TRANSCRIPT

***Transcript is unedited and done digitally

Sean: Tom, welcome to what got you there. How are you doing today?

Tom: I’m doing great. I hope you are,

Sean: I’m doing wonderful. Tom, I would, I would love to know you’ve done so much over your career and I’m wondering, has there been a mindset of yours that has been kind of a common thread throughout that you think has been deeply influential and impactful in what you’ve achieved and what you’ve been able to do?

Tom: Yeah, I definitely think that. Nobody’s ever asked me that question before. great question. I think I’ve always had this love of ideas and a love of people that, when brought together, have given me my, my career. A love of ideas alone, you could become a very abstract philosopher, right? Or a theoretician of some sort.

And my early career was, was that I did philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, metaphysics, epistemology, a lot of really complicated stuff that 37 people in the world could understand basically. And, but I did really well in that and I flourished, but then my, my love of people kind of got the best of me and, and rose to the level of.

Love of ideas. I realize I can do both. I can, I can love the world of the mind, you know, intellectual discovery, and I can put it to use for the good of other people. I want to do that. And so I did a career shift, you know, after 14 years of being on campus at Notre Dame. and I taught an eighth of the student body most years.

I had these huge classes. I had a lot of fun, but I just had a sense, a growing sense of mission that the way to bring together this mindset of loving ideas in the mindset of loving people was to become a public philosopher and bring ideas to people wherever they might be. so they didn’t have to go to a great university campus like you and I have done to, to get our start in the, our intellectual lives.

But I’d go to where they were and people just thought I was crazy. You know, I, I was a full professor guaranteed job for life. I, I taught two days a week, two hours each day. I had 12 teaching assistants to do all my grading. I just was having a wonderful time. The football players would come to my kid’s birthday parties.

I mean, I was just, I had this amazing life at Notre Dame, but I felt a sense of calling to serve more people than just those who could make it to campus in South Bend, Indiana. So in 1995. I made a switch and I moved to the beach in North Carolina because there’s a history of philosophers setting up shop at the beach.

people need philosophy at the beach too. And I’ve been here doing my thing ever since as an independent philosopher, a job, by the way, that you would never think would be a possibility.

Sean: Talk to me about that, that inner knowing, that growing sense of mission. I feel like there’s a lot of people who have those silent whispers inside, but they also often, once they hear it, they kind of push it away. You listened to it and then went further. What allowed you to do that?

Tom: Yeah, especially if it doesn’t seem to make any sense. Right? I mean, give up your job at a place like Notre Dame. And most people don’t know this. When you have tenure, when you have a job for life, that tenure is attached to the department. So, if the department is ever dissolved, like some humanities departments are being around the country now, your tenure goes away to your job goes away.

But Notre Dame is never going to do away with their philosophy department. So people said, if you’ve got security anywhere in this world. It’s at the Notre Dame philosophy department, you know, why would you give that up? Well, like a lot of people I had this the sense that there was a new adventure waiting for me and my dad who was A high school graduate used to give me great advice about life when I was a little kid You know tucking me into bed at night and one of his best pieces of advice was this he said life is supposed to be A series of adventures the one you’re on now and the ones you’ve been on have been preparing you for the next one Often in ways you can’t even imagine. Live life as a series of adventures. And he showed that in his own life. he built airplanes, he built radio stations through the South in the forties and early fifties. he invented toys. He ran a radio station. He created a real estate company. He said to me once, do something as long as you really love it.

And you think you have something distinctive to contribute. If either of those things changes, you should make a change, which is great advice. I never got to the point of not loving when I was doing it in Notre Dame. I never got to the point of thinking I didn’t have any more to contribute at Notre Dame, I was loving it, but most people make changes, big changes, especially only with things that are really bad in their lives.

Like when they got no option, no alternative, I’ve got to make a change. But sometimes the best changes are not made amid turmoil and disappointment and failure. Sometimes the best changes are made when you’re pretty high up on a hill from which you can see a lot. And that’s kind of the way I was another day.

Now, but for people who think about making a big change in their lives, I was asked to give a talk by the Chamber of Commerce in South Bend. And they didn’t offer to pay me anything. I didn’t think speakers ever got paid for anything. And I gave a free talk and then everybody there asked me to come to their real estate company, their bank, their rotary club, their Kiwanis, and nobody was paying speakers.

So for two years, I was constantly giving free talks to business groups and everybody was getting so excited. And these people started offering me a fee. And I thought, really? I mean, at first it was a little small fee, like a 50 or 100. But still, hey, a week of groceries back in the 80s, you know. but then it grew and grew and grew until there was a point where my speaking fees were exceeding my Notre Dame salary.

I thought, huh, maybe I can do this. So I didn’t just leap out into the void, right? I didn’t jump out of the plane without a parachute. In fact, I took a leave of absence for a year, so that if it didn’t work being an independent philosopher, I could actually go back. So I built in. Already, I was, my speaking, and my writing were, were more than my Notre Dame salary for my family.

And, and then, then I had a leave of absence, so I could actually go back. So I was building in these safety things, right? And then the leap was not such a. Such a huge leap, although in a sense it still, it’s, it’s still was. And then I think it was two or three years later, my income as a independent philosopher, which you would think would be like this, you know, um, was 20 times my Notre Dame out annual salary.

So the people who said to me, you’ve given up 20 years of guaranteed income. Well, I got it back. Three years after I left, and then everything else was like, oh, okay, I was supposed to do this. So I would advise people who are thinking about making a big change, especially when it means leaving a job that’s in a lot of ways good. Don’t be precipitous. Don’t be rash. You know, try to prepare for it. preparation is an important part of making anything good happen. and then, and then go for it because you could be a trailblazer. It’s not like I could call up people and say, how do, how do you, how do you do public philosophy outside of university content?

There was nobody. I had to kind of make it up as I, as I went, but boy, what fun, you know, and here I am. Somebody told me speakers only last public speakers only last five years. So save all your money and figure out what you’re going to do next. And he told me that 30 years ago. And here I am still, still doing it.

So it’s quite a story, I

Sean: Yeah. You had this great line in one of your books, our choices are always broader than our past. The best adventures in life need to be chosen, not from a predetermined menu based on what you’ve already done, but rather out of our own deepest sense of who we are and how we can contribute to the world.

I’m wondering for you, what has heightened that level of awareness to know? The deepest sense of who you are.

Tom: Yeah, that’s, that’s something a lot of people forget, right? Because there’s a lot of great advice in our culture floating around for the last 20 or 30 years about personal achievement, personal growth, about success. and there’s a lot of bad advice too. Let’s face it. There’s a lot of false wisdom, faux wisdom, I call it counterfeit wisdom, but, but there’s a lot of good stuff. And there’s a lot of most of the good stuff is around goal setting, but there’s way too little on the deep background of proper goal setting that is all about self knowledge. Right? And people seem to think self knowledge is like the easiest thing in the world because. I mean, if I want to know astrophysics, if I want to know, you know, high energy particle physics, if I want to know chemistry, boy, that’s going to take a lot of work, you know, that’s going to be really hard.

But to know myself, I mean, what are the obstacles? You know, what’s the work I’m going to have to do? People take it for granted. But one of the earliest philosophers, a guy named Thales, he believed it was the hardest thing in the world to know yourself. because first of all, we’re distracted by everything outside us.

Right. We’re distracted by constantly stuff happening that we need to attend to and focus on and take care of. And so what time do we have for ourselves? You know, even Socrates felt the pressure of the trivial urgent, you know, the thing that’s got to be done right now, but it’s not really that important, but you got to do it now.

And there’s so much of that stuff around us, and it’s hard to concentrate on our on ourselves. Secondly. Human beings can be masters of self deception. we believe in ourselves, about ourselves, what we want to believe. And it’s hard work to strip away the illusions. We have about ourselves, positive or negative.

so self knowledge to me has been a lifelong quest and I have honestly been aided in it by reading people who’ve tried it before me, like the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a great Stoic philosopher, Emperor of Rome, who, you know, every night would ask himself, you know, what have I learned today? And he would write a sentence or a paragraph, and these are just his notes to himself.

Pascal wrote notes for a book he wanted to do, but he was engaged in self examination in writing his pensées. All through history, we have these examples of people engaged in Socratic self examination. You know, Socrates said, the unexamined life is not Worth living. And I remember it took me a long time to understand that statement.

Can’t examine life is not worth living. What is it for something to be worth something else? You know, you go into a store and you see a shirt you like, you say, well, I like that shirt. You look at the price tag. Whoa, it’s not worth that. The worth has to do with what’s the cost? What do you have to pay? what if your resources are going to have to go into this? The unexamined life is not worth what? Living the investment of your whole life, the investment of your days, the investment of your weeks and months and years. The unexamined life is not worth that. He, he insisted that all his fellow citizens of Athens examine their lives relentlessly and honestly. They insisted he drink poison and die. Okay. So it wasn’t really popular recommendation, but he was right. And so with examples like that, since I’m a philosopher, I’m exposed to that all the time. And so it’s helped me be more sensitive to examining myself and finding out I can fool myself about all kinds of things.

In fact, you probably know this too. I mean, you’ve probably experienced this in your own life because I know how your podcast, you have this amazing, this, this is an amazing podcast. Your guests have been an extraordinary array of people and You know, you gotta be a really smart guy yourself to get all these people to come and talk with you about the things that excite them the most, and the smarter we are, the better we are at fooling ourselves.

and so it’s really hard for really smart people to strip away illusions about themselves, and I’m not there yet, you know, but I’ve gone far enough because of the example of those have gone before us so that I’ve gotten better. questioning myself, not just taking for granted every thought that crosses my mind, right?

but say, wait a minute, where’s that, where’s that coming from? The better we get at that. The less foolish we are, the wiser we become, I think,

Sean: Who, who was it? Feynman who said the hardest thing is not fool yourself and you’re the easiest one to fool. Something along those lines. I’m wondering for you, what other things have you done well over time to not allow that, fooling to take place? That self deception to kick in?

Tom: well, some of the stuff I’ve done is not doing stuff. Well, it’s doing stuff really badly. And I like to say at this point in my life, I’m 71 years old. I like to say at this point in my life, I stand high atop a massive mountain of mistakes from which I can see far. We shouldn’t be so afraid of failure. We shouldn’t be so afraid of making mistakes.

Now, you can go to the other extreme. The fail soon, fail fast people haven’t talked to many skydivers, right? Or neurosurgeons. so we should be cautious about failure, but we shouldn’t be afraid of it because often it’s making those mistakes that redirects us. onto onto the right path. So self knowledge to me has been built both on the things I’ve done.

Right? because in speaking, for example, in public speaking, you know, my 1st group outside of classroom was probably 100 people. And in the 30 years that have transpired since then. My smallest audience for a 3 hour presentation. Was 12 people. It was a CEO of a major insurance company in his 11 direct reports. And my biggest audience was 10, 000 real estate people in a room. And it’s been everything in between every size group you can possibly imagine. And when I got to Notre Dame, I said, give me small classes to start with. It’s what I call my damage minimization principle. I want to inflict myself on as few people as possible until I figure out what I’m doing here.

But it was learning what worked in the classroom, a vivid story, a funny story, an image they would remember 10 years later, 20 years later, the rest of their lives, build on that. And so, Yeah, I never took a class in how to be a public speaker. I didn’t go listen to I didn’t know there were other people doing that at the time, but I just built on what I saw worked and, do do it some more and the things that don’t work.

Well, don’t do that again. You know, in fact, I saw a poster the other day on the Internet and I said, that’d be great epitaph on tombstone. it was the sentence. Well, yeah. That didn’t work. I don’t want that to be said about my whole life, but things within the life. Yeah. Yeah. You learn from your mistakes.

Sean: Well, talk to me, something that I feel like is embedded underneath some of these things like leaping into the unknown, being comfortable with failure is that ability to, to look at fear, feel it and work with it. And I’m wondering how you do that.

Tom: Yeah, it’s funny because the only thing that can overcome fear is love and, and because I love what I do so much, it makes me look fearless to people, but I have plenty of fear. It’s just that I overcome it through love. I mean, my 1st book I wrote at our alma mater, UNC Chapel Hill. I know you’re a Tar Heel.

So, I wrote my 1st book when I was a senior in college. It was turned down. By 36 publishing companies, and you talk about failure. I mean, failure after failure after failure after failure, but I love the ideas in the book so much. I love the idea of getting those thoughts out to other people. I kept going and number 37 said, okay, I mean, after 36 knows publisher number 37 said it’s a deal.

So, as a 1st year graduate student, I had my 1st book out and I was getting royalty checks. I thought, wow, this is this is really something. Yeah. Every time I’ve been able to overcome a fear, it’s through love. For example, let me give you two examples of this. The first time I had spoken to over a thousand people, it was going to be 2, 500 Rider truck dealers in Orlando, 2, 500 truck dealers, uh, U Hauls and that kind of thing. And the president of the company came up to me backstage, like five minutes before I was going to walk on the stage. He said, well, we’ve never had a philosopher before. I said, and he said, and, and I gotta warn you, these people are not your Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch people that you’ve been speaking to a lot.

He said, they’re not the executives of Ford Motor Company. These are mom and pop, convenience store owners who maybe run a couple of. on the side, they’re really not going to know who Plato and Aristotle are. Okay. So he tells me this five minutes before I walk on the stage. And so I said to him, my best bluffing face, I said to him, not a problem.

What I’m going to talk about today is absolutely universal, but inside I’m like panicked, right? Do I drop all my references to Plato and Aristotle? And then I thought to myself, no, I’m going to do what I always do. And a little voice in me said, just love these people today. That’s your only job here. Love these people.

Give every person in every seat something they can use today. That’s your job. Don’t worry about Plato and Aris. And so I went out and I did my, my normal thing, mentioning all these philosophers and telling all these stories. And they said it was the first standing ovation a speaker had ever had at the Rider Truck Convention.

I overcame my fear by my love for the people. Now, story number two. I’m going to give a speech for 5, 000 people, financial services, people in the Mecca in Milwaukee, where the Bucks used to play basketball. And the night before I go into this arena and it’s huge and it’s all dark. I’m there by myself. I see the size of this place.

I realized what 5, 000 people is going to look like. I mean, 2, 500 was a lot, 5, 000. It scared me to death. It’s this, it’s the most afraid I’ve ever been. And then I see this one side, one light in this empty, dark building, the exit sign. I said, okay, that’s what I want to do. I’m going to leave this place, go to the airport, fly back home.

And then all of a sudden something stopped me and a little voice in my head said, tomorrow, this is your house. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Tomorrow, this is my house. Tomorrow for an hour. I own this place. Everything that happens during that hour is up to me. This is really going to be amazing. And the fear just vanished like fog under a bright sun.

It was like my love for the people wanting to do something good for everybody in that room. Was the only thing that could displace fear. A lot of people don’t understand. They hear people after a heroic thing, you know, first responders save a person from a burning car. Man, you were a hero. You were so brave.

Well, I didn’t feel brave. I didn’t feel like a hero. A lot of people don’t understand. Fear is a feeling. Courage is not. Fear is a feeling. Courage is a choice. And that’s why all these people say, I don’t feel brave. I don’t feel heroic yet. And it’s not a feeling. It’s a choice because of their love for their fellow human beings.

They did something that just displaced the fear. It’s not that they didn’t feel it. They probably did feel it in the first moment, but then they get so busy. The feelings just go away and they’re doing their job. So, yeah, I mean, in my own case, I felt a lot of fear, in doing things like being on national television, live, not taped, I mean, my first non university press book after about 10 academic books or 11, I think.

My 12th book was true success, a new philosophy of excellence, and that that was launched on live with Regis and Kathy Lee, when that was the number 1 morning show in America. And then my next book, if Aristotle ran General Motors was launched on the Today Show live. And so I was scared to death. I mean, before, before Regis, I was scared to death.

I couldn’t, I couldn’t go to sleep the night, that night in my hotel room. I just kept saying, Oh man, if I say something stupid, it’s like millions of people are going to say, well, this guy’s an idiot. And then all of a sudden it hit me. Regis, and I had met him at a Notre Dame football practice. Regis loves what he does. Regis does this every day. Like I’m in the classroom at Notre Dame. This is his normal day. I can, he is totally comfortable in doing this. I can borrow some of his comfort. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m gonna borrow some of Regis’s comfort. I’m gonna pretend like this is what I do every day. And I’m just gonna sit there all the time and we’re just gonna have a nice chat, him and me, millions of people, abstraction, me and Regis, me and Kathy Lee.

And. Then today show, same thing. I learned something about comfort zones that I’ve never heard anybody say, you know, you and I have heard speakers for 10 or 15 years. You got to get out of your comfort zone. You got to get out of your comfort zone. It’s like a comfort zone is the worst place to be, right?

You got to get out of your comfort zone. And I remember one time a guy on a stage under spotlights, a prominent public speaker. I’m out in the audience cause I’m getting ready to speak next or something. For a thousand people and he’s yelling everybody, you got to get out of your comfort zone. And I realized, Whoa, this guy is standing on the stage under spotlights where he is to be found 50 to 100 times a year.

He’s telling me to get out of my comfort zone while he’s saying this smack from the middle smack dab in the middle of his own comfort zone. And I suddenly think. The best athletes I’ve ever known, they play, they compete in the middle of their comfort zone. The best musicians I’ve ever known, man, they’re in their comfort zone.

They don’t say, Oh, I’ve never played in Raleigh, North Carolina before. Oh, I’m scared to death. It’s like, give him the telecaster, turn up the sound, turn up the lights. He’s in his comfort zone. So everybody’s telling us to get out of our comfort zones while they’re in the middle of their saying this. And I’m saying, wait, what is to be learned here? And I came up with this idea. It’s just like the greatest athletes don’t depend on their circumstances. For their confidence, they bring their confidence to their circumstances. Likewise, they don’t depend on their circumstances for comfort. They bring their comfort to their circumstances. My best, my national championship football players at Notre Dame were not playing scared to death. After the first hit, they said to me, all the nerves went away. They were in their zone. That’s the comfort zone, but there are two kinds of comfort zones. And this is, I mean, tell me if I’m wrong because I’m making all this up. Like all the philosophers before me, I’m making all this stuff up. It seems to be, there are two kinds of comfort zones, the complacent, the complacency comfort zone, which is about anxiety and fear and mediocrity.

That’s what they’re telling us to get out of. All these people, but it’s another kind of comfort zone nobody talks about. And that’s the courageous comfort zone. It’s not about fear and mediocrity. It’s about mastery. The masters take their comfort with them wherever they go. So I’ve, I’ve now come up with my own little idea of the portable comfort zone.

We need to each develop our own portable comfort zone. So we’re going to take it with us. I don’t care what the circumstances are. I don’t care if you’re thrown in front of 10, 000 people. If you’re thrown in front of national live television, you bring your comfort with you, even if you have to borrow a little bit from somebody who does it every day, do you want to be out of your comfort zone, trembling in your boots?

No, man, I want to be right in the middle of mine. So yeah, if your, your comfort zone is about complacency, get out of it. Create a new comfort zone. That’s about. Moving toward mastery.

Sean: I would, I would say I agree with that. I think it’s, it’s around attunement, meaning if you’re in that lower tier comfort zone, you want to push out of that. That’s the attunement and the alignment of, oh, okay, I’m pitching in front of 20, 000 people, but this is what I’m about. And so that’s where I think that alignment.

So, yeah, I like that. It makes me think of Emerson. If I have the universe against me, if I’ve lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me. I’m wondering what else you’ve been able to do then to develop that confidence within yourself throughout that process.

Tom: Yeah, you know, it’s, it’s the simplest things imaginable, right? And, and Emerson was my father’s favorite philosopher. Actually, my, I grew up in a house about twice the size of this room or rented 800 square foot house. I grew up in a full of. Philosophy books by people like Emerson and my Emerson was my dad’s favorite because of his stuff about self reliance and stuff about cultivating yourself, not deferring to all the experts in Europe, you know, but building your own as an American, your own sensibility and all this.

And a lot of my confidence building, I just have to remind myself. Of what I’ve done in the past. I mean, I had, this is funny. I hadn’t done a zoom talk for a while because with the pandemic, I was doing zoom talks two or three times a week. And then with the end of the shutdown, the kind of waning of the major part of the pandemic, people started going back to live events.

And so it had been a while since I’d done a zoom presentation to a lot of people. And I got so nervous about it. And. And then I did it and it was like the greatest possible experience. And I just said to myself, okay, that was stupid. Me being nervous about this at all, because how many times have I actually done this and, and, and has it ever gone badly?

I mean, how do I let, you know what it used to be when I was introduced. In front of a big crowd of people, I would feel my heart rate go up and I would say, like everybody says, Oh, I’m getting nervous. I’m getting nervous. And at a certain point, I learned not to say that anymore. I learned to say, I’m getting ready. I’m getting ready because the best people have a certain energy build in them when they’re about to do their thing. And that energy is what they surf on to success. So when the energy happens. Most people let it shut them down, worried about it. They interpret it as nerves. I’m worried, I’m scared. How do you interpret the energy, the heart rate, the increased awareness?

Well, interpret it as being ready. And it’s a great thing. Oh, we’re going to go do this. This is going to be great. The best people get nervous because they care, but that just means their body is preparing them for super energy, super performance. and, and go with that. I mean, it was talking to a lot of championship athletes and Olympic gold medalists and people like that, that I really learned some of that.

I, my own. Tendency to do it was just kind of innate to start saying, I’m, I’m getting ready rather than I’m getting nervous. But then I saw reinforcements in conversations. I’ve had a lot of people about the way they build their own confidence through visualization through all kinds of mental techniques and, you know, philosophy is about profound ideas, but it’s also sometimes about simple mental techniques.

I just was asked to do a book on stoicism, which I finished. Yeah. About a month ago, Stoicism for Dummies, the four dummies books, be out in about a month. The Stoics had lots of really easy, to adopt mental techniques, for dealing with difficulties, for taking advantage of opportunities. But these Simple techniques were always rooted in deeper ideas.

And so people think philosophy is all about all this really deep and profound stuff that maybe is not related to ordinary life. Well, there’s this whole stream of practical philosophy that I’ve been rediscovering in the past 30 years. And that’s what I’m trying to bring to people in all my books and all my talks.

So, yeah, I’m learning all the time, Sean. I am. I know you are too. We, we, we draw on other people’s experiences. We say, Oh, I can do that. Oh, that’s a great way of thinking about things. And, and, you know, the buddy system has been from the earliest human epic poem, the, epic of Gilgamesh is about a buddy situation.

the greatest human endeavors are never accomplished completely solo, completely alone, but always with the power of partnerships. And so no matter what we’re trying to do, Whether it’s fairly simple, like I need to lose some weight or whether it’s fairly complicated, like I need to shift my profession and I need to do something very different for, for my work, to bring in somebody, to bring in a partner, conversation partner, an encouragement partner, it can be so important.

So I’ve just recently in the last few years started urging people take advantage of the buddy system. They say, don’t go out in the ocean alone when they rip currents and stuff. Yeah, right. Don’t try anything tough alone, get a buddy.

Sean: Tom, this makes me think about a tougher time for you. I’m just seeing this kind of natural energy you have, this charisma, the zest for life. And I want to know what energy, focus, dedication, how you learned more about these concepts from eating a bad piece of fish.

Tom: You remember that story. Yeah, I was on book tour in 1994 for true success and it was going great. I mean, they were flying me all over the country and I was doing national radio, national television. I was doing, you know, good morning, San Diego. Good morning, Chicago. I was doing the bookstores everywhere. I had every experience an author could have.

I had a bookstore where it looked like nobody was going to show up. And because they had forgotten to advertise it. And then one guy showed up, I thought, Oh, great. One guy showed up and he showed up to ask me for a loan. So I think that was something. And then another time I had 400 people standing in line, to get me to sign a book.

So I had every kind of, kind of experience and I want to say in the middle of that, but toward the end of the book tour, I was at a Boca Raton resort and club to do an event at Liberties. they’re great independent bookstore at the time where I had seven or eight hundred people show up for my book.

True success. And I said to the manager of the store, this is awesome. 7 or 800 people. He said, well, you should have been here last week. There were 2000 for Stephen King. Oh, okay. Maybe I should just scare everybody here. But yeah, I ate a piece of a grouper at a five star restaurant, you know, Booker Town Resort and Club, their restaurant, and it had a neurotoxin called ciguatera, a rare neurotoxin, and I was, three days later, I had no effects for three days and the Funny thing about this neurotoxin is the sooner it has effects, the lesser the illness will be.

The longer it takes to have effects, the worse off you’re going to be. My son that day was saying, cause he ate the same fish. He said, Oh God, my neck hurts. Why does my neck hurt so bad? And then, a few days later, he’d be, my wife would be driving him to school and he would be saying, well, where are we?

You know, a lack of short term memory, a lack of. So I didn’t have a single symptom for three days. And then I’m given a speech three days later, true success, seven universal conditions for success. I’m on condition number six. I’m almost done with my talk. And all of a sudden I’m, I’m paralyzed. My neck is paralyzed.

I can’t move my head. I feel like I’m being napalmed. My lungs stopped working. And I remember my last words were, I can’t breathe and the 300 horrified people in front of me who had just been trained the day before in CPR, they all three guys run up, but they throw me down on the stage and they take off my tie.

And before I knew it, EMTs are there. Oh, his body feels like he’s on fire. You know, it’s just. And I’m in bed 6 weeks. I ended up in the Mayo Clinic and you know, nobody could diagnose it because it was such a rare thing. And I learned they, the 1 thing they told me is I would have symptoms for 5 years. I would be so dizzy.

I couldn’t stand up without my hand on something. So my students never knew it. Notre Dame, and I was back in the classroom. It was like, I was always leaning against the podium, leaning against the wall. I had my hand on something. They didn’t know it was because I couldn’t stand up. Otherwise, and I was dizzy all the time.

And then after about 5 years, it disappeared. But I learned during that period, again, my love for my students, I gave a talk for a major New York bank for maybe 500 to 1000 people when I just was barely recovering from this and I just threw myself in it with all the energy that I’d ever done in a talk because, hey, every group is the most important group to me on the surface of the earth, the hour I’m with them.

And so I’m going to do everything I can to make it a great experience. And they didn’t know that that practically put me back into the Mayo Clinic, just the amount of energy. In that presentation, but I learned what we were capable of, and I want to tell you something, Sean, and I know you know this too, but not a lot of people watching this podcast may be convinced of this our abilities tend to be far greater than what we suppose. I mean, my wife recently had a diagnosis. A few months ago, it was late July. She just started itching all over. Her skin started turning color. She got a blood test, cholesterol 666, which is ridiculous. You know, oh, you’ve got a gallstone cut, caught in a, in a a valve or a tube or something, you got it, we’ll pull it out, no problem.

It ends up being, no, it’s not a gallstone, it’s a, it’s a growth, it’s a oh my goodness, it’s, no, it’s probably nothing, you know, but. And it ends up being one of the rarest and most aggressive forms of cancer, called ampullary cancer. And she has to have a surgery that ends up, uh, a few months ago, August 10th, taking seven and a half hours. And I lived in a hospital room for 18 days. I slept in a chair and I was, well, slept in segments of 30 minutes because you know what it’s like in a hospital room. Probably, you know, you’re there waking you up all the time. And my wife had needs all night long that I would help her with. And I said to myself, wait, I’ve got to live in a hospital room.

Originally I thought it was going to be a week or two. I won’t last, but three days I need my sleep. and 18 days later, I’m going strong. I learned from Ciguatera and by the way, my wife had what’s called a curative surgery, no cancer, completely cured, no chemo, no radiation, good to go. Good for life because she had one of the best surgeons in the world.

for this at Chapel Hill, UNC Chapel Hill, Go Heels. And, I learned from that, just like I learned from the Ciguatera. Hey, most of the limits we think we have. We can go far beyond those limits. I thought it was going to last for three days. Eighteen days later, I was going strong. And actually, we had to be away from home for seven weeks.

And I was going strong, man. I was doing nothing but serving 24 7, being a servant. And you know what? The more we bring that into our daily lives, that mindset of being a servant, doing what we do out of love, then not only are we going to defeat fear, like we were talking about a little while ago, We’re going to defeat a lot of other negative things, too, and we’re going to blow past a lot of the boundaries and limitations we wrongly think we have now.

I’m not 1 of these guys who has the no limits bumper sticker because I know we all have limits. but most of us think we have limits that we don’t have when we’re really impelled. By necessity and love, we can blow past so many things that we think are going to limit us. And so I recommend to people, don’t sell yourself short.

Don’t say to yourself, I could never do that. If you do it out of love, if you do it as a servant, sky’s the limit.

Sean: Tom, what were you saying to your wife during the diagnosis and leading up? I’m asking because, two days ago someone close to me got a, a very daunting diagnosis and I’m wondering what ideas. we can help bring into their life to help them during this time.

Tom: We know she helped me as much as I helped her. That’s, uh, while we’ve been together for 50 years. But, She had this natural tendency one step at a time one day at a time. You don’t have to become Google MD Envisioning all the worst possible worst case scenarios you do what the next task is you focus on the very next thing And if you do those next tasks, right, it can be amazing.

What can happen now? We were given false. Hope many times in in our local medical Folks trying to figure out what this was. It was so rare of a hundred thousand cancer patients. One will have this particular cancer. So, it wasn’t, people weren’t real familiar with this. So they kept diagnosing it as lesser things and all the lesser things gave us false hope.

And people are so against false hope. They’re often against hope itself because they’re too afraid. It’s going to be false hope, but I will tell you something. Little bits of false hope helped us with the time we needed to adjust. to the next truth we learned, and the next truth we learned, and the next truth we learned, each time having a little hope that ended up not being well founded gave us breathing space.

So I’m not an enemy of false hope if it’s not a deceptive strategy. If you’re open to hope though, some of your hope will be false hope. That’s, you know, a risk you always take, but false, even false hope can play a positive role in people’s lives, preparing them, giving them time to prepare them for the next thing they have to face.

So be as optimistic as possible, be as hopeful as possible, but do one step at a time. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Right. And, so I was talking to her about things like this, but she was talking to me about things like that too. And she went through this whole deal. Without feeling any fear of outcomes.

That was better than me because it was supposed to be a five or six hour surgery and seven and a half hours into this or seven hours and 20 minutes before this, the, I got word that the surgery was done, I’m starting to worry. No philosopher is immune to that. It’s how you handle it, how you deal with it that matters.

But she told me, she said she never had anything but peace and confidence about the whole process. And now to see her, we’ve been home now a couple months and she’s just her normal self. She’s, you know, energetically gardening six hours a day and cooking great meals and doing her artistic stuff that she does.

And she’s just back to normal, but we had to go through a dark night of the soul in a lot of ways. To rely on the stuff we’ve learned from the great wisdom traditions of the world that have informed both of our lives for our, our decades together. And boy, the great wisdom of the world works. You put it to the test, not in the good times.

You put it into the test in the, in the challenging times. And that’s when you really see, wow, there are all these really wise people who’ve lived before us. Why should we think we have to make it up all ourselves? You know, let’s rely on some of them.

Sean: Tom, you said something really interesting to me a second ago. You said philosophers are not immune to this. It makes me think of one of the great martial artists of all time. I mess up his name every time. It’s Morihei Ueshiba, I’m pretty sure. he was the founder of Aikido. And one of his students was telling him, he says, Master, you never mess up.

And he said, I mess up all the time. I just recover so quickly you don’t notice. And I’m bringing that up because you said, I’m not immune to this. So I’m wondering what that process for you looks like for that quick recovery so you don’t get off track and then stay off track.

Tom: Yeah. It is an amazing thing, right? The Aikido, master is a great example of that because most people have some form of resilience where they eventually recover from the slings and arrows, the blows of life, right? but the wiser you become, the faster that happens. And then you go beyond resilience because yeah. People have been talking about resilience for about 20 years now, 25 years, and it is about, in its most basic concepts, about bouncing back from a mistake, from a failure, from a difficulty, a disappointment, a tragedy, bouncing back. For the last 10 years, we’ve been talking about this concept of grit. Which is another concept we need in difficulties, the ability to soldier on, you know, to persevere.

And, that’s been a nice development in the discussion of dealing with difficulties, but I’ve come to understand as a philosopher, there’s something beyond resistance, resilience or something beyond grit. There’s something I want to just call spiritual alchemy, the ability to be transformative in difficulty.

So, so. Like the Akadu Master, it’s like, it’s not like you just correct when you make a mistake. But in correcting, you always learn and get better. And you’re being transformative. So the best people in anything, they learn to be alchemists of whatever it is they do. They learn to be transformative. Yeah, something bad happens.

They make a mistake. They mess up. They don’t just bounce back. They don’t just persevere on. They are transformative. They allow themselves to learn and grow from that. They get better at using whatever comes into their lives. In fact, that’s a principle in ancient philosophy. I call it the functionality principle.

Very few things are intrinsically good or intrinsically bad in this world. Most things have the value. Of how they function in our lives well or badly. It’s like worry. It’s not going to what is it? Martin Luther, the protestant reformation theologian. You can’t keep the birds of the air from flying around your head.

He said, but you can keep them from from building a nest in your hair. He said that about worries. You can’t go through life without worry ever occurring, but how are you going to use it? What are you going to do with it? Right? Are you going to be an alchemist with it? Or are you just going to suffer from it?

So, so that to me has been extremely important and it actually became a book. I wrote most of the stuff that has been transformative for me in my own life. I try to write about it so I can share it with other people. And it’s not always a fast thing. I mean. Yeah. Two books, I’ve written each of them in three months, but one book took me 15 years, one took me 20 years, one took me 30 years.

The 15 year book, I rewrote it 24 times, it had six different titles, it was rejected by 44 editors. Never a negative word about the book, it’s like I didn’t have enough Twitter followers or something. but it’s one of my favorite books, it’s called Plato’s Lemonade Stand, came out during the, right before the pandemic, and It’s about being transformative with the things that are.

unavoidable in life, like mistakes, like difficulties, challenges. You know, there’s an old expression I grew up with, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. I must’ve heard it a hundred times growing up in Durham, North Carolina, but nobody ever said how to do this. What is lemonade making in life? What does that mean?

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Take something that’s difficult, bitter, and turn it into something delightful. Okay. Sounds great. How? Nobody ever said how. 15 years. Are there any philosophers who talked about this? Turns out there are a lot. And they had amazing advice. So, yeah, whatever works in my own life.

In fact, I’m getting ready to write a book now, Sean, that I thought I was going to write two years ago, and things got in the way. And then I thought I was going to write it a year ago, and things got into the way. And then my wife had her cancer diagnosis. I was going to write it at the end of the summer.

I was going to start. I couldn’t start it then. It’s a book that’s going to be called The Gift of Uncertainty, and I had already researched it. I already had all these great things to say, but I realized when we faced my wife’s challenge that I was going to write a book that was too glib, that was too superficially rah rah, because I’m a positive guy.

I was going to bring in a lot of the great wisdom from the great thinkers, of course, because that’s what I do, but I had to live through the uncertainty. of life and death stuff with her to prepare me to write the book I was supposed to write. And I realized as soon as I got back home from seven weeks away, I realized, oh, now I’m ready for that book. So I’m not going to write about something or speak about something unless I’ve tried it out in my own laboratory, the laboratory of my life. And if it works, then I want to share it with other people because I want it to work for them too. That’s just kind of the way I do things.

Sean: That makes me think, Tom, what do you feel is the hardest lesson to pass on to even your most intelligent 

Tom: would probably be related to that, Sean, about failure and transformation especially. Difficulty and transformation, people get that. If something challenging comes into your life, what are you going to do? Just suffer through it? Or are you going to try to make the best of it? There’s a lot of common sense wrapped around alchemy when it comes to difficulties. But when those difficulties are in the form of failures, it’s like people have a real hard time with that. They just want to lick their wounds. They don’t want in no hurry to be transformative about this. They just want to be miserable about it for a while. I failed, but don’t you get it? I totally failed. I mean, it was embarrassing. It was humiliating. I mean, I’ve never had such a big failure in my life. I’ll hear people say it’s like, it’s almost like grief. Where I was talking to a friend about this the other day, because he, he lost his grandson 3 weeks ago, and he’s a great guy created famous business.

He was the founder co CEO for many years. He’s retired now, but he’s still a young seeming guy and his 2 year old grandson just passed away in his sleep and we were talking about grief. This was just a few days ago, Sean. and the book of Job came to mind in the Hebrew scriptures, how Job lost his family.

He lost all his possessions and so these friends show up and they try to explain it away to him. Well, you must have done this wrong. You must have done that wrong. Really too bad, man. You shouldn’t have done this. You shouldn’t have done that. And his friends are just ridiculous. They make things worse.

And I was saying to my friend, I said, you know, Job’s friends should have just showed up and. Been quiet, just been with him. Because sometimes people don’t need our words, they need our presence. And so some people, when they’ve been through a big failure, here I come as a philosopher. Man, have I got a lot of stuff to tell them about.

Oh, whoa, whoa, hold up. Sometimes after something like a failure that’s big enough. People kind of go through a stage of grief about it. And if you’re going to be helpful to them, you just show up, you show up. One of the biggest regrets I have in my life, and I’ve got a lot of regrets. I’m not one of these people with no regrets and, but, but still everything I regret, I certainly have learned from, I certainly have grown from, but one of my chief regrets was that one year in graduate school, I lived next door to a very famous modern architect, Doering.

He was Harvard trained, Berlin, University of Berlin, Bauhaus trained. His houses are in books of modern architecture, these beautiful glass and steel and white houses and stuff. And he, he loved to talk philosophy every day. He was retired and he was in his seventies and he was a skier and a tennis player, and he had chickens, in big property next to where I was living in the mother in law apartment with my wife.

And, We used to talk philosophy all the time. Then I had to move away. My lease was over. They, those people moved. So I had to find another place for us to live. It was about a mile or two away. It was close, but I was busy. I was in graduate school and somebody told me one day that Paul had cancer and he didn’t have long to live.

And I thought, Oh man, I got to go see him, but I got to figure out what to say to him before I go. And the problem was days passed, weeks passed, months passed. I couldn’t figure out what to say. And then somebody told me he had, he had died. And I said, man, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Thinking that if I don’t have the right words, I can’t show up. He didn’t need words. He just needed me. And sometimes as a philosopher, I’ve got to restrain my words. Because that’s what we do, right? We live with words. That’s what you do. That’s what I do. Sometimes we have to hold back the words and just be there for people.

And when they’re ready. Well, boy, we are right at that point. But when you don’t know what to say, rather than avoiding somebody until you figure out what to say, avoid that avoidance, go see the person and just say, man, I don’t know what to say. Cause what they want is you and your honesty. They don’t, they don’t want your answers.

They all aren’t always ready. So sometimes Sean, I can have all the answers in the world. And if people aren’t ready for them, then I have another function to serve. I can just be there with my honest presence. And that’s all that’s expected,

Sean: Did that look the same when you were teaching at Notre Dame? And you see a young student in your classroom. You have the answers they need. And they’re there, but they’re not willing and ready to walk through the door. What does a great teacher do in those moments?

Tom: A great teacher crosses the bridge, not just standing on the edge of the bridge, asking the other person to cross it. The great teacher crosses the bridge himself. And sometimes it’s just halfway. But if it has to be all the way, it has to be all the way. You go to where they are. You find out where they are.

You find out what they’re ready for then. And, and you, you entice them to want more. The worst thing you can do as a professor is just kind of explain everything. Here are all the answers. You’ve got to spark curiosity. You’ve got to spark love topic. I keep coming back to the topic of love unless they love what we’re doing together.

It’s not going to help. It’s not going to be helpful. In fact, I want all these teaching awards and the students were starting to, you know, they, they. Lined up to get into my classes and often had to try 2 or 3 times and I would get a call from their parents. You know, my oldest daughter tried 4 years to get into your class and never could.

Our youngest daughter is a senior. Please let 1 member of our family into your class. And so, so I had this reputation because I had fun every, every class in every class. It was going to be something spectacular. I never had class requirement attendance requirements, because if I couldn’t make it the kind of thing that they just could not miss, then I wasn’t doing my job.

In fact, on evaluations, they would say, man, professor, it was like, it was like, I can never sleep late because I knew if I miss 1 of your classes, it would be the class. People were talking about for 10 years. I did not want to just be here here. What happened? I wanted to be there for what happened. I had to spark love.

I had to spark curiosity because I came into class like this 1st day of class, like, 2 courses were going on. Notre Dame, why the hell do I have to be in a philosophy class, right? I’m like going, going, going to med school or I’m going to law school or so. And so you could just tell it was a hostile audience first day in my early years, because in later years, they’d heard all the rumors of the crazy things that went on in my classes.

And so it was more like they’re coming to a Broadway play or they’re coming to a rock concert. The problem with that though, was this, I’d have to say to them at a certain point in my career, you guys, You think this is a Tom Morris show, you’re season ticket holders, you know, you go come see what I’m going to do next.

Right. But I got to tell you something. It’s a lot less like a Broadway show than it is like outward bound.

Sean: Mm.

Tom: You got to pull yourself up the side of the mountain. Now, I’m your native God, man. I’ve been here many times before I can share help, but you’re the one who’s got to do the climbing, you know, so they, it’s got to be a partnership back to the buddy thing back to the partner things got to be partnership.

So it’s not to be a great teacher. You have to be a great partner. You can’t be the one who does the work, puts on the show, puts on the concert, and they’re just enjoying themselves because that’s not going to last, right? You’ve got to have it to be something you’re doing together. You’re climbing that mountain together.

And that’s when they’re going to have amazing memories about the experience. If people come home from Outward Bound say they’re changed by it in a way that a person comes home from a Broadway play, even the best play they’ve ever seen, they’re not changed for life necessarily by that, but that Outward Bound week, oh, my God, you know, so that’s the kind of experience I was always trying to give people.

Sean: Tom, you have an incredible framework that I think can be extremely helpful. The seven C’s of success, which I hope you can outline here in a second, but I would love to know, how do you define true success? You

Tom: Hey, we have this Midwestern Association of Oldsmobile dealers. We have motivational speakers every year. They always say the same thing. Set goals.

Believe in yourself. You can do it. He said, this could be something deeper than that, right? Did the philosopher say anything about success? I said, man, that’s not the kind of stuff I studied. I have no idea. You want me to look into it for you? Yeah, look into it for us. Yeah. And that was my first talk on success.

I discovered a few things that a bunch of philosophers had in common. Then all of a sudden there were three or four things. And then there were five things. And for a while, I thought there were just kind of five universal conditions for success. But I kept researching, kept reading and lo and behold, there were, there were seven and for, for success. But what is true success? That’s the kind of success we want to have, right? Because if you have the wrong kind of success, well, I’ve just written a book based on Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein had tremendous success by which he launched into the world a monster he couldn’t control.

That’s not the kind of success we want to have. It’s the kind of success way too many people have in our time. And so, what is true success? Well, it’s deeply satisfying. It’s sustainable. It’s good for others as well as yourself that rolls out Victor Frankenstein. so I started pondering the kind of success that is intrinsically good because you can have a success as a bank robber.

You can have success as an assassin. But it’s not something to aspire to as to be a great human being. So how does being successful at any given thing tie in with being a successful human being would tie in with human greatness, human excellence, human virtue, human wisdom, and all these things tie together.

So I came up with these 7 universal conditions, which are not necessary and sufficient conditions such that each one is absolutely required and the sum total will guarantee the success. Because that’s not the way success in this world works, they are facilitating conditions. They position us better for success in whatever we’re, we’re doing.

and when people understand that they understand, you know, cause there have been a lot of success, motivational guys who made promises, you know, you do these five things or one guy, these 100 things, you know, you will have. It’s just like chemistry, right? You put in the right elements together, you’re going to get the same result.

No, the world is not like that. And the philosophers have never claimed that. The philosophers are more nuanced about it. So these seven universal conditions are facilitated positioning conditions for success in any given endeavor, but more deeply, the true success that any of our endeavors should be part of.

Sean: want to lay out the seven?

Tom: Yeah, it starts as. People would imagine with a clear conception of what we want to see happen. We need a clear conception of what we want. Vague thoughts cannot motivate specific behavior. We need clarity. Aristotle taught me we’re essentially teleological beings. Telos, Greek word for goal. We are naturally goal setting beings, but the clearer our goals are, the more specific, the more we Activate mental abilities to spot things relevant to that goal.

The more specificity, the better. Well, what if we’re wrong? Well, we’ll find out more quickly if we have a very specific goal and then we can switch goals, they’re not engraved in stone, right? But I tell people have great conversations with other people about your goals. It used to be people thought, you know, writing down your goals was magical.

The power of articulation, using the discipline borders of language to capture otherwise vague thinking into more precise forms. That’s nearly magical. Whether you write goals down, whether you talk them through with other people. So that’s number one. We can say a lot more about it. Number two, though, once you have a goal, bring a strong confidence to the pursuit of that goal.

Number two. So a clear conception of what we want conception confidence is number two, because if you don’t have the, don’t have any degree of confidence, What are you going to do in support of the goal? Very, very, very little, right? It’s not that you have to have absolute, complete confidence. Who, who has that?

But you, you come up with as much confidence as you can bring to the challenge. And if it’s a goal you can’t bring confidence to, it’s not the right goal. So each of these things, this is what’s interesting to me, Sean. Each of these conditions, we’ll support your, attainment of a goal, but they’re all also a checklist for whether something should be a goal.

So can I be confident in my pursuit of this? If not, can I get confident? If not, maybe this is not the right goal for me right now. And that’s the way it’ll work with all the other conditions. Cause number three, we need to focus concentration on what it’s going to take. There are people who have clear goals, strong confidence, but they don’t know the steps they need to take to get there.

They just think it’s magically going to happen. So a focus concentration on what it takes, intellectual concentration, concentration of, thought and action. And number 4, we need a stubborn consistency in pursuing the goal. So we’re often our own worst enemies. we act contrary to our own purposes for a variety of reasons.

So, help people understand that the word consistency, two Latin words that mean to stand together. Do our words and actions stand together? Do the people around us helping us out? Do we stand together or are we pulling apart? Consistency is so important. an emotional commitment. To the importance of what we’re doing a lot of stuff on success talks about it like it’s an intellectual game only but Pascal said the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing love passion enthusiasm emotional commitment so important, especially with the more difficult goals. The next condition would be, we need a good character to guide us and keep us on proper course that kind of sort of rules out being a great assassin being a great bank robber. but all often, it doesn’t get talked about and a young guy, a college student from Madrid, Spain came to see me not too long ago, and he went to go out for breakfast and he was a friend of a friend.

So I said, sure. And so we go out to breakfast. We sit down at this little dive breakfast place. I think he’s going to ask me what’s good here. but his 1st question was, what is wisdom? He says. And I gave him the answer I often would give people. Oh, wisdom is just insight for living. Oh, okay. And then an idea occurred to me I’d never thought of before.

So I said it. Wisdom is guidance and guardrails. And he said, not a native English speaker, what are guardrails? I said, you know, you’re up, driving in the mountains. You’re going around all twisty road. There’s a metal, a railing to keep your car from going over the side. Oh, guardrails. Okay. I said, wisdom is guidance to show us the way forward and guardrails to protect us along the way. Oh, and it suddenly occurred to me that morning in saying this to this guy for the first time in my life, I realized that most of the success literature of the past 20 years is about guidance, but very little is about guardrails. And so you have people being successful in all the wrong things.

Sean: Well,

Tom: is important.

Character is about, it’s the, it’s the Greek word ethos, which gives us the word ethics. But it’s not just about rules is about virtue. It’s about love. It’s about the good of others as well as ourselves. And then the last 1. so a clear conception, confidence, a focus, concentration, consistency, emotional commitment, good character.

Last 1 is capacity to enjoy the process. And I didn’t just cheat to get this 1 because enjoyment is not a C. I need 7 C’s. But actually, no, you can’t enjoy everything. There are tough things that you just cannot enjoy, but you still have to do. So, so the condition is not enjoyment. The condition is a capacity to enjoy what can be enjoyed in the process. Oh, okay. Cultivate this capacity and then the, the good days will be even better and the bad days won’t be so bad. Because there’s always something you can find even in a difficult situation to be grateful for to, to relish and I’ve even come to think that everything in life we can either enjoy, or we can learn from those tough things that we cannot enjoy 18 days living in the hospital.

We can learn from, and then we can enjoy having learned. So, so those 7 conditions for success. I discovered him in the early 90s. No, no, I discovered him earlier than that. The first talk I ever gave was to my Thursday night review session, Philosophy 101. 400 students, 100 would come to review session every Thursday night.

And that was, I had the freshman football players in that class that first, it was the last Thursday night of the semester. I had just come up with the seven C’s of success. I wanted to share them with my struggling students so they could use them in the classroom. I didn’t know that. My freshman football players would use them on the field the very next year when they were the sophomore core of the national championship team of 1988.

So that’s when I first talked about 7 C’s. It’s that long ago.

Sean: speaking of all that time, Tom, I, I’m very interested since that time, I mean, incredible professor, award winning professor, 30 plus books. How have you been able to produce that amount of work with such high quality? I know this sounds somewhat nuanced, but I’m really intrigued that output that you’ve been able to have.

How have you been so consistent with that?

Tom: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great question because I haven’t been distracted by the things that would distract an awful lot of people who started having tremendous

Sean: Yeah.

Tom: because. I had companies paying me for an hour what Notre Dame used to pay me for a year and, and, and doing that one company had me speak with that kind of fee 43 times in a three year period.

So that would have been 43 years of what I started by starting assistant professor salary or more than that, actually. And a lot of people, it becomes all about the money. It becomes all about building a business for the money. Now, the greatest philosophers have said. Money is one of those things that’s not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad.

How it functions in your life is everything. Too many people let it function as the most important thing in their lives. And if I had been one of those folks, I would have been distracted from writing what I think people need to hear to just writing what I knew people wanted to hear. You get a lot of that going on in the personal growth, motivational success arena, because people have gotten captivated by how great a business this can be.

And that becomes their governing framework, rather than just the intrinsic quality and trustworthiness of what they’re saying and precision. When I decided to leave Notre Dame, a very famous philosopher wrote me a one page letter. He said, please don’t leave the academic life. He said, very few people can do the pioneering technical work of which you’re capable.

Very few people in the world stick with it. Don’t just popularize. And I wrote him back and I said, man, thank you for the compliments on my technical work, but I wouldn’t leave to popularize. I think the stuff I’m dealing with now is just as hard. As the modalities of divine property, exemplification in philosophy of religion, you know, necessity and possibility and possibility and figuring out all this stuff in the epistemology metaphysics.

I think what I’m doing now about success and happiness. It’s just as hard, or we would have had it all figured out already. I said, I’m having to use the same analytical talents skills that I’ve developed over the years. I’m having to use the same kind of precision. Now, I can’t talk to people in a convention center the way I’d talk to fellow.

PhDs in an academic journal, but I can’t sacrifice the precision. And so what I’ve got to do is invent new ways of being a philosopher. And boy, you talk about hard. So that you never sacrifice quality for the sake of quantity. and you can do it, but it’s really hard. And that’s why not a lot of people do it, but it’s really satisfying when you bring it up.

So I’ve really never been. I’ve had so many people insist that I create a big business because Stephen Covey did that and other people when I was 1st, getting into this, there had been a couple of people who had done that big business, you know, lots of employees. No, that’s not my way, man. I’m not built that way.

I’m not built to manage a lot of people. God bless the people who can do that. That’s not my talent. My talent is I’m standing knee deep in cold river water in the mountains of North Carolina. And this is my mental vision. I’m standing in a Deep stream of ice, cold water panning for gold all day long. And most of the day, my pan is full of mud, but every now and then there’s a sparkling gold nugget.

I pluck it out, I wash it off. And that’s what I give people in my speeches, in my books, because they don’t have time to stand in that coal mountain stream all day long looking for gold. I do. That’s my gift, that’s my calling. And so. When I write a book, when I give a speech, man, it better be just full of nuggets because I’m trying to save people a lot of time, a lot of aggravation, a lot of heartache, a lot of expended energy.

Here’s a starting point. And I never want what I say to be the end point. I want it to be a great starting point for people in their own lives.

Sean: Hmm. Talking about great starting points. Tom, your books are incredible. I think they are loaded with a lot of those golden nuggets and those gems. I’m wondering though, you’ve got massive bookshelves behind you. If you could only keep one bookshelf from someone else on that shelf, which one are you going with?

Hmm.

Tom: that’s a hard, problem. Although, I wouldn’t consider myself a Stoic, because they did have a lot of beliefs and inclinations that I think There’s this movie called Thelma and Louise, and not to be a spoiler, but at the end of the movie, Thelma and Louise drive their car off the edge of a cliff.

On purpose. The Stoics have a lot of great ideas. Great ideas! But they take them to an extreme and they are always driving the car off the cliff. I would keep books of the Stoics because of all the practical techniques and tools they have. Plus, I would keep a shelf of all the great classic novels. And that’s something nobody told me in graduate school.

Three years ago, I read the Odyssey four times cover to cover, back to back in three different translations, and I finally understood it. Same year, I read the Iliad twice. Back to back cover to cover understood it. I’m just 2 summers ago. I went through. Oh, and by the way, the odyssey is about the power of purpose and the Iliad is about the power of partnership 3 summers ago.

I read all of Jane Austen and now I’m rereading because CS Lewis said if book is not worth reading twice. It wasn’t worth reading once I. Get a great I get excited by a good book the 1st time I read it. but I don’t master it until I’ve read it 2 or 3 times and I just read Emma a few weeks ago for the 2nd time.

I just read since accessibility that I ended the night before last. Getting ready to reread pride and prejudice. Jane Austen was 1 of the great insightful writers about how often we misunderstand the people around us. how much we think we know about others that we don’t know at all. We go, we take a hint in the wrong framework, the wrong context, because of our own predispositions, and we run with it, and we’re completely wrong.

She pulls us back from the illusions that we rush after. And Don Quixote? Moby Dick, I’ve read Gilgamesh 15, 20 times. I’ve read Beowulf at least a dozen times. some of the great classics that nobody in a philosophy seminar ever suggested I read is where I get my deepest ideas. So I would keep some of those great novels because a famous novelist once told me, he said, I said to him, I wish I could do what you do.

He said, Oh, we do the same thing. I said, what are you talking about? You sell a lot of books. No, he said, no, no. He said, we’re both trying to understand the human condition. We just do it differently. I said, really, is that right? He said, think about the greatest novels. never just about wonderful uses of language.

Oh yeah, you’ll find that, but they become great. They become classics only because of the power of the ideas. In the stories I said, I never thought of that before. He said, you and I are after the same thing. What are the most powerful ideas that can be transformative in our lives that can help us transform the world from the mess?

It is right now until to what it’s capable of being. Whoa. Wow. Cool. I’m doing that. Huh?

Sean: Tom, say you could do this. Sit down, long form conversation with anyone dead or alive. Who would you love to sit down with, and what would you ask them?

Tom: Aristotle, what might be number 1 dude? Couldn’t you figure out how to write any better than that? You have amazing ideas. It’s the worst written stuff in the world. I mean, I wouldn’t recommend to people. Oh, go read the Nicomachean Ethics or go read Aristotle’s Politics. It’s like, man, it’s a slog because they weren’t written as books.

Actually, they were his. notes for his most advanced students for his classes. And so you got to dig and you got to wrestle and you got to, but then there are just these amazing ideas everywhere, but you got to work hard to get them. And I would have said stuff like, dude, slavery, really, women, not as good as men.

You actually believe that. And so I would want to push, I would want to push on some of the stuff he got wrong. Because one of the things I learned in graduate school is to be a great philosopher. You don’t have to be right about everything. In fact, you don’t even have to be right about most things, but you always have to be interesting.

You always have to be provocative. You always have to be stimulating to further thought because really, we shouldn’t go to philosophers for all the answers. We should go to philosophers. Well, not just for the questions because we have those ourselves, we should go for the stimulation. We should go for the provocation.

We should go from those scintillating ideas. It’ll get us moving in directions where we’ll learn. Even if we end up saying, well, Aristotle was right about that or Plato got that wrong. We will have learned through their efforts. So I would want to sit down with Aristotle. And if I could bring in Pascal, I’d probably have him too.

And if I could bring in Emerson, I’d probably have him too. And there’d be this huge dinner party with all these. Yeah. These people and Mary Shelley, I want her to be there because she was 18 years old, writing stuff wiser than a lot of the great old guys in philosophy. Do you know, in addition to Frankenstein, which is the greatest cautionary tale about success ever written, here was a guy who did most of the seven seas.

Check, check, check, check, check. He unleashes into the world a monster he can’t control as a result of his success. Whoa. Zuckerberg and Facebook. Did he ever sit around and say, I want to take down democracy all over the world? No. What about all these people in the news for all the bad reasons, Sam Bankman freed, you know, I want to be, I hope I can get convicted of six felonies.

You know, it’s like Elon Musk, you know, I want to be, no, these guys didn’t set out to be, you know, Mr. Evil or something, but, but stuff starts blowing up because they don’t listen to Mary Shelley. And then her next book, 1826. A lot of people’s like, when I tell them this, they go like, what her next book was about a pandemic in the 21st century that kills everybody. It’s called the last man narrated by the last person alive. And not only did she anticipate, and people tell us, you know, was it? No, that’s a run up to whatever is next, you know, but, It ends up being about some of the same things, hubris, grandiosity, selfishness that Frankenstein was really all about a person with a grandiose sense of self importance who wants to be famous forever.

Watch out for those people. Don’t hire those people. Don’t fund those people. Don’t vote for those people because self focused grandiosity. No, man. That’s going to lead nowhere but a Frankenstein monster. So that’s my next book that we’re shopping around now. It’s called The Frankenstein Factor, subtitled Monster Success and Massive Failure.

20 year project where I use world literature to try to give people the guardrails that nobody’s talking about.

Sean: Well, Tom, one of the things you do incredibly well is that stimulation. I know there’s at least 20 other ideas you and I have never explored, but I’ve uncovered in your books that I just want to explore further with you. But for the listeners who are now stimulated, where do you want to direct them?

Where can they stay connected with you and all the work that you’re producing?

Tom: hey, man. Thank you for asking that. Tom V as in Victor, my middle name, Tom V Morris, M O R R I S dot com. there’s an about page. They can follow me on social media. I post a little something every morning as a thought starter across, you know, Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter and amazing conversations happen.

I meet incredible people. do that. And then my second edition, the silver anniversary of the art of achievement just came out two weeks ago. It’s a book I wrote in the nineties about the skills or arts involved behind each of the seven C’s of success that we just talked about. There’s an art of confidence building.

There’s an art of consistency that nobody talks about. And, and, and, and, and so that’s what that book is about. And I’ve rewritten it. Holy rewritten it for our time. I’m so excited about the impact on early readers. it’s called the art of achievement. and I haven’t even put it on my website yet. The link to Amazon, but go to Amazon, the art of achievement, but play those lemonade stand is on my website a book I did about.

Citizenship called the everyday patriot how to be a great American now that’s getting a lot of attention of PBS producer wants to do something on it in the coming year. stoicism for dummies is out in a few weeks philosophy for dummies. I was the person that helped launch with the curator of the Metropolitan Museum.

He and I. Launched lifetime learning for the dummies people. I did philosophy for dummies. He did art for dummies in the 90s. And now they’ve come back a revision of that book, a new edition and the book, stoicism for dummies. So I’d ask people to come on my website, look through things there and go to Amazon and, and type in the art of achievement. And let’s start a conversation because I love it when readers will ping me on social media, or even send me an email in the backs of most of my books. I give my email address because that’s how I learned. I even had an assistant. years ago, who’s running a lot of my business for me, he said, why do you answer everybody’s emails yourself?

I said, man, if I just read the old philosophers, but don’t read people now, what’s going on in their lives? What are they struggling with? I only got half the formula. So I love hearing for people to be my partners in philosophy.

Sean: Well, Tom Morris, thanks so much for joining us on What Got You There.

Tom: Thank you so much, man. You’re doing great work. I appreciate being included.

My new book, Masterpiece in Progress: A Daily Guide to a Life Well Crafted, is out now!