Tony Robbins on the REAL Reason 99% of People Stay Stuck | The Iced Coffee Hour

What would you say? That one thing is that the people that end up changing successfully have that. Those who don't end up changing lack.

Hunger, hunger and relentlessness. What I found is there are a lot of wickedly smart people can't fight their way out of a paper bag. It's the person whose hunger does not go away. The hunger to be more, do more, give more, share more, create more. And it's not hunger to get to just a goal. It's an insatiable hunger. But they also have the relentlessness to push through all the obstacles that come up. So I always hear people say, well, the system's working against me. Is this a systemic imbalance? F. No. The system's always out of balance. You don't understand. You haven't lived long enough to see how it works. So when I was your generation, interest rates were 18%. And I'm hearing people bitching about 6%, right? I had no money. I grew up with nothing. I had four different fathers. We didn't have food and Thanksgiving. The reason I provided a billion meals in 10 years. Now I'm doing 62 billion meals I've done in three years. The reason I got driven to do that is because I was hungry, right? Because I didn't have that kind of being taken care of. My fathers didn't know what the hell they were doing.

Were some people born with that hunger? Because sometimes you just see it lacking in somebody. What caused it?

Well, most people. I'll tell you the history of the world in four sentences. Good times create weak people. You can study a thousand years of Roman history. You can study 500 years of Anglo American history. I highly recommend. If you guys really want a perspective to help your generation, you should read the Fourth Turning or the book Generations. Two great books, Strauss and Howe. I was working with the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, in those days. I worked with him because I'm an independent. And then I went across the street and I worked with the head of the House. Gingrich was a Republican. And both men had this book on their desks. The President had it, and so did Gingrich. Right. And Gingrich historian. So I read the book. And it was one of those valuable books in my life because it put everything. It showed me that there are seasons to everything. And so I. I was waking up in a winter season. I was coming of age 18, 19 years old in a winter season, 78, 18% interest rates. So I studied my ass off. I figured out I made 100 offers on pieces of real estate. 99 said, no, it's actually 100. 303rd 1 said, yes. I bought this piece of real estate. Try to make money at 18% on a piece of real estate. Good luck, right? But all I knew is real estate was the way that you could build wealth. I grew up from nothing, right? But what happened was then I had somebody. I hired him. It was so far away. The place I bought, I hired a little local managing company to manage the place. And they called me one day and said, well, a guy said that one of the stairs broke and he fell and he wants $100,000. Well, it's kind of inconvenient. I didn't have that. I could have just let that end me. But I was relentless, you know, I was like, okay, I'm gonna learn. This is painful. I'm gonna learn. But the season will eventually change. So think of it this way. There's the greatest breakthrough in humanity came from the understanding of patterns. Pattern recognition gives you power. Pattern utilization gives you real power. And pattern creation makes you a master of something. What do I mean? When you don't recognize patterns, you live in fear. You live in like, oh, my God, the system's changed. I can't do it. I can't succeed. Because you don't understand that there's a pattern that's been around forever. It's just not in your lifetime that you've noticed it in your 15 years since college, right? Or 10 or whatever it's been for you, right? So as an example, when we figured out this thing called seasons, humanity went from hunter gatherers who couldn't survive to we could stay in one place. But we made one distinction. There's only one season you could plant in springtime. If you worked your tail off in the winter and planted, you didn't get the reward. So you had to plant in the spring. Then you had to go to the hard times of the summer, protect it. Then you got reward in the spring. Then you better hang on to some for the next winter. When we figured that out, humanity grew. That distinction of patterns is the most important thing for your life. You have a pattern of where you are right now in your lives, Both of you. If you're zero to, say, 21 years old. You're in springtime. Tell me it is things hard to grow in spring or easy. Easy. Very easy, right? If you start a business in springtime, you think you're a genius. You're full of. All it is, is you're in the right place at the right Time and when the season changes, that's what thins it out.

So if you were to sum up and provide some specific advice to someone out there, some real world application advice, someone that's a little bit younger, they're in that like up to 20 age or they're in the next season feeling a little jaded, a little dejected. What is some real world application things that they can do to reverse the way that they feel about the world, to actually become someone that they are proud of, being someone that's productive and positive?

I would say two things. What Jim Rohn taught me, my original teacher, when I asked him about why my fathers were broke, right? He said, if you want to have success in your life, stop asking what you can get and worrying about what you're going to get and focus on what you're going to give. If you give more value than anybody else in the marketplace, you will dominate the marketplace. He asked me at one point, because I was saying, why do my dads, four of my fathers, they were suffering, they didn't have enough money for food. And he said, tony, we're equal as souls, but we're not equal in the marketplace. So if you want to have a balance, economic balance for starters, you've got to actually invest in yourself to get the skills that will give you the advantage over someone else instead of saying how the system's not supporting you because that mindset attitude isn't self fulfilling. Second, I'd say is you've got to become a student of history. We do study history at all because you know it's not the same, but it rhymes as you've heard, right? There are patterns that are so clear. Those three skill sets, I told you, are the most important skill sets. I want my grandkids to have anybody have pattern recognition of anything. If you can recognize patterns, you can learn quickly. And you will not be in fear because it won't feel like it's random things happening to you, but you have to do your homework. You can't go online and just let somebody tell you who's pitching to you because they're afraid they're not doing well enough, that the system's rigged against them. You got to look at the people that actually have succeeded and find out what's going on in their life, what they went through to get that pattern. And so that's what I did early on. I went, I studied history, I studied, I studied everything I could on psychology because that's basically what shapes all human beings. And then I shaped myself around business. And those three skills for me were the most important skills.

Are some people unfixable?

Well, yeah. If you have no desire to improve your life, you're not going to improve your life. Of course, now the truth is life will show up at some point and get you to make a demand. You'll have something that happens in your life. You'll have somebody in your family that gets ill. You'll have an economic thing that'll happen. You'll have a Covid and your business will be shut down. You'll have life always is calling us to grow in some way. And so it doesn't matter who you are, if you don't do it proactively, it'll happen reactively. But what I'd also say to you, really is if you notice, if you understand these three skills, pattern recognition, pattern utilization, that's where the power comes. You see somebody who's great in investing, they don't just recognize the patterns, they had to use them. Right? I'm not talking about betting the money on one thing and hoping that's not investing, right? That's, you know, basically betting. That's a betting process, right? If you really start to understand anything and you start to master the patterns, understand them, use them, and then eventually you'll create them. Like playing someone's piano. You learn someone else's music first, right? Because they've already perfected it. That's what modeling is. But if you do it long enough and you were committed enough, all of a sudden you will come through. Now you're a pattern creator. If you look at somebody who's a goat in their industry, I don't care if it's in sports or business or anything else, is because they're a pattern creator. And so if you just model everybody else, you'll succeed, find the pattern that works and do it. But if you start doing that enough, with enough different people, you're going to discover there's answers in you that don't exist anywhere else. You are a unique human being. You have something to bring to the table, but it takes time. Most entrepreneurs in the beginning of their career are operators. Operators do everything. They try to keep everything as tight as possible. They hire the best person they know themselves, then they hire the next best person they can do. But the first person they know they hire, they also don't pay them enough, usually because it's their business to make it go. And you get stuck in a certain plateau unless you get to a point. The reason I have all these businesses, how Can I possibly run 114 businesses, have five kids, five grandkids, travel the world, do my speaking, do all the things I do, have a life. If I was an operator, I'm an owner. So I've learned how to be an owner. An owner is somebody. I've learned how to build teams that can do those things. But to do that, I had to go through the process that most young entrepreneurs don't do, which is, you know, you can do it better than somebody else, you do it yourself. And so as long as you do that, then no one else can make the mistakes. They can't learn, they can't grow. And you're tied to the business. So your business is really a paid job, a very paid job, maybe a highly paid job, but it's a job still. It's not a business till you can walk away for a month or two and do nothing, have it, keep growing. So you have to decide if you want a job or if you want a business. And there's nothing wrong with having a, you know, as a independent, you know, someone who's owns their own business is. That's what they call it. But usually what that person is, they're self employed to be a more accurate description. If you own a business, then you have a system that works without you.

What's been your best financial investment?

I think probably I bought a power plant in West Virginia because I saw what was happening with AI coming and the need for data centers and it was a coal power plant that they were shutting down and I saved all the jobs. And that investment's return is ridiculous.

How did you find that?

Because I'm always studying the trends again. You're not going to do anything unless you become a student. You got to become a student of personal development because if you don't grow, it's like, I remember you asked me the question, my best investment. I asked that to Warren Buffett and Warren said, tony, it's what you do. I said, what are you talking about? He goes, he said he invested in Dale Carnegie because I invested in Dale Carnegie. He said, most important investment I've ever made in my life. He said, because otherwise my ideas would have dropped out. But I learned how to communicate my ideas, otherwise you wouldn't know who I am. And he said, the most important investment you can ever make is in yourself. He actually did a big tirade on those two years ago on one of his talks. And he said, look, here's the best part about this investment. No one can tax it. Your skills keep growing, and no one can take any piece of that. If Dollar goes crazy, it goes to nothing. And we got shekels. You'll get the most shekels if you're the most skilled lawyer, the most skilled investor, the most skilled, whatever the case may be. He said, the investment in yourself is always the first, most important investment. I believe that's true. So there's these patterns in the mind that are really critical to understand because they help you understand how people are wired differently. And instead of being frustrated with them, especially if you have kids, that's when it'll really be interesting for you. It'll help you go, oh, no, they're wired differently in this area. And then you can find different advantages. Like in Chinese medicine, they have different archetypes that they use. Some people are water, some people are fire. They have different qualities, and some of them you don't relate to. But when you understand these five archetypes, you're able to go, oh, well, that's, that's the water in my life. You know, I get it, I'm not like that. But you begin to build an appreciation, excuse me, versus a judgment. The more you can understand about human psychology, the more you can not only get along with people, you can have positive influence with people. You can meet their needs, which really makes them happy and you happy. And the more you can grow a business if that's important to you.

Thank you. This is, honestly, this, I, I, I've been looking forward to this for a very long time, to be able to shake your hand and have you on, well, thank you. Seriously.