- Good morning Believe nation, it's Evan.
My one word is believe and I believe that you
have something special that when you unleash it,
it will be able to change the world.
So to help you on your journey, today's message
is aim high, over to you George R.R. Martin.
(rooster crowing)
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Enspresso keep me going
♫ I wake up every morning
- And I started actually writing a science fiction novel.
That it had been an idea I've been playing with
a long time called Avalon.
And I was working on Avalon and it was coming pretty well,
and suddenly the first chapter of Game of Thrones
came to me, where they find the direwolf pups.
(eerie music)
- It's a freak.
- It's a direwolf.
- I know it wasn't part of the science fiction novel
I was writing, this was clearly a fantasy,
medieval, had these wolves and this large family.
I had been reading a lot of historical fiction,
and that might have been in the back of my mind,
but suddenly it all gelled, and I wrote that chapter
in like two or three days.
It just came to pour out of me.
- Lord Stark, there were five pups.
One for each of the Stark children.
The direwolf is the sigil of your house.
We were meant to have them.
- You will train them yourselves.
You'll feed them yourselves.
And if they die, you'll bury them yourselves.
- When I did return to books, I said to myself,
okay, I've had many things optioned.
They never make them.
I've done pilots and TV shows, tried to keep them
within budget and produce able, and they never make that.
I'm tired of playing that game.
I'm going to, you know I have a big imagination,
I have an epic story I want to tell,
I'm going to make it as big as my imagination.
I'm going to have all the castles and battles I want.
I'm going to have hundreds of characters
because the real world is complex and I want
my fictional world to be complex too,
not a kind of simplified thing.
I want to have giant battles.
I want to have incredible castles
that each one is distinct from the other
that people will remember for all time.
I want to have dragons and direwolves
and mammoths and a wall of ice that's 700 feet tall.
I want something huge and epic
that can stand up there with Tolkien.
- A funny thing happens when you start setting
bigger goals for yourself or you start imagining
a bigger future potential for yourself.
You start to accomplish bigger things.
Most people have really, really small goals for themselves
and when they hit it, they're happy they hit their goal,
and then they set another really small goal
for themselves, and they continue to live small.
And they continue to play small because
their thinking is small.
Because their ambitions are small.
And as long as you're happy, that's great,
that's fine, but I think if you have the ability to do more
then you have the responsibility to do more as well.
And I encourage all of you to think,
how can I do something bigger?
How can I have a bigger goal for myself?
How can I stretch myself to do a little bit more
than what is comfortable for me?
If I look at my overall goal, I want to help
a billion entrepreneurs.
I want to have a billion entrepreneurs in my lifetime,
like how does that happen?
A lot of people look at that goal and they say
that's impossible, that's never going to happen.
A lot of people say well how do you track it?
Are there even a billion entrepreneurs
out there in the world?
And the people who think like that, the people
who come from that world of scarcity.
They think small.
They are not out doing amazing things.
You need to avoid those people.
Those people are like a disease.
Their small thinking can be a disease to you.
Their doubt, their negativity, their small thinking
can seep into you to shrink yourself down.
You want to go off and do this amazing thing,
but then all the people around you are negative,
and what they're doing is pulling on you,
and they pull you right back down to where you were.
Because you don't want to be judged by them,
because you don't want to disappoint them,
because you don't want to fail in front of them.
That's toxic, and you may not be able to totally
eliminate those people from your life,
like maybe that's your mom.
And maybe there's a lot of great things about your mom,
but this piece you don't like,
so you may not be able to completely brush aside
these people, but you can supplement
with a lot of greatness.
You can supplement with videos and people and ideas
and resources and thoughts and books
that make you want to play a bigger game.
If you hung around George R.R. Martin more,
you would aim higher, you would have
bigger goals for yourself.
It's why I have this channel.
That's why I have the mentor me series and the top 10,
to hang around these people more,
people you might never ever meet in your life.
Some people have passed on, some people you
may never get access to, to get more of their wisdom,
their thought process, their mindset,
because if you hang around people and are consuming
content of people who are thinking big,
you are going to want to think big too.
And it doesn't mean you need to read a book
on seven way to think big, that's one way to do it,
you knoW the how-to step-by-step approach,
but just by osmosis, just by hanging around
and watching people thinking big, it'll naturally
seep into you to want to think bigger and do more as well.
When I first started work with Lily,
and decided to take her on and mentor her
and build her up to be an entrepreneur,
her big goal was to do a Tedx talk.
That's what she wanted to do,
like I want to be a Ted ex speaker.
I need to, my big goal as a speaker
is I want to get on Tedx.
Tedx is nothing, Tedx is small.
I mean I have respect for Ted and everything
they're doing at Tedx conferences,
but you're so much more talented than that.
You have so much more of a ceiling than just doing a Tedx.
And she saw that as being a one year goal,
or two year goal, or something off in the future.
Like no we're going to, you're going to apply right now.
You are going to start researching Ted,
you're going to look at all the ones that are coming up,
and you're going to start applying right now.
And she got her first one, and she's leaving
to go do her first Tedx talk, and she's applying
some more, and the new goal that we created together
is for her to be the most prolific Tedx talk speaker ever.
I don't know how many people have done multiple Tedx talks,
have done like three or four, I don't know what
the highest is, but the goal is for her to be the highest,
to have the highest, the most number of Tedx talks.
And so taking that goal of something that's way down
in the future and bringing it to today,
taking that big thing that you think is impossible
that maybe one day will happen,
and making it happen sooner.
Taking the recent goal that you had and you just hit,
and that was a safe, easy, comfortable goal to hit,
and make it bigger.
It's like I don't know how I'm going to get there,
but I'm going to try to figure it out.
Like when you set yourself a target and a goal,
you're much more likely to have your brain
then try to figure out okay,
how am I going to accomplish it?
When I set my goal this year to hit a million
YouTube subscribers by the end of the year,
I had nothing to justify that.
You know my growth rate wasn't on track,
I would be way short, but having that as a goal
then tweaks my mind, okay how do we do that.
How do we up our production quality?
How do we bring on better videos?
How do we give more value to you guys watching
so that you want to watch more, you want to share more,
you want to tell your friends about it.
You want to, more importantly, go out and do something
in your life in your business as a result
of watching the videos and now we're on track.
We're on track for late December, but it's on track.
And hopefully we continue to climb and grow
and we hit it, and what seemed like a crazy stretch goal
at the beginning of the year, is now achievable.
And so I want the same thing for you.
Take whatever goal you have that you've been hitting
consistently and stretch it more, aim bigger,
believe in yourself more.
Stop listening to the naysayers
and the doubters and the haters
and the small thinking people around you.
It's not that they're evil or bad,
we're not you know judging them,
just stop listening to them.
Believe in yourself more,
surround yourself with the resources that build you up
and make you feel unstoppable
and give you boldness and courage,
and implement that into your daily routine
so that you wake up every day and do the thing
that makes you feel bold and courageous.
If you did that every day for a year,
just imagine where you would be compared
to where you are right now.
Aim higher.
And so the question of the day today is,
I'm curious, what is your big goal?
What's the big thing that you're trying to accomplish?
What's the big impact that you're trying to make?
I'd love to hear from you.
Leave it down in the comments below.
I also want to give a quick shout out to Rich.
Rich thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word, it really means a lot to me,
your support, and I hope you enjoyed the read.
So thank you guys again for watching,
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever your one word is, much love,
and I'll see you guys again tomorrow morning
for another shot of enspresso.
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Enspresso keep me going
♫ Every morning
- If you can figure your life so that what you are
genuinely doing is aiming at the highest possible good,
then the things that you need to survive
and to thrive on a day to day basis,
will deliver themselves to you.
That's a hypothesis, and it's not some simple hypothesis,
right, because what it basically says is,
if you dare to do the most difficult thing
that you conceptualize, your life will work out better
than it will if you do anything else.
Well how are you going to find out if that's true?
Well it's a character guardian leap of faith.
There's no way you're going to find out
whether that's true unless you do it.
So no one can tell you either because
just because it works for someone else,
that's interesting and all that,
but it's no proof that it'll work for you.
You have to be all in in this game.
There is no more effective way of operating
in the world than to conceptualize the highest good
that you can, and then strive to attain it.
There's no more practical pathway to the kind of success
that you could have if you actually knew what success was.
The world shifts itself around your aim.
Because you are a creature that has an aim.
You have to have an aim in order to do something.
You're an aiming creature.
You look at a point and you move towards it.
It's built right into it, and so you have an aim.
Let's say your aim is the highest possible aim.
Well then so that sets up the world around you.
It organizes all of your perceptions,
it organizes what you see, and you don't see it.
It organizes your emotions and your motivations.
So you organize yourself around that aim,
and then what happens is the day manifests itself
as a set of challenges and problems,
and if you solve them properly, then you stay
on the pathway towards that aim, and you can concentrate
on the day, and so that way you get to have your cake
and eat it too because you can point into the distance,
the far distance, and you can live in the day.
And it seems to me that that makes every moment
of the day super charged with meaning.
Because if everything that you're doing every day
is related to the highest possible aim that you
can conceptualize, well that's the very definition
of the meaning that would sustain you in your life.
- Thinking completely different is the key.
If everyone is competing on one level,
you got to think at another.
Like for instance, I always wanted to get into television,
but TV it was always so crowded.
Everyone's trying to get in on Friday night on NBC,
so what do you do when everyone,
I've always heard this advice.
It made sense only recently.
When everyone is doing the same thing,
when everyone is competing in the same realm,
you have to think much bigger.
There's a lot less competition up there.
There's nobody up there actually.
- Find the hole to fill it, instead of trying to
get into other people's territory.
- Yeah, so like I can't get my show on TV,
I know, I'll own a network.
Then I can put on any show that I want.
And how many other people are going up for a network?
You know how many other people applied for that network?
- How many?
It was a lot, and then it wasn't a lot.
100 people in the whole country.
In the whole country, 100 people threw in an idea
for a network and showed a presentation.
That's not a lot of people.
- [Reporter] That isn't a lot of people
for how many people have ideas.
- That's a lot less people that's even in this room.
So when you think about that, think about
how can I show somebody, how can I get someone's
attention, everyone else is at the festival,
don't go to the festival, think of something,
I mean go to the festival, but think of something also,
something else beyond that.
Don't rely on the festival because then you're
just crossing your fingers.
You got to hit it from other ways.
And that promotes much bigger thinking.
Always say aim high because if you aim just at the festival,
you might hit it and you might just hit lower.
But if you aim really high, you might just still
hit the festival, but at least now you got to a chance
to hit there, there, or like.
- By why some say the moon?
Why choose this as our goal?
And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain?
Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic?
Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon.
(applause)
We choose to go to the moon in this decade
and do the other things, not because they are easy
but because they are hard.
Because that goal will serve to organize
and measure the best of our energies and skills.
Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept.
One we are unwilling to postpone.
And one we intend to win, and the others too.