Is Your Self-Identity Limiting Your Potential? | Vusi Thembekwayo on Impact Theory

[Music] hey everybody i hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by our sponsors at blinkist hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i am here with somebody who i think you guys are going to have your minds blown by vuci tembe quayo vuci welcome to the show man i am beyond excited to spend this time with you brother bill you this is incredible it's a dream come true thanks for having me dude for sure so in researching you man i really had my mind blown i am very impressed with your ability to generate success even in a system that you could argue is pretty problematic possibly even broken and yet you've had this extraordinary level of success watching your father killed in front of you when you were 13 having to drop out of college at one point because you couldn't afford it growing up and starting a business as a black man in recently just out of apartheid south africa i mean these are pretty hardcore circumstances and yet you sit here as somebody who has had extraordinary success so given that people often reach for that excuse of the world's against me you know the system is set up to see me fail what is it about you or the way that you think that has allowed you to be successful despite all of that madness i think um so i live by two core principles right the first is that everything everyone knows they learned and i don't accept that i'm less intelligent than the next person which means i can learn it too right um the second is that every single excuse i have is valid but that's still not going to give me the results that i want and so we do live in this really uh pc culture today um um where people are looking for the excuse and the truth is the excuse is completely valid yes you are a young black person growing up in democratic south africa for the past 26 years but for hundreds of years before that it wasn't built for you to succeed right yes you're living in one of the most difficult credit capital markets in the world so it's hard to get access to funding to start a business yeah all of that stuff's true but that's still not going to change your circumstance so so the test is not whether or not you know the the reasons for not succeeding the test is whether or not you're willing to do whatever it takes to get to that next level and a big part of the whatever it takes actually is just remain teachable just just be a student student of the game a student of life a student of those who've achieved um and i've found that those two things have really stood me in good stead dude what you said about excuses being valid i think that's really important for people to understand 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 i remember i was giving a talk um 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 now how do you how have you vuci cultivated that mentality when your father was killed easy moment to give up to turn to violence to be angry to be bitter when you had to drop out of school a reason again to just be angry to be bitter what what are you telling yourself that allows you to go okay cool this is my circumstance but i know what i want so first just to make the admission that i do get pissed and i'm very real and raw at that emotion right so i i i recognize the imbalance that the world we live in has but i also recognize that those imbalances are man-made tom and they were they were created by people who precede us who had a particular view of the world and um and my role is to shift people's views and perspective right so that's literally what i do when i'm on a platform i'm just there to help you see the world differently than how you've seen it before that's it what are some of the key attributes to that so you gave us one which is excuses are valid so what what are some other core tenets yeah so the first one is your excuses are valid the second one is your reality is your reality you're not imagining it you're not imagining that you're poor you're not imagining that you're left out because you live in a third world country you're not imagining that you're not getting the right quality of education to make you globally competitive you're not imagining that that's it's real right okay but now that you've got it you can live in the emotion and sometimes i do i get really really mad and really really upset but then the following morning comes and you realize that you've moved not an inch of distance yet you've expanded all of this time and this emotion i mean right now if you think about the world we live in just think about how much hatred there is think about how much anger there is and yet we're not moving so i what really pulls me out of it and it's an honest conversation with me is i go do you want the emotion or do you want progress because you can't have both oh right go go deeper on that that's crazy just gave me the chills i'll give you an example you're at the gym right you're curling your rep 8 and your body starts to fire off those signals in your brain and it goes stop it hurts if you stop you get the emotion you don't get the progress so if you talk to any decent athlete they'll tell you that where the pain stop starts is when the work starts right talk to any decent entrepreneur that's built a large-scale business they'll tell you the they had to go through so you either get the emotion or you get the progress but you can't have both right we're living in this world today where everybody is just so deeply embedded in the emotion i want to be angry at tom because he's x y and z and i want to be angry at vuci because yeah yet you make no progress so yours and my challenge i think as a generation is how do we give the world progress and and finally you ask me so the question around so how do you get over that right so here's the final bit is i recognize that my generation has it the easiest like i think we forget actually that our generation probably has it the easiest in the history of homo sapiens on this little rock called planet earth in my generations tom if i say something that's politically incorrect i might trend on twitter if my grandfather said something politically incorrect he would have been killed or landed up in jail so so sometimes we've we've lost a sense of perspective right around it's not easy but damn it's much easier than it's ever been and and you have a responsibility to own your progress you can either own the emotional progress but you don't get both dude so if i i am willing to take up that mantle with you and say that our obligation is to help people progress um this is exactly why when lisa and i um exited our last company we didn't just retire we wanted to double down um and do something that really mattered and a lot of i'll say that the very animus the thing that animates me and keeps me going is having worked in the inner cities and seeing that there were these extraordinary people um meaning meaning that they they could become extraordinary right they had all the raw materials but they were never going to because they didn't know how to progress to use your language and so we thought okay this really is teachable going back to your point about this stuff is man-made so if if we can make this world then we can certainly make a different world if i'm prepared to take up that mantle what is it that i actually need to do what is it i need to convince people of what are the actions i need to take um i know that you're really focused on education but what are you actually trying to teach like how do people make progress so whoo see this is why i'm a fan of the show is because the questions you ask damn how did tom go there so um the hardest thing to do is to is to enable people to see themselves as they are not as they hoped they were not as they've been taught they are but as they actually are it's the single hardest thing to do and i'll tell you why because we're all embedded in this construct of a thing called identity right and so and what people forget is identity by its very nature one is man-made and two is exclusive what that means is the minute i say i'm male it means i'm not female if i say i'm black it means i'm not white if i say i'm african it means i'm not american if i say i am you know educated it means i'm not illiterate so all the little words we use to construct identity put us in a box they don't free us right and it's something people i think don't think about because people today have assumed an identity for who they are and it's it's all over right it's in the media it's on social media it's on tv it's in the newspapers it's in in music videos all you're being sold is an identity this is what you should be based on where you come from and based on how you've been socialized very early on my father taught me that i didn't have to be what society told me right that i could be different if i want to i want to put that in context and see if i'm understanding what you're saying so um i read nelson mandela's long walk to freedom it with me dude that book is so good like when every second i think i'm a badass and then i remember that the man faced 27 years in prison and refused to compromise his principles i'm just not that hardcore and yeah like so that is phenomenal and i remember him saying in the book he was like this this is nelson mandela talking he said i got on an airplane and the pilot was black and for a minute i was scared because i didn't think black people could fly a plane and he was like what the like how do i think that and he said if that had seeped into my mind identity right then how many other people had accepted something less than who they were because of what society had told them is that what you mean that we're sort of subtly taking on these i can't i can't i can't exactly so um here's a great example i'm short therefore i can't model okay i mean it's not it's not established that short people should model but whether you should or whether you can are very different tests right um and by the way i approach every little thing in my life like that like all the i do i go i shouldn't but it doesn't mean i can't there's a big difference so if you're telling me i shouldn't be in the room you may be correct it doesn't mean i don't have the capacity to be in the room i want to force my way in and i'm going to get to change your mind so this thing about identity i think is so powerful because in today's world where we've you know we're no longer demographics we're a psychographic now there is a kid living in kuala lumpur who's never been out of kuala lumpur who sounds like a kid in brooklyn new york because he's watching jay-z on on youtube but he so he's completely immersed in that culture and he's never left his small little village right and that's exactly the point is everything you've been taught you are somebody taught you that's what you are now you can keep that identity but again you can't get the progress and so what a lot of people do is they hang on to it right in south africa it um it's often about gender sometimes it's about tribe right so what tribe you come from there's a big generation issue so it's i'm part of it this generation yeah all those things are true but do you want the identity or do you want the progress because you can't have both um i'll tell you just quickly a story so my dad was the sensei in the dojo right and i used to train with my dad in the dojo and so i asked him one time i was like how come we get to change belts like i mean couldn't you teach the methodology without the belt system he said two things he said first human beings are incentive based so you need something to aim for but he said the second thing is the reason we give you a belt is because it assigns an identity now it doesn't mean that if your orange belt you can't take on a brown belt it's just you embed that in your mind and you go well he's seen you then therefore and so one of the things he said to me one of the things you're going to have to learn is that real life doesn't have a belt system so everything we know and have learned about identity is given to us it's a it's a template that somebody has given you and you can just choose to run that script of macros or not man identity is i think the the linchpin so i'm going to put my finger on the most inflammatory thing i've ever heard you say and we're just going to go straight there because i think if people can go past the emotion and get to what you're saying there's a breakthrough that applies to everybody but the the most inflammatory thing i ever heard you say is that and i'm assuming actually i think you were talking worldwide you will correct me but you said black people were not ready for freedom and i was like oh and shel there's a guy in america his name is shelby steele who said the same thing and i remember i almost like coughed i could not believe that he was saying that and your initial reaction is like what the what are you talking about yeah so what were you talking about what do you mean because i know dude you were coming from a beautiful place but i have to imagine when people hear you say that they freak out what do you mean yeah i mean i i gotta tell you so there was that's such an incred that was such an important moment and statement because so there was a context within which i said it and i was giving a master class as i do and and i made that statement and it was probably out on youtube for two years as these things are they just there kind of bubbling and simmering along and then somebody went and found it on youtube clipped that video and put it on twitter and it just exploded right so i think the language is important here i'm not saying black people don't deserve freedom i think that's an important point to make first of all freedom isn't something you deserve it's a god-given right it's like breathing right so you shouldn't have to justify why you deserve to be free and often people that approach that conversation heard me to say black people don't deserve freedom and i'm going no no no no the idea that you deserve it means there's something you have to do to earn it which by itself is fallacious there is nothing you have to do to earn the right as tom bill you to self-determine you get to self-determine that's your human right right that said if you accept and we all do that there have been hundreds of years of structural um uh exclusion and oppression not only of the black body but of the black mind most importantly the black mind nelson mandela sitting on the plane going holy there's a black pilot right this is the father of our democracy himself being caught in that trap but he had to be wise enough and smart enough to step out of that comment in his head and see that comment in the context of the moment so when i'm saying we weren't ready for freedom what i mean is we got it but we haven't freed our minds right so what we're doing is we're defaulting to the reasons and excuses we had pre-freedom for why we're not doing the we should be doing in freedom now so the oldest the oldest most independent country in africa i think is ghana i think and it's probably been independent for over 60 years right but if you track the trajectory of where that country has gone if you go to a haiti and of course there are several structural issues around the relationship haiti has with europe and with france but if you go to haiti and if you go to zimbabwe just north of here so who's zimbabwe going to blame that's really a question because what happens is we've put these people in positions of power and leadership whose mindset was not in disentangled from what the way things used to be so they bring an oppressed mind into a freedom construct then they act like oppressed people and we wonder why the results are the way they are krs-1 said it the most beautiful way in one of his raps he said he said as black people we need to be free people not freed people that's right and and the point there is the point of departure is when you're free you don't find the need to explain your freedom you just are right um and so that's where that comment was coming from was and it was a reflection was okay so we got it but were we ready for it are we using it to the best of its ability this incredible freedom that we enjoy are we really being transformative are we being imaginative are we doing new great and powerful things are we being a generation that our children's children will look at and go those guys had the right template they got it right right or not and it's a question we have to answer every single day yes it is interesting so because of my experience i think of the same problem but i don't think of it along racial lines i think of it along um economic is probably the closest thing so working in the inner cities i realized white hispanic black didn't matter people had been told things like i remember one kid coming to me had to be hispanic and he said my mom told me that the world does not want to see me succeed and i thought what the like i actually understand why she's saying that she's trying to say look this is going to be hard for you um there are difficulties you will face that other people will not face and so i know where she was trying to go it was like trying to sort of soothe him for the difficult road ahead but what it told him was you don't belong in that room so don't bother don't even try and so i began to obsess with this notion of this this is a mindset problem so generational poverty to me is not really a question of money it will manifest as money but it is a question of mindset it's a question of how to think so there are minimum requirements anybody watching you that has any bit of sense is going to go this guy is so eloquent for sure his verbal ability has helped him in life 100 i i think they're beyond a doubt but if somebody has that latent ability that doesn't get it trained they're not going to end up being able to leverage it as a skill set there's a guy named jeffrey canada and he was looking at basically how do you give people the right mindset to be successful he'd grown up in harlem at like the height of the crack epidemic and he's just like this is atrocious and what he realized looking at the data was what mattered was the number of words you heard by the age of five and the ratio of positive words to negative words because of what it did to the language centers of your brain and how you spoke in a job interview or in trying to communicate to other people and so he's like this is a very complicated problem that has a very simple like linchpin that if you address that then everything else tumbles from that and i'll say that one of those things isn't just language it's just how you think about your place in the world your identity and everything sort of keeps coming back to that do you agree that the statement that you made about being able to make the most of your freedom centers around how you conceptualize yourself and the world pointedly identity 100 which is why i think the work of our generation today really is around forcing us to cons to reconstruct these very identities we have if we think about it we live in a world today where almost all identities are assumed right so the idea for instance of masculinity is assumed all right um the idea of being a strong zulu man is assumed there is a there's a script there's a book somebody wrote that says these are the ways you've got to be this thing right and and i didn't get to do the edit i just got the pdf version right but i'm saying if i'm living in a world that is complex and changing i can't take this pdf script into a new environment it ain't going to work so i either get to keep the tradition and the emotion or i get progress but i can't do both right and you know for me i really used to resent this because i would get chastised i'd get mocked i would get attacked then i realized that actually i was giving others the permission to be themselves too right so and that's the most empowering thing that you can do when you choose to step into no man's land meaning saying the things that you're saying the sort of inflammatory things well so so not only saying the things that you're saying but allowing yourself to um to be ventilated allowing those thoughts to be discussed and ventilated by people right um one of the things i had to learn was as i did it it was incredible how many other people came out and said sure glad you said it because i've been thinking but i couldn't say it because you know they'd lynch me and i was like wow man so so so you were all aware that the script doesn't work but none of us are willing to say it because they're going to throw us in the proverbial social media concentration camp well edna son right i mean that's not progress right final thing just for you to think about which is this what's the worst that can happen well the worst that can happen is you're wrong then you're educated which goes back to where we start at the very beginning right remain teachable so the worst thing that can happen is you say something you're wrong somebody picks up the phone you're educated you grow up and you mature but i think it's really important i think this idea of identity is just so powerful when somebody asks the question who are you how do you answer that question right are you are you the job you have are you the place you come from are you the lineage of your of your ancestors are you the qualifications are you your geography who are you right and i think a lot of us don't really bother to give that enough thought i want to go back to this idea of getting started i think that um to your point about you get educated you're wrong but you figure out that you're wrong and now you can take a step towards being right um it seems to me that one of the most incredible things about your journey was just a willingness to fail in the beginning which of course you did um why is it you're so hardcore about that notion of just get started because the single most important part of the momentum equation is movement right so i'll give you here's how i explain this to people so if you're driving your car and for some other strange reason you know the car stalls and you're stuck right you have one of two things you can do right and let's imagine you're in a you know you know cell phone black zone you can't phone anybody you one or two things you can do sit in the car switch on your hazards and pray somebody's gonna come past you that's what we call the charity approach hi i'm here i grew up poor i didn't get a good education help it completely gives the power to the person on the other side of the equation which is the i feel like i want to help and here's how much i'm willing to help with all right flash the hazards the alternative is you open the driver's door you drop the the you drop the handbrake you put your shoulder behind the chassis and you push now when you start pushing the hardest part is going to be that initial meter because the car is completely still it's got no momentum so you start pushing and what happens is five meters down the line 10 meters down the line assuming the road is flat of course all of a sudden you're not pushing as hard as you were you're just maintaining momentum so the reason i always say to people start is because the hardest part is the beginning my dad used to say to me you will always be the worst at something the first time you do it so the results you get the first time you do it are not the true results that was the worst version of you doing that thing that's the first time you sing first time doing public speaking you know first time you try to do a comedy set first time you do anything is the worst time because you don't have the skill set but as you do it what happens is you mature you get better and you learn right so that's what i mean by that is is the reason it's important to start is because all of those stories that self-narrative that you've been saying and toiling in your head the excuses are valid the world isn't fair and but guess what at the beginning it is going to be tough but the only way out of it is to start there is no other way out of it you can't negotiate with it right it's um i mean let me just one last thing for you to think about so i said this to an entrepreneur literally today who came to see me about this very thing and she was saying to me look you know business it's covered it's been a tough time yada yada and i said to her so you know if you went to imagine you know the empire state buildings i said too if you went to the top of the building and uh stood at the ledge prayed to whichever god you praised god buddha allah and told him that you don't believe in gravity and jumped you'd find that gravity believes in you right so so i was saying to the environment in the moment we're in is gravity you can't negotiate your way out of it right what you can do is you can get started with who you need to be to survive this moment and what she was doing which is what i think a lot of people do is they they hang on to who they used to be right so i used to be the well that's not working anymore so who do you need to be and get started on that journey i really honestly firmly believe in the school of starting starting i think is often more important in the entire momentum construct than everything that comes after that dude your obsession with what works is a shared obsession i i you and i think so much alike that it's scary you may be the closest person in terms of saying things that like i've never heard anybody else say that i have either said or have had rattling around in my head for a very long time um and that that idea like the thing i want to scream at people is for your own sake do what works do what works like i'm not saying it because i get anything out of the equation i'm just saying do what works look at the data it's what i call the physics of progress the physics of progress is basically the scientific method recontextualized for business you're you have an informed hypothesis based on your life then test that hypothesis by running an experiment doing something but then look at the data did this actually move me towards what i want yes or no and you have a quote i actually think i wrote this down let me pull this up um you said and i quote this is vuci everybody don't give me something out of pity i don't want pity give me something because i'm the best at what i do man talk about pushing the car now what's interesting is as you were saying it i thought okay what people are going to say is well vuci the the road isn't flat this is an uphill battle and i would say that actually isn't true and the road is malleable and the road may actually start uphill but the more you push even if the car rolls back you're gonna learn something and now the road flattens then you're gonna learn something more and now the road is going downhill and all of a sudden you almost can't even keep up there's so much happening and it's like i have the chills i want people to understand that getting good is what matters get good but people people take that excuse and they don't even start pushing the car which is the thing that freaks me out talk to me about martial arts you're going to be worse when you first start what is it about martial arts that drew you in and kept you going because you've said that you you use martial arts a lot even now yeah i mean you know my so my my um my dad my dad did a style of martial arts called kyokushinkai and um and i suppose this little boy trying to get close to dad i was like well if he's doing it i'm going to join him so my dad and i shared this incredible passion of martial arts and cars right um so i kind of get started you know with my father then he gets gunned down when i'm 13 years old and i went through like a year of just nothing i just i couldn't show up at the dojo i didn't have it in me and i did all the things we're talking about the excuses at the time south africa had a a particularly high crime problem and i was like you know what's the point you know he has a first degree black belt who gets attacked he get takes nine bullets and he's dead anyway why am i going to this thing called the dojo right again excuses valid it really is but there's no progress so a year nothing and then and then i was like i actually miss it so i went back it was interesting when i went back it wasn't the same i wasn't doing the qatar to impress the senseis anymore i was doing the qatar because i wanted every single movement to be as close to flawless as i could get it it changed my entire perspective so and one of the things that happened you're going to love this i'm literally getting chills thinking about it one of the things that happened is time just expanded so right because we have a very finite construct of time i'm going to be at the dojo for an hour but what happened was that hour be felt like five hours and sometimes 30 minutes felt like five all of a sudden this fixed construct of time you know it started to change because my relationship with what i was doing changed so it wasn't just a punch it wasn't just the qatar i wasn't just i wasn't just showing up for the emotion i was embedded in every single part of the process i was looking for growth for progress right i have to tell you that changed my entire life so anytime i find myself stuck now i recognize that often the reason i'm stuck is because i'm focusing on the output and i'm not focusing on my input right so output i've got to raise a hundred million around for my business output i've got to get 300 growth for you know in customers output i've got to get 25 yeah that's all output but what you got to focus on is input what are the things i've got to do and how do i do those things intentionally deliberately and try to get better every single time every meeting every impact conversation with one of my staff members every engagement with a client or a potential client every single one of those things how do i focus on that moment because actually the output is a sum total of how those things come about so when you when you are at the dojo and you are being graded and you are going through the process of trying to attain your black belt or your brown belt that's what everybody sees is the output but what actually went in was that malleable construct of time where you're trying to perfect every single movement right do you remember what happened that made you switch over to now i'm gonna do this and try to get perfect yeah i do um yeah so my so my um my my sensei then at the time um who was also a sifu because he did us he did wing chun see for claude uh we were kind of you know having the conversation i was like yeah i want to come back yeah i had a fish paste and um he started giving me chinese philosophy to read and i'd never read philosophy before do you remember what he gave you i can't remember the book but he would actually he gave me the first one he gave me was a was like a poem it was like a literally an a4 page and he said to me this is this is uh you know first bit of philosophy i'm going to give you go read this and then he said um uh and just stick it on your wall for like three months and the opening line says there can be no denying kung fu is hard work then it says but as with everything in life you get out of it exactly what you put in that's that line is still entrenched in my head even today right um so he gave me that for three months i just if i didn't feel like going in i just read it over and over over and over over and over and then you wake up and you go and then he started maturing me into philosophy so then he'd give me nietzsche give me somebody else and what i recognized was that the masters didn't actually focus on output they focused on mastery right so beethoven didn't focus on how does he write the greatest symphony of all time he just worried about the next note just that next note and making sure that it was it was melodic harmonic and it worked right if you talk to any performer boys too man is my favorite boy band of all time but if you listen to a decent voice to men album i can tell you for free that they're not focusing on the next song it's just how do we make this next note in this next harmony work right so in today's world i think of instagram and the world wide web and the pressure of jeff bezos being worth 200 billion dollars and now every single entrepreneur is going well i want to be worth 200 billion dollars is we forget that he's he's just at a very different stage of his momentum journey right and so you're not you know you're literally to the power of a thousand away from where he is and so you've got to focus on where you are in that next part of that journey um and that for me was probably what was the most incredible part of that part of learning in my life man that that line is great i know in your school you obviously have some sort of curriculum is there like a basics that you run people through for me it's mindset 101. i want people to know how to think and how to think about themselves what are your sort of core basics strategy sales leadership and i start first with leadership and particularly self-leadership because that's a big part of the curriculum nobody talks about so we always think about leadership we think about the general um in the army right the guy who marshals the truce the master tactician um you know and i use the word guy very deliberately because that's the that's the iconography if i say general go back to this construct of identity there's been a picture sold to us of who a general is right so we've got this alpha male um you know kind of square cut hair um you know marine looking fella who's like i'm the general and i'm and i'm i'm the boss i've got all the so that's what people think about but i'm more interested in what was that guy thinking the morning he woke up knowing he's about to send a hundred thousand young men and women into the field of battle and they might not go home to their families i'm more interested in that conversation i'm not interested in how does he show up i'm interested in what is he telling himself because how does he show up is again outcome it's output we're seeing him standing on the stage right but what what what led to that how does he have so much self-belief and how does he have so much courage even in the face of adversity how is this guy still believing we can win the war so we focus a lot on leadership self-leadership breaking down narratives man i cannot tell you how many stories have people have in their heads that are deeply embedded that they're not even aware the story is there they're not aware that the script is playing every single day and so they're living their lives in autopilot right i'll tell you a big one and i work in the venture space so a particularly big one in the venture space particularly in the continent of africa is the idea that to get a business started i need somebody to fund me first so the first thing i say to entrepreneurs is why why do you need a funder well you know i go no you don't need a funder you need a customer get off your ass make something go sell it see get started now you go i got the little thing i go out and i sell it somebody pays me a dollar oh okay great can i do it again sure iterate and iterate and iterate and before you know it i've got a thousand dollars in my bank so did you need money or did you need a do you need a customer right but it's narrative it's these stories that people have told themselves so you know the question was how's that curriculum structured first leadership self-leadership personal leadership how do you show up to your family how do you show up to your friends um how do you show up to yourself in the mirror because you know that moment will come too right where you do something that you know is wrong or you fail or you're not proud of yourself when you look at you in the mirror what do you say right do you give people words that would be effective no no so what we do is we actually do an exercise called so what so hey tom you're on impact theory what would what would your life look like if you lost the business you go well you know it would look like x y and z and i go and if that's where you were so what you go well then i'd be that's where you were so what and what happens is seven or eight so what's later people get to what is their actual fear so what so i'd be poor again and i don't want that i remember that i remember going to bed hungry i don't want to be poor again oh okay so actually the reason you work like a dog and you don't see your kids and you look you have completely no balance and you're completely overweight it's because you're scared of poverty just face it now you can look it in the face and say poverty i'm scared and there's nothing wrong with admitting that you haven't conquered that fear just be aware of it right it can be an incredible motivator but you have to know that it's there um so we focus a lot on the so what technique and i absolutely i've seen people break down and cry um you know we had a i'll never forget a young lady in one of our classes and the whole conversation was you know how are things going and she's and it starts with yeah you know everybody wears the mask right oh everything's great business is good no no no and i said so what's keeping you up at night well you know i've got this small little worry uh-huh and if that happens so what and if that happens so what and if that happened so what and what it actually came down to was she was a mother of three she conceived children very late in her life and in a marital life it was a second marriage and she grew up without parents and she didn't want to be the mom who would abandon her kids right because she knows what that was like so that was for her an incredibly scary thing and she was like i can't i can't have that i can't do that but what she didn't realize it was it was holding her back so she wasn't growing her business she wasn't going to the next stage because it would demand more of her and she didn't want to give that up because of this hidden fear so strategy leadership for me is important and then strategy you just can't operate in a world and not understand how to play a chess game it doesn't work that way um and you always have to think three steps ahead of your competitors you've got to think three steps ahead of your market and you've got to do scenario planning what happens if scenario a happens scenario b and scenario c how will i react then and then as i think this is the most important skill for any human being to learn it's the ability to sell and i don't know why the ability to sell um for some of the strange reasons became like a bad thing you know we started talking about these used car salesmen but i was just like well you know you're selling yourself every day anyway you got to sell yourself to your partner about why they should stay married or in a relationship with you you've got to sell yourself to you every morning about why you're a kick-ass person right otherwise you really going to be grumpy because you don't like yourself you're selling every every day anyway so how do we develop a curriculum that teaches you how to sell in a manner that is true authentic and enables you to have an impact in the world right um and so and so those are the kind of the three tenets of what we do no man i love that i love that um you have a pact with your mom or you did growing up that i i think is um i'm going to imagine is is part of the cornerstone of your success which is if you're going to do anything be the best uh which is certainly my obsession tell me about that that's in terms of things that i say that that piss people off that is one of them when i talk about competing not just with yourself but like to actually be the best um how has that served you why why did you make that pact with your mom so so for context so my father dies i'm 13 years old my father gets gunned down and um my dad was like the uh he was the main income earner in the house so that immediately affected our um how do i say it just it affected us right and um we so the past of south africa's would come from apartheid and um nelson mandela becomes the president the country gets democratized and then those of us myself included black people have a world of opportunities now opened up to us that we hadn't had previously and one of those was the ability to go to school that had white kids in them because that wasn't allowed right and one of the things the government had done is it had given a far better quality of education at the white schools and that had like this terrible level of education of the black schools because they wanted a black majority that was not educated so it would work in the factories to create cheap labor right anyway so all of a sudden we can all go to these white schools now certainly if your parents can afford it and um dad's still alive i get into the white school because mom and dad can kind of afford it dad passes away i can't we can't afford it now so mom and i are sitting having the conversation like so you know what are we going to do and my mom said to me she said look i will raise hell if they kick you out of the school but you got to meet me halfway she said your parties you got to make sure that you give me sufficient grades that when i go into the principal's office it's not even a debate so it's like okay that's doable then she said no but not just that she said everything you do you've got to be number one and there was a reason for that too so when we were doing extracurricular activities you have to you have to like buy the kit you can imagine if you play baseball you can't just show up in jeans right there's a kit to wear and i'm coming from a household single mother of five kids there is no money for the kit so my mom went if you are gonna do it make sure that you're number one at it otherwise you're literally taking food away from the table this is money we could spend buying food and you said was you want to play the violin which i do i'm going to buy you the violin but recognize that that's that means no meat for the next three months now right you say you want to do karate absolutely or not recognize that if i buy you a ghee that means no bread for the next week right so there was always this very real real life sacrifice it wasn't just you know so when the other kids are showing up to just do the extra uh curricula activity i'm like hang on i've gotta suck every single second out of this because you know this is we've sacrificed a lot for this so that was my pack mom and i you do it number one i can't tell you how many times if i came number two it became a discussion for the whole week man like god i heard you i came number two it was a mistake she says nah you came number two at the public speaking thing you better make sure you're coming number one at the next one right so you know my mom would be at work she'd come home and i'm in the in the room studying and she's like have you done your cutter yeah mom i've done my cutter all right how many hours you're putting into the study or i've got one more audio all right when you're are you doing a public speaking thing cool oh and by the way have you done your chores have you washed the dishes have you ironed your shirt have you polished your shoes so it was just like this like narrow focus on small minor tasks but it was always such a meticulous focus so my mom wasn't polishing your shoes it was other other shoes shining it wasn't just iron your shirt it was make sure that it's crisp and the color is nicely ironed in so i learned this amazing thing about detail just like and love the process man you're writing a 60 page business plan enjoy page four like you're going to get to pay 65 you're know page 55 just enjoy page four you're building a business enjoy month one you'll get to year five but just enjoy month one right um that pact changed my life by the way she still does it to me today if i lose something or no i don't even tell her it's just like you know just don't tell me because i'm going to tell you about it do you resent your mom at all because i i think when i hear that story it fills me with so much joy and excitement but i think a lot of people hear that and think that it sounds tyrannical or cruel so what what is your emotional relationship like with your mom remember though that her approach is um her approach is a mental and an institutional reverence for my skill it's not a reprimand it's a big difference so she's not saying you're not competent she's saying do you know how competent you are why are you only this does that make sense oh yeah it's a big difference somebody going well you got 90 you suck and somebody going you got 90 but you're capable of a 95. where's the other five percent right okay well here are the things you need to do get me the other five percent so then it's a it's a it's a oh you believe in me oh wow like oh wow that's cool right so i gotta tell my venture firm we just won the 2020 best impact investment firm in africa congratulations huge deal i know like 55 different countries and i'm just like wait what i remember when i first got into the space eight nine years ago first as an angel investor again conversation right people are going aren't you that speaker guy why are you doing deals why are you investing in stuff why are you you shouldn't even be in this room and then you know and then all of a sudden you start talking about shareholders agreements and term sheets and people go oh okay so you understand a bit of the lingo now oh okay but aren't you that speaker guy yeah cause there's a frame and you put me in that frame right the only way out of that was me constantly reminding myself that if i don't win at whatever i'm doing next i'm gonna have to have a hell of a conversation with my mom so this year when we win the award i went i went to mom and i was like check this out mom you know now number one in the continent right so it's a i think it's an incredible gift to have somebody that believes in you especially when you don't believe in yourself yeah church on that one man tell me about mandela i know you met him a few times um yeah what what was he like like when you're right there with him man there are some people who have the ability to bend the laws of physics now i don't mean that thematically i mean literally bend the laws of physics right nelson mandela had this most incredible ability if you walked into the room the temperature changed by three degrees celsius it just dropped your skin all of a sudden you know like just broke out into like chicken skin and you were just like oh my what's going on and you could feel the hairs at the back of your of your neck stand up so i'm 17 i've just won the world championship in public speaking we get a letter from the foundation inviting me to go and meet him so i get to the office right and his assistant comes to meet me at reception takes me to his study and she offers me something to drink and my mother said if you get there and they offer you something to drink ask them for tea not coffee i was like that's odd so i was like why she said well because tea is high tea coffee is common yeah tea is for the bourjois people okay cool so i get there and she asks me for something to drink and i ask her for some tea she brings me this tea and i'm sitting to drink my cup right but every time i pick it up and tilt it my hand is shaking so it spills a little bit on the saucer just like man i put the cup down and every time i pick up the cup it keeps spilling and then spilling on my shirt and i'm like well this doesn't work so i stopped picking the cup up and i started leaning in to like drink it and i'm hoping he doesn't walk in whilst i'm like leaning in like a kid trying to steal you know milk from the fridge or something that's like i'm hoping so i'm sitting drinking and then i heard a where is he oh my god and my skin starts to bring like oh man that's him that's him and he walks to the study he opens the door he takes two steps forward tom opens up his arms like this and he says my son come here and um nobody had called me my son since the death of my father i can feel like these tears are just about to start running down my throat my eyes i jump up give him a big hug and we sit down i'm a failly big guy i'm six two i weigh 108 kilograms i'm not sure what that is in pounds right so i'm a fairly big i can hold my own right but next to him i was a dwarf because he was like six four six five i'm a size i'm a size 11 shoe he was a size 14. he was a tank yeah like most people actually don't talk about the side of nelson mandela he was a physical giant right so we're sitting down and we're chatting and all i'm doing is i'm just asking questions asking questions asking questions and we get to like 55 minutes into what is an hour meeting and he looks at me and he says you know they said you're a speaker and i said uh yeah but which is a torso word for granddad and he goes but man you have not spoken so you know your question was so how was he um he had this incredible ability to make you feel welcome but you always knew that you were in the company of greatness i've met him twice in both times you just always knew you were in the company of greatness there was just no doubt in your mind about it but for me what came out of that meeting was i remember he i said to him i said to him what's your dream for like mankind what's your dream for humanity right towards the end of the meeting and he looks at me and he says what we need is a little bit of faith so it was like faith such a strange thing to say i was like what what what what is faith i asked him like what's faith and he said faith is the ability to see the invisible believe in the impossible and trust in the unknown so i'm just like wow cops met and it's only as i've grown older that i realize what he was actually saying which is it's the ability to make manifest that which is not yet and i think a lot of us are living in a world today where unless we can see it touch it or feel it we don't believe it to be and we forget that everything you can see touch taste was imagined by someone created by someone who had to have faith that it would find resonance with mankind i think it's we have a duty today to understand the power of what that means man just give me the chills again yeah that what he did and represents is so extraordinary i heard you say something that i found really interesting so you said given what mandela had done for us it's given us this belief in that there's someone coming to save us and you said there there is no messiah nobody's coming to save you um and we have to do it ourselves talk to me a little bit about that i think that that's powerful there's there's both that like i have that same pull towards somebody like mandela where you know you just want that big bear hug from somebody who really seems to have figured out um yeah and then the fact that i have to save myself so i think it's you know it's part of the course of the universe that once in a couple of generations a nelson mandela is born right i mean it's you know nelson mandela mlk um these incredible people who step up but one of the things you learn as you study their history is that they were human they had hopes and dreams just like you and i they had doubts too right and the minute you figure that out you then understand that actually nothing separates them from you but for the fact that you're waiting for someone like them to show up and so the question i always ask is so if we're all waiting for the messiah who is it because it we can't all wait somebody has to step up and then the recognition that actually if you read history um communities generally save themselves right there's no single person that does it so we talk about nelson mandela but the truth is nelson mandela led a collective of people who fought for the liberation of my country right he was he was the halo right that was evangelized so we could create a single narrative about freeing black people in south africa but actually there were millions like him who made others even an ultimate sacrifice with their lives right and so when once you start realizing that you go oh but hold on this was actually a collective effort which means you and me have a duty to become a part of the collective effort of whatever freedom that we're seeking so if you're waiting for someone to save you you're it you are the savior you are and and by the way you don't have to have it figured out so you know most people go well let me figure it out first right it's what i call the mba approach let me go to school get an mba then i'll start a business no just as you go you will figure it out and you've got to trust the universe it'll meet you halfway it'll teach you what you need to learn it'll bring into your world an intersection of people knowledge spaces where you can grow your own competence and ability you don't have to be ready for where you're going you just have to be ready for what's next and and the universe will meet you halfway and that's what i mean by there's no messiah we all kind of go well we need the perfect person so we can create the perfect future but what you're learning is there is no perfect person for the perfect future there's the person who's just working on next step and that's all it is just next step the wright brothers only figured out the next step steve jobs only figured out the next step so once you get that right you go oh okay so i actually don't need the perfect person to come and save me i can do it myself brother i love the way you think man i love it where can people find out more about you i think they need to to spend time with you and your ideas so love man at vuci tembewario the full word on all the social medias i'm on ig i'm on linkedin uh twitter and of course on youtube i publish a lot of my material there and i love this like this current stage of my life i feel like it's so interesting i feel like the grand master who's a student you know what that means so i'm just like oh wow i know so much and then i'd read something and i go oh wow i know nothing and then you're you know you're just like next stage next phase and and every time i'm interacting with what i know i'm educated even more because i think collective intelligence is so much more powerful so yeah i'm on all other socials hit me up i'd love to chat love it man all right guys this is definitely somebody that you're going to want to follow this man is amazing and speaking of amazing things if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care what's up everybody there is no way to build an empowering mindset or get ahead in business without constantly learning and accessing new information and 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thousand percent behind all right take care and be legendary and enough people have said yes now you know to to now impact eight and a half million lives but boy if i could count the no's i mean there's tens of thousands of notes that we've all heard over the last decade

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 545,311

Rating: 4.9463763 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Vusi Thembakwayo, IT, no excuses, overcoming excuses, overcoming adversity, mentality, make progress, identity, freedom, freedom of the mind, willingness to fail, just get started, input versus output, martial arts, mastery, strategy, strategic thinking, sacrifice, competitive mindset, encouragement, Nelson Mandela

Id: Zwkk4NyO3GA

Length: 59min 56sec (3596 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020