How to Flourish (with Daniel Coyle)

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2026

⏱️ 75 minutes

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Summary

Author Daniel Coyle talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts on the art of flourishing: why it's a natural phenomenon rather than mechanical; how taking life's "yellow doors"--or detours from a straight, expected path--is often the key to a flourishing life; and why true flourishing can only occur in the context of relationships. They also discuss how the basic principles of flourishing have empowered people--from men trapped in a Chilean mine to senior citizens reliving their youth--to achieve remarkable things. Finally, they offer an exercise you can do for recognizing the ways that others have helped us to thrive.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is December 18th, 2025.
0:39.0	And before introducing today's guest, I want to remind listeners to go to eConTalk.org
0:43.4	and click on the link for our survey of your favorite episodes of 2025 voting closes this week.
0:50.5	And now for today's guest.
0:52.0	My guest is author and consultant Daniel Coyle. His latest
0:56.5	book is Flourish, The Art of Building, Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. Daniel, welcome to Econ Talk.
1:02.0	I'm happy to be here with you, Russ. I feel like you cheated. I feel like you picked a title that
1:07.0	that you knew would land you on Econ Talk. So I'm very, I love the whole focus of the book,
1:13.0	so many great insights and stories that I hope we'll get to many of them. Now, you define
1:19.4	flourishing as, quote, the experience of joyful, meaningful growth shared with others.
1:26.1	And that's a little different than what I would say.
1:28.9	So I'm going to read it again, the experience of joyful, meaningful growth shared with
1:33.4	others. Why did you pick that particular framing? Well, I started with what flourishing is not, right?
1:41.3	It's not a machine. It's not a result of a machine. It's not the optimizable,
1:47.6	maximizable process that you can predict. It is, it's an idea from the natural world.
1:53.6	And the natural world is really about how living systems develop. And living systems aren't
2:00.5	machines. We often talk about them as if they were,
	...

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