Avoid Burnout, Learn Faster, Improve Your Memory & Overcome Procrastination w/Thomas Frank EP 1205

Today’s guest is Thomas Frank! He’s a video creator and author with a focus on helping people become more capable of whatever they aspire to do. On his YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers, he creates artistic and educational videos around productivity, habits, and "learning how to learn". In this episode we discuss how to better understand why we get burnt out and how to avoid it, the techniques Thomas uses to learn new things faster and improve your memory, how to actually master your time management, How to overcome procrastination and develop self-discipline and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1205Kobe Bryant on Mamba Mentality, NBA Titles, and Oscars: https://link.chtbl.com/691-podKevin Hart Breaks Down His Secrets to Success: https://link.chtbl.com/956-podKatherine Schwarzenegger Pratt on the Power of Forgiveness: https://link.chtbl.com/925-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,205 with Thomas Frank.

• 0:06Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 0:29Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back, my friend. Today's guest is Thomas Frank, and he is a video creator and author with a focus on helping people become more capable of whatever they aspire to do. And on his YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers, he creates artistic and educational videos around productivity, habits, and learning how to learn. And in this episode, we discuss how to better understand why we get burnt out and how to avoid this in our lives. The techniques Thomas uses to learn new things faster and improve memory, how to actually master your time management when you feel like there's too much on your plate,

• 1:06Lewis Howes?

  how to overcome procrastination and develop self-discipline, and so much more. I think you're really gonna love this one, so make sure to share this with a friend that you think would be inspired by this message as well. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Thomas Frank.

• 1:26Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back, everyone at School of Greatness. Very excited about my guest. Thomas Frank is in the house, my man. Strong, buff-looking dude.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Are we gonna arm wrestle now?

• 1:33Lewis Howes?

  You'll beat me. Maybe left-handed, but are you right-handed or left-handed?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Right-handed.

• 1:39Lewis Howes?

  Okay, maybe left-handed. I've got a strong left hand as well, but you'll probably beat me. You're eight years younger.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  My secret. My left hand is stronger.

• 1:48Lewis Howes?

  You've got an amazing story and amazing content. Millions of followers over on YouTube. I love the content about productivity, accelerated learning, how to learn faster, memory, all these things you talk about. And in a content-consuming and creating world that we're in right now, especially I feel like in the last year and a half with the pandemic, more content has been created and consumed than ever. I'm feeling that more people are also having a sense of burnout more than ever. Like, everyone just says, like, "I'm overwhelmed, I'm burnt out."

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:17Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious, how have you managed this personally with all of your going on personal life, fitness, you know, getting up early, productivity, learning, creating new channels? How do you not feel burnt out? And what's your process for teaching that to other people?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  That's my secret cap, I'm always burned out. No, this is a complex question with multiple answers. So I can't say that there's one simple thing you can do to avoid burnout. But I made a video on burnout in 2019. I heavily burned out then.

• 2:47Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Did some soul searching, did some, you know, made some changes to my life.

• 2:52Lewis Howes?

  Why did you get burned out? Why'd you get burned out in the first place?

• 2:54Speaker 01

  So, it's, in my case, doing the same thing for too long.

• 2:58Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  And there's something called the over justification effect. It's probably been said on the show before, but it's when you allow external rewards to come into your life, it kills intrinsic motivation, you had to do something. So when I was a kid, I made PowerPoint slideshows all the time, just for fun. You know, you got a job making PowerPoint slideshows for somebody, now you're not gonna do it in your free time. And there's a lot of research around it, it's more nuanced than that. And I think you can balance it, you can be an artist for a living and you can reap the rewards while still enjoying it. But there is a cost there and a trade off. And when you start making content purely for, maybe not even purely for, but you just let your schedule get so overwhelming because there's all these opportunities, it can just sort of crush your spirit to do it.

• 3:40Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  So, biggest thing for me was realizing, okay, I don't need to be making this much content. We'd be fine without it. And I would rather put more time into making each piece better. So 2020 was actually an amazing year for me artistically, because we decided to go from four videos to two.

• 3:56Lewis Howes?

  A week.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  A month.

• 3:58Lewis Howes?

  Four videos, one a week, to one every other week?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:01Lewis Howes?

  How long would it take you to do one video before then?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess it depends. And I think that was part of the burnout, is I was like, I have one week, and you know, ideally three days, because I have other things to make this video. So it's just gotta be a listicle video, and we'll throw in some stock footage, and we'll make it like we did before. And at the time, I was watching people like Matt D'Avella make these Netflix documentary quality videos for YouTube.

• 4:25Lewis Howes?

  He was doing like, one a month.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  One a month, right? Because that's all it takes. But I'm watching, I'm like, I wanna make stuff like that!

• 4:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  So, we cut down. Took a break as well, so I could sort of just rest. And I think it's a big thing that we miss in our lives is understanding that rest is actually part of productivity. It sort of disengages you and lets you step back and get ideas again. And we started just focusing more on the quality. I was very interested in filmmaking at the time and like, okay, what lenses should I use? How can I get this kind of shot that I saw in a movie? My favorite thing we did in 2020 was this stupid video that was gonna be a response video to a video Matt made about checklists. I'm like, this is a response video. I should shoot it in two hours and be done with it. And then I get this idea and I'm like, what if I recreate a scene from my favorite movie in the world, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  And just try to make it shot for shot, like an homage? And this leads to me and my editor like standing out in random fields in the middle of like the mountains in Colorado and laying in snow fields and doing take after take and then learning how to do all these kind of editing things I'd never done before. But the result of that is my favorite piece of work that I've made, at least in terms of the visual fidelity, the editing, the music. I learned so much in doing that. And I'm like, yeah, okay, I didn't make as much money, but that was fun.

• 5:44Lewis Howes?

  It was cool.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  That was amazing. You know, and I'm gonna look back on that as one of my favorite things that I've made artistically.

• 5:49Lewis Howes?

  Right. I think what you said, rest is part of productivity is so powerful because I think we've been conditioned to stack our days with our schedule full of doing things. And something I try to do in my schedule is have strategic messing around time.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:04Lewis Howes?

  Which is like an hour, 30 minutes, two hours, whatever you can where you were like, this time I'm scheduling this so that I'm not stacking with something else, but I'm scheduling time for just brainstorming, play, walking, throwing a frisbee, whatever it is, playing a video game, something to like just clear your mind, or just talking to a friend, or just having space to do what you want.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:26Lewis Howes?

  And that has been so helpful for me. I mean, when I go to the gym, I get my best ideas. Like last night I was working out and I got a new idea for a channel and I was like... This is amazing. We just keep working out and getting this idea. But if we're not moving our body or giving ourselves space and time away from work, I feel like it's hard to be as productive.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:43Lewis Howes?

  Isn't there a video did like, what's it called? Feynman, not Feynman, Feynman?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Feynman technique?

• 6:48Lewis Howes?

  Feynman technique.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:49Lewis Howes?

  What is the Feynman technique? Does that have anything to do with this?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  So it doesn't have anything to do with rest. Uh, but we can get into it. So the Feynman technique is-

• 6:56Lewis Howes?

  Feynman technique, right?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Feynman technique, named after Richard Feynman, the physicist. I don't believe that he ever said, "This is my technique and I bestow it upon the world." I think someone else just slapped his name on it. Very simple. If you teach something, it forces you to break down the information and it forces you to understand it well enough to break it down simply for someone else. So if you want to understand something well, try to teach it to somebody else. And my video on the Feynman technique acknowledged that you don't always have a ready and willing participant who's going to ask you those questions. So you can go through an exercise of acting as if maybe you're writing a blog post or writing a chapter of a book for somebody. Write out the explanation and try to think to yourself, "What would a kid ask me?" What's the "but why?" question?

• 7:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And then recently I did a follow-up video because I'm studying for a weightlifting certification, CSCS. And then there's another one called the PBC, there's two of them. So I have to learn biomechanics, like, you know, what's this hinge joint here versus this joint here? That kind of thing. And me being a YouTuber for so long, I'm like, "What if I just film a video going through what I learned?" And then I'm like, "What if I just take that video and throw it into my notes and then watch it back and critique it?" So that's my new version of the Feynman technique is try to explain it from memory to my camera, throw it up on YouTube unlisted, throw it in my notes and then watch it back and be like, "That was wrong."

• 8:11Lewis Howes?

  Are you doing a, um, a video where you're actually watching the video and then? And then actually that's the video, your video up on there and then what's it called?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Film myself critiquing?

• 8:22Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Video of the video? It's like the Gilderloch heart from Harry Potter where he's like, painting a picture of himself, painting a picture of himself.

• 8:29Lewis Howes?

  That could be interesting, right?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  I mean, it could work.

• 8:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it would add more labor into the process for sure. But I mean, learning is labor, so.

• 8:38Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 8:40Lewis Howes?

  I've been, I was telling you beforehand that I've been taking Spanish lessons three days a week for the last little over a year now. I'll tell you what, man, my brain hurts. My brain hurts learning this skill. And I, and I wanna start changing the language around this because I wanna start conditioning myself to say this is fun and enjoyable as opposed to this hurts. Because I think the more I say this is challenging and hard, it's going to be hard.

• 9:05Lewis Howes?

  How do you, when you're trying to learn something new, how do you not let it overwhelm you and become like emotionally and mentally painful? When it's this new subject, you have no clue what you're doing, or is there no way around that?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  I don't know if there's a way around it.

• 9:17Lewis Howes?

  It's painful.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  It is painful.

• 9:19Lewis Howes?

  Why is it so painful learning something new?

• 9:21Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like building a muscle. You know, and so we always used to say like, your muscles are growing because you're damaging them and then the repair process makes them stronger. From what I've read recently, that's not quite how it works. It's more of like tension on the muscle just tells your body, hey, this muscle needs to grow. But it's still like, you need to put tension on the muscle. You need to stress everything to make it grow. My biggest philosophy in life is use it or lose it. Like pretty much everything we have, relationships, your brain, your muscle, your body, your bones. If you don't use them, you lose them. Astronauts go into space and if they stay too long, they come back with like debilitating bone mineral density degradation. That's why, that's the main reason why they have to do those exercise routines, because there's no gravity.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  And my favorite thing is like the nun study, right? So there's these nuns, they work their whole life into their eighties, nineties. And there's this study they did where they did autopsies on the nuns after they died and found, at least in one case, this lady who was sharp as a tack, whole life, eighties, working, teaching. And they found tons of Alzheimer's lesions in her brain.

• 10:23Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Just wires around it. So it's like, you know, we don't, we're purport to say too much around this because I'm not a scientist, but I believe if we use things, we keep them. We're like anti fragile beings if we lose them, or if we don't use them, we lose them.

• 10:38Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. What is the uh, the skill that you've learned that's been the hardest to learn?

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good question. It's between figure skating and singing.

• 10:48Lewis Howes?

  Figure skating?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:50Lewis Howes?

  Why figure skating?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  So I had a friend in Iowa back when I lived in Des Moines. He's like, dude, I wanna learn how to play hockey, but I can't skate. So I signed up for this class and it's all like eight-year-old girls and me. Will you join this with me just so it's like not just them and me? And I'm like, okay, sure. And I go into a hockey shop. And this is Iowa, so there's not like a ton of skating culture and everything, but I'm like, alright. I have to do the counter. I have never skated before. I remember renting skates when I was a kid and my ankles were flopping all over the place. What should I start with? Hockey skates or figure skates? And the dude's like, you should get figure skates because they're not as wobbly, I guess. Uh, so I drove up to Minnesota to get my pair of figure skates, cause if you're a dude, buying men's figure skates is not easy.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And I just ended up liking it. And I never wanted to play hockey. Don't really wanna get my teeth knocked out. I'm on camera a lot.

• 11:42Lewis Howes?

  But you liked figure skating?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  But I like it. And I've always liked like skateboarding and rollerblading and skiing and just like graceful, extreme kinda sports. And figure skating's a lot like that. In fact, I found that figure skating made me an incredibly better skier.

• 11:55Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  There's a ton of skill transfer there. So I tried that, but I found that was much more difficult than like wrestling or football or any sport I'd ever done in the past. It's just so technique-based and in my opinion, you need a coach because you can watch even yourself and you can watch the pros and you're just like, I can't really tell the difference between what I'm doing, what they're doing.

• 12:16Lewis Howes?

  How many skills do you feel like you've learned?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good question. I, I like to dabble in a lot of skills. Uh, my friends always make fun of me for getting into obsessions and then dropping them. I'm that kinda person. So, I mean, there's been a lot of them.

• 12:28Lewis Howes?

  Three, two, three months obsessing, like, okay, on to the next thing.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that will probably mean I will never be the greatest in the world at anything, but I'm kind of okay with that.

• 12:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Like, I wanna learn new things and it's just fun.

• 12:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'm similar. I like to learn new things as well. Uh, but there are some things I wanna master, which is like Spanish is one of them. But salsa dancing was something that I got into 16 years ago. And uh, I've been doing it consistently for 16 years. It's been a great gift. So I think figure skating, if that's your thing, that could be a great gift as well for a long time. So if someone wants to Learn and master a skill in twice as time. What do they need to do to really say, okay, this is, I'm gonna learn figure skating. It's not gonna take me six months, it's gonna take me three months. What do they need to think about in order to learn a skill, a language, anything in twice as speed?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Alright, so there's a few things we can go through here. First one I want to talk about is the three types of progress. Cause a lot of people get tripped up with this. So, three types. Gear acquisition, a conceptual learning phase, and then the deliberate practice phase. The thing about these phases is they each offer a different level of perceived jump for the effort invested.

• 13:35Lewis Howes?

  So what's the first one? Gear acquisition.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  So, buying the things you need. I wanna be a YouTuber, I buy a camera, I buy a lens, I buy lights. You feel like you've made this quantum leap. And in a sense you have, because you now have the tools you need to do the thing. But, they have gotten, you know, closer to actually doing.

• 13:51Lewis Howes?

  You haven't done anything, you just have it sitting there, and it might sit there for years.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:55Lewis Howes?

  Until you do something.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  So, there is like this, uh, this study that is sadly the, um, I guess sadly is not the word, but there's a study done a few years ago, victim of the replication crisis. I don't know if you've heard of that, but there was this whole thing that came out a few years ago. It's like, all these psychology studies, we've tried replicate them, and we don't get the same results. So, maybe half of psychology is bunk. But, it had a concept that I found interesting, uh, called a social reality. Where you come up and say, "I'm going to run a marathon to your friends." And they're like, "That's really cool." And you gain this sense of satisfaction just hearing your friends tell you, you know, that you're really cool, that you're gonna do it, and then you don't do the thing. You know, I don't know how true it is.

• 14:30Lewis Howes?

  And you feel bad about yourself, yeah.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I don't think you feel bad about yourself, you just, you've gained a little bit of the satisfaction you would have derived from practicing and actually accomplishing it. So, maybe that makes you a little less incentivized to go do the thing. You're just like, "Ah, I already feel good, cause my friends now see me as a potential marathon runner."

• 14:44Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  So...

• 14:45Lewis Howes?

  Is it good to talk about the goal then, the skill you wanna learn?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  That's the question, right? Because they can't replicate the study, so do we actually know? I'm not sure. My gut feeling is if you have friends who will actually hold your feet to the fire on stuff, yes. If you have friends who are just sort of like, they'll just be like, "Yeah, that's gonna be great." You know, pat you on the back. I don't know if that's actually a good idea, because if it de-motivates you to actually put the work in.

• 15:06Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  You know, if you derive the satisfaction just from having them say, "That's good, good for you." Maybe not.

• 15:12Lewis Howes?

  The thing that I've seen work, uh, and I don't know if this is proven or scientific or something, but I've seen when people say, "I'm gonna start working out and start losing the weight." Right, let's just give that example. If they say that to someone... I see maybe half the time they do it and half the time they drop after a few weeks. But the people that I see that actually fall through is when they say, I want to do this for whatever 30, 60, 90 days. I'm going to post about it every day and I'm going to commit to myself by posting about it every day on a journey. I think when I've seen that, people are more likely to show up for themselves when they know they have to post about something or, you know, if they have a coach. And yeah, I know you've got a coach when you're with lifting right now. And it's like, if you know someone is going to be there to watch you or you have to film it for that person on a daily basis.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:57Lewis Howes?

  You're more likely to do it. And if you're spending money for that coach, you're probably more likely to do it as well.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  I absolutely believe that.

• 16:03Lewis Howes?

  So, so gear acquisition is the first

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:07Lewis Howes?

  type of progress. And what's the second type?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Second type is conceptual learning. So, sit down, take a course, read a book, have a teacher. And what I'll say here-

• 16:18Lewis Howes?

  You're trying to learn figure skating. So that would mean like go online and watch videos of figure skating tutorials.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Watch a tutorial or get a coach. And the biggest thing here is you read like Josh Kaufman's book on skill acquisition or Tim Ferriss's. You want to break down the skill into the subsets you want to acquire now. Hopefully have somebody who can tell you, here's the sequencing you should probably go through. And then try to focus on learning the skills of subsets you want to learn right now. So in the case of figure skating, I do not want to start with a triple axel. I don't even want to start with any kind of jump whatsoever. Especially any kind of jump with a rotation because first I need to understand how to rotate. So there's a move called a three turn. This is one of the first things you learn. The first thing you learn is literally just how to go. But one of the first techniques you're going to learn is called a three turn. It literally is just, you're on one foot, you go one, two, three, and you sort of create this counter-rotation with your shoulders and your torso.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  That makes your hips rotate and you go from going forwards to going backwards. Super basic technique, half turn. That's like one of the first things you're going to learn and then you need to drill that for a long time before you go and start trying to figure out the technique for like a toe loop or something.

• 17:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, because you've got to feel comfortable transferring from going forward or going backward and balance yourself and not crack your skull open.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:29Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  So a little bit of conceptual learning and then the biggest part, which yields the lowest perceived feeling of progress for each hour you put in is the deliberate practice. And that is just honing in on, here's the thing I need to learn. Now I'm going to go out and specifically learn that. And my video with Charles sort of breaks down the mindset that you want to go into a session of deliberate practice with, but the biggest part of it is try to understand what you want to accomplish by the end of the session. You might not get there, but if you have a vision of what you're trying to accomplish, you have direction in the practice session. This is a big problem for musicians because a lot of practice is sitting down and noodling around. If you're like, I want to play this section of this periphery song and I'm currently able to play

• 18:14Speaker 01

  it at halftime, I'm going to use a metronome and I'm going to keep increasing the time by 10 beats per minute until I can play it cleanly. That's deliberate practice.

• 18:22Lewis Howes?

  Who coined that term? Is that from the Talent Code? What was that book?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  I'm not sure.

• 18:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. For some reason Patrick Coyle, I'm not sure if that's the name or not, but anyways deliberate practice, that's why I heard that from a book. I think it was the Talent Code. So that's conceptual learning? Is that correct still? Is that still on?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  That was deliberate practice.

• 18:40Lewis Howes?

  That's deliberate practice, the third one.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, you know, they're kind of, there's a sort of spectrum between those two. Conceptual learning and deliberate practice, you can say like, I could get the same, both at the same time.

• 18:49Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  But it's, I guess where you can put the divide is I'm observing someone teaching me or I'm reading something and now I'm going and trying it for myself.

• 18:57Lewis Howes?

  Got it. And is that the way, so how do we learn? So this is how we're going to learn something. How do we learn it faster? Does more deliberate practice?

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Those are the ways to learn it faster. I mean, so in terms of skill development, that's definitely part of it. And then there are other things like interleaving where

• 19:13Lewis Howes?

  What is that?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  You spend a little bit of time working on one subset of a skill and then you go move to something else deliberately. And that sort of lets your brain be relaxed from the practice on one aspect and get into something else and then it combines them later on.

• 19:24Lewis Howes?

  Right. It's called interweaving?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Interleaving.

• 19:26Lewis Howes?

  Leaving.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a great book by Barbara Oakley called A Mind for Numbers.

• 19:30Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  And the title makes you think it's about learning math. The book is entirely about learning how to learn.

• 19:36Lewis Howes?

  Learning how to learn.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What's been the biggest challenge for you then in learning how to learn faster?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Wanting to do too many things.

• 19:44Lewis Howes?

  It's like, I've got 10 hobbies that I'm trying to master right now.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:47Lewis Howes?

  Skills.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  One of my favorite stories, it's probably apocryphal, but there's a story about Warren Buffett's pilot. Who was talking to Warren Buffett and says, "I have 25 different skills I want to learn and what should I do?" And he's like, "Okay, go home and write down all the things you want to learn." Alright, comes back and he's like, "Here's my list, I've got it." And then he's like, "Alright, now go home and circle the top 5 you care about." So he goes home, circles the top 5 that he cares about, comes back, says, "I think I understand now. These are the ones I need to focus on the most and I should only work on these ones in my free time." And then Warren Buffett supposedly says, "No, the other 20 are your not-to-do list." Because these are what will currently distract you from putting in the actual time and focus on the things you want to do. And I get a lot of people emailing me like, "I've heard that story before and I don't like it because I want to do these other things." And my response is, "Your life is long."

• 20:34Speaker 01

  You know, and the problem that we face right now is not that, "Oh, I'm gonna spend a year on this and then what if I don't have another year for that?" The problem is, it probably takes us like 20, 30 minutes to get into a good rhythm with whatever we're doing. And a lot of us are just like, "I'm gonna put 5 minutes into this and then distract it, 5 minutes into that." So the real goal here is, can you cull what you're trying to do? Cut certain things out to the point where you're able to put a good 30 minutes of practice into something.

• 21:00Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  I know personally, that is harder said than, or harder done than said.

• 21:04Lewis Howes?

  That's really hard to do. So how many things are you trying to learn right now? Like on a consistent monthly basis, how many skills?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Uh, that's a good question. I mean, right, my life is like weightlifting, trying to buy a house and work at the moment, so.

• 21:17Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  So I guess it's like, you know, honing my squat form until I can hit my weight goal.

• 21:21Lewis Howes?

  So weightlifting is kind of like the main skill you're trying to master, get to a certain level?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:25Lewis Howes?

  And then you maintain it essentially, right?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I want to do. Because I don't want to be one of those giant powerlifters. My dad is one. Uh, there is a video circulating somewhere around the internet in the depths of like old school internet where he's in a competition, literally bench pressing 600 pounds and his fama breaks.

• 21:44Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  On video.

• 21:45Lewis Howes?

  Oh man, that's crazy.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  My dad, or my, my coach didn't know that my dad was that guy. And I went to his house to film a video and he's like, "Hang on a second. I've seen that video of your dad, so you're not one of those guys who's just lying about your dad benching 600." Like, "Your dad actually did bench 600 pounds." And I was having a conversation with my dad a few years ago about that and about just the toll that powerlifting takes on your body. And he's like, you know, if you don't want to be competitive, there's a certain weight range you get up to where those weights are legitimately hurting your joints.

• 22:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Long term.

• 22:18Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  So I want to get to like 500 deadlift, 400 squat. My bench is kind of where I want it and then go back to like rock climbing and.

• 22:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  You know.

• 22:26Lewis Howes?

  Flexibility.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yes. Versatility and the ability to do anything athletic I want to do for as long as possible is my main goal.

• 22:33Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. Yeah. Staying, staying healthy. That's the key. What about when you're trying to learn these skills for yourself? Do you know that like, okay, with a skill like weightlifting, it's just going to take me a certain amount of time in order to get to those goals? Is that something you go into it with? Or you say, ah, what if I could do, what if I could do it faster? What if I could bench and lift? Or are you just like, physically it won't let me until I reach six, 12 months of getting to that goal?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  I, I think it's kind of that. So one thing I'll say here, and this is a little bit tangential, but I used to look at people who were stronger than me and be like, oh man, that guy's way stronger than me. Weightlifting, especially working with my coach and seeing the progress that my consistent effort brings, I now look at somebody and I'm like, that guy's six weeks ahead of me. And that's just a really encouraging mindset.

• 23:19Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  To look at somebody and not be like, oh, they're better than me and they're going to be where I am, or I'm never going to get to that level. It's just, they have a little bit of a head start. And if I'm consistent in my work, I'm gonna get there.

• 23:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  But with weightlifting specifically, I think we have this thought that we can accelerate anything and publishing and the online content industry has definitely disseminated this idea that you can hack anything. You can kind of hack weightlifting, but like for, especially for beginner and an intermediate lifter, we know the programming progression. We know what it is. And if you're going way too fast, you're either. Taking exhaustionist testosterone, or you are going to hurt yourself some way. And one thing that I constantly get reminded of is like my tendons and ligaments will not grow as fast as my muscles. They don't get the blood flow, they just don't grow that way.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  So even if the musculature is able to be accelerated, I might be injuring myself in another way. So for me, I don't eagle lift. I do it because it's satisfying. I do it because I want to stay strong and healthy, but I also do not want to injure myself.

• 24:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's smart.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  I want to be able to like, you know, do monkey bars or something.

• 24:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, smart man. What about like, um, memory? You know, when you're doing so much in your business and personal life, how do you remember the skill? How do you remember these things that you're learning better? I feel like we've lost the art and the ability to remember things.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  I think so to a degree. There's probably stuff you do for Spanish that helps you a lot.

• 24:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Uh, the biggest thing is use. And this is not said enough. There's a lot of people who are like, here's how you hack your memory by building a mind palace from Sherlock Holmes.

• 25:00Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  And we're going to use this system where you identify objects in your living room and then you create a numbering system. I've tried all that kind of stuff. It can work. It's a lot of work. And it's a lot of work that doesn't necessarily feel meaningful a lot of the time. Uh, I think if you have a project that requires it, like going through organic chemistry.

• 25:19Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Or, uh, to go to a language learning example, I was learning Japanese in 2013. So there was this.

• 25:26Lewis Howes?

  Are you fluent?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  I'm not fluent. I actually remember almost nothing.

• 25:29Lewis Howes?

  Wow, really?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  So that's, that's one point that I'm going to get to here is I went through this program, uh, it was a web app called Wani Konni. And it's just amazingly created SRS app. So spaced repetition. The whole principle is, uh, if you can try to make your brain recall something nearest to the point it would forget it, then it's like lifting a heavy weight, right? You get the best bang for your buck. That does actually work. So that app uses that. It uses these fun mnemonics and it creates like these crazy stories. And that does help you remember things. But with this use, it goes away. So when I was actually using it, I found that I was able to memorize Kanji and the other, uh, the Kana more easily and faster. But because I haven't been speaking Japanese for years, I forgot all of them.

• 26:13Lewis Howes?

  So you've got to use it consistently.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  You gotta use it.

• 26:16Lewis Howes?

  That's how you remember.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. I think if I were to pick up Wanneconey tomorrow and start using it again, it would come back faster. But the biggest component to memory is interest. Your brain has to care about it.

• 26:27Lewis Howes?

  Being interested.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the biggest thing I say is like, can you find a way to get your brain more interested in the thing? Whether it's exposing yourself to a story that makes what you're learning a lot more interesting. Like, I want to go to Italy now because I played Assassin's Creed 2. I'm a gamer, like, you know, I literally got to run around 14th century Italy. And I'm like, this is super cool. And now I want to go there and I want to see that stuff in real life. A lot of it still exists. Whereas before, I didn't have a huge interest. So the biggest thing is just like going out and discovering things, exposing yourself to new things, and that makes you more interested a lot of the time.

• 27:01Lewis Howes?

  What about, you talk about procrastination as well. Why do you think we procrastinate so much? And how do we overcome procrastination so we can get more done?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  So there's internal and external factors.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  The biggest thing comes down to the resistance we feel to engaging in a task. And when we have resistance, we're kind of like electricity and we want to go to something else that's less resistant. So when we have a cellphone sitting on our table that has access to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all these little dopamine hits. It's just like, ah, well, you know, I could try to write this paragraph here, but that's hard. Let me just check Twitter really quick. So the biggest thing is, how can you tailor your environment so that there is no path of lesser resistance? There is a great story by this guy, David Shankman. And I mean, this is like, from a carbon perspective, a little wasteful, but he bought a $5,000 ticket to Tokyo from New Jersey, business class.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Wrote half of his book on the plane, gets off the plane, has a coffee, gets back on the plane, goes back to New Jersey, writes the rest of his book.

• 28:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  No, there's no Wi-Fi. There's just his computer.

• 28:04Lewis Howes?

  This is before.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  This was like 2011 or 2012.

• 28:08Lewis Howes?

  Now there's movies and Wi-Fi and internet all over the place.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  That's true. A lot of people used to swear by the plane being like their one sanctuary and now it's like, uh-oh. So there are also things like, you know, the writers' retreats. I've seen ones like a cabin in the middle of Georgia in the woods. You could just go out there and there's no phone, no service, no nothing, just write. You don't have to do anything that drastic, though. You know, just turn your phone off. And maybe if you have the ability, set up an area in your home, or at the office, if you have an office like this, that doesn't have access to a lot of stuff.

• 28:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  So I'll like literally turn my internet off on my laptop if I need to write sometimes.

• 28:41Lewis Howes?

  And you just focus.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I want to increase the resistance it would take to go to do something else. There's a principle called the 20-second rule. I think Sean Aker came up with this. And 20 seconds is not a scientific number here, but the principle is, what is the activation energy required to do anything? So if it's something you want to do less, increase the activation energy. I remember when I was a kid, my mom would take the power cord to our Playstation. And we had to ask her for it. Because my brother and I were getting a little bit too obsessed with video games. So, you know, that's a little bit of like, you have to ask her. But also, it just makes it harder to go play the Playstation. And then if you want to do something more, decrease the activation energy. So I want to play guitar more. Guitar is not in the case. It's on the stand, somewhere where I walk by every day, so I can just pick it up and play.

• 29:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, make it easier for you to play it, and then it being in the closet or something like that.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:30Lewis Howes?

  What about managing our time? I know you've done a lot of studies with, I think, Elon and Benjamin Franklin about like how they manage their time and being more productive. What have you learned from, I guess, these great individuals who have created amazing things on time management?

• 29:45Speaker 01

  So learn stuff from them, learn stuff from my own experimentation. There are some different ways of doing it. So like the Ben Franklin method is like, time box your whole day. And that works for some people. It hasn't stuck for me. So I've presented it in a few videos.

• 30:01Lewis Howes?

  What did he do?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Basically, just like actually create a schedule for yourself.

• 30:05Lewis Howes?

  For your whole day, yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then Cal Newport has an actual, I think, a better version of this, where he says, list out your schedule on the left side of a piece of paper. And you're trying to make estimations of how long things are going to take. And then as the day goes on, kind of recreate your schedule, because it's always going to be different than you thought.

• 30:23Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  So a huge reason for this is something called the segmentation effect, where when we predict how long something will take... If I give you the whole, we think it'll take way less time than if I give you all the different parts. So, how long will it take for me to do my Lewis Howes interview? I think three hours. How long will it take for me to get dressed, get showered, drive to LA, find the parking spot, get to the office, get the coffee, actually start recording? I think we did that maybe 15 minutes after we planned. It's gonna take a little bit longer. That is also combined with the fact that we basically conflate best case with average case. So, and I'm like, how long does it take to get to work? I think, what's the best time I've ever had to get to work? That's how long it just takes in my head. So, I actually love this little feature. I use Fantastical. I don't know if you've ever used it.

• 31:08Lewis Howes?

  Fantastical.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Fantastical. I wish they would make a Windows app or a web app. It's only for Mac and iPhone. But, they have a thing where you can say, when's my event? And then it will tell you when to leave based on the estimated drive time plus a window. I was surprised. It took me less time to get here this morning than it would've in the middle of the afternoon yesterday. But, I was like, estimated 44 minute drive. And then I can say, alright, add 15 minutes to that. That's when it pings me.

• 31:33Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  So, that's nice.

• 31:34Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. Where are you staying?

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Uh...

• 31:37Lewis Howes?

  I was like, where are you staying?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  I'm staying in Malibu. A friend of mine just recently moved out there. So, I was just like, hey, I've got a bedroom.

• 31:43Lewis Howes?

  It's a drive out there, for sure.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  That PCH, though.

• 31:45Lewis Howes?

  I know, man.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I've never driven it before, and I've always wanted to.

• 31:50Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  And I'm like, this is amazing.

• 31:52Lewis Howes?

  Oh, no, it's worth the drive if you're mountains, the ocean, being in Idaho.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm in Denver.

• 31:57Lewis Howes?

  Iowa and Denver, yeah. It's a different vibe, that's for sure. You've got the nice mountains down Denver, though.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  We do, yeah. Driving the 70 in the mountains is incredible.

• 32:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And what, so what did Elon do then to master his time management and...

• 32:11Speaker 01

  From the article I read, it was the same thing.

• 32:13Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  It's just time boxing.

• 32:14Lewis Howes?

  Time boxing.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  So, it's just estimating your schedule. And, I don't wanna harp too much on time boxing because...

• 32:22Speaker 01

  A lot of people try it and it just doesn't stick. So what I think is more effective is just having a habit of planning your day out. I would often do it on a whiteboard. I do it in a little sticky note area of Notion now that I have. And it's just knowing, okay, what's on my schedule? What are the gaps of time I have between those scheduled items? And what can I realistically get done? If I have an hour, I know I'm not writing an article. Because it's gonna take me way too long to get into the flow of writing. I need two hours, three hours. And then planning out what you want to accomplish during the day that isn't a scheduled thing. And then trying to keep that limited. You know, I still struggle with this. I'll be like, I can get six or seven things done today.

• 33:00Lewis Howes?

  You can really get like one good thing done, or like maybe two, three max, right?

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yep. My friend Tiago recently tweeted, "When I was 25, I would drink coffee and feel like I could do everything. At 30, I would drink coffee and I feel like I could do anything. Now I drink it and I feel like I could do something."

• 33:16Lewis Howes?

  Maybe I could do something today, yeah. What about the habits of the most highly organized people? What do they do differently than most people don't do?

• 33:25Speaker 01

  So, well, we're talking about organization. Are we talking about morning routines?

• 33:29Lewis Howes?

  I think about the most productive people. What are the habits of the most productive people?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Well, I guess we need to know what the specific habit we're talking about is. So like if you said most organized people, right? They have a system. And I think about, my favorite example is Library of Congress. 39 million books, 865 miles of shelves. Imagine if there was no organizational system for that. You would take, I did the math on this and it was like 17 months of, I estimated like, you know, you could look at two books a second. It's like 17 months to see every single one of those if you never took a bathroom break. And with the Library of Congress classification system, you can find a book in seconds. It's just a treat. I know how to get to it. So people who are organized have a system for the inputs that come into their lives. They know where they should go. And they realize that this might take a little bit longer in the moment, but it makes you easily able to find whatever you need.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  And that makes you a lot more effective.

• 34:20Lewis Howes?

  What systems should we be implementing in our life to be more organized and optimized?

• 34:25Speaker 01

  So just a few, and I don't want to overwhelm people, but you know, where are you putting your tasks? Where do you capture ideas? And how do you organize your living space? Can you easily find the things that you need to find? And does your space feel so cluttered that you can't focus?

• 34:43Lewis Howes?

  How important is living space to becoming more productive and organized in your career and in your life?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  It depends. It's more important for people who are less obsessed.

• 34:54Lewis Howes?

  It's more important for people who are less obsessed.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  So yeah, like if you're absolutely obsessed about something, you know, it doesn't matter if your workspace is messy. I've seen people, personally, I've been like absolutely obsessed with things.

• 35:03Lewis Howes?

  You're zoned in on things.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  You don't care.

• 35:05Lewis Howes?

  You're like, ah, yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  So, but we go through periods of fluctuation in our lives where we are more or less obsessed with something that we should still be putting effort into to build. And when we're in that, you know, more chill period of our lives, I think the organizational systems matter more. Basically, is the brain hyper-excessed about something? Are we super intense about it? Okay, cool. A lot of this productivity stuff goes out the window. You're just going to make it work.

• 35:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  I honestly believe that. And that's why a lot of people are like, all these productivity stuff is stupid. That's because they're obsessed.

• 35:34Lewis Howes?

  They're like, I'm just getting it done. It doesn't matter.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  And they're not watching productivity content.

• 35:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  If you're watching my videos, it's probably because you're not that obsessed right now. And so if you're not that obsessed right now, there are things you can do to make yourself more effective or sort of push your brain over that hump of resistance.

• 35:48Lewis Howes?

  Why don't people just become obsessed?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  That's the question, right?

• 35:51Lewis Howes?

  Why are people not obsessed with the thing they're doing?

• 35:54Speaker 01

  I, I mean, that's a good question. I wish I knew. I wish I could make myself obsessed about things. I remember being 15 years old and not caring about anything in the world except for the Final Fantasy game I was playing. I remember being 19 and not caring about anything in the world except for, I want to make this tweet to my homepage on my blog. I'm going to learn PHP until I can do it. I care about nothing else. And then there are just times in your life where you don't have that. And it's like this elusive thing. So, I don't know, the biggest things that helped me are, if, if I'm feeling overwhelmed, try to take a break. Every time I try to take a break, it's like at the beginning, trying to convince myself, take the break, take the vacation, or just take a day off. No, I have to get things done. And then at the end of the break, I'm like, hang on a second.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  I'm getting ideas that I would never have considered, or they wouldn't have come to me.

• 36:40Lewis Howes?

  Cause you took a break.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Cause I took a break.

• 36:42Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  So rest is probably a piece of that. You know, that cycle of work and rest is probably very pertinent to our discussion of how do we get obsessed with things. It's probably we need some time to rest.

• 36:52Lewis Howes?

  And I feel like it kind of goes in with self-discipline a little bit as well. Like if you're obsessed, you're disciplined. I feel like if you're not obsessed, you're kind of like, ah, what's the point of this? And you're kind of lazier. How do we get to a place of more self-discipline? Or is that not the right thing we should be thinking about?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  I think we should. And my favorite thing here is accountability. So how can we get accountability? I made a video recently called the five levels of self-discipline. And the model here is different types of accountability that can augment your own self-discipline. So as a baseline, I do believe we can become more disciplined individuals internally through practice. If you start, and this is a terrible example for me because I hate it, but if you start meditating, you can maybe do three minutes today. Next week you can go for five minutes. That's an increase of self-discipline and an increase in your ability to hold your focus on one object. But can you add accountability, or maybe a better word for this is duty, into the mix? And augment your own internal self-discipline?

• 37:49Speaker 01

  I want to go research this more, but I read once that like prisoners who were given dogs became much better caretakers of themselves too. There's some accountability and duty there.

• 37:58Lewis Howes?

  I've been in a prison and done a talk in prisons. And I went to a prison here in Lancaster, near LA, where there was a program where they were training dogs, rehabilitating and training dogs. And then they would go out into the, outside of the prison for special care individuals who needed dogs. And they were so self-disciplined. They were great. They were loving. They were caretaking. These dogs got to sleep in the cell with them. So they can train them overnight.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:28Lewis Howes?

  And I, so I watched this. I witnessed this one time and it was, it was cool to see that they were taking care of themselves as they were taking care of the animals as well, which is cool to see.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  So, I mean, that's really cool to see. And I'm glad to get a little bit of confirmation on that. I want to do more research on it, but it kind of goes back to something I've often thought, where it's just that duty is one of the most important things we have for our will to live, our will to do things, our motivation. And I almost worry that like, Modern society sort of gets rid of the duty bound obligations we have to each other in our immediate relationships. Because it's no longer like, now I have to do something for my village. I just gotta work for this company. And it's just much more abstracted. When I feel that I have a duty to somebody else, I don't have any trouble getting myself to do it. When I'm just like, I want to work out for me, then it's only if I'm obsessed, you know? If I'm like, I really care about it because I just love this thing, I'll do it.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  But if it's like, I should do this because I should do this for me, there's no motivation there. So I think the self-discipline is... Yes, so five levels.

• 39:30Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Duty to yourself. Duty to self. Which is augmented by external commitment devices. So this could be as simple as a habit tracker. I check it off every day and I see it in a physical manifestation that I've done it. Level two, accountability partners. This one is where people get tripped up. I have seen a lot of people be like, well, it's you, Trevor's accountability partners. And if you don't write your thing, oh, you gotta pay me 50 bucks. And if I don't write my thing, I'll pay you 50 bucks. I did this once. We both didn't write our thing. And we both just said...

• 40:00Lewis Howes?

  So you just kept the money?

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Well, let's keep the money. Pretend that we swapped. So I did one that was much more successful where I told my best friend, hey, I'm gonna read, what was it, 25 minutes of nonfiction every day? And here's a spreadsheet where I will be logging my pages. I'll pay you 100 bucks if I don't do even one day. And so he kept me to it. Now, I had two friends who were like...

• 40:21Lewis Howes?

  Did you miss a day or no?

• 40:23Speaker 01

  I did not miss a day. There were days where I was like, it was 11:55 and I'm in the basement like... Two roommates, the one is just like, yep, I'll hold you accountable and I don't want your filthy money if you fail, so don't fail. And then the other one was just like, why can't I be the person who gets the spreadsheet and I'm gonna try to sabotage you? I want the 100 bucks. So I think it matters, like, number one, what's the system you have in place? And number two, is that person the type of person who wants the best for you? Will they actually hold your feet to the fire? Will they not try to sabotage you? Do they want you to succeed and do what you want?

• 40:57Lewis Howes?

  Got you. So wait, did you go with the guy who didn't want to take your money?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Uh, yes. That's my friend Martin. Uh, he now works with me.

• 41:03Lewis Howes?

  Got you.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  He's like my COO at this point.

• 41:05Lewis Howes?

  So is it better to have that or someone who's like, I want you to do it, but if you don't, you're still gonna pay me?

• 41:10Speaker 01

  I mean, well, I mean, he would have taken my money.

• 41:13Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  He just didn't.

• 41:14Lewis Howes?

  He didn't want you to take it.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  My other friend was like, oh, I'm gonna sabotage you.

• 41:17Lewis Howes?

  Ah, gotcha, gotcha.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Get your money.

• 41:18Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  So if you got those kind of people around you, you want people who want the best for you, right?

• 41:21Lewis Howes?

  Of course. So he's gonna check in on you, hey, you haven't logged him in today.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. And he would text me, he's like, where's my pages?

• 41:27Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  I'm gonna take your hundred bucks.

• 41:29Lewis Howes?

  So accountability is...

• 41:31Speaker 01

  So that's level two, accountability partners.

• 41:32Lewis Howes?

  Crucial for self...

• 41:33Speaker 01

  I think so. I think if we have accountability, you know, things are much better. Three is the professionalized version of this, coaches, teachers, people get higher. And they have the advantage of often, you know, hopefully if they're qualified, often having a knowledge of the skill itself. So they can provide guidance and sequencing and help you to steer clear from the wrong directions, give you feedback. So yeah, I don't want my best friend to be my lifting coach because he is not certified

• 42:00Lewis Howes?

  He has no idea, yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  for biomechanics and all that kind of stuff. My coach can be like, yeah, your squat form is going to lead to an injury if you don't fix this, this and this. So he also is my accountability burner, but he's also my professional coach.

• 42:11Lewis Howes?

  Right, okay.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  And then four and five, accountability to a team.

• 42:15Lewis Howes?

  Accountability to a team.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  So, you know, you've got accountability to your staff and vice versa. They know that if they don't do something, it's not just that you're gonna say, I'm disappointed in you. It's that I have now lost something because you didn't do what you said you'd do. That's more important, or that's more powerful. And then five is leadership.

• 42:31Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  So that's just kind of like 4.5, but when you're the leader, you're at the top. And that I don't think is an accountability hack because that's a lot of responsibility to take on. So you sort of need to earn that. But I think it's part of the model because it is the highest level of accountability.

• 42:49Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm. And if you don't stay, if you don't show up and be accountable to yourself and to the team or to the community, you're gonna not be in that position anymore.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:57Lewis Howes?

  Right, so it's like you've gotta continue to be disciplined in order to stay in that position if you want to. And set the example of discipline.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  And you realize that if you're a leader and you fail, the people who are looking to follow you, you hurt them. You know, and if you're on a team, you hurt them, you can probably hurt somebody as well. But if you're the leader, you have the most potential to hurt people if you don't follow through.

• 43:17Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Which is a lot of pressure.

• 43:18Lewis Howes?

  Because they're relying on you, your skills, the money you might bring in, repaying them, whatever it is.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. So, you know, that's, I'm sure that keeps you awake at night, keeps me awake at night. My team relies on me more than anybody else in the team.

• 43:29Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  So...

• 43:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Where do you struggle with the most when it comes to self-discipline?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Oh, really? It's a good question. Um, probably.

• 43:38Lewis Howes?

  What part of your life do you struggle with the most?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  It's probably sticking to things that don't have a tight deadline. So.

• 43:49Lewis Howes?

  It's like a made up deadline. Like, I want to do this by now, but.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, made up deadlines are.

• 43:53Lewis Howes?

  My publisher doesn't need this. My team doesn't need this. It's like, I mean, I want this.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  That's what it is.

• 43:57Lewis Howes?

  It's like me even wanting to write the, my book for the last year and a half, but I wanted to self-publish it this time. And I'm like, well, there's no publisher like forcing me, which is, those deadlines are so crucial. I feel like.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  And I feel like there are things that used to really motivate me that don't anymore. So I used to use this website called BeeMinder, where you could literally bet money that you would do things. And I still think it's pretty, uh, pretty useful. You could hook it up to any like API. So it's like you can hook it up to Runkeeper to make sure you ran enough or whatever. And there's like a graph. Just make sure you go up enough. And when I was building my business, like five, six years ago, that was incredibly effective. I set a book goal. I set a blogging goal and like without fail for three years. It was like blog posts every week, YouTube video every week, podcast every week. Um, I set a goal to write 500 words a day for my book and I got my book done in two months.

• 44:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  But now, like I've tried it again and again and again, it doesn't seem to work as much anymore. So I feel like.

• 44:55Lewis Howes?

  What was the site called?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Uh, it's called BeeMinder, like with a, like a B with a stinger.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  I also used Habitica, which is a habit tracker that is video game based. So you get a character and you get experience points and gear and stuff.

• 45:10Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  And that was also super motivated for me at the time. At this point, it's become like, I need to hire a coach or somebody to actually yell at me.

• 45:18Lewis Howes?

  Yes, I hear you, man. I mean, it's like when you're, well, you weren't really starting out, but you were kind of in the. I guess the the earlier part of your journey, right?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:28Lewis Howes?

  At that phase. And I think when you're at that phase, it's easier to get motivated because you don't. You haven't created something yet. So you're like, let me get this out there. Let me start building it. It's like, if I want to have a bigger channel, I gotta do this every week or every month and be consistent. Now that you've reached these kind of goals at a bigger stage.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:46Lewis Howes?

  It's like, well, is getting another million followers really gonna like, you know, impact something or creating more content gonna impact this? It's like you've already done these things that were hard to do.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:56Lewis Howes?

  It's like, I've already written a number of books. It's like, okay, I need a deeper level of discipline, of service to a community. Like, well, how can I serve? Now I'm doing a disservice by not putting this out there. I'm hurting people by not doing this if I have a knowledge base or something I can share with people. So it's like, making that my discipline.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  And that's hard to do.

• 46:17Lewis Howes?

  It's hard, man.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Like, there's a little voice in my head that's like, you shouldn't care if you don't care about the next million followers because this is important information. You should put it out there. But if it doesn't make the brain actually take it seriously, then it's not a good argument. There's gotta be something else that's put in there.

• 46:32Lewis Howes?

  It's gotta be something meaningful for you too, right? It's like, okay, what am I gonna gain from this?

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:36Lewis Howes?

  Otherwise, it's just like, okay, I'm creating to create. There's gotta be some reward, right?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 46:42Lewis Howes?

  Well, it's internal, external, right?

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. It's either some kind of internal reward or an external reward, some kind of thing.

• 46:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So you struggle with what specifically?

• 46:53Speaker 01

  With the fake deadlines.

• 46:56Lewis Howes?

  What's the deadlines you're wanting to create?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like with my YouTube channel, it's like the actual deadline is like the end of the month.

• 47:07Lewis Howes?

  To launch the channel?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  To, no, for like, for like a YouTube video. Like, oh, a sponsor's like, we need this video to go live.

• 47:12Lewis Howes?

  Okay, the last day of the month.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  So it's like, okay. And often, it's not like I'm goofing around until the last day of the month, but it's like. I could probably make this video in a week and I kinda wanna do this other thing over here. Or it'll be like, um, okay, I'm, I've got two full weeks. I'm gonna make the ultimate guide to focus. This is gonna be the greatest YouTube video ever.

• 47:31Lewis Howes?

  And then you wait until last minute.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Or I don't, or I'm just working on it and I'm like, okay, well, N plus one rule. Why don't I go find one more study just to make this that much more thorough? And then I get to, you know, four days before publishing and I realize I have written a 30 minute video. That's like 15 minutes of me just blabbing statistics and no one cares about it.

• 47:49Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. What's the N plus one rule?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think I just made that up right now. It's sort of like just that, well, I could go get one more study result and it would be that much more thorough. And I guess like this, this sort of is, uh, more generally known in like hobby communities, like the N plus one rule in mountain biking is, well, the number of bikes you should own is N plus one. Where N is the number of bikes you own right now. There's always another bike to buy.

• 48:13Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  I have a downhill bike, but I don't have an enduro bike. Or I don't have a fat bike, so I better buy that one too.

• 48:19Lewis Howes?

  An electric bike.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's always something to get, right? Or same with camera lenses. N plus one rule is like notorious in the camera community.

• 48:27Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  So.

• 48:28Lewis Howes?

  Getting more lenses as opposed to what actually just doing the shooting.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Or just being okay with having your current collection.

• 48:35Lewis Howes?

  My two main lenses and I'll just use this, right?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:38Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:40Lewis Howes?

  So it's kind of like an author, it's like always looking for more research and more data to add to the, you know, to the book, right?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think the extra bit with the N plus one rule with authors is we know that the really hard work is crafting the story and cutting things down and making it polished. Going out and finding research is by comparison, much easier.

• 49:01Lewis Howes?

  Much easier.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  So much easier. I can go and take notes on research all day. But like figuring out how to make a compelling story around that, that's difficult.

• 49:08Lewis Howes?

  Yes, man. You talk about you do videos on the morning routine and the importance of them. You've also shot videos on how you used to do it and now you do things differently now. How important has the morning routine been for you and staying disciplined and? Setting good habits and actually accomplishing your goals. How important has it been for you?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  I think it is important. I think the specific habits are important to your current goals at the time. So if I'm like, I really want to learn Japanese. I do believe that me getting up and learning Japanese in the morning was actually the most important thing for me to do. Because, again, going back to the accountability angle here, I have a limited amount of energy during the day. If I have something I need to do that requires me to pull on my own self-discipline, I should put that first. So I can then use external self-discipline and accountability to power through the rest of the day.

• 49:56Lewis Howes?

  It's interesting you say that because the first eight months I was learning Spanish, I was doing it at the end of the day around like 5, 6 o'clock. And I was literally falling asleep on the screen because it's so like was so hard on my brain.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:09Lewis Howes?

  Like memorizing these simple, you know, not simple for me was challenging. But I was like, I've already used a lot of my energy for the day to like focus. And now I'm asking myself to be so focused on something that's extremely hard. And I should be like falling asleep. I said, I need to do this first thing in the morning. So now I do it 8 a.m. It's still hard.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Is it working better?

• 50:28Lewis Howes?

  It's working way better.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 50:29Lewis Howes?

  It's working better because now I'm waking myself up in the process. But it's way better because I have energy through the rest of the day.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:37Lewis Howes?

  Which is, which is easier for me as opposed to like, I don't have any energy to focus on this at the end of the day.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:42Lewis Howes?

  So that's interesting that you were doing it in the morning as well.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  I'm trying to move my workouts in the morning too.

• 50:47Lewis Howes?

  Because then it's done and you feel like I accomplished this. And I don't have to wait, oh, it's 6 o'clock and I had this meeting and this thing came up and this article took longer.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:55Lewis Howes?

  I want to, I want to keep going and then it's 9 o'clock and you work out.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Plus, the big thing for me is, so I do not have any trouble getting my workouts done for the most part. Because I have my coach. What I have trouble is getting the workout done in a reasonable amount of time.

• 51:09Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Because I lift a lot of big weights, man, so I could take five minutes rest.

• 51:12Lewis Howes?

  Full recovery, man.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Get on my phone like, and in the morning, I feel like I need to get to work. So I've noticed going in the morning, like my coach will tell me this, he's like, dude, when I go to workout, like my warm-up sets, I do them immediately. There's no rest between warm-ups and I do three-minute rest between my sets. And I'm like, I think I rest about three minutes.

• 51:29Lewis Howes?

  No, you're like seven minutes.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  This workout had five exercises, three of which are little accessories in a loop, and yet it took me two hours. How is that possible? Okay, I was on my phone way more than three minutes between sets. So in the morning, there's that pressure, and I'm like, cool, I will wait three minutes and no more between squat sets. I don't care if I fail a rep. And then he tells me that he's like, yeah, well, I don't care if you fail a rep, because if you're waiting like a day between sets, like you're not really getting the right tension you need.

• 51:55Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 51:57Lewis Howes?

  Why not just leave your phone at home?

• 51:59Speaker 01

  I should do that.

• 52:00Lewis Howes?

  Or turn your wifi off. Or turn the wifi off.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  I absolutely should do that.

• 52:03Lewis Howes?

  And cell service, yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  The one thing I don't like about weightlifting is even three minutes between sets is like, just, okay, what am I doing?

• 52:10Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Sitting around waiting.

• 52:11Lewis Howes?

  You should breathe, meditate, focus on the reps, I'm really hard at this next one, yeah.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Definitely get like the mind muscle connection in the set, but then in the rest periods, I'm like, I need something to do.

• 52:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I hear you, man.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  For me, I have to fill my sets too, so.

• 52:26Lewis Howes?

  Turn the wifi off, you know?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely, I could absolutely turn the wifi off, airplane mode.

• 52:30Lewis Howes?

  Or just get a camera, you know?

• 52:33Speaker 01

  But I think, you know, the morning actually solves it.

• 52:35Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Like even if I do check Twitter between sets, like I know, okay, I really want to be working in like the next hour, so let's just get it done.

• 52:43Lewis Howes?

  So what else in the morning routine have you seen as crucial for people?

• 52:47Speaker 01

  This is simple, but water, sunlight movement.

• 52:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  People feel so groggy when they wake up, and these three things help more than anything else to make you feel awake, and hopefully not hit the snooze button. So I have an iPad downstairs with an alarm that goes off three minutes after my main one. This sucks every single morning.

• 53:05Lewis Howes?

  You gotta get up.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Cause I hear my regular alarm, I'm like, okay, I really want to hit snooze. And I'll start negotiating like, well, I can have snooze for two minutes. That's enough. And then I realize, okay, no, that's not enough. I better just get up. And then my cat wants food too, so I get up, but then it's like, I'm groggy. If I at least look out the window, drink a glass of water, and get just a little bit of walking, that's great. Like I feel much better. And then I try to go for a walk, like 10 minutes, 20 minutes. It's not that fun right now, because I live in the suburbs, which is why I'm trying to move back into Denver downtown, because I will go for a walk every single day and be stoked about it down there.

• 53:41Lewis Howes?

  Right, yeah, it's hard in the suburbs.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  You just realize there's nothing else to look like, it's just other houses. There's nowhere to go.

• 53:47Lewis Howes?

  People walking their dogs maybe or something, yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Dude, this is a big thing, and I realize everyone has their own opinion on this, but purposeful movement. Is something that we don't get a lot of. If we live out in the suburbs, it's like you have to convince yourself to move your body. Otherwise.

• 54:04Lewis Howes?

  You stay inside.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Especially if we work at home, it's like I have my house. I walk from the bedroom to my home office and I do my work. And if I want to work out, I have to convince myself to do it for the sake of working out. It's just so much better when you're like, okay, I'm gonna go for a walk because I need to go to the store. But I'm gonna get like a mile of walking in. It's just so much, I don't know, I love it and I want to live my life that way.

• 54:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:28Lewis Howes?

  I love it, man. I want to talk about habits again. If someone is trying to, I guess, build a new habit. What do you think are a few important things they can do to make that habit stick?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:40Lewis Howes?

  Stay with them.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  There's definitely a few things we can do. I love that level one of accountability in the beginning. Can you get an external system? And this not only adds a little bit of augmentation to your self-discipline, but it also allows you to create a record of that habit. So in the beginning, the habit isn't a habit. It's a self-discipline-driven behavior that is new to your life. And you may have some novelty driving it in the beginning, but eventually. Great book by Seth Godin, you get this dip thing. The dip, you probably talked about the dip. One of my all-time recommendations for people to read, especially if you're starting a business. You hit that part where the novelty is worn off, now it's hard and you just need to slog through. And it's not a habit yet.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  So if you have something that is sort of giving you a bit of accountability and if you have something that is helping you track it, so you see a record of your streak, that's incredibly powerful. Twenty-second rule is also very good as well. How can you decrease the activation energy to make it easy to do?

• 55:38Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean? I'm gonna do this for 20 seconds?

• 55:40Speaker 01

  So no, twenty-second rule again is a, it's not, it's, I didn't explain the 20 seconds, part of the 20-second rule. So in the book, The Happiness Advantage, he talks about how if you want to do something more often, make it take less than 20 seconds to start doing it. If you want to do it less often, make it take more than 20 seconds. So take the power cord out of your Xbox and throw it in the drawer or put the guitar on the stand. So if it's a new habit, what can you do to make it easier for yourself to get into it? If it's like working out. Can I build a home gym? Like my gym is out in my garage now. It's super easy to go on to.

• 56:10Lewis Howes?

  That's nice.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  I skip workouts less. I'm moving to a house where my, I won't be able to have that. But I've got a friend who's like, I will meet you at this gym every day. So there's the accountability part. So, you know, make it easier to do or make it more, I guess, make somebody have you accountable.

• 56:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What would you say are some weird habits that you've seen successful people do differently? That I guess normal people don't do. That's attributed to their success. It's like, oh, I don't get up early and walk and drink water, but I do this other thing. Have you heard any of these things? Or have you tried something?

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Well, I'll go on the, I'll go on the early thing. Um, like so many people think you have to get up early. And I don't know what it is, but if you're just like, here's my epic morning routine, or here's why I wake up at four in the morning, people latch on to that stuff. And I don't know, it, there must just be something in like the basal ganglia. It's like, if I have the same morning as a successful person, then I will be just as successful as they are in my real life. And that's not true necessarily. But also there are plenty of people who are super successful, going to bed at like 2:00 AM and waking up at noon. So the biggest thing is realize everyone has a different chronotype.

• 57:23Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Which is your propensity to go to sleep and wake up at different times. How does the sun and sunset affect your circadian rhythms? It's different for everyone. Some people just sleep later and go to bed later. My fiance is a great example. She will stay up until like 2:00 AM without me telling her to go to bed.

• 57:39Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  But then she's like writing a book at 2:00 AM. And me, like, nope, it's gotta be the morning for me.

• 57:45Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  So figure out like, when do you have the most energy? And then ask yourself, am I getting enough sleep? That's so much more important than waking up at 5:00 AM.

• 57:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And structure your, your life around that. When do you have the most energy? And are you getting enough sleep? Cause sleep is important, in my opinion.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm not sure I have like an interesting weird habit off the top of my head.

• 58:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah. If someone's struggling with being a perfectionist, like they're not launching their thing, they're not doing the thing they want to do because it's got to be perfect beforehand. I guess, or they're just not able to finish a project. What would you say to that about perfectionism?

• 58:19Speaker 01

  So, I do have a video on perfectionism if people want more on this, but my favorite thing for overcoming perfectionism is what I call the 1% rule. This is why I am a YouTuber with a successful channel instead of a dead channel with like 3 videos. So, put yourself on a schedule. Could be once a week, could be once a month. Depends on the scope of what you're trying to do, but try to put yourself on a schedule and with each piece of work that you create, try to identify one area where you want to get 1% better.

• 58:52Lewis Howes?

  Give me an example.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  So, I want to make a video and I think my audio sucks. This video, I'm going to figure out how do I position my microphone and add some sound treatment to my space to make the sound better. Or there's one where I actually made a tweet thread documenting this process. This guy on YouTube, Mondo Bites, has this amazing cinema-like quality of his A-roll. It just looks so good. And I'm like, I'm going to recreate that. I want to figure out how to make my A-roll way better. Right now, I look like a dude sitting in a bedroom with the light, like the overhead light on. Okay, so we got...

• 59:24Lewis Howes?

  Mondo Bites is his name?

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Mondo Bites is his channel, I believe. His name is Armando, I forget his last name. More, I don't want to butcher the pronunciation. So, he's got like, you know, "You're the colored light behind me and I've got a key light here and I've got this like cool grid thing on the fill light and a hair light." "Oh, so I gotta add a hair light." And I'm not thinking about a million other things. It's just, I want to have the best A-roll possible for this video. And I get it on schedule and the next video, I've now ingrained the techniques I learned from that one. And I can either have it automated, like that A-roll I could just leave set up always, or it's just going to become much easier to do in the future. So, the biggest thing you realize is if you're on the schedule and you're improving a little bit every time, 365 videos down the road, you're like, I've made 365 improvements and I've been able to use,

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  maybe not all of them, but a lot of them in every video since. And you realize that there was stuff you would have never even known to do in the beginning that you are now able to do. So, like the biggest realization of a perfectionist is you cannot make perfect work because you haven't done enough work yet to understand what perfect would even mean to you in 5 years.

• 1:00:31Lewis Howes?

  And what's perfect now is not gonna look perfect in five years.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. Martin Scorsese probably has a vision of what perfect is in his head and he can't make it.

• 1:00:39Lewis Howes?

  He can't make it. Yeah, I look back at my previous books and I'm like, people are still buying them and loving them, but I'm like, ah, but would I say it that way now? Would I do it this way? Ah, this was a little off. You know, it's like you look at it differently with more time and space.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but something that, I mean, you probably realize this as well, that should make you feel better about your work. It's like you look back on it and you're like, okay, there's a better way I could have done that. But I was still proud of it when I put it out.

• 1:01:02Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  And people are benefiting from it.

• 1:01:05Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely, and that's the key. Why do you think we judge ourselves so frequently or so worried about the opinions of other people? That, that holds us back so much. Why do you think that is?

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  I'm not sure why, but I mean, I definitely feel it.

• 1:01:19Lewis Howes?

  You feel it personally too?

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like less than other people. Like, I don't look back on my old work in cringe. I have people who are like, I never watch a video after I make it, or I'll go back and watch my old videos and I think they're terrible. I don't. I'll go back and see a video from five years ago and I'm like, that was a pretty good video. Like, there was definitely some stuff I could have done better, but, and I'll remember little things I had done. Again, going back to the intrinsic motivated artistic stuff, I'm like, yeah, I remember that little stupid Spider-Man joke I threw. That's a lot of fun. So, I don't cringe about my stuff. And I realize like, I'm trying to teach people who are just a few steps behind me. And that was me a few steps behind where I am now. Like, I was proud of the work.

• 1:01:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And how do you manage your day to day right now? Do you have a, a big team? Is it a small team? Are you still doing a lot of the work yourself? You know, what are you doing to accelerate your growth?

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Small team right now. So, I got my editor, Tony, and my COO, Martin, who are the main guys. I just hired a personal assistant. Actually, very, very good decision.

• 1:02:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  I've learned that every time I've delegated, it's been like this painful process, like pulling a tooth. But then I end up making more money and having a better life. And the only trade off is I now have a team to worry about and that does, you know, make me think more seriously about planning out War Chest. Like, when I was by myself, I could just drop everything and work at McDonald's if I had to, if everything went to hell.

• 1:02:39Lewis Howes?

  But now you're like, okay, we gotta have money in six months, in a year. Do I can pay for people? Which goes back to level five of your

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  That's leadership.

• 1:02:47Lewis Howes?

  Self-discipline, which is leadership.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:48Lewis Howes?

  So, it's forcing you to level up your personal leadership skills.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:52Lewis Howes?

  And, and start strategizing, thinking the future as opposed to Well, if I wake up tomorrow and nobody's coming in, I can, you know, get by on a couch or something.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yep. I remember your story about sleeping on your sister's couch.

• 1:03:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, a year and a half, man. And here's the thing. She, she gave me great accountability because after a year and a half of living for free, rent-free, eating her food, just kind of like feeling like a bum. I was still like obsessively learning and trying to master skills during that time, but I wasn't forced to make money. I wasn't forced to yet because I had a free place to stay. I wanted it, but I wasn't forced to. She gave me a great gift where she said, okay, Louis, you've been here a year and a half. It's time you either move out or start paying rent.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Lewis Howes?

  And, and so I said, okay, I'm moving out and I'm moving in with my brother. I asked my, I went to like the next thing, like, hey, bro, can I stay here for a few months for free?

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Lewis Howes?

  And he said, my wife wants you to pay. So maybe they coordinated and say, you gotta pay somehow.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:55Lewis Howes?

  So he only charged me 250 bucks a month for a room, which I was like, okay, I gotta start strategizing the future. I gotta start planning, taking action, taking risks, putting myself out there in an uncomfortable way. And that was a great accountability for me. It was like, okay, I've gotta pay something. I gotta learn how to make some money. And it forced me to move forward. So.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Lewis Howes?

  It was powerful.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  I actually want to ask you.

• 1:04:18Lewis Howes?

  Go ahead.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  So I'm in a period of my life now where I'm buying this new house and there is definitely this idea in the entrepreneurship community that you should spend lavishly to force yourself to make more money.

• 1:04:31Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  And then there's the other side where it's just like, no, you should live Spartan and save as much as possible. And you shouldn't need, like, there's definitely, like, I'm, I'm gonna pay more for this house. And I don't think that's my motivation. My motivation is I really don't want to be in the suburbs. But there's a part of me that's like, maybe this is also good for my motivation and maybe I should go get a big office too.

• 1:04:51Lewis Howes?

  I think it's, yeah, I'll tell you my, my personal experience. I went from.

• 1:04:58Lewis Howes?

  Living for free to then paying two fifty a month. And then after, I think it was six months there. I was like, okay, I need to get out of this place, you know? And my sister-in-law was pregnant and I was just like, you know, they had their own family. And I was like, I gotta be in a grown man. Right. I'm like twenty-five at this point, twenty-six. And I was like, I gotta get my own space. So I found the cheapest apartment I could find in Columbus, Ohio. I didn't have a car at the time and I was like, I need to be able to walk. And it was downtown, so four hundred ninety-five dollars a month. And I remember thinking, how am I gonna pay five hundred dollars a month? I didn't have the money. Right. And I signed up, I was like, maybe I've got three months to be able to pay for this. But then I don't know what I'm gonna do after that. By, right when I signed like the lease for the year, my brain just started thinking differently.

• 1:05:43Lewis Howes?

  And I remember a year and a half, two years later, I moved to New York City. And I was paying twenty-seven hundred dollars for one month of an Airbnb. I was thinking, this is like six months of rent in Ohio. What am I doing? This is insane, right? I was like, this is insanity. And within the first week, it was only maybe in the first couple of days. I remember walking out just feeling abundant and saying, I'm in this environment, in this city. There's people around, people have opportunities, money. I just need to go meet them and go create something. Then I started paying thirty-seven hundred dollars a month in New York City the next month for the next year and a half. And my income exponentially grew. Then I moved to LA and I started paying, you know, more than that for a place for six years. And thinking, this is like crazy.

• 1:06:27Lewis Howes?

  I can't believe I'm spending this much money. My income grew. Then I moved a couple of years ago to way more, thinking to myself, this is nuts. I don't even own this, I'm just paying rent. You're just thinking, okay, every year I'm spending how much money? That's just going out the door. But my, and I got an office space and I'm paying more money. Opportunities grew. I started to think differently. So for me, I have been a fan of like, if I feel stuck. It's not like I wanna splurge and just spend a lot of money because I don't do that in my normal life. I'm not out here like buying watches and cars. I don't do that. I'm pretty frugal with the rest of my money. But I know the environment, my living space, when I level up. I start to think actively in my business as well.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Lewis Howes?

  That's been my experience, but again, my friends know, like, I don't wear watches and jewelry and, you know, I don't buy cars. I don't, I don't do anything. I don't like.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:21Lewis Howes?

  I, I, you know, I get a lot of travel for free. It's like, you know, I'm not really spending a lot. I'm investing in my business. And so if I was, if you were spending a lot everywhere else, I'd say, you know, don't do that.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:34Lewis Howes?

  But if you're not, I would say invest in a great environment that's gonna make you think, oh, what do I need to do? To leverage more, to hire more people to, to really grow this thing. Unless you're just happy with where you're at, and that's cool too.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  I'm not.

• 1:07:46Lewis Howes?

  Well, if you're not happy.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  That makes me feel a lot better, because.

• 1:07:48Lewis Howes?

  If you're not like, but you're, you're, you've got a great base and you're making great money and you've got this following.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:55Lewis Howes?

  But you're not like pushed to really go bigger yet, like faster, right? It's like, so for me, that's what's worked for me. Every time I do that, I'm like, this is really uncomfortable. Am I really about to invest in this?

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:08:08Lewis Howes?

  And then I have this incredible view in this space and I'm like, okay, let me go, it's worth the investment.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Okay. That makes me feel a lot better.

• 1:08:16Lewis Howes?

  For me.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  You know, I'll put this out there for the people listening. I definitely do not like where I live and neither does my fiance. You know, it feels like ungrateful to say because it's a nice house, but just the environment is not conducive to creativity. And I've been driving to where my new house is and just walking around.

• 1:08:33Lewis Howes?

  Feel inspired.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Feel something different here. And I offered on the house and I have a giant spreadsheet, right? So like, I'm not like, okay, I can't afford this house. Let me just offer on it and make it work. Like, I can afford it. It's just a definitely.

• 1:08:46Lewis Howes?

  It's a big.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  More than double.

• 1:08:48Lewis Howes?

  You're gonna double your revenue from the moment you move in there to the next 12 months, you're gonna double your revenue. Minimum.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:54Lewis Howes?

  In my opinion.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  I mean, I believe it too, because I do have ideas that weren't coming to me before I, but I made this offer and then I'm like. I can do this and this and I think I need to make these 58 videos. And that's not even exaggeration.

• 1:09:05Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  I literally listed 58 videos on the plane here that I need to make. And I kind of see it clearly and before I didn't.

• 1:09:12Lewis Howes?

  Because you didn't have a reason to.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Lewis Howes?

  Except for maybe an intrinsic reason, but you you don't have that as much anymore because you you had that seven, eight years ago.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:21Lewis Howes?

  When you were trying to make something of yourself and now you're like, well, I made something, so what do I need to to grow bigger? For me, I focus on service. I focus on like, how can I impact more people? Like, if I were to die, I kind of go morbid. If I were to die tomorrow, would I be happy with the level of service I've created in the world? I'm eight years older than you. I wasn't thinking that eight years ago. I just started thinking that around 30.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:09:45Lewis Howes?

  It was more like, how can I make enough money to like survive and grow and just like have, you know, financial freedom?

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:51Lewis Howes?

  And accomplish some things. But then, once you have it, it's like, okay, do I just want more money? What's the point of that?

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Lewis Howes?

  For me, it's been, how do I serve more people? How do I use my skills, my talents to then create information, content, and pack them in a way to help more people? And so that's what's kind of an intrinsic value. It's like I'm getting up because my mission is to help 100 million people weekly. And we're not there yet. We're not even close. So if I died tomorrow, would I be happy? Yes, I'd be happy, but what I've known I could have given more in this space as well. So I think about it from that point of view. And the financial commitment helps me think creatively around finances because finances are going to help me bring in a team, which is going to help reach that mission.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 1:10:35Lewis Howes?

  Because I can't do it on my own.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:37Lewis Howes?

  So that's the way I think. But um.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  It's reassuring because you read like Art of War is like the back against the wall principle and people fight like cornered animals and the, you know, people will take that and they'll say, you should go do X, Y, and Z because of this. And it's it's hard to know, like, is that foolhardy or not? Because I can see the positives and I can see the potential disastrous consequences of going too far in that direction.

• 1:11:01Lewis Howes?

  If you've got, you know, runway for the next six to 12 months, then I think you're fine.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:11:06Lewis Howes?

  Obviously, I mean, you're a smart guy. You know how to create something from nothing. If you lost everything right now, I bet you could make a million dollars in a year.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:11:14Lewis Howes?

  If you lost your channel, if you lost all your social media, if you lost your whole following, you could, if you're life dependent on it, could you make a million dollars in a year?

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:22Lewis Howes?

  Can you make 2 million, maybe?

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  That's a good question.

• 1:11:25Lewis Howes?

  If your life depended on it.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  If my life depended on it, then yeah, absolutely.

• 1:11:29Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so then what's holding back now?

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess maybe not my life on the line.

• 1:11:34Lewis Howes?

  So we need something, we need something, we need something bigger inside of us.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  So I need to put like a thing on my neck, like in those movies, right?

• 1:11:41Lewis Howes?

  No, but I think it's just like, what's gonna make it meaningful to you when I create? And why are you doing this?

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:47Lewis Howes?

  I go back to like, why am I, we were talking beforehand about, you know, almost 1,200 episodes in. It's like, we're doing 3 episodes a week, 4 YouTube videos a week. Why?

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Lewis Howes?

  Cause there's a deeper mission to serve 100 million people and help them improve their life. That's why, that's why we do it. I could stop right now and our content, your content would still reach a lot of people for years.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Lewis Howes?

  But I'm just wanna be fully satisfied. I'd be happy with my life, but I don't think I'd be satisfied with my calling. And so I'm just led by that. You know what I mean?

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I feel like you have this too, because everything, like this, everything is free. Everything I do, I wanna make it free.

• 1:12:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you wanna help people.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  I constantly come up with ideas and I'm like, alright, well, this is the idea that's gonna be the business driver finally. And then the next week, I'm like, guys.

• 1:12:31Lewis Howes?

  Let's just give it away.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  What if we made it free? I outlined this whole crazy thing I was gonna sell for Notion templates. And then I was like, okay, but what if I made it free? And then the thing I'm already selling, like what if I make a whole tutorial on how to build it for free? And so it's like, yeah, how do I monetize it? How do I, what's the actual economic engine here?

• 1:12:49Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Because, you know, you could say YouTube ad sense, but to grow that, it's like you have to grow views.

• 1:12:55Lewis Howes?

  You gotta get a lot of views.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  And that's, that is, I mean, you could do it, but it's tough.

• 1:12:58Lewis Howes?

  You gotta get a lot of views.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  And it's not necessarily what I always wanna do.

• 1:13:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, so you have a portion that, hey, this is free and you make money from ad sense, so it's still monetizing. And then you sell other things.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:13:09Lewis Howes?

  So it's like, hey, if you can't afford this, we have all this amazing free content. That's what I say too.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:13:14Lewis Howes?

  You've got thousands of videos. You know, if you want my coaching, I pretty much give it away for free. If you want my coaching in a more small group format, then you invest in it. You know, just like you said, it's like, if you're ready for the next level, then invest in that.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Lewis Howes?

  So I think it's wise what you're doing, man. You're a smart guy, I think you know what you're capable of creating and you've built it over the last 10 years, so. I think it's a smart move to move in there and I would think personally if you get this house and then you find a creative office space within a five minute walk. You're gonna explode even more.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  You think so?

• 1:13:48Lewis Howes?

  I think so and it's like, okay, you tried for a year or two and if it doesn't work.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  This is compelling advice because I literally toured one.

• 1:13:54Lewis Howes?

  I think if you if you if you put a yeah, even just if you could get a one year lease or you know, even take over a sublease for a year and a half or two years, you don't have to do a five year thing or a three year thing, you know, start there. You're gonna realize like, oh, this is amazing to have like separation, you're gonna be married in June, he said, I think it's like, maybe your wife wants to have some like downtime at home where you can just go to work and then come back and have some space for your cats and you know, your life. I don't know, man.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  But I think we're gonna, we're not gonna get the separation because she also wants some office space, so we might share it.

• 1:14:29Lewis Howes?

  Well, at least the separation from home.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  That and that I think will be very nice to have.

• 1:14:33Lewis Howes?

  And when I did that, things started to shift. Yeah, yeah, exactly, like just the relationship with myself became better because I could kind of relax when I got home. Yeah. Like when my studio was in my home, I was always working. You're always gonna be thinking anyways, like it's not gonna shut down in your brain. You're always gonna come up with a video idea, but I feel like you can just go home and be like, okay, I don't have a camera here to record something.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:57Lewis Howes?

  So I'll write it down on my notes and this, but then I'll put it aside and I'll do it tomorrow.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  And you're the second person I recently asked about this. So I asked our CEO at Standard when he had moved from his apartment office to a real office, I said, what did that do to your productivity? And he's like, insane.

• 1:15:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And the next week, I'm sure you'll hear it from one more person.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Probably will.

• 1:15:17Lewis Howes?

  Okay, third thing, your third time you hear it, it's like, all right, I should probably try.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  I'm gonna start believing in the secret.

• 1:15:22Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. No, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna text you in a couple of weeks and see if you found any spaces, but I think you just keep looking at them. Look at the spaces, creative spaces, think of a dream of what you would want it to be.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Lewis Howes?

  And if you find it, get it, don't force it, but if you find it. Explore it.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:15:38Lewis Howes?

  See what makes sense.

• 1:15:41Lewis Howes?

  What do you think is holding you back from 10x-ing your productivity, your results, your impact right now?

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  I mean, well, so I was gonna say fear, because I thought you were saying what's holding you back from getting that office space. And maybe that's part of it, it's just.

• 1:15:54Lewis Howes?

  What are you afraid of?

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  You know, I know I could afford this right now, but what if something bad happens? Or what if I overextend and, you know, it's.

• 1:16:01Lewis Howes?

  Fear what?

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  I often think it's fear of something that I don't quite understand. I just need to sit down and understand better. When I talked about the burnout before, the reason we went down from four to two per month when we were on that super cinematic kick was I was afraid, afraid, afraid, afraid, burned out, looked at my spreadsheet, realized if I change this number to two videos per month, we are still in the green. Oh, okay. Now, now the fear is so much less. I can actually do it. So I think it's just sitting down and understanding, here are the realities and the factors of the situation that I have not actually gotten to know yet.

• 1:16:36Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. And so what's the fear that holds you back in this point?

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  I don't, I think it's just, I think it's just that, that leap, right? It's like, this is so much more money per month. That's a huge leap. It seems irresponsible.

• 1:16:49Lewis Howes?

  Irresponsible to who?

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Right, that's like something that as an entrepreneur.

• 1:16:51Lewis Howes?

  Parents or like some?

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:53Lewis Howes?

  Parents out there that would say this to their kids, maybe?

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Yep. That, and that's, I think that's what it is, is like.

• 1:16:58Lewis Howes?

  Who weren't entrepreneurs?

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  You know? Having people say, be frugal. You know, my mom's just like, you're paying an awful lot of money for that place. And it just lodges in my brain.

• 1:17:07Lewis Howes?

  I'm all for being extremely frugal with your money and not blowing it on material things that aren't, are meaningless to you.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Lewis Howes?

  In order to impress other people. For me, I buy the same like $40 shirts. You wear t-shirts all the time. You're not like this extravagant spender.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:22Lewis Howes?

  On things. You probably get healthy food. You have coaches to help you improve your life. And you invest in people in your team to help you grow.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:32Lewis Howes?

  Some travel here and there, but it's like, you travel with a backpack, you're staying at a friend's place. You're not like getting these lavish five-star hotels and renting Bugattis every weekend, right? It's not what you're doing.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:17:43Lewis Howes?

  You're trying to optimize your life in intrinsic ways.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:46Lewis Howes?

  And so. I feel like if you're creating an investment in an environment and people that will support you in helping more people, that's always gonna be a great investment. If you're investing in things to look cool, that may not satisfy you in the long term. And it may be not as wise. If you're doing it because you enjoy that, then cool. But if you're doing it to impress or something and to feel good about yourself, then maybe that's not the wisest way to spend money.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:12Lewis Howes?

  That's my opinion. If you've got the money, what are you using it for? Just sitting around to wait until you die? I mean, it's like investing it to help you grow.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:21Lewis Howes?

  So, do you pay your coach?

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  Uh, my coach?

• 1:18:24Lewis Howes?

  Your fitness coach?

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  I actually don't pay him.

• 1:18:26Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  So, I pay him in promotion.

• 1:18:28Lewis Howes?

  There you go. There's payment there. There's time and energy.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  When he came up to me, he's just like, "I wanna coach you for free for a while and see how you like it," and it hasn't changed. Though I did pay him to coach my fiancee.

• 1:18:38Lewis Howes?

  Well, there you go. There you go. I don't know, man. Try it out and you can say, "Oh, this isn't working for me." And you can always pull back and, you know, have a small operation from your home and just live that way the rest of your life.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  And I guess, like, what do I have to lose? Uh, I think they offered me a six-month lease.

• 1:18:53Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  And it's like three grand a month. So, okay, I lose eighteen grand. I can make that. I can make, I know I can make that.

• 1:18:59Lewis Howes?

  You can make that in a week.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  I can work extra hard for a month and make that.

• 1:19:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  So, that's what I have to lose, then it's worth trying it out.

• 1:19:07Lewis Howes?

  You could always come back and say, "I didn't like this for six months. I'd rather work from home." Cool.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:19:11Lewis Howes?

  But I think you'll be amazed of what you expand into when you step into that personally. So...

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  I think it's when I think forward and I think, like, what would I regret not having done, like, ten years from now or when I'm eighty years old? That's one of those things I would regret not having tried.

• 1:19:29Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm. There you go. So, when do you move in?

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Uh... It probably could be next week.

• 1:19:37Lewis Howes?

  That'd be amazing, man.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  And that would actually help my house move, too.

• 1:19:40Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Because my house is a TV studio, basically. My agent's in there and he's like, "This house is really cool, man." But I don't know if people are gonna be able to come down here and picture themselves living in this basement when you have, like, a ton of cameras and lighting and everything.

• 1:19:56Lewis Howes?

  So, if you moved all that stuff into the office in the next month...

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  It might actually help my house.

• 1:20:00Lewis Howes?

  Can be somewhere. Interesting.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it might.

• 1:20:02Lewis Howes?

  Which would get you back into closer downtown, which would help you transition. It makes, yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  So, maybe this is the push I needed. Maybe this is like, I'm gonna call the dude and be like, "All right, let's try it." Six months, I'll do it.

• 1:20:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I mean, did you love the space?

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  I did, as long as I can. You have no noise going on here. They had A track, so I need to see if I can mitigate against that.

• 1:20:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you could probably turn it down or something, but yeah.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  There's a couple of others I looked at. There's another one that they were, they offered me like this basement space that's totally perfect for filming, but it's in like a basement.

• 1:20:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's not as inspiring.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  It's not inspiring, but it's like it would be kind of a perfect filming room. If I just picture this, just in a basement.

• 1:20:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, keep taking, keep taking, keep looking around, you know, tell them to show you some more places. But I think, yeah, in the next month or two, if you did it, I think it'd be powerful, man. Explore it. See what your heart says.

• 1:20:50Lewis Howes?

  I love this, man. I'm excited for this. You've got some amazing content over on YouTube. Thomas Frank over there, Thomas J Frank dot com. You're all over social media, obviously. Tom Frankly on Twitter, is that right?

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:02Lewis Howes?

  Tom Frankly on Instagram as well, so. How can we be of the best support to you in this moment, besides subscribing? Checking out your content, what can we do to support you?

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  I mean, man, you just supported me a huge amount right here. Both with like this push that you gave me, I'm seriously gonna take that.

• 1:21:19Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  And, and yeah, the plug's already, so, thank you.

• 1:21:22Lewis Howes?

  Awesome, man, of course. Do you know Ali Abdal? Do you know him?

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're good friends.

• 1:21:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, he, he came on a month ago, a month and a half ago. And I asked him the same thing, what's holding you back, or what's your challenge? And he's like, well, I'm still doing this like, you know, I think it was like two or four hours a week of being a man of a doctor, right? He's like, I'm still holding on to this, although I make all my money over here. And I go, why are you holding on to this thing? He was like, well, the fear of like, it should be, I should stick with this as a backup plan. I go, dude, if you lose all your business, do you think you'd recreate it and make a million dollars in a year? And he goes, yeah. And I go, then why don't you just go all in on it?

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:21:57Lewis Howes?

  Go on in your investment of what's working, not holding on to something that you, was an old identity.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:02Lewis Howes?

  That got you started, won't get you to the next level. So, and then I go, think about it. And the next week, he texts me, he goes, I'm quitting. I'm quitting like the doctor thing.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:22:13Lewis Howes?

  He quit his practice, or whatever, for the hospital or whatever. And now he's all in full time, and he's like hiring people and building it even more.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 1:22:22Lewis Howes?

  So I'm assuming it's gonna exponentially grow.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  I think so. I've been talking to some of his team.

• 1:22:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Cause I'm gonna do a guest workshop for his YouTube course.

• 1:22:29Lewis Howes?

  There you go, that's cool.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  He seems like he's, I mean, he went and got an office recently.

• 1:22:33Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  I wonder if you're the guy who pushes people to go get an office.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  He just put out a video, it's like a huge life update, everything's changing and he got in office and he's hiring all these people.

• 1:22:42Lewis Howes?

  There you go, there you go.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Lewis Howes?

  So, let's see it, man.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  He's just gonna be impetus to grow.

• 1:22:45Lewis Howes?

  I wanna see it, man. This is a question I ask everyone at the end of our interviews called the three truths. So imagine a hypothetical scenario, it's your last day on earth, many years away from now, you get to live as long as you wanna live and accomplish all your goals, but it's the last day. For whatever reason, you gotta take all of your content with you, so all your YouTube videos, your courses, everything's gotta go somewhere else. We don't have access to it.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:09Lewis Howes?

  But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world. Three things that you know to be true from your experiences that you would share with us as your final piece of content. What would those three truths be?

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  Oh man, all my content's going away? I gotta leave people with details of like IRA's.

• 1:23:25Lewis Howes?

  So three lessons, three things that you think could be powerful for people.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Okay, seriously, use it or lose it.

• 1:23:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  And this applies to your body, this applies to your brain, this applies to skills, this applies to relationships.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  1% rule. This, don't let perfectionism stop you, put yourself on a schedule of creating the work or doing the thing and then try to get 1% better each time you build over time. And then the other thing, a lot of people in my area of personal development, they always say like, you're the product of the five people you spend the most time with. And I think there's some truth to that, but don't forget the people who need you to be one of those five people. A lot of people, especially when I was younger, I'd have people in my circles and people emailing me like, "My friends aren't very productive, should I stop being friends with them?" No, because you're the positive influence for them and they care about you and you're gonna help them be the best version of themselves.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  So, you know, you need to go get exposure to people who inspire you and who will push you, like, literally this 10-minute diatribe we had about the office space is probably gonna push me and help me make a million more dollars, but I'm not gonna stop being friends with my friends who like to chill, cuz they need me. And I'm friends with them.

• 1:24:32Lewis Howes?

  So I like that. Those are good. I kind of like that that approach to that. Five people closest to you. That's cool, man.

• 1:24:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, there's always friends that just want to hang and play video games or play some sports that maybe aren't on your path. That could use you to keep inspiring them along the way. So.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the best version of their path is probably one where you're encouraging them.

• 1:24:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  You know, even if they're not going to be a millionaire entrepreneur or something.

• 1:24:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's cool. I like that, Thomas. Before I ask the final question, I want to acknowledge you, Thomas, for being a stand for you're 30 years old, right?

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:07Lewis Howes?

  30 years old. I feel like a lot of 30 year olds aren't as committed to you, to personal growth, to skill acquisition, to, you know, just showing up to trying to be better every single day. So I really acknowledge you for doing that in your personal life, but also creating content, showing people how you're doing it and teaching what you're learning along the way for people a few steps behind, like you said.

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:29Lewis Howes?

  So I think it's inspiring, man, and I'm really grateful to connect with you and I want to see, I'm going to come to Denver one day. Hopefully, when you have this massive creative space separate from your back garage. And hopefully, we can create some content out there one day when you, if you do that. So and if you don't, then it's all good, too. But congrats, man. Keep it going.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  Thank you. And let's do it.

• 1:25:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it'd be fun. Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  What is my definition of greatness? Well, that's a very tough question. I didn't prepare anything.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  You know, being able to do the things you want to do, making an impact for the people who are in your life, keeping those personal relationships going. And yeah, I mean, defining a mission and at least accomplishing it or getting close to it.

• 1:26:14Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.