Moment 6 - Tom Bilyeu on The TRUE Meaning of Success

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Here’s a conversation I had with Tom Bilyeu in Episode 24. Together we discuss the shift in drive which Tom experienced after acquiring large amounts of wealth as he recounts his transition from being money-driven to in search of a deeper and meaningful sense of fulfilment. What truly IS success, and how can pursuing fulfilment get us there? Episode 24 - https://g2ul0.app.link/mQgUuTVrmgb Tom: https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  What role does money play in your, as a motivator for you in your career, but also as a, in terms of your happiness? And this is a question I'm asking because I want to know the answer.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 0:17Steven Bartlett?

  I'm hoping you're, you know, ahead of me, so you can maybe reach back down and let me know the truth.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I wasted years of my life chasing money. Now, what I want people to understand is the reason that people chase money is because money is real. Money is powerful. Money is more powerful than you realize. It's just not at all what you've been told. So here's what I thought about money. This is why I was chasing it so hard. When I looked at somebody who had a big house and I looked at somebody with a fast car and I looked at somebody that was wealthy, I admired them. I was in awe of them. I just thought, oh my God, like that would be so cool to be that person. And I thought I would feel about myself that same way if I just had those things. And I've had the very good fortune of the way that our wealth came is it was all in the company.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  So for a long time, I had a good salary, but for a long time it was, I was just another guy with a good salary. You know what I mean? So I wasn't like really wealthy, even though on paper I was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In my real life, I was living in a normal house. I was driving a normal car. It was like, there wasn't anything really fancy about my life. And then because we took an investment, we sold a small piece of the company, but the company was valued over a billion dollars. It's like all of a sudden, the raw number of dollars is so crazy that you go from a normal guy with like a good salary to like hitting refresh on your bank account a few times because they're like, the money's been wired.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden you've got a lot of fucking commas and a lot of zeros in your account. And it's so crazy. And you have this moment of like, whoa, my life is never going to be the same. This is so bananas. But wait a second, I don't feel any differently about myself. Every insecurity that I had before the money hit, I still have. Like I feel exactly the same about myself that I did a year ago, five years ago. I won't say 20 years ago because it's like you're doing all the work, but it's like. The money didn't change anything. 1,000% it and it won't, it never will because you're not gonna. You're not gonna feel differently about who you are. Now, here's the good thing. I didn't feel badly about myself. Felt really fucking good. I felt like I was a beast. But the money didn't change anything. What changed something was I showed up at the gym every day.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  I put in the work. I did things I didn't want to do. I was willing to suffer in service of a goal. Sure. And once you're willing to do that, once you're willing to be disciplined, earn credibility with yourself. Um, have a why, push towards it, serve other people, like all of those things build your sense of self. And it's never going to be the money. Now, the irony of ironies is that the money is going to be an outcropping of those things anyway in this world, right? Cause this in this social age, baby, like the number one marketing vehicle is to be a good person. And to do amazing things for people and to add a crushing amount of value to people's lives. Like the greatest marketing vehicle of all time now is to be a good person, which is amazing, right? And I think like getting into my story, in fact, here's another moment that was utterly transformational.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  So I'm working in this tech startup with the guys. They hired me as a copywriter. They said, don't think of yourself as a copywriter. You can have any job you want in the company. You just have to become the right person for the job. I spent six and a half years all into a level that most people just simply cannot comprehend. Like only letting my wife pick an apartment that I could get to the guys who are my employers, just my employers at the time. That I could get to their house in seven minutes or less. So she would find a place she would like, and then we would get in the car, motherfucker with a stopwatch and we would drive, time it, drive back, go to the other one and time that. And if it was seven minutes or less, then yep, we can whatever apartment you want at that point. But because I wanted, if they called me at 2am on a Saturday, I wanted to be there in 10 minutes or less. So like, that was my obsession. Like I was just all in round the clock.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  For six and a half years, I didn't actually take a vacation. I would leave the state. But I would have my phone. I'd be watching the business on a camera. Like it was. Crazy. And finally, my wife had to pull me aside and say, look, you're now damaging the marriage. Like, this is just too much. You literally can't work. You can't sustain ninety hour weeks for seven years. You just, it's crazy. So, but that's where I was. And I was just hell bent to become something. I was hell bent to get rich. That was my focus at the time. And it, for the first three years, I won't lie, it was awesome. And I was learning so much, and I was growing so much. It was fucking rad. And there's nothing anybody could have said to me to make me back off. And then it started to take from

• 4:44Speaker 01

  me. And it just was too much, because I didn't believe in what I was building. And so, at about six and a half years, I was like, okay, I'm a multimillionaire on paper. And which, I hope everybody listening, there's a difference between paper money and cash money. So, but I was paper, I was multimillionaire on paper. And I was so profoundly unhappy, that I was like, this can't be real. I'm living the cliche of money can't buy happiness. Like, this is such a joke. Like, I've heard this a thousand times. So how am I being caught off guard by this? And I told my wife, because I had promised her I'm gonna make you rich. I told her dad, who the reason he didn't want me to marry his daughter was he didn't think I'd be able to provide for her. And so like, I had so much riding on being successful.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  And I went to my wife and I said, look, I know I promised I'd make you rich. But I need to do something that makes me feel alive. I need to fall in love with life again. Like, this is so crazy, and I'm so unhappy. And I said, I will do it. I will ultimately accomplish that. But I need to do it in something that I believe in. And so, she said, I bet on you. And that has become sort of the foundation of our relationship, was how ride or die she is. And I went in and I quit. And I was telling the story now, it's such a powerful and cool moment. But at the time, I was deeply ashamed. I was like, I'm quitting. I'm a quitter. And I can't get across the finish line. But I'm just that unhappy. And I know,

• 6:14Speaker 01

  like, where depression leads people. And that was obviously not somewhere I wanted to be.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  But they said, look, we could do this without you, but we don't want to. And so I never quite made it home. So I was literally driving back from having quit and they called me as I'm pulling into the driveway. I'm on the phone with my wife saying like, I did it. I quit like the hardest thing in the world. These guys were the two closest people in my life outside of my family. And I felt like I just let them down, but I finally had the guts to say, I just can't keep doing this. And they called me and they said, come out to dinner. I go out to dinner and they say, look, we could do this without you. We don't want to. And it allowed me to connect to something other than the money. And I said, all right, I have to confess, if we're gonna move forward together, then we're gonna have to sell this company. We're gonna have to build another company predicated entirely on value creation,

• 7:02Speaker 01

  on building community and not focusing on money ever again. Like I'll never again make decisions based on money. It's not that I won't be thoughtful. It's not that I won't build the business in a way that makes sense financially, but I'm never gonna let that be the lead driver again. So I have five drivers, I think most people do. Money comes, it's one of the five, but it's the fifth. And so the other ones, purpose and meaning, autonomy and the desire for mastery, like all of those sit in higher position than money. And so that became my obsession. Like I want to do rad things for people and I want to be me. I want to be authentic. We didn't have these words back then. This is all before social media was called social media. There was no influencers. No one was talking about authenticity and transparency.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  But I came to it out of a, out of a place of absolute pain and suffering. And when I finally got there and realized money is never going to make me happy, that the punchline, and I want to just bring this mic close and eat it, because I really want people to listen. The punchline of chasing success is very simple. Success isn't money. Success isn't fame. Success is not people thinking that you're cool. Success is very simply, I promise you, fulfillment. That's it. Now I'll define fulfillment. Fulfillment's what the ancient Greeks called techni. Techni is having a set of skills that are very meaningful to you, that you worked your ass off to acquire, and they don't only serve you, they serve other people. That's it. That's life. Literally, I have the chills.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  That's life. Once you get to that place where there's something you fucking believe in, man, like you really believe in it and you're ready to commit to it. Think about this. You're in this crazy mansion right now, right? I've got a lot of money. I could have bought an island and retired, but I didn't. I'm working harder now than I've ever worked in my life, but I'm more on fire, more excited, more energized, because I believe in what I'm doing. And because I know that the way that you feel about yourself when you're all alone and it's dark and there's nothing to distract you, how you feel about yourself in that moment is everything. And so when you're doing something that you believe in and that serves, like that's a big deal. And it sounds super cheesy and I wish those words weren't cheesy because it's actually really powerful.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  But there's something inside of all of us at the individual level. We want to contribute to the group. We want to do something rad for people. We want to see that moment where we're like, whoa, that thing that I worked really hard for, that just helped this person. There, there just isn't anything better than that. It's why people like being parents.