Tony Robbins Simon Says Game

Shaan tells a story about a powerful lesson he learned at a Tony Robbins event about competition and seriousness.

"At that Tony Robbins event, they play this little game before Tony comes out to get the crowd active. We're in an arena - there's 10,000 people in this basketball arena, and we're all going to play Simon Says.

This guy comes out and says the winner is going to come up on stage and get something special. So he starts, and he's eliminating tons of people really quickly. Within ten minutes it's down to the last five people, and he brings them up on stage.

He asks them, 'Did you think you were going to win?' Their honest answers were mostly, 'I didn't know if I was going to win, but I was definitely going to try. I really wanted to win.' Four of them said they actually believed they were going to win.

Then he goes to the audience and asks, 'Raise your hand if you actually believed you were going to win.' Almost nobody raised their hand - maybe 50 people out of 10,000.

And he says, 'You know, the five people on stage - it looks like you're competing with 10,000 people. You're not. You were actually only competing with these 50. You had a one in ten chance of getting on stage, not a one in ten thousand.'

That really stuck with me. A lot of life is like that. Things seem really hard, really unlikely, really challenging, but most people are not serious. Most people are not trying to seriously do anything. And if you are serious, you're already in that final five out of fifty. Your odds are much better than you think."