Episode #004: Jeff Lerner – How to Unlock Your Potential
  
After a decade of building multiple online businesses to over 8 figures and twice landing on the Inc. 5000, Jeff Lerner turned his focus to educating and inspiring entrepreneurs about the power of digital business. In 2019 he founded the ENTRE Institute to create a new generation of ENTREpreneurs. He has taken his story and the lessons he has learned and compiled them into a solid bestseller titled, Unlock Your Potential: The Ultimate Guide for Creating Your Dream Life in the Modern World. It resonates with many of the frustrations people are faced with in our time. In this podcast I talk to Jeff about how we can unlock our potential and take advantage of the opportunities available now in the new economy.
The LeadershipNow Podcast Show Notes
- 06:37 “The system is designed to and based upon limiting people’s potential.”
- 10:27 “Frankly, most people don’t spend 14 hours a day figuring out how to unlock their potential because they’re so dang busy, because they’re so conscripted in the broken system, and it doesn’t give them enough time. They’re looking for—and this is the world we live in, right—the 6-second goldfish consciousness sound bite of like I need little things that I can try to build a better life with, that don’t require much time or energy, which is itself a fallacy.”
- 11:14 “This is what the 3Ps is: it is a simple, heuristic filter. It is a lens that you can look at your life through to say, at any given time, if I am not moving my life forward physically, personally, or professionally, then I am somewhere between wasting time and killing myself slowly. And that’s it!”
- 12:26 “When you put the 3Ps lens on, and you look at your life and say, ‘Okay, either I’m moving my 3Ps forward, or I’m losing the battle,’ then life gets really simple. And, by the way, all progress has to be simple because the world is too chaotic otherwise.”
- 13:45 “We talk a lot about the connection between business and professional and personal or business and living. Business is amazing. Business allows you to orchestrate, quantify and predict forward progress, which, by the way, is what most of us are trying to do with our lives. We just haven’t developed nearly the level of organizational theory and management theory, and process theory in living that we have in business. So, when you take the principles of good business, and you think of your life, and you say, “Okay, how would I manufacture an outcome for myself, you know, lean manufacturing style, like Toyota would do it? Or how can I organize my household finances the way J. P. Morgan Chase thinks about money? Or how can I?” You know. How can I import business principles and apply it to my life? That’s what we’ve done with the 3Ps, but there’s a bigger question, which is why. Why are we doing this?”
- 15:51 “If you only focus on the 3P’s, and there’s no Fourth P, which is the purpose, the telos, the reason why you exist, that for which you are created that is greater than the self, if you neglect that, you’re just a giant narcissist. But if you flip that and say, ‘Yeah, I’m all about purpose, man. I’m here to change the world.’ But I don’t have a rigorous scientific methodological approach to actually building a better human version of myself so that I can be more effective in whatever my purpose is. Then you’re just a blowhard.”
- 17:26 “Samuel Clemens said—the two most important days in a man’s life for the day that he’s born and the day that he figures out why. And when you go listen to that Tim Ferris episode, what you realize is most people don’t even really fundamentally consider the question to the point where they’re willing to sacrifice for the answer and accept whatever implications the answer brings until they’re basically about to die.”
- 22:34 “If you’re not really, really wealthy in this world, your life should be getting cheaper, not more expensive.”
- 27:22 “And the reason I call them the 3 legs of successful action, if you’re trying to take actions to move your life forward, and you want to have you know a predictable or at least risk justifiable prospect of achieving the result successfully, then you got to have these 3 legs. And they are knowledge, environment, and resources. You have to have the requisite knowledge that specialized information. You know, relevant to the task or the goal, right? Have to have the right environment for success, and there’s a lot of science beneath that, and we dissect different ways the environment impacts you.”
- 25:58 “We’ve just basically created this science of how to build a life just like you would build a business. You would never build a business without a marketing department, or you would never build a business without a product that was good enough to not create a bunch of refunds and charge backs. Ideally, you’d create a product it was good enough to create word of mouth referrals, right? So why wouldn’t you create a life in which you’re a product that’s good enough to not generate refunds and charge backs and ideally is good enough to generate word of mouth referrals, and to try to quantify what that requires as a human being, right?”
- 30:54 “This is amazing, and if we don’t want to be disciplined, why do we even want to be human? Because humans are just monkeys with more options? And we’re saying, but we don’t want the discipline to take advantage of those options. So honestly, you should have just been a monkey, and then you wouldn’t have to be accountable to yourself.”
- 33:54 “I’ll say I was broke, but I was never poor. You know it’s a big distinction. I sometimes say broke is a temperature poor is a thermostat setting. So, like if your thermostat is set to poor, then honestly, it doesn’t really matter what circumstances you find yourself in eventually, you’ll do what a thermostat does—it’ll bring you back to poor.”
- 34:16 “But you could have a thermostat that’s set to abundant and find yourself temporarily with no money—like I did many times. But your actions, your choices, your behaviors, your disciplines, your beliefs, your energy, all the stuff in your life will, over time, be building you back towards the setting of your thermostat right.”
- 34:58 “You know that that’s one of the things that I deeply desire everyone to embrace is that 99% of what exists by default in our world is very, very bad for us. And literally, if you don’t believe me go into a grocery store and walk up and down every single aisle and try to calculate what percentage of this food is actually positive and nourishing for my body. And I don’t think I’m extreme to say 99% of what’s around us tends to be bad for us. I think it’s true on our televisions. I think it’s true on the Internet. I think it’s true of our food, and I think sadly, it’s probably true of a lot of the people if we just, you know, randomly hang out with 100 random people, I don’t think that many of them are really committed to the best version of ourselves and supporting us in getting there right. So that’s why you have to indoctrinate yourself so consistently.”
- 37:58 “I don’t think the thermostat setting is about net worth. I think the thermostat setting is about character and right behavior.”
- 39:25 “We’re all products of our environment. And most of us are products of unconducive, unsupportive, unoptimistic, unenthusiastic environments that like us the way we are a lot more than the way we could be, and actually create resistance to the change that we say we want to strive for.”
- 40:54 “You know, if you want to become rich, go make 5 rich friends, and make them your best friends, and literally, after a few years of hanging out with only rich friends, it’s almost impossible that you won’t get rich because their habits, their belief systems, their opportunities, their network. It’ll all rub off on you, and eventually, you’ll just be different and have more money.”
- 42:01 “There’s what’s called the Rosenthal effect, or the Pygmalion effect, where we realize how positive the human psyche can go based on altering the environments—what it is that the environment is reflecting back to you. If you’re in an environment that sees you and a higher standard and has a brighter view of you over time, you’ll grow up and into the bigger, better version of yourself that the environment is reflecting back to you. It works on the plus side and the negative side. And the nice thing about those changes is they require no willpower.”
- 42:31 “We naturally adapt to our environments. We actually have to work harder not to adapt to our environment than to adapt to it. So if you just change the environment one time, then all future time is going to shift in a positive direction without you having to try.”
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