I didn't have a job.
My girlfriend now wife was working
and I had one thing that I had as a
responsibility every day, and that was to
make her a sandwich before she came home
for her lunch break.
And the only thing that would get me out
of bed 15 years before I'm capable of
building $1 billion company.
The only thing that got
me out of bed was shame.
What is up?
Very kind, very, very kind.
It is super surreal to have literally
just stepped out of the car.
Seven minutes ago and then to be
on stage and with that energy.
That's incredible.
And I have to say vision, the, the
community that you put together is really
unrivaled.
It's, it's really pretty extraordinary.
So I'm honored to be nice.
I am very honored to be a part
of it, so thank you guys so much.
The thing that I find most interesting and
the thing that I think a lot about is who
are we sort of at our core?
What are we, are we changeable?
Are we malleable?
The whole nature versus nurture thing
is really come to define my life.
And whenever I give a business talk, the
first question I ask is how many born
entrepreneurs we have in the crowd?
And normally people get all amped up and
they're hyped and they're yelling and
screaming because they think that that's
somehow a better state of being to have
been born something
than to have major self.
But my thesis in life is it
doesn't matter who you are today.
It certainly doesn't
matter how you were born.
The only thing that matters
is who you want to become.
And the price you're
willing to pay to get there.
now I think that Ray Daleo, the guy that
created Bridgewater, which is the largest
hedge fund ever, has been a truly just
wildly successful person, said it best.
I don't know that the life that I have
lived is better than somebody who wanted
to live a stress free, quiet life.
I only know it's the only life I could
have lived, and that's how I feel about
the pursuit of greatness.
What I'm going to talk about up here is
that I'm going to talk about wanting to
become extraordinary, to transform
yourself into something that is truly
undeniable, to become so good that they
can't ignore you, and that has been truly
what I've tried to do with my life.
But I don't.
Prescribed it for everybody.
I'm not saying that this is
the only way to live your life.
I'm just saying it's the only
way that I could have lived mine.
Now, the irony is I started about as far
from pursuing greatness as you're ever
going to get, and my parents taught me to
be a good employee, to keep my head down,
do as little work as possible, and avoid
punishment at all costs, and that that was
real.
That was my existence.
I cheated my way through high school
because I knew that I needed to get good
grades.
But I didn't want to put in the work.
I went into the workforce.
My dad thought for sure that having me do
essentially menial labor jobs would teach
me that I didn't want to do that, but it
also made me sort of numb to that kind of
work.
And so I worked in a paint factory.
I worked in a door factory.
I worked in a paint
warehouse, a paint store.
My dad happened to work in a paint
company, hence the theme, and I was too
lazy to go get a different job.
And so I literally just always
took whatever was before me.
But I had this sense that I could do
more, that I could be more, that there was
something that I was meant to do.
I didn't know what that was exactly.
I had a love for filmmaking to be sure,
and I've had that love since I was a
little kid, but I had no idea how
that was going to play itself out.
Now, the irony of my life is when I went
to leave for college, I almost chickened
out.
In fact, I did chicken out.
And the only reason that I ended up going
to college was my mom forced me to, and I
was having this moment of crisis.
There was only me and one other kid that
was leaving the state from my high school.
Everybody else went to a state school.
Everybody stayed together.
It was that familiarity and
living essentially a small life.
And that sounded really enticing at the
prospect that I was about to move away.
And so I said to my mom, you know what?
Look, let's just forget all this.
Let's call it off.
It's going to be really expensive.
I'll just stay here.
And my mom was like over my dead body
and she pushed so hard to get me out.
But then every day since then, my mom has
tried to get me back and I was like, what
the fuck?
Like you're the reason I left.
I never would have left
if it wasn't for you.
So I literally don't understand.
And in that moment, my mom gave me the
greatest gift anyone could have ever given
me cause my mom supported me.
She was my biggest cheerleader.
But when I asked her why, she pushed me
so hard to leave for college, her answer
totally without malice was I always
assumed you were going to fail.
You didn't have the drive.
She was like, you were so lazy in high
school, but I didn't want you to live a
life of what if I didn't want you to
wonder what your life would have been like
if you had at least tried, but you didn't
show any signs of being capable of doing
what you've gone on to
be capable of doing.
Fast forward a few years, I go to the man
who would become my father in law, and I
asked for his blessing
to marry his daughter.
And he said, no.
Now here's the thing.
He did not miss.
Identify me.
He was very right to be concerned,
but I remember him asking me a simple
question, Tom, how do you plan to take
care of my daughter?
He had come from this very
small village in Cyprus.
He is one of the most extraordinary tales
of rags to riches I've ever heard in my
life as a kid.
He would eat meat once a year because
that was all they could afford.
I've been to the village that he grew
up in, and when I say village, I mean
village.
This shit is crazy.
It is like a couple hovels in
the middle of absolutely nowhere.
After you drive on this death-defying
road for like an hour in the mountains.
It was bananas, and I was like, how does
somebody come from this and then run one
of the largest shipping
companies in the world?
And he just worked his way up and he was
so disciplined and he started as basically
an errand boy.
Then he moved into the accounting
department and then at like 19 they fired
the encounter, the entire accounting
department, except for him because he was
the only one that could balance the books.
Now that becomes a theme in my life.
That skills have utility.
They let you do something because he
understood math in a way that other people
didn't.
He could do something
other people couldn't do.
Now this is where he comes from that he
worked his way from ground fucking zero
man, a dirt patch in the middle of nowhere
to living in London and running one of the
largest shipping companies
from a high rise.
It's this extraordinary
tale of transformation.
And so he's looking at me a young 20
something kid, and when he says, how do
you plan to take care of my daughter?
My answer is, sir, I know what you see
before you is a broke undereducated kid,
but I'm the most ambitious
person you've ever met.
Now, if this were a really cool story
in that moment, he would be won over and
everything will be magical.
But let me tell you, he was skeptical and
the reason he was skeptical and let this
sink in.
This is about 15 years before
I build $1 billion company.
I would lay in bed for up to four hours
a day every single day because I couldn't
motivate myself to get out of bed.
I didn't have a job.
My girlfriend now wife was working
and I had one thing that I had as a
responsibility every day, and that was to
make her a sandwich before she came home
for her lunch break.
And the only thing that would get me out
of bed 15 years before I'm capable of
building $1 billion company, the only
thing that got me out of bed was shame.
So you have to understand that
people had not misidentified me.
This is not a story of someone
who was born extraordinary.
People just couldn't see it.
That I was secretly this amazing person
who was just waiting for their opportunity
to shine.
This was somebody who was lazy as fuck,
had no idea what they were going to do
with their life.
I had no idea how I was
going to pull it off.
I was absolutely terrified.
Every time I looked in the mirror, I saw
me staring back and I knew how lazy I was.
I knew how afraid I was.
I knew how insecure I was.
I knew that at my core I wanted people to
like me, and I was terrified that they had
every reason in the world not to like me,
but instead of becoming someone who was
worthy of self-respect, who
was worthy of their respect.
All I was trying to do is campaign.
I was trying to posture.
I was trying to create the illusion that
I was something because that seemed like I
could do it fast.
Instead of just buckling down and doing
the hard ass work of becoming somebody new
because I had one failed misunderstanding.
I believed that my talent and
intelligence were fixed traits.
I was born a certain way.
And life was about making the
most of what I'd been born with.
What I did not yet understand is the
reason humans are the ultimate apex
predator.
The reason that we have taken over the
globe in a way that no other species has
is because we are the
ultimate adaptation machine.
Darwin is often misquoted as saying
it's the strongest of the species that
survived.
He did not say that.
What he said.
Was.
It's neither the strongest of the species
that survive, nor the most intelligent,
but rather the most adaptive to change.
It is the animal that can change the
fastest to a changing environment that
becomes the most dominant
species the world has ever seen.
It is our very nature to change.
That is what we are wired to do.
If you look at human DNA, we have
roughly 20,000 genes that encode traits.
There are onions with 40,000 genes.
Think about that.
Are you really less biologically
complicated than an onion?
I would say probably not, but that's
the reality of us at a DNA level.
And for a long time, scientists
disregarded all of the other, what they
call junk DNA that
didn't encode for traits.
But what we now know that junk
DNA is, is epigenetic signaling.
It is the thing that
makes us extraordinary.
It's the thing that says, ah, in
this environment, respond like this.
So you can go to the gym and bust your
ass and train your body and change your
physique.
And we've all seen it
happen with bodybuilders.
We all get that.
They came out of the womb weak just like
everybody else, and they put themselves
under an godly amount of stress and
strain, and they push themselves every
day.
And they had this unimaginable
amount of discipline.
And from that, they are able to transform
themselves into somebody completely
unrecognizable.
It's, it is amazing.
And because it happens on
the outside, we'll get it.
We all believe in it.
We look at athletes when we understand
that they work their way there, but we
don't look at Gary Casper off and realize
he did the same thing because what's
happening in the mind seems invisible.
We can't see it.
We don't understand what's happening.
And so as shame was the only thing
that would drag me out of bed, I didn't
understand that.
The same thing I believe to be true
of my body was true of my mind.
But thank God I was
sliding towards depression
because in sliding towards depression,
I didn't want to feel that way anymore.
I didn't want to be ashamed when my
girlfriend came home and I had gotten out
of bed just moments before in a panic.
I didn't want to have the conversation
anymore where my girlfriend had to pull me
aside and say, it's not cool that
you're wearing your pajamas all day.
It's not cool that you never do your hair.
And I began to make a choice.
And that choice was, at that time, there
was a hot debate going on as to whether or
not the brain was truly plastic.
Now this seems self evident now because
people talk about it all the time, but
back then it was actually a debate where
you born with a certain number of neurons
and that was all you were going to have,
and at the end of your life, you are only
going to be declining,
declining, declining, or.
Could you actually learn new things?
When I was a kid, the adage you can't
teach an old dog new tricks was like
everyone just believed it.
But because of that, I found myself
putting myself in smaller and smaller
rooms because, and this is going to be the
most important thing that I say today of
this.
I assure you
what you build your self
esteem around matters.
And whether you realize it or not, each
and every one of you has something that
sits at the core of how
you feel about yourself.
And from that, your identity, your
sense of self worth, your self esteem.
It is all built around that thing.
And I will tell you the trap that most
people fall into that I certainly fell
into that led me into hiding in bed for
five hours at a time every morning, was
that I valued myself for being smart, for
being right, for being good, for being
worthy, all incredibly fragile traits.
And I kept encountering people who are
smarter than I was, who were right more
than I was.
And it made me feel badly about myself.
Now if there's anything, you know, you
know, it's a humans move towards the
things that make them feel good and they
move away from the things that make them
feel bad.
So you can understand that is a terrible
strategy to have this very fragile thing
that holds my entire sense
of identity and self worth.
I'm smart.
I meet somebody smarter than me,
and I don't think, what can I learn?
Because I think an old dog
can't learn new tricks.
This isn't about pushing myself and
changing my mind the way that I can change
my body.
This is about fucking survival,
emotional survival, and getting into the
psychological immune system.
The psychological immune system is
powerful and they've found this freaks me
out, but you're going to love it.
The more delusional a person
is, the happier they are.
That shit is real.
And we all have that one crazy friend
who you're like, damn, but they look like
they're having a great time.
So I'm not saying that it's not powerful.
I'm just saying it's not going to
help you live an extraordinary life.
Why.
Because if you want to do something
extraordinary, you have one job.
Leave your fellow humans in awe.
Now when you think about, Holy shit, my
job as a parent, as an entrepreneur, as an
athlete, as a speaker, as a whatever you
want to be, you've got to get so good at
that thing that when people see you do it.
You make them experience the most
potent human emotion, and that is all.
To get that good is a terrifying journey
of self discovery and confronting who you
really are because you cannot make
change until you acknowledge where you're
actually at.
Now, why.
Because that's not some new age roofing.
It is for real.
Like if you understand where you're weak,
then you know where to spend your time
building skills.
To me, the gap between where you are
now and where you want to go is a gap of
skillset.
And once I realized that and I made the
choice to believe that this whole brain
plasticity thing was real, even
though it was being hotly debated.
Then I could shift my self
esteem from being smart, right.
Good.
Worthy to being that of the learner.
The learner is the only identity that
I have ever found that is antifragile.
As Nassim Taleb says, things that are
robust, that are strong, that are tough.
That can take just a lot
of abuse before they break.
They are still ultimately
defined by their breaking point.
Something that is antifragile on the other
hand is something that the more you attack
it, the more it is pounded
on, the stronger it gets.
Now imagine being able
to build a belief system.
The thing that you build
your self esteem around.
If all of that were tied to something
that is truly anti-fragile, that the more
somebody comes after it, the more robust
it becomes being a learner is that answer.
Think about it.
if somebody is going to come after you and
they want to hurt your feelings, there is
one thing every time they will reach for.
That is something that is true.
When people try to hurt you, they go for
the most real thing and they fucking jab
you right in your heart because they know
it's going to hurt because it's real man.
And that's mean for sure,
and it hurts for sure.
But if you think of it like this, when
somebody is throwing a rock at you with
the intention of hurting you,
you can put your defenses up.
You will deflect that rock
never to be seen again or.
You can lower your defenses, let it hit
you in the face, knowing that it will
hurt, but also knowing now
at your feet is not a rock.
It's a lump of gold because they've given
you an insight into where you are weak.
Now, once you know where you are
weak, you can begin to build yourself.
And that is my thesis on life.
You get to build yourself in any direction
you want in any way to become anything you
want.
There will be an extraordinary price to
pay, but you can go in any direction, and
I don't think that we're born a blank
slates, but we are so close to that to
worry about where your limits are,
is to miss how much you can improve.
so focus on how much you can improve.
There's an amazing quote by Alexander
soldier Knutsen, the author of the Gulag
archipelago, and what he said was, the
line between good and evil runs through
every human heart.
To me, it's not about good and evil.
To me it's about malleability.
That's a statement of
how shapeable we are.
Now, here's the terrifying
thing about how we get shaped.
It happens when you're young.
You get all these things that come
to you that seem to be simply true.
I believed that the human
mind couldn't change.
I believed that it was fixed.
I believe that my talent and
intelligence were just what they were.
It all seemed true.
It wasn't like I knew it to be a lie.
It wasn't even like I knew that I had a
choice to think of it a different way.
And one of my favorite quotes of all time
is from Albert Einstein, and he said, the
most important decision any human being
has to make is whether they live in a
friendly or a hostile universe decision.
The most important decision anyone has to
make, because neither of those two States
is empirically true, but either will
immediately appear true once you decide to
believe it.
So once you decide to believe, yo, the
world is working for me, this shit is
happening for me.
It's not happening to me.
I know this room has heard that statement.
Once you believe that, you start looking
for the ways in which that was powerful.
How is the worst thing
that ever happened to me?
Actually, secretly the best
thing that's ever happened to me.
And so suddenly I started saying,
how is the shame of sitting in bed?
How is this the best thing
that's ever happened to me.
How is this solely airy type awareness
of just how dumb I really am.
How was that powerful?
And the thing that winds me up when I say
that, when I talk about, I started from
not being that bright.
Nobody thought I was going to win my
own mother, thought I was going to fail.
My father-in-law did not want
me to marry his daughter.
They think that I'm just being humble
or that even I miss identified myself.
But the reality is that's how
shapeable a human being is.
And I had made decisions.
I had chosen to believe things
I had chosen to value myself.
For things I had built myself around my
self esteem, around things that were not
moving me forward.
And so I began to change my belief system.
I began to change the things that
I value and think about values.
Think about how much they shape your life.
Depending on where you
grow up, you could become.
One of the members of the tribe on North
Sentinel Island who killed that missionary
who rolled up on their beaches.
They just started hitting that fool with
Spears and arrows and it's fucking kill
them.
You can be that.
You can be a warrior of Sparta.
You could be a Nazi guard depending on
the time and the place you grew up in.
You could be a Manhattan
socialite, you can be a party girl.
You could be one of any countless
identities that we see in the world.
Not because you were
born to be that thing.
If we were born to be something, then we
would still see some percentage of Spartan
warriors being born.
Today.
We would see North Sentinel Lees born in
Omaha, Nebraska, but we don't because each
of these places carries
with it a value system.
A belief system.
Things that are unique to that group that
you grow up and what your parents tell you
about your family, about you, what
it means to be you, what you learn in
schools, what you see in the media.
All of that stuff is shaping how you
view yourself and how you view the world.
But it's happening insidious
insidiously because it is so invisible.
People don't realize
that they are choices.
Now, once you reframe all of this as these
are things that I'm choosing to believe,
and once you realize that you can
choose to believe something new.
And thusly get a different result.
Everything changes
and that's where you
begin to build yourself.
Now, building yourself
begins with intention.
Clarity.
You have to know who you want to become.
You can't just show up in the gym of the
mind and do random stuff any more than you
can show up in the gym of the body and do
random stuff and think that you're going
to end up on the stage
competing for mr Olympia.
It doesn't work like that.
You've got to have this clarity of focus
and the way that I was explaining it to
people, people come to me all the time and
they're like, Tom, I want to help people,
man, and I'm like, that is rad.
That's coming from such a beautiful place.
But telling me that you want to help
somebody is like saying you want to win a
gold medal in what?
The Olympics?
Yes.
Fantastic.
Summer or winter.
Summer.
Great tennis or swimming.
Swimming.
Which event?
Backstroke the medley because until you
know exactly in what way you are trying to
serve people, you don't know what skills
you need to acquire in order to lead
people in all so that you
may become extraordinary.
skills have utility.
Learning how to swim better makes you a
faster swimmer, building certain muscles
in your.
Arms and in your shoulders.
Um, all of the different things that go
into getting great at any sport, all of
those things must be
learned with calculation.
They must be practiced and
rehearsed over and over and over.
You have to push yourself long
past the point of boredom.
Boredom kills more people in the pursuit
of success than any hater will ever kill.
Boredom is the great killer of dreams.
Boredom.
Because people don't have the focus.
They don't have the clarity of
what they're trying to achieve.
They've not built into their life, built
into their life an intoxication for what
they're trying to accomplish.
I used the big brother
for a kid named Marshawn.
I failed Rashawn.
I spent eight and a half years with them.
I didn't realize that he was being
beaten by his adoptive mother.
I didn't save him from a life of poverty.
I wasn't able to change his
mindset and I have to face that.
I have to accept that I had a moment.
I had a chance to change
somebody's life and I failed.
But once I owned that, I can
begin to realize why I failed.
It's not a mistake that the company that
I'm building now is all about transmitting
mindset at scale because
I'm thinking of Rashawn.
So at moments,
at moments where I'm bone
tired, I have that clarity.
And when you have the clarity and you know
where you're trying to go, then it becomes
clear about what you have to train at.
What are the things that you
have to train into yourself.
But the only way to do that is to have a
self esteem that's built entirely around
being the learner.
Why.
Because you get the shot to the head,
the nugget of gold at your feet.
It says, you suck at this.
That hurts, man.
That's hard to own.
It's hard to face and there's a thousand
voices in your mind telling you all the
reasons why it's somebody else's fault,
and it's not your fault, but the reality
is the moment you do that, you're giving
away your power because you're not looking
for a way to change.
You're not looking for a
way to shape your skill set.
Remember between where you are and where
you want to go, it is a gap of skillset.
Now.
I'm not a born entrepreneur.
I don't have any entrepreneurial
instincts by birth.
When I first got involved in business,
I remember my only contributions to our
conference calls.
You're going to think I'm kidding,
and this is unfortunately very true.
The only contribution I would make to a
conference call was to say goodbye, and I
remember I used to get so excited.
Here it comes.
We're wrapping up.
This is going to be amazing.
It's my chance to buy.
And I finally, I got to say something,
but at that time I just needed to learn.
I needed to pay attention.
I needed to see where I was weak and the
constant barrage on my self esteem that I
wasn't the smartest person in
the room, that I wasn't right.
Very often it was unrelenting, and I
remember saying to myself, all right, man,
you got two choices.
You can leave.
Like you don't need to be here.
You don't need to want to
become an entrepreneur.
That doesn't have to be your life.
You can go back to selling video
games, which is what I was doing.
You can go back to selling video games.
You could go back to teaching, like if
that's where you're going to be happy,
then go do that.
But if you really want to become
extraordinary, you've got to separate your
self esteem from being wrong.
You have to.
Because otherwise you're never going
to see the opportunity to get better.
And so I decided that I was
going to start valuing myself.
My entire value was going to be predicated
on being willing to admit that I was wrong
on being willing to stare
nakedly at my inadequacies.
I was not going to hide from them.
I was not going to run.
I wasn't gonna try to do some fancy story.
I was just going to own it.
Yo, you suck at this man.
You suck at this, but you're
just not good at it yet.
And once that word yet is lingering out
there, suddenly it becomes a question of
time allocation.
So you know, you could get good at it,
but it's going to take a lot of time and
energy.
So what are the skills that
you really want to get good at?
And that goes back to that clarity.
What do I need to get good at in order
to accomplish the things that I want to
accomplish?
It does not need to be something
that somebody else values.
It needs to be the thing I have chosen,
the value that I've built into my life,
this worship around
getting good at that thing.
I didn't have to get good at
helping others build mindset.
They didn't have to be my life.
But that's what I've chosen.
That's what I want to do.
And so I build this tremendous
amount of value into it.
And because I value myself for pursuing
that, and I value myself for admitting
when I'm wrong and I value myself for
staring nakedly at my inadequacies every
fucking day.
I'm getting better
but I'm begging you, I am begging
you with everything I have.
Remember that just 15 years earlier,
I got into bed solely out of shame.
My mother thought I was going to fail.
My father in law did not want
me to marry his daughter.
Okay.
Brick by brick, day after
day, I transformed myself.
It was not an uncovering of something
that was real and already there.
It was simply acknowledging I am a
hopelessly average human, but humans are
the ultimate adaptation machine.
So I can change it, can become whatever
I want, and I just became single mindedly
focused on how much I could grow and now
that I was getting value in self esteem,
out of growing instead of out of
being, everything in my life changed.
So 15 years later, my father in law
visits the U S for the first time since we
started quest and I'm taking him around
the production floor and there's 300,000
square feet.
There's 800 employees.
The bars are coming off the
line at 1.5 million a day.
People are coming up and thanking me for
having a job and for the way that we run
the company and all that.
And I turned to him and I said, Andreas,
do you remember asking me how I was going
to take care of your daughter?
And he said, yes.
And I said, how am I doing?
And he just burst into tears.
And the punchline of that story, it
does not matter who you are today.
The only thing that matters is who you
want to become and the price you're
willing to pay to get there.
Thank you.
