EntreLeadership - #347: Growing 57,000% in 3 Years with Tom Bilyeu

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

Entrepreneur and Quest Nutrition co-founder Tom Bilyeu isn’t a doctor, but he has confidently diagnosed himself with a “sickness” that has only one symptom: an intense need to matter. But if you ask him, it’s a pretty good affliction to have. And considering that he helped grow Quest by 57,000% in only three years, we’d say he’s 100% right. Tune in as Tom breaks down the difference between ambition and drive and shares why pursuing your passion—not a big payday—is infinitely more rewarding in the long run.   entreleadership.com/podcast Impact Theory's website Principles by Ray Dalio Impact Theory Comics Free download: Chapter 1 of EntreLeadership Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, let's be honest, too many set out for fulfillment and end up settling for success. But we all know, and many of us have even experienced the fact that money, fame, power, and influence, they have very little to do with work that matters and even less to do with living for a purpose bigger than yourself. From the Ransy Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Alex Judd, and today's guest has lived a story that epitivist. the difference between success and fulfillment. As co-founder of the billion-dollar brand Quest Nutrition and the game-changing media company impact theory,

Tom Bill You is very clear about the mission that he is on. And he's pretty serious about it, so serious that he sometimes calls it a sickness. But as you will hear, the road to today was long, winding, and full of lessons that changed his life. I have an intense need to matter. And I always tell people, I'm not saying that's a good thing. Maybe years of therapy would take that away. I don't think so, though.

Like, to be honest, I don't feel haunted by it. It is something that I get such a profoundly powerful neurochemical response to. When I'm doing something that matters, it feels good. And so I talk a lot about fulfillment. So, you know, people think that wealth or fame or prestige are going to be the things that are going to make them feel good about themselves. and look, all of those things actually have a lot of utility to them. So I get why people will perpetually chase them and to pretend that, like, being famous doesn't have advantages would be a mistake.

And because they do have advantages and people continue to pursue these things. But nothing matters. Nothing even comes close to matching fulfillment. So fulfillment, I will say, is oftentimes born out of suffering. It's born out of the hard things. It's doing difficult things that make you feel good about yourself. And if people live their life in a way that made them feel good about themselves when they're by themselves, I think they would be a lot happier. So my sickness, as I call it, because it's such a driving force, it is so unrelenting.

That's why I refer to it as the sickness. It compels me to work really hard to impact people's lives and, yeah, to say it shortly to matter. So now I want to hit the rewind button because you've been through quite a journey to define that sickness or that. that calling that is now informing your entire life. Take us back to Tom Bill You in college. What were you like then? What was your mindset then? And what was your focus and goal set both in college and then immediately after college? So going to college because I was one of only two people that left my, from my high school that left the state. I really wanted to reinvent myself. So up until that point, I saw myself as a future stand-up comic.

And I was pursuing that really hard. People are going to be very sad that this interview is not funnier, given that. But I was really on that path. And I thought, you know, so much of my humor was self-deprecating. So I was making fun of myself all the time. And I had some inclination that that probably wasn't the best. And so when I went to film school, I thought, you know what? I really want to be an artist.

Like, I actually want to be taken seriously as an artist. And so I'm not going to tell people that I'm, you know, that I want to be a stand-up comic. I'm going to take myself very seriously and I'm going to really study. And up to that point, I cheated all through high school. I didn't take it seriously. And I'd always told myself, I could do the work. There are just other things that are more important to me. And I thought, this is supposedly the thing you want to do for the rest of your life. You should probably actually get good at this thing. So you need to really buckle down, focus, learn this, don't cheat. So I told myself, A or F, sink or swim. I was going to do everything 100% by the book. And so that's,

you know, my mentality coming into all of this. And I'm going through the reinvention and I'm taking myself seriously and I'm working hard for the first time in my life. And I would have been unrecognizable to somebody who had grown up with me. And I remember so. Prior to that point. Yeah. Yeah. So if you knew me in high school and then flash forward, you see me in college, you'd be like, whoa, like this guy is not at all who I remember from back in high school. It's more discipline and grit and nasty. That was definitely a big part of it. I didn't have those words.

So it wasn't as formal as that. It was, I want to be a serious artist. Those words I had. And so that's what I was thinking and saying to myself. And for, you know, anybody that remembers that age, it's a time of great sort of personal exploration. Who do I want to be? You're trying on different personalities and personas.

And the most important thing for me was that I had let go of the persona. as the jokester. And so in no longer trying to be funny, I could spend all of that energy focused in reading. And a big part of it was no longer, I didn't have any sense of needing to be the center of attention. And while I wouldn't say like I was that needy kid in high school, like I really wanted to be the center of attention in high school. And once I got to college, it wasn't about that anymore. I wouldn't have had these words, but it was about the work, right? It was about telling a story that would profoundly affect people. It was about getting really good at this thing that I cared about. And so that was a big switch. Was it an epiphany or a revelation moment that caused that?

It is, you know, when you roll up as a bundle of excitement and insecurity to a new place, you know nobody, and you just think, wow, I'm sort of unshackled from what people used to think at me. And I never conceptualize it like that. I didn't spend mournful nights, you know, when I was 16 and 17, thinking, oh, if only people saw me differently. I loved the way that I was in high squad. I thought, I thought, yeah, this is good. This feels good. I'm having a great time. And then it just, I intuitively somehow understood that this was a chance where I could be somebody totally different. I don't know where that insight came from. I don't know if every kid has that same insight. I have no idea. but now being in a place where I knew absolutely nobody.

It was fascinating to see that, like, if you've ever seen a very famous comedian go on stage, people are ready to laugh. There's an expectation that they will be funny. And so there are things that the audience will laugh at that you, if you've never heard of them, and you're just sitting at home watching a Netflix special, you might not find funny,

but the audience is in hysterics because they're just primed for that. My family and my friends were always primed to laugh around me. So one of my favorite stories is we're probably getting a little far field here. But my then-girlfriend now wife, I took her home to meet my family for the first time. And she's meeting me, you know, seven or eight years after this reinvention. I'm not trying to be funny. I'm no longer trying to be the center of attention. And I go home and there's an expectation that I'll be funny.

And so without even thinking about it, I just slip back in to the way that they expected me to be. And I start telling jokes like, joke, joke, joke. And they're in hysterics. And my sister's laughing until she's crying. and my girlfriend looks over me and she goes, who are you? She's like, what is happening? And it was such a powerful example of the way

that other people's opinions of you shape you and the way that you behave. That is fascinating. You kind of find this new version of yourself in college and then you leave college, but you don't immediately go to the movie industry, which kind of was the dream. But one of the things I love about your story

is you still had a pretty intense and specific goal and immediately start pursuing that goal. So tell us about what was the goal directly after college, and then what are the steps that started moving you in that direction? Well, so here's the real story to pull all the mythology away from it. What I was trying to do immediately after graduation was eat. I was trying to afford food.

So I was broke. My dad, who was helping me financially through college, starting, if I remember right, starting five months before graduation, he sent me a letter every month that said five more months until I'm not, giving you any more money for more months until I'm not giving you any more money. So that the day I graduated, I had no more assistance from my family. Okay. And he sent you a letter? Like, I mean, I guess that's prior to emails, right? It's a written letter. Well, certainly prior to my dad being on email. But it was so in keeping with my dad's character so that I wasn't

surprised or hurt. I actually think it's super powerful. And even back then, that didn't seem bad or problematic. And he gave me a lot of warning. And so I was like, yep, okay, this all makes sense. and I was excited to be done. I was not one of those people that was like, I want to stay in college forever. I was like, I did four years. It was awesome. I loved it.

I was so glad that I did it. And then the second it was over, I was like, I'm never coming back. So I'm like, I want to be out in the real world. You know, I want to figure this out, but I no longer have any financial support whatsoever. And I don't know, I'm a low maintenance guy when it comes to that kind of stuff.

So I was like, well, if I have to sleep on a floor somewhere, it wasn't until my wife that I started getting furniture that wasn't free. All of my furniture for years, I slept on an air mattress, one that actually leaked. And so I would blow it up every night and then fall asleep and I would put dirty clothes under it because I would wake up on the floor or on my pile of dirty clothes. And I did that for years. I was cool with that. And to be honest, like for anybody listening, the one thing that I will say, it drives me crazy when people don't have the ability to push through that period. It is a profound period in your life where poverty is okay. if you don't embrace that, then you will miss an opportunity to just go head down and get really extraordinary at something. And if you're trying to just make a lot of money right away,

it's a real mistake. You should be trying to learn right away. So there's kind of two paths you could take in that moment where you hit that broke spot. You could stay there, right? That is possible. Or you could start learning, growing, moving forward. Was it ever a decision for you? Or did you feel like, Was there any polar temptation that I'm not going to move forward? I'm just going to stay where I am and live here and just be satisfied with that because that's comfortable. Or was there always this internal drive and ambition? Yeah.

So the one thing I will say, I don't know how much I've earned. And I try only to take pride in things that I've earned in my life. Like I don't take pride in my height. I didn't do anything to earn it. But I take tremendous pride in my work ethic. But I don't know that I can take pride from my ambition because I've always been ambitious. And that caused a lot of grief in this particular period that we're talking about now because I had all of this ambition, but I was also extraordinarily lazy. That's like incredible dissonance inside a person.

Yeah. And I think people mistake ambition for drive. And so they think if you're ambitious that you automatically have drive. So you're not both lazy and driven. That doesn't happen. But what you can be is ambitious and lazy. And this is what I call the empty dreamer. somebody who has big dreams, they're talking to big game, they're telling you what they're going to do, they don't actually do anything to move that dream forward. Like, I think one of the most important things to talk about, and I don't know if I lose people with this, but it's so important, I'm just going to say it, is the second law of thermodynamics is this notion that the universe moves towards chaos, okay, entropy. Now, how do you get things to not move towards chaos? You apply energy to it. So let's use this desk. So we're sitting on this very beautiful, lovely desk.

it will not clean itself. It will not wipe the dust off itself. Somebody has to come in literally that eats something, generates ATP, and comes in and creates formal order on this table, right? These cups won't move themselves back off. All of this stuff requires this input of energy into the system. And that is, if you want to do something extraordinary in your life, the only thing I can promise you is the amount of inertia, the amount of entropy, that is coming your way, it's going to be hard to get things started. It's going to require an unimaginable amount of energy to organize the universe in such a way that it becomes your ideal career or your ideal family or whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish. It will take an inhuman effort. And so what you get a lot of times are these people that they love the idea of this thing, but the actual fighting through all of the moving towards chaos, the amount of energy they have to put in the system to create the order that they want. They're just not willing to do it.

And the thing is like, I don't think that's bad, but where it becomes dissonance is where you're having this big dream, you're telling yourself that you're going to do it, and then you don't act in accordance with that. And whenever people don't act in accordance with their own stated values, there's an internal darkness to that. And so that's why I go back to live your life in such a way that when you're by yourself, you feel good about yourself. That's the key.

So if you want a monastic life and you want to say, I'm not ambitious. I'm not striving for anything more than to be able to get a bowl of rice today so that can eat. That's rad. There are people that have been remembered through all of history, and that was their approach. Just be honest about what your approach is. So eventually you start moving against that entropy, right? And you started moving forward and saying, I'm going to get off this freaking air mattress. Yeah, but you really have to put me in context. So imagine me getting like I'm in a washing machine and entropy is just slapping me around and the world seems absolutely impossible to manipulate. And the reason I want people to think that is, it is very easy to look at me as an after picture and to think, oh, well,

he's always been like this. He's just, you know, he's one of those guys. He was born lucky. Whatever. He's smarter than me. That just isn't true. I just was maybe more terrified in that period. And so I was so hell bent to get out of that that I just had to figure out.

I could feel I'm headed towards depression or I'm headed towards figuring the game of life out. Could you, like if we were doing this interview then. Yeah. Would you have been able to say, I'm at this fork in the road where I feel like I could be moving towards depression? I probably wouldn't have used the word depression, but I would have said hopeless. I feel hopeless. I feel lost. I don't understand.

I didn't understand the rules of the game, meaning how does somebody go from a complete unknown to breaking into the film industry, which is like notorious for being this impossibly well gate kept, if that's a phrase? Like the gatekeepers were really brutal. And so getting past the gatekeepers and actually into the industry not only required you to be extraordinarily talented, but it required you to figure out the rules of the game. And so I didn't know the rules of the game. I didn't even know the rules of like getting a good job. I didn't understand corporate. I didn't understand paying my taxes. Like there were so many things I didn't understand.

And it was overwhelming. But what everybody does know is how do I feel moment to moment? And every night I felt bad. Every night I would lay on the floor of my apartment and just feel this. sense of, I'll use a fancy word, I felt the sense of malaise, right? Where I was just like, ugh, like everything just felt bad. It just sucked. And I didn't like where I was and I didn't know how I was going to get where I wanted to go. And it was just, it was just lame, man. It was lame. So what happens next? Because so many people feel trapped in that state and you use the word

hopeless, you start to convince yourself that not only this is how it is, this is how it always will be. Yeah. And I think that that's where it becomes really toxic. Yeah, and I will say the one thing I never thought that. I never thought it's always going to be this way. That's where my ambition saved me. Because I wanted something so big, the big realization for me was recognizing, okay, if I want this big thing, at some point, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to do something to get there. And so that sense of thinking back to film school and how where I had succeeded had always been about all of this disciplined effort, like really applying myself to something that I loved. And so beginning to ask myself, okay, what do I love?

What do I want to do? Okay, I have a pretty clear vision on where I want my life to go. And now what are the actual steps that I'm going to have to take to get there? And that put me into a learning frame of mind. Now, it wasn't the powerful learning frame of mind that I have now, but it was powerful enough that it got me to start reading about the brain. And so you take the movie The Matrix, you combine it with learning about the actual realities of the brain.

And I got this very important insight, which was, you're not experiencing. experiencing reality. You're experiencing your brain's interpretation of reality, which is why the matrix is the perfect metaphor for the human condition. It's like you think you're touching and feeling and experiencing, but the reality is that your brain is designed to interpret. Like, let me freak everybody out for a second. There's actually a region of your brain. This is true. There's a region of your brain called the deep limbic system. The goal of the deep limbic system, its very job, is not to tell you what is happening. It's to tell you how to feel about what's happening. Now that brings us to one of the most famous quotes from Shakespeare,

nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So there's nothing in your life good or bad, but we think some kind of way about it. We feel some kind of way. Like we feel excited. We feel terrified. This is horrible. We're a bad person. Like whatever interpretation we give it. Now, once I had that information, I was like, oh, that's interesting. So I can choose a different interpretation. Once you realize that when, and this is the important part, when you choose that different interpretation. If you choose one that's empowering, if you choose one that's uplifting,

it will actually change your neurochemistry. So that feeling of, oh, God, malaise, this sucks. I'm laying on the floor and I feel the cheap carpet pressing into my face. Like, all of that neurochemistry begins to change. And all of a sudden, you actually feel better. And you're like, whoa, I have the chills.

You feel better. You're like, I can do this. Like, I choose to believe, not that I'm dumb, I choose to believe that I don't know enough yet. And once you realize, oh, I just don't know enough yet, and with the right amount of energy and discipline and practice, I can get better at anything, then everything changes. And so I'm going through all this in the late 90s when the notion of brain plasticity is being

hotly debated. Some people are saying, yes, it's real and you can change your mind. Other people are saying, nope, you can't. It's just like the old saying goes, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And I was like, all right, I have a choice here. I can choose to believe either of these two paths. I don't know which is right. Scientists don't know which is right.

but I'm going to choose to believe that I can change because the thought that I can't change and that I'm going to be in the way that I thought back then, I'm going to be this dumb and untalented forever. Like that's not okay. Like that scares me. And that's the thing that makes me feel bad and lay on the floor and have the carpet pressing into my face. So I'm going to choose to believe this over here. And I'm going to choose to believe that I can get better. And that just made intuitive sense to me. I'm like, when we're born, we can't hold up our own head.

We can't walk. We poo in our diapers. We wet the bed. It's like, I've come a long way since then. So it's like, clearly there's some amount of change. So it only becomes a question of, do we entirely lose the ability to change or is there some amount that can? And I just thought, well, whatever amount it is that is still changeable, I'm just going

to put all my energy into that. Okay. So let's jump back on the career path now. You started taking some odd jobs. I know you were working selling insurance for a while and doing all that. But, I mean, really, you got to a point where you were now. choosing to move in a specific direction. And the times I've heard you talk about it, at that time, you had a very specific

destination that you were looking for in terms of the lifestyle you were going to create. Can you tell us about what that lifestyle was? And then what were the concrete actions you were taking to get there? So that sounds like a very fancy way saying I wanted to be rich, which was my exact obsession. And I had been stated, would you say like, that's my goal? Over and over and over. Hi, my name's Tom. I'm going to be rich one day.

It was almost that crass. And I remember my best friend growing up, whom I'm still very close with, he said, oh, I always knew you were going to be rich. And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, because he had also said, I thought you were going to marshmallow your way through life. So my mom doesn't believe I'm going to do anything. And my best friend is like, yeah, come on. But he was like, but you get what you believe in in this world. And he said, you believed in money.

You always believed you were going to be rich. And that was true. I was like, all right, I'm going to be rich. I used to tell everybody when I was a kid, I'm going to be rich, I'm going to be rich, I'm going to be rich. And I just didn't know how to get there. And so that obviously becomes its own very long story. And it pans out, but not for the reasons that people think. It's certainly not the way that I thought it would happen. So I was obsessed with that notion of getting rich. And the things I was trying to do were all pretty ineffective. And I was floundering around at one point, I called myself the king of remedial jobs. And I was like, how does a guy who's the self-identified king of remedial jobs? end up becoming rich. And so I'm sort of plotting and planning and thinking and I start trying like all the get rich quick schemes and of course none of them work. But I was floundering. It was a period of deep floundering. I had not yet encountered the ideas that I needed to truly set me free. Well, I guess the next step was you ended up with a company, I believe it's called Awareness Technologies, and that's skipping a couple steps along the way, obviously, but you ended up as a partner in that company, multi-million dollar company. So you achieve, I mean, you achieve the goal. You're a multi-millionaire. On paper. That's a very big difference in the bank account, but yeah. And how do you feel in that moment? Yeah, so that was a real breakthrough moment. So I had on paper, and again, anybody listened to this needs to understand the difference. When people say, oh, they're the richest people in the world and they're worth $75 billion.

It's like on paper. They don't have that money in their bank account. Now, somebody worth $75 billion. So it's plenty in their bank account. You do not need to worry about them. They're going to be just fine. But I was learning the hard lesson. So I was worth about $2 million on paper.

So I was technically a multimillionaire. But I'm like, my apartment's not very nice. My car's not very nice. I don't have a lot of money in my bank account. There's sometimes where I'm sweating paying bills. So if this is what being a multimillionaire is, is not as interesting as I thought it would be. So I realized, okay, that's not the only game. And by the way, I had gotten to that point by just completely working around the clock, not worrying about anything that I loved or cared about, not asking myself what makes me come alive, just work, work, work.

And what I began to realize at that period was, all right, the real money isn't guaranteed, but the struggle is. And so if you don't love the struggle, since the money may never come, you're in a really dangerous position. And so I wasn't willing to be, I mean, I did it for six and a half years before I had this epiphany. My wife had to pull me aside and say, you're now damaging our marriage because I was just working around the clock and I was getting angry and I was just bitter all the time. And I didn't have any lightness or playfulness to my personality. So imagine the one time guy who wants to be a comedian is now just not dark like that, but just heavy. The energy was heavy. Like I wasn't, I wasn't playful.

I wasn't having fun. And so she called me out on that. And I thought, yeah, you know what? I really do need to figure out what makes me come. alive. So I went in and quit. And I said, look, here's your equity back. If I don't cross the finish line, I shouldn't get anything for this. So I went from on paper being a multimillionaire to, at least in that moment, you know, back to nothing. And my wife and I were going to move to Greece and live in some like dirtbaggy beach town where we could keep our expenses next to nothing. And she's Greek, by the way,

if anybody was wondering why Greece, I was going to learn Greek in earnest and I was going to get back to writing. And that was going to be the thing because writing made me feel alive. And so I was going to prioritize my life based on how I felt about myself and I was by myself, things that gave me more energy than they took. The story takes a hard right at this point. And my partners say, whoa, like you're totally catching us off guard. We could do this without you, but we don't want to. And so what would we have to do to continue the partnership? And so I was like, well, I've already done the hard thing, which is quit. So let me lay it out. It would have to be a game of passion. We'd have to be doing something that we loved. We'd have to be adding value to people's lives.

we'd have to be focused on making sure that the struggle is fun because I don't know that we're ever actually going to succeed and win. And so in making all of those changes, we end up, of course, building the company that ends up being a billion dollar company and just changing all of our lives and ways that we never could have imagined. Are you at the stage of business where for you as an owner and certainly for your team, you are just overloaded with tasks and activities? and you're recognizing that you're at the stage where you need to start bringing system and process into your organization. Well, from a coaching perspective, the first step that we recommend you take is start automating any tasks that are repeated. And specifically, whenever it comes to automating customer communication, the service we recommend is called Keep. We've worked with them for years to grow our business and serve our customers well, and we've seen small business owners win by leveraging the power.

of this service. And so if you're at this stage where you need to start working smarter and not just harder, Keep is offering a free trial to our podcast listeners. So if you want to take advantage of that free trial with Keep, text the word work smart to 33444. Again, that's the word work smart, no spaces to 33444 and work with Keep to start automating your customer communication. There's something that strikes me about so many of the pieces of your story, it's that most people, when they experience soulless work and they have that wake-up moment that you have and say, okay, I'm quitting in, I'm moving Greece. If someone comes back to them and say, no, come back to the work. Number one, that happens a lot. A lot of times people are pulled back into that soulless work.

But no one in their right mind thinks to tell those people, like, let's just do the work of injecting soul into this thing and convinces them to start taking those steps. No one else would even think that was possible to say, like, we're taking this company that's successful. It's a multimillion dollar company, but we're just going to scrap that and move on to something different. Yeah. So here's the good news for anybody out there that doesn't think they're the smartest person in the world. It was not a brilliant idea. It was entirely, I had become so profoundly unhappy that I was like, okay, I ran this experiment. I ran the Chase Money experiment. I really tried. I gave myself over to it. I worked nights, weekends, didn't matter all the time in service of money.

And I sort of got money. And I was like, well, this didn't work. I am not happy. Broken happy was a lot more fun as a lifestyle than rich and unhappy. So I was like, okay, then I'm never going back to that. That was the promise. And then I had so much shame around quitting. And going in and quitting, I was just an anxious mess.

And I felt like I was leaving my friends high and dry. And at this point, we'd been working together for six and a half years. I was so close to them. And so I felt really badly about it. But I also felt this huge obligation to myself and my wife. And I could imagine this life. And it was so amazing. And so imagine you spend, you know, some unimaginable amount of time tunneling out of the prison.

And you finally get out of the prison. And you look back in the hole and your two partners are there. And they're like, no, no, no, come back into the prison. And you're like, yeah, that's never. happening. So I've already done the hard part, which is I've let you guys down. I've lived in misery forever. And I've dug through mud and excrement and everything to finally get out. So I'm here. I'm on the other side. I'm not going back in. So then it became a question of, well, you don't need to come back in. Being back in isn't the point. How to do the three of us stay together.

It's like, okay, well, that's a fundamentally different question. Let me tell you what this, quote unquote, life in Greece was going to be. Because I was still going to be ambitious. I was still going to try to build something, but it was going to be only from a position of the things that I loved. And so it just so happened that they were equally unhappy. So it wasn't like I was some great orator that convinced these guys to follow me. It was just my line in the sand is this. It's passion, it's purpose, it's meaning, it's joy. It's building something that, you know, I believe in.

It's being authentic. I didn't have that word back then. But like being myself and all of that. Like, I'm never going to not do this again because I know. know where it leads. So there's, there isn't anything. There's no amount of money that you could offer me nothing. That would make me go back into being unhappy. So luckily, they were in a similar space mentally. So they're like, actually, yeah, this is like sort of the perfect wake-up call. Why don't we all three build something that matters to us? It's like a scales falling off

the eyes moment where you all kind of three realize we're in prison right now and we should get out of this. That's crazy. I mean, 70% in the American workforce is disengaged, right? Lots of people, I think, don't have the courage to draw that line in the sand or to even define what that line in the sand is. One of the things that I love about this medium is that it's like we get to all listen in and have Tom as our mentor. So if you're talking to the person that is disengaged and can identify with that piece of your story, what would you tell that person? That there is a beautiful life that awaits them at a role. I won't even call it a job because that has some like dirty connotations. but there is an occupation for you to do that you will love. It will light you on fire. It will be hard. I'm not saying it's not going to be difficult, but it will be worth the fight. And I think that's really what people have to look for. And they also need to recognize your company culture makes a huge difference. Company cultures vary in more ways than you can imagine. So you need to interview the people that you're going to apply for a job at their company as much as they're interviewing you. I think that's critically important for them to choose the right employee and for the employee to choose the right environment.

all of that stuff really, really matters. And once people understand that it's their responsibility, like, if you're in a job that you hate, that's bad on you. If you're telling me that you can't leave because you can't afford to, that's on you. Not in like you're a bad person way, but like you're in control. Like start doing things to save money. Everybody should have at least six months saved up because it puts you in a position of power in any negotiation with your boss because if you know that you can survive,

if they say, nope, we're letting you go. It's like, okay, well, that's not the. end of my world. So I'm still going to be able to pay bills. And so there's all these things that people can do to make sure that they can get their ideal job. Look for a job when you don't need one. Like, that's the ideal time. If you're not happy where you're at, and then find a company that values the things that you value. Like, I'm a CEO in an environment where millennials stay for 18 months. That's your average turnover. Now, as a person, that's not interesting to me. I don't want to just be a revolving door. Now, there's going to be some of that.

I don't think there's any way around it. And people change where they're at in their life and all that. I get it. But I want to, as much as humanly possible, do the 40 years and the gold watch and all of that. So that requires a certain kind of culture. But people also have to understand that I'm insanely driven. I am going to build something. And if I have to drag people across the finish line, I'll do it.

So you have to want to play at that level, right? So I have employees, some that love it. And they just, oh, you can see they're eating it up. and it just matches what they want in their life so perfectly. And then there are other people who are like, I'm not so sure about this. And so I never want them to be in a position where they feel trapped because I don't want that in my culture

because when you have one person that's like, I don't know about this, then it starts to sour it for everybody. So we have what we call a principles culture. If you have a criticism, you are obligated to say it. Even if you were prepared to take that criticism to your grave, you were still obligated to say that directly to people. It's very powerful.

there's a whole book written on it by Ray Dalio. I highly encourage people to check it up. That's principle, correct? Yeah. Being radically candid with people. So anyway, find that environment that matches what you're about. You can really thrive, work hard, do things that lead you towards fulfillment. Again, that's often born out of suffering. It's about becoming something.

It's about becoming something you're proud of, gaining skills. So if people are doing that in an environment where they trust the people that they're around, they believe in the mission of what people are working for, you really can go to work and find true beauty. But it won't happen by accident. So you drew that line in the sand, and that line in the sand was, I'm going to work towards fulfillment now,

not necessarily success. And so explain how Quest Nutrition was tied to a sense of passion and tied to your background and your story a little bit. So that was, you have three guys who have varying interests, and we're saying,

okay, we know we don't want to keep doing awareness technologies. What do we want to do? and what's that next company going to be? And so for three very different reasons, we started centering around nutrition. All three of us had a very strong relationship with health and fitness and nutrition,

and I grew up in a morbidly obese family, so speaking for myself, that was super clear. I wanted to make food that my family could choose based on taste, and it happened to be good for them. Because I'm a big believer that you shouldn't try to change behavior, you should try to leverage it. And so I know people eat snack foods, no matter what, they're going to eat snack foods.

So what if I could give them snack foods that were good for them and we're moving them forward. And so that became, from my perspective, that became the rallying cry. Like, okay, I can show up every day fighting for my mom and my sister who were morbidly obese at the time. And I want to, when things are getting hard,

I want to hold an image of them in my mind. And that will make it easy for me to come in and fight. There's a great quote often attributed to Mother Teresa, which is, nobody will act for the many, but people will act for the one. When it's a person, a real person with a story, and you can look them in the eye and you can imagine them. Like, that really gets people motivated.

So I was super motivated to help my mom and my sister. I knew exactly what they were struggling with. And that framed it well for me. So it was like any business decision, will this help my mom or not? If it'll help my mom, then let's do it. If it won't help her, then let's not do it. And so that was a really beautiful guiding light that helped, from my perspective, really stay on track and really make the right decisions.

You have to be business savvy, but when it's, business savvy in the context of no, no, no, this actually has to help. It's not a win if I make a lot of money and don't help my mom. So that was the real drive. I love that it was at the core of it was that desire to meet a need and solve a problem and clearly so did the marketplace. 57,000 percent growth in three years. That was crazy. In manufacturing, man, this wasn't software. So this goes from two employees to 3,000 employees real fast. That is insane. So you hear all the time, the greatest problem with success is success, right? And nothing, nothing creates failure like success. So how did y'all sustain the growth? And how did you, as the leader of that thing,

reinvent yourself at such a rapid pace to be able to keep up with 57,000 percent growth in three years? Yeah, it is not easy. And I will say that growth at that rate is, becomes the hardest thing to manage. So the goal was, all right, let's create culture so that it can self-replicate and that it, you know, when somebody new comes on, they're sort of immediately welcomed into this culture and they can understand how they're supposed to think and act, and that they're doing things the quest way. And so that's a big part of how you keep the group moving forward. You also have to understand communication is key, clarity is key. You have to tell people what you're doing and exactly how you expect them to do it. You have to learn that you're only as good as what you write down. And then very, very important, you have to

understand when you're transitioning out of what I call the hustler phase where you just want a bunch of diehard people in there grinding who like just have all the guts and the passion in the world and then you're going to transition into professional management now there's going to be bureaucracy and that's not going to feel good and there's going to be this awkward change from that like do or die we're in this together to no no no now you have a real supervisor and the supervisor has expectations maybe you have to punch a clock now like there's a lot of chafing that happens if you're somebody who thrives in a startup you may not be something. somebody who thrives in an organization with thousands of employees. So it's very different.

And so surviving that very tumultuous time is a management challenge unto itself. But if you've got a strong enough vision and you really believe in what you're doing and your product is strong and your marketing is strong, then you survive it. Just quest is done. So it really does take a lot of focus and energy. People have to remember, you're in the game of people. Like a company is a game of people. And even if you're a tech company and you're thinking about creating AI, you're still dealing with the people creating the AI. This is a game of people far more than I think most startup entrepreneurs realize. They think it's a game of product. It is in that quest journey, in growing quests that people became central to you, obviously, and you started to take your personal

experience of, I know what it's like to be ambitious or driven, but also lazy at the same time, and you started seeing other people that experienced that as well. So walk us through that realization and where that realization took you to. So now we have to flash back to, it's probably early 2002, something like that, and I have fallen madly in love. And I'm dating this girl who happens to live in London, and you can get a longer fiancé visa in London

than you can in the U.S. So I moved to London. I'm staying in her mom's house in the bedroom that she grew up in. So I'm like, you know, basically like in a little kid's room. and my then-fiancee is working and I'm not. And it's a real dark period where I realize far too late that, one, I'm laying in bed for three or four hours a day every day, just laying in bed, watching TV.

And constantly like, I'll get up after this music video. I'll get up out. No, no, no. Oh, but this is too good. I can't miss this one. And just like for three or four hours was crazy. And I had one job at that time. And that was when my fiancee would come home.

I was supposed to have made her a sandwich because she was just coming home for lunch and then she had to go back to work. And so it became this like mad scramble where I would lay in bed and the only thing that actually got me out of bed was the shame of knowing if I didn't I wasn't going to make her the sandwich. And so I'd make this sandwich like in a real mad scramble. And it just became like this icky feeling of like, man, this is really pathetic. Like you've got this time where you could be writing. You could be working on whatever it is you're going to have to do to get in the film industry, whatever. But applying this rare moment where you have like six months where you don't have a job. Like now if I had six months where I had no obligations, the thing.

In fact, I mean, here's the irony of my life is I'm busier now than I've ever been because I've made all the money I ever need to make. I never need to work again. And yet I work harder than ever because this is what I would do if I had all the free time in the world. And so once you're doing the thing that you would do when you have all the free time in the world, all as well. But when you have the free time and you're.

so lost and so hopeless that you do nothing, that took me to a very dark place, very fast. And so my father-in-law, when I went to ask for his blessing to marry his daughter, he said no. And I think because he knew I was lazy. And he was like, you don't have a job. How are you going to take care of my daughter? And I get it. Now, he was always very kind to me. So even though he was like, hey, I'm not going to give you the blessing to get married.

I think that's a mistake. I don't think you guys should get married. But he wasn't trying to break us up or anything. But he just asked me a very pointed question. How do you plan to take care of my daughter? And so that's like ringing in my ears. And I'm like, I tell my fiance that I'm going to make a rich one day because this was still in the rich phase. So I'm telling her, I'm going to make you rich.

And I remember telling my father and my son and I said, I know what you see right now is a broke, undereducated kid, but I'm telling you right now, I'm the most ambitious person you've ever met. Now, that may have actually been true. I just didn't have the drive to see it through. And what he knew was, I didn't have the drive. So in this period, I finally realized there's a difference between ambition and drive. And I have ambition, but I'm not doing anything about it. And so I've got to develop that.

And so I started putting all my energy into developing drive and that changed my life. So that's the difference between ambition and drive. As ambition is a dreamer essentially, drive actually does the work to get it done. Drive is actually getting up when you don't want to. It's taking a cold shower when you want a warm shower. It's dealing with contracts when you'd rather go play video games. It's staying focused, staying disciplined because you know what you want. There was a whole study on this called the marshmallow study done out of Stanford.

And what they did was they put a marshmallow in front of a kid and they said, hey, I'm going to step out for a minute. But if you wait until I come back, I'll double your marshmallows. And so it's basically double your money. And all you have to do is wait, the kid thinks, you know, 15 minutes. And the reality is research is not going to come back until you eat the marshmallow. And what they did was they wanted to see how long kids could wait. And then they tracked these kids for 25 years. And they found out that the kids who could delay eating the marshmallow the longest

who could delay the gratification, those kids, who we would now say have grit, they do the best in every area of their life. relationships, school, jobs, they make the most money. So teaching yourself how to not eat the marshmallow, which was a skill I did not possess, that is something that has been tremendously beneficial. And so you have to choose to value not eating the marshmallow. And so now legitimately, and this is the only place I have to be careful, if you did that and you said, all right, here's your marshmallow and you can double your marshmallow,

I so value that I won't eat that marshmallow that I will sit there and starve to death before I will eat the marshmallow because I want to get my second marshmallow. So if the guy never came back, I would legitimately at some point just keel over, you know, six weeks later from starvation. That's what I was thinking. I'm never touching marshmallows again. It's not happening. I'm staying away from them. Okay.

So at this point in Quest, you start wanting to elicit the kind of fulfillment and meaning that you found in your life out of your employees' lives and starting to get them to have that spark as well. And you kind of had this realization that that wasn't happening there. And out of that was born what you're now doing, which is called Impact Theory. So tell our audience, what is impact theory? What does it stand for? What is your goal with Impact Theory? Yeah, for sure. So the name Impact Theory actually comes from some people's guess as to what caused the moon.

So the guess is that an object struck the Earth and broke off enough of it that it formed into the moon. And I was thought that was really cool. The idea of this like crazy massive collision that creates something that ends up. being part of what sustains life. So I wanted to address a question, which was, all right, I'm pouring my heart and soul into my employees. I would come early. I would stay late.

I would answer any question. I would help them try to build a business on the side if they wanted to. Whatever anybody wanted, my thing was making protein bars is your tuition. But think of this as Quest University. I want to help teach you anything. And by really showing, no joke, like whatever you need. So I never left until every question was answered. I was trying to help people.

And I realized like 2% of them are really doing something with this, but 98% are not. And I was fed emotionally by the 2% that did and watching their lives change and their family's lives change forever is some of the most beautiful stuff that's ever happened in my life. Truly, and we could do a whole podcast about what it's like to watch somebody transform. But you're never going to hear me say, as long as I impact one life, like, that's not my shtick. Now, I'm actually really glad that there are people like that. And I like the diversity of human desire and that.

the way that people want some things and other people want other things. But I'm not the guy wired to help one person. I'm the guy wired to help millions of people. That's the thing that gets me excited at scale, at scale. That's my whole schick. That's why I had a company that scaled like that. That's why the impact theory community has scaled as fast as it has scaled. I like scale. I like to do things as big as I can do them. There's particular joy in that for me. So I was like, okay, I am helping some of my employees, but it really is a really small number. got obsessed with the idea of what would it take. It's a game I play. I'll keep a PG-13. No BS. What would it take? And if people start asking themselves that question, what it does is it

flips you over into a solution-oriented mindset? Because it's very easy to see the problems, right? But when you start saying no BS, what would it take to impact this many lives, then you start getting to something that may be too hard. Maybe you have no interest in putting yourself in a position to deal with something like that. That's fine. But at least now you're in a solution-oriented mindset, you know at least one path that would work and you can work backwards to find something that you will do. And so looking at, okay, why isn't it working with this person? And I'm like, because they don't care. They don't want it. Okay, well, now I have to deal in the area of desire. How do you create desire? You create desire through identity and values. Okay, well, how can I influence

identity and values? Well, I could be their parent. That would be amazing and I would be able to do that. But obviously, that doesn't scale. The second one is I could be their friends because your friends massively influence what you value and what gets rewarded in a peer group becomes the things that you strive for. Or I could put them in a better zip code because your zip code, as of right now today, has some absurdly high predictive quality on your outcome of success. And all that's really saying is what your parents are likely to have is a value system and what your friends are likely to have is a value system. So I thought, huh, that's interesting. So really what's driving all of this is the value system of the popular culture. Okay, how can I sway popular culture to think empowerment is cool?

Because if I can do that, I can make sure everybody encounters a growth mindset, which is really the cornerstone of all of this. So I need to be in film and TV or music. That would have been another big one. But I don't have any particular talents. We're here in Nashville. I feel like I should, but I don't. So no particular music talent, not driven to get good at that. But film and TV has been sort of that thing at the core of my being forever.

So as I circled around to honestly asking, because at that point, I thought I was making a nutrition company for the rest of my life. I wasn't looking for some way back into film and TV. And I'm thinking, that's interesting. The answer is back where I started and to make good on the promise that I had told myself, which is that I was just getting rich to build a studio. And so all of this is coalescing right at the moment where I actually get rich. And so I'm like, whoa, I now have the kind of money that would allow me to build the next Disney. So let's do it. And so thinking, okay, if Disney was able to make the most magical place on earth by being

consistent and only telling one kind of story over and over and over from a thousand different angles, could I create the most empowering place on earth by telling only one kind of story from a thousand different angles over and over, both in fiction and nonfiction. So I said, all right, that's the plan. That's what we're going to do. And so we spun the studio that we had built inside of Quest. We spun it out into a standalone company with the sole aim of the... of impacting millions of people.

The way that we say it, our mission is to pull people out of the matrix by giving them an empowering mindset at scale. So that's our stick. And y'all are doing it. Just seeing your content, and I would encourage everyone that's listening to this, go check out Impact Theory,

go listen to Tom's interviews. You are a master of the craft. You are so good at what you do. And go read the comics. That's right. I mean, y'all are doing so much stuff, and it's so cool. In like 40 minutes,

we've walked through the arch of your career, which is insane. And so I would love to end with the last question being the same as the first, because I think it means so much more now, knowing the context that it's come from. So now knowing what you've been through, both sleeping on a leaking air mattress and then building a company that you then moved away from towards fulfillment and then building another multi-million billion dollar company and now stepping into this new stage of your life. Tell us about your sickness and tell us about why that matters. So yeah, the sickness is I want to matter. I want to do something that has impact on people, and that makes me feel good. So pursuing that is, that's an important word for people to understand.

The odds of me building the next Disney are virtually zero. But the pursuit of that is so important to me and feels so good and I'm having so much fun trying. And it's never binary, right? It's like, we're already touching lives. So whether we get to the scale that we want or not is pretty irrelevant. The way that I spend my day-to-day life is something that fills me with joy. It gives me more energy than it takes. I'm proud of myself for doing it. It's hard so it stretches my skill set. And I believe in the outcome that we're striving for. So when I think about why, when I've already created the kind of wealth that people usually work this hard to create. Why am I working as hard, if not harder than I've ever worked in my life? And the answer is I'm chasing that neurochemistry.

And what I want people to understand is life is neurochemistry, right? So you're not interacting with quote unquote reality. You're interacting with your brain's interpretation of reality. And so really being mindful to take care of that and to make sure that your values, your sense of identity, the people you hang around with, what you're striving for. They're all things that feed into this beautiful feeling of possibilities and that I matter and that I'm able to help and that there's just so much potential in life and that when people can get excited about actuating the potential, that's a big word for turn potential into a skill set. And people hear all the time, like, you have so much potential. What does that really mean?

It means you have the ability to learn to get a skill that allows you to execute. So I'll use a musical example since we're here. All of us have the potential to learn the guitar, all of us. And when you turn that into an actual skill, meaning you can actually play the guitar, then suddenly you can write a song that means so much to somebody emotionally that it gets them through a hard time or it becomes a song that they fall in love to or, you know, the song that they play at their wedding or, you know, whatever the case may be. But that was somebody learning how to do finger placement and learning about musical notes and learning strum patterns. And so all of that, quote unquote, potential, which sounds very abstract, becomes something very real.

And my obsession in life is to give people to understand, excuse me, that skills have utility. Once people understand that skills have utility, everything changes, meaning you're not learning something to check a box. You don't read a book to say you've read it. You read a book to get knowledge, which allows you to create something. And when people get obsessed with that, that's, again, the matrix, right? Trinity, can you fly that helicopter? Not yet. And then once she can, she can rescue them.

But until she can fly it, she can't do anything. Until you know Kung Fu, you can't fight. So it's like really understanding that the point of going to Kung Fu is to actually be able to win in a fight. It's to get your mind more discipline. They're real outcomes that allow you to do real things. And when people become obsessed with that instead of going to school because that's what your parents tell you you need to or going on YouTube to waste time, it's like,

I'm going on YouTube to learn this very specific thing, which is going to let me do something I care deeply about. And that thing is what allows them to move towards fulfillment. That's powerful. Well, thank you so much for your time. But more than that, thank you for the story that you have chosen to live. It's an inspiration. And I am pumped to see what's coming up next with Impact Theory.

So thanks so much, Tom. Thanks for having me. That story has it all. Persistence, grit, discipline, and purpose. And I'll tell you, in talking to Tom and thinking about the other interviews, that we've done over the past few months, I keep coming back to this idea that I had about the difference between self-improvement

and selfish improvement. And what I've learned is that selfish improvement is when I want to make myself better just for the sake of me being better. It's rooted in me. But self-improvement, on the other hand, is me getting better, me being the best possible version

of who I was made to be so that others may benefit. And I think the power is in that phrase, so that, because so that implies purpose. So that implies a vision. So that implies that you are serving something greater than yourself. And many of you are aware that that phrase, so that is a centerpiece of our organization here at Entree leadership and the company as a whole Ramsey Solutions. Because Dave Ramsey, our founder, had a so that moment where he was so passionate about a cause and a group of people, people that needed to be served that he got about the business of doing it. And that whole story

is cataloged in the book, Entre Leadership. And our team wanted to make it available for podcast listeners to download the first chapter of that book for free. So if you want to download the first chapter of Entree Leadership, just text EL Book to 33444. Again, that's EL Book, No Spaces, to 33444. Or you can always just click the link that's in the show notes. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link that's in the show notes. And be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, and it was edited and mixed by Will Rutter. I'm

Alex Judd, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey, if you enjoy this podcast, you should check out our other great podcast from the Ramsey Network, like Business Boutique. Hey, I'm Christy Wright, and I help women all over the country take their ideas and passions and hobbies and turn them into profitable businesses. If you have an idea in your head or a dream in your heart and you've ever wondered if you could make money doing it, I'm here to help. Join us on the Business Boutique podcast where we are equipping women to make money doing what they love. To hear full episodes, just search Business Boutique, wherever you listen to podcast. podcast or go to business boutique.com.