Thank you for having me, Hitendra. I'm thrilled to be here with you.

I do. I spent a summer in the Nepalese Himalaya and was very much completely just taken by the Sherpa culture and the Khumbu region.

The things that I write about tend to be topics that I wrestle with personally. So whenever I write, whether it is an essay or a book, I am writing something that I want to figure out for myself. Sometimes I get lucky and lots of other people are trying to figure it out, too. The origins of "The Passion Paradox" in a very short story is this.

My co-author Steve Magness and I had already submitted the manuscript for our first book, "Peak Performance", and we were waiting to get edits back from our editor on that project. At the time Steve lived in Houston and I lived in California. So we were in different states. We were promised edits back over this time period, I believe it was in April. Steve made plans to fly to California, and this was, of course, long before Covid, and we were going to spend 2 weeks together working on the edits, going through them and then submitting the final manuscript.

When Steve got there, on the 2nd day we heard from our editor that he was way behind. He had other projects in the queue, but that the manuscript is in great shape. The edits are very minor and we should rest assured that there is not much work for us to do. This was our first book with a major publishing house, and instead of having the perhaps more normal reaction of celebrating and getting a six pack of beer and just being on vacation for 2 weeks, Steve and I looked at each other. And we said, "Well, crap, what are we going to do now?" And that question led us to the book ultimately, because we sat with ourselves and we said, "What's wrong with us? Why can't we just be content? Why can't we just take a 2-week vacation? Why is our first thought immediately about what's next?" And we realized that in both of us, we had been told from a very young age that this inner drive or this sense of passion is such a good thing and we should be so glad to have it and to cultivate it. And here, we were wondering whether is it a good thing or wouldn't it be nice to just be able to sit on the couch and just veg out for 2 weeks. It was really trying to answer that question for ourselves. Where does drive come from? What is drive mean? Is drive good? Is drive bad? Is it neutral? Then we decided to have our cake and eat it too. We basically said, "Well, let's answer this question and write a book about it". We started working on the project in those 2 weeks and one thing led to another and it became the book.

Well, I think there are 3 main things that are worth focusing on. That is because they are all pretty strong myths in the culture. The first thing is that you don't find the passion. If anything trying really hard to find a passion gets in the way of you becoming passionate about something.

The second big myth is this notion that if you are fortunate enough to find a pursuit or even a person romantically that you're passionate about, that you should just follow that passion wherever it takes you. That is also not true. Passion must be handled with great care. It can be a blessing, but it can also be a curse. The root of the word passion "Passio" is Latin for suffering. The origin of passion was in the story of the historical Jesus Christ and the suffering of Christ. That is how this word passion came to be. We think passion is this great thing and it can be, but it can also lead to immense suffering.

The third myth in the common culture is this notion that 2 things to pursue is a highly fulfilled, peak performing, successful person are passion and balance. If you think about that, it makes no sense, because by definition, passion is the single minded, enthusiastic, wholehearted pursuit of something. And balance, at least the way that we interpret it typically is equal things in equal proportion. If you go to the self-help or the personal development or the business book aisle of a store, you'll see all these books on balance and all these books on passion. But it is very hard to be both balanced and passionate at the same time.

There is some interesting research. If you were to talk to a behavioral geneticist, they might tell you that there are certain genes associated with drive and kind of craving for the next thing. Based on my review of all of that work, I would say that that science is still so young, I don't put too much stock in it, particularly because no single gene is determinant of behavior. It is a myriad of these things interacting with each other.

What I would say is, the key to cultivating passion is to get beyond this societal myth and it is something that you find. The research shows the individuals think that they're going to magically find a passion. It is called the fit theory of passion, that they are just going to stumble on to some kind of activity or pursuit and it is going to be perfect and they are going to know it is for them. They are 80% less likely 10 years down the road to be working on something that they say that they are passionate about, whereas individuals that lower the bar from passion to interesting and instead of being so obsessed with finding a passion, they just pursue things that they're interested in, they follow their curiosity, those people are significantly more likely to end up passionate 10 years down the road.

The reason for this is quite simple, because if you have this extremely high bar of magical passion and everything is clicking, the minute that something goes wrong, which it inevitably does, you will just assume, "Oh, I guess this isn't for me. I guess this isn't the thing that I'm passionate about". Whereas if you lower the bar to "This is interesting". You can ride those ups and downs and you can cultivate it and the passion emerges over time.

We mentioned this in the book and what is fascinating is this exactly mirrors almost to the exact statistic research on romantic intimacy and love. People that believe that there is one single soul mate for them are much less likely to be in long term relationships than people who think that there is no such thing as one soul mate, but that they can develop love with anyone. I have come to think about love and passion the same way, which is that the goal isn't to be madly in love or madly passionate on day one, week one or even a year one. The goal is to build love or build passion over decades. It is a shift from finding passion to cultivating it or even pursuing mastery, that the more enriched you get in something, the more it loves you back.

It is very freeing as well. So back to love, just statistically speaking, you are a business school professor. I know you are also a soulful, spiritual man. It is nice to have the thought that there is one soul mate, but there are 7 billion people in the world. There are probably multiple people that I could be madly in love with. To release the way of thinking like I have to find the one really frees you to again to meet interesting people, to fall in love. I only go deep on love because the same thing is true about passion.

I am right now a professional writer and coach. I love it. If you were to ask me, is that the one thing in the world that was for me? I think no, it just happens to be the thing that hooked my attention and I became interested in that.

I guess, the big takeaway or the big lesson there, particularly for people early on in their career, and if any of the listeners are still in school or if you have kids, is to try to get rid of the language around to find your passion, because that insinuates that there is this one thing and you have to search for it and instead lower the bar to seek out things that interest you and pursue your interests. When I work with coaching clients, I talk about finding your passion. People report that it makes them feel tight. Because there is like a pressure, I have to find this one thing, whereas when we talk about pursuing our interests, you tend to feel more open, because it is a lot easier to find things that you are interested in.

Yes. This is probably my favorite of the 3 myths to talk about. It was the most interesting part for me to learn about in researching and writing this book. We could spend hours here. I think the place to start is that the human mind body system did not evolve to be content. We evolved to keep pushing. The reason for this is simple. Long ago in our species evolution, when we were on the Savanna, there were often times of famine. If you just accomplished a big hunt, you can't be content because you don't know when your next meal will be. We didn't evolve to be satisfied. We evolved to crave the chase. This brain hasn't changed that much. That is still very much how we are wired. This is why so many people who achieve a great success, they think it will make them content and happy. And then immediately, like my co-author and I, a day or two later, they're on to the next thing.

The neurochemical in the brain that is very activated in this is called dopamine. It is a very invoke thing to talk about. Dopamine does many things in the brain. But one thing that the dopamine system does is it fuels the pursuits in the chase of something.

So, when you're falling in love, there is tons of dopamine activity. If you are struggling with substance abuse or an addiction, there is tons of dopamine activity. We see the same thing and highly passionate people? Why? Because it is that same craving. It is that same chase to pursue this thing that they care deeply about. That, in part, is why it's so easy to become blinded by passion, because we very much get into the mindset of somebody that is falling in love or somebody who is an addict, where by nature, our world narrows. Because, we have blinders and sometimes all we can see is the object of our passion. Again, this is not good or bad. It just is.

There are many entrepreneurs that have started companies that have changed the world for the better because they had this kind of tunneled vision to focus on starting that company. Any Olympian that I have befriended or worked with, they better have that tunnel vision. Otherwise, they are not going to make it to the big stage. The downside is, when this blinds you to other things that are important in the trade-offs that you are making don't fit your values. I am very clear about this. It is not good or bad. It can be good. It can also be bad. And sometimes it can be both on the same day.

Away from Olympians and successful entrepreneurs is a very common example that I think any driven person can relate to is for me, passion is great. When I'm working on a book project and I have tunnel vision and the world around me completely disappears. I do my best writing. I feel great. I love it. If I let that tunnel vision escape my office and go to dinner when I'm playing with my 3 year-old, it's no longer such a good thing.

I do. I'm glad that you are bringing this up. It is a challenging topic to talk about as an alumni of the firm. The day that that news broke, I got a text message from the partner that I most enjoyed working with back in the day when I was at McKinsey, who has since long left the firm saying that this could be a chapter in The Passion Paradox, then the book had already been out. I think there is a lot of relationship there and I very much agreed with him.

I want to start because it is a touchy issue by saying that I am not here to defend McKinsey or to write another hit piece on them. I think it is a complex situation. I think that a lot of the mistakes that they made in working with the Sackler family are real and they need to be held accountable for that.

I should say, I don't know the partners. I don't know the teams. It's long since I was at McKinsey. I like to think that no one there was evil intentioned. I don't think anyone went out to say, let's hook all these people on opioids. Let's advise Purdue Pharmaceutical to make their marketing materials in a predatory way. I can't imagine that was the problem statement.

What I do think probably happened is that when you are a McKinsey consultant, when you are a partner and you have a direct line to the CEO of an enormous company, there is a big dopamine passion rush that comes with that. And you are working in this little team room and the ball gets rolling and those blinders come on. Pretty soon, you are passionate about solving the problem for your client. In McKinsey's overarching core value is client service. Any one on the call has been with McKinsey, it is serve our client.

So you take highly driven, passionate people, put them on a time crunch, intense study, pay them a lot of money so they feel obligated to do good work and then put these blinders on, and pretty soon all you are trying to do as a consultant is solve the problem. And if you lose perspective about what that might actually mean in the real world, then you get something like advising a company in predatory marketing schemes to basically get people addicted to very potent drugs. That's the simple version. I do think it is complex, but like I said, I don't think that anybody was ill intentioned. I mean, you'd have to be a psychopath literally to say that, "Oh, we're going to get all these people addicted to drugs". I think it's probably more likely that there was a very high degree of passion in that team and a complete loss of perspective.

What is fascinating and loss of perspective to bring it back to the science in the book. There is some research that shows that if you scan the brain of somebody that is suffering from an eating disorder and you scan the brain of a highly passionate entrepreneur or an Olympian, they look very similar in. The reason for that is both are delusional. If you are suffering from an eating disorder and you look in the mirror, you do not see a gaunt, skinny, ill looking person. You see someone that is fat. You literally cannot see reality as it is. If you are an Olympian trying to win a gold medal or an entrepreneur starting a company, you too have to be somewhat delusional, because 99% of entrepreneurs fail and 99.9999% of athletes don't win gold medals. Again, it's this nuanced thing and it is great to have that fuel and it is so easy to lose perspective.

It does. This is a big hope of mine, that moments like this don't lead to more black and white extreme thinking, but lead to more gray, non-dual thinking. Passion is a perfect example. Passion is good. Passion is bad. No, passion can be good. Passion can be bad. Passion is both good and bad. McKinsey is good. McKinsey is bad. No, McKinsey can be good. McKinsey can be bad. Capitalism is good. Capitalism is bad. No, both are not. I think that to transcend some of these models that we have relied so heavily upon, we can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater, but we have to bring more nuance to how we think about them and hold them down unduly. Embrace the complexity of things, embrace that most things are not good or bad. Most things are good and bad or are good in this circumstance, but bad in this circumstance.

Can I say one more thing on the passion and the drive, because I think it is really important for the audience. Another way that passion goes awry, and this is so common in the business world is what researchers call the difference between harmonious passion and obsessive passion.

Harmonious passion is when you are extremely passionate about doing the activity itself. This is when you are the basketball player that loves the game. You are the McKinsey consultant that loves problem solving and loves working with other high performing people. That's harmonious passion.

Obsessive passion is when you become more passionate about the results and the external validation you get from doing the thing than the thing itself. This is when you're the basketball player that is motivated by the All Star game or by all the endorsement deals, or you are the McKinsey consultant that is passionate about being able to tell your friends and family that you work at the firm or buying the nice car you get with your promotion.

What the research shows so crystal clearly is that harmonious passion is associated with happiness, health and peak performance. Obsessive passion is associated with anxiety, depression, burnout and unethical behavior. There is a study in the book that looked at athletes in these two types of passion, and what these researchers found is that athletes that have high degrees of obsessive passion are more likely to use steroids and cheat than those that don't. One in five athletes with obsessive passion said they would die in five years if it meant that they won a gold medal. You become so fixated on the result and so passionate about the result that of course, it creates this distress or this temptation to cheat or engage in unethical behavior.

We like to think again that these things are black and white, but they are not. And it is very hard to stop obsessive passion, because most people go on this trajectory. You pursue your interest, you cultivate a passion, and you become very good at a thing because you enjoy it and you're doing it a lot. While you become good at the thing then you start to get recognized. People tell you you're good. You make a best seller list. You get promoted. You do win a medal. You get drafted by a team, whatever it is. We are social creatures. So that feels really good. We just have to make sure that that's not the driving force behind our passion, because otherwise it leads us to really chase these outcomes at all costs.

Well, it's a question that I get a lot, which is, "I'm passionate about so many different things. What I say to that is great, then pursue different things. There is no playbook that says that you need to be completely obsessed or passionate about one thing. There is no playbook that says that you need to have multiple interests. We get into a lot of trouble trying to conform to these ideas that we have in our head of what it means to be a peak performer or what it means to be passionate versus really just letting our own inquiry guide where we channel that.

So if you step back, you asked me right from the get go if compassion can be something that we are born with. And I said, I don't really think so. But passion itself can be a trait that is cultivated independent of the pursuit. You can absolutely be a driven, passionate person that is driven about music, is driven about basketball, is driven about starting a company. And maybe you do all those things at once. Maybe there is a season of your life where you start a company and then a season of your life where you learn everything there is to learn about classical music. There is no right or wrong way to do it.

That gets back to following your interests, right? Maybe that is part of the problem. Again, like, "Oh, I need to be passionate about math", no, math was your interest. Then you followed it. And you do take these experiences with you. You mentioned identity. You build an identity that is multifaceted. There is a reason that perhaps the most famous quote in Western poetry is Walt Whitman, "I contain multitudes", probably because it's true. That resonates with a lot of people.

I think that they connect. I think that ideally you get overlap between the two. If your purpose in life is to help other people or build community or make creative work, and then if you have a lot of drive and you can direct that drive toward an activity that is aligned with your purpose, there is research that shows that you have a less chance of burning out and more chance opposite of the same coin of sustaining your performance. That is because having a strong purpose really helps during low periods and periods of fatigue to keep you going and to carry you through. That said, you can also have purpose that is very separate from passion. Your purpose could be spirituality or love, or you could be a very religious person and you could also be a founder of a company that has nothing to do with spirituality or religion. And you could have a very fulfilled, happy life that way as well.

I am so glad that you picked up on this. This is really important, good stuff.

Back to obsessive passion or harmonious passion. When your identity gets totally fused to a pursuit, it can be both a beautiful thing and a terrible thing and at different times. When you are an athlete and your identity becomes an athlete, you put your all into that. You carry yourself like an athlete. That is how you live your life.

If your passion is harmonious, that is wonderful. Until it's time to retire or until you get injured, because then once you leave the thing that you're passionate about behind, then who are you? This is absolutely why so many athletes suffer from periods of depression or addiction when they retire from sport. It is why individuals that start companies that then move on tend to suffer from addiction and depression. And that's why people that retire after long, fulfilling careers tend to suffer from depression and addiction. Because, if your identity is very fused to this thing and you lose the thing, then it can really lead to a crisis. Why it's nuanced is because when you're doing the pursuits and your identity feels tied to it. It's wonderful. You feel like you're really expressing yourself in an act.

Where I come out on this is, I like to think of identity is something that is a little bit more fluid and also that is separate from anything that you do. Identity is this deeper part of you. It is almost like your awareness or the canvas upon which all the content of your life gets painted, and at times, your identity is confused with something. The skill is realizing when that's happening and then being able to create space when it is wise to create space. Does it make sense?

I talk about athletes often because I think that to me, it's the most extreme example because most athletes are forced to retire at a time when their cohort and their peers are just taking off in their careers. So I think most athletes retire between 28 and 34. When at a time when everyone else in that age cohort is really coming into their own professionally, the thing that you've pursued your whole life with single minded focus, you have to leave behind. It's almost like a double whammy, because you look around you see all these people fusing identity to craft and being really fulfilled and then you're having to leave it behind. I think it is a really interesting subgroup of people to study because it is so extreme.

Entrepreneurs, too. That is the other subgroup where, in order to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to be a little bit delusional in a good way. Often, you really have to push hard and go all in for a period of time. Most venture capital firms will tell you that they are basically investing in the founder. How do you not fuse your identity with the company? And that's great until your company fails or until your company is acquired and you are no longer the only decision maker. It is about realizing when identity and passion converge, but always keeping just a degree or two of separation between the two so that when one thing goes away, the other doesn't follow it.

So I guess what I would say is without having more context, I think if survival mode is a lack of food or shelter or basic needs, then nothing I'm saying is going to be helpful until those basic needs are met. This stuff is not a replacement for having basic needs food, shelter, health care. Another thing that I would say is, if it is more of a mental health challenge where perhaps you feel like you can't get passionate about anything or you don't have purpose, or you are having all these intrusive thoughts and feelings that you struggle to get rid of, I think hopefully listening to this is a little bit helpful. But I would also say that seeking a therapist is probably much more helpful than any book on passion that I'm going to write.

I know you study purpose, because I am someone that has experienced the pretty dark depression. An underlying factor of that is a loss of purpose. I'm such a purpose driven person. It was utterly disorienting for me not to have purpose. Just learning that even something like purpose is non-dual. There are periods in your life where purpose goes away, where passion goes away, and you don't have to like it, but if you judge yourself and then you say, "Oh, something's wrong with me, I don't have purpose or something's wrong with me, I can't get passionate", That just entrenches the feeling.

I think that all of these very powerful attributes that are seen as positive, whether it is drive, passion, purpose, pushing, you also have to marry them with self-compassion and acceptance and realizing that there are highs and lows. When you are on a high and everything's clicking, you should ride it. But when you're in a low, you should have the faith that you can work your way out of that low, too. And sometimes it takes health to do so.

For a year, I had no idea. It was hard for me to leave the house. Maybe not a year, maybe it was 8 months. Without a therapist that was so skilled and wonderful, I don't know if I would be here right now. Certainly, not having this level of talk.

I think it's important, because very few people are completely put together and these episodes are just a part of being human. I think the more vulnerable that we can be about them, the more that we can help each other and have compassion.

I am hearing a lot of mastery or maybe intellect is the ultimate underlying value or the desire to make sense of things or to understand. And that my guess is throughout your career has been steady. But where you have pointed it has been different. Mathematics, business, PHD research, teaching, McKinsey, these things look a little bit disparate, but maybe underneath that is deeply understanding things or deeply understanding things and then as you have gotten older, sharing them.

Again, the first thing I would say is, I am not a clinical therapist. And I think if you're suffering, the best thing to do is to find a clinical therapist, a professional and work with them or at least try to find the right fit and work with someone. What I can say from a scientific or research perspective is that over the past 20 years, there has been a shift in the third wave therapies for anxiety, depression. I don't know as much about eating disorders, but if you associate eating disorders with obsessions, it is very much obsessions too, that we used to think that you had to be very motivated to do something and that the action would follow motivation or that your brain would have to be on a certain wavelength to act. That has shifted.

Now, studies have shown pretty conclusively that it is often the opposite, that mood follows action. This is particularly true for individuals experiencing depression. The technique in scientific speak is behavioral activation, which basically says that you don't have to feel good to get going. You need to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good.

With obsessions, perhaps around food, you're not going to think yourself into being able to eat. You're going to have to eat yourself into being able to eat. That's why so many intensive recovery programs for eating disorder, focus a lot on the emotional side of things, but they also focus just on you're going to sit down and eat this regardless of how it makes you feel, because you're retraining the body that you can get into motion and be okay.

Yeah. There are 5 dimensions of health that the WHO uses. I think it is physical, emotional, social, spiritual and maybe intellectual, but very much similar. Really smart people that study public health have come to the same conclusion that those things don't always have to be in balance. Sometimes you're lacking one and you can be strong in another. I would say that you never want to leave one completely behind.

In short, trying to be really passionate and balanced at the same time never works. You just end up feeling like you're stretched too thin or you're doing a mediocre job at everything, but you're not really doing great in any one thing. Where I have come out on this topic is that instead of striving to be balanced, strive to have the self-awareness, to understand what matters to you, prioritize accordingly, point your energy and passion towards those things that matter to you and be able to evaluate and shift when necessary. It is so much easier said than done. But that's it in a nutshell.

I am not a balanced person at all. My wife tells me I can't even on the dishwasher and have a conversation at the same time. I have to do one thing at a time. I have to single task, and my strength is very much that. But my weakness can be, as I mentioned, when those blinders go on, it's hard to take them off. Rather than try to be balanced and constantly be doing everything, I think it's about developing the self-awareness to say, "Hey, right now I'm devoting 80% of my time and my energy to a book project. First, just being aware of it, you're doing it second, asking myself, do I want to be doing it? Are there important people in my life, are they okay with it? How long should I do this for?"

It is easy to tell myself it is only going to be 2 weeks. But what if on the 3rd week someone tweets about my book and they want to do more interviews and you can get sucked in. So just having the self-awareness to constantly ask yourself, what matters most to me? How am I spending my time? Does this still make sense today? Because what might have made sense a year ago might not make sense now.

There are two practical techniques I like here. They both fall under this notion of self-distancing, which is literally a way to create space between your true self and what you're doing. One is to pretend that a good friend is in the same situation and then give advice to that friend, and actually follow the advice that you give that friend.

The other is to look down the road and pretend that you are 10- 15 years wiser version of yourself, looking back on yourself right now, what would that wiser version of yourself tell you to do? How do you answer those two questions is often very different than what you feel like you want to do in the moment.

Let's say you've got that tunnel vision and it's on and you're pushing really hard at some kind of pursuit and you've got 2 young kids. If a friend came to you and said, "Man it is 8 o'clock at night, I'm in a groove, I really want to keep pushing. I've been pushing the last 3 nights. Should I keep working until 9 or should I read my kid a bedtime story?" You are probably going to tell the friend to read the kid a bedtime story, and that's probably what you should do.

It's funny, because it very much mirrors a lot of the things that I have since learned in the research, and I didn't know it at the time, but I'm very fortunate that it played out as such and probably good parenting at the time as well.

I really wanted to be a writer, and I applied to Northwestern Medill School of Journalism, which is the best journalism school in the country, and I got rejected. I didn't get it. Like any 17 year old, I said, I guess I'm not going to be a writer. And here I am now writing. It's just so remarkable because I went to Michigan, like you said at the beginning, I studied organizational behavior. I went to public school. But all along I was still telling stories and communicating and writing. Even at McKinsey & Company. I think McKinsey & Company is a great place to go train to be a non-fiction writer, because every single PowerPoint slide deck recapping the study is writing a non-fiction book.

You're there to solve a thorny problem. You do research, you talk to experts, you tell us some stories. You present the data. If you're good, you tell the client how you might be wrong and then you recommend a conclusion.

That is the exact same process as writing a non-fiction book. Even though I wasn't pursuing writing or communication per say, that underlying interest or energy was still being expressed in these other areas that I was and I think I just kept pursuing that interest within reason and caught some lucky breaks. And now here I am. I think that if I would have said I'm going to be a writer come hell or high water, I probably wouldn't be here today.

I wish I knew. It's funny because to me, I don't even know if I think it was such independent thinking, I think I identified what I really liked about McKinsey and then what I didn't like. And I tried to craft my next steps around what I liked.

I loved the intellectual exploration. I liked working with smart people. I hated the mathematical modelling. So your old self and my old self would have been on different extremes. But I really liked the storytelling. I loved the reading, the research. I didn't love the travel. I didn't love the time pressure, some of which seemed artificial and those studies. If I think back, what I really liked at that time was being able to go very deep on a topic, learn a lot about it, and then have interesting conversations with people.

I didn't say, "Oh that means I'm going to try to be an author". Because, I didn't know that I was going to be an author. I went to public health school, but I think I just always ask myself for whatever I was doing, "Would this work in service of those core values?" It answered the question for me. If McKinsey would have been a place where I felt there was more time and space to get really deep on a topic and you didn't have to travel, I might still be at McKinsey and be very happy there. That was, I guess, how I did it at the time.

It is important because it gets back to a hypothesis that we tested in the book. I didn't have a pre-ordained or pre-planned path. It was very much about having a sense of what I enjoy, what matters to me, what I think I'm good at, and then trying to pursue things that have a good fit.

"The Practice of Groundedness" comes out in September and that book really explores what are the foundational principles or practices that lead to a durable, more fulfilling kind of success. It argues to your point just now that so many people that are high performing pushers, they're very successful by conventional measures, but often, they still don't feel fulfilled or they feel like they always need to have more, do more or be more. In the book, I call it both heroic individualism like this self-limiting belief that you constantly need to beat yourself or beat others or never enough etc. it's just never enough. You always need more. I was very curious, what is the latest research? What is history and what do ancient wisdom traditions have to say about marrying the pursuit of excellence, which feels very good with some kind of foundational contentedness or ability just to be strong and solid where you are? Like I said, I don't write because I have these things figured out. I write to figure them out. This book was a multi-year exploration of what it takes to be grounded in. What I have learned in the books is that if you can cultivate this quality that I called, groundedness, it's not that you stop striving or that your ambition goes away, but it's much more situated and it feels much more durable that way.

I think it comes back to identifying what matters to you and what you want to work in service of and do what you can to devote your energy toward those things. At the same time realize that life is very much rhythmic highs and lows and it is important to enjoy the highs, because that sense of enjoyment will sustain you during the lows. It is also important to remember that just like the highs are impermanent, so are the lows.

I had a wonderful conversation and how it started. Thank you.