The Science Of Flourishing & How To Give Life More Meaning
I've interviewed a lot of people about what makes a good life, but my recent conversation with Daniel Coyle stopped me in a way I didn't expect.
Coyle, best known for The Talent Code and The Culture Code, recently joined me on the mindbodygreen podcast to share insights from his newest book—Flourish—the product of a five-year journey that began after the death of his parents. He'd spent his career studying elite performers, but he knew success alone wasn't the answer. So he started looking somewhere different.
"When we really look at the definition of flourishing," Coyle told me, "it's joyful, meaningful growth, shared." That last word, he says, is the key to everything.
You can't do it alone
One of Coyle's most surprising findings is that flourishing is fundamentally a group project. "I went in thinking I'd find individuals who'd figured it out," he explained. "What I found instead were people deeply rooted in meaning, doing messy, aspirational projects together." Not people with tidy answers—people who were vibrantly, sometimes frustratingly, living in the questions.
This runs counter to so much of our cultural messaging around self-optimization and individual achievement. But the science backs it up. We literally require other people to bring out the best version of ourselves.
On the personal side, Coyle points to something deceptively simple: attention. We have two competing attention systems in our brains: a narrow, task-focused one, and a broad, relational one. Modern life, with its pinging devices and dopamine-harvesting apps, keeps us locked in that narrow beam. Flourishing requires learning to flip the switch.
Small & frequent beats rare & intense
I asked Coyle about rituals, because the question I always hear is: I'm busy, what can I actually do differently tomorrow? His answer started with a distinction I hadn't considered before: habits and rituals aren't the same thing.
Habits automate us, he explained. Rituals animate us. A ritual is what he calls an "awakening cue," a deliberate pause that says, there's more here than whatever I'm chasing right now.
His own practice is simple; he calls it the "daily rando," which is reaching out to a friend or old acquaintance with no agenda and no expected outcome. Last week, it was his childhood neighbor, Kyle.
Coyle had stumbled across a piece of paper with stats from the pickup football games they used to play at age 10, snapped a photo, and sent it over. They ended up on the phone for 10 minutes—their first conversation in a decade. "It’s a challenge for me to do it because it feels like I'm wasting time," he told me. "But there's this very deep positive output that I get from it."
The "friction," as Coyle puts it, is actually where the good stuff lives. The science backs this up: if you want to feel more connected and fulfilled, don't wait for the big meaningful trip or the grand gesture. Just show up in your neighborhood, repeatedly.
The Chilean miners & the power of shared ritual
Perhaps the most powerful story Coyle shared was that of the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days in 2010. For the first hours after the collapse, it was chaos. But when rescuers finally made contact 16 days in, they sent down a microphone—and heard the miners singing.
The assumption was that a strong leader had organized them, rallied them, given them a plan. Not true. What actually happened was that their boss removed his white helmet and said, simply, “There are no bosses and no employees anymore.” They circled up. They surrendered to each other.
From there, they built rituals, like small ceremonies around meals, a "guardian angel" system where they watched over each other while they slept, even improvised games using reflectors from the mine walls. "It wasn't a leader telling people what to do," Coyle said. Rather, it was that they were going to have a moment of responsive stillness, connect to something bigger, and build rituals together. That's what helped them survive.
Joy is a renewable resource
Near the end of our conversation, I pushed Coyle on goals. Because some of what he's describing sounds, on the surface, like the opposite of ambition, like openness, spontaneity, going with the flow.
His answer was clarifying: the goal isn't the problem. The problem is the goal for the goal's sake—the belief that when I get there, everything will transform. Fear-based drive can work in the short term, he said, but it burns everything out. Joy, on the other hand, is a renewable resource. You can fall back in love with reality again and again.
The best version of goal-setting is when narrow ambition serves something broader and more meaningful. When the target isn't the point, the connection to something bigger is.
And maybe that's the whole point. Flourishing doesn't look like a finish line. It looks like showing up, again and again, open, curious, and willing to help whoever's standing in front of you.