Tom Bilyeu's BEST Advice on How to to CHANGE Your Life for the Better

all right what's up everybody [Applause] all right you guys ready we're gonna have some fun we're gonna take the energy get a little bit crazy I want to make sure that you guys end this on a high note and honestly I will be wildly disappointed in myself if all I managed to do in this is inspire or motivate you at the end of this talk I will consider myself a failure if that's all that happens I will consider it a win on the other hand if you guys go out and actually take action and at the end of the day all of us were not judged by our intentions we are judged by what we actually accomplish and your accomplishments are going to be entirely determined by what you actually do and my talk is going to be about that how to take action exactly what action is made up of and why it's critical to recognize that humans lead with belief and so at the end of this talk hopefully I will get you guys to understand why right now you have everything that you need already to believe in yourself to be capable to do something that is truly extraordinary and we're gonna walk through that path but for my talk to make any sense I'm gonna have to give you guys a little bit of my backstory not that I can see a whole lot but does anybody familiar with me prior to seven seconds ago when you learned that I wake up Wow well I'm completely shocked by that thank you by the way so to give those of you who don't know a little bit of background my story goes like this growing up I did not show any signs of success my parents taught me to be a good employee which I'll like into the slaves mentality to keep my head down do as little work as possible and avoid punishment at all costs and that's how I started I grew up in a family in Tacoma Washington the teeter between blue-collar and white-collar and I was being trained to be a good employee and when I left for college my own mother who's always been my biggest cheerleader I think that's important to recognize just quietly assumed I was going to fail and every day since I left by the way my mom all but forced me to go to college kicked me out of the nest was only one of I think two people to leave the state for my graduating class everybody else stayed home I wanted to stay home and my mom said you need to go chase your dreams but then every moment since then my mom has done everything she can to get me to move to Tacoma and so finally one day I asked her and I said mom I really don't get it like why you were the one that pushed me you were the one that kicked me out so why are you working so hard to get me back and she said with no malice in her heart I just assumed you were going to fail I assumed you were gonna fail and come home but I never wanted you to ask what if I have the chills on my face remembering that because that's the human condition there is something inside of us that we all recognize it says we could do more we could be more we are capable of becoming something but it's that path to becoming that we don't really understand and it's that path to becoming that I want to talk about today I love the theme of this event pivot making a change while keeping your Center that to me really is what life is all about but that's that's the height now how do we get into the tactical realities of that and to explain that I'm going to walk you through some of my story so my story starts when I go to film school USC film school statistically speaking is harder to get into than Harvard Law and I managed to get in I had taken one of the teachers out who was on the acceptance committee and I said look I have really terrible SAT scores I got a 990 on my SATs by the way I took it twice that is my combined score monkeys with feces just rubbing it on their get better scores than that and I was mortified I went to the committee to find out what I needed to do to get into film school which was my dream the thing that I most wanted in this world and they said hey as long as you've got good grades and you have a 1,300 on your SATs no problem and I was devastated because I was so far from that so I took one of the teachers out and I said look I have a confession I got really bad SAT scores I took it twice look I'm just not good on testing law the whole story and he was like oh who cares he was like there's two points of acceptance once as an incoming freshman we're yeah we look at your SAT scores but the other is as an incoming junior and then we don't care about your SAT scores which are merely meant to tell us how well you do in college so I'm just gonna look your raids so if you get good grades I'm not even gonna look at the rest of your application cool so I locked myself in my dorm room for two years I didn't date I didn't drink a drop of alcohol I didn't go to a party all I did day and night was work and I studied because my problem was my mom was right I did show signs of early success people that were looking at me expecting me to fail that moment but what they didn't understand about me what they didn't understand about the human animal is our ability to adapt grow and get better the most fascinating thing to come out of science in a long time was when they sequenced the human genome and they realized and by the way they thought they were gonna solve everything they thought they were gonna cure cancer they thought this was gonna be the end of chronic aging like all of the diseases that we struggle with now they thought they were all just gonna go away once we sequence the human genome that was gonna be it it was gonna be like a map to Xanadu was gonna be amazing and then they did it and what they discovered was humans only have 20,000 genes and some onions have 40,000 so they're literally looking at the data going are we really meant to believe that an onion is more genetically complex than a human being how can this be possible oh and by the way they were ignoring all of this stuff that they were calling junk DNA now it didn't take them long to realize that that junk DNA plays a role we are without question the most dominant species this world has ever seen we're an apex predator unlike anything you can find us in the Marianas Trench which is the deepest part of the ocean you can find this in the Arctic we have literally sent human beings to the moon and what that junk DNA really is is epigenetics now it's just a fancy word for we respond to our environment and more aptly we respond to stress in our environment anybody ever seen a professional bodybuilder no okay a professional bodybuilder how it looks human to me they are it's unbelievable what they're able to do but they show in a very real and tangible way what you can do to the human body when you understand how to put it under stress now if you've ever been to the gym you know that the real money is in tearing the muscle down not building it up you actually build up the muscle while you're sleeping based on what you've eaten so the act of bodybuilding of actually going into the gym is an act of tearing down so they can create the stress so that your body can respond now if you remember nothing else from my talk remember this humans are the ultimate adaptation machine just by being human each and every one of you is capable of great change who you are today does not predict who you can become who you can become is the answer to a very simple question what do you want and what price are you willing to pay to get there what do you want and what price are you willing to pay to get there Kobe Bryant one of the greatest athletes of our time would show up on game day and if he saw anybody else at the gym as early as him even though he was always the first on the court he would end up practicing longer than that person and I had the honor of interviewing one of those people one time and he said I went up in ask OB Kobe we have a game in an hour like what are you doing out here practicing so long and Kobe said I needed you to know that I was willing to outwork you and in that game they ended up winning and that lesson stuck with that guy forever when you're willing to put in the work when you're willing to take control of your environment and put yourself through the stressors we're acquired for adaptation you literally can become anything and my life is proof of that so I stand here as one of the founders of a company company called quest nutrition that we took from not existing to being valued over a billion dollars five years later thank you that was the guy whose mother not too long before that just quietly assumed he was going to fail at college but what I began to understand is that I could harness that ability to adapt that we can learn in any direction Nature has to make a choice with any species option number one pre program everything think of a horse when a horse is born it comes out it can already run jump take care of itself and then option to be built for maximum flexibility be able to adapt to your environment a horse is a horse no matter where you put it but a human depending on when and where it's born depending on what it allocates its resources to its time and attention it can turn into a basketball player a neuro physicist a parent a coach a hairstylist you literally get to choose you get to decide what it is that you want to be good at and I want you to think about the first time that you picked up a pair of scissors you didn't know what you were doing it didn't feel like it was an extension of your hand but now when you step into that role when you show up the way that everything feels the way that you set it around your station it's all like it was meant to be it flows you know right where things are how to cut somebody's hair depending on the texture of the hair the length the quality the age of the person what they've done to it you know it all you know how to mix colors all of that stuff is from training but the irony is people don't stop and think about hey I got this far in this thing simply by allocating the time energy where else could I go could I pivot and the answer to that question is yes the human-animal is designed to adapt that is literally what we are sculpted to do for me the piece of advice that I always give to somebody whether it's an entrepreneur or somebody who wants to be the greatest parent of all time what is your goal you've got to start with your goal everything works backwards from that for me I wanted to get rich and the irony is when I started on my entrepreneurial journey I was literally saying that's people I want to get rich I just want to make a bunch of money and so I started as a copywriter in a technology company because I had failed to make it in film school I actually ended up doing horrific lis and I at the end of film school I felt broken embarrassed lost I had no idea where I was going but I started teaching filmmaking and as I was teaching that class I realized wow I don't know enough to teach these students I need to like research at night and practice to be able to come in and present this material and a weird thing happened as I started doing that I was actually learning a lot more and so I was able to convey that to the students and I was able to help the students make their films better and it made me realize whoa there's this weird reciprocal loop the harder I work over here then go and explain it they actually can take that knowledge and put it to use building skill sets getting better at something and I started thinking is that something that I could do for myself and at that moment these two very successful entrepreneurs walk into my class and at that time I was obsessed with two things I wanted to get rich and I wanted six-pack ABS now I grew up in a morbidly obese family so for me that was real man and I used to be 60 pounds heavier than I am now and I wanted those six-pack ABS man I just had no idea I was gonna get it and I remember the first time that somebody told me I think you already have abs it's just under the fat and I thought what like that doesn't make sense because I had done like a bunch of crunches and I'm like I still don't see them so I don't know what the problem is maybe it was all the licorice I had a thing so these two guys walk in very accomplished entrepreneurs ripped six pack AB bodybuilder types and they said hey you're coming to the world with your hand out if you want to control your art you have to control your resources so if you want to get back in the saddle and actually become a filmmaker you're going to have to learn to control the resources so come with us be a copywriter but understand this is a startup you can have any role in the company that you want you just have to become the right person for that job and so I took them at their word and I pivoted and I left my teaching career which had safety and I looked to my wife and I said this may fail but I've got to at least give it a shot and my wife said the words have become famous for me which is I bet on you thank you now what my wife was betting on wasn't that I already knew how to do what they wanted me to do because she knew I didn't what she was betting on in me is the same thing that each and every one of you have which is the ability to learn and so I went into it knowing I was not the right person for any job in that company I never been in a company like that before I've been totally focused on film this was software it was security software it was nothing that I had any interest in but I wanted to get rich and so I did it and for six and a half years I put my head down like those early days in my dorm room and I worked my ass off around the clock I didn't take vacations meaning if I went somewhere I would literally guys this is real I would take a camera so that I can watch what was going on back at the facility I was always working around the clock and at six and a half years I was so different than where I started I had worked my way up I was now the chief marketing officer of the company they had given me ten percent equity in the company I was now on paper a multi-millionaire I had done what I set out to do I was capable of things that I never would have believed that I could do running a team building a website online advertising marketing all things that I didn't know I didn't even know when I started the difference between sales and marketing I had no idea what the difference was but here I was now the chief marketing officer of a company that was winning awards it was making money standing in this beautiful conference room overlooking the Pacific Ocean and I realized I'm miserable and I've been miserable for a long time and I learned a really powerful lesson that I want you guys all to think about right now the goal that I had did not take me where I wanted to go I was living the cliche of money can't buy happiness and I began to realize the game were all playing it's not success it's not money it's brain chemistry to sum it up in the simplest way possible the only thing in this life that matters the only thing in this life that matters is what you think about in your most quiet moments about yourself when you're all alone and the only thing you have are your thoughts if in that moment regardless of your worldly success you feel good about who you are you feel good about what you've done and how you've touched other people's lives you feel good about what you're striving for and trying to accomplish you feel good that in the times when it got hard if it mattered to you you pushed through that matters that matters a lot but the money doesn't matter and so I quit and I realized I was just not interested in living a life no matter how much money there was were in my quiet moments I felt like I was wasting my life I felt like I wasn't helping people I felt like I wasn't connected I wasn't connected to my wife I'd been ignoring her for years I felt like I wasn't connected to my business partners anymore it was all just about the money I didn't have a why who knows simon Sinek they get out for Simon all right Simon and I did a video that essentially broke the internet about Millennials somebody watched it what got Simon on the world stage is this whole concept of why you've got to know why you're doing what you're doing if you're just showing up every day to cut and dye hair to keep your lights on you're gonna have far less energy to make it through the hard times than somebody who is there to help transform somebody to help make somebody their best to help them feel their best and I hope that you guys saw that video not too long ago of the hairdresser that went around and he was doing makeovers on homeless people right man it was incredible it was so beautiful the look on their face at that moment where they see themselves for the first time in front of the mirror and they are seeing something totally new they're seeing a version of themselves that they did not know there and the ability to give that gift like it is so easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind of what you do what any of us do but if at the core Ivan Yu is a deep and unending why for what you're doing you've got something now you've got a chance to transcend what you're doing and the way that happens is very tactical it has nothing to do with like whoo being on the air it's none of that you're gonna have the energy that you need to fight through people always ask me how I generate energy there's two ways number one take care of your body there's just no way around that at the end of the day it's a biological thing that's going on the production of ATP and the second thing is you need to be excited about the future that you're trying to create and when I went in and quit even though I had millions of dollars in equity and I was making more than I'd ever made I quit because I didn't have a why I didn't have anything that gave me the energy to keep pushing I didn't have excitement for what I was doing anymore my partners were stunned totally took him by surprise I'm driving home I called my wife and I say I did it I quit like we're actually we were gonna move to Greece we're gonna live for cheap on some beach somewhere and I was gonna write and that was gonna be that and then I am pulling into the driveway of my condo and my phone rings and it's my partners and out of love and respect I take it I say hey baby give me a second I'm gonna take this they're calling and they said come out to dinner with us and I went out and they said look we could do this without you but we don't want to and that was all I needed to reconnect to something other than money and I remembered for a minute these were guys that I loved these were people that I had gotten to know through good times through bad times through the hard times to the excitement of the company growing and in connecting to something other than the money I was finally able to really see and understand what it wasn't motivated me and I confessed to them that money was not my highest priority in business my highest priority was camaraderie I wanted to connect I wanted to bring something of value to the customer I wanted to think about the customer I wanted to be myself and I wanted to market in a way that was inclusive and created a community and in that community we could do something more than just sell products and so we decided to sell that company because they felt the same and they wanted to do something based on passion they wanted to have the energy and excitement to see things through and for three very different reasons we decide to form quest nutrition now as I mentioned I grew up in a morbidly obese family so for me I was never gonna chase money again and I told them that I was only gonna focus on value creation and it had to be something that I had a deep and personal connection to so for me I started thinking every day about saving my mom and my sister my mom and my sister both morbidly obese and have been essentially my entire life and I knew that I was going to lose them too soon if I couldn't solve the problem of how they ended up there I wanted to give them food that they could choose based on taste and it happened to be good for them now that doesn't sound hard let me assure you that it is very hard and there was one point in my life while we were making the bars by hand and it was so hard and so painful that I would wake up this is a true story I would wake up in the middle of the night with my hands cramping closed that's a weird way to wake up let me just say right now but I wanted it that bad now we started producing the bars in Compton and on the line this is another true story on the line we had Bloods and Crips and in the middle of it you got the crazy white guy now the reason that worked was because I was prepared to outwork everybody else I knew exactly what I wanted I had my why I had my goal and it was very specific and this is the thing about goals they have to be incredibly specific and my goal was to end metabolic disease not sell a lot of protein bars that was not the goal I wanted to end metabolic disease and that informed every choice that we made as entrepreneurs every time that we had to answer a hard question one that might impact profitability or how late we are gonna have to work or what we were gonna have to do and it almost always was difficult including by the way we had to become our own manufacturers which we did not want to do we wanted to outsource it we just wanted to be marketers but nobody would make the bar for us or they would but they said that we had to add sugar to it and we asked a simple question will that help and metabolic disease yes or no if yes we'll do it if no we won't and it wouldn't so we didn't it starts with that specific goal and then because I had my why my hands cramping closed in the face of doing something to save my mom and my sister it was not a hard choice in fact I wouldn't have been able to look myself in the eye and say I was not able to help them because it was hurting my hands right it sounds ridiculous when you say it like that but most people don't have a personal tie to what they're doing mother Teresa has an amazing quote no one will act for the many but people will act for the one and so as you guys go into your jobs and you think about what you're trying to do find a way to stop making it a job find a way to make it a calling of vocation something that really meets that why your desire to connect or do something great for people which by the way when I say that the game that you're playing is brain chemistry what I'm talking about is fulfillment there's a difference between happiness and fulfillment a bowl of ice cream brings me happiness it does not bring me fulfillment fulfillment is often born of suffering fulfillment is about do the things that are hard in fact the Greeks have a word for it it's called technique technique means that you acquire a set of skills that is unique to you the acquisition of those skills was very difficult and here's the important part those skills serve other people to me I believe that the very reason that we're all here is to see how many skills we can acquire that have utility and then put that utility to the test in service of others that's gonna be the thing that lights you will fire the your busting your ass you're really getting good at something you were taking action you're moving forward you're doing the things you need to learn to do to learn and trigger that adaptation response that humans have you're putting yourself under the stress you've identified a goal you're working your way backwards to where you are today and that's the key it's what I call minding the gap there's a gap between who you are today and who you will need to become in order to execute against you'll why that thing in you that's burning that you really care about enough to get across the finish line that you care about enough to keep doing even when it's making your hands cramp clothes that you care about enough even when you've got to come in and work between rival gang members it's the thing that you care about enough that you really will work so hard that the rival gang members fall in line behind you because you're leading by example thank you and that became my mission every day I'm gonna show up and outwork everybody I'm gonna be the first one here I'm gonna be the last one to leave and most importantly guys I really hope you were listening to Robert JAL Dini whose books I have read and all but memorized the key is you want to connect with them you want them to fall in love with you you want them to be inspired you want them to feel better about themselves from there around you then when they're not and if you can pull that off they will go to war for you and in the beginning when all we could do because we didn't know production we just had to throw human capital at it and I needed people they're not kidding at 2:00 a.m. on a Friday night I had a bunch of ex-convicts in their early 20s with the tattoos on the face the teardrop and all that grinding it out to make protein bars because I gave them hope because I showed them that it doesn't matter who they are today it only matters who they're trying to become and the price that they're willing to pay to get there and so when you guys walk out of here that's what you've got to ask this whole theme of pivoting this whole theme of keeping your center is about knowing what you want and believing you can make it a reality but the only way to make it a reality is to put in the work you've got to put in the work the change is hard the change is difficult the change will demand everything of you but man if inside you really believe in what you're doing you really see how you can get to that goal that you want if you really see how you can serve other people doing what you do with this skillset that you've worked your ass off to acquire then you can actually make change in people's lives and that's what motivates me getting the skills has real-world implications it took me from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough chain to put gas in my car to building a billion-dollar business it is absolutely limitless what you can accomplish now think about that if that's really true if what I just said is true that human potential is limitless then how you spend your time becomes a spiritual consideration so when you guys part from here one stay in touch with each other because you're gonna need that because if you're gonna start pushing the limits if you're gonna show how much somebody in your position can influence other people's lives if you're gonna show people the power of what you do if you're going to show people the depths to which you can touch another human's life if you've seen the look on somebody's face who's been transformed by what you've done by them to see them transform their vision of themselves and to watch them before your eyes go from believing that they can't do something to realizing that they can but they have untapped stores of potential that moment is so beautiful I would say you should be willing to pay any price so go out and do it thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 174,938

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, quest nutrition story, growth mindset, growth and development, growth hacking, motivational speeches, tom bilyeu, tom bilyeu story, keynote speech, pivot keyport, entrepreneurship, billionaire

Id: c5XsyksJLac

Length: 30min 54sec (1854 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 09 2018