How Tony Robbins created his “Category of One”

Tony Robbins is 6 feet 7 inches tall and could easily pass off as heavy weight champion or an athlete. In fact he tried but life had other plans. He barely finished high school but his impact in the world of business, finance and personal transformation is nothing short of iconic. He is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and scores of Fortune 500 CEOs have attributed their success directly to Robins. He recently had a Netflix movie about his adventurous life.

By the age of 26, he was already a millionaire with a bestselling book and today he is one of the world’s most well-known motivational speakers. He has worked with high-profile individuals on a one-to-one basis, such as Bill Clinton, Serena Williams, Oprah Winfrey, Hugh Jackman, and Marc Benioff, among others. How did someone with no fancy credentials or diplomas accomplish so much for business and society? Our Associate Jenya analyses.

It didn’t just happen.

He created his category of one with persistence and generosity. After managing to escape an abusive home and having endured a difficult childhood (growing up with 4 different fathers), he went on to become a janitor and helped people move on the weekends, all to support his family. This was until his life changed at 17.

He spent a week’s paycheck and attended a seminar by Jim Rohn, an American motivational speaker. This seminar mesmerized and inspired him to change his own life. Tony described Rohn and his speeches as, “a man takes everything he’s learned in 20,30 years of his life, and he pours it into like four hours.” Thus he approached Rohn to work for him. He agreed and things started to change. Tony found a mentor even though his job in the early days was filling the room for Rohn’s speeches.

This relationship would not have blossomed - in fact they wouldn’t have managed to meet - without Robbins investing in his learning and development at a time he had very little. You will notice this pattern over and over again. Those with insatiable hunger to learn prioritize it over everything else. They don’t believe in the “life deferment” plan which involves waiting for the mythical perfect day to arrive.

Moving On, Starting up

Tony learned a ton from Rohn but he realized something while trying to manage the community for his seminars: He could do what his mentor did, perhaps even better. He knew he had to try.

He started applying lessons from behavioral psychology, adopted a more personalized approach and started delivering his own speeches. He attended several hundredseminars (nothing significant happens until you perfect your craft and know your playground) across North America to gain deep customer insights and launched his career knowing reasonably clearly how we wanted to serve them.

Many people are skeptical of Tony because they say he is just simplifying what scientists have already said. Others say he is performer or a snake oil salesman. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and we are surely not trying to change anyone’s mind. All we are saying is that one can learn from anyone and everyone. Also, there doesn’t need to be any hierarchy of achievement. Why must we compare researchers and entrepreneurs, or ones with fancy diplomas and those without? Comparison is a natural but silly emotion, best avoided as much as possible.

6 Fundamental Human Needs

He built his category of one by developing a strong understanding and communication of 6 fundamental human needs. This isn’t just a framework. If it were, it wouldn’t be memorable. Business people create frameworks everyday but how many do you remember?

Tony’s fundamental human needs approach is drawn from real-world experience of growing up in complete disarray with no relatable mentors, no food on the table and still figuring out a way to give and serve.

1. Certainty: having the assurance that you can avoid pain and derive pleasure.

1. Uncertainty/variety: the need for pursuing the unfamiliar or unknown, the need for change or new stimuli

2. Significance: feeling validated, important, loved and needed

3. Connection or love: a feeling or bond of closeness or forming a union with someone or something

4. Growth: the increase or expansion in one’s capacity, capability, and/or understanding

5. Contribution: a sense of serving and the need to help, support or give to others

Personalizing this Framework

For each person, these six needs are ranked and prioritized differently and it shapes their character and behavior. For example, if your top need is uncertainty, it will be hard for you to find happiness in stability or sticking to one thing. You may feel the need to keep changing your personal relationships or your career/job choices in order to feel like there is variety in your life, or you may undertake risks just for the sake of risking something. On the other hand, if your top need is certainty, then you would minimize the risks you take in all spheres of your life and constantly seek stability. Thus, it is important to maintain a balance and understand all of these six needs to find out where you are lacking, and modify your behavior accordingly. Each of these needs is equally important however it is equally important to avoid extremity in any case, and this is where dysfunctionalities arise. When we focus too much on one of these and neglect the rest, we are bound to fail.

Knowledge = Power ?

“Knowledge is not power– it’s only potential power. It is the application of knowledge (action) that leads to power,” Robbins explains in one of his podcasts called The Psychology of Success. He says that one of the most important reasons for his success and what makes him smarter than other people is that every time he learns something new or significant, or when he decides to go through with an important decision, he does something in the moment that makes him commit to the task and follow through. The key is to not hesitate and maintain your pace, and to act upon what you have decided to take up. It can be something as simple as sending an email or scheduling an appointment that you have been putting off. Most people think that acquiring wisdom and knowledge is enough and that is how people succeed. Robbins thinks otherwise and believes that people are extraordinary because they succeed in taking practical action. This is how he believes that people can create their category of one and escape being average or indulging in finite thinking.

Robbins himself practiced this at 17 when he gained wisdom from the words of Jim Rohn, and then decided that he wished to work with someone like him, and he acted upon this. This helped him carve out his own career path as well. Thus, feeling inspired and enlightened is not enough, and your learnings will be rendered worthless if you do not make good use of them. Coming from a background in which his family could not afford Thanksgiving dinners at some point, a stranger helped Robbins one day by giving him a meal. This made him develop an unwavering sense of faith in humanity and he decided that since strangers have been kind to him, he would be kind to them as well. For this reason, he aims to donate enough funds for 57 million meals for those in need through his partnership with the Feeding America Foundation, and wishes to raise public funds to increase it from 57 million to 100 million meals. He believes that the true essence of living is in giving, and this is one of his core principles that he lives by.

Other Key Lessons from Tony Robbins

We can learn to master the art of consistency without stagnation or rigidity from Robbins. He chose something he was passionate about, and stuck to it for over forty years. Time flies when we chase our curiosity and understand our motivation. Throughout these 4 decades he has been immensely successful and maintained his wealth, and the only reason for this can be his ability to adapt to new times and circumstances while still maintaining his core values and personality. His contribution to people’s lives is immense, and he has even helped improve lives of high-profile individuals who at some point lost their path in life. If Robbins did not help inspire Marc Benioff at a time when he needed it, Salesforce would probably not exist as the multibillion-dollar company that it is today. Benioff himself has credited Robbins for being the reason he created Salesforce.

Robbins also points out an important thing that we all need to change about our mindset: he teaches us to prioritize fulfillment over achievement. There are people who are by all objective standards successful, financially or otherwise, but in reality underneath all that success and everything they have achieved, they are quite miserable. “Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure,” explains Robbins. Most people are always in a competitive rat-race to “achieve” the most in their lives and seldom focus on self-development, and this leaves them empty and dissatisfied with their lives even if they manage to attain success. This is what finite thinking is, a concept given by James Carse in 1986. When people focus on short-term goals and neglect the more important things by focusing on what is urgent, they lose their sense of self and create an illusion of purpose.

Robbins also believes that there is a difference in being rich (having monetary wealth) and being wealthy (having true wealth). He thinks that while monetary wealth gives us purchasing power, only true wealth can give us genuine and permanent happiness. For being truly wealthy, it is important to align your financial pursuits and decisions with your passions. To learn more about this subject, we would recommend reading Building Wealth on Tony Robbins’ website.

He has established himself as the world’s top life-coach with a net worth of $600 million, and has learnt to balance the six human needs and attained true wealth. I hope that while reading about Robbins and learning from him, we can all start acting on our aspirations and manifesting them into reality instead of treating them as merely far-fetched ambitions.

Key Takeaways

1. Invest in learning. Don’t wait for the ideal day. Start today, start now.

2. Remember the 6 fundamental human needs in all your adventures at work and beyond.

3. For each person, these 6 fundamental needs are ranked and prioritized differently.

4. Knowledge is not power, it is only potential power. Execution is everything.

5. Master consistency without stagnation.

6. Prioritize fulfillment over achievement.

7. Serve, contribute, give.Your INSIDER Team,

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