The HIGH ACHIEVER Habits You Must Copy To GUARANTEE SUCCESS! | Jason Feifer & Lewis Howes

You don't have to set down one path and then follow it the whole way. You just need to give yourself some momentum and then keep yourself open to the possibility that you're going to have.

To, I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes.

What have you learned in the last couple of years that the top entrepreneurs are doing extremely well, whereas others are not doing that well?

Yeah. So, first of all, great to be here with you.

Good to see you, man.

I found that the pandemic, for as terrible as it was for so many reasons, it was also really instructive because it forced everybody to change in the same way at the same time. And you got to see what happens. It was a controlled experiment. And I watched some people reinvent themselves, reinvent their businesses. find things that were transformative for them that they hadn't even been considering before this. And then I found other people who couldn't do that and who felt lost. And I wonder, what is the distinction between the two? How do some people move forward? And this isn't just about entrepreneurs, right? Because to me, I define, look, I run entrepreneur magazine, but I don't define the word entrepreneur as like a specific kind of career or a business person, to me an entrepreneur is someone who makes things happen for themselves. So that's what I'm talking about. So for anybody who identifies with that, use the word entrepreneur.

That could be your career, building a business, side hustle, anything.

Exactly. If you wake up and you have a vision and then you carve your way through a mountain towards it, to me you're an entrepreneur. You don't have to own a business to do that. I realized, you know, it's so interesting, you track people through moments of change. I found that people go through change in four phases. Everybody, panic, adaptation, new normal, wouldn't go back. Wouldn't go back that moment where you say, I have something so new and valuable that I wouldn't want to go back to a time before I had it. Everybody goes through all those four phases. Everybody has wouldn't go back. to look forward to. The question is, how fast can you move through them? That's the distinction. I watch people move through them fast, not get stuck at panic. I watch people get stuck at panic for a long, long time.

Yeah, and panic is like resistance too. It's like, I'm panicking, I don't want to change. We saw this, what, 10 years ago as a social media wave started to come in. You know, there were a few, I guess, ambassadors of social media out in the world saying, like, this is the new wave. And so many of the older businesses were like, now we're resisting, we're resisting, we don't want this. we don't want to adapt to this new way of being. Now it's like every business has to be in social media, right? And there's always going to be a different wave that comes probably every decade of something. But the ones that embraced it, you see them thriving. The ones that panicked and resisted it and did not adapt, they suffered. They struggled during that phase of automatic change. Life was changing with or without them.

And panic is so natural. Don't be afraid of the panic. It's gonna happen. It's very natural. I think what I find is that the reason why change is scary to people is because people equate change with loss. They see something new come along and they immediately identify something that they're comfortable with that they're not gonna have access to anymore. It feels scary.

You've lost something.

And then because what do we wanna know more than anything else? We wanna know the future. We wanna know what's coming.

We want certainty.

We want certainty. And so we take the information that we have and then we build out from it. Which means that if change comes and you equate it to loss, you're gonna extrapolate the loss. You're gonna say, because I lost this, I'm gonna lose that. Because, right, like something new is happening in my job and as a result, I can't do the thing in the way that I used to do it. And because I can't do that, then I'm also not gonna be able to help my team in this way. And because I can't help my team in this way, possibly I don't have a job next. And because I don't have a job next, maybe I'm gonna have to leave this industry and now I got nothing. That's how fast it goes. And the problem is that in reality, change leads to gain. Loss to, but also gain. And I don't think that people see the gain enough. I don't think they even try to see it. And as a result, we get so caught up on loss that we don't allow ourselves to try to pursue the game, to identify what it is, to try to extrapolate that gain, to say, you know what? I think that this could lead to this opportunity. Why don't I shift Why don't I learn this new thing? Why don't I be the person that people turn to in this moment? Because they feel lost too. Yeah.

I think it's the identity that we tie ourselves to, to our current situation or what we've been for so long. It's losing the identity.

Yeah.

There's gonna be something new. I have to develop some new skill or let go of this old identity and step into some new identity. That is scary.

It's totally true.

Unless you are excited about that and you get used to doing it frequently, it's scary.

Or unless you create an identity that is so grounded that individual moments of change cannot alter it. So I'll give you an example. I started my career as a community newspaper reporter. That was my job. I graduated college, I worked at the Gardner News, circulation like 6,000, and this was 2002, I don't know what it is now. It's North Central Massachusetts covering nothing. Nothing was happening, right?

What did the neighbor do today in their lawn?

Yes, exactly. I literally did a whole series about all the diners in town. Because there's nothing happening. And it was, in many ways, it was a little soul-crushing because it wasn't what I wanted to do. I had these aspirations for bigger things. I wasn't there and I was frustrated. But also, I love being a newspaper reporter. I mean, this is to go to your point about identity. I thought, I'm a newspaper reporter. If you came up to me at a party and you said, what do you do? I'm a newspaper reporter. And I loved it. It was my identity.

Your identity tied to that.

It was exactly that. And then a couple of years in, I discovered something. Being a newspaper reporter is a very unstable job.

It's a scary industry.

And so I thought, well, maybe I should leave. Maybe I should do something else. But one of the things that held me back and kept me in these jobs longer than I really should have been, because I wasn't that happy, I wasn't making that much money, it was working crappy hours, was because my identity was, I'm a newspaper reporter.

Interesting.

And this is what you're talking about, where you feel like this change is challenging your identity because, man, if I'm a newspaper reporter but I'm not working at a newspaper, who am I? What am I? Who am I? Exactly. And then I did it again. Eventually I left newspapers, I went into magazines, and- Now my magazine I'm a magazine editor. I'm a magazine editor. And I did the whole thing again. And there have been plenty of times during my run, I mean, I still am in magazines, but where I thought, you know, maybe I should leave. Maybe there's something else for me. But one of the things that always held me back was being afraid of some kind of new reinvention. What am I, if not this thing that I've always thought about? So when I got to entrepreneur, I started talking to entrepreneurs. and discovering that they have a totally different way of thinking about this.

How do they think?

Okay, tell you a story. During the pandemic, I was talking to this guy, Greg Fleishman. He's the CEO of Foodsters. Well, at the time, they were primarily making baking mixes. You find them at Whole Foods. Sarah Michelle Gellar is a co-founder. And they were, preparing for years or a year or something to launch this wholly new line of business. They were going to release ready to eat baked goods, boxes of cookies and whatever, right? And then the pandemic came along and it completely altered people's buying habits. And suddenly sales to sweet baked or sales to bags of cookies or whatever dropped and baking mixes spiked because people were stuck at home and they had nothing better to do. So now food stores who had been preparing for a long time, rethinking the business and the way that they're going to approach consumers. And they were so excited, they were like, oh my God, this is not the time for that anymore. And they had to make this change. They decided to scrap this new line of business and go back to the old one. And I asked Greg, was that a bummer? And he said, no, because it goes back to why this is what he said to me. He said, It goes back to why you start a business in the first place. And our goal, our mission, is to bring joy to people with sweet baked goods. That's what it's all about. Bring joy to people with sweet baked goods. And he just casually tosses this off, but I thought to myself, you know, something really important has happened here, which is that he has identified a mission for himself and his company that is deeper than any individual change. Bring joy to people. Doesn't have to be with baking mixes, doesn't have to be with a bag of cookies. It can be anything, right? And then I realized, you know, you could do that yourself. There's something that we all can do individually to define ourselves in a way in which we have an identity that does not change even when change comes. Wanna run through it? Yeah.

All right.

Three times we're gonna run through the same scenario. Somebody comes up to you at a party and they ask what you do. If they had come up to me at a party when I was a newspaper reporter, I would have said, well, I go out and I write stories about what's going on in the community, and then I run them in a newspaper. That's what I do. Rewind yourself. What would you have said? Like now or back, you mean back then?

However you want to play it. I mean, I'm going to give a bad example, but I try to read the room. Sure. And if I'm with a writer, then I'll say, oh, I write books. Okay. But if I'm with someone else who's, you know, an entrepreneur in a media company, I also do that as well. So I say, oh, I run a media company. Sure, okay. But I would actually lean into my vision and the mission, which is saying, you know, my mission is to inspire 100 million lives weekly to help them improve their life. So you're-- and just kind of leave it at that.

You're skipping ahead. Yes. But that's great because not only did you just-- you have that thing, but you have the thing in your head. That's a sentence that you have in your head. I could see you just repeated it like you've repeated it a million times. So somebody comes up to your party and asks what you do. The first thing that you're gonna do is you're gonna talk about your tasks. That's why the first thing you said was, oh, I write books. or I run a media company. I talk about my tasks because that's what we generally do. We identify by the product of our work. Yes. And then when our work changes, we feel lost, which is why it's not great to identify with the product of your work. So that's step one. You're gonna run it again. Somebody comes up to you at a party and they ask what you do. You can't talk about your tasks. So we've taken the answer that we had and we're gonna set it aside.

Yeah, so I'm not a writer anymore. Right, now you're gonna start a company.

Yeah. your skills.

I interview people for a living.

Sure, you're good at drawing out great information from people, right? I would have said something similar. I would have said, when I was a newspaper reporter, I would say, well, what I do is I'm really good at identifying what's important that's going on right now and then getting information from people and then distilling it in a way that's useful for others. Right. All right, that's my skills. Great, useful. What were we doing? We're kind of peeling back the onion here. We're taking the things that we generally identify about ourselves and we're taking them off the table. Third time, someone comes up to you at a party and they ask what you do. Can't talk about your tasks, can't talk about your skills. At this point, what do you have? Well, my argument is that what you have, and this is what I found when I started to do this for myself, what you have now is basically the thing that is so core inside of you that it drove you to develop the skills that enabled you to do the tasks. And what is that? It should be a sentence. It should be really short. It should be something that doesn't leave itself open to change.

So it's like the person you were talking about, we bring joy to people.

Bring joy to people. I'll tell you what mine is. It's not I'm a newspaper reporter or magazine editor or whatever it is. I tell stories in my own voice. Two important components to that. I tell stories, not newspaper stories, not magazine stories, not podcast stories, not books. I tell stories. That means that if one day, one of those is ripped from me, if after our conversation right now, I check my email and it turns out that Entrepreneur Magazine has decided they hate me and they're gonna fire me, which I hope doesn't happen.

You can still tell stories about your own voice.

I can still tell stories in my own voice. You have it taken that away.

On your own, at another place, yeah.

Exactly, and then in my own voice, I'm setting the terms. I am no longer gonna walk into a situation where somebody just tells me what they need me to do and then I go do it. I do things on my own terms now. That's what's important. And I think everybody, if you can identify yourself down to a single sentence like that, you have it, right? You have it. And I am sure that that sentence, whenever you came up with that, has helped guide everything that you're doing. Everything that you're doing.

It makes all my decisions.

Yeah, it makes all your decisions.

Is this supporting this vision, is this supporting me, the mission of helping impact 100 million lives weekly?

And so here it is. When change comes, how can you not feel like your identity is shaken? The answer is make sure that you have an identity that is not subject to change.

That's why I love this because I've been talking about this for years that, you know, I'm a messenger, but the mechanism is going to evolve, right? It's audio podcast 10 years ago when I started. Then we're like, oh, let's use YouTube. Maybe we can reach more people as a part of our mission. of reaching 100 million lives. So let's drive video as well. And then we just launched greatness.com because we're like, well there's a moraudience here too. So there's different mechanisms that I'm not tied to, but it's how are we being in service to human beings on these different mediums to impact and improve their lives. And I keep doing that. If it's the metaverse in five years, okay, I'm digital or whatever it is.

You know, it's like, okay, we're just leaning into a new mechanism to be of service.

And you don't know how it's gonna.

Pay off, but you're doing it anyway.

Doing it anyway. Investing now for the future.

That's exactly right. Which is the most important part, right? I think oftentimes people feel like they have to know what the payoff is going to be before they start doing it. And that means that you're never going to do it because you can't know the payoff.

It's so interesting because I had this guy on recently, his name's Alex Hormozi, and he put a post up on social media last week talking about how most people that want to be entrepreneurs, I'm paraphrasing, most people that want to be entrepreneurs, give up so quickly because they don't make money right away. Something like that. They're not willing to wait 12 months to make money. They start working.

12 months is early too.

Exactly. And I was telling one of our producers on our team the other week who's a big fan of this guy, said, you see this? And you see a year ago we launched our Spanish YouTube channel. And I told him, I go, this is not gonna pay off right away. We don't have a Spanish audience. This is a brand new channel. Zero subscribers, we're voiceover dubbing this content. We're spending a lot of money doing it to invest in this, but we're doing it to be in service to a greater audience. And in a year, hopefully it starts picking up some traction. And now a year later, it's getting over 5 million views a month. It's 300,000 plus subscribers, and it's just because we're being consistent by doing these actions, not knowing what the payoff would be. and, and sometimes there may not be a payoff. You may not make money with that. You may not. Just like this company we're talking about that invested for a year to build this new shipping goods, you know, cookies or whatever.

Yeah.

And they're like, well, all that research and development and time and energy trying to launch this thing, we're actually not going to do it anymore. You know, you don't know if it's going to be the biggest thing ever or, or not. And I think that's one of the attributes of being an entrepreneur is being willing to have this risk. to lean into something and then say, we're not going to do this.

Yeah.

And pull out if it doesn't make sense.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And what you need to be doing when you're doing those things is you need to make sure that you just understand what the potential value is, right? So that you're doing something not necessarily because you know what the specific return on investment is going to be. You can't know that. But does it play some role in your ecosystem? Does it have some purpose? I had a really interesting conversation with this guy, Jim McKelvey. So Jim is a co-founder of Square. Anybody will know Square from the Square Reader, right? You swipe a credit card basically through somebody's phone or iPad, and that's how you buy something at a farmer's market. That was a revolutionary piece of technology. Amazing. Because when that came out, it enabled small businesses to take credit cards that had never been able to before. They just had cash before. That was it. And that wasn't just because they only wanted cash. It was because it was literally too complicated and expensive to take a credit card. And then the Square Reader came out. And you and I, as consumers, go out and say, this is amazing. The person at the farmer's market who's selling us an apple says, this is fantastic. Competitors said, oh, I can knock that off. And so they tried to, and they generally didn't succeed. And the reason Jim said was because to them, the innovation was the hardware. But really, it was these 14 other things that they had done in their innovation stack. Square had renegotiated deals with credit card processors and they've done all of these things. And he said, the key to understanding the value of whatever you're doing is that you better understand your but really. Go back to what I just quoted him on, but really.

But really what?

But really, so people thought the innovation was the hardware, the piece.

Okay, we can go make this and knock it off.

But really, it was these 14 other things that we had done in our innovation stack. Everything that you and I and everybody does, we better understand what the but really is. It looks like I just wrote a book. But really what I'm doing is building a brand and establishing myself as an authority for all these other purposes. You have launched this thing, but really what you're doing is the Spanish language. You've launched a Spanish language YouTube channel. YouTube channel, right? But really what you've done is you've started to expose and introduce yourself to an entirely new marketplace and that can have all sorts of other reasons. The more that you understand your butt really, I mean, I would say if anybody is concerned about or confused about what it is that they're doing, why are they trying something? Why are they wrestling with something? Why are they doing the thing that maybe they haven't step back and reconsidered for a long time, sit down and write three butt releases. But really, I'm doing this. But really, it's because of that, right? I'm searching for a new job, but really what I'm doing is trying to reinvent myself as a whatever. Do you understand your butt releases? Because the more that you do, the more that you feel like you have a mission and the butt releases can change. That's the crazy thing is that you don't have to set down one path and then follow it the whole way. You just need to give yourself some momentum and then keep yourself open to the possibility that you're going to have to reinvent the answers over and over again. But because you're moving, you're learning and you're developing and you're discovering where you're actually going. Yeah.

Where do you think you're going right now?

Well, I have programmed myself over the years to do this thing that I call work your next job.

Work your next job.

Work your next job. It goes like this. In front of you, in front of me, in front of everybody listening right now watching, there are two sets of opportunities. Opportunity set A, opportunity set B. Opportunity set A is everything that's asked of you. So if you have a boss and you show up at work, that everything that that boss needs from you and is going to evaluate you on, that's opportunity set A. Opportunity set B is everything that's available to you. that nobody's asking you to do. And that could be at your job, that could be a new team that you could join, or new responsibilities, or something that you could learn. It could also be something outside your job too. It could be just something that you're interested in learning. It could be something that you wanna pursue. It could be, I like listening to podcasts, maybe I should launch one of my own, whatever the case is. That's opportunity set B. My argument to you, opportunity set B is always more important, infinitely more important. And the reason for that, is not because opportunity set A is unimportant. It's not. Opportunity set A, if you don't take it seriously, you're gonna get fired and you're gonna lose your income. But opportunity set B is where growth actually happens. If you only focus on opportunity set A, you are only focused, if you only focus on opportunity set A, you are only qualified to do the thing that you're already doing.

You're not setting yourself up for growth in the future.

And opportunity set B does that. Which is why everything that I do Throughout my career, this isn't just, I mean, look, I love being an entrepreneur magazine, but I started doing this very early on where I always thought, here's what is my opportunity that I got to do good at my job and where that growth is going to come from, but what else can I do? What else can I learn? How else can I grow? I don't know how it's going to be useful, but I'm going to do it. And what I found throughout my career is that by doing one thing, Years later, it pays off in a way that I couldn't have anticipated. I have this job because of opportunities at B. I think, look, you can only be additive to yourself and you should only be additive to yourself. Going into these kinds of new things can be scary for a lot of people. You put yourself in a position where you're trying something that feels totally new, you're completely foreign, and I think a lot of people stop at that moment.

Yeah, the developing of new skills every year, I think, is so important. Whether you're an entrepreneur or you have a career. If you want to grow in general, it's doing these scary things that develop skills. I'm learning Spanish right now. It's taking me a lot longer than I wish it would take me to be fluent, but I'm nowhere near that. But I was just in Mexico a week ago and I was practicing by myself and I feel like, man, I'm way farther than I was a year ago or two years ago or in high school, you know, four years of Spanish in high school. It's challenging, it's hard, it takes brain power. I've got a lot of other things on my plate. But I have a vision that I'm holding myself to in the future. I'm seeing a future vision that I want to create for my life. And that is the ability to communicate with more people and helping me of service to more people. So I think it's important for people to recognize that what are we doing right now to see, you know, to get you closer to that future vision by opportunity set B, developing new skills.

And I love how you're thinking so far ahead. You have an idea of the purpose of what you're doing. If you want to, if you want to, but people might listen to that and they say, well, that's cool to have to know what's all the way down the line, but what do I do at step one? I'll tell you what's helped me. I remember the first time I ever stepped on a stage to talk by myself to an audience. That's a scary thing.

When was this?

2015.

Seven years ago.

Yeah. I had- you- were scared. I didn't know how to do that. There were so many things I didn't know. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know if the things that I were gonna say were gonna be interesting to anybody. I didn't know how the audience would react. I didn't know how to hold myself. I'd never done any of this. And so I'm standing on the side of this stage. It was an entrepreneur event in Scottsdale, Arizona. And I was opening up for Marcus Lemonis, the guy from... Sure, the Profit. So I'm thinking to myself, is Marcus gonna hear me screw up? These people who are sitting there, are they expecting something from me? Am I gonna live up to it? I don't know. I practiced this thing in my hotel room pacing back and forth. I'd never done it in public. How does this have some purpose? And then I came to this line. And this line is, I cannot wait to do this the second time. I cannot wait to do this the second time because once you frame it like that, the whole point of what you're about to do is not whether or not you do it well. It's just to get through it.

Get it done.

It's just to get it done. Because the second time is more valuable. The first time is simply to learn so that it can inform the second time. That's it.

To have some feedback and some information on what to do better the next time.

Exactly, and once you think of everything new that you're doing as that, the purpose of it is literally just to have done it, to have learned from the experience. Well, stakes are a lot lower.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I always say that done is better than perfect. You know, just getting something done and out there for your first time is better than trying to make your first time perfect, 'cause you're always gonna wanna improve something.

Yeah.

And I used to be terrified on stage. And I went 15 years ago, I went to a public speaking class every week for a year because I couldn't stand in front of a group of five people and speak for five minutes without being nervous. And after a year of doing this, and I would film it and I would watch myself and the whole thing, I had to coach the whole thing.

Yeah.

And I eventually started to get decent, right? I wouldn't say I'm the best speaker in the world, but I got pretty decent at being on stage. Started getting paid for it and after maybe seven, eight years of getting paid and increasing my rates and getting bigger audiences, I still found myself a little bit nervous before I went on. And it wasn't until about four or five years ago I reached out to one of my coaches and I said, why am I still nervous? It was about an hour before a speech. I go, why am I still nervous? Like, what is it? I feel like I've been training, I've got a bigger brand now, all these different things, why am I nervous? He said, focusing on how you look as opposed to how you can serve. You're thinking about, are you gonna look good? Are people gonna like you? Are you gonna be funny? Are you gonna be interesting as opposed to how can you show up and deliver value to the community? And he says, once you stop thinking about yourself and you start thinking about others, the nerves are gonna go away. And the nerves are almost always gone now. When I get into a mindset of I'm here to serve, I know I'm gonna mess up. I know I'm not gonna be perfect. I'm gonna forget that joke I wanted to add that statistic to add a point, but I'm gonna be of service and be present to the best possible to this audience. And that has really been helpful for me. I'm curious for you, you've been around a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of high achievers and successful people. You've interviewed a lot of them. What would you say are the main attributes of those high achievers that help them achieve success year after year consistently?

I think that the most successful people are willing to reconsider the impossible. This is something most people are forced into, and we all have to do it. I think the most successful people push themselves to do it without being forced. So let me show you what it looks like to be forced.

Pandemic.

Pandemic. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

You lose your job.

Yeah. Or business goes under or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But what was what's so interesting is that I watched these people throughout the pandemic, I watched them, so many of them, reinvent what they were doing and I reached this point, this wouldn't go back moment that I described earlier, and I wondered what is it that is enabling that? And I called around, best answer I got was from a guy named Brian Berkey, he's a business studies and legal ethics professor at Wharton. He said that moments of massive disruption force us to shift the window on what we're willing to take seriously. You can imagine there's a large band of options. What we do very naturally is we create a little window and we look through it. The reason we do that is very natural. It's because we can't possibly consider every option. You just can't. You don't have enough time to do that. Sure, sure. So you create a little window. What we do when we do that is we do it, we take our best guess as to what is the valuable stuff, what's the possible stuff, what's the things that are going to drive us forward. And everything outside is either too difficult, too complicated, too impossible, whatever it is, we're going to leave it outside. And then a moment of disruption comes along and it forces us to shift that window because the things that are inside of our little window don't work anymore. So we gotta look elsewhere. And what we discover is that oftentimes The greatest ideas, the greatest opportunities weren't they weren't beamed down from Mars. They were some crazy. They were just things that we had discarded. I love this story. So there's a woman named Lena. Go to wig shop in Baltimore, Lena's Wigs. She ran a storefront. And you know what storefront is? Storefront, you walk in. You walk in off the street and you can shop. And so that's how she ran her store. She had hired someone. specifically to greet people and to help them out as they walked in. And then the pandemic comes along and she cannot welcome people into her store anymore, and that's everybody helped to deal with. And so she's trying to think, well, what can I do to keep the lights on? And she realizes the answer, the only thing she can think of, is appointment only. Now, that's not a radical idea. It's something she was very aware of, but she had discarded it. It was outside the window because who wants to create friction for their customers. You don't want to make it harder for people to shop for you. And so instead, she had always run the storefront in the way that it always was, but now she had to change. So it becomes appointment only. And something amazing happens to her surprise and delight. Sales and profits increase, customer happiness increases.

Really?

Why?

Why is that? There was more attention and more focus and more dedicated time or what?

Because it turns out that you know who her customer isn't? Her customer is...

The average person walking down the street.

The average person walking down the street, nobody walks into a wig shop at random and buys a wig. People buy wigs generally because of very personal reasons. A health reason, a religious reason, those people do not want to shop for wigs with a bunch of randos who are walking in off the street. So Lena, because she had been operating a storefront the way that she thought she had to operate it, very naturally, had instead actually been spending money on a person to greet the people who were never going to buy wigs. And instead, those people were just actually creating a bad environment for the people who would buy wigs. So by getting rid of all of that, she saved money. She didn't have to hire anybody to greet these people off the street anymore. And instead now she was able to offer customized, very personal experiences for people who would love nothing more than to make an appointment, come in and shop for a wig with all these random people on the street. And so this was a moment in which Lena was reconsidering the impossible. She had taken this idea and she had put it in the impossible bucket. Appointment only, no good. But now she was forced to reconsider. So that's what it looks like when you get forced into it. My argument is you do not need to wait for some kind of crisis to push you to do that.

How can we start thinking in an innovative way when there's no crisis or no friction to start thinking out of the box? How often should we be doing that too? Is that once a month? Is that once a year? And what does the process look like to brainstorm that?

So, I think that it's worth coming up to start with maybe a couple valuable questions that you want to ask and take very, very seriously. And maybe depending on the work that you do, you could set a marker every six months, every year. I'll give you one example. There's a guy whose name is, let's see, so he's Kyle Hanslovan. And I meet so many entrepreneurs. I'm like, how can I pull this name out of my memory? So anyway, he's the founder and CEO of a digital security company called Huntress. And Kyle asks himself at the end of every year, this is an annual tradition for him, at the end of every year he asks himself, is this the end of the line for the CEO? And this isn't just a personal exercise where he's basically asking himself, am I done as CEO? Because I'm no longer the right person for this company. Anybody who's run a company, and again, I want to stress, this doesn't have to be for people who lead companies. This could be anybody doing anything. You should be taking stock of am I doing this right? Am I doing the best for myself? Am I serving myself in the best way? So for Kyle, who runs a company, he asks himself at the end of the year, am I still the right person to lead this company for what this company needs going forward? And then he answers it to everybody at the company. So he sends out an email, everybody expects it at the end of the year where he is either going to make the case for why he will remain CEO, or one day he insists to me, one day he really will make the case why it's time to step down. And I really love this because it's just a simple exercise and it's being held accountable by everybody because this is a public thing. And at this point, he's now setting up a moment in which he must step back and ask himself an important question. It doesn't have to be that question. It could be other questions. I remember at the very beginning of my career, you know, when I was at a little newspaper, I knew I wanted something bigger, but I didn't know how to get there. And I was really frustrated. And so I asked myself these three questions. Really simple. What do I need? What do I have? What's available? Because if you take that really seriously, the answers are very telling. What do I need? Well, what I need is to learn from more experienced people because I want to do better and if I could do better, I would be there. I was working at a tiny newspaper. I wanted to write for national magazines and newspapers and if I had the skills to do that, Frankly, I'd be doing it. You'd be there. I'd be there, but I'm not. I'm here. So let's be honest about that, right? Let's be honest. I have big ambitions, but I don't have the talent to match. So what do I need? I need to learn. What do I have? Well, what I have right now is access to colleagues at the same paper. They're at the same level as me. They can't really teach me that much. An editor wasn't very good, let's be honest. That's it. That's what I have. What's available? Well, let's not do what's available in like the fantasy sense, right? You know, like, I gotta go, the New York Times is gonna bang on the door or something. Right? Like, that's not gonna happen. So what's available? Well, you know, in my industry, what's available is freelancing, which is to say that instead of like getting a staff job somewhere, you can actually pitch an individual story to an editor. You know, you go out, you have an idea, you do a little research, you send them an email, and you're basically like, here's a really good idea for a story. I'm the right person to write it. And that's a low-risk way for somebody to work with you. It's one story, they're not gonna pay you that much. And if I could make that work, I would then have access to the people who could teach me things, go back to what I need. So that's what I did. I quit my job. And I sat in this bedroom in a dumpy apartment in Holden, Massachusetts, next to a graveyard, looking out upon my career, you know, in this graveyard. And I just started cold pitching. I was like, this is what I need. The only thing that's available to me is this. And so this is what I'm gonna do. And nine months later, I convinced an editor at the Washington Post to run a story in the Washington Post.

Wow. Nine months.

It took a long time. I mean, look, like you said, this doesn't happen overnight.

Yeah, what was this?

2004? Yeah, this would have been like 2003, 2004. And those questions guided me. What do I need? What do I have? What's available?

Wow, what do I need? What do I have? What's available? And what are the four parts to change again?

Panic.

Panic.

Adaptation, new normal, wouldn't go back.

Did you panic a lot during that time?

I panicked so much. Really? Oh yeah, so much. I mean, it's terrifying, right? It's terrifying and it should be. But, you know, What you need to do is look at the moment of panic and reframe it. Because there's a reason you're panicking and that's because the thing that you had access to you no longer do. But that's not to say that you can't have access to more. In fact, you should. The greater risk was staying. at a job, right?

You weren't growing, you weren't being fulfilled, you weren't achieving new skills.

I'll tell you a funny story. I'm a history buff. And I once interviewed this guy about the history of music and he told me this story. Turn of the century, the phonograph is a brand new thing. Phonograph, earliest record player. And Consider how absolutely revolutionary this technology was to people. The phonograph, record player, was the first time in human history that you could listen to music without a human being playing an instrument in front of you.

Crazy.

It's crazy, right? For all of human history until that.

It's crazy.

And so this thing comes out and people are fascinated by it, right? It's like, It's like it's like mad. People didn't believe that it was real. They thought that there was like a musician in the other room. And so, eventually people loved it and it became popular. You know who hated it? --Who? --Musicians.

--Really?

--Yeah. Because they saw themselves being replaced. --Oh wow. --Right?

They don't need me anymore to show up and perform.

--Because they got the machine, right? --Right. Because my job, if you're a musician at that time, your job is entirely to perform live. It's the only thing that you do. There's no other way. What else are you gonna do? You perform live. And now there's a machine that can do it for you. And people are scared. Musicians are scared. The leader of the resistance was this guy named John Philip Sousa. You ever heard the name? You know his music. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da against recorded music technology. He wrote this piece called the Menace of Mechanical Music in Appleton's Magazine, I think 1906. And he made all these arguments for why the phonograph was terrible. And my favorite one goes like this. He said, so if you put a phonograph in a home, there will be no reason for anybody to perform live. Why would anybody perform live music in a home? That was a form of entertainment back then, right? People would have pianos, they would sing. There's no reason why you would perform live in a home once you have a phonograph. And because there's no more live music in a home, mothers will no longer sing to their children. Because again, why would they do that when there's a machine that can do it?

They'll get lazier.

They'll get lazier, they'll just outsource it. The machine will replace everything. And then because children grow up to imitate their mothers, the children will now grow up to imitate the machines that have replaced the mothers, and thus we will raise a generation of machine babies. That was the argument, a real argument, a very smart and accomplished person making that case. And that seems ridiculous to us today, but it made sense back then because what he was doing was this thing that we were talking about earlier. He was extrapolating the loss. This thing changes and I lose this, and there, because I lost that, that's going to be lost, and then because I lost that, that's going to be lost. But what he didn't do was he didn't step back, and ask himself some very basic questions like what new thing are people doing? In this case, well, people are listening to music on a machine. What new skills or habits are we learning as a result? This is a valuable question for anybody, right? Like anything that you're going through, what are we doing? What new thing are we doing? What skills or habits are we learning as a result? In this case, well, People are learning that they can listen to music whenever they want and that they don't have to be limited to the musicians who are in front of them. Okay, possibly scary except how can this be put to good use? And once you ask that, how can this be put to good use? Well, you wonder, well, in this case, I guess I could record music and I could sell it to them. And now people could listen to my music even though I can't travel to them and possibly never will travel to them. to them because they live in some remote place and they're never going to see me live, but now they can buy my music. John Philip Sousa was in fact by arguing against recorded music, arguing against his own economic interests because he was panicking.

Right. And so you talk about panic.

Yeah, you talk about panic and it blinds you to all the opportunity ahead. And the greatest thing that we can do is recognize that there is that opportunity there and then start to seek it.

Yeah, it's kind of like when Napster came around, all the artists were like, oh, we don't want our stuff digital out there online and people can download it. But then it's like, okay, then Apple Music and Spotify created a whole new marketplace for artists to be discovered digitally, right? And to make more money and all these different things. But people resisted and panicked. I don't know when that was. It wasn't Napster, 2001 or something.

Yeah, around there. Yeah.

But they created a whole new opportunity for way people consume music.

Right, that's right. And also it also started to introduce the idea of more on-demand listening, which.

Would be- Not just radio.

No, not just radio, which leads to all sorts of other things. If you start to think entrepreneurially about some big change that's happening and saying, well, what value can I add here? People want value. They don't really care how it gets delivered to them. They just want value. So if you say, well, this is what people are doing now, here's something that I have. I bet that I could communicate to them in this new way and add some value to their lives. You better believe that they're going to start paying attention.

Right, right. We'll just say the biggest lies when it comes to achieving success.

People feel nostalgic for what came before. If you're going through a major change, if you've had some success and now you're feeling like you're going through another change, you're not sure if you can repeat that success. Right. One of the things that you do, the lie that you tell yourself, is that something about this particular circumstance, something about the thing that I was doing, something about the people that I knew, something about the breaks that went my way, these are the things that drove the success that I have now. And the thing that's going to come next isn't going to have those same ingredients. and therefore I may not have success. I think that a lot of people fear that they can't repeat their success. Very successful people, I've talked to so many extremely successful people who feel, yeah, because they built themselves into one thing. I remember I had this really interesting conversation with a super successful DJ, like LeBron James' DJ. And he was telling me that he's built this career, extremely successful, and now he's going through some changes in his career. He's getting to an age where like maybe he doesn't want to be on the road all the time and he doesn't think or worries that he's not going to be able to repeat this success again because so much of what drove this success was in fact these very special circumstances from before. And I think that this really holds us back. I felt this. I don't know if you have, but I remember I was working at Boston Magazine, and this was after the newspapers, and I got an offer to work at Men's Health in New York. It was my dream. I wanted to move to New York, and I wanted to work for national magazines. Here it was. And yet I thought to myself, I have succeeded at Boston Magazine. I have good friends here. I'm writing stories. People like me. Possibly the reason for that is because of a special circumstance here, special thing right now. I don't know if it's repeatable. And if it's not repeatable, then maybe I shouldn't take the risk. Maybe I should stick with what I have because I know that this is good. So how do we dismantle that? I'll tell you how. Start to understand how you understand yourself. I've talked to these memory researchers, and particularly this one guy, Philippe Dubois-DacqUrd. He is a memory researcher at Duke University. He told me about fading affect bias. Okay, here's a fading affect bias. Fading affect bias is the scientific term for the phenomenon in which we lose the emotions attached to bad experiences faster than we lose the emotions attached to good experiences.

Say it one more time, we lose the emotions.

So we have good experiences, we have bad experiences, we have feelings attached to both of them. Yes. Right? Later on, when we recount those, we feel the feelings of the good experiences much longer than we feel the feelings of the bad experiences.

Really?

Yes.

Interesting.

This is a natural thing that our brain does for good reason, because our memories are not designed to be a recall device. These cameras that are watching us right now, these are designed to be a recall device. The point of them is to capture in full definition, everything that happened. That's not what our brains are for. We don't remember things because we want to remember them. We remember them so that they help us move forward. That's the point. What we retain is in fact the things that can help us move into the future. And good feelings help us do that.

Really?

Bad feelings don't. And that's not to say that you haven't had a bad experience and that it doesn't come back. Of course it does. Right? And that's not to say that trauma can't completely change this. But generally speaking, our brains operate on fading affect bias, which is to say that we lose the access to those really bad emotions from those bad experiences because if we didn't do that, we would be caught in the past all the time. If every time that you thought about a really embarrassing experience from the past, you started to feel it, you started to feel anxious, that would not be useful to you. Your brain is supposed to be useful to you. It is a tool that helps you move forward. That would hold you back. So this is what we do.

That's why trauma holds people back. If it's an extreme event, you are triggered by that memory of the past and you're defensive or guarded or triggered in life if something like that comes up.

Exactly. And what we're talking about here is normal experiences.

Trauma experiences.

Trauma is a totally different thing. Right. So, okay, understand that about how you think about things, which is to say that when you think back to the past, what you have done is you have started to erase the really bad experiences. So you've forgotten them. So when you think back, you think, oh, everything that led up to my success right now was because of a series of very fortunate events. And I don't know if those fortunate events are repeatable, but you've forgotten a whole bunch of important stuff. Now, next thing, and this is crazy, When you remember something, you are not remembering it the way that a camera remembers it because what your brain does is that when you have an experience, it breaks it apart into a whole ton of little things and it stores them separately and then when you try to recall it, it tries to reassemble it. Philippe at Duke University described it to me like a paleontologist trying to put together a bunch of dinosaur bones. Right? Right? So the problem is that when you put together a whole bunch of dinosaur bones, there are a bunch of pieces missing. you got to fill in those pieces. Now the scientist does that with the best understanding of what that dinosaur was like. You know what we do? What? We imagine.

We imagine. Because we elaborate our memories probably, right? The good and the bad, right?

Because our functions of memory are very closely associated to our functions of imagination. And so we fill in the gaps with things that we imagined and we experience them as memories. And now we have a combination of very interesting things that can help us move forward in life, but also that skew our understanding of our own success. Because if you are coming from a place and you're thinking, you know, everything that came before here was fortunate. And I had a series of successes that led to this moment. And I don't know that I can repeat that. Well, I will tell you something. You've forgotten a lot of the hard stuff.

The hard work you put in.

And you have imagined some of it. Think back. I do it. That job at Boston Magazine that I was so sure I could never repeat the success of, I was a screw up at Boston Magazine. I botched the story so badly that a staff writer didn't talk to me for weeks. There was one story that I tried to edit that I had gotten taken away from me because I didn't know how to do it. I messed up so many times. But I forgot all those things because I was focused on the good things. Because I wasn't keeping myself up at night feeling that feeling of pissing off the staff writer because that doesn't help me move forward. And what we ultimately need to do is have the awareness that does help us move forward.

I love it. Who do you think is the top three most inspiring entrepreneurs in the world today?

Oh my gosh.

The people that you've studied, the people you've talked to, the people you've observed from a distance. who do you see is from an entrepreneurial standpoint, maybe their personal life is whatever, but entrepreneurially you're like, wow, they've really, you know, they take on the framework that you've got here, they're willing to take on the risks, they see the future, they take actions, they eliminate stuff if it's not working after years of work, and they keep changing and moving forward. Who are a few people that come to mind?

I'll tell you what, I, like you, have the privilege of having access to incredibly impressive people. And they tell me really interesting things that lodge into my brain. Like for example, I interviewed Ryan Reynolds and we were talking about getting into new lines of work, acting, he started this advertising agency, Aviation Gin and all that. and he told me, in order to be good at something, you have to be willing to be bad. I love that. He said that, I wrote it down, I was like, I'm gonna repeat that forever. Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author, podcaster, I asked him, how does he see what a Malcolm Gladwell project is? Because I was curious, everything just feels distinctively Malcolm Gladwell. How does he see something and say, this is for me? And he said, to the best of his ability, he tries not to to do that because, and these were the words he said, again, I wrote them down immediately. Self-conceptions are powerfully limiting. Self-conceptions are powerfully limiting. That if you have a very strict idea of yourself, then you will limit all the new options available to you. So the best that he does is try not to do that. And so, when you ask me that question, the first things that I think of are like, who are these people that everybody knows? Because those are the people that I'm going to say their name and you're going to say, Aha, I understand what they do. But I gotta tell you something. The things that almost impressed me the most are the random people you may have never heard of who make these decisions that are very high stakes and that seem crazy to other people, but that ultimately they're seeing something that others aren't, and it's driving their success. Can I tell you a quick story? Yes. All right. So, have you ever heard of a brewery called Dogfish? No. So Dogfish, there's some beer lover out there who's now very angry at you.

I don't drink alcohol, so fair enough.

So then you have a great excuse.

Dogfish.

Dogfish. Dogfish is a brewery in Delaware, and is a very successful one. In the early days of dog, so Dogfish started by this guy named Sam. Dogfish started by Sam and in the early days they make an IPA, Sam makes an IPA called 90 Minute IPA. Now just some terms for folks who may not know beer all that well, so IPA, India Pale Ale, it's a bitter, very popular style of beer. Then 90 Minute IPA, the 9 is a reference to 9% alcohol by volume, so it's a very strong beer. Right, like that's a strong. That's a yes. What's typical? Like a Budweiser, there's like a four, four and a half percent. Oh, so this is like double. Double that, right? So it's like drinking two, two and one. It's beer that puts you on the floor. Wow. Right? Yeah. So beer comes out, people like the beer, Sam's distributor says to him, Hey, good beer. Can you make a version that people can drink standing up? And Sam says, okay, smart idea. Standing up, why not? Like less alcohol. Okay, yeah. Yeah, sure, sure. Right, like, you know, Nine percent alcohol is going to put you on the floor. Can we have one that people can have a few of? And so he creates 60-minute IPA, 6% alcohol by volume. That's a nice drinkable beer. You can have a few. You're still upright. And this beer comes out. People like this beer. Then they love this beer. Then they need this beer. They have to have this beer. They want this beer.

Really?

And he is getting calls from everybody. This thing just becomes the hop beer. Everybody's talking about it. very quickly, his company becomes transformed by this beer because this beer starts rocketing up to it becomes on track to be 75 to 80% of all sales. And 75 to 80%, everything that he sells is going to be this one beer. And so Sam thinks a little differently than everybody else does in this moment. And this is why I love these kinds of stories. because, and Sam's telling me that, I mean, I heard this story, I'm walking around his brewery with him. He tells me, look, a lot of people would be excited by that, right? You got a hit product, who doesn't want a hit product? What do you do with a hit product? You try to sell a hit product, right? Sell, sell, sell, make more money. Sam sees this as a problem. He's got a hit beer, it's going to monopolize all sales of his company. That means that most of the time in which people encounter his company, they're encountering this hit product. Good in a way, but Sam knows something. Tastes change.

Maybe it's a good for three to five years, but then what? People don't like it anymore, they're onto the next thing.

And then, because they only knew him from this one style of beer, he goes from being a hot company to an old company, and that's death. And so Sam makes this decision, which is that he caps sales of his bestselling product. at 50%. So remember, this thing could be 75 to 80% of all sales of his entire company, and he caps it at 50%, which means that there are a lot of people- Meaning he has limited.

Runs or he doesn't- He's just literally.

Not making as much beer as people want. So there's a demand that keeps going.

Demand'S going through the roof.

Demand's going through the roof and he.

Is not- It's like we're sold out.

We're sold out.

You have to wait till next month. That's right.

Wow. I'm really sorry. Buy the other stuff though. Buy the other stuff. That's it. So, He says when people call him, and like Amtrak called him and wanted this beer, I'm sorry it's not available.

Right.

People are-- We wanna buy this in bulk. We wanna distribute this everywhere. We want it in our restaurant. We need it. Our customers are asking for it. He said people were screaming at him on the streets in Delaware because of this. Because you got local liquor stores and people want this beer. Sold out. And sold out. And they're pissed. And they're going to him and they're angry and they're yelling at him. And so I asked Sam, did you regret this? And he said, no. And the reason was because I understood that this was the only way to ensure the long-term success of this company. And so when people would call and they would ask for this beer and we would say it's not available, we would say, really sorry, trying to meet demand as fast as we can, which is sort of lie because we're actually limiting it. But in the meantime, why don't you try some of our other styles? And this is how Sam introduces the world to a wide range of his offerings and therefore doesn't become known as an old brand but becomes known as an innovative brand and then a few years ago sells that company for $300 million.

No way.

And you don't do that if you just stick with the hit product, right?

Or if you just make as much money as you can quickly, as opposed to innovate and say how can we make this sustainable And for that reason.

I believe the lesson here for everybody is you need to make sure that you are willing to take some short-term pain in exchange for long-term gain.

Absolutely.

You have to think of it, you have to change before you must. Don't wait for somebody else to force you to change. Don't wait for some other circumstance. to get away from you. Instead, say, I'm going to take control of this right now. I understand how my actions today are going to impact what's going to happen tomorrow. So even though it's going to hurt, I'm going to do something right now that ensures my tomorrow.

I think it's a great mindset for everyone just in personal life. And that's like, okay, I'm going to work out hard today so that my future self thanks me that I'm still in shape and I don't have a disease or or something, right? It's like, I'm gonna do the thing. I'm gonna eat well today so that in a year from now, I'm gonna have to work out harder then to lose the weight. I'm gonna invest in my company by hiring two new people today, and maybe it's more money and it's more time and I have to train them, but in six months or 12 months or two years, we're gonna see the fruits of that investment and that pain, let's say, by investing in that. Same thing with my Spanish channel. I was like, this isn't going to make any money right now and it's costing a lot. But in a year, I can see it paying off. Same thing with launching a new publication, greatness.com. When there's how many million websites? Hundreds of millions. It's like, okay, I'm going to launch this thing today. It's not going to make any money. But hopefully in a year, two years, we start to see that it is.

Expanding and serving more people. You know what it's going to do?

It's going to teach you things.

A lot. You gotta learn a lot of information.

You can't guarantee money, you can guarantee learning. Absolutely. And you're going to gain skills, because this is going back to option B.

Opportunity said B, exactly.