The Psychology and Skills of Exceptional Leaders | Tony Robbins

Hi, I'm James Ledbetter. I'm the editor of Inc. Magazine and Inc.com. I'm very pleased to be joined this morning by one of the most esteemed authors and leadership experts in the United States today. He doesn't need much of an introduction, so I won't give you one. We're very pleased to be talking this morning to Tony Robbins. Tony, thanks so much for coming in. It's great to see you. I want to talk today principally about leadership, something that you think and write a lot about. Why don't we start by you giving me a definition of what leadership is from your point of view? It's interesting. When I was really young, starting out, I was looking for answers to leadership in you. Look up in Webster's Dictionary, leadership, and it says, one who leads. Helpful. Really helpful. I believe that leadership is really a skill of influence. It is the most important skill that any human being can master. I don't think of leadership as a position. I see it as a skill, a tool that all of us have to have. In other words, the quality of your life, I really believe, comes down to your level of leadership. Other people don't have to follow you to be a leader, but you have to live life on your terms. The first person you have to influence is yourself. Whether you're fit or fat, whether your kids are on drugs or not, it's who has more influence, the guy in the street corner or you. Whether you're fit or fat is can you influence your own hands, your own body, your own mind to do what's necessary. I think to be able to influence the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, and the actions of another human being, that's what leadership is. Quality leadership, obviously authentic leadership, is one where it's servant leadership. You're looking to influence those thoughts, feelings, emotions, and actions for a greater good, not just for yourself. I think the people that master that are the people that you know about. They're captains of industry. They're people that are celebrities because they've learned how to influence people. They are some of the greatest teachers, some of the greatest scientists, because you can't just come up with ideas. Ideas will die on your lips unless you become a person of influence. That's what leadership is. One of the things that I've seen you say in the past about leadership is that in order to become a leader, you need to destroy the limitations within your own mind. What does it mean to destroy a limitation inside your mind? First of all, if you look at a business, the chokehold on the growth of any business is always the psychology and the skill set of the leader. It's 80% psychology and 20% mechanics, meaning so many small businesses, the owner might be an incredible innovator. Maybe they write incredible code. Maybe they're a tremendous influencer, but they don't know the economic side of their business. They find themselves getting in trouble because somebody's giving them financial information after the fact. They don't have true financial intelligence to make decisions, and they get caught up. Can you give me an example of a business like that? You don't have to name names. I'll pick my own examples. I had several companies early in my career that were near bankruptcy because I would sit down and I knew how to produce products that would change people's lives. I knew how to market. I knew how to build teams of people, but what I didn't know was finance. I'd look and say, okay, how are we doing? They'd go, oh, you got a 20% profit. You got $2 million in profit in those days, a little tiny company. I'd come to the end of the year, and there was no cash. I didn't know that profit is a theory. So just not having that skill, or someone might be really great in finance, but they're not any good in marketing. So sometimes it's a skill problem, but 80% of it, you can solve those skills. You can get those skills if you can change your psychology. But when you accept that, oh my God, the market's down, or oh my God, the economy is down, when you allow the environment to control your psychology, you're not going to win. There's an interesting guy named Mel Fisher. You may remember from back in the 90s. If the name lingers in your mind, he was a guy that spent, I think it was 27 years if I remember correctly, looking for this Spanish galleon that was supposed to be filled with gold. Do you remember that? Yes, of course. And he found it after 27 years. Now here's my question for you, Jim. Five years into it, you've worked every day for five years, and you found nothing. What are you going to do? And how are you going to raise more money, because you have run out of money? Ten years into it, 15 years into it, 20 years into it. So I say to people in business, I say to them, you want to understand psychology? Here's the biggest challenge for most businesses. They think they've maxed what's possible, because they think they've tried everything. Once you believe that, your belief controls you, and you miss the innovations, you miss the answers. This guy found that gold because he had three beliefs. First belief was, there's a treasure out there, and he was certain it was out there, even though he didn't have any absolute evidence. And that certainly drove him. But if you knew there was treasure in your business, that's not enough. You've got to also believe, I will find it. And you also have to believe, it's worth it. Right? And without those three beliefs, he never would have found it. And so changing the psychology of the leader is what will change a business faster than anything else. Changing their skills will also do it, but lots of people have the skill, and they don't execute. And you and I both know, you know, execution's more important than knowledge. Knowledge is trumped by execution every single day. And that execution comes by changing the psychology. I can't even look for a Lego with my son for ten minutes. If I can't find the piece in ten minutes, I forget 27 years. But I guess my second question on that idea of destroying the limitations is, how do you do it? Should more leaders be in psychotherapy? Should they be mountain climbing? What are the mechanics of changing a limitation? I mean, after all, if it's your own limitation, presumably, you know, you put it there. You're probably attached to it on some level. Well, unconsciously, maybe. But let's just talk about how it happens. People are not one way. We are a reflection of the states we're living in. When you're in a frustrated state, an overwhelmed state, a tired state, your brain processes completely differently than if you're in a passionate state, whether you're feeling determined, whether you're feeling committed, whether you feel completely resolved. So learning to change the leader's state, learning how to change your own state, because, you know, one of the silliest questions I get asked is, you're not really that happy, are you? You have bad days, don't you? Of course I have, you know, bad times. But I don't have bad days anymore, and it's not BS. It's because I've trained myself like an athlete to go in these peak states so often that they're just natural for me. It's like building a muscle. So it's not like I'm so smart or I'm just so positive. It's just like, why would I waste my time stressing out? I have a 90-second rule. I'll stress for 90 seconds, but stress is not going to solve it. Let me put myself back in a different state. And so the way I do that is I use my body, because I've done this with athletes for decades, with billionaire businessmen. If you see somebody gets in a slump of some sort, great athlete, Paul Tudor Jones, one of the greatest financial traders in the history of the world, you know, I've coached him for 22 years. When I came to see him, this is a man who made 200% in 1987 when the stock market had its biggest single crash in the day, percentage-wise still. He made 200% for his clients. More money than anybody could dream of. Then he went to the moon, and he went down to earth, and he lost money. So I was brought in to turn him around. Well, how do you turn a guy like that around? I watched him. His shoulders were down. He was breathing like this, he's sitting like this the whole time, because he'd been through these failures, and it started to get stored in his body. Now in this state, this man is a genius, couldn't do it. So I watched films when he was at his best, and he's standing up, and he's doing this, and he's, this is what I'm going to do, sell this, make this happen. And the movement, the intensity, the way he used his face, and so I showed him a video of himself today, and showed him a video when he was at his best, and I said, what do you notice? He was like, those are two different people. I said, yes, but we can get back to this guy by just using the body first. Trying to use your mind, you'll go in circles. But I've been teaching for years that a radical change in your body instantly changes your biochemistry. 38 years I've taught it. Two years ago at Harvard, they did a study, scientifically proven, what I've been teaching all these decades, where they call it power postures. Yeah, the Wonder Woman stance. Yeah, standing like Wonder Woman or Superman for two minutes, or like you see guys like this, pull back like that for two minutes, literally increases your testosterone in your biochemistry within two minutes by 20%. It drops cortisol by 18%, which is the stress hormone, and increases your chance of taking a more risky behavior, which is what's required of a leader, by 33%, two minutes. Now that's just standing a certain way. I show people use their voice, their body, their movement, which is 10 times more dynamic than just a stiff stance. And when you change your state, your mental, emotional state, you change your performance. Haven't you had times when you have like, can't remember how to spell a difficult word like the, or your own email or something like that? Really tired, like can't remember your cousin's name. Yeah, exactly. And then you've had times where you're in the flow, where after you do something, you're like, I did that. I don't know how I did it, but I did it. I was in the flow. Well, you're the same person. The only difference is state. So training yourself to be in a peak state every day, I mean, you know, you think about like a great businessman, think of a great entertainer like Elton John has been around in rock and roll for what, like 40, how many years is it, 40 years? Yeah, early 70s, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's mind boggling. And most people still like some sample of his music. Well, he's gotta have days when he gets up to entertain when he thinks, if you make me sing that Daniel song one more time, I'm going postal, right? But he never does. Every single time, he's in that same beautiful state. That's not because he's naturally like that. He's trained himself to do that. Like a great athlete trains himself. That's what leaders have to do. The state of the union, the state of the company is the culture, and the culture starts at the head. Whoever that leader is, their state impacts everybody else. So training yourself to be in that peak state is the key to it all. Can anyone be a leader? And I ask that for sort of two reasons. One, just my own curiosity for supply and demand, right? If everybody's a leader, then who's a follower? And we gotta have leaders and followers. But secondly, I'm curious what you think about innate qualities versus teachable qualities. First, let's just look at what's the scarcest resource we probably need in our society today. It's great leaders. I mean, look at the political process that we're going through right now. If there's any evidence that we're hurting for leadership, you see it in government, you see it in businesses, there aren't that many great leaders. Now, so then the presupposition for a lot of people would be then, well, it must be this innate talent. There are people that are born and upbred, maybe born with more certainty, like people are willing to take more risks. There certainly are people of that nature. But anyone can be a leader in something that they decide to become masterful in. You can be the leader of your own life. Everyone should lead their own life. You should be the leader of your family. And so I think everyone can be a leader, but there are different types and different styles of leadership. And I believe that leadership is a skill. It starts with having something that you're committed to that's larger than yourself, a vision that's bigger than yourself. If there's a large enough vision, if you have enough passion for that vision, then you're going to have enough drive to actually start to execute. And then leadership is the capacity to disappoint your disappointment. Because you're going to have to go through failures, and instead of making failures, you're going to have to learn from those. And then it comes down to the skill of influence, once again. And so anyone can learn. Anyone can develop a vision. Anyone can uncover their passion. Anyone can learn to influence. That's a skill that can be learned. So yes, leadership can be taught, and leadership can be learned. Can everyone be a leader? The answer is yes, because there's so many different things to lead in, and it's not a situation like, you have to follow me for you to lead. I just have to know what it is I truly stand for and follow accordingly. It's not necessarily a zero-sum equation. My leadership doesn't take away from someone else's leadership. The fact that, as a boss, people have to follow me doesn't mean that they themselves can't be leaders. What a great boss wants is someone who is. They want to hire leaders. You want to hire people who are smarter than you are, if at all humanly possible, right? Now, some people's ego doesn't believe that's possible. One or two, I believe. But I really think, if you really look at what will free you as a leader, it's recruiting other leaders. Yeah. Training other leaders. That's what allows an organization to grow. Because what does a leader do? They get the result. They find a way to victory. They find a way to create breakthroughs with teams of people. They don't just do it themselves. Otherwise, you can't leverage. You can't grow. How important is that? Where on the hierarchy of things that people need to lead is that ability to connect? I really believe, in order to influence people, you've got to know what already influences them. The mistake that we make is we don't connect enough to figure out who this person is, and what most of us do is try to lead other people by influencing them the way we'd be influencing them. They try to influence their kid to clean the room the way that would make you do it. But even though they're your kid, they're different than you. And so they're going to do it for a different set of reasons than what you would do it for. You might have done it because someone told you to, but your kid's going to eat gum all day long. That's not it. There has to be something else. It's a sense of freedom they get from it, or a sense of mastery, something that's going to move them. So I always say there are two things that influence everyone. If you want to be a leader, you have to know how to change other people's states. A person is in a no state, a person's in an angry state, a person's in a frustrated state. You have to be able to influence their state, because if you change their state, you're going to change the result they get. But the second thing you have to understand is what are people's blueprints? Blueprint's my shorthand for what are their values? What do they believe? What do they fear? I always say to people that life is found in the dance between what you desire most and what you fear most. If I want to lead you and support you, I've got to know your goals, your desires. I've got to know what you're scared about, what you're fearful about, what stresses you out. And if I understand that, I can communicate in a way that will inspire you to maximize not only when I'm here, that's management. Leadership is I'm gone and you've raised your own standard and you're going to continue to perform at a higher level. It strikes me that so much depends on an internal mechanism of when something works. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts about that. I mean, am I a success if I'm hitting my numbers? Am I a success if I'm hitting my goals? Do we carry around ideas of success that are unrealistic and that may even hold us back? For sure. There's a program I've done for 25 years called Date with Destiny. In fact, I was just at South by Southwest and we aired a documentary. It was done by Joe Berlinger, who's Academy Award nominated, brilliant documentarian. This is the one about you? It's not about my life. It's just one program I do each year. I see a couple hundred thousand people in 13 countries and then we have one program we do for 2,500 people, the most intimate program I do, six days and nights. I mean the documentary. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. And in that compression of that experience, what I really have him show people is how people create real and lasting change. I made him agree, because it's his documentary, that he'd wait a year to publish it and follow up with people a year later to show what's really going on. It's just coming out now. But the reason I bring it up is, if you're going to actually produce change, you've got to become a student of what actually works. I have not lost a suicide out of thousands in my lifetime, knock on wood, in 38 years. I'm the guy that gets the phone call when the kid is melting down. I got a phone call, President Clinton calling me and he says to me, I'm going to impeach in the morning. What should I do? My first response is, could you have called me sooner? It's like, come on. So when you learn to influence, when you learn the skills of influence, and you can learn them from so many different locations, what you're able to accomplish is breathtaking to other people. I mean, when people see someone who's suicidal, I have one night of this event, and I call it You Have No Problems, and in a room of 2,500 people, on average, there's 12 people that are suicidal. And I say, who's suicidal? Let's handle it now. And every one of them is different, and no one breathes. And the reason it works is because I do what you just said. I connect, I uncover what are their belief structures. For someone to want to kill themselves, they've got to believe that dying is less painful than living. And I've got to shift that, or they're not going to change, they're going to kill themselves. And so how to do that is an art, but it's also a science. And what I tell people is, success leaves clues. If you find someone who's a great leader, the best thing you could possibly do is go model that person. Figure out what they do different than anybody else, and you could save yourself a decade by spending a few weeks modeling somebody that strong. We hear a lot in recent years about inequality in our society, and the way that the growth of wealth has been concentrated in the hands of very few, perhaps at the expense of the many, depending on one's interpretation. And I wonder what you have to say about people who say, well, the problem is not what's in my mind, the problem is what's not in my pocket. Are there instances in which people are genuinely held back by their lack of material resources? Well, of course there are. Half the planet lives on $2.50 a day. The challenge is, the people that complain that they're the 99% against the 1% are actually the 1%. And you say, Tony, what are you talking about? Those people down there who are in those tents downstairs a few years ago, and if you watch them typing on their iPhones and having a Starbucks drink, they think that they are really suffering. But in reality, if you're in poverty in this country, you're in the 1% of earners in the world. You're the top 1%. So if you really care about the 1%, you've got to care about everybody. But the real challenge, I think, is not so much money as it is that the world has changed. If you are a blue-collar worker, if you're an unskilled worker, meaning you're not tech-oriented, you're not cognitively driven in your job, you're going to have trouble. And I don't care what the politicians say about bringing these jobs back, there are no jobs to bring back. And the reason is because technology is making labor less valuable. And that's why jobs don't produce as much, unless you're high-cognitive, high-decision-making, high-tech. Those people have no problem. There's a 1% unemployment for people who make $100,000 or more. It's so tiny because they've learned to become more valuable. I always tell people the most valuable lesson I got from my mentor, Jim Rohn, was I asked my father who worked two jobs, we were always broke, we had no money for food, and we lived in a community we moved to, which I thought they were all rich and we were on the other side of the tracks. It was lower middle class, but compared to where we lived before, these people seemed rich compared to us. And I just didn't understand it. And Jim said to me, Tony, it's not about the value of your soul, it's about the value of you in the marketplace. And your father's skills are not that valuable. He used to take, he was an underground parking attendant, and he would take people's ticket and make change. Well, the research now shows, it's being done at Yale, it's being done overseas in England as well, and they found that 40% of all jobs they project in the next 10 years are going to disappear because of technology. It's going to be replaced by an algorithm, it's going to be changed, you know, all these guys on Wall Street, you're seeing all these algorithms take over and they're getting rid of all these traders. Right? It's changing radically in these hedge funds. There's three million truck drivers. Self-driving cars are here, in the next five years they will be the standard, certainly within seven or eight years. Are you going to hire someone who can only work eight hours a day and sometimes gets drunk or can make a mistake when you can buy a machine, write down the machine, and be in a position where it works 24 hours a day driving? But no one is telling these drivers this, and they have to retool now. So technology is the biggest challenge. Labor is less valuable because of efficiencies with technology, and it's going to get better and better for technology, which is scary when you think about what's going to happen for jobs. So I say to people, you've got to participate in your own rescue. You've got to retool yourself. The idea that Bernie Sanders has of providing free education sounds wonderful, but the education he wants to do is community college. There are no skill sets in community colleges today, for the most part, that are going to prepare you for the economy or a job that's there. So what is that going to do? You're just going to waste more money, more time. We need to retool ourselves. The government's not going to do it for you. And a great leader in a company is retraining their people all the time. The training never stops because that is the innovative, creative marketing edge is your own people. Most companies do less training today than they did 20 or 30 years ago. I know. It's crazy. So where do you get the training? I think they have to self-educate. I mean, I'm an example of that myself. You have to say, what's an area that I want to become masterful in because dabblers will never have any financial freedom. If you're going to run a company, you've got to find what is your niche. What is it you're going to do better than anybody else? Every one of us individuals have to say that and then say, now, where do I get that education? In a world that we live in today with the internet, where there's education from all the world, from MIT, from Harvard, online, and there are people you can go to work for who you could become a mentee of. There's just so many approaches, but you can't have a standard education and expect to have an extraordinary life. It's not going to happen. The one breakthrough for all leaders is constant, never-ending improvement, and that means educating yourself and continuing to develop even greater emotional mastery because that's what affects whether you execute or not. It really is remarkable what's available online now. You can learn Economics 101 with Robert Shiller at Yale, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, for free. Okay, maybe you've got to buy a textbook, but you can afford the textbook. Think about all the possibilities that are available. The opportunity for self-education is there. We have to change our psychology from, I'm going to do what everybody else does and I'm mad because it doesn't work anymore, to the reality is this is the greatest time to be alive if you're growing, you're learning, you're educating, and you're developing valuable skills. It's like if you go to work for McDonald's, I don't know, I think the average I read recently is $7.75 an hour in the United States working for McDonald's. The skill sets, the value you provide can be taught to anyone in about 20 minutes. David Tepper made, what, $3.5 billion, I think, last year. He produced, I think it was a 40% return, right, 41% return. In a world, you go, that's, those billionaires, those 1%ers, that's not 1%, he's the .0001%, but my point is the added value he did for all those families who would have been getting 33 basis points, half a percent, 1%, right, well, it'll take them 72 years to double their money. He's getting those families to get 40% more in a year alone. He's worth $3.5 billion, right. So instead of complaining, you've got to say, where are the skill sets valued in the marketplace and how do I work harder on myself than anything else because if I become more valuable, then I will be able to give more, do more, and change more. When I interviewed Warren Buffett, I asked him the most important investment he ever made in his life, you know what he said it was? I was thinking all the companies he'd done, you know. He said, Tony, go into Dale Carnegie. I said, what? He goes, because by developing myself, that's the most important investment, those skill sets, learning how to persuade, learning how to speak, learning how to influence. All my ideas would have died on my lips if I hadn't been able to influence and I learned it from that little course. Most valuable thing I ever did in my life, he said. So all of us have to understand, this is the most important investment. We have to retool ourselves and leaders, we've got to take other people on our teams and keep growing and that's what's going to make your company invaluable. Not just recruiting new people, but constantly upgrading the skills of the people you have. I met a man last week in Omaha, speaking of Warren Buffett. It wasn't Warren Buffett. A young man who describes himself as a struggling artist. Big fan of yours and that's one reason why I'm bringing it up. His question was, I'm still trying to develop enough resources to live a decent life while also trying to realize these artistic dreams that I have. How can I do both at the same time? I always tell people, I said, tell me your schedule and they'll go, well, I go to work and I work nine to five and I come home and I'm exhausted and so when am I going to start a business? I said, well, what about the other eight hour shift? Because that's what I did, right? I had to be able to work from eight to five in a normal job and then I start working as a janitor because I work my own hours in the middle of the night, but I worked eight to five and literally I'd come home, I'd get a bite to eat, and then I'd start my work at 6 p.m., 6.30 p.m. and I'd go from 6.30 to 2 a.m. and I'd get another seven, eight hours in and that's how I built everything in the beginning. That's honestly what's required and to not do that is to cheat yourself. Because in the end, what we get will never make us happy. I don't care how many stars on your chart, how many academy awards, how much money you make, what makes us happy is progress. Progress equals happiness. If you're not growing, you're dying inside. If your relationship's not growing, it's dying. If your business is not growing, no business stays static. It's either growing or it's dying. If you're at that plateau, you're going down. You better do something right now. So the mindset has to be, this is the way I live going forward. I am a learning machine because we're living in a world where technology is changing things so quickly. I've got to stay ahead and that makes people fulfilled because you become more. You're not just doing something because you have to or because you're trying to keep up. In business, every one of your readers or viewership in this case should really ask themselves the question, who am I in my core? Because we all have different gifts that we can give. In business, I think other than love, your labor is probably the most sacred gift you can give any human being because it's so much of your time, your energy, it's the essence of all you've developed in your life. If you look at it, there's three gifts you could give. There's the gift of a specific art, a skill set, an ability, a talent that you have. And many people are artists. They're not just artists like they paint. They have something that they're just so good at and then they start a business because they go, you know what? I can design better clothing than the person I work for. I can write better code. Of course, running a business is more than just the art of it, right? And most businesses are started by an artist and most businesses you know fail. So if you look at that, you'd say, if I'm an artist, I'm going to struggle because I'm going to want to do my art. A great business person says, it doesn't matter what I care about. I can't fall in love with my product or service. I need to fall in love with my client and I got to constantly changing to meet their needs. Don't fall in love with your product or service. Fall in love with your ideal client. That's a different game. There's another type of person who's more of a manager leader, meaning their gift is not a specific skill set like selling or creating or something. It's managing people and processes and they love it, right? And it's their nature. When it's your nature, you tend to get good at it if you work at it, right? Because it's just who you are. You're reinforced for it. And then there's the entrepreneur. And everybody calls themself an entrepreneur, but there are people that are entrepreneurial and there are entrepreneurs. And an entrepreneur by nature is different. They love risk. They live risk. It's like, Steve Wynn's a dear friend of mine and he took me to Cal and I saw this guy lose $10 million in less than 30 minutes. And the guy got up and gave Steve a hug and said, oh, Mr. Wynn, you're incredible. He actually said, would you take a picture? And I'm used to hearing this, right? So I said, sure. And he goes, no, would you take a picture of me with Mr. Wynn? And he just lost $10 million from him, right? That guy's an entrepreneur, right? You lose $10 million, oh, I'll just figure another way to earn it again, right? It's a different mindset. An entrepreneur is in it for the money, right? They might be in it for other things too, but they do want to make money. The artist is not as committed to making money. They want to make money, but they want to do their art. They want to make that dress. They want to write that code. They want to do what they love. So if you're going to be a successful business person economically, you've got to say, who am I and who do I need? If I'm a great artist, I probably need a good manager leader as a partner because they're going to help me build the organization and I can still do the art that people love and just make sure my art is what they want and not just what I want. If I'm going to grow and scale, who am I? If I'm a manager leader, I might want to tie in with a great entrepreneur because there's going to be something much greater I can be a part of and own a piece of potentially if I'm there. If I'm an entrepreneur, I'm looking for great artists because they're going to be the core of my business. I'm looking at great manager leaders. So you've got to know who you are and who you need. At Inc., we pay a lot of attention to entrepreneurs, what they think. We survey them. We read other people's surveys. One of the questions that comes up over and over again, we'll ask people who identify as entrepreneurs, what's your biggest challenge? Surprisingly, people will volunteer, I don't have the right idea, which fascinates me because if you don't have the right idea, why are you identifying as an entrepreneur in the first place? But at the same time, I don't want to dismiss it. I'm trying to understand and I'm curious. When they say I don't have the right idea, the right idea to... To succeed. To build the business of my dream. You're all about inspiring people and getting people to dig inside themselves. Where do those good ideas come from? Where should these people turn to find those right ideas? Steve Jobs used to say, the best ideas are stolen. He didn't create the mouse. The Apple came, he went to Xerox and they built the mouse. They built that interface. He just went out and basically stole it. I would say Starbucks was modeled. Charles Overseas, he sees this incredible situation in Italy and says, wow, this could translate so well, let's take this back here to Seattle. You don't have to be the originator of an idea. You can see a model that works and just execute better than someone else or see something that works in one place and bring it to where it's not. The idea that you have to be an original thinker, I consider myself to have a lot of original thoughts, but I also believe, holy cow, I stand on the shoulders of so many people that I've learned throughout the years that I've forgotten half of where it's come from because I've read so much, learned so much, interviewed so many people. The ideas come from A, looking for them, being obsessed to find them, and being clear about what you're looking for. I'm looking for something that's going to change lives in this way or that I'm really passionate about in this subject and that I really believe can have a margin. I think that's one thing. I think the other thing is it's all about creating the right questions. I tell people, if you want to create innovation in your organization, if you try to do it like a once-a-year rain dance, it never works. You've got to train your people in a different way, and the way I do it in all my companies and the way we've grown so much is I am always bringing new voices to the table. New voices come up with new conversations, come up with new decisions, new ideas. I met a multibillionaire many years ago, now a good friend of mine, very private man, and I asked him the most important aspect of growing his business is he said, every single year I bring somebody new to the C-suite, every single year, and he said, and the reason is new blood has fresh thinking. They have a fresh voice. They have a fresh perspective, and they shake things up a little bit, and he said, and I get somebody off the team. He does the GE approach to things very often in that area, right? Then the second piece, though, is if you're getting those new voices, you want new conversations, so you need to ask new questions, and one of the questions I teach business to ask is what business are you in? What business are you really in? I got that from Mark Benioff because Steve Jobs mentored him, and he shared with him that when he took over Apple after the debacle, right, they were near bankruptcy, the first question he asked everybody is, what business are you in? They all said the computer business. He said, if that's true, we're in deep trouble. In fact, it's not even called the Apple computer anymore. It's not. It's just Apple, right? What he said is, they worked in it over the years, and at one stage early on, they said, we're in the business of giving people, of connecting people to their passions, and we do it artfully. We do it beautifully. We do it in a way that works, and connecting their passions led them to music, which became the transformation of Apple, right, iTunes, and then that led to phone. I mean, Apple's a phone company now. If they'd said Apple computer, they would not be one of the richest companies in the history of the world. It's when they expanded and increased what their real core business was, so new questions, new voices, new experiments. Twitter was an experiment. It sounded like an idiotic idea, a couple guys on the side doing this project, and it blew up. 140 characters. Yeah, and who wants to do that? What am I going to do that for? Who's going to care? Took off, and it'll deliver. You've got to try experiments. Most aren't going to work, and I think that if you try new experiments, you get new voices, you're asking new questions, you're going to stimulate new answers, but most people do the same thing, and also, when you start saying, I don't have the idea, and you believe I don't have the right ideas, you don't even look for them anymore, right? It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the other things that you've said that intrigues me is that people running a business actually need to be running two businesses. There's the business that you're operating today, and there's the business that you're becoming. That's so critical. And I think of our, again, Inc.'s readers and Inc.com's viewers, we talk to them, and they can barely run the one. It's all they can do to get up at five in the morning and work until one in the morning and raise a family. How do you do that? How do you plan for that, what is, in essence, a second business, Apple 2.0? Yeah, it's the most important thing I teach all of my employees, all my leaders, and all my companies. It's like most people want to do the new business, but if you don't take care of the business you have, you've got a real problem. And then other people are just like totally focused on this business and not anticipating where you've got to go. The way you do it really truly effectively is you've got to develop a system where once a week you spend at least 90 minutes with your team. Your team might be an army of two, your team might be an army of 20,000, but where you work on the business, not in the business. And you take each stage of the business, you put focus on it, because what most businesses do, if you're really good at marketing, that's what you do lots of, and it keeps you going, and then you get bit on the employee side, or you get bit on HR, or you get bit on accounting, or you get bit on sales, or you're really good on innovation, you're innovating so much you're going broke, and you're not able to produce the level of sales. And that 90 minutes will allow you to work on the business you're in and the business you're becoming. But if you don't do that, you're always reacting. And I always tell people, losers react, leaders anticipate. In the last few years, I think there's been a kind of flux in the way that people think about failure. In Silicon Valley, arguably, almost a cult of failure. There's this idea, fail faster, fail smarter, iterate, fail, launch again. At times, it seems excessive, and also, it's a little weird to say to people, go out there and fail. It's a little strange. And I'm curious what you think about, what is the right level of failure? How should someone who wants to be successful think about failure? How should they think about failure, they've got to look at it as learning. Anyone who is incredibly successful has failed more than other people, you just don't see it because they got back up so fast, and they learned from it. That's really how it is. The fastest way to avoid failure is not to learn by your own experience, but to learn by other people's experiences, right? I believe in compressing decades into days, and the way you do that is modeling, once again. Finding someone who is the most successful in the world, it's taken them 20, 30 years, and digging in and figuring out what is the core essence of what's made them successful. What are the failures they had, what did they learn from them, so you can avoid them. But the other part is, you also have to know that success is buried on the other side of failure. It's buried on the other side of frustration. It's buried on the other side of conflict. And so you have to see this as part of the natural evolution. Peter Gruber is a dear friend of mine, he owns the NBA Warriors, he took them from last place to, you know, champions last year. Yeah, not a bad season so far. Yeah, not so bad this year, I mean, Curry's unbelievable. He told me a story about his life early on. He told me that when he was just a kid, there was a neighbor kid who had major physical deformities and potentially mental ones, and he saw one day his dad take him out and put him on this long bike with these two, like, mini training wheels, and he put the kid on this thing, he could barely walk, and he shoved him, and the kid went for a little bit and just crashed. And when he crashed and started to cry, the father just got up and walked away. And Peter said, he was so mad at this man, and he said, this would go on, like, every morning. And Peter would be looking out his window, and he went and told his mom, and he said, you've got to do something, he's abusing this poor boy. An interesting thing happened, he said. His mom said, stay out of their business. And one day, Peter's looking out the window before he's going to go to school, and he sees the kid out there, and the dad shoves him, and the kid goes and goes and goes, he's about to fall over, he goes and goes and goes, and he finally crashes, but he went on forever. And all of a sudden, he turns around, and he looks at his dad, and his dad's, like, going, like, crazy like this. And Peter said, in that moment, he made a decision. He said, you know, all failure is, is it's a speed bump on the way to success. And that man's great gift was, he didn't baby a son, he got his son to do this. And he said, Tony, years later, I'm the chairman of Columbia Pictures, and I think he was 34 years old. And he was picked over a man that was 55, and a war hero, and was very respected. And so there's this conflict. And the first movie Peter made, they screened it, and it was terrible. It had these horrible reviews. And the guy walked up and said, are you scared? And Peter looked at him and said, I really am, but it won't stop me. He said, let me tell you a story. And he told him a story about this little boy, and he said, you know what I learned? He said, I learned that as long as you keep getting back up, failure is just a speed bump to success, and nothing's going to stop me in this job or anything else I do. And he said, the story brought a tear to this man's eyes. He related to it in so many ways in his own life. And he said, he went from his adversary to his ally from that day forward. So I really think we're all afraid to fail, but it's the only way to learn sometimes. I mean, when people succeed, they tend to party. When you fail, you tend to ponder. And then the pondering is when you usually get the growth, the insight, the strategy that'll change your business, that'll change your personal life, that'll change your finances. And so I think, I don't vote for failure for anybody. But to think you're not going to experience it is absurd. The way to not experience it is to turn it into learning. The person that can go through failure like butter, and it doesn't stop them, they just change their approach, change their ... I mean, how long will you give your average child to learn how to walk, before you shut them off and said, you're not a walker? People go, what are you, crazy? My kid's going to keep trying until he or she is a walker. Well, that's why almost everybody walks. But singing, how many people sing? Small amount, because someone says, what's that noise you're making? Stop that. You're not a singer. Well, once you decide that, you stop trying. Failure is only when you permanently give up. If you learn anything and you apply what you've learned, failure is a stepping stone. I'm going to make you listen to my wife sing. One of the other topics that we're sort of obsessed with is millennials and the degree to which millennials represent a change in America's thinking, or are they just like they are because they're young and when they get older, they'll be like everybody else. And I'm curious if you think that the millennials bring any particular advantages to leadership, any particular disadvantages to leadership, how you think about that next generation. Whenever you're making a generalization about a generation, it's going to be wrong, because it's a generalization. But one thing is true. Millennials have grown up and their brains have been formed in a different way because of technology. We don't realize that either you use technology or technology uses you, and if you're unconscious, it uses you. Some people, they're disconnected from their Twitter, their Facebook, their Instagram feed, like what am I going to do, right? It's crazy. So their brains have been wired for instantaneous answers. They believe the answer is there, which is incredible certainty and gift, and they live in a world where it is there for them, it's available to them. Now you've got to sort through the internet, which is full of lies and bullshit, but there's truth there too. It's finding the truth, right? But also, they have a different level of community focus, social focus, and every generation has different gifts. There is scalability, there is problem-solving capability, there is the ability to find answers, there's the ability to build community that is bred into this generation. Everyone's different, but it's in the generation as a whole, and I think it's going to bring extraordinary gifts to them. It already has, but it's going to bring even greater gifts as they age. They're not going to be like every other generation. They will adapt to certain things. They will adapt to what it means to have a family, because the oldest millennials are getting close to 35 now. When you get to 35, that's around more family formation, even though they're forming longer. You have different responsibilities, you look at life differently, you learn you're not invincible. When you're 25, you know you're going to be the multi-billionaire and the president of the United States, and you're going to have 22 husbands or wives or whatever. But then you begin to realize, maybe I've got some skills, but I've got to do a little more work here. So I think there are going to be some things that are similar, but they're going to bring definitely unique gifts because they grew up in a different time in human history. Great. Well, thank you so much. It's been a terrific interview. I've enjoyed it. Tony Robbins, thank you so much. I'm Jim Ledbetter for inc and inc.com. Thanks for watching.