The Art of Online Business

Building a Meaningful Life Beyond Money with Jeff Lerner

• Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie • Episode 834

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Jeff Lerner and I unpack the concept of life design. Jeff shared insights on the importance of nurturing a mindset that believes in the possibility of designing your life. We dove into what it means to live intentionally and make choices that align with who you truly want to be.  


Watch Jeff's previous episode "Holistic Transformation on the Way to Building a $200 Million Empire"



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Speaker 1:

Hey, welcome back to the second episode with Jeff Lerner. If you haven't heard of him before one in the show notes below you can go back and listen to the episode before we hit record, where me and Jeff just got to know each other. We talked a bit of life, we talked a bit about values and belief and relationship books that we both enjoy. So that episode is below. But Jeff Lerner he's built multiple online businesses to over eight figures and specifically he has an online course you can relate to him on that point where over 275,000 students have come through his online course in the past five years, generating over $200 million in revenue. I mean, there's some other points here. He's landed twice on the Inc 5000 list.

Speaker 1:

He's the CEO and founder of the Entra Institute, which is one of the fastest growing education companies in the world, and he's also the host of the Unlock your Potential podcast, which is like a top rated, top 1.5% podcast, and today we're going to talk about this idea of holistic transformation.

Speaker 1:

He believes that we have the ability to design our lives and then go and get the tools and the skills to build that life, and when I heard that, I thought he would be a phenomenal guest to have on the podcast. Because as online course creators, we have to create so much and we spend so much time thinking about why do we want the successful online course and sometimes we get caught up in just the money aspect of it. But, like I know, if you're listening to this podcast, you've read books and you've encountered this idea where you need to discover why you want the success you want, because that's a lot more powerful motivator than just getting the money and decide about like who you want to be, so you can work with people that are like you and attract like a good quality, caliber customer. And, jeff, I know you're going to do these ideas much better justice than I could in a intro. How are you?

Speaker 2:

I'm great, kwejo, so excited to be here. Thanks for having me back.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, I mean, for us it was just a moment. It would be pretty bad if I'm like you know, we're not going to record a second episode.

Speaker 2:

Well, you know, I hope you have done that at some point, just as a declaration of free will to say. Just because it's a two-part format doesn't mean that if part one is a total dud, I'm not going to exercise my free agency to not even do a part two. You should do that sometime, if you haven't. Just as like a bold exercise of free will.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that would scare me. So, okay, that would scare me and I think I have a pretty good set of questions as far as like guests on the podcast, to where I hopefully would be able to not encounter someone who just would be a dud of an episode, so to speak. But your previous one yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I was going to say that's fair. Yeah, you shouldn't just do it, just to do it. But you should always tell yourself I will do this if I ever feel it's the right thing to do. How about that?

Speaker 1:

Sure, okay, all right, that's pretty ballsy, that's pretty ballsy, because we've all had conversations.

Speaker 2:

We've sat through conversations with someone simply because we felt like we were supposed to, even though we weren't getting anything out of it.

Speaker 1:

Right, Agreed. I'm thinking of a party. They'll never hear this podcast, but I'm thinking of a recent party I went to and somebody was talking and it was grating on me, Like she dominated the conversation, Like I personally don't swear and so like with her, there were F-bombs everywhere and it's like I'm okay, I don't expect everyone else not to swear just because I don't expect somebody with like a different worldview to believe. You know what I believe and that's all right, but this lady was out of control. Anyway, anyway, if you don't know who I am, hi, I'm Quajo.

Speaker 1:

I'm the new host of the Art of Online Business and you can find out more about me and where Rick went and what he's doing it's really, really cool project actually in the show notes, in the descriptions below. The thing you need to know is, if this is the first time you've heard me, the art of online business remains largely the same. We're giving you tips and tricks and strategies and, behind the scenes, business peaks and, of course, because I'm a Facebook ads manager Facebook ads goodness to help you scale up your business from low six figures to high six figures. And in this case, you're in for mindset, you're in for learning how to design your life, because that is what Jeff specializes in. So my first question and it's not the easiest one, but it is one that popped into my mind when you talk about this concept, Jeff, designing your life, I thought of the nature versus nurture argument and I really wanted to know where you stand like as far as that's concerned.

Speaker 1:

Are certain people born with like kind of a life that they're meant for? Can somebody from like any end of the spectrum you know, choose to go and get skills and tools like to design their life how they chose, like how, how, how did those combine your upbringing, maybe your socioeconomic class that you were born into, like your gifts, be that like mental or physical, versus where you want to go in life and the ability to go and get those skills and tools, as you said? I'm really curious.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean obviously nature and nurture are factors. I look at life through a pretty pragmatic lens. One of the schools of thought that I've been very influenced by is a school called positive psychology, which, if you're not familiar with positive psychology and you hear the name, it can be tempting to dismiss it and go oh, that sounds kind of new agey and feel good, we will whatever. But no, positive psychology is a very legitimate sort of academically bonafide discipline within the larger psychology discipline pioneered by a guy named Martin Seligman at university of Pennsylvania, within the larger psychology discipline pioneered by a guy named Martin Seligman at university of Pennsylvania. And it's, it's pretty, yeah, it's, it's, it's legit, right, it's not pop psychology, but in positive psychology one of the things.

Speaker 2:

One of the concepts that Seligman uses a lot is something he calls your explanatory style, and your explanatory style is basically how do you explain the world to yourself, like what is the narrative that you create to translate observation into meaning inside your own mind? And basically what he says is all and I don't want to misquote him. I mean, seligman's got a number of books and they're great reads. But, generally speaking, what he says there is a certain amount of uncertainty within any explanatory style, because I'll never have enough information.

Speaker 2:

I'm not an AI supercomputer and even an AI supercomputer is dependent upon the data that it's fed or the data that is networked and available to crawl. I'll never know anything for sure. There's always some hypothetical contradiction, you know, contradictory piece of evidence to any conclusion that I draw that I simply haven't been exposed to. So, like all beliefs, all truths are insane estimations to some degree. And I say insane estimations because it's fine to make an estimation but then to say, on the basis of this estimation, I have to make choices, unrecoverable, unretractable choices about how to live my life based on these estimations.

Speaker 2:

That makes them somewhat insane, because the most sane thing to do would be to go no, I'm going to get more information before I decide. But take that to its ultimate conclusion and it becomes an insane form of paralysis, because you're never doing anything, because you can never get all the information Right. So, all that to say, we got to choose a way to explain the world to ourselves.

Speaker 2:

And it's always going to be open to debate whether we chose the right one. So why not choose the explanatory style that produces in us the sensations that are most desirable and the highest probability of ultimately achieving the goals that we want? And so it's essentially. All observation and all processing of life experience is subjective. To that degree, and within that subjectivity, we can choose how do I want to be based on, how do I want to process all this experience? And so that was a long way of saying that I've chosen to, to, to act as if I believe certain things that that ultimately lead me towards being the person I think. I want to be based on what I know, and then, out of intellectual integrity, I have to constantly be pressure testing those beliefs, because if I do start to discover evidence that it's flawed, then it's incumbent on me to shift. But that and I'll be honest, I don't remember the original question that set me on this tangent but that's how I go through life. I'll just leave it there.

Speaker 1:

Cool. No, that's not right. I was asking because when you would? So, when you mentioned this idea of holistic transformation and the ability to design our lives, my basic thought was and why I?

Speaker 2:

asked about nature versus nurture. How much can we?

Speaker 2:

design our lives Like is there a limit, Like are there some things that yeah, so the reason I launched on that tangent is because that is the approach I would take to the nature versus nurture question. It's like there are scientific and sociologically valid arguments for nature, for nurture and probably for all combinations of the two. Right for nurture and probably for all combinations of the two. But what viewpoint on that question is going to empower me the most to go live a really awesome and fulfilling life, Knowing that I truly can never really know and that it's probably always different in the context of every individual life anyways. And so, from that lens, nurture all the way, man, I'm not predestined for anything.

Speaker 2:

Like I'm going to, I'm going to choose to go through life operating from the, from the belief that I can make shit happen. Sorry, I know you're not a cursor, but like I can make it happen. And and so I kind of don't care. Because it's like you can take every person, every life, and identify handicaps and identify advantages, and shake it all up and try to create a victim story of like well, my handicap to advantage ratio or particular blends results in this, you know, boohoo sob story. Or you can take the exact same set of information and say look at all the things I can go do, and that just seems a lot more fun.

Speaker 1:

It seems like you've thought this through and I agree with you. I like how, ultimately, we decide whether or not to take whatever cards we were dealt and then go and get ourselves some new cards, so to speak. So it sounds like you kind of just identified, like let's call it, a way of thinking that could keep people from making forward progress in their lives, from designing their lives. You know, getting the tools and skills. So are there any other outdated thinking patterns that you believe consistently block, let's say, online entrepreneurs, because you are an online entrepreneur, you're so much more than just a course creator. But, like what are some thinking patterns that block people from achieving success?

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean how much time you got right Cause, yes, there's a lot of them.

Speaker 1:

Hey, I got a, I got a buffer. If you want to go a little longer, we can.

Speaker 2:

Well, why don't we just double click on the one we started with right, which is, you know, nature versus nurture and sort of the choosing of the narrative frame through which we view life? I think that in the world today, the victim, victimizer narrative is, honestly, I don't want to say it's the dominant, but it is a dominant lens in cultural theory and in how people view their own lives. Through this victim, victimizer narrative there's, there's so many other lenses that are so much more empowering and interesting to me. But you know, I think from you asked about other other beliefs or related limiting beliefs.

Speaker 2:

I think one is the idea of comparison. You know, comparing ourselves to others. We always we compare our present state to someone else's snapshot of their present state, usually as presented on the internet, which says nothing about their past, says nothing about their journey, says nothing about their trajectory, says nothing about their internal state. So, like, this idea of comparison is sort of abstract, because one thing that isn't visible to any of us about anybody, unless we really get to know them, is where they started and what they went through. So therefore, all comparison in the present is sort of arbitrary and ridiculous. I think there's also a miscalculation. That is probably the greatest way that we are controlled in this world. Or maybe controlled makes it sound too conspiratorial.

Speaker 2:

It's more of just Well it's just what keeps us from taking control of our own lives is this idea of the idea that there's some sort of we talk about comparison to others. There's also just comparison to an ideal, like a vision, a picture that this is what, this is, what success or growth or achievement is supposed to look like. That is, that is to say, I know what my life will look like once I have become a different person that has experienced what this version of myself is striving for, as if you'll know what that person's priorities are and that person's values are and that person's insights from their life experience that this version of you has not even had yet. Like it's ridiculous to say, oh, that's the picture of what success is going to look like, so I'm just going to keep going after it. Right, you know, figure out who you are, figure out what you believe. As I say, let the algorithm run, and wherever you land is success.

Speaker 2:

Success is to get clear enough on who you are and to be intentional enough about the way you operate in your environment to be able to be truly, authentically and in full integrity yourself across the broadest range of human experiences that are not only what you will encounter but that you could encounter. Because if you can only be yourself, as long as your range of experience is narrow enough that who you are isn't challenged, are you really yourself or are you just comfortable and safe, like I want to know that? I'm so clear on who I am that if some sort of alien race and I'll just use an alien race because I don't want to demonize any, like foreign you know national interests, but like somebody takes over the U S government and at gunpoint says to all American citizens, you must now do these things or this thing that I don't philosophically align with, I want to know now that I'll take the bullet and that I wouldn't be a coward.

Speaker 1:

That is a powerful statement.

Speaker 2:

Let me success to me.

Speaker 1:

That's success's success. Okay, let me just camp out here for a second, though, because I really would love for you to share, like, maybe to the listener, who I'm gonna say it's a bit like me, who has read books, who has started to like self-examine, who started to like decide who they are, yet still is held back by comparison. Like I do it all the time like full transparency, like I'll look at somebody else's podcast and be like, oh, like, how many downloads do they have? Or I'll look at somebody else's business and think, ah, okay, the life they're living. And because you know, like we online entrepreneurs are kind of weird, like we share how much our businesses make you know, and how much like we lost. Like people don't do that in the real world but we do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but by the way, I'm going to, I'm going to call that out. We only do that until we make enough that our peers consider it obnoxious to keep talking about it.

Speaker 1:

Interesting. Okay, I need to get to that point. But my question is how do you get to where you can be so resolute about what you just shared about and say not struggle at least with this limiting mindset of comparison Like, how do you get from here to there?

Speaker 2:

which is another thing that a lot of people don't do, and I mean just you know, I think that a lot of it comes down to like our, our faith viewpoints, like our spiritual viewpoints. Not because I'm trying to take the conversation there or not because I'm trying to be prescriptive or even be right.

Speaker 2:

But just because I think that until, like, we spend a lot of time in this world dealing with, like, second and third order questions, right, like, how am I going to make a living? How am I? Where am I going to live? Who am I going to hang out with? What am I going to do on the weekends? Like.

Speaker 2:

But until we've answered the first order questions of like, where did I come from? What is my life about? Do I have a purpose? Is my purpose unique or is it the same across my species? What am I supposed to take from my experiences, particularly from my suffering? Until we've answered those questions, we're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic of purpose by dealing with these other questions. But the second and third order questions are the questions that everybody wants to talk about when we hang out.

Speaker 2:

The first order questions are the things that you got to go into the woodshed or you got to go into the jungle or the cave or the mines and you know, you look at the way we're reared, where it's all about socialization, it's all about learning to play well with others and it's all about learning how to fit together within this economic collective and it's all about how to integrate in society, but on the basis of what To any of that? And we just don't live in a society that, now, historical, ancestral societies prioritized. You didn't even get to be an adult in certain societies until you had gone on your, your Aboriginal walkabout or your Cherokee vision quest or your you know, dark night of the soul experience. But like we don't do that stuff, now we have like what like a graduation party with all our friends. Like, oh, you're a man. Now we have like what like a graduation party with all our friends. Like, oh, you're a man, and we've never figured out who we truly are.

Speaker 2:

88% of the Western world, meaning those who live in a liberal democracy, for whom it is theoretically acceptable to think and believe anything they choose, and yet still, within that population, 88% of people arrive at the fundamentally same religious and spiritual convictions and beliefs as their parents. That makes no sense. That means that we are simply taking what is given to us as the answers to the fundamental questions, and we're stacking an entire life worth of choices and decisions on top of it without ever really having thought for ourselves. And so I just don't understand how you can think about any of the less important stuff until you've done the critical thinking for yourself that's necessary to know who you are and why you are the way you are in the world. And I think that the world that we see now, where we've hyper-connected everyone but we're also overstimulating and depriving people of the space and time and intention in which to define themselves before we connected them to everyone else, we end up with this world in which people lack the basic skills to tolerate disagreement and different viewpoints, and then we, you know, essentially we're regressing socially back into like primitivism, because we're just like find people that agree with me and let's all hunker together and oppose each other.

Speaker 2:

And it's like I don't know. I mean, and this, what? What all this has to do with course creation. Like you might be like well, what does this have to do with course creation? Like I don't know how big the audience of the show is, but I can virtually assure you that what any one listener to this show has a course about, somebody some other listener to this show has a course about, and probably a hundred. Like, how many e-com courses are there? How many you know courses for people that I don't trade collectibles are there how many courses?

Speaker 1:

are there. I was going to say I'm not the only. Facebook ads manager, you know.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. And so, at a certain point, if your only value, if the only point of connection that you offer to the world is your competence within a narrow discipline and you're only competing around that competence, around other highly competent people within that same narrow discipline, you're, you're, you're, you're willing yourself to become a commodity and race to the bottom where it's, it's fundamentally because the need for competence tops out a little above basic competence. Most people don't need the world's greatest Facebook ads manager. They just need someone that's good enough to help them make money.

Speaker 2:

And so you, trying to compete with the other Facebook ads managers that are also good enough to help people make money on the basis of competence, and saying like I'm going to be an even better than good enough Facebook ads manager and I'm going to charge even higher than good enough prices for good enough Facebook ads managers, all you're actually doing is pricing yourself out of relevance to the vast majority of people that need Facebook ads managers. So at some point you have to start competing or attracting attention or drawing in customers on the basis of something other than the competency, of the skill or the niche or the core subject matter or something, and that's when people go okay, great, I get it. You're good at the thing, but are you a person that I want to spend time going through a course with, and why?

Speaker 1:

Okay, and that's where what you're saying is you got to know yourself and know who you are, what you believe, what you stand for, what your purpose is, because that's also tied. It's a differentiator, so to speak, that goes far.

Speaker 2:

It's the only differentiator, it's the only way you become a category of one is to go way beyond your trade and basically be a person that somebody else is like yeah, he's good at Facebook ads and he's a really interesting guy I just love. You know learning from him.

Speaker 1:

Can we go back to that bomb of a quote that you dropped that said like if you're not dealing with first order questions like what's your purpose in your life, like where do you come from, why are you? You know where are you going, so to speak. Then you said you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic of like your life's purpose something like that I've never heard that I've never heard that idea.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I don't know. I mean, for some reason, I don't know, they slipped me the red pill when I was like six years old. I actually do have a theory on why because I literally dropped out of high school at 16, because I was so fed up with an educational system that was giving me zero guidance on the things that seemed to me to matter most.

Speaker 2:

And it seemed like the more time I spent in it, the more I was just being groomed to be a cog in some sort of large institutional construct that was going to be called healthcare or financial services, or law or engineering or whatever you know trade or career. I was going to end up in Like this is all important stuff in the context of a practical life, but it's not the most important stuff.

Speaker 1:

Where did you get that idea from? As somebody in high school I certainly had did not have those kinds of ideas floating through my mind until further later. But so, like, where do you think it came from?

Speaker 2:

I think I had a really unique life experience in two particular regards that combined to give me a perspective that I think was different. For one, my parents were pretty successful financially. I would describe them as upper upper middle class. So you have like upper middle class and then you have like I call upper upper middle class. So you have like upper middle class and then you have like I call upper, upper middle class. That's not quite upper class. Like upper class is like we don't worry about money at all. Upper upper middle class is we kind of we look like we don't worry about money at all, but it's only because we actually still worry about money and we're really good at it.

Speaker 1:

You know, okay, good, yep Agreed, you know that you see the difference.

Speaker 2:

It's like it looks rich but it's not so rich that I can be flippant about living and I so. But what that meant was I got to go to a private school with people that were actually rich, and so I did not. And I and I mean I enrolled in this private school at five, in kindergarten, five years old. So from five years old I'm going to school. I mean, I can think of two kids in my kindergarten class that I happen to know now that their parents were billionaires, right.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

And so I had an early experience that completely de-romanticized money Like, look, I don't care how rich you are. Like, look, I don't care how rich you are, you're still, you know, snotty and miserable and you can be a bully and you can be mean and you can be unhappy and you can not have seen your parents in six months because they left you with the nanny and went to Singapore for half the year or like whatever I mean. So it's like having money does not equal happiness. I got a big, heavy dose of that reality in early age because, just because of who I grew up around and also I was born with a genetic condition, so I got bullied really, really bad as a kid for something that I had zero ability to control, which is just that I look different.

Speaker 2:

And so not only did I see that money doesn't equal happy people, but also even the unhappy people or happy or unhappy, I'm not I mean, it's a spectrum, right but like also, I don't want why would I ever want to belong or conform to a group of people that are alienating me without even knowing me, simply on the basis of something that I had no ability to control. So that unique, that unique combination of experiences for me meant that I grew up going like if it is to be, it's up to me, if I'm going to be happy, it's come from in here, it's not going to come from out there, because I'm around people that have it all out there and they still don't. They're so unhappy that they come to school every day and bully me to try to pay forward their unhappiness Right. So like, clearly it's not about something material or external and it just, you know, the bullying and the social isolation pushed me into the deeper questions. Because I didn't.

Speaker 2:

I was never really given the the option of distraction through social acceptance. So like, oh I'll, I'll be okay because I feel good, because other, because I'm okay with other people. I didn't have that option, really no. So I think that's how I sort of had this eyes wide open moment, maybe 10 or 20 years earlier than a lot of people do.

Speaker 1:

Right, because, like for me, it didn't come until I started reading a bunch of books and then meeting people who are from very different backgrounds than my own.

Speaker 2:

I will, and maybe you're onto something there, actually, because I was also a really early reader.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

And so I was reading, like chapter books, you know, at five and six years old. So I don't know, maybe I just I read my way into this awareness younger than a lot of people do too. Maybe that's part of it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah Well, a joke to lighten the conversation, or not so much of a joke, but just me relating is, I was an avid reader when I was a little kid. I just read stuff like you know, ramona quimby, don't judge me or like sideways stories from wayside high school, like stuff like this.

Speaker 2:

Did you read it? Did you read encyclopedia brown?

Speaker 1:

super fudge I super fudge yes, the borrowers yes. Encyclopedia brown no, I never read that.

Speaker 2:

Never read.

Speaker 1:

Judy Moody either. My daughter is reading Judy Moody, though.

Speaker 2:

It's never too late, man.

Speaker 1:

Encyclopedia Brown. I'm going to come back in a moment and then we're going to finish this episode talking about life design. But I was really curious how old are your kids?

Speaker 2:

I have a 21-year, a 19 year old, a 15 year old and a seven year old.

Speaker 1:

So my one question is does it? Does it get any easier?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean it gets well. So I think there's two things. One, once you have more than two kids, you're officially outnumbered, assuming you're, you know, married, you know raising them with a spouse. And then I think, once you're outnumbered outnumbered is outnumbered, you know. And so in that sense, no, it doesn't get any easier, but I do think that parenting gets easier, like all things, the more we work on ourselves. You know there's a lot of things that I don't necessarily have the perfect answer to as a parent, but I know what I believe and I know who I am and I know what I value and if I believe in the philosophical approach that I'm taking as a parent, it makes it a lot easier to live with the individual decisions and outcomes.

Speaker 1:

Agreed you ready for my final question? Yes, sir. So talking about life design, talking about this idea of transformation, going out there and getting the knowledge and the skills that we need to build our lives, I thoroughly believe that you know you want to think like a genius and talk like a third grader At least I really believe that, because I've just been talking like a third grader for most of my life, since I finished the third grade and have my vocabulary. So my question is taking this concept of life design, knowing full well that you've helped so many adults go through this process, what do you tell your kids about life design?

Speaker 2:

Oh man, it's interesting because it's a really interesting question that you had asked me that, because one of the really cool dynamics of my life is because I'm seen as sort of a entrepreneurial life, mentor personality, right. I have four kids, three of whom are or were teenagers, and then they have a friend group, right, and so their friend group and I don't live in a terribly large town, so I'm somewhat known locally by some number of younger people just because I'm an internet personality, yeah, in St George. And so there's actually a lot of younger people, kind of my kids' friends and friends of friends and so forth, that come talk to me for like advice and mentorship and stuff, come talk to me for like advice and mentorship and stuff, and so I get to talk about life design to you know, let's say, dozens and dozens of young people. So there's what I tell that group. And then there's the specific challenge and I'm sure you can relate to this as a parent of actually giving advice to your own children, right, and it's like sometimes I wish I could not be their dad for a minute so that I could just talk to them about life and not having it be like I'm dadding them. So I actually think one of the challenges of my life is to try to be as good a mentor for my own kids as I am sometimes for their friends, because I have to try to take the dad hat off.

Speaker 2:

That is a long way of saying, though, that, in general, my advice to younger people about life design, first of all, is to believe, like truly believe, that it's possible. It's kind of like your nature versus nurture question, right. It's like what perspective is going to be the most empowering me into me to create the highest probability of a fulfilling life? And I would argue that it's the belief that you can design your life, and even that you're called to as part of you know being here and then from there. You know, I think it's. It's a few things. One is to be like really really practical and recognize like living a life of your design is an all consuming, full-time job.

Speaker 2:

Okay, this is not a thing that you're going to do on the nights and weekends. This is not. It's not even a thing you're going to do. It's a way that you are going to be like and it's going to be really hard and it's going to. It's going to require a number of of tolerances in life. You know how we talk about it. Like so-and-so has a high alcohol tolerance. They can drink like 24 beers and not pass out Right? You don't strike me as a guy that you know talks about that a lot, but like.

Speaker 1:

But there's this idea of like how much of a thing, how much of it?

Speaker 2:

well, I have a very low alcohol tolerance too. But there is this idea in life of like how much of a thing can you tolerate? Right, you know, ultra marathoning is running a hundred miles. The reality is, if you can run 50 miles, you can probably run a hundred miles. The difference isn't capacity, it's tolerance, and so there's a number of tolerances that you're going to have to develop to actually go out and design your life the ability to tolerate other people's skepticism. The ability to tolerate risk around money, predictability or certainty, which itself begets other people's skepticism, because they're going to come try to demand answers from you about your own life, and the answer to their questions is not to try to force an answer. It's to, it's to actually be honest with yourself and them, perhaps, that I'm not working on answering that question. I'm working on the ability to tolerate not having an answer to that question, so that I can get more clear on who I am and live that way.

Speaker 1:

That was good. That was good, yeah, people people try to force.

Speaker 2:

People will try to force you to answer questions that are their questions, that they prioritize, not yours, and the solution is not to try to force an answer to make them happy. The answer is I'm not working on answering that question. I'm working on developing the ability to tolerate not having the answer to that question yet Okay, all right and to persist until all the way, until until dot, dot, dot, until comes, you know. And so that's a tolerance the tolerance of the ability to spend a lot of time with yourself and not need constant stimulation and distraction from other people, tolerance of the ability to focus on difficult things for long periods of time. So it's not just being alone, but it's being alone in intention and purpose. It's tolerance of letting go of victim narratives or excuses. It's, you know. In that sense it's tolerating gosh. Most of it is just around tolerating uncertainty.

Speaker 2:

The human mind is a normalizing machine that obsessively seeks to take available data and derive from it certain predictions about our futures.

Speaker 2:

And until you actually sort of master that, I would argue that is a defect in the evolved human mind that's residue of when we were a lobster or an earthworm or a raccoon or I don't know, whatever you believe is in the chain of before we became human, we have these vestiges of these neurological systems that are like forcing us to try to figure out certainty. But, as I stated earlier, the idea of a certain vision about the future that presumes to therefore also have certainty about who I will be in the moment of experiencing that future and what my priorities will be then and my experiences will have produced then, is essentially the desire for future. Certainty is sort of paradoxically but logically a desire for present stagnation, because the only way that our future could map to our present is if we stop growing no-transcript. But I mean talk about another thing to tolerate the clumsy, ineffective, well-intended but often horribly destructive ways that other people in our life try to operationalize their love or goodwill towards us try to operationalize their love or goodwill towards us.

Speaker 2:

You have to tolerate the fact that underskilled people are terrible at loving you well, even though they will at least argue that their intentions are pure. Sounds like family.

Speaker 1:

Sounds like family.

Speaker 2:

Family is the greatest constraint on most human potential.

Speaker 1:

sadly, and so these are the kind of things that you are sharing, or that you wish you could share more with your kids. If you could remove the, the, the dad hat, so to speak, that they're not just interpreting that.

Speaker 2:

Well, yeah, so, as a dad, yeah To your, yeah so to your point. As a dad, my number one goal is to try not to be a constraint on their potential. And there's a lot of ways that I parent where, again, one of my obsessions is trying to play the longest game possible and to master the ability not to default down to shorter time horizon thinking, which is where we all go, especially when we're hungry. When we're hungry, we default to short time horizon thinking, which is why we opt for fast food, because it's fast and it's satiating in the short term, but it's horrible in the longterm. Right, so it's like most bad choices in life come down to not having a long enough time horizon for our decision-making, and so I try to parent from that vantage point of like, wow, okay, how would I, how, how do I, how do I be the best father possible to the 45 year old version of my son right now?

Speaker 1:

Good question, good question. I'm going to end this here and I'm going to ask you if somebody wants more of the ideas that you've just been sharing on this episode, which I believe are really good ideas, where can they go to learn more about you, to hear more from you?

Speaker 2:

Jeff Lerner official is my handle across all social. I would recommend starting with YouTube. Okay, you know one. I have a book called Unlock your Potential and a podcast by the same name, which was when it was released. For about two months it was the number two bestselling nonfiction book in the country, so I'm pretty proud of that. It's actually a good book. I'll say that I'm not just a guy that wrote a book. It's a genuinely good book. I worked really hard on it. But, yeah, youtube for Jeff Lerner official. I want to close a loop on the last point I made about being a parent. Do it please To the long game version of my child. Okay, as an entrepreneur, even as a course creator, how would we create our courses or our product offerings differently if we were trying to take care of our customer for the next 20 years rather than just the six months that they have to charge back their purchase?

Speaker 1:

Wow, how do we change the course if we were trying to take care of our customer for the next 20 years instead of just the next six months left on their payment plan?

Speaker 2:

Right, or their chargeback window. I mean, I know you marketers, you can't bullshit a bullshitter we think in terms of chargeback windows, how do I keep them happy for six months? What if it was? How do I make them better for 50 years?

Speaker 1:

That is a much deeper thought. That's kind of summed up in the phrase selling is serving, and if you're truly going to serve somebody, it's probably going to be service that takes some passion?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and until you've asked and answered that question, do you really deserve the sale?

Speaker 1:

Like what if? What if? And answered that question do you really deserve the sale? What if we went to market and said I only want to earn money that I deserve? Uh-oh, I think our pockets would be a little shallower until we spent time doing what you said to do in the beginning, which is figure out who you are, your purpose, these better questions than just the deck chairs on the.

Speaker 2:

Titanic. And, by the way, the word deserve comes from the Latin, the place from which I serve.

Speaker 1:

We can't go any further than this. This is a good point of reflection. I think the listener and me are just going to stop and think about that for a moment. Thank you for giving me something really deep to ponder, truly. Thank you, not just as a way to end the episode, but thank you, jeff.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for creating a space where we can have these conversations. I think they're. As I alluded. These are the first order questions and conversations that I think we ought to be having more of, so kudos to you Agreed.

Speaker 1:

So as far as housekeeping goes for this episode listener, you can, especially if you want to get to know more of Jeff. You can head down to the show notes below, click on the link there and hear the before we hit record section. Like I really think this is like before the internet, when people would sit down for coffee to get to know each other and you get to hear more about Jeff. And then, yeah, please go. It's linked up in the descriptions below to his YouTube channel. Jeff thanks for being here and until the next time you see me or hear from me, be blessed, take care and goodbye.

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Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie

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