Start With A Win - How to UNLEASH your POTENTIAL with Jeff Lerner part 1 of 2
Episode Date: September 6, 2023Do you want to unlock your potential and find your personal and business success? Adam welcomes guest, Jeff Lerner, in this episode they delve into Jeff's journey, the importance of a mind...set shift from traditional employment to entrepreneurship, and how his life operating system, with its three pillars (the three P's, three legs of successful action, and three phases of legacy), has enabled him to achieve significant success in business and life. The discussion also emphasizes the significance of personal beliefs, autonomy, and the need for individuals to understand the trade-offs between freedom and financial security in the pursuit of their goals. In the upcoming second part of the series, Jeff will further discuss how to move from the minimum necessary to the maximum possible and the role of ambition in achieving success. In 2008, Jeff Lerner faced adversity but turned his life around. He founded three multimillion-dollar businesses, found happiness in remarriage, got into great shape, and became a father to four. He credits his unique "ENTREpreneurial" life system. In 2019, he launched ENTRE Institute, which enrolled over 250,000 students in four years, becoming a leader in online education. He expanded with a podcast, "Unlock Your Potential," and a bestselling book in 2022. Today, he manages ENTRE, various ventures, podcasts, writing, speaking, and family life while maintaining his fitness and piano playing. 02:03 It’s true, you make your bed, you sleep in it…05:13 Failed a dozen times and kept going.08:50 The three Ps of success13:20 The three legs of successful actions14:33 The three phases of legacy16:36 The fourth P19:01 Where are people breaking the most in the process? Connect with Adam http://www.startwithawin.comhttps://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEO https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcontos/ https://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/ https://www.youtube.com/@LeadershipFactoryhttp://twitter.com/AdamContosCEO Listen, rate, and subscribe! Apple PodcastsSpotifyGoogle Podcasts
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What's the best way to unlock your potential and actually find a better self, a better business,
and greater results? We talk about that today on Start With A Win.
Welcome to Start With A Win, where we talk franchising, leadership, and business growth.
Let's go.
And coming to you from Start With A Win headquarters at Area 15 Ventures, this is Adam
Kantos with Start With A Win.
I'm really excited about today's guests.
This is a fascinating story
and someone you can learn a lot from.
So let's dive right in.
Let me take you back to 2008.
Jeff Lerner was a pianist facing eviction,
divorce, depression.
He was almost, almost a half million dollars in debt due to a wrist injury. Imagine
being a pianist and having a wrist injury. Over the next decade, he founded three eight-figure
businesses, remarried happily, got in great shape, and had four children. What does he attribute this
to? He attributes it to his entrepreneurial life operating system that he
developed based on the three P's framework. We're going to dig into that today. In 2019, he founded
the Entree Institute, a whole life transformation platform that combines his life operating system
with entrepreneurship training, something we all could use. In 2021, he launched his podcast,
Unlock Your Potential, and he's also enrolled over 250,000 students in his entrepreneurial
education company. Huge success. He's doing great, and we're happy to have him on the show today.
Jeff, welcome to Start With a Win. So grateful to be here, Adam. Thanks for having me.
Awesome. Hey, this sounds like a little bit of a roller coaster ride in life. Can
you take us back to 08 when you started struggling? And you were a jazz musician, right? And how did
you, you know, you crashed from an injury, you know, professional sports injury, stuff like that,
and you started coming out of it. Take us there. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess the first question is how much time you got because it was quite the ordeal.
But I will actually, I guess, to set the record straight or make the record worse, perhaps.
My struggles extend way beyond 2008 or way back past 2008.
I dropped out of high school to become a musician
and, and I really never didn't struggle, uh, from, from that choice. And I, it was a choice
I willingly made. So, you know, we, we, we make our bed, we sleep in it, but I was a working
musician all through my twenties, uh, even, and I actually ended up putting myself through college,
even without a high school diploma, because I, I got good enough at music. I was able to get a music scholarship.
And I did learn that, uh, if you're, if you're good at something that's, that's in demand for
a particular purpose, they will change the rules for you. You know, the, the pesky, the whole,
you got to graduate from high school before you go to college thing. Yeah. They, they,
they actually ended up waving that for me because I was a pretty good piano player and they needed a pianist in the jazz orchestra. So, um,
but anyway, uh, yeah, you know, I think the reality is the life of a jazz musician is a hard life.
So I was always struggling, but I was all, I had a very unique experience where I was exposed to almost, it's like playing gigs on Mars,
only I was playing gigs in the mansions of wealthy multimillionaires and billionaire
entrepreneurs. I got in with this one booking agency that they liked me because I was young.
They liked me because I didn't smoke. They liked me because I was articulate and I could
connect with the guests, but I didn't over-talk the guests. And so it was this one agency that booked a lot of the really, really
high-end private parties in Houston, where I'm from. And so they started booking me in my early
twenties. I'm this broke musician, working gigs, going to school. And I start getting booked to
play piano in these big mans you know, big mansions on
these, you know, quarter million dollar pianos. And it'll just be like a dinner party with like
a billionaire and 10 of his friends, right? They just wanted to have a live piano player.
And I started getting exposed to all these really successful people. And I can, eventually I
connected to the Dots and I was like, these, they're all entrepreneurs. These aren't like middle managers at Home Depot or they aren't even like get to create for a living. I create music. They
create value. I'm broke. They're not. Maybe there's a way to be creative in this world because the
whole reason I dropped out to become a musician is because I just didn't see myself grinding away
at a job every day. And so I was inspired to become an entrepreneur in my twenties, even though
I was broke. And I started starting every business I could think of. And I outline all this in my book. I failed literally a dozen times.
But ultimately, in my late 20s, I did end up, as you pointed out, 2008, I was $495,000 in debt.
I had gotten a couple SBA guaranteed loans to open franchises. I know you have some franchise owners in your audience,
and I'm glad that that's hopefully working really well for them. It did not work very well for me.
I picked a hell of a time to open two franchise restaurants, which was 2007, right when the world
crashed. And so 2008, I was, like I said, $495,000 in debt. Most of that was personally guaranteed SBA loans. And I'm sure some of your franchise know this. When you default on an SBA loan, it's bad because bank. The bank exercises their guarantee with the U.S. Treasury,
and the U.S. Treasury comes after you for their money.
So 2008, I was basically hiding from the government,
trying to figure out, not that I had much for them to take anyways,
but trying to figure out how am I going to rebuild my life?
I'm a musician.
As you mentioned, I had a wrist injury,
so I couldn't even really play that many gigs.
And I discovered the world of
online business, internet marketing, digital entrepreneurship, whatever you want to call it.
And I spent my last few hundred dollars on a course, kind of a Hail Mary, a course on affiliate
marketing and was able to pay off $495,000 in debt. I settled some of it. I had landlords and
attorneys and all this stuff, but paid off
a good chunk of that and worked out the rest in 18 months with affiliate marketing.
And that was so... So 2010, I was out of debt. I was free. And I've just been doing online business,
various iterations of online business. I really... you know, having tried the brick and mortar franchises and failed miserably and then dug myself out with digital business.
I'm understandably, I think, partial to these kind of new economy creator business models.
And I've been doing them ever since.
And then in 2018, I actually, I had a digital marketing agency that I sold and decided to start teaching people how a broke jazz musician was able
to completely turn his life around in 10 years. Not just, as you pointed out, not just make money,
make enough money to dig out of debt and have a good life, but get remarried, get happy, deal with
my trauma, deal with my junk, get in shape. And that became what's now Entre Institute and yeah, quarter million students
later, it's, it's the most successful business I've ever had. Right on. Well, first of all,
congratulations. I mean, you, you know, you're, you paid off your debts. Congratulations to you
for that. You know, you, that was the, the largest economic downturn that happened has happened in our lifetime. And, you know, second to the Great
Depression, I guess. So it's fascinating, you know, and you're one of millions of small businesses
that went under during that time. So, you know, it was a difficult time for sure. I want to dig
into your, you know, entrepreneurial life operating system, though, because that is really the foundation that not just propelled you, but also this other quarter million people.
Now, granted, you've got to put this stuff into play in order to make it work.
And you and I both know it's, you can give somebody a system, but if they're not accountable for the system and operating the system, they might as well have not even had it. So I want to talk to you about, I guess,
the foundation of this, which I guess is the three Ps. Is that correct? So get into that for us,
please. Yeah. So I mean, this life operating system is basically something I developed
sort of organically. It's not like I woke up one day and said,
okay, I've been a dozen time failure as an entrepreneur.
Maybe I should create an operating system
and then that will unlock success.
It wasn't like that.
It was more of like,
I fumbled and stumbled my way through even my successes.
I was making it up as I went
and kind of figuring it out, right?
But eventually in 2018, when I decided, okay, I'm going to start sharing my story and my journey and teaching people, I sort of can, you know, my goal, even when I started Entra,
my initial email signature, I wasn't like founder, CEO, Jeff Lerner. I was valedictorian
is how I signed my emails. I wanted to be the best student of what I was teaching.
And so I, I know because I've been an affiliate, you know, I started in affiliate marketing and
when I was an affiliate, I had thousands I was an affiliate, I was an affiliate for
online courses back then, kind of in the early days of online education. And I sold all these
courses. And frankly, I dealt with a lot of people who, to your point, they bought the course,
but they didn't implement. And so they would come back to me and be like, this didn't work. I want
a refund. And I'm like, well, you didn't buy it for me. I was just an affiliate. Go talk to the guy you bought it from, but also why didn't it work?
And they're like, well, you know, once you dig into it, they're like, well, I only watched the
first video and I never really put it into practice. And it's like, well, of course.
And so what I realized, and those courses were, were, were online marketing courses.
Some of them were financial education courses. Some of them were online business courses.
And what I realized is there's a giant implementation gap on the internet.
There's like so much like education has become a commodity now on the internet.
But implementation, which produces transformation, which is what people actually want, is in shorter supply than ever.
Because when you sit at home and you consume online education, there's like no accountability. There's no teacher making sure you don't cheat and you
actually take the test and, you know, presumably move there's, there's constant progression.
So I said, okay, if I'm going to T you know, basically, if I'm going to start helping
people transition from, let's call it the employee life to the entrepreneurial life,
I need to do more than just teach them
the mechanics of business or marketing or sales or whatever. I need to help them actually live
the life that overcomes all these limiting beliefs, overcomes all this doubt and uncertainty,
overcomes fear of sales or fear of putting themselves out there, overcomes procrastination, overcome. I
mean, you know, if you have an entrepreneurial audience, everybody knows that the, the battles
that we fight every day. Right. And we're entrepreneurs when people have never been
an entrepreneur before and they go, Oh, I want to do that because I want the perks.
I want the lifestyle that I see on Instagram. They are signing up for a brutal fight. You know that,
right? We know that. And so I wanted to take everything that I had learned and package it
into an operating system so that I could say to people on day one, look, you are signing up for
the hardest thing you've ever done. And I don't want to have to BS you about that like everybody
else on the internet does. I'd rather equip you to deal with it and be successful still. And so I created this operating system that, by the way,
I started living myself. Again, I was trying to be the valedictorian. And I attribute a lot of
the success of Entra to the fact that its founder has been living this operating system now for five
years. And as much as I had been
successful before that, I have done more in the last five years than I did in the previous
lifetime, right? And it's because of this operating system. So yeah, at the core of it is
what we call the three by three success matrix. I'll give you just like the really high level
version. And the three by three success
matrix is founded on three pillars. And so it's three by three, because there's three pillars
that each have three components. And the first one, as you pointed out, is the three P's physical,
personal, and professional, the three P's of success, we call it. And we can double click
on that if you want. The second pillar is what we call the three legs of successful action, which are knowledge, environment, and resources. These are the things. So, so the first three
physical, personal, and professional, that's how you orient your time. It's kind of like
every second of every day, I should be able to concretely define what I'm doing to improve
myself physically, personally, or professionally. And if it doesn't fit into one of those buckets,
I don't know, I might be wasting time, right? The second, the three legs, knowledge, environment, and resources,
these are the three legs upon which all greatness stands. A lot of people think, oh, if I just knew
how to do the thing, then I would do the thing. And then they go learn how to do the thing, or
they buy a course to teach them how to do the thing, and then they don't do the thing, and then
they wonder why they didn't do the thing. It's because of environment and resources. It's not because of
the knowledge, right? Knowledge is a commodity. And so we have, you know, and there's, again,
we can double click on any of these and go deep. Like I've built out almost like a, almost like a
religion. I mean, I hate to say it with that term, but like there's, there's deep theology to all of
this now. It's like frameworks and application mechanisms and assessment tools.
And this is like so much of what we geek out on here at Entre now.
But anyway, then the third pillar is what we call the three phases of legacy.
And this is income, growth, and wealth.
And this is like one of the hardest but most important kind of tough love pieces of this framework or this
philosophy? Is it like, if you want to build real wealth, which by the way, a priori, I suggest
you really do want to build real wealth. Don't listen to the knuckleheads that tell you that
money doesn't buy happiness. Money solves every single problem that money can solve,
which is the majority of problems. And it unlocks or it amplifies the joy of a lot of other things because now you can afford to include other people. You can afford to do it without stress.
You can afford to send little Johnny to rehab that insurance won't pay for so that he doesn't
die from Oxycontin. There's a lot of awesome things that become possible when you have money.
Right?
And so the three phases, income, growth, and wealth is like, this is how every,
unless you win the lottery or inherit a bunch of money, this is how every
successful wealth journey goes is through these three phases.
And so when you go on the internet and you start learning about how to, you
know, you, you look up Warren Buffett and you're like, I want to, you know,
10 great Warren Buffett talks. You're learning from a guy that's in the third phase you you've skipped too far ahead
of the line you need to learn how to get through the income phase to create surplus to hit what we
call your awesome life number then you can grow you know you can anchor it to what we call the
growth phase then you can move to the wealth phase and play Monopoly for the rest of your life. And so, so much wealth education on the internet
is people, is coming from people in the wealth phase, talking to people in the income phase,
and they don't realize there's different phases. And so then they can never make it work.
And literally most people die in their income phase. They never get out of it.
And so we actually give them an orientation, kind of an arc to understand.
Anyway, like I said, we can go deeper than any of this, but those are the three pillars, the three P's, the three legs and the three phases.
And ultimately, the one thing I'll add is, why are we doing all this?
Just so we can feel good and look good and be cool and be an Instagram lifestyle influencer and get hot girls or whatever?
No, we're doing this because
of what we call the fourth P and the fourth P is our purpose. There is some reason that you are on
this earth, some service, some impact, something you're here to do. I believe this to my core
and the, and the three by three success matrix, that is your battle readiness training.
So that as your fourth P, so that first of all,
you can stabilize your life and figure out what it is that you're here to do other than just hang
on and survive. And then as that purpose emerges and that clarity emerges, now you're in shape
physically, personally, and professionally to go crush it and achieve your purpose.
So that's the framework. And that's a fascinating framework when you look at it. For a lot of people, obviously, it's overwhelming.
But I think you kind of, you know, you look at people that are trying to endeavor upon this and you're telling them, do it in a good order.
Don't jump ahead because then you're going to be overwhelmed.
You know, the whole Warren Buffett reference, things like that.
I mean, we always seek out, oh, that person has done it. I'm going to go ask them,
well, wait a sec, find somebody who's done it and is doing it because you can be darn right.
Warren Buffett is not out making sales right now. And the guy reads it. He sits at home and reads
books six hours a day. That's literally what people talk about. Like, oh, Warren Buffett reads
like 200 books a year. Great. Good luck making a living reading 200 books a year. Exactly. Exactly. So let's jump to the rubber meets the road here.
And, you know, the biggest challenge that people have is generating income by generating clients,
I would say. I mean, it's, or maybe that maybe step 0.5 of what should I be doing to begin with? Where are you seeing the breakdown
begin here in this process? Because for everybody listening, this is not easy, first of all.
But if it was easy, everybody would be multimillionaires out there. Becoming wealthy
is difficult, but it's extraordinarily rewarding. What you're doing is you're balancing three
things, time, money, and freedom, which they all play together and they all result from what Jeff
is talking about here. So Jeff, tell us, where are people breaking down the most in this process?
And what is that boot to the rear that gets them going and keeps them moving to start seeing results here?
I think there's a, let's call it a psychological and a tactical answer to that question.
And I don't think I would be doing right by your audience to ignore the psychological.
The reality is most people are broken at the starting line.
And that sounds harsh. Let me explain what I mean. If, if I sat, you know, bring me your average one-year-old
and I'm going to sit, I'm going to, I'm going to get down so that I'm on their level. And I'm
going to say, listen, listen here, Mr. One-year-old, I'm going to teach you, uh, there's 26 letters
and I'm going to teach you to assemble them
into tens of thousands of
what are called words
and then we're going to form together sentences
that have what's called syntax
and dialectical
structure and then you're going to learn
to form sentences into
paragraphs that ultimately become arguments
or logical
chains or like the one
year old's just trying to like eat his thumb. And he's like, I don't, I don't, like, he can't
even tell you, he doesn't understand what you're saying. Right. But the reality is if you don't
learn language in this world, you die, right? You have no life. You have no chance. You have no future. You have no potential. So you never have to tell the baby, Hey, keep working on this. I, you're going to need it.
The baby just knows if I can't communicate, I can't survive. So, and I promise learning
the English language is a lot harder than anything we're talking about. So why were we willing to do that?
But then like three weeks into our online course, when we're struggling with like the
Facebook ad platform, we quit.
Because we haven't actually associated it with our survival.
We haven't connected it to the same level of drive and desire and,
and fundamental belief for our life that we had those earlier things that we learned.
Swimming is incredibly hard. Reading is incredibly hard. Math is incredibly hard.
Language is incredibly hard. Certainly brain surgery is incredibly hard and people do this stuff every day. And so the reason I say that is I think the great denier of human potential or the great
restrictor or the great imprisoner of human potential is this lie that we'll be okay
if we just follow somebody else's playbook. And that playbook that was
designed for all of us says, go to school, get a job, go into debt, get a 30-year mortgage,
pay into a system, and basically trade all your time and most of the best years of your life.
And at the end, we'll give you this little thing called retirement and it'll be okay. And if you believe that is life,
you probably won't do the work. You probably wouldn't even, if I had told you,
you know, if you, you would have actually foregone learning the language itself.
If they had told you at one years old, don't worry about this English stuff.
All you got to do is goo goo gaga your way through. But as long as you do it for 60 years,
you get to retire and play golf. Babies wouldn't have even bothered to learn English if they bought
into that. Right? So you've got to believe that that life is as unfulfilling and unrewarding
as a life without the basic ability to communicate with
your fellow man. And here's the thing. I do. I did. At 16 years old, I dropped out of high school
because I looked at that life and I saw it as the bogus bankrupt promise that it was.
And so it was as distasteful to me as a life with no communication, right? And so I have, since that
time, I have done whatever the hell I had to do to forge my life, my path, my way as an entrepreneur,
not as an employee. And I'm not denigrating employees. I'm not saying that there's not a time
in our life where sometimes we have to trade time for money. But fundamentally, I believe,
you know, Ayn Rand said, and I made the worst mistake of
my life.
I read a bunch of Ayn Rand in my early teens.
And so I was forever untethered from society.
She said, civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
You know, that when you're in the village, when you're in the tribe, when you're
in the prehistoric, you know, society, your entire life is this dependency on your social network,
right? And we know from Jung and Fromm and Adler and all the progenitors of modern psychology that
the number one producer of hostility is dependency. This is why most, like when you go to Al-Anon
or you go to like the enabler or supporter therapy work
for people that have addicts in their life,
it's basically anger treatment
because you're so pissed off
because you're dependent on this person
because you love them and you have a need to enable them
even though they're toxic
and it's destroying you, right? Why is America so pissed off these days? Because we're dependent on
these large form institutional structures, whether it's big agriculture, whether it's big healthcare,
whether it's a government that tells us to put on a mask and we're not allowed to go into the
local laundromat. We're dependent on these structures that are simultaneously letting us down. But because we're dependent, we have so
much anger. And that's why dependency breeds hostility because you don't have autonomy.
Right. And so I just, again, I picked up on this at an early age and I was like,
I think I have to make a choice about what I'm going to value more freedom or money.
And the big lie is that they're the same thing.
Freedom isn't about how much money you have. It's about what you're having to do to get your money.
Right. And so I, you know, again, most people are broken at the starting line because they, they're not showing up willing to do whatever it takes to win the race.
They're showing up looking for something easier than the thing that they're currently doing not realizing the thing that they're currently doing
Is built around a bribe that's based on a false perception of ease because the gratification is all delayed
They're like, oh this you show up you clock in you trade your time you get your paycheck
You get your 401k your taxes get taken out
We've automated everything for you and and it's all worth it because you're going to have this pot of gold at the end. And it's not until the end you realize, holy crap, I can't
retire. I have $400,000 in my 401k and I live in the city of Chicago. Well, when I invest that
conservatively and don't take undue risk, I'm now going to what? Live on $22,000 a year in a major
US city. And that's, and by the way, the average person trying to retire doesn't have
400,000, they have 95,000. And we're supposed to live on like five grand a year in passive income,
or no, we just live off of our savings. And hopefully we don't live too long because it's
going to be gone in five years. And if you understand the origins of the lie, how the Federal Reserve created the system, how the United States higher education system was created, how the social security and entitlement system was created.
This is all like a plan.
It's about a hundred years old and I'm not sitting here going, there's like these diabolical Illuminati masters that did all this.
They had a problem. They had hundreds of millions of people
and they tried to set up a system that could reasonably manage people, but they did not set
it up for our benefit in terms of thriving. They just set it up for our benefit in terms of basic
survival. So if that's all you're going to aspire to, don't become an entrepreneur because it's
harder. It's harder this way. Sorry. I know I got on my soapbox.
What a great, great statement, Jeff. Jeff Lerner. We're going to make this a two-part series. We
will see you back on the next part to talk about going from minimum necessary to maximum possible
and using that A word in your life to make it happen. We'll see you on the next episode of Start With a Win.
Thanks for joining us on Start With a Win. Be sure to like and subscribe to this episode and
share it with your friends. Also, be sure to check out Adam on YouTube at Adam Canto CEO,
as well as on all the social media platforms. And don't forget, Start With a Win.