Tony Robbins

Anthony Jay Robbins was born February 29, 1960 in North Hollywood, California, the oldest of three children in a chaotically unstable family. His mother divorced three times; his childhood was marked by periodic abuse and food insecurity. He has spoken often about spending Thanksgiving 1967 — age 7 — receiving a box of groceries from a stranger, which changed his lifelong relationship to generosity. He left home at 17, slept in his car for stretches, and took a job as a janitor.

Robbins encountered Jim Rohn in 1977 when he was 17 years old, attending one of Rohn’s public seminars in his California hometown. He was so impressed he approached Rohn directly and talked his way into a job promoting Rohn’s seminars for Nightingale-Conant. He would work for Rohn’s organization for the next four years. In dozens of interviews over the following decades Robbins has credited Rohn as his single most important mentor.

In his mid-twenties Robbins studied under John Grinder (co-founder of Neuro-Linguistic Programming), went through Erhardt training, and began developing his own synthesis of NLP, behavioral psychology, peak-performance coaching, and live-seminar delivery. He published Unlimited Power in 1986 (age 26) and Awaken the Giant Within in 1991 (age 31). The books cemented him as a commercial force in personal development.

Robbins launched the Unleash the Power Within four-day event — including the signature Friday-night fire walk — in the late 1980s. The format has now trained more than 4 million people. His Date With Destiny six-day event, his annual Business Mastery program, his Platinum Partnership, and his one-on-one coaching (at reportedly $1M+ per engagement, with a reputed waiting list) have made him one of the wealthiest and most influential performance coaches in history. He has personally coached Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky crisis, Serena Williams through multiple Grand Slam runs, Oprah Winfrey, Hugh Jackman, and dozens of hedge-fund and private-equity principals whose names are not public.

In 2014 he published Money: Master the Game — the first of his three books on personal finance — based on in-depth interviews with more than 50 of the world’s most successful investors including Paul Tudor Jones, Ray Dalio, Warren Buffett, John Bogle, and Carl Icahn. The book was a #1 New York Times bestseller and introduced hundreds of thousands of retail investors to institutional-level thinking on portfolio construction.

Robbins has built or invested in more than 100 companies with a combined revenue exceeding $7 billion. He has also done unusually large-scale philanthropic work — committing to provide 1 billion meals to those in need through Feeding America (reached 2020, now extended to 100 billion), funding water infrastructure in India through the Robbins Research Foundation, and building schools and orphanages across multiple countries.

His central teaching, compressed: the quality of your life is the quality of the emotions you experience most of the time, and the quality of those emotions is determined not by your circumstances but by the meanings you assign to your circumstances. Change the meaning, change the state. State drives action; action compounds into results; results become your life. Peak performance is not a gift; it is a set of state-management and strategy skills that can be trained.