🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Without a meaningful mission greatness can never be achieved
2. Greatness is discovering your unique gifts and talents to pursue your Meaningful Mission and make the maximum positive impact on the people around you.
3. Be aware of your emotions, your thoughts and your behavior

🕵🏼Who Should Read It?

The book's target audience is people new to the self-improvement industry. The book covers basic and fundamental questions and offers practical exercises to find a mission and meaning in life. That said, people who have already read some self-improvement books may find this one boring because similar questions are posed throughout the book.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

The book had no influence on me. I found the book very repetitive and boring to read. The book contains multiple practical exercises that interrupt the reading flow. Also, some exercises are repetitive. After answering the questions and doing the exercises, I did not gain any new knowledge because most of the questions I had already answered before.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

“Life is just too short to waste any of our emotional energy on things that don’t matter.” Joel Osteen

“You’ll never rise any higher than the way you see yourself.” Joel Osteen

“Thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body.” Dr. Joe Dispenza

📒 Summary + Notes

The goal of this book is to find the purpose of your life and, in doing so, discover your greatness. Lewis Howes divides this journey to finding your purpose into four steps. But before he begins, he explains what greatness means.

What is Greatness

Lewis Howes has a very simple and understandable definition of greatness. He defines greatness as follows: “Greatness is discovering your unique gifts and talents to pursue your Meaningful Mission and make the maximum positive impact on the people around you.”

What I really like about this definition is that the focus is less on you than on others. To be great is not about doing the best for yourself but more about doing what you can do best for others. If you follow this definition, you will not only find happiness because in most cases the things you do best are also what you love to do, but you will also be successful because having an impact on people means solving problems, which leads to success.

The Enemy of Greatness

Lewis explains that the biggest enemy of success is not having a meaningful mission, not having a clear path that leads you to your goals.

Lewis says something that should be taught in every school and is probably the cause in 70% of all depression cases. “Not having direction or purpose creates a vacuum in your soul, a vacuum that fears, sadness, and mental health challenges rush to fill.”

In my personal opinion, every kid should learn in school how to discover their life's purpose and how to work toward achieving it. Obviously, some may not be able to answer that right away, and even if they do, there's a high chance that this goal will change as they get older. But the most important thing is that they engage with the question.

The Barriers of Greatness

As Lewis explains, probably the biggest barrier to success is self-doubt—fear of failure, fear of success, and fear of judgment. These three factors often define your self-doubt, as the doubt diagram suggests.

The Doubt Diagram

I've heard a lot, and Lewis Howes talks about it as well, that there is no person on this earth who achieved success without experiencing failure. This is something we should never forget. Additionally, fear has a very natural origin – to protect us from danger. Although most of our fears are no longer life-threatening, we have to keep in mind that this is the most natural response and that it's much more important to push through fear in order to reach greatness.

The Mindset of Greatness

Another important part of reaching your greatness is your mindset. But what is a mindset? Mindset, as Lewis puts it, includes your thoughts (how you think), your emotions (how you feel), and your behavior (how you act). If all of these aspects align with your meaningful mission, you are doing everything right.

The Game Plan for Greatness

In this chapter, Lewis Howes shows how to put all the previously done exercises and knowledge into action. He talks about how important it is to set specific goals because they will give you the motivation to take action. Because at the end of the day, you can have laid out the perfect plan to reach your greatness, but if you don't put in the hours, you will never achieve what you want. Think like LeBron James, who always did more than everybody else until it paid off.

Greatness Mindset and Powerless Mindset

To conclude this brief blog post, I want you to take with you this figure. It's a simple and effective summary of the book, encompassing all the mentioned topics within it. With that, I hope to see you in my next blog post, and thank you very much for reading.

With regards
Devin Hasler