Are there any other outdated thinking patterns that you believe consistently block online entrepreneurs from achieving success? We compare our present state to someone else's snapshot of their present state, which says nothing about their past, says nothing about their journey, says nothing about their trajectory. One thing that isn't visible to any of us about anybody, unless we really get to know them, is where they started and what they went through.
Taking this concept of life design, knowing full well that you've helped so many adults. do that go through this process. What do you tell your kids about life design?
Most bad choices in life come down to not having a long enough time horizon for our decision making. And so I try to parent from that vantage point of like, how do I be the best father possible to the 45 year old version of my son right now? Welcome back to the second episode with Jeff Lerner.
If you haven't heard of him before, one can go back and listen to the episode before we hit record where me and Jeff just got to know each other. We talked a bit of life. We talked a bit about values and belief and relationship books that we both enjoy.
So that episode is below. But Jeff Lerner, he's built multiple online businesses to over eight figures. And specifically, he has an online course.
You can relate to him on that point where over 275,000 students have come through his online course in the past five years, generating over $200 million in revenue. I mean, there's some other points here. But like... He's landed twice on the Inc. 5000 list. He's the CEO and founder of the Entra Institute, which is one of the fastest growing education companies in the world.
And he's also the host of the Unlock Your Potential podcast, which is like a top rated top 1.5% podcast. And today, we're going to talk about this idea of holistic transformation. He believes that We have the ability to design our lives and then go and get the tools and the skills to build that life. And when I heard that, I thought he would be a phenomenal guest to have on the podcast because as online course creators, we have to create so much. And we spend so much time thinking about why do we want the successful online course?
And sometimes we get caught up in just the money aspect of it. I know if you're listening to this podcast, you've read books and you've encountered this idea where you need to discover why you want the success you want because that's a lot more powerful motivator than just getting the money and decide about who you want to be so you can work with people that are like you and attract a good quality caliber customer. And Jeff, I know you're going to do these ideas much better justice than I could. in a intro. How are you?
I'm great. Kwejo, so excited to be here. Thanks for having me back. Yeah.
Well, I mean, for us, it was just a moment. It would be pretty bad if I'm like, you know, we're not going to record a second episode. Well, you know, I hope you have done that at some point, just as a declaration of free will to say just because it's a two-part format doesn't mean that if part one is a total dud, I'm not going to exercise my free agency to not even do a part two. You should do that sometime if you haven't, just as like a bold exercise of free will. Wow, that would scare me.
So, okay, that would scare me. And I think I have a pretty good set of questions as far as like guests on the podcast to where I hopefully would be able to not encounter someone who just would be a dud of an episode, so to speak. Yeah, that's fair. I was gonna say that's fair.
Yeah, you shouldn't just do it just to do it. But you should always tell yourself. I will do this if I ever feel it's the right thing to do. Sure.
Okay. All right. That's pretty ballsy.
Because we've all had conversations. We've sat through conversations with someone simply because we felt like we were supposed to, even though we weren't getting anything out of it. Agreed. I'm thinking of a party. They'll never hear this podcast, but I'm thinking of a recent party I went to and somebody was talking and it was grating on me.
She dominated the conversation. Like, I personally don't swear. And so, like, with her, there were F-bombs everywhere. And it's like, I'm okay. I don't expect everyone else not to swear just because I don't expect somebody with, like, a different worldview to believe, you know, what I believe.
And that's all right. But this lady was out of control. Anyway, if you don't know who I am, hi, I'm Quajo.
I'm the new host of The Art of Online Business. And you can find out more about me and where Rick... went and what he's doing.
It's really, really cool project actually. It's in the descriptions below. The thing you need to know is... If this is the first time you've heard me, the art of online business remains largely the same. We're giving you tips and tricks and strategies and behind-the-scenes business peaks.
And of course, because I'm a Facebook Ads manager, Facebook Ads goodness to help you scale up your business from low six figures to high six figures. And in this case, you're in for mindset, you're in for learning how to design your life, because that is what Jeff specializes in. So my first question, and it's not the easiest one, but it is one that popped into my mind. When you talk about this concept, Jeff, designing your life, I thought of the nature versus nurture argument.
And I really wanted to know where you stand, like as far as that's concerned, are certain people born with like kind of a life that they're meant for? Can somebody from like any end of the spectrum, you know, choose to go and get skills and tools, like to design their life, how they chose, like how, how, how did those combine your upbringing, maybe your socioeconomic class that you were born into, like your gifts, be that like mental or physical versus where you want to go in life and the ability to go and get those skills and tools, as you said. Yeah.
I mean, obviously nature and nurture are factors. Um, I look at life through a pretty pragmatic lens. One of the schools of thought that I've been very influenced by is a school called positive psychology, which if you're not familiar with positive psychology and you hear the name, it can be tempting to dismiss it and go, oh, that sounds kind of new agey and feel good, woo woo, whatever. But no, positive psychology is a very legitimate, sort of academically bona fide discipline within the larger psychology discipline.
pioneered by a guy named Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. And it's pretty, yeah, it's legit, right? It's not pop psychology. But in positive psychology, one of the things, one of the concepts that Seligman uses a lot is something he calls your explanatory style.
And your explanatory style is basically, how do you explain the world to yourself? Like, what is the narrative that you create? to translate observation into meaning inside your own mind. And basically what he says is all, and I don't want to misquote him. I mean, Seligman's got a number of books and they're great reads, but generally speaking, what he says, there is a certain amount of uncertainty within any explanatory style, right?
Because I'll never have enough information. I'm not an AI supercomputer, and even an AI supercomputer is dependent upon the data that it's fed or the data that is networked and available to crawl. I'll never know anything for sure.
There's always some hypothetical contradiction, contradictory piece of evidence to any conclusion that I draw that I simply haven't been exposed to. So all beliefs, all truths are insane estimations to some degree. And I say insane estimations because it's fine to make an estimation, but then to say on the basis of this estimation, I have to make choices, unrecoverable, unretractable choices about how to live my life based on these estimations. That makes them somewhat insane because the most sane thing to do would be to go, no, I'm going to get more information before I decide, but take that to its ultimate conclusion. And it becomes an insane form of paralysis because you're never doing anything because you can ever get all the information, right?
So. All that to say, we got to choose a way to explain the world to ourselves. And it's always going to be open to debate whether we chose the right one.
So why not choose the explanatory style that produces in us the sensations that are most desirable and the highest probability of ultimately achieving the goals that we want? And so it's essentially all... All...
all experience of processing, all observation and all processing of life experience is subjective to that degree. And within that subjectivity, we can choose how do I want to be based on how do I want to process all this experience? And so that was a long way of saying that I've chosen to act as if I believe certain things that ultimately lead me towards being the person I think I want to be based on what I know.
And then out of intellectual integrity, I have to constantly be pressure testing those beliefs, because if I do start to discover evidence that it's flawed, then it's incumbent on me to shift. But that, and I'll be honest, I don't remember the original question that set me on this tangent, but like, That's how I go through life. I'll just leave it there. Cool.
No, that's not right. I was asking because when you mentioned this idea of holistic transformation and the ability to design our lives, my basic thought was, and why I asked about nature versus nurture is how much can we design our lives? Is there a limit? Are there some things that we're kind of...
So the reason I launched on that tangent is because that is the approach I would take to the nature versus nurture question. is like there are scientific and sociologically valid arguments for nature, for nurture, and probably for all combinations of the two. But what viewpoint on that question is going to empower me the most to go live a really awesome and fulfilling life, knowing that I truly can never really know and that it's probably always different in the context of every individual life anyways.
And so from that lens, nurture all the way, man. I'm not predestined for anything. Like I'm going to choose to go through life operating from the belief that I can make shit happen.
Sorry, I know you're not a cursor, but like I can make it happen, you know? And so I kind of don't care because it's like you can take every person, every life and identify handicaps and identify advantages and shake it all up and try to create a victim story of like, well, my handicap. to advantage ratio or particular blends results in this, you know, boohoo sob story, or you can take the exact same set of information and say, look at all the things I can go do. And that just seems a lot more fun.
It seems like you've thought this through. And I agree with you. I like how ultimately we decide whether or not to take whatever cards we were dealt and then go and get ourselves some new cards, so to speak. So it sounds like you kind of just identified, like, let's call it a way of thinking that could keep people from making forward progress in their lives, from designing their lives, you know, getting the tools and skills. So are there any other outdated thinking patterns that you believe consistently block, let's say, online entrepreneurs?
Because you are an online entrepreneur. You're so much more than just a course creator. But like, what are some thinking patterns that block people from achieving success? I mean, how much time you got?
right? Because yes, there are a lot of them. I got a buffer. If you want to go a little longer, we can.
Well, why don't we just double click on the one we started with, right? Which is nature versus nurture and sort of the choosing of the narrative frame through which we view life. I think that in the world today, the victim victimizer narrative is honestly, I don't want to say it's the dominant, but it is a dominant lens in cultural theory and in how people view their own lives through this victim-victimizer narrative. There's so many other lenses that are so much more empowering and interesting to me.
But, you know, I think from a, you asked about other beliefs or related limiting beliefs. I think one is the idea of comparison, you know, comparing ourselves to others. We always, we compare our present state to someone else's snapshot of their present state, usually as presented on the internet, which says nothing about their past, says nothing about their journey, says nothing about their trajectory, says nothing about their internal state.
So like this idea of comparison is sort of abstract because one thing that isn't visible to any of us about anybody, unless we really get to know them, is where they started and what they went through. So therefore all comparison in the present is sort of arbitrary and ridiculous. If you wish that I could just hop into your Facebook ad manager and run your ads for you or at least download All my three plus years of experience into your ads so that they would run the right way, you pretty much got your wish.
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Back to the video. I think there's also a miscalculation that is probably the greatest way that we are controlled in this world, or maybe controlled makes it sound too conspiratorial. It's more of just what keeps us, well, it's just what keeps us from taking control of our own lives is this idea of the idea that there's some sort of we talk about comparison to others.
There's also just comparison to an ideal, like a vision, a picture that this is what, this is what success or growth or achievement is supposed to look like. That is, that is to say, I know what my life will look like once I have become a different person that has experienced what this version of myself is striving for, as if you'll know what that person's priorities are and that person's values are. and that person's insights from their life experience that this version of you has not even had yet.
Like it's ridiculous to say, oh, that's the picture of what success is going to look like. So I'm just going to keep going after it, right? You know, figure out who you are, figure out what you believe. As I say, let the algorithm run and wherever you land is success.
Success is to get clear enough on who you are and to be intentional about the way enough about the way you operate in your environment to be able to be truly authentically and in full integrity yourself. across the broadest range of human experiences that are not only what you will encounter, but that you could encounter. Because if you can only be yourself, as long as your range of experience is narrow enough that who you are isn't challenged, are you really yourself? Or are you just comfortable and safe?
Like, I want to know that I'm so clear on who I am that if some sort of alien race, and I'll just use an alien race because I don't want to demonize any like foreign national interests, but somebody takes over the US government and at gunpoint says to all American citizens, you must now do these things or this thing that I don't philosophically align with. I want to know now that I'll take the bullet then and that I won't be a coward. That is a powerful statement.
And that's success. That's success. Okay.
Let me just camp out here for a second though, because... I really would love for you to share, like, maybe to the listener who, I'm going to say it's a bit like me, who has read books, who has started to, like, self-examine, who's started to, like, decide who they are, yet still is held back by comparison. Like, I do it all the time, like, full transparency.
Like, I'll look at somebody else's podcast and be like, oh, like, how many downloads do they have? Or I'll look at somebody else's business and think, ah, okay. the life they're living.
And because we online entrepreneurs, we're kind of weird. We share how much our businesses make and how much we lost. People don't do that in the real world.
Yeah. But by the way, I'm going to call that out. We only do that until we make enough that our peers consider it obnoxious to keep talking about it.
Interesting. Okay. I need to get to that point. But my question is, how do you get to where you can be so resolute about what you just shared about and say not struggle at least with this limiting mindset of of comparison like how do you get from here to there spend a lot of time getting to know yourself which is another thing that a lot of people don't do and you know i think that a lot of it comes down to like our our our faith viewpoints like our spiritual viewpoints not because i'm trying to take the conversation there not because i'm trying to be prescriptive or even be right but just because i think that until Like we spend a lot of time in this world dealing with like second and third order questions, right?
Like, how am I going to make a living? How am I, where am I going to live? Who am I going to hang out with?
What am I going to do on the weekends? Like, but until we've answered the first order questions of like, uh, where did I come from? What is my life about?
Do I have a purpose? Is my purpose unique or is it the same across my species? Uh, what is the, what, what?
What am I supposed to take from my experiences, particularly from my suffering? Until we've answered those questions, we're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic of purpose by dealing with these other questions. But the second and third order questions are the questions that everybody wants to talk about when we hang out. The first order questions are the things that you got to go into the woodshed or you got to go into the jungle or the cave or...
or the mind and you know you look at the way we're reared where it's all about socialization it's all about learning to play well with others and it's all about learning how to fit together within this you know economic collective and it's all about how to integrate in society But on the base, you know, on the basis of what? To any of that. And we just don't live in a society that now, now historical ancestral societies prioritized, you know, that you didn't even get to be an adult in certain societies until you had gone on your Aboriginal walkabout or your Cherokee vision quest or your, you know, dark night of the soul experience.
But like, we don't do that stuff. Now we have like what? Like a graduation party with all our friends?
Like, oh, you're a man. And we've never figured out who we truly are. 88% of the Western world, meaning those who live in a liberal democracy for whom it is theoretically acceptable to think and believe anything they choose. And yet still within that population, 88% of people arrive at the fundamentally same religious and spiritual convictions and beliefs as their parents.
That makes no sense. That means that we are simply taking what is given to us as the answers to the fundamental questions. And we're stacking an entire life worth of choices and decisions on top of it without ever really having thought for ourselves.
And so I just don't understand how you can think about any of the less important stuff until you've done the critical thinking for yourself that's necessary to know who you are and why you are the way you are in the world. And I think that the world that we see now, where we've hyper-connected everyone, but we are also overstimulating and depriving people of the space and time and intention in which to define themselves before we connected them to everyone else we end up with this this world in which people lack the basic skills to tolerate disagreement and different viewpoints and then we you know essentially we're regressing socially back into like primitivism because we're just like find people that agree with me and let's all hunker together and oppose each other and it's like I don't know. I mean, and this, what, what all this has to do with course creation, like you might be like, well, what does this have to do with course creation? Like, I don't know how big the audience of the show is, but I can virtually assure you that what any one listener to this show has a course about somebody, some other listener to this show has a course about, and probably a hundred, like how many e-comm courses are there? How many, you know, courses for people that.
I don't trade collectibles. Are there, how many courses are there? I was going to say, I'm not the only ads manager, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. And so at a certain point, if your only value, if the only point of connection that you offer to the world is your competence within a narrow discipline, and you're only competing around that competence around other highly competent people within that same narrow discipline. you're willing yourself to become a commodity and race to the bottom where it's fundamentally because the need for competence tops out a little above basic competence. Most people don't need the world's greatest Facebook ads manager.
They just need someone that's good enough to help them make money. And so you trying to compete with the other Facebook ads managers that are also good enough to help people make money on the basis of competence and saying like, I'm going to be an even better than good enough Facebook ads manager. and I'm going to charge even higher than good enough prices for good enough Facebook ads managers.
All you're actually doing is pricing yourself out of relevance to the vast majority of people that need Facebook ads managers. So at some point you have to start competing or attracting attention or a drawing in customers on the basis of something other than the competency of the skill or the niche or the core subject matter or something. And that's when people go, okay, great. I get it.
You're good at the thing. But are you a person that I want to spend time going through a course with and why? Okay. And that's where what you're saying is you got to know yourself and know who you are, what you believe, what you stand for, what your purpose is, because that's also tied. It's a differentiator, so to speak, that goes far, far beyond.
It's the only differentiator. It's the only way you become a category of one is to go way beyond your trade and basically be a person that somebody else is like. Yeah, he's good at Facebook ads. And he's a really interesting guy. I just love, you know, learning from him.
Can we go back to that bomb of a quote that you dropped that said, like, if you're not dealing with first order questions, like, what's your purpose in your life? Like, where do you come from? Why are you, you know, where are you going, so to speak?
Then you said you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic of like your life's purpose, something like that. I've never heard that. Yeah, and I don't know. I mean, for some reason, I don't know, they slipped me the red pill when I was like six years old.
I actually do have a theory on why because I literally dropped out of high school at 16 because I was so fed up. with an educational system that was giving me zero guidance on the things that seemed to me to matter most and it seemed like the more time i spent in it the more i was just being groomed to be a cog in some sort of large institutional construct that was going to be called healthcare or financial services or law or engineering or whatever you know trade or career i was going to end up in like this is all important stuff in the context of a practical life But it's not the most important stuff. Where did you get that idea from as somebody in high school?
I certainly did not have those kind of ideas floating through my mind until further later. But where do you think it came from? I think I had a really unique life experience in two particular regards that combined to give me a perspective that I think was different.
For one, my parents were pretty successful financially. I would describe them as upper, upper middle class. So you have like upper middle class and then you have like, I call upper, upper middle class.
That's not quite upper class. Like upper class is like, we don't worry about money at all. Upper, upper middle class is we kind of, we look like we don't worry about money at all, but it's only because we actually still worry about money and we're really good at it.
Okay, good. Yep. Agreed.
You see the difference? It's like, it looks rich, but it's not so rich that I can be flippant about living. And I, so, but what that meant was I got to go to a private school with people that were actually rich.
So I did not. And I, I mean, I enrolled in this private school at five in kindergarten, five years old. So from five years old, I'm going to school. Like there were, I mean, I can think of two kids in my class, in my kindergarten class that I happen to know now that their parents were billionaires. Right.
And so I had an early experience that completely de-romanticized money. Like, look, I don't care how rich you are. You're still snotty and miserable and you can be a bully and you can be mean and you can be unhappy and you can not have seen your parents in six months because they left you with the nanny and went to Singapore for half the year or whatever. So it's like having money does not equal happiness. I got a big heavy dose of that reality in an early age because of who I grew up around.
And also I was born with a genetic condition. So I got bullied really, really bad as a kid for something that I had zero ability to control, which is just that I look different. And so not only did I see that money doesn't equal happy people, but also even the unhappy people or happy or unhappy. I'm not, I mean, it's a spectrum, right? But like, also I don't want, why would I ever want to belong or conform to a group of people that are alienating me?
without even knowing me simply on the basis of something that I had no ability to control. So that unique, that unique combination of experiences for me meant that I grew up going like, if it is to be, it's up to me. If I'm going to be happy, it's come from in here. It's not going to come from out there because I'm around people that have it all out there. And they still don't, they're so unhappy that they come to school every day and bully me to try to pay forward their unhappiness.
Right? So like, clearly it's not about something material or external. And it just, you know, the bullying and the social isolation pushed me into the deeper questions because I didn't, I was never really given the option of distraction through social acceptance.
So like, oh, I'll be okay because I feel good because other people, I'm okay with other people. I didn't have that option. Yeah. So I think that's how I sort of had this eyes wide open moment, maybe 10 or 20 years earlier than a lot of people do.
Right. Because like for me, it didn't come until I started reading a bunch of books and then meeting people who are from very different backgrounds. I will. And maybe you're onto something there, actually, because I was also a really early reader.
And so I was reading like chapter books, you know, at five and six years old. So I don't know, maybe I just I read my way into this awareness younger than a lot of people do, too. Maybe that's part of it.
Yeah. A joke to lighten the conversation. or not so much of a joke, but just me relating is I was an avid reader when I was a little kid.
I just read stuff like, you know, Ramona, Quimby, don't judge me, or like sideways stories from Wayside High School, like stuff like this. Did you read Encyclopedia Brown? Superfudge?
Superfudge, yes. The Borrowers, yes. Encyclopedia Brown, no, I never read that. Never read Judy Moody either. My daughter is reading Judy Moody though.
So it's never too late. I'm going to come back in a moment and then we're going to finish this episode talking about life design. But I was really curious, like, what? How old are your kids? I have a 21 year old, a 19 year old, a 15 year old, and a seven year old.
So my one question is, does it get any easier? It gets... Well, so I think there's two things. Once you have more than two kids, you're officially outnumbered, assuming you're raising them with a spouse.
And then I think once you're outnumbered, outnumbered is outnumbered. And so in that sense, no, it doesn't get any easier. But I do think that parenting gets easier, like all things.
the more we work on ourselves. There's a lot of things that I don't necessarily have the perfect answer to as a parent, but I know what I believe and I know who I am and I know what I value. And if I believe in the philosophical approach that I'm taking as a parent, it makes it a lot easier to live with the individual decisions and outcomes.
Agreed. You ready for my final question? Yes, sir. So talking about life design, talking about... this idea of transformation, going out there and getting the knowledge and the skills that we need to build our lives.
I thoroughly believe that, you know, you want to think like a genius and talk like a third grader. At least I really believe that because I've just been talking like a third grader for most of my life since I finished the third grade and have my vocabulary. So my question is, taking this concept of life design, knowing full well that you've helped so many adults. do that go through this process what do you tell your kids about life design oh man um it's interesting because it's a really interesting question that you would ask me that because one of the really cool dynamics of my life is because i'm seen as sort of a entrepreneurial life mentor personality right um I have four kids, three of whom are or were teenagers.
And then they have a friend group, right? And so their friend group, and I don't live in a terribly large town. So I'm somewhat known locally by some number of younger people just because I'm an internet personality.
Yeah, in St. George. And so there's actually a lot of younger people, kind of my kids'friends and friends of friends and so forth that come talk to me for like advice and mentorship and stuff. And so I get to talk about life design to, you know, let's say dozens and dozens of young people.
So there's what I tell that group. And then there's the specific challenge, and I'm sure you can relate to this as a parent, of actually giving advice to your own children, right? And it's like sometimes I wish I could not be their dad for a minute so that I could just give, like I could just talk to them about life and not having it be like I'm dadding them.
Um, so I, I actually think one of the challenges of my life is to try to be as good a mentor for my own kids as I am sometimes for their friends. Um, because I have to try to take the dad hat off. That is a long way of saying though, that in general, my advice to younger people about life design, uh, first of all is to believe, like truly believe that it's possible.
It's kind of like your nature versus nurture question, right? It's like what? perspective is going to be the most empowering me into me to create the highest probability of a fulfilling life. And I would argue that it's the belief that you can design your life and even that you're called to as part of, you know, being here. And then from there, you know, I think it's a few things.
One is to be like really, really practical and recognize like living a life of your design is an all consuming full-time job. Okay. This is not a thing that you're going to do.
on the nights and weekends. This is not, it's not even a thing you're going to do. It's a way that you are going to be like, and it's going to be really hard and it's going to, uh, you're, it's going to require a number of, of tolerances in life.
You know how we talk about it? Like so-and-so has a high alcohol tolerance. They can drink like 24 beers and not pass out.
Right. You don't strike me as a guy that, you know, talks about that a lot, but like, but there's this idea of like, how much of a thing, how much of a thing. Well, I have a very low alcohol tolerance too, but there is this idea in life of like, how much of a thing can you tolerate, right?
You know, ultra-marathoning is running a hundred miles. The reality is if you can run 50 miles, you can probably run a hundred miles. The difference isn't capacity, it's tolerance. And so there's a number of tolerances that you're going to have to develop to actually go out and design your life. The ability to tolerate other people's skepticism.
the ability to tolerate risk around money predictability or certainty, which itself begets other people's skepticism because they're going to come try to demand answers from you about your own life. And the answer to their questions is not to try to force an answer. It's to actually be honest with yourself and them, perhaps, that I'm not working on answering that question. I'm working on the ability to tolerate not having an answer to that question so that I can get more clear on who I am and live that way.
Say that again. That was good. That was good. Yeah, people will try to force you to answer questions that are their questions that they prioritize, not yours.
And the solution is not to try to force an answer to make them happy. The answer is, I'm not working on answering that question. I'm working on developing the ability to tolerate not having the answer to that question yet.
and to persist until all the way until until dot dot dot until until comes you know and so that's a tolerance um the the tolerance of the ability to spend a lot of time with yourself and not need constant stimulation and distraction from other people uh tolerance of the ability to focus on difficult things for long periods of time so it's not just being alone but it's being alone in intention and purpose It's tolerance of letting go of victim narratives or excuses. In that sense, it's tolerating. Most of it is just around tolerating uncertainty. The human mind is a normalizing machine that obsessively seeks to take available data and derive from it certain predictions about our futures.
And until you actually sort of master that, I would argue that is a defect in the evolved human mind. That's residue of when we were a lobster or an earthworm or a raccoon or, I don't know, whatever you believe is in the chain of before we became human. We have these vestiges of these neurological systems that are like forcing us to try to figure out certainty. But as I stated earlier, the idea of a certain vision about the future that presumes to therefore also have certainty about who I will be in the moment of experiencing that future and what my priorities will be then and my experiences will have produced then is essentially the desire for future certainty is sort of paradoxically, but logically, a desire for present stagnation. Because the only way that our future could map to our present is if we stop growing.
And yet we're so desperate to know what it's going to look like. So like tolerating uncertainty over extended periods of time and the skepticism that comes from other people who, because they love us, I mean, that's one thing to tolerate. I was gonna say, because they love us, they think they're doing us a favor to try to force us to answer these questions about what our life is going to look like just because they're insecure about what the idea that. if they don't have certainty about what their life is going to look like, or that if it's okay to not have certainty in general about what a life is going to look like, what does that say about their life choices, right? But I mean, talk about another thing to tolerate the clumsy, ineffective, well-intended, but often horribly destructive ways that other people in our life try to operationalize their love or goodwill towards us.
You have to tolerate the fact that under-skilled people are terrible at loving you well. even though they will at least argue that their intentions are pure. Sounds like family. Sounds like family.
Family is the greatest constraint on most human potential, sadly. And so these are the kind of things that you are sharing or that you wish you could share more with your kids. If you could remove the dad hat, so to speak, that they're not just interpreting that as you being your father.
To your, yeah, so to your point, as a dad, my number one goal. is to try not to be a constraint on their potential. And there's a lot of ways that I parent where, again, one of my obsessions is trying to play the longest game possible and to master the ability not to default down to like shorter time horizon thinking, which is where we all go, especially like when we're hungry.
When we're hungry, we default to short time horizon thinking, which is why we opt for fast food because it's fast and it's satiating in the short term. But it's horrible in the long term, right? So it's like most bad choices in life come down to not having a long enough time horizon for our decision-making.
And so I try to parent from that vantage point of like, Okay, how would I, how do I be the best father possible to the 45-year-old version of my son right now? Good question, good question. If somebody wants more of the ideas that you've just been sharing on this episode, which I believe are really good ideas, where can they go to learn more about you, to hear more from you? Jeff Lerner official is my handle across all social.
I would recommend starting with YouTube. You know, one, I have a book called unlock your potential and a podcast by the same name, which was when it was released for about two months, it was the number two nonfiction best selling nonfiction book in the country. So I'm pretty proud of that. It's actually a good book. I'll say that.
I'm not just a guy that wrote a book. It's a genuinely good book. I worked really hard on it.
But yeah, YouTube for Jeff Lerner official. The one I want to close a loop on the last point I made about being a parent to the long game version of my child. As an entrepreneur, even as a course creator, how would we create our courses or our product offerings differently if we were trying to take care of our customer for the next 20 years, rather than just the six months that they have to charge back their purchase?
How do we change the course if we were trying to take care of our customer for the next 20 years instead of just the next six months left on their payment plan? Right. Or their chargeback window. I mean, I know you marketers, you can't bullshit a bullshitter. We think in terms of chargeback windows.
How do I keep them happy for six months? What if it was, how do I make them better for 50 years? That is a much deeper thought that's kind of summed up in the phrase selling is serving. And if you're truly going to serve somebody, it's probably going to be service that. take some passes.
And until you've asked and answered that question, do you really deserve the sale? Like what if, what if we, what if we went to market and said, I only want to earn money that I deserve? Oh, I think, uh, Oh yeah. Oh, I think our pockets would be a little shallower until we spent time kind of doing what you said to do in the beginning, which is figure out who you are, your purpose, these, these better questions than just the deck chairs on the Titanic.
And by the way, the word deserve comes from the Latin, the place from which I serve.