Great Leaders Are Not Born. They Are Made.

I Am Proof That Leaders Are Made

Great leaders are not born. They are made. I know because I made myself into one. When I was 27, 28 years old, I did not consider myself a success. I did not consider myself something to be proud of. So I started focusing on making myself better.

Today we are a team of hundreds of people. Around 150 people in my marketing organization, 200 and something people in our supplement company. We are pretty big when it comes to building brands, building organizations, creating opportunities for people. I am a good example of a leader not being born but being made, and I want to pass along the traits that got me here.

Vision and Legacy: Think Beyond the Life of One Body

The first trait is vision. You have to have a vision for yourself. You cannot be thinking about today. You cannot be saying, I need to get that sale today because if I don't get that sale I'm not going to be happy. You have to think about what you want to do in the next year, five years, ten years. What do you want your life to look like? And beyond that, what do you want your legacy to look like? Going beyond the life of one body.

If you simply obsess with the now, you are going to miss out on the creation of the future. My father was a perfect example of this. Five years ago he was no longer with us in body, but over the last five years he has kept on impacting millions and millions of people. Somewhere in the ballpark of 250 million people see his content every single month because of what he created while he was with us. That is legacy. That is being mission driven.

Legacy is a very important part of the journey of anybody who wants to be a better business person, a better leader, and a better person overall.

Strategy Wins the Game, Not the Individual Battles

When you talk about strategy, you are talking about the path you want to take to accomplish the goal. You can't be randomly producing. You have to have direction. You have to have a path to travel toward your goals.

And here is the good news: you have tools now. Use tools like ChatGPT and AI to get more order and more direction in what you do every single day. Write down exactly what you want to accomplish, and these tools will help tell you every single day what you will do to get one step closer to that goal. Like I've said before, strategy is what wins the game, not the individual battles.

Marketing Genius: Attention Is Survival

For me, becoming a marketer has been something that has protected me from ups and downs in the economy. Marketing is the game of capturing attention, and attention is survival. When you have attention, you can sell. When you have attention, you can produce revenue. When you have attention, you can even get yourself a wife or a husband. If you don't get attention, you're going to be lonely.

Marketing is applicable to everything. If you understand the game of attention, you'll get your boss to give you a salary increase because they know your value. You'll get customers to buy your products. Marketing makes or breaks you and your life, because when you get attention, you can expand. Without attention, you can't expand. Marketing genius is the active procedure of figuring out how to get more of that attention.

Nothing Happens Without a Team

Nothing happens without a team. Nothing. Nobody great out there has built something incredible without a team. Think about all the incredible brands you've seen over your life. All the businesses, all the organizations, they are all built around a team.

One thing I heard my dad say for decades was that the most valuable thing he had was not his company, was not his products, was not his brand. It was his team. So I have made it a point over the last 18 years or so to put a team around me, valuable people contributing to the purpose and the mission that I have.

You have two options. Either join a team of people that are winning and doing big things, or become the leader of a team that joins forces with you and carries out your mission on purpose. Both are valuable. But you cannot do this by yourself.

Produce Every Day, Learn Every Day, Move Fast, Communicate

High performance means getting things done every single day. Don't let a day go by without an action done. I get obsessed over production. I don't want to just talk about things, I want to do things. For the last 17 or 18 years of my expansion, not a day goes by that I am not doing something toward that expansion. Rome was not built overnight. You build little by little, and you are only competing with yourself.

Stay obsessed with growth and never be satisfied, because the world out there is massive. I have a brand that does somewhere around a hundred million a year internationally. Well, there is another brand that does 11 billion dollars. The market is enormous, so you always have more to accomplish. And feed your thirst for knowledge, because the moment that you stop learning is the exact moment that you stop earning. One day should not go by in which you don't acquire new information that makes you better.

Be artistic and scientific at the same time. Care about the emotional impact your creative and your copywriting make on somebody else, while evaluating the data and operating based on it. Be speed oriented and completely unreasonable about speed. If somebody is being too slow, get them to move faster. If they're not moving at all, get them out of the way and keep pushing. The more you do and the faster you do it, the more you outpace your competitors.

And last but not least, always be willing to communicate. When you're open with communication, the barriers of the world are wide open. Everything in life can be handled with communication: with your seniors, your juniors, your co-workers, your spouse, your competitors, even with AI tools. Communication is a master trade for marketers, business people, and anyone looking to expand and conquer the world.