- Hello Believe Nation, it's Evan.
My own word is believe and I believe in people
more than they believe in themselves
and my sincere hope is that if you believe in yourself
as much as I believe in you,
you'll be able to change the planet.
So to help you on your journey, today I'm doing a video
on the 10 skills that are hard to learn
but will pay off forever.
And as always guys, if you're watching,
if you hear something that really resonates with you,
leave it down in the comments below,
it's much more likely to stick with yourself
and if you leave a comment within the first few hours
of the video going live, you have a chance to win
one of two daily prizes. Enjoy!
Skill number one is speaking up.
- One of the things you would want to be sure to do
is whether you like it or not,
get very comfortable, it make take awhile,
with public speaking for example.
I mean, that's an asset that will last you 50 or 60 years
and it's a liability if you don't like doing it
or are uncomfortable doing it that will also last you
50 or 60 years and it's a necessary skill.
- Skill number two is being honest with yourself.
- One of the big things that all startups do is they lie
to themselves, over and over and over.
Mine's faster, mine's cheaper, mine's better,
mine's this, mine's that.
No it's not and the reason it's not is because
whoever it is you're competing with,
it's not like they're ignoring you.
It's not like, oh my goodness,
this guy just started on Shopify in the startup competition
and he's doing a million dollars this year,
woe is me, I might as well close up the doors.
What are they doing?
I'm going to copy what they're doing and now you've got to
stay ahead and so, you know, you've got to be
very careful as a entrepreneur to be brutally honest
with yourself and those are some of the things
that you'll hear from me as a mentor.
That know what you know, know what you don't know,
but you got to know your business better than anybody.
- Skill number three is having confidence.
- I don't know if you'd agree with me on this,
but in many ways, one of the key factors
to legendary success isn't your natural ability.
It's not whether you have the right product,
it's not whether you're in the right field,
it's not whether you've had a blessed background.
It's not whether you have the right IQ.
I want you to really think about and deconstruct
and play with maybe later tonight win your journal.
I want you to deconstruct this idea of confidence
and it seems like a very simple work but just think about
it in your own life.
When you have confidence or we could even call it fire,
when you have that fire within you, that confidence,
that interior bravery,
you almost have this power to do whatever it takes
to get your brave vision done.
You see, in this world, it's not about, in many ways,
your strategy and your business or your ability
in your life, it's about this thing called confidence
and we've all had these times in our lives when we are
full of confidence and what other people see as a problem,
we simply do see as an opportunity.
Other people see it as a stumbling block or a wall
and we see it as a stepping stone or this solution.
So confidence is simply something that you really
want to wire in.
Confidence is something you really want to develop,
confidence is a practice, confidence is a muscle
and like any muscle, the more you focus on it
and practice it and train it, the stronger your confidence
is going to grow and I just have to say it again.
When you are at a place in your life,
when there is ongoing, steady stream of confidence
moving through your mindset, moving though your heartset,
you do the heroic in your business
and you achieve the remarkable in your life.
- Skill number four is listening.
- Nelson Mandela is a particularly special case study
in the leadership world because he is universally regarded
as a great leader.
You can take other personalities and depending on the nation
you go to, we have different opinions about other
personalities but Nelson Mandela, across the world,
is universally regarded as a great leader.
He was actually the son of a tribal chief
and he was asked one day,
how did you learn to be a great leader?
And he responded that he would go with his father
to tribal meetings and he remembers two things
when his father would meet with other elders.
One, they would always sit in a circle
and two, his father was always the last to speak.
You will be told your whole life that you need
to learn to listen.
I would say that you need to learn to be the last to speak.
I see it in board rooms every day of the week.
Even people who consider themselves good leaders who may
actually be decent leaders will walk into a room and say,
here's the problem, here's what I think,
but I'm interested in your opinion,
let's go around the room.
It's too late.
The skill to hold your opinions to yourself until
everyone has spoken does two things.
One, it gives everybody else the feeling
that they have been heard.
It gives everyone else the ability to feel
that they have contributed.
And two, you get the benefit of hearing what everybody
else has to think before you render your opinion.
The skill is really to keep your opinions to yourself.
If you agree with somebody, don't nod yes.
If you disagree with somebody, don't nod no.
Simply sit there, take it all in, and the only thing
you're allowed to do is ask questions so that you can
understand what they mean and why they have the opinion
that they have, you must understand from where they
are speaking, why they have the opinion they have,
not just what they are saying
and at the end, you will get your turn.
It sounds easy, it's not.
Practice being the last to speak.
That's what Nelson Mandela did.
- Skill number five is managing your time.
- My challenge in our generation is that gradually
through entertainment, through television, through media,
through every way possible, we are living in a
generation of the dumbing down of ideas
because we have traded effectiveness for busyness.
Statistics say, yeah somebody ought to clap on that.
We are busier than any other generation we have seen
in the last three to 400 years.
We are so busy, we are busier than a one armed
wallpaper hanger, we're just busy, you'll get it later,
don't worry about it, it'll hit you in a minute.
We are just as busy as we can be and we think
because we're busy, we're effective.
But I want you to challenge your schedule for a minute
and ask yourself, are you really being effective
or is your life cluttered with all kinds of stuff
that demands you and drains you and taxes you
and stops you from being your highest and best self
and are you substituting busyness and all the chaos
that goes along with busyness from being effective?
Let me tell you, a bunch of scientists got together,
they begin to do some research and they begin to determine
that 80% of the things we do are busy things that we do
in an area that is not effective, that the average person
only spends 20% of their time doing the thing that they
are really gifted, creative at, passionate about,
excited to do and the rest of it is all the dismal,
dumb stuff that we all have to do in order to survive.
Just crazy stuff that we're doing.
Wonder what would happen if we would go from doing
80% of things that are busy but not effective
and 20% of the things that are really effective,
if we would switch those numbers around and only give
20% of our time to the things that we have to do
and 80% of our time to thing that we were
created to do.
(audience applause)
Wonder what would happen to your life.
Now think about it a minute, there's a lot of things
you could take from me and I could make it.
You could take my suit, I got another one.
You could take my car, I could get another one.
You could take my house, I could get another house.
But when you take my time, you have taken something from me
that is totally irreplaceable.
We take all kinds of questions from money management.
We know how to manage our money, we know how to repair
our houses, we're working on our hair and our bodies
and all of this kind of stuff.
We do everything except the most important thing
is to value our time.
It takes time to be creative.
You were meant to be creative.
You were created in the likeness and the image
of a creator and in that likeness and in that image,
you have creativity.
If you had time, you would be creative
but in the absence of time and with busyness
and clutter the ring ring ring, the phone ring,
beep, beep, beep.
You all got music playing on your phone, all kinds of stuff.
No matter kind of song you put on,
after awhile you hate to hear it because every time
you hear that sound you know it's somebody else
wanting something else from you that's taking you away
from what you are gifted and created to do.
- Skill number six is stop whining.
- So I have this thing that I've been promoting called
No Whining Wednesdays.
Wednesday you cannot whine, complain, or criticize.
And people are like, well what is whining?
Whatever you think it is, don't do it.
And every time you do it,
you have to put a quarter in a jar.
If you whine about anything, I can't, I'm tired,
why me, why don't you?
Every one of them will cost you a quarter.
Or complaining, why don't you, why do you always,
how come you, I am always, they never.
Oop, cost you a quarter.
Then last week, I had people send me pictures of their
jars of quarters.
Oh my god. (laughs)
What they said to me also was, this was wonderful
because I was never, ever aware of how much whining
and complaining and criticizing I do.
I've got mothers doing it with their children.
So Wednesday is No Whining Wednesday.
We need to practice that.
We need to stop whining about what isn't happening,
what we don't have, what we can't do,
what somebody didn't do.
We got to get it clean in 2014.
No whining, no complaining, no criticizing.
- Skill number seven is staying present in the moment.
Skill number eight, being consistent.
- Success is not a destination.
People always think that oh my god, this person's
so successful because they've had a successful movie
or a successful show but success is a journey.
You have to consistently always, always be successful.
That's when you're really successful because otherwise
you'll be remembered for your last failure
and I've had a few but I just have to compensate for
my failure by just getting up and running.
The more time you take to sort of mourn it,
you're wasting that much more time in being successful.
So you just have to perk up, pick yourself up,
dust yourself off and just say what can I do?
There's always a solution.
You can't expect, people always get mistaken that
just because this year has been what it has been,
it's been because I consistently worked hard
for about 10 years.
So now, I know my job enough to be able
to be appreciated for it.
But if I hadn't had the last 10 years,
I would never have had this year or the year before that.
So success is not a destination where you,
or power is not like okay today you're powerful.
You have to consistently be powerful
and consistently be successful and that is a journey.
- Skill number nine is getting enough sleep.
- Well, first of all, I prioritize sleep.
That means saying no to things you want to do.
It's not easy.
- [Interviewer] No, it's hard, I think the hardest thing.
- Last night, you know, Sheryl Sandberg interviewed me
at the San Fran Symphony Hall and then I had to sign books
and I would have loved to go and have dinner with her
but I went to bed.
You know, because if I had gone out to dinner
and hadn't gotten my at least seven hours sleep that I need
and had to get up early to do TV,
I would not be enjoying being here with you now
and I'm really enjoying it and I'm 100% present
and I'm not tired and I hate being tired more than
I hate anything.
- And skill number 10 is having empathy.
- I've thought a lot about the power of empathy.
In my work, it's the current that connects me
and my actual pulse to a fictional character
in a made up story, it allows me to feel pretend feelings
and sorrows and imagined pain.
In my nervous system is sympathetically wired
and it conducts that current to you
sitting in a movie theater
and to the woman sitting next to you
and to her friend so that we all feel that it's happening
to us at the same time.
It's a very mysterious and valuable resource
of the human species
and women, I think, access it most effortlessly.
We cry at sad movies, we don't feel we lose face
or stature or position doing it.
We see a news story that enrages us and we write letters
through tears, our hearts pounding.
I often used to wonder why human beings developed these
inconvenient and embarrassing responses,
this sniffling, choking, wet obstruction.
You know, the thing physicians and soldiers and
stock traders and journalists and fashion models
and politicians and news commentators
and venture capitalists all must suppress in order
to work most efficiently.
(audience laughing)
I thought what possible value, function could it serve
in the Darwinian scheme of you know,
survival of the fittest and the strongest
and the most heavily armed.
(audience laughing)
No seriously, I thought why and how did we evolve
with this weak and useless passion in tact
within the deep heart's core.
And the answer as I've formulated it to myself
is that empathy is the engine
that powers all the best in us.
It is what civilizes us.
It is what connects us.
- Thank you guys so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed.
I'd love to know what did you think of this video?
What did you take from it that you're going to apply
immediately somehow to your life or to your business?
What was your favorite from the 10
and how you're going to apply?
Leave it down on the comments below,
I'm really curious to find out.
Also if you think there's 11, 12, 13 that you want to
add to the list, leave it down on the comments.
I'm super curious to see what you have to say.
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, I'll see you soon.