The guy was a new owner of a team,
a baseball team that was in the basement
of the league
when he took it over.
He went to the pictcher and he said
what is your best throw?
He said well I got a good curve ball and
I've got a good fast ball,
and he went on talking about his different throws.
He said but tell me this,
what is your best throw?
He thought for a moment.
He said I got a good fast ball.
He said that's all I want you to work on.
Nothing else.
Just develop your fastball.
The next year
they went to the world Series.
Most people don't know where their fastball is.
Most people go through life never discovering
what their talents are.
Most people never develop their talents.
They have skills and abilities, but if you don't nurture them,
if you don't develop them, they will never serve you.
Your gifts can take you many places
if you develop your gifts.
And you'd be surprised of the things that you're able to do
when you learn how to block things out,
when you learn how to keep thy eyes single.
Learning how to concentrate,
learning how to focus in.
Deciding that you are going to focus to develop your skills.
You'll be surprised of the ideas that will come to you.
Of the people that you'll be able to attract.
Of the opportunities that you'll be able to see.
You begin to see things that have been standing there
looking you in the face saying,
I can't believe this has been here all this time.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday,
not to who someone else is today.
Because you need to have a,
a hierarchy of improvement.
You need to be aiming for something,
and that means you're gonna be lesser than people
who've always already attained along that dimension.
So the question is,
who should you defeat in the final analysis?
And the answer is, you should defeat your former self,
you should be constantly trying to do that.
And you're the right control for yourself too,
because you're the one who's had all your advantages
and disadvantages.
How bad do you really want it?
You gotta hear me.
People talk about Oprah Winfrey.
You know Ted Turner, Warren Buffet, listen to me.
I don't care how much money you make,
you only get 24 hours in a day.
And the difference between Oprah and the person that's broke
is Oprah uses her 24 hours wisely.
Your brain will trick you.
You are your own worst enemy.
Because life doesn't give you what you want.
It gives you what you deserve.
And if you haven't worked for it,
if you haven't sacrificed for it,
if you haven't given your all,
then you don't deserve it
and you won't get it.
Here's the problem I find most people have.
They judge themselves to the lens of a moment.
They fail at something,
they miss,
they embarrass themselves, they flub something,
And they think that defines who they are.
But I'm telling you right now,
you're not defined by who you are.
You're defined by who you want to become
and the price you're willing to pay to get there.
So everybody goes, how do you do that?
You know exactly how to do that.
You know exactly.
It's not a magic trick.
There's nothing I talk about in that book.
That's a magic trick.
It's all backed down to a very primitive mindset
of we just have to do, it's like breathing.
Breathing becomes normal.
Like we don't even know that,
that we're doing it.
That's how you have to live your life.
When that alarm clock goes off at four or five in the morning,
your mind says no.
You just say, this is what we do.
It's what we do now, because to get to where you want to go,
the amount of pain involved, I'm not saying physical.
I'm not saying you gotta break yourself off
the amount of mental pain
of how many times you're gonna have to do something
that you don't want to do
to get to where you want to go.
It's gonna be, it,
there's gonna be more times you do something that,
that you don't want to do than you are gonna want to do it.
And that's your new norm.
That's your new norm.
So then it's like breathing.
And then once you do this over and over and over again,
it becomes like breathing.
I don't wanna live this lifestyle,
but to get to the other side of this, I have to.
So if you really want it,
you realize what trying is and what trying is not.
How do you overcome the suffering of life
is be a better person.
That's how you do it.
Well, that's hard.
It takes responsibility.
And I think, you know, if you said to someone
you want to have a meaningful life,
everything you do matters.
That's the definition of a meaningful life.
But everything you do matters.
So you're gonna have to carry that with you.
Or do you want to just forget about the whole meaning thing and
then you don't have any responsibility
because who the hell cares?
And you can wander through life doing whatever you want,
gratifying, impulsive desires for how useful that's going to be.
And you're stuck in meaninglessness,
but you don't have any responsibility.
Which one do you want?
Well ask yourself, which one are you pursuing?
And you'll find very rapidly that it isn't the majority of your soul
that's pursuing the whole meaning thing.
Because well look what you have to do to do that.
Have to take on the fact that life is suffering.
You have to put yourself together in the face of that.
This intense focus on one goal is not easy, but it is all important.
Orison Swett Marden wrote,
“The giants of the race have been men and women of concentration,
who have struck sledge-hammer blows in one place until they have accomplished their purpose.
The successful men and women of today are those of one over-mastering idea, one unwavering aim,
men and women of single and intense purpose.
Marden also said that “every great man has become great,
every successful man has succeeded in proportion as he has confined his powers to one particular channel.
” Single-minded concentration in the direction of your dreams
will intensify your desires and increase your emotional drive toward your goal.
This intensity of concentration will activate the law of attraction
and begin to attract people and opportunities into your life
to help you to achieve your goal.
The more you think about your goal,
the more it will come to dominate and direct your life.
The more you think about it, the more rapidly you'll move toward it
and it will move toward you.
You are already in pain.
Get a reward for it.
Like you already in pain.
So at the end of the day, you,
everything is already messed up.
So why would you go through all that
pain and not get something for it?
Like it doesn't make sense.
Like it doesn't make sense to put all those hours in,
okay, yeah, it was football, but it
doesn't make sense to put all those hours in
and not transfer those hours to something else.
It doesn't make sense not to recycle the pain
and get wealth or a successful life, a successful spouse,
like whatever, whatever it is.
And so for me, just going through my go through,
I was like, E it can't end here.
Like, bro, it can't end here.
I've worked too hard.
I've done, I've read the books,
I've gone to the conferences.
I went to the classes.
I got the degrees, like it can't end with
just life is going to deal me this hand, you know?
And so I, I truly feel, and I don't want to,
um, promote gambling, you know, but I gambled,
you know, as a, as a young adult to make money.
And I, and I watched guys who had a royal flush
lose because of the giddy and the excitement.
I'm like, oh, he got something.
You know what I'm saying?
Okay, take what I have and leave.
But I also watch people who had nothing in their head
with that poker face,
actually act as if they had a royal flush and win.
And so I, I learned early like, yo, it doesn't matter if you grow up rich,
you still gotta play your hand.
It's not like life says, all right, you rich.
So you're not gonna have any, your parents will never get cancer.
You know, nobody in your family will ever have multiple s
Like, you'll never get covid.
You are rich.
It doesn't work like that.
Like you still have to do life.
Regardless of how you come into life,
and I think some people feel,
well, if you come into life and everything is great,
then that's the way you live life.
But no, it doesn't matter if you come in, great If you come in poorly,
it does not matter.
You have to do life.
And if you're smart, you do life on your terms
and you don't let life make you do it on its terms.
Great men and women are those who absolutely believe
that they are put on this earth to do something wonderful with their lives.
They have a vision of something greater or better
than their current circumstances.
Personal greatness means having a sense of destiny
and a conviction that your thoughts and your imagination
are the only real limits to your possibilities.
William James said, compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake.
We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources.
Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits.
He possesses powers of various sorts,
which he habitually fails to use.
The founder of Success Magazine, Orison Swett Marden once said,
“There are powers inside of you,
which, if you could discover and use,
would make of you everything you ever dreamed
or imagined you could become.”
In a five-year study of leaders, reported on in his book,
“Leaders,” Warren Bennis discovered
that each of them consciously avoided the “comfort zone” by continuously setting higher goals.
They never allowed themselves to become complacent.
They lived their lives fully extended, always striving to be and do more.
To develop unshakable self-confidence,
you need to see yourself and think of yourself as a leader,
and to do what leaders do.
You need to stretch yourself toward the outermost boundaries of your potential.
You need to set goals that draw out of you the very best that is in you.
You need to work toward objectives that cause you to feel a sense of mastery and peak performance.