On Failure, Mentors, And Other Life Lessons With Joel Bouchard
Life is just a bunch of lessons and teaching moments following one another. Whether you learn from them depends on how hard you’re paying attention. We talk about life lessons today with Joel Bouchard, a modern renaissance man who has wide range of pursuits, including music, philosophy and business. Our discussion ranged from the importance of the two primary mentors that shaped his life's journey to how limits can fuel our creativity to the mindsets that empower or restrict our personal power. Tune in and reflect on what you have learned so far in your own journey.
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On Failure, Mentors, And Other Life Lessons With Joel Bouchard
Welcome to the show. It's my privilege to welcome Joel Bouchard to the show. Joel's a Renaissance guy. He plays seven instruments. He has put out five albums. He's a manager and a business leader in a manufacturing facility. He is getting a PhD in Philosophy. He has a Master's in Psychology. He has had an interesting life experience so far. We get into some themes that will be very useful for those of us who are looking for clues as to what we can do to unblock ourselves or what we should pay attention to to expand our personal power. I hope you get as much from the conversation as I did.
The one question that everybody starts with when you're talking to somebody is the origin story. How did you get to be studying philosophy as deeply as you do? You're well into music. Having five albums out is incredible. You’re a drummer, and then it seems like you play other instruments, too. You have a wide variety of places you put energy into. Give me a little bit of how that journey looked.
The best place to start is that I failed preschool. That's what I always love to tell people. I went to preschool. I was born in September, so I was already right on the edge. They got to the end of the year, and the teacher said, “He seems to be really smart and grasps a lot of things, but he doesn't say a single word to anybody the whole time. He's going to have to go through again.” That gives you some insight into who I am at a basic level. I am an extreme introvert. The irony is palpable when you have a podcast and you're going in on a public forum and talking all the time. At my core, I'm somebody who is very reserved. I like to keep to myself. I have a rich inner life.
Going through school, I always did very well, but I had some struggles. I have mixed dominance. I'm ambidextrous. I know in Psychology, after studying psychology, which is what I'm getting my PhD in, some of your brain functions are hemisphere-based. One side is supposed to be better at something. It's supposed to have larger structures than the other side. If you're ambidextrous or you have some of this mixed dominance, things don't specialize the way they're supposed to. It can manifest as dyslexia and some other things. There are positives and negatives to it.
In the third grade, my mom pulled me out and started homeschooling me. My mom is a fantastic lady. She's very smart. Her greatest attribute is that she's inquisitive and curious and is good at capturing that from a child's point of view. All children are like that. All children want to ask questions. Sometimes, society, the educational system, and even parents can snuff that out of them a little bit if you're not careful.
As a spectrum, some more than others. I get you there. Keep going.
My mom did a very good job of showing me that school wasn't something that took place in eight hours. It was all the time.
What a wonderful mindset to have there from a parent.
We'd read books and do math during the day. We'd go to a museum. She'd say, “Look at these dinosaur bones. Aren't these things so cool?” You go, “Yeah. They're cool.” Before you know it, you are reading every placard in the museum. We were walking through the middle school years. When I got into high school, she ended up hiring tutors for math and some of the things that were a bit beyond her. It is those middle school years having somebody who showed you that life is really cool and super interesting. Once you have that in you or rather, once you have that developed, it sparks an interest in everything.
Do you have siblings?
Yeah. I have an older brother and a younger sister.
Did they go through homeschooling, too?
Yeah. They both did. It was at varying times. We were all in school and out of school at different times based upon different challenges that we were facing and things. I went to community college. That's where I started to learn about philosophy. I took Philosophy 101 as a, “I've got to take a credit. I'll take this. Philosophy is a bunch of old books and guys with big beards who are mad at the world.”
My Philosophy teacher was a fantastic guy. He showed me the thing that I liked my whole life, which was what my mom had done. When my mom opened my eyes to the fact that everything in the world is interesting, this teacher is what gave me the academic gravitas behind that. All of a sudden, you go, “People have been thinking about everything.” Since the dawn of humanity, we've thought about things. I love that with philosophy, you can look at something at the smallest level and at the largest level, and you'll never have any answers, just more questions. That lit the fire for me for philosophy.
With philosophy, you can look at something at the smallest level and at the largest level and you'll never have any answers, just more questions.
It was over ten years later before I contacted my Philosophy professor again. I said, “I'm thinking about doing a philosophy podcast. Would you be interested?” He said, “Sure.” It originally started out that we were going to do ten episodes. It was going to be the biggest topics, like God, time, and that sort of thing. We got done and said, “There are so many other things that philosophy touches. We have to keep going.”
We've been going for over 150 episodes. We've done individual philosophers. We've done more of the big topics. We've done some things that show that philosophy touches every aspect of your life. We did Disney princesses with my wife. We did entertainment franchise reboots. All of these things can be thought about in a philosophical manner that demonstrates some of their essence and their structure. That’s the long-winded version of how I got to where I am as far as the podcast goes. There are separate stories for the music journey and all of the other things.
One of the things I take from your origin story is the potential importance of influences or mentors. Your mom and philosophy professor, in this case, are the two that you mentioned. What I get from your mom there is that she got you in the mindset of continuous learning and that everything is interesting. That sense of curiosity is so powerful. In the show, we talk a lot about curiosity and how important that feeling is. Sometimes, we lose that spark. The follow-up question there is how do you kindle your curiosity? Do you see ways that people either lose it or you could possibly lose it, so you need to nurture it in any way? Could you talk a little bit about that aspect of being human?
Yeah. There are two things that stick out to me that will resonate with you based on our pre-show talk. The one that I tell people is to always be a newbie at something. That is something that I'm always doing. People think that I'm a professional musician. I played seven instruments and built a recording computer. I do the mixing, mastering, the releases, and stuff. All that stuff started from trying things. It was picking up a guitar and learning how to play. It was picking up drums and learning how to play. It was buying the pieces of a computer and learning how to put them together. That translates to anything.
Once you get to a point with music where you're satisfied on the technical side, you can move on to other technical projects. I've got a 3D printer, painting, podcast, or anything. Always be a newbie because those skills that go along with learning new things cross-pollinate. It doesn’t mean that music and 3D printing at face value don't seem to have any connections that once you get into it, there aren't going to be things that overlap.
The other one is not being afraid to fail. This is another thing that it's demonstrated well by music. I have a lot of friends who play music. I have a lot of friends who have the same access to recording equipment that I do but have never released a song. The reason for that is because they have something that they started writing. Over fifteen years, they go, “I'm still working on it. There's still something that's not right.”
You can suck the life out of things by attempting to capture an ideal of perfection that was never supposed to exist in nature.
For me, that's the kind of thing where you have to realize that it's never going to be right. There's always something you could have done differently. There's always something you could have done better. That is part of the beauty of music. That's some of what modern music is missing. When you have things that are completely auto-tuned or completely locked to the grid, it sounds like this plastic, artificial thing. That's not what music was ever supposed to be.
There's something to be said for tuning your guitar. There's something to be said for having some of the basic things down. You can suck the life out of things by attempting to capture an ideal of perfection that was never supposed to exist in nature. Accepting that you will fail and accepting when you have failed can give you some insight into when things are good enough. Those are my two big ones. Always be learning something new and don't be afraid to screw up.
In other words, when we consider ourselves to be failing, it's not good enough, or there are flaws, by what standard are we measuring? The same guy who wrote The Long and Winding Road wrote Why Don't We Do It In The Road? Not everything we do is at the peak of what we can do. Some of the skills we gain, whether it's something we're thinking about or not, we're learning all the things. We don't even know how much we're learning.
When you talk about cross-pollination, we're getting lessons from all over our lives and applying. It's that action of application that builds our experience up. The question becomes if you're judging it and saying, “This isn't good enough,” or, “I'm going to reject it in some way,” it is the power model. We call that condemnation, where you always have to judge. The guitar has to be in tune. If you're a good judge of that, you're probably going to sound better than if you're not a good judge of that.
Judgment is critical across the board. Anytime there's a value, there's judgment. It's the condemnation piece that really costs us our personal power where the difference is I'm rejecting it. I'm saying, “I am not doing that and dealing with it. I'm putting that person out of my world. I'm putting that idea out of my world,” or whatever it is. It’s that condemnation phase of things where we lead our personal power. That's a powerful point you had there.
Why is failing important? Why is it important to accept failure? It's to develop your judgment. You need to know why something failed. You need to know what is still good in the thing that failed in order to learn a lesson about how to do something different in the future. If you condemn the thing that you did that failed, you didn't learn any lessons from it and you're probably going to do something similar again. You're probably going to get discouraged and then you're probably not going to play music anymore. It could be you're looking at something and you're not sure what you don't like about it. You're going to be on this endless quest for perfection, trying to fix something when you don't know what's wrong with it. Judgment is exactly why failing is important.
Circling back to the theme of mentors or having the influence of people who have been down the road a little bit, you have a pretty good relationship with your philosophy teacher if you, ten years later, do a podcast together. That's not a typical story, so I’m curious to put a little bit more of a spotlight on that dynamic, how it came to be, and how it's grown over the years.
That one's really interesting. The only thing I knew about him before taking the class was my older brother had taken a class with him and said, “He is a good professor. You should take something with him.” I chose him over another professor for the Philosophy course. I really enjoyed his class so I took every class I could with him during the two years I was in community college. I connected and had a great time, but then that was it. For ten years, we had no contact.
With learning new things and always being a newbie, when the thought occurred to me that I should do a podcast, he was the first and only person to pop into my head. I said, “Do you know who would be the guy to be on the podcast? It would be Norm Gayford.” At the core, my vision for the podcast, those ten episodes, was to try to recreate the discussions that we had in the classroom. That's what set his class apart. It wasn't just lecturing. If somebody had a question or there was an argument, he would stop everything to let this thing play out because he believed that's where the learning happened. That's how I wanted to model it.
There was a ten-year gap, but then there was a reintroduction. Throughout my life, I've had mentors. An important part of that which is difficult, especially in modern times, is exposure to people in other age groups. When I was 5 years old, my 85-year-old neighbor next door, I'd head up to his house every day and see, “What is he making in the wood shop?” His wife would make pecan brownies that I'd pick the pecans off of to eat. He'd take me to the dump to drop off some garbage and stuff. It didn't seem strange to me at that age to have a friend who was 80 years older than me.
I have a question for you on that particular thing. My youngest brother, Chris, has three kids. They all went through homeschooling, 2 boys and 1 girl. They were what you're pointing to where they would engage as adults in the room, unlike my other nieces and nephews, which were more how you'd expect the kids to behave. My question to you is, do you think that in private and public schooling institutions where kids are around other kids predominantly and that's their main thing versus the ability to be around people of all ages, is that separation of ages something that's learned? That is what I'm wondering from your perspective.
Yeah. The way school is set out, it's more likely that kids are going to want to engage with their peers if that is the structured societal thing that they're involved in. Whereas if you are homeschooled, you have your siblings who are close in age, but then your parents are older, your neighbors are older, and that sort of thing. You are more likely to see people as people as opposed to peers.
Having peer relationships is very good. I'm not a wholehearted endorser of homeschooling. Public school is a packaged product. You have a curriculum. You have teachers with certifications. You have things that may not guarantee a measure of quality, but at least they're in a ballpark. With homeschooling, it is very variable. If you have a parent that's smart, a parent that knows what they don't know and can get a tutor, or a parent that is going to have their kids in a homeschool group so they have exposure to other kids and learn how to socialize, then that's fine and dandy. I've seen some kids that didn't turn out well from homeschooling because their parents didn't meet those criteria.
There's a skill involved there that, if it's lacking, the kids pay a price, for sure. Also, there are experiences in public school where there are class reunions, school dances, or something. You can do that from a homeschool perspective, but it's not quite the same. It's different from school to school. A small school is a different experience than one of these big, huge schools. In my high school, my graduating class was 750, which is relatively big. In that same school, those classes are way bigger. It’s different.
It ties into what you were saying about interest in everything where you can connect with an 85-year-old neighbor. It’s that, “What are you doing?” sort of thing. Maybe you didn't have these built-in barriers like, “It’s weird for me to ask this person. They wouldn't expect me to ask about what they're doing and to show an interest, so I'm not going to.” It seems like maybe you didn't have those kinds of barriers. We get these barriers by not knowing or choosing them. They're there.
You can see that in my friendships. The guy I do the podcast with is 65 years old, one of my best friends. I also have a group of four guys, who are my age and we're really close. We do mountain climbing and a bunch of other stuff together. I joined the Army as an older guy, so I've got some friends who are in their early twenties, a dozen years younger than me. It’s all over the map. It's important to have exposure to people from various generations.
I don't want to derail if you have a thought there, but it brings up another question that you may have a unique view on that I'm really wondering about. Do you get something from these generational kinds of viewpoints that if you weren't as tight with the people, you might not appreciate as strongly?
Yeah, especially in this day and age. With the rapid increase of technology, you start to see greater segmentation between the generations. You have the OK Boomers, Millennials, Generation Z people, and all this stuff. Much like social media, your regular social relationships can become echo chambers if you don't have exposure to people of different ages.
If you're a Baby Boomer and all your friends are Baby Boomers, then you guys can complain to each other about Generation Z people. You form a distorted, inaccurate view of what young people are like or even an accurate view of some of their characteristics without understanding the reason or motivation behind why those things exist.
Having access to people of different ages gives you some insight into those things. Why do a lot of Baby Boomers have more traditional or conservative values? Why do younger people have more progressive values or struggles with certain things? It does give you a better insight into what people struggle with, what makes them unique, and what some of their strengths are. That's something that I always talk about in my show.
One of perhaps the most hidden biases, at least in America, is ageism. It is this idea that when you get to a certain age, it is okay to discriminate against an older person who's seeking a job because they're older. That's based on this stereotypical view that a younger person has of an older person without engaging with them and seeing. Every older person is going to be different. That's the one thing. If you've lived so much life, you've had a lot more time to take care of yourself or not, run into certain issues, or learn new things.
You can have 2 old people. One of them could be infinitely better at a job than a younger person and one of them could be infinitely worse because the span of time that has passed since they've been alive and what they've done with it can be drastically different. You can't slap this label on them as old people and say, “We’re going to find somebody younger.” I don't think that's fair.
My dad used to say, “There's a world of difference between 20 years of experience and 1 year of experience repeated 20 times.” It reminded me of that. The other thing is I turned 62 on Halloween. A lot of people who are in their 60s are thinking in terms of, “I'm going to wind things down and enjoy my golden years.” I'm not like that at all. This show is a new creation of mine from the last couple of years. I'm birthing a membership community based out of it. I see this as the beginning of a career, not the end.
There's a world of difference between 20 years of experience and one year of experience repeated 20 times.
It goes back to what you were saying about being willing to be a newbie and always looking to do something new. In this process, I've had to do things such as speak into a camera, which I never did before, and allow myself to be embarrassingly bad. I'm like, “I can't show that to anybody. That's terrible.” I have to get over it and say, “I’m not going to get to be a trained actor, but I can get it so that the person gets the message and we're getting the job done. I'll get better over time.”
What I'm saying is I'm experiencing it. I see that age is just a number. It all really does come down to your mindset. If you're in a beginning mindset and looking at a framework or perspective that says, “I have an exciting road ahead of some kind and I don't know where it leads,” typically, that's a youthful mindset. People, when they get older and they lose that, that's when they feel, look, and seem old. They're in the process of closing the shop down.
I can tell you from psychology that the number one risk factor in the mortality of people over 65 is retirement. The leading cause of death is retirement, which means that it's good to be doing something. It doesn't necessarily mean it has to be your 9:00 to 5:00. If your 9:00 to 5:00 is causing you significant stress or mental anguish, then it's not healthy. Being engaged is healthy. That's a fallacy that we'll see start to disappear over the coming decades. It is this idea of, “I'm going to grind and put in my time. I'll hit retirement age and then I'm not going to do anything. That's that.”
The sitting on a beach picture is not a good destination for the way we're built.
There are a number of reasons that will disappear. One is because it's a fallacy to start with. If you're always on vacation, it ceases to be a vacation. You're falling apart. You're rusting in place. The other part of it is global. As populations start to decline, there are going to be a lot of jobs that will be unable to be filled. This whole idea of there being 3 or 4 decades at the end of your life where you don't do anything is not going to be a sustainable way of having the global economy continue to operate.
My personal goal is I want to be retired from full-time work at 55, but I plan on working part-time until I die. More importantly, I plan on continuing to learn new things and continuing to grow the things that I already do forever or indefinitely. It’s exactly like you said. It’s doing new things. New things can be in the context of something that's brand new or a brand-new skill. It could also be in the context of something you already know, but it's different, like writing a new album.
For each album that I write, I try to take a different focus on different things. In my album, there were two limitations I put on myself. I noticed that I liked songs that were short. I said, “I'm going to try to make my songs under three minutes if possible.” The other thing I noticed that I liked in songs was I heard a Bootsy Collins baseline that had a really weird texture to it. I thought, “A lot in modern music, the bass guitar is only there to hold down low frequencies. You can't distinguish anything it is doing. I'm going to put some weird effects. I'm going to do some running baselines.” Those are the two things that I’ll build the album around.
Even though I've done plenty of music in my life, this album had something new and different to work towards. I don't know if it keeps you young because as you get older, you have memories and baggage of things that don't go away, but it keeps you energized and alive. I feel more excited about life and my future than I ever have at any point and certainly more than I did in my teens and twenties. It is this idea that I have all these skills, this knowledge, these resources, and a plan of how I want to do things. It's exciting.
First of all, it piques my interest. I got to hear this album. I'm really interested in hearing it because that's a great concept. The takeaway for me is that this self-imposed creative limit that you put on there fuels our opportunity and ability to be creative. That’s a perfect example of what you shared with your fifth album there, but we can do that in other ways in our lives, too.
As we get older, let’s say, “I can't run as fast. I can't work as long. I can't concentrate.” These are limits that come into play. The question is, are you going to have a playful attitude, work within those limits, and come up with something that is different and perhaps has value beyond what you would've started with if you said, “I can't do that anymore. Forget it.”
The most powerful piece of television you'll ever watch is if you have Disney+. Chris Hemsworth did a documentary series called Limitless where he looked at different parts of human capabilities. In the very last episode, Death, they simulate this death experience for him. They go through this. They talk about, “We're all going to die. We'll all get there eventually, but between here and there, you have this ability to adapt, and you need to adapt.
They have several different real-life people come on and share their stories about how they adapt to the situation that they're facing. That's morbid thinking about it from the death angle, but it's all-encompassing. In some way, we are all dying. We all have to make adaptations and concessions as we go along, but it's our perspective that determines how negative those things are. If we look at them as a loss, that loss will become our reality. However, if we look at them as an opportunity to pursue something new or approach something from a different angle, then that adaptation can lead to new opportunities.
Are you familiar with the book Being Mortal?
No, I don't think so.
It's one of the books I'm reading. Themes in it have popped up in our conversation so far. These things cross-pollinate. Everything's related. The book is from the perspective of how much improvement there is to be made in our attitude toward growing old and dying. It starts with the horrible conditions that can befall people if they're stuck in an institution and forgotten about. It's almost like a prison, in a way. People are waiting to die. Meanwhile, the machine is keeping them alive, extending their stay. What’s the word? I’m blanking on it.
Is it like a limbo?
That’s it. Limbo is one, but the place is not hell.
Purgatory.
Thank you. You are stuck there without input. It’s the opposite of life. Death is not the opposite of life because life is expression. It is compression and has no expression. That's the opposite. We're all going to die. The question is, what's our relationship to that process when the infirmities start coming in? There's a lot of room for improvement because we start taking away the reasons people have life. We're talking at a high level, trying new things and expressing ourselves creatively.
Death is not really the opposite of life because life is expression.
It is to have the independence to decide when I'm going to wake up when I'm going to go to the bathroom, when I'm going to go to sleep, what I'm going to watch, who I'm going to watch it with, what book I'm going to read, and what food I'm going to eat. It is all the various little things that maybe we don't think much about when we're younger, but you take them away and it starts feeling very oppressive.
That's when philosophy is most important. Being able to shift your perspective is most important. There are ways of succeeding in any situation. There have been philosophers who have said, “Your mind is the whole universe in a nutshell.” Within your mind, you have the ability to transcend some of these limitations. I always think about that in my personal life. The example that I like to use with people is during COVID, I was the leader of a business. During COVID, I got a lot of pushback about wearing masks. People were like, “They're so irritating. They're uncomfortable. They're this and that.”
Let me tell you a story. I was in the Army and I had one training mission where I was in Wisconsin in February. It was negative twenty degrees. We had to take an open-back truck to a work site 40 minutes away. There were only 3 seats in the truck and there were 4 of us. I volunteered to sit in the back of an open truck and drive at 40 miles an hour in negative 20-degree weather. I froze my arms all the way up to my elbows. I couldn't move my fingers for twenty minutes after that. I had to sit inside in a heated truck cab. That's uncomfortable. When you can reflect on a moment in your life and say, “I've dealt with that and I survived. I'm fine,” wearing a mask isn't that bad anymore.
It is perspective, in other words.
Even if you don't have an experience yourself or something like that, you can think about somebody around the world who does. No matter how bad your day at work was, you weren't in Gaza. You weren't in Ukraine. It is having the ability to step back from your own skin and say, “The things that I'm dealing with are difficult. Everybody's difficulty is different.”
Surely, because we're all going to die, we're all going to face things that are difficult and impersonally relevant to us on a level that transcends everything else. As we approach those things, we do have the ability to say, “Even in death, I made it this far. There are people that never had the opportunity to make it this far.” There is always some way you can look at something that brings a positive perspective out of it.
Life Lessons: There's always some way you can look at something that that brings a positive perspective about it.
It is the attitude of gratitude or reframing. You're pointing at a lot of different little nuggets of wisdom there that allow you to reframe and perhaps have more access to a wider range of behaviors than you otherwise would if you gave into your initial three-year-old impulse to say no. In the world of work, unfortunately, that impulse is alive and well everywhere.
It’s amazing when I'm working with a manager as a consultant or a coach and talking with them. It is like, “Are you a parent?” If they're a parent, it's like they can immediately understand. Why are we talking about adults as though they're kids? It’s because they're still kid-like in a lot of ways. That's why. We don't grow up all in one thing.
The theme of our discussion is about advancing through life. It's not this linear thing. I used to think, “When I'm 30, I'm going to have this thing.” You imagine what the future's going to be like. It doesn't work like that. It fits and starts with different elements. Some things go up and then they go back down again. It is way more complicated.
There's an interesting dichotomy there that's developing in our discussion where sometimes, it can be very healthy to hold on to those things that you had as a child, like your sense of curiosity, your sense of playfulness, and those sorts of things. There are other things that are good to let go of. It's good to mature past them.
Everybody's different. My PhD is in Developmental Psychology. What I study is a human throughout their lifespan. That is difficult. That's where a lot of the problems stem from. It is people not maturing past a certain point or getting so damaged that they can't stay in touch with who they are to begin with. It’s a fine line to tread and something that everybody has issues with in some way.
I’ve got a question for you out of that because that, to me, hit on something that is potentially very valuable for us to consider. It is the idea of the playfulness versus maturity. I think of childhood experiences where you're in play mode all the time as a kid. That's what's fun about being around kids. Everything's a game. Everything's fun. Everything's a try for the first time.
That energy feels good. It flows. It’s useful in all phases of our lives. It helps break through fear. Playfulness is one of the best strategies we have. It is getting past that fear of failure and playing. In music, play. Go. If you make a mistake, you keep going. New figures and new things emerge, as well as new ideas. They come in. If you’re doing it with another person, you have these conversations.
It is that versus the maturity, which the adults are all sitting around the kids saying, “I don’t need to go there anymore.” It is what we were talking about earlier, which is from the judgment to condemnation. It is like, “I’m not going to get down on the floor and play with the blocks. I’m not going to get my knees dirty. I might have to scrub the stains out of my knees. Heaven forbid.” It's like a calcification.
My question becomes, as people go through life, how do you retain the playfulness and nurture that while also developing the maturity of the ability to reframe things in the way you described earlier? I don't know if they're 100% at odds, but they seem to be a little bit at odds. How do you keep those dynamics alive and well and nurture those as you go through life?
I don't think that they are at odds. They can be very synergistic, but it requires a high degree of mindful reflection, specifically in the realm of contextualization. When you're young, everything is play. The most dangerous thing that can happen is that when you grow up, everything is serious. You can see right there the problem with both scenarios. It's the extremes. One is all play. One is all seriousness.
From a psychological standpoint, play is very important. A lot of the circuits that light up in your brain when you're playing are the ones that are involved with learning, memory, and execution. All of the things that make you better at something are what's involved when you play. That's the reason that you see it in the animal kingdom. Baby animals play the same way baby children play. Also, if you pay close attention, adult animals play, too. It is usually with their babies. The mama lion plays prey. She is like, “You got me.” She swats the baby around and bites his head and stuff. It is a reciprocal thing.
Why don't we play all the time? Play, by definition, is a fantastical state. You're being adventurous. You're being exploratory. You're at high risk of failure when you're adventurous and exploratory. Failure can be very good if it's in a controlled scenario or if you're in a safe place. It is a place where you can learn and recover. When you grow up and have responsibilities and other things going on, there are situations where you can't fail or fail to the degree that you would if you were to act in a risky, exploratory, and adventurous fashion.
In the plains of the savanna, failure means death.
It's very interesting. If you never play, you never find out where those limits are. As a result, everything becomes serious. When everything is serious, everything is threatening. The same people you see as adults who are very serious are people who are going to be stressed out, on edge, and threatened. They don't know where the boundaries are because they never explored them. They never played with them. They never experienced failure either because they were afraid of it or because some other figure chastised them so heavily that they became unable to fail.
This is a bit anecdotal, but for me as a leader, the only thing that separates my good days from bad days at work is when I come up against challenges where I view them as an existential threat to my career and my business or whether I view them as an interesting challenge that I'm going to face. That's the only difference. Guess what? I've been doing it for a long time and I've never been fired. The business has never gone under. Everything has worked out fine.
There's an element of play in the seriousness. I understand the context that I'm in. I understand I can't fail this way, but I could take a risk and see if this thing worked out. If it doesn't, there are going to be consequences. If it does, it's a risk-reward thing. Balancing the play and the seriousness is honing the risk-reward and pros and cons system. If you don't have enough play, it's going to be improperly honed. If you're always playing, it's going to be improperly honed. The two have to work together. You have to have a sense of adventurousness, a sense of curiosity, and a willingness to take risks. You also have an awareness of what the consequences of those risks are.
You have to have a sense of adventurousness, a sense of curiosity, a willingness to take risks, but you also have to have an awareness of what the consequences of those risks are.
It seems like knowing the boundaries for leaders. They need to know where the guardrails are as it relates to getting into that existential risk versus allowing this space for play, at least for some levity. To me, the classic is Chicken Little. The sky is falling. If everything's a disaster, then people become tone-deaf. You've been screaming when there is a threat so nobody takes it seriously. That's as much of a risk.
That's what you were saying earlier. The most dangerous thing that can happen to you is you grow up as everything is serious. You lose your ability to have perspective on that. Also, how fun is it to feel like your every day is a threat and a danger rather than having that security, going out, being more of that authentic self, and expressing your agency in the world?
This is something that you have to identify in your workers as well if you're somebody who's a manager. There's the old axiom. It's true that people don't leave their jobs. They leave their bosses. As managers of people, it's really easy to get into this mindset that people are people outside of work, but at work, they're workers. They're employees. That's a different subspecies of human that doesn't require the respect and thought that other humans do. Sometimes, that's reinforced.
Everybody does a dumb thing once in a while. If you have 30 people you're responsible for, there's a higher chance that you're going to be encountering dumb things every single day. That colors and jades your view of the whole workforce. You can't allow that to happen. You have to be able to recognize when other people are taking risks, trying to be adventurous, trying to do something, or when they're taking something too seriously and need you to show that it's not as bad as it is. You need to have that kind of human connection.
This may be a good place for us to start tying our conversation. I don’t know about you, but I feel like we can go on like this for the rest of the day. I'm loving our conversation. What I took away from your experience with Norm in the classroom is related to this. I made a note as you told that story. There’s his willingness to be playful in the sense that if somebody brought something up, he'd go there. He might’ve had a lesson plan. He’s like, “I got to get through all this stuff.”
It'd be very easy to be in the mindset of amusing yourself for a couple of sentences but to throw yourself into really finding out that discussion. In philosophy, I know that's where the work is. My point is that being present and real at the moment with human beings, whether it's in the scholastic setting or the world of work, is part of where maybe some of these synergies layout better when we cultivate that mindset. What do you think about that idea?
You're right. That's right on. The other important thing to highlight is that it's a two-way street. Although Norm, by and large, had really good reviews from students, there were students who would say, “He didn't teach me the stuff I needed to know during the class period. I wish he'd spend less time letting people go on and on about stuff. I wish he'd spend more time teaching the curriculum.”
I have a good anecdote for the flip side of that because I had another teacher in community college who was bizarro Norm Gayford. He was a history professor and the way he conducted his classes was at the beginning, he'd write 50 terms on the chalkboard. The only thing that he'd do is he would lecture for a straight hour and a half. Every time he said one of those words, he'd expect you to write down what he was saying.
You'd then have a five-minute break. He'd erase the terms and write 50 more. He'd lecture for another hour and a half and you'd write down all the terms. You'd take a multiple-choice test at the end of the week on all the lectures. When I took his class, a lot of the students were baffled. He was mad at me because I wouldn't take any notes. I would sit there and pay attention to what he was saying.
The fact of the matter was that he gave very good lectures. They were very interesting. To me, he was telling the story of America. When I thought about it as being a story, something that was rich and engaging and that I was interested in, all of those facts stuck. I was the only person in the class to get an A. Everybody hated him. Everybody thought he was a terrible teacher, but I still got something out of it. That's the two-way street.
If you're the manager, the teacher. Or whoever you are at the top, you have to do your best to be engaging and to do the things you can do. You have to realize there are always going to be people that aren't going to get your style. If you're the worker or the student, you're going to have good and bad managers, but you have autonomy. You have the ability to determine your own fate in some ways and determine what you get out of something. You have to make that honest effort to do it.
I always thought that history should be the most fun, engaging class of all. You had it framed, but I would consider optimally where they’re the best stories of all time. All the stuff that really happened that's noteworthy to remember is what history is. Why should that be boring or a problem? It should be something that is super fun and engaging. Somehow, we figure out ways to suck that out of it.
The way we do that is we lose the thread. Stories are powerful when they have an arc and a point. It's messy. It's a complicated story. What point are you trying to make? You're usually trying to make multiple points. This is true with any communication that we have that's in-depth and complicated, where the same thing that we experience can be experienced in multiple different ways.
We can call anybody's life a tragedy or a monumental triumph. We could make equally strong arguments either way. I'm going to say for most people, that would be true. It's in the storytelling and the points we want to make. There is more to it than meets the eye. I never heard of that method before. That's interesting. Did he say why he did it that way at all?
That’s the way he did it. That was the way he had always done it. He was an old teacher when I took the class with him. That was the way it had always been done.
He might’ve been forcing people to take notes. It might’ve been as sophisticated as that.
By the time we got to the end of the semester, he and I were on good terms. At first, he really did not like that I wasn't doing it the way that he wanted to do it.
You weren’t doing what you were supposed to do. That's great. There is one other question I have for you. You mentioned you are a business leader. Could you talk a little bit about your business and what that is a little bit? You mentioned that a few times.
Sure. I'm the production manager for a rubber injection molding plant. We do mostly safety products, respirators, head straps, and that sort of thing, as well as electrical distribution products. It’s the stuff you see on the power lines as you're driving down the road.
You are a Renaissance-type guy with music, technology, communication, philosophy, psychology, and manufacturing.
I can’t say I do any of it well, but I have a lot of fun doing all of it.
It makes you interesting to me. I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be with me. I hope the audience gets as much out of our conversation as I did. I very much appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me on the show. It was a lot of fun.
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My thanks to Joel Bouchard for being my guest. I very much appreciate his time. I had fun in the conversation. I got some things out of it. I hope you did, too. I really liked the theme of the mentors that he had in his life, which were his mom and his philosophy professor. From his mom, he got the idea of continuous learning and to be interested in a wide variety of things. Norm, his philosophy teacher and his co-host on his podcast, opened his eyes.
His philosophy professor, Norm, opened his eyes to the world of philosophy. His philosophy professor, Norm, they do a podcast together. That was a fruitful relationship. He opened his eyes to many of the traditional ways we think about things, to try different modes of thinking or different types of philosophy for size, and to be playful in the ways we think about things. It is that agility or spryness of thought when we're doing that for our bodies. It keeps us young and energetic. It keeps us more connected with our agency and our personal power.
I especially love when Joel said, “Failure is the process of developing your judgment.” That's a keeper. Another takeaway from what Joel shared with us is he said, “The most dangerous thing that can happen as you grow up is everything is serious.” He framed that very well where if everything's a threat or everything's existential, that's not conducive to a youthful mindset of play, experimentation, willingness to fail, and trying those new things. Those are some big wisdom bombs that he dropped on us. Thanks again, Joel.
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About Joel Bouchard
Joel Bouchard is a doctoral student in psychology, a multi-instrumentalist record producer, author, painter, Army veteran, business leader, and host of the philosophy podcast "From Nowhere to Nothing."