Lessons - How to Escape a Life You Settled For | Lisa Bilyeu - Co-Founder of Quest Nutrition ($1B Exit) & Impact Theory

In this lessons episode, discover how to break free from the mundane and build a life around a meaningful mission. Understand why curiosity and experimentation help uncover purpose, explore how building competence creates lasting confidence, and uncover how questioning inherited beliefs can strengthen independent thinking and decision-making. Do you think that when you start to work with people and to get them out of this purgatory of the mundane, Do you think that they have to have a goal in mind? And why I say that is because the reason why you didn't end up in the, in the purgatory of the mundane, when you started your career, your life, you were very ambitious because you had a very specific goal. And I'm, I'm, I'm not saying that you would, you need that to just be ambitious. Maybe you just want to push back against your parents and just go conquer the world, but I think a goal probably helps to a degree. when you start to move yourself out of the purgatory of the mundane, was it quest? Was it the protein bar that was like the wake up call? Like now I have a goal. Now I have a purpose and I want to work towards this. Or can you sort of remove yourself from this? Even if you don't have a defined path, because I think, The purgatory of the mundane is where I'm sure if you look at stats and you found a way to study it, like an exceptional amount of the population lives there. And they don't know what they want to do. They don't have a big company they want to start. So they're just like, shit. Well, I don't have a goal. Where do I start? Yeah. So that's very interesting because I don't think you need a goal to recognize you're in the purgatory of the mundane and think about how you're going to get yourself out. A goal to me is in service of your mission. Now, if you don't know what your mission is because you've been stuck in paragraphy of the mundane, first of all, the very first step is owning and admitting that you're stuck. With utter grace, because that's where some people were like, that is even a dent to your ego because you don't want to look back and say, oh my God, I've wasted eight years. So in order to soothe your emotions right now, you actually just blank. No, no, no, that wasn't a waste. But for me to really jolt me out of it, I had to be very honest and said, yes, I did spend eight years not living the life I want. Number one, acknowledge that. With compaction? But acknowledge it. So I think that really becomes the first step. Then the second step is, to your point, people may not know where to go. That's where I go. You need to give yourself space and time to be curious. Because you don't know what necessarily your mission may be. And you won't know until you try a bunch of things. So for me, I didn't realize that my mission was to help people until Quest started. And so my husband comes home, he's chasing money, right? We've been, we thought it was only gonna be a year. It turns into eight years. He's profoundly unhappy. I'm profoundly unhappy. So I pulled him aside and I said, I don't care about money. All I can care about is happiness. And so what would you do every day to make yourself happy? And that became the idea of starting a protein bar company with his business partners. Now, when they said they wanted to start it, they were actually exiting another company. And so I said, I'll help. I'm a good Greek wife. What do you need? And so in that, I'll help. What do you need? I started to face my insecurities and my inadequacies every single day because the company grew at 57,000%. So just to give you an idea, that goes from zero to a billion dollars in five years. It's a lot. So in that crazy growth, because our house was up for collateral, I had a choice. Every time I hit a brick wall, the old Lisa that felt extremely insecure and just wanted to stroke her ego would back off. I don't want to take on this challenge because I don't want it to make me feel bad. But when your house is up for collateral, it's a real freaking wake up call. So every time I didn't know what I was doing, every time that insecurity came up, who do you think you are, Lisa? The imposter syndrome. You were a stay-at-home wife for eight years. You have no idea what you're doing. I just gave myself a choice. You can figure it out or you can lose your house. And so every time I faced that, I chose to figure it out. In that process of figuring it out, it allowed me to build my skill sets. Building my skill sets allowed me to build my competence. And as a result, it allowed me to feel confident about building a business. So I didn't know what I was getting into until it started to evolve. As I was thrust into it, there were little markers along the way that started to really draw at my heartstrings. And so this is where I talk about the mission, right? I happened to have stumbled on multiple things that allowed me to realize, oh my God, I love being able to build a skillset that actually serves people. That became my recipe to fulfillment. So I realized that though, as I was doing it, and it came at the end. So now these little moments, I just paid attention. So the little moments were, I grew up with a mom that was borderline anorexic. And I saw her starve herself for the sake of beauty. And when we're building Quest, we get this letter. And the woman says, thank you so much for allowing me. I'm anorexic. I've been in hospital. I was 55 pounds. It was something crazy. She was on her freaking deathbed. And she was like in her 30s. And she's like, thank you for introducing Quest Bars because you've made me, allowed me to be okay with calories again. It, well... Now, I wouldn't have known that that would pull up my heartstrings until it happened. What allowed that to happen was I experimented with different things. So once that hit me, I was like, oh my God. So are you saying the harder I work, the better I build my skill sets, the more I can help the anorexic community? Yes. Wow. All right. Let me take that on board. Then my mom actually became, she went from borderline anorexic to morbidly obese in my later years. So now as Quest is getting harder and harder and I'm facing my inadequacies every single day, I start to realize the thing that was propelling me forward was fighting for my mom. It was every morning I was going to wake up and say, how can I make Quest work? Because if I can, maybe I can help my mom. It was Mother Teresa that said, not everybody will fight for the masses, but everybody will fight for the one. So who is that one person that you will wake up for every day? And I realized that became part of my mission. So now coming back to your question, over time, these little things that started making me realize that I felt great about the fact that I could be better today and help one more person. I could help my mom. So that then became part of my mission. So then I started to build out my mission statement because just like anything, you can get distracted in a million different ways. So how do I make sure that every time I show up, every time I wake up, everything that I do, all of my energy is always being pointed at a North Star. That's like what I call my mission, my North Star. So my North Star became the thing that I really cared about. So it's the what, the how, and the who. Those are the three key things that I think make up her mission. So I became, and I wrote out my mission statement that was eventually over years and years and years and years, right? Because I started to evolve and my mission started to evolve. But now I can say it very succinctly. It's create content that impacts young girls so they don't have to feel insecure like I did. Very freaking succinct. The what is creating content. The who is helping young women and the why because I had to overcome insecurity and I don't ever want them to. Now I've got my mission statement. My goal then becomes in service of my mission statement. So the mission, so the goals are what, how much, and by when. And so you keep setting goals, then you keep making a new goal, then you set it again. But every single time you set a goal, it is always in service of that mission. So that's why now going all the way back to your question, I don't think you need a goal. I actually think that becomes the last piece of the puzzle and working through your North Star, what propels you forward, then having a goal that serves all of that, then becomes the blueprint to how I think you keep moving forward in life and never get stuck again. I absolutely love this. I need to understand one more thing as well from your backstory, because when I listen to the relationship with your father, It seemed, well, it didn't seem, it was very apparent at a certain point in your life, a lot of the stress or the inability to make confident decisions stems from his lens at what your life should be. I think you used a different word. It could have been a frame or whatnot, but it's really the other individual's frame of reference. That's the point. So all these other individuals in your life have different frames of reference for what your life should be. And it sounds like what you just described with the mission is you slowly move your attention from another individual's frame of reference to your own mission. And that's what enabled you to actually be confident. How did you make that migration? Ooh, yes. Questions are awesome, by the way. I'm curious. I find it fascinating because I see this migration because your focus is no longer on what someone else thinks. It's on now what you think and care about and believe in. But that's also not easy. Yeah, exactly. So here's what I did. As my dad has a frame of reference, I just took it as fact that that's what I should believe in. As I got older and I started to listen to myself. I started to listen to my heart, the voice in my head. All of these things are messages that as a woman growing up in a Greek Orthodox family, I didn't ever allow myself to do. And so one of the big things was I surrounded myself with people that would push my thinking. And my husband was the very first person. So on our first date, and this wasn't deliberate, right? I kind of stumbled into everything. But on our first date, he was a curious man. And so in discussion, he would ask me, So why do you believe in God? And I just paused and said, no one's ever asked me that. And the truth was, my answer was because my dad told me to. So here I am, 21 years old, and I've never even considered why I believe in God. And that was, I think, the very first thing that was like, I felt so embarrassed saying that answer out loud. And I was like, wow, I'm embarrassed in saying that out loud. Why? Because it's not like it's my own thought. I haven't even... contemplated it so what else in my life have I just taken this back and not actually thought through myself so by the time we got to the moment where my husband asks my dad for his blessing to marry me and my dad says no in that moment I had to pause and I had to ask why Instead of just judging my dad, I can't believe that he doesn't believe in my marriage. Just ask my dad why. So what I did is instead of just taking it for fact, I became curious. And so in hearing his reason, he said, well, you come from different cultures. There's no way you being Greek Orthodox and him being, you know, a mixed blooded American that it'll ever work. He doesn't get us right. He doesn't have, um, he's not earning enough money in order to support you. So he starts laying out all these reasons why my dad doesn't think it can work. In that moment, I said, this is his truth. This is his frame of reference based on where he came from. So in the game, instead of judging, because I think it's easier to go, he's crazy. He doesn't get it. No, no. Let me actually just understand why he's saying that instead of dismissing him. Because I'm so like, I love learning and being a, I've got a thirst for knowledge so that I can help me cultivate my own mindset. So asking questions with my dad, why do you believe this? Well, he came from a tiny village in the mountains of Cyprus. Contraception didn't exist. And so women didn't get an education because they would get married, fall pregnant immediately. So they wouldn't give women the education when there was only five kids, let's say, that they could choose from the village. So my dad's frame of reference is, well, you're a woman. You're going to end up getting married, having kids. So why, you know, oh, sorry. You're going to get married, which means that you need someone that can provide for you. Because he's old school. Women don't go to work. Men provide. So he looks at Tom. He sees that he's not earning much money. And so he's like, he's not going to be able to provide for you. Next thing, you're not going to be able to make the marriage work. Why does he believe that? He's never once in anyone in my family ever married outside my culture. So, for his perspective, he just sees there's no way it can work because his frame of reference is he's never seen it possible. Now, taking all of that for his truth, how do I take that and use that in my life? All right. Actually, there's some lessons here. Number one, maybe it is going to be hard with our cultures. So let me preempt it. Let me actually come up with a game plan where me and Tom can talk through how this actually could be truth. And what are we going to do to combat it? So as you can see in me taking the perspectives of somebody else, not now taking it blindly, open up those blinders, being open and receptive to asking questions. Why allowed me to start to concretize my own beliefs and my own thinking that was true to me, not true to my dad, my mom, my husband and everyone else. Once I started to do that, it becomes like my favorite move. One of my favorite movies is like Karate Kid, Wax On, Wax Off. I then start to practice the skill set of listening to myself. And over time, as I started to do that, like I said earlier, with any type of skill set, if you start to practice and get really good, you become competent enough to get to become confident. So over time, I then became confident in my decision making and to trust my own gut and my own mindset instead of blindly letting someone else lead me. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.