The Small Act of Kindness That Shaped Tony Robbins Life

What changed my life is this bang on the door. Somebody knows you're having a tough time. Everyone has a tough time, and they just want you to have a great Thanksgiving with your family. We had no money and no food. We were always poor, but, I mean, we wouldn't have starved. We had saltine crackers and peanut butter, right? But when everybody else around you is having a big Thanksgiving dinner, it was pretty depressing. And my mom and dad were saying things to each other that once you save them, you can't take them back. And I have a younger brother, five years younger, and a younger sister, sister, seven years younger. So I felt like the parent almost. I'm trying to protect them. I'm only 11 years old. And what changed my life is this bang on the door. I go open the door, and there's this guy, big guy with groceries in both hands, and he had a pot on the ground with an uncooked turkey. And he looks at me and says, is your father here? And I'm like, just one moment. I'm just like. This, to me was like Christmas, right? This is the greatest thing that's going to stop the fighting. It's going to be incredible. So I go to my father and I say, you know, dad, dad, somebody at the door for you. And he's yelling at my mom through the closed door that she slammed on him. And he goes, you answered? I said, I did. It's for you. He goes, who is it? I said, I don't know. They said, they got to talk to you, right? And I had this level of excitement, like, little boy excitement. Like, this is going to be the greatest thing. And my dad opens the door, and I'll never forget the look on his face. He got angry, which shocked me. And he said to the man, we don't accept charity. Before the guy even said anything, he went to slam the door, and the guy had leaned in slightly so it hit his shoulder and it bounced off of him, which made my dad even madder. And then he said, he goes, sir, sir, I'm just the delivery guy. You know, somebody knows you're having a tough time. Everyone has a tough time, and they just want you to have a great Thanksgiving with your family. My father says, we don't accept charity. He goes to slam it again. But I think because he leaned in, his foot came in, now it hit his foot and bounced open again. It's just like, now I got fear running through my body because I know my father, right? And my father looks at him, and the guy looks at him and says something. I thought my father was gonna punch him in the face. And he didn't do it mean. He had a softness in his face. And he said, sir, he saw me and he said, don't make your family suffer because of your ego. And the veins of my father's side of his neck were like this. He's red. I thought for sure he was going to punch the guy. And then all of a sudden, his shoulders dropped, like defeated. He took the groceries, he slammed them on the ground, slammed the door, didn't even pick up the turkey and didn't say thank you or anything. And shortly after that, he left our family, which to me at the time was the worst experience of my life, I thought. So I was kind of obsessed with trying to figure out why. And I didn't figure it out for a couple of years. I had versions of it in my head. But now I use it in my life every day. And so I submit it to your viewers as well. These are the three decisions that I think everyone makes every moment. First, you're doing it right now. What are you going to focus on? You're going to be focusing on my story. I'm telling you. You're going to be focusing on the next question you're going to ask. You could be focusing on how you're stomach feels if you've not eaten. There's a million things you could focus on, literally. But we don't experience life. We experience the part of life we focus on. And so the bottom line is, I know my father and I had a different experience because we had different focuses that I was focused on was food. You know, what a concept. This is cool. He was focused on that he had not taken care of his family. And I know that because, you know, he said it about 20 times under his breath. And my mother echoed it, of course. The second decision, though, the minute you focus on something, your brain has to decide what does it mean? And meaning is what creates emotion. And emotion is where your life is, right? And so the quality of your life is the quality of your emotions. If you had a billion dollars and every day you're pissed off and angry, your life's quality is called pissed off and angry. If you got three beautiful children, a husband or wife you love, but you worry all the time. Your life is worry, you know, so his focus and then his meaning, that was the worst part. The meaning he gave it was that he was worthless and didn't belong here. And that usually leads to the third decision, which is what are you going to do? If we make the right decisions, the first one is what we're going to focus on. And that's just a habit. You change anything, take that person. Why is that person depressed still? Because all that drug does is numb you. And numbing doesn't deal with the issue. What's the real issue? You're constantly focusing on what's missing versus what you have. You're focused on what you can't control. And there's two worlds, right? The external world, the internal world, we can't control. The external world, we can influence it, we can't control it. If you think you're in control, you have deep illusion. It's part we can control is what's going on inside of us and that we control what we focus on. We can control the meaning, we can decide the meaning. We're the meaning makers and we can decide what to do. And when we make those three decisions, we're in control of our life. And all the anxiety tends to go away. Especially if we're trying to do that, to serve something more than ourselves. Not like you're so unselfish. You're not going succeed because you can't serve something more than yourself and not benefit, right? So it's like. It's not like you're sacrificing, you know, the people that play that game. It's not a sacrifice. It's like philanthropy. You know, I hear people talk about, well, philanthropy. Well, a friend of mine the other day was on an airplane and somebody was reading. I saw my book, you know, triggered me. It was life force, and person was really into it. And he said, hey, what do you. He's known me for 45 years. And he says, what do you think of that book? Oh, it's incredible. The stem cells and this. You can't believe the breakthroughs. And I don't know why we didn't know about this and blah, blah, Bl. What do you think of the author? Oh, he seems like a really good guy. And he donated all the profits to feed people, of course. He goes, of course. He's totally rich. So, I mean. I mean, it's easy when you're rich, right? And my buddy turns to him and he says, well, what if I told you that I knew him since he was 17 years old, 45 years ago, and that I remember when he had $20 to his name, there's a guy in the street and he gave him 10 bucks and told me that the time to give is when you don't have it and he said, and I watched him build that all the way up there. He taught me that if you don't give a dime out of a dollar, you're not going to give 100 million out of a billion. Right. And it's like people look at things and they make their focus something like, oh, I'm sacrificing or I'm going to do philanthropy because, you know, I'm rich. No, you do philanthropy because it's a source of kindness and love. Philanthropy can be your attention. Philanthropy can be your time. Philanthropy can be a buck five bucks. Philanthropy can be. You're in line with people in Starbucks. And you know, I remember doing this research, I couldn't believe it. If you buy five people who you don't know their coffee, you get a biochemical change that is more lasting impact than most things you could purchase for yourself, including large purchases. So it's like it's intelligent. Selfishness is the truth. You can't possibly do good and not feel good. When you want some self esteem, do something worthwhile beyond just yourself.

The reflective glow of doing things, something for everybody else is. Yeah, it's an odd. It kind of makes it difficult to be selfless when you actually think in that way. The most selfish thing you can do is to be selfless. There is truly nothing that is particularly selfless that's right. In that way, I think everything happens.

For a. I think there's a higher purpose. I think it's my job to find it. I think that life happens for us, not to us, but it's our job to figure it out. A lot of times I feel like something's happening to me. So I'll give you an example. It's like not being fed as a child. You know, I've fed well. Ten years ago, I decided I'd been feeding people my whole life, since I was 17. Two people. Four, eight. I built a couple million people a year. My foundation fed 2 million. I fed 2 million. And then I was writing this book, Money Master the Game. And I'm interviewing Ray Dalio and Carl Icahn and Warren Buffett and you know, all these multi billionaires. And Congress had just cut food stamps, which they call the SNAP program now by $6 billion. It means every family would have to give up a week's worth of food unless people like you. And I showed up. So I called my team and I said, how many people have fed in my lifetime? And they said, 42 million. And I was like, wow. I didn't. I was thrilled it wasn't the number I knew. And I said, what if I did that in a year? What if I did as much as I've done in my whole life in a year? 50 million. And what if I did? What if I did 100 million a year? What if I did 100 million a year for 10 years and did a billion meals and I did in eight years with partnership through Feeding America. And it's like when you do that, when you produce a result that seemed impossible, then what's next gets even bigger and even more available. Right. It just expands. You're pre framed to be able to do even more versus reframe. And so now because of the war in Ukraine, most people don't realize it's the breadbasket for Africa. So there's about 11 nations that are on the verge of famine. You'll never hear about it in the news. No one cares. And then you need fertilizer. 50% of the world's supply, food supply comes fertilizer. The WF doesn't want you to use it because of the environment, but you need it. And it's in Russia and it's been cut off. So I talked to Dr. To Governor David Beasley, head of the World Food Program. Brilliant guy, actually. MBS put us together one day, said, you two are feeding the most people I know I want to put you together. And I said, how big is the problem? And he said, Tony, normally you'd be in a position where, you know, maybe there's, you know, 8 million people that are on the verge of starvation. He goes, this year it's 350 million. And he goes, and no one's doing anything about it. And I said, so why do we. How many meals would we need over the next 10 years to make the transition till we get sustainability? He said, you need 10 years. I said, what would it be? I don't know. Tony made 50, 60, 70 billion meals. Let's do 100 billion meal challenge over the next 10 years. I said, I did a billion. I wasn't a billionaire when I started. I said, you're going to get blessed by doing these things. I'm sure I can find 99 other people somewhere in the world to do this. But because I kept pre framing myself, this is a must, this is not a should, it's not a reframing job. I just came up with a different plan. I'm really proud to tell you. We did 30 billion meals. We just announced in our first two years and we're on track this year to be at 60 billion. You know, I know who the hell I am. And it's like, I'd love to serve everybody. It's not going to be right for everybody. I'm totally fine. But you're not trying to prove it. All you really want to do is serve. So I used to have these giant mission statements. Change the world. All these things. And I do all those things. But now it's like my mission statement is, how can I help? I believe it's my privilege to serve people.