Overcoming trauma, finding inner peace, and living a meaningful and fulfilling life | Lewis Howes

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Lewis Howes. Lewis is a New York Times bestselling author, an entrepreneur and a former professional athlete. He's best known for his work as a motivational speaker and host of the podcast, The School of Greatness. Lewis is also the author of several books, including The School of Greatness and The Mask of Masculinity. His new book titled The Greatness Mindset is out March 7th this year.
In my conversation with Lewis, we really talk about Lewis' story, the traumas he went through as a child and ultimately the lessons he learned throughout his life as he worked through those traumas to improve his emotional health.
Lewis' story is one that I think a lot of people will relate to and while the details are obviously unique to Lewis, just like the details are unique to all of our stories, I think some of the takeaways are very common. For example, in Lewis' case, he endured a lot of hardship as a child and in some cases, many more hardships than a lot of people would endure and he channeled that into a lot of success driven by inferiority and things like that. But what he figured out and luckily figured out early in life was that ultimately these accolades and these pursuits of success left him feeling unfulfilled. This podcast really talks about that journey.
As many of you listening to this podcast probably understand, I place just as much of an emphasis on emotional health as I do physical health. And even though more of our podcasts talk about the physical side of health, cognition, different diseases, physical robustness, et cetera, it doesn't mean that emotional health is any less important. And I think Lewis's story is such an important one. I'm very grateful for how he's able to open up in this episode. And I'm hopeful that any of you listening who have some unresolved issues, this episode might provide the encouragement that you need to address those to reap some of the benefits of improved emotional health. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Lewis Howes.
Lewis, man, thank you for making time to sit down. I feel lucky that I'm gonna be one of the sort of first people to get to talk with you on the heels of your book coming out because we're recording this in January. Your book is coming out at the beginning of March. I know that you're gonna be talking to a lot of people and I've been thinking about this as I read your book. Given this is the first time we're speaking, not the first time we're speaking, but the first time I have you on my podcast to talk about it, I also wanna talk about things that precede this book in particular. And I could think of no better way to start talking about it than to really go kind of more deeply into your story because I think your personal story is what is at least the substrate for three of your four books. I think your first book was really kind of about optimizing LinkedIn. We'll probably not get too much into that given that I don't use LinkedIn too much, but it'll probably come up as part of the others. So remind me, you grew up in, was it Ohio?

**Lewis Howes** (3:42)
Yeah, a small town in Ohio near Columbus. But then I bounced around when I was 13, I left home and went to a private boarding school in St. Louis, Missouri.
I begged my parents to send me away for about two months in the summer just because there was a lot of turmoil, inner turmoil, and my environment, turmoil, and I begged them to send me away. They didn't want to send me away. Most kids get sent away for being bad. I begged my parents to send me away.

**Peter Attia** (4:07)
Sort of funny, our daughter is half joking and she's in eighth grade saying she wants to go to boarding school for high school.