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**Dhar Mann** (0:02)
Lemonada.
I would have these dreams. I would see my tombstone, and the only thing written on it was, here lies Dhar Mann, a failure. Everything that I wanted to achieve, to be someone to make a difference in the world, that was the first time in my life where I thought, man, maybe none of that is gonna happen.

**Blake Mycoskie** (0:23)
My guest today is Dhar Mann, the number one digital scripted storyteller in the world. He's got over 145 million followers across all the platforms.

**Dhar Mann** (0:33)
You never know how close you are to success.
So you know what keeps me up at night sometimes? Thinking, what if I gave up on video number 99?

**Blake Mycoskie** (0:46)
The NFL recently named him the Chief Kindness Officer. And of course, he's the founder of Dhar Mann Studios, a media company built around a single idea, that content should leave people better than it found them.

**Dhar Mann** (1:01)
Your struggle becomes your superpower. External success starts with internal success. Failure is not the opposite of success. Maybe failure is a part of success. Maybe my whole book is not failure. Maybe that's just a chapter in my story.

**Blake Mycoskie** (1:15)
I wanted to have him on the show because he's different. He's very open to conversations a lot of people just aren't comfortable having. And also what he's come to understand about success and life on the other side of these mental challenges.

**Dhar Mann** (1:29)
If you don't see yourself as the problem, then you will never see yourself as the solution. The best leaders when something goes wrong, don't look out the window, they look in the mirror.

**Blake Mycoskie** (1:49)
One of the reasons I was so excited to have you on the show is as I was reading about your story, I feel like you and I both kind of were stuck in this like achievement trap for a long time. This myth that if we have success, if we make money, if we do this, then we'll be lovable, then we'll be okay. Where did that come from for you? I know I've done a lot of therapy on where it came from for me, but I'm curious, where did that feeling of like you needed to earn your worth come from?

**Dhar Mann** (2:15)
Yeah, I mean a similar situation as to like therapy definitely helps open your mind to a lot of things, but we all have like a mom wound and we all have a dad wound. And for me growing up, my dad always just felt like he needed to collect more and more and more. It was almost this insatiable drive like for success. And my mom, she was just such a high achiever. Her father was in the military. He was like a disciplinarian. He ran a really tight ship. And so he would always try to strive like for perfection. My mom, like if I was to get like an A minus or something, why was it an A? If I got into like a UC school, why wasn't it Stanford? Like that was always instilled in me. So like the combination of both, always wanting more and you're never enough.
That's a dangerous cocktail to mix. Yeah, I still struggle with that sometimes. Cause I, you know, I hear other people that are like, you've accomplished this or you're on this track. And in my mind, I still struggle with like, I am nothing. Like what I've completely fallen off. I'm this, I've that, right? And you probably struggle with those same feelings because people are like, you're the founder of Toms. Like that is, wow. Like you must be so happy, but just because you found like external success doesn't mean necessarily that you found internal success.

**Blake Mycoskie** (3:33)
Totally. And I mean, that was my story really in building Toms. When I think about it, like, you know, I'd be like on the cover of a magazine or getting this big award at the White House. All these things were happening. But I because I had never done the inner work at that point in my life, I wasn't able to internalize it and I continued didn't feel like it was enough. And so after I sold the company, led to me getting really depressed because I did everything I was told I was supposed to do. You know, I made a lot of money. I had these beautiful family. I helped 100 million kids get shoes. Like surely I should feel like I'm enough. And I didn't. And that's why it was so scary. And I think the reason it got so dark is because there was nothing left to do.