The School of Greatness

Absolutely love your podcast. Mindset is everything and I’m reminded of it when listen to you. You ask great questions and I cannot get enough. Thank you for bringing amazing content

I have a complicated relationship with The School of Greatness… I really enjoy many of the guests and often appreciate the questions Lewis Howes asks, but I increasingly find him difficult to listen to because he redirects nearly every subject through the lens of his own experience. Relating personally can make a conversation more accessible yes, but here it feels excessive. His experience doesn’t just add to the discussion, it repeatedly becomes the standard which he evaluates what the expert is saying. That becomes especially frustrating when his guest has clearly established credentials and has carefully explained something, yet he continues returning to the same assumptions as though their answer didn’t meaningfully challenge those perspectives. This was especially noticeable in the episode with Dr. Sasha Hamdani about ADHD. She repeatedly distinguished ADHD (a highly heritable neurodevelopmental condition) from attention difficulties that may be caused or intensified by trauma, stress, poor sleep, other mental health conditions, or environmental overstimulation. But he continued suggesting that ADHD might be something people develop from modern technology or overcome simply by learning the right tools, using his own experience as evidence. Those are reasonable questions to ask once because many listeners probably have them. But after the expert has explained the distinction, continuing to say the same premise stops sounding like curiosity and starts sounding like resistance to the answer. And she’s so patient. His experience may show that tools helped him manage certain symptoms; it does not disprove her explanation that someone whose symptoms disappear may have been experiencing something that resembled ADHD rather than ADHD itself. The same underlying bias seemed especially apparent whenever medication came up. His tone and comments felt noticeably more judgmental, despite her explaining that medication can be genuinely life-changing. ADHD medication is not a shortcut or a substitute for developing skills. For many people, it is what makes them sufficiently able to access and consistently use those skills. The medications affect dopamine and norepinephrine signaling in brain systems involved in attention, motivation, impulse control, and executive function. I appreciate that he asks challenging questions and raises the doubts an ordinary listener might have. But there is a difference between thoughtfully challenging an expert and repeatedly filtering the expert’s answers througb his own anecdotal experience. I wish he would leave more room for his guests’ expertise to shape the conversation instead of continually pulling it back toward himself. His personal lens is valuable, but it is also narrow.. and he often seems unable to recognize where its limits are.

I LOVE Lewis’ podcast and his Daily Motivation podcast. I never miss a single episode. If you’re looking for an episode to help you learn to heal core wounds and grow on every level, these are a must-listen.

The steps provided were very helpful. The insight of your own experiences was relatable and helped me tremendously in my own desire to let go of the expectations for the outcome.

A harmless conversation, and positive. Also simplistic and very Oprah Winfrey Show. The tendency of the host and the guest to audibly prove how much they understand each other was tiresome. People trying to help each other is appreciated, but this podcast exists in 1000 different versions, and there’s nothing special here. Yes, not everyone likes you in life. Yes, people will try to tear you down. Yes, we all try to please other people sometimes. It’s tempting to keep listening when it seems someone understand you so deeply, but most everyone feels these things. Talk to your friends. They’ll tell you that your needs matter, and it will mean more to you. Guests who are supposed to be authorities shouldn’t being going up at the end of their sentences when making a point, as if they need someone to confirm what they’re saying because they’re not sure they believe it themselves. To me, personally, this is a tell tale sign of inauthenticity.

This used to be my ultimate favorite podcast. I’ve had interviews on here change my life. But slowly, Lewis started saying negative things about women in relationships. Saying things like “I feel like women these days…” and puts some super generic, untrue assumption about what women want in relationships, or how they are in relationships, and we do not have room or time for that in MAGA country. Extremely disappointed that Lewis seems to have become misogynistic and blind to his assumptions, even though he admits that what you get in relationships is often a reflection of yourself. Why don’t you talk about what MEN want in relationships these days and make assumptions about them? Do better.