Tom Bilyeu: Change Your Mindset, Change Yourself

Tom Bilyeu – Change Yourself

Entrepreneur Tom Bilyeu invokes The Matrix to stress the power we all have to transform our mindsets, and with it to redefine ourselves, our realities, and our future.

Transcript:

If you think you’re dumb, guess what? You’re dumb. Truly. You will act in accordance with that belief, and that should scare the shit out of you. It scared the life out of me, and I saw myself heading down a path that I did not want to be on, because I believed that I was dumb. I had a fixed mindset.

Now, I felt this unease that I was talking about, that I could do more, but I was stuck and I didn’t know what I was trapped in. In 1999, the movie came out called The Matrix. In the movie, they talk about taking the red pill. The red pill, its only promise, its only promise is the truth. I took the red pill, intellectually, and what I began to realize is that the mind is the Matrix, in and of itself. I can tell you right now, today, in this moment, I promise you, the Matrix has you.

If you guys know David Foster Wallace’s concept of “this is water,” to a fish, water is so ubiquitous it ceases to exist. Now, we all have that same thing, and it’s playing on us and it’s keeping us from becoming who we want to become. That thing is our mindset. It’s our belief system. It is so ever-present, it is so ingrained into the fabric of who you are and the way that you process data, you don’t even notice it. You don’t even know that it’s real. This is the thing that impacts your life. It is your inability to see that your mindset controls everything, that it is water in and of itself.

When I heard this from Shakespeare, I realized that once you become aware of the water, you can change everything. You can go from a scared, lost kid in Tacoma to whomever you want to be. It has nothing to do with who you are today. Don’t worry about that. I’m not very interested in the person that I am today. I am a far cry from the person that I can imagine, and the person I promised myself that I will continue to work to become. It’s not about who you are, it’s about who you want to become and the price you’re willing to pay to get there. Become that person. Change the world. Change yourselves. Do beautiful shit. Thank you guys.