Reality vs. Perception: The Big Lie Your Brain Keeps Telling You | Isaac Lidsky (Fan Fav)

Fan Favorite: This episode originally aired on April 3, 2018. Isaac Lidsky has been a child actor, Supreme Court litigator, entrepreneur, best-selling author, and just happens to be blind. After losing his sight to a rare degenerative disease in his early years he learned the power of not just simply seeing the world for what it is, but mentally manifesting what you want it to be and executing. Isaac shares what lessons can be found in the unknown on this episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. SHOW NOTES: Isaac discusses how losing his sight helped him see the world in a new way. [3:38] Isaac talks about dealing with your inner critic. [16:08] Isaac explores his decision-making process during difficult moments. [23:15] Isaac details how he built his own reality despite obstacles and noise. [28:35] Isaac reveals the impact he wants to have on the world. [43:25] QUOTES: "The value in this Eyes Wide Open vision that I speak of is, it's not about science, it's not about blindness, it's about the lessons we can take in really taking control over the reality we want for ourselves. Literally choosing who you want to be and how you want to live your life in any moment." [10:50] "You can live a life of happenstance, of reaction, or you can take some time to figure out how you want to spend your time, who you want to be, who you want to be as a parent, who you want to be as a spouse, and on and on and on. You can try to be that person and you can try to live that life." [21:55] "Every moment of your life is a choice. How do you want to spend that moment? Who do you want to be? It is not the circumstances we confront that dictate the lives we experience." [25:55] FOLLOW ISAAC LIDSKY: TWITTER - https://bit.ly/2q2K4jN FACEBOOK - https://bit.ly/2H2XPXy https://bit.ly/2H2XPXy%20 YOUTUBE - https://bit.ly/2pWQSza https://bit.ly/2pWQSza%20 WEBSITE - https://bit.ly/2Io123h https://bit.ly/2Io123h%20 CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Audible: Sign up for a free 30 day trial at https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY1 Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Thrive Market: ​​Go to https:thrivemarket.com/impact http://thrivemarket.com/impact for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift! American Alternative Assets: If you're ready to explore gold as part of your investment strategy, call 1-888-615-8047 or go to https://TomGetsGold.com https://tomgetsgold.com Tech Unheard: Tune into Tech Unheard from Arm and NPM—wherever you get your podcasts. ********************************************************************** What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20showjoin me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:https://tombilyeu.com/callsee if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:https://tombilyeu.com/sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT athttps://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:http://apple.co/impacttheoryapple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=enhttps://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeuhttps://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeuhttps://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:07Speaker 01

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• 1:37Speaker 02

  You're listening to the Impact Theory Podcast, your source of empowering ideas and actionable techniques from the world's highest achievers. 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.

• 2:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Welcome to Impact Theory. You're here, my friends, because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless, but you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it. So our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest has had one of the most staggeringly diverse and successful careers ever. He began acting in commercials when he was an infant, and then after being cast in roughly 150 commercials, he got his big break in Hollywood when, at the age of 13, he landed the role of Weasel Weasel on Saved by the Bell: The New Class. Overnight, he was a teen celebrity. But the show did not last long, and it was over just as quickly as it had began. But rather than lament the death of his Hollywood dream, he skipped a few grades,

• 2:48Tom Bilyeu?

  graduated early, and headed off to college, graduating from Harvard at the age of 19, and then Harvard Law shortly thereafter. He went on to clerk for Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, ultimately becoming a litigator for the U.S. Justice Department, where he argued more than a dozen cases in federal court, never losing a single one. Somewhere in there, he also founded an internet tech company that would later sell for over $230 million. After realizing that his high-powered career in law wasn't for him, he finally left his high-paying Manhattan-based international law firm and bought a rapidly failing cement company in Orlando, a very unlikely choice that nearly cost him everything.

• 3:30Tom Bilyeu?

  But against the odds, he turned it around, and in just five short years, he established ODC Construction as one of the country's most successful construction companies, taking it from roughly $11 million in revenue to north of $150 million. And did I mention that he did all of this blind? Literally. At the age of 13, he was diagnosed with a rare degenerative eye disease that slowly robbed him of his sight. What he's accomplished in life puts him in rarefied company already, but doing it blind puts him in a class all of his own. So please, help me in welcoming the New York Times bestselling author of Eyes Wide Open, the man whose main stage TED Talk received more than a million views in the first 20

• 4:12Tom Bilyeu?

  days alone, the only blind law clerk ever to work for the Supreme Court, Isaac Lidsky.

• 4:19Tom Bilyeu?

  That's pretty amazing.

• 4:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Pretty amazing dude. And writing that, I was like, your career accomplishments are so crazy, like you don't need to lead with the fact that you're blind.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 4:34Tom Bilyeu?

  It would be easy to write that intro regardless of that. So the fact that you were able to build a mindset that allowed you to do all of that is really astonishing. Now, what set me on fire for you is this whole notion that we live in a virtual reality. Explain that. What was it about losing your sight that led you to that?

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 4:55Tom Bilyeu?

  And then we'll dive in.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  So, you know, we have this experience that, you know, sight is truth, right? Seeing is believing, we say. And you know, you open your eyes, there's the world. It's immediate, it's passive, and it's reality. Well, the experience that I had sort of progressively losing my sight from about 13 to about age 25, really shattered that illusion for me. And I literally saw firsthand that sight, this magical experience of sight, far from objective truth or, you know, external reality. It's this personal virtual reality we create for ourselves that implicates our memories, opinions, emotions, our conceptual understanding of the world, all sorts of things. And yet, we experience it sort of passively as this direct representation of the world. And that really was, if you'll pardon the pun,

• 5:41Speaker 03

  an eye-opening realization for me. That led to this vision that I have because sight is truly just one way, right? That we shape the realities we experience. We create our own worlds in many other ways, really in every way. And having the opportunity to literally see that firsthand as I lost my sight, you know, turned out to be really one of the best things that ever happened to me in my life.

• 6:06Tom Bilyeu?

  That's really incredible that you're able to begin to frame it that way. And one of the things that was so fascinating reading your book is your breakdown of how much resources the brain sucks up with sight. Walk us through that, like how much of the brain is allocated to sight? And then what, how have you begun to sort of re-engage with the world now that you don't have vision?

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Sure, so sight's obviously very important evolutionarily and biologically, but it's not everything. And it's certainly not infallible. And in some respects, I think, you know, as I was saying, I think there's an interesting metaphor to be made or interesting lessons to draw from the way in which we experience sight as this all-consuming, you know, passive reality, you know, versus what's sort of really going on in the world and what's really going on in our minds. And sight's a crazy thing, I apologize if I'm rambling, but so some electromagnetic light hits the back of our eyes, you know, our retinas, photoreceptor cells in the back of the eye respond to that light, send a signal to the brain. We call the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes respond to, the visible spectrum, right?

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Well, that spectrum of light of electromagnetic radiation is 1/10 trillionth of the total spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that's out there. So, you know, we got this back of the eye that responds to 1/10 trillionth of electromagnetic radiation in our world. From that, you know, we create this abstracted, unique, personal, virtual world that involves, like I said, all sorts of things that have nothing to do with data from the eyes. Sight itself is really only about 10% data from the eyes. And yet, we walk around, or sighted folks walk around, thinking that they, you know, quote-unquote, "know what the world looks like." The idea is crazy, it's nonsense.

• 7:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that to me is, is one of the most powerful things about your book. And in fact, the reason that you've said you wrote the book wasn't for people with disabilities or blindness specifically, certainly, but that you wanted your kids to read it one day so that they would have that frame of reference, so that they would understand that basically you're living in this virtual representation, like you said, it gave me the chills, that only 10% of vision is created from the data that's coming from your eyes. And so, the rest is being constructed, it's being constructed by what, right? So, once you realize that your brain is constructing the world around you, and it doesn't necessarily always serve you, then it empowers you to start making choices about not only what to believe, but perspective, how to see things.

• 8:30Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, taking that perspective shift, you've talked a lot about fear, very powerfully. What is it, what is fear? Why is it such a potent force in our life? And with new perspective, what can we do to it?

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Sure, so, you know, real-world experience. Have you ever had, you know, the experience where you spot someone across the room, you walk over, tap them on the shoulder, and it's a complete stranger, it turns out, right? So, you know, we say, very quickly, we say, "Oh, we thought it was our friend," or "We thought it was our colleague." And that's just not true. We knew it. In your world, in your reality, your friend was there. And then it turned out, they weren't. So, fear, if we're not careful, we can experience much the same way. Fear is this natural response. It serves an evolutionary purpose, to be sure. It's very helpful in a lot of ways. But it's also powerfully destructive. So, fear is this mechanism that sort of fills in the unknown, right?

• 9:26Speaker 03

  When we confront times of change, times of crisis, you know, when we're uncertain, our fears kick in and we fill in, really, the worst-case scenario, right? We awfulize. Psychologists call it awfulizing, which I think is a great term. You know, we fill in the worst-case scenario and we have all these dark imaginings. And these are things that we tell ourselves, they're machinations of our own mind, but, much like that friend at that party, these aren't things that we think. We experience them as things that we know, right? If we're not careful. When I was first diagnosed with my blindness disease, I knew that blindness was going to ruin my life, right? It meant I was going to live a wholly unremarkable life, small and sad. It would be the end of achievement for me. I thought I'd never have a family, because, you know, I wasn't even going to love or respect myself.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  How could I expect someone else to love or respect me? And on and on and on. And these were lies, born of my fears, born of ignorance. But for some time, I knew them to be true. And I think, had I not had the blessing of this, this sort of shattering of the illusion of sight itself that I speak of, this sort of peek behind the curtains into, you know, the way the mind works, the wizard behind the curtains, right? If I hadn't learned to see through those fears, eyes wide open, I would have, I mean, that's the world I would have lived. That would have been my life. And the only difference is perspective. It's in here. It's nothing out there, in the world. So, you know, like I said, this journey of mine, losing my sight and then gaining this vision, has been immeasurably rewarding for me and fulfilling. And it's been one of the best things that happened.

• 10:52Tom Bilyeu?

  That makes so much sense to me when I think about the man behind the curtain, or the Wizard of Oz, once you realize that they're there. That's been really potent in my life as well. So, when I first started on my entrepreneurial journey, I was a total mess, and I had no idea how to make the things happen that I wanted to make happen. And I found that my own ego was getting in my way. And that, once I realized that my ego was based on something, and I could change what that was, that I could flip that around, then all of a sudden, I could value myself based on being a learner, being willing to admit that I was wrong, instead of trying to be smart, right, or whatever. And that was really transformative. And being able to visualize the structures of the brain, being able to understand from an evolutionary perspective, why I was set up to...

• 11:37Tom Bilyeu?

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• 12:19Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:03Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:46Tom Bilyeu?

  To be fearful or whatever was incredibly powerful. Do you find that being able to becoming aware of the visual tricks? Cause you've said that things would morph right before your eyes as you were losing your sight. I think one time you said you went to wash your hands and realized you were actually touching a urinal. And but it looked like a sink until you finally realized it was a urinal. Does being able to visualize the the physical machinations of the brain help you with things other than sight?

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. Absolutely. And, you know, as you said, I mean, the the value in this this eyes wide open vision that I speak of is, you know, it's it's not about sight, it's not about blindness, it's about the lessons we can take. You know, in really taking control over the reality we want for ourselves. Literally choosing who you want to be and how you want to live your life in any moment, right? So, yes, we do this with sight, but we do it with the self limiting assumptions we make about ourselves. You know, we do it with the way we misperceive success and weakness and failure and strength in life with the way that we, I think, really misperceive luck, the force of luck in life. Our insecurities, our vanities, our seeming

• 14:58Speaker 03

  struggle to listen to each other, let alone to our own hearts and on and on and on. So this really is for me, it's it's it's it's my daily philosophy, right? It's it's it takes effort. There was no aha moment right up on some hill where it all, you know, flipped, you know, a switch flipped and it all became perfect for me. I struggle with it every day. Some days I'm not so good at it, but it is my aspiration. And it's certainly worthwhile, I think.

• 15:22Tom Bilyeu?

  On the days where you're not so good at it, what actually is happening?

• 15:26Speaker 03

  You know, there are times still when I, you know, have fears, when I fear failure, right? When I wrestle with that critic in my mind, telling me all sorts of awful things. When I, you know, am uncareful and find that I'm projecting onto others insecurities or vanities that are really all my own. And step one is being conscious of it and being aware of it. Uh, but that, that doesn't always mean it's super easy to overcome it. But I, I try again, you know, to, to, I hold myself accountable above all else for my role in, in, in shaping, you know, the reality that I experience in every moment. Uh, so I do try to, you know, talk to my, I do talk to myself often and say, listen, you're feeling lousy, you're worried about this, you're scared about that, you're upset

• 16:10Speaker 03

  about this, and you know, it's okay, you're human, but let's, let's pull it apart. And you know, let's go through the strategies that I've developed over the years to, to, you know, overcome those things.

• 16:20Tom Bilyeu?

  So I want to get into some of those strategies that in the book, one of the most incredible parts was when you buy the cement company in Orlando, which by the way, when you look back on it and becomes insanely successful, like there's a safety net to that. We've all already landed, we know it works out.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:37Tom Bilyeu?

  But you didn't know that it was going to work out. You've got your business partners like telling you, hey, it took me 20 years to, you know, save up and protect my family financially, you ruined it in three months. Your mom is having to offer you money for you to keep the company going. You've already had to tell your wife that we're going to have to declare a personal bankruptcy.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Move in with her parents?

• 16:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Right, just to really make it fun.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And in the book, you actually walk through like step by step, what your brain was telling you, the critic. So you, you differentiate between the critic and the strong man, which I want to hear more about.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 17:07Tom Bilyeu?

  And then you really walk through like super raw and vulnerable those steps. What, what was that like for you going through that? And how, what were the mechanisms or just the dialogue in your brain that you used to silence the critic?

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Sure, so you know, it's, it's, uh, I, I wanted so badly to surrender gracefully. The company we bought was toxic, it was hemorrhaging money and it looked like, you know, we had lost everything. And then I had this, this lifeline from, uh, from my mom, this offer of essentially her life savings. To try to save my business and that was a it was almost a an unwanted offer, right? I wanted so desperately, like I said, to just kind of give up. But again, you're sort of putting my money where my mouth is on this sort of philosophy and taking a step back to really hold myself accountable for the choices I was going to make and what I wanted in life. On the inside of the business, we were even more excited about the vision. We were super excited about our team.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  We felt we could bring technology and professionalism to a very unsophisticated industry. And so logically, rationally, with some money, with some time, we could turn the ship around. And that was certainly a better approach than than giving up, right? So when you're honest with yourself and you know the right step you got to make and you know, you got to do it and you got to get yourself there.

• 18:33Tom Bilyeu?

  What I love is looking at your life, it'd be really easy to dismiss you as just being unnaturally smart and just saying like, look, this guy's a fucking genius, like it is what it is, I could never do what he does. And what I found so empowering about your book, and what I think is so cool about what you're doing in this phase of your life, is in the book, you walk people through where you're saying, you're putting this map together of these incredible entrepreneurs that have come before you that have been bold, but you're not that good. Like, you're never going to live up to that. And I was just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Like, the guy who it would be tempting for me to just dismiss as being unnaturally smart is saying it's easy for him to like dismiss other people as being unnaturally smart.

• 19:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And it is this so natural thing for everybody to have that voice in their head that says that they can't do it. And then the punchline is that it was basic execution that ended up pulling you out of that. So talk to me, what is the strong man? What is that whole concept?

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you know, this critic in our minds, you know, it's that nasty voice that is quick to pass judgment, to tell us what we can't do, you know, to keep us off the field, to tell us what others are thinking and saying about us, right? And the way this sort of critic can be so effective, so powerful in kind of dominating our lives, in my experience, is by through an insistence on perfection, right? Which is impossible. The critic insists upon perfection, which essentially guarantees your failure. Through comparison, relative merit, that critic will compare you to anybody, real or imagined, from any era, especially when you compare unfavorably.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  And the critic will swap out different definitions of success, or value, or purpose, for your own, and you won't even notice it. So, the critic, and of course this comes from Teddy Roosevelt's brilliant remarks about the critic and the strong man. The critic for me really is sort of that embodiment of, again, our fear of failure, our own worst enemy in our minds. Roosevelt's strong man, on the other hand, is someone who has no use for perfection, only progress. Someone who values effort and growth, whose focus is momentum, the next step. Not this overarching enterprise, this overwhelming endeavor, but what is my next step?

• 20:56Speaker 03

  And for the strong man, success lies in striving, in actually striving, towards a noble pursuit, which at the end of the day, is the only thing we can control.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Whether or not we are striving to our best toward a noble pursuit. And the outcome is less important. It's funny you mention that, at the time that I was going through it, I obviously did not know that we were going to turn around ODC Construction, and it would be a great success. You make a big decision, and later it either works out phenomenally well, or is a catastrophic failure. Well, it's so tempting, in the face of the catastrophic failure, to go back and beat yourself up and say, "Oh, this was the worst decision, and I'm an idiot, and this was terrible." And likewise, in the face of great success, it's very easy for people to tell themselves, "Well, man, I must have been a genius, right? I was the smartest guy there is." And just as a law of physics, as a proposition of logic, that can't be true.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  It cannot be that subsequent events determine the quality of actions you make, decisions you make, conversations you have, behaviors you exhibit. You have to assess those things from the perspective of the time in which they take place. So, how does that pan out in my experience? Was I a, you know, visionary genius to buy this struggling construction company when we did? No, it was a disaster. We thought we were buying a humble company, but a going concern. And we bought a company that was sinking like a stone. Did it work out well? Yeah, of course. And it worked out phenomenally well. I'm blessed beyond contemplation. Again, I credit the team with that and the timing and the vision and luck and all those things.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  But I'm not going to go back and say it was a great decision. And likewise, this is the harder part.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Likewise, I think it's really important that we don't read our own press. We don't get too excited about great outcomes where maybe the decisions that led to them or the journey along the way was less than worthy.

• 22:54Tom Bilyeu?

  That makes a lot of sense. There's a quote in your book about The Strong Man that echoes what you just said, which I thought was so powerful. I want to read it exactly as it is. "The strong man savers the first step. He is impatient for it, craves it. As long as he strives valiantly, with his first step, he has won." What do you mean by that?

• 23:17Speaker 03

  We are so often our own worst enemies. We keep ourselves off the stage for fear of bad reviews. And don't even realize that in the process, that first step of The Strong Man, to me, kind of encompasses victory over that critic. That's where you've said, "Look, maybe this is crazy. Maybe it's not. Maybe everybody thinks I'm way off base here. Whatever. All the what ifs, all the why I should, why I should, whatever. I've put all that aside and I have committed to enter the arena." And that is the defining moment, I think, for The Strong Man.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  And I think when we're honest with ourselves and when we start to recognize significance in moments like that in our lives, when we start to say, "Well, if I did this, it would be, it's a big move." And it doesn't have to be a huge move financially or economically. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone else why it's a big move. It's a big move for you. It's important to pay attention to those feelings because often that's the strong man inside trying to tell you. We can do this. You know, we, let's get over this, uh, you know, our fears. Let's get over our, uh, you know, our self doubt and let's, let's do this.

• 24:28Tom Bilyeu?

  You've talked earlier about how people misperceive things. They misperceive success and that the critic will even change the definition of success. What is an anchor point, a vision of success? Is there something that's universal that you think applies to everybody? Or is there a process to defining success in a way that will resonate?

• 24:45Speaker 03

  I don't think so. Personally, I think, uh, you know, who am I to even begin to contemplate what someone else should or should not aspire to do with their time or their lives or whatever, right? We're, we're all masters of our own universes, right? Alone in our own worlds and, and I, you know, I don't purport to tell anyone how they should behave or what they should aspire to or what success should be. However, however, uh, I certainly think everybody, you know, should, should figure it out. You, you should figure it out for yourself because time's going to go by either way. And you know, you could live a life of happenstance, of reaction, uh, you know, or you can take some time to figure out how you want to spend your time, who you want to be, who you want to be at work, you know, who you want to be as a parent, who you want to be as a spouse and on and on and on.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  And, and you know, you can, you can try to be that person and you can try to live that life. So that's what I have in mind when I say, you know, you, you really, uh, should define your success, your purpose and, and labor towards it. No matter how important something is to you in your life, I mean, eventually if you're, uh, if you're going to run yourself down, if you're going to cause a problem for yourself, if you're living an unsustainable path towards the worthiest of goals, it's not going to work out for you too well.

• 25:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, let's get really specific then. So you've had such a diverse life. One, I'll just walk through a few. Uh, why not? You have success in Hollywood, but you immediately stop. You then have success at, at law that is just on another planet and you stop. Obviously the tech firm ended up doing very well, but as far as I know, you moved out of that fairly rapidly. Um, so. All of these things, like you've been able to break free of the trap that most people get into, which is there's momentum in their life, they're succeeding, everyone says they're crazy when they go to leave, but you've done that over and over and over. So you obviously

• 26:32Tom Bilyeu?

  are way in touch with your balance sheet. So like, walk us through one or two of those and really say, like, leaving law, I'm gonna guess, was the hardest one. Like, you had so much invested.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  That was a tough one.

• 26:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, how, what did you walk through? What were the, "I've got this going, but not this"?

• 26:48Speaker 03

  So that was a tough one, uh, you know, unless and until I actually thought about it rationally and logically, right? And then it was pretty obvious. Those are often the hardest decisions to make, right? But, so, you know, here I was, I had been blessed to have phenomenal experiences in law in the public sector, right? Working for the Justice Department, clerking for a couple US Supreme Court justices. Love that. And then I sort of took the easy path, the direct path, you know, accepted a phenomenal cushy job at a very fancy, elite law firm, international law firm. And parents were very, very proud. I had gorgeous business cards and a skyscraper office and all that. But, uh, you know, I was expected to, you know, to work, to bill sixty, seventy, eighty crazy hours every

• 27:32Speaker 03

  week. And I was involved in kind of litigation as warfare with a constant view towards the billings of the law firm. And it just wasn't the way I wanted to practice law. A lot of people weren't people I wanted to practice law with. Certainly didn't want to spend, you know, a hundred hours a week doing it. Just none of that made any sense. So, everybody thought I was completely nuts, and maybe they're right. But, uh, you know, the more I thought about it, the more I said, "Look, you know, nothing is permanent in life. There's nothing that says if I ever want to practice law again, I can't go back to it or in some other capacity or, you know, some other city or whatever. But, you know, for now, what's important to me and what am I looking to accomplish in my life"? Going back to that

• 28:13Speaker 03

  balance sheet. And at that point in my life, really, by far above all else, you know, it was really quality of life and time with my family. Got to talk to my roommate Zach, as you mentioned, and, you know, we thought, "Hey, let's buy a small business together", and he would help me, you know, he'd pay for most of it, but he would keep his fancy day job. I'd leave behind my fancy day job and run it, and, you know, what could possibly go wrong? So that was the thesis, I guess you would say, that brought us to Orlando and that, you know, sort of took me to take the helm as the first chief executive officer of our residential construction subcontractor.

• 28:46Speaker 01

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• 29:16Speaker 03

  And of course, you know, they say man plans, God laughs. It didn't turn out quite that way. But that was a good decision at the time, to leave law. That was the right decision for me and my family.

• 29:29Tom Bilyeu?

  So then the construction company blows up, you make a lot of right decisions. I'm sure you'd attribute it a lot, obviously, to the team, but to luck as well.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:37Tom Bilyeu?

  But now things are going well, and instead of just continuing to scale it and grow it, you decide that you want to back off. Again, a pretty atypical choice.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Well, so look, you know, again, my goal was quality of life for my family.

• 29:53Tom Bilyeu?

  You've said that happiness is a choice.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 29:55Tom Bilyeu?

  In what way? How do we choose to be happy?

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Everything's a choice. Every moment of your life is a choice. How do you want to spend that moment? Who do you want to be? It is not the circumstances we confront that dictate the lives we experience. It just cannot be. There are counterexamples all over the place. I'm just a blind guy, like, that's no big deal. But you know, you think about prisoners of war who endured the most unspeakable of, you know, human atrocities, Nazi concentration camp survivors, and on and on and on. And you find examples of remarkable people who, despite these circumstances, make a choice to find purpose in life, to find joy, to be a source of strength for others in their lives. And, you know, these shining folks, you know, again, to my mind, prove categorically, it's not the circumstances we confront that dictate how we, you know, the lives we experience. So choose to be happy,

• 30:43Speaker 03

  literally, in every moment. And again, I'm not saying it's easy, again, and I'm not, you know, I'm not saying it's always easy for me. But it's certainly a worthwhile endeavor. I mean, you know, you spill on yourself, or you knock something over, or, you know, you're late for a meeting, or...

• 30:57Speaker 03

  You know, it can derail you, it can be, you know, something quote-unquote awful. Meanwhile, most of the world is worried about, you know, healthcare and food and clothing. But, you know, or you can choose to laugh about it. You can choose to have fun with it, you can choose to let it go. And again, I think every moment is, you know, an amalgam of precisely those choices. And I think it behooves us to spend some time thinking about our answers.

• 31:23Tom Bilyeu?

  And do you have a process or a mantra? Or is it as simple as choosing to laugh when you want to do anything else? To actually manifest that happiness?

• 31:32Speaker 03

  It's not simple. I don't think there's much in life that's simple. Everything's nuanced. It really, it sort of, it depends on the context. You're in times of crisis is a little different than fear of failure and other sorts of things. So there's some nuances there. And then, so other strategies I think we can bring to bear to look at things like luck in our lives. And the fundamental idea, like I said, is, you know, you're the master of your reality. And, you know, once you buy that, once you're willing to take responsibility for the fact that, you know, you are literally creating the life you are experiencing, the reality, you know, your reality is your creation. Again, the rest is details.

• 32:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And so getting into some of those details, at least of that process. So we're living in a reality that we create, which I buy into more deeply than you can imagine. Literally, my entire company is predicated on that notion. The success I've had in life is as a result of realizing that, in the same way that you have. What are the processes of making that subconscious process, right? Because we're not consciously creating this virtual reality. It's happening subconsciously. So how do we take conscious control of that? Or what are the insertion points to grab on to something like that? So that we can begin to construct a reality that's more useful?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Sure, so, you know, how to strip away some of the, you know, some of the noise, some of the chaos. Let's take, you know, again, this notion of the critic and this notion of the way we, you know, can keep ourselves off the stage, or we can be our own, you know, worst enemies in terms of our fear of failure. You know, there's several, at several sort of key moments in my life, there were two really simple questions that I've used to try to take back control of my reality. In those situations, you know, one being, what is it truly that I aim to accomplish? I think very often when we find ourselves debilitated by, you know, fear of failure, that, you know, that critic anxiety, you know, whatever. It can be a relief to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. I am loading so much junk onto this, onto what's going on here, onto what's at stake.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Let me just take a step back and remind myself. What am I in this for, right? What am I trying to accomplish? What is my endeavor here? What's my purpose?

• 33:34Speaker 03

  And oftentimes, in my experience, when you do that, there's kind of a big sigh of relief to you. Oh, yeah, this really isn't all that big a deal. This isn't so bad. And the second one really is, what's my best next step? Let's focus on today, this moment, right now. In truth, that's all there ever is. So we spend a lot of time on doom and gloom, future foreboding, awfulizing, and not enough time on this moment, right now. What is my best next step? What can I do right now to make progress? And the truth of the matter is, the world changes a million times a day. You're going to change a million times a day. Who knows what's going to happen on the journey from A to Z? Just focus on getting from A to B and get that done.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  And we'll worry about C to Z later.

• 34:22Tom Bilyeu?

  I love that notion of taking action and strength. And you, in the book, you have an amazing quote about that that I want to read, which is, "Strength unexercised will atrophy; inaction makes us weaker." So flipping that and thinking about something else you said in the book, which is, "There is no blindness with a capital B, only fire hydrants," which I thought was so amazing. Like, how do you use those concepts of encouraging yourself to be strong, to take action with that notion of, and in fact, define, what does it mean when you say there's no capital B blindness, only fire hydrants?

• 35:03Speaker 03

  So I was diagnosed with my blindness disease when I was 13, before I was aware of any symptoms. So, you know, those awful lies I spoke of earlier, that awful sort of narrative I told myself about how it would be the ruin of my life. I spent three, four years really, really feeling that. And those were some awful years. There, it was easy to have this perspective, or without even knowing it, I had this sort of perspective of blindness capital B, to your point. This amorphous force, this sort of, you can't describe it, it's this foreboding, it's this awful future. It's this monster that's gonna, you know, track me down and destroy my life. And that's not a very productive way to think about a challenge.

• 35:46Speaker 03

  That is not, you know, a construct that's susceptible to much, by way of progress, concrete progress. You mentioned the fire hydrants. You know, I went to meet with an occupational therapist at one point, when I still had a great deal of useful sight, but well before I had ever started using a cane. And I was prepared to talk about, you know, blindness capital B. I assumed, you know, she was the expert on, you know, low vision and going blind, and we were gonna be talking about, you know, tomorrow and the future and this awful, you know, fate. And she dove in and said, "Well, do you use a cane?" And I said, "No." And she said, "Well, do you ever hurt yourself?" I said, "Of course I hurt myself, right? I walked into a fire hydrant a couple days ago," and this and that. And, you know, it wasn't until she had to literally spell it out for me, like, "Do you realize that if you did learn to use a cane, you wouldn't bump into things and

• 36:31Speaker 03

  hurt yourself?" That it just kinda clicked for me, and I was like, "God, that's really all this boils down to. It's a million small details like that, which aren't so bad. And they're straightforward, and they're certainly susceptible to some type of progress. But, you know, you can look at it as blindness capital B, this, again, amorphous force, or you can look at it as nothing more than this constellation of discrete practical challenges." And the fact is, every single, you know, human being, every human, faces their own discrete constellation of challenges, right? It's part of the human condition. There's nothing special or unique in facing these big challenges or obstacles, but how we handle them and how we choose to look at them, that makes all the difference in the world.

• 37:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Talk to me about the difference between effort and results. What's the difference, which one matters?

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Oh, effort, absolutely. Effort matters a lot more than results. Results are the factor of a lot more things. Luck being a big one, timing, circumstance, who knows? Like we were saying earlier, you know, there are...

• 37:36Speaker 03

  You know, there's stories of countless entrepreneurs who great vision, great drive, worked hard, you know, tried to make it happen and it just, it didn't work out. It's the nature of the beast. Well, do you say those people, you know, wasted their time, see their failures? No, they worked hard. They strove towards a worthy pursuit, right? They may maybe found fulfillment in who they are, expression of their best self. Okay, it didn't work out. You know, that's such is life. And again, the opposite is true too. There are a lot of terrible people in this world who seem to achieve what we we loosely call success, right? Whatever that means. Financial success, popularity, celebrity, whatever you want to call it. And you know, there are terrible people who without much by way of of effort or character,

• 38:22Speaker 03

  you know, arrive at these outcomes. So what?

• 38:25Tom Bilyeu?

  So one thing that you've had to go through that I think would be really hard for most people and not necessarily that exact thing, but when you're losing something, or if you're overweight, or if you're living with your mom, like whatever your thing is, where you feel unworthy and you had said that you didn't think you would ever get married, didn't think you would ever have kids because you weren't worthy of love, you didn't, you didn't think you would ever love and respect yourself. So how could somebody else love and respect you? So how'd you get over that?

• 38:53Speaker 03

  You know, really in that in that sort of in that moment of epiphany, when I met with that occupational therapist, Chris, and I started to think more about the cane and less about, you know, blindness, capital B. I, it was it was a liberating experience. It was an empowering experience. Started to talk about all sorts of practical solutions I could employ to make my life a little easier, a little better. And you know, that's, that's when it really, you know, hit me. Well, you know, first and foremost, that, that everything I thought I knew about going blind or being blind was, was these awful lies. That's when I was able to make that connection between this experience of sight we have, this virtual reality that we experience as, as truth. And I said, well, wait a minute, isn't that kind of exactly what I did with my fears? And there, shortly thereafter, kind of in that realization, I guess, was, was this idea that

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Life is choice. And I said, if you keep, if you tell yourself you're gonna live this small and remarkable pathetic life and you're, you know, not gonna love or respect yourself and you know, you're not gonna find a mate and all, you can make that happen for yourself. Or you can choose to have a different life.

• 39:54Tom Bilyeu?

  That is so powerful. And when people understand that you're gonna become what you believe about yourself. You talked a lot about that in the book, The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 40:04Tom Bilyeu?

  How is it that, like, what are you gonna teach your kids about self-fulfilling prophecies? What should they be telling themselves? How should they be thinking? Like, if somebody watching this wants to empower themselves, are there things that are like, you could just plug and play, this belief, that thing you repeat, whatever?

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Sure. So, you know, you know, again, throughout the book, I talk about, you know, this idea in different, in different sort of contexts or concepts. So, you know, struggling with insecurity, struggling with how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. For example, you know, we talked a little bit about luck, we talked about fear. And in different contexts, sort of the specifics vary. You know, that said, at the core really is a commitment to introspection, right? Introspection, I think, is a lost art. We can know everything that's going on with everybody, every single one of our quote-unquote friends and secondary friends and tertiary friends through Facebook and LinkedIn and, you know, but really have no idea what's going on with ourselves and our own minds and hearts. And that's crazy to me. That's absolutely crazy.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  But so introspection, I think, is where it all begins. A commitment to talk to yourself, to figure out, you know, where you're at, what you're thinking, what you're telling yourself, what decisions you're making and why. And the rest really flows from that.

• 41:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about communication.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 41:16Tom Bilyeu?

  So what you've done with your company culture is pretty staggering. And you obviously have, and I've been very aware of it in this interview as well, which, total side note here for a second, then I'll get to that question.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 41:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you intentionally communicate with me with your eyes?

• 41:34Speaker 03

  Well, yes, I guess is the shorthand.

• 41:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Because you look me dead in my fucking eye. And literally through this whole interview, I have to keep going, fuck, he's blind, he's not seeing you nod. Like, and I find myself giving you those micro-expressions that we would normally communicate with.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Because it is so convincing when you look me in my eye, I'm like, is this guy fucking with me? Is he for real, Brian? Like, somebody test this guy.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  I've had, I've had people insist that I could see and then I was pretending to be blind.

• 42:01Tom Bilyeu?

  It's compelling, man.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  It's awesome, because I'm like, you are, you got it. Let me tell you all the advantages to pretending to be blind. It's just, I mean, there's no end to how convenient my day is.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  If I live as a blind man, this is great. No. Uh, so, I grew up with sight, and I grew up, you know, acting as well. And so, I'm expressive and I haven't lost that with my sight, with the loss of my sight. So, I do look at people, I know where you are because I hear where, you know, where your voice is coming from. It's amazing what you pick up from, uh, from your ears, if you, if you pay attention. My kids know that I know when they're looking at me and when they're not.

• 42:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  So, I'll say, you know, one of my sons in particular, I love him. When he's not looking at me, when I'm talking to him, I'll say like, are you looking at me? And then, he'll look at me and he'll go, yeah, yeah dad, I'm looking at you. I'm like, okay. Were you looking at me? No, I wasn't. It's like, they answer literally the question, yeah, but, but, um. So, I do probably get more information about what's going on with you than you would think.

• 43:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's, it's really impressive, quite frankly, and it made me think about what you're doing in your company and how you'll have, you'll be talking to them and have to remind them, hey, I can't see if you're nodding. And that that ended up becoming this incredibly advantageous thing because people had to really put words to how they felt.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  I really, there were times when I, I stressed out a lot, I was anxious about the fact that, you know, I thought maybe my blindness was a burden on my team and a, and a burden on my company, because, you know, we get in these meetings and someone makes a point and, you know, and then silence, I don't hear a thing. I'm like, well, what do we think?

• 43:41Speaker 03

  Silence again. And then I gotta be, well, guys, are you nodding, you know? Oh yeah, sorry, we're nodding, you know, we forget that you can't see. It's like, ha ha, yeah, I still can't see.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  That hasn't changed, but you know, and it was again, it was awkward, but I thought again, eyes wide open, hold yourself accountable. Well, maybe it is awkward, maybe you're insecure about it, maybe you're projecting, maybe, let's go through the steps here. Well, this, there's a practical solution here. Is it pretty important that you communicate with your team and you understand what they're saying? Yeah, that's pretty important. Is it worth the effort to communicate orally? Yeah, it's worth that effort. So, okay, next time this happens, you know, note to self, next time they're all nodding or whatever, I'm going to say, okay, you know what, guys, let's go around the table. I'm going to ask each of you one at a time to say yes or no. And that was the aha moment because, you know, of course, first time I did it, you know, you agree or disagree, everyone nods.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Well, folks, I can't see you, let's go around the table. You assume if everybody nodded, everybody's going to say yes, right? Never happened once. You got a, uh, yeah. Well, that's not a yes, you know? Well, let's talk about it. And you wind up having an hour-long conversation that winds up being, you know, critical to the development of the team, the growth of the business, whatever, that you might have skipped entirely if you had just left it at a nod. So ultimately, I came to learn that the anxiety, the awkwardness, the tension was not born of my blindness, but was kind of a necessary byproduct of true, meaningful communication, particularly in the workplace context, right? Where everyone

• 45:18Speaker 03

  wants to succeed, be valued, you know, your livelihood's at stake. And so it's not a natural thing. Again, you know, sometimes we're on, we're sending, sometimes, you know, true and meaningful communication is not, is not the default, it's not the natural thing. But if you can inspire a team, encourage a team, show a team how to relate at that level, there's nothing you can't do. And I know you say, and it was one of your principles is that that's a lie, but you got to tell yourself that, which I agree with.

• 45:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, you got your finger on that one. It's so powerful. You've said that fear rushes into the unknown. How do we get rid of the unknown if it isn't by filling it with fear?

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Well, information helps. Fear, again, is this evolutionary response. There are some helpful reasons to freak out, like, for example, if it's a vicious animal that's about to eat you and you're a caveman or whatever, even if you've never seen this thing before, it's probably a good idea to say, I should get running. But, so how do you overcome that? Well, step one, again, introspection awareness.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Realize that, you know, one, you're afraid and two, do a, you know, careful dissection. What do you know? What do you not know? And then the most critical bucket is, what do you think you know? Because that's where we get ourselves into a ton of trouble. The things we think we know that we really don't. So it's a shame that fear often, you know, just at that moment when we face the greatest need to to take in new information, right, to thrive, to transcend, you know, that's really when fear will will be to retreat deep inside our minds. But that's when, you know, again, it's, it's your choice to succumb or to overcome.

• 46:55Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, before I ask my last question, where can these guys find you online?

• 46:58Speaker 03

  The easiest place to find me is just my website, Lidsky.com, which is my last name, L-I-D-S-K-Y.com. I've got a blog there, a podcast. You can find my book, my TED Talk, but the one thing that I ask folks is if any of this means anything to you and/or you learn more or read the book and any of that means anything to you, please let me know what you think. You can provide feedback directly on the website. I read every single submission and that's why I do this. So, so please let me know what you think.

• 47:23Tom Bilyeu?

  That's incredible. All right. My last question is, what is the impact that you want to have on the world?

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Well, first and foremost, I guess the impact that I have is I want to leave this world with four happy, thriving children. I mean, I want that desperately. Beyond that, you know, I feel that I was, I've been blessed with this vision I have born of blindness and the more people I can share it with and the more impact it can have in their lives and helping them to, you know, choose who they want to be. That's a real gift too.

• 47:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Love that. Isaac, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was incredible. So guys, I'm telling you right now, his book Eyes Wide Open, you're going to want to read it. It is absolutely incredible. It really is a life philosophy about not letting the unknown be filled with fear, about really facing the truth and asking yourself, like he said, what is the most optimal decision that I can make, action that I could take right now in order to move myself forward? It is absolutely incredible, the amount of vulnerability that he shows in the book, the way that his mind works, understanding that we live in this virtual reality and that means that you have control. And my favorite, that everything is a choice. I hope you guys heard that. I hope you heard that you can choose even happiness, that there are steps. It is not easy. But it is a process that you can follow in order to actually embody that and experience that in your life.

• 48:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Read his book. It's literally an instruction manual on how to figure these things out. It's absolutely incredible. It really is an insanely powerful book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. All right, guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

• 48:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.

• 49:12Tom Bilyeu?

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