The Whole Story of the American Dream

I’m writing this article from Bridgewater, New Jersey, visiting family on my way to an event in New York where, among other speakers and participants, I will get to see John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods Market. Coincidentally, I’m sitting in the café section of the Whole Foods Market store in Bridgewater, store #10639 . And as a bigger coincidence, this article is my review of John Mackey’s amazing latest book, The Whole Story, a personal and business memoir that I thoroughly enjoyed.

The book takes us on a fascinating journey through Mackey’s life, both his personal life and the life of the company he loved and to which he dedicated so much of his efforts. It is an incredibly authentic and honest book where he lays out everything—from his success and the meticulous thinking behind some of his business decisions to his passion for healthy eating and living, and even to his romantic relationships, his own insecurities, regrets, and bad decisions both in business and in life.

I titled this essay “The Whole Story of the American Dream,” both because of the title of the book and also because Mackey’s journey is one of the best examples of living the dream, and it includes many aspects and clear-cut pillars of the pursuit of one’s own American Dream.

The James Truslow Adams definition of the American Dream being about searching for a better, richer, and fuller life encapsulates the book and Mackey’s story. His search for a better life embodies what has been his life’s mission or, more specifically, his American Dream with Whole Foods: to help Americans eat healthier and live healthier lives through eating whole foods.

The “richer” component of his American Dream was embracing the capitalist side of his life and business where he created value both for himself and those around him, while at the same time creating a movement of Conscious Capitalism that has now also inspired other groups like Principled Business. And the fuller component of his American Dream has been his search for meaning both in his personal life and in his work, feeling fulfilled with the company he has created and the people who have been with him along for the ride—from co-founders to employees to friends and family—and in that sense enabling many other people to find their own meaning in life through the multiple paths to flourishing he has created by way of Whole Foods.

However, the book is not by any stretch of the imagination a sugar-coated account of his life. Mackey details with great pain some of the toughest decisions he had to make in life and in business; how, for example, the company survived a 100-year flood that destroyed their first store, how he had to deal with multiple challenges to his leadership and face off with at least three internal coups, failed attempts at creating new businesses, the trial and error of daily business decisions, and the difficult decision to sell Whole Foods to Amazon.

Writing of his personal life, he details all of his romantic relationships and opens up about his good and bad decisions. When discussing his parents, he details the great relationship and friendship with his dad as one of his most trusted advisors and backers, but who, at the end of the day, he still needed to ask to step down from the Whole Foods Board because of their disagreements. And he discussed how very painful it was that he never ended up receiving his mother’s approval because he didn’t follow the college path she had hoped for him. At the end he wonders—and I believe it would have been true—if his mother (who passed away in 1987) would have been proud of what he accomplished.

One of the most important lessons he learned while building and trying to improve his business—in this particular case trying to build bridges between food producers and animal rights activists—was a lesson for that specific period of his life but which I found inspiring and deeply meaningful for anyone who is trying to dream big in other areas and make a mark or improve the world:

“In engaging the world as it could be, it is easy to lose touch with the world as it is and therefore fail to actually improve it.”

Mackey embarked on the Hero’s journey of his own life, and he’s certainly still at it with his new projects. And in that Hero’s journey and love of long-distance trekking, he related to one of his own favorite book series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The American Dream is that Hero’s journey; maybe if Frodo would have been living in the United States, destroying the ring would have been his own American Dream. But in essence that Hero’s Journey and being an entrepreneur of one’s own life is what the American Dream is all about. It is an intentional, obstacle-ridden, and outward action-oriented journey.

Mackey has embarked on the great journey and quest of his own and has poured his story with much love into the pages of this inspiring book. He has tried to stay true to one of his own mottos in life of expanding into love and not contracting into fear at all steps of the way—sometimes more successfully, sometimes less so, but always seeking to improve. And that is what the American Dream is all about, aspiring for achievement, for self-improvement, being about the journey and not only the destination, learning by doing . . . in this case in life and in business.

This book is a must for business leaders but also for any American Dreamers out there. So I encourage you to get it and immerse yourself in this Whole story of the American Dream.