The Startlingly Obvious Reason People Fail
- By Tai Lopez
Here’s something really important that I want you to keep in mind.
The number one reason why people fail at anything is they give up as soon as it gets difficult.
It’s that simple.
I came across something that really stuck with me while I was reading about ancient history...
“Polemos Pater Panton.”
It’s a Greek saying that means “War is the father of all.”
In this context, war doesn’t mean fighting and killing each other necessarily, but instead it means struggle and adversity. Some of the greatest movements and ideas have come out of conflict.
To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to understand that you can’t just handle stress and difficulty, you need to learn to thrive in it.
Will Durant, the great historian, once said"War and competition are the father of all things. The potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states. Peace is an unstable equilibrium."
So, I want to talk about conflict as it pertains to your life.
I grew up with this understanding that the world was worse off with war, that you wanted to avoid stress and conflict. This is kind of the mantra for society today, right? All of us have some friction in our lives. Someone mad at us, someone yelling at us, getting fired from a job. We all go through conflict. You need to learn how to take that adversity and those “bad” things in life, and overcome them.
First off, I think the word “bad” is the start of the problem. It’s an archaic and outdated way of thinking about life. What Durant is saying is that peace is an unstable equilibrium. Now, let me just clarify. I'm not speaking per se about war, like World War 2 or Vietnam War. That's a completely different conversation.
What I’m talking about is that without struggle, without adversity, and without friction, there won’t be any forward progress. Desperation is the number one source of inspiration.
Look at Brian Acton. He's one of the founders of WhatsApp, but before he started Whatsapp, he was turned down for a job at Facebook. After he was denied his dream job, he Tweeted “looking forward to life’s next adventure.” Then he went on to meet his business partner, and they launched this texting app. I love WhatsApp as a communication tool, and I use it all the time in business. The next thing you know a couple hundred million people are using it, and it’s one of the most popular apps out there. In 2017, they ended selling their app to Facebook for 19 billion dollars. Remember the saying?
"Polemos pater panton." War is the father of all.
The conflict and struggle that happened to Brian Acton became the potent source of ideas and innovation for him. When Brian was denied the job, he didn’t become all negative and cynical, instead, said “OK, on to the next thing.” This is because he had the mindset instilled in him to bounce back. He knew he was capable of achieving other great things.
Success is the result of mindset and hard work. What sets billionaires apart is their ability to think differently than most people.
I was reading the biography of Jeff Bezos and how he built Amazon.com and made 38 billion dollars. One of his coworkers, a guy named Dalzell said,
"Jeff Bezos does a couple of things better than anyone I've ever worked for. Number one, he embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don't engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time."
"The second thing is that he is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is he is bound only by the laws of physics. He can't change those. Everything else he views as open to discussion."
I love that mentality. He pushes the boundaries of conventional thinking, and doesn’t care whether the truth hurts. He builds his business around reality, and tries to eliminate any biases in his life and business.
The "wars" against you and your happiness, against your goals, against your fulfillment and happiness, should become the driving source of ideas and problem solving. The natural events of the world, whether that be economic or biological, they don't care about you and I. So you have a choice. You can be a victim, or you can say, "Polemos pater panton."
Now, there are plenty of people who will say"Tai, I don't want to embrace a world that's like that.” Instead of being set in how we want the world to work, it's better to recognize the reality of the world, and then conform to the rules that mother nature has laid down. It's going to happen anyway, so why fight it?
So what does this mean for you? Well, let’s apply it to one of the Four Pillars. I'm all about living the good life, and there are four things in order to live the good life that basically humans are programmed to want to achieve.
The First Pillar is health. In the world that we live in now, there are so many influences that negatively impact our health. There’s soda, fast food, smoking, all of these things are bad for you. Now this isn’t some mass conspiracy against you, but I think it's a natural outgrowth of a free market economic system, where people are seeking their own interests.
All these companies like McDonalds or Pepsi manufacture food that they believe gets the highest return on investment for their shareholders. They don’t have anything against you, they are allowing you to make your own decisions, but they want you to buy their products so they can maximize profit. They don’t care about the longevity of your health. They don't. In a sense, you're in conflict. If they can make something sweet enough and you drink it, they're going to get what they want.
Instead of seeing yourself as a victim, you have to go to war. The war on my body and my health will become the potent source of ideas, inventions, for me. How can you spin it around?
Well, I got some friends, they've turned the whole health crisis into a business online where they're teaching people how to be healthy, lose weight. They're making a couple hundred thousand dollars a day.
If you can't beat the corporations, join 'em. Just do what they're doing, but instead of making war on the health of people, make war on the institutions that are causing the problem to start with. Don’t be a victim of reality and be unhealthy and overweight, take advantage of the opportunity and make something positive out of it.
That strife and that conflict should excite you. When I was a broke at 20-years-old, I was sleeping on my mom’s couch with no job and no money, I read something that Tony Robbins said that completely changed my life. He said, "when you succeed, you party, but when you fail, you ponder, and all great things come from pondering." That's the same thing, the war, the struggle. Out of it comes great things.
There's a consistent pattern. If you get excited when you experience conflict and things not going your way, it will become a source of potent ideas that will drive you forward towards your goal. Fight the instinct to go into victimhood and retreat.
I read an article recently that said when we feel stress, fear and mental discomfort our body reacts with physical cues like your heart rate increasing. When we feel overly excited and happy our body reacts the same way, but obviously we don’t think we feel the same. So, what’s the difference? The difference is perspective and context. The next time you’re experiencing conflict and stress tell yourself what I’m feeling right now is excitement. Excitement for the potent ideas that will come from the conflict.
It’s like stocks, they don’t always go up. Even the best stocks have to come down before they can go up even higher, it’s called a correction. It’s a principle of physics, every action has an opposite and equal reaction. When things seem rough just know that you can use that downward energy and momentum to create great things that will drive you up towards your goals.
=======
If one of your goals is to make money with real estate I'm giving a scholarship to my bad ass Real Estate Wholesaling program. This scholarship is only for those of you on my email list. I brought in Jaelin White who has an amazing and easy formula for wholesaling real estate. Click the link below to watch our free presentation and claim your scholarship.
Yes, I want to watch the free training and claim my Real Estate Wholesaling scholarship.
=======
If you're lonely, take it as a time to take a whole bunch of public speaking classes, go on an online dating site and go on 50 dates, learn and grow. Make your mess your message.
Think about Oprah Winfrey, right? She went through tremendous trauma as a child and was abused. That eventually became an inspiration for her to decide that she was going to rise above it and help thousands of people.
Now, not everybody comes out of struggle and adversity stronger, but the people who do are not chosen randomly. You have to be systematic about your life to find resolution. You have to look at the situation logically, put the pieces together, and use the feedback to put together the puzzle of life.
If you fail, you need to be able to say, “OK, that didn’t work, what do I need to do differently next time?” You have to be proactive to turn conflict into success.
Instead of lamenting your life and lamenting the world and focusing on failure, go to war. Use war as the potent source of things that are new. It's a new approach to life. There's no victimhood here. Why be a victim?
I'm not saying what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I'm saying that stress is a subjective experience that we all have to go through. See, we’ve been taught that only bad things can come out of a negative situation and that we should only plan for success, but that’s wrong.
The Air Force teaches its pilots to make three different plans before they take off. They make a plan for the best-case scenario, the most likely scenario, and the worst-case scenario. The best case being everything goes their way and they land with no issues, the most likely being they face a few challenges or problems along the way, and the worst case being having to eject from their plane because it’s crashing. By doing this, the pilots lower their stress levels, because they’ve already prepared for when things go wrong.
Once you understand that conflict is going to happen, you can learn how to roll with it. If you can figure out that things are really never as bad as they seem, you start to realize that struggle doesn't have to be such a bad experience. It’s completely dependent on how you respond.
If you can learn to respond positively to conflict, then most of the time, things will work themselves out. Have you ever been dating someone and then you break up with them, and you're freaked out? You start to think "I'll never meet someone again?" Well guess what, eventually you will get over it and meet someone new. I've learned as I got older, that there's a cycle to life, and things come around. There's a winter, where it's dark and cold, but for every winter, you usually get a spring. It usually revolves around, so don't freak out so much.
There’s really no good or bad situations that happen, it’s just our response to those events that are positive or negative. We are in charge of how we perceive events that happen to us, even though sometimes it seems like we don’t have control.
You don't want to be the rich kid who just inherited their money and has no conflict. There's nothing there for you. There's no end game. Always work with an endgame. Remember, be a truth seeker.
When things aren’t going your way, take a step back and think “What can I do to make something good come out of this.”
Let’s say you have a relative get sick and die from a disease. Take your time to grieve, but don’t let that grief control your life. Take all that energy and turmoil, and refocus it to finding a cure.
When the economy crashed, Donald Trump took on over 9 billion dollars in debt. He went from one of the wealthiest men in the world to owing pretty much all of his fortune. Now, he could have used bankruptcy to get away from it, but you know what? It became the potent source of ideas. He built an empire. He realized that while the economy was in turmoil, he could buy more properties and build more businesses, because eventually things would return to normal. He came out on top.
If I could only get one piece of information to you today, it would be that as long as you remember negative situations are only as bad as you make them, and if you look for inspiration in that struggle, you will be fine.
No matter what you are going through right now, remember there is always a silver lining to it, and the people who learn to thrive in conflict are always going to be successful.
"Polemos Pater Panton."
Stay Strong,
Tai Lopez
Here’s something really important that I want you to keep in mind.
The number one reason why people fail at anything is they give up as soon as it gets difficult.
It’s that simple.
I came across something that really stuck with me while I was reading about ancient history...
“Polemos Pater Panton.”
It’s a Greek saying that means “War is the father of all.”
In this context, war doesn’t mean fighting and killing each other necessarily, but instead it means struggle and adversity. Some of the greatest movements and ideas have come out of conflict.
To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to understand that you can’t just handle stress and difficulty, you need to learn to thrive in it.
Will Durant, the great historian, once said"War and competition are the father of all things. The potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states. Peace is an unstable equilibrium."
So, I want to talk about conflict as it pertains to your life.
I grew up with this understanding that the world was worse off with war, that you wanted to avoid stress and conflict. This is kind of the mantra for society today, right? All of us have some friction in our lives. Someone mad at us, someone yelling at us, getting fired from a job. We all go through conflict. You need to learn how to take that adversity and those “bad” things in life, and overcome them.
First off, I think the word “bad” is the start of the problem. It’s an archaic and outdated way of thinking about life. What Durant is saying is that peace is an unstable equilibrium. Now, let me just clarify. I'm not speaking per se about war, like World War 2 or Vietnam War. That's a completely different conversation.
What I’m talking about is that without struggle, without adversity, and without friction, there won’t be any forward progress. Desperation is the number one source of inspiration.
Look at Brian Acton. He's one of the founders of WhatsApp, but before he started Whatsapp, he was turned down for a job at Facebook. After he was denied his dream job, he Tweeted “looking forward to life’s next adventure.” Then he went on to meet his business partner, and they launched this texting app. I love WhatsApp as a communication tool, and I use it all the time in business. The next thing you know a couple hundred million people are using it, and it’s one of the most popular apps out there. In 2017, they ended selling their app to Facebook for 19 billion dollars. Remember the saying?
"Polemos pater panton." War is the father of all.
The conflict and struggle that happened to Brian Acton became the potent source of ideas and innovation for him. When Brian was denied the job, he didn’t become all negative and cynical, instead, said “OK, on to the next thing.” This is because he had the mindset instilled in him to bounce back. He knew he was capable of achieving other great things.
Success is the result of mindset and hard work. What sets billionaires apart is their ability to think differently than most people.
I was reading the biography of Jeff Bezos and how he built Amazon.com and made 38 billion dollars. One of his coworkers, a guy named Dalzell said,
"Jeff Bezos does a couple of things better than anyone I've ever worked for. Number one, he embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don't engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time."
"The second thing is that he is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is he is bound only by the laws of physics. He can't change those. Everything else he views as open to discussion."
I love that mentality. He pushes the boundaries of conventional thinking, and doesn’t care whether the truth hurts. He builds his business around reality, and tries to eliminate any biases in his life and business.
The "wars" against you and your happiness, against your goals, against your fulfillment and happiness, should become the driving source of ideas and problem solving. The natural events of the world, whether that be economic or biological, they don't care about you and I. So you have a choice. You can be a victim, or you can say, "Polemos pater panton."
Now, there are plenty of people who will say"Tai, I don't want to embrace a world that's like that.” Instead of being set in how we want the world to work, it's better to recognize the reality of the world, and then conform to the rules that mother nature has laid down. It's going to happen anyway, so why fight it?
So what does this mean for you? Well, let’s apply it to one of the Four Pillars. I'm all about living the good life, and there are four things in order to live the good life that basically humans are programmed to want to achieve.
The First Pillar is health. In the world that we live in now, there are so many influences that negatively impact our health. There’s soda, fast food, smoking, all of these things are bad for you. Now this isn’t some mass conspiracy against you, but I think it's a natural outgrowth of a free market economic system, where people are seeking their own interests.
All these companies like McDonalds or Pepsi manufacture food that they believe gets the highest return on investment for their shareholders. They don’t have anything against you, they are allowing you to make your own decisions, but they want you to buy their products so they can maximize profit. They don’t care about the longevity of your health. They don't. In a sense, you're in conflict. If they can make something sweet enough and you drink it, they're going to get what they want.
Instead of seeing yourself as a victim, you have to go to war. The war on my body and my health will become the potent source of ideas, inventions, for me. How can you spin it around?
Well, I got some friends, they've turned the whole health crisis into a business online where they're teaching people how to be healthy, lose weight. They're making a couple hundred thousand dollars a day.
If you can't beat the corporations, join 'em. Just do what they're doing, but instead of making war on the health of people, make war on the institutions that are causing the problem to start with. Don’t be a victim of reality and be unhealthy and overweight, take advantage of the opportunity and make something positive out of it.
That strife and that conflict should excite you. When I was a broke at 20-years-old, I was sleeping on my mom’s couch with no job and no money, I read something that Tony Robbins said that completely changed my life. He said, "when you succeed, you party, but when you fail, you ponder, and all great things come from pondering." That's the same thing, the war, the struggle. Out of it comes great things.
There's a consistent pattern. If you get excited when you experience conflict and things not going your way, it will become a source of potent ideas that will drive you forward towards your goal. Fight the instinct to go into victimhood and retreat.
I read an article recently that said when we feel stress, fear and mental discomfort our body reacts with physical cues like your heart rate increasing. When we feel overly excited and happy our body reacts the same way, but obviously we don’t think we feel the same. So, what’s the difference? The difference is perspective and context. The next time you’re experiencing conflict and stress tell yourself what I’m feeling right now is excitement. Excitement for the potent ideas that will come from the conflict.
It’s like stocks, they don’t always go up. Even the best stocks have to come down before they can go up even higher, it’s called a correction. It’s a principle of physics, every action has an opposite and equal reaction. When things seem rough just know that you can use that downward energy and momentum to create great things that will drive you up towards your goals.
=======
If one of your goals is to make money with real estate I'm giving a scholarship to my bad ass Real Estate Wholesaling program. This scholarship is only for those of you on my email list. I brought in Jaelin White who has an amazing and easy formula for wholesaling real estate. Click the link below to watch our free presentation and claim your scholarship.
Yes, I want to watch the free training and claim my Real Estate Wholesaling scholarship.
=======
If you're lonely, take it as a time to take a whole bunch of public speaking classes, go on an online dating site and go on 50 dates, learn and grow. Make your mess your message.
Think about Oprah Winfrey, right? She went through tremendous trauma as a child and was abused. That eventually became an inspiration for her to decide that she was going to rise above it and help thousands of people.
Now, not everybody comes out of struggle and adversity stronger, but the people who do are not chosen randomly. You have to be systematic about your life to find resolution. You have to look at the situation logically, put the pieces together, and use the feedback to put together the puzzle of life.
If you fail, you need to be able to say, “OK, that didn’t work, what do I need to do differently next time?” You have to be proactive to turn conflict into success.
Instead of lamenting your life and lamenting the world and focusing on failure, go to war. Use war as the potent source of things that are new. It's a new approach to life. There's no victimhood here. Why be a victim?
I'm not saying what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I'm saying that stress is a subjective experience that we all have to go through. See, we’ve been taught that only bad things can come out of a negative situation and that we should only plan for success, but that’s wrong.
The Air Force teaches its pilots to make three different plans before they take off. They make a plan for the best-case scenario, the most likely scenario, and the worst-case scenario. The best case being everything goes their way and they land with no issues, the most likely being they face a few challenges or problems along the way, and the worst case being having to eject from their plane because it’s crashing. By doing this, the pilots lower their stress levels, because they’ve already prepared for when things go wrong.
Once you understand that conflict is going to happen, you can learn how to roll with it. If you can figure out that things are really never as bad as they seem, you start to realize that struggle doesn't have to be such a bad experience. It’s completely dependent on how you respond.
If you can learn to respond positively to conflict, then most of the time, things will work themselves out. Have you ever been dating someone and then you break up with them, and you're freaked out? You start to think "I'll never meet someone again?" Well guess what, eventually you will get over it and meet someone new. I've learned as I got older, that there's a cycle to life, and things come around. There's a winter, where it's dark and cold, but for every winter, you usually get a spring. It usually revolves around, so don't freak out so much.
There’s really no good or bad situations that happen, it’s just our response to those events that are positive or negative. We are in charge of how we perceive events that happen to us, even though sometimes it seems like we don’t have control.
You don't want to be the rich kid who just inherited their money and has no conflict. There's nothing there for you. There's no end game. Always work with an endgame. Remember, be a truth seeker.
When things aren’t going your way, take a step back and think “What can I do to make something good come out of this.”
Let’s say you have a relative get sick and die from a disease. Take your time to grieve, but don’t let that grief control your life. Take all that energy and turmoil, and refocus it to finding a cure.
When the economy crashed, Donald Trump took on over 9 billion dollars in debt. He went from one of the wealthiest men in the world to owing pretty much all of his fortune. Now, he could have used bankruptcy to get away from it, but you know what? It became the potent source of ideas. He built an empire. He realized that while the economy was in turmoil, he could buy more properties and build more businesses, because eventually things would return to normal. He came out on top.
If I could only get one piece of information to you today, it would be that as long as you remember negative situations are only as bad as you make them, and if you look for inspiration in that struggle, you will be fine.
No matter what you are going through right now, remember there is always a silver lining to it, and the people who learn to thrive in conflict are always going to be successful.
"Polemos Pater Panton."
Stay Strong,
Tai Lopez
