← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Adapt or Die: Stop Being Weak About Hard Things & Get Ahead Of 99% Of People | Tom Bilyeu PT 2
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Join host Tom Bilyeu, serial entrepreneur and co founder of the billion dollar brand Quest Nutrition, on a journey to unlock your potential and realize your vision of success. Welcome to Impact Theory. If you want to really make progress in your life, one of the keys is going to be to track that process. Now, the way to think about getting better is you want to get incrementally better. The problem is if you're trying to get incrementally better, you're basically going to stand still. So you want to be asking the famous question that Peter Thiel asked, which is, how do I make my 10 year plan happen in the next 6 months? When you start thinking like that, it really does shift your thinking into having a radically different approach. I think one of the big problems that people have when they're trying to make progress is they set a goal that's quote unquote realistic. And when it's realistic, it's not very exciting. I teach a whole class on the process of setting goals and one of the things that I tell people is you have to set goals and that are exciting. There's a whole bunch of research on this that shows the people that are most likely to stick with their goals are the people that set a goal that is truly exciting to them. The goals that are going to be exciting are going to be big goals. That's just the way the human mind is wired. I'm telling you right now there is an evolutionary imperative that has been embedded in your brain and there's no way around it that demands that you do hard things. I think from an evolutionary perspective that Makes sense, because staying alive was hard. And if we didn't get an intrinsic emotional reward from doing hard things, we would have died out. So we are all the ancestors of people that got off a little bit on doing hard things. So when you don't do hard things, you don't get that positive feedback loop. You feel a sense of dis ease. And so many people have that sense of unease and they think that I need to go retire and my life needs to be more relaxed. I need to be on a beach somewhere. This all sucks. It's not true at all. I'm telling you right now. The thing that you need to do is find meaning and purpose and go after it. Go after it in a big way. Set yourself a crazy goal that you really believe in, that you really think life would be better. If I do this thing, if I achieve this, and even if I fail, man, I would have spent my life, well, trying to contribute to that. If you build your life around that and go all out, man, trying to make something that you really believe and come true, to bend the world to your will, to close your eyes and imagine a world that, that is better than this one, open your eyes and then execute to make that world come true, you will love your life. That's the key to find something that you really believe in and then go all out after it. Now, to track all of this progress, you really do wanna be journaling, writing things down, checking things off. How many days did you stick to what you said you were gonna do? This can be such an amazing way to gamify your own life, is to just have a calendar, digital or physical, go through and mark off the day. Did you do what you said you were going to do? Yes or no. And then tally up for the week, for the month, for the year. What percentage of days did I do what I said I was going to do? Now, in this moment, you can lie 100%, you can lie, but if you lie, when you look at that calendar, you're not going to feel the way you want to feel. You're going to feel like a liar. You're going to know that you're a fraud. The whole idea is to feel a certain way when you look at that calendar, to be like, I did the thing that I said I was going to do, and I feel really awesome about that. So it is truly one of those things. The only person that you're going to cheat if you're lying about this is yourself. So come up with whatever way you can to track this Stuff, whether it's a spreadsheet, whether it's checking things off in a calendar. If I'm completely honest about what I do, I check in with myself every three hours. I don't keep a written tally, but I do reward myself emotionally whenever I do the thing I said I was going to do. So the first one for me is, did I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less? I get to feel good about myself. If I didn't, two things happen. One, I don't get to feel good about myself, and I give myself that jab in the ribs of, you said you were going to do it and you did not do it. And then, number two, I will confess to my wife or here to the community out there that I didn't do that day. I didn't meet my goal. And so by checking in with myself in real time, I'm able to see. The other is, when you're setting goals, it is absolutely critical that all of your goals have a metric associated with them so that you know the exact metric that you want to hit so you know if you're making progress. So often when people get into the physics of progress, they didn't set a metric by which they're going to judge their goal so they don't actually know if they're making progress. You want your goals to be specific. You want your goals to have metrics. The reason that I emphasize that so much is most people avoid metrics. They avoid dates. They avoid those specifics because then they and others will know if they're actually making progress. If you don't want the specifics, it means you're not actually interested in the actual progress. You're interested in the fiction of feeling better about yourself by saying that you have this really cool goal. And so one of the things that I'm constantly checking with myself is, did I live up to the rhetoric, meaning I'm telling people I want to do this cool thing, or did I actually show up and play to win? Did I leave it all out on the field? So do not think that rhetoric is actual achievement. Talking about something is nothing. Did you actually make progress? And to be honest, even trying, even though I actually do think, and this is complex, but I actually do think you should emotionally reward yourself only for this sincere pursuit. But when you're thinking about tracking progress, you need to be naked and raw about whether you're actually making progress. Now, the reason it's so important to do that is if you're not making progress, you need to adjust this goes back to the physics of progress. You're staring nakedly at your inadequacies. You're asking, what could I have done differently to get a better result? And if in that moment you don't have a metric to judge yourself against, you don't know how to better inform your next hypothesis. So the goal of trying something is to learn something that gives you a better thing to do. And when you do that, you make more meaningful progress. And when you don't make that meaningful progress, you need to understand why. But it really does come down to what gets measured gets improved. What gets measured gets improved. If you don't have the measurement, you won't know whether you're making progress. You won't have the emotional sting that you need to force yourself to actually dig in and figure this out. So gamify and make sure that you have metrics. You do those two things and you will make massive progress. If you want to know if you're setting the bar too high or too low when it comes to goal setting, I will just tell you this right now. You're setting the bar too low. Everybody's setting the bar too low. If you think about the crazy things that people have accomplished, whether it's in, I think it's 64 years or something, we went from the Wright brothers flying a plane for the first time to landing on the moon, 64 years. It, it, that's an impossibly small amount of time to think that somebody would have been alive at the time. Like you could have been 20 at the time the Wright brothers flown and said, we're going to go to the moon. And by the time I'm 85 and been right, but imagine how many people would have told you that you were out of your mind. There is so much literature on this. It's just beyond reproach. The people that set the most aggressive goals are the ones that end up achieving their goals. Now, the reason is because there is complexity here. The reason is that it gets you excited enough to go out and pursue this thing, to be able to attract other people to your goal, that's a huge thing that you're going to learn if you have a goal that's really exciting. And when people think about getting meaning and purpose in their life and they think about, oh my God, I could be a part of a team that takes us to the moon, or I could be a part of a team that terraforms Mars, or I could be a part of a team that ends world hunger or deals with climate change. Whatever the thing is, it gets you excited. When it is a gigantic goal, it actually motivates people. Now you also, the people that achieve their goals, have a path to getting there. So it can't be a pipe dream. You have to actually know how you're going to march towards that thing. And if it's a business, you need to know how you're going to generate revenue all along the way. It is incredibly difficult. But you do want to make sure that you're setting a bar that is within the realm of physics. You don't want to be throwing something so far into the trees that it is literally impossible. If you have to invalidate the laws of physics, I will tell you that that's not very interesting. And then one thing that you want to also think through is, is it something that you could achieve in your lifetime? And if it's not something you could achieve in your lifetime, are you okay being somebody that's going to lay a brick towards building that thing? And there's that old adage that you want to plant trees under whose shade you will never sit. So there is very many honorable things that people could do that they're not going to reap the ultimate benefits of that they understand that they're only going to be one brick in that wall. Think about all the people that have given their entire professional careers to solving cancer, which remains unsolved. Countless amazing, brilliant minds have given themselves over to that completely, knowing all they're going to do is lay one brick in what will ultimately be the, you know, the building that is that solution. But be honest, think about that. But make sure that you have a path to get there. That's the key. It's got to be exciting and you've got to see a path. But you want to make sure that you're really going after something that's going to inspire you for the long run. Because remember, the reason that most people quit is because they are broken by how boring and difficult things get. So when you ask yourself in the grips of that difficulty, that suffering that comes along with pursuing a goal you actually care about, you are going to ask yourself, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? And if the answer isn't compelling, you're going to quit. So make sure that you come up with a goal that's big enough that when you ask why, you know exactly why and you'll keep pushing. It's inevitable when you're pursuing your goals that you're going to find yourself in a rut and you are not going to want to stick to what you're doing to. The most important thing is to identify. Is this a pattern in your life? So many people love the beginning of something. They love that excitement, that initial fascination when everything is new and it just feels limitless and everything feels possible. They haven't gotten that first punch in the mouth that comes with really trying to get good at something and accomplish something. When life is going to get complex, it's going to get in your way, you're going to fail, you're going to embarrass yourself, all that stuff. So in that moment, you've got to make sure that you are going to push yourself through that, get out and get to the other side. It is inevitable that in your pursuit of a goal that you care about, you are going to end up getting in a rut. In that moment, most people give up. I'm going to tell you what you need to do if you want to be part of the 8% that actually sees their goals through. You need to fall back on process. So many people want to fall back on motivation, but the reality is that motivation is not going to be there for you. And just the vast majority of the time, the vast majority of the time, you're going to be bored, things are going to be hard, you're going to be tired, it's going to be complex. And in that moment, you just need to run a process. You need to have habits that you can rely on to get you through. I've talked about them before, but just to recap, you want to make sure that you're cognitively optimizing. You want to make sure that you have your important things list. You want to make sure that you're doing things in order. You want to make sure that you have rules in your life that you stick to. You want to be leveraging your identity, that you're the kind of person that sticks with things. And then you want to have habits and routines that you're just going to loop around day after day after day that you know are moving you towards your goal to get to your goal. It really is about persistence, consistency, metrics, so you know whether or not you're making progress and then just running the physics of progress over and over and over. You have a hypothesis about how you're going to overcome the obstacle that stands between you and what you're trying to accomplish. You're going to do something to accomplish that thing, and you're going to see how much progress you made, which is going to give you More information for you to reformulate that hypothesis. If you fall back on that process, that is going to be the thing that carries you through. Never count on motivation, because motivation really does come and go. So make sure that you have an airtight process and then everything else will fall into line. When it comes to self talk, there's something that's really important to remember. You become what you repeat. So people that are high achievers, they do not allow themselves to repeat anything. That diminishes their sense of self, that diminishes their will to push forward, that diminishes their sense of I can improve at this thing over time. So high achievers are putting themselves in an optimistic state. The reason they need to be in an optimistic state is because, going back to the first answer, mindset is everything. If you believe that by putting energy and effort into trying to achieve your goals, you can actually achieve your goals, you will keep pushing forward. If you believe that no matter what you do, you are going to fail, why would you keep trying? You wouldn't. And this is why so many people throw their hands up and they give up. Because they don't believe that by going after their goals that they're actually going to make it. So a high achiever is somebody that no matter what they encounter, no matter how many difficulties they run into, they're going to say things like, there is a solution to this problem. They're going to say things like, I can get better at this. They're going to say things like, I may not be good enough yet, but I can get good enough. They say things like, with enough time and energy, I can 100x my abilities in anything. They say things like, one of my favorite phrases on a long enough timeline, I can beat anyone at anything. Now, secretly, that one isn't 100% true, but it's the kind of phrase that even though I know at the edges that it isn't true, so many people give up along the way that if I just keep going and keep stacking skills and keep getting better, I know that I can beat the vast majority of humanity at virtually anything, which is exactly how I've been able to have the success that I've had. I am not smarter than the average person, but man, I am way harder to break than the average person. I am way more consistent than the average person. I am constantly reminding myself I can get better, but it takes a massive amount of time and energy. And that's another thing I remind myself. Everything is moving towards chaos at all times. People are Trying to stop me actively. The world is unintentionally trying to stop me. The world is complex. Humans are difficult. Humans are complex. Life is confusing. Life is chaotic, and it takes a tremendous amount of energy. But another thing that high achievers tell themselves, if I focus on what I could do differently, if I hold onto the fact that my life is an exact reflection of my choices, let that one sink in. My life is an exact reflection of my choices. If when I was born, I look like my parents, when I die, I look like my choices, I cannot remember who I first heard say that, but man, that one gives me the chills. When we're born, we look like our parents. When we die, we look like our choices. That one's sexy, I'm not going to lie. So if you stay focused on that, as high achievers do, then you begin going, okay, there is something that I could do here to level up my skill set that would allow me to do something different, that would allow me to get a different outcome. And that's the goal. If you retain control, if you don't say, oh, this is society's problem, this is that person that tried to stop me's problem, what could I do differently? This is my problem to solve. What could I do differently to get a different outcome? If you stay focused on that, you will for sure be able to achieve more than somebody who doesn't. Now, the key is that you become what you repeat. So be very thoughtful not only to tell yourself all of those things, but you want to make sure that you pattern interrupt if you're telling yourself something negative. So so many people that get stuck again, psychological immune system will come to your aid. So if you're repeating to yourself, I'm dumb, I'm stupid, I'm not good enough at that, I don't have enough talent, I don't come from the right background, all of that, then your psychological immune system is going to want to soothe your ego around that. And so you're going to find a way to make those things somebody else's fault. And you're going to start moving yourself into the zone of not trying, giving up, coasting, going easy, doing what I used to do, which is put myself in smaller and smaller rooms with people that were at my level of intellect or lower rather than people that really pushed me to get better. So if you're saying negative things like that, if you're developing a negative worldview like that, you need to pattern interrupt that. There's an amazing book called Feeling Great by David d. Burns, read that book. It talks about cognitive behavioral therapy and the way that you can use pattern interrupts to stop yourself from repeating things that are self destructive and to get yourself out of cognitive illusions. So you want to be very careful and to help you get out of cognitive distortions, you want to make sure that you're not looking at the world through a distorted lens of your own creation. Okay? That is how you leverage the things that you repeat to get ahead and stop yourself from repeating things that are going to hold you back. My journey to developing a growth mindset was a very long journey. I had a fixed mindset for my entire life until I was about 25. Now look, there were shades in there where I was beginning to grasp that something was going on. But my journey went like this. As a kid, I believed that my talent and intelligence were fixed traits. I did not believe that I could improve them. And so I thought, okay, like I'm, you know, average ish. And I knew that I was more verbal than most people, and so I certainly tried to leverage that to my benefit. But as I got older, I started encountering people that were better, faster, stronger, smarter than me. And it really began to damage my sense of self. Now, when I was 15, around there, I was introduced to the Tao Te Ching. And thankfully before that, I had seen the movie the Empire Strikes Back, which introduced me to Yoda. And I thought Yoda was amazing. I love the way that he talked. And later in life, I would realize just how real his advice was. And the Dao Te Ching sounded so much like Yoda that I was immediately drawn to it. And I was like, oh, my God, this is so incredible. And I realize now, looking back, that the Daodejing was really what planted the idea of a growth mindset, because it talks about the cognitive distortions that we get into the mental illusions that we all live under and how what I now call frame of reference, that we're all looking at the world through a really warped mirror. And by looking at the world through a warped mirror, we see a warped version of reality. And that can either hold us back or it can propel us forward. Now, I had a frame of reference that was holding me back because I had a fixed mindset. I did not recognize that the human animal, as a species chose adaptation as our primary strategy of advancement. So we're born helpless, but over time, we're able to drink very deeply from culture, knowledge stacks. And so now somebody born today doesn't have to relearn the printing press. Printing presses just exist and so you take all of human knowledge and we're able to live on the top of that and just keep building things, moving forward. It's incredibly extraordinary what the human animal has been able to accomplish with by choosing the strategy of adaptation so that we can learn from people. We don't come pre hardwired with everything. We learn as we go. And that means that we can take advantage of all the things that have come before us. So it's really, really exceptional. But I did not have that frame of reference and therefore I did not realize that, oh, just because I suck at these things doesn't mean that I can't go and get good at them. And so what I was doing, despite that I had these early seeds planted in my mind around these cognitive illusions and distortions. I was really afraid that I was not going to be able to get good enough at the things I needed to be good at in order to make my dreams come true. So I've always been very ambitious, but I was also terrified that I wasn't going to be able to achieve the things I wanted to achieve. And so that was really devastating for me. And so as I got older and life slapped me around and I met people that were better than me at things that I really wanted to be great at, it really started to make me feel badly about myself. And so to avoid feeling badly about myself, I started putting myself in smaller and smaller rooms. By putting myself in smaller and smaller rooms, I was reducing the likelihood of me achieving the goals that I wanted to achieve. One, I wasn't around the kind of people that would be able to help me. Two, I wasn't around people that were pushing me to get better. Right. Cause I didn't think that I could get better, so that didn't seem worthwhile. And then three, because I wasn't around people that were pushing me and I wasn't in an environment that was helping me grow, I wasn't growing and therefore wasn't able to actually make progress towards my goals. And so I was doing things that made me feel better about myself. And it actually did work. That's the sinister part about all of this. By putting myself in rooms with people that were less ambitious than me, people that were, if I'm the average person, people that weren't as smart as me, that made me feel awesome. And so the reality is I was feeling good as I was moving farther and farther away from my goals. So thankfully my ambition continued to propel me to rethink what I was doing. So imagine me Now I'm sort of 21, 22, and I'm starting to think I've graduated from college. I am not at all moving towards my goals. I'm not quite sure what to make of this. And I was like, how do I really go and get what I want out of life? And I realized I'm profoundly lazy. I'm not even trying to take the steps that I would need. Hey, let me start putting myself out there. Because I was highly verbal, I put myself into situations where my verbal ability would shine. That began to open doors for me. Then I started getting in rooms of entrepreneurial rooms is probably the right way to think about it, just as an employee, but in an entrepreneurial environment. And I realized that being in that environment was really making me feel badly about myself because the people around me were so much smarter than me, meaning that they were able to process raw data faster than me. Like, even all these years later, now that I don't struggle with that sense of inferiority, I still recognize that some people can just process data faster than others. So I know that's one of the things that I have to work around. I need to optimize for that. Know thyself right. I still have a growth mindset. I know I can 100x myself in any area. But understanding where you are, what things are harder for you, easier for you, is useful. So at the time, though, I was looking at the world through this distorted mirror of not yet fully realizing how much better I could get, but having Yoda's words in my head, having the Dao de Jing's words echoing in my head, realizing, maybe I can get better if I push myself, but I'm in this environment, I'm really not feeling good about who I am. And so I had this moment of crisis. And what ended up happening was I knew that that entrepreneurial environment was the thing that was going to move me towards my goal of getting wealthy. But I finally could articulate in words that I had actually been optimizing my life for feeling smart. And so there was. The moment of crisis became very acute when I was arguing for an idea. In the entrepreneurial environment, I was arguing for an idea because it was mine, even though I knew it was bad for the business. And because I was aware both of the fact that, whoa, this idea that I'm really arguing for is terrible for the business and that I really wanted to win and I really wanted them to implement this idea. And I was like, why am I doing that? I'm like, okay, because it's my idea. Why do I care about it being my idea? Because I want to feel smart. Why would winning this make me feel smart? Because they would have done the thing that I presented. I would have convinced them to do my thing. And if I could convince them of that, that means that I'm smarter than they are. Or at least that they are giving me the accolade by following my idea. That gives me the feedback loop that I'm smarter than they are, that they think I'm smarter. And so I'm sitting there going, none of this really makes sense. And so I'm like, what do I actually want? And so for the first time in my life, and this ended up being a line in the sand. It's the only thing in my life that I can say is a line in the sand. That before this realization, my life was one way. And after this realization I had a growth mindset and my life was a different way. And the realization was that I was building my self esteem around being right. And that if I continued to build my self esteem around being right, I was going to have to leave that company and go somewhere else where I was around people that weren't as smart as me. So I could feel good about myself and that I would be right more often. And I thought, wow, that's weird. So which goal do I care more about? Do I care about getting wealthy or do I care about feeling smart? And I realized that I cared more about achieving my goals. Let's say that because I don't chase money anymore, so I cared more about my goals. Okay, If I care more about my goals and I know that I'm not good enough yet to get where I want to go, then I'm going to have to really embrace. Unfortunately, Carol Dweck had not written her book mindset that defined a growth mindset. So I didn't have that word, but a path of self improvement. I'm going to go down this path of self improvement aggressively now. To do that, I need to feel good about myself. I realized pretty quickly that I couldn't just go, okay, I'm going to be fine coming in here and feeling like a moron every day. I knew that wasn't going to work because I built my self esteem around being smart. So I was like, okay, well if I am going to come in and do things that aren't as good as they're going to need to be and I'm going to embarrass myself and not only look stupid, but actually be stupid, meaning Uneducated in an area that I need to become educated. And that since being willing to make those mistakes and looking stupid is a necessary part of expedient growth, what can I do with my self esteem that will allow me to really propel myself forward? And the answer was, I could begin building my self esteem not around being right, but around identifying the right answer. I could build my self esteem around being the learner. And by building my self esteem around being the learner, now I could fail. Now I could embarrass myself. Now I could stare nakedly at my inadequacies and I would actually feel better about myself because I was building my ego, my self esteem, my sense of self, around being willing to admit when I was wrong, being willing to admit that I'd made a mistake, being willing to admit that I wasn't good enough yet, but that I could get better. But I had to lower my defenses. I had to stop using the psychological immune system to make it somebody else's fault. I had to take responsibility for my choices. I had to take responsibility for my skill set. I had to take responsibility for my energy and effort, and I had to get better. And by doing that and taking a longer view of my life and saying, okay, this is going to take time, I'm going to have to embarrass myself a lot, but I really am going to get better. I started to have success. So it was a very emotionally volatile journey that I went on that required that moment of absolute crisis, of having the two conflicting values in my life being brought to bear in one moment where I realized that I was in one way moving away from my goal of being successful and in another way moving towards my goal of feeling smart. And I was like, whoa, wow, that's really dumb. That doesn't make any sense. And by not judging myself in that moment, and I was just like, I was so devastated emotionally that I was like emotional rock bottom. So I said, no judgment. Whatever the answer is, the answer is just be honest with yourself. Do you want to be successful or do you want to be right? And I realized that I would rather be successful. And that forced me to pursue a path of self development. And so from that moment forward, I've never looked back. And it's just been all growth mindset all the time. 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The most harmful self talk that anyone can ever use and it will hold them back forever is this isn't my fault. If I could say the most controversial thing I've ever said, the thing that has generated more anger towards me and I was so shocked by this Everything is your fault. Yes, I know that is a word that triggers people. I say that so that if you can face yourself and say everything is my fault, then I know that you're not going to stop part way to taking responsibility for the choices in your life. And look, of course I know that not everything is your fault and if you were hit by a drunk driver, that's not your fault. But I would tell myself that that is my fault. The reason is I want to remind myself that I can keep my power, that I could have made a different choice. I didn't have to get in the car, right? Of course I don't control that they drink and I am not in any way, shape or form interested in somebody who has been the victim of anything in their life to feel badly about having been victimized. I'm just saying don't let yourself take on the identity of the victim even when you are victimized, because it puts you in a defensive posture. I want to be on the offensive. I want to go after things in my life. I don't ever want somebody or something to hold me back. And the easiest way to let someone or something hold you back is to take on the identity of the victim. So please don't get lost in that idea. I get it. Somebody's had horrible things happen to them. I don't want them to feel badly either. I don't want anyone to feel badly about things that have happened to them. I want them to maintain their emotional sovereignty to not let a terrible thing define them. To instead remember at any time you can Metaphorically, take up arms, you can grab your sword, you can go fight. You can get better at things. You can elevate yourself. People cannot stop you if you get good enough. But if you are constantly like, I'm in this position because of something that happened to me, because of things outside of my control, your life won't become what you and I want your life to become. I don't say this for my own sake. This is something I've already realized in my life. If I take responsibility for everything, there's virtually nothing I can accomplish. I already know that my success is evidence in my life of the reality of that fact. But I worry about a lot of other people that unfortunately have ended up with a frame of reference that makes them feel like things are out of their control. And even though, yes, I know there are things that are out of your control, there's nothing I can do to stop the sun from rising tomorrow. But I would never allow myself to feel helpless. So the example that I always give people is, imagine that we discover tomorrow that an asteroid is streaking towards Earth. Collision course guaranteed. This is a extinction level event. In that moment, I'm not going to say, oh, this isn't my fault. I'm going to say, this is my fault. Now, how do I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's my fault? Because there is a group right now that tracks what are called Near Earth objects. I know they exist, but I've never given them a dime of my money. I've never sent them an email with encouraging words or ideas on ways that they could do that better or that they could be more prepared if something were coming towards us. And I could do that. And even though I'm telling you this story right now, I'm still not going to do that, because I don't think that's the highest use of my time. But I wouldn't fool myself into thinking that there was nothing that I could have done differently that might have had an impact. Now, the reason that I live my life that way, even though that you and I both know that if an asteroid is coming, like, especially at the last minute, like, am I really the person that's going to be contributing to that? Probably not. But I'm glad that there are people in the world that look at astronomically large problems and don't say, oh, there's nothing I can do. They start going, no, bullshit. What would it take? What would we have to do in order to have a positive outcome here? It is very easy in life to throw up your hands and say, man, this is just out of my control. And there are so many things that are so overwhelming that I get why people say, okay, that's not going to be the thing that I'm going to put my energy into. I'm going to put my energy over here. But the key difference is when you do that, please don't trick yourself into thinking there's nothing that you could do. It may not be where you want to spend your time, and it may be a drop in the ocean of what actually needs to be done. But if you feel like there's really no way that I could contribute, that becomes the frame of reference through which you view your life. And even though it's probably a little bit like screaming into the void to think that I can stop an asteroid from smashing into the Earth, look at all the things that we've done as a species. And at some point, the moon landing, it's become so cliche. But really think about that. How hard would that be to leave the Earth? It's crazy to land on the moon and then come back safely. It's insane. And that required somebody to go, no, we can figure that out. And that is all that separates people that go on to be very successful from people that get stuck is when people that go on to be successful hit what seems like an insurmountable obstacle. They say to themselves, there's a solution here, there is a solution here. I may not know it yet, I may not be the person that is capable of solving that problem yet, but there is a solution. And when you stay in a solution oriented mindset now you really have a chance of doing something because you have that frame of reference that is like the only belief that matters, which is that, oh, this problem is solvable. That means that if I put in the time and energy to solve this problem, I may actually make progress. And that is exactly what you need in order to get momentum going in your life. So please, I'm begging you, even though I get it. And I don't ever want somebody to, to feel badly about themselves because something bad happened to them. I also don't want people to give up their power. Remember, you can always do something different to get a different outcome. You can always get better at something and there really is always a solution. One of the most hotly debated things when I was growing up was, is brain plasticity really real? Can you actually rewire your brain or said the way that it was said when I was growing up? Can you teach an Old dog, new tricks. Now, here's the great news. This answer has been put to bed. It is 100% true. You can actually see video footage of it happening. You can rewire your brain at any age. So you're 98 and you're on your deathbed. You can still rewire your brain. Now, of course, you can rewire your brain a lot easier when you're a kid, and kids are hyper malleable. And it definitely gets harder as we get older, but it does not ever get impossible. So please remember, no matter what, if you put time, energy, and repetition into something, your brain is going to rewire. Now, you rewire based on repetition because your brain is always trying to be efficient. It represents something like 2 or 3% of your body mass and yet takes up 25% of the energy requirements of your body. Your brain is a caloric hog. And since evolutionarily speaking, calories were hard to come by, your brain is constantly trying to do things to optimize itself. Think about a computer that's running hot. It's trying to lower the resource requirements. And if you get what they call memory leaks in a computer, the computer crashes. The same is true of the brain. So evolution has made sure that we don't have these memory leaks, that we close those apps that are running in the background of the mind so that you don't need to use as many resources. One of the ways that it does it is a process called myelination. Myelination is what people mean when they talk about rewiring your brain. It's actually two parts. It's where the end of the neurons find each other and they connect and they wrap around each other. That's the first part of rewiring. And they will actually, if you stop using them, they will disconnect and they will search for something new again. You can see footage of this go on YouTube. Nobody's guessing at this. We know this is what happens. Now, when they find each other and you repeat, then what they're going to do is they get myelinated, which is a fatty tissue that is wrapped around those connection points so that the electrical impulses can travel faster, more efficiently. Now, the catch is, when you do that, now what you've introduced to your brain is an easier way of doing something. And because your brain is constantly looking for efficiencies, it is going to do the thing which is easier, which is simply the thing that you repeat. As they say, neurons that fire together wire together, and they fire together because you're doing it they wire together because you're doing it a lot. That's repetition. So if you repeat dumb things, negative things, self destructive things, that's going to become the easiest thing to think. So I guarantee you this is part of the depression and anxiety. You're getting in a loop. It's not the only part, but it is part of that. You are getting in a loop because that's the easiest emotion to feel, it's the easiest thought to think is the thing that you think and feel all the time. So learning to pattern interrupt, that can become incredibly important. Repeating things that make you better at something, something you want to get good at, do it a lot, you're going to get more efficient at that. It's incredibly, incredibly important to recognize the biological truth of how that works. But, but if you're wondering if you can teach an old dog new tricks, the answer is an aggressive yes. So get out there and make use of it. There is one bit of self talk that I've had basically my entire life that I wish I could have eliminated much faster. And that is the belief that I'm not smart enough to achieve my goals. Now the reality is that we are all 50% hardwired and 50% malleable. So there is a reality to be faced that if intelligence is the ability to process raw data quickly, which is probably a little bit more complex than that, but that gets us close enough, I fall somewhere on that spectrum and I can just tell you in terms of speed of processing, I'm somewhere in the average range. Maybe a little above, maybe a little below, but I'm somewhere in the average range. But I have been so haunted by the fact that there are other people that are way smarter than me, that things are easier for them than they are for me. That really held me back for a long time. And there was a. There is a movie called Amadeus and it's about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And in that movie is a character named Solieri. He's a real guy from history. Whether what I'm about to quote from the movie, whether he actually said it or not, I don't know. But this really defined my teenage years into my early 20s. And in the movie, Solieri laments to God, why did you make me just good enough at music? Because he was a fellow composer to Mozart. Why did you make me just good enough at music that I can tell that I'll never be as good as Mozart? Why couldn't you have made me as good or better than him or so much worse that I would Never even think to compare myself. And I thought, oh my God, that defines my level of intellect. I'm just smart enough to realize that I'll never be as smart as some of the super smart people. And that really messed with me for more than a decade. And it wasn't until I realized, oh wait, it doesn't matter where I start, I can get a hundred times better at anything. So now it just becomes a question of what do I want to get better at? And that I need to change my frame of reference. I can lament to God all day, every day about the fact that I'm not the smartest human that ever existed, or because that doesn't sound like a good use of time. Or I can focus on getting 100 times better in an area that really matters to me and contributing meaningfully to people. And that change has rewarded me so tremendously with the only thing that matters, which is fulfillment. So 100%. I wish that I could have gotten over that much, much sooner. Self talk is really important. You need to be very thoughtful about what you repeat. But if you want to be a high achiever, the thing that you have to practice far more than a growth mindset is the physics of progress. You just need to be running that process. Because ultimately there's this weird relationship. It's not even weird. There is an intrinsic relationship between your mindset and your execution. Now, at the end of the day, only execution matters. Meaning you could have the worst mindset in the world, but if you do the right things to be successful, you will be successful. And conversely, if you have the best mindset in the world but you never take action, then you're never going to be successful. So you need to be running the physics of progress. But to run the physics of progress, you need that growth mindset. Because remember, the physics of progress go like this. You have a hypothesis on what you would need to do to achieve your goals. You're going to turn that hypothesis into the thing that you're actually going to do. Then you're going to go do that thing. You're going to fail to some degree at that thing. And then you're going to need to assess why you failed. Now, in reading the data in that moment and trying to tease apart what it is that you did that didn't work. You're going to need to take full responsibility, stare nakedly at your inadequacies so that you know what to do differently next time. But what high achievers understand that people with a fixed mindset don't is that you cannot allow yourself to tell a story about how it's something extrinsic to you outside of yourself that created that failure. You have to take full and complete responsibility. But by taking full and complete responsibility, you're now able to see what the data is trying to tell you. Failure is the most information rich data stream on planet Earth. In the failure is the information that is going to help you actually get better. Now the cool thing about a hypothesis is that it makes a prediction, right? That's the whole thing that this is contingent on. And yes, I know that this is recontextualizing the scientific method for success, but your hypothesis makes a prediction about what you need to do in order to accomplish something. When you fail, you realize that your base assumptions were slightly wrong and that you're going to have to improve upon your base assumptions in order to refine your hypothesis, in order to refine the thing that you do in order to make a little bit more progress. And so that is what high achievers are absolutely obsessed with is making sure that they are staring nakedly at their inadequacies, looking at the data, figuring out how they can adjust their base assumption to make a new prediction to give them a better way of executing and doing that over and over and over running. That physics of progress is how high achievers actually get to their goals. It's not that they were born a super genius. It's not that they were born with all of the answers. It's that they don't lie to themselves at that critical moment of failure. Make it somebody else's problem. They go, ah, there's something that I did wrong. My hypothesis isn't accurate. I must refine my hypothesis in order to make more progress Making it somebody else's problem. Soothing yourself with platitudes or anger, that's something I see a lot. If you want to see what a poor frame of reference looks like in the real world, go read the Twitter comments of people that are very successful. They are met with so much anger. I'm not even talking about myself. So please don't think this is a self congratulatory thing. I'm saying go look at like the highest achievers on the planet. It is crazy how much vitriol there is in the comment section. Especially if you're looking at people that have grown businesses. It is crazy. It's because people don't have a growth mindset and so they're trying to protect themselves, which I actually get. It's a natural response that I spent A long time doing. My hands are covered in blood on this one. I spent so much time doing that. This is simply me recognizing my own past behavior. But I needed it to be somebody else's problem. I needed it to be my parents problem for not giving me good enough genetics. I needed it to be the world's problem. For me. Being raised in a lower middle class household, I needed it to be the world's problem. That it was a system stacked against me. I needed all of that to be able to feel good about myself, which is critically important. But people that go on to be successful, that's not their frame of reference, that's not what they're thinking about. And so they're not just patting themselves on the back. They're not just saying, I'm good, I'm smart, I can pull this off. They're saying, what did I do wrong? Focusing obsessively on how they get better, refining their attempt and then moving forward and just making incremental progress relentlessly over time. That's the path forward. Let's put an action plan together that you can run over the next 30 days that are going to help you rewire your brain for growth and success. It looks like this, number one, you become what you repeat. So you're going to start repeating things that move you towards your goals. The first thing that you're going to repeat is I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals. Number two, you're going to focus obsessively on the physics of progress. The physics of progress are you're going to come up with a hypothesis and what you need to do to achieve your goals. You're then going to turn that hypothesis into something you can actually do. You're going to do that thing. It is going to fail to some extent. You're going to assess why it failed. That will give you clues on what was wrong with your hypothesis. You're going to reformulate your hypothesis in a more educated way and then you're going to turn that into something that you can do. You're going to do that thing, it's going to fail to some degree. You're going to assess why it failed. You're going to adjust your base assumptions around your hypothesis and you're going to repeat that over and over and over. The next thing that you're going to do is make a list of the most important things that you could be doing in order to be successful. So you need to have clarity on your goal. That is hugely important. Massive amounts of clarity. On your goal, then you're going to turn that into a list of things that you can do. You know, you have enough clarity when you can write down a goal or a thing to do. Excuse me, that would tell you what to do with the next 15 minutes of your life. Most people come up with a plan that's so high level, they still have no idea what to do with the next 15 minutes of their life. Their goal is something that's going to take them five, 10 years. And so knowing what to do right now in this minute becomes an example of somebody that doesn't have enough clarity about right now. Today. Your high level goal has to be translated into a very near term goal that you can achieve that is part of concentric rings for sure. But we want to make sure that we get into the list of things that we could be doing right now. Part of doing that is about habit building. And that's exactly what you have to do to rewire your brain. To rewire your brain, you need to replace repeat things. Okay, Those are the things you're going to actively do. Now let's talk about what we're going to stop doing. We have to pattern interrupt because we're repeating negative things that are holding us back. If we don't recognize that our brain wires around that which we repeat, we won't understand how to unwire before we can rewire. So the way that you're going to unwire things is you're going to let them atrophy by pattern interrupting so that you stop reinforcing the wiring. Okay. What people get is these mantras that they have in their head about I'm not good enough at this, I'm not talented enough. The world is holding me back. The world doesn't want to see people like me succeed. Whatever it is that you're repeating that is stopping you from acquiring new skills, that is stopping you from staring nakedly at your inadequacy so you can see what you need to change, what skills you need to adopt so that you can get better and make progress. So we have to stop repeating those things. So we're going to interrupt that by saying the first thing I told you. I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals. So hey, I don't allow myself to repeat that. I'm not good enough. I don't allow myself to repeat that. I'm not going to be able to pull this off. I don't allow myself to repeat that. The world is stacked against me. I don't allow myself to repeat that this isn't my fault. I don't allow myself to repeat anything that doesn't move me towards my goal. And so what that's going to do is that's going to allow for atrophy to happen in that wiring, because neurons that fire together wire together. So whatever thing that's negative that I've been repeating, that's really reinforced in my brain. And I have to first pattern interrupt so that I'm not repeating those things, so that those grips can begin to loosen. So that as I'm doing the things that we said we're going to start doing, we're start saying those positive things, we're taking action. We're looking at the things that we need to do to actually achieve our goals. We're doing those. We're turning them into a habit. Now, I can let atrophy set in on the negative things that have hardwired in my brain, and I can start repeating the positive loop that I need to be in around repeating positive things, only doing that which moves me towards my goals, Making sure that I have clarity on my goals, making sure that I translate my goal into actionable items, and turning that whole process into a habit so that I'm sitting down every day and I'm writing out my important things list. I'm taking the vast majority of my time to actually execute on the physics of progress. And I'm just running that in a loop, constantly looking at the data. How is it telling me how to get better? And if you exist in that loop for 30 days, you will really feel that you're starting to make progress. And then if you repeat that for the next 30 years, no one will be able to stop you. All right, everybody. That is the power of developing a growth mindset. I hope that you will use all of the things that we just talked about in order to hardwire a growth mindset in your life, because it is the only frame of reference from which you can actually execute on your goals and have the kind of success that you've always wanted. Get after it. What are the top five behaviors and mental traps people do to live a really miserable life? What do people do? So ego is going to be number one. So the whole idea, if you want to live the good life, is to recognize that you are a deeply flawed individual that is holding yourself back, that your life is a reflection entirely of your choices and not your circumstances. And if you're not happy with that, that means that you're doing something wrong. So I'll define right and wrong as it's right when it moves you towards your goal and it's wrong when it moves, it moves you away. So if you're not where you want to be, you are by definition doing something wrong. But most people can't work through the loop that I call the physics of progress because their ego stops them at a critical part. So the physics of progress go like this. You have a guess as to how you're going to get to your goal. So first of all, it assumes you know what your goal is. But for now, let's assume that you do know your goal. So you've got a guess. This is what I would need to do in order to get to my goal. You're going to do that thing and it's going to fail. Now we all have to struggle with the oh, I tried the thing and it failed. The problem is most people put up their ego defenses, find a way to believe that it was somebody else's fault. It was the economy, it was where I was born, it was that my parents didn't have money. It's that the system is rigged, whatever. Because those are probably valid reasons why it's going to be harder for that person than the next person they stopped. But let's go back to my definition of right and wrong. Right is that which moves you towards your goals. Wrong is that which moves you away. So people then are blind to the fact that they're saying that their real goal is to get where they're going, make a million dollars, have a successful business, be a teacher, whatever. But the reality is their real goal is to feel good about themselves. Most people never have the self awareness to avoid that conflict. And then even if they have the self awareness that they're in a conflict, they don't realize that they could shift their self esteem around instead of being right. So what I tried was right. And the only reason it didn't work is because the world is stacked against me. Might actually be true, but how are you going to move forward? Because there is some better thing that's going to move you forward. Most people are never going to see that because they stop at making it somebody else's fault. The next thing you have to do is you have to be optimistic. You have to believe what I call the only belief that matters, that if I failed at something, it's because I'm not good enough yet, but I can get good. And so many people believe because it really feels this way. You believe that your talent and intelligence are fixed traits and the reason you Believe that is it gets harder as you get older to get those huge gains that you get. Like when you're a little kid and you can't walk, it's like this whole binary zero to one moment of like, whoa, I couldn't. And now I can. This is incredible. And then you get to first grade and it's like, can't do math. Now I can do math. Wow, that's pretty cool. Can't do multiplication tables. Now I can. You start to get to algebra and it's like, oh, God, I don't know. This is not as easy as I hoped it would be. You start having failures, you get rejected by girls. Like, you start getting all these things that stack up where the path to stand up, practice walking. It doesn't work as well. You're also, as you get older, you are less plastic. So it actually does become harder to learn new things. Also, you begin to find the things that work for you. And so you think, oh, well, I know how to do this, I've done it really well. And then you encounter that moment where it stops working. And so now it's like, oh, wait a second, it was working. So I had my big zero to one moment. Then it stopped working. And people confuse that with hitting the edge of their abilities, not realizing you've only hit the edge of your current skill set. So I remind myself in business all the time, my current skill set has already taken me as far as it's going to take me. And so if I want to go farther, I have to get better. But if you don't believe that you can get better, then you won't put the energy and effort into getting better. But because it becomes incrementally more difficult to get better, you begin to confuse it with, I've reached the edge of my capabilities. Then if your ego is built around I'm right, not that I can identify the right answer, I am right. So I've done all the things. I hit the edge of my current abilities and I have a belief that I don't know that I can get any better. And I have the ego defenses coming, saying it was somebody else's fault anyway. Ah, cool. Then I'm off the hook. I don't have to be confrontational of this reality that I've reached the edge of what I'm capable of, which sucks. That feeling of, like, I'll never be as good as somebody else. That feeling eats at us in a really gnarly way. So that's where you get clobbered to death. With, ooh, I no longer am optimistic that I can get better because all my big gains, my early gains, those went away. And my subconscious hands me a ready made excuse for why this isn't my fault. And I take it and I exit. And that brings us to the third thing, repetition. You become what you repeat. So people that don't repeat things, they don't try over and over, they just give up really easily. They are destined for failure. If you don't have a massive amount of resilience, you are really in trouble. And most people don't have resilience. And so if I'm talking about the five things that you do that really, like take you down a dark path, don't be resilient, give up easily. Because if it's true that you can get better, but the sort of early big wins begin to diminish and you're gonna have to work harder and push harder and be more consistent, then it's like by giving up, you never get better. And so now you're reinforcing. Hey, not only was it somebody else's fault, you couldn't get better anyway, so why would it matter? Don't even try. And so everything that reinforces that don't even try is how people get themselves into a super dark place. Another thing that's really going to hold people back is if you are comparing yourself to somebody else and you're letting that diminish your sense of self. So I would constantly, if I wanted to fail, I would constantly compare myself to other people and be like, I'm a total loser. And I have the proof because look at all these other people and they're doing way better than I am. They're ahead of me. I remember, oh God. Every filmmaker of my generation had a moment when they turned 24 when they realized that what, at least for my generation was considered arguably the greatest film of all time was Citizen Kane really is awesome, by the way. Even though it's black and white and it's all the shit for the TikTok generation, they're never going to go for it. But it's a really fantastic film. And Orson Welles made it when he was 24 and he made it when arguably the most powerful man in the world. So imagine somebody like Bill Gates coming after you and. Oh God, even better, one of the guys that owns like a media conglomerate, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post. So the guy Rudolph Hearst owned what at the time was the media publication Citizen Kane, is about that guy. So it would be like somebody making A movie about Jeff Bezos and that he's corrupt and lonely. And Jeff Bezos is like, oh, you think you're gonna actually tell that story? Nah, I'm clamping down. I'm gonna get your funding revoked. I'm gonna make sure that nobody screens the film. All that. So this guy at 24 gets this movie made. When everybody thinks, oh, this guy's literally gonna kill him, have him killed, or he's gonna stop his movie from being funded, then not only does he get it made, but it becomes arguably the greatest film of all time. And so you hit this moment where you're like, orson Welles is just better than I'll ever be. Why am I even trying to. Then back into not being resilient, then back into all the things you're trying just aren't working on and on and on. And then the last thing is, if I really wanted to mess somebody up, I mean, I really want to break their ability to go anywhere in life. I'm going to make sure that I mess up their body. I'm going to make sure that they aren't getting the sleep they need. I'm going to make sure that they eat a ton of sugar. I'm going to make sure that they're overweight. I'm going to make sure that they don't exercise. And that is going to destroy their cognition in a thousand ways. They're going to be in a level of pain they don't even even realize they're in because they've never not had a stomachache when they eat. They've never not eaten right before they go to bed and have their sleep disrupted because they've got food just sitting in their digestive tract. They don't even know. Brain fog, all that stuff. And so those are the five things I would do if I really. The funny thing, even as I'm saying, I can't make it about me. I've got to like, if I were gonna mess up somebody else, those are the things that I would do. Wow. But gotta avoid. Like the plague. Like the plague. Dinner time. It's more than just a meal. It's when work comes to a halt, where macaroni masterpieces are made and little moments turn into lasting memories. With the blue cash preferred card, you can get 6% cash back at U. S supermarkets so you can bring home the flavors that bring everyone together. We did say everyone make the special moments even more rewarding. Learn more@americanexpress.com terms and cashback cap apply with blue cash preferred but so the. The fourth one, like, it just feels so, like, instrumental. Like, this guy, 24. Like, he did it. And I'm not 24, but I'm 24. But let's say I'm like, 26, and I'm still not. Not there yet. So, yeah, like, let's say you're 40. Say you're 46. Say you're 50. So this is the trap, is by comparing yourself to other people, it's going to diminish your sense of self. It pulls you out of that optimistic mode. And the reality is, I may never make a film as good as Citizen Kane. I may never be as good as Walt Disney. That's my. The real person I'm chasing. I may never accomplish what Elon Musk has accomplished. And so I do the thought exercise, and the words I want to introduce to people are, and now what? So you're never going to be whoever it is that you look up to and you admire. You're never going to be as good as them. And now what? Do you give up? Do you cry all day? Do you accept a lesser life? Or do you go ham? And so the thing that I want people to understand, you can get 100 times better at whatever. Now, most people spend so much time lamenting that they'll never be as good as whatever person it is that they look up to and fantasize about, want to be, that they never 100x their own abilities. And so their life is far less than it could have been. So what I have found through experience, even though I still feel the sting of not being as good as the people that I admire, or having to face that Walt Disney had done way more than I've done by this point in his life, even if he didn't have as much money as I have, he certainly had built something far more that represented what he wanted to do far more than what I have done. Right? My whole life has been about finally getting to that moment, and I haven't. And maybe it forever recedes into the distance. But what I've learned through experience is the act of going ham is so intoxicating, is so fun, that it is the juice. But most people are broken emotionally by the comparison. And so, to some extent, you just can't allow yourself to do it. How do you unlearn the beliefs that got you here, that are now holding you back, so you have to let them atrophy? So if you want your negative beliefs to atrophy, then you have to really stop using them. So, number one Read the book Feeling Great by David D. Burns. It's all about cognitive behavioral therapy. But one of the core tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy is pattern interrupting. So you have cognitive distortions. You're repeating things to yourself that aren't true. I'll never be able to. I'm not as good as I could. Never, right? Those are all cognitive distortions. You don't know that that's true. You won't know that that's true until you spend a lifetime trying and you're on your deathbed and you're like, well, I'm out of time. Now I really know. I really won't be able to do it. Or by then you will have accomplished so much if you really are that diligent and persistent. So you have to pattern interrupt. You have to break out of that thing that you repeat. Now, what I find fascinating is the reason that pattern interrupting is so important. The reason that the only way to begin to let those negative beliefs dissipate is by not using them, is because neurons that together wire together. It's an evolutionary advantage. It's actually a really good thing. This is why you can pick something and get good at it. Because your brain is an energy hog. From an evolutionary perspective, we have this weird dueling competing desires that are baked into our brain. One, go hard, go out there, chase after it, get it right. Grand ambition. But then you also have the desire to sit on the couch and eat potato chips because your brain is so hungry for calories, it eats up 25% of the calories that you intake into your body. Now, when you can just go to the grocery store and get a bag of potato chips, it's not a problem. But when you have to go out and face death every day to hunt, to gather all of that, you have to have evolutionary pressure to chill, right? So you go out, you get what you need. Don't keep going. So you've got it. Now you need to calm down because your brain, just to keep everything going, is going to gobble through those calories. So I can't also have the body going ham all the time. What the brain does is go, all right, from a biological standpoint, I've got to make these thoughts as efficient as humanly possible so that we're not 50% or 75% of the caloric energy. So it does things to make them more efficient. And one of the things that it does is it myelinates the connection points. So when you do things, and I think people underestimate the complexity of a Habit. So a habit isn't just seeing something, doing something, hearing something, feeling something, smelling. It's all of those things put together, right? So you've got the habit loop trigger. You've got then the desire to pursue the drip of dopamine that you know that you're going to get. You've got the sights and sounds that might be all a part of that. All that stuff is wired together. So it's this huge cluster of neuronal firing, and it all gets this fatty tissue wrapped around it. So it's like this ball of activity. And so you get into these patterns of activity that are the easiest thing for you to think and feel. So if the easiest thing for you to think and feel is a negative thought that you repeat to yourself over and over and over, and that your brain goes, oh, we do this a lot, we feel this way a lot, we think this thing a lot. Rad. Let me make it super easy. So now when you get back into I'm a loser, I'm not going to do that, I'll never accomplish that. Or just like a negative doom scroll on TikTok or whatever, that becomes the most efficient thing for your body to do. And you crave that feeling. You are pushed into the efficiency from an evolutionary standpoint. So you have to interrupt it, you have to stop the thought, stop the activity, whatever, and then begin to build something new. So you stop using the old one. And then you force a demand on the brain so that it's unwiring these things and making these new wiring connections and connecting that. And because tissues in the body, you never keep if they're not needed. So if you think about muscle, right, if you work out like a demon, you get a yoked physique, and then you stop working out, six months later, you're going to be way closer to where you started before you started lifting. Thanks. The lift, and I would say probably a year, 18 months out, no one would ever know, even if you had a massive amount of muscle, because your body's just like, muscle's expensive. Calorically, if I don't need it, I'm going to get rid of it. And so when you stop using a pattern in your brain, then the connections are going to dissipate. It's not going to be the first thing that occurs to you anymore. You're going to be out of that habit loop. In fact, to push this to the extreme, during the Vietnam War, there was massive amounts of drug use and people would get addicted to opioids, heroin, all that stuff, most of them just stopped when they came back. And the reason that they stopped when they came back was they just didn't have access to it. They didn't know who to talk to. Like, I'll tell you right now, I would have done psilocybin or whatever by now if I could reliably get it. But I don't have anybody that I know how to get it from. So I've tried like a tiny bit here and there, but that's it. So it's when you don't have it in your environment, you don't think about it, you don't reach for it, you don't crave it. So you've got to do that, break apart. But then to make it easier, make sure that you're leaning into something new that's powerful, that you can repeat. I want to go back to capabilities and skill set and ask you how you would advise a person who has ventured off in different career paths. They've tried so many things in their lifetime, they've excelled in all of them. But at the end of the day, they're the jack of all trades and the master of nothing. So I want to hear your advice on that. And a follow up question is, do you think that that's the way to go or do you think they should stop and just reassess and focus on one thing? What outcome do you want? Like, let's also say, because another question I had was, how does somebody go about finding their passion who's completely lost? Okay, so those are two wildly different questions. Yeah. So how you find your passion will set aside. Now we'll just say you don't find it. It is an architectural build, not an archaeological digit. But going back to the first part, so you have to know what you want to accomplish. So for most people, when they fantasize about their life, they fantasize about becoming the goat of something. Like, I'm going to be the greatest singer of all time. If you want that, just think about LeBron James. If LeBron James were simultaneously trying to be the greatest basketball player of all time, the best singer of all time, the best accountant of all time, you'd be like, hey, LeBron, I've got money on you this weekend. You better get your ass on the basketball court. Stop around with accounting. Right. So we know when it's somebody else. Exactly what they should be doing. If they want to be the greatest of all time, you need a maniacal focus. You need to be lasered in on one thing and you do it to the abstraction of everything else. And you do it obsessively to the point where everything else in your life ideally is falling apart. Right? It's just. And I say ideally is the person with money on, you know, LeBron James. It's like, ah, I don't want you to think about it. I want you to be like Tom Brady. Like, from what I hear. And I don't know that this is true, but given that he just got divorced, I'm going to guess that it is that he would make his family sleep somewhere else when he had, like a big game coming up. He did not want distractions. He wanted to be totally laser focused, literally to the point where everything else in his life is falling apart. But you want to talk goats, that guy is going to go down in history. Now, having said all of that, I find it very hard in my own life to just say, oh, I'm going to do this one thing. This channel would be way bigger if I just interviewed one kind of guest over and over and over, and everybody knew exactly what they were going to get and I didn't try to branch out and cover more things that I find fascinating. This channel would be a lot bigger if we didn't have the entertainment side where we're trying to do comics and, and video games and all that stuff, right? If I were just maniacally focused on having the best interview series YouTube channel ever. I know that. But that's not the life that I want to live. That's why the first question is, what do you want? Because ultimately my advice to people is to chase fulfillment. And fulfillment has to do with what do you love? Right? So you're going to have to discover that you're going to find that initial bump of like, ooh, this thing gives me more energy than it takes. But it's not like when I was a kid, I was like, oh, yo, I want to have a YouTube channel. I didn't even think, think, I want to build the next Disney. I created that over time. When I was at Quest, I was actually perfectly happy to do storytelling inside of a protein bar company, right? Because I just needed meaning and purpose now. I knew I wanted to storytell. I've known that since I was 12. But it wasn't like the central passion of my life to build the next Disney until I decided to make it that. And so when I was Jesus, I probably would have been 37, 38 the first time I said, oh, I'm going to build the next Disney. So it's you know, that's a lot of my life where I had another mission that I would have stated, another passion that I would have said. Now, storytelling was always one of my passions, but I actually would have told you that it was filmmaking. So I would have said, oh, I want to be a. I want to be a director. That was my earliest thing, and I invested a lot into that, which is how it went from being an interest to being a passion. So I want people to understand, you don't look inwards and find a passion. You look inwards and find something that gives you more energy than it takes. Takes. Then you invest in that to see if it's really going to be a fascination. If the more you do it, the more you push yourself into learning about it. If the more you're like, whoa, this is really cool. I love this. That's a fascination. Now, if you want to turn it into a passion, you're going to go through the process of gaining mastery. For something to be a passion, I think you have to get feedback from the world. Okay, I happen to know that you're a singer, and an amazing one at that. And I know human psychology enough to know when you played me your song for the first time and I freaked out. That that feeds into your sense of, like, wow, I worked really hard to get good at something, and this person's having a really big emotional reaction. And that's part of how I want to contribute to the world. I want to sing in a way that moves people. You saw that. It moved me. Now you're in that loop that I call the passion loop. So for it to be passion, you need to work really hard to get good at something that matters to other people. And you need both the shout, meaning when you sing, it makes you feel some kind of way, and the echo, where I hear what you've worked so hard at, and I'm like, oh, my God. And now you're in this loop where you're like, I want to get even better because I want more people to react like that. Now you're in a passion loop. Now where people get into trouble is going back to the first question. So now you're in this passion loop. You should be fine with, hey, I sing. It makes people feel awesome. We're good, right? No, because you're comparing yourself to other people. You have this huge goal that you want to attain, and so now you've got something outside. You try to achieve it, you get knocked back. It didn't work the way that you thought it was. Going to work. What does that say about me? Possibly you make it other people's fault or you just give up and go, wow, I'm really not capable. Which then makes you feel terrible about yourself, which then makes you not love the singing as much as you did before and you get into this super self destructive loop. So let me tell you what monks have figured out that other people don't get. That that desire to want more is a double edged sword. A monk is somebody who realizes, oh, this thing that makes me feel alive and pushes me to be better also cuts me down and makes me dislike myself and makes me lose passion for the thing that I loved right before I started comparing myself. And so the choice that they choose is to opt out of the rat race. And so they're like, I'm just going to go over here and I'm going to let go of desire because I realize that desire is the root of all suffering. Now I take a totally different approach and I go, well, I know I'm going to suffer. I know the world's going to kick me in the face. I know that I'm not going to be. I want to be the greatest at everything I ever think of. Of I know that just isn't going to be true. So I had to come to peace with, okay, you're never going to be as good at all the things that you want to be good at. And so now how do you play the game? And so for me, I like to be broader maybe than somebody who's going to like really be the goat at something. But I just want to enjoy my life. I want to enjoy the shout and the echo. And so for me too, if I just wanted to enjoy the echo, I would go in the YouTube comments, I would figure out what they want me to do and I would just do that. If I want to enjoy both the shout and the echo. I find this balance of here's a range of things that I like because trust me, here's how many things I want to spend my life on. Here's how many things I do spend my life on. Here's what I would have to do if I wanted to be the goat. And I just realized that for me, being that myopically focused on something doesn't make me feel the way that I want to feel. And so I understand that that means that I probably won't achieve. I know I won't achieve as much if I were to broaden it. But I only want to broaden it so much so that I can still achieve, quite frankly, on a massive global scale that will echo through human history, don't you think? You will actually be the goat of your niche by focusing on multiple skills that synergize rather than just focusing on the one thing to be the best at it. All right? So you have to hold two competing ideas in your head. So here's the truth about what it's like to be inside my own mind. I imagine myself in a Dragon Ball Z Super Saiyan moment with flames all around me, screaming, like, morphing into something huge and unstoppable. But at the same time, I understand that the reality is that this is probably going to be a struggle and I may never become the goat. But I don't accept that internally. Internally I'm like, okay, maybe it doesn't happen, but what if you play all out like it is going to happen? What if you act like it is an inevitability, that if you keep pushing as hard as you can and moving forward, that you will eventually get there. But I know so well that if I judge, if I only reward myself for becoming the goat, then my life hinges on one final moment. And I know two things. One, it is wiser, not as probably, it is wiser to enjoy the climb than to reach the summit. And then two, because I know that I may never get there, I don't want to constantly have my thing in the future, because the future will always let you down. Now the question is why? This goes back to evolution. The reason the future always lets you down is because we have hunger. This is why we equate the desire for food, the desire for sex, the desire for success. We say, hungry, I'm hungry for whatever, because that's what it feels like. And hunger can only be momentarily satiated. It can't be permanently because you would die, right? So if all you had was the motivation to go get one meal and eat the biggest meal, the biggest feast that you possibly can, if that's all evolution got you to do, and then you ate it, you were full. And like, I'm full forever, you would die. So once you understand it's an evolutionary context of there is a sub program running in your brain to make sure that you're just going to keep going and going and going. So I'm very careful about how I approach my life to make sure that I acknowledge the truth of the human condition, which is that I'm having a biological experience, which is that I will always have hunger no matter how much I eat. I mean, I'll momentarily be sated, but it won't last. And so I'm super careful to enjoy the climb because I know the struggle is guaranteed, but the success is not. And I know better than to make my whole life hinge on the future. Because even when I get to the future, even if I was the goat and I stand towering above all the accomplishments of Walt Disney, I'll still be like, yo, what's next? It's an inevitability. Do you think everybody's like that? Like, or do you think there's ever going to be a time when you like what you said, you're like hovering over all of your accomplishments like somebody would be capable of being, I'm good, like, that's it. Do you think that's a you thing? Or like, do you think everybody always wants more? It is a hundred percent that every single person has drive, hunger. It is also true that that's a spectrum. It's just a personality trait. So we all have it to some degree. But the question is how much? Now, I'm probably pretty close to pegged out where I'm willing to suffer to the point where other people worry about me because I just push myself and push myself and push myself. So not everybody's going to be like that. Also, I think there are people that have a different value system than I have. So take a monk. They like the idea of I want to disengage from the world. I realize the toxic nature of never ending pursuit, that there will never be a meal so satisfying that I don't want to eat again. So why do I allow myself? Let me transcend that. So for them, they would train themselves to let go of that, to not give into it. I feed into it. I have looked at both options before me, and one resonates with me at a conceptual level because it's not like, oh, I went and became a monk for 30 years and I'm like, oh, rad, now let me go. Like, really pour myself into building something and see which I prefer. But I flirted with them both enough to know, at least at the early stage, which one I find constantly energizing and the one I find constantly energizing is building. And even when I fail, I'm still energized by it. And I'm very careful with my ego not to let it get tied up in that. But everybody's going to make a different choice. But I think that people that don't face the reality of what they want, their life is going to be very sad. And so what I'm always trying to do and what I'm trying to get people to understand, go after it. Want, like, want to be the best and really go after it. Like, I mean, give it your everything, but don't value yourself on whether you achieve it or not. So the thing that I value myself for, the thing that I reward and punish myself for, is did I show up and play to win? Not did I win? Did I show up and play to win? And since I show up and play to win almost every day, not every day, every now and then, I'm off my game. But I play to win, man. And I'm tracking myself from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. And if I'm like, yo, you played to win today. And by the way, I had a good time doing it, like, I love that shit, then I'm good. But as somebody who has succeeded and failed many times, I learned very early to reward myself for the pursuit and not for the accomplishment. So you're extremely self aware, and I feel like that's something really hard to teach. But how would you go about helping someone become more self aware of what's right for them? Dude, I love this question. So the way to get more self aware has become an obsession for me because I'm trying to become more self aware in myself. So those moments where you break through and you're like, oh, wow, I didn't even realize that that was a part of my personality that was, you know, this is water, right? It's so ubiquitous in my life. I don't even realize it as a choice or a way that I view the world. It was completely invisible to me. And then someone will say something and you finally go, whoa, I can see me now from your perspective. And I realized that is what self awareness is. You can finally see yourself the way other people see you. There is no more water. There is only the awareness that, oh, I'm constantly wet. So I've started thinking, okay, how is it that I do that? How do I. And look, I am blind still. And it horrifies me. Every time I have an awareness. I'm like, oh my God, I got to this age and I never realized that about myself. It was a little unnerving. But I've become aware of so many different things that it, it comes back to tying a revelation to a bodily sensation. So what I try to do is realize what I am feeling at any one time and then be honest about why I am feeling it and being able to Track that down. And so figuring out there's this idea that Jordan Peterson has of micro personalities, and he says that's the best way to understand yourself. So an alcoholic, when they're jonesing for a fix, just in the. In the grips of the alcoholism, they become a different person. So they have a whole subset of their personality that's now in control, that might lie, cheat, lack integrity, push other people down, whatever, to get that alcohol. Like, one thing you learn if you're a lifeguard is they say if you go to rescue a drowning person, odds are they're going to try to drown you as well. Just because they're just trying to get air, man. They stopped being like the loving, caring person. Because when you want that, like, breath of air that badly, like, you're just going to do whatever it takes to make it happen, you have to be aware that these micro personalities take over. And so when you have a feeling, odds are that represents a micro personality that you've slipped into. And if you can recognize, oh, when I feel this, I bet I am a certain way. Now, to other people, that. That almost doesn't feel like a spectrum of you. It's like, oh, here we go. They're in their annoyed phase. They're pissed off. And I know how they are when they're like that. They're scared and they act this way. They're depressed and they act that way, right? So for them, it's like these discrete versions of you, these micro personalities. So what I began to realize was, oh, when I feel this way, I manifest this way. I have a microcosm of personality traits that cluster together that are hyper predictable to people outside of me. But because the emotion feels so justified to me, it's water. I don't even see it. It seems like this is the only way to react to this moment. There is no other way. Everybody in my position would react exactly like this. So it isn't a micro personality. It's just how one should act. And so it's not like you're even thinking about that. You're just like, stimulus response. Now what I've trained myself to do is go, I feel something. What do I feel? Whoa, I'm agitated. Why am I agitated? Well, they obviously did something wrong. No, no, no. What do I know, right? Because I have these rules. And so I walk down rule number one. If somebody's angry, I guarantee an insecurity has been triggered. Now there's actually things at the edges. I'll leave that aside for now. So I recognize, Ooh, I'm agitated. I know that that means an insecurity has been triggered. What insecurity has been triggered? But it was training myself through having these realizations of, like, oh, I get this flustered feeling, and now I want to argue for an idea that's mine. Oh, I'm feeling stupid. Okay. So that's what I do whenever I feel stupid. But it really was tracking back as I would, like, replay the day. Like, I don't like the way that feels. And in fact, that's where it started. I don't want to feel that way again. How do I avoid it? To avoid it, you have to figure out what caused it. As far as I can tell, that's other than getting feedback from other people. So empowering people to tell you, like, hey, why are you acting like that? It's not pleasant. I don't like the way you're talking to me, whatever. Or after the fact, hey, you came across really harsh. I didn't respect the way you handled that. It's like, ooh, whoa. Like, it was invisible to me. I had no idea. Like, there was one time during company team meeting where I was like, hey, everybody's got to step up now. Because I love that kind of language. I like, yo, we got this. We can do it. But everybody's got to rise up. Up. I was completely taken aback that somebody gave me a dot, which is feedback for people watching this, and they were like, yo, that was really hard to hear. And I was like, huh? And so, because for me, I love that war language. Like, we got to do this. We got to get better. I'm not saying, oh, you're a loser and you need to get better. I'm just like, this is a human condition. Our current skill set's already taken us as far as it's going to go. If we want to go somewhere in the future that's farther, we have to get better. But that gave me the like, oh, wow. I see how that part of my personality comes across to other people. Now, I may still use that tool, but at least I won't be blind to it. Now I have self awareness, literally aware of self from another person's perception, and I can act accordingly. And then a last question on this is being able to see yourself from a different perspective. Are the things that either trigger you or whatever caused by some sort of, like, some experience in your childhood that is a pattern that you exhibit which causes these emotions in other people? I think it's inevitable that you are shaped by everything that happens in your life. And you formulate responses and you repeat those responses, they get hardwired in your brain. And so you act a very predictable way in a given set of circumstances. But I personally can't track back, oh, this is because of that thing that happened. For me, there's precious few things like that. So it's more about the personality and how your personality is just you. But then if you see it from a different personality type, it'll seem that's how you'll understand what caused that or how I end up taking in the information about what I'm like to other people. A little bit of both. So the way that we become who we are, you're 50% hardwired, your personality and you're 50% malleable. Your response to all the different things that happen to you and your ability to unwind some of that. So there are things about ourselves that we can unwind and we can be different. And people are like, whoa. Like I will tell you in my marriage, Lisa and I are dramatically different people than we were at the beginning. And we will point out to each other, hey, that Barb in your personality actually don't like that, that some have been easier to change than others. And so it's like, wow, like, there are some things, even though I'm aware of them, I can articulate it. I can even say I've slipped into that thing that you hate. I can't stop myself from doing it yet. So some of those things prove very difficult to unwind. So, for instance, I constantly slide back into optimism. Like, no matter where things are going, like, I'm just. I find myself like, but we could ultimately. And then it's like Lisa's like, hey, hey, we have to reground. We've got to really think about how this is going to happen. And so we'll butt heads over that. We're all slipped back into the dream, the big vision. And she just. She can't be there. It's stressing her out. She's like, I need to know how we're going to pull this off. And so not doing that is very hard. Now. You can get better. You can train yourself. Okay, so that's part one. Nature and nurture, they collide. I think it was Lisa Feldman Barrett that said we have a nature that requires nurture. So they are so intertwined. It's almost pointless to try to tease out, like, what half is what just there's a process to run for change that is outside the scope of this answer. Every time that you get to something you want to change, run the process. If you do that diligently for three years and you're still having a hard time making a change, odds are you've hit close to bedrock of the 50% that's unchangeable. Okay, so the other part, how do I peg my sense of self awareness? This really comes down to there's only so many personality types, right? So let's ballpark it. Let's say there's 50ish types of people that you're gonna meet. Of course, you can boil it down to, like, the five types or whatever, but it feels more nuanced in reality. It's not like everybody you meet, you're like, oh, you're this, you're that, you're that. There's only five. Like, people definitely feel like shades and blends of those big five traits. So let's just call it five sort of big 50 big buckets that you're going to encounter different people. It's like, oh, okay, I'm beginning to understand how when I act that way, how that kind of person sees me. That's really useful. Now, as you begin to collect that data, you're going to drive yourself crazy constantly trying to be the way that that person is going to be able to respond to you. So there are things that I will take in and go, okay, that's really useful. You can never know too much about how you come across. But there's also, I need to live my life on how I feel as well. So if I'm going to go into battle, even though my battles are always business, if I'm going to go into battle, I'm going to call it battle because that resonates with me. Now, if that doesn't resonate with other people, in some circumstances, I'm going to make sure that I speak in a way that is understood by more people. And other times I'm going to be like, I need to feel a certain way to perform the way that I want to perform. And I'm going to go in with all of my language and all of that. The key is to just be aware of it so that you grab a tool when it's useful. So, for instance, I try never to be out of control of my anger. I won't say that it doesn't happen, but damn, is it rare. So I was recently on a call with lawyers, and I realized anger is the only thing that's going to move this forward. And so I had to display very controlled, trust me, I wasn't a raging lunatic. But I had to display a very controlled anger to let them know, hey, this is what we're doing was bringing the opposing sides together. And so I had to make sure that the intensity of a given point was communicated through emotion. So I need to know. Ah, cool. This feeling that I'm getting of being really annoyed, really frustrated, and wanting to punch through my computer, it's like, okay, some insecurity has been triggered. What insecurity? That I'm not going to be able to achieve. What do I want? What I want to achieve in the business that's going to stop me from achieving my goals. If I don't achieve my goals, as much as I know better than to build my self esteem around the accomplishment, I'm still highly invested in the accomplishment. So cool. I know why I'm feeling it. Am I going to display it? That becomes the question. Is it useful in this moment? So for instance, I was in a near rage. That entire call lasted two and a half hours. But how many minutes of that call would anybody on the call know that I Was that annoyed? 7. So it's like you have to have the awareness to turn it into a tool and then you have to have the control of your emotions to wield the tool appropriately. One thing that people do not understand is that you can literally change the way that you think. You can rewire your brain and develop a mindset that can lead you to achieving whatever it is that you set your mind to and are willing to pay the price to actually achieve. But the question is how? If you want to be successful, mindset is everything. The reason that mindset is so important is at the end of the day, only execution matters. So if you have big dreams, if you have goals, something that you're trying to accomplish in your life, you're going to have to execute against that. So why do I say that mindset is so important in that scenario? The reason is that ultimately to achieve the things you want to achieve, I can promise you when you start out, you're not good enough yet to achieve that. And or you don't have the right plan. And so the way to refine the plan, to actually do the thing that you want to accomplish, you're going to have to run through what I call the physics of progress. The physics of progress are very simple. They require you to have a hypothesis which is simply your best guess. This is what I think I have to do to achieve my goals. Then you're going to turn that into something you can do you're going to do that thing, it's going to fail to some degree. That's just the way it works. But failure is the most information rich data stream on planet Earth. But to accurately assess the data and figure out what it's telling you about why you failed to some extent, or why it was more inefficient than it needs to be, you have to be willing to stare nakedly at your own inadequacies, take responsibility for the outcome, not make it somebody else's fault or the economy's fault or whatever. Any external force. If you're making it an external problem, you're never going to be able to learn the lesson you need to learn in order to improve your behavior so that you can then execute better and make more progress. That really is it. That's the physics of progress hypothesis. Turn it into something actionable, run that action, learn from the partial failure, get a little bit smarter, come up with a new hypothesis that is more informed. Turn it into something actionable, run that, it will fail again to some degree. Figure out why by lowering your defenses, having a growth mindset, making sure that you are able to take on the responsibility. Now why is that a mindset question? Why can't you just run that equation if it really is that simple? The answer is you have in your brain something called the psychological immune system. This is something given to you by millions of years of evolution. We should all be extremely grateful for it. And the psychological immune system's job is to make sure that you don't commit suicide. It is designed to make you feel better about things. It's the reason why you can mess up, make a mistake, and you can soothe yourself. Now the problem is that the goal of the psychological immune system is not for you to achieve your goals. It's simply to make sure that you feel good enough about yourself that you can keep moving through life. Now the reason that that becomes wildly problematic and is one of the most important things that you have to address in your mindset if you're going to be successful is because the number one tool that your psychological immune system works to soothe your ego is to make everything somebody else's fault. It is the fault of the government, it is the fault of rich people, it is the fault of not being born the right color, not being born the right sex, so on and so forth. It is making something the external problem. Now here's the really bad news. Your psychological immune system is going to grab for a very valid excuse. Those things that I listed may all be True, they may really all be holding you back. The problem is, you want to know what the right mindset for success is. And if you want to be successful, you are going to have to overcome a endless parade of problems. And to overcome the endless parade of problems, you have to have a way to take responsibility for what you can do differently to overcome those problems. Instead of being annoyed, instead of shutting down, instead of just pointing the fingers, you want to adapt your behavior. It sucks that the second law of thermodynamics is that all things move towards chaos. It sucks that humans are so complicated and so weird that we don't just lift each other and love each other, which we do and is amazing. We tear each other down, we kill each other. Man, read history books. It will terrify you about how brutal humans can be. It is crazy how many different times and places throughout history, we have just slaughtered people in mass numbers in the most horrifying way that you can possibly imagine. So if humans can slide all the way to that level of depraved madness, and we know that everything moves towards chaos, how do we bring the massive amount of order that we have to bring to the world so that we can march everlong towards success and actually achieve it? The only way to overcome chaos, the only way to overcome entropy, which is the fancy name for chaos, is to pour energy into the system. So you have to constantly pour energy into your own life to make sure that you're making progress to your goals if you're going to eventually achieve success. And the only way that you're going to be able to do that is to have a growth mindset. Now, really simply, a growth mindset is that you believe that your talent and intelligence are not fixed traits, that you can get better at something as you put time and energy into getting better at that thing. It's what I call the only belief that matters. The only belief that matters is that by applying time and energy into something, you will actually get better at it. Now, once you believe that, everything in your life downstream of that gets better, because now you know, I messed up at this thing. I suck at that thing. The world is trying to stop me from doing that thing. The world is effective at stopping me from doing that thing. Oh, word. All I need to do is go and get better and I can outperform people, as Kobe Bryant said. And this has become my favorite quote in the world, boos, don't block dunks. Now, what did he mean by that? He meant that no matter what, you can get so good that People can't stop you. People were paid millions of dollars to stop Kobe Bryant from scoring points, and yet he scored 81 points in a single game just by getting better than other people. Getting better than other people requires you to have a growth mindset. That's the growth part. You're going to get better so that when you fail, and you will fail over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, and it's going to be embarrassing, it's going to hurt and all that. But when you fail, if you believe, oh, failing means that I'm a failure because my talent and intelligence are fixed traits, there's nothing I can do to get better. You will stop. Why wouldn't you? It's the only thing that makes sense. But if, on the other hand, you believe that, oh, I can get better at this, I'm not good enough yet, but I can get good enough by applying time and energy into getting better. So now you'll apply that time and energy because you believe that it will yield the outcome that you want. And that is why it is so critical to get your mind right so that you can run that loop of the physics of progress. Because watch how it breaks down if you don't have a growth mindset. I have a hypothesis. Hey, this is what I need to do. I'm going to try this thing. I tried it. Oh, my God. I failed. It's embarrassing. I'm hurt emotionally. People are making fun of me. My parents are telling me, I told you so. Oh, my God. Like, I don't want to keep going. And by the way, this is making me really feel badly about myself. So now I'm going to stew over it. I'm going to think about this all the time. Why did I fail, Man, I'm cool. I didn't do anything wrong. Oh, I failed because the world sucks. The world's against me. All the reasons that people make up, not even make up, all the very valid reasons that you were stopped. If you have a fixed mindset, you're going to tell yourself that. You're going to take those excuses because they make you feel better about yourself. And in that moment of emotional crisis that happens every time we fail, you're going to reach for whatever makes you feel better. If, on the other hand, you have a growth mindset, when you hit that moment, you're going to be like, okay, cool, I need to get better at this. I'm going to have to transform my potential into usable skill set and then execute against that. Then you can reformulate your hypothesis, come up with a better action to do, run that, and even though it will fail again to some extent, you'll have made more progress. And when you iterate on that loop enough, just relentlessly getting better, trying new things, making incremental improvement, then you win. And that is the only path to success. Once you decide that you're going to really pursue success, you have to start asking yourself a fundamental question around the growth mindset. If getting a growth mindset is difficult, what is the opposite of that? The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset. Now, if a growth mindset is defined as I believe that my talent and intelligence are malleable traits, meaning that I can actually get better at something, a fixed mindset is the opposite, that you're dealt a hand of cards genetically and it just is what it is. And so your life is really about doing the best you can with the hand that you've been dealt. But there's nothing that you can do to improve. I want to aggressively debunk that myth. So the human animal, every species has to choose to either be born with all of the things you're going to need to do to go be that thing. So a cat is born with all the things that it needs to be a cat. A horse is born with all the things that needs to be a horse, so on and so forth. And so that's why 20 minutes after being born, a horse can do all of the things that that horse is going to do. It's up, it's walking around, can run all of that. Imagine humans getting up and running around 20 minutes after being born. We would lose our minds, we'd freak out what is going on? That is a child unlike any other child in all of human history because we have the ability to adapt. And so we chose a very different strategy. So all animals bifurcate between those two things. The vast majority come with almost all or all of things pre programmed. They just do it instinctively. You don't have to be taught. Now, of course there are going to be things at the margins, how to better hunt and what stream to go to and all that. So there's some amount of that that is going to be learned in the wild, but they're going to be able to do most of the things like the vast majority, 90 plus percent of the things right after being born. Humans, on the other hand, can't even hold their own head up. They can't even hold their own head up for months. So we have taken a totally different path, which is the path of adaptation. Now, by choosing that path, we have become the most dominant predator the world has ever seen. So the question becomes, what is it about a. About that setup? That means that we need to leverage a growth mindset and completely debunks this idea of a fixed mindset. We know that humans, the average human, is designed to grow and get better. That's what we do. That's the evolutionary strategy that we've chosen. So if we know that the average human is designed to grow and get better, it becomes a question of, are you creating a frame of reference about how you view the world that gets you to take advantage of that? The reason that so many people peak in their teenage years and they don't continue to get better is they have a fixed mindset. So what ends up happening is they go and they try out for basketball. To use my own example, since this was something I struggled with and I was so unbelievably bad at basketball, it never occurred to me that if I actually worked at practice that I would get better. So since I was so embarrassed by my lack of talent in basketball, I was always trying to hide on the bench. I didn't want people to pass me the ball. If they passed me the ball, I would panic. I was never thinking about, oh, how do I get better? Like, go home, practice dribbling, practice shooting. That didn't even occur to me. I was just like, I'm bad at this thing. I'm never going to get good at this thing. And so I just didn't try. And it was all about hiding. If I had realized, wait a second. The average human is actually designed to get better. Now, it is very important to note that we are not blank slates. So if LeBron James and I had grown up together, done all the same things, I dribbled the ball just as many times as he did. I had the same coaches as he did. I showed, shot as many free throws, practiced step for step in the way that he did. Odds are I'm never going to get as good as he's going to get. He's much taller than I am. He is far more explosive and athletic. He may have a mind that is way better suited to tracking the different things you have to do on the court. From reading the court, understanding the other players, moving his body, all of it, I don't know because I never push myself. But I'm going to guess that he's pretty elite from the part. Part of us that is hardwired now, science Seems to indicate that we are roughly 50% hardwired and 50% malleable. So the odds of me becoming the next LeBron James at basketball is vanishingly slim. Though admittedly, I never tried at the peak of my physical prowess, so I can't rule it out. But I am going to say that that doesn't strike me as the right use of my time and energy. But once you realize that a growth mindset is real, you realize that you can get, let's just call it 100 times better at anything. Now, if you start at a way worse position because you don't have the mental or physical gifts that somebody else has and the 50% that's hardwired, the end point of your 100 times better may be radically different than that person. Fair enough. But once you realize, wait a second, anything in my life, I can get 100 times better, that becomes the central question of your life. Once you have a growth mindset and you begin applying that growth mindset. Now it's a question of how far can you go if you have a growth mindset? Because you can take yourself extraordinarily far in an area where you've got some positive momentum from the 50% of you that is hardwired. So finding that thing that you both love and have a natural inclination to, and then slather on top of that an obscene amount of work. And if you look at somebody like Kobe Bryant, who inspires the life out of me, that guy worked so hard to get good and put that on top of his already immeasurable gifts. But I would like to point out that not only was he one of the greatest basketball players of all time, he won an Academy Award. He won an Academy Award for a film that he made. So not only was he able to dominate in a sport that you could say, arguably he had some really natural talent, I doubt that he also had an equal amount of talent on the filmmaking side and that hearing him talk about it, he went out and found the greatest minds in filmmaking and learned from them, worked with them to create something that really was a breathtaking masterpiece. And so understanding that, that if you 100x your abilities in an area, it will be such a meaningful transformation in your life that your life in that area will be unrecognizable on the other side of that energy and effort. And that ultimately is the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Because a person with a fixed mindset may have had not only the same 50% as somebody who goes on to be very successful, the hardwired 50%, they might be ahead. And this is why when you have people that outwork somebody that has more natural talent than them, they end up going farther. Now, of course, the person that has both the natural talent and the insane work ethic is going to go farther than the person without the natural talent and only the insane work ethic. But since let me spoiler alert on the human existence, most people quit, most people give up. They just, life is going to batter you about. There's going to be so much difficulty in your life, there's going to be failure, pain, suffering, emotional trauma, embarrassment, all of that just, it chips away at the average person because they aren't relentlessly focused on a growth mindset and they're building their self esteem around being right, better, faster, stronger. If on the other hand, they would focus on the growth mindset, they would realize that they can get better. And they put all of their energy and effort into creating that frame of reference so that they're viewing the world in a way that is optimistic and encouraging them to go in and put that energy and effort into something. Now because they're seeing that incremental improvement when the world is knocking them about, they realize, oh, I can get better at this, I can outperform more people. And so they're going to be more resilient and they're not going to be as easy to shut down, they're not going to be as easy to break. And so the people that I have found that are the most resilient in life, they have the most intensely developed growth mindset. And that's part of the key. You really do have to develop a growth mindset. While some people pretty early on realize like, oh, when I encounter something difficult, I don't have to back down or, or give in. I can actually push myself, grow and get better. There's limits to that for most people. And so it really is something that even if you have the beginnings of a growth mindset, you want to make sure that you're sharpening that, sharpening that, sharpening that, and really proving to yourself just how much is possible. While it's outside the scope of this answer, I will say this is why I think that transforming your physique is one of the most potent things you can do to transform your mind because it will show you very visually and viscerally that you can go in not being able to lift a weight, you can work your way up to something and then over time, you literally transform your body, your strength and are capable of doing things you weren't capable of doing before. If you could see what's happening to your brain, I think far more people would push themselves into that zone because they would realize, like, whoa, I'm really able to get more out of myself now than I was a year ago, three years ago, five years ago ago. And getting people into that zone where they see the kind of gains that they're making, that's really critical to getting them to continue to crystallize their belief in the growth mindset, which, going back to what I said earlier, gives them the only belief that matters, which is that if I put energy and effort into getting better, I will actually get better, which means that they will continue to pour themselves into getting better at something, and that's the path forward. But you have to be willing to sharpen your growth mindset. If you don't do that, then you're going to be very easy to knock off course, because life is going to prove to you that you really aren't good enough to achieve grand goals. And so that's what ends up breaking. Somebody with a fixed mindset, because they are constantly confronted with their inadequacies, that feels like a life sentence. They don't think that they're ever going to be able to improve. And so the negative way that they feel about themselves when they're beaten by somebody else, because for better or worse, we are a comparative creature. We compare ourselves to other people all the time. So in that moment of comparison, somebody with a fixed mindset is like, they're better than me. They will always be better than me. I will never achieve what they've achieved. I will never have what they have. And then where does that lead? This is all unfair. Where does that lead? The psychological immune system kicks in. What does the psychological immune system do? It presents you the external reasons why things are the way that they are. Assures you that none of this is your fault. Which means that you don't retain your power. You don't look at what you could be doing to make a change, to get a better result. And remember, the psychological immune system is pointing out real things. It's pointing out valid excuses. But if you take those excuses and sit in that fixed mindset, you're not going to get where you want to go. And this is the thing I'm obsessed with in my life. Read a lot of Internet comments, and I see over and over and over people looking at other people that are more successful than they are, and they meet it with vitriol they are so angry. The system is broken. Not saying it's not, but that's what they're focused on. The system is broken. This person has scammed the world. World. Let's say that they have. Let's say that the system is broken and that person has scammed the world. How does that help you? How does that push you towards your goals? How does giving up and saying it's all so corrupt, we're never going to get anywhere. Think about the greatest people in history, the people that have just done insane things. My go to is always Nelson Mandela. I cannot imagine other than outright slavery, I cannot imagine a system more stacked against somebody than what happened to Nelson Mandela. He was put in prison and literally treated like a slave for 27 years and yet came out of that and helped unite a country and move people forward. And so he had every excuse at his disposal as to why he couldn't make something of his life and he becomes one of the most important people in modern history. Guys, don't grab excuses, not because they're not real, not because they're not valid. Don't grab excuses because it will stop you from achieving what you want to achieve in your life. The greatest walking among us are all the people that realize, yeah, these are valid. These are very real reasons why it's harder for me than somebody else. And this sucks, and I wish it wasn't so. But they deal with the world the way that it is, not the way they wish it were. And the way that the world is, is you can get better at anything. If you have a growth mindset, you can 100x your abilities. And if you stay focused, you don't break, you don't give in. There's virtually no limit to what you can accomplish.