Path to Success: Jeff Lerner's Resilience, Grit, and Transformation Journey

The law of compounding, if I work hard and consistently at something, and by the way, now that I've started, if I stop, I'll go back, I'll backslide. And so that was my early identification at a critical formative time that like, dude, if you want to change your circumstances, you just got to work really hard at stuff, find productive stuff to do that ultimately leads where you want to go. Welcome to super entrepreneurs podcast. I'm your host Shahid Durrani. Today we have with us Jeff Lerner from broke jazz magician to a hundred million dollars in online sales. Jeff's story and message are now inspiring millions. After a decade of building multiple online businesses to over eight figures and twice landing on Inc 5,000. Welcome to our show. Thanks. Glad to be here, man. Appreciate you having me. No, it's my pleasure. Oh, no, that's amazing. So a musician, do you still have that passion in you? Yeah. In fact, I'm about 10 feet away. I have a concert, grand Steinway piano, literally right there in my booth here or in my room, and I come in every morning and I practice for depending on how much time I have that day, I practice either 45 or 60 minutes still every morning, Monday through Friday, what I do. So what triggered that first step into entrepreneurship? So I was, as you alluded, gosh, I've, I guess there's various ways to describe the journey depending on how high level or granular you want to get. But I would say at the highest level, it was the decision I made in high school that I just didn't align with the traditional path. I remember having this moment. I was always in trouble in school. Like I was always getting in trouble for like minor behavioral problems, like talking in class or not paying attention. Or I wasn't like, I wasn't like dealing drugs. I just didn't really, I just didn't care that much. And so anyway, I decided this is all just job training. That's all this is. I can see, I see through the matrix. Yeah. They're layering on some liberal arts and some history of the Peloponnesian war and the declaration of independence or yeah, bullshit. It's all just job training. And I don't want to have a job. There's, there's a few of us on this world on this earth that are. We would basically rather die listening to our own calling than being paid to enroll in somebody else's. And so I figured that out about myself. And, but it's weird because I think about I'm a parent now, right? I have a 20 year old and an 18 year old and a 14 year old and a six year old, but particularly the 2018 and 14 year olds, I, we have all their friends. They're always over at the house. And every teenager, not every, but so many teenagers have this instinct to do their own thing. But so few, and I think it's actually getting more and more, but certainly back then when you and I were young, so few actually indulged it. It's like childhood is this process of getting you to give up on your own drives and, or at least to suspend them and to say, okay, you need to subscribe to our methodology for at least 40 or 50 years. And then when you're 65 or 70 or whatever, you can pick back up with your thing. That's literally the construct. And I just was like, no, I'm not going to give up the majority of my life and all the most productive years of my life into somebody else's program. And that's. You know, it sounds nuts, but I dropped out of high school. So anyway, that's actually when I think the seeds of becoming an entrepreneur were planted. And I had a, an adolescent experience that I think reinforced that, which was like, I went to this same school for 11 years. So from kindergarten through my sophomore year of high school, I went to the same school, same environment, same students, same teachers, same administrator, same culture, same, just everything. And then I went that summer, I went on a backpacking trip. And on that backpacking trip, it was like one of those outdoor programs. It was called wilderness ventures. But what I figured out once I got there is this is a program that they send like a lot of like troubled kids to like kids that have like me, they were having like behavioral problems acting up. And so there's this group of, this was the worst thing my parents could have done. It was like, send me to this seven week outdoors program with 25 other kids that are all just as dysfunctional and just as big of degenerates as I was. And so I was like, but I was, I got to reinvent myself because it was a total is the first time in 11 years as a student, as a child, I was in this new environment with new people. And it was people that were like me. And I had this amazing experience. And so then when I came back and it was metaphorical and it was inspirational because we were like climbing mountains and like repelling and doing hard stuff and teamwork, and I just discovered this whole other way of being. And I got back to school and I'm like, this doesn't feel anything like that summer of freedom and which was supposed to teach me discipline, but it really felt like permission to be myself. And so I was just like, I'm out. I'm out on this whole thing. I dropped out of school. My junior year, I decided to become a jazz musician or some kind of musician, because at least then I could create and be spontaneous and be self-determining. And anyway, a few years after that, I ended up getting some piano gigs. There's a lot of detail to fill in the story, but a few years after that, I ended up getting some piano gigs where I would play for very wealthy, successful entrepreneurs, and I would be invited into their, or I would get booked into their homes to play like a house party, a dinner party, a catered event, whatever. Maybe there were 10, 10, like these people, they live in a, this was early 2000s, late, probably like 2002, 2003, maybe. So I'm walking, I'm a 20, let's see, in 2002, I was a 23 year old, pretty broke jazz musician who was, and I'm going into these $10 million mansions playing for the owner of the Houston Astros with, and he's having a dinner party with 20 of his friends and I'm surrounded by centimillionaires and billionaires and they're all entrepreneurs and I'm just a little piano player playing in the corner. And I think that it was first just simply the decision to reject the mainstream and then getting exposed to how successful, but also free you could be through starting businesses and entrepreneurship and that combination just set me up later in my twenties. I got burned out on being a musician. I was poor. I was getting divorced for the second time. I, my, I started to get arthritis in my wrist. I didn't, I wasn't going to be a, you know, virtuoso the rest of my life or any of that stuff. So I just decided entrepreneurship was the way to get to have my cake and eat it too. I got to have freedom and I also could maybe make some money. Yeah. The education system that you mentioned is great as a foundation or to strengthen the capability to remember things and read, remember, repeat, but it really is designed to create routines. Right. So when you go through that process, you spend your entire life just living that routine. And that routine just consumes a person because that routine doesn't allow enough progress. Right. And what you can progress, if you start not looking at routines and doing things out of the box or being creative or bringing your own inner most desires out in the physical world, you can't have routines. It's just all spontaneous, all ambition based. There's this passionate, there's this energy in it when you go and you do something on your own. Can you talk about, about routines a little bit and what people may be suffering from routines and how it might be holding them back, not going after their dreams. Yeah, for sure. That's one of my favorite subjects to talk about. So let me be really clear. I am a, I'm a hyper-structured person, so I'm very into my routine and even the word routine, if you actually look at the word routine, it just means the root. It's like the path to get where you want to go. The path to where you want to go is paved with stones or cobblestones or pebbles or whatever you want to call it. Think of it as like these pavers that repeat over and over. That's how you get where you want to go. So that's your routine. But the problem is what school does is it brings in these ebullient, creative, spontaneous children and it systematically says, okay, we need to dampen all that. We need to squash all that so that we can, cause you use the term create a routine. School doesn't actually inspire kids to create a routine. Stool school suppresses kids to install a routine into their life, whether they want it or not. And they, and we're going to turn you into a good little clockwork orange as the saying goes. And so I, to be, to be clear, I'm super, I mentioned my piano. You have to, that's part of my routine. I get up at four, I practice the piano for, or I get ready. I do my prep for the day. I come to the office. I practice piano for 45 to 60 minutes. Then I go to the gym. I meet my wife at the gym. I do my cardio and my stretching or mobility in the mornings. Then I go like during the school year, then I go take my daughter to school. Then I come to the office. Like it's the same every day, Monday through Friday when I'm in town and it's, and if I showed you my schedule, I have every time, every block of time, pretty much scheduled from four in the morning till typically about four 30 in the afternoon. So that's 12 and a half hours a day. That's scheduled really 13 and a half. Cause then I go back to the gym and I lift weights. And then finally about six o'clock I get home and I'm actually free for a few hours to just chill and be with my family. But I mean that rinse, wash, repeat, that is my life. But the difference between me and most people is that I created that routine because I took the time to decide what I wanted my life to look like and decide what I wanted to accomplish with my life. And then I constructed my own routine to say, okay, what is my best guess for how to structure my life? So that on this recurring daily unit of time, it will eventually compound through the various outcomes that I want in my life based on what I've identified as my first principles. And so it's like, I want to continue to expand as a musician. I want to age well and get in shape. And that required for me that even requires two different segments a day. One that's more focused on elongating muscles and a different one that's focused on building the muscles. I have time structured time in that morning routine for personal growth and development. When I listen to podcasts, I listen to audio books. I create content. I have obviously from 8am to 4.30 every day. I run my business or Monday through Wednesday. I run my company Entra, the education platform. Thursday and Friday I create content or do other stuff related to my other business interests, which are more passive. And then I have, and then I want to build relationships with my family. Like I decided it all ahead of time and I engineered it myself. And what I think that school should be doing is, and for most people listening, they're probably adults. I don't imagine you have a lot of like school aged children listening to the show. You probably have adults that are going like, Oh no, now I'm living somebody else's program. I'm not running my own. I'm living somebody else's routine that was installed into my life. And it's maintained through the pressure of student loans or mortgage debt or whatever. We get conscripted into this system that says, here's a way to live, but we're going to put enough pressure on you that it must become the way to live. Because, and that pressure keeps you from being able to rise up and see alternatives. And, and that's really my mission is helping people create options in their life. That's people think that I'm this guy that teaches you how to make money online. That is probably, that is the mechanism that I've identified as being probably the most essential for the most people. But fundamentally my, my mission in life is to unlock human potential by giving people more options so that ultimately they can return to self-determination and basically individualism. One of the quotes that comes to mind for me most often in my life is by Ayn Rand. And she says, civilization is the process of setting man free from men. And to me, that's what life is about is getting to where you can choose to show up every day. As I say, man, man, or woman as a human, as an individual human who is not by necessity conscripted into a program of a larger number of human beings, you get to choose. That's my mission in life. Thank you for clarifying my point. That's a really key point there about create or inject. Like it's, there's a huge difference creating a routine because you found out what your purpose is. You found out what your goal is, that shining star. And then what is that routine you need to do to get there? But another way is that if it's given to you, like you mentioned student loans and all that kind of stuff, you're actually confined to a routine. And that was my point. When we create a routine, we're creating it to that focus that we're going towards and we can actually see it. We can see it on a weekly basis, but even to add some pizzazz to it, break that routine and take a speaking gig somewhere, go somewhere, do something out of the routine that could amplify you reaching your goal. I think that is also important to wake up something within that excites you. It adds enthusiasm into that journey. Yeah. Tony Robbins has a model of personality. He talks about the six core needs of personality and there's four of them that are what I guess you would call psychological and two of them that are spiritual and they operate on these three different polarities. So you have the first polarity is on the one side, you have certainty that the human personality craves certainty, which would be another, probably a descriptor of routine every day I wake up. And in my case, I wake up, I already have my whole day planned out. I reviewed it the night before. I'm very certain to a large degree of what I'm doing that day. And everybody falls on this spectrum. But on the other side, you have variety, which to your point, spontaneity, something that's a change of pace, something that's not part of the routine. And so that's a polarity. That's a, I guess what we would call a dialectic right between certainty and variety and everybody's naturally attuned to be somewhere on that spectrum. For myself, I do very well with routine. My therapist once jokingly, half jokingly told me I need to get a tattoo that just says structure is my friend. I do really well, but I think the reason I do really well with routine, because like when I was in school, I didn't do well with routine. I couldn't sit still for five minutes. The difference is because a it's my routine and B or it's, and it's my end game. It's my goal. It's my North star that I've developed a routine that's oriented. I feel ownership in the process, but the other thing is because my North star, my goals are based on principles that I struggled through the logical rhetorical process of, of arriving at my own first principles for what I believe are important in life. And so every day I wake up and it's not just a job. It's not just a duty. It's not just a routine. It's a mission. It's a calling. It's an act of self-expression. So I get to be myself every day. And to the extent that I am mastering being myself, it's based on a certain number of things that I've set up that are part of the routine. And I don't have to motivate myself. I don't have to find energy. I don't have to slam a Snickers bar to get a burst of sugar or whatever. I just wake up every day, inspired to go do the work. And it's, and it's not like it never ebbs and flows, but then when you talk about variety and yeah, I'll tell you the truth lately, like even this podcast, for example, we're, we decided to meet or your booker and our team, whatever, 7 AM, my time, that, that was a shift in my routine. So this morning I haven't been to the gym yet. I actually slept an hour later because I knew I wasn't going to have time for the I shifted my piano time. Now we're doing this and then I'm going to go meet my wife at the gym late. So it's like these little adjustments. But frankly, lately I feel I've been traveling a lot for speaking or for company meetings or my company hosts events and I've been training at events. And lately I'm just like, dude, I just want to stay home and do my routine. I like, I want six months with no variety whatsoever because my routine is so productive and effective and congruent with who I am trying to become in this world that I actually start to get annoyed if my life is too spontaneous. And by the way, I'm glad I'm on this podcast. That's not a knock at our 7 AM start time. But in general, I feel like my pendulum has swung a little much too, a little too far towards variety and I want to get it back to certainty. Yeah, no, I completely get it. It's that passion you have for your purpose. When we have passion towards our purpose and each day, each moment, the actions that we take, they don't really feel like work anymore because I remember working a nine to five, I would drive there and I'll say, Oh, another day. I remember it was just all that self-talk will keep going. I shouldn't be here. I go there. It didn't feel like life. I said, is this what life is about? That's what trigger all those self-awareness and the questions you start asking. But from that moment on is when you find what you working towards, so exciting, so beautiful and a purpose behind it, you become that energy. So you become that flow. When you become that flow, all these other things, they're just minor. They don't even affect, they don't even come through that flow of energy anymore. That's what it just feels like. But you made a point about unlocking potential, which is very close to home. On our show here, our slogan is you are super. We say every single human being is super. We have incredible gifts and potential just locked up and covered up by our past experiences. So the major part that I feel is that belief in yourself. So one is the conscious belief that we have. I'm going to do great. I'm going to have businesses. I'm going to have operations all over the world. That's a conscious belief, but then there's a subconscious, a more deeper belief that people have these two images, right? One image they're showing the world and then have another self image, but then about the belief of if they can do it or if they can actually go ahead and make this a reality. Can you speak about this through your experience, your own and the working with clients? How do you help people create that belief within, or if you believe that is important or not, like you can even talk about that, but to create that belief that they would actually go and take those steps or anything that you can share with them that they could do at home after watching or listening to this episode, that they can start taking those steps towards. Yeah. What an artful question that I appreciate. First of all, we're incredibly aligned here. Belief is everything. Uh, belief belief is the fuel for desire. If you read think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill, he talks about the 13 requirements to achieve riches. The first one is a burning desire, but desire burns. What fuel belief is the fuel that, that, that allows desire to burn hot. So we all want things, but the desire, the depth of the desire and the fire for the wanting has a lot to do with whether or not we believe we can achieve the thing. Because the mind is a self-regulating mechanism and it doesn't generally allow itself to have self-defeating or implausible impulses or drives, let's say. So the point is your mind, like I'll use a really crass example. If you're a man and you're five foot two and you weigh 475 pounds at five foot two, your mind is probably not going to allow you to develop a deep desire to go to LA, find Kim Kardashian and sweep her off her feet and marry her. Your mind's just not going to let you go there because you have no belief that is remotely possible. And by the way, the one person out there who's actually crazy enough to think that at five, two, 475 pounds, they got game and they can go get Kim Kardashian. They actually probably, I'm not saying they could get her, she's dating or married and she's just a proxy metaphor in this example anyways, but like that guy's confidence would probably get him pretty far because his belief it's so anyway, you get the meta, it's, it's grass, but we don't wear it, but our minds don't let us long for things that, that we deeply believe there's no possible way we could have. And so if you have, if you're like, if you're, if you think of yourself as I'm just not a very ambitious person, I don't really want that much for my life. That's probably because underneath it, you don't actually believe you could achieve very much for your life. And that probably was installed into you by some, some really unfortunate childhood experience, some crap, some bad influences, some negative reinforcement, some undermining, some shaming, some self-esteem. Destruction. And because children are inherently confident and it just gets systematically eroded. Right. And so, yeah, you gotta have that belief. And frankly, at this point, humans learn through stories. They learn through ----, what's called limbic resonance with other human beings experiences. So we hear a story, but it's why movies are so powerful because we see it. We're sensory where we have sensory immersion in the story, whether we're watching, you know, Rudy make the Notre Dame football team or Robert Redford in the natural or Will Smith saved the world or whatever we can enrolled in this. And it changes us. It impacts us. But the thing is those we deem to be fiction. So Rudy's a better example, cause that actually happened, right? That's how we learn. So part of what I have taken on, and this is really a nice sort of hack for life is if you start viewing success, not just as something that you desire for yourself or the, in a sense you, you owe to yourself, but as your mechanism for inspiring other people, where at this point, it's like, how successful can I become? Because I know my history. I know that I used to be a broke jazz musician. I know that I used to be divorced and depressed and evicted from my apartment and in all this debt and facing all these challenges. And statistically I was counted out by everybody in my life. I know all that. So the more successful I become, the more I create this experiential learning opportunity for other people to go, Oh, if he did it, maybe I can do it. Because I know that trying to get people to want more doesn't work because they won't desire their desire will not outpace their belief, trying to get people to believe more and what's possible for them. Then they will want better things for their life and they will want a better impact in the world. So yes, belief is everything. Belief is everything. Well said, Jeff. Love it. I feel that it's the powerhouse of everything. And that example that you gave, I think it's quite possible for that person. If the situation, by the way, what's the first thing that guys, if he actually starts to have a burning desire, this, see, this is the key right here. If he actually is, you know what? Inside of this body, there's a version of me that could go make that happen. And I believe I can make that happen. And I'm, because I believe it, I'm allowing myself to want it. What's the first thing that guy's probably going to do? It's probably going to go join a gym. Yeah. He's going to take the steps, create their routine. We start improving ourselves. We create routines that allow us to improve ourselves consistently over time so that we can achieve that, which we desire that was unlocked based on what we believed was possible for ourselves. So it's, it's the gray. This is how you solve society's ills. You don't have to create more government programs to take care of people. You just have to create an environment in which people believe more is possible for their lives. And they'll do what we're designed to do, which is actually self-determined self-determination, self-care, and a more empowered way to exist. Because the inverse of that, which is don't believe that what's possible for you don't have any intense desires. Therefore don't be a productive driven, inspired person. Therefore be dependent on us to take care of you and provide for you and to do for you that, which you have decided you cannot do for yourself because you don't believe you can, because we told you now you have a society that's entirely dependent on these large institutional structures and in psychology. We know that dependency breeds hostility and that's why everybody's so angry is because we're all, we all think we're dependent on these institutional structures and we, we live in constant fear that somebody's going to mess with our little dependency matrix. And so then we just go around defensive and protective all the time. Instead of being open, teaching people how to take care of themselves is like the progenitor of a loving world. Because if people can take care of themselves, their love doesn't get crowded out by fear that somebody is going to mess with their little life support system. Yes, Jeff. It's that self-awareness. When we start becoming more self-aware and we start realizing that we do have these two images and have the ability to actually go in and edit or make changes to the deep self-image to create that person that you want to go because every single attribute that is out there, every, we all have them. It's just some are more on the surface based on our experiences and others are crushed down like confidence. Everyone has it. It's just pressed down within them. So when you create that self-image, you bring that to the surface. Now you see that gentleman going to the gym, doing all those tests, making things happen, we see this in entrepreneurship too, is that when they believe and they have that self-image within and they're vibrating with that self-image, they're making moves on that level. They're creating relationships. Everything happens from that level. So it's a beautiful conversation we're having Jeff, but I would like to ask what you feel your innermost superpower is that got you to this point in life. I just think it's resilience, man. I, I write about this in my book. Another word would be grit. I, I just decided pretty young, like probably in middle school. I think when I was 13, I had this experience of a summer, like a three month transformation over a summer. So in seventh grade, I was still very chubby. I was like, I was a fat kid. I got bullied a lot and I got bullied for a variety of things. Okay, good. And we can, we can join a support group together or something. Actually, what's funny is we've probably both gone out. Yeah, we've gone out. We've dealt with it through, through, through, actually, I'm going to go back to that word confidence, which simply means con like with con is Latin for with, fidence is like fidelity with trust is what that word actually means. And I have learned to trust ourselves by keeping commitments to ourselves by making short-term sacrifices in pursuit of longer-term goals. And so we have built confidence because we have taught ourselves that we're someone we can trust. And when we say we're going to do a thing, we can do the thing. And that's why we aren't in support groups for bullied fat kids because everyone can do it. Yeah. We've dealt with it a different way, but anyways, to, to your, forgive me. I'm sorry. I got on that little resilience and resilience. Yeah. So I think that's it. And so at 13, very good. I had this experience where I was a fat kid and my, and then over the summer, I started lifting weights. And plus I just hit puberty. And like, I was, I started to have some juice in my body. And, and so then the fall of eighth grade, I went back to school and I was in shape. I'd gone from a fat kid to a fit kid. And I, and I worked my butt off that summer because I had never talked like no girl would go out with me. I'd never, I just felt like I wasn't cool. I wasn't good at sports. I just, and I just wanted certain things. And so I worked hard. I worked hard every day in the gym at seven, 13 years old, I'm pushing myself. And so I came back to school and it was like, I had a whole new life. I had a whole new existence, right? Literally dropping whatever, 15% body fat or 10% body fat or whatever that it's actually sad how much that completely changed the quality of my existence in the middle school, high school structure. And so I had that association of, okay, if I work really hard, it's something accumulates relatively slowly. Cause it's not like fitness changes happen overnight, but it's like the law of compounding. If I work hard and consistently at something. And by the way, now that I've started, if I stop, I'll go back, I'll backslide. And so that was my early identification at a critical formative time that like, dude, if you want to change your circumstances, you just got to work really hard at stuff, find productive stuff to do that ultimately leads where you want to go and work really hard at it until just until how long until. And so then when I was in my twenties or let's say after I dropped out of high school and it was like, okay, I know. Cause my parents told me, they're like, Jeff, your life is going to be really hard. Like if you drop out of high school to become a jazz musician or a musician, I wasn't a jazz musician yet. Cause I didn't know I wasn't good enough to be any kind of musician. I just knew I wanted to do it. They're like, if you do this, your life is going to be really hard. And I was like, that's okay. Because I've learned that if I just do really hard stuff, that's the right stuff. And I do it until then eventually I'll get where I want to go. Not just where somebody else tells me, Hey, you should go there because at least you'll be able to support yourself and get a job and not die. No, if I work, if I'm willing to work harder than everybody, I can go where I want to go, not just where they tell me to go. And I've just, it's like, I never, I'm like a Timex watch, dude. I just take a licking and keep on ticking. And I failed at 11 businesses in my twenties, even my current business. People talk about taking action. The current business I have, which is we've done a hundred and $40 million in sales in the last three years. And I started the thing on a credit card and it's like, how did I start this? I started it by putting out content, but people say, Oh, put out content. Yeah. But how many pieces of content? I put out a thousand pieces of content in a year just to get started. And because I don't, because to your point, I believe that if I do the right things consistently over a long enough period of time, they'll pay off. And guess what? They do. Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate you for today's discussion. I find that what you're doing out there, it's so needed, Jeff. It goes beyond what you do. What I do is such a important aspect of today's day and age to have people out there sharing this kind of wisdom, because there is a struggle out there. You went through it. I went through it. So we know both sides of the struggle and then what we find now. So it's so important to keep this going and to make this impact on the world. So I want to just share my thanks to you for making these dreams happen for people, and thank you for coming on our show today. Oh, thank you, Shahed. It's been a blast and I appreciate your kind words and let's both agree to keep up the good fight. We will and keep in touch. All right. Take care, man.