Every time life runs you to a breaking point,
you will give up and quit.
You will back away and run.
You will say,
this is too hard, this is too emotional,
this is too stressful
and you will back away.
You cannot be a champion
until you have survived
a breaking point.
It's easy to become distracted, especially with all of the chaos
that's going on in the world right now.
But you have work to do.
And so it's important that you keep your focus in the right place.
It's important that you keep working
towards crossing the finish line.
It takes courage to achieve your goal, man.
It takes courage to be successful.
It's scary.
Being like everyone else, doing what the
masses do and following the herd, that's easy.
It's easy to be comfortable.
It's easy not to try it.
It's easy to give up.
It's easy to stand on a f******* sideline
and watch what other people with courage
go out and get all this s***
for themselves that you want for yourself.
Courageous people are those who
have a dream and set a goal.
They make a plan and they take the first
step with no assurances and no guarantees
that their efforts will resolve in success.
But adversity isn't something to fear,
it's something to expect,
something to prepare for and something to overcome.
The truly courageous person is not immune to fear.
But it plays a different role in his or her life
than it does for other people.
Every successful person
who will ever come across has failed big
has failed often, but failure wasn't failure,
where they gave up,
it was where they just learned what not to do
and how they can go about it in a different way.
They used every experience
how can this teach me about being a better person?
To have better, to achieve better, to become better.
But most people spend their life
not wanting to deal with a pain of rejection.
The pain of defeat, the pain of being disappointed.
The pain of losing.
The pain of failure.
The pain of being criticized.
The pain of not being lack.
The pain, the pain, the pain, that's called life.
Don't react against a bad situation,
merge with that situation instead,
and the solution will arise from the challenge.
Because surrendering yourself doesn't mean giving up.
It means acting with responsibility.
Now, don't get me wrong,
fear is always gonna be there, all right?
No matter how hard you work,
but you've gotta start fighting back.
You've gotta start training your mind to beat fear down
when it pipes up and tells you these lies.
If you want it, then go and get it.
Don't wait till everything is perfect,
because it's never gonna be perfect.
Your greatness will never be perfect.
Some of the greatest minds, the greatest thinkers,
the greatest innovators were looked at as crazy.
They weren't ready for their greatness.
They just took a leap of faith.
Jump and grow wings on your way down.
We're built for struggle as human beings.
You, you're not after, um,
the bubbles of bliss that Dostoevsky described in,
in notes from underground.
We're built to contend with the world.
We're built to contend with reality.
You wanna challenge and the best way that you can take on a challenge
because a challenge fortifies you.
So you don't wanna be secure, you wanna be strong.
And you get strong by taking on optimal challenges.
And so you lay out your destiny in the world
and you take the slings and arrows of fate.
And you make yourself stronger while you're doing so.
And you might fail and fortune might do you in,
but it's your best bet.
And you know, people have
also people have had, have extracted unbelievable
successes out of catastrophic failures.
And so, and I'm not saying that in a naive way.
I know perfectly well what happens to people.
You know, you're doing fine in life and then you get cancer
and then six months later you're dead.
And all the heroism in the world
isn't going to save you at that point.
But that's not the point.
That's not the point.
Life is bounded by mortality,
but that doesn't mean that you don't get out there and contend
and you develop by contending and you minimize
the net amount of suffering in the world.
And that's something, man, that's something to do.
So occasionally.
And this is true for everybody.
If you live long enough, life will come for you
at some point, right?
Like something's gonna happen.
So occasionally life will stress you,
but when life doesn't challenge you,
I think it's important to challenge yourself
because otherwise you're just living in this optimal environment,
air conditioning and you know,
everything else is super easy.
You can get all the information in the world at your fingertips.
You never have to, like,
if you think about how crazy just eating is in the modern world.
So previously when we lived in tribes, you,
you had to expend energy to get calories.
at a minimum you were foraging for berries,
but otherwise you probably had to like,
run something down and kill it,
or part of a group hunt or all kinds of other things.
Now you can get calories without expending any,
all you have to do is just tap, like Uber Eats on your phone or something,
it'll show up at your door,
and you can just sit on the couch, which is
of course, like a recipe for poor health,
but also just it's, the game has completely changed now.
We've transcended a lot of our evolutionary
programming and natural situations.
And so you need to be careful about designing that to serve you
rather than to work against you because it
can very easily nudge you in the other direction.
Dare to go forward.
Winston Churchill once said,
"Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues because upon it,
all others depend.
" Courage is the chief distinguishing characteristic of the true leader.
It is almost always visible in the leader's words and actions.
It is absolutely indispensable to success,
happiness and the ability to motivate other people to be the best they can be.
Follow Through on Your Vision
In a way, it is easy to develop a big vision for yourself and for the person you want to be.
It is easy to commit yourself to living with complete integrity.
But it requires incredible courage to follow through on your vision and on your commitments.
You see, as soon as you set a high goal or standard for yourself,
you will run into all kinds of difficulties and setbacks.
Refuse to compromise.
You will be surrounded by temptations to compromise your values and your vision.
You will feel an almost irresistible urge to "get along by going along."
Your desire to earn the respect and cooperation of others can easily lead
to the abandonment of your principles,
and here is where courage comes in.
Stick to your principles.
Courage combined with integrity is the foundation of character.
The first form of courage is your ability to stick to your principles,
to stand for what you believe in and to refuse to budge
unless you feel right about the alternative.
Courage is also the ability to step out in faith,
to launch out into the unknown
and then to face the inevitable doubt
and uncertainty that accompany every new venture.
Avoid the comfort zone.
Most people are seduced by the lure of the comfort zone.
This can be likened to going out of a warm house on a cold, windy morning.
The average person, when he feels the storm swirling outside his comfort zone,
rushes back inside where it's nice and warm.
But not the true leader.
The true leader has the courage to step away from the familiar and comfortable
and to face the unknown with no guarantees of success.
It is this ability to "boldly go where no man has gone before"
that distinguishes you as a leader from the average person.
This is the example that you must set if you are to rise above the average.
It is this example that inspires and motivates other people
to rise above their previous levels of accomplishment as well.
First of all, you have to remind yourself that it's okay
to feel the way you feel
when you're going for a difficult time.
It's okay to feel weak.
It's okay to want to cry.
It's okay to feel overwhelmed,
just reminding yourself that it's okay.
This is my number one way.
Of how to find strength in difficult times
is reminding yourself that the way you feel
is okay to honor that feeling, to accept that feeling,
to actually be okay with that.
What we see, or what we perceive to be a weakness, or
what we perceive to let us down, or what we perceive
is a sign of, you know, instability or insecurity.
We've gotta remind ourselves that when
things are tough, it's okay to feel that way.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Any difficulty I go to, I look to moments in history
where people have endured the same pain,
if not more extreme, and analyze, absorb
and connect with how they got through it.
I like to see what they were thinking.
I like to see what they did.
I like to see how they structured themselves.
I like to look at how they organized.
I like to look at who they were speaking to.
I like to look at what was going through their mind at that time, because
you've gotta remember that any challenge we're facing today,
we've faced it before as a, as humanity, right?
Beyond ethnicities, beyond color, race, creed,
beyond backgrounds, beyond all walks of life.
As human beings, we've been through challenges before
and we've got through them.
You need the courage to risk failure.
You need the courage to endure constant setbacks, disappointments, and temporary defeats.
You need to learn to deal with failure
by realizing that it is an indispensible prerequisite for success.
You need the courage to treat failure as an opportunity to more intelligently begin again.
You need to overcome the fear of failure
by doing the things you fear over and over again,
and then by resolving to bounce rather than break when things don’t work out for you.
You need the courage to turn toward danger continuously.
Identify all the fear situations in your life that cause you stress or anxiety today.
Decide what the worst possible outcome of each of these situations might be.
Resolve to accept the worst, should it occur.
And then take action to resolve each of those situations.
Refuse to allow a fear situation to remain in your life,
dominating your thinking and emotions and holding you back.
You need the courage to be willing to make mistakes and learn from them.
All peak performers continually make decisions,
make mistakes, learn from them, self-correct, and carry on.