822 Optimism is a Superpower

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Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Lewis Howes. I am your host and we've got an incredible guest. His name is Bert Jacobs. He is the chief executive optimist of the company Life is Good. He and his brother, John, began designing and selling t-shirts in the street in in 1989 by converting an old van and sold t-shirts dorm to dorm. They found that life is good together in 1994. Their company has since become an internationally recognized lifestyle brand available in thousands of retail locations worldwide. They focus on guiding the company vision, creating inspiring content and growing a healthy business, all while helping kids overcome poverty, violence and severe medical challenges.

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You- know, the word superpower is kind of tongue in cheek. The whole idea behind Life is Good is that optimism is a choice, okay? Everybody wakes up in the morning and they can decide to focus on what's wrong with their life or what's right with their life. And whatever you choose is likely going to be what grows.

Right, exactly.

So- you- really want to pour your resources into a list of things that are wrong with your life, or a list of things that are gonna go wrong, because that's what pessimism is, right? And it's not helpful, okay? Now, rational optimism, it's not blind optimism that we're promoting. We don't ignore that there's challenges in the world, right? Everybody has challenges. We just choose to focus our energy on what's working, on what's going right, right? And we realized or came to realize through all these years of selling Life is Good t-shirts, We have a big customer base, millions and millions of people that write us letters and emails and share personal things. And we realize that that choice to be a rational optimist opens you up to a series of values that we call superpowers. So it enables you, right? Like when you're a pessimist, you've got your head down. So one of the superpowers is openness, just being open. If you're a believer in what's happening and you're focused on the good things that are happening and you're searching for the good things that are happening, you're more open, you're actually more attractive, you're more magnetic to people, right? So that's the first one, openness, right? I mentioned the sense of humor, you know? So, you know, optimism enables all of these things. Gratitude, one of the things our customers taught us that really surprised us and we didn't know, is that the people who face the most difficult challenges in the world, they're the ones who have the greatest appreciation for life. So if you and I had a sandwich today, Louis, right? It might just be a sandwich. But if you spent six months in a hospital eating through a tube, it wouldn't just be a sandwich.

It would be the best meal I ever had.

It would be the greatest thing on the earth. And the people that go through chemotherapy, and are lucky enough to come out the other side, they don't just eat sandwiches. Everything they do, you could have a barbecue in the backyard and it's the Taj Mahal to them. Every day, they notice the trees and the flowers. They value their friendships and the people that they love. It's a heightened gratitude. So gratitude is a superpower. It's a tool that we can use. So all 10 of these superpowers, We call them superpowers, but they're not like bullet speed or Herculean strength. These are accessible to anybody.

Of course.

I guess the other thing that's real important about these 10 superpowers is that they're timeless. We live in a day and age where you're expected to be on trend. You gotta be on trend and off trend on time, every time, right? That's really hard. We're not on trend all the time at all. We try and we're running a business. if the fit of t-shirts or whatever the trend for other businesses that we're in changes, we've got to follow that like anybody else. But the basis of our organization and the basis of Life is Good, the book, is that the most powerful tools a human being has to live a happy and fulfilling life existed for your great-great-great-grandparents. In fact, if they lived a happy and fulfilling life, they used these superpowers. Yes. And a cool thing is they will exist for your great-great-great-grandchildren. These are timeless devices. And it's not rocket science. I mean, my brother and I are simple people. Simplicity is a superpower. We live in a complex world. So we all have to cull down to what really matters. You know, we all have to choose what we love and choose who we love and put our limited time on this planet into that. Yeah. So that sounds simple, but it gets away from all of us.

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