Transfer Life Lessons Without Transferring Trauma | Simon Sinek EP 493

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

0:11I was in New York on September 11th and lived through it. You were there? Yeah. I watched the buildings fall. Really? Yeah, yeah. I actually did the calculations. I figured it out. It was exactly one mile. You could see the buildings? From my office, yeah. I was walking. I took the subway, and the subway stopped at 14th Street, and I still had to get to Soho. So I walked down 7th Avenue. The end of 7th Avenue was the World Trade Center. Wow. And so I was walking down watching them burning. Holy cow. And then got to work. And the view from my office was the World Trade Center. No way. That's embossed in my brain.

0:42I'm not going to forget that image of it. What was that day like, watching it at your office? When I woke up in the morning, because the first plane hit shortly after 8 a.m. and I hadn't left the house yet. Had you already heard about it? Well, it was on the news. A friend of mine called me and said, turn on the news. So I turned on the news and there was a hole in the World Trade Center and it was burning. But the scale of those buildings is so huge that we couldn't tell that it was an airliner. We thought it was a Cessna. So you saw a hole in the building. The buildings were so big. You literally just thought it was a...

1:14And it was a beautiful day. So it's not like there was a storm. Perfect day. So we just thought it was an idiot and a Cessna. And I went to work. And people started to talk about it on the bus. I was taking the cross-town bus. Like, did you see what happened? And by the time I got off the subway on 14th Street, because, you know, media disappears under the ground, Now there were people sitting on the sides of the street listening to radios in their cars. And at this point now, we started to realize this was terrorism. We started to recognize what it was pretty quickly, but we didn't know what the implications were.

1:43And we also didn't expect the buildings to fall down. You know, it was a weird flaw in how the buildings were made because, you know, most buildings had internal load-bearing structures. And what made the World Trade Center unique was all the load-bearing structures were on the outside. And so the floors basically floated in the middle. Wow. Except for the elevators, where you could stand on one side of the World Trade Center, inside and look clear over to the side of the building. It was an amazing building. Wow. And so they collapsed on top of each other when they came down, which nobody knew would happen.

2:10I was in constant contact with my sister, who worked also in Soho across town. Wow. And we were talking constantly, and after the second building fell, I called her up and said, I'm coming to get you, we're going to go home. We lived uptown. And so I walked across town to get her. We were part of the mass exodus, walking four miles uptown. And of all the thousands of images that were captured, that day, one image that was really never captured was very quiet. We were all walking in one direction, thousands of people, no cars on the road, walking north. No one in the subway. Everybody's just like...

2:45Everybody's above ground. All going, it was very quiet and speckled in between all of this exodus where people covered head to toe in soot. But other than that, everything was normal. They were holding their briefcase and their newspaper and it was just covered in debris. They were covered. I mean, we saw the pictures of people covered, but they were just speckled. My sister, she had two colleagues, which we dropped them off on the way. And I remember there was all four of us and we were coming up Park Avenue and there was a guy sitting on a stoop frantically calling somebody, frantically calling.

3:20And we walked up to him and we said, give us the number. No words were spoken. We just, I remember we just walked up and said, give us the number, will help call. And he held up his address book. He just pointed. He didn't have words. We all typed in the number into our phones. We're hitting, you know, send, send, send, send, send. Every single one of us is trying to call. We were all getting busy signals. My sister's phone got through. She hands him the phone. He takes it. He says, I'm okay. I'm okay. And gives the phone back and walked away. We dropped off two of my sister's friends, her colleagues, and it was just my sister and me walking up the rest of the way.

4:02And we got to Grand Central Station, which blocks Park Avenue, so you have to go around it. And as we got there, somebody started screaming, run, run, run. And we saw the cops, because there were fighter jets flying over, so you heard planes, but you didn't know what they were. So you heard planes flying over. And we looked down the street, and the cops were going like this. and everybody started running and like dropping things and shoes falling off. They thought another plane had hit. We didn't know what it was. So I grabbed my sister and I like, and I'm thinking to myself, okay, there's going to be a blast.

4:31It's going to come down like this. And I pulled her off the street and like put our hands like up against the building. And I look up and it's a huge glass. It's a shop window. And I'm like, this is not going to be good. So I grab her and we just start running and then eventually just sort of petered out. It was a bomb scare. It turned out later. We made our way back up town and didn't leave for, you know, two weeks. You know, we just, like everybody, just started watching television obsessive. Non-stop, yeah. How did that moment of being there, Ground Zero, really shape you emotionally after that, after experiencing it in person?

5:05September 11th was very important to me in my career because I worked in advertising. I struggled to go back to that stupid job in that stupid industry. Really? Yeah. I really, once I did go back to work, I'm like, what am I doing with my life? And I think a lot of people had the realization, the life that I live is stupid and I want to do something that matters. And that's when I started thinking, this is the stupidest industry in the world. Like I come to work to help people something they don't need. My entrepreneurial venture started pretty shortly after that so I could do things my way. Interesting.

5:34And do things with purpose and started talking about things in a very different way. So yeah, it was pretty formative. I mean, and it took, unfortunately, a big breakdown to happen. Maybe you had already noticed it, but that was really the eye-opening, like, okay, I've got to make a change. I think that's not interesting to me. I think what is interesting to me is why does it go bad? When you have that life-changing experience, you don't make a change. No, no, you do make a change, but then it runs out. So I saw this happen after September 11th in New York. For quite a long time, I would say months, New York was utopia.

6:07There was no crime. Everyone came together. Everyone came together. There was literally no crime. Everyone loved each other, strangers, what do you need, I'm here for you. Nothing. The total number of racially motivated crimes in New York after September 11th was zero. So Nook Day took their anger out on an Arab population, for example. And I remember thinking to myself, this is going to go away. Like, we're going to forget, and we're just going to go back to being New York again. Wow. And sure enough, in enough time, we got distracted by the short term. COVID was no different. In the middle of COVID, we're all thinking, oh my God, you know, I have to reevaluate my life, my work-life balance.

6:41You know, I don't want to work like a crazy person like I used to anymore. productivity is not going to be my primary metric of whether I'm having a good day or not. And that went away. Or working like idiots again, and productivity is like people look down on you now if you're not having a productive day. We forget the biology of the dopamine-driven animal that is more driven by the short-term and the visual. That, to me, upsets me more. Why do you think, in our personal lives, it takes a near-death experience to us or someone around us, a big health scare, a divorce, a breakup, or a massive breakdown in a career or something, for us to see a new path and start improving who we are, becoming better, transforming, overcoming this breakdown.

7:28And why does it sound like it takes war or conflict or something extremely scary out there for us to come together and start to transform as well as people? We're a myopic bunch. Human beings are very dopamine-driven. You know, find the food, look for shelter, then do it again. And long-term planning is not really our strength as a species. Because long-term planning exists in our imaginations. I better save money for the day that I retire 60 years from now. We're bad at it. We're bad as governments at it. We're bad as individuals at it. We're just bad at it. We're not engineered for it. And what near-death experiences do or competitive threats do is their tangible reminders of what could be.

8:12Again, we're tangibly driven animals, right? We love tangibility, metrics, things we can see. You know, you hear a bump in the night, you have to go look for it. It makes it real. Even though global threats have existed since the fall of the Soviet Union, now that you can see one, now you can give it a name and a flag, you know, and a language, it becomes a real thing. And I think the same goes for new death experiences. It's like my mortality, which was something that I didn't think about, is now real, which is why I ask old people for advice. They give the best advice because they don't give what you think about them because they've accepted their own mortality.

8:47The end is near. The end is near. And so I'm not doing anything to please you anymore. Yeah, I'm not trying to impress you. You know, talk to a 20-year-old and talk to a 70-year-old and see what kind of advice you get. And it's not just experience and wisdom. Of course, that factors in as well. You know, one is much more concerned about what you think about them. The other one really doesn't care. I think that's what these shocks do. And I think one of the things that storytelling does, one of the things that you do and I do and others do, is by telling the stories of other people's near-death experiences or other people's losses, hopefully, hopefully inspires people to take on themselves without having to go through the challenge themselves.

9:32Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

10:22Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.