The Fastest Way To Make $10,000 A Month | Chris Koerner

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Fastest Way To Make $10,000 A Month | Chris Koerner

The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes
Date: July 8, 2026
Guest: Chris Koerner

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Overview

In this inspiring episode, Lewis Howes sits down with Chris Koerner—serial entrepreneur, owner of 75 businesses, and self-professed delusional optimist—to explore the most actionable, practical, and mindset-driven ways to create $10,000/month in income. The conversation covers the realities of entrepreneurship, why most people fail to act, debunking myths like “it takes money to make money,” modern business models, resilience, handling failure, and combining profit with purpose. Chris’s personal journey includes powerful stories of serving others, overcoming adversity, and why action trumps perfection in business and life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Stop Planning—Start Doing

Timestamps: 02:32–05:19, 20:12–22:08

• Chris blasts the tendency to “play business” rather than do business: making logos, business plans, LLCs—none of which matter without customers.
• Chris Koerner [02:32]: "People are masters at playing business and not doing business... Go find a customer. I don't care if it's your mom, your best friend... Even if it's an unpaid customer for a five-star review. Sell it before you have it."
• The fastest path to validation and growth is selling first, building second (the “Bootcamp” or “Kickstarter” method).

2. Busting the “Takes Money to Make Money” Myth

Timestamps: 03:41–05:03

• Today’s environment—with AI, social media, and marketplaces—means starting requires almost no capital.
• Chris Koerner [03:51]: "We have more resources, tools, everything at our disposal... We could use an AI tool on a free trial to launch a service business and sell something to a business owner that pays us $2,500/month. You don't need money to start a business, period."
• Solutions: Start where you are, with the tools you have, serving those you know.

3. Overcoming Fear and Ego

Timestamps: 03:09, 05:19, 30:30–31:44, 41:54

• The real fear is not failing—it’s what others think if you fail.
• Chris Koerner [03:09]: "It's the fear of the perception of failure from others... If you do fail, they're probably not going to think anything about you."
• “Post and ghost” strategy: share online, then ignore comments. Most people aren’t paying close attention.
• Progress starts when you act despite discomfort and ignore the (imagined) opinions of others.

4. Resilience: Pressure Breeds Creativity

Timestamps: 06:16–11:44, 53:22–56:52

• Both Chris and Lewis recount how financial or life pressure forced their creative breakthroughs.
• Lewis Howes [08:53]: "Every time I stepped into a new environment in my living space that cost more, it's like I unlocked financial abundance..."
• Parkinson’s Law: time/effort/money fill the space allowed. Set scary but doable goals to force growth.
• Developing resilience comes from hardship, rejection, and, as Chris describes from his mission experience:
  Chris Koerner [53:54]: "Just resilience... I knocked on tens of thousands of doors. I was not much in high school... The mission fundamentally changed me at my core."

5. What Types of Businesses Scale to $10K/Month Quickly?

Timestamps: 12:57–19:57

• Chris’s “barbell” model:
  1. Low-tech, unsexy manual businesses (window-washing, TV mounting, plumbing, handyman)
  2. High-tech, AI-driven, digital/online businesses (AI consulting, reselling)
  • Avoid the messy middle.
• Reselling: VCRs, couches, vintage goods; service businesses—window washing, TV hanging—require minimal capital but deliver high returns.
• Chris Koerner [13:23]: "AI isn't about to disrupt that [manual labor]. On the other end... AI-heavy, all online content... I really like reselling right now. I don't know when that's going to go out of business."
• Powerful example: a $275 TV-hanging job, 8–12 jobs/day, six figures/year with no exceptional skill or marketing required—just profiles on service apps.

6. Documenting the Journey Is a Business

Timestamps: 15:28–16:01

• Recording yourself building or flipping can attract an audience who champions your progress—opening more income streams.
• Chris Koerner [15:51]: "People are good. They want to support people. They want to support the underdog. And if you're the underdog and they're watching your come up from zero to something, they're going to support you."

7. Sell First, Build Later—Bootcamp Method

Timestamps: 20:54–25:35

• Sell a solution before investing in infrastructure. Refine and build offering based on real demand.
• Chris’s own iPhone repair story: opened a retail shop with no skills, learned on the job, made mistakes, and still made 6-figures instead of waiting to “perfect” his craft.
• Chris Koerner [24:22]: "A lot of people wait until they need to get more degrees, more education, more training, until I can launch. They play the perfection game and they never make any money."

8. Learn by Doing, Not Paying

Timestamps: 29:24–30:30

• Paying more for courses doesn’t correlate to increased action or success.
• Chris Koerner [29:24]: "There's zero correlation between how much you pay to learn the thing... and you actually following through and doing it. There's no correlation. So just do it."

9. “Bias for Action” is the Winning Skill

Timestamps: 43:09–45:19, 81:37

• The key trait: acting quickly on curiosity and ideas (“impatient with action, patient with results”).
• Chris Koerner [43:09]: "Bias for action. They have to be impatient with action, but patient with results."
• Most business ideas fail due to lack of momentum and focus, not bad ideas.

10. Combining Profit and Purpose—Generosity

Timestamps: 52:26–56:52, 70:24–71:58

• Chris advocates for giving back—money and time. 10% tithing as a baseline, plus donations and mentorship.
• Profound stories of his personal journey: his daughter’s double lung transplant and his own altruistic living kidney donation to a stranger.
• Chris Koerner [70:24]: "We're here for others. Serving other people is one of the most selfish things you can do because it serves us so much."
• Living selflessly leads to unexpected abundance.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You can’t be prideful and broke at the same time.” – Chris Koerner [05:19]
• “Constraints equal creativity.” – Chris Koerner [06:49]
• "If you can create content, showing the launch of an idea is more valuable than the idea itself." – Lewis Howes [15:42]
• "Sell it before you have it." – Chris Koerner [20:27]
• "Impatient with action, patient with results." – Chris Koerner [81:37]
• "Do things for the story." – Chris Koerner [82:30]
• "Greatness is simply being a net positive to the world." – Chris Koerner [83:03]
• Chris and his wife both became altruistic kidney donors, inspired by the lung donation that saved their daughter’s life. [62:36–66:42]

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Actionable Business Ideas from the Episode

Manual/Service Businesses:

• Window washing, TV mounting, plumbing, home repair
• Start with deposits to fund supplies (can begin with $0 capital)
• Free or existing platforms (TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, Angi, Google) for customer acquisition

Reselling:

• Buy undervalued items (VCRs, couches, electronics) on local marketplaces, refurbish if needed, resell online for profit

AI Consulting:

• Help small businesses apply AI solutions. Most have no idea where to start: “Sit with a friend, learn their business challenges, use ChatGPT to diagnose and solve.”

Content Creation:

• Document your journey learning or flipping; can lead to audience-based businesses

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:32] Playing business vs. doing business
• [03:09] Fear of perception—not failure—holds us back
• [03:41] It no longer takes money to make money
• [05:19] Pride, ego, and first customers
• [08:53] Financial constraints and creativity
• [13:12] The “barbell” model for businesses
• [20:27] Sell before you build
• [24:22] Perfectionism vs. entrepreneurship
• [29:24] Learn by doing, not by paying
• [43:09] Bias for action = entrepreneurial edge
• [53:22] Life-changing resilience from mission and teaching
• [56:57–66:42] Life and business lessons from transplant stories
• [70:24] The “selfish” benefit of serving others
• [81:37] The three truths for life and business

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Three Truths (Chris Koerner’s Life Principles) [81:37]

1. Impatience with action, patience with results
2. Be more bold—nobody thinks about you as much as you think
3. Do things for the story

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Final Reflections

Chris Koerner provides a no-excuses, all-action blueprint for making $10K/month and beyond—rooted in real stories and hard-won wisdom. The keys:

• Ditch ego, skip perfection, and focus on solving someone else’s problem now
• Leverage today’s tools and platforms; start where you are
• Act boldly, document the journey, combine profit with giving
• And remember: “Greatness is simply being a net positive to the world.”

For more: Follow Chris’s daily business ideas and insights at the Kerner Office podcast or on social media @theKernerOffice.

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[Lewis Howes]

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[Chris Kerner]

People are masters at playing business and not doing business. They go get an llc, they make a business plan, a logo, they Start talking to their friends about I'm making moves. You don't do any of that. Go find a customer. I don't care if it's your mom, your best friend, I don't care. You got to start somewhere. I don't care if it's an unpaying customer and you don't it for free just to get a five star review. Go find a customer and then figure everything else out after that. Sell it before you have them.

[Lewis Howes]

He is a serial entrepreneur who has launched 75 businesses with multiple of them becoming seven and eight figure brands. And he's here to teach you the fastest way to add 10,000 plus dollars a month to your life. You have the inspiring Chris Kerner in the house.

[Chris Kerner]

It's the fear of the perception of failure from others. That's the only thing we're afraid of. It's not one of the things, it's not the fear of failure, it's what will people think about me if I fail. The thing is, if you do fail, they're prob probably not going to think anything about you.

[Lewis Howes]

How does someone develop a more resilient mindset when they launch something? They get laughed at and they lose money and they fail. How do they not let that insecurity or that self doubt stop them from trying again?

[Chris Kerner]

It's an overly simplistic answer, but we

[Lewis Howes]

I've always heard people say that it takes money to make money. Is that something you believe that maybe

[Chris Kerner]

30 years ago that was true, but that's no longer true.

[Lewis Howes]

Why is that?

[Chris Kerner]

We have more resources, tools, everything at our disposal today that we've never had before. We could use an AI tool on a free trial to launch a service business and sell something to a business owner that pays us 2,500amonth, right? You don't need money to start a business, period.

[Lewis Howes]

What do you need?

[Chris Kerner]

You need to shed your ego. You need to stop thinking that people care about what you're doing or saying on the Internet. You need to just let go. Like as cliche as that is, you need to just do your own thing and stop worrying about other people.

[Lewis Howes]

But what if someone spends a lot of time, energy and money launching something and they get zero results and they lose their money?

[Chris Kerner]

Well, how much money did they spend and why did they spend it right? What business did they pick is what I would ask them. I can think of very few exceptions where you need over 100 or $1,000 to start a business. Even if I were to start a restaurant that cost half a million dollars to open. I could still largely de risk that idea by going to farmers markets and having people taste my recipe or a pop up or, you know, renting a food truck for a weekend just to see if people come or people come back or if they care. There's a thousand creative ways to launch

[Lewis Howes]

a business without money and testing it first to make sure the model works, then scaling it, then getting the half a million dollar investment in a storefront or whatever it might be. Once you know you have customers, once you know that there's product market fit or whatever it might be. Right.

[Chris Kerner]

Correct.

[Lewis Howes]

And you told me beforehand that you can't be prideful and broke at the same time. Why is that?

[Chris Kerner]

Because we are most likely to get our first customers from our friends and family or from social media, from our Facebook page that has 300 followers or Instagram page that has 262 followers. The people that trust us, like us, know us, know our background. They are most likely to want to support us. Right. But so many of us are too concerned about what that guy from high school 20 years ago will think about me if I post a selfie video talking about my new service business. He doesn't care. He doesn't know. And if he cares, he's not a person that you should care about. So we just, we just have to let go and realize that people have more distractions than they've ever had. We're swiping so many things, they're not thinking about you, they don't care about you. Just do your own thing. Let go of the ego and you will win.

[Lewis Howes]

Were you always good with money?

[Chris Kerner]

I grew up poor, so I've had to be good with money. I've had to have a kind of a scarcity mindset around money because I grew up poor.

[Lewis Howes]

Do you still have a scarcity mindset around money?

[Chris Kerner]

Sometimes, yeah. Depends on the thing. Not around food. I'm a foodie.

[Lewis Howes]

So you'll spend it all in the.

[Chris Kerner]

That's where I ball out. Right. But around a lot of other things I do because those habits are hard to break.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. So you don't want to go back to being poor.

[Chris Kerner]

Right.

[Lewis Howes]

So would you say you have a scarcity mindset or a frugal mindset or live beneath your means mindset?

[Chris Kerner]

I think I'm a walking contradiction. I could point to like I built a house more expensive than what I could afford in my 20s, but at the same time, there are other decisions I make that show my frugality mindset. Yeah, it just, I'm Just, I don't know. I guess I'm a hypocrite. I'm inconsistent when it comes to money. It just depends. But I will say this. I like to say constraints equal creativity. And building a house more expensive than I could afford in my 20s was one of the best things I could have done because it was a motivating factor to just to work harder. And I don't want people to misinterpret that, misunderstand and say, well, I can go buy that $13 avocado toast because it'll just motivate me to grind more. I think that's kind of a weird quirk of mine, but for me, it worked. I also had my first kid when I was 23 and my fourth when I was 29. Right. And so that's always been the forefront of my mind, is providing for my family. And so if I did make a poor money decision, I always knew that, A, I could think of a creative way to start a business and make it back, or B, I would just have to work harder to be able to afford my lifestyle.

[Lewis Howes]

So interesting, because in my 20s, my first apartment was $250 a month, and I thought it was a lot of money. Then it was $450 a month. That was a stretch. Then I went from that to in Ohio to New York City, and it was $2,600 a month for a rental for one month. And I go, this is like six months of rent in Ohio. And I was like, this is insanity that I'm spending this to sleep. And then the next month after that, I went to 3,600amonth. And I go, this is way too much. And it was grand a few years later. And I was just like, are you kidding me? My younger self would be saying that you're just wasting your money. But for whatever reason, every time I stepped into a new environment in my living space that cost more, it's like I unlocked financial abundance. Like, it's like I got creative.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes.

[Lewis Howes]

Maybe it was a certain level of constraint by that framing where it made me think in a different way. I was like, I need to go earn way more to be able to pay for this so that my bank account doesn't go down.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And again, like you, it doesn't mean go spend as much money as you can next month's rent. But that pressure caused me to figure out how to provide at a different level of thinking than the lower level of financial pressure.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And maybe not. Maybe there's limits to how much pressure I could handle. Sure. Before it's like, oh, and I actually break down.

[Chris Kerner]

Right.

[Lewis Howes]

But incrementally going into that new level supported me in being creative financially and taking risks and not worrying about looking silly and just being. Risking, like, failure.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Because I was like, I need a. Yes. I need people to consume or buy or whatever it might be.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And is that something that you've experienced as well?

[Chris Kerner]

I think we don't put enough pressure on ourselves. We need, like, we hear a lot of people, like, just, you know, just don't be so hard on your. I think we need to be a little harder on ourselves. We need to put a little pressure on ourselves. You're familiar with Parkinson's Law. So for those watching, Parkinson's Law is the theory that time and. Or resources expand or contract to fit the space allotted to it. Right. So in high school, if my chemistry teacher said, we've got this project due in two months. It's a third of your grade. We were going to take two months to do it. What I normally did, I have adhd, is I would completely forget about it.

[Lewis Howes]

To the last night.

[Chris Kerner]

To the last night. And he would tell us, this isn't the type of thing that you can procrastinate, I'm telling you. And I'm like, okay, we'll see. And last night I would forget. I'm like, oh, crap, I have that project. I would stay up all night and I would submit something amazing. Like, objectively, he wouldn't have never known. And that's Parkinson's Law. And that's pressure, whether artificial or natural. That is pressure. And what you're describing is the same thing. It's just not in a time format. It's in a monetary.

[Lewis Howes]

Yes.

[Chris Kerner]

So there. There are pressures that are outside of our control. Like if I took out an SBA loan to buy a business, and then it turns out like the business was all a sham or fraud and I could declare bankruptcy. Like, that might be way too much pressure for me. But for what you're describing, it would motivate you to go do a little more, try a little harder, do this. You know, stay clocked in a few more hours. And when that pressure is applied is when you unlock these amazing things. And a lot of pressure over a long period of time compounds to an insane amount to where at the end of 10, 20 years of doing that, you're like, you're insanely productive and efficient and you have all these revenue streams and these beautiful things have happened because you've allowed that pressure to affect your life.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. They say if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person.

[Chris Kerner]

That's Parkinson's law.

[Lewis Howes]

That's Parkinson's Law. It's like, it's so funny because I've had the honor of interviewing a lot of people on this show and stay in touch and stay friends with a lot of them over time. And it's the people that you wouldn't expect to get back to you the fastest. The people that are the most successful, the busiest, that have the most on their plate. I text them, I call them, they text back within minutes.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

The people that are not doing as much, that take days. And I'm like, really? It makes no sense to me. Yep. I'm like, you can't reply within a day. Or at least just a thumbs up and acknowledgement, you know. So it's so funny that the most successful people usually are the fastest to reply. Or if they see it, they're going to give you some acknowledgement or say, I'll get back to you tomorrow. They give you something where they're saying, I want to take action now. And that action snowballs into more results. Typically you are a master at showing the world the easiest ways to launch a business and make 5 to 10k a month pretty quickly with a little amount or no money at all. Which types of businesses are the easiest to scale to 10k a month?

[Chris Kerner]

Right now I like to think of like a barbell when it comes to businesses. Very. On one side of the barbell you have no AI, no tech, no Internet, sweaty hands on difficult. I love those businesses because people don't

[Lewis Howes]

want to play their manual labor.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes.

[Lewis Howes]

Plumbing, the lawn mowing, the friggin tree removal, the dirty work. Right. Which you can charge a premium for. I feel like right now.

[Chris Kerner]

Oh yeah, yeah. AI isn't about to disrupt that.

[Lewis Howes]

No.

[Chris Kerner]

On the other end of that barbell you have AI heavy. Right. All online content. AI heavy. That's where I like to be. I don't want to be in the messy middle where either side of that can be disrupted by the other side. So I really like reselling right now. Reselling anything. I don't know when that's going to go out of business. I talked to guys just yesterday that are reselling VCRs. They're paying 5 to $10 for VCRs and selling for 100 to $150.

[Lewis Howes]

They might even be getting for free some of these probably. Right. It's like some of these things you just like, find donations and then fix it up. Right.

[Chris Kerner]

These guys are in, like, the middle of nowhere, Virginia. And so when we were talking, I pulled up Facebook Marketplace, and I live in Dallas, Fort Worth. There's 9 million people. And I typed in VCR and I just watched. Their eyes lit up because there were hundreds of VCRs for 5 to 10 bucks. And they were like, that one's worth 200, that one's worth 75. That one's worth 150. And I crunched the numbers, and I'm. You could make six figures a year if you lived in Dallas, Fort Worth, buying VCRs on Facebook Marketplace, where people don't know the value, and selling them on ebay, where there's a fair price, a fair market value for it.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

VCRs. Right. And you could rinse and repeat that category with hundreds of others. These guys were selling camcorders, all types of stuff. So that is a business where if reselling.

[Lewis Howes]

Reselling anything, it could be clothes, it could be games, it could be toys, it could be whatever.

[Chris Kerner]

I know a guy that makes six figures picking up free or close to free couches on Facebook Marketplace and selling them on Facebook Marketplace. Like people that only buy on Facebook Marketplace and then sell on the same platform to the same people for a profit.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. I think I've seen a lot of people on Instagram. I love people documenting their journeys of, like, reselling. Oh, yeah. And picking up whatever $50 furniture and selling it for a thousand.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Now maybe they put a couple days of, like, labor and paint and sanding it, but if you have that skill.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

To refurbish something and then resell and make it look nice.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

That's like $800 right there in profit, which is a couple days of work.

[Chris Kerner]

But if you're willing to hit record on the camera, put your phone on a tripod, and, like, you're not embarrassed, then you can grow an audience who's cheering for you and rooting for you. And then eventually you're going to have an audience that won't necessitate you to go buy dressers anymore. You can do whatever you want with that.

[Lewis Howes]

Exactly. It's almost like if you can create content, showing the launch of an idea.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes.

[Lewis Howes]

Is more valuable than the idea itself.

[Chris Kerner]

And that's okay. That's okay. Because people are good. They want to support people. They want to support the underdog. And if you're the underdog and they're watching your come up from zero to something, they're going to Support you.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. Okay, so reselling is one. What other couple. Other ideas you got?

[Chris Kerner]

I mean, I had a couple come to my house just last week. They wash windows. That's it. I paid them 500 bucks. And it was a husband, wife. They're like early mid-20s, and they washed my windows. And like, this isn't how it worked, but this is how it could have worked. They could have said, chris, can we wash your windows? And I'm like, sure. I want to support young entrepreneurs. So. Okay, we need to require a deposit. No problem. How much? Half. Here's 250. Okay. They could have had zero dollars to their name. No car, no LLC, no insurance, anything. They could have Ubered to Home depot, use that 250 to buy all the equipment for 50 bucks. Come back to my house, spent five hours. It's hard work. I'm not saying it's easy. And put hundreds of dollars of profit in there. They could have been paid to start a business. Right? That's a business where you would need money to start. You get paid up front. It's not unreasonable to ask for a deposit. That didn't happen. I just paid them. But I'm saying back to our. You don't need money, start a business. That's one. So any service business that you start with your hands, that's unsexy, that's physical. We're missing, like, million plumbers, H Vac and electricians in America right now. We have a shortage of like 3 million. And those are just the big three that Home Services that everyone talks about. But there's thousands of home service niches. If you look at just gutters, you have gutter repair, gutter replacement, gutter cleaning. Like, there's thousands of home service businesses. So anything you do with your hands that, you know, robots aren't about to take over, because the smart people developing robots are making robots that can, you know, package orders and do things at scale, not replace a toilet.

[Lewis Howes]

A few years ago, I was, you know, we bought a home and I was, you know, trying to hang stuff and curtains and TVs and all this stuff. And I was like, I don't have time to do this right now. And I. What is it? TaskRabbit? I went on there and it's like, I think I paid someone like four or five hundred dollars to hang a tv. You know what I mean? And it took them maybe an hour and a half, and There was probably 50 people on there that this is all they did full time. And they're making bank I know, like, this is insanity.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

But I was also like, I don't want to spend three hours doing this right now and I need to get it done. Let's go to the top person ranked on, you know, TaskRabbit and okay, they have 100 reviews. Good enough for me.

[Chris Kerner]

Let's do it.

[Lewis Howes]

And it's like, you know, I'm sure I paid a tip probably or something. It's like you're making bank doing service work that is good money.

[Chris Kerner]

And they own their. They own a business.

[Lewis Howes]

They own it. And literally all they have is like a little tool belt with maybe some nails and a hammer. Yeah, it's, it's not expensive to start that and put up a profile on TaskRabbit. Right. And I was just thinking of like window washing. They probably, these guys or gals could have said, hey, we're going to come once a quarter. Can you give us a deposit for the next one? And have these, this clientele and then just go around the neighborhood and have a full schedule cleaning windows. You could do that with cars, boats, anything.

[Chris Kerner]

Well, it's funny you bring up the, the TV hanging because I tweeted I had the same experience like a year ago and I tweeted about it. And every time I have a contractor come over, I always pick their brain. I'm like, how much do you make?

[Lewis Howes]

What do you. I said the same thing. I'm like, dude, 80 grand a year hanging TVs.

[Chris Kerner]

So this guy comes over, I paid him like 275 to hang a TV.

[Lewis Howes]

And I was like, texas, a little cheaper. Yeah.

[Chris Kerner]

I was like, how many of these do you do a day? He's like 8 to 12. And I'm like, holy cow. I was like, you're making 300 grand a year? He's like, yeah. It's like it varies. Some months are 10 grand, some months are 40. And I was like, okay, where do you find customers? Are you good at like SEO and ads? He goes, no ads. I have a profile on Google, LSA, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, TaskRabbit. They feed me all my leads. I do good work. I ask for five star reviews. They take. Some of them take a cut, some of them don't. Some of them, he boosts his profile to get more jobs, six figures a year. And he doesn't. He's not a marketing. He just lists himself on these free platforms.

[Lewis Howes]

Crazy skill is not that hard. I mean, it's like if you're, if you spend a week or Two to learn the skill.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Of that type of skill. And you master it.

[Chris Kerner]

Yep.

[Lewis Howes]

You could get really good at that skill.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And people are always going to need that.

[Chris Kerner]

Yep.

[Lewis Howes]

Well, what is the thing most people do first that immediately puts them behind before they even start when they're trying to launch a new side hustle or project or business.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. People are masters at playing business and not doing business.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. What does that mean?

[Chris Kerner]

It means they go get an llc, they make a business plan, a logo, they start talking to their friends about it. I'm making moves. You don't do any of that. Go find a customer. I don't care if it's your mom, your best friend. I don't care. You gotta start somewhere. I don't care if it's an unpaying customer and you do it for free just to get a five star review. Go find a customer and then figure else. Figure everything else out after that. Sell it before you have it.

[Lewis Howes]

I call that the Bootcamp method or the Kickstarter method, like launch the sale of something first before you launch the business. And this is something I did early on. I would do a free webinar. If I ever wanted to launch a new course product offering event. I would do a free webinar and I'd ask for a sale before having anything to give people, like 15 years ago. And then I would do a boot camp around this. I would teach and train and I'd say, all right, we're going to do a six week boot camp training on this thing that you want to learn. I would record that and then I'd sell that as the course. So I just called the Bootcamp method. It was like, do people really want this? Before I build a whole site and landing page and this and that run out, let me just see if I can get a few sales. And if it's exciting enough that people really want it.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Then I'll record it live, repackage it and sell it over and over again now that people want it.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And try to go the least amount of. Well, maybe not the least amount of effort, but the least amount of work building the business. And just create the sale first.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes.

[Lewis Howes]

And then do the service.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes.

[Lewis Howes]

First.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes. And have very generous, like, refund policies.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. 100%, whatever.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

You don't get the results. All right, we'll refund your money.

[Chris Kerner]

I've got a story that perfectly exemplifies. What about that I did right and what about that I did wrong? My first, like real business was an iPhone Repair store. And I had it in my head that I needed to open a retail store. I was a student at the university of Alabama. I met a guy that was doing out of his dorm room, making good money. And I was like, that's my business. I don't know why. I was just like, the iPhone was a year old. These are going to start breaking. And I read an article about some guys at LSU that were making like 20 grand a month from a retail store. So I'm like, all right, I need a retail store. So I had no money. I got a credit card advance, I got some of my pell grant, and I got this retail store. And this was the dumb thing to do. I was playing business, right? It worked out, so that's what you shouldn't do. But I did it and it ended up working out. But another thing I did is I never even learned how to fix iPhones. When I signed a five year lease with a personal guarantee, 2,300amonth. My mortgage was 500amonth. Okay. I had a $90,000 house. This was 2008. Oh, my gosh, 2,300amonth, five year lease, personal guarantee. And people would come in with their iPhone and they say. I was like, oh, okay, yep, yeah, 90 bucks. Okay, cool. Come back in three hours. Okay. They'd leave and I go to YouTube and I would just type in what they tell me, and I would learn how to repair iPhones on their phone. Wow. And this was the thing that I would suggest people do. Now, a couple times I screwed up, and I remember I put a screwdriver through someone's screen. I broke their screen. I was fixing the battery, but I broke the screen. And it was a $700 brand new iPhone 4. And I had to go to the Verizon store and spend like a week's worth of sales revenue on a new iPhone. And she was okay. But, like, had I waited six months to learn and perfect A, I'm going to lose momentum, probably. I'm probably going to lose steam. I never even open. Who knows where I am, never right? Or B, if I do end up opening, I miss out on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sales waiting six months to open. So net of net, the 2,000 I had to spend in broken iPhones made me an extra six figures because I opened that much sooner and I didn't lose the momentum. So that's one example of doing it right and wrong.

[Lewis Howes]

It's like learning on the fly. Instead of waiting till you feel like you're perfectly mastered the skill.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes.

[Lewis Howes]

A lot of people wait until they feel like I need to get more degrees, more education, more training, until I can launch.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes.

[Lewis Howes]

They play the perfection game and they never make any money or they never launch something because they need it to be perfect first before just launching. Whereas you launched, made mistakes, lost money, but learned through the mistakes and then kept earning on on the way.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes.

[Lewis Howes]

And that is the difference between someone who's a perfectionist and someone who's an entrepreneur willing to get dirty and messy right away.

[Chris Kerner]

I'm the opposite of a perfectionist.

[Lewis Howes]

You could use more of that in your life. Probably. Like, okay, let's try to optimize.

[Chris Kerner]

Sure. But look, I look at it as tuition. Yes, of course we'll go to university and spend 8,000 a semester, but we won't, like, be willing to lose a couple hundred bucks on a couch on Facebook Marketplace. But we're. If we make a couple hundred bucks, we're being paid to learn. It's like going to a state school and they're paying you to go there. That doesn't happen. But in business, if we're willing to learn as we do the thing, worst case, we lose a little money, but we learn. It's just tuition or we get paid to learn and we have a little extra stress along the way.

[Lewis Howes]

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[Chris Kerner]

don't have to think about it, I

[Lewis Howes]

stay focused on what actually matters. It fits right into my workflow and it keeps things moving throughout the day. Visit t-mobile.com home Internet to check availability and get your home Internet delivered today. Same day delivery for most Internet eligible customers. See if it's an option during checkout. Fastest according to OOKLA Speed test intelligence data second half 2025 all rights reserved. Why do so many people lack the mindset to learn and make money rather than pay to learn? You know what I mean? So many people feel like they have to spend 200 grand on a degree until they can start making money. Whereas you started saying even though you went to school and paid tuition, but you said, all right, I'm going to not go to business school. I'm just going to start running a business and learn while I get paid. And I might make mistakes and lose money along the way, but that's my price of admission to learning.

[Chris Kerner]

I think people create artificial stakes for themselves because they think if I pay to learn this thing, I'm going to be more likely to do it because they they look back on their life in a negative way. They're like, you didn't do this, Chris. You were supposed to do this. You didn't follow through. So If I pay 2,000 for this thing, I'm actually going to do it. It's going to kick my butt into gear. What I've noticed is there's zero correlation between how much you pay to learn the thing or to learn the skill and you actually following through and doing it. There's no correlation. So just do it. Just go watch YouTube.

[Lewis Howes]

Right? But why are people afraid of launching something? Why are they afraid to start the business? Is it the fear of failing and it not working out? Is it the fear of what other people say about them when it doesn't work out? Is it the fear of success? What if it does work out and I make all this money and now I have all this people and team and taxes and problems that, you know, come with that as well? What is the greatest fear about being able to launch something and make money around it?

[Chris Kerner]

I don't think that fear of failure is real. I don't think that exists. I don't think anyone has an actual fear of failure. Here's my analogy. You're stranded on a desert island, and you know that the mainland is like 30 miles away, but you got to get there. So are you going to be too afraid to fail at building your boat? To not even build your boat? No, you're going to try to build a boat. If you fail, you know, you get a mile out and it fails, you have to swim back and build a better version. Fine, who cares? You have to do it. But if you were, if someone was live streaming you to the whole world or to your 300, you know, Facebook friends, or to the six people that you played high school football with, you would approach that completely differently. You would, like, really want to perfect that raft because you're embarrassed. You don't want to be put on the spot. So what you said is the absolute truth. It's the fear of the perception of failure from others. That's the only thing we're afraid of. It's not one of the things. It's not the fear of failure. It's what will people think about me if I fail? But the thing is, if you do fail, they're probably not going to think

[Lewis Howes]

anything about you, maybe for a moment, and they move on.

[Chris Kerner]

It doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter at all.

[Lewis Howes]

Which business did you think this is going to be a home run. And when I launched this, that you're like, man, these other people are doing this. It's working. Like, this is going to be a home run. It's going to be easy. That was actually kind of like a dud or a failure for you.

[Chris Kerner]

Which one? Did I not think that I am the most delusional optimist ever? I got tested for ADHD in college, and she said, you don't have adhd. You have delusions of grandeur. I was like, wow, I paid 1800 bucks as a poor college student to learn that. Thank you so much. So I'm just an optimist, unashamed optimist, right? So I launch businesses because I believe they'll be successful. And I truly believe that any business could be successful with the right distribution. I can tell you the dumbest idea in the world right now. Objectively dumb, right? And if Elon Musk tweeted about it, he'd sell thousands of units.

[Lewis Howes]

Distribution.

[Chris Kerner]

Distribution. So there with the Internet, that's the asterisk. Four billion people are on the Internet. With that, if you can find the right message, the right offer, the right pricing, the right audience, the right channel, is it Facebook ads, is it Google Ads, whatever. If you can find it, you can sell anything. And I firmly believe that. So with that framework in mind, I love every business idea.

[Lewis Howes]

Even with a horrible product you can sell, you can sell it well online. You think?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah, because you could position as a meme or as like a. I mean, this guy makes a million bucks shipping potatoes to people.

[Lewis Howes]

Really?

[Chris Kerner]

Like, it's like a prank potato or like vulgar things to people or glitter bombs. Like, if you can make it a meme. Like, if you can make someone, like,

[Lewis Howes]

sell farts in a bottle or something,

[Chris Kerner]

it's like, yeah, Crazy Rock made millions of dollars.

[Lewis Howes]

That's true.

[Chris Kerner]

That was like one of the first meme products.

[Lewis Howes]

That's true.

[Chris Kerner]

So I think anything I start will be successful because I know that it can be.

[Lewis Howes]

What thing hasn't been successful under your.

[Chris Kerner]

Most of them, really? Like, I forget. I. I forget all negativity. Like, I just.

[Lewis Howes]

I just like, on to the next, onto the next. How long will you. You create, launch, and try to market something until you say, oh, it's either not working and is it because it's not working, or you haven't found the right distribution yet.

[Chris Kerner]

It always comes down to distribution. So if I pivot it all to a different business, it comes down to opportunity costs for me.

[Lewis Howes]

You want to keep working on this one until you find it. That might be months, it might be years. Who knows? It might cost a lot more money for the distribution.

[Chris Kerner]

There's a lot of people out there saying, you should focus, focus, focus. And there's a lot of truth to that. But no one's talking about opportunity cost. I was trying back in 2016, I was really trying to focus on my business. I had a good business. It was doing millions of dollars a year. I had no reason to be distracted. Then I started learning about bitcoin, right? Bitcoin. And I was just like. And my business started to slip because

[Lewis Howes]

you were putting more time and energy and focus on bitcoin.

[Chris Kerner]

What is this? Why? And I bought a bunch of bitcoin and I still own it today. And net of net. I did much better being distracted by bitcoin.

[Lewis Howes]

But it could have been worse. You could have lost it all.

[Chris Kerner]

But you either win or you learn, right? I would have, you know, learnings compound just like money does. So if I would have lost it all, then those learnings would have compounded for the, for the better in some other weird, random way that might seem uncorrelated on the surface. So I don't launch something that I'm not excited about, but I don't launch everything I'm excited about because I'm excited about everything.

[Lewis Howes]

So you're excited about everything?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

What is the thing that launched in the last three years that was the easiest to make money with that you did?

[Chris Kerner]

It always comes down to like product, market fit, the right pricing, the right offer to the right person and the right time. And that doesn't usually last forever.

[Lewis Howes]

It might be a six month window or something, right?

[Chris Kerner]

Yes. So in a few years ago, four or five years ago, I went to this gas station called Buc EE's and there's only 50 locations. It's a huge gas station there, as big as grocery stores. And they did not sell any of their products online. And that seemed like a missed opportunity to me. So this is one of those business ideas. I'm like these guys, they're a billion dollar company. They don't sell anything online. They have shirts, they have. They're like the redneck Disney.

[Lewis Howes]

It's like a cult following. It's mostly Texas or.

[Chris Kerner]

Where is this? Yeah, they started there, but now they're everywhere. They're in Utah, they're. They're going to Washington D.C. they're all over. And so my business partner and I launched a store to get their attention and it worked.

[Lewis Howes]

And it was. What do you mean, like an online store or what?

[Chris Kerner]

We launched a Shopify store to get

[Lewis Howes]

their attention with their stuff and sold their stuff.

[Chris Kerner]

I went to their store with my four kids and Wife. We bought one of everything. I hired a photographer.

[Lewis Howes]

One of everything.

[Chris Kerner]

One of everything. And I just started cold emailing reporters. I just did what anyone in the world could do. I used my Gmail account. I went to Southern Living, Eater, Texas Monthly, and I just found. Oh, who wrote this? So and [e-mail] I started, Hey, I like Buc EE's. I launched a store for them. I thought you would find this interesting and they need stuff to write about. So they did. And it went mega viral. We did hundreds of thousands of dollars

[Lewis Howes]

our first 30 days selling their products.

[Chris Kerner]

Their products. Just marking it up.

[Lewis Howes]

Did they sue you for this or no?

[Chris Kerner]

No. They just wanted us to make sure it wasn't confusing the customer. They didn't want us to look like them. It's called first sale doctrine. Anyone like I can go sell a Nike T shirt. I just can't pretend to be Nike.

[Lewis Howes]

Sure.

[Chris Kerner]

Right. Yeah, yeah. It's no different. So we did that. We started that six years ago and it does millions of dollars a year today.

[Lewis Howes]

Still.

[Chris Kerner]

Still. Yeah. And we have a ton of competitors too.

[Lewis Howes]

And you're selling their gear and you don't have a partnership with them. You just do it on their own.

[Chris Kerner]

Correct. Wow. Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

That's interesting. And it's still doing millions in sales a year.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. And I think it's important to talk about opportunity, costs and distraction and all that because the backstory behind that was my partner and I had a fulfillment company. And part of the reason for us launching this e commerce brand was to generate attention to get more customers for our fulfillment brand. At the end of the day, you know, that fulfillment company was doing 300,000amonth in revenue. Wasn't very profitable. We ended up shutting it down to focus on this full time. So at the time, we had every justification in the world to say, okay, that, okay, cute. We're gonna viral marketing stunt.

[Lewis Howes]

Cool.

[Chris Kerner]

But like we've got, we're doing 300,000amonth. Let's keep our eye on the prize. You don't realize that business is going to fail a year later.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

Even though we kept staying focused on it. So had I not been distracted, this business today would never, would never exist. It would be someone else's story to tell.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting. In the last year, I feel like I've seen so many different individuals launch side hustles. Businesses online specifically that are bringing them six figures a month or seven figures a year. What are a couple of things that you've seen that anyone with a small audience has been able to be successful with if they really focus their attention on that.

[Chris Kerner]

I'm going to say small audience is like 400 followers.

[Lewis Howes]

Okay?

[Chris Kerner]

So anyone. This could apply to anyone. AI consulting. That's it.

[Lewis Howes]

Everyone needs it.

[Chris Kerner]

Everyone needs AI. It's. So AI is, is not like the mobile wave or the Internet or crypto or NFTs or web. 3. A large percentage of people on all of those things thought that they were fads, right? Nobody rational thinks AI is a fad. Nobody thinks, like, AI is just going to go away and fizzle out. Nobody. It's here to stay. They've done surveys of small business owners, and 85% of them know they need to use AI. And like 12% of them are in any meaningful way. And of those 12%, they're like, getting ChatGPT's help with emails. So there's this massive disconnect between what? It's like cognitive dissonance. Like, we know we should be doing something and we're not. And so all we need are individuals with a ChatGPT account, a cloud account, grok, whatever it is, to just learn some skills, learn how to prompt. 10% of all adults are business owners. Okay, so there's 350 million Americans, 35 million business owners, which means that if you have 400 Facebook friends, 40 of them are business owners. You sit down with your friend, go to Starbucks with them, open the voice memos app on your phone, hit record, and just say, tell me about your business. Well, you know, okay. What sucks about your business? Oh, man. Hiring is can't find customers, and then just keep peeling back the layers. Why, like, why is it hard? Like, just get to the heart of what they're struggling with in their business. And, and the framework for having this meeting is like, I'm trying to learn AI, but I need something to learn with. Like, I need something to hold on to that I can learn AI with. I'm not going to charge you anything. I just want to, like, learn AI skills around your business. You go back to ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever, upload the transcript of that conversation and just simply say, my friend needs AI in their business. They want to make more money or save more money. What suggestions do you have? Here's 13 suggestions. Okay, number six, sounds really interesting. Tell me step by step, how can I do that for them? Because I don't know what any of those words mean. Okay, start here. Download this tool, do this. Then have another meeting at Starbucks with them and say, dude, look at what I learned. You could be Doing this. This guy over here has the same type of business and he's doing this. And they're going to look at to you now as like the AI God. You now know more about AI than anyone in their life and they're going to say take my money. Like how do we do this? And you don't have to go learn how to find customers. You just have to let go of your pride and, and your ego and be willing to talk to a friend about things that they're struggling with. Be willing to serve your friend, be willing to help them. Because that's. We're not talking about like you know, a multi level marketing scheme here. We're talking about helping our loved ones by solving problems with them for AI.

[Lewis Howes]

But how does someone develop a more resilient mindset when they launch something? They get laughed at and they lose money and they fail.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

How do they not let that insecurity or that self doubt stop them from trying again?

[Chris Kerner]

Post and ghost.

[Lewis Howes]

What does that mean?

[Chris Kerner]

Post something to social media. Don't look at the comments like hey DM me. If you want to learn more, go stay in the DMs. What they'll find is if they do look in the comments, there's not going to be much there.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah, right.

[Chris Kerner]

Anyway, but just psychologically sometimes it's just ignorance can be bliss. It's an overly simplistic answer, but we just have to get over it. And we have to get, we, we have to get to our own personal rock bottom with regards to anything. Right. If I'm an alcoholic, I've got to get to my rock bottom before I start going to AA and turning my life around. If I want to start a business and I'm just not able to get it together, I need to hit my rock bottom in that area of my life. And so if I'm not willing to get over that mental block, then I'm just not, I'm not ready to start a business. But maybe something happens, I, heaven forbid I lose my job or something. This bill comes up, an unexpected emergency that's going to be my rock bottom. And then I post about it. And it doesn't have to be on social media, but I just start talking about it. I'm willing to open myself up and put myself out there. Sometimes that's what it takes for us to step out of our shell like that.

[Lewis Howes]

What would you say then is the number one skill that successful entrepreneurs have over those that aren't successful?

[Chris Kerner]

Bias for action. They just have to be impatient with Action, but patient with results. Both of those at the same time.

[Lewis Howes]

How does that look?

[Chris Kerner]

So we're all curious to an extent. We all have questions about the world. The question is, what do we do with that curiosity? So if I'm. I was on a walk with my daughter, we were walking down these railroad tracks, and I see that some of the railroad ties are wood and some are concrete. I'm like, wood, railroad ties? It's 20, 26. Why are we using these? Why not? Why not? They all concrete? So it's like I pull out chatgpt and I just start talking. What are the wood? Why the concrete? What are the cost differences? And at the end of it, it's like, oh, that's really interesting. Okay, cool. Something that simple. We. When we have a question about anything not just business or money related, we got to get an answer to it as soon as possible, even if we're mid conversation. And it's rude. It's like, hold on, I gotta figure this out. Right? The more we train that bias for action muscle and we, we start answering these questions about the world and about ourselves immediately, the more we do it, the more it snowballs and it compounds and then the, the answer to the question turns into action. If I'm at a restaurant and I love making tacos and I'm at a taco restaurant and I see this place has a line out the door and everyone is there for these birria tacos, and it's like, I love. I make really good beer tacos. I wonder how much money this place makes. Well, don't just go on to the conversation. Go outside. Look at the line. Okay, 86 people in line. Look at the menu. $7 for two tacos. 86 times seven. Oh, my gosh. Okay, throughout the rest of this hour, I'm gonna see how many. Wow. The line got even longer. Okay, this is a Tuesday. If they're this busy on a Tuesday, they're going to be way busier on a Friday. Okay. Wow. They're doing 3.6 million a year just in Birria tacos. That's not including drinks. And you're just doing all this mid conversation. It's like, if their margins are this and okay. What? Oh, okay, then go home and like make tacos and give them out to your friends. Like that night.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. Do all, like, take action now.

[Chris Kerner]

Now, like, launch the time frame. Because we talk a lot about focus. We don't talk about momentum. We are human. And if we're going to lose excitement, we're going to lose momentum over a thing. So we need to be impatient with action.

[Lewis Howes]

See, there's something you do that I don't know if I could ever do because I also like to think about the time, the attention I put on certain things. And I feel like I did a lot of different businesses, products, programs, things like that to make a lot of money and revenue streams for many years. And then I felt like my time was stretched thin. I felt a little burnt out, I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I was putting lower energy in lots of places and nothing really was building exponentially. Where does making money, making a profit and using your time, energy, talents with your purpose tie into building a business versus here's an opportunity that I see. You can make tacos, million dollars a year with tacos or selling toothbrushes, but is that the best use of my time and talent and purpose towards launching that business for a profit? What are your thoughts on that?

[Chris Kerner]

Is it kind of like the passion versus profit question?

[Lewis Howes]

Like, I guess it's just merging both of them. You know, just because I can launch a shoe company doesn't mean I should launch a shoe company. Just because I can make money in an iPhone repair shop doesn't mean it's the best use of my time. Yeah, for me personally, yeah. But sure, there's a million dollars to be made there. There's 100 grand to be made here. There's. And there's time managing a people and starting the business and taxes and breakdowns that you have to manage of those things as well. So how do you navigate that?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah, that's a great question. I like to say chase the profit until you can afford to chase the passion. So I'm in love with business. So if it's iPhone screens, you know, Texas snacks, whatever, it doesn't matter to me. Most people won't have the luxury of loving business that much to where they're agnostic about what they they go after. But to answer your question, people should chase the energy. Like they should go to where the

[Lewis Howes]

energy is the excitement, the joy, the rush.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes, because that's what's going to be sustainable for them. So let's say they love watercolors, but the market is telling them that people want these tacos. You don't have to choose one or the other. Number one, your passion doesn't have to be your profession. They can be two separate things. Number two, there's enough time in the day to do both and to even test both as a business concept. Have you ever seen a taco shop where you can paint watercolor at the same time.

[Lewis Howes]

No.

[Chris Kerner]

Might be because it's a bad idea. It might be because it's a great idea that no one's thought to put together yet. Right. So what are you trying to optimize for in that moment of your life? If it's making more money, then you should put the passion on the back burner for now. Because if you can develop first principle skills around making money, then you can direct that at whatever you want in

[Lewis Howes]

the future on your passion later.

[Chris Kerner]

Right.

[Lewis Howes]

On your hobbies or your side projects that you like, really love.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes. But if you have a full time job and you're making good money, then you might have the luxury of being able to chase your passion right now and then finding out later could or should you even monetize that.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. What do you think is the biggest problem that people make once they start making a lot more money?

[Chris Kerner]

It's almost like the same problem of playing business. They play the role of someone who makes more money and lifestyle creep creeps in.

[Lewis Howes]

It's happened to me, spending more and.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah, because they have it. And I don't want to contradict myself because I do think that can be a good thing. But if it keeps you away from your kids or your family more because you want that second or third home, then I don't think that's a good thing. People, they contribute less and less as a percentage of their income to charitable causes, which I don't like. Like let's say you're used to giving a thousand a month to charity and you make, you know, $10,000 a month. You start making $50,000 a month and you give 2,000 to charity. If you give 5,000, it's the same percentage, but you have 45,000 to work with. You're, you're able to afford much, much more. You're able to be, to do much more good with that money. It doesn't have to be a percentage or real dollar value. So I think that's a mistake on how, how much people give. I don't like at the end of the day, we're not going to bring any of it with this anyway. I don't want my kids to be hyper wealthy from stuff they inherit from me when they're 50 or 60. So I don't think at all about my second or third generation, how much money they're, they'll have. I don't care. I want them to work for it too. Right. So I think that's a mistake people make and I think that people are likely to get prideful and to treat people on a lower socioeconomic status than them as lesser than them. And I think it should, I think it should go the opposite direction. I think they should get even more empathetic because they've been there before as well. Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

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[Chris Kerner]

Oh yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And what's your philosophy on how much you give every year?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah, so that's this quote. I'm gonna try to remember it. He who gives his his money gives some he who gives his time gives. All right, something like that. I. I try to give even more. I pay tithing to my church 10% as, like, a baseline, and then I look for other charitable causes on top of that to donate as well. But more importantly, I try to give of my time to younger people trying to start businesses in ways that don't necessarily scale. And, yeah, mission trips. Our kids are going to go on mission trips. I went on a mission trip. I plan to go on more.

[Lewis Howes]

You went for two years, Right? Where'd you go?

[Chris Kerner]

Hungry. Hungry. Yeah. Very good. Yeah. Yep.

[Lewis Howes]

Well, you were 18, 20. How old are you?

[Chris Kerner]

19 to 21.

[Lewis Howes]

Did you learn the language, too? What did that mission trip teach you about life? Business relationships.

[Chris Kerner]

Every year that goes by, I realized that it was everything to me. When I got home, it was just like, you know, first of all, I got home with a ton of confidence. I got rejected tens of thousands of times. I felt like I was able to run through a wall and do anything, which was huge because I was not much at all in high school. I was very average. And I was not like the valedictorian type, the freak athlete type. I was playing video games, delivering pizzas, waiting tables. I was very average. The mission fundamentally changed. It rewired me at my core.

[Lewis Howes]

Really?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

What shifted about your identity after two years of being rejected over and over and over again in a language that you didn't know, how did your identity shift afterwards?

[Chris Kerner]

Just resilience. Like, I don't talk about this much, but I knocked on tens of thousands of doors, and I flew all the way there to teach people about the gospel. Even so, I'm an introvert. I don't like talking to people. I don't. And so I would knock on a door, and even though I flew there to do that, I would silently hope that they would never open the door.

[Lewis Howes]

Of course, who wants to be rejected? Who wants to deal with that fear? Yeah.

[Chris Kerner]

But it's like, I felt guilty too, because I. I also genuinely wanted to teach them. If they did open the door. It's not like I was bummed. It's like, all right, let's do this. But if they didn't, I kind of had to skip my step to the

[Lewis Howes]

next door, next one.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

No rejection.

[Chris Kerner]

Right. But then shortly after my mission, I got a job, a calling, an unpaid calling in my church to teach early morning seminary to high schoolers at 6 in the morning every single day. And I'm not a teacher. I don't like teaching.

[Lewis Howes]

I don't.

[Chris Kerner]

That's not my thing. I don't like waking up early. And it was the calling that I always dreaded. Always dreaded.

[Lewis Howes]

That's why you had it.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. So I got it. And every single night, I would just dread having to plan my lesson. And then every morning, my alarm would go off at 5, 25. And I was just dread. I've got to stand in front of 30 kids who are, like, exhausted. Exhausted. They're, like, looking at their phone. Some of them would have their phone sideways with headphones in, like, playing games. And I would dread it every day. Right.

[Lewis Howes]

How old were you?

[Chris Kerner]

28. Yeah, I did for four years.

[Lewis Howes]

Oh, every day.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Five days a week.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Four years.

[Chris Kerner]

Four years. Holy paid. But what I've realized is those moments in our lives where we're just like, I don't want to do this, but I will. Will. Right. That's what I would summarize in this. I don't want to do this, but I will. I'm dreading this, but I'm doing this anyway. Some people, you know, they'll do that hundreds of times in their life or tens of times, maybe low thousands of times. Like, we go run a 5k, we go to the gym. But if you do that tens of thousands of times, I don't want to do this, but I will. I'm dreading this, but I will. It changes you. You can do anything. And to this day, if I got that calling again, I would still dread it. I enjoy, Like, I loved it. It's like this very weird thing. Like, my mission was the best ever. I loved it. My calling with those youth, I. I loved it. Like, I look back and I don't think of the negative. I think of the positive. And at the end of the lesson, I would be, like, uplifted. So I don't want to say it was all negative, but I would still dread it. Just like you might go to the gym.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. It's like, you don't want to get on there, but afterwards you're like, I feel better.

[Chris Kerner]

Right. And that's a more practical way of approaching this. Running at 5 in the morning, like, those things change you. It's cliche. We've all heard it. It's nothing new. But if you do that thousands, tens of thousands of times, you can do anything. Anything.

[Lewis Howes]

Did I also read that you had a kidney transplant? How did that come about?

[Chris Kerner]

My daughter was born with a rare lung disease, pulmonary hypertension. It's high blood pressure in the lungs, which is very dangerous because it forces your heart to pump really fast and really hard to get the blood through your arteries. Right. There's no cure for it. So we had her on medication from three to nine.

[Lewis Howes]

Three years old or three months from

[Chris Kerner]

three years old to nine. And she was just constantly worsening. She had an oxygen tank, she had blue lips. It was mostly an invisible disease other than the blue lips. People thought she wore purple lipstick. So it was tough because she had this disability, but people couldn't see it, you know. And so she was 9. And the doctor's like you, she, she's going to be gone within a year unless you get her double lung transplant.

[Lewis Howes]

Really?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. And double lung transplants happen. That is intense. Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Invasive.

[Chris Kerner]

It's as invasive of a transplant as you get. So lungs are the only transplantable organ that are exposed to the outside air. Everything else is protected. Liver, kidney, all that bone marrow. But the lungs get all of this air 24, 7. And so they're, they're fragile.

[Lewis Howes]

Oh, so open up your chest.

[Chris Kerner]

Yep, yep.

[Lewis Howes]

So they did, they did the surgery.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. So they said, basically, you don't have a choice. You got to move to Houston. We were in Dallas, four hours away because it's the best pediatric hospital for lung transplants. To keep in mind. There's only, like, I might get this wrong, but I think there's only like eight to 15 lung transplants a month nationwide or worldwide. They're very rare.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

Very rare. So we moved to Houston as a family with no notice right before Christmas, and we got her on the transplant list. We rented a house and we got a call at 10pm one night and they said, hey, we got, we got some lungs. We think they're gonna work. The doctor's on a private jet flying to Nebraska. He's gonna inspect them personally, but it sounds like they're good. So we need you to the hospital. Like, no. So that was the call we were waiting for.

[Lewis Howes]

And there's no guarantee she wakes up afterwards, right?

[Chris Kerner]

No.

[Lewis Howes]

It's like, it doesn't mean it's gonna work.

[Chris Kerner]

No, no.

[Lewis Howes]

But they were, but they were saying, hey, if you don't do this next year.

[Chris Kerner]

We didn't have a choice. She's like, yeah, she's gonna die. Yeah. So we went to hospital and I had to sign these papers and it was like the chance of death is low. Double digit percent.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

But what do you do? So they took her back. We said goodbye and holy cow, what

[Lewis Howes]

was that like before your daughter goes into surgery?

[Chris Kerner]

Oh, man.

[Lewis Howes]

It was like, did you think this might be the last time I met her. Oh, my gosh.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. That is rough. It was rough.

[Lewis Howes]

And you had three other kids at the same time or.

[Chris Kerner]

Three other kids.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

Yep.

[Lewis Howes]

Three boys. Three boys and one girl.

[Chris Kerner]

Yep.

[Lewis Howes]

She the oldest?

[Chris Kerner]

Second oldest.

[Lewis Howes]

Holy cow. That must have been emotional.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And then what happens? She goes into the operating room.

[Chris Kerner]

So then she goes back there. My wife and I are in the waiting room, and it was like a 12 hour procedure. So we're sitting there, and I had my MacBook out, and someone on Facebook, a stranger, shared a post of me in my DMs. And the doctor had told me the lungs were coming from Nebraska. Keep in mind, there's like 10amonth of these nationwide. Okay. And I see this Facebook post that a stranger messages me and says, you know, our boy Sam woke up unresponsive. We think he had a seizure in his sleep and he didn't make it. And so we're donating all of his organs.

[Lewis Howes]

This was not his lungs.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah, it was his. And I learned that as she was under the knife, which is, like, not normal. Like, there's HIPAA laws. Like, you're not supposed to know. I didn't go looking for it. It was. This was sent to me.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

And so I'm like, either this is a weird coincidence, but I think they. They even said in the post, his lungs are going to a girl in Texas or something.

[Lewis Howes]

Oh, my gosh. That's giving me the chills. That's crazy.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. So I just. I remember where I was, and I, Like, I showed my wife, and, like, we start crying and, like. And I just started, like, looking through pictures of Sam, this boy.

[Lewis Howes]

Oh.

[Chris Kerner]

Oh, my gosh. I felt like he was my son I never met, you know, like my. My long lost son. And so I just had, like, this profound gratitude for him. Even though, like, he didn't choose, you know, like his parents did, but, like, surely he would have chosen to give up his lungs. So I'm like, man, that kid. I love that kid. Immediately. Never heard of him. You know, an hour before, I was at home, you know, watching Netflix, and I'm like, oh, how do I pay that kid back? So, long story short, she gets out of surgery, and it was amazing. They were like, his lungs were perfect. Everything went perfectly. She's great. The freak. One freaky side note was, you know, her chest had swollen so much from the incision that was like this long that they couldn't sew it all the way back together. So I could literally see her heart beating.

[Lewis Howes]

It Was open still.

[Chris Kerner]

They put like, like a plastic sheathing over it.

[Lewis Howes]

Oh, my gosh.

[Chris Kerner]

I could see her heart.

[Lewis Howes]

Oh, my gosh. Man.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

That is intense.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

But she woke up and she was fine. Like.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

I mean, I'm sure it was a

[Chris Kerner]

recovery period, a long period.

[Lewis Howes]

Like a year. Probably almost like six months to a year of like full recovery. Right.

[Chris Kerner]

Or.

[Lewis Howes]

But now she's fine.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. So she woke up and she was supposed to be in the hospital six weeks. It was like four. So we came home. They wanted us to stay in Houston for a couple months for like almost daily appointments. Everything went great. And so the chest finally closed and

[Lewis Howes]

stapled it or whatever.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Holy cow.

[Chris Kerner]

And so we had always said, if, if this surgery goes well, we want to see all 50 states as a family in 60 days. So this is 2022. So in the summer of 2022, we bought an RV, we saw all 48, lower 48. And we parked it in Seattle, flew to Alaska, flew to Hawaii. In 60 days, we saw all 50 states, family. But throughout this process, you know, I was thinking about. And I learned about living kidney donation where. Or altruistic kidney donation, where you can donate your kidney to a stranger. And that's not me. I've never been admitted to a hospital. I'm afraid of needles, I'm afraid of blood. And in fact, my brother in law needed a kidney a couple years prior and I was too afraid to get tested for him. Like I would have.

[Lewis Howes]

You're like, I don't want it to know that I could work.

[Chris Kerner]

Right. I was waiting to be the very last to be tested. Thankfully, my other brother in law, who's braver than me, got tested and he donated his kidney to my other brother in law. And so that just kind of bothered me that I wouldn't. That I wasn't like first to raise my hand. But I started doing research and a. Like, I don't want to sacrifice. Like, I don't want to. I gotta be there for my kids. I didn't want to go through a surgery that was going to be a serious risk.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah.

[Chris Kerner]

Even to say thanks, that seemed like too much. But the chance of death is 3 in 10,000, which is about the same as childbirth for a mom.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

And increasingly safer than childbirth. So I'm like, okay. Half of the humans that have ever lived have taken even more risk than this to give birth to. To create a life. But I can't do it to save a life.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

I kept researching. I'm like, all right, what about like long term complications. Almost zero. Any pills I have to take for the rest of my life? None. Dietary changes? No, Just be like generally healthy. Already planning on that. All these things. What about, like, how painful is it? How risky is it? Okay, well, what if my kids need a kidney? What if I give away my kidney and my kids. Well, there's a program called the. It's the National Kidney Foundation. They have a voucher program where you

[Lewis Howes]

give one, you get one, you get

[Chris Kerner]

to the top of the list. Wow. You or five people. So I have five people in my family, so I put them all on the list. So now I have an insurance policy if they need a kidney. So I'm even better off. Right? So. So I keep researching and then it's like, well, what if I need a kidney for myself?

[Lewis Howes]

Then what?

[Chris Kerner]

Kidneys rarely go bad alone. They always go bad together.

[Lewis Howes]

Really?

[Chris Kerner]

So it's like, it's. I'm not. I'm no worse off if I only have one kidney and it goes bad because the other one would have gone bad. So I'm just doing all this learning and I'm a very logical person, and I'm like, there's no reason for me to not donate my kidney other than being like a little sissy. That's not a good reason. So I just. I just did. I donated my kidney to a stranger.

[Lewis Howes]

Do you know who got it?

[Chris Kerner]

I found out. Shut up. Yeah. So I donated on the. I donated my kidney on the anniversary of Sam's death the next year when he would have turned nine, I think. And then my wife, I was telling her all this, like, to this 3 and 10,000 chance of death. Like, yeah, this and this. And like, you can get your hospital. Like, there's. You don't have to pay anything. Like, if I had a job, they would pay for my time off work because it saves insurance companies a lot of money. Right?

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah.

[Chris Kerner]

So my wife's like, maybe I should look into this. So three months later, she donated her kidney.

[Lewis Howes]

Holy cow.

[Chris Kerner]

To a stranger. She never found out who they were on the anniversary of. On his birthday. What would have been his birthday? May 10th. Wow. So we both donated our kidneys to a stranger recently.

[Lewis Howes]

20 days ago. Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris Kerner]

And I've run ultra marathons since before and since. Wow. I almost never think about it. I have the same energy. There's been zero changes. I would do it all over again. And it was the best decision I could have made.

[Lewis Howes]

Oh, man, that's crazy.

[Chris Kerner]

I found out who got my kidney the morning that my wife did hers.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

Because I went to the hospital and they're like, chris, we have a letter from your donor.

[Lewis Howes]

Oh my gosh.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Was it? Who was it?

[Chris Kerner]

Like it was a, it was the young person, old person, an older person in San Francisco.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And they wrote a letter saying thank you.

[Chris Kerner]

Yep.

[Lewis Howes]

Man.

[Chris Kerner]

Here's the stat. If 1 in 10,000 healthy adults donated their kidney to a stranger, no one would die waiting for a kidney. But today, like 5,000 people a year die waiting for a kidney. Man. But it's needless. Like, it's, it's literally needless. That number could go to zero. One in 10,000 people.

[Lewis Howes]

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[Chris Kerner]

That is, I mean that is kind of one thing I would like to do as a Non profit advocate for that.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. That's cool.

[Chris Kerner]

There's a couple other countries that allow the government to pay people to donate their kidney. And I think that should be.

[Lewis Howes]

You make a business, you think it should be legal or illegal?

[Chris Kerner]

I think that should. It should be legal for people to be paid to donate their kidney, assuming safeguards were in place. Like in other countries where they do it, they. They interview them. Like, are you addicted to drugs, gambling? Like, is this like just to pay off a debt? If they pass all these things and it's not like exploiting the poor, It's a beautiful thing. And their kidney deaths went to zero.

[Lewis Howes]

That's cool.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. But there needs to be an incentive. It's not enough to just like, say, you'll feel really good, you know, because most people don't have my story.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But wow, like, how much is. I don't know, how much is someone willing to pay for a kidney?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

How much is that?

[Chris Kerner]

You know, Tens of thousands. Really? Yeah. 30, 50,000, something.

[Lewis Howes]

But it's like what insurance pays for this through the hospitals or how does that even work?

[Chris Kerner]

Well, insurance companies come out of pocket, like 1 to 2 million bucks. For a kidney? Yeah, like for all of that procedure and aftercare. So if they can pay someone 50 grand, they would gladly do it. But everyone wins.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow, this is wild, man. This is wild. What did, what did donating your kidney to a stranger you didn't know teach you about life and money?

[Chris Kerner]

I don't know if it taught me anything about money, but about life, it told me that we're here for others. We're here to serve other people. And serving other people is one of the most selfish things you can do because it serves us so much. Like, if you're miserable, go serve someone else and you'll be happy, period. It doesn't have to look like a kidney, but thinking about others is the best thing we could do for ourselves. When we have two kidneys and we only need one of them, what are we doing? I mean, come on, that's for a reason.

[Lewis Howes]

How has life shifted for you around making money since donating your kidney?

[Chris Kerner]

Well, I don't know if, you know, correlation is causation, but I mean, it's funny you ask that because I've never really correlated it to the time frame, but my financial life has never been better. Really? Yeah. Ever since donating. So call it what you want. I believe in God, but. But I don't know if it's correlated, but I'm not complaining.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. What Is the. What does the Bible teach us about making money that you apply to your daily life?

[Chris Kerner]

Well, the verse is not, you know, money is the root of all evil. It's the love of money is the root of all evil. So in the Bible, they worship golden calves and idols, false idols. Today we worship other idols. Technology, money. So has to be the fuel that helps us to do more good and not the fuel to help us consume more. And that's hard. It's something you have to be cognizant of every day.

[Lewis Howes]

What is the biggest money trap you find yourself getting into?

[Chris Kerner]

Lifestyle creep.

[Lewis Howes]

Buying more things or toys or cars or. Oh, yeah, whatever.

[Chris Kerner]

I find it every day. My wife's a lot better at it than me. I want to fly first class. And she's like, why? Like, it's an extra thousand dollars for that ticket. We could donate that. Like, yeah, but, like, we have it.

[Lewis Howes]

We work hard for it.

[Chris Kerner]

She's better than I am, but I fight that every day.

[Lewis Howes]

But isn't it. I mean, if you work hard for it and you earn it and you do it with integrity and you make a. You make a great product that serves people. Why not spend it on yourself? Why not spend it on something new for yourself that you want? Why not spend it on first class or a nice hotel? Why not spend it on a trip?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

For your family to enjoy memories. Why be poor when you're creating wealth?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. Yeah. I think it just has to come with balance, and I think a lot of it has to do with raising your children. I would love a private chef. We can afford a private chef. We will not have one until my kids are out of the house. Period. End of story. My kids need to do the dishes themselves. They have a chore chart. They need to help us cook food. They need to go mow the lawn. Like, I can hire a lawn guy. We do it ourselves. So I'm more concerned about our approach to money with regards to raising our kids in a normal environment that teaches them healthy habits about money and teaches them that we live in a bubble that is not representative of the real world. So we send them on mission trips, humanitarian trips, and we'll go on them with them, and we try to teach them that stuff. But. But it just has to be something that you're always aware of.

[Lewis Howes]

What is the one skill, if mastered, that makes every other business skill unnecessary.

[Chris Kerner]

Like resilience, which comes from being rejected. Sales bias for action.

[Lewis Howes]

Before you were financially successful, what was the thing you were hiding or struggling through that most people didn't see.

[Chris Kerner]

I would call it income consistency, a lack of it. Yeah. Income volatility. It's like I've had for the majority of my career. Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Even still.

[Chris Kerner]

No, no.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. But some months big and some months nothing.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. I mean, until my mid-30s.

[Lewis Howes]

Really?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. And I'm in my late 30s now.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah.

[Chris Kerner]

But just like feast or famine, I've had more zero dollar income years than I've had positive income. Really?

[Lewis Howes]

Why is that?

[Chris Kerner]

It comes with the territory nature of just being an entrepreneur. It's unpredictable. There's been a dozen times where I've told my wife, babe, this is it, this thing. This is it, this. I know, I've said this every time. She's like, okay, babe, this is the

[Lewis Howes]

thing that's going to make us.

[Chris Kerner]

This is the last thing we'll have to do. Okay, all right, I believe you.

[Lewis Howes]

How many times you said that?

[Chris Kerner]

So many times. And genuinely believing it. But the fat years have more than made up for the lean years or the zero years. Right. So we've lived in our dream house since our late 20s. Right. But like there's been a lot of times that we've had to sell assets to just to pay the mortgage. Yeah. Not recently, but in 20s and early 30s, we had some rental homes we had to sell. Like we were forced to sell. And I'm not making like big risky decisions. It's just things always take longer than you think and they're harder than you think and it costs more money than you think, always. And I'm learning that still. But so from the outside looking in, we've been in our dream house since our 20s. Everything's awesome, but it's been very volatile.

[Lewis Howes]

Really?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

What do you think is going to be the thing that actually makes it for you when you say to your wife, no, this is the thing. What is going to be that thing, do you think? Is it going to be the sexy new AI thing or is it going to be something more like, like basic and consistent that just serves a need over and over that people don't want to do?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. I don't know.

[Lewis Howes]

Or a combination of like 50 businesses all doing it together.

[Chris Kerner]

Maybe a combination. Like I could retire now if I wanted. Like I could just stop doing anything and have enough money. So in that sense, it's different than that conversation has been in the past. Like, this is the thing. It's probably something that I have just no idea about because I've been in so many industries. I just, I never know what I'm going To get my hands into. I don't know. But I love. I genuinely love what I do. Yeah, I can be honest about that.

[Lewis Howes]

That's cool. If you could only teach your kids three things about money, what would it be?

[Chris Kerner]

First would be to be generous with it, especially to. I try to teach them to treat service workers as if they're volunteers. Right. Like, if I had someone that was my servant, like, serving just me all day, unpaid, I would be so grateful for them. But, like, if you get an Uber, like, hey, thank you for picking me up. Yeah, thank you for getting here so fast. Like, they're getting paid, but, like, they've got a hard life. So I would. I do. I teach them that, like, specifically service workers treat them as if they're unpaid volunteers and be more generous with them than you think you should be. The second thing I would teach them is, no one's coming to save you like you. Nothing is guaranteed. I don't care if you have a job, a pension, you know, you work for a great company. Nothing is guaranteed. No one is coming to save you. You have to be self sufficient. You. I look at entrepreneurial skills like food storage. In our church, the LDS church, we're encouraged to have a year's worth of food storage. Okay. And we do. Well, we used to before we had as many kids. We need to stock up. I don't want to be dishonest here, but I look at, like, reselling stuff like that. I think people, everyone should have those skills just in case the crap hits the fan and they can sell some old iPhones or something just to make ends meet. So I'm not like, pushing my kids toward entrepreneurship, but I want them to develop those skills in case they need them. So treat entrepreneurial skills like food storage so you can use it in emergency. And the third one is to convert your liabilities to assets. Right. Which is kind of like a derivative of number two. So if you have a car, have the skill to make income from that car, if it's doordash or Toro or whatever. If you have a house, learn how to rent out a room on Airbnb. Because any liability could be turned into an asset with the right skills. So I'm actively, I guess, passively trying to teach them how to do that in just the way that we live. I went and drove for doordash last week. Just.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah, just to try it out.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. Because I delivered pizzas for pizza in high school, and I loved it and I just wanted to see how much money I can make and it was a lot of fun.

[Lewis Howes]

Did you try for like a few hours or something?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was a lot of fun, actually.

[Lewis Howes]

Really?

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Picking up orders, dropping them off.

[Chris Kerner]

I would, like, send goofy pictures to them, like, dropping it off, like, just like I was like praying over it and it got me extra tips. Like, I learned I was actually able to influence my tips more than you might think.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

More than just going through the motions.

[Lewis Howes]

So I read some, like, article online years ago about how if you're a service person, how you can like 10x your tips just by saying the person's order or their name back to them.

[Chris Kerner]

Interesting.

[Lewis Howes]

Like if you're a waiter and someone gives you the order and you say it back to them and say, that's a great order. And you ask them their name and you say their name like, you know, chris, that's a great order. That's a great choice you made.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Just doing that. Making them feel good about their order.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And saying their name like, just gets you 10x the tips or something crazy. Like they're 10 more the tips. And like, there's all these different strategies of being a, a good service worker to increase tips. And it's not always about being the best at what you do. It's being best with people in how you do it.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And it sounds like the way you just added joy for a moment of like taking a photo, praying over the food, or like a smiley face. You brought joy to the service.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Which then they said, oh, I'm going to give 20% rather than 10.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Or maybe I'll give 40%.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. Well, and you stand out because no one else is doing.

[Lewis Howes]

But it's so simple, so easy.

[Chris Kerner]

Like the, the, the, the ROI, the hourly rate on taking an extra 20 seconds to do that is immeasurable.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. You made a lot. You can make 10 extra bucks just like that.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

By taking one little different photo.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. And I actually brought my kids with me to do doordash.

[Lewis Howes]

That's cool.

[Chris Kerner]

Just to like, teach them.

[Lewis Howes]

That's cool. A couple final questions for you before we get to them. I want people to check out your podcast, the Kerner office. Tkopod.com at the Kerner office on social media. K-O E R N E R on social media as well, where every day you're just sharing new side hustle business ideas that people could launch with little or no money and start making money right away. A lot of great ideas. So if people are looking for side hustle ideas or business ideas, they can go check it out there. This is a question I ask everyone at the end called the three Truths. So, hypothetical scenario. Imagine you get to live as long as you want to live in this earth and create everything you want to create. Do whatever you want to do. But in the last day, you have to take all of your work with you. This content, your podcast, whatever you make in the future, it's gone from this world. But you get to leave behind three truths. Three lessons that you would leave with the world you just shared kind of three money truths. But what would be your three life principles that you would leave behind?

[Chris Kerner]

Impatience with action, patience with results. That's one in anything you do. People are much more likely to be not bold enough. It's very rare that someone is too bold. Right? So be more bold, like with what you believe. Like, just, just don't, don't care about what people think. Like, just stop. People don't think about you. And that's not a, that's not a pessimistic or negative thing. They're thinking about their family, their loved ones, their wife. Like, just do your own thing. And the third one, do things for the story. For sure. Like when you do things, if for no other reason, just to have a good story out of it, you will be wealthy and happy and you'll be interesting and rich. Yes.

[Lewis Howes]

Rich in heart.

[Chris Kerner]

Yes.

[Lewis Howes]

Yes.

[Chris Kerner]

That's what with the Bucky story, it was like, this is going to be

[Lewis Howes]

a great story and you're still telling it today.

[Chris Kerner]

Still telling it. But it's just that one thing has made me wealthy. Wow, that's cool.

[Lewis Howes]

Chris, I want to acknowledge you, man, for being of service to so many people. Not only with your intellect and your skills around entrepreneurship and business, but also your service around giving an organ to a stranger and saving a life, literally. So what you're doing is making a difference and I appreciate it, man. It's really inspiring.

[Chris Kerner]

Thank you.

[Lewis Howes]

Of course. Final question. What's your definition of greatness?

[Chris Kerner]

Greatness is simply being a net positive to the world. Net positive.

[Lewis Howes]

My man. Thanks, Chris. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness+channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great. Introducing Toyota's family full of all electric rides. As cool as you are, the adventurous BZ Woodland, the trend setting Chr and the versatile bz. Zip around town in the BZ with a smooth and sporty driving dynamic. Explore the outdoors in the BZ Woodland with dual motors and available all terrain tires. Be bold on the road with the C HR's sharp handling. Imagine what you can do with an all electric vehicle that gets you. Learn more about the new all electric [e-mail] toyota let's go places you've never

[Chris Kerner]

been one to settle, stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner, energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now. Not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing because you've always had the drive. Now go earn the degree. Capella University what can't you do? Visit capella.edu to learn more.