Many dreams die while suffering.
When you're suffering, you give up on the very things
that you wanted the most.
So many people out there
fail
not because
they don't have the ability
it's because they don't have the heart
to go through adversity.
Now it's the mental game.
And that'swhere people get lost in life.
Get lost in that next level.
But you know, if you take people,
and I've told you this, and you expose them
voluntarily to things that they are avoiding
and are afraid of
you know, that they know they need to overcome in order
to meet their goals, their self-defined goals.
If you can teach people to stand up in the face of
the things they're afraid of,
they get stronger.
And you don't know what the upper limits to that are
because you might ask yourself like, If for 10 years,
if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do
by your own definitions, right?
Within the value structure that you've created
to the degree that you've done that
what wouldn't you be like?
Well, you know, there are remarkable people
who come into the world from time to time,
and there are people who do find out over
decades long periods
what they could be like if they were who they were?
if they said, if they spoke their being forward
and they get stronger and stronger and stronger.
And we don't know the limits to that.
We do not know the limits to that.
And so you could say, well, in part, perhaps the reason
that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet
because you're not everything you could be.
And you know it.
Now whatever goal you have
you're gonna have some opposition.
You're gonna have some difficulties.
You're gonna have some challenges.
You're gonna have your inner conversation
telling you, you can't do it
and you're gonna have people
picking at you.
You gotta talk to yourself
when you begin to think negative.
"I don't think I can do that."
Les, you can.
Why don't you just
test yourself?
Why don't you stretch, Les?
Come on, man.
When you start
seeing yourself thinking something negative
stop it right quick.
Stop yourself
catch yourselves.
When you find yourself getting negative
with people
that you have allowed to push your buttons
when you find yourself
becoming negative about what's happening to you
you've got to affirm to yourself
in the process
hey, no, no, no
I can make it.
There's some way
this can happen for me.
As you start believing
that you are worthy
of good things supposed to happen to you
you develop a sense of entitlement
good things are supposed to happen to me.
Working on yourself
watching that in a dialogue
it will determine the quality of your life.
You chase something
that you believe you deserve
until you get it.
And it doesn't matter what happens to you
doesn't matter how many times you've been fired
doesn't matter how many people don't believe in you
you just go
until you get it.
'Cause if you're willing to go through all the battling
you gotta go through to get to where you want to get
who's got the right to stop you?
Nobody.
It's your right to listen to your gut
It ain't nobody's right to say no
after you earned the right
to be where you wanna be
and do what you wanna do.
If you do what is easy
your life will be hard.
But if you do what is hard
keep coming back again and again and again
get up dressed every day
knowing
some way
somehow
with a spirit of expectation
I can do this.
If you do that
over and over and over again
your life will be easy.
I think that there is a biological imperative
hardwired into the brain that you must do hard things
in order to feel good about yourself.
And when I think about it from an evolutionary standpoint,
and this is why I think rich kids implode,
they just never had to do hard things
from an evolutionary perspective.
I think it was just so hard to stay alive.
Like for
Millions of years.
It really was red in tooth and claw.
Like to stay alive.
You were killer, be killed.
You were hunting, gathering, fighting, other tribes
just crazy.
And the people that were gonna survive were gonna be the ones that,
that got an emotional, a self,
applied emotional reward.
For doing something hard, and when you do something
hard and you recognize it, it needs to feel good.
And if it does, then you will keep doing
hard things and you're the far more likely to
survive than the person who's like, that sucked.
There was no redeeming qualities.
And so it's just like when I think about that,
because if I were to create a recipe for fulfillment, it's very simple.
It's working really hard.
Doing hard things to gain a set of skills.
That allow you to serve not only yourself, but others.
That's it.
That's the whole recipe.
But it, it really has to be that
you had to do something hard.
If it came easily to you, it won't give
you the sense of respect that you want.
Like the stuff that I've gotten more easily
in my life, I don't take a lot of pride in.
It's always the stuff that I grind out, like
through pain and suffering, and I endure.
In fact, I wanna read you a quote.
This is one of my all time favorite quotes.
So here it is.
To those human beings who are of any concern to me
I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—
I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt,
the torture of self-mistrust,
the wretchedness of the vanquished:
I have no pity for them,
because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—
that one endures.
We are all chained to fortune:
the chain of one is made of gold,
and wide, while that of another is short and rusty.
But what difference does it make?
The same prison surrounds all of us,
and even those who have bound others are bound themselves;
unless perchance you think that a chain on the left side is lighter.
Honors bind one man, wealth another;
nobility oppresses some, humility others;
some are held in subjection by an external power, while others obey the tyrant within;
banishments keep some in one place, the priesthood others.
All life is slavery.
Therefore each one must accustom himself to his own condition
and complain about it as little as possible,
and lay hold of whatever good is to be found near him.
Nothing is so bitter that a calm mind cannot find comfort in it.
Small tablets, because of the writer's skill,
have often served for many purposes,
and a clever arrangement has often made a very narrow piece of land habitable.
Apply reason to difficulties;
harsh circumstances can be softened, narrow limits can be widened,
and burdensome things can be made to press less severely
on those who bear them cleverly.
We are emotional creatures.
We all study, like you're talking about it, using your brain.
You're such a smart person.
I love you dearly, and you analyze it all,
but your effing brain isn't gonna do sh*t.
What's gonna do?
It is enough emotion.
What emotion is the power?
Emotion is what starts wars.
It's what ends, wars
emotions is what gets you married
Emotions where kids come from.
Divorce is where emotion comes from.
Everything that you can think of of a major change
in humanity from the most extreme of war to the
most gentle of love all come from human emotions.
So it's the mix of emotion.
It's like knowing what you want and
having the right fuel to get there.
And you know, if the fuel has no
combustion, you're just bored.
You're not going anywhere.
If the fuel is total trauma and I'm overwhelmed,
you just blow up and go nowhere.
There's that delicate balance, and I've learned
over the years how to help people find that balance.
I would ask you to consider something.
What you just said is absolutely true.
I know you really well, and you know how much I respect and love you personally,
and what you've accomplished in your life is extraordinary,
and what you're committing to accomplish is extraordinary.
But there's an emotional inflection that made you use those things
in those moments.
It wasn't just those understandings it,
the emotion made you find the answers, brother,
and then you have a really smart mind.
You found the answers, figure out how to use it.
But there were inflection moments that made you do it.
There's a reason why you left your company
after building it to a billion dollars.
It wasn't intellectual.
It's emotions.
So, but you have developed your mind so much.
It's like your right arm, your bicep is really strong.
Your left one not quite as much.
And I'm inviting you to consider that your left one is your more powerful one
and you've used it in key moments,
but it also, it's very protective to use the mind
cuz we're all afraid to feel a little too much.
So the more I can understand it,
I put it out here, I can analyze it.
I don't have to be in it,
but the truth is
where the real impact is
is when there's enough emotion that gets you to apply the
things that you understand intellectually, right?
Or find the answers that you,
you didn't even have the answers.
You found the answers intellectually
cuz the emotion drove you.
So it's really studying what creates that emotion.
That makes the difference in anybody's life.
That's where everything begins and ends is with emotion.
And yet our society is all about up here.
You know, in Chinese medicine it's all about the heart, right?
That's considered the center, right?
In America, we think it's the brain.
You know when you first are born,
you know, your heart starts beating.
That's how we know you're alive and there is no brain yet.
And this literally is the initial sense of intelligence.
That's why, you know, for thousands of years, even
poets have talked about the power of the heart.
Well, the heart has tremendous power, and
there's a biochemical connection between the
brain and the heart that I know you know about.
And learning how to use that is
where you create more lasting change.
When I was understanding it all, I was good.
When I learned how to move people,
I got great at what I was doing.