What do you do
when the thing you didn't ask for happens in your life
in the shifting seasons?
I don't care how good you are,
I don't care how talented you are,
there's some times when things aren't going to go right.
And you have to deal with it.
You can find yourself stressed out.
You can find yourself depressed.
Mentally fragile because of the experiences,
the turbulence
that you have gone through.
You can experience enough pain in life
that it can clobber you to the ground
and you believe you can't do it.
You believe that this is it for you.
No it's not.
What if you told people the story of
Hey
I had a f*cked up life
but I don't gonna tell you that.
I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna do next.
And I'm gonna go out and do it.
That is what self development is about.
That is what peak performance is about.
That is what breaking through self limiting beliefs is about
is rewriting the story
because as long as you have breath in your lungs,
as long as your heart is beating,
as long as you have consciousness in your mind
you can go and rewrite the story of how your life ends.
Setbacks will happen
and when they do,
it's okay to cry
but eventually
you have to get over it and move on.
It is good to be uncomfortable.
I've never met anybody
who was terribly creative or gifted or strong in leadership
who was also comfortable.
It's always those people who say
"is there not a cause?"
Those exceptional people
who are uncomfortable with the times
and rise to the challenge
because they refuse to allow the chaos around them
to determine the conqueror within them.
People who resist the told to go down
and stand fiercely in spite of opposition
and say,
I'm going to do it anyway.
Forget all your problems.
Everyone has the same problems.
It's that solutions to those problems
that make us different.
Do you have the courage to get what you want?
It takes courage to achieve your goal, man.
It's easy to give up.
It's easy to look at these people and
make excuses as to why they can
do what you can't.
You have everything you need to achieve anything.
Our great problem is not that we feel that we are powerless
but that deep down inside,
we feel that we are powerful beyond measure.
It's an incredible thought.
It's almost a scary thought, isn't it?
But it's also true.
It's the powers that you have are extraordinary.
Have faith like a child.
Adults are too skeptical.
You may not be able to do all you find out.
You may not be able to do all you find out,
but you should find out all you can do.
See, you don't want to wind up at the end of your life
and discover that you've lived only one tenth of it.
And the other nine-tenths went down the drain.
Be curious.
Get excited like a child over your ability
to make yourself do anything for change.
The Law of Use.
And it goes something like this.
Whatever you don't use, you lose.
Lack of use causes loss.
You lose automatically when you quit.
The same thing goes for all the human virtues.
Ambition, unused, declines.
Strong feelings, unused, diminish.
It doesn't grow.
Faith, unused, decreases.
It's a law.
Today, unused is lost.
A talent, unused is lost.
An ability, unused is lost.
So here's one of the key expressions of the evening.
Take a new inventory of yourself.
Starting tomorrow, new project.
Take a new inventory.
And make sure that all of your talent and ability and
mentality and ingenuity and vitality and strong feelings,
faith, courage, make sure that all you've got is being used.
Otherwise, you lose.
Repetition, repetition, repetition.
Go over it.
And if you repeat it, go over it, sure enough, some day,
some mysterious day, the idea takes root, starts to grow,
and shows up in your personality and your lifestyle.
I don't care where you come from, I don't care
where you were raised, I don't care what color you are,
I don't care what gender you are
I don't care about
any of that sh*t If you invest in yourself consistently.
If you do the work consistently,
one plus one is always going to equal two.
10 years of motherf*cking work is going to pay off.
Dig deep, take accountability
for your goals, dreams, and aspirations.
Ain't nobody going to give you nothing.
Ain't nobody going to give you nothing
if you ain't working for it.
And the reason why some of you can't get to that next level,
we don't have enough stuff in you
to push you to get through some of the hell.
You gotta go through it.
That house ain't gonna get you through that hell.
That car ain't gonna get you through that hell.
You only go to another level when you're on this level,
and you're eating out of trash cans and you say,
ENOUGH is ENOUGH
I'll do whatever it takes.
DO YOU
BE YOU
FOR YOU
RISE.
You should treat yourself like you're
someone responsible for helping.
And the first question is, Well, why don't you?
And the answer is, Well, there's
a lot wrong with you, you know?
And it's hard to
exercise enough love and care in a deep
and non naive way to care properly for something like that.
It's an encouragement
To assume, to act out the proposition that even if life is
as difficult as it seems to be, and if you're as vulnerable
and Weak in a fundamental sense, as you definitely are, and
characterized by this terrible propensity for the infliction
of voluntary suffering on yourself and others and that
destructive tendency that there's still something within you
that's so remarkable and so aligned with,
with order and being in the proper manner that you can
climb above that, let's say like Abel
And that you can make the proper
sacrifices, and that you can set yourself right, and you
can set your family right, and you can set the world right.
And that the mere possibility that that might occur, that
that might be within the realm of potential, means that
you have a moral obligation to exercise the responsibility
to take care of yourself
as if you're something that matters.
And that if you did that, properly, It might turn
out that what you did would matter,
that it would matter to you, that it would be meaningful in
the way that things that matter are meaningful,
and that it would matter to everyone around you.
If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail.
Aim to be you.
Aim to look and act and think like you.
Aim to be the truest version of you.
Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it.
Work hard at it.
And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it.
Most gossip is envy in disguise.
I believe that what we become
depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments,
when they aren't trying to teach us.
We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts;
most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses,
to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once.
The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between
or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity:
what has happened, what is happening now and what is about to occur.
Immaturity is shown by making false choices:
living only in the past, or only in the present, or only in the future,
or even, living only two out of the three.
Maturity is not a static arrived platform,
where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom,
but a living elemental frontier between what has happened,
what is happening now and the consequences of that past and present;
first imagined and then lived into the waiting future.
Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon;
for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities
and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life.
I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking.
I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive,
so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane
will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality,
so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering,
great regret, great memory,
everything is forgotten, even a great love.
That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it.
There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while.
That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion
- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.