Daniel Coyle

it's really cliched it's so much of this stuff it sounds like a cliche at first oh adversity you should stay tough and everything and it's a cliche partly for a reason that there's a like a deep truth to there that those moments do both reveal character but also give you the opportunity to grow that character together

And the story I see over and over in the places that I visit for the new book is that same instinct, like experiencing adversity and then turning toward that adversity with other people and creating community.

That's what's happening in each of these places.

And that's what Pop was doing that night.

He was creating community.

And that's what we see.

That's the deep pattern that we see in flourishing places, people, groups, and businesses is this turning toward and this community that is ready to be unlocked and gets awakened.

Right.

It's a little town, Norwich, Vermont, that resembles every other New England town, right?

If you do a picture of your idyllic, there's a steeple and there's a town common.

And the only thing that's unusual is that they produced, I think, 11 Olympians over the last 30 or 40 years.

And what is unique about it is our normal instincts for explaining that is, well, they must have a set of incredible coaches or some incredible Olympic program or something.

there's something in the water as we like to say there's something in the water but what's in the water in norwich is and has been is this incredible clarity about connection and our possibilities and obligations for helping one another out in norwich there was a woman karen krauss who wrote an excellent book about it and the way she described it was the norwich daisy chain which is everyone sees every other kid in norwich as almost an extension of their own kids

You treat them the same and you hope for them the same and you're not competing and you're trying to lift each other up.

And when you scroll back history a little bit, why are they this way here and not somewhere else?

Well, it turns out that in Norwich in the 60s, they got a vivid lesson on how not to parent.

There was a tiger parent, the perfect tiger parent back in the 60s, raised two Olympic skiers and made both of them miserable in the process.

He would put ankle weights around their ankles and send them on pre-dawn runs, and he controlled every aspect of their diet and their training.

And he...

absolutely taught and both girls of course ended up succeeding and yet spiraling in their personal lives as well.