Tom Bilyeu Reveals His Formula to Get Rich Without Sacrificing Happiness

Let's fast forward a little bit, you guys do really well at the software company, but basically you come to a point where you're like, hey, the money's great, this is awesome, but now I feel like I really want to do something that I'm actually passionate about, something that actually really helps people, that I really believe in. So can you talk a little bit about how you were willing to give up your equity, go back, start something from scratch, and then how they were like, hey, let's just do something together, and then how Quest came about. Yeah, so awareness was a little more heartbreaking than that. So it was a really difficult period in my life where I'd been chasing money, and the irony is when you said that if you chase money, you're always going to be happy, I think that actually is true. The only way that I think you can pursue money and still come out the other side feeling fulfilled is if you are pursuing the money by doing something that intrinsically, in and of itself, even if the money never came, fulfills you. And that is one of those, what would you go back and tell your younger self? That. That at the end of the day, the struggle is guaranteed, the success is not. So pursue something that in and of itself brings you joy, brings you fulfillment, it's hard as hell, you have to earn something every day, like all the things that go into making a person fulfilled, do that. Because the money may never come, and even if it does, it's not going to change how you feel about yourself. So if you think you're a schmuck, you're still going to feel like a schmuck with all the money in the world. And so it just becomes like a drug where it's like, it's actually not making your life better. So it might make your Instagram account look rad, but like, I mean, think about how many recently, how many ultra wealthy people committed suicide, it's bananas. And I've had a very fascinating experience, which is that I went from, I mean, right before we took the investment from Quest and I truly got wealthy, we were making good money, don't get me wrong. It was an above average salary, but I certainly wasn't 1%. And then it was literally refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh on my bank account. And one morning, just like that, boom, lots of commas and zeros. What was that? How was that feeling? Like, I, cause I've, I've, I have a sales background. So like, you know, I've, I've had bigger paychecks and other paychecks and I know when a paycheck is about to come in and it comes in, I'm like, Oh yeah. But obviously nothing even close to what that experience was. What was that? Here's the thing. It probably is exactly like what this experience is. I mean, there's a little bit of surrealness to it. I don't want to downplay it, but so I'll back up a little bit. So because that moment is colored largely by how I got rich. So at awareness, I'm chasing money. It's all about getting rich. I'm completely miserable. I burn out. I am, um, you know, making more money than I've ever made in my life on paper. I'm a multimillionaire. Take that for what it's worth. And then I realized I'm emotionally bankrupt and I can't keep doing this. So I go in and I quit and it was deeply shameful. And now like when people hear the story, it sounds cool because it ends up playing out so well. But in the moment I was ashamed because I was quitting when I said I would never quit. And so I gave the equity back and I said, look, I'm not going to cross the finish line. I don't think I should get anything for this. Here's your equity back. And they say, you know, look, we could do this without you, but we don't want to. And so what would it look like for us to keep working together? And so we lay out, making a very long story quite short, we lay out what it would need to look like. It would need to be based on value creation, passion, something that I could just love doing every day where we were being ourselves instead of just trying to be slick marketers. And so we make this whole list. And for three very different reasons, the company that we decide we want to start is Quest Nutrition. At the time, we did not know that it was going to be big. We certainly thought it could be. And we were talking about building a, you know, multibillion dollar company. We wanted to be one of the biggest food companies in the world. But it's like, how much of that is just to have a big goal that we're aiming for? Because in the beginning, it's like, we didn't even know, like, if people were going to go for our first product or not. But we're savvy enough business guys, like, I don't want this to sound Pollyanna. It was, we were deadly focused on adding value to people's lives. That was the big shift. But we also knew to be strategic and to build something that, you know, has margin. And it's like, in the food industry, that's amazing. People eat your product. And so it gives you multiple times to touch them and be good for them and empower them and all this stuff. So, but all of that was such a huge shift in the way that I thought about business. I led with value instead of profitability. I led with authenticity, though nobody was calling it that back then. You know, just like really being a good person. And everything that we did was about being a good person, adding value to people's lives, whether anybody was looking or not. And it was just like building community and all this stuff. It just ended up being amazing. And the timing was right. So now with all of that, and I'm feeling full, and I'm feeling like I'm helping people. And it just like, every day I was showing up fighting for my mom and my sister who were both morbidly obese and had been struggling with weight their whole lives. And my sister now has lost 125 pounds. Like it was just this amazing time in my life where all this wealth was coming as a result of being willing to break myself and have to help people. And I just thought, what a cool world we live in with social media, where being a good person is the best marketing vehicle on the planet. And it was just, it was amazing. And so when the money hit, I had already changed who I was as a person. I was no longer unhappy. I knew what fulfillment looked like. I knew what it took. I knew the hard work that it took to become fulfilled. I knew that I had to show up every day fighting for myself definitely, but also fighting for other people to build a set of skills that were insanely difficult to acquire that allowed me to serve these people. Like all of that, like when the money hit, it was like, yeah, I ******* did the work, man. I did the work on myself. I did the work to do the right thing. I'm here trying to add value to people's lives. I've made a thousand hard decisions in order to serve and not just take. And it's like, so when the money hit, it was two things. The utterly fascinating thought that the money didn't change at all how I felt about myself. Not one bit. I'd worked so hard to build an identity that I felt good about, a person that I was proud of. And I remember when the money hit, it was a lot of money. And my wife's like, what are we going to do today? And I was like, go to ******* work. Like, what do you mean? Like, it's not about the money. I've said that so many times. It's not about the money. I'm not doing this for the money. And I said, that's not rhetoric. I'm not doing it for the money. The money's going to be awesome and I can already begin to visualize what we're going to do with it. But that's not why I'm here. And I want to go back and I want to show everyone on the team that my work ethic will never change. What I'm about will never change. My mission is there. And so they would never know what day the money hit. I didn't talk about it. I'm just back to work. It was a normal day. So realizing that the money didn't hit, that was sort of fascinating thing, number one. And then number two is like, there is a certain amount of money where you're like, I can do ---- now. Like, ---- your average person can't do. You know, it's crazy. Like, when you start shopping for this kind of house and your whole life you've been in like apartments or we'd finally worked our way up to a modest house. It's like you're shopping in Beverly Hills. It's actually a mansion. And I can afford it. Yeah. You're like, I can afford that two, three times. You know what I mean? And you're like, whoa, this is crazy. And I'm just going to pay all cash. Like, this is nuts. And so there is like kind of this weird, like, this is cool, man. Yeah. But it doesn't affect how you feel about yourself. Yeah. That's the biggest thing is that money is just irrelevant in the whole equation. Like it's in my opinion, like it's better to have money and to not have money. But it basically is just an amplifier of the person that you are. So if you're thinking that one day that when you have the money, you're going to all of a sudden become this other person, like that's not going to happen. But it does, like you said, allow you to now create something that you've really wanted to create something that actually really fulfills like your dreams and your vision that you had for your life. So so now coming out of out of quest billion dollar company number two on the Inc. 500 list. Yeah. So all these all all of these things coming together, right. Then you decide to go into impact theory. So I know you talk a lot about your goals for for impact theory in terms of becoming beating Disney at their own game and stuff like that. Can you kind of unfold a little bit of what that means? Like 10 year plan and then like 100 year plan. I assume you have something like that. Yeah. So the goal is to, like I said, pull people out of the matrix by giving them an empowering mindset. And so I want people to realize that the most fundamental thing they have to change is their perspective, the way in which they see the world. Now, most people don't realize that their perspective is a choice. It's been made up since they were a little kid. It was basically handed to them by their surroundings, their parents, their friends, the culture. And so they don't realize that they've built this frame of reference. And a big part of the reason that somebody in the inner cities and somebody who's middle class or somebody who grew up wealthy, they're so different is they just have different frames of reference. And you very much could have interchanged them at a genetic level and had one person grow up in the other place and another grow up in the other place, and they would have all succumbed in the same way. And so I just spent enough time working in the inner cities to see that over and over and over and over. And I saw extraordinary people, people that were smarter than me, people that had like crazy discipline or a willingness to deal with risk. And I was just like blown away. And I'm like, but they're not doing anything with their lives because their perspective tells them that they can't. And I remember the first time one of them told me, Tom, the world has told me they don't want people like me. I was like, what? Like from the background that I had, like you heard things like that in movies, but I didn't actually think people believed it. And then all of a sudden I realized, no, like they actually believe it. And why do they believe it? Because their parents actually told them the world doesn't want people like you. So crippling. So it's like, Whoa, like you can't say that. Like even it's one of those. And this is partly where I came up with the idea that I'm not as concerned with what's true as I am with what's empowering. And even if the world is working against you, focusing on that does not help you right. Focusing on the fact that you're strong enough to overcome even the craziest obstacles. Okay. That does help you. But those two different perspectives, the world is out to get me and I can handle anything the world throws at me, dude, the outcomes of those over a long enough timeframe are terrifying and it impacts generationally. And so the way I used to talk about impact theory before it was impact theory was I want to end generational poverty because generational poverty to me is not about money. It's about mindset. So I wanted to make sure that anybody, no matter where they grew up, they could not hope but encounter an empowering mindset. Now my thing is what I do at impact theory, what we're doing right now is essentially you talk direct to camera, you say exactly what you need to do, how you should think. And I'll say between two and 5% of the world, they're impacted by that and they make the real change. Now it's still pretty rad when you talk about the fact that there's over 7 billion people on the planet, but that leaves 95 to 98% of the people who are not impacted. So my thing is how do you impact people at scale? And the answer to that is exactly why this is called impact theory, which is I believe that the only way humans assimilate truly disruptive information is through narrative. Whether it's the narrative they tell themselves, whether it's the narrative they're told about the world, we interact with things and our brains are wired for narrative. So if we know that your zip code impacts how you grow up, your parents impact how you grow up, and your friends impact how you grow up based on what the culture is, what's cool, what's popular, I can't impact where you grow up, I can't impact who your parents are, but I can impact the things your friends think about based on what's going on in the cultural subconscious. But the only way I can do that is through story. So that, and you combine it with what am I good at, what am I drawn to, what am I deeply passionate about, storytelling anyway. So it just all came together when I really thought about what might work at scale, what do I want to be doing with my life, it came down to telling real stories. And so a lot of people are surprised that the way that we see ourselves here at Impact Theory is not the way that the outside world sees us. So the outside world sees us as being social content, and that's it. We see ourselves as twofold. We do the social, what we call non-fiction content, but we do fiction content. So we just released our first comic book, which we hope to translate into film or TV, and we hope to do that over and over and over until we're playing at Disney level. So the 10-year plan is going to be to get things into production, have multiple projects that end up on screens with big budgets that people love, and it starts to become part of the dialogue. I've always thought in 70 years, I guess, more than 100, I don't know why, it just seems more plausible. Even though I'm fully aware things will change so much, I can't possibly predict out that far. But it just gives you something to... I mean, Disney, that's not a 10-year thing. You can't build Disney in 10 years. And so it just gets me thinking really long term. So consistency of brand, making sure that we're only telling one kind of story but telling it from a thousand different angles, making sure that it's entertaining first, that it never feels preachy, that a kid would want to watch it, that parents want to watch it, that we serve both adults and kids. So it's like all these things. And the reason that I want to serve both adults and kids is, first, kids start by worshipping their parents. So I want to make sure their parents think we're cool, so that their parents are happy to show their kids the impact theory stuff, and then the kids have their own version of it that they can interact with. And then, hopefully, the kids will then grow up and introduce their kids. And that's... I've always thought about it as a generational thing. I think once that generation that grew up on impact theory has kids, that's when we'll really start to see impact.