When Things Get Too Hard - Motivational Speech

You're going to have ups and downs in life. Things are gonna go wrong. You're gonna lose businesses, you're gonna lose jobs, you're gonna break up. And there are times when you get injured and there are times when you get mentally defeated and you feel like you don't wanna do it anymore. And those days go on and on and on. Things are going to go wrong. And what you need to do is to keep moving forward. No matter what happens, keep moving forward. We all go through pain, get a reward for yours. There's some things in life you don't need no degree for, you don't need no money for, you don't need no support for. There's some things in life you're just gonna get through when you tell yourself, I'm gonna get through this. I need you to look at that sickness that's going on in your life right now. Whatever it is, I want you to say, I can't beat it. I can't beat it, I will beat it, I must. You think it's gonna be easy, forget about it. All right, don't even try to be successful, it's a wrap. It's not going to be easy, but I want you to feel that pain going through your body. And as pain leaves your body, guess what's gonna take its place, success. And when that thing tells you to quit, you look at it in his eye and say, I ain't going nowhere. I will break you before you break me. You will not defeat me, you will not destroy me. I'm unbreakable now. Life is going to see how bad you want what you say you want. Impose your will on it. Life will give into you if it knows you're serious about whatever it is that you're trying to do. Life will give into you. Whenever you start, you make sure you finish. If you do not kill me, you will not stop my drive. No petty adversity will not stop me. I have to complete every mission that I set out on. Your mind and attitude is all you need to be successful. That's all you need. You don't need to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth. You don't need money. You don't even need folks that like you. As long as you believe in you, you got the right mindset. You got the right attitude. We can make it happen. I don't care what's going on around you because it's not what happens around you that determines your success. It's what happens inside you. And you can't control the elements, but you can control your attitude and you can control your mindset. You get one shot. Opportunity comes once in a lifetime. You better make the kind of decisions that's gonna take you to the NBA. You better make the right decisions that's gonna take you to the NFL. You better make the right decisions that are gonna land you the next best rapper, the next business tycoon. It's one thing to talk about your destiny. It's one thing to dream about your destiny, but it's another thing to wake up when you know you're supposed to wake up, to write when you don't feel like writing that paper, to say no to that party, saying no to quitting when you still got a hundred more shots to make, saying no when your body said don't stop, but you put in 50 more pushups. You can't just talk about it. You gotta be about it. You're gonna face some hard times. You're gonna get slapped around. And don't take it personally. Don't ask, why did this have to happen to me? It's called life. It happens to everybody. You could plan your life to be ideal today, and I guarantee you there will be things that happen along the way that were unplanned, that will look as if they're unfortunate, that will feel as if the world's coming down on your shoulders. But those are also the greatest lessons. Some of the best things that we've ever learned from people happened because they were going through some time of discontent, and they said, how do I overcome this? What can I do about it? And there's other people who would have to face that if it wasn't for that knowledge, if it wasn't for that experience. But it's because they did something. They didn't just fall victim to that. See, a lot of people want to exempt themselves from taking responsibility. All they want to do is talk about the problem. Every time you see them, they'll tell you their story over and over and over and over again. No, no. You want to take responsibility for your life. I got me here. I can get me out of this. And I'm getting out. You can decide that you're going to change, that you're not going to be a wimp. I'm not going to be a volunteer victim. When your day is a museum of disappointments hanging from events that were outside of your control, when you find yourself flailing in an ocean of why is this happening to me, when you get punched in the esophagus by a fistful of life, remember that you will survive. Remember, things could be worse. Remember, we are never, ever given anything that we can't handle. When the world crumbles around you, you have to look at the wreckage and then build a new one out of all the pieces that are still here. Remember, you are still here. The human heart beats approximately 4,000 times per hour and each pulse, each throb, each palpitation is a trophy engraved with the words, you are still alive. Act like it. From this day forward, set out to achieve greatness, not by looking for someone to give it to you, but by going through all of the blood, all of the sweat, all of the hard work, by going to work to set your own inner greatness free. No matter what anyone else has said or how anyone else has made you feel before, it's there. So you've had it harder than other people. Well, then you're going to have to work a little harder, but trust me when I say you have greatness inside you. Wherever we are, with whatever hand that life has dealt us, we have the freedom of spirit. We can go through life whining and weeping or we can have the kind of spirit that regardless of what happens to you, you can stand up inside of yourself. You have an incomparable soul. You got to get up to find your purpose. Some of you getting up means, all right, here I am. I got some challenges. I'm tired of being quiet about it. Others of you getting up means I'm fighting back. I'm going to a doctor. Getting up means I'm going back to counseling. Getting up says, all right, I'm going to start the medication again. Getting up is, you know what? Maybe I can get a job. Maybe my mission has not been destroyed by my depression. I'm getting up. It can be painful. It will be uncomfortable. And that's where the growth is. When you're stretching out, when you're taking life by the collar, you're going to get thrown to the ground again and again and again. But when you have determination and you know that what you're doing is right, it gives you your life, it gives a special meaning and power to you, you'll begin to discover some things about you that you don't know you've got when you put yourself in that type of challenging situation. The journey is not easy. Everyone's hot off the start, but after a month or so into it, the wear and tear and the grind starts to hit you. You start losing focus on the horizon, do you not? You get caught away in the daily hiccups, the ups and downs and the wear and tear. And you focus on the speed bumps and the daily activities, losing sight of the true purpose. Most of you won't be successful because when you're studying and you get tired, you quit. Don't cry to give up, cry to keep going. Don't cry to quit. You're already in pain, you're already hurt. Get a reward from it. The difference between a winner and a loser, the failure's there every single time. Just the winner gets back up and does it again and does it again until it goes his way. I don't care how hard you fall. I don't care if nobody don't believe in you. It only takes you believing in yourself to get this thing done. And listen to me, it ain't failure if you learn from it, baby. So if you fall, fall on your back so you can look up because if you can look up, then you can get up. I dare you to take a little pain. I dare you. At the end of pain is success. If you can stay in the race, if you can stay in the fight, then you can dictate your own future. I dare you to fail. I dare you to take that same class over and over again. I dare you to stop dropping classes like you saw. See, getting what you want is up to you. You can turn your life around if you change your attitude. You change your attitude, you change your altitude. It's okay to not be okay. It's just not okay to stay that way. The one thing I know about emotions is that they change. One hour from right now, you will not feel the same way. And I wanna encourage you tonight that you might be in your darkest moment. You might be going through hell and high water, but I know this, it is always too soon to quit. You have a reason to live. Your best days are in front of you. Get up. Your future is brighter than your past. Get up. Your latter is greater than your former. Get up because the best is still yet to come. See, we gotta look our trauma in the face. We gotta embrace the pain and the darkness and allow it to mold us. The dark times are when we build higher, dream harder, push further, love deeper. It's forming your future. It's pushing you forward. What will your response be? Are you gonna sit back or are you gonna step up? That is a moment of choice. That is a moment of decision. Adversity creates the perfect moment for audacity. It's in your adversity, the thing that comes out of you is what defines you. When life is squeezing you and pressure is on you, what's really inside of you? When you go through a storm, it strengthens you. When you come through that kind of experience and able to reclaim your life, you come back with a certain kind of power and you'll never be the same again after that experience. There are certain things, when you go through those things and you come up out of those things, you come up a different kind of person, different spirit, different power, different energy. Don't ever say when you're going through some rough time, I'm going through a really bad, tragic time. No, see I'm going through a character building experience. Take full responsibility for your life. Accept where you are and the responsibility that you're gonna take yourself where you want to go. We have two primary choices in life. We can either accept conditions as they exist or we can take the responsibility to change them. That setback is gonna become a comeback. Go through the darkness, come out on the other side something new and allow that person to change the world. So many of us, we've gone through life and life has let us down. You can find yourself stressed out. You can find yourself depressed, mentally fragile because of the experiences, the turbulence that you have gone through. I know what it's like to barely hold on, to barely feel like you're breathing and barely feel like you can come up for air. When you're down in that hole, look up. Look up and recognize that there is a way out. There is a path for you to take and it's not an easy path. It takes courage and it's hard. But what is the other choice? What else can we do? Let the darkness completely consume us, be overtaken by temptation. Advice, no, do not accept that. You can triumph over these dark forces. You can become better. You can be better. Growth is faster and deeper during your darkest days. Through that separation, through that unemployment, through that tragedy, through that loss. And maybe you've been knocked down in your life and it seems like, hey, the fight is over. It is not over unless you quit. You take those terrible events in your life and you create a new story of triumph. See, there's some people in this room right now that you need to hear this loud and clear. You need to get this in your spirit because I don't know what you're walking through, but some of you right now, you are in a tough season. An event has happened and something's happened and maybe you have failed. But I want to remind you that failure is not final. It's formative. It is part of the process. It's part of the journey. Your failure matters as much as your success. How do you think you're gonna grow if you don't ever fail? Yet some of you have failed and you have decided, well, guess what, I'm a failure. No, failure is an event. It is never a person. Just because you failed doesn't mean that you're a failure. In fact, failure is actually fuel for your future, the way that you grow, the way that you advance. You have to fail in order to succeed. The darker the night, the brighter the morning. This too shall pass. You're gonna get through this thing. You might not be in control of the storm, but you can have the courage to face the storm and say, I'm not gonna back down. I'm not gonna run away. I'm gonna walk through this thing because I believe this thing is leading me to another miracle. You see, the fight's not over if you've been knocked down. It's only over if you quit. If you make the decision to get up one more time, I'm telling you, you will win the fight. I know what you're going through. Countless hours setting up, thinking if your life will ever get better. Thinking about everybody that's passed away, that's walked out your life. There are some things in life that are out of your control that you can't change and you gotta live with. The choice that we have though is either to give up or keep on going. I wanna ask you, what are you gonna believe? Are you gonna believe in yourself? Are you gonna believe everybody else's judgment on you? Are you gonna believe people when they say that you're a failure and no one really likes you, no one really cares about you? People ask you how you are and you say fine, but you're not fine and they'll never know that. There are some times in life where you fall down and you feel like you don't have the strength to get back up. Maybe you have doubt in your life. Maybe you don't know for sure what's gonna be happening in the future and it scares you. Maybe you're worried about what people think of you, what people say about you. Just that fear paralyzes you and I just wanna ask you today, do you think you have hope? You see, I will try 100 times to get up and if I fail 100 times, if I fail and I give up, do you think that I'm ever gonna get up? No. If I fail, I try again and again and again. For as long as I try, there's always that chance of getting up and it's not the end until you've given up. And just the fact that you're here should persuade you that you have another chance to get back up. There's still hope. I wanna challenge you tonight to get up. I invested too much to quit. I made too many sacrifices to give up. We've come too far. We've been through too much. We've seen too much. We've had too many victories. We have seen defeat. We've looked defeat in the face and we've overcome it. We've come too far to give up now. We've come too far to be negative now. We've come too far to start overthinking now. So when life happens, I don't just sit there and cry. I buck back. And the process is not supposed to be comfortable. So if it hurts, welcome to the big leagues. If you feel like you're under heat, praise God. If you feel like you're being pressured, praise God. But when God looks like he's pulling you back, eventually he gonna let you go. And the farther he pulls you back, the farther he pulls you back. Once he releases you, boom. The spirit of resiliency, the spirit of grit, it's in your DNA. It's in your blood. Overcoming is in your blood. Getting through adversity is in your blood. Your ancestors got through so much more. We will be all right. We need to focus on where we're going, not where we come from and what's happening. I just need you to keep walking toward it. I don't need you thinking about it no more. You're doing too much thinking. You're analyzing too much. You're talking yourself out of it. I don't know if it's gonna work. I tried and it didn't work. I just need you to keep moving. I need you to make up in your mind that the only way you can lose is if you quit. I just need you to keep going. You gotta tell life, I don't know who you've been dealing with, but you ain't dealt with me. You gotta tell bankruptcy. You gotta tell divorce. You gotta tell sickness. I don't know who you've been dealing with, but you come up against the wrong one this time. You can be and do whatever you want and nobody can stop you. Nobody can stop you but you. When I started listening to Adele, Adele blew my mind because as I was listening to her music, I could tell that this was real to her. And as I started studying the girl, I found out, I discovered that she had been through a breakup. They said her album, 21, like she started the album, stopped for months because she had no creativity, right? But then they said, all of a sudden, her man broke up with her. And not only did he break up with her, he broke up with her and got with somebody else and got engaged in a matter of weeks. It broke her, it broke her, it broke her so much. God is so good. Sometimes he gotta break us to bring the creativity out of us. He breaks her, he breaks her, he breaks her heart. And she goes into the studio and when she goes into the studio, she just doesn't sing something she made up. She actually sings something that's true to her heart. At first, yep, she's gifted. Yep, she knows how to write, but it was kind of in the outer space. But then something happened to her. Something broke her. And when that thing broke her, something within happened to her. At first, it was just external, but then something internal happened. And since the girl got up and said, take me in the studio, turn on the music, turn on the sounds, I got something for him. And she sang it like she never sang anything else. And let me tell you something, out of that pain, out of that hurt, came the best album, the best single, the best song in six frames. And I'm telling you right now, don't give up, I'm telling you right now. Don't give in, get through it. And so God has allowed you to go up the rough side of the mountain, not so he can hurt you or break you. He's trying to redesign you. I'm telling you right now because I care about you. I'm telling you right now because I've been there. I've done that. You've been in it for three years and you about to quit, hold. You've been doing it for five years and it don't look like you think. You put all your money in it. You put all your time in it. People looking like you crazy. Five years you've invested, hold. You put too much in it to quit now, hold. It doesn't look like you think. You didn't get the grades you thought you were gonna get. So maybe I'm not meant to be a lawyer, hold. Lay hold of it, you lay hold of it. And when that thing tells you to quit, you look at it in his eye and say, I ain't going nowhere. I will break you before you break me. You will not defeat me. You will not destroy me. You've been through so much, hell. You gonna quit now? And when you get to success, it's not about skill. When you get to a certain level of success, it's about stamina. You will not.