Ep. 144 - Community, Connection, & Conversation: Growing into Our Potential Together - with Michael Scott

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It’s really easy to get stuck in a rut. We get accustomed to doing the same thing day in and day out. We can close ourselves off to new thinking, perspectives, experiences, and people.

So today, I’m sitting down with Michael Scott to talk about the winding turns of his career journey, how his breadth of experiences drove constant personal growth, and how he’s now channeling his personal passion for books to create momentum for others on a global scale through Great Books, Great Minds.

Learning Every Day

Michael’s father was a university administrator and his mother was a K-12 teacher, and they inspired a curiosity about the world, as well as a deep love of books and continuous learning at a young age. After experimenting with about five majors in university, he ended up chasing that curiosity to become a sociology major.

Like so many, he still wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do for a career. So Michael — inspired by the TV show “Emergency!” — decided to pursue a career in healthcare. He found a starting position in a hospital’s HR department, where his boss became his first mentor.

And Michael’s mentor really pushed him to grow. Two years into the job, Michael was called into his mentor’s office. His boss asked, “Scott, have you been looking for other jobs?” Michael quickly said, “No, of course not,” but that was the wrong answer.

Michael had had this traditional, linear concept of a career, but his mentor was very progressive. He realized that you needed to have a breadth of experiences to help you grow in a changing world. So, a few months later, Michael left his role to to run the HR department at another hospital, and he continued to develop his career in the healthcare space for a number of years

Then, while taking a break from work to mourn the loss of his mother, Michael was invited to speak at a Kiwanis Club. He’d never considered being a speaker before that, but he walked away from the event with two more speaking engagement offers and that quickly became his full-time job. But this was just the first unexpected pivot in his career. Michael later shifted to writing, where his ongoing desire to seek knowledge and experiences led him to becoming one of the first blockchain and cryptocurrency journalists in the world.

Then in January 2020, Michael realized an opportunity to bring together his passions, skills, experiences, interests to find ways to help others grow and develop through books much like it has guided him during his own life. He started “Great Books, Great Minds”, and created a new era of his career focused on how books reading can inspire community, connection, and conversation — critical in helping us understand the world and ourselves, especially when we’re stuck thinking or doing the same thing for a long time.

Communal Growth

It is impossible to overstate how valuable community is in the process of getting unstuck, in any area of our lives. Whether that’s a mentor at work or a group of like-minded and supportive people encouraging you to learn a little more and think a little differently every day, the small conversations and insights we receive from others have a transformative effect.

But I know finding a community is a huge hurdle, both in the emotional burden and the ask for our time. That’s why communities like Michael’s Great Books, Great Minds can be so valuable — it’s a lot easier to take that first step when the first hurdle is lowered a little, and the momentum can be infectious when you’re surrounded by people who are excited and encouraging about personal growth.

Definition of Success:

Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
“Things come up, we stumble, we fall, we get lost. But success is being able to stay on the road, to be persistent, to go to bed every night realizing that the sun's gonna come up every morning.”

Key Takeaways:

What inhibits people from growing and developing themselves in a different way can be driven by external narratives (e.g. people in lives, society in general). That can often shape what we should and shouldn’t do and keep us from going against the grain.
But to break through it requires us to take risks and realize that we don’t always have to stick to what people think we should do or be.
Changing that outer narrative that can hold us back also involves a mindset shift about our expectations around desired outcomes. It’s not being completely locked into the outcome you want but rather being open to different possibilities.
Reaching your potential requires a lot of self-awareness and self-reflection, which itself requires some curiosity about yourself and the world.
We can often get too locked into our own perspectives and way of thinking. But to grow and develop, we need to get out of our comfort zone and seek out different thoughts, opinions, and experiences so that we don’t fall into the same patterns.
To continue that momentum of growth and development, it’s valuable to have a community of people that you meet with regularly that not only hold you accountable to what you are trying to do but also provide a safe space for you to be vulnerable and authentic.