Mel Robbins talks about the scarcity mindset that took hold during the 2008 financial crisis and still drives her to say yes to everything. Her daytime talk show ended abruptly in March 2020 when CBS evacuated due to COVID, and her book contract was cancelled. She was $800,000 in debt when she gave the TEDx talk that launched the five-second rule.
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And confidence isn't the absence of self-doubt. It's being willing to try even though you doubt yourself. I realize that I'm still in the mindset that I was in in 2008 when Kristin and I went bankrupt.
Which is I need to get as much as I can.
Scarcity.
Yeah, yeah, man, really?
Yes, that's the big insight we had during this pandemic. Yeah. Shut up.
Shut up, we're gonna talk about it.
I like, I- no, I'm just saying.
Shut up, 'cause that's crazy to hear you say that.
Well, yeah, like, because I'm, we shouldn't be talking, we should just be going.
Well, you're recording all this, you can put it in here.
We get added in here, but- no, honestly, like, so if you see, if you get into a situation, Where you nearly lose everything and look, I know you've been on your sister's couch you've been down and out you've had to reinvent yourself. We could be the reinvention twins the two of us.
We could be.
Yes, and the thing is though is that if you get in that moment where you can't pay for groceries, where you think your car is gonna get repossessed, where you can't pay for your kids f*cking town soccer league, like that is low when as a parent you can't, getting his restaurant business back on the rails. We were still $800,000 in debt. It was three years worth of trying to make the ends meet. And when I gave that TEDx talk in 2011, I had been... that was three years after I discovered the five-second rule. I had a full-time job with benefits and We were still massively in debt. There were still liens on the house. And after that TEDx talk, which is what launched the speaking business, as people started to book me and I started making money, I was like a squirrel with a frickin nut man. A dollar came in. I'm like, put it away, put it away, put it away, put it away, put it away. And every time a speech came, you know what everybody said as I started to explode on the speaking circuit is, oh, speakers get hot. You're gonna be the hot speaker in 2017 and then take everything you can get. And I said, Because then they're on.
To the next speaker. Yeah, yeah.
And so I figured I was just a fad. And so I said yes to everything. And I have become addicted to being busy. And it is driven when I'm present from making an impact. But if I'm honest, it is mostly driven from that mentality from 2008 the fear that this could all disappear.
Wow. We both went through our own, I guess, identity shift and dream death or ego death in 2008 with me from football and you with your career and everything. To give people context, because I'm just gonna roll with this from what you just shared. Mel Robbins has been a friend of mine for years. You've come and spoke at the Summit of Greatness. You've been on the show a few times before. and you've exploded in the last four years really with everything you've been talking about from speaking to the five second rule to the Mel Robbins show, which was a big hit. But then, you know, in the middle pandemic, that dream just ended. And we're talking about, you know, a big revelation for you, which is scarcity. And this is something we teach all the time to be in abundance and don't have a scarce mindset. But you're saying that you feel like you've been in scarcity still for the last three years.
Yeah, like I, in some way, obviously.
Abundance of like, I can do everything, but in some way you felt, yeah.
There have been modes where I've said yes to things, Louis, because I've been afraid that all of my good fortune would disappear. And if I had to take a look at the biggest, one of the biggest lessons from the pandemic that COVID-19 created. I call it the great pause, where all of us were forced to take a gigantic pause from our everyday life. And I need to qualify what I'm about to say by also saying that we have not lost a family member. We have not had the, you know, we don't have anybody, my dad is retired, so we don't have an essential worker at a hospital or a grocery store. So I am speaking about the impact of COVID-19 without having lost a loved one. And so the great pause that basically had my talk show end abruptly, we got five minutes notice, we're told to evacuate CBS Broadcast Center, and all of a sudden, It was over. 139 people, no goodbyes.
Oh, my goodness.
175 shows, no thank yous. It was, we finished taping. I walked into the control room. My executive producer, Mindy Borman, turned to me and said they found COVID in the building. She started tearing up. Everybody, this has been remarkable. It's a wrap. We are the last show in the building. CBS let us finish taping. They're sealing off the building. I literally ran In the middle of a show? Yes. This was March 11th. And we had already stopped down audiences. And so I ran upstairs to the apartment in CBS, which was like our green room. I grabbed everything that was possibly not nailed down. Don't tell Sony, I took a bunch of the blazers. And I'm still a farm girl from the Midwest at heart. Grab them, go. Who's gonna know that they're missing? And so I, and that was it. I mean, it was so awful because it felt like the biggest dream of my life, which was to host a daytime syndicated talk show and give advice to people five days a week on television who had no access to therapy, you know, didn't have the time for personal development, make it entertaining, accessible. My whole dream Boom, in five minutes flat, done, no completion, disruption, that was it. And then two days later, Houghton Mifflin, which was my publisher for my next book, started laying people off and they called me and said, we need to cancel the book contract.
No, I did not.
Yeah, they did. And then, well, in their defense, Louis, I was a year late in delivering.
Okay, yeah, so if you would have done it on time, yeah, it'd have been out.
