Episode 86 – Tom Bilyeu – Conquering the Mental Game (Founder: Quest Nutrition)

welcome to be human experience podcast the only podcast designed to ease your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet as we approach our advance please make sure your frontal temporal and occipital lobe are in there full employment provision as you take your scenic consciousness relax your senses and now ask to take you on a journey we are the increment strangers thank you for listening my

heart is melting right now that’s amazing I don’t think we’ve ever had a moment like that on the show before when you’re unshackled from all of that emotional baggage like what do you want to create bring into the world that’s it that’s all that exists is right now so if right now sucks you’re in real trouble what does guys believe you’re gettin here and Wow what a phenomenal episode mr. Tom bill you of quest nutrition’s really amazing

things that they’re doing over at that company definitely check them out and this episode we cover so much I mean we cover entrepreneurship and success and what it means to be successful and we just we dive in and we really get into the core what we’re talking about in this special content section which you can access and the link for that will be below please make sure that you check out us on Twitter Facebook YouTube all at the human XP thank you so much for

listening the human experiences in session my guest today is mr. Tom bill you Tom my good sir welcome to hxp thank you for having me on I’m excited to be here so Tom it’s a pleasure I mean you I feel like you’ve probably had this conversation many many times but you you founded you’re most known for finding quest nutrition and this is a company that exploded in revenue why don’t you tell us about that it and describe that feeling for us of

finding a company and having it do so well well it was um it was born out of misery so it’s it was just an incredible experience and really shows what happens when you stand up and take a look at how you’re feeling about everything that you’re doing and you make a new demand of yourself so my partners and I had been building a technology company for almost a decade before that and the company was doing quite well and I just wasn’t having any fun I didn’t feel

fulfilled I was chasing money and just came up emotionally bankrupt at the end of all that and so I had actually quit that company and told my partners you know I can’t keep doing this and I really want to find fulfilment and passion and build something that I care deeply about something that I’m excited about and long story short they felt the same way and so we put ourselves on a ticking clock and said if we don’t hit certain revenue goals by X period of

time that we would sell the company and start something that you know we’re really passionate about for three very different reasons the answer to what we were very passionate about was health and nutrition I grew up in a morbidly obese family so I was just really really focused on trying to solve that problem and save my mom and my sister and because it was coming from that place of being deeply empathetic to their plight and being so passionate to help them and

I wasn’t blind to the fact that obviously there were hundreds of millions if not a billion plus people that were struggling with food in the same way that they were it just turned business into something completely different and it turned it into creating value for other people serving other people and being able to lead with compassion and that was such a profound shift for me because I had spent so long telling myself the narrative of somebody

who was willing to suffer to get rich and once I switched that narrative to somebody who was willing to suffer to help of their people then everything changed and he did more revenue in a single day at Quest than our previous company did annually so it was just such on such a much grander scale and to see that the social awakening and the way that technology had really made everybody so hyper connected and changed the dynamic between a consumer and

company was just amazing to see that you could be rewarded and that you could treat being authentic and naturally wanting to help people as a marketing tool right and the better you were to people and the more you put yourself out there and the more you tried to connect and build a community that it came back to you in the form of big business so I mean it’s we’re living through this profound shift and it’s one of those things that as you see entrepreneurs

wake up to this and as you see more companies embrace it and stop trying to hide behind the corporate veil but instead you know really step out front and say what the company stands for who you are as people what you’re trying to bring into this world that it comes back to you because people can really feel that and there’s that sense of authentic connection that you just couldn’t have before so it’s it is such an exciting time to be an entrepreneur and it was so

neat to see that when we really turned our backs on thinking about money and instead just really started thinking about value creation that everything changed Wow you know there’s a there’s an article that I copy pasted for the research for this interview and the title of it is how this protein bar brand grew 57,000 percent in three years and it’s written on September 30th 2015 and the question someone asked you was did you expect the company to be this

big and your answer was yes we expected it to be this big if not bigger I mean wow just you know you’re I want to touch on what you said about turning things around and not chasing money because you know in the few years of running this program I’ve talked to many people who who kind of preach the same thing I mean how would you define success that’s a really individual question and I think I’ll give you an answer and it’ll be

very specific but it’ll be specific to me so I don’t expect this in any way shape or form to be universal but I think people have to set a goal for themselves and part of that is breaking free of small thinking breaking free of seeing yourself with all these limitations and foibles and and really you know when you’re unshackled from all of that emotional baggage like what do you want to create bring into the world and when you dream

freely and then turn that dream into an actual goal and then create the steps that you know that you’ll have to go through to get to that goal and then acquire the skills to actually do it whether or not you alternately accomplish that gigantic goal or not to me is irrelevant to success it’s about putting yourself legitimately on the path of pushing the envelope of your own potential so that’s how I think about myself is purely can I wring every drop

of potential out of myself through the acquisition of skills that are in service of a goal larger than myself so I’m very action-oriented it needs to be aimed at something specific and it needs to be so big an audacious that it scares me and so for me the pursuit of that the just naked raw not unafraid because I’m afraid all the time but that you act even in the face of fear that is my definition of success do you feel that in some way you’ve escaped the matrix in

in some strange way just because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company do this before I mean you go from the startup company into being a you know a billion dollar revenue company it’s just it’s mind-boggling I would say for most people it would redefine how you kind of look at the world when you’re absolutely crushing your expectations for how well you want a company to do yeah so the notion of escaping the matrix has sits at the absolute heart of my existence

and once I realized that the matrix was the perfect metaphor for your own mindset then yes I’ve escaped the matrix because I’m not held back by my mindset at least not in any debilitating way and I do work every day to you know empower myself further and further and gain more skills and be less compromised by fear and insecurity then I think it’s an ongoing process you know it’s not as sort of neatly binary as you see in the movie but yeah I do think that I’ve

escaped in that sense and quest in many ways was a result of people look at gaining skills and how do I get better and how do i improve and how do I look at myself and recognize where I’m weak and you know really set our sights on the goal and and then really really move towards that and you know a lot of what happened at Quest was being prepared for the right time so you know I don’t want people to think that there isn’t some timing involved in this but

that to me is is irrelevant you really have to set that aside you really have to be preparing yourself for what you want to do so that when the opportunity presents itself that you’re able to execute against that and that that notion of execution is what I’m obsessed with Wow yeah it’s really really intriguing there’s a bunch of articles in front of me that you talk about wealth creation and that when you care about wealth creation that you need to add one

element to the equation which is to solve a big problem and the bigger the problem is the bigger the financial opportunity is can you kind of expand on that a bit yeah definitely so there’s a guy named Peter Diamandis he’s the founder of the XPrize which is an amazing philanthropic organization that looks at the biggest problems that we face as a society and tries to incentivize the crowd to come up with solutions to those and he has a great

quote he said if you want to make a billion dollars help a billion people and it’s you know very elegant and obviously an oversimplification but it gets at the real truth of the matter which is that people will pay for value so when you think about the things that you pay for in your life there are things that you pay for gladly where you almost can’t believe for that amount of money that you can get that product or service because it delivers that much

value to you and if as entrepreneurs that we really look at that and say we have an obligation not to just be clever marketers but we have an obligation to create something that’s worth selling and that as more people buy it they’re empowered and the world at large is empowered because now you can sell and you can sell like really with enthusiasm and passion because you believe that you’re making that person better that you’re making the world better

and phil knight the founder of nike talks about this in his amazing book shoe dog which i highly recommend people read and in it he said you know i’d been a sales person before and i’d always been terrible but i was actually really good at selling at nike and when i looked internally for the reason why the answer was very simple that belief is irresistible and what i was selling was my belief that running made the world a better place and that these shoes made

you a better runner and i thought man that’s so right on like once that’s exactly what it was like for me at Qwest it was easy to sell because i believed in the product i believe that if you ate this instead of something else that you were actually going to be in better health that you were going to feel better you were going to potentially live longer you were going to look better and you know that you start putting it in real context like i’m

thinking about my mom and my sister they’re going to be in my lives longer they’re going to be happier but you know thinking about people that have kids they’re going to be there longer for their children or they’re going to be able to you know build something that they otherwise might not have had the energy to build or the longevity or whatever the case so you know you can you can really pour yourself into that kind of thing and the beautiful thing

about any grand endeavor is that it will yield to time energy and focus and so when you’ve got that energy and you’re willing to put in that time and that focus because you believe in it ultimately even the hardest problems that we face are going to fall away and as they fall away if they’re falling away to commerce to a business that’s built on bringing value into something beautiful for the world then you know you get that amazing combination of

generating real wealth which can be leveraged to make other things come true because to me money is just a facilitator and if you’ve earned that money facilitating something amazing you know garnering those resources will only let you facilitate more great things yeah I love the eloquence and in your explanations through these questions we’re going to keep going with the Entrepreneurship angle here for a little bit longer but being an entrepreneur

seems like it’s almost a trendy thing nowadays I mean if I hear about another kid who has invented the next best thing and sold it for you know 40 billion dollars I’m going to have it I just I can’t take any more and I mean I’ve been in the startup world for at least 10 years building companies and I want your opinion on what you think about where startup culture has evolved to and kind of what is going on here yeah I’ll take a slightly different viewpoint and I’ll

say this finally the world Revere’s people who are building something and they revere in themselves the ability to create something now a lot of them just like a kid who’s looking up at a basketball star instead of thinking about wanting to be capable of a championship performance he’s thinking about wanting to be a champion and the difference between those two is vast and it is so important and so people look at entrepreneurs and they’re thinking about

a big house a fast car lots of money girls you know whatever it is that they’re they’re thinking about instead of thinking about building something that matters but at least we’re living through this moment in time where people like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Richard Branson people look at them and they want to be them these were the geeks these are the ones that were picked on I mean Elon Musk was literally bullied and beaten and one of the things that he was

trying to do was to escape that when he left to you know ended up in Canada first but that was why he left South Africa and the fact that we now as a society look up to them the way that we used to look up to rockstars to me is absolutely breathtaking because at the end of the day an entrepreneurs job is to build something that matters an entrepreneurs job is to build something that is so valuable that people will trade their money for it and since you

trade most people are trading time for money you’re literally trading time for that entity your mo valuable thing so if people can actually do that create something that is so unbelievably valuable that people are in essence trading their time for it it’s that’s so amazing to me and so yes it’s trendy and yes a lot of people are doing it purely because it’s trendy but man I’ll take that I’ll take that juice and try to get people to understand that

it’s even more powerful than you think once you switch your mindset from I want the car the house the jewels and start thinking about I want the resources that allow me to build things that matter I want to have global impact I want to learn how to hold myself to metrics and learn how to move and shift and acquire new skills as the market demands it you know entrepreneurship to me is is a very amazing expression of what it means

to be garnering skills in service of something bigger than yourself yeah that’s such a beautiful explanation and really really connect with that I I just I don’t know a part of me is a little bit bitter or just I just don’t handle it well anymore I just feel like everyone wants to become an entrepreneur for the sake of making a billion dollars and it’s you know it’s not as clarified as you just kind of made it and I mean it’s something that I think there was an

article that you wrote it says that entrepreneurs are made not born how did you get to a point where you were how old are you now 40 this was 2016 where you guys were exploding how how did you go I mean was there an understanding was there something internal did you start meditating did you start following a certain group or did something happen internally other than your desire to solve a problem for the external world did something happen to you on the

inside that might have reflected this explosion with your company and it the success of your company well a it’s a really important for the world to know that there were three of us that started the company and the other two guys just incredibly talented entrepreneurs as well and so and we were on three very different paths so whatever you know things that I did was you know but one third of the puzzle and for me it’s really been a very long

journey of self-discovery that was born out of massive insecurities and not feeling good about who I was not feeling good about what I was capable of feeling like I was trapped feeling like I could do more I could be more but I didn’t know how and really movies were the things that helped me understand what that was and the matrix is the perfect example and was as close to a lightning rod moment as I had where I saw this perfect allegory for what was really

holding me back which was my mindset and once I realized okay your mindset is what’s holding you back then I could begin attacking that mindset and building a new mindset identifying the things that hold me back like one thing that is invisible I think to most people is what you build your self-esteem around matters so I think people just think of Oh ego is bad or you should have self-esteem but the fact is that what you build yourself a

steam around could be self-destructive so for instance I used to build my self-esteem around being right now if you build your self-esteem around being smart or being right it’s a trap and you’re going to fight for dumb ideas just because they were yours and you want to prove to everybody that you’re really smart you’ll also put yourself in a room full of people who aren’t very smart so that you can be the smartest person in the room you start doing all

this behavior that’s very counterproductive to acquiring skills and service of a goal that’s larger than yourself right so you’ll start to see a through-line looking and very consistent on what I think is the meaning of life which is that and when you’re building yourself seem around being right being smart it’s a fixed mindset as Carol Dweck calls it in her book mindset and switching over to a growth mindset and instead of believing that my talent and

intelligence were fixed traits that could never be changed and so it was just a genetic lottery and I had to find my place in the world to feel good about myself with those you know limited qualities so you expand your mind into saying no no I can be as smart as I want I can become as talented as I want in anything that I’m willing to really put in the work now Angela Duckworth has an amazing book that’s sort of a compendium in my mind – mindset called grit and she

talks about look innate talent matters but effort matters twice as much so as long as that’s true people don’t need to worry about you know what their natural gifts are worry about what you want to do and what you want to get great at and then just put a whole lot of effort behind that and so you know for me I’ve been on that quest for you know call it 20 years almost where that’s been the central obsession of my life is improving my mindset improving my skill

set and and measuring it against what I’m able to do in the real world yeah you know there’s there’s going to be a lot of people listening to this show who see your success and their of course they’re going to reflect that back in themselves and want something similar and whether they’re building your own company or whatever they’re doing and we do have a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to this show was there a point where you felt like

giving up you felt like I can’t do this anymore I just have to let this go a hundred percent when I went when we were building the technology company and I went to my partners and I said I quit literally you know that was me saying okay the traditional path to quote-unquote success where I make a lot of money and I’ve got the big house and all that it’s it is so draining emotionally and never were truer word spoken than somebody who said the only

thing you actually have is the present moment that’s it that’s all that exists is right now so if right now sucks you’re in real trouble so I have wanted to find a way to enjoy my right now and so that became the mandate with business was business was going to serve my right now it was going to be something that I believed in today it was going to be something that I felt passionate about today it was going to be activities that

I was going to be able to enjoy right there in that moment and that was one of the reasons that you know a huge part of our marketing strategy was to celebrate transformation was because that was awesome to see and it was awesome to know that we were contributing to that and it was awesome that the community was getting excited about the brand because it had helped them transform so all of that was like exactly delivering what I wanted business to deliver which

was momentary happiness right now today as well as what I call framework happiness where you’re trying to become something so it gave both sides of the coin yeah is there something that you could offer people that are listening that let’s say that someone is pursuing their dreams and they’re failing and they’re they’re trying and they’re doing their best and it’s just not working what do you say to someone not position they need to focus on two

things one skittle acquisition so they need to identify what are the skills that they need in order to succeed at at what they’re doing and if they’re blaming anything on the outside economics family circumstance how they grew up you know whatever they’re holding themselves back it is merely a set of skills so no matter what you’re trying to accomplish if you become so good they can’t ignore you as Steve Martin says then they won’t

ignore you but you’ve got to put an unending amount of time and energy into that and that brings me to the second thing which is you’ve got to think of yourself to the lens of a lifetime not the lens of a moment set another way be patient now the reason I don’t like using the word patient is it’s that’s very passive to me and I think people just need to understand that it’s not like you grind for a week or a month or a year you’ve got to be grinding for

decades now if you’re grinding for decades and you’re really getting better and you’re developing your ability to understand what skills stand between you and executing on what you’re trying to accomplish and you get very good at deliberate practice and acquiring those skills and making sure that you’re really pushing the boundaries of the capabilities ultimately success is going to relent to that right time focus and energy if you’re putting enough time

focus and energy on something ultimately it will relent but people want it fast and I get it and you should act with as much speed as humanly possible but you’ve got to be going all-out all the time for decades this is not something that happens overnight yeah and you know I’ve done that and there gets to a point where you just start to burn out so what do you mean what’d you say to that when when you are pushing so hard all the

time that you’re pushing 16-hour days you no longer have a social life all you’re doing is working on your company or your project or whatever you’re working on and you’re just so passionate involved immersed in it that you know it’s it’s become everything that you do you know it’s happened to me has it happened to you yeah for sure and you know my answer to that is know thyself if you want to take a day off take a day off right this

isn’t a moral thing and I think people get caught up in that so first of all I don’t believe everybody should be an entrepreneur I just think everybody’s capable so if you a person who shouldn’t be an entrepreneur is someone who doesn’t want to be an entrepreneur cuz it’s hard as hell so if you’re going to do it then it better be fun right and you better enjoy the process like I absolutely I am obsessed with learning I’m just obsessed I would

find it fun to learn even if I was living on a desert island and nothing that I was learning had immediate application I just enjoy the process of garnering knowledge so and then I like helping people so any business I’m going to be involved in has to help people that’s just that’s got to be because that that’s fun in the moment right so one person writes in like my goal in doing this podcast is that somebody in your audience is going

to write in and say my life is a little better because of that podcast now that’s the juice for me so that’s why I you know want to engage so heavily and build community and engage my community is I really love the moment of awakening in someone’s eyes when they realize just how much they’re capable of if they’re willing to put in the work over the long run like that’s fun for me but let me tell you if I need a day off I’m going to take a day off even though

I pride myself on getting out of bed fast hitting it like today I was in the gym before 3 a.m. yesterday I was in the gym at 2:30 a.m. so like I’m a total grinder I love that I eat it up it’s a huge part of my identity but if I wake up one day and I’m like holy hell like for real I’m not feeling this today then I’m going to take time off and man I’ll but shut down at Christmas because I want to spend time with my family so you know know

thyself don’t be like but you can achieve balance by aggressively going on two ends you know work hard play hard yeah you know it’s it’s really easy to talk about and truly he to say and to put into practice there’s a whole other story for me anyway and I mean kind of like you said know know thyself very very true very wise of you to say that yeah I’m curious to know when we first started this process of setting up this interview the first thing that I noticed

from quest as a brand was that there were people who were just maybe kind you know it was like this window to kindness is the strangest phenomena because I email a lot of people and you know we we get a lot of emails and just the communication was always on a level where it felt like someone on the other end actually cared what you were saying and that affected me personally it is this something that you employ into your philosophy as a

company and I mean is this something that you kind of put into your employees or how did that happen yeah 100% so there were three things that I looked for in hiring employees and number one was ambition yet that grand ambition number two was Drive you had to have the willingness to see it through and number three was compassion so you know we weren’t looking for hyper-competitive people or anything like that we wanted people that were legitimately

compassionate that actually feel empathy for other people can connect that want good things for other people and that’s a big thing for me is when somebody can want good things for another person like that’s somebody I want to be around yeah absolutely um I want to shift gears here I want to get into I want to try to get existential with you if we can ask it crazy what is your regard to consciousness consciousness altering substances

psilocybin I mean where are you in regards to meditation consciousness but using substances to enhance your your cognitive performance all of that so I’m a big believer in meditation and for me everything comes down to the science of the brain and that was really a big breakthrough for me when I first went on the journey of self-improvement was to really ask a very fundamental question which is if I were an athlete what would I focus on the body okay well then if

I’m trying to be a mental athlete I need to focus on the brain I need to understand how it works I need to understand neuro chemistry I need to understand the anatomy of the brain and by understanding all of that stuff I was able to literally visualize it and being able to visualize it and understand the mechanisms that were at work then I could fall prey to less and less of cognitive biases or mood swings or whatever the case may be because I

understood the mechanisms behind it right so that was a very big thing for me I would say that I’m not like when I think about who can talk about consciousness on a level that just like makes my jaw hit the floor you know sam harris comes to mind I don’t I don’t have that kind of deep wisdom in that area I haven’t spent time thinking about it like that and the same would hold true for the use of drugs for you know altering consciousness but man

my thing is if if you’re struggling from anxiety depression anything like that I say use every means that are available to you and it just strikes me as very odd if there was something somebody wanted to try for themselves that people were opposed if it’s for them on them and it’s just them hell yeah like give it a shot and I think that we don’t really understand the human mind yet for all the things we do know I think it is a vast ocean that we don’t know I mean

you sound you sound like you’re a pretty positive person I mean where do you see the growth of humanity going in the next 10 20 30 years considering current events well you start pushing it out 30 years and and now I think so I consider myself an amateur futurist I’m on the board of the XPrize which literally they’re part of their stated mission is to assure the future in and the reason that I find that also fascinating is its

inevitability so the future is coming whether we want it or not and I am as you said I’m very optimistic I’m very optimistic about the future I’m I’m not naive to the fact that a lot of the stuff is going to have to be very deeply thought about and we’re going to have to address things but 30 years from now I think that at a minimum you’re going to see a massive biological argument augmentation that will be living through the transhuman phase where people are

putting microchips in their brains that were you know growing organs in in labs which they’re already doing by the way but I think that that will become incredibly commonplace that will be 3d printing organs but brain augmentation is is really fascinating and we just had so I have a new show now called impact theory and we just had one of the most dynamic neuro scientists on the show a guy named Moran Cerf the episode have a man moaning ah amazing

Murphy is an amazing scientist amazing amazing so he was talking about may talked about it on your show as well he was talking about some of the work that’s being done to basically map the neurological firing patterns of different regions of the brain and so if somebody is struggling with neuro genitive decline that they can go in there and map out how that particular area of that particular person’s brain fires and then as it hits a critical

point where it’s degenerated too far they will literally remove or bypass that part of the the biological brain and insert I’m not sure if it said or exactly what it is but they would put in something artificial that would take over and replicate the way that that brain fires and all those different circumstances and that’s already being done now so you can imagine what’s going to be happening in 30 years I think it’s going to be amazing I really think that

you know if you follow Ray Kurzweil something like 87% of his predictions about the future have come true and he’s saying in 2045 we’ll hit the moment of the singularity which is where technology will be advancing so fast that like a black hole event horizon we can’t possibly predict what happens after that and people sort of round that to the moment where they think that we’ll be able to upload our consciousness it’s it’s utterly

fascinating and of course one has to at least ask the question are we already living in the matrix yeah yeah that’s a really good question ask actually um you know I would you are you a transhumanist I mean do you feel like you would be up for uploading your consciousness living forever no question no question I’ll never be an early adopter I think there’s a lot of risk involved in that but I once the technology matures absolutely so

yeah I’m I uh I have stated many times publicly that I plan to live forever so that’s definitely the game plan wow that’s that’s that’s impressive man I’m not sure if I would follow in those looked at I’m not no judgment here you know was has there been a any certain thing in your life that has impressed you the most or had the most kind of gravity in your life for you any book person event anything like that it’s interesting I’m going to tell you what

the first thing was that before you finish that that left so forcefully into my mind there is a certain look that my wife gets sometimes when we’re all alone and we just lock eyes and she gives me this look that is the facial equivalent of pure love and that sad to me is the juice like that that’s my everything if every moment of my life could feel like that I truly would need nothing else I doubt heart is melting right bad that’s amazing I don’t think we’ve ever

had a moment like that on the show before good my why are super super obsessed with each other and we just we we’ve been together now for 16 years and we’ve been through everything from poverty to you know tremendous success and highs lows but through it all we’ve really made sure that we were growing together and and that isn’t easy but that is like at the end of the day for longevity you’ve got to want to change right like I’m a guy who’s obsessed with

adding new skills thinking in new ways not letting my ideology become Dogma and so to get two people to grow in that same way it actually takes recognizing that that look and that person’s eye is incredible and it’s amazing and you should note it and talk about it and enjoy it and you know cultivate the ability to get back there yeah absolutely yeah so true and you know I want to leave it on that sort of cliffhanger for the members content side

Tom where can people find your work where can people get to your website and what you’re doing so at tom bill you is the best way and my last name is spelled a little weird and that’s B as in Bravo I ly e you and then I have actually so I’ve moved into a founder role at quest nutrition I’m no longer involved on a day to day basis but I founded a new company called impact theory and so you can also check out everything at impact Theory calm

cool this is the human experience thank you so much for listening we will get you guys next week

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