He reached the end of the conversation, paused for a beat, and said he hadn’t planned to do this.

Then he held up his phone to show us a photograph. A man in a Navy uniform, young, his face carrying something a little unresolved. And John Izzo, who is sixty-eight years old, who has spent four decades studying what makes a human life well-lived and is one of the most respected voices on the subject in the world, looked at that photograph and said: Thank you, Dad, for bringing me into this world. And I want you to know I forgive you.

He had only been ready to put that photograph on his office wall one year earlier.

His father died at thirty-six, of a sudden heart attack, when John was eight years old. His parents had separated when John was six months old. In the entirety of those eight years, his father, who lived two hours away, had come to see him once: apparently when John was about a year old, so young he has no memory of it. Not because he was cruel. Because, as John came to understand far later in life, he simply was not intentional. He did not think deeply enough about the choices he was making.

The grace of that understanding took sixty years to arrive.

There is a pretty good chance they took it as far as they could, he said. And you may never like or appreciate that they could only take it that far. But forgive them if you can, because it is good for you.

I have been sitting with that sentence since the moment he said it.

What shaped him

John Izzo grew up in Staten Island in the late 1950s, in a white working-class neighbourhood of police officers and firemen and boys, many boys, and almost no nature. His mother raised him alongside his grandmother, and his grandfather prayed by the side of his bed each night; his mother prayed too, and told him that life was about service. The Jesus on the wall in their home was a loving, forgiving one. A take-up-your-cross-and-serve-the-world Jesus. Not a punishing one. John says he had no religion to recover from, and I believed him completely.

His mother was, by every account he gave, a woman of unusual moral clarity. One afternoon, young John stole a piece of candy from Mr. Miller’s grocery store. Mr. Miller was bald, severe, feared by every child in the neighbourhood. When his mother spotted the candy, she dragged John three blocks by his ear to the front of that store and made him return it and apologise. He has never forgotten standing at that counter.

She also, without hesitation, said yes when John asked if he could go to dinner at his friend Howie’s house. Howie’s family was Black. No other child in the neighbourhood had been invited inside. His mother’s response was: Why would you ask that question? Of course you can go. And don’t ever ask that question again.

He told me these stories not as anecdotes about himself but as an invitation. Think about your own ground, he said. The humus from which you grew. What are the things that shaped you that you may want to integrate differently? And what are the things you ought to be deeply grateful for?

There was one more thing he told me about his childhood, and it is the detail I keep returning to. In the neighbourhood where he grew up, there was an old retirement home for former Navy sailors. It sat behind a fence, surrounded by a kind of nature that didn’t otherwise exist in that part of New York City. He and his friends used to sneak in. And he would find, inside those grounds, a small stream.

He sat beside it often, a curious boy, alive to something he could not name. He was small enough that it could find him.

The accidental tourist

John has described his entry into the corporate world as accidental, and the description is precise. He had trained as a Presbyterian minister, spending years sitting beside people in their final days, conducting more funerals than most people attend in a lifetime. He watched, in those years, how differently people arrived at the end. Some came to it with a quiet completeness, few regrets, a sense of having lived into themselves. Others came haunted by the life they had not quite managed to live.

The question that generated was simple and became the animating inquiry of everything that followed: why do some people live well and die happy, while others don’t?

When a hostile takeover ended his role as Vice President at a healthcare consulting firm in the early 1990s, he and his colleague Eric Klein, a Buddhist yogi, sat down to write about what they had each been circling from opposite directions. The result was Awakening Corporate Soul, published in 1994. It was, in those days, a genuinely lonely position to take. When a Speakers Bureau recommended him to a major bank as keynote speaker, the senior VP loved the book so much he gave away ten copies. Then he rang to say they would not be booking John. It would not be good for my career, he explained, to suggest a speaker who had the word soul in the title of his book.

John told that story with the ease of a man who has long since had the last laugh, but also with something warmer: genuine affection for how far the conversation has come, and honest humility about how far it has not.

He went on to write nine books across three decades, each one tracking a shift he could see before most others named it. The changing values of working generations. The rise of purpose-driven consumers. The architecture of personal responsibility. But two books sit at the centre of the body of work, and both emerged from a single, sustained act of listening.

Eighteen thousand years of life experience

For The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die, published in 2008, John asked people to nominate the wisest older person they knew. From over two thousand nominations, he selected and interviewed two hundred and fifty of those elders, aged sixty to one hundred and six, across backgrounds that ranged from Holocaust survivors and indigenous chiefs to town barbers and chief executives. He was looking for the signal through the noise.

Across eighteen thousand years of combined life experience, five things kept appearing. Be true to yourself. Leave no regrets. Become love. Live the moment. Give more than you take.

He shared two of them with us on the show, and the way he spoke of them was not like someone reciting conclusions. He spoke like someone who had sat with those people and had his understanding of the world quietly rearranged.

On giving more than you take, he told us about a native chief from the BC coast, a man nominated by others as someone who had found genuine happiness and had something to teach. When this man was fifteen, the salmon were running so abundantly that within an hour and a half, the boat was full. The teenage boys wanted to go straight back out. The father said no. He pointed to the neighbours who were struggling with their nets, and the ones who were struggling with their boat. Why don’t we go and help them so they can have enough?

At fifteen, the son didn’t want to. At the end of that day, what made him most happy was not the catch but the helping. And it is in giving that we receive most deeply, John said. I forgot that story until you asked, but it was beautiful.

On being true to yourself, he extended the idea further than I expected. The original Greek meaning of sin, he told us, is to miss the mark. To miss what you intended your life to be. His observation was that the most authentic self of humanity as a species is to extend and improve life itself, that when we act from that truest self, good things follow. He asked, quietly, whether humanity was acting in accordance with its truest self right now.

He did not wait for an answer. We both knew it.

What he could not sustain

Here is the thing John did not plan to say in the keynote, did not put in the press release, probably hesitated to admit even to himself for a while: after twenty-five years of studying happiness, interviewing elders, speaking to audiences around the world about how to live well, he found he could not sustain it consistently in his own life.

He took ten months away. He has written about walking the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain and living in the Andes of Peru. He was not seeking more information. He was seeking what was underneath information.

What he found were not more secrets. They were thieves. Five patterns that steal happiness from the inside, named in The Five Thieves of Happiness. The compulsion to manage outcomes. The ego’s insistence that our small story is the central story. The belief that what we don’t have is what we need. The equation of acquiring with thriving. The avoidance of discomfort as a life strategy.

He named these not as a researcher reporting findings but as a man who had gone looking for something in himself and found it. The Five Thieves of Happiness is a different kind of book from its predecessor. Quieter. More personal. Written by someone who, after decades of helping others think more carefully about their lives, turned the same question on himself and was startled by what he found.

What the sabbatical represents, in the arc of his work, is an act of honest stopping. A recognition that the gap between what he knew and how he lived had become impossible to ignore. The Camino was not a cure. It was a willingness to stop pretending the gap wasn’t there.

That willingness, as John would say, is itself a form of integrity.

The boy by the stream

Last June, John was in Ireland for a gathering with a poet and a group of people. The poet said something that caught him: What if his work was done and the rest was just gravy?

On a walk that afternoon, John wrote a poem. He read it to us near the end of our conversation, quietly, with no preamble, as if he was reading something private and had decided, in the moment, to let us in.

What if your work is truly done? What if you let go of all the grand ambition that has carried you and tortured you all this way? Surely, surely more has come to you than you could have reasonably expected, yet always seemingly so much less than you had unreasonably longed for. What if you just lived more generously, became again that warm, inviting, curious boy who once sat by a tiny stream alive to the sacred beauty of tiny things? What if you became small enough that the world could find you again, whether you needed it to or not?

The boy by the stream in Staten Island, sneaking into the sailors’ home because it was the only place he could find real nature. That boy, at sixty-eight, writing a poem about what it might mean to become him again.

John is recording songs now, working on a novel, doing daily videos, continuing to speak. He told me honestly that he is waiting for the current of what comes next to be strong enough to carry him out. Something is forming. He doesn’t know its shape yet. He is being patient with the not-knowing, which he acknowledged is its own kind of practice, and not an easy one.

I said to him, watching him, that I wasn’t sure he was waiting so much as already following a current. He paused. Maybe, he said.

What the question has cost and given

John has spoken with great care throughout his career about the men he has worked with through the Men’s Initiative at UBC, later named Blueprint. He co-founded it with his friend and colleague David Kuhl, motivated by two things that were, for him, inseparable: the evidence that men and boys were struggling in measurable ways, falling behind across education, relationships, health, and mental wellbeing, and the honest acknowledgement that so much of what has gone wrong in the world has been perpetuated, disproportionately, by men.

He shared a story he has carried for years, told to him by an African American man who grew up in the Bronx. This man’s brother was killed as a teenager. The family drove out to Long Island to bury him. On the long drive back, the women wanted to stop for a rest. It was just the young boy and his father left alone in the car. The father, who had not cried at all during the burial, began to wail. What the boy remembered were two things: his father kept apologising for crying. And he kept praising his son for being so strong.

John was making a point about how much men hold inside. But the story went somewhere deeper than a point. It landed as a kind of grief, for all the fathers who could not cry in front of their children until they were alone on the drive home, and all the sons who were praised for not flinching.

The work John describes, helping men find permission to speak, to name what they are carrying, to sit in a room with other men and say this is where I am not aligned with who I want to be, was not therapy. He was clear about that. It was human work. Work that happened to be most urgently needed in the rooms where men gathered.

He told me that most of his closest friends are now men, which surprised him and would probably surprise anyone who met him in his thirties, when his closest friends were almost all women. He found his way into the company of men, and found comfort there. He speaks about male loneliness with unusual directness: the number of men who die within two to five years of losing a spouse, who had only one person in the world with whom they were fully real. He names that not as a comment on helplessness but on isolation. On the cost of a life where you have never told the full truth to a single other person.

What he is asking us to see

John describes himself as a public philosopher, and the description is careful. He said something early in our conversation that I wrote down immediately: that everything, at every fractal level, is a manifestation of the inner life. What individuals produce is an expression of their inner life. What organisations produce is an expression of theirs. What humanity is producing right now, the wars, the fracturing of trust, the deteriorating relationship with the earth, is the collective manifestation of our collective inner life.

He said this plainly, without drama, the way someone says a thing they have been thinking about for a very long time and have finally found words for.

The wars and the social fracture and the relationship with the planet are not separate problems to be solved with better policy or better technology, though both may help. They are symptoms. And the question he has been asking since he was a young minister sitting beside people who were dying, the question about what it means to live well and why so few of us do it, turns out to be the same question, taken to scale.

What would it mean for a society to be its most authentic self? What would it mean for a species?

He is still asking. He has never stopped.

Taken a little further

At the end of our conversation, John held up his father’s photograph in a Navy uniform. He spoke quietly, directly, looking at it, and then at us.

He said his father was not a bad man. He was not evil. He just wasn’t intentional. He did not think deeply enough about the choices he was making. And now, at sixty-eight, John has spent his entire adult life helping others do exactly what his father could not: consider their choices before they become the shape of a life. He said, without performance, that he thought he had taken it a little further than his father. And he hoped that every person he had ever met would take it a little further than him.

Not perfect, he said. But a little further. And if you do that, then you’ve done something good in the world.

This is the kind of leadership our moment requires.

It is the kind of leadership Sincerely was built to honour.

A note on the conversation

This episode runs for nearly an hour and a half. It is unhurried and wide-ranging, moving from John’s ministry years to his mother returning stolen candy, from indigenous wisdom and the fractal nature of happiness to democracy and the men he watched learn to grieve. John is a remarkable presence: warm, genuinely funny, philosophically serious without ever being remote. There is a moment near the very end when he holds up his father’s photograph that I suspect many people will need to watch twice.

There is no hurry. The library is always here.

Three things John said I am still sitting with

“And again, at every fractal level for individuals, including myself, because we all take people on the journey we most need to go on.”

“What if you became small enough that the world could find you again, whether you needed it to or not?”

“There is a pretty good chance they took it as far as they could. Forgive them if you can, because it is good for you. And all I hope is that I will help the next generation take it just a little further.”

About Dr. John Izzo

John B. Izzo, PhD, is an author, speaker, and public philosopher whose work spans forty years and six continents. He is the author of nine books, including The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die and The Five Thieves of Happiness, both international bestsellers. He has spoken to more than one million people and advised over five hundred organisations, including IBM, Apple, Microsoft, the Mayo Clinic, and Qantas. He is adjunct professor and co-founder of the Men’s Initiative at UBC, a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center, and co-host of the podcast The Way Forward. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.Find John: drjohnizzo.com · LinkedIn · YouTube · Facebook

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