The Secret To Becoming A High Achiever & Embracing Adversity EP 1310

Jason Feifer is the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine, author of the upcoming book Build For Tomorrow (out September 2022), a startup advisor, and host of the podcast Build For Tomorrow, a show about the smartest solutions to our most misunderstood problems. Prior to becoming an Entrepreneur, Jason worked as an editor at Men’s Health, Fast Company, Maxim, and Boston magazine, and has written about business and technology for the Washington Post, Slate, New York, and others. In this episode you will learn,How to chase the gains that come with change. How to achieve long-term success. The key to building a strong identity. How to better understand your “But really”. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1310Jaspreet Singh on The Biggest Lies You've Been Told About Money, Debt & Building Wealth: https://link.chtbl.com/1257-podAlex Hormozi on Mastering Sales, Making Your First Million & Overcoming Mediocrity: https://link.chtbl.com/1296-podJoe Dispenza on Breaking Free of the Addiction to Negative Thoughts & Emotions: https://link.chtbl.com/1309-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You need to make sure that you are willing to take some short-term pain in exchange for long-term gain.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  You have to change before you must. Don't wait for somebody else to force you to change. Don't wait for some other circumstance to get away from you. Instead...

• 0:18Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:43Lewis Howes?

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

• 0:52Speaker 00

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

• 0:56Lewis Howes?

  Good to see you, man.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  I...I found

• 1:01Speaker 00

  that the pandemic, for as terrible as it was for so many reasons, was also really instructive because it forced everybody to change in the same way at the same time. And you got to see what happens. It was a controlled experiment. And I watched some people reinvent themselves, reinvent their businesses, find things that were transformative for them that they hadn't even been considering before this. And then I found other people who couldn't do that and who felt lost. And I wonder, what is the distinction between the two? How do some people move forward? And this isn't just about entrepreneurs, right? Because to me, I define...I mean, look, I run Entrepreneur Magazine,

• 1:45Speaker 00

  but I don't define the word entrepreneur as like a specific kind of career or a business person. To me, an entrepreneur is someone who makes things happen for themselves. So that's what I'm talking about. So for anybody who identifies with that, use the word entrepreneur.

• 1:58Lewis Howes?

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

• 2:01Speaker 00

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

• 2:45Speaker 00

  I watch people move through them fast, not get stuck at panic. I watch people get stuck at panic for a long, long time.

• 2:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and panic is like resistance too. It's like, I'm panicking, I don't want to change. We saw this, what, 10 years ago, as a social media wave started to come in. You know, there were a few, I guess, ambassadors of social media out in the world saying like, this is the new wave. And so many of the older businesses were like, no, we're resisting, we're resisting. We don't want this, we don't want to adapt to this new way of being. Now, it's like, every business has to be in social media, right? And there's always going to be a different wave that comes, probably every decade of something.

• 3:23Lewis Howes?

  But the ones that embraced it, you see them thriving.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:26Lewis Howes?

  The ones that panicked and resisted it and did not adapt, they suffered, they struggled during that phase of automatic change. Life was changing with or without them.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  And panic is so natural. Like, don't be afraid of the panic. It's gonna happen, it's very natural. I think, what I find is that the reason why change is scary to people is because people equate change with loss.

• 3:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  They see something new come along and they immediately identify something that they're comfortable with, that they're not going to have access to anymore. It feels scary, you've lost something. And then, because, what do we want to know more than anything else? We want to know the future, we want to know what's coming.

• 4:04Lewis Howes?

  We want certainty.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  We want certainty. And so, we take the information that we have and then we build out from it. Which means that if change comes and you equate it to loss, you're going to extrapolate the loss. You're going to say, because I lost this, I'm going to lose that. Because, right, like, something new is happening in my job and as a result, I can't do the thing in the way that I used to do it. And because I can't do that, then I'm also not going to be able to help my team in this way. And because I can't help my team in this way, possibly I don't have a job next. And because I don't have a job next, maybe I'm going to have to leave this industry and now I got nothing. That's how fast it goes.

• 4:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  And the problem is that, in reality...

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Change leads to gain. Loss too, but also gain. And I don't think that people see the gain enough. I don't think they even try to see it. And as a result, we get so caught up on loss that we don't allow ourselves to try to pursue the gain. Identify what it is, to try to extrapolate that gain. To say, you know what? I think that this could lead to this opportunity. Why don't I shift? Why don't I learn this new thing? Why don't I be the person that people turn to in this moment? Because they feel lost too.

• 5:14Lewis Howes?

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

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:22Lewis Howes?

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

• 5:29Speaker 00

  It's totally true.

• 5:30Lewis Howes?

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

• 5:35Speaker 00

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

• 6:02Lewis Howes?

  What did the neighbor do today in their lawn?

• 6:04Speaker 00

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

• 6:37Lewis Howes?

  Identity tied to that, yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  It was exactly that. And then, a couple of years in, I discovered something. Being a newspaper reporter is a very unstable job. It's a scary industry. And so I thought, well, maybe I should leave. Maybe I should do something else. But you know, one of the things that held me back and kept me in these jobs longer than I really should have been, because I wasn't that happy, I wasn't making that much money, I was working crappy hours, was because my identity was, I'm a newspaper reporter. Interesting. And this is what you're talking about, where you feel like this change is challenging your identity. Because, man, if I'm a newspaper reporter, but I'm not working at a newspaper, Who am I? What am I? Who am I? Exactly. And then I did it again.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  Eventually, I left newspapers, I went into magazines and... I'm a magazine... I'm a magazine editor. Right, I'm a magazine editor. And I did the whole thing again. And there have been plenty of times during my run, I mean, I still am in magazines, but where I thought, you know, maybe I should leave, maybe there's something else for me. But one of the things that always held me back was being afraid of some kind of new reinvention. What am I if not this thing that I've always thought about? So when I got to entrepreneur, I started talking to entrepreneurs and discovering that they have a totally different way of thinking about this. Hmm, how do they think? Okay, tell you a story.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  During the pandemic, I was talking to this guy Greg Fleishman. He's the CEO of Foodsters.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Well, at the time, they were primarily making baking mixes. You can find them at Whole Foods. Sarah Michelle Geller is a co-founder. And they were preparing for years, or a year or something, to launch this wholly new line of business. They were gonna release ready-to-eat baked goods, so boxes of cookies and whatever, right? And then the pandemic came along and it completely altered people's buying habits. And suddenly, sales to sweetbakers, sales to bags of cookies or whatever dropped, and baking mixes spiked because people were stuck at home and they had nothing better to do. So now, Foodsters, who had been preparing for a long time, rethinking the business and the way that they're gonna approach consumers,

• 8:52Speaker 00

  and they were so excited, they were like, oh my God, this is not the time for that anymore. And they had to make this change. They decided to scrap, scrap this new line of business and go back to the old one. And I asked Greg, was that a bummer? And he said, no, because...

• 9:11Speaker 00

  It goes back to why, this is what he said to me. He said, "It goes back to why you start a business in the first place." And our goal, our mission is to bring joy to people with sweet baked goods. That's what it's all about. Bring joy to people with sweet baked goods. And, you know, he just casually tosses this off, but I, I, I thought to myself, you know, something really important has happened here, which is that he has identified a mission for himself and his company that is deeper than any individual change. Bring joy to people. Doesn't have to be with baking mixes, doesn't have to be with a bag of cookies. It can be anything, right? And then I realized, you know, you, you, you could do that yourself. There's something that we all can do individually to define ourselves in a way in which we

• 9:56Speaker 00

  have an identity that does not change even when change comes. I came up with a little exercise. Three times, we're gonna run through the same scenario. Somebody comes up to you at a party and they ask what you do. If they had come up to me at a party when I was a newspaper reporter, I would've said, "Well, I go out and I write stories about what's going on in the community and then I run them in a newspaper. That's what I do." Rewind yourself, what would you have said?

• 10:22Lewis Howes?

  Like now or back, you mean back then?

• 10:25Speaker 00

  However, you want to play along.

• 10:26Lewis Howes?

  I mean, I'm, I'm gonna give a bad example, but I try to read the room.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 10:30Lewis Howes?

  And if, if I'm with a writer, then I'll say, "Oh, I write books."

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:34Lewis Howes?

  But if I'm with someone else who's, you know, an entrepreneur in a media company, I also do that as well, so I say, "Oh, I run a media company."

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Sure, okay.

• 10:41Lewis Howes?

  But my, I would actually lean into my vision and the mission, which is saying, you know, I, my mission's to inspire 100 million lives weekly to help them improve their life.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  So you're...

• 10:51Lewis Howes?

  And just kind of leave it at that.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  You're skipping ahead.

• 10:53Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  But that's great, because not only did you just, you have that thing, but you have that thing in your head. That's a sentence that you have in your head. I could see you just, you just repeated it like you've repeated it a million times.

• 11:02Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  So, somebody comes up to you at a party and asks what you do, the first thing that you're gonna do is you're gonna talk about your tasks, right? That's why the first thing you said was, "Oh, I write books," or "I run a media company." I talk about my tasks, because that's what we generally do. We identify by the product of our work.

• 11:15Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  And then...

• 11:18Speaker 00

  When our work changes, we feel lost, which is why it's not great to identify with the product of your work.

• 11:23Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  So, that's step one. You're gonna run it again. Somebody comes up to you at a party and they ask what you do, you can't talk about your tasks. So, we've taken the answer that we had and we're gonna set it aside.

• 11:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, so I'm not a writer anymore.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Right. Now, you're gonna talk about...

• 11:36Lewis Howes?

  I'm not a producer, I'm not a...

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Your skills.

• 11:38Lewis Howes?

  I interview people for a living, yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Sure. You're good at drawing out great information from people, right? That's...I would've said something similar. I would've said, when I was a newspaper reporter, I would say, "Well, what I do is I'm really good at identifying what's important that's going on right now, and then getting information from people, and then distilling it in a way that's useful for others."

• 11:56Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Alright, that's my skills. Great, useful. What were we doing? We're kinda peeling back the onion here. We're taking the things that we generally identify about ourselves, and we're taking them off the table. Third time, someone comes up to you at a party and they ask what you do. Can't talk about your tasks, can't talk about your skills. At this point, what do you have? Well, my argument is that what you have, and this is what I found when I started to do this for myself, what you have now is basically the thing that is so core inside of you that it drove you to develop the skills that enabled you to do the tasks. And what is that? It should be a sentence. It should be really short. It should be something that doesn't leave itself open to change.

• 12:38Lewis Howes?

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

• 12:42Speaker 00

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

• 13:12Lewis Howes?

  You can still tell stories in your own voice.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  I can still tell stories in my own voice. You haven't taken that away.

• 13:16Lewis Howes?

  On your own, at another place, yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 00

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

• 13:45Lewis Howes?

  Makes all my decisions.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it makes all your decisions.

• 13:47Lewis Howes?

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

• 13:54Speaker 00

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

• 14:07Lewis Howes?

  That's why I love, I love this because I've been talking about this for years that, you know,

• 14:13Lewis Howes?

  I'm a messenger, but the mechanism is going to evolve, right? It's, it was audio podcast 10 years ago when I started, then we're like, oh, let's use YouTube. Maybe we can reach more people as a part of our mission of reaching 100 million lives. So let's try video as well. And then, and then we just launched greatness.com because we're like, well, there's a more audience here too. So there's different mechanisms that I'm not tied to, but it's how are we being in service to human beings on these different mediums to impact and improve their lives?

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:40Lewis Howes?

  And I keep doing that. If it's the metaverse in five years, okay, I'm digital or whatever it is. You know, it's like, okay, we're just leaning into a new mechanism to be of service.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  And you don't know how it's going to pay off, but you're doing it anyway.

• 14:51Lewis Howes?

  Doing it anyway. You're investing now for the future.

• 14:53Speaker 00

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

• 15:04Lewis Howes?

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

• 15:29Speaker 00

  12 months is early too.

• 15:30Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. And I was telling one of our producers on our team. The other week, who's a big fan of this guy, said, "You see this? And you see, a year ago, we launched our Spanish YouTube channel." And I told him, I go, "This is not gonna pay off right away." You know, "We don't have a Spanish audience." "This is a brand-new channel, zero subscribers." "We're voice-over-dubbing this content." "We're spending a lot of money doing it to invest in this." "But we're doing it to be in service to a greater audience." "And in a year, hopefully, it starts picking up some traction." "And now, a year later, it's, you know, getting over 5 million views a month." "It's 300,000-plus subscribers." "And it's just because we're being consistent by doing these actions." "Not knowing what the payoff would be."

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:15Lewis Howes?

  And sometimes, there may not be a payoff. You may not make money with that.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  You may not.

• 16:19Lewis Howes?

  Just like this company we're talking about that invested for a year to build this new shipping goods, you know, cookies or whatever.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:27Lewis Howes?

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

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:45Lewis Howes?

  And pull out if it doesn't make sense.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's right. And what you need to be doing when you're doing those things is you need to make sure that you just understand what the potential value is, right? So that you're doing something not necessarily because you know what the specific return on investment is gonna be. Right? You can't know that. But does it play some role in your ecosystem? Does it have some purpose? I had a really interesting conversation with this guy, Jim McKelvey. So Jim is a co-founder of Square. Anybody will know Square from the Square Reader, right? You swipe a credit card basically through somebody's phone or iPad, and that's how you buy something at a farmer's market. That was a revolutionary piece of technology.

• 17:27Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Because when that came out, it enabled small businesses to take credit cards that had never been able to before.

• 17:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, they just had cash before.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  That was it. And that wasn't just because they only wanted cash. It was because it was literally too complicated and expensive to take a credit card. And then the Square Reader came out. And you and I, as consumers, go out, we say, "This is amazing." The person at the farmer's market who's selling us an apple says, "This is fantastic." Competitors said, "Oh, I can knock that off." You know? And so they tried to, and they generally didn't succeed. And the reason, Jim said, was because...

• 18:03Speaker 00

  To them, the innovation was the hardware. But really, it was these 14 other things that they had done in their innovation stack. Square had renegotiated deals with credit card processors. They'd done all of these things. And he said, you know, the key to understanding the value of whatever you're doing is that you better understand your but really, right? Go back to what I just quoted him on. But really.

• 18:29Lewis Howes?

  But really what?

• 18:30Speaker 00

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

• 18:36Lewis Howes?

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

• 18:38Speaker 00

  But really, it was these 14 other things that we had done in our innovation stack, right? Everything that you and I and everybody does, we better understand what the but really is. It looks like I just wrote a book. But really, what I'm doing is building a brand and establishing myself as an authority for all these other purposes, right? You have launched this thing, but really what you're doing is the Spanish language, right? You've launched a Spanish language YouTube channel, right? But really, what you've done is you've started to expose and introduce yourself to an entirely new marketplace. And that can have all sorts of other reasons. The more that you understand your but really, I mean, I would say if anybody is concerned about or confused about what it is that they're doing, why are they, why are they trying something? Why are they wrestling with something?

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Why are they doing the thing that maybe they haven't stepped back and reconsidered for a long time? Sit down and write three but reallys. But really, I'm doing this but really, it's because of that, right? I'm searching for a new job, but really what I'm doing is trying to reinvent myself as a whatever. Do you understand your but reallys? Because the more that you do, the more that you feel like you have a mission, and the but reallys can change. That's the crazy thing, is that you don't have to set down one path and then follow it the whole way. You just need to give yourself some momentum and then keep yourself open to the possibility that you're going to have to reinvent the answers over and over again. But because you're moving, you're learning, and you're developing, and you're discovering where you're actually going.

• 20:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Where do you think you're going right now?

• 20:10Speaker 00

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

• 20:18Lewis Howes?

  Work your next job.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Work your next job. Goes like this. In front of you, in front of me, in front of everybody listening right now, watching, there are two sets of opportunities. Opportunity set A, opportunity set B. Opportunity set A is everything that's asked of you. So if you have a boss and you show up at work, that everything that that boss needs from you and is going to evaluate you on, that's opportunity set A. Opportunity set B is everything that's available to you that nobody's asking you to do. And that could be at your job, that could be a new team that you could join, or new responsibilities, or something that you could learn. It could also be something outside your job, too. It could be just something that you're interested in learning. It could be something that you want to pursue. It could be, I like listening to podcasts, maybe I should launch one of my own. Whatever the case is, that's opportunity

• 21:04Speaker 00

  set B. My argument to you, opportunity set B is always more important, infinitely more important. And the reason for that is not because opportunity set A is unimportant. It's not. Opportunity set A, if you don't take it seriously, you're going to get fired and you're going to lose your income. But opportunity set B is where growth actually happens. If you only focus on opportunity set A, you're only focused... If you only focus on opportunity set A, you're only qualified to do the thing that you're already doing.

• 21:31Lewis Howes?

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

• 21:34Speaker 00

  And opportunity set B does that. Which is why, everything that I do throughout my career, this isn't just... I mean, look, I love being an entrepreneur magazine, but I started doing this very early on, where I always thought, here's what is my opportunity that I got to do good at my job and where that growth is going to come from, but what else can I do? What else can I learn? How else can I grow? I don't know how it's going to be useful, but I'm going to do it.

• 21:58Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  And what I've found throughout my career is that by doing one thing, years later, it pays off in a way that I couldn't have anticipated. I have this job because of opportunity set B. I think, look, you can only be additive to yourself, and you should only be additive to yourself. And going into these kinds of new things... Can be scary for a lot of people. You put yourself in a position where you're trying something that feels totally new. You're completely foreign, and I think a lot of people stop at that moment.

• 22:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, this, I mean, the developing of new skills every year, I think, is so important. Whether you're an entrepreneur or you have a career.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:35Lewis Howes?

  If you want to grow in general, it's doing these scary things that develop skills. I'm learning Spanish right now. It's taking me a lot longer than I wish it would take me to be fluent, but I'm nowhere near that.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 22:47Lewis Howes?

  But I was just in Mexico a week ago, and I was practicing by myself. And I feel like, man, I'm way farther than I was a year ago or two years ago, or in high school. You know, and four years of Spanish in high school. And it's, it's challenging, it's hard, it takes brain power. I've got a lot of other things on my plate.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:06Lewis Howes?

  But I have a vision that I'm holding myself to in the future. I'm seeing a future vision that I want to create for my life. And that is the ability to communicate with more people and helping me of service to more people. So I think it's important for people to recognize that what are we doing right now to see, you know, to get you closer to that future vision by opportunity set B of developing new skills.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  And I love how you're thinking so far ahead. You have an idea of the purpose of what you're doing. If you want to, if you want to, but people might listen to that and they say, well, that's cool to know what's all the way down the line, but what do I do at step one?

• 23:43Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  I'll tell you what's helped me. I remember the first time I ever stepped on a stage to talk by myself to an audience. That's a scary thing.

• 23:58Lewis Howes?

  When was this?

• 24:00Speaker 00

  2015.

• 24:01Lewis Howes?

  Seven years ago.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  I-

• 24:04Lewis Howes?

  You were scared?

• 24:06Speaker 00

  I didn't know how to do that.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  There were so many things I didn't know. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know if the things that I were gonna say were gonna be interesting to anybody.

• 24:17Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  I didn't know how the audience would react. I didn't know how to hold myself. I'd never done any of this. And so I'm standing on the side of this stage. This was an entrepreneur event in Scottsdale, Arizona. And I was opening up for Marcus Limonis, the guy from...

• 24:32Lewis Howes?

  Sure, The Profit.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I'm thinking to myself, is Marcus gonna hear me screw up? These people who are sitting there, are they expecting something from me? Am I gonna live up to it? I don't know. I practiced this thing in my hotel room, pacing back and forth. I'd never done it in... How does this have some purpose? And then I came to this line. And this line is, "I cannot wait to do this the second time." I cannot wait to do this the second time. Because once you frame it like that, the whole point of what you're about to do is not whether or not you do it well.

• 25:10Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  It's just to get through it.

• 25:12Lewis Howes?

  Get it done.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  It's just to get it done.

• 25:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 00

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

• 25:19Lewis Howes?

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

• 25:23Speaker 00

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

• 25:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  You know?

• 25:37Lewis Howes?

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

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:48Lewis Howes?

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

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:09Lewis Howes?

  And I eventually started to get decent, right? I wouldn't say I'm the best speaker in the world, but I got pretty decent at being on stage.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:15Lewis Howes?

  Started getting paid for it. And after maybe seven, eight years of getting paid and increasing my rates and getting, you know, bigger audiences.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:24Lewis Howes?

  I still found myself a little bit nervous before I went on. And it wasn't until about four or five years ago, I reached out to one of my coaches and I said, "Why am I still nervous?" This was about an hour before a speech.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:34Lewis Howes?

  I go, "Why am I still nervous? Like, what is it? I feel like I've been training, I've been improving, I've got a bigger brand now, all these different things. Why am I nervous?" He said, "You're focusing on how you look as opposed to how you can serve." "You're thinking about, are you gonna look good? Are people gonna like you? Are you gonna be funny? Are you gonna be interesting?" As opposed to, "How can you show up and deliver value to the community?"

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:59Lewis Howes?

  And he says, "Once you stop thinking about yourself and you start thinking about others, the nerves are gonna go away."

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:05Lewis Howes?

  And the nerves are almost always gone now. When I get into a mindset of, "I'm here to serve," I know I'm gonna mess up. I know I'm not gonna be perfect. I'm gonna forget that joke I wanted to add in there, that statistic to add a point.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:18Lewis Howes?

  But I'm gonna be of service and be present to the best of possible to this audience. And that has really been helpful for me. I'm curious for you, you've been around a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of high achievers and successful people. You've interviewed a lot of them. For the, what would you say are the main attributes of those high achievers that helped them achieve success year after year consistently?

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  I think that the most successful people are willing to reconsider the impossible.

• 27:53Speaker 00

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

• 28:06Lewis Howes?

  Pandemic.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Pandemic, yeah, right.

• 28:08Lewis Howes?

  You lose your job.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  You lose your job.

• 28:10Lewis Howes?

  Your business goes under or whatever.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what was so interesting is that I watched these people throughout the pandemic. I watched them, so many of them, reinvent what they were doing and reach this point, this wouldn't go back moment that I described earlier. And I wondered, what is it that is enabling that? And I called around. Best answer I got was from a guy named Brian Berkey. He's a business studies and legal ethics professor at Wharton. He said that moments of massive disruption force us to shift the window on what we're willing to take seriously. Right? You can imagine, there's a large band of options. And what we do very naturally is we create a little window and we look through it. And the reason we do that is very natural.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  It's because we can't possibly consider every option. You just can't. You don't have enough time in the day.

• 29:00Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Right? So you create a little window. And what we do when we do that is we take our best guess as to what is the valuable stuff? What's the possible stuff? What's the things that are going to drive us forward? And everything outside is either too difficult, too complicated, too impossible, whatever it is, we're going to leave it outside. And then a moment of disruption comes along and it forces us to shift that window because the things that are inside of our little window don't work anymore. So we've got to look elsewhere. And what we discover is that oftentimes, the greatest ideas, the greatest opportunities weren't, they weren't beamed down from Mars. They were some crazy, they were just things that we had discarded. I love this story.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  So there's a woman named Lena, go to wig shop in Baltimore, Lena's Wigs.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  She ran a storefront. And you know what storefront is? Storefront, you walk in. You walk in off the street and you can shop. And so that's how she ran her store. She had hired someone specifically to greet people and to help them out as they walked in.

• 30:02Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  And then the pandemic comes along and she cannot welcome people into her store anymore. And that's what everybody had to deal with. And so she's trying to think, well, what can I do to keep the lights on? And she realizes the answer, the only thing she can think of is appointment only. Now, that's not a radical idea. It's something she was very aware of, but she discarded it. It was outside the window. Because who wants to create friction for their customers? You don't want to make it harder for people to shop for you. And so instead, she had always run the storefront the way that it always was, but now she had to change. So it becomes appointment only. And something amazing happens to her surprise and delight. Sales and profits increase, customer happiness increases.

• 30:47Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Why?

• 30:49Lewis Howes?

  Why is that? Is there more attention and more focus and more dedicated time or what?

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Because it turns out that, you know who her customer isn't? Her customer isn't-

• 30:59Lewis Howes?

  The average person walking down the street.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  The average person walking down the street. Nobody walks into a wig shop at random and buys a wig. People buy wigs generally because of very personal reasons. A health reason, a religious reason. Those people do not want to shop for wigs with a bunch of randos who are walking in off the street.

• 31:17Lewis Howes?

  True.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  So Lena, because she had been operating a storefront the way that she thought she had to operate it very naturally, had instead actually been spending money on a person to greet the people who were never going to buy wigs. And instead, those people were just actually creating a bad environment for the people who would buy wigs. So by getting rid of all of that, she saved money. She didn't have to hire anybody to greet these people off the street anymore. And instead now, she was able to offer customized, very personal experiences for people who would love nothing more than to make an appointment. Come in- And shop for a wig.

• 31:53Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Without all these random people on the street. And so, this was a moment in which Lena was reconsidering the impossible. Right? She had taken this idea and she had put it in the impossible bucket. Appointment only, no good. But now, she was forced to reconsider. So, that's what it looks like when you get forced into it. My argument is, you do not need to wait for some kind of crisis to push you to do that.

• 32:16Lewis Howes?

  How can we start thinking in an innovative way, when there's no crisis or no friction, to start thinking out of the box?

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:23Lewis Howes?

  How often should we be doing that too? Is that once a month? Is that once a year? And what does the process look like to brainstorm that?

• 32:30Speaker 00

  So, I think that it's worth coming up to start with maybe a couple valuable questions that you want to ask and take very, very seriously. And maybe, depending on the work that you do, you could set a marker every six months, every year. I'll give you one example. There's a guy whose name is, let's see. So, he's Kyle Hansloven. And I meet so many entrepreneurs, I'm like, how can I pull this name out of my memory? So, anyway, he's the founder and CEO of a digital security company called Huntress. And Kyle asks himself, at the end of every year, this is an annual tradition for him. At the end of every year, he asks himself, is this the end of the line for the CEO?

• 33:16Speaker 00

  And this isn't just a personal exercise, where he's basically asking himself, am I done as CEO? Because I'm no longer the right person for this company. Anybody who's run a company, and again, I want to stress, like, this doesn't have to be for people who lead companies. This could be anybody doing anything. You should be taking stock of, am I doing this right? Am I doing the best for myself? Am I serving myself in the best way? So, for Kyle, who runs a company, he asks himself at the end of the year, am I still the right person to lead this company for what this company needs going forward? And then, he answers it to everybody at the company. So, he sends out an email. Everybody expects it at the end of the year, where he is either going to make the case

• 33:57Speaker 00

  for why he will remain CEO, or, one day, he insists to me, one day, he really will make the case why it's time to step down. And I really love this because it's just a simple exercise, and it's being held accountable by everybody, because this is a public thing. And at this point, he's now setting up a moment in which he must step back and ask himself an important question. It doesn't have to be that question. It could be, it could be other questions. Right. I remember at the very beginning of my career, you know, when I was at a little newspaper.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  I, um, I knew I wanted something bigger, but I didn't know how to get there. Mm-hmm. And I was really frustrated. And, uh, and so I, I asked myself these three questions. Really simple. What do I need? What do I have? What's available? Because if you take that really seriously, the answers are very telling. What do I need? Well, what I need is to learn from more experienced people. Mm-hmm. Because I want to do better. And if I could do better, I would be there. Like, right? I, I was working at a tiny newspaper. I wanted to write for national magazines and newspapers.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  And if I had the skills to do that, frankly, I'd be doing it. You'd be doing, you'd be there. I'd be there, but I'm not. I'm here. So let's be honest about that, right? Let's be honest. I have big ambitions, but I don't have the talent to match. So what do I need? I need to learn. What do I have? Well, what I have right now is access to colleagues at the same paper. They're at the same level as me. They can't really teach me that much. An editor wasn't very good. Let's be honest.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  That's it. That's what I have. What's available? Well, let's not do what's available in like the fantasy sense, right? You know, like, I gotta go to New York Times, I'm gonna bang on the door or something, right? Like, that's not gonna happen. So what's available? Well, you know, in my industry, what's available is freelancing. Which is to say that, um, instead of like getting a staff job somewhere, you, you can actually pitch an individual story to an editor. You know, you go out, you have an idea, you do a little research, you send them an email. You're basically like, here's a really good idea for a story. I, I'm the right person to write it. And, um, and that's a low-risk way for somebody to work with you. It's one story. They're not gonna pay you that much. And if I could make that work, I would then have access to the people who could teach me things.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  Go back to what I need. So that's what I did. I quit my job. And I sat in this bedroom. In a dumpy apartment in Holden, Massachusetts, next to a graveyard. Like, looking out upon my career, you know, in this graveyard. And I just started cold pitching. I was like, this is what I need. The only thing that's available to me is this. And so this is what I'm gonna do. And nine months later, I convinced an editor at The Washington Post to run a story in The Washington Post.

• 36:56Lewis Howes?

  Wow, nine months.

• 36:56Speaker 00

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

• 37:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, was this 2004?

• 37:02Speaker 00

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

• 37:11Lewis Howes?

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

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Panic.

• 37:18Lewis Howes?

  Panic.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Adaptation, new normal, wouldn't go back.

• 37:23Lewis Howes?

  Did you panic a lot during that time?

• 37:24Speaker 00

  I panicked so much.

• 37:25Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, so much. I mean, it's terrifying, right? It's terrifying, and it should be. But, you know, what you need to do is look at the moment of panic and reframe it.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Because there's a reason you're panicking, and that's because the thing that you had access to, you no longer do. But that's not to say that you can't have access to more. In fact, you should. The greater risk was staying at a job, right?

• 38:03Lewis Howes?

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

• 38:08Speaker 00

  I'll tell you a funny story. I'm a history buff, and I once interviewed this guy about the history of music. And he told me this story.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Turn of the century, phonograph is a brand-new thing. Phonograph, earliest record player. And consider how absolutely revolutionary this technology was to people.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  The phonograph, record player, was the first time in human history that you could listen to music without a human being playing an instrument in front of you. Crazy. It's crazy, right? For all of human history, until that. It's crazy. And so, this thing comes out, and people are fascinated by it, right? It's like, it's like, it's like, people didn't believe that it was real. They thought that there was like a musician in the other room. Right, right, right, yeah. And, and, and so, eventually, people loved it, and it became popular. You know who hated it? Who? Musicians. Really? Yeah, because they saw themselves being replaced. Oh, wow. Right? They said- They don't need me anymore to show up and perform.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Because they got the machine, right? Because my job, if you're a musician at that time, your job is entirely to perform live. It's the only thing that you do. There's no other way. What else are you gonna do? You perform live. And now, there's a machine that can do it for you. And people are scared. Musicians are scared. The leader of the resistance was this guy named John Philip Sousa. You ever heard of the name? You know his music. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, like all the military marches. Like, he wrote that. So, John Philip Sousa was a gigantic figure at the time. And he started making this very public case against recorded music technology. He wrote this piece called "The Menace of Mechanical Music" in Appleton's magazine, I think, 1906. And he made all these arguments for why the phonograph was terrible. And my favorite one goes like this.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  He said, "So, if you put a phonograph in a home, there will be no reason for anybody to perform live. Why would anybody perform live music in a home?" That, that was a form of entertainment back then, right? People would have pianos, they would sing. There's no reason why you would perform live in a home, once you have a phonograph. And because there's no more live music in a home, mothers will no longer sing to their children. Because again, why would they do that when there's a machine that can do it? They'll get lazier, right? They'll get lazier, they'll just outsource it. The, the machine will replace everything. And then, because children grow up to imitate their mothers-

• 40:43Speaker 00

  The children will now grow up to imitate the machines that have replaced the mothers, and thus we will raise a generation of machine babies. That was the argument, a real argument, of a very smart and accomplished person making that case. And that seems ridiculous to us today, but it made sense back then because what he was doing was this thing that we were talking about earlier. He was extrapolating the loss. This thing changes and I lose this and there because I lost that, that's going to be lost. And then because I lost that, that's going to be lost. But what he didn't do was he didn't step back and ask himself some very basic questions like, what new thing are people doing? In this case, well, people are listening to music on a machine. What new skills or habits are we learning as a result?

• 41:27Speaker 00

  And this is valuable questions for anybody, right? Like anything that you're going through. What are we doing? What new thing are we doing? What skills or habits am I learning as a result? In this case, well, people are learning that they can listen to music whenever they want and that they don't have to be limited to the musicians who are in front of them. Okay, possibly scary, except how can this be put to good use? And once you ask that, how can this be put to good use? Well, you wonder, well, in this case, I guess I could record music and I could sell it to them.

• 42:00Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  And now people could listen to my music even though I can't travel to them and possibly never will travel to them because they live in some remote place and they're never going to see me live, but now they can buy my music. John Philip Sousa was in fact, by arguing against recorded music, arguing against his own economic interests because he was panicking.

• 42:20Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 42:20Speaker 00

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

• 42:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's kind of like when Napster came around. All the artists were like, ah, we don't want our stuff digital out there, online and people can download it. But then it's like, okay, then Apple Music and Spotify created a whole new marketplace. For artists to be discovered digitally, right? And to make more money and all these different things.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:50Lewis Howes?

  People resisted and panicked. I don't know when that was. When was Napster? 2001 or something?

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, around there, yeah.

• 42:56Lewis Howes?

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

• 42:59Speaker 00

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

• 43:07Lewis Howes?

  Not just radio.

• 43:07Speaker 00

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

• 43:31Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. What would you say the biggest, uh, biggest lies when it comes to achieving success?

• 43:38Speaker 00

  People feel nostalgic for what came before. If you're going through a major change, if you've had some success and now you're feeling like you're going through another change, you're not sure if you can repeat that success.

• 43:53Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  One of the things that you do, the lie that you tell yourself, is that something about this particular circumstance, something about the thing that I was doing, something about the people that I knew, something about the breaks that went my way, these are the things that drove the success that I have now. And the thing that's gonna come next isn't gonna have those same ingredients, and therefore I may not have success. I think that a lot of people fear that they can't repeat their success. Very successful people, I've talked to so many extremely successful people who feel... Yeah, because they built themselves into, into one thing. I remember I had this really interesting conversation with like a super-successful DJ.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Like, like LeBron James's DJ.

• 44:40Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Okay? And he was telling me that he has, he's built this career extremely successful, and now he's going through some changes in his career. He's getting to an age where like maybe he doesn't wanna be on the road all the time and he doesn't think, or worries that he's not gonna be able to repeat the success again. Because so much of what drove this success was in fact these, these very special circumstances from before. And I think that this really holds us back. I, I, I felt this. I don't know if you have, but I, I, I remember... I was working at Boston Magazine. And this was after the newspapers. And I got an offer to work at Men's Health in New York. It was my dream. I wanted to move to New York and I wanted to work for national magazines. Here it was.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  And yet, I thought to myself, I have succeeded at Boston Magazine. I have good friends here. I'm writing stories. People like me. Possibly, the reason for that is because of a special circumstance here. Special thing right now. I don't know if it's repeatable. And if it's not repeatable, then maybe I shouldn't take the risk. Maybe I should stick with what I have because I know that this is good.

• 45:47Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  So, how do we dismantle that? I'll tell you how. Start to understand how you understand yourself. I talked to these memory researchers. And particularly this one guy, Philippe de Bergard. He is a memory researcher at Duke University. He told me about fading affect bias. Okay, here's what fading affect bias is. Fading affect bias is a scientific term for the phenomenon in which we lose the emotions attached to bad experiences faster than we lose the emotions attached to good experiences.

• 46:23Lewis Howes?

  Say it one more time. We lose the emotions.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  So, we have good experiences. We have bad experiences. We have feelings attached to both of them.

• 46:30Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Right? Later on, when we recount those, we feel the feelings of the good experiences much longer than we feel the feelings of the bad experiences.

• 46:40Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:41Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  This is a natural thing that our brain does for good reason. Because our memories are not designed to be a recall device. These cameras that are watching us right now, these are designed to be a recall device. The point of them is to capture, in full definition, everything that happened.

• 47:00Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  That's not what our brains are for. Right? We don't remember things because we want to remember them. We remember them so that they help us move forward. That's the point. Right? And so, what we retain is, in fact, the things that can help us move into the future. And good feelings help us do that.

• 47:19Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Bad feelings don't. Because, and that's not to say that you haven't had a bad experience and that it doesn't come back. Of course it does. Right? And that's not to say that trauma can't completely change this. It can. But generally speaking, our brains operate on fading affect bias, which is to say that we lose The access to those really bad emotions from those bad experiences. Because if we didn't do that, we would be caught in the past all the time.

• 47:45Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  If every time that you thought about a really embarrassing experience from the past, you started to feel it, you started to feel anxious, that would not be useful to you.

• 47:54Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Your brain is supposed to be useful to you. It is a tool that helps you move forward. That would hold you back.

• 47:59Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  So this is what we do.

• 48:00Lewis Howes?

  That's why trauma holds people back. If it's an extreme event, you are, you know, triggered by that memory.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 48:06Lewis Howes?

  Of the past. And you're kind of defensive or guarded or triggered.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:10Lewis Howes?

  In life, if something like that comes up.

• 48:11Speaker 00

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

• 48:15Lewis Howes?

  Normal bad experiences.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  Right. Trauma can, can, trauma is a totally different thing.

• 48:19Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  So, um, so, okay. Understand that about how you think about things, which is to say that when you think back to the past, what you have done is you have started to erase the really bad experiences. So you've forgotten them. So when you think back, you think, oh, everything that led up to my success right now was because of a series of very fortunate events. And I don't know if those fortunate events are repeatable, but you've forgotten a whole bunch of important stuff. Now, next thing, and this is crazy. When you remember something, you are not remembering it the way that a camera remembers it. Because what your brain does is that when you have an experience, it breaks it apart into a whole ton of little things and it stores them separately. And then when you try to recall it, it tries to reassemble it. Philippe at Duke University described it to me like a paleontologist trying to put together a bunch of dinosaur bones.

• 49:03Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  So the problem is that when you put together a whole bunch of dinosaur bones, there are a bunch of pieces missing. You gotta fill in those pieces. Now, scientists does that with the best understanding of what that dinosaur was like. You know what we do?

• 49:16Lewis Howes?

  What?

• 49:17Speaker 00

  We imagine.

• 49:18Lewis Howes?

  We imagine.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Because.

• 49:19Lewis Howes?

  We elaborate our memories probably, right? The good and the bad, right?

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Because our, because our functions of memory are very closely associated to our functions of imagination.

• 49:28Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:29Speaker 00

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

• 50:02Lewis Howes?

  The hard work you put in.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  And you have imagined some of it.

• 50:05Lewis Howes?

  Oh, right. Right, right, right.

• 50:09Speaker 00

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

• 50:47Lewis Howes?

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

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 50:54Lewis Howes?

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

• 51:23Speaker 00

  I'll tell you what, I, like you,

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Have the like privilege of having access to incredibly impressive people. And they tell me really interesting things that lodge into my brain. Like, for example, you know, I interviewed Ryan Reynolds and we were talking about getting into new lines of work. You know, acting till you started this advertising agency and aviation gin and all that. And he told me, in order to be good at something, you have to be willing to be bad. I love that. He said that. I wrote it down. I was like, I'm gonna repeat that forever. Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author, podcaster. I asked him, what is a, how does he see what a Malcolm Gladwell project is? Because I was curious, like, everything just feels distinctively Malcolm Gladwell. How does he see something and say, this is for me?

• 52:12Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  And he said, you know, to the best of his ability, he tries not to do that because, and these were the words he said, again, I wrote them down immediately, self-conceptions are powerfully limiting. Self-conceptions are powerfully limiting, that if you have a very strict idea of yourself, then you will limit all the new options available to you. So the best that he does is try not to do that. And so I, when you asked me that question, you know, the first things that I think of are like, who are these people that everybody knows? Because those are, those are the people that you're, I'm gonna say their name and you're gonna say, aha, I understand what they do, but I gotta tell you something. The things that almost impress me the most are the random people you may have never heard.

• 52:55Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Who make these decisions that are very high stakes and that seem crazy to other people, but that ultimately, they're seeing something that others aren't, and it's driving their success. Can I tell you a quick story?

• 53:12Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, alright, so, have you ever heard of a brewery called Dogfish?

• 53:18Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  So, Dogfish, there's some beer lover out there who's now very angry.

• 53:23Lewis Howes?

  I don't drink alcohol, that's why.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Alright, fair enough. So, alright, so then you have a great excuse.

• 53:26Lewis Howes?

  Yes. Dogfish.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Dogfish. Dogfish is a brewery in Delaware. And is a very successful one. And in the early days of Dogfish, so Dogfish started by this guy named Sam. So Dogfish started by Sam, and in the early days, they make an IPA, Sam makes an IPA, called 90 Minute IPA. Now, just some terms for folks who may not know beer all that well. So IPA, Indian Pale Ale, it's a bitter, very popular style of beer. And then 90 Minute IPA, the 9 is a reference to 9% alcohol by volume. It's a very strong beer, right?

• 53:59Lewis Howes?

  That's strong.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  That's a, yeah.

• 54:01Lewis Howes?

  What's typical?

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Uh, like a Budweiser is like a 4, 4.5%.

• 54:04Lewis Howes?

  Oh, so this is like double.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  This is like double that, right? So it's like drink it 2, 2 and 1. Beer that puts you on the floor.

• 54:08Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Right?

• 54:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  So beer comes out, people like the beer. Sam's distributor says to him, hey, good beer. Can you make a version that people can drink standing up? And Sam says, okay, smart idea.

• 54:22Lewis Howes?

  Standing up?

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Like, uh, less alcohol.

• 54:24Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Right? Yeah, right, like, you know, 9% alcohol is gonna put you on the floor. Can we have one that people can like have a few of? And so he creates 60 Minute IPA, 6% alcohol by volume. That's a nice, drinkable beer. You can have a few, you're still upright. And this beer comes out, people like this beer. Then they love this beer. Then they need this beer. They have to have this beer, they want this beer.

• 54:48Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 54:49Speaker 00

  And he is getting calls from everybody. This thing just becomes the hot beer. Everybody's talking about it. Very quickly, his company becomes transformed by this beer. Because this beer starts rocketing up to, it becomes on track to be 75 to 80% of all sales. And 75 to 80%, everything that he sells is gonna be this one beer.

• 55:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  And so Sam thinks a little differently than everybody else does in this moment. And this is why I love these kinds of stories. Because, and Sam's telling me that, I mean, I heard this story while walking around his brewery with him. He tells me, look, a lot of people would be excited by that, right? You got a hit product, who doesn't want a hit product? What do you do with a hit product? You're gonna sell a hit product, right? Sell, sell, sell, make more money. Sam sees this as a problem. He's got a hit beer, it's gonna monopolize all sales of his company. That means that most of the time, in which people encounter his company, they're encountering this hit product. Good in a way, but Sam knows something.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Tastes change.

• 55:53Lewis Howes?

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

• 55:58Speaker 00

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

• 56:21Lewis Howes?

  Meaning he has limited runs, or he doesn't-

• 56:23Speaker 00

  He's just literally not making as much beer as people want.

• 56:27Lewis Howes?

  So there's a demand that keeps going, the demand's going through the roof.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  Demand's going through the roof, and he is not-

• 56:31Lewis Howes?

  It's like, "We're sold out."

• 56:32Speaker 00

  We're sold out.

• 56:33Lewis Howes?

  You have to wait till next month.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 56:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  I'm really sorry.

• 56:35Lewis Howes?

  Buy the other stuff, though.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  Buy the other stuff!

• 56:38Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  That's it! So, he says, when people call him, and like, Amtrak called him and wanted this beer. "I'm sorry it's not available." Right?

• 56:47Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  People are-

• 56:48Lewis Howes?

  We want to buy this in bulk, we want to distribute this everywhere.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  We want it in our restaurant, we need it, our customers are asking for it. People, he said people were screaming at him on the streets in Delaware. Because of this, right? Because you got local liquor stores, and people want this beer-

• 57:01Lewis Howes?

  And sold out.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  And sold out! And they're pissed! And they're going to him, and they're angry, and they're yelling at him. And so, I asked Sam, "Did you regret this?" And he said, "No." And the reason was because I understood that this was the only way to ensure the long-term success of this company. And so, when people would call, and they would ask for this beer, and we would say, "It's not available," we would say, "Really sorry, trying to meet demand as fast as we can," which is sort of a lie, because it's actually limiting it. "But in the meantime, why don't you try some of our other styles?" And this is how Sam introduces the world to a wide range of his offerings. And therefore, doesn't become known as an old brand, but becomes known as an innovative brand. And then, a few years ago, sells that company for $300 million.

• 57:45Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 57:45Speaker 00

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

• 57:50Lewis Howes?

  Or if you just make as much money as you can quickly-

• 57:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:53Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to innovate and say, "How can we make this sustainable?"

• 57:57Speaker 00

  And for that reason, I believe, the lesson here for everybody is-

• 58:04Speaker 00

  You need to make sure that you are willing to take some short-term pain in exchange for a long-term gain.

• 58:12Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 58:13Speaker 00

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

• 58:38Lewis Howes?

  I think it's a great mindset for everyone, just in personal life. And that's like, okay, I'm gonna work out hard today so that my future self thanks me that I'm still in shape and I don't have a disease or something, right? It's like, I'm gonna do the thing, I'm gonna eat well today so that in a year from now, I don't have to work out harder then to lose the weight.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:57Lewis Howes?

  You know, I'm gonna invest in my company by hiring two new people today. And then maybe it's more money and it's more time and have to train them. But in six months or 12 months or two years, we're gonna see the fruits of that, you know, that investment and that, that pain, let's say, by, by investing in that. Same thing with my Spanish channel. I was like, this isn't gonna make any money right now and it's costing a lot. But in a year, I can see it paying off. Same thing with launching a new publication, greatness.com.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:25Lewis Howes?

  When there's, how many million websites? Hundreds of millions? It's like, okay, I'm gonna launch this thing today. It's not gonna make any money.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  No.

• 59:31Lewis Howes?

  But hopefully in a year, two years, we start to see that it is expanding and serving more people.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  You know what it's gonna do is it's gonna teach you things, right?

• 59:38Lewis Howes?

  A lot. You're gonna learn a lot of information.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  You can't guarantee money, you can guarantee learning.

• 59:42Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. And you're gonna gain skills, cuz this is going back to option B, right?

• 59:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, opportunity set B, exactly.

• 59:47Lewis Howes?

  Opportunity set B is like, that's not what it was, we were doing. It's creating something new, which took a year to launch.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:53Lewis Howes?

  Design, develop, launch, come up with the idea, hire writers, all that stuff. It took a year of time and energy and money to create a new opportunity and set B.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Lewis Howes?

  That we just launched, we'll see what happens.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  You'll see what happens.

• 1:00:07Lewis Howes?

  We'll learn a lot.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  You're not going to know what's going to happen. And here's the thing, I mean, I hope, I hope for you, I hope for everybody that it's a great success. But it's possible that what happens is that instead you, you launch it, you spend a lot of time on it. And the form in which it takes is not a success. But it drove you to learn all this stuff about digital publishing. And you take those learnings and you put it somewhere else and that's a success.

• 1:00:29Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  There's this, there's this terrible statistic out there about how, you know, you, you've heard it before. Like, you know, people will say like nine out of 10 new businesses fail, something like that, right? And when you, when you look at the actual numbers, that's not true at all, first of all. It is true that a substantial number of businesses stop operating after I think like five or six years. But, but a good percentage of those people, either number one, they had come to the natural end of whatever it is that they were building, they run a business.

• 1:01:04Lewis Howes?

  And they launched something else.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Or it failed. And because it failed, they were on the front lines of learning why it failed. And then they took those learnings and they put it into something else that was a success. You hear that all the time from everybody who's successful is that the things that they did early didn't work and they learned from them. And so that's why when, when you zoom out and you just say, oh, well, those things didn't work. And therefore maybe it's not worth trying. That's ridiculous because what those people were doing were putting themselves in a position to learn. And then those learnings are what drove success, Lee.

• 1:01:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's, you pay for business school in a different way. You know, in the real world, business school as opposed to going to, you know, back to school for that. So I love this stuff, man. This is exciting. Your book, Build for Tomorrow, again, I think this is, this is something that we try to instill here at Greatness Media, which is what are we doing now that's going to serve our audience and serve us a year from now, two years from now? What's the, the innovative thing? What's the thing that's outside of the box? How can we try something? And not everything works right away and some things fail completely. But like you said, you're always going to learn. And if you are not constantly saying, how can I evolve and change? Something will make you change.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  Something will make you change.

• 1:02:16Lewis Howes?

  And you'll be behind.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  And that's the scariest thing.

• 1:02:18Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  You know?

• 1:02:19Lewis Howes?

  You'll be panicking for longer.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  Think of it this way.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  You come from the future. You know that. You come from the future. Which is to say that everything that you love, everything that you do, was really scary to somebody beforehand. Really scary. The history of innovation is a history of people being terrified of things that then later people loved. There was a national moral crisis in America in 1907 over the teddy bear.

• 1:02:49Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  People were banning teddy bears. They were scary and new. People called the car the devil wagon. People tried to ban chess. Coffee, 500 years people were trying to ban. It's wild. Bicycles. When bicycles first came out, there was a big scare over bicycle face. Did you know that? That if you ride a bicycle, the strain of turning the wheels is going to harden your face. It was a thing that people were afraid of. This is our past. And the reason I tell you that is to say that all of those things were scary. Today, they're things that you just use every single day. You come from the future. You come from a terrifying future. But you don't think of it as terrifying. You don't think of the things that you do as scary. But that also means

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  that you've gotten comfortable with these things. And you are prone to say, whatever comes next

• 1:03:39Lewis Howes?

  is scary.

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  Probably not as good as what I have.

• 1:03:41Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. You've got to constantly be evolving this thing. Constantly be leaning into embracing change, like you talk about in your book. Build for tomorrow. I think this is going to be a powerful framework and book for a lot of people. Make sure you guys check this out and get a copy for yourself or for some friends as well. People can follow you, Jason, all over social media. Where's the main place we can follow you and connect with your content?

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  I would just go to jasonpfeiffer.com. There you can find out how to subscribe to my newsletter, which is also called Build for Tomorrow, where you can get these weekly doses of insights about how to be more adaptable. You can also follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn and all that stuff. But jasonpfeiffer.com, good place to go.

• 1:04:20Lewis Howes?

  Jason, you've got a ton of wisdom. I mean, there's so much content going out in Entrepreneur Magazine and on the website that you're at the epicenter of. You're seeing and deciphering all this content and information about entrepreneurship and leadership and change and adapting. So you've got a wealth of information. There's a question I ask everyone at the end called the three truths.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:04:43Lewis Howes?

  So imagine hypothetically it's your last day on earth. You live as long as you want.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Lewis Howes?

  But it's your last day and everything you've accomplished, you've got to take with you. Like your content is no longer here. This interview is gone.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04:57Lewis Howes?

  This book, people don't have access to.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:05:00Lewis Howes?

  But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world. Three things you know to be true from all of your life experiences. Imagine yourself in the future here. What would you say are those three truths for you?

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  I wasn't prepared for this.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  I think truth number one is it's all gonna be okay if you're open to it being okay. We often are so concerned about comparing our experience or our accomplishments with some possibly unrealistic idea of what it was going to be.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  And that can make it not feel okay. But if you're open to that the greatest things that are gonna come out of life are probably gonna be the ones that you didn't prepare for or seek out in some way, then it's all gonna be okay as long as you're willing for it to be okay.

• 1:06:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  I think number two is that the greatest thing that you can do is make sure that you know what others need.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  I think that way too many people have structured the way in which they approach the world and approach people with a real focus on what they need first.

• 1:06:29Lewis Howes?

  What they can get.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  And I will tell you, I'm a guy who a lot of people want something from because people want to be in Entrepreneur Magazine. And that means I get a lot of pitches. And...

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Most people reach out to me without clearly putting any thought into how they can be of value to the people that I serve. They're looking for value for themselves. And I get it.

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  We're both looking for value for ourselves, right? We've built the things that we have because we were looking for value for ourselves. But I will tell you something. That when somebody reaches out to me and they basically say,

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  "Hi, I would like to be featured in your magazine." "It would really be good for my business."

• 1:07:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's the worst way to approach it.

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  It's the worst way to approach it. Because that doesn't give me any value. And you're not serving me personally, but you better understand what it is that I do. And what I do is that I serve my audience. So you better understand how I serve my audience so that you can come with something that I see immediately.

• 1:07:43Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  This is of value.

• 1:07:44Lewis Howes?

  That's a win-win.

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  Right, it's a win-win. People don't do that. And so I think that when you reorient yourself by thinking, "I gotta be value-forward, right? I gotta think about how I'm gonna serve others." Not because, not because your mother Teresa, but because that's the way that you build. You don't build by just going around and taking. Maybe you can take for a little bit, but I'll tell you, people will catch up. So, number three is, I would say, keep track. It's so interesting. We go through these cycles of change. You and I have both gone through many of them in our careers. We'll go through many more. And as we were talking earlier, I think one of the greatest challenges that people have

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  is that once they reach, you know, I've got these four phases of panic. Panic, adaptation, new normal, wouldn't go back. The scariest part of wouldn't go back is that it's not gonna last forever. That something else is gonna change and you're gonna have to go back to panic. That sucks. That sucks. And so what do we do? How do we process that? How do we get ourselves prepared for these endless cycles of change? Because maybe the first couple of ones felt fine and we don't even remember them because the stakes were so low. We were at the beginning of our careers. We didn't know. But eventually you get to a place where you've built quite a lot and then change is coming. And now you are freaked out because you're going to start thinking, well, I built this.

• 1:09:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  I built all this.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  I can't afford to change now. And so the reason why I say keep track is because the cycle of change is inevitable. And I really do believe that getting to a valuable place towards the end of it is also inevitable.

• 1:09:28Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  The thing that you can do differently now in this cycle of change is you can be aware of it. You can make it a conscious cycle, be conscious of the cycle.

• 1:09:41Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:09:41Speaker 00

  Because if you keep track now, do it in any way you want. Write it down in a notebook.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  Keep a log or just be so mindful of it that you're going to remember these things. Have a lot of conversations with people so that they can remind you what it was like at the time. Whatever it is that you do, in the next cycle, when you're feeling panic, when you're feeling lost, you can go back to your own evidence because you kept track. And you can say, I know good things are coming.

• 1:10:18Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  And if I know good things are coming, then I can position myself for them instead of trying to hold on to what I'm losing.

• 1:10:27Lewis Howes?

  I love that you said these three things because I have this, in the last few years, I developed this thing for myself. A lot of people say hindsight's 2020.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Lewis Howes?

  I like to have hindsight now for the future. And I like to see, okay, I'm going through this challenging time in my life right now. Okay, if I was two years out, I'm going to look back at to now. And see how this is going to be helping me for the next two years and developing into a better human. So try to have hindsight, future hindsight now.

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Lewis Howes?

  And I think, like you said, keeping track, oh, you went through this two, three, five years ago, and look where you are now because of it.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:03Lewis Howes?

  Start seeing the future in that way, too.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Lewis Howes?

  I really love that, man. Jason, I want to acknowledge you for your constant reinvention of yourself.

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:11:11Lewis Howes?

  From 20 years of reinventing yourself and really developing a lot of wisdom to share with us. You know, you do this personally in your newsletter and your content online, but also by really being the channel for all things Entrepreneur Magazine and making sure that the best information is out there to serve the maximum number of people in this space. I really acknowledge you for 20 years of developing yourself and reinventing to get to this place, to be of service now. It's really inspiring.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  I really, really appreciate that. You know, it's funny, when I got to Entrepreneur Magazine, we realized we were in this interesting moment, which is that the word entrepreneur had stopped meaning one specific kind of job. I talked about that earlier. And so, you know, we thought, well, what could it be now? Brand is, oh, brand is 40-something years old. What could it be to people now? And we realized the one thing that everybody has in common who identifies as an entrepreneur is the emotional experience of entrepreneurship. It's the one thing. Get them all in a room, doesn't matter. Somebody running a venture-backed company in Silicon Valley, somebody selling stuff on eBay. Get them together, one thing they have in common, emotional experience. And so, we thought, that's where we need to serve.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  That's the thing that can bring everybody together and that others aren't really talking about. And so, I appreciate your acknowledgement of that. And the reason I'm saying that is not to just plug our work, though I think we do good work, but rather to say, like, I think it's always worth stepping back and saying, what is the thing that the most people need from me? And how do I deliver in a way that other people aren't?

• 1:12:52Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  Because that's what'll separate you, and that's what'll keep them coming back to you during moments of change. And that's what'll help clarify your purpose to others, so that when change comes, you understand how to be valuable to them.

• 1:13:08Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm. Beautiful, man. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  To me, greatness is simply the ability to keep going. Like, the people who I have met, who I am most impressed with, the people who I think have achieved greatness have done it because despite many challenges, despite hardships, despite feeling totally lost, despite lots of losses, they had a willingness and an ability to keep going.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  To understand that the path doesn't stop just because one of the things on the path stopped. And that's a really, really hard thing to do. It's easy to maybe check out. But the more that you can just say, "I don't know what's next, but I know something's next", that drives greatness.

• 1:14:10Lewis Howes?

  Jason, thanks, man. Appreciate it.

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:14:12Lewis Howes?

  Amazing, man. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.