This will DELETE your OLD Self. Watch This Everyday (2026)

You can't just plan your way into being a different person. You change who you are one small habit at a time.

The thing is, is that we become creatures of our own habits.

You can have any habits, any, any patterns of behavior that you wish. It's simply a question of which you decide. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers tracked people hour by hour through their days and found 43% of what they did was habit. The same action in the same place almost every day. Habits account for 40 to 50% of our daily And this is all the stuff that you're just doing without even thinking. If you want to get your life together, you have to start with small, boring habits to fix the loops that create 95% of our problems. Which means almost half of your day is already on autopilot, and your weight, your bank balance, and your marriage are mostly running on autopilot. So here's how you delete your old self and upgrade your autopilot. If you think about it, everything we do, almost everything we do in life is autopilot. Your brain is always developing habits, so it's, it's habit-forming. It's happening whether you want it to happen or not. And the question is, can you take control of the process? George Foreman did it all in public, and it started in a locker room in Puerto Rico in 1977. Before that night, George Foreman, he was the villain, and he enjoyed being the villain.

The first time around, I was angry and I just didn't care. I mean, people booed me, and it was great because they were booing the right guy. I was a bad fella.

He was the heavyweight who scowled at people, said almost nothing, and scared everyone around him. And that was his whole persona, and it worked. He was terrifying, and he was He was famous for being terrifying. But then in March 1977, he lost to Jimmy Young in San Juan.

I'd fought Jimmy Young and I had just lost the fight.

Afterwards, in the dressing room, he collapsed from exhaustion and started hallucinating. He describes it as a near-death experience.

I went back into the dressing room and I was just cooling off, and I started walking and cooling my body off, and I was just overtaken with that I was going to die. And I experienced a death in that room. He walked out of that room a born-again Christian, and he quit When I left that dressing room, I was screaming the name of Jesus. I started screaming words like, hallelujah, I've been born again.

Then he spent 10 years doing something nobody talks about.

What do you think the 10 years you spent away from boxing, from what, I guess from '77 to '87? That's right.

When was that?

'77 to '87?

10 years.

What did it take out of you? What did it take away from you?

You know, it gave me an appreciation more than anything of life. It made me a better man.

He became an ordained minister. He preached.

I became a preacher. Full-time evangelist with the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ gave me something I never had before— peace of mind. Like, I like being who I am.

He opened the George Foreman Youth and Community Center in Houston, Texas, and spent his days with kids who had nothing. A decade of that out of the spotlight, doing small repeated things that had nothing to do with who he used to be. He started deleting his old self.

I dropped everything I was doing to tell the whole world that Jesus Christ is alive. God took me all over the country fighting in Africa, Puerto Rico, uh, Europe, everywhere. And I was just trying to exalt George Foreman. Now I'm going all over trying to tell them about Jesus.

By 1987, the youth center needed money badly. So at 38, an age when every expert said it was ridiculous, he went back to boxing to pay for it. And it started one of the most famous comebacks in sports history.

I decided right then, I know how to get money. I'm going to be heavyweight champion of the world again. That's how I was getting money for my youth center.

And on November 5th, 1994, at 45 years old, he knocked out Michael Moorer and became the oldest heavyweight champion in history. The winner, and once again heavyweight champion of the world, Big George Foreman! But the title wasn't even where the money was. A grill company put his name and his face on a small kitchen appliance, a George Foreman grill, and it sold more than 100 million units. In 1999, Sultan paid $137 million to buy out Foreman and 2 of his partners for the exclusive rights to keep his name on that grill forever.

This thing sold over 100 million. Right.

And to give the check some context, too, you end up being bought out, I think, for something like $140 million after what you had already made.

Is it true?

I mean, at one point checks were coming in For upwards of like $4 million monthly.

$5 million.

He'd made about $5 million for fighting Muhammad Ali. He made an estimated $200 million from the grill. Sultan didn't pay the $137 million for an angry boxer. Nobody was ever gonna buy a family kitchen product from the terrifying 1974 version of George Foreman. He deleted his old self, and the man America met in 1994 was the one those 10 quiet years had built, and the boxing comeback is what put him in front of everybody again. Now, you're not going to collapse in a locker room in Puerto Rico, but that night wasn't what changed him either. The 10 years of preaching is the actual story. Everything that made him somebody else, everything that allowed him to delete his old self, happened in small, consistent habit changes in a church and a gym in Houston with nobody watching. Which brings us right back to that 43%. Almost half of what you do is already running on habit. The same thing in the same place. So to delete your old self like George Foreman did, you need to change the things you already do every single day. Here are the 6 things that actually rebuild who you are. Do them and you'll be a different person. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #Believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time.

Believe.

Number 1, decide who you are before you decide what to do. So you've been taught to do the reps, then you get the muscles, then you call yourself an athlete, right? You wait years before you'll let yourself say, I'm an athlete. We need to turn that around. Being leads to doing. So wake up and decide who you are today, and what you actually do after that changes automatically. When you tell yourself, I'm an athlete, I'm a great dad today, I'm a leader today, it might feel ridiculous for about a week. Then you notice that you're doing things that you've never scheduled because an athlete doesn't schedule. The workout. A great dad shows up for family dinner. A leader speaks up when it would be easier to stay quiet. A list of to-dos gives you tasks but no reason. If you've decided that you are a leader today, you already know what to do when a choice shows up, including the hundreds of small choices that were never on any to-do list. Should you send that message? A leader would. Should you have that drink? An athlete wouldn't. You stop arguing with yourself about every little thing, which is exhausting, because you've already decided who you are. Watch a salesperson at a Ferrari dealer. They don't scramble to pull up a website and prove how many races that the company has won. They stand there knowing that they are selling a Ferrari, and that means something. You are a Ferrari too when you decide that's who you are. There's a line on the t-shirt I own that I go back to constantly. A bird sitting on a tree isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. Who you decide to be today can change the rest of your life. So decide who you are before you worry about deciding what to do. Number 2, go outside before the world gets to you. If you took every habit away from me and let me keep just one, I'd keep this one. It's my believe walk. Here's how it goes. You wake up and get outside within the first 15 minutes of your day, then walk for 15 to 20 minutes. Your phone comes with you for one job only, which is audio. No email, no messaging, no scrolling, no reacting to anybody else's demands. Go for your believe walk and just listen to something that makes you believe in yourself more. There are mornings when your own belief just isn't there. And on those mornings, you can borrow somebody else's belief. You're going to spend the next 15, 20 minutes listening to something either way. And if you don't choose with intention, you'll probably just pick whatever is convenient or a social media algorithm recommends. And now you've entered doom scrolling mode, which is probably not how you want to start your day. So instead, put on a speech, a set of rules, an interview with someone who's done what you're trying to do. It's why I make these videos every single day on my channel. So there's always something new for you to put on if you want. And when you do that every morning, you come back from your belief walk with a A belief that you didn't wake up with. And that's the whole point. Do that for 30 days and it'll change your life. A bonus tip is the second you get out of bed, put a stopwatch on. You need to be outside within 15 minutes. Go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, get changed, drink some water, feed the dogs, get outside. No more drifting or doom scrolling. You have now claimed your day. Number 3, answer these 3 questions. You need something written down because your memory of who you decided to be will not last all week, especially when you get stressed. So sit down, Tonight and answer 3 questions. Who do you wanna become? Why are you here? What are the things you actually want in your life? Spend an hour with it and give yourself permission to let yourself dream for an hour. Don't worry about the stresses, the mortgage, the family drama, the health issues, the responsibilities, your past trauma, and everything else that is creating pressure on you right now. Those are real and you will fix them, but just for an hour, let yourself dream again because you can't delete your old self by living in the problems of your old self. So 3 questions. Who do you want to become? Why are you here? What are the things you actually want in your life? Who you want to become is how you behave when things go wrong. Why you're here is the one people skip because it feels too big. But write down a bad answer. A bad answer is better than no answer. And on what you want, be specific, even if it's embarrassing. The number in your bank account, the money for selfish reasons, a break from responsibility, more friends, a weight goal, looking good naked, traveling to a specific destination. This list is just for you so you don't have to worry about someone else's opinion. Someone else's judgments or expectations just right. That page is what you check yourself against. Not a mood, not a feeling about how the month went, a page that you can hold up next to your calendar. So a week later, if you're spending time on something completely different from what you wrote down, you don't need to argue with yourself. You just pull out the page. You wrote it. You can see the gap yourself in 15 seconds. Keep it to one page. If it's too long, you will not come back to it. It won't be as valuable. And keep it somewhere that you physically pass, not just in some folder on your laptop. If you have to keep looking for it, you won't, especially Especially on tough days. So keep it visible as a reminder of who you are becoming and why it matters. Bonus tip, read that page every Sunday with a coffee and a fresh perspective. If the page says you're building a business and last week you had 2 hours on it and 14 hours of other people's meetings, the page isn't wrong. You aren't lazy. Your calendar just belongs to something else, and that's what needs to change. The goal is to catch the drift while it's still just one week wide, and one week is easy to fix. If you skip the Sunday read, you'll wake up 6 months later as somebody that you Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Number 4, expect the moving cost. You are going to stall out around week 3, and this is why. Changing who you are has a moving cost, and it works exactly like if you're moving a house. The big items are easy, right? You know where the couch goes. What kills you is the small boxes of stuff that you don't know where to put. Stupid things that you forgot existed. Same thing happens with your identity. Deciding is just the first part. Then you find the bio line that still describes the old you, the link in your profile that points to something that you don't even do anymore, the autoresponder written by a person that you no longer are, the photo from 4 years ago, back when you were somebody else, the friends who only ever ask you about the old thing. None of those little things are hard to change, but all of it combined, it just slows you down. And being slowed down is what makes you quit. So go clean out those small leftover things on purpose. Give yourself one hour this week and do it in one pass, because spread over a month you'll get stuck halfway and just live between the two versions of you. Rewrite the bio, fix the links, delete the old automated messages, change the photo, unsubscribe from the 20 emails that were meant for the person that you used to be, and expect the people part to take a little bit longer because they're not trying to be difficult. They met a version of you that made sense to them and that is comfortable and familiar to them. Keep showing up as the new you, and most of them catch up inside a few months. The ones who never come around only liked you the way you were before, and that's worth knowing. And you don't need to announce any of this either. Announcing invites a debate about whether you've really changed or not. Just answer differently when they ask what you're up to and set a new standard for what you will no longer do. Number 5, set a baseline for yourself. So you do the Believe Walk for 9 days. Day 10, you sleep through your alarm, and instead of walking on day 11, you decide that the streak is broken. So the whole thing is off and you restart properly on Monday, right? Monday becomes the first of the month. The first of the month becomes never. Sleeping in wasn't the real problem. What stopped you for good was deciding that you had blown it. So instead, set a baseline that you'll almost never miss. Not the perfect version, the version that you can do with a fever, on 4 hours sleep, on a day that started with some emergency. If the Believe Walk is 15 minutes, your baseline is walking to the end of the street and back with one song on. If it's the gym, the baseline is walking in and doing one set. If it's writing, the baseline is writing one paragraph. Write the baseline down next to the real version tonight before you actually need it. You can't set a fair baseline at 6:00 AM when you feel terrible, right? That version of you is looking for a reason to skip, and it'll take any reason that you give it. Hit the baseline and you kept the promise. That's the rule. The baseline isn't there to make progress. Some mornings it does nothing at all for your fitness or for your business, and it still counts because what it protects is the promise you made to yourself. You're building evidence that you're somebody who does what they said they do. And evidence is built by showing up again, especially when it's hard. Number 6, sit down with yourself. I want to give you 2 more exercises, and both of them take 5 minutes. The first one, imagine a park bench. You sit down on it next to yourself from 5 years ago. You get 5 minutes with them and then they're gone. What do you tell them, younger you, to change their life? For me, it would be that I need to believe more in myself. Write your sentence down word for word, then realize that you're not just talking to the younger version of you. Whatever you tell them, younger you, you still need to hear it right now. Future you is also saying that same message to you right now. 80-year-old Evan is telling me to believe more in myself too right now. The second one, and I got this from Jeff Bezos, is picture yourself at 80 looking back at this exact What do you regret? What did you never try? Then make the choice today that the 80-year-old version of you would be proud of. Both of these work because they get you out of the current version of yourself for a minute, and the current version is the one making all of your excuses. So do the park bench exercise tonight. Do the 80-year-old test before any decision that scares you. They cost you nothing, and the answer you get is almost always the one you really needed to hear. It's a thing that deep down you probably already knew, but your fear was preventing you from hearing. Your old self was a rough draft. George Foreman spent 10 quiet years preaching in Houston and running a youth center for kids who had nothing. That's how he deleted his old self. And years later, the whole world trusted him in their kitchen. Nobody heard from him for those years or cheered him on. He built it himself. You can do the same. Tomorrow morning, do your Believe Walk, 15 minutes outside, and make a decision about who you are today. I'm going to do it. Today, your purpose comes from your pain, and the old version of you is the one who carried it. You've carried it long enough. Now go be the person who does something with it. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be.

Believe.

Now let's learn the Japanese art of becoming rich on a small salary. How rich you become has almost nothing to do with how much you earn. The Federal Reserve found that nearly 4 in 10 American adults couldn't Cover a surprise $400 expense with cash, and plenty of the people in that group earn very good money. So the Japanese skill of turning a modest income into real lasting wealth might be just the most important thing nobody ever bothered to teach you. And today, I'm going to. Let me take you to Japan to a little boy named Konosuke Matsushita. He was born in 1894 into a comfortable family, but when he was just four years old, his father gambled the family's money away. on the rice market, and they lost everything. They went from comfortable to poor almost overnight. So at 9 years old, before he even finished elementary school, little Konosuke was sent away from his family to work as an apprentice, first at a shop making charcoal braziers, then at a bicycle shop where he swept floors, he ran errands, and slept where he worked. He had maybe 4 years of formal schooling in his entire life. This was a child with nothing— no money, no education, no connections, no safety net But he was watching and learning and saving every small bit of money he could. As a young man, he took a job at an electric company, and in 1918, at 23 years old, with only a tiny bit of savings, he decided to start making electrical sockets out of a little apartment where he lived. His wife and brother-in-law worked alongside him. Money was so tight in those early days that at one point he had to pawn his wife's kimono just to keep the tiny business alive. And here's what actually carried him through. He was patient in a way that almost no one is. He wasn't thinking about getting rich by the weekend. He famously laid out a 250-year plan for his company because he thought in centuries while everyone else panicked about next month. He stayed frugal and disciplined his whole life, even long after the money came in. And that tiny socket workshop grew steadily and slowly into Panasonic, one of the largest companies in the world today. When Konosuke Matsushita passed away in 1989, he left behind a personal fortune of around $3 billion and a whole country that called him the God of Management. A boy with 4 years of school and a pond kimono. But notice what actually built that fortune. It wasn't a big salary, a rich family, or a lucky lottery ticket. It was the discipline he had when he had nothing, patience when everyone else wants it now, and the habit of saving and reinvesting every small bit of those things for decades. Those aren't talents that you're born with; they're habits, and habits can be learned by anyone, including you, starting with your very next payday. Now, the common objection that comes up is, "Okay, that's a nice story, Evan, but I don't have enough to save for anything, let alone invest. This wealth stuff belongs to people who have big salaries, not someone who's barely covering rent." I hear you, and that's why I want to go back to the Federal Reserve number: nearly four in ten adults can't cover a four hundred dollar surprise, and that group is packed with people pulling. In six figures who spend every dollar the moment that it lands. So high income did not save them because how much you make and how wealthy you become are two completely separate skills. Konosuke Matsushita started as a penniless nine-year-old apprentice. So this assistant to this an approach the disciplined wealthy have used quietly for generations, and the Japanese have some of the most beautiful practical versions of it in the world. It works on a small salary. And honestly, it works best when you start small because you build the habits before the big money ever comes in. So let me walk you through this art step by step. Pay yourself first before the world takes its cut. The first Japanese principle changes the order that keeps most people broke. Normally, money comes in, you pay all your bills, you spend on whatever comes up, and then you try to save whatever little bit is left over. And there's never anything left over.

Just—

there just never is. And the quiet wealthy, do the exact opposite. The moment money comes in, before a single bill is paid, they take a fixed slice off the top and set it aside for the future. So pay yourself first, even if just 10%, even if just 5% at the start because things are tight. The number matters far less than the habit you develop. You treat that slice as sacred. It's untouchable as your rent is, a bill you owe to the person that you're going to be in 20 years. And here's the trick that actually makes it work. You automate it so you never even see the money and never have to rely on your willpower. Set your account to move that slice into your savings or investments automatically the day that the money comes in. What you don't see, you don't miss, and what you don't miss, you don't spend. So let's say you earn $3,000 a month, pay yourself 10%, and that's $300 moved automatically to your future before you even touch it. You learn to live on the $2,700 and you barely feel it, but that $300 a month invested and left alone turns into hundreds of thousands of dollars over a working life. A person who saves 10% of a small income ends up far wealthier than a person who saves nothing on a large one. So it starts with your next payday, not Not someday when you earn more, because someday never comes. Kakeibo: write down every single dollar you spend. So there's a beautiful Japanese practice called kakeibo, which means something like household finance ledger, and it's over 100 years old. The idea is simple and a little uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works. So you write down by hand every single dollar you earn and every single dollar you spend. All of it: the coffee, the streaming service, the takeout, the impulse buy at checkout. Not on an app that kind of puts it behind some dashboard, but with a pen so your brain actually feels each expense. So why does this matter so much? Because money doesn't leak out in big dramatic ways. Typically it leaks out in tiny amounts that you never notice. A $4.50 premium coffee every workday adds up to $1,600 a year. A $15 ride you take twice a week instead of walking is more than $1,500 a year. One forgotten $14.99 subscription is $180 a year doing nothing. Add up a handful of these little leaks and it's often thousands of dollars a year draining out of your While you swear you have nothing left to save, John D. Rockefeller, who became the richest man of his era, kept a little book he called Ledger A as a young man with almost no money, and he wrote down every penny he earned and spent long before he was rich. Awareness comes first, always. You cannot fix a leak that you cannot see. So for one month, write down every dollar. At the end of the month, you can sit there with your ledger and ask four simple questions: one, how much came in? Two, how much do I want to save? Three, how much did I actually spend? And 4, how can I do a little better next month? We're not trying to shame ourselves here, just some reflection. And that's where the change happens. Live below your means and stop performing wealth for strangers. So here is a truth that the wealthy understand in their bones. Looking rich and being rich are 2 completely different things, and chasing the first one destroys the second one usually. So much of spending isn't even about you. It's a performance. For people whose opinions will not pay your bills, and half of them aren't even paying attention to you, or more. The new car, the designer logo, the upgrade you can't quite afford—it's just a costume, and the costume becomes more and more expensive. So the people who actually build real wealth choose to live below their means on purpose, and they feel genuinely free doing it because they're not a slave to anyone else's opinion. So look at Chuck Feeney. He co-founded the company behind the duty-free shops in every major airport and became a billionaire. And he wore a $15 watch, flew coach, and lived in a modest rental. rented apartment. He gave away almost his entire fortune, around $8 billion, because being rich was never about looking rich to him. Konosuke Matsushita stayed careful with money his whole life, long after he could have bought anything on earth. So here's the muscle that we need to start to build. When your income goes up, and it will, you don't automatically inflate your lifestyle to match it. You keep your costs steady and let the gap between what you earn and what you spend grow wider and wider because that gap becomes the raw material of all of your wealth. So before any big purchase, ask yourself an honest question: am I buying this for me or for how it makes me look to other people? And if the answer is other people, put it back. A smaller life that you can actually afford beats a bigger one that actually owns you. Invest the difference. Let it grow while you sleep. So here's a piece that somebody disciplined savers miss, and it's the one that actually turns your savings into wealth. Saving money alone will not make you rich if you just pile up cash in a bank account or under your mattress. Inflation eats it year after year and you fall behind while you are feeling responsible. The gap that you created by paying yourself first and living below your means, that difference has to be put to work. You now have to invest it. Now, I want to keep this calm because building wealth on a modest salary is not about gambling. It's not about chasing hot stock tips or day trading or throwing your rent money at whatever is trending this week. The approach is boring. And boring is exactly why it works. You buy a piece of the whole market through a simple, low-cost index fund, and you keep buying it automatically every month in good times and in scary times. And then you leave it alone and you let it grow for decades. You're not trying to be a genius. You're trying to own a slice of the economy and let the time do the heavy lifting for you. This is where compounding, the most powerful force in money, goes to work for you. Your money earns, and then those earnings earn, and the snowball rolls downhill for 20 and 30 years until the number becomes something that honestly looks impossible from where you're standing today. And please don't let the fear of not being a finance expert stop you, because that fear keeps more people poor than bad investments do. Start with whatever you can— $50 a month— just to become an investor and cross that line from someone who only spends money into someone who also owns things that grow. Once you're on the other side of that line, everything starts to change. Kaizen: 1% better with money every month. So the Japanese have another amazing gift for you, a concept called kaizen, which means continuous improvements through small steps. It's the idea that you don't transform your entire life in one giant leap. You improve it by 1% at a time, steadily, until those tiny improvements compound into something that is enormous. So we want to apply this to your money, and it takes all the pressure off. You don't have to go from saving nothing to saving 30% overnight. Which might feel impossible and makes you, you know, quit on it in a week. You just get a little better every month. So this month you automate 5% of your income. Next month you nudge it to 6%. You cancel one subscription that you forgot about. You negotiate one bill with a 5-minute phone call that saves you money for years. You learn one skill that lets you ask for a raise. None of these feel dramatic on its own, and that's kind of the whole point, because each is small enough that you'll actually do it and stick with it. But stack a year of tiny 1% improvements on top of each other and you become almost unrecognizable from a money standpoint. This is also how you raise your income, which matters just as much as saving. So get 1% better at your craft every month, become more valuable, and a more valuable person earns more. Kaizen is patient, and it's the opposite of the crash diets people try with their finances every January and then abandon by February. Small, steady, forever. That's a pace that wins, and that's a good start that you can build Mottainai. Treat everything you own as something not to waste. So there's one more really cool Japanese idea that I love called mottainai. It's a deep sense that waste is something to genuinely regret, that everything has value and shouldn't be just carelessly thrown away. So in a world that is constantly telling you to go buy the new thing and toss out the old one, mottainai is more radical and it's a wealth-building superpower. It means you maintain and repair the things you own instead of instantly replacing them. It It means you use something fully before buying its replacement. It means when you're about to spend, you pause for a second and ask yourself, do I truly need this or am I just bored or am I just trying to impress somebody else? This mindset naturally protects you from one of the biggest wealth killers of all, lifestyle creep. The sneaky way your spending rises to swallow every raise that you ever make. So you make more and more and somehow you never get ahead. When you respect what you have, you stop needing an endless drive of new things just to feel okay. And that contentment is worth more than almost anything that you can actually buy. This stretches beyond your wallet, which is why I love it. What Tai Chi teaches you not to waste your time, your talent, or your one-shot life chasing things that you don't actually care about or matter to you. A person who respects a $20 bill enough not to waste it usually respects an hour enough not to waste it too. And those 2 habits together carry you further than any one-time lucky break. So waste not Value what you have and watch how much more of your money stays yours. Think in decades. The long game is the whole game. So everything I've shared rests on one final principle that ties the whole Japanese art of quiet wealth together, and it's patience. You have to think in decades. Konosuke Matsushita literally planned 250 years into the future because he understood that anything truly great is built slowly, brick by patient brick. In money, this is the difference between the people who make it and the people who don't. The person who invests a small amount every month and refuses to touch it for 30 years ends up wealthy. The person who panics and sells the moment that the market dips or raids the account to buy something shiny resets the clock to zero over and over and never gets anywhere. Compounding needs one thing above all else to work its magic: time you refuse to interrupt. So build yourself a buffer first, an emergency fund of a few months of expenses so a surprise bill or a lost job never forces you to sell your future just to survive the right now. The old farmers stored grain against a bad harvest just for a reason. Then with that buffer in place, you can plant the seeds as you wait calmly through every scary headline in the news. There's an image that I love. It's a bird sitting on a branch, isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust was never in the branch. It was in her wings. So your wings here are your habits. These habits, this system, the discipline that you're building. Once you trust a system, you stop panicking about every up and down that happens. I think your purpose comes from your pain. And if money has been a source of pain and fear in your life, then mastering this art can become part of your mission—the thing that you model and then you teach your kids and the people around you. Play the long game because it's the whole game. So there's the quiet Japanese art of becoming wealthy, and none of it required a big salary. So pay yourself first, track every dollar, live below your means, invest the difference, get one percent better every month. Waste nothing and think in decades. A boy with 4 years of school and a pond kimono built an empire on those bones, and you're standing here with far more than he ever had. So you know when the best time to begin is? Right now. How about right now? If you can do this, and you absolutely can, then you must. Now let's learn how Steve Jobs convinced the world that he was right. Steve Jobs had a power his own team called the reality distortion field.

He made He made decisions that made good sense in terms of vision, but he was not an engineer. And in those days, they used to call it in Silicon Valley the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, and it was because Steve didn't feel bounded by the laws of physics.

It proves something powerful: the person who believes the hardest wins, even when they're not the smartest one in the room.

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.

He believed in his vision so completely that Apple became the first company in history worth $3 trillion, and today it's worth more than $4 trillion.

There needs to be someone who is sort of the, um, keeper and reiterator of the vision. What leadership is, is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision.

This matters for you because the force that built Apple is the one thing standing between your idea and the people you need to believe in it.

One of the things that made Apple great was that in the early days, it was built from the heart. Things that Apple believed in At its core are the same things that Apple really stands for today.

Back in 1983, Steve Jobs was just 28 years old, running a young computer company, and he wanted the best CEO in America to come run it with him. He set his sights on John Sculley, the president of PepsiCo, one of the most successful executives in the entire country.

They went to the most famous executive search person at that time, Jerry Roach on, uh, in New York, and he turned up my name, and Steve and I met. At that time, I was running Pepsi. Steve and I spent about 5 months getting to know one another, and, uh, we would meet almost every weekend.

Sculley had everything— a massive salary, corner office, the top job at a giant brand that everyone knew— and he kept telling Jobs no.

I said, Steve, thought about it, but I'm not coming to Apple.

Why would he Why would he walk away from the top job of the corporate world for a risky little computer company run by a kid? Then Steve Jobs looked him dead in the eye and asked one question. Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world? That one sentence changed everything. Sculley walked away from one of the biggest companies in America to join Apple.

He got about half a meter from me and just stared at me, and there was long pause, and then he said, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world? And it's like it knocks the wind out of you. And I didn't give him a different answer at that moment, but a week later I was working at Apple.

Jobs didn't win him with a bigger paycheck or a stack of spreadsheets. He won him with a vision so big that running a soda company suddenly felt small. That's how powerful real belief is. That moment right there is the reality distortion field in action. It looks like magic from the outside, but here's how he really did it. They don't even have to believe in what you're saying. They just have to believe that you believe in what you're saying. That's the whole secret. Jobs believed so hard that other people borrowed his belief until they could grow their own. Years later, he proved it again with the famous Think Different campaign. Jobs personally chased down permission from the families of Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gandhi to put them in an Apple ad. He genuinely believed that if those legends used a computer, they would've used a Mac. That's the level of belief that I'm talking about. He didn't just hope it was true. He knew it in his bones. And that certainty is what pulled the whole world along with him. And it wasn't loud or pushy. A lot of the times Jobs spoke softly and slowly, and people leaned in to catch every word. The belief was so inside him that he never had to raise his voice to make you feel it. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's great for Steve Jobs. But I'm no Steve Jobs. I don't have his charisma. I don't have some reality distortion field. I'm just me. And this is for you. Steve Jobs was not born with this. He was a kid who got fired from his own company in 1985 because people stopped believing in him. He spent years in the wilderness building other things before Apple begged him to come back. The conviction that you saw later inside Steve Jobs, it was built brick by brick. choice by choice. So it's not a personality that you either have or you don't. It's a skill, and any skill can be learned. So you already have something. It's something you believe in. You already have an idea, a project, a dream, something that lives inside you. The only thing missing is learning how to carry that belief in a way that other people can feel it too. And once you do that, doors start opening that you didn't even know were there. So let's get into how you actually do this, starting with the foundation that everything is going to sit on top of. Believe it before they do. In 2007, Steve Jobs walked on stage and showed the world a phone with no keyboard, just glass. Every expert said he was wrong. Phones needed real buttons that you could feel. Every smartphone of the day had a little keyboard, and people swore nobody would type on a sheet of glass. Jobs didn't have any proof. He had belief. He bet his whole company on a blank screen because he could already see you swiping and tapping like it was the most natural thing in the He believed it before a single customer ever touched one. Here's what most people do. You wait for other people to believe in you first, and then you feel confident. You wait for the customer to say yes, the investor to write the check, the audience to clap and cheer for you, and then you'll finally feel sure of yourself. That's backwards. The belief has to start with you before there's any proof, before anyone else is on board. So when the people in front of you lack self-belief, they borrow yours. That's your real job as a leader, as a founder, as a creator. You have to believe enough for 2 people because the person across across from you is scared and they're watching you to see if it's safe to dream. If you flinch, they flinch. If you are rock solid, they relax and start to lean in. So before you ever walk into that meeting or hit record or send that pitch, do the inner work first. Get so clear on why your idea matters that no one can shake you from it. Run the hardest objections at yourself in advance. Answer them on paper. Keep going until there's nothing left. There's no cracks in your presentation. When you become the person who fully believes, The words and the actions start flowing on their own. You stop sounding like you're hoping, and you start sounding like you know what you're talking about. And people feel that difference instantly in their gut, the same way the world felt it watching Steve Jobs hold up a little slab of glass. So before any big conversation, write down in one line what you absolutely know to be true about your idea—not what you hope, what you know. Read it out loud until your body believes it. Then walk in carrying that one. Hold their dream bigger than they hold it. When the team was building the first Macintosh, one of the engineers told Steve Jobs the computer couldn't boot up any faster. It was already as fast as it was ever going to get. Steve Jobs didn't accept that. He sat the engineer down and did the math out loud. Millions of people would turn this machine on every single day. If it booted 10 seconds faster, you multiply that by all those people every day for years, and you're saving dozens of human lifetimes. Then he looked at him and asked, "So can you make it boot faster?" A few weeks later, that engineer had cut the boot time almost in half—something he'd sworn was impossible. That's what holding a bigger dream does. The people you talk to are usually stuck in the day-to-day, buried in the fear of their bills, and they've shrunk their dreams down to something safe. Jobs never did that for the people around him. He held a bigger picture that they could see for themselves, and that's exactly why they did the impossible for him. So when someone shares their goal with you, hold it in your hand and think. Think bigger than they do. If someone tells you they want to make an extra $10,000 this year, look them in the eye and say, "That's a good start." Then show them the version of their life that's ten times bigger than the one they just described. You're not you're trying to flatter them; you're trying to remind them of what's actually possible that they have forgotten inside of themselves. People are drawn to the person who sees more in them than they see in themselves. That's leadership. Do that for the people around you, and you become magnetic. They'll follow you not because you pressured them, but because you believe in their future more than they currently. do. And I think that's one of the kindest things you can do for another human being. You give them permission to want and be more. Make it so simple they can repeat it. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, the company was a complete mess. They were making dozens of different products, and even Steve Jobs couldn't explain what half of them were for. So in a meeting, he walked up to a whiteboard and drew a simple 2x2 Grid, four boxes. One question across the top: Are you a regular person or pro? And one question on the side: Do you want a desktop or something portable? He said Apple would make one great product for each box. Four computers. That's it. Then he killed almost everything else. People thought he was crazy throwing away that many products, but that brutal simplicity is what saved the company. Jobs said something that sounds backwards until you actually sit and reflect on it: Simple is harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean enough to make it simple. The person who can take a giant idea and say it so a 10-year-old understands it, that's the person who wins the room. So let's look at the Think Different campaign. Jobs didn't give a 40-page report on company values. He boiled the whole soul of the company down to 2 words. So take your idea, whatever you're trying to get people to believe in, and ask yourself, can I say this in one clean sentence? If you can, Then maybe you don't understand it well enough. Keep cutting it down. Keep carving it out. Remove every word that isn't carrying actual weight. Get rid of the jargon that makes you sound smart but but corporatey. Because when your message is that simple, people can carry it for you. They can repeat it to their friends, their team, their family, and your one clean sentence becomes their words too. That's how an idea travels from one person to the whole world on the back of a message so clear it sticks in someone's head and.

won't leave.

Speak their words, not yours. When Apple launched the first iPod in 2001, the other companies selling music players were all bragging about gigabytes— 5 gigabytes of storage. Technically impressive and totally meaningless to a normal human being. Steve Jobs didn't say 5 gigabytes. He held up the iPod and said, 1,000 songs in your pocket. Same exact device, same storage. One of those is engineer language and the other is human language. And that one little phrase is a big reason the iPod took over the world. That's the lesson. When you want someone to believe in your idea, the fastest way to build trust is to make them feel understood. And you do that by speaking their language, not yours. Listen to how they describe their own problem, then say it back to them in their exact words. If a customer says, I'm tired of feeling invisible, you don't translate that into a line about brand visibility solutions. You say, you felt invisible, and you're done with that. Instantly, that person feels like you Get them. And here's another piece. Never tell someone they're wrong, even when they are. The second you say you're wrong, a wall comes up and they stop listening. So agree first and then gently guide and improve. Start with, I totally hear you, and then walk them towards the new way of seeing it. And stop framing your offer as some giant, big, scary leap. Frame it as just the next logical step. People are afraid of big jumps, but they'll happily take one small step that's reasonable. It's a step forward. You lower the fear, you raise the trust, and you make it easy for them to say yes. Believe it. Belief grows when people feel safe, and people feel safe when they feel heard. So do this enough, and people stop arguing with you and start asking you what to do next. And the moment someone truly feels understood by you, they stop defending their old position, and they open up to a new way. Stand up for your idea when it gets tested. In 1985, at just 30 years old, Steve Jobs—he got pushed out of Apple, the company he had built in his parents' garage. The board sided with John Sculley, the same CEO that Jobs had recruited. recruited and stripped Steve of all of his power. He could have crawled away and given up on his ideas. He didn't. He went and he started NeXT. He bought a tiny computer company that became Pixar, and he kept building on the exact vision people had just rejected him for. 12 years later, with Apple sliding towards bankruptcy without him, they came back and begged him to return. And that same vision turned Apple into the giant that it is today. So the principle here is believing in your Quietly isn't enough. At some point, someone bigger, louder, more successful is going to push on your idea, and unless you stand up for it, the most dominant people in the room will never respect you. They're testing you. They want to see if you actually believe what you're saying, or if you're going to fold the second that there's some pressure. So when someone challenges you, don't cave. Don't get defensive. Calmly hold your ground and explain why you see it the way you do. Ask some questions back. Make them defend their. And if the fear of failing is what's stopping you from standing your ground, remember the bird. A bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch. Her trust is in her wings. So put your trust in your own ability to figure things out no matter what happens. That's where real conviction comes from, not from knowing nothing will go wrong, but from knowing that you can handle it if it does. When you stand on that branch, you're not afraid of falling. That, then no challenge can knock you off your idea. Obsess over the parts no one sees. Now, there's one more thing that made people believe Steve Jobs, and it might be the most subtle one. When Steve Jobs was a boy, his father Paul, who built furniture out in their garage, taught him something that stuck with him for life: a real craftsman makes the back of the cabinet just as beautiful as the front, even though it's against the wall and nobody will ever see it, because you know it's there. Jobs took that to heart. When they built the Macintosh, he the inside of the computer, the circuit board hidden behind the case where no customer would ever look, had to be beautiful too. The engineers thought he was nuts. Who cares what the inside looks like? Steve Jobs cared. He approved every word of marketing copy and everything that went on the website, down to the last detail. People called it extreme, but that obsession is exactly why the world came to trust Apple. When you care that deeply about the things no one sees, it shows up in the things they do see. People can feel when something was made with love. So whatever you're building, pour yourself into the corners that nobody's going to check. Make the hidden parts excellent too. Answer the email better than you have to. Fix a small thing that only you are going to notice. That level of care is impossible to fake, and people will sense it. Your conviction is not just in your words, it's in how you do the work when no one is watching. Every hidden detail you get right is one more reason a customer tells a friend, one more reason a skeptic will give you a second look, one more brick in the wall of trust that you are building with people. None of it is visible on day one, but over time it stacks into something that people cannot argue with. And if you have the ability to do it right, then you have the responsibility to do it too. If you can, then you must. That's the standard that makes people believe that you are the real thing. Okay, so here's what I want to leave you with, with Steve. Steve Jobs wasn't magic. He was a person who believed in something so deeply that the whole world eventually believed it too. You have that exact same ability inside you right now, starting today. Start by believing before there's any proof. Hold the dream for the people around you. Make your message simple. Speak their language. Stand up for what you see and care about the details. Do that and watch how people start to lean in. Don't wait for permission. Don't wait to feel ready because ready isn't real. You get to decide today that your idea is worth believing in. If you gimme 50 minutes, I'll help you think like a billionaire. Check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you in the next video. See you there. Most people think becoming a billionaire is just luck, but the truth is they just think differently than most people. First principles analysis, I think, is something that can be applied to really any walk of life, anything really.