Ryan Holmes

Lewis Howes:                 This is 5-Minute Friday!!

Welcome, everyone, to a special edition of The School of Greatness Podcast! I am so pumped to bring on my good friend, Ryan Holmes. Now for those that don’t know who Ryan is, he is the founder and CEO of Hootsuite.

He started the company in 2008 and has helped grow it into one of the world’s most widely used social relationship platforms, with 10 million-plus users, including 800 of the Fortune 1000 Companies.

I met Ryan briefly after he launched Hootsuite and it’s been incredible to see where he’s taken his company from, which is just a couple of hundred thousand subscribers, to now, over ten million and taking his company from just a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue, to valued at over a billion dollars.

Ryan Holmes:                 I think that having a balanced life is so critical, that includes, you know, there is a great post that I saw and posted a while ago, I shared. It had good hustle and bad hustle, and I think there is such a thing as bad hustle and negative hustle.

Lewis Howes:                 Not a lot of sleep.

Ryan Holmes:                 Yeah, or no sleep, “I stayed up and I worked 24 hours straight!” That’s bad hustle, like, “Congratulations, you can give yourself a heart attack and die!” Like, “Don’t do that!” That’s not healthy hustle.

What’s good hustle? Those are the things I want to focus on. Good hustle, it’s working smarter and not harder, it’s getting exercise and balance in your life. It is attacking things with passion, sure, this piece I’ll share with you, and it’s awesome, and it resonates so well with people.

But, as I said, balance and health is hugely important to me. I had a back injury a few years ago.

Lewis Howes:                 I remember.

Ryan Holmes:                 That is another, speaking of formative things in my life, and adversity, that was actually, I’m surprised I didn’t immediately come on onto that, but that was a huge moment of adversity, one of my darkest years. I was using a crutch and a cane. It was really bad.

Lewis Howes:                 And that’s why you got into yoga, right?

Ryan Holmes:                 Yeah, that’s why I got into yoga, yeah, absolutely. And out of that balance, and not sitting down at you desk all day, I created my stand-up desk company, because I wanted to give that out to people and put that back to the world, to give people a little balance in sitting down and standing up.

I exercise probably three, four, sometimes five days a week. I try to get a little something in. We’ve got a gym at the office. I’ll go in and I’ll take off at lunch and I’ll go work out a couple of days a week. I’ll go for a run; I’m trying to get faster at running right now; cycling season’s on; in winter I back-country ski. I just try to get a little bit of something everywhere and enjoy myself while I do it, find sports that I like and get exercise in what I can, and then lots of yoga. I really enjoy that.

I talk about the good hustle, bad hustle, I’m huge in the hustle. Entrepreneurs are self-propelled. It all comes down to you, you have to own accountability, it is not about, you know, entrepreneurs need to be insane. You have to be insane in a good and bad way, you are crushing through walls every day.

You’ve got these, all of these things that are stacked against you, that are going to tell you that what you are doing, you can’t do. And you need to just have your own way of thinking about things, you need to basically, your mental game has got to be as strong as your physical game.

You need endurance on both fronts, but you’ve got to be able to persuasively talk about what you’re going to do, to get people aligned around a vision, to move the ball ahead, and to work through bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is the enemy of entrepreneurship, right?

Lewis Howes:                 Sure! Sure!

Ryan Holmes:                 And so, you have to be able to do that, and that just takes hustle, it takes perseverance, it takes self-discipline and motivation and you’ve got to find that yourself.

Lewis Howes:                 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, themillionairemorning.com.