John Romaniello is an author, angel investor, media personality, and consultant who helps entrepreneurs improve communication skills and increase revenue through writing. Well-known across multiple industries, John is one of the most highly regarded experts in the fitness industry and hundreds of articles covering topics from business and marketing to fitness and self-development, in publications from Men’s Health to Fast Company. He’s also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Engineering the Alpha. Today we have a vulnerable conversation with John about finding beauty in adversity and how he leant into fitness to create an alter ego and psychology that moved him towards living out a different story.
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Gary Bertwistle: Our guest this week, John Romanello, is an author and an angel investor who consults to entrepreneurs, the people who want to improve their communication skills and potentially increase their revenues through writing. John is very well known across a lot of different industries, having written hundreds of articles covering topics like business, marketing, fitness and self-development.
It really is all about helping entrepreneurs build and scale businesses through writing and branding. As with a lot of successful people that we've had here on the show, it's not been a comfortable journey for John. But, as you'll hear, he'll tell how he uses his past challenges as fuel to help us all make our own dent in the universe. John, welcome to the Inspiring Lives Podcast.
John Romanello: Thank you so much for having me. I'm very happy to be here.
Gary Bertwistle: John, when do you meet somebody, how do you like to describe what you do?
John Romanello: That is the question I've been trying to answer at every Thanksgiving since about 2009. I think that the true test of an entrepreneur is if your family can accurately describe what you do for a living, you have either succeeded to an extent very few people ever will or your job is not nearly as impressive or as cool as you think it is. But I've gotten better at this because of the character limits imposed on dating app bios, and so I can't be as long winded as I once was.
So the easiest way to describe it is, I am an author. I write books and tell stories. And in addition to that, I own a consulting company that helps everyone from entrepreneurs and influencers to mid-sized companies scale their businesses and streamline operations. But, most importantly, I help people see the value of the written word and ideally make more money doing it.
Gary Bertwistle: So, John, there's no doubt your life has seen a lot of change and you are now helping people to make change. And if I'd take you right back, when you were a kid, there was a day where you looked in the mirror and you said you saw a chubby kid but on this particular day you decided to make a change. Why was that day different? Why did you step in and actually take action that day as opposed to the day prior where you were a chubby kid and did nothing?
John Romanello: That's a great question. So this was when I was 19 years old and it was, I believe, the end of my freshman year at university. And there was just as mismatch and I'd always been what you would call a thick kid. I'd always had a heavy musculature and not a high degree of leanness. But when I was in high school, I played sports and so it was mitigated by my activity level. And I think that it just took that amount of time from beginning that semester or beginning in August of that year up until I guess it was April and May to just slowly add enough weight that the visual difference was striking.
And if I recall, the thing that did it was… I was really at the time, and still now, I was very much into a pop punk and emo music, bands like new Found Glory and Less Than Jake, et cetera, and so I had gone home for spring break and come back to school. And while I was home, I put together a box of clothing to bring back the university. And I was getting ready to go out and I put on a Less Than Jake tee shirt. It was a light blue tee shirt and I'll never forget the styling of the way that the band's name had been written.
And it was the way that shirt fit in particular, because it was a light colored shirt, the way that it hugged my body. And so I think that with anything else, distance gives you a type of objectivity and so when you see yourself in the mirror every day you're not noticing the changes because they're gradual. But when someone hasn't seen you for a while and they see you that's the big change. When you go on a weight loss journey and you look at your before picture relative to an after picture 12 weeks later.
And so this shirt had, I had a previously existing reference point for it of feeling like I looked good in the shirt, which I had not worn at that point for maybe 10 months. And now putting it on and seeing for the first time things have changed, it had just escalated to the point where now it created a new visual reference point that really just created that inciting event.
Gary Bertwistle: It's interesting because you just mentioned that you naturally had quite a thick set physique and at some point you stepped into bodybuilding and that became successful for you. What I'm curious about is what did bodybuilding bring to your world that helped you cope with some of the drama you faced in your childhood? What gap did that fill for you?
John Romanello: A few things. Firstly, bodybuilding, it is a sport of great discipline but also predictable outcomes. It is very repetitive and if you are dedicated to it and you give to it, your outcomes will be pretty predictable with regard to if you follow the diet well you're going to get leaner, if you do the training you're going to get bigger. Particularly if you have what I would say is genetic privilege. But with regard to the deeper stuff, having grown up in an abusive household, there was this feeling of wanting to be safe.
On the top level, my 19 and 20 year old lizard brain is this sort of sex brain. I very much equated it to I want to get fit or I want to look better or I want to be more successful with women. And that was certainly there. But if you dig deeper into the psychology of the wound that I had been given when I was younger, it was very much a feeling of wanting to be safe in my own body. And being bigger and stronger not only created an armor and a weapon that was capable of absorbing a lot of damage and dealing a lot of damage, it also created this outwardly aggressive image of someone you would not want to attack.
But on a deeper level than that, you get to that inner child who had grown up feeling completely out of control, even with regard to his own body. And being able to shape and mold my own corporeal form, to bend it to my will and make it look the way I wanted it to look, that was a type of reclamation of the control that had been taken from me my entire childhood. And so it really… bodybuilding served these three purposes. It served this top level ego-driven purpose like the sex and vanity which was, if you look back over the course of my career, that's very much what a lot of the writing was about.
But then it also made me feel safe and then also gave me back this...It inverted my trauma in a way, and so it really healed me on those three levels. It provided that tri-factor of things, which is why I took to it so much and it didn't just become the thing that I did. Bodybuilding was not a thing that I did. A body builder was a thing that I was, and for being very long time it was a big part of my personal identity and my sense of self.
Gary Bertwistle: I'm going to pull on a few different threads here, but before I go into the identity part of it you just talked about the physical abuse you faced as a kid. And I don't really want to spend too much time here, but I do have a question about it because… And I don't want to underplay this because it actually got pretty bad. I mean, you had a collapsed lung.
You actually had a cracked skull so this is serious physical abuse, yet you've said that at that point you felt like you should downplay it. Why did you downplay it? Why were you masking it in your own mind? And did bodybuilding help in some way to take this mask off that physical abuse?
John Romanello: Down playing it in my own life as it happened and immediately after in those preteen and teenage years, that late adolescence, that felt necessary for my survival. When you grow up in an abusive household, you are taught to lie and to hide it and to protect your abusers and that just gets built into your consciousness and your programming. And then even removed from that situation, when my mother and I were no longer living with my father and I was no longer in the immediacy of physical danger and there wasn't this feeling of if I tell I'll get in trouble and this will happen again, you've also got this shame pre-installed around it.
And as a 37 year old man sitting here, the idea of looking at a 13-year-old boy and hearing him say something like, “I don't want anyone to know that my dad kicked the crap out of me because that makes me look bad or stupid or weird or weak,” I would obviously hold that young man and tell him that none of it was his fault and it was okay. But as the 13 year old boy, you're just filled with shame that your life is full of this hurricane. It's this whirlwind and there's this terrible thing and you're comparing yourself to the seemingly docile home lives and the seemingly very loving fathers of your friends.
And you can't feel anything other than sad that you don't have that and shame about what you do have, and so you downplay it. And like all who've experienced trauma you learn, or I learned, to bury it deeper and deeper. Not to bury the things that happened to me but bury the person to whom they have happened. And it would take a really long time to unpack those. And then later when I began writing and was becoming a public person in the fitness industry and then eventually moving into the entrepreneurial space, et cetera, to whatever degree I can claim to have some low level of notoriety, it wasn't overly relevant at the time.
Because viewing it now through 2019 eyes, I didn't perhaps see the opportunity in 2010 to really start the conversation and help a lot of people feel safer by saying I have gone through this as well. And the shame and everything attached to it with regard to the things that have happened to you, you can't just shut it off. It's a degradation over time. It's a slow erosion of the feeling that what happened is your fault or makes you wrong; that if this person who hurt could do that, if this person who supposedly loved you could crack your skull and break a rib and collapse your lung, then what might the rest of the world do to you if they knew that such things were doable? It almost felt like inviting more.
Gary Bertwistle: I think it's a really important conversation, John, because I think we all carry scars or wounds of some sort. And the way you described it, I heard you say that you were broken, you were shattered like glass, which I thought was a really visual, contextual way of framing where you're at. And I'm just wondering, with that shattered glass that you were, and you've now gone about putting that back together again, if you are near that bag of shattered glass today how do you protect yourself today from getting cut? Because you had a lot to deal with. But today when I bring it up, when you think about it in a quiet moment, how do you protect yourself today from going back and being wounded by that shattered glass?
John Romanello: I think that exposure is the only thing that can give you the real safety. If you look at any traumatic experience as this item that's in this, and the metaphor that I like to use this is as you said a velvet bag with a shattered item in it, over time the handling of those pieces of glass they get dolled like sea glass. You also develop a familiarity with them and learn their shape, learn how not to cut yourself and there's also more and more distance. The more you change, the more work you do, the more evolution there, the further along in your own evolution you go.
I have created the objectivity where I can look now at the things that have happened through a different lens. And not only do I not feel the fear of them or the dread of them, I no longer really identify as the person to whom they happened. And when you really court and create the objectivity that I have, it allows you to look at the people on the other side and your abusers and make them characters in this story. And characters need back stories. Monsters are not just monsters. There are very few people in life or trolls or gremlins or ogres who just by their very nature, are there to harrow the unsuspecting people of the world.
We are, all of us, creatures of the same star stuff and however we've gotten to where we are is why we are the way we are. And when I was born, it simply was not the case that somebody placed me in my father's arms and he looked down at his newborn son and thought to himself, “Man, I cannot wait to crack this kid skull open.” That's not a thing. And so it's not until much later in life through healing through storytelling, healing through plant medicine, healing through therapy, that I was able to step back and take myself out of it and no longer be that seven year old boy who was in that situation.
But rather look at the character on the other side of the screen and I think, “What must have happened to my father? What must he have gone through? What series of events must have created the reference points for violence that he, when angry, could be led internally emotionally to the decision that beating his seven year old son and hospitalizing him was the appropriate response?" And so when you look at it like that, I'm able to feel great empathy for him because that's a tremendous amount of pain you have to be in.
Hurt people, hurt people, and you have to be an overwhelming amount of pain to respond to any stimulus by harming a child. As to how I feel, I don't feel unsafe. I don't feel the danger of having most of these discussions. I've worked through a lot of them and at this point they're just things that have happened to a person I no longer am. And then in my day to day life, I have processed enough of the trauma and working through it. It really for the longest time, especially once I had done the bodybuilding thing, once I had walked around at 200 pounds and I had done that for enough years, where my experience of the world was that every person I encountered looked at me with either awe or as though I was a threat.
I had wrestled and I had taken TaeKwonDo and some Brazilian Jujitsu and I felt physically safe from the outside world in my own body. The greatest danger to me was me, the mental health stuff that was going on - my propensity to fall into deep states of depression and potentially have suicidal ideation. But less fatally but certainly as deleterious to my life was the ingrained patterns I have to harm myself through acting out and the behaviors that I enacted which inculcated all sorts of really terrible repercussions in my personal life. Things from infidelity to what I would now categorize, possibly if not sex addiction then certainly treating sex as a numbing agent.
And the decisions behind those behaviors, very clearly now in retrospect, are the decisions of a person who doesn't know how to it exist without a wound or who simply does not believe they deserve to be happy. And all people who suffer trauma, once they are no longer in danger from that trauma in a physical sense, they're in great danger from themselves and their own coping mechanisms.
Gary Bertwistle: If I could ask you about a coping mechanism, and this is something you've said a couple of times already during the show… I'll just set this up. I interviewed Todd Herman who wrote the Alter Ego Effect about creating alter egos, one of my favorite interviews of all time because I really buy into the concept. And if I sum up the alter ego effect for people who may not have heard Todd or had the privilege of reading his book, it's about creating a character with a human or a character is that an animal, whatever it might be, that you relate to their identity and character.
They take you beyond perceived barriers or things that may be getting in the way because you step into that alter ego and it says, “Well, let's talk B. What are those characteristics? Beyonce is stepping on stage as Sasha Fierce and so on.”
I've heard you say a few times during the show, “I don't identify with that person”, “I wasn't bodybuilding, I was a bodybuilder.” Then you just said, “I'm a person who would.” I'm just curious about your view of alter egos, because one thing you did say in an interview you talked about when you were bodybuilding you were almost putting on armor.
Did you have that conscious alter ego idea? With that, I articulate it the way that Todd does, did you have that alter-ego concept in your mind as a coping mechanism? Do you still do that today? How do you qualify the things you've talked about in terms of identity with alter-ego? Was it a conscious thing for you?
John Romanello: And so I think that, like anything else, there is a way to do something that is conscious and therefore it can be wielded judiciously and for great benefit. And then there's the other side of it, which is if it is unconscious and you are not aware of it, it can become damaging. And when I was younger, 21, 22, and I got into the fitness industry, slipping into the character of Roman, that was the alter ego. I felt safe. In those early internet days of 2003 when less of your life was online and you really only had to show people exactly what you wanted.
And so this character of Roman who did not have trauma, who was this good looking Jack, shredded, happy go lucky, New York email… all of the things. All of the skills that I accrued to make myself feel like I was worthwhile, flipping into that character was easy. And he wasn't just an alter ego. He was almost an automaton that I could inhabit, this thing that would keep me safe. And this was all unconscious. And it wasn't until much later when I really started to do the work and actively separate that I realized the shield that I had created with Roman by only showing the most positive aspects of my personage.
Because the best lies are the ones that are based on truth, and everything about Roman was real. Some of it was a little and a little bit exaggerated and he wasn't as happy as he made out, but there was so much that was held back. Once I began to share more and more about who John is that made me want to do that to a greater degree and I was able to set that robot down. But the more that I have done the work in terms of really deep psychological, cognitive behavioral therapy, plant medicine, meditation, I have begun to look at the recipe for a human being, the identity of a human and your ego.
And I don't mean ego in the sense of either way people use it pejoratively to discuss arrogance or conceit or vanity, I mean the actual part of your psyche that recognizes itself as an independent entity, your sense of who you are as a me. And the recipe for that is all of the things that have happened to you so the content of your life, the history, and then the way that you relate to it. And that structure, that ego structure, that context that crystallizes early on, usually around a wound. And everything that you do, the programming gets pushed through that lens.
And when I say things like ‘I'm no longer that person' it's because I have actively distanced myself from and broken down all of the component pieces of that ego and stepped away from it. And now after having restructured then, I don't really identify as the person who went through a lot of these things. You undergo this change. Well, Todd talks about the alter ego effect and that's sort of a light switch or this costume, in Todd's case these glasses that he can put on to be, Todd the presenter or the bracelet that he puts on to become Todd the father.
These totems, I think that that is a conscious decision wielded truly accurately but it's top level. At the deeper level who you are, that piece itself, it is more fictile and malleable than perhaps people think. And with the directed insight and the directed work to cultivate objectivity and get a clear view of exactly what that ego is, you can then begin to make changes to it because you are less attached to it. And that has been my work over the past 18 months or so.
Gary Bertwistle: If I extend that, John, another coping mechanism you talk about, and this is something you did and what I'm curious about is whether you would suggest it as a coping mechanism today to someone who was going through something similar. You said that when you were bodybuilding it gave you a sense of self worth, which you've covered. But also what you said to yourself, “I can be the best at this and that will be enough.” Is that what you did back then with how you approached bodybuilding to say, “I can control this. There are certain processes systems I can put in place. I control this and I can be the best at this, which would give me self-worth and that would be something.”
Is that a frame that you would recommend to someone who is, maybe not exactly the same situation, but trying to recover from something, trying to find this new identity, trying to leave the shattered glass behind? Is that something you would recommend and talk someone through today?
John Romanello: I'll answer that question, but I want to first say that my answer is entirely immaterial because whatever advice I would give to that person I'm almost certain would not be heeded. I like to say that wisdom is the lesson you need right after you need it. And when a person is coming from a background of trauma or they, for whatever reason, don't have a strong sense of self worth, whatever it is that they latch onto that they believe will give them that, it has been my experience they need to pursue that and they need to learn the lesson of its hollowness for themselves.
There are no combination of words, nothing I can say, to tell a person who truly believes that making a million dollars is going to fill the hole in them. They need to just make the million dollars and then when they get there and that goal post moves to two million or five million, or whatever it is, then, they can make the decision for themselves. And some people never do. Some people just keep going and chasing the money and it's never enough. But you can't reason a person out of a position or belief they didn't reason themselves into.
And to just close that loop with just yet another aphorism, there are so many things that could not be taught but nothing that could not be learned. And most people will only embody that lesson after learning it, and they have to learn it on their own. There's nothing that I can say to a person who believes that having six pack abs is going to make them happy that having six pack abs won't make them happy. The only thing I can do is help them get the six pack abs and along the way the teaching them questions to ask and ways to self-audit and ways to maintain the thing. You can't tell people that the grass isn't greener until they're standing. It's human nature.
Gary Bertwistle: Something you had mentioned at the head of the show, you talked about your writing as part of what you do today. And you've become really well known for not just the content but also your style of writing, which is excellent. In a blog you wrote, “Three things I hate and still do.” And one of those things you talked about was writing by hand. Do you still do that? Is that something you step into?
John Romanello: Yes. The reason that I hate writing by hand is because I have terrible handwriting. And because I identify so strongly as a writer and I have this new fascination with historical writers, I have this thing where I'm comparing like my griffonage, this chicken scratch, to the beautiful flowing hands of Alexander Hamilton or whomever. And it's something that I actively try to work... If I really put in the effort, I can keep my handwriting neat. And I'd like to send handwritten Thank You cards and little notes to people, but it really does take considerable effort, physical and mental, to make it what I would consider it to be attractive.
And I acknowledge in this moment that the disconnect is... This is where my ego lives, right? Because I regard myself as a very fine writer. And to have the visibility of that be so ugly and the words themselves be so pretty and well-considered feels like a disconnect. And it just feels like if I'm an exceptional writer my handwriting should be exceptional. You eat with your eyes and I want the readability and the visibility of it to match the messaging. But as far as writing by hand as a daily practice, there are so many reasons to do it from greater retention to ease of communication. You don't hit backspace when you write by hand, you just keep going. And it's a much more effective way to outline, so I write by hand every day.
Gary Bertwistle: That's interesting. You just mentioned some of the great writers historically. And when I was listening and reading a lot of your stuff, it's really ironic you should mention it because somebody who came to mind for me that I wanted to ask you about was Maya Angelou who was a wonderful poet, activist, radio host, author. And my Angelou loved words and she said, “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deep meaning.” And Maya Angelou was someone who greatly valued words, who had her own traumatic back story. You seem to have the same love of words, John. You seem to share that same view of have precious words and how they come together, their meaning, how they look. Is that fair?
John Romanello: I'm not certain that I would ever dame to put myself alongside Miss Angelou in any category, but we do share the same opinion and love of words. Yes.
Gary Bertwistle: So somebody hears this, understands that love of words, wants to get started. Something I heard you say which I thought was really cool is that anyone who gets familiar with your own process for writing, one thing you advised was to lower the stakes. Is that when you are talking to somebody about writing, storytelling, getting their first book out? Is that still something that you, today, think is an important part as to lower the stakes?
John Romanello: Yeah. I think that… Oh God, I forget who said this. This is a great quote, and for the life of me I cannot remember the source. It's ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people'. And when I say lower the stakes, I'm not advising people like don't try to get your book published. It's just that is the piece of advice that I give to get people out of their heads. In the War of Art, Steven Pressfield says that there's a secret real writers know that wannabe writers don't. And the secret is this it, what's hard is not writing. What's hard sitting down to write.
And every writer I know at some point experiences this stoppage where they just can't get words on the page, and we have all of these blocks in our head and we're judging the words as they come up. And the more emotional weight we give to the project or the page or the thing or whatever it is, the harder it is to push through the resistance and right because we are telling ourselves we're living in this story that the writing has to be great, that it has to be brilliant. But it doesn't. The writing just has to be done. And so lowering the stakes can mean writing by hand instead of writing on the computer.
So many people when they sit down to type and they're looking at a blinking cursor on a blank document, there is something terrifying about that because it feels like this is work. Whereas if they are asked a question about that same topic by a friend in a text message, they could sit there and set their thumbs to tapping and in 20 minutes write 800 eloquent words. But they couldn't do that in five hours staring at the screen. And so lowering the stakes is really about getting out of your own way and creating circumstances under which you can write without telling yourself that you can't.
Gary Bertwistle: It may, for you, be conscious or unconscious. If I look through your career this far, writing, fitness, business, entrepreneurialism, bodybuilding, resilience, wellness, fashion, Pat Flynn who wrote How To Be Better At Almost Everything talks about skill stacking. And it's not becoming an expert but it's becoming very, very good at a particular discipline that you can stack on top of other disciplines so that you have a lot of different things as a generalist to call upon and you can start to combine things. And I think David Epstein talked about the same thing in his more recent book called Range where you become a generalist as opposed to a specialist.
Gary Bertwistle: Was that conscious for you? And what's the next skill that you want to stack on top of what you know? What's the next thing you want to learn to become good at to allow you to have a broader range of things the generalist to be able to call upon to write and share?
John Romanello: I don't believe that it was conscious. I think, maybe, I lucked out. Having spent so much time in the fitness world and trained a lot of athletes, I have had the pleasure of seeing people who were at the absolute top 1% of 1% in the world at a highly specific skill that has absolutely no benefit outside of a particular context. Right? Like you're training a world-class hockey player and you take them off. When is he ever going to need to know how to skate backwards really, really fast? That is a skill that is only good in one context. And that goes for pretty much most of that sport.
And when you look at more global gross mechanical processes, running, jumping, sprinting, swimming, those things have a lot of utility elsewhere. And I look at everything in life from that perspective. I was very lucky to fall in love with words, particularly with writing and storytelling, because no matter what I do those have carryover. Storytelling is a truly priceless skill. It makes you a better parents. If you're teaching something to your child, it makes you a better teacher. It makes you a better coach, a better consultant. It certainly allows you to be a better writer. It makes you a more interesting date.
It helps you be a better friend. And it also… Becoming proficient at storytelling helps you become more analytical about stories and you can enjoy television and film and books more and have greater conversations about them. Writing is something we do every day between Facebook and Instagram and email, et cetera. It's the way that we communicate. There are so many skills that have tremendous utility, I think coding for example. If I were to answer this question and sort of what skill could I develop or possess that would probably make me a generalist is the greatest leverageable asset, it would be understanding coding.
That would just help in so many things and in the way that I'm able to experience the world of technology. My baseline level of niche is so low that that would be a very, very long journey. But it's something like… Or learning another language. Beyond that, it's challenging for me to say. But I think skills that… there are so many things that I do regularly, marketing or branding, that I could get better at. But if we're talking about new skills that I would pick up, that would be stackable with everything else I've already done, I would probably say that coding has got to be the one.
Gary Bertwistle: It's funny. When I hear you during this interview and read about the stuff that you've written or hear on interviews, you're a very visual guy because you said you like whiskey because you liked how it looked in the glass. And anyone who looks at your Instagram feed will say it's very visual. It's obviously important for how you physically look, how you put fashion together. Your clothes are important. And you've mentioned the word ‘how it looks' and I could see a lot through this interview. Is that part of your writing process, John? Do you need to be able to sit down and see exactly that picture in your mind before you commit it to words?
John Romanello: No. No. No, it's the opposite. It's part of the editing process, not the writing process, to optimize readability. It's an interesting duality of when I read something out loud I want the tonality of it and the tempo of it to have a certain flow. I'm certainly not writing an iambic pentameter but I do want there to be, if not a musicality to it I do want the cadence to be evocative of emotions so there's a sound quality to it. But looking at it on the page, it's actually not just important artistically and visually for me. There's a practical element to it. Now that we are spending so much time reading on our screens, creating high readability of the content just makes sure that people will consume it.
And so I want it to be attractive. I want it to be pretty. I want the fonts to be crisp. I want the words to flow well, orderly. And I want there to be minimal redundancy except when it's intentional. Again, I love words. I love the way they feel in my mouth. I love the way they look on paper. I love finding sentences and just thinking, “This is a great written sentence. This feels really good. You can read it in your head, saying it out loud wouldn't work.” I love to play with assonance. I love to play with alliteration. I love the way that it looks and the way that it sounds and I really…
Yeah, so the visual presentation of the content is very, very important to me but I don't start with that. It's where I end up. It's the final of five editing steps that creating great readability.
Gary Bertwistle: See, you're a visual-auditory guy. Obviously, those two senses work. And I'm going to just flip across to something you said earlier in the show and pick up on the tonality word. You said that as part of your misspent youth you would deepen what you call the scene, the music scene. And that was time where you prototypically loved the early 2000 era of pop punk and emo bands, which you said earlier like Blink 182, Dashboard Confessional, Brand New. Then you said, “Nothing feels real for me until I write about it. So I did. Over time, I turned out to be a dab hand as a lyricist and committed more songs to my journal than I can possibly count.” The question I've got for you is what's the song, that if I played the song and listen to the lyric, best sums up who John Romanello is?
John Romanello: John Romanello is right now? Oh, that's impossible. So what I will say is… Oh God, this is so challenging. This music was so important to me during my formative years and I fully believe that Brand New is the greatest indie rock band of all time. And in particular their sophomore album Deja Entendu is quite possibly the album of all time, or at least it is to me. And even now, going back to that album, listening to individual tracks, I can see myself growing and maturing through the track list. A lot of that record is very outwardly whiny or at least like brooding melancholy, this person hurt me, and that is very much where I was in my early 20s.
And then there's later tracks which are very evocative of the lamination of getting older and the power of nostalgia and feeling like you want to stay young forever. So, there are so many songs that bring you back to a specific place that's the power of music. And to find one song that sums up who I am now in this moment would be so, so very challenging because I don't really listen to a lot of music that's being produced right now with the exception of some EDM. And so my playlist is stuck in 2003 and most of the songs, typical of that genre, are very adolescent and they're full of either blame or self-loathing or both.
And so as I view myself now, I'm more sealed and developed 37 year old man. There's not a lot that I personally identify with and when I listen to those I'm listening with the heart and ears of a younger person. But there's no anger in me the way there once was. There's no anger. There's no resentment and blame for the things that didn't go my way or the people who left. And given that, I think if we had to swing over then it would be like Dashboard or Jimmy Eat World who have written songs that I would say are happier and they might hold up more appropriately.
But, yeah, it's a really challenging question because the misalignment of the message of so many of the songs which I so strongly identified versus who I am now is a vast gulf. And it's interesting, because I got of a child of the ‘90s and early 2000s and when I listen to the late ‘90s or early 2000s gangster rap, when I listened to Snoop Dogg, I have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to allow for the blatant overt misogyny to not affect me and to just be like, “It's just a good song.”
And so it's a really interesting thing. But, yeah, I don't know. I will think on that question. It will be my writing prompt for tomorrow, to find a song that I love and with which I identify in this moment.
Gary Bertwistle: You can come back to me.
John Romanello: It's possibly Taylor Swift. It might be a Taylor Swift song.
Gary Bertwistle: Just to close this out, a couple of quick things. Something that I find with your journey now, John, and hearing you talk is you seem to have this deep desire to be of service to others in many different forms. And I'm just curious to know with all the people you meet now, you interact with, things you see, people you have conversations with, what you hear, what's a hidden fear that you think is inside people that's not discussed enough?
John Romanello: Do you ask everyone that question? You should, it's a good one. I was going to cheat and ask for a couple of other answers. A hidden fear, I don't think it's that hidden. I think deep down we are all afraid that we're not going to be accepted for who we are. And then one layer below that, we project the importance of other people's opinions and/or we magnify the importance of other people's opinions. And fueling that fear that we won't be accepted as we are is this belief that it matters. Because even if it were true that we would not be accepted as we are by other people, that doesn't have to matter. You can accept yourself as you are.
We've all got a core wound. We all have this thing that happened to us and it doesn't have to be massive trauma, the kind I went through. It can be something as simple as I fear abandonment because I have a younger brother and as soon as he was gone all of the attention that I was accustomed to receiving was now given to him. And so, whatever it is. Our ego crystallizes around some sort of core wound and at the heart of it though all wounds are the same wound. We are afraid that we are not worthy of love. And digging to that level is challenging because, first, you have to dig through the top layer stuff which is why do I feel like no matter what I achieve I'm not as good as other people. Why can't I except praise?
And you ping pong around and finally you get to this core wound that we're fundamentally terrified that we're not okay as we are. A lot of my work right now is talking about the stuff that men need to speak about and it's we are conditioned or socialized to be achievement based, to win love and validation and respect through the things we achieve, the school we go, to the car we drive, the job we have, the money we make, the women we’re intimate with.
And we are taught this. No boy is born with this installed in their head. And then we're taught this, we exhibit this and then the world turns on us and tells us that we're not good because we behave this way. And so the thing is none of us know how to be. We're so terrified to do the wrong thing and we're told that doing the wrong thing is truly dangerous. We are raised in this binary where if you're not winning you're losing, where doing the wrong thing is tantamount to failing. And we're terrified of it and we're terrified of just being wrong. And since you can't always be right, that just equates to being terrified of just being and being yourself and saying, “I don't know.”
And I think that the more you dig in and begin to detach from that, let's say it's where you can begin to feel. Because if you did that in the community, if you do that with a tribe, if you do that in ceremony, if you do that over time and slowly get more and more vulnerable while at the same time allowing the people around you to do the same, then, you'll see that we have the same fear. But the biggest thing is always ask yourself, “This thing that I'm afraid of, this fear that I have, this fear of people judging me, do I judge other people the way I'm afraid of them judging me? Am I worried?”
It's like I spent so much time thinking if… I don't know. Men have a lot of money shames though… Well, people have a lot of money shames. Like if I admit that some restaurant is too expensive for me for where I am in my life right now, are my friends going to reject me? Just ask yourself, “Would you reject them for that ridiculous fucking thing?” Of course not. No. But, we just invert and project and we're just afraid people won't accept us and so we just keep trying to achieve.
Gary Bertwistle: Just to close this out, I spoke with Akshay Nanavati who served in the military. He has written a book of recent times called Fearvarna and he said that he finds beauty in adversity. And it was such a beautiful saying and I think it's something that kind of relates to your journey so far, John. And what I wanted to close out with is that even as an eight year old child with all the abuse you faced you still had dreams. And you've talked about the fact that it's an eight year old, even with all that going on, you found the time. And there's beauty in that, that with all your faced you still had that time to sit down and believe in dreams. Do you remember what your dreams were back at that time?
John Romanello: By dreams, do you actually mean what was happening in my psyche when I was asleep or more like my daydreams, my hopes, my fantasies, et cetera?
Gary Bertwistle: Hopes and fantasy.
John Romanello: I mean, I spent a lot of time wanting to fight dragons. That was a big thing for me really like deep, deep in Dungeons and Dragons as Zelda and really just hoping… I was the kid who prayed for something very similar to a zombie apocalypse and I knew in my heart that I was the chosen one and that when it came to it I would be the one to stand against the vampires, the zombies, the werewolves and unraveling them. That took a long time to get over that, one, it wasn't going to happen and that, two, I'm probably not the guy. One of my favorite quotes is Neil Stevenson in a book called Snow Crash and he says until a man is about 25 years old he still thinks every so often that under the right set of circumstances he could be the baddest mother alive.
And I think that for children of trauma, you create this fantasy world for yourself to inhabit because there has to be a reason, there has to be a reason you're going through all of this stuff, and it has to be because you're destined for great things. Like, you're being toughened up for something. But when I was a kid, crazy, I just wanted to be happy. I just wanted to feel safe and be happy. And for me, books became the thing. And this is the thing that gets told in all these interviews about my story and particularly as a writer. When I was eight years old, I told my mother I wanted to write a book and she asked me why and I said, “Because books make me happy and I want to make other people happy.”
And that's really adorable if you leave it at that. But when you look at that in context and you realize that books were a form of escapism for me and they were the way that I could cope with everything that was going on around me, I really formed this attachment to the idea of creating stories to make other… The language that I had at eight years old was make other people happy. But if you dig deep under that, what it really was helping other people feel safe, give them somewhere to go when being at home was too scary. And my dreams when I was eight were of not being scared.
And in particular, whether it was zombies or vampires or dragons, it was having the strength to stand up to the monsters of my fantasies because I was powerless to stand up to the monster in my own home. And this is the kind of stuff you really only get to years and years and years later when you've done the work. But I was told, from a very young age, that I was going to grow up and be a doctor or a lawyer or use my intellect to make money for the family, et cetera. And in my own time in bed, in the wolf hours of the night when I was sitting there waiting for the next eruption, all I wanted to do was tell stories.
And I have taken a very circuitous windy road to get to that point and I'm very, very happy and cannot feel anything other than grateful for every step along the way because I get to do just that. And every time I tell the story, every time I help people learn to tell a story, I'm not just giving them a gift I'm receiving one. And what I do now, the way I use stories to help people, is healing for that little boy.
Gary Bertwistle: Could it be that by telling those stories you are, in fact, fighting dragons for yourself and for others? And could it be that today you still see yourself as being the chosen one who is out there not only helping yourself but also helping other people fight their dragons? Because in a curious way, I think you sort of are living those dreams out today with Dungeons and Dragons and being the chosen one.
John Romanello: I would say that when I was younger and I was more fully in the grasp of the type of ego structure that needed to feel special, that needed to feel chosen because I was never chosen in my own life, I wanted to be a Luke Skywalker. I wanted to be the one whose destiny it was to bring balance to the force or whatever. And now we're all that person in our own lives. We are all the Luke Skywalker or King Arthur or Harry Potter or Dorothy Gale or Daniel Russo. And it's enough for me to be that in my own life rather than trying to be that to the world. And instead I find great satisfaction not in trying to cast myself as the lead in someone else's movie, ‘follow up boy'.
But I take great pleasure in being the Obi-Wan to someone else's Luke Skywalker. And I think that is something that we can all do. We all have to be the hero of our own stories, but if we're lucky we get to serve as a mentor in someone else's. And I think that we're all the chosen one because we have the opportunity to choose ourselves. So, yeah, I think that whatever it is we want to create we can, and whether I've gotten here by blood or deed or if it's just pure coincidence and I have the storytelling acumen to retrofit everything to fit my narrative, either way, I'm good with where I am and I'm happy to help people get there.
Gary Bertwistle: Speaking of which, one of the tile lines, I think it's on your website I saw it. You wrote a comment that said, “Let's do something cool together and leave a dent in the universe.” Is that the dent you want to leave, John? That final little piece you just left us with, is that the dent in your mind that you think about today in terms of your mission that you want to leave?
John Romanello: Me personally, at the end of my life I would like to have instead with me ‘he wrote a few good books' rather than ‘he had really high converting funnels'. And, so, I believe stories change people's lives and I'm very excited to have the opportunity to tell stories that affect people and teach people. But that copy on my website, it's abstract. It's open to interpretation. For some people leaving a dent in the universe is writing a book that will outlast them or is taking their business to another level so that they feel they've impacted their industry, starting a company that changes things.
Or it could be stepping into themselves and their power and being a better husband or father or daughter or friend so that they can leave a bigger impact and more positive impact on the people in their own lives. The idea of leaving a dent in the universe to me when I wrote that, I think I was talking specifically about legacy and all that exists after we're gone. And I was probably thinking in pretty concrete financial and professional terms. But it's amazing what could change over the course of the year. And like Maya Angelou said, words are magic and the great thing is that they have so many different meanings.
And when I read that line now, it's very clear that my definition of the universe and someone else's definition might not be the same. And that's what makes it beautiful because as I do now in the storytelling workshops and the mentorship that I teach, if I can help someone figure out what it is they want to do and to do it, they can leave a dent in their version of whatever the universe is. And that doesn't mean that after they die there will be a statue of them erected or buildings named in their honor. It can simply mean that they made the people in their lives laugh, or they healed generational ancestral trauma and broke the cycle that they had been living in, or they just showed up.
And whatever that means to the people that I work with, people who I work with, the better. We're not all going to write the next great American novel or we're not all writing Harry Potter or none of us are out here surpassing the godfather or whatever else, but I think that we can all leave a dent in the immediacy of the lives around us and that's the most important thing.
Gary Bertwistle: So to do something cool with you to leave a dent, where do you send people? Where is the hub for your work man?
John Romanello: The hub for my work is johnromanello.com. I have creatively claimed my own name as my URL and also as my social media handle. And so if you want to connect with me, the easiest, fastest and most reliable way to do it is via Instagram direct message, so just please slide up in the DM. And if you're listening to this and there was something you got out of it, please do me a favor and just screenshot it on your phone and post it and tag me in it in your stories because then I am even more likely to see it and I can reshare it and we can spread the message and I would love to chat. So any questions or comments or conversations that you want to have, I am at your service now and always.
Gary Bertwistle: John, this has been a fantastic discussion. I've really enjoyed hearing you today. It's been a real privilege being able to spend time with you. I know how much you’ve got on your plate. You got us into your calendar and you just shared some wonderful learnings that we can take away. You've been truly of service. Thank you so much mate for everything you've shared today.
John Romanello: Thank you so much for having me and giving me the opportunity, and thank you everybody for listening.