Lilly Singh, Justine Ezarik, Bethany Mota, and Lindsey Sterling

Lewis: This is episode number 779 with the powerhouse women of YouTube. Welcome to the school of greatness my name is Lewis Howes, a former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today now let the class begin.

Welcome to this episode we’ve got some inspirational powerhouse females who are taking over the world with their creativity, passion. Making their dreams a reality and they all started in one place and that was YouTube. They built this massive following on YouTube which has allowed them to create a passionate following and audience to take their dreams to the next level.

We’ve got Lilly Singh who just got a late night talk show who has gained a massive following on YouTube and done so many other creative projects from TV to movies. We’ve got Justine who is a huge YouTube personalities, one of the first vloggers that really became famous. We talked about her and how she built her channels. Bethany Mota who was also on dancing with the stars and taking over the world in fashion and in beauty and styling and makeup and hair tutorials and recipes. We’ve got Lindsey Sterling one of my favorite people who is turned the violin into one of the coolest things in the world with her music, her dancing, and her choreography doing massive sold out shows around the world. She also spoke at the summit of greatness last year and performed and blew everyone away. And this is all about how to really take your dreams that people think might be a little weird or corky or different and these women have turned this creative thing that most people think you can never make money doing, and they’ve built massive business and brands and led inspirational lives that have impact and change millions of people’s lives around the world.

In this interview we talked about how to sustain this level of intensity. All of these women have done something unique with their hustle, but how do you sustain a hustle? How do you reinvent yourself through burnout? How do you continually grow when you feel like you might be getting capped out? We talked about how to surround yourself with people who lift you up because there’s a lot of negative haters that can say mean things about you on YouTube when you start to grow and any platform. And how do you really surround yourself with the right people and not worry about them.

Talked about how to overcome the fear of failing. The fear of failing when you launch something that you think maybe other people don’t believe in but you launch it anyways because you love it. How to overcome the feel of failing once you become successful and you have that pressure to stay successful. And also how to find your true self through all of this.

I’m so excited for you to listen to all of these women who are on this mashup episode about their YouTube dreams and how they built their brands. I’m super pumped about this.

Make sure to share this with your friends, tag a friend, and spread the message of greatness. Help other people become dream makers like yourself by taking action on the wisdom they learn from this episode.

Before we dive in I want to talk about sleep and eightsleep.com. I want to tell you about the pod by eight sleep. Now, the pod by eight sleep is a high tech bed designed specifically to help you achieve optimal sleep fitness and it is develop by leading sleep researchers after tracking 43 million hours of sleep. Dynamic temperature and sleep tracking to enhance your rest and recovery. It learns your sleep habits and adjust the temperature automatically. So, if you like the bed cool and your partner likes it warm you both can have it at the same time. It’s crazy comfortable you can sleep longer and deeper so you wake up refresh and ready to take on the world, and you can try the pod for 100 nights and if you don’t love it you can refund the purchase and arrange a free pickup. They already sold out of their first batch so they’re going fast. For a limited time you get a $150 off for purchase when you go to eightsleep.com/great.

And also for those who are looking to build their brand, build their business, build their passion turn that creativity into something powerful and magnetic where the world is your platform, and we can build this now. Imagine if you had a community in place of other dreamers like you. Imagine if you had a community in place with someone to coach you and guide you all the way through your process of building your business and building your following and generating more customers and sales and clients and doing all these things and monetizing this along the way. Well, you can do that with our inner circle program. Now, we got 25 hundred entrepreneurs from around the world who are a part of our monthly mentorship and coaching program where we bring you the top experts in the world to help you grow your business and we coach you live in a group format. It’s powerful we’ve had so many incredible case studies of people living and building their dream businesses and you can sign up to be a part of our inner circle community by going to lewishowes.com/innercircle. Go there right now you can see all the stuff you’re gonna get, it’s incredible. We’re gonna give you some cool bonuses right when you join and really start getting the business of the ground that you want. Check it out right now at lewishowes.com/innercircle.

A big thank you to everyone here and let’s dive into this episode with the powerhouse women of YouTube.

One of the things that our mutual friend told me about is like what really inspire you about Lilly, because her level of work ethic and hustle whether she’s working fast-food or some job she hates or put in furniture is like the same level of passion and energy and hustle across everything you do in life. So you really get inspired by that, where does that come from and why do you do that?

Lilly: Honestly I don’t know where it comes from, part of me thinks that and this is being really honest, I think it’s a great pro and strength but also often times it’s a really big con in my life. I’ll give you a prime example.

The other day we threw a barbecue for one of my team that got engage and I threw a barbecue, then I’m like I should do a fruit play and I was Facetiming Humble. As I was Facetiming Humble and I was cutting strawberries into stars and melons to make them look like flower and he just looking at me and was like “What are you doing? Why are you putting this much effort into this fruit bowl?” and I think it’s just that I like to challenge myself and when I do anything I treat it as if it’s the most important thing, and that’s great because then I get to do amazing things that I am really proud of, but then also I spend five hours making a fruit bowl. So, it’s kind of problematic.

Lewis: You’re in bed for 2 hours.

Lilly: I haven’t gone there yet but I don’t know it’s in me that’s just obsessed with improving and productivity all the time. And when people ask me ‘how do you do that? Don’t you get tired?’ The answer is I don’t know, I get tired of doing a lot of things but I don’t get tired of making this one thing the best it could be.

Lewis: You’re obsessed over it do you think there is something underneath it? Like what if you didn’t have the perfect fruit bowl?

Lilly: I mean it wasn’t perfect the kiwis were kind of whack. I think it’s just we have X amount of energy in a day and if I’m going to spend that energy anyways, why not spending it on doing something really well? It really bothers me if I just do.

Here’s an example: If I take a break I usually watch a TV show and in my brain it’s not just me, in my brain it’s ‘You are going to get fired, you have to proactively watch this TV show so you can get inspired.’

Lewis: It’s not relaxing.

Lilly: Exactly and I’m obsessed with that. I’m obsess with productivity at every level and being the best they can be and extracting the best I can out of everything and it’s obsessive.

Lewis: Who do you want to be?

Lilly: I want to be, I don’t want to feel anyone’s voice. You know I think Humble and I learned this when we were on Italy and talking [?]. It really impacted me when Humble is asking him. I was like me and Humble talk about that all the time and that got me thinking ‘I don’t want people to be like ‘You can be.’ No, I want to fill the Lilly Singh void. I want to be the best version of myself. That gives me goosebumps. You know I want to make little Lilly get goosebumps when she sees my success.

Lewis: I love the dedication that you have. Dedicated to the person I was 6 years ago “I told you to keep going thanks for listening.” It kind of reminds me the Matthew Mcconaughey speech, did you remember his speech the Oscar or the, where he was like “My inspiration is myself 3 years from now and like chasing that guy who is going to achieve those things that I want to achieve. What I need to do now to make it happen and always chasing myself not someone else.” So, I think it’s cool that you dedicated to that.

Lilly: I was thinking long and hard to the dedication, but of course I want to dedicate to my mom and of course all the other people. The person actually dedicate it to that actually got me here is the person that was like, I feel like crap and still gonna get up tomorrow that person that was like ‘I feel like crap, I’m still gonna get up tomorrow.’

Lewis: That inspires me. I just finished my next book and I might have to change the inspiration, I’m not saying the same thing but my own way.

Lilly: You don’t.

Lewis: I dedicated my family in the last book.

Lilly: Which is great, families are great.

Lewis: Acknowledgement as well so maybe I’ll change it up.

Lilly: But I think sometimes as humans we need to be like we feel pressure to always be giving people credit and that’s very important but sometimes we don’t give enough credit to ourselves.

Lewis: Absolutely I agree.

Lilly: The end of the day that is still you.

Lewis: So what’s your vision then for growth strategy in general for what you’re creating? Just for fun or do you have a vision like ‘I want to have 10 million subscribers.’

Justine: I don’t really.

Lewis: As long as you make enough money that comes in you’re happy, you’re not like focus on a big dream or big goal with that?

Justine: No, the weird thing for me in setting goals is I always set these goals like ‘I’m bored I don’t want to do that.’ I find something else cooler than that and I’ve talked to a lot of people that have set these goals that they will do nothing until they achieve that and they are so pigeon hold in getting to that goal that there are other things that you could’ve been doing that are so much better than that.

Lewis: So what are the things you want to be doing and what’s the dream for you then?

Justine: I don’t know like every day there’s something else I want to do and like I don’t want to do that the next day then I change it. So, I mean I am good working on a movie which is really fun.

Lewis: Really?

Justine: Yeah and I think another reason is I started writing the book too because I wanted to pitch sort of a web series idea based around my life, but nobody could really grasp their head around the crazy things that have happened. So then like I’ll just put it in a book and then we’ll talk.

Lewis: What do you think is the biggest thing that’s open up for you since doing your first YouTube video till now?

Justine: I am not good at staying on task, I am a procrastinator and no matter how much I try not to be I am. So it’s why it is very helpful that I need to have people surrounding me that are able to sort of compensate for the things that I know I am not good at. Even like my sister I know we hang out, we’re probably not gonna get any projects done, so I need to make sure she’s at her house telling me what to do.

Lewis: So facetiming being a person.

Justine: I think just surrounding yourself with people that are able to sort of you know lift you up for the things that you’re not good at is just super important. So, I think that was kind of the stepping stone for me as learning what I wasn’t good at and finding people to help fix that.

Lewis: I’m curious if all the content you put out there, every video out there if it all got erase, if you could put up one final video that would be the only video people see for the rest of time from you. And in this video, well first of I’ll ask you 2 things.

1. What will you post in that video if it was the only video that people would ever see? And just say under 5 minutes.

Justine: I don’t know I don’t ever plan my videos ever. If all my videos got deleted today I would probably just turn on the camera and just start talking and I don’t know what I would say though is the problem.

Lewis: Well, I’ll give you a better question: if you had 1 video left everything was deleted, all of your social network was deleted, but you get to put in 1 video out there that the world could see, and you can never record again and never have any other message to go out there, and you get to share 3 things you know to be true about the world in your experience and what you’ve learned. What would those 3 things be?

Justine: Nothing is big of a deal as you probably think it is, nobody actually really cares as much as you think they do and just have fun and be nice.

Lewis: Do you think you have been pretty nice?

Justine: Definitely. I think I am sometimes too nice.

Lewis: Does it hurt you sometimes?

Justine: I think so.

Lewis: What would you say is the biggest fear for you then? That you’ve gone through a lot bullying, the cyber bullying, you’ve had other people criticized you for things you’ve done. You’ve had failures but like you said what’s the big fear?

Bethany: Biggest fear? I think it’s funny because my fears have changed. My biggest fear used to be failing and I failed, we’ve all failed. But I used to be very affected by failure, I used to take it so personally I let it stop me for months.

Lewis: And what did failure looked like for you? Is it not achieving something that you set out to achieve or what was the failure?

Bethany: I think it’s when you have expectation. When you expect something to happen and then you feel entitled, you allow yourself to feel entitled to that happening because ‘oh, I put the work in why didn’t I get the result?’ and then you start you know it affects your ego and I think I used to let my ego have too much control, because simply I wasn’t aware of it. I wasn’t aware of the ego and when my ego was in control. And when my ego was in control that’s when I would focus on numbers and I wasn’t happy because I wasn’t focusing again on the passion and on just loving it and doing it out of love. Because when you do things out of love there is no ego there, you don’t take it personally if you don’t get the views that you wanted. You just love the fact that you’re able to create something. And so failure was my biggest fear and now I embrace failure, because now anytime I don’t even consider failure anymore, anytime I’ve experienced failure or pain somehow something beautiful always comes out of it and really strange. But cyber bullying when I went to that experience I started YouTube. If that didn’t happened, I wasn’t cyberbullied 100% would not have started YouTube.

Lewis: Where would you be now?

Bethany: And there’s so many other experiences like that in my life that have happened. Even you know maybe yesterday like little things or it’s like if I didn’t go through that challenge I wouldn’t have known that I was this strong. I’m excited like what’s the next challenge going to be because I know that I’m going to learn from it. That’s amazing because the stronger that I can get the more wise I can become.

What I am working on, what I’m creating hopefully can be more helpful to the people around me, and if I can be a little more helpful to the world then I have purpose. So now I no longer fear failure, I think I fear losing passion and long as I am aware, I think awareness is so powerful. I believe that as long as I stay aware of why I’m feeling things because obviously I’m still going to feel insecure, I’m still going to feel doubtful at times but if I can be aware of the fact that this is just a reaction it’s possibly just an illusion in my mind not even real, then I can keep the passion alive.

Lewis: I always talked about for me failure is feedback. Its information that’s telling me what’s working and what’s not working. And when I figure out this isn’t working, it’s not allowing me to achieve or create what I want to create, so it’s feedback what’s the information I need to learn to help me get there. So, I think again you are doing a great job of saying it’s just something that’s gonna challenge me and brings beautiful to life.

So, I think if we reframed failure or fear or any of these things is really the opportunity to grow.

What do you yourself creating now like its phenomenon, fans all over the world? Like where do you see yourself going? Who are you trying to become?

Lindsey: That’s a good question. I’ve been asking myself that since I was 5 years old. I mean I love what I do, my favorite part of the whole thing is I love touring and that’s kind of why I started originally the YouTube channel then the music, everything was in mode so that I could then go out and share it and perform. Like I love being on stage and seeing people smile like there’s nothing that gets me alive like that does. So, I mean I definitely want to keep touring and I’m working on my next album right now.

Lewis: Comes out sometime this year.

Lindsey: Sometime this year. I have my goal but who knows if I’m gonna make it, I’m hoping for the summer. But yeah I’m working on new music and I hope to produce a film someday with my dad actually. We’re actually working on script slightly right now but year that’s part of the goal. It’s been amazing to live my dream but also bring the people I love along with me, whether it’s now my tour family getting to bring them along in the journey is you know amazing. And then also you know writing a book with my sister and I work with my other sister Jennifer and hoping to write a script with my dad and that’s kind of what makes it so exciting is to do the thing you love with the people you want to be with.
Lewis: What’s the feeling you get when you’re on stage? Explain it to us.

Lindsey: When I’m on stage and I am performing and dancing and you know doing the whole thing, I honestly feel like that’s what I was created to do. Like there’s sense of true self of just like empowerment and you know I look into the faces and you know you can always see there’s a lot of people excited to be there but you can usually find like one or two people in the front row that you can tell they are so happy and that they’ve been waiting for this for months and being able to look into their eyes and just. I mean it’s so selfishly validating just like you know I mean I hope it’s not too selfish but it’s amazing how that moment of connection where you realize that you’re connecting with someone that you’ve never even met, and you have these moments with people that are just amazing.

Lewis: There you have it my friends. You are the dream makers in this world and you’re the ones who are taking on your dreams in a massive way and you’re making them happen. You’re manifesting your dreams each and every day when you consume this information and you take action on it. Spread the dream making ability for other people as well, send this to a friend and post on your social Instagram stories, twitter, Facebook. Spread the message of greatness and the ability for other people to dream and make those people dreams come true as well. That’s what this is all about paying it forward.

And big thank you to our sponsor eightsleep.com. You want to get the best sleep ever so you can go and take on your dreams and make your dreams happen in a big way. For a limited time you get a $150 off purchase when you go to eightsleep.com/great and the get the pod, it’s a game changer guys.

Also if you haven’t gotten in our inner circle be a part of the community, be a part of the inner circle community. I’m in there coaching every single month to the community. We’re bringing in top experts to teach you how to build your business and your brand and help you make your dreams come true. Check it out at lewishowes.com/innercircle.

And the ladies of YouTube mashup lewishowes.com/779 share this with your friends, spread the message of greatness. We’re taking over the world 1 day at a time, 1 person at a time, helping people live their dreams and live greater. That’s what this is all about. I hope you enjoyed this episode and as always you know what time it is, it’s time to go out there and do something great.