Why Humans Need Death To Wake Up | Simon Sinek

0:00Few things are as uplifting as the greatest moments in sports, and nothing brings us together quite like Team USA at the Olympic Winter Games. From NBC Universal's iconic storytelling to the innovative technology across Xfinity and Peacock, Comcast brings the Olympic Games home to America, sharing every moment with millions. When Team USA steps onto the world stage, we're not just watching. We're cheering together. This winter, we're all on the same team. Comcast, proud partner of Team USA. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show. Why does it sound like it takes war or conflict or something extremely scary out there for us to come together and start to transform as well as people? You know, we're a myopic bunch. Human beings are very dopamine driven, find the food,

1:01look for shelter, then do it again. Long-term planning is not really our strength as a species, because long-term planning exists in our imaginations. I better save money for the day that I retire 60 years from now. Or I could just bite now because it feels better. We're bad at it. We're bad as governments at it. We're bad as individuals at it. We're just bad at it. We're not engineered for it. And so I think that's a part of it. And what near-death experiences do or competitive threats do is their tangible reminders of what could be, because again, we're tangibly driven animals, right? We love tangibility, metrics, things we can see. You know, you hear a bump in the name. You have to go look for it, you know? And so it makes it real. So even the global threats have existed since the fall of the Soviet Union.

2:07Now that you can see one, you know? Now you can give it a name and a flag, you know, in a language. It becomes a real thing. And I think the same goes for new-death experiences. It's like my mortality, which was something that I didn't think about is now real, which is why ask old people for advice. They give the best advice because they don't give what you think about them, because they're close because they've accepted their own mortality. The end is near. The end is near. And so I'm not doing anything to please you anymore. Yeah, I'm not trying to impress you. You know, talk to a 20-year-old and talk to a 70-year-old and see what kind of advice you get. And it's not just experience and wisdom, of course, that factors in as well. You know, one is much more concerned about what you think about them. The other one really doesn't care. So I think that's what these shocks do. And I think one of the things that story-telling does, one of the things that you do and I do and others do, is by telling the stories of other people's near-death experiences or other people's losses.

3:12Hopefully, hopefully inspires people to take on themselves without having to go through the challenge themselves. That's the idea. But, you know, I remember after September 11th, I was in New York on September 11th and lived through it. You were there. Yeah. I watched the buildings fall. Really? Yeah, yeah. Where were parts? I was downtown. I was in Soho. Really? So just about it. I actually did the calculations I figured out. I was exactly one mile. You could see the buildings. From my office. I was walking, I took the subway and the subway stopped to 14th Street and I still had to get to Soho. So I walked down 7th Avenue, which the end of 7th Avenue was the World Trade Center. Wow. So I was walking down, watching them burning and holy can. And they got to work. And the view from my office was the World Trade Center. No way. And yeah, I remember, I remember the very strange, yeah, that's that's embossed in my brain. I'm not going to affect that. Forget that image of it. Well, what was that? I mean, this is a little sidetrack here, but what was that like that day like? Well, I mean, watching an at your office,

4:18what was the scene like where people paying a check was ever all eyes on the course? Of course. Wow. We were, you know, at this point, we, when I woke up in the morning, because the first plane hit shortly after 8 a.m. and I hadn't left the house yet. Had you already heard about it? Well, it was on the news. A friend of mine said, okay, it's a turn on the news. So I turned on the news. And there was a hole in the World Trade Center and it was burning. But the scale of those buildings is so huge that we couldn't tell that it was an airliner. We thought it was a cessant. So you saw a hole in the building. The building was just so big. You literally just thought it was in, and it was a beautiful day. So it's not like there was a storm. It's a perfect day. So we just thought it was an idiot and assessment. And I went to work. And people started to talk about it on the bus. I was taking the cross-stab bus like, you know, did you see what happened? And by the time I got off the subway, I was 14th Street because, you know, media disappears under the ground. Now there were people sitting on the side of the street listening

5:19to radios and their cars. And at this point now we started to realize this was terrorism. So we started to recognize what it was pretty quickly, but we didn't know what the implications were. And we also didn't expect the buildings to fall down. You know, it was a weird flaw in how the buildings were made that made them, because you know, most buildings had internal load-bearing structures. And what made the World Trade Center unique was all the load-bearing structures were on the outside. And so the floor is basically floated in the middle. So except for the elevators, when you could stand on one side of the World Trade Center inside and look clearer over to the side of the building, you know, it was amazing. And so they collapsed on top of each other when it came down, which nobody knew would happen. And so I was in constant contact with my sister who worked also in so-ho across town. Wow. And we were talking constantly and after the second building fell, I called her up and said, I'm coming to get you, we're going to go home. We lived uptown. And so I walked across town together. And we were part of the mass

6:21exodus walking four miles uptown. And of all the thousands of images that were captured that day, one image, and I went through all the books and everything. You know, one image that was really never captured was this was very quiet. We were all walking in one direction, smitten thousands of people, no cars on the road, walking north. No one in the subway. Everyone's just sitting. Everybody's above ground. And all going was very quiet and speckled in between all of this exodus where people covered head to toe in suit. But other than that, everything was normal. They were holding their briefcase and their newspaper. And it was just covered in debris. They were covered. I mean, we saw the pictures of people covered, but they were just speckled. And my sister, she had two colleagues, which we dropped them off on the way. And I remember there was all four of us. And we were coming up park avenue and there's a guy sitting on a stoop

7:24frantically calling somebody, I guess to tell them that he was alive frantically calling. And we walked up to him and we said, give us the number. No words were spoken. We just, what I remember, we just walked up and said, give us the number will help call. And he held up his address book. He just pointed. He didn't have words. We all typed in the number into our phones and we're hitting, you know, send, send, send, send. And every single one of us was trying to call. We were getting busy signals. My sister's phone got through. She hands him the phone. He takes it. And he says, I'm okay. I'm okay. And gives the phone back and walked away. And we're all crying, obviously. We dropped off to my sister's friends, our colleagues. And it was just my sister and me walking up the rest of the way. And we got to a grand central station, which blocks park avenue. So you have to go around it. And as we got there, somebody started

8:25screaming, run, run, run. And we saw the cops because there were fighter jets flying over. So you heard planes, but you didn't know what they were. So you heard planes flying over. And, and we looked down the street and the cops are going like this. And everybody started running and like dropping things and shoes falling off. They thought another plane had hit. We didn't know what it was. So I grabbed my sister and I like, and I'm thinking myself, okay, there's going to be a blast. It's going to come down like this and I pulled her off the street and like put our hands, you know, like look up against a building. And I look up and it's a huge glass. You know, it's a shop window. And I like, this is not going to be good. So I grabbed her and we just start running and then eventually just sort of peed her out. It was a bomb scare. It turned out later. And then we made our way to the rest of the way. We made our way back up town and didn't lean for, you know, two weeks. You know, we just, I'd like everybody to just started watching television and setting on stop. Yeah. Hold a cow. Did you guys, did you go back to work or did you do it? So like work was done for weeks. Work was done for weeks. And when it opened up, like no, but you

9:28really wanted to go. And my, my office was in part of the town, in part of the New York that was shut down. Like you couldn't, they couldn't get there. I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you were looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier. You want to make it flow. You want to feel abundant. Then make sure to go to MakeMoneyEasyBook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the

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11:34innovative technology across Exfinity and Peacock, Comcast brings the Olympic Games home to America, sharing every moment with millions. When Team USA steps onto the world stage, we're not just watching. We're cheering together. This winter, we're all on the same team. Comcast, proud partner of Team USA.