Mail Routes to Manuscripts – Career Reinvention in the Hollers of Appalachia
August 20, 2025
By Matt Miner, CFP®, MBA
Author of “Mailman” Stephen Starring Grant joins WPF to talk about career reinvention in the Blue Ridge.
Key take-aways:
Curiosity is Your Compass: Follow your genuine interests, even when they don’t align with a traditional career path. Curiosity led Steve from early web development to brand strategy to delivering mail—and ultimately to publishing a book.
Curiosity is fuel for market value, creating learning, adaptability, and problem-solving in both white- and blue-collar work.
Build Resilience Before You Need It: Career shocks will come, often when you least expect ‘em. It’s my observation that the people I view as most “successful” have usually had MORE adversity on the way than those achieving at the middle-level.
Maintain a financial safety margin – including healthcare planning. Healthcare is an “invisible safety blanket” until it’s gone.
Stay Useful in Any Context. From the boardroom to the warehouse, deliver value wherever you are.
Structure your schedule to minimize decision fatigue. Steve’s father’s advice on lunch restaurants —“pick a loser and stick with it” — applies to many routine choices.
Consistency builds capacity for big, creative projects, like writing a book while holding a full-time job.
Lean Into Authentic Storytelling: If you’re sharing your work or life publicly, don’t just report events—show what you saw, thought, and felt. Real stories resonate more deeply and attract your true audience.
See Work Through the Lens of Service: Even routine or physically demanding jobs have meaning when done in service to others. Steve’s pride came from passing the “sniff test” with fellow letter carriers and serving his community well.
Steve’s Bio
Brand Strategy to Mail Routes: Steve Grant spent much of his career as a brand strategist and behavioral economics practitioner, collaborating with research scientists to design interventions that help people act in their own (and his clients’) best interests. A pandemic layoff—and the urgent need for healthcare—landed him in an unexpected role: rural letter carrier in Blacksburg, Virginia, Steve’s hometown.
Mailman to Memoir: Delivering mail during COVID-19 offered Steve both community connection and personal challenge, from dog encounters to acts of neighborly kindness. He captured these experiences in Mailman, a book born when his agent read sketches he’d written about postal life and encouraged a nonfiction proposal.
Resonance and Recognition: Publication brought unexpected reader connections, especially from those who had faced mid-career disruption. Passing the “sniff test” with other letter carriers was his proudest validation. National press coverage in outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic amplified the book’s reach.
Curiosity as Career Compass: Steve credits lifelong curiosity—modeled by his father—as the through-line in his diverse professional path. Whether hand-coding websites in the ’90s or exploring postal routes, following his interests has opened unexpected opportunities. His advice to young professionals: be curious and useful.
Family and Financial Perspectives: The layoff’s financial instability was a lesson in economic fragility, felt keenly by his daughters. Strong family support helped them weather the transition. Today, Steve is grateful to be back in white-collar work, mindful of healthcare’s role as an “invisible safety blanket.”
Writing Discipline: Balancing a full-time job, Steve carved out consistent writing time—applying his father’s advice to “pick a loser and stick with it” as a broader principle for conserving mental energy. Four drafts and candid editorial feedback led him to share more personal, unvarnished truth.
Looking Ahead: Steve is considering a follow-up book about the human truths of corporate life, aiming for the same authenticity that marked Mailman. Steve also hopes readers will appreciate the United States Postal Service as vital public infrastructure and the people who carry the mail as more than just a uniform that stops by the letter box.
Transcript
Matt Miner (00:18.143)
Steve, what a pleasure to be with you today. I wonder if you could just take a couple minutes and share your story with my audience.
Steve (00:25.23)
Sure. So my name's Steve Grant. In my life before and after the events of Mailman, I've worked as a brand strategist, consumer insight specialist. I've done a lot of work kind of more in the social science end of that. So in qualitative and quantitative consumer research, consumer ethnography. And as my career progressed, I got more into really the harder social science side of things with behavioral economics. I'm not a PhD, but one of my jobs has been working with a lot of actual research scientists to design experiments and to do real life interventions to help people really act in their own best interests. I've done everything from ad campaigns and more traditional creative advertising work right on through to designing. applied behavioral economic systems that have been used at major institutions. But the reason anybody is listening to me right now is that I got laid off at the beginning of the pandemic and I needed health care. My family needed health care. I apparently did not understand how Medicare works and so...
I needed, I thought I needed a job in order to get healthcare. It was a happy accident. The only person, the only organization hiring at the beginning of the pandemic was the postal service. They were kind of moving to a wartime footing. And so I got a job here at the Blacksburg Maine post office as a rural carrier. And so I had the experience during a pretty strange time in the, in the country's life of being a mailman back in my hometown in southwestern Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains where I grew up and that experience became the foundation of the book.
Matt Miner (02:34.633)
Yeah, we're gonna talk more about the book as we go through and I'm delighted to heartily recommend it to everyone who's listening. But I first encountered your work, your story and the best place to find me, which is the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. And as I read it, I couldn't wait to get the book. It resonated strong with me, having also been through kind of a mid-career transition where I wasn't always in charge of the timing. And I just wanted to ask you, how has your life changed since that op-ed in late June and since the book was released in July?
Steve (03:17.774)
You know, I've always wanted to be a writer. My graduate school career was at the Iowa Writers Workshop. I was involved in independent filmmaking in the 1990s and the early 2000s. After grad school, I needed to be a career guy. We had a young family that needed to be supported. And so that's really when I kind of said, okay, I got to put this to the side now. But I've always wanted to be a writer, thought of myself as a writer, but I would not call myself a writer because I was not published. And I always had the sense that when the time came, the time to write the book would occur to me, know, it would be revealed to me.
My agent David Granger at Avatos was introduced by a friend and he read a detective novel I had written over a number of different years set in Charleston, West Virginia, where my father's from. And he was like, look, you know, I really liked your book. I don't do fiction anymore. Granger's background was as the editor in chief at Esquire for almost 20 years. And so he's kind of a nonfiction guy anyway.
And he said, do you have any non-fiction? Do you have anything non-fiction? And chance favors the prepared. I had a couple of, like, I wouldn't even dignify to call them pieces. I had a couple of sketches I had written based on just a couple of things that had happened to me when I was delivering the mail. So I got the stuff that I wrote when I was at the postal service. And he goes, wait a second, what?
And I go, during the pandemic, I got laid off. He's like, send me that stuff. And so I sent him that. And we wrote a proposal, sold the book on proposal, which was I didn't even know that was the thing one could do. And then I was on the hook. I know this is a kind of winding answer, but the fact is that like for over two years, I was working on this book.
Steve (05:48.414)
And it was exciting to say I'm working on a book, I have a contract. But I was still like Steve, strategist, consumer strategist. Like was what I did was what was on my LinkedIn page. And then the book came out. And the first real sea change when I knew things were going to be different was that piece in the journal. It had a lot of people.
You know, the Gen X are in me. The idea that a book was not like this media artifact that would fly out into space is kind of a one way communication, but that would actually rather be more like a telephone that the world was going to talk back to me. And I had many people, yourself included, reach out to me on LinkedIn and say, hey, your book.
I went through something similar. I got my horse shot out from underneath me mid-career and had to go through some gyrations and survive and reinvent myself.
It would have been if you'd asked me two years ago, it's like, hey, is your is your audience going to be? Journal readers. And I think I like any good consumer strategist, I'm to tell you my my my audience is segmented, but there is a definite segment that I never anticipated, which is like folks reading my story in the journal and saying like, hey, this dude has been through something a lot like what I've been through. And that's when I knew it's like, okay, the book is out there and it's got a life of its own. And it's reaching people and communicating a lot of the feelings and experiences I had and it's resonating with them. And since then, to see my name in the Atlantic or in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or...
Steve (08:02.569)
or Washington Post has been a frankly like a thrill. And but also disorienting, you know, it's like I was just a dude that with a job and another white collar guy with a job. And now I'm people are talking about your stuff in the comments section and writing reviews of your book in Amazon. I don't recommend reading a lot of of your reviews on Amazon if you publish a book.
But a lot of them are really wonderful. I've also got as many low... There've been a couple of lows, but a lot of highs out of that. And it has been a change, and I've had to change how I think about myself. It's like, all right, man, you chose to write this book and the way that you wrote it, and you have to stand behind it. But at the risk of sounding like I'm blowing a little sunshine, Matt, my highlight has been people reaching out to me. And I've had people such as yourself, I've had a lot of people who had a father or a husband or an aunt who was a letter carrier or letter carriers themselves that said, man, I read this, it was real and I have an appreciation for or I remember my dad talking to me about this stuff. I've had other letter carriers say, this guy tells it how it is. If you want to understand what it's like to be a letter carrier, read this book. And that has made me feel like I accomplished probably my number one goal.
Letter carriers cannot read this and say, wow, this is fake, right, or this guy's a phony. And so if I pass the sniff test with the letter carriers, I've achieved kind of my minimum victory conditions and so far so good on that count.
Matt Miner (10:11.827)
I really appreciate you taking us through all that. The best part of Mailman to me are the stories that are in the book and I realize we're going to, you know, we can't begin to scratch the surface. The first time I laughed out loud was your friend at the training center who brought her toilet paper and her pistol in her purse and wondered whether after, you know, learning that she shouldn't have a gun on federal property that she should mention the fact that she had a gun on federal property to the
Steve (10:30.519)
Yeah.
Steve (10:41.037)
No Jackie, you should not tell Jeff that you have your gun with you. No.
Matt Miner (10:41.087)
to the trainer. But, yeah.
Matt Miner (10:49.493)
But I wondered whether it made it in the book or not. Is there, for my audience who probably have not yet read your book, is there a story that you'd like to share from your time as a mailman?
Steve (11:03.265)
Well, I've had a couple of great ones and this isn't a story so much as you got the whole spectrum of like people would yell at you like, hey, how come you didn't close my mailbox? And it would be like, well, your mailbox is like an impact sculpture. You need to replace it. But you… good customer service, absolutely. So let me go back and make sure your mailbox goes. And it is the thing, know, people have every right to have their mailbox closed after they've had the mail delivered, you know, but some really kind of free form aggression thrown at you. But for every person like that, there were other people that just would wave hello or just were excited to see another human being, because it was the middle of the pandemic. And I talk about it. There were several people that on the route, just out of the kindness of their heart, would put a cooler on their front porch. And there was water and Gatorade and a thank you note. And you know, it...
Nobody had to do that, but it sure did mean a lot to me. just from a customer perspective, enlightened self-interest, like...you put a few bottles of Gatorade and some ice in your front porch, it's just like, I had to crawl under machine gun fire to deliver those folks mail at that point, because it's just those small kindnesses that let you know somebody sees you. I had a lot of crazy stuff happen. People pulled guns on me. I had dog attacks. I had, you know. At one point I got hypothermia, at another point I was probably close to heat stroke and had to dunk my head in the river just to cool off. It was a much more physically challenging job than I thought it was gonna be.
Matt Miner (13:12.885)
Steve, one of the things that I reflect a lot on now is like advising young people about career. That's not how I earn my livelihood, but I have a lot of opportunities to do that through connections with various schools and universities and through my own kids kind of being that college age kind of thing. And clearly, you didn't expect to go through the career change that you did in the way that you did.
You know, no one could have predicted the arrival of COVID-19. Probably never would have imagined that you'd be a rural route letter carrier during that time. we all get to live the lives we live, but if, if you looked back, is there anything that you would do differently from a career perspective leading up to the opportunity that you had to be a rural route letter carrier?
Steve (14:05.1)
I wish I could tell you that there was lot of intentionality behind my career path and there really isn't. If I had one piece of advice I would give to young people, it, you know...
I have real problem with this follow your dreams advice because it's like, know, well maybe my dream is to be a quarterback in the NFL. It's like that was just never gonna happen, right? It's just like I didn't play football in high school and I could have tried out at the combine. I wouldn't have made it. I just wasn't, that wasn't gonna happen. But I have.
My father was a very intellectually curious person. And I think if you want to talk about the difference between somebody who's an engineer that works in private industry and someone who is a research scientist like dad, dad was just always curious about how things worked. How did the natural world work?
And I guess I had that modeled for me from a young age. And I've always had that curiosity. I think it's been a little wider ranging, the dad. And if I follow the red thread back through my career, what has led me to success, where I've enjoyed it over and over again, has been I followed what I was curious about. So at the dawn of the internet, when people were still hand coding websites, I got really fascinated with like, wow, I don't have to know how to code code C++, I can just do HTML and I can make websites. And that's how my career got started, doing that in technical writing. And from there, I bet was my first work in Los Angeles after Alicia got hired as a graphic designer at a studio in LA and
Steve (16:02.86)
I was wandering around the office and I saw people doing consumer insights work. My other degree is, I have an English degree but I also have an anthropology degree from undergrad. And I saw what they were doing and I was like, what is this? What are you guys doing? Oh, we're doing account planning. That's what it was called at the time.
And I immediately recognized, like, this is like applied anthropology. We're trying to understand what resonates with people from a cultural perspective, from an emotional perspective. And I started doing that kind of work in the digital space. But it was because I was curious about that, and that's what led me through really a lot of the rest of my career. And I think if I had, when I was looking at jobs, there weren't many to look at once I got laid off thought, rural letter carrier, huh, that's interesting. I got curious about what that work would be like. And that curiosity about what it takes to be a good mailman, the curiosity about the people on my route, curiosity about my fellow carriers and their lives is...was really what sustained me through that time period. And so I would always tell young people, man, if you are curious in general, but if something really seizes your attention, huh, how does that work? How would you work in that space? If it engages your interest, that is a great.
That's a great place to start. If you can be useful and curious, there are many, many unexpected jobs out there. for all this talk about AI, the one thing AI doesn't have yet is curiosity, right? And it doesn't have a lot of open-ended problem solving either. And...
Steve (18:08.94)
You know, that's half of what business is, right? Business is open-ended problem solving under conditions of constraint to achieve an outcome, right? And if you can do that, you can do lots of different kinds of business and begin to accumulate the sort of problem solving skills and expertise that are gonna make you successful.
Matt Miner (18:32.356)
I appreciate you saying that. And also just to touch on the AI thing. I mean, I don't know what this leaves for anything else, but if, if, you know, half of business is that kind of open-ended problem solving, the other half of it is managing human relationships and, AI can't do that at all. One of the things that has struck me so much as I've been in this advisory career for the last seven years is how hungry people are for someone who will listen to them and understand them to some extent.
You know, even within the context of a professional relationship. So unfortunately, as there are at least in cases, you know, greater loneliness and alienation, people who are capable of bringing human connection to how they do things, whether in a large organizational context or smaller, you know, type of personal services business, I just think it's, demand is not a problem.
Steve (19:30.496)
Demand is not a problem and it's the supply is quite restricted, right? And so for, I had a good friend of mine, he was a senior executive at a large organization I worked at and brilliant dude, HBS guy, former McKinsey guy. sorry.
Matt Miner (19:30.804)
So.
Matt Miner (19:53.173)
HBS by the way is like, no HBS is like, it's like the Duke University of Massachusetts so.
Steve (19:57.996)
It is like the I've heard it's like it's like the Duke University of the Northeast and that's a well-deserved dig and And you know when he started his role he he got he got
Matt Miner (20:03.507)
Okay, go on, I'm sorry.
Steve (20:17.366)
There was a metric that we used called followership for executives. And they wanted to know like, basically assign a score to the willingness of people to work for you in another setting, right? If you moved teams, would they want to move teams with you? And then, you know, they love a stack rank. He had the lowest stack rank of everybody kind of at his level.
But he worked on it. He worked on making sure he saw everybody, he listened to their concerns, he was substantive about not just listening, but like taking it into account and meeting the human needs of the people on his teams. And he went from, he literally went from the bottom to the top. And it has served him really well. And I've thought about that specific case many times of like, yeah, expertise is great.
But it's the soft skill stuff that I think is the most difficult thing and it's the thing that human beings are the hungriest for.
Matt Miner (21:18.825)
No, thanks for sharing that. And also your friend as an HBS alum would be happy to hear that you described it as a case. So everything is working out. yeah, that's right. So you have mentioned kind of the healthcare imperative that led you to seek out this job. For my listeners out there,
Steve (21:26.412)
What once a consultant Matt
Matt Miner (21:47.861)
My new friend Steve mentioned Medicare. He was actually referring to Medicaid, which is the program that is available through Obamacare. You don't have to apologize. You're not a financial advisor, but I thought this was a good opportunity for me to share that and the general availability of healthcare through the Obamacare exchange, whatever one's opinion of the existence of such a thing may be. But you talked in both the Wall Street Journal article and
Steve (21:54.208)
There you go. Sorry.
Matt Miner (22:15.475)
and in the book about your prostate cancer diagnosis. And so I thought that was fair game to just ask you, how are you doing today? I was concerned for you.
Steve (22:18.005)
Yes.
Steve (22:23.721)
Well, I am receiving excellent care from your alma mater, Duke. Duke Medicine has a joint program with Johns Hopkins. And they are probably the most advanced prostate cancer research and care, those two organizations together in the world.
I did my research. My father was a prostate cancer survivor, my uncle as well. And I've been under what they call active surveillance. So once my PSA score, my prostate specific antigen score got me into the, you're really not supposed to have any, but some is normal for most men. The evidence is still mixed on it, but I do feel like Type A personalities, kind of like aggressive, high drive people, of which I am certainly one, are maybe more susceptible to it. It's clearly a genetic component if both my dad and his brother and me have it, but both of my brothers thankfully don't. But the latest thinking is, as long as you're under the...and you're in the lower part of the risk assessment based on your PSA and I've had some imaging done, don't do anything, right? And I've been lucky in that for many years now, it's been clicking up and eventually we'll have to do something about it, but I haven't had to do anything just yet. haven't had any quality of life impacts, which has been fantastic. I did want to say one thing and. You know, as a a family financial planner or financial planner for anybody. The most jarring thing for me out of the economic precarity of what happened to me when I was laid off was I had health care, I had good health care, and my youngest wound up having to go to the emergency room at one point during that year and I was very thankful for the health care that I had. But I was going to go in and have some imaging done and I couldn't afford the copay. It was three grand under my under that insurance plan to have it. I remember the lady behind the counter said to me, she goes, okay, so the copay's, she goes, so it's $3,000. And I said, well, the list price is $3,000, but what's my copay? She goes, that is the copay. And I walked out of the hospital. I think that of the entire year, that's the angriest that I've been. And I lived in the UK for a couple of years prior to the pandemic and I was under the ghastly oppression of socialized medicine for two years. And you know, it just wouldn't have happened. I mean, you...people that are sick are taken care of in the UK. And it's kind of funny to hear them complain about it. And it's like complaining that there aren't enough cup holders in your Cadillac. It's like, yeah, but you don't get it. Everybody here has healthcare. It's what your taxes are paying for. And you know, whatever your politics are. George Mason University no less issued an economics paper on the cost benefit analysis of Obamacare and Obamacare marketplaces. And yeah, guess what? They pay for themselves. It's like the number of hours worked and labor availability among people that are of working age, once they have healthcare, it does end up being a net good to the public. And...
It's just so... Anyway, we don't have to go into my thoughts on the economy, but it's like, what's the economy for? What is all this wealth we're creating for? And I am hardly some Bolshevik. I just think that it's like...At some point, the wealthiest society in human history should be able to to provide basic health care to its people. And it can be done pretty affordably.
And it was really, it was a cold place to be outside of that. If you want to talk, so people have asked me like, this guy was so privileged, he was privileged before he was a mailman and then he was privileged when he got out. They are exactly right. I have been blessed with being a middle class guy my whole life except for this short stint that I was in the postal service and because I hadn't worked my way up into the middle class part of being in the postal service yet, but that healthcare is kind of an invisible safety blanket that covers everybody in your family. And when it's not there, man, you are really hanging out in the wind. It was a scary place to be. I'm glad that I'm back with the healthcare that I have now.
Matt Miner (28:18.185)
Yeah. Well, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that diagnosis. I'm glad that your monitoring of it is going well. And I'm sorry for that experience that you had at the, at the hospital, or wherever you were seeking that imaging. We, in our own family have been without traditional health insurance for probably the last seven and a half years and have done that through.
Steve (28:44.286)
Wow, really? Okay.
Matt Miner (28:48.085)
Christian healthcare sharing ministry. I'm probably, which wouldn't have helped you in this instance because naturally, while I think that they do a wonderful job helping people pay for care, they do exclude pre-existing conditions from sharing. So the...
Perhaps as a follow up to this episode, I will do a dedicated solo episode talking about different ways of accessing healthcare. I've come to have a lot of thoughts and interests lately on how we think about health and then how we think about health insurance or paying for healthcare and then the healthcare that we need or seek itself. It's a big topic and I appreciate.
Steve (29:39.637)
I think a lot of people would benefit from that, Matt. It's so complex and it's, man, one of things I'll tell you as a behavioral economist is people have difficulty thinking about future risks and thinking about magnitudes of risks and consequences of risks. And so the guidance that people are hungry for about what, okay, but really what is my menu of options? How should I think about this? I heard that so much during my time in that space. I think having that clearly laid out and having someone to talk to about that is incredibly valuable.
Matt Miner (30:20.895)
Well, before we turn this into the healthcare philosophy podcast, we'll charge ahead. I did want to ask, to the extent you're willing to share, how did your experiences with both the layoff and working as a letter carrier affect or not affect your your family outside of yourself, your immediate family, your wife and daughters?
Steve (30:24.275)
Hahaha Sure. Alicia was a, my wife was a rock during this thing. I knew it was really important for me to not panic and not to convey panic. And she was right there with me.
Everybody wants to be taken care of from time to time and we knew that we really needed to take care of each other. My mom and dad helped out and again I had that strong family safety net there with them providing child care with the girls and and they helped out with groceries from time to time. You know the anecdote I think that's the most illustrative of it is when the girls started writing college application exams and, you know, Matilda wrote an exam about what it felt like when she realized that I had been laid off and that our, you know, the kind of economics of our family had been pretty radically affected and that it scared her and she realized that like it wasn't automatic. Security was something that could be taken away pretty quickly from you. And I sensed it at the time. didn't really, you we talked about the fact that my job had changed. We were going to have to be more frugal. But the fact that here it was years on and that that emotional memory was still with her. That hit pretty hard, you know, and I have tremendous sympathy for other parents who find themselves in those circumstances. It could be really destabilizing blow to you. And in the early days before, I'd kind of got my legs under me at the job and began to have a sense that like, okay, we're gonna make it, the country's gonna make it, we're gonna get through this. I had begun to have conversations with a couple of firms that were thinking about hiring as things opened back up and so I thought, okay, now let's hold the line, right? Survive in advance and that you won't be delivering the forever. I think, you know, delivering the mail can be a great career for people that start young and you work higher up in the pay scale. Like a lot of government jobs, you can work higher up into the pay scale and have a really solid middle class life. But to start at the bottom rung in your midlife is a pretty tough road to hoe. And I've been very grateful that I have been able to return to my previous career.
And when I'm having a tough day at work, I come back to that. It's not an abstraction anymore. It's like, whoa, what if I lose my job? It's like, I know what that's like. And I had gotten laid off before, but was always able to move into something else pretty quickly. That thought that it could have been permanent, that you were just going to have a permanent adjustment to your life and your socioeconomic status.
Was it was humbling. It was deeply humbling. you know, something like that can break people or you can take humility and strength from it. I've been fortunate to be able to take some humility from it. I could probably use a dose of that every once in a while. but yeah, it changed. It changed my perspective about work quite a bit. you know, if you're the primary breadwinner in your family, you know, and maybe sometimes you're like, maybe you're like, wow, everybody's at home and they're having home life and you have to go off and work.
Steve (35:13.5)
Sometimes that can end up feeling like you're a little estranged from the daily rhythms of what's going on at your house. It's just like, no, you're important. Your kids see it. They see how hard you work.
They see the work you're doing for the family and for the home and it counts. It gives them a sense of security. don't think my, the girls were younger when it started, but afterwards they have said to me, dad, we know how hard you've worked for us and we know what you've given us. And that's not why did it, but it feels good to hear it. I'll tell you that much.
Matt Miner (35:54.933)
It means a lot when the kids see it and it's a nice expression of their regard for you when they say it.
Steve (36:02.236)
It is. It absolutely is. you know, they've they've worked like Walker's worked at Scout Camp. Matilda has worked at an ice cream store here in town and they've both done. They both do a lot of stuff with nails like they're very artistic, so they do these very elaborate things with nails and like, you know, we played kind of the entrepreneur game of like okay, well what's the cost of goods? And then once we add your labor in, what are you making per set of nails? And Matilda does it for pocket money up in New York and has been kind of climbing the price scale on that because she does really beautiful stuff, Walker too. And I don't know, makes me feel good. It's like, right, I got some good work ethic in there.
Matt Miner (36:56.127)
That's awesome. We hugely value the same thing here around our place. So I'm gonna pivot now from talking about your professional experiences. I was very drawn to the book. I am also a closeted writer. No, I love to write. As I read your book, I was struck by your very direct style and telling the thing rather than telling about the thing. And so just wanted to learn a little bit about your experience as a writer. I was curious in terms of timeline, you can answer these at the same time, terms of when did you first have that encounter with your friend, the Esquire alum, to when you finished the book? And then also, was there a time of day or a place that you found to do this writing?
Steve (37:52.49)
Sure. Well, so you've put your finger on an important point, which was I was working full time and had to write a book. to find that time, I wound up...
My close friend of the family out in California had a cabin near Lake Arrowhead, very beautiful, in San Bernardino Mountains. And from there I could, from the cabin, I could walk down to the, there was a grocery store at the foot of the mountain I could get my groceries from once a day or every couple of days. And so I worked East Coast hours remotely on my day job and then would work a couple of hours every night after a dinner. And then on the weekends, I worked 10, 12 hour days, Saturday, Sunday. And so I really kind of squoze three quarters of a full time job into each week around my day job. It took about two years.
Ultimately, I had originally said like, I'll knock this out in 12 months. And that was wrong. And when I had to go to my editor and say, I'm going to need more time. And she said, it's fine.
There is not a first time writer I've worked with that hasn't needed more time than they thought they needed. There's some Dunning-Kruger certainly going on there. I got the sense that the legal department probably literally just reached into a pre printed tray of forms and just wrote in what they needed to extend the time. it took about two years. I ultimately did four drafts of the book all in.
Steve (39:59.598)
And I think the biggest change in the book was from the first to the second draft where... It's funny, you talked about my writing style. My editor came back to me with feedback and then Dante, who's a working screenwriter, the guy whose cabin I was staying in, he read it. And Dante said, hey, this kind of reads like a post on LinkedIn. There's not a lot of you in here. that's not, people need to know what you were thinking and feeling. And I realized I'd, I've been reluctant to get into that. You know, I'm a private person or I guess I was. And, and, and so I was like okay, it's decision time. Like, I'm either gonna go for it and just really write what I was feeling, what I was seeing, or, and just let the chips fall where they may, you know, but your authentic self, whatever that is. But I said, I've just gotta be honest about what was going on with me. And let that inform the book. that's when I kind of got my legs under me. I sort of found the voice of the book at that point, I went back and read some stuff I had written as a younger guy and that seemed more unvarnished and said, okay, I gotta do that, but I have to do it as a 52 year old guy now. And it's hard. I had an instructor at Iowa tell me,
Steve (42:11.923)
When you read something and you think it's terrible, that's your talent talking. That's your inner critic saying, this could be better. And it's always a balancing act of feeling like you're just directly piping it onto the page. You're not editing yourself. You're feeling it as you're writing it.
And then being able to come back almost as a different person, kind of an applied schizophrenia, where you come back and go, okay, now I have to be cold-blooded about this and take out the stuff that's just junk. And having an editor, which I'd never worked with before, was an incredible experience. And they help you sharpen that significantly.
Matt Miner (42:59.733)
Stephen King calls it writing with the door closed and writing with the door open. You do the first draft, it's just for you. And then you gotta come back and make it what it needs to be. Have you read On Writing?
Steve (43:03.721)
That's exactly it, right? Yeah.
Steve (43:10.537)
It's a superb book and it's actually my favorite book on writing. actually think he really cooks it down to the essentials. The thing I like about King is he...
He's such an, he is an incredibly accomplished writer and he's kind of always gotten snubbed as not being as literary as, you know, whatever. But, you you put him next to somebody like Jonathan Franzen and they're both up to the same gig, right? They are both incredibly accomplished writers. They're both using all of the same tools. King, I don't know if it's just the Mainer in him, but like, he's just got a really straightforward style and I didn't remember that, the door closed and the door opened, but that's exactly, and you gotta close and open that door many, many times back and forth. Writing something book length is an endurance sport, it took, it was much longer and much harder than I thought it was gonna be. I don't think I've ever worked on anything harder in my entire life.
Matt Miner (44:26.399)
Thanks for sharing about your experience with that, Steve. I just wanted to ask, tactically, how did you get your op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal? They don't publish everybody.
Steve (44:36.425)
They don't publish anybody. You know, I was really fortunate that they, I had a great publicist. I have a great publicist at Simon & Schuster and sent them an ARC of the book, advanced readers copy of the book. And they're like, hey, we want to do this as one of our careers stories. And so I was like, oh, okay. So am I going to write something? And they're like, no, we're going to.
We're gonna take the book and we're gonna cut something together and take it or leave it. Like if you say yes, we're gonna go do this and it's gonna run. We're gonna run the thing that we wanna run. I was like.
Okay, so on the one hand, I did write it, but on the other hand, they edited it. And I think they did an incredible job. They pulled from about four different parts of the book and put it together. And at the end of the day, when I read it, I was just like, this is great. I wish this is what writing the book had been like.
Matt Miner (45:41.813)
Now it was, well definitely drew me in and then I listened to the audio book, started it the day it came out and then ended up playing the audible for my whole family as we returned from Tucson to Raleigh on a recent return leg of a road trip. So we've had your voice in my ear right much. Yeah. Good apologize to my family, I feel okay about it.
Steve (46:03.682)
I'd like to apologize at this point. Okay, alright. Please pass that along to them.
Matt Miner (46:12.373)
I'll be certain to do that though. I'll tell you my youngest Ben, we didn't, we didn't finish it. We just ran out of time and he has, has said, well, when we're, when we're driving back and forth for deer hunting later this fall, we'll have to keep working on Mailman. So, okay, we'll do that. Um, I'm not an expert in, how it works. It sounds like your experience was actually in receiving a degree, but, uh, what was the timing of the Iowa writers workshop in your education and how did that feed into the book project?
Steve (46:17.223)
Yeah.
Steve (46:39.858)
Sure.
You know, I had about a decade between when I got out of school from undergrad, from State and NC State, and then when I went to Iowa. So I had this sort of decade of work and technical writing, advertising. And then I was not satisfied with what I was doing. Went to grad school for two years. It was a pretty transformative experience. I got on, I was 35 and then proceeded to not write anything for nearly 20 years. And a lot of that decision was...I would be lying to you if I said it was an entirely practical decision. think there was some of it where I was just overwhelmed with adulthood and career and being a parent and all the rest of that stuff and just didn't have the bandwidth in my head to do it. I think in part, not to get too cosmic about it, but...
You spend a lot of time by yourself as a rural route letter carrier. And that time listening to my own thoughts, no outlook, no meetings, no Zoom, no nothing, just you're slinging parcels and mail out on a back road somewhere.
Steve (48:20.57)
I think it kind of react ironically, I think it reactivated the the writer part of me. And so when this moment struck, I was kind of reengaged with that part of me that would think about stories and think about writing. And and so I was I was ready to do it somewhat providential, I think. But it was a long stretch. know, I'd I'd gone through a lot of like envy and admiration of my classmates when I would see them get, you know, a review in the Times or read about they had a new book published or whatever. I was one of those guys that kind of like after Iowa sort of disappeared under the surface. So it's been great to be able to get back in touch with them and say like, I'm part of the club too now. I have a book too. So.
Matt Miner (49:14.921)
That's awesome, and again, congratulations. I wanted to ask what was your experience recording the audiobook?
Steve (49:23.652)
Actually terrific. I, I, we did it in a studio and I wanted that because, I wanted it to be as frictionless as possible for me. It was just like, okay, I'll go into a sound booth. be a mic and there'll be people there doing the engineering and cause they had offered like, we'll come there and we'll set up. And I'm just like, no, we're not, we're not just gonna go to a studio and we'll do it but it was it was it's kind of wild to just sit there reading your own stuff took about four days and we were scheduled they had booked seven they and and Phil who was one of the engineers and Matt who was the producer incredible guys and after the end of the first day, Matt, who recorded many, audiobooks, he said, you know what, man? We're going to be fine. I said, well, what do you mean? He goes, like, look, I get people in here where we're having to almost go sentence by sentence. And I've done a tremendous amount of presenting in my professional career and I think that was sort of that was very adjacent to doing the audiobook and I knew the material well I had written it and so it's funny you had to kind of fool yourself into doing the thing like it's just me right and I'm just gonna I'm just gonna tell this story to this microphone and and I'm gonna forget that this is getting encoded and it's gonna be sold over Audible and maybe many thousands of people will listen to it if I'm lucky. And just try to tell the story. You my dad, for all of his STEM background, he was a great storyteller and...
Steve (51:39.091)
When we were kids and we'd be camping in West Virginia, Dad would tell these stories of the tales of the lost Falcon that he had made up. He had made up this, the old man lived on a mountain in West Virginia and he had nursed this, this Falcon back to health. And then they were like partners and they could communicate with hand signals. And it was always just like, there's a moonshining operation. And then there was a minor strike and the old man sided with the miners and was trying to help them take care of the you know, out with the Baldwin felts and Pinkerton men. And there was a wildcat copper smelting operation. I mean, like, very inventive and a lot of real West Virginia history in it. it was cat, you know, we always wanted to hear more about the lost Falcon from Dad when we were kids. And I think that has stuck with me in that, like, and I'll tell you in our scout troop where I'm an adult leader, a long time ago, I just on a whim around the campfire, people were doing songs and all the stuff you do at a scout campfire. And I said, let me tell you a story about when I was a scout. And I told a story and the next camp, backpacking trip we went on all the Scouts are like, mr. Grant, are you gonna tell another story tonight? I was like, geez now I got to come up with a story and so This time when we were at film on and these were older Scouts for the most part these were Scouts, you know 15 was our youngest up through Some kids that were 17 18 years old but had been in this troop when when you know when they were younger and they were like, you're gonna tell stories, right, Mr. Grant? And so Phyllis, who was my good friend, she had a little notebook, and so I I got a good story about a mountain lion that I can tell. And she would jot him down. It's like, okay, what stories are you gonna tell tonight? And I ended up being the entertainment on this trip. But I think those people are...
Steve (53:53.352)
There's a hunger for just listening to another person tell a story. It's very natural. And you get people unplugged from their everyday life around a campfire. That's what they want to hear. And I thought about that as I did the audible book. was like, all right, I'm just going to tell the whoever is decided that they wanted to listen to several hours of this. Apparently, you're a family on a long car trip.
Matt Miner (54:20.789)
So that was kind of enforced.
Steve (54:23.303)
You at least and then everybody else was by proxy. But I wanted to tell a good story right to them.
Matt Miner (54:33.119)
That's great. do you, you know, speaking of stories, are there, are there other books that you'd like to write or are you even, are you writing right now or was this like a, this was the story and…
Steve (54:42.683)
Well, my agent sure would like me to write another book. And so I've been thinking about it. You know, I...
There was a lot going on that, you know, it was discreet. This was a year of my life, but it ended up being a kind of participant observation of blue collar work in rural America. And I've got this whole other life that I've lived as kind of fool's progress of my white collar life in advertising, in corporate America, in consulting. And I think that might be the next book. I'd love it if...
Just like this one, I've had a lot of letter carriers go, this guy tells it how it is. I'd love it if somebody that's working in a large Fortune 500 firm or working in an agency or working at a consultancy read the next book and said, this is really what it's like. This guy tells it like it is. And get to kind of the human truth of what it is to work a white collar job for a living. So that.
That's a little bit of a sneak preview. Not yet. I've been blocking out my timeline. I start with a timeline. And I have some stories in mind that I want to tell. But I'm still working that out.
Matt Miner (56:00.501)
Yeah, do you have any pages? Okay.
Matt Miner (56:15.637)
Awesome. Steve Stewart, I'm interrupting the recording right here. Steve Grant, I realized as I said Steve earlier that you're both Steve. Steve Stewart, my editor and Steve Grant, my guest. Occupational hazard of the Steves. It's almost like Matt for people born between 1978 and 1983. Just wanted to do a time check. at 20 minutes to the hour.
Steve (56:26.983)
Occupational hazard. Yeah
Matt Miner (56:42.902)
I, we may be able to finish these questions, but I want to be, I'm super enjoying the conversation. I would love to just continue as we're doing, but I also want to be respectful of any constraints you have.
Steve (56:51.249)
You know, if we wrap in the next 20 minutes or so, we'll be totally fine. I gotta call it 530 and I kinda need to switch gears, but yeah, but we're good.
Matt Miner (56:58.643)
Need a break. I get it. Okay. Then I think we're good and we'll just edit the time here as best we can. All right, Steve Stewart. I'm now going to be silent for a moment and continue with my questions for Steve Grant.
Steve, this is a show about life, work, and money. And I wonder, what do you love about where you are today with life, work, and money?
Steve (57:26.351)
Well, I have worked a lot of jobs that I have not particularly enjoyed working. I've worked other ones that I really loved that I wish I had gotten to keep. But what I have been surprised by is I've wound up being more financially successful than I, than kind of in my wildest dreams. I'm not a wealthy person by any stretch. My mother and father were convinced that if I was not a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer that I'd be in the poor house, right? And so when I told them, but I wasn't going to. I started school as a meteorology major at State. State has a fantastic meteorology program which requires a great deal of math, great, great deal of math that is a great deal beyond my abilities. And and so I kind of imagined it was going to be releasing weather balloons and sort of intuiting from isobar maps what the weather was going to be. That is not how it works. And so I became an English major and got this anthro degree in my, remember my dad just being like, what the hell are you gonna do with that? And I've wound up being more trying to find the most interesting job that paid as much try to balance those two things the best pay for the most interest to me I'm easily bored and and that's wound up actually being a pretty good heuristic to apply I will say early on not early on but a few years ago when I was working on the Prudential account and an advertising agency and really learning for the first time about how 401k works. It's embarrassing that I was nearly 40 before I figured that out. I wish I'd figured it out when I was 18. But I was like, whoa, I should be getting all the free money and I should be putting a lot of money into my 401k. And from that day forward, I did. And then we made the decision to leave New York because I was kind of cash flow neutral. I was making as much money as I've ever made, but I was cash flow neutral. I managed to work remotely. I managed to make New York money, but live in southwest Virginia. And then we had kind of a snowball going and I guess because it had never happened to me up until that point, but I was just like, oh, we're actually like accumulating some wealth here and not hedge fund wealth, upper middle class wealth. that's a great feeling. That's a privilege feeling to be able to do work that you'll be compensated like that for in the market. so I've managed to move forward in my career in a way that I've stayed as interested as I can in what I'm doing. And when I feel like I've lost interest, I've moved on.
Steve (01:01:14.067)
in part because that's my employer deserves my interest, right? If I'm disengaged, then they're not getting their money's worth and that's not working for either of us. And so, you know, I, I remember dad said to me, a few years ago, he's like, yeah, you really, you really did okay. And I was like, you don't have to sound so surprised dad. but, but he was genuinely like, he's just like…
But to the man's credit, he said to me, he said, you know, when you're an engineer, that's what you do. You just, you do engineering. And I've done it my whole life. And he said, you've done all sorts of stuff. I didn't even occur to me that that was like a thing that somebody could do. And so I've been.
I've been fortunate in that regard. From time to time I've envied people that are doctors and I just thought, wow, it be something to wake up in the morning and know I'm going to go help make sick people well. But at least I've been able to, I've had a very interesting career and I've been blessed in that regard.
Matt Miner (01:02:27.817)
And you got to tell some great stories about one of the fun parts of it, fun to read anyway. Steve, the theme of this show is learning from the experience of others. I wonder, is there a piece of advice that you've benefited from in your life that you'd like to share today?
Steve (01:02:29.221)
And I've gotten to tell some good stories while I'm at it. That's right.
Steve (01:02:47.111)
Piece of advice.
That's a good one. You know, my...I'm gonna keep coming back to dad here. If it hasn't occurred to your listeners already, father was a big figure in my life. He was a brilliant, brilliant guy. In the book I talk about him being a, he was a hillbilly with a PhD and he really was. he was a very practical, kind of no-nonsense Appalachian, kind of to his core.
And that was very compatible with being the kind of engineer that he was. And he was not a dispenser of soul advice, if you were feeling spiritually disoriented or something like that, never had anything to say about it. But when it came to practical problem solving, know, dad had a number of different aphorisms and there's been one I followed for most of my career and he said, ready to go to work and dad said, Steve, you're gonna work in an office now and a lot of people are gonna waste a lot of time talking about where they wanna go to lunch. Here's my advice on lunch pick a loser and stick with it. He said, you don't want to be too excited about lunch. You don't want it to be the high point of your day. And if you know that that's where you're going to eat, then you're not going to waste any time thinking about it. And if people want to meet with you at lunchtime, they know where to find you. So just do that. And I have followed that advice. Even here working by myself in my little one-man office, I eat at Chipotle every day. I am on a first-name basis. They're pulling the bag down off of the drive-through as I'm pulling in in the truck. You could think about that as a specific piece of advice just to lunch, but what Dad was really talking about was kind of cognitive conservation, that if you set up a routine,
Like I'm going to work on these things between this hour and this hour. And I'm going to work on these things between these other times. So I don't have to think about it. I'm not reinventing my day every single day. And there's going to be curveballs. There's always going to be curveballs. But when I think about how I ended up actually getting the book done, it was a lot of that. It's like, OK, this is the architecture of your day. You're going to work on your day job from you know, six o'clock in the morning until three in the evening. Then you're gonna go get your lunch, your dinner, resupply, and then you're gonna do two hours. And then on the weekend, you're gonna work 10 to 12 hours a day. And don't think about it, don't debate it, just get in there when the time comes and get your hammer and tongs and go to work. And...
And I have followed that advice in many forms over the course of my career. And I think one of the reasons dad said that was when my oldest was diagnosed with ADHD, I was also diagnosed with ADHD. Alicia was talking to the cognitive psychologist, the developmental psychologist.
Steve (01:06:20.006)
She must have had a look that the psych recognized and said like, am I describing your husband? And Alicia's like, yes. then after me, thought about dad and I thought, dad has it too. Like dad also has ADHD. And the way he had designed his day, much like the way I live mine now, was around leveraging his ability to hyper focus in on stuff and it leverages curiosity and block out distractions through the structure of his day. for me, it's been a winning piece of advice.
Matt Miner (01:07:04.382)
Thanks a lot, Steve. I think it's good advice.
I this question often, excuse me, Steve Stewart, might be gonna sneeze. Nope, I'm gonna recover there. All right, Steve Stewart, we're going back into questions for Steve Grant. I often ask this question as leaders are readers, but I think even more so authors are readers. And I wanted to ask what's a book that's been important to you in the past and what's something you're reading and enjoying right now?
Steve (01:07:32.812)
Okay, well.
I have, if you want to talk about how to write dialogue, I taught it when I was at Iowa, Mark Twain, Sam Clemens in Huckleberry Finn, and I know it's one of those books that they make you read, but if you read it as an adult, Twain's ear for American idiom is, has yet to be matched. Like he has captured how people actually speak, the natural cadences of how they speak. And so I often thought writing this book of like, okay, am I hearing this the way Twain would hear it? Right? Am I, I'm not trying to make people sound like they didn't sound. I'm not, I'm not trying to Hollywood it and juice it up or any of that stereotypical crap. Is this really how people really talk? And one of my coworkers, Kat, in the book, she said to me, she said, you really got it. Like you really got, this is how I talk and this is how people in the office talk. And I was very pleased to hear that. And so I've gone back to Twain and Huck Finn in particular,to just keep that in my ear. I have a non-fiction book that I read every year at Christmas. Roland Huntsford's The Last Place on Earth, and it's about the race to the South Pole between Scott and Amundsen. It is an incredible book. It's an incredible story. And the contrast between these two men and how they led their teams and the preparation or lack thereof and...
Steve (01:09:28.662)
and how they met with adversity. And I like to read it in the winter because it's winter time. And so I feel like I'm in Antarctica with them. But I really, I really loved that book. have been recently rereading. I reread the first one in anticipation of the second one. But Rick Atkinson's American Revolution histories right now. I'm blanking on the titles of them. the first one was the British are coming. Incredible. Like just he has two chapters in there about the battles of Lexington and Concord that are man, it's like Saving Private Ryan. You are right there with the red coats and with the militiamen swapping shots and artillery fire. As a historian, he's second to none. And gosh, I'm going to get the Fade of the Day, I think, is the title of the second book, which I'm reading right now. And Washington, like is not a great general at the start of the American. He's mostly good at not losing. Like he's not winning, but he's not losing. He keeps slipping the noose. And you can see his, he described, Washington described to his men some years after they were having a ball for the men that fought in the Continental Army.
And he said that our victory over the British was almost a miracle. And you get it. You get it when you read that book. It's just like at any given engagement, Battle of the Brandywine, earlier on when they were having to retreat from New York, the whole shooting match could have been up in smoke. yet Washington somehow kept everybody together.
Steve (01:11:40.827)
Kept retreating until he didn't have to retreat anymore until Yorktown and then he had him and he's it's it's strange to think about someone that lived 250 years ago he feels very contemporary to me all the men and women in that it feels almost like a documentary as you read it I've really been enjoying those books
Matt Miner (01:12:05.011)
I really appreciate you sharing those recommendations. are a couple in there that I'm not already familiar with, so that's great. I also, and of course I read about it in the Wall Street Journal, but I know that Ken Burns has a new American Revolution documentary coming out that I'm excited about.
Steve (01:12:19.002)
I'm very excited about that. It hasn't, it's funny. gets, you know, the revolution gets kind of the grade school civics treatment. And the thing I've liked about the Atkinson books is it is not that. There's backbiting, there's finger pointing, there's mistakes. People are mortal.
The blood and the gore of it is very real and I hope Ken Burns, just as he did with the Civil War, is able to bring that same sort of perspective to this. I'm sure he will. He's incredibly capable.
Matt Miner (01:12:57.525)
Steve, we've had a long conversation. Is there anything else before we talk about where listeners can find you? Is there anything else that you'd like to leave us with?
Steve (01:13:07.974)
I hope people, if they read the book, even if they don't, have an appreciation for their letter carrier and the service that the United States Postal Service has provided to the American people since the country's birth. It's the 250th anniversary of the Postal Service under Ben Franklin.
It's never been a for-profit enterprise. It's not a business. It's this sort of invisible infrastructure that has served this country incredibly well. And I hope when people see their letter carrier or the clerk at the office, they have an appreciation for the fact that...
It's a hard job and while they are certainly doing it to make a living like the rest of us, there's more than that at work. They're doing it for all of us. And in some ways, I wrote the book for them.
Matt Miner (01:14:09.173)
Very good. So to everyone out there listening, obviously run, don't walk, and grab your audible or print copy of Mailman. I haven't decided whether I'm using the video from today or not, but I have both. Steve, besides that, is there any way that you'd like people to follow up with you?
Steve (01:14:27.001)
Well, you can follow me on LinkedIn. That's really the only social media that I use. If you do read the book, leave a review. It really does help. Amazon puts a lot of weight on those reviews if you leave it on Amazon. And a lot of people find their books on Goodreads. If you leave a review on Goodreads or on Audible, it makes a big difference to everybody that has already left me a view, including Matt.
Thank you. I appreciate the time.
Matt Miner (01:14:58.837)
So parting shot, can dogs you meet now tell you were a mailman then?
Steve (01:15:04.429)
No, they can't. It's the aura, man. You get out of the truck with the flashers and some kind of a vest or jacket on, and it's like they can just cue in on it. They know.
And I'm telling you dogs that I've met as a civilian, Zippo reaction, but when I met him as a mailman, psychosis. Like they were just ready to kill. I don't know what it is, but there is something about carrying the mail that it's like a sound we can't hear, but the dogs can hear it, man. They know you're coming. So.
Matt Miner (01:15:42.025)
Now, Agatha Christie actually, Hercule Poroit explained this in one of the books, which is that the letter carrier mailman, of course he said at the time, the mailman comes to the door every day, he knocks, the master of the house never lets him in, and yet he comes back again and again and is clearly not welcome, though very persistent, and so the dog's duty is to make sure that
Steve (01:16:02.979)
Ha ha ha!
Matt Miner (01:16:10.995)
that he protects the family from this nefarious interloper.
Steve (01:16:14.341)
There is a lot of wisdom in that. I had not heard that. And there is a lot of wisdom in that. In that, like, who is this guy? Why is he coming up to the house? Why does nobody seem bothered by the fact that this stranger is approaching our home? Clearly with no intention of entering the house. And maybe, yeah, maybe she figured it out.
Matt Miner (01:16:38.549)
Steve, thanks again. Really appreciate you being here today.
Steve (01:16:40.942)
Matt, cannot appreciate it enough. Thank you.