects agency to mattering. Peter explains that when someone feels in charge of their own life and is doing something because they have decided it matters to them, that sense of self-direction can become closely connected to feeling that they matter. This is one of the most interesting intersections between Peter’s research and John’s work on The Mattering Effect.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• Why childhood is fundamentally a developmental journey toward independence and greater responsibility.
• How free play teaches children negotiation, problem-solving, social skills, judgment, and agency.
• Why the rise of intensive parenting and achievement pressure has changed the experience of childhood.
• How childhood autonomy and agency connect with psychological well-being and a sense of mattering.
• Why Peter Gray believes children often discover their passions through exploration, play, and self-directed activity.
• What parents, schools, libraries, communities, and other institutions can do to create more opportunities for childhood independence.

When Achievement Becomes the Organizing Principle of Childhood

The modern pressure to optimize childhood introduces another tension. Parents naturally want their children to have opportunities, succeed academically, and build a meaningful future. Yet Peter argues that the desire to secure those outcomes can gradually turn childhood into an extended preparation for a résumé.

He describes the rise of intensive parenting as a culture in which parents increasingly monitor, manage, and steer their children’s lives toward future success. Academic performance, extracurricular activities, college admissions, and other markers of achievement can consume the time and attention that children once had for independent exploration.

Peter also questions the assumption that admission to an elite institution necessarily determines a person’s future success. The deeper issue, he suggests, is that children can begin to internalize the idea that their worth depends on performing well according to external measures.

That creates an unusual paradox. Adults may be trying to give children every possible advantage, while the structure of that effort can leave children with fewer opportunities to develop the independence, initiative, and self-direction those same adults hope will serve them later.

The Question That Led Peter Gray to Restoring Childhood

There is an anecdote near the beginning of Peter’s work on this subject that helps explain why the question of childhood freedom became so important to him.

Peter recalls meeting a young woman from Kenya who had moved to the United States as a teenager. She told him that one of the first things she noticed was how unhappy people seemed, particularly children. The observation stayed with him because it challenged a familiar assumption about what progress should look like. If a society can provide greater material comfort and more structured opportunities for advancement, why might children nevertheless experience growing psychological distress?

That question prompted Peter to look more closely at historical changes in childhood and at the gradual disappearance of opportunities for children to be free, explore, and direct their own activities. He had already explored related ideas in his earlier book Free to Learn and through years of academic writing, but Restoring Childhood gave him the opportunity to bring those strands together into a larger examination of what modern childhood has become.

The book therefore grows out of a question rather than a simple prescription: what have children historically needed in order to grow into capable, self-directed adults, and what happens when those conditions disappear?

Near the end of the conversation, Peter points toward reasons for hope. He describes schools experimenting with free-play programs, libraries creating opportunities for children to play, recreation groups experimenting with less structured activities, and communities thinking about sidewalks, bicycle paths, and safer routes that could allow children to move through their environments more independently. He describes these developments as an emerging movement toward restoring some of what childhood has gradually lost.

For parents, his suggestion is remarkably practical. Sit down with a child and ask: Are there things you would like to do independently that you are not doing right now? The answer can become the beginning of a conversation about what independence might look like at that particular age, what risks are reasonable, and where adults can step back enough for children to begin taking responsibility themselves.

How Children Discover What Matters to Them

Perhaps the most moving part of the conversation comes when Peter connects childhood freedom with passion.

He argues that children discover their interests through exploration. They play with one thing, then another. They encounter activities, ideas, people, and experiences without knowing in advance which ones will become significant. Eventually, something captures their attention deeply enough that they want to keep returning to it. Through repeated exploration, interest can become competence, and competence can become passion.

Peter has studied people whose adult careers grew from those early interests. He describes how self-directed experiences can help people eventually ask a profoundly adult question: how do I want to spend my life, and what do I want my work to mean?

This makes childhood freedom about much more than recreation. It becomes part of the process through which people discover identity, purpose, contribution, and meaning. When children are given room to explore what genuinely interests them, they have a chance to discover what matters before the demands of adulthood begin answering that question for them.

SPONSORED DEALS

FODZYME

We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.

SHOPIFY

It’s time to turn those “What Ifs” into SFX: CHA-CHING with Shopify today. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.

Vinted

Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn.

About Today’s Guest, Peter Gray

Dr. Peter Gray is an evolutionary psychologist, researcher, and author whose work has reshaped how we think about childhood, play, learning, and human development. A professor at Boston College,

Gray has spent decades examining how children naturally learn through exploration, play, and self-directed activity, and what happens when those opportunities are increasingly replaced by adult control, academic pressure, and structured achievement.

He is the author of Free to Learn and Restoring Childhood, in which he explores the developmental importance of childhood freedom, independence, autonomy, and agency. His research argues that children are naturally driven to become increasingly independent and that free play provides a crucial environment in which they learn to solve problems, negotiate with others, make decisions, and take responsibility for their own lives.

Are We Taking Childhood AWAY From Our Kids? | Dr. Peter Gray

Learn More and Connect

👉 All episode links, my books You Matter, Luma, and The Mattering Effect, The Ignited Life newsletter, and the Start Mattering store are here: linktr.ee/John_R_Miles

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Why do kids need more freedom?

Peter Gray argues that children need freedom because independence develops through practice. Children learn to make decisions, solve problems, negotiate with others, and take responsibility when they have meaningful opportunities to direct their own activities.

What is the importance of free play in child development?

Free play gives children opportunities to negotiate rules, manage conflicts, solve problems, and make decisions without adults determining every aspect of the experience. Peter describes these as lessons that extend beyond childhood because they prepare children for the demands of independent life.

How does intensive parenting affect children?

Peter describes intensive parenting as a pattern in which adults increasingly manage children’s activities and steer them toward future achievement. He argues that this can reduce opportunities for children to experience autonomy and develop their own sense of direction.

What does agency mean in childhood?

In this conversation, agency refers to the capacity to take charge of one’s own activities and make meaningful choices. Peter argues that agency is present from early childhood and can either be supported or suppressed by the environments adults create around children.

How do children discover their passions?

Peter argues that passion often emerges through exploration. Children encounter different activities through play, discover what captures their interest, return to those activities, and gradually develop skill and deeper commitment. He connects this process to the ability to eventually build a life and career around what genuinely matters to them.

How can parents give children more independence?

Peter suggests beginning with a conversation. Parents can ask their children what they would like to do independently that they are not currently allowed or encouraged to do, then consider where greater freedom is appropriate and where reasonable compromises can create a path toward independence.

The relationships we invest in, the character we develop, the trust we build, the work we refine when nobody is watching, and the sense of meaning that gives our choices direction rarely arrive with the same spectacle as the things competing for our attention. In this episode, I explore what happens when we confuse visibility with value and how we can become better at recognizing the difference.

Why We Confuse Visibility With Value

There is a subtle psychological shortcut operating beneath many of our decisions: when something is easy to notice, we tend to treat it as more important. A dramatic event demands a response. A visible achievement produces recognition. A crisis creates a story that people can gather around. Meanwhile, the person who quietly prevented the crisis, the relationship that has been strengthened through years of trust, or the strategic investment whose benefits may not appear for a decade can become almost invisible.

I illustrate this through one of the most remarkable demonstrations of salience in modern behavioral science. In 2007, Joshua Bell, one of the world’s premier violinists, stood in a Washington, D.C. metro station and played six classical masterpieces during the morning rush. More than a thousand people passed him. Most continued toward work. Bell collected just $32.17. Three nights earlier, those same pieces had filled Boston’s Symphony Hall, where people had paid more than $100 a ticket to hear him perform.

The fascinating part is that Bell’s ability had not changed. The violin had not changed. The music had not changed. The setting had changed, and with it, people’s perception of what they were experiencing. Without the stage, the ticket, the atmosphere, and the social cues telling them that something extraordinary was happening, many commuters could not recognize the value directly in front of them.

That is the lesson I want us to carry with us. We don’t respond to the signal; we respond to the stage.

And that observation reaches far beyond music. It raises an uncomfortable possibility about our own lives: how often do we evaluate something by its presentation rather than its substance?

The Hidden Cost of Chasing What Everyone Else Sees

The problem becomes more consequential when salience begins shaping our professional and personal decisions. Think about the workplace. The employee who quietly improves a process or prevents a costly mistake may create enormous value without ever receiving recognition. There is no dramatic meeting to celebrate a problem that never happened. By contrast, someone who becomes highly visible while responding to a crisis may receive the praise because their contribution is easier to see.

I have watched this dynamic play out in organizations throughout my career. It is one of the reasons I believe we need to become much more careful about distinguishing visibility from value. Managers, like stock market investors, routinely mistake visibility for value.

The same pattern can influence our personal ambitions. We may pursue a title because it signals success, choose an opportunity because others admire it, or measure progress through metrics that are easy to display. Over time, those external signals can become more influential than the underlying question of whether the life we are constructing actually feels meaningful.

This is where the distinction between attention and importance becomes essential. Attention tells us what our minds have noticed. It does not automatically tell us what deserves our commitment.

How Conformity Makes Noise Even Louder

There is another force that amplifies salience: other people. When everyone around us is responding to the same signal, agreement itself can begin to feel like evidence.

I connect this to Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments, where participants sometimes abandoned the evidence of their own eyes because everyone else in the room gave the same incorrect answer. The deeper lesson for me is about agency. When enough people move in the same direction, questioning that direction can feel more uncomfortable than following it.

I see that pressure in markets, organizations, careers, and relationships. We can remain in a job because everyone considers it prestigious. We can support an initiative because the room is enthusiastic. We can pursue a goal because it looks impressive from the outside. The more consensus surrounds the decision, the harder it becomes to ask whether the underlying assumption is actually sound.

Real adaptability therefore requires something more demanding than simply keeping pace. It requires enough independence to step outside the emotional current of the moment and examine what everyone else may have stopped questioning.

Inside Dell: What My Experience Taught Me About Salience

My experience at Dell adds a more personal dimension to this idea.

When I arrived at Dell in 2008, the company was developing the Dell Streak on Android while building a broader cloud ecosystem with an app store and developer tools. The strategy was ambitious, and our cloud architecture was, in many ways, ahead of what Apple had available at the time. The mobile division was led by Ron Garriques, a veteran of Motorola who understood the changing mobile landscape and believed Android represented the future.

Then Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, came to Dell’s headquarters. Dell’s enormous financial relationship with Microsoft created a powerful institutional dependency. What followed was a strategic decision to abandon the Android direction and move toward Microsoft’s mobile platform. Ron fought to preserve the existing roadmap, but leadership ultimately overruled him.

I remember the meeting that followed. Ron entered the room and said, “We are dead on arrival.” The product failed, Dell lost its opportunity in the smartphone revolution, and Ron left the company within six months.

The lesson I took from that experience is not simply about one corporate decision. It is about how powerful immediate pressures can become when they obscure a quieter possibility. Leadership became preoccupied with protecting an enormous existing revenue relationship while the future was developing somewhere else.

That same pattern can happen inside our own lives. Sometimes the loudest concern is the thing we are most afraid to lose, while the quieter opportunity is the thing that could ultimately matter more.

In this episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why human beings are naturally drawn toward what is novel, dramatic, visible, and emotionally salient, even when those signals tell us very little about lasting value.
• What the Joshua Bell experiment reveals about the way context and presentation can alter our perception of extraordinary talent.
• How the distinction between visibility and value plays out in workplaces, leadership, markets, and our personal decisions.
• What John’s experience at Dell revealed about the consequences of allowing immediate institutional pressures to overwhelm a quieter strategic opportunity.
• Why trust, dignity, culture, and human connection can create enormous long-term value even though they are difficult to capture in conventional measurements.
• How the Signal Audit can help you examine whether the things receiving your attention are actually worthy of your time, energy, and commitment.

Why the Most Valuable Things Are Often Difficult to Measure

One of the most consequential ideas in this episode concerns the limitations of measurement.

Modern organizations are exceptionally good at measuring what can be quantified. Revenue can be calculated. Hours can be tracked. Output can be compared. Customer acquisition can be modeled. Quarterly performance can be placed into a spreadsheet.

Human dignity is harder to put into a cell.

So is trust. So is belonging. So is whether an employee feels that their contribution matters.

I draw on Alex Edmans’s research to explain why this matters. According to the research we discuss in the episode, companies with stronger employee trust, inclusion, and dignity outperformed peers by 2.3% to 3.8% per year across nearly three decades.

The implication reaches beyond corporate performance. Some of the forces that shape our lives most profoundly are difficult to quantify precisely because they are relational and cumulative. A culture becomes healthy through thousands of interactions. Trust develops through repeated experiences. A person’s sense that they matter can be shaped by a single conversation and reinforced across years.

This is one reason I describe mattering as foundational rather than decorative. When people know they are seen, trusted, and valued, the resulting effects can extend into performance, relationships, resilience, and long-term commitment.

The things that are hardest to measure can sometimes be the things whose absence becomes most obvious only after they have been lost.

The Signal Audit: A Better Way to Decide What Matters

If salience can distort our perception, then intentional living requires a way to slow the process down. That is why I developed what I call the Signal Audit.

The first question is deceptively simple:

Would I Still Want This Without the Applause?

Imagine that nobody could see the decision you are considering. There would be no recognition, no title, no social media announcement, and no opportunity to explain it to anyone else.

Would you still choose it?

That question gets underneath external validation and asks us to examine the experience itself. If the applause disappeared, would the daily reality still hold enough substance to make the commitment worthwhile?

The second question is equally revealing:

What Am I Too Excited or Afraid to Notice?

This question invites another perspective into the decision. I recommend finding someone whose judgment you trust and asking them what you may be too excited or too afraid to see.

That is an act of intellectual humility. It acknowledges that our emotional investment can make certain evidence difficult to perceive. The goal is not to surrender our judgment to someone else. It is to make sure our judgment has enough information to operate honestly.

I think of this as inviting disconfirming evidence into the room before reality forces it in on its own schedule.

A Simple Signal Audit for Your Own Life

Take one decision, commitment, project, or relationship that currently occupies a significant amount of your attention.

1. Remove the applause. Ask whether you would still choose it if nobody knew about it.
2. Separate visibility from value. Identify what the situation makes easy to notice and what might be harder to see.
3. Ask someone you trust what you might be too excited or afraid to notice.
4. Identify the quiet foundation. Look for the relationship, habit, principle, or long-term investment that deserves more attention.
5. Decide where your best energy should go next.

The purpose isn’t to eliminate ambition or ignore measurable results. It is to make sure that the things receiving our energy are connected to the things we actually value.

The Mattering Effect: What Happens When We Learn to See People Differently

This episode connects directly to my new book, The Mattering Effect, and that connection became clearer to me as I worked through these ideas.

The Mattering Effect by John R. Miles as a Must Read by the Next Big Idea Book Club (image)

I have spent much of my career around environments where performance is measured constantly. We measure revenue, productivity, growth, efficiency, market share, and outcomes. Those measurements have their place. They help us understand what is happening.

But somewhere along the way, we can start believing that what is measurable is the whole story.

It isn’t.

Think about the person who stays late to help a colleague through a difficult moment. Think about the manager who remembers something important about an employee’s life and asks about it months later. Think about the teammate whose steady presence prevents a group from falling apart during a difficult period. None of those moments necessarily produces a number that appears on a quarterly dashboard. Yet those experiences can change how someone feels about their work, their relationships, and even themselves.

That is why the idea of mattering belongs in this conversation about signal and noise. If we only pay attention to what is easy to measure, we can overlook some of the forces that determine whether people actually flourish.

The research Alex Edmans and I discussed reinforces that point. Environments where people feel seen, trusted, and valued can produce effects that accumulate over time. Mattering is connected to the deeper human experience underneath the spreadsheet.

And that raises a question I keep returning to: What would change in your life if you became better at noticing the people, relationships, values, and quiet forms of progress that are already creating meaning around you?

That is part of what I explore in The Mattering Effect: the psychology of why we need to know that we matter and what happens when the environments around us either reinforce or erode that experience.

If this episode made you think about where your attention has been going, I invite you to take that reflection one step further. The Mattering Effect is available October 6. You can learn more and preorder your copy at matteringeffect.com.

Stop Chasing the Loudest Thing in the Room

The crowd will continue to respond to what is immediate, visible, dramatic, and easy to understand. That is part of being human. The more important question is whether we allow the crowd’s attention to determine our own.

As I wrap up this episode, I want to bring the question back to you. Look at your current week and consider where you may be giving your best energy to a loud distraction or a comfortable fear while starving a quieter foundation that genuinely matters.

That question is worth sitting with because our lives are shaped less by the things we notice once than by the things we repeatedly give our attention to.

A meaningful life is built through those repeated choices. It is built through the conversation we keep showing up for, the work we continue refining, the person we make time to notice, the value we refuse to compromise, the relationship we nurture when there is nothing to post about, and the purpose we continue pursuing when there is no immediate applause.

The signal is often there.

The challenge is learning to recognize it.

Enjoy the Show? Listen to Episode 825

If you’ve ever wondered why the loudest thing in the room can feel more important than the thing that actually matters, Episode 825 explores the psychology of salience, the hidden cost of confusing visibility with value, and how to recognize the quiet signals that shape a meaningful life.

I created The Mattering Effect as a deeper framework for intentional living, meaningful connection, human dignity, and building a life grounded in what truly matters. The book is available wherever books are sold.

Listen to Episode 825 of Passion Struck with me on Spotify, or watch the full episode on our YouTube Channel.

For weekly companion essays, practical toolkits, and interactive reflections, join our community at The Ignited Life on Substack.

SPONSORED DEALS

FODZYME: We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.

Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.

About the Author

I’m the author of Passion Struck, winner of the Gold Stevie® Award for Best Business Book and a Next Big Idea Club Must-Read, and the host of the Passion Struck podcast, with more than 85 million downloads.

As a former Fortune 50 executive and U.S. Navy officer, I’ve spent more than two decades synthesizing insights from psychology, neuroscience, behavioral science, leadership, and human flourishing to understand why so many people quietly lose their sense of significance despite outward success.

My work has been featured in Fortune, Inc., Forbes, ABC, NBC, Fox, and Writer’s Digest, and I’ve appeared on leading podcasts including 10% Happier with Dan Harris, The Next Big Idea Daily, and FranklinCovey On Leadership.

Why You’re Paying Attention to the WRONG Things | John R. Miles Explains

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean to confuse visibility with value?

When I talk about confusing visibility with value, I’m describing the tendency to assume that something deserves greater importance simply because it is easier to see, measure, or talk about. In this episode, I explore how this happens in markets, workplaces, leadership, and our personal decisions.

What is salience in psychology?

Salience refers to the tendency for certain stimuli to capture our attention because they are particularly noticeable, novel, dramatic, or emotionally significant. I use salience to explain why we can overlook quiet but important forms of value while responding strongly to whatever is most conspicuous.

Why do people pay more attention to dramatic information?

Dramatic information is easier for our attention systems to detect and remember. Because it stands out from its surroundings, it can feel more important than information that is gradual, subtle, or difficult to measure. The Joshua Bell story illustrates how strongly context and presentation can influence what we notice.

Why do we confuse attention with importance?

I think part of the problem is that attention feels like a signal of significance. When something is urgent, novel, or emotionally charged, our minds naturally prioritize it. But something can capture our attention without deserving our long-term commitment. That distinction is central to this episode.

How can I make better decisions when everyone agrees with me?

I recommend creating space for disagreement before making a major decision. Find someone whose perspective you trust and ask them what you might be too excited or too afraid to notice. Inviting disconfirming evidence into the conversation can help you see what the momentum of the group may be obscuring.

What is the Signal Audit?

The Signal Audit is a framework I use to separate what is genuinely valuable from what is simply attracting attention. I ask two foundational questions: Would I still want this without the applause? And what am I too excited or afraid to notice? From there, I look for the quiet foundations that deserve more of my energy.

How can I tell whether something actually matters to me?

I start by removing the external validation. Imagine that nobody else could see, praise, or know about the choice you’re considering. Would you still want it? That question can reveal how much of our motivation comes from genuine meaning and how much comes from recognition.

Why are important things often difficult to measure?

Many of the forces that shape our lives develop through relationships and accumulation rather than immediate outputs. Trust, dignity, culture, belonging, and human connection don’t always fit neatly into conventional metrics, yet they can have profound long-term consequences for individuals and organizations. That’s one of the reasons I believe we need to become better at recognizing value that doesn’t immediately appear on a spreadsheet.

Their collaboration brings together two bodies of work that might initially seem separate. Gregory Stock has spent decades designing questions that help people examine what they value and how they understand themselves. Scott Simon has built his work around practicing courage through deliberate encounters with discomfort. When those ideas meet, a stronger possibility emerges. A question can expose something we have been protecting ourselves from seeing, while answering it honestly can require the very courage we are trying to develop.

The result is a different way of thinking about courage. It is less about becoming fearless and more about becoming willing to look honestly at what matters, understand what fear is doing in our lives, and decide what we are prepared to do next.

How Questions and Courage Work Together

Courage often begins before the visible act of bravery. It begins in the moment when we recognize that something matters enough to require a response from us. That response might be a conversation, a decision, an admission, or a willingness to move toward something that makes us uncomfortable.

Gregory Stock describes courage in precisely these everyday terms. When he talks about turning toward fear, he is not advocating reckless behavior or ignoring genuine danger. He is talking about the many ordinary situations in which discomfort becomes a reason to postpone action. We delay the call, avoid the conversation, hesitate to make the decision, and gradually allow the unresolved issue to occupy space in our lives. Gregory sees these moments as opportunities to practice courage through small, deliberate steps.

Scott Simon brings a complementary perspective from his work with courage. He explains that the area where people often struggle most is not physical courage or even ethical courage, but the ability to ask and answer hard questions. A well-crafted question can move beneath the surface and bring us into contact with parts of ourselves that ordinary conversation rarely reaches.

That connection is central to their collaboration. Before courage becomes action, there is often a moment of recognition. A question can create that moment by asking us to pause long enough to see something we have been avoiding.

What Difficult Questions Reveal About Us

Gregory describes questions and storytelling as two fundamental elements of human interaction. A question invites a story, the story reveals something, that revelation generates another question, and the conversation continues. The process is unpredictable, which is precisely what makes it valuable. People begin revealing experiences, childhood memories, challenges, beliefs, and aspirations that they may never have had an opportunity to articulate before.

This is also why the questions Gregory and Scott create are not designed to produce predetermined answers. Gregory emphasizes that there is no right or wrong response. The point is to explore who we are and what we care about rather than determine whether someone has answered correctly.

Scott describes one question in particular as having an unusual ability to reach the core of the stories people tell themselves: what is one lie you are telling yourself to keep yourself safe, but is really holding you back?

When Scott answers that question personally, he recognizes a belief that he needs other people’s expertise to do his best work. His reflection leads him toward a more difficult realization: ultimately, he has to trust his own intuition and recognize that he is responsible for the essential work. The value of the question comes from its ability to expose a protective story that has outlived its usefulness.

That is one of the deeper functions of self-reflection. A useful question does not necessarily give us an immediate solution. It can show us the structure of the problem more clearly.

How Vulnerability Turns Questions Into Connection

A question can remain intellectual, or it can become personal. The difference often depends on whether we are willing to answer it honestly.

Scott describes what happens when people cross that threshold together. There can be discomfort in entering a vulnerable conversation, particularly because we cannot control how another person will respond. Yet once people take that step, the experience can produce a sense of liberation and connection.

The family dinner story Scott shares illustrates this beautifully. He describes asking his family, “Who’s a hero of yours and why?” Everyone put down their phones and began answering. His 83-year-old father identified Scott’s mother, who was sitting beside him and living with Parkinson’s disease, as his hero. What began as a simple question became an unexpectedly emotional moment of recognition and connection.

The significance of the story lies partly in its ordinariness. No elaborate exercise was required. Someone simply asked a question that gave the people around the table permission to say something meaningful.

Gregory’s description of questions and stories helps explain why this happens. One question can generate several more, and each answer can reveal another layer of the person responding. The conversation becomes less about exchanging information and more about discovering one another.

In that sense, vulnerability is not merely a personal experience. It can become a social experience. When one person risks being honest, they often make it easier for someone else to do the same.

What Fear Is Asking You to Avoid

Fear has a useful function because it can alert us to genuine danger. The difficulty begins when the nervous system treats uncertainty and discomfort as though they carry the same significance as actual threat.

Gregory’s distinction is important. Many of the things people postpone are not dangerous. They are uncomfortable. That discomfort can still be powerful enough to influence behavior, particularly when we have become accustomed to protecting ourselves from uncertainty. His approach is to examine that reaction and, when the situation is safe, turn toward what creates discomfort rather than automatically moving away from it.

Scott has encountered the same dynamic through his practice of engaging strangers. He describes buying coffee for people and starting conversations while waiting for their orders. Even after doing this hundreds of times, he says there is still uncertainty because he cannot know how another person will respond. Yet the overwhelming majority of those encounters became positive experiences. The conversations often began with simple questions about who someone was and what was exciting them in life.

That experience illustrates something important about courage. Repetition does not necessarily eliminate uncertainty. Instead, it can change our relationship with uncertainty. We learn through experience that discomfort can be tolerated, that awkwardness does not have to become catastrophe, and that an action we initially resist can sometimes lead somewhere unexpectedly meaningful.

The question, then, becomes less about how to eliminate fear and more about understanding what fear is preventing us from discovering.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• Why asking and answering difficult questions can itself be an act of courage
• How meaningful questions reveal the fears, assumptions, and stories that shape our choices
• Why vulnerability can transform an ordinary exchange into genuine human connection
• How small acts of courage can gradually expand what you are willing to do
• Why some of the most important things we accomplish happen before we feel ready
• Which deeply human questions may be better explored with another person than outsourced to AI

Why Small Acts of Courage Matter

The most sustainable form of courage is often built through actions that appear insignificant from the outside.

Gregory describes courage as a kind of muscle that develops through repeated steps. Scott’s experiences with strangers illustrate the same principle from another direction. Each conversation is small, but every conversation provides another opportunity to practice moving through uncertainty.

There is also value in learning to recognize these moments after they happen. Gregory points out that people do courageous things regularly without necessarily interpreting them as courage. When we notice those actions and acknowledge them, we begin developing a more accurate understanding of what we are capable of doing.

This changes the way personal growth can be understood. Courage does not have to arrive as a new personality. It can develop through accumulated evidence. You ask the difficult question. You have the conversation. You make the decision. You discover that you were able to tolerate the uncertainty. The next time, you have that experience available to you.

Over time, the boundary of what feels possible can expand.

The Book That Started With a Question

There is a personal history behind The Book of Questions: Courage that makes the collaboration between Gregory and Scott particularly meaningful.

Scott tells John that his mother carried a dog-eared copy of Gregory’s original The Book of Questions in her purse when he was a teenager. His family used the book during gatherings, and for Scott, those conversations became an important experience of being heard. He describes himself as a shy kid who often lived an invisible life at school, yet around the family table, the questions gave him a voice and allowed him to feel that his opinions mattered.

Years later, Scott met Gregory on Zoom. As their friendship developed, they discovered an almost improbable overlap in their work. Gregory had spent decades pursuing the art of designing questions. Scott had spent much of his life exploring courage. Eventually, the obvious question emerged: what would happen if they brought those two disciplines together?

Their answer became The Book of Questions: Courage.

Scott explains that the questions were repeatedly tested between the two of them. They would take a question apart, discuss it, reformulate it, and bring their own experiences and vulnerabilities into the process until they reached what they felt was the essence of the idea.

That process helps explain why the book functions differently from a collection of advice. The questions are designed to create conversations rather than conclude them. Gregory describes the ideal question as one that leads to more questions, greater openness, and further exploration.

Scott has already seen what happens when one of those questions enters an ordinary family dinner. One question can keep people talking for an hour about things that matter to them. That is perhaps the most fitting description of the book’s purpose: it creates an opening, and then allows the people in the room to determine where the conversation goes.

Why You Shouldn’t Wait Until You Feel Ready

Near the end of the conversation, Scott chooses the final question in the book as the question that best captures the nature of courage:

“What is something extraordinary you’ve done and done well before you felt either ready or confident?”

His reasoning is revealing because it challenges one of our most persistent assumptions about action. We often imagine that confidence precedes meaningful behavior. We tell ourselves that once we have acquired enough knowledge, developed enough skill, or become sufficiently certain, we will finally be ready to act.

Scott’s experience suggests that the sequence often works differently. Many of the extraordinary things we do happen before we possess that feeling of readiness. Remembering those experiences can change how we interpret uncertainty in the present. Instead of seeing a lack of confidence as evidence that we should wait, we can recognize it as a familiar part of beginning something that matters.

Gregory follows the idea with another simple question: what is something courageous you have done this week?

That question brings courage back to the scale of everyday life. It asks us to notice the evidence that is already there. Perhaps courage has appeared in a conversation, a boundary, a decision, an apology, a creative risk, or a moment when we chose to act despite uncertainty.

The larger lesson is not that readiness is irrelevant. It is that readiness is not always a prerequisite for action. Sometimes we understand what we are capable of only after we have taken the step.

A Practical Experiment: Ask One Question You Have Been Avoiding

Choose one question that you have been postponing because you suspect the honest answer might require something from you.

Write the question down and answer it without trying to make the response more comfortable.

Then ask yourself one final question:

What is one small action I can take this week based on what I just learned?

Keep the action concrete and manageable. The purpose is not to resolve your entire life in one exercise. It is to turn reflection into movement.

When Questions Become a Way of Making People Matter

Gregory Stock and Scott Simon approach courage from different angles, yet their work converges on something deeply connected to John R. Miles’s The Mattering Effect. Gregory shows how meaningful questions help us uncover what people truly value, while Scott demonstrates how the courage to ask and answer those questions can create deeper human connection.

That connection sits at the heart of mattering. When we genuinely listen to someone’s answer, invite their story, and give them space to be vulnerable, we communicate something powerful: you are seen, your experience matters, and your presence has significance.

John’s upcoming book, The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth, explores that deeper science of feeling seen, valued, and needed. The book releases October 6, 2026, and follows his Passion Struck, which was previously selected as a Next Big Idea Club Must-Read.

As The Mattering Effect joins the Next Big Idea Club’s 2026 Must-Read conversation, this episode offers a fitting place to begin exploring the idea: sometimes the simplest way to help someone feel that they matter is to have the courage to ask a better question, and then truly listen to the answer.

Discover more about The Mattering Effect and John’s work at thematteringeffect.com

SPONSORED DEALS

FODZYME

We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.

SHOPIFY

It’s time to turn those “What Ifs” into SFX: CHA-CHING with Shopify today. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.

Vinted

Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn.

About Today’s Guests, Gregory Stock and Scott Simon

Gregory Stock, Ph.D. is the creator of The Book of Questions, the influential question series that has helped generations of readers use conversation and self-reflection to explore values, relationships, decisions, and personal beliefs. He holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from Harvard University and has written and spoken extensively across science, technology, ethics, and human behavior. His work has consistently explored the intersection between difficult questions and the choices people make when there is no obvious answer.

Scott Simon is the founder of Scare Your Soul, a movement dedicated to helping people practice courage through small, deliberate encounters with fear and discomfort. His work focuses on turning courage from an abstract ideal into something people can practice in everyday life. He is also the author of Scare Your Soul: 7 Powerful Principles to Harness Fear and Lead Your Most Courageous Life, and his approach emphasizes action, experimentation, and learning through direct experience.

What If the Question You’re Avoiding Is the One You NEED? | Gregory Stock and Scott Simon

Learn More and Connect

👉 All episode links, my books You Matter, Luma, and The Mattering Effect, The Ignited Life newsletter, and the Start Mattering store are here: linktr.ee/John_R_Miles

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

How do you build courage?

You build courage through repeated experiences of taking meaningful action while tolerating uncertainty or discomfort. Gregory Stock describes this as developing a small courage muscle through incremental steps, while Scott Simon emphasizes deliberately practicing behaviors that move beyond familiar comfort zones.

Can asking questions help you build courage?

Yes. Asking a difficult question can require us to confront something we would rather avoid, while answering it honestly can require even greater vulnerability. Scott describes the ability to ask and answer hard questions as one of the central challenges he encounters in his work with courage.

What question can reveal what is holding you back?

One of the questions Scott discusses is, “What is one lie you are telling yourself to keep yourself safe, but is really holding you back?” The question encourages people to examine protective narratives that may once have served a purpose but now restrict their choices.

What is the connection between courage and vulnerability?

Courage and vulnerability often meet when we reveal something meaningful without knowing how another person will respond. Scott describes the experience of asking and answering difficult questions with others as a process that can move people from discomfort toward connection.

Why do people wait until they feel ready?

Readiness can feel like a form of protection because it suggests that uncertainty will disappear once we have enough confidence, knowledge, or preparation. Scott’s reflection on the final question in the book suggests that many meaningful accomplishments happen before that feeling arrives.

What are small acts of courage?

Small acts of courage are ordinary decisions that require us to move through manageable discomfort because something matters to us. They can include initiating a difficult conversation, asking a vulnerable question, trusting your judgment, approaching someone new, or taking action on something you have been postponing.

How can questions create deeper relationships?

A thoughtful question can give another person permission to share experiences, memories, values, and emotions that ordinary conversation may not reach. Gregory describes questions and storytelling as a process in which each response can create another question, allowing a conversation to become progressively more personal and meaningful.

What questions should we keep uniquely human in the age of AI?

Scott argues that questions involving deep human emotion and lived experience deserve particular care. He explains that when he and Gregory develop questions, they bring their own histories, vulnerabilities, and passions into the process. Gregory adds that AI can generate prompts quickly but does not yet understand the human experiences that give profound questions their depth.

What is one question I can ask myself today?

A useful starting point comes from the final question Scott chose from the book: “What is something extraordinary you’ve done and done well before you felt either ready or confident?” The question encourages you to look backward for evidence that you have already acted courageously before certainty arrived.

How can I practice courage this week?

Choose one small action that you have been postponing because it feels uncomfortable rather than genuinely dangerous. Then take that action before you feel completely ready. The purpose is to create an experience that teaches you something about your own capacity to move through uncertainty.

We talk about confirmation bias, anchoring, herd behavior, overreaction, underreaction, and our tendency to create rational explanations for choices that may have been influenced by emotion. Along the way, Alex reveals why even extraordinary intelligence cannot make us immune to human psychology, why the information everyone notices is not always the information that matters most, and how learning to “see the other side” can help us recognize our blind spots before they shape our decisions.

Why Smart People Are Still Vulnerable to Bias

We often assume that intelligence gives us an advantage when navigating uncertainty. If someone has more knowledge, more experience, and stronger analytical abilities, it seems reasonable to expect that they will make better decisions. Alex’s research presents a more complicated picture. Cognitive biases are deeply embedded in human behavior, which means that expertise can coexist with the same psychological tendencies that affect everyone else.

Alex illustrates this through the story of Isaac Newton and the South Sea Bubble. Newton initially made money from the investment, sold his position, and then returned to the market as prices continued rising. The story is striking because Newton’s intellectual achievements are almost synonymous with human genius, yet his financial decision-making was still influenced by the same forces that affect investors today. Alex’s point is not really about Newton. It is about the limits of intelligence as a defense against our own psychology.

The same pattern appears in more ordinary decisions. We can become attached to an idea, interpret new information through the beliefs we already hold, and then use our intelligence to construct increasingly sophisticated reasons for why our original judgment must have been correct. Intelligence can make reasoning more powerful, but it does not necessarily determine where that reasoning begins.

The Cognitive Biases That Shape Our Decisions

Behavioral finance gives us a way to understand why markets sometimes behave in ways that seem inconsistent with purely rational decision-making. Alex explores several of the biases that influence how investors process information, including confirmation bias, anchoring, overreaction, underreaction, herd behavior, and the sunk cost fallacy.

Confirmation bias is particularly important because it affects the way we interpret evidence. We often begin with a particular perspective and then notice or interpret information in ways that support it. Anchoring creates another problem by allowing an initial number, expectation, or reference point to exert more influence than it deserves. Overreaction and underreaction describe what happens when investors give too much or too little weight to new information.

These tendencies become even more consequential when they interact. A person who is reluctant to admit that an investment was a mistake may find reasons to continue holding it. If other investors are doing the same thing, their behavior can reinforce the original conviction. What begins as an individual psychological tendency can therefore become a broader market phenomenon.

Why We Chase What Is Visible and Miss What Is Valuable

One of the most interesting ideas in the conversation is Alex’s discussion of salience. Human attention naturally gravitates toward information that is vivid, visible, recent, and easy to quantify. In financial markets, that can mean a dramatic announcement, a rapidly rising stock price, or a highly publicized trend captures attention while less visible information remains in the background.

Alex connects this idea to the way markets evaluate companies. Some of the factors that contribute to long term value are difficult to see on a balance sheet. Employee satisfaction, corporate culture, reputation, innovation, and human capital develop gradually and often lack the immediate visibility of financial metrics.

That creates an important tension. The information that attracts the most attention is not necessarily the information that has the greatest long-term significance. Alex’s research into employee satisfaction illustrates how something that appears qualitative or difficult to measure can still contain meaningful information about a company’s future performance.

This idea extends well beyond investing. In our own lives, we can become preoccupied with what is measurable, immediate, and publicly visible while overlooking quieter forms of value that accumulate over time. The things that matter most are not always the things that make the most noise.

When Individual Bias Becomes Collective Irrationality

A common assumption about markets is that individual mistakes should eventually cancel one another out. If some investors are too optimistic and others are too pessimistic, perhaps the collective result should move toward a rational assessment of value. Alex explains why this does not always happen.

When people share similar biases, their mistakes can reinforce one another. Herd behavior provides a powerful example. Investors see other people buying an asset, interpret that behavior as evidence that something important is happening, and then participate themselves. As more people join, the rising price can become another source of perceived validation.

This helps explain why markets can experience bubbles and periods of collective enthusiasm. The problem is not simply that individuals are irrational. It is that their psychological tendencies can become synchronized.

Alex also connects this idea to organizations and the importance of having people who challenge one another’s assumptions. Diversity of thought can help counteract biases when it introduces genuinely different perspectives and experiences. A group becomes more resilient when its members are willing to question one another rather than simply reinforce the same conclusions.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• Why intelligence does not protect us from cognitive biases, and what Isaac Newton’s experience in the South Sea Bubble reveals about the psychology of decision-making.
• How confirmation bias, anchoring, overreaction, underreaction, and herd behavior influence individual and collective decisions.
• Why highly visible information can attract disproportionate attention while quieter signals such as employee satisfaction and corporate culture remain overlooked.
• How shared biases can transform individual mistakes into collective irrationality within financial markets.
• Why AI may improve the quantitative side of decision-making while human biases continue influencing qualitative judgments.
• How deliberately seeking the other side of an argument can help reveal blind spots and lead to wiser decisions in investing, leadership, careers, relationships, and life.

Why We Chase What Is Visible and Miss What Is Valuable

One of the most interesting ideas in the conversation is Alex’s discussion of salience. Human attention naturally gravitates toward information that is vivid, visible, recent, and easy to quantify. In financial markets, that can mean a dramatic announcement, a rapidly rising stock price, or a highly publicized trend captures attention while less visible information remains in the background.

Alex connects this idea to the way markets evaluate companies. Some of the factors that contribute to long term value are difficult to see on a balance sheet. Employee satisfaction, corporate culture, reputation, innovation, and human capital develop gradually and often lack the immediate visibility of financial metrics.

That creates an important tension. The information that attracts the most attention is not necessarily the information that has the greatest long-term significance. Alex’s research into employee satisfaction illustrates how something that appears qualitative or difficult to measure can still contain meaningful information about a company’s future performance.

This idea extends well beyond investing. In our own lives, we can become preoccupied with what is measurable, immediate, and publicly visible while overlooking quieter forms of value that accumulate over time. The things that matter most are not always the things that make the most noise.

When the Crowd Loses Its Mind: Inside Alex Edmans’s New Book

There is a moment in our conversation when the discussion of individual bias starts to feel much bigger than investing. We are talking about Isaac Newton, one of the greatest thinkers in history, and how even he became caught up in the South Sea Bubble. That story provides an almost perfect entry point into Alex Edmans’s new book, The Madness of Markets, because the book begins with a deceptively simple observation: the people moving financial markets are human beings, and human beings bring their emotions, biases, stories, and social instincts with them.

Alex’s curiosity about this subject grew from an unusual place. While studying financial markets, he began noticing evidence that investor behavior could be influenced by things that traditional financial models would have difficulty explaining, including mood and even the outcome of sporting events. That line of inquiry eventually became part of a much broader investigation into why markets can overreact, underreact, or misreact to information. His new book, published in September 2026, takes those ideas and turns them into an accessible exploration of the psychology behind bubbles, crashes, hype cycles, and collective investment behavior.

What makes the book especially relevant to this conversation is that Alex isn’t simply interested in cataloguing the ways investors behave irrationally. He is interested in what we can learn from those mistakes. The Madness of Markets examines how narratives, emotion, social contagion, and our tendency to focus on salient information can push prices away from underlying fundamentals, while also exploring how investors can recognize those moments and make more disciplined decisions.

That brings us back to something Alex says near the end of our conversation: “See the other side.” The advice applies beautifully to his book. When everyone is captivated by the same story, chasing the same opportunity, or reacting to the same piece of information, the interesting question may be what the crowd has failed to notice. Sometimes the opportunity lies in examining the assumption that everyone else has accepted.

And that is ultimately why The Madness of Markets extends beyond finance. You don’t have to be a professional investor to recognize the psychology Alex describes. We all make decisions with incomplete information. We all develop narratives about what is happening. We all encounter moments when confidence, familiarity, social pressure, or fear of missing out can quietly influence our judgment.

The book becomes a kind of laboratory for understanding those tendencies. Markets simply make the consequences unusually visible. A price moves, a crowd follows, a story spreads, and suddenly millions of individual decisions become a collective force. Alex’s invitation is to step back from that momentum long enough to ask a more useful question: What am I seeing, and what might I be missing?

Why Stories Can Override Evidence

Alex’s work also explores our attraction to stories and the way narratives influence judgment. A compelling story can make a complex situation feel understandable because it gives events a beginning, a cause, and an outcome. The difficulty arises when the emotional power of the story becomes stronger than the evidence supporting it.

A single example can feel more convincing than a large body of statistical evidence because we can visualize it and remember it. This is one reason stories can be so persuasive in investing, business, and everyday life. We often remember the person who became wealthy from a particular investment while forgetting the many people who made similar choices and experienced very different outcomes.

Our existing beliefs can make this even more powerful. When a story confirms something we already believe, we are more inclined to accept it. Evidence that challenges the story requires more intellectual effort because it asks us to reconsider a conclusion we have already incorporated into our understanding of the world.

For Alex, becoming a better decision maker therefore requires more than collecting information. It requires examining how we select, interpret, and emotionally respond to that information.

How Seeing the Other Side Can Improve Your Decisions

The conversation ultimately moves from diagnosis toward a practical habit. Alex’s advice is simple: “See the other side.”

The power of this idea comes from its ability to interrupt the natural momentum of our own thinking. When we feel confident about an investment, a career decision, a relationship, or an important judgment, we can deliberately ask what someone who disagrees with us might see that we have overlooked. The exercise creates space between our first conclusion and the decision that follows.

Alex suggests taking this a step further when we cannot evaluate the opposing perspective objectively ourselves. Find someone you trust who is willing to disagree with you and ask that person to make the strongest possible case for the other side. The purpose is not to create disagreement for its own sake. It is to expose information and perspectives that our own biases may have filtered out.

This principle brings together many of the ideas we explore throughout the episode. Confirmation bias becomes easier to recognize when we actively seek contradictory evidence. Anchoring becomes easier to challenge when we question our initial reference point. Herd behavior becomes less powerful when we deliberately step outside the consensus. And the stories we tell ourselves become easier to examine when we invite someone else to question the narrative.

Ultimately, better decision-making is less about becoming perfectly rational and more about becoming aware of the conditions under which our judgment is most vulnerable. Seeing the other side gives us a practical way to create that awareness, especially when the stakes are high, and our own certainty feels strongest.

Discover The Mattering Effect: The Next Big Idea for a Life That Matters

Understanding how our minds make decisions is one part of living intentionally. The other is understanding what makes those decisions meaningful.

In his upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, John R. Miles explores the human need to feel that we matter and the role that mattering plays in how we experience belonging, purpose, relationships, and a meaningful life.

The ideas in this conversation with Alex Edmans create an interesting connection. Alex asks us to examine the assumptions that shape our decisions and deliberately seek perspectives that challenge our blind spots.

The Mattering Effect extends that spirit of intentionality into another fundamental question: How do we create lives and relationships in which people genuinely know that they matter?

If you’re interested in going deeper into these ideas, join the Next Big Idea Club and explore the thinking behind The Mattering Effect alongside the broader Passion Struck philosophy of living with greater intention.

SPONSORED DEALS

FODZYME

We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.

SHOPIFY

It’s time to turn those “What Ifs” into SFX: CHA-CHING with Shopify today. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.

Vinted

Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn.

About Today’s Guest, Alex Edmans

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School, where his research focuses on corporate finance, responsible business, sustainable investing, and behavioral finance. He earned his PhD in Finance from MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar after graduating from Oxford University and previously worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley. He later joined the Wharton faculty, where he became a tenured professor before moving to London Business School.

Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified before the UK Parliament, and presented to the World Bank Board of Directors. His TED talk, “What to Trust in a Post-Truth World,” and TEDx talks have reached millions of viewers. His work has appeared in publications including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, and Harvard Business Review, and he has been featured by major international media outlets.

He is the author of Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—and What We Can Do About It, and The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions and How to Exploit Them. He has also coauthored the widely used finance textbook Principles of Corporate Finance. His work has earned numerous teaching awards, and he has served in leadership and advisory roles across the finance and responsible investment communities.

What Makes Smart People Make BAD Decisions? Alex Edmans on Human BIAS

Learn More and Connect

👉 All episode links, my books You Matter, Luma, and The Mattering Effect, The Ignited Life newsletter, and the Start Mattering store are here: linktr.ee/John_R_Miles

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Why do smart people make bad decisions?

Because intelligence does not eliminate cognitive biases, emotions, social influence, or the tendency to interpret information through beliefs we already hold. Alex’s discussion of Isaac Newton illustrates how even extraordinary intelligence exists alongside ordinary human psychology.

What is confirmation bias?

Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new information in ways that support beliefs we already hold. Alex explains that we often begin with our own vantage point and then selectively interpret evidence through that perspective.

What is anchoring bias?

Anchoring occurs when an initial piece of information disproportionately influences subsequent judgments. In financial decision-making, an earlier price, estimate, or expectation can become a reference point that shapes how we evaluate everything that follows.

Why does herd behavior make decision-making worse?

When people share the same biases, their mistakes can reinforce one another rather than cancel out. Alex explains that financial markets are particularly susceptible because investors can observe what others are doing and become emotionally attached to particular investments.

Why do people make emotional decisions and then rationalize them?

People generally want to understand themselves as rational decision makers. After making an emotionally influenced decision, they can therefore construct explanations that make the decision appear more analytical than it originally was. Alex connects this pattern to investors who remain attached to losing investments while developing rational-sounding reasons for holding them.

How can I make better decisions?

Alex’s most practical recommendation is to see the other side. Identify the strongest argument against your position and consider what someone who disagrees with you might see that you have overlooked. If you cannot evaluate the issue objectively yourself, ask someone you trust who is willing to disagree with you to make that case.

Will AI eliminate human bias?

Alex argues that human bias is likely to persist even as AI improves market efficiency. As AI takes over more quantitative evaluations, human biases may increasingly appear in the qualitative decisions that remain under human control.

In this special solo episode of Passion Struck, John R. Miles explores The Verification Trap through two very different stories that arrived in the same week. Cole Brauer was told she was too small for the Southern Ocean, cut from a major offshore sailing team, and left without the apology or reversal that might have restored her confidence. Alongside Cole’s story, John examines psychologist Marisa Franco’s research on self-verification theory, contingencies of worth, and the way our internal stories can determine which evidence we allow ourselves to believe.

The deeper question is what happens when you stop waiting for the world to provide the verdict you need. John introduces the Verification Check, a simple two-question exercise designed to reveal the external proof you may be waiting on and help you consider what it would look like to move forward anyway.

What Is the Verification Trap?

The Verification Trap is the cycle of waiting for external proof before allowing yourself to believe that you are worthy, capable, or ready to act. The evidence can take many forms. It might be an apology from someone who hurt you, recognition for work you have done, a promotion that confirms your competence, or a relationship that seems to prove you are lovable.

The difficulty is that external evidence does not always change an internal belief. John opens the episode with a striking finding from psychology: for some people, receiving a sincere compliment can actually produce a physiological stress response.

When positive information conflicts with a deeply established view of the self, the compliment can feel threatening rather than reassuring.

This creates an uncomfortable possibility. You can spend years collecting evidence that you are worthy while simultaneously maintaining an internal theory that says you are not. The problem, as John explains through Marisa Franco’s research, can be less about the amount of evidence available and more about whether that evidence fits the story you already believe.

Why You Keep Waiting for Someone Else’s Approval

Waiting for approval can feel like a reasonable way to resolve uncertainty. If someone else says you belong, perhaps you can finally relax. If the person who rejected you admits they were wrong, perhaps the old wound will finally close. If a promotion confirms your value, perhaps you will finally feel secure.

Cole Brauer’s story reveals the limits of that expectation. A year before she became the first American woman to sail solo, nonstop, and unassisted around the world, Cole was cut from a major offshore sailing team and told she was too small for the Southern Ocean. She had flown to France and turned down paid work to make room for the opportunity, only to watch it disappear. She described herself as completely crushed.

The team never called her back. There was no apology, no reversal, and no moment when the people who doubted her acknowledged that they had been wrong. Yet exactly one year later, Cole was standing on a different dock preparing to sail around the planet alone. John’s observation is crucial: the verdict did not change. What changed was what Cole did with it.

That distinction applies far beyond sailing. You may still be waiting for someone to acknowledge what happened, recognize your contribution, or revise their opinion of you. Those things can matter. But when your ability to move forward becomes dependent on another person changing their mind, your future remains attached to a decision you do not control.

Why Achievement Doesn’t Always Make You Feel Worthy

Achievement can become another form of external verification. The mind creates a future condition in which the next accomplishment will finally settle the question of whether you are enough. Get the promotion. Reach the number. Earn the recognition. Build the relationship. Then, perhaps, you will finally feel worthy.

John connects this pattern to psychologist Carl Rogers’ idea of contingencies of worth, which Marisa Franco discusses in her research. When worth becomes conditional upon achievement, every accomplishment becomes another checkpoint rather than a place to rest. The finish line continues moving because the achievement was never the actual mechanism producing the sense of worth.

This helps explain why someone can become more successful while continuing to feel fundamentally uncertain about whether they deserve the success they have earned. External accomplishments provide real information about what a person has done. They cannot automatically rewrite an internal theory about who that person is.

The result can become what Marisa calls a “hamster wheel of worth,” where achievement provides temporary reassurance while simultaneously creating another standard that must be met. The deeper work involves examining the belief underneath the pursuit rather than assuming the next accomplishment will finally resolve it.

How Your Past Shapes What You Believe About Yourself

John’s discussion with Marisa Franco introduces another important layer: the role of memory in shaping self-worth. Researchers describe memory as a “database of self-esteem,” and John uses that idea to explain why old experiences can continue influencing how we interpret new ones.

Memories do more than preserve a record of what happened. They can influence what we expect to happen next. If your early experiences contain repeated rejection, exclusion, or disappointment, part of your mind may begin treating those experiences as a forecast rather than a history. Staying guarded can then feel protective because expecting rejection seems safer than being surprised by it.

This also explains why positive evidence can sometimes slide off without changing anything. Love arrives, but you question whether it is real. Success arrives, but you assume it will disappear. Someone praises you, but you search for the reason they must be mistaken.

John’s point is not that these reactions are personal failures. They can be strategies the mind developed in response to earlier experiences. Understanding that distinction matters because it creates room for curiosity. Instead of asking why you cannot simply believe something positive about yourself, you can begin asking what story is filtering the evidence and where that story came from.

Your worth, John observes, was never something a compliment could install, and it was never something a rejection could delete. Both are forms of information. The question is what your internal story allows that information to mean.

In this episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why external validation can fail to change a deeply held belief about yourself.
• How Cole Brauer transformed rejection into a reason to move rather than a reason to stop.
• Why achievement can create a “hamster wheel of worth” when success becomes the condition for feeling worthy.
• How memories can become a database that influences what evidence you believe about yourself.
• How to use John’s two-question Verification Check to identify the proof you are waiting for.
• Why building self-trust often begins with taking the smallest possible action before you have complete certainty.

What Cole Brauer Can Teach Us About Going Anyway

Cole’s story provides the episode’s central example because she demonstrates what happens when someone moves forward without receiving the external verification they once might have needed.

After being rejected by the sailing team, Cole could have interpreted the experience as confirmation that she did not belong. Instead, she developed a different relationship with the setback. When John asked about her philosophy, she explained that hitting rock bottom meant she could go back up. For her, rock bottom became data that she was about to move rather than evidence that she should stop.

That philosophy was tested again during her solo circumnavigation. Two weeks into the voyage, she experienced what she called “the scaries,” an identity crisis that emerged after leaving behind the shore team and the familiar world around her. She found stability partly through her mother’s blunt encouragement and partly through paying attention to the natural world, where predictability helped calm her anxiety.

What stands out is what was absent. Nobody from the team that rejected her returned with an apology. Nobody reversed the verdict. The proof she had been waiting for never arrived.

She went anyway.

John describes this as Cole rewriting her internal database in real time, on her own terms, before anyone else agreed with her. Her story demonstrates that resilience does not necessarily require the world to revise its judgment. Sometimes it requires changing what that judgment is allowed to mean.

The Mattering Effect: When Your Life Becomes Its Own Evidence

A few years ago, John found himself rebuilding his life after divorce. The experience forced him into a strange position familiar to anyone who has had to begin again: he had to make decisions without knowing in advance whether those decisions would lead somewhere meaningful.

There was no outside voice guaranteeing that the next chapter would work. There was no certificate of approval waiting at the beginning of the road. The work had to happen before the evidence existed.

That period eventually became part of the story behind Passion Struck and The Mattering Effect, the book John spent two years writing. Looking back, the sequence becomes clearer. The proof came after he moved, not before.

That idea sits close to the heart of The Mattering Effect. A meaningful life cannot be built entirely around waiting for the world to confirm that your choices matter. Meaning emerges through the choices you make, the relationships you cultivate, the values you practice, and the way you show up for the people and purposes that matter to you.

The Verification Trap asks whether you are waiting for someone else to confirm your worth. The Mattering Effect takes the conversation one step further: what would change if you began living from the understanding that your life can matter before anyone else verifies it?

If this episode resonated with something you are experiencing, The Mattering Effect offers a deeper exploration of intentional living, meaningful connection, and the forces that shape whether we feel that our lives matter. Explore the book and continue the journey with John.

How to Stop Waiting for Proof and Build Self-Trust

The practical framework John develops from Cole’s story and Marisa’s research is the Verification Check. It begins with two questions.

First: What specific proof, such as an apology, a promotion, or someone finally saying you belong, are you currently waiting on before you allow yourself to move forward?

Second: If that proof never arrives, is there a version of this where you go anyway?

The second question changes the nature of the problem. Instead of asking when someone else will provide the evidence, you begin asking what action remains available to you without it.

John connects this idea to his own life. After going through a divorce, he found himself rebuilding a career and a life that looked very different from the one he had before. There was no external validation telling him that everything would work out or that he was on the right track before he began making changes. The evidence came afterward.

That sequence matters. Sometimes we expect proof to precede action when the reverse is what actually happens. You move, learn, adapt, and act again. Over time, those actions become evidence about what you are capable of doing.

This is why John’s final assignment is deliberately small. Identify the thing you have been waiting for permission to do and find the smallest possible version of that action. You do not need to make a grand leap. You need to leave the dock.

Real adaptability, in the identity and belonging sense of the word, involves building a theory of yourself honest enough that neither rejection nor praise gets to be the deciding vote. It means learning to receive feedback without handing over authorship of your identity.

The proof you are waiting for might never come. That does not mean you are not ready.

Enjoy the Show? Listen to Episode 822

If you’ve ever wondered why you keep waiting for an apology, promotion, recognition, or some other piece of proof before allowing yourself to move forward, Episode 822 explores The Verification Trap and the two questions that can help you recognize when external validation has become a condition for trusting yourself.

Explore The Mattering Effect for a deeper framework on intentional living, meaningful connection, and building a life grounded in what truly matters. The book is available wherever books are sold.

Listen to Episode 822 of Passion Struck with John R. Miles on Spotify, or watch the full episode on our YouTube Channel.

For weekly companion essays, practical toolkits, and interactive reflections, join our community at The Ignited Life on Substack.

SPONSORED DEALS

FODZYME: We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.

Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.

About the Author

John R. Miles is the author of Passion Struck, winner of the Gold Stevie® Award for Best Business Book and a Next Big Idea Club Must-Read, and host of the Passion Struck podcast, with more than 85 million downloads.

A former Fortune 50 executive and U.S. Navy officer, he has spent more than two decades synthesizing insights from psychology, neuroscience, behavioral science, leadership, and human flourishing to understand why so many people quietly lose their sense of significance despite outward success.

His work has been featured in Fortune, Inc., Forbes, ABC, NBC, Fox, and Writer’s Digest, and he has appeared on leading podcasts including 10% Happier with Dan Harris, The Next Big Idea Daily, and FranklinCovey On Leadership.

What Happens When the Proof You’re Waiting For NEVER Comes? | John R. Miles

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Verification Trap?

The Verification Trap is the cycle of waiting for external proof, such as approval, recognition, an apology, or achievement, before allowing yourself to believe that you are worthy or capable of moving forward.

Why do I need validation from other people?

External validation can provide useful information about how other people perceive your worth, belonging, or competence. The difficulty arises when that feedback becomes the condition for determining your identity or deciding whether you are allowed to move forward.

How do I stop seeking external validation?

Start by identifying the specific verdict or piece of proof you are waiting for. Then ask whether you would still move forward if that proof never arrived. From there, identify the smallest action you can take without waiting for external permission.

How do I stop caring what other people think?

The goal is not to eliminate other people’s opinions. Feedback can contain useful information. The important distinction is between listening to someone’s perspective and allowing their perspective to become the deciding authority over your identity.

What is the Verification Check?

John’s Verification Check consists of two questions: What specific external proof are you waiting for before you allow yourself to move forward? And if that proof never arrives, is there a version of this where you go anyway?

Why doesn’t success make me feel worthy?

When achievement conflicts with an underlying belief about your worth, the achievement may not change the deeper belief. The episode draws on Marisa Franco’s discussion of self-verification theory and contingencies of worth to explain why someone can continue accumulating accomplishments while struggling to internalize the positive evidence those accomplishments provide.

How to feel worthy when external validation never seems to reach the deepest part of you?

In Episode 821 of the Passion Struck Podcast, John R. Miles sits down with Dr. Marisa G. Franco, bestselling author of Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment, for a deeper conversation about self-worth, insecurity, attachment, memory, authenticity, and emotional healing.

Drawing from the ideas in Worth, Marisa challenges the familiar idea that self-esteem is built primarily through positive thinking, accomplishments, compliments, or becoming a more confident version of yourself. Her perspective is that insecurity can make those things difficult to internalize in the first place. If something positive contradicts the way you have learned to see yourself, it may simply slide off.

The deeper work begins with how you relate to yourself.

Marisa describes worth as being able to experience your emotions from a grounded place where every feeling within you matters.

That changes the question from “How can I become more impressive?” to something much more intimate: Can I meet myself honestly, including the parts of me I have learned to avoid, suppress, or shame?

Why Success Doesn’t Always Make You Feel Worthy

You can have a successful career, meaningful relationships, and people who genuinely love you, yet still feel as though you are somehow not enough. Marisa explains that when someone struggles with self-worth, positive experiences do not always penetrate their existing sense of self. Research she discusses suggests that compliments, positive affirmations, and other forms of external validation can sometimes conflict with deeply rooted beliefs about who we are.

This helps explain why achievement can become such an exhausting pursuit. If you believe that the next accomplishment will finally make you feel worthy, you can become trapped in what Marisa calls a “hamster wheel of worth.” The achievement keeps changing, but the underlying question remains the same: When will I finally be enough?

The Hamster Wheel of Worth

Marisa draws on Carl Rogers’s concept of contingencies of worth, the idea that we can learn to experience our worth as dependent on what we accomplish.

The pattern can become deceptively simple:

Achievement leads to approval.
Approval leads to temporary worth.
The feeling fades.
Another achievement becomes necessary.

Marisa describes internalizing these contingencies as being trapped in a “hamster wheel of worth.” The belief that one more accomplishment will finally make you feel worthy keeps the hierarchy alive rather than resolving it.

This can affect far more than careers. Worth can become tied to appearance, relationships, grades, status, performance, recognition, or being perceived as successful.

The result is an exhausting question: What do I need to accomplish before I am finally allowed to feel enough?

How Attachment Shapes Your Sense of Worth

Our earliest relationships can influence the expectations we carry into later relationships. Marisa explains that attachment patterns can develop as strategies for navigating experiences of love, rejection, responsiveness, and emotional safety. Anxious patterns can involve learning that love must be earned, while avoidant patterns can involve withdrawing from closeness after experiences in which reaching out felt painful or unsafe.

Rather than using attachment styles as labels that determine who we are, Marisa encourages compassion for the insecurity underneath them. These patterns may have helped us navigate earlier environments, even if they no longer accurately predict what will happen in the present.

Why Authenticity Matters More Than Performing Security

One of the most personal parts of the conversation comes when Marisa reflects on a relationship in which she tried so hard to behave securely that she stopped checking in with her own emotional reality. She focused on understanding and regulating the other person while neglecting her own hurt and needs.

Eventually, she recognized that pushing her own experience away in order to care for someone else was an act of self-abandonment. For Marisa, genuine security became less about performing the right relationship behaviors and more about authenticity, integrity, honesty, and knowing where you actually are.

That insight leads to one of the episode’s central ideas: healing is authenticity. Healing does not mean becoming perfect or finding every correct tool. It begins with being willing to acknowledge your hurt and insecurities without shaming yourself for having them.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• Why you can feel unworthy even when you are loved, successful, or surrounded by people
• Why compliments, positive affirmations, and achievement may not resolve deeply rooted insecurity
• How attachment patterns and childhood experiences shape expectations about love, rejection, and belonging
• What “open memories” are and how unresolved experiences can continue influencing self-worth
• Why Marisa believes healing begins with authenticity rather than perfection or performing security
• How memory reconsolidation, emotional integration, and self-compassion can change our relationship with painful experiences

How Childhood Memories Continue Shaping Self-Worth

Marisa describes memories as foundational to the way we develop a sense of self. As she puts it, “Memories are the database of self-esteem.” Experiences of rejection, abuse, or neglect can become part of an internal model that influences what we expect from the world and from other people.

This means that insecurity can sometimes be understood as an adaptation. If your early experiences taught you that rejection or harm was likely, anticipating it could have helped you navigate that environment. The challenge is that an old prediction can continue influencing your interpretation of new experiences long after the original circumstances have changed.

What Are Open Memories and How Do They Affect Self-Esteem?

Marisa introduces the concept of open memories to describe painful experiences that still feel unresolved. These memories do not feel completely behind us. They can continue carrying intense emotions such as sadness, anger, or rumination because we have not fully made meaning of what happened.

When a memory remains open, the present can become filtered through the lens of the past. A current interaction may activate expectations formed through an earlier experience, making an old emotional reality feel relevant all over again.

Marisa also discusses memory reconsolidation, explaining that when we revisit a memory, we can change the way that memory sits in the brain. Bringing a painful experience into awareness while introducing something new, such as care or another perspective, may create an opportunity to develop new meaning around it.

Why Feeling Worthy Means Allowing Yourself to Evolve

The final piece of the conversation brings self-worth back to identity. Marisa explores how becoming attached to a fixed version of ourselves can make ordinary human emotions feel threatening. If you have built your identity around being strong, competent, successful, or capable, experiencing anxiety, grief, vulnerability, or uncertainty can seem like evidence that you are failing to be who you are supposed to be.

Marisa offers another possibility: you do not have to remain the person you once were. She explains, “The only thing true about life is evolution,” and emphasizes that you do not have to live up to an old sense of self in order to be acceptable or worthy. Instead, you can acknowledge what you actually feel, where you are, and what your body and emotions are experiencing in each moment.

That may be the deeper answer to how to feel worthy. You do not have to construct a perfect identity and then prove that you deserve to belong. You can begin by allowing every part of your experience to matter, including the parts you are still learning to understand.

How Feeling Worthy Connects to The Mattering Effect

The question at the heart of Dr. Marisa G. Franco’s work is deeply connected to one of the central questions John R. Miles explores in his upcoming book, The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth: What happens when we stop believing that we matter?

Marisa’s work examines what happens internally when our sense of worth becomes dependent on achievement, approval, relationships, or other forms of external validation. John’s work takes that conversation one step further by exploring the broader science of mattering: the human need to feel seen, valued, and needed, and what happens when that sense of significance gradually erodes.

That connection is especially important because you can be highly accomplished and still experience a profound sense of disconnection from your own significance. The Mattering Effect explores what John calls the Mattering Gap, the space between what you give to the world and how much you actually feel that you matter. The book brings together research from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral science through the M.A.T.T.E.R. framework: Meaning, Autonomy, Trust, Time, Energy, and Reciprocity.

Where Marisa asks us to stop abandoning the parts of ourselves that feel unworthy, John examines how we can build lives, relationships, and environments where people experience genuine significance rather than having to constantly prove their value through what they accomplish.

Together, these ideas point toward a powerful distinction: being valuable because of what you produce is different from experiencing that you matter simply because you are part of something meaningful.

Go Deeper With The Mattering Effect

John R. Miles’s new book, The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth, is released October 6, 2026, and is currently available for preorder. The book explores why people can feel invisible, disconnected, or insignificant even when they appear successful from the outside, and offers the M.A.T.T.E.R. framework as a practical way to rebuild meaning, agency, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity.

Preorder The Mattering Effect

Join the Next Big Idea Club

If this conversation about self-worth, significance, psychology, and human flourishing resonates with you, you can go deeper through The Next Big Idea Club, where John R. Miles’s work continues the conversation around the ideas shaping how we understand human potential, meaning, and intentional living.

John’s first book, Passion Struck, was selected as a Next Big Idea Club Must-Read, and The Mattering Effect continues that broader exploration of what it means to build a life that matters.

SPONSORED DEALS

FODZYME

We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.

SHOPIFY

It’s time to turn those “What Ifs” into SFX: CHA-CHING with Shopify today. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.

Vinted

Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn.

About Today’s Guest, Marisa G. Franco

Dr. Marisa G. Franco is a New York Times bestselling author, psychologist, professor, and speaker whose work explores the science of self-worth, attachment, relationships, and belonging. She is the author of Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment and Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends.

With a PhD in counseling psychology from the University of Maryland, Marisa translates psychological research into practical insights that help people build healthier relationships with themselves and others.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, Good Morning America, The Telegraph, and Psychology Today. In her work and speaking, she explores how attachment, memory, authenticity, and emotional healing shape our capacity to feel worthy, connected, and resilient.

You Don’t Have to Prove You Are Worthy | Marisa G. Franco

Learn More and Connect

👉 All episode links, my books You Matter, Luma, and The Mattering Effect, The Ignited Life newsletter, and the Start Mattering store are here: linktr.ee/John_R_Miles

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

How Do I Feel Worthy?

Feeling worthy begins with developing a relationship with yourself in which your emotions, needs, insecurities, and experiences are allowed to matter. Marisa G. Franco argues that worth is not something you finally earn through achievement, approval, or becoming more impressive. Instead, it involves turning toward yourself with care and acknowledging where you actually are without shame.

Why Do I Feel Unworthy Even When I Am Loved?

You can receive genuine love and still struggle to internalize it when that experience conflicts with an established sense of self. Marisa explains that people with low self-esteem may have difficulty accepting positive experiences because they do not resonate with how they already understand themselves. Early memories of rejection, neglect, or other painful experiences can become templates that influence how we interpret relationships later in life.

Why Doesn’t Positive Self-Talk Always Work?

Positive affirmations can sometimes conflict with deeply held beliefs about the self. Marisa discusses research suggesting that people with low self-esteem may respond negatively to compliments or affirmations because the positive message does not match their existing sense of identity. When that happens, simply repeating that you are worthy or loved may not address the deeper source of insecurity.

What Are Open Memories?

Open memories are experiences that still feel unresolved rather than fully behind us. Marisa describes them as memories that may continue to generate strong emotions such as anger or sadness, particularly when we have not made meaning of what happened. Because these memories can continue shaping how we perceive reality, an experience from the past may influence how we interpret situations in the present.

How Do Memories Affect Self-Worth?

Marisa describes memories as central to the development of self-esteem, explaining that memories can become a database through which we understand ourselves and predict what will happen next. Experiences of rejection, abuse, or neglect can therefore influence expectations about future relationships and reinforce feelings of insecurity.

Can Attachment Patterns Change?

Marisa presents anxious and avoidant attachment patterns as strategies that can develop in response to formative experiences. An anxious pattern may involve learning that love has to be earned, while an avoidant pattern can involve protecting yourself from the pain of seeking closeness. Rather than treating these patterns as fixed identities or reasons for shame, she emphasizes understanding the protective purpose behind them and approaching insecurity with compassion.

How Does Authenticity Help With Healing?

For Marisa, authenticity is central to healing because it means honestly acknowledging your hurt, insecurities, emotions, and needs instead of performing an idealized version of yourself. She describes healing as beginning from a place of authenticity rather than perfection or simply collecting more therapeutic tools.

Why Does Achievement Never Feel Like Enough?

When your sense of worth becomes dependent on achievement, every accomplishment can become another test you need to pass. Marisa describes this as a “hamster wheel of worth,” where you keep believing the next achievement will finally make you feel worthy. She argues that feeling worthy involves relinquishing that hierarchy rather than continually trying to climb it.

Can I Change How I Experience Painful Memories?

Marisa discusses memory reconsolidation as a way of understanding how revisiting memories can change the way they are held in the brain. She explains that bringing a painful memory into awareness while introducing something new, such as care or a different perspective, can create an opportunity to develop new meaning around that experience.

Do I Have to Become a Different Person to Feel Worthy?

No. Marisa emphasizes that identity can evolve and that you do not have to remain who you were in order to be acceptable or worthy. As she puts it, “The only thing true about life is evolution.” Her emphasis is on acknowledging what you actually feel and where you actually are in each moment rather than forcing yourself to live up to a fixed sense of self.

Her story is compelling because the central challenge was never simply crossing an ocean. It was learning to trust herself when circumstances, institutions, and other people’s judgments suggested that she should choose a smaller ambition. In this conversation, Cole explores self-belief, resilience, purpose, solitude, failure, preparation, and the complicated process of discovering who you are when familiar structures fall away.

What Happens When You Stop Believing in Yourself?

Why Other People’s Doubts Can Become Our Own

One of the most difficult forms of self-doubt begins outside of us. Someone else makes an assessment about our abilities, and over time that assessment can become part of the story we tell ourselves. Cole’s career offers a useful counterexample. She entered sailing without the conventional background many competitors had, and she encountered people who questioned whether someone her size could handle the demands of offshore racing.

What mattered was how she responded to that judgment. Cole describes having an internal confidence that continued to exist even when circumstances pushed it toward its lowest point. She compares confidence to a heartbeat, with moments of strength followed by moments when it drops. The important lesson is that self-belief does not require a permanently elevated sense of confidence. It requires enough trust in yourself to continue moving when confidence temporarily disappears.

The Difference Between Someone’s Opinion and Your Potential

An outside assessment can describe what someone has observed, but it cannot fully describe what you are capable of becoming. Cole’s own trajectory demonstrates why potential is difficult to evaluate before someone has had the opportunity to develop it.

She did not begin her sailing career with mastery. She learned by doing. Her path included technical work, boat systems, rigging, electrical work, mechanics, and countless hours of practice. Competence accumulated gradually, and that accumulated experience became a form of evidence she could rely upon when other people’s opinions were less encouraging.

What Happens When You Let Other People Define What You Can Do

Allowing someone else’s judgment to become your ceiling can quietly narrow a life. Cole’s experience suggests that belonging is sometimes something you establish through participation rather than something another institution grants you in advance.

Her decision to continue pursuing sailing ultimately created an opportunity to answer the question through experience. Instead of spending her life wondering whether she belonged in offshore racing, she entered the arena and discovered what she could actually do.

How Do You Believe in Yourself When Nobody Else Does?

Start by Trusting What You Know About Yourself

Cole did not have complete certainty when she began changing the direction of her life. At 18, she describes wanting to restart and figure things out. She moved from art toward medicine and eventually toward sailing, with each chapter contributing something to the person she would become.

Her mother’s advice became particularly important: the things Cole had learned previously were never wasted. Art, medicine, sewing, boat work, and sailing were not disconnected failures or abandoned identities. They were accumulated knowledge. That perspective offers a more generous way to think about personal growth: changing direction does not erase what came before.

Stop Waiting for Other People to Validate Your Potential

Cole’s career developed through a series of actions taken before she had conventional validation. She contacted the University of Hawaii sailing coach despite having little sailing experience, showed up, and eventually built a career through persistence and technical competence.

That pattern is central to understanding how to build self-confidence and self-trust. Sometimes confidence arrives after action rather than before it. You learn by attempting, you develop competence through repetition, and the resulting evidence gradually changes your assessment of yourself.

Take Action Before You Have Proof That You Can

Cole’s around-the-world voyage represented an enormous leap into uncertainty. She had never previously completed that journey alone, and the experience required her to confront circumstances she could not completely anticipate.

The broader lesson is that self-discovery often requires participation. There are questions about your potential that cannot be answered through reflection alone. At some point, you have to make the attempt and allow experience to provide information that speculation cannot.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• How to believe in yourself when other people doubt your potential, and why self-trust can become stronger through action and experience.
• How purpose helps you keep going through difficult seasons, particularly when external rewards such as money, recognition, or status are insufficient.
• How Cole approached rock bottom, rejection, negative thoughts, and the uncertainty of spending more than four months alone at sea.
• Why preparation, solitude, and difficult experiences can help you develop a clearer understanding of who you are and what you are capable of.
• Why Cole’s message to anyone who has been told “you can’t” ultimately comes down to persistence, hard work, and the willingness to find out for yourself.

How Purpose Helps You Keep Going When Things Get Hard

Purpose Gives You a Reason to Get Up in the Morning

Cole describes purpose in remarkably practical terms. For her, the question was essentially what gets you out of bed each morning. Sailing provided an internal reason to keep working, learning, repairing, improving, and moving forward.

Money and fame were not sufficient explanations for the sacrifices involved. She continued because she loved the work and because she wanted to advance within a demanding profession. That distinction matters when thinking about how to keep going when things get hard. External rewards can motivate us, but they are often too distant or uncertain to sustain a difficult process. Purpose operates closer to the source of effort.

The Difference Between Chasing Success and Pursuing What Matters

Cole had several reasons for attempting her solo circumnavigation. She wanted to prove to herself that she could do it, demonstrate to the wider world that she could do it, and provide an example for young people entering an industry where they might feel that the barriers are too high.

The achievement therefore carried meaning beyond a finishing position. It represented an answer to a personal question and an example for people who might otherwise assume that they did not belong.

Why Knowing What You Want Can Make Hardship Worth It

A difficult experience becomes easier to interpret when you understand why you chose it. Cole’s years of demanding work were not simply sacrifices she endured on the way to a glamorous destination. They were part of becoming the sailor she wanted to become.

That distinction can change how we understand resilience. Hardship does not automatically become meaningful simply because we survive it. It becomes more intelligible when it is connected to something we genuinely value.

The Boat That Became Part of the Story: Cole Brauer, First Light, and a Remarkable Partnership

When Cole first saw First Light, she was living on another boat, under a tarp with a beanbag chair. First Light was originally named Dragon and carried a giant red dragon painted along her side. Cole remembers being struck by her immediately. The boat was twice the size of the one she was living on, and something about her presence captured Cole’s attention.

Their relationship developed gradually. When Cole eventually delivered First Light from Charleston to Stonington, the boat became more than a machine to operate. Cole began speaking to her in much the same way someone might speak to a dog or another trusted companion.

That relationship became particularly meaningful because First Light was powerful enough to demand respect while remaining, in Cole’s experience, remarkably forgiving. When Cole made mistakes, she could recover, learn, and continue. Cole describes the boat as feeling generous, almost as if she were saying, in effect, that the mistake had happened and it was time to pick things up and keep going.

By the time Cole began writing her memoir, she realized that a straightforward account of a sailing campaign could not fully capture what First Light meant to her. The book became, in part, a love story about a boat that had witnessed her entire experience. First Light saw Cole’s best moments as well as her difficult ones, and Cole came to think of the boat as a mirror reflecting her own capacity back to her.

That idea gives the book its deeper resonance. First Light is not simply the setting for an extraordinary achievement. She is part of the story of how Cole learned to see herself differently. In the solitude of the ocean, the relationship offered Cole a kind of continuity: she could change, struggle, recover, and continue without having to perform a different version of herself.

How to Believe in Yourself When Someone Says “You Can’t”

Don’t Confuse Someone’s Limitation With Your Own

Cole’s experience provides a useful distinction between being given information and being given a verdict. Someone may identify a genuine challenge, but that does not automatically determine what you will eventually be able to do.

Being told she was too small for the Southern Ocean became one of the defining moments in Cole’s career. The answer came through preparation, persistence, and eventually entering the very environment that others had questioned her ability to handle.

Let Doubt Become Fuel Instead of Identity

Being underestimated affected Cole, but she did not allow the judgment to become the final description of herself. Her response was to continue building capability.

That is a more durable approach to overcoming self-doubt than simply trying to silence criticism. Doubt can contain useful information when examined carefully, but it becomes destructive when it is accepted as an identity.

Sometimes You Have to Say, “Just Watch Me”

Near the end of the conversation, John asks Cole what she would tell a 14-year-old girl who wanted a life like hers. Her answer captures the philosophy running through the entire interview. She acknowledges that the path will be difficult, then returns to the importance of hard work, showing up, and refusing to allow someone else’s prediction to determine the limits of your future.

Her closing words are simple: “Yeah, okay. Just watch me.”

7 Ways to Believe in Yourself Again

1. Stop Asking Everyone Else for Permission

Cole’s path was built through decisions that often preceded external validation. Her story suggests that waiting until everyone agrees with your direction can prevent you from discovering whether the direction is right for you.

2. Remember What You Are Working Toward

Purpose gives difficult work a context. Cole’s reason for sailing was connected to the work itself, the person she wanted to become, and the example she hoped to provide for others. Knowing what matters can make the daily effort easier to understand.

3. Take the Next Step Before You Feel Ready

Cole did not begin with the complete skill set required for her eventual career. She learned through participation, work, mistakes, and repetition. Readiness often develops alongside action.

4. Turn Setbacks Into Information

A rejection can be painful while still providing useful information. Cole’s experience of being cut from a major racing team became a point from which she reconsidered how she would enter the professional racing world.

5. Prepare for What You Can Control

Preparation gave Cole a way to respond when circumstances became dangerous. Creating processes in advance can provide the same psychological benefit in other areas of life, especially when uncertainty is unavoidable.

6. Spend Time Alone Without Distraction

Cole’s time alone at sea eventually became an opportunity to listen to herself. Intentional solitude can create enough distance from external expectations to clarify what you actually think and value.

7. Let Your Actions Prove What You’re Capable Of

Self-trust becomes stronger when it has evidence behind it. Every difficult problem solved, and every commitment honored adds another piece of experience to the internal case for your own capability.

The Mattering Effect: Why Believing in Yourself Begins With Knowing You Matter

Cole Brauer’s story is ultimately about something bigger than sailing. She spent years being told, in different ways, that she did not fit the mold of someone who could accomplish what she wanted.

Instead of allowing those judgments to define her future, she built the skills, resilience, and self-trust to create her own path.

That same idea sits at the heart of John R. Miles’s upcoming book, The Mattering Effect: what changes when you stop measuring your significance by other people’s expectations and start recognizing the impact you are capable of making?

We’re also excited to share that The Mattering Effect is officially a Next Big Idea Club Must Read! 🎉

It’s a meaningful recognition for a book about living with greater purpose, significance, and intention, and a natural extension of the conversation Cole and John explored here.

Want to go deeper? Keep an eye out for The Mattering Effect and discover how knowing that you matter can change the way you live, lead, and show up for what matters most.

SPONSORED DEALS

FODZYME

We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.

SHOPIFY

It’s time to turn those “What Ifs” into SFX: CHA-CHING with Shopify today. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.

Vinted

Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn.

About Today’s Guest, Cole Brauer

Cole Brauer is an American ocean racer and solo sailor who became the first American woman to race solo, nonstop, and unassisted around the world. Her voyage aboard First Light lasted more than 130 days and covered approximately 27,000 nautical miles. Her story combines offshore racing, resilience, personal growth, and the pursuit of self-belief.

What is Cole Brauer’s book First Light?

First Light is Cole Brauer’s memoir about her life, sailing career, and extraordinary solo voyage around the world. During the interview, Cole explains that the book evolved into something deeper than a conventional sailing memoir because of the relationship she developed with First Light, the boat that carried her through the journey.

They Told Her She Couldn’t Do It. She Said ‘WATCH Me’ | Cole Brauer

Learn More and Connect

👉 All episode links, my books You Matter, Luma, and The Mattering Effect, The Ignited Life newsletter, and the Start Mattering store are here: linktr.ee/John_R_Miles

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

What does it mean to believe in yourself?

Believing in yourself means developing enough self-trust to act, learn, adapt, and make decisions even when you do not have complete certainty about the outcome. Cole’s experience suggests that this belief can grow through action and accumulated evidence rather than depending on constant confidence.

How do you believe in yourself when nobody else does?

Separate another person’s assessment from your own potential. Cole’s story shows the value of continuing to learn, preparing carefully, taking action, and allowing experience to reveal what you are capable of. Her career demonstrates that external doubt does not have to become an internal verdict.

How do I stop doubting myself?

Self-doubt does not necessarily disappear, particularly when you are attempting something difficult. Cole describes learning to understand negative thoughts rather than being frightened by them. Preparation, action, and repeated experiences of handling challenges can gradually strengthen self-trust.

How do you build self-trust?

Self-trust develops when your actions provide evidence that you can depend on yourself. Taking difficult steps, following through on commitments, learning from mistakes, and continuing after setbacks all contribute to that evidence.

How do you keep going when things get hard?

Reconnect with the reason you began. Cole describes purpose as the thing that got her up in the morning and kept her moving through a demanding career. When hardship is connected to something that genuinely matters, the difficulty becomes easier to understand as part of the process.

What should you do when someone tells you that you can’t?

Treat the statement as an opinion or assessment rather than an automatic definition of your potential. Consider whether there is useful information in the criticism, determine what you need to learn or prepare for, and then decide what you are willing to attempt.

How can failure help you believe in yourself?

Failure can clarify what matters and reveal where you need to adapt. Cole’s rejection from a major racing team was devastating at the time, but it eventually became part of the path that led her toward solo sailing. A setback can therefore become information without becoming an identity.

In this special solo episode of Passion Struck, John R. Miles brings together ideas from his recent conversations with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box, and Dr. Martin Seligman, author of Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress. Their work comes from different disciplines, yet both point toward a similar conclusion: adaptability is not simply the ability to respond to change. It is the ability to recognize the reality in front of you, determine where your influence actually exists, and use your agency effectively within the boundaries you cannot control.

John explores what happens when unlimited freedom becomes a liability, why breakthrough ideas often emerge from narrow problems, why sophisticated technology can fail when it overlooks the people expected to use it, and how the balance between “I can” and “We can” shapes both achievement and human flourishing.

The Company That Had Everything Except a Constraint

Few stories illustrate the agency paradox more clearly than General Magic. The Silicon Valley company emerged from Apple with extraordinary technical talent, significant financial backing, and a vision that anticipated many elements of the modern smartphone. Its people could imagine an enormous range of possibilities, and they had the resources to pursue them.

Yet that abundance became part of the problem. Without a sharply defined customer problem or sufficiently narrow boundaries, the organization attempted to build too much at once. By the time its product reached the market, it had become extraordinarily complicated without delivering a sufficiently clear answer to the question of what problem it was solving.

John contrasts that experience with the more focused paths taken by people who worked within General Magic. Jeff Hawkins concentrated on a specific mobile need and developed the PalmPilot. Pierre Omidyar created a small side project designed to facilitate commerce between strangers; when the idea was dismissed as too minor, he pursued it independently and eventually built eBay.

The lesson is larger than any single company. When every direction remains available, deciding where to place effort becomes its own problem. Constraints reduce that cognitive burden. They create a field of play in which experimentation becomes more deliberate, and progress becomes easier to recognize.

The same principle appears in the story of Dmitri Mendeleev. Rather than emerging from an entirely unconstrained flash of inspiration, his work on the periodic table was connected to a practical editorial problem: he was working under a publishing deadline and needed to organize a large body of chemical information within limited space. The constraint forced a classification problem, and that classification problem opened the door to a scientific framework of enormous consequence.

The implication is worth carrying into everyday life: a constraint can sometimes function less like a wall and more like a lens. It narrows the field enough for important patterns to become visible.

When the Technology Works But the People Don’t Change

John then turns the idea toward leadership and implementation, drawing from his own experience leading application development at Lowe’s. The Total Closed Loop initiative was ambitious, involving roughly two hundred sub-projects, sophisticated data tools, and substantial investment. The objective was to create a seamless customer experience across stores, call centers, and digital channels.

The technology was impressive. The problem was that the organization had become increasingly focused on building the system rather than continually validating whether the system was still solving the problems people actually faced. By the time parts of the solution were ready, some of the assumptions underneath the project had changed.

John recalls receiving particularly blunt feedback from an executive who observed that the organization had become extremely good at delivering projects that had little value by the time they were completed. It was a difficult assessment, but it exposed an important distinction between execution and effective implementation. Completing a project is not the same thing as creating lasting value.

David Epstein’s discussion of UPS and its ORION routing system provides a related example. The algorithm could calculate highly efficient routes, but drivers initially resisted recommendations that sometimes conflicted with their knowledge of neighborhoods, customers, traffic patterns, and daily operating realities. UPS made progress by bringing those drivers into the process, allowing them to interact with the system and challenge its recommendations.

The change was not simply technical. It was relational.

People are more likely to adopt a system when they can understand it, influence it, and see how their own experience fits within it. This is why sustainable change requires continuity as well as transformation. When a new system treats human beings as obstacles to implementation, resistance is predictable. When it incorporates their knowledge and preserves their sense of agency, adaptation becomes collaborative.

The Invention of “I Can” and “We Can”

Martin Seligman’s work takes the conversation from organizations into the deeper history of human progress. After decades of studying learned helplessness—the tendency to stop trying after repeated experiences of having no meaningful control—Seligman began asking a broader question: how did human beings develop the psychological sense that their actions could change the future?

In Agency, Seligman examines the Axial Age, roughly 1000 BCE to 500 BCE, when several civilizations experienced significant developments in philosophy, law, commerce, medicine, and social organization. His analysis of ancient texts suggests that language expressing individual human capability and choice became more prominent across several traditions during this period.

For John, the significance of this work is not simply historical. It provides a useful way of thinking about agency in contemporary life.

There is an “I can” dimension to agency: the belief that our choices, effort, judgment, and initiative can influence what happens next. Without it, people can become passive, waiting for circumstances or other people to determine their future.

But there is also a “We can” dimension. Human beings rarely sustain meaningful change through isolated effort indefinitely. Trust, belonging, cooperation, and shared responsibility allow individual agency to become part of something larger.

Too much emphasis on “I can” can turn strength into isolation. Too much emphasis on “We can” can suppress initiative and create conformity. Sustainable progress requires the two to reinforce each other.

That balance is especially important in an age that celebrates individual productivity. There is a difference between being capable of carrying everything yourself and building a life in which you do not have to.

When Your Attention Becomes Someone Else’s Property

John brings the agency question into one of the most ordinary struggles of modern life: attention.

During his earlier conversation with Dr. Gloria Mark, John explored research showing how dramatically workplace attention has become fragmented. Frequent task switching leaves what psychologists call attention residue, in which part of our mental processing remains attached to a previous task even after we have moved on.

The consequence is deeper than simply losing a few minutes.

When interruption becomes habitual, the mind can begin to anticipate interruption. A person may sit down with uninterrupted time and still find themselves reaching for another message, another tab, another notification, or another small task. Eventually, the external environment no longer needs to interrupt them. They have learned to do it themselves.

This creates an important connection to the agency paradox. If attention is one of our most finite resources, then deciding where it goes is itself an act of agency. Every unexamined demand competes for that resource, and every open loop makes it harder to direct attention toward work that requires sustained thought.

David Epstein’s use of the Hemingway Principle offers a practical response. At the end of the workday, he identifies the important task he will begin with the following morning. Instead of waking up and immediately allowing email or other urgent demands to determine the day’s priorities, he has already made the decision.

The practice is simple, but its significance is larger: you can protect tomorrow’s agency by making one meaningful decision today.

In this episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why unlimited options and resources can create decision fatigue, diffusion of effort, and paralysis rather than adaptability.
• How General Magic, the PalmPilot, eBay, and Mendeleev’s textbook deadline reveal the creative power of constraints.
• Why successful implementation depends on human agency, frontline knowledge, and trust—not technology alone.
• What Martin Seligman’s work suggests about balancing individual agency (“I can”) with collective agency (“We can”).
• How attention residue and constant task switching undermine our ability to exercise meaningful agency.
• How the Constraint Check, Agency Check, and Hemingway Principle can turn these ideas into practical action.

The Agency Check: Turning Constraints Into Action

The episode ultimately comes back to a practical diagnostic John calls the Agency Check.

The first question is:

What is the single constraint I am running away from that actually contains my focus?

Sometimes the source of overwhelm is not a lack of resources. It is an excess of possibilities. Drawing a boundary around one meaningful objective can transform an abstract problem into something that can actually be acted upon.

The second question is:

Am I trying to solve this entirely through isolated willpower, or am I building the collective trust to carry it forward?

Together, these questions examine two sides of agency. The first asks whether we are using constraints to focus our effort. The second asks whether we are relying exclusively on ourselves when collaboration could make the effort more sustainable.

John’s challenge is straightforward: identify one area where too much freedom is creating friction, define a single deliverable, and create a clear boundary around it. Then identify one place where you have slipped into learned helplessness and determine what action remains within your control. Finally, invite another person into the work so that individual effort can become collective agency.

The deeper lesson of The Agency Paradox is that adaptability does not require us to control everything around us. It requires us to become more precise about what we can influence.

A changing world will always contain circumstances we cannot choose. The question is what we do with the space that remains.

You do not have to know exactly where you are going to take the next step. Sometimes, you just have to be willing to take it.

Three Ways To Put Agency Into Action

Conduct a Constraint Check

Choose an initiative that feels stalled by competing priorities. Narrow its scope, identify one core objective, or establish a firm delivery boundary. Instead of treating the limitation as an administrative inconvenience, treat it as a design parameter that can help determine what deserves your attention.

Apply the Hemingway Principle

Before ending your workday, decide what important task you will begin with the following morning. Writing that decision down reduces the need to negotiate with yourself when the day begins and creates a clearer defense against reactive demands.

Audit Your Agency Balance

Look at an important goal and ask whether you are attempting to carry the entire burden through personal effort. Then ask where collaboration, trust, or shared ownership could make the work more sustainable. Individual determination matters, but so does the environment in which that determination operates.

Enjoy the Show? Listen to Episode 819

If you’ve ever wondered whether you need more willpower or simply need to change your environment, Episode 816 explores The Fit Check and the two questions that can help you know the difference.

Explore The Mattering Effect for a deeper framework on building genuine significance, strengthening connection, and creating environments where people know they matter. The book is available wherever books are sold.

Listen to Episode 819 of Passion Struck with John R. Miles on Spotify, or watch the full episode on our YouTube Channel.

For weekly companion essays, practical toolkits, and interactive reflections, join our community at The Ignited Life on Substack.

SPONSORED DEALS

FODZYME: We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.

Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.

About the Author

John R. Miles is the author of Passion Struck, winner of the Gold Stevie® Award for Best Business Book and a Next Big Idea Club Must-Read, and host of the Passion Struck podcast, with more than 85 million downloads.

A former Fortune 50 executive and U.S. Navy officer, he has spent more than two decades synthesizing insights from psychology, neuroscience, behavioral science, leadership, and human flourishing to understand why so many people quietly lose their sense of significance despite outward success.

His work has been featured in Fortune, Inc., Forbes, ABC, NBC, Fox, and Writer’s Digest, and he has appeared on leading podcasts including 10% Happier with Dan Harris, The Next Big Idea Daily, and FranklinCovey On Leadership.

Why The Most Successful People Put Themselves In BOXES | John R. Miles

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Agency Paradox?

The Agency Paradox describes the counterintuitive idea that unlimited freedom, options, and resources can create decision fatigue, fragmented effort, and paralysis. Adaptability often improves when people accept meaningful constraints and exercise their agency within the boundaries they cannot control.

Why can constraints improve creativity?

Constraints reduce the number of possible directions and force attention toward essential decisions. By limiting time, scope, resources, or output, they can make it easier to identify the actual problem that needs to be solved. The episode uses Mendeleev’s textbook deadline as an example of how a practical constraint can contribute to systematic innovation.

Why did General Magic fail despite having advanced technology?

General Magic had significant resources and technical talent but lacked sufficiently clear strategic boundaries. The company attempted to create an expansive platform without defining a focused problem for a specific user. More narrowly focused projects associated with people from the same environment addressed individual needs and achieved greater commercial impact.

What is the difference between “I can” and “We can”?

“I can” represents individual agency, determination, and self-directed action. “We can” represents collective capability, trust, cooperation, and mutual support. The episode presents both as necessary: individual agency can drive initiative and achievement, while collective agency helps sustain those efforts and protect against isolation.

What is attention residue?

Attention residue describes the lingering cognitive involvement that can remain after switching away from one task. When people move rapidly between competing demands, part of their mental capacity remains connected to the previous task, making sustained concentration more difficult.

How does the Hemingway Principle improve focus?

The Hemingway Principle involves deciding on the next important task before finishing the current work session. By defining tomorrow’s starting point in advance, you reduce morning decision-making and make it easier to protect meaningful work from the pull of urgent but lower-value demands.

His new book, Inside the Box, grew partly from his own struggle to turn broad interests into focused projects, and the examples he shares—from Mendeleev and General Magic to Pixar and UPS—show how the same principle operates in science, technology, business, and everyday life.

David’s argument is ultimately about more than creativity. It is about how we decide what deserves our attention, how we define problems, how organizations learn, and how we make progress without becoming overwhelmed by the number of directions we could take. The tension running through the episode is simple but consequential: freedom gives us possibilities, while constraints give those possibilities shape.

Why More Freedom Isn’t Always Better

How Too Many Options Can Paralyze Decision-Making

Modern life often equates greater choice with greater opportunity. Yet David points toward a more complicated relationship between abundance and human cognition. When there are too many possible directions, the challenge is no longer generating options but deciding which ones deserve commitment. That problem appears in his own experience as a writer: having accumulated an enormous body of research, he found that the abundance itself made it harder to determine what the book should become.

This is where decision-making and creativity begin to overlap. A mind confronted with endless possibilities can spend its energy evaluating paths rather than exploring one deeply enough to discover something meaningful. Constraints reduce that search space. They make commitment possible, which in turn makes sustained experimentation possible.

Why Constraints Can Channel Creativity

David’s central argument is that constraints can provide the structure within which creativity becomes more productive. His example of Mendeleev captures the idea particularly well: the scientist was not sitting down with unlimited freedom and asking how he might revolutionize chemistry. He was trying to solve a concrete organizational problem under severe limitations of time and space. Those boundaries led him to experiment with groups of elements, notice recurring relationships, and ultimately recognize patterns that extended far beyond the original problem.

David describes this as the difference between overvaluing the freedom of the “dreaming brain” and recognizing the power of constraints to channel productive experimentation. The implication reaches well beyond creativity. A useful constraint does not necessarily diminish what we can do; it can determine where we look long enough to see what we otherwise would have missed.

The Difference Between Freedom and Productive Freedom

David’s own writing process became a case study in this distinction. While working on Inside the Box, he had roughly 100,000 words of notes. Instead of trying to manage that abundance directly, he imposed a severe structural constraint: the entire book had to fit onto a single page.

That one-page outline forced him to prioritize, connect chapters, and experiment with the architecture of the book. More importantly, the constraint changed his psychological relationship with the work. Rather than remaining preoccupied with whether he could reproduce the success of Range, he became absorbed in the experiment itself and lost some of the self-consciousness that had been slowing him down.

Productive freedom, then, is not the absence of boundaries. It is having enough room to explore inside boundaries that make exploration meaningful.

Efficacy is your present-tense belief in your ability to execute a task. Coined extensively by Albert Bandura, self-efficacy is the conviction that you possess the skills, capacity, and agency to act in the immediate moment. Without efficacy, you never start. You remain frozen by perceived inadequacy.

The Surprising Truth About How Breakthroughs Happen

What Mendeleev’s Periodic Table Really Teaches Us

The popular version of Mendeleev’s story suggests that the periodic table arrived as a sudden insight, even appearing to him in a dream. David offers a much more grounded account. Mendeleev had a publishing contract for a two-volume introductory chemistry textbook and had covered only eight of the 63 known elements in the first volume. He needed to organize the remaining 55 elements despite limited space and time.

That practical problem led him to experiment with grouping elements according to shared characteristics. As he searched for families and recurring patterns, he began to see relationships that allowed him to predict properties and even anticipate elements that had not yet been discovered.

The lesson is not that constraints magically produce genius. It is that a sufficiently concrete problem can direct attention toward relationships that remain difficult to see when the problem is defined too broadly.

Why Big Breakthroughs Often Start With Small Problems

Many ambitions become harder to act on precisely because they are too large to engage with directly. David and John return repeatedly to the value of beginning with a smaller problem that can be defined, tested, and understood.

That principle also appears in the discussion of General Magic and in John’s reflections on large technology projects. Starting with a narrower problem creates an opportunity to learn before the cost of being wrong becomes enormous. A small solution can become the “keyhole” through which a much larger possibility eventually becomes visible.

Stop Searching for the Horizon

The conversation takes a more personal turn when David connects the logic of constraints to the experience of always looking ahead. John describes the tendency to search for the horizon—to imagine that the meaningful version of life or work is somewhere beyond the present moment.

David connects this to Sherry Turkle’s description of being “forever elsewhere.” We can be physically present while mentally inhabiting another possibility, another destination, another version of our lives. His observation is that we rarely develop ways to “live where our feet are” in the present moment.

That idea gives the broader argument about constraints an unexpectedly human dimension. Sometimes the relevant constraint is simply reality itself: the project we actually have, the people actually in front of us, and the circumstances in which we are living now.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• How constraints can focus creativity and turn overwhelming possibilities into productive experimentation.
• Why Mendeleev’s periodic table emerged from the practical constraints of organizing a chemistry textbook.
• What General Magic reveals about the dangers of abundant talent, money, freedom, and an undefined customer problem.
• Why Pixar keeps creative teams small and experiments contained before committing enormous resources to production.
• How the UPS routing story demonstrates that technological innovation can depend as much on human learning and trust as on the technology itself.
• How David protects his attention through monotasking, time-batching, and a simple end-of-day practice inspired by Ernest Hemingway.

How General Magic, Small Experiments, and Human Trust Shape Innovation

When Too Much Talent and Money Become a Problem

General Magic provides one of the clearest examples in the conversation of how abundant resources can sometimes make innovation harder rather than easier. The company brought together extraordinary talent, substantial funding, and an audacious technological vision. Its founders were imagining products that anticipated aspects of the modern smartphone long before the web existed. Yet the very abundance that made such ambition possible also made it difficult to decide what the organization should actually build.

David describes the company as a story about the danger of too much freedom and the absence of constraints. Without a clearly defined customer problem, the team could continue adding possibilities, features, and complexity. The result was a project with enormous potential but insufficient focus. The lesson is subtle: resources can remove practical limitations, but they cannot tell an organization where to direct its effort. When everything is possible, deciding what matters becomes its own problem.

Why Small Problems Create Better Conditions for Innovation

The contrast becomes clearer through the people who left General Magic and focused on specific customer needs. Jeff Hawkins recognized a straightforward problem for busy professionals: they wanted to carry their contacts, calendars, and notes with them. Instead of attempting to build everything General Magic envisioned, he concentrated on that narrower use case, creating the Palm Pilot. David emphasizes that defining a customer problem made such a difference because it channeled and focused the work.

This is where the idea of starting small becomes more than a project-management technique. A smaller problem gives a team something concrete to learn from. John connects this lesson to his own experience with large technology initiatives, where agile development made it possible to test ideas closer to the customer and discard an approach after months of work rather than years.

The same principle explains David’s “think slow, act fast” approach. The slow part belongs at the beginning, when a team defines the boundaries and decides which smaller problem it can meaningfully investigate. Once those decisions are clear, execution can become faster because fundamental questions have been addressed before complexity takes over. Small experiments also make failure informative rather than catastrophic: they allow teams to learn while changing direction is still relatively inexpensive.

How Pixar Uses Constraints to Improve Creativity—and Why UPS Needed Trust

Pixar illustrates how deliberately limiting the scale of an effort can protect creativity. David explains that the studio keeps directors in story development with tiny teams for years, refining the core of a story before moving into the much more expensive and complicated production phase. Pixar also uses short films as contained experiments with new animation techniques, creating a small environment in which an idea can succeed, fail, or teach the team something useful without carrying the cost of a full feature film.

The logic extends naturally into the Theory of Constraints. Rather than trying to make every part of a process faster, David argues for identifying where work is actually accumulating. If one stage is limiting the entire system, optimizing everything around it can simply send more work toward the same blockage. The more useful question becomes: where is the system constrained, and what would happen if we addressed that constraint first?

UPS reveals another dimension of the same principle: innovation has to fit the human system in which it operates. David describes how drivers initially rejected the company’s routing algorithm because some recommendations conflicted with their local knowledge and seemed irrational from the driver’s perspective. UPS eventually brought drivers into the process, allowing them to interact with the system and experiment with how it produced routes.

John describes this as turning a black box into a glass box. The drivers did not need to understand every technical detail; they needed enough understanding to see the system’s logic and develop trust in it. One especially revealing experiment allowed a veteran driver to compete against the algorithm, turning the technology from something imposed upon him into something he could test and learn from.

This becomes increasingly relevant as organizations introduce AI into established workflows. David’s observation is that the larger the technological change, the more important it becomes to connect the new system to something familiar. Adoption depends on helping people understand not only what is changing, but also what remains continuous—their expertise, judgment, workflow, and sense of agency.

The One-Page Experiment Behind David Epstein’s New Book

Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better was not simply an abstract investigation into constraints. David explains that the book emerged partly from a problem he had experienced himself after Range: he had broad interests, a large collection of experiences, and plenty of ideas, but struggled to draw boundaries around a project and actually begin.

That makes the story behind the book particularly fitting. While writing it, David took approximately 100,000 words of notes and forced himself to reduce the entire architecture of the book to one page. He described the page as bubbles and arrows packed together as tightly as possible. The restriction forced him to decide what belonged, what connected, and what could be left out.

The experiment also changed the emotional experience of writing. Instead of asking whether he could make another book as successful as Range, he became absorbed in the structural problem in front of him. The constraint gave him something concrete to investigate, and that made the work feel less like an attempt to reproduce a previous achievement and more like an experiment worth pursuing.

In that sense, Inside the Box contains its own argument. David did not merely research the power of constraints; he used one to get himself unstuck.

How to Protect Your Attention in a Distracted World

Why Multitasking Doesn’t Actually Work

The attention discussion brings the episode’s argument back to individual behavior. David describes the difficulty of constantly switching between tasks and the way that fragmented attention makes it harder to return to demanding work at the depth he wants.

Rather than attempting to respond to every demand as it arrives, he deliberately structures his work around periods in which he focuses on one type of activity.

The Hidden Cost of Constant Task Switching

David describes email as a useful example. If someone checks and responds to email dozens of times throughout the day, those interruptions create many small blocks of attention rather than a concentrated period in which the task can be completed.

His response has been to batch activities such as email into defined periods and then move into blocks devoted to other forms of work. The purpose is not simply efficiency. It is to preserve the cognitive conditions required for deeper thinking.

How to Structure Your Day for Deep Focus

The approach David describes is essentially a constraint applied to attention. By deciding in advance what kind of work belongs in a particular block, he reduces the number of decisions competing for attention in real time.

That principle mirrors the larger argument of the episode. Focus is easier when we deliberately narrow the field. A structured day does not eliminate freedom; it protects the freedom to concentrate.

The Hemingway Principle for Tomorrow’s Priorities

At the end of each workday, David writes down the important thing he intends to begin the following day. He calls this the Hemingway principle, inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s practice of stopping while he knew where the work would continue.

For David, this also protects against the “mere urgency effect”: the tendency to prioritize tasks that feel immediately pressing over work that may be substantially more important.

How to Conduct Your Own Theory of Constraints Audit

The ideas in this episode can be translated into a practical examination of almost any project or workflow.

Make Every Step Visible

Start by mapping the process rather than relying on assumptions about where the problem lies. Write down the actual sequence of steps, decisions, handoffs, approvals, and dependencies. Visibility makes it possible to see the system as it exists rather than the way it is supposed to work.

Find Where the Work Is Piling Up

Look for the point where unfinished work accumulates, where people repeatedly wait, or where decisions consistently slow progress. That location may be the real constraint.

Stop Optimizing Everything Except the Bottleneck

Once the constraint is visible, resist the instinct to improve every part of the system simultaneously. If the bottleneck remains unchanged, increasing capacity elsewhere can simply push more work toward it.

Ask What Smaller Problem You Can Solve First

Finally, reduce the scale of the problem until meaningful experimentation becomes possible. A smaller problem can reveal information about the larger one while keeping the cost of being wrong manageable.

That sequence captures much of what David explores throughout the episode: define the problem, narrow the field, experiment, learn, and only then expand.

SPONSORED DEALS

FODZYME

We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.

SHOPIFY

It’s time to turn those “What Ifs” into SFX: CHA-CHING with Shopify today. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.

Vinted

Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn.

About Today’s Guest, David Epstein

David Epstein is a New York Times bestselling author whose work examines how people develop expertise, adapt to uncertainty, and solve difficult problems. He is the author of The Sports Gene and Range, which explored how broad experiences and interdisciplinary learning can prepare people for an unpredictable world. His latest book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, turns toward the complementary question of how people can channel that range and curiosity into focused action and meaningful progress.

In this episode of Passion Struck, he draws on examples from science, technology, business, creativity, and his own writing process to examine the surprising ways constraints can improve experimentation, decision-making, innovation, and attention.

When You Narrow the Problem, Your Ideas Get BIGGER | David Epstein

Learn More and Connect

👉 All episode links, my books You Matter, Luma, and The Mattering Effect, The Ignited Life newsletter, and the Start Mattering store are here: linktr.ee/John_R_Miles

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

How do constraints improve creativity?

Constraints can give creativity a direction in which to operate. By reducing an overwhelming number of possible paths, they can make experimentation more focused and help people discover solutions they might not encounter through unrestricted exploration. David’s Mendeleev example illustrates how a practical limitation led to a much larger scientific insight.

What is the power of constraints?

The power of constraints comes from their ability to focus attention and create conditions for productive experimentation. Rather than treating limits solely as obstacles, David argues that meaningful boundaries can help people define smaller problems, test ideas, and discover larger possibilities through the process.

Can too many choices make decision-making harder?

Yes. An abundance of options can create a larger decision space without necessarily making the resulting decision better. David connects this problem to the broader issue of attention: when our mental resources are constantly divided among competing possibilities, it becomes harder to commit deeply to any one direction.

What can Mendeleev teach us about creativity?

Mendeleev’s story suggests that major breakthroughs can emerge from ordinary problems. He was trying to organize a chemistry textbook under constraints of time and space when his experimentation with groups of elements revealed recurring patterns. He was solving a much smaller problem than the breakthrough for which he became famous.

Why did General Magic fail?

David presents General Magic as an example of what can happen when exceptional talent and resources exist without sufficiently strong constraints. The company pursued an extraordinarily broad vision and accumulated complexity, while other individuals who identified specific customer problems were able to build much more focused products.

How does Pixar use constraints to improve creativity?

Pixar keeps directors and small teams in story development for extended periods, allowing them to refine the core of a story before the expense and complexity of full production begin. The studio also uses short films as relatively contained experiments with new animation techniques.

What did UPS learn about technology and change management?

UPS discovered that creating an effective routing algorithm was only part of the challenge. Drivers needed to understand and trust the system and integrate it with their existing knowledge and workflows. The company eventually brought drivers into the learning process and made the algorithm’s behavior more understandable and interactive.

How can I protect my attention?

David describes batching activities such as email, monotasking during focused periods, taking breaks between blocks, and deciding the important task he will begin the following day. These practices reduce constant task switching and make attention more deliberate rather than reactive.

Why is asking the right question important for innovation?

Because a sophisticated solution to the wrong problem can still produce failure, David’s UPS discussion illustrates this clearly: the organization initially appeared to be solving a routing problem, but an important part of the challenge turned out to be a learning and adoption problem.