If
Tony Robbins told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it? Marc Benioff would. He did.
Benioff first discovered the self-help guru as a 28-year-old. The aspiring
entrepreneur was working at a big corporation when he began absorbing
Robbins's tapes and attending his seminars. Eventually, he credited
Robbins with
his decision to start Salesforce years later, now a $6.6 billion San Francisco enterprise behemoth.
This is not uncommon. Robbins boasts a
star-studded network of clients, several of whom, including Benioff, have seen their relationship with
him morph from one of master and student to that of friends. In July 2012,
while Benioff was vacationing with four buddies at Robbins's Namale
resort in Fiji, Robbins decided to show them something in the middle of
the night. He shuffled them into his jeep, drove to a bridge, and then
came to an abrupt halt in the middle of it. Below was a raging river.
Robbins said they were all going to jump off to face their fears. "I'm
afraid and nervous," recalls Benioff about staring down at the water
swirling below. "I have no idea what's going on." But he
jumped anyway.
Robbins waited until they were in the water to tell them about the poisonous
snakes. Shortly after he mentioned them, Benioff saw one swimming next
to Robbins. "Tony didn't seem to care about the snakes,"
says Benioff. "But I did."
What could have been a reckless game of chicken was, for Benioff, a teachable
moment. "Tony turned that night into a seminar," he says, articulating,
in part, why high-power executives, politicians, and celebrities keep
Robbins at the top of their contact list. "Tony realizes that the
only thing that prevents you from focusing on what you want is fear."
This has been a central message of
Robbins's long career. It may be among the most ancient pieces of leadership wisdom, yet when
it falls from Robbins's lips, people listen, and they have for more
than 30 years. "When everybody's unsure what to do, and there's
somebody who f-----g knows, everyone pays attention," says Robbins.
"Someone who has certainty, even if they're wrong, will lead
other people."
Robbins's otherworldly persuasive powers and brash brand of popular
insight have grown into Robbins Research International, a life-coaching
empire that includes a massive book business (15 million volumes sold
globally), an audio business (50 million programs sold), a life-coach
certification business, and
seminars for which attendees pay as much as $8,000 to be in the same room with
the man himself.
His business empire, however, is hardly limited to self-help. He has leveraged
his formidable personality and network into a diverse web of businesses,
building and investing in companies as far-flung as asteroid mining, credit
cards, hospitality, nutritional supplements, private equity, sports teams,
3-D printed prosthetics, and, most recently, wealth management. By Robbins's
count, he's involved in 31 companies--12 of which he actively manages--to
the tune of a reported $5 billion in annual revenue.
In late July, Robbins was in Traverse City, Michigan, for a film-festival
screening of his latest project,
a new Netflix documentary called
Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru. Reclining his 6'7" superhero-size frame across a hotel room
sofa, Robbins shares what he calls the single most important bit of business
advice he gives his clients--something he's become adept at following
himself. "There are always two businesses you've got to manage,"
says Robbins in his deep-throated baritone. "There's the business
you're in, and the business you're becoming. If you just manage
the business you're in, you're going to get knocked out by a new
technology or new competition. But if you're constantly managing those
two businesses, you won't have to quit or pivot, because you're
always doing something to innovate, or to change, or to improve."
In other words, the man never, ever stops.
But lots of people don't stop. Lots of people run successful businesses.
Lots of people offer sound, incisive advice. But none of them could get
the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company to jump into a snake-infested
river in the middle of the night. So why can Robbins?
Robbins's entire business is built on his insistence that anyone can
learn to be confident, but the fact is, confidence appears to be native
to him. As a 15-year-old in Glendora, California, he decided to become
a sports writer after failing to make the baseball team. But instead of
taking writing classes, Robbins printed up business cards proclaiming
himself a sports journalist. By the 10th grade, he had wooed a who's-who
from the sports world to let him interview them for the local newspaper,
including sportscaster Howard Cosell, Ohio State football coach Woody
Hayes, and baseball Hall of Famers Tommy Lasorda and Leo Durocher. Even
back then, it was clear in his writing that he was wired to be an agent
of bravado. "PRIDE!" young Robbins wrote in a 1975 article in
The Azusa Herald. "The word which stands for the most powerful emotion known to man.
It has been proven to be unmatched in force. It can change anything!"
At 17, Robbins says, he attended a seminar by the motivational speaker
Jim Rohn. He soon got a job selling Rohn seminars and it was then that
he realized his own professional calling. His rough upbringing--which
includes a revolving door of stepfathers, an alcoholic mother who chased
him around with a knife, and a period of homelessness--makes a compelling
origin story, a tale he still emotionally unspools at his seminars decades later.
One of the first clients to put Robbins on the map was a young swimmer
who won gold at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Mike O'Brien was
introduced to then-24-year-old Robbins after he'd made the U.S. team.
The swimmer and his teammates had met with numerous sports psychologists,
and the sessions he had with Robbins, he says, weren't all that different--except
for the physical presence of Robbins himself. "I'm 6'6,"
and I felt small next to him," says O'Brien. "He exudes
so much confidence that without even saying the words, he's relating
that 'I believe in you. You have the potential to excel.' So you
start to believe it." (These days, however, O'Brien is more measured
than some in his praise of Robbins: "Would I characterize his interaction
with me as the thing that caused me to win the gold medal? No. Would I
characterize it as a useful tool? Possibly.")
No matter for Robbins. The state of his own mind is something he never
stops tending to. His mornings begin with a dip in a 57-degree coffin-size
plunge pool; before he goes onstage, he jumps up and down on a mini trampoline,
as if he were plugging himself into a human-battery- charging station.
He also engages in another ritual he's performed for 30 years: "I
do a little shift in my body to get myself in a strong physical state,
and then I say, 'I now command my subconscious mind to direct me in
helping as many people as possible today.'"
"There's the business you're in, and the business you're
becoming. If you're constantly managing those two businesses, you
won't have to pivot, because you're always doing something to
innovate."
All that maintenance is vital for Robbins's business, because self-mastery
has been central to the teaching he has been delivering for three decades.
Many of his most-quoted mantras slice and dice the same basic message:
Fear holds you back. Confidence--to live life fully, to take action, to
strive passionately--drives you forward.
That message has drawn in business titans who pay him a staggering $1 million
a year for personal coaching. Clients include Peter Guber, chairman and
CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group, and financial trading whiz Paul Tudor
Jones. Guber, who has been coached by Robbins for two decades, and become
one of his closest friends, calls his counsel revelatory. "I have
had many cataclysmic and painful failures in my life," Guber says,
emphasizing that Robbins "helped me overcome and move through them
faster and more efficiently. I like the fact that the uncertainty doesn't
threaten me. It did threaten me before."
Robbins has continued expanding his entrepreneurial footprint by turning
high-profile clients into business partners. (See "
Billion-Dollar Guru Machine.") How he's done that is a study in the creation and tending
of strategic partnerships. "My primary question is just, 'How
can I help?' " Robbins explains of his dealings with other people.
"When you're doing that on an ongoing basis, that builds a relationship,
because you're not asking for things. You're giving all the time."
Clients who have become friends tell countless tales of meeting him at
the end of one of his 12-hour seminar days--Robbins exhausted from giving
out as much energy as a nuclear power plant to a room of thousands of
acolytes--because he wanted to help with a project or problem, even at
2 a.m. "The secret sauce with Tony is that he recognizes that he's
not in the transaction business," says Guber. "He's
in the relationship business."
Ultimately, Robbins has created a lucrative virtuous circle: As his business
and personal networks grow, he gains access to new ideas, opportunities,
and relationships. He and Guber have since become co-investors in a Major
League Soccer franchise. Jones features prominently in Robbins's recent book
Money: Master the Game. Joe Berlinger, the Oscar-nominated documentarian who typically exposes
social injustices, was invited by Robbins to one of his seminars. Soon
thereafter, Berlinger shot
I Am Not Your Guru, an homage to Robbins. "When Tony works with someone he is excited
about, or wants to invest time and energy into, he also wants to invest
his money," says Benioff. "It's become a good financial
strategy for him."
Silicon Valley self-helper Tim Ferriss, another fan-turned-friend, says
Robbins has outlasted so many other life coaches because he doesn't
just dish out advice--he actually takes risks. "Most have no chops,"
says Ferriss. "They've never built real companies; they've
never dealt with high-profile clients in high-stakes circumstances."
After all, most gurus would have no problem telling someone to plunge
into a raging, snake-infested river. It takes another kind to jump right
in there with them.
Kris Frieswick, "How Tony Robbins Created an Empire by Being the Most
Confident Man on Earth" Inc Magazine, Sept/Oct 2016. Accessed via:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201610/kris-frieswick/most-confident-man-tony-robbins.html