← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
The Fastest Path to Success in Today’s Unpredictable World | Tom Bilyeu (Archived Episode)
01:03:42
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- [00:01]
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- [00:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Failure is the single most information rich data stream that exists. I cannot promise you that you'll ever be successful. The very thing you're pursuing in your life is very simple. It is fulfillment. That's it. So if you want to actually make your dreams come true, I'm not telling you not to chase money. I'm just saying it's not going to feed you emotionally the way you think it is. So you've got to completely divorce yourself from this notion of outcome and become completely obsessed with the idea of sincere pursuit. The reason to tie that to sincere pursuit is it's the only part you can control. And now, please put your hands together for a night with Tom Bilyeu. I'm about to ruin that fucking good mood, let me tell you right now. We'll see how fast we can get cut right through the bullshit. So we want these nights to have their own unique fingerprint. When we decided to do a live series, we didn't want it to be the same old same old. I didn't want it to be just the speech that I go and do when people bring me out to an event. I wanted it to be something where if you came to 10 of them in a row, every one of them was going to be different. And so that's why we wanted you guys to participate. We had people send in those videos, we had you guys write up on the wall what your hopes and fears are. I watched every video that was sent in. I read everything on the wall. And that put my team in a bit of an anxious state because nobody knew what the hell tonight is going to be. And quite frankly, I know what my intention is. I know what I want to do, I know what I want to accomplish, but I don't know the path that we're gonna take. And that path is going to be uniquely determined by the people in this room. So this night will only be as good as you guys engage, I'm gonna try to get us into a headspace and then I'm gonna open it up for questions. And the questions are really where the magic happens. If you can keep it a question and keep that shit brief, which is not necessarily everybody's strong suit if they have anxiety and someone puts a fucking mic in your face. So I get that. But if we can do that, if we can get to a place where we're really cutting through the BS and we're talking about what's really going on, then we can actually get to the true nature of success. And that's what I want to talk about tonight. For me, this is all about demystifying success. Because there's this sense that people that achieve something great have some innate thing in them that allows them to do this. And if you go read that wall, you're going to see certain things over and over and over. And I'm afraid I won't fulfill my potential. I'm afraid I'm going to embarrass myself. I'm afraid that I'm not going to be good enough, that I don't have what it takes. That's the kind of stuff that you see over and over and over and over. It is so fucking universal that until you can address that in your own mind, until you can understand the hard fucking truth, which is that you're not yet good enough. In fact, I want you guys all right now. I want you to look to your left and then I want you to look to your right and see the people sitting around you. And I want you to know this about them. Their dream almost certainly is not going to come true. Now that's some dark shit to open an evening like this on. And like I said, when you guys are all standing and cheering and it was so nice and I should just come and say some nice things to you, but. But that is my biggest fucking fear in life. Lisa and I have already been very financially successful. We don't have to work, and yet we're working harder than ever because I believe that there is a way for the most average of people to actually make their dreams come true. But I am only interested in the actually part. I spent a lot of years of my life being an empty dreamer where I had a vision of what I wanted. I had all the fucking ambition in the world, but I did not have the drive, the fortitude to. To do what his shirt says, which is do the work. Now, if they had let me, that shirt would read do the fucking Work to really get people's attention, because that's the truth. And for those of you that resonate with David Goggins, like, then you'll get the thing that you have to have inside you if you wanna be successful. Now, in all of these talks, I'm going to make one presupposition. And if you're with me on that, then it's gonna be a good night. And if you're not, maybe it'll be fun and entertaining, but at the end of the day, I don't know that I'm going to be of use to you. And the supposition that I'm going to make is that you want to be extraordinary, you want to do something big, that the dream that you have is worth fighting for. That's also why I say when you look to your left and to your right, the people that you're looking at are almost certainly going to fail at making their dreams come true. Unless. Unless in these 90 minutes, and this is my intention, in these 90 minutes, we're able to touch on the real shit that it takes to actually be successful, to get your head in the place you need to be and then to do the things you actually need to do. All I'm going to be talking about tonight, it is a game of fucking execution. Once you realize success is not some mysterious thing, it is simply a relentless game of execution, of falling on your fucking face, embarrassing yourself over and over, picking yourself back up and asking one simple fucking question. Why did I fail? And if you can ask that question without pointing the finger at somebody else, but really look at what you did caused that situation, then you're going to be able to begin down the path of real skill acquisition. A lot of the things that I say are not fucking sexy. And I know I could have a following 10 times the size. There's Jeremy, Mary, by the way, the guy that runs our Instagram page. Do not clap for that motherfucker. And I'm going to tell you why. He may be the hardest working Frenchman you are ever going to find, but he'd be real fucking happy for me to just lie so he can hit his okrs. And if I came on and I spit fire about, man, you could do it. Your dreams are going to come true. This is going to be fucking awesome. I believe in you. Everyone here believes in you. And then I would go shoot myself in the face because it wouldn't fucking work. And when you get to like, what do you really want? Like, someone put up on the wall that their Big fear was watching someone they love suffer in front of them and feel powerless to do anything. Now, I will hazard a guess that many of the people in this room are living that nightmare right now. How many people here have someone they love who is living a very suboptimal life because they can't get their mind in the right place? That's basically all of us. So that is the human condition. The human condition, truly, I think the Buddhists have it right. The human condition is fucking suffering. And what I'm going to talk to you about, like I said, there's two paths. One, I'm going to assume you want to do something extraordinary, but it is a path of suffering. And when you understand that, when you understand what you're going to have to fight through to actually accomplish things, then you can begin to really frame things correctly so that you can follow through and get where you want to go and not live the cliche of money can't buy happiness and all that. And you realize that you're chasing fulfillment. But fulfilling is often born of suffering. But it has to be suffering with a purpose. And so when you begin to understand that cocktail, you can differentiate it from the other side of the coin, which is a stress free life, a life that is not on offer tonight because I cannot help you with that. That is not the life that I've chosen for me. I am driven. And if you've read Tim Grover's book Relentless, you know exactly what I'm talking about. For whatever reason, a little bit of wiring, a little bit of reinforcement as a kid, a whole lot of obsessive beliefs and value changing as an adult has led me to the point where the only thing that gets me on fire, the only thing that wakes me up and makes me feel alive, is to believe that I can do anything that doesn't violate the laws of physics. And now I'm just racing against a fucking clock to do it. But now the reason that Lisa and I have had the kind of success we've had is it was never okay for us for it just to be an idea that we pushed out and pushed out and pushed out into the future like we did about having kids, because that we had planned two years after we get married, right? Baby, that was 17 years ago. But with making our dreams come true, we always had after the initial period, which you guys have heard about, and I'll walk us through it a little bit. But after I got past that, it was all about relentless execution and constantly judging myself against metrics. Like was I Actually making progress or not. So if you want to actually make your dreams come true, man, and if I can fucking explain this, this is like one of those breakthrough moments for somebody, like when you really get what I'm about to say. In fact, right now, we're all gonna make a promise to ourselves. You can do it silently. We don't have to have everybody shouting it out. But you're gonna make a promise to yourself right now. Because if you follow through with what we're about to say, everything will be different. If you fail to do this, you'll come back a year from now and you're gonna write the same shit on the wall. I promise. Because this is the part that you have to break out of. Make yourself a promise right now that you will disengage your sense of self, your sense of self worth from achievement, and you're going to marry that motherfucker to pursuit. Once you are wholly focused on sincere pursuit, everything changes when you're focused on outcome, when you're saying to yourself, I want to get rich. I want to win the Academy Award. Ah, those are my dreams. It's an end state, right? It's. It doesn't work. Like, here's one of those things. Things become trite because they're so fucking true. So please, for the love of God, don't make people repeat the most obvious shit ever. Like, money can't buy happiness, okay? Money can't buy happiness. It can buy a lot of cool shit. It bought me a really fucking nice house, in fact. Baby, show the photo. Yeah, we actually own part of that jet company. I'm not fucking joking. How crazy is that? We know the fucking CEO. There was one time where I was trying to get on the flight and they were giving me shit. I can't remember why. And I called the CEO up and I was like, yo, you need to talk to your gate agent. Like, that's fucking money. It's fucking bananas. Money is better than you think. It is more powerful than you think, but it is not at all what you've been told. Money solves money problems. That's awesome. And there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with money. There's no joke. So we run impact theory out of our house. Our house is like 10,000 square feet, fucking swimming pool, balconies, all that crazy shit. One of our rooms is actually called, like, actually, when we bought the house, they called it this. It's called the Great room. And that fucking thing is big. I'm not joking. We once Played Nerf with Nerf guns. We did like a whole hide and seek, capture the flag thing in the fucking house. It was crazy. So money does really extraordinary things. People will chase money forever because money actually has utility. So I am not the guy that's saying, oh, money doesn't matter, or money's not a thing, or money's not worth a pursuit. What I am saying, though, money really can't buy happiness. The very thing you're pursuing in your life is very fucking simple. It is fulfillment. That's it. Now, I sum up fulfillment very simply. How do you feel about yourself when you're by yourself? Do you feel good? Do you feel like you're making the most of your life? Are you tapping into what the Greeks call techni? Are you working your ass off? And that's a key component? Is it hard? Are you working your ass off? Sad but true. Are you working your ass off for a set of skills? This is. Oh, you. This is the angry face. This is about tapping into rage. We talked about that, Elizabeth. Not at rage yet. We'll get there, but there we go. So you really have to work hard for a set of skills that matter to you. Now the skills have to matter. That's a key part of the equation. Once the skills matter to you and they allow you to serve not only yourself but but other people, and then you actually go and serve those people, it becomes this really potent cocktail of neurochemistry. But I want to make sure that everybody understands the game that you're playing is a game of neurochemistry, right? In the last year, at least two billionaires committed suicide. So, I mean, like, it's fucking heartbreaking when anybody commits suicide, but when billionaires start committing suicide, like, if the answer is not just self evident, beyond all imagining, that money is not going to solve the problems that exist between your ears, there's nothing more anyone can tell you. A fool never learns. A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. On this one, I'm fucking begging you, be wise. I'm not telling you not to chase money. I'm just saying it's not going to feed you emotionally the way you think it is. So you've got to completely divorce yourself from this notion of outcome and become completely obsessed with the idea of sincere pursuit. Now why sincere pursuit? The reason to tie your sense of self, your self esteem, your pride, your ego, your identity, all of that. The reason to tie that to sincere pursuit is it's the only part you can control. I cannot promise you that you'll ever be successful. You cannot promise you that you will be successful, but you can promise and know if you actually did it, to show up every day and really pursue it. You control your mindset, you control how you feel about yourself. Nobody can actually get you to feel some kind of way about yourself. You allow that shit in, right? That's like the cheesiest self help shit you're ever going to hear. But it got cheesy because it's so true. So people repeated it a lot. And if you lose sight of that, if you lose sight of what you allow yourself to think is going to control you at a neurochemical level. And at the neurochemical level, that's going to influence then again how you feel and how you think. And then you get into this death spiral where you're thinking negative shit, you believe in the negative shit which makes you feel badly about yourself. And then you get stuck in that and you can't get out. And. And you see a lot of that on the hopes and fears. People afraid they're never going to be able to break free. People in this fucking room that took the time to write it down, that they were never going to get out of that negative loop. And that negative loop is really real. But here's the thing, the negative loop is based in biology. And once you begin to understand what the biology is exactly, then you can begin to take control of your life. And step one is in the biological train is to break the tie that you have between outcome and worth. Once you begin to break that down, then you can step to shit naked and raw and say, all right, this is just practice. And once you're in that mode of practicing, you're in skill acquisition mode. And the name of the game is fucking skill acquisition. Like it really is sort of that dull and boring. It's just about getting so good at something that you can't be denied. And that's one of those things, like I'm gonna say that phrase so much that I worry that's gonna become trite. But that is one of the most awe inspiring notions on the planet. The thought that you could become so good at something that you leave people in awe. And when you can leave people in awe, you can do just about anything you want with your life.
- [18:05]
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- [18:36]
Tom Bilyeu
The easiest way to talk about awe is to think of sports figures, right? You've got sports figures. You see somebody like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, you see what they do and you think, oh my God, like they're given a human body just like I was. But look at what they're able to do with theirs. It's absolutely extraordinary. And, and whenever you talk to the best of the best, these motherfuckers always, they always put in the work. And that is the obsession that anybody that wants to be great and achieve something has to have. It's gotta ultimately boil down to the skillset. Now here's the problem, the reality, and this is where I think most people get derailed. If you're able to detach yourself from the outcome, you're able to start thinking in this new way. It's about sincere pursuit. That idea of sincere pursuit puts you in the path of skill acquisition. The next thing that kills dreams real fucking fast is the reality of what you're trying to build to understand the reality. Who knows what is the second law of thermodynamics? Entropy. Now entropy is a fancy word for chaos. What it's saying is this is a, this is a fucking law of physics. Everything moves towards chaos. A system without additional energy added will always move towards chaos. Think about your bedroom, think about the dining room table, think about anything. You leave that shit alone for 30 seconds. She's already poking him like, yo, motherfucker, I'm going to send him pictures. Because God damn, that's chaos. That is certainly my wife. She's literally laughing right now. Because I am an agent of chaos when it comes to that kind of thing. That is for sure. Anything left to its own devices is going to move towards chaos. All right, staying with physics, how do we then create things that have order and structure? We pour energy into the system. And I'm not saying this in a woo way and everyone in this room has permission. If you ever hear me use the word quantum mind, just fucking punch me in the mouth. If Einstein didn't understand quantum physics, I assure you self help movement does not understand quantum physics. So I want to keep this shit nice and real grounded. That drives me fucking nuts. The reason it drives me nuts is I think it throws people off the trail of what you really have to fucking do. All right? So the thing that really begins to fuck people up is that they have this idea they want to accomplish something with their life. They're able to move over, start thinking about practice. It's all about pursuit. They're judging themselves based on that. Are they sincerely going after it or not? And then they get into the middle of that shit, and it is so mind numbingly boring. In fact, we, I think, have some photos, Lisa, if you haven't already shown them, that are the realities of what Quest was like to build it. Because what people see, they see the sexy side. They see us at the Inc. 500 gala. They see Lisa wearing her Louboutins, showing off the red undersoul. She was very proud of those. But they don't see this shit, which is where it started when nobody knew who the fuck we were. This was before my man Dave Barum, who's hiding in this audience somewhere. This was when nobody knew who we are. Nobody gave a shit. People were actually saying things like, I don't eat protein bars, man. No thanks, I don't want any. We were giving them away for free. People wouldn't take them. We called one distributor up and he said, and I quote, I need another protein bar. Like, I need another hole in the head. We went into a category that had 1600 other bars and flavors and had been declining for years in sales. Nobody wanted the product that we were making, but we believed we had what Peter thiel calls the 0 to 1. We had a secret that nobody else understood. It meant that we had to become our own manufacturers, which is how I went from making software all day to making protein bars all day. So this is me literally making protein bars. Like, this is the grind. This is the boredom. This is the sincere pursuit. This is the showing up every day. We had to assemble our own equipment, which I actually think we have a photo of as well. So this is us. This equipment showed up one day, a big fuck off. Like, semi backs up and we're all like, well, how the fuck are we supposed to get it out? I'm not joking. And we're like, are we really that dumb? And so we're scrambling and we're like, all right. The neighbor in the building, he's got a forklift, but nobody knows how to drive forklift. And I'm like, actually, I do. And my partner's like, what the fuck? And I'm like, as a kid, man, in my family, you had to work dead end jobs. My dad had me in a paint factory. I Worked in a paint warehouse. I worked in a paint factory and a paint store. I'm a fucking certified forklift driver. So we actually had video of me. I turned to the camera. Cause we were filming it, and I was like, dad, wax on, wax off. I was like, fuck. You want to talk about a skill I never thought I would need? There it was. So I literally drive a fucking forklift, put all this down, and now here we are, not knowing, literally, there is a manual in here somewhere. And we are opening the manual, going through, trying to figure out how to put this back together. It was bananas. But this is like this moment right here. One what's on my face? I'm fucking smiling, man. I'm smiling because I believe in what I'm doing. I have a mission. I'm not just trying to get rich. There's something that I believe in. There's people that I love that were suffering, that I wanted to do something about. I had them on my mind. And then truly advanced class shit. And hopefully we'll get into this more later. When shit really fucking goes wrong, man. This is promise to yourself, number two. Promise yourself, number two, when shit really fucking goes wrong, that's the time to laugh. That's the time to be like, all right, if I go playful right now, it will change the dynamic of everyone in the fucking room. I'm gonna ask one person in this room. I want to fucking hear you when I say your name. You better be in this room, too. Casey Elliott, make some fucking noise. That woman is so hardcore, you can't imagine, but she really feels it when she fucks up. So, Casey, when you up, what's my attitude? Am I angry? Am I upbeat? She's like, you're not upbeat. Understanding. Understanding. You'll give me that much, Whenever possible, to bounce in that opposite direction and change the dynamic of the way that you're thinking so that you don't get trapped in your own neurochemistry. Because when you have an emotion, the chances are you believe that emotion, but the brain has this crazy fucking weird mechanism where however big you react, it goes, oh, it was that big of a deal. So if you freak the fuck out and you're yelling and screaming, then your brain's like, yeah, man, it really. It matters that fucking much. Like I said, no cheese on this fucking hamburger. There's fucking cheese on this burger. That shit is crazy. You. You can't fucking do that. You can't put. Get the fucking paper. It says no cheese. And when you wind yourself up like that, then Literally, it just gets hardwired. That, yeah, this really is that catastrophic. But the reverse is true. Something horrifying happens, something terrible goes wrong. And if you can, in your mind, just flip it and be like, yeah, we're going to figure this out. And I remember in the early days when we got the equipment, everyone told us, guys, the bar you want to make, it cannot be made. And I can't tell you how many times we heard that. It's kind of a boring story as to why, but people just kept telling us over and over, it can't be made, it can't be made. We never planned to be our own manufacturer. We thought we'd outsource that. Every time we went to make it somewhere, they said, you're going to have to add liquid sugar to this, otherwise there's just no way to make it. And we said, well, that would defeat the purpose of the whole company. So we're not going to do that. So we're going to go buy our own equipment. They're like, you can buy it, it's not going to fucking work. And we were like, no, no, no, man, this is definitely. People are just being too lazy and we've got the will to see this shit through. So we're like, all right, let's buy it, send it in, got it, put it together. We're like, I knew it. Forklift driving the whole nine. We're like, yeah, we got this. And then we ran the first attempt and it didn't work. Yeah, that shit. You can't make that bar on that equipment. I'll just. I'll save you some time. If anybody wants to buy some old equipment, by the way, let me know. So we had like this area that we called our follies. And so we would take things that didn't work and we would put them over there. And when we first got this stuff together and it didn't work, and we were trying and trying and trying and trying, and it was hours. And by the way, I'm not. I am not. This is a shout out to the guy earlier who told me he burned the ships to be here. I'm not a burn the ships guy. I don't think you need to burn ships. I'm a nights and weekends guy. I think you need to work harder. That way you don't have a gun to your head financially because that puts you in a place to make short term decisions instead of long term decisions. You always want to be somewhere where you're making long term decisions. So we were Running a software company by day, and then on nights and weekends, we were building quests. We were making the bars at first by hand, then we were getting the machines and trying to figure that out. And then when it didn't work, one of my partners was a literal Iowa farm boy, and he had worked on tractors his whole life. And he's watching the line one day as it's just all going to hell, and he's like, I think I can fix this. And we're like, okay. And he was like, no, no, no. You're gonna have to let me cut it apart, though. And if it doesn't work, then we're out. It was like all of our money, and we're like, whoa. Now, you have to keep in mind, I went to Lisa and I said, hey, we're gonna have to put our house up as collateral for this company, and if we fail, then we lose everything. And she literally, without missing a beat, she says, I bet on you. That that is. That was one of those things where literally in the moment, I was like, Say it again. Which she has so many times, that woman, she is for real. Ride or die. But in that moment where he's like, hey, I want to cut this shit apart and then put it back together, but if it doesn't work, then we're out the money, I'm thinking I'd be out of my house. And the one conversation that I don't want to have with my wife is, hey, you know, we. We had literally, I think, just got in the house like, six or eight months before that. So I was like, I do not want to have that conversation. And so that's where the mentality of burning the ships becomes important. But tie it to something that is already real. It's already there. There's no way around it. You're not going out of your way to create more problems for yourself. So I was not going to lose that house. And so that became, like, the thing in my mind, all right, we're going to try this, but we are going to make it work. And so he literally got a Sawzall out and a blowtorch. He cut that shit apart, he put it back together, and it actually fucking worked. And that was one of those moments where you're like, whoa, man, you really do have to have a certain appetite for risk. And so that's the third thing I'm going to say you guys need to do. You've got to give your. Yourself permission to royally fuck up. Because if you're afraid to royally fuck up. If you're afraid to lose the house, it's okay to say, I'm not going to do it, man. I'm going to fucking fight and push and I'm going to do everything I can to stop it. But if you're not willing to accept those kinds of consequences, you will have to play it smaller. So you've got to give yourself permission to royally fuck up. Now, why am I not afraid of royally fucking up? Because I know one thing. This is so fucking important. Failure is the single most information rich data stream that exists. You will never learn faster from anything than you'll learn from failure. One Pain. Psychic pain triggers all kinds of things in your brain. The hippocampus becomes more active. Your amygdala becomes more active. You write the memories harder. Your brain focuses on it more. So there's just this intensity that happens when you fail.
- [31:42]
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- [32:12]
Tom Bilyeu
Also, failure is essentially the closest thing you're going to get to a sporting result. The nice thing about sports, and part of the reason they become like this gladiatorial thing that we obsess over and think about, is because you know who won and you know who lost. You know who's the best, you know who's the worst. You can see the fucking stats. You watch it happen before your eyes. It's very hard in life. We don't often get that. Does my boss like me? Do they not like me? Am I going to get the promotion? Am I doing what I want? Should I even be in this job? Like, you have no fucking idea. And then you make a decision and you don't know. Like, would it have worked out better the other way? Who knows? You never get to try it. So when life slaps you in the fucking mouth and you realize that you've really made a catastrophic error, then if you can approach it defenselessly, meaning you're not trying to protect your ego because you wisely have already promised yourself that you're not going to tie your ego to the outcome you're going to tie it to the sincere pursuit. So you need only ask yourself one question in attempting that thing that I just failed catastrophically, was I sincerely pursuing the right outcome? And if the answer was yes, you get to feel good about yourself. And so you step into that moment saying I tried and I failed. I know that failure is the most information data rich stream that there is. So what is the lesson here? And getting good at teasing that out, facing even more than, I'll say figuring it out, facing what you've done wrong, owning it, accepting it allows you to not make that mistake the next time. And my encouragement to you guys is never judge yourself through the lens of a moment. You're going to mess up, you're going to mess up a lot. And if you loop negatively over that mistake, it just isn't effective. And I always tell people do and believe that which moves you towards your goals. Like if you just repeat that one obsessively in your head, then one day you're going to get to a point where you do something and really makes you dislike yourself. And you're going to have to ask does disliking myself move me forward or not? If it moves me forward, then I'm going to do it. But chances are it's not going to. You may want to feel the sting of it, that may really propel you forward, but. But you don't want to exist in that state where you're just allowing yourself to beat yourself up because no good ever comes of that. At that point it is simply punishment. And so you have to ask yourself the value of that punishment, the value of the duration of the punishment. And so I began to be able to talk myself out of these self limiting ideas, these beliefs about myself not being able to do it simply because I said I'm willing to live even if I don't believe it. I'm willing to live by the edict that I should only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals. And I had this thing in me, I wanted to punish myself, I wanted to beat myself up. When I did something stupid, I certainly started thinking less and less of myself. And it just became ever more clear that that wasn't serving me, it wasn't propelling me forward. And so building in these beliefs, rules in your life become the foundation upon which you're going to build. And so this notion of building something brick by brick, of looking at your life on a long timeline, of not judging yourself in a moment, but rather I like to look at myself in 10 year increments. If you ever want to feel good about yourself, look at your Life in a 10 year increment, because maybe over a month you didn't do anything very interesting. You can't really put your finger on what you've learned or who you've met or have you really made any progress. Maybe you had a bad year. And so looking at that year, you're like, damn. And I really moved backwards. And I asked this question one time of a guy that went through his residency and I said he was about to become a full fledged medical doctor and anybody in itu, this literally just happened this last week. And I said, think back 10 years and what you knew about human biology at that point. Imagine you were going to step out and perform surgery on somebody, or be a GP and make recommendations for somebody with the knowledge that you had then. What would that feel like? He was like, that'd be terrifying. I'd be terrible. And I said, now imagine how much you've learned in that 10 years. And he was like, yeah, fuck. And he's smiling. And I said, now I want you to realize, if you play the game right, ten years from now, you're going to think of who you are today the way that you thinks of you 10 years ago. And that's when this shit gets fun. Because when you realize, stumble here, there, failure fall in your face, whatever, none of it's really going to matter if you're just relentlessly learning and learning and learning and learning and learning. And if you're doing that and if you're staying focused, then you're going to be able to begin to stack these bricks and build the thing that you want to build. But to build that thing, you're going to need clarity. Now, I'm just curious as to what's on the screen behind me. The bad news is, if I were to sit with you and push you on it, the odds are that you still lack that clarity. Now, clarity is one of those things that I talk a lot about, so I'm not gonna beat it to death tonight. But I just wanna say, however clear you think you are, you're not clear enough yet. And the reason that I can say that just beyond a shadow of a doubt is when you know something from like 10,000 angles, you just know it from every which way. You know exactly like quadrants on a map, you know precisely latitude, longitude, all of it down to like a grain of sand of where you're trying to head. When you have that, then you really can come at it from Any angle you can divert for a moment because you know where you're going back to. When you don't have that clarity, you're always lost. And that's where most entrepreneurs spend their time. Because remember, if I was the person I wanted to be, I would have walked out tonight and said, the only thing that stands between you and your dreams is a set of skills. And then drop the fucking mic. But I know that that doesn't break through. It doesn't get through to people the way that I want it to. But once you. If you can return to that over and over and over. Every time something goes wrong in my life, I am asking myself one simple question. What is it that I suck at? I suck at something. There's something I'm doing wrong. By definition, if I were doing it right, then I would be getting the outcome that I wanted. I'm not getting the outcome that I want. Therefore, I'm something wrong. It is all my fault. I'm not trying to feel badly about myself because I am divorced from the outcome. I'm only valuing myself for being a learner, sincerely pursuing. That's it. So I'm not saying all that stuff to kick the. Out of myself, to feel badly about myself, to hold myself back. I'm saying it because the fucking reality. Working your ass off, getting fucking good. By the way, this is me at an airport. We had a delay. In fact, anybody see the Tony Robbins episode? That's me stuck in the fucking airport on our way to interview Tony Robbins. And I was like, this motherfucker is gonna know. I know who he is. The intro was, like, broken into chapter and verse. I had that shit down. He actually. I don't remember if it made the final cut, but he was like, yo, I'm sorry you had to read all that, Tony. I needed you to know. I know who the fuck you are, Tony. But, like, really going in, heads down, like, just. Just believe this. This is my new obsession. The human animal. We don't have big fangs. We don't have sharp claws. What? We have the ability to change. We're crazy fucking adaptive. And I'm sure you guys have heard the quote. It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the most adaptive to change. Our ability to change is unparalleled. There is no other animal that you can find in the number of locations that you can find us. My famous before and after. Hey, nothing quite like standing in front of a group of people in your underwear twice. I would like to point out, my wife put these together. Well, first, let's talk about the one on the left. This is one of my favorite stories. So I had been lifting, believe it or not, for a long time over on the. I guess your guys's left. Yes. So on the left, my. My heavy picture. I've been lifting and lifting and lifting and lifting. And I went to see this friend that I hadn't seen in years, and I wore my tightest shirt, and I was like, oh, man, she's gonna say something. And my wife knew how excited I was. I was like, she's gonna see me and be like, oh, my God, you got so buff. Fuck, what did you do? And sat down, spent the whole night with her, and she didn't say a goddamn thing. Like, didn't even bring it up. I was like, what? And so my wife and I are leaving that lovely, beautiful woman who introduced me, and she said. When I asked, I said, yo, can you believe Sophie didn't say anything? And she was like, oh, maybe she just thought you got fat. What'd you say? That's a possibility. I was. What? I was literally beside myself. That is actually the night that that was said to me. I was like, all right, we're taking that fucking before picture right now, right this very second. And then it's about an unending amount of work. There are two years in between these pictures. Two grueling years of fighting with my wife because she was telling me that I was dieting wrong and I was so fucking hungry, I could not hear that shit. You can't try to take a man's fat burger when he's doing two hours of cardio a fucking day. All right? That's icy shit. But when you put in the work. And the body is a really fucking tangible example of just how much change the human body is capable of. And so when you see what you can do to your body, it is this insanely powerful reminder of just how much adaptation you're capable of. And that game of adaptation, like, once you buy into I am an average human, the average human is capable of extraordinary adaptation. Adaptation follows certain rules. All I have to do to become extraordinary and get where I want to go is follow the rules of adaptation. That is the fucking gospel truth. That's it. That is the name of this game. That is how you acquire skills. You do what is called deliberate practice. Read the book, the Talent Code. Read the book, the Talent Code. It's on my list. So everybody in this room, of course, has already read all the books. On my list, right? Read the book, man. That fucking book makes it really clear. Hey, there are three levels in the brain that you learn in one sort of surface. One's intermediary and then one's deep as fuck in your brain. And that's where it gets into the autonomic nervous system, where things are happening automatically, where you're just good at shit and where you look effortless, like right now, I know one of you people. Even though you know me, you know my fucking story. You know, when Lisa said we were in a room with four people, they were her fucking family. I'd known him for a decade. They asked me to tell the story, and I literally couldn't speak. I had gotten so anxious. I had let my mind run away with me so much. I could not have people talk to me. I couldn't have them look at me. If there was any expectation that I was going to talk, my fucking heart would start racing. So nothing that you're seeing right now is the result of, oh, he has natural talent. But I know that's where people go. Because you do something so much like none of you are thinking about. I'm not joking. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a standup comic. So I would spend fucking hours with a hairbrush in front of the fucking mirror making faces and shit. And the fact that now I only have two faces really pisses me off. I have big smile and neutral, and I look pissed. Literally. We just had this conversation yesterday at Impact Theory, and somebody was like, you know, have you ever thought about standing in front of the mirror? Yes, I've already fucking done it. I did that when I was 12. God damn. It didn't help. Here we are. But you clock so many hours doing something over and over and over that you really, if you do it in a deliberate way. And Daniel Coyle, in the book the Talent Code, breaks down exactly what deliberate practice is. It is not simply repeating something. It is going to the thing you suck at. So you often will hear people say, hey, just figure out what you're good at and do that. I have never, ever, once, ever encountered something where I could get paid to just masturbate. So if that's the fucking deal, then I'm in trouble. But that shit I took to that fast, I won't lie about that. No training, nothing. I just fucking. I knew what to do was fucking amazing. But getting good at other shit that I could actually monetize and do something with, that's been a very different story. That's all been about deliberate practice. It's been about figuring out how the brain works, really understanding the brain science of this all and getting into that and structuring things like that. So you're going, what am I weak at? Where am I not good? What is the thing that I need to focus on? Because once you start doing that, like, once you get into, ah, this is what is necessary for me to get where I want to go. This is the gap between where I am and where I want to be. And that gap is made entirely of skills. Then the fear kicks in and you're not going to believe in your ability to cross that chasm. Okay, now here's what I want you guys to do. Crossing the fear chasm is actually deadly simple. It's the easiest thing you're going to do, but it requires you to unwind some of your beliefs. Because right now, in fact, this is a lot like money. People are going to tell you money can't buy happiness. And they're going to say, then don't chase it. And you're going to think, but God damn, I have to pay rent, I want to drive a car, I need some gas, I need to eat. And so part of it, when people say that, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, money can't buy happiness, but it fucking pays for a car payment and it puts my kids through school and all of that shit. And so you can't like ever make it gel. And fear is the same thing because when you fail, it is going to hurt. You will go through a momentary crisis. I still do. Every time I fail, I go on that roller coaster. The key is how fast can you make that roller coaster. Can you get it to a day, from three days? Can you get it from a day to an hour? Can you get it from an hour to a minute, from a minute to a second? Can you get it to the point where it doesn't even register on your face? And that became my goal. I wanted to see how rapidly I could change my emotional state and could I change my emotional state so quickly that people didn't even realize that I'd had a big reaction internally that I fell on my face and that it sucked and I was embarrassed and horrified. And when you begin to get that kind of emotional control over things, then you're going to be able to move forward. So the key to doing that is one, you have to practice shortening the amount of time that that hurts. But the only way that you're going to be able to do that is letting Yourself off the hook. One to stop thinking the negative voice is going to go away. It almost certainly is not. I've never met anybody who didn't have a negative voice. I've seen monks speak that have been meditating for 40 years and they have a negative voice. It is. This is why I think really understanding the truth of human biology is so fucking important. Like to. To not be tricked by your brain because you know how it works. You know that there are literal parts of your brain. Its job, its job, its evolutionary function is, is to worry. There is a region of your brain called the deep limbic system. Do you want to really get fucked up? This is so crazy. Read the book by VS Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain. And he talks about syndromes where people get certain parts of their brains damaged. And there is a part of your brain, the deep limbic system. If I fuck that up in you, you no longer experience emotion. So your brain has a region that tells you not what's happening. It tells you how to feel about what's happening. If that doesn't right there already tell you you're living in the fucking Matrix. Your brain has no intention of just giving you like objective data. It's not about that. It's not just saying there is a thing with fur, a face, a heartbeat, claws. It's six inches, you're dead. Right? It's like, yo, motherfucker, something moved. It's a little bit orange. Run like fucking hell. And that's it. And so you have these things, that's their job to keep you alive, to keep you safe. But now you put yourself in a modern context, you have to know what's going on so that you can de escalate that shit. Because more people, or I should say people, are more afraid of speaking at a funeral, giving the eulogy than they are of being in the fucking casket. Like about the time that you are so afraid of what other people think you would rather be doing dead than be embarrassed. That's when you know your mind is not always working for you. Once you begin to realize, oh, my mind is not always working for me, it does not have the same agenda that I have, then you can begin to say, okay, how's it work for me? How does it work against me? What are the rules? How can I bend some of these? This is why I'm obsessed with the movie the Matrix. It is the perfect metaphor for the human condition. I don't think we actually live in a simulation except for the one created in our own minds. Right, David Eagleman episode. Watch that one. He talks about how your brain is literally encased in total darkness. And yet right now, do you not all feel like you're perceiving light? It feels like the fucking light is just getting into your brain, but it is not. It is being translated into electrical chemical signals that your brain then translates and creates a virtual representation of what it sees. And it's good enough that you don't bump into too much shit, but it is all fucking painted with what the brain thinks you need to stay alive. And one of the things it thinks you need to stay alive is a really fucking negative voice telling you, don't fucking do that, man. You're really going to fuck that up now for real. People are going to be super embarrassed when you fuck that up. You're probably going to lose your house. By the way, you barely got this job. If you quit this job and go to another job, who knows how long you've heard the economy is going to turn. What the fuck are you going to do then? Are you going to get laid being broke? Uh huh. Real sexy in the back of a fucking minivan. And that shit just plays and plays and plays and plays and plays. And if you know it's coming, then you can interrupt it and you can insert other beliefs that actually make fucking sense because they move you towards your goal. Right? Which is why we have to have clarity. So once you have clarity, you know what your goal is. You only believe that which moves you towards your goal. You hear the negative voice. That does not move you towards your goal, you interrupt it. Because you understand the way the brain works. You hit it with this mantra phrase, whatever rule, belief, whatever that thing is. And now you're changing your neurochemical state so you don't actually feel that oppression. But that's what I want people to understand is all of this. You're living this life in this neurochemical soup, like shit is going to happen. You're going to feel some kind of way all the time. And that feeling is as real as you let it be. Or you can be like, no, I don't choose to feel that and then change the narrative and feel something else. And that sounds like just self helpy words. That shit is real. That is the truth of the human condition. There's a book called the Brain that changes itself. Think about that. You have an organ between your ears. It is considered to be the most complex thing in the universe. More complex than the stars, more complex than fucking plants. And if you know anything about Photosynthesis, those motherfuckers are not for play. I mean, we can get into all the like crazy plant shit that, that's like a whole thing. But there are a lot of, lot of really complicated things in this universe and nothing comes close to the complexity in the human brain. And so beginning to understand how to leverage that thing, to not be beholden to it, to really begin to harness its power so that you can move where you want to go, you can take control of that process and propel yourself forward. But it all comes back to actually understanding how it works. And when you understand that you're living in this neurochemical soup, that all of that stuff is alterable and that it changes through thought alone, that's crazy. Through thought alone you can change, you can change the physical wiring of your brain, the most complicated thing in the universe by thinking about changing it. By thinking about changing it. And if there's anyone in this room that is, I, I am not an expert on this, but I find myself deeply, deeply, deeply fascinated by it. If there's anyone here suffering from major trauma, something has happened to you, and just a room this size, I can guarantee a massive percentage of you have. You owe it to yourself to explore medically supervised MDMA or something like that. Now why? I've never done it, but why do I think, if I had a trauma, I guarantee it is the fucking first thing I would do? Why? Because what it's doing. You guys know who Roger Bannister is? 4 minute mile. All right, the notion that the 4 minute mile was beyond human capabilities stood for decades. So imagine for decades, we have professional running track and field people going for it. I'm going to do it. No, you're not. It's not possible. The lungs, the heart, they can't handle it. People kept getting close, but nobody could break it. And so everybody just said, look, it is medically impossible. Humans cannot run a four minute mile. Just fucking accept it and move on. And then one guy was like, no, I refuse to believe that. He was a medical student. And I don't know if some of it came from actually understanding the body. And he was like, there's nothing in the physiology of the human body that would tell you you can't run a second faster. So for decades this thing stands. Then people started saying, well, maybe somebody could break it. But it would have to be under perfect conditions. It would have to be windless day, dry conditions, and he would have to be in front of like a big crowd cheering him on to run his best performance ever. And Roger Bannister shows up on a rainy, cold, wet, windy day in front of like 26 people. And motherfucker breaks the record. Now that's not the trippy part. The trippy part is 19 days later somebody else broke. The motherfucker beat his record. It stood for decades. Imagine something standing for 40 years and then within 19 days it's broken again. Within a year. Within a year, three people break it in the same race. Once you believe something is possible, once you taste that thing, that other thing, like Tony Hawk when he was trying to do the 900, he was like, honestly, I didn't know if it could be done. And so once he landed it, then everybody started doing it and it just became Dave Rigueur. Like, yeah, of course if you can't do the 900, you can't even fucking compete. But it had stood for so long until you could see, oh, it can be done. So the MDMA thing is it puts you in such an altered brain state that you realize you can love yourself again. And when you feel that just fucking intense acceptance and you're looking at the trauma, you're looking at the trauma. Do this with somebody who knows what the fuck they are doing. Not saying go to Vegas and get ecstasy, medical treatment, mdma, find a study, they're out there. But being able to taste that other thing, the other state of loving and accepting yourself totally. Even though the neurochemistry is going to radically change as you come out of that, you've now tasted it, you've run the four minute mile. You know, it is possible, you've experienced it, you lived it, you were there. It's not somebody telling you about that shit, it is actual to you. You know, it's possible. And that's the fucking thing about success. That's what I want you guys to taste. I want you to know that this has been broken by somebody just as dumb as you. I'm not joking. You look at me as like an after photo. I look at me as a before photo. Like if you show me, this is one of our first offices, but if you show me, and I don't know if you already rolled them, baby, but show the photos of me as a kid. So genius, right? Obviously you can tell that kid's fucking bright, he's going places. I used to wear that all the time. And yep, there's another one. This was a. This is a hat I was particularly fond of. So I did not take myself very seriously. So when I always tell the story that my own Mother, who was my biggest cheerleader, quietly assumed that I was going to fail when I left for college. There she is. What's up, moms? So she had reason to believe that I was going to fail. I didn't take myself seriously. I didn't take anything seriously. I cheated all the way through high school and it wasn't until shame, quite frankly, started dragging me out of bed. I was engaged to the Lovely and beautiful Mrs. Elizabeth Bilyeu. And, and yeah, and she would come home. This is. We were living at her mom's house, by the way. And that's not sexy. Living at her mom's house. She was working, I wasn't. And my only job was to make her a sandwich when she came home for lunch. Because she would come home for lunch and I would lay in bed saying, I'm gonna get up in five minutes. Five minutes, fine, I'm gonna get up in five minutes. And I would lay in bed for three, four, sometimes five hours in the morning. And the only thing that got me up was knowing if I didn't get up right then, I wasn't gonna have her sandwich ready when she came. And that was like a shame too deep to bear. And so I would scramble down my hair a mess in just sweatpants, the same sweatpants that I wore every day, which she did not find very sexy. And I would make her a sandwich and be kinda mad if she seemed a little off that, you know, I had. I made the sandwich. Yeah, you know, if you could do your hair, maybe that would be nice. I was just like, jesus, ask, ask, ask. And finally I realized I told her I was going to make her rich. And when I proposed to, when I went to her dad to ask for his blessing to propose to her, he told me no, he wasn't going to give me his blessing. And he asked me a super powerful question and he said, how are you going to take care of my daughter? I was broke, I didn't have a job. And I said, sir, look, I know what you see is a broke kid who's under educated from Tacoma, Washington. And what you don't see is that I'm the most ambitious person you've ever met. And I thought he would be moved. And I thought he would be like, you know what, kid, good on you. Go marry my daughter. And he didn't. He was like, look, you can have sex with her, but for the love of God, do not marry my daughter. And I'm not joking, he didn't use those words in his defense, but he made it abundantly clear. I'm not old fashioned, Tom. I'm not old fashioned. And. They have a Greek phrase, siga siga, which means slowly, slowly. So that became like the mantra for the whole family because everybody knew that Andreas had this whole thing where he wanted me to take it slowly and I was going far too fast for him. And I said, look, sorry, I respect what you're saying, but I am going to propose to your daughter. And there I am. She said yes. I gave her the whole speech. I'm going to make you rich. This is going to be fucking amazing. I've got all this ambition, I'm going to make it happen. And as I'm laying in bed, I have a pivotal realization, which is that there is a massive chasm between ambition and drive. And I had the ambition and I did not have the drive to see it through. But I was so ashamed of myself that that shame actually propelled me forward because I now had essentially people watching. I had a father in law who wanted to know what I was going to make myself. I had my fiance who wanted to know, like, if I was really going to be the man that I promised her I was going to be. And so that got me moving and that got me headed in the right direction and that got me into all the things that you see now. But it was this incredibly long journey of being disappointed in myself and having shame and not knowing what I was doing and being in over my head and spending so much time in over my head that I end up developing crushing anxiety because I'm failing so much and I'm failing so often. But I have not yet divorced myself from the outcome. So because I'm so tied to the outcome, every hit is a hit to who I am. And so I begin turning inward and I'm thinking less of myself. Even though I'm moving up and moving forward. I just spend so much time, much time smack bang on my face doing something stupid, saying something stupid, actually something up and costing a lot of money over and over and over. And so because I thought that meant I was bad, I was unworthy, I was never going to be able to achieve something. It was sending me into this death spiral. And it wasn't until I really started having to learn about the brain to get out from underneath the anxiety that I began to put a lot of the pieces in place, the rules, the beliefs and everything that ended up allowing me to catapult forward. And that is what for Lisa and I, impact theory is all about. It's just getting people to realize you're an average human being, an average human is enough. You can change far more than you think, but it's going to be really, really fucking hard. And so I cannot promise you that it is going to be easy. Because the dreams that you guys want to do, they're big. And some of you guys have specific dreams that are gigantic. And I fucking love that. And while I think the most powerful thing you can give any human being is doubt, I'm not going to give you that tonight. What I want to give you tonight is a very simple idea. You can have, do, and become anything you want. Anything you want, if it doesn't violate the laws of physics. You can have it, do it, become. It doesn't matter your age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, Literally none of it matters. But what does matter is you have to become extraordinary. So the first step in this incredibly arduous journey that you're going to be on if you want to be extraordinary, is simply to believe you can become extraordinary. It will be hard, you will fail, you will be afraid, you will embarrass yourself. You will make mistakes. There will be the dark night of the soul. And in that moment, in that dark night of the soul, the only thing that's going to rescue you are your beliefs about the way the world works. Because you're not going to feel good about yourself. But if you can piece that mindset together where it's about the pursuit, that you're a learner, that's your identity, then you can begin to cobble this stuff back together and get back up on your feet and get moving. So said, simply, the idea I want to leave you with, it does not matter who you are today. It only matters who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there. Thank you.
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