#116 8 Tips For Killing Weakness (From Someone Who Learned The Hard Way)

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0:31You won't admit it. Not everybody will admit it. You won't say the truth. You want to be great. And there's a reason that movie where you could take a pill and suddenly every discipline and idea that came out of your head was life-changing was a bestseller. Because if you could bottle that and give it to any man or woman, you would take it. So today, we're going to figure out how to give you that pill, how to turn you into what Bruce Springsteen said. I'm not afraid you're better than me. I'm afraid I won't reach my potential. That's not fear of failure. That's fear of a life half-lived, a tombstone that tragically reads dots, an obituary that looks like a half-finished manuscript, that will be most people's lives.

1:11But it doesn't need to be yours. So today we're going to kill that part inside of you. Welcome back to The Big Deal Podcast. I'm Cody Sanchez. And I've spent the last decade negotiating deals, firing people, being fired, sitting across from billionaires, manipulators, and people who quite literally run the world. And here's the thing I learned the hard way. If you have nothing right now, or if you feel like you're not where you want to be, or if you feel like you don't have a leg up, or if you feel like you don't have a silver bullet, I don't think you have to worry about that. Because you know what?

1:42I also was all I had. There was no backup plan. There was no fancy pedigreed school. There was no big trust fund. There was nothing. And so if there isn't for you either, that's okay. Because if you feel lost, you're not lazy or stupid. You can just be adrift. And that is what this episode is about today. I'm going to tell you how to kill that small, terrified thing inside of you that constantly subverts you and holds you back. And we're going to do it with data and lessons learned the hard way. Let's go with the first lesson, which is how do you kill weakness? You starve it. Let's get something straight.

2:16Weakness does not disappear when you ignore it. It grows and negotiates with you and rationalizes. It waits until you're tired and then it takes advantage of you. And most people let that happen quietly because you don't kill weakness with motivation. you kill it with standards. We're going to get to what the data is specifically on this, but what do I mean? It means I want you to change your verbiage. So I just was talking to Tony Robbins and he said something that really messed me up. He said, do you want to do it? Are you going to do it? Or have you already resolved to do it? Meaning, is it in the past tense, like it's already done?

2:48If you're already this type of person that has done this thing, you are more likely to do it. So I know this is a little and a little goofy, but I cannot, not for the love of me, get 10 ,000 steps a day. Or at least that was the story I told myself all of last year. I know that's not that serious, but I work a lot and I'm sitting a lot and I work out every day, but I wanted to be the type of person that I don't know, gets vitamin D. And so I said, I resolved to be the type of person that does this. Guess what? Every single day since I met with that giant motherfucker of a man, I've done it. I'm averaging like 12 ,000 steps.

3:20It's basically a marathon. I don't want to make a big deal about it, but I will. And one of the secrets I want to tell you about is how to get rid of that part inside you, whatever it is. And how do you get rid of the person that you were before? So I knew I was having a hard time hitting my little goal. And you know what that means? You know what I did? I said, I am not just going to hit 10K a day. I'm going to hit 20. Why? Because that means I'm more likely to hit 15. You don't negotiate with that little weak bitch inside of you, you're like, all right, I can't do 10. I'm going to do 20 instead.

3:56I want you to picture that like military drill sergeant yelling at you. And if you think, okay, Cody, whatever, you guru, suddenly gets everything done. No, no, no. This is backed on data because I believe in standards as greater than feelings. In fact, one of my favorite studies from the American Psychological Association talked about basically self-control predicts academic achievement, health, and money success. So the study basically went like this. They followed a group of people for decades that showed that if they could control themselves for longer, that had a higher predisposition to them achieving big things in life.

4:29It was called the marshmallow study famously. So it wasn't IQ or motivation. It was as a little kid, could you not eat the marshmallow when you weren't supposed to? How long could you not eat the marshmallow? And could you continue that throughout your life? The cool part is, is that you can actually turn yourself into the type of person that has self-control or delayed gratification. And one of the ways you do that is what I call the starvation framework. So everything that you do today, I want you to think about how do I hold off on that little tiny marshmallow so that I can move forward faster.

4:59The second tip that's really helped me is your inner circle will ruin or save your life. I know this is a little dramatic, but one bad influence can absolutely change the type of human that you are. This can happen in your business, your discipline, because the people who rely on you, well, you are also relying on them. You got to keep that circle tight. I asked Charlemagne the God about success and pressure because he's been in the game for decades and decades and decades and just did a$200 million deal. He said something that stuck with me. He said, everybody wants to sit at the table, but not everybody deserves to eat.

5:33That's true. Most people let whoever is nearby eat whatever they got. That's lazy. I want you to audit your circle like your future depends on it because unfortunately or fortunately it does. And this part is so painful because you have to leave behind in many different ways versions of you and versions of people you used to think look like friends. I hate to tell you the hard part here. I have two friends from my time in high school. Two. That's it. Everybody else gone. I have maybe zero friends from college. I mean, I did go to Arizona State Party School of the West, not exactly Harvard, but I don't talk to anybody that I went to college from.

6:08And I know that sounds kind of messed up. But when you're growing as fast as I needed to, because I was in college, a drinking too much, partying too much, kind of enjoying sorority life, lots of drama type of person, I had to up-level the people that I was around. The people I was around at that time, they wouldn't make it in my world today. And that may be the same for you. And guess what? Let me give you some permission, baby. That is okay. I wish them nothing but love, success, winning, but I don't wish them in my circle. So look around you. Who's in yours? And the data backs this up too. In fact, I went and tried to have non-confirmation bias and said, is there any data that supports that the people around you don't matter?

6:49And you know what the answer is? No. In fact, a study from Harvard and University of California at San Diego called the social network effects on behavior says behavior, discipline, ambition, and even obesity spread through social networks up to three degrees of separation, meaning your circle can actually make you fat, which is wild. Your circle can also make you rich. They call this the proximity effect. So you don't rise to your goals. You fall to the standards of those closest to you. So think about where you work, where you hang, where you love, because that is going to be your future. The next lesson I learned was that work ethic eliminates fear.

7:30Michael Jordan said it perfectly. That's what he said. He said, work ethic eliminates fear. So fear only exists where preparation doesn't. You're not scared because you're incapable. You're scared because you haven't earned certainty yet. Am I right? And here's the part most people don't like. You don't get confidence before the work. You get it after. You know, I don't know. You might even be scared because maybe like me, what if you try your hardest, more than you've ever tried in your entire life and you still fail? What if you're still not good enough? What if that's the little part inside of you that is actually stopping you.

8:01But hey, let's at least be equal. What if the flip side of that is you're never going to know that you could be better than you ever thought. You got to test the limits of where you are as a human. Otherwise, you'll never know where they end. So do the irrational, go harder than you want to go. I know right now it's not popular to say work harder. And you know what? I don't really care about that. I disagree with that. I think right now we're at a tentpole moment with AI where people who use AI to become better will become superhumans. They'll just be smarter, richer, and better than most of us.

8:30Scares the shit out of me, actually. So if you don't believe it, I wrote part of this idea Saturday, January 12th at 1136 AM. And for the past 35 minutes, I've been working on creating apps with Claude Code. I hate it. I hate every moment of it. I'm not a technologist, but I got to learn this stuff. You know, on the internet, everybody's like, oh, it's so easy programming with, it's not easy for me. I'm learning all these words like proximity and feature verse tool and repositories and terminal. And I don't know anything about it and it scares the shit out of me. And because I'm scared, I'm going to work really hard to make sure that I understand it.

9:04So can you do the same thing? What scares you so much that you have to do what I do, which is schedule the hackathon for my company so that anybody who is as freaked out as I was could come and do the thing that scares you by outworking the fear. And for many years, you know, I was so afraid of transitioning from my cushy Wall Street career to my ultimate dream of becoming a business owner, it wasn't a rational fear that kept my dreams at bay for way too long. And since I bought my first laundromat and began my journey in ownership, I've made it my mission to help educate others who are like me, maybe scared of their big, huge dreams.

9:38And that's why I created Main Street Millionaire Live. It's a yearly workshop I run to help future business owners find and buy the right business for you. It's the kind of knowledge you'd normally have to pay six figures for, but I refuse to do that. So if you've ever been business buying curious, click the link below to learn more about Main Street Millionaire Live, I cannot wait to help you achieve your goals and get rid of that little inner bitch inside of you too. The next lesson that I learned is that setting goals you never reach is one of the unfair unlocks in life. You know, we talked about it briefly in the beginning with my huge goal of 10 ,000 steps a day, but David Goggins talks about how most of us only use 40 % of our ability.

10:14And I think that's true. I was actually talking to my husband and we realized something strange about the greats. Like I'm talking Napoleon, Marcus Aurelius, they never achieved their goals because their goals were so big, they were almost unachievable, which means that the things they did along the way, they're pretty extraordinary by default. And I want you to think about that same thing for you. You know, I went to the research on this and they call this the goal setting theory of motivation. So Locke and Latham did this experiment where they saw that people who set difficult specific goals consistently outperform those who achieve, who set achievable or vague goals, even when the goals are not fully reached, which I like to think about this as like that cliche, which is if you shoot for the moon, at least you'll land among the stars, which actually isn't reasonable because the stars are further than the moon, which is why they're smaller than the moon, but we won't get into the real science right here.

11:12But I think that this is true. You know, it sounds cliche, except it's right. So what if you're not actually achieving the goals you really want because you haven't set them big enough? You know, one of the things I told my husband this year for one of our companies, I want to do$100 million in revenue. And for that company in particular, that's kind of a crazy goal right now because that's just not where the company is at. But what it forces you is to ask yourself, what would a company have to do to grow to that level? And it was scary, I think, for both of us. But what it means is it force functions you to go, okay, we literally cannot do the same thing we're doing right now, which means by default, we're probably going to be bigger than we would if we were just to say increase it by five or 10 million.

11:53Now I know those numbers are kind of big, but whatever those numbers are for you, I got goals that are 10 ,000 steps. I got goals that are a hundred million dollar companies. It's all the same process. But I do think if you want to lose five pounds, shoot for 30. Because if you shoot for 30, I bet as far as shit, you are going to lose those five. The next lesson I kind of was obsessing on was that you got to stop normalizing comfort. And I'll tell you something else unhinged. I find the idea of sleeping in and sick days to be totally disinteresting. Like, what is the point of life if not to push yourself to greatness?

12:26And how do you do that? Well, you don't sleep in. That's for one. You listen to the greats and not me that you're listening to here, but all the ideas that I bring along and try to bring along for both of us. You work out with the greats, if you want to be jacked. You read the greats and you join teams full of the greats. I mean, you never allow yourself to say it must be nice. Yeah, sure. It worked out for him because no, no, no. Instead, you ask yourself, what can I learn from these people? And how do I steal their homework? Because if you're not willing to suffer for something, you don't really want it.

12:57So back in the day when I worked at jobs I hated, like Goldman Sachs in Chicago in the middle of winter, I used sick days like you couldn't imagine. Like every chance I got, I marked them all off for the year. And now I love what I do. So that's not really part of the equation. But I guess I would ask you to push on that little bit. Like if you feel like you really need sick days and massive time off, you might just need them sometimes. Sometimes like it's like you don't need to quit. You need to fucking nap. But other times, like are you not being more curious in your job? Could you not learn more?

13:30Could you not go deeper? You're worn out from a groove maybe instead of the fact that you're not capable to do more. And so, you know, the research on this is fascinating. There's something called the comfort crisis we have. And this comes out from the Mayo Clinic. And there was a science looking at stress adaptation studies. Basically, what that means is that performance improves with stress up to an optimal point. So too little stress equals stagnation, not safety. Humans are actually wired to grow under pressure, not comfort. And so if you're feeling a little too comfortable, get the fuck out of that bed.

14:05Get up out of the bed in the morning. Do what I do. Listen to David Goggins. Have him yell at you. Come on here. I'll yell at you. I promise I'll bully you into making your life better. And the next lesson that I learned is that you have to accept that elite requires unhinged. I think I've said the word unhinged here like three or five times already. To do most things at the highest level, you have to be fucking unhinged. You have to not be normal. That's what's required. And I thought about this in particular to women. And so, you know, I've heard a lot about the soft girl era thing. And listen, I don't think you have to be pushed all the time.

14:37You can be pulled. You can attract. You can be in flow state. You can blah, blah, blah, blah. But also women, like you're savages. Like talk about yourself better, women. Think about what you do for a minute. You create life by letting a 10 pound little mini human tear through the most sensitive part of your body after growing it inside of you for nine months like a fucking alien out of a movie. You are not fragile. You are not soft girl era. You're extremely powerful And so I don't think being savage is unfeminine actually it's earned So I don't like that you sell yourself short. I want you to be unhinged.

15:13That's okay. Like for instance I've never been happier than lifting weights. I don't know what it is about it I think if you're unhappy today if you're struggling go to the gym throw up heavier weights than you feel comfortable with Yeah, you could hurt yourself blah blah blah but you're more likely to hurt yourself from eating too many Cheetos, sitting on the couch and dying from diabetes like most of society does. So go throw up some heavy lead and watch and see how strong you actually feel. And this goes back to one of my favorite studies of all time, Angela Duckworth. I believe it was the University of Pennsylvania or Pittsburgh.

15:44She talks about perseverance and passion for long-term goals comes from grit. And so she basically did this analysis of elite performers and saw that it was not about talent or IQ or education or history. It was, do they display sustained intensity and obsession, she terms that grit, over long time horizons, even when social norms discourage it. Like the woman who is pregnant but has always been a heavy lifter and keeps heavy lifting all the doctors like, lay down, sweetie, you're fine. She's like, fuck off. Women have been carrying pails on their heads for millennia. I'm not a doctor. Don't listen to any of my medical advice ever on this channel.

16:21I have no idea what I'm talking about from a medical perspective, but I do know what it takes from a psychological perspective. All right. The next lesson I want us to talk about is you don't get paid to play the game. This was so good when I heard this for the first time, and I can't remember who it was. But the line that I want you to remember is that you don't get paid to play the game. You get paid to practice. The game is the highlight, the stage, the awards, the applause. that is not what the money is for. The money is for the boring, invisible, humiliating work that happens long before anyone claps.

16:57And, you know, Don Draper has this incredible, you know, little moment, which we should clip in from Mad Men, when he's like, that's what the money is for. And he wasn't wrong. You know, the real reward isn't somebody giving you applause or thanking you or even actually the money. The real reward is the work. And once you understand that, everything changes. Because it always made me chuckle. Like last couple of years I've been on stages, right? Or getting an award or something. And I'd have somebody come up to me and be like, I want to do what you do on stages like this. I want to get paid to be on stage.

17:32And I remember thinking in my head, I don't get paid for this. I get paid not for being on a stage. I get paid for, I don't know, 155 page PowerPoint, messing with the graphics, doing the research, finding the data, pulling it together on Excel, pivot table, putting up here, practicing for hundreds of hours. That's what I get paid to do. This part I basically do for free. The stage is the reward. That's the dessert. It's not the baking. You don't get paid to eat the dessert. You get paid to be the chef making it. So practice, that's what you get paid for, not the game. And then we got to be honest with ourselves.

18:10If we want to kill that little weak inner bitch inside of us, we got to stop pity and weakness, including your own. Arnold said it so perfectly. Everybody pities the weak. You have to earn the jealous. That's Schwarzenegger, by the way. I'm not going to do an accent because you guys don't want that from me here. But I mean, doesn't that just feel right? Everybody pities the weak, but you have to earn the jealous. I feel like it feels like the gospel. I remember the first time I heard it, I got chills. And there's another truth most people won't say out loud, which is weak people don't attack strength because it's wrong.

18:46They attack it because it reminds them of what they refuse to become. It reminds them of what they aren't. And you know, when I first got on the internet a couple of years ago, I literally, I can't believe I'm going to admit this, I cried when somebody said something mean about me on the internet the first time I cried. It ruined my whole day. I just thought about all the reasons that they were wrong and how dare they. And they don't even know me. And you don't even have personality privileges. Now you're going to talk shit about me. How could you hate me? And I would just spiral and spiral and spiral.

19:20And it was so hard for me. And then I just kept getting hate and I got inoculated against it. And I kid you not, People will say the most ludicrous, mean things about me on the internet. I've had people call me a man and say it's all because of daddy's money and you don't even own any businesses and how dumb are you and what low IQ, low bread, blah, blah, Latina, idiot, all the things. And you know what I do now? I fucking chuckle. I think about them zero and then I think, God, I own more real estate rent-free in your head than you do in real life. and you just, you're giving me a little mansion inside that tiny little brain of yours.

20:01And I just picture myself stomping around, having a party, kicking the door through. I'm just in here having a great time in your tiny little pea brain. And it's fun for me. And so remember, if somebody is thinking about you, somebody is talking about you, that's because you're doing something. And I think like, I remember like I've become internet friendly with this guy by the name Cameron Haynes. And he has this book, Undeniable. And he had this one line that hit me in the chest. And he says, I'd rather die than be average. And that's not insanity. I mean, he is kind of sane, actually. If you don't know him, he literally runs a marathon in the morning before breakfast every single day.

20:40He carries 130 pound rock up a mountain every day. And then he shoots a bow and arrow. And then he goes to the gym and he has a full time job. And he's got kids and a wife. I mean, the man is kind of an absolute psychopath. And his kids are too. I actually saw the other day that one of his kids is setting like world records, running marathons in jeans. But I think that is like this refusal to negotiate with weakness. And it's pretty funny because if you ask him like every day, Cam, you're like, what are you? What if you're sick? What if it's raining? What if it's like every day? Every day means every day.

21:13Every day means every day. And it's interesting because my immediate reaction is like, oh, he's probably going to die. I don't know if he's going to make it. But you know what? I'm pretty sure most people don't actually die from pushing too hard these days. We're not climbing Everest. People die every day from giving up early on your health, your business, your potential. And you know what? You got a ton of people already that will tell you to slow down, chill out, take a rest, take a bubble bath, have some self-care. I don't think you come here for that from me. I'm here to tell you to full send it, motherfucker.

21:42And I think the final part that I want to leave you with is you don't need confidence. I mean, here's the most freeing thing I've learned. People who are great are not great because they believe they are. They are great because they're always trying to prove themselves because they know how flawed they are, which is incredible news. And like, like take that for a second. You know why I'm any good? Because I wake up every morning. I kid you not. This must mean I'm well adjusted. And I go, fuck, I should have done that yesterday. Huh? What about that? Hmm. I got this new thing I need to do. I wondered that.

22:09Oh man. I even, when I'm talking to my person who helps me work out, what's that called? Personal trainer. I only notice, she'll give me all these compliments. I go, yeah, but I noticed this over here. There's no positivity in here. But I'm very happy because I'm trying to get better every single day. So like you don't need to believe you're special. I'm not special. You don't need to believe you're a superstar. I'm not a superstar. All you need to do is keep trying. That compounds. So if you're lost right now, good. That means you're between versions. Just don't stay there because weakness may haunt us all, but it only wins if you let it.

22:45All right. Thanks for letting me yell at you today. I really am glad you're here. Let's hang out again next week. Maybe I'll be nicer. No, I won't. Bye.