The School of Greatness - 822 Optimism is a Superpower

Episode Date: July 12, 2019

LIFE IS GOOD. Being an optimist instead of a pessimist is a choice. You can wake up each day and focus on what’s wrong. Or you can choose to be grateful. Whatever you focus on grows. So if you are spending your time on things that make you unhappy, they will take over. But if you can cultivate gratitude, simplicity, and optimism, that’s what your life will become. Choose happiness. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with Bert Jacobs, founder of the Life is Good Company, where he shared a few of his ten Superpowers that are surprisingly simple and timeless. Bert has appeared on CNN’s Tips from the Top, CNBC’s Business Nation, and The Donny Deutch Show. Life Is Good has been featured in the New York Times, on the cover of Inc Magazine, and on NBC’s The Today Show. Bert is the second youngest of six siblings from Needham, MA. He credits his mother with teaching his brother and him to face the bumps in the road with a smile. The Jacobs brothers see simplicity, humility, and a sense of humor as the three keys to Life is good’s continued success. Learn how to live a good life the same way your grandfather and your grandfather’s father did in Episode 822. “Optimism is a choice.” - @LifeIsGood In This Episode You Will Learn: Why optimism is a choice (1:00) How openness is a superpower (1:30) What selling “Life is Good” t-shirts taught Bert (2:00) About the tools for living a fulfilling life (3:00) For videos, show notes, and more visit: http://www.lewishowes.com/822 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes

This is 5-Minute Friday! Welcome everyone to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Lewis Howes. I am your host. And we've got an incredible guest. His name is Burt Jacobs. He is the chief executive optimist of the company Life Is Good. He and his brother John began designing and selling t-shirts in the street in 1989 by converting an old van and sold t-shirts dorm to dorm.

They founded Life is Good together in 1994. Their company has since become an internationally recognized lifestyle brand available in thousands of retail locations worldwide. They focus on guiding the company vision, creating inspiring content and growing a healthy business all while helping kids overcome poverty, violence and severe medical challenges. You know,

the word superpower is kind of tongue in cheek. The whole idea behind life is good is that optimism is a choice. OK, everybody wakes up in the morning and they can decide to focus on what's wrong with their life or what's right with their life. Yeah. And whatever you choose is likely going to be what grows. Exactly. So you really want to pour your resources into a list of things that are wrong with your life or a list of things that are going to go wrong because that's what pessimism is yeah right and uh it's not helpful okay now rational optimism it's not blind optimism that we're promoting sure we don't ignore that there's challenges in the world right everybody has challenges we just choose to focus our energy on what's working or what's going right. And we realized or came to realize through all these years of selling Life is Good t-shirts,

we have a big customer base, millions and millions of people that write us letters and emails and share personal things. And we realize that that choice to be a rational optimist opens you up to a series of values that we call superpowers. So it enables you, right? Like when you're a pessimist, you've got your head down. So one of the superpowers is openness, just being open. You know, if you're a believer in what's happening and you're focused on the good things that are happening and you're searching for the good things that are happening, you're more open. You're actually more attractive. You're more magnetic to people. Right.

So that's the first one. Openness. Right. I mentioned the sense of humor, you know. So, you know, optimism enables all of these things. Gratitude. Enables all of these things gratitude one of the things our customers Taught us that really surprised us and we didn't know is that the people who face the most difficult challenges in the world They're the ones who have the greatest appreciation for life

Yeah, so if if you and I had a sandwich today Louis, right? It might just be a sandwich, right? But if you spent six months in a hospital eating through a tube, it wouldn't just be a sandwich. It'd be the best meal I've ever had. It would be the greatest thing on the earth. All right. And the people that go through chemotherapy and are lucky enough to come out the other side, they don't just eat sandwiches. Everything they do. You could have a barbecue in the backyard and it's the Taj Mahal to them. Right. Every day. They notice the trees and the flowers. Yeah. They value their friendships and the people that they love. It's a heightened gratitude. So gratitude is a superpower. It's a tool that we

can use. So all 10 of these superpowers, we call them superpowers, but they're not like bullet speed or Herculean strength. These are accessible to anybody. Of course. I guess the other thing that's real important about these 10 superpowers is that they're timeless. We live in a day and age where you're expected to be on trend. You've got to be on trend and off trend on time every time. Right. That's really hard. Right. We're not on trend all the time at all. We try and we're running a business.

So if the fit of t-shirts or whatever the trend for other businesses that we're in changes, we've got to follow that like anybody else. But the basis of our organization and the basis of Life is Good, the book, is that the most powerful tools a human being has to live a happy and fulfilling life existed for your great, great, great grandparents.

In fact, if they lived a happy and fulfilling life, they use these superpowers. Yes. And a cool thing is they will exist for your great, great, great grandchildren. These are these are timeless devices. Right. And it's not rocket science. I mean, my brother and I are timeless devices. And it's not rocket science. I mean, my brother and I are simple people. Simplicity is a superpower.

We live in a complex world. So we all have to call down to what really matters. You know, we all have to choose what we love and choose who we love and put our limited time on this planet into that. So that sounds simple, but it gets away from all of us. Hey guys, if you enjoyed this inspirational clip from a past episode of the show, then you'll love the free book I'm giving away right now. It's called The Millionaire Morning. It includes some of my best tips for starting off your day with a millionaire mindset. Get your free copy at themillionairemorning.com and just pay shipping. Again, check it out right now,

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