TRUST THE PLAN, NOT YOUR EMOTIONS - Powerful Motivational Speech Video

There came a day where I picked up the pen and I realized that I had the power to create a great story. Now, when you write a book, where do you start? You don't start at the end. You don't write a book backwards, do you? No. You start with chapter 1. You start with chapter 1. And today is your chapter one, my friend. What do you do now? Maybe for the last week, month, year, few years, you've been allowing life to happen to you. You've been allowing your circumstances to determine your fate, your behaviors, the way you think, how you view yourself. This is where things change. Every man addicted to something. Some smoke, some drink, some chase girls, some waste time. But real man, he addicted to discipline. To early wakes, to pray, to training, to silence. Discipline no need motivation. Discipline move without feeling. Discipline say I go anyway. Even when tired, even when lonely, discipline is best addiction. You want strong life, discipline build it. You want peace, discipline protected. You want respect, discipline earn it. No shortcut, only work. You keep looking at the whole mountain and convincing yourself it's too steep. But you don't need the strength to finish the journey right now. You just need the guts to take the next step. So stop obsessing over the finish line. Start proving yourself in inches. Because every step compounds, every rep adds up. And before you know it, the mountain isn't something you're staring at. It's something you've already conquered. You don't need all the courage today. You just need enough to move forward. And you already have that. Your life is a direct reflection of the possibility think. And so if we're honest with ourselves, that's the truth. Okay? And this is why so many people get caught up in this cycle of mediocrity. It's because all they think about is how hard they have it. If all you think about is how hard the [ __ ] you have it, guess what? The universe is going to give you more hard [ __ ] right? It gives you more of what you think about. So, it's important for you to understand that, you know, you need to be aware. You need to develop a certain level of awareness. Like when you start thinking negative thoughts, you need to push those out. The truth is, you must keep going. I repeat, keep going. Why? Because you deserve to see what happens when all your hard work pays off. I've been asking myself why can't I change or what's going on with me? Why can't I be like the others around me who work hard, who are dedicated? And here I am. I spend my whole evening procrastinating and not doing anything I was supposed to do. And it really stresses me out because my dreams are so big, so wild that I'm dreaming about them constantly. I see so many other people living those dreams, but I keep holding myself back. I see other people living those dreams and then I just think to myself, that should be me. That should be me. I'm so so stuck and I've been here for so long. If you can relate to what I've just said, I myself used to spend so much time wishing and thinking about why am I not further ahead? Wondering why am I not getting the same results that all of these other people are getting? Why am I running so hard but not getting the same results? only moving at snail speed in comparison to these other successes that I see. Have you ever wondered or asked yourself, when's it going to be my time, my moment to shine and get the credit that I truly deserve? What are they doing that I'm not? Now, here's the thing. There's going to be hard, tough days with difficult choices ahead. You may battle the same demons in your mind or even your life many times. Different level, same devil. But this comparison game that you're playing, it has to stop. If you want to compare yourself to anything or to anyone, you know what I'm about to say? Compare yourself to where you are and where you were. Your past self measured against your current self. What's the difference? Life isn't about finding yourself, especially when measured against the filtered feeds of other people far off in the distance. Your life is exactly that, your life. A journey of continually and honestly pursuing your best self. Act based on that, that future form of you that you wish to realize and form before you. Build those daily disciplines to develop your own fulfillment based on your agenda, not anyone else's. Stop comparing your seeds to someone else's fruits. Cuz after all, every seed is different and every environment and the soil it's planted upon is different. You still have time, but my friend, you have got to stop looking at the outside and start looking, working, developing on the inside. So I tell you, look not ahead, but within at your inner compass, at your inner guide, and where does it guide you? What resources do you have available to you? What skills do you have? And what skills do you need? Whose support can you genuinely call upon? And what's the easiest step that you can take from where you are to the dream of where you would like to be? What is that first step? Everyone talks so much these days about vision. To be successful, you need to have a vision. To find your path, you need to have a vision. To build your dreams, you need to have a vision. But what about foresight? the mental faculty to predict what will transpire or be needed in your future. Can you predict it? Can you commit to it and say no to the demands of others in favor of your own designed agenda for yourself? Your own foresight. The ability to see a vision so clear you develop exactly that foresight. Seeing things before anyone else around you. the particular faculty of vision that will only become clear to you when you open the pathways to your own heart instead of incessantly flicking away at a feed on your phone. When in the words of Carl Jung, you look inside to awaken, not outside to dream. Your journey, your map, your guide. Isn't that what so much of our self-absorbed society seeks? Foresight to find our way. But the problem is we compare what we feel internally with what we see externally. Distractions are just a convenient one click or tap away. So just focus, just focus for now then on taking one small step. Even if it's not perfect, you don't need to be. You just need to put in the work. Let us commit then to the work that starts today but isn't rewarded today. to the lifelong recommmitment that change has begun and will continue to move in motion. Your success in life is not based on any external measure, but rather an internal feeling of your own, an internal agenda of your own. And the first place to fix your gaze is on your foresight. And not your results being a 10 out of 10, but your effort, your diligence, your commitment being a 10 out of 10. So take a deep breath. Take it one step, one day at a time. Stop comparing yourself to others. And above all else, I'm right here cheering for you. Peace. One of the lines from right out of the 5 a.m. club is one of the DNA of legendary is longevity. Before the sun rises is the time of least distraction. Before the sun rises where you can build intimacy and fluency with what you want to stand for in your day. Before the sun rises, the luxury and tranquility of the early morning hours. you can do that deep inner work that will allow you to go out in the world and and play at your best when your only metric of your self-worth is something that's so nonimportant for your self worth which is money. Money is ultimately an ancillary effect of living a good healthy life. At the end of the day I say today what did I do to work on my physical health? You know, did I eat well, move well, sleep well? Eight hours. Emotional health. Did I am I good with the relationships around me and my friends? And you know, do I am I removing toxic people from my life? Emotional health is very important. And then creative health exercise, what I call the idea muscle. So I take a pad and I write 10 ideas down every single day. And and for me, like the minute I feel some sort of anger, some sort of jealousy, some sort of frustration, most of the time I go, "Oh, you're getting mad. That's your ego. That's your That's you're getting emotional about this." Take a step back and listen to what the other person is saying. Take a step back and try and see it from their perspective. Take a step back and try and understand what they're trying to say. It's not just uh out of their comfort zones. It's the change of reality, okay? You know, your reality is different than my reality and you know, your followers realities are all different. Uh but it's to change your reality and to make yourself uh accountable. That's not just getting outside your comfort zone, making yourself accountable. Okay? uh not just accountable, not accountable to somebody else, accountable to you, me, you know, yourself because that's the ultimate uh ultimately that's the only person you should be accountable to is yourself. And we grow up that the that that we don't hold ourselves accountable enough. We just don't. We we we've learned uh to come up with reasons why we can't do this. Reasons why it's okay not to do this. Reasons why you didn't follow up on kind. Reasons why I told the guy to get back to him by Wednesday, it's now a Friday. One should never confuse kindness with weakness ever. Because just because a person's kind or wonderful or loving or patient or tolerant doesn't mean their cup not runth over. that what I'm trying to do is keep a boat floating and they're trying to sink it. I have no tolerance for that. So you can keep your sentient if you will concepts about yourself but at the same time you have to be strong enough to otherwise you will fold. What we are is just an aggregation of what we choose to value in this world. If I value money more than anything else, that will come to define me through my actions, my behaviors, what I invest my time and attention into. If I value family, that will define who I am because everything else will flow from that. What I'm able to do is if I want something, I go into the future in my brain, which is powerful, and I visualize exactly what I want. So, I'm there. I'm in my future. And then I think about every single thing I need to do to make that happen and every single thing that could stop that from happening or what I need to avoid. And I go right back just in the future thinking about watching myself on my television network. So because I do that, that means I have to think what would be the worst case scenario and then I have to think what would be the best case scenario and then I eliminate every single thing that I think could happen which I call art detecting. Similar to when we talked about trust and building trust and giving trust. If I want to gain the ability to influence you, well then what I have to do is give you the ability to influence me. The more I allow you to influence me, the more open your mind gets for me to influence you. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to allow you to influence me. And the more I allow that to happen, the more influence I'm going to have. So when you want to when you want to earn respect, give respect. When you want to earn influence, give influence. You want to earn trust, give trust. All those three are related. I just fixed my mind to just say like what's for me is for me. No one can take it from me and what's for someone else is from someone else or someone else and I can't take it from them. And in terms of the grief of, you know, the frustration of certain things not working out or not being fair, I just fix my mind to say, "Okay, so sometimes these things aren't fair and I have a choice. I can be mad. I can be upset. I can be hurt. Um, I could be, you know, jolt and have a chip on my shoulder, or I can choose to say, "Let me just do what I can do to change things with a little girl behind me. Let me continue to push forward and be very thankful and happy for the things that I do get a chance to do." So, you can inspire people and all that energy is focused on one thing that they can visualize in their head, then it becomes a tangible reality. And I know that to be a fact cuz it's happened. It's a fact for me. So, I continue to do that. I know that anything I can imagine I can make happen. So I am really careful about how small my thoughts are because I don't feel like wasting time in a 24-hour day making this much. And I can spend the same amount of time with the same amount of energy if I architected right at this much. And with this much I can help so many more people that I love. I mean good habits are hard to come by. But what's even harder to come by are people that have good habits that you could be around. That's even tougher because you are, as I've said before, you are the average of the five people that you spent the most time with growing up. Show me your friends now and I'll show you your future. What are the beliefs that I want to focus on so they expand inside of me? Even the thoughts that I want to focus on. What are my values? What are the behaviors that I need to embody? Right? So, so you read these affirmations every day and you're programming yourself to live in alignment with that program that you've designed. Understanding why. That's why I think um therapy is so freaking powerful. It's not that time that you sit in the chair with someone and and cry about all the things. It's that moment where you're like, "Oh my gosh, that's why." If you know why, you can learn how to navigate around something. But I think if you don't know the core of the problem, you can't move past it. An ode to people who don't believe in themselves. What comes first, belief or action? Do you need to believe that you can do a thing before you can do it? Fake it until you make it is one option, but incredibly hard if you're introspective and have low self-belief and high standards. So, what about make it until you believe it? Here are some lessons that I've learned. You can believe you're not worthy of a thing and still attain it. You can be adamant that your efforts are going to go badly and still succeed. You can grip and grasp and fear and ruin the enjoyment and be totally unwarranted and things still go well. You can have no self-belief and show up anyway. You can want more for yourself without knowing exactly what that looks like. You can doubt the process, question your talent, be uncertain that you're making progress, disparage your accomplishments, permanently feel like you're not working hard enough, no matter how hard you work, never give yourself a break, fail to fully feel gratitude, be terrified of never reaching your goals, and still end up in a place that your 20-year-old self could not imagine you'd ever get to. Self-belief is overrated. generate evidence. Now you're starting to believe yourself. You're starting to believe that inner voice. You're starting to believe in your actions. You're starting to believe in who you are. You're starting to believe in your words. You're starting to believe in your dreams. You're starting to believe in your thoughts. You're starting to believe in your actions. So what happens after that? What's the next step? Doubt. Listen. believing. Haha. Now you start to trust the one person that you should have always trusted that other individuals told you not to trust and that's you. Cuz you're finally listening to that voice. You're finally starting to have self-belief. You stop doubting yourself for the moment. And you start to grow. You trust yourself. You trust your actions. You trust your words. Now, what happens after trust? You start to grow. You've worked way too hard to let one season of darkness convince you that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. As consistent as I try to be at my job, my workouts, my own personal improvements, each and every week is still full of ups and downs. Some runs, even just a few miles, feel like pulling teeth. Other longer ones, I feel unstoppable, like I could go on forever. Some days, it's so easy to get into a flow state. And I feel like I'm on track to achieving everything I've ever hoped for. And I'd be lying if I said these highs and lows didn't used to discourage the out of me, man. But recently, I've just been embracing the fact that nothing lasts forever, good or bad. No success or accomplishment is permanent, but it also means that no failure is permanent either. Not unless you let it be. So if you feel like you've just been against the wall, like you can't break out of a bad cycle. Like you've been trying everything, but nothing'sing working. Like you wish you could control everything that you can't control. That season of darkness, just keep on knocking because you're getting exactly what you wanted. So dedicate yourself to all of it. The dreams, the work, the suffering, the hopelessness. When you signed up for all of it, you knew exactly what was expected of you. So you'd better meet the standard. Or you can turn temporary into permanent. Convince yourself that this bump in the road is a life sentence that it's just too hard. Let one season define your year and let one year define the rest of your life. Or maybe now the clay is just finally starting to get warm as something's about to happen. Something's about to change. But that's entirely up to you to stick out to find out. Don't wish it was easier. Wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems. Wish for more skills. The same wind blows on us all. The difference in where we arrive at the end of the week. at the end of the month, at the end of the year is not the wind that blows and the wind is blowing around the world. And it's important because otherwise you can be afraid of pursuing the things that you want to pursue, right? And that's very common. And so then the fear inhibits you as the promise pulls you forward, but it makes you weak because you're afraid. You want to get your fear behind you, pushing you. And so what you want to be is afraid more afraid of not pursuing your goals than you are of pursuing them. It's very very helpful and lots of times in life and this is something really worth knowing. You don't get to pick the best thing. You get to pick your poison. You have two bad choices and you get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through. And every choice has a bit of that element in it. And so if you know that, it's really freeing because otherwise you torture yourself by thinking, well, maybe there's a good solution to this, you know, compared to the bad solution. It's like, no, no, sometimes there's just risky solution one and risky solution two. And sometimes both of them are really bad, but you at least get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through. And that's that actually makes quite a bit of difference. It's easy to be a victim, bro. It's easy to believe that the world just happens to you. It's easy to believe that the state of your existence is entirely the result of other people's decisions or it's just luck. Falling short and then blaming everything else but yourself is the easy path. It's the path that hurts the least. But what you're not thinking about is the fact that there's no reward at the end of it. Your life is going to be shitty. Nothing is going to go the way you want. Then you're going to get to the end of your life. You're sitting on your deathbed and once again you're going to blame everyone else. You're going to look back at your life and say, "At least it wasn't my fault." Is your dog life simply not being your fault worth having a dog life? The best path forward is the hard path. The path where everything is your fault. The path where no matter what happens in your life, you find what you did wrong so you can do it better the next time. The path where there's always something for you to learn. That is the path that hurts the most. But it's the path that's going to make you the best person and it's the path that's going to lead to the best life. The reason people are afraid of the word obsession and they like to stay in the interested area [Music] because when you're interested about something, when you're passionate about something, it's this beautiful daydream. It's this beautiful euphoric rainbow. But you know what the obsession is? The obsession lives in your nightmare. Obsession lives in your nightmare. That's why people love to work with passionate people. Oh, they're so passionate. They're so easy to work with. Individuals that are obsessed. They're nightmares to work with. You know why? Because every detail matters. Because you have probably dealt with everything that life has thrown at you so far. And do you think that it's because of the way that you grasped and controlled and feared and ruminated? Or could it be because you're a capable, competent, gifted person and the world is fundamentally fair and over a long enough time horizon, most people get what they deserve? you're doing this for you. We judge people based on how much life they can tolerate, how much feeling they can deal with and carry and enjoy. And that's something that we should all try and have more of in ourselves. Being that person that your younger self wanted as a role model, it says facing fear isn't about being fearless. It's about being brave enough to move forward despite the feeling. That's what courage is. Courage is not the absence of fear. It's deciding to do it afraid. Right? We look at these people, man. They're so courageous. All they're they have the same emotion that you have. They're just deciding to act through it rather than allow the emotion to stop them from moving. Go into the unknown because you already know what you know. And so, and that's not enough unless you think you're enough. And if you're not enough, and you don't think you're enough, then you have to go where you haven't been. You can't make yourself interested in something. Interest manifests itself and grips you. That's a whole different thing. And so, what is it that's gripping you? And and how do you conceptualize that? Is that a divine power? Well, it's divine as far as you're concerned because it grips you and you can't do anything about it. And so there's a calling in you towards what you're compelled by and what you're interested in. And sometimes that might be very dark and sometimes not. But you're compelled forward by your interest. And so and so the idea that what moves you away from your country's house and the comforts of your childhood home is is something that's beyond you that you listen to and hearken to. That's exactly right. If you do not listen to that thing that beckons you forward, you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine, you'll have everything that's terrible about life in your life and nothing about it that's good. And worse, you'll know that it was your fault and that you squandered what you could have had. Fear and doubt not the same. How many times have you felt pressure and how alive you felt underneath that pressure? And pressure was a privilege when it excited you. That's fear. Fear is about the pressure. It's about embracing the pressure. It's about wanting the pressure. is about not allowing the pressure to get to you but to propel you. You thrive on it. You look for it. You can't live without it. And what does doubt do in a pressure situations? You panic. [Music] You panic. Fear is an ally. Doubt is an enemy that you created. So, one of my favorite quotes that I try to live by each day is, "A man who procrastinates his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance." Because the only thing we ever have on our side is the time we choose to take advantage of right now. The opportunities of possibility in front of us at this very moment that only require a down payment of today's effort, which honestly isn't even as big of a cost as it seems considering how good you'll always feel knowing that you give a bit about yourself by actually trying today. So, I'd rather do all the hard now if it means I have to run further, lift harder, work longer hours, day in day out, it's not easy, I get it. But that's the wholeing point. Because it's a smaller price you have to be willing to pay today to avoid a life sentence of questions you'll never be able to answer because you kept intentionally putting things off even when you knew your future self would hate you for it if you keep skipping out on your daily opportunities, which are honestly the greatest ones you'll ever have in your life. Don't ever let yourself be just a default decision from never doing anything that makes you feel worthwhile. They'll say you're doing too much, that you need to slow down. But what they're really saying is your effort exposes their lack of it. They'll question why you're up before the sun, why you push when it hurts, and why you don't just take the easy way out like everyone else. And one day when the results they didn't believe in start showing up, they'll ask how you did it and wish they started when you did. The world doesn't reward those who seek approval. It rewards those who stay in the game long enough to prove they never needed it. What would you do if the unthinkable happens to you? What would you do if you had an accident or you lost your job or you were laid off or you became ill? How would you provide for yourself? That life is about today living today. that whatever I want to do, I do it right now. So, whatever you want to do, whatever idea that you have, the longer that you're sitting on that idea, you are either creating or you are disintegrating if you're not using it. Your skills are diminishing every day. And there goes a second. There goes another second. And life is happening right now. [Music] Well, maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life. That's what it looks like to me. It's like here you are suffering away. What makes it worthwhile? Rights. You It's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is. Responsibility. That's what gives life meaning. It's like lift a load. Then you can tolerate yourself, right? Because look at you're useless, easily hurt, easily killed. Why should you have any selfrespect? That's the the story of the fall. Pick something up and carry it. Pick make it heavy enough so that you can think, "Yeah, well, useless as I am, at least I could move that from there to there." I made this person by diving in to the insecurities that life gave me. Cuz now they're yours. They're yours to own. If you're not smart, call yourself dumb. It's okay cuz you are. But take that knowledge you're putting yourself down. If you're fat, call yourself fat. I used to be 300 lb. We We want to talk so soft to oursel. We're looking for that recovery day. And that recovery day is everything in your life. Everything in your life is a recovery day. We're looking for it. It's not coming. It's not coming. Everybody wants to get to a place. Very few are willing to sacrifice to get there. Everybody wants something and very few people are executing to go there. The amount of people whose actions matt to the ambition coming out of their mouth is very low. There is no shortcuts. There is no secret. There's no system or model. Self-care is saying I want to be responsible for my future. Meaning I want to give my body, give my mind, give myself what I need so that I'm playing the long game. That recognizing self-care is recognizing this is not a sprint. This life is a marathon. See, a lot of people allow fear to stop them from living their dream. Answer your calling. Whatever you're called to do, don't count yourself out. Don't say, "I can't do that." Many of us go through life saying no and you don't even know what you're saying no to. You don't know what you cannot do if you're not willing to challenge yourself daily. So trust self love is the soil in which you plant future contribution seeds in. And then daily grind is the life in the water required to be of some use and some some possibility for those of us witnessing your life. Don't mistake complacency with self- loveve [Music] love says I'm whole and complete and enough with where I start but hold me accountable to where I'm going. And I don't like using the word easy, but I'm going to say it has never been easier to make $100,000 a year because of this. The problem is everybody thinks you have to make a billion. And the problem is nobody has humility to live a $100,000 lifestyle. I think we have to change the conversation in our society. Not in Southeast Asia, not in America. 7 billion people need to change the conversation of what success looks like. It is not to make a billion dollars. It is to actually wake up in the morning and be in a good mood. What's your highest value, right? It's the star. It's like, okay, what are you aiming for? You can decide, man. But, you know, there's some criteria. It should be good for you. Meaning, there's constraints on what you should regard as a value, but you but within those constraints, you have the choice. You have choice. I don't care how you perceive David Yachts because through my journey I figured out the one piece I was missing. I thought it was cars. I thought it was women. Thought it was everything. The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself. Awareness plus action equals transformation. Please don't skip that plus action part because action is the antidote for despair. John Bayas says action is the antidote. Anything that's not working in your life, you have to be in some form of action. Actually thought about your life in a 50-year window or a 80-year window. You would slow down. Everybody wants to succeed so fast because they want to prove something to somebody else. You develop your gifts. Your gifts will take you places that you'll never begin to imagine. Life is suffering, right? Indisputable. What do you do about that? you you voluntarily accept it and then strive to overcome the suffering that's a consequence of that. Whenever hardness comes and you don't know what it is, it may be different for you than it is for me, but you go back to your insecurities. And then when you go back to your insecurities, you then look for comfort within those insecurities. Man, let me just tell you, if my life just belonged to me and I and I knew it to be so, I wouldn't have done half the things I've done with all the discomfort it brought me, all the peric victories, all the time loss. I have had to surrender the chill time, the bubble bath time, the time that I surrender so that my life could be of contribution. Man, your life doesn't belong to you. Your life belongs to those people who are going to cross your path. The major key to your taking charge of your destiny is you. It's you. And even though you might not have all the things going for you that you would like, you have the power within you as you begin to develop your consciousness, as you hold the vision of what it is that you want to do, as you decide to answer this small voice within you. Because as you respond to this thoughts that's telling you you ought to do this, the way will come. Ideas will come to you. You will begin to attract things you need and things that you don't even know that you need right now. We look for our wife or our husband. We look for comfort. It's in those moments you must retrain your mind to think differently in help. You have one job in your life for you to make what you think about life true. You want to be right about the life you see. So, you're going to work hard, work hard to produce the life that you talk about in your mind. And so, there are so many people in the world and and and you know, you may be watching this right now and you have these incredible ideas and what you think is missing is motivation. And that's not true in my language. You all have the same purpose. And that purpose is to reflect and to reveal the cosmos in a way that has never happened before. You can say the divine presence. You can say great God of the universe. You can say divine life. Whatever it is, we have the purpose to reveal this presence, this cosmic happening, to localize the cosmic happening in a way that has never ever happened before. We all have different missions of how we do that. Uh uh but uh our purpose is to reveal that and that is how you break free from the status quo. People always say, "Oh, haters motivate me." That line right there drives me insane. If negativity is your motivation, it's impossible to turn your ears off to the good and the bad or to pick one or the other. You know, if you're listening to their negativity, you're also going to have big ears, we call it, to the compliments and the yesmen. And the minute you're allowing someone else to control your day or control your motivation or control your wavelength of life, you set yourself up for failure. [Music] Motivation is garbage. It's garbage because it's not there when you really need it. Because knowing what you need to do, it's not enough. It's just not enough. The clock is ticking. Waiting for motivation to strike is basically saying it's never going to happen. So most people try to create a new personal reality as the same personality and it doesn't work. We literally have to become someone else. In other words, thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body and how you think and how you feel creates a state of being. So then the person says I am insecure and whenever you say I am anything you're commanding your mind and body towards a destiny. So then most people's biology is for the most part their past. And so if you're not being defined by the vision of the future, some new possibility in your life, you're only left with the old circuitry in your brain and the old emotions of the past. So the question then 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 is literally changed to look like the experience has already occurred. Every single day, you're one step closer. Then you don't know how many steps away you are from your goal or from where you from where you want to be. And and you know me personally, I want to tell you don't give up cuz because it could be a mental switch. That's all you need to whether the next 6 months of your life, it's going to be the best 6 months of your life thus far. Cuz so it's so easy to quit, bro. That's what everyone was doing. They were not trying to be like everybody else. Always remember that. Choose just one part of your personality to develop that would virtually guarantee your success. Persistence would be your choice. Napoleon Hill suggested that there may be no heroic connotation to the word persistence, but he said the quality is to the character of the human like what carbon is to steal. Persistence is going to keep you going in the face of almost every obstacle that you can imagine. It is based upon your focus being directed towards the positive polarity in life. You see, it's not difficult to find an individual who's persistently doing what they don't want to do and achieving results they don't want to achieve. A lack of persistence is not their problem. How they're using their persistence is ignorance and paradigms are the enemy that we must defeat. Everyone is persistent. Our objective must be to put persistence to work for us rather than against us. You're not going to hit it out of the park on the first shot. But the crazy thing about how success works is that you only need to win once. That's the crazy part is you only have to win once. And no matter where you're at in your journey, you've just got to believe with all your heart that you're going to make it because no one else is going to believe for you. need to believe and know that you're one decision, one relationship, one meaning, one book, one thought, one something away from a completely different life. And when you know that, when you then you begin to look for them. If I were to leave this earth tomorrow, the one message I want to get across to everybody that sees this is that life is really short. When you get the opportunity to take a chance and bet on yourself, [ __ ] take it. Honey, what most people do is when the struggle or the tough season or the adversity comes, they do every and anything to try to get away from it. Anchor down and embrace it. Anchor down and embrace it. And I promise you, the storm will eventually pass. But don't prolong the storm by trying to resist the storm. Put your anchors down. Put your feet down. Right? Like the tree that has deep roots. and embrace the storm and eventually it will pass and you will come out a stronger version of yourself. The biggest misunderstanding about passion is that it isn't something you find or something that just comes to you. It's something you create. Too many of us go our entire lives wondering why we aren't lucky or fortunate enough to have a natural purpose or to naturally be passionate about something when it isn't even a natural thing to begin with. True passion isn't naturally occurring. It only occurs through the action of building it. And that's the irony of it all. True passion, purpose. It's never one specific thing, but it's found through the effort that you give in of itself working towards that thing or anything for that matter. So, if you've always felt like you don't have a thing that others do that get them all excited to get out of bed in the morning, then just start working on all different areas of your life and let that love of giving effort fulfill you. Anyone can try, anyone can give it, anyone can invest in the idea of becoming. That's the purpose and passion that you've been searching so long for. Why don't you think the highest of yourself? We all should think that we're great. There's no reason for you to not think that you're great. If you genuinely believe in yourself, you are 75% already there towards your goals. Like you will you will accomplish them. If you believe yourself, put in the work, it's done. Nobody can make you successful but you. If you don't believe in you, why should I? If you're not going to invest in you, why should I? You are with you every single day. You know you better than anybody else. But you want someone to invest in you that hasn't spent one moment with you. If you're not willing to do that, of course you wouldn't. You believe in you. [Music] Be the person that your mom thinks you are or the person that your youngest self wanted as a role model. Brave, courageous, earnest, honest, virtuous, like on fire. There's this quote from the ancient Greeks that says, "Live as though all your ancestors were living again through you." I really love that we judge people based on how much life they can tolerate, how much feeling they can deal with and carry and enjoy. That's something that we should all try and have more of in ourselves being that person that your younger self wanted as a role model. What would your life look like if you had the ability to adhere to every single plan, every single dream, every single goal that you have set forth for yourself from the time that you were 10 years old to however you are now? What would your life look like? Life has a way of testing you. Sometimes it feels like you're caught in a storm that just won't end. The kind of storm that leaves you drenched, battered, and clinging to anything that will keep you afloat. The kind that makes you wonder, "How much more of this can I take?" Maybe that's where you are right now, right in the middle of it. Maybe it feels like the universe is against you. Like every step forward is met with two steps back. Like no matter how hard you try, it's never enough. And when you're in that place, it's easy to think the storm will last forever. But here's the truth. The storm will end. It might not feel like it now. It might not feel like there's even a glimpse of light on the horizon. But storms don't last forever. They can't. And no matter how impossible it feels, no matter how heavy the rain, the sun will rise again. It always does. The question is, how do you keep going until it does? When the storm is raging, you need something to hold on to, something that keeps you grounded when everything else feels like it's falling apart. That anchor could be anything. A goal, a belief, a memory, a purpose. It's not about pretending the storm isn't there. It's about finding something solid within yourself to hold on to when the winds are trying to pull you in every direction. Ask yourself, what am I fighting for? What is worth holding on to? It might be your family, your dreams, your future self, the person you know you're capable of becoming. Whatever it is, let it be your anchor. Let it remind you why you're still standing, why you're still fighting, why you haven't given up. When life feels impossible, the big picture can be overwhelming. You look at everything you have to face and it feels like too much. Too big, too heavy, too far away. But you don't have to face it all at once. You just have to take the next step. Focus on what you can do right now in this moment. Not tomorrow, not next week, right now. Can you make one phone call, write one email, take one step out of bed? Sometimes the smallest steps are the most important because they remind you that you're still moving. They remind you that you're still capable. They remind you that the storm hasn't beaten you yet. This isn't the first storm you've faced. It might feel like the hardest, the longest, the darkest, but it's not the first time you've been tested. And if you're still here, that means you've survived every storm before this one. Think back to those moments when you thought you couldn't go on, when the pain felt unbearable, when you doubted whether you had the strength to keep going. And yet you did. You made it through. You're still standing. Let that be your proof. Proof that you're stronger than you think. Proof that you've faced impossible things before and come out the other side. Proof that you can do it again. One of the hardest things about being in the middle of a storm is the feeling that it will never end. That this is your life now. this chaos, this pain, this struggle. But the storm is not who you are. It's something you're going through. It's not your identity. Accept that the storm is here. But don't let it become you. You are not your struggles. You are not your pain. You are the person who is weathering them. Who is standing tall in the face of them? who is learning, growing and becoming because of them.