7 SECRETS School Forgot To TEACH YOU About Success! | Lewis Howes

Just that idea of exercising first thing in the morning will help you become more resilient, peaceful, strong during the day. So yes, do your morning routine and then judge by result, because the way you begin the day profoundly sets up the way you're. I think one of the most important things a human being can do is press the pause button each morning while the rest of the world is asleep and ask yourself, how can I fortify my mindset? How can I insulate my heart set? How can I optimize my health set? How can I escalate my Soul? Set the four interior empires that I've introduced in the 5am club so that when I walk out in the world, I'm creative, I'm productive, I'm compassionate, I radiate positivity, and I have resilience in case I get knocked down. And so I think one of the best ways you can do that is this 202020 formula that I've been teaching to the billionaires, the NBA stars, the film icons, and many of the most successful people on the planet for, as I say, 24 years and very high level. Louis the 2020-20 formula is simply this. You get up at 5am and anyone can get up at 5am One of the gifts of a human being is neuroplasticity. We are built to change. So please, I would encourage, you know, if we recite our excuses long enough, we actually believe they're true. We are built to change. We are built to grow. We are built to own our heroic nature. And so according to University College London, if we do any practice or habit for 66 days, we reach a point of automaticity where it becomes easier to do that new habit than not do the new habit. Once you wire in the new habit for the first 20 minutes, 5 to 5:20, you move because you can release BDNF, Brain Derived Neurotrophic factor which promotes neurogenesis. It optimizes your brain. If you move first thing in the morning, you release serotonin, which makes you feel good. You release dopamine, which sets you up for inspiration. Second, we can get into it more deeply. But second pocket from 520 to 540 is reflect. While the rest of the world is asleep, there's such quietude in the air. This is where you can pray, you can meditate, write in a journal, sit in quietude so that you're focused, living your life and your priorities through the day. And then the final pocket of the 202020 formula that I talk about in the 5am Club is grow. You'll never get old. If you grow. You'll never become obsolete in your business. Even in a time of great volatility, if you're growing, you'll always stay happy if you grow. So 20 minutes at the end of this victory hour. That's what I. What I call it. You spend some time listening to a podcast like Lewis Howes on the school of greatness, a man adored by the majority of humanity. You listen to an audiobook, you read a book, you study your battle charts. And anyway, that's a really rough general way to explain the 2020 formula that is currently helping millions of people navigate this hard time.

Does it matter? The sequencing of 2020 20. Do you need to move first? Can you meditate first? Do you grow? Or is that a process that is proven scientifically?

The process has been proven in the trenches of elite performance for a long time with my clients. And having said that, I would say the 202020 formula is minimum viable morning routine. And you're a biohacker. I'm a biohacker. I'm a productivity hacker. I'm a life hacker. And so I would say do what's right for you. You know, it's like this whole field of personal mastery and leadership that we inhabit. I'm not one to say you must do this, because we all have different learning types. We're all on different journeys. Someone might be right now upgrading their spirituality so they connect with their crusade and their higher power. In this time of house arrest, other people are creating their masterwork right now. So I think we have to find the routine that. The morning routine that works best for us.

What about people that say, you know what? I'm just a night person. You know, I like. I think at night, I work out at night. That's when I meditate. You know, I strategize the next day at night. And I just. I've tried the morning. It just doesn't work for me. What would you say to that?

I've had a lot of night owls.

That's a great excuse, isn't it, to be a night owl?

I've had a lot of great. A lot of night owls who have said, you know, I could never be a morning person. I've had a lot of people who've said, you know, grandma couldn't get up early, grandpa couldn't get up early. My parents couldn't get up early. I don't have early rising genes, you know, and what I would say is, if you don't read that book You've been resisting because you don't think it's for you. You might just miss your new favorite book. If you fall in love with your most closely cherished beliefs and you're not open to trying new things, you might miss your new favorite trying your new favorite food. If you say, well, here's the kind of friends that I hang out with and I'm not open to anyone else, you might miss that new friend or that new mentor who will transform the way you run your craft and live your life. And it's the same for the morning routine, the 5:00am Club. I mean, it's just I've had so many people read the book, run the models in the book, live the message and achieve what they never thought they'd achieve. And so what I would say to a night owl or a lot of people say shift workers or whatever, I would say give it a try. Don't just give it a try for a week, you know, give it a try for three weeks, four weeks, the 60 minimum. And then judge by, then judge by your results.

Yeah, so it's okay to sleep in once a week or to miss, miss the routine once in a while. It's not going to affect your overall, you know, results or process. Is that what I'm hearing?

Yeah, I think, you know, if you want to commit to the 5am club, you want to commit to a world class morning routine because the way you begin the day profoundly sets up the way your day unfolds. And this again, this is not an anecdotal. You get up in morning and you run the 20, 2020 formula that I explain in the book. You will create the flow state, you will release serotonin, you will release dopamine, you will release bdnf, you will increase your metabolic rate, you will boost creativity, you will increase your willpower. You know, all those things. I mean we want, we all have the ability as human beings to arrive at our own original form of greatness. We have not been schooled, we have not been taught. A lot of us have not been mentored on the mindsets, heart sets, routines, rituals that will create and allow us to live our personal genius. But if you look at the greatest women and men who have ever graced the planet, these were so called ordinary people who just set up their lives in such a way that their native gifts saw the light of day.

It's funny how no one ever teaches this stuff unless you had a parent or an older sibling. That's that you were able to model and mimic like, oh, my dad gets up pretty early, or my brother gets up and does his violin or practices sport, whatever it may be. And I want to be like that and I want to try that. We're not taught this in school.

You know, Louis, when I was a kid, I wasn't believed in by a lot of people. I marched to my own drumbeat. I had a different way of seeing the world. I was very sensitive. I was very creative, very much a dreamer in many ways. And I didn't fit in with the cool crowd. And in grade five, I had a history teacher and her name was Cora Greenaway, and she was one of the first people in my life who believed in me. And we all meet a Cora Greenaway. And may you and I and everyone listening from around the world or watching from around the world, may we be a Cora Greenaway to someone else. What I'm suggesting is all it takes is that one person who coincidentally shows up in our life, and maybe it's a book, maybe it's a podcast episode to introduce us to a new frame of reference and a new way of living. That's why I love reading so much. You know, it could be one idea in a 300 page book, and that idea opens you up to a new galaxy of possibility. And the hand that puts down the book is a fundamentally different hand. I mean, all it takes is one new insight to change the way you see the world.

That's very true.

Yeah.

And that's why I'm on such a mission. I've been on such a mission for 24 years to remind people of who they're meant to be. Martin Luther King Jr. Said, if you have not discovered something you're willing to die for, you're not fit to live. And I believe we all need to find our mighty mission and our crusade. It doesn't have to be lofty. It could be delivering pizza by Uber Eats. It could be a, you know, a teacher. It could be a lawnmower. It could be a coder, it could be a grave digger or street sweeper. All labor has dignity, but, you know, there are no extra people on the planet. I think, you know, that's why I appreciate the work you do so much. I mean, we do have greatness within us and society has brainwashed us and heart washed us into thinking that the great ones are cut from a different cloth. And it's not. It's not true. As a matter of fact, in the 5am Club, I say, you know, genius is less about genetics and much more about your Daily habits.

Wow, that's true. That's. I mean, that resonates with me because growing up a kid that was, you know, dyslexic and still struggles with reading and writing today and was in the special needs classes, I never thought I was going to amount to much. And I didn't have belief in myself until I found a spark and belief in myself. And then I started leaning into that gift, which was sports, and started to realize, oh, I have some vision and I have some coordination and I have some speed. Even though I was never the fastest or strongest, I had some height. And so I would lean into this gift that was here and see if I enjoy this gift and see if I like this gift and see if this brings me joy. And it did. And I continued. And then I built routines and habits around that gift and kept pursuing it as far as I could pursue it until it was no longer a dream or until the gift was no longer there, until I wanted to pursue other things. And I think, you know, even if whoever's listening or watching, even if you didn't think you were talented or smart enough, at some point, there's something inside of you that is talent. You've just got to keep trying things and see what brings you that joy and that uniqueness. At least that's what I would say.

Well, you know, just. Just to hitchhike off of that, Louis, I think no one will believe in you until you believe in you. And, you know, as I'm writing this new book I'm writing, I've been. I've been looking at people like J.K. rowling, for example. I mean, everyone laughed at Harry Potter, you know, oh, no one will ever read this. And she believed in this character about a child wizard who had all of these adventures. And she was a single mother and she was suffering and she had no money, and she wrote. The whole idea for the Harry Potter concept came to her on a delayed train ride. And then, I believe in Edinburgh. She wrote the first Harry Potter, and it was rejected. And we all know this. But, like, you know, just a gentle, respectful, loving reminder for everyone who's. Who's tuning in here, which is every visionary is initially ridiculed before they're revered. And look at Jonas Salk. Look at Elon Musk right now. I mean, look at Shakespeare, look at Oprah. Look at Martin Luther King Jr. Look at Nelson Mandela. Look at Mary Curie. Look at Edison and Einstein. Look at Galileo. These were all ordinary people who followed their joy, who came up with a vision and the very nature of a great vision means you're going to disrupt the status quo. So you're going to scare people. I mean, if your idea is really good for that new business or that new relationship or that new fitness routine or morning routine, it's going to scare people who are card carrying members of the status quo. And so it's much easier to shoot the messenger than to embrace the message. And so it's much easier. It's much easier. I mean, I'll tell you completely candidly, I spent four years writing the 5am Club. I put my heart and my soul in the book, the models and the art that was done by this amazing artist and every line I wanted calibrated. And you know, people didn't understand what I was trying to do. And when the book first came out, I looked at the Amazon reviews and they were terrible.

Really?

Why?

Well, and I just want to say now it's one of the best selling books in the world and it's almost as if the tide shifted once enough people read it and the narrative changed. It was the most interesting thing. But I've actually, that really hurt when the book came out. It's like holding your baby out into the world and everyone's looking at it going, you know, I just want to tell you your baby is really ugly, not so pleasant to look at.

Yeah.

And you know what I would say is J.K. rowling again, she said, for some to love you, some must loathe you. I would say also, Bob Dylan, don't criticize what you don't understand. And so if you do anything that's disruptive and also if you put out work that challenges people to leave their comfort zone, to wake up to their genius, if you challenge people to be more loving, to stand for love on a planet that has too much hate, if you challenge people to get up at 5am and spend one hour working on your mentality, purifying any toxicity within your heart set, upgrading your health and longevity, mining your spirituality in a world where selfies and dancing cat videos and a lot of superficiality and a culture of comparison, you're going to, you know, I mean, it's easier for people to shoot you down versus to embrace the message.

MM does when we're on unusual times right now, does the 5am routine and the 20, 20, 20 shift, if things are, there's an excuse, I'm tired and then there's a shift in the world, does the 5am club shift at this time? Do people say, you know what, let me really Take it easy for a few months. Or is that an excuse for too long to get back into your vision?

There are times, for example, as an artist, when I'm writing and it's flowing and I just know this. Trust your natural cycles. Because your higher power, call it your instinct, call it your intuition, call it your artistry, knows what it's doing. So there are times to be productive and there are times to rest. Now, I very much believe in the 5am club in the 202020 formula. I very much believe that it will create a pharmacy of mastery within your brain. It's been proven by science. You know, even just the simple idea of starting your day with some sweaty exercise. Why? Sweaty exercise is because sweat reduce. When you sweat, it'll release the bdnf, which John Rady at Harvard calls miracle grow for the brain. But just that idea of exercising first thing in the morning will help you become more resilient, peaceful, strong during the day. So, yes, do your morning routine. Yes, run the 202020 formula and then judge by results. Having said that, if you've been up at three in the morning because you've lost your job, because you're just picking up on the energy of the world right now, where there's so much fear, you're dealing with COVID or you have a family member you've lost as a result of the pandemic, self love, personal care requires that you rest, recover, and do what you need to do. And I think, you know, that's one of the things. I say this with great respect, but when I read the books or see people saying, you must be like a robot and follow a morning routine or a nightly ritual or whatever your best habits are, I believe there must be room for the hard seasons of life. And you know, when my heart has been broken, when I've gone through my periods of suffering, I haven't been as disciplined. I haven't been as rigorous. I've had the inopportune pizza night. And here's what I would also say is my ego. Because a bad day for the ego is a great day for the soul. My ego says, robin, you're not being productive. You're not on your A game. You're not a warrior. But you know what I've realized? I might not be creatively productive according to the definition of society during those cycles or seasons of suffering. But am I not spiritually productive? Am I not emotionally productive? I mean, when does a human being crack the shell of the ego that covers their hearts and learns the human Virtues. I mean, Nelson Mandela learned how to be Nelson Mandela in his Robben island season. And so I think we learn honesty and compassion and vulnerability and creativity when things are falling apart, not when they're not in the seasons of sunshine.

Are you a believer that creative people are born with a creative gift or talent more than, let's say, less creative people? Or can any type of creativity be learned over the years?

Yeah.

So thank you so much for setting me up for this. Okay. Number one, almost nobody is talented. Talent is completely overrated. I would argue that you were born with certain physical talents that enabled you to excel. In spite of that, I could never have acquired, no matter how hard I tried. Even that said, though, Larry Bird was not born with the kind of talent that Michael Jordan was. Larry Bird just grounded out and shot more practice shots than anybody else. That's a skill.

And hustled.

Yeah, yeah. But the good kind of hustle.

Yeah, exactly.

And so it feels to me like talent is a betrayal. It is undermining all of the people who put all that work into skill. Don't call someone skillful, talented, because they're not. They're skillful. So we can agree that playing the piano is a skill in the sense that if you work at it, you get better at it. But I would like to believe that being enthusiastic is a skill, and then so is being creative. It's a skill. You can get better at it. You can choose to put in the work in whatever form it takes. We're not talking about graphic art here, unless you want it to be graphic art to gain the skill. And if that's true, that's really good news because it means you're not stuck where you are. It means you can go to where you want to go. And it's really good news because skills can be acquired. And that fills me with optimism about so many things in our world. We can point to the human condition and say people are just doomed to hate each other and to undercut each other. But I can point to a culture where that's not happening. So how did that happen? Well, it's because it's a skill.

What are the three biggest skills you think all human beings should acquire? Whether it be creativity or some type of attribute that just make them better human beings, Happier, more, quote unquote successful, richer lives with relationships, health, everything. What are those three skills? Whether you're 20 or 60, what three skills should we acquire to live a better life?

I love this. Okay, how about this? Number one is the skill of possibility of Seeing that things could be better. Number two, the skill of empathy, practical empathy of understanding. People don't know what you know, don't want what you want, don't see what you see, that they have a noise in your, their head that's different than the noise in your head, and that's okay. And then the third one is the skill of learning how to learn, of being open to saying, I see possibility, I see people who need to be served, who aren't who I am. And I, if I put enough into this, can figure out how to make a contribution. Those, I think, are three skills.

Yeah, it's really just understanding, emotional intelligence and people and stepping into other people's shoes and having compassion. Why did you choose those three skills over copywriting or personal finance?

There's some, there's some next level tactical ones like decision making is a skill. And almost every western human is terrible at it.

Why? Why are we terrible at it?

Because sunk costs are something that are probably hardwired into us. What a sunk cost means is the harder you worked to have something, the harder it is for you to give it up. And we see this mistake happen all the time. The example I'll give is pre Covid. You've got two tickets to the movies and they were really hard to get. And you told your girlfriend that you were going to go to the movies together. On your way, you bump into a friend who says, I got two front row seats to see Hamilton. Do you want to go? That means your tickets are worthless. And a lot of people go, well, no, no, there's no. Well, it doesn't matter how much those tickets cost you. They're sunk. You already made that decision. You can't unmake it. And so we stick with the job longer than we should, or we stick to a way of thinking about the world longer than we should because it cost a lot. We went to law school. So now I have to be a lawyer. No, you don't. The law school degree is a gift from your former self. You don't have to take it. You could say, no, thank you, and go do something that gives you joy instead. So sunk cost is a, is a giant skill based area. And then what goes right next to that is the skill of saying, that was a good idea, but I have a better one now.

Ooh, and that. Explain that. So I launched this idea and it started going and I built momentum for a few years. But now this is actually a better idea for the time or for my life or whatever. So I'm Going to let go of that thing and move into this.

Well, it's not that. That's definitely true. That sunk cost, but then beyond it, okay, I'm the boss and I built this organization and this is how we do our expense reports. But now we're going to do expense reports this way because it's better. But usually what happens is someone says that problem solved. I don't have to revisit it. So if I think about the car industry, the car industry said, took us 90 years to develop the internal combustion engine, that was a lot of cycles, a big sunk cost. And someone shows up and says, why don't we make electric cars? And you go, because internal combustion isn't broken. Because I can show you that if we look at an early electric car, compared to a state of the art Lexus, the state of the art Lexus is better. Not a problem. Whereas what would have transferred billions and billions of dollars of assets away from Elon Musk as if they had said, nope, you're right, we're just going to copy all the things you're doing that are working and make it even better. Because we have an improvement ratchet in place, a dealer network in place, we're trusted, we could go to the races. But senior executives making seven figures said, nope, nothing could be better than this.

Yeah, I tell you what, I got a Tesla a few years ago and it's hard for me to think I'd ever want to go back for a day to day car that's not electric. Personally, it just.

But let's think about Tesla for a minute. Because Tesla made a whole bunch of decisions a few years ago that they refused to reconsider. Right? That the inside of the car should have no cup holders of a certain kind. That the inside of the car should have these things on the dashboard, but not these things that the service needs. So they're as guilty of the same thing. They took a leap. They hired 1,000 people and now they're stuck on their sun costs.

Right?

That's true. And they'll be stuck until they innovate or continue to open up. Why do we need reassurance? Why does it seem like a lot of people need this reassurance? Just every day we need some type of reassurance and why should we avoid reassurance?

That's the second side. Reassurance is futile. Reassurance feels really good, right? So we get off, we get off this call, the phone's ringing, and Kai comes to you and says, hey, Louis, great job. It's Oprah. And Oprah was listening. She just wants you to know what a great job you did. You're flying for like two hours, maybe three. And then you need to hear it from somebody else. Because what it means to get reassurance is that someone is telling you that the future is going to be okay. And it feels good because we would like the future to be okay. But deep down we know that that person doesn't know that the future is going to be okay. So as soon as reassurance shows up, it reminds us that we are confronting an uncertain world and we want more of it. We want to be held safely. And it doesn't scale. You can't get enough of it. So what's the alternative? The alternative is to refuse reassurance.

So when someone says, you did a great job, Seth, it was amazing, that was the best thing I've ever seen in my entire life. How do we refuse that?

Well, that. The answer is, thank you. I appreciate you being present and giving me that feedback. But it's reassurance if you then say, and your book launch is going to go great, because that you can't know. Right? That's the second half of that's what's implied, is that I'm going to tell you about tomorrow. And what's the alternative? The alternative is to say nobody knows about tomorrow. And looking for external validation that I'm going to catch that fish, that that thing I am hoping for is going to work, that other people will get the joke. Not only doesn't it help me, it undermines my trust in myself. It undermines all of the things that I need to merely do the work. So, you know you've been seduced by, like, me and everyone else with the just do it thing from Nike. And the problem with the word just is that some people think it means, what the hell, do whatever you want. Doesn't matter, just do it. And I think it should be changed to merely do it. Do it without commentary, do it without drama. Simply show up and do the thing. Focus on the practice, not hoping and wishing for the outcome that you need to be reassured by, but the practice. The best you can do it. Because what could be better than the best you could do it? Nothing. So do that. Learn from what works, and then do it again. But seeking reassurance is distracting you from doing a better job of what you set out to do in the first place.

I saw somewhere, I don't know if it was an article or video about Oprah talking about almost 100% of her guests. Not everyone, but I think a lot of them at the end of the show would all say the same thing. And I think, you know what I say? It's like, did I do okay? Was that good enough for you?

Yeah.

Did you like that? And it's this kind of reassurance mindset, right? Of like, knowing that we got approval from the person who's interviewing us or working with us or our publisher. Were the numbers okay for you? Did the sales go okay? How do we gracefully remove that from our way of being moving forward so that we don't have to ask if we did an okay job? And we learn to just say, thank you so much for having me or I'm grateful and whatever else. How should we finish a project like that?

Well, I'm really afraid of the word should. I think should and shame go right next to each other. So I will just tell you that there are practices that you can engage in to help you insulate from feedback. That isn't going to help. So here's an interesting story. A bunch of years ago, a famous electronics company did a focus group. The way focus groups work is you set up a trailer next to a shopping mall. You pay people some money. They come in for an hour. There's hidden glass windows, and the client can watch people touch the product. And they had a clock radio, and it had all these gizmos on and everything else. And they got eight people in there, and they're all looking at the clock radio, and they're all talking about how much they love the clock radio. And at the end, the organizer says, thank you so much to thank you for being here. Either you can get the $20 we promised you or the $100 clock radio. Which would you prefer? And every single person took the 20 bucks. Why? Because that was the truth. That was the moment that they were actually telling the truth.

Oh, so they thought the clock wasn't as worth as much as the $20?

Yeah. And so what I have found is I got an ego as much as anybody, maybe more. I like it when the people around me say, you did a really good job. When Oprah says, that was good, for sure. But I want to see three years later, are people still talking about this idea? Or I just want to see in the afternoon after a blog post, did someone engage with it in a way that changed them when they didn't know that I would notice. Right. Because it's not a performance in that moment. It's, did you have an impact? So if you go to Diabeacon in upstate New York and watch what happens when people walk into a Richard Serra sculpture which weighs 2 million pounds. I hope Richard has seen that happen, because that's genuine service. He made this. The curator doesn't matter, the dealer doesn't matter. This person had their breath taken away. That's what was supposed to happen. And it did. And so we play this game with everybody around us. Do I look fat in this dress? Et cetera, et cetera. And some of that is totally legitimate. It papers over our momentary insecurities, and there's nothing wrong with that. But when it comes down to the practice and the art that we seek to make, I think it makes sense to surround ourselves with people who say, I respect you. You're onto something. You can do even better. And for us to start a cycle of what happened when this went into the world, because when it's in the world and people had choices, what did I learn? How can I help a different group of people or this group of people make a different choice? And in the workshops that I do, I get to watch all of it because I'm like, up here, and you can see all the interactions. That's different than looking at the test scores because you're watching how people are going back.

Yeah. I think I heard our good friend Gary Vee talking about how when he started in his dad's wine business, he would sit there and watch people walk through the store and say, okay, what if I move this this way? And what if I put this in the front? Did people go and pick it up? Or did they walk right past it? Observing the results and the impact that you create on people, whether that's an experiential design or a physical design, whatever may be. I'm curious. I'm going to try to be mindful of the word should. Is it more powerful for creatives to have goals and deadlines, or is that destructive to the creative process?

Right.

So deadlines are a weird word because they have the word dead in them.

Finish lines or launch lines, whatever you.

Want to call it. I am super disciplined about deadlines. I have never missed a deadline because I just decided that some people need that tension that comes from being five minutes late. I abhor that. I want to go nowhere near that. So for me, it's fuel. For other people, it might be turbo fuel because they need that five minute over thing, but there are other people who. It completely destroys their work. So you've got to figure out, how do you engage with that? But goals is a different thing. So I was talking to somebody, I wish I could give them credit, who was explaining to me that goals are externally focused. And this is one of the things that led to me writing about it in the book. Meaning if you say my goal is to be a millionaire, that isn't up to you. It's only partly from you. And the rest of it is luck. And so if you're going to say I'm a good person because I'm lucky and I'm a bad person because I'm unlucky, now you're really in trouble. Instead, what we need are practices that we call our thing. That thing we call our goal is I'm going to be the kind of person that ships this much work each day, that gets out of bed at this time, that manages their expenses. So they're always one third of. I mean, you can make a list of things that are completely under your control, call those your goals, and wipe out anything that involves fish, anything that involves something external happening that makes you feel lucky.

So I'm hearing you say focusing more on the things you can control daily, the habits, practices, the actions, your energy, way of being, your compassion daily, as opposed to the end result.

Right. And let's get back to where we started, which is the reason people don't do that is because they don't want to hear from their other voice. They don't do that because they don't want to be on the hook. It is easier to catastrophize. It is easier to say, I'm distracted. It is easier to say, oh, the world is way too whatever. All those are external things that let you off the hook. And what I remember is I was born a year and a half before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world is really in trouble in 2020. But the world was 10 minutes away from being gone in 1962. And so the question is, how did we get from that to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon seven years later? We didn't do it by saying, well, we can't, because Russia could end everything at any minute. We said, well, if Russia is going to end everything in any minute, we might as well send someone to the moon. And my friend Ros Zander helped me learn the difference between but and and. So here we go. If you go on a long planned vacation and it's raining, you could say, I'm on vacation, but it's raining. Doesn't that suck? Or you could say, I'm on vacation and it's raining, and the. And leaves Room for you to say, so I can take a cooking lesson so I can have some quiet time with my spouse, so I could figure out how to work for social justice. All of those things happened because it's raining. And so, yeah, it's raining right now. It's really bad. And you can do something. You can't fix everything, but you can make one person better.

What are the habits that you believe would support more creatives if they did these habits on a daily basis? From your 30 plus years of experience of what's worked for you and what you've seen other people you've studied do, what are those few habits you think could really help them further their inner happiness and hopefully accelerate the luck on the outside as well?

Yeah. So we have to not fool ourselves into getting hooked on the external that we'll pretend we're not, but deep down we are. So, you know, Chongyung Trevor Rinpoche said, the bad news is we are falling and falling and falling. And the good news is there's nothing to hang on to. And as soon as you acknowledge that there's nothing to hang on to, it gets so much easier to fall.

You just let go. And you don't have to keep trying to grab for something.

Right. And so it's the grabbing is the biggest thing. I write in the book. A little bit about Julia Cameron's morning pages. Most people don't really understand how they work. You're not supposed to get up and write three pages of good prose. You're not supposed to get up and write three pages of interesting things. You're simply supposed to get up and write three pages, period, about anything. Junk, garbage, crust. Get it off your chest, doesn't matter. Just put it down. Because as soon as you do for the rest of the day, if you try to bring it up again, your subconscious. I already wrote that down. I don't need to revisit that. It's taken care of. I wrote it down. I've discharged that. And so part of what it means to have a practice is the practice defines who you are. If you want to be a runner, the best thing to do is go run every day. If you run every day for 30 days, you're a runner. You don't have to subscribe to Runner's World. You don't have to have fancy equipment. You just have to run every day. If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. And you don't have to show it to anybody. You simply have to do it. And not showing it to people lets you off the hook at some level, but at least you can see yourself as that kind of person. And then the step after that, which I'm a huge fan of, and the Internet makes this easier than ever, is publish it anonymously. I think you should have a daily blog, but don't put your name on it. And after you've written 30 or 40 entries of your daily blog or made five or six episodes of your podcast, you're going to want to put your name on it. And then you can but begin with, and if your name's not on it, it's so delicious because there's no upside and there's no downside. So you're simply doing it. And that's all you're going to get out of it, is that you did it. Yeah.

I want to ask you about money for a second because I think it's a topic that a lot of creatives shy away from. And I think this will actually be. Might be some of the most powerful stuff people hear is around the topic of money. You've been financially successful. You'd launched a business 30 years ago that you sold and exited. You've had, you know, many hits in your books and businesses. You've made money as a creative. It's fair to say that.

How can.

What should creators be thinking about in terms of what if they want to create great work, but also they want to be rich, they want to make millions, they want to for the heck of it, to support their family, their lifestyle, they want to make money. What should they be thinking about in terms of art and money and marrying the both without it feeling bad or icky or I'm selling myself in a bad way to make money? How can they approach it mentally so that it doesn't cripple them, but they achieve the results they want?

My answer may surprise some people, but here we go. The odds that you will make a lot of money doing exactly what you want are zero to a rounding error. Zero. It is possible to make a lot of money. It is easier now for people of privilege to do it than most any other time in history because of the network effect, because of the power of software, because of tools that give you reach to millions of people. The way you make a lot of money is you figure out what people with money want to spend that money on to solve their problem now, and you go solve that problem. And then over time, you amplify their need and you let them do it again. That is how everybody, with few exceptions, who has Made a lot of money, has done it. Those people don't get to say, oh, but I also have this idea and I need to express it because I think it's generous. Those are different things. And only in the last hundred years has it even been conceivable that you could get paid money to do what you love. This is brand new idea. So I am in favor of doing what you love and charging for it if you can, because it holds you responsible, puts you on the hook, creating tension, serving people you want to serve. And maybe you'll get paid a little bit. But if you want to make a lot of money, listen to the market and show up to the market with something the market wants to buy, because you don't get to insist that the market is wrong when you're asking the market to pay you something.

So what are some of the habits then that you learned over the years that the millionaires have that the rest of people don't have?

So this is going to sound, this one's going to sound crazy, but this is one that I've, I've, I shouldn't say it sounds crazy, it sounds too simple. But this one has been a passion of mine for the last, probably two years more than ever. Last six months especially. I told you before with, with being a dad, you know, you always want to be able to look in the mirror, no matter how much money you're making and what you're doing for a living, and look at that person and say, are you good with you? Like, are you compromising who you are? Are you going against your values to be successful? But you know, you just, you have to have that conversation with the man in the mirror, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

But when you have kids, it compounds times a thousand. Anybody watching who knows knows exactly what I'm saying. Kids don't do what you say, they do what you do. So you have somebody watching. If I want to be the best dad possible, I want to, I need to keep evolving and faster than ever. So I would say a morning routine, this is just one of them that's been huge in my life, is setting my day up for success. And you know, in an interview like this, there's so many different directions we can go, but I want to give some really strong takeaways here. Is everybody watching? We suffer on all different levels of suffering. We, some people suffer on a high level. Some people suffer because is the job going to get done? Is the, is the deal going to come through? Like we have these moments of suffering no matter if it's five minutes of suffering or an hour suffering or months of suffering. Some people lose a relationship and they suffer for years. Some people have a partner, take their money, they suffer for years, and they're stuck in that. And if you can limit the time you suffer, the more you can work on the solutions that better your life. People stuck in suffering are stuck forever. And we know right now, I'm saying it, and you're thinking of friends that you have that are stuck. Some they went found some suffering and.

They just crippled or moments where I was suffering and I didn't let go of it.

You can't let go of it. Right.

Or I held onto it for too long and it hurt me.

Right. And if you hold on to it, there's not enough energy or focus to keep moving forward. You could. That's when you still. Right.

Yeah.

So.

So what? I've been on this obsession and literally Tony Robbins flew out. Him and I got really close, he flew out and him and I had lunch about nine months ago. And he's on the same thing, like eliminating, like complete suffering gone. Like, instead of hours or weeks, it's moments that you catch it. So morning routines help me more than ever. And I'll tell you mine. Anybody wants to steal this? This works for me because I want to set my days up for least amount of suffering. Feeling grateful and ready to, you know, just rock at the day. Like, nothing can get me off now. Everybody knows gratitude is a key to success, happiness, joy. You can't be grateful and depressed, grateful and sad. You just can't do the two together. But it's hard. Sometimes I feel like the Roadrunners before your time. But when I was a kid, remember beep beep, the Roadrunner there was the Tasmanian Devil.

Yep.

So most of our lives with Facebook and social media and cell phones, and we're like the Tasmanian Devil. There's so much dust around us, it's hard to, like, see through it. Right. Like, it's like, I just got to get through this storm and then I'll be okay. How do I. You want me to set a goal and be grateful? Like, get out of this dust storm.

Right.

So I just obsessed on how do I start my day to make sure it doesn't happen. So one thing I do is at night, put your. I put my phone on airplane mode. And for the last year, especially when I wake up in the morning, I do not check email or text, because I can't if I check email or text.

Especially in bed.

Right?

Right. And who And I have done it for yourself. I'm not telling something I haven't done. But the great text put me in a good mood. Bad text, I become the anxious. Yeah, you know, I should get this done. I should just get this out of the way, right? And you become the thermometer of life. Life just grabbed a hold of you and they're going to tell you how your day is going to be. I don't know if I'm going to adjust you on the heat, up the ice cold or stressed or anxious or. So I leave my phone on airplane mode. And the first thing I do is I feed my soul, right? And. And that's not this. I'm just being honest. I don't chant, I don't do hours of meditation. What I've done is I've lowered the bar of gratitude. Now these are habits that you think, oh, this is revolution. These are the habits that I look, have made me successful, make me keep going forward, push through the negative times, keep reaching for the next thing. So I find gratitude. But I've lowered the bar. And I just said this. But I'll wake up some mornings and be like, damn, these sheets are amazing. You know, I mean, 150,000. You can Google it. 150. 50,000 people die every day. There's some days I just wake up and go, damn, I'm not one of them. I'm here. And when you can find gratitude on the lowest level, not I conquered, I did. Look, I see your wall. You've interviewed such amazing people. You got to be so proud of yourself. I look at it, I admire it. That's amazing goals. But sometimes we just set ourselves up until you get the next one of those pictures up there. The rest of stuff is just mundane. It's not. We're in this beautiful world. We're blessed every day with learning every moment. Even an interview like this. Take all the stuff I say, throw most of it away. If you get one thing I say today, it was worth your time with us being together. Just one thing, right? So I find a way to be grateful in, like the first few moments. I wake up by lowering the bar. No big special thing. Or sometimes I'll open a book. Like I just read the Untethered Soul for the second time. Love that book. I'll read two sentences out loud and then I feed my body. So I immediately get up and I do. I mean, it's just my personal thing, but I do a glass, full, big glass of water with a lemon, a green juice, some essential Oils. And I down that because I feel like I'm feeding my body. And then I go move. Whether it's workout, run, exercise, and someone isn't working out, I just move. And those three things set me up for a successful day. And then when I get back, this is something I've been doing for a year. And I'd say, rob this because there's things that, listen, you're in business. There's things that you love to do. It's your core competency you were put on this earth to do. It's interviewing, it's meeting people, it's networking. Whatever you have is meant to be. But there's some things that you do. It's like, I don't want to do that conference call. I don't want to sit with my accountant and go over numbers, whatever it is, right? And I used to think, man, I have to do that today. And I just switch that in the mornings. I write a quick little list every day of what I get to do. I just put that word, what I get to do. When I think about that, I. I used to. I used to literally live in a bathroom with my dad and I in my teens. I worked on cars every day and smoked, you know, smelled fumes because I was like. The rooms were always smoky. I was the only one painter in our collision shop. And I'd have headaches and, like, I could be doing that. So I have to do conference calls on Tuesdays, and I don't like conference calls. Whoopty do. Now when I say I get to do conference calls, it changes everything. So that little roof.

I'm not a victim anymore.

I'm not a victim anymore.

Right.

And again, on every level, it's. It makes a difference.

I love it. Any other habit or any other thing in the morning that you.

You do?

No, that's it. That's. That's my morning routine.

Are there any non negotiables every day for you besides the routine?

No, not really. Yeah, I'm pretty flexible.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. There's a part, actually that I wanted to go over in your book called the Seven Levels Deep. Is that what it is?

Yeah.

And this is an exercise that you do, right? And what is this exercise for? And how does it go?

Okay, so Seven Levels Deep was probably the biggest impact, the biggest thing in the impact of my life ever.

Really?

Yeah. One. One day. So I hired a guy named Joe Stump. Do you know Joe Stump?

No.

Great guy. He's in the marketing world. But I hired him because I want more Engagement with my students. So it's. It's all about if you can get somebody to digest some of your book. If somebody will read 30 pages of your book, they'll read the whole book. How do you get them to the first 30 pages? So I'm always obsessing and trying to create ethical bribes, whatever, to get you to take action. Right. We know books work. It's the books and the action. So I was always. So anyway, so Joe comes in and he said. I said, I want to do whatever I can. And he said, have you ever done the seven levels deep? I don't know where he got it from. This is probably about eight years ago. She was two, so about eight years ago. And I said, if it's good, just give it to me.

Right, right.

I'll take it. And he's like, I want to go through it with you. I'm like, listen, and. And I paid Joe 10 grand. Grand for half a day of consulting at the time. And he's like. I said, I want to go through. I just want it. He goes, I won't give it to you unless you do it. So we sit there and what the seven levels deep is, is finding everybody wants to know your purpose and what's. What's this meaning of life and what's my why and all that I get. And it's kind of played out, but I don't know if anything really gets to the heart of the. Of it as simple as this. So what it basically was, he's like, why would you give me ten grand for half a day? And I said, because I want to create a company that stands out from everybody else. I want to engage more students, change more lives. And he basically said to me, that's a really great answer. So I asked you why I'm here, and you said, you want to engage more students and get more people to change your life. So why is it important for you to engage more students and change people's lives? And I remember saying, you know, there's a lot of people in this industry that shouldn't be here, and there's some great people I want to help rise all boats of the good and push the rest down. I want to leave a legacy for my kids. So he said, okay, I asked you why you pay me ten grand. I'm not going to go through. Through this whole thing. And he's like, you did this, you know, you said you wanted to stand out, and you want to leave a legacy, so why is it important to leave a legacy? And the whole point is asking the previous question seven times I took that that day. By the time I got to the third question, what happens is the third. When there was three questions left, I should say he asked me four times. It switched from my head to my heart and I felt my physiology change. I felt my emotions change. I felt like tears welling up. And when he asked me, and I don't even remember what the fourth thing I said, but the third thing I said was, I never want to go backwards. And he got me thinking about things I haven't thought about in years. I didn't like being the kid with hand me downs. And I'd make my parents drop me off down the street with their junky car and I'd go to lunch. And this is not a poor me. I. My life was designed to be exactly the way it was or I wouldn't be the man or the father I am today. But there was days I'd go to school without lunch money and I just tell my buddies I'm not hungry because we didn't have a buck, right? So I never want to go back there. And I felt that emotion and hit me so hard, I'm like, that's what it is. And he's like, well, there's two more left. So he said, dean, why is it important that you never go backwards? And I'm like, I don't know. And it hit me and I thought, my kids, I just want to give them options. I don't want to raise entitled kids or brats, but I want to give them options that I didn't have. And I'm like, that's it. So he's like, well, that's not really it because it's seven. It's not nine, it's not five, it's seven levels deep. And by now I'm crying because I'm thinking about my kids, literally. And I got half my staff there and I'm like, just weeping. And it came to me, he said, why is that important? And it just hit me. And I never knew why I worked so hard since I was cutting firewood in high school and did all stuff I said, I need to be in control of my life. And these emotions flooded in my parents, everybody's got their thing, right? But for me, and I'm saying this because I want you at home to be or when you're watching this, listen is I realized that my parents were married nine times when I was a kid. So I moved 20 times by the time I was 19 different stepbrothers steps.

Both parents were married.

Five for my dad, five for my mom, four for my gosh. Yeah, it's crazy. Always moving. Like military kids know what that feels like, right? So I'd be in a cul de sac with a new stepdad, stepbrother, stepsisters have the bike, come home one day, and my mom's like, we're moving again. And then I move in, my dad move in with my grandmother. So I had this crazy hopscotch. My whole child, there was no certainty. So what I realized at end the that moment, literally I'm bawling loose. I mean, like, literally crying. It's like, I don't want anybody to ever tell me when to move, how to dress, how to live, how to work, who, how I'm going to raise my kids. Definitely not going to kiss somebody's ass for money, right? And I realized at that moment, my. Why was. I don't want to be a control freak. I just want to be in control. When I was 27, I retired both my parents. I stopped worrying about them. I took care of my grandmother, I take care of some. Like. So I got those problems out of the way. And when, when I anchored that in. And you watching at home, it's like, if you think you're watching this because you want to be an entrepreneur, you want. Or you already are, if you're watching this, you've already had great success in your life. You want that next level, or maybe it's income or, or better health or better diet or better physiology, whatever it is you want. So many times we think it's because I want to get out of that job. I want this freedom. I just want more money. I want to take the better vacations. And it's seven times deeper than that.

I was the most ambitious, laziest person you're ever going to meet 15 years ago. And it was realizing, wait, just because I'm lazy by nature doesn't mean I have to be lazy in actuality. Like, I can actually get the discipline to develop real drive to acquire those skills. So when I met the guys that are now my partners, they put me into a scenario where there was a very real world consequence, both positive and negative, for living up to the acquisition of skills. So. And that environment, that gladiator pit that I ended up stepping into was the business world. And the great thing is when you're no longer an employee and it's your business and everything you have is on the line, and if the business fails, you lose your house like that. That's real? Yeah, it's real to you in a way that it's not to an employee. Right. Because now there's a real consequence that goes beyond, well, I have to look for another job. This goes into. I could lose everything if I can't solve this problem. Now, that can scare you away and keep you wanting to be an employee where it's a little bit safer, or that can be wildly motivating to you. And that was interesting to me. So I wanted to be able to say, the harder I work, the better result I get. And they gave me the opportunity to plug into business where that became true. If I could solve these problems, if I could build a better product, if I could market it better, whatever that better results came. And so there was, like, now a connection between how hard I work, the skills I acquire, and the reward I get. And that was all I needed. And then for me, being in that loop allowed me to do things like the gym.

Sure.

So when did you discover your new values? And what are those values? Personal and then business. And they intertwine.

Yeah. For me, they're totally connected, 100%. And that's by choice, because for a long time they weren't connected. The way that I got the value system was truly looking at what works.

Right.

And so I believe that I'm going to give away my answer to something you can ask me later. But I believe that the purpose in life to be great, you have to acquire as many skills as you can that have utility and then put that utility to the test. Because now you can see, did I actually get the skill that I thought I got? Did I get the result from that skill that I wanted? And you can judge both what skills you need to acquire and whether you have effectively required them. And business like that is the closest thing to say, MMA fighting, right, mma, is you want real time feedback on whether you're learning and getting good at something. Let someone whose sole intent is to take your head off come in and test whether you can defend a choke or defend an armbar. It's so real and so visceral. There's, you know, you can think of it. There's. Either it's pure metaphor or there's no metaphor. Right. Like you were in that moment. So finding ways that business can. Can be like that for me, allowed me to create a set of values out of pure efficiency. So when for me, I. The one thing I can't. I can't give you ambition, I can't make you want something. Right. I Can't want it for you. But once you want something, now you plug into something very real. And if you accept. So I Talk about this, 25 bullet points is the Quest belief system. And that was me trying to give people the thing that they needed to escape the matrix. And in that is the belief that you can acquire skills, that the human mind, human potential is nearly limitless. Right? So you start putting all this stuff together, and it's like, okay, essentially everything falls on my shoulders. If. If I want to be great, it's all down to me. And whether I execute on that or not, it's all down to my ability to say, this is the thing I want. This is the gap in skill set between who I am today and who I need to become in order to acquire that thing that I want. Like, for me, I want to end metabolic disease globally. Right? So now I know what set of skills I need, right. I'm gonna have to understand nutrition really well. I'm gonna have to understand psychology really well in order to build this business. I'm gonna have to understand just business in general to get the metrics right so that people can afford to buy these products on and on and on. So you can identify the skill sets that you need, and then you get to test them.

Right.

Because if I have learned the wrong skills or failed to learn a skill that I thought I had, the business doesn't grow. Right. So you have this feedback loop. And really my value system was born out of that. I was so, so clear about what I wanted to accomplish, that I could just test the skills that I was getting. And that sort of desire to accurately assess and acquire skills really is my value system. Right.

But I think you started Quest when you're 34. Is that right?

When did we start Quest? Started Quest five years ago. I'm 39. Yes. Well done. You know me better than I did.

So how long did it take you to, I mean, get clear on what you wanted? Did it take 35 years, 34 years for you to get clear on what you wanted? And what was that process of actually figuring it out that you got clear?

Yeah, that's. It's so tempting to mythologize everything and to tell you the concise story, which is maybe more useful, but is a little misleading. So the truth went something like this. We're miserable building this company that's a product we don't care about. Step one, what do we love? What do we care about? And what would we do and love doing even if we were failing? And that was the question that we asked ourselves. So, okay, the thing that we would do for three very different reasons is to make this food that people choose based on taste and it happens to be good for them. And I've already explained my reasons. And so then as we're starting to do the company, honestly, you're looking at what's working and what's not working and you're relentlessly self assessing. So it was just clear to me that people didn't think the way that we thought. So the three of my partners and I, Ron and Mike and myself, we think a very certain way, right? What we call the Quest Way. And because they had developed that over the school of hard knocks and starting businesses and failing, they were able to bring me along much later in the process. But because I knew nothing about what they had learned up to that point, and they weren't teaching me, they just drug me into deep waters. I had to learn. And because the way my mind works, I was processing that into basically a list of, okay, here are the lessons I've learned. I was codifying it, right? Turning it into a map for success that I could hand other people. And that ultimately became the 25 bullet points that are the quest belief system. So as we're going, and I realize in my head I've got these. What I didn't know at the time was 25 bullet points. But anyway, I've got this way of thinking and I'm encountering these employees that don't think like that. And so accepting that there's a. That was really when I started to realize that there's a gap between who people are and what they tell you they want to accomplish. Because in the beginning, I hired everyone. Everyone, right? Not because I'm super smart and thought, hey, I should. There was no one else, right? Like, we had the smallest handful of people ever. And so I started doing the interviewing. As I was doing it, I started realizing, God, these guys tell me they want to do something amazing with their life. And if you just listen like, wow, yeah, like, I want to be on your team, dude. You're going to do amazing stuff. And then you realize they can't execute on that dream. Why can't they? They don't have the mindset yet. Like, there's a. You could do an entire podcast series on how to get the mindset. But I'll just use Carol Dweck and her amazing book Mindset, I'm sure. Such a good book. I see Simon Sinek up there, who is also very influential in us. And she says some people either believe they're as smart as they're ever going to be and that's that. So they're going to be ego protective and they're going to try to thwart anything that makes them feel like they're not the smartest person or whatever. And then there's people with a growth mindset, and they realize I'm not the smartest person and I'm certainly not as smart as I could be. So even if I am the smartest person that ever lived, I could get a little bit smarter. And so when they're confronted with contradictory information, they learn and they soak it up like a spoiler.

Whereas other people are fixed by mindset. Right?

Correct.

Fixed on like, no, this is the way and I'm right and that's wrong.

Yes. And I would say the world, everyone's on a spectrum. Right. Even I, as much as I believe in it and work my ass off to be a growth mindset. I still have, let's call it 10% where I catch myself. I'm like, come on, dude, you know better than that. Yeah, but so people that fall in, let's say, sub 50% spectrum of the growth mindset, it's got to be 98%.

So what's the question you ask people now when you hire them to know if they have a growth mindset over a fixed mindset?

You ready?

Ready.

It's a weird thing. People actually, I don't let them do it anymore, but people actually used to ask if they could come in and sit in on the interviews because they were so weird. Not intentionally so. It was just to really get to a human being and who they are. It requires some weird stuff. So it goes like this. You walk in the door, there's a couple bad things happening. One, your anxiety levels are through the roof because you're in this weird setting. You're on my turf. You're sitting across from me. They built me up. Oh, it's the president of the company. So people come in and if you like Billion Dollar Brand.

Yeah.

Put their fingers. Put your fingers on their aorta, their arteries, and you're going to, you know, the heart's going to be just racing out of control. So that's problem number one. The blood is literally leaving the prefrontal cortex and they're just in a bad state.

They probably want to say anything to get the job.

And that takes us to the tyranny of being chosen.

What?

Well said, my friend. So people come in, they want to Be picked, Right?

Being picked is accepted, acknowledged, chosen, yes.

Hell yeah. We all want that. I teach people about the tyranny of being chosen, and I still have to check myself because it's just rad to be picked. Like, there's no two ways about it. So they walk in, they're nervous as hell. They've got the tyranny of being chosen. They want to win the job. They're not trying to assess the opportunity. They're not asking, is this job right? Right for me? They're merely trying to be selected. So step one is, hey, welcome. I understand this is a very weird situation. So I want to bring your anxiety levels down as much as possible. You should be interviewing me. You should be kicking my tires and figuring out if I'm right for you. You're offering to give me 50% of your waking hours. You better love this job. Like, for some reason, this job better be moving you towards what you want for selfish reasons. So literally, I opened the interview by saying that and then saying, I'm here to answer one question and one question only. When you're at your most selfish, are you good for me? And when I'm at my most selfish, am I good for you? And when you see an alignment of selfish desires, it really is beautiful. And I'll give you an example. My chief marketing officer, Nick Robinson, really, really sharp kid. He wants to build a media empire. He's not so worried about obesity. He struggled himself a little bit. So I think it resonated with him. But that wasn't stated thing for him. He's got much bigger goals that he needs to build a media empire to do it. Now, I need a media empire in order to get this brand to mean something to people so it can bring the kind of value to their lives that I wanted to bring. So here I need somebody that has. When they're at their most selfish, they are learning about building a media empire. And he's thinking, I need somebody to fund this whole thing while I learn how to build a media empire and.

Try that because I can't pay it all myself. Yeah, exactly.

So that's, that's the alignment of selfish desires. So I'm trying to put people in that position where they're just trying to figure out if this is right for them, which hopefully lowers their anxiety levels and they're no longer worried about being picked. And then the sort of Trojan horses, I'm trying to get them outside of the interview answers because I'm not going to see the real them. I'm Going to see the representative that they send. And when you were on Inside Quest, there was a moment on the show and that's why I stopped and I was like, the way this dude is looking at me like I wish everybody could see because. Because you weren't there to give me pat answers. You were actually engaged.

I mean I was almost crying at a couple points. I wanted to be as real as possible and be engaged as possible. And I think you got to allow yourself to go anywhere and everywhere to.

Get that truth for sure. And when you. And it was like a beautiful moment. Right. It was really. It was so cool to share that and to have been able to create an environment like that where you could be so raw, so real. We had an audience. I mean it was just like. So it created this whole vibe in the room. It's like one of those late night where it's dark and everybody can like let their guard down. If you can get that to happen in an interview, as uneasy as that is, then you get to the real person. So the technique I use for that is a confession. So I tell them, look, I'm going to try and get you to lower your guard and reveal yourself as quickly to me as possible so that I can judge you. And I'm going to reciprocate and I'm going to lower my guard and reveal myself as quickly to you as possible so that you can figure out whether.

This is what you want.

Yeah, exactly. If it's what you want and the confession is really simple and what I'm about to say is actually true. I want to be a Jedi first of all. I think in movies almost at all times. So the Matrix is the perfect example.

Of my life and comics.

Yes, 100%. And so I have no interest in wielding a lightsaber. That's not interesting to me. But the ability to influence. These are not the droids you're looking for. That is so meaningful to me. One because it allows you to control your own mind. Right. There's no more powerful mind control and control over one's own mind. And then being. Because I believe that I use it not only for the good of that person.

Right.

You should be a quest for the exact number of things days that it's the most selfish thing you can do. So I'm already thinking of you. And then we've got.

You don't want them to stay forever if it's not selfish for them anymore.

No way.

You want them to get out as quickly as possible.

100% Interesting, dude. Nothing terrifies me because I lost eight and a half years of my life.

Being complacent, being safe, because it was comfortable, good money, good.

You know.

Exactly.

All those things. Yeah.

And it really felt like I lost them. And I was like, time is the most precious commodity you have. And I mean, look, I reframed it because it doesn't do me any good to sit there and say, I lost eight and a half years of my life. I learned a lot, but it was like it was unnecessary the way that I went about. Like, I learned every lesson the hardest way possible with the most pain and suffering possible. So I'm emotionally just keenly aware of what it means to service someone else's dream rather than your own. And I think so. Elon Musk inspires the life out of me. Like that guy just dreaming the way that he dreams. So incredible to me. I want to find the next Elon Musk, light them on fire, and get them to believe that they can do that and they can execute on that level. And so the sort of background thing that's running, they leave you 100%.

So help you get to the next level while cultivating that within them. And then when they're ready to leave and it no longer serves them or you, then you want them to go out and be happy for sure.

And we've had. I've taught two people to be direct competitors, and they've gone on to launch nutrition companies, their own bars, or. Yep, 100%. And to me, that's the. If you take it out to the natural conclusion. So we make a promise to our employees, and I'm going to try to set you free. I think of it in Matrix terms, Right? So I'm going to try and free you from the Matrix. As someone helped free me from the Matrix, I feel obligated to pay that back. And getting free of the Matrix is shorthand for learning to think like an entrepreneur. You hit an obstacle, you don't stop, you find a way around it. You have a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. I want to do that for people. And I want Quest to be that environment. Whether you meet me, spend time with me should be irrelevant. Just the quest environment is going to provide that to you. So to that end, we tell people, I will teach you anything you want to know. I will give you the list of books in order that I think you should read to be able to take my job for me. I will, at every corner, encourage or every turn encourage. If you have an entrepreneurial spark and you want to chase it, I will encourage that. I will never ask you to hide your passions from me. The only catch is your tuition. You have to be killer at your job. If you're killing it at your job.

Do whatever you want. Right.

Then your reward is Quest University. And our goal is to teach you all those things. And some of it's formalized. Teaching people basic finance and things like that. The whole show inside Quest was meant to be. Be us paying that forward and teaching people that mindset, bringing on people like yourself to come on and just show people how far you can take that mindset. You know, how you can go from injury to just massive accomplishment in a ridiculously short period of time. People were super inspired by that. So that kind of thing is our promise. But if you follow that out to its natural conclusion, ultimately someone comes and says, yeah, you'll teach me anything. You'll encourage me entrepreneurial. Teach me how to build a nutrition company and we'll do it.

It.

And the reason we do it isn't because I'm eager to build, you know, my next competitor. It's really because it's a. It's a value system that I believe in.

Right.

And so I don't want to artificially limit it. Also, to be honest, I believe that the. The juice is always in the execution. And if they can out execute me, that's bad on me.

Right. Or it's something you can learn about what they have. And for sure. Interesting. Now, I saw. This is all great stuff when I saw a. Somewhere online that when you launched Quest, there were 1600 other protein bar companies that launched in 2010.

Flavors or companies?

Yeah, flavors are companies.

Yep.

What gave you the audacious mindset to think that you could compete against all Those, plus the 10, 20 years of other nutrition companies out there and beat them?

Yeah, it's.

Without having any experience in this.

Yeah, I'm in. Give you a phrase that I play in my own head, that I know when I say out loud, 50% of people love it and 50% of people hate me for it, but it's true. So, hey, here we go. I have the arrogance of belief. I believe in myself now. I believe in one thing about me. I am not the smartest guy. I got a 990 on my SATs. I took it twice. That's my combined score.

Better than me.

That's bad for both of us. I always joke with people. A monkey smearing feces on the test could score higher than I did. Literally terrible. But I always believed that I could do whatever I set my mind to, right? So that's the only, the only credit I will give myself is when other people break and give up and stop. I just don't. Right. And it comes down to the story you tell yourself about yourself. And that's the story I tell myself. I was just this last weekend, I was at an entrepreneurial organization. Organization. And they brought a world class mountain biker in and said, hey, anybody that wants to go for a ride with her, go. And I thought, okay, you know, I'll go. And because she's saying we can do a beginner course or whatever, I thought, that's perfect. Jump on the bike and go. I've never been on a mountain bike before, ever in my life. I haven't been on a bike of any kind probably in 15 years. So that was probably stupid. And we're in. Oh, God. Sun Valley, Idaho. So it's not exactly flatland. And we go mountain biking and I'm dying. I'm just done. It's at like 6,000ft, first of all. So I cannot catch my breath. And I keep stopping. And everyone's like, oh, you know, it's okay, man. Like, go ahead and turn back.

It's all good.

It's all good.

And I'm like, I don't think you know the story. I tell myself, like, there's no universe in which I stop. So I keep going. Finally, they've done the loop, right? Some people have turned back, whatever. They've done the loop and now they're coming back and they're passing me. I'm still headed out. And they're like, you need to turn around. And I'm like, I'm so sorry, but I'm not going to turn around. And they said, okay, but then we're no longer responsible for you. And I was like, okay. I'm like, it is what it is, man. I appreciate that. No worries. I'm a big boy. Like, go. And I just kept going. And I must have come in an hour and 20 minutes or something after everybody else, but I finished. And that meant so much to me. I was like, I'm gonna ignore the fact I got my ass handed to me and I came in dead last, but I'm gonna be proud that I didn't quit.

Interesting. Did you say arrogance of belief?

Is that what you said, the arrogance of belief?

You know, it's interesting. When I study champion athletes, there's one thing that they have over everyone else, one of two things, and it's a belief in themselves or Their beliefs in something higher, giving them that strength, courage, athleticism. Whenever I listen to Champion on interviews after the super bowl, whatever it may be, the first thing they say is, you know, how do you feel that the broadcaster is going to say, you know, I want to say, you know, thanks to God, who gives me all the glory, who gives me all my strength, my courage, everything. I believe 100% in him and his power and in that power or the other athlete is like, I believe in myself so much. I'm the best, I'm the greatest. I believe I will do whatever it takes. I believe that I can go through any adversity. It's that belief, that arrogance of belief either way that I believe makes people great or not great.

Yeah.

And even if you're, you know, the other person may have a lot of belief as well, and sometimes it just doesn't fall your way. You know, Tom Brady has been in, has lost a number of Super Bowls, has also won a number of them. But it's getting to that opportunity. I think you got to have that belief either way. So that's one right there. What makes you guys different than everyone else?

There's really two things. One, the product is just different. So we were the first ones. In fact, I never really answered your question. So there's 1600 bars products into a declining market. Everyone told us we were crazy, but there was nothing in the market that we would eat. So we knew there was at least.

The market of three much stuff in it, too much.

And we just thought, look, man, if we can deliver this product that's real, people will respond and, you know, and, and wanting to build a company of value so that people could love it. And in two ways. So one was just we created a better product. And then two, we said right from the beginning, there's two things that we export our product and our philosophy. And that made us weird right out of the gate. And we said, look, but different is good. Yeah, right. And this was really different in a positive way because we wanted to own up this. There's two things going on with the company. There's the ability to make this superior product and get it out into the market and all that. And then there's the mentality that we have that has allowed us to do this and we want to share that mentality with other people. And we have a similar global desire by exporting that mentality, which is we shorthanded to Elon Musk. But I mean, the next Bill Gates, people doing big things, world changing things, right. We Want to find those people. We want to give them the arrogance of belief in themselves or a less controversial way of saying we want. Want to give people the confidence of belief so that they can be confident that they can believe in themselves enough to take a risk and quite frankly survive failing. And a lot of people, I think, get eaten up by failure, which is not useful. So helping people develop a mentality that inoculates them from the pain of failing, from the pain of not being chosen, all those things that really knock people back. We want to export that philosophy. And, and that certainly plays well for the brand because the brand was always meant to be empowering.

Right.

We had to make a decision early on. Is a quest bar. What you give to somebody who has six pack abs and you say, well done, son, you get to eat one of these. So is it a trophy or is it a catalyst for change? Hey, I see somebody, this guy, this gal, they're struggling and I want to give them an inclusive community. I want to give them a product that feels good, that they can celebrate with, that they can reconnect to joy. And that's what we want to be. We don't want to be a trophy. I want to be a catalyst for change. So when you're already just in the mindset, we want to be a catalyst for change. And you're trying to put that out into the world in ways that, by the way, do not serve you from a financial standpoint in any way, shape or form. It actually allows you to create an authentic connection with the consumer and being real and really connecting with them that does serve you from integrity of the brand.

Although you cannot change conditions or circumstance, you don't have to let them control you. We can't control what's going on outside, but we can control what's going on inside. You know, and unfortunately, I don't think many of us have been raised to really understand that. Yeah, and it's a lack of understanding that's causing all our problems, you know.

But how, I mean, how can you say that to someone who's like, well, I don't feel like I have control on the inside when it seems like everything has power over me. What's something that can shift you see.

The truth is, for that person, that would be true. That they're being controlled by outside. We look at it this way, we are the only creature on the planet that's totally disoriented in our environment. All the little squirrels, the birds, all the animals are completely at home in their environment. They blend in you and I are totally disoriented in our environment. We've been given the mental faculties to create our own environment. However, we go right through school and we've never learned that we have higher faculties. And the average person has no knowledge of how to operate with them, how to develop them. We have perception, the will, reason, imagination, memory and intuition. Now, those mental faculties, they're not just words. They're actually mental faculties that we can use to take control over our world and to create the environment that we want. But unfortunately, we grow up, we don't know that. We've been raised to live through by what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch, our physical senses. And we've been raised to be controlled by what's going on outside as little kids. Will you listen to what I'm telling you? Will you look at this? You know, and so it's all outside. We get our report card, and that tells us what kind of student we are, but it really tells us where our mind was at for a few minutes three weeks ago. Got nothing to do with who we are. So I think we're raised in ignorance. Actually. There's a very small percentage of the population that have a reasonably clear understanding of who they are and what they're capable of doing. But the ones that do are in the minority. Our whole company has been dedicated to teaching that to people for the last 50 some years.

Powerful.

You talked about the five faculty, the five mental faculties. And I even touched on this briefly in our. In our previous interview. But I'm curious. I have a new question for you. Which of the faculties typically is the hardest to, I guess, master or, you know, become efficient in. To use to your advantage in a positive way. And which is the one that you feel like hurts us the most when we don't?

Well.

I think reason is probably. It's the one that's spoken about by almost all the great leaders, the evolving, complete unanimous agreement that we become what we think about. It's our reasoning factor that enables us to think. Ford says thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few people engage in it. Dr. Ken McFarland, who's gone for a long time now, but he was a great educator down in Kentucky. He one time said 2% of the people think, 3% think they think, and 95% would actually rather die than think. Now, you know, that sounds cute, but it's true. If you stop and listen to what most people are saying, it's going to be fairly obvious they're not thinking. If you stand back and watch what most people are doing, it's fairly obvious they're not thinking or they would never say or do what they're doing. Most people today have their television on the news and they're just soaking up all the stuff that's going on that's dominating the media right now. So they become a plaything for what's going on outside. And that's why they're living in such fear.

By consuming the media of whether it's true or accurate or not true, you're being manipulated.

It's not a matter of whether it's true or not. Is this how you want to spend your life, just listening to that? That doesn't mean you should deny it. It doesn't mean that you should say, well, that's all false. I don't know whether it's true or false. It's just bad news. I don't want to be involved in it. Am I aware that it's there? Well, you'd almost have to be dead not to be aware that it's there, but that doesn't mean you have to spend your time thinking on that. I would much rather activate some of my creative faculties and do something that's constructive in a time, in a time.

Under crisis and worry and fear for a lot of people. What should we be thinking about? How should we be using our imagination in different ways as opposed to fixating on the bad news?

Well, I think a good idea right now would be spend some time thinking about how are we going to adapt when this is gone. Yeah, because we're going to live in a different world. We're not going to be in the same world when this is all blown over than we're in right now. It's going to be quite different. People are not going to be rushing out to big events where there's a lot of people. They're not going to be rushing to restaurants. I think they're going to be very careful about what they do, where they think, where they're going. I was listening to Cynic and he said, if you're a public speaker, don't look for a stage for a little while because you're not going to have one. Yeah. Now, this also presents great opportunities for us, for my company. We're going online full speed ahead. Now, fortunately, we built the studio four or five years ago. So you're prepared, we're equipped and we're ready. Yeah, we can broadcast. We had a training class going in here just last week with about 300 of our consultants from all over the world, we had a three day training program for them and it was very effective online. You didn't have to come together. We did it from right here.

Yeah, I mean, you're known for doing these powerful transformational workshops in person. So for someone, I mean, it's very inspiring for me. For someone at your age, where would be the excuse of most people your age to say, well, I don't understand this technology thing and I've been doing this way of business for so long, it's always worked this way. And I'm not going to try to reinvent or evolve and pivot and grow in this way. So it's really inspiring to see someone your age with your, your level of experience and say, you know what? I'm embracing it. Maybe I don't like it. Maybe you do like it, but you're embracing it and making the most of it as opposed to resisting. Because what happens when we start to resist in our life? What truly happens?

Well, we resist that. We create it in our mind. That's all we think about. You see, I guess my age really has nothing to do with it, but I formed that attitude a long time ago. Yeah, I didn't like the idea that when you've lived for so long, you've got to cut out, you got to stop. I thought, hell, I don't like that idea at all. And first of all, I think we're, I believe we're here to do God's work. God's work is creation, you know, expansion, fuller expression, greater goodness. And if we're going to do that, we're going to be working at it all the time. We're here on this planet. We never stop. So age should have no bearing on it. I had a couple of people ask me when we started to build this place, we put a couple of million dollars into this. And somebody said, how old are you? And I think I was probably 83 when I started to break Graham. He said, you're 83 and you're going to spend $2 million building a studio? I said, yeah, like, why not? I mean, you see, we let things that really have no concern, we let them bother us, we let them control us. Age is a dumb thing to let control you. It's our thinking that controls everything. That's the one point every great leader agreed on. We become what we think about. Well, what's your person thinking? I'm thinking, if I get old, I got to stop. Well, then you'll stop. Or I'm thinking, well, If I've been here a long time, I've got a lot of experience. I want to utilize that experience to keep me going as long as I am here. I mean, anybody had their head screwed on right a few years ago would know that this thing's going to take over, and if we don't learn how to use it, we're toast. So, you know, I was doing seminars on my iPad because I can run it right onto a monitor and out through to the universe.

Yeah.

What should we be thinking about the most right now, in your mind, if.

I should be most important about our future? I think we should be thinking about the greatness, like it's the school of greatness. I think we ought to be thinking about the greatness that we've got locked up within us and bring it to the surface. Everyone has deep reservoirs of talent and ability within them, and they can bring it to the surface to accomplish anything they want. Now, to sit in fear and wonder what's going to happen. That is a dumb waste of your talent and your time. And unfortunately, that's what most of the media is promoting right now. To believe in fear is to believe in something you can't see. To believe in faith is to believe in something you can't see. Well, if you have a choice, I think I choose faith over fear.

Absolutely.

I think I believe where I can really see something happen. I believe we're going to have a phenomenal year in our company. In fact, I have business partner Sandy Gallagher, and very bright lady, was a securities attorney prior to joining us. She ran a program this morning for our entire company. We have about 70 people in the company. She was teaching, masterminding to them all and saying how this is important that every one of us get involved in this, that we learn the basics of masterminding that Napoleon Hill brought to the world, let's say, way back in the 30s. Now, I think that's what we should be teaching people. Sandy was on the right track there. So I think we ought to be thinking about what we're going to build. How big are we going to do it? Where are we going to do it? When are we going to start? Our goals have not changed. They're very big, they're very ambitious, and we're not letting this virus slow us down one bit. As a matter of fact, we're trying to figure out how can we use this to speed it up. If you care and you can't get rid of it, use it to your advantage. There is a way we can use it to our advantage. People are more dependent upon the phone. I've got a computer here. They're dependent on their phone, their computer, more than they've ever been. We can reach them anywhere in the world through those mediums.

Yeah, use them to your advantage. You talked about fear for a second.

I'm curious.

When we live in a state of fear, what does that do to us? And when we, the second part to this, when we feel that fear and we become aware of it, what should we be thinking or doing or acting on in order to shift into a more positive state?

Do you know, that is one hell of a good question. And it's a question most people are not able to answer. First of all, the cause of fear is ignorance. That is the cause of fear. And so if you follow the ignorance, it doesn't start out as fear. The ignorance starts out in a conscious level as doubt and worry. That's on a conscious level, we're doubting or we're worrying. Then we take whatever image comes into our consciousness of the doubt and the worry and we turn it over to our emotional mind. That's what causes the fear. Well, that fear then has to be expressed through the body through the only instrument it can be expressed through our physical body. It sets up a vibration known as anxiety. Anxiety is not expressed. Anxiety becomes suppressed. We suppress it. And the suppression then turns to depression, which turns to disease, which turns to decay. You see, you're talking about a track a person gets on. It's a very negative track. It's ignorance. Don't worry. Fear, anxiety, suppression, depression, disease, disintegration. Now, the polar opposite of all that, the opposite of ignorance is knowledge. There's only one way to get to knowledge, and that is to study. Now, unfortunately.

School.

Didn'T do the job that it was designed to do for most of us. School should teach us to love, to study.

Not to dread studying and homework and tests.

They should teach us to love it. Because study leads to the opposite of don't worry, which is understanding. See, it's study that leads to understanding. We understand how to handle the fear. It's understanding that enables us to cause us to understand where the fear starts, the understanding. Then we want to say, what do we understand? We want to understand. This whole universe operates by law. One of the laws is the law of opposite. The opposite of don't worry is understanding. Now, if the don't worry leads to fear, what's understanding leads to understanding leads to faith. The faith leads to expression. Well, being and expression. It's not Depression, it's not suppression, it's not anxiety. The faith leads to well being. The well being then is expression, acceleration. Because we're at ease. We're not at. There's not disease. So you're dealing with polar opposites. There's two different sides to things. And when we understand that, our world starts to change. It's by understanding that that we learn how to deal with these pandemics. When they hit, and they will hit, there will be others. There always has been. All down through history, if you look back, there's been things like this happen in the past and unfortunately, the masses are sort of paralyzed by it.

Yeah.

And as a people, we add to that paralysis by feeding them more of what scares them. What we should be doing is helping them understand what the hell's going on.

Why do we do that as people? Why do we feed people more of what scares them as opposed to what you and I do? Which is because that's what people want.

That's what they buy. People don't buy good news, people buy bad news. Why, though? Can you imagine if everybody that tunes into CNN tuned into the School of Greatness every week?

It'd be amazing.

Can you imagine if everybody that tunes into Fox tuned into your School of Greatness every week? Have you any idea the impact you could have on the world? That's what we're trying to do. It'd be enormous. It'd be enormous. People want bad news. It resonates with where their mind is programmed. They're programmed with negative information. Their paradigm is all bad news. It's what we're programmed with now. Is everybody new? There's a small select group of people that don't fall into that category. And they are always working diligently trying to lift everybody up. It's not an easy thing to do. But every nunch in a while a Lewis Howes come along and start a school of greatness. And he'll call in different people that feed into that concept that are in harmony with that, that resonate with that. And so it makes it interesting for the listener. And then that's how it goes.

Yeah.

And that's what you're doing. And that's what I'm doing.

Yeah.

And it's not a losing battle. It just appears like it is. I'm winning. I think you're winning. Now, we're not. We're not drawing the numbers that CNN's drawing, but the ones we draw are saying, absolutely, you got it, you got it.

Or making an impact on them for sure. I'm curious. I want to ask you more about self doubt because this is something I've been fascinated with for the last few years as I spent most of my life dealing with trying to understand how to overcome doubting myself and achieve the sports goals, business goals, relationship goals that I had throughout my younger years. And I became obsessed with learning how to eliminate doubt. And I've been researching this more and just trying to learn from people like yourself on how you have dealt with self doubt over the years and how you think. Anyone who feels like they're doubting themselves, what can they do to go from doubt into confidence? What do you think is the path?

Okay, that's a good question. It ties in with the previous question. Yes. What do we do with fear? Fear comes from the doubt. So the doubt becomes the cause of the fear, which is the cause of the anxiety, et cetera. The doubt is the cause, fear is the effect. What is the polar opposite to doubt? Understanding. It's understanding that's the opposite of doubt. So what is it we want to understand? Well, if it's me that's entertaining doubt, why am I entertaining doubt? If I were to find out who I really am and I believe everything that's been taught down through the centuries, I would have no doubt. I would be realizing that I could do anything. And the only thing that's causing a doubt is a lack of understanding. So I'm going to keep studying. I'll gain a better understanding. I don't doubt myself. I don't doubt what I can do. Does that mean that I can do everything? No. When doubt appears, I'll eliminate it and I'll eliminate it fast because I'm going to figure out how to do whatever it is I'm doubting.

Yeah.

And you see, if it's me that I'm doubting, it's because I don't understand me well enough. I did a broadcast the other day, it was all over the place. We had thousands into it on self image. And we've got to get a better image of ourself. We have to get a true image of ourself, understand who we are, how our mind functions. Realize this physical instrument we're living in is nothing but an instrument. It's the instrument of the mind. And the mind expresses itself with and through this thing we call our body. Well, let's understand that better. This thing, you got enough power in your one hand to light up that building. You're in for probably a month.

Wow.

There's about 11 million kilowatt hours per pound, potential energy locked up in the electrons and the atoms of the body. Well, that's the invisible power that's in me. I want to understand that better. That's the physical side. What's the higher side? Higher side is my intellectual side, and that is the intellectual factors that I run through earlier. Perception, will, reason, imagination, memory and intuition. There's six of them. And as I understand those. More as I understand my intellectual factors, I'm using the things and I'm utilizing and developing the things that separate me from all the rest of the animal kingdom of which I'm a part. Then I can tap into the spiritual essence of who I am. Because we're spiritual beings, and that's where the greatness lies.

Mm.

It lies in understanding the spiritual essence of who we are. You see, our spiritual DNA is perfect. It requires no improvement. It requires no modification. Our spiritual essence is perfect, and that perfection is within us. So the trick is figuring out how to express it in a greater way.

Yeah.

And not get trapped into a different type of expression through bad news or friends or parents beliefs or whatever it is that tries to shut us down.

Correct, Exactly. And they will try and shut us down because we're coming up and we're saying, I'm going to do this. They'll say, you got to be out of your mind. You're going to quit that. Good job. Are you crazy? We got to be strong enough to say, I'm going to follow my dream.

Amen to that. I'm a big believer.

Martin Luther King. I have a dream. He didn't say, I have a plan. He didn't say, I have a bank account. He didn't say, you know, I have a dream. I have an image in my mind. I have a beautiful picture that I want to execute in my life.

Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. The body really rewards you in terms of if you wait or if you don't eat right before bed, is it going be to to sleep better, sleep deeper, be cooler, and therefore help you have more energy the next day if you don't eat before bed.

Yeah, and this is, at least for me, been most easy to exhibit, and I think many of my patients would agree during periods of fasting. So fasting is kind of a funky state because you're altering so many other things in the physiology. But one of the things that happens, especially by about the second day of a water only fast is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a state that is totally absent food. And it's very interesting because you're competing with two forces. One that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper. The one that's keeping you awake is cortisol. You have more of it, you have more stress hormones when you're fasting. Because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint that would have been going on, right? Fasting would trigger a signal that says, go get more food.

Right?

Be alert, be focused, be alert, go get food.

Like we don't want to die. And so that's kind of keeping you awake. But the flip side of that is the total absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep and your body temperature is really going down because your body's turning down its metabolism. So I actually find fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature, rising heart rate variability, falling heart rate, all of these really valuable things. But a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to shorter sleep times. But I still feel quite, you know, rejuvenated by sleep.

Wow. Okay. I want to stay on sleep for a second. I know you got the fourth one, which I want to close that loop. But do we, does that hurt us if we nap throughout the day or take a power nap for 20 to 40 minutes? Does that help our bodies recover more even if we're doing the seven or eight hours of sleep? Or does that not matter?

You know, it depends. I would say naps are not a bad idea, provided they don't reduce your drive to sleep later. So I just got back from like a hunting trip last month where just based, I mean, first of all, it was exhausting, right? You're sort of hiking 10 or 11 miles a day on vertical walls. Balls, you know, carrying a 50 pound pack. It's, it's all the stuff that is physiologically as taxing as it gets at altitude, right? So, but there was no way you could go to bed like any earlier than 11 and you had to be up by 4:30. Really well, just because, you know, you have the most. The two times when you're going to have the best opportunity to go and stalk the animal is in the evening and in the morning. So those are the times. So there was no way I was going to survive a week of that if I didn't carve out an hour and A half to two hours in the day to sleep. And I'm normally not a napper, but I made it a priority above anything else, including practicing with my bow and arrow in the middle of the day, which I would normally want to do. Nothing was a higher priority than getting that nap in during the day because I was deficient at night. And getting that nap in the day didn't rob me of the ability to sleep at night. Right.

You still were passing out, right, when you got in your pillow?

Absolutely. Now, let's say we talk about a person who is getting seven and a half or eight hours of quality sleep at night. Is there any downside to a 20 minute power nap? I would say no, but if going any longer than that, I would be mindful of it. Because sleep comes down to balancing basically three things. The first is cortisol. So the stress hormone cortisol must decline in the evening for you to be able to sleep. The second thing is you have to accumulate something called adenosine. So adenosine is kind of like this metabolic breakdown product that corresponds to how much work we do, physical work, cognitive work. So more adenosine makes us more tired. That's how caffeine works. By the way. Caffeine blocks the adenosine receptor, so it functionally makes you think you have less adenosine. And napping reduces adenosine. So you want to make sure you don't reduce it too much. The third is melatonin, by the way, which has to go up. So good sleep is when melatonin and adenosine go up and cortisol comes down. So I guess to close that out, I would say if you are sleeping so short during the middle of the day, and this is what I was thinking about on my trip, you want to try to replicate a full sleep cycle in your nap, which is about 90 minutes. So that's why I really said, look, I'm going to set aside two hours to take a nap in the middle of the day to give me one full sleep cycle, because I'm clearly being deprived of one during the nighttime.

And is there such a thing as too much sleep? If you're getting 10, 12, 14 hours of sleep every day consistently, does that affect the body in a negative way?

Really an interesting question, by the way, and quite a controversial question in the sleep literature. So there is no question that hypersleep has been associated with poor outcomes. So there's a inverse, a U shaped curve of mortality with sleep. Right. So people who don't get much sleep have A higher mortality, and it's really more of a J curve. Right. So they kind of. As you get more and more sleep, the mortality comes down, down, down, but then it does sort of uptick. So you get these people who are sleeping a lot, and they're actually having worse outcomes than the people that are in the seven and a half to nine range. Historically, that has been explained by the fact that people who are sleeping a lot are usually sick, and that's why they're sleeping a lot. So we're not. We're missing. We got the arrow of causation wrong. We're saying, you know, are they sick because they're sleeping too much, or are they sleeping too much because they're sick?

Right.

Well, I think that the majority of the hypersleepers are hypersleepers because they're. Because they are sick. There is actually some emerging evidence to suggest that absent that there might be a downside and too much sleep. But again, I think for most people, most of us are on the other end of that spectrum, which is we're constantly battling the need to get enough, and that's either through our kids, our work, our stress, our electronics, our food, our alcohol, all the above, our travel.

And is it a negative if you're a kid and you're eating a lot of junk food? You're not sleep, you're staying up late because you're, whatever, playing video games all night, but you've got all this energy all day and you're active? Is there a negative for in your early ages, teens, early 20s, through lacking sleep, eating poorly, or is there a way to recover in your 20s from the damage you've done in your before 20?

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, certainly you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side, and you can talk about it through the physiologic lens. The good news is, before the age of 20 or 30, we are pretty remarkably resilient. I mean, you're an athlete, so you can relate. How old are you now, Louis? You're near 37.

37.

So you might not have fully appreciated. I'm 47, so I'm a full decade older than you. And when I think about 17 to 27, to 37, to 47, I can really talk about those decades through the lens of resilience. Like, at 17, you could shoot me, and I think I'd still get up the next day. Like, you just couldn't. Right. You're Superman. Yeah, you're absolutely Superman. And I don't know, I feel like the first observation of not being Superman for me kind of kicked in about 42ish about five years ago was the first time I was like, oh, so this is what people talk about, right? Like you can't just go out and crush it every minute of every day. And I think that's just one lens, which is through the lens of exercise. But the same is true of physiology. Right? Or I'll give you another example. Many of my patients have observed this. I've observed this. I was never a big drinker in college, but certainly there were enough occasions in med school or college where I'd go out and drink far more than anyone should. And yet somehow the next day I could get up at six in the morning and go and do whatever I need to do. I remember one night actually being out drinking until 3 in the morning. I mean, having so much to drink, it was ridiculous. And somehow getting up at 6 in that morning to do a 100 mile bike ride.

Oh my gosh, man.

Probably probably still partially drunk and, but felt fine by about like two hours into the ride today. If I had three glasses of wine, like the headache I'm going to have the next day is going to last me till the middle of the day.

Is that because your body was able to assimilate the glucose into the muscles and it used it for its, to its advantage then and now it's like it takes over.

It's a very good question. I really, I mean I could, I could sort of, you know, speculate on what it is, but I, I just think there's an over. So there's this thing called homeostasis, right. Which is one of the hallmarks of youth and it's one of the hallmarks of aging. And you know, it's, it's the ability to, or it's, it's our lack of homeostasis. We lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of optimal performance. So everything about the human body is very particular. For example, take ph, which is the amount of acidity in our body. We're so highly regulated. Like our body really needs to be at a ph of 7.4. So 7 would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you. And this is a scale that goes from 0 to 14 to put that in perspective. Okay. So tiny perturbations will kill you. How good is our body at staying in that amazing temperature? Right. You go much below about 94, you're dead. You go much above about 104 you're dead. How good are we at staying in that range? Oh, I mean good. I mean we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band. So this homeostasis thing is amazing. It gets weaker and weaker as we get older and so your ability to tolerate bad food, bad sleep, sedentary behavior, more stress, all those things, it just gets weaker and weaker and weaker and I think it declines non linearly. So again what you experience is a decline between 30 and 40. Eh, it's bad. 40 to 50? Yeah, that's worse. 50 to 60, you can fall off a cliff.

Is there a way to reverse this?

I don't think we know. I think you can definitely slow the progression of it. And you know what, I would say you probably can reverse it. Right. So just as you can clearly reverse diabetes, Diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem and it's clearly reversible. So there are probably some variants of this that are harder to reverse than others. But. But no, I think we can reverse this process. But it gets harder. It gets harder as time goes on and it gets harder the further you are into sort of the physiologic trap.

What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of not maybe a cliff but a dip over the last five years for yourself, how are you thinking about it?

Well, I sort of had a change of heart five years ago, so actually six years ago, 2014. So I sort of hung up my bike, which at that point I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport. But at that point a couple of things had happened. So one, I had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training, which again is a rich man's problem.

Ultra marathons, ultra biking, ultra swimming, hiking.

That's right, that's right. So again there. And it's the same sort of curve, right where as exercise, dose of exercise goes up, mortality comes down. But it has this little bit of a J where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise, especially over the age of 40, you're actually driving an increase in mortality now.

Really?

Yes.

Does that mean like running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week?

Yeah, great, great point. Running a marathon once a year probably not increasing your mortality at all. But you know, running 40, 50 miles a week probably is, especially at that age. Now again, this gets to your point about resilience. Someone in their 20s doing that doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality. It really only seems to be an issue if you continue. In fact, I did an interview with a cardiologist, James o', Keefe, on my podcast who is the world's expert on this. And it was actually James's work six years ago because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago. We became friends. It's one of those things, I'm sure you've experienced this where you hear something and you don't want it to be true. So you basically come up with all the reasons, you're gonna poke holes in it until you find the, you find.

The evidence the other way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive. So that's one piece of the change six years ago.

The second piece, it's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday.

That's all right though, you'll be fine. I just think don't do one a month. And then I think the second thing was I realized it was sort of funny, but I realized my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about what was I doing this in service of. And not that I knew needed anyone other than myself to do these things because I'm very self motivated. So I don't like. But just as a joke, one day I asked my wife, I said, hey, do you know what my PR is for 20k?

Bike run or swim?

Yeah, bike on a 20k bike on the time trial. And I was like, this is my wife, she hears me talk about this stuff all the time. I have spreadsheets and models and data and I analyze my power data every single day. And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego. Like I'm really so switched on to this. She'll probably get it within a minute. She'll guess what my PR is. Within a minute she was off by 20 minutes, meaning she wasn't even in the zip code. So I was like, huh, that's funny. Like it's like literally the most important person in my life couldn't care less about this. And what I realized was, you know, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity. So what does it mean to be a kick ass 100 year old? And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction, called the Centenarian Olympics. So how do you train to kick ass at 100, should you get there? And of course everywhere along the way. So that now dominates my landscape of Training, which means I don't, you know, care about how fast I can, you know, ride a 40 kilometer time trial because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do.

What is your mindset going into a 40 mile bike then or, or some type of experience? Is it more the joy of it?

So, so I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't train. No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars. So the pillars being stability strength, mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance. And so each of those then has a super layer detail approach. And I still ride my bike four hours a week, so it's a fraction of what I used to do. And it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training.

What was the fourth one?

Stability strength, mitochondria and mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency. And then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance.

So you focus on those four metrics now on a day to day basis?

Yeah, yeah, those, those four pillars sort of make up the training program which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to define for themselves, which is because you will have a different, you know, set of variables for me potentially. But you know, my Centenarian Olympics has, you know, 18 events in it. You know, like I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool that, you know, where there's a one foot gap between the water and the curb, like lift myself up. I want to be able to hop over a three foot fence. I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour. I want to be able to carry two 10 pound bags up four flights of stairs. I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid. I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands so I could rattle off all of my 18 things. And you would say, Peter, those seem really, really easy. And you'd be right as a 37 year old stud. But the point is as a lot.

Of them aren't easy.

Most 60 year olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it. And I have yet to meet but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can. And so that's the aspiration, is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s. How do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s, in your 50s and in your 40s, and it's actually very hard.

And as I'm getting into, you know, I'm three years away from 40. What should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're, you know, I'm healthy, I feel good, you know, maybe have some aches and pains here and there when I'm training hard or something, but for the most part I feel amazing. What should I be thinking about moving forward so that I continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things?

So I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean. And it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this. I've obviously made a very conscious choice that I don't go to swim meets, I don't go to bike races, I don't train for those things anymore. And a big part of that is just time. There are only 168 hours in a week. And you know, I have a very clear set of priorities and I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise, which by many people's standards is still quite a lot. But probably by the standards that you exercise, and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise, I've never exercised so little in my life. So I have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes. And that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that. In your case, I think it comes down to saying, okay, how much time do you want to devote to the long game? How much time do you want to devote to the short game? Another way to think about this would be investing. If you're looking at an investment portfolio, you might say, how much do I want to put both time and money? So the actual capital I set aside, but also the amount of time I spend deliberating over it into my retirement account versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short term gains, for money that I'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today. You could have totally different strategies for that and that's totally fine. So I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long term permanent capital. And so that's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that? And it might be that you say, Peter, at 37, I just want to focus on running a marathon. I've always wanted to do an ironman. So I'm going to go and do that and I want to climb Mount Everest. And that's going to require like, you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things. And truthfully, I would say do them now because it's only going to get.

Harder because you're not going to be able to do it later. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I don't think you're going to want to do it later. So get those things out of the way. And then maybe when you turn 40, you say, okay, now it's time. I'm going to really focus on my centenarian Olympics when I have a better sense of what those events look like. For me personally.

These are the mindset hacks that I personally use for my life. The first one is health as a lifestyle. Now, I grew up, you know, eating a lot of crap. I mean, I'm just going to be honest. I ate a ton of sugar. I ate a ton of junk. Fried foods. You know, we'd have like eight cans of Coke or Pepsi or Sprite every single day and thought it was actually hydrating us. I just didn't know any better. I was eating pasta and chicken fingers and pizza every single day and tons of milk. I mean, I was having eight glasses of milk probably as well half the time. Growing up, I used to have a five gallon commercial metal milk dispenser in my bedroom, believe it or not. For a year I was living as a boarding student in St. Louis, Missouri at a private school. And in the dorm room, I asked them if they could put a container of refrigerated milk, a five gallon bag. We'd fill up every single week and just crush that thing every single day, just pulling it down like you're in the lunchroom. And I was always like, well, I'm just going to burn all this off. I'm healthy, I'm skinny, like nothing is affecting me. I'll be fine. Until I could hardly ever breathe. I was always out of breath. I had a stuffy nose constantly. I always had inflammation and pain in my joints and I wondered why. And it wasn't until later in my life when I discovered information about nutrition in the body and really decided that I needed to shift things. You know, I stopped playing professional football, got injured, and I gained about 35, 40 pounds and I could notice it. I was chubby in my cheeks, my face, I had marshmallow face. They called me Fluis for fat Lewis. And I started to really feel the effects. I remember one day I looked down and my underwear was rolled over. It folded over because my belly was pushing out so much that My underwear now had rolls. And I remember at that moment, I was like, I knew to shift this. Something that I thought about growing up. And the way I've been living my life around this idea of my mindset isn't working anymore. So let me find a new way to shift it. I really think about health as a lifestyle now, not as like a diet or like, I can do what I want sometimes and then change what I want another time. It's really about a lifestyle, and the health is either hurting us or helping us achieve the life we want. And everything comes down to if we're healthy or not. You know, nothing else really matters if we're sick. Think about it. If you've been on your bed for a week or on your couch for a week, you miss work, you miss school, you can't go do any activities, you can't be around your loved ones because you're sick. You're sick, you're coughing, you're in pain, you can't move. You'll do anything to get over the sickness, to get over the pain. And sometimes when we get out of the sickness, we go back into our old ways of routines, which get us back to being sick again. Needing to be on medications, needing to be having low energy throughout the day, always being behind your health is either hurting or helping your dreams. And I learned this about, I don't know, almost eight years ago, seven or eight years ago, when I really started to dive into educating myself on nutrition and lifestyle, living it like a lifestyle. It's very challenging to break a habit. You know, for 25, 27 years, I just ate sugar every single day. I mean, I would have candy bars just for lunch. I would have six candy bars and call it a meal. Snickers. It's got some protein in there, some peanut butter, right? I was just like, this thing's all good for me. And I was addicted to the sugar. And still today, it's an addiction of. I crave it all the time. But when I shift my mindset around, this is either helping or hurting me for a greater purpose in my life, for a greater vision in my life. When I shift the mindset and think of something bigger than the pleasure of right now, of having that sugar rush or sugar high or whatever it may be. And I shifted towards the mind of the future, the mind of something greater that I'm thinking about, of something I want to achieve or how I want to show up for people, or how I want to inspire people, or how I want to live a long time Pain free so that I can do the things I love. When I start to put my attention on my dreams and aspirations, then my mindset is able to push through any of the desires of wanting to have bad food because I know it will hurt me in the long run. And listen, I'm a human being, so I'll still have desserts and things that I like every now and then. But it's a conscious decision to eat more mindfully and to eat with responsibility. Now that's a word that you know, I'm not vegan, so the vegans listening may think I'm a bad person still because I'm not plant based and I'm still not a perfect human being in that regard. But it's about the mindfulness of eating what I'm eating, whether it's meat or plant based or whatever it may be. But being very intentional and mindful of where my food is from, making sure it's organic, it's grass fed, all those different things and not just abusing food, not abusing food as a crutch for something emotionally that I'm missing out on. And that's really where it comes from. It's like, is food something that's supporting to fuel my dreams and something that I can also still enjoy the richness of food and life? Or is it something to mask a pain or deeper sense of feeling not desired or not worthy or not accepted or anything else I might be missing out on? And if we're eating from a sense of lack of pain, of suffering, then that's not the right mindset to have with our, with our food, with the way we move. So for me it's hard to stay focused on this lifestyle unless I create structure. So the mindset is one thing, understanding why I'm having a healthy lifestyle, but structure is the second thing because it's hard to follow through on any of this. So I really schedule it out, you know, 6:00am workouts, I get it done first thing in the morning. It is not fun, it sucks. I don't like waking up at 5:30 and going to the gym. I went this morning and I was like, man, I'm really tired, I don't want to do this. But at the end I felt so much stronger, so much more confident, so much more capable of taking on anything else throughout the day. And the more you do this every single time you do this and follow through on an action you commit to, your mind gets stronger, your confidence grows and the belief you have in yourself and your abilities continue to Grow. So all these things play hand in hand. It's about the lifestyle. Doing things you don't want to do today to create a greater tomorrow is what I'm always focusing on. And it pays off, you know, it always pays off when you, you do those things. That's the first thing, health as a lifestyle. Second thing, personal mindset, hack for high performance. The second thing is time. Now this is something interesting. My dad, when growing up, we wouldn't celebrate birthdays. And I've told this story a bunch, but he never wore a watch, but he was always on time. He always lived with a sense of urgency and passion towards, towards the meetings he was going to, the actions he was taking. He had a sense of urgency for his life. And I think growing up, I was always amazed by this. And I would ask my dad, why don't we celebrate birthdays? And he said, I never want you to focus on your age or time as a limiting factor towards your life and your dreams. So many people focus on their age and say that they're too young to achieve what they want, or they're too young, they're not capable of being a great athlete at that age or a great musician or a great doctor at that age. Or some people go through life saying, I'm too old to try this now. My time has passed, time is gone, I can't learn this. I'm too old to pursue my dream now. And they limit themselves with the mindset, the way they think about time and their age. And I always living in urgency.

But.

I'm not focusing on my age as much. I just hit 35 and it kind of hit me where I was like, man, I'm getting closer to 40 now. I had to stop myself and stop focusing on the age or the number and focus more on just living life with urgency, no matter what urgency. At 15, at 25, 35, 55, 85, just always living with urgency, not saying, well, I have got all the time in the world. You might have a lot of time. You might be around for another 50, 70, 100 years. You might or might be all over today. And I think about my last moment. If I got to reflect before I knew I was going to pass away on my last moments and ask myself the question, did you at least go for everything you wanted to go for? Did you at least attempt it and give your best effort towards everything that you wanted to try and explore during this lifetime? If I can answer that question in a positive manner, then I feel like I lived a life of something Meaningful and rewarding and something that I could be proud of personally. Now, I may never achieve certain things that I set out to achieve, but as long as I know that I went for it and I pursued it like I've been on the pursuit of playing in the Olympics for the last seven, eight years now. We still haven't qualified as a USA national handball team, but I've been giving an incredible effort, right?

And.

And I may never make it. I may, maybe I won't. And as long as I know that I gave my full efforts and I went as long as I could and I still had passion for it, and I still went for it and I still cared about it, or I stop when I don't care anymore, then at least I know I gave it an incredible effort and I can be at peace within myself. Understanding that sense of time and urgency. Don't live thinking you have tons of time. Even if you might have that. Live with a sense of urgency and make the most of the time. Right now that's the second mindset hack and belief. The third one, self doubt and victim mentality. Now I mentioned at the beginning of this episode about these two Brazilian influencers that I met. This is Flavia and Bruna. They're these incredible, you know, one's a writer, one's a YouTuber that teaches kids and moms and parents how to be better parents and how to raise their kids with a, with a better mentality. And I met with both of them yesterday and they mentioned how they're both from Brazil and they mentioned how there's this, this kind of victim and self doubt mentality that they notice in kind of like just the general aura of Brazil. Now it doesn't mean every Brazilian has that mentality. They were just saying how that's kind of like the overall feeling within the media and people you talk to and things like that. That's kind of the overall feeling. Whereas in America it's more about going for your dreams and believing yourself and all those things. And one of the things, the mindset hack, you know, my parents always believed in having self worth, you know, having that self worth. And the more self worth you have or create for yourself, the more you believe that you are deserving of having financial abundance, that you're deserving of having the relationship of your dreams, deserving of having the career you want.

Thank you.

Things like that. Whereas some people just, I'll hear, will say, well, I don't know if I'm worthy of having the relationship that I want or I'm worthy of having that job or I'm worthy of certain things or of the health that I want. We're all worthy of whatever we choose to be worthy of. And if we continue to choose that we're not worthy, then we're going to attract unworthy things or feelings or thoughts. But when we shift our mentality to unlimited possibilities, to an abundance mindset, and say I am worthy by the actions I take, the things I follow up on, how I treat other people, by the skills I'm learning, by what I'm mastering, by the time that I put into things, when we continue to show up in certain ways, we start to develop a deeper sense of self worth. And that self worth creates an abundance mindset. An abundance mindset that you have confidence in yourself, that you can create the things you want and you can attract the things you want, the people you want in your life, the finances you want in your life, the meaningful work you want in your life, things like that. So one of the big questions is why am I here? Something we probably have all thought about at some point. Why am I here? What's the point of all this? Is this real? Am I real? Am I a mistake? Am I supposed to be here? Did my parents mean to have me or was I an accident? And I think a lot of of us, if we don't figure out what that answer is, we live in self doubt and we live in victim mentality. Honestly, who knows what the answer is? Maybe we're all just a part of some big dream, who knows what the answer is. But I believe it's our duty to interpret and create a story around what our own answer is and discover that from for ourselves. And when you can get clear on your answer for why you're here and own it and be responsible for that story, then I believe you can move through life and choose to feel, think, act in different ways. And those ways create different results for your life. So self doubt and victim mentality. There's no room for self doubt and a victim mentality. You may be feeling like I'm not ready to do something, like I'm doubting myself in this sport or this activity or on a job interview, whatever it may be. You may be doubting yourself for a few moments and saying, well, I'm going to give my best is different than just saying like I'm unworthy. You can always doubt and still give your best and go in with your best foot forward. Number matter what, you're always going to have some type of nerves or fear or Something whenever you get out of your comfort zone. And that's natural, that's okay. But never say that I'm unworthy. Never say that you're not worthy of something because you'll constantly attract things that reaffirm that feeling. You may not achieve everything because you just may not be ready for for it. Or you may not be prepared, but don't have a sense of I'm unworthy. That's huge. And when you can shift that, then you can just get out of that rut of victim mentality. The fourth thing I want to talk about is work and dreams. Now, a lot of people tell me that they ended up doing things that their parents wanted them to do, that their teachers wanted them to do. And if they didn't love it, they ended up feeling resentful, lost, stuck, and like, they spent their whole year, got into debt learning all these things, went to class for years learning all these things that they really didn't find meaningful. They may have brought them some protection, some safety, some financial security, some something else. It may have brought you something else. But I'm always thinking about working, finding meaningful work. First, find things that are meaningful work for you or work on something that brings you closer to meaningful work. Now, you may not be able to do exactly what you want based on if you're just getting out of college or if you're in high school or a certain age or whatever it may be. If you don't have the skill set of something, you may not be able to be where you want to be in your career at this moment, but you can take a step of working towards something that brings you meaningful work. You can work and master skills on those things. You can work somewhere at a job that maybe you don't like, but you're also learning something there that you know you're going to take at a certain place to the next step. And that's what the key is like focusing on, okay, I'm going to sacrifice today for a greater tomorrow. At least I'm working on something that's going to bring me more meaningful work in the future. And that's really the key. As opposed to just saying, well, I'm stuck here, I have to work here because I did a degree for four years and now this is what I've got to do for the rest of my life and I'm just going to be miserable and I just have to suck it up. No, you either choose to be happy with your work or choose that this work is a stepping stone to bring You a more meaningful experience with the work you're doing in the future. I see too many people wrapped up in the saying that, I don't like what I'm doing. I wish I was doing something different. I hate my job. I hate my work. My parents forced me to do this. My teachers told me I should do this. Don't live for what other people encourage or pressure you to do. This is your life. Live for what brings you meaningful work. Now, number five. Number five is people. Now, I see people constantly connecting with other individuals to try to gain something. And that mentality, that mindset, never works out in the long run. People always feel used, taken advantage of, and they feel like you don't have your best interest in mind. So you really want to connect to the heart, not the head. When it comes to people, whether it be in relationships, intimate, professional, family. Connect to the heart, not to the head. And don't look for something to gain. Look for something to give. A lot of people ask me, well, Louis, how did you get all these incredible people on your podcast? How do you interview all these influencers and celebrities and billionaires? How do you get them to say yes and to meet with you so you can ask them these questions? Or how do you have the relationships that you do have and just have those friendships that you have? How did you develop that? And I always give the answer. I've always made it about them and connecting to what their biggest desires are, their biggest needs are, their biggest passions are, and focused on them, not focused on what I can gain from these individuals. I think that's where a lot of people have this mentality of, like, I need to achieve results right now in my career. So I got to go meet the person and have them give me a job. I need to go meet this person and have them invest in my company. I need to go meet this person and have them promote me and market, market me on social media and share it out to their email list so I can make money. Now I get it. You have an agenda that you want to create something in your life. But if you connect with people with an agenda, they're never going to want to support you in your life. Life, you may get something really quick and then hurt the relationship forever. So you got to lead with the heart. Lead with, how can I serve you first? Lead with, how can I add value to your life, Whether it's just hanging out and not bugging people or just asking interesting questions or just being a good human being. So focus on giving, focus on service. When it comes to people, don't focus on what can I gain from this person. You know, how can I give, how can I give more? And that will go a long way. You know, Adam Grant has a book called Give and Take, where there's a whole science behind developing relationships. And you don't want to just always give, give, give, give, give, give, give, and let someone take advantage of you or abuse you or anything like that. You know, there's some give and take in all types of relationships. Focus on giving and service first. It almost always comes back around where someone wants to help me at something, it might be right away or in five years, and that mentality really pays off. And switching that mentality will go a long way. So with people, focus on giving, not what you can gain. Focus on connecting to the heart, not to the head. And find clarity in the types of people you want to surround yourself with. Just because you grew up with a certain group of people doesn't mean you need to grow up with a certain type of people. You can let those individuals go that you grew up with and grow into greater relationships for your now and for your future. Just because you were childhood friends with someone and felt like you owe someone time and energy because you spent 20 years with them, if they are not willing to change or evolve or grow or shift in certain ways and it's affecting you negatively and you've communicated with them clearly a number of times, you're not just abandoning them, but you've communicated a number of times how you'd like the relationship to grow and evolve. And if they don't want to grow with you, then you don't have to be forced to constantly hang out with that same person every Saturday after afternoon for six hours and doing things you don't want to do, you can grow into a different person with different people around you. And that's okay. The last thing that I'll talk about from my personal mindset hack for higher performance is around money. Money seems to be something that a lot of people struggle with. It's something I struggle with my entire life because I grew up without money. We grew up on the lower spectrum of the finance finances in our neighborhood and in America, we were on the lower end, right? We still had a home and had, you know, food and clothes and all these things. It wasn't like we were poor, but we didn't have an abundance of money. And there was definitely this feeling of scarcity and we weren't living with much. It was very much a month to month type of feeling growing up. And so I was. I always had this fear around money, like I was always going to be broke or I was never going to have enough. And that mentality is hard to get out of. I get it. If you're in that mentality right now, I definitely feel for you because it is one of the scariest things to feel like, how am I going to pay my bills this month or next month, or I don't know what's going to happen in the next few months. No one wants to feel homeless. No one wants to feel like they can't earn a living and pay for the things to get people by. So I get it and I feel for that because 10 years ago, that's how I was feeling. And something I started to shift around. You know, one of my mentors, Chris Hawker, said, money will come to you when you're ready for it. And I remember thinking at the time, man, I'm really ready for money to come to me right now. Like, I could use this money right now. So I'm ready for it. Come on, money. And it wasn't until later when it made sense, because I wasn't ready to manage money. I wasn't ready to take it on emotionally. If I'd gotten a big check or something, I would have probably blown it in the wrong ways. And you see that sometimes with lottery winners, right? Almost 95% or more blow $100 million and commit suicides or have some type of deaths within a few years after afterwards. And if we're not ready to manage it, or if we don't learn quickly how to manage it, then that money is probably going to consume us because our mindset is not ready for that amount of wealth to be patiently aggressive, you know, patiently aggressive. It's so tough to do because you want your money to double now. Exactly. It might take 10 years.

Yeah.

But if you are willing to do the 10 years, it may double 40 times, it may double 30 times.