James Rhee on How You Lead Change Through Kindness EP 472

Speaker A
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Speaker D
Of us are thinking these macro things, big policy, big changes, and it's hard to do that. You can't do that if you don't do small acts in your personal life. You have to get into the habit of doing that. So we want all these great things policy wise changes, but we need to just focus on what we control in our personal lives. And to start with that.

And I think a lot of the quote, problems will actually go away. Welcome to passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.

Speaker C
If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions. On Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEO's creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 472 of Passion Struck.

Consistently ranked one of the top five most inspirational podcasts in the world. A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, to learn, and to discover new ways to live better, to be better, and to most importantly, make a meaningful impact in the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that. We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize into convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to passionstruck.com starterpacks or Spotify to get started.

I'm excited to announce that my new book, Passion Struck, won best nonfiction book at the International Book Awards. It also is a winner of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, the best business Minds Book Awards, the nonfiction book Awards, and was recognized as a must read by the next big idea club. You can purchase it on Amazon or go to passionstruck.com dot. In case you missed my interviews from last week, I had enlightening conversations with Morley Robbins and Sarah Rogers. Morley is an expert in mineral metabolism and we explore his incredible journey into the world of copper, magnesium and his other insights on the root causes of chronic health issues.

We also go into the transformative power of understanding our body's mineral needs. Sarah Rogers, the creative force behind the woman's wear line babes, was my other guest. In this episode, Sarah shares insights from her new book, the Outsider advantage because you don't need to fit in to win. Discover how she turned setbacks into stepping stones and why being different and be your greatest asset. I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews.

If you loved today's episode, we would appreciate you giving it a five star review and sharing it with your friends and families. I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners. Today we are joined by a remarkable guest who has mastered the art of leading change with kindness and a touch of mathematical precision. Embrace your agency, lead change and fly free in the business of life and the life of business kindness, and discover how this philosophy can transform your world. Our guest today is James Ray, a high school teacher turned private equity investor whose journey is a testament to the power of human centered leadership.

In kindergarten, James received a toy red helicopter as a thank you for a simple act of generosity, sharing his lunch. This small gesture became the cornerstone of his life's work, guiding him through personal and professional challenges to unprecedented success. James New book, Red Helicopter, is a transformative experience praised by leaders like Jay Shetty as a must read for anyone looking to think, act, and lead with balance, agility, and wisdom. This powerful narrative recounts how James took the helm of Ashley Stewart, an iconic company on the brink of collapse, and led it to transcendence by leveraging the intangible goodwill at its core. Through his journey, James has shown that it is indeed possible to be successful and kind, to lead with precision and compassion, and to honor our true selves in every aspect of our lives.

His story challenges us to combine the clarity and imagination of our childhood with fundamental business metrics and to apply this intuitive approach to lead change both at work and at home. If you're seeking a sustainable balance between life, money and joy, James Rays Story offers a clear path forward. It's a poignant celebration of humanity, a tale of struggle and triumph, compelling in its honesty and relatability, and filled with practical instructions to balance the books of our lives. Thank you for choosing passion struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now let that journey begin.

Speaker D
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Speaker E
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Speaker C
I am absolutely ecstatic today to have James Ray on passion struck. I've been wanting to bring this episode to you all for a very long time, ever since I first heard James talk to Brene Brown, which is probably about two years ago now, might even be longer. Welcome, James John, it's awesome to be here. That interview you did with Brene and then the TED talk after, it really altered the course of how people were hearing your message. And I was relistening to the discussion with Brene today, and it's such an enlightening one.

So in addition to my podcast, I'd recommend people go back and tune into that one as well. But how did that even happen? Because Brene's podcast is a difficult one to get on, regardless if you have a platform or not. Yeah, it's the order was actually switched, so I did the TED first and then that was my first sort of real public speaking about anything that I had done in my career. I'm a bit of a learned extrovert, so I tend to say things once and I just go do it and then we'll go into later.

Speaker D
My mother had passed away and I was taking some time off actually from my life a bit to mourn her, and I just lost my father four years before my mother. There's a lot that had gone on, but I did the TED talk because people asked me to do it, and I said, sure. And so I did it. And then Bernay heard the TED talk and then asked me to join. And she really, Ted talk?

You only have 15 minutes to talk about things. I talked about kindness in math. You only have 15 minutes. And so Brene wanted to spend 60 minutes saying, okay, what happened here? You're a private equity guy, quote, private equity guy, and you're, like, Korean American, and you did what with a predominantly black female's business, and what happened and why did you do that?

And that's how the Brene Brown conversation happened. And she was really nice. I mean, remember, I don't know if you remember from the interview, she said, introduce yourself. And I just said, yeah, I'm James. I'm a bit of a hot mess, right?

And she started laughing and saying, we like hot messes on this show because hot messes, they tend to do pretty well in transformative situations because you take a little bit here, a little bit here. And I think oftentimes you have the humility to just know that you don't know half of anything and you become a good listener that way. As I was listening to the interview, you reminded me a little bit of myself. I remember when I was in my senior year at the naval academy when we got our yearbooks, I asked one of my roommates to sign it, and he looks at me and he goes, you're such a different person. I don't know how to describe you.

Speaker C
The only thing I can say, the first word that comes to my mind is that you're interesting. And as I look at your life, I see the same parallels. And it is interesting to me to use that word again, because someone this week used it again to describe me, and I just had to chuckle when I heard it.

Yeah. I mean, your background is nonlinear, as is mine, and it's an interesting life. Right? I think. Both driven by curiosity, I think.

Yeah, both driven by curiosity. And one of the things you said to Brene, and I think it was mine, held true with me, too, is I've always had this dream of being a creative, and I always wanted to play an instrument or be someone who could create masterpieces of art. But for me, my creativity borne out similar to you in the business world. And I think we can all be creative in different things we do. It's just how you approach it.

So I like that other intersection point that she that you brought up in that interview as well. So I want to start at your beginning, because you and my mom actually have a similar starting point. You were both raised in Long island. However, this is where it gets different. You grew up as a Korean American in a predominantly white world.

How did your upbringing influence your perspectives on things such as diversity, inclusion, education, and success? Well, I was the son of two immigrants, and they were both caregivers. So one was a pediatrician, one was a nurse, and that's the culture of how I grew up. And those were the value systems that we were expected to take care of people, and it was a highly mutualistic way of living. We were always reminded that we were responsible for the well being of other people as well as ourselves.

Speaker D
And, yeah, we were the only. In terms of. From an ethnicity standpoint, we were generally the only non white family for a long time in our neighborhood. So I grew up, I don't know, generally always the only, but generally not lonely. Like, I make friends really easily.

I have lots of different interests. I love sports, love music, like to read, like to have fun. So I generally have found a way to connect with pretty much anyone. And so was I aware that I was the only? Yeah, I was.

But was I ever lonely? No. And I think most of the way that I knew I was the only was less through me. It was more vis a vis my mother. And I think that's the other major prism with which I grew up, and I still am this way.

It used to pain me to see the world through my mother's lens, where she had a much more difficult time in this country. And I admired my mother. My mother was an incredible leader, high integrity, full of courage. But oftentimes in this country, particularly in the sixties, seventies, eighties, she felt pretty small at times, that it was not easy for her to be who she was outside the house. And I grew very sensitive to seeing other people not feeling great or very comfortable.

It's like hyper acuity. So that's very much part of who I am, too, is that I'm the first friend. Or, like, when someone's having a hard time, I notice it. I generally always speak up for people, and I hold in very low regard people who, when they have leverage, who abuse it and who make people feel small or make them feel stupid or. I don't really have a lot of tolerance for it.

And so that's how I grew up. Just an all american kid who loved his mother, loved his dad, but particularly his mother, and was hypersensitive to the dynamics of quote systems, making it difficult for sometimes individuals to exercise true agency. Thank you for sharing that. And I want to go into your intuitive nature just for a second, because I understand that you are an empath. When was the first time that you realized that you had that superpower?

Oh, I think one of the things that I wrote, there are lots of little things in my life, but I think that for me, the story that I felt strong enough that I included in the book was there was a Christmas where my brother, my older brother, who was like my big brother, he didn't get a lot of gifts. He got a really crappy gift. And I think my brother was very sensitive about it. He didn't believe in Santa Claus at that point. I still did.

And he knew that my parents were buying gifts. And my brother had come over late from Korea, like they had my brother. And then, as was typical of the time, they had my grand. My grandmother raised him for a few years, and then he came, which, in retrospect, was not easy for him. But I watched my brother.

He was very sad that Christmas morning. I was really little. I must have been seven or six, seven years old, eight years old. And he couldn't tell me why he was so sad, because he didn't want to spoil Christmas for me and tell me that there was no such thing as Santa Claus. And so my brother was upset, and I watched him.

And so the entire year, next year, still believing in Santa Claus, by the way, I would save up pennies and nickels. Anytime I saw, like, a coin in the house or on the street, I would put them in this old plastic tin that used to hold my little sister's baby wipes. I could still picture it. And I hid it in my desk. And at the end of the year, after saving up money for 360 days, I went to the local Sam goodies, had my mom take me, and I bought my brother zeppelin four.

And so that Christmas, he didn't know that I had done that. And no sibling had ever given a gift to another sibling. It was just Santa Claus. And my brother opened it, and he didn't want to cry because he's my big brother, but I'm pretty sure that's the best. He just shook my hand, and I still remember that moment.

And so that's an example of the things I do. I watch people, and when people are upset or I can tell that they're not, well, I can see it in Korean. It's called eunuch. You have this really high speed intuition. High speed empath.

And then I generally try to be a part solution to it. It's just my nature. But that story is the most striking one. It was enough that I put it in the book that it encapsulates, I think, a little bit of how I was raised and who I am. Yeah, thank you for sharing that.

Speaker C
And I happen to be engaged to someone who's an empath. And I had never in my life been this close to someone who has that capability. And she's a primary care provider, and I couldn't imagine someone you would want to go to more than her because she is always putting herself out there to others because she can feel their pain, feel what's going out of them, because she's just receptive to it and how much better care she's able to give. I think the flip side of it is she spends so much time helping others, oftentimes her own self care sacrifices. Do you find the same thing happens to you at times?

Speaker D
Yes, definitely. When I was younger, I've gotten better as I've gotten older. And we didn't talk about these type of things in the seventies and eighties, right? In terms of empath and personality types and behavioral psych and cog sci, those things really didn't exist and were not part of the mainstream like learnings and medias. Yeah, I think that in generally speaking, I think it's fair to say that I saw would see too much, sometimes more than I should have, and that there were times when I expected others just intuit that my feelings or that, but maybe they weren't as empathetic.

And instead of saying, oh, maybe they don't have that same quality, I would unfairly say, oh, that. You know it, but you're not even addressing it. I think that at times I was unfair in my judgment about other people and expecting them to know how I felt, but they really didn't. And that's just now as I've gotten older, I'm like, oh, not everyone sees that and that's okay and that there are plenty of things I'm not very intuitive about and forgive me for that too. But yeah, I think generally speaking, I felt generally in my life that the balance of give, get, if you're really tracking it, which I don't holistic, give, get do.

I think that overall I've been a net giver? Yeah, I have, and that's good, but it's without expectation of getting back. When I was younger, I was like, oh, it'd be nice to get a little bit back. But now as I've gotten older, I'm like, that's just who I am, and it's okay. And I have no expectation of getting back.

And so when I do get stuff back, which I do a lot. Right. People been very generous with me. I'm very appreciative of it. It's really like an unexpected gift, right.

Versus an entitlement or an expectation. No, it absolutely is. And you've mentioned it a couple times today. So I'm just going to share the book right here. You have a new best selling book that has come out called Red Helicopter lead change with kindness, plus a little math for those who can't see this on YouTube.

Speaker C
And you mention in the book that we all have a special childhood story that can serve as a beacon during dark times and a reminder of hardship during joyful moments before you go into your story at about the same exact age, and you and I are about the same exact age. I think we're both 53 or around that we are. I'm sorry, John. We are. When I was also five years old, I was playing tag between houses in my neighborhood and it was getting more rabunctious and I was running away from my friend who pushed me.

And unfortunately, my head crashed through a basement window. And it caused a whole bunch of lifelong implications from it that I look at as both a very hard learning moment, but it's also brought on moments of joy as I faced other hardships, knowing that I can get through them. Your story is really different and unique. How did a red helicopter become part of your life at the age of five and how has it influenced you since? Yeah, it's a simple story, but it's very complicated, which I think it's a metaphor in and of itself.

Speaker D
Yeah. I came home from Christmas with a red helicopter from public school, Long island kindergarten, and the Ree family was not swimming in abundance in 1976. So my parents noticed right away that I had this new toy and it was one of these two three dollar plastic red helicopters that you would get from the five and dime, like, drugstore. And I was just like holding it and like, flicking the rotors and being happy. And they asked me where I got it.

And then it's here. It's a story now of, like, all these things of false wronghoods or perceived falseness or wrongs. First they thought maybe I had stolen it or taken it from school, and they were worried that I'd done that. And then they were worried after explaining I was the only one who got one, that they had missed an american custom that maybe they didn't know that in America people exchanged toys or red helicopters for kindergarten. And so it's a symbol of that sadness a bit, too, of my parents not, you know, being new to the country.

And then they, my dad in particular, I think, got a little bit annoyed. I didn't know why the family had given me the toy. And so he was no word. And I was like. And I was like, I don't know, if you think about it, I know people are looking at me now, but picture a face that's five years old with a bowl cut standing in front of his dad, not knowing the answer.

And so it was also a little bit of that parenting style. I think guys, father, sons, it's a long history of sometimes difficulty communicating. So it's a story about that. So they found out later I'd gotten it because I'd been sharing half my lunch with my friend because he didn't have lunch. And so the way they asked me, I thought that they were mad at me for sharing food or being ungrateful to my mom.

And I remember a very emotional moment. My dad said, like, you think I'm mad at you? I'm not mad at you. He said, I'm really proud of you. And I think it.

He paused for reflection and said, my son's doing this. He lives with such abundance. And what a great way to live. Like, I think to be generous and to be is to live abundantly, to live creatively. And he then explained that my friend didn't have lunch because his mom had died that summer.

And it was the father who had come in, not the whole family and his two brothers. And so I remember that moment was yesterday, and father just patted me on the head a bit. I think they just wanted to meet the boy that was sharing his food. And that story is just. It's simple, but it's really complex.

And I lost that story or, and particularly, like, the wisdom of that boy and some of the pain of that story, right? Immigrant family, difficulty communicating with his dad. I suppressed that part of me. And I tried to for many years in the throes of private equity, big buildings, private jets, like, living that life. And that story came back to me when I made some very monumentally, from the external world, crazy decisions in my forties when my dad was dying.

And I decided to do what I did with the company called Ashley Stewart. When you find a deal on your favorite thing in the McDonald's app and order it, does that technically count as online shopping? Save money with the app at participating McDonald's. Prices may vary. Imagine earning a degree that prepares you with real skills for the real world.

Speaker B
Capella University's programs teach skills relevant to your career so you can apply what you learn right away. Learn how Capella can make a difference in your life at capella.edu.

Speaker C
Yeah, so we're going to be exploring a lot more about Ashley Stewart and red helicopter. But before we go there, I wanted to park this and discuss a couple things. And this might be a weird tangent, James, that I'm going on here, but as I was reading your book, it reminded me of an interview, which is one of my favorite interviews I've ever done on this podcast with a UC Berkeley professor named Dacre Keltner, who has been studying compassion and kindness for three decades. And I was interviewing him about his latest book titled Awe. And what was so interesting to me and profound about this research is that he found that witnessing acts of kindness, which he termed as moral beauty, is the most powerful source of awe.

And he was talking to me about how he volunteered at Sam Quinton and he was spending time with these prisoners on death row, people who you would never expect to see exhibit moral beauty or experience awe because most of the time they're spending it in a cell. But he said he was able to witness almost more of it looking at them than he was a typical person person. And I want to go back to that story because what that family was actually seeing was the moral beauty that you were performing to one of their own. How have you seen since that time that seeing someone else's kindness has profoundly influenced your own actions and in turn, your leadership style? Well, I love Keltner's work as well, and I've seen those acts throughout my personal life.

Speaker D
Right. I see it being as a father, as a son. I see it with my friends, the things they do for their children, for strangers, for me. And I always distinguish these are not YouTube acts of kindness and random acts. It's these are very intentional, longitudinally important investments in people, and we see it all the time.

I don't see it in mainstream media because that doesn't sell like advertising, but in real life. And I hope this is some comfort to our listeners. I'm profoundly moved by how people generally treat each other outside the confines of their cell phone and digital tech. In real life, when we still have real life engagement, I see it a lot. But part of my dilemma was during my life was that I saw that less at this place we call work and I would chuckle and say, no one's ever taught me that at work.

You're not supposed to behave like that for some reason. It's like going to a foreign country that the mores are so opposite that it's looked down upon to be generous and to be compassionate, to have wisdom versus to have intuition versus being always deductive. That's where I didn't see it, and I certainly didn't see it in basically my entire career in private equity. And I, even when I was doing that, I was, I still tried to be like that. It wasn't always easy to be like that.

But that's the genesis of sort of a lot of my cognitive dissonance that I was experiencing in my twenties and thirties and saying, I don't have the capacity or the desire to live a split existence. There's only one James. It's complicated enough. I can't keep track of all the James's. So the James at work is just going to be the James that you have at home.

And I used to take these personality tests and they would give me the feedback and say, we've never seen someone whose personality behavior is the same at work as it is at home to this degree. And then I would look at them and say, but isn't that a good thing? And because the way they said it was like a bad thing, and I said, isn't that a good thing? Don't you want, like, honesty? Like, truth isn't life?

And also as an investor, you want truth, right? You always want truth. Truth generally is the right answer. But I remember them asking, saying it to me like it was bad. And so that's, I saw more of the generic.

Like, that was the puzzle for me. I'm like, why are people so motivated to not be generous, to not be compassionate, to have these values at work? Like, how silly. And so I would study that. I'm like, all this theory, and I teach theory now in some business schools.

I'm like, are we overthinking things? And I think the pandemic, after all of that happened, people really realized that. They're like, I can't dissonance. Why? It doesn't make sense.

So anyway, but I've seen a lot of red helicopter stories. We all have them. And that's why I wrote the book that way. It's not a prescriptive book, and it's not like a voice of a private equity guy, CEO, business guy. It's more, I think, a voice of a friend.

I'm just saying, don't you want to live this way. And we all know intuitively it's the right way. And when you can think like this, as Keltner writes about, you're really activating the best part and the most forward thinking parts of your brain. You're actually thinking best. You can't be generous and kind when you're scared, right?

When you're acting out of survival and jealous and selfish and aggressive, you, by definition, are not using the most thoughtful parts of your brain. So why wouldn't you want to create an environment where people were able to activate the best parts of their brain? So that's why I talk about kind cultures that work. Yeah, I think dan Pink was ahead of the game. I can't remember the exact title, but it was something about a whole brain approach and basically how we concentrate too much on the right brain thinking.

Speaker C
And that can only get you so far. And you need to use your whole brain if you really want to succeed in life. Yeah, music does that. Right. Music really activates both parts of your brain.

Speaker D
They're still studying it. Dan Levitan's done some studies, and there's a new book outline and music that has put a lot of NIH nEA findings, but it's not all of it's proven. It's in the world of intuition. And we early on, a lot of the work that I've done over the course of my life, I didn't understand the pattern at first. But it's the musicians and artists and the creatives.

It's the physicists and, like, the spiritual, like the Buddhists, who really understood what I was saying. And doing, like, this oneness, like, just built. Designing a consonant system, rather that flows, that looks like a circle. Rather than compartmentalize life work, left, right, we as humans, we've created those compartments. Nature doesn't work like that, and neither does your brain, physiologically.

Speaker C
So, James, your story after you graduate high school gets interesting. You end up getting accepted to Harvard. You were the valedictorian your high school, when you went to Harvard, you found it was a humbling experience, and it introduced you, as you write about, to a new arena of social stratification. So you come out of one of the most prestigious universities in the country, and you take a very different path than most of your classmates would have taken. So you choose to teach high school despite the pushback and the expectations of your peers and family.

What motivated this decision? I'm not purposefully an iconoclast. It's really more the spirit of Harold and the purple crayon. Like, it's. I do something, I learn it, I deconstruct it.

Speaker D
And then I said, can I put it in its simplest part? Just like taking apart a car or something like this. And then I'm like, why do people over complicate stuff like this? It's like I'm really frowned upon, not just bullies, but, like, elitism in any form I have very little tolerance for, because most of the time it's covering up lack of competence or lack of true mastery. Remember, I'm the red helicopter kid, and I was a son of two caregivers.

So I think by nature I'm also a teacher, so I like investing in people. And so after I got through with Harvard, I wanted to give back. I felt very grateful that my parents mortgaged the crap out of their house for me to be able to graduate debt free and that I was able to live on $12,600 or whatever it was I made that I could actually live on that. How lucky was I? And then I taught.

And so it was also, like, when you know this, like, when you can teach someone what you know, that means you really know what you know. And I think that was also a motivation, was like, what did I learn? Can I really teach it? Give back to a bunch of kids that maybe are on the precipice or on the cusp of not going to school or not being their best self? And I wanted to do that, and so I did it.

I coached sports, ran help run a dorm. It was awesome. To this day, I think it's one of the most meaningful experiences I've had. Because if you've ever run a classroom, five, I taught five classes a day, ran a dorm, coached the sport. I had to be an adult at 22 years old, even though I screwed up plenty of times, like, I was an idiot, still an idiot.

22 year old. The kids forgave me, right? They would say, oh, mister re, yeah, you're still young. But to this day, when I'm in boardrooms or in management meetings, I picture the adults as kids the same. We're all still the same.

As you get older, you become more kid anyway and try to connect with people at that level. I'm like, come on. Like, it's great that we know more and that we're more, quote, knowledgeable and stuff, but are we wiser? Maybe not, right? Are we wiser?

And so I try to disarm. I think when you have create those environments, those classrooms where people can really learn, I try to create those cultures and work in adult environments, too. Right? Where you learn where you can ask questions and people laugh at themselves. Right.

And self deprecating jokes, and you learn collaboratively. And why wouldn't you want to have that culture in adult form? And so it's the most valuable thing in the retrospect, I think it was the best decision that I made in my life was to teach high school. And I'm still a teacher, right? I've always been a teacher.

Speaker C
Yeah. Your story had a lot of parallels to my friend Angela Duckworth in that you both come out of these prestigious institution and you both go into teaching her in the form of various inner city schools before she then goes down the path of doing what she's doing now. And you yourself, a similar trajectory, although different. So at this precipice, what then convinced you to go back to Harvard Law School where you wanted to become a public defender? Yeah, I think that the dilemma that I had, I didn't want to teach high school forever, but I wanted to teach forever, which is different.

Speaker D
Right. I think being a good CEO or investor or adult, I think, like, I like teacher leaders. And then it was also a more macro thing where the other thing that was going on is that I've tried to live a life better at it now and. But better at it also, when I was little of not needing external validation. Like, I have a real love hate relationship with credentials and associations and brands.

And as a public school kid, first born in this country, I lived pretty free and easy up until the age of 18. When I was a public school kid from Long island, my resume said busboy, and there were no expectations. And I met people on my own terms. I was not relying on external validation. It was just like, this is who I am, and I have to, if I'm going to be friends with you, I have to behave in a certain way.

And you didn't lead with your grades, your GPA, your college degree. You just led with your character. Right? And you led with, over time, people could discern whether or not you were, quote, intelligent or not. But at a minimum, you had to have character and that you had to be someone that people wanted to be around.

And so going to Harvard, that was a big brand for this 18 year old, 22 year old kid to carry. That's why I went away and taught in the middle of nowhere. It was not a named school. And so going back to Harvard Law School was in some ways, getting advanced degree, wanted to be a public defender, really learn how the systems of the matrices of life were designed by humans, which is what the law is. Right.

It's very different from physics or bio or chem. These are all man made laws. So I wanted to learn that. And on the other hand, it was also a little bit of caving into a bit of a need for external validation, a bit like, maybe I need another degree from Harvard, that it makes me look more qualified in some way to the world, which is realistic. A lot of people do that.

And it was also me fighting that as well. Right. Like an internal intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. James, it's interesting. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of Robin Steinberg, but she took the path of becoming a public defendant and now has something she founded called the Bail Project.

Speaker C
But it relates to our discussion and the fact that what she's trying to do is to try to humanize the justice system. And she talks in her book and in the work that she's doing about the lack of compassion that she sees throughout the entire system, and especially because it's geared towards certain people of inequality who tend to keep getting brought back into the system time and time again. So your reasoning for becoming a public defender, I thought, had an interesting twist on the work that she's been doing. Yeah. For me, it's like, fundamentally, it's like I am.

Speaker D
When you were saying we were creative. So it's design. That's what I've been doing my whole life, is learning all of the designs, law, money, economics, history, poetry, music. It's just. It's the design of life that we've created and how that man made design fits into the design of higher laws of, like, physics and bio and math, and then also the higher laws of maybe something that's the most human inside all of us.

That's even beyond wisdom, which a lot of faiths would say it's just like, beyond. It's beyond knowledge, beyond wisdom. It just is intuitively what makes us human. And so a lot of philosophy. I read a lot of philosophy.

And so, to me, that's been, as I look back, it's me trying to reconcile kind of man made design with nature design and figuring out, is there a better way to reconcile them? Are they reconcilable? And I've tried, not always successfully, but generally tried, to live a life that was more in the laws of nature. And that's where I feel like things like kindness and compassion and generosity, they set. I am very hopeful and optimistic, generally, of the ability for humans to be incredibly generous and I think that sometimes humans have a hard time doing that when they live in man made systems that prime them in a different way.

Right. Particularly, like, in business and in money and in private equity. And I think in a lot of ways, again, without loving appellations and designations, I don't think I've ever stopped being a teacher. I, even though I never served as a public defender, I think I'm very much a public defender. Like, in the type of work that I do in my life, I just, it's really less the name of things, more of the substance of behavior.

That's where I gravitate, and that's how I judge other people, too. I'm like, it's like, I don't care what you. Where your names and your degrees. It's, what are you doing? And I watch what people do.

And so that's, anyway, I don't know why I said that. That's a tangent, but I think that was related to what you said. Yeah. Well, I think it leads to the quote that you started your book with from Leo Tolstoy, and I'm just going to read it. The voice of your conscious, you loved it, right?

Isn't that great quote? It's a great quote. The voice of your conscience can always be singled out above the noise of your other wishes, because it always wants something seemingly useless, seemingly senseless, seemingly incomprehensible, but at the same time, actually beautiful and good, which can be only achieved through effort.

Speaker C
Why did you use that to set the tone? Because speaking to that voice, the laws beyond the laws that we see and live by every day, it's something much more transcendent than that, right? It's that, it's the laws of physics or of philosophy. It's beauty. And I think if you ask physicists what their job is, they would say, most people get surprised by this, but they say we design beauty.

Speaker D
Like, ultimately, that's. And people get in the way and don't make it beautiful. And that's what a physicist would say. But to do this, it's not just living in a cave or sitting in Tibet and reflecting and smoking a pipe. Like, it can be achieved only through effort.

It's hard. You have to suffer. You've got to work hard. You got to. It's painful to design beautiful things.

And I think that tone and Tolstoy's work and a lot of russian literature and music are like this, and so is korean culture. It's very bittersweet, right? That it's, there's nothing. It's again, left or right? It's not left or right.

It's both. Most things in life I view as both beautiful and painful. It's joyful and sorrowful. And I try not to spend a lot of time putting something in this compartment or that compartment, which is lot of what Kahneman was writing a lot about that and got very frustrated and said people just. They love to put things in buckets, and we are wired that way.

But I think that's why someone like Keltner, right, when you think about breathing and activating your vagus nerve and not being fearful, and when you really can breathe, which is inspiring, which is. That's the derivative of that, then you have less of a impetus and a priming to put things in buckets. So I think this quote captures that oxymoron really well, that we can be better. We can aspire for better and listen to things and aspire to things that are better than what we see, that have been designed by people who are innately flawed. And we can strive for better and to design more consonant systems.

But to aspire to that, you have to work hard and you have to suffer. And sometimes that creates dissonance where it's sometimes easier to just fit in, buy into everything as it is, status quo. Put your hand over your ears and say, I'm not going to listen to the history. I'm not going to understand that Darwin wasn't just talking about survival of the fittest, but he was actually talking a lot about the importance of mutualism. That why Maslow's hierarchy, it's actually the triangle all wrong.

He didn't. He never wrote it that way. It was just done by a bunch of consultants. You can put your hands over yours and say, that's not true, but it's really finding truth. Right?

And so that's what the entire book is about. And that's what I thought, that the red helicopter moment when I was at five years old, that little story was about finding truth. There were so many things that seemed wrong, but in the end of the day, the truth was that there was a boy who was good friends with another boy, and the boy didn't have lunch, and that boy wanted his friend to have lunch. And it was so honest and so simple. And yet, when we get older, you and I could have a separate podcast, and you and I could probably come up with 10 hours of reasons why that five year old James should not have shared his lunch with that friend.

Right? We can think of economic reasons, fairness reasons. Yeah, too bad. Like kids, mom shouldn't have died. Oh, well, they should have had a nanny.

They should have worked harder. We could think so many things, and I think that's what we do as adults. We come up with all these reasons why to be punitive, why to cast blame on somebody, and instead, we don't take the other route and address it, not punitively, and say, how do we design this in a better way? Fix this, and then let's also design it in a better way and get to root causes. It's like that old Aesop's fables.

It's one of my favorite ones. It's, there was a little boy drowning in the river, and this old man starts walking along the riverbank and saying, you should not have walked that close to the river. You fell in, and now you're drowning. And the boy says, the old man, sir, you're right. But would you mind just saving me first?

And then we can talk about ways that I should have been more careful falling into the river. I think as a society, we love to wag our fingers, be prescriptive. And I find that in so many of the ways that people talk on the media, but also in books, I think a lot of the books that get written these days, it's very prescriptive. It's like, here are the twelve things while you suck, and here are the twelve ways you can fix yourself. And I don't ascribe to that.

That's not how I lead, and that's not how the book is written. I try to find, here are all the things you're doing well, and you should keep doing them, and here are the things that maybe that you're struggling with. But before you blame yourself, maybe let's look at how things are designed in the systems that you're primed to do those things, and let's learn those together, and let's get better together. Right. Versus saying, you suck and you have to fix yourself.

I just. I don't think that's what leadership is, and I don't like being told that I suck all the time. And I think most people don't want that either. I think we're in a culture right now where it's a lot of that self help. Is that right?

Like, you have a problem, we have the answer, and I don't. I'd rather say, I think that you're doing really well, despite a lot of things. You got a lot of great qualities. Let's bring those out more, right. And then let's address some of these other things together are troubling you.

It's small. It's a very small nuance, but it's a very different perspective. Right. On problem solving. No, it absolutely is.

Speaker C
And I just wanted to comment on a couple things you just said. The real purpose of this podcast is to help people, as you were just talking to with that quote, to live better, to be better, and to make a positive impact on others. Because you start doing those things and I guarantee your life is going to change and you're going to feel more fulfillment and satisfaction. I think another thing that you mentioned that I think is true and pretty funny is I've really become a fan of Scott Barry Kaufman, and I love his book Transcendental. And I had him and on the show a couple times now.

And I love how in his new book, because I think he's probably the living expert on Maslow. How you're right. I think it was Mackenzie that started this, where they took the framework and put it in the shape of a triangle. But I like his analogy of the boat metaphor much better to explain the concepts. So I want to come back to the red helicopter.

You ended up not going into law. You end up going into private equity, something that you and I both share in common. But after a successful run in private equity, you faced a challenging situation with your firm. Can you talk about how the red helicopter came back to you in this moment? Yeah.

Speaker D
Thanks for asking that question. That's actually the most pivotal point in my professional and personal life. People sometimes think it was what I did, it Ashley Stewart, or what I'm doing now. It was actually not. It was that moment.

I was 37 years old. I had the resume right? My parents, who didn't know what private equity was, but they were like clapping because I was making a lot of money. And tallest buildings, private jets, and owning companies and controlling board meetings. It was like the pinnacle of power, which we can get back to later about me and my views on power.

I had a choice. It was a small partnership, and there was this guy that I was really good friends with, and I was in his wedding party. And the partnership decided that he was no longer welcome in the partnership, which happens. But the twist is that they asked me to stay, offered me a chunk of money, like more money than my dad made in his single shingle pediatrics practice in decades. And they didn't tell my friend.

It was almost like I was getting hazed. Like I, here's all this money, and we don't want that guy. And you want me to tell him that he's not welcome. It's just like hazing, and you want the ring, then this is what you have to do. And my third child was about to be delivered within a week, and I quit.

So I resigned from this very prestigious firm. It was one of the most prestigious firms at the time in the world, and I was unemployed. And so when my third child was born, her father was a 37 year old unemployed private equity guy. That was that. I just couldn't do it.

I couldn't take. And I'm a big meritocrat. It's like, there's no one's ever accused me of not being. I create performance environments, like the things I generally am associated with. They, quote, win, but I think, moreover, they win in the right way.

And this didn't feel like winning in the right way. And I remember saying to them, I'm like, am I better than him? Maybe. Do I like him as a partner? Yeah.

And by the way, I used to make $12,000 teaching high school. You really think you can buy me? And that's it. And I quit. And so I was unemployed.

And before any of your listeners say, oh, what a hero, and you must have, it wasn't that feeling. Most of the book, I talk about how tough decisions, like the Tolstoy quote, making those decisions, it doesn't give you a fuzzy feeling in your chest sometimes. It sucks. And I had a lot of regrets. I was like, I remember looking at my kids, I was like, your daddy's stupid.

Like, I should have stayed. And so it's like, there's no hero moment. And. But that moment was the most important moment for me because I felt like it was like Lord of the Rings. I mean, I felt when someone said, I don't want the ring, I'm like, I don't want that ring.

I don't want it. And I felt like I passed some sort of odd test. That's how it felt after a few months of licking my wounds a bit. And I felt more like I was getting back onto the path of being myself. Right, just the public school kid and who likes to achieve, but it wasn't to achieve for dominance or to be the richest guy.

And, like, it's achieving because it's awesome to try to get the right answers and work with people. Right, to figure out the truth, solve a problem, to help people. And then if you help people and you solve a problem, if making money and having financial wealth as part of that's awesome, that should be. But to just do something monomaniacally just to have power, to have the ring, to have a kajillion dollars in your bank account, because you can just flex for this. I'm like, that's not who I am.

I never want to be that guy. James. I'm going to bring back Scott Barry Kaufman, and I'm also going to bring Carol Dweck into this in this next question. I was recently interviewing Mary Murphy, who studied under Carol and then is now a professor at the University of Indiana. And she has taken the growth mindset concept to businesses and communities.

Speaker C
And it dovetails into Scott's work on the whole concept that we have to choose growth time and time again. And as I was reading about the turnaround that you did at Ashley Stewart, something that you went in as an unlikely interim leader into a predominantly retailer that predominantly serves the black community, black women, to be exact. It had a lot of parallels to me, to Satya, Nadala going into Microsoft, another unlikely person to take the helm. And yet, the way that you both approach the turnarounds have so many similarities in that instead of embracing, as Mary Murphy calls, a zone of genius type of culture, you chose a growth culture similar to Satya, infused with resilience and kindness. Can you just describe this change and in a succinct way, and how this approach created just tremendous turnaround for this company that most people thought was doomed to be non existent?

Speaker D
Just set this up for your listeners. So it was also twice bankrupt, didn't have Wi Fi. I mean, just, it was a pitiful business. There was a lot of very wonderful people and relationships within the business, but the actual business. And then, yes, I was the opposite of everything that on paper was expected.

I had never run a company. I was not black, not a woman. I'm not fashionable. And the business was six weeks away from liquidating. That's a.

And just to complete the chaos picture, it was so chaotic. And with all the restructuring lawyers and all that world coming in, you had race and gender tension. And the fact that I had to hire a police officer to protect the employees months later, that's how, like, warped the situation was. In retrospect, it really was helpful for me to be that obviously unqualified for me to have said anything, that I was qualified to lead with credentials, to lead with arrogance, to lead with power, anything to say, do you know what my track record is in consumer retail? Like, I went to Harvard twice.

Like, all these stupid things that people tend to say, right? It's, how can I say anything? So I said to everyone, yeah, I know. I'm like, everything you needed. I'm not.

I'm the only one who showed up. I'm the only one who cared enough to show up. Maybe we get out, we can be kind and be mathematically honest. We can get out of this. And in retrospect, even though I said all these things from my.

It was from my chest, it came from this very human place, like that place where I felt warm and fuzzy about the red helicopter gift after my dad explained why I got it. It's very human place. It's that third place that we were talking about. That's not wisdom or knowledge. In retrospect, it was the wisest, the best thing I could have ever said, because it was the truth.

And it put me in. As you were mentioning Carol and Scott and all of these. I was in that position. I mean, it was beginners mindset, growth mindset. Vagus nerve activated.

No fear, no compartmentalized existence. It was a world of truth. And so when I look back, what? Kindness and math, those two things are truth. And that's what I was asking people for, effectively.

Speaker E
Right? I'm like, can we just be honest? We're in a s show. Like, we're about to get liquidated. This is.

Speaker D
And I am so obviously not your solution. It forced me to lead correctly. Right? It forced me. You change the vector of things like helicopters in the top prop in Europe goes counterclockwise.

And I think in the US it goes clockwise, so long as the rear prop offsets opposite helicopters can fly. Doesn't matter. That makes sense. Basically changed the vector of everything in that first speech. And then we operationalized it as we went.

It was just saying, leadership is finishing second, not first. Okay? Leadership from behind. It's listening, not speaking. It's negative space.

This is the asian quality, too. I think it was what, I didn't say what wasn't there. So I was looking for intangible things. And this is much more an asian culture emphasized. It's that negative space, it's that balance.

And I was doing things intuitively that were right. It wasn't from a manual. It wasn't from things I learned in school or even things I learned as a private equity guy. It was coming from a much deeper place than that. And then I was informed by my experience, right.

It would go through the lens of a experienced financier, a experienced lawyer, and someone who studied behavioral psych a lot. Just as a person. Like, I read neuro a lot, but the motivation, like where it was coming from, it was from a very intuitive place, right, that it had to be this. And it was much more. I felt like a kid again.

And so everyone who worked with me, and you're meeting that guy now, too. I've never felt more. This is how I was in high school and in elementary school like this. James, you're speaking to, that's how I was. Like, friend to all, very curious.

I laugh a lot. And first guy to come help somebody and like to learn things, not because I want to take tests and get good scores. I like to learn. I'm like, let's solve these problems together and do it any way we can. Like music, math, philosophy, don't care.

Like, whatever the best answer is, let's do it. And so that was what happened that first month or two. And then people really detected it. Like, particularly the women and then particularly the black women in the field, in the stores, they sensed it. There was this sense of like.

And they saw through all gender, race, my lack of experience, how generous they were with me. Remember, we were talking about give, get. They gave me so much. I still look back to this day, and I get very emotional about it. I was at a place of ultimate vulnerability.

I ripped up my resume. I was completely alone. My parents were wigging out about my life. My friends, some of them had cut ties with me because they thought I was nuts. And I realized they weren't great friends.

They just liked my credentials. And I was sitting there, my dad's dying, what am I doing? And people sometimes take advantage of. When you're vulnerable, there are groups of people take advantage of you, and then there are groups of people who extend their hand to you and say, you're in a position of weakness right now, and can we help you? And it was those women who did that for me.

And they were predominantly the black women on front lines. And that's why I thought of the red helicopter again. During those times. It wasn't me being generous to the women. It was them to me.

I wish we could have filmed it. How they treated me across the country. They didn't know what I looked like because we had no wifi. I would walk in, they're like, it's you. I'm like, that's me.

That's the guy talking on the starfish phone. And so I was in a great mindset because I had no choice but to be. And I released, right? I just let go. And to use an overused term, I surrendered.

And when you surrender, sometimes the big oxymoron is that you actually gain agency again. Right. You can make really informed decisions that are not informed by ego, by third party expectations, by prescriptive doctrine, you can find yourself again. And that is true agency. Thank you for sharing that inspirational story.

Speaker C
And unfortunately, we don't have enough time to go in depth at it. But I think this is a great teaser for people to buy the book and to learn more about the journey. And one of the things, as I read the story, it made me think of my time when I was at Lowe's and I worked with an iconic leader named Larry Stone, who had started in the mail room and had ended his career 40 years later as the president, chief operating officer. And Larry, if he didn't tell you one time, he told you 50,000 times that success begins and ends in the store. It's winning the hearts and minds of the store employees so that they are treating the customer right.

And if you don't do that, the company is never going to survive. And so you reaching out and forming that bond, especially with the store employees, was so vital because that's where you meet your customers, and your customers have options of where to buy. I wanted to end here, James, since the book has come out, I understand now it's getting a lot of attention to possibly become a movie, or is there any truth to these rumors? Yeah, there's been a lot of interest to make this into a movie. For years.

Speaker D
Before the book, I just didn't want, you know, the work that I'm doing is like serious work. I teach it at MIT, Duke Howard, and at companies. And I didn't want to do some made for tv movie or big screen movie. But there's been a lot of interest. And now that the book is out, the whole story is there and people understand more what we did.

So, like the movie musical, there's a lot of interest. I'm a suppressed musician. The book is written as a piece of music. So for those of you listening, it's written in e flat major, and it's organized in musical terms. So there is interest in a movie.

And then I think the other thing that's really cool is that red helicopter. Really what it is, is not just a book. It's a branded philosophy, much like maybe Disney was 80 years ago. And what we did at Ashley Stewart was a real life example of when you fully put in Carols Scotts Dachner's Brene, and you really put it into an.org. and as my book says, you really deconstruct accounting and undo those primes, then you can actually create an operating system that applies correctly a lot of the great research that comes out from our academic institutions, but you also have to change the math and the measurements and that are primed in a different way by gap.

And so that's what I'm doing. And then the book, the movie and the musical, just like any branded philosophy or like Disney, if you think about it, it's just spreading the word, right? And I think that the story, because it transcends race. It's three or four races working together. It's the most unlikely group of people working together.

And really, the book really is a metaphor for, I think, our country. I mean, I think. I know I wrote it this way. It's why it's called a parable. The timing of the release of the book.

I'm asking our country, come on, what are we doing? There's so many beautiful things. Remember, John, you asked me the question, do I see kindness and compassion? I see it all the time. And what are we doing?

And I hope this story inspires people to remember we're both 53, right? So for 50 years, I've lived in this country. And, yeah, there are moments of crap and racism and, like massage that, yes, people can talk sometimes, generally speaking, what a privilege it's been to live in this country, right? And I'm asking the world for the next 50 years, particularly for my children, the next, what are we doing? And let's take a page out of all the wonderful people that we've mentioned today on the call and say, can we create a form of governance in life, a design of our society that triggers compassion, generosity, vagus nerve, like, real thinking, instead of a system that triggers hate and fear and all of our worst physiological impulses.

Can we do that? And I'm asking people with the symbol of a red helicopter, maybe when you think of a red helicopter, you look at it. It's a visual prime, right? Let's just slow down a little bit and let's look at others assets instead of harping on all of the things they are bad at and telling them that they're terrible. Can we not do that?

No one wants to be true like this. That's why. That's the only reason why I would make a movie. And it's a broader way to get this message of the book out. It's like, it's.

That's why I wrote in the prelude. It sounds like a fantasy, what I wrote in this book, but it really happened, right? In the biggest stages of society, it happened. And so I'm writing this because it took me a lot of time to. You heard the Brene.

We'll end with Brene. Since you started with it, I confessed on that podcast. I said, I don't think I can write the damn book. Like, I don't think I can do it. And so all of her audience, not all, but a lot of people from, they would email me and say, do you have to write a book?

And so now I've written the book, and it's. That's what's going on. That's why the movie. Yeah, there's a lot of interest and the way I would, it's been very clear to me how it should be portrayed, and I hope people will. I think it's gonna get made.

And I'm more. But I'm more excited about the rock opera that I've been tooling around with, like, picture, like Hamilton, except telling the story of the book with all the different voices singing it. Wow, it sounds amazing. And what an incredible interview today. James, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Speaker C
If the listener wants to learn more about you, where's the best place for them to go? I'd go to redhelicopter.com and then enjoy the book. And from what I'm told, the audiobook is really fun. I read it and we wove in the original music into the audiobook so you can actually hear the musical composition to go along with my voice. So that would be a great start.

Speaker D
And I look forward to hearing from people. And, John, you're an incredibly thoughtful, well read, compassionate person. I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope we can get together like in DC in that area when I'm down at Howard. That would be great.

Speaker C
And I didn't even get to ask the question on. I know sometimes these paths take us in places we never thought we would go, but that taking that job as the CEO led you into the unexpected place of an alignment with Howard, because most people don't group Howard, Duke and MiT and Harvard in the same sentence. And yet you are bridging those gaps and bringing inclusivity and diversity of thought to so many different people. So I wholeheartedly applaud the work that you're doing. Well, thanks, John.

Speaker D
That's, I think, a symbol of our country. It's what it should and is at its best already, but what it can be more of, I think we just need to change the narrative. There's a lot of really good things, and most of us have to just breathe and remind ourselves of that and sort of those small acts of decency to other people. That's where it starts, isn't it? I think we're, all of us are thinking these macro things, big policy, big changes, and it's hard to do that.

You can't do that if you don't do small acts in your personal life. You have to get into the habit of doing that. It's like when my kids used to say, we want a new bike. And then I would say, but you don't ride the crappy bike in the garage. So go ride the crappy bike in the garage and then I'll get you a new bike.

So we want all these great things policy wise changes, but we need to just focus on what we control in our personal lives. And to start with that, I think a lot of the, quote, problems will actually go away. Yeah, well, amen to that. You and I are both huge fans of behavior science, and after interviewing 50 of the most prominent behavior scientists in the world and reading a bunch of books, it all starts with these simple choices that we make and our intentionality behind them to make the world better. So thank you again so much, James.

Thanks, John. Bye everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with James Ray and I wanted to thank Harper one and James for the honor and privilege of having them appear on today's show. Links to all things James will be in the show notes@passionstruck.com dot please use our website links to purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. Videos are on YouTube at both Johnr Miles, which is our main channel, and passion struck clips.

Speaker C
Please go check it out and join over a quarter million other subscribers. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place@passionstruck.com. deals please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at Johnr Miles on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and all the other social platforms where I post daily bits of inspiration. I also wanted to tell you about the passion struck Quiz, a perfect companion to my recently released book, Passion Struck.

Curious to know if you're an imitator or a vanquisher in the grand game of life? Then head over to passionstruck.com and take the quiz today. It consists of just 20 questions and will take you about ten minutes to complete. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck podcast interview that I did with transformative thinker Monica Berg. Dive into an inspiring conversation about personal growth, overcoming fear, and finding true fulfillment.

Discover how to unlock your potential and live a more intentional life. Don't miss this enlightening episode with Monica Berg. We take everything with our five senses very seriously. I see this, I smell that, I taste that, and then that's an absolute, which is not the reality. In reality, everything's an illusion.

F
Things we can't see are the things that are most powerful, like empathy, our compassion, even. That's allowing us to talk right now, right? We're not seeing all of the particles, the waves that are working for us to be able to communicate in different parts of the world. But we take what we see as everything, and it gets us into trouble. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting.

Speaker C
And if you know someone who could use the inspiration of the red helicopter story that James told today, then definitely share this with friends and family. The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share this show with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, go out there and become passion struck.

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James Rhee on How You Lead Change Through Kindness EP 472

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Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1. Introduction to James Rhee

2. The Power of Kindness in Business

3. Transformation at Ashley Stewart

4. Leadership Philosophy

5. Closing Thoughts

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

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Transcript