Dean Graziosi delivers a motivational talk aimed at prompting personal change and congruence between one’s public intentions and private actions. He recounts a working-class childhood motivated by his mother’s sacrifices, early entrepreneurial efforts, and a pivotal moment when he paid for Tony Robbins’ materials—an experience that altered his mindset and career toward information products and events. The talk emphasizes working smarter alongside hard work, using past pain as fuel, and the importance of intentional habits for becoming the person one wants to be.
Chapters
This could be the beginning of a new you, a beginning of not playing small, a beginning of not feeling bad about what you want out of life. Who am I when no one's watching? I don't want to say I want to be the best man to my wife, but I'm doing crap on my phone when no one's watching. I don't want to say I'm. Be a good dad and show a picture on Instagram with me and my kids, but not really listening to them and spending more time on my phone than being with them. I don't want to say that I want to create independence and donate money and build family security and leave a legacy. But I'm binging out on Netflix on the weekend or drinking too much every time I get sad just to default to that rather than do it. I want to be congruent. I want to make it so. And I'm surely not perfect at this, but I want to make it, though. If you had a hidden camera on me for six months, there'd only be a few congruencies, and that's success to me, and I'd love for you to think about that. This could be the beginning of a new you, a beginning of not playing small, a beginning of not feeling bad about what you want out of life. But there are key principles that really, if they're not a part of the ingredients, the cake's never baked. I want to share a little bit, just in three minutes, my backstory. And I think it's important not because I want you to know about me, but I hope it relates to you. You know, we all have the thing that drives us. You're all here for a reason. You're either running away from something that's not so good, something a little painful, right? Or you want to run towards a bigger life. There's something in your life that's uncomfortable, and you want to move away from that, from that job, from that relationship you're in, from being dependent on someone else to show the world to be the woman that God designed you to be or the man God designed to be. Something just doesn't align with you, and you want to move away from that. Or. Life's not bad, things are okay, but you know you're meant for more. You're called to serve more, be more, do more, donate more. Right? 100% of you are here for one of those one or the other reasons, and most of you here are both. You want to move away and then move towards right. We didn't have Money. As a kid, we all got our story. Not poor me, just, this is my. This is my story. But what really was my muse, my motivation, was my mom. She worked three jobs. My parents split when I was three. Dad's a good guy, but he never helped us financially. And my mom worked as a hairstylist and cleaned houses and painted houses. Three jobs to make nothing. Come home. Nine o' clock every night, always tired, and come home to our trailer, right? I lived in the only trailer park in our little town. My sister and I watched my mom work her tails off to where she got arthritis at a young age and her back always hurt. So I just remember being 10 or 11 saying, I'm just gonna get rich. I don't know how, but I'm gonna get rich and take care of that woman who sacrificed so much, you know, so. So we all need that driver. So for me, that was it. So I started cutting firewood at a young age. I started fixing wrecked cars, and I got into my first real estate deal. Then I got a tow truck company. I started building houses. I started doing all these things, and I started getting some real good momentum in my mid-20s. By the time I was 30, I retired my mom, retired, my dad. I got to do some of these really cool things. But around 27 years old, something really shifted in my life. I saw Tony Robbins on TV in an infomercial, and this big guy, I felt like he was talking directly to me. And there was something I had never done up until that time in my life. I paid for information. And I remember my dad saying to me, are you nuts? You paid for a guy to talk to you. He's like, I'll talk to you for free. And I felt like saying, yeah, but if I listen to you, I'll get married four times and divorce like you are, and always struggling financially. I love you, dad, but if I listen to you, I think I'll get what you have. So I cut a check to Tony Robbins, and I won't go super long on it, but it fundamentally shifted because I hadn't read books up until that point. I had some success in my life. I surely did, but I had it in a kind of a hosed up way. Anybody ever have success in your life? But you know it's not healthy, right? You're just moving away from pain so much that doesn't feel congruent with who you are. And I devoured what I bought from Tony. I learned that I could craft a new story, that I could have different beliefs that I could use my past as my fuel. I learned that life happens for us, not to us. I learned that I could focus on solutions. I don't have to listen to the naysayers that they don't make statues of critics. They make statues of the crazy people, the dreamers. I could focus, like Eric was saying. I could set an intention and spend all my energy looking at that and screw all the things that weren't working. I learned all this stuff, but it did two things. To me. It really fundamentally shifted my life. But secondly, I was like, damn, that gave Tony money. He gave me information. It shifted my life. I want to be in that business. So for me, it shifted my mindset, but it also shifted my career path. And in 1998, I did my first information product and then infomercial on tv. I only did an infomercial because there was no Internet back then. For those of you that are a little younger, everybody's like, why would you and Tony have done infomercials? Because there was no Internet. There wasn't even AOL dial up when I started, right? So I share that with you because it was such a fundamental shift. I account masterminds, workshops, live events. I've spent literally over a million dollars between hosting them or attending them in my life. And truly, I believe it's my unfair advantage, because in my 20s, I always thought you had to learn on your own. Like, I have to figure this out. I just got to work harder. Harder. I know you've heard this before. Harder or smarter. It's the combo. You got to work smarter, and you still gotta work. It.
