400 John Assaraf: Unlock Your Brain's Full Potential (and the Neuroscience Behind It)

"Everything you do or don't do leaves an imprint on your self-worth." - John Assaraf If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/400 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?

  Can you believe it? Episode number 400 is here for the School of Greatness Podcast. That's right. This is episode number 400 with New York Times bestselling author, Jon Assaraf. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:40Lewis Howes?

  I'm sitting here in the Greatness Studio, thinking about everything that it's taken to start the School of Greatness Podcast, from moving from Columbus, Ohio to New York City back in 2010, then moving from New York City to Los Angeles, going through adversity, struggle, selling a company, trying to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life, what I want to do with the next few years of my life. Who am I? What's the purpose? Why am I even here? You know, going through these questions, I feel like I go through those questions every few years. But when I moved to LA, I was going through a transition in a lot of areas of my life, through relationships, through my business, selling that off, through

• 1:24Lewis Howes?

  just trying to understand who I was as a man and a human being. And the School of Greatness was born out of my insatiable desire to learn, to learn, to discover, to acquire new skills, new information, and to tap inside the mind of those most powerful human beings in the world, who are in the top 1% of their game in their industry. And we are 400 episodes in, and all I can say is thank you. I am blown away at your generosity, at your love, at your support for dedicating your life to learning, to growth, to committing, to tapping into this podcast every time we release a new episode. Some of you, this is your first

• 2:08Lewis Howes?

  time here. Some of you, you've been here for all 400 since the beginning. No matter where you came along the journey. I just want to say thank you. It means the world to me and it's kind of hard to imagine that we are 400 episodes in. I don't think when I started it, I thought I would ever get to 400 episodes. So it's because of you that we continue to do this, that we continue to seek out the best tools, information and inspiration from the most inspiring people in the world. And it's because of you. So thank you guys so very much. Send me a message over on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, at Lewis Howes over on Snapchat as well. Let me know what your favorite episode is so far. Either say the number or the name, just tweet

• 2:52Lewis Howes?

  me or message me anywhere on social media that you like with your favorite interview or episode so far. I'm curious to hear what it is for you. Now, today's interview is massive. For those that don't know who John Osirev is, he is one of the leading behavioral and mindset experts in the world with a unique ability for helping people release the mental and emotional obstacles that prevent them from achieving their very best in life and business. In the last 10 years, he's written two New York Times bestselling books that have been translated into 35 languages. He's appeared on Larry King Live a number of times. He's been featured in eight different movies, including the blockbuster smash hit, The

• 3:34Lewis Howes?

  Secret. And he's built five multimillion dollar companies. And today, he's the CEO of NeuroGym, which develops some of the most advanced neuroscience-based brain training programs in the world, helping individuals and corporations maximize their fullest human potential. I just had a chance to have lunch with John, actually, a couple of days ago at an event in San Diego as well. He came up to the greatness studio here in LA to do this interview. We've gotten to connect more and more, and I really love his approach. Man, talk about wisdom. Talk about someone who Just knows life a lot more than me and just understands business at a different level.

• 4:15Lewis Howes?

  He thinks differently, he lives differently, and his results speak for themselves. We go in deep here on a lot of different topics. Almost every five minutes, I was looking over to Tiff, who's our video editor, and I was like pointing at her like, we gotta clip that soundbite because there's so many golden nuggets in here. So make sure to check out the full video interview and show notes at lewishouse.com/400. That's right, episode 400, baby. And here are some things we're talking about. Number one, how to retrain your mind to break through a financial limit. So I was asking him about people who have a scarce mindset or who are stuck at a certain level of income.

• 4:58Lewis Howes?

  Maybe you're making 50,000 a year, maybe you're making 100,000, maybe you're making a million, but you haven't been able to break through to that next level. We break down the science of why you're held back and how to break through. This is extremely powerful. We haven't talked about that this much on the podcast, on the School of Greatness. So make sure you dive in deep and listen in during that part. We also talk about the simplest, surest way to change your results. The big shift that is coming in neuroscience that will dramatically change how we learn. Now, a number of ways on how to build your confidence. If you feel like you don't have confidence, listen in then. Also, the difference between wanting and committing to your goals. Guys, episode 400 is here. I hope you enjoy it.

• 5:43Lewis Howes?

  I hope you love it. I hope you share it with your friends, lewishouse.com/400. And without further ado, let me introduce to you the one, the only, John Asaroff.

• 5:59Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited about our guest, John Asaroff in the house. Thank you so much for being here, my man. Hey, great to be here. You are one of the leading mindset experts and coaches in the world. And you're a couple New York Times bestsellers. You've been doing business for a long time. You've been on Larry King, I don't know, 50 times. You've been on every major media, press outlet there is. You've done some incredible things and I'm really glad you made it on the show.

• 6:25John Assaraf?

  You know what? I I love being here. I see the work that you're doing in the world and you know, one of my goals is to inspire and touch the lives of a billion people. But it's not directly through me, right? So it's through the people that I come into contact with. You're doing some kick ass work. I love it.

• 6:42Lewis Howes?

  I appreciate it.

• 6:43John Assaraf?

  It's great to just to to share the the mic with you.

• 6:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course. I appreciate it. We we connected. I guess we've I've known about you for a long time, but we connected, I don't know, maybe a year ago, six to 12 months ago. Through a meeting that you did up here, and I think that was the first time we met in person, right? But we've been connected via email before then. And I remember hearing about you from the secret days. I think that was the first time, and I think where a lot of people know about you, at least in my space, probably from those days. But you were you've been working for a long time before that. And that was what, 10 years ago, the secret or?

• 7:14John Assaraf?

  Two thousand and eight.

• 7:16Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 7:16John Assaraf?

  Unbelievable.

• 7:17Lewis Howes?

  Eight years ago, right? Yeah. Wow.

• 7:19John Assaraf?

  Unbelievable. My uh, my son, Keenan, you know, at the time, you know, was still, you know, just in his early teens. And he's, you know, almost graduated college now.

• 7:29Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Would you would you say that that movie and documentary was a kind of a tipping point for you? Or are you already doing a lot and you had the reach you wanted before then? And that was just kind of the icing on the cake? Or what did that do for you?

• 7:42John Assaraf?

  Well, it's interesting, but I've just built companies my whole life. And and so I have been involved in the personal development, you know, gathering wisdom, knowledge, skills, tools, resources from people who've just done what I want to do. So I I really just learned from masters.

• 8:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 8:01John Assaraf?

  And so I was never really in the personal development field, you know, my last company or two companies ago, I took it public on NASDAQ, retired in two thousand and then wrote a book in two thousand and three called Having It All and became a New York Times bestseller. And I was retired, so I wasn't working. I just wanted to share the knowledge and share what I had learned. About, you know, twenty plus years in personal development, going to every SEMA, reading, you know, thousands of books, buying CDs, courses, hiring coaches, consultants. What's a CD? That's right. What's a CD back then? You had the little cassettes. You're thinking, what's a CD? That's right. It's like cassettes, CDs. And now it's like just digital. Yeah, yeah. And so I just wanted to share some of the things that that I learned, the good, the bad,

• 8:44John Assaraf?

  the ugly, the challenging, the embarrassing, the shameful. Sure. You know, just be real with people of, um, what does it really take? Right. That's the thing I love about your work is, you know, you've been a professional athlete. You know, the sacrifice it takes. Yeah. It doesn't make a difference if you're, if you're the most gifted athlete in the world. If you don't have the discipline and the work ethic, you're sitting on the bench. You're not gonna make it. Yeah, you're sitting on the bench and there's so many people that have so much potential. And it seems like they're standing on the edge of it instead of leaping into it. Right. So I just wanted to be a part of helping people. And in two thousand and three, people started to ask me if I do events. I said, no. And I had more people and more people asked if I do events. And so finally, my wife said, why don't you just do one here at the house?

• 9:28John Assaraf?

  And so I remember it was, uh, like June, July, two thousand and three. And I had a, a blog at the time that I was writing about once a week. And I just said to people, hey, I'm thinking about doing an event in my house. Thirty-three people, three thousand dollars for three days. And within a week, I, people said, count me in. Wow. So I did an event at my home and nobody stayed there. Sure, sure. Um, and then people said, hey, you know, can we work with you, you know, to help us with growing our business, to help us with, with our life? And I said, well, I don't travel. If you want to work with me, you have to come here. Or we have to get on the phones and, you know, and talk. And so I had, you know, three, four people saying, yeah, great.

• 10:12John Assaraf?

  Help me. And so I started to help people. And I was like, wow, this is really fun. Yeah. Do what you want to do from your home. Yep. Right? Get paid to do it. Help a bunch of people. It doesn't get much better than that. Get paid a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah. And so that really became the beginning of, of me getting into the personal development field. Hmm. And then seeing how can I take the, the knowledge, the skills, the resources, the tools that I have acquired over the years? And then just share it with the world. Yeah. I mean, there's so many people that, uh,

• 10:40Lewis Howes?

  Just get into personal development and build a business off of that. But for years, you were building businesses and selling them. And then you got into personal development. So you've been extremely successful and sustainable because you know how to run businesses in this. And that's why you continue to grow.

• 10:54John Assaraf?

  Well, businesses is the fundamentals, you know, being healthy fundamentals, you know, having great relationship fundamentals. It's not rocket science, but it is a science. And if you understand the science, then, you know, and you take action, then you can achieve the success you want just about in anything.

• 11:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What do you think is holding people back from growing a business, starting and growing a business to a certain level?

• 11:14John Assaraf?

  Well, initially, what holds them back is fear. So fear of failure, fear of success, and then failure, fear of disappointment, fear of being embarrassed, fear of being ashamed, fear of being guilty, fear of losing money, fear of fill the back. So over 50 different types of fear that holds most people back, but they're unaware of it's like a silent, hidden enemy that's locked deep in their non-conscious brain. And this is the area that, you know, I study. This is my life's work now, is understanding what actually drives the perceptions that people have about themselves and what's possible for them to achieve. And what's the difference between somebody says, yes, you know, I want it. I believe I can have it. I believe I could do it. But then there's another voice that they listen to more that says, but you're not smart enough, but you're not good enough.

• 11:58John Assaraf?

  But what if you fail? What if you succeed? So there's, there's voices in our head that most people have not learned how to really just pay attention to. Because the, this, the voices that you hear, the thoughts that you're having, the conscious ones, and even the non-conscious ones that percolate up to consciousness, if you pay attention, you can manage, you know, where they go. Because that's what actually fires the electrical signal and the chemical response that drives behavior. And most people don't understand, you know, it's like a spark plug. One spark plug, you know, turns the car on and you can push the gas and go. The other spark plug basically turns the car off and your brake is on. Most people don't think of their body, their mind as a system that they actually

• 12:43John Assaraf?

  own. And so we haven't been given the user's manual for that. So fear is one. But then it's all the non-conscious conditioning that prevents people from, from taking the actions that are needed.

• 12:54Lewis Howes?

  Like, what are the conditioning that most people have, the non-conscious ones?

• 12:58John Assaraf?

  Well. This is from what we've learned from our parents and from peers. If we think about the era that our parents lived, okay? Um, Great Depression. Yeah. Right? Um, very, very hard to make money, very, very hard to find resources, very, very hard to, to do anything unless you're a professional. So our parents said to most of us, if you don't become a professional, uh, you're going to struggle, you're going to struggle and suffer. And even the professional said, okay, so become a professional and here's your ceiling of what you have. So we became conditioned to be worried of scarcity in a world that has no scarcity. We became conditioned to having certain beliefs about what's possible or not possible.

• 13:41John Assaraf?

  So even now, you know, as we, as we, you know, we're sitting here and we've got this, you know, amazing election time. Crazy. You know, one of the things I've been thinking about is, you know, there are some people that believe that if Donald Trump wins, they're going to make a fortune. And there's other people that think they're going to lose everything. And I have a friend of mine who has got about 70 million dollars in the bank that believes that if Hillary gets into office, he's going to lose millions. It's going to be really tough. And what really is, you know, going on in people's heads? It's, it's all of their references, their beliefs and their perceptions that are locked away in the implicit part of their brain that is driving those thoughts and even the behaviors. They may not even be aware of it. They're not even aware of it. Yeah. They can be, but there may not be.

• 14:26John Assaraf?

  And so what we really have to go back to, to focus on is it really makes no difference who becomes president or who doesn't. If you have the belief that regardless of what happens in your external world, you can navigate towards the success that you want. Right. That's a belief and beliefs are the lens by which we actually see the world and by which we behave.

• 14:52John Assaraf?

  And so if you want to change your results, don't focus on changing your behaviors. Change your focus on the beliefs that drive your behaviors. Right? Powerful. Yeah, and so the next question, though, is, well, great. Where, what kind of beliefs do I have? Right, well, we have two types of beliefs. And this is, this is where it can get a little bit, you know, heady. And that is, you know, when you start talking about my brain. It's an organ. It's like your heart is an organ. You can speed up your heart, you can slow down your heart. You can, you know, speed up the brainwaves in your brain. You can slow them down. You can tune in, you can tune out. We haven't been given the user's manual for the most powerful. They don't teach us this in school. Aware of, that's right.

• 15:35John Assaraf?

  And so the great news, you know, I know you being an athlete and a successful businessman, you have discipline. You cannot.

• 15:43John Assaraf?

  You can't achieve results. Achieve results without some kind of discipline. And so we know that there's some fundamental truths to achieving success. And every successful person will tell you, you know, and Jim Rohn is, I know you, you love Jim Rohn. So you either pay the price of discipline or you pay the price of regret. Discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons. That's good. But the thing is, can you teach discipline? The answer is yes. How? You have to have a willing participant. And if the participant's reason why is big enough, if they know I want to achieve X. And the reason why, the motive for their action, motivation, the motive for their action is a reason beyond just themselves. Chances are, they will do more.

• 16:27John Assaraf?

  To achieve that success than if it was just left up to them. But there are some people that are born, you know, with incredible drive. They just have this insatiable drive and they'll just, I'll do whatever it takes for the things that I want. And there's other people that want things, but they just don't have this insatiable drive. And this is where, you know, I, as much as I hated school, I love to use schools in analogy. Yeah. In the game of life, whether it's health, wealth, relationships, career, business, spirituality, fun experiences, you have to decide what level of the game do I want to play at? Is it the grade school level, the kindergarten level, the high school level, the university level, the pro level? Because each one of those levels requires a totally different mindset and totally different skill set.

• 17:10John Assaraf?

  They're building blocks on each other, but if you are extremely talented, but you're not prepared to practice and rehearse and drill and fall and fail forward to the next attempt, you will never make it as a pro. You will never make it as a pro business person. You'll never make it as a pro husband or wife or athlete or musician. You just never will. So just get used to that if you're not prepared to pay the price. If you are prepared to pay the price and you have the aptitude, the talent, now we're talking about there's some real potential here. And what we don't know is, you know, what's in your heart? Like, what is the fire that stirs you that that you wake up saying, I will do this even when I don't feel like it. I will do whatever

• 17:54John Assaraf?

  it takes to overcome my temptation for mediocrity, my temptation for excuses, my temptation for reasons and circumstances to hold me back. I won't allow those to be in my way. And if you have that within you, you'll achieve whatever you choose. Right. And so the question you asked before is how do you develop that? Start small. Yeah. Start small. So if you don't have discipline, show to your, show yourself that you can give yourself one command and one follow through. So you know what? Um, right now I'm going to get up, I'm going to do two pushups. Right now, not, not like later, now. Can you give yourself a

• 18:35John Assaraf?

  simple command, one sit up? Right now, I'm going to go get a glass of water. You start with something ridiculous. I, I learned many years ago, reduce it to the ridiculous. So for reduce it to the ridiculous, and I start, I said, can you do that? Great. Will you?

• 18:50John Assaraf?

  Cause that's the difference right there is that's the razor's edge. Can you? Yes, but will you? Will you? Yeah. Great. When? Now. Now. Yeah. Right? So if you develop that skill and specifically from a brain plasticity, a neuroplasticity perspective, as soon as you do that, you give yourself a command and you take the action, you have just created a neural pattern that you can give yourself a command and take action. Now that may be just be one time. Well, what if you did that every hour by putting a little bell on your computer and every hour, like if you were, if my computer was open, I'd have every hour it would say, it's 12 o'clock, it's 1 o'clock. And I take 60 seconds. Just to be in control of my mind. Sixty, I don't care where.

• 19:32Lewis Howes?

  You stop what you're doing.

• 19:33John Assaraf?

  Stop, take six breaths.

• 19:34Lewis Howes?

  Breathe.

• 19:35John Assaraf?

  Just get, just get centered. Am I on track? Am I off track? Am I doing something I shouldn't be doing versus a high impact activity that I need to be doing? Every hour, I've trained myself to just reset. I didn't always do that. So I just started with one a day.

• 19:51Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 19:52John Assaraf?

  Then two.

• 19:53Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 19:53John Assaraf?

  Then three. Then it was working so well. I said, great, let's do this every hour. But more importantly is as soon as you become the person who believes in themselves, you see? Everything you do or don't do leaves an imprint on your self-worth and self-esteem scale. And you know it.

• 20:13Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 20:14John Assaraf?

  You know it.

• 20:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, every time you have that cake or that cookie.

• 20:17John Assaraf?

  Right.

• 20:17Lewis Howes?

  Either believe in yourself or you don't believe in yourself.

• 20:19John Assaraf?

  Right.

• 20:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:20John Assaraf?

  Every time you're, you're voting with every decision.

• 20:23Lewis Howes?

  With actions.

• 20:24John Assaraf?

  You're disqualifying with every negative belief. You're qualifying with every positive. Same with behaviors. So you start to get, getting aware of, am I qualifying myself to move forward? Or am I disqualifying myself through what I say I want and what I do or don't do over and over and over? Because thought patterns become emotional patterns, which become behavioral patterns. And our brains pick up on our thought, emotional and behavioral patterns and says, hey, you know what? You've done that one enough. I'm just going to make that automatic for you.

• 20:57Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 20:58John Assaraf?

  So all of a sudden, you know, if you're a person that has lots of positive thoughts, but you suck at taking action, your brain says, let me make that a permanent pattern for you. You don't have to think about it anymore. But I'm also going to create some neural tension and I'm going to make you pissed off at yourself now. Now you're going to start talking to yourself about how you don't want to not take action, but you're still taking action.

• 21:18Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 21:18John Assaraf?

  And this is where we have this conscious, non-conscious ping pong match going on all the time.

• 21:23Lewis Howes?

  Complex.

• 21:24John Assaraf?

  Yeah.

• 21:25Lewis Howes?

  Complicated.

• 21:25John Assaraf?

  It's actually complex, but it's actually pretty easy to.

• 21:29Lewis Howes?

  So if someone's listening right now and they're thinking, you know, there's a lot of things I want. You know, I want to get out of this relationship or I want the relationship. I want to have better health. I want to have more money, whatever it may be. And they've been saying that for years and they feel like they've been consuming all the information they need to have, but they haven't been able to take action, maybe because their why isn't powerful enough. What would you say should be their first step?

• 21:49John Assaraf?

  Well, the first step is to take one thing. I'm going to go back to one thing.

• 21:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 21:54John Assaraf?

  And say, great, let me move one thing forward. Why? Because that just changes the trajectory of the same pattern repeating itself. And as soon as you interrupt a pattern and then you repeatedly interrupt the pattern, it's like taking a detour. And as soon as you take a detour, one day, you're like, okay, that was, that was okay. But you tended, your tendency is to want to go back to what's comfortable. But if you take the detour two days, six days, seven days, we know from a neuroscience perspective, it takes about sixty six days to create a solid enough neural pattern that it'll go from conscious effort and thinking about it to a non-conscious pattern

• 22:34John Assaraf?

  that has the beginnings of automaticity happening without your involvement. You're just doing it. And so for me, what I do and for myself is I, uh, whenever I want to change something, whether it's a habit, whether it's a thought or emotion or a behavior, I say, I'm going to work on this for one hundred days, not thirty days, not twenty one days, not sixty six, which is right around there. I say one hundred days. And then I focus all of my, just on that one thing for one hundred days. Why?

• 23:05Lewis Howes?

  Can you give an example of something you've done recently or?

• 23:07John Assaraf?

  Sugar.

• 23:08Lewis Howes?

  Sugar.

• 23:08John Assaraf?

  I'm a, I'm a sugar.

• 23:10Lewis Howes?

  Me too.

• 23:10John Assaraf?

  I'm a sugar, like if he was an alcoholic, I'm a sugar alcoholic.

• 23:14Lewis Howes?

  Me too. It's so bad.

• 23:15John Assaraf?

  Yeah. So I, I go like, you know, a week, two weeks, no sugar. Then a month I eat dessert every night. Ninety days.

• 23:23Lewis Howes?

  Me too.

• 23:23John Assaraf?

  You know, like a cake and cookie and, and five of them a day and then, and then.

• 23:28Lewis Howes?

  Same way. I can be very disciplined, but it's either way.

• 23:30John Assaraf?

  Yeah, I'm extreme. I'm an extremist as well. It's all or nothing, higher off. It's like no, no in between.

• 23:36Lewis Howes?

  If you have one, you have it dead.

• 23:37John Assaraf?

  Yeah, I don't, I, I don't have one cookie. If there's only one cookie, I go, no. I can have like six or seven more. My cookie bills, my cookie bills at hotels are twenty one dollars, not three. So you take one thing, just one thing that you know, maybe a little challenging.

• 23:58Lewis Howes?

  A hundred days.

• 23:59John Assaraf?

  A hundred days, just one hundred days. So let's say you want to drink more water. One hundred days, a glass a day. Conscious effort to want a day, whatever you did before, you'll still do, but one glass a day. So, you know, I started that with my assistant. So I want to drink, you know, like four of these a day, you know, like, you know, thirty two ounces, whatever the case is. And so every, we got a mug and it's on my desk every time I walk in. And then I have some support from her saying, hey, remember to drink your water. So just do it. So the first, you know, two, three weeks, I feel like I'm going to drown myself in so much water. Um, but then it's like, okay, now I'm used to it. Now I'm drinking as much water as possible because the habit is there. And one of the rules that I love to follow is the habit is more important than the intensity at first.

• 24:45John Assaraf?

  So don't worry about the intensity.

• 24:46Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 24:47John Assaraf?

  Develop the habit. So can you take one minute a day to focus on how you will achieve a goal? Just one minute a day. Can you take one minute a day to focus on your health? Yeah. Can you take one day to retrain your brain? Yeah. Can I take one day? You know, or one action a day. And you start off with something, you know, and reduce it down to just a minute. Or two minutes or one behavior. If you can get that behavior to be a habit, it's easy to stack.

• 25:18Lewis Howes?

  Right, of course.

• 25:19John Assaraf?

  It's just like the foundation of a building. Once you have the foundation, if you build it right, you stack.

• 25:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 25:26John Assaraf?

  And so every good discipline affects another and every bad discipline affects others.

• 25:31Lewis Howes?

  What do you think about when you have a bad day? Or when you have a bad moment or you react and you're not on your game where you're calm in a frustrating moment or someone on your team does something you don't want or traffic or whatever, what, how do you process that?

• 25:46John Assaraf?

  Do you have bad days? Yeah, yeah, I have not not days, I have bad Moments. Events. There's when when we're I want to separate like behaviors and emotions. So usually when people say they have they're having a bad day. Sure, certain things may have gone wrong or something that they tried to do. You know, didn't work out.

• 26:09John Assaraf?

  All information and experiences are processed at the non conscious brain first, and then it gives rise to something we call a feeling. So emotions are processed non consciously. The electrical and chemical reaction to that is called a feeling. So when I'm not feeling the way that I want to feel. I don't focus on the feeling, I focus on the cause, the neuro electrical charge that's occurred in my brain. And in most cases, it's something that you're doing to interpret an event that's causing the neuro electrical signal causing the feeling. So in meditation, for example, what why do you meditate?

• 26:54John Assaraf?

  Well, obviously, it's great for a whole host of of health reasons, whether it's it's less stress, less, you know, lower blood pressure, less cortisol release, etc. But the one thing meditation does more than anything else is it gives you the ability to have a pause of awareness so that you sense what's happening at the non conscious level. Right. And what's happening outside of you. So when somebody behaves a certain way, it's processed at the non conscious level, gives rise to your conscious mind for you to respond. And so when something happens, I like to be able to check in

• 27:38John Assaraf?

  so that I don't react and I have the ability to respond. And if you do that enough through mindfulness, being aware, just being aware of exactly what's going on, then you have fewer and fewer of those times. So, you know, uh, uh, something happened last week. I was in a hotel room and I spilled some water on a shirt that I needed for a wedding that we were going to. And my wife, I was, oh, she was going off deep and I was just calm.

• 28:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 28:07John Assaraf?

  And she goes, aren't you worried about this? Will it help?

• 28:11Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 28:11John Assaraf?

  But no, let's just figure out what to do. The accident already happened.

• 28:17Lewis Howes?

  Why are we so wired to react in situations as opposed to be calm and say, well, this, this reaction is not going to serve a solution?

• 28:25John Assaraf?

  Well,

• 28:27John Assaraf?

  we have a misunderstanding of flow of information and the way information is processed. And so the reaction happens again at the reptilian, non-conscious level. So every external stimuli, if you, if you get into some of the brain, which again is my, is my passion is, um, one of my friends is Dr. Evian Gordon, kind of the great model. He says, you know, the number one thing to understand about the brain is safety and comfort first. Right? So in the environment that you're in, whether you like it or you don't is irrelevant. Your brain finds that comfortable because it's the homeostasis. But safety first. So any loud noise, any type of, uh, real or imagined present or future pain

• 29:10John Assaraf?

  based on the interpretation at the non-conscious level gives rise to automatic feelings. So the signal is sent from the reptilian or lizard brain to the emotional brain. And it's only later logically understood if we take the time.

• 29:28Lewis Howes?

  To be aware of it.

• 29:29John Assaraf?

  Be aware of it.

• 29:30Lewis Howes?

  That's why people react so much in traffic instantly.

• 29:32John Assaraf?

  That's right.

• 29:33Lewis Howes?

  Instant reactions.

• 29:34John Assaraf?

  Yeah, but, but here's something you could do quickly. It's, it's called a reframe. So, so let's say you're driving in traffic. And let's say somebody cuts you off and you've been sitting at the same spot for, you know, 20 minutes like I did this morning. And somebody, you know, you're, you're maybe looking down at your cell phone because you have some time because you're parked on the, right? And, um, somebody cuts you off. So you could automatically react, go, son of a bitch. I can't believe he just did that. And just use all of this energy, the cortisol, epinephrine, adrenaline that's flowing through your body and causing stress in your body. Or you can say, well, what if that person just found out their dog died and they're really trying to get home quickly?

• 30:11John Assaraf?

  You go, okay, I guess it's okay if she or he cut in front of me.

• 30:14Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 30:15John Assaraf?

  Or they just got a call from their mother, their mother fell.

• 30:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:18John Assaraf?

  Would you change the way you felt about it? And the answer is, yeah, probably. And the reason, because you changed the frame. So you can learn how to create frames for yourself, how you see the world, how you see failure, how you see effort, how you see your habits, how you create frames in advance that actually serve you through awareness and response versus reactivity.

• 30:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:41John Assaraf?

  And that is what a lot of people who, for example, I'm going to go back to professional athlete, what do you learn how to do? Respond in a variety of different ways in advance or through practice. So that when it's game time, you're just unconsciously doing what you do.

• 30:58Lewis Howes?

  Especially like, um, you know, I used to react a lot whenever I felt like anyone was attacking me physically or verbally on the, on the game, in the game. I used to react and a lot of beat people up and hit people and respond. If I got hit in a weird way, I would always want to have the last say, right? The last hit. And my coaches would always train me because I would always get flagged. The person who's just the second person is the one who gets flagged, not the first person who does the foul.

• 31:23John Assaraf?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Lewis Howes?

  And, um, so I started to train myself and visualize, okay, this is going to happen in this game. Like someone's going to punch me in the nuts, someone's going to bite me, someone's going to do this. And I can either be calm and focus on the next play, or I can respond and have a penalty for our team.

• 31:39John Assaraf?

  Right.

• 31:40Lewis Howes?

  And I started to train my, my mind, seeing it in the future as it already is happening. And that really supported me in not reacting.

• 31:46John Assaraf?

  And that's actually one of the best ways. It's, it's, it's a cognitive behavior therapy process where you practice in advance, anything good or anything challenging. And what's really amazing, some of the latest research on goal achieving is the ability, you know, in the past, I used to teach and also do, uh, visualize my goals. Whether it's my body, health, relationships, money, charity, whatever, I used to visualize the outcome. And some of the latest research now shows, um, in addition to visualizing the outcome, visualize the obstacles.

• 32:19John Assaraf?

  And in the past, when we talk about this law of attraction, no, don't visualize the obstacles, you attract them to it. No, no, no, your brain's way smarter than that. So if you have, whether it's a belief that's in your way, um, a story that's holding you back, a circumstance, uh, references, you know, something that's holding you back from achieving X. So take a look at whatever it is that you already know is holding you back. I don't believe I'm worthy. I don't believe I'm smart enough. Don't believe I'm good enough. Don't believe I'm skilled enough.

• 32:45Lewis Howes?

  Too young, too old.

• 32:46John Assaraf?

  Too old. I'm, I'm too this or too that, or not enough of this, not enough of that. So address that and say, okay, here's an obstacle. I'm going to visualize that obstacle being real. And I'm going to visualize just moving it aside and me moving towards my goal. The very act of acknowledging that releases the neural tension around. If you do that over and over and over again, what your brain starts to see is yes, there was a struggle. And so it's worthy of me creating this neural pattern around this new effort. Cause most of what we're doing is, you know, we're being on, we're on autopilot. We're just eking through the day, you know, on autopilot. And so the brain loves anything that makes it curious. The brain likes anything novel. The brain likes a challenge.

• 33:30John Assaraf?

  So earlier you were asking me about, you know, one of the brain training companies other than ours. I said, does it work? I said, yeah, it's a workout for your brain. And if you can strengthen the neural patterns of you seeing yourself with an obstacle and overcoming it, what do you think that does to your self-confidence and certainty?

• 33:46Lewis Howes?

  Builds it up big time.

• 33:47John Assaraf?

  Builds it up. So if you, if you actually do the work and develop those patterns in your brain, as you're doing the stuff you need to do in the physical world, you just strengthen those neural patterns and that's what becomes your habits.

• 34:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:01John Assaraf?

  And that's where it becomes really fun because you can develop the, the habits and, and the skills that you need, that you'll actually take action on versus having knowledge and skills in your head.

• 34:13Lewis Howes?

  Now I feel like you've been testing things for decades now with all the research and the work you've done.

• 34:17John Assaraf?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Lewis Howes?

  So what does your morning routine look like now? What what's, you know?

• 34:22John Assaraf?

  So today was a little bit different, except for one thing, because I drove from San Diego to LA to be with you. But I wake up, I pee, I do my meditation, twenty to thirty minutes every morning. I don't care where I am in the world.

• 34:33Lewis Howes?

  And what are you focused on during that time?

• 34:34John Assaraf?

  I I do a variety of different meditations. So there's meditations that I can do where I'm just observing my thoughts. Now, a lot of people think, well, I'm not supposed to have thoughts when you meditate. Says whom? There's hundreds of different ways to practice awareness. Meditation is the art of awareness, awareness internally, awareness externally, but also the various millions of layers that exist in the physical and the non-physical world. So this morning, I did a meditation with some ocean sounds. And so it was about five o'clock. I woke up this morning, sat in my little sofa, you know,

• 35:14John Assaraf?

  my feet propped up and did a twenty so meditation in the dark with the ocean, just listening to the ocean, just paying attention, going into a trance-like state, where after two or three minutes, I disappeared, like my body was part of air and space. So today was, I was using sound to get into that trance-like state. Other days, I'll do a mantra, whether it's, you know, a lot of people know transcendental meditation. So it's the Om mantra. So you just take a deep breath in. Then as you exhale, it's a Om. And the question is, why would you do that? And the answer is, anytime you can give your brain a rhythm, it will entrain to that rhythm. That's one.

• 35:59John Assaraf?

  Anytime you could pay attention to your breath, inhale and exhale, you turn off the parasympathetic nervous system. You turn on the parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and relaxation and your calm state of flow versus your sympathetic nervous system, which is the stress response system of adrenaline, norepinephrine, cortisol, etc. So when you get the serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine going, and you're in that state of calmness, you're able to enter deeper levels of consciousness and awareness. So you're able to observe a thought, you're able to hear your heartbeat, you're able to sense different things that are giving, are being risen in your body through thoughts that you're having.

• 36:42John Assaraf?

  So you can actually start to see, when I have this thought, here's the sensation in my body. And you start to get so tuned to what's happening, what's stimulated happening within you that's producing these sensations that cause you to either take action or not, retreat or move forward, you can start to get a feel for how the mechanics work. So, um, so I'll do that. Sometimes I'll put on some of the Tibetan monks and chant with them. Uh, uh, so I use sound, no sound, I use breathing, I use open eye, closed eye, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes. So I practice the art of being in control of my breath, not breathing, just being

• 37:24John Assaraf?

  one with the entire universe and feeling this other than normal state of consciousness that we're used to. And it's not sleep and it's not, you know, conscious awareness, you're in an altered state of awareness and you can, you can enter deeper and deeper and deeper layers of energy, which everything is made up anyway. Everything's connected. We have this, obviously our physical body, but the space between you and I right now, there's just vibrating packets of energy, right? And so you're able to access different layers of all of the intelligence and information that already exists in the universe versus the memories that we have in our brains. And that's magical.

• 38:05Lewis Howes?

  I love this. Why are you so wired this way? What makes you like so obsessed with this information and sharing it with a billion people?

• 38:18John Assaraf?

  When I was, um, five, six, seven years old, I moved from Israel to Montreal. I spoke Hebrew, but not English or French. And for two and a half years, I felt dumb. I felt like I wasn't smart enough and I wasn't good enough and I was made fun of as a kid. That led to me being involved in street gangs from the age of 12 to 16.

• 38:39Lewis Howes?

  In Montreal?

• 38:39John Assaraf?

  In Montreal. We trafficked drugs from Florida. We did break in entries. We, we had a little streak gang. About twelve of us that just got into a lot of trouble. My path was either jail or the morgue. One of the two. And uh, there's a lot of successful people that have that kind of a story for some strange reason.

• 38:58John Assaraf?

  And at nineteen, I met a mentor. The name was Alan Brown. He was a real estate developer. Still in Montreal? Uh, no, this was in, I, I moved from Montreal after years of turbulence. I finally broke free and moved from Montreal to Toronto, which is about three hundred and fifty miles. In Canada still. Canada, yeah. And um, May nineteen eighty, I took uh, my real estate course. June twentieth nineteen eighty became licenses of real estate. And the reason I did is I met a man the weekend before that my brother introduced me to. Who was interpersonal development. Yeah. And he was into, you know, Zig Ziglar and Dennis Whately and Brian Tracy's, you know, thirty five years ago.

• 39:35John Assaraf?

  And he introduced me to this world of, of, you know, the mind, introducing me to the world of changing my beliefs, changing my habits, changing my perceptions of first, who are you? And he really helped me see that, you know, the spiritual greatness within everybody, the intelligence that's within everybody. He had me start with getting in touch with that. And um, it was very philosophical and didn't have the evidence that we have today on affirmation, visualization, meditation, mindfulness, subliminal programming, uh, habit creation. And all of the different methodologies that we've all heard about, whether it was the astronauts that went to the moon initially that trained their brains or the musicians that have or the uh, athletes that do.

• 40:21John Assaraf?

  The science now is just so phenomenal on what is actually happening. And so as I was building my own companies, I built my companies by training my employees, not on the skills that they needed, but on how spectacular they were as human beings. And the greatness was within them. And if they trained their brain to have the belief that is, they may not have the skill or the know-how, but if you have the belief that I can, I will, I must. You can build the habit. You can build the habit. You can start to. If you think about this, I don't care if you, if we asked any question on health, wealth, relationships, career, business, spirituality, we wanted to find the answer to something. Yeah. We could Google it and within minutes have everything we want to know about. Tutorials, everything we need.

• 41:04John Assaraf?

  Tutorials, videos, audios, how to, step by step, blueprint, color coordinate, whatever you want. So our problem isn't how to. Uh huh. All the how to exists. How to build a business exists. How to be a great lover exists. You know, it all exists. How to get in shape. Yes. So I wanted to focus on, you know, how do I help more people take more of the action they know they should be and want to. And it all started in 1995, 1992. After I, you know, got into real estate, then I traveled the world. I, I ended up buying the franchising rights for RE/MAX for the state of Indiana. And I was 26 years old. Wow. And I bought the franchising rights for Indiana, moved to Indiana. Wow.

• 41:46John Assaraf?

  And I remember being interviewed for the Indianapolis Business Journal and the guy said, what are your goals here in Indiana? 26 years old, I was wearing, you know, I remember a brown pinstripe suit. I had glasses on, even though I didn't need glasses, I just wanted to look older. And I said, we'll do a billion dollars in sales in Indiana. And the gentleman said to me, he says, are you certain of that? I said, well, that's my goal. He says, well, there are two largest companies that have been here for a hundred years. Don't do a hundred million dollars, a hundred or billion dollars combined. And my cocky young self said, well, we'll be the first. They're not me. Three weeks later, the Indianapolis Business Journal, and I have it at home, it says, sets one billion dollar goal. Wow.

• 42:31John Assaraf?

  Um, May 1992, we hit a billion dollars in sales, five years later. Wow. And we were stuck, which is a great place to be stuck. But it wasn't because we didn't try hard. We were stuck because people started hitting the upper limits of their financial blueprint, the upper limits of their beliefs, the upper limits of their habitual ways of doing things. So regardless of how much more information we gave them, they just were at their limits. They didn't believe they could make more. That's right. Well, and again, when we talk about beliefs, there's two types of beliefs. There's belief that I say to you, sure, I could do that. Oh yeah, man, I want to do that. But if there's an opposing belief that the implicit part of the brain saying, but you're not smart enough, you're not good enough, you're not worthy enough, you're afraid of failure, afraid of this, you're afraid of that, you won't do it because

• 43:15John Assaraf?

  the non-conscious controls the entire game.

• 43:19John Assaraf?

  And so we started to retrain our agents' brains after we did a, we did a, uh, an event. Um, seventy-five agents paid, I think it was two or three thousand dollars to go through a six-month brain retraining program. Those seventy-five agents increased our sales by a hundred million dollars.

• 43:35Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 43:36John Assaraf?

  And we said, okay, we're gonna teach this to the entire company.

• 43:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:39John Assaraf?

  So we went from a billion, two to four point five billion in sales a year in three years. By working on this versus what they needed to do. And so I became really, um, pretty well-versed in understanding a little bit about the brain. And then after I was retired in two thousand and three, after building a couple of companies, I took bamboo.com, we took public in nineteen ninety-nine. And, um, I wanted to just teach what I'd learned. And I started getting involved with some of the top neuroscientists, neuropsychologists in the world. Uh, quantum physicists, molecular biologists, I want you to understand the mechanics of how it all worked. So when I visualize in first person what's happening in my brain and where, when I visualize in third person

• 44:21John Assaraf?

  what's happening in my brain and where, when I, um, repeat an affirmation that I don't believe and I hear a little voice in my head saying bullshit, why does that happen? That's not true. And then what are the systems that get activated as soon as you believe it's not true? And then can we learn to override them? The answer is yeah, it's, it's an organ and we're just getting the user's manual now for better than ever before.

• 44:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 44:40John Assaraf?

  And I'm fascinated with biology. I'm fascinated with neurochemistry. I'm fascinated with the mechanics of if this circuit goes on, what does it do to this circuit? So if the fear circuit goes on, does that basically shut down the motivational circuit? Yeah, that's exactly what happens. So when the spiritual circuit lights on, you believe, let's say God's on your side. If you happen to believe that, then guess what? You've just created a majority in your brain and it'll override just about any other circuit in the brain. Right? And so, so there's the mechanics of, of, of it that I'm fascinated with. But then I'm also fascinated with, you know, technology and the movie The Matrix.

• 45:15Lewis Howes?

  Amazing, yeah, I was just gonna mention that, yeah.

• 45:17John Assaraf?

  Yeah, the movie The Matrix was the beginning of, okay, so we can, and we already know that we actually can transfer information from one cell to another. So we already know that. And so now it's a matter of how. Right? Not Lewis Howes, but. But how? And so I'm fascinated with, you know, where are we with augmented reality? Where are we with virtual reality? Where are we with new tropics? Where are we with whether it's electro stimulation into the brain? Where are we with accelerated visualization, accelerated emotional immersions into a virtual reality or mixed reality? And you see, I can notice already, my voice is just getting, because that's where it's all going. Yeah.

• 45:58John Assaraf?

  Right? So in the next five years for sure, to 10 years, no question about it, you'll be able to visualize and experience in your brain a thousand times in a minute. Or 10,000 times in a minute. How? Well, because your non-conscious brain is picking up information at the rate of 400 billion bits of information per second. You're only aware of four to 40 bits of information per second consciously. So all of the information's being pummeled into the non-conscious mind anyway, and then deletes, distorts, or sends a signal up for you to be aware of. Well, if you can get the information in the brain, and you could trigger the brain plasticity switch on, which is mostly off after 10 years old,

• 46:42John Assaraf?

  then the non-conscious brain's gonna do what it did as a baby. That's why babies sleep 20 plus hours a day, because it creates so many neural networks. Yeah. For what they hear, see, smell, taste, touch, experience, that it starts to formulate their map of reality. Well, we're about to go through a massive, massive shift in what happens in our brains over the next 20 years. And that's because of the ability to input information. A lot of people are stressed right now. Why? Text, phone, mobile, radio, TV, Facebook, Twitter, all this. It's just non-stop stress in the brain. And when the brain feels stressed, then obviously cortisol, cortisol, cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine kick in, and that's a stress hormone.

• 47:26John Assaraf?

  Well, it's like having, you know, your finger on the electricity button all day long and just not, not stopping. So you start to burn fibers, your nerves. And, and so there's a major shift that's gonna happen, especially with virtual reality. Just remember, the combination of virtual reality and augmented reality. I've been in some scenarios recently where it's, it's unbelievable. I was in Israel just a few months ago, and I was in a, a lab in Israel. With some virtual reality goggles on, some sensors on my body. And they basically put me, my consciousness into a baby. So that when I looked everywhere, I, I, I had my arms were baby's arms, my legs were baby's arms, but I was me.

• 48:10John Assaraf?

  And so my body basically disappeared. I took on the feeling of being in a baby's body. Wow. And, and I'm like, I know on one part of my brain's going, this is not happening. And the other part of the brain's going, yes, it is, no, it's not, yes, it is, no, it's not, yes, it is, no, it's not. And we'll be able to put ourselves into these immersive experiences. Directly focused on the non-conscious brain to rewire it. Hmm. So somebody's afraid of public speaking, afraid of heights, afraid of failure, afraid of success. The, the games that are going to be coming out, the experiences that'll be coming out. Where you'll be able to have your virtual reality, you know, just glasses on, they're not going to be as, you know, as big and clunky as they are now. That's like the telephones, you know, cell phones from 1970, they're big and clunky and weighed five pounds.

• 48:54John Assaraf?

  Now you, you know, you have a computer in your hand. That's got more power than the computer we use to put a man on the moon. Right. And so, so the evolution of where that's going is any experience, any time. Real feeling associated with it that ties into all the biometrics of your body, your heartbeat, your, your, um, sweat glands, your, your, um, blood pressure. Everything will be monitored to be able to create maximal upload into your brain for you to absorb it. So you want some confidence, you'll be able to go into a confidence chamber in your mind and build some freaking confidence. Cause confidence is nothing more than a series of neural patterns that have been reinforced.

• 49:37John Assaraf?

  If it's nothing more than neural patterns been reinforced, why not figure out how to accelerate the neural pattern creation in optimal conditions? Yeah. Are you going to develop this? Oh, that's what Neuro Gym is all about. Yeah.

• 49:52John Assaraf?

  We're not, we're going to have the best.

• 49:56John Assaraf?

  Programs like that in the neuro gym.

• 49:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:58John Assaraf?

  That's the whole vision. So if somebody has a fear of failure, great, let's create some simulations that they could play in their, you know, in their living room. And let's see if they want to invite 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 friends around the world. You know, so that's where it's all going. And so if you can get the information into the brain, then the brain can code it. And if it codes it at the implicit level, then it will change behavior and perception.

• 50:23Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. I'm curious. I want to ask you a question in a moment. I just want to hook people about how if they're stuck at making a certain amount of money, how they can break through that mentally in a moment.

• 50:33John Assaraf?

  Sure.

• 50:33Lewis Howes?

  But I'm curious first, why did you get into gangs and the trouble so much early on? Did you not have the the home life you wanted or was it just a part of being accepted by peers? Or why?

• 50:47John Assaraf?

  Had a great mom and dad, even though they didn't love each other. They were wonderful parents, both individually, a great brother, great sister, great family home, you know.

• 50:58John Assaraf?

  Had food on table every day, had a roof over my head every day, had clothes on my back. So lots of love. When I was younger, I just didn't feel like I fit in. And so there's a group of kids that just didn't feel like they fit in. And then we just hung out together and then the people that were the misfits back then, I was voted most likely to fail in life by my high school team. So even by then, I was getting into so much trouble. I was hanging around with the people who just didn't have their self conference and I didn't feel smart enough in school. I didn't feel like I was good enough in school. And even though I was athletic, I played basketball. And that was my only claim to fame, but I cheated to get out of high school.

• 51:37Lewis Howes?

  How so?

• 51:39John Assaraf?

  It's funny story, but the guy, a kid came in from Massachusetts. His name is Ted Karolos. There's a whole other story that happened about three months ago. If we have time, I'll get into it, but he came to our school. He liked playing basketball. He wasn't very good at it. So I started helping him train for basketball, lifting weights in my garage and running and teaching him some basketball skills. And in turn, he helped me with math. And on the final day of, you know, our math exams. Um, I had no idea, you know, what the hell I was gonna do. And I didn't know how I was gonna get out of high school because I needed to get my math uh grades. And so he wrote on a piece of paper that's about two inches by two inches and and rolled it up like a little snot ball fifty answers to the questions.

• 52:22Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 52:23John Assaraf?

  With a with a um engineer pen.

• 52:25Lewis Howes?

  After he took the test.

• 52:26John Assaraf?

  He took the test. He sat behind me in the gym like and he just flicked it on my desk. I took it out. Watched where the teachers were, wrote out the answers. I ended up with ninety two percent on my final math test I got out of high school.

• 52:36Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 52:37John Assaraf?

  Strangely enough, this was in in um in the seventies. Haven't heard from him, seen him in in uh about, you know, thirty years or so, however long um that is. About three months ago, my staff gets an email from a guy that says he thinks he went to high school with me. And um so I call him up and I said to him about two weeks earlier, I tried to reach him on Facebook because I was going back to Montreal.

• 53:01Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 53:01John Assaraf?

  And uh he's like, oh, my God, well, I saw your ads on Facebook. And that's why I I realized there's not many people with the name Assaraf. So he called the office and then I've been giving him all of my programs, thanking him, you know, for getting me out of high school. He's an engineer.

• 53:15Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 53:16John Assaraf?

  He's making six figures a year. I said, well, let's help you get to a million.

• 53:19Lewis Howes?

  That's amazing.

• 53:19John Assaraf?

  He's like, oh, my gosh. I said, listen, this is for me, this is the most phenomenal gift I've got to give you. You got me out of high school.

• 53:25Lewis Howes?

  That's hilarious.

• 53:26John Assaraf?

  And um so it was a great uh.

• 53:29Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. It's a good story. And who was more influential in your life, mom or dad?

• 53:35John Assaraf?

  My um dad was a cab driver and extremely hardworking man, you know, five thirty in the morning, goes out, busts his ass. Uh. He had incredible will and willpower. And so I saw some things in him that I really, really resonated with. But he was not it. He was, he went to grade five, wasn't really educated, so didn't understand the world really well, didn't understand business, didn't understand. He was um extremely happy. His only rule every day was if he woke up, he was happy. That was his only rule.

• 54:08Lewis Howes?

  That's a good rule.

• 54:09John Assaraf?

  How am I? He goes, what do you mean, how I'm alive? I'm I'm happy. And never made a lot of money, you know, made twenty five, thirty grand a year. Always had too much month left at the end of the money. Uh, my mother also went to grade three, um, but very wise, very loving, uh, very into family, very into friends, family bonding with with people. Uh, money was not that important, um, but family was and her children, the values were. And so I learned a little bit from both and my mother unfortunately has been a manic depressive, um, individual for sixty years. She takes pills, she's living in assisted living home, she's, you know, fragile and tiptoeing through life, hoping to make it safely to death. My dad's eighty six, he's flying next month to Barcelona to get on a cruise for a week, so.

• 54:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 54:54John Assaraf?

  Polar opposite, so I learned.

• 54:56Lewis Howes?

  They separated?

• 54:57John Assaraf?

  Yeah, many years ago, they they stayed together until the kids all left, which is very.

• 55:01Lewis Howes?

  Like most parents.

• 55:02John Assaraf?

  Very typical. And then, um, and then they, um, they separated, you know, he went his way, he moved back to Israel. My mother stayed in Montreal because that's where my sister is. And so, uh, and I talked to her five, six days a week, say, hey, how you doing? Talk to my dad three days a week or so.

• 55:16Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 55:17John Assaraf?

  And just stay close, but I learned a lot from them, you know, um. The, the one thing I remember is it's funny you say this, we talked about sugar earlier. I, I was twelve or thirteen years old, I came home from school with information on cigarettes. And both my parents smoked two to three packs a day.

• 55:33Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 55:34John Assaraf?

  A day, right? And my father looked at it, read it, picked up a cigarette, smoked a cigarette, was officially reading it. He says, okay, I'm done, he's never had a cigarette since.

• 55:44Lewis Howes?

  He had the information.

• 55:45John Assaraf?

  He had the information while he was smoking a cigarette. He says, okay, I get this, he quit.

• 55:50Lewis Howes?

  Two packs a day.

• 55:51John Assaraf?

  Three packs a day. And they fought about how my mother continued smoking, he stopped smoking that one day. So one of the things I I I got from him was where, where does this ability come from? Knowing what we know about nicotine and the addictive properties of it.

• 56:03Lewis Howes?

  That's unbelievable.

• 56:03John Assaraf?

  So it showed me that, you know, I think, I don't know how old he was at the time, but it's, you know, it's going back forty three years. Um, so, you know, he was in his fifties or in his forties. So he was the first, so he just made a decision and stopped.

• 56:16Lewis Howes?

  Powerful.

• 56:17John Assaraf?

  And so he gave me a really powerful lesson of the power of decision and conviction, right? And, um, so that was a great lesson from him, but my mom, the biggest lesson is just love.

• 56:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 56:28John Assaraf?

  She was just love, it's love, it's just family, it's all about love. It's all about love.

• 56:33Lewis Howes?

  Is there anything missing in your life right now?

• 56:36Lewis Howes?

  And if so, what is that?

• 56:39John Assaraf?

  There really isn't right now. I, you know, I, I've just come through a really challenging time. I was in business with one of my very best friends of thirty years. And we started a company together in two thousand and six or so. And he ended up with severe diabetes and had a stroke and had a heart attack. And it went, everything just went hell in a handbasket, lost lots of money, lots of employees. We had about seventy plus employees. We let them go, closed the company down. I had friends of mine who put two million dollars into the deal. I put a couple of million dollars into the deal.

• 57:19John Assaraf?

  And it was, you know, all my intellectual property that I developed over sixty years was basically held up in a legal lawsuit that I had with one of my shareholders and investors. And it was a very challenging time. It was, you know, reputation, IP, start from scratch.

• 57:38Lewis Howes?

  Assets, relationships, everything.

• 57:40John Assaraf?

  Lots. So it was challenging, very, very challenging time. And fortunately, because of, you know, my meditative practices, staying, staying aware of what is not buying too much into that. I just, you know, started building a new company over the last four years. And I've got, you know, thirty amazing team members now in our company at Neuro Gym. My relationship with my wife is great. My kids are awesome. My health has never been better. I became vegan about five years ago. Stopped drinking alcohol seven years ago. Gave up sugar about three weeks ago.

• 58:10Lewis Howes?

  Let me know how long you keep it up.

• 58:12John Assaraf?

  I made a decision now. It's a year.

• 58:14Lewis Howes?

  A one year, no sugar.

• 58:15John Assaraf?

  One year, no.

• 58:16Lewis Howes?

  No sweets, yeah, yeah.

• 58:17John Assaraf?

  No refined sugar. If it happens to be, if there happens to be honey on, you know, on something, then a little bit's fine. No refined sugar, no cookies, no cakes, no chocolate bars, no soft drinks, nothing. Well, right now I don't have any cravings whatsoever, zero.

• 58:31Lewis Howes?

  Wait till the holidays.

• 58:32John Assaraf?

  You know what? I just came back from Montreal and, and I was there for the holidays and the dessert table was about as big as this. And I just said, no. And the week before, actually four days before that, I was in Las Vegas at Encore, at the buffet. And I actually took a video of everything that was there. And I said, now, what I did beforehand is I pre-committed. When I, before I went to Las Vegas, I said, now, when I go to the buffet, here's what I will do. When I go to this restaurant, here's what I will do. So I pre-committed in advance, played it over in my mind, ten, fifteen, twenty times. Put myself in the situation in my mind. And then when I was there, it was easy breezy because I'd done it.

• 59:08Lewis Howes?

  You visualized it.

• 59:09John Assaraf?

  Ten, twenty, thirty times.

• 59:10Lewis Howes?

  God, beautiful.

• 59:10John Assaraf?

  So I did that. And so when I went to Montreal, usually I go to Montreal and all hell goes loose. My mother, you know, is always with uh.

• 59:17Lewis Howes?

  She's baking every day.

• 59:17John Assaraf?

  Not anymore. My sister's taken over.

• 59:18Lewis Howes?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:19John Assaraf?

  So the uh, you know, the food that's there and um, and the desserts that are at breakfast.

• 59:23Lewis Howes?

  The poutine there too. I love poutine.

• 59:25John Assaraf?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:25Lewis Howes?

  It's so good.

• 59:26John Assaraf?

  But the desserts for me is was the hardest part. But it was like, easy breezy.

• 59:30Lewis Howes?

  That's amazing. Teach me thy ways. I don't know if I'm ready to commit for the year. You've got to be ready, like I think.

• 59:37John Assaraf?

  And you actually, you you you mentioned something about the word, you know, commit. My first mentor, this was June nineteen eighty-two. He had me write down my goals, health, wealth, relationships, career, business, fun, experiences, charity, except everything. Uh, one year, three years, five years, twenty-five years. He had me a whole weekend write goals. I'm like, I was nineteen. I was like, God, this is a lot of work.

• 1:00:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03John Assaraf?

  And when I came back after the weekend, he said, okay, great. Are you serious about these? I said, yeah, I've spent the whole fucking week doing this. I'm serious about it. He says, great. Are you interested in achieving these goals or are you committed?

• 1:00:15John Assaraf?

  I said, Alan, what's the difference? Because if you're interested, you come up with stories, excuses, reasons and circumstances why you can't or why you won't. If you're committed, those go out the window. You just do whatever it takes.

• 1:00:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27John Assaraf?

  And I remember being petrified of the difference. I was petrified. I'm sitting there. There's a man, he was looking at me. I was sitting in a chair. He's looking at me, wonderful man. And he put his hand in front of me. Are you interested or are you committed? And I was like, wow, like now I've got to tell him that. Forget if I tell myself and then I lie to myself. And tomorrow I don't, but here's a gentleman that's trying to help me. Asked me if I'm interested or committed. And so I said, well, I'm I'm committed. He says, great, because if you're committed, then I'll help you. Because if you're not committed, I can't waste my time with you.

• 1:01:00John Assaraf?

  And he helped me.

• 1:01:01Lewis Howes?

  That's amazing.

• 1:01:01John Assaraf?

  My first year in real estate at nineteen, I made thirty one, thirty five thousand dollars. My second year by starting to retrain my brain. Every day he had me visualizing, had me cognitively priming my brain to see my goals. Every day I would take my goals out and I would run my fingers across them. Then I would close my eyes like he taught me and he says, now read it and then see yourself doing it or achieving it or being it. Then read it and see yourself doing it and then run your fingers across it and feel the electrical signal from those words coming into your body, into your brain and cementing themselves there. Every day I would do that for fifteen, twenty minutes for a year. Thirty five thousand first year, hundred and fifty one thousand second year.

• 1:01:44Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 1:01:44John Assaraf?

  Twenty years old. And I said, nobody's can take that away from me because I know it works. And not only did I learn it for myself, but then I taught it to my employees in my company. I had fifteen hundred agents in Indiana, plus all the staff in the offices at Bamboo. We had fif- twelve hundred employees there. And now I've taught, you know, these principles, you know, to our clients and I mean, tens of thousands of clients all over the world.

• 1:02:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and I think, you know, some people get mixed up with the law of attraction, thinking that that's all they need to do. But then you spent ten, fifteen hours a day executing and staying committed to it.

• 1:02:19John Assaraf?

  The law of behavior.

• 1:02:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, when all the challenges came every day, you were committed to overcoming them.

• 1:02:23John Assaraf?

  That's right.

• 1:02:23Lewis Howes?

  And building great habits and routines and taking massive action.

• 1:02:27John Assaraf?

  Yeah, and when, when it comes to the, you know, the, the problems that come up every day, I mean, it's, it's like weather. It's sunny for a little bit, it's raining, it's hailing, it's windy, it's not. That's life. And, and that goes back to where we started a little bit earlier, about the frames is if you expect things to always be great, you're delusional. If you expect things to always be bad, that maybe it might happen. And so it's a matter of learning the frames and how do you frame stuff? So even when, you know, I was going through this challenging, challenging times on, on a lot of fronts. Um, the frame was still good.

• 1:03:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02John Assaraf?

  The frame was still good because I was just, it's, I know it's just a chapter.

• 1:03:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05John Assaraf?

  And I know that.

• 1:03:05Lewis Howes?

  It's gonna pass.

• 1:03:06John Assaraf?

  It'll pass and I know that by taking all of my attention units and, and that's actually something we didn't talk about today is every morning when you wake up, you have, let's say, let's say it's 10 attention units. If you're using two or three or four or five or six of them on.

• 1:03:18Lewis Howes?

  What's an attention unit?

• 1:03:19John Assaraf?

  An attention unit is your, uh, your ability to stay focused.

• 1:03:23Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:23John Assaraf?

  And your ability to stay focused, um, is happening at the conscious and non-conscious level. So if you're processing stuff in the back of your mind, uh, something you're angry at, something you're mad at, something that's stressing you out that or you don't have enough money or you don't have the right relationships or the contacts, whatever. If you're stressing out about that stuff and that's eating up your attention units, that's like having your computer. Okay. Using up most of its energy in what's behind that you're not using.

• 1:03:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52John Assaraf?

  And we all have a certain amount of attention units every day. And so one of the things that, uh, you asked me before that I can come back on the rituals, um, is, is using the attention units in a way that is highly, highly productive versus, yeah, wasting a lot of time. And so my ritual, uh, we started earlier, I just remembered that, um, is, you know, wake up meditation, exercise, uh, plant-based protein smoothie, followed by reviewing my goals.

• 1:04:24Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Every day you review your goals.

• 1:04:25John Assaraf?

  Every day, five minutes.

• 1:04:26Lewis Howes?

  The goals for the day, the month, the year.

• 1:04:29John Assaraf?

  Everything. I, I review my overarching goals. I could do that fairly quickly because that's my longer range goals. I could review the emotions that I want because I'm committed to having those emotions every day and feeling a certain way every day. And then I take a look at from, you know, you know, five years out, three years, one year, 90 days, 60 days to today.

• 1:04:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:04:49John Assaraf?

  And so I just review it and what.

• 1:04:50Lewis Howes?

  Give it on a piece of paper or the iPad.

• 1:04:52John Assaraf?

  Laminated and on my computer.

• 1:04:53Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:04:53John Assaraf?

  Yeah. And I have it in a, in a, in a booklet also. So when I travel, it's really easy.

• 1:04:58Lewis Howes?

  Do you have it with you?

• 1:04:59John Assaraf?

  I, no, it's, it's a, it's a pretty big.

• 1:05:01Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, gotcha.

• 1:05:01John Assaraf?

  It's like a little manual.

• 1:05:02Lewis Howes?

  You'll have to send me a photo so I can see it.

• 1:05:04John Assaraf?

  Yeah, I'll send you. It's called my exceptional life blueprint.

• 1:05:06Lewis Howes?

  I like it.

• 1:05:07John Assaraf?

  And, um, and so the, the question many people may ask is why? Why would you do that? Well, because you're having 35 to 50,000 thoughts a day, right? And your brain isn't certain like what's really important, what's not.

• 1:05:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20John Assaraf?

  But if you instruct your brain that something is really important, whether it's something you don't want or something you do, it will actually pay attention to you.

• 1:05:27Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:05:28John Assaraf?

  So by priming my brain early every day, here is what I want you to focus on. Here are the emotions I want you to express through me. Here's the behaviors that I need to take. Then I am on a daily basis, setting the course for what I want my brain to focus on. I am cognitively priming the pump. And if I do it one day, that's great. If I do it 60 days, 100 days, my brain goes, hey, I'm just gonna make this freaking automatic because I want to conserve energy.

• 1:05:57Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:05:57John Assaraf?

  Right? I'm just gonna make it automatic. So not only will you focus on it consciously, I'm just gonna make everything happen behind the scenes to help you see, think, and feel things that are congruent with what you're trading your life for and what you want to achieve. So I'm just using the system better.

• 1:06:14Lewis Howes?

  Right. I love this. Okay, final few questions. I want to go back to the question about the financial mindset. Because there's a lot of entrepreneurs who are listening or those who are looking to make more money, maybe they're at the five-figure months, maybe they're at the six-figure a year level, maybe they're at the seven-figure and they felt stuck for a while. How do we retrain our mind to break through that financial mindset limit?

• 1:06:39John Assaraf?

  Yeah. There's something in the weight loss industry field called a fat set point. And every brain has a fat set point. And it basically states that you have a set point, just like a thermostat that's programmed in a room to have a set point. We have fat set points, we have financial set points, we have relationship set points, we have these set points that we become accustomed to achieving. And then all of the supporting evidence, the stories, the themes, the plotlines, the perceptions and behaviors all must match the set point. And so you can ask yourself two questions. Number one is how did that set point get there? And then how do I change it? Right?

• 1:07:21John Assaraf?

  So how it got there is through all of your conditioning, through what you've read, what you've done, what you've experienced, what you've been told, what you've seen. All of that has created your financial set point based on your story.

• 1:07:34John Assaraf?

  And so the first thing to recognize is the set point can be changed. And the question is how? Right? And that's the million dollar question. So number one, uh, what drives behavior more than anything else? It's not skill. It's not knowledge. Skill and knowledge is potential power. But what does drive behavior more than anything else is beliefs. And so if there is a belief um in the brain that says, yes, you know, I think I'm capable of achieving double my income. We'll just use double my income. But there's another belief that opposes that, that causes what we uh, what we know is as neural um uh dissonance. So it creates a chaotic vibration in the brain, between the conscious and unconscious mind.

• 1:08:17John Assaraf?

  So the key is to get alignment between the new goal, which is a conscious pattern of thought that you can choose in an instant and the non-conscious part of the brain around that goal.

• 1:08:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29John Assaraf?

  So how do you develop a belief? Right? So it's a pattern. So if I gave you a sentence and you said that sentence one time, you probably, it's great to be a sentence like one of those, like hearing a line in a song one time. But if you heard a line in a song repeatedly, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty times, and you had other associations with that to reinforce that pattern, then you would start to develop a non-conscious pattern through that. So we know that using, let's say visualization, you're actually bypassing the conscious mind and you're accessing the visual cortex of the brain. It's a non-conscious process, the visual processor.

• 1:09:09John Assaraf?

  And so if we take words and we affirm them and we feel them and we visualize it, repeat them a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, thousand times, now we start to create a pattern at the non-conscious level that basically reinforces a conscious desire.

• 1:09:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26John Assaraf?

  And so that's really why I developed Neurogym. That is, that's the only reason why, because we know that's what we could do and should do and it works. And I just created the tools, the technology and the tools to do it faster than anything else in a variety of different evidence-based ways. So you start to see yourself at that new goal. You start to impress a new belief that seems foreign, unfamiliar, maybe even a little stupid at first.

• 1:09:52Lewis Howes?

  Ridiculous, yeah.

• 1:09:52John Assaraf?

  Yeah, it's like, no, I'm not earning a hundred grand a year. Uh, yes, I am. Well, no, you're not. And there's this battle and you have to move from ignorance to awareness. So what do I mean by that? If you don't understand that every brain has an error detection mechanism within it. What is that? Anytime you veer out of your comfort zone, the fat point setting or the financial setting, anytime you veer out of it, the first line of defense is self-talk that's negative. That's the first thing that pops up because your brain is going, that's not true. So it's detecting an error between what you said as an affirmation, or even what you just visualized,

• 1:10:34John Assaraf?

  or even what you just did against the predominant neural patterns that exist. So it's an 800-pound gorilla initially fighting the flea, right? Dan Heath's book. And so what we want to do is we want to get the, the conscious goal, the vision aligned with the non-conscious pattern. And as soon as you align that, you have neural coherence. And when you have neural coherence, that's like hearing your most favorite band, playing your favorite song and you're just like, oh, that's the best.

• 1:11:07Lewis Howes?

  Bliss, yeah.

• 1:11:08John Assaraf?

  It's just bliss. If it's not bliss, you're out of coherence. And so the key in why we start off early with meditation is awareness of how do I tune in my vibration? How do I let go of that unempowered self-talk, that sentence, that thought that I had? Or that disempowering, it's an unpleasant feeling. Beliefs aren't good or bad, they're only pleasant to unpleasant at varying degrees. When we're out of coherence, it's unpleasant unless our life is on the line and safety is there. For the most part, you know, a fear of failing? Where's that coming from? We failed our whole lives successfully.

• 1:11:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:49John Assaraf?

  But the meaning that we're giving, you know, what people will say, what people will think, you know, how I'll be embarrassed or ashamed, those are all the things that you need to really get in tune with. And when you do that and you start to use affirmations and, you know, again, we, we just developed a, a, a mechanism using auditory brain stimulation to, to take the most powerful beliefs, the guided visualization, guided meditation, subliminal programming to help people.

• 1:12:18Lewis Howes?

  I love it. I love it. A couple of final questions. What are you most grateful for in your life recently?

• 1:12:24John Assaraf?

  To have um just turned fifty five.

• 1:12:27Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:12:27John Assaraf?

  Um in the healthiest spiritual, mental, emotional and physical place in my life.

• 1:12:33Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:34John Assaraf?

  To really have a deep connection with uh God and I'm not religious, so I'm just God to me is the source of all supply.

• 1:12:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43John Assaraf?

  Everybody, so just to really feel that.

• 1:12:45Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 1:12:46John Assaraf?

  Um to have an amazing partner in my life, my wife, uh I've been through two divorces, been married to my wife now for eleven years, been together for seventeen. My son's Keenan Noah, uh just nineteen years old, twenty one years old, just champions of life.

• 1:13:00Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:13:01John Assaraf?

  Um my mom and dad are still alive, my brother, sister and I are happy and healthy and um I've got a thriving business doing what I love.

• 1:13:08Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:08John Assaraf?

  So it's a really good place of just being grateful for for, you know, not fucking up my life with all the opportunities that I had.

• 1:13:15Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:13:16John Assaraf?

  You know, um but being um ready to, you know, uh enjoy the next chapters, the challenges, the good, the challenging, you know. I'm in a really good position to sail the oceans, you know, of life, regardless of how big the

• 1:13:32Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:13:32John Assaraf?

  the the storms are and you know, you know, even as I say, it's like, no, no, I don't want, I don't want any more big, you know, big storms, but but I'm well equipped to captain the ship a lot better now.

• 1:13:41Lewis Howes?

  What's one skill you haven't mastered yet that you want to master?

• 1:13:47John Assaraf?

  Um something that has really been on top of my mind is um being somebody who loves to write and somebody who loves to teach and share. There's, there's uh an art and a science to persuasion.

• 1:14:02Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:03John Assaraf?

  That I haven't mastered. I'm pretty well versed in it. Um but that's a science of really um being able to affect the neurochemistry in somebody else's brain.

• 1:14:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16John Assaraf?

  What you say and how you act. I went to see a play last night and you know, I'm sitting in a plane, it's a musical with my wife and my eight other friends, all of us were crying. You know, because because the story is so good. So the art of storytelling more.

• 1:14:30Lewis Howes?

  It's a good skill.

• 1:14:31John Assaraf?

  The art of storytelling.

• 1:14:32Lewis Howes?

  Those that can do that are unbelievable.

• 1:14:34John Assaraf?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Lewis Howes?

  It's a skill.

• 1:14:35John Assaraf?

  Yeah, it's you're just going right into that.

• 1:14:37Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:14:38John Assaraf?

  That hard centeredness of people. So to be able to touch people, I tend to be a little too logical at times. So I want to get more into the and I have I'm totally comfortable, you know, opening up my heart and talking about anything. Just telling that story.

• 1:14:51Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:14:52John Assaraf?

  You know, I want to go to the science.

• 1:14:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:14:54John Assaraf?

  You know, so.

• 1:14:55Lewis Howes?

  Um, this is a question I ask everyone at the end. It's called the three truths.

• 1:14:58John Assaraf?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Lewis Howes?

  So if it's the last day for you, many, many years from now, you've achieved everything you want, learned everything you want to learn. And all your books and work has been erased for whatever reason. And your your friends and family give you a piece of paper and a pen and say, will you write down the three things you know to be true about everything you've experienced in life that you'd pass on to us?

• 1:15:17John Assaraf?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:17Lewis Howes?

  What would be those three truths?

• 1:15:19John Assaraf?

  One, love yourself. So learn how to love yourself, number one. You can achieve anything you set your mind to achieve and be a go giver as much as you are a go getter.

• 1:15:31Lewis Howes?

  There you go. I like it. What should we be connecting with? Neurogym.com obviously is something everyone should go to and sign up for, but you have a brainathon, correct?

• 1:15:41John Assaraf?

  Yeah, for for Neurogym, the website is myneurogym.com.

• 1:15:45Lewis Howes?

  Myneurogym.com.

• 1:15:46John Assaraf?

  If they go to Neurogym, they'll they'll meet somebody who has a rehab company in Canada. It's a rehab for brain injuries. So it's myneurogym.com. But we have a brainathon that's coming up and.

• 1:15:59Lewis Howes?

  This is a free event online?

• 1:16:02John Assaraf?

  Yeah, basically what happens, a lot of people are fascinated with the people that I'm hanging around with, the top brain researchers in the world, the top, you know, mindset and emotional experts in the world. And so I started doing this brainathon a few years ago. And so this is going to be our fifth annual brainathon. And so it's myself and, you know, usually six or seven world renowned brain experts. So we've got, you know, the upcoming one, we've got Dr. Srini Vasanth Pele from Harvard, won more awards than any other student at Harvard Psychiatry ever. Brilliant. He'll be on with me. I've got Larry King's actually going to help moderate a couple of the sections with me as well. I've got Dr. Daniel Friedland, the former chairman of the Integrative

• 1:16:46John Assaraf?

  World Health Association, brilliant neuroscience researcher. Dr. Evan Gordon has got a MD and PhD specializing in the non-conscious brain, the stuff that, you know, a lot of people talk about it in an airy-fairy way. This is top five experts in the world. That's going to be on the show. I've got Sharon Pearson from Australia, who's the CEO of the Coaching Institute, who really helps people let go of their stories and excuses and circumstances they think are holding them back. I've got Mark Waldman, written 12 books on the brain, spirituality, letting go of your fears, you're letting go of your doubts, letting go of the negative self-talk that holds a lot of people back. So we've got a whole bunch of these individuals, plus a whole bunch of our clients

• 1:17:30John Assaraf?

  that'll be on, four or five of our clients that we're sharing, here's how they're retraining their brain, here's how they're shattering their financial glass ceilings, but it's so much more than that. Because once you understand that the power center is right within you and you learn how to just use the tools a little bit better, we've got the most powerful three-pound tool in the world with no user's manual. And so, and, and so we teach people, here's the latest research, here's how you can apply it to your life, be healthier, happier, make more money, get a better job, get a raise, start your business and do better by retraining your brain to be totally in aligned with your goals and dreams. And like, and learning how do I stay focused? How do I stay motivated? How do I stay on track? How do I develop the habits that will empower me? And how do I do the

• 1:18:15John Assaraf?

  things that inspire me instead of the things that expire me?

• 1:18:18Lewis Howes?

  There you go. Yourbrainathon.com.

• 1:18:20John Assaraf?

  Yourbrainathon.com.

• 1:18:21Lewis Howes?

  Awesome. We'll have it linked up and all that information, along with a new book you have coming out, we'll have that linked up. So make sure you guys get on the Brainathon, get the new book. What's it called again?

• 1:18:31John Assaraf?

  The new book is going to be called Inner Size, instead of Exercise, Inner Size.

• 1:18:36Lewis Howes?

  I like it. I like it. Definitely get on board with what John's doing at MindNeuroGym.com. Your, your Brainathon, what is it called? Your Brainathon?

• 1:18:46John Assaraf?

  Yeah, yourbrainathon.com to sign up for our upcoming Brainathon with me and the other brain experts.

• 1:18:50Lewis Howes?

  There you go. Um, before I ask the final question, I want to acknowledge you for a moment, John, for your incredible ability to commit to transforming your life.

• 1:18:58John Assaraf?

  Thank you.

• 1:18:59Lewis Howes?

  And inspiring others to do the same. Again, the nineteen year old in you who made that decision to commit has, uh, you know, transformed millions of lives around the world because of that decision, because of you constantly being a seeker of truth and information to support yourself and others. It's an incredible, um, you know, it's just amazing what you've been able to create for yourself and to be such an inspiring symbol. Everything from your health to your attitude, to your energy, to your intelligence, to your love. It's a symbol of what's possible for everyone else. So I want to acknowledge you for all the gifts you bring to the world.

• 1:19:34John Assaraf?

  Took my mess, turned it into my message.

• 1:19:36Lewis Howes?

  I like it. I like it. I like it. Uh, the final question is, what is your definition of greatness?

• 1:19:43John Assaraf?

  Hmm. You know, that's a, that's a great question. I think feeling and knowing that you've used your life in a way that makes yourself proud, that you're proud of, you, you felt like, what a journey. And I left it all out on the field. You know, I just left it all on the field. That's my own greatness. You know, knowing that I used my life in a way that I left it all out on the field, that the, the bruises, the bangs, you know, the trials, the tribulations, the highs, the lows, that, that you used it. You, that you, you used it. For me, and that's actually, I'm gonna just back, I made a commitment to myself that I will never meet my maker

• 1:20:26John Assaraf?

  and feel like I should have done more. So I'm willing to go through whatever to never, ever feel that.

• 1:20:37John Assaraf?

  I don't want to be one of my friends that I've had who've squandered twenty, thirty, forty years of their life. I don't want to be the person that says, I wish I would have, I wish I could have. I don't want to be that person. I won't. So there's a part of me that, you know, um, this is some of the, that will give people a good frame. I'm afraid of that.

• 1:20:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:56John Assaraf?

  So there's two ways to look at fear, right? So a lot of people, when something's, you know, they're afraid of, it's pushing them backwards. And I chose to take fear and put it behind me to push me forward.

• 1:21:12John Assaraf?

  So that's how you could take your fear and turn it into your fuel. Right? So I just choose to reframe it. I don't want that. I'm aware of that. Great. How do I use that to move me forward? So it's just a shift in how I perceive it. And so I want it. I want to learn. I want to grow. I want to love like I don't want to feel like I could have loved more. Could have given more, could have become more, I could have tried. I don't want to ever feel that the day I die. And every, any day that I do, I just get out of it. Come on. Nope. Today may be the day you die.

• 1:21:44Lewis Howes?

  Sure. There you go.

• 1:21:45John Assaraf?

  Today may be the day, this moment may be the moment you die. So nope, that that's not going to happen. So it's a really wonderful motivator for me. Fear is a great motivator.

• 1:21:55Lewis Howes?

  There you go, John. Appreciate it.

• 1:22:00Lewis Howes?

  There you have it. Episode 400 is complete. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here. If you want to watch the full video interview, go to lewishouse.com/400. Also, guys, our YouTube channel is blowing up. We've got all these interviews and episodes over on YouTube. That's right, youtube.com/lewishouse. I'm also vlogging once a week, so you can see my adventures from Iceland to India to New York to wherever I'm traveling to. I'm doing behind the scenes vlogging. That's right. I'm showing you my perspective, sharing with you what's in my head, what's going on in my life, business, what I'm thinking, processing, and we're editing it up into a vlog on YouTube once a week. So go check out, subscribe to my channel, youtube/lewishouse.

• 1:22:46Lewis Howes?

  And make sure to sign up for the Brain-a-thon with John as well and get in that game and learn more about how to optimize your mind and brain also. You guys make me smile so much. So thank you for being here. We are almost at 25 million downloads. That's right, we're a few hundred thousand downloads away. 400 episodes, almost four years in, 25 million downloads. We're in the top 100 on iTunes. You guys are amazing. Thank you so much. If this is your first time here, make sure to subscribe to the podcast over on iTunes and leave a review of what you thought about. This episode or the podcast. If this is your 400th time here, then send me a message and let me know.

• 1:23:27Lewis Howes?

  Send me a DM on Instagram if you've listened to all 400 episodes. I'm going to think of something to give you back in return just for your incredible support and loyalty for, for learning and growing and being part of this for 400 episodes. And make sure to connect with John as well. All of his info is back at LewisHowes.com/400. Guys, if you are not using Headspace yet, make sure to get on Headspace. It is what I use whenever I feel fear, anger, stress, anxiety, or if I can't sleep, I turn on Headspace and I put on a 10-minute guided meditation. I'm telling you, meditation will transform your life.

• 1:24:07Lewis Howes?

  And Headspace is a meditation app made super simple, super easy and effective. I don't care who you are, how old you are, if you think meditation is dumb or not, I'm telling you, this is so simple and easy to use and so effective. Their app has been downloaded over 7 million times, including me. I'm a subscriber, I'm a buyer, I'm a customer. And it's super simple, guys. 10 minutes a day is all you need. Learn more at Headspace.com/greatness. Again, Headspace.com/greatness. And with that, guys, thank you again for being here. Episode number 400 is complete. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.