The 5 Signs You're Burnt Out, NOT LAZY! (Change Your Life In 7 Days) | Tom Bilyeu

My friends, it is easy to mistake burnout for laziness, but let me tell you right now, these are very different things and you've got to learn to tell the difference. The problem is, there are people who are being lazy and they are blaming it on burnout, but then there are also people that really are pushing too hard and they're burning out, mistaking it for laziness. Your ability to determine the difference between the two is going to determine whether or not you're able to find success. So, pay attention, my friends, because in this episode you are going to learn how to define these differences so that you can put them to use in your own life. Let's get into it. If you want to burn out fast in your life, pursue something that you don't care about. I think this is where most people get trapped. They're living somebody else's life or they're living an unexamined life. They've actually never taken the time to stop and think about what they really want, not what they're told they should want. What they actually want, the thing that gives you more energy. Because the thing that causes people to think that they're burning out is that they're actually just putting in energy into something that they don't care about. Because let me tell you, you are light-years away from burning out. The amount of time and energy that you can put into something if you're sleeping and you're getting In fact, that's what we have to get in. We should probably start there. The number one thing that causes burnout, there's really two things. One, you're not dealing with your biology correctly, and number two, you're pursuing something you don't care about. So, let's take them one at a time. Number one, are you getting sleep? The odds are that you're confusing fatigue with burnout. Burnout is something very specific. Burnout is where you were in love with something and you were going so hard and your life is getting overwhelming that even though you love it, even though you are optimized physically, you're still frazzling at the edges. Let's set that aside because most people never get there. Most people trip themselves up with deprioritizing their sleep, not exercising nearly enough, not getting their diet on point. And if you're not sleeping, exercising, eating right, meditating, doing all the things you need to do to optimize your physiology, you're going to think that you're burning out. I remember one time I was having a conversation with somebody and they were trying to convince me that they had adrenal fatigue. If your diet is all over the place and you're having that conversation as you're eating something that's highly processed, high in sugar, you are making it impossible for your body to process ATP. Adrenal fatigue is something so far down the line from just getting the blocking and tackling right in your life, if your answer is fancy, you better be really optimized. Most people, their diet is a mess, their diet is causing them to sleep poorly, they're also doing terrible sleep hygiene habits, so they're sleeping bad even if their diet is right, they're not exercising, they're not doing the things that they need to do to be able to actually just generate ATP. And I know that is wholly uninteresting and none of us want to be talking about the physiological part of this, the biology, but that's reality. So, get that right first. The next thing is, do you care about the thing that you're pouring your time and energy into? You need to be living the life that you actually want to live, not living the life that people tell you you're supposed to want, not living the life that your parents wish that they had lived, but living a life that actually gives you more energy than it takes. This really does come down to energy. Without even intending to, I'm talking about the two ways you can get energy, physiologically and psychologically. Okay? If you're unclear on how you get psychological energy, think about this. You were downtrodden. You've had a terrible day. You are exhausted. And then, you put on your favorite song, and you get a little bit hypey, and you're feeling a bit more energy. That is psychological energy. That's you getting excited about something. That's something changing your neurochemistry. Okay, that's not addressing what's going on at the ATP level. That's just addressing psychologically, are you feeling good? So, when you pick a career path, when you decide that thing that you're going to pour energy into, you want to make sure that it's something that gives you energy. It does not mean that you're going to be able to work forever, and that there is no limits. See the first part of my answer, this needs to be something that is coming after you get your physiology into place. But, assuming that you have your physiology in place, you want to make sure that the thing that you're into gets you into a loop of passion. Now, passion has to be created. It is a process. Passion is not an archaeological dig, it is an architectural build. It's something that you put together. You create it. And one of the big problems with people burning out is that they don't actually realize that you don't You're not born with a passion. You're born with things that are going to interest you. You're born with things that as you encounter them, for whatever reason, they speak to your personality. Okay, we're all about 50% hardwired and 50% malleable. So, there are going to be things that you respond to positively that other people don't, and vice versa. Other people may love chocolate ice cream, but you may hate it. Other people may love building a business, but you hate it. Other people may be really into sports, and you hate it, vice versa. You need to find the thing that you're into. Once you find that thing, now we know what we're going to pursue to see if it's going to become a passion. And there is a process that you walk through, and it goes like this. You experiment. You try a bunch of things. When you find the thing that gives you more energy than it takes, now you're going to engage with it more deeply. As you engage with it more deeply, you're going to see if it turns into a fascination. So, take the example the people give about magic or filmmaking. There's two kinds of people in the world. There are people that as they learn how the magic trick is done, they get more excited. And then there are people that as they learn how the magic trick is done, it loses all of the magic, and now they couldn't be less interested. Same thing with filmmaking. There are people that as they learn how the special effects are created, it's more enthralling that you can make this seamless world. For other people, it's like, "Oh, that's how it's done? Like, that's really boring." And so, they lose interest. So, as you go down the path of learning about how something works, engaging with it more deeply, are you getting more excited as you realize how the sausage is made, or are you turned off? If you're turned off, that's something that's taking more energy than it gives. So, now you're going to want to pivot and try something else. Kevin Kelly has a really fascinating idea around this, and he says, "Don't prematurely optimize." So many people become lawyers and bankers because they think, "Oh my god, I'm going to make a lot of money." And they prematurely optimize for money. Instead of trying that, try skydive, professional gaming, building a YouTube channel, drop shipping, whatever it is, being a doctor, whatever. Go try a bunch of things. See which ones you're into. Once you've sampled the buffet widely, then you can begin to narrow your focus. Okay, as we go down, we realize we are fascinated. The more I learn about this thing, the more I'm into it. Now, that's a real potential for passion. But, passion requires requited love. It needs to be returned back to you. So, unrequited love is the bad stuff. That's where you love something that doesn't love you back. Kind of how I feel about ice cream. And you can find something that as you pour yourself into it gives you something. And so, that loop looks like this. Let's take guitar as my classic example. Your parents may tell you that getting good at guitar is never going to be a career. Maybe yes, maybe no, but it can certainly become a passion. How? You engage with it, you see that it gives you more energy than it takes. You really go down the path of learning how to get good. This is where you realize, yeah, I'm fascinated by this. As I learn the mathematical structures of chord progressions, I'm more into this than ever. Amazing. Now, as you get good at it, this is where it becomes potential passion. So, as you gain mastery, you're now going to enter into a reciprocal relationship with the audience. Whether that's building a business or playing the guitar, it doesn't matter. You have an audience, a customer, whatever you want to call them. It's somebody that's going to give you feedback for the thing that you're putting out into the world. So, you are putting out into the world in this case, music. If people respond and like, "Whoa, you really elevated my mood." Going back to that earlier example of psychological energy, you're able to create music that makes people feel better or feel the way that they want to feel. And they give you that feedback. That makes you feel good. You realize you've put something of value out into the world. That makes you want to get better at it. That is the loop of passion. Now, the harder you work at this thing that gives you more energy than it takes, the more that you gain mastery, the more that you get feedback from the world, the better you feel, the more you want to pursue it, the better you get, the more you influence people, the more you influence people, the more it comes back as positive energy, the better you want to get, and it just keeps going in this loop, okay? This is the game of fulfillment. Now, if you want to have the kind of energy that you're going to need to push through all the difficulties that we will inevitably talk about in this episode, you are going to need to be following the formula for fulfillment, which is very simple. You have to work very hard to acquire a set of skills that allow you to serve yourself and the group, and I wish that I could do four more easily. But, you get the idea. If you're pursuing fulfillment, fulfillment is a neurological state, a neurochemical state, it's a better way of saying it, that is going to stay intact through grief, suffering, failure, embarrassment, all of it. It's the only thing. Happiness is transient. You can't be happy and grieving at the same time, but you can be grieving and fulfilled at the same time. Having respect for yourself, feeling like you're making progress in life, adding something of value to the world. That's fulfillment. Now, if you do that in a way that serves you, now you've really got something. So, understanding that is the first place that you have to solve for if you want to know, am I actually burning out or not? And most people don't. Most people are in a world where they don't care about what they're doing, and they have not optimized their physiology. If you get stuck in either of those two things, you literally can't create the ATP at the level that you need to create because you're not addressing your biological needs, or you don't care about the thing that you're trying to pour yourself into and zapping all of your energy because of it, it's going to defeat you psychologically from a psychological energy perspective even before you get to the ATP. And most people fail at both levels, which is why people think that they're burning out. When in reality, you just don't care. Here's the thing that you need to understand about the difference between burnout and laziness. Most people are lazy, but the reason that you're lazy isn't necessarily what you think. It is not a moral deficiency. And as we go through this episode, I want you guys to understand being lazy is not a moral deficiency. This is not a failing of you as a person. I am profoundly lazy. Now, I've accomplished what I've accomplished and keep pushing harder than I've ever pushed, not because I'm not lazy, but because I care deeply about the things that I'm doing and that allows me to overcome my laziness. Now, the question becomes if laziness isn't a moral failing, which is almost certainly what you've been told, what you've internalized, what you believe, what the hell is it? Laziness is very simple. You're having a biological experience. That is the epitaph I want on my tombstone. I want people to understand that you're having a biological experience and if you don't address your biology, you're going to be in trouble. Laziness is a part of your biology. How so? It goes like this. The human animal, through millions of years of evolution, has had to seek calories and conserve calories. Your brain alone, it's what? 3 lb, so it's like something like 2 or 3% of your body mass. No, it must weigh slightly more than that. So, 5 lb and it makes up 2 to 3% of your body mass. But it takes up 25% of your calories. That's insane. Your brain takes up I don't know how it compares to your quads, but it's probably more. And when you think about from a biomass perspective, your legs are way bigger than your brain. And yet, your brain is working so hard to do all the things that it needs to do that it's just gobbling up those resources. So, the reason that you are lazy is because nature had to make sure that you would go out, hunt, face the saber-tooth tiger, all of that stuff, but then it also had to make sure that you were lazy so that you didn't need to go face an unnecessary number of saber-tooth tigers. If all the time you were just go, go, go, go, go, in an evolutionary environment that would make no sense because it is so dangerous to get out in the world. Now, this is why people are morbidly obese today because you have the compulsion to eat the calories. The calories used to be very hard to get, used to be very dangerous to acquire. Now they are not, so you have this desire to overeat, to stuff your face full of those delicious potato chips, ice cream, fried food. And yet, you also have the impulse to be lazy as the day is long. Even as I'm saying ice cream, potato chips, fried food, and sitting on the couch, I want to do that right now. I want to stop recording this very second and go shovel food into my face and lay on the couch. Sounds amazing. Because I have this competing desire to acquire the calories and be lazy so that I don't burn too many calories and make my foraging and my hunting to elevate it to a level where now the risk and reward is just too much. So, your biology is doing this weird competing thing, and this is why despite as hard as I work, I'm constantly having to overcome the desire to lay in bed or lay in the couch and eat chips and just zone out. Okay, now that you know that it's not a moral failing, what are you going to do to overcome it? You're going to find the things that get you excited. You're going to find something that's worth pursuing, and that's the key. You have to find something that you're willing to, as my My gave me a plaque that says, find something that you would die for and live for it." So, you're going to find that thing that really matters to you. And all of us, again, from an evolutionary standpoint, to survive, you needed to make sure that the group wanted to protect you. To make sure that the group wanted to protect you, you had to make sure that you contributed to the group. So, we have this buried in our brains, this directive that absolutely insists that we contribute to the group. And this is why when people detach themselves from the group, they become too isolated, they get into a very dark place, and they begin to rebel against the group because they feel ostracized and shunned, which is the kind of thing that your brain screams is dangerous. And it is dangerous. It was dangerous historically, and it's dangerous now from people getting into psychological dysfunction. So, understand that you are always going to have the compulsion to be lazy. That isn't necessarily burnout. It's often mistaken for burnout because we all psychologically want to give in to that laziness. The psychological immune system kicks in, and it tells us, "No, no, no. Laziness is is a moral failing. You're a good person. You would never fail morally." Now, the bad news is, this is a mistake on two levels. Mistake number one is that you think that laziness is a moral failing. Mistake number two is that you allow your psychological immune system to kick in. So, I highly encourage you guys all to pattern interrupt. I never assume I'm burnt out. Man, I'm going to test myself six ways to Sunday before I go, "Ah, maybe this really is burnout." Because I know that laziness is going to be presented to me by my biology, by the psychological immune system long before I'm able to get to burnout, because my brain is trying to protect myself from using my calories unnecessarily. So, I'm constantly saying to myself, "Hey, stop being lazy. Get up. Get going. Do you really care about this thing or not?" And if you care about this thing, then you're going to push through the difficulty. One of my favorite quotes from David Goggins is, "When you think you are broken, when you think you are defeated, when you think you could not possibly take another step, you're only 40% of the way there." 40% of the way there. Not 50%, not 60%, not 90%, 40. You're not even halfway. You are not even halfway to what you are capable of doing from a biological perspective. And you need only look at tales of Like, have you ever watched the show I Shouldn't Be Alive? Watch it. You will very quickly understand that the human body is capable of the most insane things you can imagine. I'm talking about people whose legs have been pulverized by giant boulders figuring out a way to survive. If you've seen the movie, what's it, 187 Hours or whatever, his hand gets trapped by a boulder. He cuts it off with a pocket knife, has to cut through, oh god, the nerve, the literal nerve. Had to sever his own hand. And then hike back out and find his way to safety. What the human animal is capable of is it's insane. When you think you are broken, you are only at 40%. Knowing that, what are the odds that this is actually burnout and not laziness? Basically, zero. So, always assume this is laziness until you've really gone through, "Am I doing everything I can to optimize my physiology? Am I pursuing something that I really care about?" How many hours am I working, by the way? Am I actually working a lot of hours? You're not burned out at 40 hours, I will tell you. You don't care about what you're pursuing, fair enough. You haven't optimized your biology, fair enough. You're not burned out. Are you burned out at 60 hours? No. Are you burned out at 80 hours? Probably not. I've worked 93 hours a week on average, obviously sometimes less, but I have worked 93 hours on average for 10 years. And before that, it was probably 75 to 80. So, I have been working a stupid amount of hours for a whole lot of years. And I'm telling you, the thing that you will collide with every day is laziness, not burnout. But, I want to say again, I'm not cool for working a lot of hours. Laziness is not a moral failing. This is just about understanding how your mind is messing with you to make sure that you're able to push through all of that stuff to get to an endpoint that you care about. But, the question is, do you actually care about your endpoint or not? That's where people fail. So, the difference is, yes, at some point this really is going to be burnout. I worked roughly 120 hours for 8 months. That was burnout. That really got to a point where my my head was just not in the right place. I do pull my wife aside and say, "Look, I'm being a terrible [ __ ] husband. I will find my way back to you." Not smart. That at that point, you're not getting enough sleep. I certainly wasn't doing things out of excitement. It there is a point where it becomes burnout. But, you have to address the stack leading up to that first, overcome all of the biology pushing you towards laziness. Then, if we're just working too many hours. In fact, I I will say this, if you're not sleeping enough because you're working too much, that is a sign that you're approaching burnout, because you just won't be able to deal with the physiological demands. In fact, we can probably anchor burnout to physiology. Burnout is I'm now pushing so hard my body can't keep up. It's going to be a different number for everybody. So, it's not like I can just say, "Oh, you burn out at 119 hours." It's not going to work like that. It's going to be different based on where you're at in your life, how your diet is, what's the state of your microbiome, how much do you love what you're doing, do you have people in your life that love you? There are going to be a lot of things that are going to feed into the biological energy and the psychological energy. The truth is hitting your career goals is not easy. You have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else. But, there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100x your efficiency so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day. You'll not only get control of your time, you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal. To help you do this, I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any high achiever needs to dominate. And you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description. All right, my friend, back to today's episode. As the biology begins to send you clues, let's talk about some of the ugly ones no one wants to talk about. Do you have diarrhea? That's probably a bad sign. Are you in bed but unable to sleep? That's a bad sign. Um are your stress levels through the roof? That's a bad sign. Now, I know people that get stressed at 20 hours a week. So, it doesn't mean that that isn't tangled up in laziness or tangled up in uh not organizing your sense of self in the right way or not organizing your finances in the right way, but you could be going through something. Let's say that you just found out that your child is being bullied. That's going to slather on a whole lot of stress. Let's say that you just found out, oh God, that your child is sick, your spouse is sick, you have cancer. God forbid, okay? All of those things, they can take you to burn out real fast. But, there's going to be that physiological component of something is happening psychologically that's breaking you down physiologically. You've got to be thoughtful. You've got to get your physiology organized before you just give in. But, that's an easy way to begin to differentiate between laziness and burnout. When we've got the physiological components kicking off, we need to address that first. Get that in line, then we can begin to address the laziness. This is complicated. This is more complicated than I thought it would be as I set out to answer these questions. But, that's really how I think about it. Optimize your body, distrust your emotions, cuz they're going to tell you to be lazy from the jump. Make sure that you're pursuing something that you care about. And then, hold yourself to a high ass standard. Most people just don't expect much of themselves. That's the cold truth. Most people accept a low standard from themselves. That's just facts. That makes me sad. Because you can do incredible things with your life. But, you really have to toughen the [ __ ] up, buttercup. That's the fact. It really is. And that's fun. It's exciting. It's exhilarating to finally realize, oh [ __ ] I don't have to be weak my entire life, which is how I felt. I was so weak deep into my 20s, deep into my 20s. So, again, not a moral failing. You just have the wrong mindset. Get your mind right, push yourself, hold yourself accountable, hold yourself to a high ass standard. You will dazzle yourself with what you're capable of. God forbid you need to get your hand trapped by a boulder and chew through your own [ __ ] tendon like a coyote to realize how much you're capable of, but holy hell, you're capable of a lot more than you think. If you realize that you're lazy as you watch this, there are actually steps that you can take to get better. The first one is you need to come up with a value system. What do you value? I'll tell you right now, in myself, I value being a hardcore [ __ ] It's written into the culture document of this company. Be hardcore. Be hardcore. Push yourself. Make demands. Find the edges of your physical, mental, and emotional capabilities. And when you find them, be angry about how weak you are. Oh, man, this is really a glimpse into my soul. This is how I think. People are going to hate this answer, and I'm telling you right now, if you want to achieve something great, hold yourself accountable, be very angry about how weak you are, and get stronger every day. Hold yourself accountable to that. I have the [ __ ] chills. Hold yourself accountable to getting better every day. No matter how far you go, you've not hit the edges of human potential. It is so fun to see how far you can push yourself, but you have to let go of the idea that just because you're weak today means you're a bad person. You're not a bad person. That's not what it's about. It's about realizing that the human animal is designed to grow and get better, but you have to give yourself one impulse, and that impulse is grow or die. Grow or die. Everyone should transform their physique. I find the gym tedious and boring. But it's also the most important thing I've ever done in my life to show myself that I could change. When you walk in the gym, these numbers aren't going to impress anybody, but they matter to me. When I first walked into the gym, deadlifting 180 lb was terrifying, and I was really worried that I was going to hurt my back. And I had to work my way up to that. I had to imagine my wife being physically assaulted in order to get myself to show up to the gym every day and say, "You're too weak. It's not okay to be this weak. And if somebody attacked your wife, you wouldn't be able to stop them." And that did not make me feel good, but man, did it make me angry. And it allowed me to hold myself to a standard and channel it. Now, it took me years, but at the height of my deadlifting, I could deadlift 385 lb. I want to round up and say almost 400, but it was 385 lb. And I remember thinking, "Whoa. I can bend over and pick up 385 lb." Now, for the guys out there that can deadlift, you know, 600 lb, that's not very exciting. But for me, it changed my sense of myself. And even though I can't deadlift 385 lb as of today, that sense of who I am and what my potential is and how far I can push myself stayed with me. And it influenced my abilities in business and my tenacity to keep going, but it required me to be deeply unsatisfied with myself. Didn't mean I didn't love myself. It didn't mean I didn't respect myself. But it meant that I had to build my respect around showing up every day and demanding more of myself. It's a nuanced thing. It is the difference between over time building the life that you've always wanted and feeling like you're a victim. If you feel like a victim, it's because you don't yet know what you're capable of. As Kobe Bryant said, "Boos don't block dunks." You can get so good at something that people can't stop you. Even if they want to, even if they're trying, even if they're working their ass off every day just to destroy you, you can get so good they can't stop you. Am I the only one with a fetish for that idea? You can actually get so good people can't [ __ ] stop you. That gets me up every day that I can get so good at business people can't [ __ ] stop me. Like right now, as I'm filming this, we are in a recession and we're marching towards something that is [ __ ] scary. What's the thing that gets me through? That I can get so good people can't stop me. That I can get so good at conveying ideas that people will pay me an obscene amount of money to do it. That I never have to worry. That I know I can add value to people's lives. That I can reach through this [ __ ] camera right here and I can change your life. And because I can change your life, I know that some subset of you will feel that I've added so much value that you'll be there for me when I need you. It's insane. This is open to everybody, but you have to hold yourself accountable. You have to push yourself every day. You have to demand that you're able to add value to the world. But if you push yourself to get better and add more value to the world every day, you will never want for things that really matter. I'm not saying that you're going to get rich. I'm not even saying that I can stay rich. All I'm saying is that I know I can add value to the world. And as long as I can add value to the world, I never have to worry about having a roof over my head, food in my stomach, or people that love me. Boys and girls, please, for the love of God, understand that you are capable of far more than you think. You're capable of more than I think, and you're capable, in my mind, of a lot. Get out. Hold yourself accountable. Don't allow yourself to be weak. And trust me, this is what I need to remind myself of. I'm not above this. This is the thing I've struggled with the most profoundly in my life is this constant gravitational pull towards laziness and weakness. But I demand better of myself, and because of that, I get better. Because I don't tolerate laziness. Because I don't tolerate laying in bed longer than I'm supposed to. I don't tolerate not putting in the energy and the effort to get better. I don't tolerate sitting in failure. I don't tolerate sitting there feeling embarrassed, crying over spilled milk. I only allow myself to do that which moves me towards my goals. And if getting in the gym and busting my ass, if getting into the business ring, octagon, is what I have to do in order to get better, if I have to take punches and kicks to the face in order to learn and grow, then that's what I'm going to do. And when you hold yourself accountable like that, you really do get better. It's extraordinary. That is the gift that evolution has given you. If you give yourself the signal to adapt or die, you'll adapt. You will grow. But you have to give yourself that signal. You have to lift weights, sustained, heavy, pushing, getting better. If you do that, the muscle tears a little bit, and then it heals stronger. Same thing with your mind. Push yourself outside of your comfort zone. Be willing to fail. Be willing to embarrass yourself. Be willing to lose. Be willing to lose money. Be willing to lose face. Just don't [ __ ] with your integrity. If you do all of that, you can get back up, learn, and keep going. And what will happen? You will be propelled forward like a rocket ship. Because everybody else is going to give up. It's just the truth. Most people give up. Most people give up. They get broken. Life breaks people. It's why they say genius is a young man's game. You develop scar tissue as you go, man. Life is going to do everything it can to break you down. And it is only a value system and a belief system that's going to keep you being the man in the arena. Build that value system. Push yourself. Stay accountable. Stay hard. Stay hungry. That's it. If you don't have purpose in life, I can promise you that you were not going to push through all of the difficult things in your life to achieve the things that you want to achieve. So, the question becomes, if you don't have purpose, how do you find it? Now, the problem is finding your purpose is a misnomer and it is the verbiage here that causes everybody to fail in life, to be unhappy, to lead a life of quiet desperation. And the word in all of that that's off is find. You don't find your purpose. You create your purpose. You decide what your purpose is going to be. Now, you do find your interest, and your purpose should be based on something that you have interest in. And this is why the idea of finding it lingers. But, you're never going to find your purpose. There's never going to be anything that you encounter on first glance and you're like, "Oh my god, that hits me so hard. That, I'm going to do that thing." In fact, the number In fact, this is almost certainly true in your own life. You're like, "Oh my god, this is amazing. That's going to be my purpose. I'm going to save us all from climate change. I'm going to be uh um I'm going to help the kids. I'm going to build schools in Africa." Like, whatever. You're going to find something. Man, when you first hear about it, it really speaks to your soul. And I'm not saying that that feeling is trite. That feeling is real. But if you don't understand that that feeling is fleeting, that it will pass, as Mike Tyson says, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face." Everybody has a plan until they get fatigued. The uh I forget who said it, but the other quote that just my god, this haunts my dreams, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all." Oof. When you get tired, all the sudden, that purpose is not going to feel so real, and you will give up. So, if you can identify something quickly and say that it's your purpose, why then am I saying that it's not really your purpose until you decide? Because once you decide something is your purpose, the whole point of deciding is that you have to build around it to make it real. And if you don't go through the process of cementing that thing as legitimately your purpose in life, the reason that you exist is to do that thing, then you won't have the juice that you need to have to fight through the boredom, by the way, which is going to be the number one killer of dreams, boredom. It's boring. The things that you have to do to actually get good at something, it it can really border on torture. It's so repetitious. It's so draining. It's not what you want to do. All your friends are out partying, having a good time, and you're working on whatever boring thing it is that you have to do. For me, it's often legal contracts. I hate reading legal contract I hate it so much. It makes me question all the things that I say that I want in life. And that's when I realized that I've done a good job of building my purpose. I've done a good job of walking the process to make that purpose real at a neurochemical level. And it goes like this. You find that thing that gives you more energy than it takes. You go down the process of passion, which I answered earlier. Once you have the process of passion locked in, now you're going to give purpose to that passion. I'm doing this thing that I'm passionate about for this reason. Remember, for passion to really take hold, it has to serve yourself and the group. So now, you're going to take the way in which that thing serves the group, and you're going to put it at the center of your life. You're going to take that ember and you're going to fan those flames until it is a raging inferno by saying, "I'm doing this thing for this reason because it contributes to the group in this way." So I'll give you an example. From the time that I was 12, I've known that I've wanted to be a storyteller. But until I was probably about 35, I just wanted to tell stories because I loved telling stories. But I didn't have purpose. There was no meaning behind it all. Then, at Quest, I was working in the inner cities, which I'd actually been a big brother in the inner city before that for a long time. And so I had the seed planted in my soul that you could really help somebody. At Quest, realizing just how many amazing, incredible people end up doing nothing with their life because they have the wrong frame of reference, not because they couldn't do something, but because they have the wrong frame of reference so they don't walk down a path that will actually lead them to building the set of skills that they need to actually go and do something. So I was like, "Okay, can I just tell people what I've done to change my own life?" I tried that, and for 2% of the people it really does work, but for 98% it doesn't work. And so I realized, wait a second, the way to make these lessons work is to hit people on an emotional level at scale through story and that brought me back round to my original passion which was storytelling. So I thought this is amazing. This is a way for me to take something that I already love and want to do, attach purpose and meaning to it and now we can really do something amazing. But I had to remind myself, okay, I'm telling stories because I believe that the best way to incept people with an empowering mindset, which is exactly what they will need to do to do something incredible with their lives, to incept them with those ideas, I have to do it at an emotional level through story. That's how you hit people at an emotional level. That's why humans are known as meaning-making machines. We turn everything into a story to convey the meaning. So just is a truism about the nature of the human animal. We tell stories. We convey meaning through stories. Then I realized, wait a second, it's not just that, it's going to be the ages of 11 to 15 because of another principle of biology, which is what's known as the age of imprinting. Kids begin to push back against their parents in that very special age, which the Japanese actually have a name for, it's called shonen, which translates as the few years. So 11 to 15, the few years where you really begin to establish your identity by drinking deeply of the culture. So could I influence culture by influencing storytelling? And the answer is yes. And so now it's not just about writing a comic book or launching an NFT project or making a movie, it's about putting in these amazing ideas about what people are capable of, what they can do, how far they can push themselves, all the amazing heroes journey stuff that they're going to be able to accomplish in their life by embedding it in the story. And so, in the way that Star Wars led me to Yoda, Yoda led me to Taoism and the ideas in the Tao Te Ching, and then Taoism changed my life. That's the path that I want to walk people. Now, that's a lot cooler than thinking, "Oh, I just want to make a movie cuz I want to win an Academy Award or whatever." That's not going to get me through those dark [ __ ] nights when I was working 120 hours a week for 8 months, and it was like being kicked in the face over and over. It was detrimental certainly to my longevity cuz I was [ __ ] stressed to the nines. It was detrimental to my marriage. It's not a good look. But, I was able to push through it because I knew that I needed to to get to the other side to build the thing that I needed to build and create in order to leapfrog and get ahead. It worked, but it was a [ __ ] nightmare. But, I would not have had the energy to push through that nightmare the number of times that I said this quote, "When you're going through hell, keep going." And the only reason I was able to do that is because I had purpose behind it. I knew, "Yo, on the other side of this, I'm going to be able to help people. Help people that would otherwise not be able to achieve the extraordinary things that they will be able to achieve if they didn't encounter these ideas." Now, when you've got purpose like that, you'll push through. But, you have to understand, I didn't turn inward and find that purpose lurking there in my entire life. I built it up. I reinforced that purpose over and over and over and over, telling myself, telling anybody who would listen, coming on camera and saying it. Even in this answer, I have reinforced that idea in my own mind by embodying the thing that I want to feel as I say what my purpose is. You have to embody it. You have to get in that loop of feeling the way that you want to feel when you say that that's your purpose. And at first, it feels like you're faking the funk. But if you do it enough, you really will get that neurochemical response that you want when you think about what you're trying to do. So, thankfully, as I was going through that very difficult period, I had for years been building the association between what I'm building, what I'm creating, and the people that these ideas are going to help. And that the only way with my talent and abilities and passions, the only way that I'm going to be able to do that is through story. And that's it. Once you build that passion, once you connect it to that purpose, and you just reinforce, reinforce, reinforce, you will have the juice that you need to see things through. But you got to build it. I feel burnout just like anybody else, but I'm not going to lie, it takes a lot for me to feel burnout. In fact, the there've really only been two times that I felt burned out. In fact, this is perfect. The two times I've felt burned out in my life, one was psychological, and then the other was physiological. So, the first time that I felt burnout, I'd been showing up and chasing money for about 6 and 1/2 years. So, this is back at Awareness Technologies, for those that know my story. Um showing up every day saying, "I'm here to get rich. I'm here to get rich. I'm here to get rich. I'm here to get rich." And even though I did not care about the product that we were making, I so believed that I could get rich, and that I owed my wife wealth, and that for me to make my dreams come true, I had to get wealthy. So, I just showed up every day for that, and it was miserable. And I would come home every day, and I would say to my wife, "Don't ask me about my day. I don't want to talk about it. I'm so unhappy. You just need to give me space." And for a long time, she gave me space. She was just like, "Cool. It's all good." And then at the 6 and 1/2 year mark, she pulled me aside, and she said, "I'm watching you erode as a person, and it's now impacting our marriage. And so, you need to do something about this." And I was like, "Damn, she's right. And I want to feel alive again." So, even though at the time I was working less than I'm working now, I was so profoundly unhappy that I didn't have the psychological energy that I needed to push myself forward. And so, I was never anywhere close to breaking physically. Now I see how much farther I can push my physicality, how much farther I can go before I actually start burning out on a physiological or stress level. But I was so unhappy. I could not muster the psychological energy that I needed to keep going. I didn't have the will to keep competing. And so, I went in and I quit. And it made me feel so icky. I felt like such a loser to go in and quit. But I just couldn't do it, man. I couldn't I couldn't justify it anymore. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to feel alive. And I know the people listening to this, you get it. You know what it's like to feel dead inside, to be going through the motions, to ask yourself all the time, "Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? This is miserable." And when you ask yourself that question, if you don't have a profound answer, you will quit. And this is why most people quit. Most people quit. If you want to get ahead in life, just don't quit. Just get a little bit better every day because everybody else is quitting. But how do you have the psychological energy to not quit? What is up, my friend? Tom Bilyeu here, and I have a big question to ask you. How would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of 1 to 10? If your answer is anything less than a 10, I've got something cool for you. And let me tell you right now, discipline, by its very nature, means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful, boring, which is what kills most people, or possibly scary or even painful. Now, here is the thing. Achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging, stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring, and it will get boring. Building your levels of personal discipline is not easy, but let me tell you, it pays off. In fact, I will tell you, you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline. All right, I've just released a class from Impact Theory University called How to Build Ironclad Discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you. All right, click the link on the screen, register for this class right now, and let's get to work. I will see you inside this workshop from Impact Theory University. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Peace out. All this quiet quitting [ __ ] people celebrating that, the weakness that's celebrated in culture right now makes me sick for you. I'm going to win no matter what because I'm not weak. I keep pushing through. But people accept some low-ass standards from themselves. But it's not a moral judgment. You've tricked yourself into thinking that trying to live a life that doesn't fill you with the juice is worth it. So understand, you're burning out psychologically, not physiologically. This isn't a physical thing. Your adrenals aren't burned out. Your diet probably sucks. You're not sleeping enough. That's probably true. But the reality is you don't care about what you're doing. And because you don't care about what you're doing, you don't have the energy to push through all the boredom that comes along with trying to do something great, or the failure, or the embarrassment, all the negative stuff that is going to come for you because I cannot promise that you will ever be successful. But I can guarantee you're going to struggle. You're going to struggle, 100%. That's a guarantee. 1,000% I promise. I know nothing about your life other than you're going to struggle. Everyone struggles. This is why you see billionaires committing suicide, kids growing up in affluent neighborhoods imploding. The opioid epidemic, you're going to struggle. Being a human is hard. But you burn out because you don't have the psychological energy to get yourself in shape biologically to make sure that you're not breaking apart either from a do I care about what I'm pursuing perspective, or do I have the ability to actually generate energy at a cellular level. So, if you want to have the energy to figure out where your limitations are, make sure that you actually care about pushing through. So, that was the first. I didn't care about what I was pushing through. The second time I burned out was because I was working 120 hours a week for 8 months. And even though I really believed in what I was doing, it's just too much, man. It was too much. I reached the limit. One, I was eating into my sleep, which is danger zone, danger zone, danger zone, danger zone. But I was so stressed that it was getting hard for me to manage my psychology to make sure that I was getting enough sleep. So, I was waking up without an alarm. I was going to bed just like I should every night at 9:00. I was having no trouble falling asleep, but I was having trouble staying asleep. And so, So, realized, once again, my wife being the amazing human being that she is, I can always ping myself off of is my marriage where it should be or not. And I could see, yeah, I'm just working too much. And so, I said, "Look, I will find my way back to you. Once I make a promise to my wife, I'm going to uphold it." And so, I had to find a way to begin reducing my hours, which would take us into a whole another video where I explain that you need to find the right people, get the right people on the team. You need to understand there's only so much that you can and should be doing yourself. Uh that you do have to build infrastructure. That was a big part of it. And that once we as a team really got focused on building that infrastructure, ah, I could begin to scale back. So, one day we'll do a whole video case study around that. Um but until then, just know in this moment, it was really understanding that we do all have a breaking point. But, if you're putting in the time and the energy to making sure that your breaking point is really, really, really far away, you can accomplish some extraordinary [ __ ] What I did in those 8 months, I'm so proud of, I can't even begin to tell you. It was hard and dumb and I could have done it way smarter, but I'm still proud of myself for having the physiological and emotional fortitude to be able to push really far before I hit the point where I was like, "And now we've reached burnout." And by the way, because I have part of my value system is understanding, if you're hitting real burnout, like your stress levels are now diminishing you at a biological level, doing less is always an option. Now, that's advanced class stuff because most people stop at the 40% of what they're actually capable of and so, I never want people being like, "Tom said doing less is always an option." And so, you do less and your life looks like uh way less than it could, way less than you're proud of, way less than will be fulfilling because you reach for the easy answer, but I do want to remind you that you need the ability to differentiate between just not pushing yourself far enough and actually burning out. And when you leave it all out on the field every day and you're playing to the best of your abilities and you're pushing yourself, that when it really is burnout that you need to say, "Oh, I need to do less. I need to do less. I need to hug my wife more. I need to uh watch a movie that inspires me. I need to go out for ice cream with my friends. Whatever. Don't judge yourself for that. It's about fulfillment. It's not about breaking yourself in half. It just so happens that if you're wired like me and you've got some serious ambition and you realize, "Oh my god, I can translate my potential into actual skill set and I can actually get so good at something that I love that helps people that people can't stop me." That is intoxicating. But you have to understand that there is an upper bound to that and that you can push yourself to the point of breaking down. So if you get there, make sure that you recognize that doing less is always an option, should be a tool in your toolkit and when you get to that point, back off. Back off. It's that simple. But you've got to earn that trust with yourself. So those were the two examples from my life. That was how I managed to get myself out of those situations and may those examples serve you as well as they served me. If you've identified accurately that you really have pushed yourself to the point of burnout and now you want to know, "How do I begin to back my way out of that?" The first thing is to make sure that you have a good criteria by which to judge whether this is laziness or burnout. So number one, do you love what you're doing? Number two, are you still making progress? Because even if you love what you're doing, if you've hit a plateau and you're not pushing yourself to get beyond that, you may burn out just because progress, as Tony Robbins says, is a foundational pillar to human happiness. And so, you really do need to be getting better. You need to be moving closer to your goals. And to do that, you need to hold yourself accountable to results. So many people are building a vision of who they are based on winning and other people's perception that they're winning. You have to be very careful about that because you're going to spend This is actually really interesting. I don't think I've ever said this like this before. If you're achieving something amazing in your life, from the outside, 95% of the time, it's actually going to look like you're failing. It's really interesting. So, you've got to be very comfortable because look, we are both the shout and the echo. You are what you do and you're the way that people respond to what you do. There's no way around that. So, you're going to care about what other people think, but you have to take a very long view to that. So, for instance, most of the time in my life, I'm failing in these like micro little ways, right? I'm trying something, it didn't work. I had an idea, but it ended up not bearing fruit, whatever. But because I'm constantly learning and getting better, the things I'm failing at are just in a way higher tier of thing to be doing. And so, all the things that I can take for granted that I don't even think about anymore, uh those all create the basis of, in the case of business, the economic engine, whatever. So, you're able to take care of the blocking and tackling. You're able to get things moving. You're able to generate momentum. In my case, you're able to generate revenue, all of that. And so, you're able to see like the basic stuff that other people might really struggle with, but you're still, because you're trying to push into that new zone, you're still failing a lot. And if I were to like even now, if you go into my comments, you're going to see people saying, "Oh, he's a [ __ ] [ __ ] He has no idea what he's talking about." And so, if I look at And by the way, that might be because I really have said something stupid. And so if I say something stupid and I go in the comments and I see what everybody's saying and I'm like, "Oh, wow, that really hurts." And it makes me want to pull back and not push into a new area, not try to do something uh new, be afraid to go out on the limb and and really take a shot at something, then I will plateau. And so you have to be able to assess like, am I not making progress because I've become afraid, whatever. For whatever reason it is that you've plateaued, you need to be very careful cuz if you're not pushing beyond that plateau, you're going to be in trouble. So, there are a lot of different reasons why you might be experiencing that sense of burnout because psychologically you're not feeling good about what you're doing, but the other thing is, because again, there are two ways you can experience burnout, psychological and physiological. So, the other is you just might not be producing energy at a cellular level. So many people, most people, the vast majority of humanity is just out of shape. They're just out of shape. And let's say the really unpopular thing, if you're overweight, you are creating a problem for yourself at a cellular level. It just is what it is. And so, stop immediately. Don't judge yourself. Don't think that you're a worse person because you're overweight. Just recognize at a cellular level I'm not doing myself any favors. And so, I'm going to burn out sooner than somebody that's in shape, that at a cellular level is able to keep pushing. I am sweating 50 years old. I can't remember I I'm 47, I think I'm 47 at the time of this recording. I can never remember. I'm always a year sort of one direction or the other. But bruh, I've got energy for days. For days. I can work, even though I'm not celebrating this, but I am proud of the fact that I could do it at a physiological level. I could work 120 hours, roughly. Of course, there were times that it was less, but I can work roughly 120 hours a week, sustained. And by the way, let's do the math cuz I know people are going to say, "Oh, you're just not doing the math." No, no, no. That's 18 hours a day Monday through Friday plus 14 to 16 hours a day Saturday and Sunday. Don't do it. It's stupid. I'm just saying, like I don't advise that people go run a bunch of marathons, but if you ran one, you'd be proud of yourself. I'm proud of the fact that I could pull it off at a cellular level even though the whole time I was like, "You got to get the [ __ ] out of this." So, at a cellular level, despite my advancing age, I am able to generate that energy. I can keep pushing because my diet is on point. I sleep as much as I can. I don't set an alarm and haven't for over 15 years, 16, 17, something like that. A lot of years. And I work out. I'm in the gym. Not always 5 days a week, which is my goal, but I'm in the gym. I have a bandwidth of where my physique is, where my energy levels are that I just do not allow myself to get outside of. So, get yourself in shape. Push yourself. Get your diet right. That's hard. That's probably the most difficult one is for people to maintain a good diet. I get it. Eating junk food is awesome. But it has real consequences at the cellular level. So, you got to be You got to be on point with that. You are what you eat and you are what you eat ate. So, you turn over all your cells, so just keep that in mind at depending on which cell we're talking about at a very high rate. So, be very thoughtful about what you eat. Keep your physiology on point. Make sure you're sleeping. Make sure you're meditating. If you do that and you really begin building passion around what you're pursuing, give it purpose, you'll be able to back yourself out of burnout just by attacking it from that position. And then, of course, doing less is always an option. But, it should be the last option. The number one question I get asked is, I feel stuck in life. What can I do to not be stuck? Here is the reality. If you are feeling stuck in life, I guarantee I guarantee you don't have enough clarity. You don't have enough clarity. People that are stuck, the reason you're stuck is you don't know what to do with the next 15 minutes of your life. This is where budding entrepreneurs, anybody trying to accomplish anything, it all comes down to what are you going to do with the next 15 minutes of your life? If you sit down and are like, what should I be doing? You've already lost. At all times, I know what I should be doing. I keep an important things list. My important things list is based on my goals. My goals will demand certain behaviors. If you want to win a gold medal in the Olympics for swimming, what should you be doing? If you're not swimming, working out, or eating right, or sleeping, or visualizing, those are your five things. If you're not doing one of those things, you're doing something wrong. So, it would be very easy for them to create their important things list and have a life that just revolves around I know what my goal is. Your goal makes demands. Your goal makes demands. What demands do your goals make? Now, the only other reason that you would be stuck is I know what I want. I know exactly what I should be doing, but I'm not making progress. Now, what do you need? You need to try new things, you need to get a coach, you need somebody or something that's going to allow you to try something new. Because ultimately, that's it. You need to be in the physics of progress. The reason I call it the physics of progress is because this is true for everybody across the world for all time. You come up with a hypothesis about how you're going to reach your goal. Should be an informed hypothesis based on your experience. If you have no experience, then it's just going to be your best guess. But your informed hypothesis of a thing that you could do that would move you towards your goals. You're then going to do that thing, run that test. Then you're going to assess the results of that test. Did that move me towards my goal? Yes or no? If it moved you towards your goal, amazing, do more of it. If it didn't, then you're going to need to adjust and try again. The problem is that as you do that thing and you assess the results, most people, are you ready? In fact, can you guess? What do most people do that completely mess them up, ruin their lives, and destroy any hope they have of forward progress? That's right. They lie to themselves. Everybody lies to themselves to some degree, and that's the problem. Most people do not realize that there is a thing called the psychological immune system, which is going to say, "You didn't fail. The world failed you. The world does not want people that look like you to succeed. Whatever. You didn't grow up with money. Your parents didn't teach you. Uh you grew up on your own." Whatever the case may be. People are always making some excuse for why they failed. When the truth is what you did didn't work. You are not good enough yet. And as long as you append yet on there, what does it matter? You're not good enough yet. Cool. Now you know, you need to get better. Now you know in what way you need to get better. But the reality is the only thing that stands between you and becoming what you want to become is a set of skills. The great news is that all of us humans are designed to transform potential into actual usable skill set. That's what the human animal does. That's why and how we became the ultimate apex predator. Really think about this for a second. People People take this for granted. Makes me want to punch them in the throat. We in 60 years in 60 years 60 years in 60 years we went from flying is impossible to landing on the moon. Anybody else freaked out by that? We went from flying is impossible to landing on the moon in 60 years. Okay? That's what it means to get better. Not all of us are going to be the best at whatever it is we want to be the best at. Okay? There's only going to be one greatest of all time. That's just the reality of the phrase greatest of all time. But you can all get a hundred times better than you are at anything that you dedicate yourself to. So, dedicate yourself to getting better. That's how you get unstuck. The problem is people aren't clear or they're blaming other people or their circumstances. Blaming your circumstances, that's so mid. Immediately stop blaming your circumstances. Now, here's the worst part about excuses. They're real. They're legitimate. The world really may be stacked against you. The world really may not want you to succeed. But, you can still find a path. But you've got to look for it. You've got to push. You've got to try things. You've got to find experts. You've got to read every book that you can. You've got to fall on your face over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over constantly taking full responsibility for the outcome. Even if there are other people that it would be far too easy to point the finger at. You're going to take complete responsibility because now you're in control. And as long as you retain control, people can't stop you. If you give your power away to other people for very legitimate reasons, I get it. I get it. But even if you have legitimate reasons, it doesn't help you. It just means you have to go that much harder. The example I always give, my wife is half my size. She can match me calorie for calorie, and she won't put on fat like I will. She'll sweat through the bed sheets, and it really makes me angry. Like it makes me angry. And I'm not You're going to think I'm exaggerating. I mean this literally. She can take her shirt off after a night of cheating if we've really gone hard. She can wring actual droplets of sweat out of her clothes. That's freak That's freaky, right? We can all agree that's weird. I don't That doesn't happen to me. You can hear me getting fatter. Okay, that I'm kidding about. But it's so close to that, you can actually see if I have visible muscles by the end of the evening, they're gone. It's crazy. I retain water and put on fat way faster than my wife. Now, I can complain about that as I've done for the last 90 seconds, or I can accept that that's just true. And so for me to get really lean is going to be hard. Now, not to take anything away from my wife. She works out like a demon. She works out harder than I work out. But it's harder for me to lose fat. It just is what it is. But when I set out to get six-pack abs, which is that is the reality. And so the fact that I have to work harder than somebody else is irrelevant. Who am I arguing against? Who am I fighting against? It just is what it is. And so I can either try to go do something to change myself at the molecular level, or I can just go, "Look, these are the things that I have to do to hit my goals." And then do them. And then when it isn't working, go, "Well, I need to change something in my strategy." Or work harder, or both. That's reality. That's the Deal with the world the way that it is, not the way you wish it were. One more time. Deal with the world the way that it is, not the way that you wish it were. Because you really can overcome anything. Look at Stephen Hawking. The man could, at the end of his life, blow in a straw and I think move his eyes. And that was it. And yet, he developed some of the biggest breakthroughs in physics in the last 100 years. Now, according to him, he never would have had those breakthroughs were it not for his condition. He said if you don't help yourself, no one else is going to help you. That's a guy who had every reason to make all the excuses in the world. I can't fathom. I can't fathom if tomorrow I realized, "Oh, I'm going to lose use of every part of my body. I'm not even going to be able to speak." And to realize that no one's coming to save me. And I can feel bad, but that's not going to change anything. In fact, it's going to make things worse. I have to say, "Okay, cool. It is what it is. And now, how do I make this an awesome life? Not an okay life. Not a good enough life. How do I make that the best thing that ever happened to me?" I love that frame. Tony Robbins says, "If you can flip it and ask a different question and say, how is the worst thing that happened to me actually the best thing that ever happened to me?" Now, you start looking for that answer. And you can really get somewhere. But if you're woe is me-ing, if you're decrying the world, you will waste time in that death loop while other people are saying, "How do I make this work for me? How do I get so good that nobody can stop me?" They go on to have all the success. Makes me sad that that's not a popular answer. I want to hear from the people that want to flip over the desk and joy cuz they're like, "Oh my god! Yes! I don't have to be stuck here. I can push forward. I can figure this out. I can keep going and that the climb is the juice. You will never climb a summit so amazing that you get to the top and don't want to keep climbing. This is why people get emotionally devastated in their lives. Either they get to the peak that they thought was going to be the everything and then they're like, "Why don't I feel satisfied?" Or they never climb because they're like, "Fuck that mountain. Why should I have to climb the mountain?" Both of those people are in trouble. The person that climbs the mountain and then looks at that next peak and is like, "I got you, [ __ ] I'm taking you down, too. I'm coming for you." Those people, they love life. Because they know that it's about becoming capable of the climb. That's just what we're wired for. That's the thing that will make you feel awesome about your life. Not achieving it, not getting to the peak, becoming capable of a more and more difficult climb. Now, if you focus on that, the irony is you get success. But don't focus on the success. Focus on getting better at climbing. That's how you get unstuck. I guarantee you there is a way to build your life where you are not going to feel burnout. I'm going to give you seven things that you can do that will make sure that you never feel burnout. And the seventh one, everyone in this room is convinced I'm out of my mind. I'm not joking or doing this to hype. This is my challenge to myself. I literally sat down and thought of what are the real things you need to do and number seven is real and is exactly what people need to hear today. So, we are going to get to it and at the end these people are going to see this is the truth. Here we we All right, number one, you need to build desire. That is critically important. People do not understand, if you're not achieving the things that you want in life, you just don't want it badly enough. Think about this. Really think about this from a literal perspective for a second. I want you to imagine you're being held under water. If you've ever sat under water, you've got a good 15 seconds where being under water is not troubling or nerve-racking. About the 20-second mark, you're still okay, but you're starting to think, "Ooh, I need that breath." Around the 30-second mark, if you haven't trained, you would claw the eyes out of whoever is holding you under water to get to the surface. Legitimately, there is nothing that you wouldn't do at that point. And if you can learn to want whatever it is you're trying to achieve in life, and yes, I say learn, if you can learn to want whatever it is you're trying to achieve in life as badly as a drowning person wants their next breath of air, you will find a way to be successful. And that really is, like when I think about the core thing that makes somebody successful, it is tenacity. Relentlessness. Just you're unstoppable because you are hell-bent to find the answer. Now, why is that about burnout? Why would building desire be about burnout? Because I've talked about this before. Burnout is based on two things. It's either physiological burnout or psychological burnout. So, you have to make sure that you are building desire. You have got to want the thing so that psychologically, you're not breaking. Now, for the sake of these seven things, I'm not going to go back into the body. I've talked about the body enough, so just know that you've got to get your body right to not burn out. But you have Build desire. That's I want you to focus on that. You're going to go in a loop of building desire. There is a process to building desire and the process goes like this. You are going to let people know that "Hey, I want this thing." You're going to tell yourself that you want this thing. And every time that you tell yourself and you tell other people that you want this thing, you're going to embody the feeling that you want to feel. I mean, literally. I'll I'll do it right now. So, I can talk about building desire like this. "Hey everybody, you want to make sure that you um take the work the cycle of building desire so that at the end that you want something in your life as badly as a drowning person would want their next breath of air, okay?" Or I can do this. This is embodying it. Guys, I'm not joking. You have got to find a way to embody the thing that you want to feel. You're going to have to learn how to actually feel inside by acting out the passion that you want to feel about something. You've got to be able to do it on command. You've got to be able to literally embody the thing you want to feel. Whether it's excitement, passion, intensity, whatever, you've got to be able to embody it. That's how you do it. You literally change your physical state. You change the way that as you're saying it inside, it's not "Oh, I hope that I get this." It's like "I'm going to get this. Nothing is going to stop me from it. I want this so badly. I want this more than anything I've ever wanted in my life." You're saying the intense words and you're saying them in an intense way. Whether you're saying them purely internally without making a sound, whether you're saying it outwardly to somebody else, whether you're marching up and down in a room, which I have done more times than I can count in my life, like really feeling that thing that you want. Your brain is wired to hardwire whatever you repeat. Let me repeat that. You are hardwired to hardwire that which you repeat. So, if you repeat something over and over, your brain goes through a process called myelination. It becomes an easier thing to do. So, the electrical impulse travels easier between those two neurons than it did before. So, it becomes the easier thing to do. It becomes the default state. So, if I'm constantly saying, "I really want this thing." and I'm embodying that every time I think about this topic, I'm doing what I'm doing now, and I'm really feeling that intensity, then I'm going to feel that desire over a period of time because my brain is going to hardwire that emotional state to that topic. And you can do this over and over. This is why you have to be very careful about what you build desire around because you can build desire around dumb things. You can actually hardwire this intense connection between that feeling and something stupid. So, be careful. But, if your goal is honorable, it's something that's exciting to you, and you build desire around it, and it's something that feeds you emotionally, and it's something that allows you to serve the group, now it's like the more you pour yourself into that, the more that you want it. Like, let me tell you right now, I am trying to build the next Disney. The reason I'm trying to build the next Disney is because I believe to the core of my being that the way that you get people to have a growth mindset at scale is through story. So, I've got to build that engine where I can tell stories to people that reach the masses, that free people from Right now, the number one predictor of your future success is your zip code. I'm not okay with that. And I've spent so much time thinking about how I can break that paradigm, how there are people in my life who I love that have suffered needlessly because they are a victim of their zip code. And of course, you know my feelings about being a victim. But, the only way to get them to realize that they're not a victim is to give them these ideas. So, they are being trapped by their ideas. And the way that I get them out is through story. Now, I have rehearsed that loop so many times thinking about the people that I love and how badly I want this that I have I feel even right now I'm actually feeling the energy that I want to feel about how badly I want to do this, which is why I'm able to do the things that I do day in and day out 7 days a week. Even when I go away on my annual vacation for my anniversary, I work 7 days a week. I work 365 days a year including Christmas. Why? Because I want it that badly. I love this [ __ ] I absolutely love what I do. I'm all in not because somebody from the outside, not because I need the money, because I want it. I've spent the time building that desire so that I feel the thing that I want to feel. When you feel the thing that you want to feel when you're pushing and going hard after something, it feels awesome. Nobody has to convince me to work. No one should have to convince you to pursue the thing that you want. The reason that they do, the reason that you feel stuck, the reason that you're burning out is because you don't want it badly enough. That's number one. We've got six more to go, baby, but when you put in the time, you can actually avoid burnout. All right, number two. Pursue something you love, please. So many people pour time and energy into something that is eroding their sense of self that it's actually breaking you down. It's making you less of what you want to be. The punchline of life is not working hard. The punchline of life is not making a lot of money. The punchline of life is fulfillment. It's feeling good about yourself when you're by yourself. That matters. That matters a lot. How do you get there? Focus on something that you love. Pursue something that gives you energy. Build passion. Build passion. It won't come naturally. It's not buried inside of you. Passion is something that you create, that you develop based on, "Hey, I've experimented, I played around with a lot of things. This is the one that I really like. The more I engage with it, the more that it allows me to create something that the world values. I get that reflection back that the world values this." And that is how you fall in love. So many people are living a life that somebody else wants them to live, or it's allowing them to make the kind of money that they want to make. I've run the experiment for you. You can get rich and hate your life. There's no point. There's no point. Why would you do that? How many billionaires have to commit suicide before you realize that money isn't going to solve your problems? Accolades aren't going to solve your problems. The only thing that's going to solve the problem, which we all know intuitively but haven't said, and that is not feeling good about yourself when you're by yourself, when there's no one there to hype you up. What do you think about yourself? And the only way to solve for that is to really pour yourself into something that you love. And the only way to really fall in love with something is to do something that gives you that positive feedback. You enjoy doing it, but it also serves other people. I don't believe in one-way love. Infatuation, yes. Obsession, yes. Love, not so much. Love is a two-way street. So you're doing something that you're passionate about, and the world is like, "Damn, give me more of that, please." That's when you fall in love with something. That's when you can fall in love with something. Now, when you love something and you've got that energy, and you're busting your ass on that thing every day, but you're feeling like, "Oh my god, like I'm my potential is becoming usable skill set. This is giving me more energy than it takes. People are loving what I'm doing. Now, you've really got something. So, pursue something that you love and burnout is going to be way off in the distance because you're getting energy. The more you pour yourself into it, the better you feel. Of course, there are going to be limits, but those limits really will be distant things. Number three. Focus on becoming the greatest of all time. Now, are you going to become the greatest of all time? Probably not. But, let me tell you, I think Tony Robbins is right. I think it is hardwired in us to need to make progress. There is a fact about goal setting that the more audacious your goals, the more likely you are to see something through. Now, you have to be able to believe it. Most of you, when you hear that you should focus on becoming the greatest of all time, you're going to tune out. That means you've got some pre-work that you're going to have to do. And that pre-work is this. Accept the following truth. You are hopelessly average. I'm hopelessly average. Life has shown me that I'm hopelessly average over and over and over and over and over. Now, what is the nature of the human animal and why do I want you to start by recognizing that you are hopelessly average? The goal is to get you to focus on becoming the greatest of all time. The reason is that once you understand, "Oh, all these amazing people that have accomplished all this extraordinary stuff," as Steve Jobs said, "they're no smarter than you. They're average people that have understood one thing." The human animal is designed to grow and get better. So, every species has to make a choice as it moves forward up the evolutionary ladder. Do you pre-program everything? So, think about a horse. When a horse is born, it can do all of the things that a horse is going to be able to do within about 20 minutes. It's going to be able to get up, walk around, run, all that stuff. A human, on the other hand, has years and years and years of dependency. The reason that humans have dependencies is because the choice that we made as a species was instead of hardwiring everything, make us malleable. So, we're about 50% hardwired and 50% malleable. That means that we can build on top of our culture. So, the culture of horses does not improve over time. Horses do basically whatever they're going to do for all of time. And it's not going to change. If you look at a human 250,000 years ago when our DNA was identical. Okay? We were exactly modern humans 250,000 years ago. But, we weren't making iPhones 250,000 years ago, now, were we? It's because material sciences and all the technological breakthroughs, physics, all of that had to happen. But, because it happens, we don't have to relearn it each generation. So, culture stacks. It allows somebody to be born today and just quickly absorb all of the knowledge that came before them. And so, those 250,000 years of being a modern human, boom, you get to download it, take advantage of all the things that are around us, and move forward. That is a uniquely human thing. We are the only species that are able to do that. So, understanding the very foundation of being human is about making progress. So, I don't need you to actually become the goat. I need you to strive to be the goat so that you will be leveraging all of the things that the human animal is designed to do, namely to get better at whatever you dedicate yourself to getting truly extraordinary at. Earlier, I was talking about you have to give yourself the impulse to adapt or die. So, you've got to put yourself in a very extreme circumstance. The way that you do that is to really want that thing that you're going after, to have built an insane amount of desire around something you love, and then to focus on getting truly great. Now, if you do that, if you have that cocktail, now, man, you are really going to make real progress, because remember this core idea. Skills have utility. You're going to get good at something so you can do something other people can't do. You're going to get good at something so people can't stop you. You're going to get good at something so you can create something that didn't exist. But to do that, you've got to trigger that whole loop. You've got to really leverage the fact that big goals get people excited as long as they believe that they're possible. You're going to believe that they're possible because you understand that the human animal is designed to grow and change, but the way that we do that is we have to put ourselves in very intense circumstances to bring that learning out. You've got to be willing to fail and fail and fail and fail and fail, but if you're excited and believe, "Whoa, I can really become one of the best." That's intoxicating, and you need something that gets you that excited so you will keep going. So, as I've said to people before, I'm almost certainly never going to become the greatest of all time at any of the things that I do, but man, is it fun trying. But to do that, you've got to have the belief that let's say that I failed to become the greatest. It doesn't make me a worse person. It doesn't make my life mean less. I'm pretty guaranteed to be on my deathbed and be like, "Well, I never became the greatest, but man, making progress and constantly pushing myself, that was awesome. So, do that which is awesome and strive to be the greatest of all time. Right. Now, how do you keep all that? Those three things are a lot of really intense things. You're going to need to celebrate all along the way. As you're going, it's going to be hard. You're carrying a lot of weight. You're pushing yourself. It gets very heavy. It can be extremely taxing. But, if it's fun and you're celebrating those wins and you're looking back, if you look back on a weekly or monthly basis, you're not going to be very impressed with yourself. But, if you start looking back a year, 3 years, 5 years, you're going to melt your brain. It's insane how much better you can get when you start looking in 3-year increments. So, you've got to celebrate those wins. Be impressed with the progress that you've made. Focus on it. Look at it. Don't constantly bury it away thinking, "Oh, when I'm the greatest of all time, I'll celebrate." That would be the greatest mistake anybody could make. You've got to celebrate all those little things all along the way because, again, the odds that you actually become the greatest of all time are virtually zero and punchline of terrifying punchlines. Even if you became the greatest of all time, do you know what would happen? You will eventually be like, "But, what's next?" "But, what's next?" That is the amazing part about being a human. This is why we've sent people to the moon. Because when we proved that flight was possible, we didn't go, "Oh, word. We did it. All done. Thanks." We were like, "Whoa, if this is possible, what else is possible?" And then we made propeller planes and then jet engine planes and then things that could take us to the moon. And now we're trying to get to Mars. And then we'll try to warp space and time and bend it so that we can travel to distant solar systems. It's just the way that we're wired. And that's awesome. But, that means that since you will never be satisfied that you don't want to make your life about some end state. You want to make your life about the climb. So you want to celebrate those victories every time you get a little bit higher. You want to recognize that and be stoked on it. So take the time to make sure that you celebrate. If you don't do that, you're going to get to the top and be horrified. It will feel empty and you will feel vanquished in victory. That's about the worst thing I can imagine. All right, number five. You have to learn how to effectively punish yourself. All right, this is the advanced class. So number four, we're celebrating all along the way. Number five, we have to learn how to kick ourselves in the ass. And I find that people are not good at this one. People can get on board with celebrating the victories, but they can also plateau because they don't learn how to be like, "No, that wasn't good enough. I've really got to keep progressing." And so you want to be careful here because you do not want to diminish your sense of self. You do not want to beat yourself up or think less of yourself. You want to get to the point where you're like, "That was not good enough. I need to go harder. I need to push myself more. And if I don't push myself more, then I'm not living up to the person that I know I can be and I don't accept that from myself." Right? Set standards. You hear me say that all the time. You got to set standards. You got to hold yourself accountable to that standard. But if you do that, oh my god, the things you can accomplish are really extraordinary. So make sure that you know when you haven't gone hard enough that you call it out in yourself. You say, "I don't accept that. I don't tolerate that." Now, I have a rule. No matter what, you don't want to spend more than 20% of your time in the punishment zone. 80% of your time needs to be praising yourself, being excited about where you're going, what you're trying to build, the beautiful things you're trying to do in your life. Doesn't mean that you celebrate if there's nothing to celebrate, but it does mean that you focus on positive things, on your ability to change, your ability to grow, all of that. Even just your willingness to look at the things you could be doing differently. Being proud of your willingness to look at that. So, that's incredibly important. But, you have to learn how to effectively punish yourself. Again, without breaking your spirit. That's the key. All right. Number six. This one's going to be a bit of a curveball, but wait till you hear number seven. Number six, you need to have people in your life that you love. This is all about neurochemical management. Burning out is either physiologically, I just don't have the ability to generate ATP, or psychologically, I'm not into the thing that I'm pursuing. My life isn't worth living. You really do need to round out your life if you don't want to burn out. There's a reason that my wife is my number one priority. Success is not my number one priority. Business is not my number one priority. Money is not my number one priority. My marriage is my number one priority. Why? Because it's the most rewarding thing in my life. It's the thing that gives me the most. Now, as I told my wife when we were just dating, I said, "Look, you can ask me to give up most anything, and I'm so in love with you, I'd probably do it. But, you can never ask me to give up my ambition." But, I would say the same thing to my inner ambition. You can ask me to give up anything except the love of the people in my life, because that's what makes it all worth it. If I had all the ambition, and all the success, and all the skill set in the world, but I didn't have people around me that loved me, there would be an an innate part. I want you guys to understand, there's no escaping this. There's nobody that gets around this. There would be an innate part in my brain that would feel disease because there would be an unanswered question. What's this all for? Why am I doing this? Because all of that ambition, all of that drive is for one reason and one reason only. It's nature's solution to answering the question, how do I keep this animal alive long enough to have kids that have kids. Love is one of those ways. Love is one of those ways that pair bonds you so that you will raise the child. It is also the thing that allows you to bond to the other people in the tribe that you're going to be um fighting against all odds to stay alive and to make sure that as a team that you guys win so that it's this incredible motivating factor to love and be loved. This is so important in today's world. And as I was thinking about number six and thinking about how important if you really want to stay motivated, if you don't want to burn out you need love in your life. Like that's one of those real things. A lot of people speak in bumper stickers and they over simplify the complexity of the truth. And the reality is that you need people in your life and as that you love. And as I was thinking about that, it got me thinking about modern culture and something that's been weighing on my mind that brings us to number seven. If you want to avoid burnout, you need to be having sex. Now, I'm presuming that you are an adult in a committed relationship because this ties into six. The reason that I say that is right now in culture, adults are having less and less sex and that actually scares me. Not because they're not having intercourse, because of what sex represents. The neurochemical cocktail present in a loving sexual relationship is extraordinary, and the fact that that's breaking apart is a symptom of something in society that's beginning to fray. And it's two parts. One, everybody's going to be able to get on board with, and that's number six. It's love and all of that. Number two is sexual market value is a real thing. Sexual market value is about recognizing your potential. It's about being worthy of another human being and crossing into this energy zone, and I don't mean that in like a fru-fru way. I mean that energetically sex is unlike anything else that you will do in life. There's nothing else like it. Uh eating the greatest food, people will say, "Oh my god, it's better than sex." It's not the same. The way that you talk, the way that you act, the way that you're thinking, your brain patterns, all of it is different. It is truly energetically a very different thing. And getting to the point where you feel not only that you feel worthy of this incredible, necessary for the survival of the species, and do you really think that evolution has baked in the very thing that you must do and not made it important to the very thing that lets you strive and push yourself to being better. Burning out is the enemy of that. You don't think that sex is going to play any role in that? Of becoming the kind of person that is worthy of sharing that ultimate pinnacle experience. You really think that you can just sidestep that and there's going to be no consequences? I'm telling you, this is one thing. I'm putting This is the first time I've talked about this on camera. I'm putting my finger on this right now. This is one of the most troubling trends that I see in society. People are letting something fray. It is multifaceted. There's no doubt that my thinking on this will continue to evolve, but I'm telling you right now, one of the most important things about not burning out is having loving relationships. One of the ways that we pair bond as a species is sex, and that sex is partly about striving to become the kind of person that is worth sharing that with somebody else. And yes, we each have to bring that to the table. We each have to become a worthy partner. And I see that sliding in society right now. If you want to avoid burnout, become somebody who is worth having sex with. Damn, that's real [ __ ] I mean that. That's hard. I don't know how the world is going to take it, but I'm telling you right now, face up to that. You've got to become the kind of person that respects yourself and that other people respect, and that you can find your way to that other thing. It just is. That's That's real. All right, you can light the the comments on fire cuz I know that one's going to be highly controversial. Trust me when I say I say that for your sake, not mine. I want to see people live a beautiful life. I want to see people push themselves because it will make you feel good about yourself when you're by yourself, and at the end of the day, all that matters is that you feel good about yourself when you're by yourself. That's it, everybody. Those are the secrets to not burning out. Until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you want more clarity on the difference between laziness and burnout, check out this next episode here. I am not a born entrepreneur. Now, there are many people that consider themselves a born entrepreneur. I am not one of them.