Tom Bilyeu

When no one's watching, I work harder than when they're watching.

thinking about it like that has given me this persistent and ever present scorecard or third party that's like, no one's watching, which means now you have to work because otherwise you're full of shit.

And so it's this continuous reinforcing cycle of me and other me holding the whip behind me to see how much I can take.

But with each lash of the whip that I take, learning that I can take it,

As long as you keep going, you bear witness to yourself of what you are capable of.

And I find that incredibly satisfying in the trenches of misery when you have to go through it.

Hard work is the goal.

And so it's not like work hard so that X. Because as soon as you have a so that, then the X is the thing.

But if the goal is to work as hard as you possibly can, then the only real output we have is who we become along the way.

then it's something that I can win or measure myself against every day in real time throughout the day, which is how hard am I working?

Because that is the goal.

Because I know that when I look back on my life, the days that I loved the most were days when I had nothing left in the tank.

And so then the goal becomes to empty the tank, not where I drive, but just to drive the car as hard as I possibly can.

And that means that in the beginning, it's just straightaways and just seeing how high I can rev the engine.

But as I become more advanced, it's like, all right, well, now we've got turns and then it's turns in elevation and then it's turns in elevation without guardrails because we have risk.

And so when I think about how hard I want to work, the interesting thing about that is that the only person who can judge you on your success is you because you're the only one who knows how much left in the tank you really had.

There's this huge time delay between when we start behaving in a way that a winner behaves and when we start winning.

And the problem is that the bigger the mountain you're trying to climb, the bigger the W you're trying to get, typically the more delayed it is between when you start behaving like a winner and when you start being a winner.

And most people don't get the fast enough feedback loop to know that they're on the right path.

when they are taking these first steps in the right direction because they have this really big goal, but they forget that with that really big goal comes the even longer delay that it takes to get there.