How to Escape Survival Mode and Thrive with Jon Rosemberg

**Guy Kawasaki** (0:00)
Where has time gone? This is the sixth year of the Remarkable People podcast, and I thought maybe it's time to find a revenue model. So if you'd like to sponsor this podcast, please reach out to me. You will be able to reach an audience of highly educated, high income, open-minded, I would even say growth mindset minded people.
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This is Remarkable People.

**Jon Rosemberg** (0:57)
For 40 years of my life, I thought my thoughts were absolute truths. I believed them completely.
Completely. I thought I was a great mind reader. And there's a lot of research in the book. And one of the studies that I cite is that they took couples and they asked them to see if they could guess how their partner was feeling. And when they tracked to see how well they guessed, it was about 20 percent, which is no better than chance. So even with our partners, we are terrible at mind reading.

**Guy Kawasaki** (1:33)
Hello, everybody.
It's Guy Kawasaki. And I hope you like my tan because I just got back from Hawaii and surf ranch. So I've been surfing a lot. I'm nice and tan and trying to get the remarkable tan because we have a remarkable guest. His name is Jon Rosemberg.
It's an E-M, not E-R-N, Rosemberg.
And what this remarkable person does is he helps people move from survival mode to thriving mode, which is really a remarkable thing to do. He's the CEO. He's the coach. He's like, he's total package. He has an MBA from Cornell University and a Master's Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. So today we're going to explore this process of going from surviving to thriving, right?

**Jon Rosemberg** (2:34)
Yes. And Guy, such an honor to be here with you. And I think it's interesting that we talk about this state of survival mode often. I've asked hundreds of people, have you ever felt like you're in survival mode? And everybody I've asked to, except for two people, and let's not get into the outliers, has said to me, yes, I felt like being in survival mode.

**Guy Kawasaki** (2:55)
And that's even true right now, whatever these people's conditions are. Like are you saying these people were set and everything, they're starving or they're like doing okay?

**Jon Rosemberg** (3:07)
Not necessarily. Not necessarily. So let me ask you, Guy, have you ever felt like you're in survival mode?

**Guy Kawasaki** (3:14)
I'm gonna ask you for the definition of survival mode. But to be honest, I cannot tell you that I've thought I was in survival mode for a very long time. And it's not like I'm a trust fund baby. I come from a lower middle income family and I've had a wonderful life. I don't have one of these Horatio Alger, you know, arrive at the Statue of Liberty with a suitcase and one underwear.
Man, that kind of shoots down my credibility as a podcaster interviewing somebody about the survival mode if I cannot ever say I've been in a, maybe I should, yeah, I've been in a survival mode constantly, Jon. I don't know how I'm still here. How's that?

**Jon Rosemberg** (3:57)
I love it. Let's define survival mode then. I think that would be really helpful. I think, of course, there's a survival mode that people who are in war zones or who are living in extreme poverty are experiencing. And that's one type of survival mode. And listen, growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, I knew what it was like to be in that state of survival mode. Why? Because Venezuela became a very dangerous country. The year that I left the country, by some estimates, there were 52,000 violent murders in Venezuela, which meant that when you left your house, it was a bit of a gamble. You didn't know if you were going to come back or not. So it was kind of like a war zone. And so that's one type of survival mode. And by the way, living in Caracas during those times, being in survival mode saved my life. So survival mode is not necessarily a bad thing. I think people try to look at it as this, there's this horrible thing that's happened to me. No, it's our bodies and our minds focusing on our survival. Now, the survival mode that I'm referring to is more kind of like a chronic state where we feel like our life is at risk. I spent two and a half decades in the corporate world, Guy, and a lot of us who worked in offices or who work, we know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night sweating because we don't know if we're going to get fired the next day or because suddenly we're given a boss who's a micromanager and finds fault in every little thing that we do. So it's this state where even though physically our life is not at risk, maybe we have food and we have a home and a roof over our heads and we have a family and we have a lot of resources around us, even though we have all of that, we still feel like a saber-tooth tiger is chasing us in the savanna. That can be very, very challenging. The thesis of my work is that over the past 25 years, there's been a lot of research around how we get out of survival mode and step a little bit more into thriving. By the way, I'm framing them as a binary for the purposes of our conversation, but I don't know that there are many things in this world that are binaries and that simple. I think there's a lot of complexity there. The way I describe it is as a spiral, more like a spiral. Sometimes we're thriving more and surviving less, and then something happens. You lose your job or you get a diagnostic and you get sent right back into survival mode.