How to Unlock Your Mind's Full Potential | Hustle Hard Every Day

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's message is hustle. Over to you, Timothy Sykes.

The key to being successful is to work harder than other people, because everybody wants success, everybody wants a Lamborghini, everybody wants freedom. But what are you willing to do to get there? That's my question to you. You know, we're here at the most prestigious university in America, Harvard. Fantastic, I'm very honored. Thank you for having me here. The people who have gotten here have worked their butts off to get here, but that's just the beginning. Whether you're in college, you're going to go to college, or you're out of college, this is a lifelong journey where you have to continually work hard, work harder than other people to get ahead. A lot of people give up at different times. I'm no longer at that stage, you know. When I had my big loss, I basically gave up. For a year, I was in the gutter, but I came back and I said, you know what, this was a mistake that I made investing. It wasn't the patterns. I didn't go against what I had learned to make all my millions before this loss. I invested and I didn't do my full due diligence. And that was my mistake. I eventually got back into trading, I saw more patterns, and I became the number 1 ranked trader out of 50,000 on Covester in 2007 to 2011.

Every time I think about this message, I think about Jerry Seinfeld, and one of my favorite bits of advice from Jerry Seinfeld is you need to find the thing that most people consider torture. It's the torture that you can endure, where when people look at your schedule, they would see it as torture, torturous. Look at what I do. Look what I do on YouTube. So many people write in, they tweet me, they email me asking, how do you do so many videos? I'm having a hard time doing one video a week. It's torture. If you were to look at my schedule, it would be torture making 3 videos at least a day going to the YouTube channel on top of Responding to all the comments that come in. We get hundreds of comments every day that we respond to. On top of keeping track of all the requests, right? For the Top 10 series, we have over 2,500 requests. Just— and we keep track of it. We keep note and we see how many people voted for different people, and then we start making those videos. On top of coming up with new series ideas for where we can test out. It'd be so easy just to keep with the same formula. But it's not enough. It's got to get better. We got to grow. We got to improve. It's torture. You would look at our schedule and say, there's no way I want to do that much work. But it's why I've gotten better. It's why I went from the worst at my agency to the best. Because while they couldn't do— everybody else was having trouble doing one video a week, I was doing multiple videos a day. It's that hustle. And it's not to say that I'm great. Anybody can accomplish it. You just have to find the thing that you can do that would look like torture to other people. So as an example, I had Neil Pasricha on my channel. We did a top 10— his top 10 together. And afterwards we were talking about his book. He has a book, it sold over a million copies, and he was giving me advice on how to sell the book. And one of the bits of advice that he gave me was he would go to all the bookstores around in the general area, and in Toronto we've got a lot of different bookstores, and find out if they had at least one copy of the book in store, and he would drive there, and he would talk to the manager, and he would sign the book, and he would have stickers that said "Signed by Author," and he would chat up the manager and talk about why he made this book, and they would, because of that conversation, profile a little bit more at the store, and when people came in and asked them for a book, they would give that recommendation. And so that's how he would spend his days, driving to different bookstores, chatting up to different managers, signing the books, putting the stickers on. And I look at that work, I think, that is torture. I couldn't do it. I wouldn't— I would, I would hate to do that, to drive 2 hours to go to a bookstore that had 2 copies of my book, to sign those books and chat up the manager to get that, you know, him or her to know me so they'll recommend the book and put it higher up and do that day in, day out. I couldn't do it. It's too— it's just, it's torture. But that's what he did, and that's what he does, and that's how he's grown and created a business around his book and his speaking now. And he's gone all in on that, and it's amazing. You need to find the same thing for you. You need to find a thing you can dedicate so much time to that you can hustle so hard at that it's one, enjoyable. Like, as much as it may seem torturous for you to jump into my YouTube schedule, I like it. I enjoy the work I'm doing. I look forward to video day. I look forward to looking at the comments. I look forward to seeing what new topics we can come up with. I like it, and that's how we get better. So what is the thing that you can do constantly and still get fueled by and improve and get better and create more value that other people would look at and say, that is torture. That's the question of the day. Question of the day: what is the thing that you do that you hustle so hard at that nobody's gonna touch you because it's torture for everybody else? Leave it in the comments below, and I'm gonna join in the discussion. I also want to give a quick shout out to Ken Ritchie. Ken, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really, really, really means a lot to me, and I hope you're enjoying reading it. Thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever what your one word is, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. Hey, Believe Nation, for those of you who want a little extra motivation on hustling, I'm including some bonus clips that I hope you'll enjoy.

People can look at me and it almost pisses them off. That's like, that guy gets results? I'm pissed, right? And it kind of pissed them off, and then they got to like deny it to themselves and stuff. You know, yeah, they can even see videos of it. I'm like, that's an actress. It can't be. He's uglier than me and he's got a girl. Actress, right? No, dude, you just didn't go out. I did and you didn't. I've actually thought sometimes of creating a video called What I Did While You Didn't Do It, or What I Was Doing While You Were— no, no, I was thinking of calling it What I Was Doing While You Were Doing What You Were Doing, and I was gonna like enact the whole thing. So I'd show like what you were doing, like watching TV, ugh, like this, what I was doing, like me just kinda hustling through my life, going through my boring little menial repetitive tasks that I do every fucking day that improve me 0.000001% and that add up over time. I really think I should make a video of myself just going through my day and just show me doing it every fucking day so people can see the menial, slow, boring nature of progress. Because for every public victory you have, you have a private victory. You know, for every kick-ass video I put up online, there's those hundreds of hours that I spent at home looking at my video footage, looking at other speakers, comparing it, contrasting it, and learning how to be a better speaker. For every hot seat video that you see of me where I do some epic shit that blows your mind, there's all that time that I spent going out and doing menial little bullshit approaches again and again and again, and then going home and looking at what I did and how I could improve it. And on and on. For every kick-ass, freaking out boot camp student that I have that love the program, there's those 50 weekends a year that I went out and taught, learned every little nuance of the fucking thing again and again and again for a decade. So, you know, that's kind of like what success is like. I hope that I, you know, I provide an example of a guy who is untalented, funny looking, and shouldn't be able to do it, and is stunting on all your faces. And, you know, that you can see that and say, oh shit, if that little dude can do it, I can do it.

How early in life did your relentless ambition begin?

Did this happen when you were very young?

You alluded to the fact that you sold papers at age 6 or something. Well, I don't know. It just I don't really feel like I'm that ambitious.

Oh, come on.

I'd hate to follow you around for a week. Yeah, well, I just work hard, but I know a lot of people that work hard. My father worked hard and set an example for me, and, uh, and I know a lot of people that work hard. What does that mean, working hard? What is your day like? You know, hustle all day long. You know, we talk about hustlers— Pete Rose on the baseball field. I try and do that all day long, and that's what I think we need to do here in America. I mean, the people working in the American automobile industry. We've got to out-hustle the Japanese. We've got to get that old roll up our sleeves and get back to work, and then we'll get this country out of trouble. We can do anything better than anybody else in the world. But if we gotta reawake that, uh, that spirit, that's what I try and do with the Atlanta Braves, is get everybody hustling, because it's, it's, it sets a good example for the people that are watching the program.

You want enough fear "Is the disease, hustle is the antidote." So, in my day, I already sound like an old school dude, in my day, we, it was just tough, man. You start a company in 2001, good luck, right? You can't count on funding, you can't count on sales, you can't count on anything but just crazy hustle and just grit your teeth, claw your way to success. There was just no easy way to do it. What I find is a lot of the entrepreneurs today are much smarter than we were back in the day. They're like way smarter. You know, they got blogs, they know what VCs are doing, you know, they know everything that's going on in the space. There's a corpus of knowledge now that makes entrepreneurs today much smarter. But there's liquidity in funding, especially on the angel side. It used to be much harder to get an angel deal done than a Series A deal. Now, Angel deals are a piece of cake, but what happens is I see a number of entrepreneurs who don't have that hustle, and they're afraid, and they act out of that fear, and when you act out of that fear, you make big mistakes. An example might be doing a preemptive deal with a VC thinking they're your friend. An example might be like not being hardcore and keeping your job. An example might be A lot of times it gets exposed through deals. You see that fear being exposed through the deal cycle. And so, if you're an entrepreneur and you find yourself afraid of something, sack up, okay? And start hustling. Hustling is the antidote to fear. Go create your success.