- Good morning, Believe Nation, today's message is
don't live in the past.
Over to you, Anthony Hopkins.
(rooster crowing)
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Entspresso keep me going
♫ I wake up every morning
- [Woman] Your approach to life,
has it changed through your acting experience?
- Yes, whether you just get older, if you live long enough,
you'll change; and if you don't, you may as well die.
(laughter)
You know, go or grow, you have to change
and I've realized over the years that I've gone through
many changes in my life.
Many changes because that's the nature of life
and if you don't go with it, you may as well not breathe,
you may as well be dead.
I know people who live in the past,
they just live back there all the time,
talking about something that happened to them 30 years ago,
they're like zombies and I can't hang out with those people.
I know them, but I can't spend more than five minutes
with them because I feel like suicide at the end of it
because I feel so guilty
about being happy when they're so miserable.
(laughter)
You know, life is in session.
For many years, I thought life was a big rehearsal
for the big event and somebody in Los Angeles said,
"Tony, this is the big event, life is in session."
You know, we spend so much time thinking it's a rehearsal
for the big event, the big red carpet in the sky
and it's not.
- So this is an interesting one for me.
First, I think too many people live in the past,
I think too many people are living off of their past glory
or are living through other people, right?
Like they didn't have a lot of success so they're living
through their kids and the only value they get
is when their kids go off and do something.
I think that is just fundamentally broken.
Yes, you love your kids.
Yes, you love the people around you, but it's your life.
You got to do the thing that you want to go out and do
and stop just telling stories of what happened before.
Stop reliving what happened five, 10, 20 years ago
and now is the time to go out and do something amazing.
This may seem really bad but I was reading the book
this morning and one of the exercises in it
was around rewiring your brain and so the concept here
is whether you're feeling down
or whether you're feeling happy, you can rewire your brain
to feel the opposite if you want to.
So if you're feeling down you can take that negative thought
you have and you picture it and you see it as this big
overwhelming huge thing in your life and then eventually
you look at it and it's getting smaller and further off
in the distance, and smaller and smaller and smaller
and smaller until it kind of fades off into the sun.
You wake up, you open your eyes, you feel happier.
You can do it the other way to feel happier
by looking at positive things.
Take on really positive memory that you have
and just make it big, make it bigger in your life
and brighter and more in your face
and feel the happiness that comes from it.
I just thought it was an interesting exercise to test
and when I first read about it, I had a hard time
thinking about one defining happy moment,
which sounds really sad, but it wasn't sad for me
because I don't live in the past.
I don't remember how old I am.
You know, when I get asked on those forms how old are you?
I have to think about what year is it, when was I born,
and make the calculation.
When people ask me when did I start my YouTube channel,
how long have I been in the YouTube world?
I don't know, who cares?
Like, I don't care when I started, I care what I'm doing
right now, I care where we're going, I care about the impact
that I want to have, not what I did years ago.
I legitimately don't remember.
Unless it's part of the story, the narrative of lessons
that I've learned that I don't want to forget,
or that could be teachable moments for you guys,
I don't remember that stuff.
All the milestones that we hit, I don't know.
When did we hit 100,000?
I have no idea.
How long did it take me to get 1,000, 10,000, 100,000?
Even now, I don't know how long it took.
Who cares, why does that matter?
How is that relevant?
I want to be happy with what I'm doing right now
and make something great going forward and so I
have trouble thinking of one defining moment of happiness
as like, the one happy moment in my life
because I want today to be happy.
I want today to be the happiest day.
I want tomorrow to be the happiest day.
Maybe I'm just a weird bird that way
'cause I know a lot of people, that's what they live off of,
is like, it took me this long to get here
and they remember all the dates and all the milestones.
I don't know, let's turn that into the question of the day.
Am I the weird bird or do you gusy feel the same way?
Are you living in the past, do you remember every detail,
every moment, and you're not happy now,
or are you focused on being happy with what you're doing
today and going forward, or maybe you found the creative way
to embrace the genius of the and and do both.
Let me know what you think.
Are you living in the past or not?
Leave it in the comments below, super curious to find out.
I also want to give a quick shout out to Tim Murphy
from cleverrestaurantconsulting.com.
Tim, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word, it really means a lot to me, man,
I appreciate it.
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 again tomorrow morning
for another shot of Entspresso.
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Entspresso keep me going
Hey Believe Nation, for those of you who want a little bit
more context and value around not living in the past,
here are a few more bonus clips that I think you'll enjoy.
Most people have good, great goals.
I want to increase my income and lose weight
and get out of debt and be thin and happy and healthy
and have a wonderful family, but then, then they decide
but before I start, I'm going to take a vacation
to a beautiful place called Someday Isle.
(laughter)
And in my estimation, 80% of the population lives
on Someday Isle.
Someday I'll lose some weight and someday I'll read that
book and listen to that program and join the Yes Network
and someday I'll get out of debt, someday I'll increase
my income, but it's always someday I'll.
If you want to be a great success, there's one simple rule.
It's vote yourself off the island, for life.
If you decide you're going to do something, do it.
You know, they've done dozens and dozens of studies
over the years, they find that there's one major difference
between successful people and unsuccessful people
and successful people launch, they start,
they get on with it, they just do it.
Unsuccessful people get the same ideas
and the same information, but they've always got an excuse
for not starting.
- So many people in life, we all know these guys, right?
They peaked at high school, they were Prom King,
they were quarterback of the 'ing team, they go through life
and you see 'em 10 years later and they're sitting
at the bar on a Tuesday with their male pattern baldness
and they're like, "Uh, bro, back in the day
I was the 'ing man and they can't pay their 'ing bills,
they're driving a hunk of and they've turned
into a basically complete accelerated version of themselves
which is a douche bag and they haven't done anything
with their lives, right?
And we see these people all the time
and the reason these people don't progress
is because they focus on the glory days.
They focus on the things they have achieved in the past
and they don't let themselves work towards a better future.
And guys, you have to be able to look at yourself
and be honest with yourself on this.
If this is you, you have to stop this behavior, okay?
When you focus no what you did last year or what you did
two years ago, or what you did last month,
or the award I won at the company function
or the sales numbers that I hit
and beat everybody on the squad, or whatever.
When you focus on this guys, that is energy
that you could be putting into actually improving
and focusing on the task at hand which is today, okay?
Champions don't sulk and Kobe Bryant doesn't sit there
and talk about how many MVPs he's won
or how many championships he's won, no.
The mother's up at three o'clock in the morning
practicing everyday, why do you think he's so great?
He's not great because he's great, he's great
because he puts the 'ing work in on a daily basis
and he wins every 'ing day.
- Our paths are very determinate.
When you think about Europe or the western hemisphere
in general, we are stuck by issues of the past.
It is the past that holds back, you know?
And if you said that you were, as I've done in the past,
let me burn everything, let me get rid of everything
in the past, you're free to start thinking about the future.
But if you're still collecting the past
and looking to the past as a solution,
having history is a very strong anchor.
You're unable to move forward because there are historical
reasons why our tribe of humanity is such a slow changer
because change is very, very scary
and human beings don't do scary things on their own.
It takes something much bigger to force them into change.
- [Man] What kind of big thing could that be?
- For every human being individual, it's the heart attack,
the car accident, something that happened
which was much bigger than you, suddenly you wake up
and say, "Oh my God, I've been spending all my life
inside a box just working for someone else.
Oh, isn't there a better way?"
For humanity in general, it is this.
Suddenly it stops raining, suddenly everything goes crazy
and you can't control the climate, so that's big enough.
If the world were hit by a meteorite, it will be enough.
It takes enormous things like that so we are dinosaurs
in that sense, we roam around and do our thing
until we're hit by something much bigger than us.
And that's true even for the individual who needs
a heart attack to wake up to find out
that they've been working too much.