How to Become the Greatest

[Music] you guys are gonna need some energy for what's about to happen I've got 30 minutes to give you a billion-dollar mindset we're gonna do it but you guys are gonna have to participate and it starts with the impact prayer so much like my man earlier had you guys repeating something to get some energy I want you to repeat after me you ready all right I will open myself to being changed forever and for the better from what I'm about to learn all right so here we go the most important thing to understand about me is that I am NOT a born entrepreneur do we have any born entrepreneurs in the house all right it's interesting if I ask that in reverse order and I asked first who's a born entrepreneur I get a lot of hands but if I confess that I'm not one all right so you guys are my people I am NOT a born entrepreneur by nature I am insanely lazy and everything that you're gonna hear about today and you think I'm kidding and I'm not everything that you're about to hear is how I overcome my innate laziness all of the things that I've accomplished in my life are because I finally got so fed up that I realized that I had to make some very dramatic changes in my life from 2010 to 2013 alone the company that my partners and I found it grew by fifty seven thousand percent that was in manufacturing we ended up at number two on the Inc 500 list we went from zero dollars in revenue to being valued at over a billion dollars in less than five years thank you the question is how and that should be the question that you guys are asking today and everything that I'm gonna talk about it's got the backdrop of business success it's got the backdrop of financial success but to me it doesn't matter what it is that you want to do the mindset is the same no matter what you're trying to accomplish in life it comes down to your ability to manage your own brain chemistry and the thing you have to understand about humans we are the ultimate adaptation machine it used to be believed that we had all this stuff that they call junk DNA and they were so surprised when they looked at the human genome they put all this money into sequencing it and they thought we're gonna really understand things and then they realized that we only have 20,000 genes when an onion has 40,000 and they said how can that be possible are you really asking me to believe that an onion is more complicated than a human being and then suddenly somebody said hey maybe we should actually look at this junk DNA and try to figure out what it does and what they realized is that junk DNA is what they call epigenetics it's how you respond to your an environment that's what makes humans so great we have this massive ability to change we're the only animal that you can find anywhere on the planet James Cameron at one point was at the bottom of the Marianas Trench the deepest part of the ocean we have people right now running research in Antarctica you're not gonna find any other species I can traverse that much diversity and we do it because we have the ability to change and that's what I want to talk about I went from broke to building a billion-dollar business entirely by changing my mindset if you guys want to follow a path and become the greatest of all time in your field you have two jobs job number one develop your mindset how do you do that the first thing you have to understand is that the matrix has you who's seen the matrix all right you're really my kind of people the matrix is the perfect analogy for a limiting mindset now when you think about the human animal is an adaptation machine you have to really understand what are the mechanisms by which we change those mechanisms are driven largely by our minds our minds are incredible it's considered by most people in the scientific community to be the single most complicated thing in the universe not on this planet think about a black hole think about the complexities of dark matter we don't even understand it and yet the people looking at those problems that understand quantum physics say the only thing that's more complicated than all of that is the human mind and it's going to be your job to learn how to force it to adapt in a way that works for you now this is the most important thing that I'm going to say today and if you embrace this it will fundamentally forever and for the better change your life you must decide you must decide that you can get good at anything now the part on this that I want you to understand is it is a decision belief is a decision people think that belief is based on the truth but I'm going to say something and it's going to immediately ring it's true because you probably heard it before you're five times more likely to believe negative information than you are to believe positive information right if you guys heard that before if I say something nice to you and then somebody comes along and says something negative to you you're more likely to believe and internalize the negative thing because of that very fact I have very little interest in what is objectively true the human animal is really bad at understanding what is objectively true so because of that if you want to be successful you're going to have to accept that your beliefs are decisions you're deciding to believe that negative thing you're deciding to discount positive things that's a decision so you can decide that you can get good at anything or you can say no there are limits whichever you do the famous Henry Ford quote whether you think you can or you think you can't you are absolutely right let that one sink in because it'll change you once you really understand alright here are the methods to developing new skills one always be reading I am obsessed with the mathematical equation i I equals I owe ideas in equal ideas out if you really want to get great if you really want to gain mastery in something you're going to have to encounter a lot of ideas I do what I call reading in swarms when I pick a topic that I want to get truly great at I don't want to become a parrot to one person's ideology I want to make sure that I have a breath of knowledge in that but make no mistake one thing you're gonna hear me talk about through this entire talk and one of the most important things you could possibly understand if you want to dominate at whatever it is that you're gonna do you've got to become so good they can't ignore you you've got to become so good that they can't ignore you now here's the problem people reach out to me all the time Tom I'm doing X Y Z and I'm just not getting any traction what's the truth of the matter they're not good enough yet they can by definition be ignored your job whatever it is you want to do you want to be the best parent the best teacher run a big business change education that's become very popular somebody's gonna do it it needs to be done but it's gonna be done by the person that really understands what it takes to do that and get so effective at putting out the most capable students that people adopt their methodologies because they work so you're gonna have to get so good they can't ignore you open yourself to being changed I've already talked about that be the eternal student ego gets in people's way we're gonna talk about how to build your ego in a minute because you need one but most people build one that gets in their way be an eternal student and take immediate action all right there are three keys to eliminating destructive behavior all of us have it every day all I'm thinking about is how can I get better I encourage my team many of whom are here I encourage my team to give me aggressive and negative feedback in its pública form as humanly possible because I want to know I want to know what my blind spots are and my ego while it is massive is not built around being right it is not built around being smart I focus on this and this is the most important thing you can do become anti fragile nassim to lab wrote a book by that name and he said something that is anti fragile is not something that is strong it is not something that is resilient it is something that grows stronger the more that it's attacked things that are strong things that are resilient they are ultimately defined by their breaking points something that is anti fragile doesn't have a breaking point because the more you come after it the better it gets values and identity Drive behavior people often look at their behavior and they want to start there they want to change their behavior by manhandling it by doing something manual to let's say get up earlier so they set an alarm to address the behavior but then what happens they hit the snooze alarm and the reason they hit the snooze alarm is because they haven't addressed their identity addressing your identity and changing your identity is bizarrely simple and this is how I do it I'm the type of person that I'm the type of person that gets out of bed in ten minutes or less once I've realized that I'm awake now why did I create that part of my identity because I used to lay in bed for up to three hours because it was too cold okay so think about this when I was not kidding which I work is it's actually really embarrassing for me when I was 22 and I'm whatever 15 years away from being very successful I'm laying in bed for up to three hours simply because it's too cold to walk across the room to put a sweater on and I didn't even think to put the sweater next to the bed so I had to manipulate my identity and now to be proud of Who I am I need to act in accordance with that part of my identity this is all building towards being proud of who you are for something that moves you forward everyone needs to be proud of who they are embrace it people your whole life they've told you the egos a problem people have told you that pride is one of the seven deadly sins I'm here to tell you that's absolute BS and the second you no longer believe that you could ever feel good about yourself again you will become suicidal truth I don't mean that like hyperbolically I mean literally the people that commit suicide are people who believe they can no longer ever feel good about themselves again and if that were true really think about it if it were true what would be the point think about those times that you feel your best you're with somebody you love you're with a significant other and you see reflected in their eyes that they love you that they're moved by you that you make them feel better about themselves when they're with you than when they're not with you what an awesome feeling that is amazing that's one of the greatest emotional states that this life has to offer to help somebody else to be of service why wouldn't you feel good about that but it comes down to what have you chosen to build that ego around and my answer is you want to build your self-esteem around not being right not being smart but rather being the learner and identifying the right answer faster than anybody else now why is that anti fragile if you tell the average person who prides themselves on being smart that they're stupid it hurts and when you're right and they know that they're undereducated or they're ignorant to something that's a real blow to their self-esteem and it sets them back and now they have to deal with the emotional pain and we've seen people go through it all the time we've all gone through it we know what that looks like we know what that feels like it's a total time waste it's a distraction but you have to go through it to find a way to build yourself back up and the way that people do it when they pride themselves on being smart is they put themselves in a smaller and smaller room where fewer and fewer people can challenge them whereas if you build your self-esteem around being the learner your next question when somebody tells you that you're stupid is simply in what way because if you can remove this blind spot for me I can now get more powerful I can become more effective I can help more people I can build a bigger business I can be a better parent and so thank you you've given me an insight that I didn't have and now because you have tried to attack me you've tried to damage my self-esteem you've actually only further empowered me this was the realization this more than anything was the realization that changed my life and took thank you once I started doing that once I filled myself with humility once I allowed admitting that I was wrong to fill me with pride once learning something new from an unexpected place not only filled me with pride but got me excited then I was on a real path towards mastery and remember the only thing that matters is getting so good they can't ignore you you need a belief system that's going to feed into that the next one is you have to develop grit becoming the greatest of all time is very very hard the struggle is guaranteed success is not that's just the hard cold truth so you're gonna have to find a way to persevere now if you guys haven't read Angela Duckworth's book grit I highly recommend it it is absolutely brilliant and what she talks about in that book is sustaining interest over time is the key you have to be willing to do the hard things no one ever got great at something on an easy road it just doesn't happen look at the greatest of all time let's talk about Michael Jordan he is literally the paragon of achievement but who knows Tim Grover give it up for Tim now if you know Tim Grover you know that Michael Jordan on the last day of his professional career went to Tim Grover and said and Tim was the guy that trained Michael Jordan he went to Tim and said if I ever see you in my neighborhood again I'll shoot you because that's how grueling it was to work with Tim Grover but that's what Michael Jordan knew he had to do in order to become the greatest of all time to be remembered if you want to be a legend and look I'm a filter I am not the right person to take advice from for everybody I am well aware of that but if you want to play on a world stage if you want to do things that people think are impossible I'm your guy because it's possible for any one of you and if you're willing to put in the work if you're willing to do the hard things if you're willing to persist and this is the one right here number three look at that one this is the one that kills entrepreneurs boredom and suffering boredom is the insidious thing that you don't see coming it's the one that eats the most entrepreneurs of all the greatness that's in this room all the latent potential the one that's gonna zap it is boredom it's having to practice long after it stops being fun it's having to do the thing that you're not yet good at so you get no sense of joy or pride and you have to switch it to being proud of the fact that you're putting in the work you have to switch your ego to really being excited about the fact that you will clock the hours that you will suffer more than most to thank the followers of impact theory the team and I did a 24 hour live thank you the reason that we did that was we wanted the community to know that we were willing to suffer for them we wanted to do something that was hard we wanted to put ourselves through something that was difficult I do three-day fasts for the same reason can you embrace suffering in suffering are many lessons there are techniques in fact who knows the marshmallow experiment the Stanford marshmallow experiment all right guys gonna want to read about that one what they found they followed these kids for over 25 years they put a kid in a room with a researcher gave him a marshmallow and said hey I'm gonna step out of the room for a second if you wait to eat that marshmallow until I come back I'll give you a second one so double your money now what the kid doesn't know is the researchers never coming back they just want to see how long the kid can wait to eat the marshmallow and then they follow those kids for 25 years and what they found were the kids that had techniques to postpone eating at the longest did the best in school went to the best colleges got the best grades got the highest paying jobs had more successful relationships because they could delay gratification alright you're gonna have to learn number four I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here you can drop it into Google the differ between a lack of grit and genuine disinterest is something called whoop look that up it's very good technique you guys will want to learn all right number three develop a passion now the word here that is absolutely critical everybody talks about passion I'm sure your parents and all of your teachers they've all said one consistent message to you your entire life follow your passion but nobody tells you how to find it and then the worst news is people act like it's something to be found burn this into your nervous system you do not find a passion you were not an archaeologist this is not about turning inward and uncovering something that is so magical that it's going to pull you through all the hard times and it's going to tell you exactly what you should do with your life that when everything is crashing down around you it's gonna be your passion that pulls you through and it's somehow hidden within you right now hopefully as you say it out loud it sounds as ridiculous as it is you would know about it how could you hide something like that from yourself the truth is developing a passion is a process you identify an area of interest those areas of interest come about through contact you do stuff and some of it seems interesting to you you start gaining mastery in that and you see if over time you really have deep interest that turns into a fascination as you get better and better and push through boredom in the suffering then it has an opportunity to develop into a real passion so what the ancient Greeks called techne ladling soup at a soup kitchen is awesome and it's nice but it's not anywhere near as fulfilling for you if you've had to work really hard for the skill set that you use to serve other people and it's somehow unique to you it is something that is very valuable to people but not other not everybody can do it that's where you want to find yourself that's a passion all right your second job build your business insert whatever it is in place of business school parent self-improvement in general whatever it is I'm going to get very specific assuming that you have an entrepreneurial bent and that you want to actually build a business in today's market some of these things are going to apply at least at the conceptual level but I hate talking purely ideological without giving people high action items all right number one have very clear goals that is absolutely fundamental you're gonna hear a lot of speakers talk about this I hope and you're gonna hear them talk about it because it is true okay there are only so many things that are true about building a mindset about building a business it's actually going to be successful and so the things that you hear people repeat over and over and over chances are that those are the real things and what you have to do is look beyond the trite words to why they have become trite but having clear goals is one of them and I mean ridiculously specific goals not I want to make more money I'm talking what way do you want to make the money what exact skills are you going to have to build and attain in order to accomplish that goal all right you're living in a new world it is an amazing world who here thinks social media is a massive distraction and worries about what's happening to their kids who here thinks social media is the best thing since sliced bread all right we got a mixed crowd I will say here and now first of all technology is a one-way street and the way that you build something new and incredible is not to fight the old it's to focus all of your energy on building the new so don't waste your time trying to stop social media it's here to stay so now the question becomes what amazing things the social media do for us because I think it's changed the landscape in the world's most amazing way it is unbelievable if you are interested in serving other people social media is your jam if you're interested in learning from other people social media is your jam if you're looking to connect with people social media is your jam it allows you to truly have global interactions with people from all around the world and create meaningful relationships where it starts online but hopefully ultimately you meet in real life where's Cage hits my man in the Batman shirt all right when we did our 20 for our live where this crazy guy that none of us had ever heard of named Cage hits and he watched all 24 hours he stayed up the entire time and we know because we hit Easter eggs during the event and we said at the end of the event we have this massive gift prize for anybody that can have found all seven of the Easter eggs and there was exactly one person that found it and that was Kage now imagine how I reacted when I saw him in real life for the first time today we built our relationship online I'd never met him before two hours ago but as soon as I saw him it was like oh my god I can't believe it it's this guy guys this is cages him so there was all this preamble that had gone on of interacting looking at each other's content seeing what's important to each other and you get a chance to do that so understand that that's the world that we live in Millennials and Gen Z want to have impact if you don't know what Gen Z is yet it's about to dominate your life in the next five years if you're in any way shape or form a marketer or salesperson impact is big now most people don't know what they mean when they say that they want to have impact but what they want is purpose they want significance they want to know that what they're doing has meaning now the reason this is important to you as a business person beyond the marketing is you need to show people how supporting your company or using your product is going to help them do something that can make them feel good about themselves who know simon Sinek all right it's right from him start with why find your mission even I fall prey to that because you don't find it you develop it develop your mission figure out what it is that you want to put at the heart of your existence what is that thing that you want to do what is that thing that you're willing to dedicate the rest of your life to my wife and I went through a moment of choice when we left quest we literally could have bought an island and retired and sip mai tais until the day that we died and we said do we want to do that or do we want to really engaged with the world and put something at the core of our being and do everything in accordance with that and our answer was we want to free people from the matrix now the reason that I want to do that is because it changed everything about my life and I feel like I've had to learn every lesson the hard way and to me the matrix is that limiting set of beliefs it's the things that you have unintentionally chosen to believe that limit your view of what you're capable of for all the people who have not yet made the decision that they can do anything that they set their mind to that have not yet decided they can get good at anything if they're willing to put in the work that's my why when you have that then you know how to interact with your community because you can tell them exactly what it is you're trying to do you can build an army around that idea and I can't tell you how utterly fascinating it is the way that this has changed the world you want to connect with people don't worry about the technology what people see is the technology they see things that they don't understand on a technical level but you know people you guys wouldn't be here if you didn't know people all the technology is is a way to reach new people that's it but then the interaction becomes the same are there a thousand waste of time interactions that you can have yes just like in real life and just like in real life you find those people you filter to get to the people that you really resonate with the same is true of social media all right don't mark it build a community this is critical and you have to understand what it's all about when we were building quest we had to make a decision what are we are we the bar that you give to somebody who has six-pack abs and say congratulations man you did it or were we the catalyst for change and what did we want to show the community and what we started doing was what we called mirror marketing we just wanted to show the user themselves back show the transformations they were going through show what they had been able to accomplish celebrate them let the community celebrate them and create this really uplifting community and that that's how we grew by 57,000 percent that was it being something uplifting knowing that this was about a community never losing sight of the fact that on the other side of these devices on the other side of your Instagram account they're real people and that we all understand and empowering people lifting them up giving them a chance to celebrate and quite frankly pushing them and holding them to a standard if you're on the impact theory army I know one thing about you nice you're not afraid of hard work that's a guarantee so build that community that has an ethos and it goes like this thought leaders are at the top thought leaders are usually the people that nobody understands they're the researchers the people reading the writing most of the time the abstracts influencers are the ones that can actually digest that information and bring it out in a way that people can relate to and then the mass is ultimately or who you're selling to what you're looking for are 1,000 screaming fans people who are absolutely rabid about the product that you have it has changed their life and they want to tell anyone and everyone about it now when most people think of getting to the influencers that can help them find those thousand screaming fans they think of famous people but really you guys should be thinking of people like this in today's world this is the cast of a musical I forget which one but between them they have hundreds of thousands of followers and they're very easy to build a relationship with in social media right now today it is very easy to find people who are undervalued I just found one yesterday I was so over the moon he's become my obsession to tell people about it's a guy named dr. Peter Atia an absolutely unbelievable human being who knows more about nutrition and human metabolism than virtually anybody alive on the planet and he's got 2,300 followers on Instagram so one of the brightest minds in the world has said I want you to like my photo which means you can get his attention that's the power of social so finding people this is jenna Marbles somebody that we worked with at Quest she has she reaches over 20 million people a day and the way that we did something with her was not to pay her money she's obsessed with her little dogs and we sewed little doggie outfits for them and sent her a whole bunch of product she was so moved by the fact that we sent her dogs clothes that she took pictures of them and all the product that we sent and we got 20 million people seeing our product for no money or for the cost of dog sweaters all right how to generate social momentum you've got to identify the influencers you need to add value to their community adding value is absolutely critical you need to figure out what's meaningful to them is it likes is it shares and I'll just tell you right now if it's me take that selfie homie I want to selfie with some big smiles tag me and post it right I'm trying to build an audience and I can get into why when I do my endless QA which by the way I always make a promise to anybody that watches one of my talks at the end of the talk I will stay and answer questions until every single question has been answered I've stayed until 3:30 in the morning before I will stand in the parking lot I will do whatever it takes I will answer every single question you have I accept hugs like a madman so you just can't even imagine go above and beyond for people really show when cage watched all 24 hours the whole team was freaking out because we thought it was gonna be some lonely hours at like 3 a.m. and there was cage rocking it out turn relationships into partnerships at the end of the day you hopefully your business is meaningful hopefully it's doing something positive for the world so it's not exactly a bad thing to turn it in to a real business model and then publish create content like a fiend alright take a screenshot of this one because we're running out of time I'll just harp on this one you want to put out amazing impactful content consistently again get so good they can't ignore you if you haven't built a following the truth is and remember your anti fragile now the truth is your content isn't good enough so get better focus all of your energy on getting better alright make sure that your content in and of itself is valuable I put out almost seven hours of content every week and we're looking to almost double it see if anybody on the team has a heart attack no they look good and we're going to in doing that all were thinking about is adding value in that piece of content that you would want to watch that piece of content regardless they don't think of it as marketing they think of it as just something that they wanted in their lives all right I'll leave you with this remember it does not matter who you are today it doesn't matter if you're the kid that's laying in bed and spends three hours there because you're too lazy to cross and grab a sweatshirt it only matters who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there if you pay that price you can have anything you want in life thank you you

Channel: SUCCESS Magazine

Views: 58,195

Rating: 4.8702235 out of 5

Keywords: SUCCESS magazine, personal development, mindset

Id: xCsguJzouHo

Length: 32min 6sec (1926 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017