849 Stay True To Your Purpose

DON’T GET DISTRACTED BY SHINY THINGS. It can be exciting to receive connections to the rich and powerful. Fancy dinners, galas, and White House dinners can be tempting. But if these things are keeping you from accomplishing what you set out to do, you’re better off without them. Money comes with strings. If the people pulling those strings don’t align with your message, that money has too great a cost. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with Jacob Lief where he shared what has made his non-profit Ubuntu so successful. Jacob Lief is the Founder and CEO of Ubuntu Education Fund, a non-profit organization that takes vulnerable children living in the townships of Port Elizabeth, South Africa from cradle to career. Ubuntu's programs form an integrated system of medical, health, educational and social services, ensuring that a child who is either orphaned or vulnerable can, after several years, succeed. Jacob has been able to stay focused on one area and one community of people by being consistent about what Ubuntu says yes to. It’s not the most glamorous route, but it’s the most impactful. Learn how to stay disciplined and focused on your goal in Episode 849. In This Episode You Will Learn: The thing that has worked the best for Ubuntu (2:00) Why you sometimes have to say “no” to things (2:30) About the struggle to keep people interested in your cause (3:00) If you enjoyed this episode, check out the video, show notes, and more at http://www.lewishowes.com/849 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes 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.

• 0:11Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to today's episode, very special episode with a guy by the name of Jacob Leaf, who has dedicated the last 15 years of his life to serving people and to serving a specific community to change their entire mindset, their entire process, their entire way of living, to have it all in life, to improve their lifestyle in a place where poverty is extreme, to improve their education process, to improve the way people feel about themselves.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  So what's really worked for us is about staying focused, right? We're in one area.

• 0:51Lewis Howes?

  Not shiny balls, like going to the next city or trying to expand or do things, but just diving deep.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, being prepared and having the discipline to say no to money. Not all, I think one, you know, it took us a long time to learn, but not all money is equal. Not every dollar is worth the same. And so, you know, we used to raise eight, nine million dollars a year, but we were taking a lot of this huge foundation money and government money that was forcing us to do things we didn't like. You know, we called it drug money. It was sexy, it was exciting, it would get us to big conferences, but it was killing our souls. You know, we were getting a lot of, it was very glamorous, a lot of stuff attached to a lot of this money. And having the discipline to say no, to turn it down if it's not right for your organization. You know, I made that analogy to startups in Northern California, but you're in Silicon

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Valley with a tech startup, you're talking, you spend a lot of time talking about who you want investing in your company, right? What type, what should your portfolio look like? And we don't do enough of that in the nonprofit sector. And I'm really encouraging nonprofit leadership to have that discussion with their team and not just take all money because it's there, because a lot of it can do a lot more harm than it does. Remember that, you know, as a nonprofit, you know your business better than others. And just because some guy made billions of dollars trading Uber doesn't mean he knows how to do global health, right?

• 2:12Lewis Howes?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  And I mean, you might have some great ideas, but you know, I say that because there's oftentimes a lot of those with the financial means dictate the agenda.

• 2:25Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  And we have to listen a lot more to nonprofit leadership. So you mentioned Scott, and I know both spent a good majority of their careers understanding their issues, right? Global education, clean water initiatives. Let them tell you what needs to be done.

• 2:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's cool, okay.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  So where is this all heading for us? I think one of the biggest frustrations, before I get to that, for us has been, and what we continue to struggle with is, we work in one little corner of the world.

• 2:53Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  And how do you attract the massive funding? Now, if I wanted to expand to seven regions, we could climb to twenty million dollar organization pretty quickly.

• 3:02Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Um, so how do you continue to sell people on the idea?

• 3:08Lewis Howes?

  On one little town.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and let me tell you, sustained success isn't exciting for people. It's weird, like, you know, if you had your money in some stock that just kept going up each year, you wouldn't take your money out, you'd leave it in. But in the nonprofit sector, people get bored. They want the next big magic bullet, and what we've realized is there's no magic in raising children.

• 3:29Lewis Howes?

  Right. You know, it's just time, energy, and a lot of love.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  A lot of love, a lot of hard work, a lot of energy. That's all it is, and that, so how do you, from a marketing standpoint, think Scott has just done, I mean, you mentioned Scott and Charity Water, they, I mean, I look at what they've done as a model from the branding perspective, and how do you reinvent yourself in a way, you know, to constantly come up with new ways of selling yourself, and they do it very well.

• 3:54Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Really, they really do. So that's what we've struggled with, is, is, you know, taking, constantly having to reinvent ourselves to sell the same, same product, really.

• 4:13Speaker 02

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