Good Life Project

We spend a lot of time weighing the cost of risking too much. Jimmy Chin has spent most of his life on the harder question, which is what it costs to risk too little, quietly, for twenty or thirty years, until the years are gone.

Jimmy Chin is an Academy Award-winning director, a National Geographic photographer, and a New York Times bestselling author. He made Free Solo, Meru, The Rescue, and Nyad, he skied off the summit of Everest, and he lived out of the back of a Subaru from 21 to 28. Then he turned fifty, started looking at his life in chapters, and went looking for people who could tell him what success meant to them at the start and what it means to them now. Those conversations became his new book, Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters.

Here's what we get into:

• The question Jimmy says he has been asking since he was ten years old, and why the answer keeps moving while the question never does
• What one of the world's great cellists realized in the middle of a technically flawless performance, and where it sent him afterward
• Why the founder of a three-billion-dollar company looked at his own growth numbers and felt sick, and the one sentence of his Jimmy channels at every crossroads
• The difference between a kid wanting a parent alive and a kid wanting a parent to feel alive, and what it takes to hold both at once
• What a seven-year-old said to her father at thirteen thousand feet that he is still thinking about six years later

If you have hit the season where the boxes are checked and the question underneath them has gotten louder, this one is for you.

You can find Jimmy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

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Nicholas Epley studies how people misjudge each other, avoid conversations with strangers, and miss out on life-affirming relationships. It all started when he noticed something on a silent Chicago train that changed how he thinks about the strangers he avoids and the people he loves but never calls. The thing stopping him wasn't what he expected.

Epley is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he's spent over fifteen years studying why smart, socially wired people routinely misread each other. His research on human connection has appeared in the New York Times and on NPR, and he teaches an MBA course called Designing a Good Life. His new book is A Little More Social.

What you'll explore in this conversation:

• Why the experiment that convinced Nicholas to talk to a stranger on a silent train started with him assuming it would go badly
• The specific belief researchers found sabotages more conversations than shyness, rudeness, or bad timing combined
• What his team discovered when they photographed people's resting faces, and why it explains a train car full of strangers staying quiet
• A kind word tends to land better than a polished one, according to decades of research on how we actually judge each other. Nicholas breaks down why
• Acting more outgoing than you feel might not cost the energy you'd expect, even for people who've called themselves introverts their whole lives

If there's someone you've been meaning to reach out to, or a stranger you keep talking yourself out of talking to, this conversation makes the case for testing that instinct instead of trusting it.

You can find Nicholas at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript

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She measured everything about her illness. The measuring turned out to be part of what kept her sick.

Giorgia Lupi is an information designer and a partner at Pentagram in New York, and one of the few people alive who can take raw data and turn it into something you understand in your bones and feel in your body. In 2020, a mild COVID infection set off four years of long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome, POTS, mast cell activation, and a level of disability that left her housebound, out of work, and eating eight foods for an entire year.

Giorgia did what she does. She tracked every symptom, every test, every prognosis, and limitation. Then she published 1,374 Days, a visual op-ed in the New York Times built from her own symptom data, and readers with chronic illness wrote to say it was the first thing they could hand to the people who loved them.

That, however, was just the beginning of a story of recovery that was about to take a wild, transformative turn. One that would find her rethinking her approach to measuring what was wrong and shifting to the opposite, realizing, all too often, that what we measure reinforces our reality.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• The number of practitioners she saw over four years before a single one offered to coordinate her care, and what her body did in that exact moment, before any new treatment was tried
• What she took off her wrist and archived on her hard drive, after believing for years that it was the thing keeping her safe
• The first entry in the new spreadsheet she opened in 2024, and why something that small was the turn
• Why the online illness communities she went to for support sent her home more frightened every time, and what she went looking for instead
• How she started charting a different kind of data, and finding new answers that not only refuted much of the dire prognosis she’d been given, but also, slowly, brought her back to life.
• Why her working definition of recovery now, which is not the one she wrote down while she was sick, is not "getting back to normal"

A note on how we held this one. Giorgia is careful, and so are we. This is her story and not a protocol, her symptoms were real, documented in labs, and measurable, and nobody in this conversation is suggesting anyone thinks their way out of illness.

If you have ever looked fine from the outside while something underneath was quietly giving way, this is a conversation about what your body might be trying to tell you before it has to shout.

You can find Giorgia at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

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Shawn Achor spent twelve years at Harvard studying the science of belief and success, and his TED talk has been watched more than 25 million times. His new book, The Power of Beliefs, grew out of research with the NFL, NASA, and six Marine battalions at Camp Pendleton, and out of watching his own daughter fight for her life three months early.

• The 7 core beliefs that control much of our lives, without us knowing it
• Why believing you’re alone in your effort can make hard things harder.
• The two small words that turn a hollow pep talk into a path to success.
• What a stranger's ten seconds on an escalator taught Shawn about the difference between mattering less and not mattering at all.
• A five-minute weekly habit Shawn's family calls the Memory DeLorean, and what it does to the story you tell about a hard season.
• How time-stress can make you abandon everything you believe is important.
• How to harness hidden beliefs to feel more alive and connected, and thrive in all parts of life.

For anyone in a season where the ground feels tilted against them, this is a reminder that the tilt might be more changeable than it feels.

You can find Shawn at: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript

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Today, we’re introducing a new conversation format that we’ll be working into the mix called Good Life Jams. These sessions take on 2-3 hot topics and go deep. Today’s conversation partner is Leah Smart, a senior editor at LinkedIn, a writer and speaker, and the host of Everyday Better.

The topics we’re digging into: When women earn more, the physical housework shrinks. The mental load doesn't move at all. What’s going on there? And why are self-help books crashing, while coaching is taking off?

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why the most common fix for an overloaded household leaves the heaviest part completely untouched
• The question Leah's husband asked her about the word "good" that quietly reset her entire standard for running a home
• What the data leaves out, and why the scorekeeping it invites can erode a long partnership
• Self-help book sales fell roughly 25% in a year while coaching grew about 15%, and what people are actually paying for instead
• The one thing a human can do that no book and no chatbot can, which may be the real reason the advice stopped working

Both halves of this conversation land in the same place, which is that the discomfort you keep trying to optimize away is usually the thing worth turning toward instead.

You can find Leah at: Instagram | Everyday Better with Leah Smart Substack | Episode Transcript

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Martial artists spend years learning how to fall before they learn much of anything else. The rest of us just brace, then wonder why the landing does so much damage.

This is a best-of conversation, first aired in 2023, and it has only gotten more useful with time.

Mark Nepo is a poet and spiritual teacher who has been working in poetry and spirituality for more than fifty years. His book The Book of Awakening was a #1 New York Times bestseller, he has written twenty-six books translated into more than twenty languages, and he was named one of Oprah's SuperSoul 100. In his thirties, he was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, and that experience runs underneath everything he writes about adversity, grief, and what it costs to stay open. He wrote Falling Down and Getting Up when his cancer years came flooding back during the pandemic. Since this conversation first aired, Mark has published The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life.

What you'll explore in this conversation:

• Why aikido teaches students how to fall before anything else, and what that translates to when the fall is emotional rather than physical
• The journal question Mark asks people in circle that tends to surface, fast, whose voice you have actually been living under
• What a friend in the depths of grief told him about "the life after tears," and the line that separates it from everything that came before
• The difference between grounding and chasing, and the small reorientation that changes where you go looking for a life
• What happened in a bar after the Iraq war that taught him how to feel for pain he had never lived through

If you are somewhere in the middle of a fall, or still carrying one that never quite finished, this conversation offers you something steadier than advice: company, and a way to keep going that doesn't ask you to pretend you're fine.

You can find Mark at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

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Jonathan sits down with Scott Harrison, charity: water founder, for a wide-ranging reflection on his 20-year mission to bring clean water to everyone on earth. Scott revisits the original spark, the scale of the problem, the storytelling strategy that helped build the movement, and the personal tension of leading a global nonprofit while raising a family. 

We discuss the long game of solving a problem that is both massive and solvable, why generosity is often unlocked through story rather than statistics, and how Scott thinks about balance, legacy, and “the work with no end.”

Key topics:

• Scott looks back on the early days of charity: water and the energy of the original nightclub fundraiser that launched the organization
• The scale of the mission has grown to more than $1 billion mobilized, 216,000 projects across 29 countries, and about 700 million people still without clean water
• Storytelling, not statistics, is the core tool charity: eater uses to overcome apathy and make distant suffering feel personal
• The Rachel Beckwith story shows how one child’s birthday campaign became a global movement that ultimately helped more than 100,000 people
• The conversation digs into the tension between mission and family, especially for leaders whose work could easily consume all their time
• Scott shares how his kids reflect back the values he hopes to model
• The closing theme is generosity as an endless practice - giving, serving, and sharing rather than accumulating

You can find Scott at: Website | Charity Water Instagram | Scott's Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're bringing you a best-of episode with Mark Nepo, to talk about why falling down might be the most useful thing that happens to you all year. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes!

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Susan Bratton has spent over two decades teaching people the passionate lovemaking and intimate communication skills that sex education (and life) never covered. At 42, after eleven years of marriage, she had never had an orgasm from intercourse, and her husband was already having an affair to cope with it. What actually turned things around wasn't couples therapy. It was something else entirely, and it changed how she teaches everyone who's come to her since.

Susan is the author and publisher of 44 books and programs on lovemaking, sensual communication, and what she calls regenerative intimacy, reaching more than 1.5 million people worldwide. She's become one of the most trusted, least censored voices teaching people how sex actually works in the body, at every age. This conversation is guest-hosted by acclaimed author and coach Cynthia Morris.

What you'll explore:

• The three different things people lump together under "low libido," and why untangling them changes what you actually need to fix.
• Why Susan stopped using the word "sex" altogether, and the shift she's seen in how people respond once she doesn't.
• The physical reason arousal builds so differently in men's and women's bodies, and the one image that makes it click instantly.
• The specific framework Susan built after her own marriage nearly came apart over unmet needs, and how any couple can use it.
• What changed the moment she stopped treating tools and technique as something to be ashamed of.

If you've quietly decided your best sex is behind you, this conversation is the case for reconsidering that, whatever decade you're in.

You can find Susan at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

You can find Cynthia at: Website | Instagram

Next week, we're sitting down with Scott Harrison to talk about how twenty years, a lot of failure, and one story told the right way turned into a movement that's brought clean water to tens of millions of people who never had it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes!

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Somewhere in the past few years, you did something you love, with someone you love, for the very last time. And you had no idea when it happened. This solo episode is about why we cruise through our most meaningful endings, and why that might actually be the best possible news about how you've been living.

In this deep-dive solo, Jonathan Fields unpacks an idea he calls unmarked lasts, the everyday endings that slip past without ceremony, starting with a story about fifteen years of chairlifts with his daughter and the ordinary Sunday that unceremoniously closed an era. It's a conversation built for anyone in their 40s, 50s, or beyond who has started to notice that the archive of things that ended is getting fuller, and wonders if they should have been paying better attention.

In this episode, you'll explore:

• Why the baby book has a page for every first and not a single page for the lasts, and what that asymmetry does to us
• The structural reason you cannot catch a casual last while it's happening, no matter how present or grateful you become
• What researcher Hal Hershfield discovered when he asked people to imagine a meaningful place for the very last time, and the surprising thing that didn't happen to their happiness
• The centuries-old Portuguese word for the ache you've probably never been able to name
• Two kinds of lasts, and the completely different thing each one asks of you

The endings you can't remember may be the strongest evidence of a life you were fully inside of.

Episode Transcript

Next week, guest host Cynthia Morris is sitting down with Susan Bratton to talk about why desire in midlife doesn't fade so much as it gets misread, and what actually rekindles it at any age. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes!

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Every villain is the hero of their own story. That line opens part two of Jodi Picoult's thirtieth novel, and she'll tell you it's also how most of us get through any given day, or life.

Picoult is the number one New York Times bestselling author of thirty novels, including My Sister's Keeper, Small Great Things, and Wish You Were Here. Her new one, Hollow Bones, arrives right around the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and centers on a woman whose entire career is built on preparing for catastrophe, who gets blindsided anyway. For three decades, Picoult has done her research by climbing all the way inside other people's lives, including people whose beliefs she can barely stand to sit across from, and a good part of this conversation is about how and why she does that, how it impacts her own life, beliefs, and approach to storytelling. We explore:

• What thirty years of living inside other people's heads has actually cost her, including the nightly ritual one narrator forced on her before she could face her own family
• The moment in an interview when she had to leave the room, splash water on her face, and decide which version of herself was walking back in
• One finding from her research on lying that explains why a small untruth gets harder to take back the longer you hold onto it
• Why one of her books landed on the most banned book in America list last year, and how she responded
• Where the line actually sits between sugarcoating your own life and bending the truth to protect someone you love, and what tends to happen to people who never find it

If you have ever told a gentler version of the truth to protect somebody you love, this conversation will sit with you for a while.

You can find Jodi at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, it's just me, and I want to talk about something that's been on my mind: the moments in our lives that end without us ever knowing they were the last ones. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes!

Midlife Design Lab: I'm opening up an intimate retreat with me and a small, curated group in Boulder, CO (Oct 24-25, 2026), followed by 3 months of virtual group coaching. A few weeks back, I shared something I'd been building for myself, and the response blew me away, so spots are limited and I expect them to fill fast. If this calls to you, apply here.

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