What is a Good Life? #171
What Must My Life Be About with Robert J. Anderson
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around how we live and what actually matters.
This week, I’m reflecting on a glorious conversation with Robert J. Anderson - creator of the Leadership Circle Profile and author of Mastering Leadership and Scaling Leadership. He talks beautifully about doubt and fear alongside grace and synchronicity, and what it takes to keep saying yes when you can’t see where it’s going.
If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.
Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
Robert is working in the family agribusiness, managing production in a feed manufacturing plant. He is frustrated and he knows this isn’t it - what he is meant to do with his life - but he doesn’t know what it is.
His frustration grows as he is unloading a railroad car in the middle of the night because the plant is down. After climbing into the railroad car and sweeping out the last of the ingredients, he is exhausted and lies down.
“Out of my mouth, completely unrehearsed, came:
I’m not becoming who I am.
It was declarative. I wasn’t reflecting on anything. It just came out. And I knew I’d crossed some threshold. I’d spoken a truth I couldn’t go back on.”
This is one of many moments in this interview that moved me. Robert’s path of continually taking notice of moments like this is inspiring.
It reminded me of what the author of Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore said in another interview:
“Every once in a while you get a deep urge to move in a certain direction. And I think it’s important to follow that urge.”
Having interviewed over 300 people on this question, and asked them to reflect on their lives, I’ve found these moments often come in far more ordinary settings than in the deliberate incubations of retreats and courses.
……………..
I was out walking my dog on a Sunday afternoon when I ran into a friend. We don’t do drive-by greetings, so we stopped and talked.
He proceeded to tell me about a chair he was restoring that he found on the street. In Berlin, people often leave out things they no longer want or need. Rarely is it just trash they are throwing away carelessly. In this case, it was a Bauhaus chair that still functioned but needed restoration.
My friend is a details guy, so he began to tell me about his process of carefully stripping off the paint. Apparently, several coats of paint, sloppily painted over different colours, had been the chair’s fate.
He mentioned that if he had used the quickest way of stripping paint, the quality and essence of the wood would have suffered.
He then had this self-conscious moment where he blinked upon realising how long he’d been talking for and apologised if he was boring me.
I told him I am all in on this process, “Please continue, it’s music to my ears.”
He invited me into his office where he was restoring it and told me how the process had worked over several days and how over time the wood could breathe again.
He then showed me how he had dismantled each mechanism of this chair and taken the time to clean them all individually. A point I particularly relished was a steel part of the chair that resides underneath the seat, which nobody would ever see unless they were lying under the chair.
He diligently cleaned both sides of the steel, even though one side would never see sunlight.
He talked about how, when this chair was being customised and more widely produced, it would have taken a number of specialists to be in conversation with each other to figure out how this chair would be built to its highest potential.
He seemed to revel in this thought back in time and the connection he had with these people from the past.
I asked how much the chair, fully restored, would cost if he were to find a similar one online. “Probably three or four hundred euros,” he responded. Nowhere near the amount his time would cost, but that wasn’t the point.
He had found a profound meaning and connection through this chair, to its parts, to the past, through the dedication of his craft in restoring it.
In going through the process and pointing to different parts of the chair, he looked up at me and said, “I realised that I need to change my job, this work is, in some ways, the antithesis of my job.”
2. This Week’s Questions
Have you ever heard yourself spontaneously speak out a truth that you couldn’t ignore?
What must your life be about?
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - What Must My Life Be About with Robert J. Anderson - What is a Good Life? #171
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Robert J. Anderson below.
For Apple click here.
About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.