There are times in your life
when you're not going to be happy.
And then what are you going to do?
Your goal is demolished
and there are going to be plenty of times in your life
when you're not happy, there might be years.
And so it's a shallow boat in a very rough ocean,
without a plan you're gonna stay right where you are.
It's time for you to make a move.
Write the rules, be your own director.
Take the power.
So what's your plan?
How are you willing to change?
What is it that you're gonna do to make a difference
make today different than it was yesterday?
What actions are you willing to take?
The least we can do
is consider what we've done
and individually, collectively do the best we can
to try and turn this thing around.
I blame no one,
I look in the mirror.
On the other side of it,
what an opportunity we have?
Because tomorrow's the first day of the rest of our lives.
So what an opportunity we have?
For far too long,
you've allowed the volume of your past misfortunes,
your past setbacks and your past failures
to play way too loudly in your speaker of life.
I need you to turn down your past failures
and make room
to turn up
your future successes.
You have got to change the way you think
It is the whole determining factor of where you go in life.
We are all where we are today
because we thought ourself to this position.
If you don't like the position,
think yourself out of it.
You know what passion is?
Passion is an emotion.
It's an emotion without an action,
passion will get you nowhere.
Inner drive will get you nowhere unless you act on it.
You have to act on your passion.
You have to act on your inner drive.
Don't let those feelings stay inside of you.
You gotta know what to do with them.
You gotta know how to make them work
in order to get what you want.
Don't keep it inside.
And so embrace the fact that you're gonna
have to sacrifice and suffer to some extent.
Once you've embraced it, it's going to happen.
It's almost not that bad.
Push yourself, get it done, make it happen.
Stop looking for external motivation
and start building that fire inside of you.
Start adding more logs, more petrol
to those flames every single day.
And when that thing tells you to quit,
you look at it in his eye and say,
I ain't going nowhere.
I will break you
before you break me.
You will not defeat me.
You will not destroy me.
You owe it to yourself
to feel the pride of knowing you made your life.
You didn't get lucky.
You worked for it.
You sacrificed when it was hard,
you pushed harder.
We try so hard in our lives to fit in.
We try to fit into certain groups, certain frats,
certain sororities, you know, among certain friends.
Yet the people we idolize are most, are the ones that stand out.
But when you're prepared, there is no fear.
There is no fear of failure, okay?
Because even if you've walked out of something and you feel
like you've failed at it, your preparation is so strong,
that you're gonna take that failure and turn it into the outcome you desire.
And most people stop at failure.
We've all failed at things.
I'm gonna continue to fail at stuff, right?
It's the most powerful tool you can use,
but it all depends on how you use it.
You know, we talk about it in relentless, okay?
A scalpel, okay?
In the hands of an individual.
It can do unbelievable damage
in the hands of a professional of a doctor,iIt saves lives.
So it's the same thing with failure.
It's how you use it.
It's that drive inside of you.
Okay?
It's what we talk about, the dark side.
The dark side is filled with failure,
but it's the fuel that burns you like something that's never burned inside you before.
Fully mature people accept that their actions have consequences.
A fully functioning adult knows that he or she can choose an action,
but once the action is taken, both predictable and unpredictable consequences will follow.
The true adult accepts that for every cause there will be an effect.
For every action, there will be a reaction.
You can choose the action before you act,
but you cannot choose or control the consequence or reaction afterwards.
Intelligent adults are very careful about the thoughts.
they think and the actions that they take,
they do not fool themselves or engage in self delusion.
They don't pretend that things might happen differently, nor do they trust to luck.
Inactions also have consequences.
What are called “crimes of omission” are often more serious
to your long-term prospects than the mistakes you make.
Omitting to think through your values, set clear goals, make plans,
commit to excellence, and so on, can be disastrous
to your possibilities of great success.
The starting point of success is the acceptance of reality.
“What cannot be cured must be endured.”
Often people will come to me with challenges they are facing,
and I will ask them this simple question. “Is this a problem or is this a fact?”
If it’s a problem, it’s amenable to a solution.
There is something that you can do to change it.
If you are not happy with the situation, it is up to you to go and do whatever you can to resolve it.
A fact, however, is different from a problem.
It is something that exists, like the weather, like rain or snow.
There is nothing that you can do about it.
You can solve problems, but the reality principle says that you have to learn to live with facts.
Something unfortunate that has happened is a fact.
A sale that did not go through, a business deal that collapsed, a relationship that didn’t work out
—all of these are facts.
Many people waste an enormous amount of emotional energy
struggling with facts when they would be much better off concentrating on doing better in the future.
Your goal is to be happy, confident, and optimistic.
The way that you achieve this is by making these positive responses so automatic
that you remain predominantly happy, confident, and optimistic, no matter what happens.
You can achieve this result by taking specific, proven, practical steps,
that have been used by millions of people and which work with virtually unfailing certainty.
The starting point is accepting complete responsibility for every aspect of your life.
The law of sowing and reaping, whatever you sow, or fail to sow,
is going to determine what you reap in the end.
The law of accumulation reminds us that everything counts.
Every positive step you take is moving you toward building a great life for yourself.
Every positive word or thought or image is deepening your belief and increasing your confidence
in your ability to achieve wonderful things.
Finally, remember the law of reversibility.
If you act in a manner consistent with high performance and high self-confidence,
those very actions will generate the feelings consistent with them.
Every positive, constructive action that you take in the direction of your dreams and goals
will reinforce your belief in yourself and in your ability to accomplish your ideals.
Challenge for building good habits and breaking bad ones
is often finding a way to pull the long-term
consequences of your bad habits in the immediate moment.
So you feel a little bit of pain right now and wanna avoid it,
and the long-term rewards of your good habits in the immediate
moment so that you have a reason to repeat it again in the future.
Each behavior cast a vote.
For the type of person that you wanna become.
If you cast enough votes for that type of identity,
you start to believe that about yourself, right?
Like if you go to church for 20 years, you believe
that you're religious, you study Spanish every Tuesday
for 30 minutes, you believe that you are studious.
Um, so in that way, your habits provide evidence of
your desired identity, and I think that that is
probably the ultimate reason that habits are so important.
It's true, like habits can help you earn more
money or be more productive or lose weight.
Um, and all that stuff is great.
But in addition to the external results that habits provide,
they also shape your sense of self.
They like the engine or the avenue through
which you learn to believe things about yourself.
You have to have just one thing in mind, keeping on track,
closing out all the noise and the clutter that gets in your way.
You've got to identify your target.
Let nothing stand in your way.
You've got to keep your eye on the target and until you've released the arrow.
Let nothing capture your attention
unless it's in the best interest of your ambition.
If you don't keep your mind on what you're doing.
If you don't keep focused on the task at hand,
it could slip right on by you.
Wherever you are, be there.
Whatever you're supposed to be doing for the moment, do it.
You can't be thinking of everything you have to do at one time.
All the time.
You have to concentrate on just one thing at a time, one project, one job.
You have to take it one task at a time and complete it.
Do what you've set out to do.
Keep your mind only on that one task.
Why?
If you don't, you won't accomplish anything.
Concentration takes a lot of discipline.
It takes a lot of discipline to demand privacy.
To keep the do not disturb sign on your door
while you're in the middle of an important job.
It takes a lot of discipline not to answer
the phone every time it rings at home.
That's why they make voicemail and answering machines
so you don't have to answer the phone every time it rings.
Your family will appreciate an uninterrupted dinner hour.
Your night work will get done a whole lot faster.
Concentrate on the work at hand
and demand of yourself, the discipline to stay focused.