Your mentality
is heavily linked to your reality,
and the fact that most people have such weak mindsets
comes from the fact that they have a weak life,
a weak body
a weak social circle
a weak network
a weak bank account
a weak relationship.
And then their mind is weak.
Well, of course.
Whereas if you had a group of soldiers around you
men who were dedicated
who would ride or die with you
if you were strong
if your woman would never leave you no matter what
cause she idolizes you
then your mentality would be strong
your mind would be strong by extension
So if someone comes to me and goes, "I doubt myself."
I usually look at them and go,
"yeah, I understand why
you're a little fat piece of sh*t
and you're stupid.
Of course you do.
Excuses sound best
to the person that's making them up.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
Get off the pity potty
telling everybody you're sad
and sob stories, trying to get people
to show up to your pity parties
and your pity parades.
If you ever see me in a Rolls Royce
a 6 or 7 star hotel
living my life to the fullest
don't get jealous of me
because I worked my ass off to get it.
Nobody handed me nothing.
Wake your ass up.
Awaken the beast
inside.
It's game on.
It's go season.
It's time for you to take advantage of the access
and the resources that you have
in your country and your community.
You got a problem with your life?
You got a problem with your environment?
Do something about it.
If you want it
go get it.
Every man understands you shouldn't be
complaining about things you cannot change.
You have to play the cards you've dealt.
To be born a certain height
and then to sit there know, what do I do?
I'll tell you what you do.
You become the best version of yourself
just like everyone else does.
Nothing about the height is in and of itself enough value
for me to be a valuable man.
As a man, you build your value.
You are born with the cards you're dealt.
Sure, it'd be ideal.
Look, I'd love to be seven foot tall, I'm not.
So it's the same argument
if you're five foot two,
you need to become rich, strong, and funny,
and charismatic, and interesting and witty.
If you're six foot four,
you need to become rich, strong, well connected.
It's the same game.
So to sit there and complain about it is asinine.
Excuses are for weak people.
If you're gonna make it happen,
get your ass up and get to work.
No more excuses.
No more "I'll start tomorrow."
No more "Just this once."
No more accepting the shortfalls of my own will.
No more taking the easy road.
No more waiting for the perfect moment.
And no more indecision and no more lies.
No more weakness.
Now is the time for strength.
And through strength
and through will
and through unwavering discipline,
I will become who I want to be.
If you don't execute,
you're not just cheating yourself, dude.
You're cheating your family
you're cheating your employees
you're cheating your team
whatever you're a part of.
Iit's bigger than you, man.
Many of you have given control
of your life to your feelings.
You gotta take back control right now.
You must harden your f*cking mind.
You gotta discipline yourself.
When it's time to rise,
you f*cking rise.
When it's time to work
you f*cking work.
You have to just work.
At some point, you have to bite the bullet and just work.
Working harder is never gonna not help
no matter what scenario you're in.
Working harder is never gonna not help you.
And it's amazing
that I get different versions of the same answer
for 99% of the questions I'm asked.
Work harder.
If you have a problem, whether you're broke,
whether you're out shape,
whether your f*cking friend dies,
whether your girl leave you,
whether you're depressed, whatever it is,
Working harder is almost always the answer.
So you know what you need to do,
you need to do it.
And what's amazing, again, It's kind of like the antidote.
If you take the antidote before the poison,
then you never get sick in the first place.
If you're always working as hard as possible,
if you're always working your ass off
and trying to be the best version of yourself
every single day,
then you never get sick in the first place.
You're already working,
you're already taking the antidote.
So things can't get... they can't attached to you.
They can't get ahold of you.
Working hard is the antidote to everything,
so, why don't you just do it in advance.
Why don't your life just become work like mine.
Why don't you just dedicate yourself to a cause
and f*cking get up
and do what you're supposed to do every single f*cking day?
I want to talk to you today because I hope that of all
the talks that happened here, you forget about me, but
that this changes your life, and I wanna remind you of
something as I begin today, that you were born to do
something great with your life, that you're extraordinary.
Listen to me, that you're enough, that you're special, that
you're favored, that you're chosen, regardless of where you
come from, regardless of what you've been carrying with you.
Some of you come in here today and you know what ?
you've even thought of harming yourselves.
Maybe you're even proud of the
fact you haven't killed yourself.
But every day some of us are killing ourselves
with the shame we carry from something
we've done some humiliation, some fear.
We put this gun to our head every
day that tells us we're not enough.
We're not strong enough, pretty enough, smart
enough, favored enough that we're dumb and
we carry these guns in our head every day.
That shame us, that take our
confidence from us, that steal our joy.
It's like a knife.
We, you don't have to kill yourself
because you do it every day.
You do it over and over and over again,
and there's a better way forward.
You can put those things down in your life.
You could decide today that you
were born to do something great.
You could set aside this weapon that you keep using against
yourself to hold you back from your joy, from your passion,
from your achievement, from all the goodies in life.
You could decide today, just intentionally to set
this weapon down, whatever it is, something from
your childhood, a divorce, a business failure,
something you're just not proud of, that you've done.
Set it down, stop using it as a weapon against yourself
and realize that happened for you and not to you.
I'll prove it to you.
I'm a big believer in fake it till you make it.
I don't want you seeing, you know, people say, wow,
social media is so full of like these fake lives.
People have always lived fake lives.
I was living a fake life way before social media came along.
In fact, when I became an entrepreneur,
I wanted to be somebody so bad.
I wanted to be rich so bad.
I wanted to look.
I thought, if I don't look successful,
no one's gonna listen to me.
Who's gonna listen to a young kid in business about
how to save your money when I didn't have any.
That was my own limiting belief.
What's yours?
You have this kind of convoluted, limiting belief
about why you can't do something right now.
That's this your own BS story.
You keep telling yourself,
how about you just drop that story?
How about you just decide it's a lie?
Even if it is true,
I'm not gonna just teach you not to tap into your pain.
I'm gonna teach you how to do it.
Okay.
I'm not a I teach people how to change
things technically,
but by believe in this concept of
living blissfully dissatisfied, which means there's a way,
most achievers have it backwards.
They think, Hey, if I enjoy my
success, I'm gonna lose all my drive.
And then other people that aren't successful yet
haven't reached what they want or like they delay
their bliss until a destination in the future.
Once I get this relationship, once I make
that money, once I get that car, once I have
that home, then I'll let myself feel bliss.
And so I teach you that the concept is you
can live blissfully and still be dissatisfied.
Your pathway to changing how you feel about yourself
of getting to the next level is always giving.
Always giving.
You know, I have this thing I kind of run my life through
that kind of is my governor on my life of when I'm trying
to give and when I'm trying to make a difference for people.
And I just have this hallucination.
I am a Christian, and so I believe that
someday when I die, there's an accounting.
I don't care if you, I, I'm actually one of these
very interesting people that I believe in the
quantum field and energy because I know it exists.
And I believe my Lord and Savior created him.
That's you have, whatever your belief is, is wonderful.
I don't preach, I just want you to
know, I know there's an energy field.
I know there's a God and um, and Lewis
asked me on the show, what are three truths?
And I said, the first thing is there's a God.
I just want you to know that.
So you believe your beliefs.
I respect that I admire.
I have people from every belief
center in the world on my program.
But I just wanna say to you, this is my prism.
I live my life through.
It governs my decision making,
and I make mistakes all the time.
One of the cool things about being a Christian is I'm
saved by the grace of God because I know I'm gonna sin.
That's one of the cool things about my particular faith.
But, but the point that I wanna make, because I
sin all the time, I make mistakes all the time.
I've already used profanity, I think four times in this
talk, so I know for sure I've messed some mistakes.
But let me tell you how I govern my life.
I believe at the end of my life, there's an accounting.
And I'm gonna sit in front of my Lord and I want
him to say, well done, good and faithful servant.
But having said that, no matter what your beliefs are,
I think that I actually get to meet somebody Interesting.
Maybe you don't believe in anything faith-based, but I
bet you believe there's a recording going on in your life.
Someone's paying attention, someone's
gonna tell the story of your life.
Maybe your great-granddaughter will carry the legacy
of your life and what you've done, but someone's
paying attention to what you're doing here.
You've always had that sense.
You've always known your life mattered.
You've always known since you were a little girl
that there's something special you're supposed
to be doing, and that anxiety, that fear you
have is maybe you're not doing it in life.
In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories:
externals I cannot control, but the choice I make with regard to them I do control.
Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.
Negative visualization, in other words,
teaches us to embrace
whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it.
But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves
for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us.
It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it.
Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success,
popularity, or power, but self-rejection.
Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation,
but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection.
When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable,
then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions.
The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or
criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned,
I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ...
[My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned.
Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life
because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved."
Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.
Life is neither a glorious highlight reel nor a monstrous tragedy.
Every day is a good day to live and a good day to die.
Every day is also an apt time to learn and express joy and love for the entire natural world.
Each day is an apt time to make contact with other people and express empathy for the entire world.
Each day is perfect to accept with indifference all aspects of being.
Persuade me or prove to me that I am mistaken in thought or deed,
and I will gladly change—for it is the truth I seek,
and the truth never harmed anyone.
Harm comes from persisting in error and clinging to ignorance.
Let us too overcome all things, with our reward consisting not in any wreath or garland,
not in trumpet-calls for silence for the ceremonial proclamation of our name,
but in moral worth, in strength of spirit,
in a peace that is won for ever
once in any contest fortune has been utterly defeated.
How is it that discipline and the straight and
narrow offer the best chance for a good life?
And, and well, how is it that we
have forgotten that is the case?
Well, the reason that discipline is necessary is because
you are a massive competing short-term interests.
And so the question is then, well, which
short-term interest should win out?
And the answer to that is, well, none of them, they
need to be organized into a hierarchy that makes
them functional across time and across individuals.
So like a two-year-old is very likely to act
out his or her proximal impulse, but of course,
a two year old can't survive in the world.
you have to bring your, your primary instincts, let's say,
under the regulatory structure of
a higher order value system that allows them to manifest themselves without
undue mutual sacrifice across large spans
of time in the presence of large numbers of other people.
So that requires a very sophisticated ordering.
It's like, We already talked about the fact
that a meta narrative is necessary to unite
subcultures, say so that they can operate
peacefully and harmoniously within the same space.
The same thing applies within you, cuz you're
like an, you're an internal coalition of warring,
single-minded tribes, and they have to all
be brought under the organizational structure
of long-term collective vision, let's say.
And in order to do that, you have to
be disciplined and any discipline.
Speaking, you know, technically speaking is an attempt
to bring all those competing short-term impulses under
a large, a larger scale and more inclusive framework.
And so you do that and then
well, that's actually what gives you freedom.
Being impulsive and being free aren't the
same things because if you're impulsive,
you're just the slave of your impulses
There's no freedom in that.
That's, that's just.
That's the same freedom, so to speak, literally
that a two-year-old has, because a two-year-old
isn't socialized yet, so it's not,
it's a completely,
it, that doesn't function in this,
in the sophisticated world, it doesn't work.
Everyone knows it.