209: How to Get Better at Anything with Tom Bilyeu

Pete Mockaitis
Tom, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Tom Bilyeu
Thank you for having me on, man.  I’m glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
In reading off about you I got a real kick out of how you say your mission is to pull everybody out of the matrix.  What does that mean and how’s it going?

Tom Bilyeu
[laugh] What it means is The Matrix to me, the movie, is a perfect metaphor for a limiting belief system.  So in the movie it’s really all about what Neo is able to believe he can do, and then once he believes it then he can actually pull it off.  I actually think that’s really, really true for real life.  And how’s it going?  I would say that I’m very much at the beginning of an incredibly long journey, so it’s going well, I’m certainly excited, but I am not fooling myself into thinking that this is something that’s going to happen overnight.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood.  So now, I’m a bit familiar with Quest Nutrition and Impact Theory.  But Impact Theory is newer, yes?  So, tell us what’s that about and some core tenants of what you believe there?

Tom Bilyeu
For sure.  So, Impact Theory is a traditional narrative studio, but we’re going to be doing things a little bit differently.  So, if you want to think of us as a 21^st century Disney, that’s how we think of ourselves.  So, one thing that Disney I think did really well, and it’s been sitting in plain sight since the 1930s that nobody’s replicated since is that every piece of content that they create fits into a brand ….

So, if I tell you that I’m going to go see a Sony movie or a Warner Brothers movie, you don’t know anything about it.  But if I say I’m going to go see a Disney movie, you already know something about that.  You know the kind of feeling it’s going to give you, you know that it’s probably going to capture the magic of childhood, right is going to triumph, and all the things that go into the Disney brand.  And they’ve just done an unbelievable job of being consistent with that, and nobody’s really had a similar level of discipline to make sure that the brand itself stands for something.

So, that’s what we’re going to be doing with Impact Theory, and the wonderful thing for us is that we’re living in a time where social media is going to be able to commentate on the kinds of themes and things that we want people to extract from the movies and TV shows and comic books and all the different pieces of content that we’ll be creating, the meaning that we’re looking for people to extract from that.

And that’s been our first phase, which is to do the social side of things, to build the audience that ultimately is going to give us a negotiating leverage on the more traditional content side of things.  Being at Quest, one of the things that just became abundantly clear to me is, if you want to have negotiating power, you’ve got to have a community.  And that was one of the things that really helped us be successful there.

And so to answer the second part of your question – what are some of the main tenants that we have – it comes down to mindset.  At end of the day this was me looking at the world and saying, “Okay, we’re living through two horrifying things right now.”  One, you have the pandemic of the body, which is I think well-understood, people get that, you can look at what’s going on from obesity and all the diet-related diseases that we were trying to address at Quest.

And then the other is the pandemic of the mind, and looking at what’s going on with anxiety, depression, crazy suicide rates, just a general sense of helplessness.  And with Quest we really said, “Okay, no BS.  How would you end metabolic disease?”  And the answer was you had to make food that people chose based on taste and it happened to be good for them.  So saying, “Hey, eat less and exercise more” – it works for a very narrow band of the population, but we’ve been telling people that for, whatever, 50-60 years, and we’re not winning.  So, I think at some point you have to acknowledge that while it may work on paper, it’s not working in real life.

So looking at the same side of the coin of mental malnourishment, if you will, what’s going to be the “No BS” answer to how do you get people to break out of their limiting beliefs, to really begin just a relentless pursuit of skill acquisition to make the things that they dream about?  How do you actually make those real?  And I think the answer to that is ultimately narrative; it’s fiction, it’s the things that help build our cultural frame of reference, that ultimately are the building blocks of our internal belief system.  And it’s the internal belief system that I think we have to change, and we can go into it if it’s useful about the sort of neural science behind why that’s true and why I’m so driven by that.  But that, in a very wordy nutshell, is what we’re trying to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is inspiring stuff.  It’s clear that you’re playing a big game and you believe what you are about, and that just liberates a lot of excitement for those around you, I’m sure.  Because I’m fired up already; I’m like, “Dang!  That’s intense.  Bring it on.” [laugh] So, I’m digging it.  Now let’s talk about some of those beliefs.  And so, I know that you are a huge believer in Carol Dweck’s work around mindset, and we hope to have her on the show in due time.  But let’s hear about you and your experience for why you think that is so important.  And just maybe unpack a little bit of what is a growth mindset and how have you made that work for you?

Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I love that you’re bringing up Carol Dweck.  So, I only wish that I had had her book 15-20 years ago when I began my own process of actually acquiring a growth mindset.  And her book breaks it down really simply.  So you’ve got two types of mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.  And people that have a fixed mindset believe that their talent and intelligence are fixed rates; there’s nothing that you can do about them, you’re born with what you’re born with and your life is about making the most of what you were given.

A growth mindset, by contrast, is where people believe that their talent and intelligence are malleable traits and through discipline, practice and a lot of hard work that you can shape yourself into essentially whatever you want to be.  So whether you’re born good at business or not, whether you’re born as a talented athlete or not – none of that matters where you start.  What really matters is where you want to go and the price you’re willing to pay to get there.  And I think we all sort of instinctually recognize that human beings can get better.  We’re all born a lump of flesh, we can’t hold our own head up, we have to wear diapers, we learn to walk and talk…

No matter what environment I put you in you’re going to learn that language.  So, doesn’t matter whether your ancestors spoke that language.  If you grew up in America and as an infant I take you to France, you’re going to learn French.  If I took you to somewhere where they speak an even more foreign language, Chinese or Japanese or whatever, you’re going to learn it and you will speak it like a native speaker.  So, we get this sense that when we’re kids we’re a pretty malleable entity, that we can go in any direction.

However, at some point people believe – a lot of people anyway – believe that that sort of stops and it dries up.  And that maybe until you’re about 12 or 13 you can really learn a lot of stuff; after that you begin to lose that ability.  But modern neuroscience proves that’s just not true and that to your last dying breath neuroplasticity is a thing, that you actually can not only create neurons, that you can create new connections between neurons, get better at something, whatever that thing is going to be that you want, whether it’s salsa dancing or physics.  You can get better at whatever you want to do.

We don’t have to get into right now whether anyone can be world-class at anything, and I fully recognize that if you’re 4’11” winning an NBA championship isn’t going to be easy, but there are some pretty compelling stories of people that just didn’t show any natural talent, but they just work and work and work and get better.  And that was my journey, man – I was not a born entrepreneur, I came smack-bang face-to-face with the fact that I wasn’t a talented, naturally-gifted filmmaker, and that was my goal.

So from the time I was 12 years old I wanted to be a filmmaker, and I only got into entrepreneurship as a way to finally control my art, to have control of the resources so that I could make movies the way that I wanted to make them.  And in that process of realizing, “Oh dear God, I’m not actually good at this naturally”, I had to find something, like some mindset.  Unfortunately at the time I didn’t even think about mindset, but I needed something that would allow me to escape this sense that everything that my life had been building towards, which was to be a filmmaker, and I just didn’t have the talent for it.

And when that felt like a permanent state of being, it made me feel really hopeless.  And so, that primed me, that opened me to anything that would allow me to believe something different, that there was some hope, some way that I could get better.  And like I said, Carol Dweck hadn’t written the book Mindset yet, so I had to sort of fumble this and put it all together piecemeal, but began to realize that you can get better, and if I was willing to work and practice and study and push myself, that I could grow.

And that ultimately leads me to entrepreneurship, which then was really an amazing testing ground for me to see how good can I get it something that I have absolutely no natural inclination for.  And over the course of 15 years took myself from knowing precisely zero about business – I was not a kid that had a lemonade stand or anything like that – going from that to building a billion-dollar business and understanding exactly how we did it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s exciting, it’s cool.  So kudos there, and that’s great stuff.  I want to zoom in a little bit on what you said, that when it comes to some folks who are still with a fixed mindset, the notion is they believe that, call it 12 or 13 or so, you don’t have the ability to learn and grow the way you did as a child.  So let’s dig into the neuroscience a bit.  So, what is different in our brains with regard to learning, growth, development, ability at age 8 versus age 38, that is real versus just bogus?

Tom Bilyeu
Well, I’ll give you a layman’s perspective.  While I play a neuroscientist on YouTube, I am not actually one in real life, but I’ve met just some of the most incredible minds in the world of neuroscience.  And the whole concept of neuroplasticity is, it’s pretty interesting how the dynamic of it does change.  And I think that failing to recognize that the way that we are able to learn as kids does change – to fail to recognize that is one of the things that leads people to believe that people are just sort of being doe-eyed and internationally naive.

So, it goes like this: When you’re young because you’re prime to make these new connections as you begin to digest the world and figure out the way that things are, you don’t have to undo anything.  So, everything is about that first connection.  So you may learn what you’re learning from many, many, many different angles with absolute nuance, and there are things at work, like there’s a region of the brain when you’re young dedicated to distinguishing the most subtle of sounds apart, which is why you learn language when you’re young with no accent, but around 11 that begins to be reallocated towards other things.

So, if in the beginning you’ve got all the potential for all these different connections and the brain is really prime to let you go in any direction you want, which is one of the most fascinating things about human evolution, is at some point unlike other animals, which pre-program everything, which is why they come out already able to walk and do a lot of basic stuff that it takes humans years to learn, we decided to go for maximum flexibility, because who knows what environment you’re going to be born into.  And that’s really one of the things that makes humans so fascinating, is our ability to be truly peak adaptation machines; we just adapt way better than anybody else.

So, that’s how the early brain is designed, is to be able to go essentially in any direction.  So we have things like that ability to really distinguish between these subtle sounds, but as we grow there’s the ever march towards specificity.  So hey, probably by 11 you don’t need to learn different languages; by 11 you’ve begun to have a region or a climate or a hunting style or whatever that is – that’s going to be the trajectory now moving forward.  So, areas of the brain which are designed to offer that maximum flexibility begin to get reallocated towards the specificity of what you’re actually doing.

So, that how you go from this feeling like, “Man, you drop a kid into any environment, and they get it.”  But when you take an adult, it’s a little bit slower.  Now part of the reason that it’s a little bit slower is because now you’re unwinding things.  So if you’re learning something new, it may be at the expense of something else.  And this is where we’re sort of getting into the edges of my real fundamental understanding of the neuroscience, so I won’t drag us too clumsily into that, but it’s something like this – where you may have 1,000 neurons dedicated to the concept of snow – you don’t need 1,000 neurons dedicated to that, so slowly they unwind and now they get reallocated to something else.

And so, anybody that’s learned a foreign language later in life will really understand that.  So for instance I learned French when I was in high school and college, and then later I learned Greek.  Now, when I reach into my brain to pull out a word from either French or Greek, it feels like it’s in a very different place than English, and I often feel like those two things overlap, so that as I’ve learned Greek it sort of unwound some of my French and replaced it with Greek, which is sort of a weird experience.  But anybody that’s done that I think will recognize that sensation.

So that’s at a really high level what’s going on neurologically that gives us that experience, but people get lulled into… Because it is different – I won’t even say necessarily more difficult ’cause you have higher-level cognition that kicks in as an adult, discipline, drive – things that actually make learning I think easier than when I was a kid – but there is that process of undoing one thing to do something new.  But as long as you understand that the neuroplasticity is still real, that you still can adapt and learn, then you can really become a supercharged learning machine.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I dig that.  That’s exciting, and I appreciate the unpacking a little bit of, “Something is different, but it’s still for real, present, and able to go to work for you.”  So, I’d like to get your take when it comes to the fixed versus growth mindset.  How do you get yourself to stay in the growth mindset more often and just really milk it for all it’s worth?

Tom Bilyeu
For me that comes down to your goals.  If you have crystal clear goals and your goals are something that actually excites you, then you’re very quickly going to adapt the mindset of, “What works?  What’s actually going to move me towards this thing?”  And when you have that, when it’s a conscious decision that, “I should be doing and believing that which moves me towards my goals”, you get un-hung up on some of the things that trip other people up.  And where I think a lot of people get stuck is what they build their self-esteem around.

So self-esteem matters very much; everybody needs it.  Pride – people need it.  Ego’s not a bad thing.  It comes down to, what are those things built around?  So if your ego is built around being smart or being right, if you’re proud of all the times that you had the right answer, then that’s really fragile, it’s really dangerous ’cause now you’re going to start doing stupid behaviors just to prove that you’re right about something.  Versus if you build your self-esteem around being the learner, around identifying the right answer faster than anybody else, no matter who it comes from – those are, to use Nassim Taleb’s words – those are very anti-fragile.

So, the more that somebody attacks you or comes after you saying something like, “Hey, you’re stupid” – when I hear that I think, “Great, if now I know I’m stupid, in what way?  Give me that piece of information, and now I can learn about that because that’s where I build my identity.”  My pride is around going, “Fantastic.”  I’m not hurt by that comment as much as I’m invigorated because now I know the area that I need to learn in.

Pete Mockaitis
Tom, I love that so much, that “You’re stupid” provides you with invigoration.  And I can relate to that.  Sometimes it’s like if the computer… If you find some over-cluttering or malware or virus or something, it’s like, “Ooh, we found something bad.  This is awesome.”  I get excited by that ‘cause that means we’re about to fix something, clean something up and I’m about to have more efficiency and performance there.  And likewise, I’m excited if I catch, you call it low-hanging fruit or whatever buzz word you like – it’s like, “Oh, there’s something that’s missing here, and by rectifying it, some great results are going to get unlocked.”  And that’s a rush.

Tom Bilyeu
Very well said.  Totally agree.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good.  But did I catch you off?  You were going somewhere as well.

Tom Bilyeu
I think that you really summed it up well there.  It’s like that’s the exciting part, right?  Once you realize it’s going to be a deeper level of efficiency that, “Okay, I’ve gotten this far with this virus.  Now what happens when I clean it up?”  When you’ve got that mentality, then the excitement is what allows you to stay in the growth mindset longer.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I dig it.  Now you said if you have crystal clear goals which excite you, then you’re just kind of cruising and you’ll naturally gravitate toward the growth mindset, your beliefs and practices to get there.  So, I’d love to zoom in on what does it mean to arrive at crystal clear goals that excite you, in terms of goal-setting, smart goals, or what’s the means by which you arrive there?

Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that is a really important process, and I think people expect to discover what their passion is, to discover what their mission in life is, and it just doesn’t work like that.  So, people need to switch their mind from thinking about discovering that stuff to developing it.  So, if you’ve read Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, he really goes into this process in a super powerful way.  Highly recommend people read that book.

And what he talks about in there is that nobody’s born with a passion; you have to really look inward, see a spark of interest, engage in that thing, and through the engagement you’ll find out whether or not you actually enjoy it, whether it’s becoming a real fascination.  And that if something’s becoming a true fascination, then as you go down the path of getting mastery, it’s in that process, in that deep level of engagement where you’re really having to push through boredom, to practice long after it’s fun, that you’re going to find out if this is something that’s really a passion.

And that gaining of mastery becomes a key part of understanding why something becomes a passion.  When you’re good at it, when you’re able to affect the world around you and the people around you… I think it was Aristotle – I’m almost certain it was Aristotle – said the thing that really gives people deep fulfillment is when they have what he called “techne”, where it’s something that you’ve worked your ass off to acquire a skill and that skill has use.  So it’s that important element of, “This wasn’t an easy skill to acquire, but I acquired it anyway, and now it’s valuable, it actually has use.”  That’s when something really becomes exciting and you can become passionate about it.  And that kind of thing is where you can begin to have the tools that you need to really manifest that goal that you have, that thing that’s off in the future and it’s exciting.

And that’s why you have to be very careful about that vision that you begin painting for yourself, because if it’s something that doesn’t excite you, if it’s something that you aren’t interested enough in the path, the skillset that you’re going to have to acquire in order to keep fighting and pushing through the boredom and all that stuff that comes along with really building something on a grand scale, then you’ll burn out and you’ll tap out and you’ll quit.

And that’s where so many people live their lives, is they just get caught up in the mundane day-to-day, because everything is like, “Eh”.  It’s like they’re not amped about anything, there’s nothing that really gets them jumping up out of bed and wanting to learn more and push.  So, identifying that thing that you’re excited about – I should say I even fall prey to that trap – developing that, deciding what that’s going to be, really going down that path and finding out if it really is exciting.  If it’s not, picking a new direction until you find something that you’re really excited to develop and turn into something.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good.  And so then I’m thinking there’s a little bit of a gray zone, or attention, in that you reference working on something long after it’s fun.  So, in a way it becoming boring is not an indicator that it’s time to give up, but you also need to see if there’s something genuine to engaging that spark of interest.  So, how do you walk that line?

Tom Bilyeu
Well, there’s another great book by Eric Barker called Barking up the Wrong Tree, and he talks about this process called “WOOP”.  He didn’t come up with it; he cites the person that did and unfortunately I forget right now, but this is the thing that you want to go through to figure out if something is something you should be greedy about or you should quit.

And “W” is wish – so what’s that thing that you want to be in your life?  The “O” is for outcome – like don’t just wish about it, ’cause that’s super vague, and fantasizing you can actually pacify yourself into feeling like you’ve done something when you really haven’t.  So, what’s the really specific outcome?  So, let’s say if your wish is, “I want to be rich and famous.”  Okay, great.  The outcome is, “I want to be rich and famous as an investment banker.”  Okay, fantastic.  What’s the obstacle?  “I know nothing about finance.”  And then what’s the plan, how am I going to learn about finance?  So, “I’m going to either go get my MBA, or I’m going to take every Khan Academy class on finance, whatever that path is going to be.  I’m going to intern for four years at a VC.”

If when you go through that process, you go, “I’m so amped to do that.  This is really exciting for me”, then you’re on the right path.  If at the end of that you’re like, “Oh dear God, I have to go for four years, I have to intern or study or whatever”, then immediately switch and find something where when you walk yourself through that process you’re excited to go through it and do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s powerful.  And then I think that it’s intriguing and interesting, in that I have had those experiences where I go, “Oh geez, that’s a lot of work.”  And I’ve gone through the same process – and I had a cool acronym at the time – but I’ve gone through a similar process and said, “Oh yeah, that’s a big one.  Bring it on.”  And so that’s really cool to codify that as a particular acid test.  And I guess if you say, “Bring it on” to everything or, “No, that seems like a whole ton of work” to everything, then I guess there’s a bigger lesson about yourself that you’re discovering.

Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, very true.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we talked about the growth mindset as being a key mental upgrade to really make things happen.  You talk about a number of others.  Could you share one or two other favorite upgrades to your mind that you think folks can benefit from having and doing, so they can really get where they want to go?

Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, one of the most important – and this is something that’s really been on my mind lately – is how people are using routines and habits as a way to counteract, for me it’s laziness.  So I’m just insanely lazy by nature, and my success has been in spite of laziness and not because I don’t have laziness.  And I think when people hear about how hard I work or how many hours I spend, they think, “Oh well, you must just not have any of the same lazy genes that I struggle with.”

And the truth is there was a time in my life, in my early 20s where I would lay in bed for three hours a day.  I didn’t have a job, and I would just lay there and watch TV.  Literally it’s so embarrassing and I only tell people because I hope that they see at any point you can start making a different decision.  And the decision that I made was to begin building in routines and rules, quite frankly, that govern my life.  And those have continued to stack on themselves now for almost 20 years, where I’ve really been building not only a mindset but a system that makes me very productive and allows me to achieve my goals.

So everything for me starts with the belief that you should do and believe that which moves you towards your goals.  So if laying in bed for three hours moved me towards my goals, I would do it, but since right now it’s certainly doesn’t help, I have a rule that I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less from the time that I wake up.  So, that’s one of them.  I have just a crazy amount of routine – I go to bed at 9:00 p.m. like it’s a religion, I don’t set an alarm ever.  I’ll say that probably 5 or 6 times a year I wake up to an alarm.  So if I have something like a super early flight where it’s like you just can’t mess around – sure.  But for the most part I don’t set an alarm, I get as much sleep as I need.  I totally prioritize sleep.

As soon as I wake up I have 10 minutes or less to get out of bed, I immediately go to the gym and I start with the gym, because I hate it.  I absolutely hate working out, but it’s so important for not only the physical longevity, performance, aesthetics, but also the cognitive benefits are just undeniable.  So, go immediately to the gym, then I meditate, then I do this thing I call “thinkitating”, then from there I read.  And just learning obsessively is one of the most important things anyone can do.  And then after that I have a list of the important things that I should be working on for my business, and I just go to that list.  So things like that – really using your habits and routines – you can so optimize your life.  That’s when I cannot overemphasize; that’s so critical.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is powerful.  And so, I want to know then, in those moments where the rubber meets the road, I imagine now you’ve got the benefit of having a routine and neural pathways and all that just kind of working for you, in terms of 10 minutes or less out of bed and going immediately to exercise.  But in those moments, when there it is: “I don’t want to do this, but I have established this rule and standard for myself”, how do you rise above?

Tom Bilyeu
The answer to that is identity, and this is one of those really underutilized things, once you understand that identity drives behavior, it’s not the other way around.  So, the first thing I do when I want to change my behavior is look at my identity and say, “Okay, I’m the type of person that…”  I’m the type of person that prioritizes exercise, even though he doesn’t like it.  I’m the type of person that doesn’t waste time laying in bed, even though it’s super comfortable.  I’m the type of person that is willing to suffer for the things that he wants, so on so forth.

But it always starts with that identity.  And I tell as many people as I can that that’s my identity, because then it kicks in this notion of wanting to be congruent with your identity, which causes massive discord in the mind when people say one thing and then do another.  Just internally that’s so uncomfortable for people that it’s a really, really powerful tool to create some pretty profound changes in behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love that take on it, because this kind of reminds me… When I was a teenager, here’s a fun fact – my hero and role model was Tony Robbins.  I wanted to be Tony Robbins when I grew up, as a kid.  And I read his books at the library, and so that was me.  And so, he said something which I thought made a whole lot of sense, about our lives change when our standards change.  But you just took it to a whole another level, in terms of your standard, not so much “What I find to be unacceptable”, but at an even more personal ingrained level of, “This is who I am.  And to do that is to kind of violate myself.”

Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.  Look, you’ve got your finger on probably the most powerful thinker in that realm.  Tony gets identity, Tony understands how this kind of thing is what drives your behavior.  Tony’s one of those guys, dude, I am such a big believer.  I really think if people take his advice, if they listen to what he says, their life will be better.  So I’m not at all surprised that that’s been somebody that’s really been a driver for you.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  Well, Tom, I’m having so much fun here, but I want to make sure that we have not a 5-hour conversation and we get you to bed on time. [laugh] And so tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear quickly about some your favorite things?

Tom Bilyeu
Look, my thing is I want to bring as much value to your community as humanly possible, so I don’t have a specific agenda, other than I hope that people hear in my story that I wasn’t born anything, I was not voted “Most likely to succeed”, my own mother when I left for college just quietly assumed that I was going to fail.  She was always my biggest cheerleader outwardly, but later confessed to me that she just thought that I would fail.  I didn’t show any signs, I was very lazy, and so I don’t think anybody was more surprised than those closest to me when I really started to make profound changes.  And all the things that we just talked about were the ways that I did that, but if people are willing to make those changes, there’s literally no limit to what they can do.

Pete Mockaitis
So good.  Well now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Tom Bilyeu
I’ll give you some paraphrases.  I really need to memorize these, ‘cause quotes are so important to me.  But most of them just sit in my soul as paraphrases.  So my favorite quote ever is from Winston Churchill, and it’s, “Never, never, never give in.  Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”  And the real quote is so much more powerful than that, but that notion of never giving up, never giving in, always pushing, keeping going even when the odds seem just so brutally stacked against you, that you keep going.  And I really resonate with that.

And then another one just sort of really coming at it from a totally different angle is, “Learn the way broadly and you will see it in everything.”  And what that means to me is, when you have a broad base of knowledge, going back to what I was saying earlier about spending time every day learning.  Learning something very specifically, learning something deeply – not just skimming across the surface but really picking things and going hard on them.  “When you learn the way broadly, you’ll see in everything”, meaning when you’ve got that just awesome base of knowledge, there’s always a path.  Whatever it is that you encounter, there’s always something that you’ve learned that’s going to allow you to get around that.  And those quotes sort of bookend my existence.

And then one last one is the one that I’ll consider… I’m writing a book right now and this is the quote that’s going to open everything, and that is from Albert Einstein.  And he said, “The most important decision any human will ever have to make is whether they live in a hostile or friendly universe.”  And I love that he says it’s a decision.  And whatever you decide, by the way, you’re going to see evidence of.  So if you decide that everything is working against you, the evidence will be there to support it.  And if you decide that everything is working for you, the evidence will be there to support it.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.  And how about a favorite book?

Tom Bilyeu
Outwardly, the thing that I always recommend to people is Mindset by Carol Dweck.  I think it’s the most important book in the English language.  Just to really give you something intriguing, the book that changed my life and is the reason that I read to this day, was The Gunslinger by Stephen King.  I didn’t think I liked reading, my dad convinced me to give that book a shot, and that book really showed me that everyone loves reading; the people that say they don’t just haven’t found the thing they like reading about, and that was made very clear.  And then the book that really is in some ways my North Star is The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell, which is certainly the thing that gave me the idea for how we were going to build Impact Theory.  So that has been very instrumental in my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.  And how about a favorite tool, something you use often that helps you do better?

Tom Bilyeu
The Internet.  Are you going to let me get away with that one?  I don’t do handy work, so your traditional tools are all out of the window.  The Internet is just such, such a powerful game changer, and having grown up without it and really not… The Internet sort of existed by the time I graduated college, but not really, so I have a very keen awareness of just how powerful and time-saving it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  And how about a favorite habit?

Tom Bilyeu
Getting as much sleep as I need.

Pete Mockaitis
And follow-up on there – just how much is that for you?

Tom Bilyeu
About six hours is my average.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, this is six true hours of conked-out unconsciousness and that’s the actual in bed time, could be a bit more?

Tom Bilyeu
Well, I fall asleep very fast and once I wake up I’m out of bed.  So, if six hours is my actual conked-out unconsciousness, I’m probably in bed for about six hours and 15 minutes.  That’s actually deadly accurate.  I fall asleep almost instantly.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool.  And could you share, of all the things that you communicate, is there a particular nugget that seems to really connect and resonate with folks – a Tom original that just gets folks nodding their heads and saying, “Yes, that’s right.”

Tom Bilyeu
That’s interesting.  So the one thing that I often get a reaction from, not ironically I guess but interestingly, it was something you reacted to earlier, which is that notion of what you build your self-esteem around matters.  And that’s one of the things that I think not a lot of people are talking about.  In fact, I’ve never heard anybody else talk about that.  And I think that that is so critical and when people tell you, “Oh, don’t have an ego.  Pride is one of the seven deadly sins”, I’ll just say that people kill themselves when they believe that they can no longer feel good about themselves ever again.

So, I don’t think it’s a bad thing; I think everybody needs it.  I think that what you build your self-esteem around though matters tremendously, and it matters from the position of how you make other people feel.  So if you’re coming from an arrogant place, from a place of, “I’m better than you”, then that’s a pretty gnarly way to build your self-esteem.  You’re going to turn other people off, it’s very fragile, ’cause inevitably you’re going to meet somebody better than you – stronger, faster, whatever the case may be.

But I think people need something and they need something that’s going to propel them forward, that the more they engage in that prideful behavior, the better their life is going to be.  And the only thing I have ever thought of that meets that criteria is being prideful about being a learner – to be humble enough to always be willing to admit when you’re wrong – when that makes you feel good about yourself, you’re in a really good position.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  And Tom, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Tom Bilyeu
@TomBilyeu across pretty much every social.  /TomBilyeu at YouTube.  I’m on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I’m doing it all.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.  If you aren’t trying every day to be a linchpin, to really figure out what you need to do to become absolutely great at your job, you’re missing an opportunity to fall in love with yourself and your skillset.  Really wanting to push yourself, really wanting to become great at what you do is one of the most intoxicating things that a human being can do.

Hey, going back to Tony.  Tony Robbins says – and I think this is so smart – that one of the most foundational pieces to happiness is progress.  So if you really want happiness, you want that deep and lasting fulfillment, getting great is just a fundamental part of that.  And I think that a lot of times people feel like they’re being taken advantage of by their job, and so they miss that opportunity to really commit to becoming exceptional at something.

And so if you feel like by getting great that you’re over-delivering to your workplace – man, it’s time to find somewhere else, because there is somewhere where you could engage at that level where it is this beautiful symbiotic thing where you’re working hard for yourself to do something amazing for yourself, and it happens to be great for the company.  And you believe in what you’re doing and your efforts are recognized.  There is a job out there, where it is a truly meaningful and empowering experience, and I encourage people to find that.  You spend 50% of your waking hours at your job, so to not feel connected to a purpose, to not feel like your efforts have meaning and are appreciated, it’s just really, really a sad way to go about it.  And man, getting great is fun, so I hope people tap into that.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome.  Well Tom, this has been such a treat, just mind-expanding in the good, legal, safe way.  So, thanks so much for sharing it, and good luck with Impact Theory and all you’re up to!

Tom Bilyeu
Thank you, man.  Thanks for having me on, I appreciate it.