Win At Anything In 2024 - Escape Mediocrity, Master Power & Build Wealth | Tom Bilyeu

in your pursuit of a goal that you care about you are going to end up getting in a rut in that moment most people give up I'm going to tell you what you need to do if you want to be part of the 8% that actually sees their goals through if you struggle getting up and getting your day started early even though you want to and know that you should be doing it this comes down to two things one it's all mechanism all the time what are you doing with your night routine to make sure

that you're getting to bed on time because the reality is if you're TI TI you're not going to want to get up the reason so many people lack motivation is because of as Vince lardi said fatigue makes cowards of us all if you're tired you just don't have what you need to face the day life is hard being a human is difficult life is going to kick you in the face the second law of Thermodynamics makes abundantly clear that life moves inextricably towards one thing chaos and the only way to tame the chaos and create

order in your life is by pouring energy into the system to pour that energy into the system you need energy at two levels at the cellular level and psychological energy now it's easy enough to get yourself pumped up psychologically but to get yourself pumped up at a cellular level you have to make sure that you are getting to bed on time getting plenty of sleep eating right and getting exercise and meditating if you're not doing those things and you're not going to be primed at a cellular level now to get the psychological energy we get

to the second thing you just don't want it badly enough most people don't want the thing that they're pursuing in their life for two reasons reason number one you don't realize that desire is a process you build desire for things you were not born with some intense and satiable desire you do have imperatives that Evolution has given us but you don't have these intense desires other than like hunger thirst sexual drive but you certainly don't have a drive to go to the gym you don't have have a drive to be more successful at work that's

actually only minorly true certainly for guys you probably do have a pretty strong imperative to gain access to resources but it will not direct you towards the thing that you're specifically going to pursue so you'll have a vague sense of I want to do more I want to be more I want to be admired I want to be at the top but the top of what that's where people get themselves into trouble because they lack that Clarity they lack that Clarity because they don't realize that you just have to pick something that you already respond

positively to naturally you encountered it it gave you more energy than it took you're naturally drawn to that thing you want to do it okay but it's not going to be like oh my God I need to dedicate the rest of my life to this I spring out of bed in the morning because I'm so excited about this thing that is not how it works you'll just be like oh that's cool I dig that thing now if you go put time and energy into build building desire which is basically the process of explaining to yourself

why that thing matters to you and as you repeat that in an embodied way meaning you embody the enthusiasm for that thing that you want to feel and you loop around it and you actually go and get better at that and do it in the world and people are like oh man that's so cool I love that you can do that thing and you get that positive feedback and it was already energizing to you and you loop around why it matters why am I investing in this so much and you do that over and over

in an embodied way now all of a sudden 6 months later a year later it really is this raging Inferno at the center of your soul something that you care about and want incredibly deeply but you have to go down that process of gaining Mastery of really pushing yourself around why you're going to love this thing so much and then it actually becomes real you become what you repeat so if you're repeating that you're an idiot that you don't love yourself that will become true now self-worth is a very complicated topic that is beyond the

scope of this conversation but just know that you do become what you repeat so be very thoughtful all right those really are the two reasons that people are going to struggle so you have to focus on making sure that you're getting yourself energized for this thing that you're pursuing and then you have to make sure that mechanistically you're doing the things that you need to do so you're not tired all the time but most people fail to get enough sleep they go to bed with such wild swings that it's like having jet leg like everybody

goes oh yeah if I traveled to the east coast from the west coast and I had three hours of jet leg of course I'm going to be tired well what do you think happens when your bedtime swings by an hour 2 hours 3 hours you're going to experience that same kind of disruption in your sleep cycle also people do a lot of things to have poor sleep hygiene from breathing through their mouth taking in blue light going to bed at different times watching TV right before they go to bed checking their text messages reading emails

working on stressful things all of this stuff are things that are going to disrupt your sleep and and and the biggest one which we haven't even talked about how close to your bedtime do you eat food I have roughly 7 hours between my last meal and my bedtime and it's amazing and I have found that if I even eat within 3 hours of going to bed I can feel the difference now 3 hours is I would say good if you got 3 hours of distance between the last moment you were chewing so not when you

start the meal the last moment you were chewing and when you go to bed you're in pretty good shape I think you will find that you sleep better the longer that you stretch that period out there's of course also a lot of individual variability I've heard some very interesting information around carbohydrates and if you have uh your last meal has a fair amount of carbohydrates that you will sleep better now I find for me that that actually is true if I have carbohydrates but they're not high sugar wear a glucose monitor it's very enlightening but

if I have something that doesn't Spike my glucose massively so think about um doing a lot of greens things like that leafy greens that I actually will sleep better but I need to have a pretty big distance still between between my last meal and when I go to bed you going have to experiment with the stuff when it comes to diet there is so much individual variability it's absolutely terrifying so try it run that but I find that most people eat within an hour maybe 90 minutes before they go to bed that's going to disrupt

your sleep massively so be very thoughtful about trying that and experimenting once you get all of that down and you hold yourself accountable to doing all of this stuff then I think you're going to find getting up is very easy but if you don't address how badly you want the thing you're getting out of bed for and your physiology it's going to be a struggle forever and last but not least I'll throw in a little bonus here and that is you have to have standards I'm angry with myself if I don't get out of bed

in 10 minutes or less I'm angry at myself if I don't go to bed on time because I really want the things that I'm pursuing so be really thoughtful of about that don't do it because you ought to find a way to get excited about it then build rules in your life around that and so you're doing it because it's what you want for yourself and so the reason that you're upset with yourself when you don't do it isn't because you're worried about disappointing other people it's because you really want it and you're not acting

in accordance with that that's it get after it if you have a goal to get up early and you find that you don't and you're feeling badly about yourself you have to be very thoughtful about how you react in that moment I may big fan of rewarding and punishing yourself but you have to be very good at how you go about that so when you do what you're supposed to do of course you want to Pat yourself on the back you want to give yourself that emotional uplift of recognizing a job well done and when

you don't you definitely want to face Square on you said you were going to do it and you didn't do it and that is a black mark on your day now the problem is that when you continue to beat yourself up now you're going to begin to diminish sense of self I advise you never do anything that diminishes your sense of self you want to hold yourself accountable you want to have a standard you want to live up to it I think that's incredibly important and I think so many people fail to get where they

want to go in life because they fail to hold themselves accountable so you want to set a standard you want to hold yourself accountable to that standard but you also want to make sure that you only do and believe that which moves you towards your goals I have a rule in my life that I only do that I'm not trying to live in a post-truth world this isn't isn't me just deciding that I'm going to believe in whatever I want to believe in in fact I Define truth as the thing that most efficiently moves you

towards your goal I think that you're most closely aligned to what is true when you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors and when you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors I think you're on to what is true so we're not going to sit there and belittle ourselves and tear ourselves apart we're going to acknowledge that what we did it breaks our rule that we had that rule in the first place because it is the set of behaviors that most effectively moves us towards our goal so we want to get back on

track because we actually care about our goal and we want to do the thing that's moving us towards our goal we're not going to get back on track because we think we're a bad person or we're worried what the world is going to think this all needs to be intrinsic motivation you need to care you need to have some reason why you want this thing so badly that you've put all these rules around s in the first place all the rules that I have the amount of work that I do how hardcore I am the

standard that I hold myself to rewarding myself punishing myself it's all in service of what I want so make sure that you want something that is legitimately exciting to you make sure that you've spent the time to build that desire in yourself and then make sure that you recognize that the most important thing that you can do to bounce back is to bounce back right away to not beat yourself up any more than is useful to bouncing back to getting back on track and then when you get back on track and you say okay cool

this happens to me all the time I have a rule I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less and sometimes uh my feet will hit the floor right as it clicks over into the 11th minute now I never miss it by much but when I'm due one I confess I tell my wife I'll go on camera I'll tell people ah I didn't make it today I like to hold myself accountable and I feel good when I hold myself accountable because I'm willing to stare nakedly at my inadequacy IES I didn't do it today

I said I was going to and I didn't but my willingness to own that to admit it to not lie to myself to not lie to other people to say hey I didn't do it today that act makes me feel good because I know how effective it is I know how much I've gotten out of my Life by being honest when I don't do the things that I wanted to do by reminding myself why I want to do them by reminding myself why I have these rules in place and then living in accordance with that

and when I don't to give myself that reminder that hey you said you were going to do it and you didn't not making excuses owning everything completely and reminding myself that my life is an exact reflection of my choices and that I made my day a little bit worse by not doing what I said I was going to do but at the same time that if I just sat there and beat myself up on what a loser I am that I'm not going to get done the things that I need to get done in order

to make meaningful progress towards my goals so I do it just enough to kick myself in the ass and then I stop I get back on track I reward myself for getting back on track and boom it's all systems go the most important thing that you can do to wake up early is to get your night routine on point my night routine really begins at 2: p.m. this is all true so what I found was the number one thing that disrupted my sleep was I would wake up in the middle of the night to pee

and then my mind would start worrying around all the problems that I have to solve and I would be up for two 2 and 1 half hours in the middle of the night every single night and so I was like okay what would I need to do in order to make sure that I never wake up to pee and at first I thought well if I just stop drinking water in the you know late afternoons Orly evening I should be fine that didn't work and then I realized ah this is a food problem if I

stop eating food earlier then I can kill two birds with one stone one I can elongate my intermittent fasting window which is already incredibly powerful but two I'm also not going to have a bunch of water being extracted from the food as I lead up to bedtime so what I do is I have my last meal I start eating at about 1:15 I'm usually done chewing by about 2:00 then by the time I go to bed at 900 p.m. I've had 7 hours without eating and I also I don't drink I have one sort of

final sip right at right before I go to bed at call at 850 855 but from 2 to then I don't have any water so I'm able to sleep through the night perfectly well I'm able to drink as much water as I need during cuz I wake up at say 3:30 to 4:30 somewhere in there so I'm able to get a ton of water on my system before 2 p.m. and so everything works perfectly so that's the first thing that I start doing the next thing I do is uh going to the food thing I

want to make sure that I have a minimum of 3 hours of not eating before I go to bed for reasons of digestion so even if I didn't have the water problem not eating eating not having food in my digestion is hugely important now the reason that I know that this actually makes a difference is if on the weekend I'm having a cheap meal I can actually drink water I don't have to stop drinking water because the carbohydrate intake will cause me to retain water so I'm not going to have that problem even if I

eat close to bedtime and keep drinking throughout the day it's actually wonderful I love it I can pound water right before I go to bed something about water at night tastes so good uh I don't have to worry about that if I've had a high carbohydrate meal so what I found though is that even by eating let's say 3 hours before I go to bed I can still tell the difference in my sleep but 3 hours is sort of that maximum where it's not truly disruptive so no matter what whether you have trouble uh with

peeing at night or not you want to make sure that starting 3 hours before you go to bed you finished all of your food intake that's really important also 3 hours before I go to bed I will avoid blue light so I wear blue blocking glasses and I make make sure that my computer um shifts over into night mode so that it actually turns the screen uh warmer colors I dim the lights I try not to get bright lights in my eyes all of this stuff makes a really big difference also I don't do any

stressful work at least an hour before I go to bed so even though I'll keep working up until I go to bed at 9:00 as I get later into the evening I do things that are far more predictable and less stressful so for instance I have um an episode to prepare for today and so tonight as I start getting ready for bed that will be one of the last things that I do literally right up until I go to bed because it's something that isn't about problem solving it's not stressful I'm not going to be

surprised by some problem that exists in the business right as I'm about to go to bed I realized you know huge Spike of adrenaline and cortisol because oh my God I just realized we have some problem that needs to be solved so it's something that's based around learning in it's usually exciting it puts my brain in a different mode and so that is really useful to helping me begin to um move my brain out of problem solving mode and get into a mode that's going to allow me to fall asleep also I tend to 30

to 40 minutes before I I fall asleep I'll get into bed now I know a lot of people say don't take work to bed with you I have not found that to be problematic at all as long as it's a certain type of work like doing research as my go-to for being in bed so I can really begin to relax and calm down I will also if I've had a particularly stressful day in that last hour I might do some meditation to really make sure that I'm calming myself down and then right as I'm about

to lay in bed and this is the one thing that I'm conflicted about recommending to people um is I put headphones in and I begin reading a book right as I go to bed so uh as I lay down to fall asleep I put headphones in and I put a book on I've used fiction in the past I'm using non-fiction currently but it's a certain type of book one it's a very long book so often biographies about a moment in time or a given person I guess technically a biography is about a person uh or

a moment in time and the books often are like 20 hours 30 hours so you know that you're not going to get woken up in the middle of the night by the book ending which has happened to me unfortunately with shorter books and so I will um listen to those books they're not where I'm trying to learn something so it's just something that's interesting and that puts my brain into a certain Zone and I tend to fall asleep very quickly I'm talking like five minutes quickly or less I'll wake up in the middle of the

night and I'll rewind the book back to a part that makes sense but because it's such a big topic it tends to be something where ah whether I get exactly to where I was was or not I can still get the gist it's not like a story where man if you miss anything you're going to be completely lost what happened it's disorienting so that has been really really useful and then the last thing that I do is I tape my mouth closed because if you breathe through your nose it can actually dry out your throat

disrupt your sleep there's a whole book on this called Breathe by James Nester if I'm remembering correctly and it's really been transformative to my sleep because I used to wake up with a dry throat and it would pull me out of sleep and you know your lip smacking you need like something to drink it's terrible so by taping my mouth I'm able to sleep through the night much better really was a game changer I highly recommend that you guys try not only that but all of the things that I just talked about I think that

they will radically improve your sleep hygiene which will allow you to sleep much better you will be far more rested and able to get to the Holy Grail which is not setting an alarm so you wake up naturally right at the perfect part of your sleep cycle having gotten as much sleep as your body needs if you find that despite having really good sleep hygiene that you're still getting tired later in the day a lot of people wonder if they can take a nap or if they should avoid it and to be honest I think

that it's completely up to the person there are times where I'm so tired that if I don't allow myself to at least completely let go meaning I lay down I close my eyes and I give myself permission to sleep I just I can't focus I can't concentrate and I have found that sometimes even just letting myself go like that even though I don't fall asleep for 10 or 15 minutes can be extremely rejuvenating other times I find that falling asleep for 10 or 15 minutes is completely rejuvenating and other times I have no idea why

I feel super groggy and even sleeping for an hour may make me feel worse than just staying awake that that's always super bizarre where you lay down you don't set an alarm you just give yourself permission to sleep as long as you need you wake up one would think that you got a full sleep cycle but for whatever reason man when I wake up I'm like God I just feel awful I feel sluggish I have a little bit of a headache the just the whole rest of the day I feel off so to be honest

it's pretty rare that I take a nap even times where because if I get five hours of sleep that I hate that I I can get by if it's one day but I really really really don't like doing it I would much rather get 6 hours 6 hours is magical seven is unbeatable so if I've gotten five I will give myself the chance to lay down and take it nap but I often find that it's like man the whole rest of the day just never feels like I quite get back on and if I've gotten

5 hours of sleep the only time I will give myself a chance to take a nap is before 700 a.m. so that I'm still getting that sleep early the sun typically for most of the year is still down and so so I'm able to sleep while it's still dark cuz remember if I only got 5 hours of sleep chances are I woke up around 2:30ish so I can by that point I have gone worked out I've started working for a few hours and then I find that just wave of fatigue really hitting me then I

will lay down but if the Sun is up and my day is going the odds of me taking a nap are virtually zero again there's a lot of self-experimentation that you should do figure out what works for you learning those rhythms figuring out what are the times like can you notice a pattern when you end up getting sleepy and and are unable to bounce back for me it's like if the day is really going and the Sun is up and if I've had caffeine or anything like that the odds of me feeling better after I

take a nap are very very low but this really is something that you should experiment with because there are going to be times where you may have gotten so little sleep that the only way to function is to get that rest is to allow yourself to lay down and take a nap so I certainly don't have any moral judgment on taking a nap I think some people do I don't like for one if I'm flying there's something about flying if I'm flying and I'm just like I cannot keep my eyes open I'm like I'll take

a nap I've heard people like oh my God like I'd never take a nap that's crazy to me you want to cognitively optimize you want to make sure that you are performing at your best and if taking a nap is going to be the thing that lets you perform at your best then take the nap you're far better to if you let's say you're going to work for three hours you're far better or you have three hours to work I should say you're far better napping for an hour and a half and being really sharp

that last hour and a half than you are just like struggling through not being at your best and trying to get something done now everything is on balance I work so hard I leave everything out on the field I just don't think twice about taking a nap if that's what I need because I know that I'm not doing it out of laziness and I think that's where a lot of people get conflicted is they know that taking the nap is something that they do as a way to avoid doing the work and that they do

that kind of thing a lot and that they probably were feeling tired because they stayed up too late watching something on Netflix or playing video games or hanging out whatever or they had a few too many drinks they've done something dumb that is counter to the goals if those things are your goals by all means do them I don't pass any moral judgment on watching Netflix playing video games get as drunk as you want if that's your goal but if it's not your goal and you did those things something tells me that now you're beating

yourself up over being lazy and part of the reason that you don't want to take the nap is because you feel guilty if you play all out all the time and you know that you've earned that respect with yourself then taking a nap is a no-brainer if that's going to be the thing that cognitively optimizes you just a reminder PSA enjoy your life and if taking a nap is going to let you enjoy it do it if it doesn't and it's going to mess up your Rhythm then don't just grind it out if you let

me control your life for the next 7 days here is exactly what I would have you do I'm actually thinking about turning this into a challenge because I think that this would be amazingly impactful for people and it goes like this our goal is to get up early and really attack the day so that we can get a lot of momentum going so that we can outperform other people remember I am super competitive when it comes to doing the things that I most want in life now I do that from a place of joy and

abundance think everybody can have what they want but it's actually fun to go hard to compete against other people and really see how far you can push your life all right it goes like this this is the ultimate life routine number one we're going to go to bed at 9900 p.m. like it's a religion no if hands or butts and we're going to as you see as we go through the day when we wake up we're going to do a lot of things to make sure that we are ready for bed at 9:00 p.m. but

we go to bed at 9:00 p.m. like it's a religion we do not set an alarm clock you can have an emergency alarm clock if you've got a meeting or a flight to catch or something like that so that you just don't have it on your mind cuz I know some people are so paranoid they're going to over sleep it actually interrupts their sleep by all means set an emergency alarm but the goal would be to have at least 9 hours before our emergency alarm would have to go off most people are not going to

sleep for 9 hours unless they've been chronically sleep deprived so no alarm go to bed at 9: or eight if you have kids or seven if you have kids whatever but we're going to go to bed early enough that we don't need to set an alarm for me that's nine you're going to go to bed at that time you're going to wake up when you wake up you get out of bed in 10 minutes or less your feet are on the floor next to your bed is your gym clothes you're going to put your gym

clothes on immediately you don't have to go to the gym you can work out at home I don't care we can do all body weight workouts or we can go to the gym and go ham whatever works for you but we are going to work out we are going to get our blood pumping no one and I mean no one hates going to the gym more than me I don't whatever the endorphin rush is that other people get I don't get but it does allow me to cognitively optimize if you haven't read the book spark

read it study show that if you have a hard problem to solve you want to tackle that hard problem immediately after working out they did all these crazy studies where they had kids go in and uh do like these incredibly hard workouts where your grade was based on your heart rate so it was like you didn't have to run a mile in under 6 minutes but you had to get your heart rate up to whatever 140 150 and maintain that for I forget how long let's call it 15 20 minutes and then if they had

their hardest class immediately following that so for me it would have been like Calculus if I had had that immediately following gym class where I got my heart rate up into that ideal Zone I would perform better there because you're cognitively optimizing so I'm going to work out I'm going to get my heart rate up that is key I'm also going to be intermittent fasting so we're going to get to when I clock that change but I'm not going to eat before I work out so I'm going to work out fasted then I'm going to

go and I'm going to meditate by the way I work out for about 30 to 45 minutes by all means work out longer I wouldn't work out a lot shorter I'm going to sit down and I'm going to meditate I'm going to meditate for about 20 minutes I'm trying to get myself into a place where I'm completely relaxed no stress no anxiety it is very possible no matter what is going on in your life to get to the point where you have no stress no anxiety now if you're really going through something and you the

thought of trying to sit down and meditate is just unbelievably torturous give yourself 7 Minutes of Doom scrolling cats it will put your brain in a certain place it's very interesting it is the art of distraction there is a reason from an evolutionary standpoint that distraction exists go for it 7 minutes only at the end of the 7 minutes then we're going to go into meditation and you're going to meditate if you did s minutes of Doom scrolling cats and you just don't have extra time fine 13 minutes of meditation so be it but I

think you're better off making it 27 minutes 7 Minutes Doom scrolling cats and then 20 minutes of meditation the goal of meditation is to just breathe you're not trying to have any Grand epiphanies you're just trying to breathe your mind is going to wander like crazy and it's going to happen a lot to the point where it's going to distress you and you're going to think you're doing something wrong you are not the whole point is to just come back to the breath come back to the breath back to the breath back to the breath

getting yourself in that calm creative state no stress no anxiety lengthening the period of time where you can focus on the breath incredibly powerful now if you haven't done this for an extended period of time yet the next thing I want you to do is take a cold shower we're doing all of this to accomplish two goals you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dooll business that will allow you to see your

goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs and impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today toughen up buttercup and cognitively optimized so working out as much as it's good for the brain it's also to show you that you can do hard things because in your life you need to be doing hard things the other hard thing that you're going to do that's also good

for your brain and good for a whole host of other things including anti-inflammatory um getting uh all the effects of longevity that come from cold exposure you're going to get in the cold shower now the amount of time you need to stay in the cold shower is going to depend on the time of year and where you live because let me tell you Minnesota in February is very different than La in August the cold temperature in La in August not that cold so and compared to and I've actually done this was it in Minnesota no

it was Chicago I did Chicago in the winter I can't remember exactly what month and the water hitting my forehead gave me a headache I was like damn this is a whole another level of cold so doing that versus in La was a world of difference but in La I would keep myself in the shower I think my record was like oh God it was somewhere between 12 and 17 minutes I can't remember but for uh what was it 13 months I did this every single shower weekend no weekend actually that might be a lie

every shower Monday through Friday that's correct I think on the weekends I allowed myself a warm shower don't hold me to that I can't remember but for 13 months I took so many cold showers it was horrifying in fact I stopped I promised myself I'd do it for 30 days I did it for 13 months I began to resent my shower but it is extremely powerful for doing things that are difficult so we're going to do the cold challenge expose yourself for the cold as long as you can possibly bear extend that period of time

you should be shivering before you get out of the shower like uncontrollably shivering that is a good way of knowing if you've been in long enough now again Minnesota in February it's going to happen a lot faster than a warm climate later in the year but get cold exposure after that we're going to go to our important things list and we're going to work our way down the most important things that we could be doing in order to make meaningful progress towards our goals once we finish all of that I know you're going to have

to do a lot of work to pay bills and all that good stuff fair enough go to your job crush it then we're going to get into the intermittent fasting zone so there are two ways to handle this way number one is that you can stop eating really early and then you're going to eat breakfast or you can stop eating a little bit later call it 5 6:00 at night but then you can't have your first meal until much later in the next much later the next day the rule of thumb is 16 hours of

fasting is about right I try to push that to on average about 17 172 hours when averaged over a full week but during the week that tends to mean that I'm um not having a meal for about 18 to 19 hours and then on the weekend it's closer to 15 16 hours so I tracked that over a year and a half and that's what it came out to be on average if you do all of those things your life will be unrecognizable and I hope that if you do that for seven days that you're not

going to want to quit because it really will transform your entire life once you get initially started in the pursuit of your goal of trying to improve yourself and become something more something better the key is consistency and follow through consistency and follow through you become what you repeat the reason that anybody successful becomes successful is because to quote Winston Churchill they can go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm the problem is the human animal has chosen a tactic of using culture in order to have generational progress so a horse will come

out doing all the things that a horse can do in 20 minutes but horse culture doesn't progress because they come hardwired with everything and they have for thousands of years and they make no progress whereas humans a generation 10,000 years ago invented the wheel and we're all still using it now but in taking that strategy what ends up happening is that you really do become the thing that you repeat the thing that you do consistently and if you begin slacking off of that then you don't end up making that progress you certainly can't maintain that

progress so you have to be very very thoughtful about what you repeat because it is going to have a profound impact on your life now the vast majority of people end up just breaking they end up quitting the reason that I've had the kind of success that I've had in my life is simply because I understand that iteration is how we make cultural progress it's what I call the physics of progress most people when they're running the physics of progress when they get to the point where they have to evaluate their results they end up

lying to themselves and making it somebody else's fault now the physics of progress are really simple it's the scientific method recontextualized for whatever goal goal you're trying to achieve and it goes like this you come up with a hypothesis if you have information that can inform that hypothesis that is much better but if you don't when you're beginning call it your best guess you're taking your best guess as how you go from where you are to achieving your goal there is inevitably going to be an obstacle in your way and your best guess is about

what do I need to do to overcome that obstacle to make meaningful progress towards my goal then you're going to turn that hypothesis into something something that you can actually do then you're going to turn that you're going to actually go do that thing and then you're going to get a result from that thing it is almost certainly going to fail to some extent which is fine because failure is the most information-rich data stream on planet Earth but you have to learn from the failure to learn from the failure you have to be willing to

admit that you made one most people will not admit that they made a mistake and so they get stuck at that level and in that moment they say it was the world it's because I was born in the wrong time my parents were dumb the world doesn't want somebody who looks like me to succeed whatever excuse they use to make it somebody else's fault now remember the most terrifying thing about excuses is that they are valid I'm not saying that those things aren't real I'm not saying that the world isn't trying to hold some people

back I'm just saying it doesn't matter you have to overcome it no matter what so in the moment where you tried this thing and it didn't work don't spend your time and energy Focus on how something else stopped you even though I will grant you it's true the world is trying to stop everybody from doing everything it just is the reality accomplishing something meaningful is freakishly difficult so don't focus on that it's more difficult for you it just doesn't matter you're just going to have to work harder you either want to accomplish that thing in

your life or you don't and you're going to give up that's the reality the people that get what they want are the people that absolutely demand that they're going to keep going until they get that thing so in that moment when you're very tempted to focus on how other things have stopped you you're not going to what you need to do is be consistent so in that moment you're going to say what could I have done differently to get a better result and that's when the physics of progress Loops now you come up with a

more informed hypothesis you learned your lesson you figure out what you need to do that's going to be a little bit better than last time you turn that into a thing that you can do you do that thing it will fail to some extent you stare nakedly at your inadequacies you figure out what you need to do to make it a little bit better and the process begins again that is why you have to be consistent but the reality is that most people break most people cannot go from failure to failure without a loss of

enthusiasm they end up breaking they end up thinking that either there's something wrong with them or that the world is against them and because they don't want to deal with the pain and suffering of having to face their own inadequacies or they give up because they just think that the world is against them they don't make progress because you have to be able to fail a lot to learn from those failures if I'm right that humans as a species have chosen culture as the learning mechanism then you have to run the loop that culture demands

which is to try something it fails you iterate and you get better that works at the societal level over Millennia and it works at the individual level in an acute thing where you just have to figure out why didn't that work and keep going but the truth is difficult boredom struggle pain breaks almost everyone that it touches and I will remind us all 92% of people fail to achieve the goal they set for themselves and the reason is that all of that difficulty just stops people because they don't have the right mindset they don't realize

that they need to fail they don't realize that failure does not make them a failure so you're going to have a ton of failure in your life you have to Contex talize it as the most advantageous thing that could happen to you so when I fail it stings it sucks I hate it I want everything that I do to work the first time and I want to make maximum progress as fast as humanly possible but once I realized that just isn't the way that things work and even people like Elon Musk who I think are

abnormally intelligent they realize oh I have to fail a lot I have to try things and see what works and what didn't there is no way around being in the messy middle there's no no way to think or hypothesize your way to what's going to work the best you have to get in there and try things even somebody that's thinking philosophically has to be able to get in there and battle their ideas and take their ideas out to other people even Einstein went out and made sure that his ideas were battle tested not only through

experimental physicists but also just his friends that were other people that were able to beat up his ideas and poke holes in them and if you're not willing to put your ideas to the test if you're not willing to try things and see what fails then you you will forever be stuck thinking and not making any progress you really want to be doing be a doing machine somebody that's out there trying but that means you have to risk embarrassment and embarrassment is one of the things that destroys so many goals because people don't want to

admit that they were struggling people don't want to admit that they were having a hard time and so they either don't tell people about the goal which is a huge mistake you want to tell as many people as you can it's part of the process of building desire you want to tell people I'm going to do this thing and it really matters to me and I'm going to accomplish it by this date now all eyes are on you but that's one of the ways you're going to stick to what you're doing and if the whole

point is that you have to repeat repeat repeat be resilient be gritty stick with it try fail try fail over and over and over as you get better at overcoming those obstacles then you have to be willing to push through all of that difficulty to know why you're doing the things you're doing and to understand that that's just the process so guys I'm telling you if you really want to achieve something absolutely powerful in your life you've got to be persistent if you haven't already be sure to read the book grit by Angela Duckworth it's

an amazing expose on how to be gritty if you're not already the process that I use for achieving my goals is really simple first and foremost you want to make sure that you cognitively optimize I cannot stress said enough so much of my life is about doing things to make sure that my brain is working well they look like this number one get sleep do not use an alarm most people set an alarm stop I built three multi-million dollar companies one of those being a billion dollar company all without setting an alarm do I occasionally

set an emergency alarm for something like a 4 a.m flight yes but for the most part I don't use an alarm I'm talking like 99% of my days I do not set an alarm I want to make sure sure that I get all of the sleep that my body needs why because I'm able to be more efficient people mistake grinding around the clock and becoming less efficient because they're tired with actually getting more done what you want to do is make sure that you have a very high output of achievement per waking hour so I

check in with myself about every three hours to make sure that I'm being productive if you're not being productive nothing else matters so go to bed early I go to bed at 9:00 p.m. I don't use an alarm I typically sleep 6 to 7 hours that's changed if you've heard other content where I say 5 to 6 hours right now I'm in a cycle where I'm sleeping closer to my average is probably just under seven hours so I never know what that's going to be it tends to be regulated by the amount of stress in

my life so I'm getting roughly seven hours of sleep so that means that if I go to bed at 9:00 p.m. I'm up at 4:00 a. I have a rule in my life that if I'm awake Monday through Friday I'm either working or working out I give myself only 10 10 minutes to get out of bed why because I struggle to get out of bed just is a thing it's always been a thing for me from the time I was a kid my dad would have to drag me out of bed in the morning to

there was a period in my early to mid 20s where I was laying in bed four to five hours a day and just could not bear to get out of bed it's absolutely ridiculous even I am completely scandalized by the reality that to this day despite all of the things that I've accomplished I have to fight myself just to get out of bed so that's a ity I accept that so I gave myself a rule that I had to be out of bed in 10 minutes or less right next to my bed I keep headphones

so I put my headphones on I begin researching the second I wake up so I'm researching uh technically this gets into a long thing right now I'm in a phase where I actually read while I sleep long story I don't think you get things subliminally that's not that but I do find that it helps me stay asleep I don't necessarily recommend that for everybody but just by way of being completely transparent in terms of what my routine looks like for achieving my goals from the second I wake up I am researching something that matters to

me I immediately put on my gym clothes I head to the gym right away I work out I then meditate after I meditate I do something I called think itating the reason that I do these two things one meditation is a good way to get your stress and your anxiety down to zero the reason you want to do this is cognitive optimization if you are feeling frantic if you are constantly in fight or flight your brain is not going to function as well as it could what is happening when you go into fight or flight

is the blood is literally leaving your prefrontal cortex the prefrontal cortex is the seat of higher level cognition it's where you future plan it's where you maintain your discipline and so when you're in that fight ORF flight stage you don't have the blood in the prefrontal cortex in the way that you need to which is why people end up cheating on their diet it's why they end up not sticking with their goals and persevering so you want to make make sure that you're taking the time to meditate to lower your stress lower your anxiety and

then there's a hidden benefit to meditation which is why I follow that sort of almost seamlessly into think itation which is where I stay in that meditative posture I keep my meditative breathing going I'm staying in that cognitive space because when you are meditating if you're just coming back to the breath very simple practice my meditation practice is dead simple it's literally what I call just breathe so as my mind wanders I remind myself to come back to the breath to just breathe my mind wanders again back to the breath wanders back to the breath

wanders back to the breath it's tragic how rapidly my brain begins to wander but I just keep bringing it back now when I do that enough I get into a calm and creative state when I'm in a calm and creative state unique areas of my brain begin to talk to each other and so I will come up with very interesting solutions to problems that I won't get when I'm not in that state so this is why people will often say I need to sleep on that problem because your brain goes through that cycle that's very

much like a meditative State as you're falling asleep and then waking up again you pass through a very similar state so I will call that calm and creative so once I'm in that calm and creative state now I begin to get these I give myself a problem to solve before I sit down to meditate so I know what I'm working on it's tied to my import important things which we'll get to in a minute but I sit there and I know what the problem is going to be that I'm going to start working on when

I'm in that calm and creative state and then I'll will allow myself to take notes as interesting ideas come up I'm going to journal on that which I would not do during the meditative part where I'm just coming back to the breath back to the breath back to the breath and I do that for as long as I need to to get to zero stress zero anxiety calm creative once I'm there maybe 5 minutes maybe 20 minutes maybe 45 minutes if I'm really stressed out but once I'm there then I move over into think itation

and I begin noodling on those hard problems once I finish that then I'm going to go into my important things now how do I know when to stop thotting and move on to important things I have found that at some point I begin running out of really fruitful novel ideas and once I feel like I'm kind of trying to force it then I'm like all right let's just now move into executing on my important things so now that I'm in my important things which is a list that I keep constantly maintained so I know what

the top things are that I should be working on so I'm not spending that time thinking about what I should be doing I just go straight into execution mode so then I start going down the list doing them in order now the way to execute on something is very much in order so first thing you're going to do everything on that thing that you can do until you've pushed it as far as you can go and now you're waiting on other people and then you're going to move on to the next thing you're going to

do everything that you can on that until you're waiting on other people and then you're going to push it off so on and so forth down your list now my important things list is predicated on my goals so the very important thing to understand about the nature of goals is that they make demands if you want to win a championship in swimming then you need to do the things that a swimmer trying to win a gold medal by a certain date would need to do it's going to dictate how you eat how you sleep how

you train who you talk to how you think all of that stuff and so you have to one get good at identifying what your goals demand and then two you have to be good at actually sticking to the things your goals demand which this is where most people fall down because it gets boring it gets difficult so you've got to be able to push through all right so I work my way down my important things list once I finish doing that then I because I'm the CEO of a company at that point then I'm going

to begin to engage with my team I'm usually working for about four to five hours on the things that I know that I should be doing to have the highest most efficient impact on the company and then because I know a big part of my job is orchestrating people making sure that they're focused on the things that they should be answering questions and the like then I go and I engage with the company and then I take meetings based on what's important and how time aligns it just is what it is I take meetings until

6: PM I try to cut off there's one meeting that I have a week because we're dealing with a company in China that goes until 7:30 at 7:30 uh it's only one day a week that I do that most of the time my last meeting ends at 6 and then for the rest of the time for the next three hours I go back into my mode of controlling my time making sure that I'm working on things that I need to do including making sure that my important things list is up to date and that I'm

working on all the loose ends for the day to make sure that everybody has what they need to start the next day all that good stuff which gives me the ability in the morning to take advantage of my Peak cognitive ability now one of the reasons that I've ended up structuring my day like that is because I found that in the morning I'm super sharp I've got these creative ideas I'm able to really make progress create space for myself whereas in the evenings I'm a little bit slower I'm not quite as efficient as I am

early in the day and so it remains easy for me to be reactive but it's much harder for me to be proactive that's just me maybe you're the complete opposite structure your day around you so in the evenings I can remain very useful as I respond to people's questions and things like that as I comb over my important things list all of those things I find much easier to do in the evenings and then the last hour before I go to bed whenever I can and this unfortunately breaks apart sometimes but whenever I can I

want that last hour to be work but to be something I'm really excited about now you want to be very thoughtful about how you structure your life because you should love what you're working on now I know that that can be very difficult as somebody who has at periods in my life absolutely hated my job I completely understand but you want to push yourself to get to the point where you at least have a part of your job that you absolutely love so that's how I spend that last hour of my day is only working

on when I can something that I'm really excited about and that helps combat fatigue and it also helps me get ready for bed because you don't want to be dealing with something super stressful as you're getting ready for bed and another thing that I do just by way of sleep hygiene is that I make sure that I am not getting blue light into my eyes towards the evenings I think that's very important so starting 3 hours before I go to bed I'm wearing blue blocking glasses my computer is set to go into night mode so

at Sunrise the blue light comes back on and at sunet the blue light turns off I think that kind of thing can be very advantageous as for my diet which is another key part of cognitively optimizing I do intermittent fasting seven days a week 365 days a year including Christmas Day and I do that because it makes me feel better so it's not even for or to be cool it's just I feel better when I do that so uh I do I average I I track this for about 18 months every day and it averaged

17 hours including weekends holidays and all that so there are of course times where that window is more narrow but the least man the least I knowingly uh go to is 14 hours so that's the least amount of time that I'll go between my last meal and my first meal the next day like I said even on a Christmas day or something like that I'm going to have at least a 14-hour window again just to protect my stomach and make sure that I feel great and that will on the week days mean that I'll go

sometimes 18 19 sometimes 20 hours uh without a meal before I eat and I eat my last meal at about 2 p.m. sometimes a little before sometimes a little after but that's roughly there and then I don't have my next meal till 89 sometimes 10 11 o'clock so that is my process and I think that that there's a lot of things that virtually everybody could use from that uh to build a very effective process if you want to really make progress in your life one of the keys is going to be to track that process

now the way to think about getting better is you want to get incrementally better the problem is if you're trying to get incrementally better you're basically going to stand still so you want to be asking the famous question that Peter teal asked which is how do I make my 10-year plan happen in the next 6 months when you start thinking like that it really does shift your thinking into having a radically different approach I think one of the big problems that people have when they're trying to make progress is they set a goal that's quote

unquote realistic and when it's realistic it's not very exciting I teach a whole class on the process of setting goals and one of the things that I tell people is you have to set goals that are exciting there's a whole bunch of research on this that shows the people that are most likely to stick with their goals are the people that set a goal that is truly EXC exciting to them the goals that are going to be exciting are going to be big goals that's just the way the human mind is wired I'm telling you

right now there is an evolutionary imperative that has been embedded in your brain and there's no way around it that demands that you do hard things I think from an evolutionary perspective that makes sense because Staying Alive was hard and if we didn't get an intrinsic emotional reward from doing hard things we would have died out so we are all the ancestors of people that God off a little bit on doing hard things so when you don't do hard things you don't get that positive feedback loop you feel a sense of disease and so many

people have that sense of unease and they think that I need to go retire and my life needs to be more relaxed I need to be in a beach somewhere this all sucks it's not true at all I'm telling you right now the thing that you need to do is find meaning and purpose and go after it go after it in a big way set yourself a crazy goal that you really believe in that you really think life would be better if I do this thing if I achieve this and even if I fail man

I would have spent my life well trying to contribute to that if you build your life around that and go all out man trying to make something that you really believe and come true to bend the world to your will to close your eyes and imagine a world that is better than this one open your eyes and then execute to make that world come true you will love your life that's the key to find something that you really believe and then go all out after it now to track all of this progress you really do

want to be journaling writing things down checking things off how many days did you stick to what you said you were going to do this can be such a an amazing way to gamify your own life is to just have a calendar digital or physical go through and mark off the day did you do what you said you were going to do yes or no and then tally up for the week for the month for the year what percent percentage of days did I do what I said I was going to do now in this

moment you can lie 100% you can lie but if you lie when you look at that calendar you're not going to feel the way you want to feel you're going to feel like a liar you're going to know that you're a fraud the whole idea is to feel a certain way when you look at that calendar to be like I did the thing that I said I was going to do and I feel really awesome about that so it is truly one of those things the only person that you're going to cheat if you're lying

about this is yourself so come up with whatever way you can to track this stuff whether it's a spreadsheet whether it's checking things off in a calendar if I'm completely honest about what I do I check in with myself every three hours I don't keep a written tally but I do reward myself emotionally whenever I do the thing I said I was going to do so the first one for me is did I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less if I did I get to feel good about myself if I didn't two

things happen one I don't get to feel good about myself and I give myself that jab in the ribs of you said you were going to do it and you did not do it and then number two I will confess to my wife or here to the community out there that I didn't do that day I didn't meet my goal and so by checking in with myself in real time I'm able to see the other is when you're setting goals it is absolutely critical that all of your goals have a metric associated with them so

that you know the exact metric that you want to hit so you know if you're making progress so often when people get into the physics of progress they didn't set a metric by which they're going to judge their goal so they don't actually know if they're making progress you want your goals to be specific you want your goals to have metrics the reason that I emphasize that so much is most people avoid metrics they avoid dates they avoid those specifics because then they and others will know if they're actually making progress if you don't want

the specifics it means you're not actually interested in the actual prog ress you're interested in the fiction of feeling better about yourself by saying that you have this really cool goal and so one of the things that I'm constantly checking with myself is did I live up to the rhetoric meaning I'm telling people I want to do this cool thing or did I actually show up and play to win did I leave it all out on the field so do not think that rhetoric is actual achievement talking about something is nothing did you actually make

progress and to be honest even trying even though I actually do think this is complex but I actually do think you should emotionally reward yourself only for the sincere Pursuit but when you're thinking about tracking progress you need to be naked and raw about whether you're actually making progress now the reason it's so important to do that is if you're not making progress you need to adjust this goes back to the physics of progress you're staring nakedly at your inadequacies you're asking what could I have done differently to get a better result and if in

that moment you don't have a metric to judge yourself against you don't know how to better inform your next hypothesis so the goal of trying something is to learn something that gives you a better thing to do and when you do that you make more meaningful progress and when you don't make that meaningful progress you need to understand why but it really does come down to what gets measured gets improved what gets measured gets improved if you don't have the measurement you won't know whether you're making progress you won't have the emotional sting that you

need to force yourself to actually dig in and figure this out so gamify and make sure that you have metrics you do those two things and you will make massive progress if you want to know if you're setting the bar too high or too low when it comes to goal setting I will just tell you this right now you're setting the bar too low everybody's setting the bar too low if you think about the crazy things that people have accomplished whether it's in I think it's 64 years or something we went from the right Brothers

flying a plane for the first time to landing on the moon 64 years it it that's an impossibly small amount of time to think that somebody would have been alive at the time like you could have been 20 at the time the wri brothers flown and said we're going to go to the Moon by the time I'm 85 and been right but imagine how many people would have told you that you were out of your mind there is so much literature on this it's just beyond reproach the people that set the most aggressive goals are

the ones that end up achieving their goals now the reason is because there is complexity here the reason is is that it gets you excited enough to go out and pursue this thing to be able to attract other people to your goal that's a huge thing that you're going to learn if you have a goal that's really exciting and when people think about getting meaning and purpose in their life and they think about oh my God I could be a part of a team that that takes us to the moon or I could be a

part of a team that terraforms Mars or I could be a part of a team that ends world hunger or deals with climate change whatever the thing is it gets you excited when it is a gigantic goal it actually motivates people people now you also the people that achieve their goals have a path to getting there so it can't be a pipe dream you have to actually know how you're going to March towards that thing and if it's a business you need to know how you're going to generate Revenue all along the way it is

incredibly difficult but you do want to make sure that you're setting a bar that is within the realm of physics you don't want to be throwing something so far into the trees that it is literally impossible if you have to invalidate the laws of physics I will tell you that that's not very interesting and then one thing that you want to also think through is is it something that you could achieve in your lifetime and if it's not something you could achieve in your lifetime are you okay being somebody that's going to lay a brick

towards building that thing and there's that old adage that you want to plant trees under whose shade you will never sit so there is very many honorable things that people could do that they're not going to reap the ultimate benefits of that they understand that there only going to be one brick in that wall think about all the people that have given their entire professional careers to solving cancer which remains unsolved countless amazing Brilliant Minds have given themselves over to that completely knowing all they're going to do is Lay one brick in what will ultimately

be the you know the building that is that solution but be honest think about that but make sure that you have a path to get there that's the key it's got to be exciting and you've got to see a path but you want to make sure that you're really going after something that's going to inspire you for the long run because remember the reason that most people quit is because they are broken by how boring and difficult things get so when you ask yourself in the grips of that difficulty that suffering that comes along with

pursuing a goal you actually care about you are going to ask yourself why am I doing this why am I doing this and if the answer isn't compelling you're going to quit so make sure that you come up with a goal that's big enough that when you ask why you know exactly why and you'll keep pushing it's inevitable when you're pursuing your goals that you're going to find yourself in a rut and you are not going to want to stick to what you're doing the most important thing is to identify is this a pattern in

your life so many people love the beginning of something they love that excitement that initial Fascination when everything is new and it just feels Limitless and everything feels possible they haven't gotten that first punch in the mouth that comes with really trying to get good at something and accomplish something when life is going to get complex it's going to get in your way you're going to fail you're going to embarrass yourself all that stuff so in that moment you've got to make sure that you are going to push yourself through that get out and get

to the other side it is inevitable that in your pursuit of a goal that you care about you are going to end up getting in a rut in that moment most people give up I'm going to tell you what you need to do if you want to be part of the 8% that actually sees their goals through you need to fall back on process so many people want to fall back on motivation but the reality is that motivation is not going to be there for you just the vast majority of the time the vast majority

of the time you're going to be bored things are going to be hard you're going to be tired it's going to be complex and in that moment you just need to run a process you need to have habits that you can rely on to get you through I've talked about them before but just to recap you want to make sure that you're cognitively optimizing you want to make sure that you have your important things list you want to make sure that you're doing things in order you want to make sure that you have rules in

your life that you stick to you want to be leveraging your identity that you're the kind of person that sticks with things and then you want to have habits and routines that you're just going to loop around day after day after day that you know are moving you towards your goal to get to your goal it really is about persistence consistency metrics so you know whether or not you're making progress and then just running the physics of progress over and over and over you have a hypothesis about how you're going to overcome the obstacle that

stands between you and what you're trying to accomplish you're going to do something to accomplish that thing and you're going to see how much progress you made which is going to give you more information for you to reformulate that hypothesis if you fall back on that process that is going to be the thing that carries you through never count a motivation because motivation really does come and go so make sure that you have an air type process and then everything else will fall into line there are almost certainly a lot of things that you're doing

that are going to keep you broke the first is what we were talking about in the last question it's all about financial literacy do you know how money actually works as somebody who came to this game really late I understand how easy it is to be educated to be dare I say intelligent and still not actually understand how money actually functions and so you want to make sure that you're taking time time to get financially literate the next thing is and some of these are going to be so basic and people don't do them you

need to stop spending so much money most people live paycheck to paycheck even people that are making six figures live paycheck to paycheck it's something like 2third of people that make $250,000 a year still live paycheck to paycheck so the goal is instead of flexing on how much money you make you want to make sure that you're living below your means if you want to dramatically reduce the amount of stress in your life and set yourself up for Success you want to make sure that you're living below your means now as you begin to live

below your means first the first habit you're going to want to introduce is that you're going to start saving some of your money so of course there's going to be amount that you're going to allocate towards your living expenses your house payment or your rent your car payment insurance all of that stuff food but then you want to make sure that automatically you're saving money if you're not automatically saving money then you're walking down the path of remaining broke so you want to make sure that you're living below your means and you want to make

sure that you're automatically saving money now once you have saved up enough money that you have somewhere between six and 12 months of emergency cash on hand if you get sick if you hate your job any of that stuff is exacerbated a thousandfold if you're living paycheck to paycheck because now you've got nowhere to go there's no way for you to be able to weather that storm and so it's what's known as a threshold event everything in your life may seem like it's going well until you hurt your back and you're unable to go to

work for uh two months and you were living paycheck to paycheck and now you're in financial ruin or God forbid you get get a diagnosis uh and you end up with medical bills and you go bankrupt from that that happens so frequently so you want to make sure that you have six to 12 months saved up now once you have six to 12 months saved up now we want to start thinking about investing now if you're not investing you're going to be getting eaten alive by inflation now a lot of people are not thinking about

inflation and the reality is even in a good economy you're looking at inflation being around 2% now right now as we're recording this inflation is about 8 and a half percent so you don't want to count on it being as low as 2% because that's not always going to be the case now the crazy thing is most people don't understand what inflation actually is so inflation is your ability to buy something goes down every year that's the same as losing money every every year so imagine if you have $100 inflation if inflation is 88.5% like

it is now the next year by the next year because it's happening every day by the next year you don't have $100 even even if you saved it didn't touch it it's locked away in your bank account you now have the equivalent it'll still say $100 but that $100 now only buys you the equivalent of $91.00 okay that's inflation so your buying power even though the number stays the same the buying power is going down so as of right now as we're recording this you would need to make $85 dollar every year in order to

stay at the buying power of your $100 okay so saving money even though I just told you to save six to 12 months you want to make sure that you understand that you can't just sock all of your money away and think that it's going to stay and this doesn't haunt anyone more than me I get it because investing is nerve-wracking but if you don't invest you're not going to be able to keep up with inflation if you don't keep up with inflation you're going to be losing money over time and if you're losing money

over time that nest egg that you're going to Hope takes care of you at the end of the day isn't going to be there for you and so you really have to be thoughtful about how you invest now I'm going to give you the most basic advice on investing now why am I giving you basic advice because all the smartest investors in the world are saying if you don't know anything about investing this is what you want to do and because I do not consider myself a good investor this is the only advice that I

feel like I can give you that's actually sound advice and that is to invest in passive things so you're going to be investing in ETFs uh in index funds now index funds are the easiest to explain an index fund is a group of companies so rather than you saying I'm so smart I know what companies are going to do well I would say don't do that because even the smartest people that do this for a living have a hard time being right over a long period of time here is a fact that most investors don't

want you to know most investors over a 10-year period are going to lose to an index fund so the really smart people with all the algorithms they're all going to lose to just picking a big basket of companies and invest in those and not touching the money and then doing something called dollar cost averaging so rather than thinking that you're so smart that you're going to beat the market right I'm going to time it I know when the bottom is right because the best advice on investing you're ever going to get is the following Buy

Low sell high now I I don't mean that as a joke that really is the best advice you're ever going to get the problem is most people can't do it and the reason they can't do it is they get get emotional or they don't have enough knowledge and so I see so many people making these big bets because it's sexy it's cool and when it hits you feel like a king the problem is The House Always Wins and the odds of you on a long timeline winning like that are virtually zero and Ray diio made

this really clear to me so Ray Dalo runs the largest hedge fund in the world it's called Bridgewater and Associates and he says Tom look I'm spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Research I've spent probably even more than that building the best algorithms in the world I have a talent pipeline where I'm recruiting the best and the brightest people from across the entire world I have fiber optic cables that allow me to make transactions that are measured in milliseconds and you're competing against me if you're trying to actively trade in the market and so

that's why people like him who understand how this system works are saying for the average person that's not the game that you want to play the odds of you losing border on 100% but if you go with something like an index fund which is there's one called the S&P 500 the S&P 500 is effectively the 500 biggest companies on the stock market now the odds that you become one of the biggest companies on the stock market and stay there you're going to stay there for some I think the average company stays on the S&P 500

for like 16 years right now now it's been declining but still that's a long time and the way that the S&P 500 works is when one finally gets down to the bottom and it gets booted off then they replace that with another one and so you always have the top 500 companies in the stock market at that time and there's a whole bunch of different index funds it could be grow stocks it could be stocks in foreign markets and whatever one you're comfortable with but at least it's a basket of stocks and your dollar cost

averaging in which just means that every day or every Wednesday or whatever you're putting in a certain amount of money that you want to invest and you're just going to leave it you're not going to panic when the market goes down and you're not going to when prices are up you're not going to buy into the Euphoria now why would you not want to do that the reason that you don't want to buy into the Euphoria is because when price when people are euphoric prices are going Skyhigh now in those moments and I have now

lived through my first cycle where I was really paying attention to the market and it got euphoric so now I know what it feels like and what it feels like is it's always going to go up that you're a genius you're making all this money hand over fist now the good news is when it all crashed I didn't sell I didn't buy like a fiend it was going up and I didn't sell when it went down which means that I don't have any realized gains or losses now of course when things are going up if

you want to take money off the table by all means do that you then bought low and you sold High makes all the sense in the world but the last thing you want to do is buy like crazy as the price is going up and then Panic as the price drops because now you've bought high and sold low but that's what most people do because the Euphoria is so exciting and people feel like oh there's no way that I can lose and then when the bottom falls out they feel like oh my God it's only

going down this is all going to go to zero and the reality is it might but if you follow the principle of never investing more than you can afford to lose then you can ride out the market and if you're in a passive fund like the S&P 500 then it's just your dollar cost averaging you're just buying at that steady interval now when the price drops you might buy more right if you know what a good deal looks like like hey if the S&P 500 is down 20% Then maybe what I'm going to do is

buy instead of my $100 a week I'm going to put in 150 or 200 if you have the capital to spare now you're getting things at a discount right I've heard it said I think it was by just breit Singh that a recession is basically just a Black Friday deal for assets because now everybody's panicking prices are falling but if you've been passively investing into something as stable as the S&P 500 now you're just able to get more of that at a discount it can be very advantageous and this is why they say more millionaires

will be made in the recession than in any other time because all of these assets are on discount now the question is what's an asset and so this is another habit that ke keeps people broke is they're not learning about money they're not taking this time to figure out F out the difference between an asset and a liability people are spending all of their money death habit number one you're spending all of your money on liabilities and not assets so the key is to understand what an asset is to understand what a liability is and

to buy appropriately an asset is something that when you buy it's going to go up in value and not cost you money or even pays you money more money obviously than it costs you if you have a liability it's the exact opposite so the classic example of a liability is a car payment the second you drive a car off the lot it's going down in value and with very rare exception it is never going to go back up so it's going down in value and you've got to keep making those payments so you've got money

going out while value is declining another one that people often think of as an asset but is usually a liability is your own home now the reason that your own home is so frequently a liability is odds are you have a mortgage odds are it's the most expensive thing in your life and it's not like you can just get out from under that liability especially if the bottom falls out you're going to have property tax depending on where you live and you're going to have upkeep no matter where you live so now you're pouring money

into this thing and maybe the value is going up but maybe not always and between the property taxes and the upkeep you may be paying more than the value is going up over time especially if you account for opportunity cost so the odds of your house after taxes fees uh upkeep all of that being a better use of capital if you're living in it being a better use of capital than taking that same money and putting it into uh an index fund or something like that a diversified portfolio let's say the the odds of the

house returning more on that are very low unless obviously if you get into rental properties and things like that and you're not living in it so now it can actually generate cash flow well then it's just a math equation this is how much I spend on average per month for um Insurance uh property tax upkeep all of that and if on average the rent that you're getting is more than the money that you have going out then it's very simple every month I'm making more off of this property then I'm losing cool now you've got

an asset so that is the difference if you're paying for something it's a liability if you're making money off of something it's an asset now most people don't have the discipline to buy assets because liabilities are usually the fun things it's the cool clothes it's the car it's the fancy house all of that stuff and so people get themselves into a difficult situation because now the vast majority of their capital is going out and this is how people end up in a position where they're living paycheck to paycheck okay another thing I want to talk

about that's a bad habit is that people are on a career path now why is that bad you ask I have so many people around me at my company that are on a career path and they're amazing people but the people that really make money are the people that get so good at something that they can solve the most difficult problem s that the company faces so rather than thinking oh I am an editor and so I'm going to get good at editing and I'm going to work my way up that way you can basically

predict what your salary is going to be you're more or less going to get a 2 to 5% raise year-over-year there'll be a couple times where maybe you're promoted into uh a role within that lane that has more UH responsibilities and therefore you get paid more money but you can just look at that career path and say what is the person that's the highest in in this chain that I'm working my way up what do they make that's what you're going to make plus the sort of annual increases on the other hand if you look

at who's the person in the company making the most money full stop now you begin to understand that just following that one career trajectory is not necessarily going to be as lucrative as solving those very difficult problems that the highest paid people in the company are solving so I'll give you one example if you want to get wealthy in a company go into sales I me that's just like the classic path to making money because now if you're getting a commission off of what you sell you're only hemmed in by how much you can sell

and the price of the thing that you sell so now you've got a lot more flexibility so be very thoughtful as you're exchanging time for money don't forget that you also want to be in a position where you can exchange skill set for money efficiency for money all of those things allow you to break the basic time for money equation and that is going to be far more lucrative and now as you're making that extra Capital if you keep your cost of living low now you're able to invest into those assets and as you invest

into Assets Now you're kicking off either cash flow or you're building up wealth over time and something that can be sold for way more than you bought it for okay if you do all of that you can finally break these habits that are keeping you broke there are certain habits basically all wealthy people have in common that you guys can put to use in your life and the first one is going to be the most controversial but I could not feel more strongly about this they make no excuses they take total responsibility for their lives

in fact many people that fall into that category will take responsibility for things that clearly don't even have anything to do with themselves I have said many times this is arguably the most controversial thing I've ever said but I'm telling you if you adopt this in your soul and act accordingly it will change your life forever you will be become an Unstoppable machine if I tomu were hit by a drunk driver I would blame myself not because I don't think that the drunk driver caused the accident because blaming the drunk driver gives all my power

away and I can't do anything about them I can't stop people from drinking I can't control the way other people drive but I can control whether or not I'm on the road I can control how good I get at defensive driving how much I pay attention and looking out all of that all of those things I control so if you take control of your life and make no excuses now you're in a solution oriented mindset and people that get wealthy let me tell you right now all they think about are solutions how do I solve

this problem because you are if you're wealthy you must remember you're you're paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve and if that's true you better get very good at solving very difficult problems and if you have something that's holding you back like I'm not as smart as a lot of people and that really pisses me off but the reality is pissing a moaning about it is not going to make me any smarter all I can do is go make the most of what I have I can go learn now I

could get pissed off at my mom I could be angry at my dad but the reality is that I am where I'm at from either uh how I was impacted as a kid in the developmental years how I impacted in the womb my genetics all of that stuff but it's all done the D is cast was I can do about it but there's 50% of my life that's completely malleable and so I'm going to focus on that and I'm going to like other wealthy people be obsessed with learning you've got to be obsessed with learning

so you're not making any excuses you take total responsibility for your life and one of the ways you take responsibility for your life is even if circumstances are against you even if you really have been dealt a bad hand you know that you can get better at things you have the only belief that matters the only belief that matters is if I put energy and effort into getting better I will actually get better now why does that matter because skills have utility now why does that matter because skills let you do something other people can't

do and that thing that it lets you do is solve problems that people want solved what have I said like eight times in this episode that people will pay you in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve so going out learning getting skills that have utility allows you to do things other people can't do you're going to be able to get money other people can't get that is something that wealthy people understand maybe it's not fair but who gives a [ __ ] nobody's coming to save you nobody's going to solve these

problems for you and if you're turning to people for a handout all you will ever get is what they're willing to put in your hand but if on the other hand you're willing to go hey what's the hardest problem you have to solve I'm going to make that problem go away for you and all I ask ask in return is money and I'm going to ask the amount of money that's either equal to the exchange for you or less so that you're tripping over yourself to buy this thing and that is precisely how you end

up breaking the time for money equation because wealthy people understand you just can't charge enough for your time in order to make it worth it so as you can imagine there are people that offer to pay me a lot of money for one-on-one coaching but I don't do it and why don't I do it because unless you're willing to give me equity in your company to do it I just can't charge enough to make it worth the time so you have to break that time for money equation you have to be getting ownership in something

and that's another thing that people understand wealthy people that real wealth is going to come from owning something you own something that other people consider extraordinarily valuable that is going up over time time now the reason that ownership matters is because you want to buy low and sell High the reason that entrepreneurs end up making a lot of money in success obviously is because they start with something that's worth nothing and they get very clever and they build something that over time goes from worth nothing to worth whatever the market values it at so to

give you an example in my own life talked about this earlier we took Quest from a product I couldn't give away literally I know that seems ridiculous now but when we first launched I would stand at trade shows and tell bodybuilders who ended up becoming like the most Ardent purchasers of quest and I would say free protein bar it's a free Quest Bar I will give it to you right now we didn't even in the beginning we didn't even ask for an email all you had to do was extend your hand grasp bar that was

the sum total of the payment that we were asking for and people wouldn't do it so we had to take it from figuring out the formulation building out the manufacturing uh all the things that we've talked about convincing people to try it and we went from that to something that people were willing to pay a billion dollars for but in the beginning it was worth nothing and so the amount of money that we had to put in to get profitable and then we reinvested all that money and then ultimately we were able to sell it

for that extraordinary sum of money and it was a huge win lifechanging for all of us involved because we started with nothing and we owned it and we built value in it that's the key you have to own something that goes up in value over time so whether you bought low and you're going to sell high or whether you were the one that created all the value and so you didn't even have to buy anything you just created value in this thing that later people wanted to own so ownership is a huge key for people

that end up generating wealth you want to want to own you want to hold and so um Warren Buffett talks about this a lot selling makes you rich holding makes you wealthy now what does he mean by that if you want to sell something you can get that influx of cash and you will have whatever that cash is now but now you're fighting against inflation right so you've got the money but what the hell do you do with it what are you going to do with it that doesn't allow it to get chipped Away by

inflation you're going to have to find somewhere to put that money that's earning you more money than inflation is taking and so that's why holding really becomes the ultimate play if you're holding the right thing because it's going up up up up up over time and then you can either borrow against that this is something that wealthy people understand you can borrow against your assets you don't even have to sell them you use the asset as collateral you go to a bank and let's say that your collateral sorry it is your collateral but your asset

is what I meant to say your asset is going up let's say 5% 7% year over every year and inflation is 2% or like right now 8 88.5% is the current inflation hopefully by the time you watch this that won't be true uh and your assets going up by 10% so now you're in a situation where even though inflation is chipping away at most people's ability to buy and whatever you have in savings is going down by that amount amount of inflation you've got this asset that's going up more than that cost now if you've

got a bank that's willing to give you a loan with that asset is collateral and the loan is let's say three or 4% but you're making five 7% off of that money that you're either using to reinvest in your company or buying stocks or whatever you're doing you have to be very careful buying stocks on debt which I'm actually I advise people not to do but just so you understand how money Works wealthy people that know how to use debt effectively that's what they're doing they don't sell the asset they borrow against the asset and

as long as there's a Delta between the cost of the loan and the amount that the asset goes up you now never have to sell the asset you can just keep borrowing against it this is how real wealth is made real generational wealth so yes you can sell the asset and you can make that money and you will have to do that uh over time in order to pay back the loan and all that stuff but again there's a Delta so even as you're selling pieces you're making more than you have to pay back it's

really crazy and it's freakish how long it took me to understand even basic things like that so trust me when I say I deep empathize with people who are hearing that for the first time so understand that they understand they have to own something they have to own something that goes up in value over time and that they want to own something ideally that they can borrow against and so that's how selling makes you rich but owning and holding can make you truly wealthy all right those are the habits if you follow those habits you

really can turn things around in your life be hyper careful about using debt that's like the the advanced level stuff but just by way of making sure you understand how the system works it can be a very powerful tool in the right hands I know a lot of people are asking the question do I have a spending problem or do I have an earning problem now the great news is you've identified the only two levers that there are you can either spend less money or you can make more money those are your two options but

I would say that most people have a problem with both the odds that you're spending too much money are virtually 100% unless you you're really able to Sock away money week after week month after month year after year and so the easy way to figure out is how much money more money do you have at the end of the year than you have at the beginning and if that number is going up and it's going well amazing now remember the goal isn't just to save a ton of money you want to save six to 12

months beyond that you want to be finding a way to invest now look there are certain economies because I feel bad saying this right now knowing that I have a huge portion of of my wealth right now in cash so some of this has to do with Seasons the reason is I think that we're in a very bizarre period of volatility right now that I don't expect to last I am now beginning to look more seriously at different assets because I do think that things are relatively depressed right now be aware though I am not

a financial adviser this is not Financial advice you should be very careful who you take Financial advice from so when it comes into the specifics I would say go find somebody that knows way more about what I'm talking about but just getting you to understand I was feeling weird not admitting that right now I have a ton more uh in cash than I would normally so anyway there are different seasons but for the most part you don't want to have a bunch of money in cash you want to have your six to 12 months and

then you want to have the rest invested in something that is very passive you're not in there actively trading going up against people like R Delio um you're taking a basket of things you're not trying to time the market you're not trying to outsmart the market you're saying this is how I say to myself I'm not smart enough to pull this off so I'm going to take a diversified approach to buying low selling High I can't time the market so I'm going to dollar cost average in and then I'm just going to make sure that

my assets are going up over a long period of time I'm not going to panic about little blips so and I'm talking like three to four year movements so I'm not worried about something going down over a three-year period I'm just thinking okay I want to make sure that I have a very robust Diversified portfolio and that it's going up over longer periods of time and just look at historicals how is it performed historically there are no guarantees of course but if something has done well over the last 100 120 years odds are that you

can roughly count on something like that moving forward and so that is um the very basic approach that I would take you want to make sure that at the end of the month that you've got more coming in than you have going out and it really is that base basic and then just remember there are two levers to pull you can either spend less which is always an option don't think yourself cool because you have a fancy car fancy house fancy watch fancy clothes none of that I buy most of my clothes on Amazon obviously

I could afford a lot more but I just don't tie I actually do tie myself to my sense of style which I actually do like but I don't tie that to whether the clothes are expensive or not and I remind myself constantly I could wake up broke tomorrow so don't tie your identity to that don't be afraid to pull back your expenses as just breit Singh has said many times if you can't buy something five times don't buy it once I think that is very good advice so be super thoughtful about your spending and then

go crazy on figuring out ways to make more money because personally I couldn't live in a world where all I was doing was saving I want to be excited about my potential upside opportunities and so for a lot of you figuring out a way to invest in yourself to take it a chance on yourself as either um uh having a side hustle or being a full-blown entrepreneur will be the greatest journey of your life even if it doesn't end up paying off financially it will be an incredible journey and if you love it you love

that hustle as long as you're not investing so much money into the bank that it into the into the business that it becomes stressful if you lose it then hey that first one fails try try try again until you find one that succeeds successful entrepreneurs almost always always have a Litany of failures behind them so don't stress yourself over that just make sure that you're in a position where you don't need a lot of money to survive and then you can do a lot of cool and exciting things for those people who do maybe they

aren't aware or they understand but have so much dopamine and just like H habitual of just going to Tik Tok Instagram Twitter just scrolling for days uh to pass the time to do whatever how do you go about he like changing that behavior if you're already so entren in it I come down to one thing George like you're young so I really want you to hear me your life is a confusing mess right now and that will manifest as negative emotion it's all going to pass I've glimpsed your future it all works out it's amazing

your life becomes wonderful because as you get older you're going to gain control of your emotions as you gain control of your emotions you're going to gain control of your time as you gain control of your time you're going to acquire skills as you acquire skills you're going to be able to do things that other people can't do like that really is the loop and so as people get older the reason that they tend to be happier and more self- assured is they realize the rules of the game that you can just really get better

at this stuff and you can get good and so I want people to hear that but my thing is like dude you've really got to be obsessed with what you want to accomplish and so if I could get you to understand bro all your dreams that maybe the scale will be off maybe you want to be the greatest and you become from you know 1,142 but out a 7.4 billion that's really pretty cool and so that's going to be the ride of your life but you have to get obsessed and the only reason that obsession

is fun is because you actually know you're going to make progress It's when you're obsessed and things aren't going well and you don't realize it's just a matter of time and so like right now dude I I am really emotionally worried for people that don't understand the economy is going to turn back around Wars end like they're devastating I don't wished on anybody but this too shall pass it's like the great buest phrase of all time this two shall pass if you knew that yeah the next three years are going to suck but after that

it's going to be dope man and there's going to be a stretch of seven years that are nothing but awesomeness but then you're going to go through an 18-month period your you know one of your loved ones is going to pass away and that's going to be brutal but then you're going to have a stretch of six years it's going to be awesome then you're going to have four years of just total suck but through it all you're going to be getting better and better at managing your emotions so through it all you know all

is going to be well that's the joy man and so the thing I'm always trying to get people to understand you'll never get what you want out of life you're never going to accomplish the things that you want unless you are obsessed obsession will hurt and it will be unhealthy unless you realize that you can get better and if you value yourself for already being good right better faster stronger life will be a misery no matter what and so far better to focus on did I leave it all out on the field today right so

value yourself for how hard you went after something not for what you accomplished and then let yourself get obsessed with something because you'll get better over time and then with that Obsession what if it's an obsession with something that's not productive or unhealthy like video games for example who said that's not productive and who said it's unhealthy so there's only that which moves me towards my goals and that which moves me away from my goals now I'll make one caveat your goals should be honorable I'll Define honorable an honorable goal is something that uplifts you

and other people that's about as simple as I can make it so if you have a goal that uplifts you and other people then why not go just absolutely Bonkers to make it come true if you want to be a professional gamer then that's going to be playing a lot of video games and I actually I never would believed this is true but I enjoy watching other people play video games it's fun and so if that's the way that you want to contribute that for people that want to watch you play they can amazing so

now it's uplifting you and other people you'll be able to get into the passion Loop so that you're both the shout and the echo the shout being you playing the echo being people enjoying watching you play or maybe you're like playing video games so you can help build video games right so there's many ways you can do something like that so I just want people to have an honorable goal and then ask themselves of everything you do did this movie toward your goal yes or no if if yes keep doing it if no stop doing

it and that's it and that literally is the easiest way to steer but people let things complicate that because their parents tell them that they should be doing something that maybe they do or don't want to do they think that they should be making a ton of money and the thing that they love doesn't make them a lot of money they want to be the best and they trick themselves into thinking this is only fun if I'm the greatest of all time I will tell you right now I play the video game Destiny 2 and

I would laugh I'm sure if I saw the people that are spanking me I mean just embarrassing me but I still love it and so I try to remind myself that it's about getting better when I play because I love to improve and it's just video games are designed to squeeze the brain centers that evolution is giving you for progression and goal acquisition and all that stuff so it is a very fun microcosm so I think people have to be very careful casting aspersions moral judgments on any goal that is uplifting you and other people

do you think that there is a a way to incorporate your passion which could be video games into purpose and also providing service and have that work for you or do you think you have to sacrifice one or like you know focus on on a certain thing first like does is there a perfect world where all three can exist I think all three can exist but greatness makes demands so hiding in that meaning and purpose will all but break you because the world is constantly moving towards entropy so from the moment of the Big Bang

everything is moving towards chaos now when you introduce humans Jesus you magnify the amount of chaos uh 10,000 fold I mean it's just absolutely insane we ourselves are complicated bumping into all people that are complicated as well and so to achieve something great you are really going to fail a lot you are going to run into more obstacles than you can count but the problem is that fulfillment requires that you work hard partly because that for humans to become the most dominant predator of the world has ever seen we' to be very good at ordering

the world to order the world you have to pour a tremendous amount of energy to stop the chaos and move it towards order because that's the other part of that equation to bring order to a system you must pour energy into it literal energy and so that's the battle that all of us are are fighting against and so if we know that meaning and purpose is is the only thing that will ever serve you long term that is how you get to fulfillment and to do meaning and purpose we know it's going to be brutally

difficult then the very thing that makes life worth living is going to be very hard it will bring you to your knees I I have literally been brought to my knees but as you get back up which I encourage everyone to do because we're all going to get brought to our knees but not everybody's going to get back up so if you get brought to your knees don't worry about that doesn't make you a loser but it does mean that you're on your knees and it does mean you owe yourself getting back up now when

you get back up that's going to make you feel some kind of way about yourself you going be like yo that didn't break me that's incredible so having meaning and purpose means by definition you are going to be brought to your knees at some point you are going to fail to have the impact you want to have on the world and if you're ever going to have that and feel the way you want to feel you have to get back up and keep going we've been talking a lot about like ambition and drive and getting

your goals I know another big part of your life is your relationship so how does your relationship fit into uh your good life with your ambition and um yeah how does that all cocktail work in your life the good life how to live it step one you're having a biological experience what does that mean you are an animal that's been shaped by Evolution the more you understand the organ of the brain really the whole body the microbes in it all of it the more you understand that biological system the more you're going to be able

to predict the outcome of your thoughts and actions and so if you're trying to have a good life one you're going to want to Define it which I will say the good life is fulfillment it's the only emotional state that is resilient to everything from anger loss and grief through all of that you can be fulfilled you may be devastated and when you love a lose a loved one it's devastating it sucks there's nothing fun about it that doesn't mean that I'm not fulfilled as a human it just means that I'm a fulfilled human going

through something brutal conversely if I'm momentarily happy but nothing is going right in my life I'm not contributing in any meaningful way I can laugh for five minutes and still be depressed so fulfillment I would say is the only thing that's resilient you're not going to be depressed and fulfilled at the same time like it's just not now that we have a definition for what the good life is now we can actually begin moving towards it now the reason I say that step one is recognizing that you're having a biological experience is I understand that

things that are going to lead to fulfillment one of them is working really hard another one is following or developing a passion that lets you contribute that's number three to the group and to yourself so if those are the rough ingredients that make up this cocktail of fulfillment we have to figure out this idea of contributing to the group what's that all about that's about being a social animal now what's the ultimate iteration of being a social animal it is love now why is love so potent because Nature has one aim and one aim only

the reason you are a social animal is because of this one reason the reason that you have drive and ambition is because of this one reason Nature's only goal this is it this is the punchline of everything every your motivation for sitting here right now my motivation for answering these questions the reason that we put these cameras together built this Channel all of it is for one thing because nature wants to make sure that you have kids that have kids that's it and now everything in your brain is nature pulling levers to make sure that

you live long enough to have kids to have kids and that you actually have kids so love which I will say is a neurochemical state is Nature's Way of going yo I want to make sure you do this thing so it's this incredible cocktail of I mean obviously the there's different kinds of love I will assume you mean romantic love since you referenced my relationship so romantic love is like the thing it is the thing that when you think about how people want to feel in fact when they have people describe how they want to

feel and they look at that neurochemistry you know what it most closely matches even though this isn't the word that people put to it do you have a guess like looks like you're on drugs or something it's an orgasm and so it makes sense that if Nature's job is to make sure that you stay alive long enough to have kids that have kids that the neurochemical cocktail of an orgasm be pretty high on people's list so as people are describing it they're like oh yeah that's the neurochemical you state you feel right after an orgasm

so technically it isn't the orgasm itself but it's that cocktail afterwards all the bonding hormones are secreted after that you can actually predict I don't know with what degree of accuracy but I'm going to guess it is extraordinarily high that you can predict who will stay married by the number of receptors that they have for I think it's vasopressin which is one of the U Bond hormones so there's oxytocin and vasopressin are the two biggest the ones where you're it's like the cuddle hormones so that's the kind of feeling over time that you want to

have for somebody why because then you're more likely to have kids and then you're likely to raise them long enough that they have kids because it's not just having kids it's having kids that have kids so you have to keep them alive and all of the crazy things that nature does to do that are incredible but nature only has two levers Pleasure and Pain and one of those tremendous Pleasures that nature will give you that is extraordinarily resilient to suffering and loss and sadness and all that is that really deep love not the early Lusty

stuff that's super fun but like that really deep I have shared a life I don't know who I am without this person love that you can have with another person if you're leveraging all of that neurochemical cocktail of soaking in the bonding so that over time time that sense of love is like nothing can touch it nothing can give me that right I've made a lot of money in a single day right nine figures in a single day I'll let people go put in a calculator nine figures of see just how much that is in

a single day okay it's a dope feeling but it's not love love trumps everything I've ever been through in my life when it's sustained and so I put a lot of energy into it a lot of energy because it gives me back more than anything else in my life so you mentioned how nature is programmed you to have kids who have kids and you made a personal decision not to do that uh why did you opt out of what nature wants why I opted out of it we'll get to in a second but the fact

that we can all opt out is fun because I'm like ha I got you [ __ ] it's like nature thought she had me but I you know I'm not I'm not playing that game uh so here's the thing I really want kids to this day I really want kids there are Still Moments where I'll see that thing that's like oo man it triggers all of my desire to have kids and I'm like man I am very sad that I can't both have the life that I'm living and have the life where I have kids

but I looked at my life from several different Vantage points what my wife calls the average Wednesday so what would an average Wednesday look like if I had kids and I Know Myself and I feel a tremendous amount of obligation in fact part of the reason that I work as hard as I do at impact theory is I feel an obligation to you guys I feel an obligation to the team and I really I take that seriously in ways that I think most people would be distressed by and so for me it's like okay I

really need to think about that if I had kids I would feel a huge OB obligation to them to come home and so one thing that I like about work is that I don't feel conflicted Lisa and I are building it together so as I put energy into this I'm putting energy into something that I'm doing with my wife so that doesn't feel like it's fragmented energy it feels like it's coming together that was obviously on purpose I'm building a company that brings many of my passions not all of them but many of my passions

together so even as I pursue things that I would do no matter what I'm also building the business and I do that because I know I'm gonna feel that sense of obligation so let me make sure that I'm doing things that I love to satisfy the obligation if I had kids now when I'm at work I would feel like I should be with my kids when I'm with my kids I should feel like I I would feel like I should be at work I just know that about myself so I want to be really honest

and then you don't miss what you don't have so it's not like I had a seven-year-old and they died just never had kids right so kids are a thought so I can think and I'll have those moments sometimes really intense like oh dude like you see that moment like have you guys seen that Tik Tok Trend where it's like they record they do like the little the there's a song and they like propose to their daughter and they have the daughter recording she doesn't realize she's recording herself and she's like looking at them with like

a enjoy I'm like oh God like that hits me right in the fields and I'm like oh man I want to have a daughter or like that Jordan Peterson one did you know that one when they have like kids will not always be kids they'll grow up and this I haven't seen it and it's just like people videoing their kids growing up from like a kid to like 5 years old even hearing about that kicks me in the fields yeah you makes a Som assault like Lisa says yes oh yeah yeah yeah my my suddenly

I have a uterus as well yeah exactly it that kind of thing like they really really hit me so but anyway I can set that aside because I'm like my marriage is amazing I fully understand Nature's trick which is when you have a kid the child will be your number one priority and right now Lisa is my number one priority I don't know that this is a stat but I'd be willing to bet that relationships are more likely to break up or be dysfunctional that's a better way to say it relationships are more likely to

be dysfunctional if you have kids so even people that stay together I think it's a higher likelihood that that stop being a very um thriving emotional and sexual relationship if you have kids so I'm super thoughtful about that and then again average Wednesday don't really like I hate like doing things that kids want to do and stuff like that I have so little time it's like I want to do the things I want to do uh and then when I look back on my life and walk through all the different moments because all of our

lives are broken into phases I look at the different phases it's not until I'm in my 60s that I start to go oo I think that having kids will like be pretty important to me and by the time I'm 0 I will regret it there's no doubt about that but because I've thought through it I'll know how to deal with that frame of reference when I get there so that I don't get destroyed by it because it's when people are caught off guard by a frame of reference and explaining a frame of reference is beyond

the scope of this conversation but when you get to that frame of reference you see life through that and when you get caught off guard like by having a kid and you didn't think through that well or not having kids and you didn't think through that well uh at last check the most unhappy people in America are mid-30s female lawyers because they've chosen career over children and they are now at that moment where it's like whoa is this really what I want for my life now maybe other occupations they love it and it's not a

problem but for whatever reason 35 year-old women uh attorneys it's emotional implosion time so that's somebody who did not think through what are the different phases of my life like it's dope in my early 20s where I'm like yo I'm proving I can do anything I set my mind to I'm grinding I'm making a ton of money this is rad and then you realize oh wait a second maybe there are other things that I didn't think through but if you think through that and you're like oh in my mid-30s I may want kids but you

know what I'd actually rather play my career out now at least you're not taking by surprise so you can plan around okay I better have a career that gives me those things thinking through that I think is very important I know when I get to 80 that I will be very grateful that I thought through how my frame of reference will change and so I will make plans to be able to Mentor people to have in fact I'm starting to do that now even just in the way that I shift my own thinking thinking about

myself more as like a father trying to like hey I've suffered in my life I want other people to learn easily what I have learn through great suffering which is of course what one of the things that makes being a parent cool it's like hey I can help you hopefully make your life a little bit better and so that part of being a parent I can express in a lesser way I'm very well aware of that through the people in the company through the people that watch the content so being aware of the how the

frames of reference shift is important but anyway that how I have the way I've thought about pulling a fast one on mother nature to the extent that you can but it's a trade-off and then the last question I had was what are like three behaviors that you do to reinforce your love for Lisa that other people can put into their relationships okay so this is huge one don't criticize compliment so when I was young and you get together and you're in that relationship and everything is great but then you start living together and like that

super druglike early days starts to wear off and all of the sudden it's all the things that they do that drive you crazy and you're like hey could you not do that you know when you do that it really bugs me hey God stop why are you doing it like that and I was like wow when she does it to me that drives me crazy so I was like you know what every time I have an Impulse to criticize her instead I'm going to reach for a real compliment I'm never going to lie I'm not

going to BS but I'm going to reach for a real compliment what that does is it pattern interrupts in my own brain so I'm not reinforcing the negative thing because it really is negative like the person really is doing something that drives you crazy and it probably really is a dumb thing that if you could wave a wand to make go away you would and so it's not even like I'm saying that annoying thing isn't actually annoying it is but if I obsess over it all I'm going to see is the Annoying Thing whereas that

positive thing is also real so I want to make sure I'm spending my time thinking about the positive thing so don't criticize compliment always make it real but spend your time in the compliment have a lot of sex just real like even now in my 40s it is so funny in my late 40s I can think back to what I was like in my early 20s my poor wife and like going through that and thinking oh it's going to be like this forever it's not like as your hormones change and I know that I'm only

one testosterone injection from being right back there but it feels more manageable whereas before I felt like a drug addict who couldn't focus it's like now I feel like hey I have a healthy relationship with this drug uh I'm a recreational user now instead of an addict which is way better and so being in that space though I've realized it's still critically important it is a thing that is unlike anything else in your life it's the only person that you have that relationship with if if you're monogamous and that's not an over vote for monogamy

but monogamy has a really potent upside and so being in uh a monogamous relationship and knowing that that's my one outlet for that it you realize that sex is this fascinating thing that is a mode that we all go into and Going Back To Nature wants to make sure that you have kids that have kids it's like nature made sure that that was an awesome thing that is unlike anything else and so I'm legitimately freaked out by how much less sex young people are having now because they're missing out on something incredibly potent now I'm

only vouching for sex with connection I won't say that it has to be uh a marriage because I've had had my share of non-marital sex and it was awesome and I'm not denigrating that at all but I've always found that it's way more enjoyable if it's somebody that you have a real connection with so but thinking about it like that it is this mode that you don't get anywhere else if you have a spouse and you have what they call Bed Death that relationship is going to become dry and brittle that's metaphoric obviously but that

you that you'll get the right idea in your head whereas if you maintain a sexual relationship you're constantly Crossing this weird boundary into like this this completely unique space that you only have with that person and nature is squeezing this neurochemistry that constantly bonds you brings you back together so that's hugely important I cannot stress that enough and then number three you have to be a highle communicator you've got to invest in saying things that you don't want to say and I think one of the biggest breakthroughs in my marriage was when I finally realized

that I had to say out loud anytime insecurity was driving me because then my wife could help me and as long as she never weaponized the insecurity against me now it's not my wife's problem to solve now hopefully she can help me overcome that that would be amazing but it's not she doesn't need to solve that problem that's my problem to solve but she can't weaponize my insecurities against me and by me articulating them now we know what's actually going on so we're not arguing about a surface level thing we get to the real issue

that's driving it we can both process through that together and so so now you don't have stupid fights that last forever you're getting to the root cause of the issue I mean this is exactly like in medicine don't treat the symptom find the underlying cause but when you are arguing you have friction in your marriage you have to figure out the underlying cause and I promise you it's either a collision of values so you just you both understand each other you just disagree that that's how the world should be it's misaligned base assumptions so you

are viewing the world in a way that you don't even realize you're doing it so people don't realize what their Bas assumption is it's just it's what they call an axiom you just live by it like oh I assume that that emotion is very distressful for you so why wouldn't you want to solve the problem you assume that I know that it's not uncomfortable to sit in a negative emotion those are base assumptions but in reality my base assumption is you're in so much pain right now from this emotion the only thing that makes sense

is for us to solve that problem and your base assumption is dude how can I solve a problem if I haven't had a chance to sit in it yet but if we don't say that I'm trying to solve the problem you're like [ __ ] just listen right and so when two smart people are colliding they need to check their base assumptions first like what's your base assumption that I need to sit with this emotion before I can problem solve I need to problem solve to to even think straight cool now we can begin to

understand each other so it's either values it's misaligned base assumptions or you've got an insecurity that's driving you and you either aren't aware of it or you're not being honest about it and so if you get that stack right then all of a sudden communication becomes very easy but man you've got to be emotionally naked and that is very very difficult but it is hyper rewarding if you have a partner that doesn't use it against you so everybody sees how strong you know your relationship is with Lisa how amazing it is how deep but then

also people see how amazing your the career side of it is like your business impact theory is growing it's thriving and I just want to know how you balance that to keep both of them leveled up so evenly to keep them both growing and what your advice would be to people who don't know how to balance their relationship and their business or their work so if you want to balance things you have to know thyself so just a few days ago I sent Lisa a text that hurt her feelings and I didn't mean it to

I said hey would you mind if we did this business thing on a day that was special for her and I and I even said you're probably going to hate this idea but CU remember I feel a tremendous obligation to to work for you guys and to make sure that the company thrives and all that so I'm always thinking like hey this would be really good for the team now Lisa's role stated role it's not like she would be confused if she heard me say this she' be like yeah that's my role her stated role

is to be the early warning system because I don't see the problem coming in the relationship as quickly as she does so we refer to it as being disconnected where I work so much that we start to feel disconnect connected so thank you for saying that people see my relationship is thriving and I would say that it is but it's because we have these bumpers and I'll bump up against it as I did just a few days ago and I sent that thing and said hey let's do this business I know this is that really

special day for us but let's do this because I think it'd be good for the team and she said hey that hurts my feelings that you would even ask because it makes me feel not heard and not understood because 2022 was the hardest year of my business life and for eight months she let me work 120 hours hours a week that's not even getting a full night's sleep that's working around the clock seven days a week I mean it's it's pandemonium and I do not re recommend it I'm not proud of myself for doing it

it was actually a result of mistakes do I think I'm a badass for doing it yes but do I think it was a problem of my own making very much so so my wife was very understanding through that now I promised her that I would find my way back to her which I did and so but now she's very gunshy31 eight months and now you want to do a work thing on our special day that makes me feel very unheard now if either thing happens poorly in that moment we have a problem but Lisa and

I do that movement well she speaks up and says hey it bothered me that you even asked and I'm like oh damn like I don't like that it bothers you that I asked because your role is to play that person where I can say hey let's do this and you say early warning don't do that so she had to be graceful in that moment and say cool I'm not going to double down I'm not going to be angry let's not do that as the early warning system I'm telling you we can't do it and then

if in that moment I'm like yo what the [ __ ] like come on this will be better for the business I thought we were in this together then she's going to feel abandoned in the marriage so I'm like hey your stated role is to be the one to say nope that will lead to us feeling disconnected and so when you say it even though I have an Impulse to go in the opposite direction and I'm not feeling disconnected and that feels like a really small thing to me that's your role word so I'm going

to immediately back off totally I'm actually sorry that I asked I didn't mean to upset you and I totally get where you're coming from I hear you like we're on it and so now we just we move on I'm more thoughtful about okay fair like the eight months is pretty intense I totally get why she's saying that next time I'm going to try to catch myself before I ask but if I do she's not going to be upset but she is going to check it and say you can't do that so it's one understanding it

takes constant maintenance there is no such thing as oh my marriage is great and it will remain great forever my marriage is great because we work on it every single day now balancing the business in that it doesn't mean that I give more more time to my marriage because I don't I give more time to the business but it does mean that I prioritize my marriage so if my wife says hey we can't do that thing then we're not going to do it like I will just tell you the CFO pulled Lisa and I aside

was like yo two weeks at Christmas Crazy Town can't do it and I was like I'm just telling you right now two weeks at Christmas every year from now until the end of time because like the rest of my life I make it about my business for two weeks I'm not a business man I'm a family man it is what it is and he was like okay cool like totally on board I get it but that's one of those you you have to know like I need to do this set of 32 things to make

sure that my marriage which is always thriving and they don't always mean the most time now it's not an accident that Lisa and I build a company together I would never be able to work as much as I do if we didn't and I know this because the first company that when I got into entrepreneurship for eight years she wasn't and it was a nightmare and even though I worked less it was harder on the marriage than when I'm working more now because we're in it together and we share you know the same stories and

the same people and wants and all that good stuff I read feeling great you mentioned it earlier um and I might inflame the comment section by saying this but I feel like if if that book exists then like like why do people who read it like don't suddenly like oh now I'm no longer depressed or no longer feeling the anxious in that sense because he lays out all the steps very clearly um so what do you think is the thing that causes people to just not be like transformed from reading a book is it the

the number three thing that you said early in the beginning like just not enough repetition it just hurts the first time that they do it so they don't follow through like what is the thing that yeah the big reason that people struggle to get out of depression even if they've read a book like feeling great is that one they aren't they don't believe the following very inflammatory statement that you can get control of your neurochemistry and they think that it's all in the mind and they don't realize that it's a far more complicated Beast than

that but because they don't believe that they can completely get control of it they will try a few things early on and stop now if you have depression and you are not dealing with the body your microbiome very specifically then the odds of you getting out of that depression are virtually zero and so even a book as extraordinary as feeling great is only dealing with the psychological component of depression and it is far deeper than that so your gut controls many of your neurotransmitters and serotonin so ssris are selective serotonin re-uptake Inhibitors meaning they keep

more serotonin floating in your body now 70% of the serotonin in your body is produced and stored in the gut so if the very chemical that they use to combat depression is in your gut and you're not dealing with your gut now you have a problem but it goes back to what I call the only belief that matters if people don't think oh I can control this then they won't keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going until they find that root cause so they think that this is oh this is

that thing that happened to me a tragedy befell me and therefore I'm never going to be able to get out of this this is because of the trauma that I went through in childhood yes partly but you can get out of that you can unwind that stuff and I am not an any way shape or form saying this to be flipping I am not trying to diminish the terrifying grip that is depression I'm just saying you have to believe that you can get your way out of it and yes it is hyper complicated and having

watched Lisa go through an extraordinary battle with her microbiome and seeing how complicated it is to undo all that the psychological side's already bad enough especially if it's a result of trauma abuse where that gets hardwired in I mean that's in your nervous system in a deep way that is going to be very complex to unwind but it starts with believing that you can unwind it you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion

dooll business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs and impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing in things tap now for a free trial and get started today and then doing something like cognitive behavioral therapy where you go through I forget how many like it's like 13 steps and one of the steps is like the 15 cognitive distortions I mean it's crazy so it is already a

very complex book just cognitively psychologically that takes a lot of repetition which requires you to believe that it's going to work but then it's also the very difficult part of getting your body right sleep exercise diet diet you want to talk about hey let's really like the comment fire on the comment section on fire remind people that what they eat is going to influence their microbiome it's going to influence their production of Serotonin it's going to influence their sleep it's going to influence depression anxiety all of it it just is and if you're eating junk

food you are making everything worse not a moral judgment it's just a biological reality now if you can strip away the moral judgment and realize you're not a bad person if you eat junk food but you are a person that's creating obstacles for feeling good so all I'm saying is remove the obstacles now there are people in my life that I love that put every food obstacle in their way humanly possible they are actively in pain and they actively tell me how much they're suffering and they actively ask me what they should do to stop

suffering and they keep doing it does that mean that I think they are a worse person not in the slightest I love them just as much I think they're just as valuable as a human being and I really wish that they they would remove the moral judgment from themselves because it is not a moral question it is 100% entirely a question of this path leads to one outcome this path leads to a different outcome pick the path where the you like the outcome and then walk that path and so people have to recognize I can

do that that there are it is cause and effect there's nothing uh mythological about this it's cause and effect but it is hyper complicated it is both Psychology and Physiology unwinding that almost certainly require that you get help from professionals and other people and so the shortest answer in the world to your question is it's complicated rewatch this episode but even that like now how do you go in and do like Lisa had me by her side and it still took five years to get back to Baseline with her microbiome and man when you're in

the thick of it the whole time you're asking is this actually going to work because some days it doesn't feel like it some days it feels like this is going to be forever and it's not until you look back a year and go yeah wow that's right I actually have 17 more foods that I can eat now that I couldn't eat before but I still three days a week have just absolute agony in my gut and so it's still this still sucks then two years you look back and you're like oh wow I'm only having

that two days a week four years in you're like oh that's right I only have it occasionally and then 5 years in you're like God this took a very long time but there's a lot of dark days for somebody struggling with depression but if you don't believe that you can unwind it if you don't believe that you're in control even though it's very complicated then you'll never do it and having been a victim of something would be horrible but you now have to take control and say okay this sucks I can't undo the past but

I always can control how I react to that thing don't take my word for it read man search for meaning that is the ultimate form of abuse he was in a concentration camp it's like nobody's got a trump card to play on him right and his punchline is it's all about how you process it emotionally so if if you can share what there in that five years were there days that Lisa just did not believe oh yeah well they were the darkest days of my marriage they were depression they were me being afraid she was

going to die because she was so sick there was her being so fed up I don't even want to try anymore why Try why bother there's no point I like wow that's hard there were times where she would respond to love with just rejection and anger I was like what is happening and so it was brutal and we didn't know I mean you had to have Blind Faith that it was going to work but did I know it was going to work no and there were times where even I was like I have to act

as if this is going to work but I've never been through this before and this is early man we we as like a a mainstream Society have only known about the microbiome for like 10 years like a year before Lisa got sick i' had never even heard of the microbiome so it's like dude this stuff is so complex that it it does feel like a big question mark but I will just say there is a solution to every problem once you master this and realize that you don't have to stay in a bad job that

you can either leave or turn it into a rad job and that there actually is a process to doing that things will get a lot better I've seen so many people live lives that they hate because we spend so many of our working hours at our job if you don't love your job yikes it is brutal on the total quality of your life all right so let's dive into this topic and see what we can do to help you guys make the most out of whatever job you have so the key here is recognizing that

there really is only one path to success and that is you're going to have to set the bar ridic ridiculously high and then surpass all expectations you want to really show people that you are capable of doing things that other people cannot when you can outperform other people and I know nobody likes to think this is a competition but the reality is when you can do things that other people can't do and if those things are valued by the company you are going to move quickly through that company even if your boss is trying to

steal your ideas which I know is something that happens to a lot of people if you really are the person that's coming up with the ideas and your boss wouldn't be able to get very far without them you've got leverage and so understanding that being able to outperform people is always the right answer that's where I would focus okay then the next thing is so I've got this amazing skill set then the next thing is when I'm always going to be growing my skill set day after day two I'm going to take my job description

and I'm going to say all right this is the stuff that I have to get done in the first half of my day and do it extreme ex well and then in the second half of my day I'm going to go find other projects that the company is trying to get accomplished see what I can do to help help other people take on responsibility for projects that are beyond my job description and then I'm going to do them just as well as I do my actual main job people that do that are worth their weight

in gold not only will you endear yourself to the people that you're helping but when you go to your boss and say hey are there other projects that I could take on maybe even things that are outside of the exact Department that you're in that's going to be a huge help almost every company is looking for people that um show initiative and are able to be trusted with additional projects and if you're in a company where they just aren't interested in that they don't want people that show initiative which by the way I challenge I

think if you put me into a company even with strict hierarchies even with political Intrigue all that stuff that I would find a way to be useful to other people that I would find a way to help other people uh oh there's a quote I'm going to paraphrase it goes something like this it's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't care about the credit so if you don't care about getting the credit and you're just helping people I think people are definitely going to take that help now the key is that you make yourself

indispensable to them once you're indispensable to them now you have that leverage and so being able to use that leverage to illustrate that you have a long track record of highlevel performance within the company now when you go and start asking for arrays you're going to be much more likely to get it and here is a secret to getting a raise go to your boss or whatever Department it is you're trying to move into and ask them what would it look like I want this title or I want to make this much money what would

I have to deliver to you in order to get that and if you get them to explain to you like hey if you were able to do XYZ thing that would be Nob brainer I would definitely put you forward for that promotion amazing now you know exactly what you need to do now you just need to go make sure that you get the skill set that's going to allow you to do that better than other people now my thing is I'm always trying to reach beyond what I'm getting paid to do because remember I started

out as an employee okay I've not always owned my own companies so when I was an employee that's what I was thinking about like I want to be indispensable I want to I want people to have fear of loss with me I want them to be afraid that I'm going to leave because I am delivering so much value I'm not saying that's not my job instead I'm saying what does a company need and then I'm helping the company get that thing and so when you're able to assess what problems a company is facing and help

make those problems go away you become extraordinarily valuable when you're communicating very directly about what you want and finding out what you would need to do to get there and then delivering against that you're going to find yourself going up when you're constantly helping other people with their projects and delivering a high level of quality and not asking for the credit for that you're just doing it because you want to help people while I have no doubt some people will take advantage of you the vast majority of people will not and you will find yourself

Meeting those people again and again and people wanting to Champion you and lift you up if you run that strategy I'm telling you right now you will be able to make things happen in your current company what kinds of thought practices can I Implement in order to approach my job differently okay to really answer that question I would have to know how you're approaching your job now but the best way to approach any job is to again instead of asking what your job description is to figure out what problems the company faces and what role

can you play in helping make those problems go away now the key to doing that is to really getting into a nitty-gritty tactical understanding of what the high level goals for the company are okay so you should be able to find those out and if your company isn't broadcasting those you have another problem but find out what your company's high level goals are find out how your department has goals that are feeding into the company level goals and then figure out what you can do on an individual level in order to help yourself or help

the company achieve those goals so there should be a direct line from what you're doing to what your Department's trying to accomplish to what the Company's trying to accomplish so that you know as you're working on that thing that you're actually contributing in a meaningful way so that you can point to something and say hey that thing contributed to this project contributed to that goal right and when people can actually track your deliverables and they see the things that you worked on and how that fed into these very meaningful goals that's how you begin to

develop that fear of loss and get people to think of you a new so as you're trying to think about your own job differently you're trying to change the way that people perceive you you want them to perceive you as a problem solver and if you were to ask me what is one attribute that is just worth it's weight and gold that I'm always looking for in any team M here at impact Theory it is problem solving I don't want to have to solve all the problems by myself I don't want to have to come

up with all the ideas people often think that their boss wants to come up with all the ideas I promise you even if your boss is stealing all of your ideas they don't want to have to think of them and so you can make yourself indispensable and then leverage being indispensable to either get out from under a boss that's just stealing your ideas to make it just undeniable that you're the one coming up with these ideas but performance is always the key now even if all you do is leverage that performance to get another job

at a different company being able to say I did this this this help with this this and this and you can convey that in a way that makes it pretty obvious that in fact you were delivering a high level of performance because you can articulate it so clearly you really are able to demonstrate that skill set you have a free ticket to go wherever you want but the key is don't think of yourself as being bound by your job description think of yourself as being bound by your skill set by wanting to put that skill

set to use against the goals that the company have when you do that now you've got the right frame of reference for what your job is what kinds of things can you do to balance your job and something you love without facing burnout burnout out is a tricky Beast burnout has a lot to do with the things that you I won't just say love doing but they have a lot to do with aligning the things that you're doing with things that give you more energy so whatever it is that you're engaging with you want to

find a way to really engage with that in a meaningful way and so there are a couple parts to that so number one you want to make sure that you understand the why that you're doing this so that you can attach meaning and purpose to it when you've got meaning and purpose behind something Everything Changes getting good at life being good at your job succeeding paying the bills all of this stuff is so hard that if you don't have a why that you're able to plug in so I'm paying my bills so that I can

support my family all right that's an incredible why but you really want to think about that you want to focus on that and then the other is just making sure that you're able to engage with it in a way that allows you to experience progress so getting better at something and moving forward in your life is one of the foundational pillars of human happiness and so making sure that you are finding ways to engage with what you're doing in such a way that it allows you to be fed while you're doing this instead of having

the energy Stripped Away okay that's part one part two in all of this is making sure that you understand an idea that a lot of people myself included who like to be ultra Hardcore have to really learn and that is doing less is always an option okay doing less is always an option so if you're starting to feel burned out you need to pump the brakes and I always tell myself I don't do overwhelm now I don't say that because I can carry an infinite weight I cannot I have my limitations just like anybody else

but the reason that I don't burn out is because as I feel myself getting close to my limitations I don't tell myself like come on like you can do anything just keep going now I am hardcore I'll be the first to admit that I make sure that I'm leaving it out on the field that I'm playing as hard as I can but I make the demand that even hard work is done in a joyful manner so I am at all times pursuing fulfillment in a joyful manner it just so happens that fulfillment by nature is

working really hard to gain a set of skills that allow you to serve not only yourself but other people okay working really hard that's part of it that's that's a directive inside of our brains given to us by Evolution so you have a directive in your brain to work hard and if you don't work hard there will be a sense of disease in your life you won't feel right something will feel like it's missing you won't know what it is you'll be grasping for something and it will seem like it's going to be a thing

you need to get to attain whatever when in reality you need to work hard that working hard there's a reason that working out leaves you with this amazing feeling nature had to incentivize that you would work hard because going out hunting foraging protecting your family all of that stuff was brutally difficult when you you know go back hundreds of thousands of years and that's what we came up through and so nature only has two tools Pleasure and Pain if you're doing the right things pleasure if you're doing the wrong things or not doing something you

should be doing like working hard then walloped with pain you get so that's a key you want to be working hard towards something that matters and allows you to serve not only yourself but other people when you start doing that now all of a sudden you're back in that energizing mode and you don't have to worry about burning out but working hard is a key part of this but when I get to the point where it's like all right I'm I'm really working hard but I'm now reaching a limit where even with all the meaning

and purpose and all the joyful pursuit of fulfillment I'm now reaching a point where this isn't Fun you need to acknowledge that and back off that's not the time to keep pushing right right you needed to gut check yourself you needed to make sure that you weren't just being lazy but when you realize I'm not being lazy this is just not fun I'm now at a point of diminishing returns need to be honest about that acknowledge it trust yourself to have busted your ass that you don't just grab for the oh what was me you

know I'm exhausted it's like no man I've really played hard I've really gone after this I've made sure that there's meaning and purpose I've made sure that I'm pursuing fulfillment I've made sure that there's progress in my life but now we've hit a point point it's not enjoyable back off relax take a Tuesday off meditate daily find some way to get calm and creative prioritize your sleep make sure you're eating right and exercising all of these things matter a lot when it comes to burnout so be very thoughtful that even something that you love that

you recognize there can be a point where you just need space you need a minute you need to take some downtime and that you actually allow yourself to take downtime but that you're checking yourself to make sure you're not just being lazy I'm not in love with my job but I have no dream or passion to succeed further I don't know what else to do I feel like this job has taken all creativity and Imagination away from me what do you recommend for someone like like me all right so first and foremost we are going

to have to figure out what exactly has happened so is it that you don't have a dream or passion because you haven't taken the time to Define that because let me be very clear passion is not an archaeological dig it's an architectural build so you don't turn inwards look inside yourself and find this glowing Ember of passion and excitement that's been sitting there since birth despite that some people will tell you that that's how this works but it is not if Steve Jobs were born a thousand years ago he would not have dreamed of making

the iPhone what ends up happening is you decide there is something that you decide means enough to you that you're going to invest in it and then over time that investment turns that thing into a deep and abiding passion as you get better and you get feedback from the world that they value this thing that you're getting better at but it isn't just lying dormant within you and this is like the number one confusion that I encounter with people is they think that either they're broken and other people were born with a passion and they

were not or they just think that you know if I do enough introspection I'm going to find something sitting inside of me and finally my life will be amazing once you realize that in fact what happens is when you look inside all you're going to find are these um Sparks of interest and from that spark of Interest through pursuing it as a process of gaining Mastery it will become a passion when you're able to use that skill set that you gained in the pursuit of Mastery to serve not only yourself but other people okay so

doing that now you're in this passion Loop of you worked really hard you gained this set of skills allows you to serve other people they give you feedback oh my God thank you this is so amazing I'm grateful for what you've done built created given me whatever the case may be and that feels good which makes you want to go get better and that's the passion Loop now as you're doing that you're able to really be energized by the things that you're doing but it doesn't start by looking Inward and finding something it starts by

realizing that you have to Fan those flames of that spark of interest to turn it into the Raging Inferno that you want to feel of that passion but that comes from that Loop okay so that's the first thing to obsess now if you already have or had a passion but this job has somehow beaten it out of you that's a very different story and so if that's what's going on we need to figure out what is it in the structure of that that is robbing you of that what's going on exactly that's making this overwhelming

or stressful or not fun is it politics in the office is it just the work environment is too fast-paced is it that you're not being honest with yourself about you know going back to this idea 50% of you is hardwired 50% of you is malleable if the hardwired part is out of step with the life that you're trying to lead there can be a lot of frustration there so having the self-awareness to understand did you put yourself in the wrong position are you trying to be Steve Jobs when you should be Steve wnc that's a

really imperative thing to look at now I find that a lot of times uh companies have their own issues whenever you get a large group of people together there are going to be weird things that have to be navigated but at the end of the day while you can't control everything that everybody does you can always control how you react and so you can reorient yourself within a company to figure out one if there's a a path back to finding that Joy but that comes from breaking down what exactly happened that made you stop feeling

the joy and two are you able to perform at a high enough level that you're able to create the space for you to get back on track because if you're going to go in and try to move things around and make some changes within the company or within your role or within how things work you're going to need to be performing at a very high level to have the credibility to make that ask and this is where it gets difficult nobody wants to hear this I get it everybody wants to point fingers and say this

is just a toxic company but in reality if it's that bad leave do not waste time start find another job first I'm not just saying quit find another job but get out of there don't act like you're actually in prison you are not actually impr prison and yes I understand that you have obligations and you may be a single parent with kids and huge responsibility I completely understand and I have the most empathy for that in the world but I want you to understand understand you are only as trapped as you allow yourself to be

if you have a useful skill set you will be able to find another job and now is the time to go looking for that while you're still getting paid now if you don't have skill set that's marketable that's where we have to start and so building up this skill set so that we can be marketable somewhere else that's going to give us the ability to perform where we are or leave if it's too toxic but assuming that we're going to stay now we need that skill set to perform at a very high level to create

the credibility to make the ask and go to your boss or whomever is creating or maybe not even creating the problem but who has the ability to help you create the solution now you go and say I'm performing at a high level yes yes oh my God you're amazing okay cool here are the things that I would need to change so often people's first instinct is just peace out and they don't realize that there are many things that they could have done to to restructure the role to create more space for themselves in order to

stay but what people end up letting happen is they let themselves burn out and then they want to leave and go somewhere else not realizing that they will have the same problem at the next job and instead of doing the work themselves solving the internal problem of how we ended up here whether it's lack of skill set not setting boundaries whatever the case may be but keeping that ownership keeping that responsibility recognizing that if you make different choices you get different outcomes so that you can go ahead and change things there now again if you

want to leave leave by all means take your skill set and go elsewhere but make sure that you're not doing what I was doing in my early 20s when I was about to move to New York because I was unhappy in LA and I thought the LA was a problem in reality it was my mindset once I changed my mindset suddenly La was amazing because it wasn't about La it was about me and I thought ah like something's got to change and so I just wanted to go as far away as I could but it

wouldn't have solved the problem I would have gotten to New York only to have the same issue again and again and again I had to address my mindset and once I did that then everything changed so be very careful be very thoughtful about how you approach unwinding this problem if you're always blaming other people you're not going to get where you want to go because you're not looking for the things that you can do differently you're letting your psychological immune system take over make it other people's problems and then you're not able to change and

once you realize that your life is an exact reflection of your choices now it's not so you feel bad it's so that you remember if you make different choices you get different outcomes and so now you can make these changes or gain more skills or whatever it is that's needed to get the life that you want now no matter where you go you will feel completely comfortable that you can shape things to your liking but you have to know how the game works you have to know that building skill set is the key you have

to know that communicating with your boss what's working what's not working and to have earned the credibility to make the ask do all that you'll have no problem I have Financial Obligations to stay at my current job it has made me feel more depressed than I can say how do I find purpose and fulfillment in a job like this okay we have to figure out why you're feeling depressed is it your financial obligations is it that you hate this job and really the question you should be asking is how do I find another job so

let me ask you a question have you ever written down in a single sentence what your ideal job is I find that often times the reason that people's lives are not what they want them to be is because they lack Clarity there's a great Tony Robbins quote if you don't know where you want to be in five years you're already there that one hit me so hard the first time I heard it if you don't know where you want to be in five years you're already there where you are now is where you're going to

be in 5 years 10 years because you don't have the clarity to steer towards something else because ultimately this is a steering problem we have to know where we want to go we have to figure out how do we end up here how did we end up in a job that we hate is it that we chose the wrong job is it that we let ourselves be the boiled frog where it was just well that decision wasn't so bad okay that I don't love that but whatever it's fine and it's just day after day month

after month year after year it's things like that where things have gotten worse you never set boundaries you never push back you didn't gain new skills so that you could demonstrate that you're capable of more you didn't take on addition responsibilities and carve your own path through the company are you waiting for people to come to you and tell you hey you should apply for this new role a lot of times people are waiting because they don't have the clarity or a lot of times they're afraid to go after it they know what they want

but they either haven't built the skill set or they're so afraid of rejection they don't even try on that you're GNA have to build some I won't say fearlessness cuz you're going to be afraid but you've got to be willing to embarrass yourself you've got to be willing to fail like you've got to be able to sit in failure and be okay with it because let me tell you the people that end up succeeding are not the ones that just never make a mistake they're the ones that aren't afraid to make a mistake or they're

certainly not paralyzed by it right there's that amazing Michael Jordan commercial where he's talking about you know I've missed this many game-winning shots and I've failed this many times and it's because I have failed that many times that I've had the successful career that I've had now it sounds counterintuitive so you need to understand what's really going on what's really going on is that you have to be willing to take those risks it isn't that you will never fail it's just that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take you are guaranteed to stay

where you are if you never try to reach for anything more a guarantee it is a guarantee it's guaranteed you're never going anywhere else if you don't try you are never going anywhere else it is 100% guaranteed so you're going to embarrass yourself you're going to make mistakes you're going to look stupid and if you can emotionally deal with that then you'll actually get better because every attempt that you make you get a little bit better at least if you're willing to be honest about the ones that failed why they failed own that respon responsibility

so that you understand next time I can make a different choice and get a different result you do that enough it's what I call the physics of progress you take your best guess you try it fail to some degree improve start over again try something new fail to some degree and you just keep iterating like that until you get better and better and better and better and better and you make that progress that's really the key but you have to do the work you have to be honest with yourself you have to take responsibility you

have to keep trying you can't give up if you hate your job and you want to find fulfillment and you want purpose you also have to assign meaning and purpose like a passion there is no meaning and purpose hiding inside of you there are things that you care about for sure and your goal is to look inside of yourself and to find one of those things that matters to you and say say I'm going to make this really matter I'm going to make this the meaning and purpose behind what I'm doing now again if you

haven't read the book man search for meaning read it Victor Frankle talks about exactly how you assign meaning and purpose to something so that you can suffer and go through difficult things all the while knowing why you're doing this why am I doing this when you have a compelling answer to that question you will move forward if you don't have a compelling answer to that question you will not move forward so we're going to make sure that we figure out how we've ended up here why we're depressed and then we're going to assign meaning and

purpose we're going to work to get the skill set that we need to make progress towards this thing that matters right because it's not enough to just have something that matters you've taken the time you've assigned meaning and purpose to this thing that you're doing but now you actually need to make progress towards that and that's all about skill acquisition so this requires you to be very honest with yourself about how you ended up here retain your power by really looking at things from what did I do to end up here versus making this somebody

else's problemo it's a toxic work culture the environment here is terrible my boss is an idiot don't do even if those things are true don't waste any time with that because you can't control that what you can control is what you do how you react so focus on that assign that meaning and purpose get the skill set you need in order to make meaningful progress towards that and it will turn you around in terms of how you feel and then remember you can always leave so if your work really is that terrible then go somewhere

else just don't forget that all of your problems are going to follow you so solve the mindset issues first and then see how that manifests every time something goes wrong in my life I am asking myself one simple question what is it that I suck at I suck at something there's something I'm doing wrong by definition if I were doing it right then I would be getting the outcome that I wanted