The ULTIMATE ADVICE For Every Young Person! (HOW TO SUCCEED IN LIFE) | Tom Bilyeu

So, here's the bad news. I am not a born entrepreneur, and that is very important for you to know about me. I had a what I'll call a slave's mentality. I kept my head down, I did as little work as possible, and I avoided punishment at all costs. That's where my life began. Thank you for laughing at my pain. In fairness, I have been to Mars, so there's that. Uh you weren't supposed to mention it though, so but thank you guys so much for having me. Um I want to know how many born entrepreneurs do we have in the crowd? Don't be shy about it. How many born entrepreneurs do we have? Let's hear you. All right, there we go. So, here's the bad news. I am not a born entrepreneur, and that is very important for you to know about me. I had a what I'll call a slave's mentality. I kept my head down, I did as little work as possible, and I avoided punishment at all costs. That's where my life began. That's thank you for laughing at my pain. It really was um brutal growing up for me. I felt entirely lost. I felt entirely out of control. I had visions of what I wanted my life to become, but I had absolutely no idea how I was ever going to get there. And understanding that, and really believing that, that that's where I started, the rest of my journey becomes that much more interesting to you because I have some fundamental beliefs. I believe that we're all trapped in the matrix. And the matrix are the limiting beliefs that you've pulled over your own eyes. They're all a bunch of lies. And so, it's really learning how to get yourself out of that, to get rid of the limiting beliefs, so that you can execute against your dreams, but it starts with belief. And humans lead with belief. Growing up, I knew two things about myself. I grew up in a morbidly obese household that teetered between blue-collar and white-collar, and I knew in my future two things would be true. One day I would have six-pack abs, and one day I'd be rich. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to make those come true, but I knew that they were going to be two of the things that I was going to make come true in my life. Now, it's important to understand that Quest Nutrition is a company that rose from the ashes of misery. Each and every one of you at some point in your life, you are going to hit rock bottom. The question isn't will you hit rock bottom, the question is what are you going to do with yourself when it happens? And for me, I was teaching film, and I met these two buff, rich guys. And I thought, "Oh my god, six-pack abs and wealth." I've got to follow these guys. It's literally like I was meant to meet them. And they said, "Tom, you're coming to the world with your hand out. And if you want to control your art, if you want to control your life, you've got to get rich. So, hey, come on. We're starting this technology company, we need a copywriter, you'd be perfect for the job." So, I went and I did it, and they said, "But don't think of yourself as a copywriter. Understand, this is a startup. You can have any job in this company that you want. You just have to become the right person for the job." So, I took them seriously, and I started working my ass off to get better. To focus on the things that I needed to do in order to get good, to grow, and be able to execute. And I got so good that by the time we sold that company, I was the chief marketing officer, and they'd given me 10% of the company just based on performance. So, imagine giving somebody something that amounts to millions of dollars just based on how hard they've worked. That was the kind of blood, sweat, and tears that I put into it. But when I came into it, we all thought it was going to take us about 18 months to sell the company. Eight and a half years later, in the depths of despair, I realized something had to change. And I went to my partners and I quit. And I said, "Guys, here's your equity back. I don't believe I should get anything. I don't plan to cross the finish line. I'm going to go do something that makes me feel alive." And let me tell you right now, I said that from the position of being in a place where I had ownership in a company worth millions of dollars. I was making more money than I'd ever made in my life. I was standing in a beautiful conference room overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the house of a company that we had built that was winning awards. And I was so fundamentally unhappy that I finally had the first of what would become a string of very profound and important realizations. And that is the game you think you're playing is money. But I promise, the game you're actually playing is brain chemistry. If I gave you $4 billion tomorrow, but inside you felt suicidal and you felt worthless, what would be the point of the money? Conversely, if I gave you $3, but you felt fulfilled and like you were contributing not only to yourself, to your family, to other people, you felt alive inside and what you're doing meant something to you and you felt that you had significance, what does the money matter? Anybody ever read the poem Richard Cory? I read this poem when I was like 9 years old and it left a lasting impression on me and it was about the best looking, richest guy in town. The guys wanted to be him and the girls wanted to be with him. And the poem ends with Richard Cory going home and putting a bullet in his head. That's the human condition. How many people have you met in your life you think they're spectacular, they're amazing, and yet they're so fundamentally unhappy that they're in the grips of depression. We're living through a mental pandemic right now. It is almost ubiquitous to know somebody who has depression and or anxiety. And the reason is people don't understand the game they're playing. The game you're playing is a game of brain chemistry. It's chemicals that flow through your brain. It's a mindset. Once you understand that, then you can begin to structure your life in a way that actually makes sense. This is a long ass quote, but I'm going to read it all to you because these Once you understand this, you will understand everything you need to know about life. To those humans who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities. I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with the profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished. I have no pity for them because I wish them the one thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not. That one endures. That's life. That's the human condition. Most people think that Charles Darwin said that it's the survival of the fittest. Darwin never said that. It was said years after his death. What he did say, and burn this into your nervous system, what Darwin said was it's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the most adaptive to change. The reason human beings are the apex predator is because what we are good at is change. What we are good at is taking a stressor, a stimulus, and changing our body. Look at the people around you. Look at homie over there, jacked to the nines. Tommy, shredded. They were not born like this. Okay, I grew up in a morbidly obese family. I'm not supposed to be lean. We adapt because we force ourselves through something that is painful and we endure. What was Tommy talking about? The takeaway from Angela Duckworth's book that really stuck with him. Many people start, but few endure. It's not interesting whether or not you guys have a dream. I don't care if you have a dream. I am so uninterested in empty dreamers, I can't see straight. What I care about, do you have the fortitude to fail? And what do you learn from that failure? Do you get back up? Do you keep going? Do you force yourself to recognize that this is a question of adaptation? You simply have not done to yourself what you need to do in order to be good enough to succeed. And it really is that simple. Once you accept that the thing that separates you from the rest of the animal kingdom is an unimaginable ability to become. You have an unimaginable ability to become something. In 2014, private companies averaged 8% annual growth. After I went into my partners and I said I quit and I'm going to go do something that makes me feel alive, they were totally shocked. And I got all the way to my house and I was on the phone with my wife, I did it. I had been unhappy for so long. And I said I did it. I told them I quit, I gave back the equity, here I am and I'm pulling into the driveway at my house and my phone rings. And it's my partners. They say, "Come out to dinner with us." Out of respect and love, I went out to dinner with them and they said the now famous words, "We could do this without you. But we don't want to. And that gave me what I needed to connect to something other than money. It reminded me of the brotherhood. It reminded me that I'd fallen in love with these guys as human beings, that there was something more than money, there was something more than being a clever marketer. That I remembered for a second who I am. The things that make me unique. That I have a desire to connect, that I actually enjoy communities, that I'm not a guy with a killer instinct. I'm not interested in stepping on my my competitors necks. This is not how I'm wired. I'm wired to build something. I'm wired to see people shine. I love seeing other people win. I think it's incredible. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't want to win. I want to win at the absolute highest level. I want to be the greatest of all time. I want more people to write about me going to Mars because they're terrified to try to match my intros. I want that, right? And I hope each and every one of you wants to play at that level. I hope each and every one of you looks at the greatest of all time and says, "If I'm willing to break myself in half to get there, I could do it." But being honest with who you are, being honest that if there's something else that you want to bring to the table that you find a way to do that. And so I said, "Guys, I will come back and work with you on one condition. I will never prioritize money again. My highest value in business is camaraderie. And at the time that was sacrilege. We had made a pact with each There was three of us. The three of us had made an actual pact that we would do whatever it took to make our technology company more profitable. And if that meant skipping a family vacation, if that meant waking up at 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday to meet and brainstorm, we did it. Both of those stories are real. We did things like that. I would go away with my wife for Christmas to see her family in London, and I would literally take a camera with me so I could watch the company back in LA. I've never switched off. I didn't take days off. I was working. No matter where I was, I was working 7 days a week. I didn't take a real vacation, meaning that I wasn't actually working while we were on it, for 6 and 1/2 years. Hello, my friend. You know that I believe success requires you to see failure as the ultimate learning tool. Success requires you to be disciplined and gritty and to never, ever quit on your dreams. I say all of that because one thing is certain, the road to achieving your goal is not smooth or linear. I wish it was, but it's not. It's going to be bumpy, sometimes scary. Some days you'll take two steps forward and slide 10 steps back. And that's why success also requires you to know how to pull yourself out of a rut and get unstuck fast. Life is short. You can't be messing around with your goals. You've got to make progress every single day. So, I've pulled a class from Impact Theory University called How to Get Unstuck, which you can watch for free with the link on your screen or by clicking below. When you join me for that free preview of that workshop from Impact Theory University, I'm going to teach you my strategy for how to understand exactly where you need to be going, how to identify the obstacle that's blocking you, and the best way to make the most progress towards that goal, and keep your momentum. All right, click that link and let's get to work. All right, I'll see you on the inside. So, if I'm going to go back to that, this is going to be in service of something that I can believe in. This is going to be something that makes me feel alive. This is going to be something that I'm passionate about. It's going to be something that I actually feel like I'm contributing to the world, that I would be willing to do all of that with a smile on my face. And I said, "The only question I will ever ask again in the context of business is this. What would I do and love every day even if I was failing? If you guys can get on board with that, if we can build something from a position of wanting to bring value and not worrying about the money, then we can work together. And so they said that they felt the same way, and we started this crazy protein bar company called Quest Nutrition. Everyone told us that we were out of our minds. I was talking to Ben earlier about imagine you're a 15-year-old who wants to play in the NBA and all you hear all day long is kids, you're never going to make it. And to have the fortitude as a teenager to push through that and believe in yourself is what I call the arrogance of belief. I was so on fire with the notion that now I was going to do something that I believed in. Now I could think about my mom and my sister every day. My mom and my sister both morbidly obese, I knew they were going to die too soon if I didn't do something about it. I believed it was my problem to solve. I believed there was nothing I couldn't do if I set my mind to it. And armed with that, armed with the passion to know that I'm showing up every day fighting for my mom and my sister, I'm not thinking about money. I'm not going to make decisions based on profitability. I'm going to make decisions based on what is metabolically real. What is the actual answer to the question of how do you end metabolic disease? And I play a game called no [ __ ] what would it take? No [ __ ] what would it take to end metabolic disease? And the answer is you have to make food that people choose based on taste and it happens to be good for them. That's the only way it's going to happen on a global scale. And so that's what we set out to do. But when you're armed with the notion of I want to end metabolic disease, not I want to get rich, not I want to sell my company. I want to end metabolic disease and you let that be your driver. Now you know what your why is. And we'll get to that more in a minute. By putting that mindset at the forefront, from 2010 alone, Quest grew by 57,000%. Comparative companies were growing by eight. We grew by 57,000. I'm telling you right now, saving the world, doing the right thing, thinking about your customer, wanting them to win, wanting them to shine, wanting great things for your employees, it's big [ __ ] business. At Quest, we made more in a single day than our previous company made annually. All by putting the customer first. All by saying we're only going to do what's actually metabolically advantageous. Because how does it serve me to make a product that doesn't when my mission, in my opinion, was to save my mom. And I would ask myself of every decision, tough decision that we had to make, which decision actually helped save my mom? And then we would make that decision. We hit number two on the Inc. 500 list. We were officially a unicorn company. We were a startup that bootstrapped, believe it or not, and made it all the way to a valuation of over a billion dollars. All right. If you guys want to have success in your life, and I don't care what it is that you're trying to do, there's going to be two things that you need to do. We're going to talk about the first one now, which is develop your mindset. We'll get to the second one later, which is build your business, but we'll get to that. For now, let's just talk about your mind. The most important thing is your mind. Make no mistake about that. Right now, the only thing that is holding you back, I promise you, and whatever excuse you're telling yourself, it's [ __ ] The only thing that's holding you back is the way that you think about yourself and the world. That's it. Flat. You not built the mechanisms in your mind that you need to free yourself from the Matrix. And boys and girls, the Matrix has you. Who knows David Foster Wallace? You all have an assignment to do. And by the way, if you don't do this, don't think for 1 second you actually want to be successful. Stop [ __ ] fooling yourself and go do something easier. Because this video is like 18 minutes long. It's one of the most profound things you'll ever watch. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water. In the talk, what he makes clear is the fish is the last one to realize that it's in water. Think about it from a human perspective. We had to discover air. We had to discover gravity. They're so ubiquitous, you literally don't see them. You take them for granted as just being there. And that's how people take their belief system. Right now, you think you're capable of certain things and incapable of others. And that is your water. And until you can identify it, until you can see that you're telling yourself lies, and they are disempowering lies, by the way, because I am not some grand fan of the truth, I'm a grand fan of doing and believing that which moves you towards your goals. Do and believe that which moves you towards your goals. That's it. Once you put that belief at the core of your being, you will be amazed at what you're able to accomplish. When I say take the red pill, what I'm talking about is waking up to the way the world really is. The amount of potential that you have, I always say is nearly unlimited. But I only say that so I don't have to get into stupid arguments with people about throwing absolutely ridiculous things out just to try to defeat the notion. And that's somebody who wants me to be wrong. But ask yourselves right now, if my message is you can do anything you set your mind to without limitation, don't you hope I'm right? And even if I'm wrong, how much farther will you go simply because you were willing to believe? Humans lead with belief. Humans lead with belief. You won't take the first step down any path unless you believe you can actually get where you're going. And this is where people get stuck in the matrix. You don't push yourself hard enough. You don't make big enough demands. You think small. You dream small. You make small demands of yourself. If you want to see what big demands look like, look at David Goggins. Anybody know David Goggins? For those of you who don't, let me tell you a quick story. David Goggins is a Navy SEAL. He wanted to honor fallen SEALs. To do that, he wanted to pick the hardest thing that he could think of. It was a 135-mile race. The person who put on the race said, "You can't enter my race unless you run 100 miles in a 24-hour period. Have you?" The answer was no. He said, "There's one 4 days from now. If you can complete 4 days, who weigh 250 lb, in 4 days, if you can complete a 100-mile race literally running around a high school track, think about how torturous that would be, if you can complete 100 miles in 24 hours, then you get to run my race and raise the funds for your charity." So, David decides he's going to run that race. He wasn't prepared. He was overweight. By mile 70, he had broken both of his feet. He had shin splints. His calf muscles were beginning to tear off the bone. He sat into a chair because he literally had nothing left to give. He urinated on himself blood cuz he couldn't move. He couldn't get up to go to the restroom, so he defecated on himself. And as he's sitting there in the chair, peeing blood, in total agony, with feces on his back, the only question he had was, "What do I need to do to finish the remaining 30 miles?" And so he taped his feet so that they would go numb, and he would stop feeling the pain of the broken feet. He ate something so that he would have the needed energy to keep going. And he got up and he started walking. And he walked for, I don't remember how many miles. And his wife said, "At this pace, you're not going to finish." And so he ran the remaining 19 miles. Broken feet, stress fractures in his shins, blood, excrement, and he finished on time. That's what a human being is capable of. We limit ourselves. And it's only us. There's nobody else that's doing it to you. You've chosen to adopt those beliefs. And once you push yourself outside of that comfort zone, what becomes possible is absolutely miraculous. Now, I choose to believe that my potential is limitless. And because of that, I've gone from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car, that is a true story, to building a billion-dollar business. All right. How do you do it? If this is about building your mindset, how? To me, it's about mind the gap. There is a gap between who you are now and who you need to become. And that gap is a gap of skill set, plain and simple. Remember, you're an adaptation machine. Your job is to place yourself under stress, and then force yourself to grow. So, back to Mr. Yoked, you don't get those muscles by looking at the weights. You get those muscles by going under the weight and not stopping when it hurts. You stop when you can no longer recruit the muscles enough to move the weight. That's when you're done. And when you're able to do that, what you're actually doing is tearing down the muscle fiber. And a lot of people, when they begin working out, they don't realize that's actually the name of the game. The name of the game is to break the muscle down. And then the body comes and builds it back up. The conscious part is tearing it down. Your job is to put yourself in stressful situations. Your job is to push yourself to the limit of what you think you're capable of, and then go past that. And when you're able to push yourself past that, when you're able to get into the Goggins reps, as I call it, when you're able to exist in that zone, long past where it started hurting, long past when it got boring, long past when you were terrified that you'd never be able to do it, that's when you'll begin to adapt, because you're telling your body adapt or die. That's how you're going to get where you want to go. Now, I love the movie The Matrix, as was made very clear in the intro. The real question is, what is your kung fu? You've got to figure that out. Right? This is a path to execution we're talking about right now. Path one is about the mindset. So, what is your kung fu? My kung fu is business. I knew that I was going to have to learn business in order to control the resources, in order to control my art. And this is how you're going to develop your kung fu. One, always be reading. The most important mathematical formula you will ever encounter is right there. I I equals I O. It stands for ideas in equal ideas out. If you want to solve a problem in your business that's become particularly tricky, you need to be taking in a ton of data so that your unique mind, your unique world view, your unique life, having grown up the way that you grew up, the way that your brain is wired, all of it. You will come up with ideas that nobody else is going to come up with. But, you first have to be getting that stimulus. Now, I doubt I have to over preach that one to a bunch of people that have come to a conference like this. These are literally the kinds of ideas you want to be encountering. Two, open yourself up to being changed. I can't tell you how many times I've recommended people my list of books, which by the way you can find on impacttheory.com Tom's reading list. It is the 25 books any human being that wants to excel should read in order. And before every book, say a little prayer. And the prayer goes like this. I am open to being changed fundamentally and for the better by this book. I am open to being changed fundamentally and for the better from this book. You've got to go into the book wanting it to be right. You've got to go into the book hoping that it gives you some piece of knowledge. Remember, everyone, everyone is your superior in some way. And once you learn to check your ego, sit at their feet with absolute humility, and be open to their ideas, especially the one that contradicts what you believe today, then you'll get somewhere. And I've got some really amazing news for you guys. Your current skill set has already taken you as far as it's going to take you. If you don't put yourself on a path to learn and very aggressively, where you are now is where you'll be in 5 years. The key is crossing that chasm of skill set. All right, realize what you believe is a choice. This is something that's really hard for people because they think some things are objectively true and other things are not. And that's simply a lie. And that's why the Matrix is the perfect metaphor. Think about this for a second. Your brain is locked in total darkness. It never sees light. Your brain is locked in total silence. It never hears sounds. What your brain does is take stimulus, the agitation of the air, and it transmits it into chemical electrical signals. It does the same with photons falling on your eye. But ultimately, this thing that you're experiencing, the distance that you feel for me, it's all happening in your mind. There's actually two dime-sized blank spots in your field of vision where the optic nerve connects to the eye, and yet you don't experience it. It's right in the center. So, why don't you experience it? Because your brain is insanely good at guessing what should be there and filling it in. That's when I realized, my brain is lying to me. Now, it may have all the best intentions in the world, but make no mistake, your brain is making [ __ ] up. And it's making up a lot of [ __ ] And so, you've got to choose what to believe. Who here has a negative voice in their head that tells them to be careful, be safe, you probably can't do it, this is all going to go wrong? Now, do you believe that voice to be objectively true? Okay, so that voice is lying to you as well. Now, it has great intentions. It's trying to make sure you don't get eaten by a lion in the bush. That doesn't happen a lot in modern society. So, maybe a little less useful in today's day and age. And then the really protective one is trying to make sure you don't get ostracized by the group, which in years past would have meant certain death, but now you don't need the group. You can survive just fine. There's a grocery store around every corner. You can get shelter of some kind. It may be lonely as hell, but the chances of you dying from being ostracized are virtually zero. So, you've got outdated software, outdated algorithms running in your mind. Your job is to develop what I call an overwatch mechanism. The overwatch is the emotionally sober part of you that distrusts every signal and impulse that your brain gives you. And once you can get over that, in fact, there's a great quote from Da Vinci, the greatest form of control is control over oneself. So, the reason I love Star Wars is because it's all about mind control. But not mind control over other people, don't worry about that. Mind control over yourself. Being able to tell yourself, "These are not the droids you're looking for." That's when this gets really powerful. All right. So, belief is a choice. We're going to talk about that more. Be an eternal student. We've talked about that. And last one, become antifragile. All right. We're going to go really deep on antifragile, so I won't belabor the point, and develop grit. All right. How do you become antifragile? This is probably one of the most important things you guys need to learn. Becoming antifragile was literally the thing that changed my life. And I remember the day that it happened. I had just started working for my two partners. They were very smart, clearly much smarter than I. And I had built my self-esteem around being smart and being right. And now, all of a sudden, I found myself with these two incredible minds that could process data more rapidly than I can. So, I'm not going to place a value judgment. I'm not going to get into an argument about how valuable IQ is. I will just say that a high IQ, in my opinion, means that you're processing raw data faster than somebody else. So, you can run through the list of possible scenarios for instance that could be very helpful going into any negotiation. You've just thought through all the possible permutations. So they made me feel badly about myself. So as you can imagine I didn't always want to be around them and the times that I was around them I wanted to find some way to be right. And so we were arguing about something a way to do something in the business and I had an idea and then they threw out another idea. I recognized immediately that their idea was better and yet I kept arguing for mine. Ever come across somebody who does that? I promise what's happening in that moment is they're feeling insecure. You've triggered their insecurities and now they're going to fight for it because it's theirs. Because if they can at least win that argument while they may not feel smart, they may get reflected back to them that they were smarter than you in that moment they could convince you of something. So I had this moment of crisis. Because I actually convinced them. And I convinced them that my way was right even though there was voice in my head screaming, "It's wrong, dumbass. You know it's wrong. What are you doing?" It was insane. I was literally heading in this collision and I couldn't stop myself. So at the end of it I asked myself, "What do I really want?" Because I tell people I want to get rich. But my actions say I want to feel good about myself. And I had a moment of crisis because I realized I need to feel good about myself. Everybody needs self-esteem. In fact what suicide is is when somebody no longer believes they'll ever feel good about themselves ever again. And if that were true, it's not, but if that were true, suicide's actually a reasonable option. Why would you want to go on living if every day you're miserable and there really is no way out of that? So I knew I couldn't give up my self-esteem. I couldn't accept some weird role where I just was always the dumbass sitting in the corner. Right? So, in that moment I realized if I'm actually going to move towards my goals, I've got to pick something to build my self-esteem around that's antifragile. Now, this is a term that comes from Nassim Taleb in his book by the same name. And in the book, he points out something that is resilient, something that is strong, something that endures, they are all defined ultimately by their breaking point. They still break. They can just take a lot more abuse before they break. Antifragile, on the other hand, is something that the more you attack it, the stronger it becomes. So, think of it this way. If I pride myself on being smart and you tell me I'm dumb, and you put up a pretty good case for it, that's going to damage my self-esteem. My self-esteem in that situation is very fragile. If, on the other hand, you tell me that I'm dumb, and I build my self-esteem around being the learner, now I'm going to say, "Thank you. Please tell me in what way that I'm dumb, because you will open my eyes to something that now I can address, and I can go learn about that thing, and I will have a new skill, and I can go out and push and execute against that skill." That's antifragile. The more you try to tell me I'm dumb, the more areas that you point out that I'm weak, the more things you tell me I need to learn about, my eyes are open to something that, if true, I'm going to go down that path and I'm going to learn how to do that. And that is absolutely critical. All right. Identifying as smart is a deadly trap, as is the notion of being right. One of the most powerful things that you could do is become the person that admits that you're wrong really fast. And it's crazy how much credibility you will earn with people simply by admitting, "I was wrong." Like 30 seconds ago, I was fighting so hard for something. I was really fighting for my position, and then somebody says something and I realize that's actually better. Imagine that. You're You're in the meeting, you're going die hard because you believe it. You should stand up for what you believe, and you should fight for it. But, when you find somebody that when they actually cuz they actually listen, and they hear, "Holy [ __ ] like that's actually a better idea." And they say it in real time, and not just say it, but like, "Oh my god, that's a great idea. I'm totally amped. I'm on that. Now, I'm going to be the energy for that idea." It was crazy. When I started doing that, people would actually come to me with their great ideas because they knew if it was right, I would get so enthusiastic about it. I would give them all the credit cuz I did not pride myself on owning the idea. I prided myself on recognizing the idea. And so, people would keep coming to me with these great ideas because they wanted me to be the energy. And so, even though all I would do is try and point out whose idea it really was in like every breath that I mention the idea, talking about the person who actually came up with it, I would get credit for it because I was the one actually moving it forward. Because at the end of the day, only execution matters. You can build an amazing reputation for yourself. And one of the best ways that this plays out is that time when you hold steadfast, and you refuse to bend, people know you're not doing it just to argue for your own idea because you've shown a thousand times as soon as somebody gives you a compelling idea that you think is better, you'll move on it. And that there's no ego in it. What is up, my friends? I have huge news for you about one of the most exciting and important projects I've ever worked on in my life. As you guys know, it is my mission to help teach people about how to build a mindset and the skills that they're going to need to live an extraordinary life. And over the last few months, I've been working hard behind the scenes to create a brand new tool that will help you do exactly that. It's called Project Kaizen, and I'm proud to announce that I'll be bringing it to the world later this year. Project Kaizen is a web 3 based game-like experience that is a story-based world that's going to allow you to get inside, build an avatar that is aspirational of who you want to become, and then take the path of the warrior seeking continuous improvement inside of a story world and game experience. All right, my friend, I cannot tell you how excited I am about this amazing new project which I think ushers in a whole new form of entertainment, and I want to meet you inside of Project Kaizen and help you have fun with these ideas of always getting better. All right, click the link and join me in Discord, and until then, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. All right, how do you develop grit? If grit is as important as we say it is, sustained interest over time. That's really what grit is. And a lot of people talk about. In fact, the title of my speech is supposed to be about how you develop a passion, which we will talk about in a little bit, but this is going to be one of those things. When you have passion, one of the things that comes out of that is you've got the ability to sustain your interest over time. Do the hard things. Do the hard things. I can't emphasize that one enough. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations just to find the mental tactics that you're going to need to deal with the hard things. It's getting those tactics. Who knows the Stanford marshmallow test? All right. For those of you that don't, this is one of the most breathtaking examples of the human condition. In the Stanford marshmallow test, they bring in, I don't know, they're 5 or 6 years old. They bring them in, and the person in the white lab coat says, "Here's a marshmallow. I'm going to go out of the room for a minute. I'll be back in just a few minutes. If you wait till I come back, I'll give you a second marshmallow. So, essentially double your money. Not bad. Now, what the kid doesn't know is the researcher's never coming back. And all they want to know is how long will you wait before you eat the marshmallow. Some kids have literally gobbled it up before they even get to the door. Other kids are like singing to themselves, putting their head down, getting up, dancing around the room. Some of them bite like the underside and try to put it back so you can't see. And here's what's scary. They followed those kids for 25 years. And based solely on the length of time they were able to wait before they ate the marshmallow, predicted their level of success in school, predicted their level of success in the job market. The people who waited the longest got into the best schools, got the best grades, went on to have the highest paying jobs. Just your ability to delay gratification. Your ability to find tactics that work to get your mind off something. There's no greater control than control over oneself. Anybody here ever done a 3-day water only fast? Not intermittent fasting. 3 days. Do it. You will learn something about yourself. And it will be profound. And what you're going to learn is that your body is manipulative. And I did a 3-day fast just a couple weeks ago. And I had the flu right before, so there were cough drops laying around. And every time I walked by those [ __ ] cough drops, my brain was like, "Eat one." I was like, "Motherfucker, like you know I'm fasting." And I literally couldn't believe like how consistently every time I walked by those damn cough drops, that my body like gave me this really intense impulse. And that's when I realized, like the notion that there are multiple voices in your head, by the way, is very, very real. And I will give you one quick quick example. Who knows what the corpus callosum is? All right, the corpus callosum is a thick bit of tissue that connects the left and right hemisphere of your brain. If you sever that, you will get people that have literal multiple personalities. One in the right, one in the left. Some of the most intriguing stuff is one of them will be devoutly religious, and the other will be devoutly atheist. In the same brain. And you can talk to them differently. Absolutely crazy. But the multiple voices notion is real. There are multiple factions, if you will, pieces that your brain is broken up into. And by the way, you have the equivalent of a cat's brain in neurons just in your digestive tract. So the whole notion of gut instinct, think of all the cool [ __ ] cats can do. And you've got that in your digestive tract. Neurons. It's literally the same material that your brain is made out of is in your digestive tract. Utterly fascinating. So we have all these competing things that we want. But inside, if you think of that overwatch, that one person, that's you, that's meant to say, I have goals, and I'm going to act in accordance with my goals. I'm never going to sell out what I want most for what I want right now. I wanted a cough drop right now, but I wanted to get on the other side of a 3-day fast and say I did it. And I wanted that more. And in learning what your tools and tactics are, so for me, I welcome hunger like an old friend. And I literally, people must think I'm schizophrenic, because you'll walk into the room, and I'll literally be like pinching and poking at my fat going, "Hunger, thank you. I'm so glad you made it back. It is so good to see you. I'm glad you're here. I know that you're oxidizing my fat, and I'm very grateful for that. So, thank you." And in doing that, I reframe it not as something that is unwanted or painful, but as something that is doing exactly what I want it to do. And learning those mental tactics, that's the game. Learning those mental tactics, that's the game. That's how you're going to get good at whatever it is that you want to do. If you want to start a business, learning how to deal with your employees is absolutely critical. But let me tell you right now, if you lash out emotionally, your employees will lose respect for you. But it's just like the cough drop moment. Now, if somebody had seen me walk by the cough drop, they wouldn't know that I had it literally had to stop myself from lunging at a cough drop. They didn't know that because I have control of myself. I've practiced things like that. I do 3-day fast. I do what I call bright lines. So, I have a bright line. During the week, I don't eat my second meal before 11:30 under any circumstance. My wife one time brought my food 30 minutes early. I was preparing for an episode. It was so sweet of her. But I don't eat before 11:30 under any circumstance. So, the food literally sat on my lap smelling so good, and I was so hungry, and I said, "Hunger, thank you so much for showing up because you're giving me the opportunity to prove to myself what a badass I am because I'm going to smell how delicious you are, knowing my stomach is grumbling and tying itself in knots because I want to eat so badly, and I'm not going to." And in those moments, you earn credibility with yourself. I hate working out. Absolutely despise it. It's why I do it first thing in the morning. And the reason I hate it, the weights are heavy, and your muscles start burning when you get into the supposed good reps. So, that just seems shitty and backwards. So, it is not in any way, shape, or form fun for me. But, I earn credibility with myself because it is something that I don't like. I earn credibility with myself showing up every day, and it also reminds me how much I can transform my body. Like, it's very easy for me to show you my before and after picture. I used to be 60 lb heavier. It's very easy for me to show you when I was heavy, and then show you six-pack abs. You get it. But, what you don't see is the body's just a reflection of the mind. What really happened was I changed my mind, and I had garnered skills. I had garnered tactics. The things that allowed me to not eat the coffee drop were the things that allowed me to not eat the things that I wanted, to not have a bowl of ice cream, to not indulge in things that are wonderfully delicious, but instead ask myself, what are my goals, and then back in with my behaviors. All right. The thing about grit that I really want to highlight is boredom. Boredom is the thing that I think kills most entrepreneurs. It's not lack of funding. It's that 90% of the things you're going to do suck. They're tedious. I I actually had to get in a fight with the IRS to get my EIN number for my most recent company. That [ __ ] was boring. Like, I can't I was flying into a rage cuz it was wasting so much of my time. I literally had to get an advocacy group to help me go through the process. That's how painful this was. And I literally I remember stopping and telling my team, "This is where entrepreneurs fail, right here. Like, it is so tempting just be like, 'Peace, everybody. Go home. I'm not dealing with this [ __ ] anymore. I'm going to go get a job.' Like, that would will so much easier. Let somebody else deal with this. It's the boredom that erodes people. And to get through the boredom, you have to know what it is that you want. When you know what you want, then you're going to have the energy to get through. Now, to have that energy, you're going to need passion. The number one question I get asked, the number one question I get asked I get asked this question multiple times a day, every day, from all around the world. I've had people in Australia, UK, Germany, uh Netherlands, Brazil, Paraguay, I mean, just literally everywhere. They all want to know, "How do I find my passion?" Asking how you find your passion makes the assumption that your passion has been lost somewhere. Your passion has not been lost. Your passion has never been developed. Passions are created. They're constructed. They're developed. And it starts with interest. You want to identify an area of interest. So, if you've ever wondered, like, "Oh man, that person is so lucky. Like, how do they get lucky to find their passion so early, and now they get to do it and live like this amazing life?" And you're searching inside your mind for that thing that's going to be like a lightning rod that's hidden under like a lampshade somewhere in your mind, and you're like, "There it is. I finally found it." But it doesn't work like that. It starts with these areas of interest. And if it's something that you're trying to turn into something that you can monetize, it starts with ideally overlapping areas of interest. So, you've got multiple interests coalescing, and it coalesces with can money be made here. But even that is not enough. Now, once you have that, you've got to start going deep into gaining mastery. And it's in the process of gaining mastery that you're going to find out if that interest turns into a love, then turns into a passion. People who are passionate are willing to fight through the boredom. Think about a musician. If you want to become the greatest musician of all time, let me tell you how many hours, literally days, weeks, months, years of your life will be dedicated to playing a scale. Do do do do do do do do do do do do. All day, every day, the fundamentals, blocking and tackling. And what makes people great, and I know Ben will back me up on this one, what makes the greatest basketball players? They walk out onto the court at 4:00 a.m. and they say I'm not leaving until I've made 2,000 shots from the perimeter. Simple. Period. It is what it is. They put in the work. Now, they're not doing it thinking, "Oh my god, this is so much fun." They're thinking, "I want to win. I want to play at the highest level and I am willing to break myself in half." And this is the thing that I cannot get entrepreneurs to understand. If you want to be great, I promise you, as Tommy said, you already have in you what you need. Which is the ultimate evolution-approved ability to adapt. So, you can change to get great. You can change to become whatever you need to. And if you're leveraging an earlier win, so much the better. If it's something that you have that little spark of early talent, and now you're just putting the work on top of that, fantastic. But it is the people that are willing to literally break themselves in half to get the result that they want. Research Michael Jordan. The absolute symbol of being the greatest. His work ethic is way more impressive than what he did on the court. If you haven't read Tim Grover's book Relentless, read it. And what he talks about, Michael Jordan has darkness in him. And if you've ever watched his induction into the Hall of Fame speech, he just lays that [ __ ] out. Michael Jordan's a dark [ __ ] But as Star Wars taught us, there's power in the dark side. And understanding how to leverage that, but what I want you guys to understand is intensity is required. Putting in the work is required. Doing more work than anybody else is required for greatness. There are three things that you can do. Work hard, work smart, and work long hours. Most people get real weird when I say they should work long hours. But Tom, if I'm working hard and smart, why should I work long hours? I'll tell you why. Because I'm also working hard and smart, and I'm working long hours on top of it. So I will beat you every time. Right? Because I'm willing to do all three. But why am I willing to do all three? Because I believe in what I'm doing. I know why I'm doing it. It isn't about the money. It's about knowing where you're trying to get to. And this is how you build your business. We live in a very very new world. That new world has been defined by social media. For anybody that in the last year has spoken ill of social media, get rid of that matrix style belief immediately. It is the greatest revolution in business ever. It is the reason that you're going to be able to build a business without gatekeepers being able to tell you yes or no. Social media has completely democratized access to consumers. Think about that for a second. Back in the day, you had to pay for radio ads, or you had to be on TV. That was it. Those were your options. And it was so expensive. And that's exactly how the big companies wanted it, because they could keep you out. So, you may have a superior product, but the world's never going to know, because they have a way to ice you out. That is gone. Like, really think about that. And I'm seeing some young faces in the crowd. You may not realize it didn't used to exist. It didn't used to exist. You, to get to a mass audience, you had to pay hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars potentially, to reach those people. And they made you buy in bulk. It's not like you could do one commercial and see what happens. They made you buy in bulk. They made you commit to big dollars. Now, not anymore. Not only that, when I was growing up, commercials had to be high quality. Now, you can film [ __ ] with your iPhone. Be like, "What's up, girl?" And you can sell product doing it. Michelle Phan, you guys know who that is? Built a multi-hundred-million-dollar empire by doing vlogging with her phone on YouTube. The world has changed. And thank God, it really puts the power in your hands. But you have to understand exactly what kind of company it's making room for. In a hyper-connected social world, everything is different. And the reason that Quest grew as fast as it did, besides us having Yemini, who you guys will get to hear speak tomorrow, the reason that we grew as fast as we did, was because we understood social media before anybody else. In 2009, when everyone was saying that Facebook is just a distraction, how's it ever going to be good for business, and we were preparing to launch our company, we realized that it was a megaphone. And it gave people the opportunity to comment on your company within minutes of an interaction with you to a global audience. And if we put value creation at the center of our company, then we had an opportunity to get you to say something powerful. And so we said, "We'll never ask you to say anything in particular. If you love it, say you love it. If you hate it, say you hate it. But please, just say something." And then our job is to make sure we do the really hard work of making sure that that product kicks ass, that it is actually delivering results, that for people that are trying to lose fat that they're going to lose it and they're going to be excited that it's delicious. But understanding that generation millennials and generation Z, they want impact. They have an inherent distrust of companies. So right now, and let me tell you because I've been through this, what's going to happen? First, you start as the undiscovered band. And the first people that find you, they love you like no other. You can do no wrong. They'll follow you like in the van on tour. They'll stay at the same dirty, filthy motels you stay at just to support your product. Then, you start getting big. And everybody's like, "Yeah, I discovered them first. I knew these guys before anybody else." And then you get really big and you're a [ __ ] sellout. And now, I don't want to hear your music. That shit's played out. I'm on to the next looking for the small guy. Because what you failed to take into account is they want to know what kind of impact they're going to have by using your product. Sometimes that's the product itself. Quest, having the mission to end metabolic disease, really got people to understand what we were about as human beings. The fact that we were investing millions of dollars of our own money into cancer research because we believe that it may be a metabolic disease, that let people know who we are, who we are as people. Me starting to do a show and stepping out front and coming and giving talks like this so people can look me in my eye and ask me questions. Which by the way, every time I do a talk, I will stay and answer questions until there are no more questions to answer. I've done it for 8 hours straight before. So at the end of this talk, even if they kick us out, we'll do it on the parking lot, whatever it takes. I will answer every single question that you have. That's the world that we live in. When you're a servant to your customer, when you understand that that's the level of obligation that you have if you want to build a real community, that's the new way of doing business. And I now get people that write to me every day saying that I've changed their life. Imagine building a company and having people write you from all over the world that you changed their life, that their life is fundamentally different and better because of you and your products. It's an unreal time that we live in that you can get that kind of feedback and interaction. All right, who knows Simon Sinek? Oh yeah. All right. Simon Sinek wrote a book called Start With Why. This is one of the most important things. If you're looking to build a business, I promise you, and this is it'll happen tonight. Even though I'm going to say it right now. I know it's going to happen tonight. One of you is going to come to me and you're going to start describing your product and you're going to ask me how you should market it. And all you're going to describe to me are features and benefits. And I'm going to say, "No, no, what's your mission?" And you're going to say, "We want to make computers faster." That's not a mission. That's a feature and benefit. What's your mission? We want to empower entrepreneurs with faster, cheaper computers so that even low-income entrepreneurs can launch companies. Okay, helping low-income entrepreneurs launch companies, that's a mission. The faster computer thing is a path. And understanding the difference between a path and a mission is critical. I'll give you an example. The mission at Quest is to end metabolic disease. What if we found that food is totally irrelevant to that? What would we do? Well, our mission wasn't to make protein bars. Our mission was to end metabolic disease. So, we would change. As we got deeper and deeper into cancer, it looked like this whole high-protein thing may actually be really dangerous in a cancer environment. You may have to go high-fat. And so, even though everybody considered us the high-protein, low-carb company, we started investing massively into high-fat. Everybody thought it was crazy. What's going on? What are you doing? But we were looking at the data. We were looking at what just metabolic truth was showing us. So, don't ever be married to a path, but be deeply convicted about your mission. And choose your mission carefully. It needs to be real. It needs to be something that sits at the heart of who you are. There's an awesome quote often attributed to Mother Teresa. No one will act for the many, but people will act for the one. I showed up every day thinking about my mom and my sister. They were very real to me. They're people that I know, that I love, that I see frequently, that I will be mortified to my core if they were to die. So, it was very personal. It was very easy to fight and push because when you know why you're doing what you're doing, when you have your mission, and you are hell-bent to make that come true, when things get boring, when things get tiring, you're still going to do it. And when you have that thing, you're able to take advantage of one of the kingmakers, transparency. There are two new kingmakers we're going to talk about both of them. The first one is transparency. Social media allows you not only to reach people, but it allows you to reach them in a super transparent way where you can tell them who you are, what you're about, what your mission is, and let them see your company from multiple angles and see if you actually hold to what you say you're about. And don't get me wrong, in some ways it's actually harder to build a business now. Because there's no corporate veil. Right? If you've got a billion dollars to start a company, you were way better off before. It was so much easier, all you could just hide things and lie and tell people what they want to hear and put out marketing messages. Anybody the cigarette industry? I mean, it's unbelievable how well it worked and for how long it worked. Those days are over. I promise you the bullet has already been fired that's going to kill the old way of doing business. They're bleeding to death and they just don't realize it yet. Now you're going to have to be transparent. Now you're going to have to tell people what you stand for and the thing you stand for better be the creation of value. Don't think about profits. Focus on value. The reason you want to focus on value is it's the only thing that you can sell sustainably. You can trick people with clever marketing, don't get me wrong, but it's always going to be short-term. The only thing that lasts is something that actually adds real tangible value to somebody's life. When people write in and say, "Dear Quest, I've lost 150 lb using your products. You've changed my life. My wedding day, which I never thought would come, is now just 2 months away. I couldn't be more excited. Here's a picture of me and my fiance." We would get stuff like that all the time. Because we were focused on making a product that was actually real. Finding your passion for something and building a product that's better than what anyone else is doing. All right. Leverage technology to connect. People get really lost. Like, I'm not a digital native. I didn't grow up with this stuff. But, once I understood what it was really allowing me to do, in fact, many of you came up and you saw me sitting out there and it looked like I was working on my phone, but what I was actually doing is engaging with my community. Because if you ever get a response from me, it's actually me. So, you can imagine I'm writing and replying to people a lot. But, I do that because the technology is meant to facilitate that connection. Once you understand that building the community is the thing that gives you power. And I'll give you an example. At Quest, we had a decision to make. Do we go to retail first, which are known as the traditional king makers? A retailer can make a brand. If you get into Walmart, you can go from nothing to a hundred million in like 12 months. Same with Costco. They can pluck you from obscurity and make you a big brand almost overnight. So, do we do that first? Or do we go direct to consumer? We decided to go direct to consumer because we wanted to build a community. We wanted the power on our side. We wanted customers going into retailers and saying, "Why don't you carry Quest?" So, we said no to retailers for a year. In fact, we ended up hiring somebody just to say no to the retailers in a nicer way. True story. Because we didn't want to burn that bridge. But, the contracts they were sending us were so one-sided, so aggressive in the favor of the retailer, that we never would have been able to be profitable. And that's how Walmart puts companies out of business that have been around for 115 years. They're squeezing your margins so tight, they become so much of your business that one misstep and like the cost of lids or something, which is what I think killed what was it, Vlasic pickle or something? They'd been around for over a hundred years, gone. So, you have to have the power going into the negotiation, and you're living in a time where you can build a community that believe passionately in you and your product, and you can mobilize them to go in stores and start asking for the product. You can even do it region by region. Think about that for a second. Hey, we want uh right now today guys, it's going to be Phoenix. We want everyone going into whatever you whatever store you would sell into, we want people going into the Phoenix area, going into the store and asking for this product. And they'll do it. It's absolutely crazy. They get nothing for it other than the pride of being in that community because you've done something positive. You've sold them something of value that's touching their life. It's making their life better. You're transparent. You're stepping out front. They know who you are. They'd recognize you. They feel like they've looked you in their eye, and you do things to go above and beyond for them. All right. This is the face of authenticity, my friends. This is actually an Instagram post that my wife and I posted every year. We go sit on Santa's lap. And I thought, hey, we really do it. It's really a thing for us, so share it with the community. And it's stuff like that, as embarrassing that it is, it's stuff like that that lets the community feel like they know you. And in today's world, you need somebody in your company that people will warm to, that they will feel connected with because what's going to keep people from losing faith in your company as you get bigger is feeling connected to a person. Companies aren't nameless, faceless organizations, and you don't want them to feel like it. Our customer support department had their own Instagram just so people could see the people that they were talking to. I don't market, build a community. That's critical. How do you build a community? It goes like this. At the top, there are thought leaders. Thought leaders are the people that when you hear them talk you don't understand what they're talking about. Neuroscientists, all the people that are publishing papers, doing if if they've ever done an abstract, then they are very much a thought leader. Influencers in the middle, that's who is listening to the thought leaders. They understand what they're saying, but they have a way of making it accessible to the masses. The masses ultimately are who you're trying to sell to, but if you're going to find the people that you need to find, you're going to get to them through influencers. They're called influencers because a lot of people listen to them. Your job is to get a thousand screaming fans. The way that you do that is by partnering up with influencers who already have the trust of those people. Now, when most people think of influencers, they think of people like this. But really, you should be thinking of people like this. And I'm guessing most of you don't even know who they are, but I'll give you one random example. This woman here, Jenna Marbles. Anybody know Jenna Marbles? All right. Jenna Marbles has a reach of over 20 million followers a day. A day. That's primetime TV numbers. One person can reach 20 million people a day. Now, how do you get social influencers? How do you create momentum with them? So, first of all, you need to identify them. You need to add value to them and their community, and you need to go above and beyond. So, Jenna Marbles is somebody that we actually worked with. And how did we get Jenna Marbles to post a photo of huge stacks of our bars? We sent her knitted sweaters for her dogs. And she loved it cuz she felt like we understood her, that we'd gone above and beyond. She felt a sense of obligation to post that photo because she was so touched by what we had done. And we did the research to find out what she really cares about. She loves her dogs, always talking about how they're cold they're so skinny and they don't have fur. And so we knit them sweaters, she loved it, and then staged that whole photo for us, took the picture, which was huge for us cuz it reached such a huge audience. And you do that and start turning those relationships into partnerships and beginning to work with them. Cassey Ho, anybody know Cassey Ho? So Cassey Ho was one of the first influencers that we started working with. Uh she has a total social following somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million people, just absolutely massive. And getting her coming in, and first it was just a paid relationship, but then as she got to know us and know everybody at the company, we actually turned that into an ongoing relationship where we've teamed up and partnered um now to the point where my wife and co-founder in Impact Theory is actually creating a podcast with her, uh and just goes to show that when it's authentic, real connections, that you really can transcend the normal sort of day-to-day sterile nature of a business relationship, and not being afraid to recognize that the times really have changed. Following some of your vendors on uh their social feeds and getting to know them can be a really interesting way to spark interesting conversations, to feel more invested in them as people, and I can't stress that one enough. And then at the end of the day, if you're using social media, you've got to publish. You've got to be creating content. Who here has a Instagram account for your work? Instagram account, Facebook, all of that. Okay. The only thing I will tell you that you're doing wrong, and I don't even have to look at your account, you don't publish enough. The consistency of publishing is what it's all about. Every time I do an Instagram story, I get 30 inbound requests on my feed. Just got to be putting it out there. Now it's got to be value add, but you want to be publishing, publishing, publishing. All right, how do you grow your community? So now you have them, how you going to breathe life into them and really get them to go somewhere? You've got to be where your customers and fans are. I routinely get asked, "Tom, which platform should I address?" And the answer is wherever your customers are. If they're on all of them, you need to be on all of them. And I know that that means it's a lot more work and it's redundant. And yes, Snapchat and Instagram stories are basically the same and maybe Snapchat is going away, maybe it's not, but if your fans and customers are there, then that's where you need to be. And by the way, this stuff is going to turn over every 2 years. It's going to be constantly on the move, constantly different. Maybe Twitter pulls it off and they race back to the top. Maybe Facebook makes a misstep and they've gone too heavy into video and something else comes up. You've got to be there and as much as you can be an early adopter, so much the better. Cuz it's always the early adopters that win. So keeping your eye on where the technology is going is absolutely critical. All right, be true to the platform. Every platform is different. I'll give you one just quick example, even within a platform how different it can be. So first of all, I'll do Facebook versus Instagram. On Facebook, if I'm going to do live content, I do live content with three cameras on a beautiful set and we switch between the different cameras so that the live feed feels like a live television show. When we do that on Facebook, we get huge numbers. If on Facebook, I was just putting the camera phone on a tripod and talking to the camera, my numbers will plummet. But on Instagram, if I just grab the phone and hold it right in front of my face and talk to all the people coming through in the feed, "Hey Bob, hey Sally, so good to see you. Oh my god, oh hey, what's up everybody? Oh, we've got Denmark in the house." Do that kind of stuff, my numbers just keep going up, up, up. So understanding what each platform is looking for, how they want to be talked to, how they want to interact with you. Twitter, right? One-on-one communication. Rapid, real-time, news-based. Now, Instagram, even within the platform, there are different ways you want to interact. So, I'm very formal for the most part in my main posts, but my stories are playful and a little bit more intimate look into my life. And they perform well like that. If I take something that feels right on a story and I put it in my main feed, it won't perform well. If I put something overly formal in my story, then it doesn't perform well. And this comes from publish a lot, pay attention, look at the data. You've got to be really, really data-driven. All right, and boost what works. So, once you find what's working, then you want to put some ad dollars behind it. Okay? And ad dollars gets very tricky. You don't have to throw a lot of money at something to get a big result, cuz what you're going to do is do a bunch of free stuff and look at what pops. And when something pops and it's outperforming all your other stuff, which both Facebook and Instagram will tell you, this is performing better than 95% of your other posts, well, that's probably a good candidate to put some money behind. Also, partnering up with other people in your space to do crossovers or um trade shout-outs, things like that. All right, what if I told you your customers hate your content? Hopefully, you would believe me, because chances are that they do. Because what most people are trying to do with their content, they're trying to sell. Don't try to sell with your content. Try to add value. Your content in and of itself should be a value add. So, at Quest, a lot of what we do is cooking, cooking with the product sometimes, not cooking with the product, but really trying to think, what is the consumer want? What would be value add for them? What are they looking for? And those are of things that are going to allow you to continue to build that community out. High value content. It's all about value add. You're living in the era of value creation. So, not only does your product have to be amazing, but your actual marketing in and of itself can't feel like a commercial. It's got to be true to the brand. It's got to be true to the brand ethos. But, it has to be in and of itself interesting and valuable. So, rethinking that, moving away from traditional features and benefits buy this. All right. I mentioned this earlier, only value is sustainable. The only thing that you're going to be able to sell over time is that. So, you guys need to be having meetings in your company talking about value. What is the value of this ad? What is the value of this marketing? What is the value of this product? Like, you have to know why that thing is valuable. That is absolutely critical. And execute. At the end of the day, only execution matters. You all have a dream. That's why you're here. There's something that you want to do. There's something that you want to create. But, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is your ability to execute. So, get really good at that. Crossing that chasm of skill set. And I can't say that enough. The only thing that stands between you and executing on your dreams at the highest level is skill set. It's getting good at something. All right. Have very clear goals. It always freaks me out. Most people stop at the first sort of vague notion of what they want to do. I'm going to punch myself in the mouth if somebody comes up to me again and says, "I want to help people." That's rad. That comes from a beautiful place. Like, I totally get it. But, that's like coming to me and saying, "I want to win an Olympic gold medal." Awesome. Winter or summer? Summer. Fantastic. Swimming or tennis? Swimming. Excellent. Backstroke? Freestyle? Like at some point it's got to get so specific because you have to know what skills you need to acquire. You have to work backwards from the goal and the goal has to be hyper specific. So if boredom is the number one killer of entrepreneurs that they're not able to make it through, the next one is they don't have clear goals. And the worst part is they think they do. That's the part that terrifies me. The worst part is they think they do. Until you know exactly what your mission is and exactly what your business model is and what problem you solve, what very concrete problem that people are freaking out to have solved, until you do that, you don't have the necessary ingredients to build your business. All right, don't be romantic, be pragmatic. Look at the data. The data will tell you what to kill, the data will tell you what's working and what's not. This was the single best piece of advice that was ever given to me and I ignored it for 3 years. I'm so embarrassed by that that I always make sure any talk I give people hear this. Know more about your product, service, industry, whatever, than anyone else. Than anyone else. If you guys have ever seen my interview show, the reason that it's doing as well as it's doing is I know more about the guest, one guest actually said this, I know more about the guest than their mother. I just put in more work than their mother. That's the truth. I go out and I research and I read everything and I watch every video that I can. And so I know so much about that person. I know I'm going to give a different interview than anyone has ever given before because nobody's done that level of research. Not only does it blow the guest away and totally endear them to me, but it gets us to the point where we can give an interview that has unique value. So, know more about what you're doing than anyone else in the world and grind, baby, grind. For 2 years, for 2 years, that's what I look like every day. Hairnet, lab coat, gloves. Put in the [ __ ] work. Put in the work. And this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where you're really going to separate the people that are wantrepreneurs from the people that are people that are real entrepreneurs. You've got to want to grind. You've got to learn to love that. You've got to learn to love to put in the work. To be proud of yourself that you showed up and put in the work. To be proud of yourself that you taught yourself how to suffer. To be proud of yourself that you're developing a mindset where you believe I can do anything I set my mind to. And by the way, once you believe that you can do anything you set your mind to without limitation, how you spend your time becomes a spiritual consideration. How you spend your time becomes a spiritual consideration because you could be doing something. If you want to end hunger, end hunger. What's stopping you? Bill Gates is actually going to end malaria. He's going to do it because he had the tenacity to generate the resources and because he has a mind that allows him to work on the infrastructure and figure out how to actually solve that problem. Do not under any circumstances make Bill Gates or anyone else extraordinary to let yourself off the hook. Don't [ __ ] do it. Don't sell yourself short. And this is where I see people go wrong all the time. They look at somebody who's amazing and they say, "Well, they're just naturally gifted." I could never do that. You couldn't do it because you believe you can't. And because you believe you can't, you don't start putting in the work. Michael Jordan got cut from his high school basketball team. He wasn't exactly showing all the promise in the world. My own mother, when I left for college, quietly assumed I was going to fail and didn't admit that for years. I showed no early signs of promise. I actually have a version of this talk where I show photos from my childhood and people are like, "Yeah, [ __ ] you just look stupid." And it's true. I used to dress like a clown and I mean that almost literally. So, my waist was size 36 and I wore size 54 pants. I wore literal jester hats. Um I had one of those big chains that connected to my belt. Uh I had shoulder-length hair. I did not exactly look the part and I didn't take myself seriously. It really is a game of transformation. It really is a game of understanding that you can become something. So, even though I didn't start with the requisite skills, even though I wasn't a born entrepreneur, which is why I start this tale with that, even though I wasn't a born entrepreneur, I could acquire and did acquire the skills that were needed to execute. It is a very long road that leads you here. Right now, most entrepreneurs in the world are thinking about one thing. Winning a championship ring. Once you understand the difference between wanting to win a championship ring and wanting to be capable of a championship performance, then you'll have the breakthrough that you need. Because most people are okay winning a ring while sitting on the bench. I am not. That holds no interest for me. I don't want to win the lottery. I don't want something handed to me. That was why when I quit, I gave the equity back. I didn't want it. If I didn't do it, if I didn't earn it, if I didn't make somebody's life better, if I didn't force myself to actually develop my potential, which for me, the very meaning of life, write this down, the very meaning of life is to find out how many skills you can acquire that have utility, and then put that utility to the test in service of something bigger than yourself. I'll say that again. The very purpose of life is to find out how many skills you can acquire that have utility, and then put that utility to the test in service of something bigger than yourself. If you do that, not only can you build a big business that adds tremendous value to people, but you'll have what's called techne. You will have something beautiful, a skill that you have fought hard for that can help someone else. And that, my friends, is fulfillment. And going back to the game that you're actually playing, which is brain chemistry, it is not money, it is not accolades, it is not number one on the Inc. 500 list. The game that you're playing is being proud of yourself. The game you're playing is being able to look yourself in the eye and go, "Damn, you left it on the field. You really played to your full potential, and you're prepared to go back to the gym to get better." When you know that about yourself, everything changes. Like people always ask me, "Tom, you work so much. When are you going to take a day off?" I'm like, "I'll take a day off whenever I want one. I've earned it. I'm not conflicted. I know how much I work. But I didn't take a day off for 6 and 1/2 years at the beginning of my journey because I didn't believe I'd earned it. Some part of me was guilty because I was still fighting my own mindset. I wasn't always doing the things that I should be doing. Once you get to the point where you know you leave it out on field every day, take a vacation whenever you want. It won't even be a second thought for you. This is the most fundamental belief that I have. I've hired drug dealers. I've hired former gang members. At one point, the staff at Quest, literally, I had Bloods and Crips working the same production line. It's a true story. Because I told the neighborhood, "I don't care who you are. All I want to know, who do you want to be? And what's the price you're willing to pay to get there? Boys and girls, I promise you, once you answer that question for yourself, once you know exactly who you want to become, and you're willing to pay a price that is higher than anyone else's willing to pay, you will win. That's the only path to success. Think about what you know about humans. Your job in building a company is to get people to feel so bonded to you, so bonded to your company, that you dazzle them. And have you ever dazzled somebody by lowering their expectations and then comfortably delivering more? The phrase that makes me want to break something, "Under promise and over deliver." [ __ ] that. If you tell me you want to under promise and over deliver, you're dead to me. I don't even want to talk to you. Because I know what you're trying to do is manage my expectations. You are not trying to be the greatest of all time. You are not trying to be capable of the extraordinary. You will happily win a championship ring while sitting on the bench. I'm not looking for that. What I'm looking for is somebody who knows who they want to become and they're willing to pay an extraordinary price to become that. Because all that matters to them is becoming capable of the extraordinary. And when you get to that point, the only way you will know how to act is to set the bar ridiculously high. So high you're almost embarrassed to say it out loud. And then my friends, you're going to surpass all expectations. Thank you. For my parents biggest frustration was that I was epically lazy and if they handed out gold medals for being lazy, I would have won, I assure you, hands down. There was a period in my life where I would spend between two and three hours in bed because it was warm in bed and it was cold out of bed. All right? That's true. I actually did