John Miles
speaker
649 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 18 Jun
John Miles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Been thinking a lot recently about Jimmy Carter, given he's kind of at the ending stages of his amazing life. He's a Naval Academy grad, and I remembered this story. He was interviewing to become part of the Spurgeon Nuclear Power Program in the Navy, and this is back in the early 1950s. And during this time, you had Hyman Rickover, the longest standing military officer of all time.
He ended up being a military officer until his 80s. He was known and feared for how demanding he was in interviews. People would lose their minds trying to think about how to prepare themselves for these interviews. In this case, Jimmy Carter had already graduated from the Naval Academy. He was in the fleet already, and he applied.
And he has this interview with the admiral, and the admiral is talking to him for about two hours. And he doesn't really do this in a set interview style. He asks questions. Carter to start talking to him about areas of interest and areas that he knows best.
And as Carter is going through everything from navigation to propulsion systems to stoicism and everything else, he realizes that Rickover is a master in every single one of these topics and an expert in them, and that he is basically being put to task. And so as they're ending the interview, Rickover asks him one final question.
And he said, while you were at the Naval Academy, did you always do your best? And Carter was about ready to answer yes when he reflected on the conversations that they had been having. And the demand for excellence that Rickover wanted out of the people who were part of the nuclear Navy, and he said, upon thinking about it, no, I didn't. I could have studied harder for tests.
I could have performed better in athletics. I could have learned more about our enemies. And then Rickover ended the conversation with, Well, why didn't you? And that really became this moment for Carter of realization that by him not always trying to do his best, it was limiting him in so many different ways. And it changed his whole approach on life.
So, I mean, that's just one example, but I've had so many mistakes and misfortunes and bumps along the way. And that is what has allowed me to learn and become better.
I guess if I would say I wrote it for anyone, I wrote it for my two kids and their generation. This world that they're entering professionally is so far different from the life that I entered. I mean, we both walked into it feeling that we were facing change and things were happening faster than they were for those before us. But change is happening at such a rapid pace now
But not only that, I think we're at a huge inflection point where the world tends to be cyclical. And I write about something in the book called social impact theory, where over periods of time, history tends to repeat itself. And I think we're at the state now of going into one of these cycles.
And we have over the past hundred years been in the cycle where we are breaking out of people being entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship has been on a decline ever since the 1970s. More and more people are unwilling to make the risk. And instead, they're going for the comfort of joining a more established company.
But I think we're entering a state that just as in times before us, there were individual jobs like a blacksmith, etc., a baker that people would do. I think in this new digital economy, we're going to have the same thing where there's a real opportunity for people instead of being employed by one company.
Where what I have learned working for them is if there's anything that they can do to make more money or lower expenses, they're going to take that opportunity at the expense of you. For you to position yourself as an individual entrepreneur where you're almost a solo agent working for a collection of businesses and living life more on your own terms.
Now, in order to do this, it's going to mean throwing out the book that my generation and I would say even the millennials, certainly my parents' and grandparents' generations lived by before us, that you basically have this recipe. You're born, you go to schooling, get a college degree or go to a trade school, get this job where you kind of lead this portfolio career, have kids along the way.
retire, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think more and more people have an opportunity to break out of that matrix that we've kind of been confined in and to live their life differently with more freedom and autonomy.
If you look at the whole educational system in the United States, I mean, you look back upon Rockefeller and when his oil empire was broken up, what he and others at that time were trying to do where they were trying to get rid of freer thinkers. They were trying to create more conformists because we needed people in factories.
We needed people doing jobs at that time that were repetitive in nature. And so our whole education system has really been fueled to go down this set path that I'm talking about. And so large institutions, our education systems, and our even government has missed this inflection point that we're in right now Hmm. Hmm.
Well, there are a ton of quotes that I love, but I think the one that I've been using most recently, do you know who Sharon Salzberg is? I don't. Sharon Salzberg is a New York Times bestselling author. She's probably one of the most well-known meditation experts in the entire world, has been working with the Dalai Lama since she was in her early 20s.
She has this great quote, there's no commodity that we can take with us. There's only our lives and whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance. And this is everything. And when I think about what she's talking about here, I discuss in the book that a lot of people hear this phrase that they're living life on autopilot.
And I think it's the wrong analogy for how so many of us are living our lives today. Because when we're on autopilot, we're typically doing the same thing, but it's generally taking us into a positive direction. I think the better metaphor for how so many of us are living our lives is
is a pinball we let the world around us influence everything we do and we get so distracted just as you do in the game of pinball by the noises the lights in human life social media influencers all these people who tell us we need to be more that we're not intentional about learning how to play the game instead of it playing us. And I think that's exactly what Sharon was talking about here.
Showing 621–640 of 649 · page 32 of 33
← Previous
Next →