When you take a step back from it, modern war is genuinely bizarre. Nation-states, formed by drawing arbitrary lines on a map, fight it out over abstract principles of sovereignty, democracy, fascism, etc., and do so by trying to conquer pieces of one another’s territory and having young men in the prime of their lives kill each other until one party cries uncle.

If modern war is strange to contemplate in general, nothing feels quite so surreal as wrapping your head around World War II. The weight, stakes, and drama of it. The extent it transformed everyone’s lives, from the average joe to the well-known celebrity. The millions of people and tons of material involved. The sheer sweep of it. What a truly staggering thing: a world at war.

There’s a reason that modern books and movies perennially return to WWII for their plots. Nothing else inspires awe — that distinct mixture of both fear and wonder — in the same way. Reflecting on the war — which is ever worth doing — serves as a dizzying reminder of just what human beings are capable of: enormous death, depravity, and destruction on one hand, and great humanity and heroism on the other.

To bring an event that can seem far away and yet remains in the living memory of thousands of people back into focus, we dove deep, deep, deep into the photo archives from WWII. When the war is covered and remembered today, there are a few classic pictures that repeatedly reemerge. But, of course, tens of thousands of photographs were taken during the war, and we wanted to find and resurface some lesser-known snapshots from the Big One.

The photos’ original captions have been retained.

9/23/1943: Detroit, MI — Scene at Detroit’s Central Station as three post-Pearl Harbor dads say a fond farewell to their offspring as they leave for training at Fort Custer after induction.

Corporal James Gregory (left) holding a M1 Thompson submachine gun and T/5 (Technician fifth grade) Omer Taylor of Headquarters Company, 36th Armored Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division of the United States First Army smoke cigarettes while taking cover from incoming enemy fire behind an M4 Sherman tank on 11th December 1944 in Geich near Duren in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany. 

View of an American gun crew as they man a 75mm Pack Howitzer M1 (M1A1) emplacement for the defense of Torokina air field, Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea, mid December 1943. 

An RAF Lancaster bomber over the German city of Hamburg during a bombing raid.

An alleged Soviet spy laughs at a Finnish soldier who is executing the spy in Rukajärvi, November 1942. 

Swinging from one bar to another on an overhead ladder is a muscle toughener to be reckoned with, and when these WAACS do the course in competition as part of their training, it is quite an obstacle. It is part of the intensive physical training regime at the WAAC training camp at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.

Coast Guardsmen on the deck of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Spencer watch the explosion of a depth charge which blasted a Nazi U-boat’s hope of breaking into the center of a large convoy. Sinking of U-175, April 17, 1943. 

7th June 1943: US film actor Clark Gable, who is serving as a gunnery instructor with the US Army Air Force ‘somewhere in England’, manning a weapon aboard an aircraft.

Bomb damage in Manchester.

American soldiers from the 503rd parachute ski battalion rest in sleeping bags on the snow after hiking and skiing over rough mountain terrain during training exercises.

Two bomber aircrew, Sergeant J. Dickinson from Canada and Sergeant F. Gilkes from Trinidad share a joke while waiting to board their aircraft for a raid on Hamburg. Britain, 1943.

11/12/43 — Darwin, Australia: Three p.m. is siesta time in Darwin, Australia, and flying Captain R.N. Skipper dreams up a date with a dream girl. Since their flight missions usually encompass a distance of 3,000 miles, personnel of B-24 squadrons in the Darwin area are only allowed four or five raids a month. Thus, in between times, they lead a hum-drum existence, and 3 p.m. is official nap time, although the heat usually makes it impossible to sleep.

An American tank goes forward with infantrymen following in its cover, searching for Japanese that infiltrated American lines the night before. Bougainville, Solomon Islands, March 1944.

Approximately three of the seven weeks training course of the U.S. Marine recruits at Parris Island are spent on the rifle range where the future leathernecks are trained in the use of weapons with which a Marine is normally armed. This is followed by a week of advanced instruction in combat work and practice with the bayonet. Here, recruits undergo calisthenics under arms.

Sharing a joke at the wartime dance hall, 1944.

The dead body of a GI who has not been picked up is on the beach. 7th June 1944. Vierville-sur-Mer (Omaha Beach, White Dog), Normandy, France. 

A French civilian woman pours a drink of cider for a British soldier with Bren gun in Lisieux, 1944.

Infantrymen of the U. S. First Army silently move through the snow-blanketed Krinkelter woods in Belgium on their way to contact the enemy during the current Nazi counteroffensive on the First Army front.

Two Navy dauntless dive bombers are poised to plunge through the thick cloud in left foreground. They carry thousand pound bombs to be dropped on Japanese installations on Wake Island.

Assault troops leave “alligator” as it hits the beach of Morotai Island. 

A YMCA mobile canteen serves soldiers next to an anti-aircraft battery. November 1940. 

Easter morning finds Technician Fifth Grade (T/5) William E. Thomas and Private First Class (PFC) Joseph Jackson preparing a special Easter egg basket for Hitler, March 1945. 

18th September 1944: A white phosphorous shell explodes as soldiers run across the street in Brest to plant explosives in enemy positions.

The British Army in Athens, Greece, October 1944. Sergeant R. Gregory and Driver A. Hardman on the Erectheum during a tour of the Acropolis.

A group of American soldiers has gathered around a piano and sings a song in the street Montéglise. 10th August 1944. The two GI’s on the right wear the insignia of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Division, which has just arrived in Barenton, Normandy, France. 

8/23/1944: Leap to free France. Thousands of vari-colored parachutes, some holding equipment, some carrying men, fill the sky over Southern France between Nice and Marseilles after dropping from their C-47 carrier planes.

617 Squadron (Dambusters) at Scampton, Lincolnshire, 22 July 1943. The crew of Lancaster ED285/AJ-T sitting on the grass, posed under stormy clouds. 

Soldiers from the 331st Infantry Regiment, 83rd Infantry Division of the United States First Army run across a road to take cover from enemy fire in the bocage hedgerows near the village of Periers during the Normandy Campaign on 21st July 1944 near Periers in Normandy, France. 

CB’s of 50th Battalion sitting on sandbags in a Canvas, NCB, Chapel, bow their heads in prayer during candlelight Holy Communion service, at Tinian, Marianas Islands. December 24, 1944.

Assault troops crossing river, Rhineland Campaign, Germany, 1945.

American Marine Corps Private First Class Natalie Slack and American Marine Corps Corporal Dean L Stidham, both wearing so-called ‘peanut suits’, overalls named so for their tan color, on the deck of the troop transport taking them to Hawaii, location unspecified, in the South Pacific, circa 1943. 

Fourth Division Marines charging from their landing craft onto the beach in the battle at Iwo Jima, Iwo Jima, Japan, March 2, 1945. 

In London during World War II, on July 30, 1944, an English soldier rescues a little girl named Barbara James from the ruins of her home after a series of aerial bombings. 

Member of Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron checks .30-caliber machine gun, Ardennes-Alsace Campaign, Battle of the Bulge, 1945.

German patrol exploring the Egyptian desert while blowing the ghibli. El Alamein, September 1942.

A British soldier in battledress kneeling in prayer at a Service of Intercession for France which took place at Westminster Cathedral, London, 14th June, 1940.

Soldiers of 2nd Battalion, 165th Infantry Regiment from the United States Army’s 27th Infantry Division landing at Yellow Beach on Butaritari Island against the incoming defensive fire from naval ground troops of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 6th Special Naval Landing Force during the Battle of Makin Atoll on 20th November 1943 at Butaritari Island, Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands. 

Infantrymen advancing under enemy shell fire, Ardennes-Alsace Campaign, Battle of the Bulge, 1945.

Black members of a Marine division on Iwo Jima. 

1941: Red Army troops storming an apartment block amidst the ruins of war-torn Stalingrad.

Using an unexploded 16-inch naval shell for a resting place, Marine Pfc. Raymond Hubert shakes a three-day accumulation of sand from his boondocker. July 4, 1944.

USS LSM(R)-190 (MacKay) a United States Navy LSM(R)-188-class Landing Ship Medium (Rocket) fires a barrage of rockets in salvos on to the shores of Tokishi Shima in a prelanding bombardment during the Okinawa Campaign on 27th March 1945 at Tokishi Shima near Okinawa, Japan. USS LSM(R)-190 (MacKay) was attacked and sunk by 3 Japanese Kamikaze aircraft off Okinawa on 4th May 1945.

U.S. soldiers aboard Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP), approaching Omaha Beach, Normandy, France.

Company F, 145th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division soldiers move past the General Post Office building on their way to assault the walled city of Intramuros, Feb. 23, 1945, in Manila, Philippines.

Vertical aerial photograph taken during a daylight attack on an oil storage depot at Bec d’Ambes situated in the Garonne estuary at the confluence of the Rivers Garonne and Dordogne, France. An Avro Lancaster of No. 514 Squadron RAF flies over the target area while dense clouds of smoke rise as bombs burst among the oil storage tanks, 4 August 1944. 

Scene of cheering crowd in the streets of Paris during the Liberation. Civilians waving at French tanks. 

Parisian women welcome soldiers of the allied troops, on August 25, 1944 in Paris, after the battle for the Liberation of Paris.

Circa 1945: GIs stand at the ruins of the great living room window of Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden, the so-called Berghof. 

A battle-weary soldier from George S. Patton’s Third Army sleeps on the luxurious bed where Hermann Goering once slept.

A boatload of soldiers aboard a liner arrives in New York City from the Pacific front, US, circa October 1945. 

The post 50 Amazing Rarely Seen Photos From World War II appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

To be successful at their craft, magicians must possess the well-honed technical skills to pull off their mystifying tricks and clever sleights of hand. But as magician Steve Cohen observes, they must also be “masters at attracting interest, holding attention, and leaving audiences with fond memories of their time together” — skills that everyone can use to persuade audiences, charm dates, own a room, and influence others.

Steve, also known as the Millionaires’ Magician, is the author Win the Crowd: Unlock the Secrets of Influence, Charisma, and Showmanship. Today on the show, Steve shares the insights he and his fellow magicians know on everything from taking command of a room to creating a compelling character to making a magical entrance. Steve shares how to build your boldness through “put pocketing,” develop “spontaneous resourcefulness,” get people wrapped up in the magic of your message by suggesting rather than stating, increase your confidence by having a place for everything and everything in its place, and much more. At the end of our conversation, he shares two of his most interesting tips and explains how to influence people to do what you want by using “layered commands” and the “trailing or.”

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Steve on the Late Show with David Letterman
• A look at what the Chamber Magic show is like on Good Day New York
• AoM Article: Command a Room Like a Man
• AoM Podcast #306: What a Magician Can Teach You About Being More Successful
• AoM Podcast #890: Toastmasters, Aristotle, and the Essential Art of Rhetoric
• AoM Article: A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place
• What’s the Deal With Mickey Mouse’s Ears?

Connect With Steve Cohen

• Chamber Magic website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Podcast Sponsors

Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

Transcript Coming Soon

The post Podcast #901: A Magician’s Secrets for Becoming More Commanding, Convincing, And Charismatic appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

In the mid-1980s, David Hemery set out to answer a burning question: “What makes a winner?”

Hemery was a winner himself, having taken the gold in the 400-meter hurdles at the 1968 Olympics. He was curious as to what contributed to this achievement, and to the achievements of others. Were there common qualities amongst those individuals who attained the highest levels in their field?

Hemery knew that innate talent and inborn traits (especially physical traits when it came to sports) had something to do with it. But why didn’t all who possessed these potential advantages make it to the elite level? And among the equally gifted people who did, what allowed one of them to best the others and come out on top? Talent, Hemery recognized, was necessary but not sufficient for greatness. He wanted to know what other factors were at play.

To discover the answer, Hemery interviewed 62 of the highest achievers in the world of sports — amateur and professional athletes who had won competitions consistently, earned Olympic gold, set world records, and/or become champions. To these athletes, who hailed from twelve different countries and were drawn from twenty-two different sports, Hemery put a set of 88 questions. He sat down with them for hours-long interviews, seeking to unearth the backgrounds, mindsets, and habits that had contributed to their success. 

Hemery chose to study athletes because their achievements are easily quantifiable. But he believed that the bulk of what made for greatness in athletes would also apply to attaining excellence in “all fields of human endeavor.”

While not every athlete shared every attribute, many distinct commonalities did emerge. Some were based on circumstances that individuals cannot control; others were qualities that can be cultivated with intention. It’s unclear whether these factors cause greatness, or are merely correlated with it, but they’re interesting to consider regardless. 

Hemery unpacked his findings in 1986’s Sporting Excellence: A Study of Sport’s Highest Achievers. Below we share some of the noteworthy attributes he found in common amongst elite champions: 

Late specialization. When David Epstein published Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World several years ago, his observation that top athletes often pursued several sports as children before choosing to concentrate on one later in their youth seemed to be hailed as a new discovery. Yet Hemery found this exact thing amongst the high achievers he studied nearly forty years ago. 

While a few sports like swimming and gymnastics “had a definite bias towards a younger starting age,” on average, the athletes Hemery studied didn’t specialize in a single sport until they were sixteen. Instead, they played a variety of sports (with an emphasis on having fun) through the first years of high school, only deciding to focus on a single sport in their late teens to see how far they could take it.

Stable home life. While the participants in Hemery’s study were drawn equally from middle-class, working-class, and outright poor backgrounds (interestingly, only 3% came from affluent families), they almost unanimously reported that their home life had been happy (93%), secure (94%), and stable (98%).

Only “6% had either a parent die or parents who were divorced” (a statistic that’s all the more remarkable given that the divorce rate peaked in the 1980s), and more than two-thirds had a close relationship with their parents. 

As Hemery observed, “Crops grow better in good soil.”

Non-competitive, non-pushy parents. While we often think that behind every superstar athlete is a set of parents who drove their child to succeed, 95% of Hemery’s participants said their parents hadn’t been over-ambitious and pushy about achieving success. Only half of the participants said that their parents had high expectations for them, and even among this half, over a quarter of them said that these expectations concerned their education, not their achievement in sports. 92% characterized their parents as simply being “supportive and encouraging.”

By and large, the high achievers had reached for lofty goals because they themselves wanted to, not because their parents had pushed them to do it. While 92% of the athletes considered themselves competitive, and this competitive streak manifested itself early in their childhoods, less than half described their parents as competitive. As Hemery observed, “It is interesting that this is an attribute not acquired by example.”

Late or early puberty. 66% of the athletes Hemery studied went through puberty at a later-than-average age; 22% hit puberty early; only 12% had gone through it at an average age. It might be theorized that this is a case of correlation rather than causation, i.e., late puberty doesn’t lead to high achievement in sports; instead, these athletes were high achievers because they trained intensely, and intense training can delay puberty, at least in females. That may be the case, but most of the athletes in Hemery’s study were males, and remember, they did not begin training super intensely in their youth.

Hemery admitted that the statistics here may be misleading given the small sample size. But he theorized that those who hit puberty late are overrepresented among high-achieving athletes because the delay in their development gives these athletes something of a chip on their shoulder; they have more to prove and work harder to prove it. Hemery himself was the smallest in his grade when he was fourteen, though he later grew to 6″ 2′. Another example of an athlete who didn’t grow and fill out until later in life was Gene Upshaw, a pro football hall of famer and two-time Super Bowl champion; when “he left school at eighteen, he was 5 ft 10 in and between 175 and 180 lb. Yet he grew to 6 ft 6 in and 260 lb during his college days.”

On the other end, those who hit puberty early have an obvious athletic advantage in becoming physically developed before their peers, and may also be looked to as leaders on the field.

Introversion. 89% of the sports achievers classified themselves as introverts, 6% said they were extroverts, and the rest described themselves as being somewhere in between. While some of these introverts were also shy, most said they “had no problems getting on with anyone.” They were socially adept, but also didn’t mind spending time in solitude. 

The finding makes sense: even in team sports, elite athletes must spend a good amount of time training by themselves and be willing to forgo parties and other social opportunities in dedication to practices and competitions. 

As mentioned above, Hemery thought that the same attributes which contributed to the success of top athletes would contribute to success in other fields of achievement as well. But in this case, he found that among individuals who became what he called “double achievers” and achieved success in both sports and another area like business, most were extroverts.  

Sensitivity to what others think. There’s a popular idea in the modern world that not caring about what other people think is a superpower — that if you could just free yourself from thinking about the opinion of the crowd, it would unlock the limits on your potential. 

Yet, nearly 90% of Hemery’s high achievers, the sporting world’s best of the best, “felt it was important what others thought of you.” And 92% said “they wanted to please others through their sports participation.” Who were these others they wanted to please? Their parents, coaches, spouses, teammates, friends, managers, sponsors, owners, or fans . . . often some combination of all the above. By and large, these elite athletes were acutely sensitive to criticism and the expectations of those around them. Only five athletes said “they were not aiming to please anyone but themselves.”

While public pressure might seem like an impediment to performance, it drove these athletes to the highest levels of success. The thought of letting others down was anathema; when they stepped into the arena, they would not, and could not, allow themselves to fail. 

Sense of humor. Nearly 90% of the athletes Hemery studied felt that humor was important in day-to-day life. Because so much of the training and competitions they engaged in were conducted with seriousness, the ability to sometimes cut up, laugh, and see the funny side of life was a vital outlet for building camaraderie, reducing tension, and getting perspective. 

Emotional intensity + high control. These top competitors unanimously agreed that true greatness came from possessing both high emotion and high self-control. Without intense emotional arousal, athletes don’t have the level of investment to put in their best day in and day out and compete with animation and energy. But without intense self-control, their emotions would get the best of them and sabotage their performance. 

The best athletes were able to maintain “a calm and controlled approach while ‘fired up.'” 

Ability to cope with pre-competition stress. Whereas some people collapse under the pressure of competition, these high achievers thrived under it. They did their best when the stakes were high. They enjoyed being under the bright lights. The comment of squash champion Jonah Barrington summarized the attitude of these athletes: “I love competing. I get fired up, no panic.”

All of the athletes Hemery interviewed reported either not feeling stressed out before an event or being able to cope well with any stress they did feel. 77% said they could “shut themselves off from their problems or concerns once they entered the sports arena.” Hockey great Wayne Gretzky spoke for many of the athletes in saying he was able to “block out” everything but the game.

Those who did get nervous before a competition experienced this feeling as a positive, energizing force that would only strengthen and fuel their performance.

Part of their adeptness in dealing with stress may have been inborn, but these athletes also cultivated practices that helped them manage their nerves. Almost three-quarters of them cloistered themselves before an event and disengaged from involvement with other people and “from distractions either mentally, physically, or both.” Some needed days of isolation; for others, it was enough to spend a quiet half hour alone before the start of a competition. Those who were going to be participating in a more periodic event like the Olympics tended to need more “monk mode” time than those who participated in a game every week, like professional athletes.

Said Olympic long jump champion Lynn Davies, “I think it’s part of the process. You train very hard and you withdraw into yourself. I think you seek inner strength and you can’t share yourself with people.”

Use of visualization. 80% of the participants in the study said they used a visualization practice as part of their mental training. They would mentally rehearse how they would perform during an upcoming competition, cognitively running through possible scenarios and what they would do under various conditions. They would often visit the stadium or course where the event would take place to add the landscape to their minds and make these mental rehearsals more detailed and realistic. Some so immersed themselves in these simulations that their heart rate would rise to around the level it would be during the competition.

By engaging in these sensory-rich visualizations, when the time of the competition arrived, the atmosphere felt more familiar, giving the athletes the sense they’d been there before and a greater feeling of being in control of their performance. Having mentally prepared ahead of time, changes in circumstances did not throw them off, and they were able to respond proactively instead of reactively. “Perhaps most important,” Hemery theorized, “the individual is convincing himself or herself that an improved and successful action is possible. This means that one is working not only on an improved physical action but also on an improved self-image.” Visualization allowed the athletes to conceptualize themselves as winners; embed the possibility of mounting the medal stand in their minds; generate the feeling that they belonged in the circle of champions. 

High self-confidence. In answer to the question, “Did you always have the self-confidence that you could produce your best effort when you asked that of yourself?” 87% of the athletes said yes.

While this self-confidence derived from a variety of sources, one of the primary themes across the athletes’ responses was that they drew their confidence from the belief that they had done more or worked harder than their competitors. The decision to do a little extra practice on their own after their teammates had gone home or to train in the kind of inclement weather they knew would keep most of their rivals inside built their self-assurance. 

Champion rugby player Barry John reported: “I still went out on my own when I felt I needed sharpening up, even in the snow and ice on the field by the river. I’d clear a little path through the light snow of about 100 yards, and I’d do twenty to twenty-five minutes to prepare my mind for the weekend game.” Another rugby great, J.P.R. Williams, ran the sand dunes near where he lived, feeling that his “work there gave him more stamina than most other rugby players.”

Ed Moses, who won Olympic gold in the 400-meter hurdles, found confidence in the fact that he could fast from food for up to a week and still train hard. Other athletes derived satisfaction in training on holidays like Christmas, knowing that most of their competitors had taken the day off. 

By engaging in above-average preparation, the athletes gained a psychological edge when they competed. Hemery observed: “Knowledge that the work had been done to the best of their ability gave a strong sense of confidence and provided a sense of calm; all that could have been done had been done.”

High tolerance for discomfort. Much research over the last several decades has shown that the pain and discomfort athletes experience when pushing themselves, which seem to signal that their bodies can physically go no farther, is actually an illusion, the product of a cautious, scarcity-minded brain that puts the brakes on exertion well before one’s physiological resources have in fact been exhausted. Athletic excellence has thus been linked to the capacity to tolerate discomfort — to feel the pinch and the pain and keep going anyway.

This ability was evident in the athletes Hemery studied. 97% consistently trained hard and believed that the intensity of their training made a significant difference in their ultimate success. Many of the athletes believed that it wasn’t so much the physical intensity of their training that made the difference but the effect that the physical training had on their mental resilience. By pushing themselves in practice, the athletes learned that they were capable of much more than they might have otherwise thought. 

Commonly made were observations like that from swimmer Duncan Goodhew, who earned a gold and bronze medal in the 1980 Olympics; he said that two or three times a week, he wouldn’t feel up to training, but when he did it anyway, “I found that 95 percent of the time it was psychological. I would get in, and forty-five minutes or an hour later, I was knocking out amazing times.” Another gold medal winner, Herb Elliott, who’s considered the greatest middle-distance runner of his era, put it this way, “In retrospect, my training wasn’t to improve my physical strength or stamina; those came along as a secondary result, but the primary purpose of every training session was to toughen up mentally. A training session was totally useless until it started to hurt. That was the point when it started to be worthwhile.” 

Gene Upshaw said, “If you don’t push yourself that way, you’re never ever going to move higher than you are.”

Hemery wrote that Ralph Doubell, a track athlete who won a gold medal in the 800 meters, didn’t even “like the term pain. He saw it more as a willingness to push oneself, and that was both a mental and physical exercise. He referred to the classic comment of the Oxford University coach who spoke to an athlete who was sweating while running round the track, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only pain.'”

Enjoys their pursuit. Even though Hemery’s athletes subjected themselves to what at least most people would consider pain, practiced with great intensity, and had to give up social opportunities, leisure time, and indulgent habits to strive for excellence in their domain, nearly two-thirds did not think they “had sacrificed anything in order to pursue their sport.” Those things they had to forgo to attain their elite-level success did not feel like sacrifices because it was what they wanted to do, and because they felt amply compensated by what they received in return. They had liked it, all of it — the training, the competitions, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. They felt it had enhanced, not detracted from, their lives. 

Because the athletes had chosen a pursuit they truly enjoyed, it wasn’t discipline but intrinsic motivation that kept them going. Olympian Lynn Davis said, “I believe if you spend two or three hours a day over a long period of time at something which you enjoy doing, you become very good at it regardless of what it is, but you have to tap what it is that motivates you, that you enjoy doing.” 

Rod Laver, who won the most singles titles in tennis history, including 11 Grand Slams, told Hemery: “It was tennis morning, noon, and night. You slept it, you ate it, but that was never forced on me. I would get up at 6 o’clock in the morning to ride my bike, eight or nine miles sometimes, to get to the club matches. We’d play all day, and people would say, ‘Weren’t you tired after cycling all that way?’ Well, that wasn’t even thought of. It was just the opportunity to play.”

While it’s true that no greatness is ever achieved without doing hard things, it’s a misconception to think that hard things are always unpleasant. For each person, there are particular hard things that, though most people would find them a self-flagellation-requiring grind, he actually enjoys doing. As David Epstein put it, “What looks like grit, is often fit.”

Feels in control of their destiny. Nearly 90% of the participants said they felt in control of their destiny. At the same time, when asked, “Do you consider yourself lucky to have been in the right place at the right time?” 88% answered yes.

There is no contradiction in their belief in a strong internal locus of control and the power of luck. These high achievers felt lucky that they had found a sport so well-suited to their interests, motivation, and abilities. They felt lucky that they happened to be in the right spot at the right time to find the right coach and wind up on the right team with the right organizational and parental support. They felt lucky to have been given the opportunities that they were. 

At the same time, they had decided to make the most of those opportunities. They had invested their everything into the chances they were given. As Hemery observed, these top performers didn’t “simply let things happen . . . [they] made things happen . . . they contributed to their own good fortune. The proverb that God helps those who help themselves was in evidence.”

Hemery shared the perspective of Olympian Duncan Goodhew, who “had a view that each individual has talent and the lucky ones are those who find it.” Goodhew said: “I think you are lucky to discover it and are extremely lucky and may be shrewd to recognize it at the time, and then the rest is the follow-through.”

The post 14 Attributes of Greatness appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

When people think of the paratroopers of World War II, they tend to think of the European theater — the 101st Airborne Division and the Band of Brothers.

But paratroopers were also deployed in the Pacific, and here to unpack their lesser-known but equally epic and heroic story is James Fenelon, a former paratrooper himself and the author of Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts, Grit, and Brotherhood. Today on the show, James tells us about the formation, leadership, and training of the 11th Airborne Division, the role they played in the campaigns of the Pacific — which included being dropped one by one out of a tiny plane described as a “lawnmower with wings” — how they built a reputation as one of the war’s most lethal units, and the division’s surprising connection to the creation of The Twilight Zone. At the end of our conversation, James shares what lessons we all can take away from the exploits and spirit of the 11th Airborne.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #1: We Who Are Alive and Remain
• AoM Article: Motivational Posters — Band of Brothers Edition
• Lieutenant General Joseph Swing
• Colonel Orin “Hard Rock” Haugen
• Medal of Honor citation for Private First Class Manuel Perez Jr.
• “Combat in Twilight: Rod Serling’s World War II”

Connect With James Fenelon

• James’ Website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Podcast Sponsors

Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. When people think of the paratroopers of World War II they tend to think of The European theatre, the 101st Airborne Division and the Band of Brothers. But paratroopers were also deployed in the Pacific and here to unpack their lesser-known but equally epic and heroic story is James Fenelon a former paratrooper himself and the author of Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts Grit and Brotherhood. Today on the show James tells us about the formation leadership and training of the 11th Airborne Division the role they played in the campaigns of the Pacific which included being dropped one by one out of a tiny plane described as a “lawnmower with wings” how they built a reputation as one of the war’s most lethal units and the division’s surprising connection to the creation of The Twilight Zone. At the end of our conversation James shares what lessons we all can take away from the exploits and spirit of the 11th Airborne. After the show’s over check out our show notes at aom.is/pacificparatroopers.

James Fenelon welcome to the show.

James Fenelon: Thanks Brett I appreciate it. As a fan it’s a privilege to be here.

Brett McKay: Well you are a historian that has written two books about paratroopers during World War II. Your first book was Four Hours of Fury which is about the largest airborne operation in Europe that’s with the 17th Airborne Division. You got a new book out about paratroopers and that is called Angels Against the Sun which is about the 11th Airborne Division in the Pacific. What’s interesting about you as a historian of paratroopers you were a paratrooper yourself before you started writing about paratroopers. So tell us about your career as a paratrooper and at what point in your career did you start getting interested in the history of airborne operations?

James Fenelon: Yeah I think it’s actually a little bit flipped. I think it was my interest in history as a kid that kind of got me interested in enlisting in the service actually. My uncle was a paratrooper in Vietnam and his stories of his service and my own natural interest in history led me down that path and I enlisted in the Army right out of high school. I went to Jump School in 1988. I served for the vast majority of my time in what used to be called Long Range Surveillance units which are kind of like small reconnaissance teams or maybe LRRPs is another concept that kind of came out of the Vietnam era of the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols. And so that’s kind of what I did during my service small airborne operations six-man teams. That capability of course nowadays by and large has been replaced by drones. I still think they have some of those teams but not nearly as many as they used to. But it was during that time I got to go to jump master school and several other schools in the army and it was during a conversation with a sergeant I think I was a corporal at the time we were looking at a picture of some guys who had their picture taken right before their jump into Normandy and they were all standing outside of their plane all kitted up.

And the sergeant said to me he said “Wow the names change but the faces stay the same don’t they?” And that comment really stuck with me and that’s kind of what’s driven my mission if you will to document some of these stories is to tell their story and to have us all connect to the fact that these are all ordinary guys put in extraordinary circumstances.

Brett McKay: And how have you leveraged your first-hand experience into your history writing?

James Fenelon: Yeah I think one of the things that again struck me with that comment about the faces never changing looking at those pictures of those young men in their late teens or early 20s was… I think one of the things that makes the greatest generation great is that it’s not a magic formula per se. It’s that those guys in particular recognized that you can’t choose what happens to you but you can choose how you respond to it. And so I think I kind of leverage my service in and my writing as a way to kind of initially introduce readers to the normality of these guys in their late teens. Their future is uncertain. In most cases before they even get to the war zone their primary mission in life is to escape the mundaneness of Army life of service life. A lot of these guys have left home for the first time. They find themselves in the army. Every minute of their day is being directed by somebody else as to what to do and where to go and how to do it and all that kind of stuff and so I really kind of wanted to… I use my services as someone who was in that circumstance as a way to kind of bring the humanity out if you will and I know that may be overstating it but…

Brett McKay: No I think you did a good job with that. You’re able to really… The transition from your training life which was just boring and mundane to I’m suddenly thrown in the jungles and we’ll talk about that. It was jarring and you did a good job capturing that. So Angels Against the Sun it follows the 11th Airborne Division in their campaign in the Philippines and then eventually into Japan during World War II. And I think when most Americans think of airborne troops they typically think Band of Brothers and the European Theater and I think when most people think about the Pacific Theater. They think like amphibious landings. So what role did paratroopers play in the Pacific during the World War II?

James Fenelon: Yeah I think it’s a great question and it’s a great point of comparison. And I think we’ll use that familiarity of band of brothers as a kind of way to explore the topic because I think when we first talk about the Pacific and lean in to answer that question I think the first thing to understand is just the vast differences in the Pacific theater versus Europe and of course the Pacific is characterized by immense stretches of ocean between islands. The island-hopping campaign is of course this concept of starting basically in Australia and island-hopping our way closer to the home islands of Japan using those islands to build up logistical bases and airfields to then fuel and feed the campaign onto the next island. So that means a couple of things. First the Pacific Theater was dealing with this concept of scarcity. Resources are finite just like they are in any circumstance we never have enough of what we want and so you’re dealing with… How do you navigate that? And in the Pacific that meant of course scarcity in that supplies took a long time to get from point A to point B because they were always invariably traveling by ship sometimes those ships started as far away as San Francisco and so aircraft were limited and so that had an impact on the use of paratroopers and parachute operations in the Pacific theater.

And then you also had this idea that Europe had the priority at the time when the 11th arrived in the Pacific Theater it was still very much a Germany first strategy. And so that also had an impact on the scarcity of men and material. And so it’s interesting when we look at the European conflict and we compare airborne operations. Certainly the band of brothers… They jumped into Normandy and then later Holland and in these massive strategic use of airborne forces almost to lay either security on the flanks or seize bridges in advance as the armies advanced into Holland whereas in the Pacific what you see is a much more tactical use of parachute operations. And so I’m sure we’ll get into some of these more explicitly but you go from these massive division-sized jumps in Europe to in some cases down to individual guys jumping out of observation planes into the jungles in the Philippines and it’s really a great contrast to kind of understand the full range of capabilities of our airborne forces in World War II.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you wouldn’t have those scenes that you’d think Band of Brothers were just like hundreds or maybe thousands of parachutes falling down it be maybe just a few dozen in the Pacific?

James Fenelon: Yeah there were some regimental-sized drops in Lausanne in the Philippines and those were certainly larger but even then when one regiment jump you see the aircraft having to go back to the airfield multiple times to pick up the rest of the troops and bring them in so when you see a regimental jump in the Philippines and a regiment’s about 2000 guys the aircraft are going back to make multiple trips to pick them up and drop them so it’s taking three round trips essentially to drop 2000 guys where in Europe you see to your point it’s a one lift operation, thousands of chutes in the sky at the same time so it’s again that concept of scarcity and having to make do if you will.

Brett McKay: So when was the 11th Airborne Division created?

James Fenelon: Yeah so the 11th was created in February of 1943 at Camp Mackall, North Carolina. They were commanded by a guy named General Swing and by Airborne Division again using the kind of band of brothers example an Airborne Division was intended to be delivered into combat via glider and parachute so you had two types of units in an Airborne Division you had the glider troops which were guys that were assigned to these units so imagine if you will for a minute. You’re a kid coming out of the Great Depression you’ve never been in an airplane. You’re assigned to the element Airborne Division and a glider unit so your first ride in an aircraft is an engine-less glider you don’t get any additional hazardous duty pay like the parachute troops and you don’t get a parachute like Aircrew do right? So if you think of Aircrew and Bombers or fighters they all had the safety net if you will of a parachute whereas glider troops didn’t have any of that. And then the other units of course were the parachute units. And in the case of the 11th Airborne that was the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment. These guys were all volunteers one of the more notable volunteers in that unit was Rod Serling the creator of The Twilight Zone television series of course that was after the war.

And these guys like Rod Serling were attracted to volunteer to the parachute troops because of the tough nature of their training in many cases Rod Serling wrote home to his parents after he volunteered that he thought going through the tough training would make him a better soldier and make him a better man and so he was looking forward to that challenge other guys were motivated because they liked the uniform and then of course they also all got paid $50 more a month for hazardous duty pay and that of course attracted a wide share of recruits as well.

Brett McKay: I came across all socio-economic there’s people from the country, rural, city, rich, poor, just it attracted a certain type of person. Of course there’s guys who wanted the money but a lot of guys they just liked the prestige and the toughness of it.

James Fenelon: That’s right I think it’s a great observation because of that wide appeal of that elite status if you will it did attract every walk of life you had some guys that were rodeo clowns all the way up to Harvard graduates who wanted to test themselves and join the ranks of these elite soldiers.

Brett McKay: So when it was initially formed in 1943 did they know they’re gonna be going to the Pacific or was it just like okay we’re gonna use you somewhere we’re just gonna get you prepared for wherever you’re gonna go.

James Fenelon: Yeah so the short answer to that question is no. They did not know that they were going to the Pacific. Of course one of the favorite topics of conversation when guys were sitting around with time on their hands was where are we gonna be deployed and there was raging rumors and debates on which direction they were gonna go but it wasn’t really until they were leaving Louisiana they did a series of training exercises at Camp Polk and it was when the train started veering left meaning they were going west towards the west coast that that was when it dawned on them that they were in fact headed to the Pacific Theater.

Brett McKay: So this was led by a guy named General Joseph Swing. Tell us about this guy. What was his military career like before he was put in charge of the 11th Airborne and what was his personality like?

James Fenelon: Yeah Swing was an interesting character. I really enjoyed learning a lot more about his military career and I would say that where we start to see his leadership style kind of emerge was not long after he graduated from West Point he graduated… He earned his commission rather as an artillery officer in 1915 not long after that he was assigned as a young lieutenant into the Punitive Expedition or Black Jack Pershing’s expedition into Mexico. And this was really the Army’s first experiment with mechanization. So this is right before World War I. The Army at that point was… You’re either moving on your feet or on the back of a horse and the expedition into Mexico was really the first time the army started integrating in things like vehicles cargo trucks to move troops they had some very rudimentary armored cars they were using motorcycles to deliver messages and for scouting they had a handful of biplanes that they were using and so what you see is this Swing is really exposed to this concept of modernization early in his career and probably the biggest impact that had on him was that there was no doctrine at this time so these guys are getting all this new equipment nobody really knows how to incorporate it into their scheme of maneuver or how they’re gonna actually conduct their campaign.

And what came along with that of course was a series of cautionary tales these things broke down or they didn’t arrange to have enough fuel for them in the field and so they were waiting on guys to bring gasoline forward and so all of these things were kind of witnessed by Swing and in my opinion and I think I’ve tried to make the point in the book you start to see later in World War II where he becomes very comfortable with for lack of a better word making things up as he goes along and I think that that flexibility of mindset was developed in this early part of his career and then from there of course he went on to serve in World War I with the First Infantry Division and then worked his way up the ranks until he became the commander of the 11th Airborne Division in early 1943.

Brett McKay: Another leader of the 11th Airborne that had a big impact on the division as a whole was this guy named Colonel Orin Haugen who was this guy and what was he like as a leader?

James Fenelon: Yeah Haugen was another interesting character he’s kind of what I call an OG parachute guy so he… As a captain in 1940 he was a company commander in the Army’s first organized unit of paratroopers the 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion. And he kind of came at things parachute operations and airborne from a very different perspective than Swing did so Swing… You can almost use the term kind of big army he viewed parachuting as simply a means to get to work a commute a unique commute to get to the battlefield whereas Haugen had come up through the ranks and like I said as a captain in this initial parachute unit where it was drilled into these guys that they were elite… At that point the parachute battalions were very similar to the early days of the range of battalion so they were elite infantry rating units that were intended to be used to jump behind the lines and blow up bridges and railroad lines and seize airfields and things like that.

So Haugen really leaned into this concept of self-reliance and again if we use the band of brothers as a comparison point their motto of, We stand alone together well Haugen in the 511th trained right there at Camp Toccoa and run Currahee just like the guys from Band of Brothers did and so Haugen really embraced this concept of self reliance and relying on the guy next to you and not being the weak link so to speak and he really led by example he led all of the runs of the unit up Mount Currahee. He would yell at them You are the best you are the best and encourage them to run faster but he was a very strict task master and so that his men’s nickname for him was hard rock and that was kind of in reference to his hard core way that he viewed their training he was extremely competitive he wanted to win and be the first at everything so he formed a regimental boxing team a regimental football team and was constantly relieving coaches and players to make sure that he got the best guys in there to win at whatever they were doing.

And he also… I think one of the important things about Haugen was that he recognized early on that the time for his leadership his officers to establish trust with his men was there during the training and that was the time to establish trust with the enlisted men if you waited till you got into combat to establish that trust it was too late and so he was really a hard taskmaster on his junior officers to get them to again lead by example put their men first and establish that trust.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned some of the training they did before they got shipped out I always love reading about the training of the paratroopers in World War II tell us more about their training. What was it like?

James Fenelon: Yeah So Jump School at Fort Benning at the time in World War II was four weeks long and so that was kind of the individual training or the individual skills to jump out of an airplane was done at Fort Benning four weeks long there was some ground training where they did… Going through mock aircraft doors and learning how to perform in the aircraft and then there was a tower week where they were learning how to do parachute landing falls.

And one of the things again that’s important to remember at this time is that the vast majority of these guys had never been in an airplane and so for most of the recruits at this point the first time they’re in an airplane is the same day that they’re going to jump out of it. And so the Army spent three weeks and in some cases four weeks getting these guys ready for that event through a series of the crawl walk run kind of strategy if you will of building them up over a period of weeks to then the final week being jump Week where they spend that week making five jumps culminating and then their graduation from that event where they earn their jump wings the Jump School today is very similar. The big difference is in World War II you spend a week learning how to pack your own parachute which is not something that they do anymore they now have a dedicated group of professionals fortunately whose job is to pack those parachutes because as you can imagine packing a parachute is a perishable skill and it’s something that you wanna be a expert in so they leave that to experts to do that and then units would get together and then start going through a series of unit exercises to where then they started to learn how to perform as squads and platoons and maneuver in those larger elements as a team.

Brett McKay: And so as you said, they didn’t learn, they are going to the Pacific till they were on the train and they started going west. When they got to San Francisco, or where they shipped… Did they get shipped out of San Francisco? I think it was San Francisco.

James Fenelon: Yes, that’s right.

Brett McKay: Shipped out of San Francisco. Where did they go initially to the Pacific?

James Fenelon: So their first destination was to New Guinea, just north of Australia. At that point, New Guinea had largely been secured. There were still some Japanese holdouts on the far side of the island, but the 11th Airborne did not see combat on New Guinea. They went into a training regimen there and took advantage of the fact that they were now in an environment in the terrain, very similar to what they would be fighting as they moved into the Pacific, and so again, you start to see here Swing and Haugen’s personalities really start to influence how the division would fight. They started going through a series of fairly elaborate live fire exercises, incorporating live ammunition, mortar fire, artillery fire, and we know that it was realistic training because, unfortunately, several guys were killed by friendly fire in those exercises. So it was very demanding. They also had the benefit of being trained by several Australian soldiers who had already been fighting the Japanese, so they incorporated those lessons learned, and it was really a time of development for the division as they started figuring out how to operate in this jungle environment.

Brett McKay: What year was this? Is this 1943 still, 1944?

James Fenelon: This is middle of 1944. So they had just arrived in May of 1944.

Brett McKay: And what was the state of the war in Pacific at this time?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so at this point, the allies were pushing their way across the Pacific, working their way, again, as in line with that island hopping campaign. New Guinea had largely been secured, so this was when MacArthur was in the process of fulfilling his famous I shall return promise that he made to the Philippine people, and the Americans invaded the Philippines in October of 1944. The 11th initially sat out the invasion, and it wasn’t until November of 1944, that the 11th Airborne landed on the island of Leyte, initially in an administrative capacity, so they were just kind of, if you can imagine following along that island-hopping campaign and landing on a secure beach after the invasion had already started, But pretty quickly into that campaign, MacArthur and his ground commander, a guy named Walter Kruger, had started realizing that they were suffering higher than expected casualties, and so the 11th was kind of then pushed up into the line to fill in as replacements and start moving into combat.

Brett McKay: So what was the objective on Leyte? Was it just to take back the island? Was that what it was?

James Fenelon: Leyte offered what they thought at the time was going to be access to a number of land-based air strips, which would put the allies in a great position to then use those airstrips to extend their air power to the other islands in the Philippines, specifically the main island of Luzon, as well as use them as bases to cut off Japanese sea lanes where they were bringing in the raw materials to still feed their war machine, if you will. Now, there was some assumptions that went into that initially, which failed to take into account the horrific torrential rains on Leyte. So these airfields that MacArthur and his staff had planned use turned out to be muddy quagmires at the time that they landed in October, so things didn’t quite work out that way initially. And the 11th Airborne was brought in and then pushed up into the central mountain range to cut off Japanese reinforcements that were working their way from the west side of the island over these mountains to try to come down into the valley where those airfields were located.

Brett McKay: So these guys were trained as paratroopers and gliders. Did they do any para trooping and gliding at Leyte?

James Fenelon: So yes, kind of. No gliding, but this is where we start to see Swing’s, flexibility, and improvisation is the way that I like to think of it. So as these guys started moving up into the mountains… This is basically like light infantry tactics at its finest. There’s no roads going up into the mountains, so there’s no jeeps can get up there, no trucks can get up there. All the supplies that are going up into the mountains are man-packed, and so if you think about it, these guys are going up like these little trails. You got a division going up into the mountains, and you’ve gotta keep them supplied with both food and ammunition as they’re engaging the Japanese. And so at some point, they get up to this plateau, and this is where Swing starts to utilize the unique airborne capability of his division.

Of course, aircraft being in short supply, as I mentioned earlier, what he did have access to was a handful of these small single-engine observation aircraft. One guy described them as a lawnmower with wings, so think as the smallest airplane you can imagine. They literally bring it ashore and then bolt the wings onto it, and so Swing tapped a platoon of his airborne engineer, so 30-some-odd guys of his combat engineering unit, and one by one, they climbed into the back of one of these aircraft and then jumped into the jungle with their shovels and demolition charges to expand and create a drop zone in the middle of the jungle. So these guys were literally climbing in, wrapping the static line of their parachute around the spars of the chair in the back seat of this airplane and parachuting in.

So those guys, 30 of them soon landed one at a time, they started chopping down trees, using demolitions, and expanding the footprint of that drop zone, so that Swing could then start dropping in supplies, additional men and material into that forward base, and using that as a way to then keep his men supplied. Surgeons jumped in there as well, parachuted in, which allowed the rest of the unit to then keep pushing forward up into the mountains.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. And what was the fighting like at Leyte?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so I think when we think about the fighting on Leyte, I always like to begin with just the elements themselves, and so I mentioned it had been raining for a number of weeks on Leyte. So the first enemy that the troopers actually engaged was just the mud. They’re hacking up into these mountains, the mud in some cases is shin-deep, everything you own is wet, you’ve got disease, you’ve got the heat and humidity. So they hiked their way up and then that’s when as they’re in the mountains, that’s when they start to engage with Japanese patrols and as there up in these mountains, it’s really… The whole advantage in the way that the American army had geared itself around technology advantages and firepower advantage were really negated by the mountains because you couldn’t get any of that stuff up into the mountains.

You couldn’t get artillery pieces up into the mountains. You couldn’t get a lot of these larger radios. The mountains were covered in clouds, so air support was difficult. The maps were horrible, so nobody actually ever really knew where they were. These maps that they had were often hand-drawn and had villages mislabeled and entire ridge lines or mountain peaks were missing from them. That was kind of the conditions under which these guys moved up into the mountains, and then of course, on top of that, they had the enemy, the Japanese, which started almost kind of imagine this head-to-head collision up in the mountains as you had squads of the American paratroopers going forward, and in these very close combat conditions bumping into squads of Japanese who were heading in opposite direction.

Brett McKay: And the Japanese, they were just formidable opponents, and at this point, for the Japanese, they kind of understood… The generals and the leaders there, they understood that their backs were against the wall. So it was kind of turning into a fight to the death for these guys.

James Fenelon: Yeah, I think a fight to the death is a great way to describe it. At that point in the war, the Japanese leadership was really… Their strategy was to win just one massive campaign, right? The strategic concept kind of was like, “Well, if we can bring the Americans to their knees in just one battle, hit them with heavy, heavy casualties, maybe we can approach a treaty on equal terms” And of course, the Americans had already made their unconditional surrender kind of demand, but that was the idea of the Japanese, and so they were throwing in troops seeking a decisive victory, if you will. And one of the things…

One of the traits of the Japanese soldier was this concept of Yamato de Machi, and I hope I’m pronouncing that right, but it’s this idea of an unwavering belief in the righteousness of their cause, and these guys were kind of steeped in that ethos, if you will, that kind of involved equal parts Bushido Shinto religion, and of course, honor played an important component of that, but it was this idea of, “Well, if we’re brave enough and if we fight hard enough, our spirit can overcome technological advantages that the enemy has.” And it was interesting because up in the mountains of Leyte when those two elements came together, and at this point in the war, of course, all of the Americans understood that the Japanese were not gonna surrender. They understood from the news that had leaked out about the Bataan Death March that they could expect to be treated very poorly as prisoners themselves, and so it really devolved into this battle of attrition because neither side was willing to give up. The Americans weren’t gonna give up, they’re not gonna put themselves in the position to where they’re gonna be taken prisoner.

Japanese units were fighting to sometimes 96-97% of casualties, and so you really get this head-to-head, no-holds-barred combat up in the mountains of Leyte, and honestly, all the Pacific campaigns were very similar to that.

Brett McKay: You also talk about these reports from American soldiers that the Japanese at some points, they would just attack with a samurai sword and it was terrifying. Usually, they got gunned down, but it was terrifying to see some guy coming at you with just a sword.

James Fenelon: Absolutely, yeah, that’s one of those things that’s just really… It’s kind of hard to comprehend the terror of that when you’ve got guys, human wave attacks coming at you with swords over their heads. The Japanese bayonets were extremely long, so that’s intimidating, as well. There was one veteran I interviewed remembered, he shot a guy that was running towards them in a bonsai attack and all he was armed with was a fountain pen. He had a fountain pen raised up over his shoulder like a dagger. That’s how fanatical some of these attacks were.

Brett McKay: Alright, so they took Leyte. It took a month, and then you talk about after they finally to control the island, they had to do this mopping up, like, “Oh, let’s go mop up,” and basically that was to go find Japanese forces that were still there in hiding. But you talk about the mopping up was actually more dangerous than the actual assault. What made mopping up “More difficult or dangerous”?

James Fenelon: Yeah, I’m glad you put the mopping up in quotes, ’cause it’s one of those terms that is easy to overlook. I think what you had there was even a bigger level of desperation. When you’re dealing with these Japanese units that have been, in many cases, overrun or bypassed, so imagine a group of Japanese on a hill top where the Japanese have kind of, the Sun Tzu kind of way of just going around that hill top, isolated it, we’ll come back for it later type of thing. When you come back for it later, you’ve now got Japanese who are cut off, they’re viewing their mission now is to take as many Americans with them as possible, and so there’s just no real easy way to go about doing that. Again, at one point, Swing did utilize the unique capabilities of his division and dropped in four small artillery pieces, so they did have some heavier firepower at that time up in the mountains to kind of help them in these situations where they’re trying to winkle out these holdouts, but they’re in caves, they’re not gonna come out. You have to bring the mountain down around them, basically. I mean, Swing was very good about using flanking attacks, and he despised frontal assaults that some other army commanders were very comfortable with, but it was just very nasty, dirty work to go up there and try to get into these fortified positions and get these guys out of there.

Brett McKay: So what was the result of Leyte? So apart from, we took control the island, what were casualties like? And how did this… I mean, this is the 11th’s first… I mean, it was like baptism by fire. How did this affect them for the rest of the war.

James Fenelon: Yeah, so I think the Hard Rock Haugen’s unit came out of Leyte. It took them a month of tracking from one side to get to the other side of the island coming down out of the mountains on Christmas day, essentially, is when they started to emerge, on the far side of the island. They had a number of casualties, some of which they had left buried up in the mountains, so there was efforts to go get those guys. They had, I wanna say, right around 500 casualties from that fighting. They had just as many, if not more, guys that were suffering from disease up in those conditions, but Haugen did the math when they came out of the mountains, and he and his men were boasting of a 45 to one kill ratio of their time up in the mountain. And so again, this is where you start to see the real aggressive nature of Haugen and Swing both really always wanting to maintain contact with the enemy, always wanting to move forward, and so they kind of boasted of this kill ratio, if you will, as a way to set expectations for the unit, for the division, as to how they were gonna continue to lean into the fight.

Brett McKay: Did that give them a reputation amongst the Allies and the Japanese?

James Fenelon: Absolutely. One of the interesting things about the 11th Airborne Division is that I use the term punch above their weight. So both the 101st and the other Airborne divisions that were fielded during World War II were only 8500 men in the division, and so this made them, in most cases, a little bit more than half the size of a regular infantry division. So regular Infantry Division was anywhere between 14 and 15000 guys, and again, the 11th Airborne was 8500. So to kind of develop this reputation of doing so much damage with about half of what they had to a regular division, and the course that also included having far less artillery than a regular infantry division did, it really bolstered their reputation and you see them, particularly with General Eichelberger, one of MacArthur’s field commanders, really leaned on the 11th Airborne for their aggressive spirit.

Brett McKay: So what happened to the 11th after Leyte?

James Fenelon: So after Leyte, MacArthur had moved on and moved his invasion next to Luzon, which was the main island in the Philippines. Of course, the main prize of that campaign was to be Manilla, which was the capital city. Before the war, it was known as the Pearl of the Orient, and I think it’s important to kinda get a good idea of what that city was like. It had just under a million people living in it, so it was a massive urban area. Many of the boulevards along the bay there, the reason it was called Pearl of the Orient was these beautiful wide boulevards where people could stroll to watch the sunset. Many of the government buildings rivaled anything that you would see in Washington DC with these massive white marble columns. MacArthur had hoped that the Japanese were going to declare Manila an open city, meaning that they would withdraw their forces out of the city to avoid what would become massive bloodshed in an urban battle.

The Germans did that in Paris. They declared Paris an open city and left so that it wouldn’t turn into the blood bath that it could have. That didn’t happen unfortunately, in Manilla. And so as MacArthur campaign was slowing down, he had landed several divisions to the north, was pushing down towards Manilla, he decided to launch several other landings, if you will, south of Manila as a way to kind of divide Japanese forces. The 11th Airborne Division was assigned to one of these landings. General Swing really advocated for air dropping the division in total. So again, using gliders and aircraft to land them south of Manilla. Unfortunately, again, we see a lack of aircraft, so there just wasn’t enough aircraft at that point to be able to lift his division, and so they ended up going in kind of what he described as half a loaf, meaning that half a loaf went in amphibious-ly, meaning he landed his glider units along the shore, and then further inland, he air dropped Haugen and his men south of Manilla to where the two units then linked up on the ground, his glider units and the parachute units linked up and then started pushing their way north up into the city limits of Manilla.

Brett McKay: So how did the fighting differ in the city compared to the jungle? What were the unique challenges?

James Fenelon: The main thing was just the urban nature of it. So as the 11th was moving up, the Japanese had anticipated the Americans returning to the Philippines and that they would be attacking Manilla, so they had built a belt of defenses along the southern edge of the city. Their initial thought was that MacArthur was gonna attack from the south. He didn’t. He attacked from the north, but the 11th did attack from the south, so they ran into this belt line of defenses, which the Japanese had labeled the Genko line. Think about this as a series of pillboxes, machine gun nests, these are built out of brick, these are built out of bamboo tree trunks, they have taken aerial bombs and buried them in the ground as mines across the road.

They’ve overturned bulldozers and city buses across the roads to create blocking positions, and so it really just becomes this brick-by-brick concrete battle as the 11th start pushing their way up into the city. They’re swarming through the city, they’re finding Japanese holdouts in attics and in basements, behind them in areas they thought they’ve already cleared, they start to… The 11th and Swing start to really work with Filipino gorillas, who are really important in this battle for the 11th because of course, they know the terrain, they know the layout of the city, they know a lot about the Japanese defenses because, of course, they watch them being built, and so Swing really starts to leverage several battalions worth of Filipino gorillas in his scheme of battle.

Brett McKay: There were some pretty epic exploits by the individual members of the 11th airborne. I think at this point, there’s a guy named Manny Perez who… Basically, he won the Medal of honor for this, what he did. Can you talk about what he did at this point in the war?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so Perez was a member of Haugen’s parachute infantry regiment. He was 21 years old at the time of this attack. So they were working their way up through this Genko Line at this point. They had pushed their way north and were now kind of maneuvering east, if you will, trying to hook around some of these defenses. His unit had been engaged all morning in attacking several pillboxes. The counts vary, but the general consensus is they had taken out his squad and platoon had worked their way through 11 Japanese pillboxes. And the 12th one really had the squad pinned down. It was a dual twin-mounted machine gun that had a pretty good field of fire over some open terrain. The squad had gone to ground in front of this.

And as the story goes from lieutenant who was up front trying to figure out how they were going to attack this position, he looked over and all of a sudden, Perez and his nickname, his buddies called him Manny, was sprinting forward towards the gun position and they yelled for him to get down, he kept going. He threw himself down on the side of the gun position within hand grenade range. He threw a couple of hand grenades into the machine gun position. Right as they exploded, he’s jumping up and following them in, find several Japanese guys that have been wounded, he quickly shoots them.

Japanese soldier approaches him and attacks him with his bayonet on the end of his rifle. Perez ends up taking the rifle away from him, killing the guy with his own rifle, and then at one point beating three Japanese guys to death with that rifle, ends up breaking that rifle, grabbing another one. It’s really one of those stories that if you put it in a movie, it would be hard to believe, but at the end of it, Perez had taken the machine gun nest and his Medal of Honor citation cites that he had killed single-handedly, 23 of the enemy in that action. He was, to your point, awarded the Medal of Honor. That was interesting because several of his comrades that witnessed the event actually disputed the citation, wanting to amend it because by their count, during the entirety of that morning, Perez had actually taken out anywhere from 70 to 75 Japanese during the assault on all those other previous pillboxes. So he was quite a one-man machine. Sadly, even though he survived that event that he was awarded the Medal of Honor for it, it was awarded posthumously because he was killed later on in the campaign.

Brett McKay: So the 11th… They take Manila, the 11th with other divisions as well. What happened to the 11th after that?

James Fenelon: So one of the more interesting exploits of the 11th’s campaign while they were on Luzon was their liberation of the Los Banos prison camp. So when the Japanese had invaded the Philippines, they had taken prisoner several thousand civilians. So think of Americans, French, British, these were engineers who worked on the island, entrepreneurs who own businesses, clergy, on missions, things like that. And the Japanese had put them in a number of prison camps, some of which were in Manila proper. Los Banos was a couple of miles, maybe 20 miles outside of the city limits. It was a camp that held a little over 2,000 of these civilian prisoners. And MacArthur and his staff were worried that as the Japanese were being pushed across the island that rather than evacuate these prisoners or just simply release them, that they would execute the prisoners.

And so MacArthur put Swing in charge of figuring out how to rescue these guys. And this again is where you see Swing’s kind of flexible approach to his war fighting. The plan that his unit came up with was a kind of a multi-pronged attack that started with a ground assault by his reconnaissance scouts. They worked in conjunction with the Filipino guerrillas to sneak up to the outskirts of the camp. They timed their assault to be launched simultaneously as the Japanese were conducting their morning calisthenics. So the only armed Japanese were the guys that were around the perimeter of the camp. Everybody else was in there doing their morning exercises. Right as that happened, a company of guys parachuted in on the far side of the camp. So about 120 men parachuted in and they joined in the assault. While that was happening, the rest of that battalion came across the lake in amphibious tracked vehicles that then made their way into the camp, knocked down the gates of the camp with those tracked vehicles, and they loaded all of the prisoners onto those tracked vehicles to evacuate them.

It was a raid, meaning that they were just going in to rescue these guys and then get out. And so it was stunningly successful. None of the prisoners were killed in the crossfire. A couple of them were wounded, but nothing serious. Unfortunately, two of the guerrillas were killed in the firefight, but all of the American rescuers were evacuated unharmed as well.

Brett McKay: So this is about February 1945 when that prison liberation happened. And then the next couple of months, the 11th Airborne along with the other divisions there, they eventually secured the Philippines. Was it pretty easy after that point, if they got Manila, or was it hard fighting even then?

James Fenelon: It was pretty much hard fighting all the way across the island. Again, I think one of the things that’s interesting to note, I think, to just provide some additional context, the last Japanese soldier to surrender in the Philippines took place in 1974, and so that gives you kind of an idea as to the tenacity of these guys and their willingness to stay in the fight. And so, again, we use that term in quotes, “mopping up”. There was a lot of mopping up in Luzon. Swing kept pushing his division east across the island as an attempt to cut the island in half, if you will, as other units were both to the north and the south of them as they made that cut across. And it was similar combat, pushing through, sweeping past some of these more heavily defended areas, cutting them off so that they couldn’t get resupplied with food or reinforcements, and then coming back and dealing with them later.

At one point, Swing had a garrison of something like 300-some-odd Japanese kind of cornered on this mountain fortress that they had built, and they sent a guy up to try to get the Japanese to surrender, the Japanese shot at the guy who was bringing up the surrender terms. And so Swing was content just to sit back. And I think something like, they launched a thousand artillery shells a day at this place until they finally just reduced it to rubble. And that again was just kind of that battle of attrition that took place all across the Philippines.

Brett McKay: They finally took it towards the middle of 1945, and at this point, the military was getting ready for just an all-out invasion of Japan. What was the 11th Division’s role gonna be in that land invasion of Japan?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so everybody… All the troopers in the 11th were convinced that they were going to be dropped into the Japanese main island as part of MacArthur’s invasion. If you go look at the actual plans that were drawn up, the 11th Airborne was gonna be used in that invasion, but as far as I can find, they weren’t actually going to air drop them in. Again, maybe that was due to a lack of aircraft. The plans that I’ve seen indicate that they were gonna be landed amphibiously. But the guys at the time didn’t know that. The guys at the time all assumed that they would finally be used in one of these massive air drops that we’ve already compared Europe to. But of course, that didn’t happen. The United States dropped two atomic bombs, which then brought about the surrender, negotiations and ultimately, the end of the war.

Brett McKay: Did they occupy Japan? Did they play any role in that?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so this is where you finally start to see the small size of the 11th Airborne Division play into their favor. So they were the first troops to be air landed in Japan. They had flown from airfields in Manila initially to Okinawa, where they stayed for several weeks. And it’s kind of a misconception that the war ended immediately after the atomic bombs were dropped. There were several weeks there where there was internal debate going on in Japan about how to respond to the bombs, how to approach the surrender terms. Those were ironed out. And then several…

After the division had sat on Okinawa for several weeks, they then flew from Okinawa to a small airfield outside of Tokyo. They secured that. All of the guys from the 11th flew in fully armed, expecting a trap. One of the troopers commented that while the Japanese surrendered as hard as they fought. And so there weren’t any incidents once they landed fortunately. There was compliance with the surrender terms. And a couple of days after they got there, MacArthur landed at that airfield for the eventual signing of the surrender documents on the Missouri.

Brett McKay: When did these guys go home? Did they go home in 1945?

James Fenelon: Some of them did. It’s an interesting kind of return, if you will. So similar to what we saw in Europe, there was the point system of when these… You earn points for how long you’ve been in the service, if you were wounded, things like that. The 11th itself stayed in Japan for a number of years as an occupation force. So their initial mission, once they landed in Japan and secured that airfield was disarming the populace. So the Japanese had armed millions of civilians for this big fight that was anticipated to occur on the home islands. And so occupation troops were responsible for patrolling, conducting inspections and overseeing weapons turn in. And so the 11th kinda came home in drips and drabs and one’s and two’s as these guys would get on ships and make their way back to the States.

Brett McKay: What happened to some of these guys when they came home? Did they… Did a lot of these guys have a hard time processing what they went through?

James Fenelon: Yeah, of course, we know a lot more now about post-traumatic stress than we did back then. It was largely undiagnosed. Interestingly enough, I think one of the most vocal guys on that topic was Rod Serling who… He certainly didn’t call it post-traumatic stress, but he certainly knew what was going on. And he talked about himself and his friends who did come back and there was those that had been physically wounded, and then of course, those who had suffered mentally from their experience. And he talked pretty freely about that and some of the challenges he had and that’s really where he turned to writing. He found that as an outlet. Of course, now we know that writing and talking about it is a great way to kind of excise those demons, if you will, but that was kind of his way of going about it. And of course, I think if we look at the Twilight Zone, you can certainly see some of the themes in those episodes that he wrote of trying to kind of explore humanity and the perception of what the human experience entails.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you can see that definitely in the episodes, the themes like war is bad, that was a theme you see in Twilight Zone. Also, the Twilight Zone, there’s like an empathy for people dealing with mental illness that I don’t think you saw in other shows, but you saw that on the Twilight Zone.

James Fenelon: Yeah, absolutely. One of the most horrific events of the war took place right in front of Rod Serling ‘s eyes. When they were up in that forward base that I was talking about, they were dropping supplies into them and sometimes those supplies were just literally thrown out the side of the airplane. And one point in that campaign, they had gone five days without food because the clouds had socked in the mountain where they couldn’t get aircraft up there. So the clouds finally broke, the planes are flying over to push out these crates. One of Rod Serling ‘s best friends jumps up and is impromptu singing a song about food, getting a laugh out of everybody, when all of a sudden one of these crates falling out of the sky crushes his skull and kills him right in front of everybody who’s sitting there watching him in this moment of glee that he’s getting ready to get some food.

And again, I think… So you can imagine yourself sitting there as a 19, 20-year-old, and all of a sudden this moment your best friend’s head has caved in. And I think Rod spent a lot of his life trying to process those kinds of things through the exploration of his writing in his show.

Brett McKay: What lessons about life and being a man do you hope readers take away after reading about the 11th Airborne Division?

James Fenelon: It’s a great question. I think there’s so many interesting lessons to learn from both Swing and Haugen and the way that the unit comported themselves during the war. But I would say one of them was this concept of flexibility or imagination. It’s the idea of… When we see that in Swing’s comfortable take on how to not stick to doctrine or not stick to a plan when it wasn’t working, I think that’s something we could all benefit from, right? We gotta be comfortable and objective enough with ourselves and our approach to understand when we might have to pivot and attack something from a different direction to make it work. I think also the idea of initiative in the 11th Airborne, that meant always taking the initiative, always pushing forward, always keeping the enemy off-balance. Whereas I think in our daily life, always looking for opportunities to stay on the initiative, there’s always something that we can do to help ourselves, to help others, and that’s certainly within the spirit of that, always leaning into a scenario or a task. And then finally, I would say endurance is another big lesson that I certainly understood from learning more about these guys. And by endurance, I mean both physically and mentally.

I think one of the things that got them through some of that horrible jungle fighting was both their physical and their mental endurance, right? So staying in shape, staying in the game. And certainly, your podcast gives us lots of tools as far as mental and physical endurance.

Brett McKay: Well, James, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so the book is available at all the usual suspects. You can order it online on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If you wanna learn more about me and my work, you can go to jamesfenelon.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well James Fenelon thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

James Fenelon: Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was James Fenelon. He’s the author of the book, Angels Against the Sun. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jamesfenelon.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/pacificparatroopers where you can find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so at Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up and use the code Manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #898: The Heroic Exploits of WWII’s Pacific Paratroopers appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

The charge to be well-mannered, to treat others with civility, kindness, and respect, is perennial. But the rules for how to carry those manners into action, the rules of good etiquette, change over time.

Given all the cultural and technological changes modern society has experienced, it’s not always easy to know the best practices for a contemporary gentleman. Here to offer some guidance on that front is Thomas Farley, also known as Mr. Manners. Today on the show, Thomas offers some answers to the frequently asked questions around modern etiquette, including when to send a handwritten thank you note, whether “no problem” is an appropriate response to “thank you,” if it’s okay to ghost someone, how to deal with our ever-proliferating and out-of-control tipping culture, whether it’s okay to exclude kids from your wedding, if you should still open a door for a woman, and more.

Related Resources From AoM’s Extensive Manners and Etiquette Archives

• How Manners Made the World
• The Importance of Good Manners
• How to Acquire Good Manners
• The Art of Thank You Note Writing
• The Unclassified Laws of Etiquette
• How to Accept a Compliment With Class
• The Ins and Outs of Opening a Door for a Woman
• A Primer on Wedding Etiquette
• How to Tame the Timing Anxiety Around Texting
• Podcast #718: How to Use Digital Body Language to Build Trust and Connection
• Podcast #162: Digital Manners & Etiquette For the Modern Man
• Podcast #422: Men & Manners — Tipping, Emojis, and Much More

Connect With Thomas Farley

• Thomas’ website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Podcast Sponsors

Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. The charge to be well-mannered. To treat others with civility, kindness, and respect is perennial. But the rules for how to carry those manners into action, the rules of good etiquette change over time. Given all the cultural and technological changes modern society has experienced, it’s not always easy to know the best practices for a contemporary gentleman. Here to offer some guidance on that front is Thomas Farley, also known as Mister Manners. Today on the show, Thomas offers some answers to the frequently asked questions around modern etiquette, including when to send a handwritten thank you note, whether “No problem” is an appropriate response to “Thank you,” if it’s okay to ghost someone, how to deal with our ever proliferating and out-of-control tipping culture, whether it’s okay to exclude kids from your wedding, if you should still open a door for a woman, and more. After show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/etiquetteFAQ.

Alright. Thomas Farley, welcome to the show.

Thomas Farley: Brett, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are Mister Manners, you’re an etiquette expert, a communication expert, you do trainings for businesses around the world and around the country, and I wanted to bring you on to talk about manners and etiquette in general, but also hopefully we can answer some common questions that people have about etiquette and manners, ’cause it seems like it’s constantly changing, especially with the introduction of new technologies that we have. So I think this will be a fun conversation. Let’s talk about manners in general. I think a lot of people listening might think, well, manners, it’s contrived, it’s artificial, it’s phony, it’s not authentic. Why do you think it’s still important to know and follow rules of etiquette?

Thomas Farley: Sure. And I think just for the listener’s benefit, it’s really important for us to distinguish between manners and etiquette because they actually, they’re used often interchangeably but they do mean different things. So etiquette, it derives from the French word for ticket. So think about etiquette as your ticket to getting more and better interactions. So when you’re speaking with someone, when you’re in an unfamiliar situation, by following the rules of etiquette, you’re guaranteed less embarrassment and more satisfaction for both parties to the interaction. That’s etiquette. And etiquette changes. It evolves over time. So people think, oh, etiquette, they immediately go to someone drinking out of a teacup where they’ve got their pinky raised in the air or they think about dining etiquette. But the fact is there’s etiquette that governs just about everything we do throughout the day. So etiquette in an elevator, etiquette for who steps to the right when you’re on a sidewalk, and so on.

And so without rules of etiquette similar to the rules of driving, we’d have more accidents, we’d have more upsetting situations. So etiquette really is valuable and important, and it evolves. Manners on the other hand is a general sense of kindness and consideration toward others, which of course can incorporate etiquette. But manners doesn’t come so much with rules, it’s more just a general sense of empathy and kindness and consideration towards others around us. So they’re both important, and I’m so glad to be able to spend this time with you because this idea that etiquette is some crusty old thing that only your grandma still cares about, couldn’t be farther from the truth. Without etiquette, we would have no civilized society. So it’s really important.

Brett McKay: I like that distinction between manners and etiquette. So manners is just thinking about making the other person feel good and comfortable.

Thomas Farley: Yes.

Brett McKay: And that might require some, the Greeks will call it phronesis or practical wisdom, kind of judgment. It might differ from person to person. Etiquette is more like the rules of the road. I really like that analogy of traffic rules. If there were no traffic laws, there’d just be chaos. The same goes for our social interaction. If there aren’t any guidelines to follow, then it would just… Everything would just be friction filled and not fun.

Thomas Farley: That’s exactly right. And sometimes the rules of etiquette can seem a little bit arbitrary, and in fact, in some cases they are very arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not important. So in the same way that in the US, we drive on the right-hand-side of the road, and in most situations that works quite well. Whereas in the UK, they drive on the left side of the road, and in most situations, that works perfectly well. The fact is that there is a set of guidelines that everyone is aware of so that we can all interact and focus on far more important things than what side of the road do you drive on or what side of the table setting your fork is. So etiquette really does play that vital role, although it can seem quite arbitrary.

Brett McKay: Well, I think everyone’s experienced social interactions where etiquette isn’t practiced. And you see these videos on the internet a lot now, just people just yelling at each other, and it’s like if they just would have practiced a little bit of etiquette, they could’ve avoided all that.

Thomas Farley: Yes, it’s true. And I think there are a lot of reasons for what we’re seeing, and literally seeing, and I think one of the primary drivers of it is the fact that we all have an independent television studio in our pockets wherever we go. So an interaction that might not have been caught on camera, that happens on an airplane between somebody who wants to take more than their share of an armrest can easily go viral in ways that it wouldn’t have before. So there’s definitely this perception that etiquette is worse than ever, that manners are worse than ever. But frankly you can read news accounts and textbooks from a hundred years ago, 600 years ago, where you hear people saying, “Gosh, people have no etiquette anymore, people have no manners anymore.” I think there were definitely throughout recorded history, there are times where if you think etiquette is bad today, boy, it was really horrific in the Middle Ages when for example, no one was able to afford their own napkin, and if you were at a banquet, there was a towel that hung on the wall, and that was the napkin for everyone to use for throughout the meal, so you didn’t even have an individual napkin.

Or where something as seemingly simple as a fork was seen as an affectation, and the only utensils that were used up until even pre-colonial times in the United States were a spoon and a knife, and anything else that required more dexterity than that, you were using your hands. So we might think etiquette is really at all-time lows right now, but the fact is we’re more refined than we sometimes give ourselves credit for, and history is certainly a guide to the fact that times have not always been so mannerly, despite what our memories or our history books might say otherwise.

Brett McKay: Alright. So let’s get into some specific etiquette and manners questions. Let’s talk about thank-you notes. When do you think a handwritten thank-you note is appropriate?

Thomas Farley: I would say a handwritten thank-you note is never inappropriate. So I get this question quite a lot. Is it okay if I send a thank-you note? And to that question, I say it is so much more than okay. In an age where everything is digital, we’re texting, we’re sending DMs on Snapchat or TikTok, the idea that someone actually took the time to remark on a courtesy or something that we did for them that was a kind gesture with a handwritten note that they licked the envelope and they put a stamp on it and put it in the mail, I think it’s a wonderful way of expressing thanks. So I would say there is… Frankly, there is no… The only occasion I would say a thank-you note is just kind of ridiculous is to send someone a thank-you note for sending you a thank-you note. But all other instances, the job interview, the dinner party that you were invited to, certainly the birthday gift or the holiday gift that someone gave you, I’m fond of saying, text messages don’t get pinned up to refrigerators or cork boards, thank-you notes do, they get saved. And if you wanna be that person who shows that you truly appreciated the gesture of the individual, no matter how small, a thank-you note is a wonderful way of doing so.

Brett McKay: So you still recommend a handwritten thank-you note after a job interview? ‘Cause I remember that was the advice that I got 15 years ago, but is that still applicable today, you think?

Thomas Farley: Yeah, I would highly recommend it if you care about getting the job. And here’s the reason. Think about it, you may be up against five, six, seven other candidates. If all things are equal, and one of those candidates actually sends a thank-you note, I guarantee you, it’s gonna help you to be set apart. The person is gonna see that you’re detail-oriented, especially if you send it out quickly. So for a job interview, what I recommend if you’re going for… And it’s harder, frankly, Brett in the age of virtual where you may not be interviewing with someone in person, that person may be a half-a-world away and they’re not even working in an office because they’re 100% remote. So there it gets trickier for a job interview thank-you note. But if you are going to a traditional job interview in a corporate office building, you have the address of the person who’s there five days a week or even three days a week, I would bring a thank-you note, blank one to the interview.

I would immediately after the interview, I’d write it out, have your stamp ready to go and pop it in the nearest mailbox. And fingers crossed, the USPS does what it’s supposed to do, that thank-you note is there with the person who interviewed you within a day or two of your interview. It shows you to be on top of your game, it shows you to be grateful, and it shows that you’re really passionate about getting the position. So I think it’s a great practice to have.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned the thank you to a thank you. You don’t wanna do that generally, but my wife and I, we do that ’cause sometimes readers and listeners, they send us nice notes thanking us for AoM’s content saying how it’s changed their life. And so we often… We just write back and just say, “Hey, we appreciate the appreciation.” We really do. It is nice to hear from our listeners that they’re getting something out of this stuff.

Thomas Farley: Yes, and I would draw the distinction. So I think if someone’s taken the trouble to send you, to write you a handwritten thank-you note, I would absolutely acknowledge the receipt of the thank-you note, but to write them a thank-you note as a thank you for them sending you a thank-you note, it starts this cascade effect of, okay, when do the thank-you notes end? It starts to get a little bit silly. But I would absolutely acknowledge it, and I think that’s a wonderful thing to do. Because if someone takes the time to write a thank-you note and they never hear from the recipient, “Oh my gosh, I just got your thank-you note. That was so thoughtful. Thank you,” then they may be discouraged from doing it the next time because they feel like their gesture didn’t really have any kind of an impact. So I would absolutely acknowledge it, but you don’t need to acknowledge it with a thank-you note.

Brett McKay: Okay, so it’s nice to acknowledge a thank-you note, but you don’t need to send a thank-you note, like an actual… Like a thank-you card in response to someone’s thank-you card. So you mentioned writing thank-you notes to the host at a party you attended. I know this was common a couple of decades ago. My parents still do this, my in-laws do this too, but you think yeah, that that’s still an appropriate gesture.

Thomas Farley: If you’re hoping to be invited back, I would highly recommend that. And not just a generic thank-you note that doesn’t really say anything of value, but truly something that remarks on perhaps a dish that you particularly enjoy, the conversation that you had with the host that you particularly enjoyed, something that doesn’t sound like your AI writing the thank-you note, but that it’s truly got that human touch. And I would say, so dinner party, absolutely. You think about the amount of time that goes into cleaning and curating the table and cooking, and from start to finish, anyone who’s ever hosted a dinner party knows the amount of work that goes into it and how exhausting it can be. If you can’t take… Five minutes really is all it should take to write a thoughtful thank-you note, I think that’s really unfortunate. And people say, I’m too busy, I don’t have time. Well, you know what, you had time to go to the dinner party, had time to enjoy the meal, you had time to enjoy the present someone gave you. Five minutes to write a thank-you note, no matter how busy we all are, I don’t ever buy that excuse.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about just saying thank you in face-to-face interactions. What’s an appropriate response when someone says thank you? ‘Cause this causes a lot of debate, ’cause a lot of people, they say, “No problem,” and a lot of people do not like that. What’s your take on that?

Thomas Farley: So Brett, this is fun because there are… From the time we’re small, we’re taught, “What’s the magic word? Say the magic word. You want a lollipop, you’ve gotta say ‘Please’. If someone give something to you, you’ve gotta say, ‘Thank-you.'” And somewhere along the way, some of those magic words, both generationally and through time have lost a little bit of their original true intent. So, thank you, I think is a perfect thing to say, and that really… That’s unassailable, saying thank you as gratitude for something, as long as you’re saying it genuinely and not in a sarcastic way. Or if you’re texting and it’s, “Thank you, period.” Well, now, you know what? Now you don’t sound so gracious anymore, now you sound like you’re being sarcastic. So taking the benefit of the doubt that someone’s genuinely saying thank you to someone for something that another person has done kind to them. Saying ‘No problem’ is almost like you’re swatting away the thanks, which I think is unfortunate. So some of the finest hotels in the world, they know to instruct their staff that ‘No problem’ as a response to thank you is simply not acceptable. And this is not something that’s unique to the English language. So in Spanish, it’s de nada, which means it’s nothing.

In French, it’s de rien, which similarly is it’s nothing. And that’s really… That’s to belittle the gratitude that’s coming from the person. So rather than simply saying, “No problem,” or if you’re Canadian, “No worries,” or if you’re a child of the 1950s, maybe you say, “No sweat,” these phrases really take a thank you and they push it down, they subjugate it, which I think is important. So rather than saying, “No problem,” I highly recommend something instead like, “Happy to do it,” or, “Any time,” or, “It’s my pleasure.” There is also, of course, the standard response of, “You’re welcome,” but that one has taken on a little bit of a generational taint, where pretty much anyone from Millennial on down through Gen Z tends to look at you’re welcome as a little bit smug, almost as if to say, “You’re welcome for the nice thing that I did and I’m glad that you appreciated it.” Perhaps owning the gratitude a little bit too much. Now, this is not something that older generations see in that phrase ‘You’re welcome’ but the way it’s parsed by younger generations, it can often have that taint. So I recommend as a great alternative, no matter how old you are, is simply, “It’s my pleasure.”

And for anyone who’s traveled through Costa Rica, as I have, what really struck me upon my first visit there was they do not say that de facto Spanish response of de nada. Everything… If you say gracias, they respond immediately with con gusto, with pleasure. And I think it’s such a nicer way of acknowledging someone’s gratitude.

Brett McKay: I think that’s an important point about how language evolves with generations. So I think you’re welcome, maybe for younger generations, you might not wanna use that with them. Maybe with an older person, yes. But I think, yeah, I tentily go to the Chick-fil-A route and just say, “My pleasure,” after someone says, “Thank you.” And then you see the same sort of dynamic with compliments. So you go up to somebody and you give them this compliment like, “Hey, you did a great job on that,” and they kind of swat it away by saying, “Oh, no worries,” or, “It was nothing.”

Thomas Farley: Yes.

Brett McKay: I think if you receive a compliment, be grateful for the compliment. Like someone’s putting themselves out there to say you did a great job, so recognize that.

Thomas Farley: Recognize it, own it. And I think the reason that phenomenon exists is people can tend to be a little bit shy about receiving and accepting a compliment. They don’t know what to say. “Oh, oh, I love your shirt. That’s a great shirt.” “Oh, this old thing?” You immediately… Your reaction is to just swat it away as if it’s not something that’s important and you don’t wanna be seen as egotistical. So I think a great fix for that is someone who really wants to be hyper-aware of how to be able to give a compliment without getting that particular reaction you just described is to immediately follow-up the compliment with a question. So instead of saying, “Hey, great haircut,” or, “Hey, great… I love your shirt,” where the person is maybe put in the position of having to diminish the compliment, “Oh no, this shirt’s nothing. It was $5.” Instead, emit following up with a question. So, “Hey, great shirt. Is that a color that you wear often?” or, “Hey, great haircut. Where do you go to get your haircuts by the way?” So you’ve instead of putting them to that awkward position of having to somehow think of a way to respond to your compliment, you’re immediately following up with a question which gives them something to talk about that doesn’t entail having to diminish the compliment.

Brett McKay: I was gonna say on the ‘No problem’ response to thank you, the other thing that I don’t like about that, it makes the person feel like, “Oh, what I asked you for was a problem, like I’m a problem for you.” So yeah, that’s another reason I don’t like the ‘No problem’. So let’s shift our focus to digital communication. Texting. A lot of our communication is done via text. What’s your take? Is there an appropriate timeframe for answering a text?

Thomas Farley: Sure. So this is gonna vary widely. First of all, do you have read receipts on, on your phone? So if the other individual can see that you’ve received and read the text, then waiting hours to respond is not acceptable. If you have an established kind of unspoken time for responding amongst whether it’s your significant other, whether it’s your best friend, whether it’s your boss, whether it’s people who work for you, if you are someone who as a practice, generally responds within five minutes, within an hour, suddenly taking hours or days to respond, it’s out of character and out of practice for you, the other person is gonna think, “Oh no, what happened? Did I offend the person? Did I say something wrong?” So I think there are certainly conversations that are not best had over text by the same token. If this is a quick question, somebody needs a quick answer, and you traditionally respond quickly, you should follow suit.

Now, that being said… And I love texting because it is absence of so much of the formality that an email might require. It is asynchronous communication, so it can happen when it’s convenient for me and the recipient can respond when it’s perhaps more convenient for them, unlike a phone call or unlike a face-to-face conversation. But there are definitely conversations that are not appropriate for a text message. If you really want a thorough, detailed answer that has multiple layers.

Let’s face it, texting is not your friend, but if you say, what time are we meeting again, what’s the address of where the restaurant is, these are perfect opportunities for us to be able to text, so I would say, all things being equal, you should be certainly responding to a text within the hour, if it’s not a very nuanced conversation, and if it is, I would simply respond back, Hey, let’s catch up about this by phone, or it’s a little bit too much for text. When can we talk? And I think that would be the better way, but to wait hours or forget it, days not acceptable.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we had a digital communications expert on the show, Erica Dowan, and her recommendation for text is if you get a text and you can’t get to it right away, like within an hour, she recommends doing what she calls a manual read receipt. So if someone asks you something and it requires you to look into something, it’s a sensitive subject, and you don’t have the time to give them a full response at the moment, you just respond right away saying, Hey, I got your message, I’m really slammed right now, but I’ll check into it and let you know by tomorrow morning or something else can be like, Hey, it’s really crazy for me today, I wanna give your question some thought, I’ll get back to you tonight, and what that can do is it can help people who are… I don’t know, I think some people don’t care when they get their text answered, but for some people, an unanswered text, it creates this open loop in their mind and they’re wondering about what’s going on, or they worry that they said something wrong, so we can sit on their bandwidth, and you can help them with that by saying, Hey, I got your message, I’ll get back to you soon, so I’ve used that before. And it seems to be appreciated. So I like that one.

Thomas Farley: Very much. The idea of acknowledgement. It’s the same thing, brett we walk into a department store or a shop, a boutique, and we’re waiting to be waited upon by the person who is the sales clerk there, and they’re chatting with their co-worker, maybe they get a phone call from a customer and you’re thinking, here I am, a live person standing in your store wanting to transact business with you, and I haven’t even been acknowledged, you’ve made no eye contact with me, you haven’t given me the, I’ll be there in one second, finger gesture, this makes us feel like we’re not being seen, we’re not being acknowledged. And it can be annoying.

And so the same with whether it’s a text message that just goes unanswered, or frankly even email, which I think email is the larger culprit for feeling like our communications are being ignored, how many emails do we receive a day and send a day where there’s just simply no response, where response is being asked for, and because we’re swamped because we don’t have all the answers, we don’t respond or we take days or sometimes weeks to respond, I think that simple acknowledgement, if it’s something you can’t work on in that moment, Got it. I’ll have an answer for you by Friday, is far better than just not responding at all, we’re forcing the person to have to be constantly checking in with that infamous line, Hey, Brett, just checking in on such and such, which… How many of those emails do we write a week So I think the bit of acknowledgement really does go a long way, texting or emailing.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

Well, this kind of goes to my next question, what do you think about ghosting someone? So this happens in dating, it’s where you go on a date and the date wasn’t great and the person text you and you just ignore them, but this can happen also professionally or in other instances where someone emails you a request or something like that, and you just ignore them. It’s kind of ghosting. What’s your take on that?

Thomas Farley: I think there are certain instances where I would say ghosting is defensible. So maybe someone has even a good friend has done something to you that is highly offensive or highly insulting and they’re simply not apologizing for it, or they don’t see err of their ways, or you had a date with someone who was just someone who really frightened you in a lot of ways, and you’re not looking for any further engagement with that individual, I think in those cases, just for the sake of personal safety, if not your own sanity, ghosting might be the best way to go, or maybe it’s someone who just gets a little bit too text happy and is constantly texting you or maybe you’re on a group text thread, and every little thing is being said, Oh hey, everybody, here’s what I had for lunch this afternoon. And you’re thinking, My gosh, I’ve got work to do. So not responding to each and every interaction, I think in those instances is perfectly fine, if someone needs your feedback on something and there’s someone that you care about and you are the only stakeholder in this interaction who holds the cards, who holds the answer and they’re seeking an answer from you, whether it’s a co-worker, whether it’s a loved one, a sister or a parent, or a prospective spouse or significant other, to just completely ignore them for no explicable reason that I would not say is acceptable, like maybe you had a date and the date was just awful.

And someone texts you and says, Hey, I had a great time last night. Would love to see you again. I think if need be… I would still send that person a gentle text without being too harsh, in the way you phrase it, if someone is a sane individual who is looking to have an interaction with you that for some reason, you’re just not interested in continuing, far better to shut it down politely, rather than let the person wonder, Oh, did the person fall off a boat is maybe they lost their phone, maybe they’re traveling, they don’t have signal, they go through all these crazy scenarios, far better to dispel all of those conspiracy scenarios about why someone’s not responding to you and just be straight forward with an answer, but if it’s a question of personal safety or you’ve been genuinely aggrieved or offended by someone and they know it, then in those cases, I think ghosting would be completely acceptable and defensible, ettiquetewise.

Brett McKay: Okay, so ghosting, it depends. I think it’s interesting about The ghosting thing is hinge, the dating app, they did a survey and they found that 85% of dating app users say they like to be rejected directly, but I think sometimes people just say that I don’t oftentimes, I think people don’t really actually wanna be rejected directly, ’cause it hurts, but I think it’s gonna just depend on the person.

Thomas Farley: I think there are ways to make it sting less. And I think if this is a dating situation and you’ve had one date and there was not a love connection, ideally both parties feel the lack of love connection, and in that case, maybe you just ghost each other and that’s the best of all worlds, but of course, sometimes you do have those situations where one person is really into the other person and the other person is just not… I’d far rather as hurtful as it probably is in those initial days, that sting will subside versus just not hearing from the individual at all. I think it’s really… And especially if you’ve had multiple dates, then… I’m sorry, ghosting is not acceptable.

If this was a single date and in your eyes it was a complete disaster, but for some unknown reason to the other party, it was a roaring success. Well, that person maybe needs a reality check, but I still think that they would be deserving of if they’re really earnestly coming back to you. I had such a wonderful time, I can’t wait to see you again. That was terrific. To not respond at all, I think is really inconsiderate, so then it’s really all about how you respond and what do you say? And I think there are ways of letting someone down easy, and I think it could even be something as simple as, Hey, I enjoyed meeting you, I just don’t feel there’s a love connection, or I just… I can’t really commit to anything right now, wishing you the best. Will hurt. Sure. For someone who’s really into you, but far nicer to do that, than just disappear.

Brett McKay: Okay, let’s talk about continue this idea of technology, phones, everyone’s got a phone with them all the time, and a lot of people when they go to eat, they leave their phone on the table during dinner. Okay, not okay.

Thomas Farley: Not a fan. So whether you’re at dinner with your family in your kitchen or your dining room, or whether you’re out to dinner in a restaurant, when you think of how difficult it is to coordinate schedules for a family to sit down to dinner, to coordinate schedules for a family to be in a restaurant or a group of friends to be in a restaurant, it’s not easy, the fact that then we spend at least even a small percentage of our time looking at our phones, Instagramming our food, checking text messages, I think it takes us out of the moment. And I think it’s really unfortunate. So I think certainly there are times and they’re rare where you need to be contacted because there’s some impending massive news that you need to be available for, you’re at a business lunch, but your wife may be going into labor. You are a real estate agent who’s on the verge of closing a big, big deal that could be happening within the hour, in those cases, if you’re out to lunch with someone in a restaurant, I would own that information upfront. Brett, I’m so sorry, I’m not gonna be on my phone, I just do need to say, You know, there’s a chance my wife may be going into labor. The office is closing a huge deal, I may need to briefly step away from the table to take a quick call.

This is the way to handle that, but putting the phone out on the table has actually been proven in studies to create anxiety just literally the sight of a phone on the table makes us anxious, makes us distracted and takes us out of the moment, so I’d put that phone away if you’re wearing a blazer put it in the pocket, put it in the pocket of your pants, but keep it away from the table, absolutely on vibrate. And if you must must take a call, do so away from the table, not with all of your table mates sitting around, kept hostage to your conversation.

Brett McKay: Okay, so if you plan on receiving a text, let people know upfront, I have a friend who’s a anesthesiologist, so when he’s on call, he’ll let us know like, Hey guys, I’m on call, so I might have to text, I might get a text I might have to go away and that’s always appreciated. Another interesting dynamic I’ve noticed in the past couple of years is the smartwatch, so you might have the phone in your pocket, but you got this device on your wrist where you get notifications on your watch, is it okay to check the notifications that buzz on your smart watch during dinner.

Thomas Farley: What I like about the smart watch, in one sense, it’s a little bit more discrete than actually pulling out a cell phone and scrolling, by the same token, it’s still the same concept, you’re still being, your attention and your energy is being pulled away from the dynamic of the folks that you’re dining with and being directed towards your device, and so for that reason, whether it’s haptic feedback where it’s vibrating on your arm or pulsating or flashing, it’s still a distraction, and unless you’re an anesthesiologist, I would not recommend if you wanna be polite to your table mates I’d not recommend acknowledging, so I’d silence those notifications, or if you’re wearing a long sleeve shirt, maybe it’s even as simple as pulling the sleeve down so you’re not tempted to look at the watch.

Brett McKay: Gotcha, alright. Let’s talk about tipping. So there’s been a lot of articles over the last year about how tipping is out of control, every restaurant and service provider seems to ask for a tip these days, even when they’re just doing straight up, like it’s the cashier job and they just flip the screen around and you get that prompt asking if you wanna leave a tip and you feel like there’s pressure to do so, ’cause they turn around, they’re gonna see whether you gave them a tip or not, so what’s the state of tipping today? When Should you tip? And when should you not?

Thomas Farley: Sure, so this is something that there has been a sea change in our culture in the way we are interacting with service individuals, not only in that kind of what’s known as a quick serve restaurant type interaction, where you’re picking something up at a counter as opposed to sitting down in a restaurant. But the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading about airports where you were being prompted for a tip at a self-serve kiosk, where you’re getting food or you’re getting some sort of an airport Trinket where you’re actually being asked for a tip, so it’s exploded beyond our worst nightmares. And I think it’s a very concerning trend for me, it’s known in the popular press as either tip creep or Tipflation are the two terms you’ll hear quite a lot, I’m taking to calling this the tipping invasion, because I really feel that when we are living in a culture, we’re living in a society where you’re being expected to tip at absolutely every turn for absolutely every interaction, there’s really… The genie’s out of the bottle, and there is no line that’s being drawn any longer.

And I think that is really… It’s frightening because we’re rapidly marching toward a culture where I think you’ll be expected to tip your dental hygienist, you’ll be expected to tip your auto mechanic, and it’s diluted what a tip is really designed to do, which is to reward an individual who works in a service industry where, by the structure of the industry, their pay is actually less than minimum wage, so for example, a server in a sit-down restaurant often is being paid $2 and change an hour, not a livable wage, by any stretch, it’s only through the use of tips, which is part of the compact, we know when we enter a restaurant, we know when we sit down in a restaurant that we are going to be tipping, and that is something that we happily accept and happily do, but the idea that you picked up a bag of potato chips on a convenience store shelf at a gas station, and suddenly you’re being faced with a tip screen, how much would you like to tip for this interaction? It’s something… Because simply because the technology allows this to happen does not mean that culturally it is acceptable.

And so that feeling that people get when they suddenly see that screen and those amounts that are also increasing, so it’s not even that they’re asking for a 5% tip they might be asking for a 25% or 30% tip for these very basic interactions with individuals who are being paid a minimum wage or more, people are feeling what is called the guilt tip, so you’re tipping simply because you feel guilty, not just because they’re gonna see it when they flip the screen around, but everybody in line behind you is gonna be seeing how much you tip, you know they’re looking over your shoulder to see which box you tap, so it’s confusing. In a time of high inflation, consumers are really feeling their pocket books are being pinched at every turn, and this is a big part of that, and I find it to be a very, very concerning trend.

Brett McKay: So I think this is an interesting dynamic because I think a decade ago, the concern that people had was, maybe I’m not tipping enough, maybe I need to tip more. Because people were kinda confused about, Well, do I tip this person? Or that person. Now, it seems like the concern is like, I should tip less, I need to be tipping less because I’m being asked to tip in inappropriate situations.

Thomas Farley: Well, it’s true, and the simple fact is there’s only so much discretionary budget any one individual has no matter how well off they are, and if every single interaction… I live in New York City, and there is… We call this the departure tax, that every time you literally walk out your door in New York, there’s a $20 departure tax, there’s $20 that you simply don’t know where it went, it went somewhere, but you know you started $20 Richer before you walked out the door. I think it’s the same now happening across the country with tipping, you’re suddenly being asked to tip for just about everything you buy in every service store and shop and restaurant you walk into, and I think what’s going to happen, I really think it’s going to diminish the amount of money that any one individual has to tip to people who really rely on tipping income because they’re being asked to tip in so many other establishments.

And that, I think is really unfortunate. Let’s face it, stores restaurants had a very difficult time during the pandemic, and I think most consumers felt the need, and it was a wonderful thing to be extra generous, knowing that these individuals, these first responders in the service industries, were out there doing their thing while so many of us were working from home, the pandemic is over, and yet those tipping levels, those expectations and that guilt has remained and is even being amplified, and I think consumers are feeling rightfully resentful, and as I say, there is a limit to the discretionary income, any one individual has. So I see servers in sit down restaurants actually having their tips suffering because there’s simply not enough tipping income, tipping money to go around to everyone, if that’s the culture that we’re headed toward.

Brett McKay: Okay, so what would you say keep your tips for people in the food service industry, bartenders, these are the traditional staff, you would usually tip for 10 years ago, maybe keep tipping for that.

Thomas Farley: Sure, and we know what those are, where… Any consumer has tipped enough in their lifetime to know if you go for a haircut, you’re tipping on that, if you go for a massage, you’re tipping on that, if you get a cocktail in a bar, of course you’re tipping on that, and yes, the sit-down restaurant experiences. It’s all these new things tipping in those interactions, it’s discretionary. If you feel you are blessed and you feel you’ve had a wonderful experience and you wanna share that, that joy with the person who’s waited on you, all the power to you, nothing to say that you can’t do it, but you should not feel obligated. Etiquette does not dictate that you should be tipping those interactions, those individuals are being paid a minimum wage plus, and what really should be happening if the owners of the establishments feel that they can’t attract good employees without offering this as an option they really need to be doing, in my estimation, is paying higher wages, and in turn, if needed, charging higher prices in restaurants and quick serve establishments, but this idea that the burden is being shifted to the consumer and this very awkward, uncomfortable, clumsy interaction. I don’t like it, and I think it really, it bodes not good things for the service industry.

Brett McKay: And I think we should point out, this is probably just an American problem. Other countries, they don’t have the tipping culture that we do.

Thomas Farley: It’s true, and that extends not just for this type of quick serve tip where you have the tablet in front of you, but even a sit-down restaurant in various countries around the world, throughout Europe and Asia, some countries, they would actually look at you quite askance, maybe pleasantly surprised, but even shocked if you gave them a tip. So it’s baked into the equation in the United States. We do have this tradition of tipping. But you’re absolutely right, this is not a global situation, and I do hear from Europeans, but then they come to the United States, they are absolutely stupefied by the number of places where they’re being asked to tip and in the amounts that they’re being asked.

Brett McKay: When you do tip, what do you think should be the standard tip amount? Or does it depend?

Thomas Farley: So if we are in a restaurant and we’re sitting down and we’re having a meal, this old standard of 15% being kind of your nice little baseline, that has gotten pretty antiquated at this point. And I read these studies very regularly, the average tip across the United States in a sit-down restaurant is hovering just above 19% as your baseline tip. So if you wanna walk out of there feeling like you were Daddy Warbucks, super generous, and boy are they gonna be clicking their heels with joy at how much you gave them in a tip, 20% is not going to do that. 20% really is about the baseline that you’re looking to tip. And frankly, I like the math better with 20% tip. If you’re calculating it in your head, which you may not be but if you are, 20% is a lot easier to calculate than 15%. But if you want to be generous, you’re really looking at more in the neighborhood of 25%-30% on a tip, but if you wanna be doing the bare minimum, 20% so that… Will ensure you’re not getting dirty looks as you walk out of the restaurant, which you would likely get if you tip 10% or 15%.

Brett McKay: Let’s shift topics to weddings. Wedding season is upon us. I’m sure there’s lots of different questions we could discuss about weddings. But in general, what’s an area of wedding-related etiquette that people often neglect?

Thomas Farley: One of the biggest gripes I hear about is people who don’t RSVP. And if you think about it, Brett, could it be any easier? Not only do you get the invitation in the mail, but you get a reply card with a return address, reply envelope with a stamp already on it, all you have to do literally is filling your name and check a box that you are attending, and pop it in the mail and you are good to go. So if you’re lucky enough to be invited to a wedding and you want to attend, you’re able to attend, get that RSVP and quickly, and no unpleasant surprises by doing a write-in ballot of someone’s name that you’re bringing when there was no guests invited. And certainly, you’re not doing any gorilla attack by bringing a guest on the day of. That’s gonna just cause havoc at the wedding. We don’t want that.

Brett McKay: That’s a good point about RSVPs. That’s for anything, whether wedding or any other type of… If there’s an RSVP, make sure you do, ’cause people are trying to figure out how much stuff they need to buy, and it makes it hard when you don’t do that.

Thomas Farley: We’re living in the age of maybe. I think it’s really unfortunate, but I think sites such as Evite and Facebook invitations, we’re now in this kind of funny time period where people feel like, well, they’ve got enough invitations that they don’t know if they can commit or don’t want to commit, so the response is either no response at all until the very last minute, or a “maybe” response. And I think that’s really unhelpful to anyone who’s hosting. It doesn’t have to be a wedding. As you say, it could be any sort of occasion. So if you’re invited to something waiting until you see if you get better offers, not acceptable. Simply not replying at all and then showing up, not acceptable. Or saying yes and then not showing up and not letting the host know you’re not coming, also not acceptable. So think about when the shoe is on the other foot, when you’re a host and you’re trying to plan something and you have no idea on numbers, it can really be very… It can convince you never wanna throw a party again. So if you’re lucky enough to be invited to something, let the host know. Even if it’s “No,” “No” is better than nothing, and “No” is better than an interminable “Maybe” that never turns into a “Yes” or a “No.”

Brett McKay: Let’s say it’s your wedding and you don’t wanna have kids there. Is it okay to say, you don’t want kids? This is a touchy, touchy one.

Thomas Farley: This is touchy. And it’s a question I get quite a lot. And what I’d say to that is, there are a lot of reasons why you might wanna have a wedding with no kids. It could be budget, it could be, this is a wedding in some kind of a night time, night-club-y type setting where it’s just not really a child-friendly environment, or simply you feel like the adults deserve and want a night off from their kids. And even parents who have two or three or four or five kids, I often hear from them, “Oh gosh, what a relief we’re able to tell our kids, ‘We’d love to bring you but we can’t. This is a wedding where children aren’t invited.'” Those parents get a night off. So I think that can be a wonderful thing.

The key as the couple, remember, this is your wedding, your rules. Whatever it is that you decide you wanna do, you follow that, but you’ve got to follow it consistently. So don’t say “No kids,” and then start making exceptions here and there, because then suddenly it looks like you’re playing favorites, and some of your guests who do have children who don’t get to bring their children, they’re gonna feel resentful. And so the only exception that you might consider if you are going to do a no-child policy at your wedding is perhaps there is a member of the bridal party like a junior bridesmaid or the ring bearer or the flower girl who typically are a close family member or relative. There you might make the exception, but if just ordinary guests you start making the exception because they couldn’t find a babysitter that night, you’re really gonna have some very other guests who are quite unhappy that they were told they couldn’t bring theirs, whereas others did.

Brett McKay: So destination weddings are becoming more popular. So you fly off to some exotic locale to get married. And they invite people and for the guest, that can be a lot of money to get to these places. If you get invited to a destination wedding, are you still obliged to get the couple a gift?

Thomas Farley: You are absolutely obliged. So your decision to attend a destination wedding, it’s based on a couple of factors, primarily, your budget. Can you afford to attend this destination wedding? Can you afford to fly there? Can you afford the babysitting perhaps that you need? Can you afford the hotel accommodations, the outfit that you might need that you don’t have, because it’s in a climate that you don’t normally have dress clothes for? All of those are factors that you need to consider. However, the travel budget, the cost that it takes for you to actually be there, that is not your gift. So your presence is not your present in this case. That needs to come from your own discretionary annual travel budget, not from your budget for wedding gifts. So you don’t scrimp on a gift for the couple simply because you feel you’ve spent a lot of money to be there. And if you feel you can’t afford both, then I would far rather see you decline the wedding invitation but still send a gift, particularly if this is someone who’s important to you.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about another topic I think a lot of men have questions about. Should you still hold the door open for a woman?

Thomas Farley: Sure. So this is gonna vary depending on the situation. And what I like to recommend to a man who strives to be a gentleman, which I think is a noble goal and something that’s still important in today’s culture, is that you’ve got to remember there’s a distinction between being out on a date and opening a door for a woman, holding a chair for a woman, standing at a table when a woman comes back to the table, gestures that many women, although not all, will find very gallant and chivalrous and very much appreciate. So know your audience. So if you’re on a date with a woman who is very progressive and feels that that sort of gesture is demeaning and insulting, then obviously you’re not going to do it. But I would say in my conversations with women who are all ages and modern to old-fashioned, most will at least appreciate the gesture behind that, the motivation behind that is a good one.

Where you’ve got to be a little bit more wary is this is now a business setting. So in a business setting, the idea that you’d be holding a door for a woman or holding a chair out for a woman, this is not something that would be traditionally done in the American workplace. We don’t recognize gender in workplace, ideally. What we do recognize is seniority, so if you’re gonna let someone go through the door first, let that be because that person is the boss, is the senior person, it’s the client, not because it’s a woman. However, I think a nice workaround for anyone who really… For a man who really strives to be a gentleman in all interactions is you just simply in those cases, you don’t make a distinguishing decision between, “Okay, this is a woman I work with, so I’m gonna hold the door for her, but here comes Charlie, my male colleague, and I’m gonna let the door slam in his face because he’s not a woman.” If you’re a gentleman, you hold the door for everyone. It doesn’t matter what gender they are.

You don’t rush to take the best seat in the restaurant when you’re going to a business dinner because that’s who you are. You let other people take the better seat. You are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to put other people before yourself, that’s truly what a gentleman does. And in a business setting, you don’t have to be worrying, “Is this a man or a woman?” You simply do it for everyone. In that way, if anyone ever accused you, “Well, gosh, why are you holding the door for me? I find that offensive and belittling,” you say, “This is simply who I am. I do this for everyone. I’m sorry to have offended you, but I assure you it’s not a gender-based decision, it’s something that I do as a matter of practice.” And I think there you’re on the best ground of all.

Brett McKay: Well, Thomas, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Thomas Farley: Brett, thank you so much, I’ve enjoyed it. And congrats on the podcast. I know you’re rapidly approaching your 1000th episode, so I can’t wait to see you achieve that milestone, but it’s been a great conversation. I am at on all social media, I’m Mister Manners, and that’s “mister” spelled out. And the website is mister-manners.com. And I pop up on TV and radio and newspaper around the country on a regular basis. I do a column for the NBC Today Show called “Mealtime with Mr. Manners” where I tackle everyday dining etiquette issues, so always happy to receive questions or if any of your listeners have a quandary, it would be my pleasure to fill it for them and answer it in a way that will help them be as mannerly and manly in the case of your listeners as possible.

Brett McKay: Well, Thomas Farley, thanks for your time. It has been a pleasure.

Thomas Farley: Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Thomas Farley, also known as Mister Manners. You can find more information about his work at his website mister-manners.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/etiquetteFAQ where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

dWell, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at ArtOfManliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code Manliness to check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #897: Answers to the FAQ of Modern Etiquette appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

In the classic Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper, the ant works through the summer, storing up food for the winter, while the grasshopper spends his days making music. When the colder months arrive, the grasshopper starves, while the ant lives comfortably off his cache.

Yet, one does wonder if the ant did not experience another kind of hunger himself — pangs of yearning for all the warm, sunshine-filled fun he missed while toiling underground. 

Frugality, a drive to accumulate resources and a reluctance to spend them down, makes for an excellent approach to economics, to budgeting and household management. But as a life philosophy, as an overarching ethos, it is greatly impoverished. 

While parsimoniously focusing on building one’s security and preparing for a potential rainy day can be prudent, it can also lead to the worst kind of waste. 

Vacation days held onto, in case they’re needed, until the arrival of the new year, when they disappear forever. 

An expensive sweater rarely put on, to make it last, until after only a few wearings, it goes out of style.

Expressions of affection carefully rationed out, to not take a romance too fast or spoil a child, until the relationship turns to ashes.

Retirement savings hoarded up, until the account holder dies, right along with his dream of traveling the world. 

Living a flourishing, fulfilling life requires mastering the balance between some of the trickiest tensions of human existence.

Anticipating a coming winter, without neglecting to bask in the glow of an eternal summer.

Cultivating the field of one’s resources, without waiting until after the harvest to start enjoying its fruits.

Laboring with insect-like industry, without becoming a music-deprived drone.

Compiling one’s reserves, without ever forgetting that —

Money is for spending. 

Clothes are for wearing.

Love is for giving.

Life is for living. 

The post Sunday Firesides: Life Is for Living appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Discipline is essential to every success in life. It establishes the stable, well-ordered ground that allows an individual to set and achieve goals. It prevents the ensnaring, vice-filled traps that torpedo advancement. It creates the consistent habits that forward progress. And it develops the authority that influences others. 

As behavioral analyst Chase Hughes shared on the podcast, when an individual not only puts on a good face in public, but is truly disciplined in their private life, they project confidence and competence. Whether or not you’re disciplined when the metaphorical cameras are off is something you can’t help but exude and that others instinctively pick up on. People intuitively trust and follow individuals who embody discipline and reflexively take a step back from those who don’t.

Chase defines discipline “as the ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your own.”

If you’re a college student, and you stay up all night drinking even though you have exams the next day, that’s a failure on the discipline front. As Chase observes, you’ll wake up the next morning thinking, “‘I can’t believe I did that.’ And [you’ll be] mad at your past tense self because you didn’t have concern for your future self.”

If, on the other hand, you spend the night studying and hit the hay early so you’re well-rested for exams the next day, you’re taking care of your future self, and leveling up in your discipline.

As an encouragement to prioritize your long-term aims over your short-term desires, Chase advises thinking of yourself as your own butler.

While few people can afford a full-time, live-in manservant, your present self can act as a butler to your future self. 

When, in the evening, you do things like pack what you need in your backpack or briefcase and set out your clothes for the next day, you serve as a butler to your future self, who, the next morning, will really appreciate the fact that his past tense self set up his present tense self for success. 

Chase described how this works regarding his own evening routine:

I’m about to go to bed, and I’ll be sticking one of those little Keurig coffee cup pods into the coffee maker and sticking a coffee mug there, ready for the next morning. And out loud, I’ll say, ‘Man, Chase is gonna love this.’ So I will continuously speak about my future self in a way that I am prioritizing his needs, and I will talk about him in the future.

When you develop a relationship between your present self and your future self, where the former serves the latter, you arrive at a point, Chase says, “where you’re looking forward in time with concern and . . . looking backward in time . . . with gratitude.” You develop a more holistic, integrated character.

By prioritizing the needs of your future self by becoming your own butler, you build the discipline that allows you to act, lead, and move forward in the way you desire; you build the discipline that grants you greater freedom, which, at the end of the day, is the ultimate luxury!

For more insights on how getting your stuff together will not only improve your personal life but increase your influence, listen to our podcast with Chase Hughes:

The post Be Your Own Butler appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Do you feel stuck in life — that you aren’t making progress in a relationship, job, or goal and you don’t know how to fix the problem and move forward? Well, perhaps you can take a little solace in the fact that it’s a universal human experience, even amongst history’s highest achievers. Indeed, when Adam Alter, a social psychologist and professor of marketing, looked at the lives of successful actors, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs, he found that they all had passed through times in their lives and careers when they felt totally stuck.

Today on the show, Adam, who’s the author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most, explains why getting stuck is an inevitability in life, as well as mindset shifts and practices to escape from stuckness. We first talk about what contributes to getting stuck, including the goal gradient effect, and how the illusion of the creative cliff can keep you from seeing that you may end up doing your best work later in life. We then talk about dealing with the emotional angst of feeling stuck, and how it can be better to initially accept your stuckness than kick against the pricks. From there, we turn to some tactics for getting unstuck, including doing a friction audit and copying the work of others. In my favorite part of the conversation, we discuss the importance of recognizing when to move from exploring to exploiting, and vice versa. We end our conversation with why the mantra for getting unstuck is “action over all.”

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Adam’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #420: What Makes Your Phone So Addictive & How to Take Back Your Life
• a-ha’s video for “Take on Me”
• Giannis on whether he considers this season a failure
• AoM Article: Meditations on the Wisdom of Action
• AoM Article: Want to Become a Better Writer? Copy the Work of Others!
• AoM Article: Solvitur Ambulando — It Is Solved By Walking
• AoM Podcast #418: How to Get Unstuck
• AoM Podcast#432: How to Achieve Creative Success
• AoM Podcast #512: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Connect With Adam Alter

• Adam on LinkedIn
• Adam on Twitter
• Adam’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Podcast Sponsors

Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Do you feel stuck in life, that you aren’t making progress in a relationship, job or goal, and you don’t know how to fix the problem and move forward. Well, perhaps you can take a little solace in the fact that it’s a universal human experience, even amongst history’s highest achievers. Indeed, when Adam Altar a social psychologist and professor of Marketing looked in the lives of successful actors, musicians, writers, film makers and entrepreneurs, he found that they had all passed through times in their lives and careers when they felt totally stuck.

Today in the show, Adam, who’s the author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to get unstuck when it matters most. Explains why getting stuck is inevitable in life, as well as mindset shifts and practices to escape from stuckness. We first talk about what contributes to getting stuck, including the Goal Gradient effect, and how the illusion of the Creative cliff can keep you from seeing that you may end up doing your best work later in life. We then talk about dealing with the emotional angst of feeling stuck, and how it could be better to initially accept your stuckness and kick against the prick. From there we turn to some tactics for getting unstuck, including doing a Friction Audit and copying the work of others. In my favorite part of the conversation, we discuss the importance of recognizing, when to move from exploring to exploiting and vice-versa. We end the conversation with why the mantra for getting unstuck is action over all. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.io/unstuck. Alright, Adam Alter welcome back to the show.

Adam Alter: Thanks so much for having me back again, Brett.

Brett McKay: So we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book, Irresistible. You got a new book out called, Anatomy of a breakthrough: How To Get Unstuck when it matters most. You walk readers through on how to get unstuck, so let’s start with that, what you mean by getting stuck?

Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean it’s a good question because you can get stuck for 10 seconds and you can get stuck for a lifetime, and I’m much more interested in these bigger instances of being stuck across days, weeks, months, years, even decades, and those tend to be fairly common. I’ve been running a survey for a number of years now on thousands of people around the world, asking them about their experiences of being stuck, and everyone in some respect says, Yeah, when I think about it, there’s an area where I do feel stuck and I’d like to make some movement. And so I’m also not just interested in these big instances, but also instances where we have some control so, April 2020, we were all stuck in place because the government had mandated that we couldn’t travel, that’s not psychologically interesting to me, there’s not much you can do about that, you might feel stuck, but that’s just how it is for that period of time, but it turns out that far more common than that are these instances where we do have room to move, and that’s what this book is focused on.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you give three things to define being stuck in life or in work, you’re temporarily unable to make progress in a domain that matters to you, you’ve been fixed in a place for long enough to feel psychological discomfort and your existing habits and strategies aren’t solving the problem, and you said being stuck can be caused by external forces or internal forces. In this book, you’re trying to focus on the internal, correct?

Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean sometimes you’re caused to be stuck by something external, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the power to shape it or change it, so I’m interested in cases where we have some agency where there is room for a better way, and that’s really what this roadmap that I provide in the book is focused on.

Brett McKay: Alright, so let’s talk about why getting stuck is inevitable and you highlight a few factors that contribute to getting stuck, the first one is this idea of the Goal Gradient effect, what is that and why does it contribute to stuckness?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so the basic idea is that when you do something that takes sustained effort across a period of time, there will be a lull in the middle, and if you think about it at the beginning of any goal, you have the energy of the excitement that comes from starting something new, you tend to do things fast and effectively and efficiently, and then as the goal is within sight as you approach it, you speed up again because you can see the finish line, either metaphorically or literally. In the middle though, there’s this long period of lull, a sort of quiet where you are in the middle and you don’t have a sense of that early push and you don’t have the sense of the goal finish line, and so there’s this midpoint lull, which happens in pretty much all goals, whether you’re a charity trying to attract money for a particular campaign, whether you’re an artist trying to create a work, whether you’re a business, it doesn’t really matter what it is, you will find this midpoint lull, and so that’s the Goal Gradient effect.

But it’s also made worse by the fact that in the middle of the goal, you tend to hit a plateau, so if you keep doing things the same way, let’s say you’re trying to become fit, you do the same exercise regime over and over again on your way to losing a certain amount of weight, putting on a certain amount of muscle that will stop working, and it depends on the person if there are some individual differences, but within six to 18 months, most people find that a regime that was working really well for them, stops working, it stops having a beneficial effect. Now humans like things that have worked in the past, they keep doing them until they absolutely can’t do them any longer, and so between this Goal Gradient, this mid-point lull and the fact that everything stops working and stops being effective in time, we really need to be nimble and to figure out ways to head off these instances of stuckness before they become major issues.

Brett McKay: So what are some things you can do to mitigate the goal gradient effect and the plateau effect.

Adam Alter: So with a gaol gradient effect, the best thing you can do is to shrink the middle, think about writing a book, if it’s… I wanna write 100,000 words. The day you start writing, you might have a head of steam, you might be doing fine, but there’ll be a point, and when you listen to writers, they’ll talk about this, and this explains a lot of writer’s block. There’ll be a point very soon thereafter that you say, this is hard, I’m struggling. And the idea of a 100,000 words is just completely overwhelming when you’ve written, say 500 or 1000 or 1500. So the best thing you can do is to shrink the goal, is to bracket it narrowly as they say, it’s about bracketing the goal in a new way, and so one thing you can do is you can break that 100,000 words into a 100 instances of a thousand words each, and if there’s something you like to do, that’s a small reward, you can do that each time you hit a new mark of a 1000 words. Now, the benefit of doing that is that you’ve shrunk the middle, and so when you shrink the middle or eliminate it all together, you don’t have that same lull, because you’ve reframed the way you think of the goal.

And this turns out to be very, very effective for writers. For the plateau effect, the solution is written into the problem. The problem is you keep doing the same thing, it stops working. The solution is to change things. If you’re running a race or training for a marathon, or training for an Iron Man or trying to… Whatever it might be, you hit a plateau because you’re… Learning a language is the same thing, you just need more than one technique, you can’t use the same training program all the time, or the same approach to learning all the time. And there’s just so much evidence of that across so many domains, so whenever you do anything, be prepared that within a few months, there’s a good chance you’re gonna need to do something new, so be on the hunt for another alternative.

Brett McKay: And we’ll talk about ways to hunt for new alternatives, when we talk about this idea of Explore versus Exploit, here in a bit. So you have a chapter about keeping going when you hit that low or that feeling of stuckness, and you use the band, the ’80s synth band, A-ha who wrote, Take On Me. What can they teach us about not quitting when we hit a wall.

Adam Alter: Yeah, I love these stories of colossal successes and you go back and you find out that, Hey, this thing that looks polished and beautiful and it worked exactly the way it should work, when you look back, it turns out it didn’t always look that way, it was much more complicated. And the song Take On Me by A-ha is one of the biggest selling songs of the ’80s, and in fact of all time, but it had several versions and iterations that came before it, and when the band was writing about what it was like to create the song they talked about how for several years they couldn’t get financial backing, once they got financial backing, the version of the song they created was just a little bit rusty, it didn’t have quite the same bounce that it ended up having in its final iteration.

They tried floating and releasing the song several times, and it just didn’t take off commercially, it took three or four bites at the cherry, and eventually the American arm of their recording Agency said, Hey, we gotta make a great video for this, and if you know the song, and you know the video, it’s this classic ’80s video that people will watch, I think it’s been viewed billions of times now on YouTube. That video launched the song and launched the band and made the song, and without that perseverance across a period of many years, that song wouldn’t have succeeded the way it did, and there are so many cultural products like that where what you see at the end is this end product that looks like it just sort of arrive fully formed, but that’s not where it began, there were instances of stuckness that came before it over and over again.

Brett McKay: And you have this idea, that talk about why it’s important to keep going even when things seem like it’s not going anywhere, and one of these ideas is the Serial Order Effect, what is that?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so this is based on the idea of the Creative Cliff, and what happens with the serial order effect is, some pieces of information are really accessible, they come to you really fast. Especially the first pieces of information. And so imagine that I say to you, try to come up with as many creative uses as you can for a paper clip, and what happens is early on, what’s top of mind, tumbles out, it feels like it’s really easy, you can start thinking of some ideas that just come to your mind without much trouble, and eventually what happens is you hit a wall that as you get deeper into the list and into some ideas that are perhaps a little bit further afield, it starts to feel hard and humans interpret that sort of mental difficulty that comes with struggling through a problem like that, as we’re on the verge of failure, we’re not doing a very good job, but it turns out that in the world of creativity, the good stuff happens once it starts getting hard, because the easy stuff everyone can do. There’s nothing interesting about what comes easily to you, because it probably comes easily to everyone else as well. And so the big idea is that you’ve really gotta persevere that those ideas that come later on are often the best ideas, even though we sort of perceive them as being less good, because they come to us with a bit more difficulty and trial.

Brett McKay: Gotcha, so the Creative Cliff is this idea, it’s an illusion that our best ideas come early and then after that, they’re not any good, but it’s actually the opposite, usually the better ideas come after that wall.

Adam Alter: Yeah, sorry. Yeah, that’s exactly right. So if you ask people, imagine that I’m gonna ask you to try to come up with ideas and you’re gonna do 10 ideas now and then we’ll do a second session of 10 ideas after that, when do you think your best ideas will come and almost everyone says my best ideas will come first, and then the ideas, ideas 11 to 20 later on are not gonna be as good, it’s gonna be harder and it’s just probably gonna be a bit stale by that point, but when you actually look, that’s an illusion that we all have or most of us have. The good stuff comes at the end, and that’s the Creative Cliff illusion, we think our creativity is gonna fall off a cliff, but actually it skyrockets, it takes off, and so as things get hard, interesting ideas tend to tumble out if you persevere it’s a mistake to quit at that point.

Brett McKay: So the idea to mitigate that is just to keep, when it feels hard, just you gotta keep going.

Adam Alter: It’s not working until it feels hard basically, so that’s your signal that you’re doing something right, and that doesn’t mean go on forever, right? There is a cottage industry of books now that say, You should quit, we don’t quit often enough, and I think that’s true. I think there are many times when you need to quit, but if you’re in a concerted period of trying to come up with creative ideas or solutions, do not think that because it gets hard, you failed or that you should stop, that’s the moment when you really gotta dig in and keep going for a bit longer.

Brett McKay: And I love this idea of the Creative Cliff ’cause I’m in middle age now, I’ve turned 40, and there’s this popular idea that people have that if you don’t… If you’re not a success in your 20s or 30s, you’ve pretty much… It’s over for you. But no, actually, as you get older, if you keep pushing beyond and keep producing, you can have… And still be prolific even in your 40s, 50s, 60s.

Adam Alter: Exactly, yeah, and actually, what we focus on in the media, in podcasts, in popular culture in general, is these cases of precocious talent, we’re very fascinated by people in their teens and 20s who come up with brilliant ideas and make huge amounts of money, are very successful, and young prodigies, talents like that, precocious talents are fascinating, but they’re also incredibly unusual, when you look at the people who start the most successful businesses in the world, they are on a average, between 40 and 50 years old, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s not surprising, it’s only surprising against the backdrop of assuming that you have to be incredibly young to be a successful entrepreneur, but by 40 or 50, you’ve lived a bit, you’ve got a little bit more experience, you know what works and doesn’t, and you’ve refined your ideas and talents and yeah, using that same Creative Cliff idea across the longer period of decades, things have started to perhaps get hard, maybe your first ideas in your 20s and 30s weren’t perfect, but they came easily and then things might have got a little bit harder in your 30s, 40s, 50s, but that’s when they get good and interesting, and when you use that experience to great effect.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about the impact of luck in creative endeavors or in work endeavors, some businesses, some professions, some things are more prone to luck and that can be demoralizing, right? You put out good stuff and then nothing happens, but you have to keep going because maybe the next one that’ll be the thing that catapults you to success, like every time you do something it’s like buying a lottery ticket, in a sense.

Adam Alter: Yeah, exactly. You sort of see the luck as this kind of mystical thing and it robs you of a sense of control, but the way to really think about luck is that it just is the thing that emerges after enough time, it may come soon, it may come later, but if you have enough attempts at whatever it is that you’re doing, or you do it for long enough, you can manufacture luck, it’s a little unpredictable, but regardless of which career you’re in, regardless of how much luck is attached to that particular career, by continuing on by pushing through, you do tend to stumble on it eventually.

Brett McKay: So in the second half of the book, you talk about how to deal with the depression and angst that can come with getting stuck, and one strategy is Radical Acceptance. What is that?

Adam Alter: Yeah Radical Acceptance, it’s this idea from eastern philosophy from Buddhism, that things kind of suck sometimes, things get hard, and you basically gotta take a couple of deep breaths and accept that that’s the way they are. And it’s more complicated than that. There’s quite a lot written about it and how it works, but the basic idea is the first thing you need to do is just take a pause and kind of accept where you are before you start making strategies to change, and there are sort of versions of this in the book that I talk about, that are much more down to earth than this philosophy, which is a little bit abstract, but when you look at how some of the most talented people in their fields respond to being stuck, a lot of them paradoxically do less, they slow down, they do the kind of Zen thing which is to say they don’t do anything, at least initially, and that turns out to be a tremendously beneficial way of at least initially coping with stuckness. I talk about Lionel Messi and Andre Agassi, and the jazz pianist, Herbie Hancock, there are a whole lot of examples in the book of these people who learned to do less to get more out of themselves.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, I think this idea of radical acceptance, I think people confuse it with having to… They confuse acceptance with putting a value judgment on it, so just because you accept something, doesn’t mean you think it’s good, you’re accepting the fact that you’re in a crappy situation, the same way you’d accept the fact that the sky is blue.

Adam Alter: Yeah, exactly. And in a lot of the cases that I’m focusing on in the book, you can accept the things are the way they are right now, without having to accept it that they’ll always be like this. And so you accept it. You say, it sucks that I’m in this position, I’m gonna have to do something to get out of it. And very often, there is something you can do, but it’s okay to take a moment to just say, Hey, this is kind of painful, this is not working the way I’d like it to work, some change has been visited upon me in a way that I didn’t anticipate or invite, and now I have to figure out what to do next, but it’s okay to take a minute to strategize, slow things down, turn down the temperature, and that’s what these geniuses from you know Einstein did this, Mozart did this, Claude Monet did this, they all would spend long periods of time just kind of mired in what the situation was, before they tackled it, before they came up with a strategy to move forward.

Brett McKay: And you just said once they do the acceptance, one of the things they do is they take their foot off the gas and they might even start relaxing their definition of success, and it’s interesting ’cause you think when you’re stuck, you wanna push harder and that could be that maybe you need to do that in some situations, but often times if you just take your foot off the gas, that might help you get unstuck, it’s like the same thing when you’re trying to get a car unstuck, alright you wanna kind of rock it back and forth, so you’re gonna push on the gas, take it off, let it rock, push on the gas and that’ll get you unstuck.

Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean that’s exactly right. And the way I think about it is there’s a very big difference between being physically stuck and being stuck metaphorically or emotionally or psychologically, the way I’m interested in this book. Now there are all these cases of hysterical strength, where you read someone lifted a car off another person or something like that, humans are really well designed for instances of being physically entrapped, we have a lot of mechanisms, we have a rush of adrenaline, all of that sort of helps us get unstuck physically, but the same just hurts you when you’re trying to get unstuck mentally ’cause what you really gotta do is, as you said, turn down the temperature, slow things down. Your first instinct to just do anything to get unstuck in that case is just unhelpful, so I think that’s a really important insight that the first thing you gotta do as you say, is turn down the temperature.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and you mentioned Messi, he does this and he’s the greatest soccer player ever but he’s got really bad nerves or anxiety before a game, and the way he counters that, you need to go into detail about it, but basically he just says, I’m gonna take my time before I get going in a game, he’ll spend the first couple of minutes of game, just kinda walking around near the sideline, not being part of the action.

Adam Alter: It’s totally fascinating. Yeah, I agree with you. I think he’s the greatest player today, maybe of all time, and I was very, very surprised to learn this, that he is among the most anxious soccer players on the field, and in fact, in his early days, his coaches said, I don’t know that this guy is gonna make it, ’cause he’s got talent, but he doesn’t have the temperament for the game, and so Messi had to figure out a way to get unstuck, he would start games and sometimes he’d be physically sick, he just really couldn’t play at the beginning of those games, and sometimes he would be debilitated. They’d have to take him off the field. So that’s exactly right. What he does now is he spends the first roughly three or four minutes of the game ambling around the center circle of the field, he doesn’t really move around much, if you plot the movement of all the other players, they’re darting around the field trying to get into the game. And he’s barely moving, he walks, and he’s doing that for two reasons, one of them is because it helps him calm his nerves, gives him a few minutes to kind of get into the game, so he’s more effective for the remaining 85 plus minutes.

But the other thing it does is it makes them incredibly good as a strategic perceiver of the game, because he spends those few minutes saying, Oh, I see there’s an injury over there, that player is limping, these two players are not working particularly well together, I can exploit that later on. On his own team, he’ll see who’s playing well, who’s doing something strange. And so what he does is he kind of compiles this idiosyncratic list of features of that particular game that he can then bank away and use for the remaining time in the game, and so it makes him just unbelievably effective for the rest of the game. Now he’s never scored a goal in the first two minutes of a soccer match, but he scored in every minute from minute three on, which shows you that he really isn’t playing the game until that third minute.

Brett McKay: So another thing we need to learn how to do when we get stuck is learning how to fail well, because often times, we get stuck because we’ve had some sort of failure. We didn’t achieve a goal or something like that had happened, so we’re kind of, we’re stuck in this little plateau trying to figure what to do. So what can we do to fail better because failing doesn’t feel great?

Adam Alter: No, it doesn’t feel great. The first thing to do is to recognize that there is an optimal failure rate in general. There are some studies that have tried to look at this. How do you maximize growth? And how do you minimize getting stuck? And what you find is that about roughly one in six to one in four occasions when you’re practicing or trying something or learning something new, you should be failing. If you fail much less than that, you’re not gonna grow. You’re just gonna be doing the same thing over and over and again, like hitting your head against the wall. If you fail much more than that, you’re gonna become de-motivated and that means that whatever you’ve put in front of yourself is a little bit too advanced for the level that you’re at right now. And so that’s the first thing. Failing well involves, first of all, failing at all, you’ve gotta fail the right amount roughly. And to temper the practice sessions and the learning experiences so that you’re failing roughly the right amount. The second thing is to basically over-train is one thing you can do. That’s very effective. There are a lot of athletes who do this, but to inoculate yourself against the hardship that will come when the real experience arrive.

So there are golfers who will play three rounds of golf on a practice day, so that when they have to play a single round of golf, they are deeply focused for that 72 plus or minus shots. And so if you’re hitting 300 or 250 shots in a day and you can focus for all of those, it’s obviously gonna be easier to focus for 70 shots. And so over-training is a great thing you can do. And then the last thing I would say about failing well, is you wanna make sure that as you fail and you don’t quite reach your goals, the gap is getting smaller across time. So you’re learning to the point where you are converging on the goal, even if you haven’t quite got there yet. And honestly, if you’re not, and you’re not happy with that, and it looks like over time you’re diverging from the goal, you’re moving further away from it, you’re not getting closer, maybe it’s time to try something else.

Brett McKay: Well, it’s interesting, this idea of you need to fail in order to succeed, and failure close the gap to your goal. This reminds me, did you watch that video of Giannis, the basketball player from the Milwaukee Bucks?

Adam Alter: Yeah, I thought it was fantastic.

Brett McKay: He has that the same sort of… He’s had this great response to a reporter who asked him, it’s the season of failure, ’cause the Bucks, they lost to the Miami Heat. And his response was awesome. He just said, you asked me this question last year, it’s a dumb question. He said, Look, every time I fail, it’s a step towards success. He says, Michael Jordan played 15 seasons, he won six championships. He says, were the other nine years of failure? He’s like, No, those failures led to those successes. So I think that’s a great way to think about failures are steps to success.

Adam Alter: Yeah, I agree. And I thought you’ve captured the best parts of the video, that where he talks about Jordan’s 15 year career and says well, nine of the years is failure. I think one of the things that highlights as well is that we see failure as a kind of binary or failure or success as a kind of binary, you’re either failing or you’re succeeding. And the idea that you can break down a career and say, well, fail, fail, fail, success, fail, fail, fail, success. The way this reporter was trying to do with the Giannis telling him that because he hadn’t won a championship that year, it was a failure, is just, it’s, first of all, it’s deeply unproductive. It doesn’t help, it doesn’t make your life better. It doesn’t help you progress or persevere, but also it’s a, it’s just misguided. The world doesn’t operate on that particular binary because failures lead to the next thing. And the next thing is often better than what came before precisely because there was this, what that reporter would call failure.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break. Few words from our more sponsors. And now back to the show. Alright, so we’ve dealt with the emotional aspect of being stuck. So reframe how you think about failure, take your foot off the gas, practice radical acceptance. The next part is to start coming up with a plan to get unstuck. And one of these things you suggest doing is called a friction audit. What is that and how can it help us get unstuck?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so this started, I do a fair amount of business consulting and consulting for charities and non-profit organizations. And the big question a lot of these organizations have is how can we spend less money to make more of an impact? Or how can we spend less money to do better sales or whatever it is they want? And so the technique that I’ve found with a great return on investment is known as a friction audit. And so what you do is, if you think about a company that’s making a product, you essentially have two ways to improve your bottom line. One way is to make the product better. And that’s expensive, sweeten the deal, make the carrot more attractive, get people in the door, get more people in the door, have them stay for longer. You can do that as a business, but it’s not cheap.

It’s hard. You’re gonna have competitors and so that’s not the road to go. The road to go is to say, one of the reasons we are not doing more or doing better is because there are friction points. People are getting stuck in interacting with our company or in the process of completing a sale or whatever it might be. So the best thing we can do is to remove some friction. So the friction audit is this process that I originally used in this business context where you say, where is the friction? How can we intervene on it? How can we sand it down? So we remove it or at least make it a little bit less friction filled. And then let’s confirm that it’s actually done some good. An example of this is I worked with a whole lot of shopping malls. They found that a lot of parents were coming and shopping and abandoning their carts without buying.

They figured out it was ’cause one of the kids they came with had a tantrum and they had to leave. So you put in these very inexpensive little play playgrounds and gyms and things, jungle gyms, they cost a few thousand dollars to install, and over the course of a year, you save a hundred thousand dollars of lost sales. And so that small investment, massive return. But this works in our lives as well. You can run a friction audit. I talk about this process in the book. You can run that process on any aspect of your life. Relationships, work, creativity, athletics, it doesn’t really matter what it is, it applies there as well.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah, imagine you could do this if you’re trying to lose weight, kinda look at your life, okay, what is causing me to maintain the weight that I’m at and preventing me from putting into action my intentions, right? So it could be, well the friction point… You actually, you can actually do this. You can actually increase friction, right? If it’s too easy to get to food that’s not good for you. The friction audit would say, well I can make this harder by just not even buying this stuff and putting in my house.

Adam Alter: Yeah, exactly. My last book on phones and screens and how much time we spend on them was about largely this idea that it is just too easy to start using these products. And so they end up sucking up a huge amount of our lives. Just as you might say, I won’t buy chocolate ’cause I don’t wanna eat chocolate, if you keep your phone far away from you, you create friction, you’re much less likely to use your phone. And so this, it’s an important general insight about humans that the things that are close to us or that are easy to access are the things we spend more time interacting with than doing, the things that are much further away tend to have a smaller impact on our lives. And so you’ve gotta sort of design your, the world around you, the way you design any other thing, the way an architect will design a building or a city, you’ve gotta do that for your own world. And so keep things around you that you wanna have around that’ll do good things for you and the things that you don’t wanna keep around you because you think they’re gonna make your life worse off. Make sure that they’re nowhere near you in physical space.

Brett McKay: So you also suggest when you’re in that stuck place in life or in work is try copying others to help you get unstuck. How can that help you get unstuck?

Adam Alter: Yeah, it’s funny that, we privileged this idea of radical originality. One of the things I teach my MBA students, we talk about innovations and we look at all the greatest products of the last 50 years. We talk about them and I ask my students, tell me a product that’s truly radically original that had no predecessor, there was, it wasn’t built on the ideas of someone else. And it’s very, very, very difficult to do that with products. And it’s just as difficult to do that with things like films or music or art. And the problem with privileging and putting on a pedestal radical originality is that it sets this unrealistic bar. And so I talk about the idea that a better way to go is to recombine old ideas. And actually, almost every instance of something that seems from the outside, like it’s new and radically different is just a new way of thinking of two things or meshing two or more things together.

I talk a little bit about, for example Dave Grohl, Bob Dylan, these musicians who, when people talk about them, they say they’re doing something that’s pretty new and pretty different. And even other musicians say about Bob Dylan in particular, he was a genuinely original voice of the 20th century. But when you go back and you look at where his origins began, he was combining folk, he was combining rock at the time, pop, he was combining blues. He put it all together in a new way. But the building blocks of all of that were not themselves new. And I think that’s, it’s an important insight because it makes the process of coming up with good ideas, with good products, with good whatever things you’re trying to create much more tractable. It means you’re much more likely to succeed.

Brett McKay: When I read this idea of copying others, it made me think of the idea of woodshedding. Do you know about this idea?

Adam Alter: No, I don’t.

Brett McKay: So Woodshedding comes from jazz. You’re supposed to go to the woodshed where it’s kind of far away and no one can hear you and practice. And the idea is you practice where no one can hear you so that you could come back later and then show off what you’ve learned. And I think woodshedding, you can copy the work of others in woodshed at the same time, right? Like you want to do this in private, you wouldn’t want to copy someone out in the public blatantly ’cause that’s just, that’s just copying, that’s like plagiarism. But what you can do is you can take the work of others and practice with it privately, remix it, try things, and then once you got something new, then you can bring it out.

Adam Alter: A 100%. Yeah. So no one would say that Dylan isn’t doing something that’s on some level different. I just think that the idea that these things that seem new are kind of mystical and just appear out of nowhere, that’s the nonsense, right? So I’m sure Dylan did something like woodshedding. He took these ideas that he liked and maybe he didn’t even do it explicitly, but they were infused in his music. And so he went and he practiced and he created the style that became Bob Dylan’s style. But that doesn’t mean that what he was doing was plagiarism or that it wasn’t on some level new and different. It just means that all that other stuff seeped into it. It was like a sort of tea that had been made with all the ideas that had come before. But you need time for it to steep and that’s that process of woodshedding or practicing or honing or whatever you wanna call it.

Brett McKay: So I know… Yeah, I know. What’s the guy’s name? He wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Oh, Hunter S. Thompson.

Adam Alter: Hunter S. Thompson, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. He supposedly typed out, I think it was The Great Gatsby ’cause he just wanted, he wanted to see what it felt like to write a great novel. Who knows if that did anything, but maybe it did. But I also Austin Cleon has that idea of steal like an artist. All artists are just copying each other, but they’re, it’s not blatant like word exact copy. Like you said, you just kind of, you work with the previous people’s stuff until it seeps into what you do and then you come out with something original. That’s how creativity works. You also have this chapter about when you’re stuck about understanding the idea or the difference between exploring and exploiting. And I really like this chapter. So what’s the difference between exploring and exploiting?

Adam Alter: Yeah, this goes back to evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology that you basically have essentially two ways to look for something new and fruitful and valuable. Let’s say you are hunting and gathering, you’re looking for fruit or food or whatever you’re doing it, you are roaming the Savannah, it’s thousands of years ago. You can roam far and wide, you can cover a lot of terrain, very shallowly. Or you can find an area that seems like it might be fruitful and really dig deeply into that area. But then you’re gonna be leaving a lot of the other pastures without your attention and so you might be missing something. And that’s really how we are as we navigate the world, as we figure out the best way forward. And so there’s a lot of research on these two. Exploring is basically a moment where you say yes to opportunities or options.

So if you think about, I, for me it was like the early days of college, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. So anytime an opportunity came along. I was like, yes, I will try that, see what that’s like. Figure out if that particular career path might work for me. I might meet a person who’s interesting and shows me a new way of doing something. I’ll just say yes to any invitation that comes my way. That’s exploring, it’s being open to different approaches. Jackson Pollock, the Painter for example, before he was doing his drip paintings that he became very famous for, was trying five or six different techniques. Peter Jackson, the director of Lord of the Rings films and the Hobbit, before he was this kind of giant fantasy epic film director and producer. He was doing a hundred other things. He wrote horror films, he wrote all sorts of other films.

And so you’ve gotta kind of dance around and figure out what works best. But if you do that forever, you’re never gonna get anywhere. So once you’re done exploring, you basically have to call it and say, okay, I’ve been exploring for a while. Of the five things I explored, this one looks like it’s the most fruitful. And so what I’m gonna do moving forward is say yes only to that thing. I’m gonna put all my time and attention and money towards that thing and say no to everything else. I’m gonna become singularly focused on that thing and make the most of it. And that’s when you see Jackson Pollock with his drip paintings and you see Peter Jackson with his fantasy epics. You just can’t get there if you don’t first explore. And you can’t succeed if you don’t, after exploring exploit, go really deep and make the most of what you’ve got. And so when you look at careers, you look for the period of careers where you find a hot streak, like the best period in someone’s career. It’s almost always after they have explored and then exploited and sometimes multiple times between the two. Explore then exploit, explore then exploit. And that’s when those hot streaks come up.

Brett McKay: I think this is great advice for people. Again, going back, I’m middle-aged. If you feel like you’ve reached a point in middle-aged where you feel stuck, you probably had a period in your 30s, maybe through your 40s where you were exploiting, like you did all this exploration in your 20s, you went to college, tried different classes, tried different careers, you moved to new cities, made new friends. And then you slowly found, here, this is what’s working for me. I’m gonna just, I’m gonna exploit this. And you probably stopped exploring. You might reach a point where you’re like, I’m feeling stuck, I’m feeling stagnant. And that’s where you have to sort of purposely and intentionally shift into exploration mode. And that can be hard because you’re probably comfortable and there’s this, gonna be an inertia not to say yes to things or try new things, but that’s what you gotta do.

Adam Alter: Yeah, you’re right. There is an element of difficulty here, right? Whenever you’re doing something that you’ve been doing for a while and therefore by definition perhaps, you’ve reached a plateau, it’s very comfortable at that point. Part of the plateau is this signal that you are doing something that no longer taxes you and so you’re not improving. And there’s, in some cases, nothing wrong with that. There are these famous cases of people who said, I was overwhelmed with the job I was doing. So every day, I wore the same clothes. I had 10 of the same suit or Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck, Barack Obama in the same suits every day. That’s an attempt to kind of minimize the mental load. And so there’s value in that in just doing things the same way all the time. But as you say, you have to reach a point where you say, I’m gonna pivot back to exploring. You’ve gotta range far and wide again.

Brett McKay: How have you done this in your own career? I mean, you’ve had a long career and varied career. How have you kind of gotten over that inertia to not explore when you needed to explore?

Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean for me, this started really early. I was at university in Australia. I was studying actuarial science, which is this sort of high level financial math course. And I knew I didn’t like it. And I was on a fellowship. And one day the person running the fellowship came in and said, if you keep doing this for another week, you’re gonna thereafter, if you ever quit, have to pay back the money. And that was the signal I needed. So I quit. I said, look, this isn’t working for me. But I had no idea what to do next. I felt profoundly stuck. I was obviously spending a fair amount of money being at the university, amassing a fair amount of debt and I wanted to figure out what was next, but I had no idea where to go. So what I did was I spent six months going to every possible first level class that I could.

I went to English classes, math classes, chemistry classes, engineering classes, psychology classes, law classes, you name it. I went and sat in and tried to get a taste of it, and that was my period of exploration. And from that, I realized that I liked psychology and I liked law, and those are the two degrees I did as an undergrad, psychology and law. And then ended up doing what I do now, which is sort of, in the beginning it was a combination of the two, and then I pursued psychology more heavily and then ultimately ended up in a business school as a marketing professor. But that’s all… I couldn’t have done that without that six month period of exploration. I needed to do that before I exploited the degrees and the courses that made the most sense to me.

Brett McKay: Well I was thinking as you were saying that. Another reason why going back into explore mode could be hard is ’cause it makes you feel dumb, right? ‘Cause you have to be a beginner again. Like you went to those introductory college classes, and it doesn’t feel good to be a beginner. You’re thinking, well I’ve mastered some things. Why am I not sticking to that? But now you gotta feel how bad it feels sometimes to be a complete noob at something.

Adam Alter: Oh, absolutely. It’s not easy on a certain level, you gotta swallow your pride. But also, you can think about this. There are two ways to live in any moment. You’re either stagnant or you’re growing. And one way to grow is to be a beginner. Beginners grow really fast, much more rapidly than experts grow. And so to go from being a beginner to being someone who’s moderately proficient at something or lots of things, that is a true form of growth that I think a lot of us don’t experience and don’t cultivate. There is massive benefit in that. I will say that period of exploration where I didn’t end up becoming an English major or a chemistry major or a math major, I still learned quite a lot about those areas. And I think that was important for me as well. That period of gathering little bits of information about 25 different disciplines had a massive amount of value that I didn’t foresee. So it’s not like this is all going to waste when you’re exploring, it’s all becoming a part of who you are. And David Epstein wrote the book, Range, about exactly that idea that in the course of ultimately flourishing, you’ve gotta kind of spend some time just dancing around different areas and figuring out if they’re worthwhile for you. And that will have a beneficial effect for whatever it is you ultimately specialize in later on.

Brett McKay: Yeah, no failure, just steps to success.

Adam Alter: That’s it.

Brett McKay: How do you know, if you’re in the explore mode, how do you know we need to shift to exploit mode?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so there are a few ways to do this. One is to just say, I am gonna give myself a certain amount of time. So in the example I gave you when I was jumping around from different course to course in college, I knew that the semester was gonna end at a certain date. So I used that as my guide and then I would have to sign up for a new program and that’s what I did. So I had a very clear six month period to do that. If you have objective metrics to pay attention to, if you’re doing something that gives you numerical feedback, you can use that feedback. Like for example, you might say, I’m gonna try these five different techniques. Let’s say you’re trying to work out, which I don’t know, technique of art is the one that you want to pursue if you’re an artist, something like that, you could say to yourself, I’m going to create five artworks in each style and then once I’ve done that, I’ll have my 25 artworks, five styles times five works, and then I’m gonna decide which one to exploit.

So you can use different decision rules to decide. I think also it’s important to pay attention to what it feels like to be in this process ’cause you can get to the point where exploring gets stale. Where you start feeling like, I don’t want to be doing this anymore. I’m ready to really focus on something. And I know that happens with me with books. Between books, I will, this is my third book now. Between books I’ll say I’m interested in 10 different things, but I don’t know when I’m ready to start actually making one of them a book. So I will spend a certain amount of time until I, that the ideas become from 10 to nine to eight to seven, and then I’ll be left with a few that look like good candidates. And eventually, I’ll hit a wall and just say, I can’t keep noodling about with this. I’ve gotta really make a go of it. And that’s when I’ll write the proposal and work on the book.

Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about how to deal with being stuck by changing how we think about being stuck, changing about how we think about failure, thinking of ways we can get unstuck, but then eventually, you gotta start taking action. So what role does action take in helping us get unstuck?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so it’s funny, the last chapter in the book is titled Action Above All. And that’s because all of the discussions about emotions, slowing things down, strategies and so on, none of that would matter for getting unstuck if you didn’t do something, all of that is in the service of action and action is really the main thing that we’re focusing on here. So action is critically important for getting unstuck ’cause it’s the thing that actually un-sticks you. And that’s true in a sort of very obvious sense that you can’t get unstuck if you’re not moving, if you’re static. But it’s also true in a more profound sense, which is that when you do something, when you act, even if the action itself is not dramatically productive, even if it doesn’t produce something that you can then use for the rest of time, the mere fact that you’re acting lubricates the wheels and gets you moving forward.

There’s this great example of this that I love Jeff Tweedy, the front man of Wilco who writes music for the band Wilco, but also is a writer. He writes books. He’s talked a lot about his creative process and he talks about the fact that he wakes up a lot of days, he’s been doing this a long time for decades and he’ll wake up on a lot of days and say, I don’t feel like being creative today. Nothing’s gonna happen. And so what he does is, he says to himself, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna spend say half an hour in the morning pouring out all the bad ideas, like sort of extracting them from my brain, putting them on the page and then that will make way for the good stuff. And so what he does is he says to himself, what’s the worst sentence I could write right now? Or what’s the worst bit of music I could compose? And he does that. Sometimes it’s better than he thinks and it’s valuable, but a lot of the time, it’s not, it’s not actually useful, but it’s, it by definition, by doing that, lowering the bar all the way down to the ground, you’re still acting. And so you show yourself something about your capacity to act rather than sitting around and naval gazing you’re doing something and there’s value in that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I like that idea that quantity and quality are related because the more stuff you put out, you increase the chances of you actually having a home run. I mean the same thing with baseball, right? I think what everyone famously says, Babe Ruth, he’s the home run King, but yeah, like the most strikeouts, he’s struck out a ton of times.

Adam Alter: Exactly.

Brett McKay: He’s taken action. The same idea that applies to any other domain in life.

Adam Alter: Exactly.

Brett McKay: And then also you talk about besides taking action on the thing that you’re wanting to get unstuck in, you also talk about just physically moving can help you get unstuck. Like actually getting up and moving your body can help you get unstuck from whatever is you’re stuck in.

Adam Alter: Yeah, there’s a lot of research on the value of walking, of moving and so if you’re trying to think of something and you’re sitting on your seat at your desk and it’s not working, walk outside if it’s nice out, get on a treadmill, if it’s not. Move your body pace around, it tends to sort of grease the wheels a little bit and get things moving again. If you are an athlete, do whatever it is that you like doing. There’s this amazing set of videos of Paul Simon who obviously not an athlete but a great musician. And Paul Simon was notoriously shy, but he was on a number of talk shows in the ’70s and ’80s. One of them was the Dick Cavett show and he would get onto the show and Cavett would ask him questions, and he would just absolutely struggle to respond. And it was clear that he wasn’t comfortable being there.

He would even make comments about the microphone and its position. He just felt really uncomfortable. But Cavett very wisely said to him, why don’t you pick up your guitar and show us how you wrote bridge over troubled water or something like that. And Simon did that and the minute he started strumming, he was charming and relaxed and things came to him much more easily. So if there’s something you do, whether it’s lifting weights, going for a run, riding on a bike, it doesn’t matter, rowing, whatever it is, that movement seems to be, it gets you to a comfortable place mentally as well and seems to lubricate whatever gears need to be turning in your head to unstick you.

Brett McKay: Yeah, getting into your body gets you out of your head sometimes, which can be useful.

Adam Alter: A 100%.

Brett McKay: Well Adam, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so I’m on Twitter and LinkedIn and are my main channels, that’s where I post information. I’ve been posting about the book a fair amount there, so there’s quite a lot of information there. I also have a website, AdamAlterauthor that is basically a compilation of all the press material and other things that have been written about the book or that I’ve written about the book. And those are probably the two places. But yeah, the book is available online, it’s available in bookstores and will be available from May 16.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Adam Alter, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Adam Alter: Thanks so much for having me, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest, it was Adam Alter, he’s the author of the book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, adamalterauthor.com. Also check our show notes at aom.is/unstuck, and find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to join ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com. Sign up, use code “manliness” at checkout for a free month’s trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it.

As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #896: The Art and Science of Getting Unstuck appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

When the video game Rock Band became popular, kids flocked to music lessons, inspired to learn how to really play the songs they’d been jamming out to with instrument-like controllers. 

But, they quit as quickly as they’d started, disappointed to find that mastering an actual instrument was a lot harder than smashing buttons on a plastic toy.

As C.S. Lewis observed, this kind of disappointment “occurs on the threshold of every human endeavor. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted . . .  by Stories of the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.”

Amidst this transition, two things collide. 

The first is an idealized vision of what an endeavor will be like, made up of the highlights of the process (buying a new guitar; sinking three-pointers; getting into the flow of writing) and the consummate outcome (slaying a solo; wearing a championship ring; seeing your novel become a bestseller). 

The second is the reality of all the daily, tedious, frustrating work that comes in between those far rarer moments. 

When the ideal runs into reality, most people turn back in dismay.

Focused on the realization that the road to their aim is much steeper and rockier than anticipated, they forget the fact that the glory of the destination remains unchanged.

Used to describe the journey to greatness, the Latin phrase per aspera ad astra is often translated as “through hardships to the stars.” It is well to remember, however, that regardless of how much outright adversity you may face on the path to the heavens, there is always one surprisingly strenuous portal to be passed through first: that of garden-variety, workaday disappointment.

The post Sunday Firesides: Through Disappointment to the Stars appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

When Daniel Zia Joseph decided to join the Army at the unusually late age of 32, he solicited advice from his buddies who had served in the military on how to succeed in the experience and become a good officer and leader. Today, he passes on these leadership lessons to us.

Dan is the author of Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts, and he first shares why he decided to join the Army at an older age and what he would tell other guys who keep thinking about doing the same thing. We talk about how he prepared himself to be a leader and how getting his masters in organizational psychology helped deepen his development. We then discuss the lessons his military mentors imparted to him, including why you should pursue attrition, the importance of command climate, using psychological jiu-jitsu, and the difference between garrison and field leadership.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Dan’s video about joining the military after age 30
• AoM Podcast #875: Authority Is More Important Than Social Skills
• AoM Article: Are You a Strategist or an Operator?
• Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer

Connect With Dan Joseph

• Dan’s website — Combat Psych

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Podcast Sponsors

Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When Daniel Zia Joseph decided to join the army at the unusually late age of 32, he solicited advice from his buddies who had served in the military on how to succeed in the experience and become a good officer and leader. Today, he passes on these leadership lessons to us. Dan is author of Backpack to Rucksack, insight into leadership and resilience from military experts. And he first shares why he decided to join the army at an older age and what he would tell other guys who keep thinking about doing the same thing. We talk about how he prepared himself to be a leader and how getting his masters in organizational psychology helped deepen his development. We then discuss the lessons his military mentors imparted to him, including why he should pursue attrition, the importance of command climate, using psychological Jiu-jitsu and the difference between garrison and field leadership. After the show is over check out our show notes at aom.is/militarymentors.

All right, Dan Joseph, welcome to the show.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Hey, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you got a new book out called Backpack to Rucksack, where you share insights on leadership and resilience that you learned in the military and in your work in organizational psychology. But before we talk about the book, let’s talk about your experience joining the Army because you did so at the age of 32, which is unusually late in life. A lot of guys aren’t joining the Army at age 32. So what’s the age limit for joining the Army? Were you pretty close to the the upper end?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yes. So as a commissioned officer, I needed to commission by the age of 33. And I signed up at 32. So the recruiter definitely had my back against the wall saying you either sign the contract or you’re going to miss your window. So I jumped in. But yep, definitely pushed against that that age limit for the Army. Each branch has a different age limit. But I tell people to… I receive a lot of questions from people asking if they’re too old. And I tell them always ask a recruiter because those numbers do change depending on the needs of the government and military, what branches need.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about your life before you joined and like then what led you to signing up at age 32. So what was going on before age 32? So you’re 18. That’s when most guys, when they’re thinking about joining the army, they join right at a high school or maybe in college. What were you doing? And then talk about what was going on right before you joined at age 32.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah. So I have a pretty, pretty unique story, I guess, to myself. I worked in biotech for quite a while here in San Diego and a lot of genetic research companies out here. I’ve worked with companies that were genetically modifying specific organisms to create industry, new industry products, some wild stuff. And it led into a job involving machine learning algorithms and borderline AI back then a few years back, to basically enhance genetic codes to optimize genes and snip out disease markers from humans, from animals, a lot of really cool stuff happening. But I was essentially working initially in the laboratory and then I moved towards business development. And what really pushed me to join the military was when ISIS was actually attacking civilians and the populace in Iraq. My family is from there. My parents escaped barely with their lives back in the ’70s. And I had a lot of friends that I made here in San Diego who were on the SEAL teams, different branches who were deploying to go fight those guys.

And as I was over here, working in a world where we were literally using computer software to design genetic code and enhance the human species in a way that’s just absolutely mind blowing, My friends were in this primal fight in a war zone that they had nothing to do with. They were entering into that fight selflessly to go save people. And they came back with these stories that were just… They were literally fighting in the villages my parents grew up in. And I felt this deep desire to put on a uniform and contribute in any way possible. I just felt it was my duty because America saved my family. They gave us a place of refuge and that just really weighed heavy on me. So as I’m working on my company, I eventually started my own company and was making pretty good money, but then my friends would come back from these deployments telling me about some of the stuff they got into. And I just felt so compelled to let go of what I had here and to join the military, just to be able to tell myself before I’m on my death bed someday, like, hey, I did it.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about in the book during that time when you were working, you’re working hard, making good money. There’s also a hint of you felt kind of restless. There was drinking and you hang around the wrong kind of crowd and you just felt like you weren’t going anywhere either.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah. So, especially if you’re the child of say immigrants and you grew up in the United States. So, I was born in the US my parents, like I said, they left Iraq in the ’70s. I was really trying to discover myself in a way here that… Yeah, it involved the wrong crowd, for sure. I got involved into what I thought was sort of popular behaviors, a lot of drinking, and then that quickly moved into a crowd that use drugs, partied pretty hard, play hard, work hard. And I got caught up in a lifestyle where it was just… It was driven sort of by how cool people thought you were based on this persona. And it felt… It was extremely superficial, very high quantity, low quality with the relationships. I made some good friends, but it definitely didn’t require discipline. It just required showing up, getting drunk and trying to have as much fun as possible. But when I started meeting friends in the military, I noticed a stark contrast between their behaviors, their level of discipline, their presence, their physicality, how they approached life. And I was drawn to their mindset. They were super sharp, super driven. And they definitely had goals far beyond what I was doing, which was just basically going from hangover to hangover. And these guys were getting after it, training all the time. And it was really inspiring to me.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you joined up at age 32. Did you face any challenges joining at that age?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Honestly, no, I didn’t. I have a lot of friends who were in the military at the time. And they their number one piece of advice to me was stay physically fit. Because regardless of age, when you show up, your body is… It’s your resume to the guys around you, especially as an officer. People want to be led by somebody who inspires them. And when you show up in good shape physically, and you can do the rucks, you can do the runs, pull ups, push ups, everything that they test you in, the guys are going to follow you, they’re going to want to be a part of your group. And age was never an issue for me. The biggest thing I was told was to never use my age as a way to talk down to anybody or be condescending. Basically, if people wanted to tap into whatever life wisdom I had, then I would allow them to ask for that. But I was definitely schooled on, Hey, just show up, keep your mouth shut, be present, and just stay physically driven. That’s going to motivate people.

Brett McKay: So what did you end up doing in the army?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I was a combat engineer. So I was a platoon leader for 19 months. It was a separate platoon is what we call it. And essentially, we would simulate combat exercises with minefields and wire obstacles, tank ditches, basically, simulating what World War III may look like.

Brett McKay: So like, what advice would you give to older guys who… They keep thinking about, should I join the military? What should I do? Am I too old? What advice you have for them? Would you just recommend to just go for it?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, I mean, I definitely tell people, if you’re thinking about it, at least start training for it. Because here’s the thing, even if you don’t make it into the military, the fact that you got up and trained yourself and started running and started doing the dieting and all of that, that’s required to just be at your top shape, it will progress you to becoming a better version of yourself. So I don’t see any downfall to pursuing that there’s a lot of people that reach out to me saying, Hey, I don’t know if I’m going to get cleared for some some medical things, or maybe some past criminal activity or whatever it is that happened in their life. And I say, don’t close the door on it, there might be a recruiter out there who’s going to find a waiver for whatever it is you’re dealing with. And don’t ever let age or any sort of negative self thought hold you back. Don’t limit yourself. And it’s amazing to see what people have. I mean, I’ve talked to guys who’ve lost over a 100 pounds just training for a military gig. That’s phenomenal.

Brett McKay: All right. So there’s the big thing. If you’re older, just stay in shape. Like if you’re fit, they’re going to take you. If you, even if you’re at that age limit.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Absolutely. Yeah. Fitness is like the number one thing because you just, you have to be able to pass those fitness tests. Yeah.

Brett McKay: I think what I heard is that it’s something like 70% of young people wouldn’t be able to qualify for military service.

Daniel Zia Joseph: I’ve heard that.

Brett McKay: A lot of that is because of obesity. That’s why they’re having recruiting problems. So how did joining the army change your life and what are you doing now?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Well, so I’m out now. I was in for three and a half years. I’m actually thinking about signing another contract. I have a MEPs appointment coming up to go in and get medically screened again. But being in the military really changed my life in ways that I never thought. I definitely was close to the troops. I loved being around them. It taught me a lot about leadership. It taught me a lot about how to relate to others in an organization that’s just constantly under high stress, high op tempo, just back to back training. It really left a mark on me that I didn’t expect. So I don’t know what to say. I could talk a lot about that.

Brett McKay: And also while you were in the military, you got your… That’s where the work in organizational psychology came in, correct?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah. So the lockdowns impacted a lot of our training and during the downtime I thought to myself, what can I do to optimize? I didn’t want to just survive the lockdowns. I really wanted to thrive during the lockdown. So I thought, well, work out three times a day, don’t drink a drop of alcohol and get a master’s degree. And I lived by that. That was my day in and day out. And I wanted to come out of the lockdowns better than I ever was. And getting the masters was eye opening to me, because as I’m leading these soldiers, as I’m seeing the impact of mental health, as I’m talking to dudes that have been to war, the first and second waves in Fallujah and Iraq and dealing with all these issues. And, I’m working with them, I’m seeing the physiological response of what happens to them at work, based on what they experienced. Simultaneously, I’m writing these articles and doing my research for my master’s, it was just an amazing connection that I was realizing between the human brain, interpersonal relationships, organizational dynamics, and it definitely added a lot of depth to my understanding of what was going on.

Brett McKay: When you got out with your initial contract, did you go back to the corporate world or what was going on then?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So that was actually pretty recent, like a few months ago. So I’m currently working on another master’s degree and I can tell you that… I’m 36 now, And I can tell you that all the training I did in the military left… It put a fire in me. I’m in the best shape of my life right now, and I cannot sit still. I mean, I’m working out multiple workouts a day, still doing ruck runs, still staying physically active. And I thought that when I got out of the military, I would be totally okay with a much more sedentary life, back into an office environment. And that’s… Yeah, that’s definitely not what happened. It’s really shocking to me. So I’m currently doing some training with a group of guys that are working on some amazing pipelines in the military. They have some tough pipelines ahead of them, and I’m working side by side with them right now at the gym, doing some runs with them. And they’re motivating me a lot more than I thought I could ever be motivated. So that’s why I’m kind of looking into some additional contracts in the next few months, actually.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about your book. So Backpack to Rucksack, what you did is leading up to you trying to figure out whether you’re gonna sign up with the Army. And also during that time when you were going through the process of training and whatnot, you got a lot of military friends and that you were talking to them, asking them for advice. Like, what do I need to know when I’m going through this process and becoming a commissioned officer? How do I handle this situation? And what you did in the book is you shared these insights you got from these various friends of yours in the military from all branches of the military. And then you combine that with your research that you’ve done in organizational psychology. And so each chapter highlights a different concept or topic. And in the first part of the book, the first chapter, you talk about this bit of advice you got from… I think it was a Green Beret friend of yours, about pursuing attrition in life, but also in the military world. What did he mean by that?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So his advice was to pursue pipelines in the military that people complained about. Pursue… Basically his philosophy is that any route you want to take in life that other people are afraid of or that they’re being just really critical or negative about it’s a filtration mechanism. It’ll stop the wrong people from pursuing it and it’ll filter for the stronger candidates. And he was just saying, make sure that… When you join the military, if you do want to find group of brothers around yourself that are just operating at a level that is far beyond your own perceived limitations, you need to go down some hard pads that remove the guys who just tap out early. And he said, next thing you know, you’ll be rubbing elbows with other people that are like-minded who sort of keep their mouth shut and just work really hard.

Brett McKay: And this is applicable outside the military too, in work, in your physical fitness. If you want to rub elbows with the best, just top-notch individuals, do the hard stuff ’cause that’s gonna filter out all the riff-raff.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Essentially, that was exactly how he approached life, yep.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about another concept you learned from a friend of yours who’s a marine named Will, and he taught you the importance of command climate. What is command climate?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Essentially, it’s culture. It’s work culture. In the military, it’s really unique because the person at the top in whatever unit you’re looking at tends to… They set the temperature for the entire unit. So if you have someone who is super physical and super into fitness, you’ll see that everyone below them, all the subordinates suddenly begin to really invest in fitness. They suddenly become really gym oriented. But on the converse side of that, let’s say you have someone who is really negative and really, it’s an overused word, but if they say they’re toxic or have certain insecurities or they have a shame-based orientation towards their leadership style, you’ll see people below them begin to treat others the same way. And you can’t really change command climate in the military. You can’t walk into a unit and go up to somebody at that rank and say, hey, sir, hey, ma’am, I need you to conduct yourself differently, so we can all experience a whole different climate. What you get is what you get. And Will’s advice was you gotta make the most of it. If it’s bad, it’s gonna be bad, but you gotta just figure out how to handle it until that leader leaves and you get someone new. And if it’s good, then definitely count your blessings and just… You’re gonna have a blast in the job for sure. They’re gonna make the job awesome.

Brett McKay: Did you have any experiences of really bad command climate in the corporate world or the military?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I mean, definitely I’ve seen good and bad. I mean, as we all have, I’m sure, so definitely have seen the impact of it. And what’s astounding to me is the way in which it compounds the stress around us, because, I tell people attack problem sets, don’t attack people. If something sucks, if something needs to be enhanced or optimized or modified, whatever it is, the military and the corporate world, look at the problem set before you. You don’t have to make it personal. You don’t have to bring emotions into it and attack others and involve ego. So what I’ve seen good leaders do is when there is an issue that needs to be addressed, they are enablers of people. They enable subordinates. They enable everyone around them to find solutions. And if you fail, then okay, so be it, but pick yourself up and find the next solution that’ll work. Own it and make it great. Figure out a way to make the situation better. But what I’ve noticed toxic leaders will do is they will have a more fixed mindset as Carol Dweck talks about growth versus fixed mindset. They’ll sort of approach the situation as, hey, nothing’s gonna change. This is the way it is. Shut up and fall in line. I don’t care what your opinion is. I don’t care what data you have from your perspective.

I don’t see a viable solution and I don’t care that you think there is one. Just carry on, keep everything status quo how it is. And it’s stifling. And it’s not just on the job. We take it home with us. It follows us home, that stress, that level of… That feeling of not having a voice. It’s really repressive. And it feeds a lot into the personality of the leader. So again, if it’s a great leader, if there’s somebody who’s open-minded, you’ll feel that. There will be a sense of levity, even amidst highly stressful conversations or situations.

And one thing I will say, there was an EOD that talked to us about his experience in Iraq. There was a guy that got blown up, and there was a body on the ground. And I mean, definitely the dude was jacked up. And the medic started panicking. And the EOD ran up to him because in those situations, the medic takes control, right? Takes over. A lot of the guys who survived the blast, were looking at the medic starting to lose control. So this EOD ran up to him and grabbed him and said, look, man, I need you to take a breath, and I need you to focus. Do what you can to save this guy. If you can’t, fine. But do what you can, but everyone’s watching you right now. And what he was telling us as new officers, he said, look, your attitude is everything in the military because calm is contagious, just the same way that panic is contagious. So whatever type of leader you’re going to be, the men around you, the women around you are going to pick up on that. So be sure to lead and conduct yourself in a way that you want other people to pick up. Because good or bad, they will pick up on whatever vibe you’re putting out into the unit.

Brett McKay: Okay, so yeah, in order to be a leader that creates a good command climate, it’s just… It’s a lot of self work, right? It’s working to learn how to control your emotions, working on your own discipline, working on those social and people skills, those soft skills, it’s a full-time job. It’s not just something that happens, it’s something you have to be intentional about.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Absolutely, and I learned that in the corporate world. When I started my own business, I had a mentor, George. He was like a father figure to me. And I was struggling with some high-power executives that were… I was in some negotiations that were just absolutely intimidating to me. And George pulled me aside in sort of a coaching seminar that we had together, a discussion we had. And he let me know. He said, look, basically, the man that you are privately, it’s going to come out in the room when you negotiate. And he said, the other men you’re dealing with are sharks. I mean, if they smell blood in the water, you’re dead. They’re going to tear you to pieces in a negotiation. So he said, you got to work on yourself. You got to know who you are outside of the business world, outside of the office, who you are privately, when you put your head on the pillow at night, when you look in the mirror, who are you? Once you figure out who you are, and you have a grasp on that, and you ground yourself in that, you can then approach the negotiations with that level of confidence that is gonna allow you to have better leverage, and other people will not take advantage of you. Situations that suck won’t take advantage of you.

They won’t change you. You will bring light into that dark situation. And that was one of the most profound pieces of information I received because I realized that, if I don’t work on myself, the guys around me are gonna suffer. My ego issues, my insecurities, my personal private hangups are gonna come out at work in the way that I speak to others and the way that I treat others. And then all of a sudden they have to manage my emotions for me. And the job’s stressful enough, especially in the military. Training can be life and death. And if I’m bringing my own ego issues and the guys around me have to manage that, man, I’m doing them a disservice. So yeah, absolutely. I encourage every leader, pick up books, read, study yourself because you’re gonna benefit the organization, you’re gonna benefit your relationships, your marriages, your relationship with your kids. Everything will benefit when you grow yourself privately and personally.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So in the military, you have to deal with all sorts of personalities, especially big personalities. Did you have any experience dealing with difficult people with big egos when you were in the military?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, I mean, the… It’s common to see people… And again, this happens in any organization, but when you see someone use their rank as a way of trying to stifle others, trying to sort of demand control… And psychology, they call that positional authority. You can have moral authority, you can have positional authority. Moral basically means when you walk in a room, regardless of rank, people, they trust you, they know that you know things, they see that confidence in you. Positional authority means, hey, do you know who I am? Do you know where I am on the hierarchy. Okay, cool. So fall in line, they rely on their rank. And yeah, I mean, I’ve seen that and I’ve had to manage that, absolutely.

Brett McKay: Did you have any military friends who gave you any advice on what to do with those big egos? People who were trying to use their positional authority to get things the way they wanted?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the biggest pieces of advice on that was my buddy Brad, he’s an EOD commander now, but he was deployed in Afghanistan. And he told me about some situations where guys would try to pull rank, and he would let them know… I mean, and this would happen in the battlefield, as he’s dealing with an IED. And he had to tell people, some people who’re very high rank to shut up and sit down, because if they continue to distract him, there could be fallout that’ll kill everybody around them. So what he taught me was, when you know something is correct, there’s a way to present it to somebody who’s an authority with a respectful attitude, yet assertive. Assertion is really important when you know something is right. So it is important to stand by what you know. However, depending on what personality you’re dealing with, you got to manage it in a way that they will be receptive to it. And at that point, it’s really dependent on the person that you’re dealing with because sometimes direct is the best approach. Other times you got to stroke their ego a bit. You got to find a way to… I don’t want to say play the politics of it, ’cause that can get really dirty, but you got to find a way to get them to have an open mind.

And this is where… I mean, I could talk for days about this, but this is something we learn in Jiu-jitsu as well. We call it working the angles, basically. Jiu-jitsu is all about having the right angle. Approaching leadership dynamics, it’s the same way. Certain leaders, again, hit them head on. They’ll respect that, they’ll respond to it. Other leaders, you can’t do that, because once you do it, it’s fight mode, and the discussion’s completely derailed.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you gave some examples in the book of… I think when you were in basic training, you had some guys who were kind of big dogging, right? They just kind of… They kind of walked around like they were the stuff, right? They had the stuff and they were just annoying. And they would do these things where they kind of confront you and try to assert themselves over you in the dominance hierarchy. And you talked about how you’re really tempted to just… I’m gonna punch back or I’m gonna push back, I’m gonna get angry about it. But like you said, you did some like psychological Jiu-jitsu on these guys to, instead of them being enemies or a liability, they actually ended up being an asset. Like what did you do to turn those guys from… Like you weren’t best friends with them, but they became guys who you could collaborate with and get things done.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, I think in retrospect, maybe they were trying to size me up to see if I would stand up for myself. And in any case, I was very direct when I approached them. I maintained eye contact. I was very direct, but I also did it privately. I didn’t do it in a way… So they would… There’s a situation where I was being called out in front of the entire platoon. And this was in training, not my actual platoon, but back in the schoolhouse. And so what I decided to do is control my heart rate, control my breathing. It’s the same way like on the mats when I’m getting smashed by one of the black belts that I train with. I need to gain physiological control of my body, calm myself down. And then what I did is I directly approached one of these individuals and I let them know, hey, we’re going to have a conversation about this, but again, it’s not going to be emotional.

This is just gonna be man to man, we’re just gonna have a quick talk about this. And he quickly realized that I wasn’t there to start a fight, I was there to learn. I let him know that, I said, look, I know I’m new, I know you’ve been in the military for a while, I’m not here to be disrespectful. I’m not here to flex on anyone. I’m here to learn. So if you have something to teach me, I’m all ears. But I’m not gonna play this game of one-upmanship, that’s just not how I roll. And I learned that because of my high school friend, Tim, who introduced me to Jiu-jitsu. He told me that if you’re ever dealing with somebody who just absolutely wants to tear you to pieces on the mat and wants to smash your face into the mat, you need to tell them, I’m not here to fight. I’m here to learn. So if you’re here to fight, that’s not why I’m here. And it really has tremendously had an impact on the mats. So I started taking that principle into the military and it had the same impact. It was amazing.

Brett McKay: All right. So yeah, be direct, do it in private. You can be assertive, but not a jerk about it. I guess is the key. Let’s talk about the politics of military life. So you mentioned that that military can be political and by political, we mean that you do… The people who do and say things, whatever it takes to advance their career. Well, you talked about, you learned this from your military buddies that politics can get in the way of effectiveness. How so?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So, and again, this is highly applicable to the corporate world, to any organization. Some people will use their rank and authority to get their agenda done. Whatever their agenda is, usually I’d say to promote their own sort of resume, but they’ll do so at the expense of the well-being of those around them, not wanting to hear about inconvenient pieces of information about the organization, but that can quickly get dark. So what’s really important and the advice I received is listen to the people around you, give everybody a voice so you know what exactly needs to be improved to help others and any rank that… As you rank up, the higher rank you get, the more people you serve. It’s not the other way around, because a lot of people commonly think that with more rank and more authority, you have more power over more people. But if you look at it inversely, it really helps add a healthier context to the relationship. The more rank you have, the higher up you are, the more people you are actually serving as a leader.

And the way you serve those people is… And I get it, you can’t have a perfect solution that everybody’s happy with. But the more conversations you have, the more incremental improvements you can have throughout the organization by removing red tape wherever you can remove red tape, allowing people to get the schools that they want to get, to work towards the credentials, to pursue the education they need, to have time with their family, with their kids, if they need medical help, whatever it is, just allowing rank to be used to improve the unit and not to just demand sort of respect authoritatively.

Brett McKay: So take a servant leadership approach instead of thinking about, well, how can I advance the hierarchy and improve my own status and rank?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Right.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And for a book, I don’t know if you’ve read this book. It’s a great book that highlights the difference between a military leader who is very political and one who has that servant leadership approach. It’s a Once an Eagle. Have you read this book?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So that book is definitely the Bible to a lot of my friends. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, so this book is written in 1968. It follows these two officers from World War I through Vietnam. One guy is Sam Damon, career army officer, started off as a private, and then he rose up to general officer rank and he was honorable. Like he was all about his soldiers. He was like the epitome, like he was the guy. And then the other guy who was the more political officer was this guy named Courtney Massingale. No honor, had no concern for his troops. All he cared about was going up in the rank. And it’s a great book if you want. It’s a beast of a book, but a lot of great lessons on leadership, especially about that dichotomy between being a political leader and a servant leadership type leader.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Definitely. We’ve had a lot of talks about that book. Yep.

Brett McKay: So a lot of the advice in the book is about just how to stay calm, right? Even when things are going just crazy around you. What was some of the best advice you got from your military buddies on staying calm during chaos?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I mean, essentially, just have an awareness of your physiological response to kind of zero out your own emotional impact in a situation. Because oftentimes, when, let’s say, a mission set suddenly changes, so we have a movement. We’re trying to get the convoy from one location to another. And everybody’s been briefed on it. And then suddenly a wrench gets thrown in. Because we were simulating combat as realistically as possible. And there’s tempers flare. People get real mad real quick when it’s 125 degrees and you’re in your full kit. And we’re talking about some dangerous terrain, some night movements. Things can get real sketchy real fast. And as a leader especially, if I were to feed into that angst with that same level of anger and frustration as I’m trying to brief the change in the mission, I mean, it would be horrible. It would just turn into this cluster of egos and sparks would fly. People would just be yelling at each other and I never wanted to do that. So the advice I received was, hey, look, when things suck, you just gotta calm yourself down, find your center. Again, remove the emotionality out of it, the primal limbic response of the brain. Get back into your prefrontal cortex. And I’m talking psychology here, but essentially get into your higher mind and come in there with a sense of awareness and transparency.

Like, hey guys, this is gonna suck. I know it’s gonna suck, all right, but here’s the change. We’re gonna do it, but let’s just… Let’s get it done. We know what needs to be done. And having that open and honest, that truthful approach, it helps kind of quell the anxiety of those around you. Because then they realize, you’re not leaving things undiscussed. Everything can be talked about. And then, yeah, we just kind of get over it. Like, all right, cool. Yeah, you acknowledge it sucks. I acknowledge it sucks as well. All right, let’s do it. And let’s do it safely. And let’s do it in a manner that’s efficient. But when people come in and say, hey, something changed. You’re going to do it. Don’t talk back. Get into the vehicle. Do this. Do that. Whatever it is that needs to be changed. Oh, man, there’s going to be some resentment that builds quickly.

Brett McKay: So you have a chapter on knowing the difference between garrison and field leadership. What’s the difference between the two?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So yeah, my artillery officer buddy told me that, Jazz. So, okay, so in the field, you deal with… Like let’s say desert terrain or whatever. It could be in the woods, it could be… I don’t know, wherever you are. But you’re dealing with more kinetic factors of the job. You’re dealing with weapons systems, you’re dealing with, adverse weather conditions, rough terrain, and if you’re a leader who… So in garrison, it’s on base. That’s more of the office side. That’s more the paperwork and stuff like that. So let’s say you’re great at the paperwork. If you go out in the field and you suck, then you could lead your convoy off a cliff. Conversely, if you’re really good at the tactics in the field and you’re good at moving people around and getting things done out there, but you come back to the office life and you don’t know how to work a computer or write a memo, then your guys are going to suffer because you’re not able to put in the awards for them. You’re not able to get them to the schools that they need to get to or help them with anything else that’s related to their personal lives.

So my buddy was telling me you could be two of three things in the military. Good at two of three things. You could be either a good officer in the field, you could could be a good officer in garrison or a good person. You can’t be all three, you’re always just two of those three. But he said always default to being a good person. ‘Cause whether you suck in the field or you suck in garrison, your guys are gonna have your back. But if you’re not a good person, then it doesn’t matter that you’re good at the other two, ’cause everyone’s gonna suffer. So that’s kind of the short and sweet.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think we wrote an article a while back ago about this difference between Garrison and Field, between Eisenhower and Patton. So Patton was probably… He was probably the better tactical officer. He loved being out in the field, being with the men and being in the muck and just being in the action. Eisenhower was more of a strategic officer, the Garrison. He was really good at people skills, negotiating, dealing with administrative things, things like that.

And because I think their personality suited those different things. And I think a lot of leaders, they get into trouble whenever they… They might be better as a field officer, but they get stuck in a garrison position or the opposite, like a garrison leader gets stuck in a field position. And I think the trick in leadership is finding out what you’re good at. And so this applies to the corporate world as well. You might be a guy who… Say you’re in sales or something. You’re really great being out in the field and talking to customers and dealing with other salesmen and encouraging them and motivating them. And maybe you get the promotion to manage a whole region, or maybe you’re at the office headquarters and you’re just miserable because it just doesn’t suit your personality. So I think that’s another trick of leadership is trying to figure out what you’re good at and leaning into that and not being tempted to go to something else because it might seem more prestigious or they might have more status.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. And I would say the best way to handle that situation when things seem sort of out of sync with who you are is to rely on those around you. And again, being a leader is being an enabler. So enabling those people around you to compensate for those deficits, to use their strength to, as a team, build a better unit. So that’s huge. So if ego gets in the way and a leader says, no, I got this, I know the book on this, I know the solutions and I’ll fix it, I’ll figure it out. Everyone’s gonna stand around and just watch that leader fail. So it’s really important to just admit, hey guys, look, I’m great at this stuff, this stuff right here, I need your help. So let’s do it. And with that open honesty and that mindset, it really helps shift everything around for that unit.

Brett McKay: So Dan, we talked about some great concepts in your book. Is there anything that we missed that you’re really passionate about that you hope people will get out of it?

Daniel Zia Joseph: The biggest thing that’s on my mind is the suicides that happen with veterans and with active duty service members. Leaders can do so much to just approach the job with a sense of humanity, a sense of kindness, a sense of love for their troops that doesn’t stop their tactical abilities. It enhances it. And this isn’t something I’ve necessarily just come up with on my own. This is something people who’ve been to war have told me. They said the purest feeling was being in a war zone, where the number one concern is, did everyone make it back from that movement, from that patrol? Is everyone intact? Is everyone here? Are they present? Are they okay? These service members that I got to work with and these friends that I’ve just… I’m so pumped that I was able to learn from them. And they just… They told me to focus on the relationships, because when you do that, you give people the resources and the tools to handle all the struggles in life that come home with them, where they’re not around their buddies, they’re not connected with others necessarily, but they understand how to handle it. They see their value, they see their capacity to overcome and that resilience stays true. So I would say the biggest takeaway is if you’re a leader, please don’t be afraid to look into what we consider the softer side of human relationships.

Because counterintuitively, it will not stop you from being a savage tactically, to being able to crush whatever physical feat is before you. But I just see sort of this trepidation about approaching leadership that way, because people don’t wanna seem vulnerable and weak. And I understand that, but do the research. Look at the psychological implications of connecting with people in that deeper level because it will save lives.

Brett McKay: Well, Dan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I have a website, CombatPsych.com, they can go to. And the book is on Amazon, Backpack to Rucksack, insight into leadership and resilience for military experts. And they can just put my name on there, Dan Joseph.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Dan Joseph, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Thank you, appreciate it.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dan Joseph. He’s the author of the book Backpack to Rucksack. It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, CombatPsych.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/military mentors, where you find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at ArtOfManliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code Manliness to check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #892: Leadership Lessons From Military Mentors appeared first on The Art of Manliness.