Best Tom Bilyeu MOTIVATION (3 HOURS of Pure INSPIRATION)

want to be happy build a life not just a business hey it's evan carmichael and this channel was created to help you overcome the number one challenge that is holding you back a lack of belief in yourself you watch these videos because you know there's something more inside you too you've got michael jordan level genius at something so today let's live your best belief life and get some incredible motivation from the one and only tom bilyeu as don murray once said the audience does not turn the page because of a hunger to applaud [Music] what we all have to understand is at the end of the day the only thing that matters is how good is your product whether you're trying to build a company or you're trying to be a kick-ass employee or you're trying to be the best parent of all time at the end of the day the only thing that matters is getting good the only thing that matters is actually delivering an extraordinary performance until you get to that point where you can actually knock it out of the park until you get to the point where you can captivate people with what you're able to do you haven't gotten anywhere if you want to be great if you want to leave a legacy if you want to be remembered you've got to focus on the acquisition of skills you have to focus on actually getting good that's the only thing that's really going to capture people's imagination and as vince lombardi said the man on top of the mountain didn't fall there it's so tempting to look at people that have achieved the extraordinary and dismiss them as being more talented than you better than you but what you need to see is the simple truth they've worked harder than you they've earned something that you haven't yet earned but here's the great news that's empowering once you understand that they've just busted ass once you understand that they've just put in an inhuman amount of work and that the only thing that distinguishes the people that are on top of the mountain the people that have really done something that's going to last is that they put in the effort they work on themselves they understand that through discipline and effort over time that we can get better that is the human condition that is the thing that i find most beautiful about being a person is it doesn't matter if you're bad today it doesn't matter where you start it only matters where you're willing to go and the price that you're willing to pay to get there and once you buckle down and you assure yourself and back it up with action that you're willing to pay any price to achieve the things that you want to achieve then you'll really be living a limitless life you'll be able to do the things that are important and as elon musk said if something is important enough you should try even if the probable outcome is failure and that's where most people stop and this is the one that drives me crazy and this is the thing about really trying to do something with your life yes you might fail yes you might embarrass yourself you might end up doing a face plan you might end up wishing that you hadn't even started but if it's important enough even in that moment you've got to get back up and ask yourself honestly where did i fail what was the skill that i didn't have that was required of this task and once you stop beating yourself up once you stop turning inward with a judgment of i'm not good enough and you start turning inward with the judgment of i don't have good enough skills yet then you can do something because you know it's only a matter of time effort and focus between who you are today and who you need to become to actually do that thing so don't worry about whether or not you're going to fail because the only promise that i can make you is that you will fail and as long as the only promise that you're willing to make yourself is that you won't stop ultimately you will get to the top of the mountain this is another part of the the rebuilding process of somebody that wants to completely transform who they are um you have to change your identity so who am i i'm i'm the smart guy and that's how i thought of myself like i thought of myself as being smart and then the life slapped me around and i realized oh wow i'm really actually not that smart i just grew up in a small town and so in my small town i was smart enough i was still never the smartest but then i moved to la and all of a sudden people smarter than me were just like growing on trees so i was like wow i really don't feel smart anymore so that was like a hard adjustment and so then putting myself into these smaller and smaller rooms was the solution but i realized that i had been sort of taken as a default value intelligence maybe it was the family i grew up in or the movies i watched i don't know but i just had this default that being smart was the thing everyone should chase and then i realized oh i can actually change that not everybody values themselves for that and so i could swap that out with something else and i want people to understand that those things that are just deeply within you that seem as if they are innate human qualities challenge them all some things you won't be able to change but some things are far more malleable than you thought and a lot of what you value comes down to what you repeat and so just repeating myself i'm the learner i'm the learner i'm the learner it began to be my identity and then rewarding myself emotionally when i did that repeating it rewarding repeating rewarding then it's like through that repetition cycle it actually starts to be meaningful that you're the learner and by the way i was telling everybody i'm the learner i see myself as a learner i'm the nurse i'm the learner and because i was telling people then i really felt the sense of congruence with wanting to act like the learner and so when you say you're going to do something and you do it you earn self-credibility so now i've got this loop going i said i was a learner here i am reading this book here i am being willing to admit when i'm wrong seeking out knowledge looking for disconfirming evidence like i get to feel good about myself for that i like the juxtaposition of the high intensity fight or flight sympathetic response of being in the gym and then the parasympathetic response of meditating and being able to rapidly shift your state like on a physiological level is really important so i go from that i come out of the gym i'm huffing and puffing i sit down and i see how rapidly i can calm my heart rate how rapidly i can calm my breath and i listen to the sounds of nature so if it's you know raining outside i listen to rain if it's night i'll listen to the sounds of you know like a meadow at night which i actually find really relaxing and i get lost in that now the reason that i do that is that shifts you into what's called an alpha wave i love this when you get into an alpha wave state it's commonly referred to as being calm and creative so it's not sleepy okay that's like getting more into theta so you feel completely alert but you feel calm you feel creative and so parts of your brain are talking that don't normally talk so you get these like really far-flung sort of creative answers to a problem since the whole point of this is to get into an alpha wave state as soon as i feel completely calm and creative sometimes it takes five minutes sometimes it takes 30 minutes but once i feel calm and creative i go into thinking where i let my mind begin to wander onto the biggest problems that i face in my business and in that i'll just have these ideas and i take notes and i go back to it so i'm still breathing i'm still keeping my eyes closed except when i'm taking notes and i stay in that space and i can sometimes elongate that for another 30 minutes so my typical meditation's 15 to 20 and then i'll think of tape for 10 to 40 minutes depending on like if i'm really on a vein of something interesting and knowing that i'm going to be able to do that once i get into the alpha state i'm very i actually get into the alpha state much faster because i'm not thinking oh is this an idea i should take a note on i'm just like when am i really there yes when i feel it click in i'm like okay cool and if i have an idea boom then i go for it as emiliano zapata said i would rather die on my feet than live on my knees it's one of those things i think echoes through everybody's heart but it is easy to say and it is very hard to do and that brings me to the most central quote to my life never give in never never never and nothing great or small large or petty never give in except the convictions of honor and good sense never yield to force never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy winston churchill that to me is the mantra that you have to say over and over and over if you want to live on your feet you have to understand there are going to be times where the might of the enemy is so clearly superior to the force that you have mustered in your own soul that what they bring to bear they are so much farther ahead they have force that makes you want to crumble and despair at their feet and at that moment you have to know who you are at that moment you have to know that under no circumstances would you ever feel to that that you will rise up that you will stand before anybody not afraid to be struck down that you could handle connecting to something other than the money i was finally able to really see and understand what it was that motivated me and i confessed to them that money was not my highest priority in business my highest priority is camaraderie i wanted to connect i wanted to bring something of value to the customer i wanted to think about the customer i wanted to be myself and i wanted to market in a way that was inclusive and created a community and in that community we could do something more than just sell products and so we decided to sell that company because they felt the same and they wanted to do something based on passion they wanted to have the energy and excitement to see things through and for three very different reasons we decided to form quest nutrition now as i mentioned i grew up in a morbidly obese family so for me i was never going to chase money again and i told them that i was only going to focus on value creation and it had to be something that i had a deep and personal connection to so for me i started thinking every day about saving my mom and my sister my mom and my sister are both morbidly obese and have been essentially my entire life and i knew that i was going to lose them too soon if i couldn't solve the problem of how they ended up there i wanted to give them food that they could choose based on taste and it happened to be good for them the only thing that would get me out of bed 15 years before i'm capable of building a billion-dollar company the only thing that got me out of bed was shame so you have to understand that people had not misidentified me this is not a story of someone who was born extraordinary people just couldn't see it that i was secretly this amazing person who was just waiting for their opportunity to shine this was somebody who was lazy as had no idea what they were going to do with their life i had no idea how i was going to pull it off i was absolutely terrified every time i looked in the mirror i saw me staring back and i knew how lazy i was i knew how afraid i was i knew how insecure i was i knew that at my core i wanted people to like me and i was terrified that they had every reason in the world not to like me but instead of becoming someone who was worthy of self-respect who was worthy of their respect all i was trying to do was campaign i was trying to posture i was trying to create the illusion that i was something because that seemed like i could do it fast instead of just buckling down and doing the hard-ass work of becoming somebody new because i had one failed misunderstanding i believed that my talent and intelligence were fixed traits i was born a certain way and life was about making the most of what i'd been born with what i did not yet understand is the reason humans are the ultimate apex predator the reason that we have taken over the globe in a way that no other species has is because we are the ultimate adaptation machine darwin is often misquoted as saying it's the strongest of the species that survive he did not say that what he said was it's neither the strongest of the species that survived nor the most intelligent but rather the most adaptive to change getting good at being strategic and this is why i'm always reading business books i'm always reading about the mind and i'm always trying to learn about what industry i'm going into so right now right now boys and girls i am enmeshed in the world of comics and i'm trying to ask and answer some very fundamental questions about why the industry is so broken so first of all you have to understand it well enough to see that it is broken then second you've got to understand it well enough that you can actually figure out what are the real answers to this so diving in reading what you can finding out who are the influencers in that space who are the real thought leaders who's got insight into this that's going to be incredibly usable once you have that then you begin compiling your own world view of that thing but you've got to practice that you've got to get and i really stop mid-stream there there's a whole universe that goes around how you get good at being strategic and breaking things down i believe the greatest gift that any great thinker can offer the world is to take the time to write down all of their insights they say a fool never learns a smart man learns from his mistakes and a wise man learns from the mistakes of others i don't know about you guys but for me i have spent a lot of time being a fool i've spent a reasonable amount of time being smart but oh man it is precious few times when i've truly been able to be wise and learn from someone else but virtually every time i was able to get some wisdom it was at the hands of an author when people ask me who my mentors were i always tell them it's the authors that i've read books contain the secrets to the universe iron man the movie franchise is off the charts and what is it at the same time that you have people occupying wall street you have them celebrating one of the richest people on the planet why because he dresses up like a superhero and he tries to save the world people don't mind money people don't mind that you want to create a beautiful lifestyle for you and your family they don't mind people getting rich but they care a lot about how you do it they care a lot about what you do with it once you have it nobody likes scrooge mcduck don't ever leak a photo of you swimming in your money i promise it will not go well but if you have a vision for how your company can make the world a better place and you use social media to allow people to touch and be evangelized by your brand if you're thinking how can i make a product or a service that actually makes the lives better of the people that work at the company and the people who buy the product if that's the question that you're asking man they will rally around you and we live in this amazing time and you've got to take advantage of that and it really freaks me out when people think that we're like either the social movement is cresting or it's behind us it's only gaining steam the tv is going away the mobile phone is becoming the television like these changes are a one way ticket to difference now i don't know exactly what it's going to look like i just know it's not going to stop and it sure isn't going to go in reverse only in the process of gaining mastery will you find passion so to me passion comes out of it's kind of like love i don't believe that love it needs a different word unrequited love is a very different neurological state than reciprocal love so if you have unrequited love to me that's something you really like i love singing but i'm good at it so i have unrequited love i love singing but singing does not love me back now i could go down the process of gaining mastery and then i may find that i have a real passion for it because part of it's going to become oh i'm gaining this skill and this skill of singing allows me to have an emotional impact not only on myself but on other people i can make them feel good i can change their mood i can tell a story whatever it is that you want to do with the music but when you're able to do that and you're truly good at it and it has the outcome that you desire then it can become a passion but to get a passion you've got to fight through just ridiculous amounts of boredom fatigue everything to truly become good enough at it that it's a skill that has utility i don't think people have researched cognitive behavioral therapy nearly enough pattern interrupting is like everything get better at pattern interrupting than lebron is at shooting like you just have to be a ninja like you've got to be so hardcore you've got to know about how to do that with yourself so if i have a negative thought that's recurring i just tell myself nope you can't think this anymore so and every time it will come up because i can't stop myself from it popping up into my conscious mind but you absolutely can control how the next thought goes the next thought can be oh i'm here's what i'll do with a negative thought that's so rad i'm so glad this negative thought appeared in my mind because that reminds me to be grateful for the fact that i'm friends with jay shetty or that reminds me to be grateful the fact i have a marriage that is so insanely cool that like i legitimately some days have to stop myself from just curling up in a ball with her and just chilling all day like that is i'm super stoked even now jay it's so funny i had to stop and think wait i'm going through this list of things that i'm grateful for what started this and i'm like oh yeah the negative thought like that actually just happened to me right now so you can imagine in real life when like you train yourself ah every time the negative thought kicks up don't don't sit in the emotion of the negativity that it will bring instead use it as a habit loop trigger to think about something you're grateful for and at first it feels so awkward and it's like the negative thought just keeps coming back but if you're diligent and suddenly negative thoughts become a habit trigger to gratitude to positivity to repeating your rules about i don't allow myself to think things that tear me down so i'm not gonna think about that even just saying that crowds out that thought and telling other people that hey this is what you're doing it is unbelievable but this is why i'm saying i'm literally just a patchwork of all these like tools and techniques that allow me to protect myself from negative self-talk from anxiety from depression i don't think i've ever officially been in depression but i've been super close enough to know the feeling of staring into the void which i don't think is accurate it feels like the void is collapsing in around you and just everything is meaningless and it is all utterly hopeless and i've had just enough of a glimpse of how hopeless that is to to get where people are in those moments but anxiety that i've been in the thick of so that one i know and i've used cbt uh cognitive behavioral therapy to do interrupts on that um i have a very well developed negative voice so i have had to um use tools and techniques to stop that i never would have become a successful entrepreneur if i couldn't learn to self-soothe and at one point that was what i would have said was my secret power that my secret power in business was i can self-soothe faster than anybody else all right focus on value only value is sustainable you want to make sure that you're delivering value at every touch point your customer service should deliver value your marketing message should deliver value your advertising in and of itself should deliver value your ads should be served to the people who even though they can skip it after four seconds they don't that's when you're actually delivering value people used to ask me like oh how do you get rid of the negative voice i'm like i don't know that you want to like the negative voice is a powerful reminder to practice gratitude it's it's also a good reminder that maybe something is wrong maybe you are doing something wrong and you should adjust and you should rethink i was just about to say that sometimes your negative voice is what protects you sometimes very not all the time but there can be times when it's protected in fact i'll say it like this it it probably does protect you all of the time but it's so repetitive that you touched this issue and now we're into the 9 000 replay of this that's where it becomes stupid and so the one thing yep cool got it i do need to work on that you're absolutely right um and then just letting it go right and not clinging on to it not beating yourself up over it and all that stuff but yeah it has a use which is why it's so powerfully with us i love inspiration and motivation but it is the neurological equivalent of candy it's rad it has its place but everyone because those just happen to be fleeting neurological states yeah you you just have to find something that's way more grounded you need a mission you need a grand why you need to know what it is and and this is not a discovery it's a thing you decide i decided now because i tell it as a story people think oh it was unavoidable he meets this kid rashaan and that coupled with all the people that he worked with the quest it's sort of inevitable that he decides that he's going to build impact theory and try to change culture to give everyone an empowering mindset yeah well literally a year before i decided to found impact theory my mission in life was to end metabolic disease so it's like you decide and then you point yourself at something nothing is ever going to feel right like this is what i was put on earth to do it won't feel that way until about a year or two years after you've been saying that's what you're going to do that that's what you're committed to and actually acting in accordance with it and then you'll be like yeah this actually is my mission be transparent it's a new world order man when i was coming up you didn't be transparent you put a marketing message out you spun that like you tried to be as close to the truth as you could but you didn't worry about transparency but these days consumers expect transparency they want to know who you are they want to know what you're doing they want to know what it means to support you because it's not enough that your product is good they want to know that your company stands for something but it's also incredibly meaningful to your employees you want to keep top quality talent around for a long time you want to make sure that they know what's going on in the company for the person who's stuck for the guy or gal who's in the cubicle who's hates their job is in a dysfunctional relationship is in debt whatever the case may be desperately wants a way out a way forward a lifeline where does that process begin for you like what is the advice that you give that person so it begins with believing or acknowledging that humans are the ultimate adaptation machine so the the thing that has made us the apex predator is not that we're stronger um it's not even that we're smarter in fact the the quote often attributed to darwin is that oh it's the survival of the fittest he actually didn't say that what he did say was it's not the strongest of the species that survived nor the most intelligent but rather the most adaptive to change now the reason that humans are the apex of all apexes is because we are the most adaptive species to change so if you know that then it becomes infinitely less important who you are today and what matters is who do you want to become and what price and the price being the time and energy that you're going to put into acquiring the skills to become that person so imagine the person that you want to be how would they act and then start acting like that if the person that you want to be would leave their job and you know regardless of whether they had a safety net burn the ships and go after something new then that's what you should do if the person that you want to be would start working nights and weekends because they very much value having a stable income that they can provide for their family or themselves whatever but are going to be disciplined and spend nights and weekends to get the skill set to go be more valuable somewhere else or to start their own company whatever then do that how do you process issues how do you do you have a system on what you go through something happens something comes up in your brain is there a step process you go through yes what is it starts with the goal so what is my goal well first it starts with clearing the emotion because probably whatever i was told just had some emotion i recentered myself the thing that i probably repeat to myself the most is you can do anything you set your mind to on a long enough timeline so i know i can learn anything so if the thing that hits me is overwhelming because i'm scared i don't know how to do it you can do anything you set your mind to so at the end of this thinking through is going to be the question are you willing to set your mind to it or not and then i identify okay what's my goal does this move me towards my goal yes or no i think through the process of has somebody done it is there already a well-laid path from where i'm at to actually completing this which is how i decided that we were going to take on disney because looking at the only studio ever in the history of time to be disciplined enough to only tell one kind of story from a thousand different angles so much so that they gave birth to americana is disney no other studio everyone else is all over the map if i say i'm gonna go see a sony movie or a paramount movie you don't know anything about it but if i say i'm going to go see a disney movie you already know something so their name brand means something so i could see oh there's a path from where i'm at to the impact that i want to have so i throw that out just as a reminder of the path that i'm walking more than i have some particular obsession with disney fascinating and by the way in your in your mind do you see it already that vision becoming a reality no question no question no question about it for sure and look i have days of where i'm like how am i actually going to do this but then you come back to you can learn anything you set your mind to so just keep marching forward your mind begins to lay down patterns over time neurons that fire together wire together so if you let's say you want to do public speaking and you get nervous every time you're about to public speak then you begin to develop this pavlovian response of anxiety as you go to speak but you could interrupt that pattern you could find ways whether it's taking a much more confident posture which there's all kinds of amazing research on how just your posture changing your posture creates a different internal reality going back to your creating the state that you're in if you're sitting like this and you're allowing your face to take on this really droopy sad posture it's very different what you feel is very different than if you take an open confident posture if you hold your face in a very optimistic upbeat i dare you try to be really pissed off and laugh out loud it just doesn't work understanding that all of that stuff is intentionality at play it's you choosing what you think it's you choosing what you believe it's you choosing what you feel and all of that stuff has a material impact on the world around you take meditation i eschewed meditation for years i thought it was the dumbest thing in the world i tried it didn't make any sense to me until someone explained what i was really doing was gaining control over my autonomic nervous system because right now so much of your life happens in the subconscious the vast majority of the data that your brain processes is done subconscious in fact the conscious mind is the last person to know if you guys have seen david eagleman and what he talks about how there's all this neurological activity going on things that are known things that are discarded things that are moved towards and the last person to know about it is your conscious mind despite the fact that he's going to take credit for all of it your conscious mind is actually the last to know so being able to take control of the autonomic nervous system is so powerful it's going to allow you to center yourself before giving a speech it's going to allow you to calm yourself before taking a test it's going to allow you to perform at a higher level take the navy seals the navy seals teach breathing exercises the navy seals teach meditative practices because when you get into a combat situation and things are flying and moving really fast and it is literally a life or death situation you've got to learn to calm your autonomic nervous system and if you can't do that if you can't lower your rate of breathing if you can't calm your heart rate if you can't push the blood back into your prefrontal cortex so that you can make the right decisions and quickly you're screwed so learning that this is all intention learning that your brain is housed in a shell and it never sees the light of day it never actually encounters sound it encounters electrical and chemical signals and from that it paints the best version of reality that it can but it isn't the total reality and it isn't objective once you accept that once you get that there's even a crack in that door of subjectivity and that you can control that subjectivity then all of a sudden your beliefs become things to control and manipulate to move and construct around something that serves you list the beliefs that you have about yourself and put them in two different sides on one side i want you to list the things that empower you and move you forward on the other side i want you to list the things that demotivate or demean you and move you away from your goals and then i want you to look at the balance my guess is most of you have more beliefs about yourself that are detrimental that make you less of who you are than you have on the positive side of things that make you bigger that make you more confident that give you the courage and the audacity to move forward once you realize both of those are fake both of those are merely a representation that your mind has chosen to give you and they're not objectively true then you can realize hey i can change these i can choose to believe things that empower me i can choose to ignore things that move me backwards or change them but it's all a construct get control of your mind it's so powerful in fact the most powerful form of mind control is control over one's own mind you were first of all never going to be right all the time yet you have to move forward as if you are right you have to come to a conclusion about what is the most sure path to your goal and be marching down that path this is advanced class but you also have to be able to go am i right so at the same time you're racing forward as fast as you can you've got to occasionally check yourself and say is this actually working is there data that i can look at what empirical evidence do i have that i'm actually going in the right direction now you want to know where i spend the vast majority of my time it's in that if i'm not actively executing and even sometimes when i am actively executing i am i'm doing these little checks what's the data what data points can i look at so not like it feels right not i want to do it is there data that i can look at that tells me i'm either going in the right direction or i'm not so i have that feeling all the time i'm trying actively to delude myself since the people that are most delusional are the happiest i'm trying to delude myself to make sure that i'm going and going with enthusiasm i'm trying to delude myself that despite the fact that i know next to nothing of what i'm going to ultimately need to know in order to succeed that i keep going that is fundamental and critical and then whilst i'm deluding myself i'm checking to make sure that that delusion never gets out of hand that i'm still grounded in reality that i'm still checking myself against data and all of those things are going to be what allow you to keep this from spilling over into something that's counterproductive because there is a level of delusion that's useful and then there's a level of delusion that is it's going to break you down it's going to take you in the wrong direction so you've really got to check yourself against that now getting good at that is not easy but leaning on data data data data what is the external world telling you and not being afraid to see that the external world is telling you that you're going in the wrong direction and then being able to pivot i own a nutrition company but i am not a thought leader i'm an influencer i have a thought leader that i trust that i listen to happens to be my business partner but i'm the one that then translates that for the masses so when you're trying to build a community the person you're looking for at the top you want to make sure the thought leaders believe in your product so you're going to send it to them you're going to explain it to them you're going to make sure that your product is real because they will smell be us bs a mile away now if they're into it and then you go after the influencers who will then ask the thought leaders what they think thought leaders will give it the green light the influencers then will begin telling the masses influencers in my world are people with six-pack abs they're the guy at the gym they're the girl at the beach in the bikini people that other people walk up to and say whoa what did you do to get in such great shape and we wanted to make sure their answer was i ate a quest bar and that was how we grew the business and we wrote individualized letters to a bunch of influencers and a bunch of thought leaders saying hey we know who you are which by the way we were very sincere it was all real we know who you are we think this product brings value to you and the people that follow you and we just want you to talk about it if you hate it tell people you hate it and if you love it tell them you love it all right you want to find your thousand screaming fans the thousand screaming fans are those influencers that are gonna get attention for you identifying them most people think of these people as getting to your thousand screaming fans for you but what they should be thinking about is this now i'm sure most of you knew the people in the previous slide i'm sure most of you don't know any of the people in this slide but this woman here anybody know who jenna marbles is show of hands i hear a couple yeses there we go all right jenna marbles has a daily reach of 20 million people that's bigger than the biggest show on tv that's crazy this is the world of social it seems hidden to most people over 35 but it is in plain sight these are the people that you're going to be going after jenna marbles we sent her dogs sweatshirts and a whole stack of our product now why did we send her dog sweatshirts because their dogs are little chihuahuas they're skinny as hell and they always look cold so we had some custom-made sweatshirts sent to her she loved them so much she started promoting the bars and showing people what we had sent her and thanking us now no money exchanged hands it was just us doing something that she would think was cool that her followers would think was cool and we got to tap into that reach that's the power of social i won't belabor these points social is still despite what you may think largely free it's real-time connection raw feedback think 30 years ago how much you would have paid for real-time feedback from your actual customers written right to you telling you if they think you're amazing or a jerk or whatever they may think is absolutely incredible and they want you to respond and win them back over it is amazing it lets you test things rapidly which is amazing and it lets you build a community very rapidly so you need something else that's going to get you off the hook and it has to be that core belief system in your life a belief system that you put in place when you were emotionally sober and you said to yourself i'm making a pledge i do and believe that which moves me towards my goals period not when it's convenient always and that becomes a guiding light in my life if the guiding light in your life is that you only do and believe that which moves you towards your goals when you get into that loop of beating yourself up and thinking that you're worthless or that you're never gonna make it remember that that belief does not serve you and you don't do things that don't serve you and not to rat anybody out but do you know how many people just today have broke down in tears in front of me and the punch line is always the same they don't think they're going to make it they become convinced they're more lost than other people they're less capable than other people that while other people are going to have these beautiful lives not them here's the irony everyone feels that way everyone goes through moments of doubt and despair so you need something to protect your mindset against that loop because it will chip away at you and the belief is very simple you don't do things that don't serve you people have got to reject this notion that they have to be protected from the outside and putting all their time and energy into that be the change you want to see in the world if you want to see people strong enough to withhold a better weight then don't worry about trying to fix systems just get tough watch how people respond to you watch out your kids look up to you watch how your family members look up to you watch how people turn to you and want help people we have an innate desire to get strong we don't have an innate desire to have something else protect us all of us if two buttons man one of them is you're such a badass nothing can ever hurt you you get it you know how to figure it out you fight your way out of anything or a magic fairy will follow behind you and just waft things away the terrifying thing is this button the magic fairy is going to get pressed a lot more than this button but this button no one dies of suicide with this button this button mother race towards suicide and depression and if you want to know why we're having a pandemic of that and i don't want to cheapen it because it's largely microbiome and there's all kinds of health things that are going on i'm not taking that away but on the mental side of what's driving a lot of people not believing in that is we're just culturally reinforcing that like we're stuck we're trapped there's nothing we can do that people don't understand the fulfillment has to be earned you can't tell someone to just love themselves you have to tell them how they earn self-respect you have to tell them that doing hard that you don't want to do and doing it anyway that's exactly how you gain self-worth you can't just tell someone to feel worthy man i want you more than the next person like i i spend an inordinate amount of my time every week talking to a camera trying to help people to touch their lives for real like my wife and i made so much money we could have actually bought an island and retired and never worked again but that's not what i want like i want that fulfillment i want to do hard i want to touch people's lives i want to lift them up i actually want to transform and change them the single most important part in learning to be honest with yourself is to accept that you must have self-esteem and the problem is most people build their self-esteem around something stupid so most people build their self-esteem around being right being good being smart being worthy and they see all of those as permanent traits and so anything that challenges them being smart which is my big one oh god even to this day if i really want to get into a bad place i'll just go hang around people that are just legitimately smarter than me and then focus on how cool being smart is now i can be around them when i value myself for being the learner but the second i let myself slip into just wanting to be cool for being smart then being around those people is like getting kicked in the face it sucks man and so i had this i went through this phase in my life that i call the king of remedial jobs phase and i wanted so this is post film school post like realizing that i don't have talent i just need to be smart man i just need to build myself back up by being smart and so i would apply for jobs like i worked i sold video games retail um and i sold insurance door-to-door i did anything that i could where i knew that the person interviewing me at some point during the interview was gonna say why are you applying for this job like you're too smart for this and be like i'm right where i need to be which is crazy and sad but absolutely true and so i did that for a couple years and in that phase it was i just didn't want my intelligence to be challenged so flash forward now i'm working with these two entrepreneurs they hire me as a copywriter i'm in an entrepreneurial environment for the first time and they're clearly smarter than me that that isn't even up for debate and i'm arguing with them for this idea because i needed to win i just i couldn't take another time where it's like they're smarter than me they're smarter than me so i was like all right i'm gonna win on this idea and somewhere in the argument i realized i was wrong and there was a voice in my head screaming you're wrong dude you are wrong you know you're wrong shut up like stop pushing for this what are you doing and i kept going and i finally like whittled them down and they finally just gave up and so they said yep we'll do it your way fine whatever and right then and there's the one time in my life that was truly a lightning rod moment where my life can be divided before and after and that moment was realizing that i was telling everybody that i wanted to get rich but the way i was acting was like i just wanted to feel smart and i thought hey no judgment i'm totally cool whichever it is like we can craft a life where that will be wonderful so if what you really want is to just be smart and to feel smart all the time you have to quit you've got to get out of this environment because they make you feel stupid all the time and that's not a great place to be feeling badly about yourself all the time for any reason even if it's self-inflicted it's not a bad scenario or it's not a good scenario you've got to get out of it so i was like okay so that's option one get out of this scenario go back to being the king of remedial jobs or if you actually want to get rich start acting in accordance with it start making decisions based on that and so i was like okay well i'm gonna have to give up my self-esteem i'm gonna have to like stop worrying about feeling good about myself and i was like oh that is clearly a losing proposition there is no way to come in and feel horrible every day and think that i will have the energy to see this through so i was like god what else could i do i was like well i guess i could build my self-esteem around something that is sort of impervious to being around people that are smarter than me and what would that be being the learner and i thought okay well i could choose to do that i could choose to build my self-esteem around being not right but finding the right answer not being smart but working hard to learn and so that became just like the core of my existence i decided in that moment i'm going to start valuing myself for how rapidly i can admit when i'm wrong how much i learn how much time and energy i put into learning and once i switch that and i switch my identity and my behaviors around to being the learner then all of a sudden everything changed and that's when i went on hockey stick growth because all of a sudden if we were arguing and i realized you were right i'd be like dude he's right you're totally right i see it oh my god thank you so much and so i started earning a reputation i never just backed into a corner i never argued for something just because it was my idea i was legitimately on the hunt to find the right answer and so now i'm getting the internal feedback of hey you said that you were going to always focus on being the learner you're doing it you said you'd always admit when you're wrong and i would try to shorten that timeline down so i wasn't like taking an hour to finally admit it or even three minutes that i was trying to get to it like dude if i realized i was wrong three seconds 30 seconds max like i'm you know just finally saying it look you're totally right i'm with you yep i see it and then the world was like whoa working with this guy is awesome he's not trying to take credit for other people's ideas he will change on what he was saying in a heartbeat when he you know he fights for what he believes in but the second you can convince him he's convinced and then he moves on it just became a really awesome environment so that was hugely transformative but it forces you to constantly be on the lookout for where am i wrong so my wife and i had tried to start our first business well we did start a first business and it made money but i made very little money it was a photography business and that gave me that entrepreneurial drive like i wanted to do it i had a little tinge of it when i was selling for prepaid legal and then really felt it when i was doing the photography but i just looked at the dollars and i'm like this never goes anywhere i can never make enough money i didn't have the words to explain it but it was because i was time for money and you can't break the wealth equation if you're dealing in time for money so i was like all right i want something more but i don't know what that more is and then two of my um two of the people that came through and saw me speaking about filmmaking uh were these two entrepreneurs and they were the two things i'd always promised myself as a kid that i would have is that one day i would have six pack abs and one day i would be rich those were my two promises and that really guided my life in like a very sincere and intense way for a long time and they come across my path not only are they wildly successful in business but they're yolked and i was like whoa so these guys are like yo we're gonna work together someday and people would tell me that all the time and i was like yeah yeah yeah and not really believed it and they called and said look we're starting this new company and why don't you come be a copywriter we settle for employees but we're always looking for partners and you can have any role in this company that you want you just have to become the right person for that role and that's really their pitch yeah and i saw him make that pitch to everybody dozens of people well dozens and nobody did anything with it and i was like what do people not see like what they're offering and everyone was telling me they're full of dude like can you not see like these guys are just trying to take advantage of you and i thought even if they are like what do i have to lose exactly like as long as my payroll checks are clearing and they're not doing anything unethical i don't quite understand the risk so everyone was like freaking out telling me that i shouldn't do it and i was just like oh wow this seems too like it's too self-evident to me that i could always go back to teaching and that i might as well try this and if it sucks then i'll go back what's this fascination you have with the matrix movie i am fresh out of film school about a year out of film school so the matrix came out in 99 i graduated in 98 so i'm i'm hopelessly lost at this point and i go to a comic convention love comic books and i come around the corner at this divy little comic um convention like if you're thinking san diego comic-con this was not that this was like a diving little thing and i come around the corner and there is um carrianne moss um keanu reeves joe pantalioni joe silver the producer like just this whole panel of people i'm like what and so this is like i mean film is the center of my life at this point i'm like i can't believe these people are here i had no idea and they're like hey we're handing out tickets to the premiere tonight you can see it on the back lot of warner brothers no way i was like oh my god it's incredible so i go uh and i'm waiting in line and as i'm waiting in line literally just like in the back alley of warner brothers the doors burst open people come out screaming and i was like what is going on and so i plug my ears because i don't want to hear if they're gonna give spoilers and and they all go off but i could tell something special yeah they were into this thing go in sit down we're watching it and you know that moment where um agent smith comes up to the cops very beginning in the movie and he said i told you to wait until we got here and he said oh we can handle one little girl no officer your men are already dead and they cut up too she jumps up and in that moment the entire audience all at once screams ah like they just go nuts yeah and i was like that has never happened to me before ever in a movie there was just something so captivating and then ultimately the matrix is the perfect metaphor for the human experience it is about a guy who from the day he shows up has the same abilities as the day at the end but once he learns to believe in himself then he can actually do more even though he had the same potential he's able to do more at the end and i was like that's life like you've got this potential but if you don't believe in yourself you're never going to put in the work to actuate it i'm not afraid to be audacious because i know that you're never going to exceed what you're aiming at so you're only your hope is to hit some percentage of what you're aiming at so i might as well dream massive and one it excites me and then two i'm not afraid of the failure so once you have that like oh it's exciting for me to dream big and i'm hyper conscious of you break it down in small pieces like i'm i'm not worried about building theme parks and all that stuff right now what i'm doing right now today is make a good comic put out a good interview show that's it that's what my life consists of stay in business be profitable like those are the things that i think about so i keep my you know my goals my immediate term goals very manageable but i make sure that they're feeding naturally into the grand vision but i don't get scared or lost and thinking oh my god i have to do all that nope right now today i need to read a script i need to make sure it's okay i need to authorize it to be drawn that's it that's today and as long as you're able to focus on that and get good at that and then just always push yourself to make your skill set better and better and better as long as it's leading towards that thing and you have clarity on where you're trying to go so you make sure the skills you're acquiring will actually lead you there you'd be fine that quest went so fast wasn't just because we had done something to our minds and gotten to the point we were so angry that we were going to push us forward no matter what it was understanding the timing of the marketplace and the technologies that were emerging and the technology that was emerging in 2009 when we first started thinking about the company everybody thought facebook was a joke everybody thought it was a huge distraction and what we understood was it was just a megaphone we didn't pass judgment on it we just knew it was a megaphone and it was a free megaphone and if we could give them reason to say something good within a couple of minutes of an interaction with us they could have a global audience and tell people about that so we saw that the timing was right there and we also understood that people want to have impact i believe the very meaning of life is to find out how many skills you can acquire that have utility and then put that utility to the test in service of someone else it's what the ancient greeks call techne i've worked my ass off for this set of skills they are unique to me and they help other people and in being able to help other people with something that i worked very hard for i feel good about myself and i will make you guys one promise right here today the game you're playing please listen to this so that you don't end up wasting years of your life like i did mine the game that you're playing is not success the game you're playing is not money the game that you're playing is brain chemistry it's about fulfillment the only thing ultimately that's ever going to matter in your life is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself my father-in-law once gave me this advice he was the first person i met that had really been successful and he said what you want to do is know more about any situation than anyone else in the world and i actually remember what i said to him i said yeah my boss doesn't really think like that i have since apologized to my father-in-law for giving me such an amazing piece of information and me doing nothing with it for like six years but once i understood that the only path to excellence is to truly become an expert the only path to excellence is to actually get good at something these days in a hyper-connected world where within minutes of an interaction with you your product whatever someone can have a global audience and tell people what they think that product better be awesome but the great news is the world's been democratized now you no longer have to have 150 million dollar ad budget in order to cut through the clutter in our first eight months we were profitable at month six in our first eight months we didn't invest more than ten thousand dollars because we had a product that actually delivered value our marketing message delivered value and if you focus on that if you focus on making something that's better than what other people are doing now you really can cut through the noise very very quickly and you gotta grind baby grind that was me for almost two years people see where the company's gotten they see me up giving speeches but what they don't see is that in the middle of the night my hands used to wake me up cramping closed because all day i was making protein bars and in the very beginning we were running the technology company during the day and then going and making protein bars by hand at night with rolling pins and handheld blades that we cut the bars and then wrapped them three at a time we wrapped them three at a time we would make 1200 bars i think nine of us made 1200 bars over a six or seven hour period now in a day we make 1.5 million but that's where it starts it starts with a willingness to persist long after it's boring it starts with the ability to focus on your end customer long after you're exhausted it starts with the ability to think about those people that you really want to serve when you're scared and have no idea how you're going to pull it off but you chose to believe that you could do it you chose to believe that and because you chose to believe that you were able to achieve excellence this is the central mantra of my life it doesn't matter who you are today it really doesn't so if you feel like you're incapable of something maybe you are today but just because you're incapable of something today doesn't mean that you're not capable of learning that thing so it's not about who you are today it's about who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there and i promise you the day that you're willing to pay any price you'll achieve what you want to achieve i knew exactly what i wanted i had my why i had my goal and it was very specific and this is the thing about goals they have to be incredibly specific and my goal was to end metabolic disease not sell a lot of protein bars that was not the goal i wanted to end metabolic disease and that informed every choice that we made as entrepreneurs every time that we had to answer a hard question one that might impact profitability or how late we were going to have to work or what we were going to have to do and it almost always was difficult including by the way we had to become our own manufacturers which we did not want to do we wanted to outsource it we just wanted to be marketers but nobody would make the bar for us or they would but they said that we had to add sugar to it and we asked a simple question will that help end metabolic disease yes or no if yes we'll do it if no we won't and it wouldn't so we didn't it starts with that specific goal and then because i had my why my hands cramping closed in the face of doing something to save my mom and my sister it was not a hard choice in fact i wouldn't have been able to look myself in the eye and say i was not able to help them because it was hurting my hands right it sounds ridiculous when you say it like that but most people don't have a personal tie to what they're doing mother teresa has an amazing quote no one will act for the many but people will act for the one [Music] and so as you guys go into your jobs and you think about what you're trying to do find a way to stop making it a job find a way to make it a calling a vocation something that really meets that why your desire to connect or do something great for people what it's really going to take for you to get to that next level is to understand that the person that you are has gotten you as far as is ever going to get you so you've got to become a new person you literally have to adapt now the great news is like we talked in my first talk that is what humans are wired to do humans are the ultimate adaptation machine the reason that we are the only species that you can find in every corner of the globe at one point james cameron was literally at the bottom of the marianas trench we have sent human beings to the moon we are going to send human beings to mars and the reason we're going to be able to do that is we can adapt to our surroundings there was a woman who swam the bearing straight really think about this the bearing straight is the space between russia and alaska so you can imagine it's not quite a swim in the bahamas to make the swim she had to change her fat from what's known as white adipose tissue to brown fat brown fat is more thermogenic so it actually kicks off heat to do that for over a year she had to expose herself routinely to cold temperatures sleeping in the winters in alaska with the window open but in doing that she actually put her body through an adaptation response her body got the message adapt or die so it adapted and when you're willing to put yourself under those kinds of stresses to become that new thing you want to become to be the new person that you want to be to go farther than anyone you know has ever gone to be the goat it is possible but it demands a price it demands a price and what this weekend is about it's about you deciding for where do you want to go and what price are you willing to pay to get there there's no right answer there's no wrong answer there's just clarity there's just clarity don't judge yourself if you don't want to play on a world stage don't judge yourself if you're not willing to pay an extraordinary price just get the clarity of what you want and what you need to do to get there when you do that then you're going to be able to construct a narrative about who you are if somebody's giving you advice about something that they have not done in their own life then they have basically a zero believability score and somebody who has a zero believability score shouldn't be pushing their idea like they know something they should be asking a lot of questions now when you're talking to somebody that's done ray dalio saying is three times or more if they've successfully done something three times or more than they have believability in that area so you want to find people that have believability that really know what they're talking about and then you should listen you should ask a lot of questions you should really come to understand it if they haven't done that they may still have amazing ideas but what you need because the um you know sometimes a novice has really fresh insights because they're just not stuck in the dogmatic ways of thinking that experts usually get into but you need to be thinking about it differently so rather than listening to their conclusions you should be trying to understand their methodology how did they get there what is their process their reasoning for making the statement that they're making now if their reasoning is sound then their conclusion may very well be worthwhile but you have to understand their reasoning so one of those two things so either they are an expert in that area and thusly you should listen or they are not and you should only be thinking about what their process was to get to that conclusion then you have to be able to derive your own assessment as to whether or not you should listen to them there's not going to be anything more empirical than that social media is going to allow you to have real meaningful relationships with your customers i will tell you one very fast in the very early days of quest when all of us had to go out and actually make the bars i'm out making bars our chief marketing officers out making bars like everybody's out there there would be periods of time where we wouldn't respond to somebody on facebook but this one woman started responding and we thought wow that's so weird like is did somebody create a fake account like is that one of you guys everyone's like no man we didn't do it that's a real person and she would tell people like oh don't worry i'm sure they'll get back to you quickly they're really great company and we were so and this is like early 2010 we're like what is happening and so we reached out and said hey we want to put you on payroll she's like i don't want to be on payroll and i'm like whoa okay now i'm getting freaked out like what do you want and she was like i just want you to continue to deliver a service i'm a nutritionist and i use your bars with a lot of people i just want to make sure that you're around so we developed this really cool relationship with her we all got to know her she held us to a standard she was not always nice she was always fair but she wasn't always nice if we were doing something poorly from a product standpoint like we weights and measures will let you ship product that's heavy you just can't ship light okay so imagine you bag your doritos your bag of doritos is going to be heavy it's never going to be light now so we're thinking okay cool we have to comply with weights and measures but we're a health and fitness company so people like if i'm buying 60 grams and that's what i have in my diet plan i want to make sure i'm eating 60 grams and not 65. and so she would call us out on it so we ended up buying a piece of equipment because of that relationship that we had with this woman that we never met and then one day she went silent we wrote to her mom hey is everything okay and her mom said she passed away she was like 28. and i got like really emotional and i'd never met her and i'm not like that guy but i got legitimately emotional and i wrote a manifesto and i said to everyone in the company basically we exist to serve these people every one of them is trying to do something that we may know nothing about and they're using our products and so we started celebrating her name's joy ramita we've been doing it for four years now the joyramita superfan award we bring somebody in that's been amazing to the community we just give them a big blowout party at our headquarters giving behind-the-scenes access to cool stuff just to say thank you and that's when we really realized it it may not be the kind of relationship you have with your mom or your brother or your sister or your spouse but it's meaningful man in a way that business relationships haven't been since like the local general store and you saw the same people come in every day it really is like if you can flip that switch in your mind and see it as something beautiful i'm telling you it will open you up to a whole new way of interacting with your customers because there's a lot of amazing stuff going on in your communities that you may not even know about or that you could really feed into and build into something amazing and if you stay focused on it being a community of people that are supporting themselves each other and your company then you can do some pretty incredible things just being honest even when it sucks because let me tell you how many times it's going to be where if you just lied oh god it would be so much easier and you would probably get away with it and but it the way that i explain lying to people is you get away with it 50 of the time and so it tempts you to think it's a good strategy but the other 50 of the time it is cratering trust and once you can't trust the person all hope is lost and there's nothing more beautiful than being in a relationship with somebody who makes you feel like they're your number they're number one and that you totally trust them and lisa wrote this um instagram post about how she could see a photo of me with my arm around a woman or resting my head on a woman or hugging her or whatever and she it wouldn't even make her radar to question it so that's the fun for us is having that level of trust now it's like um i think it's buffett that said you spend your entire life building your reputation only takes five seconds to lose it so it's like we're so careful we for 18 years we've been earning trust with each other so like dude so especially when i was back at quest and it was women would come and flirt and hit on me because they wanted something wanted to be sponsored by the company or whatever and i was around bikini literal bikini models like all the time and so if ever there was going to be a moment of insecurity for my wife it would have been that period a she wasn't insecure and b i the thought of throwing away 18 years of shared experience of all that trust and everything it's sex is like rad and super exciting and i love it the most but like compared to what i would have to give up for something like that it just doesn't rate on the radar so and by the way thing something like i'm saying now which most people would hide from their spouse oh that yeah of course i find other people attracted what are you talking about like we just openly talk about that like she'll nudge me and be like oh my god do you think she's hot it's like that's just we set up early on in the relationship to be aggressively ourselves and one thing that we both were really honest about was i was like look it is human nature you are going to find other guys attractive and i will actually trust you more if you admit when you find somebody attractive than if you say something stupid like i only have eyes for you oh really you're the only human in all of history to like uh you know transcend their human nature like it doesn't make sense yeah and then that's a super fragile place to be because what happens if i get older what happens if i get injured or scarred like then i'm really supposed to believe that suddenly you're more attracted to somebody with a scar than somebody without like it doesn't make sense so we all live in this fragile bubble of well as long as they lie to me it's okay and as long as i'm willing to believe and even though secretly i know it's a lie and then it's the more pious than now like oh my god she's thinking all these nice things about me but i'm actually finding other people attractive and i'm just lying about it and so then you're like wait if i'm lying about it is she lying about it and so it just it erodes all that trust so from the jump we were like look you're going to find other people attractive i'm going to find other people attractive but let me introduce you to this magical word called commitment now i'm with you because i love you because i respect you but i'm also with you because i'm committed to you and so you don't have to worry that i'm going to be looking over my shoulder for a more attractive woman there are going to be more attractive women than you for sure especially as you age who cares you're my wife we have shared an experience we've shared a life we've built this around each other and commitment means something to me going back to having that code that you live by and the rules and the code that i live by i'm never going to betray that yeah so it's like we've always said i may break up with you one day because i'm not saying that like oh there's nothing you could do that would make me break up with you for sure there is but i'm never going to cheat on you i may come and say i'm breaking up with you because i'm going to go have sex with somebody else but i'm absolutely not going to go have sex with somebody behind your back never going to happen so like having that trust and knowing who the other person is like all that stuff is is super meaningful and look there's just more and more and more stuff but those are some big ones there's a gap between who you are today and who you will need to become in order to execute against your why that thing in you that's burning that you really care about enough to get across the finish line that you care about enough to keep doing even when it's making your hands cramp clothes that you care about enough even when you've got to come in and work between rival gang members it's the thing that you care about enough that you really will work so hard that the rival gang members fall in line behind you because you're leading by example thank you and that became my mission every day i'm going to show up and outwork everybody i'm going to be the first one here i'm going to be the last one to leave and most importantly guys i really hope you were listening to robert gialdini whose books i have read and all but memorized the key is you want to connect with them you want them to fall in love with you you want them to be inspired you want them to feel better about themselves when they're around you than when they're not and if you can pull that off they will go to war for you think about it if somebody is going to come after you and they want to hurt your feelings there is one thing every time they will reach for that is something that is true when people try to hurt you they go for the most real thing and they can jab you right in your heart because they know it's gonna hurt because it's real man and that's mean for sure and it hurts for sure but if you think of it like this when somebody's throwing a rock at you with the intention of hurting you you can put your defenses up you will deflect that rock never to be seen again or you can lower your defenses let it hit you in the face knowing that it will hurt but also knowing now at your feet is not a rock it's a lump of gold because they've given you an insight into where you are weak now once you know where you are weak you can begin to build yourself and that is my thesis on life you get to build yourself in any direction you want in any way to become anything you want there will be an extraordinary price to pay but you can go in any direction fulfillment is what matters it is a neurochemistry state the game that you're playing is not success it is not money it is not legacy it is neurochemistry it's feeling good about yourself right now today in this moment now the absolute foundational building block to fulfillment is progress now it i don't mean progress in worldly pursuits i mean humans are an active species that are absolutely designed to learn adapt and grow we are the ultimate adaptation machine now when nature wants us to do something it incentivizes that thing with pleasure so if we're the ultimate adaptation machine designed to learn grow and get better then it's going to make that process intensely pleasurable now what it doesn't incentivize is the obsession over where other people are whether or not we have unique ideas whether or not we're valuable none of that is going to bring you joy okay as they say comparison is the thief of joy so hey if you really want to with yourself jump in the instagram feed and look how other people are crushing it and obsess over that if on the other hand you want to really have a deep and lasting sense of fulfillment jump in the instagram feed find people that motivate and inspire you to be a better version of yourself not to attain worldly success but to actuate your potential to ask yourself a very simple question what is it that i am excited by what am i motivated by what jazzes me up regardless of whether or not it jazz is anybody else up and now i'm gonna go get good at that thing and that progress is the foundational building block of happiness how do you feel about yourself when you're by yourself i know a lot of people that fear that quiet i know a lot of people that don't want to be alone with themselves and the reason they don't want to be alone with themselves is because they don't think they're worthwhile they're not happy with who they are that's what adaptation is about if you're not happy with who you are then let's step into the ownership of that let's remember that's our fault there's no one else to blame for that the people that did horrible things to you are not to blame for that because if they are there's nothing you can do but if you're the owner of that in fact don't even worry about the word blame you're in control that's what this is about it's about retaining control it's about knowing that you own your life and at any time if you want a different outcome you can make different decisions you can do different things you can start a new narrative and once you begin that new narrative you realize the power that's in that to take you where you want to go the american dream is still alive for anybody if you're willing to learn and grow first of all if you're willing to accept you're not yet the person you need to be to execute at the highest level you're willing to acknowledge your deficits and understand what skills you need and then go out and relentlessly acquire those skills that have utility and then be willing to put that those skills to the test against something for me the test is business it's the test i enjoy it's not the test everyone enjoys but that's what quest was largely me asking and answering the question am i acquiring the right skills in order to end metabolic disease yes or no and if the answer was no i changed as epictetus said he is a wise man who does not grieve for things which he has not but rejoices for those which he has and that's gratitude isn't it it's the very base decision that we all have to make are you grateful for the things you have in your life or are you always wanting more and trust me i get it i understand people that strive for more i understand people that want something bigger and better but at the same time if you allow yourself to only think about what you don't have to only be striving for something more that that obsession will begin to overtake you it will begin to corrode you but ultimately it's a choice ultimately at any time right now in this moment you can stop and think about what you have you can put your attention on the things you're grateful for and watch what it does watch what it does in that instance the way that it changes you the way that it changes your chemistry your feelings in a moment can shift from negative and dark to beautiful with nothing else changing around you nothing but you deciding that you're going to focus on the things you're grateful for nothing but deciding that there are things in your life to be grateful for and that is a decision no matter what is happening in your life at any moment right now in the depths of a depression in something going on terribly in your life you can choose right now to think about the things you're grateful for the breeze a smile from somebody kind a stranger who holds open a door for you anything but it's a choice and as einstein said there are only two ways to live your life one is as though nothing is a miracle the other is as though everything is a miracle and what choice are you making what are you choosing to focus on right now do you let gratitude fill you up or not and here's the critical part and i want you to listen to this really well whatever you decide whether you decide we live in a world of miracles or whether you decide we live in a world devoid of miracles you are choosing one thing to the exclusion of the other and when you focus on something that you're grateful for when you look at those little moments in your life and choose to see them as grand miracles even when it is only a gentle hand on your shoulder even when it's only a kiss from somebody who you've kissed a thousand times before even when it is only holding the hand of somebody who needed their hand held even when it's something that simple [Music] it really is a miracle that it really is something that can fill you it really is something that will change your chemistry bring a connection between two people allow you to see a grander vista or even just open a window and look out at the world and realize that you're alive that this is all a miracle that none of this is guaranteed that every breath you take could be your last and in that you can choose to cherish what you have in that you can decide to focus on that you have a breath to take and even when it's something that simple when you train your mind to do that when you train yourself to decide to see the beauty in that then nobody can ever take it away from you and no matter where you are no matter what's going on in your life you'll be able to rise up and feel the beauty that is being alive so take a minute at the worst times in your life and focus on the things you're grateful for so for eight and a half years i'm doing that i am working seven days a week ignoring my wife at about the six and a half year mark my wife pulls me aside and says you're now damaging our marriage and i'm not willing to continue like this so it's like all right something's got to give and that forced me to really look and say i'm profoundly unhappy and showing up every day chasing money just isn't actually who i am and i need to do something that makes me feel alive in the moment so it ends up being a cool part of my story but what i want people to know is when the following thing happened i was a wash in shame and so there i was the guy going hard by this point i've worked my way up now i'm the chief marketing officer of the company i own 10 of it um all just through sweat equity they made good on their promise and i was so broken inside and so unhappy that i was like i have to leave i need to go back to filmmaking i need to do something that in in and of itself like i will love and be passionate about and what i realized was the struggle is guaranteed the success is not now at that time i was a multi-millionaire on paper but as you well know being rich on paper is very different than having money in your bank no doubt about it so i was rich on paper i did not feel rich and so i was like what am i doing all of this for so my wife and i talk and i'm like look i know i promised i would make you rich and i swear to god i will one day but i'm gonna have to take a step backwards first because i can't just muscle through like this i'm i'm just losing so many years of my life i need to do something that if i'm gonna fail at least i'm gonna fail loving what i'm doing she was totally behind me she said what are now famous words in our marriage she said i bet on you i was like that means a lot so i go in and i quit and i said look here's your equity back i'm not going to cross the finish line so i don't think i should get anything for this so you know take it and do your thing and i'm gonna go to greece we're gonna move to greece and i'm gonna write and that's that and they said look we could do this without you but we don't want to and so what would it take for us to keep working together and i laid out a plan of if whatever i'm going to be doing next it's got to be around value creation it's got to be around passion it's got to be something that we would love every day even if we were failing i want to build community i want to be myself and i said look this thing that we now call social media wasn't called that back then but social media i think is going to change everything what year is that this is 20 2009. okay so i'm like i think this is going to change everything going to change the way that people do business and actually this probably was a little bit earlier than that um so the next company i want to be transparent i want our real personality personalities to shine through i want people to see like we actually want good things for you and so that for three very different reasons became the core of what we wanted to do and so we founded quest nutrition everyone told us we were crazy that we were leaving technology like the place where people actually get rich and going into food the place where you're in manufacturing it's going to be small margins you guys are never going to survive this and so everyone thought we were done but our thing was we're never going to make decisions based on profitability again we're going to be making it based on like actually adding value to people's lives being passionate about what we do every day and loving our lives and so we actually made a promise to each of us and we said you're going to enjoy what you do on a day-to-day basis simple as and so if it's something weird like when i started doing inside quest fine like even if it's not like we don't see the immediate roi in the business if you love it and that's a part of what's making you a complete and full human being then let's do it so we got into really crazy stuff but ended up being amazing um because we made that promise to each other so that was how all of that began and then we just really lived up to it about value creation about not just trying to sell people on something about building a real community to uplift people and it just so happened that we had the right product at the right time marketed in a totally new way because of my background in film we were creating all of our own content in-house we built an entire studio inside the company we were shooting everything long before that was like a thing it was like we were doing that and everyone was like this is crazy but then we grow by 57 000 in our first three years alone in manufacturing people don't have enough rules in their life for themselves so for instance i get out of bed in 10 minutes or less doesn't matter and i don't want to that's why i have the rule because i call us your mind literally i went through a period where i would lay in bed for three to four hours awash in shame and my inability to get out of bed and it just embarrassed me and so i felt badly about myself so i wanted to make a change so i knew that i needed a bright line so bright line 10 minutes or less you get out of bed as soon as you realize you're awake that's it so and the rule is more specific it's like i have to have had at least five hours of sleep um but once you put the rule in place then you just live by it and that's how you earn credibility like right now i don't feel the way telling you that that i want to feel this is a good moment he's on my team i'm pointing at him this is a good moment so i'm saying this and i don't feel good about saying it why because today i don't know what happened i got out of bed in 11 minutes and i was literally time it oh yeah i mean from waking up to actually physically getting out of the bed correct my feet must be on the floor and i must be standing up before it ticks over into the 11th minute and today i don't know what happened i i was i was aware of the time i knew i needed to get up and for whatever reason one of the minutes just went faster than i thought when i looked back i was like damn it and so i'm surprised you even made it here today then right so now this comes into like knowing how to handle something like that like if you totally fall apart because you don't live up 20 rules you're violating another one of my rules which is don't do anything that doesn't move you towards your goals so it's like yes i it is a part of my identity to confess this so because i'm talking about it i want to say it now to an audience it's the only thing that will allow me to reset and be able to feel good about it again because i don't lie when i miss it i own it well look if your biggest problem is it took you 11 minutes to get out sadly that's not my biggest problem this is a high quality program right yes very true but my thing is people don't have the rules and so i have other rules for instance i wear a size 32 pant that's just that's it and so no matter what your waist is no no i won't let my waist get out of line with that so i use the pants as a way to guide now i would go down if i got so lean that i was you know 31 that's not a problem but i'm not going to allow myself to go up and it's super tempting like especially around christmas i don't try to hold abs through the winter so during christmas like right now i do not have abs so and i'm totally fine with that i switch a different part of my mentality i during the holidays my wife and i definitely celebrate with food and it's amazing and i love it the most so but if that celebration took me up to like 32s don't fit anymore i gotta come back because i have a rule so it's like that's how i keep myself in a lane i keep myself from getting into trouble i know the things that i accept for myself and what i don't accept for myself and it's all like stated it's very clear self-reward and self-punishment is really really important yes and you i think that if people don't sort of automatically have the guilty thing which they probably do it's more a willingness to lean into that and to say okay this is actually going to serve me this is going to work for me and i actually do wonder sometimes you know somebody who now basically has a profession of giving advice at least on on the one side of what i do and so i think a lot about like who should actually take my advice because my advice is not going to lead to a carefree easy life lisa was just saying she was laying in bed last night thinking about me and she said how does he do it because there's there's just a level of things that i'm willing to take on and i don't one i'm not even sure it's healthy for me and two i'm certainly not certain that it's healthy for other people but what i do know is that i have a level of thrill and pleasurable obsession around it so for me it's fun so when i think about the the guilt or the momentary pain of something up and you talk about me getting better as a speaker it's like that journey is it is a very simple journey that requires you though to really accept that you're not very good at things right now and that that's fine and so a big key for me has always been to think of my life not in the len not the lens of a moment and i used to tell this to my employees all the time like stop judging yourself through the lens of a moment and start judging yourself through the lens of 10 years if you think of yourself in 10 year increments like you will blow your mind so if you're embarrassed today about where you are don't compare yourself even to yesterday which may not soothe that and encourage you to push forward think back 10 years my gut instinct is unless you've really been treading water in which case then leverage that pain to never do that again but if you think back to where you were 10 years chances are like you're going to be blown away with how far you come and so then it's like all right then i'm just going to focus my gaze ten years in the future and start saying what would i have to do to be somewhere where i'd be blown away then with where i'm at now yeah but it really does require you to say okay i'm the the pride that i'm going to establish is actually around my willingness to look at the fact that i'm not good right now today you have to fight to reach your dream you have to sacrifice and work hard for it that's coming from the man who has come to define natural talent but that's what other people put on him people want to see somebody who's just naturally talented it's god-given they were graced they were blessed with something at birth but what does he say when he's asked about what it took to become the person that he is it took hard work it took sacrifice it took giving things up it took doubling down it took pushing himself every day day after day and that's the thing about hard work when you put that kind of unending blinding effort into something it gets to the point where you've worked so hard that it looks like magic that people would sooner believe that it's dna that it's gifted that it is god-given than to believe that they would have to work that hard to replicate it but if you can stop making other people extraordinary as a way to let yourself off the hook then you too can become extraordinary all of us are capable of far more than we think we're capable of more than the people who love us the most think we are capable of more than the people who hate us the most would have us believe at the end of the day it is a very simple question you're going to have to ask yourself and answer for yourself how hard are you willing to work how much are you willing to sacrifice but on the other side of that is power and energy and as kyle rowe jr said if you're attacking you don't get as tired as when you're chasing and that's the key when you know what you want and when you will not be held back from getting it suddenly you go on the offensive it's not about pleasing somebody else it's not about chasing somebody else becoming them or even beating them it is about yourself knowing what you want and attacking it going after it and not letting anybody dissuade you it is looking at yourself and recognizing how you have to improve to get that good but you've got to hunger for that goal you've got to hunger to get across and win you've got to want that the way that a man whose head is on fire wants a pond and when you get to that stage when you're able to cultivate something in yourself like that something that is refusing to be extinguished something that will be heard something that will stand up and be counted then you're going to have what you need to get the skills that you need to move forward to win to attack and in that attack and having the energy to move forward relentlessly you will find that even though you're working harder than you've ever worked in your life you're more energized than you've ever been in your life the times where you fatigue they're not the times you're working the hardest the times you fatigue are when you're being least yourself you're not being true to who you are and what you want so right now right now start being honest about what it is you're willing to attack start being honest about who you want to be what you're willing to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there if you give yourself over to that you will not be able to be stopped if you want to do something extraordinary you have one job leave your fellow humans in awe now when you think about holy sh my job as a parent as an entrepreneur as an athlete as a speaker as a whatever you want to be you've got to get so good at that thing that when people see you do it you make them experience the most potent human emotion and that is awe to get that good is a terrifying journey of self-discovery and confronting who you really are because you cannot make change until you acknowledge where you're actually at now why because it's not some new age woo thing it is for real like if you understand where you're weak then you know where to spend your time building skills to me the gap between where you are now and where you want to go is a gap of skill set and once i realized that and i made the choice to believe that this whole brain plasticity thing was real even though it was being hotly debated then i could shift my self-esteem from being smart right good worthy to being that of the learner the learner is the only identity that i have ever found that is anti-fragile as naseem teleb says things that are robust that are strong that are tough that can take just a lot of abuse before they break they are still ultimately defined by their breaking point something that is anti-fragile on the other hand is something that the more you attack it the more it is pounded on the stronger it gets now imagine being able to build a belief system the thing that you build your self-esteem around if all of that we're tied to something that is truly anti-fragile that the more somebody comes after it the more robust it becomes being a learner is that answer we went through a whole debate about what is the next company going to be and it was one of those where it had to be something that we cared about you know we had started this whole gyration of selling the technology company because i was so pissed and so tired of chasing money and i wanted to do something that i believed in i wanted to do something that mattered that had impact so the only reason that i was interested in getting into nutrition was because i felt that it one it could save the two people that i was most worried about in the world and two i thought that it could address what i saw as the greatest health the greatest health crisis we face as a species quite frankly there's a difference between happiness and fulfillment a bowl of ice cream brings me happiness it does not bring me fulfillment fulfillment is often born of suffering fulfillment is about doing the things that are hard in fact the greeks have a word for it it's called technique technique means that you acquire a set of skills that is unique to you the acquisition of those skills was very difficult and here's the important part those skills serve other people to me i believe that the very reason that we're all here is to see how many skills we can acquire that have utility and then put that utility to the test in service of others that's going to be the thing that lights you on fire you're busting your ass you're really getting good at something you are taking action you're moving forward you're doing the things you need to learn to do to learn and trigger that adaptation response that humans have you're putting yourself under this stress you've identified a goal you're working your way backwards to where you are today and that's the key now building yourself begins with intention clarity you have to know who you want to become you can't just show up in the gym of the mind and do random stuff any more than you can show up in the gym of the body and do random stuff and think that you're going to end up on the stage competing for mr olympia it doesn't work like that you've got to have this clarity of focus and the way that i always explain it to people people come to me all the time and they're like tom i want to help people man and i'm like that is rad that's coming from such a beautiful place but telling me that you want to help somebody is like saying you want to win a gold medal in what the olympics yes fantastic summer or winter summer great tennis are swimming swimming which event backstroke the medley because until you know exactly in what way you are trying to serve people you don't know what skills you need to acquire in order to leave people in awe so that you may become extraordinary skills have utility learning how to swim better makes you a faster swimmer building certain muscles in your arms and in your shoulders all of the different things that go into getting great at any sport all of those things must be learned with calculation they must be practiced and rehearsed over and over and over you have to push yourself long past the point of boredom boredom kills more people in the pursuit of success than any hater will ever kill boredom is the great killer of dreams boredom because people don't have the focus they don't have the clarity of what they're trying to achieve they've not built into their life built into their life an intoxication for what they're trying to accomplish first of all each and every one of you needs to avoid what kevin kelly calls premature optimization then you need to go out and experience a whole lot of stuff now premature optimization is where somebody thinks off the jump oh this thing i'm kind of interested in that i'm gonna optimize my life for that thing the reason this happens is god forbid you went to a high school where they already already made you choose like more or less a major which they do in the uk and i think it's problematic and some schools do here in the us then certainly by the time you get to college everyone is forcing you they want you to pick a major then when you get out you've got to get a job and you want to get a job that makes sense with the major that you just got she took on all this debt you spent all this time and so that's premature optimization you literally made a decision when you were 18 maybe 17 terrifying and now the whole rest of your life is an echo of that random decision you made before your brain was finished developing think about that for a second your brain doesn't stop developing until you're 25. so at 18 and that's late honestly most people are thinking about it at 17 or even 16 you're making a decision you're prematurely optimizing you haven't experienced enough stuff you don't know what really lights that initial spark of interest and so you go down this path you're it you're at 25 you're having a quarter life crisis because you don't love what you do it's a mess so my advice is to go experience a whole lot of things now whether that's taking a gap year which i would never have done um so trust me when i say that's not your only option but you need to be experiencing a lot of stuff trying a lot of things taking a lot of classes watching videos tutorials reading learning like figuring out what it is you go whoa i really like that thing it's not a passion it's not gonna spark off like that it's just experience you find something ah it piques your curiosity you're more interested in that than the next thing okay now we're going to engage with it this is step two engagement is different than just going and experiencing so that's sort of a a very non-committal dilettante sort of way of involving yourself with something just experiencing it the next is i really like this and i'm going to go hard on it so if i took a dance class now i'm going to sign up for a year's worth of dance classes or something i'm going to start going and i'm really going to see if i like this and in that engagement process where you're starting to read about it you're talking to other people about it you're going to find out if the more you get into it the more you're like whoa this went from an interest to like a real fascination fascination is that next gate if it turns into a fascination and you're like whoa the more i learn about this more i want to learn and the more that i get just excited about this the more energy it gives me okay that's a good chance then that that thing can become a passion now we're going to go through the process of actually gaining mastery now i think passion is like love meaning it needs to be a reciprocal thing so as you go down the process of gaining mastery those skills need to then be useful in the real world and the echo that you get back from the real world that those skills are valuable to other people the more you're gonna be like whoa i feel good about myself so now you had something that was interesting it turned into a fascination the more you engaged with it and now as you gain skills you're actually able to serve other people who then give you that positive reinforcement where you're like whoa not only am i getting good at this like that getting good has real world utility and it impacts other people and then they echo that back and that makes me feel really good about myself so i enjoy it in and of itself and i enjoy that element of technique where as a social species i am helping other parts of my tribe and that feels really good and it's something that other people value that is the passion now fanning the flames is a slightly different thing to the side of that which is in that process which i think it starts pretty early probably starts back at the interest phase as you get interested in something you're going to start doing things like what i'm doing right now two seconds before the camera started rolling i was not talking like this i did not have this energy level i wasn't using my hands as much or my face is much oddly enough but embodying something is absolutely critical so a big part of gaining a passion is telling other people what you're up to allowing yourself to embody the excitement telling yourself and other people that you're excited about it and actually embodying that excitement embodying that passion which then your brain goes whoa we're getting really excited about this you know we're our volume is getting higher we're getting more energetic we're moving more all of that stuff forces the brain to say this must actually be really important and when you start doing that then you're beginning to hardwire your brain for that and you're beginning to associate the emotion with that thing that you're doing it is something that you can very much do as long as based on something real i find that this is pretty ineffective if there isn't that real core level of interest but if you have that real core level of interest then all of a sudden everything that you do just magnifies that over and over and over i don't go oh that's interesting brightline i go okay that's interesting i want to explore that more what would that look like how would that serve me what would it really feel like for me how's it playing out in my life does it actually have real world implications and this isn't all something that i sit down in one quick session like that's what i'm thinking about i may think about it for weeks a month more six months who knows and it depends on what kind of impact that it's going to have in my life so i don't you don't lead with bright lines to create a habit let's be really clear about that so habits are something different getting in routines and habits is a place to start and then if you find like i have a morning routine i have habits that i do every morning but they they are things that i'm very flexible on that creates a lot of um mobility in my life if i wake up late or something like that then i'll just shave this out or the other bright lines like i if i have a bright line i don't with my bright lines i do my bright lines so that's the whole point of a bright line they are absolutely non-negotiable so be very careful about what you put bright lines around make sure it is something that's leading you towards your goal and i think better to make it a habit and a routine first and see if it actually has an advantage if it's something that's important and if it's something that you struggle with and think that it's really really important and you need that bright line elon musk talks about in his business it's all about breaking things down to the physics if you sell to people the physics in your world is psychology and understanding what motivates them so your company needs to have a why if you know simon sinek and his brilliant book start with why you'll know what we're talking about the golden circle most people know what they do they may even know how they do it but they oftentimes don't know why they do it why did we launch quest nutrition because we wanted to end metabolic disease nobody knew that from looking at a protein bar but our marketing material was about that we didn't do features and benefits we said stop sacrificing we said you should hold food companies to a new standard it's ridiculous that food companies aren't engineering new equipment to make food that's both good for you and delicious it's just ridiculous nobody's held their feet to the fire people have been buying the same junk products for years they're not going to change unless you force them to and so we came along and said we're going to be the bearer of standards we know why we're doing what we're doing so i can't release a product that has sugar in it why because that's not going to end metabolic disease and that is my driver i show up to work every day not thinking about making it rain and counting my money i'm not swimming in it like scrooge mcduck i'm coming every day thinking about two people my mom and my sister and i ask a very simple question is this advantageous for my mom and my sister yes or no if it is i do it if it's not i don't now a lot of times what's advantageous for my mom and my sister was really expensive it was super annoying to have to do it because it was like you watching margins like oh god but it becomes an easy filter and every business has to have a filter every business needs to know what they say yes to and what they say no to and if you don't have that blinding guiding light when you scale you will fall apart and the reason you will fall apart your customers won't know who you are they won't know how to communicate your message to somebody else your employees won't know who you are they won't know what to communicate to each other let alone the outside world so it has got to be blinding you have to be able to write it down it has to be super clear it's got to be direct and it's got to be meaningful and it has to be real it's got to actually be something that drives you so we all come to a relationship with like expectations about how we think people should act and unfortunately we don't recognize our expectations as expectations we recognize them as truth this is how the world is it is how the world should be and when somebody we think that they have those same beliefs and values and rules and all that and so given this scenario there's only one way to act that is certainly obvious and so when the person doesn't act like that we take it personally like whoa do you not respect me do you not love me do you not care about me and it just isn't that they have a different set of beliefs and rules there's enough nuance difference that they're not if they're intending to hurt you you have a whole different set of problems but assuming that they're not intending to hurt you then you have a communication problem so lisa and i actually define our terms so we have a few words in our marriage that they mean something so if i say hey baby it's important to me that you leave that you know glass of water on the table then there she just wouldn't move it period simple as like the the word important like comes in all caps with exclamation points glowing red like that's like when we say it like it's a drop whatever you're doing like it's important that you do x y z now the big thing is when you define a word like that you can't ever abuse it so like i would never say it's important to me that you leave you know it's got to be it's just extraordinary like how many times do i tell her something's important in a year i don't know six seven times in a year so it's like it's really got to be limited and then another one is promise if i say i promise i'm gonna do that dude i'm going to do that like there's no two ways about it so you never throw around promise ever under any circumstance and so dude it's like you really really have to be hardcore and so and the other way that we use promise is um if if uh she says you know how does this dress look on me i'm like yeah it looks great and she's like you promise then it's like all right all right it makes you look fat what can i say you know what i mean it's like but then you you cut to like the chase on something now the thing is you can't say that all the time you can't be like how's this dress make me look fine promise uh what do you think of this dinner you like it yeah i love it promise like if you're doing that it loses everything but if you're saving it for like in fact god i almost don't remember the last time i asked lisa to promise something like that um but you know that you haven't we certainly use it more in the early days of our marriage but even then like how many times a year three or four i mean it's like but it really forces you to respect these things you make sacred in your relationship the number one question i get and i get this question so much you can't imagine how do i find my passion the good news is passion is not something that's handed to you it is not a lightning bolt moment it's another nice simple mathematical equation first of all you need to identify your areas of interest everybody's interested in something and i find the big problem is people stop themselves because they say yeah well the thing that i'm interested in couldn't possibly be a business so let's take video games back in the 80s back when everybody thought the video games were a joke you're ruining your brain it's like intellectual candy kids get off the computer go play outside nintendo's a joke it's ridiculous and then we have an entire industry now that's born up around video games that has made untold numbers of millionaires i met one of the founders of riot games that created league of legends the guy guys like i don't know 31 maybe younger i mean just crazy they do a billion dollars a billion dollars in revenue for micro transactions of things that are not essential to play the game the game is totally free to play you don't need to pay for anything imagine that for a second you're in an industry where they don't need to buy anything to get full use of your game and yet you do over a billion dollars in revenue because they said i love this i like being around games i like the competition of it i think it's amazing i'm gonna find a way i'm gonna be inventive i'm gonna look for areas to add value and so they have and more people now watch esports the finale of league of legends then watch the finales i think of all major sports combined it's crazy they fill arenas it's absolutely bonkers but that was somebody who said this is something i love it's something i want to be around it is an area of interest and i don't care if other people tell me that it can't be a business it's what i want to be around with enough ingenuity and enough for thought into what actually can be a business because some things can't you can really do something with something that's an interest all right so an interest you need to gain mastery in it during the process of gaining mastery you'll find out whether you actually like that thing enough to become great at it it is my belief whatever it is you set out to do as a business there should be one litmus test you should be able to ask and affirmatively answer the following question do i want to know more about this than anyone else in the world don't get into something unless you plan to be the best that's my piece of advice i know that's not going to sit well with everybody but if you want to have the passion to make something big to make big change it's got to be something that you believe in beyond reasonable doubt it's got to be something you've just got to make happen so ask yourself do i want to know more about this than anyone else because you're going to have to get better at it than anyone else if you want to be excellent and deliver on the promise they're very concrete habits that you can use that i have used once you get your mind in the right place once you believe that it can happen this is what i did i worked out why because it helped me gain control of my mind one it was micro credibility with myself every day i said i was gonna do something i did it two when you're suffering and you're willing to fight through it you tell yourself a story that you're willing to pay the price to become what you want to become and also and this may be the most important reason each and every one of you should start working out and it has nothing to do with living longer because we could get hit by a meteorite who knows so i'm not even worried about that but i am worried about this when you watch your body transform you get the loudest signal from your subconscious that you can change that you can change anything you want that you can change your bicep your tricep your quad whatever it is you want something that you literally could not do the day before you can do today and your mind sees that that's true your mind sees that something you couldn't pick up yesterday you can pick up today and it begins to ask itself well if that's possible then what else is possible now for me finding my center was also a very important thing so i work out first the next thing i do without fail is meditate i do a just breathe meditation where i'm simply trying to calm my mind then i do what i call thinkitating during meditating i get into an alpha wave state brain pattern which enhances creativity and unique connections i'm not worried about whether i'll ever think a unique thought i am simply interested in the unique connections that i will make that no one else before me or after me will ever make because their circumstances are different than mine and that to me is what makes each of us a beautiful snowflake is we're all going to make connections that other people might not make and so during thinking i take advantage of a problem i'm trying to solve i smash it together with my alpha wave state and i see what comes out of it i read i read obsessively because i believe in one simple math equation ideas in equal ideas out and then i keep a list of the most important things i'm trying to accomplish if you're trying to become something you need to know what that something is i am not a born entrepreneur now there are many people that consider themselves a born entrepreneur i am not one of them i know that there were kids out there that had lemonade stands when they were like six months old they couldn't hold their head up but they could sell that was not me i was totally when it came to stuff like that i had a paper route and they gave your money in two ways one they just gave you sort of a blanket weekly payment for delivering the paper but then the other part of it was you were supposed to go collect that money and i was too afraid to knock on the doors to collect the money so i never got that part but i felt so obligated that i said i would do it that i kept delivering the papers essentially for free so that's where i started as an entrepreneur my parents biggest frustration was that i was epically lazy and if they handed out gold medals for being lazy i would have won i assure you hands down there was a period in my life where i would spend between two and three hours in bed because it was warm in bed and it was cold out of bed all right that's true i actually did an interview with jocko willink if you guys know him extreme ownership his book totally blew me away and in the middle of the interview i confessed that and he said tom don't worry we'll let you edit that out and i said jocko i don't i actually don't want to edit that out because right now the narrative about what it means to be an entrepreneur is to be naturally gifted and i call total on that because i'm not naturally gifted i don't have any natural talents and all of us are born as this lump of jelly that can't hold its own head up that poos in its pants and we all learn to do things and it's that ability to specialize that makes us great and the things that you choose to put your time and energy into those are going to be the things that allow you to accomplish something but all of that is a choice i heard a quote one time and it so terrifies me this in fact over a long enough time period people are going to hear this quote from me so many times because seriously man i'm not joking this scares me and it scares me enough that it it has a daily place in my life and that is genius is a young man's game and when i heard that quote i thought whoa the one thing that all of us touch for the briefest of moments is youth and if you're lucky what you'll get is a whole lot of middle age and then some old age but you don't get a lot of youth and so i just thought oh that's really scary and they were basing it on the number of people that win nobel prizes it's almost always for work they did in their 20s and 30s almost always and i thought i don't like that and so looking at why that and the reason i guess this is important to say the reason that i didn't like it was i felt that my youth was really whipping by and i hadn't accomplished the things that i wanted to accomplish so if i'm you know my youth is wishing by me how do i make sure that i can access genius at any time that an on a genius shorthand for like playing at the absolute best of your game and really changing things like really having an impact and this is one thing i think you and i share like no i want to have impact in the world so um if i just wanted to be rich lisa and i would have bought an island and retired you know years ago um so clearly there's something more that's motivating me and that thing is impact and really touching lives so it's like wanting to be able to do that i don't want to say well i had this brief window in my youth and either did or didn't make use of it but even if i did i don't want the rest of my life to be looking back on that so another quote that drives me your future should always be bigger than your past so all right you've got genius as a young man's game and a personal belief of mine that you you should always be looking towards doing something more than you've ever done and so you put those two together and i just knew i had to solve for that problem and the only solution that i have for it is switching things up like you said to live at the edges and the same book was talking about the people that do end up getting either multiple nobel prizes or prizes for work they did later is it's people that would routinely change so that they would have these two overlapping areas so like chemistry and physics and like where those two meet like there's new discoveries and new ways to challenge your own thinking and so always staying fresh always challenging my own thinking always looking at how am i wrong most people go into an endeavor with the confirmation bias in fact you just brought that up so it's like i'm so aware that by nature like everybody i just want to be told how right i am how amazing the way that i'm thinking is and because it feels good right that feels awesome now you've had like i have you've had extraordinary people sitting across from me i've been blessed to have you sit across from me today and i'm curious if there was a common uh denominator between all of these people or what have you learned that surprised you in doing the show so far the thing that's really surprised me is that it is so consistent that which is what the what what has made them all successful and their ability to articulate it they use different words some people come at it from different angles everybody has something fresh at any moment this is so important at any moment you can choose to believe something new about yourself now the weird thing about belief is as soon as you change that belief it becomes true why that is i will never quite understand what weird quirk of human evolution has left us in a space where simply believing it makes it true if you think you're dumb guess what you're dumb truly and you will act in accordance with that belief and that should scare the out of you because it scared the life out of me and i saw myself heading down a path that i did not want to be on because i believed that i was dumb i had a fixed mindset i used to only apply for jobs where i knew i'd be smarter than the person interviewing me because i did not want to feel badly about myself but you can imagine the types of jobs that i got i once lovingly referred to myself as the king of remedial jobs and i actually had pride in that because what i built my sense of pride around was getting the job was always being smart was being right and none of those things were moving me towards my goals now if you don't know this quote live by it one can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery over oneself that's da vinci da vinci did amazing things with his life i wanted to do equally amazing things with mine and if that's the game that we're playing if i can construct my belief system if i can choose at any moment to believe something that's more empowering than i was believing the moment before and that that will actually find its way into my actions allow me to do things that i couldn't do the moment before then it's like that moment in the matrix where nia realizes he knows kung fu and that's like as funny as that is that's how i think about life to me the very fundamental purpose of life is to find out how many skills i can acquire that have utility and then put that utility to the test in service of something greater than myself and i used to say to myself all the time you're gonna get rich or you're gonna die trying and so starting as a copywriter i started busting my ass step number one i convinced my wife we're going to because there were two other partners that hired me i'm gonna pick an apartment that's no more than five minutes from either of them that way if they call me at two in the morning i'll be there in five minutes and they're gonna know no one else in their company is as serious as me and i'm gonna claw my way up this company and i'm gonna get whatever job i become the right person for and i'm going to work my way up and by the time we ended up selling that company i had clawed my way through sweat equity into owning 10 percent of the company and being the chief marketing officer from starting as the copywriter the person that everybody asked who's the kid in the server room was the only person that didn't have a window they literally put me in the room with all the computer servers but starting from there i knew i could wow people because i was willing to grind it out and that is one of the most valuable things that anybody can do only execution matters burn that into your nervous system get a tattoo do whatever you need to do to remind yourself only execution matters thinking about it feeling good about it those are awesome but if you have a vision of something you're trying to do become whatever and you don't execute against it and i don't need you to want to build a big business if you tell me you want to be the greatest parent of all time then i'm going to ask you what are you doing to execute on that goal what are you doing how do you define it what are your deliverables what are the metrics by which you're judging yourself and by the way if you don't want a grand goal you don't need one but then say what i'm trying to do is get centered i'm trying to experience happiness even that you can begin to look at ways that you can improve that now i very much subscribe to the theory that the human animal is an active species meaning it will forever be moving forward i think that's a good thing it's one of the most exciting things in my life and i have three fears one brain damage that freaks me out two losing my wife because damn that woman's cool and then three i don't ever want to feel like i've hit the end of what i can do i always want to feel like there's something more that i can learn and grow into so keeping in mind execution is how you get there no matter what your path is and in the beginning when all we could do because we didn't know production we just had to throw human capital at it and i needed people there not kidding at 2am on a friday night i had a bunch of ex-convicts in their early 20s with the tattoos on the face the teardrop and all that grinding it out to make protein bars because i gave them hope because i showed them that it doesn't matter who they are today it only matters who they're trying to become and the price that they're willing to pay to get there and so when you guys walk out of here that's what you've got to ask this whole theme of pivoting this whole theme of keeping your center is about knowing what you want and believing you can make it a reality but the only way to make it a reality is to put in the work you've got to put in the work the change is hard the change is difficult the change will demand everything of you but man if inside you really believe in what you're doing you really see how you can get to that goal that you want if you really see how you can serve other people doing what you do with this skill set that you've worked your ass off to acquire then you can actually make change in people's lives and that's what motivates me getting the skills has real world implications it took me from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car to building a billion dollar business it is absolutely limitless what you can accomplish now think about that if that's really true if what i just said is true that human potential is limitless then how you spend your time becomes a spiritual consideration so when you guys part from here one stay in touch with each other because you're gonna need that because if you're gonna start pushing the limits if you're gonna show how much somebody in your position can influence other people's lives if you're gonna show people the power of what you do if you're going to show people the depths to which you can touch another human's life if you've seen the look on somebody's face who has been transformed by what you've done by them to see them transform their vision of themselves and to watch them before your eyes go from believing that they can't do something to realizing that they can that they have untapped stores of potential now i don't think that we're born blank slates but we are so close to that to worry about where your limits are is to miss how much you can improve so focus on how much you can improve there's an amazing quote by alexander solzhenitsyn the author of the goulet archipelago and what he said was the line between good and evil runs through every human heart to me it's not about good and evil to me it's about malleability that's a statement of how shapeable we are now here's the terrifying thing about how we get shaped it happens when you're young you get all these things that come to you that seem to be simply true i believed that the human mind couldn't change i believed that it was fixed i believed that my talent and intelligence were just what they were it all seemed true it wasn't like i knew it to be a lie it wasn't even like i knew that i had a choice to think of it a different way and one of my favorite quotes of all time is from albert einstein and he said the most important decision any human being has to make is whether they live in a friendly or a hostile universe decision the most important decision anyone has to make because neither of those two states is empirically true but either will immediately appear true once you decide to believe it so once you decide to believe yo the world is working for me this is happening for me it's not happening to me i know this room has heard that statement once you believe that you start looking for the ways in which that was powerful how was the worst thing that ever happened to me actually secretly the best thing that's ever happened to me and so suddenly i started saying how is this shame of sitting in bed how is this the best thing that's ever happened to me how is this solieri type awareness of just how dumb i really am how is that powerful and the thing that winds me up when i say that when i talk about i started from not being that bright nobody thought i was gonna win my own mother thought i was gonna fail my father-in-law did not want me to marry his daughter they think that i'm just being humble or that even i misidentified myself but the reality is that's how shapeable a human being is and i had made decisions i had chosen to believe things i had chosen to value myself for things i had built myself around my self-esteem around things that were not moving me forward and so i began to change my belief system i began to change the things that i value and think about values think about how much they shape your life depending on where you grow up you could become one of the members of the tribe on north sentinel island who killed that missionary who rolled up on their beaches they just started hitting that fool with spears and arrows and just killed him you could be that you could be a warrior of sparta you could be a nazi guard depending on the time and the place you grew up in you could be a manhattan socialite you could be a party girl you could be one of any countless identities that we see in the world not because you were born to be that thing if we were born to be something then we would still see some percentage of spartan warriors being born today we would see north sentinelese born in omaha nebraska but we don't because each of these places carries with it a value system a belief system things that are unique to that group that you grow up in what your parents tell you about your family about you what it means to be you what you learn in schools what you see in the media all of that stuff is shaping how you view yourself and how you view the world but it's happening insidious insidiously because it is so invisible people don't realize that they are choices now once you reframe all of this these are things that i'm choosing to believe and once you realize you can choose to believe something new and thusly get a different result everything changes what is that mindset of constantly working on yourself without judging yourself to a deeper level without doing it in a way that always pulling you down but always pushing you up and you're doing that in your relationship whenever i watch relationship theory i think the conversations you and lisa have incredible so it seems like you're doing in all areas of your life which era did it start in which areas did it evolve to let's just break that hole yeah so let's answer that question so where did it start and where did it go so the honest answer is that like many of the most amazing things in my life they were born of misery and i was deeply and profoundly unhappy dissatisfied with who i was what i was capable of where i was in life all of it i was just really unhappy about it now the one good thing is i've always met things like that with and what can i do and i have a bias towards action and then i've cultivated that bias action which is how it's gotten extreme and has permeated into every area of my life okay so it starts with it's this dark place this like i said i failed in film school i didn't fail in film school i graduated second in my class but there was a failure that was so emotionally catastrophic that everybody else would have been like oh you got to be like what's the problem sure i got to be in the class but i didn't walk away with a thesis film that i could use to get a job as a filmmaker so for me it was like whoa i just lost massively so i'm you know in this very dark place i'm broke as the day is long i can't afford furniture i literally sit on the floor in my unfurnished apartment like that you know just it's a normal phase that people go through but then put on top of that that i'm feeling down and stuck like i don't know where i'm gonna go propensity towards action kicks in i start reading i'm learning about the brain figuring out how much of this can i change i realize i can change it and then that change felt so good and even let's do a thought exercise this is for people listening because you're already there but for anybody listening and you're listening to jay because you want to get there you see something which by the way you feel when you're with him it is real and i love that about you but like this sense of peace like the normal slings and arrows of life he's found a way to deal with i won't say that he doesn't have them but he's found a way to deal with it and that's what you're looking for so going into that it's like if you are in a dark place and you hear change is real change is possible doesn't that lift your mood don't you want that to be true and once you allow it because you have to allow it once you allow that to lift your mood you're like i feel better just by thinking i can change that was huge for me that was like moment one was when i realized i actually can change so this thing that feels like a death threat this like smothering cloud of just like despair it can clear away and it immediately and it's not like oh it went from gray skies to blue skies it wasn't that immediate but it was it literally immediately a lighter load just because i realized i can change so i was like whoa i can change none of this is a death sentence that's so like just amazing that was enough to get me going and people are always looking for how do i have that energy i'm depressed i'm down on myself how do i get the energy to push through man you've got to find a way to find energy in that you can change so whatever position you're in right now you can change no matter what it is no matter how horrific no matter what you've been through no matter what you've done like there is a way out from under it but part of it is allowing that sense of lightness to be there so i allowed it the important thing here to note is that everyone needs an ego everyone needs self-esteem everyone needs to feel good about themselves and the crazy thing when you really stop and think about suicide and this is a new obsession of mine if you stop and think about suicide what has happened that person believes falsely but they believe that they'll never be happy again that they'll never feel good about themselves again and that's why it's referred to as a permanent solution to a temporary problem because that will pass but in that moment it feels like it couldn't ever go away so we need to find things that make us feel good about who we are because when you lose a sense of feeling good about who you are life truly feels hopeless so that's critical and people often talk about you know to stay away from an ego to not pride yourself on things but i'm telling you that person prides themselves on not having an ego and so it becomes what you pride yourself on is absolutely incredible now don't make the mistake that i made i used to want to be smart when i talked about being the king of remedial jobs was because i wanted to put myself in situations where i was the smartest person in the room and in doing that i was always going into smaller and smaller rooms but it felt so good to be right and the problem was i was wrong a lot of the times now when this one finally came to a head my business partners who were far smarter than i am in terms of iq processing data which i define iq as your ability to process data rapidly they could process data very rapidly and we would get into arguments and i would always lose it was very frustrating and i remember one day finally i actually convinced them to do something my way and i realized oh i just won the argument but i know i'm wrong and so now what i've gotten what i thought i wanted i finally won this victory i'm if i don't feel smart myself at least i'm getting reflected back to me that i've i've solved the problem and now i feel totally stuck because if i really want to move towards my goal of getting rich it does not help to do things that i know are against the company just to be right and in that moment i realized what i had to do was switch my self-esteem from being right to pursuing the right answer faster than anyone else and then putting energy behind that and being like oh my gosh timmy came up with the idea it was sally and sally oh my gosh it's amazing and giving them so much energy to try to see it through because that's the right idea and then i began to develop my reputation of being the guy that even if three seconds before that i had been fighting for another idea once i realized i was wrong i would admit it and it's amazing what reputation you can build around that and it is way more effective for business how do you think about failure then um not trying for me like to not have the audacious goal to not really give it a real shot and i know i'm constantly gut-checking myself or am i playing at building the next disney or am i actually building the next disney that means something to me so if i get to the end of this and the world is clapping for me and they're like oh my god you're so amazing and look how far you went but i know that i was only playing at trying to get there and that i kept dialing it back because i was getting too scared that that would be failure for me the first thing you need to do whenever somebody wants something they know what they want they've got a clear goal they're prepared to do the work but they just find there's pretty radical inconsistencies as they're trying to move along that path to really get something going number one is that you need to really get amped up about why that goal matters to you because once you know why the goal matters that's going to be that thing that gives you meaning and purpose that turns into a passion that allows you to show up and keep doing it when you're bored because boredom kills more dreams than failure i just promise you you just get to the point where it's such a grind and you've got to do it day after day month after month year after year it's just like it really drags on it's like that old outcast song forever forever ever forever ever it's like it's easy to do something once maybe you can do it for a week but when you have to just keep at the grind then you really have to have a strong why so figuring out why is it that you care enough about this because by the way if you don't care enough about it to do all this go find something that you do care enough about to go after because you can do anything you want in life just not everything now if you're as angered by that notion as i am you realize whatever it is you're going to give yourself over to and do all the way it needs to be something that you are really on fire about now getting on fire about something you're not born with that you cultivate that fire so you're going to pick something starts as an interest you're going to pick it engage with it fan the flames of that fire by talking about it to yourself to your friends to your family to anybody who will listen about why it matters to you and then you go hard on that so like for me i'm trying to build the next disney but why why am i trying to build the next disney because i've worked with so many people in the inner cities that were extraordinary far smarter than i am and they're doing nothing with their life why because they don't have the right frame of reference their mindset is so limited that even though they have all of this natural skill that they could build upon and turn into something absolutely extraordinary they're not doing it because they're not thinking about themselves and the world in the right way okay i'm not prepared to live in that world right now in america the number one predictor of your future success is your zip code okay i want to introduce you to a word maybe you know what maybe don't called an animus something that that pisses you off enough that it animates you to take action now you want to find something a spark of something and really turn that into this raging inferno of i am not prepared to live in a world where that's true and now i'm going to show up every day and i'm going to fight make sure you focus it get it specific to a person don't let it be abstract who's someone you know and love that's struggling with that thing that you want to put an end to do you have a mom that's struggling with depression a brother that has massive anxiety whatever the case may be there's something out there that animates you that you want to fix and you attach that to a person that you love and care for why so that on a friday at 2am when you're exhausted and you're bored and you know you need to show up and have the discipline to see this through you don't want to be thinking in the abstract you want to be thinking very concretely about a person who is struggling with that thing and then you can fight for them i always said at quest i was trying to end metabolic disease because my mom and my sister were morbidly obese and i didn't want them to die so a friday on a 2 a.m i wasn't showing up thinking about protein bars i showed up thinking about them and suddenly when you're fighting for somebody like that and it's personal you'll have the energy that you need to see it through what does the meditation uh process specifically look like dead simple so i use a what i call just breathe so it was born of mark divine's box breathing at least he was the one that introduced it to me so he preaches do it four equal parts so you've got the inhale is the exact same length as the inhale hold exact same length as the exhale exact same length as the exhale hold now doing that made me feel out of breath i just felt weird so what i started doing was i'm going to maximize the pleasure in each part of the breath cycle so for me it happens to be a sort of medium inhale a very short inhale hold a rapid exhale i just let the air out and then a very prolonged exhale hold and that rhythm feels awesome and i do that for 10 or 15 minutes and i can get into an alpha wave stay to feel calm creative um it just feels awesome that that's one of those things that people that haven't tried meditation or tried it but never got to the part where it feels awesome my heart breaks for them it is a tool i rejected for so many years because it felt um wussy to me and remember i'm the guy that had to learn to toughen up so i feared that that was like backwards momentum and so finally when mark devine looked at me and was basically like stop being an idiot and try this and he's like this tough ass navy seal yeah i thought i'm gonna try and then it changed my life i switched my self-esteem from being right and being smart to being the learner who was always willing to admit that he was wrong identify the right answer give credit to the person who thought of it and put more energy behind it than anyone else and that became my driver now what did i do with that driver i turned that change in attitude along with my co-founders at quest nutrition into building as vision said the second fastest growing company in north america valued at over a billion dollars every financial dream i'd ever had in my life come true but at the end of the day the only thing that mattered had nothing to do with the money and it had everything to do with we set out to build a business around value creation we set out to actively ask one question what would we do and love every day even if we were failing and that for three very different reasons ended up being attacking the pandemic of the body trying to help people live a more beautiful life and there were times where putting that value first meant that we did things that were less profitable there were times where we put that value first and it was outright stressful to the company but that was the driver and that was the thing that actually allowed us to grow because people could feel that this company was different they could feel that we weren't after the sale they could feel what we wanted was to help and in today's world leading with that as you guys know if you're at this conference can have tremendous rewards there's a part in fight club and the gift that i would like to give the world if i had which i did not but if i had sat down and set my intention for you know what do i want to convey this is one of my like top five things that i want to get across to people if you really want to succeed yeah there's a moment in fight club where he puts his hand out and the guy puts a caustic solution on the back of his hand and it burns and he tells him that he has to just leave it there and he ends up holding his hand down so that he can't take it away at first because it hurts so badly and then finally he releases and the guy has the strength to leave his hand there and let it just burn and what i'm saying is you have a mechanism in your mind called the psychological immune system its job is getting to pull your hand away to wash off the thing that burns and hey you're fine again what i'm saying is if you want to be great the burning sensation is you having to accept that you've picked something up that you're not as good as you want to be that there are people that are better than you that you're not far as far along in the journey as you want to be and what you have to learn how to do if you want to be great you have to learn to let it burn and even though your impulse is going to be to turn away from that to not look at it to soothe it by saying it's them it's their fault they picked it up i grew and grow up in the wrong place it's fine for them they're wealthy like whatever excuse you use to try to let yourself off the hook for not being where you want to be instead of saying actually the power is the ability to let it burn and one of my employees was just asking me yesterday and he said how do you not get overwhelmed and i said you want to know the god's honest truth the second i feel that impulse brendan i say to myself you don't get overwhelmed i'm i'm not gonna back down i will not break you cannot break me yeah that yeah get that out of your head right now yeah and just interrupting that thought with an aggressive impulse of like yeah i'm gonna let it burn yeah now i'm not a so i immediately go hey thank you psychology for letting me know that oh there's a lot of things coming at me right now yep so i'm gonna go meditate but the way that i interrupt the thought is by reminding myself not to be weak who's in control right 100 they once gave me a list like 750 000 keywords and i had to comb through it in an excel spreadsheet and say either yes or no that took days and days and days of mind numbing yes no yes no yes no yes no what do you mean 750 this was back in like so we had um words that did we want to advertise on do we want to advertise on these keywords like so you would buy a list of like powerful keywords on google and this is all cpc stuff so do we want to show up on these keywords yes or no like here's our business you know what we're doing what keywords would we want to show up on and so i'd have to go and clean the list there's no way no ai to comb through it for us so i would do that so anything like that where i could i just add value add value add value and everyone starts gravitating towards the person who's always upbeat great energy and never says no and is always asking how they can help it it is a formula that will win for all time and so that was it and i just threw that that intensity at it because every day i was like i'm here to get rich i'm here to get rich and when i get rich i'm going to go build my studio i'm going to get rich rich rich rich and that was all i thought about obsessed over it now that would end up being my almost downfall but that was my obsession in your experience with all the you know business experience that you've had the books you've read the people that you've spent time with what do you think is uh the biggest impediment to people waking up out of this matrix-like existence that's so easy for us to fall prey to so i've had a realization recently that i'm not an all lanes driver there are certain things i've spent so much time thinking about that i'm very good at answering questions and there are certain things that i'm not so i'll give you an answer that question from my very um specific lens which is all about the person so i think that if the things in the world that scare me the divisiveness scares me and when i think about what is the individual's creation of that divisiveness it is one a desire to belong to a group intensely a fear of being ridiculed or emotionally ostracized and once we know that we have this like sucking need to belong to be respected to be liked you can really begin to decide what are the things that you want to be liked for respected for and when those are things that you respect yourself for then all of a sudden it becomes very easy to do two things to build something that is born of connection community kindness not that you're not self selfish i'm very selfish it just so happens that the more selfish i am the more i like to connect and help other people i am very much doing it for me but it manifests in a way that is humanity neutral worst case and i think humanity plus ultimately so that that starts with me having a growth mindset so that you you want to see how you're wrong that you can have these really ferocious ideas but hold them loosely because the moment that your identity is wrapped up in your ideas you are in real trouble man your identity should be wrapped up in your outcome what outcome do you want and are you actually getting that outcome and then as long as you're not a sociopath with an ugly outcome like people that get into identity politics and things like that i'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and say no for real the the world they imagine is a beautiful world for the people that they love and care about okay fair enough so i'll just give them that they're trying to do something positive but when you look at the outcome in terms of how it affects everyone it starts to break down pretty fast like that's where it really starts to worry me so that to me says that your identity is based on something that isn't necessarily anti-fragile it's probably based on something pretty fragile so to use naseem teles term something that is fragile that's easy to understand something that is anti-fragile isn't something that's strong or resilient those are still defined by their breaking point it's just that their breaking point is far away but ultimately even something that's strong it's strong because you think wow it can take a lot before it breaks something that's anti-fragile on the other hand actually grows stronger the more that it's attacked so and that doesn't mean you entrench in a position that clearly everybody's saying like this is crazy the only anti-fragile position that i can think of is to be that of the learner that is truly anti-fragile so for instance if you come at me and say that i'm stupid be like amazing in what way and the reason that i say amazing is because i i know that skills make me more powerful so you've just said that i have a blind spot which means that i'm less powerful than i could be and i'll define power because i think it weird some people out to me powerful just means you can close your eyes imagine a world a better world than the one that we have today you can then open your eyes and actually create that world so that's the kind of power that i'm trying to amass in my life the ability to impact people at scale in a positive way so if you're telling me that i'm less powerful than i could be amazing i want to know in what way because once i'm aware of it then i can address it because i know about myself that i'm willing to accept that i'm inadequate because i know that it's a temporary state i'm not good at it yet if i decide that it really does match with my goals and what i want to do i can get good at it so it's not ego damaging for you to tell me that i've you know i'm not doing something in a way that i could be it could be better cool tell me how when people don't want to hear that it's like oh it's they're in a very brittle place they're being backed into a corner and people lash out and they're backed into a corner so at an individual level i would say to everybody if you feel that your blood boiling when somebody challenges you if you feel like a caged animal or like you're being backed into a corner i promise you 100 it is not the truth of the world it is that you have a fragile something a fragile ego a fragile belief system something in there can break and because it can break you're trying to protect it and the more you try to protect it the more hardened and potentially violent vicious cruel whatever that you may become so when it isn't that and you're not afraid of that thing breaking because you want to take information in you want to assess it doesn't mean you're going to agree you may take that criticism and go i actually don't think that's accurate but i'm really grateful that you gave me that piece of information and look intention matters you can tell when someone's just trying to be a so it's like you've got to be cognizant enough of that but when you get to that point where you're you're leading with everything is my fault including the way this person is coming at me i've done something to make them want to come at me too hard or whatever so at the individual level i think that that at the fragility versus anti-fragility is is where everyone should start you will only ever get in your life what you absolutely must have your absolute obsession so you that says your obsessions become your possessions that is so true and so getting people to understand that that level of like i must have this until it is that like whatever it is if it's taking care of your wife if it's doing something rad for your mom if it's having a beach house whatever it is until you need that like you need oxygen you won't get it it is going to demand so much of you you're going to fall so many times there's going to be so many obstacles and unless it must happen in your life one of them will make you stop like you said you can't be for sale like if your will can be bought it doesn't make you a bad person man it really doesn't but if your will can be bought you're just not going to get it you don't get skills because it looks good on the resume you get skills because it lets you do the thing you want to do so let's uh let's use sports as an example it's just all too easy not to use it so if you want you're in poverty and you're um lionel messi and you realize actually i think um who's the other one christian cristiano ronaldo thank you he was in the grips of poverty and nice that's perfect so cristiano ronaldo in the grips of poverty realizes that playing soccer is a way out for him and so he goes and gets the skills why because if he can win on the soccer field then he can actually elevate his family out of poverty like when you see that trail it goes back to the nietzsche quote if you have a y you can survive almost any how so how am i going to get there the the amount of work that cristiano ronaldo has put in to become one of the greatest if not the greatest the greatest football player of all time is it's inhuman anybody else would look at and say nope not willing to do that and fair enough but it was somebody who said if i gain these skills it will let me dribble around people score when other people can't score galvanize a team around me leverage it to be wanted by teams to turn into financial resources to make me famous so that i can get brand deals and things like that all the things that he would need to do to pull himself out of poverty like this stuff isn't an accident it's about skill acquisition so there's another kid that had the same dream i'm gonna use soccer to get me out of poverty and did nothing about it therefore did not have the skills therefore could not elevate their family out of poverty and looks at it like well this is all circumstance it's not circumstance it's cause and effect it's how much energy do you put into actually gaining the skills and did you gain them or did you just put in the energy and the effort thinking that should be enough to gain it but you didn't actually gain them so this is what it's it's like the gift i want everybody to receive is you can get good at anything you set your mind to but do you actually say your mind to it do you have that inhuman level of follow through do you keep pushing and fighting long after it stopped being fun deep into boredom because you have a why you know why you're doing what you're doing and you're just driving towards that and when you have that you can accomplish this extraordinary stuff but i really think people now are doing it for the gram you're doing it for the gram you want to go to that thing and do it because it's like oh this is going to look good on my gram and look i've done that a hundred times i get it but at the core of my existence is not that at the core of my existence is i'm going to in the amount of time that i have i'm going to be acquiring skills i've always said that the most sinister thing about excuses is that they're real like you really do have reasons not to be successful but now what like now what now what are you gonna do like um i remember i was giving a talk at google and one of the guys happened to be african-american and he said tom do you think it's harder for me as a black person in america to succeed and i said that seems patently self-evident even even just accepting that humans tend to gravitate towards those that look like them what i call the school of fish phenomenon you always see the same kind of fish with the same kind of fish so being a minority just by definition is going to make things harder but now what like now you can take that excuse and give yourself an out to not try to not get started which is something you talk a lot about or you can say regardless of that i'm going to do whatever it takes to get where i want to go if you haven't read angela duckworth's book on grit i highly recommend it it is amazing i'll give you some of the key takeaways the biggest part about grit is sustained effort over time if you lose interest quickly in something once or twice no big deal it is what it is you realize that it wasn't your thing but if you lose interest over and over and over and over and over and you always only enjoy the you know first six months of a business and then you want to move on you lose interest very quickly you need to work on developing your grit being able to sustain that over time because building any business you're going to encounter hard things you need to be able to do those hard things focusing on the hard things in fact i try to start every day with one of the hardest things to get it out of the way to remind myself that i'm willing to attack that all right you want to be able to persist through boredom and suffering i told you guys that's one of my superpowers long after everybody else gives up because i'm not having fun anymore i'm still there banging away at it that's really really important in order to create momentum to keep things moving and to finally get them across the finish line a lot of people are able to get something to the 50-yard line or maybe even the one-yard line but they just can't quite push it over the finish line and that is the difference between somebody who's a entrepreneur and somebody who ends up being successful the way that they want they can get it across the finish line all right learn to tell the difference between a lack of grit and genuine disinterest if you're not interested in something you need to move on quickly but like i said if that becomes serial you may have a problem and if you're only good in the beginning that's uh the sign elaborate we're surrounded they're in front of us behind us to the left and right of us [Music] they can't get away this time when you can be surrounded when you can be in a position where you know that you're outgunned and still convince yourself that you're going to win to go into it believing you're going to win then you'll understand one of the fundamental truths of being a human being to accomplish the extraordinary first first you must believe you have to believe in something even before you have any earthly right to believe in it you have to be able to look inside of yourself and know that you're going to show up to look inside of yourself and see something that nobody else can see to know that you are playing to win to know that you understand the way the mind works and that if you can't believe it first if you can't see a vision for yourself of being capable of something then you're not capable of it and that if you want to do what other people simply can't do then you've got to start by convincing yourself that you can do it that comes down to a belief about who you are and what you're capable of and that belief is yours to hold no one can give it to you no one can take it away is who you are a decision a choice a belief walk us through your goal-setting process okay so um normally it starts with chasing my bliss so if you have read joseph campbell he talks a lot about this and this is really powerful and i think that something people don't think a lot about there is something in your life and this is sort of my secret um not secret because i've talked a lot about it but it's like the thing i don't think people are hearing me it's like in you right now i promise is something that you love to do and most people dismiss it and they dismiss it probably because they don't know how to monetize it they don't think it could be a job they don't think it can be a business their family and friends have told them you know that that's silly or stupid or whatever and so they never realize like they're they literally have a blinder to the fact that there is something in their life that's a raging interest it may not be quite a passion but it's like a raging interest and so i'm always trying to start there so the example that i always give to people of a raging interest is video games so a lot of people like to play video games or they like to read or whatever right so it's like the thing that they go and do when they're sort of you know contracting into themselves they've had a rough day or whatever or even jesus food like people really retreat into food right and so um imagine becoming a food blogger right it's like food is that thing that gives you comfort it's that thing that you think you have this negative relationship with you've got this really um unstable thing where you eat you feel guilty whatever like if you could recognize that okay this is something that i love there is a way to find a healthy relationship with this i'm going to do that and then i want to talk about it and i'm going to you know connect with other people and even if in the beginning you don't know how to make money at it like do it because it will make you feel alive right and there's that great quote and again wow i'm really forgetting my quotes today of who said it but it was like don't worry about what you could be great at do the thing that makes you feel most alive because what the world really needs is people who've come alive and so like if you tap into that thing that makes you feel alive like that to me is the juice so turn inward don't dismiss it no matter how silly or stupid it might be like what is that thing that makes you feel most alive so that's always where i'm starting so when you think about um what we're doing at quest or now what we're doing with impact theory those were both moments where i turned inside and said okay what are like what's me following my bliss like this is the thing when i really sit down and try to break down for people what you need to do to be successful there's certain places i stop because there's nothing universal to give them and the plan is one of them right so i'm i'm just ridiculously psycho about people need a goal a hyper specific goal and a plan so my thing is identify the gap between where you are and where you want to be and that gap is a gap of skill set and now you have to go and get those skills but most people can't identify what skills actually lie between where they are and where they want to go they get it like from the end result but they don't know how to plan that out yeah and i'm not like i don't even understand other than just sort of by intuition how i'm doing it i want to tell you a story and the story is either going to make you love me or hate me it has that effect on people the story goes like this my wife is british some of the story is true and some is made up i'll try to delineate my wife is british that really is true let's say that she was in london visiting her family she's in the bedroom that she grew up in the doors are locked the alarm is on her mother is sitting quietly in the next room protecting her from all kinds of woes and right at that moment a meteorite comes screaming through the atmosphere smashes through the roof and kills my wife whose fault is that now i know what most people are thinking it's nobody's fault it's divine providence it's luck it's fate it just is what it is that's not how i live my life and i invite you all to adopt the following belief system it's all my fault now i use the word fault because it jabs people in the ribs it gets people's attention it makes them angry because they think i'm victim shaming or blaming the victim and i'm not saying i refuse to ever be a victim and if i maintain control then there's something that i can do about it now i use that example because it seems so absurd and yet at the same time i know this is true there is a group that track what are called near-earth objects and they are trying to make sure that if one is ever on a collision course for earth that we'd be able to do something about it whether it's a laser or planted nuclear explosion whatever the case may be now i know they exist i even know where they are i've never called them to give them encouraging words i've never sent them a dime of my money i've never sent them ideas i know they exist i do nothing about it so why on earth if it comes around and that decision bites me in the ass and my wife is killed by a meteorite would i blame anyone else i could have done something and i chose not to now here's the great news i think it's a wise choice i think the odds of that happening in my wife are so slim that it would be a total waste of time but it shows you the lengths to which i had to take my mentality in order to learn the skills that i needed to learn to get where i wanted to go and the way that i define an entrepreneur is somebody who encounters an obstacle and gets really pissed because the thought of giving up never occurs to them and now they know they have to go over under through it around it whatever but they're not going to slow down and they're not going to stop how do you handle competing simultaneous good ideas things have to be done sequentially and that yeah that's a a huge pain but really focusing on one thing at a time is super critical to getting things over the finish line and this is something that not enough people think about getting something over the finish line is is the key so um it gets really boring and there's just an innate uh boredom to especially when i um conceptualize it as being an entrepreneur one of the things that every now and then just sort of tongue-in-cheek and for fun i'll document is when we're doing something really boring or stupid um like this morning i should have filmed it lisa spent like an hour wrangling cables and it's like that is so dull but it has to be done like otherwise you you get right up to it like you've got all these grand ideas you're gonna change the world you're gonna do this amazing stuff and then cables are the thing that stop you right and so that's one of the things that makes amazon so amazing is they get it like on a tactical level just from how do you improve the customer experience blocking and tackling blocking and tackling right it's not sexy but you've got to do it the blocking and tackling so it's the same thing with doing things sequentially you'll get these great ideas you want to do them all and you can do them all there's so much time in life but you just can't do them all at the same time so breaking them into and if they stack and that like this concept that tim ferriss has of the lead domino like finding that what is the so if you've got these five things that you want to do the order that you do them in can be really critical and then i know that in saying that i'm paralyzing people because then they're like well i don't know what the order is and yes that's one of the things you have to get good at is really identifying what is the sequence in which things are optimally done and the only way to do that is to stop and think through it and think okay what's the lead domino if i do this then what are the other things that fall so take um for me speed reading or the way i do it audible that was like the lead domino if i can train myself to assimilate information faster then i can get a skill faster and if i can get a skill faster than i can execute faster so i actually put a lot of early energy into learning to listen to audible books at 3x right so people always think that like i'm crazy and part of me is always hoping like someone will say show me your audible right now i want to see that it's actually at 3x because it's like i put so much energy and effort into like being able to do that and people think that oh well you just have some lucky skill it's not that like anything you just push yourself to do it and i'm absolutely horrific at speed reading so if i hadn't um gotten into audible i would have really really had to force myself to do that because it's the lead domino so find those things that um that are the lead dominoes and just ask like what's gonna if i do this saying what's the one that gives me the exponential results on the other stuff this has been one of my favorite weeks and it's been one of my favorite weeks for a reason that's probably very counter-intuitive for everybody it's because i've been tested last week i was sick i don't know if it was the flu food poisoning whatever it was but i had my ass handed to me i was sleeping like 12 13 hours a night which for me is absolutely unheard of and then this week i had three episodes to prepare for we shot them in less than 48 hours so over the course of just a couple of days i had to jam pack my brain full of three incredible human beings mel robbins jason silva and wyclef jean it was insane and entailed doing an absolute ton of work but this is what i love this is where i get to earn my reputation with myself i talk about earning credibility with yourself all the time and the only chance you get to do that is when things get hard i'm never impressed with myself how i act when things are easy and i'm very impressed with myself when things are hard so i'm always actually looking for those moments when things are difficult when i know that i'm willing to put in a level of work that other people just aren't willing to put in that i'm willing to spend hour after hour after hour researching people having two people on the same day that each require a day or a day and a half of research spending my entire weekend working on it working on it literally until the minute i go to bed i was listening to podcasts and interviews as i'm brushing my teeth literally making my wife put the dogs away so that i could take every possible second every transitional moment everything to drink in a little bit more knowledge and then synthesize all of that stuff so that i could do an interview that nobody else is going to be able to do and that for me is what everybody should be doing if you want to do something great if you want to stand out and i want this show to stand out if you want to be able to pull that off you've got to work harder than anybody else there's no substitute for that and that is the thing that i love that is what i love about hard work most people just aren't willing to do it so if you want to separate yourself from everybody else get better than everybody else and when you're willing to put in that work when you actually hunger for moments like this where you get to show yourself because everybody else i don't care what they think i want to know for myself who i am and how hard i'm willing to work so when you get these moments take advantage of them when they come when you have a hard road in front of you hit it with enthusiasm hit it with excitement hit it knowing that on the other side of that you get to feel a certain way about yourself that other people will never get to feel in their lives because it's the way that only people who push when no one's watching get to feel about themselves that's when you really be extraordinary that's when you really do something that's when you will surpass everyone around you because you just did the work you look forward to the test you wanted to be pushed you wanted to see what you're made of that's what it's about right now all i want to do is go to bed and this is where identity kicks in this is why i have this painting here of michael jordan from the infamous flu game i got sick i don't know what it is it's been the last couple days with stomach cramps fatigue fever i've got a big talk tonight at usc and i would love nothing more right now to crawl into bed but i'm not going to do that and i'm not going to do that because my identity doesn't allow it even right now as i think about the amount of energy that i'm expending in preparing for tonight and getting through the day and making sure that everybody here on the team is moving forward is because of that person that i'm trying to become these are the things that i absolutely have to do in order to keep pushing forward to be me it comes down to identity it comes down to what vision you have crafted for yourself what demands you make of yourself and how you react when you're tested at the end of the day you should want to be tested at the end of the day i'm actually grateful that twice now i've been confronted with either doing an interview or having a talk where i'm sick and the reason that i'm grateful for that is i get to see how i respond so what i will say to you guys is who are you trying to become not who are you today but where are you trying to get to and what is the price that you're willing to pay to get there and what are the things that you're doing repeating in your own mind surrounding yourself with that are actually going to help make you that person because at the end of the day your identity is all that you have at the end of the day your identity is going to drive your behavior and at the end of the day there is nothing else growing up i didn't show any early signs of promise a little embarrassing to put these photos up i wish these photos were atypical but in reality that is what i look like pretty much all the time uh i always had some sort of clown hat on i actually wore my pajamas out and about on the streets that's san francisco um yeah that was really where i started wanting to do something with my life i had this unending ease that i could do more i could be more i just didn't know how and i felt trapped but i didn't know what i was trapped by and my own mother who's always been my biggest cheerleader who all but kicked me out of the house when i was panicking and didn't want to leave the state for college i was actually the only person in my graduating class to leave this state wasn't something that people from tacoma washington did you stayed you went to a state school my mom still lives less than three miles from the house that she grew up in so this is not a place where people go off and explore but my mom always felt like if i didn't do that that i would have a lot of the same regrets that she had that i wouldn't see the world that i wouldn't discover myself and that one day i would look back and say what if i had only tried now what she didn't tell me at the time but she has since confessed is that she just assumed i was going to fail now my mom is hilarious she's not jewish but you would think she is because her whole life since kicking me out of the nest she's been desperately trying to claw me back and so one day i finally asked i said what is with that like literally you forced me to leave and go to college so why have you worked so hard to get me back and that's when she said with nothing but love in her heart i just always thought you would fail and that was a gift it was really a gift because at that moment i realized that the things that i've accomplished in my life had nothing to do with being given something at birth now i felt this unease that i was talking about that i could do more but i was stuck and i didn't know what i was trapped in in 1999 a movie came out called the matrix that movie ended up giving me the intellectual framework to think about what was happening in my life because there was something limiting me there was something that made me feel adrift and this gave me the vernacular to think about what it was and in the movie they talk about taking the red pill the red pill it's only promise it's only promise is the truth that's it it's not saying that it's going to make things better it's simply going to reveal the way that the world really is and that for me was incredibly intoxicating and i took the red pill intellectually and what i began to realize is that the mind is the matrix in and of itself now there's people that'll debate whether we actually live inside the matrix whether we're actually in a simulation and it's a fun conversation but i honestly don't care about the answer because i can tell you right now today in this moment i promise you the matrix has you if you guys know david foster wallace's concept of this is water to a fish water is so ubiquitous it ceases to exist now we all have that same thing and it's playing on us and it's keeping us from becoming who we want to become and that thing is our mindset it's our belief system it is so ever-present it is so ingrained into the fabric of who you are in the way that you process data you don't even notice it you don't even know that it's real and this is the thing that impacts your life it is your inability to see that your mindset controls everything that it is water in and of itself now when i heard this from shakespeare i realized that once you become aware of the water you can change everything that you can go from a scared lost kid in tacoma to whomever you want to be and in understanding that things began to become possible what makes you happy the the easy answer and the most truthful answer is time with my wife the other answer to what makes me happy there's really two things so time with my wife and then the pursuit which i'll put in all caps right so the pursuit of whatever the pursuit of getting better the pursuit of impacting the world the pursuit of building something big that that matters the pursuit maybe i never get it i don't care about that i care about the pursuit i care about whether sincerely i'm actually trying to make it happen not yeah not just like empty dreams but like for real i'm actually giving myself over to this and i spent a lot of time in the inner cities a big brother for this one kid for eight and a half years completely changed my life and then having 400 employees and about a thousand of which grew up hard in the inner cities hard i mean most of them grew up in compton i mean it was just some of the most extraordinary stories i've ever heard and i realized that those people are as extraordinary as anybody barack obama um oprah winfrey um tony robbins like they all those same raw materials exist in people in the inner cities that nobody believes and nobody think will ever go anywhere and they won't because they don't believe in themselves and so we were talking at our most honest like what what are we really driven by and i'm driven by that moment of awakening which i had in my own life where i finally realized wait i can learn new things so just because i'm not good today doesn't mean i can't be good tomorrow and and that filled me with so much excitement i want to see that in other people and i want to see what the world looks like when other people realize wait a second that steve jobs quote that the world is made by people no smarter than you is actually true and so if you're believing that these people are smarter than you because you did bad on your sats i'm just going to tell you right now stop so you can develop yourself so my obsession became that humans are the ultimate adaptation machine we are literally wired from the ground up in order to grow and improve under stress and pressure so it's like what's the phrase uh pressure can burst pipes but it also creates diamonds so it's like you need the pressure and yes it can hurt but it can also make something amazing if you're willing to put yourself in that situation so it's a weird twist of fate that humans um in order to build the muscle you first have to tear it right yeah so but once you accept that that's how it works you can do extraordinary things when people say like i don't want to intern or i want to make sure i'm getting paid when i'm worth all that stuff it's like if you're focused in the beginning of your career with monetizing your current skill set you will never get where you want to go because money only spends once unless you're really good at investing which most young people are not whereas skills monetize again and again and again and a great point that's so powerful yeah money only monetizes once or you can only spend it once but your skills can be monetized over and over and over you talk a little bit about seeking power yeah and it confused me when i first heard it i'm not sure i even liked how you said it at first until i understood it and so can you talk to everybody about seeking power and what that means yeah this is another one of those things that internally for me it's such a beautiful concept that i was so surprised the first time i said it out loud and somebody was like oh that's gross and i was like okay i need to explain this to you so to me power is the ability to close your eyes imagine a world a beautiful world the world that you want to exist open your eyes and then be able to actually make that world come true and so when i say i'm seeking power i'm saying i'm seeking the skills that will allow me to make the world a better place it will whether that's to be able to connect with people and build a team and get other people excited whether that's to be able to build a business that generates enough funds to improve the lives of the employees and the people that we touch with great products you know whatever that is like to to be willing and excited by the thought of going out and getting those skills because those skills really are powerful and to me it's like people misunderstand power the way they misunderstand money this is me 60 pounds ago and i knew if i was going to accomplish anything in my life i was gonna have to get control of my mind now ironically there's two ways to get control of your mind way number one is directly going to the mind which can be very scary can be very daunting very ethereal it's ephemeral it's hard to grab onto it's hard to touch but way number two is through the body and so i decided that my kung fu was going to be to get very good at developing my body and in that process i was going to learn about nutrition which would allow me to help my mom and my sister in that process i was going to earn credibility with myself and earning credibility with yourself is so important do it in microwaves for me just showing up to the gym every day was a micro victory i said i was going to do it and i did it now you have to understand i hate working out so for all of you crazy people that get an endorphin rush from running i hate you all running for me is like being stuffed into a meat grinder there is absolutely nothing pleasurable about it whatsoever so whatever neurological thing you guys get that you've been blessed with i have not been blessed with that so for me showing up in the gym sucks eating a bowl of ice cream is awesome and so getting to getting to a better place for me was a totally different journey thank you and what that was was just showing up every day and putting in the work it was reading about human metabolism and understanding how what i eat impacts my body it was earning a little bit of discipline every day knowing that well i did it yesterday i can do it again today it was not eating something that i wanted to eat and most importantly and if you're taking notes write this down it was about changing my identity because at the end of the day identity and values drive behavior when people come to me and they're struggling with something or whatever i always start with the same thing there's one belief that matters and if you're willing to take this on every other domino falls from here and if you don't believe this and we're in trouble it's very similar which is that the human animal is designed to learn and grow meaning you can get better at anything which is another way of saying everything is figureoutable you can learn this stuff so yes i get it you don't know it now i agree you right now today you're incapable yes you're in the moment where the radio's broken you haven't yet opened it you're not yet trying to figure out like what pieces need to go where you haven't done the experimentation so i fully accept that right now you're incapable but if you believe that you can learn then it all goes from there there there really are only two macro level motivators that we have in life and that's pleasure and pain and so what i want people to understand is okay so if nature only gave you two things to motivate you pleasure and pain why would you eliminate half of them and so most people think that life is about avoiding the pain i'm here to tell you right now in a very controlled fashion it is about really experiencing the pain learning from it so ray dalio the most successful hedge fund manager of all time has a perfect math equation pain plus reflection equals progress if you don't feel the pain you never reflect on it so my thing is i spend 80 of my time focused on the beautiful things in my life the things i'm grateful for the beautiful things that i want to bring into existence all of it 20 of the time though i'm in the darkness man i'm in that tim grover relentless i'm going to make this happen if i have to break myself and i'm not afraid to lean into that because i know how powerful it is now if you really want to put numbers how powerful this is they did a study and they wanted to find out what happens how can we get people to endure more pain and the punchline is hilarious so they would take people and they would submerge their arm in a bucket of ice and they would just hold it there as long as you can now at first it's just cold but after a while it really starts to hurt and so people would end up yanking their arms out they found that people could hold their arm in the bucket 35 longer if you let them display anger so put it in they get to that point where they're about to pull it out and you tell them yell cuss do whatever you need and they'd be able to do it they're the expression of intensity even what i'm doing right now i can feel myself ready right i'm ready to strike my muscles are tense i've got a different posture i bring my chin down there's intensity in my eyes like dude i'm now feeling that because i'm embodying it right so it makes me really feel that and so i actually started to tell the story earlier i hate the gym but what i would do to make myself work out is i would my wife would be on the opposite side of the gym and i would stare at her and i would imagine her being attacked and i would imagine her being attacked by people bigger than me and that the only way that i could fight them off is to get stronger there was nothing beautiful in it i was not worried about aesthetics i was worried about saving my wife and by stepping into that dark place and because people were like what are you doing yeah but dude that was i needed that motivation to push past what i want to push past pain boredom all of it and just to really get into it and get a result but i find that people shy away from that look to me it's an 80 20 split if you're spending more than 20 of your time there it will be corrosive yes it will start to erode your sense of self because you're gonna feel badly right because i would be saying to myself you're weak come on like you've got to get stronger if you spend 80 percent of your time doing that that sucks yes i don't want to live like that right but not being able to dip into both you'll just never hit the level of extraordinary you may be fine you may even be good yep but you're never going to be great audacity is is nothing don't don't worry about being audacious the reason people fear being audacious is they don't want to be me ten years from now when this all fails right they're thinking oh man what if this doesn't work this guy's gonna look like an and it's like yeah maybe other people will think that i'm a total dumb ass it doesn't matter and why doesn't it matter because of technique because if i know how to build a house i can build a house so my thing is i'm not trying to posture or be cool i'm telling you i have a set of skills that set of skills lets me do things i'm just interested in doing those things so whether or not i hit my timelines does not matter i'm in the skill acquisition game skills let you do things i'm in the game of doing the things my skills allow me to do so i want to impact people's lives maybe i'm not able to pull it off at a film level i'll find another way or maybe it takes me a lot longer to pull it off okay fine as long as i love what i'm doing even when i'm failing there's nothing to lose i used to post a lot about what time i was waking up i'd show myself in the gym sometimes at like 2 a.m and so people started setting an alarm and i'm like whoa whoa whoa like that's not what this is like i sleep as much as i need to i prioritize sleep so i stopped doing that because i didn't want people to lose sight of what i'm really saying which is that fulfillment is the punch line so if we can just literally skip to the end of like the whole thing that we're going to talk about like all of life the success that people are chasing they think they want money and fame and all of that and those things can be very valuable in a way but what i want people to hear in my message about like working hard and discipline and all of that is the only reason that i put as much time and energy into it is because i love it so me trying this method in something i don't love i've lived that i know where that ends and it ends with me quitting um and you know that's something that i'm sure we'll get into later but it was like i did that the first six and a half years of my journey as an entrepreneur were about the typical grinded out stuff and look man it it was an important phase of my life but it ended up really chipping away at my soul and i flirted with depression just enough in my life to know how dangerous it is and dangerous because it will literally lead to somebody killing themselves or just dangerous in that yeah sure you live a normal lifespan but you hate every minute of it and so just really understanding how you get out from under that and like lesson number one love what you do you've said it before that when you started out there was a time when it was just about money one was just about getting rich that's it i used to repeat that over and over and over what i just want to get rid of i just want to get rich that's what this is i kept saying to my wife i'm going to make you rich i'm going to make you rich i'm going to make you rich like it was it was the core of my identity from the time i was probably pre-teen because this was tied to my desire to be a filmmaker was film was i knew like inside i identify as an artist far more than i do as an entrepreneur and i was looking at okay i love poetry and i love filmmaking well there's no money to be made in poetry but i could become truly wealthy in filmmaking so that for me was a creative endeavor that i could also generate tremendous wealth and so that put me on a path which of course was part of the reason that i went into being an entrepreneur in the first place was i needed to control the art i needed to control the resources so i had to like learn business and so going down that path and really realizing what it took to build a business and all of that which is a whole universe unto itself to have the will to push through all of that difficulty it was i'm gonna get rich i'm gonna get rich i'm gonna get rich and then just realize that maybe for scrooge mcduck who wants to swim in his money that would be like a self-sustaining motivation but somebody even like a warren buffett at the end of the day it money means something to him and it's the thing that it means that drives him it isn't the money in and of itself and the problem was i was literally chasing money in and of itself if you want to believe in yourself and have a sense of self-worth you have to earn that and i wish it's something that somebody can give you but they can't but you can doing really simple stuff you say you're going to do something do it yes so my thing is i said i'm going to go to the gym i'm going to go to the gym whether i like it or not i know that it has advantages in terms of cognitive optimization in terms of longevity all that so i'm going yep um and and doing that every day and pushing into the extra reps and showing up for myself to get the result like i feel good about that yeah and it's one very simple thing that i can control doesn't you know require anybody else no one has to come through for me nothing if you want to make a change you have to change your vision of who you are you have to begin telling yourself a different narrative and the narrative you tell yourself about yourself is everything and if you tell yourself that you're a scared undereducated kid from tacoma whose family has never accomplished anything let me tell you what you will become a scared under-educated kid from tacoma who never accomplishes anything because that's what you believe you tell yourself that story enough and it will become real but on the flip side you could tell yourself a story of you're a learner you learn faster than most people you're willing to put in more work than most people you're willing to read more books than most people you're willing to spend an inhuman amount of time every day improving your mind simply by getting new ideas into the system and that you will admit that you're wrong faster than anybody else that you won't let your ego get in the way and you tell yourself that story over and over and over so when somebody comes and tells you how stupid you are that you're just a dumb kid from tacoma you go you're right that's amazing thank you for pointing out that flaw because now that i'm aware of it i can improve it because i'm the learner and once i switched my narrative to being the learner it didn't matter where i started it only mattered where i was trying to go and as long as i had that clarity then i could execute because i believed i could do anything i set my mind to without limitation when you look at somebody with money especially when you don't have it you admire them and so you think if i had money i would admire myself but it doesn't work like that so once you get the money the thing you thought would happen to yourself the story about who you are you think it's going to change and it doesn't so that's when people become totally disillusioned they think if i have the ferrari i'll think differently about myself if i have the house i'll think differently about myself your insecurities are coming with you wherever you go so if you think anything external is going to change that the only thing that changes your insecurities show up in the gym put in the effort go to work do the things suffer in service of somebody else do something to bring beautiful things to people that you love and care about do something beautiful to bring something to somebody you've never even met those things will change your story if a meteorite were to strike my wife and kill her i wouldn't blame anybody but me that is entirely my fault and i can back that up because people like tom it's so ridiculous how could a meteorite striking your wife and killing or be your fault that's dumb luck divine providence like fate whatever you want to call it but jesus man it's ridiculous to blame yourself and then i point out i'm on the board of the x prize at the x prize there was a prize presented that would allow us to track near-earth objects better than we are today i voted it down there because i don't think it matters i don't think that the likelihood is high enough but it's there i know that there's an organization right now that already tracks near-earth objects i've never sent them a dime of my money i've never called them to encourage them i've never sent them an email with ideas nothing now i know all of this stuff exists and i do nothing to stop it from happening so the only thing that i can say if my wife were killed by a meteorite is i did nothing to stop it i could have made a different decision and got a different outcome i need to focus on that to remind myself i can always make a change i can always do something different and get a different outcome so if you come in and you disrupt my industry my first thought is not the world what are you doing this is so terrible and sinister we have to stop ai or whatever my first reaction is how do i become more adaptive and people are putting so much energy into thinking like i'm frail i'm weak i have to be protected that they become frail and weak when in reality they are not my favorite quote on the planet is darwin is often misquoted as saying it's the strongest of the species that survive he did not say that what he actually said was it's not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most intelligent but rather the most adaptive to change that's how humans became the apex predator we are the most adaptive species on the planet you can take us anywhere and we will thrive and it is that ability to adapt mentally and physically that makes us amazing because i'm a learner because that's my identity and because i really believe whatever skill set you have today it's already taken you as far as it's going to take you so unless this is where you want to be for the rest of your life you've got to be open to change you've got to hunger for it so a i don't fear change i actually enjoy change because change has been the thing that's allowed me to improve my life consistently and so i'm always looking for ways in which i'm wrong because i don't value myself for being right and once people understand that that for me it wasn't in the beginning i was just telling myself to do that it wasn't at a limbic level now i've been telling myself to value myself only for my willingness to admit when i'm wrong and to learn that at a limbic level it's true so when somebody tells me i'm wrong i have this rush of like oh my god this is amazing because if they're right and i really am wrong and they're making me aware of this i'm gonna get more powerful so and that goes back to my real belief and skills having utility so it's like the ego doesn't have utility yeah maybe some but it's not when misplaced and built around the wrong things can be super dangerous but because my ego is actually built around my willingness to stare at my inadequacies when somebody tells me that oh you're doing this bad wrong or whatever i don't spend time it does still sting i think that's just natural so it'll be like oh that sucks but oh a reminder that this is going to give me something powerful and so i use it sort of as mental jujitsu and then i open myself up and i learn now i've got a really special bonus clip that i think you're going to enjoy but before that it's time for the question of the day i want to know what was your single biggest takeaway from this video and your plan of action for the next week the science says that when you just watch a video you get motivated to get inspired you have a 35 chance of following through on your goals 35 that's not enough that's not enough just to get motivated believe nation we're here you're here today matters you're an action taker when you commit to a plan of action of when and how you're going to follow through when you write it down you have a 91 chance of following through and when you commit publicly to somebody else that jumps to 95 percent chance from 30 something percent to 95 chance of you following through believe nation we need to make this happen so question of the day your single biggest takeaway from this video and your plan of action specific for the next week put it down in the comments below and i'm going to show on screen sometime next week to celebrate you here's one of my favorite things about neuroscience this literally changed my life this affected my marriage and when i give people the answer jay they're gonna think this is so dumb but i'm talking to the six of you out there right now who are actually gonna do this that are watching it it will change their life dude you ready i'm ready when you take on a facial expression you will feel the emotion no matter what whether you want to or not you will and when i realized that the brain and the body or any feedback loop meaning that the brain gets as much information so the vagus nerve i think 82 of the signals running on the vagus nerve which is the biggest nerve in your body 82 percent is your body speaking to your brain not your brain telling your body to do something your body telling your brain what's up how to feel sending signals that end up influencing massive amounts of both conscious and subconscious behavior so it is truly a loop so i used to i don't get angry easily and this actually used to really wind my wife up and or i should say but when i did get angry i would stay angry so it'd be like nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing boom now i'm pissed and now i'm gonna be pissed for the next eight hours or a day or two days or god there were times i'd be mad for like three days oh wow and i thought it's funny i've never once come out of one of those periods and thought you know what i'm glad i was mad that long that was a great use of a saturday with my wife this is really just a smart way of living every time i came out and thought this was moronic i don't know what you're doing you're wasting your time so i had read this study that said if you hold a pencil in your mouth and then have somebody which sort of forces you into almost a smile and then have people rate their levels of happiness they'll rate it higher and i thought that can't be true and so the study goes on to talk about getting people to laugh out loud and all this stuff and i thought okay i'm going to try it so i would force myself to laugh out loud and it would change my mood now i felt stupid doing it for sure and then but about like six seconds in it's so dumb and so ridiculous and now you're getting that feedback loop that it actually becomes real and your mood lightens and so i wrote this letter to myself and i gave it to my wife to read to me if ever i was in a bad mood and she only had to read it to me once and it worked so profoundly that i realized i don't need somebody to read the letter because the notion of and the letter was basically because whenever you're in a fight with somebody and they try to soothe you you reject that because you think well they're just doing that because they've done something to wrong me i'm legitimate i have a legitimate reason to be upset they have an incentive a perverse incentive to see me forgive it so i'm not going to forgive it this is real and some deep recess of your brain you feel it needs to be punished and so in that mode you won't believe what they say because they have motive so i had to read this letter and it was like hey me it's me you know i have no motive in this i want nothing other than when you're looking back on this for you to feel like you made the right decision and so what i want you to do right now is laugh out loud that's it just take 10 seconds laugh out loud and at the end of that you know it's going to change your brain chemistry and i remember citing the study and i was like you know it'll work so just do it and so she read it to me i laughed out loud it felt ridiculous i didn't want to do it by the way i did not want to laugh out loud but the code that i live by is man you always do that which moves you towards your goals i want to have an amazing marriage so i did it i laughed out loud and it changed my mood on a dime and i was like i can't believe this is real if you want some incredible motivation with brendan burchard check out the video right there next to me i think you'll love it continue to believe and i'll see you there you

Channel: Evan Carmichael

Views: 44,457

Rating: 4.8711061 out of 5

Keywords: entrepreneur, yt:cc=on, evancarmichael, Entrepreneur, evan carmichael, tom bilyeu, tom bilyeu advice, best lessons, tom bilyeu’s life changing advice, best habits for success, motivational advice, stop being lazy, utilize time effectively

Id: BG6JJjMppmU

Length: 199min 36sec (11976 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021