MAKE YOUR BRAIN BELIEVE YOU CAN DO IT - Motivational Speech

Guess what? You're going to die one day. We all are. We need to face that sometimes. We need to realize that sometimes. And sometimes it's not our morose and bad thoughts. Sometimes that's a thought that can sober us up when we're maybe a little too anxious or nervous about something that's going on here in our life. Just facing that fact, stating to ourselves. Oftentimes we'd do well to heed the advice of my college roommate's granddad who told me I've had thousands of crises in my life. Most of them never happened. The next time you want to just give in to that desire for comfort, remember that your future self is going to be the one to suffer the consequences. It's so easy to just put it off and act like it doesn't exist. But that future self that you're passing all these burdens to will one day be yourself of the present and you'll wish you chose to do otherwise. I like to think of fulfillment over happiness. Happiness seems like a kind of an immediate thing. But it won't make you fulfilled. Fulfillment is a longer-lasting emotion. It comes from, wow, I spent 2 years doing that. I made what I set out to create. I feel fulfilled. It's a wonderful feeling. It's the greatest high in the world. You already got everything inside of you. It's already inside of you. There's nothing in this physical universe that was ever created with anything on the outside. It's already inside of you. The issue is that it's locked up. In order to unlock it, you'd have to develop the core of the self. The core of the self is like the Rubik's Cube that unlocks this power that's just moving all through you. The confidence that you're looking for, it's inside of you already. It's not on the outside. It's not based on what you do or how many times you've accomplished or what level you got to. So you start to realize that your power is the capacity to you embodying that which you actually are. In order to get to that, we got to develop the core of the self. When I am 85 years old, I will regret if I behaved cowardly throughout the entire period of my life when I could have taken risks. And the reality of a guaranteed regret at a delay versus a shot, not the guarantee, but a shot at getting what I want. And so if you have no chance of what you want and a chance of what you want, which door do you go to? So you're telling me I've got a chance. And fundamentally, that's what you do. And if you are the type of person that likes to win, then go into that arena and win. All failure besides death is psychological. It's literally rules that we make for ourselves that we then draw a line in the sand and compare ourselves to it and say as a result of me being far away from this line, I am a failure. And if you start developing an attitude that's fearful, that's anxious, that's concerned, that's worried about everything that's happening, that you have no faith in yourself, where you think everybody's against you, the world is too difficult, it's going to infect you and it's going to make it, it's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're going to make life harder for yourself. You're going to sabotage yourself. So you want to have a feeling of excitement about your future, about the world ahead of you, about your possibilities. What are those possibilities? You have to understand who you are, what makes you different. The main advice I have is to think about what your attitude towards life is in the future. Are you worried? Are you concerned? Are you closed? Are you narrowing it because you're so anxious? Or are you excited and opening it? Do you have a feeling of adventure and excitement? Because the one attitude will close you off and will make the world harder for you. The other will open up possibilities. Many of you are sitting around waiting to feel ready. You can still move forward when you're not ready. It's about the action. Your mind, your history, your past, you will always have a million excuses not to do it, not to feel like it, not to believe in yourself. The only thing that matters in your life, in your business, is the actions that you're taking. And the more consistently that you take action, the faster you will start to believe in yourself because you will see proof that you are not the kind of person that sits around and feels unworthy, that you're not a victim that sits by and gets sucked into other people's stuff, that you're not that kind of person. So it won't make sense to believe in anymore, but it starts with action. Overcoming the old self allows us to become somebody else, and there is that period of transition. I call it the void where there's just not a lot happening, and you've just got to be able to keep going and continuously get to the end of your belief where most people stop. We've been hypnotized and conditioned into becoming materialists. I think that we define reality with our senses, and I think that is one of the biggest delusions. So the fundamental question is, can you believe in a future that you can't see or experience with your senses yet, but you've thought about enough times in your mind that your brain has literally changed to look like the event has already occurred? Follow your dream, and don't be afraid to fail. You will fail sometimes. You learn success by failure. Never give up. Every block down is a block up. Every misfortune is a fortune. Get off the porch. Don't give up. If you've got a goal in mind and someone can tell you not to take that goal and you believe it, you don't have a goal. Stay on course. And to the extent you are successful is the extent you have this thing, which is that you're willing to step into spaces you were ill-prepared for. So it seems to me like you're willing to, you kind of think, like, if I get my foot in the door, then I'll figure this stuff out. Whereas what most people do, this is killing you, by the way, I won't step into the door until I'm completely prepared, which is a total fallacy anyways as an entrepreneur. Have a music career or an artist or anything great, if you're waiting for a threshold of, I need to be totally prepared, then I'll step in the door, you will be on the other side of that door the rest of your life. You're haunted by all the opportunities that you missed by not bringing your best at that time when you could have won but you didn't win because you allowed life to interfere with that one shot. That's greatness. Greatness is your recall. Greatness is being so aware of the time of life in the second that went by and you can recall like it was yesterday. Greatness is being able to go back there, not making that same mistake again and being haunted by it. That is greatness. People have got to reject this notion that they have to be protected from the outside and putting all their time and energy into that. Be the change you want to see in the world. If you want to see people strong enough to withhold a better weight, then don't worry about trying to fix systems, just get tough. Watch how people respond to you. Watch how your kids look up to you. Watch how your family members look up to you. Watch how people turn to you and want help. We have an innate desire to get strong. We don't have an innate desire to have something else protect us. On the mental side of what's driving a lot of people not believing in that is we're just culturally reinforcing that like we're stuck. We're trapped. There's nothing we can do that people don't understand. The fulfillment has to be earned. You can't tell someone to just love themselves. You have to tell them how they earn self-respect. You have to tell them that doing hard s*** that you don't want to do and doing it anyway, that's exactly how you gain self-worth. You can't just tell someone to feel worthy. At some point along the way, we get confused. And we misunderstand who we are. We start building this false sense of self around all the stories and all the labels and all the things. And we start living our life that way. And we get confused about how life works, how we interact with life. We start living much smaller than we really are. And so when we do that, we start to move away from our dreams. We start to give up on this beautiful thing that we're here to give birth to in the world. And then we get stuck. Because we don't have that dream in front of us anymore that allows us to overcome all the challenges in life, right? That pulls us into it. That's the thing that allows us to grow. And we get stuck. The truth is like a lot of people don't appreciate the fact that doing anything exceptional requires a lot of work, right? And it requires that anonymous work that you do when no one's looking. And when the going gets tough and you're conflicted over what it is that you're going to do on that day, it's easy to cave in. And so there's a level of conviction and commitment to self that's required. I think you develop over time with some level of resilience and the persistence that comes with that. But if you don't appreciate that doing something hard is going to test you and is going to compel you to get out of your comfort zone, then you're going to struggle. But sometimes your biggest breakthrough is in what you unlearn. And then you relearn. Sometimes you have to disrupt your soil. Pull your soil up. Take that dry dirt that's been planted for years. I know. I've just been knowing this for years. This is what my mother taught me. This is what we've always done. You have to disrupt that soil in order to plant a new seed to grow a new fruit. Not to necessarily keep you comfortable with what you know. Stay comfortable in that. I want to disrupt you with some things that are new awareness to go, oh, wait, hold on. Or new awareness about what you've been doing based on what you've known forever that doesn't fit your future anymore. Because I can guarantee you every single one of us who wants something different than what we're getting, we're doing something unconsciously from old patterns that doesn't even serve our future. Do whatever you're doing the best you can knowing there's the bigger horizon. So the big problem I see is people want more and they hate what they're doing so that they're in a state of mind where, God, I just want I'm done with this crap that someday I'll reach my dreams. And if you can flop that to go, no, this is the gateway to my dreams. This is what I have to do and I have to do it the best. It's not this is miserable, I hate it, I feel the next level and now I'm amazing. It's like you need to master that. Living in the past, you're going to be depressed because you are rehashing things that happened to you that are not going to happen again. If you're living in the future, you're going to be anxious because you are anticipating what's coming or you're wishing for things that aren't happening yet. Being in the present moment is where you will have the greatest control and where happiness flourishes. We surround ourselves around people that make us feel great, that tell us what we want to hear. The second we put ourselves amongst the uncommon people, we don't like that feeling. I don't know, I've lost my edge. What's going on? Because once you hit the top of the mountain, guess what happened? I'm good. I'm good, so you wonder why you're falling down now. Because once you reach the top of the mountain, you got to go to another one. That's mediocrity. There's a lot of people in mediocrity who have a nice resume, but they're one-timers, man. You don't become what you want. You become where your habits take you. There's no ending. And that's the person I listen to. That's the person who's gained knowledge. You gain knowledge through suffering. And on the other end of suffering is a world that very few, very few have ever seen. It's a beautiful world because that's where you find yourself. So it's the same thing with failure. It's how you use it. It's that drive inside of you, okay? It's what we talk about, the dark side. The dark side is filled with failure, but it's the fuel that burns you like something that's never burned inside you before. And this is the problem. It's the same obstacle. The difference is when you have a clear destination, the obstacles become easy to overcome. When you don't have a clear destination, you keep coming to a grinding halt. People want to feel that the effort that they're exerting actually are moving somewhere. And so successful measurement, successful recognition is not just for the steps you take. It's not just for the effort. It's that the effort you exerted moved us closer to where we're trying to get to. And that get to should be some crazy ideal. The magnitude of the reward you experience as you're moving towards a goal is proportionate to the importance of the goal. So that means the more important the goal you pick, the more possibility there is for what is life-affirming. Fear fuels you. Fear lets you know, go get more information. Fear lets you know, step a little later and study. Fear lets you know, get up a little earlier. Fear lets you know, ask for help. Fear is informing you. It's not stopping you. It's just another emotion like love and compassion and gratitude. We just made it paralyze us. And if we are conditioned, if we've conditioned ourselves to believe certain kinds of things, and one of the things that we kind of believe and hang on to and live with is this whole idea that all of the things that happened to me in my past are what are keeping me from doing what I'd like to do today. Be willing to go to the edge and not just lean over and feel the breeze and watch the people jump and watch them soar and look through the windows at all the people who are living great lives. Don't just go to the edge and feel it. Be willing to lean. Feel your heartbeat. Feel it. That lets you know you're alive. That lets you know you're okay. That is a formula for misery. And what we do in our life is we compare ourselves to the best day and the best picture on social media that we see of somebody else. We compare ourselves to different times in our lives too. You know, even if you're in a relationship, comparing your relationship in its fifth year to its fifth week isn't fair to that relationship. There's different stages in our life. So comparison is a pathway. There's pathways to happiness and there's pathways that lead us to unhappiness. One of those for sure is comparison. And it's an ego thing oftentimes with us. We're always trying to one-up things in our life. It's a matter, I think, really, of being more present in the moment in your life and saying, I deserve to be happy right now. It has a very specific universal formula. And that formula is work your ass off to get very good at something that you care deeply about that allows you to serve not only yourself, but other people. That's it. Create your own element. Don't try and perform someone else's expertly. Don't waste your time trying to live someone else's life. Be trapped by dogma. Focus in on your own strengths, your own element, what you have to offer. Don't get lost in trying to become like someone else or pretend to be someone else. And too many of us are fish trying to climb a tree. Too many of us are monkeys being taught how to swim. Too many of us are lions being taught to live like cats. We're not getting to live in our element. So my second piece of advice is live in that element that you've naturally been given. Don't try to adopt another. We've all got a special genius inside of us. The fastest way to attract what you want in life is to deserve it by doing so much work it becomes unreasonable not to achieve it. Do so much work, it would be unreasonable that you fail. The seat at the table is yours if you want it. Do the hard work. Build the skills no one can ignore. Adjust your mindset to match where you want to go. Then pull up a chair and sit down. You want to work with such relentless obsession that when people see you they're grateful they don't have to compete against you. The fastest shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts. Do the work. Violence is the answer. I think there's a lot of power in knowing that you're doing every single thing you possibly can to win. If you leave it all in the field, if you have nothing left in the tank, I don't think there's a feeling that's more satisfying as a man than knowing that you've given everything that you had to give to an endeavor that you deemed meaningful. A man must have a quest. It's like you need to do something. You need to go towards something. And your quest could be being the best father. It could be being the best musician or the best podcaster or the best businessman or the best tire replacer or the best sweeper. I think being questless, being aimless, and never being able to use the violence that you are capable of in the pursuit of an endeavor that you find meaningful is where people find themselves lost and without hope because hopelessness comes from a perceived lack of options. We don't know what to do. Anxiety comes from many options but no priorities. And so a quest remedies both of those because you have one path that you're clear on and you know the only thing that you have left to do is destroy everything in your path to getting to where you want to go. It is an unwritten rule of life that after every prolonged period of hardship and uncertainty there is going to be a period where you achieve quantum leaps across multiple areas of your life. The only requirement is that you do not give up on yourself. Failure and success are on the same road. It's just that failure is an earlier exit. What's that one about whatever you do don't be the guy who gives up at the exact moment when you should be fighting with everything you have. You'll make it through either way but there's only one way you'll look back and be proud of yourself. This is the metaframe of the story that we one day tell. Like we tell stories of what type of person we are all day long when we're confronted with different decisions. What type of person am I? And I would like to be known to myself as a fighter. Is that I'm willing to fight for what I want and for what I believe in. Like you can change your stars. Like I was not the type of person who does the types of things that I do now. And I don't talk about them as much because honestly I blocked most of them out because I was in so much pain during that period of my life. And the reason that I'm willing to keep making content and write books and all that stuff is because I know that there is another person who is going through a similar chapter and worried if they are sane or if it is only them and it is not. And so like you can't compare yourself to people who are different chapters. You just have to believe that you can change incrementally one behavior at a time over an extended period of time and that those changes will aggregate. That they will stack up. Because like we don't know what the last chapter is going to look like. We only know what the next page does and we get to write that today. And like I was so driven by fear. I was so afraid of everything during that chapter. And so it was like other people's opinions. What if I fail? What if this doesn't work out? What if people make fun of me? Like I had all this fear around it. And like the emotionality that I have now towards it is because of the mix of pity and pride that I have for that young man, the young Alex that was going through that. Because I am proud that I made it through that but I also pity the amount of pain that I was going through to make that jump. And so I don't know who is listening but like fear can be useful. The flip that made it for me was just using that fear against something bigger. Was that I was more afraid of looking back on my life and never having tried. You talk in retrospect about that period, about what that guy went through. It doesn't sound like pity to me, it sounds like grief. It sounds much closer to grief. Like somebody nearly died or did die or suffered a lot and didn't deserve it. I think that person totally died. I don't want to say the man I was, the boy that I was totally died. And I think, I mean the hardest loss that I had to take was the boy that I was in my father's eyes that was living up to his expectations which is all that I wanted. I had achieved the dreams that I had as a younger man and in so doing it had become my nightmare. And no one is coming to save you, everything is your fault and you have to sacrifice who you are for who you want to become. I think it's so real for me is that you do. Like someone's dreams will die. It is yours or theirs. So you just want to make sure that the person who is dreaming for you has bigger dreams for life than you do. And sometimes well-intentioned people have smaller dreams for you than you do. And if they have smaller dreams then you should listen to you and not them. The world will reward you in proportion to your courage, not your intellect. The most dangerous person in the world is the one who continues to show up every day even when the rewards are not guaranteed. Your potential is determined by the amount of uncertainty you're able to tolerate and how long you can tolerate it for. You can beat 99% of people if you can master the shame of rejection, the boredom of repetition and the pain of feedback. I was asked if you could transfer only one trait to your son what would it be? And I really thought a lot about it. I was like all the traits, what would I transfer? And I think it's courage. Because if you don't have courage nothing else matters. You can't take any action, you can't do anything worth doing, you can't stand for anything because you have no courage. And so I think that's why it's so much more preferable to be a failure than a coward. And I think that I would hope that I could transfer just that lesson and try and reinforce as many times as I can in his upbringing that you have to take jumps and you have to lose and you have to be willing to lose and then realize that losing doesn't actually make you a loser because losing is the first signal on the path to winning. But not playing is the actual signal for a forever loss. What is courage to you? Being willing to take action where there's a large short-term cost with an uncertain delayed benefit. We yearn for the approval of many people who don't have lives that we want. And so if they have a specific life then it means that that is what they think is valuable. And if we don't want what they have then why would we value their weight on our decisions? It means that the path to exceptionalism is lonely. And loneliness is something that we decry as a society that there's something wrong with it, there's something bad, there's something wrong with you. If many people disagree with you. But success and pursuit of large endeavors is one of those few domains where everyone disagreeing with you is a signal that you are actually doing something different. You have to be willing to do exceptional things in isolation and deal with the pain of rejection. And some of rejection isn't people saying no I don't want to buy from you. Some of rejection is people just rejecting your behavior, rejecting who you're becoming, rejecting the choices that you're making. And I think that rejection often times is harder because it often surfaces as snide remarks, jokes that are demeaning, that have a little bit too much edge to them. And I think those moments are very painful. But you trade those moments for the many moments when you're at home alone looking at your life around you and saying this is not what I want. I don't want to be here. Right. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be who I am. And I don't want to be there with them either. Right. And so it's no man's land. And I think that that is like the beginning of the metamorphosis. And so whatever fuel you have, whether it's anger, whether it's shame, whether it's fear, even if you have all of them, if you know you have them, it's like you can either fear the whip of the person behind you or the enemy in front of you. And the direction you face is the one that you fear the least. And so if you know that there's an enemy in front of you and a whip behind you, it's like you just need to, in the short term, increase the pain of the one that you want least. If you're nervous, do more. It's hard to be nervous when you practice the same thing a thousand times in a row. When in doubt, stack reps. Anything you start, you will suck at. It will be embarrassing, but you will survive. Then you will realize that looking like a fool lasts a moment. Being one that never started lasts a lifetime. I mean, rejection hurts. Failing hurts. And I think when you give it your all and then the market, society, the universe, whatever, determines that you are still not enough, that is very painful. I think that in time, you learn that feedback is fuel rather than failure. The amount of doubt that you have to endure when doing this for the first time, when nobody around you understands what you're trying to do, when you're actively being discouraged from making changes and you have no promise of glory or success on the other side of it, is one of the most perfect cocktails of pain and discomfort that you can go through. And this happens on every mountain. So it happens on your first mountain and it happens on your second mountain. Like if you achieve some level of success that everyone around you deems as successful enough by their standards, not yours, when you pursue the next summit, then all of it begins again. The machine begins again. This was my story, right? Getting one of the biggest events companies in the UK running an organization that is cool and fun and I got to define and I was the boss and everybody knew me and there's some wealth and some status and some freedom and there's girls. Everybody's telling me that this is something that I should be happy about and satisfied with and for some reason it didn't feel right. And the only way to try and find something new is to let go of something that everybody else is telling you is something that you should want. Obviously your dad built a story about what success looks like and you rejected it, slowly but loudly. How certain are you that the story that you tell your son isn't just a new version of the same cage that you had to break out of? It's something that I think a lot about. By the time he has memory he will be the son of a billion. That's a lot. And in some ways I don't wish that on anyone and yet I'm bringing someone into that. But I am going to focus him to the degree that I can influence his behavior on being courageous, on leaving nothing on the field. I will care endlessly about his effort and very little about the outcomes. I want him to be brave and I want him to try his ass off. If he does that, well, no matter what, he will be good enough for me I will just more or so make the commitment that given all the resources that I have, both mental and financial, I will do the best I can with what I have to give him the maximum possibility of achieving what he wants. If you're going to chase a dream, go all in. If you're going to love, love fiercely. If you're going to walk away, never look back. So many people never even give themselves a fighting chance because they never fully commit. If you're going to go, go all the way. And I think the biggest issue there is because we expect our dreams to be accomplished faster and easier and risk-free when it will be hard, take a long time and we will sacrifice more things than we expected. And I think one of the hardest parts about accomplishing big things is that the cost is unknown. So even though it is more than you, you know you're giving up some stuff but you still don't even know everything that you're going to give up. Like running a race and not knowing how long it is. I don't know where the finish line is. And what's fascinating about that is that like if you know where the finish line is, you can usually handle just about anything. I think it is almost impossible to make a big swing, make big progress in your life without going complete sicko mode for an extended period of time. Yeah, it's about 10 years. I mean I've just, I think it's like about 10 years. I've just gone... I'm not going to compromise. Yeah, it's no compromises. I remember one of the most important personal moments that I had was when I lost everything for the first time. I screenshotted my bank account. So I went from having six successful gyms to losing all of it and having a thousand dollars to my name. And I remember looking at my bank account and I was like... I screenshotted it and it was this very cathartic moment for me because I was like never again. Like I will not let this happen and I will have this be part of the story I tell and I still have that screenshot. You want to document it because you believe that you will be the hero that will overcome. And I think that if you can if you can really just grasp it like just beginning the documentation story like even the fact that Kanye had some of those early videos it's like he believed that he would make it. I believed when I took that screenshot that I was going to win and I did believe I was going to get it back. And so the earlier you can have that realization that like I have to document this monster otherwise I won't be able to tell the story. And the story the receiver of that story the biggest beneficiary of that story is you. The harshest truth every young man must eventually learn is that everyone was always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Your wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk hire. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themselves meaning the deck is never stacked against you. And your failures are completely your own. People get stuck because they don't know what they want. And I define what you want by what you're willing to sacrifice to get something. You can't get rich if you never risk losing money. You can't get loved if you never risk getting rejected. You can't get strong if you never risk getting injured. You have to risk looking broke to get rich. You have to risk looking weak to get strong. You have to risk looking desperate to get loved. Egos hold back more dreams than failure and rejection ever will. Most of the gains in life and the lack of gains come from being unwilling to sacrifice mediocrity. People fear being less than extraordinary and in so doing sacrifice being extraordinary. It's like you sacrifice one either way. And so either you sacrifice being extraordinary to be ordinary or you sacrifice ordinary for the chance of being extraordinary or less than ordinary. But if you really think about it many people who are ordinary have failed and so you're really just still ordinary. And so why would you not sacrifice ordinary for extraordinary? People that are hungry are willing to do the things a day others won't do in order to have the things tomorrow others won't have. You have to discover what your values are. It's part of the reason why I think that you need to tell the truth because you're forced to negotiate with yourself to operate properly in the world and if you've warped yourself let's say or some elements of yourself by engaging in self-deception and lies and you're not now because of that you're not who you could be and you don't live in the world as you should live in it then when you discuss with yourself what your values should be it will be as if you're discussing it with someone that you can't trust. You learn more when your life has that moment of a downturn. There is more wisdom and knowledge instincts intuitions discernment and instincts that are developed in the middle of a crisis. The truth is that you are going to suffer but the way to deal with suffering is accepting that suffering and then recognizing that it is suffering accepting it and then letting it sort of have its say and then moving on from there. All of the power that you have and all of the strength that you have and all the ideas that you have are born in your uniqueness. What makes you unique is what makes you special You spend your whole life trying to conform trying to be what somebody else thinks you should be or fit into a mold or fit into a system and you dull down your specialness then you're dulling down all of your ability to change the world. So I think that it's very very important that people have an opportunity to be the best of themselves if they can be. Actually we should play like champions and train like underdogs. Why? Because the underdog works in a way not worrying about what anybody else thinks or believes. That gives you an edge. It gives you a phenomenal advantage. When you're actually worried about what will people say when you're not concerned by am I going to fail am I going to look worse. See when we become successful even as underdogs if we've risen to success the biggest enemy of that success is not reconnecting to that feeling of an underdog. So no matter how much success you've achieved always remind yourself the mindset of an underdog is the mindset that nurtures talent that nurtures success that harnesses your true potential. If you value yourself for being a master if your confidence comes from I know this stuff then you're going to be in trouble because I think that the reality is that being a master feeling like you're an expert that stuff is a trap and you need to keep your beliefs nimble. So the more you learn the more you need to be checking yourself to make sure that that stuff isn't calcifying into dogma meaning that it becomes like I do it this way and that's the way I do it that's the way I've always done it that's what my success is based on so I'm going to keep doing it. That becomes incredibly dangerous especially now in a world that changes and evolves so quickly what worked yesterday may not keep working tomorrow. So you've got to constantly be willing to check your assumptions. The things that you're feeling clenching up feeling like you're not good enough feeling like you're not ready doubting yourself kind of spending too much time thinking about how much time you've wasted you cannot overcome those thoughts because they keep rising up and they become a habit it's sort of a pattern you are going to feel like an imposter until you push through that clenched up moment over and over and over again and then suddenly through action lately you're going to see that you're not an imposter at all you're actually the kind of person that pushes through and does what he or she says they are going to do. When you get tired when you get fatigued when you get down when you're in a slump it's your habits rituals, routines and your standards that carry you through and if you don't have good habits you don't have good rituals you don't have good routines always in your life you will fall down in bad times in slumps in fatigue and in stress. You've got to know every no brings you a step closer to a yes. Anybody can stop because someone said no but there's something in you in your heart of hearts to say I'm not equitable there's something in you that says I've got the will to do it there's something in you that says I'm going to find a way. You can't straighten yourself out merely as a consequence of hope. Let's say you lay out a vision for the future and you think about what your life would be what you'd like your life to be like and then that makes you hopeful and it motivates you because it gives you something worthwhile and higher order to work for. Right? And that's useful that's positive emotion working for you because positive emotion is experienced in relationship to goals but it's not as useful as also being chased by something you're terrified by and if you have a good sense of how you'd fall apart if you stayed weak and just exactly what kind of hell that would be then when you determine to do something like to tell the truth and to say what you think and to not do things that you hate then you're going to be pulled along by the purpose that your vision has provided for you but also pushed along by your desire to avoid the worst forms of hell that you've already outlined for yourself. Yeah we want to be them we want to be someone else and in doing that you lose all the potential of who you are you mimic you be them you are them you become them and you lose you and we look up to so many people in this world who will let us down we're humans I'm going to let you down you're going to let somebody down and you put them on a pedestal you didn't lose time when that person comes up and lets you down you must hold yourself accountable and being your hero that's what that does you make yourself so totally accountable for who you are you focus on you and only on you to become the best person you can be for others because we leave a lot on the table not searching who we are and then therefore you die not knowing your greatest potential difference between vision and a goal is the finish line a goal is 26.2 miles you can simply count the metrics and know when you've completed your goal a vision is having a crystal clear sense of what the finish line looks like but no idea of how far away it is and it's and the reality is you will spend your entire life never actually crossing the finish line but the joy that every marathon you complete you feel like you're getting closer every milestone that you accomplish which you feel like you're getting closer and closer to the ideal and this is what gives our life and our work meaning it's just looking in the mirror and telling yourself the story that you want I mean and a lot of people tell the story that everybody else wants them to tell right so the marketing message so the story is being told from out here and then you're bringing it to you what you have to do is tell the story you want I wanted to be the powerful person I wanted to be the one that people looked up to I wanted to be the person that was respected I just started telling that story over and over in the mirror and it was as simple as that we suffer on all different levels of suffering some people suffer on a high level some people suffer because is the job going to get done you have these moments of suffering no matter if it's 5 minutes of suffering or an hour of suffering or months of suffering some people lose a relationship and they suffer for years and if you can limit the time you suffer the more you can work on the solutions that better your life I thought how about I just leap with my imperfection and then find my form of perfecting my imperfection while I'm sorry how about I do that how about I not how about you not wait to get it right you figure out how does it look doing it wrong how does that look because you're 80% of right as somebody else is 159% of what they need and when you want to do it right and you want to wait until you're not afraid and you want to wait until you who made it about you again see Nelson Mandela did it he just did it not knowing if it were right Mahatma Gandhi just did it not knowing if it were right Mother Teresa just did it not looking for affirmation or confirmation is this right Martin Luther King did it not even knowing if it would happen before his life ended because I have a dream what are you waiting on are you willing to do it right because you don't achieve worthwhile goals quickly or easily they take time they take struggle they take relentless pursuit day in and day out that's what it takes the quality of your life has nothing to do with how much money you have how many beautiful children you have how many people love you the quality of your life is where you live emotionally so we have to take control of what we focus on we got to come up with new meanings empowering meanings and then that affects what your final decision is what am I going to do and that's when I realized that there's two ways to see the world some people see the thing that they want and some people see the thing that prevents them from getting the thing that they want both of those things require hard work you are in love because you work very hard every single day of your life to stay in love you find a job that brings you ultimate joy because you work hard every single day to serve those around you and you maintain that joy it's not a discovery but the problem is the sensitive patience it's as if an entire generation is standing at the foot of a mountain they know exactly what they want they can see the summit what they can't see is the mountain this large immovable object life career fulfillment relationships are journeys the problem is this entire generation has an institutionalized sensitive patience and do they have the patience to go on the journey to maintain love to feel fulfilled or do they just quit and on to the next dump them on to the next ghost and on to the next so let me just ask you again I want to go back to this who in your life makes you feel bad about your dreams your goals your desires because those people are affecting you whether you realize it or not when you have a desire for that next level someone negative someone trying to protect you tells you you shouldn't you can't you might say no I'm not listening to them but even if five percent of that rubs off on you then you might make different choices you might play a little bit smaller than you need to your confidence could be crushed just a little bit more than it needs to be crushed do you think in today's world you think being good at something with most of your confidence is enough do you think being excellent with 90 percent of your confidence is enough hell no you need to be freaking outstanding you need to rock it with your confidence at 100 percent and how can your confidence be at 100 percent if you're letting people in your life make you dim your glow to lower your expectations to play safer the woe is me mentality is too hard life isn't fair these things in life are not easy for me you look to your left you look to your right and you start to judge yourself off other people we are judging ourselves against too many people you have to judge yourself against yourself and once you can silence all that all the outside interference and things that are attracting your mind to everything you can then start to grow and realize i'm stressed out for no reason it's all that thinking that over thinking that thinking too big thinking big is about dreams thinking big is about goals thinking big is about your heart and your soul and figuring out what you want then once you do that and you think big and you see where you're headed boom you gotta come back and you gotta go brick by brick to make that vision stick you gotta go brick by brick to make the action stick you gotta go brick by brick to lay that pathway forward and to keep going and let me tell you something i don't care how busy you are i don't care how tired you are i don't care how much there is to do to make this big dream forward you have time to lay one brick a day you really do you really do and this is the secret everybody this is the secret to everything it's to understanding that there is no timeline to getting your dreams done all there is to do is to allow your heart and soul to dream big to see the path forward and then to pull yourself into the moment every day and have the discipline to be delivering to lay one brick on that path that's it and to keep reminding yourself that everything that you're learning on the way as you lie bricks down and you move forward a little at a time is helping you build the path what you're going to do is trade your life you're trading your life for whatever it is you're going after whatever your goal happens to be whatever you are pursuing make certain it's worthy of you because you're trading your life for it