The Simple Life Operating System That Guarantees Your Success And Happiness With Jeff Lerner

 

Your potential is boundless; the key to unlocking it lies within your belief in your own capacity to change the world. In this episode, our guest Jeff Lerner dives deep into the world of personal development, purpose-driven living, and the art of making a positive impact on humanity. Hear his incredible journey from dealing with challenging life circumstances to creating a thriving business and helping others transform their lives. Jeff believes in the limitless potential within each of us, and in this episode, he will explain deeply why that is. He shares his innovative approach to life design and how he found the ENTRE Institute, a platform dedicated to helping individuals unlock their full potential by providing them with the tools and knowledge they need. Jeff shares with us how this program is changing the lives of thousands of people, giving them the freedom and confidence to take control of their destinies. Listen as we explore the critical role of faith and purpose in our lives and how embracing these aspects can lead to powerful transformations. Tune in now.

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The Simple Life Operating System That Guarantees Your Success And Happiness With Jeff Lerner

Welcome to this moment in time when you get to chill out, tune in, and extract wisdom that you can use to grow your business with your first thousand clients. Now, if you are a coach, you’re going to love what I am going to share with you today. My software platform is called ClientFol.io and it’s been helping hundreds of coaches save time on admin and get better results from their clients while generating powerful client testimonials for the work that they’ve done.

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Now, onto my amazing guest and his incredible story. Readers, because you’ve been a reader of this show for a while, you know that no one’s path is a straight line to success and my guest is no exception. Maybe you can identify with this story. I certainly can. In 2008, he was a professional piano player with an injured wrist facing eviction and divorce, struggling with depression, and bonus, $495,000 in debt.

You could say he hit rock bottom, but only life gets to determine when that actually happens. Realizing that something had to change, he took a radical step in a new direction because what was there to lose? He’s already lost everything. What he did is he developed and came to understand something called the 3 Ps.

Using this technique, he changed his life. He focused on his physical condition, his personal inner health, and a new professional direction. That’s when things started to happen. He presides over a nine-figure enterprise focusing on his ENTRE education platform, which has helped thousands of entrepreneurs grow rapidly and change their 3 Ps as well. He’s here with us to share his story, and his secrets of transformation, and help us see our lives a little bit differently. Welcome Jeff Lerner to the show.

I’m so grateful to be here, Mitch. I appreciate you having me.

Jeff, what a story. First of all, thank you for being here as well. It’s a privilege to be speaking with you. For readers, you know I like to bring some amazing people to this show. Jeff, you’re one of them. Tell us a little bit about how you got started.

I’m down at a summer camp in Central Texas where our company, ENTRE Institute, which you mentioned, has a five-year lease on a summer camp down here. When it’s not in the middle of the summer and it’s jam-packed with students, we get to run entrepreneurial development events down here. I come to stay in the bunkhouse when I’m down here. That’s why I am where I am, let’s say. I felt like I needed to disclaim that.

It’s unfortunate we live in a world where people judge books by their covers and like, “Who is this guy and where is he living?” Anyway, to the meat of your question. Probably the place to start, if you’re okay with it, is I’m going to answer your question about my life with the content of a Facebook post that I made.

I started with the Ben Franklin quote and I said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” This may be the most important principle ever uttered once it’s extrapolated to its basic meaning and it’s applied wherever it can be. It’s about the short game versus the long game. It cuts to the essential deficiency of human nature, our finite biological nature, i.e., the fact that we die, drives us to subordinate our values in favor of our own physical and psychosocial self-preservation.

That aspect of human nature, which is practically the entirety of human nature, is everything. It’s why we don’t stand up for ourselves. It’s why we don’t stand up for others. It’s why we vote for bad leaders. It’s why we succumb to peer pressure. It’s why we hurt the people we care about. It’s why fill in the blank of virtually anything that’s wrong with your life.

I remember the day as a teenager when I surrendered to this concept, thank you, in that case, to the book The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. It hit me. It was like, “That’s the trade.” I have since spent more than 27 years trying to kill the part of me that is scared to die and willing to compromise accordingly. Shortly after that surrender, I dropped out of high school to become a jazz musician. I have been traveling the road less traveled ever since.

If I could sum up my entire life now, including why I founded ENTRE Institute, it would be encouraging others to make the same shift and to trade the illusion of certainty for what’s possible when life is lived as an adventure, risks, and all. It is also the essence of my favorite Bible verse. Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of the world, why, as if you still belong to it, do you submit to its rules? Colossians 2:20.

Trade the illusion of certainty for what's possible when life is lived as an adventure, risks and all. Click To Tweet

I posted that and I can’t think of a more perfect answer to Mitch’s question to understand me and where I’m coming from, what I believe, why I do what I do, and why I think most people perceive me to be so unreasonable. It’s because I’m not that interested in what the world considers reasonable. To quote George Bernard Shaw, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

At sixteen, I had this light bulb moment where I was like, “If I don’t do something radically different, I’m going to end up like all my friends’ parents who don’t seem terribly happy.” Even though they’re financially successful. I went to a private school and they had money, they didn’t seem that happy. I dropped out and became a jazz musician. Bear in mind, I didn’t play piano when I dropped out. I dropped out to start practicing piano. It took three years of living at home and practicing 12 to 14 hours a day to get good enough to start working professionally.

By nineteen, I was in my first band. Over the next ten years, I ended up getting into the jazz piano program at the University of Houston locally, even though I had dropped out of high school because I eventually got good enough that they let me in to play piano and it changed the rules for me. That was a good lesson. It was like if you get good enough at something that’s in demand, all those rules, they don’t apply. They’ll let you in without a high school diploma. You have to be good enough at something they need on their campus. It’s no different than being a quarterback. Maybe it doesn’t end up paying as well.

I got into college, was a music major, and played all these gigs for successful people. I ended up becoming a society circuit piano player in Houston, which means I played all kinds of gigs. I played nightclubs, dance parties, weddings, you name it. A percentage of my gigs were very high-end private parties, galas, and corporate conferences. I was exposed to a lot of wealth, a lot of affluence, a lot of successful corporate enterprises that were hosting these big conferences and needed entertainment booked.

In particular, I played house parties for a number of millionaires and billionaires. Where I was like their go-to piano player to come play their Christmas party at their home with their friends. I’m sitting there. I’m a $40,000, $50,000 a year piano player sitting in a $20 million home playing for 100 friends of the guy that owns the Houston Texans football team, Bob McNair.

I’m hobnobbing with these people. The piano players get treated a little differently. If you’re the drummer, nobody wants to talk to the drummer. The drummer has to go hang out in the kitchen with the catering staff, eat the hors d’oeuvres, and smoke cigarettes on his breaks. They’ll come up to the piano player. They’ll make requests with the piano. They’ll tell you about how their kid takes piano lessons and ask if you have any advice.

I ended up getting to mingle with completely different strata of human socioeconomically. I’m like, “These people have it good. They seem to be in a pretty good mood. What’s the commonality?” I started to figure out these people are all either very high-end corporate executives who have finely developed skills in the realm of growing businesses or they’re outright entrepreneurs.

Take a breath here. I want to unpack a little bit about what you’ve said so far, which is fantastic. First of all, I’ve read every Ayn Rand book ever written and many of them several times. I was dramatically moved by her work all throughout my adult years. I make a habit of re-listening or reading Atlas Shrugged every year as well. It’s such a joy and pleasure to be reminded of what it’s like to be free with the values that would get you to maintain that freedom. That’s why I love the books and I know you love them too.

Secondarily, one of the other things that you said, I relate to comfort. What I mean by comfort is that this society has made us incredibly comfortable. Even at the lowest level of income, we have comforts. If you go back 200 years, there was no such thing as the type of comfort we have now. That comfort makes us lazy. It made me lazy. It made me realize that I would never have what my parents were able to give me unless I did something more than take a job. That’s why I started the business that I did back when I was 28 years old.

What I also loved about your story about the piano player is that you did something that is very important. You created mastery in something. When I raised my daughter, I wanted her to have mastery of something. I didn’t care if it was playing checkers or if it was playing the Stradivarius. I didn’t care. I wanted her to understand to emotionally connect with mastery.

When that happens, Jeff, there’s no substitute for it. It’s a heat-seeking missile for the rest of your life. At a point in time when my software company lost its rating as the best in the industry, I didn’t have to do a thing. My entire company had been so used to publishing the number one product that when we fell off the horse, the entire company rallied around it to get us back up there.

Jeff, that’s what you created too. I want to congratulate you on that. I believe that a lot of that came from the time and skill that you dedicated to developing mastery of the piano. That’s what I wanted to say because I recognize that in you and I, and frankly, not only do I recognize it, I applaud it because not many people do this. If you’re reading now, take what I said to heart. Master something. Take those feelings and then master everything. Jeff, please continue with your story. I wanted to contribute to that.

No, I appreciate it. It’s funny, I have said so many times when now, many years after I dropped out of high school, people want to know how I did what I did, which to be clear before it got pretty, it was very ugly, playing piano by night, attending school in the mornings, and trying to start businesses during the afternoons because once I connected the dots, these entrepreneurs are the ones that have all this success. I want to do that too. I started trying to shove entrepreneurship in between school in the morning and gigs in the evening. I failed a dozen times and ended up with $500,000 in debt, which is very hard to do when you only make $40,000 a year, by the way.

For better or for worse, I try to go big. I got SBA loans back in 2007 when they were giving them away to open restaurants right into the mouth of the Great Recession and went out of business in a year. That’s how I ended up online. I was learning affiliate marketing because I was trying to pay off this debt and I had hurt my hand, as you mentioned, so I couldn’t play piano anymore. I guess I’m pretty good self-taught at a keyboard. I’ll substitute a piano keyboard for a computer keyboard and started learning affiliate marketing and I paid off $495,000 in debt in 18 months, which was a miracle.

Suddenly, everybody was like, “Maybe Jeff’s not such a loser. He did something interesting.” I’ve been stacking online digitally-based entrepreneurial endeavors for years. Your point about mastery, I’ve been saying, so whenever people ask me how I did what I did, I’ve had a lot of teachers and a lot of teaching environments, a lot of learning environments, I should say. Ultimately, the things that have taught me what I needed to know to be successful, I learned as a jazz musician. You nailed it. You’re one of the first people that’s intuitively gotten that because I learned how to sit there.

You talk about delayed gratification. I was sixteen years old and I decided I needed to become a professional caliber piano player starting from nothing. I knew a little bit. I could play Christmas carols, like the simplified versions from piano lessons when I was a kid. I was starting from scratch and I said, “I want to become a professional.”

The amount of work it took to go from beginner to playing professional gigs for money in 3 years, my future was forged in those 3 years. Now, I don’t care. I love it when people doubt me. I love it when people tell me I can’t. I auditioned for six consecutive semesters. That’s three years, fall semester, spring semester, for the piano faculty at the University of Houston. God has told me that I need to become a piano player or else I’m going to have to get a real job.

I’d go in like, “I got to become a piano player or I’m going to have to get a real job someday. I’m here to audition and get into your program.” For 5 consecutive times in 3 years, they laughed at me. The sixth time, I finally got in. I wore them down. Every time, they’d laugh at me and I’d go lock myself in a room for 4 months, practice 12 more hours a day. Eventually, as you mentioned, I gave myself arthritis. I come back and be a little bit better. To your point about mastery, I’m sure you’re familiar with the rule of 100 hours.

It’s like 18 minutes a day, which I think is 100 hours a year. If you spend that amount of time, 100 hours in one year on anything on Earth, you’ll be in the top 5% of that thing. At that point, it unlocks group affiliations or higher-level conversations with higher-level practitioners of the thing. I don’t care if it’s ping pong, origami, solving Rubik’s cubes for speed, piano, Russian literature, or whatever. We live in a world where, again, because the focus is on the material and the tangible, so many people miss what for me is the real joy and magic of living, which is being good at stuff. Not for ego reasons because that’s where the richness opens up to you.

People miss the real joy and magic of living, which is being good at stuff. Not for ego reasons, but because that's where the richness opens up to you. Click To Tweet

The ability to become good at something opens up the door to be even better.

I feel like once you start operating that way in one thing, then you crave it in everything.

That is so true. In my daughter’s experience, I ran her around the neighborhood for six months, trying to find the things she loved to do. It turned out to be candlepin bowling of all things at the age of eight. Four years later, she won the national state tournament as a candlepin bowler. That set her up for life. She now knew what it meant to be the best, to have those feelings of mastery and she brought it into every other part of her life.

That’s the same thing I did after I learned the lesson with Timeslips Corporation with all of my coaching clients as well. I’m glad that we got a chance to talk about this. Tell me more about this process of creating the nine-figure enterprise. Tell me how this all began and how it became what it is now and even more about it as we continue. I want to hear about the 3 Ps. Don’t forget that. That’s important.

In terms of the chronology, again, 2008 was that rock bottom dip that you shared about in the bio. It was my eleventh consecutive fail, but I lost count. I can name eleven. There were other little things in between, but call it an even dozen failures. That was when I got into online marketing and I started learning what I consider to be a lot more valuable skillset because they were skills that had leverage built in. Now, I’m obsessed with leverage in all areas of life.

An example of leverage applied to a different area of life is, rather than saying, “I need to get more sleep,” where I’m essentially trading waking hours for sleeping hours, which impacts me in other areas, it’s more, “How do I optimize the sleep that I already get to get more deep sleep or to get more REM sleep so that I can wake up?”

If anything, I could get by on less sleep, not more. I’m obsessively pursuing leverage in every area of life. The chronology was I spent about five years as an affiliate marketer. I got very burned out in that industry. This is important because it informs what I do now. The reason I got burned out as an affiliate marketer is Jeff in 2008 was broke and facing homelessness. I got booted out of my apartment. My wife was leaving me, but fortunately, her parents allowed me to move in with them even though me and their daughter weren’t getting along.

That version of me found the world of online affiliate marketing. I signed up for a platform. I started learning these skills and for whatever reason, mostly I think because of my work ethic, I was a powerfully quick study that within six months, I was making more money in a month than I had ever made before in a year.

In my mind, I was like, “Online education, to learn the right marketable skills in the world is the unlock for any life you want.” That wasn’t like something somebody told me and I parroted. That was my lived experience in a very quick six-month window. I became obsessed as an affiliate marketer with promoting these courses and conferences. I became an affiliate of the online education industry.

Over the next five years, I learned that most people, frankly, don’t operate like I did. I’ll bet you, in five years, I sold 150,000 courses as an affiliate marketer to various people. I don’t have any way to quantify this, but going anecdotally and by feel, I’ll bet you out of 150,000, I’ll bet 149,000 of them never made a dime with anything I sold them.

Why is that?

I had little old ladies sending me direct messages. “I bought the thing that you talked about two years ago. I’ve been struggling with it ever since. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong and I can’t get any help. I called the company and nobody called me back. The service is terrible.” As an affiliate who had started as this passionate evangelist for what online education could do for your life, four years later, from 2009 to 2012, I was completely demoralized and honestly disgusted with the whole industry. Partly because that industry has a lot of sketchy operators that try to sell garbage to make money. Also, I’d say it has a lot of garbage customers.

I don’t mean that as an ad hominem attack. I mean it to describe that if you haven’t programmed yourself entrepreneurially and you’re not oriented towards things like mastery and you’re not ready to embrace the long game and understand the first principles of not business, but almost like a platonically sound life and way of being in the world.

If you have not cast off all of the mess that the world puts on us from the time we’re little kids through the traditional establishment education system, then you enter into something like online education completely unequipped for success. It’s nothing like a job where you sit there and they pay you to sit in your chair and tell you what to do. It’s as far removed from that as you can imagine. Most people aren’t equipped to succeed at it.

 

By 2012, I was sick of selling stuff that people were not succeeding with. I got out of that industry. I went and I started a digital agency and I thought, “I’m not doing a very good job of helping people become entrepreneurs with these online education programs. I’ll go work with people that are already entrepreneurs and I’ll start selling digital services to businesses.”

That was more successful because I was working with people who were already business owners. Most traditional business owners have their own set of challenges. Over the course of five years, we provided marketing services through that agency to about 10,000 small and medium-sized businesses in the US and Canada. Ultimately in 2018, I was able to exit that business. Between what I made during the time I owned the business and then the sale of the business, it probably amounted to an eight-figure enterprise for me.

There I was at 39 years old, 10 years into online marketing, half of that as an affiliate, half of that as an agency owner. I did a few other things here and there in between, all of which were successful and I’m retired. Ten years before that, I’d been homeless and broke. I’m sitting there going, “How is it that a jazz musician was ripe to take these skills and use them to transform his life so completely over a ten-year period? Most people who did graduate high school, who did follow the program, who did do what they were told, who can hold a job, unlike me, seem to struggle and fail when they try to change their lives. What’s going on here?”

Trying to answer that question is what led to the ENTRE Institute. Fundamentally, what I realized is that the two luxuries that I had as a jazz musician, one of which was I was almost completely in control of my own time. I never had much money, but most of the time, I got to decide what I wanted to do with my time. At least how to organize my priorities by my own design, not just based on what my boss told me I had to do. That was one luxury.

The other luxury was the sensation of going through life as a tightrope walker without a safety net. I’m up on the bandstand trying to keep up with the changes of giant steps at 240 beats a minute, super complex harmonies. I got some crazy drummer pushing the tempo who’s going to yell at me if I can’t keep up. Jazz musicians are crazy. It’s a very intense culture.

I realized that’s what I had. I had the ability to operate under pressure with total autonomy and still execute. That’s what society strips people of. Children can do that. By the time most of us are grown up, we don’t know how to do that anymore. ENTRE was me reverse engineering everything that I had put together in my life to do what I did over that ten-year period. Eventually, it led to the creation of what I call a Life Operating System. The concept that I espouse is called Life Design.

Jocko Willink says, “Discipline equals freedom.” It’s built on the idea that if you are disciplined enough about installing an operating system into your life and living programmatically according to principles, a software-based operating system is anchored to the underlying principles of the language in which it was created. Ditto for us. When we understand the principles and we organize them into an operating system. We’re disciplined about installing it and living it every day of our lives. Our operating system is based on what we call the 3 Ps, Physical Growth, Personal Growth, and Professional Growth. Ultimately, the point is to find your fourth P, which is called your Purpose.

I’ve taken that and I’ve expanded on it to the level of almost a hard science. That’s what ENTRE teaches., we teach entrepreneurship. We teach vehicles and paths you can use to make money, but far more than that, and underneath that, we teach people how to live in this way that makes success ultimately predictable.

 

What you’re doing, in my opinion, is getting people to stay on a course that will help them develop a level of mastery that gives them the confidence to take that to the next step and then the next step because what you’re not doing is, “Here, follow these instructions and make money.” What you’re saying is you’ll follow these instructions and become a better person than make money. What that initially does is it allows people to A) Get some wins under their belt, and B) Stay in the present time that they’re doing so because that’s what kills us. It kills us because if we are not in the present time when we’re focused on the things that are feeding us, our intellectual curiosity, our ability to connect with others.

You said something before, Jeff, I want to comment on. I have written my third book, Coach Elevation. That book is all about finding your true purpose. Here’s the interesting thing. I’ve developed a simple system to do so in 20 to 30 minutes, but the punchline is everybody’s true purpose is exactly the same. It’s to help others. The problem is that what you’re missing is your true mission. Your true mission is how you help others.

It’s when you develop your true mission that you get to fulfill your true purpose. I said the same thing you did. I just said it in a little bit different way because what you’re doing is you’re starting out by helping people understand that they can be successful if they follow these steps. They follow these steps. Next, what you do is you show them the how. Once they have some confidence, once you get them into the present time and get them focused a little bit on the future, they can see how the results are possible. Did I summarize that right?

Yeah. It’s funny because this is like exactly what I spend my time on now. I’m working on a presentation. You referenced a couple of concepts and I’ve got the presentation. I have it up on my screen right now. It’s to articulate. It’s helping our executive team at ENTRE understand what is the real work that we’re doing. We’re not a school for entrepreneurship. We’re not a place that teaches online business. We’re not a catalog of courses. We’re an ecosystem that is oriented toward human fulfillment.

In fact, I’m even going to propose at the meeting that we have a concept we use in our business called MINs, Most Important Numbers. Every individual, every team, every department, and the company as a whole has a MIN. There is a great book out there called Your Most Important Number by Lee Benson, who’s a friend of mine who has a whole business operating systems. Very cool.

Tell Lee I say hi. I know Lee.

You totally would. If you didn’t, I would’ve introduced you guys.

Lee’s great. We use a modified version of the ETW methodology at ENTRE. I’m proposing that we change the global ENTRE MIN to a metric called the Life Satisfaction Index. Life Satisfaction Index Type A is the technical classification. It comes from sociology, but it gets used a lot in psychology and behavioral psychology studies. That’s basically on a scale of 1 to 10, how closely does your life look like your dream life?

Imagine the best possible life where you are hitting it on all cylinders across every area of your life. On a scale of 1 to 10, rate your current life in comparison to that life. That’s your life satisfaction index. I am proposing that ENTRE change its whole measuring system, and its whole definition of success to increase the life satisfaction index of our students.

I love the idea. I want to intervene with one small thought here. For readers, you are privileged to be learning from Jeff Lerner. Jeff, I want to mention that Lee was a guest on my show as well. Readers, look for Lee Benson’s interview, too. We had a fantastic time together. We talked about guitars and musicianship and his nine-figure amazing software company.

Just like you’re reading with Jeff and I, we had a lot to talk about. Lee and I became friends after that interview. I would invite you to go read that too. Jeff, let’s get back to what you said. I wanted to make one comment. No one understands what their true best life would look like until they could see the possibilities. I hope part of what you’re going to be doing is showing people what’s possible and helping them select those options that allow them to craft this thing you call their best possible life.

Even to your point about purpose, I agree with you. Are you familiar with the movie City Slickers?

Yeah.

Remember the scene near the end where Jack Palance and Billy Crystal finally have become friends and they’re riding the herd. Jack Palance basically says to Billy Crystal, “You city slickers are all the same. You spend 50 weeks a year tying your rope up in knots and you come out here for 2 weeks and think you’re going to untie it. Let me tell you what’s wrong. Let me tell you what the key to life is.” He holds up his finger. Billy Crystal goes, “Your finger?” He says, “No. One thing. The key to life is one thing.”

Billy Crystal goes, “What’s the one thing?” He goes, “That’s what you got to figure out.” I use that to illustrate that even Jack Palance and City Slickers are telling us there’s a purpose to life. By the way, 81% of Americans agree with us that life has a purpose. Do you want to hear the depressing counter counterpart to that? Only 6% of Americans consider what the purpose of their life is even one time per year.

They don’t know it. They don’t understand it.

I don’t think they see a path to achieving a purpose-led life. I agree with you that underneath everyone’s purpose is the meta-purpose of helping other people. I personally found my purpose during that period of introspection in 2018. I have essentially landed on my purpose. It’s helping people find their purpose and operationalize it into a life. That is what ENTRE does.

Underneath everyone's purpose is the meta-purpose of helping other people. Click To Tweet

It’s not just what ENTRE does. It’s the only work there is to be done in the whole world. Once you understand what a purpose-led life can look like, which again, to your point, we help people envision, how do you work backward and reverse engineer a process that makes it as predictable as and probable as possible, that I will achieve it?

There are only two paths in life. There is a purpose-led life and there is deathbed regret. At the end of the day, you’re only going to have one of those two things. I’m like, “If I get to be in the business of helping people have the former or not the latter, I don’t even understand what other business there is on this Earth. Why would anybody do anything else?”

There are two parts to this, as you explained. The first is understanding what your purpose is. As I said before, at the core level of everybody’s true purpose is to help others. How do we help others? Before we go to how, which I call your true mission, you have to understand why your true purpose is your actual true purpose. In other words, why is it that?

If I told you your true purpose is to help others, it would become ear-washed. It wouldn’t mean a thing to you. If I made you feel that emotionally, if I brought you to the point where you started to cry when you discovered that your true purpose was to help others and I have a process that I do with my clients that does that, that’s when you have seen it, touched it, tasted it, and now you “know it.” Now the question is how do I get there? I think that’s what you’re engineering right now. By the way, I totally love what you’re doing.

I agree with you. Your statement of purpose, it’s something that has to be personally discovered and experienced and owned through almost like a catharsis. It doesn’t do you or me to tell somebody what we think their purpose is. Mark Twain said, “The two most important days in a man’s life are the day that they’re born and the day that they discover why.” The second day is what we’re talking about because on that day, every day before it will finally make sense. Now that I am fully on purpose, I can look at every single thing that ever happened to me.

I can look at when I was seventeen and that crusty old piano player tried to sexually molest me in a piano lesson, why did that happen and how does it tie into where I am right now? When my first girlfriend broke my heart, how did that lead me to right now? When I dropped out of high school, how did that lead me? My car accident is the reason I have my arm taped up here.

How did that tie into where I am right now? My first and my second wife, my parents, my bullying and traumas, my pain, sickness, and my sadness, it all makes sense. Once people experience that, I’ll tell you, it’s a feeling you don’t ever want to lose. You go, “How do I live a life where I get this all the time?” That brings us to the practical how and I don’t know how many details you want me to go, but I do have an answer.

I want the answer, but I also want to share one thing with you I feel when you talk the way you were. What you’re talking about here, again, is when you talk about everything happening with you to you or for you, what I’m hearing, Jeff, is that you take 100% responsibility for everything that happens in your life. That’s one of the requirements of living your true mission.

I was addicted to heroin in high school, Jeff. I had to go and spend eighteen months of my life in recovery to get out of heroin addiction. It turned out to be the most powerful, most significant, most meaningful thing I had ever done. At the age of eighteen, I became a focused, sober individual ready to attack life as a functional adult.

Whereas all of my friends were still smoking dope behind the college, the high school football stadium, etc., I was out there thinking about the world, thinking about how I change the world at the age of eighteen. I did it simply because I understood that. You understand that you must take 100% responsibility for yourself no matter what you think “happens” to you.

I say all the time I don’t wish suffering on anyone, but I see plain as day in so many people’s challenges that they haven’t suffered and overcome enough. They haven’t built that muscle. There’s a node in the brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex that grows when you have to use grit to overcome pain. That node is the leading indicator of a successful person.

The word passion comes from the Latin pati, which extended is passio, which is the Latin word for suffering. You transmute your suffering into passion. That’s why they call it the Passion of the Christ because He suffered on Calvary. Not getting spiritual here, but transmutation of suffering into passion and ultimately oriented toward purpose, that is the life equation. I believe that’s the lesson we’re meant to learn while we’re here.

Now let’s talk about the 3 Ps.

You go, “That’s all great, Jeff and Mitch, but I got bills to pay. I have kids at home. My wife’s breathing down my neck and life is tough. I don’t have time to sit around, meditate, and ponder my purpose all the time. What am I supposed to do?” First of all, accepting the reality of your starting point is a big deal for people because even at ENTRE, we get thousands of students that come in and they go, “I’m ready to change my life. I’m ready to learn a new thing. I’m ready to level up my skills.”

I’m like, “Awesome. With what time, energy, and resources? You’re already using 100% of your available capacity to live the life you don’t want and barely hang on to that. Where are we supposed to have all this time and focused energy that you’re going to develop a whole new skillset to grow a whole new life?”

People were like, “I didn’t want to hear that. Can we get to the part that I want?” I’m like, “No.” This is why I told you the story about from 2008 to 2012 of me getting so disgusted with the online education industry because of exactly what I said. They have all these thousands and thousands of people coming in to learn new skills and they’re never having the honest conversation to go, “This is what it takes to be successful at this. Until we re-engineer your life to create the production capacity to sharpen the saw, so to speak, it’s like you’re trying to chop down the tree with a dull saw.”

I’m saying, “Stop trying to chop down the tree. Let’s take a few hours and go sharpen your saw.” People don’t want to hear that because they want immediate gratification and they want the money now. I get it because they have a bill to pay, they lost their job, or they’re going through a divorce or whatever. That’s why we are a life design platform. That’s why we start with a life operating system.

Stop trying to chop down the tree. Let’s take a few hours and go sharpen your saw. People don't want to hear that because they want immediate gratification, and they want the money now. Click To Tweet

First of all, let’s apply the filter of physical, personal, and professional development to your life. We’re going to assess your entire calendar, all 168 hours per week that you have to live. We’ve all got the same allotment. Identify how much of this time am I allocating physically, personally, and professionally. What most people find out is there’s almost no intentional allocation of anything.

The only non-negotiable structure on their schedule is usually when they have to clock into and out of their job so they don’t get fired. Everything else is fluid and maybe fits around it loosely. We get intentional. What a lot of people have in their lives, because they’re in pain and they don’t want to feel, is stuff that is neither physical, personal, or professional. It’s just wasteful. We have this stark conversation as a starting point. We’re evolving how we do this for people. We’re working on an app now that’s going to use AI, live on your phone, and make it as simple as sliced bread, but let’s start building the muscle of new commitments. That term commitment, people say, “I’m committed.”

I say, “What’d you sacrifice?” “I don’t. I’m just committed.” “No.” Look up the Latin con mittere, to send up with. It comes from sacrifice. In other words, “I want this thing I am and to commit to this thing, I am sacrificing this other thing as a burnt offering. As the smoke goes up to the heavens, I send up with the smoke whatever it is that I incinerated as a show of my commitment to the thing that I want.” We start to go, “What are you willing to sacrifice? What are you willing to send up with your commitment?”

Maybe it’s poker night. Maybe it’s a bowling league. Maybe it’s needing to be right when you talk to your wife. Maybe it’s disciplining your kids in an ineffective way. Maybe it’s a drug habit. Maybe it’s smoking. Maybe it’s a lot of things. Physically, personally, and professionally, it is not that hard if people are willing, to be honest, to find points of dysfunction and start rooting them out, understanding them, understanding what they’re compensating for, and finding other ways to get that desire met. Ultimately, reestablish a foundation for a life that’s physically, professionally, and personally effective, consistent, grounded, and stable.

Once you start to live that way, you’ve sharpened the saw. You can layer on new skills. You can layer on new principles. You have the stability to start to negotiate relationships differently. We have a lot of people, for example, that when we look at how their energy gets used, they have one or maybe a small number of relationships in their life that are the reason that they can’t have a different life.

The energy they would need to build a business is actually getting consumed every day when they get home from work and they have that one hour of awkward tension with their wife. Until we solve that, they’re lying to themselves that they’re ever going to be able to build a business. That’s what we’ve done through coaching, web applications, and accountability. We have VIP concierges, an online curriculum, and our own software.

We’re trying to build this complete ecosystem to put all three legs in place, which is what we call the three legs of action, the right knowledge, the right environment, and all the right resources. That’s the ecosystem that we’re trying to build for people to support living life differently so that they can do different things to get different results.

If you are able to accomplish that and I know that you are accomplishing it every day, then you have the capacity to revolutionize the way people see life and see work. I’m a big fan of what you talked about. I’ve lived it all of my life. I probably have never articulated it as well as you do now.

I’ve been my entire life now articulating this.

I relate it back to my own experiences. I knew that when I was ready to start a business, I had to cut everything else out of my life. That meant I was lucky enough to have had the savings from working a job to quit that job and start this business. I had no girlfriend, no commitments, no children. I had paid down every possible loan I could. The only thing I had was my personal determination and my time.

With those two things and a little bit of money, not a whole lot, I was able to take that and create something of very high value. That’s where the willingness part must come in. You talked about that. If you’re not willing to, as you say, sacrifice something significant that is valuable to you, so that you can replace it with something more valuable, it’s going to take longer and it’s going to be harder or may not work at all. I love the fact that you’re doing that.

You alluded to the great X factor here, which is life circumstances. We have a concept we call success DNA, which is a combination of your natural gifts and your lived experience. That combination ultimately brings people to a point where they have the life they want and then they have the life they have. The path between those two is cluttered with obstacles.

 

You were at a point where you had certain major obstacles were not present for you. There was not a spouse that was depending on you as a breadwinner. There were no children that were draining your resources. There was not a job necessarily. I don’t know, maybe you didn’t have a job that was eating up most of your time, or maybe you got to live at your buddy’s house and you didn’t have to pay rent.

To try to solve this problem at scale, we have to be able to meet every person where they are. That’s my goal here. Let’s say as one example, we developed a program called Bootstrap, which is if somebody has $0, they can’t buy an online course. Maybe they have to run on their LTE cell phone for the internet. They can’t even afford an internet connection.

We have a program called Bootstrap now where we’ll teach them how to take basic referral partner links of our program, paste them out there, and if somebody buys something, we’ll do a commission matching program where we pay our normal affiliate commission, plus we actually match them in scholarship dollars as credit toward our programs.

That’s one example of how we’re trying to solve for making this life available for everyone. Here’s what I’ll say. People might read this and go, “I don’t want that approach.” You heard me in the Facebook post I made talking about short game versus long game. The duality of human nature. There’s what Freud called the ego ideal, the idealized nature of self where we project our superego, our best self based on everything we’ve observed and learned in life. We have our id, which is like, “I’m hungry. I want it now. The only thing that matters is for me to stay alive no matter what the cost,” and then the ego moderates in between.

That process for most people results in an unwillingness to delay gratification is what one ends up. By taking this approach, we have had an uphill battle because we have to meet people where they are and convince them to slow down in trying to get where they want to go. Another Jocko Willink quote, which is a Navy SEAL saying, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” Here’s the thing. I mentioned to you before we did this that we’ve been doing this for years now and we got the first quantitative data back from our students to suggest we’re getting good at this. I’m going to share a few data points here.

Let me mention one other thing that I believe that you’re doing. What I believe you’re doing is helping people have small wins slowly, which build upon one after the other. Why is that significant? Psychologically, it’s very hard. It’s called hopelessness when you have no wins, but you keep going until eventually, you have no desire to keep going.

That’s the definition of hopelessness. When you can help somebody make one commission from sharing one link and get paid, that’s a success. If they could build on that success and get 2 next week, and 4 the week after, then they’re on their way of building on small successes. That’s the slow success you’re talking about too.

You nailed it. Confidence again to the Latin with fidelity, confidence. Fidelity is faith. Faith in what? When you say you’re going to do something, you believe in yourself. That’s what confidence is. You build that through small wins. You’re exactly right. On that note, 90% of participants in our flagship program report more clarity about who they are and what their goals are. Seventy-six percent have accomplished a project or a task that prior to joining, they had been putting off for many years.

When you say you're going to do something, you believe in yourself. That's what confidence is. You build that through small wins. Click To Tweet

Eighty-two percent self-reported improvements in time management. Seventy-four percent report having hit a professional goal that they had previously struggled to hit. Eighty percent feel more confident taking on new things. Thirty-seven percent of participants in our flagship program report increasing their personal income within one year.

When you add our live events to that, the statistic goes to 63% report increasing income within one year. Eighty-one percent agree that their quality of life has improved. Eighty-seven percent report that quality of life has improved. Ninety-one percent report making significant changes to improve their physical health. Ninety-six percent report improved communication and quality of relationships. I’ve got a whole body of data.

The fact that you can codify and quantify this is so powerful and it speaks so much to who you are as a person. With that, we’re going to transition now to the next part of the show. One of the things that we do with this next part of the show is get to know who you are a little bit better. Honestly, I’m going to ask the questions, but I think we already know who you are.

This interview has helped me understand you probably better than many of the other guests I’ve spoken to. I want to first mention that I appreciate your openness and your honesty. That’s all important to me. It’s important to the way I value my friendships and relationships and I value this one too. Let me ask you these questions. Let’s see where we can go with it. Here’s the first question. I know the answers to these things already. Who, in all of space and time, would you like to have one hour to enjoy a walk in the park, a quick lunch, or an intense conversation with, dead or alive, fictional or real?

Can I be cliché, but also honest and say Jesus?

I knew it. That is a popular answer. Tell me why and more importantly, after you tell me why, tell me what you would talk to Jesus about.

I would choose Jesus because His ministry and His teaching are the only ways I’ve been able to make all the pieces fit in life and the meaning. It’s easy to say life has meaning, but it doesn’t logically hold to me that life could generate its own intention. Whatever generated life is the teleology behind life. Simply the idea that there is this higher purpose or power, for me, God, and whatever, that is like an a priori logical foundation for making sense of anything that, to be clear, I rejected for a large portion of my life. I wanted it to be about me. I didn’t want there to be a purpose. I didn’t want there to be accountability to a purpose.

I wanted dopamine, good feelings, fun, the party, and whatever. The biggest thing is I resented authority because authority had been oppressive my whole life. I had to renegotiate what it meant to surrender to that. You then deal with the obvious problems that are baked into human life that we’re pretty terrible. If there’s a purpose, why are we clearly so misaligned with whatever that purpose is? There’s all this pain and suffering. I read CS Lewis. I remember reading The Problem of Pain, going, “How do I make sense of this?” Eventually, you reach a point where I haven’t found another narrative beyond grace to honestly to even be able to get up in the morning and not be a piece of crap.

What do you think you’d chat with Him about if you were sitting on that park bench and you had an hour?

I would ask Him for help. Maybe my publicist would tell me that I shouldn’t even be talking about this, this way right now, but I don’t present ENTRE to the world as a faith-based organization. It’s agnostic. It’s purely pragmatic. The only faith surrender element is the idea that there is a purpose to a life. Sure, you got all line with that, or else what’s the point of any of it? Beyond that, we meet everyone where they are. I would ask Jesus, “How do I open more people’s hearts?” not to Him because I don’t believe I do that. I believe He does that. The Holy Spirit does that. How do I open more hearts to a belief in their own potential?

Give me a year with anybody and I can completely transform their life and make a lot of their dreams come true unless they have a chronic health condition that’s going to kill them before I have time as long as they believe. Saint Augustine said, “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that thou may believe. Seek to believe that thou may understand.” If I can get people to believe in their own potential, then I can help them understand how to get there.

 

That is the same conversation I, too, would love to have with Him or frankly, with anyone at that level. Let’s leave it at that. That is the key to life. If you could help people unlock their true potential and find their way to it, you have solved the problem of humanity. Thank you for sharing that. Here’s the grand finale. This is called the change-the-world question. I also know what I am going to hear as the answer too because we’ve already been through so much of this. What is it that you’re doing or would like to do that put has the potential to change the world?

Enroll the entire world into a belief in their own potential and be willing to push pause on their urgency and their dopamine addiction long enough to, in slow is smooth, smooth is fast fashion, install an operating system to start to reshape their lives from the granular habits on up to the grand purpose.

The ultimate purpose of that would be the ultimate way to change the world. I love that. Jeff, before we go, I know you mentioned that you have something very special for our readers. Tell us a little bit about what that is.

I do. It’s simple. It’s a path to value in whatever way I can provide it. If you go to JeffLernerOfficial.com, it is my website, it pulls together much of what I’m doing in the world. There are different roads you can go down, but one of them is a completely free eBook called the Freedom Business Formula.

It unpacks a lot of the life design principles and how the operating system works and uses the origination story to illustrate the principles and practice. Ultimately, it’s a free book that’s designed to do what I said I would ask Jesus for help in doing, which is enrolling people into believing in their own potential and believing that there’s a practical way to realize it.

I would encourage everybody reading this show to go check out that site. As we are speaking, I’m on it now and I love the Yiddish quote on the homepage. I totally love that. Thank you for doing that. It made me smile. Jeff, you have been an absolute delight to spend time with. You have brought to my life a gift that is hard to articulate. I feel so good now knowing that we’ve had this conversation and that we are bringing this conversation to so many people who I believe would love to hear it. Thank you so much for doing so. Folks, don’t forget. Go over to JeffLernerOfficial.com. Thank you again, Jeff and we will talk again soon.

Thank you so much.

 

Important Links

• ClientFol.io
• Jeff Lerner
• ENTRE Institute
• The Fountainhead
• Atlas Shrugged
• Coach Elevation
• Your Most Important Number
• Lee Benson – Past Episode
• The Problem of Pain
• Freedom Business Formula

 

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