Latest / The Action Catalyst / Passion Struck, with John Miles (Leadership, Self Improvement, Business, Mindset)

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Passion Struck, with John Miles (Leadership, Self Improvement, Business, Mindset) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:00
  Adam Outland: Today's guest is John Miles, a former naval
• 0:02
  officer and author, entrepreneur, Fortune 50 senior
• 0:06
  executive and award winning podcast host, who has
• 0:10
  established himself as an expert in behavioral change and
• 0:13
  leadership. His book "Passion Struck", along with the podcast
• 0:17
  and radio show of the same name have earned praise from many
• 0:20
  including some past Action Catalyst, guests such as Matt
• 0:24
  Higgins, Mark Divine and Marshall Goldsmith. So, John,
• 0:27
  good to meet you.
• 0:28
  John Miles: You too, Adam.
• 0:29
  Adam Outland: You know, one of the things that I do like
• 0:31
  talking to our guests about and I kind of probably wanted to
• 0:34
  open with you some is focusing a lot on the journey. Most of our
• 0:38
  guests didn't necessarily have a master plan from the age of 10.
• 0:42
  On being where they are today. It's evolved over time. What was
• 0:46
  the evolution that you went through different iterations
• 0:49
  that you were considering doing along the way?
• 0:51
  John Miles: Thanks for that question. As I was growing up, I
• 0:53
  had always had in my mind that I was going to be doing something
• 0:57
  of impact to others, but I always thought it was going to
• 1:00
  be in a way of some type of public service, whether that was
• 1:03
  being a police officer, an FBI agent, fireman, I never really
• 1:08
  saw myself sitting behind a desk of sorts, I kind of saw myself
• 1:12
  being out there and living this life of exhilaration, etc. And
• 1:18
  for me, that's exactly how my life was going up until about
• 1:22
  the age of 28. I had gone to the Naval Academy and spent time as
• 1:27
  a military officer, where I was working at the counter drug
• 1:31
  mecca for the United States. And in this command, we had all
• 1:34
  these different law enforcement entities and intelligence
• 1:37
  entities. And they all asked me to apply and here I am making
• 1:42
  the choice of do I want to go to the DEA, NSA, FBI, etc. And I
• 1:47
  ended up taking the route of becoming an FBI agent, and was
• 1:50
  literally a few days from going to Quantico when my detailer
• 1:54
  called me out of the blue and said, I've got some unfortunate
• 1:57
  news for you. Congress can't get their act together, you stronger
• 2:01
  words than that. And your class has unfortunately been recycled.
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  And to my nativity, I thought he was telling me, I had a couple
• 2:10
  month delay, and it ended up being closer to a four year
• 2:14
  three and a half to four year delay. And by the time that the
• 2:19
  opportunity represented itself, I had been forced to take a Plan
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  B when this plan a vanished in front of me, and that plan B
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  ended up becoming then the next 20 to 25 years of my career, a
• 2:32
  career that I never thought I was going to get into and was
• 2:35
  kind of forced to go into because of circumstances beyond
• 2:39
  my control.
• 2:40
  Adam Outland: And in reflection, did you feel like that path was
• 2:43
  the right one?
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  John Miles: I think when we get immersed in it, we don't really
• 2:47
  think that way. I guess I always had this mentality. Regardless
• 2:50
  of what I did, I always aspired to do the best job that I
• 2:55
  possibly could. So before long, I had really excelled at what I
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  was doing, and was on this rocket ship climb to the top, so
• 3:03
  to speak.
• 3:04
  Adam Outland: I think in each phase of our life, we pull and
• 3:07
  extract different lessons that we end up being able to leverage
• 3:11
  later on. And I could assume some of the lessons that you
• 3:14
  might have learned at the Naval Academy where I think you were
• 3:17
  also athlete as well.
• 3:20
  John Miles: Yeah. What's funny, I think almost everyone who goes
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  to the Naval Academy is an athlete.
• 3:25
  Adam Outland: Fair.
• 3:26
  John Miles: Yeah, I was highly recruited to be cross country
• 3:28
  and track runner. And that's where I got my start.
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  Adam Outland: What are some of the lessons you pulled from that
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  earlier formative experience that you were able to leverage
• 3:37
  in your professional and consulting career?
• 3:40
  John Miles: I would like to even go a little bit before I went to
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  the Naval Academy.
• 3:44
  Adam Outland: Please.
• 3:45
  John Miles: When I was coming out of middle school, going into
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  high school, I had always been kind of this chubby kid. And my
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  salvation from that was, I had always been a hard worker, my
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  family kind of gave us the basics. And anything beyond
• 4:00
  that, we were kind of called upon to find our own way. And so
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  when I was in fifth or sixth grade, I actually started a
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  paper route, and having to do that paper out every day and get
• 4:13
  that exercise and kind of reshape my trajectory. But I
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  still wasn't where I wanted to be going into high school. And
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  so I thought, I'll try this cross country thing, never
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  expecting to be any good at it. When I first started, the
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  seniors on the team, and no dedication or wherewithal to
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  make us a top performing team. And yet, there was this group of
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  sophomores and juniors on the team who were really serious
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  about what they were doing. And I started to watch them and
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  wanted to be like them. And the more I started to enter their
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  circle, which was difficult because they were faster than
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  me, so it meant that if I were going to go out on a training
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  run with them, it was really difficult trying to keep keep
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  up. I stuck with it and the more I stuck with it, the more I
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  started learning that not only were they working out there, but
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  they were also doing things outside of practice, such as
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  trying to get good sleep trying to eat well, and we're really
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  self supportive of each other. So they were trying to make each
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  other person good because they viewed it as a team effort. And
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  the nice thing about country cross country is sometimes you
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  think it's an individual sport, it's actually a team sport. So
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  you win by how your top five or six runners score. So I also
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  learned the importance of support and other things like
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  that. I had a huge issue at first where I was psyching
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  myself out so much before races, to the point that I was I would
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  get physically sick. And I started to approach practice as
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  if it was a race. And it completely changed the way I've
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  lived my life up until this day, because if you start treating
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  every day as if it's a game day, you don't have that anxiety
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  anymore. So those things were kind of a foundation that when I
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  went to the Naval Academy, I was so glad I had.
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  Adam Outland: So you're out at the Naval Academy, you take this
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  kind of windy road that gets you to consulting, and then from
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  consulting into senior executive roles with fairly large
• 6:19
  companies.
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  John Miles: Well I started out at Booz Allen and then Anderson
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  Consulting. So I got to work in a lot of large companies, Exxon
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  Mobil, Halliburton companies of that size. But I was also when
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  by the time I got to Anderson, I started practice focused on high
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  growth mid market companies. So I was also working on WebMD in
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  the very early days, and other startups like that, and midsize
• 6:44
  companies. So I was lucky enough that I had experience doing
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  both. I started a company called LendLease, headquartered out of
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  Australia, and when I started with them, they had about a $15
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  billion revenue, they were part financial institution, they own
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  the second largest bank in Australia, they had a whole
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  portfolio of mutual funds. They also had a relevant real estate
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  investment crossed area that fueled the other side of their
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  business, which was property management, and construction.
• 7:13
  And then from there, I went to Lowe's, where I initially was
• 7:16
  brought in to fix what had preceded me as the largest
• 7:20
  hacking incident retail history, and went on from that to lead
• 7:25
  all application development, and then eventually all big data and
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  integration for them. And then that led me to becoming a CIO at
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  Dell.
• 7:34
  Adam Outland: Yeah, one of the things that you write about the
• 7:38
  need for curiosity, there's some points that you make about both
• 7:42
  the need for curiosity and the bias to action. So you know,
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  where did this evolve for you on a personal level? And then how
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  have you explored this over the course of your career?
• 7:51
  John Miles: So take us all back to 2011. I was in the process of
• 7:56
  leaving Dell, because so much of our business model was wed to
• 8:01
  Microsoft, I had met Steve Ballmer a number of times, who's
• 8:05
  the former CEO of Microsoft. And when Steve heard I was leaving,
• 8:09
  he asked me to come to Microsoft to become the CIO. And as any of
• 8:14
  these things are, it's not as easy a process as Steve says, He
• 8:18
  wants you in this position. And it just happened. So for me,
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  this amounted into something like 16, to 20 interviews that I
• 8:25
  had to go through. And what I found was that Microsoft, at
• 8:28
  that time, had a very fixed mindset. And they really
• 8:33
  couldn't see how to do things a different way. And on top of
• 8:37
  that bomber, had this leadership style where he used his size,
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  he's a large man is a large voice and his intimidation to
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  get things done. So that's how the rank and file were treating
• 8:49
  many of the employees underneath them was really an era of
• 8:53
  intimidation to get things done. And I met this man who had been
• 8:57
  there for a long time, at that point, who was talking to me
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  about things that were so different and foreign about what
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  Microsoft could be, if they would start doing things
• 9:08
  differently. And that was sat down Nadella. And this was three
• 9:12
  and a half years before he took over the role that he has. Now,
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  the reason I'm bringing this all up is I didn't end up taking
• 9:18
  that position because I thought I was walking into a toxic
• 9:22
  culture at the time, which would have been, but if you look at
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  what he has brought into that company, he has really brought
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  in a culture of growth, of constant learning, where he
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  really rewards people for being curious about how to do things
• 9:39
  differently. But there's also a culture of deliberate action.
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  And when you combine those things, meaning you're choosing
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  growth, time and time again, whether it's in your personal
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  life, or in business setting, and then you're constantly
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  taking actions that go in concert with that growth you're
• 9:57
  trying to creating. It's a perfect way recipe for
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  greatness. We think that in order to achieve these
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  monumental things in life, it comes down to these grandiose
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  moments. And what I have learned from talking to 50 plus behavior
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  scientists and reading hundreds of books is that's not how
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  things work. We as humans, are the ultimate learning machine
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  and coupling that with intentional actions that get
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  either you or the organization that you're working for closer
• 10:31
  to the long term aspirations and the shorter term ambitions that
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  you're trying to accomplish.
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  Adam Outland: It's hard to maintain a bias for action
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  culturally in companies at scale, right? Is there anything
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  that you could share where companies have worked around
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  that to create a better platform for allowing bias for action?
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  John Miles: I think one of the leading causes of disengagement
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  and people feeling unfulfilled in work is where dehumanizing
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  work, meaning it is so much about the spreadsheets and top
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  line and bottom line growth, that we're taking out the human
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  and we're trying to maximize profits by micromanaging or
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  robotized, or institutionalizing the work that people do. What
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  that approach is doing is it is helping with top and bottom line
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  growth in the short term. But it also weeds out creativity and
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  innovation, because people are so conditioned to doing the
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  tasks, that they're not really given the white space, to have
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  breaks to be creative to think differently excetera. And so one
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  of the things I am really calling for is that we need a
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  change in the way we're leading people. And so you can think of
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  a gardener leader approach is being very much the metaphor of
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  a gardener. And just as a gardener, needs to be there to
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  plant the seeds and give nourishment, them sitting over
• 12:00
  the plants day in and night isn't going to make plants grow
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  any better. And so they really need to have this philosophy of
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  being eyes on but hands off. And I first heard about this concept
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  from General Stan McChrystal. And as Stan was talking to me
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  about it, we were discussing his role when he was in charge of
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  all forces in Afghanistan. And there was no way that him in a
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  situation room, or the president back in DC could understand what
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  a green ray team was doing in a mountainside in Afghanistan, and
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  tried to micromanage their everyone movement. So what he
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  could do is he could make sure that those people who were
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  fighting understood the mission, he could give them the best
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  training that he possibly could, he could give them the best
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  leadership he could. But when it came to them executing their
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  mission, he had to be hands off and trust that the tools,
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  learning experiences leadership that they had been given, they
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  would make the appropriate decisions in the fight. And the
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  way we can look at that in the business world today is we can
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  do the same thing, whether it's a project manager or leading a
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  team or a software developer who might be an individual
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  contributor, you could give them what the destination is you're
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  trying to achieve, and let them be creative and taking a
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  completely different approach to getting there. But if you do
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  this in an agile way, they're checkpoints. So if they're off
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  course, you can quickly get them back on. And it really humanizes
• 13:30
  the individuals in the process. Do you feel that's a universal?
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  Like anything, it's a both and situation, you're going to have
• 13:38
  individuals who require more oversight and more hand holding
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  than others. And you're going to have your breakthrough
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  performers typically, who require a lot less of that hand
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  holding, because they're free thinking and innovating and
• 13:56
  inventing new ways of doing things. So to me, typically,
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  what I have found is is employees end up winding up on a
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  chart as either see performers, be performers or a performers
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  who are and I find more of the A performers are able to operate
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  more autonomously, we're more of your see or be what we used to
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  call as plotters, tend to need more structure in the way that
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  they're doing things. The other problem I see, we tend to see a
• 14:25
  person in their current role, not understanding and really
• 14:29
  taking the time to understand their backstory. And a great
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  example of this as I remember, I had this really talented woman
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  who worked for me at at Lowe's and I saw her and her current
• 14:40
  position of being a director underneath me at the time. But
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  what I didn't understand she had prior to that been a CIO at a
• 14:47
  smaller company. She had a lot of data experience. Not only
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  that she had started her career in the business side before
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  transitioning into the IT side and really had this wealth of
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  knowledge and I I think we don't spend enough time getting to
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  understand who the individual is some of their talents that
• 15:06
  exceed the role that they're currently in, and how you might
• 15:10
  be able to utilize them differently. The other side of
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  that is, I also don't think we spend enough time looking at the
• 15:16
  person as a whole, both inside and out of work and realizing
• 15:20
  that, that just is they have career aspirations, they also
• 15:24
  have life aspirations. And so if you would know that, that
• 15:28
  developer who's working for you, is trying to save money to buy a
• 15:32
  house for his family, and they're expecting a child. And
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  you somehow bring that into how you're leading them. And being
• 15:40
  more understanding of that and acknowledging it 100 times out
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  of 100, you're gonna get better performance out of the person,
• 15:47
  because they see you treating them as a human and interested
• 15:51
  in them both at work, and in their larger success in life.
• 15:56
  Adam Outland: I think that's really well said. You know, I
• 15:58
  think almost every successful person that we've had on his
• 16:02
  podcast has pulled some of their lessons, not from success, but
• 16:07
  actually from from failure and shortcoming. A lot of our
• 16:09
  listeners, it's really easy to just superimpose on you that
• 16:12
  Okay, John was always this amazing guy. He did everything
• 16:15
  right. And the life was just this perfect uphill chart. What
• 16:19
  were some of the bumps in your road? And where did some of
• 16:21
  these lessons come in, that you learned not from succeeding, but
• 16:25
  from from falling short?
• 16:27
  John Miles: One of my favorite questions that I that I've
• 16:29
  always gotten in an interview is Tell me about your your
• 16:33
  strengths and your biggest weakness. And to me when someone
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  answers that question, saying they don't have weaknesses, or
• 16:40
  trying to lessen them, I always know that they're not a good
• 16:44
  fit, because they're not being authentic with their answer.
• 16:47
  I've been thinking a lot recently about Jimmy Carter,
• 16:50
  given, he's kind of at the ending stages of his amazing
• 16:54
  life. He's a Naval Academy grad. And I remembered this story, he
• 16:59
  was interviewing to become part of the spring nuclear power
• 17:04
  program in the Navy. And this was back in the early 1950s. And
• 17:08
  during this time, you had Hyman Rickover, the longest standing
• 17:13
  military officer of all time, he ended up being a military
• 17:16
  officer. Until his 80s, he was known and feared for how
• 17:22
  demanding he was in interviews, people would lose their minds
• 17:27
  trying to think about how to prepare themselves for these
• 17:30
  interviews. In this case, Jimmy Carter had already graduated
• 17:33
  from the Naval Academy, he was in the fleet already. And he
• 17:36
  applied. And he has this Interview with the Admiral now
• 17:39
  Admiral is talking to him for about two hours. And he doesn't
• 17:43
  really do this in a set interview style, he asks Carter
• 17:47
  to start talking to him about areas of interest and areas that
• 17:51
  he knows best. And as Carter is going through everything, from
• 17:54
  navigation to propulsion systems to stoicism, and everything
• 17:58
  else, he realizes that Rickover is a master and every single one
• 18:03
  of these topics and an expert in them, and that he is basically
• 18:07
  being put to task. And so as they're ending the interview,
• 18:12
  Rickover asked him one final question. And he said, while you
• 18:16
  were at the Naval Academy, did you always do your best? And
• 18:20
  Carter was about ready to answer yes. When he reflected on the
• 18:24
  conversations that they had been having, and the demand for
• 18:28
  excellence that Rickover wanted out of the people who were part
• 18:32
  of the nuclear Navy. And he said, Upon thinking about it,
• 18:35
  no, I didn't. I could have studied harder for test, I could
• 18:39
  have performed better in athletics, I could have learned
• 18:43
  more about our enemies. And then Rickover ended the conversation
• 18:48
  with Why didn't you and that really became this moment for
• 18:54
  herder of realization that by him not always trying to do his
• 18:59
  best, it was limiting Him in so many different ways. And it
• 19:02
  changed his whole approach on life. So I mean, that's just one
• 19:05
  example. But I've had so many mistakes, and misfortunes and
• 19:09
  bumps along the way. And that is what has allowed me to learn and
• 19:12
  become better.
• 19:13
  Adam Outland: When you wrote "Passion Struck", I was advised
• 19:16
  once upon a time that if you write a book, you try not to
• 19:19
  write it for everyone, you try to write it for maybe one person
• 19:22
  that you really have in mind, who did you write Passion Struck
• 19:25
  for in a way?
• 19:26
  John Miles: I guess if I would say I wrote it for anyone. I
• 19:30
  wrote it for my two kids and their generation, this world
• 19:33
  that they're entering professionally is so far
• 19:36
  different from the life that I entered when we both walked in
• 19:41
  to it feeling that we were facing change, and things were
• 19:45
  happening faster than they were for those before us. But change
• 19:50
  is happening at such a rapid pace now. But not only that, I
• 19:54
  think we're at a huge inflection point where the world tends to
• 19:58
  be cyclical and I write about Something in the book called
• 20:01
  Social Impact Theory where over periods of time, history tends
• 20:05
  to repeat itself. And I think we're at the state now of going
• 20:10
  into one of these cycles. And we have, over the past 100 years
• 20:15
  been in the cycle where we are breaking out of people being
• 20:20
  entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship has been on a decline, ever
• 20:23
  since the 1970s. More and more people are unwilling to make the
• 20:27
  risk. And instead, they're going for the comfort of joining a
• 20:30
  more established company. But I think we're entering a state
• 20:34
  that just as in times before us, there were individual jobs like
• 20:39
  a blacksmith, etc, a baker that people would do, I think, in
• 20:43
  this new digital economy, we're going to have the same thing
• 20:47
  where there's a real opportunity for people instead of being
• 20:50
  employed by one company, where what I have learned working for
• 20:55
  them is if there's anything that they can do to make more money
• 20:58
  or lower expenses, they're going to take that opportunity at the
• 21:02
  expense of view, for you to position yourself as an
• 21:06
  individual entrepreneur, where you're almost a solo agent
• 21:11
  working for a collection of businesses and living life more
• 21:15
  on your own terms. Now, in order to do this, it's going to mean
• 21:19
  throwing out the book that my generation and I would say even
• 21:23
  the millennials, certainly my parents and grandparents
• 21:26
  generations live by before us that you basically have this
• 21:30
  recipe you're born, you go to schooling, get a college degree
• 21:34
  or go to a trade school, get this job where you kind of lead
• 21:39
  this portfolio career have kids along the way, you know, retire,
• 21:43
  blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think more and more people
• 21:45
  have an opportunity to break out of that matrix that we've kind
• 21:50
  of been confined in and to live their life differently with more
• 21:53
  freedom, and autonomy. If you look at the whole educational
• 21:57
  system, the United States, I mean, you look back upon
• 22:00
  Rockefeller and when his oil Empire was broken up what he and
• 22:04
  others at that time were trying to do, where they were trying to
• 22:08
  get rid of free or thinkers, they were trying to create more
• 22:12
  conformists because we needed people in factories, we needed
• 22:15
  people doing jobs at that time that were repetitive in nature.
• 22:20
  And so our whole education system has really been fueled to
• 22:24
  go down the set path, and I'm talking about and so large
• 22:28
  institutions, our education systems, and our even government
• 22:32
  has missed this inflection point that we're in right now of how
• 22:35
  the world is changing. And therefore, you can't rely on
• 22:38
  those things anymore. If you're listening to this, you got to
• 22:41
  rely on yourself and take your own path. To me, that's really
• 22:45
  what it means to become passion struck. It's this never ending
• 22:49
  desire to try to become the best that you can become knowing that
• 22:54
  you're it's never a finite destination. It's something
• 22:57
  you're always striving to do.
• 22:59
  Adam Outland: Yeah, I love that. So just in tie up, one thing
• 23:02
  that we always do with our guests is is a quick lightning
• 23:05
  round. These are just short responses, but get some insight
• 23:09
  for our listeners. And so if you don't mind for you, what's one
• 23:12
  of your favorite quotes that you tend to reference most?
• 23:16
  John Miles: Well, there are a ton of quotes that I love. But I
• 23:19
  think the one that I've been using most recently, do you know
• 23:23
  who Sharon Salzberg is?
• 23:25
  Adam Outland: I don't.
• 23:25
  John Miles: Sharon Salzberg is a New York Times best selling
• 23:28
  author, she's probably one of the most well known meditation
• 23:32
  experts in the entire world has been working with the Dalai
• 23:36
  Lama, since she was in her early 20s. She has this great quote,
• 23:40
  There is no commodity that we can take with us. There's only
• 23:43
  our lives and whether we live them wisely, whether we live
• 23:47
  them in ignorance, and this is everything. And when I think
• 23:51
  about what she's talking about here, I discuss in the book that
• 23:54
  a lot of people hear this phrase that they're living life on
• 23:58
  autopilot. And I think it's the wrong analogy for how so many of
• 24:02
  us are living our lives today. Because when we're on autopilot,
• 24:06
  we're typically doing the same thing, but it's generally taking
• 24:10
  us into a positive direction. I think the better metaphor for
• 24:14
  how so many of us are living our lives is a pinball. We let the
• 24:17
  world around us influence everything we do. And we get so
• 24:21
  distracted, just as you do in the game of pinball by the
• 24:24
  noises, the lights in human life, social media influencers,
• 24:28
  all these people who tell us we need to be more, that we're not
• 24:32
  intentional about learning how to play the game instead of it,
• 24:36
  playing us. And I think that's exactly what Sharon was talking
• 24:40
  about here. You can make the choice to live intentionally and
• 24:43
  live your life wisely, or you can choose to continue to live
• 24:47
  it as a pinball and live in ignorance and never achieve the
• 24:51
  potential that you could.
• 24:52
  Adam Outland: In relation to that and some of the things that
• 24:56
  you said, What's one thing that you own that you should probably
• 25:01
  throw out?
• 25:02
  John Miles: So I remember earlier in my life, it was like
• 25:05
  I wanted to have bigger and bigger houses, I think we all
• 25:09
  think about having more than our parents did. And I've certainly
• 25:13
  reached that point. And I'm now in a stage in my life where, you
• 25:17
  know, both my kids are out of the house, and I'm now trying to
• 25:21
  downsize. And I recently had had my house on the market. And in
• 25:25
  order to do that, I had to declutter the house. And so it's
• 25:29
  amazing. Once you do that, how much you realize certain things
• 25:33
  you don't even miss a month later and what you do mess. So
• 25:37
  one of the things that I have really missed is I had to put
• 25:41
  away my record collection and my record player, and I have really
• 25:45
  missed that enjoyment in my life. But what I haven't missed
• 25:49
  was I have a whole bunch of DVDs that I've had for years that I
• 25:53
  don't know why I've saved that I haven't even thought about
• 25:57
  watching over the past four to six weeks, so I will get rid of
• 26:01
  those DVDs. I think another thing that I need to get rid of
• 26:05
  is right now I looked in my garage, and I love to cook and I
• 26:09
  think I have five different grilles, so I think I need to
• 26:13
  get that down to two. But there are a bunch of other other
• 26:17
  things from shoes and clothing that I need to declutter. And I
• 26:21
  think Gretchen Rubin has a great book on this where it's called
• 26:25
  outer order inner calm, and there is such truth to
• 26:28
  simplifying your life and how much it will bring you that
• 26:32
  inner calm and confidence if you do so.
• 26:34
  Adam Outland: I love that. You know, we accumulate so much over
• 26:37
  life and thinking it makes us bigger, but then it actually
• 26:40
  just adds a lot of stress in many cases and more things to
• 26:43
  manage right now. I always say I prefer to be friends with a guy
• 26:47
  that has a boat and have one.
• 26:49
  John Miles: Yep.
• 26:49
  Adam Outland: I love this. Thank you so much. This has been a
• 26:51
  really enlightening episode just because of your history being so
• 26:54
  unique in your pathway and some of the lessons and been frankly,
• 26:57
  some of the lessons you've learned not just from your own
• 27:00
  life, but from some of the people you've interviewed.
• 27:02
  John Miles: So I'd kind of like to end on this quote. Buddhist
• 27:05
  philosopher de Sacco Ikeda said what is defeat in life, it's not
• 27:09
  merely making mistake defeat means giving up on yourself in
• 27:12
  the midst of difficulty. What's true success in life. true
• 27:15
  success means winning your battle with yourself. Those who
• 27:19
  persist in the pursuit of their dreams, no matter what the
• 27:22
  hurdles are winners in life for they have won over their
• 27:25
  weaknesses. And I bring that up because I think it was a core
• 27:28
  kind of a core theme to everything that you were asking
• 27:31
  me today. And it's a core theme to my book. And you can find
• 27:35
  this if you want to learn more about me at John R. Miles Rs, my
• 27:38
  middle initial.com And if you want to learn more about the
• 27:42
  passion struck podcast, national strike movement, and some of the
• 27:45
  educational things we're doing, and you can go to passion struck.com.
• 27:51
  Adam Outland: John, thanks for your time so much today. Great
• 27:53
  interview.
• 27:53
  John Miles: Yeah, Adam, thank you so much for having me. It
• 27:55
  was such an honor to be here.