About this episode
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Dan Coyle is a New York Times bestselling author who's spent the last two decades studying what makes great teams great. He wrote The Talent Code, The Culture Code, and now Flourish—books that have shaped how millions of people think about skill development, team culture, and meaningful connection. He works with the Cleveland Guardians as a special advisor on culture and performance. We recorded this one together in Cleveland. Notes: Find your yellow doors. Most of us go through life looking for green doors (clearly open paths) and red doors (obviously closed paths). But yellow doors are different. They're out of the corner of your eye, things that make you uncomfortable or feel brand new. That's where life actually happens. We think life is a straight line from A to B to C, but it's not. Life isn't a game... It's complex, living, shifting. Yellow doors are opportunities to create meaningful connections and explore new paths. "Life deepens when we become aware of the yellow doors, the ones we glimpse out of the corner of our eye." The craft journey always involves getting simpler. Simple is not easy. The great ones have their craft to where there's a simplicity to it. In this world of clutter and noise, it's easy to want to compete with energy and speed, but the stuff that really resonates is quieter and simpler. Be a beginner again in something. With climbing, Dan's at the very bottom of the craft mountain. With writing, he's somewhere in the middle. It's fun to have a couple of zones in your life where you're a beginner. It's liberating, but it also develops empathy. Some stuff looks very simple, but isn't. Every good story has three elements. There's some desire (I want to get somewhere), there's some obstacle (this thing standing in my way), and there's some transformation on that journey. Teaching teaches you. Coaching Zoe's writing team helped Dan, and then Zoe ended up coaching Dan. It was never "let me transmit all my wisdom to my daughter." It was a rich two-way dialogue that helped both of them. Suffering together is powerful. Doing hard things together with other people, untangling things together (literally and figuratively), and being vulnerable together. That's culture code stuff. Whether it's skiing with your kids, seeing them fall and get back up, or being trapped underground like the Chilean miners. Behind every individual success is a community. Dan dedicates all his books to his wife, Jenny (exc
