a video for when you feel behind in life

12 years ago I was 100 lb overweight I was getting up all the time and I was stuck today I get to live the life of my dreams and it's really due to me solving these three common problems that I want to share with you today and by the end of this video you will have the solution to all three problems so you can get unstuck and actually achieve your goals the first problem was allowing the fear of being judged or disliked to actually dictate my action people are afraid of being disliked they're afraid of

being misunder OD and so because of that they are unable to grow because they won't take action out of the fear that other people are going to judge them for the action they take if you are unwilling to be misunderstood you're also by consequence unwilling to grow if being liked and being understood is more important to you than achieving your goals you won't achieve your goals and I think the reason that this happens is because we have this weird fear of standing out from the crowd we are wired to be in a community we're wired

to have a crowd that we're surrounded with we're wired to be with people but it doesn't help when the crowd that you stand with is mediocre and this is what's happened to me multiple times in my life which is I've realized that the people whose judgment I feared who I felt would stop liking me they weren't people I wanted to be like and so it's actually a good thing but it didn't feel good at the time and what I recognized through that realization was that you shouldn't surround yourself with people that don't inspire you because

whether you want to or not you are going to assimilate and take pieces from all the people that are around you you whether it be family friends co-workers boss like you will assimilate pieces of them and so you have to be very particular about the people that you surround yourself with and I know it's like the harsh truth but as nice as your cousins may be as long as you may have had those friends like do you look up to them do they inspire you or you just bullshitting yourself because you want to stay comfortable

those are the questions I had to ask myself because I realized that I was not living my life not because I didn't want to and I didn't have a desire but my desire to be liked and understood was higher so the reality is this you will be disliked and you will be misunderstood and you will be judged by people who maybe you love and who you've been close with and if anything let that tell you that you are on the path to success if those are not people that you aspire to be like and so

you want to trust the process and ignore advice from people who don't have lives that you desire all great entrepreneurs are willing to be misunderstood I can tell you this because I speak with thousands of entrepreneurs each week I am an entrepreneur I know some of the greatest of our time they are willing to be misunderstood and they are not concerned with being liked they're concerned with achieving their goals one of my heroes and somebody that I look up to and I admire a lot is Elon Musk I know a lot of people would say

he's the greatest entrepreneur of Our Generation well look at what people used to tell him everyone said that Tesla was going to fail when he started Tesla SpaceX people said no way that you can make this happen Rockets can't land themselves and nobody believed that Twitter was going to last past 3 months of him taking it over and look where he's at today he has all these successful fast growing billion dooll companies he is over all of them and they are all growing if you look at Elon Musk he is now one like the richest

person on the planet and what do most people say about him in fact a lot of people don't talk about how successful his companies are instead they talk about how he's not like us how he's weird how he seems autistic how he talks like an alien how he's not a normal person they dehumanize him he definitely doesn't care what people think he's not concerned with being liked he's said that publicly before he's not concerned with that he's concerned with results he's concerned with sustainable energy he's concerned with getting us to Mars and he's concerned with

free speech he doesn't give a if you like him along the way he gives a that he gets those things for Humanity and so I think people like that are very inspiring and they're a fantastic representation of what it looks like to take action despite people judging you and not liking you if I look at my personality what have natural proclivities towards I would say that I definitely come from a family where I was taught that to be liked is a good thing and when I first started going against the grain I remember just anchoring

myself in all this content that I saw from like Tony Robbins and Jim ran Elon Musk just all these people that were doing great things who clearly went against the grain and stood out from the crowd and each time I felt myself at a sticking point where I wasn't sure what decision to make I had to reference back to those people as anchors for me because what I realized for myself is a lot of the reason that I wasn't able to move forward with decisions quickly wasn't because I didn't know what decision to make it

was because I was fearful of what people were going to say and how people were going to judge me I was so fearful that I remember I actually met a stylist this person dressed entrepreneurs and that person took me shopping you know I dressed feminine and like a woman would and that person told me he said nobody is going to take you seriously if you dress like this if you show any skin and I was like well I don't like when people look like they're nuns at you know work or whatever they're like incredibly conservative

but at the same time I felt like well I don't want to be judged by all these people so I was so scared of the potential that people could judge me I completely changed how I dressed I was wearing turtlenecks I was covering my legs I remember just feeling even uncomfortable to the degree that I didn't even want to film content when I started 3 and a half years ago without sleeves sleeves it's like we're in 2024 what the until my friend Brook Castillo I love her she took me shopping and she said what are

you doing and I was like what do you mean like you don't dress feminine you just wear frumpy clothes you cover everything I don't understand you've got a great body and I was like I don't want people to judge me for you know dressing a certain way like looking too sexual or looking to this or to that and she was like yeah I think that's stupid and it's so funny but it just took somebody else in that moment being like why are you doing things out of fear and I remember in that moment it wasn't

even like oh I want to dress a certain way it was truly I don't want my actions to be dictated by fear of judgment in whatever direction that is and so what do I want to wear what do I feel best in I'm not worried what people are going to say about me and I don't need everybody to like and understand me for me to achieve my goals so what's the solve for this this is actually a mental switch that I've had to make which is Chase judgment and misunderstanding rather than trying to run away

from them you have to accept that not everybody will accept and support your journey it is not a need to have support to achieve your dreams lots of people say well I need support for spouse I need support from my friends I need no you don't you need support from yourself nobody can support you more than you support yourself and so first and formost what anybody else is saying about you and how they're judging you focus on how do I support myself and do I like who I am do I think that my actions align

with my goals how do I judge myself that's what matters and you have to learn to put those things first and you have to stop second guessing your own judgment and relying on other people who you don't even want to be like them it's always a trick off which is like you can have growth or you can have comfort you cannot have both at the same time what I want to give to you is the internal dialogue that I have had to assimilate in order to make these changes because you have to cue yourself in

order to take the action and so the cue is this when you recognize that somebody is judging you or they don't like you ask yourself this question is this person living the life that I want and if the answer is no probably a good thing that they don't like you or that they're misunderstanding you the second cue is tell yourself this Let Me Be Misunderstood right now you've told yourself that being disliked and being misunderstood are bad things so you've trained your brain that those are things to be anxious about you need to untrain this

and the first way that starts is just by repeating things I like to say I'm not for everyone oh yeah don't think they like me yeah definitely came off like a there because there's nothing wrong with it and I want to make it normal for myself and so the more that I say it out loud the more I repeat it in my head the easier it is sometimes and one of my favorite frames to take is I call the I am bad frame often times when I feel like people are judging me it's because they're

judging me that I'm a bad leader I'm a bad entrepreneur I'm a bad wife I'm a bad friend rather than run away from all those thoughts and feelings what I do is I actually try to really lean into them maybe I am a bad leader maybe I am a bad wife maybe I am a bad friend it I am and so what that frame has helped me a ton because it's helped me lean into being disliked being misunderstood and take action even when I'm recognizing that people maybe don't likely me or understand me and so

I like I am bad maybe I was a bad boss that day maybe I was a bad wife that day and so what are humans perfect no what you want to do is I want you to repeat this to yourself I want to be judged I want to be disliked if you're not being hated for something then you're probably not standing for anything if people don't dislike you you're probably not actually telling people who you really are because most people if they are the truest version of themselves Rubble lot of people the wrong way and

so the what you're not going to die if you are unwilling to be judged you're also unwilling to grow by consequence and it's not about getting everyone's approval it's about having the courage to act when you don't have everyone's approval and I'll leave you with this final quote which is from Jeff Bezos who I think is actually a really fantastic leader and this quote is if you can't tolerate critics don't do anything new or interesting the second problem is wanting the goal more than you want the work to achieve the goal a lot of people

claim that they want success but their actions do not back it up this is something that happens to me all the time especially when I'm interviewing people to work at my company or one of my portfolio companies people say like I would do anything to work your company and then I'm like great move to Las Vegas and you can work here and they're like oh yeah anything but that I'm like you you lied because if you really wanted it that bad you would do what it took they're unwilling to be inconvenienced or uncomfortable to achieve

their goals and here's the truth you are not what you want you are what you do and so if you don't show up and put in the work then you don't actually want it you say you do but you lie to yourself and therefore lie to others and this thing that I've had to call myself on on BS many times in my life if I don't have the result I don't want it bad enough like my example if somebody says I would do anything to work for you I want the job I want the job

and I say great you can have the job you have to just live here and then they're like no I don't well then you want to stay at home and live there more than you want this job more than you want the success more than you want the career that's okay just don't BS yourself I'll I'll give you an example of this I had a portfolio company and this person said I want to build a $100 million business so much so that they actually turned down an offer to have their business bought for tens of

millions of dollars in that moment I said if you're turning it down I want to make sure you're committed to what it's going to take to become a $100 million business you know this person verbally committed and then they didn't show up instead of building the company they let their Hobbies take up pretty much all their time they didn't show up to team meetings they didn't hire and fire the right way they didn't put the effort in to build a culture they spent all their time doing other things that were not building a$ hundred million

company I have zero issue with somebody who doesn't want a $100 million company plenty of you that watch this probably just want to be able to replace your income you probably just want to have a company that allows you freedom to be with your family and travel the world that's amazing just don't lie and he continued to say I really want this I want a $100 million company I was like but you don't because actions speak louder than words show me don't tell me demonstrate what you want don't tell me what you want and so

most of the time what it is is that we have a goal that we really want or we think we do but we actually want comfort more and so that's why I such a big advocate of disobeying Comfort Comfort kills most of our dreams because most of our dreams have an inconvenience to get them and the question is are we willing to experience that inconvenience are we willing to tolerate that discomfort in order to get our dreams most dreams require that you know the same goes for I have lots of friends who are single and

you know they tell me they're like I really want to get married and I'm like okay well no you don't and they're like well why would you say that what do you mean I just said I want to get married and I'm like how do you meet somebody if you're at home every day if you just go home go to the gym go home and eat like where the are you going to meet your husband they just fall out of the sky like if you want to get married commit to dating because dating meeting people

trying new things that's how you're going to meet somebody to actually get married because I actually went on dates for 18 months before I met the person that I wanted to marry and it was awful and it was terrible but I was willing to tolerate the discomfort of dating and being in those situations in order to find somebody that could be a partner for the rest of my life so what's the solution to this what I had to learn is that I had to learn how to reward myself for following a process rather than getting

an outcome so if you learn to follow and reward yourself for a process rather than the outcome you will learn to love the process and then by consequence you're more likely to get that outcome plus more so a question that I like like to ask myself most of the time when I'm confronted with these situations is say I want a goal say it's like I want to lose 10 lbs what am I willing to sacrifice to lose 10 lbs am I willing to sacrifice wine night with the girls am I willing to sacrifice my sleeping

in every morning because I got to go to the gym what are you willing to sacrifice to give your goals if we picked what we're willing to sacrifice rather than what we would like to get then we're more likely to achieve our goals because once you see your goals through the lens of sacrifice you understand that in order to get anything you must give up something it's just a trade-off for me to build the company I build what do I sacrifice I actually do sacrifice a lot of my autonomy of time my time is constantly

being pulled by many different people I don't have the luxury of just canceling a day when I wake up in the morning because I don't feel like it even if I don't feel good I don't feel like I've got the luxury of canceling a day because guess what I've got 15 other people that have scheduled their day around me and so everything that you want you have to give up something to get the biggest mental switch I've had to make is choosing my goals in accordance with what I'm willing to give up for example in

building acquisition. I looked at what is it going to take to build this company okay well I think it's going to take an in-person headquarters I think it's going to take having a hybrid team where it's like we have people in person we have people remote I think it's going to take going back into a season where I don't really get to travel as much I don't really get to do as much stuff in my free time I don't really get to see my friends as much and all of those things have occurred and so

what I recognize is that in order to achieve my dreams I'm going to go through a period where there's things that I do like but I've chosen to give those things up for this greater goal now is that forever no but it is for a period of time and I'm committed to doing that and to seeing it through so if you think about commitment commitment is cutting off Alternatives so if I commit to something it means that I've made it very hard to do anything else so if you commit to a spouse getting married makes

it very difficult to date other people that's why it's the ultimate Commitment if you move for a job I would say that it says that you're committed because you've you've committed to relocating for a job that's a commitment and so your actions and what you're willing to cut off are proof of your commitment instead of picking your goals by what you want to gain pick your goals by what you're willing to give up so here's what I want you to do think about the goal you have in mind and I want you to write down

that goal and then I want you to ask yourself this question I want you to write this down what do I have to give up that I currently have or do to reach that goal and then ask yourself am I actually willing to give those things up and if you're not that's okay the goal is not for you if you're not willing to sacrifice then you are prioritizing Comfort over your dreams and goals the third problem is when you allow lack of confidence to be a reason that you don't take action a lot of people

think that they need to feel confident in order to take action and that's actually just wrong you gain confidence through taking action when you feel afraid uncertain frustrated sad or lack confidence in yourself every time that I've ever done anything worth doing and I've been able to gain confidence I've gained confidence because I did something that I wasn't sure I could do I gained confidence because I did something despite how I was feeling I gained confidence because I didn't have confidence before we don't gain confidence by doing things we're confident doing the reality is action

creates experience experience builds competence and then competence leads to confidence but it starts with taking action inputs outputs the inputs are action the output is confidence the more action you can take in your life the more confident you will become through that entire process people always tell me like I just don't feel ready listen that's it's your brain trying to keep you safe nobody ever feels ready to do anything worth doing because there's the unknown unkknown right and you're not going to know until you try and so the reality is taking action even when you

don't believe in yourself is what leads to growth and it's what leads to confidence and if anything even if you take action when you're not feeling confident and it doesn't go exactly how you want it to go you're going to feel more confident because you are confident in your ability to just take the first step and take action and so even if you fail at the task itself or at the thing you're still going to feel more confident than if you hadn't tried because you've at least taught yourself that you have the ability to take

the first step you know I remember when I was talking to Alex about shutting down my personal training business to start gym launch with him and I had one friend who I really respect at the time I remember we went on a hike and I said you know I just don't know if I'm ready to do this right now what do you think and he said dude just do it who cares you know it was the advice I needed to hear because at that time I was being so cautious I was so afraid of making

the wrong decision I was so afraid that I didn't know things which I didn't I know jack I figured it all out that gave me so much confidence to be able to take a leap of faith like that and just realize I have the ability to figure it the out even when I don't know what's going on you know the other time even more recently that I took a risk was you know we started acquisition. comom which many could say is a risk putting millions of dollars into a business and not knowing if it's going

to work out that was a risk that was something that I did not feel confident in at all I felt like I had no idea what I was doing despite having all this experience in business information is not actually what's going to build confidence it's taking action and having the experience someone like me I have all the resources in the world it doesn't matter how much I know about investing until I do it and I do my first deal I don't actually feel confident I don't feel ready I don't feel like I have enough information

so the solution that I've recognized for this problem is learning to take uncertain action you have to learn to take ction when you don't know all the steps perfect conditions do not exist having all the information is a facade neither of these things will ever happen if you are waiting for those things to occur you'll be waiting until the end of time you need to take action before you feel confident and when you ignore these challenges you actually sacrifice your future success the irony of success is that in order to have more success you have

to have more failure and you don't have more failure until you take more action you don't have more action until you're willing to take action when you're not feeling sure when you're not feeling certain and you feel like you don't know what the you're doing it's not about perfection it's about learning from your failures actually if you want to learn from more of your failures you can check out my video here where I talk about productive failure here's the thing you're probably watching this and you're thinking to yourself man but if Lea knew how bad

I really was or Lea knew how uncertain I really was or Lea knew how nervous I really was she would think I should wait until I had more information or was more certain that's your brain telling you that you're special and I promise you that is how all of our brains work they all think that we are the exception to the rule you are not the exception to the rule I promise you you have enough information you just need to take uncertain action so here's what I ask myself what imperfect action do I need to

take so sometimes I will even think how do I do something that I consider imperfect because what it helps me do is it helps my brain not try to play by the rules and that helps me get way more done I get way more experience I take way more action and so I see way more results that will create a positive feedback loop that will actually accelerate your growth because what happens is you will take imperfect action you will see that you got results maybe they're not perfect but they're better than where you were and

then you're like I'll take more imperfect action and I'll get more results and then eventually you iterate enough time to say process that you will get the result but what you have to understand too is that like change achieving your goals it's a process it's not a onetime event you don't like fail once and then never succeed you also don't succeed once and then succeed forever it's a process where you have to continuously get feedback from the environment from others from yourself to see if you're on track or not to hitting your goals but the

only way to get there is by taking the first step imperfectly competence breeds confidence so start small take imperfect action and eventually you will gain confidence confidence in public comes from discipline in private it's the discipline to take imperfect action it's the discipline to not listen to every thought and emotion you have it's the discipline to listen and Trust the process rather than your animalistic brain that's telling you otherwise here's what I want to leave you with if you want to succeed stop waiting and hoping for the approval from others success is about taking action

without everyone's approval showing up with consistent effort and building competence until finally the confidence follows that is how you succeed and remember your actions are what Define you not your desires