Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tom Bilyeu: How I Proved Everyone Wrong and Built a Billion-Dollar Brand
Tue, 17 Dec 2024
Tom Bilyeu’s journey is a powerful story of transformation, from self-doubt to self-mastery. His early years were shaped by fear of failure, a lack of direction, and doubts from those around him. After struggling to break into the film industry, he joined a startup with the goal of getting rich, but found himself unhappy and in a strained marriage. Taking a leap of faith, Tom walked away from millions to pursue something more meaningful. This gave rise to Quest Nutrition, a billion-dollar company creating nutritious, great-tasting products. Yet, for Tom, wealth was never the endgame. He launched Impact Theory, a media company designed to impact lives positively. In this episode, Tom shares with Ilana the key moments that shaped his career, the philosophies that drive him, and how he defines true success. Tom Bilyeu is a billion-dollar entrepreneur, motivational speaker, co-founder of Quest Nutrition, and founder of Impact Theory. Through his content, he inspires millions by sharing tips on overcoming self-doubt, developing the right mindset, and building resilience for success. In this episode, Ilana and Tom will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:43) Facing Doubts and Rejection (04:21) How Neuroscience Changed His Mindset (06:28) Why People Struggle to Make Progress (07:59) Learning the Power of Discipline in Film School (12:46) Tom’s Guide to Finding Your Next Step (15:25) Walking Away from $2 Million to Save His Marriage (17:14) Building Quest Nutrition with the Right Team (22:00) Why Tom Launched Quest Nutrition (24:37) The Key to Surviving Entrepreneurship (26:19) Strategies for Thriving in Competitive Markets (30:20) Solving What Others Say Can't Be Done (31:16) Conquering Fear Through Hardwork (36:20) The Journey from Quest to Impact Theory (40:15) Using Entertainment to Inspire Young Minds (45:24) Lessons from Childhood that Built Tom’s Resilience (48:06) Two Beliefs to Unlock Your Potential (49:44) Letting Go of Ego to Grow Tom Bilyeu is a billion-dollar entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and co-founder of Quest Nutrition, a company that revolutionized the health and fitness industry with its protein bars. After selling Quest Nutrition, he founded Impact Theory, a media company focused on empowering people through storytelling. Through his podcasts, interviews, and online content, Tom inspires millions by sharing tips on overcoming self-doubt, developing the right mindset, and building resilience. Connect with Tom: Tom’s Website: https://tombilyeu.com Tom’s YouTube: youtube.com/c/TomBilyeu Tom’s Twitch: www.twitch.tv/tombilyeu Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training
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.
Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of the billion-dollar company Quest Nutrition. You also started Impact Theory, a media company that helps others realize their full potential, build massive thought leadership. I mean, you have, what, 4 million YouTube subscribers, 500 million content views.
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.
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...
Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of the billion-dollar company Quest Nutrition. FYI, my kids and their friends are huge fans, so I'm so excited, and they're gonna love this episode. You also started Impact Theory, a media company that helps others realize their full potential, build massive thought leadership. I mean, you have, what, 4 million YouTube subscribers, 500 million content views.
It is incredible, massive impact. But Tom, will you take us back in time to Tom who was a teen? Maybe your mom kind of believed that you will not be as successful. Tom, take us there for a second.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And so I just spent the last, whatever, 30 years proving that that's true.
And to me, that is so strong because sometimes we look at people like you and we say, oh, it's all been easy. Their path to success has been all pink and roses. And it looks like it's almost like a born thing. You have to be born an incredible leader. And that's the only people that are successful. And I think one of the...
quotes that you have that just hit me like a brick I think you're kind of at some point you say something along the line like I needed to admit that I'm actually average I don't know exactly how you say that but that to me was hitting home because I think this is what listeners need to hear everybody can do this now the only question is how hard are you going to try when are you going to give up what are you willing to do for success talk to us a little bit what changed for you
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because again, it's uncomfortable as heck and fear can be numbing. It will be numbing. But then again, you go to film school, which is basically, I want to say 180 degrees from where you ended up, but actually you are coming back towards that. But share a little bit, you go to film school, what happened there?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
seeing you suddenly that motivated and hustling to make this way, what made you fall off that horse?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
And I absolutely love what you just said about the quality of a questions will dictate the level of success that you have, but you need to remember to listen to the data, not the drama that comes with it, right?
And I think one of the things that you say is don't limit yourself to where you are now, which I think is also really important because the lens that we see life in is right now, but it's hard to really connect the dots. After this conversation, horrific experience after film school. You somehow joined kind of at the bottom of a startup, right? Tell me a little bit about what that experience was.
And I think it was a pretty toxic environment as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I read Lisa's book, Radical Confidence, who is your wife, for those who don't know, it literally seemed like it's, almost like within a few days or a day or something. Like you literally are supposed to move out. You're supposed to quit. And instead, you're starting Quest. And in fact, you believe in it so much that you're willing to risk your house, if I'm reading this correctly.
What switched? Can you go back and why Quest? Can you share that a little bit, Tom?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you share why Quest?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I love how you explain the team, because I think this is so hard to find. Teams that are from different backgrounds, they all bring a different mix, but they're all passionate about something. It's not easy to find at all. And I love that it's based on a personal thing, right?
Because I think one of the hardest thing and tell me what you noticed in the Tom, but is that in entrepreneurship, there's a lot of what we call the near death experiences. It gets really hard. And I think having that really strong why really, really helps stop. Did you run into that?
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.
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.
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
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.
between wanting to do something big and actually growing to Inc., you know, second fastest growing company, I told you, I have so much respect because I felt we are growing really fast and you are just like at a whole different level. How do you do that? How do you get started? Because again, it's, there've been other bars before. Yes, they were disgusting, but how do you get in front of people?
And I think a lot of it is what you stated, but it would be great to hear a little more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is a mic drop here that I need to also sink in a little bit. And I think that is just so fundamental because there is something about a best product, but there's also a best known product. But what you're saying is sometimes you need to think about what you're actually selling. And in your case, it's not necessarily the game. It's not necessarily the bar. It's the community.
that will advocate for it because that's going to create a real snowball versus trying to acquire one in one, right? That's what's going to make it successful, which is so interesting. As a CEO, as a founder, What makes you so determined? And again, I'm sure a lot of it is experimentation, but there's a lot of noises and there's a team that says that this is not the right way.
What helps you with decision-making? Because I feel like that's a hard one sometimes.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
How do you cope with fear, Tom? Because that sounds scary. That is a decision that costs more. Now you need to raise more capital. Like, I don't know, whatever, maybe you didn't. But I'm just saying that is a scary decision. How do you cope with the fear?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you just have to be willing to do what other people are not willing to do.
Yeah, there's a saying, there's no traffic jam at the extra mile, right? And I think you say it really well. Don't ask what's the minimum I need to do, but ask what's the maximum I need to bear, right? And it's just so exact. So you decide to sell Quest, right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you're starting a media production company with Lisa. Yeah, and again, you're not retiring on an island. Why, first of all?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I agree with all of it. And I have kids and I don't necessarily think for me personally, it's enough. Every single person can decide what's right for them. And I think it's really important to bring not just the paycheck, but the life that you want with it. And I think you actually say there's no amount of success that you can stand in it forever.
And I actually just talked about it literally two hours ago with the ex-president of Starbucks, right? You could theoretically, you know, ticked a lot of boxes of success and it's just not enough, not for certain people. Again, waking up every single day with this mission. Talk a little bit about this mission. Why is it fueling you so much?
Why are you trying to touch that 11, 15-year-old to become their best version?
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.
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.
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.
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%?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Wow. That is incredible. Well, I have two kids to donate, so. We'll take it.
We need all the feedback we can get.
That's incredible. Do you think there's something that you went through in your childhood or after that builds you to who you are today?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I will make sure my kids listen to that. But Tom, if you go back in time, I don't know, maybe right after film school, when you're kind of in that phase of anxiety, maybe even depression, I know a lot of our listeners are very driven, but some of them just don't know what's next for them or how to take themselves to a next level or how to really become their full potential.
What would be one advice that you would want to hear back in the days that you wish you knew?
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I was vice president, theoretically ticked some boxes of success. And I thought that I was coachable. I thought that I knew it all. It's kind of that ego that you're talking about, right? That confidence that you think you have, you think you know it all. And actually that's the most dangerous area because you're not listening to learn, you're listening to argue.
And you're listening to prove to someone else that they're wrong and you know better. How do you wake somebody up from that? Because again, I wish somebody woke me up a decade ago, but I don't know if I was even receptive to listening. How do you wake somebody up?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
That is so strong, Tom. Anything else that you want to share with our audience that they can help you?
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.
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.
Tom, thank you so much for all the nuggets and all the inspiration. And I was really looking forward to it because I was binging your stuff. But thank you so much for sharing all of it.
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. And I'm so impressed with your 314. Well done. That is unbelievable.
Thank you. We sort of made the list. So I'm proud fastest growing company.
As a favor to me, don't ever say it like that again.
Okay. Okay.
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.
So it's incredible what you've done and you should be obscenely proud of yourself.
Thank you, Tom. We are, we are. And we're changing lives, just like you guys. So I think we share that passion, which is important. But thank you for all the inspiration, Tom.
Truly my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.