The Fastest Path to Success in Today’s Unpredictable World | Tom Bilyeu (Archived Episode)

If you’re like most people, odds are that you’re not exactly where you want to be in life. But no matter what your definition of success is, or what you’re trying to accomplish, the simple truth is this: you’re not yet where you want to be because you don’t yet have the skills required to get there. In this talk at the Ice House in Pasadena, CA, I dive deep into the hard truths about what it takes to become extraordinary, regardless of what you’re pursuing. If you’re feeling stuck, lacking ambition, or just don’t think you’re good enough to get where you want to go, then buckle up because this talk will shake you out of your comfort zone and get you back on track to pursuing a life of fulfillment! SHOW NOTES: 00:00 | Ambition vs. Drive 11:12 | Self-Worth and Achievement 19:07 | Grit Isn’t Sexy 30:34 | Permission to Fail 39:13 | The Ultimate Adaptation Machine 45:39 | The Brain That Changes Itself 56:28 | Being Average Is Enough CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Range Rover: Explore the Range Rover Sport at https://landroverUSA.com https://landroverusa.com Rosetta Stone: Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com Miro: Bring your teams to Miro’s revolutionary Innovation Workspace and be faster from idea to outcome at https://miro.com Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Found Banking: Stop getting lost in countless finance apps and try Found for free at https://found.com/impact Momentous: Shop now at https://livemomentous.com and use code IMPACT for 20% your new Momentous routine Factor: Get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month while your subscription is active at https://factormeals.com/impacttheory50 with code impacttheory50 https://factormeals.com/impacttheory50 StopBox: Get 10% off, plus Buy One Get One Free for the StopBox Pro with code IMPACT at https://stopboxusa.com What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business: join 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: see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox: 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://cms.megaphone.fm/organizations/0482bfe8-8502-11ed-af5d-3bdc320068d7/podcasts/0a41f61a-9ddf-11ed-9eb7-dbb3a40775f5/episodes/8ac68366-8a85-11ef-bb65-abca3ffdcf54/www.twitch.tv/tombilyeuwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://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?

  Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby, and then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University, and the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement.

• 1:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Failure is the single most information-rich data stream that exists.

• 1:22Tom Bilyeu?

  I cannot promise you that you'll ever be successful.

• 1:29Tom Bilyeu?

  The very thing that you're pursuing in your life is very fucking simple. It is fulfillment. That's it.

• 1:40Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 1:53Tom Bilyeu?

  So you've got to completely divorce yourself from this notion of outcome and become completely obsessed with the idea of sincere pursuit.

• 2:05Tom Bilyeu?

  The reason to tie that to sincere pursuit is it's the only part you can control.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  And now, please put your hands together for A Night with Tom Villiers.

• 2:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Hi, I'm about to ruin that fucking good mood, let me tell you, right now. We'll see how fast we can get, uh, 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, um, bring me out to an event. I wanted it to be something where if you came to ten of them in a row, every one of them was gonna 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,

• 3:11Tom Bilyeu?

  because nobody knew what the hell tonight is gonna be. And quite frankly, I know what my intention is, I know what I wanna 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,

• 3:54Tom Bilyeu?

  then we can actually get to the true nature of success. And that's what I wanna 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 gonna see certain things over and over and over. "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 kinda 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.

• 4:38Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 4:49Tom Bilyeu?

  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 were all standing and cheering and it was so nice and I should just come and say some nice things to you. 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.

• 5:31Tom Bilyeu?

  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 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, 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 want to 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 going to 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.

• 6:16Tom Bilyeu?

  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 that 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.

• 7:01Tom Bilyeu?

  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 that 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.

• 7:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Do not clap for that motherfucker. And I'm gonna tell you why. He may be the hardest working Frenchman you were ever gonna 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 gonna come true. This is gonna 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.

• 8:27Tom Bilyeu?

  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?

• 8:44Tom Bilyeu?

  That's basically all of us.

• 8:47Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna 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 gonna 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 fulfillment 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,

• 9:32Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 10:16Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 10:37Tom Bilyeu?

  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,

• 11:21Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna 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 wanna get rich, I wanna win the Academy Award, ah, those are my dreams." It's an end state, right? It doesn't work. Like, here's one of those things. Things become trite because they're so fucking true.

• 12:05Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 12:50Tom Bilyeu?

  But it is not at all what you've been told. Money solves fucking money problems. And 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."

• 13:14Tom Bilyeu?

  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 the pursuit." What I am saying though, money really can't buy happiness. The very thing that 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 called techni?

• 13:58Tom Bilyeu?

  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, this is, this is about tapping into rage. We talked about that, Elizabeth. Not at rage yet. We'll get there.

• 14:22Tom Bilyeu?

  But, there we go. So, you really have to

• 14:28Tom Bilyeu?

  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 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

• 15:09Tom Bilyeu?

  just self-evident beyond all imagining, that money is not going to solve the problems that exist between your ears, like, there's, 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.

• 15:53Tom Bilyeu?

  The reason to tie that to sincere pursuit is it's the only part you can control.

• 16:00Tom Bilyeu?

  I cannot promise you that you'll ever be successful.

• 16:06Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 16:22Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna 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 you see a lot of that on the hopes and fears. People afraid they're never going to be able to break free.

• 17:07Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 17:15Tom Bilyeu?

  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 in the biological train is to break the tie that you have between outcome and worth.

• 17:37Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 18:03Tom Bilyeu?

  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. Luxury brands are not charging you more for better cashmere. You're paying for the storefront, the ad budget, the name on the tag, but Quince cuts all of that out. They work directly with ethical factories, they skip the middlemen, and sell 100% Mongolian cashmere, starting at just 60 bucks.

• 18:47Tom Bilyeu?

  50 to 80% less than similar brands. Now, I gave one of these as a gift last year. It was a big hit, and gifting is really the test of a brand. You might tolerate a lot of stuff in your own closet that you would never give to somebody else. I've got their joggers and a couple of their tees as well, and I can tell you their whole line is high-quality. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. It's now also available in Canada and the UK. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, make sure you tell them that it was on Impact Theory. That's the best way to support the show. I'll call you back?

• 19:31Tom Bilyeu?

  That's the most expensive sentence in business. You mean it when you say it, but by the time you remember, they've already found somebody else. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q-U-O. The business phone that's built so you never miss a call or a customer. Quo writes up your calls for you and one click turns any of them into a task with a name and a due date. The follow-up actually happens instead of living in your head. When you can't pick up at all, Quo's agent does. It answers questions, gets the details, and texts them a link to book an appointment. By morning, you've got the summary and you can jump right in. It's also an official connector in Claude and ChatGPT. Ask who

• 20:12Tom Bilyeu?

  called while you were out and it's handled. Quo is the number one rated business phone on G2. It's trusted by over 90,000 businesses. When money is on the line, always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/impact. That's Q U O dot com slash impact. 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 whenever you

• 20:55Tom Bilyeu?

  talk to the best of the best, these motherfuckers always, they always put in the work.

• 21:02Tom Bilyeu?

  And that is the obsession that anybody that wants to be great and achieve something has to have. It's got to ultimately boil down to the skill set. 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

• 21:47Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 22:05Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm gonna send him pictures, cuz 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 kinda thing, that is for sure. Anything left to its own devices is going to move towards chaos, alright. 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,

• 22:47Tom Bilyeu?

  I assure you, self-help movement does not understand quantum physics. So, I wanna 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. Alright, so the thing that really begins to fuck people up is that they have this idea, they wanna 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,

• 23:31Tom Bilyeu?

  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 Ink 500 Gala, they see Lisa wearing her Louboutins, showing off the red undersoles, 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 Barham, 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 need 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,

• 24:15Tom Bilyeu?

  "I need another protein bar like I need another hole in the head." We went into a category that had 1,600 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 zero to one. 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.

• 24:59Tom Bilyeu?

  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?"

• 25:12Tom Bilyeu?

  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...

• 25:43Tom Bilyeu?

  We actually had video of me. I turned to the cameras, 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 shit 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 shit back together. It was fucking 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,

• 26:27Tom Bilyeu?

  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 to yourself number two. When shit really fucking goes wrong, that's the time to laugh. That's the time to be like, alright, 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.

• 27:07Tom Bilyeu?

  That woman is so hardcore, you can't imagine. But she really feels it when she fucks up. So Casey, when you fuck up, what's my attitude?

• 27:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Am I angry? Am I upbeat?

• 27:30Tom Bilyeu?

  She's like, motherfucker, you're not upbeat?

• 27:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Understanding, you give me that much?

• 27:43Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 28:22Tom Bilyeu?

  There's fucking cheese on this burger. That shit is crazy. 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 gonna figure this out." And I remember, in the early days when we got the equipment, everyone told us, "Guys, the bar you wanna 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."

• 29:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Every time we went to make it somewhere, they said, "You're gonna 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 gonna do that, so we're gonna go buy our own equipment." They're like, "You can buy it, it's not gonna 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... 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.

• 29:51Tom Bilyeu?

  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 wanna 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 Quest.

• 30:34Tom Bilyeu?

  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. 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,

• 31:11Tom Bilyeu?

  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 is, that was one of those things where, literally, in the moment, I was like,

• 31:35Tom Bilyeu?

  "Say it again!"

• 31:39Tom Bilyeu?

  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 wanna 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 wanna have with my wife is, "Hey, you know, we had literally, I think, just gotten the house, like, six or eight months before that." So I was like, "I do not wanna 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.

• 32:24Tom Bilyeu?

  "All right, we're gonna 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 gonna say you guys need to do. You've got to give 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 gonna do it, man, I'm gonna fucking fight and push, and I'm gonna 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 gotta give yourself permission to royally fuck up. Now, why am I not afraid of royally fucking up?

• 33:09Tom Bilyeu?

  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. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in.

• 33:50Tom Bilyeu?

  An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. There's no credit card payment needed.

• 34:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes. 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?

• 35:17Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 35:38Tom Bilyeu?

  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?

• 36:08Tom Bilyeu?

  And getting good at teasing that out and 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 to the lens of a moment. You're going to mess up. You're gonna 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 gonna get to a point where you do something and it really makes you dislike yourself.

• 36:50Tom Bilyeu?

  And you're gonna have to ask, "Does disliking myself move me forward or not? If it moves me forward, then I'm gonna do it." But chances are, it's not going to. You may wanna feel the sting of it, that may really propel you forward. But you don't wanna 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.

• 37:32Tom Bilyeu?

  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 want it, 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...

• 37:54Tom Bilyeu?

  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, man, 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.

• 38:39Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna 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, 10 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.

• 39:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Because when you realize, "Ah, stumble here, there, failure, fall on 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 gonna need clarity.

• 39:46Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 40:29Tom Bilyeu?

  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've walked out tonight and said, "The only thing that stands between you and your dreams is a set of skills." 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 doing something wrong.

• 41:14Tom Bilyeu?

  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 shit 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."

• 41:55Tom Bilyeu?

  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."

• 42:08Tom Bilyeu?

  I was like, "Tony, I needed you to know. I know who the fuck you are, Tony."

• 42:15Tom Bilyeu?

  But like, really going in heads down, like just, just believe this. This is my new obsession.

• 42:25Tom Bilyeu?

  The human animal.

• 42:28Tom Bilyeu?

  We don't have big fangs, we don't have sharp claws.

• 42:35Tom Bilyeu?

  What we have is 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,

• 43:19Tom Bilyeu?

  your guys' left, yeah. So, on the left, my heavy picture. I'd 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! And 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 saw you got fat."

• 44:04Tom Bilyeu?

  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, alright, we're taking that fucking before picture right now. Right this very second.

• 44:23Tom Bilyeu?

  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, alright? That's icy shit.

• 44:47Tom Bilyeu?

  But when you put in the work, you, and the body is, 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.

• 45:31Tom Bilyeu?

  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's sort of surface, one's intermediary, and then one's deepest 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.

• 46:13Tom Bilyeu?

  You know when Lisa said, we were in a room with four people. They were her fucking family. I'd known them for a decade. They asked me to tell a 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 gonna talk, my fucking heart would start racing.

• 46:38Tom Bilyeu?

  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 stand-up 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, goddammit, 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,

• 47:23Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 47:46Tom Bilyeu?

  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. It was fucking amazing.

• 48:05Tom Bilyeu?

  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 wanna 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 gonna believe in your ability to cross that chasm, okay? Now, here's what I want you guys to do.

• 48:50Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna tell you, "Ah, money can't buy happiness." And they're gonna say, "Then don't chase it." And you're gonna think, "But goddamn, I have to pay rent. I wanna 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,

• 49:34Tom Bilyeu?

  it is going to hurt.

• 49:38Tom Bilyeu?

  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?

• 50:19Tom Bilyeu?

  And when you begin to get that kind of emotional control over things, then you're gonna 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 gonna be able to do that is letting yourself off the hook. One, to stop thinking the negative voice is gonna 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 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 to worry.

• 51:05Tom Bilyeu?

  There is a region of your brain called the deep limbic system. If you want to really get fucked up, this is so crazy. Read the book by V S 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.

• 51:43Tom Bilyeu?

  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're so afraid of what other people think you would rather be dead than be embarrassed.

• 52:27Tom Bilyeu?

  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

• 53:12Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna fuck that up." Now, for real, people are gonna be super embarrassed when you fuck that up. You're probably gonna 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's gonna turn. What the fuck you gonna do then? Oh, you're gonna get laid being broke? Uh huh. Real sexy in the back of a fucking minivan.

• 53:51Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna happen. You're gonna feel some kind of way all the time. And that feeling is as real as you let it be.

• 54:36Tom Bilyeu?

  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'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.

• 55:20Tom Bilyeu?

  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,

• 56:02Tom Bilyeu?

  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 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?

• 56:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Because what it's doing, you guys know who Roger Bannister is? Four Minute Mile. All right. The notion that the Four Minute Mile was beyond human capabilities stood for decades. So imagine, for decades, we had professional running, track and field, people going for it. "I'm gonna 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 fucking 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.

• 57:32Tom Bilyeu?

  It would have to be a 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.

• 58:12Tom Bilyeu?

  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 de rigueur, like, yeah, yeah, 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.

• 58:56Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna 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.

• 59:35Tom Bilyeu?

  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 um, show the, the photos of me as a kid.

• 59:52Tom Bilyeu?

  So, genius, right? Obviously. You can tell that kid's fucking bright. He's going places. Uh, I used to wear that all the time. And yup, 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 uh, 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.

• 1:00:37Tom Bilyeu?

  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 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, five, I'm gonna get up in five minutes."

• 1:01:18Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 1:01:30Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I would scramble down, my hair a mess, in just sweatpants, the same sweatpants that I wore every day, which she uh, 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. And I was just like, "Jesus, ask, ask, ask."

• 1:01:57Tom Bilyeu?

  And finally, I realized.

• 1:02:03Tom Bilyeu?

  I told her I was gonna 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 gonna give me his blessing. And he asked me a super powerful question. And he said, "How are you gonna 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 undereducated 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 ya.

• 1:02:48Tom Bilyeu?

  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

• 1:03:12Tom Bilyeu?

  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, sir, I respect what you're saying, but I am gonna propose to your daughter." And there I am. She said, "Yes." I gave her the whole speech. "I'm gonna make you rich. This is gonna be fucking amazing. I've got all this ambition. I'm gonna 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.

• 1:03:55Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna make myself. I had my fiancee who wanted to know like if I was really gonna be the man that I promised her I was gonna 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.

• 1:04:38Tom Bilyeu?

  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 smack bang on my face doing something stupid, saying something stupid, actually fucking 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 fucking 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.

• 1:05:20Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna be really, really fucking hard.

• 1:05:38Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I cannot promise you that it is going to be easy. Because the dreams that you guys wanna 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 gonna give you that tonight.

• 1:06:02Tom Bilyeu?

  What I wanna give you tonight is a very simple idea.

• 1:06:07Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 1:06:52Tom Bilyeu?

  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

• 1:07:37Tom Bilyeu?

  and the price you're willing to pay to get there. Thank you.

• 1:08:01Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:08:46Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:09:04Speaker 02

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