Share
Good Life Project
How to Make Big Dreams Happen
•
Big dreams matter. But how we pursue them matters more.
You can honor where you've come from, hold live with self-compassion, and be grateful for what you have, and still yearn to accomplish big life-changing dreams, visions, or goals. The question is how? How to do we do this in a way that makes us feel more alive, more human, and also sets us up for true success?
In this episode, Jonathan explores a radically different, practical approach to achieving big, meaningful dreams, visions, and goals that honors the life you’re actually living, and comes from a mindset of wholeness and abundance, rather than lack, shame, or pain.
This conversation offers a humane, sustainable reframe for ambition called Success Scaffolding that allows you to keep growing without tying your worth, happiness, or nervous system to the next win.
In this episode, discover:
• The Happiness Delay Trap: Why achievement so often fails to deliver lasting fulfillment, and how the “I’ll be happy when…” mindset keeps moving the finish line.
• Why Goals Collapse After Motivation Fades: How real life, not lack of discipline, is usually what derails even the most meaningful intentions.
• Success Scaffolding: A practical, science-informed framework for building goals that can actually survive a human life.
• The Seven Elements That Make Growth Sustainable: How to design goals with structure, support, flexibility, and compassion, without pressure or self-criticism.
• Enough as the Fuel for Growth: Why grounding your goals in worthiness, not scarcity, leads to more resilience, creativity, and follow-through.
• A Kinder Way Forward: Simple practices to help you stay in relationship with what matters, especially when you wobble.
This episode is an invitation to stop blaming yourself for not feeling satisfied by success, and to start building goals that support who you already are, rather than asking you to become someone else first.
You don’t need to earn your okay-ness. You need a powerful, agile, structure that can hold your life and fuel your dreams.
Follow us on Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode.
If you LOVED this episode:
Check out our offerings & partners:
- Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
- Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes
More episodes
View all episodes
How to Write a Letter Someone Will Keep for Life | Lindsay Hurty
56:54|There is a letter most of us keep meaning to write, and never do. Lindsay Hurty has spent her adult life writing the ones other people put off, and she makes a case that the part of a life we account for least carefully is the part that matters most.Lindsay is a Harvard-trained former high school English teacher who left the classroom for motherhood, started writing one line a day to her newborn daughter, and ended up building a practice around it. She co-founded Everwell, has designed and led more than 350 programs, and now helps people write legacy letters, launch letters, and life letters to the people they love. She came to this work through a story involving her eighth-grade math teacher, a mailbox, and a conversation that found her five years after he died.In this conversation, you’ll explore:The five types of letters she teaches, and the one most people have never heard of until someone diesWhat a dying teacher’s family learned about him from an envelope a 14-year-old left in their mailboxThe five-part structure that turns a blank page into something you can actually finishWhy the thing you write at the very end usually belongs at the beginningThe question she asks anyone who says writing a letter to their own spouse would feel too awkwardWhat to write on a note card when a full letter feels like far too muchSomewhere in your life there is a person who has no idea what they mean to you, and this is the hour that gets you to tell them.If you LOVED this episode, you can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.You can find Lindsay at: Website | Substack | Instagram | Episode TranscriptMiss the magic of camp? We’re launching Good Life Pop-Ups in 2027: one-day gatherings full of insight, joy, and real connection. Where should we go first? Vote now!Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor PageA Terminal Diagnosis Confirmed the Beauty of Life He'd Already Built | Dr. Bryant Lin
58:52|When Stanford physician Bryant Lin was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a friend gave him one piece of advice about his own prognosis that he still credits with how he's lived every day since.Bryant Lin is a Clinical Professor of Medicine and Director of Medical Humanities and the Arts at Stanford, a fourth-generation physician who spent two decades in primary care before his own stage four diagnosis in 2024. He built a medical school class around his experience that drew coverage from the New York Times and CBS Mornings, and he's the author of Sunshine: An Exploration of Living When You Are Dying.In this conversation, you'll explore:The advice from a fellow doctor that changed how Bryant thinks about his own prognosis, and why he stopped looking at the numbers everyone else obsesses overA simple filter he now uses to decide which commitments are worth keeping, and what needs to goWhy he changed very little, even after learning how much less time he likely hadWhy he chose to teach a Stanford class, narrating his own cancer journey, while going through chemo in real timeWhat a good life means, once you learn you have a lot less time to live it.It's a conversation for anyone asking themselves what's actually worth their time, whether or not a doctor has given them a reason to ask.You can find Bryant at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode TranscriptCheck out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor PageThe 3 Signs a Father Wound Is Holding You Back (and What to Do About It) | Terri Cole
52:02|The most accomplished women in Terri Cole's therapy practice kept describing the same private emptiness, and almost none of them could name where it came from. After nearly thirty years and a research group of 650 women, she has an answer that has very little to do with what you would expect. It’s about something called The Father Wound.Terri Cole is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of Boundary Boss and Too Much, whose new book Father Wound: Break Unhealthy Patterns to Reclaim Your Worth and Power is the first secular, science-grounded treatment of a subject she found almost nobody was writing about. She coined the term because she kept seeing it in her office with no name attached to it. For anyone in their forties or fifties who has done the work, checked the boxes, and still feels like something underneath is running the show, this conversation names the thing.What you'll explore in this conversation:The question Terri's own therapist asked about her ambition that reframed twenty years of striving in a single sentenceWhy the traits most likely to get you promoted are often the exact adaptations that keep you from enjoying any of itThe two behaviors that look identical on a Tuesday night on the couch and do opposite things to your nervous systemWhat Terri means when she says you need nothing from your father to heal this, including his apology, his participation, or his being aliveThe fear that stops high achievers from starting this work, and her direct answer to whether healing costs you what you builtIf you have built a life that looks right from the outside and quietly wondered why it does not feel like yours, this is the conversation about what is actually underneath that.You can find Terri at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptCheck out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor PageHow to Do an Annual Review That Genuinely Helps You | Tiago Forte
49:52|The year-end review most of us attempt starts with goals and ends in self-criticism. Tiago Forte has run one every year since 2008, and he has come to treat goal setting as the last step of the process, almost an afterthought.Tiago is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, which have reached more than half a million readers in over twenty-five languages, and his new book is Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review. Through Forte Labs, he has taught this practice to more than ten thousand students in over seventy countries. He is also, by his own description, someone who resists self-reflection and does it anyway, which makes him unusually useful on the question of how to start.The question Tiago offers the person whose year contained something they would rather not open, and the year his entire review became a single long walkWhy nearly everyone reaches for their work life first, and where he finds the actual source of most people's dissatisfactionA daily capture habit with a name, and his sharp reason your AI-generated notes are the wrong raw material for itThree signals he waits for in his own body before committing to anything big, and what he does when only two show upFour principles built to stop a life review from turning into the performance review you dreadIf you have ever closed out a year feeling like it went by without you, this is a conversation about getting some of it back.You can find Tiago at: Website | Tiago's YouTube | Episode TranscriptCheck out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor PageCan Anxiety Be a Super-Power? Science Says Yes…ish. | Dr. Wendy Suzuki
50:37|Most of us treat anxiety as a malfunction to be fixed or medicated away, and the neuroscience points somewhere stranger. There is a narrow band, a razor's edge, where the same emotion stops running you and starts fueling you.Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU and the incoming Dean of its College of Arts and Science, a leading authority on neuroplasticity, and the author of Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life. Her TED Talk on exercise and the brain has been viewed more than 55 million times. What makes this one land is that she doesn't teach anxiety from the outside. She has lived with social anxiety since she was a kid at birthday parties, still feels it walking into a cocktail party, and built her science around it.In this Best Of conversation, you'll explore:The half of your nervous system nobody talks about, and the one lever you can consciously pull to switch it onWhat to do the morning after a 3 a.m. spiral that converts the worry into forward motion, a practice she picked up from a stranger at a birthday partyWhy ten minutes of walking lowers anxiety, and the timing detail almost everyone gets wrongHow much of your own anxiety you can predict before it arrives, and what becomes possible once you canThe form of anxiety you're most embarrassed by, and the thing it has been quietly training you to do for other peopleIf you've spent years trying to get rid of the feeling, this is an invitation to stop fighting it and start setting the volume.You can find Dr. Wendy at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptCheck out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor PageHarlan Coben: It's Never Too Late to Start Your Creative Life
51:11|Harlan Coben spent decades insisting his novels had nothing to do with his life. Then he went looking, and found his life inside every single one of them.With over 100 million books sold in forty-six languages and a run of number one Netflix hits including Fool Me Once, Missing You and I Will Find You, Harlan Coben is one of the most widely read storytellers on the planet. His new book, Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft, is both a memoir and a writing guide, because he can no longer separate the two. He is also, at this point, one of the most credible voices arguing that the creative work you keep postponing does not require a bigger life than the one you already have.In this conversation, you'll explore:The two-word question he has been asking since he was a kid, and how it turned a boring family hike into a global hitWhy he wrote three complete novels that nobody published, and flatly refuses to count them as failuresWhat incremental ambition means in practice, and the modest first goal he set that most writers today would be embarrassed to admit toThe two things fear does to people who want to make something, and the daily choice that decides which one you getWhy he tells every aspiring writer to stop talking about the book they're working onIf you've been waiting for more time, more proof, or more permission before you start the thing you keep circling, this one is likely to shorten the wait.You can find Harlan at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptCheck out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor PageInflammation, Aging, & How to Put Out the Fires Your Body Keeps Setting | David Furman, PhD
48:36|Every year you get your blood drawn, and someone circles a number that supposedly tells you your inflammation level. Turns out that number is barely more accurate than a coin flip. But, knowing how chronically inflamed you are is critical in preventing disease and slowing the age clock.David Furman directs the Stanford 1000 Immunomes Project and runs the Bioinformatics and Data Science Core at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, where he's spent over fifteen years studying how inflammation drives the diseases most of us start worrying about in our forties and fifties: heart disease, dementia, diabetes, cancer. He's the researcher behind the first published clock that can predict frailty seven years before it shows up, and along the way he's worked with NASA and SpaceX.What you'll explore in this conversation:Why the inflammation test your doctor already runs is barely more accurate than flipping a coin, and what David built to replace itThe everyday object sitting in a lot of living rooms right now that's silently raising one of the 7 key drivers of inflammatory agingHow chronic stress can disable the anti-inflammatory drugs meant to fight itThe one daily habit David says adds roughly fifteen years to your healthspan, and it isn't the kind of exercise you'd expectWhat David actually eats, and avoids, to keep his own inflammation in checkIf you've ever wondered what's actually happening beneath the surface as you age, this conversation gives you a real way to find out, and a real place to start.You can find David at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode TranscriptCheck out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor PageJimmy Chin: The Cost of Risking Too Little
54:45|We spend a lot of time weighing the cost of risking too much. Jimmy Chin has spent most of his life on the harder question, which is what it costs to risk too little, quietly, for twenty or thirty years, until the years are gone.Jimmy Chin is an Academy Award-winning director, a National Geographic photographer, and a New York Times bestselling author. He made Free Solo, Meru, The Rescue, and Nyad, he skied off the summit of Everest, and he lived out of the back of a Subaru from 21 to 28. Then he turned fifty, started looking at his life in chapters, and went looking for people who could tell him what success meant to them at the start and what it means to them now. Those conversations became his new book, Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters.Here's what we get into:The question Jimmy says he has been asking since he was ten years old, and why the answer keeps moving while the question never doesWhat one of the world's great cellists realized in the middle of a technically flawless performance, and where it sent him afterwardWhy the founder of a three-billion-dollar company looked at his own growth numbers and felt sick, and the one sentence of his Jimmy channels at every crossroadsThe difference between a kid wanting a parent alive and a kid wanting a parent to feel alive, and what it takes to hold both at onceWhat a seven-year-old said to her father at thirteen thousand feet that he is still thinking about six years laterIf you have hit the season where the boxes are checked and the question underneath them has gotten louder, this one is for you.You can find Jimmy at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptCheck out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor PageThe Social Fear That Keeps Us Lonely (and the easy fix) | Nicholas Epley
47:01|Nicholas Epley studies how people misjudge each other, avoid conversations with strangers, and miss out on life-affirming relationships. It all started when he noticed something on a silent Chicago train that changed how he thinks about the strangers he avoids and the people he loves but never calls. The thing stopping him wasn't what he expected.Epley is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he's spent over fifteen years studying why smart, socially wired people routinely misread each other. His research on human connection has appeared in the New York Times and on NPR, and he teaches an MBA course called Designing a Good Life. His new book is A Little More Social.What you'll explore in this conversation:Why the experiment that convinced Nicholas to talk to a stranger on a silent train started with him assuming it would go badlyThe specific belief researchers found sabotages more conversations than shyness, rudeness, or bad timing combinedWhat his team discovered when they photographed people's resting faces, and why it explains a train car full of strangers staying quietA kind word tends to land better than a polished one, according to decades of research on how we actually judge each other. Nicholas breaks down whyActing more outgoing than you feel might not cost the energy you'd expect, even for people who've called themselves introverts their whole livesIf there's someone you've been meaning to reach out to, or a stranger you keep talking yourself out of talking to, this conversation makes the case for testing that instinct instead of trusting it.You can find Nicholas at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode TranscriptCheck out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page