The One Video to Watch if you want to win in 2025 | Tom Bilyeu

Stop lying to yourself. You know you have been coasting, living at an absolute fraction of your potential. All the while, that voice deep inside screaming at you that you are meant for something more. Now, I know that feeling because I have been there. I was broke, ashamed of myself, watching my fiance head off to work while I laid in bed wasting my time hours every day. This is a true story, but that was the beginning, not the end. Now, I hated feeling weak and useless, so I did something about it. And if you want to crush 2025 like I did, you're going to have to use the anger that you feel to change the course of your life. Personally, I channeled all of my frustrations not into the resentment of the world or others, but into fuel to improve every single aspect of my life. One day, I simply decided I'd had enough and I started making rules for myself, rules that will serve you if you are trying to make this year into something special. Rule number one, once I'm awake, no matter what, I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. That's a rule that I still live by to this day and I used it to fight my own laziness and fear and I trained myself day after day how to win. Now, I'm making this video because I was recently asked to explain what I did to go from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car to building three multi-million dollar companies including one unicorn billion-dollar business you've definitely heard of. By the end of it, this talk is the answer to that question. By the end of it, you'll either realize that you don't want to pursue greatness or you're going to have the blueprint that you need to get started today. Now, there's nothing for sale here. I would simply ask for help and this is it. Now, let me tell you, the answers are not what you think. They are not shiny motivational posters or fortune cookie wisdom. That stuff feels good, but it drives me nuts because it doesn't work. The steps you will have to take are often weird, they are sometimes painful, and they will demand more of you than you can possibly imagine right now. But the results will stagger you. Following the formula I'm going to walk you through took me from lazy nobody to transforming my physique, building three successful companies, staying married for more than two decades, generating a billion views on my content, and building a social following of more than 10 million people. And if you walk the same path, I know that some of you will end up doing far more than that. Now, here's the hard truth. No matter how unfair the world is, no one can save you. No one else will do the work. Even if they wanted to, they can't do it for you. It's all on you. And as Jocko would say, "Good." It means you have the power, but only if you can convince yourself to push hard enough. And if you can, the world will bend to your will." As cheesy as that sounds, it is absolutely true. As Steve Jobs said, "The world around you was built by people no smarter than you." So, you can either stay asleep or you can take notes and get to work. Because here's the framework. First, you have to define your terms. What does success mean to you? You're now on a path to gaining personal power, but you better have that aimed at something that matters to you. Now, power is not a dirty word. Whoever told you it was has a wildly dysfunctional view of the world. Power is simply the ability to close your eyes, imagine a world better than this one, open your eyes, and have the resilience and balls to gain the skills necessary to make that better world a reality. Now, people are going to tell you that power is bad because those people would do bad things if they had power, but that's not you. You can point it at something truly amazing. You can uplift yourself and those around you. It's what I call having an honorable goal. You are working to do something to elevate yourself and others. Now, if you recognize that you're having a biological experience, you've got a shot, but if you don't, you're in trouble. You are not a computer or a god, you're a person stuck in a body. And if you don't master your biology, your biology will master you. This is one of the most important things I'm going to talk about today. You cannot win if you're sick and tired. It's just too hard to be successful. So, let's start with the following basics. Fix your sleep. Exercise. I'm talking five or six days a week. Eat clean, whole food whenever possible. Get lean, get strong. Cut out addictions, and for the love of God, control your emotions. Stop believing that because you feel something, you should react with that emotion. And then, maybe most importantly, nurture loving relationships in your life. Now, these are all low-level things. If you cannot commit to doing these things, turn the video off right now because nothing else is going to matter. Everything I'm going to talk about is downstream of the cognitive optimization that comes from the things on that list. Trust me, most of the things on that list I don't enjoy doing. I do because they get my mind in the place that I need it in order to gain skills that I need to build the things that I'm trying to build in order to make the world a better place. All right, assuming you've done all of the above, the next step is to set a goal, a very specific goal. Not some fluffy thing like I want more money, that's super vague. Answer, how much? By when? Generated from doing what? If you want $500,000 in profit by the end of 2025 from building your own YouTube channel, then say that. Set that as your goal. Be that specific. If you want to be at 7% body fat and bench twice your body weight by July 15th, then say that. Goals make demands, so that you know what to do. Targets give you something to aim at, which is going to guide your actions. Without a hyper-specific target, you will waste energy, because even if you're busy, you're not moving in a clear direction. Again, you're going up a against the chaos of the world. And if you're going to overcome the chaos of the world and achieve some very specific outcome that you're trying to achieve, you've got to know exactly where you're trying to end up. Otherwise, you're going to spread your time and energy all over the place. The next thing you have to do is take extreme ownership. No more blaming anyone else. If you fail, that's on you. The world is unfair. Who cares? Your job is to win anyway. As Kobe Bryant said in one of my all-time favorite quotes, "Boos don't block dunks." Now, what did he mean by that? It doesn't matter how much people hate you. Doesn't matter what color your skin is, what your gender is, how tall you are, or how rich your parents are. It doesn't even matter if the game is rigged against you. The fact is, you can get so good at something that people cannot stop you. The greatest athletes in the world were paid millions of dollars to stop Kobe Bryant from scoring. And despite that, he scored 81 points in a single game. He was simply better at playing than other people. Champions do not complain about refs, bad luck, or bad genes. They outwork, they outsmart, they outlast, and they outperform everyone. You've got to own your results. And if you can bear that burden, if you can bear the fact that there's no one to blame but you for the state of your life, your entire life, then you'll stay focused on getting better, on gaining the skills that are necessary to win against any opponent. If you're pointing the fingers of responsibility at other people, you are going to fail because you won't stay focused in the one thing that you can control, which is your effort. Now, a quick side note about excuses. The most sinister thing about excuses is that they're valid. Maybe the world really is against you. Maybe you really are, like Muggsy Bogues, 5 3 and you've got to figure out how to win in basketball against people who are pushing 7 ft tall. But if that's the position that you're in, you either play to win given the limitations that you have, or you accept the excuse that basketball is just simply not for people built like you. If you take the excuse, sure, nobody's going to blame you, but you'll never achieve the things that you want to achieve. So, remember, the way to get out from under any excuse is not to prove that it's wrong. You probably won't be able to. It's to decide that you're going to win anyway. And once you decide, then your actions are going to follow, and then you have a chance of gaining the skills that you need, and this is a game of skill acquisition. Now, if this is a game of skill acquisition, ask yourself this. Why don't more people win? And the answer is most people quit. But you have to understand why they quit so you can avoid that trap. Most people quit because they build their self-esteem around being better, faster, stronger, smarter. Those are all extremely fragile positions because you're always going to find somebody who is better than you at something, and failure is the most information-rich data stream on planet Earth. So, if you want to succeed in the long run, you've got to be willing to fail in the short term. In fact, one of my superpowers is that I can tolerate being embarrassed longer than most people. At any one moment in my career, you could point at me and laugh and see that I was doing something wrong, see that I was failing, see that I wasn't generating the momentum that I needed to generate, but I knew in all of those moments, as long as I was learning from my mistakes, I could get the skills that I needed to keep pushing forward. So, I don't care if I fail in public. I know that I will learn from the experience even if people are laughing at me. Now, most people simply cannot stand that. The reason they can't stand it is their self-esteem is built around winning. So, when they're not winning, their self-esteem is damaged and they feel badly about myself, but I don't because my self-esteem is built around being the learner. I value myself for my willingness to stare nakedly at my inadequacies. I want to know what I suck at. I want to face the things that I'm bad at because the more I look at what I suck at, the better I actually feel about myself because I'm willing to do the things that other people are not. I'm willing to do what success demands, and I have forced myself to build my self-esteem around that thing, around my willingness to go, "Yeah, I actually am bad at that thing that you're laughing at me for." But, I'm not going to be bad at it forever. So, I keep my head in the game and I stay focused on getting better instead of worrying about what other people think about me. Because of that, I keep learning while everyone else fades into obscurity. Let's take a break from the show to talk about something I'm all too familiar with, the misery of allergies and sinus congestion. When you can't breathe properly, nothing else matters. Your focus drops, your energy tanks, and forget about getting quality sleep. After years of battling allergies, I've tried everything, which is why I'm excited about Navage Nasal Care. This is nothing like those old-school nasal rinses. It's an innovative system that uses gentle suction and saline flow to clear your nasal passages in as little as 30 seconds. It's completely drug-free using only purified saline. No side effects, no dependency, just clean, clear breathing. The design is straightforward, just hold it up to your nose and press start. If you're tired of struggling with congestion, here's an exclusive offer for Impact Theory listeners. When you order a Navage starter pack, you'll get a free cleaning kit. This offer is only available at navage.com /impact. That's n a v a g e .com /impact. And now, let's get back to the show. The harsh reality is failure breaks most people emotionally. It's just too ego damaging and they haven't done what we talked about earlier, which is to get out from under their emotions. So, when I feel badly about myself, I don't let it control my day. I know that glory awaits me if I can identify not as the winner, but instead identify as the learner. Anytime you learn, if that makes you feel better about yourself, then you're going to stay focused on learning. And if this really is a game of skill acquisition, if you feel better about yourself as you're learning and you stay in that loop, then you're going to get better than the other people who are worried simply about being better, faster, stronger, smarter. And that, when you focus on learning, is how you get into an upward spiral. Now, most people define themselves by where they're at right now. That is a trap. You should never value yourself for accomplishments. Value yourself for the sincere pursuit of an honorable goal. The sincere pursuit, playing to win, leaving it all out on the field, really trying to get the skills that you need to go farther than you've ever gone before and honestly, trying to go farther than anyone has ever gone before. This isn't just about competing with yourself. You really are if you embark on the quest to become great, you really are competing against other people. And so, this is about being honest about what your goals are going to demand of you. Now, focus on skill acquisition so you can become capable of a championship performance. But notice I don't say focus on skill acquisition so you can win a championship. No one can guarantee you success. I can guarantee the struggle, but when you chase growth, not validation, now you've got a chance of being unstoppable. Again, you get into that upward spiral of learning every time you fail. Now, I can hear you guys saying, "Tom, that's fine for you. You're somebody special. You look at my success and you write me off as somebody that has something that you don't." But that is absolutely false. When I was young, those closest to me, not strangers, the people that knew me best, assumed I was going to fail. My mother, my father-in-law, my own best friend, all of them assumed I was destined to fail. Now, they weren't mean about it, but nonetheless, all of them believed and ultimately confessed that they believed that I was going to fail. Now, they didn't misassess me. They just didn't count on the fact that I had the drive to get better. Now, I'm not asking any of you that wanted to do something great to believe that you're special. You're probably not. You're almost certainly average, as am I, and that's enough. Because the average human is designed to get better. Humans are the ultimate adaptation machine, but adaptation requires a relentless drive for improvement. Now, here's the catch. The secret that I have saved until now. If you want to be relentless in your pursuit of something, you have to care a lot about what you're pursuing. In fact, this whole speech could actually be summed up in a single sentence. If you want success more than a drowning man wants his next breath of air, you will find a way to make it happen. That's the whole thing. There's no way for me to give you the exact ABC of what you need to do. That's why all I'm talking about is framework because I don't know what you're going to pursue. I don't know what challenges you're going to be faced with. I don't know how the world is going to change. But I know the question that you're going to be asked is, can you build enough desire to fight through all of the difficulties of becoming great? Look around you. For the vast majority of humanity, the answer is no. They're not willing to do the things to meet the demands of greatness. So, the question for you is, are you like everyone else? Because if you are, you're going to fail. If you're in the grips of your emotions, you're going to fail. If you've built your self-esteem around being better, faster, stronger, smarter, you're going to fail. But if you can decide, and it is a decision, if you can decide to get yourself to commit to having a mission in your life, something you really care about, and then you commit to ratcheting up your desire, then you'll have what you need to get so good that you can't be stopped. But you can't lose sight of that. You have to build that desire. And the goal is to get so good at something that matters to you that no one can stop you from doing it. To beat this point to death, this is a game. Success is a game of skill acquisition. It's not a game of being born lucky. It's not a game of knowing the right people. It's a game of caring about something so deeply that when people mock your failures, you just keep plowing forward and practicing and getting better and failing your way upwards. Because remember, information comes from failure. You learn by trying something, seeing why it broke down, why it didn't work, coming up with a better way to do it, and then trying again. Okay, here's another important rule for you to embrace. Never, and I mean never, stand still. Never stand still. If you fail, that's fine. That's information. Adjust and try again. But you must absolutely never allow yourself to stand still. If it's a big decision and you really don't know what to do, fair enough. Give yourself 3 days to think about it. But then, if you have to, just guess. Choose randomly. Put things in a hat and draw them out. I don't care how you do it. But move forward and learn, because failure is the most information-rich data stream on planet Earth. That's why the only mistake is standing still. And that is the mistake that virtually everybody makes. They are so afraid of being made fun of. They are so afraid of looking stupid. They're so afraid of that negative emotion they feel when other people are pointing and laughing at them, that they would rather live a small life than face that ridicule. Because of where they've tied up their ego. But if you build your self-esteem around learning, now all of a sudden you get better. Now, I know that sometimes you're going to have to take nearly random action. So, the key to ensure that you're never pretending to pursue your goals is to use KPIs. Okay, a KPI is a key performance indicator. You're going to use these key performance indicators to track your progress. So, if you're trying to get stronger and add muscle, track your weights. Set a time frame. Work backwards to know how much you need to add this week or this month in order to hit your goal. So, if you set a 6-month goal or a year goal, now back into, "Okay, well, if I'm going to achieve this over a year, what would I need to do in the next week, the next month?" And make sure that you're on track. And if you're not on track, it's time for a new strategy. I don't ever want you to fear changing strategy, but I want you to be very skeptical. If you find yourself wanting to give up and focus on a new goal. I see this a lot. I see this in gold chasing. I see this in relationships. People that like the beginning of something when they're not yet being forced to face their inadequacies because they are still building their self-esteem around being better, faster, stronger, smarter. And when they do that, as soon as I get to that part where it gets hard or boring, they quit. And let me tell you boring kills just as many goals as fear. You've got to be willing to push through to do the hard boring practice to get better. So, if you find yourself wanting to start over all the time on something new, that's probably just you being weak. Here's a pro tip that I've learned the hard way. If you're going to do something amazing with your life, if you're really going to achieve greatness, you've got to focus like your life depends on it. Getting good requires an ungodly amount of effort. An ungodly amount of effort. The world is hard. The world is chaotic. And if you're going to force it to bend to your will, then you've got to have laser-like focus. If you're spreading your energy across a whole bunch of different goals, each thing will have less energy behind it. I will often talk about the sun. So, you go outside, it's a bright sunny day, it's wonderful, you can tan. But if you take out a magnifying glass, you can light something on fire because you are focusing the energy of the sun. Now, if something as gigantic as the nuclear reactor in the sky can be diffuse enough that you can lay out in it, but focus allows you to light something on fire, imagine how little you can accomplish if you don't focus your energies. Like the sun, if you find that magnifying glass and you point everything you've got at one thing, you wildly increase the likelihood that you'll will successful. and the more things that you pursue, the less likely you're going to be to achieve any of them. So, cut out anything that doesn't yield the desired improvement in the KPI that you're tracking. You also need to limit distractions and you need to be ready to sacrifice comfort for achievement. Now, I know a lot of people are going to have a hard time with that one, but the reality is if you want to do something great, it is going to ask you to pay an extraordinary price. I tell people all the time, it doesn't matter who you are today, what does matter is who you want to become and the price that you're willing to pay to get there. If you're not willing to pay the price that your goals demand, then you're never going to make any progress. All right, last but not least, you've got to learn to embrace suffering. Not all stress is bad. Now, make sure that you love what you're pursuing because it does not make sense to suffer if you're not going after something that is uplifting you and those around you. It's got to be something that you truly believe in and that you truly believe will make not only you better, but the world better. If it does, go all in and if it doesn't, don't. This is what I call fulfillment. Fulfillment is the only emotional state that can survive even grief and an evolutionary algorithm has been placed in your brain that goes like this. You are going to have to work hard to gain a set of skills that allow you to make progress towards a goal that uplifts you and other people. Okay? It's something that you care about for your own private reasons. You do not need to justify it to the world, but if it is an honorable goal that uplifts you and others, pour yourself into it because when you do that, you will be fulfilled. But, it absolutely demands that you work hard. Now, believe this. The world does not owe you greatness. And even if it did, no one is going to hand it to you. And even if they wanted to, they can't. This is the sword in the stone moment. You have to wrench that sword free by becoming a person worthy of wielding that power. It will take bloody knuckles and pure grit, but it is possible. Now, you can stand on the sidelines making excuses and wasting your potential. That is your right. Or you can step into the arena and fight until you break through. If you want to leave a mark on the world, if you want your name to echo through history, you're going to have to work. You will fail, you will stumble, and people will laugh on the way. But let them. Fail your is your teacher, not the people laughing. And suffering is simply the toll that you have to pay to forge yourself into someone who commands respect. First from yourself, then naturally from those you love. And I beg of you to forget about everybody else. You will get nowhere blaming the world for being unfair, even though it obviously is. Own your results. Relentlessly drive to get better. You now have the blueprint. So, let me leave you with a final quote from Alexis Carrel. Something that you can hold on to in your darkest hours, which I guarantee are coming. Man cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor. You can become anything you set your mind to if you're willing to pay the price. Make 2025 the greatest year ever. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. In your pursuit of a goal that you care about, you are going to end up getting in a rut. In that moment, most people give up. I'm going to tell you what you need to do if you want to be part of the 8% that actually sees their goals through. If you struggle getting up and getting your day started early, even