763 A Spiritual Path for Success with Erwin McManus

“WHY” IS NOT AN EVOLUTIONARY QUESTION. Growing up, I had more imaginary friends than real friends. I would play games with myself to keep myself happy. I was very lonely. I felt insecure. But as I got older, I was able to find meaning and purpose. That allowed me to feel connected to the people around me. We need to have hope and meaning. It’s what makes us human. On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I dive deep into why humans are always searching for a “why:” Erwin McManus. Erwin is an iconoclast, artist, and cultural thought leader known for his integration of creativity and spirituality. He is the founder and Lead Pastor of Mosaic, a Los Angeles based church of faith recognized as one of America’s most influential and innovative churches. Erwin says that people who have false hope are actually better off than people who have no hope. He became the person he is today when stopped using his imagination to hide from the world and started using it to create a better world. So get ready to learn all about man’s search for meaning on Episode 763. Some Questions I Ask: Why do most conservative churches tell people to not express themselves? (7:27) Did you grow up believing in God? (9:00) If love is what we want, why do we suffer so much? (15:30) What does it mean to be alive? (20:00) What questions are you still seeking answers for? (29:00) Why do we care so much about meaning? (39:00) What are your core ideals and do they evolve? (58:00) In This Episode You Will Learn: Why many churches are stuck in the past (8:00) The thing that sets humans apart from other animals (14:00) How gratitude can help with depression and anxiety (22:00) Why humans need hope and purpose (31:00) Why you need to have a “psychologically diversified portfolio” (45:00) How to take control of your inner world (50:00) 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

  Episode number 763 with Erwin McManus.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, 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.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Charles Dickens said, "Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some." And Eckhart Tolle said, "Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance." Welcome to a special episode of the School of Greatness podcast where we have Erwin McManus, who is an artist, a cultural thought leader known for his integration of creativity and spirituality. He's the founder and lead pastor of Mosaic, which is a thriving church based in Los Angeles,

• 1:16Speaker 00

  recognized as one of America's most influential and innovative churches. And in this episode, we talk about how Mosaic came to be and Erwin's up and down relationship with religion. The difference between just surviving and truly being alive and thriving, and how you can tap into that thriving mentality in a moment. The power of gratitude and how it benefits your attitude and thinking. The big three beliefs that we all share, and so much more. This one I did not want to end, guys. I'm telling you, I was captivated the entire time. I didn't look at any notes. I was just so excited to dive into this. For whatever reason, when I have these types of conversations on spirituality,

• 2:00Speaker 00

  the meaning of life, why are we here? What is the reason for our life? What is our purpose, our mission? I just go down a rabbit hole and love the discoveries that I find. And I think you're going to love this as well. Make sure to share this with your friends. LewisHowes.com/763 with Erwin McManus. I'm telling you, guys, this is a game changer. Tag me on Instagram, @lewishowes. Tag Erwin McManus as well. Let us know what you liked about this. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

• 2:29Lewis Howes?

  Big thank you again to our sponsor and I am so excited about this interview, guys. This is someone that I didn't know about before until about a few weeks prior to interviewing him. And now I want to interview him all the time. I want to meet with them. I want to hang out with him. I'm telling you, you're gonna love this. Without further ado, the one and only Erwin McManus.

• 2:56Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. We've got Erwin McManus in the house, my man. Good to see you. Oh, it's so good to be with you. It's great to meet you in person. I've heard about Mosaic, the church that you are the founder of here in Hollywood since I moved here because I would go by it and there's a beautiful church on the corner over in Hollywood and there was always people outside doing things and they're always the most attractive looking people. They're always smiling. They're always very like fashion forward, young, and I was like, there's some energy here. You belong there. Right? Yeah, I belong there. And I've had a lot of friends go there who love it and rave about it. And a friend of mine, Joel Marion, is like, you've got to interview this guy. And I didn't even know who you were, but I knew the reputation of the church.

• 3:41Lewis Howes?

  And as I started doing research about you, I really said, okay, this is someone I got to interview. Even though I've never heard about you personally, I've heard about your work. That actually makes me really happy. No, the fact that you knew about the church, but you didn't know about me because really the church should never be about a person. It's true. That's true. And you grew up in El Salvador. I was born there and I was, I went back in Forteza around 10 years old. So you're 10 years old. You were a filmmaker as well, right? I've done a lot of things. Which means I couldn't hold a job. Exactly. Same here. Same here. But I love your fashion, man. You walked in here, I was like, I need you to be a style mate. You know, I wear the same like black shirt every day. It's a good black shirt. Just simple. But I was like, man, this guy's got style. And it seems like interesting, all these like,

• 4:23Lewis Howes?

  I guess pastors now of churches, they have, they have like this style. It seems like there's a trend of a lot of guys and ladies who are like leading a message or a messenger, but they're leading with a fashion forward, innovative approach. You've done that with the music at your church, with the aesthetic, the design. It's not just like your 1990s church anymore, right? Yeah, I would say one of the differences is that I'm 60 years old. And so I was.

• 4:52Erwin McManus?

  Doing this forty years ago.

• 4:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Erwin McManus?

  I think some of it is a lot of pastors grew up in church. And they grew up in really conservative environments and they grew up with a almost like a narrative that you should be against culture. And so they um, they really were not connected to the world around them. I grew up irreligious. I had never walked into a church in my life. And so when people were asking, well, how did you become more? Whatever fashion for, how did you become more creative, more edgy? I'm going, no, you don't understand. I was actually normal. This is what normal looks like. If you haven't been told you shouldn't.

• 5:27Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 5:27Erwin McManus?

  Express yourself and be creative and be imaginative.

• 5:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Why do most, I guess, traditional conservative churches? Tell people to hold back from expressing themselves? Or maybe they don't say it, but it feels that way. You kind of feel that judgment, like walking in, if you have something nice on, it's kind of like looked down upon.

• 5:43Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, I think if you just objective look at historically. Religions tend to attract people who are late adopters. People who are afraid of change, people who really hold on to the past. And so whether it's a synagogue or a mosque or a church or a temple. They tend to reflect the past rather than to create the future.

• 6:03Lewis Howes?

  Really? Why is that?

• 6:04Erwin McManus?

  I think people are oftentimes driven by fear. And for me, it was the opposite. See, I grew up irreligious. I didn't, I didn't have any of this framework. And so when I became a person of faith, I felt I was liberated to create a future. To imagine and to dream and to risk and, and that if there was a God, he is the most creative being in the universe. Since he created the universe, so how in the world would I hold on to the past when he's the one who's supposed to be creating the future? And so it's just a very different view of reality for me. Like, I always tell people at Mosaic, the church should be the epicenter of human creativity. It should be the epicenter of imagination and beauty and wonder. And so, yeah, I love film, I love art, I love fashion, you know, I, I feel as alive when I'm directing a film.

• 6:48Erwin McManus?

  Then I did when I was, you know, when I'm speaking on Sunday.

• 6:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Erwin McManus?

  And I think we've created this unnecessary divide. Between what happens on Sunday or on Saturday or on Friday, depending on a person's faith. What happens every day in life, to me, everything is sacred and everything is beautiful and it's all an expression.

• 7:05Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 7:05Erwin McManus?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So did you grow up believing in God?

• 7:09Erwin McManus?

  I was an off and on kind of person. Sure, sure. Some days were like, okay. Yeah, and the best way I can describe it is my grandfather was an atheist who believed in reincarnation. Interesting. So I remember him driving us to a house telling us a little boy had died and that was him. And so he believed he was reincarnated from that young boy that died. And but but a lot of times people don't realize that Buddhism is actually a form of atheism. It's spiritual, but it's atheistic. And so my grandfather was like that. My grandmother was Roman Catholic, but we never went to mass. Right. So it was like so many people were. Christmas, maybe, or something. Yeah, that's right. And and then my mom, she was always on a spiritual journey. And so I remember one time she brought home a Buddha and, you know, and so my mind, we became Buddhists.

• 7:52Erwin McManus?

  And then she was reading the writings of Rabbi Kishner on why bad things happen to good people. And so then I go, okay, now we're Jewish, you know. I could tell she was always like processing and trying to figure things out. And my stepdad, he was just a good, solid, like pagan. You know, he, I don't think he ever had a belief system in his life. He worked in what we would call like creative underground economies. And so he, he had an alias and he had many different aliases and many different families and. Creative underground economies. Yeah. We're talking drugs, we're talking. We're just talking. Guns, we're talking. A lot of non-traditional forms of economic development. Sure, sure.

• 8:33Erwin McManus?

  So that was, that was the world I grew up in. And so I started reading two things that really affected me. I read every mythology book in the library before I was in sixth grade. Wow. And I'm not sure why, but I thought maybe in mythology I could figure out who I was and why we were here. Because I was really young when I began to feel a sense of disconnection and angst. And from probably the age of nine or 10. And so I ended up in a psychiatric chair when I was a kid. I was in and out of a hospital. I remember hearing my mom's stepdad said, we need to send those psychiatrists. We don't know what's wrong with him. I had nightmares for, you know, years and years and years and just some, you know. Some of the stuff everybody goes through that leaves you broken and shattered and disconnected from the world.

• 9:18Erwin McManus?

  And I found these writers, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asenoff and Andre Norton. They're all science fiction writers who are physicists. I found these imaginary worlds and dimensions you could travel to and worlds you'd go to and species you could find. And in my own heart, I began hoping that I was from another world and that this was an accident.

• 9:40Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 9:41Erwin McManus?

  And I know this sounds really bizarre, but probably by the time I was 10 or 11 years old, I'd convinced myself that I must be like a social experiment from another species.

• 9:49Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 9:50Erwin McManus?

  And so I was a really troubled kid, but you know what I've discovered is, I don't know who said this, it's almost like every story is true, but they're not all real.

• 9:59Erwin McManus?

  I had to create a story inside of myself just to try to survive. And a huge part of it for me has been this realization that even when people search for God, they're really just trying to search for themselves.

• 10:10Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 10:11Erwin McManus?

  You know, they're trying to find who they are, if their life matters, if they have significance, if their existence has meaning. And so I never deluded myself. I was never really trying to find some abstract reality. I was trying to make sense of me.

• 10:25Lewis Howes?

  I think a lot of us try to do that at times, right?

• 10:28Erwin McManus?

  I think that's the search we're all on.

• 10:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Erwin McManus?

  And that became a part of the mix of it all. So when I became a person of faith, I didn't, everybody talks about things like heaven and hell. That was so irrelevant to me. Why even think about anything after this life when you can't even survive this life?

• 10:44Erwin McManus?

  I wasn't looking for something that helped me after I took my last breath. I was trying to figure out how to live a life that would leave me breathless.

• 10:55Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So what do you think is the reason we're all here?

• 11:00Erwin McManus?

  I know this is the school of greatness. I actually do believe that there's greatness inside of every single person. I think that every human being is created in the image of God. And because that every human being has intrinsic value and that we're created to create. I wrote a book years ago called The Artisan Soul, and it's an anthropology. And what I argue in that book is what makes humans different than every other species is that we can actually materialize the invisible. There's no other species that can imagine a reality that has not existed and created. And we don't even realize it's what humans do because silvers just create silk. They don't wake up in the morning and decide what they're gonna do. Honeybees just create honey. It's just intrinsic to who they are. And I think that humans create futures.

• 11:43Erwin McManus?

  And that we're intrinsically created to create the good and the beautiful and the true. And I look at it, I think, I think human ideals are the best evidence of this. Like, for me, one of the best evidences of God are human ideals. Because there's this phenomenon called phantom pain, where if you lose an arm, you feel the pain of the arm for years and years and years. And you have the psychological memory, not of that arm, but that arm is still there. But you cannot have phantom pain if you don't lose something that wasn't once there. If it wasn't there, you cannot have phantom pain. And I look at the world and I think, we struggle for human ideals like peace. We've never known peace. Human history has never known peace. But we have the ideal of peace.

• 12:27Erwin McManus?

  We have the human ideal of a world without poverty. A world where no one is hungry. A world where every child is loved. A world without violence, a world without abuse. We have these ideals, but we've never known that reality. And a lot of people say, "I can't believe in God." And it's like this ideal. And I'm like, you believe in ideals every second of your life. And so every time you do a School of Greatness, you're actually experiencing phantom pain. You're saying there's something inside of you that there's no physical evidence of. But I believe it's there, we have to pull it out of you, you have to awaken it. I'm convinced that human ideals are our soul's phantom pain. That somehow we remember what it's supposed to feel like, to be like, to be human.

• 13:12Erwin McManus?

  And I think humans, we're created for love. We're created for beauty, we're created for goodness, we're created for community. We're created for intimacy. Otherwise, why would we long for these things that are so difficult to attain and sometimes seem almost inattainable?

• 13:28Lewis Howes?

  Why do we suffer so much, though? If love is what we want, intimacy, connection, why does it seem like a lot of times, people are going through so much anxiety, depression, disconnection, uncertainty, lack of focus, lack of mission, and they're not experiencing love on the deepest levels they could?

• 13:46Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, I think that's probably the most fundamental human question. It's how is it possible the thing we need most is the thing that is most elusive? We long for intimacy, but we fear it.

• 13:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Erwin McManus?

  And...

• 13:58Lewis Howes?

  We sabotage it, we mess it up.

• 14:00Erwin McManus?

  Yeah. It's... I think love is one of the reasons I have a hard time believing in a pure evolutionary theory. Because if we were just the outcome of evolution, we would have eliminated love a long time ago, because love makes you vulnerable.

• 14:15Lewis Howes?

  Very vulnerable.

• 14:16Erwin McManus?

  Love is what gets you killed, because a saber-tooth is gonna eat this woman that you care about more than yourself. If you're just interested in her...

• 14:24Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 14:25Erwin McManus?

  Then it's different.

• 14:26Lewis Howes?

  You're not trying to protect her.

• 14:27Erwin McManus?

  You know who gets the girl? The girl who doesn't love her, the guy who's still alive.

• 14:31Lewis Howes?

  That's true.

• 14:32Erwin McManus?

  Mr. Lifer. I'm going, how many times have you failed at love? Been damaged by love? Been betrayed by love? Then you wake up in the next morning, and you're going, I need to find love. I need to be loved. For me, it is probably the most powerful, driving, intrinsic proof that there's more going on than meets the eye. Because we can't seem to extricate love from us. You remember Star Trek? Right? The Vulcans were supposed to be like the evolution of human development, where we're finally emotionless. And yet somehow, we know that that's not life. That's just existence. Because if humans are at their core longing to be fully alive, what I know is that you feel most fully alive

• 15:16Erwin McManus?

  when you're most fully loved.

• 15:18Lewis Howes?

  That's the truth.

• 15:19Erwin McManus?

  And if you have all the success that the world measures, and you feel as if you've not found someone to love and someone to love you, you'll feel as if your life is a failure.

• 15:32Erwin McManus?

  Wow. So now wrap it all back to this little statement that Jesus says that God is love.

• 15:40Erwin McManus?

  And so I think that a lot of us aren't searching for God, we're searching for love and we crash into God. Say it one more time. Say, "We're not searching for God, we're searching for love." But while we're searching for love, we crash into God. Wow. I think that's what happened to me. I wasn't searching for Jesus, I wasn't searching for a relationship to some guy who lived 2,000 years ago, who died on a cross. It wasn't on my radar in any way. I was searching for love, I was searching for meaning, I was searching for intention. And in that journey, I found myself in an encounter that I would have never imagined. I still get on the platform at Mosaic and a lot of times I'll get up and I'll go, "I still can't believe I'm up here." Really? Yeah, I just had these moments where I'd just go,

• 16:25Erwin McManus?

  "Do you guys know how unexpected it is for me that I believe?"

• 16:32Erwin McManus?

  Because you didn't believe. No, I'm like that person who... You have a lot of voices in your head, I know you do. And I have so many voices in my head, they have to figure out which one's you. Yeah. Right? And I think that when we're at our worst, all the negative voices become our identity. Loud. Yeah, loud. And but a huge part for me was, like, I have these voices in my head, they're always questioning. I've never been a person... Human today. Oh, which is why I think my message works on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea. This is not a conversation from someone who doesn't wake up in the morning asking questions about everything. I wake up every day and I'm haunted with endless number of questions.

• 17:16Erwin McManus?

  I'm never under the illusion that I found all the answers.

• 17:22Erwin McManus?

  But what I do know is that in some odd way, without all the right answers or without all the complete answers, I experienced what it means to be alive. And that matters more than being right. Wow. What's it mean to be alive? You know, when you're alive, okay, when you're in love, sorry, this excites me. You know, when you're in love, everything gets heightened. Yeah. This is what it means to be alive. Because one time this secular journalist asked me, what does it feel like to believe in God? I go, you know, have you ever had that moment in your life where like the food tastes better and the rumors are more clear and distinct? And the colors are just brighter?

• 18:06Erwin McManus?

  I remember when I was driving when I was younger and I didn't know I needed glasses. My friend and I were playing this game where you're doing this alphabet thing. You have to find the letter A, B, C in words. And he kept winning and I thought he was cheating. And then as we're driving, he goes, wait a minute. Okay, tell me as soon as you can read that sign. And he could read it way before me. That's how I discovered I needed glasses. I only discovered I couldn't see clearly when I was with someone who could see clearly. And the first time I put on glasses, I realized leaves were distinct individual pieces on a tree. Not just blurs and shadows, yeah. I always thought they were beautiful. I didn't know that they were astonishing. That's the difference between surviving and being alive.

• 18:50Erwin McManus?

  When you're alive, you see the details and the beauty and the wonder. You know, a person who's just existing, every day they're, they struggle with depression and fear and anxiety. They see everything that's missing. They are haunted by all their disappointments. And they have not one more disappointment than the person that's fully alive. And not one more challenge or struggle or hardship. But the person who's alive somehow sees beauty in everything, sees wonder in things. And that's when I know I'm alive. Yeah. When I'm going, man, you cannot bring enough difficulty in my life to steal from me the wonder of taking this next breath. Wow.

• 19:26Lewis Howes?

  When someone's going through this feeling of not feeling alive, just surviving, depression, anxiety, seems like the world's against them, whatever, what's the first question they should ask themselves? To help move them out of that position?

• 19:40Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, I think when you're in that space, one of the most difficult things to do is to actually get perspective. Because when you're already depressed, when you're feeling anxiety, when you're overwhelmed with fear, that means that you've been in there so long that your world has not been consumed by every negative factor around you. So I would say is pick one thing that you can identify that's worth living for. Just pick one thing that you can be grateful for. If probably it was over 20 years ago, I actually wrote about gratitude, which seemed to be almost like, I don't know, cute philosophy, or, you know, lighthearted anthropology, but now,

• 20:22Erwin McManus?

  neuroscience is, and I actually have this phrase from a neuro clinic, that gratitude is the oil to the brain. It's a lubricant to the brain. That now neuroscience is finding that gratitude has this uncanny ability to keep our brain pliable, adaptable, and we are able to imagine and create when we're grateful. When we're ungrateful, we actually lose our capacity to think creatively and we lose our genius, we lose our brilliance, we lose our greatness. We don't usually connect gratitude with greatness. So when a person's struggling with fear, anxiety, or panic attacks, whatever, I would say the first thing you have to do is you have to find something to be grateful for. And then step into that gratitude, and if it's a person, go thank them.

• 21:06Erwin McManus?

  Whatever it is, find some way to express that gratitude, and it'll begin to lubricate your brain. I remember one time, years ago, my son, Aaron, he's 30 now, but my wife was an orphan, and I never knew my dad, and you know, grew up in that kind of... Combustible kind of family system. And so we knew our first kid was like an experiment. We're like, he's a social experiment. Let's see if we can create a A functioning human being. And one time we're in New York, years and years ago, we went up to Eastchester. And we were going back to Manhattan. And when we got into the taxi, I didn't have a lot of money or anything like that. I realized I left my wallet. My son said, Dad, I got you covered. He was like being a man, you know, he's like, I got you covered. You don't need to get your wallet. My wife was gonna bring it later.

• 21:49Erwin McManus?

  So we took this taxi to Manhattan. He paid for the taxi and then he left his wallet in the taxi. Oh, man. So we're in Manhattan, like one in the morning. And with no money, no ID, no credit cards, no phones. We have nothing. Oh, I think he might have had his cellphone. And he started panicking because we were like probably forty five minutes walk to our hotel, maybe an hour. And as we're walking, he was getting a little panicking, a little nervous. And he goes, I'm so sorry. He was so upset that he made this mistake. I'm like, it's okay, but don't worry about it, you know? And I said, okay, you're being fearful right now, you know? Because it was a little, it looked intense where we were.

• 22:34Erwin McManus?

  And I said, all right, buddy, you have this like part of your brain. It's kind of like the reptilian part of your brain. And right now it's on. You're afraid, you're angry, you're protective. You have almost like this acute sense of danger. You're hypervigilant. And I said, you can't solve the problems right now because that part of your brain is taking over. And if you can't let go of the fear and let go of the anxiety and let go of the stress, you can't access the part of your brain that unleashes imagination and creativity. So as we walked for this hour, we spent the time talking about how to solve problems. Like, who do you know anywhere in the country that could help us? Who do you know? What are the unforeseen materials that we have of human relationships? Our resource that we have? What can't you see? What can't you see?

• 23:19Erwin McManus?

  And it's funny, as we're walking, he goes, is there really such a thing as a reptilian brain? He goes, because I'm gonna use this and I want to make sure you're not just making this up. But I think there's this kind of dynamic when a person is under duress. The part of, I don't even wanna use brain, the part of your essence that you activate is the part that leaves you paralyzed. And if you can actually step away from that fear and that anxiety and begin to see that there's wonder and beauty and opportunity all around, it begins to activate the part of your brain that's full of imagination and creativity and beauty. And I made a decision when I was around 12 because I could feel myself disappearing into my internal world.

• 24:02Erwin McManus?

  Because I created an imaginary world inside of me that I felt was safer than the world outside of me. And I created a world inside of me that was much more interesting and a world that I fit in better. And I felt like I was having a hard time coming out.

• 24:14Lewis Howes?

  Of that world?

• 24:15Erwin McManus?

  Of that world, stepping back out. So I would go to school and I would disappear and the class would be gone. The teacher would just give up on getting my attention.

• 24:25Lewis Howes?

  Because you're in another world?

• 24:27Erwin McManus?

  I was just literally in another world. And every year I'd go to school and go, this is the year I'm gonna make A's. This is the year I'm gonna do well. And by the third or fourth day, I couldn't remember my classes. I just really couldn't connect to the outside world. And so I was a straight D student first through 12th grade. And I lived in this internal world and I couldn't explain it. And I tell my wife to this day, I was so comfortable in that world that the characters in that world are as real to me as the characters that you interact with every day. But I made a decision that I was either going to get lost in this internal world. If I was gonna use my imagination to hide from the world or I could use my imagination to create a better world. And that's the part of what shifted in my life.

• 25:11Erwin McManus?

  Because everything that you have is really your resource to either try to be self-protective or to create something more beautiful for other people.

• 25:20Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Man, that's powerful. I feel like a lot of people can relate to that. Maybe not as deep into a world that you were in, but I remember being like... You know, people have like imaginary friends, they like have dolls that they like wanna hang out with more than real people, you know. I used to have, played games all the time with myself because I felt very insecure and alone as a kid. And struggled in school as well, I couldn't really read and write, it was just like a struggle my whole, my whole schooling. So I was just like, I always played games with myself to just try to keep myself happy.

• 25:53Erwin McManus?

  Yeah.

• 25:53Lewis Howes?

  Try to find some sense of meaning and purpose. I remember I used to get in trouble a lot in school and I would go to the principal's office and I would just say over and over, "I wish I were dead." I would just say it to the principal over and over, "I just wish I were dead." Because I never felt like I had a meaning or purpose. I think a lot of people struggle with a sense of meaning and purpose. And I'm curious, you know, you've been through so much in your life and you said that there's these questions that haunt you still today. What are those three big things that haunt you every day? Or on a consistent basis, those questions that you're constantly like seeking the information towards?

• 26:28Erwin McManus?

  Yeah. I mean, I think as human beings, we ask an endless number of questions that are rooted in some very core fundamental issues. Years ago, I wrote in a book called Soul Cravings that every human being has three intrinsic cravings that unite us all together. And a lot of it is because, you know, I was studying Freud and Gestalt therapy and transactional analysis and, you know, I was watching, you know, reading Jung and Atler and all these guys and going, "Okay, wait a minute." Everyone's trying to understand what motivates human action. And everyone had different answers, but I thought, the question's really important. And so when I became a person of faith, I was really not, most people study the Bible

• 27:11Erwin McManus?

  for theology, I studied the Bible for anthropology and sociology. People wanna understand all this stuff about God and I'm like, "I really wanna understand all this stuff about us." And, and I think what I came to is that there are three intrinsic drives. Every human being has an intrinsic need for love, for intimacy, and there's an endless number of words around it, intimacy, you know.

• 27:32Lewis Howes?

  Connection.

• 27:33Erwin McManus?

  Connection, belonging, you know, all that. Every human being has an intrinsic need, not only just to be loved, but for hope. And every human being has to believe that tomorrow can be better than today. The moment you stop believing that tomorrow can be better than today, you actually move to despair. There's this, so it's odd if you look at it, okay, every one of us have this need for intimacy, to connect, to have human contact, to have, to be known and to know someone. Why is that? See, I think these are proofs of God. See, I, I think this is because you're designed in a certain way, just like you're designed to drink water, to eat food and to breathe air. But we just happen to, you know, because of some mathematical probability, we're, we just happen to need exactly the air that we have. Exactly.

• 28:18Erwin McManus?

  You know, we just happen to actually need the liquid that this earth is full of, that comes from the sky. I mean, it sounds like magic, right? The alchemist. Yeah, the aqueduct gets filled because the heavens open up and drop water on us. No wonder people dance to rain gods, you know? And we just happen to be able to eat the food that's on this planet. And I think it's the same way with, with love, that every human being is driven for love. And I think almost all of human history can be understood through love and hate and the way that we interact with each other. And so the great wars in history are not by people who are different from each other, but people almost exactly the same. And so you have the Hutus and Tutsis, you have the Protestants and the Catholics in Ireland, you know?

• 29:01Erwin McManus?

  And I mean, you have the North and the South and the civil war. You would think that we would be so fundamentally different. That's why we couldn't get along. It's because we're fundamentally the same. So if we're the same, why can't we get along? See, those are the questions we have to deal with. That's the question I wake up with every day. And then we have this also, this intrinsic drive for progress. Like every human being has to believe they can become more. I mean, think about this, your school of greatness is a declaration of a human intrinsic. Because you can't pull out of people anything that isn't in them. And I think this was for me a fundamental problem with faith. A lot of faith was trying to shove something down people's throats, to cram something into people. And I'm, I'm pretty much know, if I can't pull it out of a person, then I shouldn't be trying to put it into them.

• 29:45Erwin McManus?

  And because to me, that's coercion, that's manipulation. You want to pull out of a person what they're longing for, what they're searching for. And because then you don't have to worry, you don't have, there's a difference between giving a person something to drink and drowning a person in waterboarding. Right, right. Forcing it, trying to control. A lot of religion feels like waterboarding, not being given a cold drink. And that's one of the reasons why a lot of people have stepped away from religion. But think about this for a moment. When you talk about like faith, Yeah. Hope only exists in the future. Because a person who's Something that's better, a potential better than what I have now. Yeah, because if hope is in the past, it's called regret. Because you can't change the past.

• 30:27Erwin McManus?

  And oddly enough, like this guy named Paul in the Bible actually says that when something gives you hope, once you attain it, it's no longer a source of hope. Which is a really profound anthropological insight. And so, hope actually causes humans to be connected to the future. And this is one of the things was so odd for me when I became a person of faith, the way that Christians especially thought about the future. Like it was so fatalistic, so deterministic, they might have been atheists. Yeah. You know, because if you look at deterministic atheism, it says that the future is already set through a mathematical probability. And I'm like, that's the same thing that a lot of Christians say. The future is already set. And when Christians and atheists have this in common,

• 31:10Erwin McManus?

  they feel that they have no creative power to affect the future. See, I would never accept that level of powerlessness Yeah. in my life. And I think the future is dynamic and we affect the future. And so when I look at hope, it means that humans are designed to be connected to the future. And if you are connected to the past and disconnected from the future, you actually lose all hope. And one of the reasons I know these are intrinsics is that humans function best when they're loved. They function best when they have hope. And then there's this other dynamic, we function best when we have meaning. And it's a human intrinsic. It doesn't matter if you come up with a different conclusion than me. Right. Right? We all have different answers to all of life's problems and life's situations

• 31:54Erwin McManus?

  and, you know, reality and our worldview. But we're all the same in that we're all trying to answer the question, why? Which I think is so interesting that children ask the question, why? When it's the least relevant question for survival. The questions that matter for survival, the evolutionary questions are what, when, where, how. Like, okay, how did you get away when he got eaten? Yeah. How do I put a fire when I'm like freezing to death? Yeah, and the question why is not an evolutionary question. Then why do we ask it so much? See, I think it's because you're created with eternity. Inside of you, just like there's a electrical circuit that's catalyzing your heart to beat.

• 32:36Erwin McManus?

  And it sounds like magic that you're electricity, being formed into flesh and blood. I think that you're spirit, and your spirit's telling you, you need your why. You need to know why you exist, and you know why you're here. Really, if all we have is these 80 years, why would why matter at all? And then I look at humans, and I think, we are meaning machines. We not only give meaning to meaningless things, we make meaningful things meaningless. Yes. I think a huge part of your podcast is trying to align meaning for people. Stop wasting your life in the things that are meaningless and start spending your life on things that are meaningful. Absolutely. Think about it, it's like right now, we're communicating.

• 33:21Erwin McManus?

  It is what we call it, right? We're transmitting meaning. Yes. But all we're actually doing is creating sounds. And we, as a species, learned how to create sounds that were able to transmit complex and detailed images into the other person's brain. Crazy, and have a feeling, an emotion. Yeah, and all this is seeping through us, and we're actually transmitting something real. I mean, what's more real? We're passing to each other, or me handing you a book, or passing you a fork, or giving you a thousand dollars? Because if I give you $10,000, that's always outside of you. But when I speak into your life, it goes into the essence of your soul.

• 34:04Erwin McManus?

  When you affect me, it changes me, and it becomes a part of who I am. So something really powerful going on here. And we, humans, are meaning machines. I mean, think about it, there are tribes in Africa. They talk by clicking. I mean, I hope I didn't say anything profane or anything like that, you know? And, pero si cambio la idioma en que te estoy hablando, no me puedes entender. Because the moment I change my language, it no longer translates meaning to you. And we humans have this incredible way of creating meaning in everything. So colors have meaning. I mean, behind me, you write love, but it's not just that it's the word love. It's how love is written. It's interesting that love tends to always have soft, round. Yeah. Feeling, yeah.

• 34:46Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, because you're not gonna write love with hard angles, with triangular images. You're gonna write love because it has this kind of feel. Because we give meaning to everything. And then you have all these different colors, and the colors have meaning. We humans create meaning every second of our lives. And that, for me, is the fundamental question. Not, okay, not what you're doing to try to get love. Not what you actually believe is bringing you hope. Because you know, it's odd, a person who has false hope is actually doing better than a person who has no hope. Right? Isn't that crazy? Yeah, they have something they're looking for. Yeah, I'm going, are you out of your mind? You actually believe it's gonna happen? And they do, and it drives them forward, and it gets them up every day.

• 35:31Erwin McManus?

  Gives them purpose, they work harder, they're more happy. See, in this, I'm really pragmatic, I'm going, wow, this is how powerful hope is. Even if false hope works. Then you can actually find something you should be hopeful for. It changes everything. Yeah. And then all of us have this drive to find meaning, or to create meaning, or to make our lives meaningful. Why do we care so much about meaning? See, that, again, it's an intrinsic proof that you are not time-dated.

• 36:01Erwin McManus?

  That you have something eternal within you. Because meaning is an eternal question. It's not a temporal question. It's not a question that survival demands. And I think this is a part of what makes us fundamentally unique as human beings. And I think it's part of what... Drives us almost to madness, too. Hmm. Because I thought things were meaningful that were not. Like what? You know, when you're young, right? I mean, I played sports, right? You know, and I'm not from El Salvador. I should have been playing soccer, but my stepdad insisted I play football. I'm not physically really created for football, but I thought football was the most meaningful thing in my life. Yeah. And when I stopped playing football, my mom actually called the college to make sure I was not so depressed

• 36:46Erwin McManus?

  that I wouldn't do something harmful. Because it was the most meaningful thing in my life. Right. And I mean, I broke a bunch of bones in the back of my hand. I played four more games while those bones broke without going to the doctor. The same thing. Because I thought football was so important. It was life. What position did you play? I played running back. Yeah. Where'd you go to school? I didn't play in college. I just played in high school. Got you, got you. Yeah, yeah. But I thought it was the most meaningful thing in the world, right? And then all of a sudden, one day I realized, why am I doing this? Like, there's no meaning in this. In fact, it's almost tragic to think that I thought it was so meaningful when it wasn't that significant. I was coaching my son. He was playing hockey when he was like 10 years old.

• 37:29Erwin McManus?

  I know nothing about hockey, but I was his coach, you know? But he was the best player on our team. He really wanted to be a good teammate, and the other kids started getting upset because he was scoring all the goals. And he's very empathetic in that way. So one game, he's saying, "Dad, I'm just gonna pass the puck. You know, I'm just gonna, I'm not gonna score because I want other parents to like me." So we're playing and he's passing the puck, passing the puck. We're getting killed. Because our kids just couldn't score. And I brought him over. I said, "Aaron, I need you to score." He goes, "No, Dad. Team game." It's the other way around, right? You know? And he goes, "Yeah, team game. When they pass you the puck, score." Score. Yeah. That's your role. And I said, "Aaron, take the puck and score." It got a little intense. And he looked at me, he was ten, and he said,

• 38:14Erwin McManus?

  Dad, in twenty years, this game isn't gonna matter.

• 38:16Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy, that a ten-year-old had that perspective.

• 38:19Erwin McManus?

  He's been listening to the wrong messaging. He's been listening to what I say to adults, not what I say to children. And I remember looking at him and said, well, could you go out there and pretend it matters? He goes, oh, I could do that.

• 38:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Erwin McManus?

  He's ten, right, you know? And he goes out there and pretends, but he knew intrinsically that this wouldn't matter. But that was a gift in that moment, but most of us, we give ourselves like wealth and fame and power. I mean, how many times have people just given their whole life to be famous rather than to build their life to be not known, but be worth knowing? Right, you know? And how many times have people mistaken greatness for fame? And fame for greatness? And I think in this book, I actually talk about how fame is what you do for yourself, but greatness is what you do for others.

• 39:09Lewis Howes?

  It's powerful.

• 39:10Erwin McManus?

  You know, and so when you ask like, how do you give yourself sometimes the wrong thing? And think about it, have you ever made a mistake in your life and you just felt like your life is over?

• 39:17Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 39:18Erwin McManus?

  See, I've had, yeah, I've had moments like, even, I remember in high school, junior high, thinking, I don't wanna wake up tomorrow, I just wanna die.

• 39:25Lewis Howes?

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 39:26Erwin McManus?

  And I would have to tell myself then, in twenty years, this isn't gonna matter.

• 39:30Lewis Howes?

  I never had that perspective. I was just like so deep in the pain and suffering, I was like, what am I gonna do tomorrow to survive, you know? It wasn't until much later, you know, in the last ten years of my life, where I started to learn like, this isn't gonna matter, this is gonna pass. Like, everything's gonna be okay in six months, a month, whatever. But most people, I think, struggle with perspective. And finding something to be grateful for, what you talked about. For me, gratitude is one of the cornerstones of my life, especially when things are wrong, or seeming wrong.

• 40:02Erwin McManus?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Lewis Howes?

  A lot of it is just an illusion, or the, uh, the... The story we give it, the meaning we give this experience. And I've started to look at more and more challenges in my life as beautiful experiences, as lessons to make me stronger for the future. And they actually give me more hope. I'm like, okay, this is happening for a reason. For me to learn something so that when someone wants to commit suicide in 10 years, I have the courage to be able to know how to stand in that fear with peace and grace and love and not freak out or whatever it is, just probably what you've been through. You've been able to stand on your church or any stage and connect through experiences

• 40:44Lewis Howes?

  of pain and struggle and the crazy world that you were living in as opposed to everything has been perfect.

• 40:51Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, it is an ironic, kind of almost like a psychological dynamic of putting all your eggs in one basket. And we don't oftentimes realize that we may be the basket we put all the eggs in. See, if our whole life is about us being loved and our whole life is about us having a future and a hope and our whole life is about us having meaning for us, then all the eggs are in one basket. But when you say, no, my focus is going to be loving people and just the love that I need is going to come my way, but I'm just going to focus my life on loving people. I'm going to focus my life on giving other people hope. I'm going to focus my life on helping other people find meaning. And I'm going to find my meaning in serving others, not in having others serve me.

• 41:35Erwin McManus?

  Then you've actually diversified. So if you're even looking at it from an economic perspective, like, you know, a lot of us don't have a psychological diversified portfolio.

• 41:44Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 41:44Erwin McManus?

  Our whole lives are about ourselves. And the way I look at it is that every day of my life, someone I love is doing well. Every day of my life, someone I love is moving forward. Every day of my life, someone I love is doing something awesome. And so there isn't a day in my life there isn't something to celebrate because it's not all about me.

• 42:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow. It's interesting. When I'm going through hard times, it's really hard to have the perspective to not think of like, I need help right now. I need to get out of this feeling, this experience, like someone throw me a bone, right? That's the time, I think, when you feel the most challenged, the most insecure, the most doubt, anxiety, overwhelmed, the best thing you can do is call three or five friends that you care about. Just like you said, like, call five people that day and tell them what you appreciate and acknowledge about them.

• 42:33Lewis Howes?

  Like, be a listening person to them. Give them love, hope, inspiration. Tell them they're doing a good job, like, get out of yourself and serve other people, and you're gonna feel a thousand times better.

• 42:45Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, that's a good nuance that you have there, because a lot of people would call three to five friends to tell them what they're going through.

• 42:50Lewis Howes?

  Give me help. Give me support.

• 42:52Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, rather than calling them to give them support. I love that.

• 42:57Lewis Howes?

  We still wanna talk about challenges we're going through, because that makes us human and allows us to, like, process and express certain things, so I don't think you should just mask all your feelings and emotions. But I don't think you should sit in for too long and focus out. Like, the more you can just give to other people, smile at strangers, the more you can just help people. I think it was Zig Ziglar or someone like that in the personal development space says, "If you wanna achieve all your goals, help everyone else achieve their goals." And it's like, just focus out as much as you can, and you'll attract the love, you'll attract the meaning.

• 43:29Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 43:30Lewis Howes?

  So what's the biggest question, then, that you wrestle with the most? Is it... Yeah, cuz you connected with me when I said, "If we're so similar, why do we always fight in the world?" Is that one of the biggest questions you wrestle with, or...

• 43:43Erwin McManus?

  I mean, sometimes it's very practical, it's just the everyday stuff of, "How do I help people I love move from a deep sense of inadequacy to a place where they have this internal strength to know that they have everything they need to live the life they're created to live?" I wish every day I was just trying to answer the big questions of life, but a lot of times, I'm just trying to help people I care about.

• 44:07Lewis Howes?

  How do you help people you care about who maybe always seem to be a victim or are struggling, or that never seem to get a hold of, like, their purpose or their mission, and you just want to see them thrive, but they continue to suffer year after year?

• 44:21Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, I think one of the things that you have to realize is when a person is in a perpetual pattern, negative pattern, that they almost can't hear you right away. Like wherever you and I agree, communication happens easily and naturally. If we disagree, we have a more difficult time understanding each other. If we violently disagree, you will distort what I have said, and I will distort what you've said, and turn it into a more violating response. Yeah. Does that make sense? Of course. You know, so when a person's in a really bad place, you can't, you can make the mistake of thinking they're unteachable because they don't respond well to what you're speaking into their life. And you have to realize that a lot of it is that

• 45:05Erwin McManus?

  they're in a, in a, in a really, almost in a distortion zone, where they just, they're reinterpreting everything in the negative. And it takes a little, you have to be patient with people and help them through. And there's this interesting like place in the Old Testament with this guy named Elijah, I think it was. And he has a great moment and he has a horrible moment when he goes running for his life and he goes out into the wilderness and he hides under a bush and he just like, just wanna die. And it says the first thing that happens is that an angel came and said, and brought him food and drink and said, just eat and sleep. Yeah. And I think sometimes we just are too hard on each other. Yeah, we demand a lot from each other. Yeah, you know, and I'm like, hey, just, just get some food,

• 45:47Erwin McManus?

  get some sleep, cuz you're, you know, you're, you're inside of this body and if your body's not doing well, you're, you're not gonna do well. You're not gonna think clearly. Yeah, so a lot of times I ask people, look, just realize that you have to stop and take care of yourself. Just eat and sleep. And like, I'm a person who doesn't sleep hardly at all. I mean, I don't sleep very much. I've never slept. I mean, in my whole life, I've been like that. And, and so I have to like work at sleeping. Practice every day, yeah. You know, and getting to sleep and things. And, and a lot of it is cuz I process so much stuff and I do all my work in my head, so it's hard to not be at work. And you're running all that stuff down. So I know it's like to be in the space. And my wife says to me, it's too loud in bed. I can hear your brain. Wow.

• 46:31Erwin McManus?

  And she's, just turn it off. I can't just turn it off. So I think I'm empathetic going, I know that I can't just go, boom, it's all shut down. I'm not worried anymore. I'm not stressed out anymore. I'm not anxious anymore. I realize there's a process that I have to go through. And, and some of it is, it is really almost like a praxis where you have to go, okay, I just need 30 minutes where I'm just quiet. Just alone, I just decompress and I just get into my own like space.

• 46:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 46:57Erwin McManus?

  And I do think this is why historically, things like prayer meditation are so important. Whatever you choose to do, you just got to find some way to block out the outside world. And get in touch with what's going on inside of you. Cause I think some of it is, when you're not paying attention to your inner world, it's almost like it's Parliament out of control. Everyone's screaming and yelling. You have to step in and say you're in charge.

• 47:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Erwin McManus?

  This conversation is a conversation that I am the head of. And I'm gonna, and I'm gonna take on this conversation.

• 47:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I think when you're not in control of your inner world, every little thing in the outer world becomes amplified, like you've said. Everyone who's stopped at a red, at a green light, you get mad at and you react to. Everyone that honks at you, you wanna flip off and fight. Everyone that says something to you, you respond with a sense of fear and anxiety.

• 47:45Erwin McManus?

  Yeah. And by the way, that is actually why I wrote The Way of the Warrior, was that I don't write books going, what will sell? I, I write books based on, what are the real things that we're grappling with? And I found even in my own life, with a 27 year old daughter, a third year old son, me being 60, and knowing that they're struggling through some of the same stuff that I've struggled through. They face crises and challenges and, you know, they have moments of, of deep internal angst. And my kids are really thoughtful and intelligent. And sometimes I envy people who don't seem to spend time thinking about life. You know?

• 48:22Lewis Howes?

  They're peaceful.

• 48:24Erwin McManus?

  But if you are at all introspective or reflective about life, you're gonna find yourself sometimes tormented and in turmoil. And a huge part of the process of moving toward peace is slowing yourself down.

• 48:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Erwin McManus?

  And allowing your inner world to be organized the way that you wanna express it in your outer world, you know? And it's funny, cause my kids always tell me like, I'm, I'm like Zen. Cause I, I just don't lose my temper. I just, you know? I mean, it's probably been 60, 40 years since I've lost my temper. But when I was a kid, I had a violent temper.

• 49:00Lewis Howes?

  All the time.

• 49:01Erwin McManus?

  I was the guy that punched the walls.

• 49:02Lewis Howes?

  Me too.

• 49:03Erwin McManus?

  Okay.

• 49:03Lewis Howes?

  Every moment I felt like defensive.

• 49:05Erwin McManus?

  Yeah.

• 49:06Lewis Howes?

  Wanted to fight or scream or?

• 49:08Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, I was that guy, you know? And what I realized was that anger, rage, was me proving I was powerless.

• 49:20Lewis Howes?

  So powerful.

• 49:20Erwin McManus?

  That powerful people are never out of control. It's powerless people who are out of control. So when you see that person being physically violent or expressing a rage or cussing that person out, or, I mean, I see people stop their cars in the streets and get out.

• 49:37Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 49:38Erwin McManus?

  All right, here's a person.

• 49:39Lewis Howes?

  I've been that guy before.

• 49:41Erwin McManus?

  They're not just out of control, they're powerless.

• 49:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 49:45Erwin McManus?

  And that's their powerlessness manifest.

• 49:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 49:48Erwin McManus?

  And what I decided in my life was that I would not allow any circumstance to be more powerful than my internal world. And I will not allow the external world to be more powerful than my internal world. And if my internal world is stronger than the world around me, then nothing in the outside world.

• 50:04Lewis Howes?

  Can affect you.

• 50:04Erwin McManus?

  Can affect you. That's why people say, I don't know what, I don't know what got into me. I said, nothing got into you, it got out of you.

• 50:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 50:10Erwin McManus?

  And just the circumstance, it pierced into your soul and it let out what was really there.

• 50:16Lewis Howes?

  I think Viktor Frankl talked about that in his book about, you know, when he was in concentration camps, you know, people would do all these horrible things to him and he just kept a sense of peace and focused on his reactions.

• 50:26Erwin McManus?

  That's Man's Search for Meaning.

• 50:28Lewis Howes?

  Man's Search for Meaning.

• 50:28Erwin McManus?

  Which originally was called Death Camp and Existentialism.

• 50:32Lewis Howes?

  Wow, interesting.

• 50:33Erwin McManus?

  But that's not a selling title.

• 50:34Lewis Howes?

  That's not.

• 50:36Lewis Howes?

  And then, you know, I heard stories about Mandela, where he was just treated horribly in prison. And yet, from what I understand, always responded with a sense of peace and love. And in fact, after he got out, like, welcomed those guards into his home and dinners and things like that. So for me, and then Martin Luther King talks about, you know, never getting angry at someone's hate towards you. You know, because you lose your power around that. You give someone else the power when you react, something around that he said.

• 51:06Erwin McManus?

  So you're creating a human meta-narrative.

• 51:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Erwin McManus?

  Whether you realize it or not.

• 51:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:11Erwin McManus?

  You're talking about Mandela.

• 51:13Lewis Howes?

  And Viktor Frankl.

• 51:14Erwin McManus?

  Viktor Frankl and you probably could have.

• 51:16Lewis Howes?

  Martin Luther King.

• 51:16Erwin McManus?

  Martin Luther King and Gandhi. All right, and you're just naturally painting a picture of human ideals.

• 51:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Erwin McManus?

  This is what humanity is supposed to look like.

• 51:28Lewis Howes?

  Or that's what's possible.

• 51:29Erwin McManus?

  Right, yeah, but if there is nothing beyond the material world.

• 51:35Erwin McManus?

  Then they're not in any way different than Mussolini, and Genghis Khan, and Hitler. But yet, nothing in your soul tells you that those are the aspirations of what it means to be human. Think about this just from going back to this earlier conversation, because I thought about it like, have you ever seen some act and you thought that was inhumane? But the only, the only species that can commit an inhumane act is a human. When you look at a tiger eating a gazelle, you don't think it's in animal, you know, or a killer whale, right, eating a sail, that's just, that's just life.

• 52:18Erwin McManus?

  But when a human does something that an animal does in the wild, we intrinsically know it's inhumane. How is it possible for a human being to be so self-aware that something a human does seemingly naturally would be, oh, unnatural? And that's why, Lewis, I think, I think there's a divine narrative in us, that our souls actually keep whispering to us, there's more inside of you than you know. Just to point that out. You just don't realize you're preaching the gospel.

• 52:54Lewis Howes?

  I know. You gotta meet people where they're at, to the warp of the masses.

• 53:02Erwin McManus?

  No, you believe this.

• 53:04Lewis Howes?

  Of course.

• 53:04Erwin McManus?

  You've made it your whole life.

• 53:05Lewis Howes?

  Of course, yeah.

• 53:06Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, and what I would say is, you're exactly right. You're aspiring for the great, not just your greatness. You're aspiring to follow the greatness in all people.

• 53:14Lewis Howes?

  That's my mission.

• 53:15Erwin McManus?

  So then you believe there's this, this, this thread throughout the human spirit that interconnects us all together, that it's more than math.

• 53:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. You talked about ideals and beliefs in the beginning, like this belief system and these ideals. What would you say is like a core ideals that you think is the most aspirational ideals and beliefs? And how often do your beliefs evolve over time?

• 53:45Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, that's a good question, because I think that...

• 53:47Lewis Howes?

  Because when you were 10, you had a belief system, and then it evolved. And then when you were 20 or 30, maybe you're like, oh, I thought this was the truth, but maybe there's something else here.

• 53:57Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, I think a part of it is, so oftentimes, we put... Data and truth in the same category. Or information and truth. And I think I had the other, I'm the opposite. I was a person who didn't find it easy to commit to truth. So I wasn't, I was never a dogmatic person. So a lot of people who are highly dogmatic, they go through dramatic shifts of, I believe this, now I believe this, now I believe this. I was always more fluid. I was like, I don't know. You know, I can see value in everything. Again, studying Norse and Greek and Roman and Egyptian mythology and never read them with any level of judgment.

• 54:42Erwin McManus?

  Like I never thought to myself, this is less valuable than this, and less valuable than this, and less valuable than this. I always was just looking for what, where's the story that I'm in? And what makes sense to me? And it's kind of odd, like every mythology seems to have the good guy, the bad guy, and the dad who's trying to, you know, work between them, right? Sure. And isn't that what seems to be going on inside of us? There's that part of us that aspires to be great and good, and the part of us that just wants to consume and take. And then there's this, almost this other voice trying to call us to who we were created to be. And I don't think my beliefs changed in terms of, in the dogmatic way.

• 55:25Erwin McManus?

  I think my beliefs were always growing and evolving and changing. I think some of my beliefs were hopes. You know, like I didn't have a lot of proof, growing up, that the world was good. But I believed the world was good. That there could be goodness to be found out there. In fact, a lot of it, before I ever had any belief in Jesus Christ, I had this aspiration to end poverty in the world. I had an aspiration to do something truly humane in the world. And that's why it was odd for me when I would hear Christians say, oh, no, no, there's nothing good in you unless, you know, you give your life to Jesus. I'm like, I don't think you got that one right.

• 56:07Erwin McManus?

  I think that every human being aspires to do something good unless they've been so broken and corrupt. I don't think it's the way humans are intended to be. I think that's the deviation. I actually think we're created for good and that good just feels right. Yeah. You know, and Good feels good. It does, you know, and, and you're healthy when you're there. I mean, obviously, coming to faith in Jesus was a huge, both psychological and worldview shift for me. I remember studying philosophy in college. I was one of those guys who had no, no reason to be in school because I was just studying philosophy, right? And we studied Christianity for like five minutes. My professor would get up there. I mean, we spent so much time on Socrates

• 56:51Erwin McManus?

  and Plato, Aristotle, and Locke, Hume, Descartes, I mean, everybody got a lot of time, but Christianity got like three minutes. The guy said, this is the book that says that God is love. And he read this passage about war in the Old Testament. He said, isn't that ridiculous? How in the world could this be the God of love? And he laughed and I laughed. And in my mind, I thought, yeah, that's not a viable option. You know, so it took me about two or three minutes to decide Christianity was not a viable option for my life. And so when I began to encounter more this message of Jesus, it was disruptive. And I would argue with people who believed in God and, and they were terrible at arguing. Bad at it. It's just so bad, you know? You just kept justifying why you were right.

• 57:34Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, no, it's exactly right. So in college, I would just go, okay, if they believe in God, I'm gonna argue that there is no God. And if they don't believe in God, I'm gonna argue there's a God. I'm just gonna like work this thing through, you know? And really, a lot of it for me was, I keep losing the argument. I mean, I keep winning the argument, but I like them better than I like myself. You like the Christians? I did. It just happened to me, some good ones. Yeah. You know, they seemed like they were kind and filled with joy. And so I wish I could say it was intellectual and rational and all academic, but a lot of it wasn't. A lot of it was essential. That what kind of human do I want to be? And at that point, I was pretty much a, gosh, I would rather believe the wrong thing and be the right kind of person than believe the right thing and become the wrong kind

• 58:19Erwin McManus?

  of person. Because I met a lot of people who believe in God who are so judgmental and dogmatic and condemning. But then I knew a lot of my atheist friends who were arrogant and judgmental and condemning, and it was just both. And that was a huge shift for me. But I don't know why, but I didn't feel like a shift in belief, because I always wanted to believe that humans had intrinsic value. And I wanted to believe that we mattered. I wanted to believe that we were not specks of dust. So maybe I was predisposed to believe, if you could look at it like that. Because when I would study scientific determinism, I'd go, alright, wait a minute, this means that there's no creativity, there's no free will, that the future's completely set, that choice is an illusion.

• 59:04Erwin McManus?

  I go, yeah, if that's right, I'd rather be wrong. And so some of it's really pragmatic for me. I look and go, what's the view of reality that makes me most fully alive and allows me to do the most good in the world? And the most beautiful and creative and expressive. You know, and then when I believe that you've been imagined to imagine and created to create, that you're both a work of art and an artist at work, it's changed my whole view of reality. And that's why I started Mosaic. I mean, Mosaic, the name is just an art form. It's an art form of broken and fragmented pieces that are brought together to create something beautiful, especially when light strikes through it. Wow. So I said, hey, look, we're gonna be straight up, we're all broken and fragmented,

• 59:47Erwin McManus?

  we're the irregular pieces of the world, and we're gonna come together and we're gonna believe that God's gonna create something beautiful, especially when he strikes his light through us. It's got the chills. You know? That's beautiful. And that was why I started Mosaic. And I said, look, if you need to pretend you're perfect, this is not the place for you. If you need to pretend you got it all together, you're just gonna feel really uncomfortable here. If you need to follow someone who pretends they're perfect, this is not the place for you. You're not the guy. Yeah. My wife would always say, could you quit telling people that you don't know what you're doing, or you don't know where you're going? And I go, no, I'm always gonna tell them the truth. That way, when I actually know where I'm going, they'll know I'm telling the truth. And I think it's really helped, because all the brokenness that my life came out of gives people hope.

• 1:00:31Erwin McManus?

  I don't write about ideals that I've never experienced. I write out of the essence and struggle and reality of my own life. You know, and I've needed peace in my life. And then I'm so angry about

• 1:00:46Erwin McManus?

  the condition of our culture right now. And how people just attack each other and they just destroy each other. And social media has become such a negative space.

• 1:00:55Lewis Howes?

  The bullying and yeah.

• 1:00:56Erwin McManus?

  We want to find everyone in their worst moment. We gotta change the narrative here. We have to be for each other.

• 1:01:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Erwin McManus?

  And I think it's funny, there's this woman in the Bible called Rahab, and she's a prostitute. And she makes one choice that changes her life. And there are four women in the genealogy of Jesus, and one of them's a prostitute.

• 1:01:16Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:01:17Erwin McManus?

  People will talk about that.

• 1:01:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Erwin McManus?

  And as I tell people, it's like, you're just one choice away from the life you've always longed for. Like, don't let anybody tell you that you've trashed it for 40 years and you know, it's too late for you. You're just, all you need right now is just one good choice. And that, that one good choice is gonna get momentum in your life.

• 1:01:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Erwin McManus?

  And just keep moving forward. So I, you know, I was a straight D student, first to 12th grade, I couldn't get into college. My English teacher, my last day of high school, said, "You will never make it."

• 1:01:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:01:47Erwin McManus?

  And um.

• 1:01:49Lewis Howes?

  Million copies later, for books.

• 1:01:50Erwin McManus?

  So I'm going. I just want to be a metaphor that it's never too late. And everyone has something of value inside of them.

• 1:01:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I love that. I feel like I can connect with you a lot on your story and your life and your experiences. And you've got this book, I have a few questions final for you, but this book is called The Way of the Warrior, An Ancient Path to Inner Peace. And the reason I'm attracted to this, when Joel told me about it, I said, "Okay, I gotta read this in an interview." Erwin, is because for my whole life, I was focused on success and accomplishment and achievement to gain love, right? Because when I would win in sports, I would get acknowledgement. Friends would like me, you know, parents, everything. So I just said, "I have to win at all costs." Everything I do. That translated into relationships, and that's never a good thing.

• 1:02:38Erwin McManus?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Lewis Howes?

  Uh, business, everything. I came from a very loving, compassionate place. Until something was on the line and I really needed to win. Then it was just like, nothing else matters. We are winning at all costs, right? And up until I hit about 30, I'm 35 now, almost 36.

• 1:03:00Lewis Howes?

  I was so accomplished, but never felt a sense of inner peace. And then I went on a journey for the last five, six years of like reinventing myself and rediscovering what is greatness, what is success. And I told Maria Shriver, when I had her on, I was like, you know, for me, you can't achieve greatness without inner peace. It doesn't matter all the money and the success and accomplishments. If you feel a lack of inner peace, I don't feel like you're living a great life. And if you're not living a life of service, if your mission isn't attached to helping other people, I don't feel like you can find that inner peace as well. I'm not saying you need to save the world and hunger in the world, but there's gotta be a part of your life that is on a mission to help the people around you.

• 1:03:45Lewis Howes?

  I think that helps you bring more inner peace. So for me, greatness is really around cultivating the gifts that we have within us, bringing them out to pursue our dreams. And in that pursuit, making the maximum impact we can on people around us, but also finding that inner peace. And so I love that you talk about being a warrior is finding inner peace. And the back of your book here, just everything you talk about resonates with me. So I'm excited about this and I want everyone to go get a copy because I think it's gonna be very powerful for you. So the book's out now. You guys can go get it at bookstores, also where, online, what's your website for this?

• 1:04:24Erwin McManus?

  You go to earlmakemanus.com or Amazon.

• 1:04:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's up everywhere. I want to make sure you guys go get this book, get one for a friend as well. And I love this at the top, it says, "In order to be ready for a battle, you must first know peace." And I think that's the thing we are seeking the most, you know, where we're facing daily wars around us, whether it be trying to find a new job or career, build our business, the relationship struggles we're in. And we're always gonna be struggling if we don't know how to find peace within us first. Would you agree or not?

• 1:04:52Erwin McManus?

  Absolutely. No, I just gotta say on a personal level, Lewis, one, you're really, both a really fascinating person and just like a most incredibly immediately likeable. It's really beautiful. By the way, when I wrote the book, it's crazy, I was driving down Hollywood, down Vine, and I was with my wife. I have a vivid imagination. I heard this voice and I heard this, the first line of the book, it was, "The warrior's not ready for battle until they have come to no peace." This is the way of the warrior. And I looked over at my wife and said, "I have my next book." And I love Japanese culture. I used to go to Japan a lot and love all the Japanese films and it was.

• 1:05:33Lewis Howes?

  Last Samurai.

• 1:05:34Erwin McManus?

  Oh, my God. I have a Last Samurai poster in my house.

• 1:05:37Lewis Howes?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:05:38Erwin McManus?

  Of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, signed by Ang Lee.

• 1:05:41Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:05:41Erwin McManus?

  You know, and I wrote this book as if it was an old samurai writing to a young samurai.

• 1:05:46Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:05:46Erwin McManus?

  Passing on the wisdom. And I think the problem is that we have people who are at war, but they're not at peace. And so I want to answer an individual and a global question because the world will never know peace until we have inner peace. War rages across the world because war rages within our hearts. And the only way we're going to have world peace is through inner peace. And so this is a battle for world peace, one life at a time.

• 1:06:14Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. I love this, man. I'm so excited for this. Guy, I didn't even get to any of the questions I had here.

• 1:06:20Erwin McManus?

  I'm sorry about that.

• 1:06:21Lewis Howes?

  It's all good. I was just so fascinated by everything. It's actually good when I never have to read a question off of here because it means I'm just so enamored by the message. We didn't even get to like, you just had cancer a couple of years ago. You went through surgery and now you're cancer free. I'd love to know what Kanter has taught you about life. And I don't know if we have time for this now. I don't know if you have to run or.

• 1:06:45Erwin McManus?

  I'll give you my quick answer because when people say to me, are you cancer free? I always tell them, I was always free of cancer because it never owned me.

• 1:06:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:06:52Erwin McManus?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Lewis Howes?

  That's great. Real quick answer then, what has that experience, the illusion of having cancer, taught you about?

• 1:07:00Erwin McManus?

  No, not an illusion. It was a reality, but we're all dying.

• 1:07:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Erwin McManus?

  But some of us are gripped by the fear of death. And I think the only reason we're afraid of death is because we're actually afraid to live. And what I discovered when I was told I had cancer and I didn't know how long I would live was this beautiful realization that I was not overwhelmed with regret because I felt like I'd lived every day of my life as fully as I knew how. And I can tell you that my family confirmed this to you. I never felt afraid. I never felt angry and never felt bitter. And I gave myself permission to feel all of it. Because to me, like, to be human is permissible. I don't need to pretend, you know, being a pastor or starting Mosaic. They don't need me to pretend, they need me to be real.

• 1:07:49Erwin McManus?

  And so I took them through the process with me. And I started wondering, why am I not afraid? I thought, maybe there's something broken inside of me, right? I could, now some people can't feel love or empathy or whatever that. There's something broken, and I realized there's difference between being sad because you might lose something. Like, I wanna see my kids grow up, get married, have kids. I want to see the world become a better place. I still believe humanity's best days are ahead of them. There's so much I want to experience and do. But I didn't feel fear, because I didn't wake up one day going, oh, no. I don't have time to live a life I was created to live.

• 1:08:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24Erwin McManus?

  And I think most of us are actually afraid of death, because we realize we've only existed.

• 1:08:28Lewis Howes?

  And we haven't truly lived.

• 1:08:29Erwin McManus?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Wow. So these are, it's called the three truths. Imagine you get to pick the day when it's the last day for you on earth. Let's just say there has to be a day, and you have to leave the body and move on to whatever's next. And it could be a hundred years from now, it could be whenever you want it to be. And let's say you've accomplished everything your imagination has wanted to create in the world. You've done everything good you wanna do, you've seen your kids do everything, you've had the life. But for whatever reason, time's to go. It's time to go, and you've gotta take all of your work with you. So all of your writings, your books, your content, video, any content you put out there, you've gotta take it with you, so no one has access to that information anymore.

• 1:09:13Lewis Howes?

  But they have, they give you a piece of paper before you take your last breath. And you get to write down three things you know to be true, from your whole life experience. From all the crazy worlds you were living in, all the questioning, all the experience and the lessons. You get to write down three final lessons or truths that you would share with the world. What would you say are your three truths?

• 1:09:35Erwin McManus?

  I would say that the motive of all things is love. And that people are the only true value that exists in the world. And that when everyone else thinks you're gone, you've just gotten started.

• 1:09:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:09:54Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. That's a good third one. Okay. Make sure you guys get this book, The Way of the Warrior, An Ancient Path to Inner Peace. It's gonna change your life, I already know. How can we connect with you online personally? Where do you hang out the most on social media?

• 1:10:07Erwin McManus?

  I love Instagram, because I love taking photographs. And of course, right now, my son and his little media team are helping me get the book word out. But we're gonna put a lot of video content on ErwinMcManus.com. So we've gone through and we've shot like 10 to 15 minutes for every chapter of the book to carry people through. And it's all content that's not in the book.

• 1:10:28Lewis Howes?

  Great.

• 1:10:28Erwin McManus?

  Because in a book, I might have 10% of my content.

• 1:10:32Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:10:33Erwin McManus?

  And 90% of the content doesn't make it in the book. And so the best place to go is ErwinMcManus.com, or go to the Mosaic app. Because our church, all my talks are there. So I guess you guys have like 2 million people on your podcast. It's incredible. We have a podcast. I have two. One, it's my talks every Sunday at Mosaic Order. And my son and I have a podcast called Battle Ready. And it came out of when I had cancer.

• 1:10:57Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:10:58Erwin McManus?

  Yeah, so that became our theme, was Battle Ready when I had cancer. Because I did it, when I told him I had cancer, I said, hey, look, you just need to be battle ready.

• 1:11:06Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:11:08Erwin McManus?

  So we've been doing that podcast, and it's so raw and honest. And I'd love for people to join us there.

• 1:11:12Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. Okay. I want to acknowledge you, Erwin, for being just a fresh breath of air. For bringing so much love into this moment, and so much soul and spirit. And giving people a sense of hope who maybe don't feel it right now. Because there's a lot of people listening that are succeeding, but I still feel like are missing that moment of inner peace and hope of like, is there going to be a better tomorrow, even though I'm succeeding? Am I gonna feel something better? Am I gonna have that love? I'm gonna be able to get out of this toxic relationship? So I acknowledge you for being battle ready, and for continuing to have a positive attitude through...

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  Life-threatening experiences and constantly being in service to humanity. I feel like that's the greatest measure of our human is how much they continue to want to serve. So I acknowledge you for all that and for for just showing up today, man. This was powerful for me and I'm very excited. I hope to play basketball with you one day. I hope to hang out more and I'm going to come check out Mosaic.

• 1:12:11Erwin McManus?

  Hey, this is a bucket list. I've wanted to be on your podcast. When I first heard about the School of Greatness.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 1:12:17Erwin McManus?

  I thought one day I would just love to have a conversation with you. So I want to thank you so much. You've made my year.

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  I appreciate it, man. I appreciate it. This is the final question. It's what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:12:28Erwin McManus?

  Well, I have a whole chapter in the book on greatness. And I would say that the definition of greatness is what you've done for others.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Erwin, thanks, man. Appreciate you. Thank you, brother.

• 1:12:39Erwin McManus?

  Thank you.

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  There you have it, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this one all about love, spiritual progress and the way of the warrior with Erwin McManus. If you enjoyed it, share with your friends. Tag me on Instagram at Lewis Howes and at Erwin McManus over there as well, because this needs to go far and wide. Do yourself a favor and help someone today. Send them this podcast, send them a message, send them a text. Copy this link from the podcast app or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this and send this to a friend who you think it could inspire. Tell them to listen to this. Tell them to ask you what you got out of this the most. And you guys have a conversation about this. This is all about progressing together. Don't do it alone.

• 1:13:27Speaker 00

  Share it to a friend, a spouse, a partner, a family member. Send this to someone that you want to see grow in their life as well. We are just getting started, guys. This is episode number 763. I'm so excited about everything we have going on. We had an amazing interview the previous week, the previous two interviews with Terry Crews, talking about toxic masculinity.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  His rise to success and everything else he's been able to create. We have Bubba Watson, two-time Masters Champion on. Go check out those last week's interviews. We've got so many great interviews as well in the past and coming up. I'm so excited for who we have and I can't wait for you to see them. So this is your first time here, subscribe to the podcast. Leave a review over on Apple Podcasts. Let me know what you think, what you got out of this. And yeah, leave us a review. Leave us a rating. Let me know what you think. Follow on Instagram, follow on the website, all the good things, guys. And as we started out at the beginning, Eckhart Tolle said, "Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance."

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  If you fixate on what you lack, you will continue to create more lack in your life. If you focus on what you are grateful for, you will attract more good things in your life to be grateful for. Remember these simple principles and apply them to your daily life. As always, guys, I love you so very much. You matter to so many people in the world. It's time for you to step up and start mattering to yourself. And as always, you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.