Mike Rowe

Lewis Howes:              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 stop.

Mike Rowe:                  My granddad used to say, “Shortcuts lead to long delays.” Shortcuts lead to long delays, so we’re told every single day, in about a thousand different ways, back to our earlier conversation, that happiness is attainable, if you do this, this, that and that. And let me 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 forty when you can work thirty? Why work fifty if you can get by with forty? 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 freakin’ boss, it’s your crazy schedule, it’s that son of a b**h down here.

Lewis Howes:               Right. It’s victim mentality.

Mike Rowe:                  Yeah. I just think, I think it’s true, you know, 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. Well, one of my favourite 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, recently, a very powerful group of men, about 2000 of them. I mean, heads of state from all over the country, and it’s 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 had 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, 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…

Lewis Howes:               How hard it was.

Mike Rowe:                  They wanted to tell me about the time in their life when they looked down and didn’t see a net. When they realised 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’s agitating, you know, right? Like, when you hear something you believe to be true, but most people haven’t heard, it’s agitating and it makes you want to grab the country by the lapels and shake it.

I went from a guy, a sixteen, seventeen-year-old kid, convinced and utterly connected to all the things I just mentioned, then I wandered in the wilderness until I was forty-two, in Hollywood and New York, impersonating a host, completely just kind of bulls**g 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 honour of my granddad,” and suddenly, again, a long, sloppy, random 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.

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.

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