Tony Robbins on finding your passion, competency, and market

(upbeat music) - You give a lot of advice to people who are the top of their game or trying to reach the top of their game. - Yes. - What kind of advice would you give to someone who's just starting out, someone who's just graduating and needs to know what to do to be successful. They want to be the next Paul Tudor Jones. Or they want to be the next Tony Robbins. What do you say? - Well I think the most important thing is what do you really want, not who you want to be, you don't want to be Tony Robbins, I love Paul, you don't want to be Paul. He's a great role model to say the least. I love the man because he's one of the greatest contributors I know. What he's done with Robin Hood and what he's done to his life personally is extraordinary. But role models should be examples for you. But you've got to decide what do you want to give? What are you here to deliver? I think you're going to fall in love with whose lives do you want to touch and through what vehicle? You can't fall in love with your product or your service today, it's going to change. You've got to fall in love with the client. And so you got to decide, who do I want to serve? And you got to know more about their needs, their wants, their fears, their desires than they do. And you've got to anticipate how to meet those. And you got to remember that technology's going to change, the competition's going to change it, the government's going to change the rules. It's three dimensional chess and unless you are constantly striving to be ahead of that path and find a way to add more value you're going to get eaten up. I mean, what is it, you know you got four out of 100 businesses that make it after 10 years. 96% fail so if you're going to have an advantage you need to say what is it I want to do? Now, I would say that you also have to say, like a lot of people say find your passion. I say you got to find your passion, you got to find your competency and you got to find the market. Right, a lot of people have passion but no competency. And so they'll be struggling a good portion of their life. You got to make sure you match those two but you also have to find a market. Where can I serve a group of people? What's a problem I can solve that's perhaps scalable in size if you want to do something on scale. Or you got to say I want to be a great artist and here's what's going to fulfill me and here's how I'm going to keep growing. But the common denominator I learned from my original mentor is a man named Jim Rohn, he's a personal development speaker. I remember I first met him and I had four fathers, we were totally broke, one of the reasons this year I'm feeding 100,000,000 people, I fed 56,000,000 so far myself, and I've got matching funds so we're up to 82,000,000 people, is, I've been feeding people my whole life, 42,000,000 over the course of my life, but when I was 11 somebody fed my family. We had no food at Thanksgiving which we wouldn't have starved but wouldn't have had a Thanksgiving treat, and somebody came and took care of us. I tell you that because my fathers were hardworking people, all four of 'em. They were always broke, they were always struggling. So I met Jim Rohn and I'm like how is this possible? I could see people that worked a third of the time of my father and they're wealthy. And my father works his guts out and we don't have money for food. I mean, how is that possible? Part of it is how that money was spent, you know. Abuse and alcohol and things of that nature. But what Jim Rohn taught me was that it's really, in the world we all have intrinsic value but in the financial world it's about how can you become more valuable to people than anybody else? And I think today you have to anticipate that this is a knowledge workplace now. It is not brawn, it is a capacity to know and to utilize information, and it's wisdom, to be able to act and produce results faster than anybody else and if it was me starting my career, I'd be saying where is the market where the greatest opportunity is that's going to fulfill me and give me a chance to make a difference and then what skills and tools do I get now, but how do I keep upping my game constantly? 'Cause Rohn taught me, he said work harder on yourself than you ever do on your job or your business. Because if you can become more valuable, sizeably so, you will produce an amazing result. You see people that work at McDonald's and work their guts out time-wise, they work hard. But what they're doing you can teach someone to do with the devices we have these days in about 30 minutes, right, or less. If you see a David Tepper who, you know, gets paid $4,000,000,000 or somewhere in that nature, you go it's so incredibly unfair. Yes and no. When people are getting a few basis points for their money in a savings account and this man's getting people a 42% return and we know what that means in terms of multiplying over time, he's being rewarded for adding massive value. We may not like that value, you may not like what he's doing, but it's adding value and I think we all have to say what is my niche that I will love, that I'm competent in, and there's a market for and then how do I just constantly and neverendingly improve so that I have that cutting edge and being able to give more. - Easy. - Not easy, worth it, worth it. 'Cause the alternative is settle for a world where you're constantly dropping behind 'cause everything's moving forward and technology's making it happen faster than ever before. And so you well know, in Silicon Valley, they used to do annual reviews and now they're doing quarterly reviews. Some people are doing monthly reviews. They're doing them on like this and if somebody's not adding value they're gone. The world is more competitive than any time in history. So you can say I don't like it but the best study of life is how it is and it feels incredible to constantly grow. You've asked me what does it take to be fulfilled, grow or die. If you're not growing in a relationship, the relationship's getting hurt. If you're not growing in terms of your energy, you're getting weaker. If you're not growing in your skillsets, you're going to fall behind. And if you grow you have something to give. And I really believe, corny as it sounds, the secret to living is giving, is a phrase I wrote in my book when I was 18, when I was really frustrated with my life feeling nothing's going in the right direction and I realized I was so focused on what I was doing and what I wasn't getting, I wasn't focused enough on what I was giving. And I think when we give is when we feel most alive. And don't get me wrong, we all can receive and deserve to receive, and I've certainly received, but there's nothing like knowing what you've done makes a difference. And I think that motivates people more than money ever will. Some people money more, but not the majority. The ability to create, to add value, to have autonomy, those are pieces the human spirit grows from. And companies like LinkedIn, and I'm not just blowing smoke your way, 'cause Reid Hoffman's a friend of mine as you well know, you guys created a culture like that and that's one of the reasons you've exploded the way you have and expanded what you're doing.