Never STOP Chasing Your DREAMS, Even When They Call You CRAZY! | Evan Carmichael | Top 50 Rules

Everything in your life will change when you realize that you do not want an easy life. Stop praying for easy. Stop praying for convenience. You don't want it because you don't want to photocopy your life every single day over and over and over and over again. You want variety. You want change. You want something different. But with that variety comes uncertainty, comes pain, comes challenges. And from that pain comes purpose. Ultimately, your purpose comes from your pain. And the more pain you go through, the more challenges you take on, the more you stretch yourself in your comfort zone, the the more you're gonna be able to reach down and help somebody come up to your level as well. You can only help people to the extent that you have been through something. So the next time you're going through some pain, tell yourself this is the best because it's your chance to show yourself and the world what you're made of and will define the impact that you will have.

Rule number 2, give more value.

Most entrepreneurs don't charge enough. You're so worried about getting rejected or losing clients because of a higher price that you'll charge just enough so that you stay just above the survival line. That's not how winning businesses are built. If you can't break your survival mentality, you'll stay in survival mode forever. So the first brand deal that I ever got was for $500 from a major telecommunications company, and they wanted me to write for their website. And they hired me, they hired 9 other people to write an article, and they said, "Write 300 words, we'll pay you $500." And for me, $500 at the time, I thought, "This is great." It's amazing, I got my first deal, $500, this is cash, I'm pumped. But more important, I'm getting a link from a huge company. And for anybody back in the old school SEO days, if you get linked from a big company, that can mean a lot for your business to take off for rankings. So I would have done it for free just for the link. So they gave me the $500, but I didn't just write the 300 words because I wanted to give more value. I wanted to get paid based off the value that I could provide, and so I had to show them Here's how much value I can bring. And so instead of writing 300 words, I wrote 1,500 words, right? 5 times more than what they asked. And then I made a video talking about it. And then I also promoted it to my newsletter list, promoted it to my audience, let people know when that article came up, here it was. And so what happened as a result of me doing all this work? I was the only one doing it. So when they came to the end of the series, I had my posts that were crushing it. And the 9 other people were doing what was asked, the 300 words, the bare minimum. What is asked of you is the bare minimum. That's your ticket into the door. If you just did what they asked, that's not enough. That's not giving them insane value. And so I was the only one that they hired. 10 of us went in. I was the only one who kept going because I brought them way more value. Now I started charging more for what I was doing. It went from $500 per post to $1,000 to $1,500 to $2,000. Kept increasing my prices because I was bringing them the value and they could see it.

Rule number 3: Raise your standards.

One of the hardest things in the world to do is to raise your standards. Everything that you are surrounded by keeps you where you are. Your friends, your family, the media you consume, your habits, everything. Your environment has been perfectly created to keep you exactly where you are right now. If you want to raise your standards, you need to raise your environment. I met up with a friend of mine recently who I've known for 12+ years, and he was talking about how much I changed over the years. And for those of you hardcore fans of mine, you can go back on my content and see how much I've changed. But specifically for him, he's an entrepreneur. I've seen his business grow over the years, and he talked about how much more willing I was to be truthful, to be honest, to push him, to push him when it was uncomfortable and believe in him even harder, to say the things that are uncomfortable that need to be said that will help him get to where he needs to be, to believe in people more than they believe in themselves. He's seen the changes in me and how much more direct I am, how much more confident I am, and how that's helped him directly in his business and his life. Where did that come from? It came from my videos. If you go back and watch my old content, I didn't have a lot of confidence. I loved what I was talking about. I thought it could help, but I didn't have the emotional commitment to the words. A lot of my messaging belief has stayed the same, but my confidence and my commitment and my standards have raised because of the videos that I consume. Because my environment was a certain way and it was pretty good, but now in watching my own channel, watching my own content, being a subscriber to myself, making my videos for me and then sharing it with the world, I feel like I have all these people on my wall and more in my ear every day. I've got Steve Jobs talking to me every day. I got Oprah Winfrey in this ear. I got Elon Musk back over here. I've got all these people every day, all these successful people in my ears constantly. When you are around successful people, you will become more successful. When you hang around these people, you will start to think like they think. You will adopt their mindset. You will see the world the way that they see the world. And so you have a choice. Look at your current environment. Look at the people who you're currently hanging out with. Look at the media that you are currently consuming. Does it lift you up? Does it build you to be a better version of you? The thing that you want to go off and do, the thing that you need most in your life, are you surrounding yourself with that enough in your environment? Are you taking enough of it in? I want more belief in my life, and so I get a daily injection of belief through my channel, right? I inject myself with belief every day so that if you come around me and you've got a cold and you sneeze on me, right, you're a negative person, you're pessimistic, you sneeze on me with your negativity, I'm good because I have so much belief in me from the injection.

Rule number 4, focus on your distractions.

The thing that you keep getting distracted by might be the very thing that you should be focusing on. So many people keep asking me, hey Evan, how do I stop getting distracted? How do I focus on my work? If you keep getting distracted, it's for one of two reasons. Either one, you don't like the work that you're doing, or two, you're afraid of it working out. The solution isn't to keep avoiding it. The solution is through. And chances are that thing that you keep getting distracted by is actually the thing that you should be focusing on. You just don't know how to make it a business yet. Now, I'm a big believer in as soon as you get an idea, you test, you try, you tinker, you experiment. Idea to action, the 2% difference. Let's go, let's go, let's go. So a quick example with my Top 10 series. When I first started the Top 10 series, I didn't think it would become a series. I didn't think it would become this huge thing that then later defined my channel and became the most popular series on my YouTube channel. It started off because a friend of mine, Mark, posted a blog about Kanye West and how he interrupted Taylor Swift. And this was multiple years after he had actually done that. I was like, come on, man, you can learn from Kanye, dude. Stop hating on Kanye. Yes, he gets himself into trouble. He deserves it. But he's also a genius. He's also someone that you could learn from. He's won more Grammy Awards than anybody at his age. He convinced John Stevens to change his name to John Legend because it had an old-school voice. There's all these amazing stories about Kanye that you can learn from his success. And so I thought, forget this. I'm not just going to complain. I'm going to take action, and I'm going to make a top 10 rules for success from Kanye West. And I went out myself and researched all these different clips, and I put them together. And sure, there's a lot that you can't learn from Kanye. There's a lot that you don't want to model or copy and emulate into your life and business. I get it. But there's still 10 things at least that you can apply and learn from him to make you a better version of you. And so I just did it. And I released it and people liked it. It was meant to be a one-off video just to show my friend Mark, to say, just watch this, Mark. Watch it, learn from it. You could learn from Kanye. And it was a distraction project, right? I'm working on my business. I'm working on trying to create something. Mark creates his blog posts and I get distracted by it and think, I want to make a video. And I put my business on hold instead of saying, no, no, forget that idea. I need to stop doing that. I need to, I need to just focus and forget all distractions. No, I said, you know, I'm gonna put this on hold because I can't stop thinking about this. So I'm gonna do this, get it out of my system, and then I'm gonna come back to my main business. Although that little thing that I did just as a one-off to show my friend Mark ended up becoming the entire channel. You never know. And so it's idea to action. That thing that I got distracted by ended up becoming the beginning of an entire series, an iconic series on my channel, and it might be the thing for you too.

Also, if you want more motivation and confidence, check out our 254 series. The link is in the description below.

The people who win work the hardest because they love what they do. Create an outline and a schedule. What I found really helpful for me was to create an outline at the start. If you're doing work that you love, you're more likely to follow through. You're more likely to do it because it doesn't feel like work because you love doing it.

Rule number 5: Align your goals with your dream.

This is why I think 10-year plans are almost useless. Because if you are chasing down your dreams, then your goals will change so many times over the next 10 years. Think back to who you were 10 years ago. Take today's date and imagine yourself 10 years ago. Could the person who you were 10 years ago accurately predict what a great life would be for you right now, today, 10 years later? If you've had any kind of growth over the past 10 years, then it's a no. It's a no way. You've grown so much that the person 5 years ago, 2 years ago, let alone 10 years ago, has no idea of what you're capable of. And so the danger of creating these 10-year goals for yourself is you can hit your 10-year goals. You can have a goal and hit it in 10 years. I just think that it's small compared to what you could do. Because if looking back 10 years, the 10-year younger version of you could not actually predict what would make you happy right now, then what makes you think that you right now can create a great plan for you looking forward 10 years? You can't, and that's the best. Now, I don't think goals are useless. I think goals are great. I think goals are a stepping stone along the path of your dream. You have to just make sure that your goals constantly align with your dream.

Rule number 6: Model success.

Nobody has the exact life you want. Nobody. This is why so many people have a challenge learning from mentors, because you're looking for one person to teach you everything. That one person does not exist because you want a unique life, because the perfect you doesn't exist out there yet. You have to create it. It's on you. And so the way to get through it is to model from different people. It's to look at, I want to learn this from this person and this from that person and this from this person and this from that person and mix all of those things together to build an amazing life for yourself. This is partly why I created my channel. I want to be able to model success from all sorts of different people. And every video that I make, I've learned something from. All the people that I profiled, I've learned something from them. If I personally, me, Evan Carmichael, haven't learned something from that video, then I don't post it.

Rule number 7: Don't settle for the wrong thing.

I think too many people settle too early on in life for the wrong aim. People settle for the wrong business, people settle for the wrong career, people settle for the wrong relationship because they're in such a rush to get to their aim that they end up with a life of suffering. If you don't know your aim yet, that's okay. It's normal. And maybe you found it but lost it. That can happen too. There may be many times in your life where you don't know your aim. The solution is to taste, is to test, is to try, is to until you find it. Because otherwise you live a life filled with regret, knowing that you are capable of more, but you settled for less.

Rule number 8: Learn.

Reading should not be your priority. Learning should be your priority. There used to be only a small number of ways to learn. It used to only be reading, or maybe going to lectures and learning from people. But reading was one of the fastest ways to learn because you could take somebody's life and in one book condense the whole thing thing, all of the lessons, and here you go, chance to learn. Now though, there's so many different ways to learn. There's podcasts, there's videos, and so you need to understand what is the best way that you learn. Reading does not have to be in your top priority, but learning has to be. The difference between where you are today and where you will be in 5 years, that growth will be in direct relation to how much you learn, how much you feed this brain right here with knowledge that shifts the way you think. but it doesn't have to come from reading. So looking at my story as an example, I used to read all the time growing up. I used to read. I'm 39 now, so I used to read a lot growing up. It was the only way to learn. And the idea of being able to look at any famous entrepreneur and look at their story and how they got started, that was a lot of knowledge that allows you to step into somebody's world, right? If you don't like your environment, you don't like the people around you, you don't want to become your parents or the people in your community, you want something you want something bigger, then you need to start to surround yourself with those people. And reading is a great way to step into their world. And so I used to read every single week, not quite every day, but almost. I was reading a lot. I was voracious. But as soon as video came out, I quickly shifted. I would much rather watch a video than read a book. I just learn better that way. I would much rather have an Elon Musk video, watch him and see him tell his story and look at the body language, than I would reading a book about somebody else telling Elon Musk's story. Story. That's me. That's how I learn. I listen to zero podcasts because auditory is the slowest way for me to learn. If it was the only way, if the only way to learn was to listen to podcasts, then I would be all over it and I would force myself to do it because I love learning. But because there's so many different options and I love video first, I default to learning through video like this, videos like this on my multiple channels. And so video is by far number one for me, and I consume video pretty much every single day of my life. Number 2 would be reading, and a huge drop down to number 2. I'll read maybe 3 to 4 books a year. And then number 3 would be auditory, which would be podcasts. And I consume zero podcasts. I don't know that I've listened to an entire podcast all the way through. It would have to be some person that I can't find the video or a book on, and the only information, the only way to get it is to listen to a podcast.

Rule number 9, you share pain.

Your story is the secret to finding your purpose. The thing that you feel is holding you back and that you're afraid of is actually the thing that you need to lean into so that you can help other people. Your purpose in life comes from your pain, and you can either succumb to that pain and let it control you for life, or you can use that pain to change the world. So my biggest pain was being an entrepreneur and struggling and suffering and making $300 a month and owning 30% of a company and turning down extremely high-paying jobs to go off and be an entrepreneur and live the entrepreneur life. And I was too embarrassed and ashamed to tell my friends that I was struggling and suffering and not making any money. And I hated myself, and I felt like a loser. I felt like I was adding no value. I felt like I was getting up every day and working and working and working the entire day and not seeing my friends and not doing any other stuff that I wanted to do because I was so focused on building my business, and I wasn't getting results. Like, nothing was happening every single day. And I was tired of living way below the poverty line, and I told my business partner that I quit. And that was the worst day of my life, that one day when I decided that I quit. Eventually, I woke up the next day and I said, I can't quit. I'd rather know and fail than not know. And I asked myself, who else had done this before? Who else had built a software company? How can I learn from that person, model their success to build my own company up? But I love helping entrepreneurs now because I struggled so much as an entrepreneur. That was my pain.

Rule number 10: Do what works for you.

Should you have a plan B or not depends on your personality. For some people, the only way they act is if they are all in, if they don't have a plan B, if they burn the boats. But for others, the best way to get them to take action is actually small starts to taste, to try, to test. If you want to quit smoking, do you go cold turkey and just quit? Or can you use Nicorette and slowly wean yourself off? Both strategies can work, but it depends on your personality. The same thing applies in business. I had a guy call into my morning show today on Instagram and he's in a bind. He is making a lot of money. He's making $300,000 as a base salary, pulling in over a million with commissions at his current job, but he doesn't want to do his job anymore. He's tired of doing his job. He wants to have a bigger impact. He wants to make more money. Yes. But he wants to do something that's fulfilling. You know, he wants to do something that is coming from his soul, and he's worried that starting over, starting from scratch, he's going to lose all this money from this high-paying salary and he's not going to be able to find success. Great. He's an all-in kind of guy. The challenge with all-in kind of people is you can't just do things on the side. The smart, safe, logical, practical way to do it would be keep your job, and in the evenings and on the weekends, start your business. Get it going. When your side hustle is making enough to support yourself, you can quit your job and go all in on that business. But you have something to fall back on. You've got your business. It's growing, right? You're making some money. If you can support yourself part-time from your business, then if you can go full-time, you'll make even more money. That's what makes sense. It's practical. It's logical. But if you can't do it, if you can't stay consistent because you're an all-in kind of person, that plan won't work for you. The way to get through it is you have to go all in. Take a leave of absence, go all in, give yourself a year, and recognize that it's not fatal. Whatever job you're at, if this is your problem, whatever job you're at, you have a skill set. What's the worst thing that's going to happen in the next year? Well, maybe you don't make it, right? Maybe your business is zero, right? You make zero money from your business. You have to go back and get another job. At least you know. It's better to fail and to know than not to know. You have a skill set. You can go back and get another job. Maybe you don't burn the bridge with your company and you can get that same job back if you want, or maybe you move on and get an even better job. It's not fatal. You're not screwed for life, and if you don't do it, you will always regret it. And so he's wrapping up some of his deals, and then he's gonna take a leave of absence and go all in his business. To find out, to know, because this opportunity that he has in his head has a limited time frame, and if he doesn't do it, he's going to regret it and hate himself for the rest of his life.

Rule number 11: Chase your dream.

Chasing down your dream, even if everyone around you thinks you're crazy, is the only way you're gonna win. I like to say that everybody has Michael Jordan-level talent at something. Everyone. Yes, you, you right there, you, you could be the greatest of all time at something. The problem is most of us settle for something just over survival, something just good enough to get by, instead of going for something that you could be the greatest of all time at. The toughest choice I ever had to make in my life was whether I should become an entrepreneur or go take this 6-figure job traveling around the world in investment banking. And I thought I wanted to be an investment banker, But I had this thing clawing, gnawing at me saying I need to at least try this entrepreneurship path. Just to test, just to see. Nobody in my family was an entrepreneur. I didn't have an upbringing of entrepreneurship. I didn't have heroes or role models around me who were entrepreneurs that I wanted to model and be like them. I thought I wanted to be a banker. But when this opportunity came up, I did not want to live with regret. That's the final filter through which I made my decision. I looked at the two decisions. This is where you can't just make your list. When you're faced with a really tough decision, you have to make your big decisions with your heart and the small ones with the head. What do I do? The most difficult decision of my life. What do I do? Do I take this job or do I try to be an entrepreneur, make $300 a month and have 30% of a company? What's the best call? I did not want to live with regret. I asked myself, if I'm 100 years old and I'm sitting on a rocking chair and I'm in a retirement home and, and I'm, I'm about to go, this is it, this is the end of my life, when I look back on this moment right now, I look back on it, what will I regret more? Saying no to the job or saying no to the business? I thought, you know what, I can always get another job. I could. It may not be the same job It may not be in Asia like this one was. May not be traveling as much, but I can get another job that's similar. This business, I don't know if I'm ever going to get the shot again. I don't know if this will ever come around again. I'm going to regret it if I don't know. And I adopted the mentality that I would rather know and fail than not know. I had to know.

Rule number 12: Play smart.

I hate spending money until I'm making money. I think this is how so many people end up going broke. You take all the money you have, pour it into your business, and because you don't know what you're doing yet, you fail and end up losing everything. Taking that one shot may mean you're in debt for the rest of your life. I want you to take a smarter path. So I look at my YouTube channel as an example. I've started this channel 10 years ago. It's crazy. Just over 10 years ago. What a crazy ride. But when I started it, I had nothing and I didn't want to spend my money on hiring a bunch of people and investing into gear and equipment and everything else. And so I started by just asking a friend of mine, Mark, who's been a longtime friend of the channel, if he would come and film me. He had a video production company at the time. I said, Mark, can you come and film me for one episode? And he did, and he came in and he filmed me, and it was a lot of work and a lot of editing afterwards, but he did it because he was a buddy of mine. But he wouldn't do every video like that, and so I had to find other ways. I had to borrow equipment from my friends, and when I couldn't borrow their camera anymore, I used the— I want to pull for my cell phone, but this didn't exist 10 years ago. I didn't, I didn't have this capability 10 years ago. I used whatever phone I had, whatever camera I had, these tiny little things. I don't know if you remember the flip cam that I would just prop up on, on a desk in front of me, on a bookcase, and it would tilt and so the video itself would be a little bit looking like it was moving because it wasn't, it wasn't fully stable sitting there on the shelf. I had sold my business, I had made some money, I had another successful business, my website, I had 8 people on my team, but I don't want to spend money till I'm making money. I don't think that's a healthy practice. Maybe I'm a little too risk-averse, maybe I care too much about protecting my capital. I don't know. There are some people who go in and they take out a huge loan, invest everything they have, and sometimes they hit. Sometimes you hit. That's, that's the appeal. That's the attraction. Sometimes it's gonna hit, but most of the time it's not.

Rule number 13: Stick with your goal.

Most people don't hit their big goals because they don't believe that they can. Because you've trained yourself that when you set a goal and when it gets hard, you quit. If you're on a diet and that food comes in and it smells oh so good, you eat it. You're training yourself that you set goals and don't follow through. You set goals and you don't follow through. You set an alarm to wake up at a certain time and you hit the snooze button first thing in the morning. You set a goal and you did not follow through. And so now when you set new goals, you've trained yourself, you've conditioned yourself that I'm the kind of person who doesn't follow through. So instead of "do it anyway," I'd switch it to "do it because I said I would." Sticking with your goals, doing it when it's hard, that's how you build self-respect, self-esteem, and self-confidence.

Rule #14: Do difficult things.

You don't want an easy life. You don't want to sit on the beach and just be served drinks all day long. That might sound appealing right now if you hate your life, but it's not what you actually want. You want to do difficult things. Your self-confidence, self-respect, self-esteem comes from doing difficult things. You want to be a hero. You want to be on a journey. You want to make an impact. All of the heroes that you look up to right now, look at where they came from, look at the journey they went on. They suffered a lot of pain to get there. You want to follow a similar road. So don't hate the pain. Recognize it for what it is: your chance to show yourself and the world what you're made of. So I recently came back from doing my tour, 23 cities, 90 days, and I broke my neck along the way. And thank you everybody for the warm wishes, and having you guys in my back pocket sending me all the love every day was, was super helpful, and I appreciate you. And so many people saw me doing what I was doing with this giant neck brace on, with this huge, you know, cut and scar across my forehead. Is it this side? Yeah, this side. So there's still a little bit of a scar right there. They saw that and said, man, you're so inspiring. I see you in the hospital still doing a live stream, and I am telling myself some BS excuse as to why I can't get up and go to work. And, and that's amazing, and that's uplifting. But the real reason why I did it why I kept going wasn't to try to be an inspiration to everybody watching. It was to be an inspiration to myself. It was to show myself what I could do. Is that I'm in pain every day. At the beginning, I had this crazy concussion, but then once that subsided, I still had, I still had pain. I'm still in pain. This is months later and I'm still in pain. I'm still recovering. I'm still going through rehab. Just that hurts like so much. It's crazy. I'm still in pain, but I want to make myself proud. I want to be an inspiration to myself because when you do difficult things and you get through it, that's how you build self-love. Not by taking it easy and only doing the things that are within your comfort zone. If you're in your comfort zone all day long, you hate your life. It means that you're setting tiny goals for yourself that you know you're going to accomplish, and you're basically just photocopying your life. Every day is the same, is the same, is the same. And it's all inside your comfort zone. That's not what humans are built to do. You want to grow. You're a hero. You want to go on a journey. You want to do amazing things. You want to help others.

Rule number 15: Hate mediocrity.

To make a real change, you have to hate your life. Good is the enemy of great. If you're good, you're good. It would be nice to have more, but you're not willing to do the crazy, scary, painful things that require to get great Because you're good. You need to realize, if only for a few moments, that you hate your life. You hate it. You're capable of more, way more. This is nowhere near— this is nowhere near maxing out. This is nowhere near the max of your capabilities. You should hate that. You need to hate that. And then you make a powerful decision to change. So if you've ever been to a Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within event, the 3.5-day event, His most powerful exercise that he does is his Dickens exercise, and what he has you do is write down your limiting beliefs. He has you write down what are the things that, that you do that is holding you back, the belief system you have that is holding you back, the things that you know you need to act on that you're not doing. Why is it that you're not doing it, and what is it holding you back from accomplishing? And that's a great thought exercise, but unless it's emotional, you're not going to take action, right? You know it. Fixing that would be nice, it'd be good, it'd be nice, right? Yes, but you still like your life. It's a problem. You don't hate your life. You're not desperate enough to make that happen. You could think, well, I'll do it tomorrow, I'll do it next week, I'll do it next year. No, you need to hate your life right now or that thing will never happen. And so what Tony has you do is you take those 3 limiting beliefs and then you project forward, and it takes you down, I think, 5 years and 10 years and 20 years into the future. So now you imagine your life 5 5 years into the future. That thing that you're afraid to do, that thing that you have in your head, that limiting belief of yours, you haven't fixed it yet. What's the result? What happens? What do you look like in 5 years that you still haven't done the thing? What happens to you in 5 years? And then in 10 years? And then in 20 years? It takes you deeper into the pain basically each time that your life is terrible, right? You never fix this thing. You never chase that opportunity. You never go after the thing you know you're capable of. And he puts puts so much pain on you through this exercise. It lasts, I don't know, maybe 20 minutes. He puts so much pain on you, but then it forces you to want to make the change right now. And then he'll snap you back. The idea isn't let's stay negative forever. As entrepreneurs, we don't want to do that. I don't want to be negative forever. It's using negativity and negative forces in a really acute sense. And he's little pockets, these little moments to force you forward, to force you into action. Because when you hate something, you're gonna change it. When you've hated something in your life, it's an immediate change. I need to make that change immediately. But again, when you're good, you're good. You don't do anything about it. And so whatever it is that you want in life, you have to be desperate to go and chase it down. You have to. And the only way to do that is is to hate your current situation.

Rule number 16: Surround yourself with success.

Raising your game starts with raising your standards. Raising your standards starts with raising your environment. And raising your environment starts with a decision to make it so. I just finished my 3-day workshop here in Toronto where I teach people how to become thought leaders and transform them so they can take the ideas that they have here in their head and blow it out to the world, start building a business, making money, having an impact. And I was super fortunate to have two people there at the workshop who I've known for a decade plus, friends of mine who I've known for a long time. Typically it's people who fly in from around the world, but I was really grateful to have these two people here. And it was a really interesting conversation that came out of it from both of them. And then that led to my wife and other people who I've known said, over the last two years, Evan, you've really turned it up a notch. You, you seem to have accessed a different level, and, and I want to know how I can access that too. I know I felt it too. I mean, it's great hearing it from these people who've known me, but, but I know I felt it too. And maybe you guys have felt it too. If you watch back my videos that are 2, 3, 5 years old, you've seen a shift. I'm still talking about believe. A lot of the messaging is exactly the same, but the confidence, the standards, the expectations have gone up in the videos. I've gotten better. I care more. Now, how did that happen? I'm not some magical unicorn creature. You can do it too. It happened because I chose to continue to surround myself with excellence. With the videos, I make my videos for me. The top 10s, the mentor me's, this series, I make it for me because I want to be around excellent every day. And here's what happens when you're around people who are pushing the limits and doing amazing things every day. Slowly it seeps into you. It doesn't happen on a daily basis, but it's a cumulative effect where if you're around Steve Jobs and AP Giannini and, well, my parents and Howard Schultz and Kanye West, if you're around them every day, if they're talking in your ear every day, if you're watching the Top 10s and Mentor Me's every day, you're around it slowly it's gonna seep into you. The more you're around success, the more that success mindset will seep into you. It just will. And what that does is change your perspective and gives you more confidence and gives you more courage. And that made me step up. That made me go and do things that otherwise I would have been scared to do. That made me go and do this crazy tour of 90 days, 23 cities, when I broke my neck and then kept going on the tour. All of these things that seemed impossible to me at the time, that then I said, I'm gonna do it. The thing that gave me the strength and courage to do it is all of the content that I've been consuming. It's the people I've surrounded myself with who've had success that make me want to be more successful myself.

Rule number 17: break free.

Where you start from does not have to be where you end up. You didn't choose your parents, your community, your neighborhood. You didn't choose that being born. But at some point you become an adult, and then it does become a choice to stay exactly where you are or break free. All of your heroes, all the people you look up to, all the people you respect and want to be like, they started with less than what you already have right now. They started from a worse upbringing, from fewer opportunities than what you currently have available to you right now. So you have to decide. Do you want to win big like they did? Do you want to escape? Do you want to break free? Do you want to come back and be an inspiration and lift the world around you up? Or do you want to blame, complain about where you started and stay there forever?

Rule number 18: Don't fear rejection.

Rejection leads to success. All you have to do is look at the people that you look up to. Look at the people that I profiled on my YouTube channels, and what you'll find is rejection after rejection after rejection. So rejection leads to success. You know this intellectually. You already know this. But when you get into the situation where you have to face rejection, then your emotions take over. Your fears take over, and you don't do the thing that you might get rejected for, even though you know logically, because in that moment your emotions, your fear, are greater than your logic. I had a life-changing fear of rejection situation happen to me in Paris when I was 18 years old. And I was there, and I was on the street outside the Notre Dame Cathedral, and I had a map in front of me. And this cute girl comes up to me, she asks me for directions, and I wanted to ask her out, and I was too afraid. I was too embarrassed. I was too ashamed. I was too worried that I might get rejected. In my head, the only thing I could think of was, I want to ask her out, and she might reject me. She might say no. And so what did I do? Nothing. Now, if I had logically stood to the side, pressed timeout, you know, paused the situation, say, Evan, logically, what makes sense? Logically, you know, she might say no and you're okay. You'll move on with the rest of your day. Logically, she might say yes. Why is she coming up to you asking for directions? Why is she asking for directions? When she already speaks perfect French and she seems like a local, right? Logically, that's what makes the most sense. Logically, I should have summoned the courage to go off and do it. But in the moment, your emotions take over. Your fear takes over. That idea that you might get rejected takes over. And so what did I do? Nothing. I let her walk away. And ever since that day, I reminded myself that I would rather know when failed than not know. And I use that painful moment to whenever I am thinking about doing something I'm afraid of rejection for, afraid of it not working out, then I have to do it. That, that moment is what led me to become an entrepreneur. Because a year later, when I had the chance to have my dream job and make $100K a year, travel around the world, or be an entrepreneur, own 30% of a business and make $300 a month, I had that picture in my head where I was thinking, I can't let this happen again. I don't want to live with regret. I would rather know and fail than not know.

Rule number 19: Have a cause.

Having a cause will make you feel like a superhero. It'll allow you to do things you never thought you'd do and give you the courage you never thought you'd have. All of your heroes had a cause, and if you want to stop selling sugar water and change the world, it's time to find yours. I love the Steve Jobs story. I'm a huge fan of Steve. I have his poster on my wall as one of the 5 people that I look up to on a daily basis. But one of the things that I really find most valuable about having a cause is it can allow you to have the courage to be the evangelical person, even if it's not naturally who you are. I look at Steve Jobs and I see someone who is naturally talented, who's a great salesperson, who has the gift of gab, who loves being in the spotlight, who is that person who likes being up front and center. And so it's easy to go off and be that person. Now you combine that with a cause and you get a company like Apple. But having a cause can make you evangelical even if you are introvert and shy and don't like the spotlight. I know because I'm talking about myself. I am an introvert. I don't like talking to people. I don't talk to the person next to me on the airplane. Being in front of the camera me nervous. Being in front of a giant audience makes me shy. I'd much rather be at the back of a room than be the center of attention. One of the things I used to fight the most with my agent about was he would say that, Evan, you don't want to be famous, that's a problem. Like, yeah, I don't want to be famous. It's not about me, it's about the cause. And recently it started to sink in that by me becoming more famous, I could spread the message more. But it's one of the biggest things that we kept fighting over because I don't crave the limelight where a lot of people, they absolutely have to have it. But when you have a cause, it forces you to the front. I make videos because I want to help entrepreneurs. I make videos because I struggled so much. Your purpose comes from your pain. I struggled so much in starting my business. I want to make the path a little bit easier for the next generation of people coming through. I'm making videos and content and speeches for the 19-year-old version of myself that needed to hear this stuff. And so I feel it's my responsibility, it's my obligation, I have to do it. And it forces me out into stages that normally I would say, you're crazy, I'm on this tour right now, right? I gave up a quarter of my year, 90 days, to hit 23 cities and do the thing that I'm most afraid to do, which is get up and potentially disappoint people every 4 days by doing another event. And I kept going even though I broke my neck. I broke my neck 3 weeks ago in Denver, and, and we kept going. I only canceled one event completely, and I just got up and kept going. And so having that cause, feeling like the work that you do is important and meaningful, is the whole thing.

Rule number 20: Be practical.

Your vision alone is not enough. Doing what you love is the number one rule for success from everybody that I've covered, but doing what you love, following your vision, is not enough. You need to balance it with what actually works. This is why so many people fall down and fail. If you just have a vision but don't pay attention to the trends, your vision will never happen. It will die within you. If Simon's vision is to help people be inspired to go to work, I love it. That's awesome. I'm on the same page. That is a joint vision. Amazing. But how you go about doing it matters. He's not doing it through smoke signals and face-to-face, right? That era is gone. But he's also not doing it through virtual reality and hologram Simons coming into your living room, right? That era has not arrived yet. How you approach the work matters. So how does Simon do it? He does it mostly through his books, right? Start With Why. He does it through his speaking, the TED Talk that launched his whole career, right? How did Simon get his mission to take off? How did Simon get people even aware about his vision? Well, he started by doing it just helping his friends, right? He was just being a good friend, helping them out, and he said, "You should go and speak." And then he created that TED Talk and he blew up. He blew up through his TEDx talk that became a TED Talk and YouTube, and then through his books, right? If he was not paying attention to the trends, if he did not go do his TED Talk, if he did not get on YouTube, if he did not write the book, if he was not marketing in the era that we are in right now, if he was not paying attention to the trends that, oh, people watch YouTube videos, oh, people go to TED Talks, oh, people read books. If he wasn't paying attention to those trends, nobody would know Simon Sinek. That's the problem. You start with a vision 100%. Just paying attention to the trends is not enough. You start with the vision, but you have to know the trends too. It's always both.

Rule number 21: work hard.

Hard work is your ticket in. It doesn't guarantee your success. There are tons of people who work hard and are living at the poverty line. But there is nobody who wins and doesn't work hard. Working hard is your ticket in. One of the biggest reasons why I've won on YouTube is because I've been making 3 videos a day for the past 5+ years. 3 videos a day for 5+ years. There, there have been 1 or 2 days where maybe I missed 1 video, not 3 videos, not an entire day off, maybe 1 video once or twice in 5 years. That's it. It's just been a testament to consistency. Every single day, videos have to go live on the channel, and I filmed through everything. I filmed through having broken my neck, right, in two spots. I filmed through having a concussion. I filmed through being sick. I filmed through completely losing my voice and then having to pull up pieces of paper with the notes written on it. I filmed through everything. I think there's a lot of people people who, who I look up to, who I think are way better than me, people who have way more talent than me, who are way more natural than I am at making videos and expressing themselves. And I've passed them because I just worked harder, because I just kept going, because I kept making the content. One of the, the biggest reasons why you are not more successful is you're just not consistently working hard enough at it. This game of entrepreneurship, whether you're trying to be a YouTuber or something totally different. It's are you getting up every single day and doing the thing that you have to do? Because you're going to get punched in the face. There's going to be so many setbacks.

Rule number 22: Race your environment.

Your environment is keeping you where you are. Your environment has been perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are right now. The people you listen to, the media that you consume, the habits that you do daily, All of them, all of them are designed to keep you exactly where you are. So if you want to raise your game, if you want to raise your life, you need to raise your environment. I've changed a lot over the course of having this YouTube channel. The people who've known me the best and the longest, especially in the past 2 to 3 years, have said, Evan, you've changed a lot for the better. You've evolved. You're more confident. You have more, more poise. You're a better speaker. You, you're pushing the boundaries more. You've changed. What happened? How do I get that for myself, right? People wanted it. Whenever you are off growing and learning and evolving, other people, they want it. They want a taste of it. They want to do it too, because we are not designed to just photocopy our lives over and over and over again. So how did I get it? I paid more attention to my environment. I paid more attention to my daily routines. I paid more attention to the people that I hang around with. It's important. So looking at my physical environment, right? Look at the— look at this office. Look at the people behind me. This all means something to me. Looking at the new design that I've had here below, putting things like my neck braces. It's down below. You can't really see it, but this inspires me. I walk into this every day. My YouTube videos, the channel I create for myself, that the people that I profile, I'm learning from. I feel like I have Gary Vee in my head. I have Oprah Winfrey in my ear. I've got Elon Musk telling me what to do, pushing me to try to get better. I hear these people talking about, you have to be courageous, you have to be bold, you have to believe in yourself more. And when I feel myself being nervous about something, boom boom boom boom boom, it's a push that I have to do it. And so I've designed my life, I've designed my environment to help push me to get to the next step.

Rule number 23: take action.

Most people don't fail enough. Most people are so afraid of a huge fail that they don't even even try. You're afraid of taking a big bet. You're afraid of going into deep debt. And that fear prevents you from having the thing that matters the most right now in your business— momentum. You don't need to fail big, but you do need to start. Otherwise, you will never build the big business that you're capable of building. So I'm a big fan of going from idea to action, idea to action, idea to action, idea to action. Get an idea. What do you do? You take action. Teach yourself, train yourself. As soon as you get that idea, don't judge it, don't think about it, don't plan and ponder and strategize, because your list of ideas is a mile long and it's not going to get any shorter. You're a genius. You come up with great ideas. You're going to keep coming up with ideas for the rest of your life. That list of ideas is not going to shrink. So how do you start moving? You take action. I call it the 2% difference. Instead of planning to get to 100%, for your idea? What's the 2% difference that you can just do something about right now? I think your ideas came to you for a reason. I think it's inspired. Why are you thinking about this thing? Don't judge the reason, just go off and do something. One small conversation, one small action, start building momentum. That's the thing that's missing right now is momentum. You need more momentum. You're a genius, you have great ideas, you should be changing the world. What's missing is momentum, and I I want you to find it.

Rule number 24: Love what you do.

This is why it's so important that you love what you do. Success is painful. It's a lot of work, a lot of stress, a lot of failure, a lot of rejection. But the thing that gets you through it is you love what you do. You love the process, you love the work, you love the growth. If you don't love the work you do, you will give up because it will just become too painful. Meaningful to keep going. So at the Whole Foods this morning when I went to go get my Bulletproof coffee, I ran into a friend of mine, an entrepreneur friend of mine who I told about my tour in December before I left, and she was super excited and I hadn't connected with her since I got back. I went on this 3-month, 90-day, 23-city tour across the US, and it was amazing happenstance to meet her at the Whole Foods this morning. And she said, how was the tour? What was the best part of it? And I said, breaking my neck. Two-thirds of the way through, I broke my neck. I broke my neck in two spots. I compressed my spine. I had a concussion, had to get staples in my head, all of it. She said, breaking your neck, that's the best part of your toro? That's a really positive outlook. Like, it's not just a positive outlook, it's the best. Like, it actually was the best part. Because it really got the test. Like, why? This sounds crazy, but this is it. This is, this is the process. This is the mindset shift I want you guys to make, that you do difficult things. You love difficult things. You don't want it to be easy. Easy means you're inside your comfort zone. Easy means you're not pushing up against any barriers. You don't want to be easy. Stop getting these easy, small, tiny wins that you can snack on. You do difficult things. You love taking on amazing, huge things. That's That's who you are. That's what you do. And this was a chance for me to grow and help cement that for myself.

Rule #25: Don't make busyness your habit.

Most people are crazy busy but don't get anything done. If you feel like you're crazy busy, like you barely have any enough time for yourself, that you get to the end of the week and you know you've been hauling ass all week long, you've been busting your face in. You've been working and working and working, super busy, but then you look back and you say, what did I actually do this week? If that's you, then this message is for you. You're busy, but you're not focused, and shifting your life begins with shifting your priorities. So I used to pride myself on responding to email ASAP, quickly. Like, you send me an email, 30 seconds to 60 seconds later you would get my response. I prided myself on it. Time. Like, that's good service. That's what you should do as an entrepreneur, right? Like, people communicating with you, you want to send it back to them quickly. I hated having to wait and wait and wait on people, so I didn't want to be that for others. So I had all my notifications turned on, and as soon as an email came in, ding, came in, boom, response, go. What made it worse was people would then get my response— they tended to be on the computer at the same time— and then they write back right away and say, wow, you're really quick, like, thank you so much. And that fed, that fed the identity, that fed the, the ego. And I am very fast, exactly right. There's proof that this thing works. The problem was I wasn't getting anything important done. I was working on something and then the notification came in and I stopped what I was working on to go answer this email, feel great about myself, that little hit, and then come back to my project like, what was I working on? And it takes time time to start getting back in the flow of working on that thing, and then another email comes in. And so I ended up being busy. I was working all day long, all day long, right? Like lunch at the desk, breakfast at the desk, dinner at the desk, all day long, right? Washroom, back to the desk. There was no breaks, all day long straight through. But then I get to the end of the day, end of the week, like, what did I do this week? I don't know. But I answered a lot of emails because I didn't have focus. I didn't have priorities. And when I realized that, after that happened enough times, I realized, wow, this is— I'm never gonna get close to my goals. Like, just doing this, all I'm doing is reacting to other people's goals. When somebody shoots me an email, that's what they want. They're demanding my time, and I'm giving it to them freely because I have no defense around my time, because I have no respect around time. I'm just letting them bleed out. There's no time for me to work on what I want, and so I'm not gonna make any progress on the things that I want. If you want to make progress on the things that you want, you have to carve out time for the things that you want. That's how it works. And you got to put gates and blockades and barriers around and say, this is my focus time and nobody's allowed in. Now, worst-case emergencies, family, awesome, but there aren't that many actual emergencies. You have to be willing to let let the small balls drop to go for the big goals in your life. You have to pick. You can't do both really well. You have to pick. What do you want to be great at? Do you want to be great at getting every little small thing done and then never do the big thing? Or do you want to be great at getting the big things done and risk losing some of the small things? Because by chasing down the big things, you're gonna lose some small things. It's just gonna happen.

Rule number 26: Have a mission.

This is why I hate 5 to 10 year goals. You are not going to be the same person 5 years from today as you are right now, let alone 10 years from today. You won't be the same person. Think of the person who you were 5 years ago. Go back 5 years from today, 5 years, subtract 5 years from today's date, go back to that person. Could that person accurately predict what a happy, successful, joyous, impactful life is for who you are right now? Could that person 5 years ago accurately predict what you today are capable of? Heck no! Heck no! None of you have been growing, none of you have been learning, none of you have been experiencing life. You're capable of so much more today than you ever thought was possible 5 years ago. And so what makes you think that the person who you are right now can accurately predict what you're gonna love doing, what you're gonna be great at, your goals, your plans for the next 5 to 10 years? It's not possible. You're thinking small. Here's the thing, I think you could have a 5-year plan or 10-year plan and hit it, it's just small compared to what you are actually capable of doing because you put the blinders on. You stayed down this one course, but the best course for you is actually going to swing out here. But you are so stubborn and so focused— focus can be a great thing, but it can also lead you to play small for life. Instead of having 5 or 10-year goals, I want you to replace them with a mission.

Rule number 27: Focus.

The problem is not that you're not a genius. The problem is not that you don't have great ideas. The problem is that you are not focused. You haven't said that this is the thing. This is what I have to accomplish today. This is the mission that I am on and nothing is going to stop me. If you don't learn to focus on what's important to you, you'll never do important things and live your life reacting to what's important to other people instead. So I recently started a new business with one of my Thought Leadership Academy students, Jeremy. He came to my event last year. I was thinking about him on my tour this year and said, I want to start a business with Jeremy around YouTube consulting. I get asked a lot, hey Evan, can you check out my channel? Hey Evan, can I work with you? Hey Evan, can I hire you for XYZ? Looking at my channel, give me ideas, mentoring, guiding me, and it's just not the business that I want to be in, but it is a business. And so I thought, Jeremy, Jeremy's gonna come on board, he's gonna do it. Now, when I recruited him and called him, he was not a YouTube expert. And I gave him the homework and said, listen, if you want to do this business together, it's got to be important to you. I'm halfway through my trip on my tour, I'm coming back in a month and a half. Here's what I need you to know by the end of the month and a half. And I gave him resources, I gave him videos, I gave him insights and analytics, and said, you need to know all all of this, know all of this, and then when I come back, if you're ready, we'll start the business. And he did. He focused. He made it his priority. He knew nothing about this, and all of a sudden he became an expert by every day, all day long, grinding to learn, by, by researching everybody who is an expert at this, understanding their methodologies, their best practices, looking through all my videos, my thumbnails, my strategies, all the things that I've talked about in the past, digesting it, kind of like The Matrix when Neo's in The Matrix and he— now he can learn kung fu and now he learns how to fly a helicopter, all of that stuff. That's basically what he did. And when it came back in a month and a half, I put him to the test and said, hey, let's do 2 free calls. We'll take 2 people from my community and say, hey, free, free call, let's go. And he blew me away with how much he knew because he focused on it. Here's a guy who went from knowing almost zero to now being an expert to be able to really help give value to people. And now when we're looking at new people coming in, I barely have to do anything because he already knows what I'm gonna say. He already knows. He's already done the work. He's done the research because he spent that time on focused effort. And this is where I think a lot of people feel like they're never gonna win because you may not have had the expertise, you don't have the education, it doesn't take long to become an expert. It's just focused work that you're passionate about. Focused work. You could quickly become, in a matter of months, an expert at something if you just focus in on it and dedicate your life to that thing that you love. You can easily pass people who are experts at something who don't love their thing, but because you're willing to take it on, you're willing to absorb— think about when you want went to school, how much of the information you had in your head but you had to read over the page 4 times? So if you're at the same page 4 or 5, 6 times because you got lost, you got distracted, that's not focused work because you don't love that thing. But when you love something, how much faster do you retain it? How much more enjoyable is the learning process? How much better are you really quickly because you love doing that thing? And so Jeremy got really good really quickly because he loved it, because he attacked it, because he focused on it, because he made it a priority, because he didn't say, well, I'll spend half an hour a week trying this new thing. No, that's not how you win. Now, where do we go from here? We'll see. Does Jeremy want to be a one-man band forever? Does he just want to be a high-paid consultant? Does he want to then bring on a team? Does he want to expand? Does he want to have products? We'll see. We'll see how that business evolves. And flows, but he got here in a really short amount of time because of that focused effort and energy. And that's what I want for you.

Rule number 28: Let your genius out.

You have two choices in life. Choice number 1: chase your dreams and risk upsetting some people who don't get it. Or choice number 2: play small for life and never do what you're capable of because you're afraid of what some people will say about you. Most people play small and live a life of regret. I want to put pressure on you today to step into your fear and step into your potential. So yesterday I shot a 10-part series with Neil Pasricha. He is an author who sold over a million books, and I did a 10-part series. I said, Neil, I have a series on how to make a million dollars in different industries. I want to do a 10-part series with you on how to sell a million books. You've done it. Most people have never come even close. I want to pick your brain, dissect it, understand what makes people successful. And how to sell a million books. And he said yesterday on camera that his default reaction was, who am I to do this? I mean, I just got lucky. Yeah, I don't know how I did it. And, and he was afraid to come on and actually share some of his tips because most people don't ask him this question. So I've never been asked this question before. I don't know how to respond. I'm afraid of coming on camera on the YouTube channel with you, a friend of mine, and, and looking dumb and having nothing nothing to say. And because that was part of the reason, he had to go off and do it. And so he came up with a list of 10 things. He came up with his ideas. He said, no, I work hard. Neil's one of the hardest working authors of all time. Neil is constantly working, constantly grinding, constantly finding new opportunities to write books and promote his books. He got there not out of just luck. He got there because he worked really hard at it. And I pulled out those lessons from him. And that's the mindset that I want people to take. That's what I want you to take, that you're not in your situation because you're lucky. You're good. You could be better. You could still grow more, but you're a genius. You're talented. You're amazing. And you need to let that shine. You need to let that out. And some people may watch you. They may watch your videos. They may read your books. They may see what you produce and say, this person is so full of themselves. This person doesn't get it. Like, you're not going to appeal to everybody. Even me, even my message, I'm not a controversial guy, right? My message is belief. How do you hate on belief? People do, right? I'm not, I'm not coming out with my channel and saying this person sucks and talking politics and all these things that you know are going to trigger people, right? That's not who I am. I want to spread belief. And yet, even though I think we've got one of the best communities online in the YouTube community. People are often toxic on different channels, but shout out Believe Nation, fist bump, love you guys. It's, it's positivity, and yet we still have people who are negative. They don't get it. They want to spread negativity in my community. And so what do I do? Should the answer be, well, I'm not going to post content because I'm worried about what this person is going to say? Should I not post content because I'm not, I'm not happy with the end result. I mean, those 350 videos I made public before, I wasn't completely embarrassed by my content. Embarrassed, like I couldn't watch it back. I was so embarrassed, like, oh, it's so bad, it's so bad, it's so bad. Post. Next, move on to the next one. And with practice and repetition, you get better. I've done 6,000-something videos, so it took me a long time to get there. You might be able to get there a lot faster, but it's very rare that you start off and the first thing you pops. And even if it does, don't expect everybody to love it. You're gonna get people who will not like what you do.

Rule number 29: Just try your hardest.

You need to tie your self-respect to your efforts, not your results. Where you get your self-love from, your self-respect, your self-confidence should not come from winning. It comes from trying. Because if you tie your self-respect to winning, you'll only do things that you know you're gonna win at and and therefore you play small for life. So I'm training a guy on my team who I've promoted, and I'm putting him in a position that is way beyond his skill set, way beyond what he thought he'd be doing, and it's a big push outside his comfort zone. He was a guy who was doing a bunch of admin tasks for me, and now he's in charge of all of my YouTube analytics. I want him to be my data guy. I want him to go through the thousands of videos that I have on my channel and make recommendations to say this intro is too long, this intro is too short, this thumbnail sucks. You know, when you talk, Evan, things blow up, or things suck. When you wear black, people love it. Anything. Go through all the data, go through all the analytics, and tell me where we need to make improvements. So I was on a call with him yesterday and had to have a serious talk with him because he's looking for data that supports his hypothesis because he He suggested on my channel, my main channel, that we go back to my original intros where I say one sentence here, one sentence here, and one sentence here, and then, "He's Robert F. Smith, and here's my take on his top 10 rules of success," right? That's what we did way back, like in the very first original series of the top 10s, and we've evolved. So he suggested take out the song, take out the intro, take out a whole bunch of stuff and just do those 3 things and let's see if it works. So that's what I did. Like, great, good idea, the data supported it, backed it up, let's go and try. We haven't tried it, we won't know. So we tried it. The first video came up was the Robert F. Smith Top 10 Rules of Success on that new template. And I'm looking at the data and it sucked. You know, my goal is to get 70% audience retention at 1 minute. That's what— that's my goal across my channels, 70% audience retention retention at 1 minute. That means 30% of people max have left at the 1-minute mark. That's an insanely high goal to reach. Almost nobody hits that, especially consistently. You might think, oh, 70%, it's easy. It's insanely difficult in the YouTube world. So I looked at the numbers for this one, and it was 52% or something, something brutal. We haven't— we don't really operate in the 52% range. So this one came in, it was brutal. 52%, like having a heart attack. Oh, sucked. People hate this. And then I asked him, hey, how are we doing on the new videos? And he sent me this report that says, hey, well, on our relative data is up, you know, a relative of data saying compared to all videos on YouTube, this video is doing well in the first minute. Yeah, but that's, that's not actually the real story because all of our videos relative to regular YouTube, if you're looking at any video, this video, any Evan, my first video, all of them, every video I make relative to a normal average YouTube video were higher relative. That's not what I'm looking for. We're going after 70% audience retention at 1 minute. You know this, this is where we're focused. And behind all of it was he just didn't want to feel like a failure. He didn't want to feel like he recommended something to me and it didn't work out. That is trying to justify it by saying Well, look, this stat shows that it works, but it's not what we're after. This experiment so far has been an epic failure, and that's okay. What I need you to do is expect to suck. Expect the ideas not to work. Know that coming in. Know that coming in, we're already operating at a really high level, right? If every experiment that we try works, that means that we just sucked at the beginning, right? We sucked. You're learning, you're picking this up. Most of my new experiments don't work. I'm trying hundreds of new things all the time and most of them won't work. I expect to suck, but it's okay because I tie my self-worth to the effort. Am I putting my max effort out? Your experiment— I'm talking to the guy— your experiment was a great test. I backed it. The data suggested we do it, but it's not working. And we'll give it a month to see, and if it still doesn't work, we're gonna move on to do something else.

Rule number 30: Believe.

95% of the world wakes up and drives to a job that they hate. I believe that you have Michael Jordan-level talent at something, that you are a genius. You are the best, the best at something. Most people either, one, have no idea what that thing is, or two, they have found it but they don't have the courage or belief to to go chase it down. Either way, the path is through. You need to find the thing that you are a genius at, that you have Michael Jordan-level talent at, and live it every single day if you want to live your life instead of regret your life.

Rule number 31: Attack the fear.

People aren't afraid of failing. You're afraid of failing in front of other people. You'll sing in the shower, but you won't sing on the street corner. You'll record a video, but you'll never release it. You'll be your own biggest critic, but you won't at the same time also be your own biggest fan. That needs to change starting today. So my biggest fear is disappointing people. I'm terrified of disappointing people. The idea that you would come to my Thought Leadership Academy and I would teach you how to win on social media and get the ideas out of your head and pay $2,000 to do it— the idea that, that you would come and be disappointed destroys me. And it's led to some positive things in that I always overdeliver. I'm always obsessed. I'm always putting so much value to that. Even if you only get 10% of the value I'm giving, you still more than made the money that you invested into any of the stuff that I'm doing. But at the same time, it's still this fear. And so I want to attack the fear. I teach myself to attack the fear, and I think you should too. Even just attacking it for the sake of attacking it is good, even if it doesn't lead to a positive result for your business. It's good because you're building strength, because you're pushing your comfort zone, because you're getting better, because you're growing. That's worth something. That's a ton of value. Because if you can conquer your fear of doing this one thing, that translates to every area of your life. If you teach yourself to have more courage, that translates everywhere. So maybe you're afraid of— if you're on a cruise ship and they bring up couples and they do a game show, you're afraid of what might happen. On that game, do it. How does that make you a better entrepreneur? It makes you a thousand times better as an entrepreneur because that's the same fear that you face in your business. That fear of going on that game show on the cruise ship, that fear of taking your phone and recording a video in public on the street. These fears that seem like nothing, they show up everywhere in your life. They show up everywhere in your business. And so learning to tackle them, especially in low stakes, starts building the muscle.

Rule number 32: Believe.

You go as far as you believe you can go. When the people around you say you're crazy, when you're putting in massive effort but you're not getting the results, where you sit alone and wonder, did you just make the biggest mistake of your life by starting this business? That is the time when most people quit, and you need to believe more. Because if you love this thing, if you know that it's going to impact people and you give up too soon, you will regret for the rest of your life knowing that you were capable of more and you just quit on it a little too early. So I look at my new book as an example. I did my tour across America, met with entrepreneurs all across America, and found that people were struggling with the same thing. They want to know, how do I find what my purpose is and turn it into a a lucrative business. Every city that I went to, even though that was not the topic I was covering, it came up over and over and over and over again. 23 different cities. And so I thought, I'm going to write a book on this. This is going to be my next book. I'm going to take people through the process because my process works and it helps people live in 10, 15 minutes and they're getting, they're getting new ideas and results. And here we go. Like they understand what path they need to take. Finally, they have clarity on what to do next. And so I told my agent and my lit agent, like, this is the next book I want to write. We told publishers, this is the next book I'm going to write. And from the start, it's been this big pull. It's been, it's been fighting. It's, we don't like the title. We don't like the concept. No, we're not going to publish it. No, we're not going to publish it. And I want to do it by January because I want to do my next tour across the rest of the United States, East Coast, Texas, Mexico. I want to do my my next tour. So I want to have my book in stores by that time. And it's been this rough slog where if I didn't believe in myself that this was so important, with the people who are looking at it saying, "No, we don't like this concept. Nah, it's been written before. No, this method we don't believe in," it's easy to quit. It's easy to give up. It's easy to say, "Forget it." I just know that it's going to work. I know that the process helps people. I've seen it with my eyes across 23 cities over 90 days. I wrote the draft of the book and I gave it to some beta readers, and the number one piece of advice from people who've read both my books— so, "You're One Word" and then this— like, "This is the better book. This is the best book you've written so far," including my self-published ones. And so what do I do? I've got these people who are my audience who love it, and then these people who aren't my audience but who make decisions saying, we don't believe in it. I'm not going to quit. I got to keep going. I got to do my tour. There, there better be some crazy good reason for me not to do my tour, right? Even if I have to self-publish it. Now, I'm pretty close to making my deal, making it all happen, and, and getting timelines and all that, but we don't have a signed contract yet, and anything can happen. We're pushing the timelines because I'm pushing the timelines, because otherwise Otherwise this thing could drag on forever. When you have an idea that you love, that you know can have a huge impact, that's just taking longer than you hoped it would, when people are telling you that it's crazy and that it's stupid and that who are you to go off and do this thing, if you love it, you have to double down on it. You have to go in on it. You have to be open to getting help, but if that door closes, you try to find another one. And that's the story of every successful special person. You're trying to do something different.

Rule number 33: Become a shark.

You haven't become a shark yet because you haven't decided that your mission is important enough. Now, being a shark doesn't mean that you have to become aggressive, violent, and angry. It means that you're pushing to be the best in your industry, a true leader, someone who makes a difference. And it starts with your mission. Raise the level of how important your mission feels to you, and your entire life changes. So I look at my mission as an example. I want to solve the world's biggest problem. It's never going to happen. I'm trying to solve the biggest problem I think in the world, which is that lack of belief in yourself, the untapped potential. It's what I wake up every day trying to do. And the more that I put myself in a position of this thing matters, what I do really, really, really matters, the more I can put myself in that mind timeframe, the bigger my thinking becomes, the bolder I get as a human and as an entrepreneur. And I look at the path that I've taken over the past X number of years. I look at being able to collaborate with someone like Eric Thomas when he gave a shout out in his video. That would have been something I wouldn't have thought of when I first started on YouTube. I look at the relationships I've built with people like Tony Robbins and Gary Vaynerchuk and Grant Cardone and the people that we profile. Tony Robbins, I took the people on my team to go see him at Unleash to the Power Within. I brought 5, I think, of my people down and we're sitting up in the cheap seats. And then a year later, a year later, he invited me as his personal guest to sit right down in the front row, chairman-invited seating. And I'm going back. I leave tomorrow. I don't know when this video goes up, but I leave tomorrow for Dallas to do it again. It's wild, right? Like, it doesn't feel like that stuff is possible. It comes from shifting the value of your, your mission. I deserve it because what I'm doing is solving a real problem. And we often feel like we're not capable of doing these great things, and we downplay our role, and we downplay how important our mission is, and we downplay what we think we can do. That's what needs to shift. That's what needs to change. You need to feel like the work you do matters. You need to feel like the mission you're on means something, can have a big impact. And if you're a approaching life in that way, everything in your business changes.

Rule number 34: Never quit on something that you love.

As long as you love it, you have to keep going. You cannot quit. Maybe one day somebody does throw you a bunch of money and you can stop sleeping in your office. Or maybe it's just a slow grind up and it takes you 10 years to become an overnight success. You'll never know how long it will take you to be successful. Successful. But what you do know is that if you quit on something that you love, you will end up regretting it for the rest of your life. As long as you love it, you have to keep going. You can't quit. So look at my story. It wasn't easy being an entrepreneur growing up. That's why I do so much to help entrepreneurs because I don't want you guys to struggle as much as I did. In my first real business when I was 19, I had to decide between earning $100,000 a year and travel around the world in my dream job versus owning 30% of a company making $300 a month and being unsure if anything's gonna work out or not. And I decided that I had to keep going. I had to try because I didn't want to end up being 85 years old looking back and saying I never did it. I never went for it. I would rather know and fail than not know because the things that you regret are rarely the things that you do. It's the things that you didn't do. The things that you had a chance to do, you had an opportunity, you thought about it, you felt it, but then you backed down because you were afraid. Those are the things that you regret. That's what you regret most, and I didn't want that to happen. But starting off my business wasn't easy. I struggled, I sucked, I made it harder on myself because I told my friends that I was living the entrepreneur life and I couldn't hang out with them. Meanwhile, that $20 was just too expensive for me to go out and have beer with them, right? I isolated myself myself. I made myself lonely. I felt worthless as a human being. And the worst day of my life came when I told my business partner that I quit on him, that it was just too difficult, that I couldn't keep going, that I needed to feel like I was contributing, that, that my time meant something, that all this work I was putting into something— I just need to feel valuable again, that I was contributing to something. When you wake up every day and you're working and it's just not getting results, it can be real hard to keep going. Going. And so I told them that I quit. I hung up the phone and then just started crying. And the next day I woke up and I just thought, I can't, I can't, I can't quit on this. Not yet. I haven't given everything I've got. Because I felt like in a year, in 2 years, in 5 years, in 20 years, I would look back and regret that I gave up. If I knew that I gave everything I had and it didn't work out, I was okay with the failure. It was just the idea of that thing lingering, that I could have given a little bit more, that I still like this thing and I needed to see it through and I, and I didn't, that I quit on it. I knew that would eat me up forever. And so I had to get up that next day and tell myself, I'm not gonna quit yet. I just have to find a different way to stand. What I've tried so far has not worked. It has not worked. I'm making zero money. What Well, $300 a month. But it's not working out, and I hate myself. I hate my life. I hate how I feel about myself. I have to find a different way to stand. And that energy allowed me to keep going. That energy allowed me to then ask myself, who else has done this before? And I looked at Bill Gates and how he started Microsoft, and that started the path up for my business. And then 2 years later, I sold my company. It happened pretty quick. All because I refused to quit on the thing that I knew I needed to see through.

Rule number 35: Unlock your talent.

You have Michael Jordan-level talent at something, but instead of being world-class at that thing, you settled for being just above average at something that you should not be doing. Albert Einstein once said, everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to to climb a tree, it will believe its whole life that it is stupid. That's most people's problems. You are a fish and you're trying to climb a tree instead of going and being great at swimming. This is the exact problem that I am on a mission to solve. So I recently had a young entrepreneur come to one of my Toronto Q&A meetups that are free that I host every week, and he said, Evan, I have a problem. I'm trying to decide between what my parents want me to be, which is an architect, and what I feel a yearning towards, which is being a musician. And I don't know what to do. I don't know how to decide. I don't know how I'm going to be a success as a musician. I don't know how it's going to work out. And my parents want me to be an architect, and there's this clearly defined path for how to do it. And he's afraid. And I think that's so many people. There's this safe, perfect path that has been designed, that people have done forever and ever and ever and ever and or there's this new, crazy, messy, unrealistic, unsafe, unsure path, which is following your passion, being an entrepreneur, and trying to figure out where you're supposed to go. Here's the thing: if you only go down that safe path, if you only take that job, if you only listen to your parents or other people and you do what they want you to do, you're always gonna be unhappy. You're always gonna know that there was this thing in inside you that you could have done that you didn't take action on, and you hate it. It's never been easier to actually be yourself and build a business and have success being uniquely you, right? This was not open to your parents and definitely not your grandparents. The ability to be an entrepreneur on the side, making money using your phone is something that your grandparents don't understand. It's just, it's totally wild. And so you are unique in individual, right? You are, I am, we all are. You have unique interests, personality traits, belief systems. You're unique. You need to do something unique. If you are unique, you need to do something unique. If you're stuck doing the same thing that somebody else wants you to do, you're never going to be happy. Now, there may be some alignment. You may not absolutely hate the job that you're at, but you know you're capable of more. You're Michael Jordan. You are the Michael Jordan of something. You're a genius, an absolute bona fide genius at something. This is why I think it's the world's greatest problem. This is why I do what I do every single day and making this content videos for you, because I want to unlock people, hopefully more than one at a time. But even if it's just one person who watches this video and gets unlocked, I'm pumped, because I think if everybody is off doing the thing that they are a genius at, man, I want I don't want to live in that world.

Rule number 36: Keep up with the change.

Every time YouTube updates their algorithm, you should be pumped. Anytime Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram makes an update, you should celebrate. Because this is your chance to win as an entrepreneur. Everybody else who's ahead of you, who've made it on the old algorithm before the update happened, they're complaining and wishing that it goes back to the way that it used to be. It's not going going back. And the faster you can get on that train and understand how the new algorithm works, you are going to soar past everybody else. Whenever something new comes along, it's going to happen, guys. The new things that are coming along is only going to speed up. There's going to be more new things, not fewer new things. Every time a new thing comes along, you don't necessarily need to be the first one on it. I'm not saying that you have to go off and try everything, but when something new is coming along, Embrace it because this is the future, right? So many people say, well, I'm not on social media. Oh, that's for the kids. You've got to get on it. If you're an entrepreneur, you need to be on social media and not just giving it off to your kid or your niece or your nephew to do. You, you need to understand it. Doesn't mean you need to be the best at it, but you need to understand it because this is not just where marketing is going. It's where marketing is. Your business is suffering because you don't understand understand how to play the game. So Rome wasn't built in a day, but it didn't crumble in a day either. If you're not on social, if you're not taking advantage of new technologies, your business is slowly starting to crumble, and I don't want that for you.

Rule number 37: Play to win.

Most people are so afraid to lose that they don't even try. So when you have nothing, when you're at the bottom, you've got nothing to lose, and so it's very easy to go off and try. But as soon as there are stakes, as soon as you've won just a little bit, now you risk losing something. And this is where most people back down and play small for life. And so you need to decide: are you playing life to win, or are you playing life afraid to lose? So I look at my YouTube channel as an example. When I started it, there was no risk. Nobody knew me, nobody's watching my videos. I could go and fail, didn't make a difference. I could try a I tried a whole bunch of different things. Whenever the algorithm changed, I got pumped because the people who were ahead of me were complaining and would be romantic and would want it to go back to the way it was. I'm like, hey, algorithm change, amazing, let's go! I'm gonna learn that new thing. But now I've gotten bigger, right? Now I think I have more views than anybody in the entrepreneur space on YouTube. And it's easy to now be protective. It's easy to say, well, I built this thing, I don't want I lose, and I hate that. I need to, I need to destroy that. I want to be constantly losing, constantly testing, constantly risking. Now, not risking it all, not, not putting everything on the line just for one thing, but to be willing to test, willing to fail. As an example, I split up my channels. I split up my channels into 8 different channels. I got advice from Matt Gielen. He's one of 5 people who are I would put on my hand as people who I listen to for YouTube advice, right? He was one of the 5, and another one of the 5 said, "Don't do it." So I got 5 people who I listen to about YouTube. One person says split up your channel. One person says don't do it. What do I do? I have to do it just to see, because I know what not splitting up my channel looks like. It's what I'm currently doing. But splitting up my channel, I won't know if it's gonna work or not until I actually go off and do it. And so I did. And here's a newsflash: it's not working yet, right? My other channels— the most, I think, has 8,000 subscribers. I have 2 around 8,000 subscribers, and the others are smaller, and they're growing every day, and they're gaining momentum every day. But overall, my subscriber growth is down, my views are down, my revenue is down. Everything is down. It's all down. Watch time is down. Everything is down. Is it a big failure? I don't know. Maybe. I'm gonna give it more time and see. I'm gonna give it more time and see. It's a risk, right? I went from making 3 videos a day on one channel to making one video a day across a couple channels, and then, you know, once a week on some channels. And we have 8 different channels now. It's more headache, it's more management. Maybe ultimately it will work out, or maybe in 6 months I'll come back and say, man, that was a giant failure, that sucked. But I won't know until they try. And that's, that's where you need to risk it. That's where you need to try. You need to see. You need to test. You need to taste it.

Rule #38: Stop hiding.

The reason why you are not further ahead is you have told yourself that you are not capable of it. That's it. And you'll come up with really smart reasons that are based in logic as to why you're not more successful. You are a genius. You are excellent. And so you'll come up with really smart genius countless reasons as to why you are not further ahead right now. But at the end of the day, you're just afraid and you don't think you're capable. That's what I want to change in you today. So I sat down yesterday with an entrepreneur who is an up-and-coming entrepreneur. He's had a job for a long time. He's now in his mid-50s and he got let go from his job and he interviewed for another job and it didn't feel as a quite fit and, and he didn't get the job, but he doesn't want to go back and get another job. He wants to now go do his own thing. But there's that gnawing little voice in your head that says, who am I to do this? Who am I to be an entrepreneur? Who am I to bring value to others? Who am I to make money off this idea? Why not just go play it safe and get a job working for somebody else? And his one word was getting down to saying yes. Like, you have to say yes. And so this is where it's really important. When you know what you stand for, when you know what your core value is, whenever you see it and then you see your life not aligned with it, you're gonna be unhappy. If you're unhappy, if you need more boldness, more motivation, more confidence, more courage, look to your most important core value. Look, look at what you stand for. Look at who you are. Because if your one word is all about saying yes to things, then you have to say yes, right? You have to go off and do it, because otherwise you live your entire life in regret. So here he is, this entrepreneur who's now in his mid-50s, who's been let go from his job, who's now trying start up his own career, his own thing. Just got his first speaking gig, just getting started with his YouTube channel and podcast and building momentum. And that's what it's all about. He has all the skills, he has all the talents, he's been in this industry for decades, he knows what he's doing, and yet he's afraid. He's afraid that he's not good enough, he's afraid it's not gonna work out, he's afraid that people won't find his expertise, his knowledge valuable. And I think that's most people. I think, I think every I think everybody's a genius. I think you're a genius. I think you have Michael Jordan-level talent, skills at something. You're just doing the wrong thing. And we're afraid. You're afraid to take action. You're afraid to do the thing. And so you'll live your entire life with regret knowing that you are capable of more. You right now know you're capable of more. Even if your friends and family and the people around you say, "Wow, you're doing such a good job," you know you're capable of more. And you're not living up to your potential. That's most people. And why are you not living up to your potential? Because you're afraid of what that means. You're afraid of the obstacles you have to overcome. You're afraid of the difficulties that you have to go through. You're afraid of being judged. You're afraid of a failure happening and it being catastrophic and you not being able to recover. You're just afraid. And so we need to crush that. We need to crush that. We need to teach yourself that you do scary things.

Rule number 39: Concentrate on your effort.

Most people don't concentrate long enough on achieving their goals. So what happens? You don't achieve your goals. If you're focused on something and you do it every day consistently, you will eventually get results. But if you're constantly jumping from one thing to another, from one idea to another, from one activity to another, then you'll never actually accomplish what you're capable of. The problem isn't lack of creativity or ideas or genius. It's a lack of concentration. And if that's you, I want to fix it in this video today. So let's take a quick look at my YouTube journey. I started on YouTube over 10 years ago. It's crazy that it's been that long, and I wasn't very good when I started. Go back and watch my first videos. They're all still up there. I haven't deleted them. You can go back and watch every single one of them and see how much I sucked. I'm an introvert. This is not natural for me. It took a lot of concentration, a lot of focused effort, and 6,000+ videos later, here I am. Why? Because I just kept going. Because I kept focused on my mission, on my objective. It took me 350 videos until I wasn't completely embarrassed by myself. 350 videos. I had to have my sister come, come into the room with the camera, focus on me, press record, and then leave because I couldn't film with her in the room. And that's my sister. How is this guy gonna be a YouTuber and be on stage and give speeches and be a thought leader and deliver presentations if you can't even do a a simple video with your sister in the room. Concentration, focused effort, that's the key. It's been every single day we've been uploading videos. We've done 3+ videos a day for the past 5 years. Every single day. I've been sick, videos went up. I broke my neck in 2 spots, had a concussion, videos going up. I lost my voice, videos going up. All the time! Every single day for the past 5+ years, it's been at least 3 videos across my main channel, now my multiple channels. Concentration. I'm not very good at this. The point of all this isn't to brag or say, look at me. It's saying that I suck, that if I could do it, so can you. The difference is I think a lot of you guys are way more talented than I am. I look at Alex, for example, who works for me at TDS. He's just so much more naturally gifted in front of the camera. He's funny, he's charismatic, a lot of the stuff that I'm not, and I've been slowly grinding away, getting better. In front of the camera. So I think a lot of you guys are actually better than me, or better than what I was. And if, if you just kept going, if you just kept working on it, you would, you would improve and you would have the results you're after. You're just not patient enough. You're not concentrating enough. You're not putting in the work every single day. This great story comes to mind that is great and sad at the same time. I was meeting a friend in Orlando, another influencer, 6 years ago or so, and we met up and he said, "I'm gonna be the next Gary Vee." Okay, great. I love it. Pumped. Like, let's go. I'm just starting my YouTube career, really starting to take off, and he wants to be his thing and he's gonna be the next influencer. I love it. And then he posted something about a year ago or so and he said, you know, 5 years ago I met Evan at this place in Starbucks in Orlando and I I told him I was gonna be the next Gary Vee, and he was on his career to build his YouTube channel. And fast forward now, and Evan's got, you know, a million, million and a half subscribers, and I'm still kind of where I was because I didn't put in the work. And so that's what I don't want for you, right? He just— he has talent, he's a genius, so are you. He just didn't do the 5 years of work that I did. And he's someone who's actually, I think, way more charismatic than I am. And so I don't want that for you. I want you to concentrate on your effort, which will then lead to results. And I'm going to give you a 3-step process that you can follow to help you get there. Step number 1 is flip patience and impatience. People have this really messed up view on patience and impatience. I think people are often impatient with the results, so you want the results immediately. Human nature, you want it immediately. But you're very patient with yourself. If you look at what you're doing every day, like, "Oh, I'll do that tomorrow." You get an idea, "Yeah, I'll start Monday." I'll start next week. I'll start in— I start next year. Fresh year, start off fresh, all that, right? No, you flip it. You flip it. You flip patience and impatience. What I want you to do is have patience with the results, that the results will come, and impatience with yourself, that today matters. Today you're watching this. I don't know what time it is during the day you're watching this. Today matters. What you create today has to mean something, because if you approached every day with massive impatience for yourself and your effort, and you did that every day, you did the work, that you were proud of yourself for your effort, I promise you that the results are going to come. But it will take some time to get to your big goals. You have big goals, right? You want to, you want to do something big. You have big ambitions. You don't want just some tiny little win. Awesome. That's going to take some time. Even if you're hustling and grinding and being proud of your effort every single day, it's going to take some time. So patience with the results and massive impatience with yourself. Number 2 is think big and act small. This is where I think a lot of entrepreneurs get tripped up. You need to think big and act small. So you have a big vision, a big mission, something that you want to go off and change the world. My big thinking is I want to solve the world's biggest problem, right? It's never going to happen in my lifetime, and yet I wake up every day trying to tackle it. You want to have a big vision. The problem with it of it though for some people is that it means you don't start because to make that big vision happen, you need money, you need investors, you need camera gear, you need equipment, you need a team, you need all this stuff, right? Just keeps adding up all the stuff you need and then you never start. That's the problem. The reason why some dummies are winning off of your idea instead of you is because they just started because they acted small. So you think big and that's the motivating dream that you're chasing down every day, and you act small. What's the smallest thing that I can do today just to start building momentum? Because momentum is the thing that is missing in most businesses. You have great ideas, you're a genius, you're talented, I love what you're trying to do, it's amazing. You need momentum, momentum every single day, creating a little bit more momentum to make that dream come true. Think big, act small. And number 3 is schedule for success. Look at your calendar. Success is your habits, right? You want to make sure that your actions map to your ambitions. The actions that are in your calendar, if you did those things, would help you accomplish your goals, your dreams, your ambitions. So if you're talking about building a YouTube career, amazing. Show me in your calendar where every week you're making time to make YouTube videos. If you want to be an author, awesome, I'm pumped. Show me in your time, show me in your calendar where you've blocked it out that you were going to spend time writing on your book. Most people don't you don't do it. And then you allow all these little things, these distractions, to pull you away from the thing that you want to be doing. You have to put the big things into your calendar first and block off the time and protect that time and look at it from above. And not just your business, your, your personal stuff too. What's a good relationship look like? What's a good health situation for yourself look like? Right? Habits. Put in your calendar and then step above it and look at the week that you're about to go off and do. Look at your week ahead. If If you did those things consistently, would it help you accomplish your goals? And for too many people, it's no. You're living in reaction mode to other people's emergencies, and then you never get to do the thing that you want to do. You got to defend your time. You schedule for success. So whatever your big goals are, whatever you need to concentrate on, you need to make sure you're spending an appropriate amount of time on it so that you get good at it, so you can start getting results and making the impact that you know you can make. Schedule for success.

Rule number 40: Ignore what others think.

If you live your life based off the opinions of other people, you will never do anything great. Take a look at who you're worried about. People who are not happy with their life. People who never went and took their shot. People who spend their life complaining instead of trying to change something. Is that who you want to be? So worried about what they think about your decisions? If anything, you want to do the exact opposite of what they're telling you to do. You don't want their life, so stop living your life by their rules. So I had an amazing one-on-one with an entrepreneur yesterday at my Q&A session here in Toronto that I do weekly, and I feel for her. She's such a talented, amazing, gifted entrepreneur, and we talked about your purpose coming from your pain, and she went through some massive pain that guided her to this success right now. And on her path to personal development, but she's afraid to share what happened. And she said, maybe in a year or two, like, give me a year to work on it, maybe I'll share it. Because she's afraid of what people will think. She's afraid that if it doesn't work out, that she may not be able to get another job. She's afraid of all these things that people might say about her if they found out the truth. The problem is, that's your path. I don't care about what— where you're at right now. I need to know where you've come from. I need to know that you look like me. I need to know that your story is like mine. And so by living in the shadows and being afraid to tell the truth, what you're doing is one, not letting people connect to you as a real person, right? This fake perfect version of you isn't something that people can connect to. Two, you make it so that whatever you went through, you're telling yourself that it's shameful, and you're telling other people that it's shameful too. But if you come out and talk about what happened, Then the people who feel ashamed about it, they now can come out and say, "Huh, I'm not the only one. This happens to other people too. I'm a little bit more normal." And 3, if you want to build a business, if you want to create a YouTube channel, if you want to have a podcast, you want to be an author, you want to write a book, that's the thing that's gonna actually help take you off. That's the thing. There was a great video that I told her about, about a woman who gained 70 pounds. From having a child. So she's pregnant, she gained 70 pounds, and she had a 10-pound baby, and now she had 60 pounds of extra fat on her, right? 60 pounds. So that's a lot. And so she's trying to lose it, and she's working out, and she's eating healthy, and she finally gets down to having a six-pack abs and looking great. And then somebody noticed that when she bent over, that, that they could you could see the flaps of skin. When she stood up, it was all six-pack, but when she bent over, there was flaps of skin. And what most people would have done is deleted that video, pretend like it didn't exist, not talk about that, comments, right? Only show the perfect version. Look how much weight I lost. But she did something different. Instead, she said, yeah, that's my body now. That's what happens when you gain 70 pounds in pregnancy and pump out a 10-pound baby. And that became a rallying cry. That one moment of vulnerability of saying, hey, I'm still not perfect. Like, look, look at this saggy skin that I still have. That's what brought people to her. Now she's not just another mom who lost weight and did this workout plan and meal plan, right? That, that connection was real. And now she's built a million-dollar-plus business from selling e-courses and her recipes and everything else that she goes through. That's the thing. This is your competitive advantage. Your purpose, your pain, your story is your competitive advantage. I do not want to learn from you until I know that you've been through what I'm going through. I can't relate to that story, right? I can't tell that story. I can't tell a mom who gained 70 pounds how to lose weight. That's not my story. I can't relate to it. But helping entrepreneurs, I can, because I struggled and I suffered and I was making $300 a month, and I was eating the same bean salad lunch every day, and I celebrated with only McDonald's french fries because I couldn't afford to buy it. All of it. I struggle with, with fear and embarrassment and shame. All of it. I know what it's like. I've been through that. And why I do what I do now is because I want to try to make the path a little bit easier for the next generation of entrepreneurs, for you. I want you to feel like you're not alone. I want you to feel like there's a place you can come to with a beautiful community, Believe Nation, where we're supporting each other. And there's content every single day across multiple channels that you can go and digest and dive into and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully make your path just a little bit easier. Because I wish I had this when I was getting started, when I was a 19-year-old entrepreneur who was insecure and, and ashamed and embarrassed and not willing to talk to anybody about the problems I was going through, right? That's the thing that it will connect people to you. But if you're so afraid of what people's judgments are going to be, you're never going to get started. I believe humans are built to serve. You're built to serve. You want to help other people. It's hardwired into us. Studies show that the impact of serving other people has the same effect on your brain as food and sex. It's hardwired into you. You want to help other people, and at the same time, you're afraid of judgment. So how do you help other people if you're also afraid of judgment? It's, it's having your foot on the gas and the brake at the same time. You know you're capable of more, but then you're just standing on the same spot. It's the worst. And so you have to let go of the opinions of other people. Some people may not like what you're doing. That's okay. That can't prevent you from service. That can't prevent you from fulfilling your mission. That can't prevent you from living the life you want, because you're gonna be 95 years old looking back on your life and regretting it, knowing you're capable of more but never taking action.

Rule number 41: focus on the effort.

Everything in your life changes when you learn to tie your self-worth to your effort instead of the results. Most people tie their self-worth to the results, to winning. You only feel good about yourself when you win. If that's how you think, then you're screwed, because that person only takes on projects that you know you have a pretty high chance of winning at, and therefore you play small for life. The key is to tie your self-worth to the effort, to trying, and if you do that well, you'll win beyond your wildest imaginations. So let's use me as an example. Look at this video right here, this video. 2 minutes before getting on and making this video, I'm nervous. I'm scared. I don't want to do it. I'm trying to find a reason why I don't have to do this video. Now why? I've done 6,000 of these videos. Do I not love it anymore? Nope, that's not it. I love doing it. So why am I afraid? Who cares? I've done 6,000. The answer is because I don't want to make it the same way that I've done the past 6,000. I want to push harder. I want to push and do something new. If I was just doing what I've already done, then it'd be easy, right? If you're doing the same thing over and over over again, it becomes easy. But then you get bored, you start to hate your life, you start realizing that everything is just a photocopy over and over and over and over and over again. And so how do I push through? I put this pressure on myself to say, this video right now has to be the best video that I've ever made. That's my intention going into every time I'm filming. Most days I don't accomplish it. When you're trying something new and scarier and bigger and bolder, most of the time you won't get it. You fail a lot. But I tie my self-worth, my respect, to the effort I'm trying. And every now and then you'll make a bit of a breakthrough, you get a bit of a win, and then those accumulate, and then you get another one and another win and another one. And so the answer isn't have a big goal and then find a reason why you can't do it. The answer isn't dream big and then convince yourself of some logical excuse for why you're not going to take action. The answer is to push through. The answer is you're scared and you're going to do it anyway. The answer for me is I'm going to make another video. I'm going to try and push myself harder. And I think that's what achievers do, because achievers are failing more than you. Because most days I get up and fail. Most days I'm just failing. It's another failure, another failure, another failure. But the more you fail, the more you're eventually gonna win. I'm gonna get massive results because you tie your self-worth to your ability to get up and try again and try again and try again and pat yourself on the back for the effort you're putting in, not just when you're winning.

Rule number 42: Find your drive.

Most people quit on things because they don't have a powerful mission or they don't know where their drive comes from. Chasing an opportunity isn't isn't enough because you're going up against people who love that thing, who might be willing to die for that thing. If you want to go to Mars, you're competing against Elon Musk, who would die to go to Mars. You better absolutely love it or he's going to crush you. You need to find the thing that you love that does not feel like work. Otherwise, you'll end up working your entire life and hating it. So every Thursday when I'm in Toronto, I do this free event for Toronto entrepreneurs at my dance studio, Toronto Dance Salsa, 5 to 6 PM Thursdays when I'm in the city. I do a free event, Q&A session for an hour. Come out, meet me, talk, let's hang out. However I can help give back to the community and help local entrepreneurs. My Thursdays are bonkers. My Thursdays are all day long interviews, hangouts, podcasts, Skype sessions, one-on-ones. My assistant books them in 25-minute chunks, and I have 25 minutes on, 5-minute break in between. Usually I use that break to get set up for the next one. 25 minutes, 5, 25, 5, 25, 5, the whole day long. And then I end up going to the studio, record my podcast with Mark Drager. I then do 2 30-minute one-on-ones that we film for the YouTube channel. And then after all of that, I do a 1-hour Q&A for the entrepreneur community. And then after that, I'm doing more meetings with my team. It's crazy. And somebody asked me last Thursday, how do you have the energy for all of that stuff? I love it. Like, I love being there with the people. That group session is the best for me. I love it. I'm not getting paid for it. It's free. It's probably not a great use of my time. If I had to pick for 1 hour, what's the best use of my time? Hang out with startup entrepreneurs, ask me their questions. Or, or do something like write my book or make my next course or something else. It probably doesn't make the most sense, but I love it, and so therefore it makes the most sense, right? And for other people, jumping into my schedule might be torture, and it should be. For me to jump into your schedule should be torture. I should look at your calendar and say, that's ridiculous, how do you have so much energy for all that stuff? And when you jump in the mine, it should look the exact same. For me, when I gear up for a Thursday, as an example, when I put my extrovert hat on, I gain energy as the day goes on. I'm not losing energy. By the time I hit 5 o'clock and I'm doing the group session with people, I'm carrying the energy of all the entrepreneurs that I've met on my 25-minute one-on-ones throughout the entire day. I love it. I gain more steam. But most things— ask me to do almost anything else for, for 8, 10, 12, 14 hours, I would hate my life. Ask me to make coffee for 10 hours a day, I would hate my life. Ask me to play piano, ask me to do almost anything for that amount of time, I would hate my life because it feels like work. And so you have to find the thing that does not feel like work, so then when you go off and do it, it actually gives you energy. So paying attention to the energy— if at the end of every day you're like, oh, oh, this sucks, like, that's a good signal that you're doing the wrong thing because you have micro Michael Jordan level talent at something. You are a genius. You should be crushing it at something. And if the work that you're doing is draining your energy, the people around you are draining your energy, chances are you're in the wrong spot. You're hanging with the wrong people. You're doing the wrong kind of work.

Rule number 43: Do difficult things.

Self-esteem comes from doing difficult things. You set a goal, you said you'd start doing something, and maybe even you do actually start doing that thing. But then you hit a roadblock. Then it gets difficult. It gets hard. And what you do in that moment will define the rest of your life. When it's hard, when it's difficult, do you rise to the occasion? Or do you let yourself off again, finding some really logical reason why you can't do that thing? It doesn't count until it's hard. You don't grow until it's hard. You don't build self-respect, self-esteem, esteem, self-confidence until it's hard and you follow through. I keep these in my office as a reminder of who I am, of who I am in my best moments, my best self, to push me to do more and to push harder. What, what are these? If you're new to my channel, welcome, I'm Evan. I went on a tour at the beginning of this year. I did a tour, 23 cities, 90 days, and two-thirds of the way through with a month left, I broke my neck. When I was in Denver, I fainted, I fell out of a chair, I hit my head against a wall, cracked my— the back of my head open. I had 3 staples on my head. I had a concussion and I broke my neck in 2 spots. And after that night, I had to wear this. I had to wear this for the next— I just noticed this note here. Nina signed it. "I love you. Get well soon. Nina." She signed it. That's sweet. Aww, gotta go thank her. Anyway, had a little emotional moment there. I broke my neck and I decided to keep going on my tour. I had a month left. Everybody was telling me to go home. My agent told me to go home. My friends, my family said, "Come home, get the healthcare you need. Relax, stay in bed, rest. You need to recover." And I said, "Being with entrepreneurs is my recovery and pushing through and doing this tour is my healing." One, physical healing, because just sitting on the bed all day is not going to be for someone like me something that's amazing. But two, just, just push it through and knowing that I can, right? It doesn't count until it's hard. It doesn't count until it's difficult. And then you get up and you do it. And so if you've seen any of the videos or pictures of me at the events, I went from standing up and moving around and having energy to then I had to sit at the front of a room with pillows behind me and an ice pack on my shoulder blade for 3.5, 4 hours in massive pain the whole time, answering questions and doing my workshop. And I was so proud of myself for doing it. That's how I built my self-esteem, by getting up and doing it, by showing up. And it inspired the people who came out. They're saying, well, you know, I lived 25 minutes away, I didn't I didn't know if I wanted to make the drive, commit to it. I was kind of tired. And then I saw you with your broken neck still showing up, so I had to show up too, right? But that's not why I did it. I did it for me. I did it for myself. I had to wear this all day, all night long. This was my first one, and then it started to break, so Nina put some duct tape on it here. And then this, this was my second one that once it started to really wind down, I couldn't wear it anymore. I went for this one. And 10 minutes a day is all I could do to take it off for a shower. So I had to sleep in this, I had to do my workshop in this, everything. 23 hours and 50 minutes a day, except for a 10-minute break in the shower where I took it off and was paranoid about moving anything because my neck was broken, I had to keep it stabilized, I wore these. This reminds me of how strong I am.

Rule #44: Alter your environment.

Your environment has been perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are. The people you hang with, the videos you watch, the media you consume, all of it are perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are right now today. If you want to raise your standards, it starts by raising your environment first. So a friend of mine and friend of the channel, Mark Drager, from Fanta gave me a really warm message yesterday, and he thanked me for helping start the process for him to turn from being a pessimist to an optimist, from being somebody who was always worried and negative to somebody who's having more energy, who's seen the light, who's becoming more optimistic, who still has a road to go but is so far further along than where he was before. And he wrote to me to say, thank you for starting me down this path. He said there was one conversation in particular that had special meaning to him, where I told them that I just really believed in him, that I saw a lot of the people around him, I saw a lot of his peers, and I just thought that he had so much more potential than where he was. And I think maybe for the first time he had an extra bolt of belief pushed into him, which is what I do, which is what I'm great at, which is what I enjoy doing. Fast forward to now, 6 months, 8 months later, he's made major gains in his life. He's, he's brought on new team members. He's now consuming other content that is positive and optimistic. He's changing his business around. He's investing more in himself. He's happier. He's lost a lot of weight. He's growing. He's wanting to strengthen his relationships. He's just seen a big shift in his life by trying to move more into optimism instead of pessimism. And so it started with my conversation with him. He then promoted somebody within his organization to become COO whose name is Louie, and he's also a massive force for good and positivity. He started consuming Gary's content, which is positivity. He started consuming Tom Bilyeu's content, which is positivity. He started now injecting all these, these people and resources into his life to make him feel more positive, more optimistic, more happy, give him more energy. So that he has that to go take on his goals and the challenges that are in front of him and slowly move that needle from being a pessimist to an optimist. I don't think people are pessimists, to be honest. I think everybody is born an optimist. I don't think people are born negative. You know, I think that's trained into you. I think you're pessimist and negative because of the circumstances you had and what was planted in your brain by the people around you. I think people are good. I think humans are just good. I think if we weren't good, we wouldn't be here anymore. 99.99999% of people are good, right? Some people have a little bit of a miswiring up there and it causes them to enjoy killing people, but for the most part, we're good. I also believe that people are built to serve. I believe that you get happiness from helping others by being of service to others. That's what actually makes you happy. There aren't very many happy moments in your life didn't involve somebody else. You were helping, you were serving. They've shown the effect on your brain of serving and helping somebody is the same as food and sex. We're literally hardwired to help others and to serve. And so if you believe like I believe that humans are good and humans are built to serve, then what would cause somebody to be pessimistic and negative? How sad of an upbringing does that person have to have had? The programming that was installed inside them by other people who just were negative and down on their life but weren't inherently bad people. The people who stole from my car in LA, the guy who cut me off in traffic yesterday, I don't think they're bad people. I still think they're good people who are built to serve, just circumstances and conditioning have led them down a negative path. And so the good news is you can get out of it, just like my friend Mark has, who was someone who would— who was sworn to say, I am a pessimist, right? I just default to negativity. To now seeing the shift by changing the people he's surrounding himself with, by altering his environment, by consuming content that is more positive. He's already seen a noticeable shift over the past X number of months, and that's going to continue to grow. That could be you too.

Rule number 45: Believe.

Your biggest problem is a lack of belief. The only thing that's holding you back, holding me back, holding your friends and family back is a lack of belief. It is the world's biggest problem, and that's why I created these YouTube channels. I've seen the impact not just on the people around me but myself firsthand, myself, the value of having my own channel. In the work that I do, I make it selfishly for myself so that I learn, that I get better, that I grow, that I challenge myself, and it's it's often hard to see it on a day-to-day basis. You may not feel a lot more confident, have a lot more belief from one day to the next. You might have some big win, you might take on some big challenge, and then you feel good about yourself, but then you fall back down the next day, and you don't see that that's actually a win because the win that you had was so small. The growth that you had was so tiny that on a day-to-day basis, you can't see it. That's the problem. But if you consistently are doing the things like like watching this channel or consuming a podcast or reading a book or hanging around people who are better than you, who have more belief than you, who, who are growing and pushing that inspire you. If you were around that every single day and you look back on your life, you look back in the past X number of months, you'll see how much you've grown. You just will. I've seen it in my own business. Go back and look at my old content. I started a new series on my other channel where it's Old Evan versus New Evan, and the first video we did was 2016 Evan versus 2019 Evan. And what do you think? And you may not see that big a difference in me from last week's video to this week's video, or yesterday's espresso to today's espresso, but when you go back 3 years, see, it doesn't even look like the same person. Go back 10 years, go back and watch my first videos. Go back and watch the first videos. The content was still good, the message was still good, but the delivery, the execution sucked because I didn't know what I was doing, because I didn't have a lot of belief. And I'm still trying to chase the next level. You know, I've grown in belief, but I'm never done. The thing that's holding me back, it's still belief. It's belief in the ability to get to the next step, because as you expand your comfort zone, there's still other things that are outside your comfort zone. You don't want to ever get to the point where you're not growing, where there's not something else your comfort zone. But then everything inside becomes easy, right? What used to scare you now is super easy. Now isn't a problem anymore.

Rule number 46: Make sacrifices.

There will be moments in your business where you will need to have superhuman strength to keep going, where it just demands everything from you, every single ounce that you have. But if you need to have superhuman energy every single day, you're gonna burn out and fail. So whenever I want to try something new, when I'm testing something new, I always eat into some of my reserves. It may mean to go off into this new project, I'm gonna sleep less or spend a little bit less time working on my book or a little less time working on my YouTube channel, right? You eat into these reserves, but that's not sustainable. If that's what you're doing constantly, you're gonna be unhappy, you're gonna burn out, you're gonna fail. So quick example, Sadhguru came to Toronto. Sadhguru, if you don't know, he's a yogi, he's He's an Indian mystic. We did a top 10 on him. He then invited me to come to his event in Toronto and then do a one-on-one interview with him close to the Toronto airport, the island. It was amazing, great time. Out of that, he says, Evan, I want you to come to my multi-day event in the US. I want you to come, be a VIP guest there. It'd be amazing to have you. Awesome, but before you do that, you have to do my 7-day program where you have you have to meditate every day for 7 days, and I think it's an hour plus every day. I didn't have an hour a day, right? I mean, that's not part of what I had in my calendar. Every hour in my calendar is accounted for. It doesn't mean I'm working all that time, but I might be spending time with my wife, I might be spending time with my son. Every hour is accounted for. And so to do this, I had to eat into some of my reserves. And so for that one, I asked Nina, I said, Nina, if you're going to come with me, you have to do this too. Do we want to spend our hour in the evening instead of watching a show, instead of relaxing, to do this program for 7 days for meditation? And she said yes. And so here's the thing, we did it for 7 days and we went to the event, it was awesome. If it was something that we were going to continue, if we're gonna meditate every day for an hour ongoing, then I'd have to readjust my schedule. Your success comes from your habits. You need to figure out what a balanced life looks like for you. Now ultimately, I don't meditate an hour every night. I do some healing meditation for my neck every morning, but that habit didn't stick, and that's okay. So when you're testing new habits, testing ideas, testing something for your business, or some emergency comes up that you have to deal with, it's gonna tap into your reserves. You can't be running your business at full capacity already. You can't be running your business on on zero, on empty, because that means there's no extra gear. That means that when life punches you in the face, you can't handle it. That means if you want to try or taste or test something else, you can't do it because you have no reserves, you have no battery, there's no more gas in the tank. And so that's where a lot of entrepreneurs live. That, that's where it's really troublesome. That's where a lot of entrepreneurs will end up burning out, failing, and crushing their dreams, because you're just running with no gas left in the tank. And so you can stretch yourself. I think that's normal. I think that's okay. I think life will hit you in the face, and just when you think it couldn't get worse, here comes another punch. That will happen. But it's making sure that you can live that balanced life, whatever balance looks like for you.

Rule #47: Hold yourself accountable.

You need people in your life to hold you accountable because you will never push yourself as hard as you can go. You get a personal trainer not because of what exercises you should do, you can look that up online. The real value of a trainer is to have somebody right there in front of you, in your face, telling you to do 3 more reps of that exercise when you want to quit, when you're gonna tap out. And if you were by yourself, you'd say, I'm done, and they say, give me 3 more, because all of the growth happens in that last set. If there's nobody around you to hold you to a higher standard you'll always know that there's another level, but you'll be too afraid to reach for it yourself. So let's use me as an example. I want to solve the world's biggest problem. I don't think people believe in themselves enough. It's why I created this channel and all the other ones I have, and the books and the speaking and everything I do. I want to go out and do this impossible thing that's never gonna happen. I'm never gonna solve the world's biggest problem, and yet I wake up every day and I try to do it. And I use a I do it from a combination of what I call aspirational mentors, which are people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and the people that I profile on this channel. And then I also do it from people who challenge me one-on-one. If you watch my Entrepreneur Advice channel, I get pushed every week by my agent Steve, by psychologists in Australia, by people who are coaching me on how to get better. And they push me and they tell me I need to do more and they tell me I'm being an idiot in these areas. I'm like, go, this is the homework. And the more uncomfortable I feel during that process, usually the better the advice is. If I think about the tour that I launched last year and now the tour that I'm doing this year, it started as a free tour and became a paid tour when my agent Steve pushed me to do it. You need to charge for this. And immediately my heart's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm scared. Means I have to do it. Having people around you who can push you to do the things that you need to do, who make you nervous, who make you scared, who see your blind spots, who cut through your BS, who tell you, "That's just fear talking," because we'll come up with really logical reasons why we can't do something. Or aspirational mentors who, when you see how they react to things, how they see things, how they understand the world, and then you look at what you're doing, it forces forces you to be pulled up. It forces you to take the next step up on the staircase. You need to do it because your environment's been perfectly designed to keep you where you are. Your friends, your family, all of it. It's keeping you exactly where you are, and the difference between where you are now and where you want to be and where you can be in a year, in 2 years, in 5 years, in 10 years is going to be the people you have around you and how much they're willing to push you to believe believe in you, to tell you what you may not want to hear but you need to hear to grow, to challenge yourself, and get to the next level.

Rule number 48: Own your dreams.

When did you decide that your dreams shouldn't be big? When did you decide that you shouldn't tell anyone else about your dreams? Until you own your dreams and stop making yourself feel small, those dreams will never happen. Never. Now, this is something everybody struggles with everybody, myself, Mel, everybody. We're worried about playing a bigger game. We're worried about thinking bigger for ourselves, and we're worried about telling other people because what if it doesn't work out? What if we don't make it? What's that judgment gonna come? How are they gonna think about us? And so I think about my own story when I'm trying to create. The biggest fight that I used to get into with my agent Steve was he says, Evan, you need to be a household name. You need to be famous. Famous. Like, Steve, I don't want to be famous. I, I equated famous to ego. If you're famous and you're this big egomaniac— I didn't— I don't want to be an egomaniac. It's not— it's not about me. It's about spreading belief. I don't— I'm nervous getting in front of the camera. Even before filming this video, I'm nervous. Like, I wanted to— wanted to do well. The lights come on. I don't crave it. I don't crave attention. I'm an introvert. I like just doing my thing. Evan, you need to get Why, Steve? Why do I need to get famous? And for maybe 2 years we fought over this because I kept equating fame with ego, and I looked at the people who were famous and like, I don't want to be like them. And there's a lot that they did that, that bothered me, and I wanted to do it a different way. And that's the key. It's finding the different way to do it. How does an introvert on a mission become famous? I don't know. We're gonna go on this journey together and hopefully find out. What finally clicked for me was him saying, when you get famous, your mission will spread. If you start tying actions to mission, that's how you get me to move. For other people, might be, hey, I'll give you all this money if you do this, or you'll have the fame or credibility, or have statues built. I don't need statues built of me. But as soon as you tie it to mission and service, that gets me going. So he said, if you actually want to fulfill your mission, if you say you want to spread belief, then you need to get famous. Because the more people know about you, the more people will hear your message. And it finally, it finally stuck. Like, okay, I got to do it. I don't know how to do it. I've never, I've never tried to do it. I've always wanted to be behind the spotlight. And so now Well, now this is part of my mission. I need to become a household name and get famous so that more people can believe in themselves. If I actually want to solve the world's biggest problem, then I need to be out there doing it. I need to believe in myself more. If I'm trying to spread belief, I need to believe in myself more too. And so I think that's a human condition. That's part of what we want to do. You want to step outside your comfort zone. You want to serve. Humans are built to serve. We are. We are built to serve. But service requires helping other people, and because we're afraid of judgment, you don't want to do it. So you've got your foot on the gas and the brake at the same time. You want to help people, but you're worried about their judgment, so you don't do anything. You know you're capable of more. You know you're capable of more, but you don't do it because you're afraid.

Rule number 49: kick yourself forward.

Comparing yourself to other people can be a fantastic thing. A fantastic thing. But there's only one way to make it work. You have to kick yourself forward, not down. You kick yourself forward, not down. Most people, here's what they do. Most people, you see someone who's had success, you see somebody with a Ferrari or the car, or somebody who you're jealous of, or you're insecure about yourself when you're around them. You see them and you, you, you think you suck. You look at them and say, I suck. Why am I not further ahead? Why is Dan, who's not even 40 years old yet, have all of this success, and here I am and I'm not doing it yet, right? You kick yourself down. That's how most people do it. And in public, you might tell your friends how that person's a scumbag, he stole, he's ripping people off, he's a jerk. But when you go home, you just tell yourself, man, why am I not further ahead? Why am I— why am I here? Why am I stuck? Why am I not getting more momentum? You've been kicked, but you've been kicked down, where what you want to do is kick yourself forward. You want to kick yourself forward. If you see Dan driving his Ferrari, or you see somebody that you look up to and respect, use it as a kick forward to say, this is what's possible. This is what's possible. And if he can do it, if she can do it, then I can do it too. My hero is young Les Brown. I love him from a speaker, just my favorite speaker of all time. I look at that and I say, I can get better. Not that I suck, it's that this is what's possible. I need to get better. I need to I need to practice, I need to keep going, because that's what's possible.

And rule number 50, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is never give up.

Paul Newman, the legendary actor, had an amazing quote that I love to repeat. He said, I check my pulse, and if I can find it, I know I've got a chance. You've got a very important choice to make. You either make the rest of your life the the best of your life, or you settle for what is and live in your excuses. So you know why I would give up? You know what I'm deeply afraid of? I've got two. I've got a short-term fear and a long-term fear. My short-term fear is of disappointing people. My biggest short-term, in-the-moment fear is disappointing people, that I would show up to an event and let people down, that I wouldn't give them value, that people would come and waste their time, spend their money, and I didn't give them value. I'm deeply afraid of it and still am. I put pressure on these videos. I want these videos to be great. Every time I get in front of this camera and start making a video, I put pressure on myself that this needs to be the best video that I've ever done. I want to not disappoint you guys every single time. And there's this little pause, hesitation before filming, and I'll spend a couple minutes procrastinating because I'm afraid. I'm afraid I'm afraid of disappointing you and making a crappy video. I'll procrastinate and then I'll do it and I'll feel great doing it. But my biggest short-term fear is disappointing people. My biggest long-term fear is of regret, is that I won't live my life, is that I'll look back and say I could have done more, I should have pushed harder. Because you rarely regret the things that you did, it's the things that you didn't do, the things you were too afraid to do, the actions not taken. That's what you normally regret. And so my biggest short-term fear is disappointing people. Maybe it's a long-term fear is fear of regret. And those things, they fight each other, right? They fight each other because if I'm afraid of disappointing somebody, I'm not gonna take the action that I should be taking, and then I'm gonna regret it later on. And so I try to use that fear of potential regret to push me into action, to say, if I don't make videos today, if I don't do that speech, if I don't get up and and make that presentation, if I don't do the thing that I'm afraid to do because of disappointing people potentially, then I'll regret it. And I'll put the pressure like, this is the video, this video right here, this is the video that's gonna blow up everything, that'll change the whole game for me. And if I don't record it because I'm afraid of disappointing somebody, I'm gonna regret that my whole life. And I make it so painful for myself that then I have to act, and that pain pushes me into action. And out of procrastination mode.

Now I have a very special bonus clip from Evan. Learn how to enjoy the process. But before that, it's time for the 3-point landing questions. Let's go from watching the video to taking action. Here we go. Question number 1: Where do you need to kick yourself forward? Number 2: Where do you need to stop hiding? And number 3: What is the rejection that you need to stop fearing?

Living a joyful life comes from enjoying the process of what you you are doing. When you wake up every morning, do you look forward to the work that you're about to do today, or do you hate it? Do you dread it and want to stay in bed? If you are waking up and going to do work that is torture to you, that you don't enjoy, that you dread on a daily basis, you will never be joyful or successful. And I want to change that. So I was on a call yesterday with a buddy of mine who had built a million-dollar-plus business, and he said, Evan, Evan, I don't know what to do. I'm unhappy, I'm depressed, I don't like my business. I've built this business that I hate going to, and I've always hated most of what I've done. I've had success, I've built a million-dollar-plus business, but I've always hated the work. And I thought you have to hate the work to get the results that you want. But I keep hearing you and all these other successful people saying you gotta love the process, you gotta love the work. So what do I do, man? I don't know what to do. Do I shut the whole thing down? Do I keep building? What do I do? I'm lost. I said, hey, man, there's something that you love inside your business. What do you love doing? And it started off was, well, I like giving people strategy. I like doing the strategy part of my business, but I don't like the rest of it. Okay, great. So step one is you're going to start doing all the strategy work in your business. Amazing. What else? Like, well, I also like selling. Okay, awesome. You're going to be the chief salesperson. You're going to be off selling. I'm meeting people and having conversations. It's like, I don't like delivering. I don't like the operations. Awesome. That's why you've hired a COO to run your company. And then he said, I also like having conversations and mentoring people. Not everybody on my team likes to be mentored, but I love mentoring people. I love guiding them. So he's got 3 things that he loves doing, that he looks forward to, that he wishes he could do all day. And luckily, those are high-value skills for his business. Right? He wants to be able to set the strategy and help his clients with strategy. He wants to be able to sell, and he wants to be able to mentor and guide the people on his team. He just doesn't want to deliver. So you either become a consultant where this is all you do, or you hire somebody who he's already brought on who's your CEO and give him more lateral, give him more abilities, give him more power, give him more permission. And at the same time, if he loves mentoring and training people, he loves people who will listen to him and be open to his guidance and wisdom, then he needs to have a team who respects him, who wants that. And not everybody will. You could have the greatest person who can write copy or the greatest programmer or the greatest whatever for your business, but if you love mentoring and they don't want to be mentored, that's not a good fit. So you need to do an assessment on your team and see who loves being mentored by you and keep those people. Because if you go into work every day and you see the people who you love being with, who you love mentoring, who you feel like you're a team with, you'll love going to work. But if you go to work every day and you see these people who don't want to listen to you, who don't want to be trained, who don't want to be mentored, just want to sit down and do their work, it's not going to be a joyful experience for you. And that lack of joy will mean you won't have success in your company as well. And so he's built up this machine that he hates because he always thought you need to hate the work. Like, work is work, it sucks, but you get the results. Like, no, dude, it's the exact opposite. You had success, you built a million-dollar-plus business because you're talented, but it should have been a $10 million-plus business by now. And if you want more Evan, check out his top 50 rules video. The link is right there next to me.

Continue to believe, and we'll see you there.