Adam Outland
speaker
678 appearances
26 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2024
last heard 13 Aug
Adam Outland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Hello, Action Catalyst listeners. This is Adam Outland, and this is another episode of Overtime with Outland. This Overtime focuses on episode 467 with author, entrepreneur, and podcast host, John Miles. We learned a few different things from our interview with John Miles. The first of which is that there's no such thing as a practice mentality.
As a young athlete, John used to have a huge issue psyching himself out before track and field meets to the point where he'd get sick. That changed when, like many great athletes, he learned to treat every practice like a real race and every day like a game day. When you fully devote yourself all the time, the anxiety melts away.
It's something John has continued to carry over into his professional life. John also brings up the idea of being a gardener leader. Just as a gardener needs to be there to plant the seeds and give nourishment, sitting over the plants day and night staring at them isn't going to make them grow any better or faster. Leaders need to have this philosophy of being eyes on but hands off.
The third point was to stop living like a pinball. You may have heard the phrase living life on autopilot, but John thinks that's the wrong analogy. When you're on autopilot, we're typically doing the same thing, but it's generally still taking us into a positive direction. He says the better metaphor for how so many of us are living our lives is as a pinball.
letting the world around us influence everything we do. Just as we get distracted in a game of pinball by the noises and the lights, in our lives we're distracted by social media, naysayers, and others. We're not intentional about learning how to play the game instead of it playing us. You can make the choice to live intentionally, or you can choose to continue to live like a pinball.
Lastly, John brings up the idea that the perfect recipe for greatness has two ingredients, constant learning and a bias toward deliberate action. When you combine those things, choosing growth time and time again, while also constantly taking action that go in concert with that growth, that's when things really start to happen.
John says that most people think in order to achieve monumental things, it comes down to grandiose moments. But that's not really how things work. It's constant forward motion, building upon short-term ambitions towards long-term aspirations. For the full interview and more, check out Action Catalyst episode 467 with John Miles.
Today's guest is John Miles, a former naval officer, an author, entrepreneur, Fortune 50 senior executive, and award-winning podcast host who has established himself as an expert in behavioral change and leadership.
His book, Passion Struck, along with the podcast and radio show of the same name, have earned praise from many, including some past Action Catalyst guests, such as Matt Higgins, Mark Devine, and Marshall Goldsmith. So John, good to meet you. You too, Adam.
You know, one of the things that I do like talking to our guests about, and I kind of probably wanted to open with you some, is focusing a lot on the journey. You know, most of our guests didn't necessarily have a master plan from the age of 10 on being where they are today. It's evolved over time.
What was the evolution that you went through, different iterations that you were considering doing along the way?
And in reflection, did you feel like that path was the right one?
I think each phase of our life, we pull and extract different lessons that we end up being able to leverage later on. And I could assume some of the lessons that you might have learned at the Naval Academy where I think you were also an athlete as well.
Yeah. What are some of the lessons you pulled from that earlier formative experience that you were able to leverage in your professional and consulting career?
So you're out of the Naval Academy and take this kind of windy road that gets you to consulting and then from consulting into senior executive roles with fairly large companies.
Yeah. One of the things that you write about is the need for curiosity. There's some points that you make about both the need for curiosity and the bias to action. So where did this evolve for you on a personal level? And then how have you explored this over the course of your career?
it's hard to maintain a bias for action culturally in companies at scale, right? Is there anything that you could share where companies have worked around that to create a better platform for allowing bias for action?
Do you feel that's a universal?
Yeah, I think that's really well said. You know, I think almost every successful person that we've had on this podcast has pulled some of their lessons, not from success, but actually from failure and shortcoming. A lot of our listeners, it's really easy to just superimpose on you that, okay, John was always this amazing guy. He did everything right. And life was just this perfect uphill chart.
What were some of the bumps in your road and where did some of these lessons come in that you learned not from succeeding but from falling short?
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