How to Totally Reinvent Yourself | Tucker Max on Impact Theory

the truth is that you are going to suffer but the way to deal with suffering is accepting that suffering and then letting it sort of have it say and then moving on from that everybody welcome to impact really you're here my friends because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless but you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it so our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams okay today's guest is sold over three million copies of his books and is one of only three authors ever to have three books simultaneously on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list he's also the first author to take a book from blog to bestseller and his website was generating millions of views long before that was the thing he was nominated to Time Magazine's 100 most influential lists in 2009 unsurprisingly as he appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for an astonishing six consecutive years but with titles like I hope they serve beer in hell and [ __ ] finished first his astonishing success baffled many but not Future New York Times bestselling author Ryan holiday working side by side with him holiday quickly realized that today's guest was a brash and brilliant marketer as well as a raw and authentic author holiday would later detail many of the techniques at today's guests pioneered in his book trust me I'm lying while he'll tell you that he's just a normal guy who's lucked into much of his success his resume tells a slightly different story he graduated college in just three years with the highest possible honors went to Duke Law School on an academic scholarship and has even had a movie made about his life in 2012 however he announced that he was going to be retiring from the genre of nonfiction he'd helped pioneer called frat tire he'd evolved as a person and wanted to begin a new journey that journey saw him embark on psychotherapy and evolved into a devoted family man and dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur dedicated to using commerce to help other people solve their problems from that his wildly successful company book in a box was born which even in its relative infancy already done eight figures in revenue so please help me in welcoming the man who turned his drunken exploits into a publishing Empire that has now helped hundreds of people become published authors and share their wisdom the former [ __ ] who's still finishing first Tucker max thank you so much for coming on the show my wife sounds pretty cool do you put it that way no they're being like that's some Dunson baller stuff that's pretty cool yeah you never think about it on a day-to-day basis I suppose yeah you don't when you're interviewing somebody though you're when I'm researching them anyway their whole life collapses down to like this basically 12-hour timeline for me where I get a go on the full journey seeing you cuz I mean luckily all this stuff got captured on film so you see you as a 20-something yeah being interviewed by the news and people being somewhat antagonistic and you be you know quite flippant and very much the man of your books and then watching you go through the evolution they're really really fascinating I haven't even done that you can do it it's it's pretty haven't gone back and looked at any of the media especially like early on I think probably because the few times I've done that I'm so mortifyingly embarrassed I'm like what are you thinking not even like with the attitude it's like if you're gonna have that attitude at least do it right as someone on the outside I'm really glad that your twenties were captured so vividly but I'm really grateful that mine weren't so like it yeah it would be pretty tough to look back on this yeah one of the things I want to talk to you about is reinvention like you you have in full public view which I think most people get trapped by and they're never able to get out and I remember the first time I met you which I think the first time we shared the same physical space was at Hustle Khan and I had no idea like what to expect right so it was really because I had read I hope they serve beer in hell and so that that's sort of my snapshot and then fast-forward you know however many years later decade later yeah and we meet and so it's really interesting that you were so successful at getting out of that persona and establishing yourself anew yeah what was that process like so well the first thing was everyone and I understand why everyone thinks this and they say it they asked me well it's funny use the word persona most people use the word brand and what they mean is how did you change from this persona or brand to this one meaning like how did you change the perception of you right and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth but when most people lost this question that's what they mean that's exactly what I mean right so my answer is always the same is that it's not you can't think of it like perception right I never I never thought to myself okay I'm projecting this now I want to project something else but there's this hidden self that's different one of the reasons I think I was so successful almost in spite of myself early on is because I didn't create a like a projected front the guy that I wrote about the guy that that showed up on those in those interviews that was flippant that all that that was really pretty much exactly who I was most people most people in the public eye you know this now you've been in the public eye for long enough you've met enough famous people or like you you're on stage with them when you meet them in media and then you get the green room when they're like something you know different right like I know a lot of the same people and a lot of those people for better or worse are different in private they are in public I was just never the case for me so for me the change was not about how do I change my persona it was how do I change myself which is just a totally different thing and as I grew and changed and developed as a man and matured it was like I left my my cult brand behind but it wasn't leaving a brand behind it was like I don't want to drink and hook up and act stupid and party anymore like that was cool in my 20s and early 30s and I'm done with it and I want to change and it was like I almost couldn't write so I had to that's why I had to like publicly retire from writing this stuff and I had to cut all of that off and move on because to answer your question it wasn't like how do I change perception how do I change brand it was how do I change my honest authentic self and then go in a fundamentally different direction that was hard to do that that that's the prostitute man that was like so the first thing I had to do was I had to accept that this was something I wanted right cuz look it's not obvious that I ever had to change like I was doing pretty well I was selling a lot of books I was making money I was famous enough like I had plenty of girls like I had everything that at 19 if you told me like I was gonna have half of what I had I would have [ __ ] my pants an excitement I'm like are you kidding this is coming for me this is amazing and then I got it and it was like it's not that it was bad because it wasn't it was fun and there was a lot of good stuff here's the thing people who go and I say this being as a person who did it someone who goes intentionally looking for fame which I did they're always part of the reason they're doing it is to fill a hole in their soul some sort of hole right and and I mean I was definitely it's true of me and then once you get that Fame you realize as awesome as it may be it doesn't fill the hole right and so then and everyone famous in any way shape or form it that intentionally went to go get Fame right not someone who like is doing work on their own and all of a sudden that you know like the world sees them talk about people who go you go to Hollywood you go to New York I'm gonna be famous then you well if you achieve it then you have that you you have that moment of truth where you realize I got everything I wanted or more and I'm still lonely and I'm happy or whatever it is you're trying to compensate for and you gotta have that moment of truth and ask yourself okay what do I do now you know like do I lie to myself and tell me that this fantasy that I created in my head is everything that I wanted when it's not or do I start looking for the truth and so in my case I lied to myself for a long time right and it's easy to man when you're selling books and and people want to interview you and girls come like want to hook up with you and they don't even know you it's like what is this magical world of celebrity this is incredible right and it's not like I was that famous but I was like famous enough where I understood what it was like and um but then it's like you go through it enough and you realize like oh wow this is hollow and empty and it doesn't really mean anything it's just it's like the trappings of success and so it took me about three four or five years to come to terms with that that like the thing that I thought would make my life perfect didn't and then it culminated with a movie that was made about my first book and like seeing that kind of like not do well which is so it dude think about how crazy this is this is the most first world which white person problem there was a movie made about my life that didn't do 50 or 100 million dollars of the box office and it was a crushing blow to me right like that like which at the time was truly crushing but if you think about that on the span of human history in human suffering is like what the [ __ ] is wrong with you dude like that's what crushed you but it did because that's just the way our brains work and so it kind of culminated with that and so then I had to like really that becomes like a turning point for yeah it really was affect I'll dive in I'll really tell you like there was actually a very specific moment I was in a hotel room and it was the the day before the movie was launching or the day it launched and we got like the numbers back and you know you know immediately right like and we knew that like you know it's gonna do fine I think it did like a million two million three million the box-office whatever and they did really well on DVD but like I was expecting this to be like the next you know what in Crashers or anything something like that and so um I was in my hotel room and dude it was I mean I wept a like I cried and like by myself like didn't want anyone around no girls nothing and I wept and I cried and it was like it was it was an ego cracking soul-crushing moment for me as ridiculous as it sounds it was and then from there I had to accept okay I got all this Fame and all this stuff I thought I wanted and it didn't make me happy it didn't fill the hole in my soul and and if I really want to get to the the sort of the peak of the mountain I've got to realize I'm on the wrong mountain like I'm on the peak of this mountain I'm trying to get the peak of this mountain but they're different mountains and so I had to go down and up and so then that from there basically I realized the first thing was I had to look honestly myself right like what why did the movie fail because I had an amazing book we had an amazing script this should have worked and of course I started doing was that what does everyone do right when something fails you blame everybody else so at least I did I blame the director I blame the producers I blank and listen they were they made mistakes but then at the end of the day I picked the director I picked the producers and I created a lot of issues and all the materials their effort to do well and it didn't and it was my fault and that was a man that was a hard toward to swallow dude it was bad because like mehar distill eyes when you don't succeed it's because of your own it's not even like I made it I gambled on something I lost this should have worked it should there's no reason it shouldn't have and and I just it was my own fault and so then I had to really start down that path of recognizing all the truths in my life that I was ignoring and I was avoiding and they were painful and awful and I got pretty far along that path by myself but then I kind of reached a sort of an impasse and so then I realized I needed someone to help me and there's a lot of ways to get help I picked like therapy talk therapy there's a lot of different types of talk therapy I ended up with psychoanalysis which is just a very specific type of it and I spent four years in analysis going four days a week what was motivating that was it a positive feeling of I have the sense that I can get better or was it like this hurts so much I just need something it was it was that's a great question it was it was not self-improvement in the sense of like you know like I'm gonna go like lift and work out and get in shape like I love doing that but that provides a pretty immediate reward it's pretty straight forward this was much more about unpacking painful trauma it's not like I was just in misery every day cuz I wasn't man like I had money it's not like the movie failed and like I was destitute right like I had money like I still had friends I was in shape I was still young like I'm still young like I like everything was great objectively in my life like there was like I said it was a total rich white person problems like I hadn't there was nothing to be sad about so really what it was for me was understanding that like I had to go back to why was I looking for fame right like why why was I trying to fill this hole what made this hole right and he goes back to me for a lot of I had parents who just weren't very good at being parents like they were perfectly nice people like it's not no one beat me as a kid no one hit me or anything terrible like that right like like thank God but I just had parents who were like I archetypical iconic baby boomers they just didn't care about anyone but themselves their whole life was about like them and they had a kid which is fine if you don't have a kid right but they had a kid and so I grew up sort of lonely and ignored but in like the most Western sort of rich middle class way you know it's never hungry I had nice stuff I went to good schools it was just like I just they just weren't good to being parents they were perfectly fine caretakers and humans and so I just missed a lot emotionally and so you know I mean one way to deal with trauma is promiscuity and I don't just mean sexual anything you do anything to an extreme whether it's gambling sex working out achievement like a lot of the entrepreneurs I know and probably you do too I'm convinced the reason that they are so successful is because they are it's not just they want to succeed they're just driven beyond belief and it's because that's their way of sort of filling their hole the hole in their soul which is at least is productive like that's great and I picked a path that you know a lot of people pick I drank hooked up I didn't really even go that far I just wrote about the only reason people know me about this is just because I wrote about it in a funny way and then I kind of took off and it led me to success and then I kind of went a little excess but if you asked me at 26 I'm like no no no my parents you know they were fine everything's great I'm perfectly happy are you kidding everything's wonderful it's not true what some wasn't true and I just never thought about my emotions I never really connected with them I had never really I just had never really had those conversations with myself or with anybody else really and so part of therapy was understanding first recognizing the pain was there then it was accepting that it actually existed right which is hard like you think well if you recognize it you accept it but no no like I was in denial for a lot oh well I'm not yeah all the stories like you tell yourself oh well but other people have it worse they do doesn't mean like that my stuff doesn't deeply impact me or you know it wasn't that bad it may not have been it doesn't mean it's not having an impact I mean all the sort of that sort of stuff so I then had to accept all this then I had to give myself space to really investigate like okay like what am I feeling like so really kind of connecting my thoughts to my emotions which sounds like really basic and I don't know I it just wasn't there I think most people aren't in that presence of this is so useful right and I don't know if you have a sense that that this is so unique to you'd never be been but like I get this question over and over and over like no I'm having this on how to become aware yeah what they're going through no I'll talk about it if you if you're yeah listen I'll talk about it all right so I mean all I can do is tell you what I did right like I'm not gonna say Rimmel here's the 8 ways to do it and I don't know I can only know my path so for me like that's why I picked psychoanalysis because it's it's intense you were going four days a week for an hour day right so for four years I did this and what you're doing when you go is it's not like it's not a good analyst and I had a pretty good analyst is very it's kind of like the classic you know image of like you know laying on the sofa and the analyst is kind of behind you it's like that it's mainly you're talking and then about what you're thinking what you're feeling and then they essentially do their best to present basically a mirror to you right so they ask questions or they point things out and they never like say what you're doing this wrong almost never give advice they never tell you what's right or wrong they're definitely not judgmental it's very accepting it's very like they care it's very caring but it's also like very reflective right like it's very much like um kind of like the you know like in return Empire Strikes Back we're like Luke goes to see Yoda and then he's like you know he has to go in that cave where it's like he's like what's in there it's like whatever you bring in there is what's in there right he sees Darth Vader and he's like got freaked out and it's like that's what analysis is it's whatever you bring in I love that scene in Star Wars because many cuts Vader's mask off it reveals himself yeah it is it's a cool moment so um so for me what my my analysis was very much about I mean I was just in denial for a long time about like it's not that I denied that my parents were like I intellectually understood I saw them clearly for who they were I didn't connect to the emotion of it right like I refused to accept that I was scared or lonely or sad I mean I even in luck but emotionally I wouldn't connect with that right the difference between me now and me let's say ten years ago in this realm is that now the emotions don't go away right so anyone who tells you that they have a way for you to control your emotions or get rid of your emotions is either lying to themselves or lying to you and trying to sell you something so it's not a this [ __ ] goes away it's that now I recognize it like like I recognize the feeling I accept that it's there and I can like not let it overwhelm me or let it control me without understanding for most people the only way you can get past this stuff is to bring it out let it let it have its voice accept it and then you know like see okay I like I know I think I'm skipping ahead a little on your questions but this ties directly into something in my life now that I'm a father right I have a three-year-old son Bishop and this happened like four months ago I'll never forget it so something like Bishop knocked over a glass or something whatever he spilled something he's three and and I kind of like you know I was having a bad day and I was in a bad mood I kind of snapped I'm like Bishop what do you why did you do that what are you doing be careful like really almost exactly like that tenor right and like I didn't it didn't even occur to me that I was snapping or being mean or whatever I was just like talking yeah yeah what I'm reacting but I looked at his face and that kid's face man it looked like I had stabbed him in the chest with a knife like he was crestfallen like broken I remember looking right at him and and understand in a flash understanding I had done to him what my dad did to me and at that moment I had a choice to make about the type of man let's have a father I was gonna be like either I could rash oh well you know like he deserved it or I needed he needs a toughen up or I could rationalize this or I could accept that I had hurt this kid my son and I had done it unintentionally tential it doesn't matter I had done it and that I had to accept it and then deal with it right deal with the fact that I had done and and of course thank God I went through therapy right because I was able to see it in the moment and understand in the moment what I had done and accept it and then deal with it and dealing with it is actually pretty easy if you'll accept that right but it was really painful I'm like it's still painful to think about the fact that I did like I did it there's no way to undo this but you know I picked them up I said all buddy come here are you are you sad and it's like yeah I'm like okay why are you sad and he's like you know I don't know he's sad Mike are you sad cuz Daddy yelled at you he's like yeah I'm like okay well you know daddies make mistakes too daddy shouldn't you know should he know what daddy makes mistakes and what do we do when we make mistakes we say we're sorry and we cleaned it up like okay what daddy's saying sorry to you okay cuz daddy shouldn't you know daddy made a mistake and daddy sorry so let's give me a hug and now clean it up right and like I don't know like that was to me like if there's a happy ending that's a happy ending right that's what therapy taught me and if you had to boil down so that particular thing to me from the outside it sounds like ownership is is the key their ownership of yourself and your emotions and your a desire to seek and to feel the painful truth not just intellectually recognize the truth in therapy is about connecting with the emotions you are running from and feeling them no matter how painful or awful they are because almost certainly they're awful painful to you otherwise you wouldn't want from them like you know run from happiness maybe it's not like Oh remember that great memory no no put that away hide that don't no that's not the problem it's the painful stuff you know yeah yes I totally get that and the fascinating thing to me is in my own life the thing that has become the most powerful thing for me isn't isn't maybe internalizing or connecting to my emotions maybe that wasn't the problem that I had and it's kind of interesting seeing you from the outside because there have been times in my life where I almost wish that I was a little less connected to my emotion but I see now though that also leads to some we're not very effective but the thing for me that was really powerful was learning to take responsibility for everything that I did and that that was where my entire life change and the most intentionally provocative but the most unintentionally controversial thing I've ever said is around the notion of taking ownership and how people really get riled up now maybe I pushed it too far but I used to one of the first blog articles I wrote was about I if I got hit by a drunk driver I would blame myself and people just went [ __ ] ballistic like him sooo with that title I can see why so the take-home messages I could have made different decisions that would have had a different outcome so it doesn't mean that I wasn't victimized but being a victim moving forward is a choice that that I have to make yeah and once and and I wrote it understand I wrote it from a place of like I'm giving you the best gift I know how to give you in fact one of the questions I was trying to formulate in my head is like if you were gonna take the gestalt of psychotherapy and hand it to Bishop and like one just one key thing to take away like what would that be and and I do want the answer that question and so writing that article is missing the single most important thing I've learned in my life right is that if you get hit by a drunk driver as unfair as it is cosmically as much as it isn't your fault from anyone else's perspective the gift I'm gonna give you is if you're willing to say I could have made a different choice and gotten a different outcome everything in your life will change right and it's very hard because then you take the ownership of other than happens going forward I get it and I get your point I can see how someone misinterpret that but your the point is rock-solid and amazing yes own everything in your life that you have control over you don't have control over drunk driver but you have control over everything that happens after that yeah [ __ ] yeah oh hell yeah yeah like for me it was yeah like I've never had problems taking ownership over my life I've had problems I think and this might be a different version of taking ownership over your life I've had problems recognizing painful unpleasant truths which i think is just actually us if you think about it's a subset of taking ownership over your life you know like the movie think it's a great example it took me six months to a year to fully accept it clear as day it was my fault it's not like this is like some - Katie you know multi-level thing where like I had to unpack this mystery it was clear everyone involved with the movie could be like oh dude you totally [ __ ] this up without I'm quiet but it took me a year about a year to fully emotionally own that was there a voice in your head that was like look [ __ ] you know this was you know no I don't think so because that's one of the downsides of being and like this is a sound like a ridiculous humblebrag it kind of is but one of the downsides of being smart is that it's really easy to rationalize you know and I'm really good at rationalizing so I'm really good at creating narratives that that really are true in a way but they hide an underlying truth my analysts would always say I would be you know 20 minutes down the path of this amazing story that was essentially rationalizing or justifying something and she would look at me and she would say the best defenses are true because because I like what I would be saying like I could tell you a story right now that is factually correct about the movie that would place all the blame off of me but the underlying truth is that it's my fault right so yeah I think there different ways to saying the same thing I would totally 100% agree it that was the last I'd always done a good job owning my life in terms of taking action I think I've done a very poor job owning responsibility emotional responsibility especially for the way I've made other people feel a lot of times I didn't I did a terrible job at that and I don't think it was that I didn't care it was that I was so disconnected from my own emotions it was like how the hell am I gonna feel hers or his or yours like it doesn't even occur to you that that's a thing like why would they yelling bother you doesn't bother me it's well dude not everyone's like you like it took it took me a long time to really internalize that on an emotional level yeah god I hope people see this interview in the context of how brash and successful by the way you were early in your career and how different you feel now like the interviews that you did are the books that you wrote which were all nonfiction by the way oh of course so it is really really fascinating and especially for me because over such a collapse time period it's like I really got to go in that massive swing in this really finite period of time it's been really really interesting all right I do want to get the answer the question if you had to wrap up yeah you're like big takeaway from psychotherapy for Bishop what's that breakthrough you hope you never need psychotherapy for yeah so right if he needs if you need a second othera P then I failed as a dad right I mean he'll he's gonna experience traumas in his life but I'm just hoping they're not in the core family the takeaway of psychotherapy is the exact same takeaway of Buddhism they just are 180-degree diametrically opposed ways to get at the same truth and the truth is the truth is that you are going to suffer but the way to deal with suffering is accepting that suffering and then recognizing that it is suffering accepting it and then letting it sort of have it say and then moving on from that right so to really condense that I would say the what I would tell him this is what I try to do with him and and my daughter Vaughn is we help them connect what they're thinking to how they're feeling right because I think so many people disconnect those things and and that that's why I like the example I gave you with Bishop like three or three years old they feel but they don't know how to articulate their feelings so I spent a lot of time with him helping him understand what he feels you know not telling him what he feels like I'll give you an example every kid falls down they hurt themselves right and I learned this at sort of indirectly an analysis or early on my wife would like oh you're okay you're okay cuz ever instinct is like you know motherly once the pain to go away I said no no stop doing that don't do that because what you're doing is you're actually confusing him you're negating his feelings because he fell down he skinned his knee he hurts and you saying you're okay is a very confusing thing because it's like I'm saying to my wife you're the center of his universe for his mom so the better thing did say is hey how are you okay and then let him tell you no I'm not okay or yes I am okay right that's a great example of something I learned in analysis is just under standing what am I feeling and then connecting it to what am i what I'm thinking I almost think of it like two different parts of my brain the feeling part in the thinking part because actually literally you know there's three different parts right but you really literally do have like two different parts to your brain and it's not quite biologically neurologically accurate to say thinking is only in one part I'm feeling is only in another but if you but roughly you're close enough dude I'll give you a good example coming in here I was actually a little bit nervous for this interview the weird thing is it's like because I've seen a bunch of your your episodes and you get great stuff out of people like Simon's Simon's Simon cynics good friend of mine and he like his like has been viewed like a couple hundred million times right right exactly so I'm showing up like man I can't I can't screw the pooch on this like I got a really show up and do a good job but it didn't freak me out because like I reckon it's standing right there 20 minutes ago I recognized okay like I got chills it's not cold in here I'm a little bit nervous no big deal I've done this before I can talk about this stuff I just I recognise the anxiety I accepted it and then actually another technique I use that reframe it is like okay I'm gonna reframe it as excitement and energy and I'm gonna use it to really dig deep and do like a great interview but like yeah like that's that's what I would tell him to take away and that's what I try to teach him is thinking is awesome but emotions are kind of what drive you and you've got to connect those to really kind of have a happy successful life that's a pretty damn good takeaway I want to go back to something you said you said I'm on this mountain I'm at the peak of this mountain and I had to really realize that I'm actually on the peak of the wrong mountain and so I had to go down before I could go back what what was that process like and then how did you recognize that you wanted something new and what were you telling yourself as you knew I'm gonna have to go down first yeah it sucked Zeus good luck because you work so hard and you think this is the mountain you're trying to climb and you climb it man like climb the mountain right like I I was there and then I kind of looked around and I realized I wasn't happy I didn't really have what I wanted I had what I thought I wanted to be happy right I had like I I'd set the X on the map and I got there and I actually did better than I thought I needed to be to have everything right everything I wanted I did even better like I would have been happy you know selling half a million books right and be having one year on the bestseller list I'm way past that and so like it was it ties in to what you mentioned earlier the one thing that I I think I do better than most people if I had to attribute my success to one thing other than hard work which is you can't succeed without hard work that's just table stakes but one thing I think I do better than most people even successful people is I'm always willing to face the truth once I know it like I'll fight it for a long time right I'm really good at rationalizing it but once the truth is like that's why the movie failing was such a turning point in my life because you can't argue that away right and so like that was the thing that was the thing that made me realize I'm at the top of this mountain and it sucks right cuz it if it didn't suck if I was at the top of a mountain I wanted to be at the top of then the movie failing would suck but it wouldn't crush me it wouldn't break me like that really that cracked my grandiosity in a real way i dude like I really I felt like I was gonna die I mean which say it seems ridiculous but anyone who's really ever gone through a serious like emotional like painful thing you know what I'm talking about and I really totally subjectively emotionally felt like I was gonna die and that was the thing that woke me up was like okay like alright like at least that started the path to understanding I'm on the wrong Mountain alright so then how did I go down so that's when I finished my other books and I retired at the end of the the last book right and that was a very intentional thing like that was kind of a symbolic I'm a big fan of ritual and like I used to think weddings and all those things were so stupid and then I got older I'm like okay maybe the way we do weddings is stupid but I get why you have rituals and why you do public things and what like they're the they are very impactful right why that's Rick I believe that more than you know but I want to know why you say that because rituals done right I think integrate thinking feeling and accountability in a public way and they commit you to something that that that you want right you stand up in front of everyone and say this is what I want or Who I am or what I'm committing to then it integrates all parts of yourself and line and your community and lines you up in a direction and that happened for me like that's why I retired from from frat tire because part of this cuz I just I'd outgrown it man like I just didn't you know I was 35 36 when I did that it's like I didn't you know I hardly drank anymore like I didn't go out and he's like going to a bar at 35 is like kill me right 25 is the greatest thing ever 35 night like it was the worst and so so retiring was like a way for me to step off the stage and to to find something else so that was I had that was a ceremony that was very important for me really fast before we move off that was part of the reason that you wanted to do that because the way you bit your persona everything you wrote you your book was literally titled [ __ ] finished first self-identified [ __ ] around the movie that repeat you incited a riot on yourself yes so there were plenty of people that wanted to see you burn at the stake that had to cross your mind as you're like I'm gonna retire and I open this vacuum for people to like pounce on me and say [ __ ] finally it's about time this guy shut up like that kind of thing did you worry about that mmm not consciously maybe unconsciously dude I don't know I grew up very independent right like they unintentionally taught me at a young age how to be self-reliant like I was cooking my own meals at 10 I mean like I'm never worried about losing everything or whatever I know I can start again I know I can handle myself and also I've just never worried that much what other people think you know like I didn't have a tight circle of people who loved me and cared about me and nurtured me who also taught me to be very very conscious of their opinions right I grew up like kind of on my own and so like it never occurred to me to worry about what these people think who aren't in my life and don't impact my life I mean if they like me okay that's cool like I like that if they don't like me yeah well [ __ ] them like it doesn't doesn't impact me you know and so that was really one of the reasons why I was able to write what I wrote God knows I was not the first person to get drunk and throw up on myself and fall down right I was the first dude to write about it in an honest way under my own name and I think the reason why is because I didn't care about embarrassing anyone because I had no one to embarrass right it didn't bother me what people thought and there was no one around me that like I was gonna shame by doing that and is that part of what then made it the gave you the ability to go down without too much overwhelming pressure yeah it was like well let's be honest money helps like I'd sold a lot of books and it was like okay I have a chunk of money like maybe I'm not I don't I don't have your house yet you know but like I don't have a jet yet but like I don't have to work anymore so I don't have to answer to anybody and even if I did I could always there's a lot of ways to make money I could make more money so it was like well why do I care like it doesn't matter to me like I I've done what I had to do I've said what I had to say about fryer in that point in my life and I climbed that mountain and I thought that was the peak and then I got to that there's a great Buddhist saying when you reach the top of the mountain you'll there'll be another mountain right and I like I didn't think that and then I did it and I realized okay great and so it was like alright and then I retired coming down the mountain was not hard right it it's really easy to lose momentum like it's really easy to kind of step off the stage because there's always a hundred people waiting to replace you so that was not hard at all that going down was easy climbing the next mountain was really hard because that required therapy that required me to really be honest with myself about myself to discover hard things find hard truths - and it required me to shed a lot of the things that had made me successful in the last mount right like being the rambunctious devil-may-care flippin [ __ ] works great if you're gonna be that character right or if you're gonna live I wasn't even a character I it was who I was but if you're gonna essentially occupy that that that niche but when you're climbing a different mountain then you've got to let those patterns go and because it wasn't a brand it wasn't a persona it was who I was I had to really kind of relearn in a lot of ways how to be successful and how to how to successfully deal with people because if everyone knows oh that's that guy that's that guy who wrote beer in hell then they give you a wide berth like you can be an [ __ ] and people actually think it's funny like it's like oh yeah that's that's Tucker max he's supposed to you know throw up on the table or whatever right but when you're like an angel investor or an entrepreneur or at a business meeting like that's you done fine like professionals you can't deal with that right and like a serious successful adults like they might even people who like might have thought my books were funny and liked them a lot there's just like a certain level of maturity that they expect which is totally reasonable and most of the time I was perfectly fine there were just a lot of things that like I had to either shed or learn going up them either about the world around myself it was tough dude it was hard he don't the hardest part the hardest part is I think there's this expectation that once you're successful at one thing you just get to be automatically successful at everything else right and like that's just not the truth a good friend of mine actually my editor told me this great saying he said Tucker all success gets you is the conditional opportunity to prove yourself again and at first when he told me that I was like [ __ ] you that's [ __ ] like I'm already successful people should just accept my genius because I'm Who I am and of course that's nonsense right it took me a while to relearn that but yeah like then it became very clear I've got to relearn every day especially in the new arena I've got a real success that is something I understand completely having exited quest and I think everybody looking at me like I was out of my mind and knowing I mean we talked as a team about this is reading your stripes you know and if you know the JJ Watt quote which I'm sure it's him quoting somebody else but success isn't owned it's leased and rent is due everybody right and I just I love that beyond measure do you meet that with excitement do you meet that with trepidation like how do you think about definitely excitement it's not it's actually both man I don't think I think those those are two sides of the same coin I'm excited so I am blessed enough I've worked hard enough and made enough money that I get to pick what I want to do right not everyone has that that ability although I think more people have that ability than I realize but so I wouldn't be doing the company that I'm in the business and if I didn't like it if I didn't if it didn't if I didn't wake up excited to go do this I would not do it talk to me about your willingness to fire yourself as a CEO yeah that's a 100% because of therapy that's another one a hundred percent like in fact one of our clients was this guy JT McCormack he was the president of a hundred million dollar software company just like another software company in Austin and he had like come on when they were two million as a sales guy and had become president like in six months and scaled the the company turnable whatever and this is after he'd already run he got a long history in sort of bits scaling businesses and doing all kinds of cool stuff and I kept going to him for advice like dude what do I do with this and he's like oh man you guys are dict up you gotta do this and this and this right and he kept giving me all this amazing advice and so I started like inviting him to our like executive meetings at like asked him to be an advisor and eventually he's like look man no offense I don't think you can handle this I'm like I know I can't that's why I keep coming to you for advice and he's like why don't you just hire me I'm like dude you you made last year in salary probably about what we made in top-line revenue like for judo don't be ridiculous I'm like when we get to 10 million we'll hire you he's like no no you're not gonna make it to 10 million doing what you're doing now he's like you actually need me now and I'm like yeah but we can't afford sec yeah let's talk so turns out his company hadn't given him any equity and he was kind of looking for his next thing and he loved our process like I I sat down with him pain and sort of our long-term picture cuz like about what what what what our vision was and he was totally on board and he's like I'll come on as president you can stay CEO like I'll take over ops whatever you can be you you can be the face of the company all that sort of stuff and I was like no no no that's [ __ ] like if you come on you need to be the CEO I will step aside because like everything you're gonna be doing pretty much our CEO tasks and so if you are president I'm CEO then it's like it's [ __ ] I'm just a figurehead I'm really good at certain things so girls clearly I'll stay in the company I'll go run marketing I'll go you know run product and and you run the company you scale the company and it was hard for me at first to like kind of accept that it was but when I say hard it was like a couple days right and what was that process because that is exactly what I want understand yeah the number of people that can do that from an ego standpoint is vanishingly the only reason I could do that as physiotherapy man is because because what happened on the movie because I know the last time I tried to keep control of everything I ruined it and I went through therapy and I kind of addressed that stuff in me you know what it came down to Tom it came down to did I actually care about our mission and our team or did I care more about myself because if I cared about the mission on the team clear as day JT should be CEO and if I cared more about myself than I should say CEO and once I framed it that way then it was it was a painful decision but it was easy all right before I asked my last question where can these guys find you online learn more about book in a box yeah it's a book or lock calm pretty simple me I have a site called Tucker max Amy well actually wrote a whole article about why I stepped aside and then my email is Tucker at book in a box that's probably the best place to start I think awesome all right what is the impact that you want to have in the world I got to give two answers because one is gonna seem trite and probably won't be fulfilling for the audience but it's the God's honest truth answer and then the second one will is also true but it's like the second thing I would say but is something I think the audience will will take more from so the the impact I most want to have on the world God's honest truth is I feel like I will be a success in life if my children I've - now Bishop and Vaughn if they look back after I'm gone and they are they miss me and they love me and they are proud to be my kid and they feel like I my wife and I gave them everything they needed to succeed at life or to set them up because they're gonna have to fight their own battles but we we set them up the best possible way I feel like that's the impact that's most important to me if I'm a hero - Micah a true honest hero to my kids that's the impact that matters the most to me by far now in terms of impacting the world outside of my children it's the company I'm working on now I like it from the outside it's like oh yeah we're you know we help people write books right okay pretty simple but I think it's a lot more than that one of the great tragedies of human history I feel like is when Caesar got mad at Cleopatra and burned the Library of Alexandria which at the time held basically all of the world's knowledge like the Egyptians were obsessive they were suss of scribes about like copying essentially what everyone else knew and the the at the time it was said that the Library of Alexandria had at least one copy of of all like recorded knowledge and and it burned and so like a huge swath of wisdom was lost and I feel like now even though we have so much technology and so much sort of ability to record knowledge I think almost everything that's recorded is essentially garbage nonsense that no one will care about and even a week much less a lifetime but I feel like there's so many smart people who knows so much who don't record their knowledge they don't and not because they're bad not because they're trying to hide it not because anything but because it's hard to really turn your knowledge into and doesn't have to just be a book but take your knowledge out of your head and put it into a form that you can share with others that they can utilize in their life right and I just feel like I have the ability and my in my team and my tribe a book interlocks we have the ability to unlock the world's wisdom right to get it out of people's heads and to get it into not just book books or what we're doing now but we plan to expand to a lot of different verticals but essentially we want to create a community that can take people who know things that are valuable to others like know how to do things right or how to anything that's valuable put it into recordable shareable forms and share it with the world people who want a good like you've got the resources and the ability you're good at medias you can get your wisdom out of your own head but how many people are know maybe not as much as you but know like the equivalent in their niche but either don't have the time or the money or the desire to go to all this effort right why should their knowledge die with them god knows man what what I wouldn't give to know at 18 what I know now or at 25 when I know now right what would you pay when you start a quest to have a book that what you know now just about the like that business right well it would be priceless so that's that's the impact that we are trying to have as a company is we're trying to unlock the world's wisdom yeah all of that man thank you so much for coming on their toes notable guys this is somebody who I'm telling you is the most amazing example of the extremities of human transformation that I've ever seen in my life do yourself a favor go look at where he started read some of the early books and then watch this interview again it is unimaginable the lengths to which you can reinvent yourself change yourself if you're willing to do the hard work to look inside yourself to do what he says and really connect what you're thinking to what you're feeling and most importantly know what the mountain you're actually trying to summit and make sure that you have a plan to get there and to have the internal fortitude the sense of self to be able to go down that hill first and I know this is where a lot of people get lost you get that first level of success and you've still got the ego in the way and you're not able to allow yourself to descend before you go back up the other side you don't have the humility to recognize that what stands between where you are and where you want to go is a really hard to acquire set of skills that's going to require a lot of work internally and externally to get that we didn't even get to talk about his background in MMA and I'm guessing that's where the bruises or the arms come and what he's learned on the mat and one thing that I came across in the research that I just thought was really incredible as he says that he feels a sense of gratitude to everyone that he grapples with because they give him a chance to show where he's really at and I love that and I think in life in business in your family and everything that you do oh the people that show up to really let you show yourself where you're at and to be who you are at that moment and and then they're gonna be on that journey with you as you change and push and grow I think it's absolutely incredible and honestly honestly in all the people that I've interviewed this guy sums that up the best and is one of the most profound transformations I've ever seen and doesn't [ __ ] he says look I enjoyed who I was then so this isn't that it's not me running away from something it's me really evolving as a human being reassessing what I want doing the work looking inward and becoming something new and I think that is absolutely incredible so I hope you guys take as much away from this as I did it was really incredible and if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next my friends be legendary take care thank you what's up impact ah--this if you've ever failed your New Year's resolutions we've created a free guide just for you the resolution reality checklist it teaches you how to write smarter resolutions so you will actually crush this year you can download it today at info impact Theory comm forward slash resolutions

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 410,402

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, tucker max, Tucker Max, reinvent yourself

Id: RJaczGjkS3w

Length: 53min 41sec (3221 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2018