Please enjoy this transcript of a special episode about overcoming mistakes and failure. What do you do when your work is rejected, when the big bet fails, or when the path ahead suddenly disappears? As you’ll hear in this episode, setbacks can often present opportunities, if you know how to look for them.
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
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Tales of Overcoming The Odds, and How to Turn Losses Into Wins — Tim McGraw, Terry Crews, Dax Shepard, and More
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Tim Ferriss: Now, I hate to focus on something maybe superficial, but you said riding your motorcycle. Now I apologize if this sounds like a weird question, but you have three limbs that have been damaged. How do you ride a motorcycle?
BJ Miller: So, yeah, so you know, this was sort of a long dream that recently came true.
Tim Ferriss: Congratulations. I mean, it’s awesome. I’m just so curious about the logistics.
BJ Miller: Thank you. Well, it’s interesting you ask, because right now there’s – the man who helped make this dream come true, Randy, he ended up being my patient and our resident at Zen Hospice Project not long after he converted my motorcycle. So there’s a lot to this story, my friend.
So cheers to Randy and his family and his wife, I mean, and his mother, [inaudible] who I might be seeing next week actually. But so that’s one piece of the story. But the other is, I love two wheels. I love gyroscopic lifestyle. I love the feeling of it. So I’ve always loved riding bicycles. And then I’d always wanted to get on a motorcycle, but I kept going to shops and, you know, people would sort of look at me and no one got into it. I could never find a mechanic who was willing to take it on and try to help make it happen.
A fellow named Mert Lawwill, who’s an old motorcycle racer champion, sort of legendary in that world, he happens to live around here. He lives in Tiburon. And he built a prosthetic component. I don’t know what the story that inspired Mert to do this, but he’s a machinist himself and a handy fella, and in his retirement he got into this business of building this prosthetic component that lends itself very well to mounting an arm onto a bicycle or a motorcycle.
So the first piece of this puzzle was discovering Mert’s invention and getting a hold of it myself which allowed me to get my prosthetic arm attached to a handlebar in a very functional way.
Tim Ferriss: Now does that connection – so you have throttle, rear brake and then typically front brake on the left. How are those controls modified?
BJ Miller: So, okay, so Randy, what he figured out, so first was to get the arm piece and then what Randy figured out was – and then – well, then Aprilia, and I know Honda had made a version of this as well, but Aprilia makes a model, the Mana, M-A-N-A, that is clutchless. So that was a huge –
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
BJ Miller: – piece to get out of the way. So this is essentially an automatic transmission. So do away with the clutch and gear changes. So that’s a huge piece of the puzzle out of the way. And then Randy figured out a way to splice the brakes, front and rear in a certain ratio into a single lever. So I’m doing nothing with my prosthetic feet except hold on to the bike.
I’m doing nothing with my prosthetic arm except for hold on to the bike. So all the action is in my right hand. Brakes the one lever, and then Randy built this box and moved all the controls, the turn signals, horn and all that stuff, over to the right side of the bike in good distance for my thumb to reach them. So I have throttle, brake lever and then the turn signal box all going with one hand.
Tim Ferriss: That’s so awesome.
BJ Miller: That’s it, you know. Away you go!
Tim Ferriss: I just have to pause here for a second and just ask everyone listening, what bullshit excuses do you have for not going after whatever it is that you want. Like, please, write in, tell us on social media why these are real excuses. With #bullshit afterwards. Oh my God, man, that’s such a great story. I’m so glad I asked about it. And what a really fantastic work-around. Man! Congrats, that’s awesome.
BJ Miller: Well, thank you, and thanks Randy and thanks for the folks at Scooteria, the bike shop in the city. I mean I – a lot of people helped me make this come true. And it took a long, long time of trying to find the right folks to make it happen, so Amen.
Tim Ferriss: Amen to that.
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Tim Ferriss: When I was looking at your history and your book and your back story, one thing that I paid attention to as a pattern was an uncommon degree of self reflection. And so, I want to rewind the clock a little bit back to high school. And one of the stories that you put in Tribe of Mentors is related to my question related favorite failures or a failure that set you up for later success. Could you tell us a little bit about that please?
Terry Crews: Man, yes. In 1986, that was my senior year in high school. And I went to Flint Academy. And it was a classy school, but we were highly ranked in the state. And I used to be a basketball player. Hard to believe now. Basketball was a big sport for me. But I was the starting center on this team. And what was wild is we were picked to go all the way in the state. We had a super star on our team.
And we had a really, really good team. But we played against a school who decided not to play. It was the district championship. And it was right at the beginning of the playoffs. And these guys would take the ball down the court and pass the ball to each other at the top of the court and wouldn’t play. And we had a coach who was like well, you know what, I’m going to beat you at your own game. So, we stayed in the zone. So, we’re sitting there the whole time. And I’m telling you, it was the most boring game of all time. We just sat there with our hands up, and they passed the ball. And if anything happened, somebody went and got it, and you scored two.
It was just a mess. So, the score was really, really low. And they were up 47 to 45. And it was, literally, under a minute. And I’m freaking out because, now, we’re going to – it’s evident we’re going to lose because I’m going man, this is a dumb defensive strategy anyway. We should have been going after it. But what happened is a guy threw the ball. Their guy threw the ball cross court, I intercepted it. And with literally five seconds left to go, and I take the ball all the way down the court. You got to understand. I’m thinking I had visions of oh, my God, this is the thing. I’m the hero. The heart is like pounding. I’m already at the party. You know what I mean? And I go with this layup, and I bring it up there, and it’s totally – it gets around the rim, and it rolls off. And let me tell you that place goes nuts because it was the upset of the year. And I collapsed in a heap. And I know my life is over. And you got to understand. And this is another thing. Shame among men. It’s like how could you do that, man?
Other players were yelling at me. The coach – I was in the locker room, and he was like you had no business taking that shot. And I stole the ball. It wasn’t like – we didn’t have a shot anyway. But he was like you had no business taking that shot. You should have passed it. Man, it’s your fault. And everybody in the room was like yeah. And they didn’t let me off one – and I remember just going oh, my God. And I went in the paper. And the paper, the next day, it was like Terry Crews had a shot, and he missed. And let me tell you, it was the most dark – when you’re 16 years old, I was beyond crushed.
And one guy was taunting me. I got in a fight after it at school and the whole thing. And I was just like this is awful. It’s horrible. And so, it was a couple of days went by, and I was in the deepest funk. I’m sitting on my bed, and I shared my room with my brother.
But, for some reason, he wasn’t there because I always remember him being there. It was kind of crazy. I don’t ever remember being alone, except that time. And I remember being alone and just thinking about I should have passed it. I should have passed it. Maybe I messed up. And what else could I have done? And then, another little voice. It said I took the shot. I took the shot. And I was like I did. I did. And I kept thinking, it was like, man, look, when you had the chance, when everything was on the line, you took your shot, man. You did that. You did that. And all of a sudden, I was like that’s right. I took it. And I learned, from then on, I said, man, wait a minute.
If I win or if I fail, it’s going to be on my terms. It’s going to be up to me. If I have the opportunity, I have to go for it. And then, I felt really good about losing the game. It was real. Now, you can call it reframing. A lot of people have scientific ways or psychological ways to do things. But I learned always to kind of reframe things so that it’s to your advantage. You know what I mean? And you look at these things like wait a minute, you took the shot, man. And this is another thing because what’s so crazy is that no one ever remembers that game. It’s one of the least important things in my life. But the lesson I learned is still guiding me today. The fact that go for it. Take your shot. Take your time.
When you get that thing, when you have that opportunity, don’t mess it up because this is another thing. And I want to tell you, Tim, the scariest thought ever is one thing that blew me away is that you really do get what you want. And let me tell you what I mean. There have been times when you can be self destructive. And you think it’s something else, or you think – I discovered, for a long time, if I show up late for something twice, I don’t want it. And you get what you desire. Everything about you, you get what you want. Now, the way your life is, truthfully, you want it. Now, that’s hard to say because a lot of people are like no way. There’s so many other obstacles. There’s this and this and this and this. But the truth is, if you wanted something different, you’d change it. And that hit me. Like it’s scary because, if I failed, or if I showed up wrong or messed up on something, I was like I didn’t really do what it took to get it. And, again, that comes from taking that shot way back in high school. But now, I realize, okay, get rid of any what I call self sabotage, and you can achieve whatever you need.
Tim Ferriss: This is such a pattern that I’ve seen across interviews that I’ve done. We were talking about Jamie Foxx back stage. But it goes all the way across the spectrum, say Debbie Millman who is a well known graphic designer. And she realized, at one point, and then, made her mantra busy is a decision. You’re disallowed from complaining responding to someone when they say how are you with a complaint that you are busy because that’s a consequence of your decisions.
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Tim Ferriss: I would love to flesh out the humanizing of Tim McGraw a little bit, because for people who may not know your career, they might be like, “Man, this giant just gets off the Greyhound bus and then it’s like he’s hitting a double and a triple and a home run and it’s just endless home runs. Green lights the whole way.” And I’m curious if there are any favorite failures, things that didn’t work, that ended up teaching you something important or laying the seeds for something later, or if there was ever a period of feeling plateau or stuck-ness and how you dealt with it?
Tim McGraw: There’s both of those. I think failure that I learned a lot from was my first album, which we always say went wood. I think we had one song that made it to 38 off of that album.
Tim Ferriss: Went wood.
Tim McGraw: Yeah, it went wood, so no hits on it. And so the label just sort of forgot about me after that. And so I was slowly gathering songs, but I learned a lot. I learned what I didn’t want to do.
Tim Ferriss: What was that?
Tim McGraw: The way to make music, I learned what I didn’t want it to sound like. So I slowly started gathering songs from songwriter friends of mine. Not really big songwriters, just friends of mine who were songwriters. Slowly started collecting songs. The label never even called me after the album came out because it didn’t do anything. Didn’t talk to them at all. So I collected these songs and I went to Byron. I said, “All right, I’m ready to go record these songs.”
Tim Ferriss: Who’s Byron again?
Tim McGraw: My producer, Byron Gallimore, that we produced together. I said, “I’m ready to cut these songs.” And he goes, “Well, has Curb heard them, are they approved?” I says, “Nope, we’re just going to book a session and go cut the album.” And so we booked the session.
Tim Ferriss: So it was like an album on spec?
Tim McGraw: Yeah, and we billed Curb. We billed Curb for the whole thing, we cut the album, did all the artwork. Had the CD ready with the artwork done and turned it in to them. And of course, they hit the roof because we had spent a bunch of money making an album that we weren’t approved of. And then they listened and it was the Not a Moment Too Soon album. And then they listened to the album and then they were all on board.
And the good thing about that is the first one didn’t work. The second one, I said, “I want to do this my way and to do this — and had “Indian Outlaw” — I’m going to do the songs I want to do. I’m picking all the songs, doing the songs I want to do. We’re going to cut them the way I want to cut them. And if it fails, it fails on my terms this time.” And luckily it worked.
Tim Ferriss: So that’s why you didn’t reach out for approvals because you’re like, “I don’t want some album by committee.”
Tim McGraw: No. No. It never works. Not for me. I’m sure it works for other artists, but anytime I’ve done that, anytime that I’ve let somebody else talk me into a song, whether it be a record label head or somebody else, talked me into a song that I knew wasn’t right for me, it’s never worked. It’s never worked. And there’s been tons of times where people didn’t like the song at all and it worked.
Tim Ferriss: How did you decide, or when you say you knew what you didn’t want it to sound like, can you say more about that?
Tim McGraw: Yeah. Well, you can go back and listen to my first album, you can figure it out. I just knew that there were three songs on the first album that they sort of let me run loose with.
Tim Ferriss: Well, they’re also like what other people hear and then there’s what you hear and what it means to you.
Tim McGraw: Absolutely. And you also realize quickly in this business that you think when you move to town, you find your producer, you get a record label, you get all those things and everybody knows what they’re doing. That’s not necessarily the case.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds a lot like book publishing.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. Most of the time the artist knows what they’re doing and then everybody sort of follows the artist that gets successful and starts doing what they’re doing. But there are great people like, boy, without Byron Gallimore, I wouldn’t know my right hand from my left. He’s my partner in the studio and I can’t imagine making a record without him. But you find out very quickly if you don’t have an idea about what you want and how you want to make your music and how you want it to sound and how you want your career to go. And if you don’t get into control of that and you don’t do it the way you want to do it, it might work, but it’s not going to work for long.
And there have been times in my career where I’ve sat back and decided, “All right, I’m going to let this float and let other people make the decisions. Everything’s fine for now.” And sure enough, if I don’t get involved, it doesn’t go the way I want it to go.
Now I’ve got people around me now that’s been around me for 20, 30 years that I trust. But even still, if they don’t get regular input from me, nobody knows what’s in your head. Nobody knows exactly what you picture, even though you might think they do. They don’t.
I mean, they can get close, but you have to stay involved. And I’m learning that more more, and these last few years have been tough for me to be involved as much as I want to be because I’ve been battling, just trying to get my health back. And I’m fortunate that I have the right people around me that helps me through those periods. But when your focus is on and you’re paying attention to what you’re doing and you know what the path is, it makes it easier for everybody around you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What about the periods of stuckness outside of the most recent injury period and the surgical, obviously the multiple surgeries?
Tim McGraw: Well, the biggest period of stuckness and the biggest period where I thought, besides this period where I thought it might be over is when I went through a whole legal battle with Curb Records, that was a very dark period in my career. They kept extending my contract by putting greatest hits albums out. So every time I would turn in an album that would be the final album for my contract, they would drop the greatest hits, which didn’t count against the contract. So I think they ended up putting like 10 greatest hits albums to keep me from dropping my album.
So finally, I decided I either had to bite the bullet and try to go to court with them and get out or be stuck with them. And either way, I’m taking a chance on my career.
And we battled for a couple of years and I had to pretty much rebuild my career after that. And that was a scary time because momentum’s a tough thing.
And I heard a quote the other day, it was actually a Landman. I was watching it and —
Tim Ferriss: It’s a great show.
Tim McGraw: A great show, and Sam Elliott was talking to Billy Bob and says, “You know that monkey at rodeos that rides on the back of the border collie and the border collie just runs around and runs around and the monkey’s just hanging on for dear life, and he can’t let go because he’ll die so he’s got to hold on?” He looked at Bill, he said, “You’re that monkey.”
And I looked at Faith, goes, “Jesus Christ, I’m that monkey.” So I feel like I’m that monkey. But I don’t know that if it’s intentional, if it’s innately in you, but there’s something about even when you know you need to take a break or even when you know you need to slow down, when things are rolling, there’s this sixth sense in your body that knows you can’t let the momentum stop because it’s so hard to restart, even if consciously you’re not thinking that, there’s something in you that keeps it driving because you don’t want the ball to stop rolling and it’s because you’re scared, because you’re scared if the ball stops rolling, you’ll never get it rolling again.
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Tim McGraw: So that was a time when that was happening to me and I thought, “Boy, it’s going to be hard to restart the momentum.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: And then after these surgeries, it was another one of those times.
Tim Ferriss: Legal battles, it’s just exhaustion upon exhaustion.
Tim McGraw: Oh, it’s just crazy.
Tim Ferriss: And sometimes you can’t avoid it, but if you can avoid it.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. I don’t want to be involved in legal battles unless it’s just —
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely.
Tim McGraw: But I was at a point in my career that if I didn’t do something, my career was going to be over.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: And if I did do something, there was a chance it would be over.
Tim Ferriss: It was still a risk.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What were some of the most important things in retrospect that you did to rebuild your career, regain that momentum afterwards?
Tim McGraw: Well, choosing the right partner, for one thing, which was Scott Borchetta, who happens to be the son of Mike Borchetta, who signed me on my first deal.
Tim Ferriss: A small world.
Tim McGraw: I know. Who I signed with on Big Machine afterwards because I knew he was a hard worker. So that certainly being first, but I was also recording the best album I think I’d ever recorded in my life while all this was going on. Once I was cleared to record. And so I had an album ready to go by the time all the dust was settled —
Tim Ferriss: It was settled.
Tim McGraw: — I had an album ready to go and Scott Borchetta was ready and the album worked and the juice was back.
Tim Ferriss: Incredible.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. But a lot of that was my team, kept fighting for me the entire time. When I went to Scott, to his label, he knew what had happened and he fought really hard because he didn’t like what had happened either.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would imagine that also injected a helpful amount of piss and vinegar to demonstrate, to really relaunch in a meaningful way.
Tim McGraw: Oh, yeah. I think it turned me up to 12 after that. I mean, it kicked me into high gear for sure. And that’s the way I feel now. After all of this and worrying about being able to come back and worry about if I did come back, what’s my show’s going to be like? How I was going to be able to perform? Was I going to be able to be me again?
Now I feel like that same way I felt after coming out of Curb and starting with Big Machine and getting the ball rolling again. I feel like that we’re right on the edge of just tipping that ball over the hill, that boulder over the hill and let it go again.
Tim Ferriss: I am so curious because you must get approached all the time one way or another from musicians at different stages in their careers. Maybe it’s the son of a friend or the daughter of a fill in the blank, or it could be someone who’s just coming up. Maybe they’re trying to be an opener for you. Who knows?
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Someone who is earlier in their career, I imagine the advice you might give them has changed over time, but if they want to be more than a flash in the pan —
Tim McGraw: Take charge.
Tim Ferriss: — to really last. Yeah. What advice do you give them?
Tim McGraw: Take charge.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Can you say more?
Tim McGraw: Take charge of your career.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: Take charge of your career. Take charge of what you do. Be confident in your decisions. Listen, of course, you want to listen to people. Listen to people that know what they’re doing, but ultimately you have to make the decisions and you have to make your choices and you have to make the right choices for you. And nobody can do that but yourself.
And if you just coast, you might have a career for a little while, but if you want a long career, you’re going to have to take charge and ownership of it and you’re going to have to guide it. And you’re going to have to have your finger on the button all the time and you’re going to have to say yes or you’re going to have to say no. And you’re going to have to use your skills to manage people. You’re going to have to use your skills to be managed.
And both of those things can happen simultaneously and they have to happen simultaneously. You have to listen to smart people. But if you don’t have a vision about what you want to do, if you don’t have a plan about what you want to do, if you don’t act on it every day, it’s not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen.
And you can do all those things and it’s still not happening.
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Jessica Lahey: So I wrote The Gift of Failure, it was my first book. I didn’t know how to write a book. I mean, knowing how to write a book is a learned skill, right? So the idea that a journalist who’s used to writing 1,200 words because suddenly write 70,000 and do it perfectly the first time around, I had it in my head — my fantasy was I would hand my first draft in and my editor would come back to me and she’d say, “Well, there’s no edits here. I mean, this is it. We can publish early. This is perfect.” What happened instead was this. I turned my book in on time, on October 31st, and on November 1st, I went on a horseback ride with my husband. My friend of mine has horses that she lets me borrow sometimes.
I was thrown from the horse and I landed on my head and I lost my memory and lost my ability to read for a little while. It was bad. It was really bad. Didn’t remember that I’d finished a book the day before, all that sort of stuff. So I had some post-concussion syndrome that was really depression and stuff. Then I got a call from my editor. Actually, I got an email from my editor, asking me to come to New York for a talk. No, yeah, that’s not good. My editor is like — oh, I just idolized her. She’s like a grande dame in publishing. She’s amazing. So this wasn’t going to be good. I went and what she said was this. Oh, God, it still makes me want to throw up.
She said, “This book is unpublishable.” Then she said the worst part. That wasn’t the worst part. What she said was, “We need to think about bringing in a ghost.” Now, a ghost means a ghost writer. I am a professional writer and she wants to bring in a writer to help me write my book. So I didn’t throw up. I was actually very proud of myself for that. But I said, “Look…” and I didn’t cry, which was also a huge thing. I said, “Before we do that…” I needed some extra time anyway because of the head injury. That really got in my way for a while, so we had some extra time to play with. I said, “Give me two chapters, give me a probationary two chapters and tell me everything I did wrong and what you want this to look like.”
I filled a notebook. I sat in her office for — I was in there for over an hour listening to how bad I was, to how much I stank as a writer, essentially. Luckily, she was also lovely and she said things like, “This happens with a lot of journalists. You’re used to writing in short bursts and so you end up writing this very fragmented, large thing that doesn’t hold together as a whole. Your writing is fine. It’s your organization that sucks and that’s what you need help with.” So she gave me those two chapters and I went home and I read over a notebook full of how badly I suck as a writer and I digested it and I turned it into essentially a checklist of what not to do again. Those two chapters turned into four, which turned into six, which turned into the whole book, no ghost writer, which turned into a New York Times bestselling book.
That’s not the best part of the story. The best part of the story for me was that when she bought my second book, I turned that book in on time. My agent was a little nervous because she knew I’d been a lot to handle the first time, right? My editor’s having to line edit an entire book, because I’m a ton of work. But I had run my second book through the what not to do again to-do list filter, and the book was so clean that she wanted to move up my publication date.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.
Jessica Lahey: So it’s not that I’m a great writer. It’s that I was humble enough to say, “Teach me how to be better. I will take it to heart and I will be able to be objective about it and I will use it and I won’t make the same mistakes again.” So when I handed in not only Gift of Failure but then the next book, I was able to show my editor that I learned from my mistakes. And what was really sweet is she referred to me in a recent email as a dream author because I learned from my mistakes.
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Tim Ferriss: You’ve been very forthcoming with a lot of your challenges over time. You do something that I respect a great deal, which is not leading with solely the highlight reel. I think that that’s a real service to people who are suffering, as we all are in various ways, often self-inflicted wounds. And I wanted to know if you have perhaps a favorite failure? And what I mean by that is a mistake or something at the time that you viewed as a failure, that in some way set you up for success later. If there’s anything that you gained from tremendously, that at the time seemed like a shortcoming or a failure or a mistake?
Dax Shepard: I mean, the one that jumps out immediately and is most relevant to this conversation is, I was heartbroken when CHiPs didn’t open. Because back to my identity crisis, I had a three-year stretch where in my mind I decided I wasn’t an actor anymore. I was a writer-director, and I liked that. It felt loftier. Well, and substantively, I feel a lot more pride over having written a script than having acted. I do think it’s harder, so some of it’s worthwhile. But I had decided I was a writer-director and that was going to be the next 10 years of my life. CHiPs had tested really high at Warner Brothers, and they immediately put me on another movie that I took over from some other people, and so I was doing that.
And then overnight that ended. I did not have that identity anymore. And they had already commissioned CHiPs 2. I was already beginning to write that. And I got very depressed for three or four months, maybe more. I started doing math and thinking, “Okay, could I retire now? Could I be done now? Live on this amount of money?” Blah, blah, blah. That’s what I was spending most of my time thinking about is whether I was completely done.
And that’s when I wanted to do the podcast. I was ruminating on so much stuff. I was thinking about my own life and identity and trajectory and the failure, and then I started it in the wake of that. And I think because I was so interested in failure at that time—I say often on the podcast, I have nothing to learn from someone holding an Emmy over their head. I’ll never be holding an Emmy over my head, but I can relate if that person cheated on someone they loved and regretted it. I can relate to the failures that led up to that. That’s something I can learn from. And that’s how I learned from people in AA. I don’t ever learn from someone telling some victory story, it’s always how they fucked up and realized it.
And so now in hindsight, had I had the thing I wanted, which was being a writer-director, it’s so time-consuming. My kids were one and three when I finished that movie, maybe two and four; and I would have been gone. I would have taken bigger movies. I would have been way more into that. Ironically, I would have ended up making less money.
This thing that I had no desire to do and this complete collapse of this identity I had and desire turned out to be something that allows me to be with my kids a ton. I’m at home all the time. My wife can take work out of town if she wants. I can travel and do this. This life that came out of this epic failure, this 20-year pursuit, turned out to be something better than I had even thought to imagine. I didn’t even know that this could exist.
Yeah, that’s a very obvious one for me now that I look back and go like, “Fucking thank God that thing failed.” I would have been writing that movie, then directing that movie, then trying to get them to give me $100 million to do this one. Well, and by the way, the movie business is collapsing, so I would have been doing all that in a time it’s almost impossible to do that. Yeah, I got so lucky in that thing not performing, crazy enough.
Tim Ferriss: What a story. It makes me think of something a friend of mine said, I can’t recall who it was, but sometimes you need life to save you from what you want.
Dax Shepard: oh, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, what a great story.
Dax Shepard: Well, even if you go through your own life, right, and you think of the times you got exactly what you wanted and then the times you didn’t get the thing you wanted. And what I know most is that I don’t know what’s best for me. The things I got that I wanted did not turn out or result in anything I had forecasts or dreamt of; and yet, all these things I didn’t want to do.
I didn’t want to be on TV. I had decided in my egotistical mind I was a movie actor. I didn’t want to be in TV. I reluctantly was on this show Parenthood because I was at a lull in my career. Best experience I’ve ever had as an actor, opened up the doors for me to act and so many other things. Without question, the best thing that ever could’ve happened to me as an actor, and it was the thing I didn’t want to do. And I got to do the exact thing I wanted to do, ride wheelies motorcycles in a movie I directed, and it fucking didn’t turn out.
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Cathy Lanier: So I went from a talented and gifted student with straight As to failing literally every subject the first quarter of seventh grade. I was chronically truant. I think I was averaging 19 days a quarter that I was actually showing up for school. My mother didn’t know because the school never notified her, and by the time she got home from work at 6:00 p.m., we were all sitting around pretending to do our homework. So my poor mother had no idea until about midway through the eighth grade I was so chronically truant that I was failing all of my major subjects.
So meanwhile, while I’m skipping school, I’m hanging out with the wrong people, much older crowd, friends of my older brother and just an older crowd and just getting in trouble. And I fall in love with a much older boyfriend at the time, think I’m in love, and we want to get married and run away and get married. And so by the time I was in the ninth grade, I’m 14 years old, found myself pregnant. My boyfriend at the time had given me a diamond ring. We were engaged, we’re going to get married, so we run away. He was 26 at the time. I was 14. My mother, when she finds out, was going to have him arrested. She was going to put him in jail. So I run away from home and think, “Well, we’ve got this. We’re going to get married and we’re going to have the baby and everything’s going to be great.” The mind of a 14-year-old. Obviously things didn’t work out that way.
Interestingly, I went to my father who had been out of the picture most of my life and asked for him to sign for me to get married. Because of my age, one of my parents had to legally sign over my legal guardianship to my husband. So they literally signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. So my dad, thinking he would have one less child to pay child support for, because once he signed over my guardianship, he —
Tim Ferriss: Right, cuts the child support bill.
Cathy Lanier: — paid $100 less a month in child support. So he signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. We got married the day after my 15th birthday. I was eight months pregnant at the time.
So I guess fast-forward a little bit, a year and a half later, I was back at home. My mother was taking me to GED classes at night. I was sneaking to go to GED classes when I was still married. My husband didn’t approve of me going to school. So once we separated, my mom made sure I stayed in school, got my GED. And she would bring her typewriter home from work and she taught me how to type on the kitchen table. So she taught me how to type and take a little shorthand, and I went and got a job as a secretary. I lied about my age. I got a job as a secretary when I was 16, so started working as secretary and then worked as a waitress in the evening in a bar. Also lied about my age to work in a bar. That was the only option up in the area where I was working. So for the next several years, I worked two jobs as a secretary and a waitress.
And my motivation really was my son. It was kind of a significant moment for me, and I’ve had a few in my life. When my son was born, I had never babysat before, I’d never held a baby. I didn’t know anything about babies or children. And when he was born, he was such a good baby. His crib was at the end of my bed in my bedroom. And I’d wake up in the morning, and he’d be awake and he’d just be looking at me, waiting for me to wake up. Not crying, nothing. He would just be looking at me. So about three weeks into this —
Tim Ferriss: That is remarkable. Yeah.
Cathy Lanier: Yeah, about three weeks into this experiment, I’m looking at him one morning, and it just dawns on me for the first time that I’m a parent and that that helpless little baby was completely reliant on me. And my mother always stressed the importance of education and work to us, and here I was, my husband didn’t allow me to go to school, I would never be able to get a job, and I’m looking at this poor little innocent baby and I’m thinking his whole life depends on me, and what am I going to be able to provide with a ninth grade education? Not much. So that was a aha moment.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to resist the temptation to ask 300 questions about the last few minutes that you shared because we’ll end up spending all of our time there if I do that. But I am curious for you, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes at that young age, when you — and we don’t need to get into the details unless you’d like to share, but when you separated from your then-husband, when that happened, what did you think was going to become of you? What did you envision your path would be at that point? I have to imagine that it would have just been incredibly challenging. I don’t know. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet, but I read that when you were a young girl, you dreamed of being a lawyer. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Cathy Lanier: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: And then flash-forward, you go through this entire tumultuous experience and you land back at home. Where did you think your life was headed? Where did you think you were headed at that point?
Cathy Lanier: Well, I knew that with a ninth grade education and a single mom that I had zero chance of being able to do what I thought was most important in the world, and that’s take care of my son. And when I first moved back home, I got my GED, but I still was not able to easily find a job at my age. It was 16, almost 17. I had to wait till I was 16 and nine months to take the test to get the GED. Interestingly, you needed 255 to pass the test. I got 256. I passed it by one point.
Tim Ferriss: Oh my God. Talk about —
Cathy Lanier: There’s another little footnote of my life.
Tim Ferriss: — these Sliding Door moments. Holy cow, right? Okay.
Cathy Lanier: So I knew that my mother had always stressed the importance of education and work, so I knew I had to go back to school, and I wanted to go to college. I didn’t want my son to be subject to the same crappy neighborhoods and the same crappy schools that I went to. I wanted him to have a real chance, and I knew if I was going to do that, I had to go back to school and get a college education. If I didn’t do that, I was standing in the same food stamp line my mother stood in with me. I remember the first day I went to get food stamps, going to the big white building by Prince George’s Plaza right near my home and standing in the same line with my son that I stood in with my mom when I was a kid, and I was like, “This is not my path. This can’t be my path.”
And so when I got my job as a secretary, they offered tuition reimbursement to go to college, so I started at community college. I just started taking one class a semester, and that’s where it started, one class a semester. And they reimbursed me for it.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, for people who don’t have context, we’ve been trying to schedule this for a while, and understandably you got a lot of balls to juggle. And I remember hearing just pieces of your story. This was, God, it has to be, what, more than a year ago now, I’m sure. Time flies. But it’s been a long while. And I just remember thinking to myself, “God, I hope someday that we can have this conversation on the podcast,” so I want to thank you again for doing it.
How do you then go from there — what is the connective tissue, sort of the catalyzing events that ultimately get you into law enforcement? What are the first few dominoes that get tipped over that start to push you in that direction?
Cathy Lanier: So to be fair, my family’s a public service family. My father was a firefighter. My oldest brother had become a firefighter right out of high school. My other brother was a police officer. I was working as a secretary. I was taking that one class a semester working as a secretary, trying to get my son in private school. I wanted him in private school. I did not want him going to those schools. I was still living in the same crappy neighborhood, but I wanted my son in a good school.
And I saw an ad — I was 23 years old. I saw an ad in the Washington Post for the Metropolitan Police Department; they were hiring. And what caught my attention — it’s a full page ad in the Post. Half of the page said tuition reimbursement. I’m like, “Oh my God, tuition reimbursement. I’m paying for one class a semester. Going to take me 30 years to get a degree.”
So I went with a friend, and we went and stood in line. They were hiring a thousand cops. This was during the crack cocaine wars in Washington, early 1990. 500 murders a year. DC was known as the murder capital of the world at the time. So I just went and stood in line with a thousand other people, went and took the test, and I came out — I want to say I came out like 60 out of a thousand people on that test. So they called me right away. I was the only white female in the room. This is back in the early ’90s. Washington DC was about 89% African American.
So I mean, I felt the same drive my mother felt taking care of us is that I have a son that needs me, he needs me to provide for him, and the only way I’m going to do this is get a good job, government job, not a bad option, and go back to school and get my degree. So I got hired by the Metropolitan Police in 1990, started walking a footbeat. My first day out of the academy was the Mount Pleasant riots. So my first day out of the academy, I went to work and didn’t come home for five days. It was great.
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Tim Ferriss: I like that. That rings true to me. Let’s use this as a segue to an answer that you provided very graciously in my last book, Tribe of Mentors. I asked a question in the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? So I’m just going to read this and then we’ll dive into it. So these are your words. “I used to resent obstacles along the path thinking if only that hadn’t happened life would be so good. Then I suddenly realized: life is the obstacles. There is no underlying path. Our role here is to get better at navigating those obstacles. I strive to find calm, measured responses and to see hindrances as a chance to problem-solve. Often I fall back into old frustrations, but if I remind myself this is a chance to step up, I can reframe conflict as a chance to experiment with solutions.” What led to this realization?
Janna Levin: Oh, man. I mean, gosh, it is one of my best, you know, how we might all have these certain boulders we nail into the wall to cling to. This is one of them for me very much so. I think we struggle with the idea of who’s privileged and who’s not privileged? What opportunities have you been given? What have you earned? And we all have a different balance of that. I definitely had feminist parents, I had intellectual parents. I had a lot of ups and advantages. And when I came to blocks in the road, I really didn’t like that I had people to stand up on me and demand, “What do you have to say about being a woman in science?” It really bugged me. And I thought, “But you’re not talking about all these leg ups I had from all these other people and how I look around and I don’t see a lot of diversity. Why should I only talk about the hardship in my road?” It bugged me instinctively.
And I think that what I realized was I had been sold because of my kind of comfy childhood and idea that life is great, and just don’t screw it up. And that’s false. Life is not great for most people, and they have to do a hell of a lot more than not screw it up. They have to build bridges, and pave ways, and do things no one’s ever thought of. And fight poverty, and find solutions. And I just thought the people that have taught me the most have done those things and that we have to stop fantasizing that we’re — my dad always said, my dad was from a tougher upbringing. And he always said, “Life is unfair.” He told me that all the time. Oh, my God, it’s so hilarious. I can totally hear him saying it, “Life is not fair. It’s not about fairness. Nobody told you you were owed fairness. No such thing.”
And it really taught me to think that, “Oh, life is a series of obstacles. It’s not a paved path.” And the obstacles are what make you and when I’ve really screwed up with something like that, I felt really deep shame. Nobody had to tell me to be ashamed. I felt really ashamed. And when I’ve succeeded in that, I felt really good, and nobody needed to tell me I should feel good about it. It’s just obvious. And so I started to see life as a series of obstacles that were test trials, teaching modules of how to be a better person and to pave the way behind you, not in front of you. And it’s really been a pretty important principle for me, I guess. That when I see something happen I don’t think, “This is so unfair. Why are they doing this to me?” That I think instead, “Okay, am I able to rise to figure out a solution to this?” And I’m not always able to do that. But when I do, I feel like it’s genuine progress.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s an enabling lens of agency. Right?
Janna Levin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I mean, we talked about it a little bit before recording, but I mean, there’s certainly you are whoever you are. And some people certainly much more than others, you’re going to run into boots in the face.
Janna Levin: Boots in the face. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then the question is: what do you do when you run into a boot in the face? And —
Janna Levin: Yeah, so I think it’s very interesting that certain people with privilege are enraged by a boot in the face because they were told that they had the road paved ahead of them. And it’s an advantage to not think that. So then when the boot is in your face, your immediate reaction isn’t like, “How dare you? I deserve this. I’m owed this opportunity.” That your reaction is instead, “Oh, that’s who you are. You’re the guy with the boot and what can I do to go around you? What can I do to go over your head and to be okay with that?” I think a lot of us cling to the degrees and the accolades and trust me, it’s helped me and my wife to have those things. So I’m not dismissing them. And I’m really grateful for them. But if you’re not going to get that accolade, big deal.
Learn how to pivot, move away from the boot, the boot actually has no power unless you insist on continually pushing against it. Unless you consider it your only avenue forward. And you’re just going to keep pushing until the boot and convince the boot and that, forget it. Move to the left and figure out something else, and go over their heads. And that’s really, really liberating. That took me much longer to realize and it’s super liberating. Suddenly they’ve got no power over you if you’re not interested in the avenue that they offer.
Tim Ferriss: I loved your answer in the book, and I love your explanation. Life is the obstacles. There is no underlying path. It’s actually very relieving in a way.
Janna Levin: It is. And it makes you less resentful. Like why did this happen to me? And this is an unfair. No, it’s not. It’s an opportunity to develop yourself. It’s exciting.
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Tim Ferriss: I want to bring up one of the lines from The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life that — it certainly pops to mind quickly when think about this book. I’m sure it’s a line that a lot of people bring up. I know it’s a line that Josh has brought up and I’d love to just hear you explain why this is in the book and why it matters. Quote, “I don’t know where we’re going, but I know exactly how to get there.”
Boyd Varty: Oh, I love that. Don’t you?
Tim Ferriss: I love it. Absolutely. It really, if you take a moment to pause and contemplate, the implications are pretty profound. So I’d love to just hear you riff on this and why and how this ended up in the book?
Boyd Varty: Well, there were two things that Renias used to say regularly. The one,
“Hi ta kuma”: “We will get it.” And it was almost like this kind of incredible self-talk that he would have when the track was cold or the track was — we weren’t making progress. I would look at him and you’d say, ah, hita xikuma, we’re going to get this. And then often he would say too, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there.” And what he’s saying, he’s talking to the dynamic of tracking, which is… It’s an interesting, energetic dynamic. He is profoundly committed to finding that animal, but he hasn’t allowed that commitment to become a burden of some kind. He is working moment to moment on the signs that he’s getting. And you can think in a vast wilderness as trackers, we also talk about the first track, in a vast wilderness, 360 degrees of wild terrain.
All he needs is the next first track and then the next first track and then the next first track and the next first track. And he’s able to dial down the infinite possibilities of where that animal could have gone to a moment of knowing and a moment of presence and then another moment of knowing and another moment of presence. And all he needs is that next sign. So he doesn’t know where it’s going, but he knows how to get there. The next moment of presence. The next thing I know to do. And it might be a good segue there just telling you a little bit about how the tracking process changed for me over the years, but let me know —
Tim Ferriss: Let’s do it.
Boyd Varty: — if you want to go there.
Tim Ferriss: Dive in.
Boyd Varty: So I had these encounters, Tim, whereby I had a childhood following animals and learning this art form and really the dynamics and the psyche of the tracker, how a tracker approached the process of finding an animal in the middle of nowhere and then watching how consistently good trackers delivered an outcome. They found the animal they were looking for. And at that time as a young child, I thought I was learning that skill. And then through my early 20s, I had a series of pretty traumatic encounters and the result of that was that by the time I was about 23 or 24 years old, I had found myself frozen by trauma.
I was depressed. I was uncertain how to move forward and in the way trauma limits options, I felt my myself extremely limited. I did not have access to a lot of emotionality. I did not have access to different choices. I was stuck. And at that time I was very lucky to meet a woman who came on safari and she became my first mentor. And the reason I guided her was because Alex, my friend, who also features in the book, he had guided her a year before and he said to me, she’s a martial artist.
And I was very interested in martial arts, as I know you are. And so I went into the guide room and in the guide room, there was this board where every guide got their name put next to the clients who were coming in. I rubbed off someone else’s name and I put my name next to her, to guide her and that moment absolutely changed my life. Her name was Dr. Martha Beck and she arrived on the safari and we went out the first two days and she said something on the second day that I felt something in me like really moved. We were driving along and I was telling her about the restoration of the land and she said, “I really understand this and I believe the restoration of the planet will come out of a transformation in human consciousness.”
And the minute she said it, whatever my grandfather knew or my father knew, or my uncle knew when he saw that leopard, I felt that thing move inside of me, that idea struck me very dear deeply. And then on about the fourth day, I’d driven back to the camp and I’m in my safari gear, I got my rifle. I’m the guide, I’m rugged guy. I’m out there tracking lions. And she turned and she looked at me and she said, “I’m ready to talk to you.” And I was sort of taken aback. I said, “Well, what, what do you mean?” She said, “I can see what you’re carrying and I can see how stuck you are and I want you to know that I can help you and I’m here.” I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those instances where someone sees you when you’re in one of those places, but I’ve felt myself becoming really uncertain and then I felt tears starting to come to my eyes. And then there was this moment where this woman is hugging the safari guide and just consoling me.
And she was an incredible healer and she was exceptionally adept at transformational processes. And so she started to teach me how to move through the trauma and the suffering that I was stuck in. And as that happened, my relationship to tracking started to change and I started to see this art form in a different way and I realized that I was looking for something and all of the skills and the mentality of the was highly adept to being in a transformational process. The first thing that you will have to do, if you want to go track a lion in the wild, is you will have to become super uncomfortable with unknowns.
You’ll have to give up all the ways you try to know what to do and say, I don’t know how to do this. All trackers operate using unknowns to almost bring them to life. You will need to develop your track awareness. Track awareness is teaching yourself to be attuned to a very specific set of signs, metrics but self-generated. Like when I was a kid, Renias would take me out to a game path and you would say, walk down that game path and tell me what you see. And I would come back and I would say to him, I saw a herd of impala walk there and he would say, “Heh mfana, famba uya languta futhe.”: “Young boy, go look again.” And as I was walking away, he would say, “phuza mati phela.” He’d say, “Put your head down like the way an animal drinks.” “Put your head right down against the trail and look like you drinking water, like an animal.”
And I would come back and I would say, “I can see where the herd of impala walked, but they actually walked over the tracks of a leopard. And I can see where a mouse ran across the path. And then an owl swooped down and its wing touched the ground.” And each time I walked down that path under his guidance, there was more information. And that idea became very important to me. The idea that there is information in your life, if you are looking for transformation, but you have to teach yourself to attune to it. And so, what do you need to attune to in transformational processes? Things that make you feel expensive, things that make you feel alive, letting go of your rational idea of what you should do and noticing what you move towards. Noticing what you’re curious about, noticing the people who energize you, the activities that make you feel more alive.
So I started to see through the eyes of the tracker, the first track. The first track being the next thing you know to do, letting go of where that animal might be or letting go of where you think you should be and just doing the next thing you know to do and the next thing you know to do. If you watch great trackers, they drop into what I call the following state. And it’s so beautiful, if you watch Alex and Renias in the following state. The following state could be the find almost as constant creative response to what is occurring. If the track cuts left, Alex will click and he’ll say, “I’m on the track.” If it cuts right, Renias will be on it. They’re getting a sense of the mood of the animal. They’re using their own body to attune to the way the animal is moving.
And in that way, like almost feel the animal as it’s walking out ahead of them at the same time, they are vectoring and they are getting a sense of their bearings using waypoints of marula trees up ahead. When you watch them, they’re almost having fun in it, they’re playing, they’re playing on that track. And so you will need to develop the following state in your own transformational process. How can you play? How can you be creative with not knowing what you’re trying to create or this place you’re trying to get to, but being open and willing and aware and attuned. You will almost certainly lose the track and I’m sort of saying this to see how the tracker came to me in a different way as I got into my own journey of healing.
You will lose the track. You’ll be in the middle of it thinking I’m deep in the following state, I’m right on track, and then so suddenly it’ll be gone. And you will need to build community around you of other great trackers, people who are willing to move with you, follow with you. And the core of it is really that there is something inside of you that knows. There is a part of you, you might call it your wild self. You might call it the track of your life, or as native people call it your medicine way. A part of you that beyond rational thought reacts when you become more in tune with yourself and sifting away, the layers of socialization, all the things you should do, all the things you have to do to start to be able to follow the trail of that place inside of you, became really what the core of my own journey to healing was.
And I live like that to this day as a tracker, trying to be present, resting into the unknown, attuning and trying to fall into the following state with what energizes me, makes me curious and pulls me forward.
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