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Rachael Xerri: Hello. I'm Audible Editor Rachael Xerri, and with me today is bestselling author Daniel Coyle. You may know him from his previous books, The Talent Code and The Culture Code. We're here to discuss his latest listen, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. Welcome, Daniel.
Daniel Coyle: Thanks for having me, Rachael. Fun to be here with you.
RX: It's a pleasure. So, Daniel, in Flourish, you identify making meaning and building community as two of the core practices of thriving groups. Can you walk us through this framework and why these two elements work together so powerfully?
DC: Yeah, to get to the elements, I guess I should start with where I started, which is, you may have noticed, Rachael, we're kind of living through this crazy moment we're in. The world lately has done a couple of things. It feels like it's sped up. A lot of people's experience of life is sped up, and it's also felt really fragmented. It’s made life feel really busy and thin, and we're pushed around by all these forces. As a writer, I've always studied—you mentioned the books I've written—I've always studied kind of the mountaintops, like how people get super talented and how groups perform at a super high level. But as I got older, I got interested in the valleys. Like, where is growth happening? Where are people feeling like they're thriving? Where are people feeling like there's this deep sense of connection and aliveness?
So, I kind of set out for five years visiting places that do that, places that are really flourishing. Like a little town that produced 11 Olympians, and all of them go back there to live after they finished the Olympics. Or a tiny deli that grew into a $90 million community of businesses. Or a Paris neighborhood that switched from being super disconnected to being like a little village. What's going on there? That got me really curious. And what I found when I went there, long story short, was this framework. They are connecting deeply, first, not shallowly. They're finding ways to make meaning together, to actually have these moments. Life's not a machine. It's about these moments where we connect to something bigger. That's the first step. That's like the soil, right? That we're connected, these seeds growing.
And then they are doing stuff together. They are building community together. They're not seeing community as a noun. They're seeing it like a verb almost. They're doing community, which means they're connecting to create these messy, aspirational projects that bring them to life. So, these two things sort of work in tandem in this framework. The pause of creating meaning together. “Why are we here? What is this about? Who are you really?” We're locating this bigger thing that we're connected to and we're seeing value in each other. And then we're doing stuff. We're saying, "Oh, let's try this to improve our neighborhood. Let's try this to improve our work." It's agency and belonging brought to life.
We often go through life thinking life is a big game, like it's a big machine. A game is kind of like a machine. “Well, I need to figure out the rules. I need to do this, that, that, and it will add up to an output.” But what I found in these flourishing places was that they were doing the opposite. It wasn't a game, it was more like a garden. And what do you do when you grow a garden? You create connection, you plant seeds. You get roots in meaning. And then you create conditions where that growth can happen. That's what I found in these places. They were not treating life like a game to win. They were treating it like a garden to grow.
"They are building community together. They're not seeing community as a noun. They're seeing it like a verb almost."
The other thing, but the thing that was fun about it for me as the journalist, the science journalist here, was they weren't doing that much. It actually was more about stuff they didn't do or stopped doing, because we're pre-wired, all the science would show we're pre-wired for community. We've got parts of our brains and our bodies that are absolutely evolved to connect deeply and to explore things together and have collective agency. So, it was a little bit inspiring in this sped-up, fragmented world that we live in. I found it to be inspiring to say, "Look, it's not that hard. Life doesn't have to be this way. There is another way."
It involves these two core skills of: How do we slow down and create meaning? How do we stop and really see each other? And then how do we do messy projects together? Like, that's basically it. How do we stop and then how do we do messy projects? And those were the skills that I saw really exemplified and embodied by the places that I visited.
RX: We're going to talk more about all the fantastic examples that you just brought up in that answer and that are throughout Flourish. But first I want to talk about a moment, or really it's a chapter in your book, where you describe the story of 33 Chilean miners trapped underground. It's such a remarkable example of human resilience. What surprised you most about how they maintained connection and purpose in such extreme circumstances?
DC: Oh, what a good question. I begin the book in that story. It's like, if you wanted to trade places with people in the world, these guys would not be the ones you would choose. It happened in 2010. Most of us remember that story. San Jose Mine in Chile, 33 people underneath 100 million tons of rock. They spent the first 16 days not sure, obviously, if they were going to be rescued. They had basically very little food. When they were located, I think what surprised me also surprised the world, because they dropped a microphone down the hole and they expected to find chaos, psychosis, starvation, desperation. And what they found were these guys, the first thing [the guys] did was ask about people who weren't in the mine. They were like, "Was that truck driver okay?" And then they sang a song together. They had created, in those 16 days, this set of meaningful rituals, these games they played together, these group routines and habits that created meaning among them.
So, what surprised me the most is that what allowed them to survive was not acts of individual leadership. They created community down there is what they did. And when we see community, we tend to think, "Well, who organized that?" We kind of tend to put it on, “Who were the great leaders?” And the answer was all of them. They created conditions where they could circle up and stop and say, "What does this mean that we're here together? Who do we want to be together?"
One of those moments, they had a boss there, his name was Luis and he was the supervisor. He was very stern. Everybody was kind of afraid of him. But one of the first moments happened when the group realized, "We're not getting out of here." And Luis walked to the center of the circle, he took off his white helmet and he said, "There are no bosses and no employees anymore. This, now." And that moment, which is mysterious, like nobody knows what's going on, but that's the kind of moment that community creates, where someone walks in and is vulnerable and opens the door, creates the space for this conversation about who do we want to be? What are we now? Community doesn't happen. When you're creating community, whether it's at home or at work, it never begins with somebody taking charge. It always begins with someone creating a space where people can stop, where people can pause, and people can connect to something bigger than themselves.
That's what I saw over and over again in the places that I visited. They were like the Chilean miners. They would always have this habit of small circles of people talking about mysterious stuff, like, “What does it really mean to be here, to work here, to do this work? What excites you about it?” They're continually looking and searching for that bigger thing to connect to, and they're connecting to it. The hard thing about that is that it's kind of the opposite of all our instincts. We're built and we're brought up and we're entrained in this world where you gotta always get things done and you gotta always have a plan and you gotta always go from A to B to C to D. That's not what they're doing. They're stopping and they're saying, "I have no idea what we should do. What do you think we should do?" That kind of openness—and I guess that's the word that best describes those moments of community building—this openness that happens in those conversations, in those spaces, is where meaning is created.
RX: This concept of community, it's so strong, and the word that I keep connecting to it is human. That's what really stuck out to me about this book, is how human it is. And it felt at once refreshing and nostalgic. It feels like you're laying a framework for us to navigate these challenging times, but it's also very reflective on what has worked. One example that really caught my attention was Zingerman's, the small Michigan deli that grew into a $90 million business and has somehow maintained its business culture through decades. What specific practices did they use to foster the kind of connectivity that drove such extraordinary growth?
DC: Oh, I love that. Well, I love the larger point you made there in that I think in our world we're very used to saying, "Here's a new way, here's a new way, here's a new way." These places, they were great because they had the clarity not to look for the new thing, but to stop and really look at where they were, at the humanness that you're talking about. They're not rediscovering anything. They're reconnecting and reviving these natural capacities that we all have.
"When you're creating community, whether it's at home or at work, it never begins with somebody taking charge. It always begins with someone creating a space where people can stop, where people can pause, and people can connect to something bigger than themselves."
Zingerman's is a beautiful example of it. Some of your listeners might have heard of them. They're kind of famous now, but they started out as a one-building deli in Ann Arbor. Their goal is to serve a great Reuben sandwich, period. They got kind of good at it. And then they realized when they got to a certain point, people were going to start copying them. It's business. You can copy it. You can copy anything. And there were other businesses that were popping up looking exactly like them, and they said, "Who are we? What do we want to do?" The two co-founders had a talk on a bench one day in, I think it was the 1980s, and said, "Where do we want to be in 10 years?" And they came up with this crazy vision. Neither of them really had much business training. One of them had been a cab driver mostly. And because of that, they were kind of liberated to say, "What do we want?" And what they decided on was a community of businesses rooted in Ann Arbor.
The goal was, “We're not going out of Ann Arbor. This is where we find our meaning. This is who we are. We care about this place. We know the mailman. We know the baker that we work with. We want to be here and [build] a community of businesses.” They had this idea, “Well, maybe we should have a coffee place, maybe we should have a bakery, maybe we should have a travel business, maybe we should have a catalog business.” And over time, that's precisely what they've created in this kind of slow, organic growth.
They do this crazy thing that I think more people should do. They spend time, they call it visioning, where you simply don't think, just write down where you want to be in five years. Write a postcard from your future on an average Tuesday, five years from now. Go. Don't even think. Just where do you want to be, Rachael? What's it look like? And you describe your average day, and you describe, "Oh, I bicycled to work and I met my sister," or whatever it might be.
It gets you out of that narrow attentional mode that we're in so much, that kind of cause-and-effect mode, and it lets you do what the Chilean miners did, which was just kind of open up and say, "Oh, what really matters to me?" It reveals what's waiting there. It gets you out of that narrow focus. And so they do that exercise and they did that exercise over and over, and it just sort of revealed what they could build. It's gotten to the point now they're super famous and really, really good at what they do.
Walt Disney came up to them a few years ago and said, "Hey, we'll give you $50 million to come into our park. We really want you in our theme park. You guys are the best deli in America." And it took like five minutes for Zingerman's to say, "Well, thanks, but no, we don't go to Florida and we don't go to California. We're about Ann Arbor. If you ever come to Ann Arbor, we'll totally be in your Walt Disney World, but, you know..." That kind of deep clarity, and it absolutely has led to them having a sense of soul, having employees that really, really feel like partners and a feel of belonging. And when you're there, you can feel it.
To go back to your original point, they've tapped into this humanity, which, if we want to go even one level deeper, is like they're creating this feeling of aliveness. They're creating this feeling of aliveness there and you can sense it and it feels really good to be around them. It's what I saw in all these places. Because they can sort of surrender control, let go a little bit and explore, make these messy projects together, it just creates something that's super special. The challenge of reporting this book is I kept wanting to keep reporting, because it was really fun to be in the presence of these people.
RX: I think the word you used in that chapter was energy, and it's what I think of as vibes. Sort of like a secret element of what is keeping successful communities together.
DC: Totally. 100 percent. We use the word vibes all the time and we use it like, "Oh, it's magical." Like, “Great vibes, great vibes.” But the thing that is really kind of empowering is it's not magical. Actually, there's a lot of science beneath it, how we pay attention to the moment we're in, how our attentional systems of our brain work. There's two ways we pay attention, and we can get into that if you'd like. But vibes are real. We all know that, and they're real in that you can kind of guide them and control them. You're not just going around hoping to bump into them. You have the power to generate them in your individual life and your work and your family.
RX: So, speaking of vibes and science, in one of my favorite chapters, “The Role of the Beautiful Mess,” you write about MIT's Building 20, which served as, I would call it an unregulated hub of innovation. What positive insights can we glean from those who collaborated there?
DC: Yeah, such a crazy place, right? The MIT Building 20, it was built in like two days in World War II. It was going to be the center for the US government to develop radar. So, they did a classic government thing. They're like, "We need a building now," and they shoved a bunch of scientists into it. It was giant, it was drafty. It was just plywood walls. And after the World War ended, it was scheduled to be torn down, but MIT needed space. So, it ended up being this coral reef that attracted this sort of motley group of thinkers and scientists and researchers that didn't have anywhere else to go.
Then something strange happened. These innovations started coming out of this building. It developed, I think, the first totally soundproof chamber. Some of the first video games on the planet were developed there. Noam Chomsky developed all these theories of linguistics. Key discoveries in black holes were happening there. It was like this crazy thing where it was an accident. And when we see a place like that, we usually think, "Oh, there must be just super brilliant people there. Like, they're obviously brilliant." But when you dig into it, a lot of the people that were there were not brilliant when they started there and their way of interaction was totally unorganized.
What they had, though, were the elements for what I call in the book “group flow,” which is really agency in motion, right? They had this sense of agency. If you needed to change your lab in that place, you didn't have to get a budget for it, you just got out your saw and cut through the walls. It was absolutely DIY. They had a coffee station there where they didn't have any food, so they ate dog biscuits. They got in the habit of like, "Well, dog biscuits are cheap and they're nutritious. Let's just eat dog biscuits." So, they're eating dog biscuits, they're cutting their own holes in the wall, they're self-creating these group lunches where they're saying, "Well, we should have the sociologists hang out with the engineers. Let's see what happens there." It was this continual hive of experimentation and agency.
"I think the lesson is that if we want to really create a community, we have to create the conditions of agency."
It was this accidental thing that led to, I think, eight Nobel Prizes, the research there. And it absolutely cuts against our instinct. If we want to create colleges, we tend to say, "Well, we should have this department and we should have that department and we should have heads of the department." And this flipped that on its head and it's the most innovative, successful, creative place in scientific history. I think the lesson is that if we want to really create a community, we have to create the conditions of agency. We have to create conditions where people can self-determine what they want to do in any given moment.
The way that we do that, it turns out, is by doing a couple of things. What you do is you kind of smoosh people together with constraints, like you have a space where they're going to be, and then you give them some horizon to move toward, and then you say, "It's up to you." Those three things we need for that kind of thing to happen. We need to have a constraint. We can’t have people all over the place. They weren't spread all over the lawn. They were in this crazy building together, constantly colliding. Then they had dreams. They all wanted to pursue those dreams together. And then you gave them agency. “It's up to you.” They weren't asking, "Oh, do I have permission to pursue this?" It was like, "No, we're eating dog biscuits and we're going to explore this together."
In that sense, that's why startups are so magical, right? That's what a startup is, a good startup, and that's why they lose that over time when they get more structure, more frameworks, more hierarchy. But over and over again, we find the scenario of Building 20 being a core set of conditions: constraints plus horizon plus agency is what leads to these beautiful messes.
The difference between flourishing and being a machine, or executing to get a goal, is this messiness. If you build a machine, you want neatness; there's someone building it, there's some output we can measure. But flourishing is alive. If you grow a garden, there's no metric that says, “This is where we should be right now and where we'll be tomorrow.” No, there's surprise all the time. There's surprise built into the system because it's alive. And that's what Building 20 had. It was a garden where, because people could organize themselves, because they had the agency moving at every moment of their day—where they wanted to go, what they wanted to do, how they wanted to collaborate—you created this, it's not magic, it looks like magic, but everything alive looks like magic. Everything that's alive looks like magic. “How did that happen? How did that grow? We didn't expect that.”
So, as I put it in the book, a mess is not an obstacle. It's the gateway. You actually have to be messy. You have to be messy. And the second rule is, if you're not surprised, you're doing it wrong. There has to be a sense of not knowing exactly what's going to happen if you want to create community, if you want to flourish. And keeping that in mind as a leader or as a teammate ends up being a powerful way to continually create the kind of conversations that lead to messy surprise. So, as a leader, you're not trying to figure out exactly where to go. You're thinking more directionally, and you're thinking like a designer. I want to design a space where we can have a good mess that creates surprise.
RX: That's beautiful. I think you just hit the nail on the head as far as what it takes to build a meaningful life. Many people really do struggle to find meaning and belonging in their daily lives. What's one practice from your research that individuals can immediately start implementing?
DC: Well, there's a few that I think about. One that I learned from a Major League Baseball coach. We were interviewing him. I do some work with the Cleveland Guardians. We were interviewing for a managerial position, and this guy, his name is Craig Counsell, he happens to be the manager of the Chicago Cubs. We asked him a question that you often ask people, which is like, "What do you do when you're down? Being a leader's lonely, what do you do when you're sort of feeling down and isolated?" And his response was, "I go find somebody to help." Which I thought was really powerful, like, micro helping. Just a little moment. Look around, you can either go down or you can go out. And that moment of connection ends up being really powerful.
Sort of similarly, there's a practice called the daily connect, making a connection to somebody who's in your world that you haven't connected to and that you don't really have a reason to connect with, but just kind of a rando ping, a rando connection, daily, making a practice of that. At the end, it's all about relationships and relationships aren't machines. They’re like a garden. Those little moments of nurture, of just, "I'm going to jot you a note. I'm just going to reach out. I'm going to call you for no reason" end up being way more powerful than we think they are. And we resist them because they seem like a waste of time. They seem inefficient. “I could obviously be way more productive than call up Kyle, who I used to play football with in our neighborhood in 1975.” But it's better, I think, to carve out that time, and it ends up being super energizing.
Another one that I think is really powerful is looking for the yellow door. We usually go through life looking for the green doors that are open and the red doors that are closed to us, the opportunities. Should I go this way or that way? And we're always tuned in to that in our narrow attention, but if we let go and widen our attention a little bit, there's a lot of opportunities, little moments where you can step into uncertainty, where you can be a little uncomfortable and walk through and see what happens.
Because if you diagram your life, if you took a sheet of paper and a pencil, drew the shape of your life, you wouldn't draw a straight line. You'd draw something with a lot of curves and a lot of things where you've failed and then tried something new or were blocked from this and met someone new and then randomly moved here. Yellow doors are the places where life curves and where we can see a new path opening up. So, carving out time and space and tuning in to those moments, it can be really transformative.
They're not all great, right? Some yellow doors stink. Some yellow doors are bad. But the whole thing of living in community, like I saw these people do in the book, is that, yeah, it's kind of annoying at times. The annoyance is the price of community. Communities are also transcendently great. We're wired, we're built to find fulfillment in them. But if you think you're not going to be annoyed at times living in community, you're deluding yourself. It's going to be annoying, and actually embracing and expecting that friction ends up being a really powerful stance, because you're not a machine, it's not a machine. You're going to be annoying to some people sometimes, and that's fine. That's just the humanity that you talked about.
"A mess is not an obstacle. It's the gateway."
It's funny, if you ask people to reflect, one powerful question is, “Where have you felt most vibrantly in community, most alive, most flourishing in group with other people?” A lot of people remember summer camps. That comes up over and over again, these summer camps. I think that's kind of a useful pin in the map in some ways, because what are those like? We're young, we're thrown in to spaces that are kind of annoying. You're doing this stuff you would never do. You're learning these silly songs and you're eating food that you wouldn't necessarily choose, and you're doing activities that you wouldn't necessarily choose, and everybody's kind of uncomfortable at the same level and feeling vulnerable, and it's freaking great. It's transcendently fun and you get these relationships that can last a lifetime over a two-week or a weeklong stretch.
So, the challenge to us, I think, is how do we re-create that vibe? And I think those Building 20 people feel like campers. They totally felt like that all the time. “We're going to eat dog biscuits and figure stuff out together.” And I know at Zingerman's it feels like that. I know the Chilean miners definitely feel like that. So, that sensation of that openness that you get and also that discomfort that comes with that openness, but that's just the human experience, right? I think embracing that and understanding that. The world wants to always sell us something that's free and frictionless and easy. And it's like, that's great, but life is not that way. And if you live that way, if you live with no friction, you end up being super lonely.
RX: Totally. I think it's interesting that you bring up this idea that many people hold that messiness and community and downtime and freedom can maybe seem illogical. But I think what you've illustrated in Flourish is that it's very logical, through these examples of successful communities and businesses and perseverance. What do you hope listeners take away from your book?
DC: I think you kind of put the nail on the head there, because it is deeply logical. If you were to picture your ancestors in a line, all of you holding hands across the globe, right? We're all connected to generations and generations. You'd have hundreds of people stretching back in time. Almost none of them lived like you do. You got to where you are through messy community and meaning. But when you think about their lives that got you to where you are today, they weren't tidy and frictionless and neat and clean and perfect. They were messy, exploring. They were filled with pauses and meaning and festivals and fun and suffering. I mean, that's logical to say, "Wait, all of us here, and I'm the only one living this weird, fragmented, fast life?” “Maybe I should do what they did," is kind of the deep logic of the book, I think. The good news is, it ain't that hard. It's not like you have to invent something new. It's more like you have to stop and connect with what already works.
RX: Absolutely. So, I would love to talk all day long. I'm wondering with the limited time we have left, if there's anything else you would like to add or share with our listeners.
DC: I think it is about these little things. I guess a lot of this adds up to some larger themes. If we look at the little things that you can do every day, one of the themes is that little is really big. These little things that you do can have a big impact on the communities that you create and the experience of being alive that you can feel. We all know that instinctively. Like, you don't have to climb Mount Fuji to get meaningful connection. You can do tiny, tiny things.
I guess the other thing is that stupid is smart. Communities do stupid stuff all the time. What is a music festival but a really stupid thing that is delightful, right? It's filled with joy and delight. I mean that not in a sense of doing something that's harmful or illogical or purposefully obstinate. I mean it in the sense of joy and delight and exploration, where it's like, “Let's just lay in the sunshine” or “Let's have everybody over and everybody brings the worst appetizer they've ever had.” Like, that sense of fun and delight that can happen.
I guess the third theme would be that forgiveness is essential. If you're going to live in community, you have to be good at forgiving each other, because you're going to be annoying and they're going to be annoying. And having that all kind of be part of the bigger ecosystem is really, really vital to the whole thing. You can't do it if everybody is hepped up and looking narrowly and looking for fault. Forgiveness is the lubrication that keeps everything moving and connected.
RX: Speaking of doing things just for fun and because they spark joy, you narrated Flourish. Was there anything during the recording process that illuminated a new idea for you or perhaps made you see something in a new light?
DC: Yeah, it's funny, this was the first time that I've narrated. We've hired other narrators to do it [for past books] because I was just too busy, and I thought with this one, because it was more of a personal journey, I said, "Well, I'm going to give it a try." The thing that was fun was the relationships with the producer—who was just super cool and he was a great coach; he really had a brilliant way of just quickly connecting and letting me know where things were good and do more of that—and then the audio engineer. It was in this big warehouse, and he had all these guitars around, and so we ended up hanging out. He had a bunch of cookies, we were eating cookies and we were playing guitars and it was just kind of a nice hang. I had kind of expected it to be a grind. Like, six hours of reading is not something that you would wake up and dream about doing. But because of those two people, it ended up being kind of a memorable connection.
RX: Thank you, Daniel. And if you've been listening along to this interview, you can find Flourish and all of Daniel Coyle's books on Audible. Happy listening.
