The School of Greatness

Great episode. Thank you. And great to hear someone mention Florence Scovil Shinn. Her books helped me so much.

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.

Thanks for Turning me OFF so badly that I saved the rest of the hour and 45 minutes and left to write this review. And that will be the only time you’ll be getting from me from here on out, that’s how ridiculous that was. A waste.

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.