Lewis Howes

Ryan Serhant:		Welcome back to another episode of Big Money Energy where we talk to super successful and self-made people to find out exactly how they did it, how they went from nothing to something. I’m Ryan Serhant. Today I’m joined by New York Times bestselling author and host of the School of Greatness podcast, Lewis Howes. We discuss the importance of having coaches and mentors who outline how to look within to find the confidence you need to be your best self and what it takes to go from being unemployed, sleeping on your sister’s couch, to becoming one of the most influential podcasters on the planet. Let’s get into it. Welcome to another episode.
Ryan Serhant:		Today is a super, super special day. One, it is snowing in the city again. I don’t remember the last time it snowed so much in New York City, but that means I don’t have to go show properties. It means I can sit here, and I can talk to one of my favorite people, a former professional football player, keynote speaker, now media entrepreneur, high-performance business coach. Everyone, Lewis Howes.
Ryan Serhant:		We first met when my first book, Sell It Like Serhant, came out. He was gracious enough to help me launch the book in Los Angeles back when people used to talk to people in person. We used to have a book events. That was really, really cool. You guys know him from everything, one of the biggest podcasts in the world, the School of Greatness, which we’ll get into. Recognized by the White House and President Obama, is one of the top 100 entrepreneurs in the country under 30. He’s met Tom Brady, okay? That’s really, really important to me, amongst many, many other things. Without further ado, Lewis Howes, thank you so much for being here, man,
Lewis Howes:		My man, I appreciate you. Congrats on the new book. Excited to have you on my show soon to talk about it.
Ryan Serhant:		Yes, let’s do it. Before we start though, I’ve been on other people’s podcasts for a long time, right? Million Dollar Listing started 10 years ago.
Lewis Howes:		Wow. Man, you were, what, 22 when that happened?
Ryan Serhant:		Yes, I was 26.
Lewis Howes:		Wow.
Ryan Serhant:		Now the time goes by real fast. Kind of right around that time, a couple years later, right, you just celebrated your eight-year anniversary at School of Greatness, yes?
Lewis Howes:		Yes. This year, we just celebrated eight years, last month.
Ryan Serhant:		Over a thousand episodes.
Lewis Howes:		Thousand episodes, man. It’s crazy. It goes by fast, like you said. I remember the first episode. You probably remember your first episode. You were probably terrible on TV, and I was terrible on podcasting. Look at us now.
Ryan Serhant:		Could we go back, though, to the beginning, before I get into all the questions I have about your kind of career, right, and your professional life, and what a lot of things mean to you? You graduate college. You go into arena football. You get hurt. Whole life leads up to that one moment. What do you do?
Lewis Howes:		For me, in that moment, it was an identity crisis because my whole identity was tied to being an athlete, and being known, and being valued for my athletic abilities. When I’m not able to do that anymore and that’s the only identity I have, I had to learn the hard way. It took a couple years to figure out, okay, my identity does not define me, and I can always reinvent my identity.
Lewis Howes:		Imagine if you lost all the ability to sell real estate, or talk about real estate, or buy real estate, or invest in it. Just for whatever reason, you lost that ability. That’s been 10 years of your life. For a lot of people, in transitioning sports into real world afterwords, they get depressed. They get unsure of themselves. They don’t have that same confidence when they had that identity into the next stage.
Lewis Howes:		I lacked the confidence. For a couple years, I was on my sister’s couch. I didn’t have any money. I was trying to figure out how to get a job. This was 2007 to 2009, when the economy was crashing, yes, everything. For me, I didn’t have a college degree yet. I eventually went back and finished. I really didn’t know what to do. Again, I just used what I learned from sports and said, “What got me to being a professional athlete?” What allowed me to accomplish all American status in a couple sports, and then break records, and all these things was having incredible coaches. Why would I do life, or career, or business alone without a coach? because this is what I know.
Lewis Howes:		In order to get to the top, I’d needed coaches. In order to stay at the top, the greatest athletes in the world invest in better coaches. Kobe, Jordan, LeBron… They don’t say, “I’m the best. I don’t need a coach.” They say, “No, I’m going on the team that has the best coach because I want to win multiple championships. I don’t want to just get to the top, and that’s it.”
Lewis Howes:		I started to look for mentors. Originally, it was people that I’d already met from professors at school or whatever. Then I started reaching out on LinkedIn to finding kind of local entrepreneurs in Columbus, Ohio, which is where I was based at the time, where I’m from, and started reaching out to them, and essentially begging them to mentor me because I had nothing to offer them. I had no skills. I had no career. I had no value except for a curious heart and a listening ear, that I learned how to ask the right questions so that people would reply to my emails on LinkedIn, so that people would go to coffee with me or actually take me to lunch and pay for my lunch because I couldn’t afford it.
Lewis Howes:		I would find these really successful kind of local leaders spending their time with me as a 23, 24-year-old punk with no job, no nothing. It was all around positioning. I positioned my LinkedIn profile in a right way to get people to reply to me. I positioned my email messaging the right way so people would respond to me. That positioning created proximity where then I had access to people, people that had skills, people that had money, people that had job opportunities, people that had experience. I could learn from that proximity and from the people that had that knowledge.
Lewis Howes:		That was the thing that out of necessity… because I didn’t have money. I was living off my sister’s couch, eating her food, not paying rent for a year and a half. She gave me a gift. After a year and a half of not paying for anything or contributing, she said, “It’s time for you to leave. Either you need to pay rent, or you need to leave.” It was the greatest gift she gave me because it created urgency and it created opportunities to break through because I probably would be on that couch for another year, two years, three years. I was a grown man at 24, 25 at that time. I didn’t want to live off my sister, but it was also like, I don’t have to work hard. She created the sense of, okay, there’s, A, they have to go live on the streets. What I did is I begged my brother to let me stay at his place. He-
Ryan Serhant:		Good-sized family there. You got tons of couches.
Lewis Howes:		Exactly, exactly. He gave me a gift. He said, “Listen. You got to pay $250 bucks a month for your room.” I was like, “Okay, I got to do something. I got to figure out, how do I make $300 bucks, right, so that I can pay here and also buy some food?” It just got me working a little bit more. Okay, what do I need to do? Do I go get a job? Do I go try to make money? How do I make money? It went down that path of just next steps.
Ryan Serhant:		That’s insane. That is a really, really, really cool story. What was your relationship to money at that time? because you didn’t have a whole lot.
Lewis Howes:		Afraid, uneducated, ignorant, needy. I desired it, but I was also scared of it. I didn’t know how to make money. I never made money before 25, really. I mean, I was a truck driver for a number of months making $250 a week, driving six-
Ryan Serhant:		Truck driver?
Lewis Howes:		I drove NAPA auto car parts from Columbus, Ohio, to Cincinnati, and back every day. I’d drop them off, take two and a half hours to get there, do about a 30 to 45-minute pickup of new parts, and bring them back to the Columbus warehouse. I was driving the largest truck before… It was kind of the massive U-Haul. Before, you needed a trucking license. It was miserable. It was a miserable experience. I also was like, “How do I make the most of this six-hour commute daily, driving car parts?”
Lewis Howes:		What I did is I said, “I’m able to just play crazy games in my mind. The truck only went 55 miles an hour when I put the pedal to the metal. Everyone’s passing me. In the middle of Ohio… I don’t know if you’ve been to Ohio, but there’s just cornfields for hours, so there’s nothing really to look at. It’s where I learned how to salsa dance. I learned salsa dancing as a truck driver.
Ryan Serhant:		What?
Lewis Howes:		In my mind. I would-
Ryan Serhant:		That’s some inception style right there.
Lewis Howes:		I wanted to learn how to salsa dance because I was terrified of it. I went to this jazz club one night that had salsa dancing, and I was just blown away by all the Latin people who were there, dancing salsa. I was like, “This is the most intimidating thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s also probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” I kept going back to this place. Once a week, they would do salsa dancing. I’d go back once a week, and I would just watch. I literally was the creeper. I wasn’t trying to be a creeper, but I would sit in the corner and just be like, “This is amazing. This is mesmerizing.” I loved the music. I loved the culture, the people, the language, everything.
Lewis Howes:		When I started truck driving, I said, “Okay, I’m going to teach myself salsa dancing.” I had someone burn me a CD. I don’t know if you remember CDs back… I had someone burn me a CD of the greatest hits of salsa songs. I listened to this for six hours a day. I would practice on YouTube back then. YouTube had this channel called Addicted to Salsa, which taught salsa tutorials before its time. I would watch these at night. I would practice in the mirror. I would then rehearse these moves in my mind for six hours a day while listening to the music.
Lewis Howes:		I was trying to figure out, how can I learn a skill, making money, doing something I don’t like? That was a process. I didn’t know how to make money. I was a truck driver. I was a bouncer on the weekends, making, I don’t know, maybe $150 bucks a weekend at a nightclub. I never was entrepreneurial. I didn’t have the lemonade stand. I didn’t do the baseball card thing. I didn’t garage sale, none of that stuff.
Lewis Howes:		I relied on my dad to kind of be like, “Okay, here’s $20 bucks or $100 bucks when you needed it or whatever.” He never gave me a lot of money, but it was always provided. I had a house and food. I didn’t need anything else. When you’re 25 and you’re sleeping in your sister’s couch, you’re not as cool anymore. That’s when I said, “I’ve got to learn financial literacy. I’ve got to learn and understand what it means to make money, how to make money on your own, what it looks like to get a job, how to manage my personal finances,” just all the basics that no one teaches in school.
Ryan Serhant:		What was your first job then? Now you’re crashing. You’re paying your brother. You had to figure out how to make money, right?
Lewis Howes:		I did.
Ryan Serhant:		The podcast came years later, didn’t it?
Lewis Howes:		Yes, years later. That was actually the dream. Back then when I was on my sister and brother’s couch, I was like, what do I want to be doing? I had this idea of… Back in 2007, ’08, and ’09, I was like, “I just want to interview the most fascinating people in the world and ask them how they got there because wouldn’t it be cool if you just get paid to just ask questions of smart people?” I was like, no one will listen to me at this moment. I don’t have any credibility. Why would they show up to my show? Why would these people even talk to me?
Lewis Howes:		I knew there was something I wanted and spent about five years building a business, online marketing business, to where things started to take off pretty quickly. It took about two years of being broke and on my sister’s couch and then my brother’s place, until I made, really, my first dollars online. I remember for those two-year period, I was obsessing over LinkedIn. I was obsessing over it because I was connecting with these thought leaders in my local community. Eventually, people started reaching out to me, saying, “Hey, Lewis, can you show me how to use LinkedIn for connecting to people or generating leads and traffic?”
Lewis Howes:		Since I was just doing it all day long, I started writing articles about it. I eventually wrote a book about LinkedIn. I was one of the first people to write a book about it in 2009. I started hosting LinkedIn networking events. I hosted a LinkedIn networking event using my connections, 2009, messaging people one at a time. I think I started my first one late 2008. I really just messaged everyone I knew one at a time, custom email message on LinkedIn, and said, “Hey.” They had an events feature. I said, “Hey, we’re hosting a LinkedIn networking event. Here it is. Please bring three friends. It’s free,” all this stuff. I sold four sponsorships at $250 bucks for a table, a little booth. I called up-
Ryan Serhant:		Four months of rent, baby.
Lewis Howes:		Exactly. I called up a few local restaurants and I said, “What’s the worst night of the week for you when no one comes in?” They were like, “Tuesday night, or Wednesday night, or something.” I said, “Can I have it for free if I can bring people, 100 people, to this?” They were like, “Sure.” They had food, and drinks, and bar, and all that stuff. I said, “You can keep all the money. I just want to have the space.”
Lewis Howes:		The first event we did, we had 300 to 350 people show up. I made $1,000 bucks on the sponsorships, but the coolest thing was the connections. Everyone thanked me afterwards, saying, “Wow. I met so-and-so, and now we’re going to talk about doing this. I met so-and-so who I’m going to hire, whatever it is.” I became, essentially, the champion of everyone’s problems into solutions. I was like, wow. I wonder if I did this again, and I charged for people to come. I charged $5 at the door. I was like, I don’t know if anyone’s going to come. We had more people show up. I was like, oh wow.
Lewis Howes:		I sold sponsorships the second time and I charged $5 bucks. I wonder if I can charge $10 bucks? I just started going to the next level. Okay, we made $10 at the door, sponsorships. Then I started to build a relationship with these restaurants. I said, “Hey, will you give me 10 or 15% commission on the food and bar?” They were like, “Yes, this is the worst night of the week. No one’s coming in. Of course.” I was getting three levels of revenue from one event.
Lewis Howes:		Then I was doing one-on-one consulting for people that said, “Hey, can you show me how to do this on LinkedIn?” I was charging $100 dollars, and $200, and $300 a session for doing one-on-one. Then I was like, okay, let me write a book around this so I can have something to sell at these events. Now I had five levels of revenue. I just kept thinking, “Okay, what else can I do?” Then I started making money off of connecting people and getting commissions on deals. I just kept thinking, “How can I make more money with one event? What can I do?”
Lewis Howes:		Then the thing that really transformed everything is when I was branding myself and positioning myself in the social media world as the LinkedIn guy. I was like, everyone’s talking about being a social media expert. I know social media platforms pretty well, but not as well as LinkedIn. Everyone was like, I’m a social media expert online, their bio. I was just like, no, I’m the LinkedIn king. I don’t care about anything else, but LinkedIn.
Lewis Howes:		Because I positioned myself as that… That wasn’t what I wanted long-term. I wanted to do a show, but in the moment, I knew I needed to position myself as an expert in one thing as opposed to an expert at all things. By doing that, opportunity started to come to me. Every social media conference said, “We need a LinkedIn room. Who’s the guy who can come speak?” Well, I know Lewis, and Lewis is writing articles about this. Lewis has wrote a book about this. Lewis is hosting events on LinkedIn. Let’s bring Lewis in.
Lewis Howes:		I was doing that. Then eventually I met a guy at a conference. He asked me to come on one of his webinars. I didn’t know what a webinar was in 2009, but I said, “Let’s do it.” He was a pretty big name in kind of the space at the time. He said, “I need you to do a presentation about LinkedIn. It’s going to be a free event. You’re going to present. At the end, I want you to sell something. I want you to sell a course or a program.” This is back in 2009, when there was no course platforms. It was really hard to build a website back in 2009 and put stuff together. I had no clue what I was doing.
Lewis Howes:		I said, “Okay, I don’t have the time to put together a course or a training, but what I’ll do is I’ll put together a PayPal link. I’ll give a free presentation. Then at the end, I’ll say, ‘Hey. For anyone who wants more advanced training on LinkedIn, pay me here. I charge $150 bucks. Pay me here. What I’ll do is three weeks of more online training on a live webinar. I’ll just give you access to a private link. I’ll teach you this, this, and this every week.'”
Lewis Howes:		I was horrible. It was my first time giving a presentation. I had no clue what I was doing. The slides were janky. I was stuttering the whole time. At the end, I closed down the webinar presentation. I opened up my Gmail, and it was probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life, more than any girl I’d ever seen. It was my entire email on my screen that said, “You’ve received payment.” Every line said, “You received payment. You received payment.”
Lewis Howes:		I was literally screaming. I was in my brother’s place at this time living for $250 bucks a month. There are $6,200 in my PayPal account in minutes. I was like, I’m the richest man in the world. I could do this every day for the rest of my life. If I get to teach about LinkedIn and make $6,200, I’ll do this all day long.
Lewis Howes:		For the next six years, that’s pretty much all I did. I said, “Okay, how do I become a better teacher? How do I master LinkedIn more? How do I understand webinars? How do I learn about online marketing, copywriting? How do I create relationships and affiliate partnerships to drive traffic? How do I buy traffic? How do I do more of this thing?”
Lewis Howes:		I just obsessed over becoming better at that. After about four or five years, I got tired of just talking about LinkedIn. I was like, this is not what I want to do. My dream has been to do this interview thing. I don’t know the best platform. I’d like a TV show, but I’m still not really known. I’m known as a LinkedIn guy, but not known in anything else. I took about a year off where I sold the company to my business partner at that time. Had saved pretty much everything. I pretty much lived like I was on my sister’s couch still. Saved, didn’t have a car, didn’t have a TV, just walked everywhere, saved money.
Lewis Howes:		Then I had a couple years of runway where I was like, I could do whatever. I was like, I really want to do this interview show. Podcasting back in 2012 wasn’t a thing. It was like, Joe Rogan was on there. Some weird basement tech shows were on there or something. No one knew even how to go download a podcast. I had two friends that had just launched one in middle of 2012. I’d just moved to LA at the time for a girl. Didn’t even work out quickly. I said, “But let me stay here.”
Lewis Howes:		I was driving in L.A. traffic and was miserable. And I was like, man, I just kind of feel stuck in my life right now. I feel stuck that I moved here for this girl, and it’s not working out. I was kind of resenting myself. I was really frustrated because I was supposed to go meet someone a mile away, and it took two hours to get there in a car. I was like, “This is exhausting.” I go, “How are people doing this every day? stuck in their car, stuck in their life. There’s got to be a way to serve people who feel this type of stuckness, whether it be literally in a car or just in their life.”
Lewis Howes:		I said, “God, why don’t I just create a free show, like a podcast? I heard a couple friends are doing it. Let me call them.” I called them in the car ride, literally, and asked them both, “What is this podcasting thing? Is it worth it? Is it going to be a waste of time?” Both of them said it was the most fun they were having of anything they’re doing in their business. It was the most qualified leads they were getting for the things that they were selling eventually. They were just having a blast doing it. I was like, God, if these guys could do it, I could probably figure this out. Probably about four or five months later, I had launched the show, end of January, 2013, so eight years ago. It’s just been a figuring-it-out process every day since.
Ryan Serhant:		Great. I could listen to you for a year straight, I think. I don’t even have to make noise. Your story is just so interesting. You skipped over one thing. Just really quick, coaches got you to a certain point. Did you end up finding that life coach, business coach, or mentor when you were kind of stuck in there, or was it mostly just leaning on friends?
Lewis Howes:		I had three mentors at the time. One was… It was funny at the time, also. When I just finished playing football, I had to have a surgery on my wrist because I broke a bone in my wrist. I was in a full-arm cast from my shoulder to my fingers. I kind of looked like the kid from Rookie of the Year that had the arm up.
Ryan Serhant:		When it got out, he’s like, doosh, doosh, doosh. Exactly.
Lewis Howes:		Except for I was like a wet noodle. I couldn’t move my arm when it got out. I didn’t have power or strength. I was in this cast for six months. It was miserable, miserable. During that time is when I was just on LinkedIn because I couldn’t really work out. I didn’t have a job, nothing, on my sister’s couch. I reached out to a few people. One was a former headmaster of the school I went to, the college I went to, that I became close with. He was an Olympic qualifying athlete, all this stuff.
Lewis Howes:		I kind of connected him over sports. He was my kind of spiritual leadership compass, great family man, had success in business. I had invented a product during this time that I called the cast… because this cast I had to wear for so long was smelly. I don’t know if you’ve ever broken a bone and had a cast.
Ryan Serhant:		Yes, it smells.
Lewis Howes:		It’s smelly after a week, dirty. It’s scraping my face.
Ryan Serhant:		You just want to rip it off.
Lewis Howes:		Yes, exactly. I was like, there’s got to be a better solution if someone’s wearing a cast, so it doesn’t look and smell dirty. I went on Alibaba at the time. I had no money except for $100 bucks or something. I spent… I think it was, yes, I don’t know, $70 bucks to get a couple samples. I designed a sample of… I was like, there needs to be something you could put over this, and I actually still have them. I was like, I need a double-thickness sweatband, like an arm wristband but seven times the length. I was just kind of designing this thing on a piece of paper. I upload it to Alibaba. Found some manufacturers in China. I was like, “Can you make this and send it to me in Ohio?”
Lewis Howes:		Six weeks later, I got my first prototype. I was like, this is amazing. I had different colors. I had different lengths. I was like, I need someone who can help me design this better, package it, sell it, market it, all this stuff. I have no idea how to do any of this. I met someone at the time who knew an inventor, and begged this inventor to meet with me, and showed him my design, and everything. I had it there. He ended up mentoring me for the next six months. He was like, “Come into the office a few days a week, ask me questions, and work for me for free, essentially. I’ll help you launch this thing. I’ll help you get it off the ground.”
Lewis Howes:		We ended up not getting that off the ground, but I ended up learning about product design, product development, naming. He’s a master of naming, trademarking. We’d go to design shows together. I would go to trade shows with him and just learned about the business of networking. I just learned about how to take an idea in your mind, and make it a physical reality, and manifest it from every process, from idea, to manufacturing, to licensing, to PR, everything. That was an amazing six-month experience. He was my creative mentor of, how do I take an idea and manifest it into a physical form?
Lewis Howes:		Then at the salsa clubs, because I started going salsa dancing a lot and teaching myself salsa dancing, I met another guy who was a professional speaker. At the time, I was terrified of public speaking. I could not even speak in front of an audience of four people without stuttering and being nervous. I was like, “Man, you go around the country and you get paid to speak. That sounds amazing, but I could never do it.” He mentored me and said, “You need to join Toastmasters. You need to overcome the fear, learn the basics of public speaking. I want you to go every week for a year to Toastmasters until you feel confident enough in presenting without notes, without preparation in front of an audience.”
Lewis Howes:		I went every single week for a year. I would film it. I would get feedback from him, all this stuff, until I finally overcame the fear. I didn’t know that speaking would be a thing in my future because I was terrified of it, but that mentor and coach really guided me to overcome those fears. Those three were really instrumental, but then every year, I’m finding, hiring new coaches. I’m paying for experts at different levels to help me in my health and wellness, business strategy, relationships, therapy, inner work, all that stuff. I’m always looking for great coaches.
Ryan Serhant:		Where do you think your… Or what do you attribute your sense of enthusiasm to? You have great energy. I think one thing that people are-
Lewis Howes:		Big money energy, man. You got to have that.
Ryan Serhant:		I think one thing people are attracted to you about… It’s so fun to listen to you and just to listen to your interviews that you do on the podcast. I’m sure why people take your courses and everything is that you have this amazingly authentic and new sense of energy almost every day. You grammed to tweet where you said, “Mindset is everything. The way you think affects your energy, and actions change your thoughts, and your life will start to change,” which is right.
Ryan Serhant:		You just talking about the things you think about now as part of your work ends up becoming the things that you’re doing two to three years from now as long as you put in the work. You mentioned that word, energy. Then I watch you even now on that amazing high-resolution camera that you have that my team needs to fucking figure out. You’ve got that incredible energy. Do you credit your parents or just excitement for life? Is it something you developed because you knew you needed to have it?
Lewis Howes:		I think I always had something… There was always something inside of me. I don’t know if everyone else feels this. Maybe you felt this as a kid, Ryan, that I always felt like, okay, I don’t know why I’m here. There were many times that I would get in trouble as a kid and get sent to the principal’s office. I would tell them all the time, “I wish I were dead.”
Lewis Howes:		I had a darker childhood in a lot of ways. I mean, I was sexually abused as a five-year-old. It took me 25 years to open up about it, and start sharing, and start healing. I lived with a lot of resentment and anger in moments of my life, but I had this duality of passion, and childlike joy, and energy as well, but when someone triggered me, it was like, don’t ever try to take advantage of me or use me. Otherwise, I was like, I’m going to destroy you.
Lewis Howes:		I didn’t understand why. I was sexually abused as a kid. My brother went to prison when I was eight for four and a half years. Almost every weekend, I was in a prison visitor room with a room full of inmates and their families because there was visiting hours for my brother. I was in special-needs classes until I graduated college. After seven years of college, all the way from as long as I can remember. There was a lot of inner suffering that I created myself based on experiences. I just wanted to be happy. I wanted to be joyful. I was a loving kid, but also when I was triggered, there’s a lot of anger and resentment.
Lewis Howes:		It took me many years to learn how to heal, and learn how to accept, and love myself. That was about eight years ago when I learned that process. I’m still in that process. I’m not perfect. I’ve also had a deep sense of gratitude at the same time for my life. There was a knowing. Even though I was angry, and upset, and resentful as a younger kid, the older I got, I was just like, God, I’m supposed to do something for the world. I don’t know what it is, but I know my life is more meaningful than being a dumb kid and just being an athlete. I don’t know what it is, but I need to figure it out.
Lewis Howes:		Listening to that voice, trusting it, or that knowingness is what’s allowed me to wake up every day, literally, I kid you not, with just so much gratitude that I have another day to express myself, to enjoy life, to meet cool people, to share what I learned, to learn new stuff. I mean, I woke up this morning, 7:00 AM. I did a Spanish class because I committed to learning Spanish. I’ve been doing it for six months, this one-on-one Spanish class. I have someone that teaches me on Zoom.
Lewis Howes:		For 20 years, Ryan, I’ve been telling myself, “I want to learn Spanish,” 20 years. Every year, I say, “I’m going to buy this course. I’m going to download this learning app. I’m going to take this thing.” I try it. It’s so hard on my brain that I get exhausted. I’m like… It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The middle of last year, I said, “You know what? Every year, I tell myself I’m going to learn Spanish. Every year, it’s New Year’s Eve. I say, “I haven’t done squat.'” I feel like I always let myself down. I said to myself this year.
Lewis Howes:		I was like, “I don’t care if this takes me 10 years to learn. I need to stop speeding up the process of being fluent in Spanish.” I needed to enjoy the process of just the small little win, just figuring out one thing every class, and being okay with sucking. I’ll tell you what. The first six months have been the most challenging, humbling thing for me because I feel like I’ve gotten nowhere.
Lewis Howes:		Today, literally, this morning, was the first morning where I was like, I’m understanding some of these things. Maybe I’m a slower learner. Maybe it’s extremely challenging based on how I learn. Man, it just felt good to be like, okay, even though I’m probably not going to be fluent for many, many years, I understand more than I did six months ago, and I can be proud of the progress. That’s been fun.
Ryan Serhant:		Dude. I am so excited for the future day, whenever that’s going to be.
Lewis Howes:		Let’s go.
Ryan Serhant:		When you put out your one episode at School of Greatness-
Lewis Howes:		[Spanish].
Ryan Serhant:		In complete Spanish, exactly. It’s going to be awesome.
Lewis Howes:		It’d be amazing.
Ryan Serhant:		You’re going to be like, “I don’t even understand how I’m here right now, but this is happening.”
Lewis Howes:		I know, man.
Ryan Serhant:		It’d be awesome. Something you also said, you spend so much time on kind of one-on-one with people, whether they’re your coaches, or the people that work with you, or kind of students and stuff. I remember when you and I met a couple years ago, I know you’re on your phone. I was like, “What are you doing?” You’re like, “Answering DMs.” I was like, “Answering DMs?” I just remember the look you gave me. It was probably just a random moment, but it’s one of those moments that stuck with me. It’s like, “Holy shit. He puts so much passion and care into the responses to total strangers on social media,” where I think you even said you respond to almost everybody.
Lewis Howes:		Still, even this morning, I was responding to DMs, yes.
Ryan Serhant:		Dude, that is commitment.
Lewis Howes:		I don’t know if it’s the smartest use of my time. You’re probably smarter by not doing it. I feel like this stage where I’m at with my life, I’m trying to be as connected to as many people as possible. I want to have a pulse of what people are saying, and what their challenges are, what their feedback is, what’s working, what’s not working, so that I can be like, okay. I never want to lose touch, and think I’ve figured it out, and think I’ve made it or I think I’ve mastered something because the beginner’s mind for me has always benefited me at any stage of my life. When I feel like I’m the man, that’s when I slip up. That’s when I make mistakes. That’s when my audience can feel that, okay, he’s got a big head now, and he’s not caring and compassionate. If I’m not constantly reminding myself, the world will remind me in a way that’s not as pleasant.
Ryan Serhant:		I have so many questions for you. I’m never going to ask them all because we’re going to run out of time. What are you bullish on in the ’20s? Where do you think the world goes? Where does the world go for podcasting? What is this business?
Lewis Howes:		I’m bullish on team. I’ve realized that I’ve gotten so far with a very small limited team for the last year and a lot of it, just being myself, and saying I’m going to… I was betting on me. I was bullish on me, but I realized what got me here won’t necessarily be the thing that’s going to get me to the next level of where my vision is, my mission. I know that I need amazing people on our team.
Lewis Howes:		I go back to sports. I need all-stars. I need people that are invested in a mission who are hungry, excited, just like me. That’s what we’ve been investing in. We brought on, I think, seven or eight people in the last six months. I’m looking to bring on another seven people in the next three to four months. I’ve been learning the skill of being a better coach to team member. As opposed to me being coached and being the star player, how do I now coach people? I’ve never really done that. I have a little bit, but I’ve never done anything like my business context.
Lewis Howes:		Learning how to build an amazing team, because the more I spend time… I mean, you’re around a lot of wealthy people, successful people who’s skilled businesses. They don’t get a billion-dollar exit or a hundred-million-dollar exit with five people on the team. I mean, that’s probably extremely rare. It’s like, yes, we got 300 employees. We have 1,000 employees. We have 70 employees. You can’t do it all on your own.
Lewis Howes:		For me, it’s, how do I build team better? How do I build culture better so that they’re integrated with each other and feeling connected without me? How do we reach more people in the service of what we’re creating? That’s what I’m excited about, building team, because then I know that’s the thing that’s going to get us from 13 million downloads a month to a hundred million downloads a week. The mission is to serve a hundred million people weekly to help them improve their life.
Lewis Howes:		I can’t do that alone. I can’t do it with a small team. I need the right team who is all-in on a mission to help us create more meaningful content that is scalable, that has better distribution, production value, all of that stuff. It’s scaling every aspect of the team and the different tentacles we have in our business.
Lewis Howes:		Also, I don’t know if people have bought your book yet, but it just came out. Congrats on the success. I’ve been diving through it, man. I read everything you’re sharing in there. For me, if people haven’t bought the book, they need to buy the book, Big Money Energy, because it’s a game-changer.
Lewis Howes:		I love how you talk about confidence in there because I think a lot of people don’t have the ability to believe in themselves. The skill of learning how to believe in yourself is one of the greatest skills that we can have. It doesn’t matter how much experience you have. It doesn’t matter the credentials and years, all this stuff. You teach that skill well in the book. I want people to get that and buy a couple copies for their friend as well.
Ryan Serhant:		Thanks for the plug, man.
Lewis Howes:		Of course. Of course, man. I can’t wait to have you on our show. I’m going to ask you things that no one’s ever asked you, and I’m going to get you to share things you’ve never shared before.
Ryan Serhant:		Great.
Lewis Howes:		People should listen to that too.
Ryan Serhant:		All right, man. Go about your day. Keep crushing it. Keep being great. I will talk to you soon.
Lewis Howes:		My man. See you.
Ryan Serhant:		If you’re ready to take action today based on Lewis Howes’s entire blueprint for how he got to where he is, go to bigmoneyenergy.com/podcast to download an action plan that I put together for you as well as the show notes. That’s bigmoneyenergy.com/podcast. Find more podcasts like Big Money Energy on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Big Money Energy is hosted by me, Ryan Serhant. It’s produced by Mike Coscarelli and Joe Laresca, and executive produced by Cristina Everett.

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