The 5 Secrets to Success (They Didn't Teach You In School) EP 1200

One of the main reasons I created this show was to learn about topics that weren’t discussed in school when it came to being successful. I felt like there was a lot of the emotional side of things left out when I was growing up. This week I wanted to bring together some of the most successful people I know to share some of the biggest secrets to building your dream life, becoming successful and being fulfilled while doing it. In this episode we discuss how talent is overrated and how to actually work towards getting what you want with Seth Godin, the importance of loving yourself with Tony Robbins, how to manifest success with Mel Robbins, the power of reflection with David Goggins, how to develop a strong morning routine with Robin Sharma and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1200The High 5 Habit & The Secret To Motivation w/ Mel Robbins: https://link.chtbl.com/1170-podTony Robbins: Own Your Future in Business, Life & Love: https://link.chtbl.com/1107-podThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-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 1200 on the five secrets of success they didn't teach you in school.

• 0:10Lewis 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.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back, my friends. One of the main reasons I created this show was to learn about topics that weren't discussed in school when it came to being successful, when it came to accomplishing your goals, when it came to dealing with the emotional side of failure, and so much more. And it felt like there was a lot of emotional side of things left out when I was growing up and when I went to school. It was more of just, you know, show up, sit up straight, do your homework, get straight A's, and pass your tests. That was really what the key was. But this week, I wanted to bring together some of the most successful people that I know to share some of the biggest secrets to building your dream life, becoming successful, and being fulfilled while doing it. In this episode, we discuss

• 1:15Lewis Howes?

  how talent is overrated, and how to actually work towards getting what you want with Seth Godin, the importance of loving yourself with Tony Robbins, how to properly manifest success with Mel Robbins, the power of reflection with David Goggins, how to develop a strong morning routine with Robin Sharma, and so much more. Again, I wish I learned these things growing up and in school. And if you're inspired by this, and you're finding value from this, then make sure to share this message with someone that you think it could help along the way as well. We're all here to improve the quality of our life, and the key to greatness is lifting others up with us. So make sure to spread this message. Use the link lewishouse.com/1200 and share this over on social media, text some friends,

• 1:59Lewis Howes?

  or post it anywhere you think could help other people. And I want to give a shout out to our fan of the week. This is from Courtney, who said, "The show is so intriguing that you won't find yourself..." Daydreaming while listening. Plus, you might learn something important about being a better person for yourself and for those around you. So, big shout out to Courtney for being a fan of the week. She left a review over on Apple Podcast. So, if you want a chance to be shouted out as a fan of the week, then go ahead and leave us a review right now or at the end of this episode and let us know your thoughts on what you love most about this episode. Okay, in just a moment, let's dive into the secrets of success they didn't teach you in school.

• 2:43Lewis Howes?

  In this first section, entrepreneur and bestselling author Seth Godin shares how talent is overrated and why focusing on building your skills is the most important thing you can do, as well as the skills he thinks we should all learn.

• 2:57Seth Godin?

  Almost nobody is talented. Talent is completely overrated. I would argue that you were born with certain physical talents that enabled you to excel in sports that I could never have acquired, no matter how hard I tried. Even that said, though, Larry Bird was not born with the kind of talent that Michael Jordan was. Larry Bird just grounded out and shot more practice shots than anybody else. That's a skill.

• 3:23Lewis Howes?

  And hustled. Yeah.

• 3:25Seth Godin?

  Yeah, but the good kind of hustle.

• 3:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:27Seth Godin?

  And so, it feels to me like talent is a betrayal. It is undermining all of the people who put all that work into skill. Don't call someone skillful talented because they're not. They're skillful. So, we can agree that playing the piano is a skill in the sense that if you work at it, you get better at it. But I would like to believe that being enthusiastic is a skill. And then so is being creative. It's a skill. You can get better at it. You can choose to put in the work. In whatever form it takes, we're not talking about graphic art here unless you want it to be

• 4:05Seth Godin?

  graphic art, to gain the skill. And if that's true, that's really good news. Because it means you're not stuck where you are. It means you can go to where you want to go. And it's really good news because skills can be acquired. And that fills me with optimism about so many things in our world. You know, we can point to the human condition and say, people are just doomed to hate each other and to undercut each other. But I can point to a culture where that's not happening. So how did that happen? Well, it's because it's a skill.

• 4:43Lewis Howes?

  What are the three biggest skills you think all human beings should acquire? Whether it be creativity, or some type of attributes, that to just make them better human beings, happier, more quote unquote, successful, richer lives, with relationships, health, everything. What are those three skills, whether you're 20 or 60? What three skills should we acquire to live a better life?

• 5:08Seth Godin?

  I love this.

• 5:10Seth Godin?

  Okay, how about this? Number one is the skill of possibility, of seeing that things could be better. Number two, the skill of empathy, practical empathy, of understanding people don't know what you know, don't want what you want, don't see what you see, that they have a noise in their head that's different than the noise in your head, and that's okay. And then the third one is the skill of learning how to learn, of being open to saying, I see possibility, I see people who need to be served who aren't who I am, and I, if I put enough into this, can figure out how to make a contribution. Those, I think, are three skills.

• 5:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's really just understanding emotional intelligence in people, and stepping in other people's shoes, and having compassion. Why did you choose those three skills over?

• 6:05Lewis Howes?

  Copyrighting or

• 6:07Seth Godin?

  Well, I got, I have

• 6:08Lewis Howes?

  Personal finance.

• 6:09Seth Godin?

  There's some, there's some next level tactical ones like decision making is a skill.

• 6:14Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 6:15Seth Godin?

  And almost every Western human is terrible at it.

• 6:18Lewis Howes?

  Why? Why are we terrible at it?

• 6:20Seth Godin?

  Because sunk costs are something that are probably hardwired into us. What a sunk cost means is the harder you worked to have something, the harder it is for you to give it up. And we see this mistake happen all the time. The, the example I'll give is, um, pre-COVID, you've got, uh, two tickets to the movies and, uh, they were really hard to get and you told your girlfriend that you were going to go to the movies together. On your way, you bump into a friend who says, I got two front row seats to see Hamilton. Do you want to go?

• 6:58Seth Godin?

  That means your tickets are worthless. And a lot of people go, well, no, no, there's no well. It doesn't matter how much those tickets cost you. They're sunk. You already made that decision. You can't unmake it. And so we stick with a job longer than we should. Or we stick to a way of thinking about the world longer than we should because it costs a lot. We went to law school, so now I have to be a lawyer. No, you don't. The law school degree is a gift from your former self. You don't have to take it. You could say, no, thank you. And go do something that gives you joy instead. So sunk costs is a, is a giant skill based area. And then what goes right next to that is the skill of saying,

• 7:43Seth Godin?

  that was a good idea, but I have a better one now.

• 7:46Lewis Howes?

  Ooh.

• 7:48Seth Godin?

  And that takes

• 7:49Lewis Howes?

  Explain, explain that. So I launched this idea and it started going and I built momentum for a few years. But now this is actually a better idea for the time or for my life or whatever. And so I'm going to let go of that thing and move into this.

• 8:03Seth Godin?

  Well, it's not, that's, that's definitely true. That's sunk cost. But then beyond it, okay, I'm the boss and I built this organization and this is how we do our expense reports. But now we're going to do expense reports this way because it's better. But usually what happens is someone says, that problem's solved. I don't have to revisit it. So if I think about the car industry, the car industry said it took us 90 years to develop the internal combustion engine. That was a lot of cycles, a big sunk cost. And someone shows up and says, why don't we make electric cars? And you go, because internal combustion isn't broken. Because I can show you that if we look at an early electric car compared to a state-of-the-art Lexus, the state-of-the-art Lexus is better, not a problem.

• 8:48Seth Godin?

  Whereas what would have transferred billions and billions of dollars of assets away from Elon Musk is if they had said, nope, you're right. We're just going to copy all the things you're doing that are working and make it even better. Because we have an improvement ratchet in place, a dealer network in place, we're trusted, we can go to the races. But senior executives making seven figures said, nope, nothing could be better than this.

• 9:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I tell you what, I got a Tesla a few years ago, and it's hard for me to think I'd ever want to go back for a day-to-day car that's not electric, personally. It just...

• 9:24Seth Godin?

  But let's think about Tesla for a minute, because Tesla made a whole bunch of decisions a few years ago that they refused to reconsider. Right? That the inside of the car should have no cup holders of a certain kind, that the inside of the car should have these things on the dashboard, but not these things, that the service needs... So they're as guilty of the same thing. They took a leap, they hired 1,000 people, and now they're stuck on their sunk costs.

• 9:47Lewis Howes?

  Right. That's true. That's true. And they'll be stuck until they innovate or continue to open up. Why do we need reassurance? Why does it seem like a lot of people need this reassurance just every day? We need some type of reassurance. And why should we avoid reassurance?

• 10:07Seth Godin?

  That's the second side. Reassurance is futile. Reassurance feels really good, right? So we get off, we get off this call, the phone's ringing and Kai comes to you and says, "Hey Louis."

• 10:21Lewis Howes?

  "Great job."

• 10:22Seth Godin?

  "It's Oprah." And Oprah was listening. She just wants you to know what a great job you did. So you're flying for like two hours, maybe three, and then you need to hear it from somebody else. Because what it means to get reassurance is that someone is telling you that the future is going to be okay. And it feels good because we would like the future to be okay. But deep down, we know that that person doesn't know that the future is going to be okay. So as soon as reassurance shows up, it reminds us that we are confronting an uncertain world and we want more of it. We want to be held safely. And it doesn't scale, you can't get enough of it. So what's the alternative?

• 11:07Seth Godin?

  The alternative is to refuse reassurance.

• 11:10Lewis Howes?

  So when someone says, "You did a great job Seth. It was amazing. That was the best thing I've ever seen in my entire life." How do we refuse that?

• 11:17Seth Godin?

  Well, that, the answer is thank you. I appreciate you being present and giving me that feedback. But it's reassurance if you then say, and your book launch is going to go great. Because that you can't know.

• 11:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Seth Godin?

  Right? That's the second half of, that's what's implied, is that I'm going to tell you about tomorrow. And what's the alternative? The alternative is to say, "Nobody knows about tomorrow." And looking for external validation that I'm going to catch that fish, that that thing I am hoping for is going to work, that other people will get the joke? Not only doesn't it help me, it undermines my trust in myself. It undermines all of the things that I need to merely do the work. So, you know, you've been seduced by, like me and everyone else, with the just do it thing from Nike. And the problem with the word "just" is that some people think it means, "What the hell? Do whatever you want, doesn't matter.

• 12:16Seth Godin?

  Just do it." And I think it should be changed to merely do it. Do it without commentary. Do it without drama. Simply show up and do the thing. Focus on the practice, not hoping and wishing for the outcome that you need to be reassured by. But the practice, the best you can do it, because if you, what could be better than the best you could do it? Nothing. So do that. Learn from what works and then do it again. But seeking reassurance is distracting you from doing a better job of what you set out to do in the first place.

• 12:49Lewis Howes?

  I saw somewhere, um, I don't know if it was an article or video about Oprah, uh, talking about almost a hundred percent of her guests, not everyone, but I think a lot of them at the end of the, the show would all say the same thing. And I think you know what I'm going to say. It's like, did I do okay? Was that good enough for you?

• 13:08Seth Godin?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Lewis Howes?

  But did you like that? And it's this kind of reassurance mindset, right? Of like, knowing that we got approval from the person who's interviewing us or working with us or our publisher. Were the numbers okay for you? Did the sales go okay? How do we gracefully remove that from our way of being moving forward? So that we don't have to ask if we did a okay job? And we learn to just say, thank you so much for having me, or I'm grateful and, um, whatever else, what like, how should we finish a project like that?

• 13:44Seth Godin?

  Well, I'm really afraid of the word should. I think should and shame go right next to each other. So I will just tell you that there are practices that you can engage in to help you insulate from feedback that isn't going to help. So here's, here's an interesting story.

• 14:05Seth Godin?

  A bunch of years ago, a famous electronics company did a focus group. The way focus groups work is you set up a trailer next to a shopping mall. You pay people some money, they come in for an hour, there's hidden glass windows and the, the client can watch people touch the product. And they had a clock radio. And it had all these gizmos on it and everything else. And they got eight people in there and they're all looking at the clock radio. And they're all talking about how much they love the clock radio. And at the end, the organizer says, "Thank you so much. To thank you for being here, either you can get the $20 we promised you, or the $100 clock radio. Which would you prefer?" And every single person took the 20 bucks.

• 14:46Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 14:47Seth Godin?

  Because that was the truth. That was the moment that they were actually telling the truth.

• 14:52Lewis Howes?

  Oh, so they thought the clock wasn't as worth as much as the $20?

• 14:57Seth Godin?

  Yeah. And so what I have found is, I have got an ego as much as anybody, maybe more. I like it when the people around me say, "You did a really good job." When Oprah says, "That was good." For sure. But I want to see, three years later, are people still talking about this idea? Or I just want to see, in the afternoon after a blog post, did someone engage with it in a way that changed them? When they didn't know that I would notice, right? Because it's not a performance in that moment. It's, "Did you have an impact?" So if you go to Dia Beacon in upstate New York

• 15:39Seth Godin?

  and watch what happens when people walk into a Richard Sarah sculpture, which weighs 2 million pounds, I hope Richard has seen that happen. Because that's genuine service. He made this. The curator doesn't matter. The dealer doesn't matter. This person had their breath taken away. That's what was supposed to happen, and it did. And so, we play this game with everybody around us. "Do I look fat in this dress?" et cetera, et cetera. And some of that is totally legitimate. It papers over our momentary insecurities, and there's nothing wrong with that. But when it comes down to the practice and the art that we seek to make, I think it makes sense to surround ourselves with people who say...

• 16:26Seth Godin?

  I respect you. You're on to something. You can do even better. And for us to start a cycle of what happened when this went into the world? Because when it's in the world and people had choices, what did I learn? How can I help a different group of people or this group of people make a different choice? And, you know, in the workshops that I do, I get to watch all of it because I'm like up here. You can see all the interactions. That's different than looking at the test scores because you're watching how people are going back.

• 16:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I think I heard our good friend Gary Vee talking about how when he started in his dad's wine business, he would sit there and watch people walk through the store and say, okay, what if I move this this way? And what if I put this in the front? Did people go and pick it up or did they walk right past it? Observing the results and the impact that you create on people, whether that's an experiential design or a physical design, whatever it may be. I'm curious, I'm going to try to be mindful of the word should.

• 17:31Lewis Howes?

  Is it more powerful for creatives to have goals and deadlines? Or is that destructive to the creative process?

• 17:43Seth Godin?

  Right. So deadlines are a weird word because they have the word dead in them.

• 17:51Lewis Howes?

  Finish lines or lodge lines, whatever.

• 17:55Seth Godin?

  I am super disciplined about deadlines. I have never missed a deadline. Because I just decided that some people need that tension that comes from being five minutes late. I abhor that. I want to go nowhere near that. So for me, it's fuel. For other people, it might be turbo fuel because they need that five minute over thing. But there are other people who it completely destroys their work. So you've got to figure out how do you engage with that? But goals is a different thing. So I was talking to somebody, I wish I could give them credit,

• 18:37Seth Godin?

  who was explaining to me that goals are externally focused. And this is one of the things that led to me writing about it in the book. Meaning, if you say, my goal is to be a millionaire.

• 18:51Seth Godin?

  That isn't up to you. It's only partly from you, and the rest of it is luck. And so if you're gonna say, "I'm a good person because I'm lucky, and I'm a bad person because I'm unlucky," now you're really in trouble. Instead, what we need are practices that we call our thing, that thing we call our goal is, "I'm going to be the kind of person that ships this much work each day, that gets out of bed at this time, that manages their expenses so they're always one-third of..." I mean, you can make a list of things that are completely under your control. Call those your goals, and wipe out anything that involves fish, anything that involves something external happening that makes you feel lucky.

• 19:33Lewis Howes?

  So I'm hearing you say focusing more on the things you can control daily, the habits, the practices, the actions, your energy, way of being, your compassion daily as opposed to the end result.

• 19:45Seth Godin?

  Right, and let's get back to where we started, which is the reason people don't do that is because they don't want to hear from their other voice. They don't do that because they don't want to be on the hook. It is easier to catastrophize. It is easier to say, "I'm distracted." It is easier to say, "Oh, the world is way too..." Whatever, all of those are external things that let you off the hook. And what I remember is I was born a year and a half before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Right? The world is really in trouble in 2020. But the world was 10 minutes away from being gone in 1962. And so the question is, how did we get from that

• 20:27Seth Godin?

  to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon seven years later? We didn't do it by saying, "Well, we can't because Russia could end everything in any minute." We said, "Well, if Russia's gonna end everything in any minute, we might as well send someone to the moon." And my friend Roz Xander helped me learn the difference between but and and. So here we go. If you go on a long planned vacation and it's raining, you could say, "I'm on vacation, but it's raining. Doesn't that suck?" Or you could say, "I'm on vacation and it's raining." And the and leaves room for you to say, "So I can take a cooking lesson. So I can have some quiet time with my spouse. So I can figure out how to work for social justice."

• 21:10Seth Godin?

  All of those things happened because it's raining. And so, yeah, it's raining right now. It's really bad. And you can do something. You can't fix everything, but you can make one person better.

• 21:23Lewis Howes?

  What are the habits that you believe would support more creatives if they did these habits on a daily basis? From your 30-plus years of experience of what's worked for you and what you've seen other people you've studied do, what are those few habits you think could really help them further their inner happiness? And hopefully accelerate the luck on the outside as well?

• 21:47Seth Godin?

  Yeah. So we have to not fool ourselves into getting hooked on the external that we'll pretend we're not, but deep down we are. And so, you know, Chöngyung Trungpa Rinpoche said, "The bad news is we are falling and falling and falling. And the good news is there's nothing to hang on to." And as soon as you acknowledge that there's nothing to hang on to, it gets so much easier to fall.

• 22:13Lewis Howes?

  You just let go and you don't have to keep trying to grab for something.

• 22:16Seth Godin?

  Right. And so, the grabbing is the biggest thing. I write in the book a little bit about Julia Cameron's morning pages. Most people don't really understand how they work. You're not supposed to get up and write three pages of good prose. You're not supposed to get up and write three pages of interesting things. You're simply supposed to get up and write three pages, period, about anything, junk, garbage, crust, get it off your chest. Doesn't matter. Just put it down. Because as soon as you do, for the rest of the day, if you try to bring it up again, your subconscious says, "I already wrote that down. I don't need to revisit that. It's taken care of. I wrote it down. I've discharged that."

• 22:57Seth Godin?

  And so, part of what it means to have a practice is the practice defines who you are. If you want to be a runner, the best thing to do is go run every day. If you run every day for thirty days, you're a runner. You don't have to subscribe to runner's world. You don't have to have fancy equipment. You just have to run every day. If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. And you don't have to show it to anybody. You simply have to do it. And not showing it to people lets you off the hook at some level, but at least you can see yourself as that kind of person. And then the step after that, which I'm a huge fan of, and the internet makes this easier than ever, is publish it anonymously. I think you should have a daily blog, but don't put your name on it.

• 23:41Seth Godin?

  And after you've written thirty or forty entries of your daily blog or made five or six episodes of your podcast, you're going to want to put your name on it. And then you can, but begin with... And if your name's not on it, it's so delicious because there's no upside and there's no downside. So you're simply doing it and that's all you're going to get out of it is that you did it.

• 24:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. I want to ask you about money for a second because I think it's a topic that a lot of creatives shy away from. And I think this will actually might be some of the most powerful stuff people hear is around the topic of money. You've been financially successful. You'd launched a business thirty years ago that you sold and exited. You've had, you know, many hits in your books and businesses. You've made money as a creative, if you're going to say that.

• 24:35Lewis Howes?

  How can... What should creatives be thinking about in terms of what if they want to create great work, but also they want to be rich? They want to make millions. They want to for the heck of it to support their family, their lifestyle. They want to make money.

• 24:48Seth Godin?

  Yeah.

• 24:49Lewis Howes?

  What should they be thinking about in terms of art and money and marrying the both without it feeling bad or icky or I'm selling myself in a bad way to make money? How can they approach it mentally so that it doesn't cripple them, but they achieve the results they want?

• 25:09Seth Godin?

  My answer might surprise some people, but here we go. The odds that you will make a lot of money doing exactly what you want are zero. To a rounding error, zero. It is possible to make a lot of money. It is easier now for people of privilege to do it than most any other time in history. Because of the network effect, because of the power of software, because of tools that give you reach to millions of people. The way you make a lot of money is you figure out what people with money want to spend that money on to solve their problem now. And you go solve that problem. And then over time, you amplify their need and you let them do it again.

• 25:51Seth Godin?

  That is how everybody, with few exceptions, who has made a lot of money, has done it. Those people don't get to say, "Oh, but I also have this idea and I need to express it because I think it's generous." Those are different things. And only in the last 100 years has it even been conceivable that you could get paid money to do what you love. This is brand-new idea. So I am in favor of doing what you love and charging for it if you can because it holds you responsible, puts you on the hook. Creating tension, serving people you want to serve. And maybe you'll get paid a little bit. But if you want to make a lot of money, listen to the market.

• 26:40Lewis Howes?

  In this section, bestselling author Mel Robbins talks about properly manifesting success while using the law of attraction and why so many people get it wrong. What's your thoughts about the law of attraction, on how to apply it the right way?

• 26:55Mel Robbins?

  Yeah, I think, well, I think the law of attraction and manifesting are the same thing. So law of attraction, for everybody who has not read The Secret, is simply your thoughts become things. And it's true. We've talked all about how, when you have a negative self-talk, it tends to draw more of that to you. I think about it like lint in a dryer. Once negative stuff starts collecting, it collects a lot more. We can also talk about your brain filter, something called the reticular activity system, and how it is a live network that filters the brain. We'll dig into that deeper, but let's do surface-level right now, manifesting law of attraction. So here's what everybody gets wrong about manifesting.

• 27:33Mel Robbins?

  Everybody, at least kind of in the mass market, what you're trained to think about when you think about manifesting is vision boards. And when you hear the word "vision boards," you think about the big stuff. Should you have big dreams? Of course you should! Should you dream of building a mansion on the ocean, if that's your thing? Yes. Should you dream of the log cabin? Yes. If you want a Lamborghini or the new Ford Bronco, should you? Yes, yes, yes. If you want the family, if you want the body, should you think about? Yeah, absolutely. Here's where everybody goes wrong. You dream about the end, you make this gorgeous collage of all this stuff that has nothing to do with your current life.

• 28:16Mel Robbins?

  That literally, as you're sitting in your studio apartment with the cat box that hasn't been changed in two weeks...

• 28:22Lewis Howes?

  No food in the fridge.

• 28:23Mel Robbins?

  No food in the fridge, and you're looking for a job, and you're staring at a mansion going, "Someday, it's gonna make you feel like a loser." Because the gap between where you are and where you want to go seems insurmountable. And so what happens, based on the research, is when you only visualize the end game, Louis, it's demotivating. At first, it's really fun to like have a bottle of wine and make your like collage. I'm gonna visualize, I'm gonna slap this up. There's my vision board, fabulous. Love attraction, baby. Come on, I'm gonna think about it, it's gonna come to me.

• 28:58Mel Robbins?

  Okay, I've been doing this for two days. I'm still in this apartment with the cat box that needs to be changed. The way to visualize properly is to visualize the bridge between where you are and where you need to go.

• 29:12Lewis Howes?

  The bridge.

• 29:12Mel Robbins?

  Yes, and particularly

• 29:16Mel Robbins?

  the horrible stuff. So let's use your example of the marathon. The vision board would be Louis crossing...

• 29:24Lewis Howes?

  With your arms up at the metal.

• 29:26Mel Robbins?

  Yeah, the arms up at the metal, exactly.

• 29:27Lewis Howes?

  The high fives, yeah, I did it.

• 29:28Mel Robbins?

  High fives, yes, I did it, exactly. That will not help you. Because when you hit mile 13 on the actual race and it is sleeting rain.

• 29:37Lewis Howes?

  You're just saying, "Why am I doing this?"

• 29:39Mel Robbins?

  Yes, and it feels nothing like that thing on your vision board. You're going to start a negative dialogue. "I can't do this. My knees hurt. This is not what I thought it was gonna be. I'm not ready for this. I didn't train for this. I'm running New York. I trained in LA. Are you running in New York?"

• 29:53Lewis Howes?

  LA.

• 29:53Mel Robbins?

  Okay, good. Well, then at least you're training in the right weather. So on and on and on, and you are going to tank yourself. What you do by visualizing the bridge is you train your nervous system and your mind to do the hard work. So you should visualize not crossing the finish line, but what is it like to be at mile 12 when your batteries run out on your earbuds?

• 30:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Mel Robbins?

  I'm serious. And you keep going. What's it like when your shoelace breaks? And now your heel is lifting and you're starting to get a blood blister at mile 17. What's it feel like when you wake up and it is pouring rain? And you visualize yourself running anyway. That way, when you visualize the work, you are preparing your body for it so you're not resistant to it when it comes. Isn't that cool?

• 30:46Lewis Howes?

  I think it's great. It's a story that I had. George St. Pierre, who's one of the greatest UFC fighters of all time. He said that he always puts himself in the most uncomfortable situations in practice leading up to the fight. The most, you know, the hardest situations to get himself out of. When his arms are behind his back and he's faced against the mat in between the fence and he's just getting punched in the face. He's like, "How do I get out of this?"

• 31:14Mel Robbins?

  Right, right.

• 31:14Lewis Howes?

  He's like, visualize that and seeing, "How can I get through this?"

• 31:18Mel Robbins?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:19Lewis Howes?

  Where it seems like, "I just wanna tap out."

• 31:21Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 31:22Lewis Howes?

  Instead of tapping out, what's the process for figuring out how to get through it?

• 31:26Mel Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Lewis Howes?

  To then raise my hand at the end victorious.

• 31:29Mel Robbins?

  Totally. And so you are literally building up almost like this resilience and this muscle inside of you to do the work, to get the thing. So yeah, create the vision board, but make sure in addition to crossing the finish line, you have somebody running in the rain. You have somebody who, you have an alarm clock that says 5:13. You have, you know, these images that show the stuff that you don't want to do. So like for people who want to launch a business, for example. Like a lot of people that I'm sure follow both of us are dying to launch a business, or interested in being an influencer, social media, or making money online. And what you visualize are the checks. Or you visualize the money you're gonna make. Or you visualize how cool it's gonna be when you're a lifestyle entrepreneur, or whatever the hell it is. Don't do that.

• 32:14Mel Robbins?

  Visualize working a day job and telling your friends that you're not gonna go out tonight because you're working on something. Visualize making cold calls and being told no. Visualize not going to that party because you're staying in on a Saturday, and not going to the barbecue because you're putting in the work. Visualize sitting in a seminar and learning from other people. Visualize watching YouTube videos. Visualize your first ever course failing miserably. Like, literally, that's the sort of thing that you want to visualize yourself doing and pushing through. Because that's gonna help you do the work. Isn't that cool?

• 32:49Lewis Howes?

  I think that's great. Yeah, visualizing... So in order to manifest what you want, don't just visualize the good things happening. Visualize the bridge, all the things it's gonna take to get there.

• 32:58Mel Robbins?

  Yes, and the hard parts of the bridge. Because then you're ready for it. Then you're like, "I didn't expect this to be this hard." I mean, it's still gonna be hard. But you're less likely to quit.

• 33:07Lewis Howes?

  Yes. So what have you done in the last five years to help you manifest after the first book? Were you doing this as well? Or, kind of, once you get on a rhythm and build momentum, does it become easier to manifest, in your opinion?

• 33:22Mel Robbins?

  Well, so I am constantly training my mind to work for me. And there's this little trick that I talk about in the book that is all sort of the beginning of having a high-five attitude. And a high-five attitude is the ability to catch yourself when you're going mentally low, and to flip yourself back up into a high-five attitude.

• 33:43Mel Robbins?

  The thing that I know to be true is that you cannot control the things around you. You can't control what's gonna happen. You can't even control how your nervous system might respond, or what thoughts might pop into your head. But you can always choose what you do next and what you make it mean, right? And so that's where all the power is. Yes. And so I do this thing where I... This is, again, it's gonna sound so dumb, but it's a way for me to introduce you to the power that your mind has to change in real time. Okay. We've talked a lot about negative self-talk.

• 34:24Mel Robbins?

  And part of the reason why negative self-talk is so crippling is not only because you've repeated it for so long and now it's a pattern, but it's also because you have a filter on your brain called the reticular activity system, okay? This puppy is the keys to everything. And it's remarkable that most of us have never heard of it. We've experienced it, but we don't know how to use it to our advantage. So first, let me tell you what the RAS does. Then I'm gonna give you an example of when you've experienced it in your life, and then I'm going to explain to you how to use it to get what you want in life.

• 35:05Mel Robbins?

  This is like the super attractor manifesting, and it also works for interrupting negative self-talk. Like, it's gonna supercharge all the work you're doing with the mirror and interrupting thoughts. So first, let's talk about the RAS. So the RAS, imagine a hairnet on your brain, only it's like electric, meaning it's alive, okay? Now, the RAS has one job, and the job is block out 99% of what's going on and let in 1% of what's going on. Our brains, at this moment in history, are having to process about 34 days' worth of cellphone data. In one day.

• 35:43Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 35:43Mel Robbins?

  It's crazy. And so your RAS has a monster job. It's like a bouncer at a bar. You're not coming in, you can come in. And you've experienced this. So have you ever shopped for a car?

• 35:55Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 35:55Mel Robbins?

  Okay, so what's the last car you bought?

• 35:57Lewis Howes?

  Tesla.

• 35:57Mel Robbins?

  Oh Tesla. Oh fancy. Lewis Howes. I like that.

• 36:01Lewis Howes?

  Well, I never had a, I never had a nice car until three years ago. I had a $4,000 car for five years before that.

• 36:08Mel Robbins?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:09Lewis Howes?

  And then I was like, you know what? I have no Bluetooth. I have no, it's like, I just needed an upgrade.

• 36:13Mel Robbins?

  Yeah, I love it. You deserve it.

• 36:14Lewis Howes?

  It was a 1991.

• 36:15Mel Robbins?

  Dude, you deserve it.

• 36:16Lewis Howes?

  I had a 1991 Cadillac. And I was like, okay, let me buy a car. So I bought a Tesla, yeah.

• 36:20Mel Robbins?

  Right. And so before you thought about buying a Tesla, you drive down the road, you don't really think about it. The second you're like, you know, I think I'm interested in a Tesla. What do you see everywhere?

• 36:28Lewis Howes?

  Teslas.

• 36:29Mel Robbins?

  Yes, everywhere.

• 36:30Lewis Howes?

  Everywhere.

• 36:30Mel Robbins?

  My husband just bought a pickup truck. I'd never even noticed him. Now I'm like, there are baby blue pickup trucks everywhere. What is going on? That's the bouncer in your brain. And let me tell you how this works. There are only four things that automatically get through the bouncer in your brain, the RAS. Number one, your name. So you've experienced being in a crowded place and somebody's like, you think you hear Lewis and you're like, huh? Somebody call my name? That was the bouncer in your brain. The second thing that always gets let in is any threat to your safety. So there are loud noises all the, all the time, but only ones in close proximity make you go like this. That was the bouncer in your brain letting it in.

• 37:07Mel Robbins?

  The third thing that gets let in is when you sense that your partner is interested in sex with you or somebody else. You're like, Chris, you know, who are you looking, stop looking at her. You know what I'm saying? You kind of pick up on the signals. That's the bouncer in your brain. And the fourth one, and this is where, this is the billion dollar thing that everybody needs to know. The bouncer in your brain lets in whatever you think.

• 37:36Mel Robbins?

  is important to you.

• 37:38Mel Robbins?

  So when you get intentional about telling your brain what's important to you, like I'm interested in a Tesla, your brain's literally like, oh, let's let all the Teslas in, come on in. Here's the downside to this. If you have told yourself that you are a bad person for the last 10 years, guess what your brain thinks is important? Examples that mean you're a bad person.

• 38:03Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 38:04Mel Robbins?

  So I'm going to give you a very specific example. So I personally don't think I'm a bad person. I don't think I'm perfect, but I know I do my best. I mean well. I don't have that story about myself at all. I used to, but I don't. And let's say I oversleep and I miss the dentist. I miss the dentist appointment. I'm like, oh, I gotta pay the 25 bucks. I had to reschedule that thing. That kind of blows. That's all I think. And then I go on. My daughter, who constantly beats herself up and says she's a bad person, this is a real example, by the way, she oversleeps, misses a dentist appointment, and it becomes, see, I always screw everything up. I'm a terror. I'm always messing things up. I'm

• 38:48Mel Robbins?

  like, everything that gets let in confirms that you're a bad person.

• 38:53Lewis Howes?

  She finds proof and evidence.

• 38:54Mel Robbins?

  Yes. That's the bouncer in your mind. I'm here to tell you that when you get intentional about what you want to think about yourself, it changes in real time what your brain lets in and what it doesn't. That helps you with the other things that you're doing. The high five in the mirror. I'm not thinking about that. The pathetic mantra, hey, you know, just because I missed the dentist appointment doesn't mean I'm a bad person. I'm doing the best I can here. Give myself a break. High five. You know what I'm saying? Shake it off. Get back in there. It's true, right?

• 39:29Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 39:29Mel Robbins?

  Because it's these little things. Somebody cuts you off. Somebody reaches for the last thing of cereal that you wanted to buy at the grocery store. You think it's like a sign that the world's out to get you. This is all your story and your mind skewing the world to prove all of the stuff you keep repeating. And the only way to get a handle on it is to start acting the opposite. Like, high five yourself, even though you don't feel like it. Interrupt the crap that you keep saying. Put your hands on your heart and settle your body down.

• 40:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 40:02Mel Robbins?

  All of these things are things that somebody does when they care about themselves. When they think they deserve to be treated with kindness.

• 40:10Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 40:11Mel Robbins?

  When they think they deserve support. And when they realize they need it. And when you start to build yourself back up, you'll show up very differently in other relationships.

• 40:22Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 40:23Mel Robbins?

  You know, if you tolerate this kind of treatment from yourself, you'll tolerate it from other people.

• 40:27Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:28Mel Robbins?

  It does begin with you.

• 40:30Lewis Howes?

  And when you create boundaries, and you don't abandon yourself, then you won't abandon yourself with other people either.

• 40:35Mel Robbins?

  Correct.

• 40:36Lewis Howes?

  You won't let them cross the boundaries.

• 40:37Mel Robbins?

  Correct. Like, if you stand in front of the mirror every single morning, and you're like, "I look like crap. I am not good enough. I'm unhappy with my life." And then you step into a relationship, and somebody leaves you unread, and they ghost you for three days, like, you come to expect that. Because that's how you believe you think you deserve to be treated. When you stand in front of a mirror, and you're like, "Hey, you're awesome. We got this. I got you. I know it's hard, you know? We're gonna go do this." Or, "Hey, this is a big day today. I've got this huge presentation. I am going to destroy this." You know, like, you get into it, you're excited. Like, then you're creating momentum for yourself.

• 41:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Mel Robbins?

  Otherwise, what? You're gonna stand there, like, "Oh, my God, I screwed this up. I'm not prepared." Like, it's like the negative morning routine.

• 41:28Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:29Mel Robbins?

  It leads to negative actions.

• 41:31Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 41:32Mel Robbins?

  So, this training thing, training your RES. So, here's what I want you to do. Starting tomorrow, after you wake up and make your bed, and kind of settle your nervous system, and high-five yourself after setting your intentions. So, now you're like, sending yourself into your morning routine in a totally different way, with a calmed-down nervous system, an intention, and this boost of feeling supported and loved and celebrated. I want you to find one naturally occurring heart shape as you go through your day.

• 42:03Lewis Howes?

  I saw this in your book, yeah.

• 42:05Mel Robbins?

  Yeah. It could be a stone. It could be a leaf on the ground. It could be a cloud shape. It could be a coffee stain. It could be an oil stain on the floor of a garage. It could be a spot on a dog walking by. I want you to tell your mind. Let's find a heart. Let's see if we can find a heart. And something weird's gonna happen. You're gonna see something. And then I want you to literally supersize what's going on in your brain. And what you do is when you see the heart, I want you to then take a moment and literally congratulate yourself, like feel like, "Oh, my God, I found it." Like, whatever you believe in, God, the universe, like greater connection, you put that there for me, and I found it.

• 42:47Mel Robbins?

  And I want you to feel this kind of wave of, "That's kind of cool." Yeah. "I just saw a heart." And then that positive thing, remember how I told you, the bouncer in your brain pays attention to what's important to you? When you get your nervous system celebratory involved, that makes your brain really pay attention, just like trauma makes your brain pay attention. It does. So you supercharge the experience by celebrating it, and then look for another one around. I see hearts all day long. Yeah. And what happens when you start to play this game is you will start to realize you are walking by an entirely different world every single day because you're not looking for it.

• 43:31Mel Robbins?

  There are opportunities, there are signs, there are mile markers on your path that you are literally tuning out. Yes. And we can all sit in this moment, Louis, and look back and see how the dots of our life connect us here. The coolest thing about practicing the high-five habit, this training of finding hearts and the high-five attitude, is that you start to ground yourself in the idea that this too is a dot on the map of your life, and it is leading you somewhere incredible.

• 44:10Lewis Howes?

  In this part, entrepreneur and bestselling author Tony Robbins shares the importance of loving yourself by your own standards that you have the ability to set. Was there ever a moment where you didn't unconditionally love yourself? And if so, and if so, when did that shift where you stopped that? And you started saying, okay, I appreciate myself because of my contribution and my service and who I am? What was that shift?

• 44:36Tony Robbins?

  I don't think it was ever I just didn't love myself. There were times, obviously, being angry with yourself or frustrated with yourself or thinking, you know, I'm not doing enough. I mean, I can remember my birthdays, to be honest with you, probably up to my 40th birthday, including my 40th birthday. You know, you have a birthday with a zero on it. Once you're over past 30, you know, 35, sometimes five years on it as well. People look at their life differently culturally. And I used to think it was bull, but sure enough, I would do it. I remember turning 40 and I was really, really unhappy. I was like, Jesus, I've not done enough. I've not helped enough people. I helped tens of millions of people at that point already, all over the earth and 100 plus countries at that point. But it was still kind of stuck in my head. So I would earn the love by over delivering, change somebody's life.

• 45:19Tony Robbins?

  Like, I don't get it because somebody says, oh, I love you, Tony. I mean, I appreciate that or oh, you're the greatest. It's got to be my standard. My standard is higher than their standard for me. Right? So when I get up and someone's going to kill themselves and it's they're suicidal and boom, turn around. They're no longer not going to kill themselves, but they're transformed. Their life is there. You know, that's when I go, okay, you know, now we've hit the center of what I'm made for now. You know, I deserve to feel this euphoric feeling within myself and appreciation. And even then, I still know it's God coming through me. I don't have the delusion, it's just me. But I think sometime after 40, I finally saw the stupidity of it. I accumulated enough that I looked at life with fresh eyes. And I can say by the time I turned 60 a year ago, I noticed it was interesting because my birthday, I didn't have an ounce of it.

• 46:03Tony Robbins?

  I was just like, you know, how could I at this stage of my life? And I've had the privilege of serving so many humans in so many contexts. You know, from turning around, you know, guys are going to kill themselves with PTSD to helping kids turn around, to getting kids off cocaine or adults, to, you know, helping people build multi-billion dollar businesses from nothing. And when I've lived this long, I can't go by without hearing half a dozen stories a day or dozen stories a day from people telling me how something I did changed their life. So it's not that I'm so smart now, it's just I've stacked it. By the way, though, stacking is the way you can do things. Most of us stack the negative. If you are really angry, it's not usually because of just the moment.

• 46:43Tony Robbins?

  It's that it happened again, you know, it's like if you've ever lost it or overreacted to your kid or to a friend or a business or even within yourself. It's because it happened again, we hit this one, two, three mini point. And then our nervous system overreacts, but what I've learned is you can stack the good. And but for example, if you're, if you go into a state of really strong anger for more than five minutes, your immune system is suppressed between an hour and a half to two hours. That's a physiological fact. But no one had done any study, I started stacking good, like, okay, let me stack a dozen great memories. Feel them, see them, experience them. And I felt this biochemical change that didn't just last a half hour, an hour or 10 minutes. It went on for a day or two. And so I think I've learned to stack the good.

• 47:27Tony Robbins?

  So just having experience is not enough. You gotta stack the good to be able to appreciate it. But I, I think, just come back to the main point here from my perspective, which could be completely just my perspective, so I want to point that out. I think the more you find unconditional love for others, the easier it is to find in yourself. And I think the focus is serving and loving. And that's what will get you the point where you start doing it. But if you want to speed it up, stack all the good you've done, you'll feel great about yourself.

• 47:55Lewis Howes?

  I already know all the comments that have come through, thousands of comments telling me, but what about my family that's toxic? What about my partner who's toxic? And how do I love someone unconditionally when they don't respect me? I can't trust them. What about situations like that?

• 48:10Tony Robbins?

  All those reactions are natural human reactions from ego. Cause it's all about you, me, me, me, what I'm not getting, what I'm not doing. And that's why you're in pain. And so I'm not telling you like I haven't done this, but I've done it too in the past. But it's an old pattern, I don't really do anymore. And it used to affect me. Now, not a dominant one, I wouldn't have become who I've become. Early in my life, I developed this belief that life is calling not to give me something. Life is calling for me to deliver things, for me to bring something to life. And I felt the the joy that came from not getting but giving. And I got hooked on that core pattern and then the pattern of learning so I'd have something to give. Which I know one of the things I respect about you, Lewis, is that you have that same pattern in you.

• 48:55Tony Robbins?

  You're you're always trying to learn more because underneath it all, you also want to give it. You want it for you, but you want to share it, right? And so those patterns helped me not be in what they're not giving. And all this language, language. Today, people don't understand the power of their language, like toxic. What the hell are you talking about? You've been reading too much social media and thinking about yourself or somebody raised you to constantly judge everybody else. We live in a culture now where people, you know, you're evil or you're like me. That's basically how it is, right? The whole world, everybody else is immoral unless they do what you do, think what you think, experience you think. I mean, being a liberal, I was a liberal, right?

• 49:34Tony Robbins?

  Being a liberal growing up meant you, I would, I would fight for your ability to say and believe whatever you want different than me. Today, now everybody wants everybody to think the same thing, otherwise they're evil or otherwise they could hurt me. Whatever happens, sticks and stones will break your bones, words will never hurt me. We have this whole thing that words are evil, words are action, words, it's bull. And all it does is make you incredibly weak as a human being, and you're more than that. We all are more than that. But you know what, like a kid that's never broken their bones, definitely afraid of breaking the bone. But if you're a kid and you're rough and tumble, you broke multiple bones, they heal, you don't have any fear of it. There's so many kids that have been raised to be safe and secure every moment.

• 50:15Tony Robbins?

  Anything that's insecure or unsafe, they don't want to be a part of, including language. And what it does is make you incredibly weak and fearful. And that's why there's so many people that are abundant that are angry all the time. Because they're angry because they're not growing. So, don't get me wrong. I know some people are not a good influence. I'm not denying that. I'm just saying you're more than somebody's influence. Unless you obsess about it every moment and make them wrong. So you can make yourself feel superior morally, psychologically, or spiritually. That's bullshit. Stop the pattern. We've all done it. Catch yourself. Cause if you want joy, happiness, and freedom, and extraordinary life, it will not come from blame. Never. There's no pride that comes from blame. I don't mean fake pride where you make shit up to feel good. I'm talking about real pride. Pride is something you earn.

• 51:00Tony Robbins?

  Like, people tell me, "Oh, I have no self-esteem because my parents used to say this, or they'd say that." I'd say, "That's such bullshit." I'm not saying it's bullshit they didn't say that. I said, "It's bullshit, that's why you don't have self-esteem." Self-esteem does not come from what people say about you. Self-esteem comes from what you experience about yourself. See, someone will tell you your whole life you're a piece of crap, and in part you go, "You're full of it. I'm gonna show you." Lots of people have done that. They never bought it. Or, someone will tell you you're beautiful your whole life, you go, "I'm not really beautiful." So what people tell you doesn't matter at all. It's what you stack. It's what you assemble. It's what you create. It's the habit of what you put in your head. And today, I don't blame you because we got a whole culture that's always blaming somebody else for something in their life.

• 51:44Tony Robbins?

  But blame is not a strategy for pride. That's why you're listening to these blaming people. They're all angry all the time. Listen, if I wanted to blame, I grew up in an environment, I didn't even share it till my mom passed, and even then I didn't share. I grew up in a pretty rough environment. My mom was a beautiful soul, but when she drank alcohol, and she mixed it with prescription drugs, it was a different creature. And it was a violent creature. And I have a younger brother, five years younger, and a younger sister, seven years younger. And my mom would get nuts. And I didn't want them to get hurt. So, I was 5'1" in high school. She'd grab me by the hair and smash me against the wall till I bled. And I never shared this, and I'm not denigrating her in any way. I only shared it like, four or five years after she died.

• 52:28Tony Robbins?

  Because I was talking to a group of kids in New York City, all without fathers, eighty percent African American, about twenty percent Hispanic out of their group roughly, no white kids, and I'm talking about your biography is not your destiny. And it doesn't matter what you've been through, what you decide now is what's gonna control your life. What you decide each day going forward is gonna decide your life. And I look at them, seeing me, I can read their minds. This big, tall, white, rich guy is gonna tell me biography doesn't matter. So I said, "Yeah, let me tell you my story." And I told them the whole story, way more than I'm telling you. And everyone was crying their eyes out when they're done. I said, "Look where I am right now." Because I wouldn't assemble the story that my past equals my future. The past only equals your future if you live there.

• 53:11Tony Robbins?

  If you're using a rearview mirror to guide yourself, you're gonna crash. So what you've been through is horrific, what you've been through is unjust. I'm on your side. But if you hang on to it, you have no future, and you have no one to blame but yourself. And these kids, to their credit, man, they just responded to the challenge because they first cried their eyes out hearing all the stories. My mom would think I was lying, and I wasn't lying. She poured liquid soap down my throat till I threw up, and I wasn't lying. So it's not the physical abuse, it's the fact that this is the person you love most that's trying to hurt you, that messes with your head. So I could have been messed up for life, but I didn't. Because something inside me says, "I'm responsible for this life." And part of that is because I started reading, when I was thirteen, fourteen, biographies

• 53:55Tony Robbins?

  of people, the greatest people in history, and reading their lives and finding out, guess what, their lives were far from perfect. Some of them had worse lives than I had. But when you have no reference, and all you just go online, you talk to other people, making everybody else toxic, and I'm like this, and they didn't do that, then you get to have this shit life just like those other people. Why are they online so much? Because they don't have a life. Right? Don't be one of those. Free yourself from the chains of your past. I'm not saying your past doesn't matter, but listen, my mother, I tell people this all the time, and it's the truth. If my mother had been the mother I wanted to be, the mother she should have been, I would not be the man I'm proud to be today.

• 54:38Tony Robbins?

  Because I had to become a practical psychologist way before any schooling. Figure out when's she gonna go in the mood? How do I change her state? How to protect her from the kids? What do we... I mean, it was life and death, and it was to some extent. So I developed skills at such a young age. Then when I learned things, I just added to my skills. But I had a core sense of certainty that I could turn anybody around because it started with my mother. And thank God for her. And she encouraged me in so many ways. She did so many great things. And she loved me, even though it didn't look like it at times. Correct. But if your parents, if the people around you said all the things you thought they should have, if they had just not been toxic, if they'd encouraged you, you wouldn't have any muscle. And right now, you don't have any muscle because you're using that as an excuse if you're thinking that.

• 55:23Tony Robbins?

  And I'm not attacking you, brothers and sisters. I'm calling to you because I know you're more. Otherwise, I'd just keep my mouth shut. We're just, you've been hypnotized by a culture of weakness. Now, having said that, I'll say one last thing. I know you have a lot of other questions, but it's so important what you've asked.

• 55:39Tony Robbins?

  Yes, there are people that you don't want to hang out with that will not serve you. But then move on. Don't sit there and talk about it constantly. Don't waste your time. And you say, but what if it's family, Tony? Mine was family too. And you learn to grow. You go, they're in my life. If someone can get your goat, if someone can piss you off, if someone can make you feel less than, that's God coming to you saying, grow. You need some spiritual growth. There's gotta be some change in your perception, your belief, your emotions, your spiritual look of life. So that can't happen anymore. And when it happens, like at 61, I've been through so many of those things. And I like do things in mass. I took on big challenges, so I'd have to grow more.

• 56:22Tony Robbins?

  But then life throws them at you too. When they come, you just go, okay, it's gonna have me until I grow. What needs a shift in me so that no longer has an impact? But you know, Jim Rohn used to say, my original teacher, he used to say, Tony, what happens if I've got a cup of coffee here? And he'd say, what if your worst enemy drops sugar in your coffee? What's gonna happen? And I'd go, well, you'd have sweet coffee. And he goes, what if your best friend, your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, your loved one drops one drop of strychnine? I said, you'd be dead. He goes, that's right. Life is full of sugar and strychnine, so watch your coffee. His whole thing was stand guard at the door of your brain. But some people take that and go, oh, my God, you can kill me. It was a metaphor. These people are not so toxic. They're toxic because you give them energy. So if your mom's crazy and constantly criticizing you and it drives you nuts,

• 57:08Tony Robbins?

  just go, that's my mom. That's her way of showing love. And I find a new perspective. And no matter what she does, just stay in a beautiful state and love on her and think, boy, think of all that she cares and feels for, all that she's frustrated in life, or all that she's going through that's made her this way. And think, I don't have to go through this. I can love her. It's like, your growth is the only limit to your happiness. If you're not happy, you're not growing in some area. And usually, it's a place where you're blaming, you're pointing the finger. I don't care if it's government, don't get me wrong. People can be unfair, unjust, that's for sure happens. But you can't control that. You can't make it not happen. What you have to do is become stronger than any of it, so you're free. Freedom comes from growth.

• 57:52Tony Robbins?

  Freedom does not come from control. Because control's an illusion. You can't control everybody, no matter how hard you try. You can't control what they think or feel. And not everybody's gonna be fair and just. And you, my dear friends, and I, have not always been fair and just. Whether we admit it or not, it's just the nature of being a being, a human being. But we can make the largest pattern fair and just, and loving and powerful and serving and growing, until it becomes the dominant thing inside you. And then you experience, life is being great, not your great. Life's great because you're living a great path.

• 58:24Lewis Howes?

  It seems like what I'm seeing and hearing from a lot of people that this past year, everything has fallen apart for them. Their health, their relationships, their finances, their mission or purpose. And their spiritual awareness, like every area of life has been in breakdown mode for some people. Not everyone, some people have had incredible lives and it was stepped up to the occasion and broken through on all these things. But I'm seeing a pattern of a lot of people breaking down in many areas. Hypothetical scenario, let's say you could only focus on one thing to get you started. You only had the time and energy to focus on one of these areas. Your health, your relationships are all breaking down, your finances are failing everywhere.

• 59:05Lewis Howes?

  Where should people lean into first to kind of create that foundation so that everything else can start to rise as well?

• 59:11Tony Robbins?

  I think before you answer what to do, you gotta answer why you're there.

• 59:16Tony Robbins?

  It is not because of the pandemic. I remember when 9/11 happened and people tell, "Oh my God, my life was destroyed because of 9/11." And there were people in the same building who turned their life around, became, grew spiritually, grew closer to their family, made their businesses larger. And the same building burned down, right? I know in my case, you know, 9/11 comes, if you can imagine, you know, I'm fortunate enough to have now more than 80 companies in all these different industries. And obviously, you know, I've done pretty darned well by most people's standards of business and life. But my core mission is what I do for a living. It's why I'm here talking to you right now. It's getting people to be free and alive and have the level of fulfillment that they deserve to have. I know they desire, but I also believe they deserve to have.

• 59:59Tony Robbins?

  But to deserve to have it, you gotta do certain things, right? And so you're not in a place of being overweight because you lost your job. So stop the bullshit blame. Blame is not a strategy for a meaningful life. Blame is not a strategy for greatness. So you gotta resolve that, number one. And then your question was, what's the one thing to focus on if you only focus on one? I think it's smart to focus on one thing primarily. Focus on too many can be overwhelming. Other people, it's good to focus on multiple things. It depends on your personality. So I wouldn't presuppose. But then the answer would be whichever thing you're most desirous of changing. Whatever thing is giving you the most pain. So if it's your relationship, I'd go full force on that. Now, in the world we're in today...

• 1:00:40Tony Robbins?

  You know, you don't usually have the the privilege of going, okay, I want to work on just being happy. Well, I can train to be happy while hell's breaking loose. You can sit in this chair and be totally euphoric. But if you do that in a Western culture, people come and take your furniture, right? So you probably have to work on both your business or financial side and some personal side. I would be working on both. And to me, the way to attack that, if you're not sure which area, is to start with the body. And I know you can relate to this, Louis, because you and I both share this in common. It's like, I always teach physiology first, as you well know. If you change the body, you'll change the emotions. If you change the emotions, you'll change your decisions, you'll change the quality of your life. Because the quality of your life is your emotions. It's not what you get, and you have a billion dollars and commit suicide. People have done it.

• 1:01:24Tony Robbins?

  Right? You can have beautiful relationships and commit suicide. You can have people loving you and be sad all the time. Our pattern of emotion is our home. And you have to upgrade your home. You have to train it. And one way to train it is the emotion comes from the way you move, the way you breathe, the way you speak. So if I said to your listeners, uh, there's a depressed person behind the curtain over here, and I'll give a hundred thousand dollars to their favorite charity if they had to describe their body, their posture, and they're depressed, you tell me. I'll just use the example. What's that person look like?

• 1:01:58Lewis Howes?

  They're slunched down, they're looking down at their feet, they're not looking upward, their their shoulders are over, they're...

• 1:02:04Tony Robbins?

  Are they breathing full or shallow, do you think?

• 1:02:06Lewis Howes?

  They're shallow.

• 1:02:08Tony Robbins?

  Are they talking fast or slow?

• 1:02:10Lewis Howes?

  They're talking, if they're depressed, they're probably talking fast because they're not calm.

• 1:02:15Tony Robbins?

  Well, no, that's usually stressed. Depressed is different than stressed.

• 1:02:18Lewis Howes?

  They're probably talking low volume, slower than...

• 1:02:23Tony Robbins?

  And all those physical characteristics change your biochemistry towards this feeling of being depressed. And in a depressed state, you won't do anything. When I used to be depressed, and I don't get it anymore, I just took it out of my life. I even took the language of it out of my life. Because the words you create create a biochemical response. But when I did that decades ago, because I was like, having those thoughts like, is there a reason to still be here? That kind of crazy shit in your head. I got out of it by using anger originally. I'm much like, sometimes if somebody's really sad or depressed, I'll make them angry. People are like, "What's he doing to make them angry?" Because angry is much more resourceful than depressed. From anger, I can get you the laughter, I can get you the taking action. So, and then gradually, I got where I didn't need anger. It was about growth, it was about contribution, it was about meaning. So there's like stages to go through.

• 1:03:05Tony Robbins?

  But to answer your question, they should work on both their business side of their life and personal. One of each. And or for either one of those to work, you need to be in a strong emotional state. And if you start with your body, like you know, I start every morning in my cold water. Start every morning with my workout. I start every morning by feeding my mind, right? So there's certain things you gotta do physically. So you're strong enough to remember the truth. Because remember, fear is physical. You feel your throat or your gut. So is courage. Courage doesn't mean you're not afraid. It just means you're strong enough, you push through in spite of the fear, right? And courage feels different in the body. So when you go lift, or you go for a sprint, or a strong run, or you jump in that freezing water. When you push your mind, you go beyond what's comfortable. You feel a strength inside you, and that strength will help you to change your body, your emotions, your relationships, whatever.

• 1:03:48Tony Robbins?

  But then the other thing I have to say is, model someone who's successful. Don't just do this shit by trial and error. Like, find somebody who has what you want. Ideally, maybe more than one person, two or three. And figure out, what are they doing different than you in their relationship? What do they believe different than you about relationship? If it's their body, what are they doing different? They're not lucky. They're doing things differently. You might be slightly biochemically different, but there's patterns there that you can see. And so, instead of learning by trial and error, which can take decades, you may never learn. Jim Rohn taught me, "Success leaves clues, man." Find someone's got what you want, study what they do, every aspect of it, and then add yourself to it. And that's the pathway to speed of transformation. So now, like, you know, I've done it. I'm not the only person.

• 1:04:32Tony Robbins?

  There's so many companies that went from worse off than they'd ever been in their history to the best off because they found a way to pivot. But that required a psychological piece of not blame.

• 1:04:45Lewis Howes?

  In this section, former Navy SEAL David Goggins shares why it's so important to reflect on our lives and how you can only reach a certain level of success if you don't. What's your biggest insecurity today?

• 1:04:57David Goggins?

  Not to be arrogant, I don't have one.

• 1:05:00Lewis Howes?

  What was the last one you had, and when was that?

• 1:05:02David Goggins?

  The last one I had was probably, um...

• 1:05:08David Goggins?

  Still me. Me, still living, cause I, I always talk about, I, I pay rent, so we live, we used to live in a seven dollar a month place when I was growing up.

• 1:05:19Lewis Howes?

  This is in Buffalo or is this?

• 1:05:20David Goggins?

  This is in Indiana.

• 1:05:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21David Goggins?

  So, like, we had a lot of money in Buffalo.

• 1:05:23Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:24David Goggins?

  And when my mom left, my dad, we went to nothing for a period of time before she got on her feet.

• 1:05:29Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:05:30David Goggins?

  And that seven dollar a month place used to be, it was my, it was who I was. I was no one. I was in the sewer. My mom lived there. I had nothing. And you always feel like you have nothing. I, I achieved so much. I was a Navy SEAL. I've gone through Ranger School. I've gone through Delta Force Selection Training. I, I, I done so much. I, I run two hundred miles, pull-up records. Everything. Learned to read and write, became pretty intelligent. And I still was like, man, what is wrong with me? It wasn't until I got real sick, and I talked about in the last chapter of that book, I got real sick, and I was about, um, thirty-eight years old.

• 1:06:12Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:13David Goggins?

  I'm forty-three now. And my life got real quiet. I, I went from running two hundred and five miles in thirty-nine hours to I couldn't get out of bed. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, but once again, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

• 1:06:28Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 1:06:29David Goggins?

  In that moment, where my whole life changed, I went from a guy who worked out every day, trained every day, to a guy who couldn't get out of bed. My life was taken from me. The one thing that kept me going was my training.

• 1:06:42Lewis Howes?

  Now, you didn't have that.

• 1:06:43David Goggins?

  I didn't have anything.

• 1:06:43Lewis Howes?

  Now, you just had to sit alone.

• 1:06:45David Goggins?

  Alone.

• 1:06:45Lewis Howes?

  And not train.

• 1:06:46David Goggins?

  And that's what changed me. And that's when I realized, I hadn't thought, hadn't taken time to think about what I'd done in my life.

• 1:06:56Lewis Howes?

  You hadn't reflected yet.

• 1:06:57David Goggins?

  I hadn't reflected. I'd done all these things, but there was no finish line. I still believe that, but you must have time to reflect.

• 1:07:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03David Goggins?

  I was just going. I wouldn't even, I'd finish a race of life, and I wouldn't even receive my medal. I'd go on.

• 1:07:10Lewis Howes?

  You're like, on to the next.

• 1:07:11David Goggins?

  I'd get in the car and I'd go.

• 1:07:12Lewis Howes?

  You wouldn't even take the medal?

• 1:07:13David Goggins?

  Gone. Don't care about it.

• 1:07:15Lewis Howes?

  Like, I'm not gonna waste an hour sitting around for this ceremony?

• 1:07:17David Goggins?

  Most people sit around, and that's what they like. They they need the ceremony if I accomplish something. I haven't done anything. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.

• 1:07:26Lewis Howes?

  Just getting started.

• 1:07:26David Goggins?

  I'm just getting started. That's right. When I started figuring out life. That I was leaving so much in the tank. I call it my forty percent rule. I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my God, man. I was this dumb, fat kid being bullied. And now I'm a hundred and eighty pound person, lost a hundred and six pounds in less than three months. Learn to read, learn to do this, learn to do that. I was like, I need more. I was fueling my mind with everything. And I never took time to say, my God, you came from this hell. And you're here. So those insecurities. And this is how I explain it the best way. SEAL training became pretty hard and a lot of guys weren't getting through it. So they designed a SEAL pep prep program.

• 1:08:10Lewis Howes?

  Like a boot camp for the boot camp.

• 1:08:11David Goggins?

  That's right. And it was two months. In my last two years before I retired from the military, they sent me there to train these kids. To get ready for.

• 1:08:21David Goggins?

  Young kids. So when they get to Navy SEAL training, man, they were physical studs. They were running, swimming. I mean, they were they were hybrids. But they get to buds. And the same amount of people would quit.

• 1:08:35Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 1:08:36David Goggins?

  This is why.

• 1:08:39David Goggins?

  We were training bigger, stronger, faster quitters.

• 1:08:44David Goggins?

  It's not about.

• 1:08:45Lewis Howes?

  Not the mind.

• 1:08:46David Goggins?

  That's right. We weren't diving into the sewer. Everybody's got a story. We don't share it on social media. We share our nice life on social media. We have, we all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine. Most of us aren't willing to talk about it. I'm gonna talk about my dungeon. I wasn't getting into the dungeon of these guys' minds. I wasn't building that so-called mental toughness. Mental toughness isn't something that you sample. It's something that you live in every day. So when something hard would happen to these kids, like in Hell Week. It would draw on something that made them very insecure. And they look for comfort.

• 1:09:29David Goggins?

  Whenever hardness comes, and you don't know what it is, it may be different for you than it is for me. But you go back to your insecurities. And then when you go back to insecurities, you then look for comfort. Within those insecurities. And we all look for that cookie that your mom used to give you.

• 1:09:45Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:09:45David Goggins?

  When you were sad.

• 1:09:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47David Goggins?

  When you were sick. We look for our wife or our husband, we look for comfort. It's in those moments. You must retrain your mind.

• 1:09:56Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:57David Goggins?

  To think differently in hell. I wasn't training them to do that.

• 1:10:03Lewis Howes?

  Why weren't you training them?

• 1:10:04David Goggins?

  I wasn't training myself to do that, because at that time. I was doing what I was told.

• 1:10:08Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:09David Goggins?

  These guys need to meet a standard.

• 1:10:10Lewis Howes?

  Physical standard.

• 1:10:11David Goggins?

  A physical standard. The physical standard is not what they need to meet. It's a mental standard. You must meet in life. So going back to when I was sick. I was hitting the physical standards.

• 1:10:27David Goggins?

  I wasn't meeting. The mental standard. The mental standard is you must know how far you've come.

• 1:10:33Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:10:34David Goggins?

  I wasn't, I, I had come. Eight thousand miles from where I started. But if you never know that, you're still in a seven dollar a month place. When I was sick, I was able to slow it down. And reflect back on my entire life. And in that bed. And I thought I was dying, because that story is long, that, that sick person in my life is long.

• 1:11:01David Goggins?

  I didn't care if I died or lived.

• 1:11:03Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:11:03David Goggins?

  Because I was for the first time in my life, happy.

• 1:11:06Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:11:06David Goggins?

  And at peace, because I reflected back on where I started.

• 1:11:09Lewis Howes?

  You said, wow, I have come a long way.

• 1:11:11David Goggins?

  That's right, and no one saved me.

• 1:11:14David Goggins?

  It wasn't like someone came down here and guided me through life. When you figure this out on your own, the amount of pride and dignity and self-respect you have. That's why I walk around the streets with a backpack and just like I don't need anything else.

• 1:11:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31David Goggins?

  You figure it out by going inside yourself, by callusing over the victim's mentality. You're always a victim, even if you have everything in life until you realize what you've achieved. You have to first realize what you've achieved and my mom has accomplished so much in her life since my father. But she hasn't done that one step.

• 1:11:53Lewis Howes?

  Really? She doesn't acknowledge it and reflect back?

• 1:11:56David Goggins?

  She continues to go back to the dungeon of her past life.

• 1:12:01Lewis Howes?

  And live in that space?

• 1:12:02David Goggins?

  And live in that space versus living the space that she's in now and reflecting back on, my God, this is what I've done with my life. So.

• 1:12:11Lewis Howes?

  Have you talked to her about this?

• 1:12:12David Goggins?

  We talk about it all the time and you have to be willing to go there. You have to be willing to really go there, not, not surface. I don't, I don't live on the surface of anything.

• 1:12:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23David Goggins?

  Surface is what got me where I was at. It got me from a hundred and seventy-five pounds to three hundred pounds. Telling everybody I'm good. I don't, I don't give a damn. I'm good. No, they're, they're hollow words.

• 1:12:35Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:36David Goggins?

  A lot of us speak in hollow words. I used to speak in hollow words. I don't do anymore. Everything that comes out of my mouth has substance. It's real. And we all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds, in our souls. I act on mine. A lot of us who are afraid of something, we allow our minds to choose the path of least resistance so we go a different route. When I'm afraid of something, it's telling me you must.

• 1:13:00Lewis Howes?

  Do this thing.

• 1:13:01David Goggins?

  You must do that.

• 1:13:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03David Goggins?

  You have to go that way. And most of us don't understand that mentality. We go left and we wonder why we haven't fulfilled something in our lives. It's because we continue to take the journey that is mapped out. And how I look at it is I, I, I talk in life like. A lot of us in life want to take the four lane highway. That has road maps and all this other stuff on it, man. Tells you where to go, gas stations. The next ten miles up, you're gonna see a McDonald's or Cracker Barrel.

• 1:13:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35David Goggins?

  It's the easy route. Very few of us want to go to the right side.

• 1:13:39Lewis Howes?

  That Cracker Barrel is that Midwest life.

• 1:13:41David Goggins?

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:13:42Lewis Howes?

  I'm from Ohio.

• 1:13:43David Goggins?

  It's all about it, man. Indiana, Cracker Barrel everywhere.

• 1:13:47Lewis Howes?

  Dude, that's amazing. Bringing back memories.

• 1:13:51Lewis Howes?

  This is powerful, because I've been telling people this. I've been living that way unknowingly my whole life of like, whatever the thing is I'm afraid of. When I was in high school, I started doing those things.

• 1:14:01David Goggins?

  Right.

• 1:14:01Lewis Howes?

  And it was just like, I'm sick and tired of feeling afraid.

• 1:14:04David Goggins?

  Right.

• 1:14:04Lewis Howes?

  So I need to do the things that scare me the most.

• 1:14:06David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 1:14:07Lewis Howes?

  You know, I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. Tiffany's heard me share these stories, but I was afraid to talk to girls when I was a teenager. I was afraid of dancing. I was afraid of like singing and playing music in front of people. I was afraid of all these different things. And so I said, I want to do this. I'm gonna give myself a challenge every single day until the fear goes away.

• 1:14:25David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 1:14:25Lewis Howes?

  And I feel like that's what more of us should be doing. I'm hearing that that's what you, how you live your life.

• 1:14:30David Goggins?

  That's all it is, man.

• 1:14:31Lewis Howes?

  And it helps me feel so much more confident. When you overcome that fear of saying, this doesn't have control over me anymore.

• 1:14:37David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 1:14:37Lewis Howes?

  It's like you can get such more peace.

• 1:14:39David Goggins?

  It's a hundred percent. Most of, like, for instance, I never thought in my wildest dreams, I could be a Navy SEAL.

• 1:14:47David Goggins?

  It's until you opened your mind, open mindedness creates that. We all shut down our mind. Like for instance, when I broke the pull-up record. Everybody around me who heard the pull-up record was four thousand and twenty pull-ups. That's the first thing they did. Oh my God.

• 1:15:02Lewis Howes?

  Four thousand in twenty-four hours?

• 1:15:03David Goggins?

  Yeah, it's four thousand twenty pull-ups in twenty-four hour period.

• 1:15:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:07David Goggins?

  The first thing I did versus closing my mind, you're like, oh my God, that's crazy.

• 1:15:12David Goggins?

  I went and got a pin.

• 1:15:13Lewis Howes?

  And say, how many is that every minute?

• 1:15:14David Goggins?

  Exactly.

• 1:15:15Lewis Howes?

  Every hour, every second.

• 1:15:16David Goggins?

  Instead of taking life and making it out to be this grandiose thing, start breaking it down. Start breaking it down. And most of us, we live in a box. And we don't want to go outside that box at all, ever. Outside that box is all these possibilities of life. But what we do is we shackle our mind. We are a prisoner in our own mind that this is all I can do. This is all I'm good at. And we, we, we take away the possibility that you could be this, you could be that.

• 1:15:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:50David Goggins?

  You could be all these things. And I never thought at three hundred pounds I could be Navy SEAL.

• 1:15:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:15:54David Goggins?

  So if my mind was shackled, me and you would never meet. There'd be no book.

• 1:16:00Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:16:00David Goggins?

  There'd be no book.

• 1:16:01Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:16:03David Goggins?

  There'd be nothing. So what people understand is that they live for themselves, not knowing that you have the power within yourself to change millions of lives.

• 1:16:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:15David Goggins?

  By facing life, by facing yourself. And through that, I, I would die never knowing that I had the power to change millions of lives. It will haunt me the most. People ask me, what, what haunts you the most? What haunts me the most is that if I would have died at three hundred pounds, let's say I was seventy-five years old. I got to heaven and God has a chart like that on everybody's life. God knows all, let's say that. I don't care what you believe in, doesn't matter. I'm not judging anybody. But let's say my thing is God. You get to heaven, I'm three hundred pounds, I sit down, I was a cockroach, terminated my whole life. And we're sitting down just like this, you're God and I'm David. And he gives me that chart. And he says, look at this.

• 1:16:58David Goggins?

  Now I'm looking at this chart and on the chart it has all these different things, but my name's on it. But these things aren't me. I was gonna change the world. I was gonna, I was gonna set records. I was gonna be a Navy SEAL. I was gonna be all these things in the military that I accomplished. You're gonna get the VFW award. You're gonna be honored here, honored there. And I'm like, God, I was, this isn't me. Like it says, David Goggins. I was an Ecolab guy, sprayed for cockroaches and I'm three hundred pounds. Instead here, I'm one eighty-five. It says here, I got a, a bachelor's and a master's. It says all these things. And God goes, no, that's who you were supposed to be.

• 1:17:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:17:39David Goggins?

  My biggest fear in life is if there is a final resting place in this world and there's a final judgment. And you talk to something much bigger than you. I don't want to sit down and have a conversation with someone with something that says, you're in heaven. This is what you should have been on earth. And are you really in heaven now or are you in hell?

• 1:18:03Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:03David Goggins?

  Thinking about how much I left on the table for fear. For not willing to go over the wall and over the next wall and over the next wall. So in my mind, I believe that and God knows all, at least I believe that.

• 1:18:19David Goggins?

  I want God to be up there right now as we're speaking, writing stuff down and saying, my God, he exceeded even my expectations. That's how I live my life. I now know that there is no cap on the human mind. There's no cap. We cap it ourselves.

• 1:18:39Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Is there a cap on the human body?

• 1:18:41David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 1:18:42Lewis Howes?

  Is there one?

• 1:18:43David Goggins?

  There. I.

• 1:18:48David Goggins?

  I don't believe so.

• 1:18:49Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:50David Goggins?

  Because one thing I found out was I didn't, for several years, I gave myself a way out.

• 1:18:58Lewis Howes?

  When you were three hundred pounds?

• 1:18:59David Goggins?

  When I was three hundred pounds, when I was, all the way up to I was twenty four years old. I would climb a mountain, I'd fall back down. I'd start climbing, I'd fall back down for the first twenty four years of my life. I went to my first hell week, my second hell week, and then my third hell week came in SEAL training. And the CO, Captain Bowen, looked at me, I'm on crutches, I'm all jacked up. He says, hey, this is your last time you're gonna go through butts. This is it. I had several stress fractures. I had double pneumonia, I was jacked up, and he gave me a few months to heal. He said, this is your last time going through. I shouldn't even let you go back through.

• 1:19:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:19:38David Goggins?

  I started Navy SEAL training with stress fractures. Stress fractures, not shin splints.

• 1:19:44Lewis Howes?

  That's hard to finish.

• 1:19:45David Goggins?

  Stress fractures, starting the hardest training, arguably the hardest training in the world with stress fractures.

• 1:19:50David Goggins?

  And this is when I started to not put a cap on the body. If the mind is there. Every morning, I would wake up at three thirty morning, four o'clock in the morning, go to my dive cage. Go in there before anybody saw me. I'd get duct tape and I would tape from my forefoot all the way up to the middle of my calf. And I would put two black socks on. And so I ran not using the pivot.

• 1:20:15Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:20:16David Goggins?

  And I ran my hip flexors. So for the first forty-five minutes to an hour, I was in absolute excruciating pain. But what motivated me through that whole process was the fact that this kid came from that. I'm in the hardest training in the world, in the worst shape of my entire life. What if I can graduate amongst these studs?

• 1:20:42Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:20:43David Goggins?

  All these guys around me are studs. They're stallions, they're gladiators in my class, they're all healthy, most of them. They're not broken like this. They may have some, you know, everybody's sick going through that training. But if I can graduate, it would change everything for me. If I can start the hardest training in the world, broken, and graduate. So my mind fed off of that. You are now from the weakest man, you are now the hardest man to ever live. If you can do this. If you can do this. Life is one big mind game. And you're playing it with yourself. Is it true? I don't care.

• 1:21:25David Goggins?

  It got me through the hardest training, starting out broken. Where most people quit, I had just started.

• 1:21:33Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:21:34David Goggins?

  And when you take that mindset and you learn to flip that around, that's what made me powerful. And my body followed. And three months later, my stress fractures were healed by running on them.

• 1:21:50Lewis Howes?

  Calcifying it, just like.

• 1:21:52David Goggins?

  I never had him since, I'm forty-three years old.

• 1:21:55Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:21:55David Goggins?

  I ran seven thousand miles in two thousand and seven, haven't had a stress fracture since. And I'm not saying to do that. I'm just saying that when the mind and the body connect, and you didn't, and you don't give yourself a way out. The only way out for me at that time was death.

• 1:22:12Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:22:14David Goggins?

  I'm gonna be a Navy SEAL.

• 1:22:16Lewis Howes?

  Or I'm gonna die.

• 1:22:17David Goggins?

  Or I'm gonna die trying.

• 1:22:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19David Goggins?

  Period. And my body said, Roger that. We're gonna get you to do this.

• 1:22:26Lewis Howes?

  So when the mind gives it no way out.

• 1:22:28David Goggins?

  No way out.

• 1:22:28Lewis Howes?

  Your body says, okay.

• 1:22:30David Goggins?

  Okay.

• 1:22:30Lewis Howes?

  I believe you now.

• 1:22:31David Goggins?

  I have to heal.

• 1:22:32Lewis Howes?

  I'm gonna figure this out with you.

• 1:22:34David Goggins?

  Yes.

• 1:22:34Lewis Howes?

  Do this, it's gonna be the, the worst part of your life, but we're gonna, you're gonna survive.

• 1:22:38David Goggins?

  We're gonna survive.

• 1:22:39Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:22:40David Goggins?

  And as you hear in that hundred mile race I did, I started figuring out more and more and more and more about at the other end of suffering is a life that no one, and I'm not talking about go out there and kill yourself. Don't take these words and flip them and say, oh my god, no. It just be uncomfortable, I call it suffering.

• 1:23:02Lewis Howes?

  Physically injure yourself.

• 1:23:03David Goggins?

  Yes, not saying that.

• 1:23:04Lewis Howes?

  And then be out for six months.

• 1:23:05David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 1:23:06Lewis Howes?

  That's no good.

• 1:23:06David Goggins?

  That's no good. I'm not saying, I'm not saying do what I did.

• 1:23:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:10David Goggins?

  I was in a spot that life forced me. I had a choice. I had a choice to be this guy or the guy that's in front of you. I had choices, I chose this path.

• 1:23:20Lewis Howes?

  And you're still choosing it.

• 1:23:21David Goggins?

  And I'm still choosing it.

• 1:23:22Lewis Howes?

  You can go back to that guy any moment.

• 1:23:24David Goggins?

  Cause I found out. I found out something with those stress fractures. I found out something through facing all these things. I found out a whole nother world, which is why I walk around with all my stuff in a black backpack.

• 1:23:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:23:39David Goggins?

  I found a whole nother way. A whole nother way of,

• 1:23:44David Goggins?

  no matter how far you get in life.

• 1:23:47David Goggins?

  You have to be able to go back to scratch in your mind at a moment's notice. You can never get so far beyond scratch. What that means is when you accomplish something in life, if you're willing to go back to scratch and go back to that seven dollar a month place where I once lived and visit that place for a long period of time. If you were here, when you went back to scratch, you would now be here. Scratch is what makes you better. Scratch, friction, obstacles create growth. There's no friction when you're this far up in the game anymore. You think there is, that's right. When you achieve so much, the friction is is is minor. Cause why? I'm sore. I'm gonna get a massage today.

• 1:24:33David Goggins?

  I'm hungry. I'm gonna eat today. The refrigerator is always full. So your comforts are now, so your discomfort is now very miniscule to your discomfort back here in the seven dollar a month place. So you have to go back to the total discomfort to then raise your level of where you're at now. I'm not saying stay there and stay there. Visit.

• 1:24:55Lewis Howes?

  Visit it.

• 1:24:56David Goggins?

  And then you raise your level.

• 1:24:58Lewis Howes?

  Take a day trip.

• 1:24:59David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 1:25:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:00David Goggins?

  Always take day trips.

• 1:25:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Don't stay there.

• 1:25:03David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 1:25:04Lewis Howes?

  But take a day trip.

• 1:25:04David Goggins?

  Take a day trip.

• 1:25:05Lewis Howes?

  So when you complete some massive obstacle and challenge, whatever the adversity that you force upon yourself. Cause these are all curated experiences for yourself that you're scratching constantly. What happens now, since this was five years ago, you would just leave, you want to take the medal, you would just go on to the next. What happens now? Do you take, you know, a day to reflect, a moment, 10 minutes? Like, how does the process work? And then how do you get back to visiting the seven dollar, uh, you know, place you lived in?

• 1:25:36David Goggins?

  Now, I don't have to go back and visit it. I don't have to think about it. It lives with me now. Every day of my damn life, that feeling that I had to go back and think about, I found a way, this habit. It's constantly there. I have a self-talk. I have a self-talk. It's called my cookie jar. It's a constant reminder of David Gatt. Every day of my life, I believe in quiet. There's no growth outside of quiet. The, the world's too noisy. Your mind needs quiet for you to find who you are. People ask, what's my purpose? Why am I here? You're not gonna find it nowadays unless you lock yourself in a quiet room in your mind

• 1:26:22David Goggins?

  and find it. It's too noisy. For me, I could be in a busy street in New York City, horns honking, and I'm walking around with like, nothing. It's me and myself in a quiet spot. And when you are constantly reflecting on who you are, where you've been, the journey you've gone through, the journey you could continue going through,

• 1:26:46David Goggins?

  the feeling's always there. You don't allow the world to pull you so fast that you forget. You don't allow yourself to pull you so fast that you forget. It's not about staying in that moment. It's about, you wanna get to the point where that feeling follows you like breathing.

• 1:27:06David Goggins?

  Because a part of your life, a part of your DNA. But it's made, like these cowss is on my hands right now, they're made. They are now on my brain. This is now a part of me. It's a daily process, a part of me. And how I go back to a seven dollar a month place

• 1:27:24David Goggins?

  all the time is now, I go out and I dig fire line. I'm a wildland firefighter. I don't need to do it. I'm a forty-three year old man. I, I work with twenty-seven year old kids. I'm a rookie. Every day I'm a rookie, it feels like. And Why do you do it? That's why I do it, man. There's a story I'm gonna tell you about why I do it. So I make, I have a good living now, for me, where I'm at in my life. I was out on a fire in Colorado. And we were digging a fire line on this like fifty percent like it was like on the side of a daggon mountain.

• 1:27:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:00David Goggins?

  And we're trying to keep the fire from moving and we're digging this fire line fourteen inches or my fault eighteen inches wide. Three miles long. Twelve of us digging. And it is the hardest work. You make twelve dollars an hour.

• 1:28:12Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:28:13David Goggins?

  Okay, nothing. You set up your shop like when you're done digging, you just pretty much lay down, you go to sleep and you get up, you dig some more.

• 1:28:20Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:28:21David Goggins?

  It happens for two weeks long.

• 1:28:22Lewis Howes?

  What are you digging? It's like a hole?

• 1:28:23David Goggins?

  So you're trying to get down to to a mineral source. So you're trying to get down to the to the earth. So so that if that fire is moving. It can't burn dirt.

• 1:28:33Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:28:34David Goggins?

  So you're moving fuels.

• 1:28:35Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 1:28:35David Goggins?

  You're you know, so so not only are you digging, you're cutting down trees. It's hard work. But the moral of the story is I'm forty three. Don't need to do it at all. This is why I do it.

• 1:28:44Lewis Howes?

  You're making money.

• 1:28:45David Goggins?

  I'm making money. I I I have a good life. I don't need to do it.

• 1:28:51David Goggins?

  And everybody asks me why I do it. This is why. This twenty one year old kid was out there. And he wanted a pair of running shoes. So all you want is a pair of running shoes. Sixty, seventy, hundred bucks, whatever, you know, easy for us, running shoes.

• 1:29:08David Goggins?

  But he looked up at the mountain. That we had been on for days digging this fire line. And he said that'd take me five or six hours of work to buy those shoes. Said I'm not gonna buy them. It's the perspective of life. That perspective of life right there. Of that is the value that we lose. When things start to come so easy. In life. It's the perspective that twenty one year old had. He looked up at that mountain and thought, he looked at his hands, he looked at the at the amount of hours of pulling that Pulaski, that that tool and raking that ground and and then cutting those trees and moving them and that hours of work. He looked at his feet and said, these old shoes would do.

• 1:29:52David Goggins?

  It's that perspective in life that we lose. And that's that story that most people may not mean anything. It's that story I always want to have in my life. You cannot lose perspective. Of where you've come in life.

• 1:30:10Lewis Howes?

  And in this final section, bestselling author Robin Sharma shares how developing a morning routine is extremely important and what you should do in the morning to set yourself up for success.

• 1:30:21Robin Sharma?

  I think one of the most important things a human being can do is press the pause button each morning while the rest of the world is asleep and ask yourself, how can I fortify my mindset? How can I insulate my heart set? How can I optimize my health set? How can I escalate my soul set? The four interior empires that I've introduced in the 5am Club, so that when I walk out in the world, I'm creative, I'm productive, I'm compassionate, I radiate positivity, and I have resilience in case I get knocked down. And so I think one of the best ways you can do that is this 202020 formula that I've

• 1:31:02Robin Sharma?

  been teaching to the billionaires, the NBA stars, the film icons, and many of the most successful people on the planet for, as I say, 24 years. And very high level, Louis, the 202020 formula is simply this. You get up at 5am, and anyone can get up at 5am. One of the gifts of a human being is neuroplasticity. We are built to change. So please, I would encourage, you know, if we recite our excuses long enough, we actually believe they're true. We are built to change. We are built to grow. We are built to own our heroic nature. And so according to University College London, if we do any practice or habit for 66 days,

• 1:31:47Robin Sharma?

  we reach a point of automaticity where it becomes easier to do that new habit than not do the new habit. Once you wire in the new habit, for the first 20 minutes, 5 to 520, you move, because you can release BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which promotes neurogenesis. It optimizes your brain. If you move first thing in the morning, you release serotonin, which makes you feel good. You release dopamine, which, you know, sets you up for inspiration. Second, we can get into it more deeply, but second pocket from 520 to 540 is reflect. You know, while the rest of the world is asleep, there's such quietude in the air. This is where you can pray, you can meditate, write in a journal, sit in quietude.

• 1:32:32Robin Sharma?

  So that you're focused, living your life and your priorities through the day. And then the final pocket of the 202020 formula that I talked about in the 5am Club is grow. You'll never get old if you grow. You'll never become obsolete in your business, even in a time of great volatility, if you're growing. You'll always stay happy if you grow. So 20 minutes at the end of this victory hour, that's what I call it. You spend some time listening to a podcast like Lewis Howes on School of Greatness, a man adored by a majority of humanity.

• 1:33:09Robin Sharma?

  You listen to an audiobook, you read a book, you study your battle charts. Anyway, that's a really rough, general way to explain the 2020 formula that is currently helping millions of people navigate this hard time.

• 1:33:24Lewis Howes?

  Does it matter the sequencing of 202020? Do you need to move first? Can you meditate first? Do you grow, you know, or is that a process that is proven scientifically?

• 1:33:38Robin Sharma?

  The process has been proven in the trenches of elite performance for a long time with my clients.

• 1:33:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:45Robin Sharma?

  And having said that, you know, I would say the 202020 formula is minimum viable morning routine. And you're a biohacker, I'm a biohacker, I'm a productivity hacker, I'm a life hacker. And so I would say, do what's right for you. You know, it's like this whole field of personal mastery and leadership that we inhabit. I'm not one to say you must do this because we all have different learning types. We're all on different journeys.

• 1:34:14Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:15Robin Sharma?

  Someone might be right now upgrading their spirituality so they connect with their crusade and their higher power in this time of house arrest.

• 1:34:25Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:26Robin Sharma?

  Other people are creating their masterwork right now, so I think we have to find the routine, the morning routine that works best for us.

• 1:34:33Lewis Howes?

  What about people that say, you know what, I'm just a night person, you know, I like, I think at night, I work out at night, that's when I meditate, uh, you know, I strategize the next day at night and I just, I've tried the morning, it just doesn't work for me. What would you say to that?

• 1:34:50Robin Sharma?

  I've had a lot of night owls who have-

• 1:34:53Lewis Howes?

  That's a great excuse, isn't it, to be a night owl?

• 1:34:56Robin Sharma?

  I've had a lot of great, a lot of night owls who have said, you know, I could never be a morning person. I've had a lot of people who've said, you know, grandma couldn't get up early, grandpa couldn't get up early, my parents couldn't get up early, I don't have early rising genes, you know? And what I would say is, if you don't read that book you've been resisting because you don't think it's for you, you might just miss your new favorite book. If you fall in love with your most closely cherished beliefs and you're not open to trying new things, you might miss your new fa- trying your new favorite food. If you say, well, here's the kind of friends that I hang out with and I'm not open to anyone else,

• 1:35:41Robin Sharma?

  you might miss that new friend or that new mentor who will transform the way you run your craft and live your life. And it's the same for the morning routine, the 5 AM club, I mean, it's just, I've had so many people read the book, run the models in the book, live the message, and achieve what they never thought they'd achieve. And so what I would say to a night owl, or a lot of people say shift workers or whatever, I would say, give it a try. Don't just give it a try for, for a week, you know? Give it a try for three weeks, four weeks, the 66 day minimum, and then judge by, then judge by your results.

• 1:36:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, so it's okay to sleep in once a week or to miss, miss the routine once in a while? It's not going to affect your overall, you know, results or process? Is that what I'm hearing?

• 1:36:36Robin Sharma?

  Yeah, I think, you know, if you want to commit to the 5am club, you want to commit to a world-class morning routine, because the way you begin the day profoundly sets up the way your day unfolds. And this, again, this is not anecdotal. You get up in the morning and you run the 202020 formula that I explain in the book, you will create the flow state, you will release serotonin, you will release dopamine, you will release B D N F, you will increase your metabolic rate, you will boost creativity, you will increase your willpower, you know, all those things. I mean, we want, we all have the ability as human beings to arrive at our own original form of greatness.

• 1:37:21Robin Sharma?

  We have not been schooled, we have not been taught, a lot of us have not been mentored on the mindsets, heartsets, routines, rituals that will create and allow us to live our personal genius. But, you know, if you look at the greatest women and men who have ever graced the planet, these were so-called ordinary people who just set up their lives in such a way that their native gifts saw the light of day.

• 1:37:52Lewis Howes?

  It's funny about how no one ever teaches this stuff unless you had a parent or an older sibling that's, that you were able to model and mimic, like, oh, my, my dad gets up pretty early, or my brother gets up and does his violin, or practices sport, whatever it may be, and I want to be like that, and I want to try that. It's, you know, we're not taught this in school.

• 1:38:13Robin Sharma?

  You know, Louis, I, when I was a kid, I wasn't believed in by a lot of people. I marched to my own drumbeat, I had a different way of seeing the world, I was very sensitive, I was very creative, very much a dreamer in many ways, and I didn't fit in with the cool crowd. And in grade five, I had a history teacher, and her name was Cora Greenaway, and she was one of the first people in my life who believed in me. And we all meet a Cora Greenaway, and may you and I and everyone listening from around

• 1:38:54Robin Sharma?

  the world or watching from around the world, may we be a Cora Greenaway to someone else. What I'm suggesting is...

• 1:39:02Robin Sharma?

  All it takes is that one person who coincidentally shows up in our life, and maybe it's a book, maybe it's a podcast episode, to introduce us to a new frame of reference and a new way of living. It might even be, that's why I love reading so much, you know, it's, it could be one idea in a 300-page book and that idea opens you up to a new galaxy of possibility and the hand that puts down the book is a fundamentally different hand. I mean, all it takes is one new insight to change the way you see the world.

• 1:39:35Lewis Howes?

  That's very true.

• 1:39:35Robin Sharma?

  And so, yeah, and that's why I'm such, on such a mission, and I've been on such a mission for 24 years, to remind people of who they're meant to be. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "If you have not discovered something you're willing to die for, you're not fit to live." And I, I believe we all need to find our mighty mission and our crusade. It doesn't have to be lofty, it could be delivering pizza by Uber Eats, it could be a, you know, a teacher, it could be a lawnmower, it could be a coder, it could be a gravedigger or a street sweeper. All, all labor has dignity, but, you know, there, there are no extra people on the planet, and I think, you know,

• 1:40:15Robin Sharma?

  that's why I appreciate the work you do so much. I mean, we do have greatness within us and society has brainwashed us and heartwashed us into thinking that the great ones are cut from a different cloth. And it's not, it's not true, as, as a matter of fact, in the 5am Club, I say, you know, genius is less about genetics and, and much more about your daily habits.

• 1:40:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's true. That's, I mean, I could, that's, that resonates with me because growing up a kid that was, you know, dyslexic and still struggles with reading and writing today and was in the special needs classes, I never thought I would go to amount to much and I didn't have belief in myself until I found a spark and belief in myself. And then I started leaning into that gift, which was sports, and started to realize, oh, I have some vision and I have some coordination and I have... Some speed, even though I was never the fastest or strongest, I had some height. And so I lean into this gift that was here and see if I enjoy this gift and see if I like this gift and see if this brings me joy. And it did, and I continued.

• 1:41:23Lewis Howes?

  And then I built routines and habits around that gift and kept pursuing it until as far as I could pursue it until it was no longer a dream or until the gift was no longer there. Until I wanted to pursue other things. And I think, you know, even if whoever's listening or watching, even if you didn't think you were talented or smart enough at some point, there's something inside of you that is talent. You've just got to keep trying things and see what brings you that joy and that uniqueness. At least that's what I would say.

• 1:41:55Robin Sharma?

  Well, you know, just to hitchhike off of that, Louis, I think no one will believe in you until you believe in you. And, you know, as I'm writing this new book I'm writing, I've been, I've been looking at people like J.K. Rowling, for example. I mean, everyone laughed at Harry Potter, you know, oh, no one will ever read this. And she believed in this character about a child wizard who, who had all of these adventures. And she was a single mother and she was suffering and she had no money and she wrote, the whole idea for the Harry Potter concept came to her on a, on a delayed train ride.

• 1:42:37Robin Sharma?

  And then I believe in Edinburgh, she wrote the first Harry Potter and it was rejected. And we all know this, but like, you know, just a gentle, respectful, loving reminder for everyone who's, who's tuning in here, which is every visionary is initially ridiculed before they're revered. And look at Jonas Salk. Look at Elon Musk right now. I mean, look at Shakespeare, look at Oprah, look at.

• 1:43:05Robin Sharma?

  Martin Luther King Jr., look at Nelson Mandela, look at Marie Curie, look at Edison and Einstein, look at Galileo. These were all ordinary people who followed their joy, who came up with a vision. And the very nature of a great vision means you're going to disrupt the status quo. So you're going to scare people. I mean, if your idea is really good for that new business or that new relationship or that new fitness routine or morning routine, it's going to scare people who are card carrying members of the status quo. And so it's much easier to shoot the messenger than to embrace the message.

• 1:43:49Robin Sharma?

  And so it's much easier. It's much easier. I mean, I'll tell you completely candidly, I spent four years writing The 5AM Club. I put my heart and my soul in the book. The models and the art that was done by this amazing artist and every line I wanted calibrated. And, you know, people didn't understand what I was trying to do. And when the book first came out, I looked at the Amazon reviews and they were terrible.

• 1:44:19Lewis Howes?

  Really? Why?

• 1:44:24Robin Sharma?

  Well, and I just want to say now it's one of the best selling books in the world. And it's almost as if the tide shifted once enough people read it. And the narrative changed. It was the most interesting thing, but I've actually, that really hurt when the book came out. It's like holding your baby out into the world. And, you know, everyone's looking at it going, you know, I just want to tell you, your baby is really

• 1:44:52Lewis Howes?

  Ugly.

• 1:44:53Robin Sharma?

  Not so pleasant to look at. And, you know, what I would say is J.K. Rowling, again, she said, "For some to love you, some must loathe you." I would say also Bob Dylan, "Don't criticize what you don't understand."

• 1:45:12Robin Sharma?

  And so if you do anything that's disruptive, and also if you put, if you put out work that challenges people to leave their comfort zone, to wake up to their genius, if you, if you challenge people to be more loving, to stand for love on a planet that has too much hate, if you challenge people to get up at 5am, to spend one hour working on your mentality, purifying any toxicity within your heart set, upgrading your health and longevity, mining your spirituality in a world of selfies and dancing cat videos and

• 1:45:58Robin Sharma?

  a lot of superficiality and a culture of comparison, you're gonna, you know, I mean, it's easier for people to shoot you down versus to embrace the message.

• 1:46:13Lewis Howes?

  Does, when we're on unusual times right now, does the 5am routine, uh, in the 2020 20 shift? If things are, there's an excuse, I'm tired, and then there's a shift in the world. Does the 5am club shift at this time? Do people say, you know what, let me really take it easy for a few months? Or is that an excuse for too long to get back into your vision?

• 1:46:45Robin Sharma?

  There are times, for example, as an artist, when I'm writing and it's flowing and I just know this, trust your natural cycles because your higher power, call it your instinct, call it your intuition, call it your artistry, knows what it's doing.

• 1:47:03Robin Sharma?

  So there are times to be productive and there are times to rest. Now, I very much believe in the 5 AM Club and the 2020 20 formula. I very much believe that it will create a pharmacy of mastery within your brain. It's been proven by science. You know, even just the simple idea of starting your day with some sweaty exercise. Why sweaty exercises? Because sweat reduce, when you sweat, it'll release the BDNF, which John Rady at Harvard calls Miracle Grow for the Brain.

• 1:47:35Robin Sharma?

  But just that idea of exercising first thing in the morning will help you become more resilient, peaceful, strong during the day. So yes, do your morning routine. Yes, run the 2020 20 formula and then judge by results. Having said that,

• 1:47:54Robin Sharma?

  if you've been up at 3:00 in the morning because you've lost your job,

• 1:48:01Robin Sharma?

  because you're just picking up on the energy of the world right now where there's so much fear, you're dealing with COVID or you have a family member you've lost as a result of the pandemic.

• 1:48:16Robin Sharma?

  Self-love, personal care requires that you rest,

• 1:48:23Robin Sharma?

  recover and do what you need to do. And I think, you know, that's one of the things, I say this with great respect, but when I read the books or see people saying, "You must be like a robot and follow a morning routine or a nightly ritual or whatever your best habits are." I believe there must be room for the hard seasons of life. And, you know, when my heart has been broken, when I've gone through my periods of suffering.

• 1:48:58Robin Sharma?

  I haven't been as disciplined. I haven't been as rigorous. I've had the inopportune pizza night. You know, and here's what I would also say is my ego, because a bad day for the ego is a great day for the soul. My ego says, Robin, you're not being productive. You're not on your A-game. You're not a warrior. But you know what I've realized? I might not be creatively productive, according to the definition of society, during those cycles or seasons of suffering. But am I not spiritually productive? Am I not emotionally productive?

• 1:49:42Robin Sharma?

  I mean, when does a human being crack the shell of the ego that covers their hearts? And learns the human virtues?

• 1:49:54Lewis 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.