6 Insights on How to Achieve Success From Tony Robbins and Other Powerful Speakers

Did you miss the Power of Success event at Vancouver Convention Centre this past Thursday? If so, I’ve got a treat for you.
On July 27th, 2017, thousands of people gathered in one big auditorium to listen to inspiring keynotes on What it Means, and How to Achieve Success from Tony Robbins, Phil Town and more:
I’ve digested one key takeaway that switched on my light bulb from each presenting speaker at the Power of Success all day speaker series. Underneath each takeaway, I have a few simple thought exercises to get you thinking about how you can apply those takeaways to your own life or business.
I’ve also found the resources they recommended (books they’ve written, workshops, or guidelines) both free and paid, and leave it up to you to decide on purchasing it or not.
Yes, I did pay for my ticket, but I believe in the power of paying it forward. My idea of success is one where you can influence positive change on others, however big or small!
If this does influence you in any way, comment below — what did you learn? What would you add? How can you apply these strategies to your life?
Here we go:
1. Ryan Mitchell: Battlefield strategy forms before you even get on the battlefield. It all starts from the team you surround yourself with.

Ryan Mitchell is “an army veteran, social entrepreneur, innovator and investor.”
He talked about how his passion and service kept him motivated as a leader in the army, waking up at 5AM every day, and overcoming frightening experiences teetering the border of life and death.
The most intense and stressful moment of his life happened when one of his team members accidentally drove his tank into an active minefield. Even though his tank didn’t enter, he entered to deactivate the mines by scraping away sand with his bare hands, and deactivating them one by one until he could get them out. The 10 seconds they took to get in took more than 10 hours to get out.
How is this relevant to business?
As a startup founder or business leader, you always hear about culture. Team. Talent. But when do we ask the most uncomfortable questions:
How would your team react when things hit the shitter?
Would you be willing, able, and ready to lead your team out of the shitter?
Can you trust your team with your life, and vice versa?
Who would you want to be with if you’re ever stuck in a minefield, literal or physical?
Assembling a rock star team that can overcome any challenge starts with you. How would you handle a stressful situation? If times are tough, are you going to complain? Give up? Blame someone else? Or are you going to get right up in the heat of it and lead your team out of a pickle?
2. Vivian Risi: Believe, and you shall become. Don’t let others mold you into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Vivian Risi started working at 12 years old and then began her career as a realtor at 18 years old. She had kids at 20, become a single mom.
“Balancing her time between raising three young children and growing her sales business, Vivian quickly realized that achieving her goals in a male dominant industry would require strength, focus and determination.”
Throughout her life, people doubted her. People told her that she couldn’t do it. That she shouldn’t bother trying. That she should just go and kill herself. And yes, she considered all those things and came close to quitting. But, there was a voice deep within her, however small, that told her to ignore those voices and to mold herself into the person she wanted to become.
Eventually, without the money or experience to buy it, she bought her boss’s Royal LePage franchise. With her leadership, she has grown it to become Canada’s largest franchise with 12 locations, over 1000 realtors.
How is this relevant to business?
As a startup founder or business leader, you will face adversity. Negativity. Doubt. Blame. Harassment. Bullying.
In the face of adversity, how can you use it as fuel to your passionate flame?
What one big thing would you want to accomplish if you could? Why aren’t you doing it now?
Haters will hate, but how well do they actually know you? Will you let strangers define you?
3. Phil Town: Yes, Rule #1 is “Don’t Lose Money.” But Rule #2 is Know Your Money, and Rule #3 is Maro Up.

Phil was literally a drifter. He completed college on his fourth try, and worked what he called “dirty jobs” for most of his early life. He was a river guide in the Grand Canyon, and lived on less than $15,000 a year in a tipi. He hated rich people, and never thought he would become rich in his lifetime.
As luck may have it, one of the tourists who he guided down the river turned out to be a brilliant investor. Offering to share some of his knowledge with Phil, Phil eventually accepted after some reluctance.
His investment career boomed. By following the best of the best, and challenging common theories of investment bankers who need to turn quick profits for their clients, and even the founders of Modern Portfolio Theory, he busts some of the biggest myths on investing.
Phil, along with some of the world’s best like Warren Buffet, say that “big risk big reward” means that you don’t understand the risk. Instead of high diversification, he believes in loading up on a good bargain for a few select companies that fit the following criteria that the company should:
- Have meaning to you, and you understand the business.
- Have a “moat” — IP, talent, storytelling magic, shelf space, trade secrets.
- Be managed by good people with values you believe in and share.
- Have a margin of safety — buy it on sale.
Wait, wait, wait. Doesn’t this sound familiar? Any startup founders who have light bulbs going off right now? Just like how an investor or venture capitalist would evaluate a startup business to see if it’s worth investing in at the stage they are at, you are an investor putting your money into other companies. Seems simple enough.
Does it work? Well, out of his 209+ investments, he only lost money on 10 of them, and made a few good million after just a few years. That sounds like a much better return than the interest rate your bank gives you.
Does it sound too good to be true? Yes, it does. But how will you know until you try? Well, I’ll personally be putting this to the test by taking his seminar in mid-August, and I’ll follow up with another post about what I’ve learned, and if I was able to do the same.
Oh, and “Maro Up”? This comes from the Warren Buffet of Japan, Wahei Takeda, who practices being grateful 1,000 times a day and expects his portfolio company executives to do the same. This was what he credits to have helped him achieve growth and success.
If you have mutual funds & RRSPs, have you done your due diligence to really know where your money is going — what companies the fund managers invest in, and why?
Can “big risks” be “small risks” if you do enough research to understand the opportunity?
How can you as a company or startup become attractive to the right investors using these same principles?
His recommended readings include Warren Buffet’s annual letters, as well as the following:
4. Niurka: Your quality of life reflects the quality and power of asking good questions.

Niurka is such a captivating character — I mean her name alone is pretty cool, and she was rocking some pretty rad sparkly pants and rockstar gloves.
Her background came in consulting for big companies like Mercedes Benz, and being bold by challenging opinions, changing mindsets, and achieving results from her “creative potency” and powerful questions.
Her energy captivated the room, as she asked us some mindbending questions and pointing out mistakes that we often make in asking questions.
By including “presuppositions” — assumptions that are often negative about yourself, others, or a situation — in your questions, you’ve already lost power.
Whatever you say often materializes, tying back into the dangers of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the Vivian Risi talk.
Example #1: “How can I face my boss if he’s always such a jerk?”
Presupposition: my boss is a jerk.
By saying this, you already decided in your head that he’s a jerk and are not willing to change. Because of this presupposition, you most likely are not willing to change your mindset about him either.

Niurka asks us to step outside of our narrow (and quite literal) frame of mind, and look at yourself as if you were a director looking at yourself, an actor, on the stage. What angles could we have missed? What is the bigger picture?
Here are some of her mindbenders to get you to think in a different frame of mind. Let’s see if your brain hurt as much as mine did:
What wouldn’t happen if I didn’t have that problem?
What were you pretending not to know to have thought you had that problem?
5. Cam Chell: Even lone wolves need their pack. Be willing to put your ego aside, accept help, and your strength will multiply.

There is a famous Chinese proverb which goes something like this — if you take one chopstick and try to snap it in half with your hands, it will be very easy. However, when you try to take a bundle of chopsticks and try to snap it in half, it’s nearly impossible by brute force.
Similarly, Cam gave the example that 1 ox could pull 1,000 lbs, but 2 oxen don’t just pull 2,000 lbs, they pull 3,000. There is strength in collaboration.
Cam shared a very intriguing background of his serial entrepreneur past filled with all his trials and tribulations. From building several billion dollar businesses by the age of 33, to witnessing 9/11, to emotionally spiraling downwards, to disappearing on month long trips to consume drugs, and to hitting absolute rock bottom on the Downtown Eastside, broke and broken with $35 to his name.
Well, as they say, the good thing about hitting rock bottom is that you can only go up from there. For Cam, it was about choosing to accept help, which really means letting go of your ego. After doing so, he finally bounced back and regained financial stability, happily married with 4 children, and is now teaching others how to build strong business and how to work with a team by being alongside an actual wolf pack. Real life, breathing wolves!
I couldn’t for the life of me find any public-facing information on his RIPKIT System for organizational team building. But, I did his Build Impossible course to achieve above average business results. His story of roller coaster success made me wonder:
How much more could you accomplish if you were willing to accept the help of others?
Could you become a billionaire and not be successful?
Money can’t buy you happiness, but could it buy you more time to figure out what makes you happy?
Is happiness and success best kept to yourself or shared with others, with humility and pride?
6. Tony Robbins: An extraordinary quality of life = the Science of Achievement + The Art of Fulfillment.

Does this man really need an introduction?
Anthony “Tony” Robbins is “the chairman of a holding company comprised of more than a dozen privately held businesses with combined sales exceeding $5 billion a year.” He’s also 6' 7. More so than this, he is well known for working with celebrities, executives, and anyone really to turn their life and business around.
I want to point out one thing — look at his smile! This man has been through so much, yet every time he does his talks he comes on the stage with a huge smile. I’m sure in the beginning of our talks, there would be skeptics. In fact, the entire day the audience was quite tame, quiet, and low energy.
Tony came on, and there was that immediate excitement factor. It’s not just because of his celebrity status. It was mainly because of his ability to get us excited.
When he first tried to get the entire room to stand up, shake, yell, dance… I thought — wouldn’t it be embarassing if us Vancouverites just couldn’t commit to doing it, like the talks before? A mediocre welcoming in the wake of Tony Robbins?
I was totally wrong. Every single one of us jumped up and at it — I saw grannies dancing like they were a kid. People who were shy and quiet were smiling, saying hi, and giving strangers hugs.
It was a weird kind of magic that Tony cast on us — until I realized what he was doing. He made us more energetic and happier by applying his own principle — emotion = energy + motion. He changed our very moods using simple exercises, including the simple act of standing up. Energizing music. Talking to our stranger neighbours. Doing silly dances.
Most of all, he demonstrated it himself and you could tell that he was giving it all. When someone like Tony genuinely says that he believes in you and you can tell his sincerity, it becomes easy to believe in yourself too.
We may have wanted to stand up earlier in the day and be more of an active audience, but we were shy. Lazy. Tired. Pretentious. Fearful of looking foolish. He busted all those excuses by getting us to commit to action.
The key to helping others achieve success is by helping them realize that they already have everything it takes to become successful. And failure, as he says, is never because of a lack of resources. It’s a lack of resourcefulness.
So how do we break down his formula for success?
The Science of Achievement = (taking 100% responsibility + know your passion and your goal + reducing complexity of the tasks that lead you to where you want to be + always be grateful for everything you have) x (do 1% more every day).
The Art of Fulfillment = Define what you want to focus on + what does that mean + what does an extraordinary life look like for you + what’s keeping you from making it happen.
What is an extraordinary life to you?
What or who do you usually blame things on?
What are 2 of your most stressful thoughts right now?
If failure arises from lack of resourcefulness, who could you surround yourself with to expand your network?
What do you need to let go of to achieve your goal?
What could you improve on?
What is preventing you from moving forward?
The final collection I have for him are his books, but he also has tapes and seminars. I personally have listened to his tapes which I love, as I tend to digest information better with sound. At our startup office, we have both copies of Awake the Giant Within and Money — Master the Game.
All in all, what a great event! $110 CAD bucks well spent. I look forward to attending more talks in the future, and sharing my learning with you.
Was this helpful? What did you learn? Who would you want to see next?
Share your thoughts down below.
xx
Valerie Song :)
Chief Grower at AVA
