Becoming Anti-Fragile - Tom Bilyeu

[Music] okay our next presenter this dude is frickin awesome did a podcast episode with him which is killer people love it and how I first heard about him was I was having a phone call with Peter Diamandis about a year ago and he's like I've got to introduce you to this guy he's running a company that's doing over a billion a year now he's a total badass and he told me about this individual and I you know I was like great it'd be great to meet him at some point and then earlier this year at abundance 360 I had an opportunity to meet him in person because he actually presented at abundance through 60 so he's gonna talk about fragile so the deck the dictionary defines the word fragile as easily broken or damaged not a great quality for an entrepreneur to possess however if you could become anti fragile that word is defined as you actually grow stronger the more you're attacked or fail and that's what tom bill you is going to discuss with us tom is the co-founder and president of quest nutrition which began making healthy protein bars in their kitchen here's one of the protein bars all of you have one of these in your bags and we're going to have more in baskets outside for all of you and in just three years quest nutrition exploded and became the second fastest growing private company in America and today is over a billion dollar a year business Tom went from a broken ploy living from paycheck to paycheck and at one point actually scrounging through his couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in his car to building a billion-dollar business by changing his mindset in building a belief system that made him truly anti fragile you can do the same thing Tom's title is becoming anti fragile please welcome Tom bill you [Music] [Applause] Oh what's up my man thank you thank you you got it so becoming anti fragile that has is really something that's defined my life but before I can get to that I have to tell you I am NOT a born entrepreneur and I know that there are many born entrepreneurs here and I'm sure I look somewhat like an alien species to you I did not have a lemon stand growing up I did not arbitrage baseball cards or candy I was forced to get a paper route but I was so lazy that I didn't collect the money so I actually did the paper route you get paid half of it just for doing it but the other half you have to go door-to-door so I did it for for half that is the profound way to which I was lazy as a kid and not at all thinking like a problem-solving entrepreneur but somehow some way even with that going against me I was able to do something to my mind that allowed me to go from as Joe was saying scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change but gas in my car that's a real story I wish it weren't but that's a real story to co-founding and building a billion-dollar business now the question is what did I do to my mind in order to get to that place and to tell you that story I'm gonna walk you through exactly what my entrepreneurial journey looked like so I met two guys who ended up becoming my business partners and they made a pitch to me hey we're starting this technology company seemed like a really bright kid we've got a role as a copywriter why don't you come on and be the copywriter and then don't think of yourself though as a copywriter this is a startup you can have any role in the company that you want you just have to become the right person for that role now I was just young enough and just dumb enough to believe that my thought that sounded awesome yay so I joined the startup and then began the long and arduous process of getting my ass kicked and what was happening was I didn't have the skillset to keep up with these guys my business partners are incredibly bright their IQs far outshine my own and I'm just talking from a pure ability to process raw data I don't over value IQ but I understand that it has certainly its applications and there - incredibly bright guys so here I was I had this goal in my life and that goal at the time it since changed that's a whole nother ten-minute talk my goal at that time was to get rich I wanted to get rich more than just about anything so I had the ambition to do what I needed to do but I didn't know what that was and so I would find myself in discussions with these guys where I would present my case something that I believed in something that I thought was right for the business and they would just out argue me and they would out argue me all the time now if you're somebody who is foolish enough to pride yourself on being right and this is such an important thing to understand because what you build yourself a steam around matters and the whole punchline of this talk is going to be that how did I go from being broke and having the traditional employees mentality of keeping my head down doing as little work as possible and avoiding punishment at all costs the way that I escaped that was by finally realizing the thing that was holding me back and what was holding me back was I had a fixed mindset if you know Carol Dweck I had a fixed mindset I believed that my talents and intelligence were fixed that was it they were as good as they were ever gonna be there was nothing that I could do about it it was kind of like height now I've done nothing to earn my height and yet I can say hey I'm six feet tall and I tried to stand around people that are shorter than me I try to avoid NBA players I try to avoid NFL stars I try to avoid Tony Robbins if you've ever stood next to Tony Robbins that guy's nuts he's so big one of the most heart-wrenching photos of my life is Tony holding me in a warm embrace making me look like a child so but the intellect to me was the same way there was nothing that I could do about it so it was what it was and and my job was to put myself in situations where I could shine now the problem was now is working with these two guys that I couldn't shine anymore they were way smarter than me and it wasn't exactly hard to see that not only were they able to process data more rapidly than I could process data but they'd been in business for like 15 years before I met them so now I'm in a position where everything I do makes me feel bad about myself and so I hatch a plan I'm gonna get really good at arguing and I'm going to debate because I have two choices I can either remove myself from this situation or I can find a way to feel good because people are going to feel good about themselves and when you think about what suicide really is suicide is the moment when somebody believes they can no longer feel good about themselves no it's false but that's what they believe and because of that belief they check out and why wouldn't you if it were true if you could never feel good about yourself again what would be the point so I was gonna get good at debating and I was going to win some of these arguments and I was gonna find that [ __ ] in their armor and I was going to explode it so that I could even if I didn't feel smart about myself that I could get that reflected back from them that they thought I was smart and so I remember the day that it finally happened we were debating something and I knew their idea was right which really sucked but I had gotten so good at arguing that I convinced them to do my idea and then I thought oh what have I done because if my goal is to get rich I'm now acting in complete opposition to that goal because I know that their idea is right and I've simply used a trick to get them to go my way and so I had a values crisis values and identity Drive behavior and in that moment I wasn't sure who I was did I want to get rich was I willing to do what it took to make money and if I really did want to get rich and again it's changed since then but that was my focus then if I really did want to get rich why on earth did I fight so hard to be right because I never said I want to be right I never said I want to be smart none of that was happening in my mind I said I want to get rich so here I was moving myself away from that and I realized I've got to make a decision if I really am here to achieve my goal that I need to decide what my goal is and I can't have both I can't feel good about myself the way that I defined it about being smart about being right and achieved my goals so I realized I was either going to have to abandoned self-esteem I actually considered that I'm gonna have to totally abandon self-esteem put my head down and just grind it out for a few years with these guys until we can have an exit and I'll be rich and then I can worry about loving myself again or and this was what changed my life I could change what I built my self-esteem around now unfortunately I did not have access to Carol Dweck's book but I realized that instead of fighting to be right I could put all of my time and attention to identifying the right answer and once you identify the right answer you can earn tremendous credibility with your team for saying hey I was wrong that's right now I'm gonna put all my energy behind that and so that's what I began to do and as it began to do that I found that the only thing that was standing between me and where I wanted to get was a skills gap now that skills gap it's what I call mind the gap and for you Brits you know exactly what I'm talking about mind the gap that skills gap is everything now the way that you close that skill gap is painful because it starts with the following mantra I am not yet good enough it's one of the most controversial things I ever say whenever I tweet that out people freak out but what I'm saying is if you're trying to achieve this objective and you do not have the skills to actually accomplish that you simply are not good enough yet that's just the truth of the situation it's the math as Elon Musk says boil it down to its physics that's the physics of the situation but if you have a growth mindset you know that you can't acquire those skills and once you set about living your life by the following phrase everything will change do and believe do and believe only that which moves you towards your goals and that brings us to becoming anti fragile as joe said when people hear anti fragile they think resilient they think tough but both of those things and every other synonym around there is defined by that things ultimate breaking point it is resilient simply because it's breaking point is distant it is strong simply because it can move a lot of weight before it breaks but they both have breaking points if you want to be truly anti fragile the game is the more you realize you're wrong the more somebody attacks you and tells you you're stupid the more mistakes you make you see in that one thing and one thing only the ability to get better and when you see in your failures an absolutely fundamental bedrock foundation piece of your belief system which is that oh dear God thank you for pointing out how wrong I've been thank you for showing me that this mistake was just that that it's a mistake thank you for making it clear I am NOT actually moving towards my goals right now I'm not making progress because when you can do that the more people assail you the more mistakes you make the more times you fall on your face the stronger you get because you respond to that with the acquisition of skills it's the acquisition of skills that matter another talk that I would love to give at some point is the fact that we are all in the matrix but the matrix is just a metaphor for your mind and if you have the mind of an entrepreneur and you really can see that acquiring skills will lead you where ever you want it to you'll truly become capable of the impossible thank you [Music]

Channel: Joe Polish

Views: 4,604

Rating: 4.8297873 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Joe Polish, Genius Network, marketing, impact theory, inside quest, motivation, joe polish genius network, genius network annual event, Genius Network Events, Piranha marketing, 25k Group, Business, Entrepereneurship, Becoming an entrepreneur, Quest Nutrition, quest bars, Becoming Successful, Motivation

Id: 3B_Oz_PHShY

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 26 2017