Barbara Jenkins: Walking into Remarkable

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable, so stop just thinking different and start thinking remarkable. Helping me this week is Barbara Jenkins. She captured the hearts of millions of people when she chronicled her epic 3,000-mile walk from New Orleans to Oregon in the blockbuster bestseller, The Walk West. This journey with her former husband became a National Geographic cover story and international sensation. The book sold over fifteen million copies. Barbara went on to author several more inspirational books, including the number one mass paperback, The Road Unseen. She's been a keynote speaker for major conferences and served in influential roles, like a commissioner for two Tennessee governors.
Jenkins also chaired the board of the Tennessee Women's Forum. Barbara continues to embrace adventure, whether painting, writing her next book or telling stories to her granddaughters. Jenkins lives with openness and passion. She believes that even when one door closes, patience and persistence will open another. Jenkins sees life's curveballs as opportunities to build resilience and grow. Her latest book, So Long as It's Wild, is out now, and tells the inside story of that 3,000-mile walk. You will be fascinated.
This episode is brought to you by my friends at MERGE4. M-E-R-G-E, and the number 4. I'm an investor in the company because they make the coolest socks. For a 30 percent discount, use the promo code “friendofGuy”. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People. Now, here is the remarkable, Barbara Jenkins. At the very end of your book, you talk about all the great adventures you've had. One of the adventures is going to Maui. You must know about the fire, but I just wanted to let you know that, that big Banyan tree you discussed, people think it has survived and it will make it through this time.
Barbara Jenkins:
I remember, they had a beautiful crafts fair under that tree. I bought some gorgeous jewelry there. I always think of that tree and just the roots all the way out across the ground where people just sit there.
Guy Kawasaki:
You start off with this great story about writing or co-writing a book, and it sells fifteen million copies. You tell story after story about meeting these great Americans and inspiration. Give me the gist of that book.
Barbara Jenkins:
Obviously, it was a life-changing experience. I spent three years walking from New Orleans to the coast of Oregon and meeting real Americans across this country, facing all kinds of dangers, of victories, of losses, of weather conditions. Not knowing where my next meal was coming from. Learning to sleep on the ground at night. Learning to live at a different pace. Putting one foot in front of the other. The gist of that story, of that life, I think really was about self-discovery and discovery of an America that we have forgotten and of people that we have forgotten and overlooked.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let me get this straight. You meet Peter in New Orleans.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
You fall in love.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
You go on this three-year walk.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
You're basically carrying a forty-pound pack.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
You're trying to do fifteen miles a day.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
You don't have GPS.
Barbara Jenkins:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
You don't have Patagonia. You don't have REI. You don't have Uber. You don't have Lyft. You have no Airbnb.
Barbara Jenkins:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's just hard for me to wrap my mind. How did you logistically do this?
Barbara Jenkins:
It is like an alternate universe. You have to get into a different mindset where literally you walk by faith. You put one foot in front of the other. Because you don't know what the day's going to bring. You don't know who you're going to meet. You don't know where you're going to get your next meal. I did that for three years. Living one day at a time. It taught me a depth of life that I think very few ever truly understand or experience. Because I honestly, in order to get from A to Z and when I would look ahead or look at a map, it was overwhelming. How could I ever accomplish something like that? It's like everything in life, we do it one step at a time. It was one step, one hour, one day at a time. I began to notice things along the way.
I began to hear sounds and smell smells and experience the earth and the people and the weather. Experience life in a way that if you're a nature lover, sometimes when you get out in the wilderness, it may take a day or two for you to assimilate and come down out of all the frantic life pace that the world is today into an alternate universe where you begin to hear the sounds and see the stars and feel the earth under your feet. I did that day after day in all kinds of conditions. If you read the book, you know about the tornadoes and the storms, the heat strokes and the white-outs, the blizzards. It was a great adventure. If I were in my twenties again, I'd do it again.
Guy Kawasaki:
You would?
Barbara Jenkins:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
If your kid said, "Mom, I want to retrace your footsteps." You'd be all in?
Barbara Jenkins:
Just a couple of years ago, my oldest son, we took a road trip, and we retraced the route that I walked from New Orleans to Oregon with his dad. Of course, he has written, it's coming out this fall, it's called Mother Nature. He's a New York Times bestselling author as well. You need to have him on your podcast.
Guy Kawasaki:
You'll be the first mother son combination.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes. It's an oddity. Very rare, because I certainly didn't time. It took me three years to write this book, Guy. Because I did not want to write it. I had no desire to write this book.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, wait, just for clarification. You're talking about the second book. We're talking about the book that you're just about to release.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Not the original one.
Barbara Jenkins:
The book, So Long as It's Wild, is going to be released September the 12th, 2023. I did not want to write that book. It took three years to write it, but it was my granddaughter, at the time, she was seven years old. She said to me, "Yo." My name is Yo. She said, "Yo, did you really walk across America?" I knew then that was my calling. I knew I had to write this story from my vantage point, from my voice, from how I experienced walking across America and all the before, during, and after events. I had to do it for my own legacy, but I didn't want to do it.
Guy Kawasaki:
You didn't want to do it because it forced you to revisit some of the things that your ex-husband did, or what was the negative?
Barbara Jenkins:
I think part of it. If you remember, I go back and tell the stories of being raised in the Ozarks as a poor Ozark hillbilly in the Missouri Ozarks. My mother, whom I love deeply and who passed away in 2010. My mother was hell on wheels when she was a young woman. She was a fiery, redheaded, temperamental woman. She was a very difficult mother. It was painful for me to tell those stories because this conflict of how much I love her, but yet to tell the story in such a way where the reader sees her for who she was at that time. Because being raised as a poor hillbilly, we did not have indoor plumbing until I was twelve years old. We were very poor. The reader really needs to see where I came from to understand how in the world could I ever agree to walk across America.
I knew what it was to do without, to live humbly. It wasn't a stretch for me. It was painful to write because I had to go back and tell stories that involve my mother. Then of course, after the walk and all the fame and the fortune, selling millions of books. Our books became a permanent part of the White House Library. We were on the cover of National Geographic magazine. We were a phenomenon, a sensation. There was so much more to the story. I lived the part because I had so much invested. I had walked across America. We had built a financial kingdom. I had three beautiful children. Why would I want to upset the apple cart? I had to go back and revisit the truth of why the marriage failed and then rebuilding my life. It was painful for those reasons. Out of great pain comes great change and great victories.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm trying to figure out why the title is So Long as It's Wild, because the word wild can be interpreted in several ways. Please, explain the title.
Barbara Jenkins:
The title comes from a wonderful quote by John Muir. John Muir was a naturalist, a writer, an adventurer back in the 1800s, and he settled in California. He has this famous quote that says, "God made everything beautiful, so long as it's wild." So Long as It's Wild comes from his quote. So Long as It's Wild is a very captivating title. It does mean many things to many different people. It's like the freedom and the wildness of life, of nature, of change, and of not being confined by all the structures of a “nine-to-five” job or living in a grind. So Long as It's Wild, I love the title.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I loved it too. Maybe I'm trying to see a pattern or see something that doesn't exist. Seems to me that around the same time you were walking across America, Lamar Alexander walks from Mountain City to Memphis, like a thousand miles.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Did he inspire you or you inspire him, or that's just coincidental that the two of you are walking?
Barbara Jenkins:
It's coincidental. We did not know Lamar at that time. What was it? Do you have the years there?
Guy Kawasaki:
He walked in 1978, which is about the time you were walking.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes. No, we actually, I think probably inspired him because he asked us to endorse a book that he wrote called The Tennesseans. Because of his walk and our walk, we did become friends and we spent many evenings in the Governor's Mansion having dinner and talking about wild things and adventures, and he was quite an outdoorsman.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right. You tell this great story about you're young, you've fallen in love, you're in New Orleans. You go to this service and this woman named Mom Beal has a sermon and she talks about going with this man. You took it as a sign of God that yes, you should go with Peter and walk across the country. Looking back, do you now think, "Oh, that was just a coincidence. It really wasn't God talking to me." What a mistake it was, or how do you interpret that?
Barbara Jenkins:
No. First of all, it was a phenomenal experience. I was working on a master's degree at a seminary, so I was already a woman of faith. When Peter asked me to walk from New Orleans to Oregon with him, I had never been camping a day in my life. It was overwhelming. I was going to break up with Peter because this is his dream, his journey, not mine. I spent a lot of time meditating and praying and looking for guidance, what should I do? I said, "I'll go to church with you one last time. If I don't have some kind of revelation, something that tells me that I should do this, then it's over. We'll just see where we are after you finish this walk."
It was 1975. It was the fall. We're in New Orleans. Beautiful, sunny day. Peter is in his holey jeans and T-shirt and sneakers. Of course, I'm embarrassed, because he looks like he came in from under a bridge. There's no place for us to sit except on the front row. This is at a big church. There's about 2,000 people. I'm embarrassed. We sit on the front row and then they wheel out this old woman in her eighties in a wheelchair. I'm thinking, "This is like Star Trek. Where am I? This is so unique, so different." This little old lady, she begins talking in this very sweet but very forceful voice. She begins telling the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible, and they're looking for a wife for his son.
They send this servant to this village, and the servant sees this beautiful young woman, and he thinks, "Oh, she's definitely the one." Then the family asks her, "Is this something you want to do? Will you go with this man?" Mom Beal developed this entire sermon. After she told the story, she said, "The title of my sermon today is, Will You Go with This Man?" For me, it was like a bolt of lightning, because that was the question of my heart. Was it coincidence? On that time, on that day, in that moment in history, that particular sermon, those particular words came to me. I did feel like it was a bolt of lightning and that it really was a call.
Now, I had the choice. The question was to me, will you go with this man? I didn't have to go, but I felt like it was a call and that I should go. Obviously, it changed the trajectory of my life forever. I had some of the greatest adventures of my life. The greatest joys, as well as the greatest heartaches. Isn't that what life is all about?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes, it was. I do not regret, regardless of what's happened in my life. Not for a second. Because each of us along the trajectory of life are given the choice every day of our lives. What will you do today? How will you be better, do better, go better? There came a point in mine and Peter's marriage and life, he chose another direction. I can't be responsible for his choices, but that doesn't mean that the call for me to go was not real and was not meant for me, so yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
You go on this walk, and arguably, you have a very good lens into, I would say the word real is overused, but you really met Americans. It wasn't just investment bankers and venture capitalists.
Barbara Jenkins:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
What did you learn about people on this journey?
Barbara Jenkins:
I learned that common people are remarkable and extraordinary. Every person has a life story. I trapped alligators in Louisiana. I walked across Texas. I met ranchers in Texas. I met Homer and Ruby, ranchers out in West Texas. They stopped and gave us water to drink and invited us into their home for a bath and a meal. We ended up staying a few days. I sat at Ruby's feet and I learned from her that she actually traveled to Texas in a covered wagon. She was the oldest of thirteen children. They were so poor that she ate water gravy for food. I heard their stories and sat on the front porches and sat at the tables of Americans across this country and learned their hard work, their ethics, their belief systems.
What I discovered is that we're so much more alike than we are different. We may live in different houses and have different levels of income, but yet when you take away all the trappings, people are just people. We all have very similar needs and goals. If you're a parent, you love your children, you want what's best for them. If you're a man, you want to work, you want to earn an honest day's pay. If you're a mother or a woman, you want to raise up your children the best you can. The very core of humanity, we're all so much alike.
Guy Kawasaki:
You brought up Ruby. In one of your conversations with Ruby, you were expressing the difficulty of the trip, the difficulty of the relationship with Peter. She basically said, "Suck it up and keep going." Right?
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes. Ruby was a pioneer. She had worked like a man in the fields and had picked cotton and had worked in cafes. They built this little three-room ranch house themselves and had lived in a shack after they got married in the 1930s. Ruby had a hard life. To look at me, I'm a young woman, I'm healthy. I'm on this great adventure. I've got the best of equipment, JanSport backpacks, tents, equipment. She looks at me and she has no pity or sympathy for me. Instead of saying, "Oh, you poor girl. Oh, your husband is not nurturing you or doting on you." We were newlyweds sleeping on the ground. There was no romantic evenings by a pool drinking a glass of wine. We were sleeping on cow patties under bridges.
Instead of Ruby offering me all this pity, she challenged me and she said, "Oh, law, girl." She'd say, law, L-A-W. "Oh, law, girl. This ain't so bad. You ain't lived till you've picked cotton all day long in the hot Texas sun for twenty-five cents, a hundred pounds." She said, "This walk across America, it ain't nothing. You can do this." She never said anything against Peter or talked about our marriage. She challenged me as a person, "Barbara, you can do this." That's exactly what I needed. I called her one of my many angels along the way that gave me the encouragement. I think that's what's wrong with young people today. We're not challenging them. We're pitying them and enabling them to be immature and to not stand up to the trials and difficulties in life. Ruby, she gave me guts. She gave me her pioneer spirit, and I'll forever be indebted to her.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just to be devil's advocate a little bit, but there are some times when you should get out of a bad relationship. How do you balance suck it up by Ruby versus get the hell out?
Barbara Jenkins:
Peter and I were still newlyweds at that point. I wasn't going to get the hell out because I wanted to give it a shot. I'm not a quitter. Peter and I were married twelve years and had walked across America and had three children. I'm not a quitter. I wanted to give it my best shot. I think most people do. You don't want to just throw in the towel without doing everything you know to do to preserve a home and a family. When Ruby encouraged me to keep going, and not to focus on Peter, but to focus on myself and what I could do. I really needed that at that time. Yes, there is a time in many relationships people need to get out, for any number of reasons. In the context of the story and where I was at that time, Peter and I were newlyweds. It was too soon.
Guy Kawasaki:
You answered what you learned about people in that we're more similar than we're different. What did you learn about yourself on this journey?
Barbara Jenkins:
I had a lot of preconceptions and a lot of prejudices because of growing up in the Ozarks, growing up a hillbilly. We were very poor, and I thought anybody who had money or prestige or wealth, they were all born with a silver spoon in their mouth. They were all stuck up. They were all this, that. That's not true. There are wonderful successful people in this world.
When you grow up poor, you can look through the lens of seeing people, anyone who is prosperous or doing well, from your point of view it's, "Oh, poor, pitiful me. They're just stuck up and they think they know it all or they've got it all." That's just not true. I learned many things about myself. In fact, it was an entire journey of self-discovery and breaking down prejudices about people and places and environments, everything. If you travel, it dispels a lot of your misconceptions about people and places.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is going to be an off the wall question that is going to, let's say it's going to reveal some of my ignorance and prejudices and et cetera, et cetera. With that caveat, I ask you this question, which is, after I read your book, I said to myself, "You know what? Maybe she can help me understand this." The question is, especially when you're talking about the people you met in Texas and Ruby and all this, can you explain the attraction that Donald Trump has to people like this? What do they see in him that make them so loyal to him?
Barbara Jenkins:
I think conservative people see Donald Trump as a voice for them. I think they don't like a lot of his personality or mannerisms, but I think that they see Donald Trump as a man who isn't polished with all the right things. Isn't polished with saying one thing out of one side of your mouth and then doing another. I think they see him as a man who, if he says he is going to do something, he's going to do his best to try to do it. For all of his failures and weaknesses, and every politician has them, no matter what side of the fence you're on, I think they trust him more than others.
Guy Kawasaki:
You can see my liberal bias, but I'm trying to embrace your thinking about understanding others and understanding where they're coming from as opposed to assuming you're right.
Barbara Jenkins:
I think all of us view life through our life experiences, positive and negative. We see things through, there are so many layers, whether it's the way you grew up, it was your parents' beliefs and politics. It was what happened to you when you were at the bottom of the barrel and you needed some kind of government program. You needed some kind of help. Either you got help or you didn't. That's going to influence your thinking. Everybody views, particularly I think, religion and politics through their own life experience. What I say is when you meet people across the country, across the world, and you peel back all the layers, we're all just human beings, mind, body, and spirit, looking to do the best we can with what we've got and to find our way in this world.
Guy Kawasaki:
You are a wise soul, Barbara Jenkins. You are a wise soul.
Barbara Jenkins:
If I have any wisdom, it's because of my life experience. It's because of the things I've done and the things I have experienced in my life. I've made many mistakes, and I fall short in many ways. When I do learn a lesson, it sticks.
Guy Kawasaki:
Sounds like it, yes. This is another off the wall question. By any chance, do you still have that Nikon camera?
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes, I do.
Guy Kawasaki:
You do?
Barbara Jenkins:
I do. I have the Nikon camera and the lens that big semi-truck ran over. Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Does it still work?
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's a great story.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes. Yes, it does.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's the little detail like that, that you talk about. Not that you just had a camera, but it's a Nikon, and the lens got dented by the semi. I just love those stories. It may not be big picture, but it adds so much color to your book.
Barbara Jenkins:
Guy, did the book hold your attention?
Guy Kawasaki:
Absolutely. Yes.
Barbara Jenkins:
Good. You got an advanced reader copy. I got a wonderful endorsement from Dolly Parton.
Guy Kawasaki:
I saw that.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes, and Hilary Swank.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you know Dolly?
Barbara Jenkins:
My very best friend has been her backup singer for thirty-five years.
Guy Kawasaki:
I read that.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes. That's how she got the book, because Dolly does not endorse books. Dolly is a big reader, and she read this and loved it. That made me very happy. Let me tell you the greatest compliment to me, because I came out of basically forty years of silence. I didn't want to write this story because of my parents, my children. I didn't want to hurt anybody with any painful stories, but life does have pain. I came out of forty years of silence to write this. The greatest compliment I had was from this one editor, and nobody knows who she is. She's not Dolly Parton, and she's not Hilary Swank or Connie Britton or Jedidiah Jenkins. She's an unknown, but a brilliant editor who has edited many big books.
She thanked me for being able to edit the book. She said it was like Margaret Wrinkle meets John Steinbeck meets Mark Twain. It was all those great writers coming together. To me, as a writer, coming out of forty years of silence, to be able to have an editor tell me that's what it was like reading this book, was the greatest compliment. That's not a public endorsement. It's just for me. At this stage in my life, Guy, I'm too old. I don't care about fame and fortune. It's a great story of encouragement and overcoming odds and finding joy in life no matter where you are or what happens, because it's there. It's there. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm getting on my soapbox.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's okay. Why else get on a podcast if not to be on your soapbox? That's the whole point. To that combination of what you said, I would throw in a little bit of Studs Terkel. I see a little bit of Studs Terkel in your book too. I mean that as high praise, because Studs Terkel wrote some great books. Also, Salt of the Earth Americans, right?
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes. What was it? Abraham Lincoln said, "God must love the common man because he made so many of them."
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, the other saying is you can tell what God thinks of money by looking at who she gives it to.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
One of the points you brought up in your lessons from this journey and the forty years is learning how to accept help. What is the Barbara Jenkins theory of how to learn to accept help?
Barbara Jenkins:
If we're going to grow personally, spiritually, intellectually, whatever, we have to have a teachable spirit. If you're going to have a teachable spirit, you need to approach everything with some humility. You don't know it all. You just don't know it all. All of us need help. All of us need people we can lean on. People who will lift us up when we're down. We need friends. Several years ago, many years ago, I started a group called Twelve Women. My kids were still at home. I was a single parent. One of my children was very rebellious, and I didn't need to go out and look for love in all the wrong places and find another man. I just needed support and help for where I was in my life.
I started a group called Twelve Women, and this was patterned after the twelve disciples. I thought, we can come together in humility and together be a support system for each other. We met in my home for two years every week. Then we continued meeting on about once a month and then once every six months for another ten years. Those kinds of support systems and friendships help you get through life, just help you in good times, in bad times. Maybe you're at a flourishing, wonderful place in your life and you have a friend over here whose life is falling apart. You can be a help to that person.
You can be a stable influence. You can be a guide. I've had enough ups and downs and joys and sorrows in my life that when I need help, I'm first in line with my hand out, looking for help, asking for help. I don't have too much pride to say, "I'm in a spot here. Can you help me?" I think some people can't do that because they don't know how. What I like to say or do is whether it's forgiveness or humility or asking for help, is basically show you how to do it. A lot of people don't know how to ask for help until they see someone else asking for help. When you see someone modeling some of these behaviors, it shows you the way.
Guy Kawasaki:
Then let's get tactical here, how?
Barbara Jenkins:
How what? What do you want to know?
Guy Kawasaki:
How to ask for help? What's the inside scoop on how to ask?
Barbara Jenkins:
I think if you're going to ask for help, like I said, you need a teachable spirit and a humble attitude. Then if you want help in whatever area it is, you find the best person you know in that field. If it's economics, if it's real estate, if it's personal growth. Wherever you need help in your life. If you're going through a divorce, then you need the best kind of resources available to help you. Don't be afraid to ask. Because there are wise and wonderful people out there to help. All we need to do is to ask. There are a lot of people who don't want help, and you can't force it down their throats. It's when a person wants help that things can happen and things can change.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, one interpretation of your book is that it's a wonderful tactical and human collection of marriage advice. What is your marriage advice looking back on this great adventure?
Barbara Jenkins:
Of course, I do believe God called me to walk across America and to marry Peter, even though the marriage ended. I think in any human relationship, marriage, friendship, parenting, all human relationships, I think at the core we must do everything in love. Everything in love doesn't necessarily mean being a doormat or someone wiping their feet on you. I think it is truly caring about that other person and what is in their best interest, whether it's your spouse, whether it's your parent, whether it's your children. That your treatment of them is truly an act of love and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you and to love others as you love yourself. I think marriage advice, there are so many psychological factors and intricacies in a marriage because it's spiritual, it's emotional, it's sexual.
It's all those different layers, and it is a dance. I think from a woman's perspective, because even though my marriage ended with Peter, I have two sons. I love sons. I love men. I respect men. I don't have a bitter bone in my body when it comes to men. I think men need respect and deserve respect. I think as women, we do ourselves a favor when we honor our husbands, when we honor the men in our lives, when we value their opinions, and we're not always trying to punch holes in everything they do. To be patient and to wait and to be long-suffering. I'm speaking as a woman here. I think when we treat men with the honor and respect that they deserve that even in the differences that those, over time, those things will work themselves out.
Guy Kawasaki:
What if somebody says you were treating Peter better than he probably deserved?
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes, I think I was. The marriage ended because of multiple infidelities. If Peter had been faithful to me, I probably would've stayed with him, but I couldn't live a lie. Throughout the marriage, I honored and respected him to the extent that I could. When the time came that I knew, and this was about me, not him, I couldn't live a lie. I couldn't sweep things under the rug. I'm a very authentic person. Walking across America and living the way I lived, sleeping on the ground and living under this, I cannot live a fake life. I could not model that to my children. That has nothing to do with the responsibility on each side in a marriage of honoring and treating the other one with love and respect.
Guy Kawasaki:
My last question for you. When all is said and done, Barbara, what do you want people to say about you? What's your legacy?
Barbara Jenkins:
That's a big question. I think it would be that I walked humbly and that I loved well. I think that at the end of our lives, it isn't about how much we've accumulated or how wealthy or how famous we are, any of that. It still comes back to our humanity. It comes back to who we are as a person, as a human being. My greatest legacy would be what my children think about me, what they would say. I know even now, my children love me and adore me. We have great relationships. I'm not a saint. I'm not perfect. I've made many mistakes. I don't know it all, but I am a woman who has lived a full life, a big life. I've done it all. I've seen a lot, done a lot. At the end of the day, how did I treat my fellow man? How did I love others? Do my actions from my pocketbook to my personal actions reflect that I really care about other people?
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, that's a beautiful, remarkable answer, Barbara Jenkins.
Barbara Jenkins:
Oh, good.
Guy Kawasaki:
I’m sixty-nine years old. I can relate to many things you just said.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's ironic, maybe unfortunate, but interesting nonetheless, that it would be so much better for the world if one could come to these insights earlier in life.
Barbara Jenkins:
Yes, I think about that too. I think we need all those years and all those experiences to really understand the depth of what they mean and how important they are. We don't get that. I think when you're young, you just want to intellectualize everything and think it through and figure it out. It's like, I had a dear friend of mine who is a life coach, and we did what's called the core story of my life through all this stuff. He said, "Barbara, the reason you can love the way you do is because you experienced it from your grandmother. It is not something you can intellectualize or just think about. It is truly a spiritual, emotional experience." If you've never experienced that, you cannot think it into existence.
Guy Kawasaki:
You can't end a podcast better than that answer. This has been just so enjoyable, Barbara. I'm sure many people will enjoy this podcast. Why don't you give a thirty second pitch for your book?
Barbara Jenkins:
Thank you, Guy, for letting me tell you about my book, So Long as It's Wild, by Barbara Jenkins. I came out of forty years of silence to tell this story. I did not want to write it, but my granddaughter asked me, did I really walk across America? This book is full of high adventures, great twists and turns, lots of drama. I've had people tell me it is a page-turner, they couldn't put it down. I've been blessed with endorsements from people like Dolly Parton, who literally congratulated me for writing it. From Hilary Swank, from Connie Britton, from Jedidiah Jenkins. I'm so humbled and thankful that I've had the opportunity to write this story and to tell it. I think people will love it, and I think it will be a great encourager for people who are on their own path of self-discovery. Because it is a story of change and self-discovery, high drama, love and loss, and great victories.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. You have a future in marketing, Barbara.
Barbara Jenkins:
I do?
Guy Kawasaki:
You do. It's never too late.
Barbara Jenkins:
Thank you. I just want to do what I feel like I'm supposed to do. Telling this story, I just feel like I was meant to do it.
Guy Kawasaki:
It cannot get better than that. That's what it's like to walk across America, 3,000 miles from New Orleans to Oregon. Let's thank Barbara Jenkins for taking the time out to explain that adventure and give us the inside coop. What a remarkable story. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People. My thanks to the remarkable team, Jeff Sieh, Shannon Hernandez, Madisun Nuismer, Tessa Nuismer, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magaña, and Fallon Yates, the Remarkable Team. Don't forget, this podcast is sponsored by MERGE4, creator of the world's coolest socks. 30 percent promo code, “friendofGuy”. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People. Until next week. Don't just think different, think remarkable. Mahalo and aloha.