Stop Wasting Your Life Before It’s Too Late! | Jesse Itzler EP 755

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12When I first got there, literally the first minute I walked in, I took a quick tour. And the main monk, like my grand poobah, brother Christopher, said to me, tomorrow we're going to start at 7.15 a.m. with prayer, reflection, and meditation. And I was like, great. It's 6.05 p.m. What do I do for the next 13 hours? And he looked at me dead in the eye and he said, you think? And I was sitting in the room the size of this desk, basically. I said, okay, I'm going to try to meditate. I'm not a big meditator. My form of meditation has been running. So I set my timer for 20 minutes and I'm like, let me try to focus on my mantra.

0:52And I'm going through my routine and I'm getting bombarded with thoughts. And time is going by and I'm like, why hasn't my timer beeped? You know, I've been at this. So I'm like, well, maybe I didn't set it. Let me reset it. I'm like, no, I don't want to cheat. It's going to happen any minute. So I go back into my mantra and back into my mantra. And after it felt like forever, I'm like, I didn't start the timer. So I go to reset my timer and I look down three minutes and 27 seconds. And I'm like, whoa, I am that distracted that I can't even like sit quietly for three minutes. Like I'm that overwhelmed and distracted.

1:29and I realized that like I'm here for 15 days. What am I going to do? I realized, you know, when I came home, everybody asked me what I missed the most, but nobody asked me what I didn't miss. And I realized that a lot of things that I didn't miss filled up my calendar during March Madness. I've grown up watching March Madness and filling out the brackets and watching all the games. And I didn't miss that at all. You know, I didn't miss going and searching through Netflix, the thousands of films that I could maybe watch and short circuiting because it's just too much. I didn't miss a lot of stuff that I do every day.

2:07I'm turning 50. The average American lives to be 78 years old. If I'm average, I got 28 years left. But if you reverse engineer that, if you reverse engineer the next 30 years, the relevant years you have to do things that you want to do. It's limited, you know? So my enemy is the clock. And I realized, man, I just got to live with so much urgency and to put as much stuff of the things that I love to do with the people that I love to do them with on my plate. And that's like, as soon as I got home, I'm like, I'm a limit. I'm saying no to everything unless it moves the buckets in my family life, wellness, business finances or cause related when i first started out in in the music business i was writing theme songs for professional sports teams but i had no money i had like a hundred dollars in my bank account and i needed money to write demos to create these demos to present them because everything was on spec yeah do you like it buy it it wasn't like hey i want to write you this theme song will you give me money 10 grand so i can go in the studio you're to make it you're to make it.

3:17Deliver the product, yeah. And then if they liked it, they would buy it. But I had no money to make it. So I went to this music manager and he said, I'll lend you the$10 ,000 you need to make four or five of these demos. But I want 10 % for that. I want 10 % of you forever. Forever. Forever. Like I'm investing in you. I'm giving you the 10 grand. I don't know where this is going to go. And I was like, I'll do it. I'm 21 years old, 10 % of me,$10 ,000. There wasn't nothing without this money. But before I finalized the deal, I went and talked to my friend's father, who was a big business mogul.

3:57And I went into his apartment and I start to tell him the story and he stops me. And he says, Jesse, I will trade every single thing I have for the one thing that you have youth and the process the journey of going through the unknown the struggle the uncertainty everything the wins the losses just the whole thing he would give up everything to go back to that to go back to that i've been really aware of that like that here i am 30 years later still talking about that wow but now more so now i don't want to get to be 70 and 80 and have that thought in my head. Like I want to live my life with that kind of urgency and fill up my plate.

4:42So I don't have that regret that like, because when you're in a routine, time goes really fast. And then you wake up and you're 70. When you get out of your routine, like at the monastery and you look at the thing and it's three minutes and 27 seconds, time slows down. I want to stop the clock, man. I got four kids. So my relationship with time in general was reestablished at the monastery. Really? Definitely. So like I climbed Mount Washington. I didn't get to the summit with five friends and I came back. And Mount Washington is a really dangerous mountain in the winter. I think it's one of the 10 most dangerous mountains because of the climate.

5:21It's cold, like minus 30 and the winds get up to 50 to 75 miles an hour and no visibility, blah, blah. So I didn't get, because of that, I didn't get to the top of this journey I did with five of my close friends. I came back, and I'm talking to my wife about it. And because I posted it on Facebook, I was getting bombarded with, you didn't make it. Six miles to the top, you couldn't get. And I said to Sarah, I failed. And I felt terrible. I let my friends down. We put it out there. And she said, no, no, no, sweetie. She said, first of all, you numbskull, get a tour guide. Right, don't do it on your own.

5:59Get proper equipment and train for it and go back next year, next winter, and knock it out. And I was like, next winter? I'm going back on Saturday. Wow. That's the urgency. Because there's no guarantee what next winter is going to do. You know, like we could talk about all of our vision. My thing would be like, well, do it now. You have a five-year plan? That takes too long, man. Yeah, it does. It takes too long. Yeah. So that's what I mean about my relationship with time. It's like, yes, I eliminated a lot of the things that were no's, but I also created a tremendous amount of urgency. I started to look at my enemy, my greatest enemy, is the clock.

6:58show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.