BREAKING Mental Barriers | Unlock Unstoppable TRAINING for Your Future

Most of this generation quits the second they get talked to. You did this wrong, you did this wrong. It's so easy to be great nowadays.

Most people are weak.

This is a softened generation. So if you have any mental toughness, any ability, if you have any fraction of self-discipline, the ability to not want to do it but still do it. People have a hard thing to understand. I hate to run.

And what makes me so crazy, people go, well, why do you run if you hate it? What are you talking about?

I don't want to take showers and eat either. I hate that too.

That's life, man.

It wasn't until I changed that mentality that I became somebody. I hated going to school, so guess what? I was dumb as shit. 1 1 2. But if you can get through to doing things that you hate to do, on the other side is greatness. That's what people understand. By me running, I am calloused in my mind. I'm not training for a race, I'm training for life. I'm training for the time when I get that 2 o'clock in the morning call that my mom is dead or something happens tragic in life.

I don't fall apart.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I make these videos because when I started my first business, I really struggled to believe myself. I was making $300 a month. And quit on my business partner. And the thing that saved me was watching the stories of successful entrepreneurs. They gave me strategies as well as hope and belief that just maybe I could do it myself as well. And I hope that this video here today helps you get a little bit more belief in yourself, because I still need the videos for myself today too. So today, let's learn what you need to start doing for a successful life. Enjoy.

I'm training my mind and my body and my spirit so it's all one, so I can handle what life is gonna throw at me. Because the life I've lived, it throws a whole bunch at you. And if you're not physically and mentally prepared for that, you're just gonna crumble, and you're good for nobody. You said I can be me. The second you said I can cuss and be me— and cussing, people say, "Man, you cuss all the fucking time. Why?" Well, I hate to say it, the best way for me to get how I feel across I can't sit here and say, you know what, yeah, I went through Hell Week and man, it was really hard. No, that motherfucker takes your damn soul, rips it inside out, and then they say, now we're going to fucking start. It allows me to express where I was at at a point of my life. If I don't give you all of me, why the hell am I here?

Why?

How will you learn from me? People take so much offense to me. You will never learn from people if we always tap dance around the truth.

Oh God, I love that.

We tap dance around the truth by finding the right words so I don't hurt you because you have thin skin. No, tighten up, people. It's okay. Trust me, it's okay. You might be called nigger one day. It's okay. You might be called some Jewish word or some faggot or gay word. It's okay, let them call you that. What are you going to do now? They don't own your life. How are you going to control that now? How are you going to flip it upside down and say, roger that, now I'm going to harness it and you'll read about me years from now?

Rule number 2 is flip your money with Grant Cardone.

So if someone's got between $1,000 and $10,000 and they're trying to multiply it to $100,000, What would be the steps they would take? How long do you think it would take them to go from $1,000 or $10,000 to multiply it? And would you say put that all in your own personal investment? Would you put it— invest in the business that you're in? Would you invest it in other things that cash flow, appreciate, and provide tax shelters?

What would you do if you got $1,000? I would like just keep, you know, keep investing yourself until you got another $1,000.

Okay.

And, and then invest in yourself, you know. Now you got $2,000 invested in you. Go, go, go you should start making money faster. At some point, you should start— like, every time you make an investment in yourself, if I put fuel in my car, it's supposed to take me further, right? Right. So if I invest in myself, then— and look, you know, there's things I bought that I didn't get a return on right away, but I didn't quit investing in a course or workshop or training or education because it didn't work. Or your health. Or I spent 17 years going to school. None of it was any good for me, but it did teach me. It did teach me how to go to school.

Wow.

You know, how to study, how to study, how to go there, how to finish, how to complete a course. Like, I completed college. I'm not proud of that, by the way.

You're not proud you completed it?

Why?

No, no, because it was stupid. It was ridiculous. I should have dropped out. Like, I knew it was a bad thing.

What'd you major in?

Uh, major in accounting. It's a good degree. It's not like just some, you know, business degree, right?

But you should have dropped out of it.

100%.

Because I, I mean, I would still, I would still be, I would Well, I'd have a 5-year jump on my career. But the problem is I was on drugs. So, you know.

Physical, actual drugs?

If I wouldn't have been on drugs, I would've quit college. 'Cause I would've had enough confidence in myself. When you're on drugs, you can't have confidence. 'Cause you know you're drugged.

Right.

So everything is second-guess because my self-esteem was like through the basement. And so I'm like, I need to quit college. But everybody around me is, oh no, you gotta finish college, you gotta finish college. I'm like, what do I know? I'm a drug addict.

And if I drop out, I don't have a degree, and then I gotta hire me.

And yeah, I didn't even worry about any of that because, you know, I didn't worry about that. I just didn't have the confidence to follow my intuition. You can't when you're on drugs, when you're not yourself. You say, what do you do with $1,000, right? Um, you know, I think you just got to keep investing in you until like, oh, oh, now I'm making $3,000. Okay, boom, reinvest all that again. But what we do is we start taking it off the table, right?

We save it, we don't invest it.

So I think people just need to get on that cycle of like, okay, I'm going to keep repeating this activity. I'm going to reinvest some money in myself, go to the workshop or whatever. Monday I got to be hustling again until, okay, now I got $4,000. Okay, now I got $5,000. Now the income's starting to pick up. Income has to pick up. The income should be an indication that whatever you're learning is helping you.

That's interesting.

Until one day you're like, okay, I have more money here than I can actually invest in myself. I can't— like, there's nothing I can go to to get rid of this money. You need to get rid of that money though.

All my free time is going to my workshops. I don't have more free time to invest in me. Yeah, I'm developing skills, I'm working, I'm earning more. Yeah, now what's the next step?

Yeah, and now, now it would be, okay, I got to spend money on marketing. I wouldn't go make a— I wouldn't go look for an investment right now. I'm going to spend money on marketing now. Now, now, now I'm gonna spend money on marketing to get me more leads. And I would, you know, big mistake I made in my career was not spending more money on marketing because you turned what, 50 when you really started investing? And I was 50, I was 51 when we started playing the social media game, and, and I was probably 56, 55 or 56 when we started spending money on marketing.

Wow.

Yeah, 51 when you started doing social media.

Yeah, yeah. And I should have been spending money. I should have been spending money when I was 25 years old, when I was selling cars. I should have spent money, been spending money on ads, but I was scared, man.

So, so what made you not scared 25 years later, 26 years later, at 51?

I started studying, hey, what do all these successful people have in common? You know, whether it was the mattress dealer, the car dealer, the furniture dealer, or Elon Musk. They spend money, man. You know, they spend money. They spend a lot of money. And they don't worry about money the way I was worried about it. They use money. You know, they used it. They didn't save it. They didn't hoard money. And the greatest companies on this planet today, the ones that have just like— some of these companies have lost money for 25 years. Look at Amazon.

Yeah.

Reinvest. 1.7 million employees. When I started, I remember I looked at Ernst Young. I said, I have a buddy that worked at Ernst Young. I said, how many employees you got? He's like, 240,000. Wow. And I'm worried about 10 people. What am I thinking? So when I quit studying individuals and started studying people, everything shifted for me. When I quit trying to be the— when I quit worrying about what Bob was doing or Pete or whoever and started saying, hey man, what is this big company doing? Because that also relieved me of being competitive with this guy Pete and started saying, okay, I'm gonna go do what Coca-Cola does. That's when I bought the plane.

Wow, really?

Yeah.

How old were you when you bought the plane?

Uh, I was, uh, 50, maybe 55, the first one. I bought it because, because I studied what Coca-Cola was doing. They bought planes. I said, why are they buying planes? Oh, then I learned how they write them off, and then I learned how they trade them every 3 years.

That's crazy.

So notice every 3 years I'm trading a plane. I'm getting rid of it, replacing it with another one. But what are they using it for? They don't use it for pleasure. They're not using it for Instagram photos. They're using it to go and set up headquarters in other countries.

Wow.

You know, so that's when I wrote "If You're Not First, You're Last," because when I started studying these companies, I'm like, Coca-Cola's everywhere. You can't go anyplace and not see Coca-Cola. And I was like this big. I was always thinking about what can I keep? And they were thinking about how many shells can we get on? How many eyeballs can we see? So that's when it all clicked for me. And then that goes back to that thing about the financial misinformation, right? It's like, who am I studying? And that's when we started open up the funds for, I went to New York City to go walk in Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan's offices. I wanted to walk in and see what it was like. These are multi-hundred billion dollar companies. Crazy, you know. And I walked in, I was like, oh my God, man, I just— it just all hit me in a second. I've been doing everything wrong.

What were they doing different?

They owned the building.

They weren't renting the building.

They owned the building. Well, they don't care if they rent. They could rent it, but they owned it. The elevators were bigger than the studio. All right, one elevator.

It's crazy.

And 60 people got on that elevator and went to the 120th floor. And then there was 6 of these elevators, people going up and down. Everybody told me, don't take people's money. Do not let investors invest with you. Keep the whole deal for yourself. The second I walked into Goldman Sachs—

'Cause all they're doing is getting investor money.

That's all they do, okay? And the difference is, what I do is I could go to Goldman Sachs, I was there, they would give me money. And I'm like, I'm not going to get money from them. I'm going to do what they do.

From individuals.

Exactly.

From my friends, from people that follow me, from people that support me. Okay. Goldman Sachs will give money to anybody.

Right.

Okay.

They don't know how to go to these people. They're not on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or TikTok. So I'm going to create a fund where I can tell my audience, hey, Lewis, you can invest with me. I'm gonna kick Goldman out of the deal or JP or whoever. There's a bunch of these guys. It's not that they're doing a bad thing or anything. I'm not saying they're the devil, but they're close. Because they're not gonna call you up and say, how you doing, man? Without saying, hey, you got any money to invest? It's just not, that's not what they do. Their job is to make money, period. So anyway, when I saw that, I'm like, okay, these people are, these are the richest institutions on the planet. They fund everything that happens. The company BlackRock, BlackRock's gonna be, BlackRock and Vanguard, these are multi, you know, probably gonna be worth $20 trillion each in the next handful of years. They'll own, they say they'll own 99% of all the assets on planet Earth, not just in America.

How are they able to do that?

Because they scale, right? Because they think big. So they, you know, they're funding everything, everything that happens on this planet from media to foreign policy Pharmaceutical is gonna be funded by those two companies.

Wow.

So it just, when you're studying your rich uncle or the neighbor down the street, the think is only so big. And then when I started studying these other companies, I was like, okay, this is who, if you want to create that kind of legacy wealth and really help a lot of people, 'cause they are in a position to help or hurt a lot of people. That's the scale you gotta think at.

Rule number 3 is create something of value with Tom Bilyeu. My question to you is, if I was starting from scratch, as in I had $0, in your opinion, what will it take for me to get rich in 3 years?

Whoa, okay, getting rich in 3 years, that is a very aggressive timeline. The only way that you're gonna get rich in 3 years, and we should probably define that, I'll say 7 figures or higher. Seem like a reasonable baseline? Okay, so the only way that you're gonna get that kind of wealth is, and I'm assuming that you're not able to invest something, go buy something or something like that, so we're literally starting at scratch. So you're going to have to create a company, create something that generates a lot of value. Typically that's gonna be a company. So you're gonna create a company that meets a very well-known need that has not yet been serviced by a product that is relatively easy to get across over the finish line and into the marketplace. It needs to be something that is going to resonate with social media, and it needs to be something that doesn't cost a lot of money to get started. So either you're gonna layer on way better marketing, so if somebody has a solution to a well-known problem but they don't know how to market it, you can go and partner and say, hey, look, I understand marketing, I'm gonna be able to get this out there. Or if you have an information product that can be associated with a known problem that you uniquely can solve, I know a little bit about your background, so if there's an element to working in the music industry, to becoming a professional singer, improving your voice or something like that, that you really have a beat on, that you know a lot of people are interested in, that you could turn into a course, for instance, that people would really resonate with, that could be a great one. The reason that I keep coming back to information products is you're looking for something that doesn't cost money up front. If you're gonna like take Quest Nutrition, for instance, when we were building that, there was still a substantive amount of investment that we had to make. Even just buying a bunch of protein powder was expensive. Buying the liquid fiber, you have to buy them in 55-gallon drums. So it's like there were still thousands of dollars that we had to put in in the beginning. And so to find something that really takes little to no money down, you're either going to be doing an information product Or you're going to be doing something that you can make yourself that doesn't have expensive constituent parts, or you're going to be finding something that's already made that the person doesn't understand marketing. So it's really about what is the bit of value that you're going to be able to bring to that that's unique that somebody else can't easily replicate, that the world is going to know instantly that they need, and you just have to make them aware of it. Because 3 years is fast. And so Quest, for instance, depending on what you mean by rich. So for instance, 3 years into Quest, we had a billion-dollar brand, but I was, I didn't have a billion dollars that I could put in my pocket. So I was still driving. I think by then I had finally upgraded my car, but for a first couple years of that, I was still in a beater car, even though I was worth a lot of money. And so if you need the money to be in your pocket, that's probably gonna take a fair amount of time longer. And if I can take a minute to get everybody watching to understand the difference between net worth and income, that would be really valuable. So if you don't mind generating $1 million plus in net worth, now we're back to you just have to build something that other people say that they want. To have the actual money in your bank account, you have to build worth in something that people say that they want, and then you have to sell that thing. So it's very rare that you're going to get rich off of the operations of your business. You get rich by building a company where somebody's looking at that. God, this is going to get complicated fast, so ask follow-up questions. So you're either going to build something that's going to IPO, okay, initial public offering, and what you're saying is, hey, I built this really cool thing, it makes a lot of money, or people think it's going to make a lot of money. And by going to the SEC, they'll actually let me fractionate my company, break it into a bunch of pieces known as shares, and then I'm going to sell some of those shares on the open market, the public markets, and then people can buy those shares. And so that's a way that you're going to be able to put that money in your pocket, but you're, you're literally selling a piece of the company that you own. Otherwise, you can sell a minority, controlling, or total interest in the company to private equity, venture firm, something like that. But usually when people do that, they're not doing it for founder liquidity. They're doing it because they expect you to invest the money back into growing the company, which is why IPOs get people really excited. Because some of the shares you will sell as part of the company treasury, which generates operating capital. Some of the shares will be yours personally that you get for being a founder, and so you can use that as a liquidity event. So now you actually have that money in your pocket. But most people in 3 years, it's gonna be tough. You could get to an IPO stage, but that's gonna be a really rare moment that again follows the equation of you're solving a problem that people already know exists in a very dynamic way that people are basically falling over themselves to give you money for, and you've actually created a company that can be sold, which is, we could do a 2-hour class just on what that means. So it's interesting when you ask that question, I really want to give you a hot, sexy take and just be like, oh, go do this. But the reality is to, to have a 7-figure exit that fast would be hyper rare. It does happen. And I would rather get people thinking about how do I build a business that's doing $1 million in revenue. All the following things apply, but then it's really about reinvesting every dollar that you're getting back into the company to grow and scale. But again, it's a problem with a killer solution that you're doing in a unique way that didn't require startup capital.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all of the lessons learned in this video as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there. Rule number 4 is decide to be great with Ed Mylett.

I want to talk to you today because I hope that of all the talks that happen here, you forget about me, but that this changes your life. And I want to remind you of something as I begin today, that you were born to do something great with your life, that you're extraordinary. Listen to me, that you're enough, that you're special, that you're favored, that you're chosen regardless of where you come from, regardless of what you've been carrying with you. Some of you come in here today, and you know what? You've even thought of harming yourselves. Maybe you're even proud of the fact you haven't killed yourself. But every day some of us are killing ourselves with the shame we carry from something we've done, some humiliation, some fear. We put this gun to our head every day that tells us we're not enough. We're not strong enough, pretty enough, smart enough, favored enough, that we're doomed. And we carry these guns in our head every day that shame us, that take our confidence that steal our joy. It's like a knife we— you don't have to kill yourself because you do it every day. You do it over and over and over again, and there's a better way forward. You can put those things down in your life. You could decide today that you were born to do something great. You could set aside this weapon that you keep using against yourself to hold you back from your joy, from your passion, from your achievement, from all the goodies in life. You could decide today, just intentionally decide today, Set this weapon down, whatever it is. Something from your childhood, a divorce, a business failure, something you're just not proud of that you've done. Set it down. Stop using it as a weapon against yourself and realize that happened for you and not to you. I'll prove it to you. I'm a big believer in fake it till you make it. I don't want you seeing, you know, people say, well, social media is so full of like these fake lives. People have always lived fake lives. I was living a fake life way before social media came along. In fact, when I became an entrepreneur, I wanted to be somebody so bad, I wanted to be rich so bad. I wanted to look— I thought, if I don't look successful, no one's going to listen to me. Who's going to listen to a young kid in business about how to save your money when I didn't have any? That was my own limiting belief. What's yours? You have this kind of convoluted limiting belief about why you can't do something right now. That's this your own BS story you keep telling yourself. How about you just drop that story? How about you just decide it's a lie? Even if it is true, I'm not going to just teach you not to tap into your pain. I'm going to teach you how to do it. Okay? I'm not a— I teach people how to change things technically, but I believe in this concept of living blissfully dissatisfied, which means there's a way— most, most achievers have it backwards. They think, hey, if I enjoy my success, I'm going to lose all my drive, right? And then other people that aren't successful yet, haven't reached what they want, or like, they delay their bliss until a destination in the future. Once I get this relationship, once I make that money, once I get that car, once I have that home, then I'll let myself feel bliss. And so I teach you that the concept is you can live blissfully and still be dissatisfied. Your pathway to changing how you feel about yourself, of getting to the next level, is always giving, always giving, always giving. You know, I have this thing I kind of run my life through that kind of is my governor on my life of when I'm trying to give and when I'm trying to make a difference for people. And I just have this hallucination. I am a Christian, and so I believe that someday when I I, there's an accounting. I don't care if you— I'm actually one of these very interesting people that I believe in the quantum field and energy because I know it exists, and I believe my Lord and Savior created it.

That's—

you have whatever your belief is, is wonderful. I don't preach. I just want you to know I know there's an energy field. I know there's a God. And, um, Lewis asked me on the show, what are 3 truths? And I said, the first thing is there's a God. I just want you to know that. So you believe your beliefs, I respect them, I admire my people from every belief center in the world on my program. But I just want to say to you, this is my prism I live my life through. It governs my decision-making, and I make mistakes I sin all the time. One of the cool things about being a Christian is I'm saved by the grace of God because I know I'm going to sin. That's one of the cool things about my particular faith. But the point that I want to make, because I sin all the time, I make mistakes all the time. I've already used profanity I think 4 times in this talk, so I know for sure I've made some mistakes. But let me tell you how I govern my life. I believe at the end of my life there's an accounting, and I'm going to sit in front of my Lord, and I want Him to say, "Well done, good and faithful servant." But having said that, no matter what your beliefs are, I think that I actually get to meet somebody interesting. Maybe you don't believe in anything faith-based, but I bet you believe there's a recording going on in your life. Someone's paying attention. Someone's going to tell the story of your life. Maybe your great-granddaughter will carry the legacy of your life and what you've done, but someone's paying attention to what you're doing here. You've always had that sense. You've always known your life mattered. You've always known since you were a little girl that there's something special you're supposed to be doing. That fear you have is maybe you're not doing it.

Rule number 5 is craft your plan.

So when you think of your goals, that is the number 1 thing everybody talks about. So many times in life, people think goals will solve everything. And it's a part of it, right? It's a part of it. We know, if you ever saw that 50-year Harvard study, do you know there's only 1 common denominator between a 50-year study of the most successful people from Harvard. Did you ever see that study? The only common thread of the most successful people at Harvard— didn't matter what ethnic background, where they came from, if they were rich or they were poor, if they got great grades or shitty grades— you know, the only common factor of the most successful people at Harvard was they set goals. So how important is our goals? I think they're extremely important, but I think we have to look at goals goals in a different way. So I just want to give you a different light today. If you know anything about me, you know I always talk about instead of setting a goal looking forward, right? Let's pretend it is 1 year from today and we're back here celebrating and it was the best year of your life. That's the framework in which I would love for you guys to look through setting your goals. Instead of looking forward through a busy life, look at the best year of your life and what had to happen. When I say look backwards and pretend it's the best year of your life, what your brain will automatically go is, oh yeah, I want to be making more money. I want some more freedom. Oh, I want to lose that 10 pounds. Oh, I want to get the intimacy back in my relationship. That's still— I want to be really— I know it sounds like I'm splitting hairs. You're still looking forward of what you wish could happen. I've trained my brain over the last 2 decades that when I do this exercise— and we have to do it right here— when you do this exercise, it's not about looking what you hope to happen. It's about saying it already happened, and how do you feel looking backwards? Meaning put yourself in that spot. And if it's visualization, if it's a little quiet time, if it's reflecting, if it's while you take a walk, if it's in your shower, when you're meditating, whatever it is, picture it. Like, I literally can spend time thinking about where I'm going to be in a year from now, and I can literally get goosebumps, and I can feel it as if it exists right now. You know, people talk about manifesting and all. It is manifesting. You got to do the work. It's not about just dreaming it and hope it happens. I'm not a believer in that. A lot of people say you set the intention, the universe will deliver. Bullshit. You have to set it up, and you actually have to do the work. You can't just say, oh, I'd like to have $1 million in my bank account. Let me go back to my old old habits of surfing on the internet and watching Netflix and hope that million dollars shows up. No, we gotta, we gotta do the work. So we'll get a little deeper, but the first thing is, is we must have that compelling future of our own designed. And for me, I literally can put myself in this place, and I remember writing down, okay, this is what Mastermind has to look like. And I remember writing down 100 Miles and, oh, we're gonna do a big launch and we're gonna call it the Knowledge Business I remember writing it down, and I was writing down as if it already happened. I literally, if you could see the hair on my arms, it's standing up right here because I can visualize because I've been practicing this for so long that I visualize it and I see it. That is a great practice. Then once we see it, then the part that I think has to happen, as soon as I was done visualizing, I didn't go, "Done, I dreamed it up." up?

No.

Then I got my ass to work. Like, who do I need to learn from to do this? Who do I have to model? What patterns of successful people who've already done this that I can model and do in teaching this? And then I started making the list of what I had to get done so that fantasy could become a reality. This might sound like this is what everybody does, but do we? We all agreed if we eat better and work out more, we'd be in better shape, but most Most of us want to be in better shape, but we don't eat better and we don't work out more. So a lot of us want to be next-level successful and we're looking for something else magically to come along, and it's not gonna. We have to visualize what it is we want to be, and if it was the best year of our lives, we have to get as detailed as possible. Remember, fuzzy targets don't get hit. Don't just say, I want to be a coach making $1 million a year. What does that mean? What kind of coach? How many coaching sessions? How many clients do you need? Listen, if you said, I want to be a coach and I want to make $1 million a year, and you were sitting with me and I was consulting for you, I'd reverse engineer it. How many people? How much do you make per person, right? If you say I can make, you know, it's $10,000 a year per person, okay, so that means you need 100 clients, okay? You need 100 clients over 12 months. Months. It's gonna take you— first month you might only get 5. So if you get 5 the first month, and then the second month is 7, and the third month is 20, how many do you need to get? I would lay out, all right, first month 5, second month 12, third month I need 22. And I'd have a freaking goal every month on how I could get there, and nothing would stop me. I would go back to what I teach you guys. I'd know my why, I'd have my compelling future, I already visualized it, I knew I knew how I'd feel once I made $1 million being a coach. I know how I would visualize how the people I'm coaching's lives would change. I would think about if I'm saving marriages or helping people eat better or learn how to sell or learn how to go vegan or a million other things. I would think about the lives I'm changing and I would literally craft the plan saying, okay, $1 million as a coach. Okay, I need 100 clients. That's an average of 10-ish, 8-ish a month, right? Whatever that is. I might not get as many the first one, so I got to stack up the other months. And then I'd say, okay, what is my plan to get the first 5 in January? And I would craft the plan to get my 5 $10,000 coaching sessions in January. And that would be my whole obsession. And if I got 4, well, shit, I got to get an extra one in February. If I got 6, I'm like, I'm ahead of the game. Let's bust it in February and and let's keep this little cushion that I have, right? I just wanna tell you, I'm not trying to say the way I do is perfect, but I meet so many people that set goals and then dabble and hope. It's like, even if you have the recipe, you gotta cook the meal. There's no one coming over to do it.

And rule number 6, the last one before some very special bonus clips, is master one thing with Tony Robbins.

I'm 20 years old, I'm in college right now. I'm in my junior year. The hours are really crazy I'm going to school for game design. That's what I really want to do.

Okay.

I really want, I really want to be able to just purchase my own game studio.

Okay.

Um, so I also, um, I work part-time. I have, um, I just started a marketing business just to try and bring more money in, but this is the first business thing I've ever done. And I'm trying to, um, start my own gaming YouTube channel just to get my name more out there and learn how to but my, learn basically how to get on my own following and become an influencer for video games myself. My question is, how do you know whether or not you're trying to basically take too much on?

Right, are you stretching yourself thin?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I wanna know.

I got it, Miguel.

How do you know when you get to that point?

I got it. Tony, this is such a classic question for a lot of entrepreneurs. You've done it, I've done it, we've lived our lives, right? Where does doing a lot of different things to see if there's upside in it, which all my great things have come from, stop, and where does it start to you're taking on too much and now you're trying to do everything, which means you're doing nothing?

Yeah, first of all, thank you for the question. Most people who start a business very often will start 2 and 3, 4 more, and the reason they do it is 'cause the first one isn't succeeding or they no longer use it.

They lack patience.

Exactly right.

And so what happens to that person is they're never going to be successful in most cases, unless they get lucky. You can get lucky and bounce across something that's easier to do, but most people are always looking for that next level. What my view is, is it's great to test all these things, but you got to find what is your flagship. What is it that you're going to commit your soul to? Because if you don't do that, the inevitable challenge is going to come up and you're going to then move on to something else that's not enjoyable. And so the other thing to look at is business is about constant constantly not only adding such massive value, doing more for others than anybody else, but it's also simultaneously about your own psychology. It's your ability to go through thresholds of control. It's like, I can remember when I didn't have $50,000 to keep the doors open on my company. I had 12 employees and 11 wanted to quit because they hated the person running the show. And $50,000 would be like $500 million to me today. And I figured out how to get through that threshold. And once I did, I said, like, all the problems related to that were handled. I know you've done this as well. And then I had a $5 million lawsuit that was totally unfair, unjust, and I finally had just the amount of time, energy, money, I had to bite the bullet and do it. $5 million was more than I could ever imagine. Then I had a partner who took a company that was losing $1 million a day and turned it to $1.5 billion in positive EBITDA. I'm not mentioning names, Amway. And he wanted me to join him in business some other partners not doing the multi-level side, did the business, put in $10 million, we all put in $10 million, $40 million in debt, but I signed joint and several, which I didn't understand in those days what that meant. And 2 of my partners were supposedly billionaires and they went broke. We bought some more companies, I ended up with $120 million in debt that I was on the hook for, no one else had any money, and I'm getting up to do a seminar wanting to throw up. It was a new threshold of control. So you know when you ski or you snowboard and you think you're— maybe you're just new at it and you think you're going down a blue or green, it turns out to be a double black, and you're like, yeah. And so you have two choices. One is you start to go down and you freak out, you're gonna die, you slam on the ground, try to hang on for dear life. Or the other is, baby, you focus on where you want to go, you find a way to curve, you find a way to cut. And once you do it a couple of times, you get used to it, you have no more fear of element. Now my biggest one out of that, that led me to a billion. I have 31 companies now to give you an idea, 7 different industries as diverse as like, you know, stem cells to virtual reality. We have the exclusive for the NBA now in virtual reality to give an example. We do, I got 1,200 employees, we're on 3 continents, and we got $5 billion in sales, but I did that because I first stayed on one frickin' thing. Yes, exactly right. I got so masterful at it. Masterful at it, then I— the way I look at it, I'll give you one more metaphor. You're probably not old enough to remember this, but I'm old enough to remember a guy.

I'm pretty old.

Mel— I forget his name. He was the guy that—

Mel's Diner, the great '80s sitcom?

No, the guy that looked for gold on the Spanish galleon. I forget his name now. But anyway, he found half a billion dollars in gold, but it took him like 31 years to do it. And you can't live on that.

Maybe he loved the journey though.

He did not love the journey. His son was killed on the journey.

Well, that's bad.

He made no—

can you imagine 31 years of going out there, getting money from investors and showing nothing? I mean, after a year, 2, 5, 10, some point you hit your breaking point. He never hit his breaking point. So I looked at my businesses back then and I was always looking for the new business that was a great opportunity. I love what I was doing. It's emotionally rewarding, but low margin business. And I had these meetings with a group of billionaires and they said, that you have not maximized. And then I saw this guy, Mel, and I thought, I don't believe, I have not the right beliefs. You need 3 beliefs to be successful in your business at the highest level. You have to believe, number 1, what did this guy have to believe to go 31 years? He had to believe, number 1, that the treasure was out there. Number 2, he had to believe, I'm gonna find it. And number 3, he had to believe it was gonna be worth it. If you don't believe there's that treasure in your business, you won't go find it. You've gotta use those 3 things to go to another level.

You need that instinct for meaning too. So, and we should get this real straight. Why do you need it? Well, you need it because life is really, really difficult, right? I mean, people have a rough time of it. There's plenty of suffering in life, and everyone is going to encounter it, right? There, you don't know, you learn this as a clinical psychologist, and you know this generally. you know, unless you're an extraordinarily fortunate person. You don't have to talk to someone for very long, and really talk to them, and get beneath the surface until you find, you know, there's a tragedy or 2 or 3 or 10 lurking not very far beneath the surface. Someone in the family is very ill. There's a childhood history of extreme pathology, alcoholism somewhere in the family, maybe a touch of insanity. Someone has cancer. You know, someone's— some older relative is dying. There's financial trouble. There's economic trouble. There's marital trouble. It's like life is trouble. And now, you know, that doesn't mean it's all trouble, but man, it's trouble. And sometimes it's a lot of trouble. And sometimes it's so much trouble that you can barely stand it. And you see that because people, you know, people get depressed and they commit suicide. The reason they do that is because they think not being is better than being. And that's quite the decision, you know. So, and it's not that uncommon among people who are depressed. And so it's a very important thing to consider. And it isn't just a matter of depression and suicide. That's bad enough. But, you know, if you're unhappy because your suffering has pushed you past the point of your ability to cope, then there's all sorts of other things that can happen to you that aren't directed towards you. You can become cynical and you can become bitter and you can become cruel and you can become narcissistic and deceitful and arrogant. And it's like everything's for you. And then you're out for revenge. That's a nice one. I don't know against who, but maybe everyone. Maybe even including you because you're not happy about the role you've played in generating your own misery. I mean, there's a lot of darkness underneath the suffering. And so, and that's an ever-present existential danger for human beings. You know, we're aware of the future, we're aware of our fragility, we're aware of our mortality. It's something that makes us truly unique, truly conscious in a way that no other creature is, and capable of things that no other creature can do, but also bearing an unbelievably heavy existential load. We're the only creatures that have to always contend with the fact that we're finite and that everyone we know is in the same position. That allied with the suffering. And so that's there all the time. And, you know, even in the brightest moments, in some sense, you know, in Renaissance paintings, in still lifes, they used to put a memento mori often in the still life. Like a skull somewhere in the corner, or sometimes in a very strange perspective so that you could only see the skull if you were standing like right beside the painting instead of dead-on. But the idea was to always remember, you know, that everything that exists is tainted or touched with the taint of mortality. And you know, that's rough, but there's some useful things in it. It keeps you awake, and it keeps you focused. If you're careful. But it also does indicate to you, if you think about it, the necessity of having a meaning in your life. Because, because if it's true intrinsically that life has this unbearable element of suffering, which seems to be completely in— in— what would you say— indisputable as far as I'm concerned. And it's worse than that too, because it's not just suffering, it's suffering contaminated with malevolence, right? It's bad enough to have something bad happen to you, and it's likely that that'll happen, but it's even worse for you to do it to yourself and to know that you did it. That's rough. And it's also extraordinarily rough to be betrayed by someone else or, you know, tyrannized by your own culture. And so— and that's not just suffering, that's like unnecessary and pointless suffering that's been directed at you by something that It wants that to happen. And so both of those are very, very powerful, let's say, archetypal forces, suffering and malevolence. And we have to deal with them at every level of reality. And you need something to push back against that. It's not optional. If that's the default position, and I think it's the default position, like a meaningless life isn't meaningless. It's suffering and malevolence. That's not good. And if that's acted out, you know, that's the other thing. If that's acted out— and I've read the accounts and the actions of people who've taken a very vicious turn into the darkest parts of the underworld, consequence of their resentment and their malevolence, and then their desire to make everything in the world suffer for the outrage of its existence, man. I mean, that's how we turn things into hell. If you want to know why totalitarian states take the brutal twists they take and why people are motivated to do the absolutely terrible things that they do, well, that's why, is that the suffering and the malevolence that's intrinsic to life overwhelms them and they turn, and they turn in a very bad direction, and then they make everything that's already bad way worse. And we're very, very inventive at such things. And so That's not good unless that's the path you want. That's a bad idea. You need an alternative, and that's meaning.

I never graduated from college, and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you 3 stories from my life. That's it, no big deal, just 3 stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why'd I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates. So everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, we've got an unexpected baby boy, do you want him? They said, Of course. My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life. And 17 years later, I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford. And all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After 6 months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting. It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it, and much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example. Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever—because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I love to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, As Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at 30, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't I didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next 5 years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, and I returned to Apple, and the technology The company we developed it next is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, It just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle. My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like, if you live each day as if it was your last, Someday you'll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I've looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable and that I should expect to live no longer than 3 to 6 months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I live with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening, I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach, and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas, and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying because it turned out to be a very rare a rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery, and thankfully, I'm fine now. This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late '60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then, when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue, was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay hungry, stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish. Thank you all very much.

There's no question that capitalism, as it gets more advanced, will widen the gap between the people that have market skills, whatever that market demands, and other years unless government does something in between, which say the Earned Income Tax Credit or all kinds of things. And I think that's a proper function. So I would say that if people— it isn't some diabolical plot or anything. But look at it this way. If you go back to 1800 and 80% of the people were farmers and you were the best farmer in all and I was the worst, the difference in our value might be 2 to 1. You might be worth twice as much if we were out there picking corn or whatever we might be doing or planting. But now there's, we'll say, 2 million times— there's 30 million American males between 20 and 35. And if you're in the top 1/10 of 1%, in basketball ability or football ability or baseball ability, you aren't worth anything. If you're in the top 100th of 1%, you're getting close. So if that's— if the payoff is huge because some guy discovered television many years ago and another guy discovered pay TV or cable and then pay TV, so your talents— where Ted Williams got $20,000 a year for batting.406. Your talents now, if you make the majors, still doesn't pay well in the minors, but if you finally get to that 100th of 1%, now you're worth millions. And 1/10 of 1%, you can just play sandlot ball. And so you get this pushing of extreme rewards to people who are very, very good at something the market demands. And people demand entertainment. They demand people apparently that arbitrage securities, you know. I mean, there's all— there's certain specialties and that isn't because a bunch of people are sitting in a room deciding we're going to figure out how to take it away from the poor or anything like that. It's because of the market system. But we want the market system to keep functioning that way, but we don't want people left behind in a society where you've got $60,000-plus of GDP per capita. It— and that the people on the— on in the lower half have been getting— falling behind the gains overall achieved by the country. And we've— they aren't worse off than they were 20 years ago. They're somewhat better off, and they're better off. They're better off because of things like an iPhone. I mean, you know, that's something that's terribly useful and everybody— I get the benefits of search, you know, for nothing, you know, basically. But that's the ultimate tension is how do you keep a system that produces incredible benefits for everybody, you know? Sports is an easy example because we all like to watch them. We don't want to watch a bunch of guys like you and me play basketball. So that's where the money is.

But that didn't exist 200 years ago. But then how do we address that?

We address it through things like the Earned Income Tax Credit. We address it so that anybody that works 40 hours a week and has a couple of kids, that they don't need a second job in the family. They can have a decent life.

Does that mean increasing the minimum wage?

It means increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit. Right. I think that's a better system. What they need is more money in their pocket. Now you can do more money in the pocket through a minimum wage, but you don't have as many people working. You need something so they have money in their pocket. And we can do that. And that does require a— in my view, it requires higher taxes on people that where they were born into this world with peculiar talents that marvelously now and 200 years ago they would have been out there picking corn with me.

Can you take the higher taxes on wealthy people and put it directly to the Earned Income Tax Credit? Well, you could. I mean, because people complain, oh, my taxes are going—

they're squandered.

Yeah, nobody likes taxes, obviously.

Yeah, but if you had a program where it was earmarked—

Well, that's what people do when they're on the debate stage. You know, currently it's the Democrats and they They tell you all their new programs and how they'll pay for it, but they don't tell you how they're going to pay for the ones that are already there. Nobody's discussed the trillion-dollar deficit we have. So to talk about how you're going to introduce some new— but basically, you don't want to run deficits indefinitely that increase the relationship of debt to GDP. There's some point at which that causes real problems, although we haven't seen it a lot of places that you might expect to see it. But this country has the productive capacity to let people like me live extraordinarily well or sports stars or entertainment stars, all kinds of good managers, whatever, and still make sure that nobody is really left so that 2 people have to work and you have to hold 2 jobs and you wonder how you're gonna feed your kids if you're, if you're working at, you know, $7.50 an hour doesn't do it. And $10 an hour doesn't do it, but we can do it. We have the resources to do it.

When I analyze businesses, whether they're startups or doing $100 million in revenue, doesn't make a difference. Usually there's something in one of those three or all of those three that is missing. And so when we start to focus on getting the inner game right, plus what you need to do, and then you do it, the results are pretty easy. So here's what I want you to ask yourself. Are there people out there, all right, that could buy your product or service, but you don't know how to reach them? Is it possible that there's people out there that need what you have, your product, your service, your knowledge, your skills, whatever it is that you're selling, offering to the marketplace, is it possible that you just don't know how to reach them? So that means that it's a skillset issue, right? Now in 2021, we know how to do those things. Like I said earlier, where I started, right? The fact that there are 2 billion people a day online means that there's more than enough people to get in front of. Listen, in the old, in the old days, right? When we didn't have the internet, we had to advertise, you know, in the newspapers, postcards, magazines, radio, television, or set up a store in a shopping center. But now just about every single business, okay, is online offering information content to develop a relationship and rapport with prospects. And they're taking them through a process. Yellow Pages, that's right. Thank you, Muse Debbie, Debbie Muse, right? So Yellow Pages. So here's the thing. One of the formulas that you must figure out is where I started before, traffic times conversion equals revenue. The added version to that is traffic times conversion plus repeat business and referrals equals exponential revenue. Traffic times conversion equals revenue. Now traffic times conversion plus referrals and repeat business equals exponential revenue. And so one of the things that you need to be thinking about, okay, and if this is the only thing that you leave today, I'm gonna give you a couple things. Number one, is I need to adapt. I need to adapt to the market and use all the tools available to me, but not use every one of them. I want you to ask yourself the question I posed earlier is, what has to happen in order for me to just double or triple the leads that I get? Leads, the, the prospects coming to see you online or offline. If you just focused on that question What has to happen in order for me to double or triple my prospects or leads? And I'm not sure who said that you picked up The Answer, Virginia. Yeah, this is, this is my New York Times bestselling book, The Answer. If anybody's read it, it is a New York Times bestseller for many, many, many years now. One of the best books on the inner game and outer game of business. I put that back over there on my, on my thing. Um, but I didn't come here to, to sell you on my, on my book. I want to give you information. If anybody wants to get the book on Amazon for $15 or less, um, it'll blow your mind. And The Lux Coast, you're reading it now? Awesome. So when we understand there's already a process in place And we discover how do we take our product or service and create the marketing. How many of you, are you good in marketing? Are you good in marketing? Meaning I'm not talking about branding. I'm talking about getting your product or service with the right message in front of the ideal client. If you're not good at marketing, okay, I want you to let me know, are you good at marketing? Yes or no? So you're not good at marketing. Think about this. If you're a business owner, there's a couple of different hats that you have to make sure are being taken care of, right? In business, if you're a business owner with a product or service, you have to have somebody who's doing the marketing, right? Which is developing your brand, creating your messaging for how you're gonna promote your product or service to people who don't know you. You have to learn how to sell, and selling is doing something for somebody, not to somebody. You need to learn how to manage. You need to learn how to either develop products. You need to learn some of the technology needs that you have. There's a lot of different hats that you have to wear, or you have to make sure that somebody in your company is wearing that hat, right? And so imagine if you need surgery, but you're not a good surgeon, what would you do? You'd have to find, how do I get somebody who could do the surgery? So for those of you who are not good at marketing or sales, which is the oxygen required for any business regardless of how good your product or service are, the question you want to be asking yourself is this: who can I hire to help me? Or who can I barter with to help me? Who can I partner with to help me? Do my marketing and sales if you're not good at that. So hire, partner, barter, or defer payment to get it done. Because without marketing and selling, you really don't have a business. And those are skills that either you have that you need to develop, or you don't have, you're not good at, you don't want it, but you still need to figure out as a business owner, how am I going to get it done? Your job as a business owner is not not to do everything, but to make sure that everything that is oxygen and is required gets done.

I'm going to teach you the entrepreneur success formula. This is the formula. It's very simple. It's easy to apply that when you actually execute it, it will change the course of your life and your business. The entrepreneur success formula. Are you ready? You need to If you want to have success as an entrepreneur, combine what you love doing with what brings value to other people. People mess this up. What you love doing with what brings value to other people. In that intersection is your next great genius, amazing business idea. Here's what most people do. Most people just pick one. Most people either pick what they love doing but they can't figure out how to bring value to other people. So you've got a hobby. If you love doing something, it just fills you up. It's amazing, but it never brings value to other people, then you never get paid. You've got a really fulfilling hobby and that could be great. And your hobby can be something you do in the evenings and weekends and it fills up your soul. But you'll never turn that into a business if you don't figure out how to bring value to other people. So you're stuck always having to have a job or go work for somebody else. While you're doing your hobby on the weekends, evenings, on the side, etc. So those are the people who just chase what they love doing, right? Chase your passion. Amazing. There's other people, a lot of entrepreneurs who just go after the money, just try to bring value, just go after opportunity, right? That's the only focus. Like, I'll do whatever it takes. I need to be a millionaire by the time I'm X years old. I'll do whatever it takes. But you won't. You will not do whatever it takes. Because as soon as it gets hard, you're going to lose. And the problem is you're going up against people who love it. Pick whatever industry. You open up a magazine or website, it shows you the hottest businesses for next year. These are the industries that will take off and you have to get into it. It's like, oh wow, that's hot. I'm going to go off and do those things. If you don't absolutely love it, right? This part here, if you don't actually love it, what you love doing, what brings value to other people, if you don't absolutely love it, you're going to lose because you're going up against people who do love it. If it's just a strategy for you, but for other people, they love it, you're going to lose every time. You're going to lose every time because while you're counting the hours and while you're trying to figure out, oh my gosh, when is this going to pay off? You're going up against people who aren't even tracking it, who get lost in it, who 12 hours later, they're still doing the thing because they love it so much and they can't believe that, like, where is the time gone? So it has to be in that combination. So many entrepreneurs start a business because they think they're going to make a lot of money and they end up going broke. And it wasn't because the idea was bad. The idea could have been fantastic. The problem was you didn't love it enough. You didn't care about it enough. It was just a strategy. It was just an opportunity for you instead of being actually something that you love. So the entrepreneur success formula, you start with doing what you love and then you figure out how to bring value to other people doing it. Another way I like to explain it is your heart and your head. So you make the big decisions in life with your heart and the small ones with your head. What you work on, what you do, what you're spending your time on day in, day out has to be heart-driven. It's got to be something that fills you up with so much joy. But then your head needs to be part of the equation too, to say, okay, okay, heart, that's great that you love doing this thing, but how are we going to make money? How are we going to bring value to other people? The people. So you make the big decisions with your heart, and then you use your head to figure out how to make it actually practical. So you're not just daydreaming constantly in la-la land. We're actually turning it into something that can have a massive impact on the world. The entrepreneur success formula: you got to do what you love and figure out a way to bring value to other people doing it. When I started making my YouTube channel, I never thought I was going to make money. I did it because I love doing. I did it because I wanted visual content. I'm a visual learner. I struggled in reading books. It took me a long time when I read a book, unless it's really short chapters and really spaced out well, I would find myself reading 5 pages of the book and then realizing I read 5 pages and I have no idea what I just read. So I had to go back and read those 5 pages again. I would look how long a chapter was and see Oh my gosh, it's 40 pages. This chapter is going to kill me. I read because I needed to because I wanted knowledge, but it was a really inefficient way for me to learn. I'm a visual learner. I like to see things. And so I said, well, why hasn't somebody made this? And I wanted to be around successful, famous entrepreneurs because I didn't have anybody in my life who had achieved what I wanted to achieve. And so that was the root of why I started making my, my videos and my content. And before YouTube, I had my website. Which is similar idea of sharing the stories of famous entrepreneurs and what you can learn from their success. So I did it for myself and then figured out how can I do this so that I can make money doing it, so that I can do this as my full-time thing, so that I can recruit a team of people to help me do this. So now we've got a team of people who are all building these channels with me so I can create even more impact and make even more videos. The combination led first with what I love doing. I want to create content that speaks to 19-year-old Evan who was struggling, who doesn't know what to do, who was making $300 a month, was broke, who wanted to do something big but had very little belief in himself and, and didn't have a plan for what to do next. I still make my videos for 19-year-old Evan, and I had to figure out a way to turn it into a profitable business so that I can have a bigger reach and be able to do this full-time $1 million plus and have a team to help me do it. Entrepreneur success formula: what you love doing with what brings value to other people. Okay, so how do we do it? How do we start to figure out that process? That's an easy formula, but underneath it, let's, let's dive a little deeper to give you even more value. Step number 1 is embrace the "and." Most people are thinking "or." Most people are thinking, do I do this or do I do this? Do I do this business or do this business? If you think about your passions and your interests, right, what do you love doing? What's your heart-centered thing that you could do all day. You probably have a couple things and you feel like you have to pick. This is the mistake. People feel like you have to pick. You don't have to pick. The actual selection is in doing both of those things combined. A lot of people have said some amazing things of me. It's very humbling. I think of Ed Mylett and Gary Vee, where Gary Vee called me the DJ that likes to watch so much content and then spin it to inspire people. And Ed Mylett said that I'm the modern-day Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill is the biggest influence of all time in personal development, and I'm the modern-day Napoleon Hill. First off, that's extremely humbling, but why are they saying that? This is how I'm unique because I love consuming all of this stuff and I love spinning it and mixing it up as well as adding my own message to things. This is how I'm different. There's a lot of people who are just sharing their message. And there's a lot of people who are also mixing things together, but there's nobody who's really mixing things together and sharing their own message. Right? So instead of looking at those two things as different, right? Like I have to pick, I got to pick this or this, I'm going to combine them and that's how I'm going to be unique. So think about your different interests. What do you love doing? What are your top 2, 3 things that you can get lost in and they feel completely different? Your genius is going to be in actually mixing those things together in a way that's never been done before and then using that to bring value to people. Stop thinking "or" and instead embrace the "and." Step number 2 is try to get as close to customers as possible. So it's great to be making, it's great to be creating, it's great to be, you know, engineering of where you could go. When you start to solve the problem for yourself, that's a great step 1 because there's probably a lot of people people who currently are who you used to be and seeing how you solved it for yourself, sharing the videos. I need the videos for myself and then I share them and it, it helps other people, right? So I solve the problem for me first. You solve the problem for you first. I know there's lots of people like you, but you need to start talking to customers. You need to start getting their feedback. You need to start seeing what they interact with, and that can help guide a lot of your future product or service creation. You need to get out of just sitting by yourself on your couch researching and into actually talking to people. So a quick example from my channel, the whole top 10 rules for success thing came because I just made one video on Kanye West. That's why he's, you know, on the wall behind me. I made one video on him and then people started requesting more. Hey, can you do Dame Dash? Hey, can you do Jay-Z? Hey, can you do Jeff Bezos? Hey, can you do Steve Jobs? Hey, can you do these people? It's like, well, that's a cool idea. Sure, why not? I could do that. I never thought of it as being a whole series. I just was— wanted to give a tribute to Kanye West, and it was a one-off video. And then in the videos that people were suggesting, can you do this person, this person, this person, this person, I still get final say. We ended up having over 2,000 different requests for people to profile. I still get final say as to who we profile because I have to feel connected to the message. And when I'm pulling out the content, if we're doing Kanye West or Steve Jobs, it's always something positive. It's always through the lens of belief because that's what I want to put out. I don't want to put out Kanye West's biggest attacks or insults or negativity. I don't want to put out negativity in the world. I could easily done top 10 Kanye West stupidest things you've ever done. I'm not interested in putting that out. So it's that combination of what people are asking for. Hey, can you do this? Can you do that? How can you do this? Plus what I love doing, right? What I want to put my stake in the ground to say, I made this, right? This is the contribution that I'm trying to make to the world. Back to the entrepreneur success formula, right? What you love doing with what brings value to other people. So how to figure out what brings value to other people? You have to get as close to the customer as possible. Understand their business, understand what they're going through, understand their mindset. You solving the problem for yourself is a good first step. And then going into, okay, what are you struggling with? So number 1 is embrace the end. Number 2 is get as close as possible to the customer. And then number 3 is solve a problem. Solve a problem. As you're talking to customers, as you're talking to people who will be using your product or your service, who will be engaging with your content, as you're talking to these people, what is the problem that they're facing? What is the struggle? What is the challenge that they're facing? And then help them accomplish it. If I apply it to myself and the YouTube channels, for context, one of the biggest challenges I think people have is a very poor environment. You've got people in your life who keep you where you are. Some people may be telling you that you can't do things, uh, that's the worst-case scenario. Some people might be cheering you on, but they can't guide you. You're not inspired by them. The people around you are not inspiring enough for you. And that's why you're stuck, because the environment is keeping you small. Where if you are around higher achievers, if you're around Tom Bilyeu and Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk and these people, they would pull you to be better. And so that's the biggest problem that I see the entrepreneurs that I love helping is, you know, you're capable of more. You've got this big mission inside you. You've got the heart and the care and the willingness to serve. You've got everything, but you're not being pulled forward by anybody. And so I want to try to create that through content because you may not be able to hang out with Tom Bilyeu and Elon Musk and Oprah Winfrey, but every day on YouTube you can hang out with Tom Bilyeu, Elon Musk, and Oprah Winfrey from the content that I'm going to make and create, right? So that's the problem that I'm trying to solve. And I get that because it was me who struggled with it, but also the people that I see who I connect with who are watching the videos, they're leaving feedback for me. And I'm talking to them and I realize you've got everything. You've got everything. You, you've got everything. You're just missing that environment to push you forward. So that's a problem that I solve. What is the problem that you solve when you can combine your passions? Right. Step number 1, you're combining your passions. Step number 2 is we're talking to customers, people who are going to use potentially what we can create. And then you're understanding what their problem is and you solve it for them, that's how we start to build a successful business. Back to the entrepreneur success formula. If you get this formula, if you apply it, it's simple, it's basic, and it's one of the most powerful things you can ever do. And it's one of the biggest reasons why entrepreneurs don't win despite having the heart and the care and the service. You have to combine the thing that you love doing with all your heart with something that brings value to other people. Bring those things together and you're on to your next successful business career. Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it, but you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So it's a special celebration. If you put a hashtag #believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. If you want to learn to take action on your dreams, check the video right there next me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. I still don't believe in myself to do the next thing. I'm the believe guy. Well, I believe in myself to do this, but to do the next thing, that's the struggle. So it's a constant, how do I believe in myself to do the next big thing? Well, how do I then teach belief?