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Sean: It's a bonus Session with Jake Ducey, author of The Purpose Principles. Here’s what’s coming up!

Jake: We have so much opportunity to explore and discover more about who we are and what we like and what we’re capable of and the ways we can share our smile, shine our light on others. You don’t find joy out of things and paychecks. You find joy out of being ap positive light and finding opportunities wherever they are to smile and experience life and see how beautiful it really is.

Sean: Here we go! What’s up y’all? Welcome back to The Sessions. I’m your host, Sean Croxton. Thank you so much for tuning in once again. Today I’ve got a bonus episode for you. I'm really inspired right now. I’m really geeked up right now. You may know this. I very seldom listen to my own podcasts. I very seldom listen to the episodes because I just can’t deal with the sound of my voice. I’m just weird like that.

For the last hour I’ve just been kicking back listening to this particular episode with Jake. It's one that we recorded in February of 2015 for Underground Wellness Radio. It was a huge hit with the listeners. There's just so much inspiring stuff in here. At the time, Jake was 23 years old. He had just released his second book, The Purpose Principles, which is such a good book. It’s a real page turner. I think everyone out there needs to read it.

His first book was called Into The Wind, and he has another book coming out in June called Profit From Happiness so he’ll be back on the show with a brand new episode really soon. There's just so much knowledge in here. It's just so impressive that it comes from such a young man. Since we recorded this episode Jake and I have become friends. We hang out. We're both local. I'm in San Diego. He's in Encinitas.

We’ll hang out and we’ll talk about Bob Proctor stuff and personal development and just life in general. He's just a really, really good dude. I'm really happy that I know him. I'm happy that you're going to get to know him over this next hour or so if you haven't heard this episode before. I have some guests coming up.

We don't have a new guest this week, but next week we have Tara Mackey who wrote a brilliant book called Cured By Nature. The story is ridunkulous. It's a really, really wild story. I’m really pumped about talking about that with her and sharing it with you. The following week we have Tara Mohr who is the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead.

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The following week we have Christine Hassler who is the author of Expectation Hangover: Free Yourself from Your Past, Change Your Present and Get What You Really Want . It’s all about getting what you want. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @SeanCroxton, Twitter @SeanCroxton, and on Facebook at facebook.com/seancroxton. I will see you at the end of this episode with this week's takeaways. Here is Jake. Jake. Welcome to the show, man.

Jake: Thank you for having me.

Sean: Thanks so much for being here. Your book totally rocks. I grabbed it a few weeks ago over at Barnes & Noble, The Purpose Principles: How To Draw More Meaning into Your Life. Hey, Jake, how old are you?

Jake: Twenty-three.

Sean: Twenty-three years old. You've written The Purpose Principles. It totally rocked. It was one of those books I couldn't put down. You also wrote another book, Into the Wind?

Jake: Into the Wind is what it's called, yeah.

Sean: Twenty-three years old. When did you start writing Into the Wind?

Jake: I started writing Into the Wind when I was 19, actually. I started in May and I turned 20 that July, so just before I turned 20.

Sean: At nineteen years old you wrote your first book. At 22 years old you wrote your second book. Now, most people, 99.9% of the earth does not write one book. At the age of 19, then at the age of 22, what gave you the audacity to think that you can write two successful books?

Jake: What gave me the audacity? I think that…you have that one photo on your Facebook which I love which is, "If you're not on the edge you're taking up too much space." I really believed that the purpose of life is to find our gift and share it with the world. I just get this joy out of writing and getting lost in it. It’s a really cool process for me.

It just so happens that some awesome people like you are inspired by it. It's this double thing where I do it because I have fun and I get lost, and then it also turns out that it can be a good job and inspire some people which always feels good.

Sean: Yeah, you definitely did that. You inspired me with the book. I had a friend text me other

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night, "What's a good book I should read right now?" I'm like, "The Purpose Principles." I even put it in my B-School Facebook group. I put it in there because a lot of them have a hard time getting started with their businesses. We'll talk about that in a little while, but you said you get this joy from writing. Were you a good writer in school? Because I think I'm a pretty decent writer and I never got less than an A minus on anything I wrote in school ever. Were you a good writer in school?

Jake: I don't think I ever got as high as an A minus. I failed junior English class in high school. My teacher and I rifted really hard. I failed and then the second semester I got booted, but I wanted to leave so I finished in an independent study class. I was a basketball player. My entire second semester junior year grade was dependent on a persuasive essay as to why Kobe Bryant was better than Lebron James. I picked that myself.

I could not write, man. I did really bad on my SATs. I’m stoked you asked that because I never was. I never did good at it, and then I realized that it's way less about the right grammatical way and this and that. It's just about being excited to do something or share something, for me at least. I found something that called me.

Sean: In my emails that I write to my list I break every grammatical rule in there. It's like don't start a sentence with the word “and,” but it just sounds better, right? It just sounds more conversational. Knowing that you weren't a good writer in school, that you weren't at least getting good grades in school, was there ever a doubt when you said, "Hey, I'm going to sit down and write Into the Wind because I want to do it." Was there anything in your head that said, "Wait, you never got better than a C on a paper. Why are you trying to do this?"

Jake: The whole time, even till today. I'm starting my third book and I'm still it always happens. I think that that's a really beautiful process that we can undergo to really find success in our lives, whether we want to create a software company, a non-profit, a million-dollar business or we want to gain 20 pounds of muscle or lose 20 pounds of fat. It doesn't matter what it is.

There's always this thing it's like, "You're not ready. You're not smart enough. You're not in good enough shape. Your parents weren't that smart. Who are you to think you can do that?" That always happens. I think that I find a lot of pleasure in stepping into that space where I feel totally vulnerable. I think that when we can step into that uncertainty a lot of awesome things happen. I get this joy out of feeling the fear and doing it anyways. It's like a jolt. It gives me this jolt in my heart.

Sean: I would guess that most of the great writers of our time—we’ll talk about Hemingway or

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Emerson—they very likely didn't get As in all their writing classes in school. What I'm really interested in, and I think I learned this from Tony Robbins, is the concept of modeling. For your case, you were finding great writers and finding out what their processes were for becoming great writers. I think it was Hunter S. Thompson. He did something to become a great writer and you did the same thing. What was that?

Jake: Yeah, Hunter S. Thompson is another example. I don't think he graduated middle school. He was one of the best, most famous writers of the 70s. He didn't know how to write but he thought it would be cool to be a writer. He really liked the book, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, so he retyped it.

That's how he learned to write. In the same way that if you want to be a reggae singer it might be a good idea to learn Bob Marley songs. Hunter S. Thompson thought it would be a good idea to learn to describe like F. Scott Fitzgerald and pick up that way of explaining things and detailing his feelings.

When I read that, I was like, "That's how I can become a writer then." I did the same thing and a bit of Hunter S. Thompson's work as well. I did the same thing with The Great Gatsby because I liked the way Hunter wrote. If I wanted to develop that style of really, to me, just an off the wall conversation then I needed to do that. The ironic thing was that The Great Gatsby was the book that I was reading in junior English class when I had to leave the class for good.

Sean: That's a trip. Now, going back to high school, you were a top basketball recruit from what I understand. You had a nice jump shot, right?

Jake: Yeah, I led San Diego in three point shooting my senior year. I was definitely a ball player.

Sean: What school did you go to?

Jake: I went to La Costa Canyon which is a North County San Diego Public D1 School.

Sean: Gotcha. That's really cool. That's something I've always want to do is have a really good jump shot. I never had a jump shot, man. I’m really good at handles. I got eyes behind my head, all fancy pants and stuff like that. I could never shoot it up but I still work on it almost every morning.

Jake: No way.

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Sean: Yeah, I'm always at San Diego State shooting, but was just thinking maybe I need a coach. I need somebody to show me the proper form to shoot. I was actually thinking about you the other day when I was shooting because you made sure that it was the same shot every time. You were in my head when I was shooting. I was like, "Do what Jake would do. Make it the same shot, the same form every single time."

Again, I mean that's modeling—is doing what successful people do. At your high school you're a top basketball recruit. You can't write a lick according to your teachers. You end up going to college, right? What happened from there? Didn't you have a car accident or something?

Jake: I had a drunk driving accident actually. It was about eight months before I graduated high school. I think that often we find more and more upset, young people depressed. We’re at such a high rate of teen suicide. I think it was really hard.

Although I was good at sports, I derived my value in life out of if my name was in papers, did I lead the team in scoring that game that week, were my parents proud of me, whether the people at the school know that I had a good game and everything, and then grades.

Our intelligence is based off of numbers. I never found any real sense of meaning once I got to school. I had gotten in a car accident and then I tore my IT band and my knee my senior year. I was out for a while. Being out for a long time then coming back…I went to school to play at Cal Lutheran which is in Thousand Oaks Southern California.

When you get up there for college ball three months before everyone else is in the college dorm, you're the only one in the dorm. You’re playing ball that much after being out, it made me really wonder, "What am I doing?" I've never found anything I like to do in the classroom.

I’m playing for school just so I can basically pass classes and get a degree in business because everyone says business will be a good idea. Then when school started and I sat in the class I realized most of us are gambling on the biggest risk of all and that's the bet that one day we can do what we want.

While I was sitting in class I wanted to know things in economics like why we couldn't audit the Federal reserve. I started having all these sparks. I read a few books like Jack Canfield’s Success Principles. That's what made me really start to ask the questions like, "Who am I? What am I here for?"

Sean: You decided to drop out of school, correct?

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Jake: My answer was to drop out of school.

Sean: Now, just so the audience knows is dropping out of school something that you advocate or was a decision that you made for yourself?

Jake: I'm laughing because I don't advocate it. The funny thing is I dropped out with the intention of thinking I was just going to go backpack around the world and maybe I'll never come back. I'll live outside of civilization. Now I live in Hollywood of all places and I'm working on what has become of this.

I realized it wasn't about quitting the job or dropping out or whatever, but for me that's what had to happen for me to realize. I had fallen while hiking in Indonesia and had an opportunity to see how short life was. I could have hit my head and been seriously injured.

It made me realize that I wasn't looking for something in the world. It was actually finding this passion, this happiness, this sense of purpose within me and that's what brought me back. That's why I laugh when I say that and it's not my message at all.

Sean: You said it was within you. Do you feel like a lot of people feel like it's somewhere out there that they need to go get it when actually it's just inside of them?

Jake: I think all of us do. My morning routine is I walk all of Hollywood Boulevard in the morning before the cars start coming for morning traffic with a cup of coffee. I walk across the Walk of Fame for three, four miles. Everything is set up for us to look outside of ourselves. There's all these names on the stars. I can't possibly be as smart, as good looking, as talented, as lucky, as successful as this person or that person or this person or should I do this? Should I do that?

We're always looking into the world for things. I think that we can stop and really find out the ways that we can just find opportunities to even shine our light, smiling at somebody we cross paths with, or creating something or reaching an internal goal. We think health and getting in better shape is something physical, but actually I think what we find often are that our goals, our dreams, are not necessarily what we can get, but who we can become internally in the process. I think often times we're looking into the world too much rather than looking within ourselves.

Sean: Yeah, I agree. It reminds me of a scene from my favorite documentary which is Finding Joe. They were talking about what is the name? Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and how in order to get home all she had to do was click her heels. It was always in her she just had to click her heels and

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she would have gotten back home, but she was always looking out there somewhere. Really interesting.

Your book starts out very similarly to a book that I read recently by Alexandra Jamieson. She wrote a book called Women, Food, and Desire. It’s a trip because you two covered that very same question in chapter one of the book. It’s, “What do you want?” Right? Why is asking, “What do I really want” such an important question for people in their lives?

Jake: I think it really ties into what I just spoke on a moment ago in terms of we're almost told what we want. We're saying here are the few choices to major in in college. Go to college because that's how you're going to find an opportunity. Then here are your choices to choose from after that. I think we often never ask ourselves what we actually want. It may not be what you want in terms of… you may never change someone listening, you may never change their career and it may be a great place for them to support their family.

I think even just what we want in terms of other aspects, in terms of our health, in terms of creative expression. It's an important question because happiness is, I believe, something that is done by living on our own terms. I think it's up to us to really examine “What are my terms?” Gallup poll came out with a study in fall 2014. They said what came back out of the hundreds of thousands of Americans surveyed was that 73% were actively disengaged from their jobs. So, 73% of us are going somewhere and doing something we don't want to do, where we don't want to be. At the end of the day we all want to be happy. I think that asking ourselves what we want or things we may desire…What would have to happen a year from now for you to look back and say it was the most successful, the most fulfilling year of your life? Those things are important because we drive meaning out of doing things on our own terms.

Sean: I think a lot of people who listen to this will be like, "I still don't really know what I want no matter how much I ask myself that question." You have another question in the book that I found to be quite fascinating. I think it's even a better question. It's “What makes you feel like yourself?” Why is that such an important question?

Jake: I think that's really important because we can conceptualize happiness. At the end of the day, we ask what we want because we want to feel happy. We can conceptualize feeling happy and put it on a thing. If I have this job or have this thing or this lover, this person, this, that, this, that. I believe it's a feeling. We want to feel happy, we want to feel we've lived a life well-lived. Ralph Waldo Emerson says that, "The greatest success is to be yourself in a world that's constantly trying to make you something else."

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To be ourselves is the ultimate, coolest thing. Just to feel like ourselves. That question came about because I was asking people in attendance of one of my workshops, “What would have to happen one year from now for you to look back and say it was your most successful, your most fulfilling year yet,” whether it's lose 10 pounds, gain 10 pounds or build a million dollar business and anything in between. A kid raised his hand and that's when he was like, "I have another question. What makes me feel like myself? I want to be a writer because everyone else wants me to be something else but writing makes me feel like myself.”

I think in the busy-ness of today's world it's often easy to get off the tracks of who we are. So, finding ways that makes us feel like ourselves whether it's stepping out and gardening for 45 minutes, or writing in our journal when we can, or going on a run, those are important things. It’s important to stay connected to ourselves.

Sean: Did you watch the Grammy's last night?

Jake: I did not watch the Grammy's last night but I saw bits and pieces of it.

Sean: Sam Smith won a bunch of awards, right? During one of his acceptance speeches he said something that reminded me of your book. He says, "I made my best music. I make it now because I'm just being myself. When I made that decision just to be myself I started making the best music," if I can get the word out.

That was so awesome because it reminded me of you. I have a couple of favorite books. One of them is The 50th Law by 50 Cent. Then, my favorite rapper of all time was Tupac. There are two guys who are just fascinated by death. Tupac of course was shot several times in New York and survived it. 50 Cent got shot nine times and survived it. I follow him on Instagram.

He's always just doing these big things because he's so fascinated with death. He knows that his time on earth is short and that it can end at anytime. You say in your book, "I remember the day I finally accepted that you're going to die at some point." You said that your whole life changed when you accepted that. Do you remember when that was?

Jake: Yeah, I think the first time that that happened was actually when I was traveling in Indonesia. Here I am on the outskirts of civilization in this little village on an island called Lombok. We’re climbing up these rocks with these three local Indonesians that I met. Only one of them speaks good English. We’re climbing up rocks in the middle of the rain in nowhere to get to their

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favorite waterfall. When I fell was when I realized there's no bungee cord that's going to bring me back.

Thankfully I landed in a certain way where I didn't hit my head and just was hurt but nothing broke. I think that's when it was put in perspective. Being on the other side of the world, too, away from my family and away from my home place where I grew up in Southern California was when I realized really we can go out at any minute and ultimately it's not up to us. I feel that there's this fate beyond our control. I think that that's why it's so important. Steve Jobs said the same thing.

Remembering I'm going to be dead soon is the tool I used to make the most important decisions in life. We're not going to be here eventually. I think some people that scares them, but I think it's actually really freeing. It puts the stress in everything in context. We don't need to worry that much about if something bad happens because what's the best that could happen?

Sean: You know what? I wasn’t going to ask you this, but tell the story, if you don't mind, about what happened at Jimbo's that one day.

Jake: What happened at Jimbo’s? I was walking at Jimbo's Natural Grocers in Encinitas, California. I was just hopping up onto the side walk. I was so excited feeling like ten feet tall while I'm walking because my first book Into the Wind, which was self-published, was out. I saw one of my buddies that I went to high school with. He had this grin from ear to ear and he was really excited for me that the book was out and we were standing there with his girlfriend.

He just has these huge beaming blue eyes and smile. He's really excited about the book so I'm like, "I need to go get you a book." I run back over to my car. I popped the trunk on my sedan and I take a book out. I go back and hand it to him. I can tell by the look in his eyes he's going to read this today. I go about about the rest of my day so excited. I gave him a hug goodbye and head in through those electric sliding doors at Jimbo's and go through my day. I get a call that night from my friend Luke. Luke tells me that Vic—who was my friend that I gave the book to earlier that day at Jimbo's, Vic was his name—had hit his head skateboarding and died. That was nuts to see that he was 19 years old and a great kid, just dead. It's not like he planned that he's going to die or something like that.

Sean: He was just here.

Jake: He was just here, yeah. I think that when we realize that impermanence it really gives us an opportunity to free ourselves from the fear of failure.

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Sean: Didn't you write something in your book about how there is a page of your book that he had earmarked?

Jake: Yeah, he had earmarked. I actually talked to his brother recently. He told me about when he found out Vic died he slept in Vic's room that night. The book was actually still open on the bed. That was really crazy for me, too, because imagine someone reading your book, which is really about the idea of the shortness of life, and they die six hours later and the book is open? That made me think that there's this power beyond us that while we're here we can tap into to really do incredible things.

Sean: Yeah, another book that you wrote about several times in your book is The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware. We're not trying to bum out our audience right now about death and whatnot, but I think this is an important conversation to have. One of the top regrets…I want you to comment on this. I think it was number five is “I wish I would have let myself be happier.” What are your thoughts about that one?

Jake: I think it really just ties into what we're talking about. For anyone who doesn't know, that book is about a nurse who spends years and years counseling people before death. She was curious. What are the top regrets of the dying? She brought it all together and those were the top five. “I wish I would have let myself live happier.”

I think it really ties into this whole idea that we can get so wrapped up in everything that we never have time to ask ourselves these questions. What do I want? Why am I here? What will make me happy? We never let ourselves be happy because we have so many things to do, and so many places to get, and what if that person thinks this about me, or what if this doesn't work out, whatever it may be.

When we look around we have this seriously incredible opportunity. We have these lungs that breathe hundreds of times a minute without us needing to do anything, this heart that beats all this blood through our body, these electrical and energetic impulses that create thoughts within us and ideas that come to us. This energy when you're working out, when you're writing, when you're building your business, when you're raising your family and you're like, "I don't think I can go anymore," but something pushes you forward anyways. These are incredible almost magical type of gifts and abilities that we have.

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We're on a rock spinning through the middle of space. We have so much opportunity to explore and discover more about who we are and what we like and what we're capable of and the ways that we can shine, share our smile, shine our light on to others. We have these opportunities each and every day from when you pass your wife, your husband, your child, your roommate in the hallway of your home or a stranger on the sidewalk or a co-worker in your office space to just be a light. This opportunity to push our limits everyday in the gym or on our business or writing our book, anything. I believe that when we can push these limits and step in to ways that we can share our smile and recognize this amazing gift that we have, that's life. We can let ourselves be happier.

Sean: Yeah, I'm always telling people that it's always about the journey, the process. I do a lot of coaching for novice entrepreneurs. They are always talking about the money like, "I got to make the money, I got to make the money." I was like, "This is about the process. Don't focus so much on the money right now." I remember when I wrote my e-book The Dark Side of Fat Loss I thought that when I finished writing it the sky was going to light up with fireworks and all this stuff and it was going to be this amazing feeling.

It did feel good but it was just so fleeting, right? It was just momentarily I felt really good about being done, but when I think back on that experience of the book, I think more about the writing part. That's the part that I'm most proud of. When you finished your books did you have a similar feeling? Did you feel like there's going to be fireworks and there just weren't?

Jake: Yeah, for sure. I always say there's this rainbow, really happy upside of releasing a book, and then there's this shadowy hallow gray ashy side. No one knows that side. The reason that that happens is because most authors are addicted to their Amazon rankings. The reason I know that is because Amazon updates their real feed rankings like in real time, every 60 seconds. I know because I've sat at the computer and pressed the refresh button for 24 hours.

When my first book Into the Wind came out was when my addiction to Amazon rankings started. I was 20. I wrote the book like we talked about when I was 19. It was self-published and after about two months of hustling, the book made it to the top 300 out of all books on Amazon. I was so excited that I screenshot-ed my book Into the Wind ahead of Eat, Pray, Love.

I had the top book on travel on Amazon. I was so pumped up and run down to go tell my girlfriend. She comes back up and I'm like, "No, no, leave me alone I'm screenshotting the rankings." I printed it out and put that on my wall and just stared at it like, "I was the best author in the world at 11:48 a.m. on April 30.” I wake up the next morning and that feeling is gone.

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Where’d it go? Then, everything was much better when I got my first Amazon check and I'm like, "Yeah, I got my check. This is the biggest check that I ever had. Yeah, I sold all these books, yeah."

I go to the bank and like, "I'm going to cash that. Might as well just write my first name on the check now because I'm 300 on Amazon. Everyone must know who I am.” I come back, the feeling is gone again. That happens when we put the check in the bank account and it just turns into a number that doesn't love us back that we can't source joy from. It made me ask, "Why did I write my book? What do I do now?"

I thought of Atitlan, Guatemala which was the first place I traveled to in my book Into the Wind. I remember coming down these huge green rolling hills in the mountains of rural Guatemala in the back of this flight taxi. The driver's name was Pablo. He’s wearing a Bob Marley shirt. He hardly spoke any English.

I just have the window down and I was watching all these little rickety corrugated villages on the side of the road where all the women are covered in these beautiful colorful Mayan cloths that they weave themselves. I'm coming down this hill and I get into this town, Atitlan. It’s three San Pedro volcanoes that imploded on themselves hundreds of years ago and formed the biggest lake ever.

I took this little dingy across the water to this town San Marcos to this wobbly dock. All these kids just greeted me with all this happiness that they were sharing and passion for life just to be alive, not necessarily chasing a goal except for the goal of being happy. When I got closer I saw they had holes in their teeth, cuts on their arms, the same shoes every single day covered in dirt, holes in their shoes. They had literally nothing, yet they were super excited about life.

It was amazing because they shine so much light. They saw so much opportunity to be alive in the little things, to make the lives of those around them better, yet it was awful because they had nothing. They are getting this relentless Guatemalan sun beating on them. They have nowhere to go. That's why I wrote the book.

I wanted to be someone that could uplift the world. I saw that you don't find joy out of the things in paychecks. You find joy out of being a positive light and finding opportunities wherever they are to smile and to just experience life and see how beautiful it is.

That's where I saw happiness. I wrote this book because of that. That gave me this idea. I hop back in my car and I drove back to the bank. I asked them for a cashier's check for all the money from the paycheck I just deposited. Every part of me is like, "No, don't do that. Don't do that." This

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other part of me is, "Do it, do it." I write a note to the chief of the village and I say, "Use this for the kids."

Every part of me was like, "Don't do that. You can't do that. That's yours." This other part of me was like, "Whoa." I'm still 314 now on Amazon so I think “okay.” I put the check in there and I send it off to them for the kids. I walked away feeling like two feet taller. It was the first time that feeling wasn't gone. I realized that life is probably about more than rankings, paychecks, et cetera et cetera. Maybe it's about we spoke earlier, finding passion in the little things. Maybe it's about giving more acts of care.

Sean: That's a great story, man. You are so freaking mature for your age. I mean, when I was 20, 21 years old I was doing stuff I can't even talk about on the show, right? You're writing books, you're building orphanages in Guatemala. You know what? How do we encourage more people in your age group to do things that you're doing?

Jake: I think I'm really excited because I just linked up with this organization called High School Nation. I’m going to be speaking at hundreds of high schools this year, three a week starting this spring. I'm really excited about that because it's been hard for me to get into public schools. I finally have that opportunity with 3,000 kids a day about three schools a week. I think just by giving kids an opportunity to hear things like this, whether it comes from me or whether it comes from Billy or Susie or whomever it is. There's a lot of people that want to inspire kids and share this message with young people and give them positive influences. It's not happening as much as it could. I think things like that…I think if you have a child, take them out on Thanksgiving, on Christmas, on Hanukkah, on a random Saturday. On this coming Saturday, take them out to go cook some rice and beans for some ... My mom used to do that with me and it left a positive influence on me. Maybe cook some rice and beans and go give it to someone or just clean up. Go clean up the beach.

I think when we can expose young people to these things we recognize that that makes us feel good. It feels good to do something positive. I think if we can just give young people those examples and have that imprint into them…I believe people ultimately are smart enough to make the decisions that will make them happy. I think things like that. Don't tell them their dreams are ... Their dreams are realistic. Let them learn. Let them fail. Let them grow. Give them creative expression. Teach them that it's good to go outside and not just be in front of TV and video games. The music

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that we're listening to, all these things add up. I think that it starts with you and me and everyone listening. Half the world's population is 30 and under. There's a lot of young people in the world. I think the only thing that we know for sure, the ways we can create change is really by leading by example. When you pass someone today, smile at them. You don't even need to say hi. Just all these little things I think are really awesome opportunities for us.

Sean: You said something in there that I want to cover. You said, “Let them fail and let them grow.” Failing is really hard. I think it's hard for parents to see their kids fail. It's hard for kids and people in general to fail. They don't like that feeling of failure. You say in your book that failure is an event. It's not a person, right? It's not who you are. It’s just something that happens. Can you expand on that? Because people are so afraid to fail. Because they are afraid to fail they don't really grow and progress in life and do what they want to do.

Jake: Yeah, I think if you look at most of us, and then a few people that are at the top of any industry, whether it's entertainment to technology to investing, usually that top few percent of achievers and highly effective and productive people are the people that when you ask them about failure they are like, "Yeah, I'm scared all the time.” I think it's really important to face our fears and our anxieties and our doubts about if we're good enough or if we're capable enough.

Because they look at failure like ultimately this is a long term game. If you're trying to create anything, whether it's a business or whether it's to getting a better shape, that opportunity to fail and find the adversity actually just gives us skills. If everything is easy, you don't create a skill. It's hard for us to recognize that, but I think the top percent of people in any industry will tell you that whereas most of us can get lost in the notion that if I fail then I'm a failure.

We never really maximize our productivity and potential and happiness because we can get lost in that idea. I learned how to do everything that I'm doing now because of failure. No one would publish my first book. Everyone laughed at me and said, "You're 19. Why are you writing a book about purpose and happiness and risk? Go back to school. Learn how to write first." I had to self-publish my book and from that I learned how to do my own PR. You and I connected because I reached out to you. I realized that in order to get my message out and to turn this into a living I need to contact shows and podcasts. I made a list of my favorite ones. I felt I could connect with someone like yourself and I reached out. I learned this skill that's now serving me for the next book down the road. It’s going to help this next book that I'm writing now, because I can go back to my publisher and I can say, "Look, here's what I did on my own." It can help me potentially get a higher cash advance, a better team. Ultimately though, it just makes

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me feel good about myself to commit to something. That initial failure gave me the skills. Skills can be developed through failure.

Sean: Yeah, you didn't reach out to me once. You reached out to me twice. Just to be honest, Jake reached out to me while I was going through the craziness of the Digestion Sessions where we're getting so much customer service email and whatnot. I put it into my later file and I was like, "I'll just get with him later." Then, eventually when I started the podcast again after I had a little break in January I reached out to Jake, "Hey, man. Sorry, I was just busy. Come on the show."

He's like, "Yeah, I’ll come on." Thanks for your persistence. You didn't send one. He sent two. You have lot of great stories in your book. I had a friend over last night. We were talking about Brad Pitt. I was like, "Did you know that Brad Pitt dropped out of school, went to Hollywood and he was the mascot for a fast food like chicken company or something like that?” He wore a chicken suit to make money and pay his bills.

There’s all these really good stories, talking about J. K. Rowling was on welfare, went through a divorce, you talk about what Oprah had to go through, Laird Hamilton. Elvis was told by a manager that he should go back to truck driving because he didn't have any talent. You talked about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs’ biography is one of the best books out there. I'm sure you've read that. What's your favorite story of maybe failure and taking risk that you can share from the book?

Jake: First of all, I like to say that I have a huge smile on my face because when I was writing the book and putting all those stories in…My goal out of this is I'm putting this all together because these stories we don't know. It is mission accomplished if people who read that book go in normal conversation to their friends and they are like, "Did you know this about this?" This ripple of inspiration to make these people, just like us, can happen and I think that that is awesome.

Here's one story that is about feeling like you may not be qualified or you're not ready yet. You don't want to face that notion of possibly failing because you're not even going to face that idea because you're not ready yet. That is a guy who is now a billionaire and is dyslexic and started Virgin, one of the biggest enterprises ever as a 14 year old. He called it Virgin because he was a virgin in business and he was a middle school drop out that was dyslexic.

No one would give him any money to start a magazine so he started it himself out of an extra room in a church. He started printing them himself and doing it all himself until they raised enough money to eventually sign a couple artists. Richard Branson’s first sign was the Sex Pistols when he was 14. It sold a million copies and he failed in school. He did foreign school so he had every reason to believe this idea like a lot of us. "I'm not smart enough. I'm not intelligent enough."

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Yet, he just kept taking action. He kept experimenting along the way, and he went long enough to where that magic occurred. I believe there's a certain thing that we can’t exactly measure. Some people call it magic. Some people call it synchronicity. Some people call it a good day. “That was a good day.” But we get rewarded for things eventually. I like Richard Branson's story because against all odds he created something that now no one knows was against all odds.

People might think that his dad was a billionaire or something. People don't know that this guy, he wants to go to space now and he can't read spreadsheets. Still to this day he can't read financial spreadsheets. You can do it. It’s within you.

Sean: There's a lot of successful people who are dyslexic. John Demartini is one of my favorite successful writers who is dyslexic. Daymond John who is on Shark Tank. He says he can't read anything and is a billionaire I believe. I watch Shark Tank all the time on CNBC almost every night. Somebody gave him something to read, he's like, "Man, I'm dyslexic. This isn't going to make any sense to me anyway, right?"

I hope I'm right on that but yeah, so many people out there. There’s even somebody in my family, I'm sure he’s not going to listen to this but he is dyslexic as well. He blames it all the time for where he is at in life. I'm like, "Yo, there's all these people who are dyslexic killing it right now." There's a quote in your book by Theodore Roosevelt. Here’s the quote. I want you to comment on this. "If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month." Talk about personal responsibility.

Jake: I thought that quote would just make some people laugh because it's so true but it's so funny. It's like sometimes responsibility sucks but it's also the most empowering thing ever to know at the end of the day your publicist isn't going to create your success. They may help but at the end of the day your manager can't create your success, your neighbor, your wife, your dad, your mom, a stranger, an investor.

People can contribute. You can get great help, but at the end of the day you are the one that…Your attitude, your actions, your thoughts, the questions that you ask, all of these things are ultimately the last word. The last word is really depending on us and I think that's really empowering. For me, my excuse was I didn't know how to write. I didn't know how to write. I did bad in English. I literally didn't know how to write. When I realized or when I conceptually read you can do anything andI decided I wanted to try writing, I started retyping The Great Gatsby.

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I realized that I could become a good writer if I put in enough practice and intention and passion into what I did. That's really freeing because that means that we're not in control of every circumstance. If somebody helps us, if something bad happens,we don't control all that, but at the end of the day what we can control is our own talents, our own skills, our own thought patterns, our own beliefs, the way that we treat other people, the way we treat ourselves. That means we can allow ourselves to be happier and healthier than we can possibly imagine. What's more awesome than that?

Sean: Amen. I got some more quotes for you that I want you to comment on. This one is about talent by Macklemore that I grabbed from your book, "The greats were great not because at birth they could paint. The greatest were great because they paint a lot." What do you think when you hear that?

Jake: Firstly, I think of it's next lines, "I will not be a statistic. Just let me be." I was just thinking of the next ones but really what I think of is later in the book, Will Smith says, "The greatest misunderstood concept is the difference between talent and skill." Talent is something you have naturally, but talent will fail you if you're not skilled, if you don't spend hours of developing your craft. We're talking about taking those risks. If you don't develop that skill no matter how talented you are you're going to fail.

We see that in professional sports all the time where the kid who grew up and until he was 19 years old he was just so good. He never had to hit the gym. He could jump higher, run faster than every single person but when he went to go play ball at D1, everyone else could run as high and jump as fast, but they put in two more hours a day. Not that much, just two more hours a day in the gym than the other guy. By the second, third, fourth year and the time they are in the NBA together one guy now developed the mental strength to be an all-star each and every year while the other guy is the 9th man on the bench.

In practice he can light it up and every seven to ten games he'll score 20 points a game, while the other guy does it consistently every single day. I think that that's the example. The distinction between talent and skill is we can see that in the NBA. Is Kobe, is Michael Jordan, is Lebron, are they that much better? Is it they are a little bit better but they also just have this mental game that is just so beyond everyone's that came from the skill of being the first one in the gym every day? I think that no matter how untalented you think you are…I don't believe the idea that some people are just born for this. I see that all the time while I walk around the walk of fame in Hollywood. I believe you can learn any skill, you can do anything if you just start spending two hours a day. Just

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start somewhere. I believe you can learn how to be a writer or a rapper, an opera singer, a piano player or anything, you can become better and better at something.

Sean: Yeah, I love Will Smith. I've seen that same quote. We probably watched all the same Will Smith videos but he just talks about “I spent hours and hours beating at my craft. When you're sleeping, I'm working. When you're eating, I'm working.” Because people don't realize that Will Smith was a corny rapper back in the day. A story about Will Smith is that when he first started Fresh Prince of Bel-Air they used to have to cut because he would mouth other people's lines on camera. That's how bad he was.

Now, he's a 20 million dollar a movie, legit Oscar nominated actor. I think people forget where he came from. That guy is ridiculous. That guy is a hard worker. His kids are really hard workers as well. I'm excited to see what happens with his kids down the road. Let's see if I got another quote. We'll do two more then I'll let you go. Here's a Byron Katie quote that I pulled from your book. I love this one. "It's not your job to like me. It’s mine." That's good stuff. Talk about that. You know what? Tell the story about when ... I'm not giving away your whole book. I’m trying not to.

Jake: At the end of the day, The Purpose Principles is what it's called and at the end of the day if this conversation speaks to someone, they will buy regardless of a story or two they hear, so I'm excited. Let them know.

Sean: That's what I'm saying. I love your attitude. Tell us about your experience when you started your public figure Facebook page.

Jake: That's funny. First of all, the first myth that I believed was that if I got a publisher then I would just sell books. Publishers can just sell books but at the end of the day it's up to the author. The publisher can't do quite as much as they used to because all the books aren't bought in stores and there's not 25,000 published books a year. There's hundreds of thousands. I thought that I didn't need a Facebook fan page, all that stuff.

I’d just write a book in my room and then it’d sell 100,000 copies and then I’d write another one. I had realized I had to make a Facebook fan page. I made it four years ago when I was 19 and just my name Jake. Of course I had no people interested in my work so the first like was by me—one like by Jake's personal page to his professional one. Then I invite my mom and some of my friends. I was really self-conscious about that. It can be defeating to look at something and it says, "Four people like it,” when the authors that are selling books like Wayne Dyer has six million. I

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t's easy for me to look at it like that. I saw at the top of my news feed, this guy—I won't say his name that I went to high school with. He made a status on the Facebook so it was popping up. The status said, "Jake has invited you to like his fan page ... " All caps, YEAH RIGHT. I forget exactly what he said now but basically said like, "Yeah, right. Haha. Why would I do that? This kid is an idiot. What are you thinking?" It just was not cool. I remember being so hurt by this guy I played basketball with and grew up with. I remember being so hurt by it and it sucked. I'm not going to say, "I was totally independent and enlightened of the thought and I just didn't even feel anything." I just kept going about my business.

Maybe it hurts when someone says no, when someone says next, when someone says you can't do that. It can hurt but at the end of the day we can keep moving. You can. Even if you feel doubtful, scared, hurt, you can keep going. I was like, "All right. I'll just keep going." Three years later, Penguin is publishing me and all these cool things like that. I saw him at the gas station this summer.

He was drunk. It was like at 12 o’clock in the day time. He didn't look that good. I could see in his eyes now that things were going well for me, he was genuinely interested because he wanted to know what the heck, all these things. I also think he realized like, man there is this certain magic in just being yourself regardless of what people think. It's BS. Really finding out who you are. So it was a cool full circle, but that's the story. I got made fun of for making a Facebook fan page.

Sean: Do you feel like that hate or that hater-ism comes from people being dissatisfied where they are in their own lives?

Jake: Yeah, why else would you take the time to do something like that? Especially at high school you make comments on other people's clothes and looks and whatever it is, but I don't know for sure. He may have been the happiest kid ever, I don't know. I think I know because of the way I saw him years later, but I think we can ask ourselves why and drive ourselves crazy.

Why did they say that to me? Why does this keep happening? At the end of the day it's happening. We have a choice whether to move forward or to move forward carrying that experience and half of our attention being gone on another reality of wondering, “Why did that happen, why did they say this?” At the end of the day we don't know for sure. It seems reasonable that if we're trying to make someone else feel bad it's because we have this pain within ourselves we're trying to project out of us. I'm not positive but I don't think it's that important.

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Sean: Gotcha. Last quote for you. This is so powerful right here. "I'm sorry. I love you. Please forgive me."

Jake: Nice. That goes in perfect. You rocked this interview.

Sean: Thank you.

Jake: The personal development, personal growth, self-realization, self-actualization, these kind of concepts of self-discovery, success, can be so focused exteriorly. We can work so much that we are actually working out of pain that we don't want to face so we keep ourselves busy all the time.

I realized how much I used to work for 12 hours a day every day. I was not sleeping for months. That's cool but I realized now I like going to the gym. I like going outside. Sometimes I like just sitting around with my friends and just sitting there drinking a coffee or journaling or meeting someone or walking in a place I’ve never been.

I like other things besides working all the time. That's why I didn't say the other half of the Will Smith quote, because I think it's important for us to recognize a lot of our happiness and success actually can come just by forgiving ourselves of our past and letting go of our past and the mistakes that we may have made. “God, I wish I wasn't such an idiot then. I wish I was a little bit skinnier or stronger or older or younger,” or whatever it may be. We’re okay the way that we are. We don't need to prove somebody wrong or prove it to ourselves or to somebody else.

At the end of the day we don't need to prove everything. I believe that the fact that we're alive and we have the opportunities, we have with the internet to learn anything we need to learn, that if we're listening to this you probably have electricity and you probably have clean water and you probably have had the opportunity to at least eat today, I think these are facts that we are loved and that we are amazing and that we are safe.

We are going to be okay and so I think when we can recognize that at the end of the day to love ourselves and to forgive ourselves, we can free ourselves of so much stress and pain and tension in our body. That can bring us, almost like magic, great opportunities and new relationships and friendships and people that are more like us and opportunities and more success and happiness and more opportunities to find love and excitement in life.

Sean: You're the man, Jake. I look forward to watching you grow in this whole space. I'm really, really excited about that and reading more of your books. This one, The Purpose Principles: How to Draw More Meaning Into Your Life is available now at local book stores and on Amazon. I'm

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encouraging my entire audience to pick this one up because you did a fantastic job. The other one is Into the Wind, correct?

Jake: Yeah, Into the Wind is the other one, and The Purpose Principles.

Sean: Is that being turned into a movie?

Jake: We're in the works of that right now. What I found is that it can be quite a process and that it's definitely a goal of mine. I’ve got the relationships developed. I'm an MC for the Warped Tour this year, which is really big—600,000 people in attendance between 50 cities doing this big high school touring.

Right now, I'm just looking to get in front of as many more and more people so I can build, get the right writers and team together in order to put the film in place.I feel that the reasons that I want to do it is because I think it can be an entertaining, exciting, adrenaline moving story, but sends a good message about where we can find real happiness and purpose in life. It's in the works.

Sean: This 23 year old guy who was on my show told me to enjoy the process so you should do the same thing.

Jake: Yeah, for sure. Now, I'm just chilling. I used to spread it.

Sean: I heard that. Jake, again, this is great. Really great conversation and a great book you put together. Thanks so much, man.

Jake: Yeah, man. Thanks for having me, Sean.

Sean: All right, friends. Great stuff with Jake Ducey. His website is JakeDucey.com. Pick up his books Into The Wind, The Purpose Principles, and he has a brand new book, his third book coming out in June of 2016. It is called Profit From Happiness. Expect Jake to be back on the podcast with a brand new episode very, very soon. I’ve got a few takeaways. I actually have a whole page full of notes after listening to this podcast. I'm trying to keep them shorter.

I'm actually thinking about adding a new episode, having the takeaways as a completely separate episode and maybe actually having some friends come on and discuss that episode and answer your questions about that episode and stuff. The episodes will be shorter if we do it. Once they get too long people don't want to listen.

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Takeaway number one: You can do anything. You can do absolutely anything that you want to do regardless of any limitations. Typically, the limitations that we have are limitations that we have placed on ourselves, because we've accepted what other people have told us about what we can and what we can't do. We've accepted grades, some letters, or some numbers that tell us how good we are at something, or how bad we are at something, but it's not true. It doesn't matter what it is. You can do it. Jake said he had never gotten an A minus on a writing project. Jake just wasn't a great writer in high school but he couldn't follow the rules of being a good writer in school. Remember Lisa Nichols episode? She talked about how she had never gotten better than a C minus in any writing class. Jake and Lisa write books.

They write really, really good books because they were willing to decide who they wanted to become and they decided to actually put in the work to get it done, to make it happen. You can do the exact same thing. It's not going to happen overnight, but it will happen as long as you work at it. It's so funny, because Jake and I recorded this episode in February of 2015. That's about a year and two months ago. We were talking about me playing basketball and working on my jump shot.

Back then in February of 2015, I couldn't even shoot the ball straight. It would not go straight. It just went right and it went left. It's so funny listening to this episode this morning after I had just walked in the house from playing basketball this morning. It was crazy the way I was talking. This morning I was draining three-pointers like they were lay-ups. It was crazy just to think about how far I've come since February of last year because I was willing to get up at 6 or 6:30, sometimes 5:30, and go and work. I remember everybody in high school said I could do everything.

I could pass. I could dribble. I could rebound. On a good day, I could dunk, but man, I couldn't shoot. I accepted that, but I don't accept that anymore. I go out there and I work at it. You can do the same thing with whatever it is you want to do in life. Number two…Again, we talked about the big question that comes up almost every episode which is, “What do you want?” I like the question he posed in the book, which is maybe a little bit less intimidating than the what do you want question. It is, “What makes you feel like yourself?” I think that's just such a great question.

Pose that to yourself. What really makes you feel like yourself, when you're just completely present, you're just completely being you? What is that? How can you get more of that? He talked about that poll where 73% of people are completely disengaged from their jobs. That's wild to me. I think we have to understand that it is possible.

It may not be the predicament that you're in right now, but it is possible to make money, to earn a living, to put food on the table, to have a sense of financial security. It is possible to have all those things while loving what you do at the same time. You do not have to sacrifice one for the other.

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You can have them both. I'm not saying to quit your job right now. Again, as Lisa Nichols said in her episode, make your job your investor.

Figure out what you want to do or have some inkling of what you want to do. Use your job to put money aside to fund that dream down the road. But again, consider that question. What makes you really feel like yourself? If that thing has anything to do with your employment, what you do for a living, consider how engaged you would be if you actually did it. How much more fulfilled would you feel if you did it? How much happier would you become?

I love this quote that he brought up. We'll make this takeaway number three. I think I posted this quote on Instagram and people loved it. It's that failure is an event, it's not a person. That's huge. Let me say it one more time. Failure is an event, it is not a person. Failure just happens. It happens to everybody. The people who are more ”successful," it has happened more to them than to everybody else. It's just going to happen.

It doesn't mean that because you failed once or twice it makes you a failure. It means that you didn't get the result that you wanted. You look at it and say "What was the lesson in that? What can I do differently? How can I become better? How can I make the process better? What can I do to get a different outcome? "Then you just go back and you try again.

What's the Napoleon Hill quote? Every adversity has the the seed of equivalent benefit. I'm totally butchering that quote, but it's real. Every time you have an adversity there's a seed in there that has a greater benefit to your life. It's crazy because what I feel like is that the fear of failing is actually worse than failing itself. When you walk around, you live your life with a fear of failing and a fear of making mistakes you never try anything new.

As Bob Proctor says, and many other authors have said, is you're either moving forward or you’re moving backwards. There is no standing still. There are so many people out there who are trying to stand still by never trying anything out of the box, never really putting themselves out there, because they fear that they're going to make a mistake. They're actually going backwards. It's that fear of making a mistake that is worse than actually making a mistake itself.

Do I have anything else for you? I think that's it. Please, be really awesome and subscribe on iTunes. You can go to thesessionsonitunes.com and get subscribed. If you really want to because you're really awesome, leave a rating and review over there. If you want transcripts for all of our episodes you can go to thesessionswithsean.com. Again, that's thesessionswithsean.com and sign up for transcripts. That's it. I will see you next week with Tara Mackey, then the following week, Tara Mohr, then the following week, Christine Hassler. I will see you then. Thanks so much. Peace.

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