"This MINDSET SHIFT Will Let You Achieve ANYTHING YOU WANT In Life!" | Tom Bilyeu & Lewis Howes

you really want to talk about success success is a large amount of discipline and timing love deeply man nothing will ever reward you like i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness yeah please welcome what do you think has been the biggest accomplishment you've had in the last five years and the biggest lesson you've learned since that previous interview well i cannot believe that so if it's five years i hadn't even started impact theory yet so that's for sure co-founding impact theory of my wife wow and very specifically because it's with my wife that i will say it's my biggest accomplishment by far what was the second part of it biggest lesson in the last five years um it so i'm i'm at a place where it's more i won't say that i'm not always sort of updating my way of thinking but the big model of my life is pretty stable now so i would say that how well the things that i have cobbled together work in high pressure situations you mean like your values your principles your frameworks for life how to deal with your emotions that's probably the most important one like when things are really going haywire like how do you center yourself and i i learned very early in my business career that the thing that because i looked back there was a bunch of us at awareness technologies that were given the same spiel don't think of yourself as an employee think of yourself as a partner if you act like a partner and you know achieve certain results we'll actually make you a partner and nobody did it and so i was just like why am i the only one that's doing this and i realized that my ability to self-soothe was a huge part of that so other people would get upset they would derail they would take their eye off what they wanted to achieve because they were frustrated or whatever and i could just bring myself back to center now those are pretty small tests and obviously as things have gone on you start dealing with big numbers um you start to realize is this real like is this can i actually center myself when you know say hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake and then it's like okay this still works and that was very encouraging very encouraging because when you get a test that's sort of way beyond where you've been tested before you're like how's this going to work uh so that was pretty extraordinary how do you soothe under chaos it is a for yourself the the big thing for me was recognizing that i'm having a biological experience and that i need to understand the brain like the brain not just the mind which is incredibly important but the brain what is the brain doing how does it hijack me what is neurochemistry what triggers it like what are all the things that evolution is sort of primed me to do it's what i call the physics of being human so if you are a human sort of regardless of intellect or experience or upbringing there are a certain number of things that are true they're as universal as universal is going to get and and look nothing is perfectly universal but some things are really close like an internal dialogue and an internal dialogue that skews negative right which is where most people start yeah you get people like kanye on one end who just cannot see themselves doing anything but the best ever the greatest and all that and then you get people who actually don't have an internal dialogue like there are no words going on in their head which is crazy but nonetheless true but the vast majority of us live in a place where you have an internal dialogue and that internal dialogue is largely negative and so once you know okay cool this is a trick of evolution and my brain this is so a guy named david eagleman gave me this insight he's a neuroscientist this is so powerful louis i hope it hits you the way it hit me and he goes think about this your brain is enclosed in a dark box light never touches your brain sound never reaches your brain and everything you experience as being in the world out there beyond you is all happening in your brain it is a virtual reality that your brain creates for you and so i was like my obsession with the matrix and i'm like oh my god even though i don't think we're actually living in a simulation your brain is creating a simulation of the real world and i forget there's a i had a physicist on the show and he said tom objective reality is the number of photons reflecting off of any object that's reality but you don't perceive it like that you look at something it's like this is gray that's why your shirt is sort of green sort of gray yeah and like you just perceive it like that and so your brain is not making any attempt to represent reality your brain is making an attempt to keep you alive and help you navigate the world and i just thought oh that's so interesting so knowing the heuristics that my brain is using the rules of thumb the shorthand it's not true but it has this massive influence on my life so something bad happens and you take it on as negative it makes you feel badly about yourself and so i just put in all these rules of like well that's not objectively true so if i'm not worried about objective truth what should be sort of the north star and for me the north star became utility what's useful and so once i shifted away from trying to like be objectively true about myself realizing i'm probably not going to ever nail that but i can get to something that's very very useful and so then i wrote my my beliefs down and sort of started thinking about value system and um and i will end this rant with one thing which is recognizing that brain plasticity is real and so much of who we are let's say it's roughly science says it's roughly 50 it's not me making it up that 50 is hardwired and you're not going to be able to do anything about it but 50 is insanely malleable and um i love this quote so great that you can't make a racehorse out of a pig but you can make a really fast pig and i thought okay cool so maybe i'll never be a racehorse but i can be a really fast pig and so whenever i'm feeling badly about myself or something knocks me off center i just come back to that idea of what's useful how do you move forward like even if you're not going to be the greatest of all time does it benefit you to act as if you could become the greatest of all time if you pour yourself into it and so i don't know that i'll ever end up being the greatest anything but dude acting like i can and like really practicing and moving through the world like i can become the greatest has propelled me forward yeah because acting like you can't won't get you there yeah won't make you good probably or great if you're constantly obsessing over why i'm not good enough or why i'll never become great so acting like you can at least gives you a much better chance of getting somewhere than nowhere 100 it's what i call the only belief that matters the only belief that matters is that if i put time and energy into getting a new skill i actually will get better at that thing and if you then extrapolate that and say and skills actually have utility they matter so knowing how to build a business that doesn't fall or build a business build a building that doesn't fall down is very very useful or a build a business that doesn't fall apart right so those skills actually let you do things and so that's become sort of my obsession is getting people to understand you don't read a book to check a box you don't go to school to impress your parents you do it because the skill that you will acquire lets you do something in the world that other people can't do or you wouldn't be able to do and that has a material impact on your life yeah i feel like you and i are very similar in the fact that we talk about skills a lot acquiring new skills and i think when you have a down phase or a breakdown phase that's when you should think about what are the skills i'm lacking that could benefit me so this doesn't happen again i remember in my early 20s i had a lot of free time because i was broke on my sister's couch i just obsessed over skills and when you learn a skill that is hard that you don't think you can accomplish and you actually master it for me i feel unstoppable i feel like i can accomplish anything i feel like even in a setting where i feel uncomfortable as long as i know in the back of my head i've got these other skills that maybe they don't know about that i can pull out at any time they just make me more confident i don't know if you feel the same way about acquiring skills 100 yeah and it's interesting and i know you talk about it so some people in your audience i'm sure have a sense but i think of you very differently than they think of you so i don't think of you as on-air talent though you were obviously very gifted at that because i've spent so much time with you outside of that like talking strategy around how do you grow a podcast how do you get good at um youtube how do you build a business like whatever and seeing how adept you are and those skills like that's where it gets interesting so that people understand that all the things you talk about all the training that you do and stuff it isn't the part that they see like the school of greatness is sort of the tip of this very large iceberg of skills that you're building um and that to me is the fascination when when you're not focused on the tip but you're focused on actually building that that foundational set of skills what you can do with your life and what you can make as the tip of the iceberg that other people will recognize becomes really really interesting it's interesting my skill was never i'm a good interviewer or a host or anything i never would learn that skill my skill was actually my fear was connecting with people and as a teenager i learned that in order to become successful in my life i had to learn how to connect with people and build relationships so i turned the fear into a superpower of building relationships then translating that into okay let me interview people was another thing i had to learn but it was never my gift from birth it was a skill i had to acquire and overcome what was the greatest fear in the last five years that you had to overcome that has now become a skill or a superpower for you um i think the only thing that i've sort of thought through like that is i feel like kobe bryant when he split from shaq and it was like he wanted to he obviously had won a championship with shaq but could he win a championship on his own and so my last company was so successful but i did it with two partners and so now to have a new partner in lisa it's like okay can i also lead this team to a championship and so that drives me in a way that i find so fun of like okay cool hey as a part of that group smashed it but can i do it over here yeah so that like reinvention you know trying things and letting myself feel the weight of like hey you gotta you gotta prove it buddy like right you know you had a big success once can you do it again and so doing that under new circumstances to me like i love that like i love the excitement of can i willy won't he uh so that's a lot of fun but that's something that i think if i thought about the world differently so i don't value myself for achieving it so whether i achieve it or not is irrelevant but showing up every day and sincerely pursuing it is what i value myself for and i like to feel that sort of weight of like hey maybe you won't maybe you're going to fail maybe like it was only you as a part of this collective hey you did a great job there or maybe it was just that moment in time yeah yeah yeah like you you wrote a wave but like over here can you create something from scratch can you repeat it uh so yeah that it's not it's not i don't live in a space of letting that be a fear sure sure but it's like that is it's a cousin of that feeling what do you think uh all success starts with well the fast answer is mindset um going back to the only belief that matters you said it it's your the way you act is ultimately all that matters and the way you act follows what you allow yourself to believe or maybe a better way to say it is what you choose to believe so if you choose to believe that your energy and efforts will result in more skill set then you will actually put energy and effort into getting that which means you actually will get the skill set but if you think well my talent and intelligence are fixed so no matter how much i work i'm never going to get better right i can't be a fast pig and if you don't think that putting time and energy into it will yield anything then you won't put time and energy into it and you thusly won't get the skills so and if you don't have the skills then you can't do the things other people can do and so people just get stuck because they don't have the only belief that matters so they don't put the time and energy and so that's like where everything starts is are you putting the time and energy into getting better yes or no yeah and when do you get the most angry um and reactive are the things that make you reactive yes very much maybe not angry but like well now this frustrates me don't do that i think the same and i think you're right i'm not somebody who's quick to anger in 99.9 percent of my life yeah you might not scream with anger that point one percent really does get from you exactly where you're going which is um when i see somebody accept excuses make excuses do less than they can and it impacts me so if i'm honest if it's just impacting them i don't get angry right i feel compassion yeah but when it's like and now you're dragging me down now you're slowing me down now you're trying to talk me out of something now you're telling me i dream too big now you're hurling stones at me or whatever because of something that you've got on you and i'm freaking you out because of how i'm moving or what i'm going for or whatever that actually does make me angry so how often how often does your team make you frustrated if they're not taking responsibility 100 in time and because we have like so one thing i learned back at quest because we grew so fast and i just wasn't smart enough at the time you're only as good as what you write down and you can be small and sort of communicate everything in these interpersonal relationships as you get bigger it goes away yeah and hope people have it memorized or something it's interesting you're only as good as what you write down correct when you're running a company yeah uh so in terms of like having a process documented that someone could implement not just a simple conversation that you hope they memorize 100 so coming into impact theory you have to sign it's not a pledge but it's about as close to a pledge as you're going to get and it's our our culture code document and it says things like you will take 100 responsibility for your job you will be expected to look beyond your role i mean just like all these things that and one of them is i only want to play with hardcore and it says this is not a safe space so do not come here expecting people to um be kind like look we here's the thing i also expect you to elevate your team and to lift them up and celebrate them and want them to win and like cheer them on and never worry about whether it was your idea the only relationship worth being in because all relationships are sacrificed the only relationship worth being in is where you feel like well like this person really cares about and i want people to retire at impact theory at a time where millennials stay at a company for 18 months i'm asking them to stay for 40 years wow now to do that i've got to give you emotional stability i've got to give you somewhere where you can build trust where people are honest with you but in being honest people are going to be direct they're going to say hard things in the spirit of i want to lift you up i want to see you get better because remember we believe that you can get better and if you put your time and energy into improvement that you actually will improve and therefore you get more out of your life the company gets more out of your involvement but like i really had to be hardcore about that because you know you'll hear a lot people say you know don't hire for skills hire for culture or john wooden sort of the best explainer of this the famous basketball coach i don't look for the best player i look for the best fit that really is true man when you get somebody who like you can really relate to and you can say hard things and they're receptive and they say hard things you know they're coming from a good place it elevates you yeah and it's fun to be around right as a social animal we just love that stuff um so that's huge but i'm really hardcore on the way in so that once you're in like we can give you grace like imagine if you were on my team and i don't i try never to refer to people as employees i slip out from time to time but i really think of them as teammates yeah so if you're my teammate and you're like hey look man i'm really having a hard time my girlfriend and i are we're just in a dark place right now and i'm going to need a couple weeks just to go sort it out don't even explain i got it cool i got you tell me what i need to know to be able to pick up the slack for you we refer to vacations as being sacred so we don't have the only vacation policy we have is that it's unlimited so do whatever you want get your work done you need to be a high performer yada yada yada but like if you need the time to deal with your girlfriend the death and the family yeah whatever take that time be an adult autonomy is huge for me i assume it's huge for most people so but to do that you've got to say this is the criteria we expect you to meet you're going to be high performing the rest of the time you're here and if any of this turns you off and it says that in the document like if if this does not if you're not prepared to do this this this this this this this then this is not the place for you wow so is it literally saying a line this is not a safe place yes this is not a safe space what does that mean not a safe space it means that i'm going to make absolutely no effort to protect your feelings i'm going to never ever ever sacrifice clarity for kindness now i will be as kind i want to be kind dude i want you to be kind to me i want to be kind to you my wife is my partner i would never want an environment that was tearing her down so it's like in the spirit of trying to elevate people i'm not a machiavellian kind of guy that's gross to me that is such a turn off i want to like you would treat a friend dude if you're in a dark time you're going to underperform and i'm down i'm with it i will do your work for you to create the space for you to have that moment because i know at some time it's going to be my moment but that only works if i'm not parasitic you're not parasitic it's going to be hard enough if you don't have ill intent now if you are lazy if you have ill intent if you are trying to milk the system or whatever then it's never gonna work but if it's just legitimately you're going through a period we will all go through which is a very hard time for whatever the hundreds of reasons throughout our lives that we will underperform be in a dark place whatever if at that moment people lift you back up they brush you off remind you of who you are and who you can be and they love you and they're there with you cool we all get it yeah but to do that you really have to have a code of behavior on the way in you just have to like the the everyday of it all what do we expect and i want to be around hardcore people yeah for their own reasons right i don't want to have to sweat you i don't want to think about you like i want you to go i want you to go do your thing i want to do my thing i want to be able to count on you to crush it and you could definitely counted me to crush it and then if i need you i will ask and hopefully you will aid me and if you need me i'm going to run to your side to help you but i don't want to micromanage yeah so like i want you to be good at what you do to be getting it better every day for your own reasons and there is a certain subset of humanity that is like that if you get them in your company and you set them free they won't all get in the groove but 80 it's pretty magical what's the best hire you ever made in my life besides your wife um there have been a lot dude i'm super stoked to my team how about instead of saying a person i will give you types of personality there you go that i find intoxicating number one somebody who is so convinced that they're not yet good enough to achieve their dreams but so believe they can get there and are what i call a relentless problem solver a relentless problem solver is worth their weight in gold i don't need them to be highly educated they will educate themselves over time somebody who's not afraid to speak to power that is a big deal i have a very strong personality and unintentionally i shut some personality types down and uh a quote that i that popped into my mind one day when a person who shall remain nameless didn't use these exact words but basically said slow down so i can lead and i was like yeah no that doesn't said that yes not not an impact theory but at a point in my life sure sure uh somebody once effectively said slow down so i can lead and i remember being incensed that that this person would allow themselves to say those words like that's so anathema to who i am like i could see myself saying i can't keep up with you you need to lead and then i would follow and be the greatest follower that i could be so that notion of like i want people that make me sweat i want people that are like they're trying to be so good for their own reasons that i'm like yo like keeping up with this person is intense that's intoxicating for me so the times that most frustrate you you have a code of ethics when people come in so hopefully you're not frustrated because they understand their accountability their actions their behaviors everything but what are the times that frustrate you the most outside of your company oh just in my personal life yeah just in life in general inefficiency is the only thing that winds me up it's the only thing that i will say i'm irrational about so active too you see something like nobody in the outside world would know because that's just ridiculous i recognize that it's it's an offshoot of something that's very powerful in my life my obsession with always doing things as efficiently as possible but i also recognize that life isn't like you can't on my deathbed i will never say wow i was efficient efficiency is useful towards getting to a goal and so i prize it and i love it and all that but my wife has tempered me and shown me that sometimes just the connecting just being with somebody just sitting and being is is joyful yeah not even not even just enough like it it is precisely what the doctor ordered and so and i'm not great at that not having not having to be efficient all the time at something like i'll give you an example my wife on a saturday will be telling me a story and i'll be like oh god please like narrow this down like say this faster and every single time i have done that i have thought that was a really dumb way to handle this moment like let that part of your brain go part of this for her is the joy of telling the story and if it takes her an hour and it's joyful for her what does it matter and having to sort of step in and out like i've done everything i can to confuse whether i'm at work or at play and moments like that where at work the efficiency really really serves me but now at this moment with my wife and we may even be talking about work but it's in a different context it's a saturday you know and we're just sitting in the kitchen and you know enjoying each other's time and she'll talk about something that bumps me back into a work mode and now i'm just sort of coveting that efficiency and it's just terrible for the relationship you know one of the most fun moments for me of witnessing you in the last six years was no can you guess i actually have no idea i think you saw me we were in puerto rico and you were sitting with your wife on a on the beach you're on a flatbed chair sitting back just holding her yeah just sitting there looking into the ocean no phone no nothing maybe you were thinking about business in some way but i was like that's a really nice moment to watch you be calm and because you're making me emotional louis no i'm serious though this just came to me because i only see you in hustle walt disneyland out of the matrix world like let's crush it but i was like this is a really nice moment to just witness for a few seconds you be present with your wife and i'm sure you do this all the time on the weekends and stuff but it was like i want to see more of that as your friend yeah yeah it could be 10 minutes a week it doesn't have to be all the time but this was a beautiful moment that i was like that's what i think the world needs more in general in their own lives i'm not saying that's what you're going to do because your personality is driven on other things but i think it's in some ways healthy as well i don't even think you have to couch it it is extraordinarily healthy i think it's absolutely necessary in everybody's life mine included um you know part of what makes my marriage my single greatest joy is lisa is good at what i am not good at and so very early in the marriage we said okay you you're the canary in the coal mine so i trust you if you ever say we need to slow down i will slow down instantly you're more important to me than my business so and she is never abusive about it so whenever she says something like hey let's go sit on the beach i know be there on the beach with her i'm not like hey she's not looking at me she's facing away on the ocean so i can think about whatever i want no no it's like that's where you smell the nape of her neck and you like drink in that neurochemistry of that bond how do you how do you silence your thoughts over the obsessiveness of what you want to create in the moment of being present and connected with your partner one practice so i meditate a lot out of necessity um and then two is understanding that when you reinforce a behavior you really start to get something positive out of it so when i'm there like literally yesterday there is a smell that my wife gets on her neck if she hasn't showered in a day so she might skip a shower on the weekend right oh my god the oh my god it is the most intoxicating scent ever and scent is the only of the senses that goes directly to the part of the brain the emotional center of the brain everything else goes into a relay station first it's the only part that goes directly into the limbic parts of your brain so that's why when you smell a barbecue or whatever you're like a kid again you're just in it and when that smell is on my wife's neck nothing else exists it is just my wife so lisa just don't shower every other day if you wanted to slow down or do something else i mean that's one trigger it's yeah so what do you prize right what is your value system so nothing not all the business success in the world has brought me the level the sustained amount and the amplitude of joy that being in a relationship with my wife has brought me so i have so much clarity about what my values are it's just that they don't often conflict but when they do and my wife says hey slow down or hey i need time or you know let's make sure we take x number of days off a year or whatever i do it no questions asked even though i'm you know sort of hard charging the rest of the time and so we do dumb stuff like we shut down for christmas our impact theory my wife and i just talked about it this year we will always and forever shut down for about two weeks at christmas and i don't expect anybody to work i'm not going to be working like go be with your family don't think about this stuff does not working for you mean actually not doing any strategizing of the mind not taking notes or working out of an outline for a potential book or i think oh this is a great character for my next month i would do anything that's fun so for work is fun for you yes so there will be some fun things i'm sure that i will do yeah but i'm more off the radar during christmas than other times so i you up the radar for christmas in two weeks it's more productive than most people's entire year on the radar well so and we can talk about that because that that i i have gone way way way out of my way to make sure that i built because so lisa and i had enough success i never needed to work again so if you're going to work then you might as well structure for two things the moment like the in the moment joy so doing this hard thing i actually find intrinsically pleasurable and i will say 40 of my life work life is that 60 is not but 40 is i would do this whether i was building a business or not getting paid or not for it right you love it that's huge and then the other is impact so if you can make impact doing something that you would be doing anyway that's amazing but really at christmas time it is we wear onesies so i don't know how much you know about the neuroscience of like how humans biologically sync up if you put three women in a house together their periods will sync up based on hierarchy by the way of who's considered the sort of um dominant females it's crazy but heart rates will sync up breathing rates sync up it's nuts so my wife and i when we shut everything down even though yes i'm still doing fun work we dress the same so we'll wear matching christmas onesies we listen to christmas music together we dance a lot we watch the same movies like we just do all this stuff to like really sync up as much of our sort of minds and bodies as humanly possible it's absolutely phenomenal i love it so much wow have you ever how long have been together now 20 years 20 years was there a time where you ever thought you'd get divorced no no no no deciding to propose i threw my heart and soul into that i was pros and conning it because lisa used to get sick a lot you're analyzing the whole thing listening like that project out never going to sleep with another woman um i am she gets sick and i'm not a caretaker i don't enjoy like some people just get off on that i do not i am not a caretaker yeah so i was like okay i'm going to be caretaking a lot am i going to be okay with that is she worth you know all these sacrifices and in the end i was like either i'm never getting married or i'm marrying this woman and so once i flipped that switch in my mind i never looked back so getting married was not stressful deciding to get engaged i really weighed that decision and then so i don't know how much we've talked about this so i believe in ritual i think it's missing from today's world i think we're suffering huge consequences of the lack of ritual especially coming of age rituals read this book called the power of myth by joseph campbell and he said that he thought part of the reason that marriages were ending in divorce was there was you weren't a different person before your marriage and after your marriage so i wanted to go through a ritualistic scarification like killing your old self correct killing the ego the identity the man you once were and becoming someone new so how did you do this ritual so i hate needles i never wanted a tattoo so because of the time it was sort of the biggest fear that i had that wasn't life-threatening i got a tattoo as a ritual i designed it all this it was like my sort of credo to my wife and uh it's in greek so her you know not native language because she learned english first but like she's fluent in greek and so there was just all this stuff tied up about you know taking on this sort of new identity as a unit and all this stuff anyway so i get the tattoo and as i'm doing it i wanted it to be painful and as they're doing it i'm saying i am now a new man i'm a different person i'm stepping into this marriage i will never look back divorce is not an option we will be together forever now admittedly if she cheated on me that would be the end so it's not like oh no matter what happens but when i say we don't even say the d word in our house it's called the d word i tease her about everything in the world but never about breaking up with her ever i don't make a joke about it nothing never because i don't even want that like taste in my mouth of that idea and so i've told her hey you get horribly burned in an accident you and i are staying together homie and i'm going to find a way to be attracted to the scars and all that and it's just that's commitment and i needed her to know that because look one day she's going to be 85 and she's going to be a bag of wrinkles and she might be beautiful but odds are 885 she's not going to be hot and she needs to know i'm still going to be with you i'm going to be into you i'm going to be more into you then because what i value is a shared life and by the only thing you can't fast forward right so yes there will come a point there's going to be hotter chicks than you you never have to worry about me chasing that because you and i are building a life together and that's what i value so how old were you when you got this tattoo i would have been 26 26 fresh out of usc film school you're a professor you're years out you were perfect we were teaching there at this point i was teaching at the new york film academy i've never taught at usc yet uh yet yes louis yeah yet i bet someone watching at ufc will i bring you lectured at usc though believe it or not but i'm sure you could yeah i'm sure you could be a teacher there if you wanted to but it may not be the best use of your time so 26 we got this tattoo you read this book power of myth yeah before that and thought to yourself i need a ritual in order to anchor myself into this marriage into this commitment into this new identity and not have a way out is that what i'm hearing you say yeah the last part of that is not how i thought of it i didn't think of it as not having a way out i thought of it as being completely committed to always making sure that the most joyful thing in my life is this marriage and so i'll never joke about ball and chain or anything like that it's like the most joyful thing in my life is my marriage and therefore i will treat it with the reverence it deserves i will never neglect it betray it nothing and so was there a phase where you were like man this is really tough though marriage is a series of compromises and so in any moment where you're arguing it's like oh my god like i don't this is not how i want to be spending my saturday right but never did i think anything other than this is me not being good at something yet and so i need to figure out like where was my failure of communication are my emotions running away with me like what am i failing at right now and thankfully that's an idea that i learned very early in my marriage that like if i look at why i was wrong why i created this argument what i could do differently then i don't have to spend an entire saturday in a fight i can get us out of it and if she's doing the same thing going what have i done wrong here how could i get us out of this now you've got two people that are like oh we'll actually say oh this is that point of no return we've got one last sort of stop here before we're just angry enough that we just have to part ways for a couple of hours and it's going to be a waste so let's take a second let's you know dial it down remind each other we love we actually say this stuff and that has been ridiculous if you were watching from the outside our arguments i'm sure look ridiculous because we're externalizing our internal narrative like hey when you said that it made me feel like this and i know i shouldn't i know that's not what you mean but it's really triggering an insecurity so we say all of that stuff and that helps us like keep everything calm and like remind us that we want to connect and you know that we love each other that's a big thing in a fight what does this person love yes when you know you're right in an argument but the other person is unwilling to for whatever reason they're rational they're reactive they're insecure they're hurt whatever but you know in your heart i am right with this thing this situation and you can't get your partner to see your point of view but you know it's going to cause more and more stress and chaos if you continue to be right what is the solution so you can get back to love and peace and is are you okay with knowing you're right but having to say you know what well i'm just going to let this go even though i know this is the truth facts in the world right now no probably not like i we would need to come to a resolution because that's one of those things that really could fester if i'm right about something immaterial then i might just be like what exactly am i arguing about a lot of times in those moments it's just space it's just like let's just take a minute because a lot of times let's say she's right and if she gives me an hour i might just be like yeah actually either it doesn't matter or she actually is right about this and you can sort of once you've de-escalated and you get back to the the easiest way to explain it is you're at a place where you want them to win where the idea of them being right is like you get joyful even though it does mean that you were wrong it's like you're back to a place where this is i would literally die for this woman and if i would literally die for this woman i can't be wrong for this woman like that seems like a much lower bar sure so you get back to that place of like i actually want her to win not necessarily i want her to win all the arguments just like but her having this win is now i can frame it as a joyful thing and that helps a lot and i'll say that's probably 90 percent of the issues just go away when you both step back you get time to recalibrate your neurochemistry and you can approach it just from like oh yeah i love you more than anything in this world then i can actually feel that now and so i want to concede anything that's true and you know now we get to a point where we can move forward now if it's like this just really like both of us at different times i will say this is maybe a particular strength of mine is i'll say no no we have friction here and it would be very easy to pretend that we don't it will only get worse it's going to manifest in something good give me an example maybe not something specific in your relationship where you but this has become a famous one for us where we were out one night for dinner and she was upset that i hadn't said that she that her new shirt looked good mm-hmm and she'd gone to all this effort you know this is a time where i was working a lot a lot a lot a lot so this is impact theory or previous early quest yeah and we didn't get a lot of time together when we weren't working i mean making protein bars together it's time together but it's not exactly cool it's not hanging on the beach yeah yeah so we were at dinner and she put on this new shirt and she loved it and thought she looked amazing and i didn't say anything and so we're at dinner that's going to be a key part of this equation in a minute so we're at dinner yeah she says um you know what do you think of my top and i'm like that's all right and she was traumatized traumatized and just very upset you know we we have uh very little time to come out and you're not sort of appreciating me and why didn't you tell me before we came out and and so what i ended up saying was look it would have been very easy for me to just gush and say you looked amazing and the reason that i'm not is because if i tell you the truth now when it's hard then when you're 85 and i say you're beautiful to me you know i'm being serious because it was hard a thousand times before this and i said what was true why all of a sudden would i not say what's true and so i need you to be able to cash that check that i have been honest in a thousand ten thousand hard moments leading up to this one time where i need you to know i know it's counterintuitive but i'm telling you i think you made the right business call or whatever and no i'm not pandering to you no i'm not telling you right what you know you need to be i think you need to hear whatever like this just really is true like you really nailed that and i know it was hard and maybe you're embarrassed but i really think you did the right thing and i'm very impressed and she'll be able to say whoa okay like that really is real that's one example another example was what we call the famous tea argument the biggest fight my wife and i have ever been in was over a cup of tea and it all goes to insecurities so it's very early in our marriage and we were dirt poor i never took time off work but she had said we need to take time off we need to go away for the weekend now go away for the weekend for us is one night in the hotel that's all we could afford and so i thought hey we're going to pay for a night in the hotel i want to be there the second they will let us check in and i'm going to stay like extra late check out right for the the money for her it was well we get quality time together and you're taking a breath and for her to finally slow down and to have that moment in the morning where we're about to drive off to this beautiful hotel and it's going to be so amazing and i'm sitting there watching her have this cup of tea like i cannot believe that she's wasting this i've taken time off work i'm paying for a hotel and she wants to sit and have a you can have a cup of tea anytime what the hell is going on and so i start reacting like that like what are you doing this is insanity let's go and so now we're literally screaming at each other over this cup of tea and we were halfway to santa barbara and i turn around and we're driving back and something snaps wow and i'm going to turn around because you're still arguing i'm so angry i'm like this is a waste i'm not even going to keep let's go home this is stupid and so when i actually take the exit ramp and actually get back on and i am going back home we are actually going back home i was like you're being a child to yourself yeah yeah i'm like you're being a child and you're not ruining this is this internally or internally okay and so finally i said this argument isn't about the t what are we actually arguing about and so i broke down what the cup of tea meant and all the things that i just said to you about i never take time off i'm so freaked out about taking time off from work because i'm poor i have made you poor you are clipping coupons i'm panicking about spending money on you know whatever 140 hotel i'm freaking out the only way that i can sort of justify the time and the money is if we make use of every second and i feel like you're being disrespectful to my sacrifice to your money your time doing all of this and she was like i just want to be with you i just want to spend time with you and a way for me to soak in the moment is to slow down and have this cup of tea and i was like whoa like i have the chills now this was like 17 years ago and i remember thinking let's never do this again let's always ask ourselves or say we're arguing about the t and so now to this day you know 17 years later we'll say we're arguing about the t what's really going on and then when you really it's always insecurity you get into like oh i'm insecure about something you've poked on some insecurity that i have what is it ah it's this and because we have this whole thing about never weaponize your partner's insecurities ever under any circumstance even though you could win an argument by hitting them with that insecurity you can't do it not even once and so when you find it and you say it and then we celebrate the other person for acknowledging that and saying that yes cool okay now i understand where you're coming from here's why now that you mention it like this is what was really bothering me and you can get to that now look there's now we're very fast with navigating through the emotional hijack but your emotions still hijack you it's not like i don't get mad or she doesn't get mad we don't sort of miss each other or like you know we're miscommunicating but because we have names for this stuff yeah and we have best practices and you know tools uh you find ways to to center yourself what's your greatest insecurity now and what was it in the first five years of marriage and kind of business my greatest insecurity i think will always my greatest insecurity has been the same since i was like 12 and that's that i'm not smart enough to play with the big boys who are the big boys einstein elon musk jeff bezos um walt disney like the people who history remembers and i actually don't know if i have the the raw intellect to pull it off now i think that i meet minimum requirements and so i act as if uh i just need to keep acquiring skills and i have yet to reach a point of diminishing returns i still am learning so much so quickly that i'm encouraged that i could accomplish enough to be remembered now keep in mind two things one i don't think about legacy ever so it's a north star of seeing if i am going to be a fast pig or if i actually am going to be a racehorse but knowing the only thing that i value in in a conscious active way because clearly my desire to be smarter is tied to something maybe it's truly intrinsic and maybe we all have this desire to be the best at something maybe that really is like every single human will live a less joyful life unless there's some narrow band somewhere something where they're the best at i'm the best at picking weeds drawing a straight line pouring milk whatever there's something right that like have you ever seen the documentary the king of kong no the guy holds the world record for um donkey kong so that's gonna i gotta watch that right but we all like found something yeah like some niche and you go ultra hard and it's like i'm the best at this so maybe that's true i don't know but maybe it is so but you wanna be great at some niche you wanna be great at something grand yes but what i'm trying to separate here is i don't consciously value myself for intelligence that it is proven to me that that is an emotionally dangerous game because all too often i meet people that are smarter than me and i'll even define smart the ability to process raw data quickly so i routinely meet people that can process raw data more quickly than me there are some some type of data we're talking about like like numbers if i said um lewis should we put should we think more about um the school of greatness youtube or the school of greatness podcast now i will come up with a profound answer to that if you let me think about it for two weeks but there are other people that will come up with a profound answer in seven seconds and i find that just astonishing and i'm so in awe of the ability to think quickly and because i speak quickly people think i think quickly but i don't and other than my wife i don't think anybody believes me when i say that but i assure you that is true i just think a lot and because i think a lot i've solved problems in my own life and some number of those problems that i've solved in my own life are useful to other people but it it's rumination so who are the five icons that you look up to the most whether live or dead can i just multiply elon musk by two and walt disney by three it's like those two to me tower over everything but really the people that i just listed walt disney elon musk um jeff bezos einstein einstein but even i'll pull him off because he's while i find that kind of intellect very powerful there's nothing in my life that even hints at that i've never sort of tasted that kind of view on the world whereas the other guys i feel like i get them though i do not compete with them right i get them steve jobs if i didn't already say that like that's an area i can picture him spielberg that to round out i think that's five um if i could mash them all into my brain i would be a very happy man a very happy man no but some of those people weren't this i mean i think of elon sure okay steve jobs made but was walt disney the smartest or the most creative so this is where it gets to separating the wasn't like an average just drawer or something he was he was i mean from a job at his newspaper for not being creative enough but that's one of those like early sort of who you are early i don't get too much in a twist about because it was the fact that he spent some ungodly number of hours creating animation in his garage literally that just put him ahead of other people so i mean if you really want to talk about success success is a large amount of discipline and timing and so he had both he was working in a garage when there was no money to be made and everybody said what are you doing um all the animations played out well animation's dead baby it's dead and he just loved it enough that he was there and ready for that second wave of success timing that's exactly what happened with tony hawk tony hawk was huge and then skateboarding died died but he loved it and so even when it was just like backyard skateboard competitions he just kept going and going and going and going for no money for no money whatsoever no prestige nothing and then it has this resurgence in the 90s and he's the only one that anybody knows because everybody gave up and so now it becomes tony hawk pro skater and boom he's like the biggest name by a factor of 100. so that was the same thing with walt disney he didn't need to be the smartest he needed to be the one that put in all the time when everybody else gave up and then the world had to meet him they almost went out of business during world war ii and roy disney sort of keeps them afloat and they do like sort of propaganda films and stuff and then they come out of it as like the only survivors and because he had been so passionate working so hard he had that discipline and that work ethic of what he was doing in the garage to innovate so you have this guy that wants to innovate so he's doing things other people aren't doing at a time where not only were there no other innovators everybody else had fallen by the wayside and given up because there was no money and now he was the best of the best and he had that discipline in the work ethic and the timing met him and it's just you get these so dude i will just say this to everybody watching because it'll be this will be a time capsule in five years i mapped something out seven years ago that is now coming to fruition lewis i promise you i have a vision people go watch it right now i mapped it out it's called if you in youtube type tom bill you and master plan i laid the whole thing out yeah and i am executing it against it every single day and seven year plan no no it just happened to be seven years ago it was the first time i said out loud this is what i'm doing so then whatever three years ago i said we need to record this so four years into it i said i want to plant a flag so it's not people having to believe no no i really did have this master plan that i have it and people can watch me execute it and see if i pull it off because i think i know where the puck is going to be and that there's something happening right now in media that's opening up this a moment of tremendous timing that i'm aimed precisely to be in the middle of that timing so that i can create another gigantic successful company this one will take longer because i have to have built something up to be ready to take advantage of that opportunity that's coming um in a way that like when you're selling something people can eat it's not the same problem although we did have our own lucky timing there um yeah yeah so it sounds like i mean you've got the work ethic and the discipline like disney he had timing he had timing because it could have been no one cared so it's like he wasn't more brilliant it seems like he was brilliant but he wasn't more brilliant he was dedicated in a craft that had timing and that's why i don't know my obsession with because you just asked what my insecurity was that's the truth whether it makes any sense or not is a totally separate debate because you don't need to be smart to be iconic it is entirely possible that i meet minimum requirements to become an icon yes i don't know yet i don't think you need minimum requirements i don't you don't need that you do you do my friend we both in terms of intelligence yes i don't want that to be true but it is true the us military has run the experiment they said if you have a below 84 iq i think it is that they would rather just not have you because even peeling potatoes you'll create more chaos i don't even know if more my iq i don't even think my iq is not 84 right i swear i promise you i have no idea i promise you no matter how much you may struggle with reading or whatever your iq is well above that um and then on top of that like you're sort of dancing around there are other things other than your ability to process raw data quickly okay which will sort of round to iq there are things that are just as important maybe more important than iq um i heard this real story once and i want to do a fictionalized version of this that at one point in the u.s the guy with the highest iq in the world lived in the us and he was working as a bouncer in a bar and had done nothing with his life what now imagine that a guy who if i remember the numbers correctly correctly einstein is 160 and this guy was like 220. shut up so think about that the the average in the u.s like 115 i think so if 115 is normal and then einstein is 160 there's a bigger gap between einstein and this guy than einstein and your average guy and the guy was a bouncer at a bar because if you're if you don't meet minimum requirements in sort of all the areas social skills interpersonal skills the ability to manage your own emotions right maybe this guy had suffered trauma and he just could not get himself to a place where he could engage or wanted to engage you know so it's like i get it i somehow at some point in my life chose subconsciously to value intelligence i'm in awe of it when i see it i wish i had more of it i don't i don't cry myself to sleep tonight you know right at night about it but if there was a button in front of me that said you could be the smartest person in the world the only thing that makes me hesitate is would i still be able to enjoy my time with my wife and because i used to say yes i would hit that button and then lisa was like i know this is make-believe but if i could put a request that you hesitate before hitting it because she said would we still relate to each other i was like i actually don't know so if i knew that i would still relate to my wife i would pound the life out of that button so why is this the biggest insecurity uh because it's because you're doing pretty well for yourself i really feel like i have i don't spend a lot of time in insecurity but i'm trying to give you a real insight yeah yeah so when i think about things that still do like oh that sucks it's when i see like when i look at elon musk i am not equal parts because i'm more inspired than i am crestfallen that i just don't have that ability to process data like that uh that's astonishing like when you see what he's done i am i'm going all out to build the next disney and i think i might pull it off but he's building a company to take people to mars while building the most dynamic car company on the planet and an underground tunnel company right and yes and solar city it's like hyperloop is he just had an idea and so he published what multiple companies are now using to build he gave away his patents i mean it's insanity the guy is is the um chief engineer of spacex he taught himself he taught himself he got books and taught himself rocket science that's insane so that to me is i choose to let it be awe-inspiring even if there i could only ever be a fast pig and who knows i'm not running the experiment but i i i think in terms of there are some areas where you get disproportionate rewards on your time if it has to do with verbal or emotional abilities i get disproportionate return me and somebody else could read the same books and i'm just going to walk away with more um i could give the same number of speeches as somebody else and i'm just going to be a little bit better than they are so that's an area where i've really poured myself into if you could uh hit a button right now that would say you are one of the smartest people at what did you say something with data uh the ability to process raw data data yeah to be the smartest or one of the smartest in the world right now or guaranteed to be the same level intelligence you are for the rest of your life or incrementally better with the amount of process you take and be bigger than disney guaranteed that's so easy bigger than disney nothing brings me more joy than storytelling nothing so why are you obsessed with the the the like i'm not sure that it's smart i don't know that it's a good use of my cycles but i you're so good at asking like that really pointed question and and it's tempting to dodge right and just like give you some bs answer the truth is for whatever weird reason that i have not been held back enough by to worry about the thing that i worry about in my life at least some small amount is my intelligence so it probably stems from growing up i was just always around maybe it's pure luck maybe if i'd grown up anywhere else i would have been the smartest kid but i was in a group of friends where i was not the smartest and so i became the funniest and that has served me very well and you became the hardest working and you became or i haven't tracked enough of them to know i was not then i will assure you of that now whether i'm the hardest working of all of us now but we're a bit of a stephen king bunch where everybody's scattered to the wind and we have not stayed in contact but i do think like that line and stephen king that you never have friends like you had when you were 12 that is true like the friends that i had at the age of 12 was like a magic stephen king novel and uh but unfortunately i have not stayed in contact except for one of them which is a whole thing unto itself he's a fascinating guy wow but anyway they were smarter than me many of them don't you want to not be the smartest person in the room yeah you're gonna you'll end up in a death loop because i think it's dumb i should not be obsessed about wanting to be smarter but i'd be lying if i said that i wasn't like it is an area where yeah it would be cool i won't lie right right but i know how to emotionally center myself i know how to be beyond grateful for the talents that i do have i am able to generate an extraordinary amount of joy uh with the talent and intelligence like if 50 is hardwired and then the other 50 is making the most of that i am really having a ball making the most of what i was given so i'm good yeah but am i insecure yes am i paralyzed by insecurity no do i invest in that insecurity no i don't think it makes any sense to wallow in like oh i should be smarter you know what i mean like i'm not stuck there yeah yeah but that's the honest answer a very pointed that's interesting in terms of the thing that keeps coming up for me is uh your ability to self-soothe under whatever adversity or frustration or anger moments in business with team with partner uh personal letdowns you might have what is the the strategy you've learned from all the people you've interviewed and on in your own just personal tests and experiments of soothing and kind of getting back to a place of heart rate slowing down getting back to a rational state of mind letting go of the hurt 12 year old that's not smart or whatever it may be that's heard in that moment and reactive what are those soothing techniques besides having a blankie when you're a child and something at some point uh well so i'll get the mechanistic one out of the way meditation is big um that that has been a lifesaver for me that's helped me manage stress in very stressful situations but the thing that maybe people haven't heard before is i always ask myself one question so i have a goal i know what my goal is that's very very important in my entire rubric everything that i say assumes that the person knows what their goal is big goal or the goal just in that moment so let's say your goal is i want to feel good about myself so getting back to center okay i want to feel good about myself but i just did something to embarrass myself and it has real world consequences right it really was embarrassing and it really will stick with me maybe if for a year maybe 10 years maybe this is a thing that now is associated with me forever right it's out in the internet whatever so how am i going to recenter i use one question will it serve me to feel badly about myself because of this and if it does serve me and by the way sometimes it does like you need that sting of like oh i messed that thing up i don't want to mess up like that again and being upset by it never more than 20 of your time but in that 20 leaning on what i call the dark side to be like angry about it be upset hold yourself accountable and not just let yourself off the hook and be like yeah you screwed that up you weren't paying enough attention your skill set wasn't ready whatever but nine or eight times out of ten i guess um the right answer is no it's not going to serve me and even if kicking my own ass served me for a little bit it's not going to serve me for long so i need to very rapidly transition into forgiveness into just not focusing on it letting it go and knowing that so i have a belief that i've consciously instilled in my life that i only do and believe that which moves me towards my goal so if even if it's true that i'm a believing that isn't gonna serve me so i just go okay well that's not gonna serve me so i need to at least believe i can get better okay i can get better cool then i'm just gonna focus on that yeah and that simple reframe pulls me out of that and i just it's a pattern interrupt right using cognitive behavioral therapy language i don't allow myself to death spiral about what a i am you know it's interesting i probably spent 27 28 years of my life maybe 30 obsessing over being a internally right internalizing like stupid you're an idiot whatever it was around the relationship or something in my business something i would obsess about it and i think when i turned 30 i finally was like well that doesn't really serve me anymore and i feel like a lot of people in the world continue to obsess about calling themselves something negative that they're no good or a or god or an idiot for doing this thing and we obsess over why do you think we obsess so much for decades of our lives until we die most people it seems like you're having a biological experience so one of the physics of being human this is the actual structures of the brain are designed to do the following it's designed to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids that's it now you trying to be the the alpha in your tribe is actually very dangerous you're gonna have to put yourself out there take risks try to build alliances all that so that's why people are so afraid of making a mistake public speaking doing something that could get them ostracized now in a modern context it doesn't make sense anymore to have that fear but the programming is there so also we have a negativity bias so if you think of it as the sort of snake stick effect you are better off assuming that a stick in the grass is actually a snake than you are to assume a snake in the grass is a stick because if a stick is you know just a stick but you react like it's a snake you look silly and people might chuckle but if it's actually a snake and you react like it's a stick you're dead yeah so you're way better off skewing to the overreactive same with negative you are way better off going lewis you really embarrassed yourself you never should have done that you should have just kept your mouth shut stay safe yes because you are better off fitting in than you are sticking your head up yeah now if you win the lottery and you become the alpha male and you get access to more females and you procreate it's a risky strategy but when it pays off at genghis khan and it pays off you know i mean he can his impact can actually be measured in the gene pool it's insane but it's a dangerous strategy man so that's why you have all this like negativity bias you're something like five or seven i forget what the stat is seven times more likely to believe something negative than you are to believe something positive because if it's positive then it's just you didn't get ostracized but you don't get a lot more out of it whereas if you really misstep and you're in danger of being put out of the group you need to address it immediately and go into damage control have you ever done anything where you felt like oh i really messed up i messed up daily but i mean like daily oh i shouldn't have said that i shouldn't have done that thing or i got too much negative comments than i normally get and is there a moment you can think of that stands out where you felt like uh i held onto this for a few days of beating myself up because i knew i needed to take accountability are you asking about whether i hold on to something too long or whether i make mistakes where they're they're legitimate what was the mistake that was a big one for you were you like okay i had to beat my not beat myself up but like i had to hold myself accountable for a few days longer than i normally would to really i don't have a quick answer to that yeah um partly because i don't lash myself for mistakes and haven't for a very long time now um i make mistakes routinely i've made huge mistakes with building culture really dude that you want to talk trial and error like trying to figure out like how to build a culture in a company was very very difficult when i used to mentor somebody um i would do this thing where i would say they would come to me inevitably and say hey i want to be you in 10 years and i would say okay then i'm going to start talking to you the way that i talk to myself that was a mistake most people are not ready for that and like finding a way to stair step them into that and sort of help them begin to process things that you know i've had my entire life to earn my own respect or incredibility with myself so and then also i could never understand and lisa really had to show me she was like when you speak people don't hear tom billy the teammate they hear tom bill you the ceo and it's like she was like some of your staff has only ever interacted with you when you're on camera and so to you it's like you have both the sort of you're the boss you pay their paycheck and you're a celebrity in a very microwave trust me i'm well aware of that but like that's the perception that they have but because i don't think of myself like that i don't feel that way internally that i cannot think that oh when i say this thing and i'm a very forceful person so now i'm saying it forcefully but i don't want deference i assume you're not giving me deference but in reality that person is hearing the ceo this guy could fire me and he's you know now he's coming at me hard which he did ask my permission to do because i came and said but it just it didn't work so i don't use that strategy anymore um just a lot of little things like that where it seemed like i really was trying to do something amazing but it was a terrible strategy yeah what would you say is the uh the wrong way about getting into a business partnership with your married uh as a married couple and the right way to do it what have you learned in the last five years that it's really worked and what has been like man we maybe we shouldn't have done a business together if we would have went down this way yeah if your relationship isn't high functioning if you don't have insane levels of emotional stability a sense of longevity you know that you're in this forever and that you've shown over a certain period of time that we have the chops to solve disputes that's the key the second key is what are the roles baby i don't care who takes what role have some roles so for instance when lisa and i created impact theory we said to the lawyers make this the ultimate divorce nightmare lawyers said no no one of you should take 51 percent trust me everybody thinks this is all going to be sunshine and rainbows um and lisa was like yeah absolutely tom should have 51 and i'll take 49. and i said over my dead wow you are taking 50 this is half your company you have earned over the life of our marriage you've earned every half of everything that we have like if my wife were cheated on me with an entire football team i would still give her half because half of it is hers like she has earned that half and becoming you know a horrible wife does not negate that she earned her half and so i would i would just close that chapter i would give her half and never look back and just go do my thing and because i believe that to the core of my being and i believe it for two reasons one she really has earned her half and even if she hasn't the only way to to make sure that my marriage is my number one priority is to say to her no no i trust you implicitly if you're gonna burn this business down do it please don't mess up our marriage but like i don't care about the business like i care about you and i want to be very clear and i want my actions to show it isn't like oh no it doesn't matter but you know what i'll just put the 51 down just so you know the lawyers are telling us no no 50 50. but let's be very clear i will try never ever ever to move forward without us agreeing and you will convince me sometimes i will convince you i am very open and i she knows me i never argue for an idea just because it's mine i know where the company's trying to go i've built a skill set over multiple businesses in many many years of being good not perfect but being good at knowing which movement is most likely to get us where we want to go so right my luck beloved wife about to be my business partner if we ever find ourselves at an impasse i can't convince you you can't convince me we have exhausted our ability to communicate um you know to move each other we will every single time go with my idea now if you're comfortable we're 50 50 though correct but we have roles yes i am the ceo i am the visionary interesting she is unimaginably good executor and she has also amazing visionary ideas just as i know how to execute but when you look at the dominant trait i am dominant when it comes to vision she's dominant when it comes to execution so if it's something around execution and i think she's crazy we're gonna go with her idea because i know she is the right person to listen to but when we get to loggerheads on something where let's say we were equal like no one has more experience no one has proven to be better at this thing then ultimately i'll make that call now that's your role that's my rule and just like you're not gonna step on her execution role if she's like no we're gonna do it this way and her one percent will probably win out over that is that true or no whoever is the right person to listen to like jocko willing makes it very clear if you want to be a good leader you have to know when to follow and that's another thing that we talk about in the culture document you better be prepared to lead but you also better be prepared to follow so i would follow her like i have no problem with that there's no ego tied up it's just somebody has to be the tie breaker when there's only two of you it has to be agreed upon ahead of time who has the final say interesting and that will force you to cross a line in your relationship where it's like we're going to say it we're going to write it down there's going to be no uncertain terms when we don't agree and if it's area by area we're going to write the areas down right and then when something falls into a gray zone who makes the decisions in the gray zone write it down that's clear yeah very clear now you had 15 years under your belt of building a successful marriage and partnership of trust and relationship and shared experience together what if someone's in the first two years of their marriage would you say you should it's still a good chance you'll have a great business experience together and not crush your marriage in those first if your relationship is high functioning you'll just learn the lessons in a business context right so a marriage is way more high stakes than business all that's at stake in a business is money what's at stake in a marriage is a shared life and there's no way to fast track that so you can break up and start over but like let's say you stay together for 10 years and then you break up the only way to get to an 11-year relationship is to start by one wow whereas by then that marriage would have been a 20-year marriage so it is a to me with my value system the thing that i protect most ferociously is my wife and my marriage so that's just so easy now i play for keeps with the business i'm not just like fair but like whatever but it's like when when they collide you need to know what you care about in rank order which i find people have a very hard time doing what do you think we've heard a lot of the habits and mindset uh strategies you have but what do you think are some things when you feel completely stuck and i don't think you ever feel stuck but in general for people what are some habits they can take on along with meditation to help them get unstuck in that moment to at least stepping forward in the actions they want towards their goal so a couple things one you you really have to have beliefs and two rules so beliefs and rules and values or values that come into play but just to keep it simple um we can talk to all three if you want it is the full cocktail is beliefs values identity rules and habits that's like the the whole thing you can sort of put routines in there but they're so related to habits um those are what you live by that is how i make sure i accomplish what i want to accomplish what is what are your beliefs i have 25 of them these i've actually published so while i don't have them memorized yeah yeah if somebody wants one or two like that i only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals i can do i can do anything i set my mind to without limitation then the next one is i know that's a lie but that's an empowering lie and i do and believe that's that which moves me towards my goals okay so um but there's 25 things like that human potential is nearly limitless um sure on and on so it's all things to to basically get you moving in the right direction and the reason that i bring up rules is they need to have a rule that when they're indecisive they immediately act and i will just promise you you're going to embarrass yourself because you'll be wholly unprepared and there will be times where if you'd sat down and thought about it longer you would have come to the right answer but you didn't because you hit indecision you have a rule in your life the indecision equals action and i will just promise you it isn't like two to one it's a thousand to one so while there will be consequences you will suffer consequences for living this way but what you would get is so much bigger that it's like it's not even close yeah and so in my life i don't allow indecision how many rules do you have um i'm actually so i you know i got a book deal nah look at yay seven figure book deal i turned it down so i'm no longer writing it and every what i was gonna write in that book was gonna it was gonna force me to come up with to actually write my values down because i've never done it so i it's kind of like pornography i know when i see it i'll get into a situation i'll ask myself what do i value and because i'm totally unafraid of rank ordering things i just rank order them so for instance the one that was really hard to do my wife my business family and friends what order do they come in because you don't get two number ones my wife my business my friends and family wow that's just this is being real yeah so but saying that out loud that was not easy doesn't mean you're not going to hang out with friends and family it doesn't mean that i don't absolutely like i am obsessed with my family and there is almost nothing i wouldn't do for them i wouldn't die for them and leave my wife alone but like in a moment of my mom falls in a river and i have to risk everything to save her i would do it 100 yeah so um you know that that's easy but that's that's just me being honest about like ultimately the order in which those three things so so why not take the seven-figure book deal what's that to do with your rules because that is i love the mindset stuff i love it and it's changed my life and i love watching somebody's eyes light up when they get it for the first time and so i created impact theory university and it is the book but in lecture form yeah and so i've already created that stuff now i know that i would open up a much bigger market if i were to make the book so that those people could go oh my god this stuff is life-changing and then i say you like the book you'll love impact theory university sign up today and it would quintuple our business overnight i can pretty much guarantee it when you say no to something that comes with a lot of zeros you do so because of your value system and what i value when i think about tom bill you on his deathbed if i may speak in the third person i think of myself on my deathbed i don't regret not writing the book but i regret tremendously not telling stories because i think if i want to impact 100 of the world two percent of them can be impacted with what we're doing right now where you say think like this act like this it will make your life better and two percent will do it it's amazing now i don't mean two percent of your audience your audience is the two percent they have selected themselves out they watch your show so now some ungodly number of them are going to go out and do it because they belong to that very rare group the 98 though they will not and the i became obsessed with this because working at quest i had 3 000 employees a thousand of them grew up in the inner cities and many of them could process raw data faster than i could they were smarter than me but they had done nothing with their life and they were not going to do anything with their life not that would be remembered or anything that even they valued right and when i boiled down to why not it came down to they didn't have a growth mindset they didn't have the only belief that matters so i thought okay well how do i get it to them so i we created quest university and i would show up early i would stay late i would tell anybody anything they wanted to know about mindset building a business whatever and two percent of them did it and it was life-changing and it's amazing and i still get phone calls from people like you changed my life i mean it's amazing but it's only two percent the other 98 are either apathetic or actively antagonistic to change so how do you reach them entertainment the line is you have to get to the limbic system which you do through entertainment so you tell them tv movies yeah so star wars storytelling yep star wars affected my life tremendously the matrix it's how you sway culture so the only way that i'm going to sway culture with my skill sets i'm not a musician would be telling stories so so the book you weren't able to do the book because it wasn't it just took some time yeah got you and now i do admit i might at some point cross the bridge and go hey this is just taking impact theory university and putting into book forms yeah yeah and get him to do it like ryan holiday i would have him do it it's only sort of been recently that i've crossed that bridge because he was going to work with me on the book but that was when i was like no i got to write every word but now i'm like man just send ryan into itu and say you know spend four months watching all the content and just write it as a book um and that might be the punchline i i haven't thought yeah i think you could focus on that's powerful what are other rules that you live by so have you written those down or no no the only ones i've written down are the beliefs part of what got me interested in doing the book was oh it's going to force me to write down my values um so here i'll just give you a few yeah i'm out of bed in 10 minutes or less if i've had more than five hours of sleep i'm out of bed in 10 minutes or less if i wake up after three hours sleep i'll lay there for two hours trying to fold out i'm talking about during the weekday but not the weekends here uh no even on the weekends uh i don't have a hard rule about it but rule of thumb i'm still usually out of bed and 10 minutes or less so i'm out of bed in 10 minutes or less and most everything i'm going to say just assume i mean monday through friday yeah i'm out of bed in 10 minutes or less um i if i'm awake i'm either working or working out um so like spoiler alert i don't have sex during the week that's just like uh with rare exceptions uh that's a no-go um i do hard things at night you don't relax no i work until i go to bed even when i brush my teeth i'm listening to a podcast so legitimately patient with all your time from the moment i wake up monday through friday it's very different on the weekends monday through friday if i'm awake i'm either working or working out and when i'm working out i'm still listening to a podcast so that was actually double duty wow um those are those are like some easy and fast ones that i live by every day if i'm stressed i meditate um i never blame other people i always take on responsibility myself i only do things that move me towards my goals so i'm very careful about what my goal is and another rule my goals must always be exciting and honorable and i'll define exciting is just like i'm amped up it gives me more energy i wake up excited to go do that thing honorable is it serves not only myself but other people okay and what about identity how does that play in everything that to me as far as i can tell there's only one smart way to go about identity and that is to adopt the identity of the learner so instead of valuing yourself for being something it's all about becoming something or what you've acquired or or being smart this in fact this is how i got myself out of the death loop i was in my 20s around being smart where i was making all these dumb decisions and i only wanted to be around people that were dumber than me i was actually thinking about this this wasn't like some subconscious program i was like oh man that person is smart oh god i don't want to be around them and so there's this movie called um amadeus and true story probably fictionalized inspired by amadeus mozart's real life and there's this real guy his name is solieri and he laments in the movie and i remember watching this at probably 17 years old and instantly going this is my life and he says uh he laments to god and said why did you make me just good enough to realize i'll never be as good as mozart like you could have made me better than mozart or you could have made me so dumb i can't tell but when you're like so close but you'll never get there he said it was it was too heartbreaking and i sucked that into my soul and for more than a decade i was like i am solieary and like you with realizing hey calling myself a is not serving me i finally had to say thinking of myself as the person who's just good enough to recognize that other people are better stop doing that and now start thinking relentlessly about acquiring new skills that's it like whatever be inspired by people that are better than you great that's amazing but don't sit there and lament which is what i used to do that you're not as good as them find out how close can you get yeah you know what i realized ah man my nephew is 16 and he is able to spend so much time learning new skills right now he can obsess over something all day and try this sport and do this thing and read this book and try everything he's cooking class like all this stuff is happening and he seems like he's got all the time in the world even though he's in school and homework but he's like i'm just going to do whatever i want and learn how hard is it for you to learn a really great skill that you want to learn at this stage when you don't have that much time do you we all have 24 hours no excuses but when you're working so much on the bench make sure you align what you want with that so what are the things that i'm learning yeah what are the skills you want to learn are you ready i i just to my wife yesterday made a proclamation i'm going to become the greatest writer of what's called shojo manga the world has ever seen now shoujo manga is aimed at women it's typically written by women for women and i am so excited to learn what makes good shojo manga for anybody that watches my interview shows they're going to see whenever i have a guest on that can talk intelligently about the differences between men and women i'm like pinning them down not because i care sort of intrinsically about the difference between men and women though i do find it interesting but if i'm going to write this stuff for them i have to really understand it because people can say what they want baby the numbers speak for themselves louis dude if you have you read a billion wicked thoughts no oh louis is going to change your life you're going to love it so much so this crazy book jordan peterson makes an offhanded comment one of his lectures about oh there's this crazy book called the building wicked thoughts and if anybody's wondering if men and women are the same read this book and i thought oh my god i have to go read this google engineers are like interested in understanding what are people's sexual desires when nobody's looking and they said there's this fundamental flaw wow that people lie because even if you say is the researcher no no i'm never going to tell anybody this is totally anonymized people like ah too many data breaches i'm not sure and they just don't tell you and the engineers are sitting there going wait a second we have search history we have the data trillions of searches men and women from around the world and now let's look at what they search for what porn they watch dude it's insane it's so revealing dude so this book is it goes through what do men and women search for what does it tell you about them where does this come from like uh it is absolutely give me the 60-second cliff notes of like a difference between men and women of this book well so the punchline of the book is that just from an evolutionary perspective you would expect men and women to have um different to respond sexually to different things because they have different agendas so guys have two mating strategies one to pair bond and mate with that person and then the other is to basically um oh god there's a funny name for it it's a rhyming way of basically saying plant and dash so you put your seed and then you just bail it right forgetting what it's called oh man and because we have these two strategies so guys men have both those strategies strategies but for because for a guy it's like sperm is cheap the encounter is cheap they're if the woman has to raise a child even like the nine months of gestation the woman has to go through all that man man is off scot-free so he's always looking for those opportunities where he can just impregnate a female and then bounce and when you think about it as a legitimate mating strategy women also use that strategy to attract men it's the difference between being hot and being beautiful hot is advertising sexual availability whereas beauty is often sort of a more internal thing it's about who the person is it's the sort of totality so somebody can be standoffish and still beautiful but hot comes from the allure of they could be accessible and that is like that's fascinating and when you think about the things that really turn women on get ready vampires billionaires um pirates it's like the um the number one female fantasy is beauty and the beast not literally that story but that archetype of the sort of out of control beastly man who is tamed by one woman and brought into a loving relationship with one woman why is that dude think about it you've got to get this like high status male into a monogamous relationship it's like the hardest thing to do hardest thing to do and it's the thing to get that high status male to not use you and then leave but to pair bond with you trips melt right so that i love that but here like before we go laughing at women guys they're porn genitals that's it and now if you really want to freak yourself out there is the number of porn that's like one guy two girls is tiny compared to one girl and multiple men no yes have you not heard of sperm competition what yes it's this is sexual selection this is crazy wait a minute so guys like watching porn with too much it won't say like the data shows data shows they watch way more of it so without two guys and one girl and you know do you know how they get a horse like if they want to make sure that a horse impregnates another horse they'll have it be around another stud so that there's another male present so it's like who's bigger or stronger you ejaculate more semen if you've just watched uh another man have sex you if your wife has been away for something like three days when she comes back you'll ejaculate more because you don't know who she's been with dude it's insane i don't know like i don't know how much you want to get into this on your show but it is like we could go deeper it gets weirder and weirder the farther you go but human sexual selection is absolutely fascinating and it gives these powerful insights into like how you can sort of feel more at ease like with your own sex and be able to talk in a way and feel understood and seen and all that and then when it's the opposite sex there can be like these misunderstandings and like what the hell is going on and the way that i explain it is being around other men is easier but being in a mixed group is more productive because you get heterogeneity of thought so people are coming at it from different angles it's way more explosive in terms of what you can get done it's awesome and so i always seek out like the different modes of thinking in groups because it's way more powerful but i'd be lying if i said that it wasn't easier when i'm in just a group of guys with all the things that you've learned from personal experience of marriage and intimate relationship and the psychologists you've been interviewed the books the billion negative thoughts thoughts like all these things you've experienced if it could boil down a healthy happy relationship to three things that each partner needs to do and take responsibility for in order to create and cultivate a long-term healthy happy relationship what would you say are those three things number one is the one that everybody's ready for communication [Music] number two is you've got to what i usually refer to as fill your heart with love but i'll say another way which is want them to win you need to elevate your partner if your partner doesn't feel better about themselves when they're around you then when they're not you are in real trouble and then third lots of sex but only on the weekend for you for me that i make up for it louis make up for it the whole weekend is just sex crazy like all you guys being around other dudes and then just with your wife zero percent of that it is entirely uh pair bonding sex is a big part of that touch is a big part of that cuddling is a big part of that sharing something food watching something together touching while you watch it massage like dude so doesn't have to be sex but some type of physical touch for sure and sex sex i do mean that one sex is important otherwise you become roommates and bed death is like this whole thing bad death yeah in relationships where you respect each other you're fond of each other but you're not having sex anymore so sex is important it's very important those are the three things those are the three how do you communicate when you think differently actively believe differently first it's important to recognize that we really do overlap far more than we're different so the commonalities are so overwhelming um that it is powerful i mean there's there is no human i feel more connected to or more understood by than my wife um but there is an ease when you're with like-minded guys i mean you can be with guys and be like these guys are i can't even stand to be around right but there is like a camaraderie and stuff which i'm sure you'll get relaxing yeah it's just easy right like i don't have to worry about oh i need to phrase this in some kind of way to be more careful about how you might feel i can just say it right and if you had a problem you'd be like dude don't be a dick and so it's like very easy um and women likewise like they are more protective everyone's included like they're just they default to that they don't have to deal with you know the neanderthal guys in the group um but there's so much overlap so anyway lisa and i have to be thoughtful about like oh yeah you're right i'm the classic one everyone jokes about is i'm just trying to solve your problem you just want to be heard right yeah so that's sort of the easiest one that people be like oh yeah i can totally relate to that so you have to navigate some of that but um the communicating even when you have differences just rules of engagement right like say what do we do in an argument do we step away do we keep going until we get to the end of this do we go to bed mad do we not go to bed can you leave the house do you have to stay in the house right like having can we name call can we yell can we raise our voice like if you just say yeah like this this is how we fight this is fair this is not fair like lisa and i never ever ever ever ever under any circumstances not even once weaponized the other person's insecure powerful can't do it and so that would be such a violation of trust that we just don't yeah that's good what's the thing you admire by your wife the most man that's a long list uh the most thing is that my wife has an unbreakable will and there have been times where it actually annoyed me because there were times early in our marriage where i just thought i'm just going to wear her down and just be like don't do this or leave me alone about that or whatever and i'll be so inhumanly consistent that she'll back off eventually she'll just give up and once she believes in something and dude that i i need to go deeper on this because i'm going to get myself in trouble with a little generalization here but there is a book it's very profound and i highly encourage every human being to read it called the gulag archipelago written by a man who was put in the the gulag the russian um like internment camps i'm not sure what the right way is the gulag what the gulag archipelago so it's basically like the the groupings of the gulags and he got pulled into the gulag system and it's terrifying far more terrifying in terms of number of deaths than the um nazi concentration this would have been post-world war ii um really yeah yeah his name's um alexander soulja nitzin is the author real guy really survived the gulag like a victor frankel type of yes but this guy's enraged so it is jordan peterson wrote the forward to the um the sort of updated reprinting of it or whatever and he talks about how when you're reading it you feel like soulja nitsan is screaming for 800 pages or whatever it is it is it's one of the most chilling books i've ever read like it it's sort of a kin it's not quite because the gulags were different but imagine you're reading the book written by um victor frankl but instead of having found this sort of beautiful insight he is enraged and points out how we ended up here this is how you end up creating a system that's so inhuman absolutely breathtaking book anyway in it he says most people under torture will eventually say whatever you need them to say but he said there was when you heard that someone was tortured to death he said i'd put a chip that it was a woman because he said wow once they latch on to something they're not backing down they will just will not let go it's right and it's right what's right is right and that's it they're willing to die yes and i was like giving the chills now and i so see that in my wife when i read that i was like this is my wife like she has this thing of like when she believes it should be this way and she just like died for it yes and at times where good sense is telling you to back down you don't need to die for this it's okay to lie and say yes you were right like that didn't make any sense right and truly from the outside it i would be begging my wife to lie to give up her principles like i want you alive and you you're being tortured this is crazy but she really would be tortured to death before she would give on that and and it's like it's it's awe-inspiring wow now it's all inspiring until it becomes pathological and it's terrifying but like really really really when i because i think i am hardcore but that woman man once she like she has true righteous indignation and she just becomes unstoppable wow okay so the bulog gulag archipelago log the gulag is like their prison the gulag i gotta read this book there were only three books you could recommend to people that this all the books they could read in their life this is the hardest thing probably but if you're like three books to live a better life to understand the world and to just thrive what would you say are those three books it's not a hard question but it's one that i'm sure i will answer differently every time somebody asks uh number one is mindset by carol dweck that's great it's the most important book in the english language uh number two is the obstacle is the way by ryan holiday which is an absolutely extraordinary book and then number three is extreme ownership by jocko willing he's great and leif babin shout out to leif what is that the thing that you think most people about you that's very easy they think that i'm trying to be the next uh tony robbins and i'm trying to be the next walt disney yeah i get that a lot too and i'm like i'm not i love tony i think he's amazing amazing i don't want to run a business i don't want to run on the events business and it's me being the the one leading people in that way i feel like that's a lot of pressure and i'm just not that good at i don't think you know compared to someone like him but tony's tony's the goat yeah so i won't put either of us in that category but you are amazing at it and seeing the what you've built around you is a reflection of how you're able to influence people on stage but more importantly and this is something that only a precious few people in your audience know what you're like in person right right and for anybody and i know you must get this comment a hundred times on every video louis you're such a good listener what they'll never understand is the way you look at people mm-hmm it and it's always how do i look you really do have a sparkle in your eye you really are like you're here you are with me you are present there there's just something about the way you look when you're listening to somebody that is awesome yeah it you really do feel heard and like somebody's present and all that and so anyway i know how that plays out in business as well so it's like all those things that you can do will only continue to get bigger and as long as you love it and want to do it it's going to keep going but i certainly get that tony does a thing and it's amazing and he's still doing it first of all like tony betoni um but yeah i don't it's not the game i want to play um it's incredibly powerful and it's a necessary part of my master plan to play in that realm um but the closest thing and of course i'm not trying to be a clone of walt disney i really want to be tom bill you so all the people saying oh no just be yourself yes yes yes i'm just saying but that's the model having a model that helps you have something to aim at it's and also is just an organizing principle for people to understand so and what's the hardest skill that you want to learn i don't yet know what's going to be the the linchpin thing that i need to know how to do right now it is i'm running a strategy in hollywood so hollywood is known for and i don't i don't think it's actually um that anybody's doing it on purpose creative things are really really hard it's really hard to know what's going to pop we don't know right so you want to tell everybody because you're not sure you want to say hey this could be amazing or this is amazing kid i love you like yeah yeah let's do this man i love it i love it now what you're really trying to do is buy yourself time to get feedback from other people to see will this person keep going to see if it starts to generate heat so you want to get as close as you can and yet push them off so you want to create a relationship where you're the natural person for them to turn to when they've got heat behind them yeah but you want to know they're big enough keep them at arm's length until they have momentum yeah like i love you man yeah yeah what you're doing is amazing you're a talent and so i get it i and i don't think it's sinister i don't think it attracts ugly people or anything like that i think it is so difficult to know what's going to hit you need to create that sort of weird friction so anyway i come into this and i say i've already had all the financial success in the world i don't have to think about that so i'm only going to play the hollywood game as long as it's interesting it's only interesting to me if i can be real so i tell people when i meet them for the first time i'm building a reputation and i'm building my reputation by always saying what is true and so it may be uncomfortable because if i don't like your project i'm going to say i don't like your project right and my hope is that that will be refreshing and you will always know exactly where you stand with me and dude it's coming back around to me i don't know that it's a winning strategy yet i've gotten some early interesting feedback where i'll say no to an early project so i'm like this just doesn't line up and then they'll come back a year later and be like hey i really like the way you move and because i can get things done which is like my ability to create momentum is sort of my secret superpower and people will come back and be like hey i see what you're doing i see how much you've accomplished in the intervening year it's amazing and you were really honest and so i know i can trust you so but i also i had a an agent and they just flat stopped calling because in a meeting i was like i'm tired of you guys saying this you keep saying it every time we meet like happens and i'm like what are we doing like and i literally said i said stop the reading what words do you need to hear from me to know that i'm serious and i'm ready because every meeting they'd be like hey if you like this idea we should do it i'm like ah i'm doing it every meeting i have said the same thing to you i am in i'm ready to move i'm ready to move now and i said maybe everybody else you deal with that means let's have another meeting it doesn't mean that with me we don't need another meeting right let's make it happen right now what words do you need to hear from what did they say they left and they they they were visibly annoyed and because i wasn't playing the game the same way and they never called me again it was the absolute end of the relationship and i was like fine like you're not the agent for me if a you're gonna loop around the same thing like we don't create momentum by talking we create momentum by doing and if this is a project that's not ready and it's two years off then just say this is a project in two years cool but let's talk about the projects that are now so i have no i actually don't know i may alienate a lot of people yeah and hollywood is very incestuous so i try to be in a space where i can control my destiny which is why i'm so obsessed with comics because webtoon is the youtube of comics so i can publish i don't have to get anybody's permission i can build a following i don't have to ask anybody building community is what i know how to do so it's like that is where i can really focus and control uh um what we're doing but yeah i don't know the strategy of working on what do you think you need to let go of in order to get to where you want to be faster um whether it's intrinsic or extreme i don't think that there's anything holding me back so when i think about i think that the strategy that i'm running right now on a long enough timeline ends in the next disney so because now i check that all the time to see if that remains true because the obvious thing is i need to stop doing interviews because they take a lot of time yeah a lot of time a lot of research and everything but they also bring people into my ecosystem so i i run the thought experiment very frequently of should i stop doing the university should i stop doing the interviews and just focus on really creating the intellectual property and the reason i don't is twofold one the other stuff generates revenue that allows us to um put towards the creation of pvp which is expensive enough and then the other thing is all the breaks that i've gotten executives that have just given me access that i wouldn't otherwise have are all people that are like i watch your show i love it um and so if there's ever anything i can do to help and it's like whoa i've now got i've got executives in japan that are helping me find talent there i've got executives here in the u.s all from the content yeah that's crazy it's crazy louis there are people in mogadishu who know who you are that's just crazy so we're living talk about timing we're living i promise you you have somebody in mogadishu what's mogami mogadishu is a oh god is it a country or a city it's one of the two uh and it is it is my place holder for someone from foreign so when you look online you see that that someone's watched here yeah yeah i have people from everywhere every country countries every country it's in almost every country i mean it's really close so they allow the content to be in yeah it's amazing so that is extraordinary and so you never know who's going to be able to open a door for you and because i'm so aggressive about telling everybody what i'm up to people dm me all the time oh i might be able to help with right when do you think will be the day you stop doing interviews uh when i no longer need it as a way to get people into the ecosystem and i feel i'm having more impact through the stories because right now the interviews are massively impactful on myself and other people so that it is quite joyful for me and i do love it um just when i think about the sort of 98 versus the two percent and i weigh that up and and truly i love interviewing and i love researching but i love writing even more um do you think in order for you to be walt disney uh you'll be able to do it by you writing or by you directing the writers directing the writers when i say writing oftentimes what i mean is just editing i'm shaping the story i'm working actually um yeah ultimately every time i'm actually writing a script something is broken it's just i'm too slow yeah you're a very very slow writer but you were seeing the script editing it being the creative director and i understand story structure and things like that and also i just have lewis i have so much energy and so much willpower and i can get people excited that i can get projects across the finish line and that is my ultimate contribution even more than like knowing what's a good story and when a story is ready and who's got talent and who to assign where even more than that just like i love it so much i will drag my entire team across the finish line if that's what i have to do and and then surround myself with people that i don't have to drag right yeah so it's like the ability to get a team get them excited and then also lead from the front and just go go and refuse to give up and do whatever it takes and look we've had success two years ago i told my team we're getting into comics and they were all like what even though i had already told them that when we founded the company right but it's like people get caught up in the day-to-day i said hey we're it's time we're officially launching people like what 10 months later we had a comic and now two years into it we have two of the top ten spot we only have two projects active right now both of them are in the top ten of webtoon sci-fi which is like a the youtube of comics yeah and they they post rankings and they do it by genre and both of them happen to be science fiction that we've put out so far and we're they're both they were four and five that's pretty top ten now when they're one and two i'll be much happier but the fact that an unknown publisher has come out of nowhere with nothing their first two projects hit four and five it's pretty cool it's pretty cool where can people follow the the comics out of things they can read the comics on webtoon so one of them is called hexagon one's called neonfuture and then on instagram they can follow us at itcomics so they go to i t comics on instagram follow you there then they'll be a link to where they can go read them on webtoons or whatever absolutely uh it's been powerful man i've got a couple final questions for you but i want people to follow the comics they're amazing i love when you send me the first copies they're unbelievable uh follow that follow impact theory you have the youtube show that has been crushing with content uh so follow that what do you have two million now subscribers just under oh trying to get that before the new year like a few months away but uh so make sure you follow that there follow you on instagram probably one of the most uh positive accounts on instagram with some of the greatest content that i've seen with you and lisa doing a lot of great stuff there as well follow relationships theory yeah if you want to master your relationships youtube channel you guys are doing amazing on that own channel now for anybody paying attention blowing up it's not just content in the feed it's its own channel separate yeah it was a smart move yeah it wasn't getting the love that i thought it deserved because it's going to attract a different audience but i think our content there is fire it's really good two decades of us like making every mistake you can make and like finding our way through it is that weekly you do it once a week multiple times a week yeah that's pretty cool so check that out um how else can we support you man that's it if you've got somebody that's into comics please send them to webtoon like that's my big thing if anybody is trying to change their life impact theory university is legitimately one effort the most aggressive money back guarantee you're ever going to get no questions if you told me that you didn't get 10 times your money i'll give your money back but it this is what if you want to be successful at whatever it is you're trying to do this is it this is all the stuff that they should teach you in school and that's great there you go and then is there is it tombilly.com do you have that yeah we do but it's impact theory.com youtube is tom bilyou oh really yeah okay cool so check all that stuff out i'm curious the last time i had you on five years ago i asked you uh what your three truths were i don't know if you remember them i'm not going to tell you that but i'm curious i have them here i'm curious what they are now five years later to see if they are very interested so if you can only share three things with the world and it's your last day and we have no access to your walt disney-esque animation studio movie empire uh all that went with you all the conjuring created goes with you to the next place and you can only share three final things what would those three things be number one the human animal is designed to grow and get better you have to put the time and energy in number two fulfillment is all that matters don't chase money don't chase fame don't chase success the only thing that matters to actually enjoying your life is to feel good about yourself when you're by yourself that's it and getting people to recognize that like if i were to give you one thing i'm trying to do it's that and then number three love deeply man nothing will ever reward you like the connection with another human being that's true that's true well all three of those were different on the previous enterprises so if you want to hear what those three were make sure to go check out the other immune we did five years ago we'll have it linked up below this um amazing man i want to acknowledge you tom for for constantly showing up and leading the way you do an incredible job of using your willpower your mindset and your consistency showing up and obsessing over the process and it's such an inspiration to be your friend it's such an inspiration to watch you just freaking take over and build something so powerful that impacts the world in a massive way and i love that you are willing to take a massive risk on your beliefs and your values and your dreams and really put something out there like a comic series that maybe isn't the the decision most people would make but you're doing something based on what you know is going to pay off 40 years from now and not something that's going to be hugely successful financially or whatever it may be in this year or moment or a big return right away and i think playing the long game is one of your strengths you know how to execute the short game in a big way to still get results for the long game and i think that delayed gratification process really inspiring man so i acknowledge you for that and and many other things and i really acknowledge you also for being such a committed husband you know no one knows behind the scenes what really happens but it feels like and it seems like that you're so committed to this in a world of social media where it's easy to be distracted in other relationships or in other people all the time to constantly make that your number one i think it's really that's the thing i think i'm most inspired by so i'm proud of you for leading the way when so many people are lost in that direction um final question for you man what's your definition of greatness we'll see if this is the same as well to me greatness is leaving it all out on the field like you can't guarantee results but you can guarantee like did you really play to win and this is something that i am heartbroken for other people if they're not playing to win and the only reason to not play to win is if you don't think you can win and you value yourself for winning so my thing is maybe i can't win i think the odds are actually against me building the next disney but it's such a fun game to play because i only value myself for this sincere pursuit so greatness to me is not about achieving something it's about playing all out sincerely pursuing it tom billy thanks man appreciate it amazing man if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here i hate conflict it's and i find it very stressful but conflict delayed is conflict multiplied

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 135,075

Rating: 4.8543606 out of 5

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, tom bilyeu, tom bilyeu interview, tom bilyeu speech, mindset is everyting, tom bilyeu rich roll, impact theory, tom bilyeu motivation, achieve anything you want

Id: DN6BP65jWhk

Length: 114min 32sec (6872 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021