Jeff Lerner Talks About 6 Keys To Motivation
Jeff Lerner Quote: "Here are six things you can do to increase your motivation."
Jeff Lerner: Here are six things you can do to increase your motivation. Actually, 6.1 things. The first 0.1 thing is watching this video. And by the end of this video, I will have given you six things you can do to increase your motivation.
Real quick, let me ask you, what do you feel like is the difference between the life you have and the exact life that you want. Or in fact, nevermind just for you, for all people across the board. What do you feel like is the difference between the life that they have and the exact life that they want? Do you think that it is a lack of opportunity?
Do you think that it is a lack of information? Do you think that it is a lack of money?
Jeff Lerner: "It was not about a lack of opportunity!"
Well, I think in the world we live in, and I'm going to say this as a guy that used to be half a million dollars in debt, broke, homeless, and had a few hundred bucks to his name and went on the internet and blew it on some online courses, that it was not about a lack of money. It was not about a lack of information. It was not about a lack of opportunity.
I think that the challenge most of us have, the gap between the life that we have and the exact life that we want is actually motivation. Now I'm not talking about motivation to like get up, go to work, go to the gym. Although many of us struggle with the go to the gym part. But like I'm not saying we're not motivated to do basic stuff. I'm not saying we're not motivated to do things that we can't survive if we don't do.
Jeff Lerner: "Most of Us Are Not Unmotivated."
Most of us are not so unmotivated that we're just going to lay in bed and starve to death because we're too unmotivated to go to the fridge and get food. I'm not saying that. I'm talking about the kind of motivation that pushes you and drives you to do all the extra stuff, the stuff most people don't do, the things that say, hey, not only did I go to my job and I was motivated enough to work my eight hours, but now that I'm home, instead of doing what most people do and like stop by happy hour on the way home and come home and like flip on the Netflix and chill. I'm not saying Netflix and chill, but like maybe Netflix and chill. But like whatever. I'm not going to do that stuff. Instead I'm going to dive into that online course that I bought. Then I'm going to spend four hours mastering XYZ, whatever so that I can completely transform my life in the next two years. I'm talking about that part of motivation, the motivation most people don't have. That's the motivation that this video is going to give you six ways to go out and get because honestly, that's the motivation that's the difference between most people's lives and most people's ideal lives. That's the difference between most people's realities and most people's dreams.
Most importantly, it's the difference between your life and your dream. It's actually a gap of motivation. Because again, the opportunities are out there. The information is out there. There's really not that much that's necessary. I mean unless your dream is pretty outlandish. If your dream is like, I want to go snorkeling in a goldfish tank on Jupiter. Okay. Maybe there's not quite enough information or opportunity out there for you to realize that. But for most people's dreams, the information and the opportunities are out there, and the resources are gettable. But the motivation to do all that extra stuff, that outlier stuff, that outlandish stuff, that stuff that, you know, might seem improbable so you don't bother doing it.
Jeff Lerner: "Motivation Becomes a Superpower."
There's a level of motivation where like probability morphs into possibility because you understand that when you're motivated and energized enough in this world, you literally have a superpower. You can do things that other people can't do, not because you're smarter, not because you're stronger, not because you're better looking. Clearly, that's not what it takes. Look at this face. It's because you're more motivated and energized than ordinary people. It literally becomes a superpower.
You'll find yourself walking up to people, having conversations you wouldn't have previously had, creating opportunities that didn't previously exist, and now taking advantage of those opportunities on the basis of a belief and self-confidence that comes from the motivation and energy that frankly, even if those opportunities were given to other people, they probably wouldn't have taken advantage of them in the first place.
Jeff Lerner Quote: "Motivation and energy will close the gap between your present state and your desired state. "
Motivation and energy will close the gap between your present state and your desired state. I'll give you an example. When I was in my 20s, I was obsessed with the idea of composing a show and having that show produced. Like I wanted to see, I was a musician and I was a piano player. I played gigs. I played sessions. I played whatever paid the bills.
But my real passion was writing and composing. And I wanted to see something that I composed brought to life on a stage. And so I got what I thought was going to be my big break when I took this class in college, and me and a writing partner together, we wrote a musical. At the end of the semester, they produced the musical, and it was a student production, but it was like, oh my gosh, this is it. And I got so fired up. I was like, okay, now what we need to do is we need to take the musical, and we need to go get it produced on a big stage, right? We need to go to festivals. We need to go to theater companies.
Jeff Lerner Quote: "We need to get our life produced on a Big Stage."
We need, whatever we got to do. We need to get this produced on a big stage. Because my obsession, my passion, my mission, my motivation was anchored around I want to see my work come to life on a stage. We applied to, I don't even remember, it was probably a hundred theater festivals. And we would get turned down and turned down and turned down and turned down. And it was probably about the hundredth one, we finally got accepted to this festival. And the acceptance was like, hey, you get a stage and you get some time slots. There's no money. There's no cast. There's no production. There's no anything. You just get a stage and some time slots. And you got to be here at this festival ready to produce it. So me and my buddy, like we're not producers. We're like, what are we going to do? Okay. I guess we got to hire actors. We got to organize rehearsal. We organized this whole production together, right? We have six weeks to put a production together. And I start doing charitable stuff. I started hitting people up for donations. Totally self-organized. Totally thankless. We're all just bleeding time and money. Like I don't care. My motivation is just I want to see my show on a stage, right? So we put it all together. Rehearsing, I'm teaching everybody the songs. I'm like hours and hours playing rehearsals. I already worked 60 hours a week just trying to make ends meet as a musician and this is new time that’s just only coming out of my sleep allotment. But whatever, I'm committed.
So then two weeks to go before it's time to put everybody on a plane and fly them up to Minneapolis and put this show up on a stage, and what happens? The show had two lead male parts, and one of the lead male actors drops out. Doesn't even give me a reason. He just says, hey, I'm sorry. I'm not going to be able to be there. I have a conflict or something. So we're screwed, right? We wasted all this money.
Jeff Lerner Quote: "Sometimes you have to learn new skills and move past your comfort zone."
We got all these people's time together. We don't have time to bring in another actor. Nobody can learn the lines fast enough. Nobody can learn the songs fast enough. And what was the only option? I had to do it. I wasn't an actor. I wasn't a singer. I wasn't a dancer. But it was the only way that the show was going to happen, right? So I have to step in. I have to convince my buddy to like cancel everything he's doing for the summer to come in and lead the rehearsals and play the keys because now I'm learning how to like sing and dance and act. And it's a comedy too. It was like not easy. Comedic acting is hard. I'd never done it before, right? But I don't care because I'm just all I want is to see my flipping show up on a stage. Right? So over the next two weeks, I crammed, I became a competent singer, a competent dancer, a competent comedic actor. We went up to Minneapolis every freaking night. I'm there loading, you know, I had to pack up a U-Haul. We built a little set with like a bed frame and a mural or whatever. I'm driving up to Minneapolis. It’s like a 1,500 mile-drive while everybody else is like hanging out and drinking tea with lemon and honey to nurture their vocal chords. I'm like loaded into gear, setting up the set every day. And you know, we did it. We put a show up on stage for two weeks, and it was my dream come true. And then guess what happened from that? So this one person happens to be in there, happens to be at one of the shows. Turns out, this is the guy that invented the Breathe Right Strip.
Jeff Lerner Quote: "My first mentor was very important to me."
You know, that thing that goes on your nose? He sold like 3 billion of these things worldwide. He’s a very wealthy, successful inventor who's also a patron of the arts up in the St. Paul, Minneapolis area. So he sees the show. Bear in mind, there were never more than like five or 10 people in the audience. It's not like it was some big smash success. But this one guy sees it, comes backstage. You know, he's like, hey, I want to talk, who's in charge back here? And everybody’s like, oh yeah, Jeff, he wrote the show. So he comes up. He starts talking to me. He's like, you put all this together. You did all this work. You learned to act on short notice. Like he heard the whole story. And he's like, oh my gosh, this is great. I love this show. And most of all, he's like drawn in. He's attracted to the fact that I was so motivated, I was so energized, I was so driven that we actually produce this whole thing. So the guy ended up becoming a really good friend. He ended up becoming a mentor. He ended up becoming a benefactor and a financial backer who helped me start multiple businesses that are part of what led me to this place right here, right now, doing work that I love, having a huge impact in the world. Right? So that's an example of how when I'm talking motivation, I'm not talking about just the motivation to go to your job or the motivation to, you know, cook breakfast. I'm talking to the motivation to do all that extra stuff that is the kind of stuff that has your friends and your parents and your coworkers going like, why are you doing all this extra stuff that we don't see the payoff for based on our narrow, limited view of the world that says, oh, there's only payoff in doing traditional mainstream stuff that everybody else does?
But look at that story, right? And there's no way I could have predicted how it was going to pan out. It was months of grinding and thankless, you know, rejection and disappointment just to get to this one moment where this one guy happened to see the show. And what was he drawn to? It wasn't that it was the best show he'd ever seen. It was that what I did to even get that show alive impressed him. And this is one thing I've learned. Really, really successful people, what are they actually looking for? And we all know that it's not what you know, it's who you know, right? The single best thing you can do to create opportunity in your life is to know and be of interest to really successful people, the keepers of opportunity, the keepers of the resources, the keepers of the network, right? What's the number one thing that they're looking for?
Jeff Lerner Quote: "Sometimes life does not turn out as predicted, and you have to innovate".
They're not looking for people that already know all the answers or have all the skills. I know. I hire all the time. I don't want know-it-all’s to come into the interview. I don't want people that are going to come in and tell me how to do it their way because they know everything and they've already got it all figured out and they're so proud of all their big, impressive credentials. I'm looking for gamers. I'm looking for hustlers. I'm looking for hyper-motivated, driven people to get in the boat with me and start rowing in the same direction.
That's what successful people are looking for. You will open so many doors for yourself in life by being orders of magnitude more motivated, energized, enthusiastic, and optimistic than virtually everybody else in your life. Take it from a high school dropout, bum musician who was half a million dollars in debt who's gone on to sell over $100 dollars of stuff, be on the Inc 5000 three times and blah, blah, blah. Let me tell you all the cool, impressive stuff I've done. It's not about that. It's not about bragging. It's about telling you that even when I had nothing else, what I had was my motivation and my enthusiasm.
Jeff Lerner Quote: "It's really hard to be committed to something when everything in you is telling you to cut and run."
Okay. So hopefully I've got you sold on enthusiasm and motivation and drive and hustle and grit and all that good stuff. Let's talk about how you actually become that. Because I do recognize from having been kind of down and out at times in my life, when you don't have it, it's hard to have it. Like it's easy to have it when you have it, right? It's like commitment. Like when I feel like, when I'm super into something, it's easy to say I'm committed to it. It's really hard to be committed to something when everything in you is telling you to cut and run, everything in you is saying, this isn't rewarding, this isn't fulfilling, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. But now and only now do I have the opportunity to actually prove that I meant it when I said I was committed.
Because you're not committed until you don't want to be anymore and you still stay in it. In that same way, you're not really an enthusiastic, optimistic person until you develop the ability to manifest enthusiasm and optimism even when circumstantially or environmentally, you're not feeling it, right? Outside of that, you're just riding on inertia. You're riding on momentum. But the ability to get it when you need it and the ability to get it back when you lose it, that's what true enthusiasm is. All right. So like I said, six things to drive your motivation. First item, mission. What are you doing with your life and why does anybody care, especially you, the protagonist of your own story? What are you waking up every day to go after? So when you think about great stories, right? And there's a saying, facts tell, stories sell. Stories are the fabric, the essence of all great human communication, right?
Jeff Lerner Quote: "What story are you participating in?"
And essentially every day being motivated is just about the communication you have with yourself. It's about the conversation, the dialogue you have with yourself. Are you enrolling yourself every day in attacking the day in the way that, you know, is going to get you to your goals, right? Which is the motivated way of being. So ultimately, it comes down to what story are you telling? What story are you participating in? Honestly, what book are you writing through the daily living of your life? Is it a book that anybody would want to read? Is it a book that you would want to read? Is it a book that has the characteristics of a book that people would want to read? And what characteristic do I mean?
Jeff Lerner Quote: "You need singulariry, you need focus, you need direction as an entrepreneur."
I mean singularity. I mean focus. I mean direction. You say, hey, tell me about that movie or that book. Was it, how was it? And they say, well, it was, you know, it had like four different plots going on. And like this one character, like he was focused over here. But then like, you know, after 20 minutes in the movie, he seemed to be going over here. Then like right when the movie should have been like at the climax, suddenly, he changed interests and he was like focusing over here. And then some new character showed up. I don't know where they came from. And then now suddenly the movie was about them. That's not a movie you're going to go see, right? Great stories, written or visual, have singularity of focus. They have one, you know, relatable protagonist, someone we feel connected to that's on a journey or fighting a struggle that we relate to and we connect to. And it has a singular arc, right? It carries all the way through.
Those are the stories we can't take our eyes off of. You have to make your own life into one of those stories. Trying to ride three horses, trying to chase three rabbits is a boring movie, it's a miserable life, and it's not something you're going to wake up every day fired to go after. Go watch the movie City Slickers with Jack Palance and Billy Crystal. At the end of the movie, what does the Curly the cowboy, Jack Palance’s character, what does he tell Billy Crystal is the key to life? He says, it's one thing. Your life is one thing. And he's like, well, what's the one thing? You tell me. Pick one thing and wrap everything in your life around it and you will be so fired up to go live every single day. That's your mission.
The Millionaire Shortcut - A book by Jeff Lerner
Hey, sorry for the interruption. I just wanted to let you know you can get a free copy of my book, The Millionaire Shortcut, which will show you the fastest way to become a millionaire in the new economy. And there's a special link just for this episode in the description. So thanks for tuning in, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. Next is expectation. What do you actually expect? Adjusted for time, you know, aggregated over lots of decisions, lots of experiences, lots of living, we tend to get what we expect. This one's really simple. What do you expect? Most people have tacit expectations, silent, unexpressed expectations. What they tend to get over time, which is meeting up to their expectations, they've never actually verbalized.
Jeff Lerner Quote: "Nobody knows you better than you."
They've never actually written down. So a simple thing you can do is actually stop and write down and say, what do I expect in my life? What do I expect my life to look like physically? I talk about the three P's: physical, personal, and professional ultimately in support of the fourth P, which is your purpose, right? What do I expect my life to look like physically? Like truly, look at yourself, think about yourself. Nobody knows you better than you.
However much you may try to delude or deceive or lie to yourself, you still know yourself better than anybody else. What do you expect? Do you expect to be 40 pounds overweight? Do you expect to have high blood pressure? Do you expect to drive to Carl's Jr at 12:30 in the middle of the night and stuff your face with four cheeseburgers?
Like do you expect these things? Or do you expect to take good care of your body? Do you expect to nurture and revere the one housing that you were given to dwell in for the entirety of your life? What do you actually expect physically? Personally, what do you expect from relationships? How do you expect to show up in relationships? Professionally, how much money do you expect to make? How much value do you expect to provide? What are you actually expecting your exchange with the world to look like?
And then write it down. And I promise you, if you're being honest with yourself, what you're expecting from yourself and what you're expecting from your life is probably pretty close to what you're getting. And then proactively change it, right? There is so much power just in crossing stuff out and writing in a new expectation. You say, I expect myself to wake up early, prepare my meals ahead of time, balance my macro nutrients, go to the gym, stretch, meditate, do whatever, buy my wife flowers, spend time with my kids. Write it all down. Not as what I hope for, not as what I wish for, not as my goals. But as my expectations. Because over time you will naturally get what you expect.
And by the way, you're going to have to do this more than once. You're going to have to repeat it back to yourself more than once. You wake up every day, and you say, today I expect to perform this way and I expect to get this result for doing so. It may not happen perfectly the first day, but I promise you, you will change your life through that consistent practice. And the next thing is get obsessed. And here's how you know you're obsessed.
Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever in your life do you find yourself doing something because, ooh, these was just the cringy last words in the language. I got nothing better to do. If you ever find yourself doing stuff because you got nothing better to do, you're not obsessed. Because obsessed people, they always have something better to do because they have an obsession that drives them, that pushes them, that is like an infinite size glass that will accept whatever they have to pour into it. Right? And obsessions are infinite and endless. And you may say, oh, that sounds exhausting. No. You know what's exhausting? Is uninspired living. It's unmotivated living. It's a story or a movie that nobody else would want to watch, and you're stuck watching it every day because it's your life.
That's a lot more exhausting than being obsessed and having something to go after it like a madman every single day. And next is the flip side of obsession. It's the counterpart to obsession. Consistency. You can tell somebody who's truly obsessed versus somebody who's just, I don't know, riding a high or they're pumped up because obsession is consistent. It's unrelenting. It's unyielding. I am obsessed with having a good marriage. I signed up for that. Every day for the rest of my life, whether I feel like it, whether I'm motivated for it, and notice my choice of words there. This is a video about motivation. The motivation derives from your obsessions, not the other way around. You’re not going to say, oh, I need to get motivated so I can get obsessed with this thing. No, you need to be obsessed with the thing so that even when you're not feeling motivated, there's still a gravity.
There's still a vacuum pressure that draws you in the direction of your capacity so that even when you're not feeling motivated, you're still doing more than most people who just went to a seminar and got motivated, but they're not obsessed. Right? And so the counterpart of it is consistency. If you truly live from a place of mission, you live from a place of obsession, you live from a place of passion and purpose, and you're truly motivated, the kind of motivation that doesn't wear off like bathing where you got to re up every morning, right? If you're truly feeling that, it's going to show up inconsistency. And the way I like to look at consistency, I like to be really, really simple and just say, okay, what's my test?
My test is when I lay my head on the pillow at night, did I do something that moved me closer to my goals? Something meaningful. And I frankly like to define it as something that most people don't do. Did I do something that moved me in the direction of my goals today, every day, seven days a week? I don't buy into this fricking day of rest crap. You can take a day of rest from certain activities, but you can't take a day of rest from trying to live your best life. You can't take a day of rest from your obsessions and your interests. You can't take a day of rest from your mission. It’s like really elite athletes. When they rest, they don't lounge. They don't loaf. They don't like completely fall back to zero.
They have active rests. They have active recovery. They might say, okay, well, today the way I'm going to rest but still be moving towards my athletic goals is instead of lifting weights and running sprints, I'm going to do yoga. I'm going to do flexibility. I'm going to do Pilates. I'm going to do breathing exercises. But they never really just totally don't do anything. Because in nature, in life, in biology, if we do nothing, and this is true. Biologically, it’s true.
Psychologically, it’s true. Spiritually. When you're doing nothing, you're moving backwards. You're decaying. The natural state of energy is to decay over time. It takes a certain amount of energy not just to go backwards. It's kind of like it takes a certain amount of money not just to be losing value to inflation. Because life is naturally getting more competitive and more crowded over time. You have to be doing better just to be staying good enough. You have to be doing something just to be not regressing and backsliding, right? So this consistency every single day. Laying your head on the pillow. Did I do something today that meaningfully moved me in the direction of my goals, ideally that most people out there aren't doing? Because if most people out there are doing it, I'm probably going to be getting the results that most people out there are getting. And there's plenty of data to support, most of us just anecdotally live it every day, that most people ain't that stoked about their life. So you got to be consistent about being exceptional every day. Head on the pillow.
That's the rule. And the next thing is having a great mindset. And I'm going to give you, I mean all of this stuff is kind of a mindset conversation, but ultimately, I'll give you one principle that drives great mindset. And it is called self-efficacy. The concept of efficacy, it's different from ethics, and it's different from efficiency. It's kind of a blend of the two.
Efficacy as a concept has to do with economic benefit and practical benefit. It's not saying, does it work? It's saying, is it worth it to do it the way that it works? Self-efficacy is efficacy applied to self? Is it worth it to do this thing? It doesn't mean can the thing be effective or productive? It means is it worth it based on economy of energy and resources. Is it worth it? And the principle of self-efficacy can basically be boiled down to one statement. Waste no time, energy, resources, or anything else you have to offer on anything that you can't control. Ultimately, having the best mindset is just, am I giving energy or time or resources or anything else I have to give to things I can't control? And if so, stop. That's the key to a great mindset. And then finally, we've talked a lot about internal characteristics.
The last piece is your external environment. Is your environment around you cluttered, distracted, negative? Are you surrounded by the proverbial crabs that are trying to pull you back in the bucket as soon as you seem like you might get out of the bucket? Right? Being a really, really great steward and groundskeeper of the land and the world around you and sweeping 90 plus percent of the junk out of your space and just being left with a very, very pure and limited set of environmental aspects around you that support you and edify you and keep you focused on your goal. So that right there is six things that you can do to get hyper motivated to do that extra stuff that's really where all the results are.
I hope you've enjoyed this video. If so, give me a like. If you want more like this, give me a subscribe. And if you have any comments or questions, I'd love to hear from you below. That is my favorite part of doing what I do is getting to converse with my audience. So thanks again. I'll see you on the next video. Hey, if you liked this video, then you're going to love this video. I am not going to motivate you in this video. I'm going to teach you how you can motivate yourself every day consistently on demand, make sure that you're getting the most out of what's possible for your life.
