In this episode, Steven Pesavento interviews Jeff Lerner - a highly successful entrepreneur and educator who teaches people how to think like an entrepreneur. They discuss the importance of understanding your purpose as the foundation of creating a fulfilling life. Through personal stories and experiences, Jeff shares how you can break free from the societal constructs that hold you back and step into a life of purpose and abundance.
Key Takeaways
Resources Mentioned
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About our Guest:
Jeff Lerner is a highly successful entrepreneur and educator who teaches people how to think like an entrepreneur. He is the CEO of ENTRE Institute, an entrepreneurial education platform that has enrolled almost 300,000 students. Jeff's personal story of success, failure, and growth has led him to the belief that understanding one's purpose is the foundation of a fulfilling life. His mission is to empower others to break free from societal constructs and live a purposeful life.
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What networks should I build? What financial goals should I set like? But people, people reverse the cart and the horse and they get on to all the practical questions. They don't even know what the point is. Yeah. And when you start with purpose, when you start with what you want, why you want it, and what you're actually here for, all of a sudden you can then back in to what are the things that you need to do?
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Learn, know, grow? Who do you need to be connected to that will actually get you on the path to being able to fulfill that purpose? I'm Steve Bass event doing Welcome to the Name Your Number Podcast presented by the Investor Mindset. As someone who comes from a challenging childhood, I've spent my life seeking financial security, personal growth and ultimately freedom.
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The freedom to not wake up worried about the next paycheck, but rather with the confidence of knowing that my passive income pays my bills without the need to think about it. When you name your number that you'll earn passively, that creates your ultimate quality of life, then I believe you've achieved real freedom. Welcome to my show. It's time to name your number.
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Today, I have Jeff Lerner in the studio. How are you doing today, Jeff? So great to be here, Steven. Thanks for having me and super good to have you. You've had a ton of success in business. You've had a big exit. You've had a ton of failure, a ton of lessons learned along the way. And I know you're now teaching people how to think like an entrepreneur.
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I'm a big fan of really changing those belief systems and helping people get closer to what they really want. So we'll get into all of that today. But before we do, Jeff, what was one of the first targets, the first things that you name that you were going after that was kind of on the path towards creating a different financial destiny than most people do.
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It's it's yeah, what a perfect question it was. It was in my case, it was in my teens. And I remember having this sort of like, you know how when you're a teenager, especially in hindsight recollection, everything seemed sort of dramatized. It was like the movie of your life when you were a teenager. So what did the one of the main scenes of that movie of My life was sitting alone in an abandoned music building on the campus of a boarding school that I had ended up having to apply and get into last minute because I got expelled from my my regular high school back in Houston where I lived.
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And then as soon as I got to that school, I contracted mono the first week I was there. So I wasn't allowed to meet anyone or talk to anyone or go to any of my classes. So I'd been like alone and roaming aimlessly on this campus at this boarding school in freezing cold western Massachusetts for a few months.
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My junior year of high school, no friends isolated, and I found this old abandoned music building. And I saw I was sitting at a piano just like trying to fill my time. And I started teaching myself to play the piano. And I had this moment where it was like God said, if you if you don't figure out something else to do that isn't about chasing money, then your life will be forever defined by the need to chase money and trade your time for it and do what other people tell you.
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You have to do for it. And and that was the moment that I committed myself. Basically, I said money will not be the most important currency in my life. And I and not long after that, a few months after that, I dropped out of high school to pursue a career as a self-taught musician. And I did. I ended up becoming a professional jazz musician for about ten years and then ultimately veered into entrepreneurship.
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But it all it all source back to that moment as a teenager when I made a decision that my life would not be defined by the pursuit of money, which ironically is one of the main reasons I have quite a bit of it. Yeah, that's it's a beautiful lesson, especially being able to connect to source and hear that message and receive it and then actually be able to take action on it.
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I'm curious, when you were growing up, did you come from a family that had money or was comfortable talking about money? Yeah, that's actually a really key part of the year. You're asking so far, two for two, just the right questions. I did. I came from a money, a very money conscious and and money, healthy family. My mom was a partner at a big law firm.
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My dad was an institutional investment broker and then he later became a high net worth money manager, wealth services, you know, financial professional. And so I had like successful white collar parents that had both pulled themselves up from nothing. They both came from a lower middle class, blue collar, scrappy upbringings, met each other in college and really bonded together to say like, let's live life the right way and pursue the American dream.
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And they did. And they were great models for that. They worked very hard. They got up early. They also got home at a reasonable hour and I had a nice home life in the evenings with them. And so I that blessed me in a couple of ways. I mean, particularly not my dad, they they didn't just make decent money.
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They my dad literally dealt with money as a career, right? So he was like teaching me about the stock market and about, you know, capitalizing businesses and how to read a balance sheet and, you know, price earnings and price to book value and how to pick stocks like as a kid, I would sit on my dad's knee and watch the ticker go by.
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That was back when they used to price stocks and eighths of a dollar. And IBM would be you know, would be like IBM just traded up a quarter point. My dad would go, that means my client just made so much money. I was like very aware of finance at a young age, but also very aware that having a lot of money and first of all, that it's all relative.
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I went I attended this school where even though I was by most standards, my family was financially successful, I was like one of the poor kids at the school that I went to because there were like billionaires sent their kids to their school and so forth. And like, yeah, it was all different types. But, but I had this unique lens as a kid to realize, like, money doesn't guarantee happiness.
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And I'm not so naive then, and certainly not now, is to say that money doesn't contribute to happiness or that it can, given the right preconditions, money can amplify any emotion, any experience, but it does it correlate directly to happiness. And that made it a lot easier as a teenager to go, I'm not going to chase this for the rest of my life because frankly, I was like a suicidally depressed teen at various points and like, having money didn't change that.
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And so I wasn't going to let it roll me. Well, I think it's so powerful that you had that lesson so early because all of those things really kind of like play into one another. I grew up super blue collar, lower middle class money was never a parent, was never enough of it. And I was obsessed with the idea that I had to get some of it, and that was going to solve all my problems.
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And yet I, you know, I had a lot of success, was making a lot of money, but I realized I still had the problems. They were still there. I just had money. So now I can pay professionals to deal with it and try to grow and learn. And so when you bring those two concepts together, it's it's like infinite opportunity is available because now you can really work on making yourself the best person you can be and enjoy the path and the journey and not focus on the money as the end result.
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But you can then also attract money into your life. Yeah, I think I had a really nice like my first 30. I mean, it's crazy how life works and I'm a big believer in this and frankly, we teach this as part of our platform that what you're supposed to do can be reverse engineered by everything that you've done and that you've experienced like life points you towards your purpose, whether you want it to or not.
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Right? So I look back on my life and it's like, okay, I had my first six years of life where a great body of evidence that money doesn't directly correlate to happiness. And then the next 14 years of my life dropping out of high school, becoming a self-taught musician, struggling my way up through the ranks as a working piano player in Houston, surrounded by people that, you know, jazz musicians are like the broke category of human on earth, maybe right next to like actors and, you know, surrounded by people that were really involved in this noble creative struggle to make art and not pursue money as their primary agenda.
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And also realize that, like being broke and poor really, really sucks too in a different way. And so it's not like, the glory in the, the, the poverty, the impoverished, starving artist life. Like, that's that's not any better. I've burned through two marriages. Nobody wants to be married to a broke jazz musician that comes home at five in the morning smelling like the bar that he's been working at.
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And so and then ultimately all these entrepreneurial ups and downs, which we can talk about. But but you sum all that up, and I basically realized that the key to a fulfilled, happy life and I like the word fulfilled a lot more than happy. It's like it's like it's like, yes. And it does money. Money does. And this is statistically validated.
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There's a lot of data on this. Money actually does directly correlate to a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in one's life, because the more money you have, the more empowered you are to live a life based on what you would choose to do rather than what you have to do. And then you could. But you couple that with like all of this non-monetary stuff that also has to be in place.
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And because, you know, again, I grew up around plenty of people whose parents were rich and miserable because they were owned by a hedge fund or owned by a hospital as a cardiologist or owned by a bank as a banker or, you know, I guess in a sense we're all owned by someone. And so there's this alternative way that, frankly, society and school don't actually teach in.
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And it falls to the alternative education industry, which has shows like this and platforms like mine and books like I wrote and this whole world out there, it's actually like this is the real way to truly be fulfilled in life. And they don't teach it in schools. And, and as an entrepreneur and as a guy who teaches alternative finance strategies, it's unbelievable how much more powerful it is when you learn a different way of thinking than than the traditional system.
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Because the system is broken, it's designed to keep you stuck. It's designed to keep you working in the machine. And they don't want you to become aware of this. They don't want you to know this information. They want you to continue down that path, to go to school, to try to get an A on every single quiz so you get out of the real world, which has nothing to do with school to then stay in the job because they want you to be stuck.
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Because when you're stuck, you're in control. Even if you're making a lot of money or not. If you're in the system and you don't have the authority and ability to make those decisions yourself, then you feel like you don't have the control that that is really right right there. And it's really a jail that you're the ones holding the door closed because they told you to.
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I'm so glad you said the system is broken. I have my book behind me. I could go turn to one of the many references in it I like. I speak almost obsessively about the broken system I like. I talk about. That's like anybody in my world knows. I'll hear Jeff goes again about the broken system, and I talk about it as this.
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This I draw it is a Venn diagram with three circles that intersect in the center of big education, big employment and big retirement. Those. So that's how I term it. Education, employment, retirement are the three sort of ideological social constructs that basically conscript us at a young age, at a young impressionable age, when our first our most profound imprinting of personality and memory is happening in our life for between three and five years old and it sucks us in, You could argue that big health care actually gets us since the day we're born, but that's that's it's not my fight to fight.
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But where you get conscripted in it 3 to 5 years old and we stay in this system until we're we're you know, theoretically 65 and we can retire. But even then we'd ever really get out of it. And each of them and I have a free e-book. This isn't a pitch, but if somebody goes into my world and they end up downloading the free e-book that that I offer everywhere, I actually in the appendix, I give the history lesson of each of those three constructs, the history of American education or Western education, the history of Western employment and the history of Western retirement, and how between the three they create this this conveyor belt that
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human beings live on their entire life, that virtually from birth to death. And and like to your point, they're prisoners and they don't even realize that they're the ones holding the door shut on themselves. Yeah. And yet, as you and I and hundreds of other people try to teach and share this information, those beliefs are so stuck, like people don't want to open themselves up until they get into that moment.
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Well, what have you seen or what do you recommend, Jeff, for those people who are like, Man, I see that there's a revolution happening around the world. I see the people who are speaking about this are living a different life. I see that presidents in different countries around the world are being elected because the people are not getting what they want.
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And this anti-establishment or different way of thinking seems to be an incredible movement. But those beliefs are holding them back. What do you recommend to be able to break through that and come to the realization of what the real reality is, first of all, to your to what you just said? I've never given two shits about Argentinean politics before, but how about that man, Javier, play this libertarian former rock star?
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Yeah, getting elected on a platform of smaller. I mean, this is Argentina. This is like, yeah, I mean to have an Argentinian leader who's who's about less government contracting from all the geopolitical complexities and relationships to ultimately like create sovereignty of a country, to say, let's be self-determined and let's give growth and progress back to the private sector, which does it infinitely better than the public sector ever could.
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Like I'll just say, I needed a win and I'm taking that one as as the one for the weak anyways, because the world the world is is jacked up. I mean, that's, that's the bottom line. And you know your forgive me I actually I got so excited as soon as you referenced that I forgot the actual core question.
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Do you mind restating it. Yeah. Well I think the thing that I was really getting to is that, you know, when you see Argentina, who is a socialist country and has been for a very long time, and people are that upset that a guy that can come in who's super direct, honest, flagrant talking about cutting every part of government down to the core things we're seeing in Italy, we're seeing that in the US, people like Trump and RFK Jr and Vivek.
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Alternative candidates are rising in the polls. A lot of people are waking up, A lot of people are waking up. And what do you recommend for those people who who still have those beliefs that want to hold them back into the system? How can they break free of that and see what's really happening so that they can take back control of their life?
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Yeah, okay. That's that's such it's so the right question. And I have to I think that one of the hardest challenges for me has been to to recognize that I had such a unique set of of early life experiences that I described, that it's not reasonable for me to say to people, well, you just have to you have to divorce yourself from the idea that money is the primary currency by which you define success in your life, or you just need to recognize that certainty is a is a fallacy.
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It's a it's a psychological ego construct that we use, that our amygdala and are limbic brains try to project out there so that we can feel safe because historically and ancestrally, we're worried about getting eaten by a tiger, but we don't live in that world. And risk tolerance is the new adaptive survival mechanism. And I can say all this stuff, but like people, you got to meet people where they are, right?
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And so the biggest way I mean, and again, you asked the right question to the right person because leading an entrepreneurial education platform that's enrolled almost 300,000 students in the last four and a half years, I have a lot of experience of how to invite people into a conversation about a different set of possibilities for their life and then try to meet them where they are so that they'll they'll stay open to it and actually lean in and keep going even when the work gets hard.
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And what I have found is the single greatest common denominator conversation that everybody can resonate with is the idea that your life there is some purpose, there is some teleological design to your life, like we are not. I mean, there's a small fringe of people that believe that life is nothing but like chaos and colliding particles, and it's all just a happy Darwinian accident.
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And frankly, to those people for whom nothing means anything, I don't I can't make anything mean anything. But for the rest of us, there's a there's a purpose here. And how how truly do you feel like you're living it? And when you get people thinking about that, why am I here? What is the point of my life? And everybody, you know, the vast majority of people have had similar experiences of life, which are feels a lot more like hanging on to survive then then learning to grow and thrive.
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And that conversation, I think, is how you crack. Most people open to the idea to say, okay, listen, if we're going to live your life's purpose, if we're going to if we're going to find fulfillment, which by the way, the word fulfillment comes from the old English word for prophecy or destiny, that which fulfills you is going to come from you fulfilling that for which you are born.
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And if as you start that conversation, people, people recognize, okay, I'm going to have to start challenging some core beliefs because at no point in my educational or my employment journey was my personal purpose and fulfillment ever the primary orientation. And so now that it is, I recognize that other aspects and themes from my primary education, employment are going to probably need to be challenged.
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Yeah. And so once you come to the realization that the purpose of your life is that door that can actually open up to what are all the ways that I can fulfill that purpose, you get a new level of motivation. You've got a new reason to step into the discomfort of the uncertainty of of the fear of all of the things that are holding you in that place that the system is taking advantage of for its benefit that you can actually be able to then recognize a reason to break free and open yourself up to seeing things from a different perspective.
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And with that, what is one of the best ways, in your opinion, to be able to unlock and discover that purpose? Because a lot of people talk about it, but it I found that at the beginning it can be a very difficult process to really discover Why am I actually here? Yeah, I think there's there's two aspects to that question.
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There's sort of the call it like the ethereal and the practical, right? I mean, first is there's a lot of personal healing and growth. And, you know, I come from a where I've done a lot of therapy and I come from the there's a generalized school called cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a number of different therapeutic modalities, rational emotive behavior therapy and transactional analysis and all the different things that we could geek out on if you're into that stuff.
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But yeah, in general, it's kind of like, okay, for me to actually reorient my life toward a belief in a sense of purpose, on the basis of a faith that there is a realizable potential to live that purpose and thus be truly fulfilled in a way that anything other than that will never fulfill me. There's a certain amount of egoic surrender that has to happen where like it's like, okay, I'm not going to just live as a martyr for all these other things that I've been.
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You know, it's kind of like I mean, this is we're getting to the heart of the sort of the libertarian versus the socialist ideological war is like, what is the point of life? Is it to take care of of society and the collective, or is it to manifest and be individually free and expressed? Am I an Ayn Rand said that civilization is the process of setting man free from men?
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and so you kind of have to. But, but within that is you have to reconcile like I freaking matter. I am a created child of whatever God or source or universal energy I want to attribute created, designed to you. But like I am, I am a unique property. I was given fingerprints and I was given a gut biome and I was given a DNA sequence and I was giving given a face.
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I was given all these unique markers to show how, how, how, how chosen and special and precious I am. And so whatever purpose I was created for, it matters enough that it's worth pursuing. And honestly, that's where it has to start for most people, because they've had all this conditioning of like, you're here to you know, worry about how you reflect on your parents or worry about how you reflect on your family name, or worry about how you reflect on your alma mater, or worry about paying your mortgage or worrying about, you know, living the right nuclear family structure that reflects well on society or living a call, according to all of these these tropes
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in these models and these paradigms that we're given, not not that are bad, but that are meant to be a suggestive foundation for living our best, most fully expressed life. They're not meant to be a cage that we spend our entire life trying to fit ourselves inside of. But that's what they become for most people because we're, you know, we're not told from day one that we matter to the level necessary that would lead us to pursue a life of purpose is our primary goal.
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And then what ends up happening is that that desire, that inner urge will it will try to express because it was placed there prior to our consent, like it's part of our created imperative as living sentient beings that are capable of a relationship with the divine. And so then it ends up expressing. But because there's no construct, there's no model for it in society, it ends up expressing is all this like weird, hedonistic, self-destructive stuff, whether it's like my, my secret onlyfans account where I have sex with cats or my my bizarre double life where I do whatever or like or just my general narcissism, where my whole world is this little five time I've
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built to edify and glorify me because society doesn't provide that outlet like, well, it all shows up and all these weird behaviors. I mean, the Internet is does a wonderful job of displaying when in reality what we need to be doing is teaching children that, you know, there's a the freedom to be self expressed is the the pursuit goal of life.
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But that that freedom comes through discipline and it comes through adherence to profound, timeless first principles that are grounded in sacrifice and service and love, but that those are manifestations of our divine created this not of some obsequious, pious requirement that we just sacrifice ourselves on the altar of a society that has its own agenda that's not ours.
00;24;09;09 - 00;24;32;19
Yeah, I mean, at the core of it, it's it's first coming to this place where I'm aware and I have a belief that I came to this earth, to this plane, that source gave me a purpose, and I'm here for a reason. And even if I don't know what it is, if I have the belief that I'm here for a reason, then I can be open to discovery.
00;24;32;23 - 00;24;54;01
What that reason is, I can start listening, I can start feeling, I can start seeing it. And then as through that process, you begin to discover it. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is they feel like they need to know exactly what it is and then when they don't or they don't feel connected to it, they want to put it away and they want to stop being aware that they're here for a reason.
00;24;54;01 - 00;25;18;11
But they have to have that faith to have that space for that message and to actually be received. Yeah, there was exactly I mean, exactly. You said it beautifully. It's not about knowing what your purpose is. It's it's about believing that you have a purpose like that's the starting point. That's the precondition. And then the purpose it manifests over time, through life experience, through clarity of values.
00;25;18;11 - 00;25;36;17
The word purpose comes from the French word proposé, which is the old French for to propose or to stand for, to essentially say, I stand for this in the world. That is our purpose. It's that which it's our proposition to the world and that which we're going to embody through the way we live our life. But that you discover that over time.
00;25;36;24 - 00;26;03;05
But like your reticular activating system of your mind, which is what determines when you scan your environment, what you actually see and, and absorb and remember from your environment, that's your reticular activating system. It's like your radar to the tuning of your radar that that is completely different. That will draw in completely different information from your environment depending on whether or not you do or don't start from the place of I have a purpose.
00;26;03;07 - 00;26;26;10
And again, to your point, you don't have to see exactly what it is. So so once you have that and I know it may sound like we're being sort of metaphysical, but like like I said, there's a there's an ethereal and a practical, but it starts with the metaphysical, like you cannot get kids that think that the point of life is to work in factories and make widgets for the man.
00;26;26;12 - 00;26;49;05
You can't get them to dream kids or adults, and most adults are are kids that grew up having their dreaming stomped out of them. And so, so so once but once you have that sort of a priori, then you can say, all right, well, what's your thing? And the Japanese have a concept called Ikigai, which is which essentially means purpose or reason for being.
00;26;49;07 - 00;27;12;15
And it's the Japanese concept, by the way, the Japanese also don't have a concept called retirement. That was something we got tacked on by the Westerners about 150 years ago, which I can explain. Again, I document all these back stories in my book, but if a guy as a is is a shared answer to four questions, it's finding one answer that answers four different questions is how you define Ichigo.
00;27;12;18 - 00;27;37;21
What does the world actually need? What do I actually enjoy? What am I actually good at, and what can I actually earn a living doing? You find one thing that answers those four questions. I'm pretty damn sure, especially if it's in alignment with your historical experience. Like, I'll get. I'll give an example for myself. What am I pretty good at?
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I sure as hell enjoy it. The world definitely needs it and I have figured out how to get paid doing it. It is challenging the broken system. Challenging the paradigms of big education, big employment and big retirement. And how does that align with my life experience? Well, I mean, I wrote about it in my book. I could I could recount almost virtually every single thing that's ever happened to me has been leading me to that catharsis.
00;28;05;23 - 00;28;30;06
And and this is the the framing of purpose is that everybody has life experience and natural gifts that have led them to a set of realizations and experiences from which they can derive values upon which they can make a stand. A profession. A By the way, a profession is not. How do you trade time for money? Your profession is what you profess.
00;28;30;06 - 00;28;49;19
It's your purpose, It's your proposal to the world. They're meant to be the same. It's in the language, your purpose and your profession. Those are actually two words that mean the same thing if you understand the history. And so you figure out the answer to that question, and it's there. It's there in the the clues are hidden in every human life.
00;28;49;21 - 00;29;09;24
And you just got but your reticular activating system has to be tuned to look for it, which requires the belief that it is the goal and the point. And from there there's a lot of tactical questions. Well, what skills should I learn? What industries should I, you know, apply myself to? What networks should I build, what financial goals should I set?
00;29;09;24 - 00;29;35;10
Like, but people people reverse the cart and the horse and they get in on all the practical questions. They don't even know what the point is. Yeah. And when you start with purpose, when you start with what you want, why you want it, and what you're actually here for, all of a sudden you can then back into what are the things that you need to do, learn, know, grow, who do you need to be connected to that will actually get you on the path to being able to fulfill that purpose?
00;29;35;12 - 00;30;08;23
I think it's really, really powerful, just underlying that. Most of the problems that we have in our country for my perspective, is a lack of purpose. People are unhappy because they have no real clear connection or reason on why they're here every day. And so when we can actually become aware of that like we are right now, as you're listening to this show and we're having this conversation, you can be begin to start keeping your eye open for it and start seeing where those different things can come into alignment for you.
00;30;08;26 - 00;30;27;23
And so shifting gears, when it comes to the path towards entrepreneurship, you know, I, I started out my career, I was doing a bunch of entrepreneurial things when I was very young. I also worked blue collar jobs and worked my butt off. And then I went to university and I wanted to break free of that blue collar life.
00;30;27;26 - 00;30;46;27
And I got a career in management consulting. And I quickly realized I there's no passion here. There's something is so out of alignment. I went the path, I followed the rules, and I hate the rules. I don't like I don't like doing things because someone else tells me I should do them. I like doing them because it feels right and it's in alignment.
00;30;46;29 - 00;31;10;15
And so I got out and I broke free and I went the entrepreneurial route and, you know, I had a good amount of success after a lot of failure and continue to have failure over and over again alongside success, as I'm learning for a lot of people, they're stuck in that W2 world and I think you can have success and you can find purpose and fulfillment working a job.
00;31;10;23 - 00;31;46;29
But from your perspective, how and why is it so important to get clear on being able to break free of having to do anything, whether it is working in a job or going more the entrepreneurial route like you're teaching so many people to do? Yeah, I mean, I think it just comes down. I mean, regardless of what purpose or or origin of life story people want to tell themselves, like, I think there is universal consensus that like I want I want to feel fulfilled in my life.
00;31;47;16 - 00;32;29;08
And your your probability of achieving fulfillment in your life, I think it's probably completely true to say the probability of you achieving fulfillment in your life directly relates to your ability to be self-determined and to make your own choices. And the inverse of that is the psychological axiom that dependency always inevitably leads to hostility. Well, the inverse of that is that, I mean, hostility which is operationalized aggression or anger, which is actually a mask for fear and the fear sources from the dependency, because it's a fear of loss.
00;32;29;08 - 00;32;51;22
If we lose that which we are dependent on and over time that transmutes into hostility and anger, the inverse of that is I'm not dependent, right? And when I'm not dependent, I don't have to be afraid and therefore I don't have to be angry and therefore I don't pick fights and I don't fight wars and I don't invade my neighbors and I don't do all that shit that has our world so screwed up, right?
00;32;51;25 - 00;33;10;23
So that's why it matters. And it just so happens that and this is where it all comes together. People say, are you a socialist? Are you are you an individualist? And it's like, No, it all comes together that the society, the utopian ideal that socialists are trying to get to. I just happen to think they're going the wrong way.
00;33;10;26 - 00;33;36;11
Is it? We're basically all trying to get back to the Garden of Eden where, like, everybody's happy and everybody's chill and everybody's cared for and provided for. But the path there is not by us defining this monolithic collective that subsumes the rights of the individual, the path there is everybody being so fully expressed and individuated and self-actualized, to use Maslow's term, that there's nothing to fight about anymore.
00;33;36;13 - 00;33;58;12
There's there's plenty of resources. I mean, everybody knows there's enough food in the world to feed everyone. It's just not properly distributed. And the reason it's not properly distributed is because of hostile self-interest, which manifests from dependency, which manifests from a collective that's easy to manipulate to nefarious purposes that are like counter to the human condition. Like it's all sometimes I'm just like, how is this not so fucking clear to everyone else?
00;33;58;14 - 00;34;27;29
But sorry, I get it. So anyway, no, no, I think it's phenomenal. I love the passionate about it, but it really at the core of what you're saying is that whether you're working in a career or you're building your own business, at the core of it is taking back the understanding that you were actually the one who's in control of your destiny, that you get to that point where you don't have to do anything because you now are in control of being able to do those things that you actually want to do with your life.
00;34;28;01 - 00;34;55;21
You're not divided. Yeah, I think I think I and Rand honestly, like she is so misrepresented and misunderstood in the world. She has a book called The Virtue of Selfishness. People think that the way to fix society is to subordinate individual interests and essentially sacrifice ourselves on the altar of society, a society upon which we become hopelessly dependent, which ends up why everybody's so frustrated and angry all the time.
00;34;55;24 - 00;35;20;17
Paradoxically, the way to create the ideal society is to have every individual operating from self-expression and self-interest, because then people are so fulfilled. All the conflict goes away. And as somebody and this is where, like, you're trying to tell people, what is it? What is what is the what is life look like further down the entrepreneurial path?
00;35;20;19 - 00;35;37;07
And they're like, well, how much money am I going to have and what business am I going to own? And how many people are going to report to me? And they're asking all these sort of superficial questions. And it's like, no, I can't tell you. You know, faith is the substance of what is what we hope for. It's the certainty of what we cannot yet see.
00;35;37;07 - 00;36;04;16
Therefore, I can't tell you I can't show you the picture, because then you'd see it. You wouldn't need faith. It's no, that's not what it is. It's about as I decouple myself from social dependency and economic dependency, then I start to become that change, which, if it were pervasive enough in the world, would actually lead to the place that society thinks it's trying to get by, by shoving us all in the all the opposite direction.
00;36;04;22 - 00;36;26;21
That's why you become an entrepreneur, because it's like you can have you can have you actually can have your cake and eat it too. You can operate from self-interest. You can operate from a desire for freedom. You can operate from a desire for liberated self-expression, while at the same time contributing to taking society in a direction in the only direction where I think that peace is actually possible.
00;36;27;20 - 00;36;50;13
It's such a it's such a simplified version of something that it feels very complex. But when you actually break it down and you realize that again, back to purpose, it allows you by taking this step, decoupling those different things, break free and be able to live more of the life you want to live. So I couldn't I I'm loving this conversation.
00;36;50;13 - 00;37;15;26
Jeff. This is it's been amazing talking with you. I couldn't recommend enough getting the book Unlock your potential. You should absolutely read Jeff's book if you enjoyed today's conversation and you want to take your life to the next level. Jeff, where can people find out more about you're doing or or follow you? Yeah, just honestly, I invite people to my YouTube channel or my podcast or my book.
00;37;15;28 - 00;37;38;24
Obviously, I have an entrepreneurial education platform called Tantra Institute. We sell courses where we sort of fancy ourselves the only complete holistically, complete ecosystem in the world for people that want to take this adventure. And when I say adventure, by the way, the literal translation of the word entrepreneur from the French roughly correlates to the English word for adventure or adventurer.
00;37;38;26 - 00;38;00;08
And so but that's all like, that's like stuff you buy. I'd rather people I'd rather steer people to stuff they can try. So that's like my YouTube channel, which is thousands of hours of free content. My book, which is, I don't know, 20 something dollars and, you know, 350 pages or whatever my podcast, which is hundreds of episodes for free around these types of conversations.
00;38;00;08 - 00;38;24;04
And if people, you know, look, it's not for the faint of heart, like there's days I wake up and I go, Life would just be a lot easier if I would forgo self-determination and just be a little more willing to feel like a slave, like my life would actually be easier in a lot of ways. But if you had enough of that and you want to try the alternative, those would be the places to start.
00;38;24;07 - 00;38;46;29
The easiest path is often not the path that the path that leads to the best result and the most fulfillment. So, Jeff, I really appreciate the lessons and the things today. I couldn't recommend enough grab grab a copy of that book and thanks for listening. We'll see you guys on the next episode. Today's episode is sponsored by Von Fish Capital.
00;38;47;01 - 00;39;06;26
If you're interested in investing alongside me in the same type of real estate opportunities that I personally invested, then head over to Von Finch Capital and join their private investor network. You can do so at von Finch dot com slash invest. Join me on that next deal. I look forward to seeing you on the inside.
00;39;06;28 - 00;39;28;02
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00;39;28;05 - 00;39;47;16
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