How to Avoid Being Cash Rich and Life Poor | Robin Sharma & Blake Mycoskie

0:02Lemonada.

0:05Better days will come even though because of the negativity bias of the human brain, we can't see it. Welcome to No Magic Pill. I created this podcast after going through seven years of depression and learning the hard way that there wasn't one thing out there that was going to fix me. I tried everything, therapy, medication, psychedelics, brain stimulation. And what I came to realize is that for so many of us, the real struggle isn't just pain, it's disconnection. Disconnection from our purpose, our creativity, and our deeper self. And that's why having Robin Sharma on the podcast today means so much to me.

0:48Anyone who's listening who wants to dramatically upgrade their life, get rid of the dream stealers and the energy vampires. Robin is the author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, a book I read when I was 26 years old that changed the direction of my life and helped open me up to living with more purpose and presence. If you look at the great writers, the great creative people, those people were fully present with their work. They were fully present with their art. In this episode, we talk about mindset, purpose, daily practices, and what real wealth actually looks like. And no matter what you do, you do it with pride and a commitment to mastery.

1:32Incredible way to find joy, happiness, and a currency money can't buy. So if you're looking to optimize your life or you are feeling stuck, burnout, or like you've lost your way, or you know someone that is feeling that way, this conversation is absolutely for you.

1:56Okay, Robin, thank you so much for being on the show. And I just want to start by saying how much I've been looking forward to this conversation. And I must say it's a little surreal because I read The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari 24 years ago. And it had such a huge impact on my life. At that point, I had been an entrepreneur for about eight or nine years. I'd been successful as a young entrepreneur, but I was really feeling burnt out. And when I found that book, I just saw myself in the main character so much. and what I learned in that book really changed the trajectory of my entrepreneurial life.

2:37And frankly, I think it's the whole reason I started Tom's Shoes. So I just want to start this conversation by saying thank you for writing that book and having such an influence on my life. You're very kind to say that. And if I've been helpful, Blake, then that makes me feel great. I should mention I'm deep into finishing my new book. and I'd only do this podcast for you and because you asked. So I'll try to be as clear and give you hopefully a valuable interview, but just know I've been at this new book for weeks and weeks. It's kind of become a devotion bordering on an obsession, but I'll give you my best today.

3:19Thank you so much. And I think, you know, in terms of this conversation, which might be a little bit different than other ones you've had, You know, the whole reason I started the No Magic Pill podcast was really to help others at a time of maybe struggle or suffering because I struggled a lot after I sold Tom's shoes. I had almost seven years. I battled depression. It got so bad that I almost took my own life, which is really hard to even say out loud these days because it seems so long ago. But what I realized was, and the reason why I really wanted to have this conversation with you is, you know, so often we think that chronic, you know, really severe anxiety or depression is chemical.

4:03But what I really found for me was it wasn't chemical. It was really about disconnection, disconnection from my purpose, disconnection from creativity and really from myself. And I feel like at the core of your work, whether it was, you know, your most recent book or The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, you're really about helping someone connect to themselves. And I really hope that we keep in mind in this conversation that person today that might be listening that doesn't feel connected to themselves, that might be struggling, that might be suffering, might feel like they've made too many wrong turns in life.

4:40because I think that is something that you have really given the world is tools and practices through your storytelling, through your writing on how to reconnect with themselves. And so I just want to say that that's kind of what I'm hoping to gain from this interview is to really help that person who might be listening and really going through hard times. So thank you again for being on the show. And I'd like to start with The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari because that book, was the beginning for me. And I had so much fun. I actually reread the book in preparation for the interview. So it's been 20 something years and I got it back out and I enjoyed it just as much.

5:22And there were four parts of the book that I really wanted to focus on at the top of this show. And the first one is this idea of your mind as a garden. You know, I really like that metaphor and how what you plant and what you allow to grow kind of determines everything. So I would love to hear from your words, you know, how did you come to this concept and how has that really impacted the way you live your life and the way you teach people and coach people? Well, you know, Blake, I wrote The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari about 28 years ago and my thinking has evolved. You hear a lot of pundits talking about mindset is everything.

6:04and right now I don't think mindset is everything. So I think the mind needs to be protected. Your psychology is important. We live in a very volatile world. There's so much negative news. There's so much social polarization, and I think we need to protect our focus. We need to protect our psychology, but I believe mindset is just part of the human performance. Let's call it education. There's also we have an emotional life, not just our psychology. I call that our emotionality. Then we have a physical life, and that's our physicality. And then we have a spiritual life, our soul set or our spirituality.

6:43And I think to really be highly functioning as human beings, we need to calibrate and, let's say, optimize all four of those interior dimensions. But, yeah, it's very important to see your mind as a garden and to remember that you become your conversations. I think we are absolutely a function of our ecosystem. We're a function of the conversations we have. We're a function of the places where we work. We're a function of the places we go to. And so, you know, I sure am no guru, but I try very hard to protect what enters my psychology, especially, again, in this world that we live in where there's just so much toxicity.

7:26And I think we live in a dark time. I know, you know, you're a seasoned, much-respected leader. And I think a lot of people are really discouraged right now, but I would say that real leaders emerge not in the light but in the darkness. And a great hero of mine is Nelson Mandela. And my life changed when I stood in his prison cell about roughly 10 years ago. And from what I learned about Nelson Mandela, he became Nelson Mandela not when everything was going well, but he became Nelson Mandela when everything was falling apart. I love that you brought up Nelson Mandela. He's also a hero of mine, and I've stood in that same cell in Robben Island almost 25 years ago.

8:12So actually before I even had the opportunity to read your book and I agree. I think that, you know, it's through our pain and through our suffering that oftentimes we not only learn the most, but we can even get further clarity on what our purpose really is. And I think about mind, you know, the mind is a garden. And, you know, part of my healing was I had to recognize that I was carrying around this core wound that I never felt that I was enough. And I was constantly chasing achievement to try to get the external validation that my inner self wasn't capable of understanding. And I think that I look at it now as that was like a weed, you know, weed in my garden, this feeling of not feeling enough.

8:57And I had to extract that. And I think there's a lot of people listening right now that are saying, man, I feel like I'm just constantly ruminating in these negative thoughts. I don't know how to get them out of my mind. is there any specific you know kind of tip or tactic you would say to someone who finds that their garden doesn't feel like a garden it actually feels more like you know the upside down and and stranger things or it feels like a really dark place like how do they how do they start to weed those negative thoughts out of their mind yeah it's a it's a great question i first i'd love to respond to what you said about core wounds and you know i i mentor a lot of very senior leaders.

9:43And I'd say almost to a person, they all have the wound you spoke of. They all felt they weren't enough. And it always goes back to a mother or father. They just never were enough for a mother or a father. And so they have this, what I call an ancient wound or an invisible wound. And they have a hole that they're trying to fill with more money and more achievement, more applause and more performance. And they get to a place where they're at the top of the mountain, and they wonder if they've climbed the wrong mountain. And I've worked with a lot of people who've exited companies, and one in particular told me, said, you know, I watched the wire come in, and I thought I'd feel completely different.

10:26And a fortune arrived in his bank account, and he was stunned that he felt completely the same. And it's that old Zen proverb where wherever you go, there you are. And so, of course, strategy is important and building an A-plus team is important. A great operation is important. Delivering huge value to your customers is incredibly important. But I think everything does begin within. And to be a great leader and have a really rich life, and I've written my latest book is The Wealth Money Can't Buy, based on the eight forms of wealth that I started teaching my clients over 20 years ago. and we can talk about those because I believe money is only one form of wealth, and we can get confused about that.

11:10But I think doing that inner healing that you spoke about is really important. So you asked about a tactic. One of the tactics that has worked incredibly well in my life is what I call MVP. MVP, we know in sports, is most valuable player. And I think if you want to be the most valuable player of your life, practice meditation, visualization, and prayer. And we're all looking for a holy grail. Your podcast, the name is perfect, right? We're all, so many people are looking for the magic pill. But I must tell you, in my own life, I've read a lot of books and I've done a lot of different modalities.

11:46But meditating, and I believe 4 a.m. is the new 5 a.m. So about two years ago, I started getting up at 4 a.m. and I started going to bed a little bit earlier. and from about 4 o 'clock to 4.15 I started meditating and then visualizing for about 20 minutes and then praying. And we can go granular and I can share how I do it if it's helpful. But nothing happened for the first few weeks. Nothing happened for the first few months. But after about six months of this practice, I started finding I was so much more present. I was little things that would bother me, didn't bother me. and my performance really rose very significantly.

12:29So I think the combination of meditating, visualizing and praying first thing in the morning is a great way to reduce that toxicity or fear that you spoke of or that darkness. I love that. And I would love to go click a bit deeper into that. So for someone who maybe doesn't have a meditation practice, what exactly are you doing when you're meditating? Is this a mantra-based meditation? Is this insight meditation? Is this TM? What has worked best for you? I find breathing is very helpful. Just inhaling, exhaling, and being present to my breathing. And if my mind strays, I just bring it back to the activity of breathing.

13:15And that, I find, increases my focus and increases my ability to concentrate. Also, meditating in a way that focuses on maybe a phrase, like a mantra, as you suggest, I find is very powerful. And maybe most helpful for the first 20 minutes of my day is just doing a body scan and locating, okay, is there something blocked? Is there something tight? And what I've learned is that could be fear or it could be some emotion that you're holding on to. And once you start to breathe into it and pay attention to it, it starts to dissolve. It sounds very simple, but I've learned it to be very profound. Because the more we can release our fear, the more we, in business, do fearless things.

14:02The more we release a feeling that we're not enough, the more in business we can shine a light on the gifts and talents of our teammates. The more we locate in our body where we might have scarcity because Whereas maybe we're four years old and something happened where we set up an emotional contract of scarcity and we release that. We go out in the world and we think abundance. Is that important for an entrepreneur? Of course. You ask for bigger deals. You're better in negotiations. You think a bigger game. So anyone who might be thinking, wow, Blake and Robin are talking about MVP. They're talking about healing.

14:43That doesn't apply to me. I say this with great respect. One of the greatest things you could possibly do as an entrepreneur and as a business builder is optimize your self-identity. Because you'll never rise any higher than the way you perceive yourself. You are. 100%. Right? We are our own worst enemy. And so all the externals, of course, they're important. Branding, marketing, operations, team, value creation for customers. Of course, execution. but it all does start within. And that to me is what real leadership is about. I love that you brought that up. I mean, that has been my experience on this healing journey.

15:23You know, when I was experiencing depression, I did not have a single entrepreneurial idea for seven years. I thought I would never start another business. I wasn't, I thought Tom's was just a fluke and I had these negative thoughts and I didn't really, and I didn't feel I was enough. And then as I went on this healing journey and really healed that and really felt that in my body, which also was something that took a long time. I'm glad you brought up that you didn't feel anything in your MVP for almost six months until it really started to pay off because a lot of people were looking for a quick fix and it was not a quick fix for me.

15:56It was over a year of working through this. But once I really healed that and understood why I had it and then let it go, since then I've started three new companies in 12 months. I've launched this podcast. I've launched a nonprofit. I mean, I've never been more productive and people are asking me why. And I was like, cause now I'm playing with a different energy. I'm not playing to prove myself to someone. I'm not playing out of fear. I'm playing cause I feel enough. And whether these businesses work or whether people watch the podcast, it still is coming from this place of just joy. And I'm so glad you brought that up because I often think people ask me this question like, oh, well, if you didn't feel enough, would you have had as much ambition?

16:41Would you have been able to do these things? And the answer is absolutely. Because now, once you said we work on ourselves, then we can rise as leaders and create something from abundance. And it's just also a lot more fun. So, I'm really glad that you brought that up. Yeah, I would say, I call it, the question I ask is, what's your root intention? Is the real reason you're building? Because you're feeling not enough, and if that's the case, then you're building from an energy of fear. If your real reason for building your new companies, if your real reason for wanting to dominate your domain, if your real reason for wanting to have an incredibly rich life is because it's coming from joy and self-respect and wanting to distribute value for lots of people and do things for the people that you love, then it's not coming from fear.

17:37It's coming from a really positive place. And I think the way I try to look at it, maybe I'm wrong, but I try to be in the world but not of the world. I love that. And what I try to do is, like you, I like to win, but I try not to need to win. And I try in my best to get to a place where if I was to lose everything, it still wouldn't cost me my peace. And I think that is in many ways to get to a place inside where you create the life you want on the outside, but you don't need it. You don't cling to it. And so inside you've got to a place of such sovereignty, let's call it, where you're peaceful, you're joyful, you're centered, you're grounded.

18:24And this is what a lot of the new book I'm writing about is. It's like, you know, the hero, it's another story like the 5 a.m. club and the monk who sold his Ferrari. Oh, great. And the hero was successful, maybe a little bit like Julian Mantle in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, and he left it. And he's so peaceful, and he's so grounded, and he's so rooted, but he still understands the power of ambition. But I would call it post-success ambition. And I think that's the most powerful ambition that you have. because I think a lot of people suffer from the trap of they're ambitious because they don't want to feel left out, and they want to prove something to other people.

19:08I think there's another type of ambition. That was me. 100%. That was me. You're describing my life up until the last couple years. I think there's a different type of ambition, Blake. It's basically you run your own race and you play your own game, And it's not about building something great so you feel enough. It's about building something great because of the human capability to live our gifts and our talents. And I think that's a completely different game. It's not born of fear. It's not born of comparison. It's not born of worry. It's born of saying, I want to do something beautiful with my life.

19:51I've been born with whatever potential. and I want to do something great and I want to do it for myself and for my loved ones, but also for the benefit of the world. Yeah. And that's exactly where I've landed. And I think that's why I'm having so much fun being an entrepreneur and doing this podcast is because it's from a place of joy and it's a place of purpose. And in Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, you talk about purpose and dharma. And I think that that is something that when you align with that, everything else seems to flow a lot more effortlessly. And I'm curious, 30 years ago when you wrote the book, what experience in your life gave you that insight, that that was really at the core of great leadership?

20:41Well, I had a great leader in my family, and that's my father. My dad is going to be 89 in June. And for 54 years, he was a family doctor. And I think he was a family doctor, but maybe also a great philosopher. And so he filled our home with books and he used to give all sorts of lessons to my brother and I. And one of the things he used to say to me when I was growing up is he'd quote a Sanskrit poem and he'd say, Robin, when you were born, you cried while the world rejoiced live your life in such a way that when you die the world cries while you rejoice beautiful and he would talk about humility and he would give examples to me and my brother of see that guy who launched this hospital well he used to walk around with these cloth bags and you know he you could never tell that he had any wealth and and so I believe from a very young age, there was this idea of service.

21:43And my father's father was a priest. And so my dad really gave me this idea of calling. And like I say, I'm writing this new book and I could have mailed it in. It was good maybe six weeks ago. And Blake, I'm going to the wall here. You know, I was thinking the other day, like this book is killing me. And it's not really killing me, but it's kind of like this book is killing me. Like, it's like my eyes are blurry. I've looked at the manuscript so many times. I'm trying to get every line right. But why am I doing it? It's because this is my oxygen. I believe this is why I'm here on the planet. I see the faces in my meditation and prayers of the readers reading this book and hopefully gaining value and lighting up.

22:34And so to your point, I think whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're a writer, whether you're an astronaut, whether you're a teacher, if you, not cognitively, but if you put your emotions into your cause, I know you have a lot of entrepreneurs who follow you. If you're doing it for the money, you're not going to win. If you're doing it to serve, if you're doing it to change lives, if you're doing it to help people, as perhaps esoteric and altruistic as it sounds, that's where you get the emotional fire to run through walls when you get knocked down and keep going when you feel exhausted like I am through this creative process I'm experiencing right now.

23:13I love that. And thank you for sharing about your dad. You know, it's something I did want to ask about. My dad also is a huge influence in my life and he's also a doctor. I read that you actually were born in Uganda. Is that correct? Correct. And so was your dad practicing medicine in Uganda? Exactly. He graduated from medical school in Agra, India, where the Taj Mahal is. And then he went to Africa, met my mom in Kenya, and then they moved to Uganda where my father worked as what they called a field doctor. That just warms my heart. having spent so much time in Africa giving children shoes over the years with Tom's.

23:56I mean, just seeing someone being of service and medical is such an important need there that oftentimes they don't have the best care. So I can see why you're such an amazing person having a dad like that. Hello, everyone. I decided not to take advertisers for this first season of No Magic Pill. Instead, I want to use a break to talk about a few things that have had a huge impact on my mental wellness journey. The first thing I spoke about in my episode with Michael Pollan, it's an AI therapy app called Sonia. Now, I was super skeptical when I first heard about this, but I met the founders at a mental health conference.

24:31They encouraged me to try it. They said it was HIPAA compliant, totally secure. I've been using it for six months now. I still have my therapist, but I don't know about you, but like at 4 a.m. when I wake up with a ton of anxiety or I'm up late at night ruminating about something I wish I hadn't said, like my therapist isn't available at those times of day. So that's when I go with Sonia and it has had such a huge impact on my mental health. So the company just launched, it's in the Apple app store and they let you try it free for a couple of weeks. So whether you have a therapist or not, it can be so helpful.

25:05I've told all my friends about this, my dad's using it, my sister-in-law, and I'm even using it like a life coach as well as a therapist. Like I tell it like, hey, send me a text on Mondays and Wednesdays and make sure that I'm actually in the gym. So I want to show a real short clip of me actually using Sonia so you can get a feel for it. I'm here. What's on your mind right now? Oh, I'm just feeling a little stressed about things right now because I feel like I've got so much going on and I really don't know how to prioritize it. When everything stacks up at once, it can blur what actually matters and make that old not enough story get louder.

25:43Let's slow this down by picking one thread to start with what feels most pressing in this moment. The important reframe is this. The projects did not cure the depression. They arrived because you healed. And when you overwork to prevent relapse, you actually undermine the things that keep you well, like sleep, presence, movement, and connection. When that edge shows up, it is a signal to reduce load and restore choice, not to push harder. Can I just say one thing, Blake? Yes, please. With Tom's, you had an amazing mantra and And from what I remember from the events that we did together, it was like for each pair you would help a child.

26:29It was something like that, right? Yeah. So every time, for every pair we sold, we donated one pair. We called it one for one. And so over the period of the 12 years I ran it, we gave about 100 million children's shoes all over the world. Wow. So the reason I remembered that is one for one, when I went to Nelson Mandela's prison cell, the guide who was showing me around Robben Island said he actually was in prison with Nelson Mandela for eight years. Oh, wow. And I said, well, what was he like? And he said, that man was a humble servant. And then he also said he used to tell all of his fellow political prisoners, each one teach one.

27:20And it just reminded me of one for one because I think that's in many ways one by one is how you cascade leadership through a world. Well, thank you for saying that. And now you definitely do that with your books. I mean, I love the idea that you're in your visualizations, you're seeing the readers of this new book because, you know, there's another 25 year old me out there that's going to read this and it's going to change their life. And so, well, I want to hit one more thing on the Monk who sold his Ferrari and then I want to get to the wealth money can't buy. but one of the things in the monkey's soul is Ferrari that I had not really spent a lot of time focusing on up until my you know when I first read it was this idea of how important presence is and you know living with intention in the present moment and I just wanted to tell you something I haven't told you before is that had such an impact on me that my very first tattoo ever is this one right here.