E72: Why Chasing a Single Purpose Is a Trap—And How Happiness Evolves Over Time with Mark Decarlo

Unlock the secret to genuine happiness and purpose with Emmy-winning comedian Mark DiCarlo, who shares his journey from a near-death experience to a life centered on joy. Discover how embracing what makes you happy can transform your career and relationships. This episode offers practical tactics like identifying your last 10 happy moments, mastering storytelling and listening, and reclaiming time from social media addiction. Perfect for anyone feeling stuck or searching for deeper meaning, Mark’s insights will empower you to live intentionally and pursue what truly makes you happy. Join us to reimagine success and embrace a more joyful, authentic life.

Connect with Mark

https://www.markdecarlo.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Work is preparing your lines, but when you finally step onto the stage, that's the fun part. So many people spend their lives searching for purpose, like it's one destination, one title, one answer. But purpose evolves as we evolve. It changes with age, experience, failure, success, and the people we meet along the way. And today's guest is the perfect example of that. From storytelling to entertainment, creativity to collaboration, he's worn many hats and continues to reinvent himself while staying true to what makes him happy. Because there are no ABCs to purpose, no perfect roadmap. Maybe the better question is this What are the last 10 things that genuinely made you happy? Time is our most precious resource today. So I spend it chasing things that drain us. Let's roll right in. All right, welcome to the Works Ducks, but I like it podcast. Today we have Mark DiCarlo. He's an Emmy-winning improv comedian, host, screenwriter, and best-selling author of the book A Fork on the Road, 400 Cities, One Stomach. He was also the voice of Hugh Neutron in the Nickelodeon TV series Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius. Mark speaks on the only thing that matters in this life: happiness. Mark, welcome to the show. Tony, I am happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Mark, define work for the listeners today. Define work.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Well, there's a lot of different ways to define work. I mean, the most base thing is something you do that you wouldn't normally do unless somebody was paying you to do it. And I think a lot of Americans, a lot of people in the world, that's how they approach work. But ideally, you want to find a work, a job, a thing that generates income for you that also feeds your soul and makes you happy and is productive and good for you and good for society. And I think a lot of people don't automatically realize that they're entitled to at least search for something like that. And they kind of settle for jobs that they hate and uh do it for 40 years and then retire. And um, there's a better way. And it's actually better for you and better for your employer if you're doing something that you really enjoy. So even though that it's work, it's something that uh feeds you financially and emotionally and spiritually and any other way you want to get fed.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Love that, Mark. So why do you think people are like so serious with how they sort of define that bleak side of work? Why do we really define work like that?

SPEAKER_01 2:50

I think a lot of people are held captive by fear. They live their lives based on fear as opposed to centering your life on happiness. And, you know, I get it. If you've got a family and a spouse and taxes and school, and you know, life is complicated. There's a lot of moving parts. And I I've just known personally a lot of people who end up taking a job because it pays really well, but they despise it. And then, you know, they wake up 20 years later and they've been doing something that they hate 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week, just to get a paycheck when really, if you can figure out what your purpose is, find out what makes you happy, there's probably a way to make a living from doing that. It just takes a little extra uh inventiveness and time. But I think if you respect yourself, you should at least invest that time and try. Um the just just the sound of the word work is, you know, it's heavy and it sounds like it sucks. Um, I mean, from an acting point of view, I think the work that the actor does is auditioning and learning your lines and doing all the other crap you have to do. Once you're on set, it's not work, it's fun. You have to prepare, and you know, that's the part of it. And you audition, you don't get jobs. That's the work part of it. But the part that is enjoyable and um fulfilling is the the actual job that you're hired to do. And I think most people would benefit from balancing those two things a little better.

SPEAKER_00 4:43

So, Mark, talk to us about purpose because you've been a comedian, uh, you're still comedian, you know, screenwriter, an author. You've done all these different things. Talk to us about purpose because I think people sometimes think that purpose is this one thing. How do you see purpose now? No.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

I I think purpose, first of all, it can be many things. I think it evolves as you get older. You know, my purpose in my 20s was to meet girls and play sports, and now um I've added a couple of things to that list, and I found the one girl I needed. So um purpose is anything that makes you feel alive and good, and I don't think a lot of people even realize that they can chase that, right? My dad was a plumber, I'm a plumber, I don't like it, but I'm making a living, and you know, that's just what we do. I that's never really worked for me. I think that the the everyone, you know, we're uh like a fingerprint. That's my neighbor taken off on his Harley. Um everyone is completely different. So the the problem is there's no there's no ABC to find your purpose. What I do when I'm doing my um my workshops and my speeches, I ask people, list the last 10 times you know you were happy. What were you doing? Were you painting? Were you fishing? Were you working, uh, riding your motorcycle? What what was it? And then look at that list of 10 things. And if your job, your work doesn't include any of them, you're probably doing the wrong job. And you should figure out a way to align the things that you enjoy with the things that will pay you. So early on, I realized that I liked comedy and I liked performing. Um, and uh my best friend in high school's two older siblings were on stage at Second City in downtown Chicago, and we would sneak in and watch the shows, and it just looked magical. They were improvising, had no scripts, and they could do a 45-minute hilarious show. And when I realized that they were getting paid, I'm like, wow, that's what I want to do. And I've kind of oriented my life towards that. And it has expanded as I've gotten older into corporate speaking and teaching and trying to help people travel better, travel more informed, and just lead better lives. I I it as far as I know, this is the only life that we get. So my goal is to be as happy as possible every single day. I almost died in high school. I had this epiphany in the hospital that nothing matters more than being happy. So I try and do things that make me happy to the exclusion of things that don't. And I think if you center your life on purpose in finding what makes you happy, everything else falls into place. Because you're always going to be better at a job that you enjoy than a job that you don't enjoy, right? Yes. You enjoy podcasting, which is why you're good at it. If you hated it, you would not be as good. I mean, that's just that's just the way the world works. So I think it's incumbent on every individual to kind of take a moment, regardless of, you know, you're 20, 40, 50, wherever you are in your life, sit down and think, well, you know, what do I like? What makes me happy? What do I enjoy? And am I doing enough of it? And if I'm not doing enough of it, I'm gonna figure out a way where I can do more. And if you can then marry that with a source of income, you found your perfect purpose. But it takes time and thinking, and um no one's gonna give you the answer. You can only figure out the answer by looking into yourself and you know, being honest with yourself. And I think a lot of times fear prevents people from doing that.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

No, I love that, Mark. So I'm always curious. You mentioned you had a near-death experience in high school. I love guests like yourself, like that come onto the show and they sort of have this transformation with how they see work. Would you say that back in high school when you had this NDE, that what did what did it shift for you? What was this sort of identity shift that you saw in that that kind of said, wow, I need to be chasing happiness? Walk us through that sort of experience.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

It shifted everything. I mean, I was I was 14 and I was at track practice in high school. I got hit by a shot, put my ribs cracked, my spleen burst, and I almost bled bled out to death. I was unconscious for three days. I woke up in the hospital. The first thing my doctor said is he stuck his head in my room and goes, Oh, you're awake. Another 10 minutes, we would have lost you. And most 14-year-olds are not considering their mortality or thinking they're gonna die. Dying is what happens to old people, right? And it really hit me like, wow, I I almost died. And at the time I was really fat. I was 250 pounds as a freshman in high school and couldn't get dates, uh, you know, was on the JV team, couldn't play bar, you know, I wasn't really good at baseball, though I really wanted to be. And I tried diets before and in secret, and they never worked. So I'm laying in the bed going, well, you know what? If I could die tomorrow, I want to have a happier today. So I, once I got out of the hospital, I changed my plan. I told everybody I knew, my friends, my family, everybody, that I was gonna lose 80 pounds by my birthday in five months. And told everybody. And basically locking myself into it, right? So I wouldn't backslide again. And I had friends from the drama club that were also girlfriends who were also running cross-country, uh, girls cross-country. I couldn't keep up with the dudes. So I said, you know, can I run with you guys after school? And they were like, Yeah, sure, great. So I started exercising more and eating less. And in five months, I lost 80 pounds and got down to 170 pounds, and it changed my life in two ways. Number one, um, my pants didn't wear out in the crotch because my thighs were rubbing together all the time. And it gave me the confidence to know that anything a normal person can do, so could I. I'm smart enough, I've got enough stick tuitiveness. If a normal person could achieve X, then I could achieve it. Not hoping that I could achieve it, but knowing that I could. And that confidence has carried me through my life, you know, in speaking, in acting, in comedy. And being thinner also made me happier. I was in shape and wasn't as limited as I was before. And that all sprang from almost dying and realizing that, you know, everyone listening to this podcast is going to be dead by the year 2100. All of us. And the most precious resource each one of us has is time. So why would you waste another day, another week, another month, another year doing stuff that you don't enjoy? And from that day in high school, I I it's like I started, you know, a new life. And I, every time I had a major decision to make or a minor decision, I would ask myself, which will get me closer to my goal? That immediate goal being losing 80 pounds, eating this pizza or walking around the block and then having an apple when I get back? What will make me happier? And then I try and do that thing. Now, you know, I wasn't always right. My decisions weren't always correct. But in general, if by orienting my life that way, what's going to make me happier? X or Y. If you keep making decent choices on that decision, your life automatically gets happier. And I realized I didn't, when I graduated from college, I had an offer to go work in PR. And I had been doing theater at UCLA and was doing stand-up comedy already. And I really loved doing it. Even when I bombed, which was often at that point, I enjoyed it and it was fun and it was engaging, and it kind of, you know, it I used all of what I thought my skill set was. Doing PR would not have been the same. It would have been a job, it would have been work. And I I turned that job down and started working as an actor and got lucky and started booking commercials and television shows. And I think a large uh a main reason why that worked is because I enjoyed it. And because I enjoyed it, I was good at. And but it was a choice. I could have taken guaranteed money from the Uniden Corporation of America to do PR for them and, you know, made good money and probably been relatively happy. But in the back of my mind, I would always be saying, oh man, this isn't really what I want to do.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

So one of the things we like to talk about on the show is that success is not a matter of good luck, it's good skill. Through that journey that you had, what would you say was the one skill from all these sort of different things, TV, voice, live comedy? What's the one skill that you believe has made you successful today?

SPEAKER_01 14:41

I think I understand people really well, and I'm a storyteller. If you're doing improv or you're doing comedy or you're writing a screenplay, or you're acting, you're telling a story. And that's one of the original human things, you know, from cave painting to uh the initial writing to communication to talking to plays to music. What does a culture leave behind once it's gone? It's the stories. We know mythology because all the Greeks wrote down their stories and they were so beautiful and and interesting, they survived. Same thing with the Romans, same thing with the Egyptians. You know, it stories engage people in a variety of ways, but the it it a good story captures you intellectually and emotionally. And I think the one skill that I have that touches all the different ways that I make a living is storytelling. And it's um it it it's it sounds like a trivial thing, really. You know, my brother's a lawyer, my other brother's a doctor, those are important jobs. But I think storytelling i i is also important because it defines who we are as a people, as a culture, and um it's uh uh eternal, really, I think, you know, a good story. We're still reading Shakespeare's stories, you know, 600 years later.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

So you have a very unique perspective, right? So you've written a story, your book, you've acted in other people's stories, you're living your story, right? I guess walk us, walk us through. So what I was uh before we got on the the call here to do this episode today, I was listening to previous episodes, and you said something to the extent of like, you know, you like being an improviser more than an actor because it made you a better listener. I probably butchered what you had said because you said it way better. But walk us through why better listening makes us, I guess, going back to the thread here of telling stories.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

It it is the essential skill. You and I are having a conversation. If I was just here and I was selling my book or I had five talking points that I wanted to jam down your throat, regardless of what you said, this would be a shitty podcast. Yes. Because I wouldn't be listening to you. Conversation. I love to do this all the time here in LA. Everyone always has their phone, well, everyone really has their nose buried in their phone all the time. I get into an elevator with a stranger, I say hello, and they physically jump because nobody talks, you know. Um when I was doing my travel channel show, I did uh five hundred five seasons. I was on the road 10 months a year. And at the end of the day, oftentimes I would go out uh without my crew just to be, you know, we're in Burlington, Vermont. What up, what's going on here? And I would go out and walk and talk to people just as a solo person. And you you meet interesting people and you hear interesting stories. This is this is like a cacophony of outdoor sounds. I don't know what the hell is going on down there. It's part of the story, Mark. It is, yes. The story of Mark getting cranky because his neighborhood's loud today. That's not good. Uh um it we I'm listening to the noise down there. I think it's funny. It's listening, is the way you can tune into another human being and learn a different experience than your own. I always go back to uh Johnny Carson, uh, who you know was on the air with the Tonight Show for 30 years. And he was an excellent listener. He would ask his pre-prepared questions, but when a guest would say something tangential, instead of going to his next question, he would follow up because he was listening. I'm like, well, what do you mean about why would you and those are some of the greatest conversations because you're listening to what the person wants to tell you. When I was doing uh the dating show studs, a lot of times I would ask a question that people didn't want to answer. And I could tell by what they said that there was more to the story. So by listening to them of what they said and what they didn't say, I was able to ask the next better question and get to something funny or get to something interesting. And I think um people that are just a little too self-absorbed or narcissistic or tuned out don't listen. Right? You can have a conversation with someone and not listen. Uh-huh. Yeah. Really? Okay, great. Uh-huh. But you're cheating yourself out of that interaction and you're not going to learn anything.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

You know, I'm not sure. Why do you think our conversations? Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I'm not listening right there, but why do you think that you're we're I'm just I really want to keep going with this listening aspect because I really agree with you. And I just feel like, you know, with online today, everybody's shouting for attention. They want their likes and their followers and their comments, but no one's really listening. Why do you think we've gotten to this point, Mark, in terms of our communication? Why do we suck at listening?

SPEAKER_01 20:14

We do. Well, I it's exactly what you just said. People are online, they're not online to converse, they're online to make money. And they're online to make clicks and get likes and views. And to me, it is just assinate. Yeah. Who cares that 400 people liked your cop going to the gym Friday leg day? Who cares? I don't care. Even if you're my friend, I don't care. People have gotten and and technology, you know, the the the the smartphone is 12 years old. No. What is it? 15, 20 years old at the most. Getting up. 15 years old. It has completely changed culture on earth. You know, you can find out anything you want to find out instantly. But people cross the street in front of my car without even looking up, staring at their phone. It it is projecting yourself into the digital void it it enthralls people for some reason. Me not so much. I I think the louder and more crowded the communication technology becomes, the more loud and irritating you have to be to break through. And it just keeps keeps ramping up and ramping up and ramping up, you know? Um you you you have to be more outrageous and louder and more obnoxious and more offensive than you were last year to keep feeding this beast that you've created online, which is total it's a fallacy. These people aren't your friends. They're not following you. You ever watch people scroll on their phone? It's it's gar it's It's throw away noise that they're consuming because they're bored. When I was a little kid, we'd come home from school, we'd change our clothes, we'd get on our bikes, and we'd come home when it was dark. And we played with our friends, we goofed around, and we did stuff. Now kids sit and they stare at their phones. Even if there's four of them together playing, they're on their phone. And I just to me that it's not enjoyable. I don't know. I sound like a cranky old man, but no, Mark, I'm with you.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

I was at a Panera um, you know, a couple months ago, and there was a soccer team that was that just come in, they're like these young kids, and they just come back from again playing soccer, and all of them at the table were on their phone. Right. It's like, are you kidding me? You just played soccer. Like, what are you doing on your phone? And then the parents brought their phone to me.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

Yeah, it's it's um that's crazy. It it it it it it's you know, by design, it's designed to be addictive. Uh social media is designed to give you those little dopamine blasts of, oh, someone cares about I'm going to the gym. Someone likes my outfit. They don't. They don't, they wouldn't recognize you in a police lineup. It is it is the entire social media ecostructure is designed for one thing and one thing only. To get you addicted, to sell you stuff. It is advertising.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

How do you balance then this idea of social media addiction versus entertainment? Especially, I'd love to hear from your perspective, right? For doing shows and writing books and these things, which I love, by the way. What are your thoughts and how do we steer through this sort of mess that society's created now?

SPEAKER_01 23:44

I mean, it's hard. You go back and look at a comedy movie 20 or 30 years old. The scenes are longer, the ideas are a little more nuanced. Um you know, uh a story takes a little longer to unspool. Now the attention span has condensed so much that everything has to be immediate. I mean, look at TikTok is the perfect example. It's literally, you know, a billion people around the world getting hit in the nuts with a ball in one way or another, right? I mean, and you know, uh, don't get me wrong, that can be hilarious. It is funny, I agree. Uh to to to try and create, you know, a half-hour sitcom or do stand-up or do uh anime the animation stuff I'm doing now, it requires context and story and character and structure. And even that has to be condensed. So, you know, you can't fight that. I I try and break through with things that look interesting and sound interesting and are are compelling and funny. Um, you know, a great joke takes a moment to work because you need a setup, you need a moment, and then you need the punchline. If the setup and the moment and the punchline all come together, it's not as funny. I mean, uh the uh Peter Sellers did a movie called The Party in the 60s sometime, and very little dialogue in the movie. It's just Peter Sellers playing an Indian guy at a Hollywood party, and it it it it is hilarious, but it's just him doing physical gags at this party. And it's not fast-paced, it's slow, and but the laughs build because of the tension in the scene. So I I mean to answer your question, I don't I don't know that there is a way out because again, this whole system is built on monetization. It's it's no one cares about your content, it's about what we're selling. And you're the stooge making the content so that I can sell my four my five-step plan, or I can sell my you know, shoes that light up at night. Which is, you know, show business has always been that way. You know, it's half-hour sitcom is 21 minutes, and the other nine minutes are ads. And it's just it just keeps collapsing on itself like a black hole of bullshit. Can you say bullshit on this podcast?

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Oh, come on, Mark. This is the work sucks, but I like it podcast. So at some point, though, I just think of like so a stun will get larger and larger, right? And eventually explode. You mentioned like people's voices getting, you know, it becomes a black hole. Um, people shouting louder and louder. At some point, it's gotta boil over, right? I guess where do you see it? Are we gonna boil over soon? Is it gonna be 2100 when we when we're all dead and then we don't have to deal with this crap? Or what is it?

SPEAKER_01 26:37

I mean, I don't know. I was just at a meeting earlier today with some animators that are using AI. And what people don't understand is right now, today, 40%, 30 to 40% of the stuff you see online that you think is real is generated by computers. It's distributed by computers, and you're downloading it and looking at it on a computer. There's no human interaction at all. It is just an optimized uh brain worm that keeps you glued to your screen so that they can sell you something. And and I would I would like to hope that it eventually kids are just like, oh, screw it. I want to go ride my bike. I want to hang out with my friends and and do something else. They have to break free from that designed addiction, though, right? Because you can't make money off a kid riding his bike unless you're the Schwinn Corporation.

SPEAKER_00 27:32

Right. Or unless he gets hit in the nuts with a baseball.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Right, while he's riding his bike. Exactly. Right, right, right. And and I think, again, I think it goes back to people deciding that they want to orient their life around happiness. Hey, if you're happy on your phone 12 hours a day, great. But statistics and data show that there's a much higher incidence of depression and and and helplessness and all these bad emotions that have risen over the past 15 years that can reasonably, reasonably be tied to uh screen addiction and spending more time on screen than we do in real life. Um hopefully it's there'll be some breaking point, but the entire economy is pushing you in the other direction. So it'll be the iconoclasts first that break away, and you know, then they'll probably tell people on social media how great it is to be not on social media and the whole cycle starts.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

Well, it's funny, Mark, because that's how I feel. Like I'm off Facebook, I'm barely on Instagram. LinkedIn, I guess, is my preferred social media, but then again, it's become a friggin' Facebook now. But my message, if I were to post a lot, is be like, get off of online and go live your damn life. Like, so it's funny you say that.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

It's crazy. I agree, yeah. I don't go on um, you know, I I go on LinkedIn for work, but I don't linger on LinkedIn and I don't uh, you know, it's I suppose on one level it's great that people chime in and, you know, hey, congratulations on this, congratulations on that. But they don't know you. Right. They're congratulating you because they want a job from you or because they did it in a millisecond as they were scrolling because it's the thing you're supposed to do. Me, I'd rather spend a half hour with one of my friends laughing about something or playing bocce ball or whatever. Love it. But uh, you know, maybe I'm out of step with uh the rest of the world. And if you know, if you're a 12-year-old kid right now, you don't know any different.

unknown 29:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:39

You don't, and and your friends don't know any different. Where are you gonna find four friends to go ride bikes for five hours after school?

SPEAKER_00 29:45

And the thing about the bikes today is you have to, they're all battery powered.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

You don't even You can't exactly that's the more pathetic part. It is it is just the perfect metaphor for what is happening, what technology has the power to do to people. You're not even riding your bike, you're sitting on the bike where it pushes you. You know what? The movie Wally, did you see it? Oh, I love it. I was gonna ask you the same thing, Mark. Go ahead, fly with it. I love it. That's where we're headed, and I don't see unless you volitionally unplug, like you and I have decided to do, that's where we're all headed. We're all gonna be 600 pounds sitting on those sledge you see at Walmart, yeah, eating and watching TV. And again, if that makes you happy, great. But I I guarantee you that most of the people that are doing that could be happier doing something else.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

Yeah, I love that. And it made me think of the movie Don't Look Up. Have you seen that one too?

SPEAKER_01 30:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

Oh, it's just crazy. But yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

It it's it's you know, um the the the there's all these algorithms and computer technology and AI have figured out ways to outsmart humans and really get us addicted to whatever they're trying to get it addict uh us addicted to, and it's not really a fair fight. Yeah, you know, it it you have to A, decide that you don't want to do it, and then B, you have to fight the fight and consciously not check Facebook and not check uh all the other platforms and just go out and do stuff. But it it it's it's an effort, it's an extra effort that didn't need to be expended 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

You mentioned something, and I've been kind of and I want your thoughts on this. So doing versus being, right? There's this perception that we do a lot. We want to look busy, we want to put our shit up on you know Facebook that we did leg day, right? So walk us through the difference between doing and being, or do you see a difference?

SPEAKER_01 31:44

Oh, there's a huge difference. All right, that's a great question. Being is what you what you are. I've decided personally that what I want to be is happy, and since that high school near-death experience, I would say I spend 97% of my waking hours doing things that are enjoyable. And I've built that life on purpose, and uh I enjoy it. So I don't have to show off to people that I'm happy. I don't have I I just know that I'm enjoying my life, and I'm enjoying today, and I'm enjoying this conversation, and I'm just being myself. I think a lot of people are afraid to examine themselves because they've never done it. You know, if you've been uh I I again I know people who are incredibly wealthy and incredibly miserable because they're doing jobs that they despise, that they make fun of in private, that they hate. But hey, you know, I gotta have my second home and I need my Maserati. And but you know, does the Maserati really make you happy? Does your second house make you happy? I could be happy uh living in Wrigley Field 81 days a year, you know, that that makes me happy. It doesn't matter how I take the train there. I think and again, it comes with you you have to be honest with yourself and and really dig in to find your purpose. And then as you age, your purpose can evolve and you can add other things into that mix. But until you stop the map, you know, stop the circus and go, what the you know, what who am I? What makes me happy? And then go chase that instead of chasing dates or money or things, because whatever you chase, that's what you're gonna catch. So I I think you should chase the things that have true value and and um it's also something that can't be monetized. No one's making money from me being happy every day. They would make money if I was on my phone all day or if I was buying Maserati, but just being happy, you don't doesn't have to be expensive. Yeah, you don't need much, right? No, you don't. You just have to you need a good life and friends. And again, once you find a job that aligns with the things that make you happy, you will be better at that job than the job that you hate. 100% guaranteed. That there are studies, there's data, there's that there's no equivocation. That is a given. So you'll be more successful. In theory, you'll make more money because you'll be better at your job, and you'll be happy. It's the biggest win-win in business when companies spend money on uh wellness program and happiness programs. Productivity goes up, retention goes up, the happiness of the individual workers goes up. So even if you're a CEO that doesn't give a crap about the lives of your people, spending money to give them these ideas and these classes will make you more money, will make the company more money. Uh it it it's and it's I I it's starting to catch on and get more popular, but still it's a novel idea for a lot of people. And it sounds silly, right? It sounds, it sounds uh stupid and fluffy. Oh, yeah, just be happy. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 35:30

Yeah, I think the thing about that, Mark, and organizations, I totally agree with what you're saying. It's like companies can't put like they love black and white, they love transactions that they can put in their Excel sheets and say, this made me money, this didn't. When you say, oh, someone's happy or not, that doesn't equate to how many widgets they produced. But it does what you're saying. I agree with you.

SPEAKER_01 35:50

I agree with you. And all the data, all the data shows that the the ROI on wellness and happiness programs is from 300 to 500%. That's just in the company being more productive. That doesn't take into account um less sick days, lower health costs because people are happy and healthier, doesn't take into account uh higher retention, right? What does it cost to onboard to fire someone, to onboard and train a new person? And what do you lose when a guy that's been working at your company seven years says, I'm out of here, I'm fed up with this crap, and leaves? You have seven years of institutional knowledge that walks out the door with him. 100%. If you can keep somebody happy and engaged for 20 years and reward them financially and otherwise, your company will be in better shape. Full stop. I mean, it just is.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

Yep. Totally agree.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

I mean, uh, you played have you played team sports in your life? Yeah, I played a lot of soccer growing up. Okay. Weren't your soccer teams better when you were friends and buddies with the guys on the team than if you were just playing pickup with a bunch of guys that you thought were jerks?

SPEAKER_00 37:03

100%. And we were on the same team, not competing against each other. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:08

Exactly. Yep. Exactly. It's it's the difference. What I try and do when I go into a company is transform groups into true teams. Right? To use a baseball metaphor, sometimes you have to bunt. Now, I want to hit a home run. I don't want to bunt. But if me bunting gets the guy to second base and the guy behind me hits a single and we get a run and we win the game, I'm happy. And that mentality, that surrendering to the group, to the team, making those sacrifices builds camaraderie. It builds cohesion. And by helping them with improvisational communications and creativity, you build a really strong team that is going to be far more productive and valuable to the overall enterprise than just randomly throwing six people together and telling go do this product loan.

SPEAKER_00 38:02

No, I love that, Mark. So I feel like there's a lot of resistance though. And I love what you're saying with the team analogy, like bunting when you want to hit the home run. Some people don't want to do that. They want to be the one being the superstar. How do you navigate a particular teammate, a person like that in corporate or a company?

SPEAKER_01 38:21

That's another great question. When you're building a team, what I do is I go through a series of exercises, and as you're doing that improvisational stuff, you see more of the character of each person on your seven-person team, let's say. There are people that want to do everything and be in charge. There are people that don't want the spotlight. There are people that want to crunch the numbers. There are people that want to think outside the box. And a good team has a variety of skills inherent in the team, included in the team. When you get to a person who just has to be everything and has to take credit for everything, it's cancerous because I don't want, you know, why do I I'm going to come up with a great idea and you're going to take credit for it. Um, you have to confront that person and explain to them if your goal is solely self-enrichment, the best way you can do that is by being a good team member because your team will be more successful and you, along with your teammates, will increase in value to your company.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

So, Mark, I want you to get technical here with that. So, walk us through this person that's got an ego through the roof and they want to hit that home run, but they need to be a team player. How do you handle that sort of tension?

SPEAKER_01 39:40

Well, the first thing is you have to establish what the hierarchy is in the group. If that person is the CEO of it, if that person is at the top of the food chain, then I would I would explain to them that what you're doing by, and I would do this in a group setting with exercises that would reveal this toxic tendency that this person has. But I would explain to them that being that guy is off-putting to everybody, and you are disincentivizing people to chime in with good stuff. Um, you know, a lot of you've heard the term um we're thinking out of the box. We have to create a new widget or whatever it is. If you are truly trying to create something, by definition, it means it doesn't exist yet. So you can't just rehash something that already exists out in the marketplace. You have to create something new. And to do that, you have to think way out of the box. So you have to build a team where saying incredibly stupid shit is not frowned upon because so many accidents and so many brilliant ideas come from dumb ideas. What I'll do is I'll sit people down and I'll go, all right, what's your problem? You guys here at Company X, you're you're doing a product launch, and what's the roadblock you're hitting? Well, we can't design a marketing program. Okay. Uh, we're gonna go around the room a couple times, and each of me, each of you give me the dumbest solution you can think of, the absolute dumbest. And they'll start rattling off really stupid things. And after a while, we're able to cobble together a piece from this person, a piece from that person, and a piece from this person, and it becomes a viable way forward. You you have to work in the margin. You have to think in the margins if you're truly trying to create something new. So if every time you raise your hand and say something off the wall, and the man or the woman who's in charge goes, oh, shut up, Mark, that's stupid, you're not gonna talk as much. And you may down the line come up with a crazy idea that is actually valuable. But if you've taught me that every time I say something out of the box or in the margins, that you're gonna mock me and make me feel stupid and make me worried that I'm gonna get fired, I'm just gonna shut up. So if you've got a group with seven people and one guy wants to be the boss, and the other six people have been shamed and basically taught to shut up, the group's gonna fail. And it won't be a team. So, Mr. Boss person, you're gonna fail. I always uh another uh I was on Seinfeld, and what I clearly, Jerry Seinfeld is the least funny person on that show, right? Of the of the main characters. He is the genius, he and Larry are the geniuses that wrote it and constructed it, but they built a cast around him that were so weird and hilarious and off the wall that he's the he's the spoke of the wheel. And he was confident enough in his comedic sensibility and his vision for the show to give the other people the punchline. But you know what? It's called Seinfeld, and Seinfeld is sleeping on $500 million. He he knew, uh, and there are several excellent examples of that in sitcoms throughout history. The Dick Van Dyke show, written by Carl Reiner, one of the funniest people in the 20th century. Same thing. He comes up with an idea where the show's going to be about people that are professionally funny, comedy writers. So anything you think of that is funny, one of the characters can say it. That's different than coming up with a uh a shop where everyone isn't funny professionally, right? It's it's a it's a design that that leans towards success because you are empowering everyone on the team to be spectacular. Every at every entrance was spectacular. Julia's stuff was funny, Jason's stuff was funny, uh Newman. Everybody was given the space and the creation. Of freedom to be excellent. The week I was on Seinfeld, they were working on a scene and it something wasn't quite right. It wasn't really clicking, and um, the other actors are sitting there giving notes to each other, and the caterer walks up to Larry and goes, Hey, what if they did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? And Larry goes, All right, let's try it. They tried it and it worked. Now, if Larry would have turned to him and said, Dude, just go make more guacamole. We're actors, we're the professionals here. We know what we're doing. Go back to your food table. You are shutting down a valuable avenue of creativity. The guy's been watching your show for five years. He knows the show. And if he has a good idea, take it. Use it. Doesn't cost you a dime. When we were doing Jimmy Neutron or when I was doing the animated movie that I did that I wrote and produced that's coming out later this year, Pinocchio and the Water of Life, we would record every scene as written, and then I would just tell everybody, all right, we're doing a crazy pass. Say and do whatever you want. And because I had hired, in my opinion, the funniest improvising cartoon voices in the English language, Fred Tatashour and Rob Paulson and Mo Lamarch and Megan Kavanaugh. They do all the cartoons that you love, Phil Lamar. It was free genius, right? They knew their characters, they knew the scene. We already had a version that would work. Now go ahead. You have a great idea. Say it. Let me hear it. And you know, 15 to 20% of the movie is improvised material from these geniuses because why not? You know, we were a team, and everyone understood that if they said something really stupid, we would just cut it out. There's no downside. There's a whole scene between me and the bad guy in the movie that we improvised, literally walking out of the room going to lunch. And it was hilarious, so we used it.

SPEAKER_00 46:04

So, Mark, walk us through how you step into this vulnerability, right? We talked about how, you know, getting in the nuts, you know, on a YouTube video is going to make us famous, but we don't really want that. You're kind of differentiating here this sort of other sense of vulnerability. Walk us through how we can step into that and really utilize that to our potential.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

I think the key to being vulnerable goes back to what we've touched on several times, finding your purpose. I know what my purpose is. I know what I'm good at and what I put on earth to do, for lack of a better term. So that's what I do. And if you think that's stupid or silly or whatever, okay. I don't care. It doesn't, you know, bother me. I have a couple of old Italian aunts in Chicago. And my Aunt Rose the other day says, you know what? I'm old enough, or I don't care what anybody thinks anymore. And if you notice, old people will say stuff that more circumspect younger people typically won't because they just don't care. There's no way to hurt them. So if you know who you are and you know what makes you happy, and you know what makes you not happy, you can follow that drumbeat. And if people don't like it or think you're silly or stupid for it, okay, that doesn't affect me. Right? If if someone is listening to that podcast, this podcast, and thinks my answers are dumb, okay, they're dumb for them. It works for me. And and I would suggest again, fear is always and only self-defeating, self-sabotage. If you are not able to be vulnerable, it's because you are afraid of what you will discover. And you have to understand that there's nothing that you could discover about yourself that you should be fearful about. You are who you are, and we're all different. Thank God.

unknown 48:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:06

You know, so you just have to, but that's the hard part, figuring out who you are and what what makes you tick. And once you once you get a really good bite on that, you know, I I I've had this weird career where I do a lot of different things, and I was thinking, what is it, what's the one thing that's common to all the things that I do? And it's storytelling in different forms, right? Um uh I went and saw Bruce Springsteen Tuesday night here in Los Angeles, who put on a spectacular show. He was amazing. The guy's 76, and he he killed it. And he was talking about getting politically involved and making sure your vote counts. And he goes, You go out and you do what you do. All I do is sing songs. You go do what you do. Now, you know, he had 20,000 people that showed up and paid hundreds of dollars to watch him sing his song because he's so good at it. But he knows his lane, he knows what he's good at, and he's been doing it for 50 years. And that kind of clarity is difficult to come by. But once you have it, it's the key to vulnerability, it's the key to happiness, it's the key to success, it's the key to everything. And I think a reason a lot of people have difficulty getting there is because you have to be honest with yourself and, you know, look yourself in the mirror and go, man, you're a fat bastard. You you're 14 years old, you need to lose 80 pounds, and then go out and do it. So it's not necessarily easy, but I just don't see I don't see any viable alternatives to living your life because as we've discussed, we're all going to be dead by 2100. So be happy while you're alive.

SPEAKER_00 49:45

So this is the work sucks, but I like it podcast. What is one thing that sucks about your work, and what are you doing to make it not suck?

SPEAKER_01 49:53

I don't like chasing work. I don't like auditioning or sending out PRP or uh pitching myself for corporate work or for animated work, or I I don't like I like doing the work. I don't like all the rings you have to jump through to get the work. But unfortunately, that's the way entertainment is. So I've made my peace with that. The good part of it is if you're out of work for a week, you have a week off. So you can enjoy that time instead of sitting home and worrying about your next job. You you have to, uh and I made my peace with that a long time ago. You know, no one, you don't work 52 weeks a year, even if you're the most successful person in show business. There are times in between the jobs and you have to deal with that uncertainty and that fear of how am I gonna pay my mortgage and all that stuff. And the way the way I deal with it is, you know what? I'm good at what I do in my little lane here. I'm just gonna keep doing that, and people who need that will find me. So you can't, I don't think, negate the sucky part of all work. You can minimize it and you can contextualize it so it doesn't bother you. At least that that's what I try and do. And it doesn't always work. But you you try and go, well, you know, if I want to have three weeks off to go to New Orleans and goof around for three weeks, I have the lifestyle that allows me to do that because of all the other, you know, not so fun stuff. So it's a package. But uh again, it it I sound like a broken record, and I know I sound like a simpleton, and it sounds like a panacea, and it sounds like BS, but it's truly true. If you know your purpose, if you have discovered your purpose and you orient your life around happiness, stuff works out. It just does. And you have to you have to have faith in that process, which is a term people throw around, but it's true, you know. Baseball players go into slumps. Does that mean that Aaron Judge sucks? No, he's gonna hit 12 home runs, you know, in the next week. He's just in a down cycle right now, and you have to be able to, you know, ride the wave with some sort of equanimity so that you don't get too high or too low.

SPEAKER_00 52:24

Well, Mark, it's a pleasure having you on the show today. If listeners want to check out your upcoming shows that you kind of hinted at towards us, or check out, you know, your previous work, where's a good place for them to land?

SPEAKER_01 52:35

Um, my uh speaker site is markdecarlo speaker.com. If uh you're in the corporate world, that's the place to get a hold of me. Uh, I'm also on LinkedIn, and um MarkDacarlo.com is where all my entertainment stuff is, my upcoming cartoons and uh comedy stuff. It's all all there. I don't really go on X uh anymore, and I'm not really on Facebook. Uh we also have a travel show that we do on Instagram, MarkDacarlo TV on Instagram. Uh, we've done some cool stuff there. Awesome. Or just come to my house.

SPEAKER_00 53:08

I love that. It's sunny over there. The loudest house in La California. Yeah, exactly. I love it. Well, Mark, it's been a pleasure having it in the show. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 53:17

Tony, thank you. You you you uh really made this an interesting conversation. You asked a lot of really great questions. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 53:26

Awesome, thank you. Purpose isn't a fixed destination. It moves, it grows, and it can change as we do. And that's the point. Today's conversation reminds us that fulfillment isn't always about hitting the home run. Sometimes it's about bunting when the team needs it. Sometimes it's about creating space for other people to shine, like in the example of allowing the team to add wild ideas to the project. Sometimes it's simply about showing up and doing the work, even the stucky parts. Success isn't a matter of good luck, it's good skills. Today the skill is to write down the 10 things as Mark indicates that make you happy. Bear in mind. One, happy and healthy, being a vegan and practicing yoga in a great community. Two, my relationship with Emily. Three, working on my 14th class and my PhD program. Four, finishing my third book to publish this year in 2026. Five, my cat that continues to sit on me when I record and edit these podcasts. Truth, she's on me now. Six, this podcast show makes me happy. It really does. And thank you for the guests and you listeners out there. Seven, my JLB at Alchemit, it makes me happy being a quality manager in the aerospace industry. Eight, my work in therapy makes me happy as well. I'm learning about myself, how to communicate when I'm frustrated with the world. Number nine, being a yoga teacher. And number 10, texting my family my top three things that value every day. What are your 10 things? Write them down, share them. This is the Work Stux by Legged Podcast. Thanks for listening.