March 15, 2024 • 34 mins
Renowned novelist Mitch Albom joins On Leadership for a captivating conversation about the thought-provoking themes that inspire his work. You know him for his bestselling books Tuesdays with Morrie, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and most recently, The Little Liar. Mitch emphasizes the importance of treating writing like a job and maintaining a consistent routine, which he said has contributed to the success and relevance of his storytelling in today’s world.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:10):
Hello and welcome back to FranklinCovey's twice weekly podcast On Leadership
with Scott Miller. That's me.
I'm your host and interviewer each weekright now for six years in 350 plus
episodes taped on Tuesdays and Fridays,
we try to share with you podcastepisodes both in audio and video that
are designed to make you a betterleader. FranklinCovey, of course,
(00:32):
the world's most trustedleadership firm, founded,
co-founded by Dr. Stephen R. Covey,
who many of you know as theauthor of the seminal book,
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,
where collectively our associatesworldwide have gone on to build better
leaders through hundreds ofmillions of professionals and
literally every free country in the world.
(00:54):
And this podcast is meant to take whatis the FranklinCovey spotlight and
platform and bring new insights fromthought leaders in a variety of different
spaces to you twice weekly tomake you better. A better leader,
a better parent, a betterpartner, spouse, human being.
And we typically interview thoughtleaders, business leaders, athletes,
(01:15):
celebrities, actors, researchers,
people that have perhaps survived sometragedy that can share their story
to make you a better person. Thisis not a book review podcast,
but oftentimes thought leadershave books and typically,
almost always it's nonfictionauthors. Today, however,
we've taken a little bit of a pivotand we're interviewing one of the most
(01:37):
famous novelists of my lifetime.His name is Mitch Albom.
You know him from his eight numberone New York Times bestselling books.
He's sold in languagesand across the world,
more than 40 million copiesof his numerous books.
You probably know him as the authorof the book, Tuesdays with Morrie.
But today we're interviewing himon all of his books, the insights,
(02:00):
his writing process with a focus onhis most recent release called The
Little Liar that I think isespecially timely in an era,
a political era where wedebate what the truth means,
what are the opposite sides of thetruth, how we manufacture our own truth,
how our ability to tell thetruth impacts our brand.
And we'll talk about his book today.
(02:21):
Honored to have the novelistand iconic author, Mitch Albom,
welcome to On Leadership.
Thank you, Scott. Thanks forhaving me on the program.
Mitch,
we have interviewed pretty much everyliterary titan that's been out there,
certainly on the nonfiction businessleadership, self-help side. This,
as you know, is a leadership podcast,
but as a voracious reader andauthor myself, I have cherished,
(02:45):
I think I've read all of your bookscertainly from the beginning with Tuesdays
with Morrie, which I believe becamea motion picture. Am I right?
Yes, it did.
I think the book that had the mostimpact on me was this book about The Five
People You Meet in Heaven.
For the last few people that may belistening or watching our podcast that
aren't aware of the amount oftime you spent writing the last
(03:08):
couple of decades,
would you just maybe reorienteverybody to your career as an author?
I don't think you were born author.
Talk about what got you into the businessand give maybe a broad landscape of
what has brought you now to yourmost recent book, The Little Liar.
Well, I'm a good exampleof man plans and god laughs
(03:28):
type of thing. I started outwanting to only be a musician.
I never wrote for anythingin high school or in college,
not college newspaper or anything likethat. I just wanted to play music,
produce music.
I did that for a couple of years when Igot out of school overseas and then back
in New York City. And as I wasfailing doing it in New York,
(03:51):
I happened to walk into a supermarketone day and they were giving out a free
newspaper that they would throwin your basket and it said,
if you have free time, we could usesome help putting out this newspaper.
And since I worked at nights asa musician, I had some free time.
I went down there,
they gave me an assignment that day towrite a story of the parking meters.
(04:13):
I'd never written anything, but I'dread a lot of newspapers in my life.
And so I kind of went to this meetingabout parking meters and wrote the story
up the way a newspaperstory I thought would go.
And the next week when Iwas in the supermarket,
I picked up the newspaper and there wasmy story on the bottom of the front page
with my name attached to it.
And I got that little tingle that youget when you create something with your
(04:35):
name. And I've been a writer ever since.
And then when I got into journalism,
I ended up becoming a sports writer andprobably would've stayed a sports writer
my whole life and a sports broadcasteron ESPN and other things like that,
except when I was 37 years old,
I had sort of an epiphany kind ofexperience where I connected with an old
(04:57):
college professor of mine named MorrieSchwartz who was dying from Lou Gehrig's
disease and ended up visiting himevery Tuesday that he had left in his
life.
And we sort of did a last class togetheron what you know when you're about to
die,
that puts everything else into perspectiveand how you could use that knowledge
to be better when it comes to work andmarriage and culture and money and all
(05:21):
the rest of the things. Andit was a great last class.
It was not supposed to be a book,
but when I found out that Morriewas so in debt for his medical bills
that he didn't have the money to pay itand his family was going to have to sell
their house to pay his bills,I decided to try to help him.
And I found one publisherafter everybody turned us down,
(05:43):
one publisher who was willing to takea chance on this little book called
Tuesdays with Morrie, and they gave usenough money for him to pay his bills,
which I gave to him. Iwrote this little book,
which I didn't think anybody would read,
and I prepared to go back tobecome being a sports writer.
And then that book came outand ended up becoming the most
(06:04):
read memoir in the history ofpublishing and changed my life forever.
And I've been on a path ever since ofwriting books that are not about sports,
but about life and bigpicture issues about life and
meaning of it and what we can learnfrom being human to one another.
And there's been 10 bookssince Tuesdays with Morrie,
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and this is the newest one that I haveout now is called The Little Liar.
So I think in a couple minutes there,
I've taken you from when Iwas 10 to where I am now,
so I haven't bored you too much. That'sthe story of my life up till now.
I don't think I knew most of that story.I want to talk about The Little Liar.
Before I go there, your firstbook was Tuesdays with Morrie.
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As you look back now with thebenefit of hindsight, do you think,
why was that book so successful andhad that book not been your first
book, had you not written other books?
Was that book I think consequentialenough that it provided you the
platform?
Talk about how the timingof that book helped it and
(07:08):
helped you as an author and yourown creative writing skills.
So I had actually written a coupleof bestselling books before that,
but they were sports books.
One was a biography ofAutobiography of Bo Schembechler.
One was about The Fab Fivebasketball team at Michigan,
but I'd never known anythingabout a book like that,
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and it was not supposed to be a big book.
They printed 20,000 copies ofit total for the whole world,
and I thought I'd have them in thetrunk of my car for the rest of my life.
So it speaks to the power of peoplepassing a book around and passing a book
around and saying, you should readthis and you should read this,
because the book cameout in August of 1997,
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which is not a good month for a bookabout the meaning of life to come out in
August when everybody wants tojust be reading beach books.
And it didn't even get to a bestseller'slist of any kind for about four
months.
And then it was just at the bottom andit slowly started to work its way up and
it didn't reach number one on thatbestseller's list until April of the
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following year, which is usually,
by that point books are long sinceforgotten and coming out in paperback
already. So it really justsort of caught on fire.
And I can tell you basedon my experience why that
is,
I don't think it was anything brilliantthat I wrote or my use of prose.
(08:32):
I think it's because everybody who readit could identify with one of the two
characters. Either theyhad a mentor like Morrie,
an older person, a teacher, a grandparent,
someone who was important in their lives,
who gave them wisdom at atime when they needed it,
or they identified with me kind ofa way too ambitious, way too busy.
(08:53):
Why isn't life more satisfyingkind of person at age 37?
And I can't tell you how many people Iwill run into who will take out their
wallets and say, here's my Morrie,
and they'll take out a picture ofsomebody and say, this is my Morrie.
And I think that that's whythat book, not just in America,
but all across the world, foundsuch an audience because everybody,
(09:16):
no matter what culture you're in orcountry or language, has a Morrie.
So that's why the bookbecame popular, I think.
And in terms of what it did tome, I can just tell you Scott,
that before that I was on ESPNand therefore pretty recognizable
in airports at least to guys.
(09:37):
And people used to stop mein airports and say, hey,
sports guy who's goingto win the Super Bowl?
And I would say Patriots andjust kind of go up the escalator.
And then after Tuesdayswith Morrie came out,
people began stopping me and saying, hey,
my mother died of cancer and the lastthing we did was read your book together.
(09:58):
Can I talk to you about her?
And you can't go up the escalatorand say Patriots and disappear.
You have to stop and talkand engage and listen.
And I've had that happen to me,
not 10 times or a hundredtimes or a thousand times,
but tens of thousands of times. And whenyou have something like that happen,
so often you come to become sensitizedto how people are suffering and
(10:22):
what's really important to themand the grief that they endure.
And it's not surprising that myfocus became on those kinds of
issues and all the books that I havewritten since I've never written a sports
book again, all the books I've writtensince have been about that type of thing.
So Tuesdays with Morrie was notjust a big book for other people,
it was a seminal book in pivoting mylife from one direction to another.
(10:45):
Mitch, I appreciate you taking the timeto share about that because it obviously
instructs all the books you'vewritten since, as you've said,
including your current releasecalled The Little Liar.
This is a novel that followsa particular person through
decades of their life asthey have struggled with the
(11:05):
truth,
which is an issue we'll talk about ina moment in terms of American business,
American politics. Giveus a glimpse about,
for those of you who are listening andwatching right now going on Amazon or
their favorite bookstore siteto pick up The Little Liar,
talk us through the central characterand the struggle that is central to
(11:26):
this book.
Sure. So The Little Liarcenters on actually four people.
The biggest protagonist is a little boynamed Nico who's 11 years old living in
Greece during World War ii.
And when the Nazis invade his town,
they find out that Nico at age 11has never told a lie in his life,
(11:48):
and he's known throughout the villageand the city as an honest boy.
And so they decide to use him as a weapon.
And when they herd all theother Jews into ghetto areas,
they keep him and they say, we'lllet you go back to your family.
You just have to do us a littlefavor for the next couple of weeks.
We want you to stand on these traintracks and as people are getting on and
(12:08):
they're going to be confused,
you just tell them they're going to goodjobs and good homes and everything's
going to be okay, and they'll believeyou because they know that you're honest.
And so because he's never lied before andhe has no reason to suspect otherwise,
he does this until the very last trainis sent out and he sees his family and
this little girl that he sort of lovesand being shoved into a box car and
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they're screaming at him,
and that's when he realizes and findsout that these trains are actually going
to the concentration camps,
into Auschwitz and he's notallowed to get on the train.
The Nazi who perpetrates this actkeeps him from getting on the train,
and so everybody he knows and loves isshipped away and he's left behind and the
book follows what happens to him aswell as the little girl that he loves,
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his brother who was sent tothe concentration camps and the Nazi who perpetrated
this for the next 40 years,
showing the ramifications of a singlelie on four different lives and how it
changes all of themjust from that one act.
So it's really a parableabout truth and lying,
about hope and forgivenessover the course of the story.
(13:13):
It's something that I've been thinkingabout writing for many years and I'm glad
that I finally was able to do it.
Mitch, one of my favorite interviewsin the six years of this podcast is
a woman named Dr. Susan David.She is a renowned author,
she wrote a book called EmotionalAgility, has a very famous TED Talk,
South African by Birthand lives in Boston.
(13:35):
And she talks about how in lifethere are facts and there then
are feelings, emotions, and opinions.And oftentimes we conflate the two,
our feelings and emotionswe present as facts,
but it's important to know facts arefacts and feelings and emotions are our
feelings. Again, both areimportant, but they're not the same.
(13:55):
I never thought that you and I would behaving a conversation in 2024 where we
were debating truth.
People certainly have perspectivesand political ideology and they have
religious views,
but it seems like now that thedefinition of truth is whatever the
loudest, most charismatic,
(14:18):
largest social following,
the person who repeats it themost makes their own truth now.
We know this is sort ofcommonplace in American politics,
and how did any opinion on how wegot there and how we get away from
that and how you mightdefine truth versus lies?
Maybe reground us in the principleswe all know that from a guy
(14:40):
I think who has a strong sense of moralauthority in the books that you write,
take that whereveryou're comfortable going.
Okay, there's a lot ofquestions in there, Scott,
but I'm going to try toanswer them. First of all,
let me recite you a quote,
"a lie told once is easily seen as a lie,
but a lie told a thousand timesbecomes the truth." You know who said
(15:03):
that? A Nazi, Joseph Goebbels.
And that was the philosophy that theNazis used during that period of time.
And if you think about the worldthat we live in now, social media,
where people can put out a messagevery quickly that they know is false
and it can travel aroundthe world in 15 seconds,
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a lie told once, easily seen as thetruth, a lie told a thousand times,
easily seen as a lie told athousand times becomes the truth.
We live in that world now,
and when people decide they'regoing to choose their own cable, TV,
network news and that they're only goingto believe that side or the other side
or they're going to havetheir own politician,
only don't believe thatand not the other thing.
(15:46):
It's very easy for people to justsort of put blinders on and say,
this is the truth, and I don'thave to hear about anything else.
It's shocking to me, Scott,
as someone who wrote a book that thefirst quarter of which takes place during
the Holocaust that astudy just came out after
October 7th in the attacks in Israel,
(16:06):
a study came out that one in five young
people,
people under 25 or so in America,
think the Holocaust was a myth.
One in five and another 30% aren't sure
one way or the other.
So you're talking about almost half ofyoung people in America who can't come
(16:28):
out and say, as you say, there'sfacts and there's feelings,
can't come out and say theHolocaust was true. Now,
that same study showed that people over 65
0% believe that the Holocaust is a myth.
So obviously the people whowere around during that time
or know people who were around duringthat time can tell you No, it's fact.
(16:52):
This took place. Six million Jewswere killed, millions of other people,
Catholics and homosexuals and gypsiesand all the rest were murdered.
It's not deniable. This is not somethingthat you can have a version of.
It is the truth.
And yet you have half of young peoplewho can't even make that sentence,
why? Because someone has perpetrated somesort of lie or some sort of thing for
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whatever their purposes are that nowlet's just deny this thing ever happened.
And through social media,
there are enough people that are justsort of buying into this and they don't
look at anything else andthey don't meet anybody else,
and they pick up their own version ofthe truth. So we are living in a very,
very dangerous time forthe truth and it's very
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precarious. And when wehave phrases like my truth,
which are being celebrated, which isreally nothing more than my story,
there's a big difference betweenmy story and my truth. The truth,
there's one version of the,there's a millions versions of,
and somehow we need to determine thedifference between the two or we're headed
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for a very, very dangerous thing.
And if you don't think that what happenedin Nazi Germany could happen again,
then you're not a very good student ofhistory because many of the things that
launched that terrible campaign havealready started happening in our society
right now.
Thank you.
It is despicable that anyone woulddeny the legitimacy of the Holocaust.
(18:19):
And let us be very clear,the Holocaust happened,
and you heard it from my voice hereas well. We interviewed Tova Friedman,
who you know of, who was asurvivor of the Holocaust.
And when you read her book and youlisten or watch her interview with
us,
it is incomprehensible any educatedhuman being would be anything other than
(18:41):
horrified and sympathetic at the livesthat were lost at the hands of the Nazis,
like you said, beyond just the Jews.And that you're absolutely right,
it could happen again. Andit's, I think your book,
although only a small partof it is about the Holocaust,
it's about the decades that ensuedwith these four people's lives,
it's a great testament for all of usto differentiate between our story
(19:03):
and the truth. Mitch, on a lighter note,
you write fascinating novels that usuallyhave multiple characters whose lives
intertwine and come back togetheragain, you don't have one writing style,
you have differentarchitectures for your books.
How do you come up with your ideas?
For the millions of people who arelistening and watching to this,
(19:25):
many of which have a book idea intheir mind, fiction, nonfiction, novel,
business, romance, science fiction.
Is there any insight you might offer?
I'm trying not to giveyou five questions again.
Is there any insight you might offer inyour own architecture and writing style
and how someone definesand uncovers their own?
(19:46):
Sure. I'm fortunate enoughto know a lot of writers.
I play in a band of writers,
Stephen King and Dave Barry and ScottTurow and Ridley Pearson and James McBride
and many, many others.
And over the years we've hung out togetherand I've had a chance to talk to all
(20:06):
of them about their writingstyles as they have with me.
And what I've discoveredis it's quite different.
Everybody does things a littlebit differently, and some of them,
especially the novelistsamongst them, they say, well,
I just create my characters and I justsort of put them together and I let them
sort of take me wherethey're going to take me.
(20:26):
And I look at that withstunned eyes because I don't
know how that works. If Iwere to ask my characters,
where are that you going to take me?
They would look up at me from thetable and say, how the hell do we know?
You created us. You'resupposed to be telling us.
So I work a little bit differently.
I don't decide to make a book justbecause I think I have a good idea for a
(20:51):
character or even because I thinkI have a good idea for a plot.
I decide to write my books andagain, this is just unique to me.
Others do it quite differently.
I try to pick a theme or a lessonthat I think is important to me that I
want to say something about,
and I come up with that long beforeI come up with a plot or a character.
(21:12):
So The Five People You Meet inHeaven, which you mentioned Scott,
is a book that you've enjoyed.
So the idea of that book was notto write a book about heaven.
The idea of that book was that nobody,there's no such thing as a nobody,
that everybody counts.
I had an uncle of mine who diedthinking that he was a nobody.
He would always say, I've neverbeen nowhere, never done nothing.
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I don't matter to anybody. And Ialways thought that that was terrible.
I loved him and I could never reallyconvince him that he was important.
So that was the idea behind TheFive People You Meet in Heaven.
But I found that Icould tell that story by
creating a story about a manwho dies thinking that he
didn't save a little girl froman amusement park accident,
(21:56):
goes to heaven and finds,
thinks that he's a nobody and goes toheaven and finds five people in his life
who tell him, no, you did thisand changed my life forever.
You did this that changed my life forever.
You did this that changed my life forever.
So I try to do that with all of my books.
I get a theme and then I put thecharacters and the story around it.
And so if someone is trying to contemplatedoing the book in the nature of the
(22:18):
kind that I write, I would say that thatmight be a better way to do it. First,
decide what your north star is going tobe in terms of what messages do you want
to say. With The Little Liar,
I wanted to talk about how precioustruth was and what would you
do to be forgiven the biggestlie that you ever told.
And with that in mind,
(22:39):
I started to create this story about thislittle boy and in Greece and the Nazis
and the Holocaust and all thethings that come around it,
but it didn't start with characters.
It started with the theme or thelesson that I wanted to get out,
and then I built the charactersin the storyline around it.
Anything interesting to share interms of when and how you write?
(23:00):
Is there a cadence? Do youtend to take years or months?
Is it every day at 3:00 AM?
What works for you that mightinspire people to find their own?
And maybe you give permission,
people give permission to people thatare writing books, how to find their.
Well. Yeah, yeah, sure. I hear that a lot.
And let me tell you that all those writersthat I mentioned before that are in
(23:20):
the band or that I know, every oneof them treats writing like a job.
None of them sit around and saying, well,
I'm just waiting for the muse to hit me.
I'm waiting for 3:00 AM,
lightning's going to strike and I'm goingto wake up and I'm just going to start
typing and typing and typing. Itdoesn't work like it does in the movies.
Every one of them from StephenKing to Amy Tan to Dave Barry,
(23:40):
or disparate writers, justthose three right there,
they all get up every day and treatit like a job and go to work at it.
And I do the same thing. Mywriting technique, I start and it just works for me.
I get up in the morning early6:30/7, something like that,
and I go right to writing. I'llgrab a cup of something to drink,
and I go write to sit down andwrite. I don't watch anything.
(24:04):
I don't read anything. I don't turn onany music. I don't have any other input.
I want my brain to be devoid of anyideas in the morning so that I can
just have the ideas for my writing.And then I sit down and I write,
and I don't write probably morethan two to three hours a day.
I've learned over time that you can sitin front of a computer all day long.
That doesn't mean words are going to come,
(24:25):
that you have a certainamount of gas in the tank,
and you should recognize how big yourtank is and just drive until you run out
of gas. And for me, that's abouttwo and a half hours, three hours.
But I do it every day, not justMonday through Friday, but every day.
And I always try, and I foundthis to be a good technique,
I try to finish on an upbeat note,
(24:47):
when things are going well,
because if you're in a paragraph or achapter that's just not working and it's
terrible, and then you don't likewhat you're writing and you go, ah,
I'll just get up and I'll do it tomorrow.
But then when you wake up in the morning,
you're not very excitedabout coming back down to it.
You left a big pile of turd there.
(25:08):
So you try to quit when things are goinggood so that when you wake up the next
morning,
you can't wait to get back down therebecause there's something positive that
you're working on. I always foundthat to be a good technique too.
Mitch, of your numerous books,
how many have become movies?Just one. The first one?
No, four. Four have been made into movies,
(25:31):
and I've done 10 books.No, I've done 12 books.
If you count the sportsbooks, all but two,
have been optioned and are in the processof various stage of becoming movies
or television series or streamingseries or things like that.
Well, given that track record, doesthat instruct how you write books?
(25:51):
Because potentially this might becomea major motion picture or a made
for TV and there you thinkabout the characters,
or do you write agnostic of that?
No, I never do that.
And I think every writer when they write
fiction probably has a face inmind of what their character looks
(26:13):
like.
And frequently that face may end up beingan actor because we know actors that
way. Or it might be somebody thatin your life and you say, oh,
he looks kind of like thatguy I went to school with.
Or he looks like that woman who works atthe grocery store. She looks like that.
But I think if you startwriting thinking, oh yeah,
I'll write this way, so they'llwant to make a movie out of it,
(26:34):
then you end up withneither a book nor a movie.
People want to makemovies out of great books.
Sometimes they succeed andsometimes they ruin it.
And we all know examples of both.
But what inspires people to want tosee a movie version of it isn't a book
that's written like a movie. It'sa book that's just a great read,
(26:56):
and when you're finished it, youwant to see it in some other form.
So I only concentrate ontrying to write a good book,
and then if somebody wants to tryto make a movie out of it, fine.
The old joke was, I think itwas Ernest Hemingway who said,
if you want your booksto be turned into movies,
(27:16):
you should run to the California/Nevadaborder holding your manuscript,
and you should throw all the pages overthe line to California and then you
should run the opposite direction becauseyou're not going to like what's going
to happen to it and it's notgoing to be yours anymore.
And I've seen that happenin the books that I've had
transferred into movies and even theones that are being transferred into
(27:40):
movies. And you have to sort ofaccept that. And you just have to say,
a book is a book. A movie is a movie.
What works in one doesn't necessarilywork in the other. And really,
if it's a movie, a movie's two hourslong. Think about when you read a book,
how far into the bookare you after two hours?
You might be 60 pages inthe book might be 400 pages.
(28:04):
So what does that tell you thatthe other 340 pages don't get made?
So a book, a movie hasto, by its very nature,
be very just a shred ofwhat the actual book is.
And you can't start gettingupset over that and saying, oh,
they didn't have this in, or theydidn't include this, or whatever.
The best you can hope for is that thebook is a good book and the movie is a
(28:27):
good movie, and somewhere there's aconnection between the two. But you can't,
one can be the equal version of the other.
They're just two differentcreations, apples and oranges.
I think you just liberated millions ofpeople who are stuck on their movie not
being what they liked in the book.
What do you want the reader todo differently as a result of
(28:50):
engaging with your newest release, TheLittle Liar? What do you hope happens?
Well, I'd like people to ask themselves,what's the biggest lie you ever told?
Like Nico tells this lie in the book.What were the ramifications of that lie?
Who did you hurt? Was a relationshipruined? Was a business dissolved?
(29:12):
Were you not able to comeback from certain things?
And what would you doto be forgiven that lie?
And Nico spends his whole lifeafter that moment trying to
be forgiven for the liethat he told ironically,
he becomes a pathological liar becausehe can no longer tell the truth,
(29:32):
because the truth is so painful tohim because of what he thinks he did,
that the only words that will comeout of his mouth basically are lies.
And so he learns how to be a really goodpathological liar, how to forge checks,
how to change his name,how to use phony passports,
how to move about the worldwith all different identities.
And he does this and ends up actuallyin America as hugely successful
(29:55):
because if you're a brazen liar, youcan become hugely successful in America,
and he does and becomes very, very rich.
But the whole time he isprivately pining to be forgiven
for what he did. And meanwhile,
this little girl who always lovedhim when she was 12 years old,
she's convinced thathe must've been duped,
(30:15):
and she sets out to try to find him.
And of course he's changed his nameand he's moved all over the world,
so it takes her half a lifetime to tryto find him again, just to forgive him.
And so what I want people to learn fromthat is that the desire to be forgiven
and the need to forgiveare equally powerful
(30:35):
forces in our lives. And we alwaysthink when it comes to forgiveness,
it's just the person who's seeking tobe forgiven that has the driving force.
But that's not true.
Inside of us we also have anurge to forgive other people
because when we don't forgivepeople, it's like a two-sided blade.
Part of it goes into them,and part of it goes into us.
(30:57):
And so I want people to sortof understand a forgiveness
theme as well. And the book is ultimatelya hopeful book. It's not a down book,
it's not a Holocaust book,like a horrific holocaust book.
It makes a point about thetruth and forgiveness and hope,
and I hope that those are thethings that people take from it.
You've just given me the bestliner in six years of interviews,
(31:21):
horrifyingly. If you become a brazen liar,
you can be a huge success in America.
Isn't that sadly true. Mitch, what's next?
I'm actually already workingon my next book, which is
more of a slight novel, notas heavy a subject. Basically,
(31:45):
it deals with a person who magicallygets to do everything twice in life.
He gets to fix every mistake that he made,
but he only gets two chances and he hasto live with the consequences of the
second try.
And it's a lot about the ideaof grasping always greener and
what happens when we jump to the otherside of the grass and we leave behind
(32:08):
what we had before. So again,
I picked that theme because Ithink that's a universal theme.
People are always thinking,I should have done this,
or I should have married this person,
or I should have switched careers whenI had the chance, or I should have.
And what would your life be like?
That whole sliding doors kind of thingabout if I lived in a different world.
(32:28):
So this character actually getsto do it, but only twice. And
I'm not going to tease too muchabout it, but it's a surprising,
surprising conclusion to carefulwhat you wish for type of thing.
We have interviewed 350plus of the most impactful
(32:49):
authors on this podcast, it's been ahuge honor, prior to today's interview,
I mentioned to someone I wasinterviewing what I thought was the most
consequential novelist of mylifetime, and they asked me who?
And I said your name.And they all say, Hmm,
because I think your books are,
I think your books are a gift. I thinkyour books are inspiring. They're real.
(33:14):
They penetrate our soul aboutwhat our purpose is, our legacy,
our mission. Your mostrecent book, The Little Liar,
invites people to takeaccount of their life,
of their lives and how they are goingto move forward with their character.
I feel like the world's at acrossroads in terms of how we
honor and treat liars versus those who
(33:38):
tell the truth and pay theconsequence and own up to it.
I appreciate you comingon today, Mitch Albom,
eight #1 New York Times bestsellers,40 plus million books sold.
You deserve your success startingwith Tuesdays with Morrie,
now with The Little Liar. Honoredyou joined us, Mitch Albom.
Thanks for coming on today.
(33:59):
It's been a pleasure, Scott.Thanks for having me on.
And we'll see you back here next weekfor a new conversation On Leadership.
Hello and welcome back to FranklinCovey's twice weekly podcast On Leadership
with Scott Miller. That's me.
I'm your host and interviewer each weekright now for six years in 350 plus
episodes taped on Tuesdays and Fridays,
we try to share with you podcastepisodes both in audio and video that
are designed to make you a betterleader. FranklinCovey, of course,
(00:32):
the world's most trustedleadership firm, founded,
co-founded by Dr. Stephen R. Covey,
who many of you know as theauthor of the seminal book,
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,
where collectively our associatesworldwide have gone on to build better
leaders through hundreds ofmillions of professionals and
literally every free country in the world.
(00:54):
And this podcast is meant to take whatis the FranklinCovey spotlight and
platform and bring new insights fromthought leaders in a variety of different
spaces to you twice weekly tomake you better. A better leader,
a better parent, a betterpartner, spouse, human being.
And we typically interview thoughtleaders, business leaders, athletes,
(01:15):
celebrities, actors, researchers,
people that have perhaps survived sometragedy that can share their story
to make you a better person. Thisis not a book review podcast,
but oftentimes thought leadershave books and typically,
almost always it's nonfictionauthors. Today, however,
we've taken a little bit of a pivotand we're interviewing one of the most
(01:37):
famous novelists of my lifetime.His name is Mitch Albom.
You know him from his eight numberone New York Times bestselling books.
He's sold in languagesand across the world,
more than 40 million copiesof his numerous books.
You probably know him as the authorof the book, Tuesdays with Morrie.
But today we're interviewing himon all of his books, the insights,
(02:00):
his writing process with a focus onhis most recent release called The
Little Liar that I think isespecially timely in an era,
a political era where wedebate what the truth means,
what are the opposite sides of thetruth, how we manufacture our own truth,
how our ability to tell thetruth impacts our brand.
And we'll talk about his book today.
(02:21):
Honored to have the novelistand iconic author, Mitch Albom,
welcome to On Leadership.
Thank you, Scott. Thanks forhaving me on the program.
Mitch,
we have interviewed pretty much everyliterary titan that's been out there,
certainly on the nonfiction businessleadership, self-help side. This,
as you know, is a leadership podcast,
but as a voracious reader andauthor myself, I have cherished,
(02:45):
I think I've read all of your bookscertainly from the beginning with Tuesdays
with Morrie, which I believe becamea motion picture. Am I right?
Yes, it did.
I think the book that had the mostimpact on me was this book about The Five
People You Meet in Heaven.
For the last few people that may belistening or watching our podcast that
aren't aware of the amount oftime you spent writing the last
(03:08):
couple of decades,
would you just maybe reorienteverybody to your career as an author?
I don't think you were born author.
Talk about what got you into the businessand give maybe a broad landscape of
what has brought you now to yourmost recent book, The Little Liar.
Well, I'm a good exampleof man plans and god laughs
(03:28):
type of thing. I started outwanting to only be a musician.
I never wrote for anythingin high school or in college,
not college newspaper or anything likethat. I just wanted to play music,
produce music.
I did that for a couple of years when Igot out of school overseas and then back
in New York City. And as I wasfailing doing it in New York,
(03:51):
I happened to walk into a supermarketone day and they were giving out a free
newspaper that they would throwin your basket and it said,
if you have free time, we could usesome help putting out this newspaper.
And since I worked at nights asa musician, I had some free time.
I went down there,
they gave me an assignment that day towrite a story of the parking meters.
(04:13):
I'd never written anything, but I'dread a lot of newspapers in my life.
And so I kind of went to this meetingabout parking meters and wrote the story
up the way a newspaperstory I thought would go.
And the next week when Iwas in the supermarket,
I picked up the newspaper and there wasmy story on the bottom of the front page
with my name attached to it.
And I got that little tingle that youget when you create something with your
(04:35):
name. And I've been a writer ever since.
And then when I got into journalism,
I ended up becoming a sports writer andprobably would've stayed a sports writer
my whole life and a sports broadcasteron ESPN and other things like that,
except when I was 37 years old,
I had sort of an epiphany kind ofexperience where I connected with an old
(04:57):
college professor of mine named MorrieSchwartz who was dying from Lou Gehrig's
disease and ended up visiting himevery Tuesday that he had left in his
life.
And we sort of did a last class togetheron what you know when you're about to
die,
that puts everything else into perspectiveand how you could use that knowledge
to be better when it comes to work andmarriage and culture and money and all
(05:21):
the rest of the things. Andit was a great last class.
It was not supposed to be a book,
but when I found out that Morriewas so in debt for his medical bills
that he didn't have the money to pay itand his family was going to have to sell
their house to pay his bills,I decided to try to help him.
And I found one publisherafter everybody turned us down,
(05:43):
one publisher who was willing to takea chance on this little book called
Tuesdays with Morrie, and they gave usenough money for him to pay his bills,
which I gave to him. Iwrote this little book,
which I didn't think anybody would read,
and I prepared to go back tobecome being a sports writer.
And then that book came outand ended up becoming the most
(06:04):
read memoir in the history ofpublishing and changed my life forever.
And I've been on a path ever since ofwriting books that are not about sports,
but about life and bigpicture issues about life and
meaning of it and what we can learnfrom being human to one another.
And there's been 10 bookssince Tuesdays with Morrie,
(06:24):
and this is the newest one that I haveout now is called The Little Liar.
So I think in a couple minutes there,
I've taken you from when Iwas 10 to where I am now,
so I haven't bored you too much. That'sthe story of my life up till now.
I don't think I knew most of that story.I want to talk about The Little Liar.
Before I go there, your firstbook was Tuesdays with Morrie.
(06:47):
As you look back now with thebenefit of hindsight, do you think,
why was that book so successful andhad that book not been your first
book, had you not written other books?
Was that book I think consequentialenough that it provided you the
platform?
Talk about how the timingof that book helped it and
(07:08):
helped you as an author and yourown creative writing skills.
So I had actually written a coupleof bestselling books before that,
but they were sports books.
One was a biography ofAutobiography of Bo Schembechler.
One was about The Fab Fivebasketball team at Michigan,
but I'd never known anythingabout a book like that,
(07:29):
and it was not supposed to be a big book.
They printed 20,000 copies ofit total for the whole world,
and I thought I'd have them in thetrunk of my car for the rest of my life.
So it speaks to the power of peoplepassing a book around and passing a book
around and saying, you should readthis and you should read this,
because the book cameout in August of 1997,
(07:50):
which is not a good month for a bookabout the meaning of life to come out in
August when everybody wants tojust be reading beach books.
And it didn't even get to a bestseller'slist of any kind for about four
months.
And then it was just at the bottom andit slowly started to work its way up and
it didn't reach number one on thatbestseller's list until April of the
(08:11):
following year, which is usually,
by that point books are long sinceforgotten and coming out in paperback
already. So it really justsort of caught on fire.
And I can tell you basedon my experience why that
is,
I don't think it was anything brilliantthat I wrote or my use of prose.
(08:32):
I think it's because everybody who readit could identify with one of the two
characters. Either theyhad a mentor like Morrie,
an older person, a teacher, a grandparent,
someone who was important in their lives,
who gave them wisdom at atime when they needed it,
or they identified with me kind ofa way too ambitious, way too busy.
(08:53):
Why isn't life more satisfyingkind of person at age 37?
And I can't tell you how many people Iwill run into who will take out their
wallets and say, here's my Morrie,
and they'll take out a picture ofsomebody and say, this is my Morrie.
And I think that that's whythat book, not just in America,
but all across the world, foundsuch an audience because everybody,
(09:16):
no matter what culture you're in orcountry or language, has a Morrie.
So that's why the bookbecame popular, I think.
And in terms of what it did tome, I can just tell you Scott,
that before that I was on ESPNand therefore pretty recognizable
in airports at least to guys.
(09:37):
And people used to stop mein airports and say, hey,
sports guy who's goingto win the Super Bowl?
And I would say Patriots andjust kind of go up the escalator.
And then after Tuesdayswith Morrie came out,
people began stopping me and saying, hey,
my mother died of cancer and the lastthing we did was read your book together.
(09:58):
Can I talk to you about her?
And you can't go up the escalatorand say Patriots and disappear.
You have to stop and talkand engage and listen.
And I've had that happen to me,
not 10 times or a hundredtimes or a thousand times,
but tens of thousands of times. And whenyou have something like that happen,
so often you come to become sensitizedto how people are suffering and
(10:22):
what's really important to themand the grief that they endure.
And it's not surprising that myfocus became on those kinds of
issues and all the books that I havewritten since I've never written a sports
book again, all the books I've writtensince have been about that type of thing.
So Tuesdays with Morrie was notjust a big book for other people,
it was a seminal book in pivoting mylife from one direction to another.
(10:45):
Mitch, I appreciate you taking the timeto share about that because it obviously
instructs all the books you'vewritten since, as you've said,
including your current releasecalled The Little Liar.
This is a novel that followsa particular person through
decades of their life asthey have struggled with the
(11:05):
truth,
which is an issue we'll talk about ina moment in terms of American business,
American politics. Giveus a glimpse about,
for those of you who are listening andwatching right now going on Amazon or
their favorite bookstore siteto pick up The Little Liar,
talk us through the central characterand the struggle that is central to
(11:26):
this book.
Sure. So The Little Liarcenters on actually four people.
The biggest protagonist is a little boynamed Nico who's 11 years old living in
Greece during World War ii.
And when the Nazis invade his town,
they find out that Nico at age 11has never told a lie in his life,
(11:48):
and he's known throughout the villageand the city as an honest boy.
And so they decide to use him as a weapon.
And when they herd all theother Jews into ghetto areas,
they keep him and they say, we'lllet you go back to your family.
You just have to do us a littlefavor for the next couple of weeks.
We want you to stand on these traintracks and as people are getting on and
(12:08):
they're going to be confused,
you just tell them they're going to goodjobs and good homes and everything's
going to be okay, and they'll believeyou because they know that you're honest.
And so because he's never lied before andhe has no reason to suspect otherwise,
he does this until the very last trainis sent out and he sees his family and
this little girl that he sort of lovesand being shoved into a box car and
(12:29):
they're screaming at him,
and that's when he realizes and findsout that these trains are actually going
to the concentration camps,
into Auschwitz and he's notallowed to get on the train.
The Nazi who perpetrates this actkeeps him from getting on the train,
and so everybody he knows and loves isshipped away and he's left behind and the
book follows what happens to him aswell as the little girl that he loves,
(12:52):
his brother who was sent tothe concentration camps and the Nazi who perpetrated
this for the next 40 years,
showing the ramifications of a singlelie on four different lives and how it
changes all of themjust from that one act.
So it's really a parableabout truth and lying,
about hope and forgivenessover the course of the story.
(13:13):
It's something that I've been thinkingabout writing for many years and I'm glad
that I finally was able to do it.
Mitch, one of my favorite interviewsin the six years of this podcast is
a woman named Dr. Susan David.She is a renowned author,
she wrote a book called EmotionalAgility, has a very famous TED Talk,
South African by Birthand lives in Boston.
(13:35):
And she talks about how in lifethere are facts and there then
are feelings, emotions, and opinions.And oftentimes we conflate the two,
our feelings and emotionswe present as facts,
but it's important to know facts arefacts and feelings and emotions are our
feelings. Again, both areimportant, but they're not the same.
(13:55):
I never thought that you and I would behaving a conversation in 2024 where we
were debating truth.
People certainly have perspectivesand political ideology and they have
religious views,
but it seems like now that thedefinition of truth is whatever the
loudest, most charismatic,
(14:18):
largest social following,
the person who repeats it themost makes their own truth now.
We know this is sort ofcommonplace in American politics,
and how did any opinion on how wegot there and how we get away from
that and how you mightdefine truth versus lies?
Maybe reground us in the principleswe all know that from a guy
(14:40):
I think who has a strong sense of moralauthority in the books that you write,
take that whereveryou're comfortable going.
Okay, there's a lot ofquestions in there, Scott,
but I'm going to try toanswer them. First of all,
let me recite you a quote,
"a lie told once is easily seen as a lie,
but a lie told a thousand timesbecomes the truth." You know who said
(15:03):
that? A Nazi, Joseph Goebbels.
And that was the philosophy that theNazis used during that period of time.
And if you think about the worldthat we live in now, social media,
where people can put out a messagevery quickly that they know is false
and it can travel aroundthe world in 15 seconds,
(15:24):
a lie told once, easily seen as thetruth, a lie told a thousand times,
easily seen as a lie told athousand times becomes the truth.
We live in that world now,
and when people decide they'regoing to choose their own cable, TV,
network news and that they're only goingto believe that side or the other side
or they're going to havetheir own politician,
only don't believe thatand not the other thing.
(15:46):
It's very easy for people to justsort of put blinders on and say,
this is the truth, and I don'thave to hear about anything else.
It's shocking to me, Scott,
as someone who wrote a book that thefirst quarter of which takes place during
the Holocaust that astudy just came out after
October 7th in the attacks in Israel,
(16:06):
a study came out that one in five young
people,
people under 25 or so in America,
think the Holocaust was a myth.
One in five and another 30% aren't sure
one way or the other.
So you're talking about almost half ofyoung people in America who can't come
(16:28):
out and say, as you say, there'sfacts and there's feelings,
can't come out and say theHolocaust was true. Now,
that same study showed that people over 65
0% believe that the Holocaust is a myth.
So obviously the people whowere around during that time
or know people who were around duringthat time can tell you No, it's fact.
(16:52):
This took place. Six million Jewswere killed, millions of other people,
Catholics and homosexuals and gypsiesand all the rest were murdered.
It's not deniable. This is not somethingthat you can have a version of.
It is the truth.
And yet you have half of young peoplewho can't even make that sentence,
why? Because someone has perpetrated somesort of lie or some sort of thing for
(17:14):
whatever their purposes are that nowlet's just deny this thing ever happened.
And through social media,
there are enough people that are justsort of buying into this and they don't
look at anything else andthey don't meet anybody else,
and they pick up their own version ofthe truth. So we are living in a very,
very dangerous time forthe truth and it's very
(17:34):
precarious. And when wehave phrases like my truth,
which are being celebrated, which isreally nothing more than my story,
there's a big difference betweenmy story and my truth. The truth,
there's one version of the,there's a millions versions of,
and somehow we need to determine thedifference between the two or we're headed
(17:55):
for a very, very dangerous thing.
And if you don't think that what happenedin Nazi Germany could happen again,
then you're not a very good student ofhistory because many of the things that
launched that terrible campaign havealready started happening in our society
right now.
Thank you.
It is despicable that anyone woulddeny the legitimacy of the Holocaust.
(18:19):
And let us be very clear,the Holocaust happened,
and you heard it from my voice hereas well. We interviewed Tova Friedman,
who you know of, who was asurvivor of the Holocaust.
And when you read her book and youlisten or watch her interview with
us,
it is incomprehensible any educatedhuman being would be anything other than
(18:41):
horrified and sympathetic at the livesthat were lost at the hands of the Nazis,
like you said, beyond just the Jews.And that you're absolutely right,
it could happen again. Andit's, I think your book,
although only a small partof it is about the Holocaust,
it's about the decades that ensuedwith these four people's lives,
it's a great testament for all of usto differentiate between our story
(19:03):
and the truth. Mitch, on a lighter note,
you write fascinating novels that usuallyhave multiple characters whose lives
intertwine and come back togetheragain, you don't have one writing style,
you have differentarchitectures for your books.
How do you come up with your ideas?
For the millions of people who arelistening and watching to this,
(19:25):
many of which have a book idea intheir mind, fiction, nonfiction, novel,
business, romance, science fiction.
Is there any insight you might offer?
I'm trying not to giveyou five questions again.
Is there any insight you might offer inyour own architecture and writing style
and how someone definesand uncovers their own?
(19:46):
Sure. I'm fortunate enoughto know a lot of writers.
I play in a band of writers,
Stephen King and Dave Barry and ScottTurow and Ridley Pearson and James McBride
and many, many others.
And over the years we've hung out togetherand I've had a chance to talk to all
(20:06):
of them about their writingstyles as they have with me.
And what I've discoveredis it's quite different.
Everybody does things a littlebit differently, and some of them,
especially the novelistsamongst them, they say, well,
I just create my characters and I justsort of put them together and I let them
sort of take me wherethey're going to take me.
(20:26):
And I look at that withstunned eyes because I don't
know how that works. If Iwere to ask my characters,
where are that you going to take me?
They would look up at me from thetable and say, how the hell do we know?
You created us. You'resupposed to be telling us.
So I work a little bit differently.
I don't decide to make a book justbecause I think I have a good idea for a
(20:51):
character or even because I thinkI have a good idea for a plot.
I decide to write my books andagain, this is just unique to me.
Others do it quite differently.
I try to pick a theme or a lessonthat I think is important to me that I
want to say something about,
and I come up with that long beforeI come up with a plot or a character.
(21:12):
So The Five People You Meet inHeaven, which you mentioned Scott,
is a book that you've enjoyed.
So the idea of that book was notto write a book about heaven.
The idea of that book was that nobody,there's no such thing as a nobody,
that everybody counts.
I had an uncle of mine who diedthinking that he was a nobody.
He would always say, I've neverbeen nowhere, never done nothing.
(21:34):
I don't matter to anybody. And Ialways thought that that was terrible.
I loved him and I could never reallyconvince him that he was important.
So that was the idea behind TheFive People You Meet in Heaven.
But I found that Icould tell that story by
creating a story about a manwho dies thinking that he
didn't save a little girl froman amusement park accident,
(21:56):
goes to heaven and finds,
thinks that he's a nobody and goes toheaven and finds five people in his life
who tell him, no, you did thisand changed my life forever.
You did this that changed my life forever.
You did this that changed my life forever.
So I try to do that with all of my books.
I get a theme and then I put thecharacters and the story around it.
And so if someone is trying to contemplatedoing the book in the nature of the
(22:18):
kind that I write, I would say that thatmight be a better way to do it. First,
decide what your north star is going tobe in terms of what messages do you want
to say. With The Little Liar,
I wanted to talk about how precioustruth was and what would you
do to be forgiven the biggestlie that you ever told.
And with that in mind,
(22:39):
I started to create this story about thislittle boy and in Greece and the Nazis
and the Holocaust and all thethings that come around it,
but it didn't start with characters.
It started with the theme or thelesson that I wanted to get out,
and then I built the charactersin the storyline around it.
Anything interesting to share interms of when and how you write?
(23:00):
Is there a cadence? Do youtend to take years or months?
Is it every day at 3:00 AM?
What works for you that mightinspire people to find their own?
And maybe you give permission,
people give permission to people thatare writing books, how to find their.
Well. Yeah, yeah, sure. I hear that a lot.
And let me tell you that all those writersthat I mentioned before that are in
(23:20):
the band or that I know, every oneof them treats writing like a job.
None of them sit around and saying, well,
I'm just waiting for the muse to hit me.
I'm waiting for 3:00 AM,
lightning's going to strike and I'm goingto wake up and I'm just going to start
typing and typing and typing. Itdoesn't work like it does in the movies.
Every one of them from StephenKing to Amy Tan to Dave Barry,
(23:40):
or disparate writers, justthose three right there,
they all get up every day and treatit like a job and go to work at it.
And I do the same thing. Mywriting technique, I start and it just works for me.
I get up in the morning early6:30/7, something like that,
and I go right to writing. I'llgrab a cup of something to drink,
and I go write to sit down andwrite. I don't watch anything.
(24:04):
I don't read anything. I don't turn onany music. I don't have any other input.
I want my brain to be devoid of anyideas in the morning so that I can
just have the ideas for my writing.And then I sit down and I write,
and I don't write probably morethan two to three hours a day.
I've learned over time that you can sitin front of a computer all day long.
That doesn't mean words are going to come,
(24:25):
that you have a certainamount of gas in the tank,
and you should recognize how big yourtank is and just drive until you run out
of gas. And for me, that's abouttwo and a half hours, three hours.
But I do it every day, not justMonday through Friday, but every day.
And I always try, and I foundthis to be a good technique,
I try to finish on an upbeat note,
(24:47):
when things are going well,
because if you're in a paragraph or achapter that's just not working and it's
terrible, and then you don't likewhat you're writing and you go, ah,
I'll just get up and I'll do it tomorrow.
But then when you wake up in the morning,
you're not very excitedabout coming back down to it.
You left a big pile of turd there.
(25:08):
So you try to quit when things are goinggood so that when you wake up the next
morning,
you can't wait to get back down therebecause there's something positive that
you're working on. I always foundthat to be a good technique too.
Mitch, of your numerous books,
how many have become movies?Just one. The first one?
No, four. Four have been made into movies,
(25:31):
and I've done 10 books.No, I've done 12 books.
If you count the sportsbooks, all but two,
have been optioned and are in the processof various stage of becoming movies
or television series or streamingseries or things like that.
Well, given that track record, doesthat instruct how you write books?
(25:51):
Because potentially this might becomea major motion picture or a made
for TV and there you thinkabout the characters,
or do you write agnostic of that?
No, I never do that.
And I think every writer when they write
fiction probably has a face inmind of what their character looks
(26:13):
like.
And frequently that face may end up beingan actor because we know actors that
way. Or it might be somebody thatin your life and you say, oh,
he looks kind of like thatguy I went to school with.
Or he looks like that woman who works atthe grocery store. She looks like that.
But I think if you startwriting thinking, oh yeah,
I'll write this way, so they'llwant to make a movie out of it,
(26:34):
then you end up withneither a book nor a movie.
People want to makemovies out of great books.
Sometimes they succeed andsometimes they ruin it.
And we all know examples of both.
But what inspires people to want tosee a movie version of it isn't a book
that's written like a movie. It'sa book that's just a great read,
(26:56):
and when you're finished it, youwant to see it in some other form.
So I only concentrate ontrying to write a good book,
and then if somebody wants to tryto make a movie out of it, fine.
The old joke was, I think itwas Ernest Hemingway who said,
if you want your booksto be turned into movies,
(27:16):
you should run to the California/Nevadaborder holding your manuscript,
and you should throw all the pages overthe line to California and then you
should run the opposite direction becauseyou're not going to like what's going
to happen to it and it's notgoing to be yours anymore.
And I've seen that happenin the books that I've had
transferred into movies and even theones that are being transferred into
(27:40):
movies. And you have to sort ofaccept that. And you just have to say,
a book is a book. A movie is a movie.
What works in one doesn't necessarilywork in the other. And really,
if it's a movie, a movie's two hourslong. Think about when you read a book,
how far into the bookare you after two hours?
You might be 60 pages inthe book might be 400 pages.
(28:04):
So what does that tell you thatthe other 340 pages don't get made?
So a book, a movie hasto, by its very nature,
be very just a shred ofwhat the actual book is.
And you can't start gettingupset over that and saying, oh,
they didn't have this in, or theydidn't include this, or whatever.
The best you can hope for is that thebook is a good book and the movie is a
(28:27):
good movie, and somewhere there's aconnection between the two. But you can't,
one can be the equal version of the other.
They're just two differentcreations, apples and oranges.
I think you just liberated millions ofpeople who are stuck on their movie not
being what they liked in the book.
What do you want the reader todo differently as a result of
(28:50):
engaging with your newest release, TheLittle Liar? What do you hope happens?
Well, I'd like people to ask themselves,what's the biggest lie you ever told?
Like Nico tells this lie in the book.What were the ramifications of that lie?
Who did you hurt? Was a relationshipruined? Was a business dissolved?
(29:12):
Were you not able to comeback from certain things?
And what would you doto be forgiven that lie?
And Nico spends his whole lifeafter that moment trying to
be forgiven for the liethat he told ironically,
he becomes a pathological liar becausehe can no longer tell the truth,
(29:32):
because the truth is so painful tohim because of what he thinks he did,
that the only words that will comeout of his mouth basically are lies.
And so he learns how to be a really goodpathological liar, how to forge checks,
how to change his name,how to use phony passports,
how to move about the worldwith all different identities.
And he does this and ends up actuallyin America as hugely successful
(29:55):
because if you're a brazen liar, youcan become hugely successful in America,
and he does and becomes very, very rich.
But the whole time he isprivately pining to be forgiven
for what he did. And meanwhile,
this little girl who always lovedhim when she was 12 years old,
she's convinced thathe must've been duped,
(30:15):
and she sets out to try to find him.
And of course he's changed his nameand he's moved all over the world,
so it takes her half a lifetime to tryto find him again, just to forgive him.
And so what I want people to learn fromthat is that the desire to be forgiven
and the need to forgiveare equally powerful
(30:35):
forces in our lives. And we alwaysthink when it comes to forgiveness,
it's just the person who's seeking tobe forgiven that has the driving force.
But that's not true.
Inside of us we also have anurge to forgive other people
because when we don't forgivepeople, it's like a two-sided blade.
Part of it goes into them,and part of it goes into us.
(30:57):
And so I want people to sortof understand a forgiveness
theme as well. And the book is ultimatelya hopeful book. It's not a down book,
it's not a Holocaust book,like a horrific holocaust book.
It makes a point about thetruth and forgiveness and hope,
and I hope that those are thethings that people take from it.
You've just given me the bestliner in six years of interviews,
(31:21):
horrifyingly. If you become a brazen liar,
you can be a huge success in America.
Isn't that sadly true. Mitch, what's next?
I'm actually already workingon my next book, which is
more of a slight novel, notas heavy a subject. Basically,
(31:45):
it deals with a person who magicallygets to do everything twice in life.
He gets to fix every mistake that he made,
but he only gets two chances and he hasto live with the consequences of the
second try.
And it's a lot about the ideaof grasping always greener and
what happens when we jump to the otherside of the grass and we leave behind
(32:08):
what we had before. So again,
I picked that theme because Ithink that's a universal theme.
People are always thinking,I should have done this,
or I should have married this person,
or I should have switched careers whenI had the chance, or I should have.
And what would your life be like?
That whole sliding doors kind of thingabout if I lived in a different world.
(32:28):
So this character actually getsto do it, but only twice. And
I'm not going to tease too muchabout it, but it's a surprising,
surprising conclusion to carefulwhat you wish for type of thing.
We have interviewed 350plus of the most impactful
(32:49):
authors on this podcast, it's been ahuge honor, prior to today's interview,
I mentioned to someone I wasinterviewing what I thought was the most
consequential novelist of mylifetime, and they asked me who?
And I said your name.And they all say, Hmm,
because I think your books are,
I think your books are a gift. I thinkyour books are inspiring. They're real.
(33:14):
They penetrate our soul aboutwhat our purpose is, our legacy,
our mission. Your mostrecent book, The Little Liar,
invites people to takeaccount of their life,
of their lives and how they are goingto move forward with their character.
I feel like the world's at acrossroads in terms of how we
honor and treat liars versus those who
(33:38):
tell the truth and pay theconsequence and own up to it.
I appreciate you comingon today, Mitch Albom,
eight #1 New York Times bestsellers,40 plus million books sold.
You deserve your success startingwith Tuesdays with Morrie,
now with The Little Liar. Honoredyou joined us, Mitch Albom.
Thanks for coming on today.
(33:59):
It's been a pleasure, Scott.Thanks for having me on.
And we'll see you back here next weekfor a new conversation On Leadership.
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