606 Reconnect to the Important Things with Mike Rowe

"LOOK FOR THE THING THAT DOESN'T DRIP WITH COMFORT There's so many times I try to find the fast or easy way to get things done. I'm sure you've been there too. We want to get things done as efficiently as possible. But honestly speaking, shortcuts are rarely the answer because if they were, they wouldn't be a shortcut. They'd just be the way. Many times we need to avoid taking shortcuts. We need to do the hard work because it'll save us time and money in the long run. For this episode of 5 Minute Friday I brought back the renowned Mike Rowe with this clip on the importance of hard work and how even the most successful people in the world take pride in their hardest working days. Learn the importance of not taking the easy way out, on Episode 606. In This Episode You Will Learn: What society tells us about achieving happiness (:56) The thing that the most interesting people do (1:52) What the most important people in our country wanted to tell Mike (2:32) 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.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:09Lewis Howes?

  Today, we've got an incredible human being on. His name is Mike Rowe. Now, I was just up in San Francisco giving a speech to a corporation up there for one of their day-long events they were doing. They brought me in to speak, and I got a chance to connect with Mike because he lives in San Francisco as well. So, I went to his studio, and we sat down to what I thought was going to be an hour interview, which ended up being over a two-hour interview. We just kept diving in deeper and deeper. I mean, the insights I was learning, I just didn't want to stop.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  My granddad used to say shortcuts lead to long delays. Shortcuts lead to long delays. So, we're told every single day in about a thousand different ways, back to our earlier conversation, that happiness is attainable if you do this, this, that, and that. And, I mean, turn on any commercial right now for any financial institution, you'd be happier if you could retire a little sooner, if you could take a longer vacation. Why work 40 when you can work 30? Why work 50 if you can get by with 40? Everything is geared in a very, very subtle way to suggest that the reason that the proximate

• 1:31Speaker 01

  cause of your misery is something external. It's your frickin' boss. It's your crazy schedule. It's that son of a bitch down here.

• 1:43Lewis Howes?

  Right. It's victim mentality, yeah.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  I just think it's, I think it's true, you know? And I honestly believe that, look, there are no guarantees for success, but the most interesting people wake up, look around, identify the hard, challenging thing. It's not about eating your peas and sucking it up and getting through it. It's about identifying it and loving it. And saying, "That looks affirmatively..." It's about learning how to salsa. That's what it's about, man. You know, it's about look for the thing that doesn't drip with comfort. Well, one of my favorite unintended consequences of getting Dirty Jobs on the air and being the Dirty Jobs guy

• 2:26Speaker 01

  is when I go to places, I get a chance to talk sometimes to recently a very powerful group of men. About 2,000 of them. I mean, heads of state from all over the country and it's a private club and exclusive and a lot of reasons that a lot of people get a little nervous around it, but this group of men was the most extraordinary assemblage I'd ever seen. Wow. And I talked to them very candidly about Dirty Jobs and told some funny stories. And later, hundreds of them came up to me. These are people who run Fortune 500 companies.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And Louis, they all said the same thing. They all pulled me aside and you know what they all wanted to tell me? They wanted to tell me about their first job. They wanted to tell me- How hard it was. They wanted to tell me about the time in their life when they looked down and didn't see a net. When they realized sometimes you gotta make little rocks out of big rocks. Sometimes you gotta pick up the hammer. Sometimes you've gotta work hard and not smart. They were just so eager to talk about that and not in a braggadocio kind of way.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  But just like when you hear truth, when you hear something that strikes you as truth, it's agitating. You know, right? Well, like when you, when you hear something you believe to be true, but most people haven't heard. It's agitating and it, and it, and it makes you want to grab the country by the lapels and shake it. I went from a guy, a 16, 17-year-old kid convinced and utterly connected to all the things I just mentioned. Then I wandered in the wilderness till I was 42 in Hollywood in New York impersonating a host. Completely just kind of bullshitting myself and anybody who might be watching. Just creating the illusion of competence. Yes. And then all of a sudden, oh, now I'm in a sewer in San Francisco crawling around

• 4:26Speaker 01

  trying to get a show off the ground in honor of my granddad and suddenly, you know, again, a long sloppy rambling way of saying that Dirty Jobs reconnected me. To a lot of things that I believe are fundamentally important. And I don't know what will reconnect you, not that you need to be reconnected, but the many, many, many other millions of people who are not going to get a chance to work shoulder to shoulder, castrating lambs or repairing sewers. But everybody somehow or another, in my view, needs to get reconnected to the important things.