A 9-month-old baby and a 47-year-old daughter.
That’s the age difference between all Tony’s Children.
The giant guy with the big teeth doesn’t understand conventional. He throws a spanner in your brain as soon as he opens his enormous mouth to talk.
I haven’t consumed any content from Tony for a while, which is why I completely missed the fact he had a kid at the age of 61.
In the last 30 days I came across a Youtube video of him. It’s as if the Youtube overlords could read my mind (hint: they can).
Here are the unbelievable things I learned from him that stopped me from sleeping for a few days.
Push the limits in everything you do
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man ― George Bernard Shaw
Tony makes the bulk of his money from live events.
Coroni-macaroni destroyed his business. He lost over $100 million. He couldn’t have thousands of people in a room anymore. The idea people would pay thousands of dollars to join a Zoom call seemed silly.
The only thing he could do was become the unreasonable man. He found a film studio with high ceilings. Inside, he built a massive stage with 360-degree cameras, huge screens, and even a way to regulate the audio based on the intensity of the claps coming from the virtual participants.
The setup defied the odds and reinvented the events business forever. Before coroni he’d get tens of thousands of people to his events. His last virtual event had 800,000 attendees.
Hard times create incredible opportunities if you can be unreasonable enough to believe anything is possible.
True happiness isn’t found where you think
Society has led us to believe that happiness is found behind a white picket fence in the suburbs with a Toyota minivan in the driveway.
Bullsh*t.
Tony said in the last 30 days that “progress equals happiness.”
When life progresses you get a sense of fulfillment. The impact is crap though if it’s selfish fulfillment. Progress that helps other people at the same time is the real goal. That’s where a sense of meaning comes from.
Something else happens…
Many people live lifeless existences. Their pulse is there and they don’t need to go to the emergency room, but they’re dead inside.
When you progress as a person you start to feel alive again. Toxic pessimism says that progress is bad. That we all should earn the same amount of money and have the same house, or life is unfair.
What’s missed is this:
Making progress gives you something to give, according to Tony.
We need progress to feel abundant so that we have more than enough to give away to those who need more. It’s the circle of life.
History teaches us what’s about to happen
Understanding this odd time in human history is difficult. Read this.
Good times create weak people.
Weak people create bad times.
Bad times create strong people.
Strong people create great times.
Tony says this is the cycle of history. In the 1990s former President Bill Clinton gave him a book called “The Fourth Turning.”
Based on what he learned Tony thinks we’re at stage two, where weak people are creating bad times. He says we’re at the learned helplessness stage. Rightfully so. We’ve been locked in our homes and beaten about by the news headlines for more than two years. It’s understandable.
The unbelievable thing we need to do is take these tough coroni times and rebuild ourselves back into strong people again.
The ingredients are:
- Habits
- Discipline
- A focus on mindset/psychology
- More execution, less complaining
- Self-learning through books that hold wisdom
The next phase of history is going to be incredible. It’s time to come alive and get fired up, not get stuck in Twitter debates about the end of the world.
How to become a learning machine
Many people don’t know that Tony’s #1 skill is learning. He’s not that smart but he’s always looking at future trends. This habit isn’t that unusual and you’re not surprised.
There’s one subtle difference.
Tony only does full immersion. His live events run for 4 days straight, 12 hours per day. He hates 2-hour events because he can’t produce changes in people’s thinking in a short space of time. It’s too much like a Netflix movie that you forget in 7 days.
A few years back Tony became obsessed with finance.
He interviewed the greatest financial minds in the world for 3 years without interruption. Each interview was scheduled to be 30 minutes long. All of them on average lasted for 3 hours.
The information in the book costs $20. It’s probably the best financial education you can get.
Since coroni, Tony has become obsessed with life extension. The passion came after he injured a shoulder in a snowboarding accident.
The doctors told him he’d be out of action for 6 months.
Sticking his middle finger up at them, he traveled to Panama and had stem cell replacement therapy. This led him on a multi-year journey to get the best new information about the future of medicine.
One story he tells is of a firefighter who has part of their face burned off. Normally they’d be scarred for life. Using spray-on stem cells the doctors are able to regrow the skin in real-time.
These insights — that make Tony look like an expert in so many fields beyond his base skills — are only possible because of his obsession with learning immersion.
It’s as simple as this:
If I drop you in a small Italian town and you can’t leave, you’ll be forced to learn how to speak Italian.
You can simulate these immersion situations in real life to become a learning machine. Try it.
Most people run out of this life force
It’s far too easy to run out of energy. A guy I follow on twitter said startups don’t fail. Founders simply run out of energy. I love that.
My friend Clyde said it beautifully:
20 years ago it was all about task management.
10 years ago it was time management.
Now it’s about energy management. Stay with the people, processes, and places that help your battery stay at 80%+
How do you get more energy?
First start with the cliche basics:
- Eat more plants
- Drink plenty of water
- Remove energy leaks
- Spend time with more high energy people
- Chill the hell out more to recharge your batteries
Those answers are obvious. Let me give you Tony’s unbelievable answer:
Helping others is the secret to energy.
Mind blown.
And when you help other people you get luckier, richer, wiser, healthier. Anyone can meet their own selfish needs. Meetings the needs of others, though, is the secret to more energy.
It lights a fire under you.
“When your identity expands your whole world expands”
Learned helplessness is an identity.
The worst identity I’ve ever got is “victim.” A police officer said it to me after a crime was committed against me.
“Stop using that word. I hate it,” I said angrily.
It’s easy to be a victim. It’s easy to think someone is going to save us and ride in on a golden chariot to make everything better. It doesn’t happen. Hollywood lied. You gotta build the chariot yourself and find the horses.
The trick is to look at the labels you use to describe yourself. A friend of mine went from cancer victim to cancer survivor. He drives a ute with a bumper sticker that reads “F*ck Cancer.” No joke.
Change your labels, change your identity, change your life.
Pattern recognition is the secret to high performance
The best in the world at what they do aren’t that smart.
Tony says they get good at spotting patterns. I don’t consider myself to be a great writer. But I spend a lot of time looking for patterns and asking…
What are the problems people face? I even run surveys with my tribe to uncover their issues. It frames how I write. I don’t guess. I use data-backed patterns to write about things that are helpful.
You can do the same.
Every skill has a pattern. Study the greats and look for commonalities. Then steal the commonalities and iterate on them through consistent repetition. That’s how you become the Tony Robbins of your field.