Lessons - The Philosophy That Took Him From Rock Bottom to 100 Million Views | James Whittaker - 3x Bestselling Author & Napoleon Hill Foundation

In this lessons episode, explore the principles that separate high performers from those who remain stuck in place. Discover why resourcefulness and resilience are essential for long-term success. Understand how winning each day creates clarity and momentum toward bigger goals and uncover practical strategies for building balance, purpose, and lasting fulfillment across every area of life. There's a few things that I want to unpack.

We'll understand like the win the day philosophy. But before we go into that, because that's the current thesis that you've come to understand that sort of helped people the most. But you derive that thesis from the people that you interacted with when you uprooted your life and you went all over the world for your MBA and you worked with all these entrepreneurs. So what is the difference?

What is the, I mean, there's like probably unlimited differences that you can pinpoint, but what is that like one thing that the person who has intent, that is building something that has their purpose in the world, What allowed them to do that at a certain age or at any capacity that you originally didn't have, that the person who's listening to this knows what an entrepreneur looks like, but they're like, that's not me. I've never done that. What is that one thing that differentiated you?

I think there's really two traits that this comes back to. Thinking Grow Rich talks about, if I can be permitted to have two, Thinking Grow Rich talks about 13 principles of success. But the two that if you had to really break it down, I don't think you can have success without these two things. And I think you can have extraordinary success over the long term when you have these two attributes together.

These are the most important things that I want to have with my clients, that I want to have with my children, that I want to have with my friends. The first one is resourcefulness, meaning that you can acquire anything that you want. The second one is resilience, meaning that when adversity inevitably strikes, that you will keep moving forward. I think if you have those two things, then the sky is the limit to what you can achieve.

When I look back at the person that I mentioned at the start of our chat today, who was in his early 20s, I didn't have resourcefulness, really. I didn't have any resilience. I was busy blaming other people. But the fact that it reached a point where, to me, it was literally life-threatening.

If I had gone down that path, I have absolutely no doubt that. how that would have unfolded. Zero doubt in my mind, and it's why I'm so passionate about helping people to have a similar realization in their lives. I love that.

So let's talk about how you codify all the principles, all the lessons that you've learned into that one sentence, win the day, because there's win the day, and then there's extreme focus and intent, and a word that I picked up on your website actually is clarity, which I love. So win the day to me, I want to understand that because win the day means like I'm winning today. And when I think about winning today, that's great, but it doesn't, in my mind, immediately make me think tomorrow or the next day or six years or 10 years or 20 years from now.

It's literally today. So walk me through why winning the day is important for the long term vision, the focus and the clarity. Well, where I first got this from, it was when I was reading and rereading and rereading Thinking Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which was part of my role of writing the book, Thinking Grow Rich, The Legacy. I needed to know that text inside and out, also as a producer of the film.

And there was one passage that kept standing out to me. And that was that any mind that is not preoccupied with being success conscious will automatically be overtaken by the poverty conscious. And I was like... wow, that is so interesting.

And it kept coming back to me. And then I was like, well, how do I say that in a way that people can understand? And then I thought, well, each day, if you do not make the decision to win, you will have automatically made the decision to lose. And then it was like, huh, win the day, if we can focus on winning the day.

And then I started thinking more and more, I brainstorm more and more about this concept. And that's what I thought about, where do people's anxiety and fear and worry and stress live? They don't live in the present. They live in the future, worrying about something that's about to happen, or they live in the past when they're freaking out about something that they might've done a year ago or yesterday or five years ago, and none of that stuff can help you.

There's no point dwelling on any of those things or worrying about what's to come. But if you have an idea of who you are, in terms of things like your values and where you wanna go in terms of goals in all areas of your life, rather than just a financial goal or a fitness goal or a business goal or a family goal or a travel goal. It's important to think about all of those things holistically in a comprehensive manner. And once you have the foundation on who you are and where you wanna go, you can focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

You have completely alleviated yourself from everything that's gonna happen in the future because you already know how the story ends because you've written it You just need to do what the character in the book would be doing today that's going to help you get there. Some of those things as part of that win the day routine, I think the very first part of that is coming up with an awareness because you mentioned something a little bit earlier along the lines of how do we motivate people who don't want to help themselves.

You can't really, you can only, John Assaraf from The Secret told me that he only works with, he said, help the people who want the help, not the people who need the help. And that can be very tough when you want to go out there and help everyone. But if you help someone who isn't ready for the help, they're not going to change and you're going to end up really frustrated and depressed and burnout in the process. So giving someone the ability to have that awareness of the trajectory that they're on, is that happy for them?

Is that a good thing for them to hear? And do they recognize that change needs to occur? And then are they willing to embrace that change? So coming from that foundation of awareness is very, very important.

Then we can look at things like purpose. What are you put here to do? I have a, for me personally, I have a career purpose and I have a family purpose. They're very different and it's important that I live both of those things and that I live, that I list out both of those things.

And then from there, we can focus on things like goal setting and then your daily routines and your environment and your relationship with stress and your mindset around reframing adversity, all of those types of things. And so let's say you're working with somebody, and I love that, the fact that you work with people who are motivated and who do want to change. I think that's a huge, huge, I mean, that transcends somebody who's just a coach or somebody who's advising a founder or somebody who's looking to grow in their career.

That transcends to CEOs, to executives that are trying to upscale people on their team. It even is a great... it's a great thought when hiring people. Are you looking for people that actually do actually want to progress, which can be a massive benefit or candidly there's spots in every career and every job or business or people that actually would just like to do the thing that they're doing.

And that's also okay too. But to identify that is huge because that could be well-placed or misplaced energy, depending on who you're trying to mentor and, and, and help. Right. So that's a very, very smart point.

achieve clarity and direction. What are some of the major roadblocks? So somebody is very willing and they're like, listen, I'm listening to this. I hate my job or I'm an entrepreneur and I have five side hustles and none of them are going the way I want them to.

So what is the major roadblocks you see? There's so many. A lot of them, there is no balance. They've taken the time to define success in one area of their life, but they haven't tied that in.

So if you don't have an idea of three things that you need to do today that are going to make that day a win, then you're going to struggle. I see a lot of people, they wake up and they just work hard. They work hard, they work hard. But if you don't have, I always write down three things and they're never all business related.

There's always one that might be related to family or might be related to health. I'm really interested in those people who are very mentally strong, physically healthy and strong, financially healthy and strong. They're the types of things that we can start to calibrate, get those things ready. Perhaps there's some other relationships that can inspire them on their next chapter because a lot of people reach a point where they feel like this is it.

And it can be very daunting for them to say, look, I'm 50 years old. I might have $10 million in the bank, but I'm not happy day to day. What needs to happen? Well, that's when we move away from money and we can focus on, first of all, restoring balance and getting clear again on who they are and where they want to go.

Then we focus on impact. How do you want your children to think about you? How do you want to turn up each day? Like when you wake up in the morning and you just take a moment to think about who is Scott and how does he go through the day?

What are the standards that you're willing to uphold? How do you, what food are you putting into your body? What conversations are you initiating? Where are you allocating your time?

Once you can start to bring all of those things in together, that's when you can give someone very much a renewed passion. And sometimes it means they need to say farewell to the certain phase of life that they're in. They might have a business that could have served its point. It's like it just died.

It just led to like a natural conclusion. And that's fine that the business can move on with some people who have the excitement and you can move on to doing something that frees you up mentally. It creates all that space for you, which in that time of having six months for like a mental reset and allowing your intellectual curiosity to go to wherever it needs to be, That's a lot of the times that I've found with clients and really highly successful entrepreneurs, they had that time off to figure out their next move.

And the next move is something they went all in on. And it was generally something that they were really excited to do. after the day was done. An example of that is a guy called Michael Fox who created a good friend of mine.

He created the world's first female custom shoe company. So you could go on to Shoes of Prey. If you were a woman and you'd order whatever shoes you want, completely custom made for you, and they would send them out to you a week or two later. But he realized that he wasn't coming home from work.

He didn't want to read magazines and articles about women's shoes. So eventually, after that business that had raised more than $30 million and partnered with companies like Nordstrom, had some really high-profile investors, he took six months off. And then his next venture is called Fable Food Co., which is doing massive things now in all to achieve his mission of ending industrial agriculture.

Very different than that business that he was in, but he is on a huge trajectory with this thing and he actually really loves to do it, which never would have happened if he didn't give himself that six months off. 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 wanna dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.

See you in the next one.