It's just controlling my time and, yeah, not very creative.

I know.

It's true, right? I mean, that's the modern world, and it's, it's built in a way-- We live in a world that our ancestors would not recognize, right? They, they spent way more time.

So going back to the kind of the machinery underneath this, we really do have two consciousnesses, two forms of attention.

One, as you say, is connective and is, is designed to create meaning and relationship, and the other is controlling.

It's designed to help us grab stuff and manipulate it.

And the modern world has been absolutely brilliant at maximizing our, our controlling attention.

Like, did, did you ever get a sense in this journey of how, like, what is it that makes this tick? Because again, it, it feels like it shouldn't work, yet it does.

Chapter one: Where talent actually comes from.

We live at a really interesting moment in history.

Unlike all of our ancestors, we live in this moment of peak individualism, and so whenever we see achievement, we focus on that individual.

We focus on what makes them special.

We focus on their habits, their behaviors.

We just see them.

But like all matters of focus, focus makes you a little bit blind.

Chapter two: How great cultures are built.

Help me out.

It's growth of capacity.

It's growth of the gifts that people have.

It's personal growth, not outcome growth.

The way I saw that over and over again was this idea that these places have that I visited, that everybody's got gifts that they're not using.

Part of the modern world often sort of conspires to put everything around, like you say, we've got a goal, we've got answers on how to get from A to B to C to D, let's execute on that plan, let's execute on that mission.

And rarely do you pause to ask, what do you want to get better at? What matters to you? What are you already good at? How can we grow? And the places that I met always were on this kind of dual track in a way.

How can we perceive that for our lives? Because the point isn't just no rules and it's just Mad Max and Thunderdome or whatever.

Now, how do I start on this path to flourishing? What do I do?"

Yeah.

I think starting with kind of identifying those two questions that we talked about.

Those two questions.

Who do I feel most alive with? Do an audit, right? Do an audit.

See where it's already happening.

And then the challenge is to grow those relationships, to actually spend time with the people, places, projects that matter to you, creating those moments.

Seems, like, oxymoronic [laughs] terms there.

Yeah.

So the temptation was, "Oh, let's just go back to the hotel." This was the most gut-wrenching loss maybe in the history of the NBA, and there's an account, I talked to the, uh, assistant coach, he said Popovich said, "No, we're going to the restaurant.

We're going." And he go, he gets there early, and he sits in a chair in the restaurant, and he looks as broken as a man has ever looked, like his, he- he j- just destroyed.

The bus pulls up, he straightens himself up, and he takes a deep breath, and he walks to the door, and he smiles, and he starts greeting all the players.

And then they gather at that dinner with families and everything.

He puts the players at the center table, and he spends the night.

The coach said it was like watching a father at a wedding, like helping every, lifting everybody up.

Yeah.

[laughs]

It is, it is not very results-oriented.

In fact, you don't know what's gonna happen.

It's this little experiment.

But what ends up happening, because she's creating this constraint, this, this sort of, this connection, the master's student kind of rediscovers the joy of art, and the four-year-old is lit up by the possibility of partnering with a, with a full-grown adult, and they create something...

What they create is sort of connective energy.

And so the, the rugby team and the art, and this little art project are in the exact same business.

[laughs]

What are some themes you noticed as you visited different groups that had this kind of flourishing quality? What did they do?

They're really good at making meaning, which means they're really good at, like, pausing and illuminating things that are bigger than themselves.

Those little moments, those pauses where they're not trying to control the moment, but simply experiencing it together end up being super powerful because meaning, making meaning together isn't about information.

You know, we tend to think of meaning as being informational, like I'm gonna give you this piece of data and you'll understand it and you'll think it through, but actually, meaning is all about stopping your thinking, stopping your thinking and experiencing some connection to something bigger.

They're moments of resonance.

You know? They're moments where we can s- where our self kind of disappears.

You, you're not the center of things anymore, and that's why moments of awe, moments of wonder, these little doorways of curiosity, these pauses.

No matter who he's working with, Peter Block asks questions that get people talking about stuff that matters.

Yes.

Like, good...

You cannot get great conversations out of bad questions or out of have, having all the answers.

So, like, and that depends on curiosity.

So it's like that, you know, curiosity isn't some nice little extra.

It's, like, absolutely the, the, the governing software of these moments, you know? It is the essential moment that, that they had in the mine and that I saw in all these places that I visited, and I think that you are capturing in, in so much of your work, that moment of saying, "What if I don't know what's going on here?"

Yeah.

I mean, and, and so, uh, uh, but I think we're in the process, and maybe AI will help hasten this.

What are some of the, just one example or two of some of the key ones?

Yeah, the first thing they do is they, the map is sort of two basic behaviors.

I'm making the argument that this is a craft.

It's not magic.

You go into a flourishing community or flourishing school or bakery.

It feels like magic.

It's like everybody here is really lit up and alive and they're fun and they're spaciousness.

What do they need to unlearn to be able to flourish in the years ahead?

What are some of the, just one example or two of some of the key ones?

Yeah.

The first thing they do is they-- The map is sort of two basic behaviors.

I'm making the argument that this is a craft.

It's not magic.

You go into a flourishing community or flourishing school or bakery, it feels like magic.

It's like, oh, everybody here is really lit up and alive, and they're fun, and they're, and there's spaciousness, and they're creating things.

What do they need to unlearn to be able to flourish in the years ahead?

Again, go to eatiqbar.com and enter code BAR20.

The New Zealand All Black rugby team, one of the best rugby teams on the planet, they have players guide practice once a week, players coach practice.

So the coaches step back, players run things.

Now, is that the most efficient way to go? Absolutely not.

Like, coaches are better at running practice than players are, no question.

It's messier.

It's more unpredictable.

[chuckles]

And I wonder if you'd talk us through those and what it means is we struggle to find meaning today.

I know.

I know.

Well, it's fascinating.

I mean, I spent five years visiting these places where there were impossible amounts of sort of meaningful, joyful growth.

That's the definition of flourishing, these places that are producing that.

So the question is, you know, they're talking like little town in Vermont that produces all these Olympic champions and they all go back there to live afterwards, right? or this little deli that grows into a giant $90 million community of businesses that is just impossibly thriving.

As leaders are trying to bridge a disconnected, divided workforce, how can they use concepts like this to design change? more meaning, more community into their workplaces.

I, I kind of would use them interchangeably almost.

Me too.

That's how I always did, but it, they're not actually.

When you look into it, when you look into the math and the science, they couldn't be more different.

And here it is.

Complicated things always come together the same way.

A leads to B leads to C leads to D.

And y- y- you say we crave it, and yet there it is and we ignore it.

Mm-hmm.

These moments of ignition, and they're not about information.

They're not about, like, learning some fact or seeing some person.

It is about this energized relationship where you are, you find yourself mattering.

You find this sense, you, that you're, you're seeing some immense value, some enchanted circle.

And those moments, I think, they happen all the time, and they end up driving these big things that happen both in history and in our lives individually, and cluing into them.

As a parent, I think about that a lot.

So let me put that in here.

But for those who are listening, dive us into

that.

Yeah, same thing.

Well, complicated stuff goes together the same way every time.

If you take apart a Ferrari and put it back together according to the instructions, you will get a Ferrari.

A goes to B goes to C goes to D. There's a causal link.

Complex ones don't.

So

What's to be done?

Yeah.

Well, what's to be done? What's to be done? It'd be great if I could be like, "Here's a silver bullet that will solve all the problems." That doesn't exist.

Two things I would say, though.

First of all, reflect on where you are getting a sense of aliveness.

There's a little litmus test that you can give in terms of flourishing, which is, who do I feel most alive with? Is, is there anybody in this? Who do I feel most alive with? And the second is, what are you growing together? What are you making together? What are you growing? So ask that, find locations in your life, find the spaces, the conversations, the relationships where you feel that energy and that sense.

That's the first thing.

[laughs] Like, this is a pretty amazing experience.

What role does vulnerability play? And similarly, what are the biggest misunderstandings of vulnerability that hold people back from truly being vulnerable?

Oh, that's really good.

I like that.

Well, I'll take the second part first, which is I think the biggest misunderstanding, we hear that word and we think like, oh, I can disclose everything.

Like we take it for disclosure for saying, here's how I'm feeling right now, right? Or here's my opinion on this.

We sort of think, oh, vent, share.

And that's not actually the kind of vulnerability that I see in those groups.

Right,

But what's your take on the, on the, the personal?

Yeah.

On the personal, it, this sort of takes place in kind of the ways in which we pay attention, right? On the personal side, where this stuff resonates is in openness, in the ability to shift your attention system, and we actually have two attention systems, as the, the book gets into.

We have task attention that's pretty narrow, and we have broad attention that is really relational.

And on a personal level, what this, these communities require, what this process requires is, to put it really simple, a kind of openness.

It requires the kind of relational attention that lets you connect to something bigger.

You have to be open to that.

But I, but I'll let you tell the story and, and talk about some of the lessons.

Wow!

And it's done by disobeying just about every single rule of business.

When the people show up to do orientation, their new employees, they sort of flip it on its head.

Rather than saying, "Here's how-- what you need to know to succeed here," um, what they do is they just ask questions of the employees.

"Well, how'd you get here? What do you care about? What matters to you?" And they create exactly what the Chilean miners created.

They see the value, the deep value in each other, and then they connect to something bigger.

And that's how meaning gets created.

Who helped Zingerman?

Not sure if you've read it, Dan, but her white paper on this is phenomenal.

yeah yeah and she's focused if i remember right largely on what's happening outside the mine as they come together to build this incredible talk about a space shot right they're going 2 000 feet into the granite to rescue these people most of us remember the big outlines of the story the 33 33 miners there's a cave at san jose mine there's 100 million tons of rock on them the hope for escape is pretty minimal at first because nobody's ever escaped from that far down before and they're trapped in what's called a refugio a little room which had a cabinet with some old cans of tuna and some cookies and some sour milk and for 16 days they were there in the dark Then when they're finally contacted, they're thinking what typically happens in these things is there's severe mental health risks.

Juries get infected.

There's all kinds of horror stories of what happened when you have a group of roughneck minors in a small space with no certainty of rescue at all, like probably not going to be rescued.

And then they finally contact him and they drop a phone down the hole and say, how are you guys doing? And they say, we're doing great.

But our first question is what happened to the bus driver who was near us when the cave-in happened? First thing they do is ask about somebody else.

They didn't say, oh my God, when are you going to come and get us? We're dying down here.

I'm picturing it right here in my mind.

And so if we find ourselves in sort of a more normal situation and we have some community, but maybe not as much as we want, what are some things we should start to do?

Yeah, a lot of it is rooted in the way we pay attention to things.

And what I found these places doing regularly, almost like it was a physical workout, is they really embraced ritual.

These places really embraced ritual as a way to connect, but also as a way to kind of ground yourself, your individual self.

Modern life is like this incredibly fast race.

You're like chasing, you're hunting, you're playing this game.

And they had a way of using ritual to slow down and stop.

Can you talk about that?

Well, it's the same

way that it happens in our private lives, which is moments of grounding.

Moments of grounding.

When you get very busy, Adam, I'm betting that you don't just keep going full steam and say, I should speed up.

But in a business environment, we often do exactly that.

You know, as private people, we know to sort of, in our private lives, we take a breath and we zoom out and we have that moment of stillness.

Well, what happens in business is that these places develop those same things, their set of grounding practices, grounding practices that create clarity.

Yeah,

Uh, how would you define it? What do you mean by presence, and why is it important?

Well, what we're really talking about here is, uh, the way our attention systems work, and one of the things that the book really showed me and the research for the book taught me was that we've-- we tend to think about attention as a single thing.

And we all know we're in this attentional crisis, right? Like, we all acknowledge this.

We're in an attentional crisis, but what we lack is a clear model of what attentional health is, what it looks like.

You know, like, it's like we're trying to eat well, but we don't understand the building blocks.

We don't understand proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

So the way attention actually works, and it's kind of an interesting backstory, why we got off on the wrong track, attention isn't just this narrow, focused thing that we usually think it of.

... what's their general strategy for thinking about, uh, marriage and how to have a good relationship?

Yeah

... it's the most powerful skill because, 'cause it's not a machine.

Because these organizations are actually more like these energy channels that are exploring stuff.

They're more like rivers.

It's like a river.

How do you make a river flow? Well, you give it a horizon to flow toward, like, where are we going? You set up some riverbanks.

Where is where we're not gonna go.

Sure.

Okay, so tell us about Voorstad, the Dutch neighborhood that came alive when one person planted just a tiny garden.

Yeah, it was such a cool story.

This neighborhood kind of was pretty dead, economically down.

It's very two-story structures.

It's in Holland.

There's brick streets, brick sidewalks, brick buildings.

Everything's red brick, gridded, and there were these two dudes who sat out in front of their stoop every day in lawn chairs, and they smoked, and they were kinda handyman sort of.

[chuckles]