Why Trying to Be Right Will Hold You Back | Tom Bilyeu AMA

everybody welcome to another episode of AMA I'm your host Tom bill you and I am going to be taking your questions but this time that you submitted ahead of time forgive me because of travel we're not able to record this one live but nonetheless here we go first question is from Kendra border hey Tom I'm currently in the process of making changes in my life and something I've realized is a part of me refuses to let go of limiting beliefs why do we care more about being right than being happy I don't know that we do care about being right more than we care about being happy but I think when you're not thoughtful about the thoughts that enter your mind it is a passive thing to want to be right it's a passive thing to want to be happy but there's not anything that kicks off mechanistically in your mind that pushes you down the path of being happy but since you're in these constant interactions where maybe you're right maybe you're wrong maybe your idea wins maybe it doesn't that makes it feel like there's something that's constantly being kicked up in your mind about wanting to be right but the reality is just our life situation is like that so we're gonna be in situations where we have to go to work at work we have a job that we're supposed to do it collides with other people's jobs you have a family they have ideas that they want to see put forth so you're just constantly in a world where other people's ideas are colliding with yours so that creates a lot of momentum for that instance in your brain to pop forward and say hey I really want my idea to win I really want to feel good smart right good all of that stuff and because of that it creates this dis-ease in yourself because you haven't done the work the very active work of getting out of that passive cycle and saying okay what I really want my long term goal is hopefully a deep sense of fulfillment and not just a sense of being momentarily happy because part of the problem is that being right will bring happiness and that is part of the conundrum where this really gets confusing and I think that we have to acknowledge that being right feels awesome and this is where people get themselves into trouble because you become addicted to that and then given your environment you're constantly running into opportunities to be right so that dopamine desire to be right to get that feeling happiness is there constantly dripping at you and so in that moment you just fight for it to be right to get that release of dopamine yeah I won I'm smart I'm good I'm worthy all those things that you're going to feel momentarily happy about so you have to do the hard work of switching it over to making the thing that gives you that a the dopamine release of anticipation and then B I really have to find out what the neurochemical is probably serotonin that you get when you're actually getting the thing that you wanted so if you can switch that over to learning something new to acknowledge that whoa I was willing to look at my inadequacies I was willing to accept that I wasn't right I was willing to admit publicly that I was wrong that somebody else has a better answer when that cycle gets the dopamine release you're actually looking for those moments to learn something you're looking for those moments to realize that you were wrong and then to then be empowered by that new information that becomes available because you lower your ego and all of that if you can get that cycle going then you'll find actually the opposite which is that you're always looking for opportunities to learn something new that that's this ever-present self reinforcing cycle and that's a huge part of the growth mindset and that's why I say one of the most important things you will ever do is switch what you build your self-esteem around from being right being good being worthy these permanent states over to being the learner and always being willing to admit when you're wrong if you make that switch then suddenly the mechanisms of a growth mindset become much easier next question dog Mara Ava in his book principles Ray Dalio makes a distinction between goal oriented thinkers versus task oriented thinkers and your experience is it possible to switch and train yourself to become a goal airy oriented thinker from a task oriented one what steps would you need what steps would need to be taken for that okay so absolutely 100% it is possible I know because this is exactly what I did in my own life I very much used to be task oriented I have lovingly said that what my parents imbued me with was a slave mentality keep my head down do as little work as possible and avoid punishment at all costs that's how I thought about things certainly how I thought about school it's how I thought about a job how I thought about most of the relationships in my life it was about avoiding conflict it was not about having a strong core beliefs it was really getting by getting through life like trying to you know get through the week so that you can enjoy yourself in the weekend and love your family and I'm doing me wrong they had really amazing intentions and they wanted me to enjoy my life but there were just things that they saw is an alien there were you just couldn't change them and so that put me in just thinking about whatever was right before me so oh I need to get an A okay you know this is what I'll do to get my A and the grades is a perfect example because the real goal should have been learning it should have been knowledge it should have been me going hey the system doesn't actually really give me the things that I want and so pushing back against that and trying to figure out what I need to do to actually educate myself but I didn't do that because the task before me was get an A that's just what you did in my family you got good grades and so cheating was a perfectly reasonable solution to that now when I went to college I realized wait a second this is supposedly the thing that I love most I was studying film so if I really loved this then why would I cheat if I'm going to try to get a career out of this again why would I cheat and if I'm taking on massive amounts of college debt to learn about this why would a cheat it doesn't make sense and so in that I switched from that task oriented mindset to really thinking bigger about my goals there were things in life that I wanted to achieve that I wanted to accomplish and I had to then reverse engineer what I needed to do to get there and so when you look at that so another great example I use the word instead of task and goal I use the words path and goal so I think about a path as being totally irrelevant and you could switch paths give up on a path totally abandon a path and never lose sight of what your goal is so my goal now is to pull people out of the matrix and by that I mean to give them an empowering mindset that will allow them to actually go out and do the work that they need to do to get a skill set that's gonna let them execute against whatever they want but it's my role in all of this is to give them that core set of beliefs that's going to allow them to not get in their own way to realize that they can do and learn anything that they set their mind to okay so if that's my now I have a path and my path right now is narrative so it's putting out comic books movies TV shows that's what I think is the ultimate end goal and I don't confuse that with the social content which I believe is preaching to the choir it's people that already are on that path which is that's all the hard work right making that flipping that switch and really wanting to go down that path so I can give very direct instructions like this but ultimately to do at scale what I want to do I have to go down that path I think but I may be wrong about that and if I end up being wrong about that then I'll jettison that path and do whatever is most effective so I'll tell you one thing right now that I'm constantly checking whether it's working or not is as far as a path versus the goal so Geoffrey Canada has said basically give up on adults that's you're past the age of imprint your past where it's really easy to massively influence somebody and so better to go after kids maybe he's right maybe he's not look him up super interesting dude somebody I really want to get on the show I don't know he might be right but emotionally I just really don't want that to be true so I am going down the path of first adults and then kids and we've already got some projects that we're beginning to incubate that RnB kids but so anyway that's that's the difference you absolutely can train yourself to do that and it really boils down to having a goal and I think this is where most people fall down they don't actually have a goal and so doing the tasks before you become very easy and this is actually one of the things that drives me crazy about my wife who spends a lot of time cleaning now cleaning is a task and I get that it gives her a momentary sense of happiness but it's this never-ending cycle of you're gonna have to clean again again again again again and so making that a priority in your life as if it were a goal to me is to misunderstand the difference between a task and a goal so it's it's about what do you want what do you want most what's worth fighting for what's we're dying for like once you've got that in your mind then you can begin to switch yourself out of task-oriented thinking and this really comes down to write it down this is my goal in terms of the very concrete steps you want write it down this is my goal what are the steps you need in order to reach your goal those tasks as you're doing your tasks you have to be asking are they actually serving my goal or not yes or no and if they're not jettison them immediately stop doing a task midstream if it's not serving your goal once you realize that once you get good at that process of identifying whether or not it's actually taking you towards your goal and break that weird emotional relationship people have with tasks the desire to check things off a list the desire to you know get things done and feel that micro level of productivity and and I get that and that is powerful when it's serving your goal but everything has to come back to that you've got to be ruthless about whether or not it's actually serving your goal okay next up Cody dulky could you explore what it's like to lose passion for something you were once passionate for and how you come to terms with choosing a new passion over an old one I think about whether or not I've actually ever lost passion I definitely redirected my focus and over time that flame then burns out so wow it's it's really not my experience that it happens quite like that so here is how I actually have experienced the world so passions are created they are not innate it's not something that's born within you might walk people through how I develop my passion for film before I've walked people how I developed my passion for the body and helping people with nutrition so I won't belabor that point now but just know that it is something that you create it starts with an area of interest you engage with that interest it either gets more interesting to you which I'll call a fascination or doesn't if it doesn't move on to something else find another area of interest engage with it and see if it grows an interest and the easiest way to understand that is as you engage with that as you spend more time with it is it giving you more energy than it takes so if it gives you more energy and you feel alive and you look forward to and you want to do it that's a very good sign that this is something that's leading towards a real fascination now in the book so good they can't ignore you Cal Newport really differentiates between the classical view of a passion which is like I was born with it I'm on fire and it's just naturally amazing and what I think is actually a passion which is the act of gaining mastery takes a deep fascination and turns it into a passion but I think like love is a reciprocal relationship and you're not actually in love if there's no reciprocity I don't think you actually have a passion unless you're gaining mastery in it and you're able to alter the world in some way through that whether it's a musical creation whether it's becoming an incredible teacher and you know that you're impacting people's lives whatever it is your skill set actually allows you to serve other people and that emotional resonance of going wow I worked really hard for this skill set I am actually good at this thing and being good at this thing actually allows me to manifest that in some way that is tangible in the real world so for instance I've spent a lot of time a lot of time learning how to communicate and learning how to communicate not only helped me build businesses but it's also helped me build this amazing community and every time someone stops me when they see me which by the way I love so if you ever see me out and about come up and say hello that's incredibly meaningful to me and when people tell me that the content is somehow impacted their lives it's made them start down a path of really gaining mastery or changing their mindset or whatever it is that it's impact them in some way that for me is when I realized whoa like this skill set which I have worked inordinately hard to get good at it actually has real-world implications like right now it is all too easy for me to get lost and to feel like this is just me staring into the dead eye of a camera lens but what I work really hard on is thinking about the person on the other side of that lens and that's the juice that to me is a real passion so when you've taken the time to build that up even though over time you may begin to focus on something else and that may begin to diminish I find that the things that survived that it started as an interest I engage with it became a fascination I went down the path of actually gaining mastery it embeds itself so deeply that it may go dormant but it's like those flowers that rebloom every spring right and do anything I forget what those are called you don't do anything there's a bulb a seed that lies underground and every year like clockwork it springs back up and then it dies in the fall but then it springs back up in the spring it's really pretty incredible and I think that's what passion is like not interest passion once you've taken the time that that thing is there and so I went on almost 15 years of not feeding into my passion for movie TV shows I used to watch seven films a week that's harder than it sounds to watch an entire film every day day after day month after month is really really difficult and in doing that it like was just all-consuming in my life and it was beautiful and one of the most amazing things in my life and then I went through this desert of becoming an entrepreneur and really developing a skill set and in that time I didn't watch movies much I won't say that I never did but if I was doing seven a week I dropped down to like maybe less than half of a movie a week so I mean is just dramatic dramatic reduction same thing with reading I wasn't reading any nonfiction whatsoever then I started reading nonfiction or sorry fiction I wasn't reading fiction and I started reading fiction once a year and that was like big spender for me but now as I've turned back to it because it actually makes sense again with my goals it bloomed back into life the moment the son of my attention was upon it so in that I feel like probably what you're talking about may not have been a passion it may have been either an area of interest or a fascination and so that's my gut instinct and so I would follow that all the way through and if you've got something in your life that's robbing you of the passion for something then I would stop that thing so let's just take a job I think the fastest way to hate your life is to hate your job I think the fastest way to lose sight of what made you love your passion in the beginning could go away with a bad job but I don't think that a job doing something for a living necessarily makes it worse in fact I will say I am more passionate about storytelling now than I have ever been in my entire life because it feeds into my goals so even though it's my job it's my day-to-day thing I'm so Gore goal-oriented and I so love that process that it's so amazing to me to have tied something that I have so much love and passion for with actually solving business problems and holding myself accountable to revenue and supporting a team and all of that mine so I could keep going about this but I will stop Liam O'Donnell is it possible to fully grow into your potential achieve your huge goals and continue on that journey of the mind whilst used whilst which I respect while still enjoying getting drunk and partying I didn't see that coming or are they completely mutually exclusive so here's what I think about that I am a big believer that if you're going all out you are grinding it out you leave it on the field mother I'm telling you right now Monday through Friday if I am awake I am working or working out period in fact now these days I read while I'm working out which I never did before and we could do a whole episode on how I've made that finally work but that process one requires that you love what you're doing so let me just make that abundantly clear I love what I'm reading about I love what we're trying to build all of it just amazing it gives me more energy than it takes away now once you have that the really wanting to actuate your potential and going after it everyday and knowing I'm going to bed now because I have left it all out on the field and I'm telling you there are times during the day where I'm like let me just look at reddit for like five minutes I just like for five minutes I can't do it it's so embedded in me to want to be the person that I say out loud to actually be internally that that's when I go and I start looking at Instagram replying to comments doing research whatever so doing that playing that hard every day leads me to when I want to stop and go shake my ass even if it's a random Tuesday I'll go do that because I know how hard I've played every day I know how much I'm willing to bleed for my goals so this is not about emotional austerity this is not about grinding yourself into into the dirt first of all it's doing something you love so that as you're grinding and going that hard it's something that you just want to do then on the other side because you're going that that you just don't have the guilt that most people have when you take time off and relax and chill so when I'm working I am all the way in and when I'm relaxing I'm all the way in so I think this comes down to how much you're doing of one than the other and I think if you're asking the question you know you're not giving it your all towards building your your dreams and making them come true and I would say focus there figure out why not why are you not putting all of your time and energy into that and then also remembering that there's no moral obligation to live your life like that at Full Tilt going all out and that is absolutely fine to have balance in your life I'm not the balance guy so my advice is never gonna sound like it's going to achieve balance because it absolutely will not but there's no right way to live your life so there is only a way that provides deep fulfillment and I think just neurochemically that's what humans are wired to desire and to love and to sit in and live with and I get a deep sense of fulfillment from going so hard to build a skill set that serves other people so if you find that that's a conflict in your life just be honest with yourself about what you prefer there is not a right answer Johanna James Lynne in my experience it's not until you have this sudden this is it I'm serious now a moment that everything clicks into place and the thing you were struggling with becomes easy can you manufacture one of these moments how do you get yourself to that point or do you just have to hope and wait for one to come along you absolutely do not hope and wait oh god this is why I'm so anti patience like it's not a thing it's not a thing patience is not a thing okay now that doesn't mean that you don't play the long game you need to play the long game whatever it is that you want but patience to me is a synonym to relaxing - waiting - letting it happen - thinking all things happen for a reason which is all horseshit you've got to go all-out every day to build your skill set to make something happen that that is truly the only way now the great news is what you're asking is there is a process to that you're gonna go all-out for it you're gonna try to make it happen and it is the classic process of creating a passion in your life you star with an interest you engage with it turns into a fascination you spend time there going hard you decide do I want to keep going do I want to actually gain mastery if you decide yes then you go down the path of actually gaining mastery and that is how you create a passion in your life that's how you create the actually that's totally different though from the moment you were talking about which is the this is it moment I'm gonna take it seriously and that to me comes from one of two things either taking the time to cultivate your want and turn it into a burning need that's huge and I think most people don't take the time to do that there's a huge reward for you at the end if you do that if you want to achieve big things I've spent a lot of time doing that right now around comic book so comic books to me have always been something that I've liked I've collected comic books for a very long time but I've never considered myself a nerd so I like when I hear some of the people and how deep they can go unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the comic lore around it and you know going back to like storylines from the sixties and seventies like that's some next-level and I've never been that deep into it but now because we're publishing comics I really want to get that deep into what makes all that work what does that mindset about why do people like all the sort of fractal patterns that you can go down of learning like all these like minut things all around the central storylines and in pouring myself into that really looking that and in trying to fan those flames in my own life about things having to do with sort of collecting the greater universe and I use that word because as I'm speaking out loud I realize that's the part in me that triggers like I love collecting I love having the physical thing I love like this is related to that and understanding how it's all interconnected and so feeding into that really turning it into something just a couple days ago I had that first moment of like where I was legitimately neurochemical II rewarded for discovering some obscure fact and I thought cool that's what I've been trying to build into this so that was me taking a want which I really enjoy all of the universe of comics but turning it into a need right I need this for what I'm doing to fan those flames to really make me like hungry for that knowledge and I think that will serve me well the other is and this has happened in my life as well to get so fed up and disappointed with yourself that you just won't tolerate it anymore so hitting rock bottom is also incredibly powerful and that happened to me right after I got married and I realized I was a lazy and I was doing absolutely nothing with my life and I'd promised this woman who was now my wife that I was going to make her rich that I was going to build an incredible life for us and I wasn't doing that and I was doing things that were only going to exacerbate the problem make us even poorer and yeah that just I was not going to allow that to happen and I was disgusted with myself welcome to advanced class if you can leverage that instead of being controlled by it it can be very powerful and I'll just give you a really simple way to deal with that if you're spending more than 20% of your time being disappointed in yourself thinking negative about yourself you are so don't do that but that 20% can be very powerful it can be the exact kick in the ass you need to get back into the 80% to get moving to do things to look at the beautiful things that you want to create to look at how you're winning and doing things that are worthy and amazing and all of that so 8020 is the nice simple way but those are the two things rock-bottom emotionally or turning a want into a burning crushing need Oscar Zamora I'm 32 years old and recently discovered that I want to dedicate my life to making it in the movie industry word however I feel too old to start studying oh I've been working as a PA but I want to be closer to the cameras as DOP do you think it's too late for me to start studying or should I continue on my current path let me tell you something right the now first of all you're 32 you were so young it's [ __ ] so let's be really clear but let's answer the hard question and let's say that you were 62 years old and is it too late for you I will say this the thing you should be pursuing all-out in your life whatever that's going to be should be something that gives you more energy than it takes so that the process the act in and of itself is interesting and fascinating here's what I find when people start down these paths in fact I'm about to give you probably the most powerful entrepreneurial advice achieving advice I am ever going to give you you're going to ignore it as most people do because it's very hard to get your mind around that it's really this simple but it's this simple get rid of patience stop having the patience to let things unfold naturally now if you want to get ahead it's going to take an obscene amount of time I am NOT saying that my message is you can make it happen overnight you absolutely can't but let me tell you right now even if you're giving yourself 10 years to become a DOP a director of photography if you're gonna give yourself 10 years to accomplish that I promise you the only way it's gonna happen is if you're saying to yourself in every moment you're gonna bifurcate your mind and I want people to understand you will never win at the highest level until you can hold two competing ideas in your head and here are the two ideas idea number one this is gonna take me ten years idea number two I'm gonna make it happen today and I'm gonna ask myself every day why didn't it happen today what thing did I not do what skill set am I missing what am I gonna have to do and I'm telling you right now that has been the secret to my success I was so desperate to make things happen right now that I'm always looking for what's the next massive leap forward that it is not okay for me to plan on it taking ten years because secretly I know it's going to but it's going to take ten years and only actually going to happen for me if I'm going all-out everyday like it has to happen right now now to make matters even more confusing nobody likes a bull in a china shop so while you're holding yourself internally to that that it's got to happen today what's the next quantum leap forward how do I circumvent this system how do I not just like grind it out going straight forward that you don't ever let anyone feel that you're gonna Bowl them over that you're gonna break their system that you come in you're looking for ways to circumvent the system you're looking for ways to jump the queue you're looking for that next quantum leap forward and yet people want to be around you because when push comes to shove you never step on a neck you're always encouraging other people to rise up you'll always stop and take the time to build that relationship thinking only in the long term because guys that's the only way it actually happens so I'm doing all of that stuff I go slow when I need to go slow because it's the only way to actually go fast if you're a dick if you're like dismissing people because you're like oh they're not gonna help me do it today then they won't be there six years down the road because you didn't make a friend before you needed it you didn't plant a seed and this convoluted mess that is these two conflicting ideas is the only path forward so to recap you're young if it's giving you more energy than it takes it doesn't matter if you're young because in the moment you're gonna enjoy the process you're actually going to have fun it's going to make you feel more alive and then you must hold the two competing ideas in your head this is gonna take a really long time and I absolutely refuse for it to take a long time and the reason that you do that it gets you thinking totally differently if your everyday you're thinking about 10% incremental improvement she's never gonna go anywhere if every day you're forcing yourself to think I need to ten fold this then all of a sudden you think radically differently and in that process through a lot of failure you'll finally hit on something that actually does let you go forward that fast that's the secret and if I could explain it really well I like to think that it would be this major breakthrough for people but I don't explain this very well but it is maybe not the most powerful thing any human needs to learn but it's certainly the most powerful thing any entrepreneur needs to learn that's just the truth all right Shannon you come I you could you could I am in the process of leaving medical school to pursue my dream of being a travel videographer I grew up in an environment where every single one of my family my friends and family finished school to work in traditional safe jobs as excited as I am I'm equally terrified to go down this path and can feel the self-doubt already how can I maneuver through this alright we just did an interview with an incredible man named Kevin Kelly it's going to be coming out by three or four weeks the honest answer is watch this guy's episode of impact Theory it it is unbelievable so first of all he ends up becoming one of the most influential people in technology is successful by every measure you can imagine he's the founder of Wired magazine just an incredible incredible human being but he dropped out of college in the 60s to go wander Asia which was just coming out of the ancient times to be a photographer and he said I just didn't overvalue success like that was the same I loved photography I wanted to go find myself and he has this concept of don't try to optimize oh wow we're really way later than expected I thought that alarm won't go off he he'd got what does he call it premature optimization don't fall for premature optimization you really need to go find your voice and that means stumbling around it means goofing off it means having fun it means experiencing a lot of stuff means trying and failing like don't try to prematurely optimize all right guys I got a piece out I got to go jump on the flight thank you guys so much for joining me always amazing if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and oh by the way today's episode is brought to you by the do shirt if you haven't already hit shop that impact Theory calm self signal your way to success alright guys until next time be legendary take care [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 20,375

Rating: 4.9293284 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, Why Being Right Will Hold You Back, don't be right, AMA, Tom Bilyeu AMA, tom bilyeu ama

Id: QF35lsgRTe4

Length: 30min 43sec (1843 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 17 2018