How To Become Successful Under Pressure | Tom Bilyeu EP 823

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:10When things are really going haywire, how do you center yourself? And I learned very early in my business career that there was a bunch of us at Awareness Technologies that were given the same spiel. Don't think of yourself as an employee. Think of yourself as a partner. If you act like a partner and achieve certain results, watch and make you a partner. And nobody did it. And so I was just like, why am I the only one that's doing this? and I realized that my ability to self-soothe was a huge part of that. So other people would get upset, they would derail, they would take their eye off what they wanted to achieve because they were frustrated or whatever and I could just bring myself back to center.

0:48Now those are pretty small tests and obviously as things have gone on you start dealing with big numbers. You start to realize, is this real? Can I actually center myself when, you know, say hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake? and then it's like, okay, this still works. And that was very encouraging, very encouraging. Because when you get a test that's sort of way beyond where you've been tested before, you're like, how's this going to work? The big thing for me was recognizing that I'm having a biological experience and that I need to understand the brain, like the brain, not just the mind, which is incredibly important, but the brain.

1:24What is the brain doing? How does it hijack me? What is neurochemistry? What triggers it? Like, what are all the things that evolution has sort of primed me to do? It's what I call the physics of being human. So if you are a human, sort of regardless of intellect or experience or upbringing, there are a certain number of things that are true. They're as universal as universal is going to get. And look, nothing is perfectly universal, but some things are really close, like an internal dialogue and an internal dialogue that skews negative, right? Which is where most people start. You get people like Kanye and One End who just cannot see themselves doing anything but the best ever, the greatest and all that.

2:02And then you get people who actually don't have an internal dialogue. There are no words going on in their head, which is crazy, but nonetheless true. But the vast majority of us live in a place where you have an internal dialogue and that internal dialogue is largely negative. And so once you know, okay, cool, this is a trick of evolution, your brain is enclosed in a dark box. Light never touches your brain. Sound never reaches your brain. And everything you experience as being in the world out there beyond you is all happening in your brain. It is a virtual reality that your brain creates for you.

2:36Even though I don't think we're actually living in a simulation, your brain is creating a simulation of the real world. And I forget, I had a physicist on the show. He said, Tom, objective reality is the number of photons reflecting off of any object. That's reality. But you don't perceive it like that. You look at something, it's like, this is gray, that's white, your shirt is sort of green. Sort of green, yeah. And like, you just perceive it like that. And so your brain is not making any attempt to represent reality. Your brain is making an attempt to keep you alive and help you navigate the world.

3:08So knowing the heuristics that my brain is using, the rules of thumb, the shorthand, it's not true, but it has this massive influence on my life. So something bad happens and you take it on as negative, it makes you feel badly about yourself. And so I just put in all these rules of like, well, that's not objectively true. If I'm not worried about objective truth, what should be sort of the North Star? And for me, the North Star became utility. What's useful? And so once I shifted away from trying to like be objectively true about myself, realizing I'm probably not going to ever nail that, but I can get to something that's very, very useful.

3:45And so then I wrote my beliefs down and sort of started thinking about value system and recognizing that brain plasticity is real. And so much of who we are, let's say it's roughly, science says it's roughly 50%. It's not me making it up. That 50 % is hardwired and you're not going to be able to do anything about it. But 50 % is insanely malleable. And you can't make a race horse out of a pig, but you can make a really fast pig. And I thought, okay, cool. So maybe I'll never be a race horse, but I can be a really fast pig. And so whenever I'm feeling badly about myself or something knocks me off center, I just come back to that idea of what's useful.

4:23How do you move forward? Even if you're not going to be the greatest of all time, does it benefit you to act as if you could become the greatest of all time if you pour yourself into it? And so I don't know that I'll ever end up being the greatest anything, but dude, acting like I can and like really practicing and moving through the world like I can become the greatest has propelled me forward. The only belief that matters is that if I put time and energy into getting a new skill, I actually will get better at that thing. And if you then extrapolate that and say, and skills actually have utility, they matter.

4:56So knowing how to build a building that doesn't fall down is very, very useful. Or a business that doesn't fall apart. Yeah, that too, right? So those skills actually let you do things. And so that's become sort of my obsession is getting people to understand you don't read a book to check a box. You don't go to school to impress your parents. You do it because the skill that you will acquire lets you do something in the world that other people can't do or you wouldn't be able to do. And that has a material impact on your life. Yeah, I feel like you and I are very similar in the fact that we talk about skills a lot, acquiring new skills.

5:27And I think when you have a down phase or a breakdown phase, that's when you should think about what are the skills I'm lacking that could benefit me so this doesn't happen again. The way you act is ultimately all that matters. And the way you act follows what you allow yourself to believe. Maybe a better way to say it is what you choose to believe. So if you choose to believe that your energy and efforts will result in more skill set, then you will actually put energy and effort into getting that, which means you actually will get the skill set. But if you think, well, my talent and intelligence are fixed, so no matter how much I work, I'm never going to get better, right?

5:59I can't be a fast pig. And if you don't think that putting time and energy into it will yield anything, then you won't put time and energy into it and you thusly won't get the skills. So, and if you don't have the skills, then you can't do the things other people can do. And so people just get stuck because they don't have the only belief that matters. So they don't put the time and energy. And so that's like where everything starts is, are you putting the time and energy into getting better? Yes or no?

6:34Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:24Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

7:35Thank you.