Here are 20 Mentors You Should Follow In 2020

Part One (20-11)

20. Ray Dalio – Billionaire, Author, Principles.

– If you can get past your ego barrier and you can get past your blind spot barrier, you can accomplish anything because you also know you don’t have to figure it out yourself. You can take in from other people the different ways to approach things in the best possible way.

Almost always or quite often, the first order consequences of things like it feels good, it makes me happy, I don’t wanna argue, I don’t wanna deal with the challenges, I wanna avoid the pain, that whole litany of things that you would say, Ah, that’s gonna bring you a happy life kind of thing.

The second order consequences are more often the opposite than the first order consequences. I mean, I don’t know the foods you eat, the ones that taste good are probably the ones, they aren’t the ones that you should be eating. So now when you start to realize that life is almost a trick, okay, are you gonna go for the first order consequences or the second order consequences?

Okay, I’m like sitting on one side of a jungle and that if I can get to the other side of the jungle safely, I’ll have a great life. But okay, but if I cross the jungle, all sorts of things is gonna happen. Now, what am I gonna choose? Am I gonna be on this side of the jungle and have just an ordinary life or am I gonna have what I think is the best life possible but ooh, I can get bitten all those things. And that’s just the nature of life. And then I said, ‘I have to.’ It’s my nature. I have to have the best life I can have. So, I’ve got to go into the jungle.

19. Lisa Nichols – Author, Entrepreneur, Motivational Speaker

– I’m in Inglewood, living off of Arbor Vitae. I’m on government assistance, and I run out of money, and I have to buy Pampers for Jelani. And I had $11.42 in the bank, and I remember wrapping my son in a towel for two days.

You know someone said, ’cause when I tell the story I always get teary-eyed. Someone said, “Do you fabricate the tears “’cause you’ve told the story so much?” No, I’m a mama. Every time I tell the story, I feel it again. I remember the second day, like you said, I had my hand on Jelani’s stomach, and I said, “Don’t worry baby, mommy will never be this broke, “or broken, again.” And that day, what shifted for me, was I was willing, and I don’t know if this is gonna sound crazy, I was willing to completely die to any form of me that I had been. So that I could birth the woman that I was becoming. The reason why a lot of people won’t become who they want is because they’re too attached to who they’ve been.

And you hear it all the time, when people say, “I’ve always been this way.” Okay, well, if that’s working for you, then keep doing that. I knew it wasn’t working for me any longer. I had hit my version of rock bottom. So, I was willing to let go of everything, and everybody. See, another reason why people won’t get there is because the door way is for you to fit through. You’re trying to carry everybody else through, ’cause you’re trying to be Rescue 911. And you gotta rescue you first.

I am much more valuable to my family, and to my community, because I was willing to let them go, go through the door myself. Teach myself, learn myself, condition myself, and then come back and get them. I’m much more valuable to them now. But I had to go through a window time of 10 years, of judgment. You leaving us, hanging out with white people all the time. You going to these crazy countries, we don’t know what I have to be willing to, to allow my conviction to make me inconvenienced.

See, we wanna grow but we wanna all stay liked by everybody. I was willing to be my own rescue at the risk of your approval. But most of us aren’t like that, Facebook is example we wanna be liked. Well, I woke up and I like myself today so your like is extra. My job is to like me first. I was willing to say everyday Lisa, you like you? Lisa, are you proud of you? Lisa are you playing fallout every day before I checked in with anybody else.

18. Sadhguru – Author, Indian Yogi

– Only when you’re in a pleasant state of experience your body and your brain works at its best. There’s no argument about that. There’s enough evidence to show that. So whatever impact or success or reaching goals or growth or whatever you say, on one level in the physical world, it’s about how well you harness your physiological and your psychological process, isn’t it? Whether your body and mind works against you, or works for you. This is a big difference.

So there is enough evidence to show only when you’re in pleasant levels of experience this happens best. So obviously joys first, then growth. If you’re joyful constantly and you have no fear of suffering because you understand all human experience comes from within you. And so you have managed to create the kind of experience that you want. Now growth is possible unbridled. If you have the fear of falling down and suffering, you will not go very high, isn’t it? See right now, what are the instruments of your experience? You know you’re here only because you can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. This is the only way you know that you’re here right now. Suppose you doze off. Don’t okay? Suppose you doze off. You don’t know that you’re here, isn’t it?
– Yes.
– Even though you’re here. Your heart is beating, everything is functioning. The world is on. We are all here. But you won’t know that you’re here, nor will you know that I’m here or anybody else is here. Isn’t it?
– Yes.
– All that’s happened is life is on full on even within you. Only thing is these five sensory organs have shut down. So your entire experience of life right now is happening because you can see hear, smell, taste and touch. Just look at the nature of the sensory organs. In the very nature, they’re outward bound, isn’t it? Can you roll your eyeballs inward and scan yourself?
– No.

Our nose is located right above our mouth. Suppose you don’t brush your teeth for three days. Though this nose is right here, it won’t tell you you have not brushed your teeth. The whole room will know you have not brushed your teeth but you will not know. This is the human predicament. It’s very easy to see what’s wrong with this guy, what’s wrong with her, what’s wrong with her. It takes a lot of observation to see what’s wrong with this. That level of keenness of observation is missing in most people, they need to cultivate that.

17. Mel Robbins – Best Selling Author

– When you set goals, when you have an intention on something that you want to change about your life, your brain helps you.

What it does is it opens up a checklist, and then your brain goes to work trying to remind you of that intention that you set. And it’s really important to develop the skill. And I say that word purposefully, the skill of knowing how to hear that inner wisdom and that intention kicking in and leaning into it quickly.

So for me, my brain saying that’s it, right there. Move as fast as a rocket Mel. I wanted to change my life. And I think most people that are miserable, or that are really like dying to be great and dying to have more, we wanna change. We wanna live a better life. We wanna create more for our families. We wanna be happier. The desire is there. Again, it’s about how do you go from knowledge to action. So the first thing in the story that’s important is realizing that the answer was in me. And my mind was telling me pay attention. Anyway, the next morning the alarm goes off, and I pretended NASA was there. It’s the stupidest story. I literally went five, four, three, two, one. I counted out loud and then I stood up.

And I’ll never forget standing there in my bedroom. It was dark. It was cold. It was winter in Boston. And for the first time in three months, I had beaten my habit of hitting the snooze button. I couldn’t believe it and I thought, wait a minute, counting backwards? That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Well the next morning, I used it again and it worked. The next morning I used it again and it worked. The next morning I used it again and it worked. And then I started to notice something really interesting. There were moments all day long, all day long, just like that five second moment in bed, where I knew knowledge, what I should do. And if I didn’t move within five seconds, my brain would step in and talk me out of it.

Every human being has a five second window, might even be shorter for you. You have about a five second window in which you can move from idea to action before your brain kicks into full gear, and sabotages any change in behavior.

Because remember your brain is wired to stop you from doing things that are uncomfortable or uncertain or scary. It’s your job to learn how to move from those ideas that could change everything into acting on them.

16. Peter Diamandis – Entrepreneur, Futurist

– You do what you need to do to make it happen and you pursue your dreams and education is like the most important thing you could possibly get.

I have a belief that every problem is solvable. As I think about the world we’re living in today, it’s the realization that we have solved so many problems to achieve this extraordinary world we live in today.

In terms of global production of food, of energy, of water, of information. We’re living in the world of Star Trek, I mean it’s, you think about that, that we can diagnose almost anything, I can read your genome for 100 bucks in a matter of a couple of hours. And understand all 3.2 billion letters of your life and have an AI analyze it and tell me about yourself, right? I can have one of these devices cob any piece of information talk to anyone on the planet. This is magic. This is crazy stuff. Just 20 years ago, let alone 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago. So, the realization is any problem is only a problem contextually today. And we’re gonna be creating the tools and knowledge to be able to solve that problem. And I believe that any problem not forbidden by the laws of Physics is solvable. And even then we’re gonna sort of learn where the boundaries of Physics truly are.

15. John Assaraf – Mindset & Brain Expert

– The law of GOYA is simply get off your ass. So if you think and you believe and you emotionalize, you visualize and you create your plan for how am I actually going to achieve this. So what do I need to do? When am I gonna do it? How specifically, how am I gonna tweak it, measure it and iterate it so that I’m consistently making progress.

I learned the value of progress versus perfection. None of my mentors ever had me focus on perfection. They had me focus on progress to just keep getting better, little incremental gains every day, every week, every month, every quarter. And even when you move backwards a couple of steps, what’s the progress that you made in what you learned?

So I was taught that failure is an opportunity to learn. And I was also taught to disassociate me being a failure from failing. When we feel something, chances are that we’re gonna release dopamine in the brain, the feel good neuro-chemical that activates the reward center of the brain. And chances are if we feel that, and we have this positive emotion around it, and that neuro chemistry is flooding our brain and our body with feel good chemicals, we’re actually activating the motivational center of the brain. And so when we visualize, when we set a goal, when we take an action step, when we emotionalize, when we read our goals, the initial flood of neuro-chemicals, dopamine, serotonin, feel good chemicals. And then if we share it with a friend, oxytocin, those three neuro-chemicals, those are the neuro-chemicals of goal achievement. But then there’s the other side of it, the other circuits of fear, of stress, where norepinephrine, cortisol or epinephrine, the stress hormones can be released as well.

And so I’m fascinated and I wanna teach people the stuff that we’ve learned about beliefs, self esteem, self worth, fears, and the stuff that really holds people back because all the how to, how to get healthy and stay healthy, we know. How do I build a business and sustain, we know. How do I get into relationship and make it successful, we know. We know most of the how to for anything that anybody wants to do in this timeframe that we live in. So the how to is the easiest part of the equation. So the harder part of the equation is why am I not doing the things that I know I should be doing? And why am I not doing the things that I could find out easily how to do?

14. Aubrey Marcus – Author, Entrepreneur, CEO Onnit

– Yeah, they make a differentiation between the person who’s the artist and kind of the canvas, you could say. You know so the artist is an artist painting the masterpiece of their life, they’re holding the brush. They decide how they wanna make themselves, forge themselves. They decide how they wanna express what they wanna be, or how they wanna interact with this incredible, school of life that we have available to us. And then the other side is those people who are just constantly getting paint splattered on them from other people, their parents telling, oh, you should be this, you should do this, or this is what you need to be. This is how you need to look, this is how you need to dress, this is what and they’re just receiving all of this external pressure from what the Toltecs would call the Mitote which is like a term for the marketplace where everybody’s shouting their expectations, their beliefs, their agreements, all the things that they have that kind of, we can either conform to or decide no, no, screw all that. I’m the artist, I will decide what I accept, maybe I agree with this perception. Maybe I disagree with this perception, but you take control of your life.

And the Nagul is a place of control where you’re shaping your own life with the power of your intent, with the power of your belief, with the power of choice and actual free will rather than being just kind of battered around by everything that society and people want you to be.

It’s funny, because if we were able to do like, even a fraction of the things we know we should, we would all be bad asses, but there’s so many things you talk to people, yeah, I should be doing that. Yeah, I should be doing, I know I should be meditating. Yeah, I know I should be doing this. I should be eating better. I should be doing this. We all know what we want to do to be the best version of ourselves, but for whatever reason, we don’t do it. And there’s a lot of reasons why but we’re not doing it. And so the ability to choose and actually decide what you’re gonna do to be the Nagul, to be the artist and say, oh well, if I believe I should meditate, then I’ll meditate and just collapsing that I know I should with actually doing it. That is a superpower.

That’s what defines the greatest performers from the people who haven’t quite made it yet is really their ability to say, oh, if I should train now I will. Oh if I should eat like this I will. Oh if I should do this, okay then I will. It’s collapsing that knowing what knowing what you should do, and actually doing it and making that one. And that’s ultimately a choice. We have the ability to tap into that superpower of choice, that superpower of free will. Not gonna be easy as the mind will play a billion different tricks and rationalizations and whatever. But ultimately, we are in control. You know, as I said, I’m not saying it’s easy. And I’m not saying it’s the best strategy. I think you got to be fair and say like, oh, I can’t do that. Well, if you can’t do that you use other methods. Do what you need to do to be effective, but know that you do have that power. We all have that power, we have the power to have the agency to make those types of choices.

13. Jesse Itzler – Author, Entrepreneur

– Once you get over the fear of being embarrassed, no one likes to be embarrassed. But once you get over being scared of being embarrassed, it’s super liberating. And it allows you to go into lanes that you otherwise you wouldn’t go into. And everybody is wired differently. Everybody’s wired completely different. It’s hard to rewire someone, to be comfortable taking risk, comfortable with being embarrassed. And I think it comes from having a lot of egg on your face. And learning along the way.

My partner and I were guests on a private jet when I was 27 or 28 years old. And when we walked onto the airplane, it was like the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” when everything goes from black and white to color like people fly like this. This is unbelievable, I wanna fly like this. And when by the time we landed, I was like let’s start a private jet company. You know like definitely so we could fly privately, except we have no airplanes. So we went to a company called NetJets owned by Warren Buffett, the 800 pound gorilla. They had 600 plus airplanes in the fleet, and pitched this idea for a 25 hour prepaid jet card, which was called Marquis jet.

But the meeting actually, when we pitched the idea, the meeting lasted 12 minutes, and they threw us out. And the president of NetJet said, and this is almost a direct quote, he said, cool idea, but if you think we’re gonna give two kids that didn’t break 1,000 on their SAP, which kinda pissed me off, I got like a 980 but I’ve convinced myself I’ve gotten over you’re like keep telling yourself you broke 1,000. He’s like I’m never giving you guys access to our airplanes, ’cause the notion was, if we could sell and market onto their fleet, through this 25 hour program called Marquis jet, that’s how we would piggyback off their airplanes and they threw us out in the meeting and then we were relentless. And we came back and we realized that we couldn’t sell this concept through a PowerPoint, because they’d see 1,000 PowerPoints a month.

So we literally brought our own focus group in to bring the meeting to life. And one by one, the guys stood up. We had Carl Banks from the New York Giants and Run from Run DMC and powerful real estate mogul. And they explained that they would never buy a fraction, what NetJet was selling, but they would buy a 25 hour card if it was offered. And that’s how we ended up solidifying the opportunity. And then to your point, when we started the company, this is back in 2000. So I had no sophisticated way to get leads. I didn’t know a lot of wealthy people. And the only way that I could really build my database or sell anybody was to go to events, where rich people hung out.

So I heard about this conference called The Ted. I didn’t even know what it was in Monterey, California. So I flew commercial, transfer three flights, drove six hours when I landed to get to Ted to try to pitch this idea to anyone that would listen. But when I got to The Ted conference, it was like Fort Knox, everybody had credentials, double credentials, and I had nothing. And they won’t let me anywhere near the venue. So I went to the local coffee shop and just tryna figure out how I’m gonna get in or sneak in or get someone to get me in or get access. And I realized like every hour to everyone with credentials, was walking into the coffee shop and they were buying lattes and muffins and lattes and muffins and lattes and muffins.

So the next morning, I woke up at five o’clock, and I went to the coffee shop and I bought every single muffin that they had, I took all the inventory out of the shop. I’m like, I’ll take all your muffins, they gave me like 80 muffins. And I was sitting and then when the first wave of Ted attendees broke for their break, and they came one of the customers said, oh, can I have a latte and a muffin and the guy said, well I could give you a latte, but we’re all out of muffins. And when he was walking out I said, excuse me, sir, look I happen to have an extra muffin, actually I have 800 of them, but if you want a muffin, you can have one of my muffins. He’s like no, get out of here. So then I realize it starts but what do you do? What are you doing here? And we started having a conversation and he said, do you mind if I join you and I, my only thought was like, you are qualified to buy a card, you can join me. And he was my first sale. He was my first sale. The guy owned a company that sold it to eBay. And that was the start of the adrenaline rush of okay, let me try to crack this code of how we can build this thing with not a big database.

12. Tim Ferriss – Best Selling Author

– If more information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with six pack ads. That’s a good one, right? It’s just absorbing not even absorbing, just reading and watching and listening to more, isn’t enough like you have to apply it, you have to use incentives. You have to have rewards and punishments set for yourself to actually get things done timelines, et cetera. So that’s one.

Another one is, don’t be a donkey. There’s a philosopher’s paradox, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s just a parable about Burdains Ass, about a donkey who is thirsty and hungry, and there’s water on one side, few feet away and hay on the other. And he can’t decide whether to do the hay first, the hay first or the water, the hay or the water and he dies of thirst at the end of it. He couldn’t do them sequentially. In effect, you can do almost everything you want in life, but you can’t do it at the same time. And if you can just dedicate yourself to one thing for even a year and then the next thing for a year, you can do those 10 things. But if you try to do all 10 at once, you’re gonna be Burdains Ass. And you’re gonna go, should I do this, should I do this? Or should I focus on this, should I focus on this? So don’t be a donkey.

11. Vishen Lakhiani – Founder Mindvalley

– Transformational education to me, is the most important type of education. The single most important type of education you want to invest in for yourself and that you want to put your children through. So, first let me define what that is, right? Transformational education covers the education that many of our institutions forgot to teach us.

It’s about wisdom. It’s about mindfulness. It’s about taking care of your body, your mind, your health, your emotional states, it’s about being a more conscious parent, being a more conscious lover. It’s about how to deal with those days when you might wake up one day feeling depressed or sad, and how do you deal with that? Schools don’t teach us that stuff. And here’s why transformation education is so important.

If you think about the human experience, what really matters is not so much your grades or the job that you have. All of these are mean scores. They are a means to an end, right? But if you ask a human being, to share with you the moments in life that they’re most grateful for, all of those small moments often deal with inner states. It’s falling in love. It’s carrying your first child in your arm.

It’s the joy of like accomplishing your first big win. And all of these are states of happiness, states of joy, states of human connectivity. Transformational education shows you how to get there faster without the dogma, without the unnecessary toiling towards a degree and then that job that society says you need. And then that career path, then breaking yourself working nine to five on something you hate. And the reason that’s so important is because the world is changing at an exponential rate.

Ray Kurzweil says that by 2029 on our smartphone, all of us will have the equivalent of personalized artificial intelligence. You can call it anything you want Rose, Jarvis, Nancy, whatever, but this AI will be able to run your life for you. All the knowledge that we are currently learning in school will be in our extended brain. And so what then should we be studying? Because history, geography, everything is gonna be on a personalized AI. So the most important thing to teach people is transformation. It’s to teach people how to expand their worldviews, to teach people how to know how to take care of their health, how to stay healthy, how to practice longevity practices, how to go within when they’re feeling sad, how to practice meditation and mindfulness. This is the most important education.

THE TOP 10!

10. Robin Sharma – Best Selling Author, Mentor

– Before the sun rises is the time of least distraction. Before the sun rises is where you can build intimacy and fluency with what you want to stand for in your day. Before the sun rises, the luxury and tranquility of the early morning hours, you can do that deep inner work that will allow you to go out in the world and play at your best. So what the 20/20/20 formula is is simply this, there’s three pockets.

The first pocket is move, five to 5:20 and you get into the sweaty exercise because like I mentioned, it releases neurotransmitters, it reduces the cortisol, it increases your metabolic rate, which gives you more energy, and serotonin as well, which gives you joy. So now it’s 5:20, fundamentally you feel different, you have energy, your state is strong, you’ve got a fire in your belly and you’ve accelerated your focus. 5:20 to 5:40 is the second pocket of the 20/20/20 formula which is reflect. We live in a world where a lot of people are busy being busy but what’s the point of being busy around climbing the wrong Mt. Everest’s? And so clarity is one of the DNAs of mastery.

You know this if you talk to the titans of industry and you talk to the people really getting traction around their ambition. These are people who have a monomaniacal focus on the few things that matter. They have an obsession bordering on a possession around the few priorities they want to build their life around. And so 5:20 to 5:40, the second pocket, you write in a journal, you meditate, you visualize, you do what I call in the book a blueprint for a beautiful day or you just sit in solitude and you think and you ponder and you reflect. And then the final pocket is 5:40 to 6:00, and this is the victory hour, the final pocket is grow.

But if you look at the greatest billionaires, I’ve coached many billionaire over the past 20 years, if you look at the greatest producers on the planet, these people have one thing in common, they are ridiculously curious, and no matter how much money they make and no matter how much impact they have, they maintain a white belt mentality. One of the keys to epic performance is a relentless commitment to daily growth.

9. Ed Mylett – Entrepreneur, Author

– That which you do not hate, you will eventually tolerate and I think that identifies most people’s lives. In other words, the average becomes sort of like this slow asphyxiation. It’s almost like an anesthetic and that over time, we become kind of immune and dulled to the average that we’re becoming. And so over time, we sort of minimize where we’re at. In other words, you don’t magnify the degree to which the main ought to be affecting you.

And so really what he means in that is listen, you’re gonna get out of your life what you’ll accept. That’s really difficult for people I think to understand is look, what you think you’re worth and what you’re gonna tolerate is absolutely what you’re gonna bring into your life and what the outward part of your life’s gonna look like. And so I live by that. I let myself sort of feel the pain and the difficulty of being not where I want to be, in whatever that area is, whether this be my spirituality, my relationships, my money, I let myself feel that pain ’cause as you know, there’s two motivators, right, there’s the gaining of pleasure, wanting to go get something, chasing the dream, but then there’s the avoidance of pain. And for a lot of champions, that’s a pretty big driving force for them.

And so at least for me, I leverage both of those things on me to get myself to take action. There’s this thing people think that like I’ll be happy when. Once I get this big amazing home or once I get this car or once I get this relationship or an amount of money, then I’ll allow myself some happiness. The problem is the finish line always moves, you never arrive there, right? The other part is people think well, if I enjoy myself now, I’m gonna lose my drive. In other words, if I can just wire myself with enough pain all the time, I won’t lose my drive or ambition.

The truth is there’s no correlation between the two at all. There’s no relationship between you feeling complete pain all the time and losing drive. And so I talk about living in a state of blissful dissatisfaction and that’s why so many people stall out in life. They got to a certain point and they cheated themselves out of the bliss, out of the celebration. It’s important that we celebrate our wins, we celebrate our lives because it causes us to want the next bite, it keeps us hungrier, not the reverse. And so for me, I want to live in a state of being grateful and blissful now, not waiting for some future place or date that may never arise.

8. Wim Hof – Founder, Wim Hof Method

– The power to adapt to the stressor in general. We lost this connection is because we wear clothes all the time and we live in a comfort zone behavior, we think we can control nature but by being nonstimulative in our behavior, we lost the connection in the depth of our physiology ’cause we are able to adapt about to anything. We are built to be able to adapt without stress into any stressful situation and get a solution. The body knows but because we got into this comfort zone behavior hundreds of years, our genetics have changed, our physiology has changed, everything has changed, and we lost actually the full power of the mind. And I’m here to bring it back.

7. Gary Vee – Entrepreneur, Investor, Author

– I think so many people are keyboard activists, right? Everybody’s good at sending a tweet about how the world should be and nobody’s doing anything about it and that is just very much human nature.

– I was just gonna ask if you think that’s human nature or you think that we’ve gotten soft as a culture?

– Yes. Of course we’ve gotten soft as a culture in the US because the US has had an incredible 200 year run. This is just what happens. So as a culture, I can’t speak for people that live in the Amazon river and I can’t speak for people that still live in Belarus but the American culture is soft, and that’s a great thing, that means there’s been enormous amounts of prosperity but let’s not be naive. People literally complain when somebody gives them the wrong amount of like extra cream in a Starbucks six dollar coffee. My lack of interest in complaining is so high and when I watch what people complain about it breaks my heart because they completely lack perspective and I genuinely believe my happiness and optimism comes from my perspective. Even in political unrest times like right now, a lot of people are very bent out of shape but the reality is is that it’s just never been better to be a human being, that’s just the truth, that’s just data, that’s reality and it’s just a very fun time to be alive, so much going on. The internet is starting to hit maturity. Look what we’re doing right now. This right now would’ve cost millions of dollars in production and distribution to have the amount of people who watch this just 15 years ago and I think the way people look at the world right now, because it’s such an incredible time is actually the quickest tell to who they are. If you think it sucks and it’s bad, you have losing pessimistic DNA, and if you think it’s awesome and phenomenal, you have optimistic winning DNA and I believe that to be true.

6. Simon Sinek – Best Selling Author, Speaker

– Don’t try and influence that which you cannot influence. Don’t control that which you cannot control. An infinite mindset means that is something I can’t do but I can influence and take care of the people to the left of me and to the right of me, I can take care of the people who work for me, I can even take care of the person I work for.

Sometimes we have a toxic boss, not because they’re bad, but because we don’t understand the pressure they’re under. Sometimes to simply exhibit empathy to our boss, hey boss, you were really harsh on us today, everything all right, what’s going on? I’m worried about you. I’m here, like we can succeed together, we’re here to help you, you know? No matter where we are inside an organization, leadership is not about rank or authority. Leadership is taking responsibility for the people around us. And so anybody on any team at any rank at any level can be a leader. The first choice is that we have to want to be. A dear friend of mine, Lieutenant General George Flynn from the Marine Corps said that the first criterion to being a leader is you have to want to be one. So any of us can volunteer to be a leader. And that’s what you do, you commit yourself to seeing the people with whom we work on a daily basis love coming to work, they feel that someone’s got their back, they feel supported, they feel that they have top cover, they feel someone cares about them as a human being, listens to them, knows their story, allows them to be themselves.

We can be that leader and what you start to see is those teams because really high-performing and those teams become super tight, and you start to hear rumors across the company ’cause everybody wants into that team ’cause apparently it’s a great team to work with, to work on. And before you know it, one of those people goes and moves to another team and they take everything that they learned, ’cause leadership is learned, and they do it for another team. And if we take that infinite mindset and eventually the tail will wag the dog, and it doesn’t matter if it’s this CEO or another CEO because we will outlast whoever’s in charge right now, and that’s the goal. We’re doing this for the good of the organization, we’re doing this for the good of the cause.

5. Marie Forleo – Author, Coach, Speaker

– There are of course challenges that every single human being faces and I don’t pretend to know the history or the hardships of every single person watching this interview right now but what I do know is this, that every single person watching or listening to this has immense power inside, has incredible talents and gifts, has incredible capabilities that they don’t even know exist right now and I know that if they’re just willing to try on this idea, just again try it before you deny it, don’t believe me, just try it out for yourself, that they can overcome any hardship, any challenge they face and create miracles in their lives and in the lives of people around them. I’m certain of it. Nothing in life is that complicated. You can do anything you set your mind to if you roll up your sleeves, you get in there and you do it.

Everything is figureoutable. But that phrase got embedded in my soul in such a deep level and I just said it over and over again and then I realized as I became an adult it’s been the single biggest driving force of my life from continuing to get rejected on sports teams and cheerleading and going again and again and getting out of an abusive relationship when I was, it was like my first love, to getting into classes in college to getting every part-time job I’ve ever gotten, every full-time job I’ve ever gotten, getting out of relationships, into relationships, building the entire business. I still use that phrase every single day.

4. Tom Bilyeu – Entrepreneur, Founder of Impact Theory

– I heard Ed Mylett once say, “You’re one decision away from a totally different life.” And I agree with him but I want to ask you this, what is that one decision? And the answer is to take complete and total responsibility for everything in your life. And I mean everything.

The way that I explain it to people is if my wife were hit and killed by a meteorite, I would take responsibility for that, I would say that that is my fault, not to blame me or to put shame on me, but to remind myself that I’m in control, that there is always something I could’ve done. Now I know that that’s true, as crazy as that sounds but I know right now there are a group of people tracking what are called near Earth objects making sure that if something like a meteorite is on a collision course with Earth that they could do something to stop it. Now even though I know they exist, I’ve never done anything to help them. I’ve never given them money or ideas or encouraging words and I think that’s the right answer. I think the likelihood of my wife being killed by a meteorite are virtually zero but if it happened, I wouldn’t waste time saying there was nothing I could’ve done about it.

I know I have made a choice and at the end of the day that’s the most powerful realization that you can have, that even inaction is a choice. You’re deciding every minute what you’re going to do with your time, your energies, your intelligence, your focus, all of it, you’re deciding how to use it and your life right now is an exact reflection of the choices you’ve made, for better or worse. If you love your life, congratulations, you’re making the right decisions and if you hate your life, that’s on nobody but you and that’s the best news I can give you.

That’s the most comforting thing I can say. Why? Because you can do something about it. If it were somebody else’s fault, if life were happening to you, if you weren’t in control, then there’s nothing that you could do to get out of your situation. But the reality is you are in control. Every moment is an opportunity to do something different and when you make different choices, when you take different actions, when you do different things, you get a different result. There’s a reason that Einstein said the very definition of insanity is to do the same thing and expect a different result. So if you want something new for your life, it is very attainable. You can have something new, you can have all of the things that you want but you’re going to have to work your ass off, you’re going to have to make the right decisions and that’s a hard thing to face, it’s hard to accept that simply wanting it or being a good person or trying isn’t enough. But it’s not. You’ve got to work until you find the right answer.

You’ve got to be willing to fail and fumble around until you find the path that actually works but once you hold yourself to the standard of efficacy, that it actually got you the desired result, then you’re fumbling is gonna be all for nothing because it’s not directed at anything. You’ll never know if you’re hitting the mark if you don’t have anything to aim at. But once you have that clarity and you know exactly what you’re going for and you accept responsibility for whether or not you’re getting there, then everything changes because you have the power.

So right now, take your life back. Right now, no matter what is going on, no matter what has happened to you, no matter what crazy things have befallen you that seem like fate, take ownership. Don’t beat yourself up, don’t waste time feeling badly about it just recognize you are far more powerful and capable than you know. And once you take that, once you take the reigns of your life, you can make the changes and the decisions that you need to get wherever you want to go and that truly is the most powerful realization, the most important decision any of us can ever make.

3. David Goggins – Athlete, Author “Can’t Hurt Me”

2. Jim Kwik – Brain & Memory Expert, Author, Coach

– Your brain is like a supercomputer and your self talk is a program that will run. So if you tell yourself you’re not good at remembering names, you will not remember the name of the next person you meet because you program your supercomputer not to. And I always tell people to keep it positive, keep it empowering, because your mind is always eavesedropping on your self talk and you have to be careful what you say to yourself because it’s this unconscious command. So I’ll be very careful like when I get into a rift or, I think some of the most successful people live at the edge of their limits and they play there also as well. And whenever I feel in my nervous system, I feel like I can’t do it, then I feel like I really must do it because I feel like how we do anything is how we do everything ’cause motive matters, right, and what drives us, I always tell people that there’s a success formula, I subscribe to it, I call it H-cube, that it goes from your head to your heart to your hands, especially in the personal development space or what they teach you about goal setting, you could affirm things in your head or think things in your head or visualize things in your head but if you’re not acting with your hands, there’s something that’s missing, right, there’s an incongruency there and what I tell people is like check in with the second H, which is your heart, which is the symbol of emotion, the energy of motion. And so I feel like that’s the fuel that fuels the car that gets you to take action for something. My message to people, whether it’s on stage or on the podcast or anything is that we are more than what we’re demonstrating, that we’ve been sold this lie that people are taught through school. Like when I do these demos and I on stage memorize 100 names and words and numbers forwards and backwards, and it appears effortlessly, I always tell people I don’t do this to impress you, I do this to express to you what’s really possible ’cause the truth is everyone can do this too and so much more, applied towards creativity and focus and flow and problem solving and thinking and really overcoming the biggest challenges of their life, and maybe even the world.

The challenge is we were taught a lie. We were taught a lie that somehow our intelligence, our potential, our learning, our memory somehow is fixed, our creativity is fixed, our thinking is fixed, like our shoe size, and what we’ve discovered, as you know, more about brain science, in the past two decades, we’ve discovered more than the previous 2,000 years and what we know is that we’re grossly underestimating our own capacity to be able to grow, to be able to contribute, to improve our intelligence, and our influence and our impact. It’s just we all grew up with a 20th century education that prepared us for a 20th century world, which at the turn of the century was working in factories and farms and assembly line and our education system was mirrored to that. It was assembly line, one-size-fits-all, cookie cutter approach towards education, teaching us things about what to learn, math, history, science, Spanish, but all things we can find online nowadays, right? So what do you need to be able to regurgitate that information for? It was about what to learn but not how to learn, how to think for yourself, how to solve problems, how to be creative, all the things that you can’t outsource to automated or technology or you can’t outsource to Asia, our value in this world is really our creativity because that’s not something that’s easily outsourced. Our ability to create value, be creators, take our vision and turn ’em into reality, take the invisible and make it visible, but where are the classes on that, on how to be able to live your best version of yourself? But what about interpersonal skills? That’s got to be at least as important, to be able, the ability to connect with individuals. What about, besides interpersonal skills, what about intrapersonal skill, like just self-awareness?

Because as Gary Vee talks about, I think self-awareness is a superpower, like awareness of yourself, your own condition and what motivates you, what drives you, your own beliefs, identity. If knowledge is power, then learning is your superpower and I think it’s a superpower that we all have, it’s just that we’re not taught, recently we had Quincy Jones in our audience and I had to pull him on stage, right, and I was like, I have to ask you, we are the world and Michael Jackson and Oprah, how’d you overcome these challenges, these problems that you had to be able to create this legacy? And he looked at me, he’s like, “Jim,” he’s like, “I don’t have any problems.” I’m like, what do you mean? You’re 84, you have no problems? And like no, I have puzzles. And I was like wow, like that little shift of vocabulary changed everything for me. Yeah, because puzzles are like riddles, you can solve them, there’s answers for it and it was a change of perspective. And that was the thing about growing up with superheroes, reading these comic books late at night when I was so impressionable, is for me, a superhero more than anything represents hope, do you know what I mean? That one person can make a difference. And a lot of superheroes go through a lot of challenges, right? When you think about the most popular superheroes, they’re all orphans. Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, Iron Man, Spider-Man, they all lost their parents and they got through these big challenges but through it, they found their dharma, they found their mission and I find that if someone’s watching this and they haven’t found it quite yet, I have a belief that their mission and that people’s mission, their purpose is looking for them also but most of us aren’t sensitized to it because it’s coming in different forms and we’re not open to it as much.

And so my thing when it comes to success rituals and high performance and making an impact is that we all have that sovereignty, we all have that power and whenever we put it out there and give it out to somebody else, like we’re a thermometer, the metaphor I always talk about, we’re either thermometers or we’re thermostats and a thermometer, you think about the functionality of it, it just reflects what the environment is giving it, it just reflects the temperature and stuff but a thermostat is different, it sets a standard, it sets a goal, it sets a vision, and the environment changes along with it, and I feel like our happiness, our joy, our level of fulfillment, our success, is all dependent on where we put the locus of control, and I feel like we have more power than we realize in these cases. And it’s hard, because we have to fight media, we have to fight marketing that’s always telling us about all the things that are going on in the world but we live in an abundant universe, right? We talk about the matrix, which pill people are gonna take and that determines everything. And every single morning, you determine what color pill you’re gonna take.

1. Joe Dispenza – Author, Educator

– Well a habit is a redundant set of automatic, unconscious thoughts, behaviors and emotions that’s acquired through repetition. A habit is when you’ve done something so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your mind. So if you think about it people wake up in the morning, they begin to think about their problems, those problems are circuits, memories in the brain, each one of those memories are connected to people and things at certain times and places and if the brain is a record of the past, the moment they start their day they’re already thinking in the past. Each one of those memories has an emotion. Emotions are the end product of past experiences. So the moment they recall those memories of their problems, they all of a sudden feel unhappy, they feel sad, they feel pain. Now how you think and how you feel creates your state of being. So the person’s entire state of being when they start their day is in the past. So what does that mean? The familiar past will sooner or later be predictable future. So if you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, and you can’t think greater than how you feel, our feelings have becomes the means of thinking, by very definition of emotions, you’re thinking in the past. And for the most part, you’re gonna keep creating the same life. So then people grab their cell phone, they check their WhatsApp, they check their texts, they check their emails, they check Facebook, they take a picture of their feet, they post it on Facebook, they tweet something, they do Instagram, they check the news and now they feel really connected to everything that’s known in their life. And then they go through a series of routine behaviors.

They get out of bed on the same side, they go to the toilet, they get a cup of coffee, they take a shower, they get dressed, they drive to work the same way, they do the same things, they see the same people, that push the same emotional buttons and that becomes the routine and it becomes like a program. So now they’ve lost their free will to a program. And there’s no unseen hand doing it to them. So when it comes time to change the redundancy of that cycle becomes a subconscious program. So now 95% of who we are by the time we’re 35 years old is a memorized set of behaviors, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitudes, beliefs and perceptions that function like a computer program. So then person can say with five percent of their conscious mind I want to be healthy, I want to be happy, I want to be free, but the body’s on a whole different program. So then how do you begin to make those changes? Well, you have to get beyond the analytical mind because what separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind is the analytical mind. And that’s where meditation comes in because you can teach people through practice how to change their brain waves, slow them down. And when they do that properly, they do enter the operating system where they can begin to make some really important changes. So most people then wait for crisis or trauma or disease or diagnosis, they wait for loss, some tragedy to make up their mind to change and my messages is why wait? And you can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering or you can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration. I think right now the cool thing is that people are waking up.

Masters: Les Brown – Motivational Speaker, Author

– You get hungry about finding something that’s you. I believe that all of us are born unique but most of us die copies. You got to find out what is it that turns you on, what resonates with you?

One of the things that I realize and what allowed me to become successful as a speaker, the speaking industry has been hijacked by people who speak to sell and it’s okay to do that and make money. I speak to change lives because somebody spoke and changed my life. So this is my passion. This is my drive. This is something that I feel in my heart.

And so the key to that hunger-driven life is a heart-centered life. I didn’t do what I’m doing for years because of my programming, because of the culture in which I was raised in. I would see other people with degrees and PhDs and MBA’s and credentials I don’t have and I convinced myself I couldn’t do it. But you have to work on yourself, you have to have an unstoppable attitude and no excuse is acceptable and you’ve got to make it a priority, a non-negotiable in your life, and hold a constant vision of what it is you want to achieve. See it accomplished and go all out, find a way to win, in spite of the setbacks, in spite of the disappointments, in spite of your failures. I tell people, when I’m giving presentations you will fail your way to success.

I have a saying, if life knocks you down, try and land on your back because if you can look up, you can get up. Those experiences of going after goals that’s beyond your comfort zone and having relationships that will challenge you and surrounding yourself with coaches and mentors who can take you to a place within yourself that you can’t go by yourself because you can’t read the label when you’re locked in the box. And so those experiences, they challenge you to go to that next level and continue to move forward in your life doing new and exciting things that eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor is it in the heart of mankind what God has in store for you when you live a heart-centered life deciding that you’re gonna live a life that will outlive you, you’re gonna live a life that counts, a life that will build a legacy and change the planet.

Masters: Eric Thomas – Motivational Speaker, Author

Masters: Tony Robbins – Life & Business Strategist, Author, Mentor