Why "Realistic" Goals Are Secretly Keeping You STUCK Feat. Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis

This room is filled with some very high achievers. Obviously, what I wanted to derive from you guys is just some insights, some how-tos, some what it is you do to just give them perspective and stuff. I carefully chose some questions. This one is, you're both masters at achieving what most people consider impossible. I mean, really, what you guys do, most people consider absolutely impossible. When something is considered impossible, how do you reframe it so it becomes possible in your mind, and how much of that is mindset?

I think impossible is not a fact, it's an opinion. When someone tells me it's impossible, I always just look at them. Anybody around me knows that they can't do that. That's part of it. But if they didn't know me, it's your opinion. Then they'll say, no, science shows. I say, yeah, and how many times has science showed something's impossible, now science shows it's possible? Things are impossible until somebody does it. And so I find that, you know, most of you are business people. You look at businesses and what does it take to make a business grow? It's not impossible to make a business grow. A business has been shrinking for a long time or it's been stuck. The real problem is always— the chokehold is always the psychology and the skills of the leader. Always. And 80% of that is psychology and 20% is the mechanics. Like, if you don't know how to read your financials and you're trying to fly the plane of your company, company, I mean, come on, you know, if all you do is go down, you look at profit loss and you see what it is and you have a beer either way, you either celebrate or you get depressed, you know, something, you know, you're gonna be in trouble, right? But if you have the skill sets, that's one thing, but you can get any skill set if you have the psychology. And anytime a business is not growing, it is not because it's impossible, it's because they aren't innovating, and they're not innovating because they're believing it's impossible. I mean, if we all know what does it take to transform, obviously help people, it takes 3 things to create a breakthrough in anything, in your personal life, in your business anywhere. You need a strategy, but that's not the first place you should look, and it's the first place all of us look. Me too. It's our inherent thing. You wanna lose weight? Well, how do I do it? I wanna grow my business, how do I do it? It's instinctive, we've been trained to think that way, but the problem is the how-to is usually not that complex. I mean, come on, 70% of America, what, 75% of America now is overweight? Is that because it's so complex how to be fit and strong? Right, you know, only the 1% know the answers, they hide it from you. You have to work your ass off to not hear what it takes. Right? And so, you know, I remember I went to this— I went to a TED Med Center and I watched about 12 doctors one after another get up and do these stories about how we could just get patients to take their medications and trying to figure out the whole thing. And I was just looking at them going, you're all talking about strategy and you've forgotten psychology. Because strategy is wonderful. I'm a strategist. I spent my whole life figuring out strategies. As we both know, a strategy could save you a decade. Right? In business, strategy could save you, you know, it could make the difference between success and failure. But most people have strategies available, or they could get them, or you could create them. But the problem is you got a story, and your story is why it isn't working. And the story is, I've tried what? Everything.

What?

Everything. If you tried everything, you'd be fit, right? If you tried everything, you'd be profitable. If you tried everything, you'd be there. But people say it, you know, I'm big-boned. That's what I used to say. I'm still big-boned, but I'm 38 pounds lighter than I was 25 years ago, and I've never gained it back, right? When I was big-boned, that was my story. All the good ones are gone. That's why I'm not in a relationship. Or they're gay and I'm not, or I'm gay and they are, or whatever the story is. There's always a story. And what I tell people is, you know, if you can just divorce the story of your limitation and marry the truth of your unlimited capacity, then the whole game changes. But it's hard to do that because when you're in your story, you don't even realize it. So you need a third piece for a breakthrough, and that's really what my life's about, which is changing people's states. 'Cause in a different state, we're different people. Can mean people be nice? Yes or no?

Yes.

Yes or no?

Yes.

Of course they are when they're in a nice state. Can nice people be mean? Sure, they get in a mean state. So really learning to train yourself to be in an ideal state where the best of you comes out for yourself, for your family, for your mission, for your world, for your coworkers, to me, that's one of the most important decisions in life to make. If you ask me, out of all the people I've met, all the things I've seen, What creates a magnificent life? Everybody has goals and dreams that are different. Some people want a picket fence. Some want to make a billion dollars. Some want to have this huge breakthrough in technology. Some people want to write beautiful poetry. Whatever is right for people is what I want them for themselves. I don't want them to be like me or you or anybody else. I want them to have their dream, but to have it, you need 2 skills. You need, number one, to have the science of achievement. It's a science. You have to know how to take your vision and make it real. And most of the people in this room have already figured that out. And this guy sure as hell has, and you have, and I have. So most of us know, and we can all refine our skills in that area, but we know how to take what we dream about, make it real. And if you don't, you can learn from somebody who does. You know, the simplest thing is get crazily hungry for something. We all know when you get so hungry, so desirous, your brain starts coming up with answers. And then it's massive action but effective execution, which is all modeling, which is, I assume, what this is about. Find the best example, Compress the time. Let someone else take 20 years to figure it out. You do it in 2 weeks or 2 months or whatever the period is. We should all be standing on the shoulders of the people around us instead of reinventing the wheel. And then there's this thing called grace. You work your ass off, you're totally focused, you're trying to serve something larger than yourself, and you really are executing what works. You need a little grace. You might want to call it luck if you prefer, God, the universe, but it's there. And we can all achieve. But I think the more important skill, if you ask me, is to have an extraordinary life, is the art of fulfillment. And it's an art. It's not a science. Because there's a science to making money. I don't care who you are. If you do certain things, you're going to have too much financial stress. You do other things, you're going to have an abundance. There's a science. There's a science to your body. Everyone here is biochemically different, different genome, but there are certain fundamental patterns that if you and I follow them, you're going to have tons of energy and feel good. And if you break them, you're going to feel terrible. You're gonna pay the price and have low energy or disease. But fulfillment is an art. What's gonna fulfill you is different than the other person next to you. You're not gonna learn that from anybody else. And you gotta find it, 'cause success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. And I get those phone calls all the time for the multi-billionaire entrepreneur or politician or business person or the person just won their Academy Award and they're depressed and they can't tell anybody. 'Cause they got all their goals, but they're not fulfilled 'cause they really don't have that sense of meaning in their life. They went for something and they got it. They achieved. And if you doubt this, what I'm saying is relevant to you or us or anyone, just think about about a year and what, a month ago, we lost what I consider to be a national treasure, Robin Williams. How many of you loved Robin Williams? Look around the room. Keep your hands up.

Look.

All of us.

And most of you didn't know him. Almost every— anywhere you go in the world, people love Robin Williams. By the way, was he great at achievement?

Yes.

Oh my God, that guy. He said he wanted to make— become a great comedian. He did that. I want to make the world laugh. He did. I want to make my own TV show. He did. I want to have the number one TV show. He did it. I want to make movies. He did it. I want an Academy Award for not being funny. Not his skill set. Drama. And he did it. I want a beautiful family. He did it. And then he hung himself. Make everybody happy but yourself. Not a good plan. So if I had a gift to give you, it would be maybe make a different decision. And the decision is that no matter what happens in your life, you're gonna live in a beautiful state. A beautiful state. And that could be happy, that could be grateful, that could be being generous. Those are all beautiful states, aren't they?

Yeah.

It could be curious. It could be fun, it could be playful. You're not limited to one state, but it's different than suffering. And most people's suffering and all suffering I've ever seen, I've traveled to 100 countries, I've dealt with presidents of countries and presidents of businesses, CEOs, I've dealt with people in prison, I've dealt with, you name it, average people. Suffering always comes because you're obsessed about something related to you. You can only be depressed if you're focusing on yourself. You say, no, I'm depressed because it's my kids and they're not doing well.

No, you're depressed because you feel you've failed your kids.

It's about you.

It's about how you think, what you should have done or shouldn't have done, or what someone did to you or didn't do to you in the past or the future, which don't even exist. So I have a simple goal. My goal is help people make a decision that says, I don't know what's going to happen. You might get a divorce, even though you don't think so. You might find a member of your family with cancer. You might have your house get burned down or have a tornado go by. And if you live in the same place that happens every 2 years and you move back, we should talk. Some people seem to do that for some reason. You can't control those things. I can't control those things. I don't want those to happen to you or anybody I love or anybody who's even a stranger to me, but they're going to happen. True?

Amen.

Not positive thinking bullshit, just the truth. So if that's gonna happen, I say make a decision now that says, I'm gonna live in a beautiful state and I'm gonna find beauty in whatever life brings me, because life is too short not to. I see a little buddy over here named Sean. I remember when I got a phone call From the Make-A-Wish Foundation. They have a young man that's about to die and he wants to meet you. And he came to the seminar and then I took him out afterwards. And at the time, if he coughed too much, they said, they said, you can't grab him. I said, I want to take him across the fire. They said, take him across the fire? If he coughs, he'll break a rib. I said, I'll be really gentle. We're gonna do this thing. And he did it. And then afterwards I sat down with him. I said, man, I don't have the answers, but if your body is You're just coughing and it's gonna make you break a rib. Your body is so acid. I said, you should get alkaline. Let me put you together with a doctor. How many years ago was that? I'm 36. I was 19. You were 19 and you're now 36. I like seeing you here still, brother. Give him a hand. He's a beautiful man. But Sean, what made me think of Sean is Sean lives in a beautiful state. He could be bitching and complaining and whining. What does he do? His whole life is not about himself. That's why he's so happy. He doesn't live in himself. He lives outside himself serving things he loves. He still takes care of himself and he's funny as shit and he likes to seduce women and things like I can't talk about right now, but—

I'm married.

Oh, you're married now? Okay, well, good. I'm glad to hear it. It's about frickin' time, all right, John? It's good to see you grew up. Now, the bottom line is this young man over here who now is At a different stage of life. He's always been who he is. I think he lived because he lived for more than himself. I'm sure he felt pain, but we only suffer when we think about what's being done to us or what people are going to think or what they should have done or hadn't done. And you can't control that stuff anyway. I mean, why be pissed when people are going to do that? Are people going to be mean? Yes or no?

Yes.

Are people going to be unfair and unjust? Yes or no? Are people going to be beautiful and generous? Yes or no? You just never know when that shit's gonna happen, so might as well enjoy yourself along the way. And I suggest today, if you want, if there's any gift I came by to give you, it's to tell you what you know already, but get you to make a decision about it. To actually decide, I'm gonna live in a beautiful state. That doesn't mean I don't get angry or pissed or tired or whatever. You know, suffering arises and you end it the moment you go, holy shit, I'm thinking about me. If I do this, I'll always be suffering. The human mind is always looking for what's wrong. The human brain is not designed to make you happy. It's designed to make you survive. Happiness, that's your job. And you only get it if you draw a line in the sand. That's how it's going to be. And I can tell you, the few people that do it, I know a few people that have done it, they have magnificent lives. And when you're in a beautiful state, the best ideas come in. This man lives in a beautiful state. Every time I talk to him, I love seeing Peter. Peter's just always on fire about something. But notice, you know, he's doing unbelievably well. There's nothing wrong with that. But almost everything he's doing is about more than himself, and so that's why he feels so alive. He's not suffering an ounce. He's in ecstasy. He's not lucky. He's living life a certain way. It's a beautiful way. I'm honored to have you as a friend.

Thank you, brother.

Wow.

Now say something better than that. I mean, like, let's, let's really see how good you are here, man.

Oh God, you know, it's got to be going through my mind. There's no way to follow this. What the hell was the question?

He doesn't have to say anything. Truthfully, he doesn't have to say anything. He lives this shit. I'm just telling you what he lives. He really does. I'm not saying that to blow smoke. This guy lives it. If you meet this man— how many met this man before and he was in a wonderful state? Let me see a show of hands. I don't think I've ever seen him not in a wonderful state. I've seen him have some painful, challenging places, but he doesn't stay there. And look what he's able to create because of it. He has a 9-year-old boy who's on fire. He's on fire to light the world on fire with what's possible. It's a beautiful thing. I honor you.

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 joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So the contribution I'll make— thank you, Tony. And I think it was about impossible and mindset and so forth.

Yeah.

Is the reality is there is very little that's impossible, period. It just is. And your mindset, as soon as you say something is impossible, then you shut down every possibility for solving it, right? And we all know this. And the challenge is that it's really hard not to be in that state because we get thrown stuff all the time. And what I want to share with you is an experiment, which is to say, okay, not only how do I make it not— how do I make it possible, but how do I actually go 10 times bigger? And you've heard me speak about this, you know, moonshot thinking, bold thinking, whatever the case, whatever terminology you want to give it. And most of us in our life are trying to make a 10% improvement. And we know this. This is, I'm trying to increase my revenues by 10%. I'm trying to increase my— reduce my sales by 10%, save 10% more of the, you know, the lands out there, whatever it truly is. We all have this sort of beaten into us by life and by the rest of the universe that you can make these small incremental improvements. But the fact of the matter is That there are those in the world that go 10 times bigger. And you, every one of us can be that. And as soon as you say, I want to not only solve this thing, but go 10 times bigger in my work, in the things— and can I say this? In something that you're truly passionate about, not just about earning a little bit more money. I mean, it really should be in something that you care truly about that is— Bigger than yourself that is impacting the world. As soon as you try and go 10 times bigger, 3 magical things happen. Number one, even if you have no idea how to solve it, no idea how to get there, you'll be amazed at what you come up with. And what's interesting is our legacy, our past anchors us to where we are today, and you have to let go of that. You truly have to let go of all the stuff in your past, what you thought you'd done, all of the infrastructure that you've built to let yourself go. When Elon Musk built Tesla, the reason Tesla was such an amazingly better car is he didn't have 100 years of Detroit to hold onto. He started with a clean sheet of paper and imagined what could be. The second thing is when you try and go 10 times bigger versus 10% bigger, it's 100 times the value proposition. And it's never 100 times more expensive or 100 times harder. And so you get this increased capability. And then the third thing is when you try and go 10 times bigger, to solve a problem 10 times bigger, you've got to reinvent stuff. You have to actually go and figure out, okay, I have no idea how I'm going to solve that, but you're going to start to reinvent things. So when Eric and I were working on asteroid mining, We had to reinvent, we had to have so much computational power on board the spacecraft, we had to come up with brand new sensors and hyperspectral and mid-wave IR that didn't exist, had never been licensed, because these spacecraft were gonna be operating at 200 million miles away, and that forced us to come up with new kinds of capabilities that were not currently possible. And you'll be amazed what those capabilities that you create in your business, in your life, enable you to do. And so there's this massive benefit, this payoff, this dividend that comes from expanding your mind and not being anchored to the past. And so I think that there are very few things that are truly impossible. I think that impossible is a state of mind. And I'll say one other thing. The people in your life are part of that anchoring. And so how do you anchor yourself with a new set of people? I'm looking at my dear friend Naveen Jain here with whom we've opened up XPRIZE India and are really working on solving women's and girls' issues in India and providing abundant drinking water in India. I mean, so how do you surround yourself with amazing people who live in this state of anything is possible? I'm blessed at XPRIZE, at Singularity University, at HLI and PRI. I live that constantly. And so how do you do that? Where are you doing that? What is your nothing is impossible community?

Here.

Yeah, it is here. It is truly here. And so that's really critically important because once you get into that mindset, then you start freeing yourself from the bullshit that other— that you tell yourself and people tell you because We are living in a world where constant amazing miracles happen. The other thing, because I'll put my commercial into this, stop watching the news.

Yeah.

Stop watching the news. You could not pay me enough to have the Crisis News Network or the constantly negative news network, whatever you call CNN, pollute my mind. Really, I have social networks. I have Google filters and so forth. I was just telling Arianna about this, and hopefully she'll do this. I want on the front page of Huffington Post, I said, I want a slider where I can control the percentage of positive news stories.

Yes.

Right? How would you like that instead of— because right now it's 10 to 1 negative to positive, and that pollutes your mind. And we heard an amazing presentation this morning. I apologize. Who was the gentleman who was talking about that, talking about a few minutes of negative news in the morning?

Sean.

Thank you. Yeah, Sean. It's true. It's like, why would you possibly invest in the world and in the life and all these things if the world is falling apart? If the crisis news network is showing you airplane accident, airplane accident, airplane accident. What the problem is that the news networks never tell you there was no school shooting today at this school. You know, or there was this airplane actually flew LA to New York and actually made it and everybody survived. That's not news. And so we get this disproportionate view. And so our minds are constantly— the mindset you have when you watch the negative news is awful. Not that it's not going on. It's not that there's this amazing hardship and lives that are on the precipice of hunger and death around the world. But the world is getting better at an extraordinary rate and you can make a difference in it. And there is no problem. There is no problem we cannot solve, period. End of statement.

Awesome.

All right.

There's so many questions here, but there's only so much time. So since both of you are 2 of the greatest achievers and biggest thinkers, at least that I know, In the history of humanity. Well, honest to God, you know what? No, in a very serious way, I, you know, it's funny, I can't imagine there will ever be another Tony Robbins. You are a freaking freak of nature.

That's true.

A force of nature. And I mean, one of the most amazing things, like when I went to Date with Destiny, which you're doing, I don't know if you're gonna turn that into a documentary, a movie, whatever, because Just seeing you process people where you— you know, Tony, if you've never seen it, he'll ask, how many of you came here, you're thinking about committing suicide? And literally, I don't know, anywhere from 6 to 12 or whatever, I don't know the amount, stand up and you literally take that shit on. I don't know another human being that could— I miss it. I mean, it's mind-boggling and you flip it. You take a person in a horrible hopeless state and they're coming to your seminar maybe as a last ditch effort, but there's that hope. And you just channel it, but then you share that with freaking thousands of people live on the spot. I mean, and that's just one of like hundreds of things that you do that are mind-boggling.

Everybody in the audience is thinking, there's no way, there's no way he can do this, there's no way you can solve— how can you possibly— and then boom, it's done, you do it. It is truly a blessing to have you on the planet.

It is, it's a blessing.

I mean, like, were you born this way? It's a stupid question, but like, I'm saying it for other people. Like, you built yourself to be Tony Robbins.

Could we publish your gene sequence?

I was a kid from Azusa who had no certainty, who— we had no food and had to be in charge because my mother was a little crazy. And I promised myself that my future family would never go through this. And so I decided I hated suffering because I experienced it and I wanted to end it. So I read 700 books in the area of human development, psychology, and physiology when I was still 17, 18, 19 to 21, 22 years old. I was saying I was going to read a book a day. I didn't do that, but I'm still immersed. I went to every event. I listened to everything. I got immersed. But when it comes to people, I've been doing now— I've been doing this for 38 years, and I've been with 50 million people and 100 countries. So there's nothing I haven't seen at this point when somebody stands up. So it's beautiful. It happens different every time. It comes through me. And I really believe in grace. I really believe it's there, but I prepare at a level that most people would never dream of. And I also know that there's— whatever human beings feel, we are not our feelings. We are not our patterns. Those are things we might identify with, but we're not that. And so when I see a pattern and it doesn't work, I don't think the person's broken. I don't think anybody's broken. I'm not here to fix people, but I am here to break up the patterns that don't work. And I've never lost a suicide, knock on wood. And, you know, thousands for 38 years, and we follow up 2 years later, 3 years later, we're making—

That's amazing.

They're making a documentary right now, A Date with Destiny, that's coming to Sundance for January. So you'll see all these people and their lives change and so forth. But what's the question?

Well, so the question was, so how do you both deal with or think about or even channel, like, extreme levels of stress, adversity, criticism, public opinion, or failure? Because both of you have had, you know, things that just flat out didn't work, but you're quite—

you're public figures.

And how do you handle it? Or deal with it or think about it?

I really let go of criticism really fast. I actually, I might sort of process it in the moment to try and figure out is there something that I truly can learn from there or valid, but I let go of it really fast. And so if I'm in a fight, a personal fight or whatever, it's like, Time is so precious. Time is so precious. Failure? God, I've had a wonderful series of failures. I built a launch vehicle company that we won this huge contract and couldn't finance it and had to close it down. I've built a multitude of companies. Luckily, a third have been great, a third have been Okay. And the third have been life lessons. But it's— I have to believe that what I'm doing in my heart of hearts is the right thing to do. And if I'm doing the very best I can and I believe it is something— because when I take a dollar from somebody as a donation or as an investment, I— and those of you who are in the room here who have supported me or invested in me know that— it's like It's me. It's like, you got my cell phone number and I care and I am so, so committed to making, you know, to delivering. I will do everything I possibly can. So I need to know that for myself. And I can sleep at night if something fails, but I know I gave it everything I possibly could. And there are also those times where shit is hitting, you know, it's like nosedive. And I will stop everything else I'm doing and I will go laser-like on that.

Mm-hmm.

100%, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And I will do everything humanly possible. And it takes that a lot of times. It absolutely takes that a lot of times. So I mean, that's for me.

Awesome. Thank you.

I would say, you know, I love to light people up. Since I was a little kid, I love to light people up. And so early on, I was wanting to make everybody happy all the time. And then I, you know, I come in this package. I was 5'1 and then next thing I know, I'm 6'7. I grew 10 inches in a year because I had a tumor in my brain. And I didn't even know it. I grew, so I'm big, and I'm quiet and understanding and have a hard time expressing my true feelings, so it makes it difficult for people to understand what I'm really like. No, I'm fairly loud and intense. I can hear it. Thank you very much. But what happened for me in the beginning is I was trying to make everybody happy all the time, and then I just began to realize not everybody wants to be happy. And gradually I began to realize Opinions are a dime a dozen, but impact is all that matters to me. So you know when you've had the impact, and you don't need anybody else to tell you, and you don't need somebody else to acknowledge you, you know, put stars on your chart. When you do what's right, you know it, and no one can take that from you. They can take away anything you have, but they can't take away who you become. And you become something unique when you find a way to grow and you find a way to give, and you do that consistently, it creates an extraordinary life. So I'd lie to say that I want people— I don't want people to hate me or dislike me, but it wouldn't be accurate to say I don't care. But I don't care enough to change what I'm doing if what I'm doing is valuable. And I think that as far as failure is concerned, oh my God, there's so many failures, but I just don't hold it that way. And it's not a technique or being positive, it's just being intelligent. Failure is education if you use it. If you learn something, it's not a failure. If you don't learn anything, then it's failure. I'm curious, But if you learn something, I mean, how many of you in this room have had something happen in your life that was horrific? You hated it. You'd never want to go through it again. You'd never want somebody you care about to go through it. But looking back on it 5, 10 years later, you say, I'm so glad I went through that because it made me so much stronger, or so much smarter, or made me care so much more. Who can relate? I'm curious. Right? So if that's true, then, you know, why not adopt the philosophy that life is not happening to me, it's happening for me? And that everything's happening for me, even what I thought was failure, and now my job is to Figure out where's the benefit and use it, use it for greater good. So I could probably list unlimited failures, but I would be insincere because I don't really look at them as failure. And that's not because I'm positive, it's just because I work my ass off to figure out what can I learn from that, how can I use that. And I'd like to make people happy, but I've also learned in business, like, I fire customers, man. I was like, if I find someone that's an asshole, I don't need them. It's a privilege to do business with us because we will more than deliver times 10. I'm curious, And so I teach my team, and it's so rare we have to do it anymore, but you know, you fire a customer and you say, listen, we're not going to be able to meet your needs clearly, because are there people out there that no matter what you do, they're going to be unhappy? Yes or no?

Yes.

Why are you doing business with them and taking the life energy of your organization from it? I get rid of them so fast, and then they always want back in, and I never let them back. Never. And then they become a public hanging, and other people go, well, this is how you play here. Because in the world of the internet, we've lost any form of kindness. People say things that are the most harsh, horrific things. I'm not talking about to me. I remember reading one time, we were in Las Vegas, and my wife likes— what's the woman who's a singer there? She was there for so long. What the heck's her name?

Celine Dion.

Celine Dion, thank you. And so my wife went online and she was looking at one of her videos, and underneath it, it's like, you've You lost that child because you put your career first. I mean, the stuff people write, and all it is is people who feel insignificant who would never have the guts to say something to your face, but we've created an environment where it's tolerated. And so I think reversing that is really important. You have to define your environment, your business, your world, your family, because we all get what we tolerate. I won't tolerate it. I'll give my soul To a stranger, but I won't tolerate somebody being abusive to any member of my team or to people in my audience or to me, certainly not to my family. And you get what you tolerate. You got to decide. And you also get what you tolerate in yourself. And I think if you can look at what you're tolerating in yourself and say, I'm not going to tolerate that anymore in myself, then it's easier to lead other people. If you're just telling other people you won't tolerate, they'll look at you and go, yeah, you don't tolerate, but look how you are. You don't have to be perfect. But people see how, you know, you don't have to know who I am. You don't have to watch my lips move. You can see how my feet have moved for 38 years. That's Tony Robbins, right? That's probably the best signature you can give. That's the brand that you put out there. It's the way you live.

The thing you said, the line which I love, life is not happening to me, it's happening for me. Is that like, you know, I mean, is part of that a trick you plan yourself, or do you truly believe everything You are able to take that as ingredients of, this is all happening for me, the shittiest, most horrible, most horrendous thing from diseases to suffering. I mean, that's an important line and I'd like to—

It's not just a line. There's a woman that I just saw that I'd met 15 years ago and she just showed up at my seminar and she was suicidal because one of her daughters had gotten sick and she brought her to the hospital and the doctor said she's fine. She brought her home and the child died. And she was going to kill herself, and she had 3 other kids. So I really truly had to work with her. And I remember working with her back then. I looked it up because we have all the stuff I've ever done on film. And I asked her, I said, what are your spiritual beliefs? And she said, I believe everything happens for a reason, all that stuff. I said, so you're going to abandon what you believe spiritually because life didn't turn out the way you want right now? She says, no, no, no. I said, if it's the truth, it'll be the truth when it's painful. It'll be the truth when it's pleasurable. So I would lie to you to say, oh, I jump up and go, oh, this is happening for me right now, bitch. I don't do that. I think, what the hell's happening? And then I catch myself and I go, there's some good in this. And my core belief, my real core belief underneath that is everything I've ever been able to help people with is because I faced some portion of it. If I, you know, have to face a divorce, I decided I needed to go through a divorce and I didn't want to. No one takes it pick your partner after 14 years. It was the most horrific thing in the world. But I thought, if I can figure out how to do this elegantly, intelligently, lovingly, no matter what the other party's like, then I can help anybody else. If I— you know, I've had several businesses over the decades that were, you know, near the verge of bankruptcy. I had a resort in Fiji and there was a coup. You know, it's kind of inconvenient. You know, and I'm losing $1 million a month, you know, and it's like— and I didn't have $1 million a month to be losing at that time, just because I wanted to create this great place for people. But it's like in the midst of all those elements, you know, I'd come back and say, if I can figure this out, I can help any other business. So almost all my skills have come because of something I had to solve in me or help someone else solve. And my view is if I can figure it out for me, I can help millions of people. And so that makes the problem inspiring, as opposed to the problem being, why'd it happen to me? Because we're all going to experience problems. I mean, the only thing that we all have in common is everyone here is going to experience Severe pain. I don't care how rich you are, money is not going to create immunity to pain. Suffering, you can get immunity from, from the decision I told you about. But we're all going to have problems. We're all going to have challenges. The only difference is what the hell are you going to do with them? And if we just deal with our own problems, they get really boring. And some people need problems to have drama in their life to cover the fact they're not doing anything. But I think it's much more interesting to solve it and move on and help other people do the same because you've actually done it, not because you talk about it.

Yeah, gotcha. What I love is Robin Sharma, who we did a call with, he's in the room. He has his thing, The 5 AM Club. A guy named Hal Elrod wrote a book, Miracle Morning. You do priming in the morning. I'd love to hear what you guys feel are your best rituals or what it is that you are doing that just massively impacts you to be as effective as both of you are. If there's something simple or something that you just do that makes your life work, starting— be it a morning ritual or just anything that people here could do.

Does watching cartoons with my kids at 7 AM count?

No, that may be accurate.

I mean, it's— for me, it's anchored in My desiring to do— to make the impossible stuff I set out happen, right? It's anchored in this infinity challenge. I'm never bored. These problems I've taken on with an amazing group of people are all sort of infinite and there's no Getting there. So, when they're— for me, they're my guiding stars. So, it's like, okay, what am I going to do right now to move the game forward this day? You know, I wish I could say I was a great meditator or yoga person or so forth, and that will come, but not right now. For me, it's just— it's dedication to the child inside me and what I care deeply about. Which is making this— making these succeed. And ultimately, it's trying to be clear about what I'm enjoying doing. It's surfing the stuff I love versus this is work, I'm probably not good at this work, who else can I find that can do it, and doing the stuff that I truly love better and doing more of. more of that. I mean, it's— there's nothing sophisticated there. Tony, what do you got?

Well, I think anyone who succeeds has something that they aspire to. There's a mission, there's a direction, there's a desire, and they bring it up regularly. And you do that, even though you say you don't do it in a sophisticated way, attacking the human genome and figuring out how to get meteors to to feed you what you need is a fairly large vision, somewhat sophisticated. Mine's really simple. Mine's simple. I believe that the body is the place that drives the mind the fastest. You can go inside your head all day long trying to resolve things and make excuses or freak out, but I learned early on in my life that in order to make myself do things, I had to trigger this body to feel strength and to know that when I say something, I mean it. And so I have a simple ritual that's actually enjoyable. It may not sound enjoyable, but it is now, which is I get up every morning and I'm privileged to have multiple homes. So if I'm in those homes, one of the homes I have a river, the rest of them I have cold plunges. And I go into a 56-degree temperature just for about 60 seconds. I jump straight in, or I was just in Sun Valley, the river's 38 degrees, a little bit cooler. And I took my nephew and said, you're about to learn how to start your day. And I bring all my friends when they come. They all have to do this. They're like, holy shit, I know when I go see Tony, he's got something for me to do of this nature. But every cell, every nerve in your body explodes, and it's phenomenal for your lymph system, phenomenal for your health. But it also is just a simple discipline that says, I say it, it happens. I'm going to say I'm going to do this, I do it. And I've done it so much, it's there, and it's invigorating. And then I do, as you said, something I call priming. You wake up and you're 22 hours off your normal time zone, and you've got to get up and take care of 10,000 people for 3 days and nights for 14 to 15 hours. You don't always wake up feeling, wow, is this the coolest thing in the world? Some days you wake up and go, what universe is my body in? And so I do my physical ritual, but then I also do this priming. And priming for me is just, I don't hope that I'm going to show up at my best. Create a state for it. Most of you know probably the principle of priming. You know, you can— they've proven it in so many scientific studies. We all think we make our decisions consciously, when much of our decision-making that we think is conscious is being made by contextual environmental manipulation that we're not even thinking about. One study, they took some people and they hired actors that would go to 100 people, and they'd walk up to you, and they were trained to do the exact same look, same expression, and they'd say, would you hold this? They hand you a coffee cup and They reach in their pocket and grab their phone, put them back, say, thank you very much. They just kind of assume the action. And they would do it the same way, same facial expression, 100 people one way, 100 people the other. And what was the only difference? Cold iced coffee versus hot coffee. An hour later, they come back with some people, different people, who've got little caps on. They're saying, listen, we'll give you $10 if you'll give us 2 minutes, if you'd read this 3-paragraph story and give us 2-question answers. And they read this little story, everyone reads the same story, and at the end they ask them, how would you describe the main character? What are they like as a person? 80% of the people that got warm coffee said they're warm, they're generous, they're loving. But warm is always one of the language patterns. 80%, like clockwork, of people who got the iced coffee, same story, say that they're very cold, that they had— they were using language like being obsessed or being about themselves, selfish, things of this nature. I give you dozens of So what I do each morning is I do a breathing pattern. It's an explosive breathing pattern that I learned in India, breathing your breath in and exploding it out, you know, from the gut out the nose. And I do that 3 sets of 10, pause, 3 sets of 10, pause, 3 sets of 10. So it alters my state. And I just do 3 things for 10 minutes because I have this deal with myself: if you don't have 10 minutes for yourself, you don't have a life. Who's with me on this? So I said, you know what, I don't, I don't need to have 20-minute, 30-minute, 40-minute meditations. I want 10 minutes, and I don't know me to meditate. I don't know if I'm gonna meditate. I don't— to not think, I don't know too many people can do that. And I don't even know that I want to not freaking think, you know. So I thought what I want to do is I want to focus on the emotions that will cause me to be the better me. And the 2 emotions that most people are messed up by are anger and fear. And when you're grateful, you can't be angry. Try to be grateful and angry simultaneously, it'll never work. And you can't be fearful when you're grateful. So when I look at people, almost always they're reacting out of fear or they're reacting out of anger. It's some version of those 2. So gratitude to me is the antidote. So I spend 3 minutes, just 3 minutes, and I think of 3 things I'm grateful for, 3 people, 3 situations, but I step into it. I don't remember the roller coaster over there riding it. I put myself in the front seat going over the edge so I feel the moment, and I make sure one of the 3 things I'm grateful for is something really simple, like the wind on my face, or something beautiful like my child's smile. And the reason I do that is because I remember interviewing some of the astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and these guys. And most of you probably know, as you can imagine, to be an astronaut— this man knows— I mean, to aspire to do that, and then to go through the thousands of people and be picked, and then to actually go to the moon and stand on the moon and look back and see that picture we've all seen, that blue-green Earth. I mean, You imagine, and then you come home and what happens? There's a ticker tape parade and you shake the president's hand. And now what the hell do you— you're 32. What the hell do you do for the rest of your life? And you know what? If you know the story of many of these astronauts, most of them had some major emotional challenges, right? Some abused alcohol, some drugs, and they had a real rough time because they forgot to find adventure in a smile. They thought the only way to go to the moon. So I train myself to make sure not just the big beautiful things that are part of my life, but the little things. And so I feel that for 3 minutes, then I do 3 minutes of a blessing, corny as it may sound. I imagine life, God, energy coming into my body, healing every muscle, every nerve in my body, strengthening everything that needs to be strengthened, bringing the best of me, my passion, my love, my generosity, my creativity, my humor, my love. And then I see any problem that needs to be solved just being solved.

That's great.

Because otherwise I tend to think I got to do it all. And then once I feel that fully and that energy comes through me and back through me multiple times, then I do a circle of my intimate family, my kids, my wife, my friends. This little character over here is one of my list. And I just circle out all the way out to my clients and I send that same energy to them. And I imagine, as corny as it sounds, they're being healed. They're getting what they need energy-wise. They're having the life that they deserve and seeing it multiplied. So I do that for 3 minutes. And the last 3 minutes are my 3 to thrive. I think of 3 specific outcomes that matter to me, and I don't think about achieving them. I see, feel, and experience them as done, and I see the impact that it has. I see people's lives touched. I see the joy. I feel it as done, and I feel grateful. And it's 10 minutes, but honestly, it usually goes 15 or 20 because I'm having a damn good time.

Awesome.

But by having a 10-minute walk, there's no excuse not to do it, and I do it every day, and I don't hope I'm going to And then what happens is you're primed. You literally, you see things through a different set of filters. You make decisions through different filters. And also think of it, most people are wired for stress. They're wired for frustration. They're wired for feeling lonely. And they got a highway to pissed off and they've got dirt roads to happiness. So I decided I'm going to wire myself for happiness. I wasn't born that way. I had— my view is I have to change the whole earth to be happy.

Yeah.

Today, that's different for me. Now I can just wake up and be happy because I've wired myself in a different way neurologically. And then I show other people how to do this as well.

I want to talk in the second part now about a bold and abundant mindset. And I want to start that with a video. My goal here is for you to up your game. My goal here is for you to think at a level that's uncomfortable. My goal is to have you think At, as Dan and Joe would say, a 10x level or a 100x level? How are you gonna touch a billion people on this planet? How are you gonna take on the world's biggest problems and solve them? So let's watch this video and then come back.

The actual moonshot is wonderful and It was inspirational, poetic, beautiful, involved great technical challenges, genuine heroism. It brought the world together. But think about the Polynesian islander on the dugout canoe deciding one day they were gonna go that way. No one had ever been that way before. No one even knew if there was anything that way before. It was amazing and it changed the world.

People can set their minds to magical things. seemingly impossible ideas, and then through science and technology bring them to reality. And that then sets other people on fire that other things that look impossible might be accomplishable.

Galileo is such a hero, you know, in thinking big. And what he represents to me is both curiosity and wonder that humanity had, that he had, that pushed him and drove himself to invent and work on the first telescopes that allowed us to see the moon. And here we are.

These aviation pioneers were figuring it out as they went. as they went. No one really knew how to build an airplane, right? No one knew how to fly an airplane. It was amazing and crazy and wonderful, and they wanted to explore.

Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it.

He said, because it is there.

There's so many challenges in the world, and you could feel daunted by that, you know, and sort of oppressed by that, or you kind of say, How might we think differently about this?

Everyone else in the world is working on that next 10%. If you can be the one that delivers that 10 times improvement, you have a chance to really change things.

If you want cars to run at 50 miles per gallon, fine, you can retool your car a little bit. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas for 500 miles, you have to start over.

You need a lot of courage in this work, and you need You need a lot of persistence. One of the things that's really critical is not only having the courage to keep trying every day or thinking big, even if you don't really 100% believe it's possible, like you might think this might be possible, have the courage to try. That's how the greatest things have happened.

You don't spend your time being bothered that you can't teleport from here to Japan because there's a part of you that thinks it's impossible. Moonshot thinking is choosing to be bothered by that.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things.

Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Humanity's progress has been a series of amazing, audacious things from the very small and personal up to the great, big, and grand. And we are a species of moonshots. And to me, that's like the really amazing, poetic, and inspirational thing.

I think our ambitions are a glass ceiling on what we can accomplish.

When you find your passion, you're unstoppable. You can make amazing things happen. It's been true through all of history.

I believe in the human spirit, and I believe that there are always going to be crazy people who will get out of bed I think that if we become afraid to take these great big risks, we stop inspiring people. We stop achieving things. And the biggest nightmare scenario is that we won't have what it takes to solve the really big challenges.

When Kennedy said that we would put a man on the moon, it's about the fact that he said it out loud. We don't know how to do this yet, and we're going to do it anyway. And that sends chills up everybody's spine. Because if that happens, what couldn't we do?

Yeah, it's great, huh? So the guy speaking in that video Is a good friend, Astro Teller. He's the head of Google, Google X. And I interviewed him at length for my next book, Bold, and talk about the fact that we're living in a world where you can take moonshots. And his ethos is so true that when you're trying to go 10% bigger, you're competing with everybody else trying to go 10% bigger. When you go 10x bigger, When you have the audacity to say that and try that, it inspires an amazing group of people to come by your side. And no one's competing with you there. And the question is, is it really 100-fold harder? And the chances are that it's not. So I also in Bold really drill down into what the 8 innovation principles are that Google uses, and then with Steven, look at how Lockheed Skunk Works maps onto that. So, you know, what are the most extraordinary companies and mindsets, and how do they work? So let me share with you these 8 principles. The first is focus on the user. Google's issue, and you'll see this again and again, is focus on the user. What does the user need? Pretty obvious, pretty direct. The second is open will win. I bet on Android over iOS for that one reason. Open will win. The ability for having billions of people to contribute to you instead of thinking that, oh, my 10,000 employees are the best and brightest in the world, there's no competition there. The second is ideas can come from everywhere or anywhere. The whole notion of crowdsourcing, right? We talk about that at Abundance 360, we talk about that at At XPRIZE, at HeroX. It's the fact that you can crowdsource solutions from around the world to solve your problems. Think big, start small. So at Singularity University, I constantly teach the students, start with a product that has the ability to earn $1 on day 1, but can impact 1 billion people in a decade. That's the, you know, think big, start small.

Yeah.

Never fail to fail. This is where big companies screw up, where they don't take risks, and you guys know that as entrepreneurs. Never fail to fail, the rapid experimentation. Launch early and iterate. My friend who's the CEO, Reid Hoffman, of LinkedIn says, if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've launched too late. And I believe that. When you look for striving for perfection, you miss the whole benefit of this hyperconnected world today. Be a platform, float all boats. And then finally, make it matter. Make it matter. Oh my God, make it matter. So in Bold, I talk about a concept that my good friend Salim Ismail coined, which is having a massively transformative purpose, an MTP. Do you have for yourself and for your company a massively transformative purpose that matters, that's going to attract people to work for you?

Right?

At XPRIZE, it's making the impossible possible or solving the world's grand challenges. So here's the 8. We'll talk about these a little bit more. My question for you is, what is the area of your business Where you should be going 10 times bigger rather than going 10% bigger? So I want you to reflect on that and think about that. I don't have time to do a session now, but ask yourself that question, please. So here's one of the first moonshot organizations, one of the first bold thinkers out there is Kelly Johnson, who in 1943 is called by the Defense Department and says, we're losing the war against Nazi Germany. And we need a jet plane. Never had a jet plane before. In 143 days, these guys did not design a jet plane, they delivered working hardware. You can't negotiate a contract in 143 days today. They also delivered the U-2, the SR-71. So the question is, how did they do this? And so In Bold actually looked at how Lockheed Skunk Works did this, compared this against Google X, and came up with some shared elements. And here they are. The first is having a compelling purpose or mission, an MTP that is uniquely yours. Google's is, you know, to categorize the world's information, right? And if someone else came up with that MTP, They say, no, that's Google's. So something uniquely that's yours that attracts the world's top people to come and work for you. The second that Kelly Johnson and Google X share is small teams, a passion around small teams. And this is the words from Kelly Johnson, the number of people connected to any project should be restricted in almost vicious manner. This is Jeff Bezos' 2-pizza rule.

Right?

Teams under 10, ideally 5 or 6. Extreme isolation. Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled. Because if you're trying to innovate inside your organization of even 100 people, let alone 5,000 people, and you're trying to do something that's disrupting your company, the entire immune organization is going to come out to you and say, That's a crazy idea. It can't be done. If you do it, it could put us out of business.

What are you doing?

Come on, stop it. And so actually taking your, that skunkworks inside your group and isolating it, right? It's Steve Jobs taking his Mac team to a different building with a pirate flag above. So how do you isolate your team? Authority and autonomy. The manager must have control of his program, create mutual trust and very close cooperation on a day-to-day basis. It's the notion that my team at PhD Ventures, Abundance 360, it's 5 group— it's a team of 5. It's like they're a self-managed company. They have the authority and the autonomy to go and run on their own. I learned that from a strategic coach, of course. It's all good things.

Flexibility.

Must provide a very flexible drawing. So when they designed The fighter jets and the U-2 and the SR-71, there was a drawing in the middle of the room where anybody could go and change the drawing. There was no sort of organizational hierarchy, I need to get this person's permission, this— you could go and change the drawing of that airplane. And so it provided immense flexibility, but also responsibility. Lives were at stake if you screwed up. But it allowed rapid iteration like never before. And then finally, testing and experimentation. Fail often, fail early, test, test, test. The next part of the book, I actually had a chance to sit down at length with a number of amazing people, Larry Page, Elon, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, studied their work, and came up with a series of 8, I'll share 6, thinking at scale strategies. Passion and purpose. You know, Elon said, I didn't go and build a car company and a rocket company to make money. I'm not crazy. It was like driven by my passion. Thinking at scale and experimentation. Jeff Bezos saying, you know, you need to have thick skin. If you're not failing often, if you're not experimenting on a monthly or daily basis, you're not going to innovate. Larry Page saying, you know, we need to be customer-centric. We need to be doing stuff and touching stuff that people use every day. Richard Branson saying, you know, we need to have risk mitigation. And again, you guys will all get copies of my book, but, you know, specifically, you know, entrepreneurs are ones who take risk but set it off to someone else. Long-term thinking. Jeff Bezos with Amazon is a perfect example of long-term thinking. And then finally, optimistic thinking, and Larry gives me credit on abundance often, but it's, you know, it's we have a reason to be tremendously optimistic in the world today. And having that mindset inside your organization and your company and your family and your life changes how you think about the future.

You talk about 4 forces that will solve our biggest problems: exponential technology, the DIY innovator, which is do-it-yourself, the techno-philanthropist, and the rising billion. So I'd like to have you describe what those things are.

You wanna grab?

Yeah, I'll jump in. So the DIY innovator is a great place to start. Because of the accelerating rate of technology, for the very first time probably in the history of the world, individuals can solve problems that previously only governments or large corporations could do. And I mean, Peter's XPRIZE is a fantastic example. It was won by Bert Rutan with a team of 26 people, 30 people, 30 people?

Yeah, thereabouts.

And $26 million. They put a man into space. This is something that took $300 billion, is my number correct?

A lot of money.

A lot of money for the US government privately, and here we are 30 years later and one guy and a small team of innovators is doing this. We're seeing the same kind of progress that Burt made in space opening up in the medical frontier. Craig Venter beat the United States government in the race for the human genome, and it was, I mean, it was a When NIH announced the Human Genome Project, they set aside $10 billion and they gave it 15 years. Venter, obviously he built on some of the work that came before, but he came in and did it in under a year relying on exponentially growing technology, a whole new generation of gene sequencing technology and a new highly technical approach called shotgun sequencing made possible because of the exponential growth rate of technology. And he accomplished what the government couldn't do, and he did it for $100 million, you know, in under a year. And that same technology that he spent $100 million on, here we are, this was in 2000, it's 11 years later, and it's $4,000 now. So anybody who wants to play in gene sequencing suddenly has access to the technology. This whole kind of change has empowered DIY individuals like never ever before. So individuals can actually take on grand challenges and really solve them for probably the first time in history.

I'll pick the rising billion as a force. People speak about the bottom billion, the bottom of the pyramid, and we've given them a different name in this book. I call them the rising billion, and it's because—

I'm gonna call them Fred, but we've decided the rising billion is better.

Yeah, it sounds better. It does sound better.

So if you, going back to what I commented earlier, that cell phone penetration is growing exponentially, roughly in Africa and the developing world. We expect it to exceed 70% by 2013. And an individual on a cell phone, if you think about it, has extraordinary capabilities. Not only the information access and the communications access, but if they're on an Android phone or the equivalent, they've got access to hundreds of thousands of applications. These applications, just think about GPS that you might have. If you went back 20 years to buy a GPS, would it cost you tens of thousands of dollars? Today it's free. In this book, we did a little estimate of pick 30 applications and go back and price those 30 applications that you now get for free on your Android phone and price it what it would cost you 20, 30 years ago, and it was well over a million bucks. So someone who's living on $2 a day literally has access to millions of dollars of capability on their cell phone. So they are a rising billion. In other words, they are rising in their ability to add to the economy, to consume, to produce. Another fact along this line, in 2010, we had about, of the world's population, 23% had access to the internet. By 2020, just, you know, 8-odd years from now, we're gonna have on the order of 2/3 of the world. We're gonna go from 2 billion people connected to about 5 billion people. 3 billion new minds are getting connected to the internet.

Wow.

What will these people want? What will they consume?

What will they produce?

What will they invent? So they're a powerful force for the world, and that's why we call them, not only Fred, but The rise of a billion.

You also, I mean, one of the things that Peter alluded to earlier is it's not just 3 billion new minds coming online. We have things like the Khan Academy. All of MIT's coursework is now online. There's massive educational opportunities. So not only are these people coming online, they're coming online and they're educating themselves. We learned kind of the hard way, one of the aid failures of the past 30 years has been just dump money into the third world and see what happens. And it was a massive, massive, massive failure. One of the lessons there is you have to empower the individuals. You gotta do it in-country. You gotta start at the bottom with their needs, their desires, and what they wanna do. These technologies are allowing these people to actually solve their own problems for the first time.

Yeah.

And their solutions, because a lot of the markets that they're being developed in are a little more, shall we say, pliable than say the rigid structures that are in America. So a lot of the solutions that are coming out of the third world are gonna be things that we need here in the first world. They're gonna be the things that save our asses here.

And they're also gonna be very cheap because that's all they can afford, and so we get to benefit. So for example, this year for the first time, there's a $35 Android tablet that is being sold and distributed in India, and now here in the US you can buy a $35 tablet if you want.

Why?

Not because we designed it for ourselves, but because it was designed for the rising billion, and we get the benefit of that.

Gotcha. You probably hear continuously how much your ideas and your writings and your speaking has been beneficial and encourages other people. How do you take that in? How do you interpret it when people come up and ask you for an autograph? I mean, to me, it's the weirdest thing in the world, and, you know, and I'm not a famous guy. It's just when I'll do seminars, people come up I do my best, like, I'm not a guru. I mean, you have no idea. I have plenty of personal problems and nothing special because I want people to actually feel that, hey, you can do so much more than you actually believe you can do. You're a guy that's a huge encourager. How do you take all of this stuff in? Because you put out— millions of people read your works.

The moment you think you're a master is the moment you become a beginner. I run an event called the Titan Summit, which we run every year. And there's a model I teach which is called the Titan's Decline. Like, I'm really— I'm not really fascinated by people who get to the top, whether it's the billionaires I work with or who show up at those events, or the pop icons or the great athletes. That's great. What I'm fascinated about is what makes a legend versus a fad. And we haven't talked so much about my business philosophy, but to me What makes an iconic brand or company that endures the generations versus a company that's really cool for 3 years?

Well, what's great, we're talking about it right now.

Well, okay, so it's the Titan's Decline. And really, I mean, the starting point is the moment you think you know everything and the moment you fall in love with your success is the beginning of obsolescence. So when people come up to me and they send me this or whatever, on the social media, they're saying things. I say thank you because that shows respect, and I'm humbled and privileged to get to do what I get to do. But, you know, when I go home, I'm just dad to my kids. You know, like, they— I'm not some kind of something special aside from their father. You know, I spend a lot of time with my parents. They're in their 70s. My friends are very Wonderful people, but they're not really in the circle that we talk about in the sense of you know being at the events we talk about. I spend a lot of time alone, a lot of time praying. You know, I don't share that very often, but you know prayer affirmation, reading the great books of wisdom and philosophy, journaling, walking in nature, trying to keep my feet on the ground because I think the moment you know ego and arrogance sets. That's in, again, I mentioned it, but it's so profound, important, I think, because if your attention and your focus is on how many people are going to like me on Facebook, how many bestsellers will I have, how much money am I making, this launch, how much, whatever, your attention and your point of being is actually off being of service, creativity, lifting the world, transforming people.

Mm-hmm.

Which paradoxically makes you iconic in the world.

That's good.

And if I could, because we've talked a lot about a lot of big ideas, but people are probably wondering, like, so what are the tactics? Well, one thing is to remember that self-mastery and leadership, and these are skills. Like, if someone were to say, well, I want to be heavyweight boxing champion of the world, and I read a book on it, and afterwards I didn't change, we'd call them crazy. But how many people do we talk to in leadership and high performance They go, I read the book and nothing worked. Well, the book worked, the ideas worked, you just didn't have the guts and commitment and discipline and follow-through and self-sacrifice to do the work. So bravery is a skill. It doesn't show up one day. It shows up after 10,000 hours of— people don't think about that, right?

Right.

Bravery, confidence, you know, all of those internal things. Being loving is a skill. You don't just get it, you earn it. Yeah, I wear my scars on my sleeve because everything I've earned, whether it's the character I have, and I'm not saying it's so special, but the character I have, the thinking I have, the energy I have, the bravery I have, the love that I have, like, I mean, love is a very powerful word. That has been very, very, very hard-earned.

Let's talk for a few minutes about what it means to be the best. As you know, This is a group of high achievers, and a lot of people in here are, you know, are among the best or the best at what they do. Sometimes it's hard to know what's who's among the best and who's the best, right? We actually have another other than yourself another world-class athlete in the room in the room here in Arizona, which is Whitney Jones, who was just for the third time crowned Ms. Fitness Olympia. So, and we acknowledged her earlier, and and you know we talked a little bit about the ironclad mindset. that enables mastery of the physical self, right? It reminded me of the story you've told many times in front of your group, where I've had the honor to be present and participate a few times. And you referenced it before about your high school. You know, for all the years before, all the years since, nobody's been to a pro—

Yeah.

Nobody made it to a pro sport, certainly not to the NFL or maybe any other league. But when you were there, there were— and maybe with your brother Tony as well, but certainly your mindset and your commitment to what your plan was elevated some people around you.

Mm-hmm.

Right. And so that happens in a business also, I would suggest.

Yeah.

Right. But what, what is the dynamic when you are ironclad about what is gonna be happening in your future? What is the dynamic that elevates the people around you either to a similar goal, but, or even more like tangibly to this group in a business and people get on board that train? And, you know, it's like Francis Ford Coppola says, the biggest challenge in making a movie is getting everyone to make the same movie.

Yep.

Right? So it's like, how, how does, how does your ironclad mindset or how did it And how does it elevate those around you?

Yeah, it's so true. That is 100% true. So in my case, you know, the story that Michael referenced, I went to a high school that had like 280 kids. It was a little country farm, all farmers' kids, right, that went to school there. So I played football. 27 farm boys were on my high school football team, right? And there's never been a pro athlete of any kind come from my high school in 100 years. Not before I got there, not since I left, right? So there's never been one. And the odds of playing pro football are 0.03%. 0.03% high school football players play pro football, right? So the odds aren't great. But the high school I went to, who never had any kind of athlete in 100 years, 4 of us, 4 of the 27, which is statistically impossible, all played pro football. And 2 of them played in the Super Bowl. 4 guys out of 27 with the odds of 0.03 of every high school football player. That was the odds, right? So how do you explain that? And I, I was shocked. I didn't even think anything of it. I just thought that most people played pro football. I didn't realize that the statistics were so bad. I didn't realize that there was no way I was playing pro football, and there was no way my brother was, and there was no way two of my best friends were. But it happened. So I asked them. And I asked the rest of the team, why did this happen? This is at a 30-year career— a 30-year reunion, Michael. So we're at a 30-year reunion. I went around to the guys and I said, why did this happen? This is a statistical impossibility. And they all said the same thing. They all said it was that damn plan that you were walking around with. I carried around, and some of you have seen it, a, a plan that is 50 years old now, uh, 51 years old now, and it says that I'm to be the best safety in the world, right? But no one thought that was going to happen. But I just kept saying it and saying it. And at the 30-year reunion, what happened was these guys said, well, I just thought, you know, you were like, you weren't the biggest player, you weren't our best player, but you were committed to the— this piece of paper. And so they said to themselves, well, shit, if Bo, you know, being the size that he is, is going to play pro football, then I certainly am too. And so that drug 3 guys who maybe wouldn't have thought of it On to play in the NFL against those odds. So I thought to myself after those 30 years, like, damn, I'm gonna do the same thing again. I'm gonna do it again. I'm gonna keep doing it. I'm gonna keep telling people my dream even though it's impossible. And what I have found out is people go with you. They go with you wherever you're going. Now, your dream might be different. than other people, but they see that you're kind of unreasonable about your own dream. And you're, you've got a loyalty, not to the culture and not to the odds of you achieving it, but you have a loyalty to the piece of paper. And I have found that if you just stay loyal to that instead of— you know, what the odds tell you or what people tell you or what the news media might tell you, then that dream, you will end up at— you will end up with a gold medal around your neck. And then what the most shocking part of it all, Michael, is so will the people closest to you.

Hmm.

The people who— people will eliminate themselves, of course, from your presence. They will. Because, you know, that ain't easy. That kind of— gold medals are just not easy, as you all know. Being an entrepreneur and reaching the very pinnacle, that ain't easy. There's a lot of skinned knees, there's a lot of bloody noses, and there's a lot of people who extricate themselves from you. But if you hang in there and you stay loyal to that original vision, that original dream, not only will you have a gold medal around your neck, Everybody you admire and respect will have one too. And I said, that, you know what, that's the coolest thing ever. So, and then, Michael, let me just, let me just say this one, one thing too. And it's, it's true of my life. It's true of everybody's life that's ever done this. Um, um, so, uh, my son Axel, he's 14 now, so he's a freshman in high school. So we took him out of the high school he was in And put him in one that the most elite athletes are at, right? Because his dream, his ultimate dream, is to be— if his dream is going to come true, you guys, he's going to have to end up being maybe the best athlete we've ever had, if it's to come true. So if he's around people who are better than him and are a step and a half ahead of him, I know that's going to be painful for him. It's going to be painful for me and my wife and, you know, the rest of the family. But if that's his dream, that's the only way to get there. Because if he's the best athlete at 14 at his high school, he ain't gonna make it.

Hmm.

Because he goes to a high school called Sierra Canyon. So LeBron James's kid, is on that basketball team. Dwyane Wade's kid is on that basketball team. Scottie Pippen's kid is on their basketball team. And now Axel, a 14-year-old, is going to be standing among them and getting his butt kicked, right, at the age of 14. But what does it look like for him at the age of 21?

Hmm.

You can't be the best, you guys, at 14. You've got to surround yourself with a demanding situation. That's the only way, right? And that's, that's why this group is so great. And that's why, Michael, your group is the same way. When you go into Genius Network and you go into Consumer Health Summit, you go in and now you're sitting in tall— what my dad used to call tall cotton. He goes, boy, I want you standing in tall cotton. And when you're standing in tall cotton, you gotta rise to the occasion. Or you're gonna get stickers all on you. You gotta rise above, and you've gotta be— that's a demanding situation, and it's the only situation that's gonna demand you adapt. If you're the best in the room, you're the smartest in the room, you know, you can't— your body will not adapt. Well, what's the one thing us human beings are the best in the world at? Automatically, naturally.

Adaptation.

We have proved over time that we're the best at adaptation to demanding situations, whether that's weather or lack of food or lack of mates. You and me know how to adapt. So for me, I wish my kid had an easier time, but he should have chose an easier dream. But now he is getting his butt kicked by guys who are better than him, who are faster than him, who are bigger than him. Mm-hmm. So what is that demand of my son? He's got to rise. He's got to adapt to the demanding situation that his dream requires. Well, now let's look at us. Let's look at us. Let's look at our jobs. If you're the best and you're shoulder to shoulder and you look and you laugh, oh, I'm in Consumer Health Summit. Oh shit, there's Ann Shippey over there. Oh shit, there's, you know, Dr. Mark Harmon over there. You're like, Damn, I didn't know shit. I thought I knew. I don't know anything now, now that I'm standing among this. But I gotta rise and my body will adapt, and now I'll be better walking out of here. That's what you must surround yourself with. But it is the most humiliating thing in the world to do.

Totally.

But it's the only way to get to the top. And then I'll finish with this. Once you're there, Once you're at the top, and every Olympic champion knows this, you're no longer at the top. Once you're at the top, you're just at the bottom of the next summit, right? Because there's some young person or some smarter person or somebody's willing to outwork you right on your tail.

Hmm.

And that's the beauty of this thing. I'm not saying it's like the funnest, if funnest is a word. It's not the funnest life. Right? But I think it's our— it's what we're made to do. And it's a life worth living.

That.

Yeah.

And that's the best. The beauty of the best, Michael, is you just never get there.

Well, all right.

Let's jump to the 5% productivity. How do you know that's the case? How do you—

So it's the 500% boost in productivity?

Yes. Because that— well, just for the entrepreneurs Because if you could figure out how to be 500% more productive, you'd probably be like, that would be really valuable.

Let me back it up a step. What does flow amplify? Right? I said mental, physical, and emotional. The physical side increases fast twitch muscle response, strength, stamina, and a bunch of other things all go up on the physical side. On the cognitive side, the mental side, productivity spikes 500% above normal. I'll talk about— so that 500% above normal. Not my data. McKinsey, the business consultancy, did a global study. They spent 10 years going around the globe talking to leaders of companies, top leaders of companies all around the globe. And that— it was, it was— you got to take it with a grain of salt because it's self-reported, but they said, how much more productive are you in flow than out of flow? The average was 500% more productive, right? Richard Branson summed it up nicely once. He said, you know, in 2 hours in When I'm in flow, there's nothing I can't accomplish. And that's pretty much standard. To put 500% more productive— boost in productivity in context, you go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state, take Tuesday through Friday off, and you're going to get as much done as everybody— as your steady-state peers in one day a week in flow as they will over the course of a normal week. But it's not just productivity. So the Department of Defense measured— they They dropped soldiers into flow. They wanted to know how fast— how much did learning increase? Learning increases 240 to 400% above baseline in flow. We've done studies on creativity. A bunch of other people have done studies on creativity. It's 400 to 700% above baseline on average. And the numbers, they just keep going like this. But learning, creativity, productivity, and then you get to—

Flow.

Emotional wellbeing. And we talked about this the other day. Flow underpins happiness, wellbeing, overall life satisfaction, meaning, and purpose. We know that the happiest people on earth are the people with the most flow in their lives. Right now, there are 3 tiers of happiness. When psychologists define happiness, there's baseline happiness. How do you feel right here, right now?

Mm-hmm.

Dan Harris was right about baseline happiness. We can get about 10% happier because of something known as an emotional set point. point, which are sort of locked in by the time you're about 10. There's a low-level emotional set point. This is the worst you're going to feel on the planet. There's a high level. This is the best you're going to feel. And we live our lives in between those emotional set points. You can fuck with them a little. Regular access to flow over time will extend the upper boundary. The death of a child or chronic unemployment will extend the lower boundary. But those are about the only things that will move it. You want to get to the next level of happiness. It's known as enjoyment or engagement. It is a high-flow lifestyle where the thing that is driving you into flow is attached to your goals. You want the best you can feel on the planet? It's purpose. It's a high-flow lifestyle where the thing that is driving you into flow is attached to something greater than yourself— purpose. And by the way, all that sounds really fancy— purpose and things like that. The reason it's a big deal is when you're just dealing with yourself, you can only get access to 3 or 4 of the feel-good neurochemicals in the brain. But once you add other people into it, it unlocks all the pro-social chemicals. So you start getting things like oxytocin and endorphins and these other feel-good chemicals. So purpose sounds really high-minded and, oh, I'm helping the world. It's totally selfish. You're getting extra feel-good, high-performing neurochemicals for being— for helping other people.

Yeah.

Evolution basically has incentivized us Yeah, so to—

we talked about this the other day, uh, being in the addiction recovery space and being in recovery, in my worst states of despair and depression and hopelessness and feeling this life just sucks, constant angst, fear, shame, guilt, you know, every negative sort of emotion I would have on, uh, in the The worst states. Now, the very best states would be flow. So the Johann Hari line, the opposite of addiction is connection. And I think the ultimate form of connection would be flow.

Flow.

And so, as I think of how do we help people to get sober and stay sober, and I think the word sober is interesting. It's like not engaging in the activity, which is different than thinking about it, because that's where the term like dry drunk comes around, where people quit drinking, but they haven't dealt with any of the underlying issues that caused them to drink in the first place. So they could still be assholes, they could still be hating life, they're just white-knuckling it and they're not drinking. So they're dry drunks. And so there's a lot of, uh, of people that stop the behavior, they abstain from it, and they're quote unquote sober. But that's stage 1 recovery, which is sobriety.

Right.

Stage 2 is dealing with the underlying You know, relationship issues that came— like Ernie Larson, who wrote Stage 2 Recovery, it's this book written years ago, he traces so much of addiction to relationships, the inability to be in relationship with another person. And I think the inability to be in a relationship with yourself, which is, I think, what flow gets to.

So I always say that. That's funny that you point that out. It's a hard— I One of the things that is really interesting, one of the reasons I like flow a lot, and I think this is true for a lot of founders, a lot of leaders, probably a lot of people in this room. One of the things about being, like, the world's leading expert in anything, what that really means is I've got very few people to talk to about the thing I care most about, right? And that's most of us in the room, right? Most of you in this room, you're the leader in the thing that you do. And it's a Essentially, it's lonely at the top for just the basic reason that, like, you're the expert and that this is the thing you're most passionate about and you can't share it with anybody because there's nobody who knows more than you. Flow somehow makes us feel— it reconnects us with ourselves in a way that really heals that loneliness. And I don't— like, that's one of the mysteries of— I don't know why that is, right? But it somehow makes that loneliness, especially if you're an entrepreneur and you're a founder and at the top of your game, it makes it less lonely in a really deep way. And then it does a lot of other stuff, but that's one of the things that really matters to me.

Yeah, yeah. And so, um, what have you learned about flow with animals?

Well, flow, uh, this is really funny, but, uh, flow's really old, right? It's peak performance. So all species have had to, like, fight battles, just fight for their lives, or search for, like, flow Is conserved across species. Years ago, a friend of mine, Arne Dietrich, did a study, really funny study. He taught ferrets, dogs, and humans— humans were obviously the hardest here— how to run on treadmills. And then he measured their neurochemicals. And we found that, like, the line— all social mammals can get into flow. So horses, horse rider flow, as Simon was talking about the other day. Dogs get into flow. Dogs and humans get into flow together. Ferrets don't seem to get into flow because they can't produce anandamide, which was the finding then. That doesn't make sense to me because the endocannabinoid system, which produces anandamide, is very, very old. So that may not be quite accurate data. It might have been how they were measuring it back in, like, I think it was the experiment done in 2003. But basically all social mammals and everything sort of above ferrets has been proven to get into flow.

How did you deal with failure and what advice could you give to entrepreneurs going through difficulties or struggling? Because certainly you've had a shit ton of that.

Okay, I'm gonna try to explain this because I had a download about this a couple months ago.

One of those downloads.

It's one of those things that sounds so simple yet it's so profound, I know, and I haven't quite— the magnitude. Okay, so I saw success and failure, what we consider success and failure like as a yin and yang, you know, like this energy.

Mmhmm.

And what I saw was that at the same rate you fail— so the amount of failure that you put into— let's just say failure is the black, you know, part of the yin and yang. It's the yang part. And the success is the white. That the amount of energy that you put into that failure is the amount of energy that you can have in success.

Uh-huh.

And I suddenly saw why my life, I'm like, my God, most of my life was failure of what people consider, right? So now I've had this success that's so big. And then I thought back to like a concert violinist. Think about how much failure there is and how many years. That's the 10,000 hours. Those 10,000 hours aren't 10,000 hours of success.

Yeah.

Right? So there's something energetically that I haven't quite figured out, but do you guys understand what I'm talking about? So I think that we should all be aiming for failure all the time, lots of it. Lots and lots and lots and lots of failure. Because you're going— I believe that we have a natural propensity to learn.

Yeah.

And that we're not gonna— it's just like, you know, oh, fire. Like, we naturally know not to do things, and that is gonna actually increase the magnitude of your success.

Yeah, that makes a good point. You know, this thought's coming to me about— I'm trying to— I have a friend who actually talked about how we measure success in, let's say, love relationships more so over not depth but duration. Like, if you've been married for 50 years, well, it could have been 50 years of total misery.

Yeah.

But if you were married for 50 years, you're like, that's a successful couple, versus maybe you were only in a relationship for 1 year, but that 1 year had enormous depth and growth and things like that. Or you've been in business for 20 years, but you fucking hate it. You don't let— I mean, everything about it's been miserable, versus you had a certain period of time where you just, you were winning and you were connected And that sort of thing. So I think depth and just squeezing the much juice out of life in all areas is far more, to me, admirable than just long drawn-out duration.

I think that's great. We have a saying that we just have to win more than we fail. Because I want my team to fail. I want them to, because we don't take those long shots. I wanna take the long shots. I'm debt-free, I don't have any loans, so we're all self-funded. So I make sure it doesn't hurt the organism. But I want them taking these risks because the only way— and it might not work. And what's the worst thing that happens?

I think here's— I think the entrepreneurs that get rewarded the most in life is relative to their ability to take those risks and put themselves out there. And this could be totally taken out of context where it's like, oh, that means be crazy. 'Cause when people hear the word risk, they sometimes think, oh, that just means do crazy shit and be willing to lose it all. When you can point to those sort of stories. I mean, I remember in a meeting with Elon Musk, there was about 20 of us there and Peter Diamandis had set it up at SpaceX. And one of the guys had asked Elon, how did you have, How'd you become successful? And he said, you know, I'm willing to endure more pain than anyone that I know. That's what he said.

Yeah.

And he also said that he was borrowing money from friends and sleeping on couches, and he bet everything that he had. And had that rocket not flown, he would have just been done. But he was willing to do that. And, you know, I don't know if that's necessarily a smart thing because there's— now looking back everyone's like, of course, and it's super admirable, but for every one of those things there's so much human wreckage.

Yeah.

But the thing with risk though is your thing on failure— no, the thing on failure though, what you're saying, here's what I'm getting at, is that every time you're willing to put yourself out there you're building that muscle, and by doing that You develop an endurance and a stamina that cannot come any other way. You can't just think yourself into successful entrepreneurship. You have to just do shit. You don't build a great reputation by talking about what you're going to do. You build a great reputation by doing shit that ends up leading to a great business or a great whatever.

Yes. And I would say, and maybe, hopefully that idea was so alive within And that's what I tell entrepreneurs, like wait till the idea's alive. Like we will literally go 8 months without making a video and we've had hundreds of millions of views. That seems like a long time in marketing. You know, you would think content, you have to have all this strategic content, but we wait until that idea is so delicious that we can, you can feel the energy and you can feel the aliveness and then we go towards that campaign.

Yeah.

So that's the way we operate. And so hopefully it is worth the risk. So for me, if everything failed tomorrow, which I've been in that situation before, like, I'm happy, right? Like, I— there was nothing that I didn't go for that I wanted to go for. Maybe love. Okay, so we already talked about that, so let's take that one off there. But, but as far as business, like, there's nothing that I really haven't shot for in our business. So that's what I want everybody to feel, hey, we went for it. Because to me, the worst thing is when you didn't go for it, you held back, and then you sold out. And I mean, that shit, it doesn't feel good. I gotta tell you, it sucks really bad.

Well, you're either winning or you're learning. That's one thing I learned from Tony. And I remember telling that back to Tony when he was going through some media shit that he was dealing with. And it's like, yep, you're either winning or you're learning.

And he's like, yeah.

Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that'll be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead.

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