IT'S TIME TO FOCUS AND VALUE YOURSELF - Powerful Motivational Speech Video

Tell everybody that you know to delete the old version of you that they have in their head. That version of you, it's gone. You've destroyed it to build someone new that the world has never met before. This year isn't about tweaking who you were, it's about becoming someone that you've always meant to be. Because this isn't a comeback story, this is a full-on reinvention. You're going to build yourself from the ground up. That old version of you has been deleted. You are six months away from an entirely different life. If you really lock in, it might only take you two. But most people don't want to hear that. Because the second you say it, their brain loads up a list of why nots. My schedule is too packed. My job's too draining. My bank account's too empty. You might be right. The excuses are real. So is the discomfort. But the version of you you keep imagining? That one lives on the other side of all of it. You might lose friends. You might disappoint your family. You might go broke chasing it. You might feel insane. But none of that is worse than living a life you know isn't yours. So here's the truth. You don't need perfect timing. You need commitment. The time's going to pass either way. So ask yourself this. Do you want to arrive in six months with a story you built or an excuse you memorized? You know that thing that you keep meaning to start, bro? That thing that you've been thinking about starting for over a year now? Maybe even longer. It surfaces every few weeks when you're in the shower. You think about it on a commute to work. And in those quiet moments before you fall asleep, you've planned it all out in your head more times than you can even count. And yet you've still not started. And every week that passes, bro, the gap between you and that thing gets bigger and bigger. And not because it gets harder, but because you start to convince yourself that you've left it far too long now. But here's the truth, bro. The best time to start that thing was the time when you first thought about it. But the second best time is right now. Today. This week. And not with a perfect plan. Because guess what, bro? Everybody starts out like that. Because the version of you that's sitting on this thing is costing you more than a failed attempt ever could. At least a failed attempt gives you feedback. It gives you information. Waiting gives you nothing except more waiting. And you know what that thing is, bro. You've always known. And the only question that's ever mattered is whether or not you're going to keep letting it only live in your head. Or you're going to finally let it exist in the real world. Start this week. Not perfect. Just start. What's your definition of greatness? I think the definition of greatness is to inspire the people next to you. My parents were great. Growing up, they instilled in me the importance of imagination, of curiosity. And understanding that, OK, if you want to accomplish something, I'm not just going to sit here and say, yes, you can do whatever you want. Yes, you can. But you have to also put in the work to get there. You grow up as a kid thinking that all things are possible if you put in the work to do it. You grow up having that fundamental belief. My father was really influential at a really critical time where I had a summer where I played basketball when I was like 10 or 11 years old. And here I come playing and I don't score one point the entire summer. I scored not a free throw, not a nothing, not a lucky shot, not a breakaway layup, zero points. And I remember crying about it, being upset about it. My father just gave me a hug and said, listen, whether you score zero or score 60, I'm going to love you no matter what. That is the most important thing that you can say to a child. That gives me all the confidence in the world to fail. But to hell with that. I'm scoring 60. From there, I just went to work. I just stayed with it. I kept practicing, kept practicing, kept practicing. I think that's when the idea of understanding a long term view became important because I wasn't going to catch these kids in a week. I wasn't going to catch them in a year. Right. So that's when I sat down and said, OK, this is going to take some thought. Started creating a menu of things. When I came back the next summer, I was a little bit better. Open shots, not miss open shots. Be able to shoot it with speed because those kids are so much more athletic. So it's a simple thing of math. If you want to be a great player, if you play every single day, two, three hours, every single day or a course of a year, how much better are you getting? If you're obsessively training two, three hours every single day over a year, over two years, you make quantum leaps. Go up every single day, do the work. They're looking at me as if, OK, this kid's soft. Right. He's from the suburbs of Philadelphia. It felt like they could try to be physical or try to intimidate me and do all sorts of stuff, which they couldn't. Now I'm saying, OK, well, you're trying to attack me. How am I going to attack you? One of the things I would do is while everybody would be at the cafeteria, we're eating and doing all sorts of stuff. I just go back to the gym. Yeah, I may be from the suburbs, but you're not going to outwork me. I look at things, things that they're smallest. There's a lot of times the game starts moving really fast. But if you train yourself to watch hours and hours of film, the game's not moving that fast anymore. I mean, it's just it's it's an obsessiveness that comes along with it. You want things to be as perfect as they can be. Understanding that nothing is ever perfect. But the challenge is try to get them as perfect as they can be. So how can we teach our children what it means to work hard? Well, you do it through training. Right. So when I get up in the morning, my daughter goes with me for him. My 15 year old goes with me. Becomes a daddy daughter thing. Through that process, she understands the value of hard work. So it's through those behaviors is where I find the motivation to do it. For what does losing feel like to you? It's exciting because it means you have different ways to get better. There are certain things that you can figure out that you can take advantage of. Right. Certain weaknesses that were exposed their answers there. If you just look at them, there's a constant process. It's exciting when you win. It's exciting when you lose because the process should be exactly the same. The hardest thing is to face that stuff. I think it's the fear of starting anew. When you play for 20 years, I play for 20 years, you reach a certain level. I'm like, OK, wait a minute. I have to start again at the base of a mountain and try to climb the top of this mountain. First of all, what mountain am I climbing? I don't even know. What the hell am I going to be doing? The thing that helped me actually was hurting my Achilles because that forced me to sit there and say, OK, the day could be today that your career is over. First question I asked, which is the wrong question is, what's the biggest industry I can get into? I said, OK, stop thinking of it that way. You're thinking of it the wrong way. Why did you start playing basketball? Because I loved it. What do you love to do? I love to tell stories. All right, let's do that. I think stories is what moves the world. Nothing in this world moves without story. And so I think that is the root of everything. And if we're going to try to make the world a better place, story is the right place to start. A quote from one of my English teachers, a Lord Marian named Mr. Fisk. He had a great quote that said, rest at the end, not in the middle. That's something I always live by. I'm not going to rest. I'm going to keep on pushing now. There are a lot of answers that I don't have, even questions that I don't have. But I'm just going to keep going. I'm just going to keep going. And I'll figure these things out as we go. And you just continue to build that way. So I try to live by that all the time. I had a really good friend of mine. I went to lunch, and he said, I don't know who this guy is here in front of me. And he goes, let me ask you a question, honestly. Right now, what are you grateful for? And at the lunch, I said, jack ----, nothing, brother. There's nothing good in my life right now. And I'm not exaggerating this to you when I tell you this, and this is a factual story. As I'm mouthing these words, two people walked in with an older man. Both of them clearly were fighting cancer somehow. Both had lost their hair. One of the ladies had a bonnet on, and they were barely moving in. Both walked by our table and gave me the most warm greeting, the warmest smile as a stranger. And he goes, that's pretty freaking pathetic. You can't find anything in your life to be grateful for right now. And on the drive home, I'm not kidding you, I started to stack gratitude. I started to take inventory. Because if you can find things to be grateful for in that space, man, is your life going to be rich when there really are external things to be grateful for. So my first mechanism out of that space was honestly to stack the things I was grateful for. And I started reinforcing it over and over and over again. And what happens is, there's this reticular activating system in our brains, right? And all of a sudden, because that's the messaging I was giving myself, all of a sudden, all these things start to come into my awareness that I'm grateful for. I start to magnetize to myself some people that I needed to find into my life. And that was the next layer. I started to see things to be grateful for. My health, my fitness, people who loved me. And what it did is it changed my state. When I stacked gratitude, I changed what I did in the morning, and I changed what I did in the evening. And so somehow by grabbing control of my morning, and by grabbing control of my evening, I got some measure of control over the middle of my day. I was an out of control person back in those days. Meaning this, I woke up worried, stressed, fearful. And I immediately started thinking about a bill I had to pay, something that was wrong. And I'm in a state of reaction to begin every, I'm talking within six minutes of waking up, six seconds. Most people listening to this, that's what they do. I said, I got to grab control of my morning. And I set up routines in my morning. Maybe they served me, maybe they didn't. They were things I could deliver on doing for myself. That which you do not hate, you will eventually tolerate. And I think that identifies most people's lives. In other words, average becomes sort of like this slow asphyxiation. It's almost like an anesthetic. And that over time, we become kind of immune and dulled to the average that we're becoming. I know this is true, at least for me. You probably experience it yourself too. And so over time, we sort of minimize where we're at. In other words, I'm a little pudgy instead of being, no, you're a fat ass, right? You don't magnify the degree to which the pain ought to be affecting you. And so really what he means in that is, listen, you're going to get out of your life what you'll accept. That's really difficult for people, I think, to understand is, look, what you think you're worth and what you're going to tolerate is absolutely what you're going to bring into your life and what the outward part of your life is going to look like. And so I live by that. I let myself sort of feel the pain and the difficulty of being not where I want to be in whatever that area is, my spirituality, my relationships, my money. I let myself feel that pain because as you know, there's two motivators, right? There's the gaining of pleasure, right? Wanting to go get something, chasing the dream. But then there's the avoidance of pain. And for a lot of champions, that's a pretty big driving force for them. And so at least for me, I leverage both of those things on me to get myself to take action. It's this thing people think that like, I'll be happy when. Once I get like this big, amazing home, or once I get this car, or once I get this relationship or an amount of money, then I'll allow myself some happiness. The problem is the finish line always moves. You never arrive there, right? The other part is people think, well, if I enjoy myself now, I'm going to lose my drive. In other words, if I can just wire myself with enough pain all the time, I won't lose my drive or ambition. The truth is there's no correlation between the two at all. There's no relationship between you feeling complete pain all the time and losing drive. And so I talk about living in a state of blissful dissatisfaction. And really the best example of that would be like, if you've ever, I love a good meal, right? You know, if I bought into a great piece of steak, if you're a steak eater, like I am, you take that first bite. It's like complete bliss, right? There's no correlation between how great that tasted and your lack of desire for the next bite. In fact, that bliss causes you to want more of it. And so the more we can be able to reward ourselves with bliss, we're not going to lose our dissatisfaction. We're not going to, we're not going to lose that. And so for me, our brains, there's dopamine hit you get when you do something successful. If you constantly cheat yourself out of that hit, right? Biomechanically in your body, less and less in the future where you want to achieve the next level, the next dream, the next step. And that's why so many people stall out in life. They didn't, they got to a certain point and they cheated themselves out of the bliss, out of the celebration. It's important that we celebrate our wins. We celebrate our lives because it causes us to want the next bite. It keeps us hungrier, not the reverse. So for me, I want to live in a state of being grateful and blissful now, not waiting for some future place or date that may never arise. Self-confidence is really self-trust. So the first thing is the people I know that are really happy are very self-aware. In fact, the best entrepreneurs I know are very self-aware. They're aware of their shortcomings, right? They want to improve them. They want to get to the next version of themselves all the time. And so for me, self-confidence comes because I didn't have it. And I think anytime you meet somebody like yourself or myself who might now appear self-confident, it's because I really had to find tools and resources because I was so insecure and shy and introverted. So I had to find techniques and resources to build that up in me. And for me, it's very simple. It's the promises that I keep to myself. If I have a habit over and over beginning to stack one on top of the other of keeping promises I make to me, not other people. In other words, the minute you begin to get external in your life, worrying about what other people think about you, right? You've lost all control. And it never fills you up. And people's admiration, people's gratitude towards you will never fill you up. It's your own. It's your own inside. And so for me, self-confidence comes from keeping the promises I make to myself. And the other part of it is being aware I'm doing it. In other words, most people don't give themselves enough credit all the time. They're very aware of these 20% things and not aware of the 80, right? And that's why the dosage is so important too. You've nailed it. It should be 80-20, right? Because people get addicted to this. I'm not good at this. People don't like this about me. I don't feel good. Instead of focusing on the 80 and stacking up, wow, I did eat what I said I was going to today. I did get up when I said I was going to. I made the amount of phone calls. I treated people in such a way I promised myself. It's not just doing those things. It's rewarding. It's being aware of it and stacking that up. When I work with athletes, the successful athletes I work with, when they're in a slump, it's never that they can't hit a ball anymore or make a shot or swing a golf club. They've lost their self-confidence. Somewhere along the way, they've lost the ability to focus on the things they are great at and stacking those promises they make to themselves. And the way I get them to break their slump is not correcting their swing or getting them positive. It's getting them to acknowledge the small promises, showing up to batting practice early, hitting that extra bucket of balls, beginning to reward themselves for the extra promises they keep to themselves, puts them back in a state of self-confidence. All of a sudden, they're hitting the ball great. What's the biggest irrational fear that you have besides being unsuccessful? I guess not being enough. Imagine for a second a world in which you are unanimously adored by millions, but you hate yourself. Are you happy? Every man just wants to hear, I know you can be more, but you are enough already. Admit it. You aren't like them. You're not even close. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider. People who are so afraid of being broken by their feelings that they never let themselves be shaped by them. Not being good enough. And I don't know who for. I don't know who I am scared of not being good enough for or enough for. The sense that you always need to prove yourself, you always need to sort of offer the world something in order for it to love you back. And now imagine a world where you're disliked by everybody, but you love yourself. I propose that self-love you would be happier. You're going to be great, but you don't need to be great. And even if you just stay where you are, I'll be right here next to you. We are all chasing a sense of completion, but we never actually allow ourselves to savor any tastes of completion that we get along the way. Alan Watts has got this idea, if we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives, we may forget altogether to live them. The common feeling that your life has not yet begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death. And this is the uncomfortable truth. As we get older, days move quickly because we can't remember them. And we don't remember our days because we haven't done anything memorable with them. Our days are forgettable, therefore we forget them. Monotony is the enemy of a well-remembered life. So, in order to slow a time down, you have to give your brain a reason to pay attention. Leading a full life means having lots of varied experiences that will later be memorable. This means you need to start saying yes to more new things and no to more of the same things. Saying yes will guarantee that you create some novel and potentially intense memories. Sure, it might be easier to stay on the couch instead of going out, but you know that you won't recall a single thing if you spend yet another night watching Netflix, whereas you will have tons of memories if you go and do something new. Allow yourself to be immersed in the things that you spend your time doing. Regularly plan new experiences. Talk to different people. Say yes to adventures whenever you can. Walk the dog on a different route. Visit a new town. Eat at a fresh cafe. These are all memory investments that future you will be able to draw dividends from. Each day, you can ask yourself the question, what did I do today that will stand out in my memory? And the more that you can answer this question clearly, the slower your time will move. Eventually, you are going to be looking back on your life. The choice is between viewing a beautiful, varied art gallery stretching as far as the eye can see, or a gray, monotonous hallway peppered with the ghosts of TikTok dances and Netflix series. If you make your life memorable, you will remember it. You're doing this for you. This is something I've only realized relatively recently, but after a certain level of material comfort, the only person that you need to do this thing for is you. Your conscience knows when you're being honest and when you're not. I think optimizing to make that person happy, that conscience happy, is a really good idea. You should basically 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. 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 youngest self wanted as a role model. Fear doesn't keep you safe, it keeps you trapped. Whatever you fear establishes the boundaries of your freedom. So if you're afraid of heights, you stay low. If you're afraid of people, you stay alone. And it's such a good asymmetry. You can think thoughts at 4,000 words a minute and you tend to only get paralyzed by overthinking negative outcomes. You're not, I wish in these 4,000 words a minute, they're just all about great things that might happen in my life. Like that's not the way that it works. Affection is impossible. Roger Federer played 1,526 singles matches across his career. He won nearly 80% of them, but he won only 54% of all the points he played. 80% of matches won and he only won 54% of every point he played, which means that even one of the greatest to ever do it lost nearly every other point. I think the lesson here is to treat every iteration like it matters and then let it go. Whether it's an unforced error or a perfect winner, it's still just one point. One failed relationship, one embarrassing interaction, one late wake-up time. It's still just one point. What matters most is how quickly you reset and where you finish in the end, not how you perform just now. And this is one of the best questions, I think, to ask yourself when faced with a decision which is, what would you tomorrow want you today to do? The reason it's so effective, I think, is it depersonalizes the decision, helps you treat yourself like a friend you're responsible for helping. It forces you to optimize for long-term thinking instead of immediate gratification. It reminds you that ultimately, decisions are not being made for you now. They're being made for you in 24 hours. And 24 days. And 24 months. Our decisions are investments that we make into our future. Optimizing to gratify your desires in the moment at the expense of the way that you will feel and the story you will tell yourself about yourself in the future is rarely a good deal because you live with the story of your decisions for far longer than the impact of them. You need to be very, very careful about what you invest into that future story of you. 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 the 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, says Ryan Holiday. Railing against how hard something is or how much time it's taking up or the difficulty, the fact that people around you don't believe you or that no one's giving you the support that you want or that you thought it wouldn't take this long. The fact that that is happening is half of the course. It is the price of doing business. It's a cost of entry for whatever the thing is that you're going about because if it wasn't, it wouldn't be happening. And so much of the pain, as far as I can see, is you railing against the fact that there are difficulties, there are going to be problems continuously for the rest of time and there will never be a day when you don't wake up and have to mediate or negotiate or cajole your way through something. Such things aren't meant to be easy is a nice little reminder. Don't be so worried about winning that you forget what winning is supposed to feel like. Is your presiding feeling when things go well one of happiness and satisfaction or one of relief? Is it joy or simply the abatement of fear? After a while of winning, you realize that how you win is more important than if you win. How you feel during the event is more important than the outcome of the event. How the people who read your work are impacted is more important than how many people are impacted. You can't be so terrified of failing that even the act of winning is made miserable. Some advice on how to support men. Men want to aim high without feeling insufficient if they fall short. Men want their suffering to be recognized and appreciated without being pandered to or patronized and made to feel weak. Men want to believe they can be more without feeling like they're not already enough. Men want to be able to open up without being judged. Men want support without feeling broken. Men want to be loved for who they are not for what they do. Question that every guy has asked themselves is how do I set lofty goals which drive me to fulfill my potential without feeling less than if I don't get there tomorrow? And the desire for self-love and high performance comes into conflict inside the mind of everyone. I think most men desire a mix of encouraged self-belief and understanding support. Inevitably, these two things come into conflict. Basically, every man just wants to hear I know you can be more but you are enough already and even if you just stay where you are I'll be right here next to you. You're going to be great but you don't need to be great and I'm with you no matter what. If you as a person that's close to a man in his life can say those two sentences to him I wonder how few men have ever heard that. I know you can be more but you are enough already and even if you just stay where you are I'll be right here next to you. If you find a girl who believes in your dreams more than you do who makes you want to be a better man who's willing to work alongside you to get there and is grateful for whatever you have just marry her. Your relationship should feel like home. It should feel like a house with a sturdy roof and strong foundations and ---- gets thrown at it all the time and rain comes down and there's weather and there's heat and there's cold but inside of that house is the one safe refuge that you have. You can lose your job, status your financial position can fall away your health can break down your friends can leave you but you have this one safe place and it's in another person it's in them and if you can't be yourself with that person the entire house does not exist. Rene Brown has got this line without vulnerability there is no courage if there's no uncertainty, no risk, no exposure you're not being that brave because there's nothing on the line. We are so quick to praise suppression as strength we call it control we call it discipline we pretend emotional detachment is a sign of maturity but fully living your life means actually feeling what ******* happens not just performing composure while something inside of you quietly breaks. Different symptoms from the same disease people who are so afraid of being broken by their feelings that they never let themselves be shaped by them. The real fear isn't just the emotion itself it's also what the emotion might not receive. We're not afraid of sadness we're afraid of being sad in front of someone who shrugs we're not afraid of grief we're afraid of grieving and being judged for doing so that's the abandonment we're trying to avoid. Even if we know that feeling our feelings is braver than denying them the people around us still might think less of us for opening up so we keep things hidden not because we want to but because we don't want to feel alone in the sharing. Men as far as I can see have this harder still as almost all definitions of masculinity have some version of emotional control as a core tenet which makes feeling pride in showing emotions as a man even tougher but you cannot connect with the world or anyone in it if you never truly show yourself. Intimacy only exists to the degree that you reveal yourself your sadness, anger, joy, desires, boundaries. When you hide your flaws or your feelings out of fear of shame you block intimacy and authenticity. The more that you expose the closer you are the less you show the more distant you become which do you want to choose? Vulnerability isn't weakness it's rebellion it's not how little you feel that makes you strong it's how much you can face and stay open. The world belongs to optimists because if you're going to do anything big you have to believe that it can happen otherwise it never will. Sean Puri says the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich. 99% right and 100% wrong they're right 99% of the time but they're wrong 100% because the only thing that matters is the big one at the end. Your family and friends will say that every girl you ever date is not good enough except for the one time you find a girl that you're actually going to marry or that this business idea won't work and you might have nine failures. My first nine businesses didn't really amount to anything nine as in the first one I spent time on it it failed second one this one will be different spent time on it failed and then the third one this one failed and then six more after that and it's painful as ---- because the whole time everyone is telling you I told you so and they're right today but not forever. Problems are a feature of life not a bug there will never come a time when you have no problems. What? Did you think that you would just wake up one day and you're going to cease having problems like completing a video game and leveling up to a map where there's nothing there? Would you pay the price back then for the insights and developments that you have now? If so, have faith that whatever stresses that you're facing right now will lead to a greater version of you in the future. The challenge that you're facing is a gift and leaning into the discomfort as if you invited it through the door saying thank you for the opportunity to learn and reflect because it's making you better. Whatever negativity is consuming your thoughts probably won't matter in three months time. So you are sacrificing your joy and presence in the moment for a problem which you won't even be able to recall in the future. So immortality is literally the only life where such flippancy with the days that you're alive for is acceptable. Stop taking things so seriously. No one is getting out of this game alive literally. In three generations no one will even remember your name and if that doesn't give you liberation to just drop your ******* problems and find some joy I don't know what will. Life is inherently ridiculous and guaranteed to end sooner or later so you might as well enjoy the ride. If you want to be great the burning sensation is you having to accept that you've something up not far as far along in the journey as you want to be and what you have to learn how to do. If you want to be great you have to learn to let it burn and even though your impulse is going to be to turn away from that to not look at it to soothe it by saying it's them it's their fault they fucked it up I grew up in the wrong place like whatever excuse you use to try to let yourself off the hook for not being where you want to be instead of saying actually the power is the ability to let it burn. Not only is it possible that's probably the best time to do it. When circumstances and situations are pressing in upon us the only way we can overcome them is to go within to actually begin to ask very empowering questions with the awareness that this universal presence and its law will answer any question that you ask. So if you're in a situation that is pressing on you and you ask what's trying to emerge in my life what is my gift to share what is my purpose why am I here on the planet not just how can I pay my rent not just how can I stop the pain you ask empowering questions the universe will answer these questions in a language and in a way that you can understand. What is it what is the one power that you have right now in this moment that can change everything you have it I have it we all have this one singular individual power that can change anything in our life regardless of what's happened to us. I want to I want to find more all I can and in that second you have to dive in that to find more because if you're not willing to go in there and face yourself I could find anything you're gonna live right here on surface man right here on surface so if there is an ending to this world and there is somewhere to go and there's a judgment you're gonna get there and you might see a chart and that chart might tell you who the you should have been and now you get the rest of your life to think about that now I could live a much better life I just would have just suffered a little bit more whatever your answer is you can do it right now today starting today right it's still possible you can start doing that right now it's empowering the present with the future there is nothing stopping you from making it happen right now you don't have to feel that way when you're 70 you don't have to feel that way when you're 80 you never ever have to feel that way if you start doing it right now and you can do it right now even if it feels impossible you can start working on it right now you can start trying right now you can start making plans right now because you're not there yet we create our own reality so that will be true for me I'm saying you're going to come out the other side of this and you will be unstoppable your back's against the wall you got work to do like let's go you want to make a change you have to change your vision of who you are you have to begin telling yourself a different narrative and the narrative you tell yourself about yourself is everything it's far more fun to die on your sword than to die on someone else's please have this belief if you want to be successful at anything in life never leave the sight of setting a goal without doing something that commits you to fulfillment be able to go inside of your own soul and remember why you came to earth you did not come to walk lockstep in the status quo you did not walk to come to just adapt to how you've been invented you have come to transform your life wake up again and remember your soul call and then be of service with effluence generosity giving as your inquiry every single day and you will discover by law the universe by law will bring you your assignments every single day adopt the mode of authentic being and that is something like refusing to participate in the lie in deception in the lie to orient your speech as much as you can towards the truth and to take responsibility for your own life and perhaps also for the lives of other people and there's something about that that's meaningful and responsible and noble but also serves to mitigate the very suffering that produces say the nihilism or the escape into the arms of totalitarians to begin with the hunger that doesn't go away that hunger to be more to do more to give more that hunger that never ends look when you start deciding that it's time to change you may have to use 5 4 3 2 1 5 000 times a day because you're pushing through self-doubt and you're pushing through procrastination and you're pushing through resignation and you're pushing through fear over and over and over and over and over and over and over again if you use 5 4 3 2 1 and you push through everything that's stopping you right now because you this is your year this is the moment that you're going to change at some point something's going to click and the momentum is going to kick in and suddenly change isn't going to be scary change is going to be what's happening stop judging yourself through the lens of a moment and start judging yourself through the lens of 10 years if you think of yourself in 10 year increments like you will blow your mind so if you're embarrassed today about where you are don't compare yourself even to yesterday which may not soothe that and encourage you to push forward think back 10 years but if you think back to where you were 10 years chances are like you're going to be blown away with how far you come and so then it's like all right then I'm just going to focus my gaze 10 years in the future and start saying what would I have to do to be somewhere where I'd be blown away then where I'm at now the pride that I'm going to establish is actually around my willingness to look at the fact that I'm not good right now today we are most alive we have the most energy we are most intimate with our best selves when we're progressing towards our mighty mission I think what's happened on the planet right now is there's been a great seduction and a great brainwashing when we are kids we want we want to be astronauts we want to do all our dreams and we're full of curiosity and we're loving and we're passionate and we're strong we're not afraid to be ourselves but as we leave the perfection of childhood the hypnosis and the brainwashing begins be reasonable so that's our nature but our parents give us limitation based on their limited psychology and don't sing too loudly don't dream too big don't be too passionate as we've left who we truly are we've contracted and now it's all about staying safe in the world versus going out there and letting our brilliance our primal genius shine and a lot of people just have stuffed that pain of disappointment and their doubt really deep inside and they just are addicted to distraction and escapes because they don't want to deal with their potential that they've denied before you can be a painter who can paint what's beyond mere memory you have to inculcate that discipline skill and a lot of that is painful repetition and hard grinding work it's the sacrifice of the present for the future but once you manage that then things open up and virtually everything you learn of value is like that while you're learning those rules the probability that you have any creative freedom to speak of or any facility with the rules is very low you're a ranked beginner and even to some degree whatever creativity you have is going to have to be stifled while you're passing through that keyhole but if you pass through it then something massive opens up on the other side you have to narrow yourself first and then you can broaden outward anybody not just Navy SEALs but anybody that can accomplish anything that is hard the only separator is is that they really want to be there there's some people that get inspired and that inspiration moves them to try to do something but the inspiration I watch a movie about some badasses you're inspired but the second you're not in this environment and you're actually doing what inspired you that suck factor is not real one of the real reasons we don't do the things that frighten us is because we are afraid of being judged and to become fearless why not find some time every day to practice becoming fearless stop resisting I encourage you stop resisting the natural flow of epic performance stop resisting the natural seasons of life but something that the more somebody goes after it the better off I'm going to be the more it's going to push me towards my goals and that thing is and if somebody has a better answer I will take it but the only way to build your ego that is truly anti-fragile that I have found is to be the learner to be willing to admit when you're wrong to look at your goal and work backwards and say is what I'm doing actually moving me towards my goal or not not does it make me feel good about myself not am I right not am I smart is it moving me towards my goal and if it is then you do it and if it doesn't then you don't it is better to live courageously than cowardly better to live truthfully than in deceit and you can tell that too because that's also what you tell people that you love and we know that you should pick up your damn responsibility and move forward everyone knows that it's part of our intrinsic moral nature and that nature is there greatest heartbreak is being untrue to yourself there's something I believe in which is instinct is much more powerful and wiser than intellect and I think when all of us trust our instinct in a world that says intellect and logic is everything fine your destiny doesn't knock it whispers and so it wasn't this epiphany you know it was just I think when you start to trust your instinct and trust yourself versus the world and you sort of block out the opinions of other people the pace of synchronicity starts to open up and these doors that you're supposed to walk through start to present themselves to you but if you want to have the passion to make something big to make big change it's got to be something that you believe in beyond reasonable doubt it's got to be something you just got to make happen so ask yourself do I want to know more about this than anyone else? because you're going to have to get better at it than anyone else if you want to be excellent and deliver on the promise that's the ethical requirement of individual being in the proper sense is to constantly note that you're not what you could be to take responsibility for that and to commit yourself like body and soul to the attainment of that ideal