The 9 BEST Habits Of RICH PEOPLE | Lewis Howes

the same way that compound interest you know accrues through finance your the effects of your habits multiply over time two out of three things i try don't work out you know but people just remember the success but i know what the failures are i got confidence out of failing each time these ones are more important than everything else we measure over 100 different habits these are the ones that move the needle if you want to be rich you've got to develop strong habits and in this video we connect with the top entrepreneurs in the world about the habits they've developed to make them wealthy [Music] so the six habits the personal habits and these are the ones that move the needle most number one high performers you like this one high performers seek clarity more often than their peers and what that means for them is every situation they go into they're seeking clarity and setting intention and it's not like once in a while they're doing way more often it's like uh you know i've been blessed to work with oprah winfrey when she has a meeting at the start of every meeting she asks what's our intention here what's the intention this meeting not what's the agenda what do i do what's the intention that's every meeting so she's seeking clarity at the beginning of every meeting that's why she's so amazing right if you think about her whole career she was always trying to have people seek clarity on who they were so they could be themselves that's what high performers are doing they just do it more often they see clarity before they shoot that video before they have the podcast interview but specifically we found three practices help you get better at seeking clarity number one they are seeking clarity in what we call the future for so you've probably heard that successful people are more future minded it's true and specifically what they're looking at if you talk to a high performer they're more clear about um who do i want to be in this upcoming situation and by the way it's not about who i am it's about who do i want to be they're more future oriented they're more intentional about who they want to be in social situations so it's like i want to have this type of interaction with lewis today that that's intentional they're more clear about what skills they need to develop to reach their next level of success right here's how you really know an underperformer open up their calendar and look for any evidence that they have planned their own curriculum for greatness if they don't have classes or courses if they if they're not actively skill building there's no chance of high performance i mean maybe they can dumb luck into it for initial success but high performance is long-term success you got to be building your skills growing constantly learning constantly growing being aware about and the last of the future for is i know the service i want to provide in the future talk to any high performers i'm sure you've interviewed they kind of know the service and the difference they want to make maybe not precisely but they're asking the question so that's some of what we know they seek clarity um and that's kind of the first practices asking questions in those areas and the other two real fast is uh when you're seeking clarity they're more clear about the feeling they want to have like an olympic sprinter who's won gold is more likely to have said before he went or she went on the track how do i want to feel out there not like just the result like when i when the foot's in the block and um arms down like what do i want to feel like they're very aware of the feeling they're trying to get yeah i don't feel nervous and stressed i want to feel calm and yes clear and smooth yes and they're they're doing that self-talk which is seeking clarity and then the last one which is really important they're they're clear about what's meaningful to them now and what might be different in the future which is something i didn't know until we did a lot of the interviews or the conversations is uh a lot of people kind of know what i like now they know what their passion is but it's like what's going to be meaningful to you later like in five years they've thought about that then you know i would say they you know they've done the work so that's just the first habit and so the book kind of opens with with that story of like finding what's we all have to decide who we are and what we want and how to get it at this stage of our life and when we don't know that you know reaching high performance can be really hard yeah it's all about clear vision for me it's the first chapter in my book is yes the greatest leaders in the world have a clear vision love that yeah that's it and they got that vision by seeking clarity yes that was the habit that gave them the vision they were consistently seeking like how do i what do i i mean they ask themselves more questions that's one of our findings they literally are doing more of the self-talk asking more of the questions which is so important yeah awesome yeah and and you i love how you talked about this you say the world cares less about your strengths and personality than about your service and meaningful contributions then why do so many of us focus on our strengths and personality yeah i think that was a huge finding and i would that's another one i would have completely freaked out on anybody strength finders all these other books out there you know it's like yes we focus on our strengths and unfortunately one that's in the history of personal development that is the greatest false dichotomy there's ever been focus on your strengths or it's like you have to do both you have to do both but what we found in our research which surprised me high performers do not report working on their strengths any more than regular people so that's not what gives them the edge uh one of the chapters opens up with this guy he wrote this email really highly successful guy and he wrote this emailed me says you know and i'd put him through all this i put him through strengthsfinder the berkman the colby the myers-briggs put them after everything this is one of my first coaching clients ever i knew everything about him we knew i was background he did all the we did all the homework had his peer review you know his 366 estimates from work and then i watched him fail for two years and he wrote me this email and he said brendan stop telling me like what successful people are like because we know my strengths i'm not getting ahead and start telling me what they do and that's what this book came out like what do you need to do because and in this email he wrote this which is where that finding came from he said this was so good listen this line he said as a leader i have to be honest with myself that my mission and vision should never be made to bow down to my limited human strengths i should have to rise up to my mission or vision the strengths aren't the relevant thing is the question is what is necessary for me to develop into to reach that mission it's like your strengths are great and it's like yes of course do your strengths but that's kind of like what i tell people is like uh if let's imagine you have a bear and that bear wants to go on top of this cliff over here and it's never been on the cliff and he wants to get that new honey up there right telling the bear to focus on the strengths to go somewhere that's never gone before and do something that's never done before is stupid it's like saying hey you know what just try being more of a bear all right if i just you say brent i got this big new vision i just say just try being more of lewis i mean it's a spiritual level that feels good but you and i both know you're going to develop far beyond your comfort zones and strengths are typically comfort zones yeah we got to overcome that and go next level and develop new skills and overcome certain fears and all these other things that are going to help us get to the next level yeah right yeah yeah the whole conversation beyond the comfort zone really requires us to go beyond our strengths it really requires that is our comfort zone that is our comfort zone we already know what we're good at and the problem with the strengthsfinder and all of the strengths-based movement is the assumption and they're all written academically this way based on what are called innate strengths and innate strength is the assumption that you had that from birth and that those innate strengths are sure what you focus on and i'm like well if you had at birth you probably had it when you were 15 years old too so if it's a nate you had it to 15. are the strengths you had at 15 sufficient to serve you at 50. hell no you need to develop beyond what's innate and go to a whole other level and so uh i take on strengths in the book in that way uh because but i also say it almost doesn't matter because a lot of people have strengths and they suck at work because they're not doing these habits well i mean how many people do you i know who are amazingly strong and they their strengths finders are amazing and they don't do anything all day that's it yeah a lot of people i mean in the sports world there's a lot of great talented people who had the greatest gifts but they still weren't able to win yeah or they were lazy or they wouldn't you know hustle or sacrifice their body because they just relied on their talents their strengths yeah and so they were never able to get to the championship game or get on the best teams because and they had all the town in the world and you're just like if i was as gifted as this person i would be incredible you know that's the whole thing about the talent code or a lot of new sort of newer research and performance it just says what's more important is what you do with what you got to develop into the vision of the mission you need to serve and so the book kind of lays out a lot of the science behind that and then goes into you know obviously most of it's oriented towards the six habits so in terms of clarity what is that habit that you take on on a daily or monthly basis with habit with clarity what do you think about you're like every morning what am i clear about or yeah you know how do you apply that habit to your life i apply in a couple ways first for me every situation i go into i'm consistently asking like what what's the feeling i want to have here have you ever see me teach it's often i always say bring the joy so i have joy triggers that i've set up in my mind that makes me more intentional about things so for example a door frame trigger whenever i walk through a door i say bring the joy so when i walk through that door right there it's like bring the joy into this room it's just it's just a mental trigger that i've set up for myself every morning in the shower i ask myself three questions and not that i shower every morning the first question i say what can i be excited about today so it forces me to be clear about what's going to draw joy enthusiasm for me number two i say what might trip me up today because usually i know what's going on today i'm like what what might mess me up what my where might i perform well what might bother me and number three i say what can i do to surprise somebody today to give a gift of appreciation or acknowledgement today and so i think through that in the morning so i think that helps me begin my day pretty clear um then when i sit down before i do work i literally look at my calendar of the day this morning and i look at whatever's going on the day and i think about it for 20 minutes it's one of my 20-minute routines in the morning i literally think about my calendar for 20 minutes a day people think that's crazy but what i'm thinking through when i'm looking to count i'm like okay i'm gonna have that call what do i want to happen on that call you know what's my intention for that call what's my goal for that call what's the feeling for that call how do i want to end that call you know i'm going to have that time with lewis like how do i want to be there and and and how can i make sure i enjoy it because it's a big deal you know i love your show i want to do a good job i want to share something good for the people even though i have no idea what you're going to ask right i want to be present for that and and make sure i i'm i'm really there even though maybe i have a head cold today you know it's like it's like just thinking through it i think that helps me it keeps me asking questions every sunday i do a life arenas assessment that just means i think there's 10 areas of our life and i score myself in them and this is about my 11th year of doing this wow so each area of my life you know from from emotional quality to happiness to relationships to time to hobby et cetera i just give myself a score of one to ten and one means i suck i i was horrible in the previous week on that 10 means i did a good job and then i asked how can i do better it's my sunday routine yeah and it just keeps me clear and it's not like i don't sometimes like everyone else you know wonder what's going on or what i'm doing but those habits those were my habits you have to establish your own for seeking clarity but when you have them you weaponize your life absolutely yeah clarity powerful thing without clarity it's hard to achieve a dream yeah it's hard to to get better it's hard to grow and be a high performer yeah no clarity no change that's it no goals no growth that's it uh the second one that i see here is energy yeah what do you mean by energy uh so in the way we peak energy high energy all day long no it's not caffeinated energy but uh uh it it's it's the habit is generate energy okay not necessarily have energy create energy create energy and what they do the way we measure that was kind of academic mental energy which is tied to your focus and your stamina and your ability to manage complex tasks without too much mental stress number two is emotional energy which is just the quality of positive emotions and number three is physical energy high performers are 40 more likely to work out five times per week than the rest of their peers so that means the top 15 percent most high performing people in the world tend to work out five days per week and that workout could be defined as you know 45 minute brisk walk or you know hit intensity or whatever it is but 40 percent more likely that's a huge finding and what we found is high performers just have better well-being and happiness and physical conditioning than everybody else one stunning finding was ceos senior executives and business owners they report expending as much energy as athletes who are competitive now i can imagine yeah yeah i kind of i was surprised by that i would thought you know athletes be ten percent more i mean the emotional and mental energy yeah the decision making the conversations the big deals the stakeness yeah it's a lot of energy it's a lot that's why i mean if you really want to achieve your dreams you have to care for your body yeah your mind it's why all these things you know finally resonating in the marketplace because the science of meditation or taking a break or you know uh managing your own energy sleep is everything yeah um and i think all of that is really important and we say generate energy because there's this myth that you know some people have happiness or they have it's like no you generate you don't have happiness you generally create it yeah you create it and so the quality of your energy you have to create like you and i both i mean if most of our audience knew our schedules your schedule the last five days was like how is lewis even able to focus right now and how are you able to get here and do this as well yeah but it's because we say well this is our mission show up man you know there's plenty of times i gotta imagine you walked on the field and you were like i'm spam exhausted you know i remember when you like flew down to compete and i still play yeah i still play with usa team handball yeah team and a year ago i i flew down to i remember i did an interview in miami and then flew out from miami and then went and just went right into training camp and then played against brazil which is like you know olympic olympic qualifiers and yeah got our assets booked but it was fun you know but i had to have clarity yeah she didn't show up even when i was like oh we're gonna lose yeah like there's zero chance yeah it was like the worst team in the nba playing like the warriors and we were just like we had no chance yeah but i had to show up and give my best and you have to set all these routine i mean you know the amount of routines that tom brady has in his life so that he can generate energy it's unbelievable stuns most people it's unbelievable and that's just that's that's what it takes if you want to take that level if you don't want to be at that level you don't have to do it yeah you don't have to do it i mean everybody can just like well i'm going to go you know hit the cinnabon but it's like it's pretty good how do you want to feel at three o'clock if you want to feel amazing at three o'clock don't end lunch with a cinnabon you know it's like gosh it's crazy like i'm 34 now and i would i could eat like sugar and bad food oh my gosh all my 20s right yeah and now when i go off of sugar for like a month and then i just binge for a day it's like i literally can't walk my back is like so sugar oh my gosh like my whole body is exhausting inflammation so much inflammation once i cut it out and then i bring it back i'm like yeah oh i feel so old yeah and uh dude i'm the same way my seminars like i you know we do four day event and it's just me i usually have one or two big names come in but it's me 12 hours a day four days and i never sit down high energy never sit down on stage and super high energy i mean really going for it not just the clapping the jumping butt really just spending heart you know how hard it is of course and uh i had to about the same time when i was 35 i had a a famous strength and conditioning coach backstage he works with me in usher and he uh he's like what do you eat back here and you know another guy came in and strapped the heart rate monitor machine he goes i'm equivalently burning uh clearly working out at the marathon level every day for four days they're like you're not i was losing on average 11 pounds every and i do eight events a year so i was losing 88 pounds a year you know it was like it's horrible for your health so i had to learn how to eat i had to learn i do ice baths every night at my events which smart no one loves to do that here's the thing i used to do it every day in football like during the season yeah and we it sucks for the first month but then you start to love it yes yeah i have to do it you know what i mean it's like you just start to ah i feel so good so i feel so good after stage you know it's like 12 hours so those are no one says i want a habit of taking an ice bath at the end of the day but if i want to be high performing on stage that's the choice yeah now obviously people listening you know consult your doctor of course yeah yeah yeah um they don't do it for 10 minutes don't stand for a half hour yeah right right so but all those things you have to so what are your habits for energy and the funny thing is you sit down with high performers they know him they can tell you i do this this this this you're like man you're on your game you got it down yeah and they're always probably looking to improve it yeah totally yeah they're always but they're very aware of it and they and they what i found was they get pissy if they're off it yeah of course i didn't meditate this morning and i was like you know i was kind of frustrated a little bit someone asked me when we were at our meeting today at the so house he was like how was your meditation because he knows i like to meditate and i was like you know i missed this morning i did yesterday but i missed this morning it's agitating when i missed one of my habits yes it's like oh i had to get up earlier and yeah that is exactly what you just said it it it just it really agitates high performers when they're off they're energetic absolutely the third big personal habit which by the way i've been teaching high performance for a decade we have the number one seminar on that and uh the number one online course and i was wrong i never knew this was the thing and you're going to laugh because like duh dude i could have sat down but i just didn't know i i knew i taught it as like subtext but i didn't always the thing and that is high performers raise necessity and what that means is they raise the necessity of performance in their mind before each performance they say i got to do great and they give themselves reasons why so they're connected to their why but it's different than just giving like know your y is nice know your y and give yourself edge for it what do you mean let me give you an example two guys walking out on the track field who's gonna win well equal quality of experience similar times maybe they've raced before the guy at the block so i'm gonna bet on is the guy who came out and said i gotta do this for my mom they have a reason to perform at heightened levels and they have connected to that over and over now again some of this duh brendan but the finding the research is they just do that more often than underperformers or even you know good performers yeah they're more connected to their reasons why and they're stirring it man it's like and they do it from two angles one angle is your your your like your internal standards like my values or my self-expectations say i gotta crush this because that's who i freaking am yeah like when you walk out you're like you're not gonna you know screw around on when you're playing handball you're like this is who i'm loose i'm an athlete yeah i'm gonna kick some ass here yeah it's that self expectation okay then though they pair it with external obligation like my team needs me to do this the deadline says this time there's some kind of external they don't call it pressure my family something bigger than themselves something bigger themselves yeah yeah and that's what that was another thing i was surprised by they don't say they they rarely use the word pressure because they want it like people who use pressure they don't want it but high performers i found they want they like they're connected i'm doing this for a bigger cause a bigger reason a team or yeah they're sometimes just like deadline like i'm i'm an unbelievably high performing writer when there's a deadline i wore a weapon right before that you know i'm not always on my game so but if you have those reasons so you gotta have your internal reasons and your external reasons and then your job is remind yourself of that more often that's what's called raising necessity and we were the first ones to prove that with the data and i was pretty stunned that remember these three aren't like my opinion you might say yeah these are whatever i'm like but these ones are more important than everything else we measure really over a hundred different habits these are the ones that move the needle so if you want to move in your personal life number one seek clarity more often number two generate energy with more consistency and will and number three raise necessity raise the stakes before you go into any performance situation [Music] one of the phrases i use i have this in the book is that habits are the compound interests of self-improvement so it's like the same way that compound interest you know accrues through finance your the effects of your habits multiply over time and so often these choices that you make these little one percent improvements for you or against you each day and they're very easy to overlook on a daily basis right like what what really is the difference between eating a burger and fries or a salad and chicken for lunch you don't really taste a lot better yeah right yeah it tastes amazing at the moment that's actually a crucial point that i cover in the book which is that habits that are immediately satisfying are more likely to be repeated and so pretty much any behavior produces multiple outcomes across time right like if you eat a doughnut right now it's tasty and it should be good but in the long run you gain weight and so the the immediate outcome is favorable the long-term outcome is unfavorable with good habits it's often the reverse right like you go to the gym right now and it takes effort you sweat you have to work hard to sacrifice your time for netflix and chill to go train the immediate outcome is unfavorable but the ultimate outcome you're in shape and in you know a year or month or whatever is favorable and so the challenge for building good habits and breaking bad ones is often finding a way to pull the long-term consequences of your bad habits into the immediate moment so you feel a little bit of the pain right now and want to avoid it and the long-term rewards of your good habits into the immediate moment so you have a reason to repeat it again in the future so is it kind of like okay i'm going to go to the gym and eat donuts at the gym so i feel good but also realize this is going to help me long term so in the book i talk about this concept i call identity based habits and essentially what you're the ultimate form of immediate gratification is the reinforcement of your desired identity so you go to the gym and you're reinforcing the identity of i'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or you show up to write and you're reinforcing the identity of i'm someone who writes every day and so you get a little bit of immediate satisfaction from being that person and being aligned with your identity your values your principles but you also get the long-term rewards from showing up every day and so what you don't want is some kind of immediate reinforcement like eating a donut at the gym where you're casting votes for two different identities right it's like i showed up at the gym i'm casting the vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts the type of person who's healthy but then i eat a doughnut so now i'm casting a vote for being an unhealthy person so right so you want you want reinforcements that align with your principles and values so you essentially have to form your identity first is that what i'm hearing so who you want to be i think that your habits are the way that you embody an identity right so like each time you uh make your bed you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized each time you go to the gym you embody the identity of someone who's fit each time you sit down to write you embody the identity of a writer so you can sort of think of it as like each behavior casts a vote for the type of person that you want to become and if you cast enough votes for that type of identity you start to believe that about yourself right like if you you go to church for 20 years you believe that you're religious you study spanish every tuesday for 30 minutes you believe that you are studious so in that way your habits provide evidence of your desired identity and i think that that is probably the ultimate reason that habits are so important it's true like habits can help you earn more money or be more productive or lose weight and all that stuff is great but in addition to the external results that habits provide they also shape your sense of self they like are the at the engine or the avenue through which you learn to believe things about yourself like sometimes people will say stuff like fake it till you make it but fake it till you make it is asking yourself to believe something without evidence for it and you can do that for a little while you could do it for day or week but eventually i mean there's a word for beliefs that don't have evidence behind a delusion right and if you're deluding yourself then eventually you give up on that but the power of doing a better habit each day or casting a little vote for that type of person is that now you have evidence to root your belief in yeah so now i've done it for six months yeah right like i mean now you have a lot of evidence that you're a podcaster or a good interviewer you know like you do this over and over again each time you cast a vote for believing that about yourself and you don't just you aren't delusionally believing that you're a good interviewer it's because you've shown up and done it hundreds of times right um and so i think that that's true for any habit large or small that they provide evidence of the desired identity or the the type of person that you are what are the five non-negotiable habits for you on a daily basis oh that's a good question so obviously this is going to depend on your goals for me specifically uh i think there are a few core habits that are going to serve everybody and certainly serve me well so exercise is a huge one um i don't do it daily but i exercise i train four times a week yeah and i feel like if i didn't exercise i don't know that i would be an entrepreneur like i don't know if i could handle the psychological rollercoaster without the physical outlet yeah the release the you probably feel that as like an athlete too you know like i for being an athlete for so many years i feel like i need to push myself physically in addition to mentally if it's just mental it doesn't do it for me i need to have a physical outlet so exercise exercise one the other the ultimate meta habit is reading because if you build a habit of reading you can solve pretty much any other problem you know you want to learn how to be a better podcaster you can read about that you want to learn how to meditate you can read about that you want to learn how to make more money you can read about that and so what you need is to develop a habit of reading and then whatever problem you're facing at the time you can you have a method for solving that okay um writing for me is huge i don't actually know what i think about something until i write about it i find that if your ideas you get it out if you ask me something right now that i haven't written about before what is really happening is i'm just talking my emotions so what i mean is that you'll ask me something and i'll get an implicit feeling about what what that topic is i'll have some intuition a gut feeling about it and i'll say whatever that feeling is driving me to say but i don't actually know if that's what i really think what i deeply think until i have the time to sit down and write it out logically go through it because a lot of the time you know if you would ask me the same question next week i might have a different feeling at that time so i'm talking different emotions so i think i actually need to to have time to sit with it a little bit and write write it through to learn what i actually think writing's third exercise reading writing um i don't know i would say that those are probably my main three uh if i was gonna pick five and the other two that i would add going for a daily walk would be a huge one that's one that like i kind of aspire to because i don't do that every day um but anytime i do it really benefits me in what ways well you see this with a lot of anybody who does creative work in particular um that something about getting outside and walking i think there's this is just me spitballing i don't actually have science by this idea but um when your body is moving it's very hard for you one to not be active mentally like if you think about someone who's shut down mentally what does their body language look like they're usually closed off their arms like they're sitting they're not moving very much try to be closed off mentally and be dancing physically it's very hard to do if your body is moving like that it's really hard for your mind to be shut down so that's one thing it kind of gets like the juices flowing the second thing and this is where i'm spitballing i don't know if this is actually true but i wonder about your non-conscious mind being like a bottleneck sometimes and so if you're if you're moving if you're walking it gives your non-conscious mind something to do so you're like it gets out of the way and now you can actually like have this stuff arise or think um in a different way than if you're sitting um so i don't know i think that those are two yeah that's cool okay so that'd be the fourth thing sleep zoo is the fifth one um and this is one that i actually am pretty good about uh so my cardinal rule is that i don't cheat myself on sleep um so if i stay up late and work till midnight uh i'm gonna sleep till later or not sleeping in yeah like i'm not gonna get up early because i don't want to cheat myself on that but um yeah i think that those are are kind of the core things it's funny sometimes people ask like oh how can i double my productivity or something like that and you'll see articles like that all the time like follow this one five minute trick to double your productivity but the real answer to most of that stuff is like get eight hours of sleep a night exercise don't eat like crap and then instantly you have this boost of productivity and motivation you have energy the fundamentals are covered 90 of it yeah exactly um you said this you said you do not rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems what are the systems you created to be successful beyond those kind of core habits right there yeah so this is a really good question i think first i just want to talk a little bit about that that point that you do not rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems what do i mean by that so often when we set about to change something or to achieve something the first step is almost always setting a goal uh and this is coming from someone like i was very goal oriented for a long time right like an asset yeah i was like goals for the things i wanted to do in sports the goals the grades i wanted in the class the goals for how much money i want to make in my business and sometimes i would achieve those but then sometimes i wouldn't and so i had this question like well clearly i'm setting goals for both so like that can't be the thing that determines it and you see this a lot that the the winners and losers in a particular domain often have the same goals like every olympian wants to win a gold medal sure every job candidate wants to get the job so if the winners and the losers have the same the same goal then the goal cannot be the thing that distinguishes the two and the thing that distinguishes them is the process the system behind the goal this is also important because achieving a goal often only changes your life for the moment it's like you know say you're um do just take like a simple example say you have a messy room you know and you set you get motivated you set the goal to clean your room well you can do that in an hour and then you have a clean room but if you don't change the sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place then you just end up with a dirty room again yeah so it's like treating a symptom without treating the cause and habits are a better solution in that case because if you fix the inputs the outputs fix themselves automatically right you don't have to fight to have a clean room if you have clean habits and i think that's true in a larger sense as well right people want outcomes they want to earn more money or lose weight or be more productive or reduce stress but the outcome is not the thing that needs to change it's the system that precedes it so give me the let's let's bust the myth of how many days it takes to set a habit because there's 14 days 28 days 60 days a year right if you do something every single day and maybe it changes for each person but what's the science or the uh the statistics say about how long it takes to form a positive or negative habit i guess so 21 days is the thing you hear all the time 30 days 100 days whatever right now 66 days is making the rounds does the latest in another book what was that book well there was one study done that found that 66 days was the average uh for how long it takes and as a rule of thumb i don't think it's terrible like you should remind yourself yeah this is going to be months of work it's not just going to be something quick but even within that study the range was quite wide so if you did something simple like drink a glass of water at lunch each day it would take like three weeks if you did something more difficult like go for a run after work every day that would be like seven or eight months but i think actually that question to begin with is sort of a there's like a broken mentality the wrong question yeah it is because if you ask that question the implicit assumption is when do i have to stop working or when is this done um and is it automatic after a certain period of time well the honest answer to how long it takes to build a new habit is forever because if you stop then it's no longer a habit it's a constant choice and a decision right i think people often look at habits as like a finish line to be crossed but it's actually a lifestyle to be lived and if you look at it as a lifestyle change then you're saying okay okay what's something small and sustainable i can stick to right what's something that can actually last over time so it is true that you can actually map this through research that a habit will become more automatic with practice but this reveals another important point which is that there's nothing about the amount of time elapsed that leads to habits being built you could practice something once in 30 days or you could practice it a thousand times what actually leads to a habit becoming automatic and becoming learned and ingrained is repetition so the phrase that i like to use is not 21 days to 30 days but put in your reps i mean that's the real thing is you need to you need to practice and if you put in your reps then your brain starts to automate how that process works yeah what makes you an expert on habits based on lots of other people that are talking about habits why are you talking about it differently and what have you discovered that's different than everyone else okay so two questions there so the first one is expertise um and i think that and i've said this many times before i'm just going through this with everybody else i consider my readers my peers in the sense that we're all just trying things out the only difference is i write about what i learn and share it each week and but we're all just learning along the way early on i had a feeling like that i was like who am i to you know i'm just a guy who am i right about this and i had a friend tell me the way you develop expertise is by writing about it every week so i wrote a new article about habits every monday and thursday for three years and that was how i developed the expertise on the topic by writing about it you did research you said here's what i found here's what i tried here's what worked what didn't work it's a combination of me reading the scientific literature and reading the research and then trying to distill practical insights from that and testing things out in my own life as a weightlifter a travel photographer a writer an entrepreneur and seeing what that looks like and then the two together i think you need both like i don't want to be some new age version of an academic who's in an ivory tower just like theorizing about ideas is different what it looks like to put ideas into practice right like imagine you're a peak performance coach and you show up to coach like an mba team these guys are like dude you need to step on the court if you know it right to see what it's actually like so you need to have both to have a firm understanding of that so you were researching and you were applying it into your life and what was the second part of the second question which i think is probably the more interesting one which is what makes my angle different or what makes this different than every other book out there about habits so you can broadly put books about habits into two categories the first book the first category is what i'll call motivation models so motivation models are about what sparks a behavior how do you get started how do you get motivated the second category is what i'll call reinforcement models so how does a habit stick how does it last why do certain behaviors get reinforced and sometimes books will touch on one but focus primarily on the other a lot of the time they'll just kind of live in separate worlds that's what i would say is it happening in like the self-improvement space then you have the academic space so psychology or neuroscience or whatever and a lot of those books are focused on the why but not the how they'll tell you they'll tell you why something happens why a particular neuron fires why a particular biological process works the way it does but they don't tell you how to implement it in your daily life and so what i wanted to do was try to combine the two why and how yes a why in a book that is both why and how um why do habits form the way they do why are they important and then how do they actually work and my hope is that atomic habits was able to do that largely because of the framework that i put together so in the book i lay out these four stages that all habits go through and i felt like we needed a new model because most of the models right now are either a motivation model or a reinforcement model but not both okay and you need to understand what both sparks a habit and what makes a habit maintains it yes if you want to be able to understand how they work and how to make them last and what are those four frameworks so the first stage of every habit is a cue the second stage is a craving or some kind of prediction that your brain makes i'll give you an example of these in a second the third stage is the response and then the fourth stage is the reward so you walk into a the question i had that that no model i could find could solve in in any good way or explain in any good way was why can the same person respond to the same cue in a different way so let's say you get into the habit of going to the gym at five o'clock every day but then sometimes work gets busy and you don't go to the gym at five o'clock current models don't explain that very well because it's like well the queue is five you should be going to the gym right now it says you the routine falls automatically after the queue or why why does someone walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies and then they automatically want to eat it but you could just as imagine just as easily imagine that you just got done eating dinner in the other room and you're stuffed and you're full and you walk in you see a plate of coke and you're like i'm stuffed i don't want to eat anything so what's going on there and i think these four stages explain it which is you see the cue or you experience a cue and then your craving or your prediction differs based on your current state so the way that you interpret the cues in your life is contingent upon the current state that you're in the way you're feeling right um and also other things like your beliefs or your identity the social group that you're part of right so like if you're in a different group then maybe you interpret things in a different way um you know you can imagine one group they practice a particular religion they walk into a butcher shop and see pork and they don't they're like oh we can't eat that right another person walks in and they're like oh yeah have a pork sandwich because it's obvious and easy and right there so what you choose is contingent upon how you interpret the cues in your life [Music] i don't think i'm the type of person that is brave enough to admit i've made a mistake honestly because i think things have not worked out along the way where things just didn't work out as i had hoped or dreamed to be and but i don't see them as a mistake because as quick as you're thinking oh poor me you start to see the light of the door that it's opening that couldn't have opened without it okay so i don't have like a regret this was a big mistake that was a big mistake but i have to also say i have my whole life been very cognizant of doing anything and exposing myself to anything even when i didn't want to do it because i'm deathly afraid of feeling like i would regret like what if i don't do it that's more of a motivation for me than doing me too you know just like well well i look back a little you know like for example with dancing with the stars i did not want to do it i'm an old babe the last thing i want to do is practice four hours a day you were great you were you think i was so great not the judges they didn't think so i was the number one person on dancing with the stars last season number one rejected now there's a record okay but so you might say that was a mistake with all the work that that led up to and it was a social embarrassment i thought i'd be rejected maybe number three or five or six but number one i never saw it coming and so i was kind of a little mortified on that one but you know what i'm so thankful i did it and the minute i recovered by the next morning i'm like thank god i did it and thank god it's over it's a lot of work it's a lot of work because i didn't want to i said yes because i didn't want to wonder what it would have been like you know so what did you learn from the experience about yourself i learned i'm not a good dancer i swear i've looked at the tapes now one year later when i thought same tapes i looked at a year ago i thought you know i really got this but i look at the one year i'm like i'm stiff as a board what was i thinking missing steps so so what i learned from that is that i can't dance well but inside my body i feel like i'm a good dancer and i'll get out on any dance floor do my own makeup steps and people really smile as i'm dancing because i don't really give a crap and i look like it you know yeah but what did i learn i learned that i learned the same lesson i learned again and again which is thank god i did it thank god and and the the injury of oh god you did so poorly dissipates quickly but there's an echo to not trying something that's going to sting here i think not that i know that because i really don't do that but i'm afraid of it it's like it's like fear of a nightmare that might happen i don't know why because i don't really have that in my life but i'm fearful of it yeah i think that'll sting you for a long time too that fear of regret of like oh i had the opportunity to do this dance with the stars and i didn't do it how many years would you think about not you know what maybe a year but still a bad year you know um you know what uh regret does i think and and why i've been able to build up my personality and whatever i can get out of and give to life as best i could what regret does is it quietly takes down your confidence a notch because in short you're a coward you shied away even if the right decisions to shy away once you shy away you quietly without even consciously thinking think a little less of yourself now i say that from experience because i've watched many people get stronger or people where life makes them weaker and there's a lot that goes into that but i really believe that that regret piece is not given um enough do you really have to try everything and try your best because even and listen two out of three things i try don't work out you know but people just remember the success but i know what the failures are but still i got confidence out of failing each time a little notch up a little notch up so then you conduct yourself with more power in life because you feel better about yourself and ironically you have more to give you're a better package to give more because you've you've put a lot into that basket by just trying try and try and try you know do you feel like you're more confident even though you're the first one out of dancing with the stars that you you did it and you absolutely yeah absolutely i'm more confident i got a lot of confidence out of that because every female friend and male friend i had that was even close to my age they were like i can't believe you even went for it right they said you're out they would discourage you out of your mind but i want all their respect and they constantly say that was amazing that was amazing so even my friends that kind of took me for granted think better of me i went up a notch in their head you know it takes a lot of courage to do that it takes a lot of courage to publicly fail but i happen to be very good at public failure really because i've done it my whole life and i'm that doesn't bother me i think uh what i think what i didn't want to happen was that i would look foolish or old dancing with a 24 year old rip stud on the floor until i realized it feels really good to lean in on that guy let him spin you around that floor and how my girlfriends are having to dance with anybody like that lately there you go that's a good way of looking at it yeah what would you say um why did you not why are you not afraid to fail publicly because you know what i've learned nobody's really watching nobody gives a yeah everybody's something about it the next year or whatever you know maybe even in the moment because the truth is that people most of all are thinking about themselves so just when you think the limelight's on you and everybody's going to say god is she's stupid why would she say that or do that the minute they've given you that one moment of attention they back on to their own problems their own selves so it's like overstatement of your ego to think you're really that important right you know you could just move right on we could distract people you try the next thing their eyes on that if you're lucky so no it doesn't really amount to anything it doesn't really amount to anything yeah it's self-ego that is not really true that's interesting because you say that most people are focused on themselves so when you mess up publicly or you fail publicly they'll think about it for a moment but then they're on to their own thing if you're lucky and they notice honestly most people won't notice it just feels like everyone notices yeah definitely what a shame right exactly yeah what about um when you want people to have the attention on you for the things you're doing good how do you keep uh the attention on you the relevancy of yourself as an entrepreneur an individual when people are focused on themselves so much how do you keep them thinking about you your brand your business your work your mission you have to think of a way uh to grandstand you know what do you mean by that uh good old-fashioned grandstanding like i built my corcoran group brand on the backs of the new york times and the wall street journal the new york post without a doubt i would think of all kinds of crap to get media attention okay as long as my brand name was in there really the best single best thing i thought of which was really just an attempt to get publicity when i couldn't afford advertising because it was a bad market was my corcoran report and all that was a was a one-page report giving giving the average sale price of apartments in manhattan is how i labeled it i didn't i was too stupid to know that that was the wrong label it was just my 11 sales but it was on the front page of the real estate section and i was quoted on the first line and boy that was an eye-opener that's how i learned that publicity can build a brand today's version of publicity that i look for in all the entrepreneurs i invest in is how good are you at social media i don't care if you're in the sock business if you're in hardware or what what's going on how good are your social media what's your fault and those are the key questions now how how well how good are you at building uh attention through social media because that's the new free ride not really free but to a large degree free just like the new york times and wall street journal my free ride okay so you have to be creative i think in thinking of how you can grandstand and so what's uh like i don't know i'm thinking what's a business right today like well i don't want to use cousins we already talked about uh cousins like um grayson lakes which is a start out as a baby sock company phenomenal entrepreneurs i have this the long like the long lady stocking yeah with a little lace on top i bought some of those for a girl before yeah and they make girls look sexy and they're well priced and they're beautifully known nice they're elegant they're sexy well now it's a full fashion line and it's uh i think 70 million dollars in sales this year but what are they particularly good at is there's a husband and a wife team melissa the the the wife of the team has gorgeous long legs you may remember her from shark tank her husband's more of a nuts and bolts guy but great at business what she does is she constantly models and talks directly with cameras she has so many people that love her she has limited dishes out constantly constantly she's great at social media she knows how to primp herself right look sexy talk to the ladies and get sales okay so she uses her assets but she does on social media and that's built their entire business social media yeah and did i answer your question because i feel like i somehow got lost in my life how do you stay relevant when things are going good because when your things are going bad they'll look at you for a moment maybe where it seems like everyone's looking at you but then they forget how do you stay relevant while you're growing or well things are kind of going the same i'll give you another example i have a company i just bought in this past season i was out of my mind to buy into them it was two guys with a product called comfy it was a sweatshirt blanket you slip into it it's like a sweatshirt but it's actually a blanket why i say i was crazy to buy into it none of the sharks they were smart enough not to is because they're two loud-mouthed guys having a good time pitching their product and they had no inventory they had handmade their own product two prototypes had no idea what would cost to make what they'd sell for who they'd sell to they had none of the answers but they're a great salesman and i i said um i'll take 15 or 40 whenever i got it boom just because they're great sales people right and what they have done is they've done in their first year 11 million dollars in sales they found a way to produce it and sell it but a couple of weeks ago it was very quiet they have had social media coverage to the moon and back but it was very quiet and they hand delivered and i wish i could remember the famous actress name sexy cool long-legged actress i'm so bad with names whoever she was i think she was the same actress who closed the uh oscars the other night i might be telling you i didn't watch it ah shame on you oh my god oh come on all right well anyway i saw your little party watch party on instagram so long but anyway they sent hand delivered to her front door how they found it in holly with the package and she put on video her jumping on her bed in it they quicker than a second starter social media campaign people competing with the jumps they're johnny on the spot that's smart business okay they're causing attention they made it happen and then they're going to write it again and it's going to be all over social media all over they're annoyed with me that i'm here because i don't have their product because they want me jumping on the beds you know what i'm going to do i'm going to put the hood on i one girlfriend has gorgeous long legs i'm going to photoshop my head in to her long legs and i'm going to win the contest i like that so grandstanding now is like more influencer marketing if you can find creative ways that's a fancy way to put it with an audience maybe it's a micro audience or a large audience or create an audience of your own one by one but you really have to be able to grandstand yeah i know you talk about the keys to entrepreneur success a lot but for those who haven't heard you talk about it what are what are you think some of the smart ideas in business right now the smart industries to go into if someone's maybe talented maybe they sold a company or they're trying to start as an entrepreneur what's an industry you really like a product uh section you really like you know is software is it coaching is it consulting is it an agency is it physical goods what food what's the type of category no really none of the above okay it's not my cup of tea to think of an industry that's that you can uh this is certainly leading industries i don't believe that's where your head should be if you're thinking of going into business i think your head should be is what do you enjoy what are you naturally inclined to be good at what were you always good at things these these abilities don't change much whatever you're you know if you're gregarious as a young kid you generally don't wind up as a bookworm you know when you get older and get a head on your shoulders you're still gregarious so i think what you have to do is think what would suit me what could i visualize myself doing where i could picture a happy picture of myself you know and i think most people are capable of dreaming that up i don't think it's an analytical kind of left brain kind of thing where you apply yourself to your best shot like going and playing back blackjack and putting your chips on the right thing no i think you have to figure out your other table where should you put your chips what what's on you what's true to you okay and so for me it took me 22 jobs to find real estate but the minute i was out opening keys uh you know opening the doors and chatting people up and it didn't feel like work and i was the boss i knew i was going to be the queen of new york real estate i knew it as sure as i knew my middle name was in i just could see it in my mind's eye i never had that vision when i worked my other 22 jobs and the other thing it's sort of related what you ask i think it's such a such wrong thinking that you have to choose your spot i think it's like finding out what clothing you look good and you got to go try a lot of on the rack and see what works with you and then you kind of little by little kind of get your look on what looks well with on your body type your personality the colors that are good i think you find yourself little by little it's very hard to sharp shoot it's not that kind of a thing and you know often the people i know so many entrepreneurs well beyond a world before shark tank peers of mine in many industries that have succeeded no one ever went out for that industry and so that's what i want to do but you know what made the biggest difference in a myriad of those if that's a word a selection of those people uh that made the biggest difference was they came along someone they worked for who believed in them getting one good boss that gives you an opportunity is worth a million intellectual thoughts in harvard mbas grouped up in a pile because you kind of can sometimes need somebody else to see that light or you get into something you never thought you'd be interested in you really love your job and then that winds up being what you do for a lifetime and so i don't believe that you've named the big industries that's more of mark cuban stuff he's like high level um investment strategy stuff but i'll put my businesses against this any day one two one because i think i'm so good at seeing who's got that talent that matches where they are you know if uh if someone's approaching you for uh investment or to partner with you and you could choose only three qualities that you would dream that they would have whether that's you know never giving up a grid a positive energy whatever the quality may be and you could say if they had these three qualities it doesn't matter what business they ran maybe timing and the uh economy might play a little bit apart here and there but like if they had these three qualities they're most like i would bet on them any day yeah well that's what i do every day on shark tank yeah and i've gotten better at it because i've learned to hone in on those um i could think of two maybe i'll come up with a third if i keep talking all right number one is uh salesmanship i have never succeeded with any business where the principal didn't know how to sell i mean sales is the guts of every business if you don't have sales you're not in business any business applies to everything okay so okay if you're a technology nerd and really are in a technology space but you better have a partner who could sell the out of it or it ain't gonna go anywhere okay so selling is number one the other uh thing i look for and maybe it sounds weird to you but i've learned it to be a great um almost insurance policy i look for injury i look for anger in the individual if i could find someone uh and this is true of all my successful business interestingly enough if i could find someone who had injury at an early age and has something to prove i got myself a winner it's like insurance okay so when i say injury meaning they were dumps in school like three out of four three out of five sharks were dumpsters at school they're they're out to prove you know um i have i i don't want to out them so i really i'm inclined to use the names but i won't i have entrepreneurs usually successful never had a father and then when they went on shark tank their father after 35 years was back into how insulting enraged them okay i have on entrepreneurs who were sports figures uh almost uh going to be professional sports people had an injury but were fiercely competitive with someone who wound up in their space they hate that person because they played against them in ice hockey crazy all i have to do is name the other person their sales go up yeah so i think anger improving uh is very much part of a lot of successful stories out there it's an overcompensation over proving or overdriving like i'll show you give me the i show you something that went wrong earlier and you've got a motivated person and it gets you through hard times really well and then um i'm coming up with a third i can't there's a million other ones but none of them as serious as that it's those two you have to be able to sell and if you have injury uh to prove something it's a wonderful insurance policy how important is a positive attitude with those two things like if you were negative you're not even going to get out of the gate well there's negative people all right you know what i'll be trying to prove people wrong and always nasty about it you know forget it let me tell you what's true about a negative person you will meet them in the entrepreneurial space you know why because they are far more comfortable criticizing the next guy than doing negative people are blood suckers they just suck your energy away you know the nicest thing i did for all the people that worked with me over the years was get rid of negative people the men and i spotted them i didn't care if i had cause they were out you know why because it's like it's like letting the enemy quietly into your camp and giving them free reign negative energy is the enemy of all business especially i've always been in sales related businesses you let a negative person into a sales force they have a pity party all of a sudden they need one more person to feel sorry for them or to point out what's wrong it's terrible i would spot them my way feel their vibe do you have a few minutes on friday i'd love to have a chat with you because i felt like i was saving my good people you know they were good positive people i don't mean criticism it's invaluable in business you need to have your criticizers to let you know when you're off and what you could do better but i'm just talking about regular blood suckers you know you know everybody's met a few all right yeah yeah now sales is number one for you if there are great salesmen you would bet on them if they're a great salesman with something to prove that's like the golden ticket it sounds like so how does someone train to be a great salesman if they don't know how to is it something they can learn or is it something you just have to be a part of your energy well you had question about positive uh that's the blood that goes through a great salesman seeing the positive side of anything a lot of people see that as bologna i don't it's just like you show me a negative and i'll say you know you're right it's a negative but i can tell you what the upside of that negative is so you have a bend toward being positive so you must have that okay to be a salesman if you don't you'll never become a sales i don't care how hard you try i think it's an intrinsic quality of personality trait i know you're not supposed to say that everybody's supposed to believe you could become a salesman i think if you're inclined to be outgoing and and positive you can become a better salesperson but the real phenomenal sales people that i have worked with and i've made my living my whole life in different venues with phenomenal sales people i am telling you um they come out of the gate maybe not out of the womb but they come out of the adolescent gate as salespeople it's very hard to teach that it's a it's an artistic gift to be able to sell really well because think of how complicated it is you have to read the situation accurately you have to read the person and think of how you could use them in the way that they want to use themselves and thank you in a thank you note 12 hours later thinking it was their idea that's a complicated little thing right and you need to think of how that person could be used for your long-term goal of the picture you want to create so that's very complicated math in the head and that's what great sales people do [Music] i want to dive into morning routine at the start because you're a huge advocate of a very specific morning routine and you know morning routines are talked about a lot on success-minded podcasts and uh high achiever podcasts these days but you have a different approach to it and yours is to 5 a.m uh morning routine which is the 20 20 20 plan and first i want to ask if you can talk a little bit about what that plan is why it's more powerful than other morning routines that people might talk about and then i want to ask you a follow-up question on it after that you know lewis i've been teaching morning routine uh for 24 years i wrote a book years ago called the monk who sold his ferrari where i talked about the ritual of early awakening and i talked about the 5 a.m club you know the spartan warriors i learned a lot from them these are human beings that were fierce in the resolve to do amazing things the spartan warriors had nobility and honor look at the world we're in right now we need to do what it takes to become stronger as well as more compassionate the spartan warriors mothers used to actually say to them come back on your shield come back victorious or don't come back at all wow and the spartan warriors also used to say sweat more in training and you'll bleed less in war and so we live in a world obviously there's covet but i think this is a time of incredible unrest we've got social unrest for all of the unjust injustice that is has been out there for so many years we've also got a financial crisis which i believe is going to get much worse and uh we've got we for sure i'm no financial expert or an economist but i mean if you look at if you look at all the quantitative easing happening right now if you look at the low interest rates and all the encouragement that we buy more and spend more right now to pump and jump start the economy we're just pushing uh the inevitable collapse further down the road i believe so i think we have you know we have the coronavirus and we've have some early optimistic trials on the vaccine which i'm very encouraged about and then we've got all these other things including an environmental catastrophe in the making so with that context 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 20 20 20 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 20 24 years and uh very high level lewis the 20 20 20 formula is simply this you get up to 5 a.m and anyone can get up at 5 a.m 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 a 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 uh if you move first thing in the morning you release serotonin which makes you feel good you release dopamine which you know sets you up for inspiration second we can get into it more deeply but second pocket from 520 to 540 is reflect you know 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 20 20 20 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 a school of greatness a man adored by a majority of humanity um 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 20 20 20. do you need to move first can you meditate first do you grow a lot you know 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 yeah and having said that you know i would say the 20 20 20 formula is minimum viable morning routine and you're a biohacker i'm a bio hacker 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 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 master work right now so i think we have to find the routine 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 uh 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 who have 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 fa 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 5am 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 for a week you know give it a try for three weeks four weeks the 66 day minimum and then judge but then judge by your results hey it's louis here and i would love to connect directly with you text me the word youtube to my number 614-350-3960 to receive weekly inspirational messages from me i did this for i was getting up at uh not not that i was in competition but i was getting up at 4 50 a.m robin for a few months a couple years ago and i was doing a 5 am workout and that's how i do it so i was spending an hour in the morning working out at 5 00 a.m then i was coming back and meditating and strategizing for the day and it was extremely challenging for me for the first month um but then it got better and better and i started to make it a you know something i was proud of you know i call it beating the sun i was like i'm gonna beat the sun tomorrow and i'm gonna wake up and the first 20 minutes are not fun for at least a month and maybe it's never fun in the first few minutes because you could it always feels more comfortable to sleep until your body really starts to find a routine and a rhythm that okay you're just going to bed by eight or nine and you start to appreciate that process in a different way you might have loved being up late before in its own way but this is a new way to find appreciation so i i'm not in that space right now my you know my girlfriend moved in and i said you know what i'm gonna allow myself to sleep in a little bit with her and experience something different but i tell you what i always feel more productive when i'm consistently waking up earlier um even if it's uncomfortable well there's a line in the 5m club which is all changes hard at first messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end yeah and so you were telling me i don't think you'd mind but before we go ahead started recording you you were sharing how you're running more and it's like the first time you run it's like the first time you ski it's like the first time you fall in love it's like the first time you played chess i mean we we we stumble before we walk and then on shaky legs we embrace the new habit and that's the very nature of personal transformation i mean every master was once a beginner every professional was once an amateur and so this this this idea that we need to be masters right out of the gate that we need to you know get up to 5 a.m and instantly it should be easy well falling like a great relationship isn't easy building a world-class business that stands the test of time isn't easy uh becoming a maestro or any kind of a virtuoso it's it's always a process i mean i know you you interviewed kobe well i think what made kobe kobe was his intense rigorous practice over many many years yeah you know he just out practiced out everyone around him and i think you know we live in a world of easy we want the easy morning routine versus the morning routine that'll give us the greatest payoff and i just there's a reason lewis that a lot of the great saints sages poets military leaders world changers got up at 5 00 am and before the sun i think it's the quietest time of the day you if you look at willpower researchers we wake up with the most willpower when we first wake up you have the most mental focus before the phenomena attention residue takes over and cognitive bandwidth is high and you know it's uh it's it's it's been profound for me how does someone be consistent in their discipline you know when most people say i want to do this for three months or six months but then ah interruption covid ah i got sick uh something someone in the family needs needs me and i'm up all night and what's the difference between what kobe did for two decades in the nba where he was disciplined how is he able to stay motivated and how are the greatest able to stay motivated where others seem to lack the motivation and discipline to be consistent because anyone can do it for a few weeks but how do you do it for years and decades what's the difference between that it's an excellent question and i and i would say first of all in covid right now may we give ourselves permission to be gentle with ourselves i think you know even this whole idea that we must be machines in terms of our morning routine or even our pre-sleep rituals this these messages that are out there that we must be monomaniacally consistent and flawless human beings for us to wear our badges of honor and society as leading members of the cult of productivity you know i'll just i'll confess right here to you right now i sure am no guru and i slept i slept you know i i slept on the 5 a.m club i have had uh those those evenings where i feel like a few extra chocolate croissants and i i just think we must give ourselves permission to be humans i think you know i was flying on a little plane um from white river south africa to this game reserve and the pilot let me fly the plane for a little while and he kept on saying you know the winds are going to push you off of course and just you know keep keep that i think was the altimeter or whatever but just keep it in the center and so the the currents lewis would pull me off course and then i just you know look at the dial and i'd come back and i really believe you know that's that's that's how we live our days as human beings i mean i'll get up and sometimes there's a current like you said you know a child who kept you up at night or it's in the pandemic so maybe you're worried or maybe you've lost a job and so those currents will take us off course and so our job is just to steer back on course each day we're we're not perfect human beings 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 5m 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 the morning and you run the 20 20 20 formula that i explained in the book you will create the flow state you will release serotonin you will release dopamine you will release b dnf you will increase your metabolic rate you will boost creativity you will uh increase your willpower you you know all those things i mean we 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 you know 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 [Music] people buy from you will love you will learn from you will give you a promotion when they feel understood not when they understand you and that was one of the biggest lessons ever when you watch someone who is so full of knowledge so full of wisdom and wants to sell their product sell themselves to get the raise close the deal at the board room they're always want to just exude who they are their credentials what they have and how they can solve the problem and that will get you so far like being great at sharing who you are will get you out of egypt understand how people feel and let them feel understood i'll get you to the promised land right so when you go to an audience or you're talking to to close a deal most people want to share most of the time you just need to be quiet and and find what's going on in that person's life be be an expert at the temporary state of mind like understand what they're going through at that minute and let them feel understood when you let people feel understood when someone's watching you and you do an amazing job dude i've been watching you forever and i love what you do but when someone watches you and go man that guy gets me he understands where i'm going at he understands my struggles he understands where i want to go that's someone i can hitch my cart to rather than someone who's got great cadence credentials and tells uh you can go i understand that person but i don't think he understands where i'm at right right and so the two things when it comes to an infomercial comes to anything with persuasion the two things i always tell myself is how do i make sure that person feels understood and secondly how do i enter a conversation going on in their mind not mine you know when you were on your sister's couch you had different struggles right now i come to dohany drive in la you're in a completely different world a completely different space flying to the white house and all the stuff that you've got going on the conversations in your head have changed dramatically from when you're on your sister's couch till now yeah so what happens and i've watched this with marketers and people in business as they evolve they hit a certain you remember that pain that passion the desire for more i mean you could probably close your eyes right now and remember that desire and thing can am i ever going to make it and and even a little bit of envy for maybe some of your buddies who made it or a little jealousy doesn't mean you wished ill thoughts on them but it's like damn it they made it i don't have it what if i never get it when if you remember that pain if you remember that process you remember that thoughts you will always serve anybody watching who needs that but what happens to some people is as they evolve and you're gonna join the country club maybe you're going to get married you're going to move to the suburbs now you got an accountant and you got two assistants and now should i hire a sales team got a private jet and then is the pilot going to be late and then and then you know and then you're like i got a facebook team should i outsource the facebook market and all of a sudden your conversations change you get to do an interview or you pitch on camera or you do an infomercial and all of a sudden you're having conversations in your head and your audience feels disconnected yeah and you don't even know why you're like what did i miss because now you're asking questions of a completely different group because you've evolved so the two things again i always go back to even before i turn the camera on before i go on stage before i do an infomercial i said people buy from you love you adore you will learn from me if they feel understood and i want to enter conversations going on in their heads not mine wow powerful so too too simple like such simple little things but it's a foundation for persuasion amazing man um 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 um 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 are you going against your values to be successful 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 wanna 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 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 of 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 something they they went when it went found some suffering and they just crippled moments where i was suffering and i didn't let go of it you can't let go right or i held on to it for too long to 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 all right yeah 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 it hours or weeks it's moments that you catch it so morning routines help me more than ever and i'll tell you mine um anybody wants to steal this this works for me because i want to set my days up for the 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 road runners before your time but when i was a kid remember beep beep the road it was the tasmanian devil yeah so most of our lives with facebook and social media and cell phones and tech we're like the tasmanian there's so much dust around us it's hard to like see through it right like it's like i just gotta get through this storm and then i'll be okay how do you want me to set a goal and be grateful like how do i get out of this dust storm right sure 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 years i'm not telling something i haven't done but the great texts put me in a good mood bad text i become the anxious yeah like if you're like oh you know i should get this done let's 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 revolutionary 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 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 a hundred and fifty thousand you can google it 150 000 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 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 we're learning every moment even an interview like this take 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 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 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 next 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 are 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 the 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 smoke 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 now when i say i get to do conference calls it changes everything so that little room not a victim anymore i'm not a victim anymore right and and again on every level it's it makes a difference i love it any other half 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 uh 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 okay and how does it go okay so seven levels deep was probably the biggest impact uh the biggest thing in the impact in my life ever really yeah one one day so i hired a guy named joe stump do you know joe stump no great guy uh 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 i can do to get you to take action right um we know books work it's the books and the actions so i was oh so anyway so joe comes in and he 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 um and i said well 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 for a 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 10 grand for a 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 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 kid so he said okay i asked you why you paid me 10 grand i'm not going to go 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 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 it's just not a poor me i my life was designed to be exactly the way it was 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 it it it 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 i don't know and it hit me and i thought my kids i i 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'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 and my 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 realize that my parents were married nine times when i was a kid so i moved 20 times by the time i was 19. different step brothers steps both parents were married five for my dad five for my mom four from my 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 step-dad step brother step sisters have the bike come home one day and my mom's like we're moving again and then i move in with my dad moving to my grandmother so i had this crazy hop scotch my whole certainty there was no certainty so what i realized at 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 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 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 something like so i got those problems out of the way and 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 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 and when you find that and the reason i know this not only because it wasn't just transformative to me transformational to me is i did live events in las vegas for six years straight every single month there was 400 people in the room that paid 20 grand to go to real estate events right real estate so about five and a half years i did them um every month in las vegas so once a month i'd fly in and that was like the highest level and i'd every single month i'd raise i'd get i'd pick somebody out of the audience and i'd say come on up let's do this seven levels deep like i got it man i know what it is and i'm like okay so like i'm gonna give you a quick example i i won't beat this up but this is so important because when you feel fatigued when you want to say no when you don't want to go to the gym when you don't want to make that sales call when you don't want to get your funnel working when you don't want to start new and you don't want to say no to someone you should say no to or say yes to someone else you should say yes to literally for me still i fall back on my why when i think of my kids and going backwards and being in control i could push through anything nothing will stop me a bad day i don't know what it's like to be sick because my mind i can program my brain to just power through because i focus foundationally on this why right so i get i remember this guy he was awesome big dude he had dreadlocks he was like six foot seven i mean six foot five he's huge just awesome dude he comes up he's like man i like picked me up he gives us big hugs so i said why are you here he's like i already know dude you're not gonna get seven levels on me you're not gonna i've already done the exercise because i'm here because in my neighborhood there's no dads there's not enough dads in my neighborhood i grew up without a dad these kids need dads so i'm making money in real estate and i'm starting this youth group i already had debt we get dads together and we go spend these days he has he had this amazing story and i mean i melted on the first one i said why is that important he goes dude what do you mean why is that important of course it's important and he's laughing he's joking he gives me another reason i want more money because i want to build a building for it but i could tell he was still in his head he gets the number two or one and his everything changed on him he gets small and he starts crying i mean like uncontrollable crying and he gets to his number one he's like my mom raised a good boy but when she died nine years ago i was a drug addict and she never saw the man she created and she said i'm showing her in heaven what a man she i'm saying right now wow physical good he said that and i said he said i'll never stop now i'll never stop and again we all have our own reasons for doing stuff but when you get to the heart of why you're watching why you do what you do it's so much deeper than what you think and i forget sometimes i i hope i don't sit here and feel like seem like i got my life all figured out i've been blessed to have more i've had more blessings in my life than i ever could imagine if somebody would have told me at 25 this is where i'd be i'd say impossible it's a so i appreciate my blessings but i'm not i'm not perfect at all this stuff but when i practice these habits when i think through this when i recognize my why the days that i'm off track the days i think i bit off more than i can chew or the days where i feel like i plateaued when i go back to that y it's like game over you're not getting in my way nothing is there's so many people that uh just get into personal development and build a business off of that but for years you were building businesses and selling them and then you got into personal development so you've been extremely successful and sustainable because you know how to run businesses in this and that's why you continue to grow well business is the fundamentals you know being healthy fundamentals you know having great relationship fundamentals it's not rocket science but it is a science right and if you understand the science then you know and you take action then you can achieve the success you want just about in anything yeah what do you think is holding people back from growing a business starting and growing a business to a certain level well initially what holds them back is fear so fear of failure fear of success and then failing fear of disappointment fear of being embarrassed fear of being ashamed fear of being guilty fear of losing money fear of feeling about it's over 50 different types of fear that holds most people back but they're unaware of it's like a silent hidden enemy that's locked deep in their non-conscious brain this is the area that you know i study this my life's work now is understanding what actually drives the perceptions that people have about themselves and what's possible for them to achieve and what's the difference between somebody says yes you know i want it i believe i can have it i believe i could do it but then there's another voice that they listen to more that says but you're not smart enough but you're not good enough but what if you fail what if you succeed so there's there's voices in our head that most people have not learned how to really just pay attention to because the the voices that you hear the thoughts that you're having the conscious ones and even the non-conscious ones that percolate up to consciousness if you pay attention you can manage you know where they go because that's what actually fires the electrical signal and the chemical response that drives behavior and most people don't understand you know it's like a spark plug one spark plug you know turns the car on and you can push the gas and go the other spark plug basically turns the car off and your brake is on most people don't think of their body their mind as a system that they actually own and so we haven't been given the user's manual for that so fear is one but then it's all the non-conscious conditioning that prevents people from from taking the actions that are needed like what are the conditioning that most people have the non-conscious ones well this is from what we've learned from our parents if we think about the era that our parents lived okay um great depression yeah right um very very hard to make money very very hard to find resources very very hard to to do anything unless you're a professional so our parents said to most of us if you don't become a professional you're going to struggle you're going to struggle and suffer and even the professionals said okay so become a professional and here's your ceiling of what you have so we became conditioned to be worried of scarcity in a world that has no scarcity we became conditioned to having certain beliefs about what's possible or not possible so even now you know as we as we were sitting here and we've got this you know amazing election time crazy you know one thing i've been thinking about is you know there are some people that believe that if donald trump wins they're going to make a fortune and there's other people who think they're going to lose everything and i have a friend of mine who has got about 70 million in the bank that believes that if hillary gets into office he's going to lose millions it's going to be really tough and what really is you know going on in people's heads it's all of their references their beliefs and their perceptions that are locked away in the implicit part of their brain that is driving those thoughts and even the behaviors they may not be aware of it they're not even aware of it yeah they can be but there may not be and so what we really have to go back to to focus on is it really makes no difference who becomes president or who doesn't if you have the belief that regardless of what happens in your external world you can navigate towards the success that you want that's a belief and beliefs are the lens by which we actually see the world and by which we behave and so if you want to change your results don't focus on changing your behaviors change your focus on the beliefs that drive your behaviors right powerful yeah and so the next question though is well great where what kind of beliefs do i have right so well we have two types of beliefs and this is this is where it can get a little bit you know a heady and that is you know when you start talking about my brain it's an organ it's like your heart is an organ you can speed up your heart you can slow down your heart you can you know speed up the brain waves in your brain you can slow them down you can tune in you can tune out yeah we haven't been given the user's manual for the most powerful tools we're aware of that's right and so the great news you know i know you being an athlete and a successful businessman you have discipline you cannot you can't achieve yourself achieve results without some kind of discipline and so we know that there's some fundamental truths to achieving success and every successful person will tell you you know and jim rohn is i know you you love generally so you either pay the price of discipline or you pay the price of regret discipline weighs ounces regret weighs tons that's good but the the thing is can you teach discipline the answer is yes how you have to have a willing participant and if the participants reason why is big enough if they know i want to achieve x and the reason why the motive for their action motivation the motive for their action is a reason beyond just themselves chances are they will do more yeah to achieve that success than if it was just left up to their own but there are some people that are born you know with incredible drive they just have this insatiable drive and they'll just i'll do whatever it takes for the things that i want and there's other people that want things but they just don't have this insatiable drive and this is where you know i as much as i hate at school i love to use schools and analogy in the game of life whether it's health wealth relationships career business spirituality fun experiences you have to decide what level of the game do i want to play at is it the great school level the kindergarten level the high school level the university level the pro level because each one of those levels requires a totally different mindset and totally different skill set they're building blocks on each other but if you are extremely talented but you're not prepared to practice and rehearse and drill and fall and fail forward to the next attempt you will never make it as a pro you will never make as a pro business person you'll never make it as a pro husband or wife or athlete or musician you just never will so just get used to that if you're not prepared to pay the price if you are prepared to pay the price and you have the aptitude and the talent now we're talking about there's some real potential here and what we don't know is you know what's in your heart like what is the fire that stirs you that that you wake up saying i will do this even when i don't feel like it i will do whatever it takes to overcome my temptation for mediocracy my temptation for excuses my temptation for um reasons and circumstances to hold me back i won't allow those to be in my way and if you have that within you you'll achieve whatever you choose right and so the question you asked before is how do you develop that start small yeah start small so if you don't have discipline show to your show yourself that you can give yourself one command in one follow-through so you know what right now i'm going to get up i'm going to do two push-ups right now not not like later now can you give yourself a simple command one sit-up right now i'm going to go get a glass of water you start with something ridiculous i learned many years ago reduce it to the ridiculous so for reducing to the ridiculousness i start i said can you do that great will you because that's the difference right there is that's the razor's edge the people who can will you will you yeah great when now now yeah right so if you develop that skill and specifically from a brain plasticity a neuroplasticity perspective as soon as you do that you give yourself a command and you take the action you have just created a neural pattern that you can give yourself a command and take action now that may just be one time well what if you did that every hour by putting a little bell on your computer and every hour like if you were if my computer was open i'd have um every hour it would say it's 12 o'clock it's one o'clock and i take 60 seconds just to be in control of my mind 60 i don't care stop what you're doing stop take six breaths just get it just get centered am i on track am i off track am i doing something i shouldn't be doing versus a high impact activity that i need to be doing every hour i've trained myself to just reset i didn't always do that so i just started with one a day right then two sure then three then it was working so well i said great let's do this every hour but more importantly is as soon as you become the person who believes in themselves you see every thing you do or don't do leaves an imprint on your self-worth and self-esteem scale and you know it absolutely you know it yeah every time you have that cake or that cookie right either believe in yourself or you don't believe in yourself right yeah every time you're you're voting with every decision you're disqualifying with every negative belief you're qualifying with every positive same with behaviors so you start to get getting aware of am i qualifying myself to move forward or am i disqualifying myself do what i say i want and what i do or don't do over and over and over again because thought patterns become emotional patterns become behavioral patterns and our brains pick up on our thought emotional behavioral patterns and says hey you know what you've done that one enough i'm just going to make that automatic for you so all of a sudden you know if you're a person has lots of positive thoughts but you suck at taking action your brain says let me make that a permanent pattern for you so you don't have to think about anymore but i'm also going to create some neural tension and i'm going to make you pissed off at yourself now now you're going to start talking to yourself about how you don't want to not take action but you're still taking action and this is where we have this conscious non-conscious ping-pong match going on all the complex yeah it's actually complex but it's actually pretty easy too so someone's listening right now and they're thinking you know there's a lot of things i want you know i want to get out of this relationship or i want the relationship i want to have a better health i want to have more money whatever it may be and they've been saying that for years and they feel like they've been consuming all the information they need to have but they haven't been able to take action maybe because their why isn't powerful enough what would you say should be their first step well the first step is to take one thing i'm going to go back to one thing yeah and say great let me move one thing forward why because that just changes the trajectory of the same pattern repeating itself and as soon as you interrupt a pattern and then you repeatedly interrupt the pattern it's like taking a detour and as soon as you take a detour one day you're like okay that was that was okay but you intended your tendencies to want to go back to what's comfortable but if you take the detour two days six days seven days we know from a neuroscience perspective it takes about 66 days to create a solid enough neural pattern that it'll go from conscious effort and thinking about it to a non-conscious pattern that has the beginnings of automaticity happening without your involvement you're just doing yeah and so for me what i do and for myself is i uh whenever i want to change something whether it's a habit whether it's a thought or emotion or behavior i say i'm going to work on this for 100 days not 30 days not 21 days not 66 which is right around there i say 100 days and then i focus all of my just on that one thing for 100 days why do you give an example of something you've done sugar sugar sugar i'm a sugar me too i'm a sugar like if it was an alcoholic i'm a sugar a whole pizza right it's so bad yeah so i i go like you know a week two weeks no sugar then a month i eat dessert every night 90 days me too you know like a cake and cookie and five of them a day and then and then the same way i can be very disciplined but it's either way yeah i'm extreme i'm an extremist as well right so it's all or nothing higher off it's like no no in between right you have one you have a dead yeah i don't i i don't have one cookie if there's only one cookie i go no you're gonna have like six or seven more my cookie bills and my cookie bills at hotels are twenty one dollars not three so i keep replenishing so so you take one thing just one thing that you know maybe a little challenging 100 days 100 days just 100 days so let's say you want to drink more water 100 days a glass a day conscious effort to one a day whatever you did before you'll still do but one glass a day so you know i started that with my assistant so i want to drink you know like four of these a day you know like you know 32 ounces whatever the case is and so every we got a mug and it's on my desk every time i walk in and then i have some support from her saying hey remember to drink your water so just do it so the first you know two three weeks i feel like i'm gonna drown myself with so much water um but then it's like okay now i'm used to it now i'm drinking as much water as possible because the habit is there and one of the rules that i love to follow is the habit is more important than the intensity at first so don't worry about the intensity right develop the habit so can you take one minute a day to focus on how you will achieve a goal just one minute a day can you take one minute a day to focus on your health yeah can you take one day to retrain your brain yeah can i take one day you know or one action a day right and you start off with something you know and reduce it down to just a minute or two minutes or one behavior if you can get that behavior to be a habit it's easy to stack right of course it's just like the foundation of a building once you have the foundation if you build it right you stack and so every good discipline affects another and every bad discipline affects others [Music] let's go into some of the the principles the the fundamentals of success sure and i think uh you talk about being clear first things and having a clear vision right because if you can't you can't be successful without a vision and being clear well you have to first take 100 responsibility for your life give up being a victim then you have to get clear about what is my purpose i believe each person has a purpose they were born with whether it's to be a mechanic or a chef or to be a doctor or to be do what we do which is empower and enlighten people uh through the work we do and so once you've got that you have to have a clear vision of what would you like your life to look like both in the business world in your social world and your relationships your health and fitness your travel and fun all of that so we have seven areas of your life which we say let's let's pretend that you can have anything you want no holds barred you know god comes down and says you're chosen you won the lottery you get the life you want what would you do and you go oh i'd like to live in this house in malibu i'd like to live on the ocean i want to have three kids i want to be able to travel to europe five times you know whatever it is write it down and then using things like visualization and affirmations you can start turbo charging that vision with intention and then some of the tools that come out of the law of attraction work and so forth but you first have to know where you're going i liken it to a gps system in a car here we are in santa barbara you live in la somewhere whiny roads to get back here yeah and but if you have a gps that says 929 via fruitary or whatever your gps system will tell you how to get there now when you left la you did not know exactly where you were going you just trusted a gps to say turn left turn right turn your subconscious mind works the exact same way it is a programmable gps system that will figure out the path if you program it correctly which is putting in a vision of the destination that's all you have to do interesting but a lot of people feel a lot of fear because they're of the unknown of what's going to happen or that they might fail because they have a big dream right so what is fear to you and how does someone overcome that fear well here's here's the deal you know basically fear is i love this word the guy who wrote the book dune said fear is the mind killer fear takes you back into the amygdala which is in the limbic system of your brain you want to be in the prefrontal cortex which is where the executive functions where spiritual insights where wisdom occurs where rational logical thinking occurs so basically as soon as i get into fear i go back into this primal fight or flight or freeze place and so i want to be up here so you know basically we now have technology called eft tapping i'm sure nick ortner and all those guys and literally nine acupuncture points you tap on those in a sequence for maybe five minutes seven minutes and the fear disappears it literally dissolves there's absolutely no reason for anyone to be in fear now the value of setting a goal is to watch all these fears come up i i refer to it as a if you ever played the game whack-a-mole at the moment yeah yeah yeah you got to whack them before they go back down so we want to surface those fears so we can whack them using eft and other technologies that are out there neuro-linguistic programming and so forth but now it we have this science that just literally you don't have to be stopped the other thing a friend of mine just wrote a book called the the fear cure and or the cure for fear one of those and she talked about one of the biggest fears is of the unknown and uncertainty of the future but everything's uncertain you know we're trying to create certainty in an uncertain world and stop being afraid of uncertainty uncertainty is what's exciting right if you go to africa on a vacation a safari you have no idea what's going to happen that's part of the adventure fun that's part of the fight exactly you knew oh there's going to be a zebra that pops out right here or this is going to be next it might get boring right or if you go river rafting you don't know where the rapids are and how you're going to do it and if you go surfing you don't know exactly how the wave's going to break and all that and how big it's going to be and so that adventure is really what life's about so we need to be excited fear is created by imagining bad things that haven't happened yet so fantasized experiences appearing real everyone always says that someone else recently said forget everything and run but but i think that if you realize that you're creating your own fear by imagining a bad thing oh for a recession i'll lose my house why not go if there was a recession i'm going to make more money because there's going to be opportunities and we're going to be able to pay our house out faster zig ziglar said worrying is negative goal setting and all you have to do is use that same power to think and visualize to create a positive outcome instead of a negative and then the fear disappears yeah and you a quote of yours i believe is in the book as you say everything you want is on the other side of fear absolutely you know we all live in our comfort zone we want to be comfortable when i was down in the rain forest a couple years ago with the achoir indians i always wanted to go to the rainforest ever since i heard how was it it was so cool that's really cool we got to live with the ochoa indians which is an indigenous tribe which is uh you know had not had any connection with white people from the outer world until about 10 years ago 15 years ago and friends of mine are down now working with them to help preserve the rain forest and i always wanted to go and the trees are unbelievably huge roots are as tall as this building and go out like that you can build a house inside the root system oh my goodness there's army ants that are about that big these leaf cutter ants and you can see them just like going across with all these little leaves waving we got to swim in this river that was full of piranha they told us later oh but piranha don't eat you they they don't they they have a rule in the river nothing attacks anything six times bigger than it is wow and so if you are in a tide pool where you there's no food and you know there's flooded now it's stuck over there and you step in there a prana will bite you but uh river they're not going to not not at all we had so much fun it was so delightful to be in that nature so the point is everything is an adventure and we have to think of it that way or we're going to be victims and you know one of the other principles you talk about is how to transform transform yourself for success so tell me about the people we surround ourselves with and how do people influence us in a positive way of achieving our goals or keeping us back into victim mode i don't know if your parents ever said this to you but mine did they always said i don't want you hanging out with those kids they're bad influencers yeah yeah yeah so that doesn't stop when you're 18. right you know so there are certain people who are negative curmudgeonly you know liners complainers and blamers that if you hang out with them that's who you become yeah and you look at any bar all bars have a personality to them you know there's bars on lower state street in santa barbara here where the lower economic class hangs out and they just a moan about how about everything right there's bars further up the street where the people that are more successful hang out and they're just doing deals and talking about all the great things that happened that having fun having fun they're networking and brainstorming with each other introducing each other to opportunities so basically you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with yeah like i remember mark asked this one guy who owns evergreen airlines to uh if he could give him an idea that he thought might work for him and he said well if i take it how much money do you think i might make he said well a couple million he says mark i can't even consider an idea that won't make me a hundred million dollars oh my gosh it's just below my threshold right yeah you know so now most of us that's a very rarefied atmosphere most people listening to this aren't there but just to give you an example um there's a friend of mine who now a friend just died recently but i didn't know him at the time his name was lou tyson he ran the pacific institute and was teaches a lot of stuff we do and he was making again like you know a lot of money and he was his clients included the navy you know the government of denmark you know that kind of stuff yeah and i said i want to learn what he's doing he's playing at a bigger level than i am so i called him up and i said to him lou if you're ever in la uh could i this was when i was in my 30s i said could i be your chauffeur don't hire a limo let me show for you for free all i ask is i can pump you with questions for the 20 30 minutes of sure sure he said sure so about three months later i get a call he says hi i'm coming to l.a gonna do a talk at a country club pick me up at lax take me to the hotel take me to the country club back again so i did and i just i peppered him with like what'd you do how'd you do this how did you do that and he told me so about a year later we both bid for a contract it was 875 000 contract to educate people on welfare in california based on these success principles to get them off welfare and we were the final two competitors pacifica and we won oh wow and so he was very gracious he sent me a nice note he said you're a good student that's great he should have held back some of his secrets well he didn't really need to i mean his bigger goal was to get all this out to the world and the father's doing yeah that's part of that as well but he is uh i mean most people it'd be surprisingly people say yes if you ask them to spend some time with me of course i want to speak into the mastermind part because when i did my first mastermind probably five six years ago when i had no clue what was going on i think in our company i was just starting out in business we did around i think 250 000 in sales for like the first six months of our business and then it was um the end of the year we went to this mastermind of these online marketers and a lot of them were making five to 10 million and within the next month the relationships we built from that mastermind we did 250 000 in sales in that next month just from five relationships in the mastermind right and that year we broke a million dollars and it was just like all accelerated after being around people who were at that next level so i can definitely speak into that yeah i mean you're living proof of it exactly extremely powerful and if you're not a mastermind make sure to join one and find one and become a part of it or or get a mentor you know find find somebody who's done what you want to do and whether it's being in person with them or reading their book or listening to their home study course or their podcast excuse me but whatever it is people have already done tony robbins says success leaves clues i love that yeah you know and so everyone has ever been successful has left some kind of clue there's a manual a franchise operation manual a workbook they wrote you know a seminar they're leading a boot camp go get educated yeah and i have a chapter in a book called learn more to earn more you you know brian tracy always talks about the idea that if you want to make more money become more valuable have more impact that you can give somebody that will affect their life in a positive way yeah whether it's your employer or people like us to our clients the more i know the more i can support people i mean i have people now who are making they own companies worth 600 million dollars and they'll come to a retreat with me just so they can do tapping with me to overcome some fear they have some stress or whatever yeah yeah one guy he was from czechoslovakia pavo and he had this huge company he was totally miserable and and he basically as a result of all this work we did he sold two of his companies he hired some people to run his other companies he always wanted to be a cyclist hired lance armstrong cycling coach now he's won two cycling races races in the pyrenees in europe so and he's in his 60s so why not have a balanced life yeah sure now who are your mentors growing up or in your early career well my first mentor was a man named w clement stone he was a friend of napoleon hill and they wrote a book together actually called the success system and never fails and um napoleon hill we all know from think and grow rich and so he mentored me for about two years when i worked at his foundation i was teaching teachers how to teach this stuff to kids to raise their self-esteem and teach them how to be successful his big phrase was success is not a four-letter word you know it's like most people think success is bad you know money is bad and success is bad especially back in the 60s and 70s when everyone was a hippie in the counter culture and all that going on so another mentor of mine was jesse jackson who was a contemporary of martin luther king i used to go to his church when i lived in chicago i was teaching in an all black inner city school because i was part of the civil rights movement one to make a difference and i remember one day i watched him you know he always had people like sidney poitier and and bill cosby would come in you know all these stars and i remember standing on the edge of the church so i got there late so i'd have a seat and i'm looking over and the band is playing and all of a sudden jesse looks over and goes like that just a little nut the band stops you know wow and this room must have had a thousand people in his church and i went oh that's cool i won't learn how to do that you know and so now i run groups of like you know 500 to 800 people at a time and thousands the largest group i ever talked to was 20 000 people you know wow and so like learning how to manage the energy of a large group of people like that is a skill and i wanted to learn to learn to do that so i used to go to church every sunday just watch a master do that work and then i've had masters along the way that i've worked with in terms of i used to be a psychotherapist people that have taught me you know marketing people that have been gurus for me in terms of my own relationships john gray for instance and um i think you should always have somebody who knows more than you do about something teaching you that so you can keep expanding your capacity just because you're passionate about something doesn't mean you won't suck at it right and if you just because you're passionate about playing football doesn't mean you're being the nfl welcome to the podcast right and i actually became passionate about opera two or three years in but the truth is i i didn't have the chops or the discipline um or the drive i had enough passion to make me think i did for a while but look you're in charge of your passion yeah and and whenever people hear me talk about this i always get a lot of grief because they're saying i'm never going to abandon my passion and i'm like i would never suggest you do i'm just saying don't follow it take it with you wherever you go right but don't be so damn picky about what you apply it to it's kind of like with personal relationships right you know there's there's this idea that's been um championed by maybe a million films and books that says your happiness in a relationship will happen when you find your soulmate and so what happens is you you embark on this snipe hunt you spend most of your life looking for your soulmate right and during the period of time between your search and maybe you find or maybe you don't you know then where are you supposed to be miserable and unhappy the whole time well you're certainly not going to be as happy as you could be and that's the thing that gets drilled into your head so so there's this narrative that goes on in the world today uh and i'm generalizing but in a very very broad way if you're happy in your personal relationship it's because you found your soulmate and if you're happy in your professional relationship it's because you found your dream job and if you're happy in both it's because you followed your passion and i think all of that is a big steamy pile of crap the happiest people i know were very uncertain for a long time and their decisions i saw this on dirty jobs over and over people ultimately wound up in their vocation because they looked around to see where everybody else was going and they went the other way and then what they were confronted with was okay there's an opportunity cleaning septic tanks it's not my wish fulfillment but it needs to be done and nobody's doing it a year later you're getting good at it two years after that you got three trucks and five employees pretty soon you're passionate about other people's crap because now you've made a pile of money and now you have two homes no one else wants to do it that's right so you've got job security nothing's going to be outsourced and you're kind of i used to say about so many of the guys i met on dirty jobs that they're all in on the joke and and by that i just meant you know when you meet another professional athlete and you start talking about a training routine right you go right to the shorthand you get it yes you get it when you talk to a soldier or a marine it's been an action and and you have to you you just get right to the part right and so people with dirty jobs they get it right whether you're hanging upside down on the golden gate bridge you know spot welding or whether you're just crawling through the sewers of san francisco knocking out those rotten bricks and putting in new ones you get it right and so the idea and the big lesson that came from working with so many of those people for so long was that by and large as a group they were happier than most of my friends they were better balanced than most of my friends and they had just the kind of the kind of peace i think that comes from knowing knowing if i call it the uh it's a wonderful life test right another movie you probably don't remember you were born in 1983 but but but if you're if you're somehow magically pulled out of existence like right now yeah right what happens to the world you know what happens to the world of poof i'm gone you know and dirty jobs never happen is the world going to spin off its axes no right right you know what you know if poof an accountant is gone poof you know it's like so you you tend to measure at least i do anyway you know can i can i do something that's fundamentally going to to change a thing dirty jobbers do they all the plumbers call in sick for a week party over right all the electricians call out for two days game over riot right so you know the it's odd that the jobs that we all depend on most are the most underappreciated in our society and so the people who do those jobs they know that they're in on it and by and large it makes them really fun to be around um what was the most surprising uh person you met during the dirty jobs process that really shifted something in you or inspired you in a different way because you've probably seen the same type of stories the same type of people for 10 years doing the show but was there one person that you were like wow something actually shifted in me where i wasn't just not that you're on autopilot but just like whoa something different here no um there were hundreds i mean we did 300 and of the 300 jobs we did i can tell you you know i i talk a lot about this when companies you know how they are every now and then somebody will overpay you to come and stand in front of a bunch of people you know let me tell you let me tell you what the problem is so people pay me to do that and um and and just to keep the conversation lively i i try and mix up the answers a bit but all of my answers come back to what the what the greeks called a um a parapatia and a parapatilla is a form of an anagnoresis and an anagnoresis is the greek word for a discovery so aristotle aristotle said the the definition of a tragedy was the moment when the protagonist comes face to face with his true self right and i love that so for me dirty jobs was a tragedy because going all the way back hey freddie what are you growling at this is my dog by the way i didn't properly introduce you she's proud of tiffany steve got close yeah yeah this is bring your dog to work dave you're gonna be a good boy or what come on don't be an we talked about this embarrass me in front of everybody here we go um the uh the idea that an anagnorisis or a discovery can drive the narrative forward is classic but the idea that a parapatia which is a discovery that fundamentally changes the direction of the narrative that's what i love so like you know when when when bruce willis realizes uh in the beginning of the sixth sense you saw the sixth sense yes i did okay great because that came out after 1983 um you know he has an anagnorisis in the beginning of that that uh that film when he meets little cole and cole is crazy because cole thinks he sees dead people and over the course of the movie bruce makes more discoveries about coal and eventually toward the end he makes a big discovery he has a pair of patea when he realizes this kid is not crazy at all and he really can see dead people why because he's dead right right and so when that happens the entire narrative changes so that's a long answer to your question but for me i had parapatias doing dirty jobs one after the next really oh my god wow so for instance um i talked about this years ago at one of those uh ted talks yeah right but it was like i've always deferred to the primacy of experts we're taught right the there's an expert opinion on everything yes and getting that expert opinion uh as a host on the discovery channel was always important because discovery was dedicated to making sure all the facts that went out were correct and because dirty jobs was what it was i was constantly getting angry emails from a whole army of acronyms from from from epa to osha to spca like yeah they they they would all see something on the screen and they would and they would freak out and uh so we go to castrate labs in craig colorado and i call i call the spca and i call the humane society and i say look we're going to be castrating lambs on the show i want to make sure we do it right because the last time we uh don't offend anyone yeah i don't offend anyone and they were all upset because a couple months earlier i'd gone to a ranch in uh uh outside of houston and collected the semen from a bull called hunsucker commando and uh artificially inseminated a bunch of cows and apparently it was great tv but they were like nah nah you're doing it all wrong so i called and said how are we going to do this right and they said the right way to do it is you take a rubber band and you put it around the testicles of the sheep and over the course of a couple days the testicles fall off oh my gosh i'm like all right well that sounds it'll be interesting tv so we go there to do the job we have a time lapse for two days you see well i i don't know what we're gonna do right because i never did on dirty jobs we we we always showed up um you know there was no pre-production there was no plan there was no yeah there was no there was no second see what happens yeah right i mean it's a very very honest show and and and the ranchers guy named albert um and he and his wife melody they brought the the first lamb out and they put him up on the on the fence post and um albert reaches in his pocket and pulls out one of those rubber bands you know like the humane society told me except it's not a rubber band it's a it's a switchblade oh man he pops it open and he leans down and he and he grabs the scrotum and he pulls the scrotum towards him and he clips off the tip of the scrotum and then he pushes the scrotum back exposing both testicles which look like thumbs on a little lamb and then he bends down and he bites him off oh my gosh and then he spits him in the bucket i'm holding and i'm like what the hell are you doing dude are you this what happened my little show just worked it's like now it's suddenly a german porno or something like what are you doing so i say i say cut cut stop you know which i never say on on dirt wow and i said albert look i get it you've watched the show you want to be sensational you want to do something that's going to be all great for reality tv you don't have to do that on this show and he's like i don't know what you're talking about i've been i've been ranching for four generations this is how we do it is how we do it this is how we've always done it and i'm like i okay look i don't know what kind of operation you're running here but you're freaking me out can we just please do it the way the humane society does and he says well it's not very uh it's not very nice like not very nice you just bit the balls off and shoot dude come on man let's just do it right so so we start filming again and albert goes to like this tackle box and he comes back with these bands and and his wife puts a little am up and albert puts the band over and put the lamb down and now the lamb is just you know trembling and this this poor creature walks off into the corner of the pen and just kind of sits down and i'm looking at it and i'm like jesus help the pain like how long how long is he going to be like this he said about two days oh my gosh meanwhile the one he had just orally violated it's fine it's walking around looking around no blood wow not a care in the world back with this mom and they're like trotting off over the rockies to pursue a life of religious lamb fulfillment or whatever they do and i'm just like you know something it was one of those parapatias where where it actually clicks in your in your head and and the lesson on that day was beware of experts you know just beware of the idea that one size fits all the it looks so much kinder but it's not oh so was there a job that you're unwilling to do the only jobs that i passed on were ones that i knew the network wouldn't allow us to air um and like well uh body farm technician so you take a cadaver and you put it in the trunk of an old pinto yeah and you drive the old pinto into the atchafalaya swamp and two weeks later you haul out the pinto and you take out the body and you do stuff to it yeah and now you know what a body looks like that's been in the trunk of a pinto in the chapala swamp for two weeks now that's a job it's csi type stuff and while it's an important job and certainly a dirty one there's very little opportunity for humor in it yeah and it was important to me on the show it's too heavy i just wanted like my experience growing up whether it was factories or construction sites or fish boats or whatever was there's great humor yeah and hard labor and there's great humor in in entrepreneurship too which i know is important to you and i it's important to me too to say that a lot of people who watch dirty jobs looked at it and saw us a straight-up homage to uh blue-collar work and while it was that it was also a love letter to entrepreneurship so a lot of entrepreneurs were built from dirty jobs who did the dirty work and they started it themselves i'd say that 40 40 or 50 of the people that we featured on that show were multi-millionaires you'd never know they owned the farms they owned the the businesses they were doing it yeah yeah they were just covered in many cases with other people's crap yeah and so you know we we don't associate success in this country with with that particular uh optic right right and so there was a lot about dirty jobs that was really very very uh entrepreneurial in nature uh that kind of got lost in the in the visual i mean like 1-800 got junk is probably a billion-dollar company right huge all-around junk so yeah absolutely wow so you know i for me we can talk about lessons from the dirt for for hours and hours and hours but the big one on a very personal level was once i once i got rid of the paradigm of a host or an expert and really committed to being a guest in people's places of work and an apprentice that's probably the best you know i was a it was for me it was groundhog's day in a sewer for 300 you know for nine seasons i was an apprentice every day was the first day of of work you had to be coachable you had to be a student at the game it'd be a good sport you have to try everything and and what i realized by the end of season one was the actually my mother called me uh after watching an episode she said michael watching you is almost identical to watching watching you and these people on your show is like watching you and your father when you were young and like watching your father and your grandfather to this day right because they my dad was always worked as my grandfather's apprentice and i always wanted to to help in that same basic way right and so you know i don't know how much psychology was at work but it's kind of interesting when i look back at that show and realize that going back to when i'm 17 and flunking out of shop and getting a different toolbox now i get the toolbox right and now flash forward now i'm now i'm 45 it's season one of dirty jobs and what am i doing on that show well i'm singing i'm hosting i'm writing i'm producing i'm directing i got a different toolbox and i used them as best i could and ultimately the only project that gave me any celebrity at all was the project that turned in to an homage to my granddad so you know hakuna makata right circle of life and everything else it's it's it's it's always a kick you know to catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror and and see the men from which yeah [Music] how do you stay on track with a connected loving relationship as a female entrepreneur when you're putting so much energy into your business and the culture and the team and your customers and i made so many mistakes i mean let's just be real like i talk about this and i told this story like um i worked so hard to get my business off the ground and i was often working seven days a week you know not just coaching like that was a portion of what i did but to keep a roof over my head it was bartending it was waiting tables it was like being a personal assistant cleaning people's toilets whatever i needed to do in order to pay my rent you know put food on the table and actually continue to grow the business so i basically developed a habit of working non-stop before marietv oh yeah like getting the business off the ground like i worked sidekick fitness code she did like dance instructions i was a nike elite dance athlete i you know taught anywhere from like three to seven classes a week at crunch fitness some of them were choreographed some of them were basic fitness i had the coaching clients i was doing the content and i was bartending and waiting tables so i had developed this habit of non-stop work because that was what was necessary at that time in new york yes but as josh and i you know got together and eventually when i let go of the bartending and the waiting tables and even the dance and fitness as a revenue stream i didn't let go of the habit of working non-stop and that created some real problems in the relationship where it was to the point that him and i had been together for seven years and never taken a vacation together like we had traveled because either he had something for his work or i had something for my work but it was always work related so it wasn't actual just together time just him and i and our relationship was almost over like he was kind of done with me wow because you were just i want to work i got to build my business you don't understand me this is my dream i was operating too out of a lot of scarcity and a lot of just habit like feeling like if i didn't work constantly that it was all going to fall apart and so there were other things mixed in there as well um you know there were other layers of just life pressures from all these different ends but that was like a definite a critical scenario yeah yes yes son oh yeah so i my stepson zane came into my life when he was seven so the year that josh and i kind of you know one of the times we've had many bumps along the road we've been together for 16 years any couple that's been together that long it's it's not all unicorns and rainbows no absolutely not relationships are so difficult but at that particular juncture zane was going off to college which that was a really big thing in terms of josh processing that you know having your kid go off after you've raised them and then me working all the time there was this confluence of stressors that put us in couples therapy and i had to really change a lot about how i was living what i was believing and really putting things back into perspective which you know saved our relationship what were you believing well i was believing that if i didn't work constantly that i wasn't a worthy person that i wasn't doing enough to make my business successful that i was perhaps letting people down and so i had to really shift that and understand that you know i come from a background i don't come from a wealthy background so the work ethic in my nuclear family is very strong like my my dad owned a small business my mom um although she stayed home with us she was constantly doing stuff constantly working constantly fixing things constantly doing things that took care of the family so that's the kind of dna i grew up with was like no if something needs to get done you get it done it's not like you sit around all day and eating bon bons and watching tv yeah yeah yeah so um yeah so so that's kind of how i got there but then i really i had to readjust if i actually wanted to not only have a successful business but have a successful life yeah how old were you when you came to this realization that like okay i can take a day off a week or i can take two weeks and go to italy yes yes yes yes so that was probably i may not get the dates right because time gets warped for me but that was i would say well over like a decade ago where i started making some changes and then really starting to see also how much more creative and productive i was when i scaled back a little bit and that was a really powerful realization because i think often and i understand this and i think it's it's important to contextualize this because at different stages of our life and at different stages of our creative process we need to work in different rhythms you know often when you're getting something off the ground it's kind of like a rocket ship leaving the atmosphere it takes a lot of inertia to break free from gravity right to get into that upper stratosphere so there's a lot of work required in the in the beginning but then you have to adjust as you move on and i just needed to learn that lesson but you were just in like launch mode all the time like we got a launch launch launch launch i mean not launching things but the idea and the energy behind correct go go go yep so yeah i think about testing a decade ago is when i really started making some good changes and putting boundaries and bumpers in place for myself and what that means was that at the top of the year what we do in terms of relationship and even for the company we do the same thing so there's two points i want to make here in terms of my personal relationship josh and i look at the calendar at the top of the year and we set non-negotiable adventure time so my favorite place to go is italy that's my happy place um so we and we don't always have to go there but it's just been a habit for like the past four or five years and we set two weeks in the calendar where it's like he doesn't accept work you know i tell the team like this is the time we're going to be away no matter what's going on we're just offline that's it and then there's other kind of smaller adventures that we plan like adventures with friends where you know have a bunch of friends up for a couple of days around a birthday or around a holiday and like put these bumpers in place so that both him and i know that there are these solid connection moments throughout the year that no matter how busy everything else gets that we have these things to look forward to and that's been a game changer wow and then in the company um i don't know if i've ever told you this story but uh one day i was in new york and i was having like a really bad pms craving for carbs i was just like i was like mama needs some carbs and i was feeling like a croissant and there was this great little french bakery around the corner that i've never been to and i'm like i'm gonna go get my croissant right now so i roll up to this little french bakery and on the window there was like this handmade sign that said you know offer vacation back you know july 18th and it was like this two-week thing wow you were like what and i was like wait wait what the business you need to be here yes and yet there it was empty and this simple little like hand-drawn sign and in that moment lewis i had this notion i was like wait a minute i'm running this digital company i have all of these amazing beautiful gorgeous souls that i work with and we're producing content once a week every week non-stop when do we ever take a break and the advantage for me like josh who works in entertainment like siri sometimes they'll have you know you watch your favorite series like i love hands maids tale i love stranger things you see 11 or 12 episodes and wait a year and yes right and i thought to myself why do i not have down time built into my business and this was about the time when also there was just a cultural uprising with like you know hustle 24 7 and you have to work non-stop and like never take a break and i'll i'll sleep when i'm dead and i'm like those are horrible messages for your health yeah so we decided after i saw so after i had my croissant craving i told my director of operations i said starting right now we're going to close the company down for two weeks in the summer and two weeks in the winter and in addition to people's already having their yes their vacation time and we started that i guess maybe i don't know five six years ago it might be wrong on those dates but a good number of time ago and so our company goes dark twice a year and now the company's at a place where not everyone in customer service takes off those exact same two weeks so they stagger so that we can take care of people but everyone has two weeks of dark time two weeks of dark time and what's great about that is that you don't get fomo thinking that you're off and there's all these other things happening and there's projects moving ahead and there's these things that you want to be in on but you're like feeling that tension because the rest of the company is moving ahead and you're trying to relax so it's been a game changer for us wow as a team five years ago roughly yeah interesting have you felt any negative effects to that not one what if you took a month off in the winter in a month is there like too much time where you're like okay now people are just it's a great question we haven't tested that so i don't know two weeks for us has felt like a really beautiful amount of space so over the past couple years the feedback and we all talk about what we do when we come back and we also share very openly about how it feels and this is this is no too this is one of the things i'm most proud of when everyone comes back from break they are a so excited to get back from work it's almost like a little joke they're like oh my god i miss you guys so much like and they talk about how they spend time with their families like the adventures that they had how they got a chance to refresh and renew themselves and they come in with all these ideas they didn't work on those ideas while they were away it's just it came to them it came to them because they had a chance to step away yeah and this is the other cool thing lewis is i'm really proud of this oftentimes and i don't find out about this until after a fact they come back and i see these photos uploaded into slack they went to hang out with each other oh wow and i was like that's cool amazing that's great yeah wow that was just big changes those four weeks are those paid or is it just we're off and you guys take your time off no they're paid that's great yeah so they have um we have pretty good benefits because i feel like in our culture i was just talking about this last night with uh my creative director we were at dinner and um you know it's such a strange environment that so many people that work for companies feel afraid like they feel what expendable like there's no sense of loyalty and we were talking about someone that we know collectively who's like super talented but in an industry where things are shifting fast and this person you know there's always this undercurrent of not knowing whether or not they're going to be let go because budgets or this that or the other thing and there's not necessarily um a connection between employee and employer and granted many people maybe well that's just the way that business works that's that's how it must be and i don't agree with that like i want the people that work for me and with me to feel a sense of safety and security i mean nothing is guaranteed i get hit by a bus you know we don't know something may happen but that's all outside of all of our control but on a day-to-day basis for someone to feel like if they're contributing their top gifts and their talents and their time to an organization that that organization is also is equally invested in their health and well-being their sanity their ability to show up fully for their family to have time to have flexibility i just think that's where we need to go if we want to create real change in our culture i mean there's that statistic that's been around for a while now it hangs out that about 70 of people here in the united states are actively disengaged from their work right you know on sunday for like two hours actively you know maybe there's two hours of work a day right yeah or but just even the sentiment that they have towards their work like they're not satisfied with it they're you know going through the motions just showing up they're doing it only because they get a paycheck they feel no sense of meaning or purpose and the economic repercussions of having 70 of our workforce disengaged at work or not liking their work or not feeling satisfied with it is enormous which speaks nothing of the emotional or the psychological or the spiritual cost of having that proportion of our workforce unhappy yeah that's true wow yeah that's good yeah what are the things you think you're not doing well in your business i think a lot of these have started to shift with this book project so i tend to be a person um there's this comes from two places i like to be involved in things because i'm very collaborative yeah so i love to see how things are turning out and i love to like put my spin on them or at least have my input um but at the same time um you know that can be overbearing i don't want folks to feel like they constantly have to run things past me you know my team definitely knows i trust them um so the thing that i haven't done well in the past is delegating enough letting go enough control and particularly with this project it's pushed us all so far outside of our collective comfort zones that it's been a joy to be like you guys make the decision you're amazing you're intelligent you're smart whatever you choose i'mma be happy with wow yeah that's been good hard to do to let go of that right it's been great it's been good it's been really great like the fact that i'm this like awake and happy and and like in it right now speaks to my you know kind of let go and let jesus take the wheel and in this case jesus manifests as my team if you want to learn how to make more money and master money in your life then check out this video right here whether it's a house or investments my point to you guys is take your money seriously once you take your money seriously and you put some time in it whether it's this book or wherever you want to get your information you're going to be better off for it you don't want to delegate this to somebody else i want you to understand it

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 358,287

Rating: 4.803535 out of 5

Keywords: lewis howes, lewis howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, how to get rich, wealth, success, how to become wealthy, rich habits, best rich habits, how these good habits will make you rich, success principles, life advice, how to make money, brendon burchard, john assaraf, jack canfield, mike rowe, dean graziosi, robin sharma

Id: YgeM0N8I40k

Length: 155min 19sec (9319 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020