You're listening to the Impact Theory Podcast, your source of empowering ideas and actionable techniques from the world's highest achievers. Join host Tom Billu, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of the Billion Dollar Brand Quest Nutrition, on a journey to unlock your potential and realize your vision of success. Welcome to Impact Theory. What is up everybody?
Welcome to a very special Facebook Live. Tom Billu, we had a lot of responses to a post that we did on Facebook, soliciting questions. You guys submitted the questions, these are going to be the answers. It is going to be a lightning round.
I have a hard stop at 12. It gives us a little less than an hour, but I'm going to burn through all of these bad boys. Then, if there's time, I'll also be taking live questions. If you have a question during any of this, follow up something you want to more information on, go ahead and drop it in.
We will get to that. Then, this could also potentially be a new format, which we'll call the ANMA series. Here we go. The first question was submitted by Melissa Utero.
What pushed you through the days when you were living your reality but working towards your vision? Obviously, it takes time. How did you stay focused on your goals and seem to have reached? First and foremost, this is what I call the arrogance of belief.
You have to believe that you can accomplish it. I won't say that I ever allowed goals to seem out of my reach. Many times in my life where I was really unsure of how I was going to pull it off, but I never let that stop me from taking the first step. I think that's critical.
Here at Impactary, we're building a studio, a traditional studio, so I think Disney. I think it's going to take a very long time to outpace Disney. I have no idea how we're actually going to pull it off. I have some theories, things we're going to try.
That didn't stop me from taking the first step and taking a risk and knowing that I'll be looking for opportunities all along the way and that I won't be afraid to pivot or go in a new direction. That's really critical. Developing the skill, the willingness to even though you don't know exactly how you're going to pull it off, to have faith that taking one step after another is always always the right answer. The only execution matters, being willing to take a risk is absolutely critical.
That's always been my motto, always be learning and always be moving forward. The next question comes from Dreya Van Grisvin. How did you find what suited you for success? I followed lots of paths and have been successful in almost all of them, yet still looking for the, oh my god, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life moment.
This really comes down to how do you find or develop a passion. I want to differentiate between, I don't believe you find a passion. I believe you develop it. You need to look inside yourself for areas of interest and things you just find interesting.
Whatever they may be, don't pass a judgment on them. Find an area that overlaps, ideally multiple interests, overlapping, and then you're going to be able to find an area that's going to be more than the absolute critical part. It overlaps with your ability to monetize. So whether that manifest as employment in somebody else's company, whether that manifest as being a contractor or whether that is actually building your own business, I don't think it really matters, whatever suits your personality.
But at the end of the day, you need to find an area where that interest overlaps with your ability to monetize. Then you're going to begin gaining mastery in that thing. The desire to be great. I think it's absolutely critical.
And anybody that doesn't have a desire to be great to push their own skill set, regardless of what other people are saying. So if the world is pushing back on you and telling you that it doesn't want you to be great, it doesn't want to see you shine like Kodak Black says, thank you to the people that submitted that when I asked what song that was that people don't want to see you win. If you can still pursue greatness in the face of that wanting to develop your own skill set, then you're going to go far. And it's in the development of mastery in an area of interest that will ultimately develop into a passion.
So if you haven't found that, oh my god, I want to do this for the rest of my life moment, one, don't be afraid of that. I don't think that anything needs to be a forever thing. And the only thing I know about any forever company that I do, which I actually consider Impact Theory to be my forever company, is that it has to be flexible enough to allow me to adapt and change and grow and want to move in multiple directions. So, excuse me, don't be tense about that.
Okay, the next one, Lewis Ramos, if you could start again with no money, connections, team, which industry would you tackle and why? Well, the great news is that I just had that opportunity, so building Quest and really wanting it to be that flexible forever company and just having this sort of unimaginable success, but being identified as a protein bar company that made it impossible for me to do this part of my passion set, which is the mind. So Quest allowed me to address the body, which was amazing, and I will forever be grateful for all of the success we had there and just still am such a huge believer in that and still consider myself the chief evangelist for the company. But it wouldn't allow me to address the mind.
And that was really when I turn inward is the thing that I'm most meant to do. So wanting to do that, I had to sort of, admittedly, have the good fortune of having the money, connections and the team, but nonetheless, the industry is the same. So I would be addressing the pandemic of the mind as I see it, depression and anxiety, the lack of belief in oneself, the lack of belief that you can become whatever you want to become, and wanting to do that through the lens of narrative, because I believe that it's the most powerful way to do it. So I would still be in that industry.
I would obviously be taking a different approach, though. I still would be using social content because you can do it for free. It just wouldn't look like this. We would be in, this would be a podcast.
I would do most of my interviewing over the phone. But none of what I think makes me a good interviewer costs money. It takes time, but it doesn't cost money, so I would still be leveraging that. All right.
So basically, on tough mornings and days, what specifically are you telling your mind that it gets you out of bed to keep moving? Step by step, methods, tactics would be awesome. All right. So for me, I think that you need rules that you live by.
So one of the rules that I live by, for instance, that gets me out of bed is literally I have 10 minutes to get out of bed. And to be the person that I want to be, then I have to get out of bed because I've set a rule for myself. So you need to understand that behavior drives, or sorry, identity drives your behavior. So you need to craft your identity around something that's going to get you the behaviors that you want.
So I am by nature a lazy person, but I don't let that be part of my identity. So what I tell myself is I'm the type of person that despite being lazy is always going to do and believe that which moves me towards my goals. So adjust your identity and the behaviors will follow. All right.
Brandon Vanderstappen, dope name. First off, huge thanks for giving us this opportunity. Totally my pleasure. My question is this.
What is your ongoing heartfelt commitment to yourself and all of those around you? Well, my entire business is really predicated on one promise, which is that I really feel I got pulled out of the matrix and I got pulled out of the matrix by my wife, by the books that I read, by my business partners, like they're just been cumulatively all these amazing people that have come to my life that ultimately pulled me out of the matrix. And I swore that if I ever had ever gotten to a position where I could pay that forward that I would. And so now that's really the central mission of my life is to what is the most scalable way to give people that mentality that will get them out of the matrix.
So that is for sure, my most ongoing and heartfelt commitment to myself and to others is to give them the mental framework with which to be successful, however they define success. Your question is sort of multifaceted, but I think to make sure that I get to all of them, I'm going to have to stop there. Sorry. Gingerome, does your ego allow you to take advice from someone now?
Your wife doesn't count. Like, do you only allow yes men around you? I don't mean any of this in a bad way. You were awesome to me, but I was wondering when you get to that to the level that you're at, can you still listen if you're doing something wrong?
Let me tell you, A, I don't think that you're ever going to succeed at the level that you want if you can't learn and you're sure as hell, I'm not going to stay at that level if you can't learn. So the only thing I can promise you is that change is coming for you. The world is changing so rapidly that I think at the core of anybody with an anti-federal personality, you absolutely must be willing to sit at somebody else's feet with absolutely no ego and learn. So I know I'm wrong about just an unimaginable amount of things and I'm always looking to get better.
And so my identity is that of the learner. So the only distressing thing I find in your question is, does your ego allow you to take advice from someone now? My life and my success is predicated on the fact that I'm always trying to learn from everybody. I believe everybody is my superior in some way and I'm trying to extract as much knowledge from people as humanly possible.
So the long and short of that is absolutely and not the least of which is my wife who I think also has amazing answers. I do not surround myself with the S-Men. These people here tell me no all too often. But no, I love it.
And it's definitely what makes us, I think, sets us up for success. All right. Corey McLennan, what is your brand? I'm not taking the piss.
You revealed yourself as British with that one. I actually get a lot out of your interviews, but I never saw what was before that. Did your vision always look like what we see today or did it evolve with your brand? And where do I start?
I'm not sure why I is in quotes, but okay. So the, I think what you're asking is what was the brand that made me successful? The answer to that was Quest Nutrition. I built that with two co-founders.
I think it was a long and I think very interesting story of how we went from not liking what we did, selling that company and then founding this. I'm sure they're in passion. Let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building. Compounding.
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Quince.com slash impact pod. And value creation and not focusing on money and then oddly enough, and not focusing on money anymore and really just thinking about what's valuable, we were able to build a massive brand. It was very, very exciting. There were always two things I knew I would do with my life.
Always, but as I got deep into my business career, once I clicked over to Passion, I should say. Once I clicked over to Passion, I always knew there were two things that I was going to address and that was the pandemic of the body and the pandemic of the mind. So that's where I'm at now. Quest is addressing the pandemic of the body and impact theory is addressing the pandemic of the mind, which means anxiety, depression, not believing that you can do anything you set your mind to.
So I ask myself the question, no bullshit, what would it take to give people the mentality they would need to get themselves out of the matrix? And the answer is that you have to use narrative to impart the ethos that is at the core of the impact theory. So that's what we're doing. All right.
Adele Khan. I'm just absolutely critical to develop the ability to understand how you can switch off the suffering. Watch the episode that I did of impact theory with David Goggins to really get insight into how I see the usability of suffering itself, both how to deal with it and how to leverage it. So that was amazing.
And then two, any plans to work directly with Brendan Bouchard. So I just met him for the first time a couple months ago at a success live event and found him to be such a nice guy. I was literally dumbfounded. So imagine you're walking down a hall.
You've never met somebody before ever in your life and from like 30 feet down the hallway, somebody screams your name like they know you like you're a long lost friend and he was so kind and so generous and just giving me all kinds of useful information about how to grow a social following and how to be meaningful to your community. It's so cool. So the second Brendan wants to do something I would do with him in a heartbeat. He's amazing.
Want to get him on the show, do an interview with him. I really, really think he's a special guy. Andrew Pestana. How did it feel when you purchased your first big ticket item?
Was it a full circle fuck yeah moment where you realized all of your hard work paid off or was it just another carhouse moment? I think it is so dangerous to let any moment be just another whatever moment. So even when it's like small, like I try not to take for granted the way my wife's smile eats her face. So that's just one of my things and she's actually behind the camera right now smiling for me.
When she smiles like that really big authentic smile, it actually looks like it's going to consume her whole face and I love that more than I can possibly tell you. And I remind myself to be grateful for that and to see the beauty and to let it affect me on a neurochemical level to step out on my balcony and just enjoy sunrise or sunset or just the view like all that stuff's critical. So when my wife and I bought our first really big ticket item which was the house that we're now, we really let it affect us and we were like, oh my God, I can't believe this. We were freaking out.
We were like little kids. Even just when we started house shopping and to know like the budget that we could play in was nuts. And you know, as somebody who grew up in Tacoma, Washington and not being around money and you know, really like making my wife who grew up on resource in Growbridge, which she definitely grew up much better off than I did. And I made her clip coupons for years because I basically made her pour for a stint and to not take for granted how far we've come I think is just absolutely critical.
And so yeah, the first purchase was just inspiring and amazing and I try never to take it for granted. Alright, Benedict LePap, how did you change your belief system from passive victimhood to proactive and responsible leader entrepreneur? Did this have to do with the relationship to your sister? That's interesting.
I get because I talk so much about my sister but no, it had nothing to do with my sister. So how did I change my belief system? I became goal obsessed. So once I became goal obsessed and I was like, okay, I'm trying to get here.
What are the things that are actually going to allow me to do that? That was really, really important for me and just a huge part of my development. So in doing that, that really gut checked me with a lot of my belief system. And I think that is really critical.
So that gut check just made me realize that I was going to have to develop a growth mindset. I unfortunately didn't have those words, but that was the path that put me on to developing a growth mindset that would allow me to actually achieve my goals. Okay, LK Eliot, how did you build your brand with Quest and impact theory? Your branding and community has been so powerful.
How did you create it? So Quest was really a company born at a misery. So before that I was chasing money and I was just helping to get rich. And I spent eight and a half years chasing money building a company that I didn't really care about and thought while we solve the problem for people, certainly it wasn't something I was passionate about.
I don't think it was really something even people buying it were passionate about, which oddly enough actually made it hard and it certainly made it soul sucking. And so at the end of that, I realized I was not willing to do it anymore. And I actually went to my partners and I said, I quit, I can't keep doing this. I gave them the equity back on the company.
I said, this is just a total misery for me. I can't be a part of this and long story short, so I only have two minutes per answer. They said, you know what, we actually feel the same way. And for three very different reasons, we decided to get into nutrition and we agreed that it was going to be a company predicated on value creation for the employees and the customer.
That it would be a passion play that we would ask the question, what would we do and love every day, even if we were failing. And by shifting our focus over to that and really focusing on something that was fun for us that we can enjoy in the moment, that was creating value for other people. It was just a total game changer and it focused us on building community and making an amazing product that was actually good and holding ourselves to just a totally different standard than we had been holding ourselves to before. So it really was a radical shift that made us think about branding.
Up until that point, we never really thought about branding. It was always the product we were trying to brand and not the company. And so that was a big shift with impact theory. I'm really trying to take that to the next level and really truly being entirely community focused.
And yeah, just how far can we push the notion of value creation? So you'll notice this show right now, what I'm doing right here is marketing, but it's all value add. So we don't do like your traditional, like you're not going to see ads and stuff. I won't say we won't ever do it because if it helped build the community, I would do it in a second.
But all of our marketing is value add. So this is all free. We give it away. And we do that because we want people to understand how sincerely we want to positively impact your life because we want that to be the brand ethos.
We want people to understand that literally from the ground up, this company is designed to help. We plan to monetize it, plan to make a whole lot of money doing it. But I believe the only thing that's sustainable that you can sell for the long term is value. So that's what we're all about.
And then the second part, knowing that it's physically possible in my land, et cetera, and that people did it isn't enough, would be great here at how exactly did it. So I think I sort of covered that. But basically, I focus on community, build community, make a great product. Those are the shorthand answers.
Okay. Locks reign. What was the single moment that catapulted you towards your first step? What clicked for you that changed and turned it around?
Insight wisdom, wisdom, a experience that helped you put it all together, wisdom and experience it all together. This is very similar to the last question. It really was frustration. I'm going to take a taste of your beverage, a beer with me in one second.
It really was more an insight into what I didn't want to do anymore. And I think that's important to acknowledge. Like, I got fed up. I got frustrated with not feeling alive, with not loving what I was doing every day, with feeling like, man, you got one shot at this.
This is your one life. This is it. You're not coming back. So what are you doing to make it count?
And realizing that the game you're playing is actually brain chemistry. So feeling good in the moment is all that matters. So I wanted to structure my life in a way where I would actually enjoy the day today. So frustration is the only honest answer.
And actually, it wasn't just frustration. It was despair. Despair was my first step. And I was unwilling anymore to continue on the way that I was.
And yeah, that was the key insight for me. Despair. There you go. All you have to do is hit rock bottom.
And you too can go on to do what you love. If only it were a little easier. Hopefully you guys can learn and not have to put yourself through that. So there are ways to monetize doing what you love and what you believe in.
You have to look inward, figure out what that is, develop a passion. It's not something you want to cover up earlier. All right, Alan Cruz. Do you have a customer experience department at Quest?
So will you share the success you have with that department? If not, why? If not, can I start one for you? This is very kind of effort.
We do have one. So our customer support department and really, quite frankly, every department from the ground up is meant to evangelize the customer. And that was our whole thing right from the beginning is you have to take care of the customer. You have to evangelize them.
Now, very important point. Very critical to realize that starts with evangelizing your employees first. And you really do have to be an employee first company. If your employees are bitter, they're going to pass it on to the customer.
And so taking really, really good care of your employees is absolutely critical. Now it's harder than it sounds. I made my share, my fair share of mistakes there. But that remains like a core value for me and something that I take very seriously to make sure that the employees believe in what you're doing, understand what you're doing, are better for having worked at your company.
And that's really my promise that every employee is that if you work here, your life will be better than if you hadn't. And making good on that promise is hard as hell. But I think that every entrepreneur has to hold himself to that standard and really accept responsibility when you're falling down on that, assess how you're falling down on that, why you're falling down on that, make adjustments and go forward. So that's super, super critical.
And going above and beyond, going way over the top of your customers, that's also really critical. And a great way to build community and build a business, by the way, to not always be thinking about eating every bit of profitability out, but instead think of the emotional reaction that the customer has to your brand as the profitability. And I just really believe if the customer believes in your mission, believes in the company, wants to support it, that in the long run you're just going to be way more profitable. So always putting that first, I think it's just smart business.
All right, Jonathan J, what would be your strategy if you didn't have social media web? Well, it would take you back to, I mean, I can only go backwards, right? So I don't know what looking forward is going to look like without social media in the web. And maybe we have all passed it almost certainly things changed so rapidly.
But looking back, I mean, it was traditional marketing and advertising. So being high touch is where I shine. So I think that given, if I were in the same circumstances I am now, just I didn't have social media in the web, I would be doing a lot more events, I'd be doing a lot more speaking engagements, I'd be building the community one by one. Meeting artists and writers and creatives is going to be so critical to my go forward business.
I would still be based here in LA. I would still be building relationships with those people. And then it would be, excuse me, it would be a much more direct path to the creating the content. I would have to rely much more heavily on the traditional means of getting that done.
And so instead of, because what we're doing now is essentially building the community, but telling the community all along the way to know what to expect from us that we're going to be building a studio, that we're going to need your help identifying what content to put resources behind all that to engage the community. And that was not a surprise when we started doing that, but really, really believe that building the community is step one and is so much easier to do with social media in the web. So I would forgo that without it. I would focus more on creating my persona, which I think is very critical.
And if you look at what Disney did, I'm very much modeling myself after that, which is why I stepped up front, all that. But looking at the way that Disney built an ethos on the brand of Varela. So that's what we would do. The only certain types of content that we would create that I would leverage the traditional distribution means to do that.
Okay. So Moody Imira, how long did it take you to have a net worth of over a billion dollars? It's funny. I've heard people make comments like that before.
I'm not a billionaire. I don't have a net worth over a billion dollars. Our company had a net worth over a billion dollars, but I had two other partners, so you got to divide everything in a third. So I'll let you know when I finally cross that mark.
Andres Roso Ejaveri, I'm sure I just brutalized that name. What is the best way to meet prospects at the start? Well, oddly enough, social media on the web. So depending on what you're trying to do, that's a very generic answer.
But nowadays, getting the awareness through social media is so easy because it's free. So and I say easy compared to what it used to be where you had to throw money at the problem and just getting people to pay attention to you. There were a thousand gatekeepers that could stop you because they were the only ways to get out in front of people. It was much harder to do grounds well.
But one thing I will say, have an awesome product. Like having an awesome product is always the right answer. So focus on that, make your product great, whatever your product is going to be. And if it actually solves a problem, start giving it away.
That's giving away a product that's amazing and solves a problem is just always going to be the fastest way to getting things done because then people are going to talk about it. But yeah, really making pain go away for people is super important. Okay, Ariel Huskins, what was the single most valuable tool you use to create your business? Well that's really twofold.
There's only you have to give two answers to that. One, your product has to be amazing. Okay, there's just no substitute for that. And that's why I really encourage people get great at something.
Like get really good. Focus on being amazing. Focus on being extraordinary. Outperforming everybody else.
And that's the only thing that nobody else can match. Like that is so important. And I think that in the with the millennial desire for immediacy, and anybody quite frankly that uses social media where it's so fast, like there's you can get something out really rapidly and get feedback really rapidly. And even just the forget social media like the mobile generation, I can order something from Amazon now and it'll be delivered by the time I'm done like with this segment is crazy how fast.
So we've all really been trained to want things immediately. And that's why I think the people that are willing to go head down and do the work are still going to be the ones that win because there's the getting to the physics of the problem, the physics of the problem is the human condition. And the only way to get people's attention is to wow them, to solve a problem for them, to excite them, to entertain them, whatever. But that only happens when it's actually good.
It's actually impressive. It captures their imagination. It captures their attention. It draws them into your universe.
So that is just super super critical. So the people that go heads down do the work to create an amazing product you're going to win. The second part of that is that you really have to leverage building a community. Community is everything because they're going to be the ones that help you spread that word.
So building a community evangelizing them, making them love your product, helping them understand what it means to use your product and what they represent to the world when they're using your product. That is just really, really important. So those are the two things. An amazing product in building a community around it.
Okay. Ariel Huskins, I guess part two, looks like she's snuck in or he's snuck in two questions. What's the best and worst thing about competition with other companies in your space? The best thing about it is they push you to innovate in no uncertain terms.
Having that competitive pressure, triggering in you that competitive drive to want to keep pushing and being better and having somebody that's making you sweat, I think that's always pretty advantageous. So yeah, that's the best. The worst part about it is it can create a confusing message to the consumer. And that is very, very true.
Back at Quest where I felt like, man, we make products that are way more real than 99% of our competitors. And yet there was a lot of noise from the competitors that muddy the issue of nutrition, which is already confusing as hell. So that got really frustrating that people would start to listen to what I felt was a metabolically worse message and product than what we were putting out there. And you still have to deal with all that.
So that was the worst part that can really muddy the waters, especially if your product relies on some degree of understanding in a difficult space. So for me, anyway, that was the worst. Joe Snyder, what one thing took Quest from 1 million to 1 billion? It's the same two things.
I know you guys were one, but you really have to have both. It was the product in the community. Those two things were what really allowed us to leave for. The product was real.
In fact, I'm going to throw in another thing. And so if you're going to make me isolate and sort of forget those other two things, the one thing that we had that a lot of people didn't have that gave us a huge advantage was our ability to execute operationally at the production level. So we became our own manufacturers because nobody else would manufacture the product that we wanted. So in order to make that great product that I think is so necessary, we had to be willing to manufacture it ourselves.
And that was a huge, huge leap forward. Nobody else was doing that. Let us make a product that was really unique and gave us probably a three year head start on everybody else while they really struggled to keep up and alter their equipment enough to allow them to make the same product that we were making. So that was just super critical.
Jordan Demko, is it a good idea to find a mentor? Absolutely. So that mentor is only books. There's a great quote from Socrates, read so that you may learn with ease what other men have struggled greatly to learn.
It's a paraphrase, forgive me. But that's the idea, right? That people are putting into books like they're taking 10, 20, 30 years of knowledge and condensing it down to something that you can consume in a week. So that's arbitrage.
So be sure, always be reading AVR. That is like that sits at the center of my universe. I'm just always reading, always reading, always reading, always trying to learn, always trying to push my skill sets. So that is really, really critical.
And so think of those authors as your mentors. You don't necessarily need a flesh and blood mentor, although they are awesome as well. And you can ask them questions, but especially in today's social age, I think the ability to get digital mentors has just never been easier. So yeah, find those people that you resonate with and maybe understand your industry or what you're trying to get into and engage with them socially.
Like it is so meaningful to me to get these questions because it gives me an opportunity to deliver value to the community. So like this is a great opportunity for people to get their questions answered. So you're delivering me value and hopefully I'm delivering value back. And there are a lot of amazing people that are doing something similar to this.
So take advantage, whoever speaks most clearly to you, Kevin Holt. How do you actually make money? Like me personally? If that's the answer by selling product.
So at Quest, that was really simple. Self protein bar, self protein chips, protein powder. That was how I made money there. How do I make money at Impact Theory right now?
We're in a building phase. I'm not worried about monetizing yet. I'm in a very fortunate position. I don't have to.
So that's put us in a very unique position that I never anticipated but am leveraging to the hilt, which is that I can build a community predicated on value and build a brand doing that. My ultimate money making plan is merchandise. So I believe that if you can create intellectual property that resonates with people on an ethos level where it's like, how do I live my life? What are all the things that I need to be thinking and doing?
I think that you can really build a powerful community that then leverages that merchandise to do what's called self signaling, where they're intending to signal to other people, but they really reinforce in themselves their ideology. And I believe that we have a unique ideology here that's going to pull people out of the matrix that will allow us to create traditional narrative content. So the easiest way to explain it is look at what Disney's done. So the way that Disney Builders Studio has never been replicated is crazy to me that has never been replicated.
And what they understood that nobody else seems to understand that we plan to have a discipline to replicate is every piece of content that Disney creates feeds into the brand ethos. So if you say that you're going to go see a Warner Brothers movie, nobody knows what you're talking about. They don't know what kind of movie you're going to see. But if you say I'm going to go see a Disney movie, people know exactly what kind of movie you're about to go see.
So that's what we want to do. And we want to create books, comic books, TV shows, movies and video games. That's really how you get narrative to people. And while we'll make money on that, that's not the real big play, the real big play is merchandise, which by the way, you can go right now to impact3.com and buy some of our merchandise, which ultimately isn't, I don't think we're ever going to make a lot of money off of impact theory, merchandise, but we will ultimately make a lot of money on the properties that we make underneath that.
So if you think of a comic book turning into a movie and then all the subsequent merchandising that kicks off of that, that's where the real money is made. And so like, take George Lucas and Star Wars, he made billions of dollars off of merchandising, not off the property itself. So that's our path to revenue. And so we're in a very fortunate position where we can build community first and worry about the money later.
Yeah, which I think is the right way to do it, just most people can't afford to. And then Valerie, Vieira, Gardner, do you like turtles? I'm indifferent. I'm glad they exist.
I would hate to see them become extinct. But I can't say they make my daily radar. So there you have it. Patrick Smith, why are you a good bullshitter?
If you mean, why do I have good verbal skills, which I'll choose to believe is what you mean, because I have practiced it. I think that I am wired for it. So I think that that is an early win, but I don't think early wins take you very far. I've worked very, very hard since about the seventh grade to get adept at verbal communication.
When I was in high school, for instance, I used to do essentially improv stand up comedy, I was sitting down improv comedy at my lunch table pretty much every day, Monday through Friday, or four years. So that alone was worth its weight in gold. And then on top of that, I did speech and debate in high school. So I spent an inordinate amount of hours not only doing it, but competing at it.
So yeah, it's been something that I've put the number, I've put more than 20,000 hours into getting good at verbal communication. So yeah, I'll choose to believe that's what you were meaning to ask me. Zia Raymond, how did you get out of distractions? That comes down to identity.
So I was diagnosed with ADD when I was a kid, but because I could sleep through the night, my mother refused to medicate me. Yay. And sorry, not ADD hyperactivity disorder. So bouncing off the walls, yeah, that's a much more accurate description of myself.
So as an adult, I've just learned to train myself to focus because when I start to drift, I remind myself that that doesn't move me towards my goals and my identity is to always be gold driven. And so I refocused myself, I was just doing that today. I opened my phone to go into something else and had that, like I saw that I had responses waiting for me on social. And I so wanted to dive into that.
I got that dopamine rush, oh, you're about to go in into social and have interactions. Yay. And I thought, nope, that doesn't jive with my identity. And I'm much more emotionally and chemically rewarded for being true to my identity.
So my identity keeps me focused. So and then also, by the way, I keep a list of the most important things I could be doing at any one time. So when I find myself drifting in a natural rush to be paying attention to, I just dive into that. That's really, really helped.
Matt Davis, where can I get one of those FE man t-shirts, which stands for Iron Man? I got it on Amazon as I get virtually everything that I don't make. So yeah, there you have it. All right, Paul, Dominique, how do you get high profile mentors?
By delivering a crushing amount of value. Do not reach out to the mentor and say, how can I help? Matt puts the onus on them and is the exact opposite of value and they will almost certainly just ignore you. Plus it makes you feel bad because they don't want to ignore you.
Like there are a lot of really cool people out there that actually want to help, but you have to facilitate them helping because they're getting hit up all day, every day by people like, how can I help? How can I help? How can I help? And that's a pain in the ass.
So if you really want to high profile mentor, do the following. Find out what is valuable to them. Find out what their mission is in life. What's that thing that they're trying to do?
Find out how your skill set makes you adept at doing part of that for them better than anyone else. So and then go explain to them how you're going to help them get what they want and tell them, I'm going to work for you for 90 days for free. I'm going to work harder and smarter than anyone you've ever met at the end of the 90 days. If I have delivered value, put me on payroll or if you just want a mentorship, great.
And if not, at least I got knowledge and connections and that's all that I'm looking for. But it's really about figuring out how them mentoring you helps them. That's what you have to show them because if it only helps you, why would they do it? So you really have to put yourself in their shoes and know that like every human being, they're going to be selfish.
So you have to show them how mentoring you is a win. That is the big thing. And I really cannot emphasize enough. It is so lazy to ask the other person how you can help them.
You need to go arm knowing so much about them, what they're trying to accomplish and then detailing for them exactly how you plan to help them achieve that so that they can see that the most selfish thing they could do would be to mentor you. All right, so we're getting low in time, but I do have 10 and a half more minutes. Jay, do we have any questions coming in? Yeah.
All right, you want to just run over here real fast and throw them out. Yeah. What is up, everyone? So we got a question from Vishiwav Rana.
Hey, Tom, is it worth risking job security for an unplanned future in dreams? So I don't think that you have to be binary like that. I don't think that you have to burn the ships at the shore. I think at the end of the day, you can do it night's weekend.
You can do the side hustle and then just prove it out that there really is something there. That's certainly what we did at Quest. So we were running a technology company by day and then we were building Quest at night's end weekends. And then once we saw that it was taking off, then I left that and went to do Quest full time.
But I think that there are ways to hedge your downside, which I actually think is pretty important and taking a cue from Richard Branson, one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time, hedge your downside wherever possible. Got it. So another question from John Belt. Why couldn't you do what you're doing now with the name Inside Quest?
So maybe you want to change into a brand new company and not just adapt it to Quest? Because what I found was we were building two separate fan bases communities. So unfortunately, for me, because I would much rather than that, the community just, there wasn't overlap. Like people did not see the connect, like, why is a protein bar company doing a show about the mind?
That's what people just kept asking that. And also my partners and I did not share a vision for it. So it would have been very stressful to try and drag them along in the process, which inevitably it was going to be very expensive and take years to build that community and years to give people to understand how body and mind are integrated and all that. So I thought, you know what, rather than do that, it just makes more sense to spin this out into a standalone company.
The reason we didn't keep the name Inside Quest is because that intellectual property is owned by Quest. So even though I own a third of it, I only own a third of it. And so trying to pull that out just would have been weird. Also rebranding gives a chance to get away from the identity of the protein bar company and create something entirely new.
An impact theory was certainly ideologically much more in alignment with what I'm trying to accomplish. So, yeah, that's why. Cool. So a question from Tyrone Davis in all caps.
I saw the interview with Goggins. It was deep. Question. So, I don't know if you're going to be a parent with change or you think that whatever decision that we make, we will gain something and we will lose something.
Or is it all just a matter of Atlantic rhetoric? Either you're good at it or not? I don't know what Atlantic rhetoric is. I'll answer the rest of the question.
I don't think that suffering is necessarily a part of change, but I do believe that to really transform, they're going to be moments of suffering. I'm like trying to recognize there's a time where that's not true. So there are definitely moments of change that are pain-free, where if you can learn from somebody else, that's incredible. But I found the deeper you go into your belief system, the harder it is to change without some sort of moment of crisis, without some sort of moment of collision conflict, something to really force you to take that big step.
So I won't say it's inevitable, but I'll say that, God, it gets real close. That, how about this? It is inevitable that in a grand enough journey, there will be extreme moments of suffering. Now, back to one of the earlier questions.
Can you turn off suffering? Struggle is inevitable, but suffering is not suffering. It's a choice. And I do think that at some level that's true, but I've never met a human being that didn't suffer, at least to the point where you have to learn to make peace with it.
Like for instance, I would tell you that when I'm doing it fast, would you and I did together? It sucks, but you can actually embrace the suck, as David Goggins says. And once you begin to embrace it, the suffering takes on a different note. And so it doesn't feel like that imposed upon you suffering, which has its own layer of pain.
So one thing I find very interesting in the brain, like if you go to a hypnotist, they can hypnotize you to not feel pain. It actually isn't true because there's pain and they're suffering. So the signal, the pain signal is still going to your brain, but the area of your brain that registers this stimulus, this pain is bad, which is what makes it suffering, switches off. So I think you can shut that off.
I just think that it's inevitable that you're going to go through it at least temporarily until you get to the point where, okay, now I've got control of it. I'm going to turn that part of my brain off. So and the moral of my story with all of that is don't fear suffering. Like don't do something based on whether or not you think you're going to suffer, but do learn to make friends with the suffering.
Do learn to see the power in it. That's very, very advantageous. And then that actually makes the suffering less. I can't take away that as well.
As from Man Search for Meaning, Rick DeFranco said that you don't need to suffer to find meaning, but you can find meaning in suffering. I think that's a key takeaway when looking for this thing. Nice. Said way better.
But then Victor Frankel says everything better than I do. So yeah. Let's see. I think we have time for maybe one more.
So from Victor Sogado, Tom's any plan? By the way, Victor is OG Quest. Assuming this is the same Victor Sogado. Tom, any plans on writing a book?
Yes. We are literally working on that as we speak. So we're in negotiations with the ghost writer right now and assuming that we're able to pull that off, essentially what they're going to do is go through all the content that we've created, boil it down into one narrative about how to get yourself out of the Matrix. So it'll be all my words just taken from all at this point.
We've put out hundreds of hours of content that all contains the belief system about how to get out of the Matrix. They're going to consolidate because the reason that I push it off is I can't justify the time it takes me to actually sit and write. But I've put all of the ideas out there. So that would be an amazing solution to that problem.
So yes, our hope is that by call it mid summer 2018 that the book would drop. Cool. Excited. So last question from Niko Rose.
How do you get yourself to believe in yourself when your doubts and fears dominate you? All right. So this is do and believe that which means you charge your goals. So if you can allow yourself to believe for the following, humans lead with belief.
What I mean by that is you won't take the first step unless you believe you can get there. So you don't have to believe that you're capable of doing it today. You just have to believe you can become capable of it. Now, if you don't already believe that, then believe this humans are an adaptation machine.
Period. That's just fact. You can look at the way the brain does a process called myelination and we can learn anything. So when you were born, you couldn't walk, you couldn't talk, you've learned all of that.
Those are way more difficult skills. You don't think they are. You totally discount them because you did it when you were young. They're actually way more difficult skills to learn than whatever talent skill thing that you're trying to get good at.
So through discipline practice, all things are possible. So if you can believe that humans are an adaptation machine that you don't need to know how you're going to get there when you first start, but you have to start in order to do the discipline practice in order to get good, but you just have to take that first step. You're putting one foot in front of the other, making demands of yourself to put in the time, the energy to look at yourself and honestly assess where you are and what you need to do to be good at it. Then that literally to me, that's just looking at the physics of the problem.
That was me not going, am I extraordinary? It was me going, what is the truth of the human condition? How does a human get good at something and then doing it? And also just realizing that your brain is lying to you.
So insecurities are totally worthless. They do not serve you. So you have to jettison them. Simple as.
The only reason anxiety is good is to get you to take something seriously to make sure you put in the work to get good at it. So I get anxious before every interview, but if I didn't, then I wouldn't take them seriously. I wouldn't put in all the work and then the interview would be as good. So I'm grateful for it in that sense, but I don't let it escalate to where it's becoming like panic because then it's actually deleterious to your performance.
So again, do and believe that which moves you towards your goals. Well said. Word. I think that's it for right now.
Oh, yeah. All right, everybody. Thank you so much. This camera might now be on me and be wider.
So I'll take a risk and say, guys, thank you so much for joining me again. This was an AMMA. Hopefully we'll be doing more of these. So what happened was we put a post up on Facebook.
We said submit your questions. You guys submitted them. And that was a lightning round answer, which is very different. And I probably only answer five or six questions in an hour, which is fun.
I get to go down tangents, but it means a lot of people don't get the questions answered. So this was you guys heating that call for questions, doing a lightning round answer, which we'll call the AMMA series based on the Reddit thing, which hopefully will actually integrate with Reddit here at some point in the near future. So thank you for submitting your questions and give me the chance to answer them. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe.
And thank you guys so much. Until next time, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
Everybody, thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, please go to iTunes, go to Stitcher, rate and review us. That helps us build this community. That's what we're all about right now building this community as big as we can to help as many people as we can deliver as much value as possible.
And you guys, rating and reviewing really helps with that. All right, guys. Thank you again so much. And until next time, my friends, you legendary.
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