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1% Better Podcast Kevin Johnson, KJ Book Coach – Quick Links

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Key Takeaways

• Everyone Has a Story Worth Telling: Kevin has worked with people aged 23 to 86 who felt a deep need to share their message – be it personal, professional, or philosophical
• Writing Is a Tool for Legacy and Healing: Whether it’s a leadership book or a memoir, writing offers people a way to make sense of their lives, capture their wisdom, and leave something lasting behind
• Random Acts of Kindness Change Lives: From movie scripts to real-life rescues, Kevin and Craig discuss how acts of kindness, big or small, are often the real drivers of transformation
• Books Start with Action, Not Perfection: The hardest part is starting. Kevin encourages aspiring authors to write just five minutes a day and resist the inner critic, “stay in your writer brain”
• True Coaching is Deep Listening: Whether as a pastor, career coach, or book coach, Kevin’s success has come from listening without judgment and seeing people for who they really are

1% Better Podcast Kevin Johnson, KJ Book Coach – Transcript

Craig (00:08)
this is the 1% Better Podcast. And today I’ve got Kevin Johnson with me. And Kevin Johnson is an author, bestselling author, and he’s also an author coach. And he’s helped many people write books and people that we now mutually know, but I think over 70, maybe close to 100 books he’s helped either author himself or coach and well over a million copies sold. So Kevin, welcome to 1 % Better.

Kevin (00:36)
Hey Craig, thanks for having me.

Craig (00:38)
So Kevin, one of the things that I just fascinated by you and the perspective of all the conversations we’ve had is just your very diverse backgrounds. Maybe go back and tell us about your different stages of your life and the different things that you’ve been involved with in your life.

Kevin (00:55)
Yeah, so I’ve had a what I will frame as a quirky life, a different life, collective life, eclectic life, career wise. I it’s easiest for me to go back to my parents. Dad was an inner city school teacher his whole life. My mom is the author of a beloved author, children’s historical fiction. And so if you think of those people skills and those content skills, I’m a mash up of that.

So I started with an English major and a Print Journalism minor back when that was a thing and I went to graduate school. And my first role, my first gig out of school was I was a pastor and I worked with more than 500 middle schoolers at a large church before that was really a thing. And during that time, I started writing books for that age group. And I joked that I was raised by a herd of middle schoolers, which means that they will ask you whatever they want to ask and I will usually answer it and I will try to be as forthright as I can and I’ll try to make some complicated things accessible to them. And so that became a standard for me in communication but it was during that time that I started writing books and the first books that I did did well and that opened doors for me really for the rest of my life to be in the field of publishing and so I wove in and out of that religious world but also through the publishing world. so after that, my publisher actually asked me to come and head up the adult nonfiction line. So I went from being this guy who worked with a lot of kids and spent 30 days and nights a year out camping and on cycling trips and whitewater rafting and service projects. I moved from that into going to book conventions and wearing bad suits and editorial kind of glasses and the whole look. But I did that for about five years.

Was successful at that and we ate our way up the food chain as far as getting authors and every book we did was a calling card to the next level author. And we wound up working with some great people that way. I did about 30 books a year. So that was the start of not only my own books that I’ve added up over the years to 69 of my own that I’ve written either author or co-author. Oh, and then about 135 that I’ve coached beyond that. So as an editor or now is what I call a book coach. So But so that first gig as a pastor, second as a publisher, publishing leader. Then I wrote full time for five years. And I got to work with some A-list authors and help them write their material. And our material co-authored things. Never ghosted. It was always up on the up and up, like we’re working on this together and all that. And then the economics of that fell apart. And I found myself back into it in another large congregation. What was interesting there is I had 500 the first time around. had 1200 the second time. And that was 1200 students and hundreds of volunteers and 45 paid staff. So it was my of my organizational time where that wasn’t by business standards. That’s not huge. But in a nonprofit setting, that’s a, it was fun. It was a sandbox to play in.

And I went from there to in that role, I went from that setting to another place where I was the person up front and could be creative. And we met in a black box theater and had a blast doing that for several years. And then it was like, I’m out of gas. I can’t do it anymore. And so I went for career coaching, helped myself not really knowing what I was getting into, but it led into my becoming a career coach. And I’d written in the field, had some street cred there, but I didn’t know the field even existed in my wing of what I did as a pastor when you left it was don’t let the door hitch on the butt on the way out there was no such thing as outplacement or career coaching but I stumbled into that and so adding to the pastoring and then the authoring and the editing came this career coaching and over the years About ten since and I’ve had 400 some career clients industries levels and functions. So I a lot of visibility into into what goes on in people’s work lives and then how their lives impact that and decisions they have to make about where they want to go next. And then I popped out of that about six years ago and emerged as a book coach.

So taking all the things that I’ve rolled together where what I do now is I help business and nonprofit leaders craft their books and it’s capturing some sort of point of view, leadership principles. Sometimes it’s more personal, a story, but whatever they need to do, I help them get it on paper and then think about how that can best present and that’s a long and ⁓ involved process. But it’s a tremendously rewarding process to kind of see inside people’s heads. So I get to know them and they get to know me pretty well along the way as well.

Craig (05:37)
Well, it’s an interesting thread. Seems like the thread through all that is connecting with people, understanding the entire life cycle of people. I mean, as a pastor and as a career coach, as the book ends, you get to see the best and the worst of people’s lives. I mean, right?

Kevin (06:00)
Absolutely Craig, that’s really a great way to put it…

Craig (06:02)
Just everything in between. And so that gives you perspective, doesn’t it?

Kevin (06:06)
24-7-365 and it’s cradle to grave. It’s the best and worst of life. And whatever pops into someone’s head when they hear best and worst of life, chances are that I’ve dealt with that and dealt with it ⁓ multiple times and a lot of depth. And so it does give you some insight into what makes people tick. It’s what their joy is, why they hurt and where they hurt, and then how they can get out of that and have a life that they want that’s productive for themselves and for other people. And then that rolls now into what messages do people want to communicate in a ⁓ book to what audience and how will that help them? How will it create impact? How will it create improvement in their lives?

Craig (06:45)
Yeah, alright, so there’s a lot to dig into there. So let’s go back to the when you were working with all these middle schoolers. You remember this show from the 70s? The kids will say the darndest things.

Kevin (06:56)
Yeah, yeah. ⁓

Craig (06:58)
You must have heard a lot of different things because the kids at that point, they just kind of say things. So what were some of your early books that you wrote? What were they about?

Kevin (07:09)
Well, you’re exactly right that they’ll say what they’re thinking and picture if you’ve never thought about like what a middle schooler is. It’s like they’re a kid and then the light bulbs start coming on and their brain develops. That’s why we all got sassy and emotional and everything else as middle schoolers. and then in high school they get cool and all the masks come back on and that was not my crowd. Those weren’t the kids that I dealt with. But when I started writing to them, it gets a…

You can get a picture of the first title, and I don’t talk about these books very much, but the first one I wrote was ‘Can I Be a Christian Without Being Weird?’ And there was an example of that in that book about the kid with the hoisted pants and the big glasses. And it was I was thinking of Steve Urkel at the time. So those of us who remember Kids Say the Darndest Things think about Steve Urkel. A little side note on that, Steve Urkel was actually a person in Hollywood who pitched me on a book once. So this person got a proposal, got a call.

And the person said Steve Urkel and I said you got to be kidding me I said no they took my name because the producer thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard so that got that got brought into the world that way but but what they What I tried to do in my first books those early books for kids were to deal with their world and what what they’re experiencing growing up and obviously there’s physical changes but emotional, social, school, parents… to speak to all those different parts of their life and write something that was relevant. Sometimes I compared myself to the caddy trying to point out where the sand traps were, the water hazards, or how to get the best, how to put it on the green. But having some fun doing it. My editor joked, had I thought about a career in standup, and I remember the particular one in that book was doing the swindive thing we did in college, jumping off the dresser onto the crappy mattress in school. in the university. yeah, lots of laughs with those along the way.

Craig (09:02)
Yeah, that’s an interesting world to be part of the middle schooler. So speaking of working, kind of interacting with some of the Hollywood folks, one of the things that I was very interesting is that you have this little factoid that you wrote three books, which a lot of people, as I’ve gotten to know quite a few different authors, it’s.

The first thing they say is, my gosh, it’s so hard. It’s harder than I ever thought. And it takes way longer. And it kind of ranges between the one to two year version. And then I’ve one of my friends, it took them over 10 years and he was, it wasn’t 10 years of just like it’s on the back burner. It was active. Like he was working on it for 10 years. So it’s it’s a big thing. And so the factoid for you is that you wrote three books in four weeks and it was part of a

release of Universal Pictures, Evan Almighty. So you can tell us what’s the story on that.

Kevin (10:03)
Yeah, it was a very cool thing. So Universal Pictures had a media promotion company. The media promotion company got in touch with one of my buddies who ran a publishing company doing a lot of student work. And they said, we want three books. And one of them was a curriculum for students. And then another one was a daily reading book. And then another one was a just on the topic. And the topic had to be, if you remember, Evan Almighty was Steve Correll. was the the acronym there was ⁓ ARC, Acts of Random Kindness.

The director, Tom Shadiak, had had an experience and he had some sort of an injury. I don’t know if he, I want to say bonked his head, something. And he had this, I want some of my life to add up to something. And so he did the movie with a very keen mindset to acts of random kindness. I want people to live differently. I want them to do things for their neighbors. And so they wanted a product that would help students think about that.

So I was not given a ton of time. What they did is the funny story behind it was they said, you know, we’d like you to do this book. And I said, great, mail me the script or overnight it. And they said, we don’t do that. And I said, well, put someone on a plane because I got a day job. I can’t get away. Put someone on a plane with the script. And well, we don’t do that. So they flew me out. And it’s the only time in my life I’ve been in a black town car and shuffled around in both ways and brought into the executive’s office at Universal Pictures. And it was a

⁓ sitting in a room with a whole bunch of scripts and posters for upcoming movies and with no NDA signed on. I think it was the, we’ll plug you if you don’t, if you say anything about these or some other enforcement mechanism there other than an NDA. But I got to read the manuscript or the script and decide, okay, what I want for this book was I need four scenes.

And so I laid that out and oddly one of them had Beatles song in the background and we couldn’t have that because Apple wouldn’t grant the rights for its use in a curriculum outside the film. I crafted these books, did them in four weeks, was able to go out at four weeks and see a screening of the movie at the Hitchcock Theater at the studio. And the great thing was I had a son who was turning 18 who had been born almost to the day in Hollywood 18 years before. And so it was fun to take him with and have him live that kind of life with me. It was as fun as it sounds.

Craig (12:23)
Like you’re a big deal and were flying in and Universal Studios had the heyday of Hollywood and these big productions and Jim Carrey was at the peak of his career probably, right?

Kevin (12:38)
Yeah, and Carrey was in the first one, so that brought the notoriety, the name to the second one. I was clearly not the big deal. The big deal were the, well, there’s a team. You just see the amazing work that goes into it, but it’s the number of people involved. But I did get to play a part in it. It was fun.

Craig (12:54)
⁓ Sounds amazing. That’s so cool. speaking of this acts of random kindness, so you know who Paul Stamets is? He’s sort of the the guru of of mushrooms. He’s written eight books on mycelium networks and mushrooms, and he’s a self taught sort of scientist where he’s discovered, you know, hundreds of varieties of mushrooms and he’s just a guru on the whole topic. Well, anyways, I just listened to his podcast on Joe Rogan about a week ago. And he was talking about, they were talking about AI, which we might kind of even at some point here, because I’m curious about how AI has impacted the whole book writing business. Because a lot of people have this idea that you can just write books with AI. And so he has this idea about AI, because a lot of people are fearful.

fearful that AI is going to take over humanity and it’s going to be this evil thing that takes people out at some point. He has this idea, we need to train it. If we all ask the AI and we do this over and over again, because it’s learning from all of us, it’s learning from all the interactions, all the stuff we’ve ever written, all these books that you’ve published, it has read those, it has learned from those.

and everything else that we put out there in the ether. And he goes, we just need to ask it a simple question. What are you going to do AI specifically to help propagate random acts of kindness, which his argument is random acts of kindness have sort of helped humanity evolve. Some of the greatest accomplishments in the world weren’t just because of the best scientists or it was somebody did something nice, someone gives someone an opportunity, hired someone that had no experience, someone mentors someone, someone did something that they didn’t need to do and that led to something great. There’s thousands of these examples in history. And so he says, this is just part of how humans have evolved is we just do something nice and something amazing happens. So he’s like, we should all be asking AI, how are you going to help propagate this in the world so that it goes, maybe this is something.

I should try to propagate. anyways, he just made me think of that.

Kevin (15:05)
Yeah, super interesting. You know, when you said that, it makes me think about, well, that’s how we raise our children, whether we’re, whether parents or whether we’re helping a parent, other, other family or friends or neighbors, whatever community. But as we look at, as we look at those kids, like at every turn, we’re trying to teach them, like, how can you be something that will improve somebody’s life? How can you, how can you show kindness to other, other folks? So that’s, yeah, if we could train AI to do that, that would be, you’ll know way better than I can, whether that’s that’s doable or whether that’s trainable. But boy, it’s the best and the struggle of every person who’s ever brought another life into the world.

Craig (15:41)
Right, so if we can somehow infiltrate how AI thinks, maybe it can help us propagate that. I had a crazy experience with my mother, is in her 90s, and she has to mention she escaped from her memory care. And this was in January, and was 10, 15 below zero, and it was turning dusk. And the police were notified, and they couldn’t find her.

And she, you know, they have her on video walking out and she doesn’t have, you know, the right proper clothing or any of that stuff. Well, anyways, a state trooper heard this on the radio and it wasn’t his job, wasn’t his jurisdiction, wasn’t any, it was, you know, like a city police matter in a small town, Northern Minnesota. And he just says, oh, I’m going to swing by there. So he drove, you know, whatever, 15 miles and wasn’t part of the operation, didn’t communicate with any of the other.

local authorities and just went there and started tracking the footprints and just on a hunch. And so he found her and she was laying on the edge of a lake hunched up at dusk as it’s turning and she clearly wouldn’t have survived, you know, very long there, 10, 15 below zero. And that was a random act of kindness. Like, no, it wasn’t his job. Nobody asked him to do it. Shouldn’t have done it. And but how many things like that happen every day? So

Kevin (17:07)
There you go. Astonishing. Yeah, cool.

Craig (17:11)
All right, so one thing that’s fascinating about all the books that you’ve been involved with, over 200 directly, I didn’t know this, but how many books are written a year is unbelievable. So apparently, according to our friend AI, 4 million books are published a year, 4 million. That’s 10,000 per day. That’s a lot of people that have to get some stuff out. So what’s your?

Kevin (17:35)
Yeah.

Craig (17:39)
psychologists hat say why do so many people want to write books?

Kevin (17:46)
Boy, I think there’s an urge to say something. The book always starts with what’s your message? And if the person is thinking about why they’re doing that, there’s a message and then there’s an audience. And then the question is, what’s my message? Who is the audience? And then how do I get it there? It’s producing it. It’s producing it for someone specific. And then it’s getting to that audience. And you and I have talked before about it. It’s long form. When people have something to say,

They can say it in a way that’s very short and there’s power in that and then there’s power in being able to go into it in depth. I had an interesting experience. talked to someone this last week and she’s using AI to read her book back to her. That’s her best way to edit is to hear it back. And interestingly, the manuscript, I’ll just give you some hard numbers, was 80,000 words. And it took, I said, how long does it take to listen to that? And she said about six hours.

But she’s listening to that. think she said at 1.4 or 1.6 speed. So it doesn’t want to listen to herself at normal conversational pace. So that’s a lot of words. That’s ton of content. And so if you’ve got something to say and you want to get it out, then it’s hard to think of a format. I mean, it’d be doing multiple podcasts or multiple hour-long videos or whatever else. there’s something that happens in writing where

I get to control every word and I don’t have to snatch something back that I said. I know what it’s like to stand up in front of a group of people and I would script what I said because if I figured I’m going to have all these people there and I’m going to talk at them for 25 minutes or half an hour or so, I want it to count and I don’t want to make mistakes. I know that the 2 % of the time that I veered off topic or veered off my script, it usually wasn’t any good.

being able to control that and control the message and have the precise wording you want. And then somewhere along the way, have people reading it critically and giving feedback on it and saying, yeah, I don’t get that. And maybe that’s an editor or a book coach like me, or maybe it’s your best friend, or hopefully it’s someone who doesn’t know you or someone who’s in a writing critique group where there’s enough, there’s some knowledge of how this thing should work, but not so much that it pollutes the process and wrecks art and everything else.

Yeah, it’s a unique form. I mean, it’s why it lives on. And now it’s so accessible because we can do it digitally. it’s another revolution in publishing what we can do now.

Craig (20:14)
There’s got to be something though, like deep inside of us that ⁓ I wonder if there’s what the stats are. You may know this just by personal experience. You’ve got enough data points. You can just say, well, here’s what my experiences are. But like, what is the average age? I got to believe that it’s, you know, somewhere around what we call the midlife crisis, the 40s and 50s, where people go, hey, I might not be here for forever. And I got to start thinking about

know, my legacy, what have I done, what’s my mark? There’s got to be something in us that says, I want to leave, you know, we leave kids, we leave, there’s not a whole lot of ways that you can leave a piece of yourself after you’re long gone, but a book is one of them, because once it’s published, it’s out there forever in some form.

Kevin (21:01)
Yeah, it is. And I think it’s partly age. It’s partly that kind of knock on the side of your head of you’ve got something to say here. The people that I personally worked with age range in ages from 23 to 86. And so each one of them has felt like they have something to say. And it’s a matter of, well, do they have something to say? And then do they have the patience to get it out and to polish it and then to get it into a book? And for some people, it’s that

It’s the emoting, it’s the getting it down and capturing it. And in consideration of like, who’s the audience? Am I doing this for myself or am I doing it for other people? But they do have that impulse for understand it. I had a back and forth with some of this last week about photography and it dawned on me a few years ago that I take all these photos and I’ve got a website where I put those up and it’s great. And they’re my computer wallpaper and I love looking at them.

But it dawned on me one day, like, nobody’s looking at this stuff the way I am. Like, does this matter anymore? With my books, I know, yeah, they got out an X number people have bought them and read them. But with my photography, it’s a hobby. It’s a very personal thing. And I came to the conclusion not too long ago that I need to do it. I need to be creating something for one other than words. So that’s my way of capturing something. I need to find a way to share it.

I need to find a way to make it accessible to my friends and family. And so that’s begun that process of it’s like I’m publishing, but it’s my, but I’m not going out on social media platforms. I don’t want to do that. I just want it to be used and valued and seen by the people who maybe shared that moment with me. Well, this is how I saw it or this is how I’m remembering it. So there’s, is that impulse. So are you sharing

Craig (22:39)
that just with the people that you’re part of or are you putting it out on your website?

Kevin (22:45)
Well, it’s out on, yeah, it’s out on, it’s my book coaching website is kjbookcoach.com. My photo website is kjphotos.zenfolio.com. Okay. And a recent gallery, what’s interesting is I went back to some of my earliest photos that go back 40 years that were filmed and that have been scanned digitized and I pulled them all into one gallery.

And there’s probably 600 photos in there now. And what’s interesting for me is to see the evolution of how I saw the world and what I shot and what I was capable of in different media. And I should say, well, from film to early digital to more advanced digital now. And so it’s cool for me to say it’s a history of my life. And that’s frankly what book writing is for a lot of people. I work with people who have very pointed, non-

I’m going to say they’re non-personal topics because it’s a leadership thing that they want to say. It’s a work issue. But for almost all those people, let’s put them on one end of the spectrum. And then people where it’s kind of pure story, I don’t do a ton of those, but I do enough of them to know what it is. And I know that there’s either some really great thing that’s happened to them or some really awful thing that they want to talk about and process for themselves and for other people. But for most people, there’s something in the middle there of they’ve got something in their life that’s touched them and

they now have something to say about it. And like, to your point, they don’t want it lost. I’ve known people who their whole life kind of literally goes up in flames at the end because they get rid of, in their purging processes, they get older, they get rid of the material that they’ve written or they get rid of the art they’ve done. Or I urged a friend to like, don’t let your stuff be lost.

Someone is both a poet and a photographer and just said you can’t do that. The world needs your brilliance So, yeah

Craig (24:37)
Well, we’ll get the links to that. I just pulled it up here, but we’ll get the links to that on the the podcast ⁓ and have lots of people hopefully check it out. It’s way of sharing yourself and your life. So for those people out there, again, this is a very common desire and a lot of people, if there’s four million people that actually take the time and effort and have the discipline, as you say, patience to do it. There’s probably a hundred times out that say, geez, I’d like to do it, but they just, you know, life’s too busy or they don’t prioritize it. So what would be basic advice for people that are kind of noodling it that maybe you would give them to kind of get the process started or give them some, at least know what they’re getting into.

Kevin (25:26)
Yeah, I think that when you said 100 times that was exactly the number running through my head of it’s got to be some exponentially insanely large number beyond that that would like to do it. I think it’s like any other life change of find a way to start small and find a way to write five minutes a day and say, I’m going to do it and I’m going to do it in a medium where it’s comfortable for me. And that might be handwriting because there’s some deliberateness to that. could be some of these tools. All you see is the

the words on the page and it takes away all the other clutter of your phone or of your PC or whatever you work on. Or it could be on a Word document and PC, but finding a way that they’re going to start doing that. And I think the most fundamental thing for people to understand is a lot of us have bad experiences writing as we were growing up. Like nobody ever said to Kevin, boy, when you grow up, you’re going to be an author and an editor. Down to the point where I can remember my third grade,

creative writing notebook, yellow spiral bound with ⁓ the Daimo label maker that pressed the letters with a wood grain label that said creative writing. I’m sure I’ve gotten a box somewhere because my mom saved all that stuff, but nobody ever told me I could be a writer. But I had some great coaching along the way, the English teachers, the journalism professors, and I was like, okay, this is a thing that I do. But there’s this negativity that we might bring to the task where someone told us we weren’t any good or we feared we weren’t any good.

And then we fall into the, there’s a creative writing brain, the creative side, and then there’s the editorial brain. So you’ve got the creativity and the critique of that. And the key thing for people as they’re starting out is to always stay in that writer brain. Just don’t let yourself self-correct or assume that there’s a voice out there that’s going to say, that’s the right or the wrong thing to say, or the right or wrong way to do this process. to just, whatever flow is for you, whatever, ⁓

Ideas come to you for me. That’s like capturing it on paper because I get stuff that flies through my head all day if I and all night long if I don’t like I wake up in them all night and I have an idea I’ve got my phone there and I’ve got a way to record that and capture it because I won’t remember it the next day but that first initial process of get it down and ⁓ It adds up over time you you in my own process of 69 books and 20 of those were co-authored with with other folks But it’s just you sit

You sit down over a period of time and over a period of years it adds up. And that can happen. might be for one book or half a book or, ⁓ and having some sense of where you’re headed with it. But even that’s not important. Like just start writing. It’s, it’s kind of in our high school comp free write, just pen to paper or fingers on the keyboard, get something down.

Craig (28:11)
Yeah, it’s interesting. So one, you know, we’re on the 1% Better Podcast and so much of whatever you’re trying to do, so much of it is just action above all else. So whether you want to run a marathon, you’re not gonna run a marathon in one day. So go out tomorrow, go for a walk for one minute. And then, you know, one step, one step, one step, 1% every day and all of a sudden you’re running marathons and Ironmans and what have you. And I just heard

this week, it was an author and someone asked, how do you write so many books? don’t you ever get writer’s block? Don’t you ever get stuck in it? It’s like, yeah, like all the time. But someone taught me once, if I’m having any issues or challenges, just write for two minutes. And so just that action of saying, I’m going to just force myself. Like it’s the same thing if you’re training for a marathon.

There’s some days rainy, cold, just, ⁓ I don’t want to get out. I’m sore. Just get out for five minutes. And all of sudden, the two minute exercise and writing all of a sudden, might not happen every day, but all of a sudden, that two minutes of, I’m just going to write something, turns into an hour of in the zone and you just wrote 30 pages, right?

Kevin (29:26)
Absolutely. I was journalism trained. I was trained, there is no such thing as writer’s block. It was in those days. It was here’s 15 facts. You have 15 minutes. There’s there’s typewriters ringing the room and you need to produce letter copy perfect copy in 15 minutes. So there is no such thing as writer’s block. Well, yeah, there is. But the analogy I use for it is it’s just Swiss cheese it. It’s like whatever little bite you can if you’ve got a project or something you need to do, whatever little bite you can take out of it today in this moment for a minute or two.

And like you say, then the flow comes. And that’s that, it’s that creative, the writing brain as opposed to the editorial brain of I don’t have anything to say, it’s not the right thing to say, people not get that, whatever. All those blocks that come up, it’s getting back into that creative side.

Craig (30:10)
So I’m just, was looking at your pictures. Wow, it’s it’s kind of blown me away the level of detail, how much, know, they’re saying the pictures worth a thousand words. These pictures are so in depth and it just reminded me like how much we all live in an Instagram world where you get these, you know, volume of pictures but they don’t necessarily have the depth of.

the artistic value, but every one of these pictures, Kevin, it’s just got so much depth. could look at it for 10, 15 minutes and not even pick up on it. And that’s good old fashioned photography. In a while since I’ve really looked at like real photography versus all this Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, which is just these quick little things, little snippets.

Kevin (30:47)
Yeah. Now, I thank you, Craig. I appreciate that. What’s interesting is that anyone who looks at my website, you very quickly see that I shoot in one and have least what I put on there, it’s wallpaper. It’s what I look at in the background. And there’s lots of rules of composition. It’s part of what I studied as a journalism minor. But basically what it is is your eye bounces around the hole. It’s led around the whole picture with a lot of those. And the first four, I think, photos were from yesterday.

And I did quick edits and the idea is I want to capture something. I want to see it and I’ll edit it, but it’s going to be pretty minimal on the computer. And I figured out how to do that and to frame it. It’s the digital. Well, from film era, it’s it’s you had to capture it in camera unless you’re really good in the dark room. And digital, it’s like captured in camera as best you can. And I wanted to reflect reality. And some of those are black and white and some of them. There’s a feeling there. So it’s yeah, there’s liberties with that. But

I want it to look like what I saw. I’m enough of a journalist in my photography to say I want to remember something. when people wander by, there’s a shot of a waterfall up north a couple of weekends ago where a couple of young women wandered in from the side. it’s it’s not just nature there, but it gives scale to the waterfall. Because you could look at that otherwise and not know, well, is that six inches higher or is it 60 feet high?

There was a couple human beings there and we know that they’re okay, five, six foot feet tall. You can extrapolate and all you get a sense of place there then. So and you sort of get what you get.

Craig (32:33)
Look at them, just clearly just looks like you’re just trying to capture that moment, whatever that moment was from the most natural, because it’s a lot of nature, it’s a lot of landscapes, lot of even wildlife. And it’s, there’s so much beauty in nature. Like all you have to do is you don’t have to overthink it. You just have to say, this is that. What’s interesting about it, it is a moment in time very accurately reflected.

Anything else, even the written word, is not accurately reflected. I mean, there might be 30 people that would observe the same thing, or maybe it’s something you just created in your head, but it’s definitely unique to you. But whereas a photo, it’s like, it is what it is. And then you just captured something forever that actually existed in almost perfect form.

Kevin (33:25)
What’s crazy, Craig, too, is last weekend I was out shooting and I had chased Sandhill cranes across North Dakota, work assignments about five years ago, ⁓ tens of thousands of miles that I drove and I never saw one. And then I’m driving up near Scandia where my mom spent some growing up years, my grandparents lived there. there’s six Sandhill cranes standing out in the field. And at a moment in time, and I was with a

relative and I said slam on the brakes and I got on my long lens and I it was the day that the air quality index was around 200 so I’m shooting through smoke basically at these cranes 75 or 100 yards away. It took some technical wizardry to get the cranes to show through the smoke. I’m not entirely happy with the image but there there’s six cranes all facing the same way. It looks like the cover of the Beatles Abbey Road album where they’re walking across the street and again moment in time I just said

This was my son-in-law said that the, ⁓ I’m never gonna see that again. I’ve waited for years to get that shot and I will never see Sandhill Cranes do that again. So, and there’s something with that too in the writing process and the work process, like you have to seize that moment when it comes on you and grab it and get it down.

Craig (34:39)
Absolutely cool stuff. Alright, so just taking a complete left turn here. So tell us about your ham radio days.

Kevin (34:47)
Yeah, again, quirky. I grew up listening to shortwave radio and that started and my parents were talking with my grandparents. All the relatives were together and there was a little shortwave radio in the corner. I would have been 11 or 12 at the time. So mid 70s and I grabbed it and went out and sat in the family room on basically a porch and tuned in and I got the BBC and I got Ecuador and I was just absolutely hooked.

Like you can pick up a radio signal from around the country or around the world. And so that led to shortwave listening where I eventually logged about 165 countries. Always wanted to get my ham license, but never did where you can transmit. And part of it was I don’t want to, I didn’t ever learn master Morse code and then it’s voice. So that takes huge antennas and lots of power. And there’s a digital format now called FTA where it’s a hundred watts and a wire up on your roof.

And I’ve now logged 286 radio entities. like when I say entities, Alaska and Hawaii count as separate countries. So you get a little higher count than a political country. it’s 100 watts and sometimes five watts and it will get you around the world. It’ll get you to Antarctica. It’ll get you to the anywhere. So it’s one of those habits where you it’s

whatever the process is of you try it and sometimes it’s the rare reward thing where it’s a little like gambling. Like you hit the jackpot, you get this country that’s come on and then you don’t get it again for long time. So it just feeds the addiction.

Craig (36:19)
I mean, we grew up in the same era. about the same time when I was about 10 years old, we had this big hunk of furniture and it was just we didn’t have any other place to put it in the house. Besides my bedroom, it was just like put it there. so, you know, late at night, couldn’t sleep. I turned this thing on, had all the big vacuum tubes, took while to warm up. And I was getting stuff from- I remember getting stuff from Europe and I’m like.

This is crazy technology. now, of course, we don’t even think anything of it. Everything’s instantly connected. But back then, to think that I’m getting a wave, shortwave radio that bounces off the atmosphere from Europe to the middle of the United States is pretty mind boggling. And so I would tinker with that once in a while. And so first of all, I get that. And that was fascinating for me. But what

What is the difference between shortwave radio and ham radio? Exactly.

Kevin (37:18)
So shortwave, when people say that, ham, the bulk of the ham bands are on the shortwave. OK. OK. So it’s probably a frequency description. But when people say shortwave, they’re generally referring to listening, to broadcast. And so what you get, like this morning, I had radio Yumi from Papua New Guinea on streaming as I was getting ready. And I’ve got, you know, it’s click, click. It’s incredibly fun because there’s hundreds of thousands of radio stations on the air now that we could never have gotten.

in the old days when broadcasting. But it’s that broadcast, so it’s like terrestrial radio, but it’s global versus two-way communication of ham radio. And again, ham radio can be in morse code or it can be single sideband voice or it can be digital and the current hot format is FT8 that it’s called.

Craig (38:09)
So can I still, I mean, if I wanted to try the old shortwave radio listening, would I have to go and buy some antique vacuum tube radio or do they make new modern type equipment?

Kevin (38:24)
They do. They make some very nice portable still. are, I don’t know if there are any desktop systems that are still made. Actually, what you could get at what would have cost 10 or $15,000 even 10 years ago is a software defined radio. That’s every bit as great as and better than I have surrounded by some vintage receivers here from the last five to 30, 40 years ago. They’re really hot receivers.

But it’s that little thing that costs, well, you can get them for about $30 or the $100 ones, $150 ones are equivalent to a $10,000, $15,000 military quality rig from a dozen years ago. So it shrinks down. And if you can put a wire into it, you get a lot. The unfortunate thing is there’s not a lot left on radio. So there’s not a lot of broadcasting left going on. OK.

And what happened as countries that have shortwave radios would to reach their population. Like the best stuff was in New Guinea, there were dozens of radio stations or Indonesia that were the local radio station, but they would happen to bounce all over the world. So certain times of day you could pick them up here. Well, those all generally moved to FM radio where they ⁓ it was cheaper, close by limited range. Like our FM stations are here. ⁓

There are ways, there’s a thing called Kiwi SDR where you can tap into radios in different parts of the world, which I’ll tune in on a station or a radio through in Taiwan that I can listen to what’s coming out of there. Like Taipei, where I studied as a student, I can get essentially all of their local radio stations, or there’s a couple in Southern Africa that I can listen to all sorts of still their AMRF, well, their AM radio stations with some reasonable range. I’m geeking out here.

But yeah, it’s broadcast and it’s fascinating because you can get news from all over the world in English and you get music. Like I went to bed listening to the South Seas Island music as a kid or African traditional music. ⁓ I studied in Taiwan and so I like anything from old school Chinese opera, to pop and anything I can get that way. So it’s like if you want music, and that’s all that’s just streaming.

Craig (40:43)
Right? Fascinating. OK, so we kind of went off a little bit of a rabbit hole there, but let’s go back to just weaving. You know, think think back, take a step back. You know you as an early pastor working really as much of a as a teacher as anything working with a lot of middle schoolers. Then you started writing middle school. Then you sort of got into the writing business. Career transition.

You know, writing coach, you’ve worked with, as we said earlier, lots of people at lots of different parts of their life, good, bad, children, elderly, best of times, worst of times. What would you say you’ve learned just about people in general that you just go, yeah, I think I understand. Because you had a lot, so many more at bats than the average person. And we all experience those things if we live a full life. We’re lucky enough to live a full life. But we get them in little tiny you know, pieces where you’ve had sort of volume of all of these experiences. So think back on all that and say, what do I, what have I learned about people?

Kevin (41:51)
Yeah, think that’s great question, Craig, because it’s easy for people who work with people. Like there’s a Peanuts cartoon, one of them, an old one says, Charlie Brown and Snoopy are talking and they say, Snoopy I think says it’s really, Charlie Brown, I suppose, was talking about, it’s really people-y out there. So my wife and I, who’ve spent our lives working with people at times, we need to pull back. And it’s like, it’s really people-y out there. We just need a break from this. that said, so what we have. ⁓

an environment where things are, um, can be hostile, where it can be angry, where the communication can be one sided. And I found that the approaching people with curiosity and saying, when we go someplace and we think, boy, those people look weird. One of the things I think is they, look as weird to them as they look to me. Yeah. So that, that differentness, that whatever it is that goes, boy, that’s, that’s not how, who I am, but I look the same.

on the level of, I might be off the scale even in my quirkiness to them. And then with that is what I’ve realized in working with all these people having seen into their lives in a really open, transparent way where either as a pastor or as a career coach where people just tell you what’s going on, that people are doing the best that they know how. And so that attitude of, ⁓

criticism, condemnation, judgment that can come with any sort of interaction with people, with human beings like, I am tired of that. It’s people-y out there. To turn that around and say, what’s going on? What do they need? How can I help? Craig, since the last time we talked, what’s interesting is I had a client ask me, and we have yet to finish the conversation because I had another appointment to go to, and we’re going to finish the conversation this week. The question this person asked was,

And I don’t know him well, but I’ve had a few meetings with him now. And he said, Kevin, why do you care? And my first comeback is, well, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because I can psychoanalyze that and say, where does that come from in me? But yeah, I care. And that’s why I work with people. That’s why I publish. It’s all about impact. What can we do to make the world a better place? And I think my answer is, life can be pretty hard.

And if it’s hard for me as someone who grew up in middle America, you know, in a pretty good time of life, and if it was hard for me, I can extrapolate. And I’ve heard enough to know it’s really, really hard, exponentially harder for many other people. So again, back to what I’ve learned, people are doing the best they can. know, what might look hard, dysfunctional, wrong, evil to us, like, well, let’s go a little bit deeper than that. And let’s say, what are they trying to accomplish here?

And then how do we dialogue? How do we help each other? And it’s a two-way street. How do we help each other? So that’s what I learned. It’s hard out there. Yeah. How we see each other? How do we care?

Craig (44:53)
Yeah, I mean, could have a whole podcast just talking about that. But there’s a couple of things that come to mind for me. One is we just went through a, you know the story, but it went through a hospitalization experience with one of our children. one of the things that you learn about just healthcare workers is there’s because we saw lots of healthcare workers, we probably saw, I don’t know, 30, you know, three month period, like a lot, right. And you get to

see very quickly that there’s, I don’t know what the percentage is, but probably if I had to guess, maybe a quarter of them, it was definitely in the minority, a smaller percentage, just like 20, 25% actually seem to care, seem to have empathy, seem to genuinely like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? Wanna talk with you a little bit, even if it’s for two minutes. And the other,

So when you see a lot of trauma, I will just call it, generally speaking, or you see a lot of people that are dealing with things, whatever they are, I think there’s one or two, when you see them in volume, like you’ve seen them in volume, there’s one or two things that can happen. One is it can make you more empathetic, it can make you more understanding, it can make you more like, hey, this is part of life, I get it, I’ve seen it. Or it could make you more callous, like you’re just another sick person, you’re just another.

one of these types of people and I can’t process it all myself. I can’t absorb your trauma. So, and you feel it like it’s just you are literally a number and you’re just, got to get to the next person, the next person. And so that’s interesting to see. I don’t know the good or the bad of it, but we definitely could feel the people and you really appreciated the people that actually seem like they care. I mean, it would brighten your day. And then the other thing I think about, Kevin, that’s similar is that

We travel a lot, we travel and it’s been to a lot of countries and a lot of cultures. And what I learned about that is that as soon as it’s very similar to you said, as soon as I sort of stripped away the judgment of comparing whatever country it is to my view of the world, my country, my wealth, my access to stuff, whatever, as soon as I sort of stripped that away and just said, hey, I’m gonna just try to understand their world from their perspective.

Then all of sudden it’s like, we’re all the same. We all love our kids. We all are trying to do our best. We all have issues, challenges, struggles. And the language might be different. The food might be different. The clothing might be different. Cultures, all this stuff might be different. But when you really actually get past the tourism part and you just talk to people, like we’re identical. It doesn’t matter what country, what language. We still have the fundamental same like.

You know things so that’s interesting, but it it’s easy to get hung up in all of the fanfare of you know what we’ve all been raised in the culture and the food and the all you know everything can kind of distract you sometimes.

Kevin (47:58)
Yeah, I think what’s interesting about that is what you’re what you’re getting at, Craig, is really why my early books worked. And it was because I was addressing the stuff of life in the in the world of a junior higher, the world of a middle schooler and 11 to 14 year old caught between the psychology psychologist, Eric Erickson would say they let go of the trapeze of childhood and they have not yet grabbed the trapeze of adulthood. And so they’re flailing in midair.

And that happens to us when we’re in ⁓ post high school, maybe college or early young adult midlife, we’re flailing in air trying to figure out what we are. But that realization of where we are and what our situation is and a common humanity that we share. And at the time when I started working with kids, the push was to be like to know every band that the students were listening to or every pop culture reference, every slang word. It’s like, sorry, I can’t keep up.

And that was the beginning of splintering of culture, where we were going from three TV stations to cable to what we have now. ⁓ So you could never keep up. But the real power wasn’t, I called it the developmental river. You have this swirl of culture, and then you have the undercurrent of that river. And it’s at, I want to say 80 % of life, is that stuff that we all share, that as a writer, I was tapping into that. Like I was writing about their daily world.

And one of my biggest rewards in life was when I was actually leaving that setting. a couple of parents, mom and dad came to me and said, our daughter told us this. said, Kevin knows me better, mom and dad, than anybody else in the world except for you. And what I didn’t tell them at the time, and this was 30 years ago, was I didn’t know their daughter’s name. I had 500 middle schoolers. I was like the principal.

working with the teachers, working with the students. But I was the principal who knew the students, who knew that I had kids in the building. Over time, I would know all of their names. But I didn’t know her name. But she sensed from how I talked that I understood her world and I cared about it. And that is that same, ⁓ when we tap into the things that are really going on in each other’s lives, and frankly, in writing, that’s where the power is.

And I can give you examples of, and I won’t because I don’t want to out anyone, but I work with writers and I joke, you know, I’m going to make you cry at some point. And these are business leaders. These are people who got their masks on.

Craig (50:27)
Ask them tough questions about themselves or what?

Kevin (50:30)
Yeah, and it can be personal or can be organizational related or whatever. And every once in I hit a nerve and it can be with someone that I think that I know really, really well. And I found something that I didn’t know. And then I’ll say, that needs to be in the book. Somehow you need to own that, admit that, talk about that, that feeling you had, that thing you went through that because that’s where that’s where writing comes alive. Like of the four million books that are published a year.

Craig (50:53)
Yeah, for sure.

Kevin (50:58)
The best of those are going to be talking about real human experience at some level. And that can be in a narrow slice of business or can be ⁓ whatever else. it’s getting at that core of who we are as people. There’s power in that. ⁓

Craig (51:14)
Yeah, I mean, when you’re getting, when you touch it on something emotional, then you know you’re getting somewhere real, right? It’s not just, it sounds good or it’s on the surface, but yeah, there’s something very carnal about that. You’re getting to something core. Let me ask you about, just in our interactions, I feel like you do have a very, you have a talent around listening,

Um, feel, you know, allowing people comfortable available and maybe share them, but the feeling that you do care. Um, some people call it coaching, you know, cause you sometimes do it with a purpose. I’m going to try to help you write a book or I’m going to try to help you through a career transition. And so the term coach is all of a sudden all this proliferated word used for so many different things. um, I sometimes, use know,

It’s an overused term, actually. And so I view it as like two different versions of the word coach. One is what we would maybe consider like mainstream America, where it’s like a coach is really an instructor, a mentor, a drill sergeant, like a football coach. Here’s how you do the X’s and O’s. I’m going to teach you, did it wrong. And then there’s a coach like the Michelangelo version where it’s, hey, I didn’t create the sculpture.

I just let it out of this big piece of granite and I found what was already in there. It’s kind of the same thing when you really coach people, you don’t tell them, guide them right or wrong. It’s just helping them discover themselves, maybe discover what’s in there. And so I’m just curious, you seem to have that as a natural ability. Is that true? Did you always have that as a natural ability? Did you just learn it through repetition, repetition? What’s your view on that whole area of coaching?

Kevin (53:10)
Boy, another really good question, Craig. I think that I always had it. I was raised by incredibly kind people, compassionate world changers. And so whether that’s nature or nurture, I got that right from the start. ⁓ I was surrounded by other people who did that. I had people in my life who made ⁓ hard life choices to make some sacrifices to do what they thought was the right thing. And so I think some of that right or wrong, and we can grow into that and we can…

buy into it too much, sometimes to our own detriment. We don’t care for ourselves. We don’t live to fight another day. We have to learn all those hard things. But I do think I’ve had that all along. And then it’s been this weird, quirky career path that’s taken me and exposed me to a lot of different people. So I can speak to what I’ve seen in people who are, by any of the world’s definitions, ⁓

not accomplished, they’re ordinary people, which is where most of us are, or people who are leaders, or people who are leaders who are really well known, who when you get to know them are not what they seem to be, or all these gradations of, what’s the surface say about who they are and then what’s reality? And sometimes some of those people that have a pretty bad reputation turn out to be pretty real people, and some people have glowing reputations turn out to be anything but.

And so being able to see through that, there’s something that comes with it. And being realistic about my ability to see into any one person’s life, but the things that they show me, I can see that. And I’ve just been fortunate to have that with a lot of different people. The pastoring thing applies to the coaching thing, applies to the book coaching thing. It’s like 24-7-365 best and worst of life. When we let that be real to each other, it’s

It’s really hard not to care. ⁓ When I coach people in job transition, I just say, count on the goodness of humankind. If that person knew that you needed a job, if you knew that that person needs a job, well, how would you respond? It’s like, I’d do anything I could for them. Well, turn it around and count on 90 % of the people out there to do the same thing for you. yeah, it’s kind of.

It’s there. It’s been there a long time. It’s been more of a battle to learn, OK, how do I do that so I can live to fight another day and not burn myself out?

Craig (55:35)
I mean, it’s definitely a talent and it’s a skill, you know, because there’s so many, everyone’s situation, even though you’ve seen it 100 times, maybe, you know, someone losing a job or someone having a death or whatever the thing is, being depressed. They’re all unique. I mean, it’s just like your, it’s like your photography, your pictures, you know, photography.

you could take the same picture every year, every day, every month, and it’s always going to be different. Everyone’s situation is different. So how do you approach it, not in a standardized way, but in a, hey, I’m going to be present for you right now, which gets back to that health care experience. If it’s just here’s the response to that, it feels mechanical versus, no, I’m going to, this one’s different. Everyone’s different.

Kevin (56:22)
Absolutely.

Craig (56:24)
All right, Kevin, last question on 1 % Better. Taking a look back at your entire life and saying, what would be the best life lessons, the best advice you’d want to know if you were 16 again or your grandkids are sitting down at the fireplace with you? And just what life lessons, what 1 % Better life lessons would you want to pass on?

Kevin (56:48)
I want to key off of what you just said, Craig, is when I, and I’ll make it very particular about the book coaching ⁓ world. So when I’ve done all these books on my own as a co-author with people and then coaching them as an editor and then kind of this on my own as the book coach thing, it would be easy to say, well, I’ve seen it all before. You know, it’s the same. It’s repetitive. It’s redundant. Let’s like, here’s the cookie-cutter approach. If you want to do a leadership book, you do it this way. If you want to

do a personal revelation story, you do it this way. And then the reality is I have to remind myself, and it’s not a challenge because I can do this easily, but the reminder is to always look for what’s different. Like what’s the opportunity here? Because it’s when I’m working on books that person is different, their writing process is different, their skill level is different, their gaps are different. So our process will evolve and be different as I work through that with them.

The result is going to be different. And sometimes I work with people and we kind of butt heads because I’ll say it needs to be this way and they’ll say I want it to be this way. And frankly, as a book coach, I will hold to what I think are best publishing standards. But usually they bring me around and then at some point they come around to what I brought to the party and we wind up not necessarily somewhere in the middle, but there’s a solution that brings in both of those.

Those both of those points of view so it’s the look what’s new what’s what’s the opportunity here to create something different. On my auto website There’s something about I basically I shoot by walking around I don’t travel to Iceland and take all the glorious stuff there or other places that are the photogenic places the world it’s like no I most of the photos I take were within six hours of home, but it it’s ⁓ It’s seen it with new eyes not trying to recreate someone else’s photo

but then also not trying to recreate my own. I do have in a park reserve here, I’ve got a picture, I’ve got a tree that has, I’ve watched it grow over 20 years and I’ve got a few pictures of that tree. What’s new? You know, what can we do differently? That’s how we get at improvement. It’s how we get at what’s fit for the moment.

Craig (58:49)
Right, that’s cool. Yeah, I highly recommend people go look at your site. It’s just that the pictures are astounding. So anyways, that’s a great way to wrap it up, Kevin. It was great talking with you. We could talk for a long time with all the stories and books and things you’ve been involved with, but thanks for sharing some of it with us on 1 % Better.

Kevin (59:18)
Thanks so much, Craig. Great to talk with you.

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