The School of Greatness - 606 Reconnect to the Important Things with Mike Rowe

Episode Date: February 23, 2018

"LOOK FOR THE THING THAT DOESN'T DRIP WITH COMFORT There's so many times I try to find the fast or easy way to get things done. I'm sure you've been there too. We want to get things done as efficiently as possible. But honestly speaking, shortcuts are rarely the answer because if they were, they wouldn't be a shortcut. They'd just be the way. Many times we need to avoid taking shortcuts. We need to do the hard work because it'll save us time and money in the long run. For this episode of 5 Minute Friday I brought back the renowned Mike Rowe with this clip on the importance of hard work and how even the most successful people in the world take pride in their hardest working days. Learn the importance of not taking the easy way out, on Episode 606. In This Episode You Will Learn: What society tells us about achieving happiness (:56) The thing that the most interesting people do (1:52) What the most important people in our country wanted to tell Mike (2:32)

This is 5-Minute Friday! Today we've got an incredible human being on. His name is Mike Rowe. Now, I was just up in San Francisco giving a speech to a corporation up there for one of their day-long events they were doing. They brought me in to speak, and I got a chance to connect with Mike because he lives in San Francisco as well. So I went to his studio and we sat down to what I thought was going to be an hour interview, which ended up being over a two-hour interview. We just kept diving in deeper and deeper. I mean, the insights I was learning, I just didn't want to my granddad used to say shortcuts lead to long delays shortcuts lead to long delays so

we're told every single day in a in about a thousand different ways back to our earlier conversation that that that happiness is attainable if you do this, this, that, and that. And I mean, turn on any commercial right now for any financial institution. You'd be happier if you could retire a little sooner, if you could take a longer vacation. Why work 40 when you can work 30? Why work 50 if you can get by with 40? Everything is geared in a very, very subtle way to suggest that the reason that the proximate cause of your misery

is something external. It's your freaking boss. It's your crazy schedule. It's that son of a bitch down here. It's this victim mentality. I just think it's true. And I honestly believe that, look, there are no guarantees for success. But the most interesting people wake up, look around, identify the hard, challenging thing.

It's not about eating your peas and sucking it up and getting through it. It's about identifying it and loving it and saying that looks affirmatively. It's about learning how to salsa. That's what it's about, man. You know, it's about look for the thing that doesn't drip with comfort. One of my favorite unintended consequences of getting dirty jobs on the air and being the dirty jobs guy is when I go to places, I get a chance to talk sometimes to recently a very powerful group of men, about 2,000 of them. I mean, heads of state from all over the country and it was a private club and exclusive and a lot of reasons that a lot of people get a little nervous around it. But this group of men was the most extraordinary assemblage I'd ever seen. And I talked to them very candidly about dirty jobs and told some funny stories. And later,

hundreds of them came up to me. These are people who run Fortune 500 companies. And hundreds of them came up to me. These are people who run Fortune 500 companies. And, Lewis, they all said the same thing. They all pulled me aside. And you know what they all wanted to tell me? They wanted to tell me about their first job. They wanted to tell me about the time in their life when they looked down and didn't see a net. When they realized sometimes you got to make little rocks out of big rocks. Sometimes you got to pick up the hammer.

Sometimes you've got to work hard and not smart. They were just so eager to talk about that and not in a braggadocio kind of way but just like when you hear truth when you hear something that strikes you as truth it it's agitating you know right well like when you when you hear something you believe to be true but most people haven't heard it's agitating and it and it makes you want to grab the country by the lapels and shake it. I went from a guy, a 16, 17 year old kid, convinced and utterly connected to all the things I just mentioned. Then I wandered in the wilderness until I was 42

in Hollywood in New York, impersonating a host, completely just kind of bullshitting myself and anybody who might be watching. Just creating the illusion of competence. And then all of a sudden, oh, now I'm in a sewer in San Francisco, crawling around, trying to get a show off the ground in honor of my granddad.

And suddenly, you know, again, a long, sloppy, rambling way of saying that Dirty Jobs reconnected me to a lot of things that I believe are fundamentally important. And I don't know what will reconnect you, not that you need to be reconnected, but the many, many, many other millions of people who are not going to get a chance to work shoulder to shoulder castrating lambs or repairing sewers. But everybody somehow or another, in my view, needs to get reconnected to the important things.