Tom Bilyeu
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I don't want to talk about it. And so she just felt alienated from my life effectively. And so her saying that, I was like, I had always said, and this boys and girls know your value system. I'd always said that my marriage is my highest priority.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So if it's true that my marriage is my highest priority and my wife is telling me I'm damaging the marriage, then I need to do something to address that. So I went in and quit. And by that point, I'm worth about $2 million on paper. And I said, look, here's your equity back. I'm not gonna cross the finish line. I don't want anything for this.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I'm just going to go do something that makes me feel alive. Long story short, we end up realizing that we all felt that same way, that there was a dark cloud over all of our lives, that we wanted to keep working together. But to do that, we were going to have to radically change our approach to business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And so the company that we end up founding after that ends up being Quest Nutrition, which goes on to be this legendary success. But at the time, it was really born out of something pretty dark.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Yeah, so what changed was I had all this pent up anxiety around, I'm gonna let these guys down. They felt like my brothers. They had taught me so much about business. And here I am after, at the time that Lisa said that was six and a half years in, So Quest ends up being like another year and a half down the road. So this is at the six and a half year mark.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
But that's a long time to be working with people that you really care about. And I just felt like, man, I'm quitting. I'm leaving them. So there was a lot of shame around it. But once I quit, you feel that sense of freedom. I mean, it is instant. And I felt so good. And I was like, whoa, I really nailed it. I want to do something that makes me feel alive. So now the great irony is I quit.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I give the equity back. I have the conversation. It was just absolutely horrible. And I am driving home. I call my wife and I'm like, I did it because we were going to move to Greece. I did it. I quit. We're going to move. This is going to be amazing. I felt so good. I felt light and alive and she was happy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And I am quite literally pulling into the driveway of my apartment complex and they call me. And I'm like, hey, babe, it's my partners. Let me take this because I still loved and respected them. I felt very guilty, but I knew I had to do it. But I was like, let me take this call. I took the call and they're like, look, man, you really caught us off guard. Come out to dinner with us.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Yeah, so the story that you're referring to is when I left for college, my mom, who was always celebrating me, always encouraging me, but she quietly assumed I was going to fail, which I didn't find out till years later when I asked her, you essentially kicked me out of the nest. I was about to stay home. At one point, I was like, look, I don't think I should leave.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Let's just talk about this. And I was like, of course. Now at this point, I'm like, I'm not going to go back to work. I've done the hard thing, but I'll happily go to dinner and I'll explain everything. And anyway, they kick off the dinner and they're like, we feel the same. We don't like what we're doing anymore. So what would it need to look like for the three of us to keep working together?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Because look, finding people that you can build things with is not easy. And so we were like, I mean, this is a very long process. I'm sure in the book, it sounded very short, but like I said, this takes about a year and a half, but we decide, okay,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
immediately at the dinner after a conversation with my wife, but we lay out this path of let's spend the next year trying to hit revenue metrics in our software company. If we can't hit that, we've already done this for six and a half years. It's crazy to just shut it down. So let's set goals. If we don't hit them at the end of the year, we'll shut the company and we'll do something else.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And in the meantime, let's start building out what the next company would look like. And so over the next year and a half, we start mapping out, okay, what would the next company look like? We start prototyping, doing all that stuff, debating and arguing about what the next one would be.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And I just kept saying, here are the things I'm not willing to compromise on because I'm not going to get sucked back into this. I'm only going to do things I'm passionate about. I'm only going to do things that make me feel alive. I'm going to be myself. I'm going to be authentic. I don't want to be a slick marketer.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I want to build community, thousand true fans, all the things that end up being valuable. the playbook that people run in terms of social media. But back then it wasn't called that. This was all just beginning. So out of anger and frustration, I end up being one of the first entrepreneurs that understood the power of social media for business. in building real authentic communities.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And that ended up being one of the things that just really helped us explode along with other things that my partners can take responsibility for. But that was my big contribution was we're going to use social media. We're going to tell stories, all the things that I was like, I'm not going to get pulled into another business that doesn't do this stuff. I'm going to do it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And the world just met us right at the right time as social media began to explode, as using influencers began to explode. We were just some of the earliest people to do it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
We founded the company for three very different reasons. So I'll tell you why I founded Quest. So for me, I didn't want to change behavior. I wanted to leverage it. So this is now something I teach people. It's called solve a known problem. So you want to meet people where they already are.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So the known problem is you have people that are morbidly obese because they would rather choose food based on price and taste. And if you then want to help them, don't ask them to eat healthy. Don't ask them to eat chicken breast and broccoli. Give them something that tastes like candy, but has the macronutrient profile of chicken breast and broccoli.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So I was like, okay, if we can do that, then I can show up every day fighting for my mom and my sister. Now, why Quest specifically? Because I wouldn't have started a nutrition company. It was really the three of us, each represented one of the three areas that every business gets broken down into, and that's product, process, and people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So I was people, one of my partners was product, the other was process. Literally, when you're in manufacturing, process is extremely important. And so when we really thought about, okay, what's a business that the three of us with those natural proclivities could really be into? So Tom wants to go love people, build communities, help serve his mom and his sister. Okay, cool. That fits nutrition.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And she recognized that that was just fear. And she basically kicked me out. She was like, you are going to go pursue your dreams. And then has spent every day since then trying to get me to come back home. And so one day, it's probably 10 years ago now, I was finally like, mom, why work so hard to get me home? You kicked me out. I would have just stayed.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
One of my partners was obsessed with just the physics of the human body and how what we eat impacts us and all of that. So, okay, that fits nutrition. And then the third one, understanding being an Iowa farm boy was like, oh, I get manufacturing. Cool, here we are. This is a business that suits the three of our personalities that the three of us are already passionate about. And...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
It meets those unique individual needs. And it's something that people eat. So having a product where the person is going to consume it. Imagine a car that you eat every day and you need another car tomorrow. That's a good business to be in, right? Because as you build that brand loyalty, they just come back and back and back.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And once people make a decision, now for sometimes years, that's just the default decision. I don't think about it. I'm not trying new protein bars. I just eat Quest. And so getting those customers in the door, then it's just an incredible business model.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
What I have run into is that the human mind is built over millions of years of evolution. And if you look at it through that lens, you will understand the quiet little algorithms that are running in the back of your mind. And one of them is that you must contribute to the group. Now, if you contribute to the group in a self-sacrificing way, you will burn out.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
But if you contribute to the group in a way that also keeps you excited, you're passionate about it, now you have what I call fulfillment. And so when you're pursuing fulfillment, you really can push through a lot of stuff.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And since it really is the emotional difficulty of building a business that kills most entrepreneurs, so if you have that thing to fall back on of, oh, I'm serving myself and the larger group, which makes me feel good about myself, which is the ultimate punchline of life, is to earn your own respect, now you're in a great position. And so you wanna create that kind of fulfillment flywheel
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And when you create that, you've got a shot of being able to stick through something. So a hundred percent, if you ignore that element of service, you ignore it at your own peril.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And she said, oh, I just always assumed you were going to fail. And I was like, whoa. So hearing that, it was very in keeping with how all the major people in my life had seen me. So my best friend said, oh yeah, I just assumed you were going to marshmallow your way through life. And when I went to my now father-in-law and asked for his blessing to marry his daughter, he said, no.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So one, it is weird to me that people ask the question, oh, is it too late to enter the podcasting field, YouTube field, whatever, fill in the blank. And the answer that I gave when asked that question was there's always room for the best.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And if you understand that there's going to be a new everything all the time, like the gigantic conglomerates, sure, some of those are going to have modes that are so tough. The vast majority of things just don't. You just have to find a way to be different and better. So my latest endeavor is going into the world of video games. And you want to talk about a crowded field.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I mean, it's just absolutely obscenely crowded. So the question becomes, how are you going to be different and better? And if you can accurately identify an area where you can be different and better, then it's never too late. And you just have to go in and actually be better. And this is the hard part. Being a good person is not enough to build a good business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
You actually have to understand business. You have to understand your target audience. You have to make a product that solves a known problem. And then to your actual question, you have to figure out a way to get people to be aware of what you do. And in business, you always want to be in a position where you only have an awareness problem. So your product is amazing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And all you have to do is let people know that it exists. Now, when you have an amazing product and you simply need to let people know that it exists, you're in great shape. Now, getting good at understanding that's really hard. I'll walk you through something that's very real about what we're going through right now.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Okay, so building a video game, just to give you an idea, I'm gonna compete against a game called Grand Theft Auto. Now, Grand Theft Auto 6 is about to come out. So not only do they have a 10 plus year head start, but Grand Theft Auto 6 cost a billion dollars to make. as successful as I am, throwing a billion dollars at a video game would be very unwise.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
We have way, way, way smaller budgets and we still have to somehow compete with those guys. So what I know is right now, even though I have a part of my video game out in the world and people can go play it right now, I know that that's actually not my product.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
My product right now is the community that I'm building around the video game that I'll use to get people aware of the video game in the next phase when it really is the final video game. Now, the difference between an entrepreneur that survives and the one that dies is the entrepreneur that thinks that, at this stage in my development, that the game is actually the product, misses it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And I even have trouble convincing my own team of this. And I'm like, guys, stop trying to sell the video game. You don't have a video game that will sell itself. Sell the community. The community is gathered around the video game. But the thing, the unique selling proposition right now is we've gathered a bunch of gamers that are like-minded around mindset, empowerment, positivity, all of that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
That is a beacon of light in the gaming world. So focus on that. But this is where I go back to tactics don't help you if you don't understand the strategy. And so what I'm trying to bring to the world is there is a way to think through all of this stuff.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
But if you don't do it or you never learn it or you think, ah, I just have to learn how to market, market, market, you will miss the fact that you don't even have the right product.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
When I asked him why, he was like, look, I think you guys just come from very different backgrounds. And if I'm honest, I don't know that you can take care of my daughter. And I was like, wow, okay. So, hey, fair enough. And I said, look, I heard you. I get it. And I now looking back completely understand. But I said, I am going to propose to your daughter.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
This is... the thing, the thing is the ability to solve novel problems. There's a very simple solution. It's just, you really have to be disciplined to do it. The simple solution is you must think from first principles. That's it. Now, what does first principles mean? First principles is literally thinking from physics. Okay. Why would you want to do that? Because
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
When you're not reasoning from first principles, you're thinking from a cage. Somebody gave you that cage and the human mind needs shortcuts. But if you don't understand that those shortcuts are cages that you get trapped in, then you won't understand how to break out. Now, in my own life, breaking out of a cage was a big part of the reason that we were able to be so successful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So cage number one went something like this. Hey guys, cool bar idea that you have, but this bar can't be made. okay, why can't this bar be made? We heard that from multiple people, actual manufacturers, the bar can't be made. And I thought, thinking from first principles, that just isn't a true statement. So does this bar somehow violate the laws of physics? No, it does not.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
But it really doesn't work on the equipment that's available. Why not? Oh, the punchline ended up being super weird. The reason that our bar couldn't be made on any of the commercially available equipment was because for the last 70 years, more now, All of the manufacturing equipment was engineered assuming that you're gonna use high fructose corn syrup. Why?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Because the government subsidizes the production of corn and high fructose corn syrup is cheap and delicious. So you have a thing that's cheap, delicious and subsidized. And now all of a sudden, you as a manufacturer of equipment really can't assume that people are gonna have high fructose corn syrup because it's so good. It preserves things, it's delicious, it's cheap, it's subsidized.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Oh man, it's got everything going for it, except the fact that metabolically it is disastrous. So we were like, okay, well, it doesn't violate the laws of physics. So I reject that cage of thinking and I'm gonna ask myself a new question. Am I willing to engineer my own equipment? And if I am, then I have a path forward. If I'm not, fair enough.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
But getting out of that frame of reference that was handed to us first, this bar can't be made. Every single person before us went either, oh yeah, this bar can't be made. I accept that frame. Or I reject the frame, but I'm not willing to become my own manufacturer. We were the first ones that said, I reject the frame and I'm willing to become my own manufacturer.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So please just don't tell her I'm going to propose. And he didn't. He did not say anything until after I'd proposed. But there was a lot of tears, a lot of drama because he tried to talk my, again, now wife of 22 years, talk her out of it and say, look, you guys are going too fast. I don't think this is the guy. And let me be very clear. My father-in-law has always been lovely to me, always.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
One, you're gonna wanna try to mitigate all the things you're afraid of. Fear is a wonderful emotion to assess and go, okay, cool, what am I afraid of? So rule number one in business is avoid a mortality event. Okay, cool. So if we bottle the equipment up front and it doesn't work, mortality.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
If we make the bars by hand, prove that there's profit, get profitable, and then buy the equipment, now you've got a shot. So we literally just said, cool, we're gonna keep running our software company by day, because I don't want that pressure on me. I wanna be able to pay my rent and all that stuff. So we're gonna keep running that, and nights and weekends, we're just gonna grind it out.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
We're gonna start growing this protein bar company. And we made them literally by hand with rolling pins, everybody, rolling pins and handheld knives and sealing them three at a time until we were profitable. And it was just an obscene amount of work. And here's the reality.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
The reason that magic works, like actual magicians, the reason they work is they find a place where you would sooner believe that they're able to tap into some other dimension to pull this thing off then that they put in 3,000 hours of work to make the way that they touch their coin seem seamless. No, they really just put in 3,000 hours of work that nobody saw alone in their bedroom.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And they practice that so many times that it looks effortless, that they know exactly where you're going to look and how to control that. There's a famous one where there's a card hidden inside the basketball. And so the person's like, oh, is this your card? No, it's not your card. Oh no, go open that basketball. They go get it, they stab it, they open it. Oh my God, my card is in here.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Now, what they don't understand, because they just can't allow themselves to believe that the magician learned how to do what's called force a card, where they get you to pick a card unnaturally.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And then on top of that, they go to the basketball manufacturer and they have them put, let's say, five different cards in the basketballs because they're not necessarily 100% sure you're going to pick the right card. And then they memorize which of the basketballs has which card in it. And then they just tell you to go pick the one that has the card that you actually picked.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And they think, oh my God, that'd be way too hard. How do you convince the basketball manufacturer to do that? And so the brain doesn't even go there. That's building a business. You have to be willing to do that level of obscene work to just keep, okay, well, if we wanna do this, we're gonna have to do that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And you end up going, oh, we're going to fly to China to try to find manufacturing tips that we can learn from. We're gonna go to Germany and meet with manufacturers and learn how to do this stuff. And then literally- Instead of buying a Ferrari, we're gonna spend that money on engineering a new slab line, which is exactly what we did.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
But he was honest. And I actually respect honesty tremendously. So yeah, when I was younger, nobody thought, oh, this is going to be the guy. But what I have found that I now call the only belief that matters is that if you believe that you can get better and you put the time and energy into getting better at something, you will get better.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So you just have to be willing to do what other people are not willing to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Well, for me, that was easy. I had gotten into this, if you remember, this all starts back at film school and me realizing I couldn't control my destiny in filmmaking and meeting these two guys who said, well, if you got rich, then you could go build your own studio. And so I thought it would take 18 months, but we did it. In the end, we actually pulled it off.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So for me, that was just the natural part of the evolution. Now, admittedly, when I was at Quest, I didn't know if I was ever going to be able to exit. It was so much work. We had so much capital tied up and everything, and we'd been reinvesting hundreds of millions of dollars. And so it was all a big question mark. And I learned a lesson a long time ago that You cannot guarantee the success.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
You can only guarantee the struggle. So make sure you're struggling at something that you care about. I was still grinding it out at Quest. I loved it. I thought it was awesome. It was amazing. But the fact that I had an opportunity to go pursue my ultimate dream has been just the most incredible gift ever. And so, yeah, I left on a Monday.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
On Tuesday, I started Impact Theory because I felt like it was a dream that I'd been holding my breath on at that point for 14 years.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Well, that's meaning and purpose. So I really believe the punchline of life is to respect yourself. You want to feel good about yourself when you're by yourself. Okay, if I'm right about that, then the right question to ask isn't how much money can I make? The right question to ask is what makes me respect myself? And the answer is that you need to act in accordance with evolution.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So evolution insists that you serve yourself and the group. So I'm like, okay, that's where meaning and purpose comes in. I've got to be doing this thing, whatever this thing is in service of other people. Cool. I live stream me playing Fortnite and my game Project Kaizen. I try to do it seven days a week. I don't always make it, but I stream a lot.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Now, if I were just streaming to play video games to get followers, I wouldn't feel good about it. But because I'm streaming to talk about mindset, playing video games to build an audience so that I can have an audience for the video game that has mindset at its core, and that I know that's how I'm gonna reach 11 to 15 year olds with empowering ideas, Now it's like, okay, this is dope, man.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And so I'm here fighting to try to make people's lives a little bit better, that I understand that most people you cannot reach by saying, think like this, act like this. So anybody, if you hear my voice right now, you are part of the 2%. The 98% will never listen to something like this. They've gotta engage in a movie, a story, a game, something.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And then if you entertain them, you have the opportunity to give them an empowering idea. Because I have that meaning and purpose, now I can get up and fight and do all the things that I need to do to build a video game, which is ironically harder than being my own manufacturer. Crazy but true.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And because I know meaning and purpose is so important, I knew if I retired to an island that I would not have ready-made meaning and purpose. Now, the most natural way to have meaning and purpose in your life is to have a family, have kids. I have not chosen that path, so I knew I needed to be way more careful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And so I just spent the last, whatever, 30 years proving that that's true.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And if I had chosen that path, I would not want to raise kids on their own private island because, ooh boy, are they gonna struggle.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
That's a pretty interesting journey. So I assumed that I would only ever speak to adults. Didn't even cross my mind to make things for kids. Even towards the end of Quest, when I was like, I can see now that I'm probably going to actually get a chance to do this. I just assumed that I would make movies for adults and I'd put empowering ideas and it would be amazing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And then I started Quest University and I started teaching all my employees every trick that I knew. And I said, look, I'll even teach you how to build a competitive nutrition company. So part of it is I'm just wired. I love to help other people. So I'm probably, I get a disproportionate response out of helping other people than maybe some.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So I wanted to make sure that they were working at Quest because they saw that I believed in them and their success more than their own mother. And what I found was the hard reality was 2% of people did something with the ideas. And still to this day, I get texts and phone calls from people saying, you changed my life. I started this company. I moved up the corporate ladder, whatever.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
It's amazing. But I was just haunted by the 98% that did nothing with it. Now, obviously I'm rounding those numbers, but that's roughly accurate. And so my wife and I just, as scale people, we said, okay, but what do we do to reach the 98%?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And going back to neuroscience and just researching the brain and human development, I realized that, okay, what are the things that end up making your frame of reference? We talked about this earlier. So your frame of reference is your biology. Can't do anything about that. And then it is your beliefs in your value system.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Now your beliefs in your value system, those are malleable, but they're largely set by your zip code, which is why right now in the developed world, your zip code or your country's equivalent of that is the number one predictor of your future success. So it's basically, who are you born to? And if you're born to people that were unsuccessful before you, odds are that you will be unsuccessful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And if you're too far down the rung, now you're just in a soup of terrible ideas. And what I realized was pick any kid. But if at birth you took that child and you put them into an upper middle class household, odds are that they're going to succeed in life. And a guy named Jeffrey Canada figured out one of the biggest reasons why. It's absolutely astonishing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
The number of words that a kid hears by the time they're five and the ratio of positive to negative words has a tremendous impact on the language centers of their brain. So now when you grow up without hearing enough words and hearing a lot more negative than positive, you literally have an accent. Even though you grew up in America, you grow up with that inner city accent.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And the reason that you grow up with that is because the language centers of your brain just didn't develop. Has nothing to do with the kid, has nothing to do with genetics, has everything to do with zip code. So now I'm very aware of this and I'm working in manufacturing and I have 3000 employees and a thousand of them grew up in the inner cities. And it does not matter your race.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Literally doesn't matter. They all have the same accent, first of all. And then second, they all have the same set of ideas. I'm just like, what is happening? So I start, okay, what can you do? Because I can't control who their parents are. I can't control that they've started in this environment. So where can I intercept? And I discover something called the age of imprinting, which is 11 to 15.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
The Japanese actually have a word for it. It's called shounen, which translates as the few years. So we have an intuitive understanding that there's this period, this few year period where kids push away from their parents and they just drink deeply of culture. And this is why there's a famous line. I think it was written by Stephen King.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And he said, you'll never have friends like the friends you have when you're 12. And what he understands intuitively is the age of imprinting. It is that first moment, again, where you push back from your parents, you connect with your friends, you guys all drink deeply of whatever is culturally relevant at that moment. This is why people say we're all a product of our time, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So that's a stamp to we're all a product of our culture, which is obviously true. So I was like, well, okay, I can't control your genetics. I can't control who your parents are. I can't even control who your friends are, but I can influence what your friends think is cool. So awesome. I'm going to hit kids at 11 to 15 with empowering ideas through entertainment. That became the thesis statement.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And that's why literally the company is called Impact Theory, because my theory is that you impact people at scale through entertainment, specifically at the ages of 11 to 15. But because that's the area that I didn't have any credibility, it's the area that we're coming to the latest. But we did start developing here about four years ago, first with our comic books.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And then two and a half years ago, we moved into video games, just when I could see that it's eaten the world from a revenue perspective, where I think technology's going. And that's why.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
We need all the feedback we can get.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Of course, of course. We are all half how we're, our genetics. So just mom and dad, thanks. You know, the good and the bad. I have high levels of anxiety and so does my mom. So mom, I'm looking at you. But then of course I'm looking at her mom and so on and so forth. So that's one. My genetics set a stage. And then, yeah, it's a lot of little things, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
It's the way that I was raised in terms of, for instance, my parents did not have a lot of money. And so I was constantly, I wanted things that I couldn't have. And I was told, you can't have that because we can't afford it. I'm actually glad that they baked that in. So I really grew up with a lot of resentment about not being able to have the things that I wanted because I couldn't afford them.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And then in my household, you had to have a job in the summer. Every summer, I had a job from the time I was 12. So I got a job in a door factory when I was 12 because my parents refused to buy me a Nintendo, one, because it was expensive, and two, because they believed that video games would rot your brain.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I highly disagree, obviously, but all of that really instilled in me this resentment of not being able to control my own life And then that, oh, wait a second, if I work for something, I can get money and then I can control my life. I was like, okay, yeah, I can get behind that. It's just cause and effect.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And so, yeah, from the time I was 12, I had horrible jobs and my dad always said, this builds character. And so I just had it beat into me that you do hard things, you learn the lessons. Sometimes it's, I don't want to do this, but you don't quit, you push through.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And so even though I resented it tremendously, it built a lot of resilience, a tremendous ability to suffer because I was just so often doing things I hated that were physically demanding that It really showed me, one, none of this broke me. None of this killed me. I really did get better for it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
You would constantly realize, oh, because of that job that I had that one summer, I can do things that somebody else can't do. And so it's just all these little seeds. Now, when I was a kid, I was just frustrated and annoyed. I don't want anybody to think that I sounded like some sage. As a kid, I was just mad. And so, dear parents, remember, your kids aren't going to appreciate it now.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
They're only going to appreciate it later. But suddenly all the dimes started dropping in my early to mid 20s. And so by the time I was in my late 20s, I had put together a set of ideas that really allowed me to set my sights on something and achieve it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Honestly, it was studying neuroscience. So I was reading about the brain. And at the time, I had a very deep fear that I simply wasn't smart enough to achieve the things that I wanted to achieve. I started reading about neuroscience. And in the late 90s, there was this idea being put forward that we would now call brain plasticity. But it was put forward as we're not sure this is true.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
This is where the idea of the only belief that matters came from was, all right, dear me, if I have 30 seconds with my younger self, there are two things you have to understand. You can get good at anything that you apply yourself to or better. You'll get better. Don't worry about becoming the greatest. You can get a hundred times better at anything.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So just point yourself at the thing that you want to get better at. But number two, there's a reason that you don't believe me right now. And that's because you were dumb enough to build your self-esteem around being right, being smart, being better, faster, stronger. And so you're just in constant defense mode. You don't wanna feel dumb. You don't want other people to see you fail.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And because of that, you're never gonna get better. So you need to build your self-esteem around being the learner. Now, if you build yourself steam, like legitimately reward yourself emotionally for staring nakedly at your inadequacies. And then remember, the reason I'm doing this is because if I decide that I want to point myself at getting better, I now can.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And that one-two punch will take you everywhere you want to go in life, kid. But you got to do them. You have to build your self-esteem around learning. And then you have to understand if you want something, just go get better at it. But you have to put a ton, an inhuman amount of discipline and energy into that thing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I'll tell you why I founded Quest. I didn't want to change behavior. I wanted to leverage it. You don't want to feel dumb. You don't want other people to see you fail. And because of that, you're never going to get better. Being a good person is not enough to build a good business. You have to understand you cannot guarantee the success. You can only guarantee the struggle.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
steer by what works, dear person, especially if this is me talking to my younger self again, explain to me how anything makes more sense than saying, this is my goal, and then all you wanna know is, is the thing you're trying to do to get there, is it working or not? Is there any other better question? No. Okay, cool.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Then we're gonna judge every idea's merit by whether it moves you towards that goal. We are not gonna judge an idea's merit by whether you thought of it. That doesn't make any sense. So always be open and receptive. Somebody else might see something that you are missing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And by the way, when you let go of your own idea to grab onto somebody else's idea because it is obviously more effective, you need to celebrate yourself for that. You need to be like, yeah, I'm the learner. I learned from anybody and so cool. I just got this amazing idea. Hey everybody, I just spent the last 48 years being wrong and thank God this person just gave me the right answer.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And now if you campaign that hard, other people will start judging you based on your willingness to do that. So you end up pulling a Jedi mind trick on them. So if you're really worried about what other people think, guess what? You get to set the frame on them for how they judge you because you just say, ah, I don't care if I'm right about this. I don't care whose idea this is.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And by the way, if when that person gives you an idea, you're like, yo, Susie just gave me this idea. Susie's amazing. Everybody, Susie's amazing. Now, here is the weirdest thing about humanity. They're actually not gonna gravitate towards Susie. They're gonna gravitate towards me because people go where they find certainty and enthusiasm.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And if you can bring certainty and enthusiasm and make people feel good, and they're like, I wanna be celebrated like Susie. So now they're trying to point out, hey, did you think about this? And what about that? And did you try this? So in building my video game community, People are giving me ideas all the time. And I'm like, oh man, that is brilliant.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
The number of ideas that someone will just come and stream and be like, hey, Tom, have you thought about doing this? And I'm like, yeah, we didn't think about that. That is so smart. And so now I am building a community where they're coming in to help me. It's unbelievable. Everybody wants to give their good ideas.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Maybe yes, maybe no. But it's possible that even people that aren't kids can keep learning, because everybody knew kids could learn, but it was pretty hotly contested as to whether adults could keep learning. So I said, okay, I'm going to act as if that's true, partly because it just felt better.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And if you're receptive and open and you celebrate them and you point out it was their idea and they did this, I try to give away more ideas than I take credit for. which by the way, works shockingly well. The number of times I have literally said an idea and everyone's like, ooh, that's a dope idea. And I'll be like, yeah, I'm so glad they came up with it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Everybody just watched me come up with it. But people will still take the credit. It's amazing. Give your credit away. Do not worry about it because what people gravitate towards is not the person that comes up with the great ideas. They gravitate towards the person that makes them feel good about themselves. And if you make people feel good about themselves and you have certainty, ooh, buddy,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Oh man, don't worry about helping me. So the question is, ask not what the world needs, ask instead what makes you come alive because what the world needs is more people who've come alive. If we line up on anything, if you find, if you're a gamer, man, come and join me on the Tom Bilyeu Twitch live stream. If you are interested really trying to push yourself forward.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
We have a university for stuff just like this. It's Impact Theory University. We have a mindset course called Billion Dollar Habits. Check that out. Otherwise, I'm sure I will see you somewhere on the internet.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. And I'm so impressed with your 314. Well done. That is unbelievable.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
As a favor to me, don't ever say it like that again.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
The vast majority, 90% of all businesses fail. Not only did you not fail, You made 314. That's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. And if you wear it with pride, then you give other people permission to wear their successes with pride. And plus, we both know the difference between second and 314 is industry, is timing, it's things like that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So it's incredible what you've done and you should be obscenely proud of yourself.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Truly my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
When I thought about never being able to achieve the dreams that I had in my mind, it felt very constrictive. And when I thought about, oh man, maybe I could get better, it made me feel lighter, it made me feel expansive. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna act as if that's true. And then in acting as if it were true, it started making my life better. And of course, the science is now settled.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
You can keep learning and growing until the day you die. The rate and the ease with which you can learn does diminish pretty dramatically, but you can grow and get better. And so I was like, I'm not gonna worry If only I'd known this at 11, I'd be better. Yes, that's true. But hey, here I am. I'm in my mid-20s. At least I know it now. And let me push forward and see what I can do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And it's pretty extraordinary. You know, we're 50% hardwired. So there are parts of you you're not going to be able to change. But the 50% that's malleable is pretty extraordinary. And so I just decided I'm going to focus on what I can change. I'm going to aim myself at a very specific set of skills, and then I'm just going to be relentless.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And the big punchline for me is that the reason most people don't make the progress in their life is because they either don't believe that only belief that matters. So they just don't practice. They don't push themselves. Or what I'll sum up as they're afraid to be embarrassed.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
If you want something, just go get better at it. You have to put a ton, an inhuman amount of discipline and energy into that thing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And if you're afraid of embarrassing yourself, because you will, you're going to look stupid a lot when you try something you're not good at and you put yourself out there and you really put yourself in a situation where there's high stakes, which is how you're going to get better. You're going to look stupid and people are going to laugh at you and it actually is going to set you back.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And most people, they just can't deal with that. And they never put two and two together that, yes, I take one step back, but every time I step back, I learn something new. So every step back, every defeat, every embarrassment, if you stop and reflect on it, you're actually growing more powerful. So you're only stepping back in the eyes of other people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And in a world of 9 billion people, it literally doesn't matter. If a billion of them think I'm a moron and 8 billion don't even know who I am, I have an opportunity to go impress The other 8 billion people, people are just so convinced that, oh man, I only get one shot to make a first impression and I blew it. And that just isn't true. You blew that chance, but you learned something.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Now go blow another billion of those chances and then talk to me at that point about how strong you are. So just most people, they just cannot sit in the difficult emotion of looking stupid.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So make sure you're struggling at something that you care about. It is weird to me that people ask the question, oh, is it too late to enter the podcasting field, YouTube field, fill in the blank. And the answer that I gave when asked that question was...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
What happened at film school was I really got my first taste of discipline that if I set my mind to achieving something and I'm willing to pay a higher price than anybody else, then I actually can make it come true. So I would not have had any of these words back then. I was really just acting out of desperation and fear, which is perfectly fine. Those are very powerful motivators.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
But I found out that you could apply as an incoming freshman to film school. I didn't know that. I thought if you got into USC, you just got to pick whatever college you were in. And that is not the case. So I found out I could have applied as an incoming freshman, but I was too dumb to know that. And your only other chance is as an incoming junior. So I was like, okay.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
Thankfully, I thought, who says yes and no? Who are those people? And I found out one of my teachers was actually on the admissions committee. And I found out yet again that he would let students take him out to lunch. So I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna take this guy out to lunch, which practically nobody did, which I just thought was insane. I took him out to lunch. I had him to myself.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And I was just like, okay, what do I need to do to get into film school? I have really bad SAT scores. to give people an idea. And I know they score them differently now, so I don't know if this will land, but to get into film school, they wanted a 1300. I had a 990 and I took it twice. So I was like, oh man, this is rough. I don't know that I'm ever gonna be able to get in just because of that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So I said, hey, look, his name was Drew Casper. I actually remember to this day. Drew, what do I have to do to get in? And he said, look, SAT scores are a proxy for how well you'll do in college. I don't need to know your SAT scores because you can't apply again until you're an incoming junior. So for the next two years, just get good grades. And I was like, okay, word.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And I just put my head down and I didn't drink. I didn't date. I didn't go to parties. Everything was about, is this going to get me into film school? Yes or no. And so I got to know as many people that were in film school as I could. I watched as many movies as I could. And I tried to just get the best grades ever. There's whole other stories there and it worked.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And so my grades were so high that, whether my writing samples were good or not, I won't speak to, but I ended up getting in and it was so systematic of like, oh, I went and found the guy that could tell me what to do. And then I just literally did it. And then in working that hard, you start seeing, oh, wait a second, I'm actually getting better at all of these things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And so it starts giving me this reinforcing loop. My life is not just an only up trajectory at when I graduate, my life is a mess. I'm in a terrible emotional situation. I sort of forget all the lessons that I learned in college. And it starts to feel like, yeah, that worked fine back in school, but now I'm in the big, bad world and none of it seems to work anymore.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And so, but it planted seeds that I would later be like, wait a second, this is an echo of exactly what I did in college. I think this is going to work again, but now I need the new context.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I wouldn't say that I fell off the horse. So it really is, you have to have a framework that you're looking at your life through. In high school, I thought, oh, I don't mind cheating and not learning all this stuff because this is really a time for me to pursue friendships and doing the things that I think make for a meaningful life.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And so if I loved it, like speech and debate and things like that, then I would do it a lot. And if it wasn't something I cared about, I just cheated and didn't pay attention. But when I got to college, I thought, hold on a second. I'm about to take on a lot of debt. And this is the thing. My parents said, whatever you want to pursue, pursue it. So I was like, okay, film is my greatest passion.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I want to pursue that. I'm paying a lot of money. to learn a thing that I supposedly wanna do the rest of my life, I can't track anymore the logic of cheating. It doesn't make sense. And so I said to myself, before I started my freshman year, A or F, sink or swim, I'm gonna get good grades based on what I've earned. And then you put that with the guy saying, you have to get good grades.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
So now I have this interesting intersection of, I promised myself I wouldn't cheat. for reasons, right, not just moral. This is the only thing that makes sense is to actually learn this. And then somebody telling me that you need the reflection of what you've learned. So I'm like, okay, cool. And we're just gonna double down, we're gonna do it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And thankfully, it never made sense to me to cheat my way to get into film school, only to then one day you're gonna be on the job. And it's like, if I don't know how to do this stuff, there's an end game here where I actually have to know how to do it. So I get out of film school and I can't break into the industry. And so now I realize, wait, wait, wait, this is not the game I was prepared for.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And so now I'm just lost and confused. So all of the great discipline that I had, I'm like, oh, I'll point my discipline at whatever, but what do I point it at? I just felt so hopeless. And that hopeless led me to despair and that starts sliding you to depression. Because now it's like, well, I have the willingness, but I don't know what to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And when I try to sum up business for people, because everybody thinks they need the tactics. The reality is you don't need to learn more about marketing, creating videos or funnels. All of those things are important, but you can get somebody else to do those. What you can't get somebody else to do is know what to do next. Life is simply a series of questions. What do I do next?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
What's the smartest thing that I could do next that will lead me towards the outcome that I want? People get lost in all the fancy stuff. And the reality is you're probably just not answering that question well. And there's a process by which you can answer that question. And so if I skip over that question and just go to, for instance, I wanna be a social media influencer, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
That just seems like the thing I wanna do. And so cool, I'm gonna go start a YouTube channel. And so I'm gonna go look at people that are telling me how to be a YouTuber. But what was your process like to asking and answering the question that led you to the conclusion that you want to be a YouTuber? That matters a lot. And what I've seen is nobody knows how to do that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
They get an emotion, an idea pops into their head. They don't know why. They don't translate that emotion into logic. And so they pursue an emotion. Emotions make dots feel like they connect that don't actually connect. They learn tactics to building a picture that never made sense in the first place. And now I've got to rewind you because those tactics, by the way, will burn out anyway.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And then you're going to be left asking the question, the age-old question, What's next? Now what? What should I do now? I did all the things the influencers told me and it helped, but I'm stalled out again. Now what? And my life is about the framework of now what? How do you figure out what to do next?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I was teaching filmmaking and I ended up being invited to join a startup as a copywriter. And the idea was that What life was teaching me was that I couldn't control my destiny in filmmaking. And so I'd met these two very successful entrepreneurs, the guys that made me the offer to come on board. And they said, you're coming to the world with your hand out.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
And if you want to control the art, you have to control the resources. So you should get into business and get rich, and then you can build your own studio. And I was like, that sounds amazing. I thought it would take 18 months. It took 15 years, but it ended up working. But the part in the story that you're talking about is for roughly eight years, I had just pursued getting rich.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand | E62
I showed up every day. I'm just here to get rich, here to get rich. And at the six and a half year mark, my wife pulled me aside and said, you are now damaging our marriage. You need to change something because you're so unhappy. that you just bring that energy at home. And I had told her, don't ask me about work. I do not want to talk about it. So I'd come home in a terrible mood.
Something You Should Know
Where To Find Answers to Your Toughest Problems & How Weather Works
If you don't understand what's happening in the world, you are already losing. I'm Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of the billion dollar brand Quest Nutrition and host of Impact Theory. And every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I break down the biggest stories in politics, business, future tech, AI before they hit the mainstream. Information is power, but only if you get it fast enough to actually act on.
Something You Should Know
Where To Find Answers to Your Toughest Problems & How Weather Works
That's why I record these episodes in the morning and drop them in the afternoon. So you're always ahead of the curve, getting unfiltered, high signal insights on the topics that actually affect your future. And if you want to be a part of the conversation, you can join me live on my YouTube and Twitch channels. to help shape the topics, ask questions, and prep the episode with me in real time.
Something You Should Know
Where To Find Answers to Your Toughest Problems & How Weather Works
The people who see it first win. The rest, they get left behind. If you want to stay ahead, think for yourself, and take control of your future, search for Impact Theory wherever you're listening right now. Until then, my friends, be legendary.
Something You Should Know
Cool Things You Can Do With AI & Surprising Insight in Chance, Probability & Risk
If you don't understand what's happening in the world, you are already losing. I'm Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of the billion dollar brand Quest Nutrition and host of Impact Theory. And every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I break down the biggest stories in politics, business, future tech, AI before they hit the mainstream. Information is power, but only if you get it fast enough to actually act on.
Something You Should Know
Cool Things You Can Do With AI & Surprising Insight in Chance, Probability & Risk
That's why I record these episodes in the morning and drop them in the afternoon. So you're always ahead of the curve, getting unfiltered, high signal insights on the topics that actually affect your future. And if you want to be a part of the conversation, you can join me live on my YouTube and Twitch channels. to help shape the topics, ask questions, and prep the episode with me in real time.
Something You Should Know
Cool Things You Can Do With AI & Surprising Insight in Chance, Probability & Risk
The people who see it first win. The rest, they get left behind. If you want to stay ahead, think for yourself, and take control of your future, search for Impact Theory wherever you're listening right now. Until then, my friends, be legendary.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show. The thing I always lead with is humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. And if you focus on the amount that's malleable, the amount that you can change your life is so extraordinary.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So I am not a born entrepreneur. And the whole like our entrepreneurs born or made as a debate is hysterical. You created a billion dollar company. Exactly. So it's like, I don't know what else has to be true in my life for people to realize. I was so bad at being an entrepreneur that so as a kid, I had a newspaper route.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And I didn't collect half the money because I was too afraid to knock on people's doors. So you get stories of people who like rip the flowers out of somebody's front yard and sell them back. Dude, I was not that kid. And yet I realized, oh, there are principles of entrepreneurship. I can learn them. And a lot of this stuff is teachable. Look, maybe it was harder for me to learn than most people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Maybe this is some people really would have an easier time. I don't doubt that. And I'll say that verbal ability comes easier to me. So every ounce of energy I put into getting better verbally has paid dividends. So the way I've always thought of it is I get, let's say a 1.3 X return on my verbal. And so for me, I've been practicing speech and debate and all of that since I was 12.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So I am the result of not 10,000 hours, not even 20,000 hours. At this point, it's gotta be 30, 40,000 hours. I used to stand in front of the mirror with a hairbrush and I wanted to be a standup comic. Like I've, I've put in the time and the energy I did speech and debate all through middle school and high school.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So it's like, what I want people to see in that is that you can put deliberate practice into any area. Now, if you can find areas where you get a disproportionate return, amazing, but if not, don't worry about it. If it's something that your goals demand, then you're going to have to learn that thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
One, I think it is to keep you alive. The brain is going to make sure that you don't get yourself ostracized from the group. The brain isn't designed to maximize your status in the group. It is designed to keep you alive. So doing things like pushing yourself, holding yourself to a high standard, taking risks, learning from the failures, for a long time that was a high risk endeavor.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Because if you didn't understand how you fit into the group, you alienated yourself, let's say you were on a ship and they're like, yeah, forget this guy, we're leaving him on this desert island, it could quite literally mean death. Or if you were in the tribe and they kicked you out, you were getting eaten by a lion. So there's a reason. Yeah, for sure.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
There's a reason from an evolutionary standpoint to have that be high stakes. But in a modern context, it becomes a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. So Carol Dweck has a brilliant book on the subject called Mindset. And she said, with all the good intentions in the world, when you do something well, people are going to reinforce the behavior as if it were something based on an innate trait.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So if you get good grades, your parents are like, you're so smart. Look how clever you are. And the worst part is that feels amazing, but it builds in this fragility of what happens when I encounter something that I don't understand. So then you try to hide from it. You try to always do things that are easier for you. So she said, better to praise the process.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So instead of saying, hey, you're so smart, you say, wow, you must have worked really hard to get grades this good.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
so it's a fundamental belief pattern around whether you're born with intelligence and talents and they are fixed or whether no no we all have some talent and intelligence but they're actually malleable and you can improve them all the problem is most of the way we grow up we're getting the wrong messages from our teachers from our parents from our environment correct
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And then your brain kicks in and you've got what? You hear different numbers, but I don't think anybody thinks that there's less than a one in five ratio. So for every one negative thing I say to you, I'm gonna have to say five positive things to balance it out. I heard a study that said one in 17. So it's like, we all get it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Dude, do you know the talk that—oh, God, I'm blanking on his name—
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Like one painful, you're not good enough comment is really hard to overcome with a lot of you're good enough. So the mind goes to these survival mechanisms to keep you alive, which I'll say oftentimes means keeping you small. If you don't take it seriously, that people think that you're doing something wrong, and if you don't back off, there were times where that would have been deadly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Now, you just get in these negative loops. You get in a negative loop, and people have taught you that, hey, it's just what you're born with, and you get this death spiral of, this is who I am, and I'm never gonna be any better, And so you don't have what I call the only belief that matters. The only belief that matters is that you can improve. That's it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
it's called this is water by something wallace oh god i'm gonna punch myself in the mouth um don't do that anything to a doctor but i don't want to have to use my techniques um david foster wallace there we go that was really gonna bother me uh he gave a speech called this is water and to your point about like the fish is the last one to realize that they're swimming around in water which is
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So it's like if somebody goes- It's pretty simple. It is deadly simple. And it's why it's the only belief that matters. Because if you don't think you can improve, why would you put in the effort to get better? Because if you believe that you will get nothing out of that, there really is no point to putting in the time and the energy to improve.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Whereas if you believe, whoa, the time and energy that I put into getting better, I'll actually be rewarded with skills. And as a doctor, you're gonna understand this immediately, but this is one thing that I think people really struggle to understand. They think that skills are about checking a box or pleasing your parents.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Skills are about, in the case of a doctor, being able to save somebody's life, going from C diff and thinking, whoa, I'm actually going to die from this to no, no, no. I understand this well enough. I have a skill set that allows me to figure this out. And now I can reverse all of that. So skills are insanely powerful.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
But people think about reading a book as being able to say, oh, I read the book. It's not about that. It's about being able to say I can now employ this skill in my life in a way that shapes the world around me.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
an amazing way to explain your mindset. So your mindset is the water. It is the thing in which you exist. It is the matrix. And to finally get your head around the fact that you've constructed it, that it's a belief system, it's your identity, it's your values, it's the very reason that who you hang out with is going to determine your health level. I heard you give a stat of something like,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
if your friends are obese, then you're more likely to be obese than if your family is obese.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
I will hypothesize that the reason is our friends help establish our values and our belief system And so I'm writing a book now, which is like the tentative title. This will never be the real type It's called build yourself. Like how do you construct a mindset that actually lets you go forward? so I'm a freak for looking at the human animal as a biological entity and so understanding how thoughts
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
wire your brain your brain has certain things that it's going to do like good luck ever not ever thinking it's just one of the things your brain is is heartwired genetically incutating right exactly like your brain is going to cough up thoughts that that just is its nature humans are an active species humans also balance out that active nature of wanting to explore and control their environment with a deep laziness designed to conserve calories
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So it's like you have this weird push-pull. So if you really accept that the human is this biological creature, that thoughts become literal physical wiring in your brain, and that your brain wants to think the thoughts that are easiest, whatever you repeat then becomes the easiest. It goes into what's called the default network in the brain, and that's just where you always default.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So you talk about these people being stuck in these loops. They get stuck in these loops.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And that becomes their default, right? They can slide so easily into that. And psychedelics do the same thing, right. Have you done psychedelics? I have. Oh, Mark Hyman, we've got to talk about that. So I am intrigued and completely chickened. I grew up in the 70s, you know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
I'm really interested in psychedelics, really interested. I've micro-dosed psilocybin. I didn't find it very interesting. So it felt like a low grade buzz, but without the fatigue. So if I were going to drink, it actually probably would be slightly more pleasurable maybe to be to have that a micro dose of psilocybin because there are no sort of after effects that I find unpleasant.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
But I didn't find I was more creative. I certainly didn't find that I could focus. I found myself sort of drifting in and out of attentive focus. So I was like, meh. For the people who say that it really helps them be creative or more productive, not me. But I've never done a full-on.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Yeah, I haven't done that yet. I'm keenly interested. The one that I would do literally this afternoon if I had access to it legally would be MDMA. To sit down with my wife and do MDMA together I think would really be extraordinary.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
It's crazy how fast people talk about it having that kind of impact. So this is one of those things that I can't come out and vouch for because I haven't done it, but I will say that if I had some sort of trauma that I was trying to get over, I would do that as a protocol very fast. I would fix my diet first, admittedly, to get my microbiome in line, to deal with depression, anxiety, whatever.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
But if I had something that was intractable, whether PTSD, depression, anxiety, I would really give it a shot. The studies are just too crazy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Why not? So here is the my deepest trauma in life is that you can't want it for people. No. So I was wired. And I will say that this is we're not blank slates. So all of us have sort of preset things that we're more into or whatever that we're a bigger responder to. So just like some people respond to one food and some another food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Some respond to certain emotional states or ways of connecting with people. And for me, I love seeing other people win. And so like I, I pretended not to see Easter eggs in an Easter egg hunt because I knew my sister was four years older than me. So I was like five or six and my sister was 10 and I knew it meant more to her to win than it did to me.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So I would pretend not to see them so she could find them. Like that's my natural state. I've been like that since I was a little kid. And yeah,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Truly does. And that's a huge driver for me. And meeting people that I've impacted their life is always amazing. But my big trauma is that I can't want it for people. So people that I love can't make the change. And it's crazy because they've watched me. Like there are people who've watched me my whole life. They know how lazy I was. They know that they didn't expect me to do anything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And yet seeing what I've been able to do and change in my mind, how much I've been able to learn, how I've been able to just take a new frame of reference, which put me on a new path of behavior, which is actually how you get people to change. The things you do must be different.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Definitely. It is a loop that you can change either first. So one, I'll finish the loop on the fact that, it is very difficult to get people to change. And then I'll tell you the people that do change, what they all have in common. So the reason that it's hard to get people to change is if you don't want it, you're not gonna have the energy to see it through.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And you can give people all the tools and tactics in the world. If they don't want it, then they won't have the energy to make the changes. Okay, so now set that aside. The thing that people have in common that all end up making the change, so first of all, they want to make change. Second of all, they understand that at the end of the day, the name of the game is to change your behaviors.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And whether they start with the mindset shift or they start with the behavior shift almost doesn't matter. When you understand humans as a biological entity and you know that things like the following are true, if you fake a smile, like they would have people, they did a study, they had people put a pencil between their teeth and bite down on it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So it sort of forced your face into a smile, just like you're doing now. And then rate their levels of happiness. They rated them higher than when they had them make a frown.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
just because it activated those muscles. Now, I have felt this very keenly. So I will use like crest whitening strips on my teeth. And so I keep my mouth closed, which forces me into this sort of non smiling thing. And I find myself while I'm whitening my teeth with this sense of like, just kind of mopey a bit. And I'm like, whoa, this is so crazy. And so I wrote a letter to myself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So when my wife and I were first married, first couple of years of our marriage, we would argue and like dumb stuff. And I just thought, we end up often losing like an entire Saturday to some stupid argument. And at the end of the argument, when my neurochemistry has changed and I'm no longer upset, I think, wow, why did I waste all that time? Like, I know she loves me. This is really stupid.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And so I wrote myself a letter and I said, hey, me, it's me. You know you have no ulterior motives. And I gave it to my wife to read to me. I said, the next time I get annoyed about something and I'm not letting it go, read this to me. And did she do it? Yeah, she only had to do it once because it was so profound that I realized, whoa, you can shift your. So what was the letter?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So the reason that I addressed me is when you're in an argument with somebody, a lot of times you think they're trying to calm you down because they have an ulterior motive. They don't want to feel bad or whatever. When someone upsets you, unless you're unreasonable, they probably actually did something wrong.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Like they really did do something that hurt your feelings and you really do feel justified in being upset. I will assume you're not flying off the handle. I'll assume they really did misstep. And so they have misstepped and now you're annoyed about it. And you think that them trying to talk you out of it is because they, they just don't want to feel badly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And so I was like, that never ends up feeling true. What's that? They don't want to feel guilty. Right. But that never ends up feeling true once you've calmed down and you always then can have the compassion and see from their perspective. So I thought, let me just remove that because I know two hours from now or whatever, I'm not going to feel like it was a good use of time to be pissed.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
you know you don't have any ulterior motive other than you know that like there's energy behind neurochemistry and once you get in a flow it gets hard to get out of that but there are physiological hooks into breaking that so right now no matter how you feel i want you to laugh out loud and i want you to laugh out loud until you feel better and you will find you know you've read the studies that if you do that you won't be able to maintain the sense of frustration and
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
I did it. I laughed out loud. I was so annoyed. She read it to me, which was courageous. And I said to myself, you told her to read you this letter. So even though it's really annoying that she's reading this letter when you're annoyed. It's your own medicine. Do it. Yeah. And so I laughed out loud and I was like, oh, my God. Literally in like seven seconds. It's absurd how.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Right. Like if people really hear what you just said, uh, Because then you know that it can go either way. So if you can't get yourself there with reason and logic, jump in an ice bath, laugh out loud, watch a comedy, go for a run, lift weights. Like there is this feedback loop that you get into with your thoughts and your body and your body and your thoughts.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So the vagal nerve, of course, you're going to know this, but The vagal nerve is something like 80% telling the body, telling the brain what's going on versus the brain just instructing the body what to do. Like as a kid, you think, oh, the brain tells the body breathe, digest, blah, blah, blah. But in reality, it's like the brain is getting more input from the body. And I am so grateful.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
that there's this reciprocal feedback loop. So I know when I'm in a negative place that all I need to do is smile. Like literally I can even think smile without actually smiling and it makes me feel different. It is so weird. So that's super useful. Music can shift your state, channeling aggression, which is something I do to like do hard things. Like there are all these feedback loops.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So I try to get people to understand that. But the most important thing, the thing I always lead with is humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. So we are the ultimate apex predator for one simple reason. We adapt to change better than any other animal. And I'll say that at a physiological level, like the ability to turn white adipose tissue into brown fat where it's more thermogenic.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
There was a woman who swam the Bering Strait. So think about that. The Bering Strait is the space between Russia and Alaska. That shit is cold, man. So the fact that somebody can swim that, it's bananas. So she slept with the window open in Alaska for a year, which you can imagine how cold that would be. She took only cold showers.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So basically all of her fat cells became more thermogenic and she could insulate herself. So we're adaptable on that level. She had a wetsuit, yeah. So you have that level of adaptation, which is like sort of purely biological, but then you also have the ability to learn. So there's a reason, like a horse is born, it's walking that day. It is not that way for humans.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So the prefrontal cortex, which is like all your executive functions, doesn't finish developing until you're 25.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And it's not like it's more complicated biological material. It's the same. But it allows you to soak up your environment and learn and figure out, okay, in this environment, these are the values, the norms, the beliefs, the way that you act here. Because it could be different based on time, based on circumstance, whatever. So
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
It is. I think the big thing is you have to get certain core beliefs. So there's one... One, people come to me because they're in an emotional, painful point. They know they can do more, be more, but they don't know how to get there.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
humans are designed to be malleable now again we're not blank slates this is not like you can become anything you want like it is you have a certain amount that's hardwired and then you have a certain amount that's malleable and if you focus on the amount that's malleable the amount that you can change your life is so extraordinary so whether it's an example like how would that play out well the the example of how it's played out in my own life is i don't have any entrepreneurial instincts whatsoever
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
What's the most jaw dropping use of AI that you guys are doing in a portfolio company?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Inbound, I assume.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Wow.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Wow. Now, are you guys doing any of the training or are these companies that are building these? These are tools that we I'm not an AI company.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Yeah, that's where I wanna get my hands in the mix. I wanna do the reinforcement learning so that it will do the things we wanna do. But yeah, I don't wanna have to build the AI out itself. AI is the one that, man, this really gets me excited when I think about how much it's already sped us up. And we're, you know, what are we just under two years from when it launched?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
It's absolute insanity how far it's already come. If you could push a button and get it to work in one area of your company, that would just have a huge impact. Where would you want it?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's I think the right way to think about it with that kind of stuff. The nice thing now is AI doesn't have taste. And so what I have found is that because the output of the prompt matters so much in terms of what I give it. that that still feels like it matters a lot.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
To your point about you have infinite or limited resources against infinite possibilities, the same is true with AI. So you can have it go a thousand different directions, 10,000, a million, whatever. And That matters. So understanding the end target person that you're creating this piece for, but it taking all of the manual work off of my plate so that now I can iterate faster.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
So I just have to think about, okay, I need to understand my customer. I need to understand what it is that I'm trying to communicate, the angle that I want to do it, knowing which pieces say yes to, which to say no to, where to push it, and then to be able to edit it. It, it is, it's taken so much time off of so many of my different workflows. That's cool. It's really incredible.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
And for us, because game development is such a big part of what we do, if it can do 3d characters. Yeah. Oh my God. The, all of the cost is in the creation and the, um, rigging of the 3d characters. How far is that away now? I'm going to guess. So I just saw very compelling 2D to 3D stuff. It's static, so you can't rig it yet.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
So I'm going to guess 2D to 3D over the next year is going to be extraordinarily compelling. Give it another 18 months. So 18 months to 24 months. And I think that the financial structure of a gaming company changes overnight. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. So you were saying that you're bummed about it replacing certain aspects of marketing because you're really good at it. What is the thing?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Because we can all look at you and go, yeah, there's something here that you were unusually good at. What is that thing? I think it's rhetoric.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
So you're doing it intuitively or do you have a method?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
That's interesting. All right. What's some of the worst business advice you see people give out all the time?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
All right. So what is the difference between what life is like when you're running a million dollar company versus a hundred million dollar company?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
How do you recognize talent?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Yeah, talent is a whole beast. How do you go in when you've got a role that you don't necessarily know? How do you make sure that you can't be bamboozled?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
All right. As you scale up and you are just really entering a whole new echelon, how do you think about or do you think about political environment? Does the government matter to you at all? Do you think about tax or anything like that?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Well, so do you care about who's in government?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Yeah. Now the willingness to try things I think is incredibly important. You said earlier about courage. I want to go back to that. So what is, what is the most courageous thing you've done? I actually think it's quitting my job. I think that's the hardest thing. Back in the early days.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
What was the bridge?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
But yeah, we were able to make it through. Wow, what an awesome example of no bullshit. What would it take? What do you like off camera? Do you have a super hard edge? You have a really playful vibe, but you've said a couple things here that if we can't control it, we don't talk about it. Things like that, I can see. I think people are always surprised
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
when they come to work for me, if they've seen me on camera. Now, I have the world's most angry face, so that helps at least a little bit. But I'm very, look, this is me on camera, but I am very intense, for sure. Yeah, what's the off-camera, like, not for play, I don't fuck around, or...
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
are you flirting with me?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
I love that. As always, my friend, it is wonderful to have you. Where can people follow along for the hardcore?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
And if you're on YouTube, then you can check out the videos on YouTube. I love it. I highly encourage people to do so. And speaking of things I encourage you to do, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Now, I heard you talk recently about you can feel a shift in culture, people moving away from the soft stuff, getting a little bit harder. What do you think is going on in culture?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
that people are going to go way too hard into like other direction and all that stuff.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
You and I both. Now, you've said that you want to normalize guys, young men working 12 hours a day, six days a week. Yeah. Why?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Why men? Why not men and women?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Makes sense. So what should young men be doing? If they're working their ass off 12 hours a day, how do they make use of that 12 hours?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Yes.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
for the other to live. Oh yeah. That's heavy. It's interesting. I never, uh, love my parents, but I never felt in any way, shape or form beholden to what they wanted for me. Now I will say though, this is sort of a bizarre similarity. Uh, I was trying to write, I wanted to break into the film industry and I thought, okay, I need a screenplay. That's going to be my calling card.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
Cause this is all before YouTube. And my mom once calls me in the middle of the day and I'm sleeping and she's like, Why are you asleep in the middle of the day? And I'm like, I got a new job. Doing what? Driving. Driving what? Driving models. Driving models? That's escorts. And I was like, oh, God. And so my mom was like, you have to call them right now and turn this down. There's no way. Yeah.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
And so that is the one time where I let my mother's superior judgment, I think, in this case. But yeah, so that I could write, I took a job driving lingerie models to their appointments. Someone has to. Someone has to. And the funny thing is, in the interview, they're like, first of all, the guy, he's sitting there playing guitar while interviewing me.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
And he goes, I have to ask, why are you interviewing for this job? And I was like, I need something that'll let me write during the day. Yeah. He's like, okay, well, here's how it's going to work. The girl's going to have a pager. You're going to have a pager. If they paid you, you know, whatever, seven, they're like, you go in there with a gun, you kick the door down.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
And I was like, oh God, oh God. But I actually took the job. I can't believe I did. Very stupid. I'm very grateful to my mom for ensuring that that did not happen. But I was actually going to go on a job where they're like, you kick that fucking door down. You get in. If she sends you a seven or whatever the number was. And I was like, okay, cool.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 857
If that's what it takes to write, man, then we'll go for it. But thankfully not.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
So what I tell them to do is look, and this is what I do myself. Uh, I'm going to do this thing, whether it's, um, build a piece of content and put it out, whatever. Uh, and I think this is going to get a million views, 1.5, whatever. So when it does 75,000 views, I'm like, Whoa, there is something I did not understand.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And so when it comes to content, I'll even predict at the idea level and I, okay, this is what I think it's going to get. Then we'll execute. And I'll say, okay, actually now seeing the execution, I don't think it's quite as good. And so now I think it's going to be this. And then you put it out.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And that way, if you can really come to understand why something works or doesn't work, now you've got a better shot. But because I know I'm prone to lie to myself that, yeah, that's roughly what I was expecting because people want to look cool. Yeah. But you're saying in that scenario, you guys just sort of art by the pound. Yeah. A lot more things out. Are you looking to build intuition or.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
I'm so shocked. Alex Hormozy with the free stuff.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
It's interesting. This to me is I'm always trying to get entrepreneurs to one thing from first principles, which most people don't even know what that means. So you start by defining it. But this feels like that getting to understand the essence of what it is so that you understand it the way that somebody understands a combustion engine.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
It makes a lot of sense now. So again, I'm always trying to figure out where are people gonna fall down because you can give this stuff to people and they're still going to struggle. So you said something earlier that is profoundly insightful that I wanna know if you have a method for that or if you just have a brain for it.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
But you said we need to get local call wrapping as people are more likely to pick up a local number. So you're sitting in a room, you're not getting the results that you want and you start thinking to yourself, what is stopping this from happening? does it just bubble up into your conscious mind or do you have a method?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
So you can get in and be like, well, I know what has to happen for this car to go. And if I know what has to happen, you can break it, you can pull it apart and I'll be able to put it back together because I actually understand how this works. So how does wealth creation work?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
So that is one of my favorite things to do is to go to a conference, stand up on stage with a microphone and say, okay, ask me your hardest question. I have nowhere to go. There's nowhere for me to hide. What is that biggest problem that you have in your business? I've had people ask me stuff like, I am a farmer in South America and I'm going up against the cartel. What do I do?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
I mean, like really crazy stuff. But if you can do what you just did in a formal fashion, which I'll round to thinking from first principles, like if you just start, so I'll tell entrepreneurs, you need to start at literal physics. Like, what do we know about physics? Start from there. So this was the thing at Quest where we go to make the bar. Everyone says the bar can't be made.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And we're like, hold on, this does not violate the laws of physics. You then realize the thing that's actually stopping us is that for the last 70 years, corn has been subsidized by the government. So everybody uses high fructose corn syrup. So all the equipment that's being engineered is being engineered thinking you're going to use high fructose corn syrup, which has a certain viscosity.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And so now you go, oh, wait a second. So all we have to do is engineer our own equipment. Got it. Now, maybe we're not willing to do it, but at least now I know what that sequence going back to a combustion engine. If you understand how the engine works, you can walk through and be like, it's broken right there. Yeah. And now you can go, okay, how would I fix that?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
What is the level of physics that's going to carry across? Now, what you did, which is the shortcut that most people take is, look, I'm trying to sell a thing to a guy. And so now I'm just leaping to the physics of the human mind. So what do I know to be true about people? And the way that you just walked through that, it's so brilliant. How do you get people to do that?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Like, do you have magic words? Do you have a training thing that you do for people that come on?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Dude, violent agreement. So Lisa and I call it no bullshit. What would it take? Okay. So of everything you're trying to do in your business, no bullshit. What would it take? Again, you might not be willing to do it, but you shift out of problem mindset into solution oriented mindset. This is one of the things that,
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
I find the hardest to instill in people, especially if just by nature, they're a problem finder where they can tell you all the reasons why something isn't going to work. But Peter Thiel has a really cool way to frame this, which is to ask, how do I make my 10 year plan happen in six months? Hmm. Because he said, everybody gets locked into this incrementalism.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Like, how do I make this 10% better, 30% better? And he's like, you have to throw everything that you know away when you have to make something 10X or 100 times better. Now, all of a sudden, you're going to be reaching for... what I call a frame of reference that is so radically different than the way that you look at the world now.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And I'm always trying to get entrepreneurs to understand you are trapped inside of a frame of reference right now. And you don't even realize it. It's shit that your parents said to you when you were a kid, it's the girl that you asked out and it didn't go well. It's the first sales calls that you did and they failed. It's that business that went under.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
It's a thing of VC said to you one time in a meeting that just kicked you in the nuts. And once you understand, okay, wait a second. I have to get out. This is the box that people are telling me to think outside of. And I have to find a way out of this. And that Peter Thiel angle of I have to make something that I thought would take me 10 years. I have to make it happen in six months.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And I refuse to let myself believe that it's impossible. So now it's like, like you said, what would have to be true?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Yeah. Iteration, iteration. It's funny. People are so terrified of failure that they don't even stop to think that, oh, if I could just not worry about embarrassing myself, then I could get in the game, throw the punches, look foolish, but I will get better and better. I've often joked. It's definitely not a joke.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
but i've often said that part of what is my superpower is that i can be embarrassed longer than the next person and also let me know what you think about this i think you have whatever 8.4 billion chances to make a first impression probably more than that because most people are going to forget that they ever encountered you in the first place and so getting out ultimately i think what people care about is can you they have a screaming problem that you may go away
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And they'll forgive everything that they've encountered up to that point if you can. And anybody, somebody that they respect told them, no, for real, this works.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Very fair. Speaking of somebody that clearly winds people up, you mentioned Elon earlier. Yeah. What is it that makes him special?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Alex Hormozy, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Truly a pleasure. Let me ask, why do smart people stay poor?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
There are two options before people in life. So option one is lay your balls out on the table like Elon did and you give people a chance to smash them with a big fucking hammer. Or you can hide and you can go a long way hiding. Why do you admire people that slap them up on the table?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
how do you model yourself after somebody from afar? So we live in the age of the internet where people want to get to know somebody. I'm old enough to look at the internet and be like, you do not understand what a glorious time this is to be alive. I mean, it's unimaginably cool. So people will look at you and say, well, you can get access to anybody.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
But somebody like Elon, who you say is worthy of modeling, how would you run something that all of them now can do?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
What are the behaviors that Elon does that you think are worthy for somebody of your level of already absurd success? Sorry, I appreciate it.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
There's one that really had a big impact on me, which is the idea. So I had Mark Andreessen on the show. Shout out to my boy, Mark Andreessen. Yeah. Love that guy. Love that guy. I'm such a fan. Mark, if you hear this. He is amazing. And I asked him, what is it that you think makes Elon so efficient? Yeah. And he said, making a long story short, he goes down to the level of engineering. Yeah.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
and he understands the engineering and so he figures out what the bottleneck is and talks directly to the engineer that can make that problem go away and just makes that problem go away and eliminates the bureaucracy and all the bs of it all and i i was like that is utterly brilliant and even though except on the gaming side of impact theory we're not an engineering company there still is that same concept totally
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Like if you've got a problem, let's say with a piece of content, Hey, our, uh, retention at 60 seconds is not where we want it to be. Okay. Well, who are the engineers that can solve that problem? Whether it's the editor or me, myself, uh, you go and you solve the problem at that level.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
I think so many people get sucked into the vortex of, well, this is their boss and I need to go talk to them and, oh God. I want to get around the chain of command. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We try to encourage people to kick through any chain of command. Go over, go under, go around, build coalitions.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
I tell people literally, if you don't like an answer I give you, by all means, build a coalition and come back and try to convince me. I know that I am blind to some answers. What was that? I said, but you'll be wrong. Yeah, exactly. Saving some time, guys. Yeah, no, I'm so paranoid that there's something I don't see.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And my primary analogy of what life is, truth exists inside of a black bag and we're all wearing mittens. We get to reach inside the black bag and be like, oh, I think it's like this. And then if I can get other smart friends to reach in and grope around and tell me what they think. So yeah, I'm on a campaign to get people to distrust themselves.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
People that drive me the most fucking crazy are people that are utterly convinced they're right. And yeah, that really drives me nuts because one, if you're right and you're already right, It's a pretty short detour to be like, hey, anybody see a problem that I don't see?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And the number of times that someone would give you like an oblique angle to look at something like, oh, my God, that is incredibly useful.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
That's interesting. It makes a lot of sense to me. The two years ago I had to put a policy, no new things because I am a, I'm King red dress. Uh, so that has been really advantageous. And if I'm completely honest. We still do too many things. And so, yeah, narrowing your focus, knowing that you have a finite amount of time and energy, especially now where so many companies have a face.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
It's like every department or every company, depending on how you think about it, wants to use me, my face. And so it just becomes a real time drain if I'm not careful. And so, yeah, really narrowing scope, I think, is super important.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
I think about this every day.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Okay. So the around and around we go, you and I both know that even though you just laid out a lot of things that are very, very true, do you think about the gap as to why the vast majority of humanity will not be able to translate that into actual money?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Yeah. The ability to see the problem from a different angle, man, is so clutch. That is definitely you're so good at systems. You're so good at taking a view askew. This is why I really encourage people. Anybody, if you can hear the sound of my voice right now, I'm telling you and I'll I'll.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
take the conversation somewhere political for a second feel free to dodge as much as you need to but um my thing is the center is a destination and what i mean by that is i want the friction between the left and the right to help me find an actually intelligent path forward i want people to help me see the problem from different angles i don't want to get a hard-on from hearing somebody say what i already believe which is like the big temptation and
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And I get it, dude, it juices me up as much as it does anybody. But I'm just like, that is not gonna help me see the problem from a more clear perspective. So I think of myself as, I'm a terrible debater, let me be very clear. I'm a deep thinker, but a slow thinker, so debate's never gonna be my thing. I want to know as if I were going to have to debate this.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
I want to know the best arguments from both sides, because if I really understand the smartest people who think that my angle is just idiotic, if I can say, okay, I'm going to steal men's argument. I know their argument as well as they do. And then here's why I believe, which my whole thing is predictive engine to getting you where you want to go. Right. So I know my goal.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
And then what has the most predictive validity? Cool. So I want the collision of those ideas. But there is something in the human brain, just the very architecture where people are so hungry to be told what they already think that that one makes me sad for them because.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
if you can do what you just did which is go okay i have a problem but i need to see this from a totally different angle and then i need to formalize what i see if you can do that and then you're willing to iterate iterate iterate and go actually i need to update this uh this breakdown that i have and while i haven't seen you do it i absolutely will bet my entire net worth that if you found a better system you would update your thinking you'd tell the world yeah i'm doing something differently now which i think is incredibly powerful
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Oh, thanks.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
How do you get people to buy into that? I find the, I run into frames of reference, natural ego, evolutionarily placed algorithms, like by default, most people just really want to be right.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
I've got, so I am now teaching a business scaling course. Oh, cool. Yes, it actually is a lot of fun. Where can people find it? Oh, sure. It's so funny because the answer, of course, is school, your company. But I promise we did not talk about that. Set that up.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
But yeah, on school and the it's got me asking a lot like, OK, I really want these people to be successful for no other reason than to be a glowing testimonial. And so what's going to be the place that they fall down?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
There is a concept in sailing that I am beginning to think other than intellect, which unfortunately matters, I'm beginning to think is like the thing is called velocity made good VMG. And the whole idea is that you can have a lot of wind, but if your sails aren't angled in the right direction, you could be moving fast, but not going in the direction that you want to go.
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
You could be not moving at all because your sails just aren't able to capture it. Um, or you could actually be moving fast in the direction that you want to go. And yeah, That to me, like pulling that apart as to what are the things that people don't understand? What are like if we were going to make angling the sales, not a metaphor, but like a reality?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
What is it like as somebody who's now scaled a business tremendously? What is it in all of those things that allows you to capture the potency of your intellect to understand that making, just making content doesn't do it. The content has to be aimed in a direction. It has to have a goal in mind. How would you teach entrepreneurs how to quote unquote angle the sales?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
All right, so if 90% of businesses fail outright, 96% fail to break a million and only 4% go over that. What is it that those have in common? The ones that make it, do they share something in common? And if so, what?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Do you force yourself to predict the outcome of initiative before you do it?
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
Very interesting. So I'm thinking a slightly different angle. So here's what I always tell entrepreneurs to do. So you describe a very similar thing to the way that I try to go about scaling, which I call the physics of progress. So to me, progress has a nature. There's just a way that it works. So you try a
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Why Do Smart People Stay Poor (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 1) | Ep 849
thing and it either works or it doesn't but to know if it worked you had to say this is where i'm trying to end up yeah this is what i think is my obstacle this is the thing i think i need to do to overcome my obstacle now i'm going to do that yeah but what i find is entrepreneurs will lie to themselves when they get the result they'll be like yeah that's roughly what i expected now the problem is that that will break their ability to do things as a thought exercise and so now they have to actually test everything not realizing they don't know how to predict the outcome
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
So AI tools will make it such that all of the things that we use as a moat are going to go away. So it takes a while to master all the tools. It takes a while to get all the different people on your podcast, all that stuff. what's going to end up happening is all of this information is gonna fracture, like hyper fracture.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And somebody will be able to have an idea for a video with or without a guest. I mean, you could post videos of like, here's my conversation, my imagined conversation with Elon Musk, stuff like that. And instead of actually needing to get that person on your podcast, you just have the AI spin up his personality. You ask a bunch of questions.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And if you do it in a way that the audience finds more interesting than the next person, then that's going to be what it's going to be. So what's going to end up happening is right now, it's already... changed so much. You're so young. You probably don't have a sense of just how much it's already changed. But like when I was growing up, there was, you know, whatever, five channels and that was it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And they controlled the narrative and we didn't even realize the narrative was being controlled. And then as things have gone to social, now you start things, seeing things break apart. Now, when I started podcasting, People literally like, Tom, why are you doing this? It's already played out. All the players that are there that are going to be there. It's already decided, man. It's too late.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
When I started, there were 400 podcasts. There's now 6 million podcasts. So it is just insane how many more podcasts. And I may have said 400,000 podcasts. So the world has just changed absolutely dramatically. And that's gonna keep happening where the format of a podcast itself is gonna get disrupted by somebody alone with an AI doing things that nobody's ever thought of before.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And the difficulty of production, the friction of going from idea to execution is the current moat. That's gonna go away, which means this will be more like TikTok. So instead of there being a person that has a podcast, take a Rogan or something like that, instead of that person dominating the landscape,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
you're gonna have like, oh, one of his episodes might pop off, but somebody else is gonna release something else that's a totally unique format that nobody saw coming. And it'll just be like that. And people will just be scrolling onto the next, onto the next, onto the next. And that's gonna happen across everything.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
It's gonna happen across video game production, which I trust me, I have just as much anxiety as you. But the key is to adopt AI faster than the competition. And then just remember that,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
one we're moving towards an abundance reality where if ai does all of the wildly disruptive stuff that people think it's going to do over the next say 10 years it's also going to be dropping the cost of virtually everything so everything is just getting cheaper now this takes you into a post um capitalistic society and there are big questions around what that looks like but
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
People will have access to the things that they want for far, far, far cheaper. Now that doesn't mean people won't find a way to peacock through other means because we will. Um, but especially when you throw in the mix brain computer interfaces, this is all going to get real weird.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
There are already people that can play video games, like proper video games using just their brain computer interface.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
So I think people make a mistake when they do preemptive quitting or preemptive strikes. The reality is you want to pay attention. You want to be at the cutting edge. You want to be integrating AI right now. AI is a phenomenal tool and it is a terrible master. So it's not going to be able to do things without humans yet. So people should be excited right now for this phase.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
It's going to allow you to do more with less. And so if you're somebody like you that's paying attention, you've got a whole thesis, you know what you're moving towards, AI is going to help you keep costs down, help you stay really nimble. Now, if AI starts changing the landscape, then just pay attention. Like, okay, what do we need to do to stand out? How do we add value?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And yes, it's going to change things. And yes, some people are going to get smashed into little pieces, but if you're really paying attention and if you continue to look at where's the puck going to go, then you'll be in better shape.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Now I've often made the quip that yes, you should always skate to where the puck is going to go, but it's getting a little hard now because the puck is teleporting, but it's still, it's the right idea. You want to pay attention to, okay, predictive engine. Where is this going? What does this mean for content creation? I think there is going to be that hyper fragmentation.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
I think this is really going to be about deep communities. So part of the reason that I'm on Twitch now doing my video game streaming is that yes, I'm building a video game. So I need to build a community around that, but also historically I've built audiences, not communities. And so this is a chance for me to really build a deep community where the interactions are very different.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And that's gonna be something that AI will have a hard time with just because people know on the other side of this is not a person, it's AI. And so I think there will be some things that people just have a weird resonance when it's AI versus when it's a real person. So I'll be looking for opportunities like that. I'll be looking for places where I want to lean into the humanity of it all.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And I'll be looking for places where I want to lean into the AI of it all. But because I don't push back on the way the world actually is, AI is here. AI will keep getting better. AI may slow down, but I don't think it's going to stop. So I'm just paying attention to where it's at and how I can leverage it for now.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I would say it slightly differently. So I think people should distrust their emotions. So this is where you wanna ground in the fact that you're having a biological experience. And so I'm gonna ask myself, okay, I feel some kind of way. Why do I feel the way that I feel? If you're really gonna go macro, this is evolution only has two levers, pleasure and pain.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Evolution has one goal, to make sure that you survive long enough to have kids and have kids. Okay, so I'm doing something right now that hurts. That means I'm doing a thing that evolution does not want me to keep doing, or I'm doing something pleasurable. This is something that evolution wants me to keep doing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Okay, now, if my goal is not focused on having kids that live long enough to have kids, I have some different goal, then those emotions might not be what I need to reach my goal. And this is what I see all the time. People confuse feelings. Feeling with thinking. Don't make that mistake, boys and girls. Feeling is not thinking.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So feelings are literally a very high bandwidth communication from the part of your body and your subconscious mind that can read a lot of points of data very, very quickly. But it's hard to translate that into conscious thought, into communication. words, even more narrow of a data pipe. And so you just get a feeling, right? Tiger and bush run. You don't have to think through it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
In fact, you may not even get to tiger. You just have a sense. I need to get out of here right now. You don't know why. You don't know what it is. Maybe you picked up on a rustling in the bush, certain way, a stick cracked. And the same is true in relationships, in business. You just get this overwhelming feeling. Now, if in that moment you realize my life isn't actually in danger.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So the fact that I'm having this really strong emotion should lead me to pause and go, why am I feeling this? And if you can pull that very high bandwidth emotion through that low bandwidth pipe into your conscious mind and say, oh, this is what all of that is boiled down to something very simple. which is almost always, if you're having a negative emotion anyway, it's almost always an insecurity.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I'm worried if I don't get this right, my business is gonna fail, and then I'm gonna lose her, I'm a loser, and my parents are gonna disown me, or my girlfriend is gonna break up with me, whatever. And it's all happening, again, based on that level of emotion.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
If you can slow down and say, hold on, that's overwrought, that's ridiculous, this is one of many things that I need to think through, I can make a lot of mistakes and still be fine, I do need to be thoughtful, I need to learn my lessons, but people don't do that. they get mad and they react mad. And then that makes things worse. And they never take the time to say, why am I mad?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Oh, wow, this is an insecurity, not anything positive or empowering. This is an emotion designed to mask the underlying thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yeah, and if I ever change my first principles approach, you should be the first to come punch me in the mouth. So first principles is quite literally the only way to think. It is at its simplest. It is trying to get to the fundamental base reality that we all live in, which we are shockingly bad at. And I can explain why later. But the idea is don't reason from analogy. Reason up from physics.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So the great example of this is Elon Musk saying, hey, for us to make a electric car that is priced to a place where the average person can afford it, we have to completely reinvent the way the batteries are made. Now, when they went around to everybody, everyone was just like, but this is the cost of batteries.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And he was like, well, does it violate the laws of physics to lower the cost of batteries? It might, if you go and look at what it costs to get it out of the ground and all that stuff and to mine it. And you may be like, yeah, this is just it. And there's no way to get any cheaper. But when he looked at it, he realized, whoa, there's like all these markups along the way.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
We could actually get closer to the source. We can do them for a lot cheaper. Cool. Same thing happened to me at Quest. We took our formulation for a protein bar to the manufacturers and they said, this bar can't be made. And we're like, hold on, does manufacturing this bar actually violate the laws of physics? Like that doesn't seem true.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so we went and looked at it and long story short, we realized what was happening is because the government subsidized corn, everybody used high fructose corn syrup in their products as a sweetener. It's cheap. It's delicious.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So all the equipment that had been manufactured over like the last 70 years could be made with the assumption that all the products that would run on it would have high fructose corn syrup. So this government intervention had all these downstream effects that nobody thought of. So when we said, well, wait, it's not that the bar can't be made, it's that we would have to engineer our own equipment.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so by being willing to engineer our own equipment and becoming our own manufacturer, suddenly it wasn't impossible. It was just impossible with that equipment. And so by thinking from first principles of, okay, this bar only takes a certain amount of pressure to put down. The bar has a certain viscosity. The bar has a certain level of stickiness. So what could we re-engineer on the equipment
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
to deal with the deviations from a standard product to our product. And once you engineer equipment with those different tolerances, now it produces just fine. And that ends up being one of the reasons that we are very successful. So that's thinking from first principles. You're not allowing anybody to handle you a frame of reference.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
When people say think outside the box, what they mean is you've been handed a frame of reference. You see the entire world through that frame of reference, and you don't realize it's artificially limited because it's all shorthand. It's all analogy. Instead of saying, well, hold on, this is just how we view the world. It's not necessarily how the world actually is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so let me, again, go back down to base physics and and build up from that. And if you sell an info product or something like that, start with human psychology and build up from that. But don't let anybody tell you something is impossible unless it legitimately violates the laws of physics.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I don't want people to feel like this is an exercise where it's like, oh my God, do I really have to go back to quarks and bosons and all that stuff, which we don't even fully understand anyway. So most of the time when I'm running this experiment, It's something for sales and marketing. And so forget all the early stuff. Just get to how does the human mind operate?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
What do people look for in products? Like what is the truth, the inescapable truth of the human mind? So like, for instance, people don't make decisions rationally. They make them emotionally. I mean, I can just tell you that from the architecture of the human mind standpoint, that is true.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so once you get to that, it's like, oh, well, you may want to sell this product on features and benefits, but it won't work because that's not the architecture of the human mind. So now instead of like, if you're looking at somebody else in your field and you think, well, they're doing it as good as it can be done. Well, not necessarily.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
What are they missing in terms of their approach that would allow you to get more bang for your buck? If you go back to instead of the frame of reference that they're handing you and go, what do I know to be true about the way the human mind works? Now you can do something better. You can do something different and win because you're building up from universal truths about how people think.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Meaning and purpose is ultimately all that matters. If you have all the money in the world, but you don't believe in what you're doing, then it will be a very empty pursuit. Progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness. The average human is designed to get better. So if you put time and attention into getting good at something, you will actually get good at that thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Okay, so that went in interesting waves. So when I was young, I felt very confident in myself, but I absolutely lacked self-awareness of any kind.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then as I began to develop self-awareness, I became incredibly self-conscious and very insecure, and then was afraid that I wasn't gonna be able to achieve the goals that I wanted to achieve because I wasn't good at the things I needed to be good at. And I, at the time, just by default had a fixed mindset.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I believe that my talent and intelligence were fixed traits and life was just about making the most of what I had. Now, the honest answer is we are 50% hardwired. Like half of what you're gonna be able to achieve is grounded by just the hand that you've been dealt. but 50% is malleable.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so I started really focusing on the part that I could change and not worrying about whatever was hardwired. It is what it is. And so what can I do with that part that I could change? And once I started leaning into that, then it was like, okay, I didn't need to believe I was special. I just needed to believe that I was average and that the average human is actually designed.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
That's what I call the only belief that matters. The average human is designed to get better. So if you put time and attention, into getting good at something, you will actually get good at that thing. You just have to put the time and attention in. So then it's like, okay, well, my goal makes a demand that I be good at X, Y, Z thing. Am I willing to go get good at it?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Because I could certainly just assume you can get a hundred times better at anything. Am I willing to put the time and energy to get a hundred times better? And is a hundred times better going to be good enough? And if it is and you're willing, then you go down that path.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if it's not, you either stop pursuing that thing or you find a partner that can be good at the thing that you've decided you're not going to invest in.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But really getting the lay of the land of how the human animal actually works was freakishly liberating for me because I didn't have to believe I was born special, but it was incredibly encouraging to know that I could get better in any aspect of my life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yes, free will is an illusion, though. And I mean, is an illusion. And if you don't believe me, read the book Determined. It's an unrefutable take. People will try to refute it. But if you read the whole book, I mean, he really does attack every answer.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So good, man. So good. You've got good guests. I like it. I'm in good company here. So yeah, Robert Sapolsky, absolutely brilliant. It's just a horrifying truth that we all think we have free will, but we really don't. But I don't think it matters. And I think if you let it influence your life, it will drive you crazy. You need to act as if you have free will.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I think people should don't let anybody tell you something is impossible unless it legitimately violates the laws of physics.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It's the only logical way because here's why that matters. Even though we are automata, that are just responding to things. We do respond to ideas and we are changeable and we are changed by our surroundings. This is why culture just keeps getting better and better and better because as we learn more, we're able to do more, but there is no ability to escape your biology. It's just not possible.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Like even the most monk of monks has not escaped their biology. They've leveraged their biology in a pretty fascinating way, but they have not escaped their biology. And so just as nobody can will themselves to fly, they cannot will themselves to think a thought that they've never thought. If they could, then I would say, please solve quantum physics because that's in need of a solve.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if they then say, well, but I'm not smart enough. It doesn't have to do with free will. Yes, it does. You're just telling me that you're limited by your biology, which we already agree on. So I wouldn't spend a lot of time there, but it is true.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You do have the ability to change. The question is, do you have the ability to direct that change? And I think he is correct. I know he is correct that we don't, but here's the catch. That idea is a worse idea for knowing that people will respond and change based on ideas. So it's one of those, it is true. And I never fight against anything that's true.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But part of the reason I don't bang that drum a lot is that it's just not a super helpful idea. So I have a goal and that's human flourishing. To get to human flourishing, you have to pursue fulfillment. To pursue fulfillment, you need to act as if you can change your circumstances and make your life better and make the lives of others around you better.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Money only monetizes once. You can only spend it one time, but knowledge and connections monetize forever. As long as you're , then you can have everything you want.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if you go down that path, you will feel better about your life. And if you don't, you won't. Now, it is just true. I can't stop myself from saying that. I am hardwired. I've encountered these other ideas that make me want to say this, but great. I'm still going to act as if I'm in control and it makes my life better. And so I have a rule.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals. I'm not trying to create a false picture of the world. In fact, I'm trying to get to ground truth. However, I know that humans are ridiculously bad at identifying what is actually true. Therefore, I have to steer by something that I can tell, and that's effectiveness. So how useful is an idea in getting me where I wanna go?
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if I, going back to one of your earliest questions, if I wanna feel good about myself when I'm by myself, what do I need to believe in order to do that? And so even though I know I'm just responding to my environment and my biology, that's not a good overarching narrative because it demotivates me. And so it's true. I just don't think about it. I think about things that motivate me.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And that has led me to where I wanna go.
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As long as you understand need as it relates to, it is a more efficient way to get to the goal I have stated, which is human flourishing. But if somebody has a different goal, then it may not be as necessary. Like obviously for Robert Sapolsky, he's got a goal that's more in line with being, he would probably sum it up as a moral, compassionate being.
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And so he, to him, it is a moral violation to hold people responsible for their lot in life. Whereas for me, it is a moral violation to let people roam around the streets, attack people, even though I'm like, sure, it's not your fault, but I don't care. You can't roam the streets hitting people. So everything is an echo of somebody's goal, whether they realize it or not.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
All right, I was just talking about this on my Twitch gaming stream this morning. So, okay, it goes like this. First, you need to know exactly what your goal is. You need to care deeply about your goal. Like you have to really want it And you can run something I call the loop of desire to reinforce that. But you have to know what your goal is. You have to really want your goal.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Then you have to make sure that you're doing the things that are causing you to actually progress towards that goal. Tony Robbins talks about how progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness. Anytime you see something like that, you know you're tapping into those evolutionary algorithms that are running in your brain. So it just feels good.
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And then on top of that, this needs to be something that you have a really strong why that you're doing this. So I'm doing this to help these people is gonna be the most universal why. There's a group of people you care about for whatever reason you care about them, and you're pursuing this thing to help them.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And now that taps into the evolutionary demand that we have that we contribute to the group. And so if you want to stop being lazy, ironically, that's the sequence. And then one thing I'll add is you need rules in your life just so that you can demarcate whether you're doing the thing that you should be or not.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So the most important rule I ever put in my life was that once I realized I'm awake, I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. And I did that because I would lay in bed four and five hours a day every day. It was, I mean, looking back now, it's really crazy. The heartbreak I feel over how much time I lost So finally, I was just like, this is absurd. I'm now ashamed of myself.
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Shame actually ended up being helpful, but it was not fun to go through. And so once I finally built up enough shame, I was like, okay, the only way I can think to break this is to set a timer and be like, okay, you have to get out of bed no matter what. And that one simple rule has been one of the most impactful things in my life.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Oh, she's amazing. You're going to love her.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yeah, well, so the catastrophe was just realizing that I didn't have talent. So that was gut-wrenching. So I had a fixed mindset. So I believed however good I am now is how good I will be forever. And that was the mystique of film school was like, hey, you're finding the best of the best. And it was like a whittling down process. Like, could you get into film school? That was the first thing.
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Because when I went to USC film school, It was easier statistically to get into Harvard Law than it was to get into USC Film School. There were just that many people applying. And so I got in and I was like, oh, maybe I really am this brilliant filmmaker. And then you go through these series of classes, basically auditioning to see if you can be one of the four people chosen to do a senior thesis.
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And I ended up being one of the four. And I was like, oh my God, I knew it. Like, this is my chance. Like, I'm just everything I've ever wanted is gonna come true. I'm gonna graduate. I'm gonna get the three picture deal. I'm the next Steven Spielberg. It's gonna be incredible. And I mean, I could taste it.
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And then I made my senior thesis film and it was terrible, just objectively terrible on every metric that a film can be terrible. It was terrible. And I didn't think, oh, cool. Let me break this down to what are the things that I'm not good at yet that I need to get better at? Why was it that the earlier films that got me to be one of the four chosen?
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What did I understand about that style of filmmaking that I didn't understand? Because it's actually a pretty big leap in style of storytelling. I would say naturally, I had an intuition for silent storytelling that I did not have once you bring in dialogue and all of that. But at the time I couldn't understand that. I was just like, oh my God, like I'm actually not good at this.
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I thought I was, but apparently I'm not. And so that was as close to an existential crisis as I have ever been because I thought that was gonna be my whole life. That was the death of a dream that I had. I mean, when you're, you know, whatever, 22, you feel like, wait, my whole life has been pointed towards this. I thought this was gonna be the next 60 years of my life and it's just dead.
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And then you find yourself selling insurance products Door to door. So I was like, whoa, it was one of those my how the mighty have fallen because I went from being celebrated at film school. I graduated second in my class. It was like, yo, this guy's really going to do something to actually hold on. No. embarrassing. Everybody knew my film was bad.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It was not like, oh, this is me being hard on myself. Everyone was like, oh God, that was like a train wreck. So it was emotionally devastating and I had no idea what to do. And then thankfully between Tony Robbins and some stuff about brain plasticity, And which now, of course, we would call a growth mindset, but Carol Dweck had not written that book yet, unfortunately for me.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So start reading about brain plasticity, realize, wait a second, maybe it is possible to change and get better. I start teaching film and I realized, wait, I'm helping these students make their films better. Why couldn't I help myself make my own films better? And so then I was like, oh my God, this is a game of skill acquisition.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so then the things we've been talking about now start coming together as my belief system. And I realized, okay, wait a second. If I can get better, then this is about putting time and energy into getting better. And so I just poured myself into that, poured myself into it from a film perspective, poured myself in from a business perspective, and the rest is history.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
My life is what happens when you answer the question, How far am I willing and able to go if I get 100 times better at a small number of things that really matter to my goals?
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yeah, the loop of desire is really basic. So you are having a biological experience. Your brain responds to certain things in a certain way. One very key thing to understand about your brain is you become whatever you repeat because of a process called myelination. So myelination is the wrapping of fatty tissue around the connections of the neurons in your brain.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So any emotions you feel, any thoughts you think, they will become easier for you to think and therefore will be the things you keep repeating. So the more you repeat something, the more you repeat something. So be careful what you repeat. So understanding that, that whatever I repeat is going to solidify in my mind. So what if I intentionally repeat something positive? Cool. So let's try that.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Then there is your brain will justify what whatever amplitude of emotion you display. So if you freak out, your brain goes, whoa, I guess this really matters. So I was like, okay, well, then if I repeat a really high emotional state every time I talk about my goal, would it begin to myelinate such that now I'm Whenever I talk about it, I get that big emotional response.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So at first it felt like I was faking it. And then six months later, whenever I would talk about it, I would feel that sense of like passion and excitement. I was like, I can't believe this works. So be careful because you can align yourself to dumb things.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So if you pick a goal that's honorable, that is legitimately exciting to you, and then talk to yourself about it, what you're going to achieve, what you're going to do, and like with that feeling of passion and excitement that you hope one day you will feel naturally. And then when you talk to other people, which is even easier than talking to yourself, same thing.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You embody, embody the emotion you wanna feel and do that over and over and over. And then at least in my experience, call it four to six months later, now you can just be talking about it normally and you get that sense of like, oh man, this is really important to me. This is really exciting. You're like, wow, it's so crazy because six months ago, I was interested, like it was legitimate.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I didn't try to tie it to like, I really love grass. Like it's something you already have an interest in. But by doing that, now you've got the impetus to gain the skills. And by having that initial burst of energy married with getting the actual skill set, now you can make progress. And when you're making progress, then passion kicks in.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But you're not going to get to passion until you're actually able to use that skill in the real world to get feedback from other people. You are the shout and the echo. People are telling you, hey, you're improving my life by that thing you do. That thing you do could be podcasting. That thing you could do could be building a video game like I'm doing now. It could be accounting, whatever.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But people give you positive feedback. This is why so often adults are pursuing something that they first got that positive feedback on as a kid.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Thanks for having me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Okay, so at Quest, we had 3,000 employees and 1,000 of them. I grew up in the inner cities. And I thought, hmm, these guys are smart. Some of them smarter than me, but they're not doing anything with their lives. And when I started asking them like, hey, why aren't you doing this, that, or the other, the answers that came back were just ridiculous.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so I was like, this is not a intelligence problem. This is an idea problem. So I started what I then called Quest University. And I was like, let me teach you everything I know about entrepreneurship. One, it will just be good for your life. You can go on and work for any company at that. Like if you can master the skills that I'm teaching you guys, you'll be able to work anywhere.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Now, my hope, of course, is that you stay here because you realize I care about your future more than your own mother, but you'll be empowered. You can go anywhere that you want. And I poured my heart and soul into it. I came early. I stayed late. And we've had people start other companies that are still running to this day, almost a decade later. Absolutely incredible. I love it the most.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
The only catch is it was only 2% of the people that I brought those ideas to. 98% did nothing. And so I really started to get obsessed with, okay, what would we have to do to reach the 98%? And I very quickly realized you have to bypass the logical centers of their brain. You can't just say, think like this, act like this. You've got to really get into the storytelling of it all.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And I mean, look, when you see political campaigns and stuff like that, that's exactly what they're doing. They're telling a story. Stories simplify things and they focus attention. And that is the magic of storytelling. This is exactly how humans are able to come together in these gigantic, flexible groups with people they've never even met and cooperate. You have shared stories.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It could be shared story of a nation state, could be shared story of a religion. but you need some sort of shared story to pass on values, to pass on identity, to give people a unifying narrative. So for better or worse, humans are a meaning-making machine and stories allow you to transmit meaning. So they're just a mechanism by which you simplify things enough to extract meaning from.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So we do it all the time. When we stub our toe on the coffee table, we tell a story. We're an idiot because we don't pay attention enough to our surroundings. And that's what stubbing our toe means. Or you could tell yourself the story of, man, I'm so hardcore. I probably broke my toe just now, but I don't stop. I don't quit. I'm the kind of guy that keeps pushing forward.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So it all comes down to what's the story that you tell yourself about that thing. So it isn't what happens. It's what it means. And once people understand what it means, you're telling yourself that story. Someone may have said it from the outside, but you decided that that's what you were going to repeat. That's what you were going to adopt.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So whether you're a marketer, whether you're just trying to lead your own team, you've got to tell them a story. This is why every company needs a mission. Your mission statement is about galvanizing your team. It's about telling the consumer what it means to buy your product, what they're sort of becoming a part of.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then in your marketing, you want to tell something that's simple enough that people can remember it Like it's a story. And oftentimes just literally telling a story inside of your marketing is one of the most useful things that you could do. A couple of times in this interview, you've asked me to tell stories from my childhood or whatever. And so we all just resonate to story.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
impact. Meaning and purpose is ultimately all that matters. If you have all the money in the world, but you don't feel engaged, you don't believe in what you're doing, then it will be a very empty pursuit. And I thankfully learned that lesson when I was quite young.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So in the same way that when humans look at an image, we look for eyes. When people are hearing, okay, this thing happened, they're looking for the story in it. And so if you reveal character through it, if you reveal a moral through it, people are going to remember it way more than if it's just a list of facts.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
This is why humans get so bored in high school history only to later discover through, you know, like a hardcore history episode. Actually, history is amazing, but history is only amazing when you tell it like a story. If you tell it like a story, it's fascinating.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You tell it like disembodied facts and figures, not interesting at all and hard to remember because that's not the architecture of the human mind.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Well, it didn't just happen, but it was not something I ever thought I would do. So you heard the story of me graduating film school and things not going well. I met these two entrepreneurs and they were bang on the money. And they said, look, you're coming to the world with your handout. And if you want to control the art, you have to control the resources.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So if you want to build a studio, you want to tell your own stories, you should get into business and get rich. And I was like, oh man, that's so smart. I can't believe I didn't think about that before, brilliant. And this is like right before the tech bubble burst.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I was like, oh word, man, I'm gonna get into tech, take 18 months, build a company, sell it, all's good, be able to make my own movies. And that didn't work. So 18 months turned into 15 years, but it did work. And so that obviously ends up being incredible. And during that journey, I end up finding stroke constructing the reason that I was going to make films.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So instead of just doing it because I like stories, it became, who am I going to help impact theory arises. It's literally called impact theory because my theory on how to impact people at scale is through story. So putting empowerment at the center of it becomes the whole jam. So I got into business strictly so that I could control my own destiny. But I learned a very powerful lesson, which is
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So yeah, when I had all the financial success at Quest, I knew that whatever I do next has to be grounded in meaning and purpose, just like Quest was. So my last day at Quest was Monday, and my first day at Impact Theory was Tuesday. And just Got right back to it because that's ultimately what feeds me is that sense of, okay, I'm doing something with my time that matters.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I can guarantee you're going to struggle, but I cannot guarantee you'll be successful. And so you better struggle well. And so I stopped asking myself what I think is the worst question people could ask, which is what would I do if I knew I couldn't fail? Because failure is the most likely outcome. So I started asking myself, what would I do and love every day, even if I were failing?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so that's why impact theory is literally architected from the ground up to be the things that, man, if I'm gonna fail at something, I wanna fail at this thing. So that has improved my life immeasurably. But do keep in mind, I'm saying that after having the gigantic financial success. So if I had to do it all over again, I would very much go straight into storytelling.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I would not go into business first, for sure, because it really is true that your network is your net worth. These are gonna be the people that open doors for you and stuff. And so I'm having to completely reinvent myself, meet all the new people, all that. And it's added a decade to my journey. So I could have gotten it done a lot faster.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Now, the problem is going into business allowed me to learn all these principles. So I don't waste time lamenting that I didn't do it, but I am not somebody who's like, I have no regrets. Yeah, I would do it differently, but such is life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
No, I would have gone to somebody who was living the life I wanted to live, which would have been at the time in filmmaking, and said, I will work harder and smarter than anyone you know. And all I ask in exchange is knowledge and connections.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I would literally live in a hovel with five other guys, eat the world's cheapest food, do whatever I had to do to get by, but so that I could be as close to that person as humanly possible. I don't want to work for somebody who works for them. I want to be next to them all the time, watching how they deal with the world. That is insanely useful.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It's all the in-between stuff that you would never even know. It's how a deal is structured. It's how to talk to somebody who's being a dick in a meeting, but doing it in a way where it's like they're not quite crossing the threshold where you can just call it out. How do you handle things like that? Or
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
somebody comes to you and asks for something that is clearly they're reaching beyond what they have any right to ask for, but they're kind of in a tough spot. And like, do you help them out? Do you not? Like all of those things, when you're in your early twenties, man, you have no idea how to handle all that stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You might be shooting from the hip, but you really don't have a sense of how it's all going to play out. And when you can watch somebody go through all of that soft stuff, that's next to impossible to teach in a business school, then it's like, If you can ask the occasional question like, hey, I was really surprised the way you handled that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You're normally so hard on people, but you were really nice just then. Like, how do you know when to be hard and how do you know when to be soft? And if they're a thoughtful person and can be like, okay, well, let me explain why I was doing this here, why I did something completely different here and how I typically will make those decisions.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then to some extent, it's just seeing the patterns over and over and over and over and over. But you're not going to get that when you start as a junior, junior, junior, something in a corporation where everybody's afraid of losing their job and they're lying to each other and playing politics. It's all just stupidly nightmarish.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Obviously, I'm very thoughtful to make sure that I enjoy what I'm doing, even when I'm failing, that it's a thing that I not only care about the potential outcomes, but that I enjoy the process. So you got to fill your time somehow. And I'm not a retired to the beach kind of guy. So impact is to say it in a word.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So what I always tell young people is, look, money only monetizes once. You can only spend it one time. But knowledge and connections monetize forever.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Let's go.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
That's a stack of really cool people. I love it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Well, the big thing was I only got into business so that I could build Impact Theory. So that was always self-evident, but we had had so much success and my partners and I no longer shared a vision on how to grow the company. And so it was like, well, we've been this successful. So I had been building what's now Impact Theory inside of Quest. It was literally called Inside Quest.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And I said, let me spin out this studio into a standalone company. They agreed, spun that out and Like I said, left Quest on Monday and on Tuesday was at Impact Theory. But yeah, that was the whole thing from the beginning. The guys that I was partners with back then were the ones that had said, hey, you're coming to the world with your handout. You should get into business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So it was not a surprise to them. So it was a very simple transition. And we've been at this now for almost a decade. It's crazy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So AI tools will make it such that all of the things that we use as a moat are going to go away. So it takes a while to master all the tools. It takes a while to get all the different people on your podcast, all that stuff. What's going to end up happening is all of this information is going to fracture, like hyper fracture.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And somebody will be able to have an idea for a video with or without a guest. I mean, you could post videos of like, here's my conversation, my imagined conversation with Elon Musk, stuff like that. And instead of actually needing to get that person on your podcast, you just have the AI spin up his personality. You ask a bunch of questions.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if you do it in a way that the audience finds more interesting than the next person, then that's going to be what it's going to be. So what's going to end up happening is right now, it's already changed so much. You're so young, you probably don't have a sense of just how much it's already changed. But like when I was growing up, there was, you know, whatever, five channels and that was it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And they controlled the narrative and we didn't even realize the narrative was being controlled. And then as things have gone to social, now you start seeing things break apart. Now, when I started podcasting, people literally like, Tom, why are you doing this? It's already played out. All the players that are there, that are going to be there. It's already decided, man. It's too late.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
When I started, there were 400 podcasts. There's now 6 million podcasts. So it is just insane how many more podcasts, I may have said 400,000 podcasts. So the world has just changed absolutely dramatically. And that's going to keep happening where the format of a podcast itself is going to get disrupted by somebody alone with an AI doing things that nobody's ever thought of before.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And the difficulty of production, the friction of going from idea to execution is the current moat. That's going to go away, which means this will be more like TikTok.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So instead of there being a person that has a podcast, take a Rogan or something like that, instead of that person dominating the landscape, you're going to have like, oh, one of his episodes might pop off, but somebody else is going to release something else that's a totally unique format that nobody saw coming. And it'll just be like that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And people will just be scrolling onto the next, onto the next, onto the next. And that's going to happen across everything. It's going to happen across video game production, which I trust me, I have just as much anxiety as you. But the key is to adopt AI faster than the competition. And then just remember that one, we're moving towards an abundance of
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
reality where if AI does all of the wildly disruptive stuff that people think it's going to do over the next, say, 10 years, it's also going to be dropping the cost of virtually everything. So everything is just getting cheaper. Now, this takes you into a post capitalistic society. And there are big questions around what that looks like.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But people will have access to the things that they want for far, far, far cheaper. Now, that doesn't mean people won't find a way to peacock through other means because we will. But especially when you throw in the mix brain computer interfaces, this is all going to get real weird. There are already people that can play video games like proper video games using just their brain computer interface.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It's nuts.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Now, what you think about yourself when you're by yourself. So there's no one there to hype you up, no one there to tear you down. What do you think about you? And it's normally in that quiet space that people start beating themselves up and they don't feel they're living up to their own ideals. That matters. I think ultimately we just were hardwired for it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I think people make a mistake when they do preemptive quitting or preemptive strikes. The reality is you want to pay attention. You want to be at the cutting edge. You want to be integrating AI. Right now, AI is a phenomenal tool and it is a terrible master. So it's not going to be able to do things without humans yet. So people should be excited right now for this phase.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It's going to allow you to do more with less. And so if you're somebody like you that's paying attention, You've got a whole thesis. You know what you're moving towards. AI is going to help you keep costs down, help you stay really nimble. Now, if AI starts changing the landscape, then just pay attention. Like, okay, what do we need to do to stand out? How do we add value?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And yes, it's going to change things. And yes, some people are going to get smashed into little pieces. But if you're really paying attention and if you continue to look at where is the puck going to go, then you'll be in better shape.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Now, I've often made the quip that, yes, you should always skate to where the puck is going to go, but it's getting a little hard now because the puck is teleporting, but it's the right idea. You wanna pay attention to, okay, predictive engine. Where is this going? What does this mean for content creation? I think there is gonna be that hyper-fragmentation.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I think this is really gonna be about deep communities So part of the reason that I'm on Twitch now doing my video game streaming is that, yes, I'm building a video game. So I need to build community around that. But also historically, I've built audiences, not communities. And so this is a chance for me to really build a deep community where the interactions are very different.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And that's going to be something that AI will have a hard time with just because people know on the other side of this is not a person, it's AI. And so I think there will be some things that people just have a weird resonance with when it's AI versus when it's a real person. So I'll be looking for opportunities like that. I'll be looking for places where I want to lean into the humanity of it all.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And I'll be looking for places where I want to lean into the AI of it all. But because I don't push back on the way the world actually is, AI is here. AI will keep getting better. AI may slow down, but I don't think it's going to stop. So I'm just paying attention to where it's at and how I can leverage it for now.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yeah, so it is impact theory in the sense that my theory on how to impact people at scale is through entertainment. The most dominant form of entertainment right now is video games. Also a core part of my thesis is that who I'm focused on is 11 to 15 year olds. So Project Kaizen is a game, if anybody's ever heard of Extraction Royale, it's an Extraction Royale game that's aimed at
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
11 to 15 year old demographic, technically 13 and up because of SOPA laws. But that's that core demographic that's in what's known as the age of imprinting. And so trying to reach them so that we can introduce empowering ideas. So one of the characters in the game right now, which is out right now, by the way, if anybody wants to play it, it's a free to play game at projectkaizen.io.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And Bruce Lee is one of the characters in the game. And It's an official collaboration with the Bruce Lee family. And the reason I wanted Bruce to be our launch partner was he had a tremendous impact on my life, even though he had passed away before I was born. But he wrote a book called The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, which was about his style of martial arts.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And some of the ideas in there, even though I didn't train in the martial art, the ideas were profoundly shaping for the way that I think now about mindset and getting better and all of that stuff. So we wanted him to be a character in the game who's like our Morpheus or our Obi-Wan Kenobi. He's the mentor character that's giving the players advice.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So yeah, really excited for people to get into it. And then the other part is the UGC aspect. So players can come in and build their own maps. And this is the very beginning of a much deeper set of tools that we'll build for players to build their own content.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yeah, so I think the way that creators need to think is your job is to create a container for your community to come in and create. So because I think in IP, the way that we look at it is we've created Project Kaizen. It's this gigantic sci-fi world. And inside that world, there's characters and stories and things.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
physics, if you will, rules of the game, the way that it all works, the conceit of our story is that everything you've ever known is a simulation. So imagine the matrix, but there's no real world. The matrix is the real world. There's nothing else. And in that story, that means that we're connected to other dimensions and all that kind of stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Well, so we are a hungry species. We are designed to pursue. We're designed to grow, to keep getting after things. When you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, you would be hardwired to do the things that are gonna keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids. And so hard work,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And that way, as players spin up their own storylines, they can be like, oh, we're from this what we call instance, a server instance, or a universe, if you want to think of it in those terms. So we're from this universe. These are our people. This is what our world looks like. And they can literally build that up as much as they want. It could be as simple as one little floating island.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It could be all the way to a planet. Not yet, but one day. And them being able to tell their own stories and then giving the community the ability to say, hey, this person's storyline is follows all of your guidelines, Impact Theory. We love it and want this to be canon in your world. And so when a story meets certain criteria, players can vote for it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then if we approve it, then it becomes official canon within our world. And so our goal is for them, if you know UEFN, this is what Fortnite's doing, is absolutely brilliant, giving the players the tools to from the game to build their own sort of mini games inside of it. And so we're doing a very similar thing, much smaller scale compared to Epic, which is absolutely gigantic.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But I think this is just the future. I think everybody's gonna be doing this. So it's not like, oh, we're trying to be some pale shadow of what Epic is doing. I just think this is the future in the same way that if you were gonna launch a video site, of course, you're gonna let people upload to it. There would be no other way.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
That is our plan now is to give players the ability to create unique experiences within our container.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Always be learning. Always be learning. So it should cue off of your goal. So again, your goals make demands, but I spend on average two hours a day, 365 days a year, every day for the last 15 years, maybe more learning. Be a relentless learning machine.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So for me, I know that nothing matters more than reciprocated love. So I make sure that I put a ton of time and attention into that. And then also I manage my biology. So I get sleep. I eat healthy. I exercise. I work out. I maintain loving relationships beyond just my wife. Those things are incredibly important.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then if I can really ground this for people, guys, you have to learn how business works. Like business has physics. And if you really want to get good, you need to learn those physics. And they are available for anybody to learn, anyone to master. The game is really relatively simple. Learn it. Learn the game. Do not let yourself get overwhelmed. Just one piece at a time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
contributing to the group, facing difficult tasks, making progress, like all of those things are hardwired. So the things that you do either make good on those evolutionary algorithms that you have running in your brain that say like, hey, you've just been lazy. I don't feel good about that. Or whoa, like you really did something and it helped a lot of people.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Pick apart the skill set. Learn it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yes. And where it interfaces with leadership and human psychology? Yes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
At Tom Bilyeu across the socials. Best place is probably YouTube.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Absolutely. Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You're going to feel great about that. So in that sense, what you do becomes a critical component. So the way I like to explain it is we are both the shout and the echo. So we're the things that we do, that's the shout. And then we're what the world tells us they feel about the thing that we did. And anybody that thinks that they can escape
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
that sense of like that feedback impacts me in some way is delusional. You are going to be impacted. Now you want to keep it in balance. You don't want to let that get out of hand where you only live for the validation of others, but we are a social animal. And so you will be impacted by what other people think.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
To be honest, it hasn't changed in a very long time. And so when I was working 120 hours a week, which was a couple of years ago, I knew that I was making a short-term error for a long-term gain. And it really did, though, get to the point where I was beginning to damage my marriage.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And that's always my barometer of, okay, if my marriage is really the most important thing in my life, simply because it has yielded the most return on my investment, then I needed to make a change. And so at the height of all that, I pulled my wife aside and said, look, I will find my way back to you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And it just became about putting business processes in place that I could hand things off, that I wasn't trying to do everything myself. And so it's like, look, at the same time, it's the period of my life that I'm probably the most proud because if the world was ever going to break me, that was going to be the moment And so it didn't.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And I kept pushing forward and I got the business to where it needed to be. And I got back into the rhythm of prioritizing my marriage. And so, look, it was not a period without its consequences. But if you're very cognizant of that, if you engage in my case with both the business and the marriage, to communicate, okay, business, this is what we're going to have to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
We're going to have to get people in that replace these different elements. We're going to have to create new processes so that this isn't so manual. And then dear wife, we're going to need to start setting aside some time. I need a couple more months to really put these processes in place. But if you can just bear with me until this time, I won't be working these stupid hours anymore.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so because I was able to make a promise, make good on that promise, And then she could see the results that I was yielding in the business. So it's like through communication, all things are possible. So I don't believe in balance. The cheesiest way to say it is I believe in harmony. The more accurate way to say it is goals make demands.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And as long as you're executing in priority order, then you can have everything you want, but you can be very efficient in what you get done by just saying, okay, this is the most important thing that I can do based on my goals and where I want to end up. This is the second most important, so on and so forth down the list.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if it's integrated with a marriage and friendship and things like that, you'll be fine. But most people, and this is really like, hey, dear everybody listening, if you want to know one problem I see over and over and over is people allow themselves to get overwhelmed. There is not an amount of things barring a hot war where people are literally getting shot and dying around you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
There's nothing that should be able to overwhelm you. And so overwhelm is about an expectation that you are putting on yourself that you can carry an infinite load that triggers a psychological revving up of you trying to track every variable. And the reality is that I don't ever get overwhelmed, even when I was working 120 hours a week and it was a massive physical toll.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
There was never the additional layer of I'm mentally breaking because I just, it's all about priorities. I have them in priority order. I draw a dotted line and say the things below the dotted line just are not going to be addressed right now. And I'm able to just shut that door.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And what I find is people are not able to shut the door on the things that exceed the number of hours that they're willing to work. And so they're trying to track everything, even the things that are what I call dormant priorities. And that's the thing that drives them crazy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And you literally just have to do what's known in behavioral cognitive therapy as cognitive behavioral therapy, excuse me, as a pattern interrupt. And so like anybody, I get that initial impulse of like, oh my God, like I can feel my brain speeding up. And that's when I say to myself, I don't do overwhelm. And then I do diaphragm breathing and I slow down ironically.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And in slowing down, rather than trying to speed up, to do everything, it just dissipates. And I thought this would be something I could just tell people about. They would adopt it and it would be great. Man, I see people get overwhelmed all the time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
No doubt about that. My marriage has given me more of everything that you could want than anything else. So my wife has certainly made me a better person. I do not know who I would be if I had not met her. I met her in my early twenties and we've been together for 24 years, married for over 22. It's crazy. Yeah, it's extraordinary. Absolutely.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And having somebody that supports you and having somebody that sees things that you would otherwise be blind to, somebody that instead of getting on their knees and crying with you when things are going rough, they're like picking you back up and reminding you who you are and brushing your shoulders up.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
My wife has given me the Jerry Maguire speech many times to get me back in the game when you're starting to flag. So that's really been incredible. Being self-aware and having a partner that is also self-aware and that can talk with you and lay options out and help you problem solve. That's really the thing that I would give the credit to. And so you don't necessarily need a significant other.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It helps. It's wonderful. And I encourage it for everybody. But I don't want people to feel like that's out of reach simply because you don't have a partner. Because it ultimately comes down to what are the beliefs that you hold that are choices? What are the values that you hold? Those are choices.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if you live by your beliefs and your values and your beliefs and values are positive and they move you in the right direction, you're going to be fine. Now, if you have a significant other to reinforce it all even better, but certainly not necessary.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Well, so failure, the only right way to approach it is to approach it like AI. So when AI is trying to learn a pattern, which is essentially what all of us are trying to do, it tries a thing and it gets a result. And it's not like you can't imagine the AI having like an emotional breakdown. Oh, my God, like I tried to play this video game and it didn't work.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It's like the AI just goes, OK, I'm trying to learn the rules of the game and I move the paddle this way and I don't make contact with the ball. I don't get any points. So what if I move over here and then eventually makes contact with the ball and the ball bounces and scores a point? It's like, OK, I see now I have to make contact with the paddle and the ball and the ball will then hit this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so you're just getting what are known in AI as samples. So you try a thing, it gives you a piece of data. This is a sample. Now you know a little bit more about the world. And if people understood that you're running trial and error as a way of building up a prediction engine so that you know, oh, when I do this, I get this outcome. And that really is all life is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It's what I call the physics of progress. You're trying to build a prediction engine so that you know, when I do this, I get this result and I want to go to XYZ goal. And I see what I have to do in order to get there. And I've got such an accurate prediction engine. I can now do all the things that are going to take me there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Now, you can never be guaranteed to arrive at your goal because the world is just changing so rapidly. But at least if you're running this exercise of the physics of progress, you always know what to try next. Whether it will work or not depends on a whole host of factors. But that is really, really useful. And failure is a necessary part of that sequence.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And there's an amazing guy, he's the largest hedge fund manager in the world named Ray Dalio. He's got a great quote, which is, pain plus reflection equals progress. And so when you fail, it hurts, but that sting causes you to reflect and say, okay, I want to feel this way again. What did I do last time? What was the outcome that I got? Let me change my behavior so I can get where I want to go.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And as long as you don't let that emotionally break you, then you can hit escape velocity.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
So AI tools will make it such that all of the things that we use as a moat are going to go away. So it takes a while to master all the tools. It takes a while to get all the different people on your podcast, all that stuff. what's going to end up happening is all of this information is gonna fracture, like hyper fracture.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And somebody will be able to have an idea for a video with or without a guest. I mean, you could post videos of like, here's my conversation, my imagined conversation with Elon Musk, stuff like that. And instead of actually needing to get that person on your podcast, you just have the AI spin up his personality. You ask a bunch of questions.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And if you do it in a way that the audience finds more interesting than the next person, then that's going to be what it's going to be. So what's going to end up happening is right now, it's already... changed so much. You're so young. You probably don't have a sense of just how much it's already changed. But like when I was growing up, there was, you know, whatever, five channels and that was it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And they controlled the narrative and we didn't even realize the narrative was being controlled. And then as things have gone to social, now you start things, seeing things break apart. Now, when I started podcasting, People literally like, Tom, why are you doing this? It's already played out. All the players that are there that are going to be there. It's already decided, man. It's too late.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
When I started, there were 400 podcasts. There's now 6 million podcasts. So it is just insane how many more podcasts. And I may have said 400,000 podcasts.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Uh, so it, the, the world has just changed absolutely dramatically and that's going to keep happening where the format of a podcast itself is going to get disrupted by, you know, somebody alone with an AI doing things that nobody's ever thought of before. And the difficulty of production, the friction of going from idea to execution is the current moat.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
That's gonna go away, which means this will be more like TikTok. So instead of there being a person that has a podcast, take a Rogan or something like that, instead of that person dominating the landscape, you're gonna have like, oh, one of his episodes might pop off, but somebody else is gonna release something else that's a totally unique format that nobody saw coming.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And it'll just be like that. And people will just be scrolling onto the next, onto the next, onto the next. And that's gonna happen across everything. It's gonna happen across video game production, which I trust me, I have just as much anxiety as you. But the key is to adopt AI faster than the competition. And then just remember that,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
One, we're moving towards an abundance reality where if AI does all of the wildly disruptive stuff that people think it's going to do over the next, say, 10 years, it's also going to be dropping the cost of virtually everything. So everything is just getting cheaper. Now, this takes you into a post-capitalistic society, and there are big questions around what that looks like. But
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
People will have access to the things that they want for far, far, far cheaper. Now that doesn't mean people won't find a way to peacock through other means because we will. Um, but especially when you throw in the mix brain computer interfaces, this is all going to get real weird.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
There are already people that can play video games, like proper video games using just their brain computer interface.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
So I think people make a mistake when they do preemptive quitting or preemptive strikes. The reality is you want to pay attention. You want to be at the cutting edge. You want to be integrating AI. Right now, AI is a phenomenal tool and it is a terrible master. So it's not going to be able to do things without humans yet. So people should be excited right now for this phase.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
It's going to allow you to do more with less. And so if you're somebody like you that's paying attention and You've got a whole thesis. You know what you're moving towards. AI is going to help you keep costs down, help you stay really nimble. Now, if AI starts changing the landscape, then just pay attention. Like, okay, what do we need to do to stand out? How do we add value?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And yes, it's going to change things. And yes, some people are going to get smashed into little pieces. But if you're really paying attention and if you continue to look at where is the puck going to go, then you'll be in better shape.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Now, I've often made the quip that, yes, you should always skate to where the puck is going to go, but it's getting a little hard now because the puck is teleporting. But it's still, it's the right idea. You want to pay attention to, okay, predictive engine. Where is this going? What does this mean for content creation? I think there is going to be that hyper fragmentation.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
I think this is really going to be about deep communities. So part of the reason that I'm on Twitch now doing my video game streaming is that yes, I'm building a video game. So I need to build a community around that, but also historically I've built audiences, not communities. And so this is a chance for me to really build a deep community where the interactions are very different.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And that's gonna be something that AI will have a hard time with just because people know on the other side of this is not a person, it's AI. And so I think there will be some things that people just have a weird resonance when it's AI versus when it's a real person. So I'll be looking for opportunities like that. I'll be looking for places where I want to lean into the humanity of it all.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And I'll be looking for places where I want to lean into the AI of it all. But because I don't push back on the way the world actually is, AI is here. AI will keep getting better. AI may slow down, but I don't think it's going to stop. So I'm just paying attention to where it's at and how I can leverage it for now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
This is an emotion designed to mask the underlying thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yeah, and if I ever change my first principles approach, you should be the first to come punch me in the mouth. So first principles is quite literally the only way to think. It is at its simplest. It is trying to get to the fundamental base reality that we all live in, which we are shockingly bad at. And I can explain why later. But the idea is don't reason from analogy. Reason up from physics.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So the great example of this is Elon Musk saying, hey, for us to make a electric car that is priced to a place where the average person can afford it, we have to completely reinvent the way the batteries are made. Now, when they went around to everybody, everyone was just like, but this is the cost of batteries.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And he was like, well, does it violate the laws of physics to lower the cost of batteries? It might. If you go and look at what it costs to get it out of the ground and all that stuff and to mine it and You may be like, yeah, this is just it and there's no way to get any cheaper. But when he looked at it, he realized, whoa, there's like all these markups along the way.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
We could actually get closer to the source. We can do them for a lot cheaper. Cool. Same thing happened to me at Quest. We took our formulation for a protein bar to the manufacturers and they said, this bar can't be made. And we're like, hold on, does manufacturing this bar actually violate the laws of physics? Like that doesn't seem true.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so we went and looked at it and long story short, we realized what was happening is because the government subsidized corn, everybody used high fructose corn syrup in their products as a sweetener. It's cheap, it's delicious.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So all the equipment that had been manufactured over like the last 70 years could be made with the assumption that all the products that would run on it would have high fructose corn syrup. So this government intervention had all these downstream effects that nobody thought of. So when we said, well, wait, it's not that the bar can't be made, it's that we would have to engineer our own equipment.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so by being willing to engineer our own equipment and becoming our own manufacturer, suddenly it wasn't impossible. It was just impossible without equipment. And so by thinking from first principles, of, okay, this bar only takes a certain amount of pressure to put down. The bar has a certain viscosity. The bar has a certain level of stickiness.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So what could we re-engineer on the equipment to deal with the deviations from a standard product to our product? And once you engineer equipment with those different tolerances, now it produces just fine. And that ends up being one of the reasons that we are very successful. So that's thinking from first principles. You're not allowing anybody to hand you a frame of reference when
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
When people say think outside the box, what they mean is you've been handed a frame of reference. You see the entire world through that frame of reference. And you don't realize it's artificially limited because it's all shorthand. It's all analogy. Instead of saying, well, hold on. This is just how we view the world. It's not necessarily how the world actually is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so let me, again, go back down to base physics. and build up from that. And if you sell an info product or something like that, start with human psychology and build up from that. But don't let anybody tell you something is impossible unless it legitimately violates the laws of physics.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I don't want people to feel like this is an exercise where it's like, oh my God, do I really have to go back to quarks and bosons and all that stuff, which we don't even fully understand anyway. So most of the time when I'm running this experiment, it's for something for sales and marketing. And so forget all the early stuff, just get to how does the human mind operate?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Thanks for having me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
What do people look for in products? Like what is the truth, the inescapable truth of the human mind? So like, for instance, people don't make decisions rationally. They make them emotionally. I mean, I can just tell you that from the architecture of the human mind standpoint, that is true.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so once you get to that, it's like, oh, well, you may want to sell this product on features and benefits, but it won't work because that's not the architecture of the human mind. So now, instead of like, if you're looking at somebody else in your field, And you think, well, they're doing it as good as it can be done. Well, not necessarily.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
What are they missing in terms of their approach that would allow you to get more bang for your buck? If you go back to instead of the frame of reference that they're handing you and go, what do I know to be true about the way the human mind works? Now you can do something better. You can do something different and win because you're building up from universal truths about how people think.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Meaning and purpose is ultimately all that matters. If you have all the money in the world, but you don't believe in what you're doing, then it will be a very empty pursuit. Progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness. The average human is designed to get better. So if you put time and attention into getting good at something, you will actually get good at that thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
impact. Meaning and purpose is ultimately all that matters. If you have all the money in the world, but you don't feel engaged, you don't believe in what you're doing, then it will be a very empty pursuit. And I thankfully learned that lesson when I was quite young.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Okay, so that went in interesting waves. So when I was young, I felt very confident in myself, but I absolutely lacked self-awareness of any kind. And then as I began to develop self-awareness, I became incredibly self-conscious and very insecure.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
and then was afraid that I wasn't going to be able to achieve the goals that I wanted to achieve because I wasn't good at the things I needed to be good at. And I, at the time, just by default had a fixed mindset. So I believe that my talent and intelligence were fixed traits and life was just about making the most of what I had. Now, the honest answer is we are 50% hardwired. Like
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So yeah, when I had all the financial success at Quest, I knew that whatever I do next has to be grounded in meaning and purpose, just like Quest was. So my last day at Quest was Monday, and my first day at Impact Theory was Tuesday. And just Got right back to it because that's ultimately what feeds me is that sense of, okay, I'm doing something with my time that matters.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Half of what you're going to be able to achieve is grounded by just the hand that you've been dealt. But 50% is malleable. And so I started really focusing on the part that I could change and not worrying about whatever was hardwired. It is what it is. And so what can I do with that part that I could change?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And once I started leaning into that, then it was like, okay, I didn't need to believe I was special. I just needed to believe that I was average and that the average human is actually designed. That's what I call the only belief that matters. The average human is designed to get better. So if you put time and attention into getting good at something, you will actually get good at that thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You just have to put the time and attention in. So then it's like, okay, well, my goal makes a demand that I be good at X, Y, Z thing. Am I willing to go get good at it? Because I could certainly just assume you can get a hundred times better at anything. Am I willing to put the time and energy to get a hundred times better? And is a hundred times better going to be good enough?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if it is and you're willing, then you go down that path. And if it's not, you either stop pursuing that thing or you find a partner that can be good at the thing that you've decided you're not going to invest in.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But really getting the lay of the land of how the human animal actually works was freakishly liberating for me because I didn't have to believe I was born special, but it was incredibly encouraging to know that I could get better in any aspect of my life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yes. Free will is an illusion, though. And I mean, is an illusion. And if you don't believe me, read the book Determined. It's an unrefutable take. People will try to refute it. But if you read the whole book, I mean, he really does attack every answer.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So good, man. So good. You've got good guests. I like it. I'm in good company here. So yeah, Robert Sapolsky, absolutely brilliant. It's just a horrifying truth that we all think we have free will, but we really don't. But I don't think it matters. And I think if you let it influence your life, it will drive you crazy. You need to act as if you have free will.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It's the only logical way because here's why that matters. Even though we are automata, that are just responding to things, we do respond to ideas and we are changeable and we are changed by our surroundings. This is why culture just keeps getting better and better and better because as we learn more, we're able to do more, but there is no ability to escape your biology. It's just not possible.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Like even the most monk of monks has not escaped their biology. They've leveraged their biology in a pretty fascinating way, but they have not escaped their biology. And so just as nobody can will themselves to fly, they cannot will themselves to think a thought that they've never thought. If they could, then I would say, please solve quantum physics because that's in need of a solve.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if they then say, well, but I'm not smart enough. It doesn't have to do with free will. Yes, it does. You're just telling me that you're limited by your biology, which we already agree on. So I wouldn't spend a lot of time there, but it is true.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Obviously, I'm very thoughtful to make sure that I enjoy what I'm doing, even when I'm failing, that it's a thing that I not only care about the potential outcomes, but that I enjoy the process. So you got to fill your time somehow. And I'm not a retired to the beach kind of guy. So impact is to say it in a word.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You do have the ability to change. The question is, do you have the ability to direct that change? And I think he is correct. I know he is correct that we don't, but here's the catch. That idea is a worse idea for knowing that people will respond and change based on ideas. So it's one of those, it is true, and I never fight against anything that's true.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But part of the reason I don't bang that drum a lot is that it's just not a super helpful idea. So I have a goal, and that's human flourishing. To get to human flourishing, you have to pursue fulfillment. To pursue fulfillment, you need to act as if you can change your circumstances and make your life better and make the lives of others around you better.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if you go down that path, you will feel better about your life. And if you don't, you won't. Now, it is just true. I can't stop myself from saying that. I am hardwired. I've encountered these other ideas that make me want to say this, but great. I'm still going to act as if I'm in control and it makes my life better. And so I have a rule.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals. I'm not trying to create a false picture of the world. In fact, I'm trying to get to ground truth. However, I know that humans are ridiculously bad at identifying what is actually true. Therefore, I have to steer by something that I can tell, and that's effectiveness. So how useful is an idea in getting me where I wanna go?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if I, going back to one of your earliest questions, if I wanna feel good about myself when I'm by myself, what do I need to believe in order to do that? And so even though I know I'm just responding to my environment and my biology, that's not a good overarching narrative because it demotivates me. And so it's true. I just don't think about it. I think about things that motivate me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And that has led me to where I wanna go.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
As long as you understand need as it relates to, it is a more efficient way to get to the goal I have stated, which is human flourishing. But if somebody has a different goal, then it may not be as necessary. Like obviously for Robert Sapolsky, he's got a goal that's more in line with being, he would probably sum it up as a moral, compassionate being.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so he, to him, it is a moral violation to hold people responsible for their lot in life. Whereas for me, it is a moral violation to let people roam around the streets, attack people, even though I'm like, sure, it's not your fault, but I don't care. You can't roam the streets hitting people. So everything is an echo of somebody's goal, whether they realize it or not.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
All right, I was just talking about this on my Twitch gaming stream this morning. So, okay, it goes like this. First, you need to know exactly what your goal is. You need to care deeply about your goal. Like you have to really want it And you can run something I call the loop of desire to reinforce that. But you have to know where your goal is. You have to really want your goal.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Then you have to make sure that you're doing the things that are causing you to actually progress towards that goal. Tony Robbins talks about how progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness. Anytime you see something like that, you know you're tapping into those evolutionary algorithms that are running in your brain. So it just feels good.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then on top of that, this needs to be something that you have a really strong why that you're doing this. So I'm doing this to help these people is gonna be the most universal why. There's a group of people you care about for whatever reason you care about them, and you're pursuing this thing to help them.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And now that taps into the evolutionary demand that we have that we contribute to the group. And so if you want to stop being lazy, ironically, that's the sequence. And then one thing I'll add is you need rules in your life just so that you can demarcate whether you're doing the thing that you should be or not.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So the most important rule I ever put in my life was that once I realized I'm awake, I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. And I did that because I would lay in bed four and five hours a day every day. It was, I mean, looking back now, it's really crazy. The heartbreak I feel over how much time I lost So finally, I was just like, this is absurd. I'm now ashamed of myself.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Now, what you think about yourself when you're by yourself. So there's no one there to hype you up, no one there to tear you down. What do you think about you? And it's normally in that quiet space that people start beating themselves up and they don't feel they're living up to their own ideals. That matters. I think ultimately we just were hardwired for it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Shame actually ended up being helpful, but it was not fun to go through. And so once I finally built up enough shame, I was like, okay, the only way I can think to break this is to set a timer and be like, okay, you have to get out of bed no matter what. And that one simple rule has been one of the most impactful things in my life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Oh, she's amazing. You're going to love her.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yeah, well, so the catastrophe was just realizing that I didn't have talent. So that was gut-wrenching. So I had a fixed mindset. So I believed however good I am now is how good I will be forever. And that was the mystique of film school was like, hey, you're finding the best of the best. And it was like a whittling down process. Like, could you get into film school? That was the first thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Because when I went to USC film school, It was easier statistically to get into Harvard Law than it was to get into USC Film School. There were just that many people applying. And so I got in and I was like, oh, maybe I really am this brilliant filmmaker. And then you go through these series of classes, basically auditioning to see if you can be one of the four people chosen to do a senior thesis.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And I ended up being one of the four. And I was like, oh my God, I knew it. Like, this is my chance. Like, I'm just everything I've ever wanted is gonna come true. I'm gonna graduate. I'm gonna get the three picture deal. I'm the next Steven Spielberg. It's gonna be incredible. And I mean, I could taste it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then I made my senior thesis film and it was terrible, just objectively terrible on every metric that a film can be terrible. It was terrible. And I didn't think, oh, cool. Let me break this down to what are the things that I'm not good at yet that I need to get better at? Why was it that the earlier films that got me to be one of the four chosen?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
What did I understand about that style of filmmaking that I didn't understand? Because it's actually a pretty big leap in style of storytelling. I would say naturally, I had an intuition for silent storytelling that I did not have once you bring in dialogue and all of that. But at the time, I couldn't understand that. I was just like, oh my God, like I'm actually not good at this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I thought I was, but apparently I'm not. And so that was... As close to an existential crisis as I have ever been, because I thought that was gonna be my whole life, that was the death of a dream that I had. I mean, when you're, you know, whatever, 22, you feel like, wait, my whole life has been pointed towards this. I thought this was gonna be the next 60 years of my life, and it's just dead.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then you find yourself selling insurance Door to door. So I was like, whoa, it was one of those my how the mighty have fallen because I went from being celebrated at film school. I graduated second in my class. It was like, yo, this guy's really going to do something to actually hold on. No, no. embarrassing. Everybody knew my film was bad.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It was not like, oh, this is me being hard on myself. Everyone was like, oh God, that was like a train wreck. So it was emotionally devastating and I had no idea what to do. And then thankfully between Tony Robbins and some stuff about brain plasticity, And which now, of course, we would call a growth mindset, but Carol Dweck had not written that book yet, unfortunately for me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So start reading about brain plasticity, realize, wait a second, maybe it is possible to change and get better. I start teaching film and I realized, wait, I'm helping these students make their films better. Why couldn't I help myself make my own films better? And so then I was like, oh my God, this is a game of skill acquisition.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so then the things we've been talking about now start coming together as my belief system. And I realized, okay, wait a second. If I can get better, then this is about putting time and energy into getting better. And so I just poured myself into that, poured myself into it from a film perspective, poured myself in from a business perspective, and the rest is history.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
My life is what happens when you answer the question, How far am I willing and able to go if I get 100 times better at a small number of things that really matter to my goals?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yeah, the loop of desire is really basic. So you are having a biological experience. Your brain responds to certain things in a certain way. One very key thing to understand about your brain is you become whatever you repeat because of a process called myelination. So myelination is the wrapping of fatty tissue around the connections of the neurons in your brain.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Well, so we are a hungry species. We are designed to pursue. We're designed to grow, to keep getting after things. When you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, you would be hardwired to do the things that are gonna keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids. And so hard work,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So any emotions you feel, any thoughts you think, they will become easier for you to think and therefore will be the things you keep repeating. So the more you repeat something, the more you repeat something. So be careful what you repeat. So understanding that, that whatever I repeat is going to solidify in my mind. So what if I intentionally repeat something positive? Cool. So let's try that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Then there is your brain will justify... whatever amplitude of emotion you display. So if you freak out, your brain goes, whoa, I guess this really matters. So I was like, okay, well, then if I repeat a really high emotional state every time I talk about my goal, would it begin to myelinate such that now I'm Whenever I talk about it, I get that big emotional response.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So at first it felt like I was faking it. And then six months later, whenever I would talk about it, I would feel that sense of like passion and excitement. I was like, I can't believe this works. So be careful because you can align yourself to dumb things.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So if you pick a goal that's honorable, that is legitimately exciting to you, and then talk to yourself about it, what you're going to achieve, what you're going to do, and like with that feeling of passion and excitement that you hope one day you will feel naturally. And then when you talk to other people, which is even easier than talking to yourself, same thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You embody, embody the emotion you wanna feel and do that over and over and over. And then at least in my experience, call it four to six months later, now you can just be talking about it normally and you get that sense of like, oh man, this is really important to me. This is really exciting. You're like, wow, it's so crazy because six months ago, I was interested, like it was legitimate.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I didn't try to tie it to like, I really love grass. Like it's something you already have an interest in. But by doing that, now you've got the impetus to gain the skills. And by having that initial burst of energy married with getting the actual skill set, now you can make progress. And when you're making progress, then passion kicks in.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But you're not going to get to passion until you're actually able to use that skill in the real world to get feedback from other people. You are the shout and the echo. People are telling you, hey, you're improving my life by that thing you do. That thing you do could be podcasting. That thing you could do could be building a video game like I'm doing now. It could be accounting, whatever.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But people give you positive feedback. This is why so often adults are pursuing something that they first got that positive feedback on as a kid.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
contributing to the group, facing difficult tasks, making progress, like all of those things are hardwired. So the things that you do either make good on those evolutionary algorithms that you have running in your brain that say like, hey, you've just been lazy. I don't feel good about that. Or whoa, like you really did something and it helped a lot of people.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You're going to feel great about that. So in that sense, what you do becomes a critical component. So the way I like to explain it is we are both the shout and the echo. So we're the things that we do. That's the shout. And then we're what the world tells us they feel about the thing that we did.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Okay, so at Quest, we had 3,000 employees and 1,000 of them. I grew up in the inner cities and I thought, hmm, these guys are smart. Some of them smarter than me, but they're not doing anything with their lives. And when I started asking them like, hey, why aren't you doing this, that, or the other, the answers that came back were just ridiculous.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so I was like, this is not a intelligence problem. This is an idea problem. So I started what I then called Quest University. And I was like, let me teach you everything I know about entrepreneurship. One, it will just be good for your life. You can go on and work for any company at that. Like if you can master the skills that I'm teaching you guys, you'll be able to work anywhere.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Now, my hope, of course, is that you stay here because you realize I care about your future more than your own mother, but you'll be empowered. You can go anywhere that you want. And I poured my heart and soul into it. I came early. I stayed late. And we've had people start other companies that are still running to this day, almost a decade later. Absolutely incredible. I love it the most.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
The only catch is it was only 2% of the people that I brought those ideas to. 98% did nothing. And so I really started to get obsessed with, okay, what would we have to do to reach the 98%? And I very quickly realized you have to bypass the logical centers of their brain. You can't just say, think like this, act like this. You've got to really get into the storytelling of it all.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And anybody that thinks that they can escape that sense of like that feedback impacts me in some way is delusional. You are going to be impacted. Now you want to keep it in balance. You don't want to let that get out of hand where you only live for the validation of others, but we are a social animal. And so you will be impacted by what other people think.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And I mean, look, when you see political campaigns and stuff like that, that's exactly what they're doing. They're telling a story. Stories simplify things and they focus attention. And that is the magic of storytelling. This is exactly how humans are able to come together in these gigantic, flexible groups with people they've never even met and cooperate. You have shared stories.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It could be shared story of a nation state, could be shared story of a religion, but you need some sort of shared story to pass on values, to pass on identity. to give people a unifying narrative. So for better or worse, humans are a meaning-making machine and stories allow you to transmit meaning. So they're just a mechanism by which you simplify things enough to extract meaning from.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So we do it all the time. When we stub our toe on the coffee table, we tell a story. We're an idiot because we don't pay attention enough to our surroundings and that's what stubbing our toe means. Or you could tell yourself the story of, man, I'm so hardcore. I probably broke my toe just now, but I don't stop. I don't quit. I'm the kind of guy that keeps pushing forward.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So it all comes down to what's the story that you tell yourself about that thing. So it isn't what happens, it's what it means. And once people understand what it means, you're telling yourself that story. Someone may have said it from the outside, but you decided that that's what you were gonna repeat, that's what you were going to adopt.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So whether you're a marketer, whether you're just trying to lead your own team, you've got to tell them a story. This is why every company needs a mission. Your mission statement is about galvanizing your team. It's about telling the consumer what it means to buy your product, what they're sort of becoming a part of.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then in your marketing, you want to tell something that's simple enough that people can remember it like it's a story. And oftentimes, just literally telling a story inside of your marketing is one of the most useful things that you could do. A couple of times in this interview, you've asked me to tell stories from my childhood or whatever. And so we all just resonate to story.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So in the same way that when humans look at an image, we look for eyes. When people are hearing, okay, this thing happened, they're looking for the story in it. And so if you reveal character through it, if you reveal a moral through it, people are going to remember it way more than if it's just a list of facts.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
This is why humans get so bored in high school history only to later discover through, you know, like a hardcore history episode. Actually, history is amazing, but history is only amazing when you tell it like a story. If you tell it like a story, it's fascinating.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You tell it like disembodied facts and figures, not interesting at all and hard to remember because that's not the architecture of the human mind.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Well, it didn't just happen, but it was not something I ever thought I would do. So you heard the story of me graduating film school and things not going well. I met these two entrepreneurs and they were bang on the money. And they said, look, you're coming to the world with your handout. And if you want to control the art, you have to control the resources.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So if you want to build a studio, you want to tell your own stories. You should get into business and get rich. And I was like, oh man, that's so smart. I can't believe I didn't think about that before, brilliant. And this is like right before the tech bubble burst.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I was like, oh word, man, I'm gonna get into tech, take 18 months, build a company, sell it, all's good, be able to make my own movies. And that didn't work. So 18 months turned into 15 years, but it did work. And so that obviously ends up being incredible. And during that journey, I end up finding stroke constructing the reason that I was going to make films.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So instead of just doing it because I like stories, it became who am I going to help impact theory arises. It's literally called impact theory because my theory on how to impact people at scale is through story. So putting empowerment at the center of it becomes the whole jam. So I got into business strictly so that I could control my own destiny.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But I learned a very powerful lesson, which is I can guarantee you're going to struggle, but I cannot guarantee you'll be successful. And so you better struggle well. And so I stopped asking myself what I think is the worst question people could ask, which is, what would I do if I knew I couldn't fail? Because failure is the most likely outcome.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I started asking myself, what would I do and love every day, even if I were failing? And so that's why impact theory is literally architected from the ground up to be the things that, man, if I'm gonna fail at something, I wanna fail at this thing. So that has improved my life immeasurably. But do keep in mind, I'm saying that after having the gigantic financial success.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So if I had to do it all over again, I would very much go straight into storytelling. I would not go into business first, for sure, because it really is true that your network is your net worth. These are gonna be the people that open doors for you and stuff. And so I'm having to completely reinvent myself, meet all the new people, all that. And it's added a decade to my journey.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I could have gotten it done a lot faster. Now, the problem is going into business allowed me to learn all these principles. So I don't waste time lamenting that I didn't do it, but I am not somebody who's like, I have no regrets. Yeah, I would do it differently, but such is life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
No, I would have gone to somebody who was living the life I wanted to live, which would have been at the time in filmmaking, and said, I will work harder and smarter than anyone you know. And all I ask in exchange is knowledge and connections.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I would literally live in a hovel with five other guys, eat the world's cheapest food, do whatever I had to do to get by, but so that I could be as close to that person as humanly possible. I don't want to work for somebody who works for them. I want to be next to them all the time, watching how they deal with the world. That is insanely useful.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
To be honest, it hasn't changed in a very long time. And so when I was working 120 hours a week, which was a couple of years ago, I knew that I was making a short-term error for a long-term gain. And it really did, though, get to the point where I was beginning to damage my marriage.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It's all the in-between stuff that you would never even know. It's how a deal is structured. It's how to talk to somebody who's being a dick in a meeting, but doing it in a way where it's like they're not quite crossing the threshold where you can just call it out. How do you handle things like that? Or
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Somebody comes to you and asks for something that is clearly they're reaching beyond what they have any right to ask for, but they're kind of in a tough spot. And like, do you help them out? Do you not? Like all of those things, when you're in your early 20s, man, you have no idea how to handle all that stuff.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
you might be shooting from the hip, but you really don't have a sense of how it's all gonna play out. And when you can watch somebody go through all of that soft stuff that's next to impossible to teach in a business school, then it's like, if you can ask the occasional question, like, hey, I was really surprised the way you handled that thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
You're normally so hard on people, but you were really nice just then. Like, how do you know when to be hard and how do you know when to be soft? And if they're a thoughtful person and can be like, okay, well, let me explain why I was doing this here, why I did something completely different here and how I typically will make those decisions.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then to some extent, it's just seeing the patterns over and over and over and over and over. But you're not gonna get that when you start as a junior, junior, junior, something in a corporation where everybody's afraid of losing their job and they're lying to each other and playing politics. It's all just stupidly nightmarish.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So what I always tell young people is look, money only monetizes once. You can only spend it one time. but knowledge and connections monetize forever.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Let's go.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
That's a stack of really cool people. I love it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And that's always my barometer of, okay, if my marriage is really the most important thing in my life, simply because it has yielded the most return on my investment, then I needed to make a change. And so at the height of all that, I pulled my wife aside and said, look, I will find my way back to you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Well, the big thing was I only got into business so that I could build Impact Theory. So that was always self-evident, but we had had so much success and my partners and I no longer shared a vision on how to grow the company. And so it was like, well, we've been this successful. So I had been building what's now Impact Theory inside of Quest. It was literally called Inside Quest.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And I said, let me spin out this studio into a standalone company. They agreed, spun that out and Like I said, left Quest on Monday and on Tuesday was at Impact Theory. But yeah, that was the whole thing from the beginning. The guys that I was partners with back then were the ones that had said, hey, you're coming to the world with your handout. You should get into business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So it was not a surprise to them. So it was a very simple transition. And we've been at this now for almost a decade. It's crazy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I think people should don't let anybody tell you something is impossible unless it legitimately violates the laws of physics.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So AI tools will make it such that all of the things that we use as a moat are going to go away. So it takes a while to master all the tools. It takes a while to get all the different people on your podcast, all that stuff. What's going to end up happening is all of this information is going to fracture, like hyper fracture.
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Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And somebody will be able to have an idea for a video with or without a guest. I mean, you could post videos of like, here's my conversation, my imagined conversation with Elon Musk, stuff like that. And instead of actually needing to get that person on your podcast, you just have the AI spin up his personality. You ask a bunch of questions.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if you do it in a way that the audience finds more interesting than the next person, then that's going to be what it's going to be. So what's going to end up happening is right now, it's already changed so much. You're so young, you probably don't have a sense of just how much it's already changed. But like when I was growing up, there was, you know, whatever, five channels and that was it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And they controlled the narrative and we didn't even realize the narrative was being controlled. And then as things have gone to social, now you start seeing things break apart. Now, when I started podcasting, people literally like, Tom, why are you doing this? It's already played out. All the players that are there, that are going to be there. It's already decided, man. It's too late.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
When I started, there were 400 podcasts. There's now 6 million podcasts. So it is just insane how many more podcasts, I may have said 400,000 podcasts. So the world has just changed absolutely dramatically. And that's going to keep happening where the format of a podcast itself is going to get disrupted by somebody alone with an AI doing things that nobody's ever thought of before.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And it just became about putting business processes in place that I could hand things off, that I wasn't trying to do everything myself. And so it's like, look, at the same time, it's the period of my life that I'm probably the most proud because if the world was ever going to break me, that was going to be the moment And so it didn't.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And the difficulty of production, the friction of going from idea to execution is the current moat. That's going to go away, which means this will be more like TikTok.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So instead of there being a person that has a podcast, take a Rogan or something like that, instead of that person dominating the landscape, you're going to have like, oh, one of his episodes might pop off, but somebody else is going to release something else that's a totally unique format that nobody saw coming. And it'll just be like that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And people will just be scrolling onto the next, onto the next, onto the next. And that's going to happen across everything. It's going to happen across video game production, which I trust me, I have just as much anxiety as you. But the key is to adopt AI faster than the competition. And then just remember that one, we're moving towards an abundance reality where it's
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
If AI does all of the wildly disruptive stuff that people think it's going to do over the next, say, 10 years, it's also going to be dropping the cost of virtually everything. So everything is just getting cheaper. Now, this takes you into a post-capitalistic society, and there are big questions around what that looks like.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But people will have access to the things that they want for far, far, far cheaper. Now, that doesn't mean people won't find a way to peacock through other means, because we will. But especially when you throw in the mix brain-computer interfaces, This is all gonna get real weird.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
There are already people that can play video games, like proper video games, using just their brain-computer interface. It's nuts.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I think people make a mistake when they do preemptive quitting or preemptive strikes. The reality is you want to pay attention. You want to be at the cutting edge. You want to be integrating AI. Right now, AI is a phenomenal tool and it is a terrible master. So it's not going to be able to do things without humans yet. So people should be excited right now for this phase.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It's going to allow you to do more with less. And so if you're somebody like you that's paying attention and You've got a whole thesis. You know what you're moving towards. AI is going to help you keep costs down, help you stay really nimble. Now, if AI starts changing the landscape, then just pay attention. Like, okay, what do we need to do to stand out? How do we add value?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And yes, it's going to change things. And yes, some people are going to get smashed into little pieces. But if you're really paying attention and if you continue to look at where is the puck going to go, then you'll be in better shape.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And I kept pushing forward and I got the business to where it needed to be. And I got back into the rhythm of prioritizing my marriage. And so, look, it was not a period without its consequences. But if you're very cognizant of that, if you engage in my case with both the business and the marriage, to communicate, okay, business, this is what we're going to have to do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Now, I've often made the quip that, yes, you should always skate to where the puck is going to go, but it's getting a little hard now because the puck is teleporting, but it's the right idea. You wanna pay attention to, okay, predictive engine. Where is this going? What does this mean for content creation? I think there is gonna be that hyper-fragmentation.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I think this is really gonna be about deep communities So part of the reason that I'm on Twitch now doing my video game streaming is that, yes, I'm building a video game, so I need to build community around that. But also historically, I've built audiences, not communities. And so this is a chance for me to really build a deep community where the interactions are very different.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And that's going to be something that AI will have a hard time with just because people know on the other side of this is not a person, it's AI. And so I think there will be some things that people just have a weird resonance with when it's AI versus when it's a real person. So I'll be looking for opportunities like that. I'll be looking for places where I want to lean into the humanity of it all.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And I'll be looking for places where I want to lean into the AI of it all. But because I don't push back on the way the world actually is, AI is here. AI will keep getting better. AI may slow down, but I don't think it's going to stop. So I'm just paying attention to where it's at and how I can leverage it for now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yeah, so it is impact theory in the sense that my theory on how to impact people at scale is through entertainment. The most dominant form of entertainment right now is video games. Also a core part of my thesis is that who I'm focused on is 11 to 15 year olds. So Project Kaizen is a game, if anybody's ever heard of Extraction Royale, it's an Extraction Royale game that's aimed at
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
11 to 15 year old demographic, technically 13 and up because of SOPA laws. But that's that core demographic that's in what's known as the age of imprinting. And so trying to reach them so that we can introduce empowering ideas. So one of the characters in the game right now, which is out right now, by the way, if anybody wants to play it, it's a free to play game at projectkaizen.io.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And Bruce Lee is one of the characters in the game. And It's an official collaboration with the Bruce Lee family. And the reason I wanted Bruce to be our launch partner was he had a tremendous impact on my life, even though he had passed away before I was born. But he wrote a book called The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, which was about his style of martial arts.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And some of the ideas in there, even though I didn't train in the martial art, the ideas were profoundly shaping Bruce. for the way that I think now about mindset and getting better and all of that stuff. So we wanted him to be a character in the game who's like our Morpheus or our Obi-Wan Kenobi. He's the mentor character that's giving the players advice.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So yeah, really excited for people to get into it. And then the other part is the UGC aspect. So players can come in and build their own maps. And this is the very beginning of a much deeper set of tools that we'll build for players to build their own content.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
We're going to have to get people in that replace these different elements. We're going to have to create new processes so that this isn't so manual. And then dear wife, we're going to need to start setting aside some time. I need a couple more months to really put these processes in place. But if you can just bear with me until this time, I won't be working these stupid hours anymore.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yeah, so I think the way that creators need to think is your job is to create a container for your community to come in and create. So because I think in IP, the way that we look at it is we've created Project Kaizen. It's this gigantic sci-fi world. And inside that world, there's characters and stories and things.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
physics, if you will, rules of the game, the way that it all works, the conceit of our story is that everything you've ever known is a simulation. So imagine the matrix, but there's no real world. The matrix is the real world. There's nothing else. And in that story, that means that we're connected to other dimensions and all that kind of stuff.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And that way, as players spin up their own storylines, they can be like, oh, we're from this what we call instance, a server instance, or a universe, if you want to think of it in those terms. So we're from this universe. These are our people. This is what our world looks like. And they can literally build that up as much as they want. It could be as simple as one little floating island.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It could be all the way to a planet. Not yet, but one day. And them being able to tell their own stories and then giving the community the ability to say, hey, this person's storyline is follows all of your guidelines impact theory. We love it and want this to be canon in your world. And so when a story meets certain criteria, players can vote for it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then if we approve it, then it becomes official canon within our world. And so our goal is for them, if you know UEFN, this is what Fortnite's doing, is absolutely brilliant, giving the players the tools from the game to build their own sort of mini games inside of it. And so we're doing a very similar thing, much smaller scale compared to Epic, which is absolutely gigantic.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
But I think this is just the future. I think everybody's going to be doing this. So it's not like, oh, we're trying to be some pale shadow of what Epic is doing. I just think this is the future in the same way that if you were going to launch a video site, of course, you're going to let people upload to it. There would be no other way.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
That is our plan now is to give players the ability to create unique experiences within our container.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Always be learning. Always be learning. So it should cue off of your goal. So again, your goals make demands, but I spend on average two hours a day, 365 days a year, every day for the last 15 years, maybe more learning. Be a relentless learning machine.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so because I was able to make a promise, make good on that promise, And then she could see the results that I was yielding in the business. So it's like through communication, all things are possible. So I don't believe in balance. The cheesiest way to say it is I believe in harmony. The more accurate way to say it is goals make demands.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So for me, I know that nothing matters more than reciprocated love. So I make sure that I put a ton of time and attention into that. And then also I manage my biology. So I get sleep. I eat healthy. I exercise. I work out. I maintain loving relationships beyond just my wife. Those things are incredibly important.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And then if I can really ground this for people, guys, you have to learn how business works. Like business has physics. And if you really want to get good, you need to learn those physics. And they are available for anybody to learn, anyone to master. The game is really relatively simple. Learn it. Learn the game. Do not let yourself get overwhelmed. Just one piece at a time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Pick apart the skill set. Learn it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Yes. And where it interfaces with leadership and human psychology? Yes.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
At Tom Bilyeu across the socials. Best place is probably YouTube.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Absolutely. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And as long as you're executing in priority order, then you can have everything you want, but you can be very efficient in what you get done by just saying, okay, this is the most important thing that I can do based on my goals and where I want to end up. This is the second most important, so on and so forth down the list.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if it's integrated with a marriage and friendship and things like that, you'll be fine. But most people, and this is really like, hey, dear everybody listening, if you want to know one problem I see over and over and over is people allow themselves to get overwhelmed. There is not an amount of things barring a hot war where people are literally getting shot and dying around you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
There's nothing that should be able to overwhelm you. And so overwhelm is about an expectation that you are putting on yourself that you can carry an infinite load that triggers a psychological revving up of you trying to track every variable. And the reality is that I don't ever get overwhelmed, even when I was working 120 hours a week and it was a massive physical toll.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Money only monetizes once. You can only spend it one time. But knowledge and connections monetize forever. As long as you're then you can have everything you want.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
There was never the additional layer of I'm mentally breaking because I just, it's all about priorities. I have them in priority order. I draw a dotted line and say the things below the dotted line just are not going to be addressed right now. And I'm able to just shut that door.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And what I find is people are not able to shut the door on the things that exceed the number of hours that they're willing to work. And so they're trying to track everything, even the things that are what I call dormant priorities. And that's the thing that drives them crazy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And you literally just have to do what's known in behavioral cognitive therapy as cognitive behavioral therapy, excuse me, as a pattern interrupt. And so like anybody, I get that initial impulse of like, oh my God, like I can feel my brain speeding up. And that's when I say to myself, I don't do overwhelm. And then I do diaphragm breathing and I slow down ironically.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And in slowing down, rather than trying to speed up, to do everything, it just dissipates. And I thought this would be something I could just tell people about. They would adopt it and it would be great. Man, I see people get overwhelmed all the time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
No doubt about that. My marriage has given me more of everything that you could want than anything else. So my wife has certainly made me a better person. I do not know who I would be if I had not met her. I met her in my early twenties and we've been together for 24 years, married for over 22. It's crazy. Yeah, it's extraordinary. Absolutely.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And having somebody that supports you and having somebody that sees things that you would otherwise be blind to, somebody that instead of getting on their knees and crying with you when things are going rough, they're like picking you back up and reminding you who you are and brushing your shoulders up.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
My wife has given me the Jerry Maguire speech many times to get me back in the game when you're starting to flag. So that's really been incredible. Being self-aware and having a partner that is also self-aware and that can talk with you and lay options out and help you problem solve, that's really the thing that I would give the credit to. And so you don't necessarily need a significant other.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It helps. It's wonderful. And I encourage it for everybody. But I don't want people to feel like that's out of reach simply because you don't have a partner. Because it ultimately comes down to what are the beliefs that you hold that are choices? What are the values that you hold? Those are choices.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if you live by your beliefs and your values and your beliefs and values are positive and they move you in the right direction, you're going to be fine. Now, if you have a significant other to reinforce it all even better, but certainly not necessary.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Well, so failure, the only right way to approach it is to approach it like AI. So when AI is trying to learn a pattern, which is essentially what all of us are trying to do, it tries a thing and it gets a result. And it's not like, I mean, you can't imagine the AI having like an emotional breakdown. oh my God, like I tried to play this video game and it didn't work.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
It's like the AI just goes, okay, I'm trying to learn the rules of the game and I move the paddle this way and I don't make contact with the ball. I don't get any points. So what if I move over here and then eventually it makes contact with the ball and the ball bounces and scores a point. It's like, oh, okay, I see now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I have to make contact with the paddle and the ball and the ball will then hit this. And so you're just getting what are known in AI as samples. So you try a thing. It gives you a piece of data. This is a sample. Now you know a little bit more about the world.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And if people understood that you're running trial and error as a way of building up a prediction engine so that you know, oh, when I do this, I get this outcome. And that really is all life is. It's what I call the physics of progress. You're trying to build a prediction engine so that you know, when I do this, I get this result. And I want to go to XYZ goal.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
and I see what I have to do in order to get there, and I've got such an accurate prediction engine, I can now do all the things that are gonna take me there. Now, you can never be guaranteed to arrive at your goal because the world is just changing so rapidly, but at least if you're running this exercise of the physics of progress, you always know what to try next.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Whether it will work or not depends on a whole host of factors, but that is really, really useful. And failure is a necessary part of that sequence. And there's an amazing guy, the largest hedge fund manager in the world named Ray Dalio. He's got a great quote, which is, pain plus reflection equals progress.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
And so when you fail, it hurts, but that sting causes you to reflect and say, okay, I want to feel this way again. What did I do last time? What was the outcome that I got? Let me change my behavior so I can get where I want to go. And as long as you don't let that emotionally break you, then you can hit escape velocity.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
I would say it slightly differently. So I think people should distrust their emotions. So this is where you wanna ground in the fact that you're having a biological experience. And so I'm gonna ask myself, okay, I feel some kind of way. Why do I feel the way that I feel? If you're really gonna go macro, this is evolution only has two levers, pleasure and pain.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Evolution has one goal, to make sure that you survive long enough to have kids and have kids. Okay, so I'm doing something right now that hurts. That means I'm doing a thing that evolution does not want me to keep doing, or I'm doing something pleasurable. This is something that evolution wants me to keep doing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Okay, now, if my goal is not focused on having kids that live long enough to have kids, I have some different goal, then those emotions might not be what I need to reach my goal. And this is what I see all the time. People confuse feelings. Feeling with thinking. Don't make that mistake, boys and girls. Feeling is not thinking.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So feelings are literally a very high bandwidth communication from the part of your body and your subconscious mind that can read a lot of points of data very, very quickly. But it's hard to translate that into conscious thought, into communication. words, even more narrow of a data pipe. And so you just get a feeling, right? Tiger and bush run. You don't have to think through it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
In fact, you may not even get to tiger. You just have a sense. I need to get out of here right now. You don't know why. You don't know what it is. Maybe you picked up on a rustling in the bush. certain way, you know, a stick cracked. And the same is true in relationships, in business, you just get this overwhelming feeling. Now, if in that moment, you realize my life isn't actually in danger.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So the fact that I'm having this really strong emotion should lead me to pause and go, why am I feeling this? And if you can pull that very high bandwidth emotion through that low bandwidth pipe into your conscious mind and say, oh, this is what all of that is boiled down to something very simple, which is almost always if you're having a negative emotion anyway, it's almost always an insecurity.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
So I'm worried if I don't get this right, my business is going to fail and then I'm going to lose her. I'm a loser and my parents are going to disown me or my girlfriend is going to break up with me, whatever it's. And it's all happening, again, based on that level of emotion. If you can slow down and say, hold on, that's overwrought. That's ridiculous.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
This is one of many things that I need to think through. I can make a lot of mistakes and still be fine. I do need to be thoughtful. I need to learn my lessons. But people don't do that. They get mad and they react mad. And then that makes things worse. And they never take the time to say, why am I mad? Oh, wow, this is an insecurity, not anything positive or empowering.