The One Video to Watch if you want to win in 2025 | Tom Bilyeu

Summary

In this motivational video, Tom Bilyeu shares his personal journey from being broke to building multi-million dollar companies, including a unicorn business. He emphasizes the importance of harnessing anger and frustration as fuel for self-improvement and success. The video outlines a step-by-step framework for achieving greatness, including setting specific goals, taking extreme ownership, acquiring skills, and embracing failure as a learning tool. Tom encourages viewers to define success on their terms and relentlessly pursue their passion with focus and dedication, urging them to embrace suffering as a necessary part of growth.

Highlights

• Tom Bilyeu talks about transforming frustration into improvements and setting personal rules. 🚀
• He emphasizes the importance of defining what success means to you. 🎯
• The video discusses taking extreme ownership and not blaming others. 💪
• Failing is portrayed as a vital learning tool on the path to success. 📚
• Tom advises viewers to focus intensely and avoid distractions to achieve their goals. 🔍
• He stresses the need to embrace suffering to forge one's character. 🌟

Key Takeaways

• Harness your anger and frustration to fuel personal growth and success. 🔥
• Define what success means to you and pursue it relentlessly. 🎯
• Take extreme ownership of your life and results, blaming no one else. 💪
• Embrace failure as a tool for learning and improvement. 🚀
• Focus intensely on your goals and cut out distractions. 🔍
• Embrace suffering as a necessary part of achieving greatness. 🌟

Overview

In this powerhouse video, Tom Bilyeu takes us on his journey from a struggling individual to a business success story. Opening up about his past, Tom shares how lying to himself kept him from reaching his potential, and how anger became his catalyst for change. It's a raw and inspiring account that motivates viewers to push beyond their comfort zones and pursue greatness.

Tom underscores the importance of personal accountability and setting clear, specific goals. Whether it's defining success on your own terms or embracing failure as information for growth, Tom provides a blueprint for those willing to work hard. His insights into the importance of skill acquisition and resilience against life's chaos resonate throughout the video.

The crux of Tom's message lies in understanding that success demands sacrifice and an unwavering focus on one's goals. It's about recognizing that suffering molds character, and that relentless pursuit is essential. Tom's engaging narrative urges viewers to step into the arena, fight against the odds, and redefine their future by putting in the work and staying the course.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:30: Introduction The introduction chapter delves into the universal conflict of self-denial and unrealized potential. The narrator candidly shares a personal anecdote of feeling stagnant and unfulfilled, as they confess to living only a fraction of their true capacity while ignoring a persistent inner voice urging them towards greater things. This reflective moment is spurred by a vivid memory of financial struggle and personal embarrassment, exemplified as the narrator recounts watching their partner work while they idly spent days in bed. The chapter sets a tone of transformation, hinting at a journey from these dishearting beginnings to a more empowered and purposeful existence.
• 02:31 - 06:00: Personal Transformation The chapter focuses on the concept of personal transformation, emphasizing the necessity of leveraging one's anger and frustrations as a catalyst for change. The speaker shares a personal journey of redirecting negative emotions into motivation for self-improvement. Key strategies include setting personal rules and guidelines to turn a challenging year into a transformative experience.
• 06:01 - 11:00: Framework for Success The chapter 'Framework for Success' begins with the author sharing a personal rule: to get out of bed within 10 minutes of waking up. This discipline helped combat laziness and fear. The author attributes this rule as part of a larger strategy that led to success, transitioning from struggling to find spare change to fund basic needs, to founding three multi-million-dollar companies, including a unicorn business.
• 11:01 - 15:00: Own Your Path The chapter 'Own Your Path' is focused on understanding what it truly means to pursue greatness. The speaker emphasizes that by the end of the talk, the listener will either decide against pursuing greatness or gain a blueprint to start their journey immediately. The speaker clarifies that there is nothing being sold here and asks for help in spreading this message. The answers provided are unconventional, steering away from superficial motivational sayings, implying that real progress requires deeper understanding and effort.
• 15:01 - 20:00: The Importance of Learning The chapter emphasizes the challenges and growth that come from learning. It acknowledges the difficulty and unusual nature of the learning paths people must take, as well as the demands they can place on you. However, it promises transformative results that can exceed expectations. The formula to success discussed in this chapter led the author from being considered unmotivated to achieving various milestones, including personal fitness transformations, founding three successful businesses, maintaining a long-term marriage, amassing a billion views on his content, and gaining over 10 million social media followers. The author encourages readers by noting that following the path of learning could lead to exceptional outcomes, potentially surpassing even his achievements.
• 20:01 - 25:00: Plan and Execute The chapter 'Plan and Execute' emphasizes personal responsibility and empowerment. It highlights the idea that despite the world's unfairness, no one can do the work for you. You have the power to shape your destiny if you push hard enough. Quotes from Jocko Willink and Steve Jobs underline the message: the world is malleable, created by people no smarter than you, so seize the opportunity to exert your will.
• 25:01 - 30:00: Final Thoughts The final chapter encourages readers to wake up, define their own terms of success, and work towards it. It emphasizes the importance of personal power, clarifying that power is not inherently negative. Instead, power should be viewed as the capacity to envision and create a better world. It prompts readers to decide what truly matters to them and align their efforts towards that vision.

The One Video to Watch if you want to win in 2025 | Tom Bilyeu Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 stop lying to yourself you know you have been coasting living at an absolute fraction of your potential all the while that voice deep inside screaming at you that you are meant for something more now I know that feeling because I have been there I was broke ashamed of myself watching my fiance head off to work while I laid in bed wasting my time hours every day this is a true story but that was the beginning not the end now I hated feeling weak and useless so I did
• 00:30 - 01:00 something about it and if you want to crush 2025 like I did you're going to have to use the anger that you feel to change the course of your life personally I channeled all of my frustrations not into the resentment of the world or others but into fuel to improve every single aspect of my life one day I simply decided I'd had enough and I started making rules for myself rules that will serve you if you are trying to make this year into something something
• 01:00 - 01:30 special rule number one once I'm awake no matter what I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less that's a rule that I still live by to this day and I used it to fight my own laziness and fear and I trained myself day after day how to win now I'm making this video because I was recently asked to explain what I did to go from scaming in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car to building three multi-million dollar companies including one unicorn billion dollar business that you've definitely
• 01:30 - 02:00 heard of by the end of it this talk is the answer to that question by the end of it you'll either realize that you don't want to pursue greatness or you're going to have the blueprint that you need to get started today now there's nothing for sale here I would simply ask for help and this is it now let me tell you the answers are not what you think they are not shiny motivational posters or fortune cookie wisdom that stuff feels good but it drives me nuts because it doesn't work the steps you will have
• 02:00 - 02:30 to take are often weird they are sometimes painful and they will demand more of you than you can possibly imagine right now but the results will stagger you following the formula I'm going to walk you through took me from lazy nobody to transforming my physique building three successful companies staying married for more than two decades generating a billion views on my content and building a social following of more than 10 million people and if you walk the same path I know that some of you will end up doing far more than
• 02:30 - 03:00 that now here's the hard truth no matter how unfair the world is no one can save you no one else will do the work even if they wanted to they can't do it for you it's all on you and as joa would say good it means you have the power but only if you can convince yourself to push hard enough and if you can the world will bend to your will as cheesy as that sounds it is absolutely true as Steve Jobs said the world around you was built by people know smarter than you so
• 03:00 - 03:30 you can either stay asleep or you can take notes and get to work because here's the framework first you have to Define your terms what does success mean to you you're now on a path to gaining personal power but you better have that aimed at something that matters to you now power is not a dirty word whoever told you it was has a wildly dysfunctional view of the world power is simply the ability to close your eyes of imagine a world better than this one
• 03:30 - 04:00 open your eyes and have the resilience and balls to gain the skills necessary to make that better World a reality now people are going to tell you that power is bad because those people would do bad things if they had power but that's not you you can point it at something truly amazing you can uplift yourself and those around you it's what I call having an honorable goal you are working to do something to elevate yourself and others
• 04:00 - 04:30 now if you recognize that you're having a biological experience you've got a shot but if you don't you're in trouble you are not a computer or a God you're a person stuck in a body and if you don't master your biology your biology will Master you this is one of the most important things I'm going to talk about today you cannot win if you're sick and tired it's just too hard to be successful so let's start with the following Basics fix your sleep EX exercise I'm talking five or six days a
• 04:30 - 05:00 week eat clean Whole Food whenever possible get lean get strong cut out addictions and for the love of God control your emotions stop believing that because you feel something you should react with that emotion and then maybe most importantly nurture loving relationships in your life now these are all lowlevel things if you can not commit to doing these
• 05:00 - 05:30 things turn the video off right now because nothing else is going to matter everything I'm going to talk about is Downstream of the cognitive optimization that comes from the things on that list trust me most of the things on that list I don't enjoy doing I do because they get my mind in the place that I need it in order to gain the skills that I need to build the things that I'm trying to build in order to make the world a better place all right assuming you've done all of the above the next step is to set a goal a very specific goal not
• 05:30 - 06:00 some fluffy thing like I want more money that's super vague answer how much by when generated from doing what if you want $500,000 in profit by the end of 2025 from building your own YouTube channel then say that set that as your goal be that specific if you want to be at 7% body fat and bench twice your body weight by July 15th then say that goals make demands so that you know what to do
• 06:00 - 06:30 targets give you something to aim at which is going to guide your actions without a hyp specific Target you will waste energy because even if you're busy you're not moving in a clear direction again you're going up against the chaos of the world and if you're going to overcome the chaos of the World and Achieve some very specific outcome that you're trying to achieve you've got to know exactly where you're trying to end up otherwise you're going to spread your time and energy all over the place
• 06:30 - 07:00 the next thing you have to do is take extreme ownership no more blaming anyone else if you fail that's on you the world is unfair who cares your job is to win anyway as Kobe Bryant said in one of my all-time favorite quotes booze don't block dunks what did you mean by that it doesn't matter how much people hate you doesn't matter what color your skin is what your gender is how tall you are or how rich your parents are it doesn't
• 07:00 - 07:30 even matter if the game is rigged against you the fact is you can get so good at something that people cannot stop you the greatest athletes in the world were paid millions of dollars to stop Kobe Bryant from scoring and despite that he scored 81 points in a single game he was simply better at playing than other people Champions do not complain about ref's bad luck or bad jeans they outwork they outsmart they Outlast and they outperform everyone you've got to own your results and if
• 07:30 - 08:00 you can bear that burden if you can bear the fact that there's no one to blame but you for the state of your life your entire life then you'll stay focused on getting better on gaining the skills that are necessary to win against any opponent if you're pointing the fingers of responsibility at other people you are going to fail because you won't stay focused in the one thing that you can control which is your effort now a quick side note about excuses the most
• 08:00 - 08:30 Sinister thing about excuses is that they're valid maybe the world really is against you maybe you really are like Mugsy Bogues 53 and you've got to figure out how to win in basketball against people who are pushing seven feet tall but if that's the position that you're in you either play to win given the limitations that you have or you accept the excuse that basketball is just simply not for people built like you if you take the excuse sure nobody's going to blame you but you'll never
• 08:30 - 09:00 achieve the things that you want to achieve so remember the way to get out from under any excuse is not to prove that it's wrong you probably won't be able to it's to decide that you're going to win anyway and once you decide then your actions are going to follow and then you have a chance of gaining the skills that you need and this is a game of skill acquisition now if this is a game of skill acquisition ask yourself this why don't more people win and the answer answer is most people quit but
• 09:00 - 09:30 you have to understand why they quit so you can avoid that trap most people quit because they build their self-esteem around being better faster stronger smarter those are all extremely fragile positions because you're always going to find somebody who is better than you at something and failure is the most information Rich data stream on planet Earth so if you want to succeed in the long run you've got be willing to fail
• 09:30 - 10:00 in the short term in fact one of my superpowers is that I can tolerate being embarrassed longer than most people at any one moment in my career you could point at me and laugh and see that I was doing something wrong see that I was failing see that I wasn't generating the momentum that I needed to generate but I knew in all of those moments as long as I was learning from my mistakes I could get the skills that I needed to keep pushing forward so I don't care if I fail in public I know that I will learn from the experience even if people are laughing at me
• 10:00 - 10:30 now most people simply cannot stand that the reason they can't stand it is their self-esteem is built around winning so when they're not winning their self-esteem is damaged and they feel badly about myself but I don't because my self-esteem is built around being the learner I value myself for my willingness to stare nakedly at my inadequacies I want to know what I suck at I want to face the things that I'm bad at because the more I look at what I
• 10:30 - 11:00 suck at the better I actually feel about myself because I'm willing to do the things that other people are not I'm willing to do what success demands and I have forced myself to build my self-esteem around that thing around my willingness to go yeah I actually am bad at that thing that you're laughing at me for but I'm not going to be bad at it forever so I keep my head in the game and I stay focused on getting better instead of worrying about what other people think about me because of that I keep learning while everyone else Fades
• 11:00 - 11:30 Into Obscurity let's take a break from the show to talk about something I'm all too familiar with the misery of allergies and sinus congestion when you can't breathe properly Nothing Else Matters your focus drops your energy tanks and forget about getting quality sleep after years of battling allergies I've tried everything which is why I'm excited about nage nasal care this is nothing like those old school nasal rinses it's an Innovative system that uses gentle suction and saine flow to
• 11:30 - 12:00 clear your nasal passages in as little as 30 seconds it's completely drug-free using only purified saine no side effects no dependency just clean clear breathing the design is straightforward just hold it up to your nose and Press Start if you're tired of struggling with congestion here's an exclusive offer for impact Theory listeners when you order a nage starter pack you'll get a free cleaning kit this offer is only available at navage.com com/ impact that's n a v
• 12:00 - 12:30 ae.com impact and now let's get back to the show the harsh reality is failure breaks most people emotionally it's just too ego damaging and they haven't done what we talked about earlier which is to get out from under their emotions so when I feel badly about myself I don't let it control my day I know that Glory awaits me if I can identify not as the winner
• 12:30 - 13:00 but instead identify as the learner anytime you learn if that makes you feel better about yourself then you're going to stay focused on learning and if this really is a game of skill acquisition if you feel better about yourself as you're learning and you stay in that Loop then you're going to get better than the other people who are worried simply about being better faster stronger smarter and that when you focus on learning is how you get into an upward spiral now most people Define themselves by where they're at right now
• 13:00 - 13:30 that is a trap you should never value yourself for accomplishments value yourself for the sincere pursuit of an honorable goal the sincere Pursuit playing to win leaving it all out on the field really trying to get the skills that you need to go farther than you've ever gone before and honestly trying to go farther than anyone has ever gone before this isn't just about competing with yourself you really are if you embark on the quest to
• 13:30 - 14:00 become great you really are competing against other people and so this is about being honest about what your goals are going to demand of you now focus on skill acquisition so you can become capable of a championship performance but notice I don't say focus on skill acquisition so you can win a championship no one can guarantee you success I can guarantee the struggle but when you chase growth not validation now you've got a chance of being Unstoppable again you get into that upward spiral of
• 14:00 - 14:30 learning every time you fail now I can hear you guys saying Tom that's fine for you you're somebody special you look at my success and you write me off as somebody that has something that you don't but that is absolutely false when I was young those closest to me not strangers the people that knew me best assumed I was going to fail my mother my father-in-law my own best friend all of them assumed I was destined to fail now they weren't mean about it but none less
• 14:30 - 15:00 all of them believed and ultimately confessed that they believed that I was going to fail now they didn't masses me they just didn't count on the fact that I had the drive to get better now I'm not asking any of you that want to do something great to believe that you're special you're probably not you're almost certainly average as am I and that's enough because the average human is designed to get better humans are the ultimate ad adaptation machine but
• 15:00 - 15:30 adaptation requires a Relentless drive for improvement now here's the catch the secret that I have saved until now if you want to be relentless in your pursuit of something you have to care a lot about what you're pursuing in fact this whole speech could actually be summed up in a single sentence if you want success more than a drowning man wants his next breath of air you will find a way to make it happen that's the whole
• 15:30 - 16:00 thing there's no way for me to give you the exact ABC of what you need to do that's why all I'm talking about is framework because I don't know what you're going to pursue I don't know what challenges you're going to be faced with I don't know how the world is going to change but I know the question that you're going to be asked is can you build enough desire to fight through all of the difficulties of becoming great look around you for the vast majority of humanity the answer is no they're not willing to do the things to meet the demands of
• 16:00 - 16:30 greatness so the question for you is are you like everyone else because if you are you're going to fail if you're in the grips of your emotions you're going to fail if you've built your self-esteem about around being better faster stronger smarter you're going to fail but if you can decide and it is a decision if you can decide to get yourself to commit to having a mission in your life something you really care about and then you commit to ratcheting
• 16:30 - 17:00 up your desire then you'll have what you need to get so good that you can't be stopped but you can't lose sight of that you have to build that desire and the goal is to get so good at something that matters to you that no one can stop you from doing it to beat this point to death this is a game success is a game of skill acquisition it's not a game of being born lucky it's not a game of knowing the right people it's a game of
• 17:00 - 17:30 caring about something so deeply that when people mock your failures you just keep plowing forward and practicing and getting better and failing your way upwards because remember information comes from failure you learn by trying something seeing why it broke down why it didn't work coming up with a better way to do it and then trying again okay here's another important rule for you to embrace never and I mean never stand
• 17:30 - 18:00 still never stand still if you fail that's fine that's information adjust and try again but you must absolutely never allow yourself to stand still if it's a big decision and you really don't know what to do fair enough give yourself three days to think about it but then if you have to just guess choose randomly put things in a hat and draw them out I don't care how you do it but move forward and learn because failure is the most information Rich data stream on planet Earth that's why the only mistake is standing still and
• 18:00 - 18:30 that is the mistake that virtually everybody makes they are so afraid of being made fun of they are so afraid of looking stupid they're so afraid of that negative emotion they feel when other people are pointing and laughing at them that they would rather live a small life than face that ridicule because of where they've tied up their ego but if you build your self-esteem around learning now all of a sudden you get better now I know that sometimes you're going to have to take nearly random
• 18:30 - 19:00 action so the key to ensure that you're never pretending to pursue your goals is to use kpis okay kpi is a key performance indicator you're going to use these key performance indicators to track your progress so if you're trying to get stronger and add muscle track your weights set a time frame work backwards to know how much you need to add this week or this month in order to hit your goal so if you set a six-month goal or a
• 19:00 - 19:30 year goal now back into okay well if I'm going to achieve this over a year what would I need to do in the next week the next month and make sure that you're on track and if you're not on track it's time for a new strategy I don't ever want you to fear changing strategy but I want you to be very skeptical if you find yourself wanting to give up and focus on a new goal I see this a lot I see this in Gold chasing I see this in relationships people that like the beginning of something when they're not yet being forced to face their in adequacies because they are still
• 19:30 - 20:00 building their self-esteem around being better faster stronger smarter and when they do that as soon as they get to that part where it gets hard or boring they quit and let me tell you boring kills just as many goals as fear you've got to be willing to push through to do the hard boring practice to get better so if you find yourself wanting to start over all the time on something new that's probably just you being weak here's a pro tip that I've learned the hard way
• 20:00 - 20:30 if you're going to do something amazing with your life if you're really going to achieve greatness you've got to focus like your life depends on it getting good requires an ungodly amount of effort an ungodly amount of effort the world is hard the world is chaotic and if you're going to force it to bend to your will then you've got to have laser light Focus if you're spreading your energy across a whole bunch of different goals each thing will have less energy behind it I will often talk about the Sun so you go outside it's bright sunny day it's wonderful you can tan but if
• 20:30 - 21:00 you take out a magnifying glass you can light something on fire because you are focusing the energy of the sun now if something as gigantic as the nuclear reactor in the sky can be diffused enough that you can lay out in it but Focus allows you to light something on fire imagine how little you can accomplish if you don't Focus your energies like the sun if you find that magnifying glass and you point
• 21:00 - 21:30 everything you've got at one thing you wildly increase the likelihood that you'll be successful and the more things that you pursue the less likely you're going to be to achieve any of them so cut out anything that doesn't yield the desired Improvement in the kpi that you're tracking you also need to limit distractions and you need to be ready to sacrifice comfort for achievement now I know a lot a lot of people are going to have a hard time with that one
• 21:30 - 22:00 but the reality is if you want to do something great it is going to ask you to pay an extraordinary price I tell people all the time it doesn't matter who you are today what does matter is who you want to become and the price that you're willing to pay to get there if you're not willing to pay the price that your goals demand then you're never going to make any progress all right last but not least you've got to learn to embrace suffering not all stress is bad now make sure that you love love what you're pursuing because it does not
• 22:00 - 22:30 make sense to suffer if you're not going after something that is uplifting you and those around you it's got to be something that you truly believe in and that you truly believe will make not only you better but the world better if it does go all in and if it doesn't don't this is what I call fulfillment fulfillment is the only emotional state that can survive even grief and an evolutionary algorithm has been placed in your brain that goes like this you are going to have to work hard to gain a
• 22:30 - 23:00 set of skills that allow you to make progress towards a goal that uplifts you and other people okay it's something that you care about for your own private reasons you do not need to justify it to the world but if it is an honorable goal that uplifts you and others pour yourself into it because when you do that you will be fulfilled but it absolutely demands that you work hard now believe this the world does not owe
• 23:00 - 23:30 you greatness and even if it did no one is going to hand it to you and even if they wanted to they can't this is The Sword and the stone moment you have to wrench that sword free by becoming a person worthy of wielding that power it will take bloody knuckles and pure grit but it is possible now you can stand on the sidelines making excuses and wasting your potential that is your right or you can step into the arena and fight
• 23:30 - 24:00 until you break through if you want to leave a mark on the world if you want your name to echo through history you're going to have to work you will fail you will stumble and people will laugh on the way but let them failure is your teacher not the people laughing and suffering is simply the toll that you have to pay to to forge yourself into someone who commands
• 24:00 - 24:30 respect first from yourself then naturally from those you love and I beg of you to forget about everybody else you will get nowhere blaming the world for being unfair even though it obviously is own your results relentlessly drive to get better you now have the blueprint so let me leave you with a final quote from Alexis Carroll something that you can hold on to in your darkest hours which I guarantee are
• 24:30 - 25:00 coming man cannot remake himself without suffering for he is both the marble and the sculptor you can become anything you set your mind to if you're willing to pay the price make 2025 the greatest year ever if you like this conversation check out this episode to learn more in your pursuit of a goal that you care about you going to end up getting in a rut in
• 25:00 - 25:30 that moment most people give up I'm going to tell you what you need to do if you want to be part of the 8% that actually sees their goals through if you struggle getting up and getting your day started early even