Tom Bilyeu’s EYE OPENING Keynote on Success & Life Will Leave You SPEECHLESS

the reality is when i started my life nobody thought i was going to be successful my own mother quietly assumed i was going to fail my best friend said oh i just assumed you were going to marshmallow your way through life my father-in-law when i asked for his blessing to marry his daughter he said no they were right i was wrong i go on to build a billion dollar business but i start laying in bed five hours a day not knowing how the [ __ ] i'm going to make my dreams come true so the question is and how did i become successful and the only honest answer is the very reason you're here which is the only thing that matters is skill set [Music] what's up everybody [Applause] [ __ ] is about to get really real so here is what we're gonna do i'm gonna put myself on a high wire act which is that very shortly you guys are gonna get access to a microphone and i want you to ask the hardest [ __ ] question you can think of and we're gonna solve that [ __ ] in real time now one clap one [ __ ] here to change their life whoever that one lonely clap was you better break an ankle getting to that microphone but here's the reality you guys are all here because you want to do something great with your life that's why you come to a conference called the 10 billion dollar conference something called driven but the difference between wanting to do something and knowing how to do it is a massive chasm and what i want to do in the next 60 minutes is teach you how to cross that chasm because it is possible the reality is when i started my life i was literally just talking about this behind stage nobody thought i was going to be successful okay you were looking at the after picture now let's talk about the before picture my own mother when i left for college quietly assumed i was going to fail my best friend said oh i just assumed you were going to marshmallow your way through life my father-in-law now father-in-law then just extraordinarily intimidating person when i asked for his blessing to marry his daughter he said no and he said tom look i've become very successful in my life my daughter has become used to a certain way of life how do you plan to take care of her and i said sir i know what you're seeing right now is a broke unemployed under educated kid but i'm telling you right now i'm the most ambitious person you've ever met and one day i'm gonna make your daughter a wealthy woman the problem was he knew something that i didn't these were the three people closest to me in the world that believed i was going to fail and they had not misidentified me they were right i was wrong now i say there's three things that i look for in anybody that wants to come work with me number one i look for grand ambition because if you don't have grand ambition i'm gonna seem like a crazy person because i really believe that i can do anything i set my mind to number two is drive and number three is compassion now compassion is beyond the scope of what we're going to talk about today but drive isn't most of you unless you already have a business that's going you're what i call an empty dreamer you have a dream and that's really important you've got the ambition you want to do something great just as i did but the very next day after telling my soon-to-be father-in-law that i was the most ambitious person he'd ever met i laid in bed for five hours now i laid in bed four to five hours every single day and the only thing that got me out of bed was the shame of knowing that my then fiance was coming home because she was the only one with a job she was going to come home and i was supposed to have a sandwich made for her by the time she got there and if i didn't finally get out of bed and stop watching music videos i wasn't gonna have the sandwich ready on time and then i would have to confess that i'd just been laying in bed okay that's where i started i go on to build a billion dollar business but i start laying in bed five hours a day not knowing how the [ __ ] i'm going to make my dreams come true now if you make the mistake of thinking that somehow i have something in me that is special that is different that allowed me to be successful you would be wrong and you will let yourself off the hook by making me extraordinary don't make me extraordinary because i'm not so the question is then how did i become successful and the only honest answer is the very reason you're here which is the only thing that matters is skill set the reason that i was marshmallowing my way through life the reason that i was laying in bed for four to five hours a day was i didn't have skills and i didn't realize that i could get skills i don't have an entrepreneurial instinct in me how many born entrepreneurs do we have here six man guys you're not gonna [ __ ] make it you're not gonna make it how many born entrepreneurs do we have here all right i am not one of you i am not a born entrepreneur i have had to cobble myself together one brick at a time now the great news is because i have done it and i've learned everything the hard way i know how to explain it to people and i've always believed that the only people that should be able to write the manuals an instruction manual is somebody that struggled to build that thing because if it came easily to you you're not going to know where the problems are and you have to understand the problems the things that are going to trip people up i know the things that are going to trip you up i know the things that are tripping you up right now whether you have a seven figure business that you're trying to scale to be the billion dollar business or whether you're trying to start your first company or whether you're just trying not to go out of business i know all the things you're going to encounter because i encountered them all and struggled with them and had to put together tools and tactics now i always love it when jim quick goes before me because he focuses people on the brain what i'm going to convince you of by the end of this talk is that you're having a biological experience now it won't be clear why that matters until we get to the end but those of you that begin to understand why you have to understand how your brain actually functions that your brain is the result of millions of years of evolution and quite frankly your brain is [ __ ] with you and if there's a god god put you in this body to [ __ ] with you because otherwise why would you have a negative voice in your head that tells you that you're not going to make it that tells you that you're a loser that tells you that you're not smart enough it might be okay for the other person but it's not going to be okay for you that was certainly what i had a voice inside my head telling me every day and i remember laying on the floor face down by the way of my unfurnished apartment feeling the cheap nylon fabric pushing into my skin and wondering how am i ever going to make anything in my life i don't know how to do this and i remember lamenting to god and i said why make me just smart enough to realize how dumb i am why not either make me so dumb that i don't understand it and i'm just blind to how dumb i am or make me smart enough that i can actually do something with my life but to put me in this weird gray area where it's like hey guess what you're dumb that was ruthless emotionally and i spent so many years there and it wasn't until i started reading about the brain and learning about this thing called brain plasticity which basically every species has a choice interesting that we're in the equestrian center right now because the example i always use of choice number one is horses the species of horse chose to just know everything when you come out so 20 minutes after being born a horse can do all the things that a horse is going to do 20 minutes after coming out a baby can't be left alone it'll vomit on itself it'll poo in its diapers it can't hold its own head up now that was a choice and it's an incredible choice and the result of that choice is something that if you're taking notes i want you to write it down because this is going to become the most important idea in your life humans are the ultimate adaptation machine you are by design created to learn and that choice because while we are not blank slates as a species we are the blankest of slates we are the most determined by our choices than any other creature that has ever come along now that matters because no matter where you're at in your business journey today the punch line is going to be if you want your business to grow if you want to get to the next level you have to learn something that you don't already know you have to get better at something tomorrow than you are today whether that's reading the moves in the marketplace like let me tell you if you don't understand what nfts are already you're missing out it's going to change the world and don't say that i didn't tell you it's as important if not more important than the internet and most people in this room have never bought one nor have they ever created one okay this is 1997 and nfts are the internet you now know now maybe it's that you have to understand the moves of the market maybe it's that you need to get better at operations maybe you need to understand finance better maybe you need to understand psychology better in fact who thinks they know the hardest problem in business just raise your hand if you know what the hardest problem in business is we got one guy everybody better go see him afterwards because damn i'm going to tell you right now and the funny thing is as soon as i say it you're going to be like [ __ ] that's what i think it is too but i didn't want to say it cause i don't want to be a dick the hardest thing in business is people look to your left look to your right whether they're the people you work with or your customer damn it gets frustrating who has ever had the impulse to shake one of their employees real hard just me if you don't understand psychology you're not going to make it there's so many elements to this game when somebody asks like have you ever asked yourself this question what is money like what is money oh my god somebody actually knows the answer or they're real close i want you to shout that [ __ ] out it's the ability to get energy secured across time and space so you go do something really hard you need a way to store the value of that time and energy and that thing we call money but you'll notice only she either knew it or had the courage to shout it out now pick it up pick it up pick it up i teach a course called business decision making it's for six figure and up entrepreneurs and as with everything i do i always tell people if you didn't think that you got 10 times your value from that get your money back i'll give it to you and i had one guy get a refund he took the whole course and he asked for a refund and his reasoning was that it was too simplistic and i wanted to hang my head and weep for him because here's what we're going to spend i'm going to wrap this up and then we're going to spend the next whatever 30 40 minutes doing this in real time so you see why this is so critical to understand i could come up here and teach you sales which everybody is going to tell you is important than it is i could stand up here and teach you marketing and everybody's going to tell you that it's important and it is i could teach you funnels i could teach you copywriting these are all valuable i could teach you hr how to hire better how to talk to your employees these are all going to be critical things and if you don't figure them out your business is going to fail but all of those things you can hire somebody else to do there is only one thing that you have to do nobody else is going to be able to do it for you and that's make the right decision business is standing in a room with a thousand doors none of you are going to die from lack of opportunity unless you have picked the wrong industry assuming you're at least in the right industry your business won't fail because of lack of opportunity your business will fail because you pursue the wrong opportunity or you dilute your attention across too many things so everybody in this room i want you from now and forever to imagine yourself standing in a room with a thousand doors and your job is to know better than anyone else in the company better than anyone else on the planet which 999 of those doors to close that's business rule number one of business and if you think this is too simplistic you're never going to make it rule number one a business avoid a mortality event don't do things that if they fail you go out of business why because business is a loop that i call the physics of progress now why do i call it the physics of progress because everything in this world has a nature things that are inescapable gravity we're all familiar with that that's inescapable that's the physics the way large bodies interact gravitational pull the way all of that we're used to hearing about newtonian physics and things like that we all accept it nobody thinks that maybe tomorrow morning they could step off the building and they would float gently to the ground right we all get you're gonna [ __ ] slap down real hard on the ground and we just accept it but we never take the time to ask what are the physics of business what does it take hey tom you're in a new industry in fact let me walk you through my past company number one technology we made security software turned it into a multi-million dollar company company number two nutrition say what you went from software to manufacturing and you had three thousand employees three hundred thousand square feet a lot of equipment but what did you know about it i didn't know anything about it company number three oh and by the way quest became a billion dollar company thank you company number three is a media company already a multi-million dollar company well on its way to bigger and better things but i won't call the b word till we actually get there all three extraordinarily different industries security software nutrition and manufacturing and now media and yet i've been able to build multi-million dollar companies in all three divergent industries without learning about it before i got into it so now the question is how and the answer is the physics of progress if you're taking notes write this down because i'm going to walk you through the actual [ __ ] steps and then i'm going to reinforce the idea that the physics of progress is all about thinking from first principles understanding the physics of a situation not thinking from analogy we're not going to say this is like this we're going to say this is the nature of this thing this is necessarily true and once you know what is necessarily true you can go into any industry face any problem and know how to think your way through it know how to make good business decisions there is a physics to this and it goes like this the physics of progress is the scientific method recontextualized for business it is the quest for what is true it is how you make progress if you don't do this you won't make progress i promise you because it is the nature of progress itself step number one have a clear goal there is a gentleman backstage that's very familiar with my work and i always tell people hey everybody you think you're clear on what your goal is you really believe it but you're not clear step number one is get clarity and this i hear a version of this all the time tom already know what i want in fact maybe you already have a business your business is already doing great you're making 10 million dollars a year you're [ __ ] killing it but you can't figure out why you can't get to the next level and i will tell you it's one of two things either you're not clear enough or you're not running the physics of progress which is just a loop so here's what people will say when they think they have clarity i want to win a gold medal tom that's amazing in what the olympics yes tom the olympics fantastic summer or winter summer my man swimming or tennis swimming fantastic backstroke freestyle medley what are we doing until you have so much clarity this is another one burn into your soul until you have so much clarity that you know what to do with the next 15 minutes you're lost if the next 15 minutes isn't self evident to you you're lost so whenever you're like you know i'm not sure what the next move is it's because you don't have enough clarity goals demand certain actions let me give you an example you kobe bryant you want to be the best that ever lived might and you want to pick up a basketball maybe you should practice can we agree that's self-evident maybe you should practice more than the next person maybe you should study game film more than the next person maybe you should understand the psychology of the game and how to get inside other people's heads once you know exactly what you want now your goals will tell you what you need to do they will tell you what the demands are and the way it works is this i know what my goal is i have hyper clarity i know what when and how much i have my goal i've written it down it has a date attached to it hyper-specific then i have to identify what the impediment is between where i'm at and where my goal is hopefully you guys have all heard of the second law of thermodynamics the second law of thermodynamics is one of the most applicable applicable to business ever and it states in any closed system that system will move towards entropy which is just a fancy word for chaos unless you inject energy that is the truth of a business so when you think hey my goal is there and i'm here why won't i just automatically get to my goal that's the question okay literally in that sentence i just gave you everything you ever need to know i know you don't think i did but 10 years when it clicks and you hit me up and you stop me somewhere and you're like tom yo when i finally realized my whole [ __ ] job as the decision maker of this company is to understand why if we keep doing what we're doing now why we will not get to our goal and the answer is entropy you will have to put energy into the system in order to get to a specific outcome so let me give you an example back in 1961 if you were able to get onto the s p 500 which is a list of the 500 most profitable stable biggest companies if you got on that list you would stay for an average of 61 years as of today that number is approaching 12 years with no signs of stopping the shrinkage because the world changes at an insanely fast pace my whole thing in business decision making is aimed at one thing to teach you how to think from first principles to solve a novel problem my goal is here i'm standing here and in between me and that goal because this world is changing so fast because things like nfts have come up and i don't even know what the [ __ ] that is i have to be able to think from first principles to figure out how i get around this problem that nobody can tell me is a problem if you can't solve a novel problem all you can ever do is copy i'm going to say that again and if it doesn't give you the chills you're not listening close enough if you can't solve a novel problem all you can do is copy now you can make a career out of being a fast follower but the only way to get where you want to go is to be able to solve a novel problem so back to the physics of progress step number one i know what my goal is step number two i've identified the novel problem that stands between me and achieving my goal step number three i'm going to come up with a hypothesis now a hypothesis is just a fancy way of saying best guess i'm going to come up with my best guess as to how i'm going to solve that problem then step four i'm going to run that test and i'm going to see how well it worked now here is the truth that decimates most upcoming entrepreneurs you're going to fail a lot failure says nothing about you failure is a part of the physics of progress failure is the most information rich data stream that exists failure does not make you a failure failure is the most information rich data stream that exists but you must get your ego out of the way when you fail so that you can pay attention and read the data i can't tell you how often i see entrepreneurs not wanting to be wrong not wanting to be embarrassed not wanting to lose the faith of their team finding ways to justify why that failure wasn't really a failure or it was something outside of their control or whatever [ __ ] that noise everything is your fault you have to own everything if you didn't get the result you wanted by definition you failed cool tom told me that failure is the most information rich data stream that exists so all i need to do now is look at the data and figure out what i learn you get that learning and then the physics of progress begins anew you've assessed however much it failed and you begin again henry ford said that failure is simply the ability to start again this time more intelligently so now we go we have our goal here's the problem here's my hypothesis on how to overcome that problem i try it i failed to some degree i learned from that and i try again more intelligently i failed to some degree i learned from that i try again more intelligently that's the physics of progress now grab a microphone because we're going to go through this in real time don't give me easy problems and don't let me off the hook if i did not solve your [ __ ] problem say tom you haven't solved my problem now here's rule number one you're gonna be real [ __ ] tempted to do what the british call waffling you're gonna you think i need eight months of real-time context to understand your problem i promise you i do not if i need context i will ask for it your job to be a good citizen of this time is to ask your question in a single sentence with no commas or run-ons i assume everybody's heard of einstein yes einstein said if you can't explain a problem simply you don't understand it very well what did i say is number one clarity clarity clarity if you can't give me your problem in a single sentence you don't have clarity so what do i know is the answer to your problem get [ __ ] clarity it's just the way that it has to be and this is how people die in these really simple [ __ ] loops they're not forcing themselves to get clear now why aren't they getting clear because they have emotion emotions make dots feel like they connect when they don't all right now we've got a line go for it keep it short hey tom how do i present a 60 000 proposal in person you're gonna have to give me your problem what's your problem you're not good at presenting no i am i the problem is i've never done this announce a consulting group i'm jeff the entrepreneur by the way i love you by the way you've got me through some dark times to be where i'm at right now i'm honored i'm serious your your thing and everything dude you've helped everybody here so right now i have a consulting group uh the company's actually here so it's actually the c the ceo is not here today is that his thing but i'm gonna be presenting this to him uh tomorrow a lot of words these feel like context um so yeah just the psychological is what it is a presenting so here here it is guys you always start with the problem okay remember i just walked you through the physics of progress it is the [ __ ] nature of progress there is no way to sidestep this so we all already know before he even speaks the answer is going to be what's your goal what's the thing that stands between you and your goal and then what is our best guess as to what we would need to do to get over that goal so now i don't know if you're a bad presenter i don't know if you have a bad product so you have to come at this from why am i asking this question because i'm nervous i'm uneasy because the answer is that you need to figure out what problem you solve for them and in the meeting you don't have to be slick or cool you just have to show them how beyond a shadow of a doubt that thing that keeps you awake at night dear buyer my product actually makes that go away and then here's the the thing about business that i wish weren't true because secretly i just want to talk about like how to feel good about yourself right like if we're not in business to help other people and to do rat [ __ ] to help our family and to make money like what the [ __ ] are we doing this for so this ultimately comes down to this emotional thing and i just want to talk about that but the reality is to get there we have to understand the nature of things and this one is you have to solve a problem for them and the part that i wish wasn't true you actually have to be better at solving that than anybody else [Applause] now i'm so fascinated by that's the one that got sort of a tepid but it was better than all the other reactions so we'll take it but all i said was what should be self-evident is that you actually have to be good at your business now what i find is the thing that people are always if somebody's going to compliment me the thing that they're going to compliment me on is tom you always seem so prepared for your interviews and my thing is like the only way to win in life is to be more prepared than everybody else if you want to win a gold medal in the olympics you actually have to be better at that sport than any other human being on planet earth that's [ __ ] business you're going here's another one this drives me nuts people will say tom if i because i always tell people you have to work hard smart and long hours and the inevitable question that i get is tom if i work hard and smart why do i need to work long hours because [ __ ] you're going against me and i'm willing to do all three so now what there there's no arbiter other than being better right if your game is to be stronger you better be able to lift more weight if your product solves xyz problem it better actually [ __ ] solve it and better than anything else so the presentation is hey look guys i'm a nervous wreck i hate giving presentations but the one thing that i know about my product it will outperform and i invite you now to put me in whatever circumstance you need to and i'm going to show you that it outperforms this is why trust me if albert would let me i would stay here on this [ __ ] stage and answer every single question i would let people push me and say no but tom you haven't solved my problem i will keep going until we solve your problem now i don't mind doing that because it's first principles thinking it applies to everything i know my product is better so i will just stand here and [ __ ] do this moment after moment after moment when you get as confident in your product as i am in my ability to solve business problems presenting will be very easy perfect thank you i'm going to use that opening thank you for sure let's go over here thank you very much for being here today uh have a couple well actually it's one question in a single sentence right you know what in a single sentence in a single sentence yes my man my goal is to have fifty thousand laws in centuries by 2029. 50 000 what licensed agents i mean the life insurance business so 50 000 licenses by 2029. how to know if it's a company to sell or a company to keep that's an emotional decision because there is no right answer but they will take you on wildly divergent paths so everybody in life what is the number one thing you know in my mind right i've walked you through the physics of progress he asked that question everyone should have been able to scream one word all at the same time and that word is clarity there you go guys here unfortunately i've learned one immutable truth i can't want it for you now in my own life i'm a [ __ ] psychopath because i am going to win and that's just that and i'm willing to suffer and get kicked in the face as many times as it takes to get good enough because that's what this is all about in order to be able to solve the problems better than anybody else and win so when we get to the participation part show me what you got for your own sake it doesn't [ __ ] matter to me i'm going to go win whether you guys want to win or not so this is about you this is about it's what's called self-signaling you're going to remind yourself how badly you want this [ __ ] all right you feel me you've got to have clarity no one can ask that it's emotional so you have to pick one path and go down it now here's the great news about whatever path if you start running a thousand miles an hour in that direction and realize oh i made a mistake amazing failure is the most information rich data stream that exists so by taking action you're learning more we now and it's not like you have to run all the way back and start over you just [ __ ] cut a line across and then start going on the right path so you can always change direction right you close 999 doors realize the one that you went through sucks you can always come back out open a new one and go through that learn learn iterate you have to start with clarity all right next tom super quick [Applause] con context hello context right um i only been in the united states for 11 years i i managed to own 23 properties and had three companies that are successful my question to you since you excel at scaling you obviously found an industry and it proved it proves that you know it's successful when i mean you've done this through placing systems to placing systems right systems in place that's all so these companies my companies they proved to be successful right but when do you stop injecting money or when you continue to inject more money to take it to a level like you right like this thing what's your goal everything starts with a goal but and my goal is no but yeah no no goal i mean no no but right no goal uh i want to take you to a billion dollars so why when five years word right so you've got to have just a freakish amount of clarity on what you're trying to do and how you plan to get there because the answer about injecting money is actually a totally separate question that's about where do you feel safe where do you feel secure you know what's that number so when i started impact theory i picked a number and i said i'm not going to burn more than this and if we get to that point in the capital i either raise outside capital or i fold the company and i just i picked a number and i went after it now of course as you start having success and you start seeing how much faster you could go if you injected a little more capital then maybe you change your mind but you have to set a number go after it have very clear metrics here's another one people often don't know what success looks like so you don't know whether you failed or not because you didn't set a metric so for instance you could set a metric that said if i'm not growing at this rate with this profit percentage i won't invest any more money but here write this down [ __ ] write this down this one's big if it can be turned into math it should be turned into math so we're going to make a math equation around this it's velocity of sales it's profit margin percentage it's going to take in some amount of like where is the industry going and we're going to find out also what number you're comfortable with where do you feel overextended right because number one avoid a mortality event so you've got the business mortality you've got your lifestyle mortality and so you want to be very thoughtful of hey i can blow 30 million dollars if i lose that i'm fine but 31 million dollars starts to be uncomfortable cool then we know it's 30 million and we better be hyper disciplined and not act like a vc funded company and be like yo 30 million it's like you really have to be really specific but there's no right or wrong answer it's up to your tolerances and it all comes from clarity and i know it haunts you several numberless some industries right very profitable i know it hunts you you why am i not in that space why don't i take my systems and go to that space why don't i take my system and do with this other industry i shiny object syndrome all the time when does it stop for you it'll never stop you just have to be disciplined i know what my goal is because i know what my goal is i just sift every opportunity through is this really the most effective way to overcome the problem that i have to achieve the goal that's good all right hit me up okay i don't know if anybody has this issue but uh why am i so good and i'm trying to try this in one sentence so why am i so good at the things i hate and horrible at the things i love i have a feeling that if we were to actually audit that it what's happened is because that's such a clever way to think of it you've told yourself that story but that it's probably not actually true so there are going to be a lot of things that you excel at that you're like oh i don't want to be doing this and fair enough and you can either do those or find somebody else that can do those and then the other thing is just because you currently aren't good at something you love go get good right when i started in business and i promise everyone's going to think i'm lying and i'm not exaggerating in the slightest i know it's hard to believe but my first year maybe 18 months in business the only contribution that i would make to a conference call was to say goodbye and i would actually get excited so my business partners right i was just an employee at the time and my business partners were like these high-level entrepreneurs and i looked up to them so much and they'd run the whole call and i'd be like whoa like this is crazy but i didn't have anything to add because i felt really stupid and i didn't know what i was talking about then i could feel oh we're about to wrap up i get to say it here we go goodbye and that felt amazing but then i've gotten good right i've gotten so good that people pay me a lot of money to come up and explain what i do so remember your goals demand the skill set that's required so now it's just a question of whether you get disproportionate returns or not okay so all of us get either subpar performance par performance or above par and you're getting a disproportionate return so and i have a friend backstage who knows golf and he's horrified because i just did that backwards but you get the idea because subpar is good right somebody that knows golf uh so you have to figure out what are the things i'm going to put energy into so for me i don't [ __ ] with finance i learn as much as i need to learn to make sure i can't be stolen from and then that's it and i bring other people in to handle that does not speak to my personality or my desire verbal ability on the other hand to get disproportionate returns so every unit of energy i put into getting better at speaking i get better than somebody else who's putting the same amount of time and energy and so you pick those things that are useful and you get disproportionate returns and you lean in on those things and then you remember that you can learn anything but you can also hire almost everything so the only thing that you must get good at is decision making if you're not good at decision making you work for somebody else thems are the facts you feel me all right by the way i want to be clear nobody's even hit me with a business problem yet i'm game for the like i have a business plan i'm trying to scale into paraguay and what the [ __ ] hey tom hello so uh i have a company that's doing eight figures in revenue and it's been sitting in that range and i've tried a few different things when with your first company what did you have to do to get it to nine figures and what did you have to sacrifice whether personal or in business so in the first company to get to nine figures we had to sell it and move into a totally different company so this is where are you in the right industry are you solving the right problem and you really have to look at that because the reality is some businesses are just eight-figure businesses and so is this an eight-figure business and what we need to be doing is pivoting and finding something that opens us up to a much larger vista or are we doing something wrong so we run the physics of progress we start with our goal our goal is hyper specific then and this is the art we have what is that problem are there people in your industry that are doing it are there nine figure businesses in your industry if there are nine figures in fact this is a really useful life tool who is doing it well okay you're trying to do something who's doing it well who's ahead of you right so i decide that i'm going to try to make sure that nobody gets to the age of 15 without encountering a growth mindset that's my mission in life okay everything i do is about that thank you so now you work backwards my first attempt was to just look into a camera and say think like this act like this and i realize two percent of people will respond to it but 98 don't you will never hear me say as long as i help one person i'm not that guy i want to [ __ ] help everybody and at scale as much as humanly possible so i start thinking about the 98 and i realized okay i'm going to be doing something in media either music which sways culture video games movies tv whatever that's going to be and so i decide given my passions and my skill set that i'm going to be on the film tv video game side so who's done it well who has told only one kind of story right because that's i can only make one kind of story if i'm trying to give you a growth mindset every story has to tell a growth mindset so i was like has anybody ever told one kind of story and built a really successful media company and the answer is god damn right disney told one kind of story over and over and over from a thousand different angles and in doing so he has swayed culture to give you an idea my sister went to disneyland 72 times in 12 months pre-covet obviously and i thought whoa like this place really means something to her so if disney can build the most magical place on earth can i build the most empowering place on earth now i don't just go copy disney but i see a lot of the cues that i need about what they did how they swayed the psychology of the world and so you want to find somebody that's doing it and that's going to give you those first clues you have to take ownership of everything say everything is my fault and get real good at identifying that problem whether it's we don't have enough capital we don't have the right product i'm not the right sales person whatever but you have to figure out what that problem is do you have a guess what holds you back well uh there's well there is uh nine and ten figure businesses in my industry and what they do is once a company gets to eight figures they look at buying them so that's the end goal so what's the problem uh trying to figure it out trying to figure out that's vague trying to figure out how to i have to multiply the revenue by five times to get to eight figures are you saying though that you don't understand which companies to buy no uh in my company when it gets to eight figures nine and ten figure companies in my industry buy them which is the goal okay but so are you a seven figure trying to be an eight or an eight trying to be a nine no eight trying to be a nine okay so if we know that people go from eight to nine remember you said this if we know that eights go to nines by acquiring other companies the goal is already obvious we have to go buy companies at least that's one path true or false uh true but sorry what i meant what i meant is when you go from eight figures to nine figures the nine figure ten figure companies buy buy you at that point uh and you're afraid you'll get purchased no i wanna sell i wanna get to tell me the problem in a single sentence um because just just to be clear when you started unless i misunderstood you said tom i'm an eight and i want to become a nine how do i do it and the answer is sitting right in front of us but now when i say that's the answer you say no no that's not the problem well what i was asking is what you specifically did in your first company to get from eight to nine we exited that company and started a new one from scratch because that was a market that was never going to take us to nine figures so so that's an option to look at that then absolutely yeah everything's on the table we're thinking from first principles i didn't look at that option so but it also sounds i'm a little confused we'll move on but i'm a little confused because you gave us the answer which is to acquire other companies so there's and now i'm going to speak to everybody else about your problem forgive me but like do you guys see how the answer he was able to articulate the answer but there's something that doesn't satisfy him in that answer oh this is so important so if we've been on sort of the 101 101 we're now in the master's degree this is where i see entrepreneurs get tripped up all the time there is a gap between what you feel and what you can articulate if you're living in a feeling and you cannot say the problem in a single sentence your emotions are making something feel obvious that actually isn't obvious hey everyone this episode is brought to you by our sponsor betterhelp an online counseling company with the mission to make professional counseling accessible affordable and convenient i hope you enjoy oh god this is so important you're having a biological experience this is one of those where i would need a full week to walk you through why it is so important to understand i'm going to give it to you real fast i've got still a little over 15 minutes okay this is really important you're going to think i'm not talking about business but i swear to god i am the conscious mind uses language the subconscious mind uses emotion the conscious mind can process very little data the subconscious mind can process what they call faster and vaster so your subconscious mind can take in all this information from the world and it can't speak to you in language so it's processing a lot of data a lot of data all the data that's necessary but it can't communicate to you in words for two reasons one we pass through infancy and from an evolutionary perspective we pass through millions of years of not having sophisticated language but even now we go through an extended period where we cannot speak but we have to have a way to communicate so anybody that has kids know the way the kids communicate is they have all this data coming from their body they get stressed and they just scream and so it's this really simple feedback loop and what i'm trying to get people to understand is that you're existing in that same feedback loop right now in your business so subconscious will speak to an emotion you must learn to translate that emotion into words a very simple conscious thought that you can say in a single sentence with no commas no run-ons no parentheticals so there's nowhere to hide now you're having a biological experience i started by saying your brain is [ __ ] with you you ready for a true story who's ready for a true story okay if this doesn't freak you out and the story i'm about to tell you is going to explain eighty percent of the problems that you have as a business owner this is so true and you're not going to believe me but i'm only ever going to say what is true this is a real study you can read about it in very famous textbooks there is a region of the brain that you can damage that will eliminate your ability to form long-term memories so you can form short-term memories but if we meet and your this area of your brain is damaged and i leave the room and come back three minutes later you won't remember me it's real okay it's not just the movie momento it's a real condition so they would test this guy and one time they had a doctor walk in with a pin in his hand so when he reached out to shake the guy's hand it poked him and the guy pulled his hand back and was like whoa doctor leaves the room waits three minutes comes back in remember this guy's not faking it he does not know who this doctor is the region of his brain that forms long-term memories has been destroyed and so he meets this doctor new the doctor sticks out his hand if he doesn't know who he is he should reach out and just get pricked over and over and over right would you not assume that to be true but he'll refuse to reach out they've tested this on multiple people now and this is the important part open your minds for me i want you to hear what actually happens because this is what's happening to you right now and you don't realize it when asked why won't you shake this doctor's hand what the guy said was i've always had a long-standing problem of shaking the hand of someone in a white lab coat that's a lie has nothing to do with that it has to do with a region of his brain stored a tie between this guy and pain that can't articulate into the conscious mind because of the memory storage problem but the brain will not allow there to be no answer the brain will not allow there to be no answer so when we run into a problem hey i'm an eight-figure business i'm trying to become a nine-figure business you feel like you know why well it's because of this that or the other it's almost certainly true that that narrative is the version of your brain connecting some pain you feel an emotion something doesn't feel right you put it into words and feel like cool i've got the words i can use when somebody asks me about this 80 maybe 90 percent of the problems you face in your business you have an emotional understanding of but you never take the time to question the narrative that you've layered on top of that and until you can pierce that narrative and figure out what's really going on using the physics of progress you're never going to figure it out so know that you lie to yourself all the time and it's the only way to get through life we all do it you have to do it it's actually a great strategy but to grow your business you have to figure out how to get through that and get to the other side because there's some emotion stopping you okay i'm gonna stay on this for one more second because i want to see if we can break through i can tell by your face that my answer isn't landing with you you think i'm off the mark and we're about to see if that's true what do you think i'm missing uh no i'm actually trying to take in what you're saying so i just changed your life forever and six months from now it's going to be a nine figure business because you know you just need to go acquire exactly i kept thinking about being acquired and not one second that it crossed my mind to acquire so i can get to that number instead of just waiting for sales to grow it's amazing thank you guys first principles will solve every problem in your business okay i don't know his industry yeah i'm just trying to ask questions what's your goal what's the problem who's doing it well what can we learn from that if no one what experiment can we run i promise you there is not a single problem in any business anywhere where the right set of questions won't lead you to the right answer and now one gift i want to give you because this one's important please please i'm begging you don't for one second value yourself for being the one that comes up with the answers because then it becomes uh can you think of the solution to all these questions can you come up with all the right questions and all the right answers and i can already give you the answer to that and it's no that's why we build teams now i could do a whole another class about how what you need to be is the soil in which other amazing people grow because that's really how you get somewhere but at the same time you've got to be the baddest [ __ ] in the room so it's this weird dichotomy of like yay i'm the sun that feeds you and nourishes you and lifts you up and i'm also the biggest baddest tree in the forest it's a whole thing we'll move on hey tom um i'm in the mortgage industry i check i manage a team of 21 people and i want to grow my specific goals to grow to 100 people by january 2023 so why because more people equals more revenue and that's do you know where the breaking point is no so this i'm always fascinated by people who start with people first because the people isn't your goal the revenue is your goal you just know one path to the revenue is people but if the real goal is revenue let's just jump right to it because there might be 30 solutions and one of them is that we hire these people to get there but you don't need it to be people do you well we're in a in a one-to-one sales environment and more salespeople in my business equals more sale equals world revenue i hear you but do you like if you brought in 100 people and they ended up bringing in less revenue would you still want to bring on 100 people no and if i could come in and coach everybody for six months and bringing on 50 people instead of 100 people bought a more revenue than you were expecting from 50 people would that be a better solution for you absolutely can we now agree that the revenue is what you care about 100 okay so now that we know the revenue is what we care about now the goal will dictate what we do but the crazy thing is in all these brokerage type businesses whether it's real estate whether it's insurance mortgages whatever everybody thinks they want headcount and i get it because there's a math equation and hey tom said anything that can be made math should be made math and i know if i bring on a person they account for this much revenue but they also it gets more complex the more people you have the more hr issues you have the more infrastructure you need so i'm just always a little skeptical now i'm not saying that that isn't the right answer i'm just saying it is a hypothesis that's meant to lead to a goal but your goal again clarity your goal is not people that's a path okay never confuse the goal with a path to the goal so like i don't give up on my goals but i [ __ ] discard paths all day long whoever you are you're my new bestie that was a reaction right so yeah don't worry about the path now again maybe that is the most obvious one and maybe that's the one that we pursue just don't lose sight of what you really care about which is revenue it'll allow you to be more clever it opens your mind in fact here's write this down never let your beliefs calcify into dogma i'll repeat that never let your beliefs calcify into dogma so jim quick gave you one of the great answers of life which is that all of your behaviors follow your beliefs that really is true so if that's true and i believe that the only way to get there is by bringing on more people i won't even think to look beyond that and then you will get outperformed by somebody who does find a way to automate the industry or to do something else that's clever if you at least leave your mind open and say it slightly differently my goal is the revenue and as of today the quickest way that i know to achieve that is to scale my people but do you see by putting a little bit of extra language around there you don't trap yourself in a box because and this is another nugget to write down you become what you repeat you become what you repeat so if you repeat that i need to scale people then you're going to scale people if you focus on revenue it might not even be you somebody else in your organization might be like you know what if we did this like i actually think that we could grow revenue faster than bringing on another person or the other thing is as you scale people invariably you hit a point of diminishing returns where one person used to bring on a hundred thousand they start bringing on 90 then it's 85 then it's 70 and then you're like we're in free fall what's going on and that will force you to start looking for other avenues but be very very clear on there are many opportunities to get there we just need to get there okay so if it's just the revenue that we care about what's holding you back um process technology and not enough not enough bandwidth not enough staff to handle the handily increased business okay so what's your problem are you you're scared to hire no i'm trying to hire my problem is attracting top people top performers i feel like do you have a gut instinct on what would attract more people how i've attracted people thus far is through my personal brand just putting out more content but now we're hitting a point where it's not bringing on enough people or the people are just asking for help they're not already performers right so they need develop they need sales development and do you know sort of where i go already with what the answer is train people that's one but the other is don't try to solve this problem with more people because you're telling me you've already hit diminishing returns so the question of where are the diminishing returns and you said i don't know the answer is you've already [ __ ] found it so at least within your system you have found the point at which whoa i with my abilities and the offer that i'm making i'm now attracting a less and less qualified person and therefore now i'm getting less and less out of these people and it's creating a problem that's why you want to open your purview to what are other things that we could try or to build the training or to get a better pipeline or to be so much better like if i were in your shoes i would be thinking one equation one equation only and everybody is going to immediately go yes of course [ __ ] and that is i want to make sure that my agents make more money than in any other agency and then i would just go on every podcast that would have me that people in this industry listen to i put my feet up on the [ __ ] table and i'd like let me run you through the numbers everybody at this agency they make this at this this agency they make that but with me they make this and then people will flock to you but it's hard to become that good but that's actually the solution hey everybody it's time to talk about all of our favorite subjects mental health is there something holding you back or preventing you from achieving your goals or even just interfering with your happiness do any of you suffer from depression or anxiety as a lot of you guys know i've suffered from anxiety for years and trying to tackle something like that on your own is not always the optimal strategy but a lot of people are super nervous to try out therapy or they don't really know where to start or they're just plain embarrassed but now there's a service called betterhelp that makes therapy more accessible and affordable betterhelp is professional counseling done securely online using your computer tablet or mobile phone through video calls phone calls or text messaging with licensed therapists who are certified by their state's board to provide therapy and counseling it is not self-help and it's not a crisis line it's an online service available worldwide and it has a massive network of counselors who have a broad and diverse range of specialties so you can get a counselor with a sort of expertise that might not even be available in your local area betterhelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed professional therapist within 24 hours you can log into your account anytime to message your counselor and betterhelp also has group in our sessions every week where members can learn in groups directly from licensed counselors on multiple topics like relationships and ways to overcome anxiety especially if the thought of seeking help makes you nervous or embarrassed be sure to check out the over 60 000 positive reviews posted on the betterhelp site and that's betterhelp h-e-l-p betterhelp is committed to making it easy for you to access the therapeutic help you need even if you have never gone to counseling before it's free to switch therapists it's more affordable than local therapy and they even have financial aid available if you need it betterhelp wants you to start living a happier life today visit betterhelp.com impact and again that's spelled better h-e-l-p and join over 500 000 people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional betterhelp costs just 65 dollars per week and financial aid is available for those who qualify during the sign up process as an impact theory viewer you can get 10 off your first month so visit betterhelp.com impact and get the help you need today all right guys if you need this one please give it a shot take care and be legendary thanks tom word my pleasure all right albert you're going to hate me but i'm going to ask anyway can i get 10 more minutes on the clock and then we're going to do a speed round tell albert if you want 10 more minutes on the clock all right my man okay we have to do speed round now so i'm not going to be able to go into like all the super details the more that you can give me like yo hard fast problem i can give you quick fast solution thank you tom what an honor to be here present my name is ricardo mariscal i'm from mexico best known as rich the realtor i got a question simple question for you i think let's pretend money is not a problem for the next years of my life for anyone else which area would you recommend will be the smartest or areas to focus on in order to become the most fulfilled person in the human's history i love it amazing question in fact arguably the most important question that we'll be asked today okay so the punch line of life is not money the only thing and speaking from experience i will just tell you this i chased pure money getting rich every day for almost a decade and i ended up miserable and learning one immutable truth the only thing that matters in life is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself also no one can guarantee that you'll ever be financially successful but they can guarantee that you're going to struggle now the good news is nature incentivizes struggle so struggle actually feels good so the goal isn't to avoid struggle in fact you have to manufacture struggle in your life if you have kids and you're wealthy you must make them struggle otherwise they will implode because nature compels them to work really hard for something you won't appreciate what you have if it was given to you just naturally you can't so what you're going to do is you're going to find an area that gives you more energy than it takes it could be helping kids it could be building homes in mexico it could be doing wilderness treks through uh to the north pole whatever there's gonna be something that gives you energy and then you're gonna get into the loop of desire this is how you build passion people think that passion is born into you it is not so passion is cultivated and so what you have to do is you find that thing that gives you more energy than it takes you engage with it okay find it engage with it then you see do you become more fascinated or less the more you engage if more you move to the next step which is gaining mastery so now we're in it with the sole intent of getting good as we get better we get into a reciprocal loop that we call fulfillment which is you're working really hard for something that matters to you that allows you to serve not only yourself but other people so as you get better at this thing you help more people and they do things like what people do to me which is they come up and they're like oh my god you changed my business all that and she's like [ __ ] i want to do this more i want to go get better so i can get more of that and now you're in a reciprocal relationship with that passion the better you get the more you help the more you get that feedback loop which makes you want to go get better and now you feel fulfilled because fulfillment has a math equation and it goes like this fulfillment is starts from a goal everything starts from the goal your goal needs to be exciting to you and honorable meaning that it serves not only you but other people this is just the nature of humans it's not me passing a moral judgment just that's what nature will reward you for doing the next thing is you have to work really hard to gain that set of skills and then you have to deploy those set of skills to help yourself and other people that is fulfillment you do that your whole life will be amazing speed round thank you hey tom uh very nice meeting you i've been a big fan for about three years me and my wife admire a lot so it's quite an honor to be here with you thank you um really quick question um if you have a one million dollar business you'll get want to get it to 10 million what's the best way to distribute your time between marketing training your employees developing yourself all right everybody what does this start with clarity of your goal so what's your goal 10 million dollars a year that's just money how are you going to get there why are we are we just chasing money yes sell drugs you might go to jail but damn on the way up baby you can make some the next best thing crypto then flipping nfts but you go broke real fast doing that but damn if you hit i made a hundred thousand dollars in 48 hours on a single nft that i bought for 250 not financial advice let me tell you but those are really dumb ways crypto's not dumb but those are like really sort of roll the dice bet at all on black ways if all you care about is money it will send you down a very dark path that i'm not super helpful at once you have a goal and there's like a thing behind you but even setting all that aside i will just say you have to be in an industry where the upside potential is big enough that you could actually solve a problem remember this starts with i'm solving a problem for somebody who knows they need that problem solved and then i'm gonna go solve it better than anybody else that's the real answer but if i could change your life because this will matter so much business is a game of attrition most people give up why do they give up because hard things suck so when you have a hard thing who has read man's search for meaning by viktor frankl i wanna is that really it [ __ ] scream that out if you've read it [Applause] okay this is the the most important thing i will say to you literally in this whole talk every single person in this room if you are serious about enjoying your life read man's search for meaning by viktor frankl it is about a guy who survived the concentration camps he happened to be a neuroscientist and what he realized was you could predict when someone would die within 72 hours because they would lose a sense of meaning and purpose now if you can survive auschwitz on meaning and purpose alone let me tell you how important meaning and purpose is in a business because as hard as building a business has been it's no [ __ ] auschwitz so trust me when i say meaning and purpose will get you through when i was building quest it was all about saving my mom and my sister that was what i attached to it and so when i was there at 2am on a friday night with bloody knuckles fixing a piece of equipment that i did not want to be fixing i would think of my mom and my sister i would not think of 10 million dollars because nature has compelled me to think of them in a way and i get an emotional reward i won't get from anything else so even if you're just going to chase the 10 million make it about your kids giving them a better life or something but think about that other something we good all right thanks hi tom um i came all the way from costa rica just to learn from you guys and i feel very excited for it i'm honored i have one question uh you talk about nfds i invest personally a lot of them be careful yeah i know and that's my question like what will you recommend focusing on investment and what i mean like which nfts will you put an iron on to invest right now so i don't think of nfts as an investment i'll be really honest um it's a whole different thing so what i would think of is how can i integrate nfts into my business what can i create if this really is the next evolution of the internet like when in 97 when we were getting web pages we couldn't imagine uber but uber goes on to be this gigantor company that required the confluence of a few different technologies one of them being the internet so the question is where are nfts going to know that you have to learn the technology right this gets down to think from first principles once you're thinking from first principles then you can evaluate so i'm what they call a utility maxi so i don't care about one project or the other unless i know what the utility is of that thing what do i get where are they going so at impact theory i'm launching my first impact theory nft which is basically utility token on october 13th for anybody interested uh and that is it'll be the single most valuable product i ever create because of what it gives to the community and how it lets them participate imagine just imagine maybe i'm crazy but imagine i am the next walt disney and you could buy an image from steamboat willie at the time he created it what does that look like in 20 years 30 years 40 years right now again i don't think of it as an investment but we're going to be giving you things if you're one of the people holding that showing that you love the company we're going to give you a lot of stuff for that over time so think about from your business perspective how do i create something meaningful because right now nfts are about community and rewarding the community so how do i reward the community thank you very much for sure all right we got time for like two more i'll go quick so in my business there's like a massive opportunity cost to my time spent in the business versus spent doing other things and i struggled to find the balance of like how much time should i be spending educating myself so that in the long term that opportunity cost is even greater or when it comes to self-education the game goes like this because it's a speed round forgive me so you want to learn a little and take action a lot learn a little take action a lot learn a little take action a lot right because reading a book will not teach you nearly as much as failing so you've got to get in there you've got to try something so the opportunity cost is whittled down by you getting good at thought exercises what does success look like where i see people waste a lot of time is even if this is a victory it's not very interesting and they'll still pursue it because they've never run the thought experiment of what does the world look like if we actually win so run that thought experiment then get in as fast as you can and just start deploying that knowledge the point of reading a book today is to use the knowledge today not tomorrow right now and so what's my goal what do i need to know in order to overcome this problem right what skill set do i need to get over this what book or youtube video or podcast has that information and then get in there hard and so i am constantly learning but i'm also constantly taking action and this is one big thing guys if if i were going to say in a single sentence what has allowed me to have outsized success it's this i have an unflinching willingness to embarrass myself publicly and here's the best news lean in because this makes me smile so much every time people are making fun of me and saying oh how i have failed on the inside this is all i hear because i know i'm learning [ __ ] and on a long enough timeline all you will give up and i'm going to keep going it took me 12 years of getting kicked in the face every day starting with goodbye being my only contribution on a phone call to building a billion dollar business and people like oh it's an overnight success and i was like yeah an overnight success 12 years in the making okay so who can get kicked in the face the most times be embarrassed the most times and keep getting up and internally know i'm not that impressive yet i'm not the person i need to be to pull this off yet but i'll learn i'll get there and the person that keeps going knowledge stacks knowledge stacks tommy thanks for having me my pleasure my name is andrew brown um my question is how do you scale a direct selling business in an oversaturated industry similar to like what you do with quest here it is i'll have the answer for you in a single sentence because we're out of time this applies to everybody this is the one you write down when we started quest the industry had been declining for years and there were 1600 competitive flavors on the market bars and flavors and they were like why are you doing this this is crazy and my answer was this there's always room for the best don't forget it your job's to get to be the best everybody all right thank you so much for having me are you not entertained let's do it thank you guys kick ass all right my friends i hope this added value to you if it did make sure that you smash the like button make sure that you are subscribed and that you don't miss a thing and until next time my friends be legendary take care you