Tom Bilyeu: How To Build Mental Toughness Like a World-Class Athlete!

The only credit I will give myself is when other people break and give up and stop, I just don't.

Do whatever you need to do to remind yourself only execution matters.

So my entire youth, I feared pain. I moved away from pain. If something was emotionally or physically difficult, I avoided it.

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you, and I want to see that great thing that you have inside of you come out so you can help change the world. So to help you on your journey today, we're going to learn from entrepreneur Tom Bilyeu and my take on his top 10 rules for success. Rule number 1 is my personal favorite, and I'd love to know which one you guys like the best. And as always, guys, as you're watching, if you hear something that really resonates with you, please leave it down in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired. And when you write it down, it's much more likely to stick with yourself as well. Enjoy.

What is up, Believe Nation and Evan Carmichael?

Evan, I have been using your content for years to help me prepare for my episodes of Impact Theory, so I am incredibly honored that you're doing one of these top 10 rules for success on me.

And Believe Nation, I hope that you guys get a ton of value out of this and that it helps you build the mindset that you're going to need in order to actually execute on your dreams.

And until then, my friends, be legendary.

Take care.

When you launched Quest, there were 1,600 other protein bar companies that launched in 2010.

Flavors or companies?

Yeah, flavors or companies.

Yep.

What gave you the audacious mindset to think that you could compete against all those plus the 10, 20 years of other nutrition companies out there and beat them?

Yeah, it's, um, not having any experience in this. Yeah, I'm going to give you a phrase that I play in my own head that I know when I say out loud, 50% of people love it and 50% of people hate me for it, but it's true. So hey, here we go. I have the arrogance of belief. I believe in myself. Now, I believe in one thing about me: I am not the smartest guy. I got a 990 on my SATs. I took it twice. That's my combined score. Better than me. That's bad for both of us. I always joke with people, a monkey smearing feces on the test could score higher than I did. Like, it's literally terrible. Yeah. Um, but I always believed that I could do whatever I set my mind to, right? So that's the only, the only credit I will give give myself is when other people break and give up and stop, I just don't, right? And it comes down to the story you tell yourself about yourself. And that's the story I tell myself. I was just this last weekend, I was at, um, an entrepreneurial organization and they brought a world-class mountain biker in and said, hey, anybody that wants to go for a ride with her, go. And I thought, okay, you know, I'll go. And, and because she's saying we can do a beginner course or whatever, I thought, oh, it's perfect. Yeah, jump on the bike and go. I've never been on a mountain bike before ever in my life. I haven't been been on a bike of any kind probably in 15 years, so that was probably stupid. And we're in, um, oh God, Sun Valley, Idaho, so it's not exactly flatland. And we go mountain biking and I'm dying. I'm just done. It's at like 6,000 feet, first of all, so I cannot catch my breath. And I keep stopping and everyone's like, oh, you know, it's okay, man, like, go ahead and turn back, it's all good, it's all good. And I'm like, I don't think you know the story I tell myself. Like, there's no universe in which I stop So I keep going, finally they've done the loop, right? Some people have turned back, whatever. They've done the loop and now they're coming back and they're passing me, I'm still headed out and they're like, you need to turn around. And I'm like, I'm so sorry, but I'm not gonna turn around. And they said, okay, but then we're no longer responsible for you. And I was like, okay.

I'm like, it is what it is, man.

I appreciate that, no worries, I'm a big boy, like go. And I just kept going and I must've come in an hour and 20 minutes or something after everybody else. but I finished, and that meant so much to me. I was like, I'm gonna ignore the fact I got my ass handed to me and I came in dead last, but I'm gonna be proud that I didn't quit.

Interesting. Did you say arrogance of belief? Is that what you said?

The arrogance of belief.

Now if you don't know this quote, live by it. One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery over oneself. That's da Vinci. Da Vinci did amazing things with his life. I wanted to do equally amazing things with mine. And if that's the game that we're playing, if I can construct my belief system, if I can choose at any moment to believe something that's more empowering than I was believing the moment before, and that that will actually find its way into my actions, allow me to do things that I couldn't do the moment before, then it's like that moment in The Matrix where Neo realizes he knows kung fu. And that's like, as funny as that is, that's how I think about life. To me, the very fundamental purpose of life is to find out how many skills I can acquire that have utility and then put that utility to the test in service of something greater than myself. How many skills can I acquire that have utility, put that utility to the test in service of something greater than myself?

That is who I am.

Is this for me the purpose of life? Now, I don't actually want to know kung fu. That is not the mission that I'm here to live. But I knew that I had to identify my mission. So what was going to be my mission? Mother Teresa has an amazing quote: "Nobody will act for the many, but people will act for the one." And that really struck me because I realized they were right. I was looking at this global pandemic of ill health, and I wasn't moving into action, but thinking about my mom and my sister, or the uncle I had who ate himself to death when I was 12 years old, that made me want to act. Can you describe what you mean by going into the darkness?

I can.

Alright, so going into the darkness, I think everybody is motivated by two different things. One, you have the beautiful things in your life, The things that are going well, the things that you're grateful for, the things you're moving towards instead of away. You have a compelling vision of your future. It's something that you're very excited about. All of those things are the beautiful things. Now the flip side of that equation are the things that, it's people that doubt you, it's haters, it's things you're moving away from, it's fear-based things, it's something that you absolutely refuse to let happen. One that is incredibly potent to me, are the people that want to see me fail. So it's very different than people who just think you're going to fail. I actually don't have a lot of aggression towards people like that, but people that want me to fail, those people I have a lot of aggression for. And I find in very acute moments, the darkness serves you better. In very acute moments. Now, the light, the things you're moving towards, the things that are beautiful, the things that you're grateful for, all of that is the only winning strategy long-term because the darkness becomes corrosive. You start to become bitter, you start to be angry, you stop being optimistic, you stop seeing things in a way that's empowering and positive. And I mean, just thinking about the deep limbic system, when it gets inflamed, you perceive things as negative. I think negativity stops people from making progress. There's a whole host of neurological reasons and sort of mindset reasons why I think that being negative over the long run becomes very, very detrimental and holds you back. But from an acute standpoint, they've done studies on this. If you want someone to be able to endure more pain, the surest way to get people to endure more pain is to let them get angry, let them be aggressive. And in doing that, people are able to withstand— in the clinical trials, I'll say there's probably more more than this, but in clinical trials, they're able to withstand 30% more pain. So just straight being able to take more pain, anger and aggression lets you do 30% more. So that's why I think in acute ways, in short-term bursts, that the darkness will serve you.

There's a gap between who people are and what they tell you they want to accomplish. Because in the beginning, I hired everyone.

Everyone.

Right. Not because I'm super smart and thought, hey, I should. There was no one else.

Right?

Smallest handful of people ever. Um, and so I started doing the interviewing. As I was doing it, I start realizing, God, these guys tell me they want to do something amazing with their life. And if you just listen, like, wow, yeah, like, I want to be on your team, dude, you're going to do amazing stuff. And then you realize they can't execute on that dream. So why can't they? They don't have the mindset yet. Like, there's a— you could do an entire podcast series on how to get the mindset, but I'll just use Carol Dweck and her amazing book Mindset.

We have it up there too on the shelf somewhere.

I'm sure. Such a good book. I see Simon Sinek up there who is also very influential on us. And she says some people either believe they're as smart as they're ever going to be and that's that, so they're going to be ego-protective and they're going to, you know, try to thwart anything that makes them feel like they're not the smartest person or whatever. And then there's people with the growth mindset and they realize I'm not the smartest person and I'm certainly not as smart as I could be, So even if I am the smartest person that ever lived, I could get a little bit smarter. And so when they're confronted with contradictory information, they learn and they soak it up like a sponge.

Whereas other people are fixed mindset, right? Correct. Fixed on like, no, this is the way and I'm right and that's wrong.

Yes, and I would say the world, everyone's on a spectrum, right? Even I, as much as I believe in it and work my ass off to be a growth mindset, I still have, let's call it 10%, where I catch myself and I'm like, come on, dude, you know better than that. But so people that fall in the, let's say, sub-50% spectrum of the growth mindset, it's gotta be 98%.

And I remember this was a piece of advice that my father-in-law gave me that I promptly ignored. And don't worry, I've since apologized to him and very much adopted this mentality. But he said, the most important thing in business is to know more about the topic than anybody else in the room. And if you don't see an echo of that in my preparation for the interviews, and I'm not doing a good job of explaining it. That was something that when he said it, I am so sad to report that it did not hit me, but for whatever weird reason, it really stuck with me, and it was one of those things that I thought about and thought about and thought about, and then it finally manifested itself in me realizing that to get good at anything, whether that's business, whether that's interviewing, it really is that level of preparation. It is about going above and beyond to get good at something. And I was thinking about this last night at the event, and there's always like 1,000 questions that I get asked about how you build a business, you know, whatever your dream is, how do you go and actually manifest it? And the honest answer to everything is get better, get better. And I've had really talented artists begin reaching out to me on Instagram because obviously that's a huge focus for us in the next phase is going to be getting writers, getting artists bringing them together, creating amazing comic books in phase 1, and they'll have like a really small following, and they'll say, you know, like, what, what am I doing wrong? What's the secret? And the truth is, even though they're really good, they've got to get a lot better. And when you can be world-class but admit that you're not yet undeniable— there's unfortunately a lot of people that are world-class. Like, think about it, you make it to the Olympics, your whole life you've been You've been busting your ass. You finally make it. You're one of the best in your country, truly a world-class player, but you come in 7th, 8th. It's, you haven't gotten to the point where you're so good that you can't be ignored. And that, like, in today's world where social media rules everything and anyone can get on there, create noise, you've got to find a way to cut through the clutter. And the way to cut through the clutter, one of, there's more, and I will recommend Perennial Seller by our boy Ryan Holiday. Really interesting book. Really excited. I think we've booked him for like November. That'll be a lot of fun. But in his book, he talks about several of the other things you're going to do. But I'll say that the most important one is to get so good that you cannot be ignored. Cannot be ignored. So if you're being ignored, by the way, the world has told you that you've not yet gotten to where you want to get to. So everybody knows my obsession with Disney. Read the Disney biography. In times of trouble, Disney always came back around to make the product better, make the product better.

Only execution matters. Burn that into your nervous system. Get a tattoo. Do whatever you need to do to remind yourself. Only execution matters. Thinking about it, feeling good about it, those are awesome. But if you have a vision of something you're trying to do, become, whatever, and you don't execute against it, and I don't need you to wanna build a big business. If you tell me you wanna be the greatest parent of all time, then I'm gonna ask you, what are you doing to execute on that goal? What are you doing? How do you define it? What are your deliverables? What are the metrics by which you're judging yourself? And by the way, if you don't want a grand goal, you don't need one. But then say, what I'm trying to do is get centered, I'm trying to experience happiness. Even that, you can begin to look at ways that you can improve that.

Your talent and intelligence are not fixed, they're malleable. So you suck at skateboarding because you're afraid of pain. So the only thing you need to know right now, the point is not to avoid the pain, and you need to stop asking yourself what's the least you can do to get good, and you need to start asking yourself what's the most you can bear to become great. Once you understand that the whole point is to let the suffering and the pain harden you into becoming the version of yourself that you need to become in order to execute at the highest level, world-class at anything, and stop avoiding it, stop being afraid of it, and start understanding for what it really is, which is the thing that shapes you. So my entire youth, I feared pain. I moved away from pain. If something was emotionally or physically difficult, I avoided it. And I remember being in the gym one day and going, motherfucker, will you stop asking like what's the least you need to do to consider it a full workout? 'Cause it was like, could I stop now, could I stop now, could I stop now? And I was like, do you want the muscles, or do you wanna like put on a show that you showed up? You showed up, right? Like, 'cause the muscles demand what the muscles demand. Like, you have to break them down, you have to push, you have to do more. Like, so it is purely a question of how much you're willing to bear, because there's never gonna be enough. You could've always done more.

Everybody lean in nice and close. Self-compassion, it's probably the most important thing that you can do for yourself, is when you fuck up, you need to forgive yourself, okay? So that's really, really important. So, and I'll walk you through an example. About whatever, 20 minutes ago, I get really frustrated when people are trying to tell me something, but they're whispering. That fucking redlines me in a way that I can't even begin to tell you, and so it just happened while I'm here live on camera, and I hold myself to a standard of catching my emotions before they rise up. Now, this has happened twice today. The first time it happened, I caught myself, yay! The second time it happened, I was like, for real, we're doing this again? And I got very frustrated, so I was, I'm very disappointed in myself for that, but I need to be compassionate towards myself, forgive myself for that, get better, use it as practice, and remember that life isn't performance, it really is about practice. So once you can meet yourself with compassion, then you can begin to let go of whatever it is that's really fucking with your mindset. You can get back on track, you can refocus, and don't wait till Monday. And that's a mistake that everybody makes. So if you fall off the wagon, like if I fell off the wagon at 9:58, at 9:59 I'm back on the wagon. So I'm not waiting even for 10 o'clock. Like, you literally do it right there at that moment. Make it a part of your identity that you're the type of person that does that. So that is really, really critical.

Right now, between me and the person I want to be, between you and the person you want to be, there is a gap of skill set, and that's it. But once you know your mission and once you believe that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to, then you can do the extraordinary. Now for me, getting out of that space of being lost, of not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, it all came down to needing to earn credibility with myself in very small incremental ways. This is me 60 pounds ago, and I knew if I was going to accomplish anything in my life, I was gonna have to get control of my mind. Now ironically, there's two ways to get control of your mind. Way number 1 is directly going to the mind, which can be very scary, can be very daunting, very ethereal. It's ephemeral, it's hard to grab onto, it's hard to touch. But way number 2 is through the body. And so I decided that my kung fu was going to be to get very good at developing my body. And in that process, I was gonna learn about nutrition, which would allow me to help my mom and my sister. In that process, I was going to earn credibility with myself And earning credibility with yourself is so important. Do it in micro ways. For me, just showing up to the gym every day was a micro victory. I said I was gonna do it and I did it. Now you have to understand, I hate working out. So for all of you crazy people that get an endorphin rush from running, I hate you all. Running for me is like being stuffed into a meat grinder. There is absolutely nothing pleasurable about it. Whatsoever. So whatever neurological thing you guys get that you've been blessed with, I have not been blessed with that. So for me, showing up in the gym sucks, eating a bowl of ice cream is awesome. And so getting to, getting to a better place for me was a totally different journey.

Thank you.

And what that You know what it was?

It was just showing up every day and putting in the work. It was reading about human metabolism and understanding how what I eat impacts my body. It was earning a little bit of discipline every day, knowing that, "Well, I did it yesterday. I can do it again today." It was not eating something that I wanted to eat. And most importantly, and if you're taking notes, write this down, it was about changing my identity. Because at the end of the day, Identity and values drive behavior.

Amen. Preach.

Identity and values drive behavior. So if you want to make a change, you have to change your vision of who you are. You have to begin telling yourself a different narrative. And the narrative you tell yourself about yourself is everything. And if you tell yourself that you're a scared, undereducated kid from Tacoma whose family has never accomplished anything, Let me tell you what you will become: a scared, undereducated kid from Tacoma who never accomplishes anything, because that's what you believe. You tell yourself that story enough, and it will become real. But on the flip side, you could tell yourself a story of you're a learner. You learn faster than most people. You're willing to put in more work than most people. You're willing to read more books than most people. You're willing to spend an inhuman amount of time every day every day improving your mind simply by getting new ideas into the system, and that you will admit that you're wrong faster than anybody else, that you won't let your ego get in the way, and you tell yourself that story over and over and over so when somebody comes and tells you how stupid you are, that you're just a dumb kid from Tacoma, you go, "You're right, that's amazing. Thank you for pointing out that flaw because now that I'm aware of it, I can improve it because I'm the learner." And once I switched my narrative to being the learner, it didn't matter where I started, it only mattered where I was trying to go. And as long as I had that clarity, then I could execute because I believed I could do anything I set my mind to without limitation.

And then the last one, which is maybe a little bit controversial because I use this word to get people's attention, it's all your fault. That, what I mean by that is you always can control the outcome of anything. So the example I give to people, do I have time to give you? Of course. Okay, so the example I give to people, and this is something that I do in the interview a lot so that people understand how we think at Quest. And if they think it's crazy, I tell them, "If you think this story is crazy, you should turn and run in the opposite direction. You will hate it here. But if in hearing it you're like, 'Oh my God, I wanna be around people who think like that,' then you'll get us after hearing this story." It goes like this. My wife is British, that's actually true. Let's say that she was at home visiting her family in London. She's in the bed that she grew up in, the doors are locked, the alarm's on, her mom's there, she's safe and sound. Right at that moment, a meteorite comes screaming through the atmosphere, crashes into her bedroom, and kills her. Whose fault is that? Whose fault is that? Now, every time I ask that question, once people stop trying to guess at what they think I'm gonna say and they just give their answer, they say, "It's nobody's fault, divine providence, fate, force majeure, dumb blind luck," however you wanna sum it up, but that. And my answer is no, it's entirely my fault. And the reason it's my fault is because I know that there is a group right now that track what are called near-Earth objects, that's very true by the way, they're trying to find some way to knock them off course course, so if it could be something truly dangerous, so whether it's a laser beam, a planted nuclear explosion, whatever it is, something to bump it off course so it doesn't collide with Earth. I've never sent them an email with encouraging words. I've never sent them a dime of my money. I've never called them up to give them any ideas, nothing, and I know they exist. Now I think that's smart because the likelihood of my wife being killed by a meteorite is very, very low. I'd be much better off focusing on car safety or something like that, but I choose not to contact these people. I choose to leave my wife at risk of being hit by a meteorite.

Sure.

So even though I would be mortified and sad if it happened, I would never waste time saying that it wasn't my fault because I could have done something and I chose not to. Sure. That to me is empowering. I don't want people feeling guilty about it. You shouldn't waste— like, I wrote an article about this one time. People like, yo, you're, you're blaming the victim and all that stuff, and What I'm trying to say is you don't have to allow yourself to be a victim even if you've been victimized, right? Like, you can transcend that and you can look back and go, what could I have done differently? Oh my gosh, I could have done all these things. Awesome, I'm now in control again.

Yeah, right?

Because being victimized is inevitable, but being a victim, that's a choice, right? It's like pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice.

Yeah, yeah.

So once I freed myself from the belief that I couldn't break out of certain things. Like, everyone told me, ah dude, your mom and your sister, like, they've got to want it. People kept saying that they've got to want it, they've got to want to change. And I was like, I reject that because they're going to die. Like, they clearly don't want it. So, but I'm not willing to accept that I'm going to lose these people who I love so much. I'm not willing to accept that. So I'm going to acknowledge the human condition, which is that they eat for pleasure and not for sustenance. So I'm going to give them food that they can eat for pleasure that's good for them.

Yeah.

And my sister's lost 120 pounds. So it works, right? And my sister owns that. Like, she did— excuse me— she did the hard work. Like, she put the grind in. She should be super proud of herself. Uh, but at the end of the day, the— it was born of me not accepting that she, you know, that I, I had to wait for her to make that choice.

The responsibility.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So just paint that to any area of your life, whether it's you want success, it's not happening because your boss is a dick or whatever. No, your boss may be a dick, but you haven't learned how to persuade dicks to do what you want. Right, right, right. Which is how I think, which is why I say I want to be a Jedi, um, because I I want to be able to persuade people to do things so that I can move the ball forward on the big goals that I want to accomplish. And yeah, just own it. You can always change something.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Steven Ody asked me to. If there's a famous entrepreneur that you would like me to profile next, check out the link in the description and go and cast your vote. I'd also love to know what did you learn from this video that had the biggest impact on you? What lesson are you going to take and immediately apply it somehow in your life or in your business? Leave it in the comments below. I'm really curious to find out. I also want to give a quick shout out to Jason from HarperCollins Christian Publishing. Jason, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and posting the link in the review on your LinkedIn. I really, really appreciate the support, Jason, and I'm so glad that you enjoyed the book. Thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever Your one word is much love. I'll see you soon.

Maybe the most important reason each and every one of you should start working out, and it has nothing to do with living longer, because we could get hit by a meteorite, who knows. So I'm not even worried about that, but I am worried about this: when you watch your body transform, you get the loudest signal from your subconscious that you can change, that you can change anything you want, that you can change your bicep, your tricep, your quad, whatever it is that you want. Something that you literally could not do the day before, you can do today. And your mind sees that that's true. Your mind sees that something you couldn't pick up yesterday, you can pick up today. And it begins to ask itself, well, if that's possible, then what else is possible?

It's important to me to have the balls to look at the biggest problems we face as a society and say, that's my problem to solve, right? Obesity, metabolic disease, the slide towards ill health, however you want to categorize it, that's my problem. Like, I don't even wake up thinking that's my business partner's problem. That's my problem.

Now I'm working with my business partners because they're very sharp guys, but at the end of the day, like, I own that responsibility.

And that's awesome to me, right? Like, having that It isn't a weight that drags me down. It's like this goal to chase that's so big that I'm just stoked that there are people in the world that are prepared to dream that big. Like, I'm inspired by that in others and hopefully can inspire other people with our dream.

But there is one truth that you have to burn into your nervous system.

I cannot remember where I first heard this, but your network is your net worth.

The people that you meet, The relationships that you cultivate, they are going to be that next phase in your development. They are going to be that next relationship, that next partnership, that next thing, introduction that turns into something that allows you to scale and grow and get beyond yourself because that is the thing about scaling. You will never scale if it's just you. You have no leverage. So you've got to meet other people that can get the ball rolling, that can introduce you, that can give you that key piece of information that you need to really go on and do something. So get out there, meet people, be yourself, let your freak flag fly, introduce yourself, stand super fucking awkwardly next to somebody that you want to meet like I did tonight, and just say what's up, introduce yourself, tell them what you're up to. And if you want to be interesting, be interested. Ask them, find out what they're about, find out what makes them tick. That's the secret. That'll get them rolling, and then you can see if there's a real connection connection, and if there is, from that something can build.

So get out there!