THIS Is How You Overcome Failure and Launch Yourself to Success | Tom Bilyeu Q&A

This video was brought to you by our very own Impact Theory University. For more information, be sure to check out the description below. Everybody, welcome to another episode of Impact Theory Q&A. Today, we are going to be talking all about how to bounce back from failure. This is one of my favorite topics on the planet because this is really how you're going to separate yourself from everybody else. The people that can leverage that failure to learn from that, to improve their skill set, and go on to be successful are the ones that ultimately build the life that they want to lead. The ones that are emotionally devastated by failure are the ones that end up in a death loop, and they never go anywhere. So, without further ado, let us dive into your questions. Number one, "I feel like I've always been able to bounce back pretty easily from setbacks and even pretty big failures. Then in September, within a short span, I lost almost everything. The woman I planned on marrying left me for what seemed to be no reason at all. The company I had worked for all year, for 11 plus hours a day doing sales, found a loophole in my contract and didn't pay me for the work I had done all year, leaving me broke and nearly homeless. Several close friends showed their true colors and betrayed me, and I had sacrificed my faith in the pursuit of these goals. I sat there after the hardest year of my life completely empty-handed, feeling broken. I had never been depressed before, but I felt it very keenly then. I held on to the thought that I would get through it, I always do. As I look back months later, the depression is basically gone, but I feel a profound sense of negativity. I have a feeling of deep-set failure that I'm trying to overcome. Almost like the childlike enthusiasm was lost, and now I'm a grumpy old man at the age of 23. People talk about overcoming failure in the short term. Could you please talk about overcoming it in the long term and going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm? Okay. This is amazing. So, I want to talk about Jocko Willink's idea of no matter what life throws at you, the reaction is good. I lost my job. Good. My woman left me for no reason. Good. People took money from me. Good. All of it, good. Once you flip that switch in your mind like even out that gave me the chills just thinking how powerful the reaction to the world's most negative news to say good. Yeah, good. Now, you have to come up with a reason why it's good. And the reason that it's good is because you know that the only way to think about failure, quote unquote failure, is like AI, artificial intelligence. Okay, in AI it's not called failure, it's called a sample. Okay? You try something. So, if you've ever seen the video of AI learning to play the video game Breakout, the old Atari game, it is hilarious. You see this paddle squiggling around like crazy. The obviously the AI has no idea what it's supposed to do. So, all it's programmed to do is get a high score, but it doesn't know what gives it a score. It doesn't know am I supposed to move the paddle? Am I supposed to hit the ball? Is the ball supposed to, you know, break through the blocks at the top? And so, it just like does these random ass movements. And then finally it'll hit the ball. And then finally the ball breaks a brick. And then finally it finds the most efficient path to break all of it. Now, let me tell you in my 20s. I don't know about you, but in my 20s, I was a mess. In my early 20s, I was so lost frustrated afraid insecure overwhelmed paralyzed. I mean, it was it was a dark period in my life. That's the nature of your 20s. Now, in my 20s, as old as this is to make me sound, in my 20s, the internet barely existed. So, we certainly didn't have YouTube. There wasn't people putting out content that would allow me to recontextualize my world. The fact that you already know the quote that success is going from failure to failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm, you were so much farther ahead than where I was. Now, I'm going to use an analogy of love, if I may. One of the things I find most interesting about love is that in love, you are opening yourself up to being far more easily hurt. When you are in love, it's a very vulnerable state. You have opened yourself to somebody. You've given yourself over in a way to that person. And now you are far more easily hurt. They know your insecurities. They could weaponize them against you. And when heartbreak comes along, it's very tempting to turtle up and to protect yourself. But then you're closed off from the things that make love valuable in the first place. The very thing that makes love worthwhile is being able to be open like that to somebody, to be vulnerable to somebody. And the thing that makes love so extraordinary is that even when you get hurt, the people that can open themselves up again and approach somebody without the baggage of previous relationships are the ones that end up finding that beautiful relationship that ends up being worth the vulnerability and worth the sacrifice. And speaking from experience, ends up being the single greatest thing in your life. Now, if you learned nothing from the heartbreak, I understand why it's scary to go into the next thing. But the idea here, the very way that we bounce back from failure, is by looking exclusively at what we can do differently. And when you look exclusively, I'm not saying other people didn't do something that maybe it's maybe any rational person would say it's all their fault. Maybe the list of things you gave us is literally you were just the world's unluckiest human being. But the reason that we're going to say good, the reason that we're going to look at this like AI and samples, the reason we're going to remind ourselves that success is going from failure to failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm, the reason that we're going to think of that love analogy and be willing to open ourselves back up, is because we're going to figure out what we could have done differently. We're going to see what can I improve in my skill set? What did this catastrophe reveal about my strategy? And whenever a strategy yields a result different than the desired result, then you know the strategy is, by definition, wrong. And I want you to own that. Doesn't mean you're a bad person, okay? But it does mean that your strategy wasn't working. Go back to AI, right? It's wiggling around. It finally realizes, "Oh, I need to hit the ball. Okay, cool. So now I'm going to track the movement of the ball and I'm going to adjust my paddle to be there. Okay, cool. I got it. Oh, I actually see that hitting it on the sides is far more advantageous than hitting it in the middle because once I clear a path on the side, then the ball can bounce around on the top and destroy bricks far faster than any other strategy." Okay, amazing. But you had to first have the reaction that that failure was good. Good. Because it revealed the flaw in my strategy. And because I'm playing the long-term game, I'm going to open myself back up again. I'm going to allow myself to be vulnerable again. I'm going to let the wound hurt as much as it needs to for me to learn the lesson. No more. Not going to beat myself up over it. I'm not going to end up in a death spiral of shame. But I am going to recognize that I could do something different the next time and get a different result. That to run the same strategy and expect the result to change is as Einstein said, the definition of insanity. So, that's what you have to do here. You have to recognize that this thing that you considered the worst thing that ever happened to you, with the change of framing, is actually the best thing that ever happened to you. And if you change the question that you ask about this and say, "How did this help me? What did I learn from this or what could I learn from this? And how can this improve my strategy moving forward?" Then all of a sudden the frame of reference changes, the emotion, the way you feel about it, the dark energy that's around it begins to change because you're stoked, right? This is good. All right, I'm going to learn something from this and it's going to be XYZ. And maybe you only get incrementally better and you try again. And maybe you fail again and you get incrementally better. And all of a sudden, if your life is anything like mine, your 20s were getting kicked in the face over and over and over. But getting a little bit better at blocking, a little bit better at avoiding. And then finally in your 30s you begin to find your footing and then you turn into beast mode late 30s, early 40s. And now you feel like you can really move the world. It's exactly what it feels like when you understand how your own mind works, how the minds of others work, and just sort of the nature of the world. It's really incredible. But the only way to get there is to flounder around, to make horrendous mistakes and say good. All right. Next question. Every time I face a challenge and feel like it is no longer possible to overcome it, so like I already failed, I completely break down. I cry about it and then I'm stuck with a feeling of disappointment in myself for at least a week. Afterwards, I slowly but surely regain my resilience. How can I shift the limiting belief that failure is bad and therefore avoid such an intense reaction? And how can I stop putting so much pressure on myself to do everything perfectly? Okay, so what's wonderful here is we're now dealing with the physics of the human mind and my obsession is to get people to understand that you are having a biological experience. Now, why do I want you to understand that you're having a biological experience? Because I want you to understand that the brain reacts a certain way and you can actually insert yourself into that and change your approach, framing, the way that you react, and in changing those things, you will change not only the way you feel, but the outcomes that you're able to get. And so I want to introduce you to Victor Frankl and cognitive behavioral therapy. So Victor Frankl said, "Between stimulus and response is a gap and how we choose to react in that gap will determine the rest of our lives." Now, if you don't know Victor Frankl, he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning. He wrote that book after getting released from Auschwitz. Okay? This is a guy that survived multiple concentration camps and he was a neuroscientist and his ability to explain what is happening inside the mind of a human during something that catastrophic is breathtaking. And when you realize that a guy that went through something that just seems unimaginable for a human being to endure says the way that you endure it is to one, find meaning in your suffering. So, why am I going through all of this? What do I expect to see on the other side of, in your case, shortening the window? Okay? This was a big thing in my life. Learning to emotionally soothe. Whoever emotionally soothes them self the fastest is going to win, because you don't waste the week spiraling out of control, right? So, if for me, it takes 3 seconds to emotionally soothe and it takes you a week, you can imagine how much more progress I'm going to make in a year than you're going to make. Okay? So, Victor Frankl says, we've got that gap. For you, that gap may be very, very small. And now what we're trying to do is widen that gap. Now, how are we going to widen that gap? We're going to widen that gap with cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy is beyond the scope of this, um, video to go into all the sort of details about it, but I will say, one of the most important things that's talked about in CBT is pattern interrupting. So, you know that these patterns aren't serving you. You know that spending a week derailed, not feeling resilient is a waste of your time. So, now, when you feel that lack of resilience, the emotional distress, you're going to interrupt that pattern. Now, I'll give you an example in my own life. So, for me, I don't allow myself to feel overwhelmed. And as dumb as that sounds, it works extraordinarily well. So, as I can feel that, you know, that sense of like like agitation, like you can feel your brain like speeding up and you can sort of feel yourself like escalating and moving towards panic, in that moment, I say to First of all, I bring my chin down and I furrow my eyebrows and I say, I don't do overwhelm. And by saying that phrase, it interrupts the pattern. And the reason I know that works goes back to this idea of you're having a biological experience. And I know that there is nothing, either good or bad, it is thinking that makes it so, right? Shout out to Mr. Shakespeare. There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. It isn't what's happening to you, it's what you think about what's happening to you. So, I'm not overwhelmed, [ __ ] cuz I don't do overwhelm. And now all of a sudden, by reminding myself, I don't do overwhelm. Now, I may take things off my plate. I may decide, no matter what's going on right now, I'm going to sit and meditate. I may remind myself that breathing from my diaphragm will physiologically, whether I want it to or not, if I do it long enough, it will move me out of the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight, into the parasympathetic nervous system, rest and digest. That is physiological. And so, I'm going to do those things. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm wired differently than anybody, or that I'm doing anything, you know, particularly special, but it interrupts the pattern of escalation that I've gotten into because I'm thinking that this is bad. I'm thinking, "Oh my god, I've got all these things going on. I'm never going to be able to handle them. There's so much pressure. What the [ __ ] am I going to do?" And in that moment, what I do is remind myself, I don't do overwhelm. So, for you, it may be reminding yourself, I don't spiral out of control for a week. I don't allow that in myself. What I do is I meditate. What I do is I remember failure is part of the process. What I do is remind myself that like artificial intelligence, I need these samples. I need these moments of failure. This is exactly why I need an anti-fragile personality. My very identity is tied up in learning, okay? That's a huge thing. When you tie your ego to being the learner, now all of a sudden, the pattern interrupt becomes, "I'm the learner." I don't mind that I failed. Nothing to spiral out of control about. I'm going I'm going from this, and I'm going to keep going. In fact, I want to know, what can I learn from this? What's the lesson here? And when you change your framing and you look at that and you take advantage of Victor Frankl's gap, and you fill that gap with I'm the learner. I'm going to get better from this. What can I learn? Everything else is going to take care of itself. All right. Question three. Hi Tom. I took the plunge and dove straight into entrepreneurship after completing my junior college at the age of 18 any job experience. I'm 25 this year and none of my ventures have taken off or succeeded. I've started looking for a job this year and was rejected even for entry-level positions. As a founder, I did not acquire many hard skills, how to use specific software program, etc., as I had to work on the higher-level strategy and management while running my own startups. I'm stuck and unsure of how I can translate my failed startup experience while I seek out new employment opportunities. I'm terrified that I've wasted seven years bumping into walls with no results to show and it's too late to start from scratch. Okay, so first of all, there are many things that we're going to want to do here. Much of it is going to be reframing. So, I don't know, maybe you really didn't develop skills and maybe you were floundering for seven years and maybe you really did waste that time. Probably not true. But the most terrifying way for you to approach this question is as if that is true. That you really did, quote unquote, waste those years because that's never how I would think about it. But we certainly found things that didn't work, right? So, Thomas Edison talks about I didn't fail 10,000 times, which supposedly is how many filaments he tried when trying to invent the light bulb. Said I didn't fail 10,000 times, I simply found 10,000 ways that didn't work. And every attempt discarded is another step forward. Okay? So, you just spent seven years putting things to the side that you know aren't going to work. A bunch of attempts discarded. Cool. You're now seven years ahead of everybody else. Now, you may be approaching the job market in the wrong way. You may be applying for jobs that require hard skills, but I'm telling you, look, if an entry-level position, depending on what you're trying to go into, if it's an entry-level position like, "I I'm trying to be an entry-level doctor with my, you know, 7 years of startup experience." That's never going to work. Or I'm trying to be an entry-level coder. That's never going to work, right? There are certain things that have really hard skills, and you're going to need those hard skills. Go learn them, right? So, learning this stuff takes time and energy, but that's all it takes. Time and energy, okay? It's what I call the only belief that matters. If you put time and energy into learning a skill, into getting better, you will actually get better at that skill, okay? I'm not saying it's not hard, but who the [ __ ] cares? Like, I It drives me crazy that people focus on it's hard. Yes, it's hard. Getting good at [ __ ] is hard. Outperforming other people is hard, but if you want to win, you've got to do hard [ __ ] So, you're going to have to lean into this. You're going to have to get it good. So, anyway, the fact that people get weird that learn to code has become like some sort of weird thing, I don't understand. If you want a job at something that requires a set of skills, go get that set of skills. It's just that [ __ ] simple. So, your 7 years may have been a total waste of time in the acquisition of skills towards the job that you want now. But unless you just spent the last 7 years staring at a wall, you have a treasure trove of learnings that you'll be able to pull from. So, now this is a question about how you're approaching the job market, not a question about whether you wasted those 7 years. So, we have to frame this in such a way that we understand what the value of those 7 years was, how we can articulate that value to somebody as we begin approaching the job market, and getting good at pitching yourself is a skill, and it's not necessarily going to come easy, but I have a gut instinct that the real problem that you have is just how to interview for a job, how to explain to people what it is that you're good at. Because the hard knock life of an entrepreneur is man, the amount that you're learning is so crazy. Leadership, working with people, um how to create momentum, starting from scratch and getting your first customer. I mean, it's really an extraordinary skill set. So, find the right thing to approach from a job perspective, um practice articulating what that is, walk into the interview armed to the teeth with how you can help their company, do way more work than anybody else applying for that job, and you will get a job. This is where you can learn on your entrepreneurial skills harder than you've ever done in your life to show people the kind of value that you can bring. So, the last thing I'm going to give you on that is this idea of starting from scratch. I want you to use the brain in a vat thought exercise. I do this to myself all the time. Every time I can feel I'm about to get stuck in this loop of like, um you know, how have I learned the right things? Am I pointed in the right direction? Did we just spend a year pursuing something that was stupid? I'm never going to get that year back. I remind myself, it's entirely possible, in fact, I actually am a brain in a vat. It just so happens that the vat is my skull. And my brain is creating an artificial reality. I'm not saying we live in a VR world, but I am saying your brain never light never touches your brain, sound never touches your brain, and yet you have this sense of sound and sight and touch and feel and all that stuff as if it were outside of you, when in reality it's being created in this virtual environment in your brain. So, what if I were just a brain in a vat somewhere and all of my memories are fake and that I actually just came online 7 seconds ago? That thought experiment is so powerful to me because it reminds me, "Oh, my memories can work for me or against me. They're just the background that I need to give me the context to move forward." So, if this is really just about context, right, which is all memories are, it's just context, then while I can't change the memories, I can change how I think about the memories. And so, I'm going to recontextualize those 7 years as being my 10,000 hours of getting good at something. And now it's like, "Cool, they weren't failures, they were lessons. And now what I do with those lessons is up to me." This video was brought to you by our very own Impact Theory University. For more information, be sure to check out the description below. All right, number four. I'm a television presenter and got two offers to host those shows. Both producers were impressed and gave me offers on the same day, both unknowing that I applied elsewhere. I picked one and respectfully turned the other down. Where I turned them down, they moved on with a new presenter. I was told to come sign a contract with the production team the following day. Upon arrival, they postponed until they went silent on me. I have been extremely demoralized by this. I am now struggling to find work. It's depressing and frustrating all at the same time. How do I move on? Okay, this is like one of the key insights of my life. You should only ever do and believe that which moves you towards your goal. So, will feeling badly about making what may have been a legitimate mistake, maybe you handled that poorly, maybe you should have taken the other job, or maybe you should have waited to tell the other people no until you'd actually signed on the dotted line, right? Super powerful lessons, you're probably going to handle this differently in the future. But will beating yourself up over it, holding on to it, kicking yourself, thinking what a dummy you are, is that going to move you towards your goal? If it does, then do it. But, my gut instinct is it will only serve you as much as it will give you the impetus that you need to ask yourself, "What should I do differently the next time?" That is powerful. Spiraling out of control because you made a mistake is not powerful. In fact, you need to be decisive in life. You made a [ __ ] decision, it didn't work out. Such is life. It just goes like it goes. So, now we need to find a way I am constantly asking myself, "How can I get control in my hands so that I'm not waiting on somebody else, right?" You could go right now, start a YouTube channel. You don't have to wait for legacy media to give you the thumbs up. You have a phone. Get on your phone, record yourself. If you can add value to people, then you can build an ecosystem. So, two things. We're going to reframe, right? It's a key part of bouncing back from failure. We're going to reframe that failure. There's powerful lessons to be learned. Looking forward, we're only going to do and believe about ourselves that which moves us towards our goal. So, we're not going to sit there and think what an idiot we are cuz it's only going to slow us down. Negative energy psychologically, it's not putting you in the best place. Okay? And then, we're going to realize, "Hey, we can keep applying. Cool, go do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah." Like become the best interviewer ever, get more jobs, keep going. It's a numbers game. And we always have the other option, which is to build a following for ourselves. But, we retain that control. We're always looking for what we could do differently. We're not putting the power in somebody else's hands. Word. Next. I always thought the moment I would fail, I would trust the process I am in and just keep going until I win. But, the moment I failed, everything crashed for me. I failed an important exam that would get me into medical school, and now I'm doubting my chances of ever getting in. It's so easy to have faith in yourself when you haven't felt how it's like to fail and failing hard on the ground. My question is, is the the that comes with failing worth it if your chances of getting the victory only a few percentage Oh my god. Patay! Patay! Where do you find these? This is so good. Okay, so here is a concept. This is a really hard reality to face. When we are young, we can become anything. But as we age, we become something specific. And there's a depth in that. There's something that really bothers me about that. That legitimately I have the chills right now. It that [ __ ] haunts me. And so I understand what you're saying. I get Go through the darkness with me here for a minute. I'm going to pull you back out on the other side. I promise. That does suck. And I have a friend who failed to get into the college of his choice, which would have moved him to a different city. And the thing that kept him from going I mean it's a whole story. It's too heartbreaking for words. Stupid. And he ended up not moving. And because he didn't move, the course of his life, in my opinion, changed forever. And I remember thinking, "Why didn't he if that's what he really wanted, why didn't he try what Alex Banayan calls the third door? He didn't get in the first door, fair enough, right? They just sort of knock knock knock, anybody there? You didn't get in the window, right? Or the second door. But there's always the third option of going so ham, whatever it takes, by hook or crook, to get in. Like when you read Alex's book and the things that he did to get an interview with Larry King, the Warren Buffett one is a great example. He wanted to ask a question at the Warren Buffett every year holds the um the conference where shareholders get to come and they get asked questions. He worked so hard to figure out cuz there's they do it in an arena. There are different microphones all over the arena and he figured out that certain places get called on more frequently than others. He got like five or six friends that all had or maybe even bought shares so that they could go do this and each of them had the same question. Each of them went to the like five or six most likely microphones to get picked and he went and one of them ended up getting to ask the question. And that's the third door. Like doing things that nobody would believe that somebody would do. To think that hard about the problem. To understand it that deeply. And this is the thing about magic. So I've studied magic at the Magic Castle. I'm obsessed with magic. Now why am I obsessed with magic? For one reason. What makes magic work is far more impressive than it being true like Harry Potter style magic. It is that somebody has worked so hard on something, thought so far in advance on something, gone so far out of their way to plant something that when they pull it off, it's easier to believe that it's magic than it is to believe that they went through all of that rigmarole. So for instance, I have seen um I think it was David Blaine have somebody pick a card and then there's a it was basketball players, famous NBA players. And over off on the side there's basketballs. And he has them pick a card, any card they want, and they pick the card. And then, you know, he does the thing and he's like, "I'm going to find your card and all that." And he's like, "You know, is this your card?" No, it's not. And then, of course, that's a plant. And in the end, he says, "Oh, actually, I know where your card is. Go grab one of those basketballs." He doesn't even tell them which basketball to grab. "Just go grab one of those basketballs." They grab a basketball. This [ __ ] stabs the basketball with a knife, pops it right there, and pulls out a card. Now, it just seems impossible to think that he went to a basketball manufacturer and had them make basketballs with a card in it that he could get you to choose. It's called a force in magic, where you lead somebody to pick a given card. You force them to pick the card that you want them to pick. You put that and he may have picked two or three different cards. And maybe he had them in different places in the gym. And depending on which card they picked, he'd send them to whichever grouping of basketballs he wanted them to pick. And he knows, okay, you know, that's the ace of spades, that's the king of hearts, like queen of hearts, things that are like most likely for people to pick. And then, when you cut it, you just you can't imagine. Your brain doesn't even go to that place. But that's what you have to do when you've had a tremendous failure to recognize that you've got to get so hardcore that people would sooner believe that it's magic than that you just worked that hard. But that if you do that, you really can achieve whatever you want in life. So, this thing has kicked you in the teeth. It's made you believe that maybe the thing that you wanted just isn't possible. And because of that, when you failed, it feels like your whole world view has crumbled. But in reality, there are many things that you could point yourself at, that you could learn to love as much or more than that other thing. And I say learn to love on purpose. Everything is a process. Love, passion, skills, all of it is a process. But also, there's still that opportunity to get in through the third door. So, you didn't get in the obvious way, but there is a way. And if you believe that medical school is the right answer for you, now we need to find out what's that path. So, I did this with film school. I didn't get into film school the first time that I tried. And all the teachers, or sorry, the counselors, when you go see them, USC film school, you are more likely to get into Harvard Law statistically. It's not about intelligence. Just the number of people that apply versus what gets accepted. You're statistically more likely to get into Harvard Law than you are to get into USC film school. And so, every counselor was like, "Hey, you're not going to get in." And this is one of the They didn't say words like that. They said the exact word, "You are not going to get in. Stop taking classes like you're going to get in. Just the odds are so stacked against you, there's no way." And I just thought, "Hmm, I'm going to get in." Because everything in my life has pointed at that. And so, I found out who was on the admissions committee. And I found out that he offered, you could join him for lunch, cuz he was also a teacher. You could join him for lunch if you were a student in his class. So, I took his class, and I went to his lunch. And I was the only person there, which I still to this day cannot believe that more people didn't take him up on it. And I joined him for lunch, and I said, "Look, I have one question. I didn't My SAT scores are really low. I got a 990. They wanted a 1300." Scores are all different now, but you get the gap was [ __ ] huge. And I said, "What do I need to do with SAT scores this low?" And he said, "Oh, SAT scores just tell us how well you're supposed to do in college. You've already missed the window to get in as a freshman. You have another opportunity as a incoming junior. Just get really good grades. If your grades are high enough, then you can get into film school." When I say that I nothing else in my life existed for 2 years. I didn't drink. I didn't go to parties. I didn't even date. I didn't do anything but study because I knew that I needed to get good grades. And I ended up getting like a 3.95 or some crazy [ __ ] So, when I reapplied, I got in just like he said I would. Okay, that's the third door. Finding out, who's the gatekeeper? What do they actually want? There are other ways to get into medical school medical school, let me tell you. Now, it's just a question of do you want it bad enough to work so hard that when you pull it off, people would rather believe it was magic than just really hard work. Because if you do and you do those things, then, my friend, you will get in. Failure is only permanent if that's what you choose to believe. Reframe it. Recognize you have power. Recognize you have control over what you do. And recognize that if you leave people in awe, and that, my friends, is your job. The only way to really have mind-blowing success in life is to set the bar ridiculously high. And then surpass all expectations. And that's when it looks like magic. And that's when you'll get what you want. That simple. Don't buy into failure. It's just a lesson. All right. Last. My question to you is, "How do I bounce back when I find out that my mom doesn't believe in me?" Oh my god, I can already tell you how to answer this one. "I'm emotional when it concerns my mom. I can deal with relatives or friends, but I'm struggling because it's my family who I love very much, and she is the center of my universe. It's a knockout punch, and I know and I don't know how to deal with this, and this has created a very toxic environment in my home. P.S. I lost my father almost a couple years ago, and it's just been me and my mom ever since. Also, moving out isn't an option because she is completely dependent on me. Please help. Oh my god, my life was tailor-made to answer your question. Okay, so first of all, when I left for college, my mother quietly assumed I was going to fail. Now, she admittedly did not say, "You're going to fail." but she assumed I was going to fail. My father-in-law, once I'd already graduated, but I wanted his blessing to marry his daughter. He said no because he didn't believe that I was going to become anything. Now, somebody telling you that they don't want you to marry their daughter because they don't know that you're going to be able to take care of them, that is a pretty direct way of saying, "Hey, kid, I don't believe in you." I have often said the greatest gift anyone can ever give you is doubt. It isn't belief. Your mom is working for you. Your mom is giving you the best thing that she can give you. Here's the thing. The reason you Oh, I have the chills. The reason that you need her to believe in you is because you don't believe in yourself. The reason you don't believe in yourself is because you actually aren't good enough yet. Now, your obsession, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to become good enough to get so good that nobody can stop you. You can't be denied. That booze can't block your dunks. Let that be the driving force. When in your darkest moments, you have that reminder that there are people who don't believe that you can pull this off. 80% of your time should be spent in the light, the beautiful things you want to do, your self-belief, focusing on your improving over time. Spend the the vast majority of your time there. But there are going to be times, dark moments are coming for you, and ironically, when you feel broken, when you feel like you couldn't possibly go another step, it's proving them wrong, not letting them be right, which is dark energy, man. It's the dark side, right? But the dark side is powerful. That's why it's so seductive. We're not going to spend a lot of time there, but we're going to recognize its power. And you can love your mom and still want to show her. And maybe one way you can think about it, if you want to put this into the beautiful side, that that's your mom who doesn't believe in herself, which is why she can't believe in you. She can't see it for herself, so she can't see it for you. And so, showing her just how much is possible by just day after day focusing on getting better. It's okay to not be good enough yet. You're the average human, right? Don't believe that you're special. I don't believe I'm special. I think I'm hopelessly average. Now, when people look at me as an after picture, they they think I'm being falsely humble, but they didn't see me in my 20s. I was a mess. The reason my mom quietly assumed I was going to fail is because I was on a trajectory to fail. The reason my best friend assumed I was going to marshmallow my way through life, that's a quote, is because I was marshmallow in my way through life. The reason my father-in-law didn't think I was going to succeed is because I didn't have the drive to see my ambition through. These people had not misidentified me. I just wasn't good enough yet. And so, I took that on and said, "Cool." I love my father-in-law. He's an amazing human being. He was always very kind to me. He was very transparent that he didn't think I was on the right path. My mom, my friends, my father-in-law, they were right, but I could change. I could get better. And so, I just became obsessed with getting better. So, we don't need to convince mom. We don't need mom to cheer us on. We know it is a fact of the human existence that if you put time and energy into getting better, you will get better. Now, it is true you cannot make a racehorse out of a pig. But you can make a really fast pig. So, maybe this thing that you're pursuing, you're never going to be the greatest in the world at. But even tenfolding your life would make your life unrecognizable. And I will say that somebody who shows up every day for years and years and years and years and years, sincerely pursuing improvement, won't 10x your life, you'll 100x your life. By improving your skills, it's that simple. You're just going to be improving your skills. And suddenly, you turn that lack of belief, you turn that failure into being a guiding light for other people. Right? When I said I wanted to become an entrepreneur, my family thought I was crazy. They thought I was risking everything. What was I doing? And there were times I wondered about that. Had I just made my life my wife's life miserable, right? That her father was right and I really was going to make my wife's life hard. And I did, quite frankly, for years. Being married to me in the beginning meant poverty. It meant clipping coupons. It meant having to track uh $2.99 rental of a movie back when that was a thing. And in my dark moments, I worried that they were right. But in my dark moments, I just focused on I'm not going to let them be right. And I only need one belief. And that is that if I put consistent time and energy into improving my skill set, if I'm honest with myself about where I am, what I need to do to improve, I actually will improve. And so I started saying the following phrase to myself, "Don't judge yourself through the lens of a moment. Judge yourself through the lens of a lifetime." And maybe a more practical way to think about it is look at your life in three to 10-year tranches. In any one day, you still feel like a loser, right? But when you look back over 3 years and you think, "Hmm, I'm a lot better than I was 3 years ago." When you think about who you were 10 years ago. Like if your One of the earlier questions was asked by somebody who was 23. 10 years ago, they were 13. Were they capable at 13 of what they are now? Not by a long shot. I mean, the the the radical nature of the change would be staggering from 13 to 23. When I think about who I was at 34, right? I'm 44 now. If I think about who I was at 34, oh my god! Like the amount that I'm able to do now that I couldn't do then is truly staggering. And even looking back 3 years ago, it's staggering. So, recognizing that you don't need people to believe in you. You need only believe in a simple fact about the human brain. Time and energy put into getting better will yield improved skill set. Skills have utility. They allow you to do things in the world. Whether your mom believes in you or not, whether anybody believes in you or not, if you get good enough, you will win. It's that simple. All right. I think that's a good note to end on. Everybody, trust me. The things you want in life are all possible. It is just a question of skills, and nothing, and I mean nothing, will help you accrue skills faster than failure. But you have to reframe it. You have to see that it's empowering. You have to see that it's useful. You have to see that it is the most information-rich data stream that exists if you're willing to see yourself as the learner, look at the lesson, adjust your behavior accordingly, and pour your heart and soul into getting better every single day. If you do that, failure will propel you forward faster than anything else. All right. Thank you guys for joining me. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Everybody, thank you so much for watching. If you haven't already, be sure to smash that subscribe button and hit the bell notification so you never miss a thing. Till next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.