#31 — Andy: Transformation, Healing, Jung
How to shed expectations and find your compass.
Hello, and thanks for being here. I took a few weeks off from the newsletter to travel and fill up on food, family, and fun. In case you’re new here, Mia’s Queue is a newsletter devoted to “conscious culture.” When I’m not exploring what that means in my own life, I chat with an undercover tastemaker infusing creativity and wonder into the world. Learn what lights them up, where they find inspiration, and what they think we should all be consuming right now. Meet Agent 031: Andy Johns, the creator of Clues.Life.
I first encountered Andy Johns in Silicon Valley many years ago when he came to talk to my company about user growth. Honestly, he intimidated me with his checklist of successes and cowboy swagger. I’d hear his name continually bandied about in Startup Land — a mythical figure who turned founders’ pupils into up-and-to-the-right charts.
About two years ago, a former coworker asked if I had seen what Andy was up to on LinkedIn. Expecting another impressive notch in his skyward trajectory, I was surprised to see him talking openly about burnout and mental health struggles. He spoke with a vulnerability that captivated me and always offered helpful takeaways. As someone fascinated with how people change, I became invested in watching Andy’s transformational shift.
Eventually, I got the courage to reach out, and Andy took a call with me, basically a stranger, and stayed on for twice our allotted time. His platform, Clues.Life, is “an act of creative expression” — an evolving collection of stories, research, courses, and books, created to help people heal and find deeper meaning and purpose. I’d ask Andy to be my guru if he were taking applications! But seriously, I’m fortunate to absorb his gifts through Clues.Life and this interview. I hope you find some gems here too.
You describe your work as helping others heal and find peace but what does this entail exactly?
It's a process of helping people shift their consciousness into different stages of awareness, beginning with an intellectual understanding of themselves. Analyze how your past helps explain your presence. Why you are who you are.
After the analysis, the mind is no longer the right tool for the job. It’s time to shift gears from an intellectual approach to life into an emotional one. Instead of asking “What do I feel like?” maybe there's deep intuition or some younger version of yourself that's still trapped inside, speaking from a distance. That’s the feeling of intuition.
In a nutshell, that begins a transformation of how we live. Because at the end of the day, the work that I do with somebody is about helping them understand that maybe there is not one big intrinsic meaning to life; rather, the purpose is to realize that you can assign the meaning to it that you choose, and break free from the patterns of behavior around how the world told you to live. To realize that from here on out, I get to decide what I want to project out into the world. I want that meaning to come from an authentic place, from a place where I am really, really in touch with who I am and what I want for myself.
What are your goals with Clues.Life?
I realized that so much of what I did in my life previously was based on expectations. I was really, really good at being agreeable. I didn't like disagreement. It felt uncomfortable. Seeing my parents fight; I didn't want to be a part of that. And so, as a highly agreeable person, I excelled: if a teacher told me to do something, I got an A+. A CEO told me to do something, I was gonna do it really fucking good.
When it comes to my work today, now that I've shed a lot of my prior patterns around doing things based on the expectations of others, I want to do things simply because I feel like doing them. There doesn't need to be any other reason or explanation for it other than it feels like something that's trying to come through. I want to avoid the old pitfalls of thinking that it must become something grandiose, economically successful, or any of those measures of the external world.
Where do you find inspiration?
I used to be inspired by business tycoons and entrepreneurs and all that stuff — or at least I was trying to convince myself to be inspired by those people.
The ones that inspire me the most are two types: 1) People who are very clearly in touch with who they are and really comfortable with that, even if it’s strange to other people. An example of this would be Mark Rebillet. I love that guy — and anyone like him. He is exactly who he is. He found freedom.
Often there’s overlap with the second type: 2) People who walked through the fire — they’ve transformed themselves in the face of horrific or difficult circumstances — and come through reborn. But not reborn in some image of perfection.
If I could smoke a joint with somebody, who would it be? It would be with Mike Tyson. This is somebody whose childhood was so horrific most people couldn't comprehend. There's a reason he’s the baddest man on the planet — a true warrior. When you have a life that difficult, you have to become a hard man to survive. And he still came out transformed on the other side. All the loss, the heartbreak, the prison time. Somehow he survived it and has come out this beautiful, philosophical, loving, thoughtful person.
Truly authentic people and people who’ve been through the fire and transformed have both benefitted from the output of transformation: reconnecting with the self. Once you do that, you start living authentically, expressing yourself truly as you are.
What recommendations do you have for people seeking transformation?
First, I want to put a caveat, which is that there's a risk of over-intellectualizing the problem. If we're constantly at the level of the intellect, studying everybody else, reading from the experts, that can distract us from turning inward and becoming aware of ourselves. I support intellectual pursuits but to a limit. If somebody’s doing “the work,” but they're not actively sitting with the uncomfortable shit their mind was trying to avoid, then they need to pause and say, “I’ve over-intellectualized the problem.”
That said, I happen to have three fantastic recommendations:
📙 Carl Jung “The Undiscovered Self”
This one, in particular, is about how essential it is for the sake of the survival of humanity that enough people become awakened toward their authentic self to avoid the inevitable slide towards totalitarianism. He speaks about the essential goal of discovering our individual nature in the face of ideological fanaticism.
📙 Alice Miller “The Drama of the Gifted Child”
She's the best, especially for Silicon Valley types. This is a masterpiece, and it's nice and thin. It doesn't mean “Oh, you're the top of your class.” The point she's making is the adults in the world force us to conform to what they expect from us. When we do what they expect, they give us “love.” I put love in quotes because it's not true love. When we don't do what they expect of us, they punish us. The same way that we domesticate a dog; we end up being domesticated. The plus side of domestication is we get accepted by society; we get accepted by the parents, by our teachers. The downside of that, of course, is that later on in life, we may be 40 years old, and we might have done everything that the world asked of us, and yet there's this giant, gaping existential emptiness inside of us. And we're left wondering, “What the fuck am I missing?” Well, maybe the thing you're missing is, you're not who you really are. This book is an incredible psychoanalytic walkthrough of that process of conforming to our parents’ expectations and what that does to a child.
📗 Robert Sapolsky “Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers”
Check this out if you want to understand why you're stressed, and the disconnect between the modern environment and the way our nervous system has evolved. Sapolsky is a biologist and neuroscientist who studies primates. He's one of the most beloved professors at Stanford. He points out that our nervous system evolved to what we know as fight or flight. It evolved so that we can avoid temporary, mortal risks. A lion runs after us. The superpowers kick in for about 10 minutes, giving us the ability to fight for our lives; then it's meant to shut down.
Problem is, in the modern world, we are surrounded by social and psychological stressors like constant streams of work emails, all the bullshit on social media, etc. They are activating the exact same nervous system that was designed to run away from a lion. Instead of that being a temporary activation, we're in a constant activation of that nervous system. We've become that proverbial frog boiling in the pot without realizing that our nervous system is completely overworked.
Here’s a message for the seekers out there, both from Carl Jung.
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”
That jives with neuroscience and our understanding of the programmability of the human mind. The organ is designed to be programmed by our experiences and the world around us. It stores that programming to make predictions about what to do in every waking moment of our lives. We act on deeply ingrained programs. Unless we become self-aware, unless we find a way to break free and start to reprogram ourselves and get back in touch with our authentic program, then we will become what the world tells us to be.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
It's the same principle. Our unconscious is just the program parts of our mind that we may not be aware of; automatic behaviors, feelings, and thoughts. And if we're unaware of that, we may go through life habitually recreating the same disasters with relationships, jobs, bosses — whatever it might be. We'll say, “Well, I guess it's just fate.” But maybe there's a deeper pattern there.
There are some profoundly central truths in those two quotes that can bring somebody much closer to the true nature of reality, the true nature of themselves, and the true nature of the world they live in.
Just sit and contemplate those two quotes. They’ll take you somewhere.
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