554 Spiritual Weight Training and Becoming a Peaceful Warrior with Dan Millman

"Daily life is a form of spiritual weight training." - Dan Millman If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/554 Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Episode number 554 with Dan Millman.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  A warrior does not give up what he loves. He finds the love in what he does. It's from The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. Welcome to today's episode. I'm super pumped. Guys, we are less than one week away from the launch of The Mask of Masculinity book. That's right, one of the biggest, most anticipated books of the year, at least in my mind, is coming out. And if you haven't pre-ordered it yet, make sure to go to maskofmasculinity.com, preorder a copy or a few copies, and there are a number of different bonuses over there. So go grab your copy at maskofmasculinity.com. And also make sure you're following me on Instagram, because every day, I'm posting about what's happening, who I'm doing interviews

• 1:17Speaker 00

  with, the press, the media, all the people I'm meeting who are loving and reading the book. It's been crazy what people have been saying about the book. I'm so pumped. And also, the tour that I'm going on. So I'm gonna be in New York City, I'm gonna be in LA, Chicago, Charlotte, San Diego. So make sure to follow me on Instagram @lewishouse, and be prepared to come hang out at one of the book stops. And we might be doing more later. So always be tuned into my social media to see where I'm going next. But today, we've got Dan Millman, who is a former world champion gymnast, coach, martial arts teacher, and college professor. And he's the author of 17 published books in 29 languages, shared

• 1:58Speaker 00

  across the world, and generations to millions of readers. And his classic work, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, was adapted into a film in 2006, which is one of my favorite films. Speaks worldwide to people from all walks of life. And his newest book is called The Hidden School, which is a missing piece of his bestselling book, The Peaceful Warrior Story. And I'm super pumped about this. This is one of my most favorite recent episodes because, gosh, I just love when we get into like a philosophical, spiritual conversation and make it practical as well. And bring it back to the things that are happening in our daily lives that a lot of people can relate to. For instance, one of the things we talked about early on are

• 2:42Speaker 00

  why we are so triggered by the people we love the most and how to navigate that. Man, that's an interesting thing. Also, how daily life is a form of spiritual weight training. Yes, spiritual weight training. How to behave when we're feeling afraid and scared. Also, why there are no ordinary moments and the definition of faith. Guys, I'm pumped. If you are listening right now and you're on your podcast app, take a screenshot, tag me on Instagram, LewisHowes.com/554 is the link to send people to the show notes and the full video over on YouTube. This is a powerful one. So make sure to share it out and tag me at Lewis Howes. Let me know what your thoughts are about this.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Also, the fan of the week is from Joe, who is from Ohio, it looks like. So Joe, who says, really inspiring. I've been listening for a while. Caught the episode with Jefferson Bethke. Really, really loved it. The content spoke to the heart. And if you're looking for a show that will challenge the status quo and push you to an inspired next step into greatness, then you have found the right podcast. So Joe, thank you so much for leaving your review over on iTunes. You are the fan of the week. And if you guys want a chance to be shouted out on the podcast, just head over to the podcast app on your phone or go to iTunes and you can leave a review right there. So thank you again, Joe, and make sure to leave your review

• 4:13Speaker 00

  for a chance to get shouted out.

• 4:18Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back at one of the School of Greatness Podcast. We've got the legendary Dan Millman in the house. Good to see you, sir. Thank you for being here.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Thank you, Lewis.

• 4:25Lewis Howes?

  Very excited. We've been catching up about our similar paths, you know, as an athlete who had big egos and got brought back down to life with injuries. I was telling you about how The Peaceful Warrior was very impactful in my life. So, thank you for writing that book and for, you know, I'm more of a movie watcher. So, the movie was inspiring for me.

• 4:49Lewis Howes?

  And you've just been on an amazing journey for so many years. You've helped so many people. So, thank you for all the work you've done and what you continue to do. And you've been, you got the new book out called The Hidden School, The Return of the Peaceful Warrior. So, for those who don't have yet, make sure you guys go pick up this book, The Hidden School. And why The Hidden School? Why The Return of the Peaceful Warrior? Is that not enough already for people to have The Peaceful Warrior? You need The Hidden School as well?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Lewis, I'd have to say my life has been more like improvisational comedy than strategic planning. I know there are people who plan their lives and, you know, plan the work, work the plan, that sort of thing. But it's been a strange journey, like the Grateful Day, a long, strange trip. I wrote this book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, in 1980. It came out in paper and started reaching a lot of people through other people.

• 5:42Lewis Howes?

  Did it take off right away or did it take some time?

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Oh, it's got its own story. In fact, the book died. When it came out, it was subtitled "The Basically True Story" and the bookstores didn't know where to put it. I didn't give it the subtitle. The editor thought it would be clever. But the bookstores didn't know what shelf to put it on. So, the bookstores didn't take any copies. And so, the book went out of print almost immediately. I figured I'd had a brief career as a writer. And then, four years later, this old gentleman, I call him old, but he's probably was a few years younger than I am now. But he was a retired publisher, read a copy of the out of print book and said, "I'm going back to publishing and I'm starting with this book." It took him two years to get the book changed, to take one copy in each store. But the word of mouth started and...

• 6:29Speaker 02

  We were getting letters, people going, "This book changed my life. This book changed my life." And I was going, "How?" You know, I started asking people. And so he put a subtitle, "The Book That Changes Lives," provocative, of course. And so it was passed through families and generations and still going strong today. I didn't write another book for 10 years. I had nothing new to say, so I didn't write another book. But then I wrote, see, "Way of the Peaceful Warrior" looked like a complete book. It had a beginning, middle, and end. But it wasn't complete. There was a page and a half where I just referred to journeys I took around the world, but I never really went into details.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  So 10 years later, I wrote about adventures in Hawaii in a rainforest with a Hawaiian shaman, teaching the underworld, subconscious. And so I wrote that book, but it took 37 years after the first book, until I was ready to write The Hidden School. But both of those books are slices, expanded slices, of the first book. So now it's finally complete, and I can rest for a little while.

• 7:35Lewis Howes?

  You're done with that series now? Yeah, gotcha. Wow. So what is The Hidden School about, then?

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Well, we all know intuitively, The Hidden School is right in front of us. It's right here, when we're paying attention. Many people have heard that saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears," become sort of a cliche, but what I think it means, when the student is ready, any of us, when we're really paying attention, the teacher appears everywhere. Small incidents in life that happen can turn us around. And I know you've had that experience as well. So have I, and many of your listeners, I expect. So that's what it really means. So The Hidden School is everywhere, but I had to search.

• 8:15Lewis Howes?

  What's the biggest challenge for you in your life right now? Since completing this book?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  What are you at in your stage? My edge, I have two edges right now in my personal life. One, professionally, I'd like to be able to express what I have to say in fewer words, not to take too much of people's time and get right to the point. Sometimes I do a warm up. James Michener, the writer, once said, "It takes me 20 pages just to say hello." So that's one thing. I love quotations because they have power. A favorite quote, for example, by Mark Twain was, "I've had many troubles in my life, most of which never happened." And people go, "Wow, that's true for me too." Because most of our troubles are in the past, future, in our imagination.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  They don't actually happen to us. So quotes are reminders, and that's, that's what I try to do through my writings and speaking. Is remind people of what they already know, but they tend to forget. What's your biggest trouble right now? That hasn't happened? Probably, well, it has. It's, I think the biggest challenge is with my family. What, people intimate, you know, they say you always hurt the ones you love. Well, it's not a matter of hurting them. I mean, we, traditionally speaking, we get along very well. But it's

• 9:32Speaker 02

  having a really good rapport with my daughters. Grandkids are great. You know, I've got little grandkids and they climb all over me. Yeah, yeah. But

• 9:42Speaker 02

  actually, I found I could get along with my daughters really well, even through the teenage years. But unless I said something insensitive or stupid like, "Hello."

• 9:54Speaker 02

  So it's, it's been a continuing challenge. Really? And that's, that's the arena. My daughters are 49, 37, and 35. Wow. So. It's challenging to understand daughters. I'm not a father yet, so you're gonna have to educate me, but it's challenging to. Well, it can be. It can be. Every relationship is different. And I, I don't want to give the impression we have a bad relationship. We have a very good one. But still, I

• 10:23Speaker 02

  With families, it's more challenging. Ram Dass used to say, you think you're enlightened? Go visit your parents. Yeah, they're frustrated as hell, right? Yeah, yeah. So, within families, that's, that's a cauldron of growth. What, why are we so triggered by the people we love the most? We're vulnerable to them. We care about what they think, and they care about what we think. We, someone else can say something and we just brush it off, you know, it, it slips off our back. But when a family member, a father, a mother, says something to a child, they can remember it for years, and you never know. So, you can't make casual comments without really understanding where they are. So, that's been a challenge for me in my own life. How do we, how do we heal those relationships, those triggers that affect us so much?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Well, if I knew, I'd do it. You know, people have asked me, I've written seventeen books, and, you know, Everyday Enlightenment, No Ordinary Moments, and about the twelve gateways to personal growth, and so on. And people say, well, Dan, have you mastered all that you write about? And the answer clearly is no. But I'm sincerely practicing, and that's all I can ask of anybody. And if you looked, if you observed me, I think you'd find him a good example. Perfect? No. But good example, yes. Albert Schweitzer once said in Influencing Other People, "Example is not the main thing, it's the only thing." And so, I just do my best to be a good example. Yeah. So, that's what I continue to do, yeah. What do you think's missing in your life the most right now?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Nothing, absolutely nothing.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  You know, people come up to me a lot and, and ask me, they say, Dan, you know, I'm, I'm doing pretty well, but I haven't reached my potential yet. And I want to ask or suggest, maybe you already have. Maybe last week was your high point. And then what are you gonna do? Enjoy life? Right. Continue to evolve? Relax a little bit? Because it's crazy making that we never reach our potential. Whatever it is, gotta do a hundred percent. Well, there's a point at which, I mean, I, I really appreciate the title of your first book, The School of Greatness. It's really calls people to their best. If I would ever start a school, I'd probably call it the School of Goodness. I don't aspire quite that high.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Or if I were to start a church, I might call it the Born Yesterday Church of Occasional Clarity. Has a certain ring to it. Yeah, yeah. So, you'd start the hidden school. Or the hidden school. And each of us has our own hidden school. I believe that very sincerely. Our lives are like, uh, daily life is a form of spiritual weight training. You don't lift any weights, you don't get stronger. And so I often ask people in audiences when I speak to groups. Raise your hand if you've ever experienced physical, emotional, or mental pain in your life. Of course, all the hands go up.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  And I invite people to disagree with me. Because if we agree on everything, only one of us is necessary.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Um, but I hope we can agree on this. And I think your listeners will relate, any pain, any difficulty, adversity, challenge we've had in our life. Because of that, I think we're a little bit stronger now, a little bit wiser.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  And maybe even more compassionate. We know what the big stuff is, and we know what the little stuff is. So it lends perspective. We don't have to welcome adversity.

• 13:45Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  We don't have to look for it. I shattered my right femur, my right thigh bone in forty pieces in a motorcycle crash. When I was a young man, uh, here in Los Angeles. And if that hadn't happened, I probably wouldn't be sitting with you here now.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  It shook me up. You know, I started asking bigger questions. You can relate. It changed the course of my life. However, I want to be really clear. I don't recommend fractures as a method of personal or spiritual growth.

• 14:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  There are other ways.

• 14:15Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Daily life, it's called.

• 14:16Lewis Howes?

  Right. Just waking up and walking around and saying hi to people.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:22Lewis Howes?

  People will swear at you just walking and driving in a car.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  It happens.

• 14:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  And, and, and the idea of waking up. Uh, many people know, we all dream at night. We remember them sometime, we don't remember dreams sometimes. But you, one can develop the capacity of lucid dreaming. And there are techniques and books on that. Where one can actually learn to wake up within the dream. One technique for doing that, it's quite interesting. Is you get in a habit in your everyday life. To ask yourself, am I dreaming now? And then twenty minutes later, or ten minutes later, or half an hour later, am I dreaming now? Am I dreaming now? We get in the habit of asking that question. So, a time will come when we're actually dreaming, and we'll remember to say, am I dreaming now? And when you ask that, you'll go, I am.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  And you wake up within the dream. And when that happens, the dream no longer just happens to you. You're not at its affect. You can begin to play in the dream. You wanna fly, take off. If there's a monster, turn it into a flower. Do whatever you like, because you're awake within the dream. The significance of that is that we can practice lucid waking. Because in all the spiritual traditions, there's a saying that this life, right now, is something like a dream. That's why it's good to ask ourselves, am I dreaming right now? Because we can wake up within this dream too, in a particular way. And if I can indulge you, there's a brief story about a wanderer in the forest centuries ago, who came upon the Buddha.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  And there was something about this serene man walking through the woods that fascinated this wanderer. And he finally got enough nerve to walk up and walk alongside the Buddha. And he said, excuse me, uh, because he didn't know who he was. He said, are you a wizard? And the Buddha said, no, I'm not. And he said, well, are you a great warrior or a king? And Buddha said, no. He said, but what is it then that makes you different from anyone I've ever met? And the Buddha smiled and said, oh, he said, I'm awake. Is it possible that in some sense, we're all sleeping now? Making meanings and associations and projections of our life as it unfolds, and complicating our life?

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Where there's a way to awake within it, and suddenly life becomes very simple. We live in the eternal present. And one thing happens after the next. Because how many of us wake up in the morning? I have sixteen things to do today. Yeah, a lot. But we only have to do one thing when we wake up. Open our eyes. Put our feet on the ground, take a step. See, my life is busy, yours is too. But life can become very simple when we recognize we can only do one thing at a time. Even if we're juggling, even if we're fighting multiple opponents in martial arts training, we only do one thing at a time. And the more we bring our attention to that, the more simple life becomes.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Just focusing on this one thing.

• 17:25Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, wow. I feel like I was in a dream right there, just listening to your voice. What's the question you think we should all be asking every single day to ourselves?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Well, I asked a question last night of a group of people I was speaking to. And they asked each other the question for a few minutes. And the question was, what is the good life to you?

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Because often people don't really consider consciously and directly, what is the good life? We see friends on Facebook and everybody's showing what a good life they have. I see people walking down the streets of New York City, holding their chai latte and going to work. And they're doing their best to live the good life, at least as good as everybody else. And everybody's showing their best face on Facebook. We all desperately want to live the good life.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  You know, it seems to me, and this is one of the basic premises that I teach in this approach to living, I call the peaceful warrior's way, is that there's no best book, teacher, philosophy, religion, martial art, sport, diet, yoga. There's no best, there's only the best for each of us at a given time of our life. Life is an experiment, we have to find out what works for us. And we have to stop comparing ourselves to other people. The Buddhists say that comparison is a form of suffering. It's a profound disrespect to ourselves.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Instead of acknowledging our process, you know, I've taught gymnastics for when I was a young coach and so on for years. And some people take longer to learn a skill than others. But those who take longer often learn it better than those who learned it quicker.

• 19:11Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have to start respecting our own process. You know, when we were babies, every one of us stood up and sat down, stood up, shook a little bit and sat down again when we were first learning to stand. We didn't fall down and go, but the baby across the streets, learning this a lot better.

• 19:29Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  No, only adults do that.

• 19:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  So we're all desperately trying to find the good life. But just as there's no best one thing for everybody, there is no best good life.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Each of us has to realize we are living our own best good life right now, despite the adversity, despite the challenges.

• 19:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  The opportunity to live a human life on planet earth is extremely rare.

• 19:53Lewis Howes?

  It's pretty powerful.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:56Lewis Howes?

  Is there any question that you haven't answered yourself yet?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  I don't know, because it probably hasn't come up. I do have a way of asking questions. It's like a gift or a blessing and the answers come.

• 20:10Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  For example, I was on a book tour for one of my books, Life You Were Born to Live. And it deals with numbers and people's lives and their life path. But I wanted people to know my teaching had a broader scope. So I asked myself, well, wait a minute, this is just one small piece. And I said, what is personal growth? What does it mean, personal development, spiritual growth? And the answers came so quickly, I wrote them down and they came out to 12 courses in the School of Life that every one of us is enrolled in. 12 courses, we have to graduate from in order to achieve any kind of personal mastery in life. And I'll just recite them as a list if your listeners are curious. What are these 12 courses we're all taking?

• 20:55Speaker 02

  But before I do, I have a great story. Um, I used to have this recurring dream years after I went to college. And the dream, some other people, you may have had this too, and many people have had this or similar dream where I just realized I have a really important exam to take, but I forgot to go to the class. I forgot I'd enrolled in the course. And so I have to take this exam, but I never went to class. Many of the listeners I think will go, oh, yeah, I've had a dream like that. The irony is, the reason I bring it up is because that's how we live. We have tests every day, exams, and we don't know what courses we signed up for.

• 21:35Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  So I'm about to share what those courses are.

• 21:37Lewis Howes?

  Awesome.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  First, to discover our worth. That, that is our innate worth. It's not about being entitled. It just means our, respecting ourselves. Our innate worth is human beings. If we don't, we end up sabotaging ourselves. You know, things get too good and we go, oh, that's enough and we say or do something. Money burns a hole in our pocket and so on. So it's a source of self sabotage, many addictions, low self-worth. It's different from self-esteem, which is just feeling good about ourself. Self-worth answers the question, how good of a person am I? How deserving am I of life's blessings? And if we're afflicted in that area and limited, whatever we do, whatever technique we learn, books we read, we still get in our own way. So that's the first.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  The second is reclaiming our will, which is about turning what we know into what we actually do. Isn't that a challenge? You know, people are looking to find motivation. Now, I'm not a motivational speaker. In fact, somebody came up to me once and said, Dan, I feel kind of inspired. I said, don't worry, it'll pass.

• 22:40Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  You know, because inspiration passes, motivation comes and goes. I try to sow seeds. So turning what we knew, what we know into what we actually do is, is one of the major challenges for all of us.

• 22:52Lewis Howes?

  Right. Because a lot of us have the information on how to live a healthier life, but we don't apply it and take action consistently.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Exactly. So that's the second course we're enrolled in. The third is energizing our body. Because, and you seem to have a lot of energy and that's, that's really a blessing because it enhances every human capacity. If somebody is really strong, but they have no energy, they're not very effectively strong. People have more charisma, the more presence, more healing ability, all that with more energy. And there was a man who was seeking energy everywhere. He drank the magic green powders and the supplements and did everything to get more energy. But nothing seemed to work for him. And one day he climbed a sacred mountain and he reached up to the heavens and he said, "Fill me full of light. I'm ready, energy." And a voice thundered down from the heavens, or maybe in his own mind.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  And it said, "I'm always filling you, but you keep leaking." And that's our human condition. We're surrounded by spirit, by beauty, by inspiration, in some sense, every day.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  The weatherman doesn't come on and say 20% chance of rain, 30% spirit out today. But we're often preoccupied. What am I going to do about my relationship, my career, my finances? So we don't have the eyes of a child. We don't have the free attention to look around and notice the beauty of a tree. Once in a while, we have these peak experiences, these moments. So energy, that's the key. And to plug up these leaks, to reduce the tension we do things with. So that's the first leak, extra tension. And that's real practice in life, learning to relax more. And the second leak is inhibited breathing.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  It can be valuable to deliberately hold our breath for periods of time as part of physical training in yoga. There are exercises where you hold the breath. But what we don't want to do is unconsciously hold the breath. When somebody's taking a selfie, they're holding their breath. Often when they're sitting down or standing up, or pouring liquid into a glass, we hold our breath many times during the day and wonder why we feel tired. So learning to breathe like a pendulum, fully, and just remembering to breathe. A young man came up to me once. It said, "Dan, I know you do consultations with people, but you charge a lot of money." And he said, "I'm a poor college student. I only have a dollar." "What can you tell me for a dollar?" And I told him six words that could change the course of his life if he practiced them.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Here and now, breathe and relax. And that's a lifetime practice. And it really can enhance anything we do in any aspect of life, from making love to doing sports. Here and now, breathe and relax. So I'll go on very quickly because that's a long list. After energize the body, manage your money, need I say more? Tame the mind. Tame the mind. Tame the mind, and I have different approaches for that.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Trust your intuition, because most of us are trained to trust just logic, reason. But sometimes we make a reasonable decision and the next morning we wake up with a weird feeling. So we have to listen also to that still voice inside. And the next is accept our emotions, major part of life. And finally, well, then we go into Face our fears, you know, self doubt, insecurity, all that stuff. And illuminate our shadow, which is really all about self knowledge. Seeing ourselves and accepting ourselves realistically instead of a gloss of persona. Becoming authentic, it's really about that, being real.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  And then embrace our sexuality. You can't ignore that in personal growth. How we channel our energy in that way. Awakening the heart and finally serving our world, finding a way, as you have. When you stopped being a performer in sports, like you found a way to serve other people. And so, serving our world is a way we connect with people in a meaningful way. Even people who are independently wealthy, they need a way to serve and to make a difference in the world. So those are the courses now your listeners know. And this is not a burden. It is not something we have to add to our life, all these 12 areas. They're part of our life, we're, we've all been enrolled in the course.

• 27:15Lewis Howes?

  Whether we like it or not.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Whether we like it or not.

• 27:16Lewis Howes?

  It's happening, yes.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  That's what comprises personal growth in everyday life.

• 27:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I love those, I'm glad to hear. I didn't know what those 12 were before, but I'm glad to know that your last one, the service. It's the last chapter in the School of Greatness is if you want to live a great life, you've got to be willing to give back. And be of service to the world, whether it be your family, community, you know. Country, the world, however, however much you can impact.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 27:39Lewis Howes?

  It's all about that, if it's just for ourselves, it's kind of unfulfilling, right?

• 27:43Speaker 02

  I was so much into self improvement, maybe you were too, you know, I, I took memory courses, speed reading and gymnastics and juggling and martial arts and. One day I realized no matter how much I improved myself, only one person benefited. But there was something about if I could influence or inspire other people, the way I did as a coach in gymnastics.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  That made my life more meaningful.

• 28:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  And, and that's what I've been trying to do ever since.

• 28:08Lewis Howes?

  What's the greatest skill that you have, you think?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  I don't know that I'd call it a skill. But it's more of a calling. I just really.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  I feel.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  A oneness with everybody I meet. I can be talking with a group of people and I think I'm talking to myself. In a real, real sense, I am. So. I think that connection with other people, I'm on the subway in, you know, Brooklyn where I live now. Going into Manhattan and I look around at all the people, I loved to people watch.

• 28:44Lewis Howes?

  Me too.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  I wonder what they were like when they were kids. You know, and what they're going through.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  I wish I could reach out and give a hug to all your listeners, you know? I guess, so I don't want to call that a strength. It's not something I work on, but it's a quality that's been really a.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Again, I use that wording, but like a blessing in life, yeah.

• 29:09Lewis Howes?

  When you look in the mirror, what do you see?

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Oh, this character called Dan Millman. I take my work in a sense seriously, but I don't take the character very seriously. I've seen through myself, you know, it's, you mentioned the word ego. The ego gets a bad rap in spiritual circles, you know, if someone says you have a huge ego. We don't normally consider that a compliment. But when Freud coined the term. Ego just meant self, identity. It was neutral.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  But so many people in today's world, in the ancient times, they used to say the devil made me do it. You know, when we were misbehaving in someone. Now it's the ego that made me do it. And I want to say, show me this ego. It's simply the conscious self. It's the self that learns, it grows up and learns. It's our sense of identity. We're not here to get rid of the ego. We're here to transcend it and that's a big difference. And that comes through humor, insight and humor. So I have a sense of humor about this Dan Millman guy.

• 30:11Lewis Howes?

  Of the 12 courses, if you could only, say you only could enroll in one to master one. Obviously, it's all of them.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  It's all of them.

• 30:18Lewis Howes?

  But let's say the one, is there one that's the most important that you would start with? Is it worth, is it sexuality, is it?

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Again, to respect your listeners, the one most important one is going to be different for every one of them at different times, at different moments.

• 30:36Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  I'm not dodging the question. I can, I can answer it in a sense. The first three are foundations. So we get them in all orders. You don't do them in order. They pop up, it's like whack a mole, you know?

• 30:46Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  But yeah, without self-worth, you won't benefit from any of the others. And reclaiming our will, turning what we know into what we do, that's supreme. And then energizing our body. So those three form a triad, the foundation.

• 31:06Lewis Howes?

  And how do we develop self-worth?

• 31:08Speaker 02

  We don't. There are no techniques to do it. We have to just become aware. And it's not a matter of feeling worthy. Because you know, we feel differently, all our emotions pass through us like the weather.

• 31:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  We feel differently moment to moment, all through the day.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Life is a series of moments. I've never met a neurotic person, only people who have more neurotic moments. Sometimes they forget to be neurotic and they function pretty well. I've never met an intelligent person, just people who have more intelligent moments.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  So there are moments where we feel worthy, when we do something worthy. But it's recognizing this, our innate worth as a human being. Respecting ourselves, treating ourselves with respect. So it's more about how we behave. And that's one of the key elements of the hidden school and this approach that I teach to living. We grew up in a world that was very psychological and very spiritually oriented. Somehow, we believe, we just grew up assuming that we have to fix our insides in order to live well. That if we just have the right thoughts and the right emotions, like confidence and love and peace and happiness, confidence, then we can go out and live well. And if we just have quiet mind or positive thoughts.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  But I've found another approach. You know, I ask audiences often, please, raise your hand if you've read a book on positive thinking, positive mental attitude. Many people raise their hand and I go, great. So then, how many of you have only had positive thoughts, say, the last two weeks? All the hands go down. And everybody kind of laughs. And I, I suggest, but if you read the book twice, you believe, if you'd highlighted and done all the exercises, you too would be having just positive thoughts. But maybe that's an idealistic notion. I've been around the track. I've done many different kinds of meditation for decades. And sometimes my thoughts are positive, sometimes they're negative. Yeah. Sometimes dreams are pleasant, sometimes unpleasant. It seems natural to me.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  There is a way to transcend all that. And in fact, I'm going to share with you the most controversial thing I teach. Let's hear it. I do not encourage you, Lewis, or Christine, or Tiffany, sitting in the back here, or any of your listeners, I do not encourage you to feel grateful. I don't encourage you to feel kind, or loving, or peaceful, or happy, or confident, or courageous. I just encourage you to behave that way.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Now, some of your listeners might, wait a minute, Dan, that's a bit off putting. You're saying feel one thing and behave a different way? Isn't that inconsistent? Isn't that inauthentic? Maybe even hypocritical? But I would ask, what if you were walking down the street? And you saw a little, little baby lying, and somebody left it in the middle of a heavy trafficked street, cars whipping by? And you were terrified of running out in the street? But you found yourself doing that. And you didn't think, you grabbed the baby, and you ran off, and you dodged the cars? So while feeling afraid, you behaved as if you were courageous.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Would that be inauthentic? Would that be hypocritical? No. That would seem highly virtuous.

• 34:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  Of behaving with, in fact, we can only behave with courage when we're feeling afraid. So I'm suggesting we can behave with kindness when we're feeling angry. Not easy. We can behave with confidence when we're feeling shy. There is a way of liberation while we live in everyday life, not waiting for some cosmic experience, by focusing more on what we do in the moment, rather than fixing our thoughts, fixing our feelings. Because we have a lot less control over what we feel in any given moment than what we actually do.

• 34:56Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  We don't have a spam filter in our head. If I were to suggest to your listeners, whatever happens in the next few seconds, don't think about a green elephant.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Too late.

• 35:07Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  So thoughts come and thoughts go. Thoughts happen to us. They appear in our awareness. They just random, these things pop up. And sometimes they're nice thoughts, sometimes not. But if we can accept those thoughts, which is about meditation. Meditation lets us get some distance from those thoughts and see them from a distance. So they don't have as much control or impact over us. Same with feelings. We can feel, and feelings are important. We learn from our feelings. I'm not saying ignore feelings. But we can, while we're feeling whatever we're feeling, we can focus on what needs to be done right now. What do I need to do? What would my higher self do? If I were enlightened, if I were a kind, strong, courageous being, what would I do right now? And doing our best to do that, we'll fail many times.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  I fail many times. But it's a great practice.

• 35:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Focusing on what we do simplifies life a lot.

• 36:02Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely, yeah. What would you say is the course that you need the most focus and attention on of the 12?

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Of the 12?

• 36:11Lewis Howes?

  Or the one you have the lowest grade in right now?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Me personally?

• 36:14Lewis Howes?

  Personally?

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Well, it wouldn't be embrace your sexuality. In fact, even at my age, I still have sex almost every day. Really? Almost on Monday, almost on Tuesday, Wednesday. That's a good one. I had to slip that in. That's a good one. Sorry about that. That's a good one. All right, uh, of course, I'm in the, let's say in this moment, because you know, life is a series of moments.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  I've always had a challenge managing my money. Really? Yeah. Uh, there was a period of time where I was mastering poverty consciousness. And I remember seeing some attractive young women in their late teens or maybe early twenties, getting out of their Mercedes. And I looked at them and I felt negative about them. It was so strange. I didn't know them. They might be very lovely young women, nice people. But because they appeared to have a lot of money, or maybe I was thinking, oh, they're driving their mommy or daddy's car. That came out of nowhere. I was making an assumption. And I realized in that moment, if that's how I feel about people who are well off, I'm certainly not going to attract much money. I don't want to do that. Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to do that. I had these, these issues with money, you know?

• 37:27Speaker 02

  In movies, all the movies I saw as a young man, uh, the wealthy people were mean. Remember It's a Wonderful Life, that movie, that old classic? Mr. Potter who owned the bank and half the town? He was a Scrooge-like character.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Really selfish and mean. And the poor people, they were the salt of the earth. So to me, I grew up thinking, you know, money is the root of all evil and all that stuff. I'm sure you've had guests who talk about that. But I was stuck on that. And I finally realized, you know, that, uh, as, as you well know, that money is a form of energy. It makes us more of who we already are. If we're greedy, it makes us more so. If we're kind, it makes us kinder and more generous. So I, I saw through that and worked with it. But you know, some people can walk naked into the desert and come out driving a Mercedes and,

• 38:21Speaker 02

  I've done all right for myself. I believe a peaceful warrior, that's all of us, can make good money doing what we enjoy while serving other people. All three are important. Yeah.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  You still struggle with that the most of the But I'd say, I'd say that Managing it or Yeah, and it's related to worth as well, you know, yeah. Yeah, self-worth maybe ties into that. So I have had, over the years, let's say I've had that issue. Yeah. But right now, you know, it's, it's good to be conscious of these things, yeah, of our different challenges. Of course. But over time, I've had difficulties with trusting my intuition. Learned to do that. There were some very interesting experiences I had around that.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Taming the mind. We all have something. There's something for everybody. Yeah. It's called everyday life. To me, daily life, I, I think earth, I view earth as a divine school. And daily life is our classroom. What I'm saying is, daily life is guaranteed to teach us everything we need to learn eventually to evolve as human beings. We're actually in this school together. We call it relationships. We call it physical fitness or healing. We call it managing our money. Career decisions.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  So no one needs to read my books or anyone else's or go to any seminars in order to keep evolving. People were evolving before books and seminars. Of course. But people ask me, well, then why do you write books, Dan? Why do you teach? Because a good reminder can help people learn more from everyday life. They don't have to learn harder lessons. Right, right. Could I share another quick story? This guy named Ralph was given a parrot for a birthday present. Beautiful bird. They live a long time, very intelligent. How long do they live? Oh, they can live a hundred years. Really? Yeah, or more. A parrot? Yeah. Huh. I could be wrong, but that's what I heard. Yeah. A little bird told me. Wow. Well, he loved this parrot. It was a beautiful bird, but somebody had taught it to curse like a sailor.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  I mean, it really had a creative string of epithets. And it embarrassed him. His mother would come over, you know, Ralph's mother, and the bird would start cursing at her. He tried everything. Played new age music, played Anya, you know, he, he taught him affirmations, you know, but nothing seemed to change this bird. And finally Ralph lost his, lost his patience and he grabbed the bird and shoved him into the freezer, shut the door, figured it would teach him a lesson. And he heard the bird cursing, muffled squawking inside, but suddenly dead silence. And he said, I didn't mean to hurt him. And he opened the freezer and the bird named Maurice, he walked out on Ralph's arm, stood on his shoulder and said in his ear,

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Ralph, I realize, I had a realization in there, very articulate bird. He said, I realize my behavior leaves a lot to be desired and my language needs cleaning up. I know that now and I vow to do better in the future. I hope you'll forgive me. Well, Ralph said, that's great. But then the bird said, but by the way, Ralph, when I was in the freezer, I noticed there was a headless chicken wrapped in plastic. Can you tell me what the chicken did wrong?

• 41:41Speaker 02

  So he was a smart bird. He wanted to learn the easier lesson because lessons repeat themselves until we learn them. Notice that one? And if we don't learn easy lessons, they get harder. Life throws a ping pong ball before it throws a bowling ball. So that story is just a little bit about, uh, there's a moral there.

• 41:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  We can learn a lesson from a dream, from an incident, from a suggestion somebody makes. But the more stubborn we are, uh, the more dramatic the lessons.

• 42:12Lewis Howes?

  The harder the lesson will be. Yeah, yeah. What's the thing you think about the most day to day right now?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  I can honestly say to you, I really don't ruminate on things very much. Uh, over time, uh, as I've seen the reality of this moment and this moment,

• 42:36Speaker 02

  I realized that there, there's no such thing as the past. What we call the past is something happening to us right now. Synapses are opening in our brain and we are having, using something we call memory. So the past is gone. It's only kept alive as this thing we have memory and the future is our imagination. There is no future. Tomorrow never comes. It's always tomorrow. It's always five minutes from now and then five minutes from now. You know, I had a friend who was feeling very depressed and suicidal. And I said, "Oh, it's okay to kill yourself. Just do it tomorrow. And when you wake up the next day, just say, 'Okay, I can do it tomorrow. Tomorrow.'"

• 43:22Speaker 02

  What we have meanwhile is today is this moment. And so as I focus more on that, look, you know the experience. What, uh, what position did you play in football? Receiver. Receiver. When you're running and that ball's flying and you're reaching forward, you're not thinking about breakfast tomorrow. No, in the moment. Yeah, or dinner, what you're gonna do later. You're totally... Athletes, they gain great wisdom, but they don't know it. They're so focused on the winning and the losing and the scores. They don't realize they're learning spiritual or universal laws about process, about living in the moment, the law of presence. So you can relate immediately to that. And anyone can have that experience. They can take their car keys, throw them up in the air and reach to catch them. And when they're reaching out to catch them, they're not thinking about past or future.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Pure awareness, present moment. Can you imagine doing that all the time? It's amazing. I was in the gym once, doing a, I was doing a high bar routine. You know, I was a gymnast. Socrates was watching me. His arms were crossed. He was the only one watching me in the gym. It was at night. And I did this really good dismount, a full twisting double somersault. I was one of the first ever to do that. And I stuck the landing. That's a good thing. I didn't stumble or I just stuck it. Boom, and stood up and went, "Yes." And so I figured that was a good place to end workout. So I ripped off my sweatshirt, threw it in my workout bag. And we were walking down the hallway afterward. And he said, "You know, that last move you did, Dan, was really sloppy."

• 44:49Speaker 02

  I said, "What are you talking about, Sok? That was the best dismount I did in weeks." He said, "Oh, I wasn't talking about the dismount. I was talking about the way you took off your sweatshirt and put it in your bag." He reminded me again that there are no ordinary moments. I was teaching, I was treating one moment on the high bar, flying through the air, as a special moment. But at the other moment, I was ordinary. And again, he reminded me that. And then he said something, I actually got into the movie a week before they started shooting this line. He said, Dan, the difference between us is you practice gymnastics. I practice everything.

• 45:28Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  What would that be like for you, for me, for your listeners, to begin to practice everything they do, walking, breathing, signing their name? How many of us try to improve signing our name? See, the difference between doing things, most of the day, we do things. We do the dishes. We do our homework. We do our work. But when you practice something, you're doing it with a specific intention of improving it, getting better at it. And that pulls us into a form of absorption. You know, it's called the zone and all that, many different names for it. But it pulls us into the present moment.

• 46:07Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  And it's a different quality of life.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  You know, you sign books a lot, right? Your books, and I do the same. My publisher once sent me two boxes of first pages, signing pages.

• 46:19Lewis Howes?

  Yep, I just did this.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Four thousand pages. And they said, would you sign these, please?

• 46:22Lewis Howes?

  Four thousand?

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:23Lewis Howes?

  I only had a thousand, but that took hours.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Well, it took me a couple, over a couple of days.

• 46:27Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  And I took a breath, and I signed, heart, Dan. That's what I do. I draw, heart, that's my message for you. And Dan. Then I moved that page aside, took a breath, did another one. It became a meditation.

• 46:40Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  And I practiced. I tried to do each signature a little bit better than the last. And it creates a different quality of life, because the quality of our moments become the quality of our life. And so the idea of practicing what we do. Socrates tried for a long time to get me to do that, he asked. How are you pushing open that door, Dan? Are you breathing? And I was getting irritated with him all the time. But finally, I got the point. Yeah, I got the point.

• 47:07Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Did you ever know his name?

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Well, I wrote another book called The Journeys of Socrates. It starts in 1872 in Russia. So his name, he grew up in Russia in a military school as a young boy and so on. It tells the whole story of his life. Great adversity in his life. I grew up, middle class kid in LA in the 60s, you know? But his life was really tough.

• 47:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  And

• 47:35Speaker 02

  his name was Sergey Ivanov, or Ivanov.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  But he didn't tell me for a long time.

• 47:42Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:43Lewis Howes?

  How long did you know him for?

• 47:45Speaker 02

  That's paradoxical.

• 47:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Because he became the archetypal mentor. You know, King Arthur had Merlin, the magician. Daniel-san had Miyagi, the karate kid.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Frodo had Gandalf. I mean, there are these archetypal stories of the mentor, the wise mentor, and the bumbling young student. And so, and Carlos Castaneda, you know, he had the Brujo Don't Want. So, Socrates became the archetypal teacher. And many people say, Dan, I wish I read your book and I wish I had a Socrates in my life. I go, you do. I wrote my book so I could share my teachers, so they could be part of your life. And I could be part of your lineage, and it's wonderful. We're part of each other's lineage. Each of us who interact with each other, we influence people and we teach them in that way. I believe we're all teachers and all students.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  I was mentioning before our talk here that Albert Schweitzer said in Influencing Other People, "Example is not the main thing, it's the only thing." So, that is how we teach. Many of us think, oh, nobody's paying attention to me. Yes, they are. Our peers, our colleagues, people on the street. You know, after our session, I'm gonna be walking down the street later and if I see a piece of litter on the ground, I might just pick it up and toss it in the can.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  So, I can't know the impact of my words, but I do know when I leave LA, it's gonna be a little cleaner.

• 49:17Lewis Howes?

  I like that.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Little things can make a big difference like that. Somebody might see that, and they might pick up some litter sometime.

• 49:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  And I think that's how we have the major impact on people.

• 49:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:28Lewis Howes?

  If there was only one lesson you could share from Socrates, what's the most meaningful for you?

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Well, it might have something to do with trust.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  We second guess ourselves so many times. Could've, should've, would've. We could've done this, regrets and so on. And in the sense we're not trusting the process of our life. That everything that's happened to us has been for our highest good and learning. That is, that's how I would define faith. F A I T H. It's not about believing something. It's about the courage to live as if. Everything that happens is for our highest good and learning. So it has to do with that sense of trusting our process. That, that we think we've lost the path. Maybe you felt like that at a point in your career. But wherever we step, the path appears. Even if it doesn't feel like it.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  And to continue to move on, to move on. But there is, there is one story. Huston Smith, he's an elder wise man. He wrote a book called World Religion. And he had a friend called Aldous Huxley, who wrote a book called Brave New World. And Professor Huxley, among his peers was, he had traveled the world intensely studying every spiritual tradition around the world. And when he was in hospice care before his death, his friend Huston asked him, Aldous, is there any way you can summarize everything you've ever learned? And he said, I'm a little embarrassed to say that I can probably summarize it in about six words.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Try to be a little kinder. And it's possible that it all comes down to that. For each of us in our own family, in our own life, to do our best to be a little kinder, to make a little bit of a difference, a kind word now and then, a bit of service for someone else. So I'm still working on that one.

• 51:32Lewis Howes?

  Being kinder?

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:35Lewis Howes?

  Do you get triggered easily in the world in general, outside of family?

• 51:40Speaker 02

  No, I have other issues. I don't get triggered.

• 51:42Lewis Howes?

  What are the issues?

• 51:44Speaker 02

  I tend to stonewall, you know, my, my wife. You know, it took me 25 years to realize my wife was not criticizing me, she was improving me.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  Sometimes rather enthusiastically. And when she is, was, her face was close to mine and she was improving me. Sometimes I do the typical guy thing and I'll cross my arms, break off eye contact, you know, and stonewall. But once in a while I rise to the occasion and I keep eye contact with her. I listen, I take it in. And I even, when she's done, I thank her for what she said. And I say, I'm gonna really, you know, think about this and is there anything you'd like to add? I've actually done that.

• 52:24Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  So, we all have good moments and lesser moments. So, I think, even those practicing in your School of Greatness, I think, they have great moments and other moments less so, like I do. We're all in this together, we're all practicing together on this, in this school.

• 52:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Who's the second greatest teacher in your life?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Socrates, the man I call Socrates, the greatest teacher in my life. After forty-three years of marriage, I would have to say is my wife.

• 52:56Lewis Howes?

  What's the greatest lesson she's taught you?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  She still is teaching me, just to, she, she's a reminder to work at my edge, whatever it is that's most difficult for me. And again, as I indicated to you. And to be willing to lose face. You know, Socrates once said, "We're all fools, just that some of us know it, some of us don't." To be willing to be foolish and appear foolish. And I, I'd say that, that would be it. You ask some challenging questions and I've given you the most honest answers I can.

• 53:40Lewis Howes?

  I like them, yeah, it's great. People going through transition in their life, going through a dark time, a challenging time, an uncertain time, what feedback or suggestions do you have for them? Maybe financial crisis, maybe physical challenges, maybe career, relationship challenges where what was once certain is now not.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Well, Alan Watts, he was a great teacher. He wrote a book called The Wisdom of Insecurity. Because we all go through those kinds of moments. And we all know you have to let go of one side of the pool to swim to the other side. But we don't like to let go. We like that security, that sense. You know, it's said that spirit comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. When our lives are in difficulty, we're looking for change. Usually it's change out there, something different. But when life is going great, we don't want change. Life comes at us in waves of change. We can neither predict nor control. But we can learn to surf. To surf?

• 54:49Speaker 02

  To surf. S U R F. We can surf those waves. That is a fundamental life skill. To accept and make it over our way. Any good martial artist knows, you can't always fight force with force. You get out of the way, use the energy. And we use it to lift, again, daily life, spiritual weight training. You don't lift weights, you don't get stronger. So to remember that, to hold to that thread, that in those moments... All right, another quick story. When I turned 60, which was 11 years ago, I decided I'd learn to ride a unicycle. Anybody who's tried that knows it's humbling. Really tough. I'd get on and out from under me. I'd get on, out from under me. And I went out to a tennis court. A friend of mine loaned me his unicycle

• 55:33Speaker 02

  and told me, "Go around the court, hold on, get a death grip on the chain-linked fence." And I was holding on to it, trying to ride this thing. Took me about an hour and a half to go around. And at the end of the first week of practice, I came back every day. I could careen forward for about six pedals. The second week, 12 pedals. The end of the third week, I could do figure eights around the tennis court. And I never, at the start, I said, "This isn't for me. I can't do this. I'm just not capable of it." But I kept at it. And even though I'd learned some of this in gymnastics years before, because I failed 50 times a day in the gym, I learned two things from this. One, everything is difficult until it becomes easy. But the most important thing, and this is the response to your question.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  That there were a couple of days in those three weeks, everything fell apart. I felt dumber, less coordinated. I was worse than I was three days before that. I was mentally confused, physically confused. I didn't know what I was doing. But I came to realize, because the day after that usually, I had a breakthrough. You know that from your own training.

• 56:39Lewis Howes?

  Of course, yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  And I think those crisis times, those times of difficulty are really the learning times. It's going from front brain to the back brain. That's when the learning is happening, but we're making that shift. That's why the confusion happens. Like learning to drive a gear shift car, you know, for first you have to think about it a lot. So it's important to trust that process of not knowing what you're doing and leap into the void. And I know it's easy for me to say, but we've all been through it and to trust that path.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  By the way, I did write a book specifically for people going through transitions. It's called The Four Purposes of Life.

• 57:16Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  We may have spoken with that. I'm not sure which book we spoke about. But it goes into the four purposes we're all working on.

• 57:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  And it's good for anyone in a transition time.

• 57:25Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  I guess I'm supposed to promote The Hidden School. It's my latest book, but you know.

• 57:29Lewis Howes?

  All your books are great.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 57:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 57:32Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 57:34Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. This has been fun. Curious, what else I want to ask you though.

• 57:43Lewis Howes?

  For someone, I'm thirty four, you're seventy one, right?

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 57:47Lewis Howes?

  Um, I'm curious, and you're in amazing shape. At least you look like it. I don't know, maybe there's something else going on, but you look like you're great shape.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  Doing okay.

• 57:55Lewis Howes?

  Amazing energy, posture, alignment. Obviously you had a couple surgeries, but other than that, got great, great shape.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 58:01Lewis Howes?

  What is, what advice about health would you give to someone my age or in their twenties, thirties and forties about what's to come? If you could go back to my age, how would you set up your day in your life knowing what's to come?

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know that saying, somebody said, if I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have, I would have treated myself better.

• 58:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  We know that genetics are a tendency. If we have long-lived parents, we tend to live longer. But there's wiggle room because there are these triggers. We can turn off a gene or turn it on, whatever that is, good or bad thing, by our lifestyle. And people sometimes come up to me saying, "I have a spiritual problem. I have an emotional problem." But I ask them three questions. Are you getting regular, moderate exercise? Second question. Are you eating a balanced diet for you? Third question. Are you getting enough rest? Because we tend to be sleep deprived. And you know the research on that. And notice when I said regular, moderate exercise, I didn't say the latest slow-motion Pilates, this system, that system.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Are you moving your body? Are you moving around? The body's meant to move and stretch and do some strength and so on. Older people need more exercise than younger people, just different kinds of exercise. So moderate, balanced exercise almost every day. And for those who don't do that, who know it would be good for them, who don't, I recommend they get up tomorrow morning and do one jumping jack. And the next morning, one jumping jack. And the next morning, one jumping jack. After 30 days, if someone says, "Do you have a regular exercise routine?" They can say, "Yes, I do." Now, people laugh. They say, "That's not going to give you your aerobic capacity or train your set point or anything." But it's got a foot in the door.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  It's based on the principle, a little of something is better than a lot of nothing. Simple is powerful because we're more likely to do it. So rather than grandiose resolutions, start small. Dream big, dream big, but start small, then connect the dots. That's how we turn what we know into what we actually do. That's small start. Gesture in the right direction. And a balanced diet. I didn't say vegetarian, vegan, raw food, gluten-free, paleo, all the systems. I don't believe in imposing a philosophy on our body. It's really just about finding out what works for us, what gives us more energy, and continuing to experiment until we settle into a diet that's balanced for us. Eating a little more of what's good for us, a little less of what's not.

• 1:00:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  And the third thing is, again, getting enough rest over time. Some nights we stay up, we have a lot of work to do. But over time, getting enough rest. When we do those three things, with all the gourmet challenges and systems and sophisticated approaches to health and wellness, really comes down to those three things. If we do those, we're likely to optimize our own genetic potential and live a balanced life. And those so-called emotional and spiritual issues tend to fade and go away.

• 1:01:02Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  And we're better able to face the real challenges of everyday life. So small, dream big, start small.

• 1:01:10Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, hmm. Who's been a big influence in your life in terms of this space? Other authors, speakers, seminar leaders? Who do you feel like has done a really great job at delivering a similar message in this space? That you're like, wow, I really appreciate his writing, or her speech, or her, whatever it may be?

• 1:01:40Lewis Howes?

  Was there anyone that you do admire in this space, or?

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  The reason I'm kind of holding back from that is, I'm, next year I start my final book. It's probably gonna be the last book I write.

• 1:01:51Lewis Howes?

  How many years have you been saying that?

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I haven't. Really? I, I, yeah, I could be wrong. You can always be wrong. But I, I really do believe that it'll complete my work. Eighteenth book, and it's gonna be a memoir, and it's gonna be about the four primary mentors who've most influenced my life and work. I will say this, one I call the professor, one I call the guru, one I call the warrior priest, and the fourth, the sage. Uh, these are other than Socrates. They influenced his character by a time or with the book.

• 1:02:21Lewis Howes?

  So you haven't shared these yet?

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  No, so I'm, I'm kinda holding back on that.

• 1:02:24Lewis Howes?

  You're waiting.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they will, that'll come out, that's yet to come.

• 1:02:27Lewis Howes?

  Can you share one that's not in those four, that you're just like, wow, I really respect or admire them?

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  Yes, uh, and yet, it's not really well-known speakers, or teachers, or writers. I mean, I've been influenced by books. I, I love fiction books like Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, you know, epic fantasy, but spiritual search. My favorite movie's Groundhog Day.

• 1:02:49Lewis Howes?

  It's a great movie.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Love that movie.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  And but it's people from everyday life. When I see someone do something that I admire,

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  those close to me, my wife and daughters, I've become quite a feminist. I really can see the challenges for women today, as well as men.

• 1:03:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  So I take my role models on the subway. That's where I see them. And in the streets of New York. And here.

• 1:03:18Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Sitting across from one now.

• 1:03:20Lewis Howes?

  I appreciate it. Yeah, appreciate it. This is one of the final questions. I don't know if I asked you this last time, which you were on in June of 2015. So I can't remember if I asked this or afterwards. It's called the three truths.

• 1:03:35Lewis Howes?

  And let's imagine you've written your last book, and maybe you've written more, or you've done any anything else you want to do for the rest of your life. You make it happen. You speak all over the place. You do whatever you want to do. It happens.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Accomplished it, yeah.

• 1:03:49Lewis Howes?

  And it's the last day, many years from now. And for whatever reason, all your work is erased. So all the books, content, done. But you have a piece of paper and a pen by your bed, just before you're about to take your last breath. And you get to write down three things you know to be true about everything in your life that you've experienced. And this is the only thing people would have to be remembered about you, are these three truths. Do you know what you'd say are yours?

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  You have a pencil, paper handy? All right, well, let me see. Let me see.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  I would write down paradox, humor, and change. My old mentor Socrates gave me a business card many years ago, and those were the three words on it. Paradox, humor, and change. Humor, meaning cosmic humor, not just laughing at jokes, but not taking ourselves so seriously in our life. Change, we talked about a bit earlier, that is a constant. You know, the Buddha said,

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  "All that begins also ends. Make peace with that, and all will be well." So change is, and if we can learn to flow with change, that's a huge, huge life skill. But paradox may be the key. In fact, in the hidden school, I'm going to bring it back to that. Paradox is two apparently opposing statements that are both true.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  For example,

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  And actually, it's a key to reconcile some of the major questions before humanity. The big questions of philosophy. Does free will exist? Does time exist? Are we all one, or are we separate beings? Is death real or an illusion? These are big questions that underlie everything else in our lives. Without understanding that, there's no real foundation in our life. We wander around, doing the best we can in relationships and everything else. So paradox is a key to help reconcile these questions. Because I can really state this. Does time exist? Yes. Is time an illusion? Yes. Is free will real? Do we have free will? Yes.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Is free will an illusion? Yes. Are we separate beings? Yes. Are we all one? Absolutely. Is death real? For sure. Is death an illusion? Clearly. How can I say that? Well, I go into that in The Hidden School. There's a book within the book, and it goes into some of these fundamental questions that underlie all of our lives that many people don't even think about. Because we're dealing with the challenges of everyday life. But I think it was time to write that, and that's why I waited 37 years. It's like an advanced training.

• 1:06:47Lewis Howes?

  Make sure you guys get the book, The Hidden School: Return of the Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman. Guys, check it out. DanMillman.com.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  PeacefulWarrior.com. Either one.

• 1:06:57Lewis Howes?

  PeacefulWarrior, DanMillman.com. Are you on social media as well?

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  I'm on Facebook. I send out quotes every week, favorite quotations.

• 1:07:04Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure. Awesome. Dan Millman on Facebook, everywhere on social media, yeah. Or Peaceful Warrior.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, people can find me.

• 1:07:11Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, gotcha. Before I ask the final question, I want to acknowledge you, Dan, for the incredible impact you've made on my life and so many people's lives with your wisdom and your constant search for meaning and understanding of how to live this crazy life that we're all in. So I want to acknowledge you for the gifts that you have and for all that you do for so many people. It's amazing.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  Thank you, Lewis. I'd like to acknowledge you back, really. Yeah, you're doing some great work.

• 1:07:37Lewis Howes?

  Thank you, appreciate it. And the final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  The word that came up for me? Everyone. They just haven't all awakened to that yet. It's not about achievement, or how good a publicist you have, or if you get in the media, get famous. There's a real heroism, and I don't cheapen the word. There's a courage in every human being. We all bring it out at times, so that's what comes up for me when I think of greatness.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  Pleasure.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  Ooh, I love this one, guys. If you enjoyed it as much as I did, it's all about the spiritual weight training and becoming a peaceful warrior. We all need more of this in our lives with the constant stresses and adversities and challenges that come up. How we respond to these moments every single day? How we respond defines us. If we respond out of fear and anger and scarcity, it defines the results in our life, and it defines our inner peace and our inner well-being. But if we respond with love and compassion and grace, and wanting to connect with humanity

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  and lifting other people up, well, then it defines our results as well, and it definitely defines our inner peace in that process. So if you enjoyed this, make sure to take a screenshot of this right now on your phone, post it to your Instagram story, to your Instagram page, to Twitter, Facebook, and use the link lewishouse.com/554. The full show notes, all the things we talked about, the resources, the full video is over there as well, where you can watch us in the flesh. That's right. And make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, guys. We have so much amazing video interview content and other behind-the-scenes videos that you can't see anywhere else. So go become a subscriber over on YouTube.

• 1:09:44Speaker 00

  And of course, make sure to preorder a copy of the book, The Mask of Masculinity. Guys, if you haven't got your copy yet, at least go to maskofmasculinity.com and look to see what it's all about, all the raving reviews, how important it is for men, how important it is for women to dive into this topic and learn more. Guys, check it out, maskofmasculinity.com. Such a powerful episode. It's all about the spiritual weight training. A warrior does not give up what he loves. He finds the love in what he does. I hope you guys enjoy this one, and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.