The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Unmistakable Classic: The Power of a Single Intention with Patti Digh

In this Unmistakable Classic, we revisit a thought provoking conversation with Patti Digh, author of Life is a Verb.

The importance of feeling good about the work you’re doing
Asking yourself what you’d do if you have 37 days to live
The keys to writing your voice with a sole intention
How art history and English degrees shaped Patti’s world view
The 3 blocks that keep dreams from coming true
A look at what it means to be truly transparent
How we deal with incredibly negative thoughts
How intention shapes the nature of what you create
Presence and the role that it plays in our lives
Why you don’t want to be invested in an outcome
Why you need organizing principles for a bigger body of work

Patti Digh, the creator and author of the award-winning blog 37days.com, is the author of the best-selling Life is a Verb (Skirt!), a Books for a Better Life nominee. An internationally recognized speaker who has worked in over 60 countries, Patti ’s comments have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The London Financial Times, and The New York Times, among other international press. Smart, funny, and insightful, her Web site is pattidigh.com. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

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Duration:: 1h 24m
Broadcast on:: 06 Jun 2014
Audio Format:: other

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At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced that they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of detail. Patty, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Oh, thanks for the invitation. Always a pleasure. Thank you. Well, I want to ask you my very first question that I usually ask everybody. And that is, can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background and kind of how that's brought you to doing this work that you do? Sure, I'm always tempted to begin this, to scare the interviewer by saying I was born in a small southern town as if we're going to go through the whole shebang, but definitely a southern girl. You know, I was doing business work after I finished graduate school. I got my graduate degree in English and art history from the University of Virginia and always thought I would teach, my mother to this day says, when are you going to teach college English? Moved to DC and got a job in a nonprofit, which really began my career because I ended up for the next 15 years building international divisions for relatively large nonprofit organizations. And that was fabulous. It was really a great way for me to see business at work in a nonprofit setting. And I knew at a certain point it was time to go. My daughter, my oldest daughter was about three and she climbed into bed with me after a very long trip, excuse me, and said, you know, mommy, I had a lot of dreams when you were gone. And I said, honey, what did you dream about? She said, I dreamed that I was a little tiny fish in a big, big ocean and I couldn't find my mommy. And I was like, wow, I'm saving the world yet. I'm letting this young, fantastic human being miss me in that really dramatic way. So I quit that job and started writing business books based on my experience, doing the work I had been doing. And the first book did really well. It was a Fortune Magazine Best Business Book for the year it came out, the year 2000. By all external measures, it was a fantastic success. It was based on interviews with CEOs of very large companies in about 30 countries. And, you know, there was a piece of me, and I think I write about this in life as a verb, but that felt like I was play acting. I know I'm doing good work in the world, but it just doesn't feel connected to me in any way. And when that book came from the publisher, in my little box of books that I got from the publisher, I remember opening the box really excited on my front porch and then feeling nothing when I saw it. And you know, that should have been a big moment, and it was in some ways for me, but I wrote another business book because that's what I did, you know, that's what I was rewarded for, that's what I was really good at, and I think it's easy to kind of go through life in that kind of out of body experience where you're doing what's expected of you or what you know you're really good at, but it's not something that you're passionate about. So after that second business book came out and actually came out in the year that my stepfather was diagnosed with lung cancer, and as I say in life is a verb, and it's really the beginning of this new body of work that I'm creating. He was diagnosed and died 37 days later, and that's the reason behind my blog that you mentioned 37 days, it was such a huge moment for me to wake up on day 38 and ask myself what would I be doing today if I only had 37 days to live. My primary answer to that was I would not be writing another business book, you know. I needed to be connected, mind, body, I needed to have a much more embodied experience of my work in the world, and so that was really the catalyst for writing in my own voice for the very first time, which is the book that you were mentioning in life as a verb, I knew that there was an answer to that question, and it wasn't just what I didn't want to do, which is pushing against, it was what I wanted to create. I knew that I wanted to create a real sense of who I am as a person for my two daughters. I had at that time an 11-year-old and a three-month-old, as I tell everybody, I give birth every 11 years whether I need to or not, so these two girls, I wanted them to know me as a human being and not just a mom, so I started writing my stories down to leave them behind and really to not create a prescription for them because I want them to be thinking about their own lives, but I wanted to at least tell them what I had learned, and there's a lot in the blog and in the books that have come out of it that's not real pretty, it's not the resume me, it's not the power suit business me, it's not the, oh, here's what I did, Riot, it's really, you know, here's what I fear and here's what I screwed up on and here's what I wish I hadn't done and here's what I learned from it and here's what I feel really, really vulnerable about, so that writing has led to a whole new body of work for me, which is really about intentional living, living more mindfully, creating the life and the story of our lives that we want to live, really keeping in mind that 37 days. Awesome, well, so there's a lot of stuff here that you've said and I want to kind of dig back deeper into all of it, you know, this raises a lot of really interesting questions for me, so I want to ask you, you know, sort of the first question about this is you mentioned all these sort of different parts of your background, the English degree, the art history degree, working in non-profits and, you know, writing business books and what I'm really kind of curious about is how that has shaped and influenced the work you do now and the work you did in writing business books and how that sort of shaped and influenced your worldview. You know, it's an interesting thing to think about the path that we take, there's a great image from a physicist, a Tom Helmholtz, who talks about the Royal Road and the Royal Road is the straight path that you can see when you're at the top of the mountain and you look down to where you started, but it's a fallacy, I think, to think that we can take that Royal Road and a lot of people ask me advice about the Royal Road, you know, how do you get from A to B and it's such a windy path, I think, for most of us, so the path for me really was beginning, it actually started in high school, excuse me, when I was an exchange student to Sri Lanka and seeing a world outside this very small southern town I grew up in sounds my youth and when I think about it now, but it was so powerful to me to really recognize that this is a place so different from where I grew up and the people are exactly the same and that was a huge, huge moment and really has driven a lot of my social justice activism, which is a huge part of what I'm about, I went from that to college, a small paper college where the idea of social responsibility was foremost and deep intellectual conversations were a big part of that conversation and I was actually in Greensboro and I've written a lot about the Greensboro massacre in which the KKK in downtown Greensboro and daylight shot people dead and this was in my lifetime, you know, at a time when I was in an interracial relationship in a southern town where people were being killed on the streets and that was a huge part also of my journey forward around isms of all kinds and then when I went to graduate school I was really entranced with the idea of intellectual curiosity at a time when, you know, I had the opportunity to really follow threads of things that interested me and I was studying in both the English department and the art history department simultaneously because I was looking at the image of the painter or the image of the artist in fiction and it's so esoteric, I think about it now, but I loved the exploration of what it is to talk about a spatial form, a piece of art in a linear format, so a linear, you know, language is linear in that it unfolds over time and a painting or a sculpture is something that we see in an instance. You know, my mother still asked me when are you going to teach college English as a result of that experience but I just had a great time unraveling that and really looking at language in a compelling way as an art form in itself and writing some of my own work but really looking at things critically more than that, well that's not something that you go out and find a job doing, you know, I want, unless you're going to teach I want to look at the figure of the artist in fiction is not high on the resume scale, you know, but I had a great time and I think, and it actually led me to studying the end teacher in Chinese because Chinese was the perfect combination of those two forms, it's a spatial language in a linear form and I just think back now even talking to you about it I can remember how exciting it was to dig into that and to learn Chinese and the characters and to really see the interplay of meaning, that was really interesting to me. I was pretty close to being a philosophy major and I loved at UVA, there was a t-shirt that the philosophy department had that I got one of them and it said on the front, you know, it was the department, University of Virginia and on the back it said philosophy, I'm in it for the money and it was just so beautiful but that was kind of intellectual pursuit with such a core piece of what I did and then I moved to DC, I got married and moved to DC and couldn't find a job because it's what, 1984, 1985, I have this very esoteric degree and no job experience so I took a job as a receptionist in a nonprofit but it was one that dealt with international education and I thought if I'm going to have an entry-level job at this point in my life at least it's going to be in a field that I care about and that really began my international work and a lot of my work since then in nonprofits was building international divisions for nonprofits and I'm looking at, you know, diversity issues and cultural issues that come with that kind of expansion internationally and so that really takes me to the point at which I stopped doing some of that work and started writing in my own voice and really investigating the question that I think all of us know but we deny which is life is short, you know, what am I going to have at the end of this, am I going to have a tune that says, wow, what a great administrator, you know, or am I going to have really fulfilled and found out what my gift is and brought that out in a significant way and that's been the journey, you know, for the last 10 years, has been finding that out and life is a verb is a good example of that. Well, I definitely want to talk about that in a bit more detail because I think there's a lot there that, you know, it raises a lot of questions for me and also a lot of comments. You know, I will say one thing that has been kind of interesting for me to listen to you kind of, you know, break it apart and kind of show us kind of what the journey has been is that it's been anything but a linear path and I remember sort of saying this to a group of Pepperdine students that straight and narrow paths very rarely lead to interesting destinations and I only learned that when all of a sudden I was forced to sort of get off a straight and narrow path because I graduated into a recession, which kind of takes me sort of to my next question because you brought up not being able to necessarily find a job that you wanted and kind of going into something that would at least be something you were interested in and so what I'm very curious about is, you know, we are living in a world today where there's sort of a lot of career transition going on, there's people coming out of school sort of disillusioned with, you know, the whole idea of working because at work as we know it is fundamentally changing, the whole idea of spending your life at one company or having this job waiting for your graduation is no longer sort of the case and then, you know, the people who have been working for a long time are looking to get out of the work that they're doing to do work that is actually meaningful to them. So I'm very curious, you know, when you work with people and you advise people what kind of suggestions you have for them on making these career transitions because I mean, I think we have a lot of people even in our audience who are still working full time jobs with sort of the hopes of getting out of them. Well, you know, it's interesting. It's a great question. I teach a lot of writers now. It's part of the work that I do and, you know, inevitably, when we want to be a writer, we actually don't necessarily want to write. We want to publish and those are two dramatically different things. And then the second thought that a lot of people have is why I need to quit my job and it was to write. And I think we set up these false stories. We have these investments in these false stories that don't serve us. Lots of writers, really beautiful writers. In our American cast, if not others, have been insurance salesmen and they write and they've been, you know, doctors and they've written. So I think first is to explore what are the stories that I tell myself about what it is to be ex-against us. What is it to be a writer? Because, you know, in my work, I talk a lot about these three things that block us. And I think they're the same if somebody's been an established job or if they're in a transition. And the first of those things is false comparisons with other people. Well, how does he do it? He seems to have it all together. He's got a great voice. He's, you know, a great marketer. He fills up all his stuff. Well, how come I can't do that? I'm not that smart or I'm not that whatever. So these comparisons don't serve us. They're not, it's not the kind of comparison that leads us to better and greater things. It's the kind of comparison that just stops us. So my favorite writer is Richard Towers who is the most extraordinary novelist that I think I've ever read. And I can easily read a book of his and say, well, screw it, I'm never going to write anything else again because I could never achieve this. So false comparisons with other people. I think for my story, you know, the idea that I was doing extremely well in the nonprofit world, I was very young. I was at the top of an organization, a very large organization because I was smart and I worked really hard. And I was passionate about it. It's easy to continue in something because other people tell you you're good at it and not stop to investigate, oh, yeah, I might be good at it. But is it really what I want to do? So the first one is false comparisons with other people, whether it's, I should be doing this because it's lucrative how I get an idiot to stop or I could never do that. So I'm not going to move forward on it because I'll never be a good writer. So those comparisons are good way. And the second one is false expectations of ourselves. And those are stories like, well, you know, my first book needs to be a New York Times bestseller or it's not worth writing. And, you know, it's laughable, but we do this a lot and we do it in very insidious ways. You know, there are these expectations that we place on ourselves. I have a physical trainer who I set goals every week with. And one week I had these goals that were pretty reasonable goals and I didn't achieve any of them. And I had to report with my head down, you know, I didn't even achieve any of my goals this week because I had the flu. And he looked at me and he said, how do you, why wouldn't, why would it not occur to you to change your goals based on the circumstance you found yourself in? Well, could you give yourself the grace to say, okay, these are not the right goals for this week. This week I need to go to bed earlier and I need to drink more water and et cetera, et cetera. So these false expectations are ourselves are also something that stops us. And the third one is false investment in a story. But this is what real writers do. Or if I'm going to be a real entrepreneur, this is what I need to do. This is what I should do. This is the story that I tell myself about what it is to be successful. Without the investigation of really internally what does success look like for me? So I, you know, I find those three blocks to be powerful, whether you're writing, whether you're transitioning in terms of the job, whether you're parenting, they really play out in terms of our human experience in really significant ways. And in every case, they stop us. Yeah, you know, I love this. It's so funny because it kind of reminds me, I shared this Facebook status update yesterday that for some reason just got passed around like crazy. And it was this whole idea of, you know, we live in this world where it's very easy to get into false comparison because our lives are on display in such a public way, in a way that they've never been before. Like I can look at you and I can see something that you write and say, wow, okay, that's poetic. I could never touch that, which you know, goes to exactly what you're talking about. But I think that one of the things I even said in this is that, you know, we often are quick to judge the package by the wrapping paper. And you don't realize that by the way, with the parts of my life that are awesome, you're going to, if you, if we were to trade, you also get the parts that suck. Yeah, but you know, we're not, we're not accepting private groups or secret groups. We're not putting that out. You know, we're, and that drives this comparison. And I know it drives it for me. I've written many, many times, God, I'm so tired of striving. You know, I'm tired of my own striving. I'm tired of the striving of other people. It's just weary making to watch the ways in which we project ourselves into the world. And so, yeah, I think that drives a lot of it. You know, we talk a lot about transparency of our lives because of the internet, but we're choosing where the transparency hits, you know what I mean? We're not necessarily going on and saying, God, I'm depressed. And if you do that, you know, if you, if you do that, you'll see, you'll see people peel away because we don't know, I think a big piece of that is we don't want to have a handle that kind of honesty. It's one thing to handle pictures of kittens. And it's another, you know, when somebody says I'm feeling suicidal or whatever, we don't have the capacity to really handle that. So I think that's another piece of transparency for us to look at. Well, I guess, you know, the way I summed it up, I said, you know, there's no Facebook photo album for somebody's inner turmoil. Exactly. Yeah. And so we either find other places, you know, I just finished the book project, the geography of law. And it was all about this idea of the shadow, the shadow fell from the ways in which we are or are not allowed to grieve the things that are grieved us. You know, the things that are are difficult for us, not just to ask, but losing a job or a child leaving home or, you know, aging, even looking in the mirror and recognizing, I look like my mother, you know, that these are, these are big moments for us. And there's very little outlets for that kind of, um, of anxiety or that kind of, of law. You know, the other piece that I think you brought up that, at least for me, you sort of resonates a lot just because of the culture I grew up in is this whole idea of doing what's expected of you because I've done everything but what's expected. You know, I mean, you know, I always jokingly say it was like, you know, my sister is the poster child for, you know, success as far as Indian families are concerned. I mean, she is about to start an assy as the old you residency at Yale. And that sounds a lot more impressive than, hey, I started this online show where I interview people in, you know, and again, we get in, it kind of brings up the point of the comparison thing that we're talking about. And as like, I can, I can understand use, I can hear you say that intellectually and understand it. And at the same time, to bake, to bake at my default sort of state to say, okay, stop with the comparison. Easier said than done, I think sometimes. Oh, I don't think you ever stop it. And I think that the idea that you could stop it is the thing that stops you from being able to stop it. You know what I mean? I think that I think the best that we can do is to notice our first thought and to work on the second. So the first thought is, I should have done X or I should have taken that job or I should look for a real job or whatever those truths are. And I mean, you're going to have those. I mean, I think that to try and train ourselves never to have those, we're putting the focus on the wrong thing. What we should focus on is we're going to have those where humans, that's part of being human, but we can work on that second thought so that we don't just stay in that comparison. We work on the second piece of it, which is, I'm doing what I love. And I don't know where this is going. You know, certainly, when I started writing 37 days, I had one single intention and that was it. I didn't even know really what a blog was. You know, my posts were 2500 words long because I was looking at it as a writer. This was writerly to me. And I only published once a week. And yet, I think the power of the single intention, which was, I want to leave behind these stories for my daughters. That was good. And I've never in my life really seen so clearly what it is to have a single intention, because usually we have a split intention. So a friend of mine is a train's young actors. And he says, one of the first things he trains them is that you cannot be on stage and play two intentions at the same time and do either one of them well. So if you're in the play, Hamlet, you can either warn Hamlet, if that's your job in the play, or you can try and get the audience to love you, but you can't do both of those things at the same time. So your job is to warn Hamlet. I think a lot, and I see this in myself, and I see it in a lot of other people, we have split intentions. And I mean, we want to say things that other people will read on our blog. That's a split intention. A lot of people when life of the group came out and it did really well would write to me and say, how do I write a successful blog? And how do I write a successful book? And my answer was always really disappointing for them, I think, because I would write that and say, what do you long to say? What do you long to say? And they had never identified that. They just wanted to say whatever would raise the numbers. And I think fundamentally you can do both of those things at once if you follow your single intention, if that's the drive and force behind the work that you're doing in the world. Love that. It's funny, I think back to the conversation I had with Danielle about this, and she said, living by the numbers is not a formula for success and not a formula for feeling good. And it's funny because I get that question too. And I had actually a question from somebody who I had given a talk to at Pepperdine, and she said, I'm starting the blog, but I have no idea what to write. And then I had been sort of using this writing prompt lately, and it's funny because I sometimes feel like I've become a victim of my own advice. You know, I've been using this writing prompt to say, okay, you know what? And I wonder on some level, you know, reading your work influence, but I thought, you know what? And part of it is, because my 35th birthday is coming up, and I thought, okay, what if this was it? And this is what I was using every day. I was saying, you know what? If this was the last thing I was ever going to write, what would I say? And amazingly enough, it's making a lot of things that are really striking a chord come out. And I had even mentioned this whole idea of the paradox of popularity is that you want to recreate it, and it causes you to water down your work. And of course, you know, to me, it, you know, I just released this book called "The Small Army Strategy." It's done very well, and it's like, okay, well, the very curse of this book is that it's done well. It's the blessing and the curse. And so you're like, and the funny thing is I even wrote in the book about the fact that if you try to replicate a previous success, you're doomed, because all you're going to do is create sort of a watered down sequel. And yet here I am a victim of my own advice. You know, it's a funny thing, because at a certain point, I was as worried that life as a verb would do well as I was, but it wouldn't. Because then your job changes, doesn't it? Then you become an author. And there's a whole other job description that goes with that. And it's been a struggle for me. I have to tell you, I mean, yeah, it's been a struggle because I just now feel like after that book came out five years ago, this was the fifth anniversary this fall. I feel like a bobble ball, you know, one of those bobbleheads that I finally have righted myself. But it took a while, because I think you do get swept into Amazon page rankings and royalty checks if you've done it traditionally. And, you know, there's a lot that goes on with being public, even in a small way. You know, as I am, I think that there's something that takes you off balance. And yet I think in order to learn and order to move forward, we have to be off balance. So it's a lot of bad things. I talk a lot about the ideas that learning, but both as a child, but certainly as an adult, is when we walk to an edge, a place of not knowing a hot spot. And that it's not so important that we do what's expected of us at that point. It's not so important that we jump over it and that we leap into it or fling ourselves in. It's just important that we notice what we do when we get there, you know. So it's my first reaction to being off balance is to hide. That's really good information for me. That's free data. If my first reaction is to fling myself into another project, that's great information for me. So the only way that we can learn, I think, when we come to an edge or a place of disequilibrium is if we don't judge because we can't judge and learn at the same time. So if I'm dizzy saying to myself, "Oh my God, I was an idiot. Why didn't I do X or why did I do X?" That was the stupidest thing I've ever said. That's a place of judgment and I can no longer learn. If I judge other people, why did he say that? He's an idiot, you know. That's also a place of judgment. I've thrown myself completely out of learning mode. So to go to a place, you know, Madam Curie who I love, bless her little radioactive part, she said that the symmetry causes phenomenon and so things happen when we're thrown off balance. That's true, I think. But the bigger part of that for me is we have to know that's what we notice about ourselves when we're thrown off balance. That's really the learning point. It's not the event. It's what we do in that moment and if we go into judgment, we can no longer learn from that. So I have one more question around some of the earlier part of our conversation and then I want to start shifting gears and talking quite a bit about sort of, you know, your new body of work and all of that. One of the things you said is, you know, you asked this question of what if I only had 37 days to live and I think this is something that has come up for me a lot lately is that, you know, we can listen to you say that and we can intellectually understand it and say, okay, well, yeah, that makes sense. Of course, we should all act accordingly and strangely, you know, I mean, I got myself to book a surf trip that I'd been hesitating on after reading your book and Richie Norton's book, The Power of Starting Something Stupid, I thought, wait a minute, what am I holding off for here? I was like, I've been saving money specifically for this purpose and, you know, I basically made this decision that I would start saying yes to anything that brought joy into my life. And I realized I was like, I'm not going to let money be this whole factor. I mean, obviously, I'm not going to do anything that is going to send me into the poorhouse. But at the same time, I thought, okay, well, this is manageable. I can do this despite not having the ideal circumstances to do it. But what I'm curious about is sort of, you know, despite hearing you say it, despite hearing a lot of people say it, we can understand it intellectually, but how do you live from that place? How do you get yourself to the point where you can say, okay, you know what, now I can live from that place? Well, I think you have to eliminate the false dichotomy between my life and the end of my life. That's one piece. I think that we, I think we, I got an interesting thing on Facebook from a woman who was so angry at me, and she wrote a very long thing. I included it in one of my books, a camera in which one, but it was basically this. This was all fine and good. She wrote, I would love to live my life as if I only had 37 days left, but the fact is I probably have more than 37 days. So the bills have to be paid, and I have to go to my job, and I have to do X. And she went through a long litne of things. And so while it would be fantastic, she ended her note, to think of my life as a masterpiece, the fact is that I have to still do the drudgery of everyday life. And I wrote back and I said, what is the drudgery of everyday life? Is your masterpiece? How would you think differently about your life? So that we're not separating living the life I would do if I knew I were dying, from living the life. This is the false dichotomy. So how do I look at my kids' lunch, not as drudgery, but as a piece of art, that I can create some surprise for them in that. It's really the integration of this sense of the fact that everything ends, the fact that this is fleeting, the fact is we don't know if we're on day one or day 36 or day 37. We don't ever know that. So how do you infuse your whole life, not with a sense of fear about that, but with a great sense of urgency about that. So that if I'm in a moment, I can, my favorite thing at this point, I just did a speech in California and I got a whole audience, a couple thousand people to do this with me and it was so beautiful and so easy to do. And it's simply to breathe in, I think to yourself, hello moment, and then breathe out as you think to yourself, I am here. Hello moment, I am here. And so that very, very simple act of grounding yourself in that moment is living intentionally. It is keeping those 37 days in mind. It doesn't have to be a big Chicago musical kind of event. It has to be daily recognition and really look at the quality of your engagement with the world. How am I engaging with this small human in my house? How am I engaging with the person who gives me my coffee at Starbucks? How would I describe the quality of my engagement with the world around me? I think that's the bigger question. So it's not stopping everything. When I asked that question, there were a couple of answers. One, as I said, I wanted my girls to know me as a full human being. And two, I wanted, when I got to my last 37 days, whenever that is, I wanted to be able to say to myself, this is the life I wanted to live. I didn't want to get there and say, "Okay, now I'm going to see the world and now I'm going to go surfing and now I'm going to go do X." I really wanted to be content that I had done what I wanted and needed to do. And you know what? Sometimes that includes things I don't want to do. Sometimes it includes a job and that's okay. That's a piece of it. It's not a separation from that recognition of living your life as fully as you can within the constraints that you find yourself in within the context that you find yourself in. I love that. It's so poetic and I just, it's funny because I think about what you're saying about being in the moment. Obviously, as a surfer, that's a big part of my life and that's part of what got me so addicted to it. And I've always talked about this in the show. I said, "Part of what makes it so compelling to spend that much time in the water is you really are forced to live in the moment because if you don't, you're either submerged or taking waves on the head." And I kind of realized one of the things that I really always take away from my surf experiences is that I think one of our natural tendencies is that we dwell on the past and we worry about the future. And then you realize, "Wow, wait a minute, all these things that are so painful and may really make us miserable only exist in time and only exist in the future and the past." And like in true presence, I have found that it is really difficult to be miserable. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that, you know, there's three things that I came to in this new project that I think were, for me, really powerful and the first, and this is what's grounding me now. The first is to embrace what is, not what was, what will be, but what is right now. Susan Pivers, a friend of mine, and she wrote in the wisdom of a broken heart about having a heartbreak and sitting on the curb, having taken the garbage out, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing and then realizing, "Wait a minute, nothing is hurting me at this moment. It's not, this moment is not hurting me." And to embrace what is, you know, what has happened is to be able to sit in that moment and to recognize this is the moment that I have right now. And the second one is to honor what was. I think a lot of times if we have a loss of a job or a relationship or a friend, you know, anything against somebody, we push away, we push that away. And to really allow ourselves to honor what was, to recognize the gifts that came from it, to recognize what we loved about it is really important. I think that's an important part of healing. And then the last one is to love what will be. And the unspoken part of that is, you won't know what that is. We can't know. 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Individual results may vary. So let's shift gears a little bit and let's start talking about sort of your creative process and sort of the transition you made from writing business books to sort of this next body of work. I mean, you brought up two things that really kind of struck a chord with me and I'd love to hear you sort of expand on them. Was the idea of intention writing in your own voice and creating this new body of work. So one thing I'm very curious about is sort of making that transition from one genre to another. And then, you know, the other part is kind of, you know, one, how do people discover what their intention is right in their own voice? And then I do want to talk specifically about the bookwriting process itself. And we'll sort of tie it all together with the business and the speaking and everything else. So this idea of intention, I think is really a powerful one. I think for me, like I said earlier, the power of a single intention was important. And I have pushed back against the imposition of other intentions in my life to be an author, to be visible, to be all the things that come along with that, to market, all those things. Because what happened in that period of time when I woke up and thought I'm going to write, I'm going to write one story a week and I'm going to play with language. And it really took me back to my graduate school days when I loved looking at words and language. And I hadn't done that because writing business books, you're writing for an intention that is outside of yourself and it's outside of the language. The language is a tool for something else. And I really was looking at the language in and of itself. And that was so beautiful to me. I honestly have never been happier than I was in that beginning two years of writing 37 days because I was so engrossed in the language. And so the intention for that was really clear because I felt a great sense of urgency about it. What is urgent in your life? It's like you said, you know, when you think about if this was the last thing I was going to write, there's an urgency behind that. There's a passion behind that. There's a legacy leaving behind that. And there's a, probably for you, and I know for me, there's an embodiment of that. I had been living my whole life from the neck up. You know, I was this body carrying around this big head. And I really wanted to feel things at a different space and a different way. And to describe these very simple, you know, you've read lives as a verb. There's some very simple stories in there. And to get away from the fact that they needed to be bigger, or they needed to be bold, or they needed to be something else. I tell the story a piece that's so funny to me about going to San Antonio to do a speech, so often, sorry, to do a speech. And yelling for my husband and saying, "Oh my God, I'm like, God, look at the opening keynote." I was the closing keynote. He goes, "That's fantastic. It was the first woman to roast solo across the Atlantic." And I was like, "Fantastic, are you kidding me? She's going to have these enormous stories of living through, you know, typhoons and eating bugs all the way across the Atlantic. And she's going to have these really thick arms. And there's no way that my stories can, you know, can survive that. My stories are about tests, my little girl carrying a grape around. And Steve looked at me and he said, "I didn't know this was a contest." And I thought, "Wow, you know, these stories that we tell ourselves are so insidious." And if I look back at my single intention, it is to tell my stories, not somebody else's stories, or stories that people will laugh at or love or, you know, it is to tell my own story. I think you know when you've gotten there. I think you also know when you're not there. When you're having what I have described earlier as an out-of-body experience, these books, these business books were so well received. And yet it was like somebody else was writing them. And that disconnects. We can avoid it and we can ignore it for a certain period of time. And at some point, something in our lives shifts and we can no longer have that disconnect exist. And so then it becomes the moment of, "Okay, how do I re-align, you know, without judgment?" Because I could easily go into judgment, "Oh my God, I've spent 20 years of my life doing this false work." You know, I can honor what I learned from all that, incorporate it into my story as I move forward. But I can't regret it because that will stop me as well. So to really play around with, you know, what do you feel in your body when you know you're doing work that is important to you? And how do we stop? This is what I hear from a lot of writing students. Well, how do I know if anybody wants to read this? I don't know, but do you need to say it? You know, do you need to say this becomes the question. And it seems so esoteric and I understand that. But I think the more we are splitting our intention and on that stage, just wanting the audience to love us, then we're not in the play. We're not allowing ourselves to be honest on the stage, warning Hamlet. We're too focused on what I like it. And this happened with my second book. I couldn't finish it. I couldn't finish it because I thought, you know, it won't be a successful life as a verb. And I hate to admit that. But I think that was a block, you know, it's what you said earlier. You get into that space of, and here's what I know. The thing that has taken the place of your work has become your work. So if wanting the audience to love me has become my work, it's taken the place of writing. That's become my job. And I think that's really important for us to think about what has taken the place of your work. Because that has become your work. And if it's checking your rankings, then that's become your job. If it's, you know, it can name anything. If it's procrastinating, which I'm familiar with, then that's become your job. I can relate. Oh, that makes perfect sense to me. I mean, I think we, you know, I've seen your updates on Facebook. And so, you know, I want to ask you a question around this whole idea of playing with language that you brought up. Because one thing that really struck me was your sort of way of assembling words and using metaphors. And the one that always stood out in my mind that I could not get out of my mind. And I remember when I first contacted you, I said, this is probably my favorite line from the book. And I can't stop thinking about it was when you described your younger daughter as, you know, being around her is like getting a PhD in exuberance. And, you know, when I looked at how you constructed sentences, that was what immediately drew me to your work. I was like, wow, you know, in fact, often if I am stuck for writing prompts, you know, I've highlighted so much of your book that I'll just put it up on the screen in my writing software and say, okay, you know what, I'm just going to riff on this. And what I am curious about, you know, it's funny because I think, you know, to some degree, you've answered with intention, which you're right does sound somebody so teary. But how do you cultivate that? Because I think there are writers who have it. And I think there are plenty who get caught in the echo chamber. So, you know, what's the key to that? Is it just, you know, practice and time? Because as we were talking about, you know, I have found that a lot of somebody commented the other day like, why your insights seem to be just spot on one after another these days. And it made me think back to something that Jonathan Field said to me when I interviewed him. And he said, you know, there's sort of two types of thinking there are, you know, insight-based thinking. And he said, insight-based stuff really is just a byproduct of having been at something for such a long time that that's how it comes out. Yeah. Well, first of all, I just want to say thank you because I, you know, I had a little conflict inside myself when life is a verb came out because I saw myself as a writer. And it was categorized as a self-help book. And so to have you appreciate the language makes me very happy. I think that, so that was a huge aha for me about what do I believe about my work and what is the world? How does the world categorize it? That somebody, a reviewer, said this is on a self-help book. It's a full help book, which made me feel better. But I still really am proud of the language in that book. And so thank you for that. That's beautiful to hear. And that came from writing eight hours a day every day per week on each one of those essays. And that was, that kind of dedication and that sort of playing around with language and really seeing it as a tangible thing. You know, language is interesting. It allows us to have shared meaning with other people. It allows us to express and to understand the meaning that others have for us and we for them. And yet there's a deeper level of language that I think becomes so much more tactile and so much more fashion. I don't even know what the word is. I rather clearly don't know what the word is to use. But there's a deeper level of appreciation for the word that I hope is embodied in my words. But I don't, I want to go beyond the surface of where I've been categorized as helping people to really be attentive to the ways in which language can both free us and not. You know, I think that we, language reduces reality to a space where we can all identify what's happened. And in that reduction, there's something that's lost. And so I see part of my job is adding that back in, if that makes sense. For that the words are not just referential. They have a deeper, different meaning embodied inside of them. And so that's a piece of it for me. And that comes from attention. It comes from a mindfulness about what words are. And I think that came definitely from my graduate career, really looking at how does a writer, for example, describe a piece of art so that I can see it. And that there's a different level of understanding about that piece of art when I see it again. So I think language is magic in that way. And I also think language is dangerous in that way. And many books that I read, I think don't pay attention to language in that way. Let's talk about something that's not always top of mind, but still really important. Life insurance. Why? Because it offers financial protection for your loved ones and can help them pay for things like a mortgage, credit card debt. It can even help fund an education. And guess what? Life insurance is probably a lot more affordable than you think. In fact, most people think life insurance is three times more expensive than it is. So with state farm life insurance, you can protect your loved ones without breaking the bank. Not sure where to start? State farm has over 19,000 local agents that can help you choose an option to fit your needs and budget. Get started today and contact a state farm agent or go to statefarm.com. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot. We charge you a little. So naturally, when they announce they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. 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I'm doing this to feel better. Get your personalized plan today at Noom.com. Real Noom users compensated to provide their story. In four weeks, a typical Noom user can expect to lose one to two pounds per week. Individual results may vary. At Sprout's Farmers Market, we're all about fresh, healthy, and delicious. Step into our bulk department to scoop up as much as you like from hundreds of bins filled with wholesome grains and limited-time goodies. Visit your neighborhood Sprout's Farmers Market today where flavor fills every scoop. And I love the exploration of it. And it's what you said. It is bathing in words. It is really engaging with them on such a physical level that you can feel them in a different way than if you just write quickly. And I'm a fast writer. I write pretty quickly. But it's going back and back and really massaging and feeling that language in a different way. And I think as my inspiration, you know, not business book writers or self-help book writers, I take as my inspiration novelists, like Richard Powers and others, whose command of the language is so powerful that it just gives me shivers really to think about. So that's where I find my my joy. I love talking about this, by the way. I'm so happy you asked this question because I'm excited. I'm excited talking about it. This was very much the reason I wanted to have you on the show. Like once I read that line, I was like, okay, I got to figure out how to get her on our show. I'm so happy that you like the language. Oh, that hands down the thing that stood out to me the most about the book. I was honestly, you know, I think it's interesting. And I will openly admit, I'm very guilty of not reading nearly enough fiction. You know, Robert Greene and I had a conversation about this where, and I've mentioned this on the show before, and you know, you know, we were talking about sort of our modern day writers on the web, you know, sort of our bloggers and all these people. And he was telling me, he said, you know, he said the example that he sort of referred to was biodiversity. And the sort of more inputs you have in an ecosystem, the richer that ecosystem is, and he kind of described your, you know, absorption of information and information consumption almost the exact same way. And, you know, like I said, I'll openly admit, I'm very guilty of reading a very similar type of book. And I've always, even though I know, you know, I know from having conversations like this one that that could be the key to really unlocking a lot of, you know, some of the better work that I'm capable of doing, or, you know, stop absorbing information altogether for a while. Like, one of the great experiments I always tell people to conduct is unsubscribe from everything you read for a while, because otherwise it'll drown out the sound of your own voice. It does. And I did that this last year because I just felt so overwhelmed with input that I couldn't, it's like that bobble head thing, or that, you know, there's things you have when a kid, as a kid that you would punch, you know, that would bobble around and come back up. That's kind of how I felt. And I really had to, I just needed to disengage, and that's what I've done. Except for reading fiction, and I started more intently reading for 30 minutes allowed to my daughter at night. And that, too, gives me a real sense of language. And if you're a writer, I think the thing you must do is read your stuff out loud, because you will get a different feel for how the words fit together, and whether there's a satisfaction in how they fit together that way. You know, the other thing I think that's really interesting that you brought up, and I've never heard put this way before, is this whole idea of sort of feeling your words. You know, I'd never heard anybody describe it that way, and I've never even thought about it that way. The idea of, you know, you're taking something that to some degree we consider intangible and saying, okay, make it this tangible thing. Like, you know, how does it taste? How does it feel? You know, how does it sound? All of it. And I'd never thought of it that way, and I think that's absolutely brilliant. So I really, really appreciate that insight. I want to shift gears a little bit, and I want to start talking kind of about sort of the whole inception of the book, because, you know, one of the questions you probably heard me ask if you heard my other interviews, is sort of about the writing process of one, you know, sort of one, what were the seeds for life as a verb, because, you know, there's a lot of people who look from outside of the blog history, and they have the blog to book deal dream, you know, obviously not realizing what really goes into it, because we sort of hear the outlier stories of people saying, hey, you know, this book got turned into a movie. I started a blog, and next thing you know, I was wildly successful. It's like, wait a minute, no, that's not actually the truth. I only know this because I've talked to all these people now. But what I'm curious, or, you know, kind of one, what were the seeds for this book idea, and then I'd love for you to talk about your process, because I know that creating something like a larger body of work, which I think ties to our whole body of work conversation, like a book, is a very different process than, say, an individual blog post. So I'd love for you to walk us through that. Then we'll talk about the marketing plan you're speaking and kind of wrap things up. Well, sadly, my story is I wrote a blog and a publisher came to me and wanted to make a book. Oh, I really apologize for that. But, you know, interestingly, I think also I wasn't invested in an outcome. And so I never thought about writing a book. Two years into writing 37 days, a publisher did come to me and say, we've been reading your blog for two years and we'd like to make a book. So that's the fairy tale part of it, you know, and I remember vividly, I'm big on organizing principles. What is the organizing principle of this body of work? You know, what are the practices that emerge from these stories that I've been telling? How can I organize them? That to me is very important. And that's really the process of making a book. It's not just a combination of unrelated blog posts. There's a story to be called and a story has a certain organizing principle. And I remember vividly the Sunday morning I woke up at 3 a.m. and came down to the computer and had it. I knew what those six practices were that had emerged from the story. So from that perspective, you know, that was the process for me was to really understand what is all that's telling me, what are the things. And as a facilitator and a speaker and a teacher, I do that all the time. I take disparate pieces of information from a class of people, for example, and I create something out of it. You know, I create understanding and meaning from it. So that's really the process for me was, yeah, you have all these stories or you have these ideas, but where's that thread? You know, what is that thread? And how do you start pulling it? And one of the things I was going to mention earlier is that the way that I make meaning of the world is through story. And the way that I create story or acknowledge or uncover story is by following threads. And a lot of times if I'm writing a story, I start with one intention and I get into it. And if I write and keep writing and paying attention to language, the outcome could be completely different because I haven't so set my intention so strongly that I can't follow threads, if that makes sense. So the book process itself, you know, can, I imagine that is the fairy tale version is to have somebody come to you and say you want to make a book, you know. Within that, there's lots of learning about what it is to work with a publisher and what it is to hold your ground in terms of your work in the world. And to be able to say no, you know, no, we're not going in that direction, even if a publisher says you are. So I think those were huge lessons for me that I needed to really understand what it was to so identify with and so be connected to a piece of work that I would risk it not being published in order to maintain the integrity of what I believed it could be. And those were huge lessons for me in that process. Well, I love that last bit that you said, you know, the idea of risk not being published in order to maintain the integrity of the work. And you know, I think about our friend AJ Leon, who had, you know, this amazing manifesto called The Life and Times of a Remarkable Misfit, which I mentioned on the show and we just had him here as a guest, he actually returned his royalty check because he said he returned his advance. And he said, you know what, he's like, my book, the way you guys want me to write it is going to be a piece of crap. So I don't want to do it, which I thought that was very admirable. And I don't think that's the easiest thing to do, but I really, really appreciate you mentioning that. One other question around this, you know, and I think the other thing that you brought up is this whole idea of an organizing principle. And you know, Chris Gilbo when I asked him about it, he said, yes, he's like, you know, we call that an arc and narrative. And it's definitely, you know, and I, you know, I think that I was under the delusion that you keep forcing it, you keep forcing it, and you'll come up with it. And I realize, you know what, that's not going to work. If I try to force it, I have to let it sort of happen naturally, and I'll keep doing what I'm doing. And I noticed, you know, suddenly, I'm able to start creating things that I hadn't thought about before, like bigger bodies of work. And, you know, there are things that I wish I could have done three years ago. And I realized it wasn't the right time three years ago to do them. Right. Right. Well, I wish I were, you know, twenty-five and had singers without. Me too. One of the things that I would say to you is that I, Robert Olin Butler is a writer who says that a story is a yearning meeting a series of obstacles. So if you think about your life, your life is a story, you're creating it every day, and it's the story of your yearning or your intention, the thing that you desire, meeting a series of obstacles. And in our culture, we don't like obstacles. We want to burn them. We want to, you know, whack them all then. We want to, you know, we want to get rid of them. But it's actually the obstacles that make the story move forward. So if we can engage in a different relationship with those obstacles, whether they're lost, whether they're bad business deals, whether they're, you know, transitioned to a new job, whatever they are, those are the things that make up that plot of our lives. And so it's like little red riding hood meets the wolf to be a compelling story, but we want to avoid the wolf. The wolf is the thing that makes us move forward. So how do we embrace it? How do we walk with it? How do we move toward it? And to really acknowledge that those are the things that move our life forward. In my case, with my book, it was the title, you know, my publisher said to me, we've had our final titling committee meeting. And the title of your book is Make Every Day Count. And I said, I said, no, it's really not. That's not it. And it was that that was an obstacle that really moved my story forward in terms of my capacity to say, no, no, that won't be happening. No, you know, like the example you gave, here's your money back. I will not publish a book under that name. And I could see that as an obstacle to fret about or to get upset about, or I could see it as something that really changed my engagement in the creative process in a significant way. And that's what it did. So one other question around the book, and then we'll start wrapping things up. Can you tell us a little bit about the marketing plan for the book? Because I know that, you know, one of the big things that everybody always talks to me about is the fact that, you know, a publisher comes to you because you have the platform and they expect you to market the book. So, you know, what went into getting the word out? You know, I just, I didn't really have a plan, I did what I thought made sense. And what made sense was I had all these readers who were excited about a book coming out and I shared information with them. And I did a blog tour the first month that it was out. So people got books, they reviewed them, they interviewed me, they wrote about it on their blogs for 30 days. And I expected, as many authors do, I think, I expected that the publisher would have a marketing plan. And that really wasn't the case. You know, it's a different business model for publishers than the world believes. And so there was no book tour, there was no anything. What happened was the readers of my blog who were very, it was just an amazing community. They invited me and put me up and arranged for readings. And I went to 43 cities as a grassroots effort. Which was kind of at the time unheard of, you know, how do you get all these people to rally around and do that with a very small, relatively small readership. So it was really the loyalty and the engagement of the people who had been reading my work for a number of years that got the word out at all about life as a bird. Very grassroots. And it's funny because I think that sort of that grassroots mindset is more important probably today than even when your book came out. Because we are in such a sort of noisy world. And I think that grassroots concept is probably more accessible to us, even more with all the tools that we have at our disposal with all the technology. And it kind of to me really just makes important the message of a loyal audience versus a massive one. Because I think that we get like, you know, it kind of brings back our conversation about numbers. It's like you can have all the eyeballs in the world. But if nobody cares, then what does it matter? Well, I tell you, it's a great thing that you've just said. Because I believe so clearly that engagement with our community and I'm very community and relationship oriented. And some people are not, but I am. I really love conversations with people. And I love the capacity that we have and very differently now than five years ago to gather people around core conversations that really matter to all of us. I'm an early adopter of technology, but certainly if you miss a day, you're kind of behind. I'm not at the very edge of it. But neither are the people who read message early who read my book. So, you know, we have these very compelling conversations with each other. And there's a relationship there that is not based on a mass, a massing people. And I think that is really important. It has been for my work in the way. So let me ask you this. You know, I have two more questions for you and we'll wrap things up. You know, obviously, all of this ties together now into running it like a business and being an entrepreneur. So how have you connected all of these experiences into sort of, I mean, because I think you and I both know books don't make you rich or famous. What? That was my whole business plan, Tanner. Maybe, maybe, maybe there's a part of your story you haven't told us, but you know, I mean, I've seen this with a lot of authors having talked to so many authors, but what I'm curious about is how you connect all the moving parts together into, you know, sort of running it like a business, doing the workshops that you do and everything else. I mean, where does all that come from? And then, you know, what can we look at in our own work to find sort of the real business opportunities? Well, it's an interesting question. And for many reasons, not the least of which is, I completely changed my quote unquote business model. Like you could say, I have one in the past year. I always have joked for many, many years that I make money when I'm on the road, because that's when I'm training, that's when I'm teaching, that's when I'm speaking, when I'm away from home. And that's true. It has always been true. And I've done a lot of diversity training in my, you know, in 25 years of looking at social justice issues and, but all of that has been on the road. My daughter, my youngest daughter, Tess was diagnosed with Asperger's last June. And I had recognized before that diagnosis that my travel was really causing her pain. And so I, at the end of 2011, said, "Enough is enough. That's going to stop. I'm still going to travel and not nearly as much. I mean, I was traveling every week." And so until the beginning of 2012, I laugh about it now. That's kind of how I do everything I do. I sit to myself one night. You know, I'll teach an online writing class, and I put it up the next day, and it filled up. And I've had a blast teaching at Culverb Tribe. A blast teaching writers how to create sustainable writing practices for themselves. It was an amazing success. I had a hell of a good time doing it. I learned a lot. I figured out, you know, that the things that I thought were so important about building community and teaching face-to-face were doable in an online format, and that was a huge aha for me. So my business now, you know, I still speak, but not nearly as much. I'm very clear about how many times I'll speak every year and travel, and most of my work is online. And so, you know, one of the things that I would suggest is to really begin to understand, maybe take classes online to realize, you know, how do you build the kind of thing that you want online? I knew I didn't want a talking heads class. I knew I didn't want a passive experience for the people who were in it. There were many, many things that were important to me in my face-to-face training that had to be present, and I was able to create them. So that's been a big, big change for me. Just a sea change for the way that I've done business. In terms of helping other people decide, you know, I think the technology is one piece to really get clear about what is possible, because a lot is possible online. But to really be clear about what it is that you offer, I talk a lot to my writing students without making a strong offer. And a strong offer to me is like an improv, you make a bold, strong offer to the world, and your job is to make the offer. Your job is not to, you know, spend stories to yourself about whether people are buying it or not. Your job is to make the offer, and you'll learn from whatever the reaction is, and then you can make another strong offer. I don't know if that's helpful or not. Yeah, no, it is. I think the thing that kind of stood out to me really was the whole idea of, you know, one of the things is you said you wanted certain things in what you're creating as an experience. And I think that that's really important. I don't think we think enough about that. We think sort of about the logistics, the marketing, but we, you know, we don't think about, am I going to create an experience that I'm going to enjoy delivering? And I wish more people thought about that. I can tell you that there have been times when we've created things, and we realize, wait a minute, we've just set ourselves up for doing something. We're not going to have any fun doing. Well, I think that's important. And I think the other part for me is my job as a teacher is not to be loved. My job as a teacher is to take you to an edge and to create a safe space for you to be at that edge, but it's not necessarily to be loved. So if you come to my class, I have to be really clear about the fact that for myself and also for people who come, I'm not going to hold your hand. I'm going to imagine that you're an adult and you can make decisions about how you engage and how you engage in the class might give you an indication of how you engage in life. And I think that's really important for people to recognize. It's so easy to buy online classes and never do them. And I think as teachers, we need to expect more from the people who engage. There needs to be a different transaction than just money changing hands. You know, teaching for me needs to be transformational in some way. Or I don't know what to say to me. Having done quote unquote transactional diversity training for many years, I'm no inch no longer interested in transactions. I really want people to come to my classes with an expectation of themselves, not just a name as the teacher. Awesome. Well, one final question for you. And this is something that I have been closing all of our interviews with. One of the things that's been interesting to me as I've sort of observed the online world is just a sheer amount of opportunity that's available to us. And it's strange because on some level, I think that it brings us full circle to that whole idea of false comparison. But you know, we look at people like Daniel Laport, like Chris Gellibault, like a lot of people who have become sort of a probabilist authors, and we look at them sort of as our heroes and our role models. And I've always sort of been curious, you know, what is it that distinguishes the people, you know, in your own experience and sort of what you've observed, who achieve at the highest levels from the ones who don't? One of the great questions. I think that there's a clarity of purpose that is well-honed. I think that there's an embrace within that clarity of purpose of ambiguity that comes with growing so that I have created a path or a yearning for my work in the world. And I am also open to altering that in some way as the context for my own life changes. I think the other piece for me that's very, very important is that my job is content and it's not necessarily formed. And a lot of people, I think, who are not as successful as some of the people you've mentioned, are so focused on form that they're not paying attention to content. So an analogy from the writing class is book. You don't worry about whether it's a play, a poem, you know, don't worry about the form. Is this a book? I don't know if it's a book. You need to do the writing. So to really do the work to sit down and Ron Carlson is the writer I love and he says the writer is the person who stays in the room. And I think that people that you've mentioned and others are the people who are able to have an agile clarity of purpose and they stay in the room. They do the work. Awesome. Well, Patty, this has been absolutely phenomenal as I expected it would be. Like I said, I knew when I read your book that you were going to be just an amazing guest for our listeners. I have had such a blast talking to you and I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share some of your insights. Totally my pleasure. Love being here. Awesome. Today's episode of The Unmistakable Creative has been brought to you by FreshBooks, a simple accounting solution for business owners who want to skip the headaches of tax time. No more hunting receipts, digging for invoices or going through records one at a time. For a limited time, you can try it free for 60 days. That's two whole months to see how much more efficient it will make your invoicing process. Visit getfreshbooks.com to learn more. And remember, when you get to the how did you hear about a section, enter Unmistakable Creative. And don't forget when you support our sponsors, you support our show. You've been listening to the Unmistakable Creative podcast. Visit our website at unmistakablecreative.com and get access to over 400 interviews in our archives. Let's talk about something that's not always top of mind but still really important. Life insurance. Why? 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In this Unmistakable Classic, we revisit a thought provoking conversation with Patti Digh, author of Life is a Verb.

The importance of feeling good about the work you’re doing
Asking yourself what you’d do if you have 37 days to live
The keys to writing your voice with a sole intention
How art history and English degrees shaped Patti’s world view
The 3 blocks that keep dreams from coming true
A look at what it means to be truly transparent
How we deal with incredibly negative thoughts
How intention shapes the nature of what you create
Presence and the role that it plays in our lives
Why you don’t want to be invested in an outcome
Why you need organizing principles for a bigger body of work

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