Bruce Feiler

But I think for me, what I was going through is I was going through...

You, you c- when you start getting what, uh, Bruce Feiler, the author, calls a life quake, where you're having multiple transitions at once, um, it can feel like a pile-up, like a, like a, a crash on, on, on a freeway.

You can sort of feel like you're, you're, you're doomed and so- you're doing something wrong.

There's a lot of emotions a- a- attached to this where you can feel like something...

Like, how do I shorten it? [laughs]

Well, yeah, l- learning TQ, t- uh, transitional intelligence allows you to move through this process more rapidly.

Bruce Feiler in his book Life Is In The Transitions, and he's a faculty member at MEA, um, he says that the average transition takes three to five years.

Okay.

School, then career, family, retirement, each stage arriving right on schedule.

But writer Bruce Feiler spent years discovering that almost no one actually lives that way.

After traveling around the US and collecting hundreds of life stories from people in all 50 states, he kept finding the same thing.

Our lives are full of disruptions, and every so often, one of them cracks everything wide open.

They turn our nightmares into dreams.

Thank you.

[audience applauding] [bright music] That was Bruce Feiler at TEDxIE Madrid in Spain in 2021.

This talk was originally published in June 2022.

Live with your soul on fire.

Well, if you enjoyed today's episode with Linda, you'll love the conversation with bestselling author Bruce Feiler.

Bruce reminded us in our conversation that life rarely unfolds in a straight line, and he shares instead how we can navigate periods of transition, rewrite our stories, and find meaning in whatever chapter comes next.

You can check out that episode with Bruce way back at episode 596.

I didn't make up the term.

So first of all, let me give credit to Bruce Feiler, who is a writer who I believe coined the term lifequakes.

Lifequakes are those things that happen to adults on an average of four times per year that just shake you.

They can be good things and they can be bad things.

It's a really important part of life.

And Bruce Feiler, who's teaching September 13th through the 17th at the Santa Fe campus, his book on ritual, his newest book on ritual, is really important because the thing that ritual allows you to do is to let go of something so something new can come in.

What are you ready to let go of? We do something called the Great Midlife Edit in all of our five-day and four-day workshops at MEA that helps with this.

And I just want to finish with one last thing.

This is Guy Kawasaki.

This is the Remarkable People podcast, and we have Bruce Feiler on today.

And my God, you've been a New York Times bestseller seven times? Seven times.

Wow.

So you gotta define ritual, and you say it's an act, and it's shared, and it's unnecessary.

Those three things wouldn't pop into my mind for a definition of a ritual.

So what is a ritual in the eyes of Bruce Feiler?

So I'll answer the question directly, and then I'll back up and tell you how I came to be asking this question.

In fairness, I don't think we always assume that life is going well, but I take her point.

And so we decided that today we're doing the other side of it, setbacks, transitions we didn't choose, the big disruptions in life that my first guest, Bruce Feiler, calls lifequakes.

Bruce is a bestselling author who studies life's transitions and how to deal with them.

And later I'm joined by Romany Yuill, once Britain's youngest financial planner, on how she helps people through the hardest turns in their lives and how she recently came through a big one of her own.

[ethereal music] [upbeat music] And back up out of the rabbit hole and breathing in the good, clean Scottish air.

This is the Money Mindshift Podcast: Your Life, Your Money, in that order.

I'm now connected to New York, to Brooklyn, to Bruce Feiler.

Bruce is one of America's most thoughtful voices on contemporary life.

But some transitions are bigger than others in terms of the impact they have on you and on those around you and your future.

There was a book came out a few years ago called Life is in the Transitions by a guy called Bruce Feiler.

Not sure if he's a believer, but he says this.

In your adult life, you will go through three to five major transitions.

It's not just struggling to find a new job.

It's finding yourself in a completely different place and space that you never thought you would be in.

And those lifequakes, Bruce Feiler says, take three months to three years.

but sometimes five years.

It's deniability beyond a reasonable doubt, uh, a much higher standard.

[Instrumental music] A few years ago, the writer Bruce Feiler was given an assignment by a magazine.

Uh, he was to try and bribe a series of maitre d's at popular New York City restaurants in order to get a good table.

What did he imagine would happen when he did this, Steve?

If you're tendering an outright quid pro quo bribe, you're kind of treating them like a, a, you know, l- like a sales clerk, l- like a transactional partner, undermining that aura of authority that they have.

And, uh, doing it in cases where you don't know whether they will agree leads to that emotion of on, on the part of the speaker, it would be awkwardness.

On the part of the recipient of the bribe, it would be outrage, at least in the imagination of the writer.

And even in the case w- where it did succeed, which, which it did in every time, it may not have succeeded had he tendered the bribe in, uh, as a naked quid pro quo.