Give Me 60 Minutes and I'll Eliminate Your Self-Doubt Forever with Benny Blanco

The Mel Robbins Podcast

In this empowering episode of The Mel Robbins Podcast, host Mel Robbins sits down with legendary music producer and songwriter Benny Blanco to

Key takeaways

• Failure is not the opposite of success—it's part of the process. Every major achievement comes after countless setbacks.
• Self-doubt often stems from fear of embarrassment or judgment, but most people forget about your failures faster than you do.

Main topics

• Overcoming self-doubt
• Embracing failure as a path to success

Notable quotes

"If you're 5'4 and you want to be in the NBA, I'm going to root for you, but it might be an uphill battle."

"Nobody is keeping a scorecard on your life except you. And if they are, they're an a-hole."

Conclusion

Benny Blanco's message is clear: your past failures don't define you, and self-doubt only

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Speaker 1 (0:08) You pressed play on this episode for a reason. It's because you're tired. You're tired of doubting yourself, talking yourself out of the things that you want, tired of letting fear make your decisions for you. Well, have you picked the right episode to listen to? Because our incredible guest today is going to look you in the eye and tell you if you want your life to look and feel different a year from now. You want the dream job, true love, unshakable confidence, better friendships, more happiness. There's one rule. Keep showing up. Benny Blanco is a 12-time Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer with 29 number one hits, and 19 of those songs have over a billion streams each on Spotify. Now, you might not know his name, but I guarantee you. Speaker 1 (1:05) You know his music. Songs like Love Yourself by Justin Bieber, Teenage Dream by Katy Perry, Moves Like Jagger by Maroon 5. Hit after hit after hit. But Benny didn't start his impressive career with everything figured out. He's going to tell you he didn't grow up with famous parents or money. He doesn't really have any special talents, and he'll admit he's not the hottest guy you're ever going to see. But that makes him the perfect person to teach you how to erase self-doubt, Speaker 1 (1:33) overcome failure, and start believing in yourself and acting like it. Benny has come all the way to our Boston studios with the real stories behind his success and the hard lessons he's learned along the way. He's going to share the life-changing tools and strategies that have helped him push through nonstop rejection and setbacks, and they will help you do the same. Benny wants you to know every single failure is leading you somewhere great. even if you can't see it right now. And if he can turn his failures into hits, you can turn yours into the life you've been wanting to live. Speaker 1 (2:24) Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am fired up for the conversation today. I'm so excited you're going to experience this. It's such an honor to be together, to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener, holy cow, are you in for a doozy. If you're here because somebody shared this with you, you better thank them. But first, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. Today, we're talking about how to erase self-doubt. overcome failure, and reset your mind for success with the one and only Benny Blanco. Benny is one of the most successful and sought-after music producers and songwriters in the world, and one of the defining hitmakers of the 21st century. He's a 12-time Grammy nominee who has 29 number one hits. 19 of his songs have over a billion streams each. Speaker 1 (3:19) He has won five BMI Songwriter of the Year awards, and as a solo artist, he has released two albums that have been streamed more than 11 billion times. Benny is also the New York Times bestselling author of the cookbook called Open Wide, and now he has written a blockbuster of a book called F Failure, which happens to be exactly the message he is here to share with you today. Penny Blanco, welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. Oh my gosh. Speaker 1 (3:52) Are we on? We're on. Oh, wow. Okay. I'm ready. So am I. Here's where I want to start. Okay. If the person listening takes everything to heart that you're about to share based on your life experience and your crazy career about the importance of failure, the importance of how you handle self-doubt, if they really take to heart what you're going to teach us today, What the heck could change about my life? I got a few things. One, I'm from Virginia. I'm not from Los Angeles. I am not from New York City. I did not grow up with famous parents. I did not grow up with a ton of money. I was like a funny looking kid. And somehow through. Speaker 1 (4:43) sheer will and not an incredible amount of talent. I really don't have an incredible amount of talent. I'm not the hottest guy you've ever seen in your life, but somehow I married the most beautiful, talented woman on planet Earth. I did everything I wanted to do in my career, and I'm still. searching for new, amazing opportunities every day. Look, if you're 5'4 and you want to be in the NBA, I'm going to root for you, but it might be an uphill battle. I'd say almost everything in the world you can do. You can do most of the things if you work hard at it. It's just about getting started, okay? So everyone always gives 9 million excuses why they're not going to do something, why they can't. They'll say, oh, Speaker 1 (5:31) I'm going to write this book, but first I got to get a typewriter. Oh, no, I'm not going to do a typewriter. I'll do it in my phone. No, no, I got to be old school and I got to write it by hand. By then there's been three weeks and you're still figuring out what apparatus you're going to use to write your book. And it's just about starting now. Start today. I don't care whatever idea you have. If you have one idea and it's usually the idea you're too scared to tell anyone because you're embarrassed, you're shy, all of the above. Start doing something to move that from here. Speaker 1 (6:01) to here. I'm asking you to move it three and a half inches forward. If you can do that, just start to do it. And you know what? The thing you start off doing might not be the thing you do in the end, but you'll probably land somewhere pretty fucking cool. Like I thought I was going to be the biggest singer rapper in the world when I was 11 years old. That didn't happen for me, but I did get to do some pretty cool shit along the way. So just start somewhere. You, right on the back of this book, I wrote this book to show you why it's the key to success, failure. Every hero you've ever had has failed more times than you can imagine. Nobody is keeping a scorecard on your life except you. And if they are, they're an a-hole. Embrace failure and never look back. Why do you think it's so hard for people to start? Why do we get so up in our heads? Speaker 1 (6:59) What are we afraid of, Benny? I think it's really hard for people to start the engine because there's so many what ifs. Well, what if I post this and then my friends from when I was younger make fun of me because it looks like I'm trying to be like too reachy or too preachy or too this or too that. And then someone says, well, what if I post my music video and it gets zero views? Well, what if I... try out for the basketball team, and I don't make it. What if I go to acting class and they tell me I'm bad? People are scared of being embarrassed, okay? It's something that we were taught. And it's not true. I fail every day, okay? I fail every single day. And one of my friends, he was going through a tough time. Very successful. Had something that failed in his career. Speaker 1 (7:54) And he like couldn't get over it. And he said, you're standing on a soapbox talking about how you're going to do something and it's going to be the biggest, best thing in the world. And 90% of the time it is. He said, but even when you fail, you just wake up the next day and you just go about it. You just go about it like nothing happened. And I started thinking about it and I said, well, I guess. I have like a failure to amnesia. What does that mean? Failure to amnesia? Or amnesia to failure. See, I fail all the time. Look, I just fucked up just now. Okay. So that's a perfect, keep that in. Nobody take that out. I'm not taking that out. Okay. So I. You have an amnesia to failure, meaning you forget about failure? If. Speaker 1 (8:41) You forget about the failure. I feel like everyone else is going to forget about it. I want to make sure that as you're listening, you actually heard what Benny just said, that if you forget about the failure, everybody else is going to forget about it. Okay, look, this. So he's holding a board that says failure. What's that say? Yeah, anyone listening, I'm holding a board. It says failure, okay? This is you. This is me. We are this board. We are together. We both have lots of failures. But if we just go like this and we... Speaker 1 (9:09) Go like that. And we go like that. And you just pretend that I'm really good at erasing and there's none of those little specks of failure there anymore. Right now, we have a blank board. Okay? So you're looking at this right now. This is me. You don't see failure. You see nothing. It's so true. But hold on. You know what I see when I look at you? What? Because this is one of the reasons when you and I first started talking and I think you are. such an incredibly powerful and unique teacher. I really do. And yet I was like, okay, and how do I get over the fact and overcome the fact that when somebody looks at you and sees Speaker 1 (9:56) your career or sees you in the public eye and sees all the accomplishments, there's that distance that's sort of like, okay, well, you know, it's Benny Blanco. I mean, what could he teach me about like how I'm going to get like happiness in my life or meaning in my life? Do you see what I mean? And so people look at you and only see the accomplishments, but they don't see the failures that got you here. because nobody's looking at those failures. What do you remember about Michael Jordan? He dunked from the foul line. He scored like the most amount of points out of anyone. Maybe LeBron broke that now. I don't even know. But at that time, it was that. So you're sitting there. You're looking at Michael Jordan. Are you counting all his misses? He took the most shots out of anybody. And it's like, he's not sitting there saying like, I took. Speaker 1 (10:43) 22 shots today. I shouldn't take any more. I only made six of them. No, he's going to shoot the fucking lights out until he gets what he wants. And I feel like you, me, we're all doing the same thing. I should be the exact person you're listening to. Look at me. I have no special power. I wasn't born with anything special. I'm just a normal guy who works really hard and gets what I want because most people, when they get up to that line where Speaker 1 (11:11) It's just a brick wall, okay? You're sitting at a brick wall. Most people, they get to the brick wall, they go, ah, it's a brick wall, I'm gonna turn around. Me, I get to the brick wall and I like, I like, I like throw it to the ground. I run, I jump through it. I might break my neck or something, but I'm gonna die trying to do it. And that's just, if you have the motivation and you just keep going, you don't let anybody tell you, you can't do something because of this, this, and that. Speaker 1 (11:41) You can do it. You can do whatever you want if you put your mind to it, almost. Well, Benny, you know what I find fascinating is that a lot of, at least for me personally, I can see years wasted waiting for either somebody to pick me or somebody to notice or somebody to give me permission or the perfect conditions. And as everybody's been waiting around for some other person to give you the signal, it's easy to miss. is that the only person that's actually stopping you from doing something is you. And you're stopping yourself because you're scared and you don't need to be scared. I'm going to look at the camera and you don't need to be scared. Nothing bad is going to happen, except maybe you're right where you started and you just got to keep working harder at it. And I'll tell you one thing. I've been at the top and had to go. Speaker 1 (12:34) all the way back to the bottom and come back up. Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever been at the top of your game and fallen down so far you don't even know where you could go and then you got to climb all the way back up? Yes, 41, three kids under the age of 10. We were doing great. My husband was in the restaurant business. Things went sideways. We found ourselves 800 grand in debt. Liens hit the house. I lost my job. Couldn't pay for groceries. Like, yeah. And what'd you do? Well, first of all, I drank myself into the ground and then laid around in misery and bitched at my husband and blamed the world for my problems. And that didn't work. And then I finally got so sick of where I was and I got so sick of waiting for somebody else to rescue me. And I got so disgusted by the spiraling that I was creating and the... Speaker 1 (13:29) envy that I felt watching other people progress in their lives. Like I literally got just disgusted with myself and the stagnation and the self-loathing that I just had this moment where I just said, if I actually want to change my life, prove it. Do you remember where you were? Yes. Where were you? I was lying in bed on a Tuesday morning, February, 2008. And then how many things do you think you tried? before things started going your way? How many times did you try to get a job, try to do this, try to get money? I mean, it took every day, all day long. That's my life. That's my life. But when you say that, you know, I have special talents, convince me, because I don't believe that. Okay, here's what I- Because I think it's a special talent to start, but I think you can teach us how to do it. Yes, I know if I show up. Speaker 1 (14:24) Every day. Maybe I don't know even what I'm doing, but if I show up and eventually there might not be the other guy there and they just need the next best thing. Like, it's really not that complicated. Look, it seems so complicated. It seems daunting for me. I started. OK, I had a dream. I wanted to be a musician, a professional musician. OK, music is going to be my life. And I have no connections, 0.0 connections. So there's nothing. There's nothing there. There's no point of entry, zero. I can't even go show up somewhere. I don't know where it is to show up. It's so true. So I would go and I would wait outside of recording studios when I was probably at this point, like 10, 11. 10 or 11. Yeah, I'd go to a studio. I'd have my mom take me. I'd go to a studio. Speaker 1 (15:21) And I'd wait outside and I'd wait for a person to walk out and I'd say, do you make music? And that was, I would just ask. And then I'd say, can I do anything here? Can I do this? Can I do that? And I was just trying to be in the room. Cause if you show up and you're in the room, something's going to go down. Something's going to happen. You're going to either learn, you're going to get