Dr. Abraham George
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And then I will demonstrate that to others and convince them that I can be their agent.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
That's where I was born. That's where I was born, Trivandrum.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
The three oceans converge close by. The Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the Arabian Sea, they are all coming to that tip of India, very close to Trivandrum, yes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
That is correct. According to the statistics, 70% of the people are classified as some form of lower caste. The caste system exists in India, even though you are not allowed to discriminate. But people's minds, yes. The government asks for your caste in the application form. So the caste exists.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
and 70% of them are so-called lower-caste, out of which I would say more than half the people of India live less than $5 a day for a family. And what you witnessed outside of the city, outside of Trivandrum, in the villages, is exactly what you see elsewhere. In fact, the state you went to is Kerala, and that state is actually a little more prosperous than some of the other states.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And you will find absolute poverty for many people, and then you will find poverty. People try to survive on $5 a day. And then you have another dimension to it, that is the caste system. And people are discriminated based on, you know, how they are classified. Many villagers don't let you come and take water from the well where the upper caste come, and a lot of issues.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Without getting into it, what I have, I always think of, what I've learned Social discrimination is one of the reasons why poverty exists. When people don't have the opportunity to go to a good school or poorly, they don't have the status to travel in a bus along with children of upper caste or sit in a classroom separately and so on. And they can't get jobs very easily.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
They don't have the training. So the social discrimination is one, if not the main factor for poverty. And the other thing I learned is that in order to break social discrimination, any amount of preaching in church or temple, it's not going to do the job. empowering them economically is the way. And I felt there's no better way to empower the social underclass than a good education.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
So I have chosen to create one of the best schools anyway for people of disadvantaged people. And I don't know whether you are aware, some of our children are studying in Ivy League today. Children who came from one room hut ended up in Princeton and Stanford and so on. And of course, in India too, a number of colleges.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And that tells you that even the poorest, if you provide a very good education and upbringing, they too can succeed, just children from the affluent society.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Well, in the United States, you don't have a caste system. You have a class system. And the class system and the racial prejudices people have, racial prejudice of people of darker skin, you identify them by the color. But in India, you don't identify by the color because the rich guy from an upper caste can have a dark color too.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
You identify by hundreds and hundreds of years of family status and where they live. In fact, the caste system in India, it traces back to 1,500 years. It's in the Rig Vedas or the ancient scriptures where the various classes or castes were created. The people who owned the land and so on, and they wanted somebody to work for you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And then you needed somebody else to clean your fecal matter and so on, and latrines and things like that. So they created the cash system for people to be employed in various things. And then they said, okay, if you belong to these lower cash, you can come anywhere near me. And so they created a system, and a little bit of it is in the religion itself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
But when India became independent, the government said you cannot discriminate on the basis of caste. the government did not, by constitution, did not eliminate caste. So even today, the caste system exists. And if you discriminate, of course, you can bring someone to court. But if you're born into a certain caste, you stay there. Unless...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
You are very, you break out of it with your education and your job and you go to another city and you live well and nobody knows. And then you are out of the gas. But if you live in the village in the same place, you belong to the low gas.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I... chose a place, a remote village away from the cities, where poverty was rampant. That was one of my criteria for establishing this place. And where more than 60% belonged to the so-called, 60 or 70% belonged to the so-called lower caste. And so that is where I established my school.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Now, the villages around, there are landlords and people who had more money than all these people, and they have been enjoying cheap labor of these lower caste. They have to work in the fields for them, and a lot of them, We became bonded laborers because they wanted some money for something, the child's medical care or fixing up a hut or something.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And they would lend the money and then they can't pay back. And then you become a bonded laborer. That is, you have to work with no salary. They feed you a little bit. And until an equal amount is created by your labor, then you are out of the bonded status quo. By then, you have borrowed more, and it goes on.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
So my criteria was to find a place where poverty really exists and do the transformation there. And as you pointed out, rightly pointed out, my children studying in the school come from different religions, different communities, different parts of southern India. I frankly, I don't know which kid is what religion. I never bother to ask them. I never ask them what caste they are.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I know that 95% of them belong to the lower caste. I know that by the records they have, but I never go and check it. They are all beautiful children, and my goal is to give them self-confidence, self-esteem, and tell them that caste doesn't exist, that's a man-made creation to oppress others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And very soon the children believe that, and then they say, okay, I am just as beautiful, I am just as good as anyone else, and they work hard and try to have a good future.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
To this day, these last 30 years, I had never addressed them as anything other than children or my children. I think of them as my two sons I have. And it has created a bond with me. I treat them with love. And they reciprocate with love. That doesn't mean that I'm not strict when I need to. That doesn't mean that I don't correct them and always pampering them. No, I guide them. But
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Never do I address them anything other than children. They are my children. And when you do that, they realize how much you care for them. And that's the reason.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
There are other considerations in the upbringing of the children. There are three pillars to our program here. One is excellence in education. The second is leadership qualities and personal ability to communicate and interpersonal skills and character and so on. But there is one more thing that is equally important, and that is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
developing humane values, the kindness, generosity, humility, compassion. These are things that schools normally don't spend much time because that's not their mission. That's taught at home. And since we are the home for the children from four years of age to until they get jobs, we have to bring them up correctly. Yes, education, leadership, and humane values. All three are emphasized.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Well, the school has equal number of boys and girls, and they live in the same campus. The girls' dorm is hardly a couple of hundred yards away from the boys. The reason is that we want them to grow up from a very young age. They're familiar with each other, and so that when they are set free and go to colleges and so on, they don't have these unnecessary notions about the other sex.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
so the children think of girls think of themselves as just as smart as just as good as boys they think of each other as brothers and sisters though i will admit that there is a lot of romance sometimes there's nothing you can avoid something you can't avoid at teenage years but that's all fine and we Make sure it doesn't get out of control. So they grow up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
By the time they go to college, they have mutual respect. If a boy addresses a girl in a demeaning way, he's in big trouble. So, in fact, the girls, many people complain are... I mean, they're stronger than the boys in some respects. So it's fun. There's no problem at all when you bring them up together and let them know that they are both equal.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
We realized that, oh, I was of the opinion, reading literature and so on, you cannot bring about major change unless in their personality, their character, and even their education, unless you take them at a very young age. And so we take them when they are three and a half, four years of age. So at a given time, only 30 children are taken. And every year it has to grow.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And right now there are over 300 children in one school and we just started the second school. There are 60 children in the second school. That will also grow into 320 children. So altogether there'll be 600 plus children in both schools combined.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Poverty has different dimensions. It's not hunger. It's suffering. And even indignity of being in a lower caste, that is also a part of poverty. So I find all these activities that I embarked on, they're closely interrelated, though you may not see it as such. Somebody may argue that I did, doesn't fit in with poverty is lead poisoning. That's an urban problem more than anything else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Definitely, definitely. I initially started with Shanti Bhavan, which is the school for children from deprived communities. But as I got going, I realized there are so many interrelated problems. For example, The women in the villages, they were extremely poor. They didn't have jobs. They were working for landlords. So I started a banana cultivation of almost 200 acres.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
We were harvesting tons and tons of bananas. Unfortunately, the rain stopped with climate change and everything, and I got into trouble there. Then I realized that one of the reasons for poverty is bad governance. And I felt that maybe I should start a postgraduate journalism college. And so we built the facilities and it turned out to become the best journalism postgraduate college in India.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Then I was doing that, I realized that people, the villagers have to travel a long way to get medical care and there is nothing close by, so I started a hospital close by. Like that, one after the other. But one of the most important things I did was in the area of lead poisoning. The cities were suffering from pollution, and lead was one of the major pollutants in the late 90s.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And so I went to World Bank and others and CDC, and they trained me on that, and I brought equipment and did some 20,000 children. Lead test was done. And that led to a conference at which we persuaded the oil companies to come. And they came and announced that within a year and a half, they will introduce unleaded gasoline. And today, India is unleaded.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
So I got myself into so many projects with my own money. And in some ways, it was a mistake. And I also thought that the properties I brought by the beachfront, there are only so many properties by the beachfront, so it'll never go down in value. Well, Katrina came along and then... The subprime crisis came along and all the values of properties fell by more than 50%.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
So all my investment in real estate went to docks. And then stock market collapsed on me. And so one thing after another is a cascade. And I lost a great significant part of my wealth. And in the meantime, I was spending millions of dollars here in India, and I realized that I couldn't sustain it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
So I started selling everything and sold all my property, including my house in America, and put it into running the institutions here without closing many of them. One or two, I reduced the staffing. and kept it going. While my son, my older of the two boys, Ajit, he left his work and joined me in starting a fundraising effort. And miraculously, within two, three years, he found success.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
People were willing to listen to his story. Maybe because I had already done quite a bit of work in this area and people felt convinced that I'm doing something honestly. And therefore, since 2010, we started receiving a lot of donations. And today, we are stronger than ever. In some ways, what happened to me was a blessing in disguise. The school and all the projects are not mine alone.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
It's owned by, in theory, it's owned by everyone who contributed. contributes to it. So in that sense, I brought the community of well-wishers to a cause that meant something for them too, not just a personal project. And I think that's a way to do it. Try to do it all by yourself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Even if you have money, it's not necessarily the right way to do it because you want to attract ideas and criticisms and everything else. And you have someone to report to. the board and make sure that you keep yourself honest.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Absolutely. One of the pressing issues in my mind is that in the next 10, 15 years, I have to transition to the next set of managers, next set of people whom I train and so on. So we already started on that. My son is there, but he cannot do it himself. The same thing he has to have many people surround him who will do a good job. And honestly, so the transition is just as important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
You have to recognize that you don't live forever. So I'm working on that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Absolutely correct. For a magical reason, one of the Academy Award winners, Vanessa Roth, discovered us. And she said she would like to spend time, send us the camera crew and all of that, and she herself, and shoot. And she was shooting both boys and girls. And she realized that she needs to track them. You can't just take a snapshot and forget about it. So she kept going.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And after a while, this camera crew was living with us, literally. And we didn't even think of them as part of some outside force. They were there. Everything we did, they were shooting. And they collected a story, which we didn't know what it was. And the day before Netflix released, they asked us to come for a showing. That was the first time we saw the film.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And so when you see this Daughters of Destiny, you realize that There is nothing staged, no acting. It was just the true story. Children's voice, our voice, neighbors' voice, parents' voice, everything in there, the hard truth. And that's why this film became very popular all over. And so that is the history of these seven years of shooting.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Television with a Conscience is an Academy Emmy Award, yes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Well, I am on your show. That itself is a privilege.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
If you have the money, You must be willing to spend a good portion of it and create the infrastructure, create the base for it that others can appreciate. But if you don't have the money, you need to, right from the start, you need to partner with someone who has some money. Without money, it's a little hard. I'm not saying it's impossible. If you are a very highly motivating person, you can
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
maybe start fundraising even before you have anything to show. But that's a big challenge. You will have to work for some other NGO and be part of their organization. Starting something of your own with no money in your pocket or very little money in your pocket, it's a big challenge. I wouldn't advise anyone to do that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Find a partnership organization or join a group of people who have deep pockets and say to them, listen, you have the money. I have the commitment. I will deliver what we both agree on. Help me and show from the start that you will do what you promised.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I am amazed that you should know so much about India. that I don't have to tell you. But anyway, what you observed is correct. Once you come out of the major cities like Bangalore and hardly 20 kilometers, everything, there is no infrastructure at all. People are living in huts. The roads are full of potholes. and no real shops and so on.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
So when I first discovered this piece of land in this village, there was no electricity. There was no water supply. The telephone lines, some cell phone would work from the top of some hill. That's where I started. And there were no roads properly. And I had to do almost everything. We decided to use solar power. In fact, the British Petroleum, which had solar panels, we bought from them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And later on, when we started running the entire school on solar, 30 years ago, when nobody was talking about solar, the British Petroleum came and took a film and showed it at G8 summit where President Ellison and President Clinton were having their summit. So a little historic footnote about our solar effort. And telephone lines got improved over time as the cell phone industry got going.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And water, we have deep wells. Some of those wells go down as deep as 1,000 feet. We have a whole lot of wells, and we pump the wells. And today we pump the water out with solar panels. So again, we are not using electricity from the public service. So you find solutions. And then the road, the nearest four or five kilometers to our school was impossible to navigate with all those potholes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
So after trying for five years, trying to get the government to do something, they weren't doing. So we just had to spend the money and build the road, tarred road. That's how we got here. So we overcame many hurdles, but that's part of living in a remote area. And if you find solutions one by one, you will be able to move forward.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Yes, absolutely. You have to be patient, especially in rural areas, trying to de-government. Nothing happens sometimes. You just can't get frustrated. Contractors don't want to work in remote rural areas. There are so many hurdles you have to overcome. The solar panel is a perfect example where we didn't have to rely on too many people to buy from British Petroleum.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
put them up and it produces energy. So some solutions are much easier.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
But I would argue even there, who suffers most is the poor people in slums who have no way of protecting themselves, who are right next to a factory that is fabricating lead. They are the ones who are suffering. So it's also a poverty issue. So everything I've done has some connection, may not be directly visible, but some of them are directly connected.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Shilpa is one of the great sexist stories coming from one of the poorest. Her father is an elephant chaser. That's why her book is called The Elephant Chaser's Daughter. The elephants come into his village and he's asked to chase them away by the government by bursting crackers. A lot of them get killed too. But anyway, they were living in utter poverty. But this girl was really smart.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And she went on to take two masters and come to Hofstra University for her PhD. This is her last year, sixth year, clinical psychology. She'll be a doctor next year. And she wrote this marvelous book. It is Fit the Elephant Chase's Daughter, which is right now, I think in Kindle, it's running like 4.6 out of a score of five in ranking. So she's one.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
There are other kids whose mother burned herself because she was raped by some people. And we picked him up and did some plastic surgery and things like that. And he's now a a middle-level manager in a technology company. There are others who were orphaned. There's one girl who was an orphan, and we took her and we got her through her college. And today she's somewhere in, I believe, in Dubai.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
She is running a real estate firm. So they've gone into different things, some in technology, some in psychology, some in business and so on. They are in Google, they are in Amazon, they are in Microsoft, they are in ExxonMobil.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Every company would like to take them when they go for interview because our children display a certain level of self-confidence, their communication skills are excellent, and they are humble. So the combination of all these things and intercommunication skills are high. So all combination of these things make them very attractive and they get hired.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And they compete with other students from well-to-do families and our kids get selected. Now, you pointed out that, and now there are 12 of them in the last three years joined American colleges in full scholarship. Just to name a few, Princeton, University of Chicago, Stanford, Duke, Middlebury, I don't know. There are 12 of them. And this year we have another five.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
We're expecting them to get over 95% in SAT and do well in interviews and the essays and get on merit. The lesson, John, if I can tell the audience, this is this. This is one of the most rewarding parts of my work. And that is that you take children from this absolute poverty and transform them for good enough to be in Princeton or Stanford or any of these places I've mentioned.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
How is it possible? People asked me and I said, nothing magical. You just got to bring them up right, give them lots of love and caring and provide an excellent education, instill self-confidence in them and their communication skills and try to make them as honest as possible and kind and caring.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
If you work on all these things, that's why I have to stay here 10 months in a year and only go two months. I'm not the only one. There are so many others working with me. But the biggest challenge I have is not the children, John. It's not the children. It's the staff. It's the staff. I have to bring them into that culture and that mission.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And if you have 70, 80 people working on the same thing and children are noticing how they are and how they treat the children, magic happens. That is the secret. The children are not my problem. Much less problem.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Amazing. You touched upon the most important point I forgot to tell you, but you touched upon the most important point. That is, it's one thing to bring about great success in a few children or hundreds of children, but where the true impact is how they touch others. One of the things we instilled in them right from childhood, that they have a moral duty.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
because they are beneficiaries of other people's kindness. They have a moral duty to be kind and generous to others. So we tell them, in your lifetime, maybe not in the first five years when you're trying to fix your homes and get your parents out of poverty, that's all fine. But in your lifetime, you must carry at least 100 others with you. And that is a moral duty you have.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And yes, already these children have taken their families who are graduated and working, they've taken them out of poverty. They are no more living in those broken-down huts. If they were living in a They improved that and added rooms and toilets and kitchen and so on. Because they used to go to toilets somewhere in the field and keep cooking outside and so on. All that has changed.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
They buy clothes for their parents. They put them on medical insurance. And all those things they have done for their families. But they then get their sisters married. India has a dowry system, which is terrible. But you have to pay money to get your daughter married. They pay for it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
They educate their siblings in college and then they are involved in other projects that are available to serve the community or someone outside the community, their own community. I tell them, listen, don't talk about your blood relationship. You can't go around testing somebody's blood to see whether your DNA matches.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
But your job is to help as many people as possible, regardless of where they are. It doesn't have to be in India. It can be in Africa. It can be in the inner city of America. Wherever you can, you have a moral duty to help. So that's a core value we try to inculcate in them. And the children, for their part, their initial years of their careers, they already started doing it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I'm not promising that every child will do it. Even if a good majority does it, that will be wonderful. They will be changemakers of tomorrow. They will contribute to society and the world at large.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I think I can speak for myself, but that is I found great joy in improving the lives of people through service, in this case, to children or the village women or whoever was unemployed and so on. There is a certain joy that comes with transforming the lives and you see it in their eyes. I can't describe it more than that. But the point is this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
If you have the means to reach out, touch someone, you are not going to get poorer by just spending some money to help a few. Do it by all means and see the happiness that comes from it. At least I find it. I hope others find it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And if you assume that half the world is poor and the other half is reasonably well off and everybody contributes one or two dollars a day, there'll be no poor people in this planet. There are enough number of people, 78 billion people, 4 billion people out of that half of them, give a couple of dollars a day, we will solve poverty. But we are not doing it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
So I would say when you can help others, do it and find the happiness from it. It's not just a religious issue. It's a moral issue. It's something that compassion in action. Compassion in action is just feeling sorry for somebody who doesn't do the job. You have to act on it. And a small act, like what I just described, can make a difference.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And if everyone does it, we will be a much, much happier world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
They are all interrelated. They're free press, like yours, that addresses issues and challenges government policies if they are wrong and bring out the corruption. If you do that, you will have better governance. And I feel that one of the reasons for poverty is bad governance. If you're talking about Baldi Medical, poor people don't go to a doctor unless they are really sick.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
But if you go to them, to their huts, and look at them and say, you've got this problem, let me do a blood test on you and take care of them, or they can walk up to your clinic, it will make a big difference to their health. That's another moral duty you have to make sure that people don't suffer. Suffering. Poverty has different dimensions. It's not hunger. It's suffering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And even indignity of being in a lower caste, that is also part of poverty. So I find all these activities that I embarked on, they're closely interrelated, though you may not see it as such. I mean, the only one somebody may argue that I did doesn't fit in with poverty is lead poisoning. That's an urban problem more than anything else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
But I would argue even there, who suffers most is the poor people in slums who have no way of protecting themselves, who are right next to a factory that is fabricating lead. They are the ones who are suffering. So it's also a poverty issue. So everything I've done, as some connection may not be directly visible, But some of them are directly connected.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I am Not that worried or concerned about my personal legacy. I like to leave behind an institution, Shanti Bhavan, and some of the other projects that will last for hundreds of years, that will change people's lives, that will bring joy to people who never had anything. If others would carry that forward, that would be great. And what I have done,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
if it appeals to people and they will be attracted to join this crusade, that will be wonderful. So what I hope to see is this mission carrying forward with the help of millions of others and we transform the lives of those who are suffering and who are deprived. And that will be my greatest wish. I don't personally don't care what happens about my name. That's not as important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Thank you, John. I just want to say I am truly amazed at your knowledge, not only India, but the issues that you pointed out and you hit right on the things that I would like to talk about. You gave me the opportunity. I am very thankful to you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I was barely 18 when I was sent up there. My first posting was to the Himalayas. The Chinese had invaded India through a pass called Salem Pass, and that is 14,000 feet above sea level. At that time, the highest battleground anywhere in the world. And there's a young man set up there with some 300 soldiers to establish a gun position. That's the background. And I was alone as an officer there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And the experience I had for 11 months, digging and blasting rocks and establishing the guns and afraid that the Chinese might come through it, that was very educational. I learned to make things happen on my own, motivate the soldiers. and also endure the conditions under which I was living for 11 months. It was always snowing and minus degrees and everything else, a lack of oxygen.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And I think it has helped me all through my life. I learned how I could keep the morale of the soldiers high. And that lesson carries on even today.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Yes, certainly. During my stay up there, I was alone as an officer and I used to climb one of those little hills up there. Already we were 14,000 and I would sit there only because I could see the sky below me. The clouds were floating below me, and it was absolutely magnificent to sit up there in endless range of mountains and valleys.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And while the blasting of the rocks were going on down below, I would occasionally go and guide them and check. But then I didn't have much to do other than wait for them to complete the blasting. I had to be away from the blasting area. Anyway, I started thinking, what is that I'm doing? Sure, the Chinese might attack us and I will have to defend the border.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
But after a while, I didn't find sufficient purpose to what I was doing. And that was the time I read one important book by Albert Schweitzer. He's a German and he won an Nobel Prize later and he went in a river boat. It's a small camp. It wasn't even a boat, a canoe. And he reached Gabon, Africa. And he lived with the tribals. He established a hospital. He treated the patients there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I mean, people who came to him, the tribal people. He lived in the middle of the midst of animals and everything else. And I thought it was very fascinating and romantic to be living like that, especially the tribes. And another book I had read
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
which had an impact on me, apart from Albert Schweitzer, I'm just trying to remember the name, and in which the author says that there is nothing right about the book. It is what is left. And I said, by God, what is left? By which he meant, of course, that who is alive? Russell, Bertrand Russell, he's a great philosopher of modern times. He's passed away.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Bertrand Russell's book also I happened to read. At that time, and a few days later, not a few days, a few months later, I... was blown up in one of those dynamite blasts.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Only because the fuse wires the military was giving had to be cut short because we were running out of fuse wires, and their eyes took up the job of blasting, lighting the wires, and I didn't notice that the wire had already lighted. And suddenly it was near the the dynamite and I turned around and jumped, but it was a little too late and I was injured.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And then I realized that there must be some reason why I was spared. And that's when I decided that I'll devote a good part of my life after I have a chance to make some money into serving other people, the people who were suffering. And that was my way of paying back.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I left the army soon after, but I managed to get out and come to the United States. And to start from the beginning, studying college, I went to NYU and spent seven years doing my master's and doctorate and all that. And I joined a bank. And my goal was to make sufficient money that I can do this, what I'm doing today. And I realized that as much as I work hard for it, that's not enough.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I must have the means to do it. And so that's what I did for the next 25 years. But then I realized that I hadn't fulfilled my own promise to myself that I will do service. And so before I turned 50, I said, here it is. I sold my company. Got out of everything and somebody told me to come to Bangalore, which is a city close by here where I am. I'm in a village.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
My connections are not the greatest. It's a remote place. And I started a foundation and got myself going with that. And ever since for the last 30 years, I've been living here and a couple of months, I come back to the United States and spend some time and then come back here. So I'm living right now in the midst of a lot of children and a lot of people in the village.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And I'm surrounded by poor people in the remote villages.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
I thought I could make sufficient money in 10 years. It became 20 years. And then finally it became almost 30 years. And I said, this is it. Whatever money I've made, that's enough. I'm going with it. So the defining point was my feeling that I have now, I got to get started. Otherwise I'll be too old.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
And secondly, the money I've made by selling my company would be sufficient to establish what I have done.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
Well, unless you are a very rich person with billions of dollars, I suppose you'll never have enough money. You've got to get started and you have to put your foot in. And then you show to the world outside that you mean what you're doing and you are committed to it. And then you reach out to others to help you. That's what I did after 15, 18 years. I started fundraising.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
By then I had established the infrastructure. The children were here in the school that I started and a couple of other projects. And I could tell my story to others and they could see that I have, I mean business, I mean what I was trying to preach. And so once people saw what I was doing was sincere, They came forward to help me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
So then this, the last 15 years or so, the foundation is funded, not just by my money, but by hundreds, hundreds of donors, both in the United States and a few in India, actually the biggest donors are in America.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Creating a Legacy of Hope: Dr. Abraham George on Educating India’s Underrepresented | EP 550
a lot of individuals in fact if i am not mistaken maybe close to 500 or more the donors individuals not corporations individuals in america they come forward with small amounts and large amounts those who can afford they give more so we are able to do it so the answer to your question is You can't keep on waiting. At some point, you have to say, okay, this is what I have. This is what I can do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Poverty has different dimensions. It's not hunger. It's suffering. And even indignity of being in a lower caste, that is also a part of poverty. So I find all these activities that I embarked on, they're closely interrelated, though you may not see it as such. Somebody may argue that I didn't fit in with poverty is lead poisoning. That's an urban problem more than anything else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
But I would argue even there, who suffers most is the poor people in slums who have no way of protecting themselves, who are right next to a factory that is fabricating lead. They are the ones who are suffering. So it's also a poverty issue. So everything I've done has some connection, may not be directly visible, but some of them are directly connected.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
So that's, I gave myself four years to figure out what that meant. And it was only one year after I put in that calendar invite that a friend of mine said the Texas Renaissance Festival was for sale. And that was the moment the clouds parted and the angels sang and I got hit by a lightning bolt.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And it turns out that the Renaissance Festival is the only thing I've loved my entire life, other than my mother. I went there as a 12-year-old on a school trip, you know, yellow school bus, the whole thing. And I think I missed a year or two when I was 13, 14, but then I went to that show 38 years in a row.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so that's traveling back to Texas from three years in Boston, three years in Germany, a year in England, a year in Russia, a year in Australia. I didn't want to mess up my streak. And what was fascinating about that is that it had never occurred to me that was a business. It was this thing that I loved. Like when October came, I just got giddy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I was so excited to go to the Texas Renaissance Festival. But when my friend said it was for sale, I started scratching my head going, oh, yeah, I guess someone owns it. And someone there's a P&L on a balance sheet. And I start doing some numbers in my head. And I think that might be a really good business. And that's it. That set me on the path.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so I actually tried to buy the Texas Renaissance Festival, which if you lived in Houston, I'm sure you're familiar with. And that didn't work. And then I tried to buy the one in Dallas and that fell apart one day before closing, which means like multimillion dollar loan from a big bank, signed purchase agreement, escrow, like everything is done. One day it fell apart.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And then so then I co-founded Sherwood Forest Fair, which is the, we say Renaissance Fossil because that's what people know. It's really a medieval fair because we're set in the 1190s. So I co-founded that with a business partner and we opened up in 2010. So we've been doing it for 15 years. And this past, we just do eight weekends. That's the standard for this business.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
We had 167,000 patrons in 17 operating days. So it's just 10,000 people out there every day eating turkey legs and drinking meat and watching jousting. That's what I love.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Absolutely. It's not really a joke, but it sounds a little bit goofy when I say people think that owning a renaissance festival is really fun and sexy, and it is. But a lot of it is the line to get into the parking lot, clean toilets and the beer lines.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
You have to put enormous amount of energy and then making sure people can get into the parking lot fast and they can get a beer fast and they can go to the bathroom fast. So there's a lot of just operational stuff going on. And of course, then the key elements of the value proposition are The stage acts.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
So we hire the jousters and the falconer and the jugglers and the comedians and all these guys. And then we have our artisans. We have 170 artisans. So there's the boot maker and the hat maker and the glass blower. And you have to manage all those people. And then there's just enormous amounts of investments.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
In some parts of the country, the Renaissance festivals are in public parks and they just take a few weeks and they build it up. It's more like a tent city. But in even more of the country, as in Texas and New York and Ohio, The fairs are permanent. So it's a permanent theme park. I've got like 200 buildings.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so there's always investment in more parking, more underground electricity, more water pipe, more storage tanks for water, all that kind of stuff. And then finally, probably one of the most important things is the marketing. I just did a talk an hour ago at, I'm at the University of Texas Macomb School of Business, and one of the students was interested in event production.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And she asked, what do people mess up the most? And I said, what they mess up the most is the marketing investment. So I'd have this benchmark of spending $2 or $3 per patron that you want. If you want to have 10,000 people spend $20,000 on marketing, and a lot of event producers underestimate the amount of marketing spend they need to do. And they don't and they miss doing it rigorously. Right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
So in my first year, 2010, I tried everything, even though I thought billboards were dumb. I'm going to try them anyway. And then I did an exit survey where I asked people, check off everything that you saw and you could add up all the check marks, divide into the spend by vehicle, by radio station, by television station, by billboard location. And you can get an ROI.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And it turns out billboards crushed. And so those are some of the key success factors in the event business.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And my biggest concern was whether it was going to take off or not. I'll never forget opening day in 2010. I had spent my marketing budget and I had no idea if 30 people were going to walk through the gate or 300 or 3000 or 10,000. I had no idea. And so I'm just sitting there sweating bullets and the cannon goes off and 3000 people walked in. I was like, okay, this is going to be all right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
So one was I spent a solid marketing budget for year one. But then what I did, and I think it's a good idea, is I stayed in the real world at big corporate jobs for the first several years of building my passion business. So I was building my theme park and I was a booze and company partner at the same time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And then I was the CEO of a billion dollar cell phone distribution company at the same time. And what that enabled me to do is to write checks to get my passion business to scale. And so I did that for the first four years and we've been in it forever. for 15 years now, but to scale the business. And then that worked.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And now the business is at scale and it's really successful and doesn't need anything for me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
That's the exact topic of my book. The whole book is about how to deal with that kind of thing. I can step back and describe my framework where I can talk about that individual person. Which way do you want me to go?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Yeah, so you're 25 years old, you have a business degree, you're in a job that's okay, but you're not passionate about it, and you want to be a writer. I think one of the very important things this person needs to answer is, what is their need for financial security? And you can really think that through.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And in the book, there's a little tool that helps you think through that because it's things like, do you need to live in an expensive city or are you okay in a less expensive city? How many kids do you want to have? Do you expect to pay for their college? Do you have expensive taste? Do you need a new car in a few years? Do you expect to have health problems?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Right, so getting a handle on your need for financial security. And then at the same time, really testing your readiness to follow your heart. If the person wants to be a writer, they really have to test their readiness to be a writer. And I tell people when I talk about my book, especially young people, don't trust yourself when you're testing your readiness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Ask other people because people are not very good about assessing their own capabilities. Ask people that you trust to assess your capabilities. Ask people to assess your capabilities in a way that's anonymous, right? That would be great.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so I would say to that person, look, if you're ready from a capability point of view and your need for financial security is low, you should probably start writing commercially, go for it, follow your heart. But if your need for financial security is medium or high, I would keep working at that regular business job.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And I would try to orient that regular business job in a way that builds out your skills. See if you can take that regular business job and shift it towards doing more writing or shift it towards digital marketing skills because that will be useful for an author.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
So be intentional about learning things in your regular business job that are going to help you be a writer or follow your passion later. That's what I would say to that person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Definitely. And it's a real challenge because the kind of net margin on a book is so low, it makes it hard to spend marketing money on it. So it's a big challenge.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Definitely. I've somehow, I didn't choose to be intentional. I just was, right? So I think it's easier when it comes naturally to you. But if it doesn't come naturally to you, I think it's really important to try to figure it out. It meant everything to my career. So when I got out of college and started working,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I wanted to make partner at McKinsey and I knew that financial progression and I knew my cost of living and I had a savings goal. I wanted to have a million dollars in the bank by the time I was 36 years old or less. And I was thinking that way at 22. And so then it's like, okay, well, I need to succeed. And a lot of people wash out strategy consulting firms.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I really hunkered down and figured out what does it take to succeed here? And they have their capability matrices and they have their feedback forms, not really focused. on succeeding there. And because I was successful there, I ended up getting into Harvard Business School. And then I just kept being intentional the whole time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And then that example of when I was 36, saying, I want to marry my skills and my passion, even though I don't know what that means, that was a very intentional choice. Like, this is what I'm going to do. And I'm giving myself four years to figure out what that means. So yeah, I think intentionality is absolutely a superpower. I also think
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
it gives you great comfort when you have chosen your path even if your work and your passion don't have anything to do with each other if you've made that decision this is what i'm doing my passion is smoking pot and playing video games on saturday that's it it's the only thing i want to do and i'm going to repair diesel engines for a living because i can make a hundred thousand dollars a year
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And if that's your decision and you're intentional about that, I think you're going to be much more fulfilled than if that just happens to you. I think there's a lot of peace in doing what you've decided to do as opposed to what you defaulted into or what the world expects you to do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Yeah, I talk to various mental health practitioners. First off, I love Angela Duckworth. She's a keynote speaker at a conference I'll be in in January. So I'm really excited to see her in person. I think a lot of mental health practitioners will tell you that the first hurdle they have to get over with patients is convincing them that they have agency.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so that's something I talk about a lot in the book and in my talk is people typically have a lot more agency than they think they do. You can make decisions every day that make your life better. And I was in my talk with, if you take 1.0, think of that as a step, and you raise that to the 365th power, that equals one.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
But if you take 1.01, so imagine that is 1% better, and you raise that to the 365th power, that's 37%. This is night and day. So I always tell people, when in doubt, act. Make a decision today that will make your life better. And if that's going from zero pushups to one, that's a step. If that's going from walking 2,000 steps to 3,000 steps, take it, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Take the step every day to make your life a little bit better and own that choice. You have the power to do that. Don't make excuses. Take the damn step.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
People typically have a lot more agency than they think they do, right? You can make decisions every day that make your life better. And I was in my talk with, if you take 1.0, 1.0, think of that as a step, and you raise that to the 365th power, that equals one. But if you take 1.01, so imagine that is 1% better, and you raise that to the 365th power, that's 37, right? This is night and day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Yeah, great question. So there's a couple of different pathways here. In the mead business, there was a little bit of luck involved in that. I think it behooves us to confess when there's luck involved with what you're doing. So my first year of Sherwood Forest Fairs, 2010, and my cousin comes up to me during the fair and says, I make an incredible mead.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And I fancy myself a mead connoisseur because I've been going to Renaissance festivals forever. And I was like, okay, I'll try it. And so we went and sat down and I'm humoring him, right? And I try the meat and I said, wait a minute, that really is the best meat I've ever tasted. What's going on? And he goes, oh, it's an old family recipe. Been making them my whole life. Grandparents made it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I got something here. I'm like, okay, well, this is amazing. You know, Do you have a license? Do you produce this stuff legally? And he goes, no, that's where I need your help. I don't know how to do business. I know how to make mead. And I keep getting arrested because I sell it and I'm not allowed to. I'm like, oh, God. Okay, I know how to do that. And so then we got into business together.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And now that business is really flourishing. And so a big part of that was luck, but another part of that was that skillset of knowing how to build a business. And another part of that, which is gonna be a good segue, was just strategic thinking. The mead business in the country in a year is mostly Renaissance festivals.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
The retail market is there, but it's just not that material relative to festivals. A mead is a festival drink. And I could already see that at my show, and I had mass market meads in year one, it's outselling the beer and the wine. And I think back over mine, like, yeah, this is what people drink at shows. They drink mead.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so strategically getting into that business could be really wise because I get to internalize that margin. Well, then that segues to getting into another business. So I own this land and I've got a Renaissance vessel that runs for six to eight weekends in the spring. But I own the land. I'm like, okay, well, I need to do something else with the facility because it's, it's a full facility.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
What am I going to do? And then I launched a Celtic music festival, which is just like Scottish and Irish music, not period specific, but geographic specific all time periods. And it was because I could see Celtic festivals around the country being successful. And I'm like, I love that. We like flutes and fiddles and bagpipes. I'm in like, let's go.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so I launched the Celtic Music Festival, which we've now done. This is our 14th year to do it and next month. And I'm like, well, I've got the summer. And so I launched a medieval summer camp. So Robin Hood summer camp. And we had 542 kids over the course of four weeks this past summer. Incredibly fulfilling, successful business.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And that all came from just a business strategy of I've got a bunch of fixed costs. And I've got assets that are not generating revenue for 10 months a year. I need to come up with other events. And so then I followed all those natural strategic footsteps and it all worked out.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Absolutely. We've got swords and bows and arrows and horses and glass blowing, and we'll do a vision workshop for you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
that's it we can do that in three weeks from now i will spend all day saturday and sunday at the university of texas arlington and i will be getting paid to teach sword fighting man well we gotta love that it's a hundred bucks to work 10 hours a day for two days but that's what i love
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
That's what I did.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
That's what I did.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
So the five meta paths. The meta path defines a relationship between your work and your passion. So we've got five different paths that govern that relationship. The passion path is make your passion and your work the same thing now. The independent path is the opposite. It's that your passion and your work don't have anything to do with each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
The experiment path is mostly for people who don't know what their passion is. And so the experiment path is try things. And you can try things in different organizations, different geographies, different parts of one company. And I've got some rules in the book around how to experiment in a way that makes your resume look good. But you're trying things out to look for that spark, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
You're looking for that passion. Then there's the money path. And the money path is passion smashing. I've got to be rich or I've got to be rich. And then maybe I'll worry about passion later, but I got to make money. That's for our Goldman Sachs friends. And then the balance path, which is the one that I did, which is I know I want to have my work and my passion be the same thing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
But I'm going to do a regular career first to build the financial security and the capability set that maximizes my probability of success 10, 15 years down the road when I switch over. And so the framework leads you to pick one of those five pathways. And then I've got a chapter in the book on each one, and it lays out a game plan. So I really wanted the book to be tactical.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
You pick your path, and then here are the five next steps and pitfalls to avoid. And it's a work plan for success. pushing that path forward.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I always tell people, when in doubt, act. Make a decision today that will make your life better. And if that's going from zero push-ups to one, that's a step. If that's going from walking 2,000 steps to 3,000 steps, take it, right? Take the step every day to make your life a little bit better and own that choice. You have the power to do that. Don't make excuses. Take the damn step.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
What I'm finding is college students, even the early ones, so freshmen and sophomores, freshmen, you don't put an S on that word, freshmen and sophomores, 18, 19, 20 year olds, they're absolutely wrestling a lot with what am I going to do with my life? Am I going to not enjoy what I'm doing? How can I find something that I love? How do I figure out what I love?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
They're wrestling with this topic a lot. And so my talk, which I just did an hour ago, is I summarize the book in 35 minutes. And then everybody does my little pick your path tool online. It takes five minutes and they pick their path and we talk about the next steps. And so it's really resonating because they are wrestling with this topic and they're wrestling with it a lot.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I gave the talk at Texas A&M University a couple of weeks ago. And there's about 100 kids, I shouldn't say kids, young people in the room. And the professor started with, how many of you are worried about your career? 100% of the hands. How many of you are worried that you're going to find yourself five or 10 years from now at a job thinking, oh, God, I really don't like what I'm doing?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
100% of them, right? So they're absolutely worried about this stuff. That's why the book and the talk are resonating so much.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I would say, one, get real clear on how much money you need to give the passion project to go. And two, I very strongly believe that you can start building out a passion business while working in the real world at the same time. That's what I did. And so I would keep working. I would dabble in the passion business, write the business plan, take the steps that you can take.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
get to the number you need to give it a go and then even if you can direct your real world career in a way that enables you to learn capabilities that are going to help you on the passion project it's a standard balance path it's just it's slower because you lost half your money
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I think it's a great scenario. It's a terrible scenario, but it's a great question. First, I would say to the parents, you're making a terrible mistake in pressuring your kids or grandkids into a career. That's awful. You really shouldn't do that. And it's not only these being a doctor. We've got a lot in small family businesses where the parents expect the children to work in the business.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I think it's a tragic mistake. And if you just... Read some business history. You're going to learn pretty quickly that it's far more likely that you're going to frustrate your kids than it is that they're going to flourish in the parent's path. So one, to the parent, don't do that, right? That's awful. I've got this beautiful business that I'm completely in love with, Sherwood Forest Fair.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And my kids do work there. They work for other people, not me. But there's no pressure or expectation whatsoever that they're going to work there as a career. That's point one. Point two is I would go into the matrix. And it sounded like a Keanu Reeves thing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
and see what your path is right it the answer varies based on your need for financial security and do you know how to monetize a passion can you do it now or do you want to do it later so let's say in my toolkit you land on the balance path and the balance path is you're going to do a career for 10 15 20 years and then you're going to switch over if you know what your passion is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
and being a doctor will certainly build the wealth to maximize a probability of success, then I would say, will it build the skill set? And it may or may not. And if it doesn't, I'd probably go try something else. But if it does, if you're on the balance path and being a doctor, which is what your family's pressuring you to do, builds capabilities and wealth, that might be just fine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
If you're on the passion now path, so let's say you want to be a musician, your need for financial security is very low, and you're talented enough to get paid. Paid enough, you know, enough by your definition. My friend would say, go be a musician. And I think at that point, you know, once you're an adult and you're 18, I think you have to be brave enough to say, I'm not going to be a doctor.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I'm going to be a musician. And I'm doing that knowing I will probably be low income, but I'm okay with that. I know how to manage that. And that's what I'm gonna do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
There are lots of stories of, especially like actors and musicians who got their big break right after they decided to give up. There's a lot of stories about that. Yeah. So I would say you probably shouldn't follow it. So this is really an interesting thing. You should not follow your passion when you're
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
21 years old, if you're not confident that you can make the financial living that you need, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
If you expect to have three kids and pay for their college, and you have expensive taste from your background, and you're a mediocre musician, but you're really passionate about it, that's probably not wise to be a musician, which kind of gets into the things on my book I talk about around testing your capabilities and having other people test your capabilities.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
that there are lots of people where so that's for for people in in the arts following your passion in the arts as a 20 year old i'd say only do that if your need for financial security is low for whatever reason it's low and i'll give a neat story about that and your capabilities are good enough to meet that hurdle so you got to do those two things then you can do it when you're 20 years old
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Great exemplar of that. And then I do want to go back to people whose passion can actually be lucrative. I have an exemplar in my talk, a friend of mine named Roxanne. She's a musician and she's a leader of a band called Wine and Alchemy. She's been a leader of this band for 17, 18 years. She's never going to be rich and she knows it. And she chose music because it meant the world to her.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
She had a hard time imagining being fulfilled doing anything else. And she knew she was good enough to make the little money that she needed. And the key thing is that she knew she was frugal. And she's so talented and frugal that she'll go to Spain in the summer and put a hat down, play music for a day, get 200 euro, spend the next day touring as a tourist.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Thank you, John. Happy to be here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
The third day puts the hat down, makes 200 euro playing music. The fourth day is touring again. So that was this perfect combination of talented enough to make the amount of money that she needs, which was low. And so that's my guidance for young people who want to follow the arts. Then there are plenty of people who are passionate about things that actually have good money.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
In the class I just talked to, there was a young man who he's passionate about cars and he wants to own his own car dealership. And it turns out he can go work at a car dealership for 10 years and learn all those capabilities and make plenty of money and save it and then learn how they finance dealerships and build that network and that reputation and that capital and those skills.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And maybe it's 10 years down the road, he opens his own car dealership. So he's following his heart the whole time, but it's not so hard from a financial point of view. So those are these nuances that I think I'm trying to tackle on the book.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Well, and when you said working as a waitress, I filled in a cocktail bar. Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Oh, listen, I've never had this question asked of me before, and it's going to be my favorite question of all time. William Marshall lived in the late 12th, early 13th centuries, and he's widely considered the greatest knight to have ever lived. He served five English kings over his life. And I'll say a couple of things about him. One is a quote, and I use it in the book.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And it's just a little bit of an admonishment to the people who can't get out of smoking pot and playing video games. Marshall said, and by the way, the job title Marshall comes from this guy, William Marshall. And he said, know this, for this is the heart of it. Idleness shames a young man. And I think it's true for young women, too. That's what he said. Idleness shames a young man.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
So that gets back to something I said earlier is take the step every day. Take the step. If you do one push up rather than zero, do that. Right. So that's one thing is he William Marshall encourages us to act. And I think we should take that lesson. The other thing is that he built such a reputation that he ended up being one of the richest, most powerful people in the world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And it really was because of reputation. And so there's this great moment where King John of England is such a jerk that the Crown Prince of France has invaded England. Now, the Crown Prince of France is married to John's niece. And so there's a lot of people thinking, that's close enough, right? The king's niece, she can be the queen, close enough.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And John was such a jerk that half the barons of England turned against him. And they're fighting alongside the crown prince of the Dauphin, the crown prince of France. It was Louis. And so then John dies. And there's a war. I mean, this is a hot war. And France has conquered half of England. This is like 1215-ish, 1216-ish. And King John dies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And he has a son, Henry, who could be Henry III, but he's young. He's like 10 years old. And William Marshall had such respect amongst the nobility that they all got together and they looked at him and they said, are we going with the prince or the boy? And the prince meant the French prince and the boy meant the 10-year-old son of King John. And Marshall said, we're going with the boy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
That was it. I'm going to get choked up. Everyone abandoned their alliance with France, and they all sided with Henry, who became King Henry III and ruled for 50 years. And then you ask, what's the lesson I'll learn? He had that power because of his reputation. And he had that reputation because he kept his word, and he was loyal. He was loyal to his oaths.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
When he said he was going to do something, he did it. And he was pretty old by that time, right? He's like older than we are now. And this is in like 1216. And he had kept his word for so many decades that everybody held him in high esteem. So much so that when he said, this will be the next king of England, everybody said, okay. I got a little excited there, John. I got a little excited.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
It was funny. I asked my mother the other day, where did my ambition in school come from? Because I remember very clearly in junior high at 11, 12 years old, taking great pride in my little report card saying all A's. I mean, I remember that I can still see that little report card. And so I was like, where did that come from? And she said it was just always there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Yeah. So, I mean, the Viktor Frankl story is certainly worth everybody knowing. And then I'll just, I'll back it up to something that I'm really interested in. Viktor Frankl, he was like a psychology teacher who was in the Nazi camps, the Jewish extermination camps in the Holocaust in the 1940s. And he wrote, he made it out and he wrote a book. And the book was an analysis of
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
what are the differences between the people who survived the concentration camps and the people who didn't? And what he came up with is the people who survived had a purpose, right? They had something deeply, profoundly important to them that they were living for.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And he went on to create this school of thought around having a purpose in your life is a brilliant driving force for fulfillment and success and productivity and all sorts of things. And so those people who had that purpose, then that generated the willpower for them to survive. And so I think that's a really powerful anecdote.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
The topic of owner mindset versus victim mindset, I think is really important. I'm planning to write an article about that soon. I've got it. I got the outline, the whole outline written. The owner mindset is, some people would call it stoic. It's that I can't really control what happens in the world, but I can control how I react to what happens in the world. I get to control my own emotions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And I get to take action every day to make my life better. Whereas the victim mindset is the world is against me. There's too many structural conditions against me. I have no agency. I can't take any steps. I'm screwed for whatever reason. And I think this is one of the great fights for the next few decades.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And we are not fighting it, but it should be a fight because what's happening is the stoic people have their flourishing community. And the victim mindset people have their flourishing community. And they're all in their confirmation bias bubbles. And these two camps are not talking to each other. And they probably should.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And the thing that I want to write in my article is the victim mindset people tend to be much more inclined and educated to talk about mental health. Whereas I think the owner mindset, the stoic mindset, I think is better for mental health.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And if we can convince the victim mindset people that their mental health will be better, if they accept the philosophy that I can't control what happens in the world, but I can't control how I feel about it, that will be better for your mental health.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I think he's brilliant. I probably see an Instagram clip of him every day. But he's got these three circles, and it's basically, I pronounce it Ikigai, and my publisher went down this whole path of how do you pronounce that, and they actually made me choose. They said, there are Japanese people on either side of how to pronounce this, and so I chose Ikigai, although it sounds dumb.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so Ikigai is these four circles. And the Ikigai is Japanese for your reason for being. And the concept of Ikigai is your reason for being is if you can spend your time at the intersection of four circles, what you're good at, what you can get paid for, what the world needs and what you love.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And I've got three kids and one of them is like that. She just takes great pride in making all A's. And so I think just being ambitious about education was somehow just always a part of me. Like we don't really, we can't figure out where it came from. It just is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
If you can spend your time in the middle of that, those overlapping four circles, that's your reason for being your Ikigai. And Scott Galloway in his book basically takes the framework and just deletes the what you love circle. I'm like, why the hell would you just delete the what you love circle? That makes no sense whatsoever. Of course, that should be part of the math.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And of course, there are a lot of people that follow their heart right away, and it's great, as opposed to what his guidance is, follow what you're good at, and then the passion might come, or he'll say the passion will come, but follow what you're good at.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And I think I said in the book, he needs to meet more Renaissance festival workers, because there's a lot of Renaissance entertainers and craftspeople, and also artists and musicians,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
and even car dealer guys that they follow what they love immediately and if you do that under the right conditions then and that can be a beautiful decision and a wise decision and so i poke at him for why the heck and he knows what ikigai is i've heard him quote it he took ikigai and deleted the passion circle or the love circle i'm like come on man so the last question i want to ask you is along these lines i think we're on the verge of a major shift
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I agree with that. I think COVID was a spark that lit a fire of entrepreneurship. So I think if you look at the number of companies founded, it exploded in 2020, 2021. And I think it's stayed up. So I think entrepreneurship is booming. Numerically, it's true that people are founding companies. The other piece of evidence for that is the gig economy, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
There are just millions of people now, solo entrepreneurs, that their work is gig for different kinds of things. And I think it's a beautiful thing because I think a lot of these people that are doing that are following their passion. And another element of that is a lot of them, they just feel like they're in control of their time and they're not really... It's good to not have a boss, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
It's good to have a good boss, but that's hard. It's hard to have a good boss. There's a great sense of freedom. Being an entrepreneur, it's stressful and it's hard, but there's a great sense of freedom and control in doing it. So I agree that the entrepreneurship is flourishing. The class I just talked to at UT was an entrepreneurship class. I heard plenty of young people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I've got an author website, georgeampling.com, and it's got something about all the different things that I do. And yeah, you can buy the book at all the online booksellers, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, all those guys.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Same here, John. I feel like you and I have a lot in common and I hope we stay in touch.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
That really resonates because two of my three kids are twins and they're 14 years old. And the girl twin is the one who wants all of her grades to be 99s or 100s. And the boy twin spikes on empathy. Like he just feels what other people are feeling and he cares and he's kind. And so they're quite different and they're twins and they've done every single thing together their whole lives.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
So I'm sure it's biological somehow.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
If you'll indulge me, I think there are two. When I was in high school in a very small town in Texas called El Campo, a tiny little town, like one McDonald's, one Dairy Queen kind of town, the German professor, whose name was Paul Sechting, I actually saw him last week. He encouraged me to study abroad. And so I went to Germany for the first time on a study abroad program when I was 16 years old.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And that started a lifelong love of travel. And I've been all over the place and lived all over the place. And so I do credit him with kicking it off. The other one is a little bit of a longer story. When I was at Texas A&M, there was a a gentleman there named J. Wayne Stark. And he was the director emeritus of the Memorial Student Center, which is a big establishment, the MSC.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And when I was there, he was already retired. And he was considered the wise man on the mountain. And he had his director emeritus office back in the corner, which nobody knew. But it turns out if you made a 4.0 for a couple of years, he would send someone out in the middle of the day to tap you on the shoulder.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And this sounds different now because of Marvel movies, but they would tap you on the shoulder and say, Mr. Stark wants to speak with you. And then the clouds parted and the angels sang and something special was about to happen. And he gave me the following advice. He said, you're doing a degree in accounting and that's useful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And he's a big fan of doing a degree that's useful, science, engineering, business. He said, but look, you're at an educational institution where there are world-class faculty in a lot of different disciplines. And you would really be remiss to not study under them. because you don't want to miss this chance to become a well-rounded person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so he gives me this piece of paper and he says, I want you to take these classes. And it was Shakespeare, the philosophy of art, metaphysics, medieval history. I mean, all sorts of random stuff. And it was Mr. Stark. So I'm like, okay. And so I did that. And I just started taking all the classes that I had to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And then I just started taking everything on that list and everything that I thought was fascinating. And I got to the end of my fifth year as non-graduate and realized I only needed two more classes and I could have a degree in political science. So I just stayed the summer. I already had my job offer for McKinsey. I was like, guys, can I start in September instead of July? They said, sure.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so then I picked up my second degree in policy. And so I think that that advice was really impactful to me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
So I worked at two strategy consulting firms. One was Booz and the other was McKinsey. And I really credit them with an incredible learning experience. I like to say I learned more in my first three years at McKinsey than I did at Harvard Business School. And Booz is, of course, very similar. And what's beautiful about these firms is that they're 100 years old.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And so they've really had the chance to do the Kaizen, do the continuous improvement, get better and better. What I learned from them, which I think is the most important thing, is to let facts and logic lead you to conclusions rather than start with your conclusion and cherry pick facts and logic to support it. And I think it's a really valuable skill in business and life to be open-minded enough
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
to set aside your hypothesis, your preconceived notions, and let the facts and logic lead you to the truth. That's what those firms taught me. Well, lots of things, but I think that's the important one, the most important one.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
That resonates. My college roommate of three years went to work for Arthur Anderson. And he really waxes nostalgic about how wonderful the place was. And then they just had that one screw up called Enron that took down this revered institution. It is, it's a very sad story.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Well, I did a consulting project at Interon. It wasn't in the stuff that went south, but it was there in the business and it was quite something.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
I think... My entire career, even as a 20-something, I had this notion that at some point I wanted my work and my passion to be the same thing. But I didn't know what that was or what that meant. And I knew that I would have a higher probability of success if I built the capabilities that came along with an industry career.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
And I knew that I would have a much lower risk profile if I aligned my work and my passion with a bunch of money in the bank. And so I had that thought the whole time. And so I had a very clear savings goal. When you work at a hundred year old firm, what you're going to make each year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
So I had my spreadsheet and how much I was going to spend and how much I was going to save and all this kind of stuff. And the moment come came when I was like 36 years old. And I put a note in my calendar. It was on a Blackberry. You remember when we had Blackberries on our holsters or belts and we thought we were cool? We thought we were like Billy the Kid with our Blackberries.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
It was great. I would bang out emails with my thumbs and I'm playing. I love that thing. Anyway, I put an invitation or a meeting on my 40th birthday, so four years hence, and it said in all capital letters, STOP. And what that meant to me was stop doing what the economy expects me to do and do what I love or do what I'm passionate about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Unlocking the Richard Branson Formula: Why Happiness Leads to Success | EP 549
Poverty has different dimensions. It's not hunger. It's suffering. And even indignity of being in a lower caste, that is also a part of poverty. So I find all these activities that I embarked on, they're closely interrelated, though you may not see it as such. Somebody may argue that it doesn't fit in with poverty is lead poisoning. That's an urban problem more than anything else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Unlocking the Richard Branson Formula: Why Happiness Leads to Success | EP 549
But I would argue even there, who suffers most is the poor people in slums who have no way of protecting themselves, who are right next to a factory that is fabricating lead. They are the ones who are suffering. So it's also a poverty issue. So everything I've done has some connection, may not be directly visible, but some of them are directly connected.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
Thank you for having me here. Tomorrow is the speaker's race here in the state of Texas, Texas House. And what we usually have for the last decade or so, a small group of Republicans going to Democrats, which is the minority party here. This time it is 62 members from the Democrat side, 88 from our side.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
Some Republicans will partner with the Democrats to choose a moderate or a rhino Republican, for lack of a better term, to put as a speaker. Then they will go and kill all the conservative bills in Texas House. The Texas Senate is very conservative. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and the group will pass good legislation.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
One of the legislation that got killed last time is the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government is buying land in Texas, especially around our military bases. And there was a bill to stop that. And some of the Republicans, along with all of the Democrats, said it's a racist bill and we're going to kill it. And they killed it. Now we have a national security issue in Texas.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
The last year, we talked about voter protection while Biden was in office. And Texas did what we can do, but it could have been a lot better if we had a conservative speaker. This is the same group who went and impeached the Texas attorney general. So this year, the party said, if you're not going to support a real Republican speaker—
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
who will support reforms in Texas House by putting only Republicans in committee chairmanship. That's another thing they do. They put Democrats in committee chairmanships and give a lot more power to Democrats than they deserve in Texas.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
So if we do that, we're going to not only come after you, we're going to censure you, we're going to educate your constituents, and we're going to come after you, basically. couple of months. Governor Abbott is on board with the caucus nominee, which is David Cook. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is on board with it. All of our statewide elected officials are on board with it.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
Most of our county parties are on board with it. But a small group of Republicans joining the Democrats most likely going to elect a speaker. At least they're going to try to do that tomorrow, which is what we're fighting at this point.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
So, you know, in Minnesota, you heard this a couple of days ago, they have one seat majority and they decided we're going to elect a speaker by the Republican caucus, which is the normal thing to do, which is what everybody does. In Texas, a group of Republicans will join the Democrats and elect a speaker who is backed majority by the Democrats. That's unbelievable to me.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
Yes, it's the craziest thing. And it started happening in 2008 when Barack Obama got elected. Our margins went down from 76 to 74. And, you know, we had to to two seat majority. So all these Republicans were kind of like very Democrat in their heart. They said, well, this is an opportunity for us to go work with the Democrats and get a speaker who we can control.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
And that's what they've been doing ever since. Our margin now is 88. We actually had added two more seats to the Texas House this time around. We were 86. We have 88 members. And all we need is 76. But we can't get 76 Republicans to support the Republican nominee. They're supporting a Democrat nominee, or they're joining the Democrat Party to give power away to the Democrats.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
This is craziest thing in Texas. I don't know if you heard this. Don Jr. got involved in this and said, what are you all doing in Texas? This is not the right way to do things. President Trump won by 12 points. We flipped 12 out of the 14 South Texas counties. One of the counties have never elected a Republican for the last 130 years. We got Donald Trump elected at 14 points.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
We have a clear mandate. I mean, I listen to your show and you understand this more than anybody. There is a clear mandate for the Republican Party and for the elected officials. And what we have in Texas is unfortunately. A lot of these Republicans who used the party's name to get elected is real Democrats, and they're going to go put Democrats in charge. And parties are working against them.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
So we spent a lot of money over the last two, two and a half months educating our constituents, saying this is what's happening in Texas. And one of the legislators, Cordy Harris, took that as a legislative bribery for the party to send mailers to his district
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
which will potentially affect his reelection and file the Texas ethics violation against me personally saying the party chairman is bribing and threatening legislators, which is a crime punishable by minimum of two years in prison. So this is how crazy they are and how far they're willing to go to go against the party and the grassroots in Texas.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
That is absolutely right. So if 10 or 15 Republicans go to Jeffries and say, hey, if you put one of us as a speaker, but we will give you all the committee chairmanships you need, and we will pass all of your bills, and we will do everything you guys want. That's crazy. You don't see that in the U.S. House. And thank God we don't see that.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
I mean, I like that bipartisanship once in a while, but I don't want this. But that's what's happening in Texas. It's been going on for about 12 years, actually 14 years now. But ever since that tradition started, that's their excuse. Well, that's being a tradition in Texas. It's not. It started at the same time when Barack Obama got elected because we did not have enough
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
Republicans who had the balls to stand up and say, hey, we're going to still support a Republican nominee and we're going to have a conservative as a speaker. We're going to pass some conservative bills. But this is they're basically giving power away to Hakeem Jeffries. And that's exactly what they're doing in Texas House.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
Well, if you go to Texas UOP dot org. you can see all the representatives who are Republicans who are supporting the Democrat nominee. And their phone numbers are there. The grassroots needs to get... the Republican nominee and actually talk to their representatives and say, if you do this, we are going to primer you and we're going to get you out.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
That needs to come from the grassroots, from their district. That's the only thing that we can do at this point. We've done everything else. The people, the constituents need to wake up and say, well, this is not what we elected.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
Well, there is a lot of people who are excited to hear that Paxton is considering that, especially during your AmFest. I think that's when he literally, Paxton literally went out and said, hey, I am playing about it. I did have a conversation with him a couple of days, a few days ago when we were
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
traveling across the state about the speaker's race and i asked him what are your thoughts and he said well abraham i'm praying about it we're looking at numbers uh so i don't know if he's going to do it there is people who are very upset with john conan on certain issues and there is a lot of people who just like him uh so we don't know be honest with you we don't know what's going to happen um
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
I know there's a lot of interest in Texas to primary the senator, but is it going to happen and is it going to be successful? It's a whole different conversation. And because Texas is a huge state and it takes a lot of money to run for Senate here. Ted Cruz just spent, I think, about $300 million doing this. So it's not a small task. So we don't know.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
Well, one thing is we need conservatives running in 2026. And that goes from all across the state for real Republicans for who actually gets America first agenda, who actually will stand for state of Texas to run in the Republican ballot.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
not everyone's going to be successful but we just replaced about 25 26 members who were against the school choice who were uh out there impeaching ken paxton one of our uh favorite uh attorney generals in the entire nation uh so party is doing the right thing we are moving forward but we need you and your your audience to
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
talk to them and wake them up a little bit and get them to the polls and actually get them to engage with the candidate who is actually going to be a MAGA candidate. And that's what we've been doing. And it's very controversial when the party does it because you're going against one Republican who is sometimes in office. We actually went against Tony Gonzalez as a congressman.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
We've been against a date failing as the, uh, house rep and his former speaker. So there was a lot of, um, unhappy people when the party does it, but when the grassroots do it, that's a whole different angle and party can be somewhat neutral unless there's really horrible Republicans who does some really horrible things against the party platform and its principles. And, uh,
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
One thing that changed in the last convention, which is we have one of the largest conventions, about 10,000 people come together every two years to put our platform and our priorities. We'd love to have you as a speaker on the next one in 26. Yeah, sounds great. Yeah. Yeah.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
And they came together and they said the party's name belongs to the people, not to the electorate, the electorate officials. So they basically said, if you're not going to play by the rules that set by these grassroots members, they're going to hold you off from the ballot. They're going to say you cannot run as a Republican.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
You can run as a Democrat or independent, but the Republican Party's name belongs to the grassroots members, not to the elected officials. So there is a lot of that going on, conversations, which is one of the reasons why Cody Harris thinks he can actually file a felony charge against me if I were to remove him from the ballot. But it's not up to the chairman.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
It's up to the members of the party who makes that decision. And it comes with a lot of censoring, things like that. And he has to violate multiple rules and all those things. But at the same time, that gives the party a lot of power
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
over elected officials and they hate that um but i think the people are waking up and your audience can help a lot by making that phone call talking to the elected officials and also showing up to the capitol starting tomorrow the session starts for 140 days we only meet 140 days every other year so they need to show up and say This is a bill that I like.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Why Do Texas Republicans Give the Democrats Power?
I want you to actually work on this and support this, get behind this.