Change Your Brain Every Day - When You Stop Learning, Your Brain Starts Dying - Part 3 of an Interview with Tom Bilyeu

Episode Date: July 7, 2017

In the final episode with Quest Nutrition co-founder Tom Bilyeu, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen dig into the topic of new learning. Success leaves clues, and therefore your role models and peers can often rub off on you in either a positive or negative way. Learn how to identify which is which, and how basing your self-esteem on the concept of you as a “learner” may help you evoke major positive changes in your life.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain.

For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We're here with Tom Bilyeu. So much fun. Tom is the co-founder of Quest Nutrition. He's also the co-founder and host of Impact Theory, where he's really building a brand new media company. And we are so excited to have him

and hear his story. Yeah. So as I've been listening to you, Tom, what I, it's very apparent to me. So, and I've always said this, there are people like, I love to watch people. I love to copy people. I know, you know, it's like you see, like, I love what Tony Robbins always says, you know, success leaves clues. So you, you just watch people and you, what are they doing that makes them so successful. Well, there's very, it's very clear to me. You do something different. Your entire energy is very different than, than just the average person that you see that's comfortable with where they're at. You're not comfortable with like, with the way things are. It's very clear to me. So I love talking to you about killing the ants, your mindset, your obsession with being a better person, with constantly improving. So this is going to be a good one. We're going to talk about mindset today and how it affects your business. So it seems to me like you've been interested in that topic for a very long time. Yeah, yeah. I've been full blown into mindset for probably about 20 years now.

Yeah, well, it's obviously worked. There's something going on. So talk to us about the biggest lessons you have learned. So that's easy. There's one lesson that really rides above everything else, which Carol Dweck summed up in her amazing book. I so wish I had had this book when I was coming up, but the book Mindset and the whole notion of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. And that really is, to me, the fundamental lesson everybody has to learn. And a fixed mindset is somebody who believes that their talent and intelligence are fixed. It's what you were born with. It's what it's always going to be. There's nothing you can do to develop it. So life is really about putting yourself in a situation where

you can shine. So if there are people that are smarter than you, then you go down a rung until you get to the point where you feel good about yourself relative to the people that are around you, which causes people's worlds to sort of collapse in on itself to always becoming smaller. And that's it. But they need to do something to feel good about themselves. And then people with a growth mindset realize that their talents and intelligence are not fixed, that they're malleable, that they can be grown and developed through discipline practice that you're gonna have to put in the work, but that you really can change and grow. And people understand that about their bodies, like people get if I eat right, if I exercise, if I go to the gym, if I move a lot of weight, that I can literally

transform my physique and become capable of something tomorrow that I'm not capable of today. And people totally buy into that physically. They've seen that transformation so many times, whether it's somebody losing fat or somebody becoming a bodybuilder. I mean, whatever the case may be, they get it. But when it comes to the mind, because it's invisible, because it's all hidden inside that skull, people don't have that same sense of it's possible. And because they don't have the sense of it's possible, they don't set out on that quest. They don't actually take the first step.

We said in one of our earlier podcasts that that transformation really starts with belief. Humans lead with belief. And until you have that belief that you can do it, that you can make those changes, you're never going to go anywhere. And then the other really big breakthrough for me was understanding that you can choose what you build your self-esteem around. And that was a big breakthrough moment for me. And what was happening was I had a fixed mindset and I had a goal that I wanted to become wealthy. It's no longer my goal. I don't really think like that anymore. But at the time, that was like my obsession. I wanted to become wealthy.

And I was working with these two guys, and they were 10 years ahead of me as entrepreneurs. They were much smarter than me. And I'll define intelligence as the ability to process raw data rapidly. So they could just process raw data rapidly, faster than I could. I valued that so much. It made me feel small. And I found myself wanting to win arguments with them because they made me feel stupid. And because I built my self-esteem around being smart and being right, being wrong often

and not feeling as smart as them was really detrimental to my self-esteem. So I got into this weird habit of arguing for an idea just because it was mine. And there was a time one day I remember so clearly where the idea that I was arguing for, which was mine, was worse. And I knew it was worse. And there was a voice in my head that was screaming, like, stop arguing for this idea. It's counterproductive for the business. And I just couldn't help it. I couldn't help it. I keep pushing, keep pushing, and I actually win the argument. And then I found myself in this moment of terror where I keep pushing, keep pushing and actually win the argument. And then I found myself in this moment of terror where I'm like, wait a second, I wanted to win the argument

because it feels good to be right. Even though I know I'm wrong, them telling me that I'm right feels good, but now I've just moved the business in the wrong direction. So if my goal is to actually become wealthy, what am I doing? Because I'm moving away from that goal and I'm moving towards just feeling good about myself.

So if my goal is to feel good about myself, then just own it and go do that. Get out of this situation because it routinely makes me feel badly about myself. Or admit that you really do want to create wealth and thusly you need to listen when an idea is better than yours. You need to gravitate towards it. And at that moment, I realized I'm never going to be able to be long-term in a situation where I don't feel good about myself. So I need to feel good about myself,

but maybe there's another way. And that other way would be to build my self-esteem around something that, and I didn't have this word back then, but I got this word from Nassim Taleb who wrote a book called Anti-Fragile. So to build my self-esteem around something that's anti-fragile. Now, something that's resilient or tough is still defined by its breaking point. So that's not anti-fragile. Anti-fragile is something that

the more you attack it, the stronger it becomes. So what if I could build my self-esteem around something that was truly anti-fragile. So I thought instead of valuing myself for being smart, which is very fragile because sometimes you'll be the smartest person in the room, sometimes you'll be the dumbest person in the room. And instead of valuing myself for being right, because sometimes you're going to be right, sometimes you're going to be wrong, I'm going to instead value myself for being the learner and for identifying the right answer faster than anyone else, because that is an antifragile. So you can tell me that I'm stupid. You can attack me,

say that was so dumb, what a terrible idea. And if you're right, then I get to value myself for recognizing, oh my gosh, that's actually right. That actually is the better idea. That's going to move us towards what we want. And now we're going to feel proud about that. I get to be happy. I get to feel good about myself because I recognize I'm not going to let my ego get in the way. That answer actually is the right answer. We're going to follow that. We're going to do that. I'm going to put a lot of energy and enthusiasm behind that idea.

And then I'm going to be proud of myself for going out and learning more about the topic of knowing that, hey, I'm wrong now, but it's just an opportunity to be right tomorrow. And that I can go learn more now that my eyes are open. And that shift changed everything in my life. That is so interesting. I love what you said. The anti-fragile concept. I've never heard that term. But again, the thing that comes to my mind, and I just love it, what you said, because it's so true. People build their... We talk a lot to our daughter about this idea of building your self-esteem on something. I never knew that concept, but building it on something that is, again, not, it doesn't have eternal value. So for me, it's like, I don't

build it on something that doesn't have eternal value, which for me, I build it on learning and contribution and what I consider to be eternal value, which is, you know, a spiritual belief for me. So those are things no one can take away. Those are things that right, wrong, or indifferent, they're something that are deeply rooted and it has nothing to do with money or anything else that someone can take from you. And that's what we try to help her understand as well. Your, your worth, your self worth, your value is not based on what, how you perform today. It's not, you know, as I'm listening to it and thinking about some of the principles of success is you are partnering with people you perceived as smarter than you. So that's always a good thing is you always want to hang out with people

who stretch you. So for example, I play table tennis at a really high level, but I try to always play with people who are better than me because that's the only way I'm going to get better. But you also recognize the toxic thought of I have to be right, even though knowing you were wrong, which is death to a relationship or it's death to a business. But being able to step back and learn from that is critical. I can't tell you the number of relationships that just blow apart because somebody has to be right rather than really learning what the other people need or what the business needs, that it's our biggest successes actually are on the stones of our failures that we've learned, okay, well, we're not going to do that again.

I remember fighting. And I love the anti-fragile i do too i love that concept i the term i would use for it is called hormetic which is it's almost like you get something that's not good for you but actually makes you stronger what doesn't kill you makes you stronger what doesn't kill you make makes you stronger i remember arguing one time um with my mom when i was really young and you know my mom wasn't a high like formally educated person but she's very wise and she said to me one time with my mom when I was really young and you know my mom wasn't a highly formally educated person but she's very wise and she said to me one time when I was really young and it always stuck with me you can be right but sometimes you can be dead right and I was like whoa that was like it was just a really intense phrase but I'm like you know what's the point of being right

if it kills what's valuable in your life and it it just always stuck with me. But it's a self-esteem thing. I totally understand it. It's I'm as good or better than someone else. And then when you step back from it, you realize how toxic that can be to the relationship, to the business and so on. So helpful. What else comes up in your mind as you're thinking about the stair steps to your success? Really then taking that notion of being a learner to the next level

and executing against it. And I'll go back to The Matrix again. And watching that movie really made me think through like, so in the movie, basically the guy wakes up in the real world and realizes that what he thought was a real world is really just a construct. It's the matrix. And if that metaphor holds true for the brain and that my brain has essentially made the matrix for me, maybe with the best of intentions, but not everything is very useful or helpful. But in the matrix, you can learn anything you want to learn. And once you

learn how to harness the power of the brain, were there things that I could go out and really begin to empower myself with? And if they are, like in the movie, it's, you know, he learns Kung Fu. And so I was like, okay, what is my Kung Fu? And I realized that my Kung Fu was business. And if I was going to learn that, what was my equivalent of jacking into the matrix? So in the movie, he plugs into the matrix and they essentially upload into his brain all the knowledge of Kung Fu. And so in an instant, he can do it. And I realized that for me was reading. And so that's when reading really became an obsession of mine, because that was my way of taking all this amazing knowledge that people have been putting out into the world for literally thousands of years. And it's now our

opportunity to learn easily what they have learned with great difficulty, which is a quote, I think it's from Socrates, like, read so you may learn with ease what others have learned with great difficulty. And that always struck me as really, really powerful. So getting out there, reading, really asking yourself, how many skills can I acquire that have utility, and then put that utility to the test in service of something larger than yourself. And once you believe that you can do that, then how you spend your time becomes a spiritual consideration. Because it's like, what skills do I want to get? How do I want to serve the world? What is it that I want to accomplish? What's the impact that I want to have on the world? Those all become incredibly important questions because you're no longer paralyzed by, well, I was born here, I don't

have money or whatever. It's like, you can go anywhere you want, do anything you want to do. You just have to acquire the skills that are going to allow you to get there. And so that became just the absolute most foundational question in my life of what am I trying to accomplish? And then once you really believe in that radical notion that you can do anything you set your mind to, then life takes on a whole new dimension because you could say that you're going to cure cancer. You could say that you're going to help people with their brain, that you're going to do

it on a global scale, that you're going to become a best-selling author. All the things that you guys have actually done, right? That's so incredible to think. At the end of the day, it's not like you won some genetic lottery. You just put in the work. You became fascinated by something. You asked yourself how you could serve other people, and then you put in the work to actually do it and that to me is is a life well lived that's somebody who's really come alive but it all starts with the belief that

you can learn and then going out and putting in that work and that's just been probably the most exciting thing in my life is flipping my self-esteem over to being a learner and then executing against that actually going out and learning and discovering all these amazing people they're writing and then what's happening now i mean the fact you guys are doing this podcast like you can't imagine if somebody had told me when i first found your book that one day i could watch your podcast and like be even if we had never met to be drawn into your world to feel connected to your life to be able to learn from you on a weekly basis i gotta be like that's not pot like how how would that ever be true and so you had done the specials and things on tv but it was like that

that always felt once removed where there's such an immediacy i could comment on your video and you might comment back and it's just like we're living through this extraordinary time where we can really connect with these people who've changed our lives in a way where they're actively continuing to try and change our lives like it's unbelievable but you have to plug in you have to do something about it you have to engage and all from what I guess you know looking back on on my life even Tana's life maybe yours from people that weren't terribly special right I mean I was a short kid not very smart until I got to college and I figured it out and all of a sudden that changed. You struggled. I was the special kid. I was in the back of the room like you know one of those kids that couldn't read and it was the pain. I was like I can't take the pain of this anymore and I just remember going and checking out the fattest book I could find

and I was in third grade. I'm like I'm done sitting in the back of the class and sitting in the special like group where they can't read. I was not going to move after school. I was going to sit at home till I made it through that book. And so it was just, it was the pain that, you know, propelled me forward at the time. But it was that, that, that drive of not wanting to. Someone having a fairly crazy family and cancer and all of those things now to, you know, be a bestselling author and leading a community.

I mean, I'm really proud to be with her, but you know, it's, it's so many people think, Oh, I don't have the advantages or, or they were born.

Right. And the thing that kills, I was not born with it. It's comparison. You know, if you compare yourself with Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos or you, you know, people go, well, how could I ever do that? And the fact is all of us started somewhere, but we became passionate and then we developed the skills and they're all teachable if you take time to learn. So what are some of your favorite books? What are some of the books that have

made the biggest difference in your life? So you talked about Making a Good Brain Great, thank you, and Mind mindset. What about some of the other ones that have made the biggest difference for you? Joseph Campbell's book, The Power of Myth, really, really had a just transformational effect on me. And I will credit that book with, oddly enough, like contributing to my marriage in just a wonderfully powerful way. And he talked about how if you ever wanted to know what a world looks like where we have plenty of mythology but people don't believe in the mythology anymore, look at the world around you.

And he talked about divorce and he talked about how the potency of the ritual to enter into marriage is not as potent as it used to be. There's just not the weight of it. And I thought, whoa, that's really interesting. And this was before I got married and he had been talking about traditional coming of age rituals where people would be ritualistically scarred or whatever the case and say what you will, but those people knew from one day to the next, they were different. And that left a really powerful effect on me.

And when I got married, I realized I wanted to be a different person the day before I got married and the day after I got married. And so as a part of my wedding, not the actual day, but very shortly thereafter, I got ritualistically scarred as a way to remind myself that I am a different human being. And it was a tattoo, but I am not a tattoo fan. So I think of it as being ritualistically scarred. And I created it myself and it was my, basically my promise to my wife. And it was her name in Greek. And then the sort of four pillars of, of my belief system, I guess, towards her. So it was love, passion, commitment, and respect. And those were like the driving forces. I wanted to make sure that each and every one of those things is very real and that this was forever. And, um, and,

you know, I'm, I'm very proud to say that we're, we've been together for, um, my wife will tell you almost 17 years. I'm a little less aggressive in my rounding. Uh, so a little over 16 and a half and, um, about to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary. So we've figured something out. And we got together when we were pretty young. I think it's kind of crazy when I really stop and think about it. But that book just really gave me the framework with which to look at the world. And then I would be remiss not to mention Stephen King's book, The Gunslinger, which changed my life.

That was the book that made me realize that I actually liked reading. Up until that point, I was convinced that I hated reading. And my dad said, look, just one more. Read this book. If you read this book and you don't like it, I'll never ask you to read again. And I read it. And to this day, I remember the opening line of the book. It just so captured my imagination immediately from the word jump. And then once I

realized that I loved reading, then that began my transition out of fiction and into nonfiction, where I've really accumulated a lot of skills. So those two, I think, give you a little bit of a flavor. That's awesome. You mentioned one of my favorites, which was Man's Search for Meaning. And I have to say, Loving What Is by Byron Katie was really great. There's so many good books. So many good books. No question. Hugely important.

Well, thank you so much for your time. What a joy. We would love to invite you to the clinic. We got to scan Tony Robbins this past weekend. That was so much fun. He was such a nice guy. Very cool dude. But we think it would be awesome for you to learn more and anything you can do to help us spread this message we'd be grateful for as well. We're trying to build a community of brain warriors, people who

are arm prepared and aware that they could make a huge difference in their lives and the lives of people they love. Very cool. I would love that. It'd be a bit like being invited to a rock star's recording studio for me. So yeah, I'm going to count me in. I'd love that. Great. So much fun, Tom. Thank you. You're listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Stay with us. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Stay with us. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We have a special gift for you. It's an opportunity to win an evaluation at the Amen Clinics.

All you have to do is subscribe to this podcast, leave a review, and rate us on iTunes. To learn more about Amen Clinics and the work we do, go to amenclinics.com. You can also learn about our nutraceutical products at brainmdhealth.com. Thanks for listening.