Take Control and GET What You Want Out of Your LIFE | Tom Bilyeu Keynote

[Applause] [Music] well thank you guys and thank you for the video so the good news is that video is the punchline to the story that I really want to tell you which is that I end up building a billion-dollar company I end up very far from where I began doing things that I never would have dreamed that I'd be able to accomplish but the most important thing to understand about me knowing where I end up is that I am NOT a born entrepreneur there's a lot of people out there these days that are born entrepreneurs I know there's a lot of people of the head before it seem like they could walk they were snatching flowers out of somebody's yard and selling them back to the personnel in the house but that was not me so I had a paper route and the paper route was the payment for it was bifurcated into two parts the first part you just got automatically for delivering the papers and the second part was you had to knock on people's doors and collect the money and I was so afraid to go knock on the doors that I never ended up collecting the second half of the money so even though I was supposedly on this entrepreneurial venture I was so scared that I was making half the money that I could have made and that was how I grew up I grew up in a family that teetered between white collar and blue collar one minute my dad was a purchasing manager at a paint company the next he was a mechanic sort of bounced back and forth my parents taught me to be a good employee which meant keep my head down do as little work as possible and avoid punishment at all costs and that was really where I grew up and I thought that that made a lot of sense and I cheated my way through high school I also thought that made sense and then when I was about to go to college I almost chickened out I had taken the SATs twice I got a 990 combined score a monkey smearing feces on the test can actually get a better score than that it was absolutely heartbreaking but it felt so reflective of who I believed myself to be I didn't think of myself as smart I didn't think I was well educated I didn't certainly didn't think I was smarter than the next person and I remember I told my mom that I didn't want to go and she like went nuts and she was like there's absolutely no way you've got go and she all but kicked me out of the nest now the great irony is she then spends the next 20 years trying to claw me back so I was like mom what gives I don't understand like you were the reason I was willing to stay home I was more than happy to live that small life you were the one that made me one of only two people in my entire graduating class to leave the state so why and she said I never wanted you to say what if I never wanted you to look back on your life and wonder what could have been if you had tried and then she said with absolutely no malice in her heart but I just assumed you were gonna fail but that was the only reasonable assumption to make about me at the time I was profoundly lazy I felt really lost I didn't know how to get out of life what I wanted I had applied to one school other than the state school and that was because someone had made a random comment that it was the best film school which was USC film and I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker I had that dream and so my mom kicked me out of the house she doesn't tell me at the time that she thinks I'm gonna fail she's my biggest cheerleader she's wanting me to do well she sends me off I go there and I realize I've made a catastrophic mistake and I've been accepted to USC the school but not USC film school I didn't even know you had to apply separately that's how blindly I went into this that was my approach to the world right keep my head down do as little work as possible avoid punishment at all costs I figured that college was gonna be an extension of high school so I go to the guidance counselor and the guidance counselor says look I see this all the time you're not going to get into film school it is statistically speaking harder to get into USC film school than it is to get into Harvard Law so what you're doing right now is you're taking film classes like you've already been accepted I'm telling you it's gonna end up costing you a year of your life and extra money because you're not going to get in now one thing I'm gonna tell you right now the greatest gift anyone can ever give you in life is doubt when someone doesn't believe in you that's the single most profound gift that they can give you and I told them I was going to get into film school and they said look I'm telling you right now it's going to be a mistake but there was nothing they could do to stop me so I started taking classes of it as if I had already been accepted to film school and I said alright this is my dream this is the thing that I want to do and I know that I've up to this point been incredibly lazy in my life but if this is what I want if this is the thing that supposedly is my passion this is the thing that my life is building towards it doesn't make sense to be cheating I'm gonna about to take tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to pull this off why would I want to cheat my way through this and so I went and found out who was on the admission committee to USC film school and I took him to lunch and I said what do I need to do to get into film school they said well you need a 1300 on your SATs I said I have a 990 so what's the way around that and he said well look there's actually two times where we accept people into film school as you're an incoming freshman and then as an incoming junior so we said the SAT just stands for scholastic aptitude test is supposed to tell me how well you're gonna do in college but if you've been in college for two years I'm just gonna look at your grades so Tom I'm gonna give you a secret if you get good enough grades I'm not even gonna look at the rest of your application so I said all right and for the next two years I locked myself in a room I did not date I did not party I didn't drink a drop of alcohol I didn't smoke weed I didn't play video games nothing all I did was work and I told myself ERF sink or swim I'm not gonna cheat not once and I ended up getting better grades than I'd gotten in high school and the one thing that my mother had not accounted for when she silently thankfully thought that I was going to fail was my ambition what I hadn't learned yet was Drive and I was beginning to get the first taste of what Drive looked like so I buckled down I got the grades I got into film school and then everything started going right for me it was magical my first set of films were great they captured the attention of the class because of that in the next round of film school I got the ideal partner that everybody was trying to get to make their big film I made that big film and then from that it's called a 3:10 from your 3:10 film four people in the entire class get chosen to make a senior thesis film now remember I was the kid with the 990 on his SATs who was told he would never get into film school I get into film school then the odds are against me that I'll make a senior thesis and I get to make the senior thesis and it was amazing and I was over the moon and I believed in my talents I knew deep down I was born for this I was made to make movies it was in my DNA the very thing that made me me my entire sense of identity and who I was was that I was a great filmmaker and I had just been proving it for two years I had captured the imagination of my entire class and here was my moment I was going to make the senior thesis film it was going to be amazing it was going to give me a three-picture deal in Hollywood and my life was gonna be set and then I failed completely and I failed completely because I was utterly devoid of talent now this is true and in that moment I realized I had no idea how to tell stories I had no idea how to make movies and the reason that I'd gotten as far as I'd gotten up to that point was you were telling an artificial kind of story short films silent films was totally different language totally different how you put the camera and for whatever reason I made one simple choice on accident that paid off that made me think I was talented and that was I just didn't tell stories where you expected people to be talking which is the mistake most film makers make they trying to tell a normal story but you can't hear anything so super weird and so that one sort of accidental decision convinced me that I was talented and then when the reality check of failing so publicly in front of my entire class having to screen it in front of my family who'd flown down it was heart-wrenching and people were making fun of me not even behind my back they were making fun of me to my face film school in LA boys and girls certainly back then was a brutal dog-eat-dog world and when they smelled blood in the water they went after me and it was gut-wrenching and I remember calling my mom from a payphone laying on the ground in the middle of campus because I felt so broken everything about who I thought I was was gone in an instant and my mom just didn't know what to say and so that began a period of my life where I felt utterly hopeless completely lost and my parents stopped helping me financially when I graduated so there I was I did not have my three picture deal I'm laying on the floor in the middle of campus I can't afford rent at one point after graduating I was laying on my carpet because I couldn't afford furniture and I was just laying on the floor of my apartment saying where where do I go from here I have no idea how to break into the film industry I'm not a talented filmmaker anyway so what does the rest of my life look like and it felt so hopeless and I was flirting with depression and I had no idea how to get out of it and then I lucked into a teaching job and I started teaching filmmaking and the fascinating thing was I knew how to help the students get better and so this notion that I had in my head that you're either born with something or you're not you're either a born filmmaker or you're not you're either a born entrepreneur or you're not began to waver and I began to think wait a second if I can help them make their films better why can't I help myself make my own films better and I went back into that mode that got me into film school and I put my head down again and I started working my ass off and every night to be able to go in and teach a class the next day I worked and I study then I tried to figure this stuff out and bring it in so I could teach them to help them improve and in doing that I was reinforcing in my mind that I could change that I could improve and at that time for those of you that remember this the idea of brain plasticity was debated people said you're born with a certain number of neurons and you just lose them over your life can't teach old dogs new tricks there's no way to get better and aging was this one rate one-way road to nothingness of becoming less of yourself day after day after day and in that I started to question that now today we have words for it it's called a growth mindset but Carol Dweck had not yet written her seminal book by that name so I was stumbling my way through this trying to figure out just how far I could push my talents how far could I take this could I get really good and then I meet this incredible woman I fall for her in a way that never fallen for anybody in my life she's from London very successful father who took himself from living in a small village in Cyprus which I had never even heard of I'd never passport at the time took himself from a small village in Cyprus began living on his own at the age of 11 and worked his way up to running one of the largest shipping companies in the world took himself from abject poverty the kind of poverty you can't imagine where you can't afford meat that your family eats meat once a year from a goat by the weight that you raise and slaughter and took himself to being wealthy and very successful flash forward I'm in love with this woman and I go to this man and I asked for his blessing to marry his daughter and he says no that was hard to hear and he asks me one very simple question now at this time by the way I don't have a job I'm living at his ex-wife's house my soon-to-be mother-in-law his daughter is the breadwinner she's going to work every day while I stay at home and he asks me one question my daughter has become used to a certain lifestyle how do you plan to take care of her and I said to him sir I know what you see right now is a broke kid with no job but I'm telling you I'm the most ambitious person you've ever met but the truth was while I had that dream I knew what I wanted to become I wasn't doing anything about it because they didn't understand the difference between ambition and drive and add this period in my life I would lay in bed for up to three or four hours every morning because it was warm under the sheets and it was cold out of them and I didn't want to walk the four steps to grab my clothes to put them on I wasn't clever enough to think I'm gonna take this sweatshirt and put it right next to the bed so I can warm up before I get out that's seven years before I'm a multimillionaire and there I am laying in bed not having any idea how to solve the problem of being so cold I can't get myself out of bed and I start to feel a deep shame about Who I am because I promised this woman that I'm gonna make her wealthy one day and there I am laying in and the only thing that finally gets me out is I know she's gonna come home everyday for lunch and at that point I need to get out of bed quickly make her lunch so that she doesn't see that I've been laying in bed all morning and that shame starts to intensify so much that I hit a breaking point and I realized I can't marry her in good conscience telling her father that I am going to take care of your daughter I'm gonna make her rich I will take care of her in a way that is gonna shock you one day I can't say that and keep acting the way that I'm acting and I started thinking about my time as a teacher and I realize I can get better but I've got to hold myself to a standard I've got to work I've got to figure out this thing called Drive I've got to get up and get going I've got to become unstoppable and I'm here to tell you right now becoming unstoppable is the thing it is very real and has everything to do with who you want to become and has nothing to do with who you are today so I began to think about the person I wanted to become I stopped worrying about who I was right now and I began to paint a vision of how the person would act that I want to become and I began to act in that fashion now growing up there were two things that I promised myself that would happen now this is as a slightly chubby kid growing up in a morbidly obese family in Tacoma Washington hey hey to come in the house and I said one day I'm gonna be rich and one day I'm gonna have six-pack abs that was the promise but I know how it's gonna achieve either of those things my wife and I end up moving back from London to LA I start teaching again it's going well it's reinforcing that belief that I can change I can become what I want to become I feel myself getting stronger I'm reading a lot for raesha Slee I have this mathematical equation that I live by I I equals I owe ideas in equal ideas out don't worry about whether or not there are new thoughts to think worry only about that you have a unique mind based on your time based on your experience based on the things that you've read and you will synthesize those ideas in a unique way so I start reading voraciously trying to get anything that I can into my mind and as I'm doing this as I'm really realizing what it takes to actually grow and become different two guys walk into my class and they're wealthy entrepreneurs who also happened to be body builders so I'm like you've got to be kidding six pack abs and money like this is nuts and these guys say hey look we're about to start a company it's a technology company why don't you join us we need a copywriter but don't think of yourself as a copywriter you can have any job in the company that you want you just have to become the right person for the job and I'm thinking these guys are my white rabbit they've got money they've got six-pack ABS I can learn a lot from them so even though everybody thinks I'm crazy to leave the job teaching which is a stable job to go with these guys who are probably biessing me and follow them into this startup but I do it and there's a whole bunch of us that they make that same statement too you can have any job in the company you want you just have to become the right person for that job and when it started we were in this beautiful conference room overlooking the Pacific Ocean everyone had Florida glass or floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at the Pacific Ocean except for me and I was put in the server room if you've ever seen a server room they are dark they have whirring sound of all the computers processing everything and I remember one of the guys asking me who's the kid in the server room and that's where I started I started at the bottom and one by one I watched other people fall away people that didn't want to work the amount of hours they didn't want to put in the effort to get better they weren't prepared to become somebody new they were trying to capitalize on who they were but by that point I really believed that could become somebody else and I remember saying to my wife we're going to move and we're gonna get an apartment that's no more than seven minutes from either of the two guys that hired me they were the two partners in the company and I said the reason I want to do that is if they call me at 2:00 a.m. in the morning I want to be able to get there in less than ten minutes and I want them to know no one is more serious about taking advantage of this opportunity than me no one in this company is willing to work as hard as me not only will I be the only one that shows up but I'll show up in less than ten minutes and so my wife agreed and we moved and we actually timed it every time we found an apartment that she liked we would drive first one time it back drive to the other one time it to make sure that I could get there in less than ten minutes and that began to create momentum for me and I began to move up in the company and I began to read and learn and fail and embarrass myself and I remember when it started I knew nothing about business and I remember whenever we would do a conference call there would be one part of the call where I would get to contribute this is this is true and that part where I got to contribute was saying goodbye and I used to get so excited like here it's coming we're wrapping up this is amazing goodbye and that was my contribution and that's where I started as an entrepreneur I did not start as the guy with the lemonade stand I did not start as somebody buying baseball cards and selling them back I started out literally as a who knew absolutely nothing but I had the live to learn now if you guys have been keeping up with brain science I am here to tell you right now you can become anyone you want now the process of taking myself from scrounging my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car to building a billion-dollar business was all about building a set of beliefs now I believe that the matrix has us all I don't actually think we live in a simulation but I think the movie The Matrix is the perfect metaphor for the human experience we have all pulled a web of lies over our own eyes and the web of lies is what you tell yourself about what's possible for you and for the world and once you get that web of lies over your eyes you simply see it as reality and you don't understand that each one of those fundamental beliefs is alterable that you could choose to believe something else in fact you don't even realize that they are beliefs Einstein as a quote it's one of the most important quotes in my life the most important question any man must decide for himself is whether or not he lives in a friendly or hostile universe now what I love about that quote so it's hiding in it is that it's a decision you get to choose whether you're living in a friendly or a hostile universe there's no objective reality it just is what it is you're gonna get what you see you're gonna get what you focus on and you see what you focus on so the more you focus on the world works against me I've got bad luck the more you're gonna see proof of that you're going to seek it out you're going to act in accordance with that belief if on the other hand you believe the human potential is nearly limitless that the human animal is by its very nature the ultimate adaptation machine think about this for a second humans are the apex predator unlike anything else the world has ever seen we can live in any corner of the globe from the Arctic to the deserts at one point James Cameron was literally at the bottom of the Marianas Trench which is the deepest part of the ocean humans can not only get there they can thrive now nature had to make a decision with every animal do we create something that comes pre-programmed think of a horse when a horse is born it can already run jump walky a human on the other hand takes the opposite approach where nothing is pre-programmed but now you can go in any direction when humans are born we can't hold our own head up this is something that really freaks me out humans are so incapable of taking care of themselves you could literally lay an infant next to a bottle and it would still starve to death we can't hold our own head up we poo in our diapers we are literally in need of constant care for years of our lives now this comes with a benefit which is that we can adapt in any direction that we want and the most beautiful part of this is it never stops even as you get older you can decide that you want to go in a different direction you can change the course of where you're headed and so in this role that I found myself as budding entrepreneur I set out to learn everything that I could to understand what is my goal and then to work my way backwards one of the most profound things that ever happened to me and if you guys haven't read the book anti fragile buying the seem to leb do in that book he lays out the difference between something that is resilient and something that is truly anti fragile I'm gonna say somebody that's unstoppable is truly anti fragile and what anti fragile is the more you attack it the stronger it gets there's something that is resilient or tough it is still defined by its breaking point the more you go after it eventually it will break something that's anti fragile grows with that and I believe each and every one of us can build a mindset that is truly anti fragile there is only one thing that I have found that is actually anti fragile and it looks like this I was there with my partners they routinely made me feel stupid all the time they were older than me they were more than 10 years ahead of me on their entrepreneurial journey and so I was just wrong all the time now up to that point in my life I actually called myself the king of remedial jobs up until then I'd only gone for jobs where I knew I'd be smarter than the person interviewing me I knew that at some point during the interview they were gonna ask that magical question which made me feel so good about myself which was why are you here why are you interviewing for this job and I lived for that because it made me feel smart so here I am now not in that world anymore I'm with guys who are way ahead of me they're way smarter than me and I feel dumb all the time and one day I find myself arguing for this path in our business because it was my idea and I knew it was wrong that was the hilarious thing I knew it was wrong and yet I was arguing for it like really passionately and then all of a sudden it actually worked and they agreed to do it and I thought oh now what I've been telling my wife that I'm gonna make her rich and here I am arguing for something that just makes me feel good about myself and I had this moment of crisis and I asked myself no judgment what do you really want because if what you really want is to feel good about yourself to feel smart to be right to be worthy if those are the things that you want then get out of this company because you're wrong often you're making mistakes all the time and your partners are so far ahead of you that they make you feel stupid so this is like that doesn't make any sense so if you want to just go feel good go back to being the king of remedial jobs be in places where you're always feeling smart where you're usually right and live that life but if on the other hand what you really want is to actually reach your goals then you're gonna have to stop worrying about feeling good about yourself and both of those felt flawed everybody needs to feel good about themselves that that's just the reality of being a human you've got to find a way to feel good about yourself but I really believe everything you do in life should be in service of your goals and the moment that you're acting out of alignment with your goals you might have a problem with your goal or with your behavior one of them is gonna have to change and so I realized in that moment that I needed to change what I was building my self-esteem around because I was building it around being right and that was wrong so much I was building it around being smart and I just wasn't that smart I was building it around being good and worthy and the fact is those are just judgements on myself and so I decided right then and there it's the one thing in my life that borders on truly being an epiphany and I realize I need to change what I build my self-esteem around and it needs to be something that I didn't have the word anti fragile at the time but something that the more somebody goes after it the better off I'm going to be the more it's gonna push me towards my goals and that thing is and if somebody has a better answer I will take it but the only way to build your ego that is truly anti fragile that I have found is to be the learner to be willing to admit when you're wrong to look at your goal and work backwards and say is what I'm doing actually moving me towards my goal or not not does it make me feel good about myself not am i right not am i smart is it moving me towards my goal and if it is then you do it and if it doesn't then you don't and my life became that cut-and-dry and you can literally draw a line in the sand a demarcation point of my life before that and my life after that and after that I suddenly found myself just wanting more knowledge I wanted to know what I was doing wrong I wanted to know where I was making mistakes because and this is so important because at that moment I realized skills have utility once you understand the whole reason to acquire a skill is that it gives you power now I'm going to define power power to me is the ability to close your eyes and in a world the world the way you wish it was and then open your eyes and make that world come true that's power and the thing that stands between you where you are today and your goals where you want to get is a gap in skill set it is a gap in abilities and once you're willing to look naked Liat your inadequacies to literally build your self-esteem your entire sense of self-worth and value is built around one thing whenever you face an obstacle whenever you face a difficulty whenever you fail you have one thing that you say to yourself on a long enough time line I can learn this when you switch your life around to that whatever your goal is here whatever part of the honors Club or the leading edge you're at or if you want to go beyond that whatever that is wherever you want to go plant that flag identify the skills that you would need to get there and then set about everyday getting those skills here's the problem I find most people have they judge themselves to the lens of a moment they fail at something they miss the honor club they don't close that deal they thought they were going to they embarrass themselves they flub something and they think that defines who they are but I'm telling you right now you're not defined but who you are you're defined by who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there so flash forward I start putting all this to use in my life I am focused only on what I can learn I'm no longer being held back by my ego we work and work and work we take that technology company up becomes the 42nd fastest growing company in North America on paper I'm a multimillionaire I had earned sweat equity in the company by working so hard I didn't ask for a raise for five years I just went after it I worked every day seven days a week to the point where at six and half years my wife had to pull me aside and said is now damaging our marriage I was so into it I was so committed to where I wanted to go that I was really learning and I was getting more powerful I had the ability to imagine something and then make it come true with my abilities and in that process I began to realize whoa like you can really become what you want to become and I had on paper become a multimillionaire I was making more money than I've ever made before in my life and I went in and I quit and I quit because I was so profoundly unhappy because I realized somewhere in this race of becoming the best version of myself somewhere in this race of trying to get wealthy I'd completely lost touch with what made me love life and I was living the cliche of money can't buy happiness means literally ridiculous and so I go into my partners and I say look here's your equity back I just can't do this anymore I've got to live a life that makes me feel alive I want to have fun like this is just crazy and they said we could do this without you but we don't want to and so that let me connect with something other than the money for the first time in six and a half years and so at that point I'd already quit so I thought I don't have anything left to lose and so I confessed I said look my highest priority in business is Brotherhood it's camaraderie it's the people I'm with and what I had learned at that point is the struggles guaranteed the success is not if you're really striving for something it's going to be hard it's gonna be really really hard and it's going to force you to adapt and grow and become a better version of yourself and that can be the single most beautiful process of your life if it's aimed at something you care about and so I said well the only way that I'll come back is if we sell this company we create something that's predicated on value we focus on building a community we focus on connecting with our customers with really doing something amazing that we'll be proud that will have passion for there's a great quote often attributed to mother Teresa nobody will act for the many but people will act for the one and so I started thinking about my mom and my sister morbidly obese I knew I was gonna lose them too early if somebody didn't solve that problem and so for three very different reasons we decided to sell the technology company and start a nutrition company and when we started that company everybody told us we were crazy there were 1600 protein bars already on the market when we started quest the category had been declining for years one potential distributor actually said I need another protein bar like I need another hole in the head that sound familiar with your guys's circumstances it's not a great time in your business not a lot of inventory in that same setup by focusing on what we loved doing what made us feel good on what would be beneficial to the customer providing exceptional customer support evangelizing our customer at every turn doing only that which was going to actually help my mom and my sister which was not always the most profitable by the way in fact it usually wasn't but it made us feel good about who we were and so we didn't know if we were gonna build a big business but we knew that we were gonna believe in it we knew that we were gonna be passionate about it we knew that we were gonna touch people's lives and that became the rallying cry for the business actually deliver value do things that other people just can't imagine and that's how we went from not existing to being valued at over a billion dollars in less than five years just as we are coming out of the Great Recession into an industry that was oversaturated and declining because let me tell you something right now and burn this into the core of your soul there's always room for the best there's always room for the best and if you're prepared to become the best you can be unstoppable you can build something other people think is impossible you can build something out from under a mountain of doubt and that brings us back to my father-in-law the man who had asked me how I was gonna take care of his daughter he's always been very kind to me it's important to note that always very kind to me and he came out to LA and by this point we're doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue we've got 1400 employees millions of dollars of equipment hundreds of thousands of square feet of space and I'm walking him around the production floor bars are coming off the line at the rate of 1.5 million a day and I said Andre as' do you remember when you asked me how I would take care of your daughter and he said yes I said how am i doing and he just started to cry that to me is everyone's story everyone can choose that journey now I don't make a moral distinction I don't think that it's the right way to live your life it just happened to be the way that was true for me I believe the very meaning of life is to find out how many skills you can acquire that have utility and then put that utility to the test in service of someone else it's what the ancient Greeks call techne I've worked my ass off for this set of skills they are unique to me and they help other people and in being able to help other people with something that I worked very hard for I feel good about myself and I will make you guys one promise right here today the game you're playing please listen to this so that you don't end up wasting years of your life like I did mine the game that you're playing is not success the game that you're playing is not money the game that you're playing is brain chemistry it's about fulfillment the only thing ultimately that's ever get matter in your life is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself the things you say to yourself quietly in your mind when no one else is around that's what matters and becoming somebody that you're proud of in whatever way you define that is completely open to you humans are the ultimate adaptation machine we can grow in any direction it is what we are designed to do what scientists used to call junk DNA and they were so confused because humans only have 20,000 genes some onions have 40,000 genes and they thought this can't be onions just aren't more biologically complicated than humans so what's going on and then they realized all that junk DNA that they were dismissing that's epigenetic information meaning this one animal this human animal is designed to respond we don't come pre-programmed we come ready to adapt we come ready to change we come ready to grow and once you know that that is the nature of being a human that that is the beautiful gift of this life is to see how much you can grow in whatever direction you want towards whatever end you want but the gift that you have been given is the ability to change so if you don't like who you are today that's okay it doesn't matter who you are today it only matters who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there thank you [Applause]