Tom Bilyeu Motivation: Anti-Fragile Mindset, Laziness & Self-Esteem

So becoming antifragile, that is really something that's defined my life. But before I can get to that, I have to tell you, I am not a born entrepreneur. And I know that there are many born entrepreneurs here. And I'm sure I look somewhat like an alien species to you. I did not have a lemon stand growing up. I did not arbitrage baseball cards or candy. I was forced to get a paper route, but I was so lazy that I didn't collect the the money. So I actually did the paper route. You get paid half of it just for doing it, but the other half you have to go door to door. So I did it for half. That is the profound way to which I was lazy as a kid and not at all thinking like a problem solving entrepreneur. But somehow, someway, even with that going against me, I was able to do something to my mind that allowed me to go from, as Joe was saying, scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car. That's a real story. I, I wish it weren't, but that's a real story. To co founding and building a billion dollar business. Now the question is, what did I do to my mind in order to get to that place? And to tell you that story, I'm going to walk you through exactly what my entrepreneurial journey looked like. So I met two guys who ended up becoming my business partners and they made a pitch to me. Hey, we're starting this technology company, seem like a really bright kid. We've got a role as a copywriter. Why don't you come on and be the copywriter and then don't think of yourself though as a copywriter. This is a startup, you can have role in the company that you want. You just have to become the right person for that role. Now I was just young enough and just dumb enough to believe them. I thought that sounded awesome.

Yay.

So I joined the startup and then began the long and arduous process of getting my ass kicked. And what was happening was I didn't have the skill set to keep up with these guys. My business partners are incredibly bright. Their IQs far outshine my own. And I'm just talking from a pure ability to process raw data. I don't overvalue iq, but I understand that it has certainly its applications and they're just two incredibly bright guys. So here I was, I had this goal in my life and that goal at the time, it's since changed, but that's a whole other 10 minute talk. My Goal at that time was to get rich. I wanted to get rich more than just about anything. So I had the ambition to do what I needed to do, but I didn't know what that was. And so I would find myself in discussions with these guys where I would present my case, something that I believed in, something that I thought was right for the business. And they would just out argue me. And they would out argue me all the time. Now if you're somebody who is foolish enough to pride yourself on being right and this is such an important thing to understand because what you build your self esteem around matters. And the whole punchline of this talk is going to be that how did I go from being broke and having the traditional employees mentality of keeping my head down, doing as little work as possible and avoiding punishment at all costs? The way that I escaped that was by finally realizing the thing that was holding me back. And what was holding me back was I had a fixed mindset. If you know Carol Dweck, I had a fixed mindset. I believed that my talents and intelligence were fixed. That was it. They were as good as they were ever going to be. There was nothing that I could do about it. It was kind of like height. Now I've done nothing to earn my height. And yet I can say, hey, I'm six feet tall. And I try to stand around people that are shorter than me. I try to avoid NBA players, I try to avoid NFL stars, I try to avoid Tony Robbins. If you've ever stood next to Tony Robbins, that guy is nuts.

He's so big.

One of the most heart wrenching photos of my life is Tony holding me in a warm embrace, making me look like a child.

So.

But the intellect to me was the same way. There was nothing that I could do about it. So it was what it was. And my job was to put myself in situations where I could shine. Now the problem was now I was working with these two guys that I couldn't shine anymore. They were way smarter than me. And it wasn't exactly hard to see that not only were they able to process data more rapidly than I could process data, but they'd been in business for like 15 years before I met them. So now I'm in a position where everything I do makes me feel bad about myself. And so I hatch a plan. I'm going to get really good at arguing and I'm going to debate because I have two choices. I can either remove myself from this situation or I can find a way to feel good because people are going to feel good about themselves. And when you think about what suicide really is, suicide is the moment when somebody believes they can no longer feel good about themselves. Now it's false, but that's what they believe. And because of that belief, they check out. And why wouldn't you, if it were true, if you could never feel good about yourself again, what would be the point? So I was going to get good at debating and I was going to win some of these arguments and I was going to find that chink in their armor and I was going to explode it so that I could, even if I didn't feel smart about myself, that I could get that reflected back from them, that they thought I was smart. And so I remember the day that it finally happened. We were debating something and I knew their idea was right, which really sucked. But I had gotten so good at arguing that I convinced them to do my idea. And then I thought, oh shit, what have I done? Because if my goal is to get rich, I'm now acting in complete opposition to that goal because I know that their idea is right and I've simply used a trick to get them to go my way. And so I had a values crisis, values and identity, drive, behavior. And in that moment I wasn't sure who I was. Did I want to get rich? Was I willing to do what it took to make money? And if I really did want to get rich, and again, it's changed since then, but that was my focus then if I really did want to get rich, why on earth did I fight so hard to be right? Because I never said I want to be right. I never said I want to be smart. None of that was happening in my mind. I said I want to get rich. So here I was moving myself away from that and I realized I've got to make a decision. If I really am here to achieve my goal, then I need to decide what my goal is. And I can't have both. I can't feel good about myself the way that I defined it, about being smart, about being right and achieve my goals. So I realized I was either going to have to totally abandon self esteem, I actually considered that I'm going to have to totally abandon self esteem, put my head down and just grind it out for a few years with these guys until we can have an exit and I'll be rich and then I can worry about loving myself again, or, and this was what changed my life, I could change what I built my self esteem around. Now, unfortunately, I did not have access to Carol Dweck's book. But I realized that instead of fighting to be right, I could put all of my time and attention to identifying the right answer. And once you identify the right answer, you can earn tremendous credibility with your team for saying, hey, I was wrong. That's right. Now I'm going to put all my energy behind that. And so that's what I began to do. And as I began to do that, I found that the only thing that was standing between me and where I wanted to get was a skills gap. Now, that skills gap is what I call mind the gap. And for you Brits, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Mind the gap. That skills gap is everything. Now, the way that you close that skill gap is painful because it starts with the following mantra. I am not yet good enough. It's one of the most controversial things I ever say. Whenever I tweet that out, people freak out. But what I'm saying is, if you're trying to achieve this objective and you do not have the skills to actually accomplish that, you simply are not good enough yet. That's just the truth of the situation. It's the math. As Elon Musk says, boil it down to its physics. That's the physics of the situation. But if you have a growth mindset, you know that you can acquire those skills. And once you set about living your life by the following phrase, everything will change. Do and believe. Do and believe only that which moves you towards your goals. And that brings us to becoming antifragile. As Joe said, when people hear antifragile, they think resilient. They think tough. But both of those things and every other synonym around there is defined by that thing's ultimate breaking point. It is resilient simply because its breaking point is distant. It is strong simply because it can move a lot of weight before it breaks. But they both have breaking points. If you want to be truly antifragile, the game is, the more you realize you're wrong, the more somebody attacks you and tells you you're stupid, the more mistakes you make, you see in that one thing and one thing only, the ability to get better. And when you see in your failures an absolutely fundamental, bedrock foundation piece of your belief system, which is that, oh, dear God, thank you for pointing out how wrong I've been. Thank you for showing me that this mistake was just that, that it's a mistake. Thank you for making it clear. I am not actually moving towards my goals right now. I'm not making progress. Because when you can do that the more people assail you, the more mistakes you make, the more times you fall on your face, the stronger you get. Because you respond to that with the acquisition of skills. It's the acquisition of skills that matter. Another talk that I would love to give at some point is the fact that we are all in the matrix. But the matrix is just a metaphor for your mind. And if you have the mind of an entrepreneur and you really can see that acquiring skills will lead you wherever you want it to, you'll truly become capable of the impossible.

So abundance. What the hell is abundance? How did you get in on all this? And how do people think about it?

So I live my life in a very amazing world and community both at the xprize foundation where I serve as founder and chairman and at Singularity University where I'm co founder, executive chairman and all the companies I've started. I'm working my 19th company right now with my good friend Evan Pagan, which is going to be awesome.

Watch out for him by the way.

Yeah, I know. But I started realizing that everything that we used to think of is scarce, is becoming more and more abundant. And it turns out that technology is the force that takes what used to be scarce and makes it abundant. And we forget as humans what the world used to be like. We've got this perverse version of the future that was, you know, we make ideal, but it's not, you know, we used to be based on an energy economy of like whale oil for lighting, right? Then we discovered this thing called petroleum and we start getting after that and then we have technology that allows us to dig 5,000 meters below the ocean surface and then 5,000 meters sideways get access to more oil and then all of a sudden we're fracking for more natural gas. And so energy is becoming more and more abundant. And then all of a sudden we realize that there's 8,000 times more energy hitting the surface of the earth than we use as a species. And there's this explosion of solar production. The, the cost of batteries is dropping at two to three times faster than the optimists predicted. So we're heading towards a massively all electric economy. And then you think about well, is water scarce? But we live on a water planet. One of our X prizes at Ratan Tata out of India's funding a water abundance XPRIZE is about taking the water out of the humidity of the air and giving a family 20 liters of clean drinking water. So the question is, what do you think of as scarce? And I would posit that There is very little that is truly scarce. That technology takes anything that used to be scarce and makes it abundant. You know, Naveen, a dear, dear friend, one of my most successful pupils. I might say he's my older brother from another mother. But so we're working on the fact that the Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources. Right? There is no limitation. A half kilometer nickel iron asteroid has got platinum group metals a thousand times cheaper than you can get it on the surface of the earth. And so energy, water, food, healthcare and education are going to go to zero cost eventually. That's just, we're demonetizing and dematerializing that. We, we can talk about that if you want. And at the end of the day, the only thing that is some degree limited is time. Whether you're the richest person on the planet or the poorest person on the planet, we're all born with the same 24 hours a day, 365 days in a year. It's how you use your time that can make it more abundant. My work at human longevity and cellularity is adding 30 to 40 healthy years in a person's life which will make time more available. But you know, it's how you use your time. And Dan, you talk about the importance of free days and how you, you know, we just, it coached in this last session. We talked about how do you buy back time.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com.

And you can get a copy there. Yeah, so my approach is very single minded, very single focused. So I have, I'll give you an example that these are two of my great successes because I used to worry about not being connected in the world and I'm not a connector, you know, I'm not, I'm, I really don't have the instinct, you know, to be in contact with a lot of people. And Dean Jackson, where's Dean? Is Dean hear him? Where's, where's, where's Dean?

He's sleeping in, probably drinking and smoking out this.

Can you imagine Dean tying one on? I mean really. Anyway, we were just comparing cell phone experiences and we determined in our last podcast that Dean in any two day period has more telephone activity than I had had in the previous year. And a half and half. My half of my telephone activity was actually with Dean, so. So I'm not really plugged in, but I look at individuals like Joe, and I look at individuals like Peter, like resources. So to go back to the resource model, my job is to take a resource called Joe from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity. And when I met Peter, I got a feeling of where the center was for Peter. And I said, you know, if we could just free him up, the impact on the planet would be a lot greater. So what I look like is individuals that, if I can show them how to buy back their time, just get centered on where the real power of who they are as an individual. In other words, where their confidence is and where they feel most abundant inside themselves. And then you can get them focused and you can create a network of very, very skilled people around them. Then you can multiply the impact of this individual 10 times, 100 times. And, you know, with technology available today, it can become global in its reach. And day in, day out, that's all I'm interested in, is that one resource called the, you know, the person with a passion for a particular new thing on the planet who's dedicated his or her life to that, but they've gotten kind of complicated, they've gotten kind of complex in their life, and bring them back to simplicity and then build frameworks, help them build frameworks around them so that they can just be doing what they do on the planet all the time. And that's the source of energy, too, for the planet. That's, you know, it's the human side of it. So that's really what I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which, you know, when you just even talk about resources, I mean, are you of the belief that we have plenty of resources in all areas? It's a distribution problem.

It is.

It is where. So the challenge is that we as humans are dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing products and services. I talk about the 60s, Dan, and I spend a lot of time talking about this. I work with the entrepreneurs that I coach in abundance360 and abundance digital to help them understand how do you digitize everything you have. Once you digitize your products, your services, they enter a period of deceptive, slow growth. Then they become disruptive, and they, in this sequence, dematerialize, demonetize, and democratize. And so the digital camera is an example.

Right.

Film photography used to be very expensive and inefficient. Remember when you used to pay for the whole roll of film to get exposed and you hope a picture came out. What a gimmick that was. And you know, so then we dematerialize, demonetized and democratize photography and film photography falls off a cliff and digital photography grows. Last year, 1.2 trillion digital pics taken and it's exploding onto the scene. And so there's.

How the hell did they count that?

I think they probably do an average and they multiply by the number of digital cameras.

I just want to make sure you're not making stuff up.

You kind of.

But at the end of the day, well, you know, it is an absolute fact that 27.8% of all facts are made up on the spot.

I was going to see if you were going to respond to the audience laughing or just got to go with it. That was good.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I learned that from you. But there is very little that truly is scarce. And so the job of an entrepreneur, your job as an entrepreneur is to actually find, find an incredible area that you're passionate about and to make it abundant, to digitize it. And we're seeing this over and over again. We're about to decimate banking industry, insurance industry, because of blockchain, because the fact that. Can I jump into one fun fact?

Yeah.

In 2010, we had 1.8 billion people online. 2010. Today it is about 3.5 billion people connected on the world by 2024. What is that? Six years from now? We're going to 8 billion people connected online. So we're getting about four and a half billion people are going to come online in the next six years. Now for this community in particular, it's four and a half billion new customers who've never uploaded or downloaded anything before, have never had digital experience before. Think about this. We're doubling the world's population and these people are coming online, not like you and I did at 9,600 baud on AOL. Right. They're coming online at a megabit gigabit connection speeds with access to the world's information on Google and Baidu. They're all going to want health care, education, insurance and banking. They're not going to go to an atm, they're not going to go to an insurance broker. They're not going to go to a school, not going to go necessarily to a hospital. They're going to want all of these things digitized at marginal zero cost and huge markets, huge businesses. Add blockchain on top of that and you get change the world. And one of the things I realized, if we're going to make more wealth in the next 10 years than we have in the entire, entire past century, and I predict that the Forbes 500 list is going to be radically different 10 years from now.

Yeah, well, okay, so talking about making wealth and creating business for the people here in the room, what are the mindsets, Dan, that for all these years are critical for freeing yourself up in order to do it? Because it's sort of an interesting thing, thing, as you said earlier, freeing someone up like Peter. So Peter can be a bigger version of his already pretty superhuman self.

Yeah, well, and it's Peter connected to a lot of new people that he hasn't even met yet. In other words, there's going to be people. It's a bit like what Naveen was talking about. He just put out that he wanted to make illness optional for people that you could actually choose. And all of a sudden, talent pours out of the walls of people who've been working on something for 10 years, 20 years, but they didn't have a spokesperson. They didn't have a public vehicle for their work. And so, you know, I really talk a lot about money mindsets. And Peter and I are pretty much totally in agreement that basically mindset either closes doors or it opens doors. And I've been thinking, you know, I've been coaching for 43 years, and I said, well, if you had just a couple mindsets, that would make people more open to taking advantage of everything that Peter's talking about. You see, I've delegated all this stuff to Peter. I used to spend 500 hours a year on the web looking at. I had files, looking at artificial intelligence and everything else. And then I meet this guy. I read about him in the Wall Street Journal. I read his review of Abundance, the review of his book Abundance. And I said, man, I said, this is fantastic, what, you know, what he's saying here. And so when I got the chance to meet him, I mean, you have your own, you know, your own recollection of that meeting and what it did for you. But what it did is just save me 500 hours a year that he's out there every day. You know, all I have to do is, you know, you know, get him kind of clear, get him kind of focused, and I get his 500 hours, and it's a lot better stuff than I was getting. So anyway, and then Joe. I mean, the thing is, a lot of people have Rolodexes in whatever form they are today. And so I've Just got one name in my Rolodex, and it's Joe. I said, I'd like to meet so and so, and it's done. So I've just delegated hundreds, thousands of hours to these two guys. You know, I mean, you know, I'm just happy to be up on stage with these two guys, working and working away, working away. But here's the two mindsets that I think are crucial. One of them, and they're in short supply, I'm noticing, in public life. One of them is gratitude. Gratitude. I think if you're really, really grateful, you create an abundance related to your past. That's really what gratitude is because it's. You're grateful for what has gotten you here. And gratitude is a proactive skill. A lot of people make it a reactive skill in the sense, well, if somebody does something for me, I'm grateful for that. But the word gratitude, being grateful is related to the word appreciation. How many of you say, say, well, I really appreciate that. And appreciation is a really neat word because it's got that emotional sense, psychological sense, but it's also got an economic sense that things appreciate. Gold appreciates. Land appreciates. Stocks appreciate.

Could we add bitcoin to your list?

Yeah. Bitcoin appreciates everything Peter's involved in. Appreciation appreciates. I hope so, because I've got. He's got some of my money, you know, I want it all to appreciate. And I appreciate you. Yeah, but what appreciation, what appreciation really means is that you just give value to something. In other words, you say, you know, there's qua. Qua sitting right across from me, and I always appreciate qua. And, you know, and I really appreciate. You know, I can just sit there and think about for a half minute and, you know, I totally appreciate Babs, as everyone knows, you know, without Babs, I'm just a smart drunk worried about the rent. And, you know, I just appreciate. And I think about the people. I appreciate so much what Peter does. And that creates a higher value for Peter in my life. So this gratitude principle is one of them. And the other one, generosity. If you truly believe in abundance, you'll be generous with what you have, not worrying about how you're going to get paid back for it, you know, so I think that the twin, you know, and they're related to each other, but one of them is related to the past. It's appreciation because you're giving greater value to your experience up to the past, present moment. And then generosity is that you're making a bet on the future. See, I'm making a total bet on the future with Peter that it's just going to get bigger and better in every way. And therefore anything that I contribute to that, I don't have to worry about what the return is. There's going to be a big return and I don't have to keep book on it. You know, I can't stand keeping book on things. So I see a lot of people who are super intelligent, but they're not grateful. I see people who are very successful, but they're not generous. And I said, you know, you've got all the, you got all the hardware, but you don't have any of the software and you need the software to actually make your way in the world. And you won't have to worry about competing because there's going to be so many opportunities, so many opportunities for collaboration.

Lee, how would you define marketing and why do you love marketing?

Well, marketing connects people. And for my companies, I'm always looking for a way to allow people to see what do we do, how do we do it and how we can serve them. So, like in veterinary industry, in the veterinary industry, we have a holistic hospital. So we're looking for that top 5% of people who love their pets so much they will do anything and they come to us and we teach them proactive care and we teach them how to have a longer, healthier life with their bed and people who want to do better in the world. I just absolutely love supporting them on their journey.

Great.

Yep. So, Dean, we're going to talk about mindset. So I wanted to ask Lee, what is your perspective on the entrepreneurial mindset? I mean, what does that actually mean to you and how do you think about mindset? Because, you know, we can give people all the different strategies and ideas all day long, but their ability to do something with it, I think has a.

Lot to do with their mindset.

100% starts in mindset. And we actually just did a five day auction online, a five day challenge online. And one of the things that we learned is the very first day we brought in a mindset expert to help the entire community have the same frame of reference around how to approach things. And the first thing is I start every single day in a gratitude circle, sometimes with my team, sometimes with my family. But every single day I'm looking for the good, I'm looking for the things to celebrate. And I realized that in anything you could look at a perspective one way or another, you could look at it, that it's empowering you and helping you have a better life. Or you can look at it that it's hard and a struggle and everyone's going to have things that are difficult and struggles. But how do you convert it to something that's more empowering in your life? Right. A friend of mine, Brandy Gilmore, taught me years ago to look at my stories, whether it's in work or personal, look at my stories and as I'm telling a story, looking for the piece that's most powerful and most amount of love for myself and stop the story there. Don't continue the story to when something went wrong or something didn't show up or somebody disappointed me. She said, why are stories in your brain? So that it's the most empowering, filled with the most love, so that you're carrying those stories forward with you. Yeah.

Great.

So, alright, so with. With that, let's talk about something that me and Dean have spent hundreds of hours discussing on I love marketing, which is how to get more customers. So what are some of the best ways that you've discovered in your, you know, careers, your businesses, to get more clients?

20 years ago, I bought a veterinary hospital that had already been around for 40 years, right? So it was 2001, it started in 1961. When I bought the hospital, it had 3,500 current clients. In the following 10 years, I took that 3,500 and turned it into 25,000 clients who literally came and saw us in person, one at a time. And what I learned is it really is consistent action every day, every single day. We had different ways that we reached out. And in the center of my mind map it says attracting new clients. And then we had 13 different ways they could find us. We had a mind map. 13 days, 13 ways. And the reason it's 13 ways is because there's 13 weeks and a quarter and every deep dive on one of them. One might be networking, one might be JVs, one might be social media. Doesn't mean we ignore the other ones. But each week we deep dive on one and get really crystal clear on our plan for that quarter and then we repeat it the next quarter. But it started with the mind map I wrote maybe 20, 25 years ago, and I still use that foundation. But in 2008, when the market crashed and veterinary hospitals were empty, they had hallowed halls. They were taking clients and making them part time employees. We were bursting at the seams and the group was wondering, like, how did we always have more clients coming in, even in a down market? And it was because consistently, every single day, we were doing marketing things every day, no matter what. Something I would test might be Facebook ads in another city and then count how many new clients we got from that city. But I made it fun for the team, too. I will give them ways that they can participate, kind of gamify it at the front desk. How many calls did they close and turn into appointments for the team? How many people came to us from Yelp. And counting it and seeing how they converted it. And the more we gamify it, make it fun for the team, and they get to win as well, the more fun it is for me.

Love it. Well, you know, you're quite familiar with elf. Go ahead, Dean, what are you saying?

I was going to say there's a lot like ipower. Like what? Getting your team members involved in the process. Because everybody's got great ideas. You just need good direction. By framing the question that's going to elicit the great response. I remember reading there's a great book about Albert Lasker, who was one of the old original advertising men. And when they were selling refrigerators, you know, back when refrigeration was brand new, one of the things that people were afraid of is that they didn't want to have something that was plugged in all the time and sucking electricity because they were new to the whole. You had this meter outside your house that you could see it moving, and when that's moving, it's costing you money. So people were weighing the benefits of having refrigeration versus their fear of this bottomless pit of electricity spent. And he tasked the entire company, he said, we need some phrase that makes people comfortable with Frigidaire as the brand that they can trust for refrigeration. And somebody who was like the equivalent of in the mail room came up with the idea of that every Frigidaire is equipped with meter miser technology. And just those words, Meter miser said exactly what you need words to say. To say, it's watching your back, it's not going to take any more electricity than it absolutely needs to. And that was really the thing that made people comfortable, choosing Frigidaire over all the others, because all the others are just money pits. But you better get that meter miser because that one will save us the most money.

There's a really big key you said in there, Dean, too, and it's genius, which is coming up with the right phrase that allows your customer to feel comfortable with their decision making. They made it. They want evidence. They Made a great decision. Right. And one of the things I taught my front desk, Joe, which was really important in the shift, in closing clients at the front desk is no matter what the client asks them, the first thing to say is, yes, I can help you with that. Absolutely. Then it puts their mind at ease that they have the right person and the right person who really cares about helping them. And just by using that one phrase, even if they have to say, you know what, I have to check on the answer and call you back, it's okay. Because they set up the relationship of I do want to help you. And I think that that's just been really key in my business, is that my clients feel like the team sees them and listens and cares.

Hey, Joe, I just saw Evan Carmichael's here too.

Yes, we need to do a shout out for Evan. And Evan is just a master at YouTube videos. If you don't follow him, follow him on YouTube. He's got 2.6 million subscribers, over 385 million views. I know that because he was just a guest on the Genius Network meeting we just had. And we're going to be doing a jam session with him at the Genius Network annual event November 6th, 7th and 8th because it was such a big hit.

But interview on his on his channel right now with Kevin O' Leary from Shark Tank. He brilliantly did a two parter with him where it's 1/2 of the interview on his channel, 1/2 on Kevin O' Leary's channel. So what is a great model for collaboration there?

Well, Evan, why don't you pop on and explain what that is and then post it in the link so people can watch those interviews. And if there's anything that you want to say to either make fun of Dean or to ask Lee or mention anything, feel free. Wherever you're at out there bouncing on his trampoline, I'm sure. Where are you at right now, Evan?

I am on my trampoline and I just discovered Dean is a fellow Torontonian, so we can't make fun of him. We got it. Only show love shout out to Lee and her website too, because I was on and she's got this. If you haven't seen Lee's website, I popped it in the chat and it's this epic video across the top of her coaching and speaking and with Oprah and high fiving and it's like, wow, how did she do that? I want to. I gotta get Lee's website people on board, but I think that's a great Joe's on there too. Joe, you made your appearance. You're like right after Oprah on there. The link, I don't know where the link is. I'm sure it's somewhere off my YouTube channel. But Kevin O' Leary is trying to grow on his YouTube channel and he wanted to do something. He wanted to do more collabs. And he happens to be in Toronto as well. He wanted to do something in person because all of his stuff has now been remote and Covid era. And so we connected and we did a two part series. We had two hours or so of time to talk. And what we did was we took questions from both of our audiences. What do you want us to answer? And then we went through about 11 or 12 questions and we put half on my channel and half on his channel. And since I edited it or my team was editing and filming it, we took our favorite questions and then gave him the rest. But they're still good on both channels. And one of the great things you can do on YouTube is there's a thing called an end card, which in the last 20 seconds of every video, you can call things out and it's clickable. So that could be your PDF download, that could be your lead magnet, that could be sign up for your email, that could be your website, that could be your offer that you want to send people to. And so what we did was we did a thing at the end where we said, hey, if you want to see part two of this interview, go check it out on Kevin's channel or on Evan's channel. And we called the Kevin and Evan show for that day. It's just great way to do collaboration. So anybody who's doing YouTube, I always love Genius network events. They're great, amazing people. Huge warm hearts here. And so I'm looking forward to the annual event and jamming out with all you guys.

Awesome. Yeah. And there's a bunch of Genius network members that are here too. So Evan's going to do a whole session on just how to really build and grow a sustainable YouTube channel, which is awesome. Lee, you know a lot about elf. Easy, lucrative and fun. Running an elf business versus a half business, which I refer to as hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. What does an elf business mean to you? Because you tend to have a lot of fun in what you do.

It's true. And that is the actual criteria when I'm taking on a project. Is it easy? Is it lucrative? Is it fun? MIT knows it as well. They run it through the same filter. I actually spoke to 8,500 event planners last month and I drilled this home so much that one of them sent me a gift with Lee Richter. Easy, lucrative and fun. I'm like, well, it's actually Joe Polish, but I give you credit. But they just have heard it so much because I think, why make it anything else than easy, lucrative and fun? Especially at this time in my life when I have so many choices. And that is literally the filter I go through first for every project, it has to meet those three criteria. Seems so simple, but there's things that don't meet that criteria. And I cut it out.

Yeah, I love it. And that actually that term was given to me by my friend Mark Schneider, who recently passed away. And you know, it has been a great criteria on not just marketing, because I've actually trademarked ELF marketing. Right. And so if you do use it, you have to give me credit because we're going to just sue you.

Really?

No, I'm kidding. Well, it depends. We may see you. It depends if you totally plagiarize my shit. But, but I love the term elf and I recommend using it as a criteria, use it as a process. And it's helped me. I used to think of it just as marketing, doing automated robotic types of marketing methodologies. But I now apply ELF to people, projects, anything. Because if it's not money, is it easy, liberating and fun? I even apply it into my personal life. So I'm going to take next year as a sabbatical and. And so there's going to be a lot of things that need to be just ELF for me that aren't money related. But it has to be liberating. So I highly encourage it as a filter because the genius network members that we have a tool called ELF versus Half, where they list what are the people and the projects and things in their life that are ELF and what are the things that are hard, annoying, lame and frustrating? And really take a look at how do you eliminate the half and how do you get to the elf? So one thing I want to, I have this question I wrote down here. And then I'm going to ask Jeff Madoff to ask you a question about pr. How can people utilize tough times? As many people in the world have been going through incredibly difficult times with the pandemic, how can people utilize tough times as a springboard for greater success? And what does that word that gets thrown around a lot success mean to you?

Well, success is that I have freedom of time and I can make choices on how to Spend that time. That's what money buys me, is freedom of choice, period. That's how I see it the way right now. You know what? Looking at tough times, the first thing I did, I remember on March 16, I sat down with my manager. I'm like, what has changed in our world right now? We wrote a list of 25 things that had changed based on Covid and the pandemic, but immediately turned it into what can we do about it? And then a week later on Slack, they were celebrating how things were actually getting better. But it was because we were identifying the challenge and overcoming it together that they were excited about it. Right? It wasn't. They weren't afraid anymore. And they also knew if any changes happen, they'd find it on Slack, so they didn't have to worry about us making different changes and doing things in the company unless they were included. But I tell you, we have had so many more opportunities come out of this pandemic. Our company's up 31% this year. The team feels essential. They feel excited. They feel like people really need them and want them. And so what I do is I highlight that every Friday I write, here's 10 things we're celebrating right now. And one of the things I've learned is to share that list with our clients coming in, too, so that they could see the value of the team. And by sharing it not only with the team, but with the clients, they could see we're celebrating the team, but also what we have to overcome as well. Because the clients are coming with their perspective of what they have to overcome, but they're not thinking about all the things we have to do to be there. Ready? And so I think by highlighting that it's now elevated on both sides, the appreciation, the clients appreciate the team more, and the team appreciates their position more. They have seen so many people lose jobs, lose opportunities. And even last Friday was bosses day, and they came in and they wrote me this beautiful card. And each one of them is like, thank you for being a leader and helping us be happy rather than scared. And I think a lot of that is just being consistent, sharing what is the challenge and then overcoming it together.

So, Damon, you have your famous shark points. Jay, you have many things. Three ways to grow a business. The strategy of preeminence, power, Parthenon, nine drivers, etc. Of them, which one single principle or concept would you keep and use if you could only choose one, and why? Which is like, what's the most important thing?

Mine would always be my first of the sharp points and I have various different ones. So a lot of time my sharp points is S, H, A R, K. And depending on who I'm speaking to, some, you know, can vary the S is always that. About goal setting, I always attribute reading a book that probably the entire crowd has read. Think and grow rich. The first time I read it at 16 years old and I didn't really understand the value of goal setting until I was probably about 20. And after that, immediately my life started to change. And I don't say that casually and I don't know if anybody here does not know what goal setting is. It is not about what you're going to do. This week I have 10 goals. Seven of them expire in six months, one expire, two expire in five years and one expires in 20 years. The one they expire in six months, I, you know, I read them every morning and every night before I go to sleep five days a week. It's the last thing I think about when I go to sleep. It's the first thing I think about when I wake up and I make them very, very. I set my goals very high. I usually get to about 50% or 80% of the six month goals in regards to account accomplishing each one and then I reset them for another six months.

Interesting.

And those have been over the course of my life. Those have always been the ones that I've gone back to. I do find that three months or six months out of my life when I'm going through extremely challenging times. It could have been my divorce or it could have been various challenges and I start maybe drinking more than I should or hanging out more than I should and I find that I don't do that. And after a while, after six, seven months, I find that my life and or my motivation have taken a large decline. So I have been through that part of not goal setting probably about six times in my life and those have been actually the worst times of my life.

Wow. I love the whole thing of a goal with an expiration date. I mean that's very, I mean I put deadlines on things, but I've never really kind of thought about it.

They have expiration dates and I find myself getting anxiety around that. If the goal is the 15th of March, why am I feeling like this? And then I reset them.

Well, okay, I would fire myself if I was interviewing me for this one because I'm going to give you a double answer. But probably the most important distinction, ideology, philosophy I ever learned and I can, I can be very arrogant about it because it wasn't my own originally, but was. Was the strategy of preeminence. It's really redefined what I've become as a human being, as a contributor, as a. As a, you know, as a catalyst to others, a benefactor, guide, advisor. And it's also, it's. It's propelled people to the highest level. And I'd like to actually tell a simple story because it's quite profound about it. But also I'd like to give a context about relational capital because there's a depth and a breadth of it that is so transcendent to what somebody would think of as an affiliate deal. But just, I mean, to give you the simplistic concept of preeminence, it's basically to establish yourself as the only viable choice, the most trusted advisor for life. You have a moral responsibility to guide people to what's in their best interest. You can't let them buy less, more, less quantity, less quantity. You may not even allow them to buy from you. Or you can't allow them to buy from the competitor, not because they're a son of a gun prick, but because they're not going to add the value of support. Your goal is not to fall in love with your product or your service. It's to fall in love with the people whose lives you're transforming. You have four categories of clients, certainly the ones that pay you, but then the others are the ones you pay your team members, your vendors, your advisors. And your goal is to enrich their life, to grow, to add value. That's the important part. But it is totally external. And the real key to it is you don't to want wait for money to change hands to start investing. The preface or the premise is, in any relationship, one side is always being asked to invest first in the other. And your attitude is, I think you're a good investment, so I'm going to invest. But you're going to invest real value. And you can't invest real value if you don't have a clear context of what value is defined as by the various segments of the market you're trying to take. I can go deep on that, but forget that now. So we've done billions of dollars for clients using very sophisticated relational capital. And it's totally different than an affiliate deal. You know, it's like we will find people who have very trusted, credible relationships with the market that our client wants to reach, and we will engineer extraordinary relationships. And the easiest example I can give you is an old one, but it'll show the differentiation. I was laughing. Somebody wrote me the other day and said, I want you to promote my software. There's $100,000 top prize and I'm giving my Porsche. And I said, well, first of all, I have more than one Porsche. Second of all, I don't do things for that. If it's got value, I don't make it. Another 20 or 30 grand ain't gonna change my life. So I'd rather do it gratis if it's gonna really impact the people. But when we used to do really integrated strategic relationships and the easiest one, I can tell you I'm gonna go back and date myself. But when gold was first legalized in the 70s, all the gold dealers are running ads in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Barron's. And that wasn't where the gold buyers were. The gold buyers were the conservative, pardon me, many is the water right here. Many of them were the libertarians, the von Mises, the Hayek type people. And they were subscribing and paying money to any of about 40 different newsletters that were out there. And I was the down below, the surface strategist, mastermind, ethical puppeteer for all these people. And I also was the mastermind for this gold company that sold physical gold. Physical means you buy, you get it. You can buy physical gold, you can buy, you can buy options, you can buy bank owned. And I felt helped all kinds of companies like that. But we would go to financial newsletters and we wouldn't say send out an email for us. We would strike a long term arrangement. Well, first we would be the recommended provider of the hard asset. Every time a new subscriber came, they would get from us a kit that would explain hard assets, give it the content, have interviews with prominent economists and advisors, including ones that didn't like gold. So it had balance. Our deal was four times a year we would pay to put out special editions of the newsletter that would chronicle a lot of hard assets. And we'd pay money for great, respected, iconic writers and we would be featured in it too. Thrice a year. We would do regional promotions where we would do programs on site all over the regions for these newsletters and they would be for profit. We would use part of the money we were spending to get an icon. Then we would speak any profit we would give them, but it gave us credibility. Many of these newsletters were very arrogant and they would stop marketing if their marketing piece started breaking even. We were in a lead generating business and Lead generating was costing us 1,200, excuse me, 100, $200 a lead. So anytime their subscription offer stopped working, we had a standing offer that we would pick up the responsibility of taking their subscription piece, their promotion. I would improve the headline, I would improve the risk reversal, I would add to the bonuses. We would do whatever we could to make it profitable. Then we would pay to send it out, but we would get joint tenancy of all the names. And I can go on and on, but it's so much more sophisticated. And it wasn't static. It was a perpetual. We always played a long game. And also, if we were the first one to do that and it worked, I separately would reserve as a contingency the right to become the ombudsman, the provider, the manager, the partner in any and all other long term strategic offerings that would go through that newsletter. So I created it as a distribution channel and, and I did the same kind of thing with everybody and it was a whole different level. And there still is. Oh, by the way, we never sent the same communication to any two newsletters. They were all customized. So they had integrity. Because a lot of these newsletters, not unlike a lot of the email lists, were multiple subscribed. And if you have the same rhetoric, it looks very crass, but there's just a lot of deeper, straight strategic thinking that's possible. And I over talked.

No, no, but there's always more underneath the surface. That's why people that just try to knock off a certain particular ad or promotion don't really see everything that's going on.

Agreed.

And when you make so much of your marketing, just the public thing and you're not doing the relationship building stuff, we had Dre Redfern talk about direct mail. You know, 27 year old guy here in the audience who you know, of course, you know, you're friends with Andrew.

I adore him.

Yeah.

And so basically, you know, 27 years old, expert in direct mail and the beauty of. I became one of the highest paid speakers in the world in a niche of carpet cleaners where no one knew who the hell I was. But it was all in. I'd have all these people that would try to knock off my ads, but they didn't see all the direct mail. It was, it's like, it's so stealth, it's so under the radar, as are many marketing things. People just cannot see them in the surface. And that's why, if you understand what you're talking about here, like a positive iceberg. Yeah, yeah, I Mean, it's. It's just. It's just such a. Such an advantage.

Let's talk about kind of the mindsets and emotions, how you get. How you kind of manage that amongst yourself or what. What kind of do you come into this with on a daily basis? I guess, you know, you're.

Do you.

Are you an affirmation guy? Are you?

Yeah, I guess I'm an enneagram 3. Most people think I'm an enneagram 7, but I am still driven by success. Affirmations. Yeah. We actually did the love language test with everyone on our staff, and. Which is good. You know, we say, love your customers more than you love your product, but love your people, love your team even more than you love your customers. If that's true, do you know what your people love? We didn't know it. So our fans first director said, I want to do a love language test of all of our people. And so we did a test of the entire team and it was great. We found out that 90% of our people were words of affirmation was number four. Number one. And it was funny. Our president was words of affirmation was number one. But touch was on the bottom. He goes, guys, tell me you love me, but don't you ever touch me. Don't you ever touch me. But yeah, so we learned that. And again, I remember we ask our team every year what was their favorite moment of their year. And I will never forget our director of operations. And we hosted huge concerts here, sold out crowds. And he goes, jesse, it was after our first concert and you put your arm on my shoulder and said that you were proud of me and that I did well tonight. He goes, that was my best moment. And I go, wow. And I was like. It was just something I never really remembered. But, you know, we think as leaders, how do we. How do we tell people, you know, that we care about. Recognize them?

Isn't that interesting how knowing that little bit of information, like if that person was words of affirmation and touch, you just like full HD appreciated them and what. You could do that same thing if people are gifts and quality time or. Yeah, you know, looking at that, I see how that would, how that would work.

And you have a database, you know, when you. We have all of our fans, we have all of our team, when they join our team, even in the interview process, we ask all these questions so we get to know them when they first show up that first day, we try to create the biggest fan of them so we map their entire Day, you know, when they first come in, we actually have everyone in costume, silly string. We have their favorite breakfast, we have a whole breakfast ceremony and we map their day. At the end of the day, we have a big cheers. Their name goes up on the wall. And so again, I think if you want to create great fans of your customers, you got to create great fans of your people first. And that's part of our strategy, how we do things. But I don't know if that was the whole question. I think you asked some affirmations. I'm an energy guy. I just try to thrive. I try to do things that give me energy. I was terrible at operations, I'm terrible at finances. I'm terrible. I don't touch those things. Details. I stay in my energy. So I created my energy list. What are the things that give me energy? And I realized it was creating, sharing and growing. Whenever I'm coming with ideas, creating new visions, sharing with our team, leading on a speech, on a podcast or growing, reading, learning, listening to your podcast, other podcasts, I try to spend most of my day doing that and hire other people to do everything else. So when I go home to yeah, yeah. And I go home to my 23 year olds, I have energy. I have energy to be there for them because I'm doing the things I gave them.

Because everything you're doing all day is energy. You're thinking we're a lot alike in that. In my world, I. The ideas are what. That's the thing is I really like the coming up with what, what we could do, possibilities, getting all of those things. But I definitely need and am surrounded by who's who can then make all of that come true because I'm not the person who can focus enough to do any of it right. That's the reality. So what's your best piece of advice for say, startup? Somebody who's thinking, you know what, I'm going to take something on here and I want to take this approach.

It's not the most poetic, but I would ask this question and I'd put it right on top of the front page of your paper and look at it on a regular basis. What makes you different? And what we did is we actually challenged our team and it's on our website, on our about us. We wrote all the different things that were different. We're the only all inclusive ballpark. We have no ads at our ballpark. We have grandma coaches, eight year old coaches, we play in kilts. We wrote all those things. I think everyone tries to Be a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper. What can you be the only at? And when you're the only, you don't have to market, you don't have to do everything else. You're the only because everyone's doing the marketing for you. So what makes you different? What can you be the only? I think for a startup, if you're trying to be a me too, it's hard work, but it's a bloody ocean as the blue ocean strategy.

Right, Exactly.

The one thing that I have really focused on for a long time is the mindset of 10 times. And so I believe for a number of reasons, 10 times is a very useful thought to today simply because of the capabilities that are in the world around us. And Peter gave a very, very good background to why it's so possible now for us to think in terms of 10 times. And it's because of all the exponential capabilities that are now being created in the world around us. So this wasn't true. I was born in 44, so I just celebrated my 70th birthday, May. And I have to tell you, I mean, Richard, Richard and I have conversations because Richard is, you know, checked around for six years and then he said it was okay for me to be born six years. Ten years. Ten years. And we talk a lot about it. But the things that you are doing in today's world simply weren't possible for someone of your intelligence and creativity. And that 1950s, I have to tell you, this was not possible. You could not be enabled and empowered by the system that you were living in in the 1950s like you can today. So this, I'm in complete agreement with the notion that this is a very extraordinary period to be born in. And I'm going to talk about the title here of 10 times is easier than two times. And I'm going to give you a comparison of two mindsets because somebody look at that. Well, it's just five times two times. And I'm going to show you a difference, that two times is actually bad for your brain. You should not be thinking in terms of two times. It actually does something bad for your brain. And I'm going to show you what 10 times does. 10 times is actually very, very good for your brain. And I was just estimating here just what probably the revenues were for this room here. We got like 220 people, I think, that are in the room and I would estimate it's in the billions. Well, Dina takes care of one of them. So I know it's more than. I know it's more than 1 billion. But what I see is very, very possible that within a period of time, and it would differ for each of you, that let's say the number was 3 billion, the total revenues in the room was 3 billion, that in a short period of time, 30 billion would be very, very possible for this same room, the people who are here in that. And when I show you how this would happen, you'll see that it's actually very reasonable. Actually, it's not only reasonable, but it's actually the only way you would want to think. So my talk has four parts to it. But first of all, before I get into the actual lineup of what I'm going to do, I'm going to talk to you about what is X? When you say 10x or 10 times, what is the X? Because what I've discovered working with entrepreneurs, and by the way, tomorrow is 40 years since I started creating, coaching. So tomorrow. And yeah, I'm Catholic, and August 15th is the feast of the assumption. I can guarantee you on that. August 15th, I had a lot of assumptions. And then I had my first bankruptcy. And then I had my bankruptcy that I was divorced in the morning and bankrupt in the afternoon. So. So there was what Jeff Walker would call testing that I did back in those days. But I personally worked with 6,000 entrepreneurs. And they're ambitious people. They're talented, successful, ambitious people. But what I find is that each of them has a unique take on what the future looks like for them. And each of them has a sort of a formula or a unique recipe of really what constitutes success for them as a person. It's just in their business life, it's their personal life. So I'm just going to give you a list of the sort of things that people, when they talk about increasing by 10 times, these are the things that they would want to increase. And the number one is confidence. Okay? And. And I'm a great believer that confidence is a capability. And that confidence as a capability can be increased 10 times. And if you increase your confidence by 10 times, the results are just a byproduct of 10 times higher confidence. Where you are today is really a function of your current confidence level. And therefore you could increase it. But then there's things like revenues and profits and wealth. And one of my big one is free time. Okay? So just to give you a little tip, Babs, would you stand up? Because. Babs. This is Babs. Babsmith. And as Joe mentioned this morning, without Babs, I'M just a smart drunk, an out of shape smart drunk who is worried about the race. So that's where I am today. So my life consists of before Babs and after Babs. And I'm really quite clear. I tell her that in the morning and I tell her before I go to bed at night. And I'm very, very conscious of what Babs did to my life. So free time and then health and then fitness and your overall energy level, these are all ten times great goals. So it's not just one thing. You know, typically your mind would go to income or it would go to profits, but in fact, that all of these are factors that contribute to 10 times. And the people who do 10 times and do it well, what I mean is they do it in a way that's absolutely good for other people, but they absolutely do it good for themselves. Actually cover the, you know, they cover the menu here and then reputation and of capabilities and clients and your customers and the kind of support you have, technology and connections. So as you're thinking about this, you would have three or four that you would go after right away, you know, and it wouldn't be necessarily some people, it's not about income. You know, I have a. I just a few days ago, I was with a client who's from Ojai, and he came down to see an intro that we did, that we did in Marina del Rey. And he had come into the program about 10 years ago, 13 years ago, and he was making a quarter million dollars personally. And then he was working 300 days to get his quarter million. And then we started our new 10 times program three years ago. And I asked him, you know, how have you done? And his income had gone to 2.5 million personally. So he was up 10 times, but he was doing it in 30 days a year. So he had done a double 10 times. He had done 10 times with income, but he had done, you know, he was working. And so it was actually 100 times increase. And he's a big art collector and he likes doing all sorts of things, but he's got it down to 30 days, 30 days a year. And now he's going for. For 10 times the top number, the income number. But he wants to get his whole work, the actual work that he has to do is down to roughly about 10 full days a year. Okay, okay. Now you say, well, I wouldn't want to do that. And that's exactly the point. You wouldn't, because that wouldn't be your goals. But those are his Goals. And so when we talk about this, what I want you to think about here is that it has to be your goals, so you know that 10 times has to work for you, okay? And that's really the point here. And everybody's unique and you've got the freedom. You know, entrepreneurs are the only people on the planet who actually have the freedom of time, the freedom of money, the freedom of relationship, and the freedom of purpose. Four freedoms that you have that other people have. Time. You can arrange your time the way you want. There's no upper limit on the amount of money that you can make. You can choose to work with who you want to work with, both inside your company and outside your company relationship. But the big thing is purpose. So Dave Kekich, you know, and I've been communicating with Dave for a number of years, but today is actually the first, first time I actually met him. But we were talking and I was talking to Craig Venter, who's Peter's partner in longevity, and we were talking about the life extension, which I believe my goal is 156 right now and has been for 20, 27 years. So at 70, I'm not even actuarially on the table yet. I haven't even qualified for the actuarial table because I still have 87, six years to go. But I said, you know, you can extend physically, you can extend people's lives, but the question is, do they have any purpose? Do they actually have any purpose? Because a lot of people really don't. Once they finish their work life, they really, really don't have much purpose. So that's going to be the big issue. I think once the purpose drives people will, you know, they'll do it. And 10 times is a nice purpose to have. And so my goal, I'm 70 and I'm going for 95. So I just put together a 25 year goal. And everybody in my that I coach is on the 25 year plan. And my goal is that in the next 25 years, I accomplish 10 times more than I accomplished up till 70. Okay? So whatever that was, I accomplished a lot before 70, but it's going to be 10 times more. Okay, So I just wanted you to be clear about that now as far as what I'm going to talk about, I'm going to talk about the mindset. So the mindset has really been talked about a lot here. It starts with just how your brain's looking at your life, looking at the world, looking at the possibilities. Then I'm going to Give you a model that shows you the radical difference between 2x and 10x. And I'm going to show you a method that everybody in this room can do. You can start doing the method that I'm talking about here. You can do that method starting right now. As a matter of fact, you could put together a very good game plan by the time I'm finished here. And I'm going to give you a map of what the world looks like and what's happening to the world is that it's going binary. And what I mean is that the world always takes on the structure of the economics of the world. So when the world was industrial, the world looked like a factory. The World wars. I was born during the Second World War. And after the Second World War, for the next 25 or 30 years, America looked like a factory that was producing war materials. It was big, it was multi level, it was a big pyramid. GM had 18 levels from the CEO down to the factory floor. And everybody thought that was great. The unions were that way, government was that way. But now we're going digital and we're going network. And now the world is rearranging itself along network lines. So it's very, very different. And I'm going to show you basically that there's an emotion you have to have to actually get on one side or the other side side of the binary. There's sort of a split going down the middle of the world. You can see it reflected in the news. Every day they talk about the polarization of society. I'm going to show you what the real polarization of society is. And I can say right now that all of you in this room are on the right side as opposed to the left side. No, but the thing about it is that there's a way of thinking about the world and it starts with the mindset, but it's actually an emotion. And your basic path that you're going to create for yourself in the years ahead comes from a particular emotion. And there's a counter emotion. And I'm going to show you what that is. Okay, so let's just talk about the model and the mindset. First of all. First of all, I'm going to show you what 2x looks like. And we've got three tools that the brain has that I consider to be tools. And we have a tool called the future, we have a tool called the past, and we have a tool called the present. And these are tools and these are learned because children, newborn children, do not have a time sense. They learn. It takes about two years and the development of language before children begin to realize that there's a difference between what happens before they go to sleep and what happens after they get up in the morning. They call them dark sleep. So a lot of kids come up with dark sleeps as nighttime and short sleeps are naps. But they start to distinguish that there was a before I went to bed last night. And there's something happens and the brain starts to develop. It's like three dimensions. Children do not see three dimensions. Takes quite a while before children get a handle on three dimensionality. It's in the structure of the brain, but it has to be learned. And everybody learns past, present and future completely differently. I've never found two people in all my coaching who look at past, present and future in the same way. And the reason is they're made up. They're made up. People make up the future and they make up the past. People are just as creatively fictional about their past as they are about their future. And so one of the things is, it's your property. These three tools are your property. And the past, present, future are your property. And you do anything with them that you can get away with. Okay, so here's the way 2x works, and I've seen this over and over again, that if you do 2x, you start with the present, you start where you are right now and you got a 2x goal. But you don't go to the future, you actually go to the past. You actually go to the past. And the reason is because we're smart rats, Humans are smart rats and they don't like working. And so they say, I'm going to do 2x and I wonder if I can pull it off without changing anything. So they go back and they do an inventory of the past, of all the things that they don't want to change to get to 2x. And how many of you, if you rearranged a few things, you could probably go 2x. How many of you? And they would be known. You would know right now how you could go to 2x would you know, you could double. You would probably know the means would be there. You know, it's a tightening up on the systems. A little smarter, a little better time management, you would know how to get to 2x. And so it's not very exciting. 2x is how many of you 2x really isn't that exciting. It's just not that exciting. And therein lies the issue. 2x is not exciting. It's not Exciting for you. And if you tell somebody about it, it's not exciting to them. So there's no new energy in the system. So what happens then is that you actually start in the present and you circle back and you try to pull as much of the past as you possibly can into the future. And the past negotiates with you about your future. How many of you have noticed that the past is union organized? And not only are they unionized, but they drink. They're drinking partners. All the past. Oh, no, no, we're not going to do that. No, no, have a drink, you know, and everything else. And that's one of the biggest things I've noticed is just this negotiating with the past, that most people, when they come up with a goal, they have to go back and first justify it to their past. They have to justify it to their past. And that you can see the drag immediately on this goal. Now I'm going to show you the other one. So this is the other one. So with 2x, you start with the present. Trying to change as little of the past as possible. Not exciting. It doesn't cause any inspiration, doesn't cause any electricity. It doesn't cause any real movement that's going to get a lot of people interested in what you're doing. That's why, I mean, when, you know, I sit there and let's see, Peter, what's he gonna do? First of all, he's gonna take a billion people and make them literate in 18 months. And then he's going to capture name, put his name on it. Asteroid diamantes. It's worth 5 trillion. All right, I got that one. You know, and then you go down the list. These are big. How many of you are excited just sitting there, you know, just, just sitting there listening. But that's, that's the secret of it. It's. It's the excitement. The excitement. There's no. If there's no excitement, there's no electricity. If there's no electricity, there's no movement. You have to have the. You have to have the excitement. So. So the big thing is that you got to go 10 times or nothing moves. You got to go 10 times. So with 10 times, it works just the opposite. You don't start with the present. You actually start, start with the future. And with the future, you come back and you grab the present. You come back and you loop the present like that. Okay. And you leave the past in another category. I'm going to tell you why the past is valuable. Because a lot of People say the past is not valuable. I don't think about the past. A lot of entrepreneurs, they say, I never think about the past. And I said, well, that's too bad, because there's a lot of useful stuff in the past that would be useful for the future. And so don't knock the past. I'm not knocking the past here. I'm not saying bad things about it. I'm simply saying that you got to start with the future as the lead. And here's the deal. The past has to justify itself to the future. The past has to justify. The only reason why any of your past gets to come along is because it has a value for the future. So I've got 70 years with the past, and I've got a lot of valuable stuff back there. I got a lot of stuff there, and I'm constantly going back to past experience and saying, what did I learn there that's really valuable? Okay, so here's how it works. If with 10 times, you start with. With the future, freeing your present as much as necessary from the past, you got to free it up, okay? And that requires some shifts. That requires, you know, that's why Daniel. A lot of the stuff he does, you got to have a brain that can do this, because a lot of the, you know, a lot of the brain, if it's a damaged brain, it's responding to damage that happened in the past, okay? You're. That. That's a map of your past. When you get some bad brain scan, you get. You get. It's a map of the past. I was knocked out twice in a football game when I was 18 years old, and the damage was still sitting there on my brain. You could see the dark section on my brain. In those days, they said, you okay?

Yeah.

Okay, get back in there. You get back in there. Yeah, yeah, it was good. I got knocked out. I sat on the bench for about five minutes and got back in. First play, I got knocked out again. Guy said, why don't you sit this one out? The coach said, why don't you sit it out? But I was back on the field next week because that's what men do. I was a man. So that's the model. Okay? So that's the model, and so that's the mindset. So here's the model. So I'm going to put the two of them together, and the two of them are side by side. And you can see the radical difference just visually, okay? And this is what it looks like in the two times you're trying to pull the past into the future. And in the ten times the present is being pulled into the future and the past, large parts of the past being discarded. How many of you this actually, when you're doing things well, this is what you do. And when you get really bogged down, you're doing the left hand side. Yeah, that's what happens. See, this happens with all 7 billion people. And nobody's 100% with it. So nobody's 100% in any area of their life. Some people are really advanced in one part of their life, but they're not advanced in other parts of their life. There's parts of their life where the future is really doing the work, but in other parts of their life, the past is giving the orders. It creates tremendous tension. All right, now how many of you would say that this is probably harder, this is harder and this is easier. So now I'm going to talk about harder and easier. And all things considered, how many of you prefer easier easier over harder? Yeah, yeah. And that's really the thing. Now you have the brain that can do this, and you've got the experience that can do this. But you gotta get the distinctions right. It's kinda. You gotta get the circuitry right on this. And it has to do with what you do with past, present and future. You gotta get them. You gotta get them right. And generally speaking, if your child, if you're thinking about your children and they've spent. Spent 20 years in the educational system, and that's usually the case now, 4 years old to 24 years old, they have been almost 99% taught by people who would not even believe in two times. They would not even believe that. They would believe at a much worse thing. They would go for cost of living. Cost l. Living.

Wow.

I mean, that's what union fights are over cost of living. I mean, that's not very inspiring. Yeah, so it's a union, so you got to have the right teachers. That's why you come to Genius Network. And I just had a wonderful four days in Rancho Mirage with JJ and Camper and their mindshare. Mindshare, you know, I mean, if you said that in the 1950s, I don't know really what that would all be about, but the whole thing of bringing together people who are future oriented and have an impact. I mean, you just being in this room for two days, your brain will change chemically, your brain will change by being in this room for two days. And Joe is just a master bringing together people who can provide Shifts they provide, you know, they almost sometimes, you know, I'm sitting here and I'm watching a 10 minute talk. I'm going whack. I just get the, you know, I just get this like. And all of a sudden there's this real shift and you never go back to the way you were before the shift. So this is the educational system that really, really works. But if you take everybody who does that and has that kind of impact and shift, they do the same thing. They free you from the past. There's this freeing up and you get this real movement toward the future. And remember, past, present, future, they're yours. You make them up. You got to choose what you want to feed them. You got to be careful what you feed those time sense. Ok, so I'm going to talk about harder and easier. So now I'm going to talk about the method. So I'm going to talk about 10 times easier and 2 times harder. And I'm going to talk about 10 times easier because 10 times easier is based on energy. How many of you would know in any situation whether this was energizing or this was stuff? How many of you know the difference between energy and stuff? Energy and stuff. Okay, energy makes you feel good and stuff makes you feel bad. Okay, that's good. That's good. So I'm going to put energy and stuff. Here's what energy. First of all, I'll start with stuff. Stuff is activities that are devoid of energy. How many of you right now know that you're doing activities that are devoid of energy? How many of you could make a list of activities that are devoid of energy? How many of you could make a list of people who are devoid of energy in your life? Situations that are devoid of energy. Activities that your company has gotten involved in. Situations that you that are devoid of energy. Okay, that's stuff. Okay, everybody got stuff. Okay, Energy is. Activities are free from stuff. Activities are free from stuff. What's it feel like when you're freed up from stuff? Yeah, feels like bulletproof coffee. Last thing I did before I came on stage was make sure you have a bulletproof coffee before you get up on stage. Fat in my Adderall. I love adderall. Now, he doesn't recommend. He doesn't recommend. He said, but you might want to try this. You know what I realized when I came back? It took me six weeks to take the first one because I don't know if I want to do this. And I took it and it was just before our workshop and I took it and I walked in and I sat down. I was just, I introduced the group and then I sat down and all of a sudden it was almost like a physical. It was all going bang like that and the whole world went quiet. And I realized that for 66 years I had lived in a world of noise. And this is the first time my life was quiet. It's been quiet for four years. And these have been the four best years of my life. So. But I got the scan, got the scam, shitty scan. Yeah, it is better. It is better. I, I saw him a year later and he was amazed. You were amazed, weren't you, how much it was like a lit up city a year later. It was really good. And I got a lot of confidence out of it too. So energy and stuff, okay? Now think of the world. I mean think of Washington right now. You know what Washington is? It is an entire organization and ecosystem that's completely devoid of energy. It's just all stuff. Just all stuff. You know, and there's so many of these large organizations, these large systems that were considered just the normal part of life now that are just stuff. And the reason is they don't have the ability to have a future. They don't have a future. Everything has to be justified on the basis of the past, okay? And you can just see, it drains the energy. And you can see, see what happens to public officials. They come in, they're full of vigor and they're very, very exciting. You just see them, energy goes out of them, they get sucked in. So the big thing here is this is the method that I'm going to talk to you about right now. So we're going to talk about that. The method for going 10 times consists of eliminating stuff. So how many of you would have a hit list right off the bat of stuff that you can do? And so I'm going to just show you in coach because we coach a lot of people and they all come through, but this is sort of the kind of things that people go after. And if you wanted to on your sheet of paper, I know this is on the sheet of paper, you can just write down everything that others do better, everything that drains energy, relationships that go nowhere. And what I'd like you to do with each of those three things, if you see them on the sheet of paper, it's in our little folder on the right hand side down at the bottom. So this is a little strategic coach diagram that we have there. But just write down below each of those words that I have up There everything that others do better, everything that drains energy, relationships that go nowhere. And just write down a word, a name or a word of something that would be on that list, and I'd like you to have one under each of them. Just write that down. For example, everything that others do better. So what I. You know, the real, real impact that I have on entrepreneurs in the program is I get them to do far, far, far less. You know, they come in and they're doing 20 different things. I say, you're not good at 20 different things. Okay? You're good at three things. You're good at three things. So I do three things. I do what I'm doing right now. I coach my workshops, and I come up with new ideas, and I come up with new diagrams. Diagrams. And in the course of my work here, 95% of my time is made up of those three activities. I got a circle, okay. And I'm not allowed to go outside that circle by my team. Okay? Dan goes out and he goes. You know what I mean? If I step outside of my circle, I mean, if Dan tries to say anything about the company that doesn't relate to giving a public performance or coaching or creating new material, he's out of bounds. He's out of bounds. And Babs enforces it. She enforces it. And I teach everybody to do that because I came from the entertainment industry. And the entertainment industry. You want the entertainer to entertain. You don't want the entertainer selling tickets. You don't want the entertainer moving furniture backstage. Frank Sinatra does not move pianos. I made a living before he died on that one. He just plays. He just entertains. Every one of you in this room is an entertainer, and you've got a song to sing and an audience to sing to. And anytime you're not singing your song to your audience, it's probably stuff. It's probably stuff. Does that make sense? I mean, I find entertainment's really interesting because. Because it's all about energy. Entertainment, the whole entertainment industry, is just pure energy. If you want to know a model of the future, it's the entertainment industry. And that includes sports. That includes sports. Everything that drains energy. Well, what drains energy? Everybody's got a list, and it's different for everybody. If I'm not front stage or I'm not doing things front stage, it's probably not. It's probably stuff for me. I'm a front stage guy. Okay, how many of you in this room are kind of front stage people, using the theater term? Yeah, you shouldn't be shouldn't be backstage. Okay? I mean, you're backstage to prepare for it, you know? And it's really, really different. And the thing is, you can't be disrespectful about what other people find energizing because everybody's wired. We have Babs, and I have a personal bookkeeper who twice, twice a week, she comes in. She handles all of our bills and everything. And had her for 25 years. And from my perspective, she's done exactly the same thing every day, two days a week for 25 years. So I went in one day. Her name is Mary Beth. And I said, mary Beth, do you like this work? And she said, dan, from one day to the next, you never would know what's going to happen, You see? And I wasn't seeing it. I wasn't seeing it. So we can't make judgments about other people. Everybody's nervous system is constructed differently and what they find stimulating and everything else is different. The only thing is you want to get them inside their circle. So we do this with all of our team. We have 120, and every one of them, the moment they start the company, we start this process of getting their circles smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until there's just three of them. And we've got 65 people who've been with us more than 10 years. Because going to work every day and just being energized is actually a good way to spend your life. Okay? We try to keep them away from stuff. And then relationships that go nowhere. That'd be both business. How many of you right now have a relationship that's going nowhere? Okay, It's a stuff relationship. It's not going anywhere. Write down the name. All progress starts by telling the truth. Bill W. All progress starts by telling the truth. You have to tell the truth, okay? And the writing hand is connected directly to your brain. 40% of the brain that you. The hand that you write with is direct. 40% of the brain is connected directly to that hand. Posable thumb. Human brain takes the opposable thumb really seriously because the opposable thumb basically was one of the big things that created the human brain. Okay? So that's it. Now we're going to go to the other side. Increase energy. I start with the stuff because it's annoying and most people can get to it right away Now, So here's the energy side of it. Everything that you permanently love, everything that produces growth and everything that grows confidence. Okay? So I have big thing that I have a question. And Dean Jackson here. Dean and I had a great conversation one night. I said, dean, what is the single angel activity or focus that would absolutely keep you fascinated and motivated for the rest of your life? Fascinated and motivated for. And it took him about, what, two minutes? Two minutes. Wham. Like that. And Dean, big difference since we did that. Amen. Yeah, I got him on Adderall, too. Yeah. So the big thing is there's a. Something that is just eternally fascinating. How many of you, when you saw a number of the speakers up here, you knew they were in their sweet zone about what fascinates and motivates them. I mean, Peter, you're just. I mean, you're just a role model. You're the poster child for being in the zone of something that just permanently fascinates and motivates you for the rest of your life. Joe is Joe. I mean, Joe. I mean, if it moves, he'll talk to it. I mean, Joe would call Putin if he thought it was a good interview. No, he's a connector. Joe cannot help not connecting. I mean, it's just fascinating and motivating to him. Scans. I mean, it's more than the scans, Daniel. There's something in there that. That just totally fascinates and motivates you, and you can't get enough of it. And when you're 20, 30, 40 years older, it'll still fascinate. So if you can get the person just locked into that, you can build everything else around it. And it's a series of questions. Jeff. I had this wonderful interview with Jeff when he first came into the program about what it was like to do his first launch where he was charging and he got $1,300 back, and he was just sitting there in a state of awe for a couple days, simply because, first of all, it was equal to their disposable income as a couple for that year. But just where are the possibilities? And I think, you know the book. I read the book, and the book reflects that fast, and motivation with that process. Okay, so that's what really prompted you to become an entrepreneur. It was this point of fascination and motivation that is permanent right at the center. But a lot of entrepreneurs get off track, and then they get tied up with the rewards of doing this activity, and then their life gets very, very complicated and they retire and whatever. So there's this whole thing. So do this. Okay? So you get this every three months. What we want you to do is eliminate three stuffs, and we want you to increase three energies so you have stuff, stuff. Stuff. Energy. Energy. How many of you? Every three months, you could eliminate three areas of stuff. Stuff. Big, small, medium in your life, and you could increase three areas of energy and go after the small stuff first because it gives you a kick of energy. When you eliminate stuff, you get a hit of energy. When you add energy, you get a double hit of energy. So it's really, really great. And then you get those three. And then what we do is this is what it looks like. 36. Over 36 months, you would eliminate 36, 36 areas of stuff, and you would increase 36 areas of energy. How many of you. That would probably. I mean, can you imagine yourself if you got rid of 36 things that are stuff and added 36 things of energy? What do you think it would do to you? What do you think you would be like to other people? The ones you hadn't eliminated, But you would have attracted a lot of people in new life. Because I believe all of life is based on radio frequencies. You send out a certain energy frequency and other people pick up on it. Okay, so that's that. So this is what it looks like. Okay, so I switched it here. So this is the energy going up and the stuff going down, and this is life. You could do this for the rest of your life and every year. And that starts to compound. It isn't like you go. You start to compound. It starts to become exponential. This is where you can actually experience what Peter talks about. Exponential experience is getting rid of the stuff and adding energy. And it takes you right into things that allow you to do things faster, easier, cheaper, all the technologies and everything. This is the proper training, the emotional, psychological training for getting in tune with the technological age. All Uber is, is they got rid of all the stuff and added all the energy. Airbnb, they just get rid of all the stuff and add the energy. Amazon, I mean, they said Dan. They always. Barnes and Noble. Never called me Dan. Dan. You know, I get so excited and I order. And they say, dan, you already ordered this one. I love that, Dan. How many of you? I love that, Dan. Barnes and Noble.

Border.

Borders. No, Dan. Borders with stuff. They're gone. So. No, no, no. I mean, this. I mean, I just want you to see this on the big level. Oh, okay. So let's go to the big level. It's going to wrap up here. So this is the math. Okay, I'm going to talk to you about scarcity because Peter talks a lot about abundance, but I want to talk about scarcity first. And scarcity starts with an emotion. Okay, okay. So I got a 15 minute grace period here when I'm. We got an agreement, Joe and I, you know. Okay, okay. So here's all stuff. All loss of energy in your life starts with envy. Envy is the emotion that kills energy, okay? Envy, okay? And envy is looking at what someone else has and wanting them not to have it. That's what envy is. And it's the most. It's the energy killer. Any kind of envy and envy. So it's stuff. Envy is about stuff. What are people envious about? They're envious about stuff. You got more stuff than I got. I don't want you to have that. Okay? All right. And envy leads to guilt because you got more stuff than other people. So you're guilty. So on the one hand you're envious and on the other hand you're guilty. You're guilty. And so you get caught between these two emotions. These are all energy killers. And then there's blame, because you got to blame somebody. Why? The world is structured such a way that some people have a lot of stuff and other people don't have enough stuff. So now you got three things going. Can you see how this really, really kills energy? And this is how all scarcity. It's a set of emotions that become a system. That's how scarcity, scarcity, there's more than enough for everything to go around. But the energy systems that people, or the devoid stuff systems that people prevent there to actually being any abundance. And what that leads to is a sense of massive unfairness. I mean, I went to college, I go back to college reunions. And it's about the unfairness of the world. You know, it's about the unfairness of the world. You know, living in America, you know, talk to the Uber drivers. They're all immigrants, they love this place. Their solution is send all the unhappy Americans somewhere they came from. So unfairness and then depletion. The depletion. The planet is being depleted, okay? There isn't enough to go around. In 1800 we crossed a billion. Now we have 7 billion. Average incomes are up 17 times. Lifespan is up 42 years. You know all the great slides that Peter had this morning? There's just massive amounts. And the reason is because it comes out of human imagination and human. The imagining infinite future and then having more and more energy in your life. And then the other one is the zero sum. If you have something, that means I don't have it. If this person over here has it, it's only at the cost of something. These are killer thoughts. These are killer thoughts. They destroy energy, they destroy any possibility of creativity. Okay, so I call this the scarcity system. And it's a stuff system. The whole thing's based on stuff. The whole thing's. All right, now I'm going to. That was quick. I had to get through that quickly. Then I go to the abundance spiral. Starts with gratitude. Gratitude is the single most powerful energy producing emotion on the planet. Abundance is connected. Gratitude is connected to another word which we use interchangeably, which is called appreciation, which is interesting because it has both a psychological meaning, but it has an economic meaning. So stocks appreciate, land appreciates. So appreciation means growth. And I say that every time you're grateful, you appreciate the value of something, you appreciate the value of that person, but you appreciate who you are because you're grateful. So if you want to know how to enter and continually grow within the world of abundance, you have to be grateful for everything. And you'll never run out of new things to be grateful for. And people can tell that you're grateful. And people love being around people who are grateful and they hate being around people who are envious. So gratitude leads to as energy and it leads to creativity. Steve Jobs, they said, Steve Jobs, what is creativity? He says it's putting things together. People who put a lot of things together are really creative, are really creative. You only put things together that you love and you appreciate. Creativity only. You only put things together that you really like. And creativity leads to cooperation, which is really what character capitalism is. FA Hayek said that capitalism is an ever expanding system of increased cooperation among strangers. Big thing there is strangers. So when I was in. And the thing that really gets me about this is the atm, I mean, you know, I mean, I grew up in slow times, so ATMs are really, really exciting to me. And we were in Vienna, we were at the soccer hotel, very famous for the soccer tour. And I came down to the concierge and I said, is there an ATM here? Of course he knew what I meant. He says, yes. You come out the front, walk down two blocks till you get to McDonald's, cross the street. And the ATM is right between Starbucks and the Apple store. I go there, they ask you, you know, language, okay? They ask you, currency you put in your card. Millions and millions of strangers cooperating with each other. I get my. And Babs is there. I turn to her and I say, what a world. What world? I love it. I mean, I love it. This is massive cooperation among strangers. Most of the world still you can only have cooperation among friends and family. Okay, finally, real quick. Opportunity. Opportunity. When you get this, you get massive opportunity, which leads to ingenuity, which leads to Peter's favorite subject, exponentials. And this is the energy system. So what you have to do now is that you have to put a barrier, the abundance barrier, between these two systems. And what you have to do is continually surround yourself with people who are energy people, which I call the abundance neighborhood, which goes like this, Goes like this. And this is what this is. This is what Joe is putting. He's putting together abundance. This is what Peter does with abundance. 360. We put together an abundance neighborhood. So this is my whole take on how going from the simple thing of getting past, present and future right in your mind and then understanding that the mechanism for growing the future is to actually increase the amount of energy in your life, reduce the amount of stuff, you end up in a neighborhood like this, and it's a good world. Thank you very much.

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