Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick

In this good shift episode, Dr. JC Doornick brings you the best of the Makes Sense Substack live in his Wednesday series. He begins with a line attributed to Lao Tzu: nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. From there he asks a simple, funny question: do trees worry? Drawing on his own healing journey while contending with cancer, he explores why the present moment may be the only p...

Meet Steven Kotler, founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective, a Distinguished Research Fellow at Florida Atlantic University, and co-author with Peter Diamandis of We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance . In this conversation, Steven breaks down what flow is, where it came from, and why it shows up in our best memories. He tells the story of the day a singl...

On this Makes Sense episode, Dr. JC Doornick takes on the quiet questions most of us avoid: Am I doing enough? Am I behind? Do I matter? Drawing on ideas explored by Alan Watts and on his own experience living with stage 4 cancer, he asks whether we have turned purpose, achievement and legacy into evidence we collect to prove our existence has value. He walks through how ordinary moments become ex...

In this Good Shift episode, Dr. JC Doornick, the Dragon, hears a David Guetta and OneRepublic song and finds it lands differently than ever before. Navigating cancer, he asks one question: what are you waiting for? He walks through the quiet assumption that there will always be time to call the friend, hold his wife longer, or follow the desire knocking at his door. He then connects it to Martin L...

My guest today is Jack Daly, a serial entrepreneur, sales leader, author, and endurance athlete. He built six companies into national firms, sold two of them to Wall Street firms, led sales organizations numbering in the thousands, and is a former US Army captain. He has also finished 15 Ironmans and run a marathon in all 50 states. What matters most is what life taught him along the way, includin...

Most of us are remarkably good at preparing to live and surprisingly bad at actually living. In this solo episode, Dr. JC Doornick shares what his cancer diagnosis has taught him about the illusion of tomorrow, why urgency is not the same as speed, and how much of our lives we put on layaway while waiting for something to change. Along the way he draws on Steve Jobs, Pema Chödrön, Randy Pausch, an...

In this episode of Good Shift, Dr. JC Doornick brings one of the best ideas from the Makes Sense Substack to the show: a personal board of directors made up of ten people whose lives, ideas, or courage inspired you. Not a boardroom with quarterly numbers, but framed pictures on your wall that you can consult at any fork in the road. Dr. JC shares the questions he imagines bringing to his own board...

Evan Carmichael turned a year of near silence into one of the biggest YouTube channels for entrepreneurs on the internet, with millions of subscribers. He built and sold a biotech software company and raised venture capital before he ever pressed record. Today he trains thought leaders through his Brandlytics software and his Movement Makers program. In this conversation, we get into why he refuse...

Yesterday everything was fine. Today they’re cold, they’ve ghosted you, or you find out they’ve been talking about you to everyone but you. In this episode, Dr. JC Doornick takes on “hurt people hurt people” from a different angle: what if the pain isn’t being resolved but transferred, and what if the person on the receiving end has no idea a trial ever took place? He breaks down how perception ha...

In this Good Shift episode, Dr. JC Doornick takes the term "vibe coding," coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 to describe building software by simply describing what you want to an AI, and turns it on its head. Every repeated thought is a line of code, and every algorithm is competing to write the next one for your operating system. Dr. JC explains how convenience qu...

Jill Schulman was one of the first women to lead in Marine Corps combat engineering. She then turned a career in pharma and corporate leadership development into a master's in positive psychology at Penn, and she has trained more than 30,000 leaders around one idea: action creates confidence. Her book, The Bravery Effect, delivers that science as a parable. In this conversation, she and I make sen...

Even Dr. JC Doornick is not immune. One presentation was all it took to send his mind spiraling into doubt, comparison, and the question every high achiever quietly fears: what if I am not as good as I think I am? Then he did something small that changed the whole story. In this episode, he shows you the one move that puts you back in the driver's seat, and why it might be the most underrated skil...

What if the life you keep trying to make happen is not the only one available to you? In this Good Shift episode, a new series where Dr. JC Doornick brings one of his favorite Makes Sense Substack blogs to life, he starts with a question he was asked about who he creates for and what makes his voice different. That leads to a thoughtful look at allowance. Dr. JC explores the sweet spot between set...

What if the search result you trusted most was quietly chosen to change your mind? Dr. Robert Epstein is a Harvard-trained research psychologist and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. For more than a decade, he has studied how search engines, search suggestions, and video recommendations can quietly shift what people believe and how they vote. He has testified twice before Congress, a...

What if the very thing draining your energy every day isn't your circumstances, but the hours you spend rehearsing a future that hasn't happened yet? Dr. JC Doornick is currently navigating a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and instead of talking around it, he uses it as the live case study for the system his book and coaching are built on: the Interface Response System. He walks through what he calls r...

What if the people you love most aren't getting your best attention, just whatever is left after the noise has taken its share? In this Good Shift episode, Dr. JC Doornick brings his Makes Sense Substack writing to life with a short, powerful reflection on Carrency: the limited supply of time, energy, attention, and focus we distribute each day. He explores how the brain's filter, programmed by th...

He built Magna International into one of the world's largest auto parts companies, with hundreds of factories and well over a hundred thousand employees. But the real story isn't the company's size. It's what he did with the profits. Instead of keeping them at the top, he split them with the people on the floor. Today's guest is Frank Stronach, founder of Magna and the mind behind the Economic Cha...

If you've been trying to change your mindset — for success, happiness, or just clarity — you found the right video. I'm Dr. JC Doornick, and for over 20 years, I've helped thousands of high-net-worth individuals see things from a different perspective—one that got them out of their own way and finally helped them achieve the success and life they wanted. But watching how reactive and quick to judg...

What does it really mean to “keep your feet” when life tries to sweep you away? In this short Good Shift, Dr. JC Doornick explores the difference between experiencing adversity and letting it take control of your identity, direction, and response. Inspired by Bilbo Baggins’ timeless warning about stepping onto the road and not knowing where you might be swept off to, Dr. JC asks a deeper question:...

For thirty years, if you worked at Mars, Kellogg, General Mills, KPMG, or Sony — and your brand needed to change from the inside out — there's a good chance you were quietly sent to one woman. No client logos. No case studies. No public profile. Just results so consistent that people in the industry started calling her 'the best-kept secret in the corporate world.' Today, that secrecy ends. Helen...

Someone told me I was called a misogynist. Not a stranger's opinion I could shrug off — someone who'd formed a real judgment about who I am. And it caught me off guard, because it felt nothing like how I see myself. My first instinct was to defend myself. My second instinct was to dismiss them. But then I went... Hmmm. Because if I'm asking all of you to stay curious and question your conditioned...

What if the reason certain problems keep coming back isn’t that you haven’t fought them hard enough—but because you haven’t changed the environment that allows them to thrive? In this Good Shift, Dr. JC explores the difference between living like a Weed Whacker and becoming a Transformational Gardener . Drawing from his own journey with Stage 4 cancer, he challenges the instinct to spend our lives...

What if reality isn't made of particles — what if it's made of code? My guest today is an independent researcher who took a laser, pointed it at the world, and recorded something that mainstream science has no clear explanation for. Danny Goler calls it the Code of Reality. Others have compared what he captured to the geometric patterns people report seeing on DMT. We'll get into the experiment it...

In 2001, psychologist Roy Baumeister tried to find one situation where good news outweighs bad news of the same size. His team couldn't find a single one. Their paper became one of the most-cited in psychology, and the conclusion was simple: bad is stronger than good. That's not pessimism — that's how your brain is wired. It's why one criticism can outweigh ten compliments, and why 'what if this f...

Welcome to Good Shift —our weekly series where I take one of my favorite entries from the Makes Sense Substack and bring it to life right here on the podcast. Today’s Good Shift is about the Automatic Yes —and why learning to pause before you commit might be one of the most powerful ways to protect the life you’re designing. Let’s get into some Good Shift . How many times have you said “yes” befor...