Lessons - Should You Quit or Keep Going? How to Tell the Difference | Carl Daikeler - Co-Founder & CEO of Beachbody

0:00 In this lessons episode, discover why entrepreneurs should stay committed to their mission while adapting how they achieve it. Understand how evolving business models create new opportunities, explore why iteration matters more than giving up, and uncover how sustained ambition drives long-term impact. So obviously the first version of entrepreneurship that you had is at a very young age, but I'm sure that you've gone through sort of these other... journeys and you tried to build other things throughout your career. I'm assuming a lot of them have not been successful. Obviously, we only know you for the successful ones, but even walk me through that framework.

0:42 Totally agree, but every entrepreneur is also going to have a lot of things that didn't work out. So applying that mindset of persevering, being in it for the long haul, not giving up, how do you balance that with okay, this idea is not working and I want to move on to something else? Because there are two conflicting ideas that are very important to balance that will eventually lead to success. Because if you stuck on that idea that didn't work, that you started 20 years ago, well, then you wouldn't have had the success you have today. So how do you balance those two sort of conflicting ideologies? That's a really good question. And I don't think anybody can appropriately answer that in a formulaic way, because it sort of depends on how much is it burning inside you to create your category and define your category.

1:39 I guess a good example is the first fitness video I ever did was called 8-Minute Ads. That was for a different company that I ran with an entrepreneur named Lance Funston. That company was Telemerica. And, uh, so this was just an idea. I needed it for myself. I thought it would be, help me stay consistent. Could eight minutes a day, how hard could that be? And, uh, and I remember with the success of eight minute abs on selling through TV, I said to Lance, look, there, there's something here that's really compelling. I think, uh, providing information on how to work out at home through, at that time it was VHS, turned into DVD and now it's digital.

2:23 But, you know, in an environment where people think they got to go to the gym or they got to spend money on a trainer or just jog their way to fitness, this is a very compelling way and cost-efficient way for people to get results. So let's do more of these. I got a bunch of other ideas. And... He said, no, I want to pursue this other angle that the business had also a media angle. And so now that was a company that he and I started together to be a marketing and media company. But I saw this other opportunity that I was very clear on.

3:04 So that's what I chose. So chose that opportunity and pursued it, but I had to do another job In the meantime, because I wasn't ready to pursue that, I had to start a whole other company. So before I started that company, I had a little business with the infomercial company, Gaffney Ranker, where we created this sort of, sort of an online matchmaking dating service that we did through radio, and then Match.com came along, and so that business didn't work, but we did okay for two years. But over the course of those two years, I formulated other ideas, and then I was ready to raise money and pursue this other concept. But even then, I remember the first year that we were in business, we were doing okay.

3:51 but we weren't well financed. So like we were selling a product called Shin's Eyes Guaranteed and Great Buns Guaranteed and Great Abs Guaranteed, but it wasn't enough to pay everybody's salary. I wasn't pulling a salary. But we got a contract, a consulting contract, one month before we ran out of money to help a company that was marketing LASIK services. So at the same time that we started to develop our first big infomercial program, I had this consulting contract to build this LASIK business, which kept us in business. And so all of it is creativity. And if I ran out of capital, it would have been done, and then I would have started over in another way.

4:37 So it all is iterations, and it's never going to be a straight line. Do I quit or do I not? Here's another good example, Scott. So, when programs like P90X and Insanity and Power90 and all these things that people know were so incredibly successful at people getting results, And then somebody would see them and go, how'd you lose 50 pounds? And they'd say, oh, I'm doing this thing, P90X. And I had people saying in our message boards, if I could have a nickel or a dollar for every time somebody bought P90X because they saw my results, I'd be rich. And I thought, wait, that's really interesting because that's really a true thing.

5:19 Somebody loses a lot of weight. Everybody around them, it's got credibility. It's not a company marketing, that's my buddy. So I want to do that. So we said, how can we be a catalyst to that kind of initiative? So we went into the network marketing business, what's known as multi-level marketing. So that was the way for people who were customers to monetize their health and fitness. That worked for us incredibly well for 17 years. Well, let's say incredibly well for 14 years, and then we started to see it decay. And the model got a little bit, well, it got antiquated and unpredictable, which is very, is not a good formula for a public company.

6:03 But the premise stands that a human being getting results with a fitness and nutrition program is better marketing than any company can do on its own. So we just shifted it. So some would say we quit on multilevel marketing and our business. Yeah, but I see it. But you still take all the learnings and you keep rolling them into the next thing again and again and again. And it's changing slightly. And there's nuances to how this thing is a little bit different than the last thing. But I see what you're saying. You could look outside looking in, you say you quit. But ultimately, it's just different iterations. It's evolution more than quit.

6:43 Exactly. And so... So for anybody who might be thinking about quitting, here's the process I go through. I go through all this weekly, certainly, sometimes daily. What is my mission? Yeah, I want to make money. But at some point, I'm going to make a lot of money, and the question is, am I still on this mission? Our mission is to help people achieve their goals and lead healthy, fulfilling lives. What's the most compelling way to help those people achieve their goals and lead healthy, fulfilling lives? By seeing other people that they know get those results. So against that test, I go, 170 million people overweight or obese in the U.S. alone?

7:29 That TAM, the whole fitness industry has barely dipped a teaspoon into that ocean of TAM. So I fully believe that we're just getting started. We just need the business model to be right. And that's what you'll quit on. It's not the construct that is quit or not. It's the mission. or the goal or the passion. And that's what you stay committed to. I love that. You know, it's so crazy to me, and I'm sure people that are listening to this are gonna echo this too, because you're still telling me, after all the success that you've had, and this is how I know that you're actually mission-driven, after all the success that you've had, and after all the programs that you've rolled out that are quite literally household names, like people know the names of all the programs you rolled out.

8:13 And we can talk about, you know, some why they were more successful than others. But even now you're still like, I'm still learning. I'm still iterating. I'm still targeting this tan because we've only barely touched it. By any other measures of success as an entrepreneur, like you could probably never work again. But it just goes to show you, I mean, if you want to, I mean, that's a whole other story. But by, by most people's definition, you've already achieved massive success in what you've done when you have household name products. That's incredible, but it is, it's being mission driven. It, I would bet without really knowing you that well, outside of just the past 10 minutes of us chatting, like you still feel like there's so much, an incredible amount more to do with the people that you serve.

8:59 And that's why you're still rolling out new things, iterating, improving, evolving. The longer you go, I think the hotter your ambition burns. And I think everything's a razor's edge. You got to balance that to not make it miserable on yourself. But like I used to have a, when I would pull into my parking spot at the office, instead of having my name on my parking spot, I had my metrics. So I wanted 10 million subscribers of our digital platform 2 million subscribers of our nutrition platform, and I wanted 1 million what we would call partners, and that was people in the network, okay?

9:40 You know, right now I'm at about maybe 10% or less of all those numbers. So this is eight years ago. That was my objective, and I'm not there yet. And I fully expect... to achieve that still. 60 years old, been doing this for 26 years, and people are like, wow, what a career. I'm like, I literally can tell you, Scott, I feel like I've been doing this for six months. I feel like I just got started. It does not feel like people... I was with a bunch of people who've been working with us for two decades, and they were reminding me of things that happened.

10:21 And I'm like, wow, it seems like we've been doing this so long. And I feel like we just got started this year. So, you know, maybe that's the way I'm wired or maybe that's just what happens when you really are this committed. You know, there's this argument about with entrepreneurs and I don't know. The best entrepreneurs that I know, most successful ones, dismiss the concept of work-life balance because their work is so important and gives them so much joy. And that is the thing that they are determined to achieve. And so work-life balance, while you want to meet your obligations to family and friends and so on...

11:02 Work-life balance as a goal is far less important than achieving the mission that I set out for. And I'm lucky to be wired that way.