Lewis Howes Quotes

What lights you up? Inspires you? Energizes you? When do you find yourself losing track of time because you are so absorbed in an activity and can’t wait to get back to it and do it again? What would you love to do even if you didn’t get paid to do it? Fast-forward to your golden years. What might you wish you had done more of? Now take a moment to compare your lists. What common themes do you see in your answers? What words get repeated? What activities keep getting mentioned? What threads are woven consistently throughout your story? Summarize the patterns you see by circling common words or writing a few summary sentences below both lists.

Katy Milkman, award-winning behavioral scientist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, describes the essence of greatness as being clear on your purpose or mission so that it serves as your North Star. She told me that when someone has that clear North Star and has built their life to support and “lean toward it” in all aspects, she feels like she is in the presence of greatness.

Tim Storey joined me on my show, he shared this wisdom: “When you find out where you came from, who you are, and what your purpose is, you cannot be stopped.

We only have one rule. You can’t stop. You can go as slow as you need to go, but you cannot stop. You can never drop out.

Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

You’ll need to become comfortable with trying, failing, and learning, knowing that failure is the only path to success.

Greatness is what remains when that talent and vision meet adversity — and persist in the face of it.

As President Teddy Roosevelt put it: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

But dude, in 10 years, nobody’s going to care. Nobody’ll even remember my name. But they’ll remember if I impact their life. That’s why I’m retiring from the National Football League. I want to have a legacy. I want to have an impact.

if you’re receiving validation from others instead of having it within yourself or creating your own validation through the things that matter most to you, then you are always going to be subject to the judgment of others.

Successful people are simply those with successful habits. — Brian Tracy

You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly. — Rumi

HABITS MANIFESTO What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while. Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong. Focus on actions, not outcomes. By giving something up, we may gain. Things often get harder before they get easier. When we give more to ourselves, we can ask more from ourselves. We’re not very different from other people, but those differences are very important. It’s easier to change our surroundings than ourselves. We can’t make people change, but when we change, others may change. We should make sure the things we do to feel better don’t make us feel worse. We manage what we monitor. Once we’re ready to begin, begin now.

In 1991, a college sophomore studying music in the American Midwest made the mistake of selling some drugs to the wrong person. Until then, he hadn’t done much more than smoke pot and sell some of it to his friends. Petty vandalism at his high school was as high stakes as his criminal career had been. Then, as these things tend to go when you’re just 18 years old, he tried to push the envelope and test his boundaries. He started experimenting with hard drugs like LSD. But he was naive, and the brashness of youth got the best of him. He sold some of that LSD outside his circle — to an undercover policeman. And as if his luck couldn’t get worse, like a scene out of a TV movie of the week, the judge, under pressure to make an example out of this young man, sentenced him to 6 to 25 years in prison. It’s a faceless, timeless story that transcends race, class, and region. A young kid makes a mistake that forever changes their lives and their family’s lives as well. We are all too familiar with how stories like this usually end: The kid spends their most impressionable years behind bars and comes out worse than when they went in. Life on the outside is too difficult to contend with; habits learned on the inside are too difficult to shed. They reoffend; their crimes escalate. The cycle continues. This story, however, is a little different. Because this young man didn’t go back to jail. In fact, after being released in less than 5 years on good behavior, he went on to become one of the best jazz violinists in the world. He left prison with a fire lit underneath him — to practice, to repent, to humble himself, to hustle, and to do whatever it took to make something of his life. No task was too small, no gig was too tiny, no potential fan was too disinterested for him not to give it everything he had. And he did. The story is a little different for another reason, too. That young man’s name is Christian Howes. He is my older brother.

I asked myself: Why am I not feeling good inside? Why am I feeling unfulfilled? Why do I not feel satisfied when I’ve been so driven for the last several years?