Powerful ROUTINES to Beat PROCRASTINATION and Achieve ANYTHING! | Tom Bilyeu | Top 10 Rules

Step number 1: have a goal. Make it specific. Make sure you know the rules of the game you're playing. Make sure you know what a win looks like. In fact, that may be the most important question that you could ask yourself. The most pointed thing that you could determine in your life is to know what does it look like to win. Once you know what it looks like to win, then you can work backwards. Then you can figure out what you need to do to score. Then you can figure out the skills that you're going to need in order to get great, in order to go out and dominate, in order to be better than anyone that has ever come before you. But to do that, you've got to know what your goal is. And once you have that, as Dale Carnegie said, if you want to conquer fear, don't sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. So now you have your goal. Now you're telling people what you're gonna do. Now you're telling yourself who you're gonna become. And it is terrifying to me how people can pacify themselves with a sense of accomplishment simply by having a goal. So let me tell you right now, the thing that separates the people who dream from the people who execute is a willingness to act. And at the end of the day, nothing is gonna stop you. Not fear, not inability, not inadequacy, You see, the only thing that will stop you is failing to start. You've got to find a way to get yourself going. You've got to find a way to take that desire, that interest in you, and turn it into a raging inferno, something that's going to get you moving and going ahead, that will trample everything in its path.

Once you're able to do that, nothing, and I mean nothing, will be able to stop you. Need motivation? Watch a top 10 with Believe Nation.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I make these videos because you are probably the most ambitious person in your circle, but you know you're capable of more, and you get that push by surrounding yourself with the best. So today, let's learn from one of the best, Tom Bilyeu, and my take on his top 10 rules of success. Enjoy. Rule number 2, connect to your purpose.

Once you accept that the thing that separates you from the rest of the animal kingdom is an unimaginable ability to become. You have an unimaginable ability to become something. In 2014, private companies averaged 8% annual growth. After I went into my partners and I said I quit and I'm gonna go do something that makes me feel alive They were totally shocked. And I got all the way to my house, and I was on the phone with my wife.

I did it.

I had been unhappy for so long. And I said, "I did it. I told them I quit. I gave back the equity. Here I am." And I'm pulling into the driveway at my house, and my phone rings, and it's my partners. They say, "Come out to dinner with us." Out of respect and love, I went out to dinner with them, and they said the now-famous words, "We could do this without you, but we don't want to." And that gave me what I needed to connect to something other than money. It reminded me of the brotherhood. It reminded me that I had fallen in love with these guys as human beings, that there was something more than money, there was something more than being a clever marketer. That I remembered for a second who I am, the things that make me unique, that I have a desire to connect, that I actually enjoy communities, that I'm not a guy with a killer instinct. I'm not interested in stepping on my, my competitor's neck. That's just not how I'm wired. I'm wired to build something. I'm wired to see people shine. I love seeing other people win. I think it's incredible. Now that doesn't mean that I don't want to win. I want to win at the absolute highest level. I want to be the greatest of all time. I want more people to write about me going to Mars because they're terrified to try to match my intros. I want that, right? And I hope each and every one of you wants to play at that level. I hope each and every one of you looks at the greatest of all time and says, if I'm willing to break myself in half to get there, I could do it. But being honest with who you are, being honest that if there's something else that you want to bring to the table, that you find a way to do that. And so I said, guys, I will come back and work with you on one condition. I will never prioritize money again. My highest value in business is camaraderie. And at the time, that was sacrilege. We had made a pact with each— there was 3 of us. The three of us had made an actual pact that we would do whatever it took to make our technology company more profitable. And if that meant skipping a family vacation, if that meant waking up at 2 AM on a Saturday to meet and brainstorm, we did it. Both of those stories are real. We did things like that. I would go away with my wife for Christmas to see her family in London, and I would literally take a camera with me so I could watch the company back in LA. I've never switched off. I didn't take days off. I was working no matter where I was. I was working 7 days a week. I didn't take a real vacation, meaning that I wasn't actually working while we were on it, for 6 and a half years.

Rule number 3: Overcome a fixed mindset.

Here is the reality.

No matter how successful the person is that you're looking at and wishing you could be like them and thinking that they have everything all figured out, the one thing that I can promise you is that all of us struggle on the inside. That is just a reality of the human condition. Once you understand that that is a reality, that that's just a part of the human condition, then you can begin to ideally let yourself off the hook and that you're not spending a lot of time stuck there.

But to give you a specific example from my life, the biggest one, the most harrowing one that I went through was in film school.

So To cut a very long story short, I went to film school, believed that I had innate talent. I went into film school with a fixed mindset. I did very well at the beginning of film school.

And that all to me felt like it was proof that I was right, that I was naturally gifted, that I was a born storyteller and that I was going to go and have an illustrious career. And I actually went through a fascinating period in film school where I was both terrified that secretly I wasn't good enough and but at the same time actually believed that I was naturally gifted and this is what I was meant to do.

And every bit of feedback that I got in either direction was— it made me believe to the core of my being that it was true.

So when I would do something poorly, I would think, see, that part of me that was convinced that I actually don't have talent, you were right.

And then I would do something well, and the part of me that believed that was like, see, I knew it. You were born for this.

And it all came crashing down as I worked my way up the ranks at USC film school. Only 4 people are chosen to direct what's known as a senior thesis film or a 480. And I was one of the 4 people picked and I was like, see, I knew it, man. I'm born for this. Of course I got picked to do one of the senior thesis films.

That just makes sense. I'm, I'm that good. And I thought, okay, cool.

The thing that makes the thesis film so important is the film school pays your budget to make this film.

So at a time where there's no YouTube, there's no iPhones, like filming is an expensive endeavor.

Here you've got somebody that's paying for it and that becomes is your calling card to the industry. So George Lucas famously made one of these films, and obviously we know how his career ended up working out.

And they showed us his 480, by the way, and it was amazing.

It was amazing.

And so you could see that here was this gifted filmmaker.

And so I have that in my head, like, look at George Lucas's films, absolutely brilliant. He's gone on to have this brilliant career. I'm gonna make an equally brilliant film, or maybe a little more brilliant. Then I'm gonna go become the next Lucas or the next Spielberg, and I'm gonna take that film and get my 3-picture deal.

And I proceeded to run smack bang into one immutable truth, and that was that I wasn't a talented filmmaker. And I don't say that to be humble. I say that out of truth because I didn't have the skillset to make a good film. Once the level of complexity had gone beyond a certain level, So I thrived in these really short, really simple films.

And then once you're talking actors and dialogue and, you know, the things that would come close to what we would recognize as a normal film, I had no idea what I was doing. And try and try as I might, I couldn't figure out how to make the film come out well.

And it didn't come out well. And I was mortified and I was embarrassed and I never wanted anybody to see that film. And I was really and truly devastated. So I want you to imagine your whole life.

So what, I graduated at like 22.

So from 12 to 22, all I knew was I wanted to be a filmmaker and my whole life was moving towards that. And it looked like I had the natural gift.

And of course, if you're going to be an artist, you're either born with it or you're not, right?

That's all anybody said. I can't express enough. In the '80s and '90s when I grew up, When people talked about art, you either had it or you didn't, and that was that.

There was no sense of growth mindset.

Carol Dweck had not written the book yet, and so it wasn't even like I knew there was a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. I just knew you're either born with it or you're not. The great news was I was born with it. Here we go. It's gonna be amazing.

And then boom, I can't do it. And I realize, oh my God, I wasn't born with anything. I don't know how to do this.

There is a tremendous amount of process to this art, and I don't know that at all.

But of course, as I'm in the middle of it, I just think my world has come crashing down. I'm not gifted, I will never be gifted, and therefore I will never be a filmmaker, I will never make anything of myself. And just, it was a downward spiral of epic proportions. And at the height of that, I would go home from my dead-end job and I would lay face down on the carpet because I couldn't afford furniture and literally just sit there I can still feel that cheap nylon carpet and the way that it felt on my face as I laid there thinking, well, my life is effectively over.

Certainly the, my life that was working towards a dream is over. And now it's just about finding a way to be the smartest person in the room. And if that means that I have to go and work a dead-end job to be the smartest person in the room, then that's what I'll do.

And so I used to go and interview for jobs having nothing to do with film because I felt totally broken. And my goal was to, at some point in the interview, have the interviewer say, you're so smart, why are you interviewing for this role? And because I had a fixed mindset and I so needed that praise from the outside, I was putting myself in these super weird and useless positions just to get that little nugget of, oh my God, like, you're so smart.

And I had to put myself in sort of worse and worse company to get to that point. And finally, and I don't remember what it was that led me to this idea of brain plasticity, but somewhere in the depths of my despair, I realized Can we get better? Maybe we can. And so I started reading about the brain, and that started to plant seeds in my mind that maybe brain plasticity was real and maybe I could get better.

And just because I wasn't good at film today, maybe I could get better at film down the road. And I ended up getting a job teaching film because remember, those that can do, those that can't teach.

So I felt like, okay, well, I can teach this even if I can't do it.

And then so between reading about the brain and realizing, wait a second, if I work at this thing, I actually get better. My brain actually changes and I become better at something. And given, you know, having gone through however many years of schooling I'd been through, I started thinking about it like, wait a second, you would come into any class. And the funny thing is, as a kid, I remember every grade just being absolutely terrified that, well, I did okay at being a 4th grader, but Mom, I'm going to get devastated as a 5th grader.

I don't know what I'm doing.

And no matter how many times my mom would console me and saying, remember, they're going to teach you how to learn the things that a 5th grader needs to know.

They don't expect you to already know it. It just wouldn't sink in. And so I was sort of back in that moment of, you know, I don't know how to do this, but maybe my mom is right.

Maybe the neuroscientists are right, and maybe I can learn to become that thing I want to become. I start teaching film, and as I'm teaching it, I realize, wait, I'm helping my students become better filmmakers. So if I can help them become better filmmakers and brain plasticity is really true, then I could get better as a filmmaker myself. And that, that realization changed the rest of my life. And this is why I am so obsessed with the idea of a growth mindset and brain plasticity, because the biology backs it up.

And once you understand, it's what I call the only belief that matters. The only belief that matters is that if you put time and energy into getting better at something, you'll actually get better.

Rule number 4, have clarity.

Have very clear goals. It always freaks me out. Most people stop at the first sort of vague notion of what they want to do. I'm going to punch myself in the mouth if somebody comes up to me again and says, I want to help people. That's rad, that comes from a beautiful place, I could totally get it, but that's like coming to me and saying, "I wanna win an Olympic gold medal." Awesome, winter or summer? Summer. Fantastic. Swimming or tennis? Swimming.

Excellent.

Backstroke? Freestyle? Like, at some point it's gotta get so specific because you have to know what skills you need to acquire. You have to work backwards from the goal, and the goal has to be hyper-specific. So if boredom is the number one killer of entrepreneurs that they're not able to make it through, the next one is they don't have clear goals. And the worst part is they think they do. That's the part that terrifies me. The worst part is they think they do. Until you know exactly what your mission is and exactly what your business model is is and what problem you solve, what very concrete problem that people are freaking out to have solved. Until you do that, you don't have the necessary ingredients to build your business. All right, don't be romantic, be pragmatic. Look at the data. The data will tell you what to kill. The data will tell you what's working and what's not. This was the single best piece of advice that was ever given to me, and I ignored it for 3 years. I'm so embarrassed by that that I always make sure any talk I give, people hear this. Know more about your product, service, industry, whatever, than anyone else. Than anyone else. If you guys have ever seen my interview show, the reason that it's doing as well as it's doing is I know more about the guest. One guest actually said this. I know more about the guest than their mother. I just put in more work than their mother. That's the truth. I go out and I research and I read everything and I watch every video that I can. And so I know so much about that person. I know I'm going to give a different interview than anyone has ever given before because nobody's done that level of research. Not only does it blow the guest away and totally endear them to me, but it gets us to the point where we can give an interview that has unique value. So know more about what you're doing than anyone else in the world and grind, baby, grind. For 2 years, for 2 years, that's what I look like every day. Hairnet, lab coat, gloves. Put in the fucking work. Put in the work. And this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where you're really going to separate the people that are wantrepreneurs from the people that are real entrepreneurs. You've got to want to grind. You've got to learn to love that. You've got to learn to love to put in the work, to be proud of yourself that you showed up and put in the work, to be proud of yourself that you taught yourself how to suffer, to be proud of yourself that you're developing a mindset where you believe, I can do anything I set my mind to. And by the way, once you believe that you can do anything you set your mind to, without limitation, how you spend your time becomes a spiritual consideration. How you spend your time becomes a spiritual consideration, because you could be doing something. If you want to end hunger, end hunger. What's stopping you? Bill Gates is actually going to end malaria. He's going to do it because he had the tenacity to generate the resources and because he has a mind that allows him to work on the infrastructure and figure out how to actually to actually solve that problem. Do not under any circumstances make Bill Gates or anyone else extraordinary to let yourself off the hook. Don't do it. Don't sell yourself short. And this is where I see people go wrong all the time. They look at somebody who's amazing and they say, well, they're just naturally gifted. I could never do that. You couldn't do it because you believe you can't. And because you believe you can't, you don't start putting in the work. Michael Jordan got cut from his high school basketball team. He wasn't exactly showing all the promise in the world. My own mother, when I left for college, quietly assumed I was going to fail and didn't admit that for years. I showed no early signs of promise. I actually have a version of this talk where I show photos from my childhood, and people are like, "Yeah, motherfucker, you just look stupid." And it's true. I used to dress like a clown. Clown, and I mean that almost literally. So my waist was size 36, and I wore size 54 pants. I wore literal jester hats. I had one of those big chains that connected to my belt. I had shoulder-length hair. I did not exactly look the part, and I didn't take myself seriously. It really is a game game of transformation. It really is a game of understanding that you can become something. So even though I didn't start with the requisite skills, even though I wasn't a born entrepreneur, which is why I start this tale with that, even though I wasn't a born entrepreneur, I could acquire and did acquire the skills that were needed to execute. It is a very long road that leads you you here right now, most entrepreneurs in the world are thinking about one thing: winning a championship ring.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all the lessons learned in this video, as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there. Rule number 5: Learn to fail forward.

To make progress and to fail forward, to really figure out when you make this catastrophic error, you have to conceptualize it in the right way. So when you're trying something, recognize that as a hypothesis. So number 1 is to recognize I have a goal.

My goal is over there.

I'm here.

There's a gap between my goal and I. I need to know what that gap is. I need to understand it. I need to know what the impediment is.

I need to recognize why if I just keep doing the thing that I'm doing now, why am I not going to get where I'm going. Okay, so first you have to identify that.

Now, once you identify that, then it becomes a question of what is your best guess, which we will call— which is called a hypothesis. So you make that hypothesis, which again is just your best guess as to what you would need to do. It's very important. This isn't thinking.

We're not going to live in the abstract. That when we finish this, it's going to tell us to do something. So what would I need to do in order to overcome the obstacle that stands between me and my goal.

If your major goal is like way down the road, you're going to have to break it down into smaller goals. And so this goal with my next 15 minutes is how I tell people to think of it. When you understand your goal clearly enough and you understand the impediments clearly enough, you know exactly what you should be doing with the next 15 minutes.

Okay? That's the level of clarity that you need.

So, okay, cool. I've identified this. What the thing is that I believe I need to do.

It's a guess. Don't wait for lightning to strike. Don't wait for anything to be self-evident.

You have a best guess as to what you should do with the next 15 minutes, and then your 15 minutes stack up to your best guess, you know, over a week or a month or a quarter, you know, whatever, however big that project is.

Then you're going to do that thing. So I have a hypothesis on what would be the most efficient way most effective way for me to overcome this obstacle. And then I'm going to do that thing. And that thing is either going to work or it's not. And if it works, amazing.

Did it work as well as it could have?

If not, and I have to do this, it's something I have to do again, then refine and do it again. If it did, then what's my next obstacle?

And I'm gonna do that one.

Now, eventually you're gonna do something and it doesn't work.

It either—

you stood still or you made so little progress as to be unworthy of celebration, or maybe you even move backwards.

Maybe this is that moment where you totally embarrass yourself.

Maybe this is something that happened out in public and now you look like a total ass.

And in that moment you need to go, okay, why did this not work?

Okay, so this is where we analyze the data. Now, the key to analyzing the data is before you run this experiment, you need to say what success looks like. So, all right, If I think, here's my best guess as to what I need to do to overcome this problem, and here is what success will look like. So let me give you an example. We had a hypothesis.

I still can't believe that this is true, but it is.

We had a hypothesis here on our YouTube channel that if we put guests, if we took a photo of them or pulled a screenshot from the episode where they're doing something with their hands, that the click rate will go up and that the click rate will positively impact our monetized views.

Okay, so that's our hypothesis.

We test it. I still can't believe this is true, but it works. And it doesn't just work most of the time. It works almost all of the time. Now, nothing is— you never have one blanket statement where it truly works for everything, but I'm talking north of 95%. So, hey, we had this hypothesis.

It worked.

We did it. Now, the number of times where we had a hypothesis, hey, uh, put, make the text white with a, um, drop shadow.

We tried it and that didn't work. And it's like, wow, I can't believe that didn't work.

It looks so much better than black text, but it keeps losing over and over and over. So in that moment it's like, okay, well I really thought this was gonna work, but it didn't work. And you try something else.

Now when it's something where there's emotion involved, That gets harder for people to get clear on what the data is.

And that's why you have to have a, a very clear understanding of what success looks like.

Rule number 6: Earn credibility.

Now let's talk about the more important part, which is earning credibility with yourself. This was one of the big breakthroughs in my life, was realizing that if I said I was going to do something, something and I wanted to give up on it, I would think about, well, if I position it this way, if I move this way, if I kind of hide this from that person and sweep this under the rug over here, then I can still manage other people's beliefs about who I am. And as long as other people think that I'm cool, I'm good, I'm talented, I'm smart, whatever, then I'm good. And what I realized is A, that only works 50% of the time. So 50% of the moves that you make to try to manage your persona, 50% of the time it works. The other 50% of the time though, people see through it, and then you begin to earn the reputation of being a bullshit artist. So what I realized was, okay, not only does it not work as well externally as I think, but it doesn't matter what the outside world thinks if I don't think positively of myself. So that became my obsession, is understanding credibility is most important when you're talking about self-credibility. And how we earn credibility with ourselves is by saying, I'm going to do this thing, and then doing it. And then you just keep inching that out farther and farther and farther until you get to the point where you show up for yourself in the most extreme and difficult of circumstances. So I'll tell you guys a story. At my old house, I used to have this painting of the Michael Jordan flu game hanging above my fireplace, and that was so inspiring to me. And I always said I put that up there to remind myself of what I'm capable of and how I would react if I were put in a championship game situation. And then lo and behold, flash forward probably a year later, and I actually get the flu, and I have a double episode the next day. And I remember I had a fever. I was rocked. I could barely stand up. It was really miserable. And I had to do all the prep the day before for the episodes. And I was like, I actually don't know if I'm going to be able to make it through this. Like, it— that's how sick I was. It's one of the sickest I've ever been.

Rule number 7: Develop grit.

If grit is as important as we say it is, sustained interest over time, that's really what grit is. And a lot of people talk about— in fact, the title of my speech is supposed to be about how you develop a passion, which we will talk about in a little bit. But this is going to be one of those things. When you have passion, one of the things that comes out of that is you've got ability to sustain your interest over time. Do the hard things. Do the hard things. I can't emphasize that one enough. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations just to find the mental tactics that you're going to need to deal with the hard things. It's getting those tactics. Who knows the Stanford Marshmallow Test? All right. For those of you that don't, this is one one of the most breathtaking examples of the human condition. In the Stanford Marshmallow Test, they bring in— I don't know, they're 5 or 6 years old— they bring them in, and the person in the white lab coat says, here's a marshmallow. I'm gonna go out of the room for a minute. I'll be back in just a few minutes. If you wait till I come back, I'll give you a second marshmallow. So essentially double your money. Not bad. Now, what the kid doesn't know is the researcher is never coming back. And all they want to know is how long will you wait before you eat the marshmallow. Some kids have literally gobbled it up before they even get to the door. Other kids are like singing to themselves, putting their head down, getting up, dancing around the room. Some of them bite like the underside and try to put it back so you can't see. And here's what's scary. They followed those kids for 25 years. 5 years. And based solely on the length of time they were able to wait before they ate the marshmallow, predicted their level of success in school, predicted their level of success in the job market. The people who waited the longest got into the best schools, got the best grades, went on to have the highest paying jobs. Just your ability to delay gratification. Your ability to find tactics that work to get your mind off something. There's no greater control than control over oneself. Anybody here ever done a 3-day water-only fast? Not intermittent fasting. 3 days. Do it. You will learn something about yourself, and it will be profound. And what you're gonna learn is is that your body is manipulative. And I did a 3-day fast just a couple of weeks ago, and I had the flu right before. So there were cough drops laying around. And every time I walked by those fucking cough drops, my brain was like, eat one. I was like, like, you know, I'm fasting. And I literally couldn't believe, like, I was like, how consistently, every time I walked by those damn cough drops, that my body like gave me this really intense impulse. And that's when I realized like the notion that there are multiple voices in your head, by the way, is very, very real. And I will give you one quick example. Who knows what the corpus callosum is? All right, the corpus callosum is the thick bit of tissue that connects the left and right hemisphere of your brain. Sever that, you will get people that have literal multiple personalities, one in the right, one in the left. Some of the most intriguing stuff is one of them will be devoutly religious and the other will be devoutly atheist in the same brain, and you can talk to them differently. It's absolutely crazy, but the multiple voices notion is real. There are multiple factions, if you will, pieces that your brain is broken up into. And by the way, you have the equivalent of a cat's brain in neurons just in your digestive tract. So the whole notion of gut instinct— think of all the cool cats can do, and you've got that in your digestive tract. Neurons. It's literally the same material that your brain is made out of is in your digestive tract. Utterly fascinating. So we We have all these competing things that we want, but inside, if you think of that overwatch, that one person, that's you, that's meant to say, I have goals and I'm going to act in accordance with my goals. I'm never going to sell out what I want most for what I want right now. I wanted a cough drop right now, but I wanted to get on the other side of a 3-day fast and say I did it, and I wanted that more. And in learning what your tools and tactics are, so for me, I welcome hunger like an old friend. And I literally— people must think I'm schizophrenic because you'll walk into the room and I'll literally be like pinching and poking at my fat going, hunger, thank you. I'm so glad you made it back. It is so good to see you. I'm glad you're here. I I know that you're oxidizing my fat, and I'm very grateful for that, so thank you. And in doing that, I reframe it not as something that is unwanted or painful, but as something that is doing exactly what I want it to do. And learning those mental tactics, that's the game. Learning those mental tactics, that's the game. That's how you're going to get good at whatever it is you want to do. If you want to start a business, learning how to deal with your employees is absolutely critical. But let me tell you right now, if you lash out emotionally, your employees will lose respect for you. But it's just like the cough drop moment. Now, if somebody had seen me walk by the cough drop, they wouldn't know that I had— literally had to stop myself from lunging at a cough drop. They didn't know that because I have control of myself. I've practiced things like that. I do 3-day fasts. I do what I call Bright Lines. So I have a bright line. During the week, I don't eat my second meal before 11:30 under any circumstance. My wife one time brought my food 30 minutes early. I was preparing for an episode. It was so sweet of her, but I don't eat before 11:30 under any circumstance. So the food literally sat on my lap smelling so good, and I was so hungry, and I said, I said, hunger, thank you so much for showing up because you're giving me the opportunity to prove to myself what a badass I am. Because I'm going to smell how delicious you are knowing my stomach is grumbling and tying itself in knots because I want to eat so badly and I'm not going to. And in those moments, you earn credibility with yourself. I hate working out.

Absolutely despise it.

It's why I do it first thing in the morning. And the reason I hate it— the weights are heavy and your muscles start burning when you get to the supposed good reps, so that just seems backwards. So it is not in any way, shape, or form fun for me, but I earn credibility with myself because it is something that I don't like. I earn credibility with myself showing up every every day, and it also reminds me how much I can transform my body. It's very easy for me to show you my before and after picture. I used to be 60 pounds heavier. It's very easy for me to show you when I was heavy and then show you 6-pack abs.

You get it.

But what you don't see is the body is just a reflection of the mind. What really happened was I changed my mind, and I had garnered skills, I had garnered tactics, the things that allowed allowed me to not eat the coffee drop were the things that allowed me to not eat the things that I wanted, to not have a bowl of ice cream, to not indulge in things that are wonderfully delicious. But instead ask myself, what are my goals? And then back in with my behaviors.

Rule number 8, be accountable to yourself.

I think the reality is you just have to realize that there's more advantage to holding yourself accountable all the time than to hiding from it, not living up to your own standards. It seems like the right answer to, you know, let yourself off the hook or to make promises that you're not actually prepared to keep because it's cool or whatever. It seems to make sense in the moment. But going back to that idea of having credibility with yourself is one of the most powerful emotions you will ever feel, to respect yourself. Is— it's one of the, the pillars of self-worth. And if you don't have self-worth, that is a really gnarly place to be. And so it's very okay to only make yourself very small promises in the beginning, and then we'll widen that out slowly over time. But that was how I earned credibility with myself in the beginning when I didn't have any. When I would say I was going to do things and then not do them. When I would say I'm gonna get out of bed tomorrow, you know, really early. And then I would lay in bed for 5 hours, which used to happen all the time. So I didn't start by saying, oh, I'm gonna get shredded, or I'm gonna build a big business. It started with, I'm gonna go to the gym. Not even, I'm gonna work out hard. I'm gonna go to the gym. And so then I would go to the gym. If I felt like walking out, I would walk out. Then, as I found, okay, hey, look at that, I'm being consistent. I'm going to the gym every time that I say I'm going to go to the gym. Now it's about, okay, well, can I push it a little harder than I did last time? And then you start doing that. And then it's like, well, can I set a goal for myself to be able to lift a certain amount of weight, to look a certain way, to lose a certain amount of fat? Whatever it is you want to do, if you start building on that, making slightly bigger demands over time, you know, maybe you increment the demand weekly. And so it's like, this is what I'm gonna do this week, and then the next week it's a little more. All of a sudden, a year later, it's pretty extraordinary. You've had 52 increments of improvement, which is huge. So realizing that you get this tremendous benefit from two things: one, making what you promise yourself smaller so that you know you can trust yourself to do it, And then two, constantly like bumping that out a little bit, that you actually get a huge reward. So in, in that you have gotten better at something, you have moved towards a goal, you have actually obtained your goals that you can set over time. You can set these bigger and bigger, more audacious goals and you can actually reach them. Now when you know that about yourself, you have that credibility with yourself. You know that you're gonna stick to it. Now when you set a goal, it's like, Yo, this goal is exciting. I'm amped up because I know that I'm going to follow through. And as long as you've built up that muscle, right, the resilience, the ability to push through pain, boredom— when you have that and you've built that resilience, that tenacity, now all of a sudden you don't want to not be accountable to yourself because you want to feel good about yourself and you actually want to achieve those goals. Man, that's like— if I could snap my fingers and give people a gift, it would be to say, hey, the craziest dream that you have, you can actually make that come true. The craziest dream that you have, you can actually make come true. That's why accountability is so joyful.

Rule number 9: seek clarity and wise choices.

If you want to do something, recognize there's no obstacle holding you back other than what you choose to believe. And if you want to be miserable, it's going to be there for you. And if you want to be empowered, it's there for you. If you want strength, it is there for you. It's a decision. It's something that you decide to believe in, that you can get strong. And that ultimately is the ultimate strength— to believe that you can get better, to believe that you can become whatever you want to become. So choose optimism right now. Choose to let it fill feel it, to sit in that sensation that anything you set your mind to is possible. When you allow yourself to embody that, to believe it, no matter what anybody tells you, no matter how many people tell you that you're stupid, you're a failure, that you're never going to do anything, that you are going to believe in yourself. If you can do that, if you can choose that optimism, you can go anywhere because you realize everything you needed was in you all along. Along in simply choosing to believe you can execute against it. So have that faith.

Go out and do it.

And rule number 10, the last one before some very special bonus clips, is know who you are becoming.

The reality is, if you want to achieve something great in your life, you've got to be willing to accept who you really are right now. You've got to know exactly what you're good at and what you're you're not, and the reason that the truth is going to piss you off is it's going to hurt.

It's going to hurt to acknowledge that you're not yet who you want to be.

It's going to hurt to know that you're not yet capable of the things that you want to be capable of, and it's really going to hurt to know that the things that people say behind your back, the things that they say to hurt you, that they're actually true, that they're right, they have a point. You aren't good at that thing. You aren't as good as you could be. You did embarrass yourself. You have fallen down. All of those things are almost certainly true. But when you can look at those things, when you can stare nakedly at your inadequacies, when you can really stop and not protect yourself with ego but protect yourself by knowing that you're going to learn from where you failed, you're going to learn from the places you've fallen down, you're going to learn your inadequacies. So that you can build something new.

The reality is that those who can delay eating the marshmallow the longest do the best, because you're right, delaying gratification is an absolute superpower. Now, one of the most extraordinary experiments was done at Stanford University. It's called the Marshmallow Experiment. There's a whole book written on this, utterly fascinating. They followed the participants in this study for like 25 years. Absolutely incredible. They bring these kids into a room, they give them a marshmallow, and they say, hey, you can eat the marshmallow now if you want, but if you wait until I come back, then I'll give you 2 marshmallows. So it's basically double your money. It's not going to be that long. Now, what the kid doesn't know is that the researcher isn't coming back, and they just want to see how long the kid is going to wait until they eat it. They do eventually come back, but they leave them really to struggle for quite some time. And What they found was the kids that could come up with games, whether singing to themselves, not looking at the marshmallow, whatever, the kids that were able to delay the gratification the longest ended up doing the best. They got the best grades, they got the highest paying jobs, they had the most successful relationships. Now, the reason that that works is in any one moment, if you're just operating around optimizing for momentary mind states, brain states, neurochemical states, then you're always going to be in short-term thinking. You're always going to get short-term results. If, however, you have this goal that excites you and is honorable, and you're able to push through all the boring stuff and all of that, then what you get is a set of skills that allow you to do things other people can't do. And as we established in the last question, if you can do things other people can't do, that is by its very nature success, and you will be rewarded in a way that other people will not be rewarded because they can't do the things you do. And as long as the things you do are valued by society, then you are always going to do very well. But that ultimately is the key. You have to be able to delay gratification. Now, for me, understanding that that was the nature of things, that if I can delay my momentary wishes for something longer term, then I could get these very different results that separated me from other people. And because I'm excited about what I'm pursuing, I use that excitement as my trick to stay focused when things get boring. And I've said many times that boredom kills more entrepreneurs than failure. So everyone will tell you that fear of failure is what stops people, and that is a huge deal. But honestly, like, I think it's the fact that people don't want the outcome badly enough to fight through all the boring, painful stuff that you have to go through to get to the other side to ultimately be successful. So make sure that you are hyped up on your goal. If you're not, then you're not going to be willing to go through all the difficult things. I like Jordan Peterson's idea of tell the truth, or at least try not to lie. Sometimes there can be a truth that we leave unsaid because this is a momentary interaction. Where I would say kindness is the higher value than pointing out every flaw that we see or every bit of obnoxious behavior. Because at some point, it just spirals into madness to point out every misstep that somebody is doing. And so when I look at somebody that is being obnoxious, being rude, my goal is to shift their energy. How can I get them back into a place where they're feeling good, they're feeling warmth, they are in a place where they feel kind, right? Because most people, it isn't that they are incapable of kindness. And if they are, like, imagine how shitty that life would be. Somebody who never experiences kindness, joy, warmth, connection— that would truly be its own hell. So I'm not going to worry about pointing out every obnoxious thing that they're doing. And I would play a game with myself of how much joy can I spread. And in some ways, you are leaving a truth unsaid, which is that they're being unkind or obnoxious or whatever. But by trying to spread kindness, you're not lying. And especially if you share that value with me of wanting to just put as much good vibes into the world as you can. And look, I'm not perfect, and there is no doubt that sometimes people are just like, goddamn, like, I just don't want anything to do with it. But that doesn't feel like me at my best. Me at my best feels like, all right, cool, can we switch this energy around? Can we get them to soften, to feel that human warmth and a bit of connection? And can I— I mean, with a smile, you will be shocked how much you can change somebody's demeanor. So that's how I would flip it. I would just see how much joy can I spread even when people are being problematic to me. Now, that doesn't mean that I let people abuse me or anything like that. I don't. I imagine you guys can get a pretty good guess about what I'm like. I don't let people walk over me or be a dick to me or whatever, but I find it far more interesting to try to change somebody's energy than to get them to go, yeah, I am being a dick. That's just not interesting to me, trying to get them to sort of confess that they're the problem. I'd much rather hold myself accountable to like, how much sort of emotional jiu-jitsu can I do here? Let's play a game and let's call this game What Would Tom Do? Now I want you to ask, do you think that Tom is going to stay in a bad job for long? No. That's the, I'll skip to the last page. And Tom has a bad job, skip to the last page, Tom leaves the job. Now, Tom is gonna be very thoughtful because I completely understand that this is largely about, yo, I have to pay bills. Hey Tom, nice for you, you don't have kids and you've already been successful. So that's not really helpful for me. Now I will say that joy and fulfillment are the punchline of life, not money, not success, not adoration. So you are losing, losing, losing if you're staying in a job that makes you unhappy. I promise, if you have kids and that's the thing that's really making this difficult, you are bringing that unhappiness home. And so we have a moral obligation to break that, to make sure that we are pursuing things that are joyful so that we can show our kids, hey, this is how it's done. Now, you're not stuck at a job. There's something that's making you feel stuck at the job. I'm going to assume for now that it's money, keeping a roof over your loved ones' heads. That, that to me seems like the scariest. So okay, assuming that it's that, remember there are always two levers. Lever number one, make more money. Lever number two, need less money. Okay, you can pull on either lever you want. Now if you say, ah, Tom, I can't need Hey, less money, we've already cut it all to the quick. My kids just need a certain amount, it just is what it is. Okay, amazing. So now we're gonna make more money. Awesome. How do we go about doing that? First of all, let's identify what we hate about our job. Because there might be, are there other roles within that company? If it's just the job and not the company, is there somewhere that we could move? In which case we go ask, hey, I want this job which pays more money. What would I need to do? What skill set would I need to have? What expertise would I need to demonstrate in order to get there? And then go do that thing. If it's the company and we just— the company's toxic, we can't be there anymore, then I will ask, how many resumes have you sent out in the last 48 hours? If the answer isn't 250, then we've got some work to do. Now, let's assume that the answer is 250. Then we have to figure out why aren't we getting a response? Do we not have a skill set that's marketable? Is our resume terrible? Are we not going out to the right places? Have we not framed ourselves well? Could be any one of those things, but we have to be honest and real and figure out what we need to do to get out of this situation. But we certainly don't just accept defeat and go, wow, this sucks, this is my whole life. Nights and weekends is also going to come to our help, our aid here. So nights and weekends, if you know, whoa, I just don't have the skill set that I need to go find another job, then we're gonna start building that skillset. Maybe the skillset is interviewing, getting good at interviewing, and then we're gonna get good at that. But we are going to find a way out of our situation, and we are going to find a way out of our situation quickly. So do not accept defeat. Hold yourself accountable to the truth, to what you need to do to get out of that situation, and then get out. Because as you said, our time is truly limited.

When people are truly passionate about what they do, you just get a chemical rush. You get the energy, you become more resourceful. When someone who doesn't have passion, 'cause they don't really wanna be there anyway, they will give up way easier because they're not having a good time. It's not in them. There's an awesome quote, I'm paraphrasing, but you'll get the idea. "Don't try to change the world unless you seek change the way a man whose head is on fire seeks a pond." That is so true. Like imagine what that would be like, right?

Your head is literally on fire.

Your ass is gonna find some water. You will mash your head into the side of a rhino if you have to to put it out, right? Like, you're putting it out. There is an immediacy to that need that gets humans to do incredible shit. If you wanna change your life, you've got to tap into something that gives you that same feeling. For me, it's passion, and for the people that I've seen that have that passion, something is burning inside of them, wow, man, you can do incredible stuff. Now the follow-up, I'll ask my own follow-up question. Well, how do you find that thing that you're passionate about? About, since I know that's the next question that people ask. In you right now is the ember of something you don't want to admit to yourself. I promise you. And if you let me interview you long enough, I will get to that thing. And you will resist me trying to get to that thing for a very long time. First, you'll give me a bullshit answer. First, you're gonna tell me that you wanna be happy.

That's useless.

I need to know what makes you happy. I need to know how you plan to be happy. Okay? When people say generically that they want to be happy, they might as well tell me that they want a hit of meth, 'cause they're just saying, "I want a chemical state." Great. It's transient. It's gonna go away. That's not very useful for you. Then, once we get past that you want to be happy, you're gonna guess at some random things that make you happy. "I want to be around my family," all that. Okay, well, let's put that in context. You're here seeking a job, or you ask me a question about being an entrepreneur, and you're telling me that the thing that makes you happy is being with your family. I can't help you with that. In fact, I'm gonna do the exact opposite. If I do my job, I'm pulling you all away from your family all the time. I'm trying to get you to commit so deeply to what we're trying to accomplish here that you're going to be absent just from a physical time perspective. And my only hope is that I light you on fire with so much passion that I send you back to your family full of joy, optimism, optimism and a vision for you being able to do anything you want. Now that's infectious. Your family will love you for it and they'll push you right back into my loving arms. But that's still not the truth. That's me feeding you answers. So once we get past that and we paint that picture, we finally get to I don't know, which is the truth that lies on top of the better truth that I'm going after, which is that thing underneath that you never thought be able to acknowledge that is the thing that you really want. And for me, it was finally admitting that I didn't have to wait for my family to make good choices. I could find a way to trick them into eating healthy. Once I honestly accepted that that's what I wanted, that I was not prepared to wait, that I was going to be a Jedi, I was going to walk up to somebody and I was going to get them to do things that was quite literally against their will. And I was gonna make them want to do it, and it was gonna be better for their life, and they were ultimately gonna thank me, and I was gonna do it without any force at all. I was gonna do it by understanding them as a human being, by attaching myself to the things that were already working for me, their biological impulse to eat something that they crave, their biological impulse to soothe themselves with food. I knew I've got all that. I know those levers are there. So now I just have to figure out We have to do the hard work of making something that's actually good for them that has all of those taste pathways.

Your brain has evolved to be a thing, and there's a lot, rightly so, of focus in the popular zeitgeist around mindset about understanding the mind, and that is critically important, but so few people take the time to really understand what gives birth to the mind, which is your biology. And so understanding your mind within the context of evolution and the brain become critically important. And people that, uh, don't take the time to distinguish between the brain and the mind are doing themselves a disservice. I think much of what they go through is going to be— it's going to be surprising is what I was going to say, but the reality is what people end up getting stuck on is They confuse feeling with thinking and the immediacy of feelings, the visceral nature of them. There's something about embedded in the way that we experience an emotion is this just screaming from our subconscious that this is real, this is true, this is like, this is it. This is the context. Everything you need to know, dear mind, is contained in this emotion. And it's really an interesting process that I, I think warrants a lot more thought on certainly my part, uh, and probably science's part. And for sure, um, any of you that are following along at home, uh, a big part of what you should be thinking about is the nuance of how all of this comes into being and how How emotions are— the great trick that they pull is they, they paint themselves to be self-evident. Thank you for letting me think in real time here. This is interesting. Emotions feel self-evidently right. I don't even want to say true because true doesn't capture what's really going on. When I try to talk about the physics of being human, a big part of that is that sense that my reaction to this moment, to this event, does not strike me as a decision. It strikes me as self-evidently write because of the things that I feel. And I'm pretty sure that as we went through one of the classes, I read, um, a quote by Thomas Sowell, which I'm going to paraphrase. And it's, the problem isn't that Timmy doesn't know how to read. The problem isn't even that Timmy doesn't know how to think. The problem is that Timmy doesn't know what thinking is. He confuses it for feeling. And we feel something. It feels so self-evidently right that this reaction that we're having is not an echo of biology and context and our own life experiences and a bazillion decisions about what to believe that we have made. It feels self-evidently the only logical way to react to this set of circumstances. And that is what leads people to spiral because people have different reactions. They both think they are self-evidently right and people spiral. And so now reanchoring you guys back around this idea of no, no, no, you have a goal. The only thing that matters is will reacting the way that you're reacting take you towards that goal? And if we can all embrace this idea of fulfillment, that fulfillment is the goal, having a positive emotional state that is resilient to the ups and downs of life because we have self-respect, self-worth, we're elevating ourselves, improving ourselves, and elevating, improving those around us. If that's our goal and we can all buy into that, now we have a steering mechanism. And this is the thing that's crazy-making for me in this cultural upheaval that we're living through right now, which is people don't agree on what the goal is. And when you don't agree on what the goal is, now you have what Lisa and I call a collision of values. When you have a collision of values, either talk about the collision of values or shut the fuck up. Like, legitimately, those are your two options. Because option one, let's talk about the collision of values and what should be the goal, fruitful, Things can come out of that. Arguing about the tea, as Lisa and I call it. The biggest argument we ever had was over a cup of tea. Now, you can imagine that doesn't make any sense. How could you ever get in a fight that large over a cup of tea? The answer is you can't. But you can get in an argument that big about a collision of values, which then attacks your sense of self-identity. There's this incongruous thing where your reaction feels self-evidently correct, and yet this person is acting in a crazy way because the way that I feel, that is self-evidently correct. There's no need to even question it. It is obviously right. Now you get these massive fireworks because the other person is thinking the exact same thing. They feel self-evidently correct because they have all these emotions that are kicked up by their biology that is kicked up by millions of years of evolution. Misinterpreted through this lens that we live in called life in a modern context, completely removed from the evolutionary soup that our brains marinated in— our brains marinated in as they were formed. And now all of a sudden, people cannot allow themselves to conceive that, oh, this emotion was a choice which I have made somewhere through a string of the gazillion little moments that led up to right now in this moment. All of those decisions have formed a set of values, and those values are essentially invisible to me because I have mistaken them for truth. Therefore, my values become water, right? To the fish, fish is the last one to know what water is. It permeates everything in their world. It just is. It's like us and air, right? That actually had to be discovered. Imagine the hundreds of thousands of years. Really think about how long where you've got human-level cognition as we think of it today, and yet there's no concept of I'm in this thing.

It just—

you're here.

And values become that water. You don't even think about them. You don't think that they govern essentially every aspect of your life. And yet they do. And the failure to recognize that my values are not objectively real, they are simply choices that I have made invisibly based on all these emotions that I've gotten, which were kicked up to me by evolution. I don't understand them. I don't understand what drives them, but they feel self-evidently true. Therefore, I go with them. Therefore, however I feel, I confuse with thinking. And I think I've thought through the problem. I think I have articulated what my goal is and how I'm going to get there. But the reality is I've just been feeling this whole time, and chaos ensues.

Where should a person start with improving their self-care if they have low self-esteem? Do you think leveraging one can directly improve the other? Okay, you've really got two issues here, but they are inextricably linked. You've got biology, you've got psychology. The self-care is largely going to be a question of biology— getting the sleep, eating a diet that at a cellular level is serving us. At a microbiome level is helping us, at a cognition level is helping us, right? Setting us up for success. Meditating, making sure that we get that background stress and anxiety radiation down to zero, huge in terms of getting you into a calm and creative space so that you can think through difficult problems. All of these things are what you're going to need to do if you want to do well in your life. Now, self-esteem is a whole nother issue. Self-esteem has everything to do with what you think about yourself when you're by yourself. Now, you have to earn your way to that. And so the key to earning your way to that is to figure out what is your value system. What do you value? What do you think is the way that people should be spending their time and their energies? And then are you doing things in accordance with that? And then there are things that are baked in that are innate. So there are these innate drivers given to us by evolution: hard work, the desire to contribute to the group, meaning and purpose, deep connection with other people that we love. Okay, these are— you have that imperative. There is nothing that you can do to shake that imperative. And so understanding how it works and understanding how you need to meet the needs of that if you want to be fulfilled and be joyful is critically important. So as you go about teasing out whether you have a self-care issue, a biological issue, a self-esteem issue, something that is either we're not addressing the imperatives to contribute, which is sort of the easiest one to go to, or we've let the self-care get so out of whack, we're not sleeping, we're not doing all of those things, that it's really beginning to debilitate us from doing the things that we need to do in order to build up our self-esteem. Now, your self-esteem is really built around the framework of congruence. I said I was going to do it, I'm going to do it. So that when you say you're going to do something, you actually do it. And then whether that's a promise you make to yourself or to somebody else. And then the fulfillment formula, which is to work really hard to gain a set of skills that are unique to you and matter to you. Are exciting to you, and that they serve not only yourself but other people. And so if you're doing that, working really hard to get exceptional at something that matters, that the world cares about, and that you love, and then you contribute in a way that elevates you and other people, that's the game of fulfillment. And so if you're doing that, I think you will find that that will take care of self-esteem. But if you're not doing that, if you're not finding ways to contribute to the group, if you're not progressing in your life then you're going to really struggle with that. So you do the self-care to make sure that you can actually build the self-esteem by contributing in that way. And then those two things work wonderfully together, but you have to recognize that they really are two separate issues and they both need to be addressed. I think it is very instructive for people to ask the question, who's living my ideal life? And that doesn't mean who's making the most money. It means what person's life do you want to live? The real day-to-day grind of it. And when you identify what your dream job is, now we need to go about figuring out how we get that job. And so very quickly, a question about managing our ADHD and figuring out how to stay focused actually becomes a question of how do we get good at finding the right job? And so if you think about orchestrating your life, and most people live By the law of accident. I want to repeat that. Most people live by the law of accident. Don't let that be you, right? You bump into somebody, they know there's a job offering, or it's closer to where you live, or it's, you know, easier for you with the kids, whatever. And so you bump into these things, it's like, oh yeah, cool, oh, I'll make that little thing. And instead of designing your life, you end up just responding to sort of little bumps along the road that end up leading you down a path that was never a conscious choice. You want to sit down and map out, okay, we know that we have— we need a job that meets certain criteria, and one piece of that criteria is that it allows you to be very physical and get that energy out. Okay, so take control of your lives. I cannot stress that one enough. Journaling is hugely important. Recognizing where you thrive, where you don't thrive, what are deal breakers. So It sounds like 8 hours behind a desk is a deal breaker for you. So map out those things, take very strict control of your life, and remember, this may be one of the things that, that has led me to have a career, a life that has certainly led to a tremendous amount of joy in my life and looks like from the outside impossible to obtain. I am an unreasonable person, and I set aside all of my lacking elements, all of my— that's a weird way to say inadequacies. I set aside all the things that I'm not good at because I know it's all a process. I can get good at anything that I point myself at, right? The only belief that matters if I I put time and attention to getting good at this thing, I actually will get good at this thing. So I just set all of that aside. Okay, cool, yeah, whatever. I'm not yet good enough to have the life that I want, my ideal life, but I'm gonna get good enough. And from that, I plant a very unreasonable belief inside my soul, which is I can have any life I want. And now I just need to write out exactly what that is. I've handcrafted the life that I desire, and I know the realities of who I am and what needs to be true in order for me to move well through the world, right? As somebody who was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, I fully get it. And so I have tailored my life to that. Momentum is everything to me because I've got to always be moving. I've got to always feel like I can have tomorrow be wildly different than today. But I take responsibility for the fact that I have to build that, and it's not going to happen by accident. The life I would be leading if I led my life by accident would be radically different. It would not be tailored to the things that I want. So don't be afraid to want. Don't be afraid to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what you really want. And then don't be afraid to be unreasonable in accepting nothing less.

When my voice coughs up, "You're just not smart enough to pull this off," I say, "All right, cool. That's a habit loop trigger to remind myself that all that really matters is skill acquisition. Have I reached the limit of my ability to acquire skills in the area that I need to move forward?" If the answer is yes, go hire somebody. If the answer is no, then keep pushing my skillset because I don't value myself anymore for being smart. So, realizing that I'm never going to be the smartest person that ever lived, sad but true, that it doesn't damage my sense of self-worth. That becomes really important though when you think about—

So I always try to tell people this, the point of life isn't money.

As somebody who chased money for a very long time, I can assure you, it won't touch how you feel about yourself as much as you think it might. So money's not going to help you. Fame isn't going to help you. Accolades aren't going to help you. None of that is going to change the one thing that matters, which is how do you feel about yourself when you're by yourself? That matters. Your entire life is about that question. And once you stop valuing yourself for being smart and you value yourself for this sincere pursuit of greatness or excellence, just translating that potential into actual skill set, then, you know, look, you still have ups and downs in life. Things are going to be hard. There's going to be emotional turmoil, all that. But man, can you get back to center really, really fast.

What steps can I take to bring my focus to the one thing I'm working on while blocking out all else? All right, so the real key is you've got to learn to compartmentalize. So what I do to begin my compartmentalization is I create a list of all the important things that I should be working on. I put that list in order. This is very important. Getting good at prioritizing is an art form. It is critically important that you get good at that art form. And as you begin to break things down and put them in order, now you can tell yourself, hey, this is what I should be working on right now. So rather than trying to digest all the different things that have to be done, it's I'm focused on this one thing right now, and my only job right now is to focus on that thing. And so by not letting your mind wander— and this meditation is very good at bringing your focus back to the breath, which teaches you to bring your focus back to whatever. So I've got a lot of things, many things competing for my attention, but I know what my important things are. I'm working on the number one thing right now, let's say, and so up, this is my entire world. And if I find myself wandering, I bring myself back. Now, part of the reason that I can invest so heavily in that is because I have the belief that that's the most effective way to work. So So since behaviors follow beliefs, you want to make sure that you put that belief in place, which is true, by the way, that you can do everything that you want to do, just not all of it at once. So everything has to be done sequentially. You can't do everything at the same time, and this is why you have to prioritize things out. So if we know that multitasking is actually a myth and that you can put people in brain scanners and what you're seeing, people who seem like they can multitask What they're doing is called rapid switching. So they don't have what I have, which is high switching costs. When I get in a flow, man, I can go and go and go. But if I try to bounce back and forth between things, then I pay this high price in inefficiency between the switching costs of moving from switching from that task to this task. So I focus, I stay on one thing, I have them in order, I know what I'm working on, I remind myself that I only have one job in that moment, that is to work on that thing. I know that that's the most efficient way to work, and I know that I'm good at prioritizing things, so it becomes very easy. Boom, boom, boom. And then you just hold yourself accountable to actually doing that. Practice makes perfect. You might have a difficult time in the beginning. Start meditating if you need to, to train yourself to come back to the breath over and over and over. And then you can just apply that to whatever you're working on. Come back to the project. If you have a $1 million business, you'll get— want to get it to $10 million.

How—

what's the best way to distribute your time between marketing, training your employees, developing yourself.

All right, everybody, what does it start with? Clarity of your goal. So what's your goal?

$10 million a year.

That's just money. How are you gonna get there? Why are we— are we just chasing money?

Yes.

Sell drugs. You might go to jail, but damn, on the way up, baby. You can make some money. The next best thing, crypto, then flipping NFTs, but you can go broke real fast doing that. But damn, if you hit— I made $100,000 in 48 hours on a single NFT that I bought for $250. Not financial advice, let me tell you. But those are really dumb ways. Crypto's not dumb, but those are like really sort of roll the dice, bet it all on black ways. If If all you care about is money, it will send you down a very dark path that I'm not super helpful at. Once you have a goal and there's like a thing behind you, but even setting all that aside, I will just say you have to be in an industry where the upside potential is big enough that you could actually solve a problem. Remember, this starts with I'm solving a problem for somebody who knows they need that problem solved, and then I'm gonna go solve it 'cause you're better than anybody else. That's the real answer. But if I could change your life, because this will matter so much, business is a game of attrition. Most people give up. Why do they give up? Because hard things suck. So when you have a hard thing, who has read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl? I want to, is that really it? Scream that out if you've read it. This is the most important thing I will say to you, literally, in this whole talk. Every single person in this room, if you are serious about enjoying your life, read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. It is about a guy who survived the concentration camps. He happened to be a neuroscientist, and what he realized was you could predict when someone would die within 72 hours because they would lose a sense of meaning and purpose. Now if you can survive Auschwitz on meaning and purpose alone, let me tell you how important meaning and purpose is in a business. Because as hard as building a business has been, it's no fucking Auschwitz. So trust me when I say meaning and purpose will get you through. When I was building Quest, it was all about saving my mom and my sister. That was what I attached to it. So when I was there at 2 AM on a Friday night with bloody knuckles fixing a piece of equipment that I did not want to be fixing, I would think of my mom and my sister. I would not think of $10 million because nature has compelled me to think of them in a way, and I get an emotional reward I won't get from anything else. So even if you're just going to chase the $10 million, make it about your kids, giving them a better life or something. But think about that other something.

We good?

All right.

If something is really high value, really important, the most important thing you could be dealing with, then you're gonna do everything you can do to move that ball forward. Now, inevitably, no matter what it is, there will be times where you will get to the point where you need a break or there's nothing more that you can do, whatever. And so you're gonna do everything that you can do to push that ball forward. And then once you need to move on for whatever reason, then, or you're waiting for something, thing, then you go and focus on the smaller things. But don't be afraid to say, this is my number one priority. And so other things are going to get less attention. So one thing I always tell people at Impact Theory is doing less is always an option. What's not an option is hating your life. Okay, so we're not going to do things that allow us to hate our life. So if I know, hey, I've got a health issue, I have to go really ham, but I also have all this knick-knacky that I have to deal with, I'm gonna take care of my health first and foremost. I'm gonna cut out things that don't have, you know, anything to do with that because they are less important to me. And we went through this with Lisa, and that meant that she was doing less at work. You know, if you have to take paid time off or whatever, do it. If you have to take unpaid time off, do it. If you have to scale your lifestyle back to make sure that you can take unpaid time off, do it. There are 1,000 ways, but when something is truly the most important thing, then you need to address it as such. Now, what I find is everybody tries to have these dueling competing number ones. They think that they're supposed to be doing all of these things at the same time. I'm just here to tell you that's not how it works. So you have to put things in rank order. There is no such thing as a dual number one priority. Okay? There is number one, there is number two, three, four, five, six, so on and so forth. Okay, so line them up, do them in that order, and you have to be relentless about it, and you have to accept that not everything is going to get done as well as you want to get it done, but it should get done in priority order. I find people have a really hard time with that. That one to me is a bit weird. If your priorities are listed in order of the things that are important to you, why would you do them in any other way unless you're lying to yourself about what's actually important to you. So if what's really important to you is what your parents think about you, well, then you might start making stupid decisions because you're not being honest that what you really want is to please your parents. Now, once you start being honest about what your priorities are, like for instance, let's say you have a health issue and you have kids, and the reality is that your kids are your number one priority and your health is number two. Now what do you do? You've got a choice. You either have to deprioritize your children, which is going to be hard for some people, or your spouse, or your job, or whatever. But be honest. And if you're not prepared to deprioritize your kids, then you have to own that and accept the consequences. Namely, depending on what your health issue is, you may die younger than you otherwise would because you're not addressing it. This is where we got to be honest. We have to say what's really going on. We've got to say what our priorities really are. And when we stop bullshitting ourselves about what our priorities are, then we can execute in priority order. And then everything in life gets clear and simple. Doesn't get easy, but it gets clear and it gets simple. Do it to it, as my mom would say.

When I really think about what's the impact I want to have on the world, it's to show people that it does not matter where you are today.

It only matters who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there.

and it makes me sad for other people that they think that I have some natural talent, and that they then let themselves off the hook because of that. Because let me tell you, when I was laying in bed 4 hours a day, every day, in the morning, I didn't feel talented.

I'll just tell you that. Like, I felt like a loser. Social media didn't exist. There was no way for me to reach out to people and connect.

With these thought leaders. You could get Tony Robbins tapes and books and stuff, and that's what I did, but it's like, man, that's a pretty far cry from where things are today. And so I felt so hopeless and so lost and just unsure of how I was gonna make anything in my life, and so for people to be like, oh well, easy for you to say, you have XYZ talents, like really truly, I do not.

I had zero instincts as an entrepreneur coming into it. I was a buffoon, fell on my face, embarrassed myself. I mean, just stupid beyond all imagining.

How do you know when it's time to refuel and choose self-care instead of continuing to grind? Physiological self-awareness is critical. I hear a lot of talk about people developing psychological self-awareness, so understanding what you're good at, what you want to do, all of those things. Incredibly useful. But understanding how to read your body may be even more important than that. So Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made, detail the way that emotions are far more of a bottom-up phenomenon, meaning they come from your body. It isn't you thinking about something and then creating the emotion down. That does happen. And of course, you can spiral yourself out of control simply by thinking. But usually what begins this thinking process is a sense of unease, right? Anxiety is a bodily feeling, oftentimes disconnected from what you're thinking. So figuring out, ooh, why do I have the sense, being able to process it consciously, we can pull it up into our conscious mind and think through it with words and logic. But oftentimes it's starting with that, like, oh man, I don't feel good about this and I don't know why. So this is the fascinating thing about drugs, is drugs can either eliminate or change the bodily sensation, which then changes the story that you're telling yourself about the sensation. Now, this isn't an advertisement for drugs. It's to get you to understand that it can be risky to sever the sense of body from what you're telling yourself about it. So you want your body to give you this description of what is going on, but then as you take conscious control of that, to develop that self-awareness around physiologically what's happening, you need to understand why you're feeling the way that you feel. And so developing that to get a sense of whether this is a time to keep pushing through or whether this is like one of those moments where you actually really do need to step back. It's the difference between sore muscles from, you know, a nice hard workout and a torn muscle or damaged joint from an injury. And the same thing is true when you're thinking about how hard to work, how hard to push yourself, you need to figure out this fatigue that I'm feeling, this unease, this anxiety, this stress, is this a natural part of pushing through the difficulties of this project or is something else going on? This is now really starting to cave in on me and what I need to do now is take a step back, meditate, journal, hug my significant other, pet my dog, cuddle my kids, whatever the case may be, go for a run. But doing something that slows you down, lets you take a deep breath. And the only way to figure that out is to be able to interpret the feelings that your body's giving you into conscious thought. Okay, and getting good at that loop is very, very important, and it takes practice. It takes understanding what the body is communicating, why it's communicating it, what impacts it. Like, what you eat and drink has a huge impact on what your gut is telling you, and then your brain tries to make sense of it, and it doesn't always go, oh, I'm feeling anxious because, in my case, I was drinking a zero-calorie Monster, which, much to my dismay because I absolutely love them, make me feel anxious. And so getting an understanding of that, seeing that pattern, was actually quite transformational because I stopped drinking them and my anxiety levels plummeted by like 70%. It's pretty crazy. Didn't take me to zero, but it made it a phenomenon that was easily manageable through meditation. So this is where you have to develop that awareness, that pattern recognition and be able to say, oh, I feel this way because of XYZ thing happening at work or with my spouse or with food that I'm consuming. So be very thoughtful about that, and that will then help you determine whether it's we need self-care or we just need to push through. I get it.

I get that humans do dumb things.

I get that humans can be hurtful.

I'm not interested though in what my partner did wrong.

I'm only interested in what I can do next time to avoid the same mistakes without diminishing the beauty that is a relationship. Now, I have a fundamental belief that the single greatest joy that anybody can have in their life is to share a life with somebody that they love and who loves them, that they trust and who trusts them. So I'm not going to give up on that belief because it went wrong one time, two times, three times, whatever. I'm looking at what I can control to make sure that I don't end up back in that situation. First and foremost, we are going to have to figure out what exactly has happened. So is it that you don't have a dream or passion because you haven't taken the time to define that? Because let me be very clear, passion is not an archaeological dig, it's an architectural build. So you don't turn inwards, look inside yourself, and find this glowing ember of passion and excitement that's been sitting there since birth, despite that some people will tell you that that's how this works, but it is not. If Steve Jobs were born 1,000 years ago, he would not have dreamed of making the iPhone. What ends up happening is you decide. There is something that you decide means enough to you, that you're going to invest in it. And then over time, that investment turns that thing into a deep and abiding passion as you get better and you get feedback from the world that they value this thing that you're getting better at. But it isn't just lying dormant within you. And this is like the number one confusion that I encounter with people, is they think that either they're broken and other people were born with a passion and they were not, or they just think that, you know, if I do enough introspection, I'm gonna find something sitting inside of me and finally my life will be amazing. Once you realize that in fact what happens is when you look inside, all you're going to find are these Sparks of interest. And from that spark of interest, through pursuing it as a process of gaining mastery, it will become a passion when you're able to use that skill set that you gained in the pursuit of mastery to serve not only yourself but other people. Okay, so doing that, now you're in this passion loop of you worked really hard, you gained a set of skills, allows you to serve other people, they give give you feedback. Oh my God, thank you, this is so amazing. I'm grateful for what you've done, built, created, given me, whatever the case may be. And that feels good, which makes you want to go get better. And that's the passion loop. Now, as you're doing that, you're able to really be energized by the things that you're doing. But it doesn't start by looking inward and finding something. It starts by realizing that you have to fan those flames of that spark of interest to turn it into the rage in front of that you want to feel of that passion. But that comes from that loop. Okay, so that's the first thing to assess. Now, if you already have or had a passion but this job has somehow beaten it out of you, that's a very different story. And so if that's what's going on, we need to figure out what is it in the structure of that that is robbing you of that. What's going on exactly that's making this overwhelming or stressful or not fun? Is it politics in the office? Is it just the Is it that your work environment is too fast-paced? Is it that you're not being honest with yourself about, you know, going back to this idea of 50% of you is hardwired, 50% of you is malleable? If the hardwired part is out of step with the life that you're trying to lead, there can be a lot of frustration there. So having the self-awareness to understand, did you put yourself in the wrong position? Are you trying to be Steve Jobs when you should be Steve Wozniak? That's a really imperative thing to look at. Now I find that a lot of times, Companies have their own issues. Whenever you get a large group of people together, there are going to be weird things that have to be navigated. But at the end of the day, while you can't control everything that everybody does, you can always control how you react. And so you can reorient yourself within a company to figure out, one, if there's a path back to finding that joy. But that comes from breaking down what exactly happened that made you stop feeling the joy? And two, are you able to perform at a high enough level that you're able to create the space for you to get back on track? Because if you're gonna go in and try to move things around and make some changes within the company or within your role or within how things work, you're gonna need to be performing at a very high level to have the credibility to make that ask. And this is where it gets difficult. Nobody wants to hear this. I get it. Everybody wants to point fingers and say this is just a toxic company. But in reality, if it's that bad, leave. Do not waste time. Start— find another job first. I'm not just saying quit, find another job, but get out of there. Don't act like you're actually in prison. You are not actually in prison. And yes, I understand that you have obligations and you may be a single parent with kids and huge responsibility. I completely understand and I have the most empathy empathy for that in the world. But I want you to understand, you are only as trapped as you allow yourself to be. If you have a useful skill set, you will be able to find another job, and now is the time to go looking for that while you're still getting paid. Now, if you don't have skill set that's marketable, that's where we have to start. And so building up the skill set so that we can be marketable somewhere else That's going to give us the ability to perform where we are or leave if it's too toxic. But assuming that we're going to stay, now we need that skill set to perform at a very high level to create the credibility to make the ask and go to your boss or whomever is creating, or maybe not even creating the problem, but who has the ability to help you create the solution. Now you go and say, I'm performing at a high level. Yes, yes, oh my God, you're amazing.

Okay, cool.

Here are the things that I would need to change. So often people's first instinct is just peace out. And they don't realize that there are many things that they could have done to restructure the role, to create more space for themselves in order to stay. But what people end up letting happen is they let themselves burn out, and then they want to leave and go somewhere else, not realizing that they will have the same problem at the next job. And instead of doing the work themselves, solving the internal problem of how we ended up here, whether it's lack of skill set, not setting boundaries, whatever the case may be, but keeping that ownership, keeping that responsibility, recognizing that if you make different choices, you get different outcomes, so that you can go ahead and change things there. Now, again, if you want to leave, leave by all means. Take your skill set and go elsewhere. But make sure that you're not doing what I was doing in my early 20s when I was about to move to New York because I was unhappy in LA, and I thought that LA was a problem when in reality it was my mindset. Once I changed my mindset, suddenly LA was amazing. Because it wasn't about LA. It was about me. And I thought, ah, like, something's got to change. And so I just wanted to go as far away as I could, but it wouldn't have solved the problem. I would have gotten to New York only to have the same issue again and again and again. I had to address my mindset, and once I did that, then everything changed. So be very careful, be very thoughtful about how you approach unwinding this problem. If you're always blaming other people, you're not going to get where you want to go because you're not looking for the things that you can do differently. You're letting your psychological immune system take over, make it other people's problems, and then you're not able to change. And once you realize that your life is an exact reflection of your choices Now it's not so you feel bad, it's so that you remember if you make different choices, you get different outcomes. And so now you can make these changes or gain more skills or whatever it is that's needed to get the life that you want. Now, no matter where you go, you will feel completely comfortable that you can shape things to your liking. But you have to know how the game works. You have to know that building skill set is the key. You have to know that communicating with your boss, what's working, what's not working, and to have earned the credibility to make the ask. Do all that, you'll have no problem.

Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it. But you You are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So as a special celebration, if you put a hashtag #Believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. If you want to see the recent one-on-one interview I did with Tom Bilyeu, check it out right there next next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

I was worth $2 million on paper, and I'd never been more unhappy in my life.