Introduction

Before Tom Bilyeu was the co-founder of a billion-dollar nutrition company, he was the self-described “king of remedial jobs.” His self-esteem was high from the beginning; his career performance in those early years, not so much. A former film student at the University of Southern California, Bilyeu graduated into a string of mediocre retail jobs. At one point, he was driving 45 minutes to a strip mall video game store just to clock into his hourly job at the sales desk. Bilyeu said of that time in his life and his makeshift title: “I loved that because I was the king of something.” So, king of remedial jobs it was. Eventually, his career hit a little bit of traction. He

took a job working as a copywriter for two entrepreneurs who were starting a data security company. The two partners saw something in him and encouraged him not to limit himself to just writing sales copy, but instead to help take on any challenge he encountered in the business. And he did. It worked well for a time. The two partners

eventually rewarded his work ethic with equity in the company and even started referring to him as the third co-founder. Together, the three partners grew the company into a sizable operation. They were generating a lot of revenue, and each making a hefty salary. But something was off. Bilyeu explained, “I went through an emotional crisis where I realized I was making more money than I’d ever made. But I was so unhappy.” On paper, he’d made it. He’d become something

more than the king of remedial jobs. He had a good salary. He had equity. But in actuality, the job still felt remedial.

He was putting in too much time. He was burning out. He was hating what he was doing, and he was suffering

in silence. Until one day he couldn’t stay silent anymore.Bilyeu sat down with his partners and told them he was

finished. He told them he was leaving. He didn’t have an idea for what to do next; he just wanted out. He even offered to give back his equity. His plan, as he described it,

was to leave everything behind and move with his wife to the small village in Greece from which her family had emigrated and relax until he’d re-evaluated his life. His partners were surprised. They hadn’t seen it

coming. But they also didn’t want him to go. As a team, they’d worked together for more than six years and felt they’d really achieved something, despite having to work for the better part of a decade without a single day off. In trying to explore what to do about Bilyeu’s desire to leave and what to do with the company, the two partners quickly realized they wanted to continue to work together and with him. So, they started to explore what other projects they could work together on—projects that would make Bilyeu want to come back. At one point, they asked him outright what he wanted to do. He told them he wanted to save the life of his mom

and sister. Bilyeu had grown up in an overweight family. While

he wasn’t morbidly obese like his mom and sister, he was known as a chubby kid by most of his school friends. In his twenties, Bilyeu had fallen in love with fitness and had slimmed down (ironically, he’d actually started trying to gain strength and build muscle, but the intensity of his workouts started eliminating his body fat, and he ended up losing 35 pounds before he gained any muscle). Bilyeu had seen firsthand what a focus on exercising

and eating properly could do, but he also knew his family, and he knew they were representative of a majority of Americans. They ate on impulse—when the urge to snack struck, they ate what tasted good in the moment. Bilyeu knew that if they could create something that tasted good and happened to be healthy for them, his mom and sister (and millions of Americans like them) would make a better choice. Specifically, Bilyeu had in mind one area to focus

on: protein bars. At the time, there were dozens of brands of protein

and meal replacement bars, and some of them were owned by major multinational corporations that even controlled distribution. But while the market was crowded, Bilyeu felt it was crowded with bad products. There were no protein

bars on the market that he would actually eat. He’d learned the science of nutrition and it taught him to avoid almost every product on the market. Every product either tasted terrible or was loaded with sugar. Despite hearing from potential distributors how crowded the marketplace was—one distributor even yelled to them the cliché, “I need another protein bar like I need a hole in the head”— Despite all that, Bilyeu felt like there was an opportunity if he could create something nutritionally sound that actually tasted good. And his former partners agreed and quickly became

his partners once again. The trio started working on preparing the old company to sel l while a lso experimenting with formulations for a great-tasting, actually healthy protein bar with which to build their new company. Very quickly into this process, they encountered the

same dilemma that had led so many past brands to compromise. Every formulation they could come up with that tasted great and didn’t have junk ingredients was also impossible to make shelf stable. It would rot too quickly. In the end, they had to throw away tons of manufacturing equipment they’d bought to mass-produce bars and start again from scratch to find new ways of production. Eventually, things started to turn a corner. They’d sold the old business and poured the funds into a formula that worked. They found specialized equipment that could produce the bars and wrapped them by sterile-gloved hand until they could afford equipment to package them. And then they went to market. And the market exploded. Within the first three years, the company they had started to save Bilyeu’s mom and sister, Quest Nutrition, had grown 57,000 percent. That’s not 57 times more revenue; it’s 570 times more revenue than year one. They grew so fast they struggled to find available production space, often having to rent out a portion of one warehouse in an industrial park and then find other unused spaces of other warehouses in the same park just to have additional space remotely close by. Even ordering supplies was a problem. Bilyeu would put in an order for one ingredient,

and by the time it arrived weeks later, it wasn’t enough to supply the updated and larger production schedule. Fueled by a simple but powerful company mission, “to end metabolic disease,” Bilyeu and his partners had grown the company to a billion-dollar valuation in the first 5 years. But it’s not the growth rate or the net worth that kept Bilyeu and his team motivated. It’s the impact. Bilyeu regularly has people write him letters or talk to him on social media about how much the product has helped them. He describes the feeling this way:

“I have people write in and say, ‘this has changed my life’ or ‘You helped me lose 100 pounds.’ My favorite story ever is a woman whose son has brain cancer, and every day had to take the weirdest foods to school because of his diet. The kid was getting teased and made fun of. So, she said to me ‘When your product came out, I could send him with that and that was the first thing he got that people didn’t tease him about.’” In 2016, I toured the home offices of Quest Nutrition and met Bilyeu. But I was more impressed by meeting the employees of Quest. If you asked any employee, from operations to marketing, from reception to social media, what they were working for each one would answer the same way. “To end metabolic disease.”

It’s easy to look at such a powerful story and attribute Bilyeu’s success to an all-too-familiar cause. Sure, it’s a story of finding a unique business idea, working hard, and experiencing success. But a closer look at the story, and the science of what actually brings teams together for exceptional performance shines a light on a few under-appreciated elements. It wasn’t Bilyeu’s willpower and grit that led him and his team to success, if it were then he never would have burned out in the first job. And it wasn’t some internal team-building activity that kept everyone unified and un-compromised during the stress of making the right product, if it were then they probably would have compromised the formula just to get to market quickly with just another generic protein bar. Instead, the success of Quest Nutrition is the result of a specific principle well-known throughout history and

now being proven in the world of social science. The simplest and most effective way to build a high performing team that stays together despite the stress of the challenge is to get that team working against a common enemy. In other words, to pick a fight. Bilyeu picked a fight against metabolic disease and found it a more powerful driving force than any bold vision of success. Bilyeu started a company not for himself or to make money, but to save his mom, his sister, and everyone else who was in danger from a clear and present threat. And it made all the difference.

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While modern corporations spend billions of dollars every year on “team-building” and on making sure that they hire top talent to “get the right people on the bus,” it turns out there is a much older, and much lower cost, way to rally a team. It’s not about ropes courses, trust falls, or any other of the team building activities that so many have tried and found wanting. It’s not even about how to motivate people by casting a vision or setting a big hairy audacious goal. It’s about finding out, or sometimes just declaring, what battle your team is fighting. It’s about finding the common threat to the team or its stakeholders and outlining a clear path to overcoming it. And this isn’t a new idea. While social science has only recently been studying the unifying effect of outside adversity and a sense of mission, civilizations have known for millennia that fighting against a common enemy brings people together and brings out the best in them. Finding something worth fighting for is one of the oldest ways to establish an organizational purpose, and a great template to use when communicating that purpose. Moreover, that purpose inspires people to be more productive and more creative. Inspired people create more value not just for themselves and their company, but for their families and for the communities that they live in.

People don’t want to join a company; they want to join a crusade. But not just any fight will do. Corporations have used battle language for decades in vain attempts to rally their employees and found them wanting. In fact, when I first started thinking about this idea, everyone responded with the same reaction: “So what? Everyone knows that business is kill or be killed.” But every single example that followed was a story about how leaders attempted to inspire their teams to “win” and “beat the competition.” To which I simply asked, “and did that inspire you?” The answer was almost universally “no.” Recent research suggests that the reason for this is that your direct competitors, while they might seem like a threat to market share, aren’t a very motivating threat to most people. Because people want to fight for something bigger than just winning against a different group of people doing the same work. Likewise, many leaders know the importance of being “mission-driven” or of focusing their people on a higher purpose. They know they should probably “start with why.” But communicating that mission or purpose is difficult and answering the question “why” can be tricky.

For corporate leaders, there are a variety of stakeholders to satisfy, and the pressure to address each in the mission statement leads to long, winding prose that few employees even read and almost none internalize. This is why mission statements so often fail to motivate. There’s no clarity and, if there is, there’s no clear and present danger.

For entrepreneurs and small business owners, just taking the time to define a mission statement maybe be more time than they can spare. The business just started serving customers, and owners never really reflected on the deeper reasons for starting. And if they do know, putting that purpose to words is often looked at as too time consuming. Picking a fight—and picking the right fight—makes it all crystal clear.

It defines in short, precise language why the organization exists. And it gives the people inside the organization something most of us deeply want from our work. We want to start revolutions. We want to bring justice to the world. We want to overcome serious odds. We want to defend the weak. We don’t want to sell more widgets than the other guys. Picking a fight is a powerful motivator; but leaders need to pick their fight wisely. Instead of someone to fight, they need to find a cause worth fighting for. Over the course of our journey, we’ll take a deep dive into some of history’s most well-known battles, and some of business history’s most amazing turnarounds, in order to understand why fights motivated individuals and how fights and outside threats bond teams together. We’ll also look at three specific types of fights—the Revolutionary Fight, the Underdog Fight, and the Ally Fight—that organizations often find themselves in anyway and hence are perfect for leaders to declare. We’ll look at decades of social science research and real-life examples from billion-dollar companies to French pirates to Olympic champion curling teams (you heard that right). And we’ll discover how picking the right fight was the key to their success. We’ll end most chapters with specific takeaways or questions you can use to find your own fight. In the meantime, remember: It’s not about competitors; it’s about the crusade. It’s not about who you’re fighting; it’s about what you’re fighting for. The secret to team success isn’t “team-building” and it’s not finding the right people. It’s finding the right fight.

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