ACHIEVE anything you want in Life | Jeff Lerner | The 2%

If you can't first take care of yourself and then take care of the people close to you, what right do you even have to go out into the market and say, here, here, market, here, here, audience, here, here, customers and prospects. I'm going to take great care of all of you, and in exchange for that, I want your money. You're not even taking care of the people that live under your roof. You have got to advocate for yourself. You have got to get loud and noisy and bold and unapologetic and almost confrontational with the. Listen up. This is who I am. This is what I do. Pay attention, and I'm going to win you over with value.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the 2%, where we're interviewing peak performers in all walks of life to help decode excellence so that you can reach the top of your game and in whatever it is that you're doing without sacrificing the things that matter most. And I'm super thrilled to introduce to you today my guest, Jeff Lerner. Now, Jeff has so many fascinating things to share with us. He's the founder and the CEO of Entre Institute, which to date has already skilled up, trained up over 120,000 people, helping them build online businesses, create awesome lives, and also doing that, as I said earlier, without sacrificing the things that matter most, without sacrificing, for example, their health and relationships. And on that note, Jeff is also married, the father of four. And before he was doing all of this, his big passion was the piano, which I'm sure he'll share a little bit about today as well. So welcome to the show, Jeff. Absolutely thrilled to have you here.

So grateful to be here, Eric. I'm grateful for the invitation and the time.

Yeah. Thank you. So we were just having a really interesting chat right before we hit record, and you were talking about how the day didn't go to plan and you missed doing some of the things that you normally would like to do in a day. And then you had 48 minutes before this interview was going to start, and you had a choice. Tell us about the choice you made.

Yeah, I'm happy to, because it honestly, it sums up a lot of how I try to live my life, and I think a lot of the concepts that you talk about on this show. So I did. I had 48 minutes. Anybody that's watching visually can see I'm in what looks like a hotel room. I am. I'm on vacation. I'm in Las Vegas. I'm here with my wife. It's actually the first getaway we've had in a long time with no kids. So last night we hung out, we stayed up a little late. And this morning, plus when I'm here, the time zone is an hour earlier, so my meetings start an hour earlier. Plus the gym here at the hotel doesn't open until 5:30, which doesn't really give me of time to do my normal morning routine. Normally I start the day at 3:30, but I can do that because the gym is 24 hours. So it's like these little hiccups in your life where circumstances, you know, disrupt the plan. So I was sitting here, I just got off a long morning of meetings and I had 48 minutes until this show was going to start. And I was thinking, okay, what do I do? I can either, you know, have a cup of coffee, kick my feet up, mentally regroup or refresh or recharge or the things that we tell ourselves that are code for slack. And instead I said, okay, I'm going to see how much I can cram in in the next 48 minutes. And in those 48 minutes I ran, I got, I put on my workout clothes, I ran down, like literally ran down to the gym. I did as many sets as I could squeeze in of bike sprints with pull ups back and forth. I got in six in about 20, 24 or 25 minutes roughly. While I was doing that, there was another thing on my to do list today, which was to proofread my book. That was, I just got back from the editor with some edits, so obviously I can't do that while I'm running back and forth in the gym. So I used the speak function on the apple on the iPhone to highlight the text and I had Siri reading my book to me the whole time I was doing it. Then I got done, then I sprinted back up here, took a shower, changed clothes. Also, my wife had just gotten back from shopping, so I even had a minute for her to show me what she got and got some vlog footage because I was behind on vlog footage for the day. Shower changed back here, Boom. And as you can attest, I was on to the minute when I was supposed to be. And the reason I share that story is I think those little windows of time that exist in the life of everyone, every single one of us, including those of us who don't have enough time, we all have these pockets of time, whether it's 15 minutes between a meeting, you know, a 20 minute drive from point A to point B, a 60 minute lunch break that if we had planned ahead and had our meal prepared, we could probably handle in 15 or 20. Like, I'm really obsessed with maximizing those little windows of time. And what I find is you make a game of it and it's fun. And truly in that 48 minutes, I got as much meaningful stuff done as, you know, reasonably some people do in a half a day. And it's like I didn't even miss the time. It's like, it's like I created time out of thin air just by using a gap that normally would have gone to waste. And anyway, you get the point. But that's. And then what's funny is I get so excited about it, I want to talk about it for the next hour. To people like you that understand high performance, it's like, I'm such a performance nerd that this is like the high point of my day is just that I had a really efficient 48 minute packet of time.

Yeah, but that's awesome. And it's, you know, as you're talking, I literally looking up, you know, above my screen here, and it says 10 minutes to success. And the reason it says that is because I have a quote from the founder of ikea. And you know, he said you could do so much in 10 minutes time. 10 minutes once gone are gone for good. Divide your life into 10 minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity. And that was from a man who built IKEA up from scratch and turned it into the multibillion dollar company. It was very similar to what you're saying there. All about protecting his time as his most valuable asset and making the most of it, wasting as few of those as possible. Now, a couple of things that I love with what you said there. You used the word plan and, and a lot of time. And I used to do this with myself. I used to, if my day didn't go to plan, I'd feel really bad about it and the rest of my day could kind of like go to crap. And then I had the insight, and it sounds like you're actively practicing this, that a great day isn't a day that goes to plan per se, but a day in which you operate at your best despite whatever you have planned.

Oh yeah.

And so I really got that vibe from you when you said that because it's like, okay, I have a recovery opportunity here, you know, how am I going to make the best of it?

Right.

But stepping back, if we talk about plan from like a more Macro level. So can you tell us a bit about your life? Because the life you're leading right now wasn't planned. You know, how did you get here? Like, what's the backstory?

Yeah, well, one of my favorite sayings.

Is, well, there's two related to plans. And it, by the way, it's not planning or failing to plan, is planning to fail. That's not one of my favorite sayings about planning. It's no plan survives contact with the enemy. You know, common battlefield statement. And then Mike Tyson's famous line that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

So, yeah, I mean, the life I live, I wouldn't say it's a happy accident. I would say it's a convergence of happenstance and intention, which is life.

And yeah, I mean, so I'm this founder and actually I will. When we submitted that bio to you, I was the CEO of Entre Institute, but I actually take it as a further evolution and sign of progress that I'm not anymore. I'm actually the CVO Chief Vision Officer. Oh, wow. I was able to, I mean, have a business partner and frankly, he's better at details than me. And so he's in his lane of genius, running the day to day. And I get to essentially be the figurehead and the evangelist and the content creator for what we're trying to do in the world, which is my sweet spot.

And yeah, we're a big company. We have a staff of 150 people. We have. Our goal is a nine figure run rate this year. Our goal is to enroll 250,000 students this year. Like, it's a big business and it takes a lot to manage. But I am really, really committed to, like you talk about the things that matter. And by the way, I think work is one of those things that matter. I think a lot of people have this false dichotomy in their mind that I'm going to do my work in order to support the things that matter. And I think that's a really sad state of affairs because for most people, you're going to spend the majority of your life doing your work. Most adults are going to spend more time with their work than they do with their families. That's just how it goes. And so if work is this constant sacrifice to fulfill the things that matter, I think that's the biggest opportunity, time, opportunity, squandered imaginable in a life. And one of the things I'm committed to doing is with the work of Entre is proving to people and empowering and teaching and, you know, equipping with the tools to create a life where the work you do can be part of what matters in your life and be well compensated for it to be clear. So you know how that all came about. I mean, like you mentioned, I was a broke musician or I was a musician. You mentioned I was a musician. I guess I'm adding the part that I was broke. In my late 20s.

I ended up almost $500,000 in debt. I had gotten this entrepreneurial bug as a piano player working with and playing in the homes of really successful people. I played private parties, I got booked into these homes and I ended up playing piano for several billionaires. Lots of CEOs, founders and lead operators of Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies. Anyway, I got this entrepreneurial book because I was like, man, all these, I'm sitting here, I'm 24 years old in the early. No, I guess, yeah, early 2000s, 2002, 2003. And I'm playing piano in like 10, 15, $20 million houses, which would be like $50 million houses today. And I'm like, who are these people? Well, they were all entrepreneurs. They were all people that started businesses. They weren't people that had, you know, gone to, gone to Wharton and gotten an MBA and gotten a job and climbed the ladder. And I mean, those people, those people were at the parties too. Cause usually they worked for the guy that was hosting the party. But I just got this bug planted of like, you know, I love my life because I'm creative and I get to make music for a living. But I don't love the struggle. And so I'm going to try to keep that element of creativity and improvisation. I was a jazz musician, so I literally improvised for a living. But I'm going to try to learn some different skills. If I can play these 88 keys the way I do, I can probably pull some different strings. And I became obsessed and a student of business. And it took 10 different business attempts in my 20s, everything from MLM to starting a marketing company. I was a party promoter for a while. I tried starting a booking agency to book other bands. I tried flipping houses on credit cards. I tried originating mortgages, I tried phone sales, creating my own little gig to do sell over the phone. I tried doing door to door marketing in college towns with a different product I created. It was a long litany of failures. But I had the wisdom from these billionaires that I had played for ringing in my ears. When I used to go to the Gigs, I would take a notebook and I would try to corner whoever's party it was and get some mentorship from them. I'm like, how many 24 year olds have access to billionaires, right? And so I would go into their house and I would ask them questions. Usually I'd only get like 30 or 60 seconds of their time, but 30 or 60 seconds of time from a guy that you know, like Bob McNair of the Houston, the owner of the Houston Texans football team who passed away in 2017. 60 seconds of his time, although actually him I got a few more than 60 seconds. But, you know, this is a guy that failed at 17 businesses, didn't have a success until his mid-40s. And at the time I was playing for him in his 60s, he was worth two and a half billion dollars. And when he died, he was worth almost $5 billion. Like you get a couple minutes of that guy's time, you want to be prepared, right? And he told me, he said, you know, they tell kids all the time that insanity, the definition of insanity, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. He said, fortunately, I wasn't in school that day. I missed the memoir because I started 17 businesses before I got it right. And so I was fueled by that and some other great advice I'd gotten from people that the only real failure is a mistake that you don't learn from. And so every one of these failures, I was getting better and just iterating again and again and again until finally in 2008, admittedly coming off my biggest failure, which was opening a couple franchise restaurants and taking on a bunch of debt, sometimes we got to learn the lesson the hard way about being under capitalized and over leveraged. And I did. But under that pressure of having to pay off a half a million dollars in debt, I went online and I discovered a much more scalable, lower friction, lower overhead way of doing business in the digital economy. And I was able to pay off a half a million dollars in debt in 18 months.

And what was your experience in digital and online before? Finding? Finding.

Was about the same as my experience of flying shuttles to Mars.

So what did you do?

How did you set yourself up focus in the right way? How did you understand what to do to reach the top of that game so quickly?

Two things. One, and I'll give you the easy thing first, which is I bought some training from a credible source. I joined a community. And it wasn't just training, it was community. I think that's a Huge. In fact, the way ENTRE teaches education, we teach that community is just as important as knowledge. And I believe that very strongly. And I think one of the reasons I was successful is because I didn't just buy a good course on affiliate marketing, which was what it was. I joined a community of about 40,000 affiliate marketers and got a lot of support and guidance from that community, especially about 20 people in that community that were the highly visible leaders and top producers in that community. But the other thing I did was.

And this is probably the truth that everybody needs to, but may not want to hear, is I worked like a maniac when I, I taught myself to play the piano. I dropped out of high school when I was 17 years old. I started playing piano when I was 16 and within a few months I was like, this is what I want to do. I don't want to get a job. I had had a summer job when I was the previous summer when I was 16 and I got fired and I hated it and I was psychologically unemployable and I resented authority and I frankly had a lot of personal issues that went beyond just not wanting a job. And I've thankfully done enough therapy. I can claim that I feel like I've resolved a lot of those. But fundamentally it meant at a young age I did see myself ever getting a job. And so I taught. I dropped out of high school and had a conversation with my parents. It wasn't like some act of rebellion, it was like, listen mom and dad, I just, I think this is a better path for me. Let me pursue my music, let me build a life doing this. I know it's going to be hard. I know I'm not going to be that well paid. But honestly, getting fired from a job every two weeks doesn't pay very well either. That's the life I see for myself if I go enter the traditional path and I need time. So let me drop out of school because I just started. I'm 17 years old and I have a lot of making up to do if I'm ever going to be good enough to play professionally. So they were okay. They actually withdrew me from school my junior year and I just started practicing like a maniac. I was self taught, nobody would take me on. I was almost a college age piano student who'd never played before. So all the really serious teachers, they were interested in working with 5 and 6 year olds that they could groom on a path to play in the Van Clyburn competition or whatever. And so I was Self taught for three years, I taught myself to play piano out of a book called the Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine. And I made flashcards teaching myself harmony and chords and just man, I practiced 10, 12 hours a day. I practiced so much I developed arthritis in my wrist. But that came years later. But, you know, ultimately, after three years, I was able to get into a conservatory level college music program at the University of Houston, and I graduated. It took me 10 years to graduate with a degree in music composition and an emphasis in jazz piano performance. And I had this great career in my 20s. And the reason I'm saying all that is, you know, this thing right here. A keyboard, right? Yeah. I knew from a deep base of experience that you give me enough time sitting at a keyboard and I can accomplish the unaccomplishable. Because when I had, it had taken me three years to get accepted into the University of Houston. And that was an audition every semester. So twice a year I'd audition six auditions. It took me to get in the first five auditions. Every single person on the piano performance panel told me I was crazy and that I needed to find something else to study because nobody can start piano as late as I did and actually enroll and become a professional. And I just, I don't know why I believed they were wrong. And they were. And so fast forward, whatever it was, 12 years when I'm sitting at another type of keyboard going, okay, now I'm a half a million dollars in debt and I have a $400 course that I bought and the equivalent of a Facebook group that I belong to. These are my tools. What can I do with this? I just knew that.

If I push the drill long enough against the wall, eventually it'll bust out the other side. And that's what I did. And it took 18 months, probably 12 to 14 hours a day of affiliate marketing to pay off that debt. And now as a teacher, like you said, I've enrolled over 120,000 students. And the number of people that I see with a willingness to work like I did is I could count on maybe my fingers and toes.

And how long for the person who's listening, who wants to make that entrepreneurial leap? Do they, in your mind, need to have the Stamina to work 12 to 14 hour days for a decade, or is it for a period of time? You know, where's the balance come into the equation? And what's your view on that?

I mean, if you're a half a million dollars in debt and you have basically two years to pay off the debt or else the federal government is going to come seize everything you own. Because they were SBA loans, which means now you owe the US treasury the money.

That's a gun to the head then.

Yeah, you might need to. Right? I mean, I'm not. My desperation and my dire circumstances was my fuel in many ways. But. No, I mean, the reality is there's a lot of different tools now that didn't exist back then. Back then, if you wanted to build a sales funnel on the Internet, I mean, I went. One of the first things I did was I went down to a used bookstore and I found, you know, HTML for Dummies, CSS for Dummies, JavaScript for Dummies and PHP for Dummies and MySQL for Dummies. Five different books on coding and databases, server side coding, front end coding, you know, ux, like user experience. I mean, I had to teach myself to become a competent technologist before I could even get to the starting line of building an online business. That was in 2008. Now, I mean, I, you know, people tell me how hard it is now and you know, I don't want to sound unkind, but I just, I just sort of smirk like, like, you know, and you know, it's kind of like when you see how like old school bodybuilders had to train with like they were like filling up paint cans with cement to do lateral raises and stuff. And it was just a totally different world. Now you go sign up for an Entre soft account, which is Shameless Plug, that's our funnel builder software. And you know, you can, you have 25 beautifully designed high converting sales funnel templates that you can activate with a click of a mouse. That would have taken me six months to create one of those when I started. So yeah, I don't think it's required now. I think to do what I did, it was required then.

Got it, got it. And talk to us a little bit about Entre Institute, because one of the things that you really pride yourself on with the whole institute is you talk about these three P's of excellence. Can you take us through those?

First of all, I'm grateful that you asked because this is actually the thing about what we've done at Entre that I'm the most proud of. You know, digital marketing education and digital business education is, I don't want to say it's a dime a dozen, but it's fairly widespread on the Internet now. I think that we curate it better than most, so we bring together the best people and the best information. And we screen out a lot of the fluff that a lot of, you know, you'll waste a lot of time consuming if you try to do it on your own. But beyond that, I think the thing that I'm most proud of, and certainly I know for a fact the reason that we have the most stickiness and success in the market is we teach a model called the three Ps, as you mentioned, the three Ps of excellence. And I draw them as concentric circles. So the inner circle, the core, if you will, is physical excellence. It doesn't have a damn thing to do with making any money. It's just about taking care of the battery and the machinery that you need to go out into the world and do anything. Even if it's just to love your children. You can't love your children well if you're a tired, broken down piece of flesh, right? So we start with physical. Then we. And by the way, that includes psychological and even a portion of spiritual, which I can dissect if you want. Then we go to personal excellence, which is the next ring. And that involves relationships. You know, first of all, relationship with self and relationships of direct impact. And the way we define it is anybody that you have, you know, what I would call a, an energetic exchange with or limbic resonance and psychology. But, you know, it's what you and I are doing. It's somebody that you talk to and you create, you create a shared energy. And your, your space bubble bumps into their space bubble, physically or virtually, right? That's direct impact. That's personal excellence. And then, and only then does the third ring of professional excellence even. Is it even a worthwhile conversation. And I see so many people, so many entrepreneurs, especially on the Internet, where there's this culture of. It's so ironic because there's this, like, dual culture that's all about the hustle and the grind, but yet it's all about the sexy, unrealistic marketing claims like, yeah, I'm on my hustle, I'm on my grind, and I made a million dollars in 60 days. And I can show you how to do it too, right? Like this. They coexist. And neither one is the truth. The truth is actually neither. And both of those things, which is you can get extraordinary results and compress a lot of time if you commit to excellence. But you have to commit to it in that order, because I only sleep five hours a night, and a lot of people, and I used to be like an 8 to 10 hour a night guy when I was a musician and people are like, how do you do that? Because the first thing I do every day and the number one box I check every day is great physical self care. That's why I did what I did in those 48 minutes. I have to work out every day. I haven't missed. I work out seven days a week. And unless it is an extremely impossible day of travel, I haven't missed a day in five years. By the way, I haven't been sick in five years either.

And so I have to check that box. I also have to eat. I have a very specific nutritional regimen. I prepare all my meals twice a week. So it doesn't take a lot of time. In fact, it takes less time than driving to McDonald's to eat a Happy Meal. And I have a very specific supplementation regimen. And I'm like, I'm extremely diligent about that part of my life because it allows me to a need less sleep than most people and do more work in an hour or two or certainly by 8am every day. When my morning routine concludes, which is from 3:30 to 8:00am It's a four and a half hour morning routine. I've usually done more than I think most people do all day. And so that's physical then personal. How you take care of your family, how you connect with people. Are you empathetic? Do you know how to listen in a way that builds connection to people? Are you unnecessarily power imbalanced in the way you communicate because of insecurities or ego issues like, you know, getting all that stuff worked out. And then you can go out to the market and deliver a ton of value and produce with great energy, and produce great energy in such a way that the market's going to resonate and align and feed back to you a fair exchange for the value you're putting out, which for most people is what they want, which is money. But it has to go in that order. And so many people in this hustle and grind culture are like, I'm going to work, I'm going to grind until I get the results so that then I can fix my personal issues and then I can fix my physical issues, then I can fix my psychological issues. And I asked the question, it's like, if you can't first take care of yourself, then take care of the people close to you, what right do you even have to go out into the market and say, here, here, market, hear, hear, audience, hear, hear. Customers and prospects. I'M going to take great care of all of you. And in exchange for that, I want your money. You're not even taking care of the people that live under your roof. And so that's the thing I'm most.

Proud of, 100% agree with that whole structure, everything that you set up. I mean, I had an incident where I nearly died almost a decade ago and that was because I wasn't focused on my health. And then interestingly enough, when I was in the ambulance and they're administering nitrates and the paramedics looking down at me, the first words out of my mouth was please don't let me die. I have a five year old son. So it's my health which was compromised. And the first thing I was worried about was my relationship or a relationship. There was no mention of please don't let me die. I have to clear out my inbox.

So I really love how you structured things with that and I could see a lot of similarity in our thinking. I was really curious when you talked about the morning routine because that sounds pretty darn epic. From 3:30 to 8 borderline. I think some people can listen to that and go, oh my gosh, it doesn't sound epic, it sounds exhausting. But what's your response to that? Well, two questions really. What do you do during that routine and how do you keep it so that it isn't exhausting, so that it's energizing?

Yeah, it's not exhausting at all. In physics there's two things that decrease. Well, there's really one thing that decreases resistance to motion and that's inertia, just continuing in a straight line. And inertia is a complex calculation of momentum, velocity and direction. So when I look at my life, I say, okay, how do I keep momentum? It's do the same thing every day I wake up, I don't have to think about what I'm going to do. Day to day it's always the same. I wake up at 3:30, I count to five. I have to have my feet on the ground by five seconds or else I am, I need to go back and watch Mel Robbins TED Talk on the five second rule. Because I know that if I give myself five seconds to talk myself out of getting out of or into get or out of getting out of bed, I won't. So wake up 3:30ft on the ground by 3:30 and 5 seconds. I have an audit. You know, I usually put on an audio book while I'm prepping for the day. I get My supplements organized, I get my, and I have my supplements pre bagged in one week at a time. So all the vitamins are in the bag. I just grab the bag, I take the fry. There's a few I have to take before I eat. I mean it's like I could, we could spend eight hours and I could explain to you the minute by minute breakdown of my morning routine, but at a high level by 3:40 I'm already listening to an audiobook. I'm already prepping for the day. I'm setting intention around nutrition, physical work, personal work, professional work. I review, I make my plan for the day. Any, any variables that I need to account for. I always try to account for the night before, right? So I can wake up and just go right into it based on the previous night's plan. And then I'm, you know, I'm on my way to the gym. I'm at the gym by 4:30, I work out for one hour and it's, it's literally crafted. I spend 15 minutes rolling out alternate, you know, one day I roll out upper body, the next day I roll out hips and lower body. And then I have 45 minutes of, you know, pretty aggressive. Like I think of it as like hiit weightlifting where I'm weightlifting but I'm doing it quickly in high reps to keep my heart rate up the whole time. 5:30 I'm done. I'm in the car by 5 or I'm at my office by 5:35 because it's right by the gym. I practice piano. That's still a deep passion and I consider it an essential part of my personal development that I have to play piano every day because you think about it.

So then I do that for an hour and I'm done at 6:35. So now by 6:35, in the first three hours and five minutes of every day, I've done the two hardest things I'm going to do every day. Physically I've done the hardest thing and mentally I've done the hardest thing. Right now I'm working on La Campanella Etude by Franz List. Most people probably don't know what that piece is. Go look it up on YouTube. There is nothing I could work on the rest of the day that would be any harder than trying to work on that piece. And so I've done the hardest work. By 6:35am it's like all downhill. I'm home by 6:45, I take my daughter to school, she's got to be at school. By about 7:15. Sometimes we grab coffee on the way if we have a few extra. And then I'm home by 7:20, my other kids are up. I spend time with my other kids, especially my 4 year old, from 720 to 8. Usually I'm showering, but she comes and hangs out in there with me and we talk and sometimes she wants to wash my hair and like we have a whole routine. It's really cute. And eventually she'll get older and it won't be appropriate, but you know, she's four right now. It's a lot of fun. And then by 8 o' clock I'm on calls and my day starts and it's all, it's all organized in 20 minute intervals till at least 6pm usually. Occasionally I have longer meetings and then I go home. And then from 6 o' clock till bedtime, which isn't until 10:30, so I still have over four hours. I get to be relaxed and kind of decompress and not have to feel so rigidly scheduled. Because I do know that eventually you'll go insane if you never have flex time. But here's the other thing. The other thing about momentum and inertia and decreasing friction and decreasing exhaustion is the concept of decision fatigue. The other thing that changes that in physics, costs momentum, is having to change directions. Every time an object in motion changes direction, the force that it has to use to change direction gets subtracted from the force that it had propelling it forward, right? So that's every time you have to stop and make a decision in this world, you're an object changing directions. So by being so scripted and so methodical, I've basically reduced virtually every decision that I have to make on a daily basis. Except that in a case like today, when I'm traveling and something is a little different. But even then I already know what my priorities are. So I don't have to think about what matters to me. I just think about, ok, the schedule is different, how do I squeeze it in? But that is. It's not. You mentioned exhaustion. My life is productive of energy. I feel better, my immune system is stronger, I get more done than virtually anyone I know. So clearly I'm not tired all the time, even though I get up at 3:30 on five hours of sleep. When I first started cognitive behavioral therapy 10 years ago, one of the first things my therapist told me is he says, jeff, I don't know if you're into tattoos, but if you are, I want you to get one on your arm that says Structure is my best friend.

Nice.

He said, that's the same advice I give to addicts, to highly dysfunctional people. He's like, there's no one for whom that's not the best advice, you know?

And as you were talking to, you reminded me of a quote from Jack Canfield, and he says, 99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze. And what he talks. Yeah, and it's about decision fatigue, really, because when it's just, this is the way I do things and there are no alternatives, you know, like, I don't eat McDonald's. Like, what about when it's a birthday party or when it's. No, that's the 99%. And then do I deserve it or not? And it creates a slippery slope. Whereas if it's 100%, life is a breeze. I only do things this way. And I was getting a lot of energy as you were talking from basically the structure you're sharing, because I can see how it creates that simplicity and focus in life. I can also then relate that back to how you made that incredible career shift. Right. Going from the musician to the failed restaurant franchises, and now you're going into digital marketing. And in a space of 18 months, you went from nobody to top of the class. And that must have been related to that intense focus and ability to structure.

Yeah, at the time, I would say it was just as intense, but it wasn't nearly as balanced. And I don't really love that word balance because of the way it typically gets used as. As a justification of a series of compromises, like, oh, I'm just balanced. That's why nothing's that good like that. But. But at the time, it was like, oh, 14 hours a day, one thing to solve one problem. Now it's.

19 hours a day to touch on numerous things to create an overall puzzle. That's the complete picture I want for my life. But the intensity and the energy and the drive is non negotiable in all cases.

And the discipline, the discipline is.

Key.

Yeah. Can I say something about that word, discipline?

Yeah, go for it.

A lot of people think of discipline as like, the connotation of discipline a lot of times is like punitive enforcement from parents. It's like, oh, I messed up and I was disciplined.

First of all, if you're a parent, there's a great book called Positive Discipline and a series of books called Positive Discipline by Jane Nelson that can help reframe the definition of the word discipline. But the root of discipline is disciple. A disciple is about service to a set of beliefs or a being, if you want. But it's about service to a set of beliefs that are bigger and more meaningful than our small, insignificant life. It's a way to get significance in our small, insignificant life by being a part of and in service to something greater than ourselves. And when you reframe discipline as that, it doesn't become this, oh, my gosh, I need to do this thing, but I really don't feel like it. It's more like, oh my gosh, I get to do this thing that I should do because what it makes my life mean. You're talking about the 2%. That's Maslow, the fifth hierarchy of. Or the fifth tier of self actualization. That all happens inside of discipline. Right. Because you get to be a part of something bigger than yourself completely.

Another. Another angle I like with it is just to embrace and accept pain. And so I think of, you know, we. Nothing comes for free in life. I always say to myself, yeah, it requires a payment of some form. And I can either pay now with the pain of discipline or I can pay later with the pain of regret. And the pain of discipline is always cheaper than the pain of regret later. Right. So.

Amen. Like I say, what's that thing that's like real common now on the Internet? They say, choose your hard.

Yes, yeah, exactly. So on that note, maybe we wind a little bit back in time, and I know you had growing up and you suffered various obstacles and bullying, and that was a difficult time for you. So can you share a little bit more about that? I think that would really resonate with people. And then also, how did you overcome that?

Yeah, So I appreciate the question and I do like sharing this part of my story, even though it's still to this day, it's the hardest thing to talk about because. And certainly this has been my experience, usually the hardest things are the best things. And I know this reaches a lot of people. So, yeah, I was bullied pretty bad when I was a kid. And it was. I think it was. At least it was. I mean, everybody's bullying experience is unique to them, but I think mine had a unique quality that everybody can understand where I grew up with it or I still have a genetic disorder, genetic condition called Waardenburg syndrome that, you know, especially when I was younger, it really resulted. I kind of looked different as I, you know, as I went through puberty and I matured. I've kind of. It's not as visible, but I looked, to be honest, I looked like I might have been like handicapped when I was a kid and. But I wasn't, I was like a pretty smart kid. So it was that much more frustrating that people treated me like there was something wrong with me. But the fact that it was something that was literally coded into my DNA, it wasn't something I could ever really convince myself was only other people, like, oh, that's just them, they're just being jerks. They don't, you know, people would say, oh, bullies are just kids that feel bad about themselves and they're just putting it onto you. But I was like, no, there really is something wrong with me. Like that's how I processed it as a kid. And so.

Now I feel like there's something great about me. It's like everybody in this world wants to be unique and I have a leg up, right?

But yeah, that was hard. And what I can really only sort of articulate it as in terms of how it played out and how I think it played into who I am now is I was like, you know, if I want to be judged just on the surface of who I am, I'm never going to win that, that, you know, just people are how they are. I'm never going to win being judged on the basis of how I look or just who I am. What I wear, how I dress, how I combat, like aesthetics are never going to win for me. And so I'm, I need to, I need to reshape the conversation so that I'm being judged based on what I do. And so let me do a lot, let me do well, let me perform. And there's some liabilities to that view where you can get burned out or you can be overly competitive. But fundamentally the decision that my success in life was going to be based upon performance and production at a very early age. I mean, how many 4 and 5 year olds have the self awareness to go, I'm only going to succeed in this world in relation to other people if I'm performing at a high level.

Oh, that's like, that would be next level for them to have that right.

And it was thrust upon me, admittedly in an unpleasant way, but I think it serves me to this day especially because I've done the personal work to temper it and reframe it in a healthier way. But you know, I would share that with everyone. Lean into your weirdness, lean into your, you know, your differences and whatever makes you less palatable and less conforming. And to the rest of the world, lean into those things because a They're probably your strengths and B, they, they create a paradigm for your life where if you, if you operate and execute on the, on those things. Well, like if you're weird and you have a quirky passion or you're, you know, you don't like, you're like me and you don't know how to dress, like I don't know, start a brand online that's like, you know, nerd, nerd attire and sell clothes for people that don't know how to dress and intentionally sell outfit outfits that don't match or like just. I mean, that's a silly dumb example I just came up with on the spur of the moment. But like find a way to lean into your weirdness.

Yeah.

And understand if you do your weird better than anybody else in the world, you'll have any life you want.

Awesome. Awesome. The. I was, I was looking through the Entree Institute website and there was a particular thing that interested me around. So when an entrepreneur who's keen to build an online business, you know, joins your, you know, incredible community, one of the things that they have access to is coaching. And you talk about how they get a quite unique blend of business life coaching and digital marketing coaching. So on that note, could you just share just one top tip in each of those areas on the business life and digital marketing side?

Yeah, I think on business, business life and digital marketing, actually my first tip is going to really be kind of business and life. It's that, you know, historically we've lived in a world, we've evolved in a world where there were a number of fairly consistent variables and your ability to stand out was based on how well you could operate in and leverage those variables. So people, for most of human history, we all live. Whatever town we were born in is the town we were going to die in. Whatever our name was when we were born was going to be our name when we died. Whatever our father did, typically professionally, was what we were going to do professionally or if we were a woman, it was going to be about marrying into X. And so when in a world like that, you can understand why we evolved. This deep desire to be, you know, to be like everyone else and to be kind of conforming and to be excellent within a very specific box. But that's not the world we live in anymore. There are now seven and a half billion people that are all free radicals floating around in the world with very little constancy or set foundations to their life where like, you can be anyone you want, you can go anywhere you Want. You can create any business you want. You can work any job you want. You can get access to training on just about anything on YouTube and you can, you know, relationships. It's not like, oh, well, you're not in my club, so I can't talk to you can meet anyone you want. Like all the, all the structure, all the, all the structure, I guess all the enforced structure is gone. And so within that. That's why it's so important to create structure, because we were never evolved, we were never adapted to operate with this many variables. So, one, you have to create structure in the absence of structure that's being forced upon you because the world has changed. But the other thing is you got to understand that there's no assumptions anymore. It's not just assumed that because of the color of your skin or the city you live in or the school you went to or the trade that you studied or anything that you have any value or that the market is valuing what you do in any way. Or frankly, that people are valuing you in any way because everybody has this infinite set of possibilities. And the reason I'm saying all this is you have got to advocate for yourself. You have got to get loud and noisy and bold and unapologetic and almost confrontational with the market to go, listen up, this is who I am, this is what I do. Pay attention and I'm going to win you over with value. But once I do, I'm going to expect fair compensation.

And most people are still caught in this. Well, my grandparents told me to like, keep quiet in church or don't make a scene or. And people are so scared to make a scene that they never get seen, right? And you have to be pretty boisterous now by a thousand times more than you probably did two generations ago just to even have be able to afford a meal at a good restaurant in this world. Otherwise you're going to live the average bottom of the basement, mundane, humdrum life. That's essentially saying, I played small and I took what was given to me. And we wonder why 86% of people self report as not being very happy in this world. It's because they're not doing a very good job of advocating for themselves. If you read T Harv Eker, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, one of the big differences, he talks about one of his 17 wealth files, the difference between rich and poor people. He says, rich people are very, very willing to get up and proclaim their value and insist on being, you know, compensated for it. Poor People, and I don't remember the exact word he used, but basically in his lexicon, poor people are too busy being humble to ever get noticed.

Right.

So anyway, that's business and life. Yeah, Digital marketing, honestly, it's an extension of the same. Only leverage these platforms produce content, learn the game. Like I say half jokingly, but not jokingly all the time. That every realtor, every chiropractor, every attorney, every auto mechanic, every whatever in the town that I live in of St. George, Utah, is lucky that I'm not their competition because I learned these tools and I'm not afraid to go out and advocate for myself and leverage these tools. I'd be the number one whatever category I chose to be in those fields if I was just competing in a local market. I mean, I compete in a global market against Tony Robbins and Russell Brunson and Grant Cardone and Tai Lopez, and I'm built one of the largest private education companies in the world. And I did that in less than three years. Imagine if all I was competing with was realtors in a town of 250,000 people. But it's not because I'm superior. It's because I'm more willing to and I've spent more time understanding the tools. And I just think people are spending so much time worrying about and learning all this other stuff that doesn't matter at the end of the day. Learn to write, copy, and learn to promote yourself online. You can create any life you want from anywhere in the world. I don't understand why anybody's interested in anything else until they have those things mastered.

Amazing. And Jeff, if somebody wanted to learn more about you and your programs and all of that, where do they, where do they go to? Where do they head to?

So we actually put, I mean, there's, you know, if you Google me, you'll find a thousand pages. But we actually put a landing page together just for this episode because we were so grateful to be coming on to talk about 2%. So if somebody just goes to millionairesecrets.com ericp. Ericp, obviously the eponymously named after you, millionairesecrets.com erICP. You'll get a total entryway to my world. You can access my YouTube channel, which has over 500 free training videos on it. You can access my podcast, which is I think over 150 episodes now. And you can get my free book called the Millionaire Shortcut and download it and we'll teach you the fastest way to become a millionaire in the new digital economy.

Amazing. Thank you. Jeff, that's awesome. Really, really appreciate that. And last question, just to wrap it up. What would be if you think back into your own life and you think of breaking free from the 98%, you know, entering that realm of people operating at their full potential, that 2%, what is. What's the number one? What was the number one thing for you? What was it? Or the tipping point? What. What. What gave you that activation energy to break free?

So if you read one of my favorite books called the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, he talks about keystone habits. These are habits, and they are different. Even though I am sure many people share the same keystone habit, there is no script. It is different for every person. They have to find their own. But for me, it was figuring out in high school, late, I guess around 8th, 9th grade, that my keystone habit was working out and realizing if I make myself work out every day. The concept of a keystone habit is. It's a habit that predicts how you'll. How you'll create and perform on all other habits. If I just am in a groove of my life where I work out every day, I start to feel unstoppable.

Nice.

And if I stop, I feel very stoppable. It is almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There's like, two different versions of Jeff, and the version of Jeff that is not on his game physically is just a lazy degenerate. Even my morals get compromised. Like, it's just not the guy that you want to. Certainly would want in charge of a big company or even as the breadwinner for a family. And so for me, it was realizing the first of all, the concept. And then secondly, what it was for me, that there are certain things you can key into for your life that'll drive execution in all other areas of your life. And that was a big breakthrough for me because life has to be simple. Like, we're men. We're not that smart.

It's got to be so simple that we can remember to do it. Even when, like, we're stressed and we're under a deadline and our wife is mad at us and our kid, you know, whatever. Our kids spilled coffee in the backseat or. Well, that's a weird one. Kids probably shouldn't be drinking coffee. But, you know, like, life is chaotic. And in the moment, if there's not super simple things I can retain and access when my, you know, adrenaline is surging, I'm not going to be a top performer because it's easy to remember how to be a peak performer when there's no pressure, but you got to be able to do it when there's pressure. And so for me, the simple idea that, okay, I have 16, 18 hours in a day, I better squeeze a workout in and everything else will work out. No pun intended. That's, like, so simple, I can actually remember it.

Love it, love it. And I love this quote I came across that 90% of our psychology is driven by our physiology, and it certainly kind of seems to be that you're a disciple of that quote as well. So thank you so much, Jeff, for coming on today, especially given the fact that you're doing this away for some time with your wife. So really appreciate that. And, yeah, looking forward to connecting again soon in the future. And thank you very much.

Yeah, this has been great. I appreciate your great questions, and I appreciate that your podcast is really focused on what I think is the most important thing. It's not about how to make average work. It's about how to work your way out of being average. Because honestly, average doesn't work. It just doesn't.

Exactly. That's the spirit of the 2%. Decoding excellence. Thank you so much, Jeff Lerner, everyone. Please do check out the link that he mentioned, which you'll also find in the show notes. So thanks very much, Jeff. Speak to you soon.