Erwin McManus On Beating Cancer, Negative Emotions & Finding Your Genius DSH | #169

amazing to see because at your age a lot of people are retiring and they're getting ready to, you know.

I know, that's so tragic.

Yeah.

I don't even know why you would ever want to retire.

I mean, you accepted death at such a young age.

I feel like people fear death their whole lives.

Yeah, I think they do too.

I think seven years ago I had cancer.

I had stage four cancer.

And my family's pretty shaken up.

Welcome back to the show, guys.

I'm your host, as always, Sean Kelly, Digital Social Hour.

Got an awesome guest for you guys today, Erwin McManus.

It's good to be here with you.

Man, I love your energy.

Can't wait to get into this.

I'm excited.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so happy birthday.

I saw you just turned 65.

I did, man.

And you look great.

And I'm alive.

Yeah, you're alive.

You know, when I was your age, I thought 65 was basically post-dead.

So I'm pretty jazzed to be alive.

And honestly, I feel more excited now than I think I've ever had my whole life.

Whoa.

Yeah, it's amazing.

You have to rethink it.

Yeah.

And I feel like I'm at the beginning of a new life.

I feel like I'm starting some great adventures.

I don't think I've ever been more innovative, more creative, more curious, more excited about life.

Wow.

That's amazing to see.

Cause at your age, a lot of people are retiring and they're getting ready to, you know.

I know, that's so tragic.

Yeah.

And

I don't even know why you would ever want to retire.

I mean, to me, it's like you want to create.

Yeah.

And you might create till you take your last breath.

Right.

So what awakened this spark for you at this age?

Like, was it a specific event?

I think I've always been like that.

And when I was around 19 years old, I nearly died three or four times.

Whoa.

And I got hit head on by a car running across the highway, paralyzed from the waist down.

I was working construction fall off a four-story building.

and happened to grab a scaffold on the way down before I hit the concrete.

And I had different events like that.

And so I think I had a a heightened awareness that life was really temporary.

And so very early on in my life, I took on some what I would call like primal samurai values and just always told myself, today is a good day to die.

And I just treated each day as if it was my last day.

Whoa.

And allowed me to live a fairly intense life, a life of incredible adventure.

I mean, I've been to probably 70 countries around the world.

I've walked the streets of Damascus.

I've flown into Pakistan.

I've been in the most violent cities in the world and

sat with drug cartels.

And

yeah, in my 20s,

I cannot tell you how many times I was surrounded by Uzi machine guns and stacked the ceilings.

And I was able to live that life because I wasn't trying to preserve my life.

And since I decided that I would live my life in the most extremely beautiful, extraordinary, unexpected way possible, I think I died when I was early.

You had no fear.

You know, I did have fear.

Oh, you did?

I had no limitations because of fear.

Interesting.

I think that's the difference: I used fear to my advantage.

Whenever I felt fear, I leaned in that direction and moved fast in that direction.

Whoa, because everyone else runs away from their fear.

Yeah, and I think that is why we live such small lives is fear establishes the boundaries of our freedom.

So whatever you're afraid of, that becomes your limitation.

If you're afraid of heights, you stay low.

If you're afraid of people, you stay alone.

If you're afraid of failure, you stay safe.

And when you realize that fear establishes the boundaries of your freedom, the moment you press through those fears, now you have unlimited freedom.

That's so crazy.

What a powerful message.

So you accepted death at such a young age.

I feel like people fear death their whole lives.

Yeah, I think they do too.

I think seven years ago, I had cancer, had stage four cancer.

And I was finishing a book called The Last Arrow.

And what's amazing to me is the day they told me that I had cancer and my family is pretty shaken up.

I wanted to finish editing this book, which happened to be called The Last Arrow.

And I thought maybe this is my last book.

And I opened up to edit, and the line I read, the very first line I read, said this,

I need to tell you before you hear it from someone else, I'm going to die.

I wrote that line a year before.

And I read that that night when I learned I had cancer.

But the next line was the most important line in the book.

Right after I wrote, I need to tell you before you hear it from someone else, I'm going to die, but so are you.

And that was the line I was trying to get to.

That most of us live almost

unconsciously pretending we're going to live forever.

And because of that, we do not treat our days with intense value.

And I can tell you when I had stage four cancer and I didn't know if I was going to make it, and I had to have a six-hour surgery, that I didn't feel fear.

It was the strangest thing I've ever experienced.

And I look back and

I tried to understand why I was not afraid.

And I think it's because most of us confuse fear for regret.

What we're actually experiencing is massive regret for never having lived the life we long to live, for never pursuing great ambitions or great dreams.

And I didn't have regrets.

I felt like if this was the end of my story, I lived a really good story.

That's awesome.

And I didn't want to leave my son Aaron, my daughter, Mariah, and my wife Cam.

I obviously wanted to be here.

I love life.

I have no death death wish.

I want to live as long as I can, but I want to live.

I don't want to exist.

I think that's the difference.

Yeah.

So would you attribute, because the survival rate at stage four is very low, right?

It's not high.

Yeah.

So would you attribute just your mental strength to helping you through that process?

Yeah, I've heard some studies have said that about 50% of the determination of a person's survival is their mindset.

And I remember when I had knee surgery years ago, I was in my 50s, and I wanted to find a surgeon that believed I could play basketball again.

And so I kept going from surgeon to surgeon because each one kept saying, hey, you're never going to play sports again.

We're just going to help you walk.

So I found, I think it was Kobe Bryant's surgeon.

Nice.

And I said, look, I don't want knee surgery that helps me walk.

I want to be back on the court.

I want to be able to drop threes.

I want to destroy 25-year-olds.

And

he said, we got you.

And then I said, how long will the recovery take?

And he told me a really interesting thing.

He said, the recovery process is really vast.

Some people never recover from the surgery.

Some people, it takes them up to two years.

And I said, how long did it take Kobe?

And he said, three months.

And I said, how long will it take me?

And he said, three months.

He goes, we can already predetermine before the surgery how fast a person will recover based on their mental frameworks.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

Which is a huge reason why I've written this new book called Mind Shift.

Yeah.

And is that most of our limitations are internal.

And if we can destroy internal limitations, we begin to live our optimal life.

Yeah.

So how did you shift your mindset to be so positive?

Because you didn't always have that mindset, right?

No, I was a hyper-depressed,

very moody artist.

Yeah.

You know, by the time I was 10 years old,

I was in a psychiatric chair.

Whoa, at 10?

At 10.

And I spent six months in and out of a hospital for psychosomatic illnesses.

And I struggled with massive depression

and I was a straight D student and I would disappear into an imaginary world even in school I remember waking up one time and the whole class was gone because the teacher couldn't bring me back into

into a conscious state I I created a defense mechanism where I started living in this imaginary internal world as a kid and I just detached myself from the world around me My mom and stepdad didn't know what to do with me.

They were going to send me a psychiatrist to try to help me.

And so early on in my life, I think I was mostly marked by

an overwhelming sense that my life didn't matter, that I was insignificant, that I was just a speck of dust

on the backdrop of the universe.

And I'm not sure, you know,

I think it's true for many people.

I know it was true for me.

Somehow I moved into an existential crisis by the time I was six, seven years old, and I just wondered if there was any meaning to life.

And I read every mythology book in the library by the time I was in sixth grade.

I was 11 years old.

And I was trying to search for some kind of legend or mythology to try to make sense of my existence.

11 years old?

Yeah.

And so I just became really despairing,

which I guess eventually drove me to college where I became a philosopher.

And I began reading Aristotle and

Plato and Socrates.

And I mean, just going through every philosopher, through every era, trying to find out if someone had found the meaning of life.

And so I was really driven.

I would never put myself like an intellectual category.

I didn't feel like I was particularly smart.

I just felt I was desperate and trying to find out if our existence was just arbitrary or whether there was any meaning to it.

Right, like a simulation almost.

Yeah, and so it drove me.

Yeah.

And I did have like a transformational journey for me.

And when I determined that life mattered, and what I determined was that people mattered, and really if nothing else in the universe exists or

in terms of

a transcendent reality, what matters are people.

And I just knew that if I could make the lives of others better,

if I could help end poverty or injustice or

help people achieve their greatest capacity.

And so I became a huge fan of humanity and just decided if my life,

maybe my life is insignificant and maybe it doesn't have true intrinsic meaning, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to give meaning to my life by making other people's lives meaningful.

And then in the midst of that, frankly, I came to

a faith and I became a follower of Jesus.

Nice.

And

that became for me

a shifting moment because I thought, wow, if I could actually believe that the creator of the universe was aware of my presence and that my life actually mattered, then

what excuse do I have for living a life that is small?

And yeah, so it actually brought a significant change.

That's not what it really meant to talk about today, but it's just where the conversation goes.

Fascinating.

So what age were you when all this happened?

I was 20 years old when I was studying philosophy and

I encountered the teachings of Jesus.

And,

you know, I wish I could say it was like this incredibly thought-out intellectual discovery.

It wasn't.

It was a complete act of desperation of going, going, God, if you're out there.

Yeah.

And I matter, I would love to know.

And Jesus, if you're rear, if you're Jesus, if you're real,

I'm in.

And,

you know,

I think it was like the

probably like the ultimate expression of subjective desperation of saying, God, I don't know.

But I know what it's like to live as if you don't exist.

So I'd like to figure out what it looks like to live as if you do exist.

Love that.

I've also seen you talk about energies.

I'm a believer in energies.

I've seen you mention that it's easier to be attracted to negative energies than positive, right?

It's certainly easier to be shaped and fueled by negative energy.

And, you know, if we looked at humans as a product, right?

You know, that we were created to have functionality,

we're really like broken.

Have you ever noticed that negative emotions stay with you, but positive emotions disappear really fast?

I have, actually.

Right.

It's like, if you get angry, that anger stays with you.

People who are bitter, that bitter stays for years.

That bitterness, it just.

I've seen it for 30, 40 years.

It's incredible, right?

But you have hope and it lasts for 13 minutes.

You know, you have an exhilarating, joyful moment.

In fact, I think I can share this.

I coach a lot of high-level leaders, and one of the people I have the privilege of coaching is Sean McVeigh, the head coach of the Rams.

And I asked Sean after he won the Super Bowl, I mean, the youngest coach to ever win the Super Bowl, youngest coach to ever go to a Super Bowl,

and

just

without question, one of the greatest coaches that

lives

in our era.

And I said, after you won the Super Bowl,

how long did the exhilaration of victory last?

And he said, about 10 minutes.

That's it.

And it was gone.

Crazy.

And then after that, it's the overwhelming weight of,

can I do this again?

Can I live up to the standard?

And is this going to be my pinnacle moment?

And everything after this is going to be diminished because of that.

And the reality is that positive experiences and positive emotions don't seem to stick with us as long as negative ones.

And that to me became really interesting and significant because I try to help people move out of negative moments.

And, you know, we talk about being depressed.

We almost never talk about being exhilarated.

You know, and we're even when you think about overthinking, I've been doing a lot of teaching on overthinking.

We never overthink about positive outcomes.

When you're overthinking, you're overthinking because you are running endless negative scenarios.

You are never running endless positive scenarios.

Never.

You never wake up going, my company's going to make too much money.

Oh my gosh, my relationship's going to go too well.

I'm never going to get healthy.

I can't believe I'm going to get too healthy.

I don't want to get in the gym too much.

Because what's going to happen if I get too jacked and too healthy and too strong and too attractive?

We're never overwhelmed by positive scenarios.

We're always overwhelmed by negative scenarios.

And so I started looking at this, okay, what's going on

in the sense of the internal world of us human beings?

And here's what happens.

We...

fall into negative patterns, but we have to move into positive patterns.

You do not fall fall into positive patterns.

You do not fall into positive thoughts.

You have to move into positive thoughts.

You have to move into positive behavior.

And the same way,

and to me, this is, I think, so significant, you move, you fall into negative energy.

You have to move into positive energy.

Wow.

So if you're going to

bring negative emotions, all you have to do is just slip into it and fall into it.

You don't walk into a room going, I'm just going to ruin the environment.

There's some people that I like that.

At least they're being proactive.

You're rarely going, I'm going to just destroy my relationship.

I want my girlfriend or my wife just to have the worst day because I've had the worst day.

We transfer negative emotions because we do not take control of our inner world.

You have to choose to bring hope.

You actually have to choose choose to be fueled by love.

This is one of the things that would frustrate me as an artist.

I've designed clothes and I've worked in the fashion industry for a long time.

And I remember one time I worked with an artist, and we developed an art center in Istanbul, Turkey, together.

And he asked me to do an installation in a gallery.

And

one day we were talking about art, and his art was getting darker and darker and darker.

And I remember asking him, I said, hey,

what's going on?

You know, why is your art moving into deeper and deeper darkness and he looked at me goes I refuse to be inauthentic I want to express emotions that are true

and that's why my art is what it is and I remember saying or asking him

is it possible that positive emotions were all are also authentic and true Like, is it possible that hope is also authentic?

That love is also authentic, that compassion is also authentic.

And he looked at me and he said, that thought has never occurred to me.

And if you pay attention to the narrative of art,

what we usually hear is to be authentic is to express negative emotions.

To be superficial is to express positive emotions.

And I want to argue that negative emotions are actually superficial.

It's easy to get there.

Positive emotions are actually deep.

You have to pay a price to get there.

Despair is easy for me.

Hope takes work.

Hate is easy for me.

Love takes sacrifice.

Greed, it's easy for me.

Generosity, it costs me something.

I think we've created a false narrative because we want to make what what is easy for us sound as if it's the most authentic expression of us.

The most authentic version of me is one that's fueled by love, that's overwhelmed and captivated by hope, one that believes in beauty and truth.

And one of the conclusions I came as an artist

was that

art

does not need hope,

but beauty does.

You can create art without hope, but you cannot create beauty without hope.

Wow.

Man, this is so powerful.

I'm trying to comprehend all this, man.

Art does not need love to be authentic, but beauty demands love.

Absolutely.

To exist.

Going back to the emotion stuff and the positivity, why do you think a lot of men in general have trouble just opening up, you know, being positive with each other?

Is it like a subconscious thing, you think?

It's because negative emotions feel like strength.

And men do not like feeling weak.

Right.

So let me give you the example.

When someone's bitter,

they do not appear weak.

Bitter people feel powerful.

They feel strong.

But bitterness lies to us.

It tells us that bitterness is strength, but actually bitterness is weakness.

It takes greater strength to forgive.

But we've flipped the script.

We go, oh, people who forgive, they're weak.

People who hold on to bitterness are strong.

But when you begin to let go of bitterness and move towards forgiveness, you move to an intense vulnerability.

You feel the vulnerability and you do not like it.

I mean, the moment, Sean, I choose to forgive you, or you choose to forgive me, you are now vulnerable being hurt again.

And we do not not like that feeling of vulnerability.

We do not like, in a sense, revealing our soft underbelly.

And so bitterness allows us to protect ourselves with a shell.

And the challenge, though, then is that we humans are not compartmentalized like we pretend we are.

When you're bitter toward one person, that bitterness affects every relationship in your life.

Absolutely.

When you can't trust one person,

you're not capable of trusting anyone.

And by the way, you see this true as well

in the reflection of faith.

When people

say they hate God, and I go, you know, like, what has God ever done to you?

And they always tell me everything people who believe in God have done.

They go, no, you're not angry with God.

You're angry with people who believe in God.

We say, well, I can't trust God.

And you go, well, the reason you can't trust God is because you can't trust anyone.

God's just a reflection of the way you're actually relating to other human beings.

Wow.

And

what I've decided in my own life, have I ever been betrayed?

Absolutely.

Have I ever felt the pain of someone I trusted and loved

not live up to the commitments they've made or even the level of loyalty that I thought that was there?

Of course I have.

But if I choose to stop trusting, I actually damage my ability to experience the wonder of human relationships.

And

you know that adage that

you you don't find what you're looking for, you find what you are.

And it's really, really true.

I've traveled the entire world and I find really wonderful people because I believe people are intrinsically

longing to be loved and longing to be good and longing to have meaningful friendships.

And so I find really hopeful people all over the world and really loving people all over the world, really kind people all over the world.

And I meet other people and go, everywhere I go, you know, people are terrible and they can't be trusted.

And I'm going, you're not meeting people.

You're seeing yourself.

Right.

And there is that dynamic where the energy of who you are

does attract people to your life.

Yeah.

And

if you're attracting untrustworthy people, you need to deal with the fact that you're untrustworthy.

Wow.

If you're attracting people who are not loyal, you need to deal with the fact that you're not loyal.

It's a reflection.

It is a reflection.

You can know who you are by who is drawn to you.

And we just don't like to see ourselves that way.

Yeah.

Yeah, I never thought about it that way, but that's so true.

Because you are what you attract, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Going back to the forgiveness stuff, do you believe everyone deserves forgiveness?

I don't think anyone deserves forgiveness.

Oh, anyone?

You don't give forgiveness because someone deserves it.

I know that's the part that makes it really, really irritating.

You give forgiveness because it is the best thing for you to do.

So it's selfish.

It's not selfish.

It's healthy.

Is drinking clean water selfish or wise?

Wise.

Right?

So why would you say forgiveness is selfish if it makes you better?

That's the interesting thing about us as humans, right?

There's almost like this secular view of humans where there is no selfless act.

In fact, I hear a lot of atheists talk about that, that there is no selfless act.

But I think there are healthy acts.

Like when I choose to eat healthy, that's not me being selfish.

That's me actually making wise choices.

So if I'm going to drink, you know, we were just in Mexico and we all got sick because we forgot and we drank the water.

There was bottled water right by the sink.

I mean, there was a reminder to me, don't drink what's coming out of this.

And I drank it anyway.

And then we get angry.

You know, I can't get angry at the water, so we get angry at God.

But it's the same thing with forgiveness.

Forgiveness is like drinking pure water rather than drinking toxic water.

You don't forgive if someone deserves it.

People don't deserve to be forgiven.

And someone may not even want to be forgiven.

Someone may not even admit they did something wrong.

That's why forgiveness is so hard.

And I don't forgive someone because they deserve forgiveness.

I forgive someone because I do not want to become bitter.

And I had to deal with a guy, not deal with him, I had to help a friend.

And

here he is working in the billion-dollar world

and was in a massive lawsuit with the DOJ and incredible human being.

And won, I think, the largest settlement in history.

Wow.

4.2 billion.

Jeez.

Yeah, not small.

So after he wins, he's still bitter.

Really?

He's mad because what they did was really unjust.

And there were people who were out really to get him.

And he could point to all the things of why he should be angry and want justice.

And

I walked him through, I said, here's the danger.

Because the first day we talked about forgiveness and it really didn't sink in.

I mean, he was going to lose everything.

He was going to lose his company.

He was going to lose.

all of his life work.

They were going to destroy everything he had.

If he had lost, it was over.

And so I understand why he felt what he felt.

I would feel the same way.

But the next day

I went up to him and I said, here's the reason you need to forgive.

Because when you do not forgive, you become what you hate.

Forgiveness is the palate cleanser of the soul, or you refuse to become a reflection of the people who hurt you and wounded you.

And that's why forgiveness is so important.

Not even for that person, but for you.

And at the same time, there are people who really desperately want forgiveness and they can't get it.

Because someone wants to hold power.

When you refuse to forgive, what you're actually saying to a person is, I want to rule over you.

I want to have power over your soul.

I want to control your ability to fuel a life without shame and without guilt.

And why should I feel that I have the right?

to trap you in shame, to trap you in your worst moment.

And I think forgiveness is the greatest economy in the world.

I love that.

Yeah, my father had a really rough relationship with his parents, and he never forgave them.

And I saw it kind of eat at him in his relationships his whole life.

It does, and it ruins you.

And it affects the people that you actually love.

And you don't even realize that it's affecting your relationship to your wife.

It affects your relationship to your kids.

Because if you don't let go of that,

it's toxic and it destroys everything.

I want to end it off with what you're working on now, what you're passionate about, what's in the future for you.

One of the most exciting things that I do is I work, it's funny, I work with both my son and my daughter.

Let me tell you, one of the best outcomes of parenting is when both your kids are adults and they want to be your best friends.

And my daughter's 31, my son is 35.

My daughter actually works with me on the faith side at Mosaic Church we started in Los Angeles.

And she's an extraordinary leader and artist, musician, singer,

writer, and then my son Aaron works with me in the business side.

And so we started this

global online mastermind called the Arena, where people can actually come pay a membership and be a part of a learning community where we focus on communication, leadership, character, and big ideas.

I want to have a place we could just talk about every big idea in the world and break those down.

And a lot of it is because I love creating content to help people process and grow, but I hate selling.

And I thought, well, if we have an online community, I can just create things like the art of communication and the seven frequencies of communication.

And then everyone in the community gets it for free.

So it's, to me, I think it's the revolutionary future of education.

Powerful.

And we do not need the processes of the past.

And I know Harvard and Brown and Yale are all awesome, but they are not going to create the leaders the future needs.

Entrepreneurs do not like formal education, but they love to learn.

And they learn tactically and in the moment of crisis.

And our community allows us to have that kind of adaptability for learning.

Absolutely.

And then I have a new book that's coming out October 3rd.

I'm not sure when we're going to release this, but it might already be out.

It's called Mind Shift.

You don't have to be a Genius to Think Like One.

And really, it's about destroying internal limitations.

And I'm super excited about it.

It's a social psychology book.

It's really 40 years of learning these mental structures that have limited people's optimal capacity.

And if you just make these small, granular shifts, it opens up a whole new world for you.

Love it.

Will it be on Audible?

It will be.

I just did the audio book.

Nice.

Yeah, check it out for sure.

Thanks for coming on, Erwin.

Hey, thank you so much.

Thanks for watching, guys, and I'll see you next time.