Why Humans Need Death To Wake Up | Simon Sinek

0:00Simon Sinek:Now at the Home Depot, receive 12 months special financing and free basic installation on carpet projects with LifeProof, LifeProof with PetProof Technology, Home Decorators Collection, and Traffic Master Carpets. Bring a new look to your floors or give them a durable surface that stands up to life's tough messes. Get 12 months special financing on installed carpet projects right now at the Home Depot. Offer valid March 12th through March 29th, 2026. Exclusions and additional charges may apply. For licenses, see homedepot.com slash license numbers. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:42Why 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? You know, we're a myopic bunch, you know. human beings are very dopamine driven you know find the food look for shelter you know um then do it again and long-term planning is not really our strength as a species uh because long-term planning exists in our imaginations i better save money for the day that i retire 60 years from now you know it's just like well or i could just bite now because it feels better right we're just 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 um and so i think i think uh that's a part of it um and what near death experiences do or um competitive threats do is they're tangible reminders of what could be because we're again 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 you know um and so uh it makes it real um so even though global threats have existed since the fall of the soviet union now that you can see one, you know, now you can give it a name and a flag, you know, in a language, it becomes a real thing.

2:16And I think the same goes for, um, 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, ask old people for advice. They give the best advice because they don't give it what you think about them because they're close. Cause they've accepted the, their own mortality. The 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 um 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 um uh so i think i think that's what these 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 that's the ideal but you know I remember after September 11th I was in New York on September 11th and lived through it You were there?

3:30Yeah. I watched the buildings fall. Really? Yeah, yeah. Where, what part of, uh... I was downtown. I was in Soho. Really? So just about, I was, I actually did the calculations. I figured out I was exactly one mile. You could see the buildings? From my office, yeah. I watched, I was, 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, um, which 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.

4:01No way. And yeah, I remember the very strange, yeah, that's embossed in my brain. I'm not going to forget that image of it. What was that? I mean, this is a little sidetrack here, but what was that day like? I mean, watching it at your office, what was the scene like? Were people paying attention? Was all eyes on the building? Yeah, of course, of course, of course. Wow. Wow. We were, you know, at this point, 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.

4:38So 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 beautiful day. So it's not like there was a storm. It was a perfect day. So we just thought it was an idiot in 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, you know, 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.

5:16Now 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. So we started to recognize what it was pretty quickly, but we didn't know what the implications were. And we also didn't expect the buildings to fall down. You know, it was a weird flaw in how the buildings were made that made them... 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.

5:44Wow. So except for the elevators, you could stand on one side of the World Trade Center inside and look clear over to the side of the building. And, you know, it was an amazing building. Wow. And so they collapsed on top of each other when it came down, which nobody knew would happen. And so I 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. And we lived uptown. and so I walked across town together and 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, and I went through all the books and everything one image that was really never captured was this, it was very quiet we were all walking in one direction You can just imagine thousands of people, no cars on the road, walking north.

6:48No one in the subway. No. Yeah, everyone's just like... Everybody's above ground. And we're 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. and 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's a guy sitting on a stoop frantically calling somebody I guess to tell them that he was alive frantically calling and 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, we'll help call.

7:40And he held up his address book. He just pointed. He didn't have words. We all typed in the number into our phones and we're hitting, you know, send, send, send, send, send. Every single one of us was trying to call. We were all getting busy signals. My sister's phone got through. She hands him the phone. He takes it and he says, I'm okay, I'm okay. And gives the phone back and walks away. And we're all crying, obviously. um 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 and we got to uh uh 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 what they were so you've heard planes flying over and and we look down uh the street and the cops are going like this and everybody started running and like dropping things and shoes falling off they thought another plane had hit we don't know what it was so i grabbed my sister and i like and i'm thinking to myself okay there's gonna be a blast it's gonna come down like this and i pulled her off the street and like put our hands you know like like up against the building and i look up and It's a huge glass.

8:59You know, 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 it just sort of petered out. It was a bomb scare. It turned out later. And then we made our way to the rest. 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 obsessively. Non-stop, yeah. Holy cow. Did you guys, did you go back to work? Or did it, like, work was done for weeks? Work was done for weeks. And when it opened up, like nobody really wanted to go. And my office was in part of the town in part of the New York that was shut down.

9:33Like you couldn't get there. couldn't get there.

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11:23Simon Sinek:Now at the Home Depot, receive 12 months special financing and free basic installation on carpet projects with LifeProof, LifeProof with PetProof Technology, Home Decorators Collection, and Traffic Master Carpets. Bring a new look to your floors or give them a durable surface that stands up to life's tough messes. Get 12 months special financing on installed carpet projects right now at The Home Depot. Offer valid March 12th through March 29th, 2026. Exclusions and additional charges may apply. For licenses, see homedepot.com slash license numbers.