Greg Lav was sitting in the Nevada desert on a Wednesday morning, no boss, no schedule, no permission required, filming a talk for the next generation of entrepreneurs. That image is the whole argument. The CEO of Bloom, a wellness brand now stocked in 60,000 retail doors, graduated college with a 2.3 GPA, describes his ADHD as so severe he can barely read, and by his own admission was never athletic, well-spoken, or pointed toward anything that looked like success. What he had instead, and what he credits for everything that followed, is discipline, and a very specific understanding of what that word actually means.
Why freedom and discipline turned out to be the same thing
The version of discipline Lav teaches is not the punishing, white-knuckle variety most people picture. His framing is almost the opposite: discipline is freedom, and doing whatever you want whenever you want is actually a form of captivity. ‘The most powerful man is the man who has power over himself,’ he says at the start, and he builds every lesson outward from that center.
For Lav, the practical expression of that idea was the word no. For roughly five to seven years of early entrepreneurship, he turned down social invitations nine times out of ten. He skipped Thanksgiving for five consecutive years, missing Christmas repeatedly to prepare for January, which he calls ‘the Super Bowl of wellness.’ The one year he finally made it back to Christmas, four 18-wheelers loaded with product were stolen en route to a major January launch, and he had to leave after one hour to address what he flatly calls ‘highway robbery.’ He tells that story not as a complaint but as proof of cost. Building something real requires intentional sacrifice, and the people who stay close through years of nos, he says, turn out to be the only ones worth keeping.
Walking into the Target pitch in cargo shorts and Air Force Ones
One of the sharpest moments in Lav’s account is the Bloom fundraising push, when the company was attempting to raise $100 million and he was 27 years old, living in Venice Beach, wearing cargo shorts and a baggy t-shirt into rooms full of bankers and private equity professionals. He called a high school friend who worked on Wall Street and asked whether he needed a suit. The friend told him: ‘Greg, you’re Bloom. Enter the room as yourself. But enter it with conviction, because energy is contagious.’
That advice carried directly into the Target pitch in Minneapolis. The team flew to the retailer’s headquarters with, as Lav puts it, ‘no doubt in our mind that it would be a blowout success.’ The launch went through. Bloom entered Target nationally in 2023 and the brand’s trajectory shifted. They were not wearing suits. They were clean, groomed, and entirely themselves.
The other lesson running underneath all of this is one Lav calls ‘be the quietest man in the room.’ He declines business dinners almost categorically, exits meetings the moment the goal is achieved, and warns against overstaying any welcome. The logic is direct: the less you say, the more space the other person has to imagine what the relationship could become. He admits to losing deals earlier in his career by following up too aggressively and letting the controlled energy of an initial pitch dissolve into something that read as chaotic.
The moment he realized stress was the raw material
Lav’s closing argument is about reframing pressure. Modern culture, he says, treats stress as a failure of self-care. Looking back from 31, he sees the most stressed chapters of his 20s as some of the most formative. ‘That pressure truly did create diamonds,’ he says, and he means it without irony. The goal, he argues, is never to eliminate stress but to never surrender freedom in pursuit of money. ‘Money without freedom is just paper.’ He describes signed contracts, bad debt, or any arrangement where someone else holds power over your choices as shackles, regardless of the salary attached.
The session closes on a point that doubles back to the opener: success does not build character, it reveals it. The discipline required to get there is also what determines what you do once you arrive.
The cargo shorts hanging in a Minneapolis hotel room
Somewhere in the Bloom archive, there is a version of Greg Lav the night before the Target pitch: 27 years old, cargo shorts, Air Force Ones, no finance vocabulary, no suit.
The pitch happened the next morning anyway.
