Tony Robbins (TW/FB/IG: @TONYROBBINS, TONYROBBINS.COM) is the world’s most famous performance coach. He’s advised everyone from Bill Clinton and Serena Williams to Leonardo DiCaprio and Oprah (who calls him “superhuman”). Tony Robbins has consulted or advised international leaders including Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and three U.S. presidents. Robbins has also developed and produced five award-winning television infomercials that have continuously aired—on average—every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, somewhere in North America, since 1989.
I first read Tony Robbins’s Unlimited Power in high school, when it was recommended by a straight-A student. Then, just out of college, I listened to a used cassette set of Personal Power II during my commute in my mom’s hand-me-down minivan. It catalyzed my first real business, which led to many of the adventures (and misadventures) in The 4-Hour Workweek. People say, “Don’t meet your heroes” because it nearly always ends in disappointment. With Tony, however, it’s been the opposite: The more I get to know him, the more he impresses me.
The first Instagram pic I ever posted (@timferriss) was of Tony literally palming my entire face. His hands are like catcher’s mitts.
Nelson Mandela’s answer when Tony asked him, “Sir, how did you survive all those years in prison?”
“It’s a belief: Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent.”
“‘Stressed’ is the achiever word for ‘fear.’”
“Losers react, leaders anticipate.”
“Mastery doesn’t come from an infographic. What you know doesn’t mean shit. What do you do consistently?”
$35 for a 3-hour Jim Rohn seminar, attended at age 17. He agonized over the $35 decision, as he was making $40 a week as a janitor, but Jim gave Tony’s life direction. Decades later, when Tony asked Warren Buffett what his all-time best investment was, the answer was a Dale Carnegie public speaking course, taken at age 20. Prior to that, Buffett would vomit before public speaking. After the course—and this is the critical piece—Buffett immediately went to the University of Omaha and asked to teach, as he didn’t want to lapse back into his old behaviors. As Tony recounted, Buffett told him, “Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll ever make in your life…. There’s no financial investment that’ll ever match it, because if you develop more skill, more ability, more insight, more capacity, that’s what’s going to really provide economic freedom…. It’s those skill sets that really make that happen.” This echoes what Jim Rohn famously said, “If you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy.”
Tony sometimes phrases this as, “The quality of your life is the quality of your questions.” Questions determine your focus. Most people—and I’m certainly guilty of this at times—spend their lives focusing on negativity (e.g., “How could he say that to me?!”) and therefore the wrong priorities.
“This brain inside our heads is a 2 million-year-old brain…. It’s ancient, old survival software that is running you a good deal of time. Whenever you’re suffering, that survival software is there. The reason you’re suffering is you’re focused on yourself. People tell me, ‘I’m not suffering that way. I’m worrying about my kids. My kids are not what they need to be.’ No, the reason [these people are] upset is they feel they failed their kids. It’s still about them…. Suffering comes from three thought patterns: loss, less, never.”
TF: The bolded portion above, combined with another friend’s advice, changed my life. It took a while for me to connect the dots. I don’t think I’m a complete narcissist (too bald and pale for that), but I still wondered how to put this into a concrete daily practice. Then, I learned the dead simple “loving-kindness meditation” exercise from my friend Chade-Meng Tan (here), which had a profound effect after just 3 to 4 days. Try it.
I learned this from my first Tony Robbins event, Unleash the Power Within (UPW), which Tony invited me to after our first podcast. Perhaps more than any other lesson from Tony, I’ve thought about this the most in the last year. If you were to look at my daily journal right now, you’d see that I’ve scribbled “STATE → STORY → STRATEGY” at the top of each page for the next several weeks. It’s a reminder to check the boxes in that order.
Tony believes that, in a lowered emotional state, we only see the problems, not solutions. Let’s say you wake up feeling tired and overwhelmed. You sit down to brainstorm strategies to solve your issues, but it comes to naught, and you feel even worse afterward. This is because you started in a negative state, then attempted strategy but didn’t succeed (due to tunnel vision on the problems), and then likely told yourself self-defeating stories (e.g., “I always do this. Why am I so wound up I can’t even think straight?”). To fix this, he encourages you to “prime” your state first. The biochemistry will help you proactively tell yourself an enabling story. Only then do you think on strategy, as you’ll see the options instead of dead ends.
“Priming” my state is often as simple as doing 5 to 10 push-ups or getting 20 minutes of sun exposure (see Rick Rubin, here). Even though I do my most intense exercise at night, I’ve started doing 1–2 minutes of calisthenics—or kettlebell swings (see Justin Boreta, here)—in the morning to set my state for the day. Tony’s own priming process is included below.
I now often ask myself, “Is this really a problem I need to think my way out of? Or is it possible I just need to fix my biochemistry?” I’ve wasted a lot of time journaling on “problems” when I just needed to eat breakfast sooner, do 10 push-ups, or get an extra hour of sleep. Sometimes, you think you have to figure out your life’s purpose, but you really just need some macadamia nuts and a cold fucking shower.
Upon waking, Tony immediately goes into his priming routine, which is intended to produce a rapid change in his physiology: “To me, if you want a primetime life, you’ve got to prime daily.” There are many tools that I’ve seen Tony use over the years, several of which I’ve adopted for myself, including:
Following something like the above, Tony does 9 to 10 minutes of what some might consider meditation. To him, however, the objective is very different: It’s about cueing and prompting enabling emotions for the rest of the day. His 9 to 10 minutes are broken into thirds. Here is an abbreviated synopsis:
The first 3 minutes: “Feeling totally grateful for three things. I make sure that one of them is very, very simple: the wind on my face, the reflection of the clouds that I just saw. But I don’t just think gratitude. I let gratitude fill my soul, because when you’re grateful, we all know there’s no anger. It’s impossible to be angry and grateful simultaneously. When you’re grateful, there is no fear. You can’t be fearful and grateful simultaneously.”
The second 3 minutes: “Total focus on feeling the presence of God, if you will, however you want to language that for yourself. But this inner presence coming in, and feeling it heal everything in my body, in my mind, my emotions, my relationships, my finances. I see it as solving anything that needs to be solved. I experience the strengthening of my gratitude, of my conviction, of my passion….”
The last 3 minutes: “Focusing on three things that I’m going to make happen, my ‘three to thrive.’ … See it as though it’s already been done, feel the emotions, etc….
“And, as I’ve always said, there’s no excuse not to do 10 minutes. If you don’t have 10 minutes, you don’t have a life.”
This reminded me of something I’ve heard from many adept meditators (such as Russell Simmons) in various forms: “If you don’t have 20 minutes to delve into yourself through meditation, then that means you really need 2 hours.”
Tony has interviewed and developed friendships with some of the best investors in the world, including Paul Tudor Jones (who he’s coached for more than 10 years), Ray Dalio, Carl Icahn, David Swensen, Kyle Bass, and many more. These are the hard-to-interview “unicorns” who consistently beat the market, despite the fact that it’s called impossible. Tony wrote a book based on his learnings (Money: Master the Game), and here are few of the patterns he identified:
1 | Capping the downside: “Every single one of those [people] is obsessed with not losing money. I mean, a level of obsession that’s mind-boggling.” On Richard Branson: “His first question to every business is, ‘What’s the downside? And how do I protect against it?’ Like when he did his piece with Virgin [air travel]—that’s a big risk to start an airline—he went to Boeing and negotiated a deal that [he] could send the planes back if it didn’t work, and he wasn’t liable.” TF: Branson also tested with little or no risk. In Losing My Virginity, which had a huge impact on me around college graduation, he described his very first flight: “We were trying to catch a flight to Puerto Rico, but the local Puerto Rican scheduled flight was canceled. The airport terminal was full of stranded passengers. I made a few calls to charter companies, and agreed to charter a plane for $2,000 to Puerto Rico. I divided the price by the number of seats, borrowed a blackboard, and wrote virgin airways: $39 single flight to puerto rico. I walked around the airport terminal and soon filled every seat on the charter plane. As we landed in Puerto Rico, a passenger turned to me and said: ‘Virgin Airways isn’t too bad—smarten up the service a little and you could be in business.’” Back to Tony, “cap the downside” also applies to thinking long-term about fees and middlemen: “If three of my friends [and I] all put aside the same amount of money, and we all get a 7% return, but my buddy’s getting fees of 3%, my other buddy’s 2%, and I’m 1%, and all three of us put $1 million in or $100,000 … the person with 3% of fees ends up with 65% less money [in the long-term]….” |
2 | Asymmetrical risks and rewards: “Every single one of them is obsessed with asymmetrical risk and reward…. It simply means they’re looking to use the least amount of risk to get the max amount of upside, and that’s what they live for…. [They don’t believe they] have to take huge risks for huge rewards. Say, ‘How do I get no risk and get huge rewards?’ and because you ask a question continuously and you believe [there’s an] answer, you get it.” TF: Here’s a wild example. Kyle Bass at one point bought $1 million worth of nickels (roughly 20 million coins). Why? Because their face value was 5 cents and their scrap metal value was 6.8 cents at the time. That’s an immediate gain of $360,000. Nicely done. |
3 | Asset allocation: “They absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, know they’re going to be wrong … so they set up an asset allocation system that will make them successful. They all agree asset allocation is the single most important investment decision.” In Money: Master the Game, Ray Dalio elaborated for Tony: “When people think they’ve got a balanced portfolio, stocks are three times more volatile than bonds. So when you’re 50/50, you’re really 90/10. You really are massively at risk, and that’s why when the markets go down, you get eaten alive…. Whatever asset class you invest in, I promise you, in your lifetime, it will drop no less than 50% and more likely 70% at some point. That is why you absolutely must diversify.” |
4 | Contribution: “And the last one that I found: almost all of them were real givers, not just givers on the surface … but really passionate about giving…. It was really real.” TF: One great example is the Robin Hood Foundation, conceived of by Paul Tudor Jones, which fights poverty in New York City. |
• Who comes to mind when I say the word “punchable”?
For a few dozen podcast episodes, I asked the question: “When you think of the word ‘punchable,’ whose face is the first that comes to mind?” Nine times out of ten, it fell flat, and I’ve since stopped asking it. But in my interview with Tony, all of those flops were redeemed. He took a long pause and then said, “Punchable. Oh, my gosh. Well, I had an interesting meeting with President Obama …” and proceeded to describe a closed-session conversation with President Obama (you can hear the full story at 42:15 in episode #38). It was one of those “God, I really hope my audio equipment is working” moments. He closed it with “So, I don’t know if I’d say ‘punch,’ but ‘shake’ him.”
• Most-gifted or recommended books
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Fourth Turning by William Strauss (Also, Generations by William Strauss, which was gifted to Tony by Bill Clinton)
Mindset by Carol Dweck (for parenting)
As a Man Thinketh by James Allen (see Shay Carl, here)