I started the Hell Yeah You Will podcast because I needed it. Last week, I updated the tagline before printing my new business cards: “Human perseverance— in a world of AI disruption.”
I get the sense around LinkedIn and elsewhere that our surface-level fascination with AI as a new toy is masking the deeper fear of “why bother?” That we are drifting further from the human connection we crave. Our inboxes and text messages are constantly clogged with bots, making it even tougher to respond to the people we care about.
Anyone else notice this? 🤔
Back in February I wrapped a two-year cycle of change that repeatedly broke, and then healed me. I came home from my India pilgrimage with a hypothesis: that perseverance is the spiritual practice of returning to purpose as many times as necessary, despite all tests and trials. That each of us has a pilot light burning inside us, left glowing since we were children.
So I started asking fellow teachers, mentors, and travelers one question:
Here are 7 lines I can’t stop thinking about.
“I don’t like to lose.”
Tom Bergeron hosted America’s Funniest Videos and Dancing with the Stars for 15 years apiece. 50 plus years in broadcasting. When I asked about his Pilot Light, he went straight to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Kirk is stranded on a dead planet, seemingly out of options. But he’s already working a way out. He takes a bite of an apple, and says: I don’t like to lose.
Tom told me that line was running through his head the day he decided to keep betting on himself instead of taking the safe job. “If I end up going to work and surrender all of my creativity, all of the energy that I think I still have, I’ve lost. And I have been responsible for the loss.”
Like most entrepreneurs, I’ve danced with fantasies of returning to a predictable, “safe” corporate job. And, when I connect the dots between Tom’s unstoppable spirit and his life of bringing to joy to millions, it answers the question I asked in my song about him:
”Where can I get some, what are you on Tom Bergeron?”
Hear the Full episode
“Nothing left but light and drinking it.”
Elena Brower has been teaching yoga and meditation for 26 years. When her teacher’s scandal broke, she was sitting in a hospital room beside her mother, and her health was failing. Elena wrote her resignation letter from that lineage and published it.
“I knew what I was doing and I just had no idea how it was going to turn out.”
That night became the turning point, the corner into new traditions and teachers she never could have dreamt of. Her polarity, caring deeply and holding nothing, runs through everything she does, from volunteering in hospice and prisons to raising her son to her brand new book Hold Nothing.
She read me a passage from it that I’ve returned to a dozen times since. It ends with a poem called Nothing:
“Sounds of my mind forgetting all the differences, targets, grievances. Nothing left but light and drinking it.”
That last line. That’s what kept me pushing through the podcast whenever the honeymoon energy dips. I also return to Elena’s journey beyond “self-referentiality”. Something our social media profiles keep us trapped in. She embodies the love and joy to share freely of ourselves, while somehow never letting it be about her. She just works here. 🎧 | full episode
“What’s the story you’re telling yourself?”
Emiliya Zhivotovskaya has certified nearly 2,000 coaches and consultants through The Flourishing Center. She holds more certifications than most people hold credit cards. And before any of it, she was a party entertainer for a decade. She weaves science with magic.
Her Pilot Light came from her mentor, Dr. Shrikumar Rao: “We create our own reality. The stories, the beliefs that we hold become the lens through which we see the world. It’s not a matter of if you create your own reality. It’s more a matter of whether the reality you’re holding serves you.”
When she opened up about her fertility journey, our conversation deepened.
“I thought life was teaching me to surrender over and over and over again. Participating in the miracle of making life, which is this ultimate collaboration with the universe, you really have to surrender for.”
We feel it, we take as many breaths as needed. Then we keep moving. That’s what the long middle asks of us. 🎧 | full episode
“Don’t just do something. Sit there.”
Lodro Rinzler started meditating at six years old. His parents found him facing a wall, cross-legged. In most households, that would be concerning. In a Buddhist house, they fine-tuned his technique. He said, “I was just noticing that I was breathing. And then when I got distracted, I went back to it.”
“Yeah, that’s basically it.”
He’s been teaching for 25 years, written eight books, and founded MNDFL meditation studios. His polarity is teacher and student, and he frames it with a mountain metaphor: “I’m only so far up this mountain, but I can help people get to where I am.” He studies with a teacher further up. And he looks over his shoulder to help others climb. This is what the world needs from us now, more than ever: a willingness to lift as we climb.
The line that stuck with me was the old saying in Buddhist circles that flips our entire productivity obsession on its head: “Don’t just do something. Sit there.”
Because when we sit there, we actually see how to do these things more skillfully. For anyone grinding through their long middle, that one sentence might save you a year. It will certainly ground you into why you started in the first place. 🎧 | full episode
“You can’t think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking.”
At 24, Eric Zimmer was homeless, addicted to heroin, facing serious prison time. Today, is excellent first book How a Little Becomes a Lot is making major waves. His team is 800+ episodes into The One You Feed, one of the most respected podcasts on the planet. Every Tuesday for 12 years, an episode has dropped.
He learned the phrase above in early recovery. It became an operating system for everything that followed. “There are just times that I’ve known that the action that I take is the important thing.” Not the emotion, the story in his head, or the fear. The action.
His practice during the book launch blew me away. Instead of tracking who said no, he started writing down kindnesses. Who showed up. Who bought 20 copies. Who had him on their show. “There’s constant love and kindness everywhere we look if we just look hard enough.” 🎧 | full episode
“We’re made no promises.”
“Just be a freak. The stuff that makes us weird is the stuff that makes us awesome.” Jonathan reminds me pick up my guitars, and just play. To plan a wall mural of my son’s artwork. To tinker and innovate in my business: just because we’re lucky to even remember how. No outcomes, just the process of getting lost in the joyful messiness of it.
Jonathan Fields has built a 100 million+ Good Life Project podcast, the SparkType™ Assessment used by over a million people, and he still putters around his shop making guitars and woodblock prints by hand. His TED Talk reframed craft in the age of AI with a line I keep replaying:
“We don’t make things just to have them exist in the world. We make things because the process of creation changes us. And when we choose to offload the process of creation to technology, we unwittingly annihilate the opportunity to be changed by the experience.”
When I asked about his Pilot Light, his quote surprised me, because on the surface it was morbid. “We’re made no promises. I have known people who wake up in the morning thinking they’re about to have a great day. And they’re dead by dinner.”
My (gulp) two nearly fatal accidents on local roads drove this home. No guarantees, just receiving the gift of being here with people who love us. The rest of what we create is for the love of doing it, and serving others.
🎧 | full episode
“I’ll be here like the weather.”
Dave Pearson played offensive line in the NFL for the Detroit Lions and Atlanta Falcons. Today he’s EVP at Related Companies, one of the largest privately owned real estate firms in the country, with $70 billion in assets. He started as an analyst 18 years ago, once his pro football career ended.
His Pilot Light goes back to Michigan. Their strength and conditioning coach, Mike, used to say it every day as the guys walked out of the gym, battered: “I’ll be here like the weather.”
Rain or shine. Good days, bad days. You always show up to work. Then it hit me that in all of Dave’s stop-starts with different teams, when it was his big, honkin’ impossible dream as a kid: the only thing he could ever control was how hard he worked.
We opened the episode with his formative lesson while playing at Michigan. Losing to their regional rival, Minnesota. Down 28 to 7 going into the fourth quarter. He’s sitting on the sideline, thinking: “We’re going to win this game. I know we are.” They went out and scored, came back to the sideline, waited their turn, and went out and scored again. The miraculous turnaround.
“There’s really no obstacle that can’t be overcome if you have a certain resolve.”
🎧 | full episode
These seven conversations taught me more than I expected. Like every one of us, each guest navigated two opposing forces you can’t solve. These are called polarities, and they can only be danced with.
Tom held comedy and earnestness. Elena held deep caring and radical letting go. Emiliya held academic rigor and childlike play. Lodro holds the teacher’s seat and the beginner’s mind. Eric holds radical transformation and incremental daily practice. Jonathan held tinkering alone, and impacting millions. Dave holds team player and Player One.
None of them resolved the tension. They learned to hold both. That is the game of creating, and the dance of life.
Season 1 is still rolling. If any of these lines hit you, share this with someone in their own long middle. They need to hear it.
Hell Yeah, You Will.
Subscribe to Hell Yeah, You Will on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Join the conversation at kristoffercarter.substack.com
Two things get me fired-up as a coach right now.
1. Your X-factors as a human being matter more than ever.
Your clarity. Your presence. Your ability to lead people through chaos without losing yourself. No AI can replicate that. Not yet, not ever. But only if you REMEMBER it. Only if you believe it down to your core.
2. Which is what makes me nervous. In 15+ years of coaching Fortune 500 leaders, I have watched brilliant people forget their worth. Our lives and careers are cycles of forgetting, then remembering. The dip, then the hockey stick.
Our work together? In this time of chaos, change and disruption, we must shorten that dip. Grab 30 minutes with me to chat 1:1 coaching, or training for your team.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.