Daily Motivations
S19 Ep91: Mindset of Winners
I felt like this is a lot with getting to me with a lot of pressure. I felt like things were just kind of hard and tough and I wanted to just quit to be honest. I felt like I lost a lot of faith in myself and it was getting really hard to just push through. And I didn't quit, obviously we're here today, but this morning before, after prejudging, I had that same cry in the bathroom, but this one was a cry of gratitude and pride that I had pushed through and gone through that. And it's these moments, it's this journey and like, I felt this before having the trophy around my neck, it's your journey, it's the experience, it's knowing that you pushed past times where you wanted to quit. But everyone out there who dreams are scaring you, who dreams make you want to quit, just don't quit, it's good, your dreams should be big, they should be scary, just keep pushing through. I have this thing, I say champion mentality, it's not about winning, it's not about a trophy, it's about having no quit, it's about giving everything you have so that when you can show up on games, day before the results are over, you're proud of yourself to know the work you put in. We all have these moments, these moments in time, that either make you or break you, that can determine the rest of your life. The rest of your life can be determined by one simple decision, and I had the decision to make. I wanted to quit, I wanted to give up. There wasn't some inspirational quote, there wasn't some, there wasn't nothing, it was me, myself, and it was freezing out here. I had to make a decision, the decision I make was to get up and keep on going. That one moment changed the rest of my life. If you haven't gotten what you want, then you're not worthy of it, period, and that's okay. Now you can admit that you suck and improve. Better to know you're bad for a season than pretend you're good for a lifetime. You're not making as much money as you want, because you're not as good as you think you are. You're not struggling from imposter syndrome, you're a student and pretending to be a teacher. No students say they feel like frauds are trying to learn, you're a fraud when you get up to teach the class, and you've never done it. We're not on a stage just because of talent or ability. We're up here because of 4 a.m. We're up here because of two a days, or five a days. We're up here because we had a dream and let nothing stand in our way. If anything tried to bring us down, we used it to make us stronger. We were never satisfied, never finished, we'll never be retired. My high school English teacher, Mr. Fisk, he had this beautiful quote, and it read, "Rest at the end, not in the middle." And I took that to heart. I believe there's time for resting at the end, but for me, that time is not now. Have a dream, sacrifice for it, and never ever rest in the middle. You're willing to shoulder more than your responsibility of life, because you expect and demand something more of life. Champion's mentality, man. Hoping for a good result, you're demanding a good result. You're going above and beyond what's expected in the gym, what normal people do. You do more than what's normal, because you want more than a normal return of life's investment. My personal goal is to squeeze every ounce of potential out of whatever I have. And I think that if you feel like you have potential left over, then it will eat you alive until you do something about it. Here's the fact, all of you have extraordinary capabilities, all of you. You have to decide if you are willing to do the things to put you in that category. Look, as best we know it, we have one life. In it, you have to trust your own voice, your own ideas, your honesty, your vulnerability. And through this, you will find your way. You do not have to be fearless. Just don't let fear stop you. Live like this as best you can, and I guarantee you will look back on a life well lived. You are capable of greatness in your profession, and more importantly, in your quality of self. Stay hungry. Stay young at heart. Take those risks. You are going to change the world around you in big ways and in small. And I greatly look forward to being a part of the future that you will shape, and good luck. You're crazy until you're successful than you're a genius. And I think for a lot of people, when you're grinding as a small channel, people think you're too obsessed. You're weirdo. Stop only making videos. Get alive. Be realistic. People will come into your mind for wanting to do this. But then once you're successful, they're like, "Yo, your drive, your tenacity was great." But it's like, "Yeah, well, where was that back then?" I didn't get back when I was a small channel. I have failed far more times than I've succeeded. Far more. You will never succeed more than you fail. That's not how it works. You know why? Because failure is a wonderful teacher. It's the only way to learn. You have to fail. Failure is a part of the process to become unsuccessful. So when you fail, it's a part of the process. Keep going. You're supposed to fail. You know that gets it right all the time. That's impossible. You have to fail. Matter of fact, when you fail, be glad about it. Every time you fail, you one step closer. And the decisions we make on the moment-to-moment basis, champions who have broken up, born into success. They're created, they're matured, they're struggled, and weathered through that effort of hard work and dedication and sacrifice to achieve that championship status. It's these moments, these decisions we make on a daily basis. Do we get up early and go for a run? Do we hit the snooze button? Do we go that extra wreck in the gym? And our bodies die and we push past that. All these little things are the inches that add up to be the measure of difference between first place and forever for God. I see too many kids get so discouraged because they're expecting to make this quantum leap. And when that quantum leap doesn't come, it feels like it will never come. But that's not how it works. It's step by step. One foot in front of the other day by day, get better every single day. And then when you look back, then you look down and you realize the mountain that you just scaled, right? But you can't jump from the bottom of Everest and get to the top of Everest like that, it doesn't happen. Your Superman is only in comics. The mumble mentality simply means trying to be the best version of yourself. That's what the mentality means. It means every day, you know, you're trying to become better. You want to train as much as you can, as often as you can. If you want to be great, you want to be the best motherf***er ever at which you do, you're going to be misunderstood by everybody. Because you're going to be so f***ing obsessed and so driven to get there. That's what it takes. That's the truth. It takes every second of your f***ing life. Anybody that says balance? Yeah, balance is important for a lot of f***ing people. It is. But if you want to f***ing go to that edge where people do not like you, don't understand you, question everything you f***ing do, you've arrived. When you are misunderstood to the point where f***ing people think you're psycho and you're nuts and you're this and that, why are you in a f***ing gym at one o'clock in the f***ing morning? You've got to do doing an op for 13, 14 hours after Ranger School, man, at the gym. But it's wrong. You will never understand what is wrong with me. You have to lose your fear of failure. Failure is a part of the process. People who don't, who never fail, never try. You have to fail. You got to get it wrong to get it right. You learn nothing from winning. You only learn from your failures. It's only delusional until it works. So is it really delusional? And then once the world see it, there's nothing delusional about it. Now your delusion becomes, oh, he was a f***ing genius. We didn't see it when he saw it. We didn't understand it when he did. We thought that some other f*** was crazy. I just wanted it so bad. You know, wanted it so so bad. Young men really need to hear this more, I think, is that you should be a monster. You know, because everyone says, well, you should be harmless, virtuous. You shouldn't do anyone any harm. You should sheath your competitive instinct. You shouldn't try to win. You know, you don't want to be too aggressive. You don't want to be too assertive. You want to take a back seat and all of that. It's like no. Wrong. You should be a monster, an absolute monster. And then you should learn how to control it. You're the hunger, the motivation, the desire. You're the best possible basketball player you have to be. I tell you, the harder and harder you're working here, the harder and harder it becomes, except failure out there. The second place isn't an option anymore, guys. The more you give in here, the more you get out there. Why would you not want to give it at all? What else are you going to do? You're going to come here and kill it right now, or stay home on the couch. You know, watching the life pass by. I know it sounds like habitual while I stay all the time. But sometimes you got it ingrained in your head. What else would you be doing right now? Taking a time off? Taking a time to get ahead. If it doesn't seem so, so easy to you, it's because you don't believe in yourself. You believe in yourself. You want to be in here killing it. Because giving you that much more chance because you believe you can come there. But people that don't come in here, they're tired of stuff, or people that don't believe in themselves. That's why they don't see the asset of being in the gym to grow. They see as a waste of time because they don't believe they can ever get there. So if for a while I take the precautionary steps to sharpen it home in the arsenal to really go to battle. Because they don't even want to go to battle because they know they're going to lose. Everything but money. Do you want a positive reinforcement? Or do you want a negative one to go about your head? I didn't want people to see you. As a competitor, if you're trying to do something meaningful, if you don't have the mindset that you're the best ever, you failed already. And that's been my mindset since I can remember. That will be my mindset as long as I can remember anything. That I am the best ever at what I do. And every day that I step on the basketball floor, I will strive to be that. But my mindset will always be as such as I am the best to do what I do. And that'll give me a shot at being the best. But before you can ever reach anything you have to believe in. You don't just mistakenly become great at something. You've got to play with your heart with every ounce of fighting in your body. There's no room for second place. There's only one place and that's a first place. All that stuff is the mindset of the champion. Thinking before acting, you have a purpose for every action. You have a purpose for every action as a result. You have to feed all these things. You have to feed the love. You have to feed the competition. You have to feed the discipline. And that to me is the only way to stay balanced. It's a great feeling to know that you set a goal for yourself. You were able to reach that goal and to knock it down. You have to want it. You have to want to be better. And it starts off with you have to have pride in yourself. Accept the challenge. And as the years go on, the separation that you have with your competitors and your peers just grows larger and larger and larger and larger. And by year five or six, it doesn't matter. What kind of work they're doing in the summer, they're never going to catch up. You guys never really made it easier on yourselves in terms of is that what goes along with trying to win the first one? That's what defines champion. I much rather have this game either way it was. I was having to come back and fight from a deficit as opposed to just throwing it out. Because then we have to sense our championship skills and not determine it. Champions aren't found on the podium with their handout. No, champions are found in the lab studies. The thousands of hours of hard work when no one's watching. That's what makes the will of stopable. When you're here, no one else is. Winning was fun. Feeding so much even better. Why is that? I don't know. I've always had that. Do you believe you'll get 18 majors? To be honest with you, no. You don't, no. You've accepted that. I've accepted that. I'm going to get more. Why go to a tournament if you're not going there to try and win? There's really no point. I will explain to my dad second sucks. The third's even worse. I want to win. That's just my nature. My all-time out rush more of golf. Far as need. Jones. Nicholas. Me. The mindset's simple. Every tournament I enter, I enter to get that W. That's it. Period. Nothing's ever going to be given to you. Everything's going to be earned. If you don't go out there and put in the work, you don't go out and put in the effort. One, you're not going to get the results. But two, in one part lane, you don't deserve it. You need to earn it. To be a winner, you want to be disciplined. You want to know what you're doing. And then you want to be on the edge where your skills are being developed. And if you're going to be on the edge where your skills are going to be developed, you're out of place where loss, where losing, is always a possibility. Because otherwise you're not pushing yourself beyond your current capacity. Finishing of a winner is someone who never let losing stop them. You said I failed over and over and over and over again I failed. And that's why I succeeded. I always think that there's two types of players, players who love to win and players who hate to lose. Which one are you? I'm neither. I play to learn something, right? Because I think if you play with a fear of failure or you play with the will to win or that supersedes a fear of failure, I think it's a weakness either way. A lot of people in general are afraid of failure. How did you become one of those people who doesn't seem to be afraid of failing? It doesn't exist. It's a figment of your imagination. Try to use those as a source of strength. At first I think it's getting over the stigma of it being something that is embarrassing or a sign of weakness. It's not a sign of weakness. I think that's step one. When he lose to a better fighter, that's not a big tragedy. The big tragedy in fighting is when a person lose to himself. I can't win them all. I'm human. I'm just like y'all, man. I'm just like you. You might be a little better me. But you human, you're just like me, right? You're just like me. You ain't no different. You're just like me. You bleed just like I bleed. You cry just like I cry. You're just like I hurt. I ain't no different than you. It starts with an undying will. The leaf that the journey you're about to bark horn is a winnable horse of action. And that you can do it better than anyone's done before. That belief is so ingrained in the will of the individual that creates the driving force of physical strength to turn into maturity or something. If your day doesn't challenge you, don't ever expect to be changed by it. You can try to put your feet and my shoes. They won't never fit. 'Cause you can't go through what I go through in my life. But just try. Just try to stick your foot in my shoes. Just for one day ain't gonna be a damn day. Just for one minute. Just for one minute. Stick your foot in my shoes and try to deal with what I go through in my life. Why not just commit one time in your life to something? See what happens. There are no losers in the world of passion and commitment to something. No one loses there. Whatever it takes to win the game or you got to do whatever it takes. I mean, that's my job. Sometimes shots are not gonna fall. How bad do you want it? Are you already seeing yourself stronger from it? Before you enter it. This is what happens. This is on the other side of overcoming. It becomes very, very powerful when you overcome yourself. All those things you want is coward from. You're afraid of and you're facing eye to eye every day. Is there something wrong with being competitive? There's nothing wrong with it. There's something wrong with cheating. There's something wrong with being a tyrant. There's something wrong with winning unfairly. All of those things are bad. But you don't want people to win. What's the difference between trying to win and striving? Make up your own mission statement. What do you want to be in life? Going to work every single day when no one's watching. Paying your dues every single day. There's only so much time in the day. And we can't let it pass by. You have the chance to change your life. Your family's life. You could be something very special. Don't you want to be champion? You could be champion of the world. I didn't pay no attention to it. He said, "Really? You could be champion of the world. You could devastate the world. No man can take it with you. It's got to believe it." Your lack of commitment is almost an insult to the people who believe in you. Two forms of pain. Pain that breaks you. And the pain that changes you. That's the pain of a change right there. That's the pain of progress. The pain that destroys you isn't this. It's later in life knowing you could have been more. And all that's left is you in the f***ing mirror and tears of a possibility left. Now you allowed to die. Own your f***ing life, guys. You're in every opportunity. There's no excuse not to be the hardest mother f***ing worker in the room. Sometimes you just have to say things just what they are. Just what they are. Passion. Passion is free. Nobody can charge you for passion. Nobody can tell you what passion looks like. Because that's all about you. Effort is isolated. The reason why effort is isolated because nobody can dictate it. Effort is 100% in the mind. No coach, no player, nobody else can make you run to the wall. Nobody else can make you finish a tackle. Nobody else can do it. That's why it's the most isolated things in this earth right now. It's effort. And when you finally figure it out. How to win real battles is final for fundamentals. That's what wins championships. That's what wins battles. Block in tackling, block in tackling, and today get tired. Because you don't know what tired feels like. That's the only reason we do it. If you guys believe you can do this. You can eat in twinkies and become the f***ing man. I know there's no scientific evidence for that, guys. But I swear to you, obviously eating right, resting, you know, have a good cardio and everything else. In other sense, add up to equal weights and they're all very important. But none of them mean anything without the mental f***ing state that today I'm no longer a f***ing loser. There's nothing worse in life than not being challenged, not having that anxiety, that fear factor. What if I lose? What if I don't? That moment is life. That's what's right about it. Average is a weak mentality. We must believe it so much so that we're arrogant about it. We must be pissed off for excellence. Who am I? I'm a champion. That's right. You need to remember that all through this game. It hasn't been easy. It's a dog fight. It hasn't been the road. It hasn't been successful. It's just a paved road and like each he goes this way. It's been rough. It's been crooked. It's been hard. But I've made up in my mind that I will get a reward for the pain that I go through. I will not stop in the middle of the process. I will not be defeated. I will not be destroyed. I will take everything that happens in my life and I will allow the pain to push me to greatness. You will not break me. You will not stop me. You will not defeat me. The only way I lose is if I quit, it's going to be a dog fight. You have to be the champion before you become the champion. So that means lifestyle. You have to be and before you become money. You have to be and before you become him. So if you're ready to quit, then don't get started. If you're ready to quit, don't get started. If you're looking for this easy path, don't get started. If you think they're not going to close the door and you want to say no, a million times, don't get started. But every time they close the door, I just get excited. Why? Because I am not a no. I'm one yes away. I'm one yes away. You can't keep telling me no forever. You can't keep denying me forever. This type of energy, this type of passion. You can't stop it. You can contain it for a while, but you cannot stop. This is life. You can't defeat me. There is not. You don't have enough power. You don't have enough energy. You don't have enough strength to stop this. Life begins now. If it doesn't begin now, your life is f***ing over. If they can do it, I can do it. And there's the mentality. If somebody else can do it, you can do it. And I said to myself, I will do it and I will do it better. I try to, when I do something, want to be the best. I will not be happy being the second, third or the fourth. My inspiration is that above everybody else, in everything I do, in my project like this, in my football, and another thing, everybody else says is not important. So if they tell you your best, it's not important. The important thing is that you say you're the best. If you don't believe in yourself, who can you ever expect to? You guys must be the now of what you want to be later. Let's start right now. If you're not doing the now, don't ever expect the later to be the person you want to look in the mirror. Everyone's like, "Oh, later in life, I want to do this. Later in life, I want to do that." Later in life is turning around looking in the mirror right now. That's the later in life. Unless that turnaround is something in progression, later in life, it ain't going to be anything different. Belief, when you turn around, you're going to see something to put a smile on your face. It's going to make you turn around the next day for action. Turn in belief in the productivity. Otherwise, while you're in here, man, you're in here to grow what? But it's not convenient for you. Think guys, think of where you want to be. Before you start where it is now. It's too hard, man. The journey is too hard. You guys start trying to follow someone else's path, success. You guys are days and confused. You must travel your individual path, success. Someone else's path has already been done. It's not for you to incorporate what you believe in. Make your own content. You obviously don't want it bad enough. I became obsessed with being the baddest thing that got ever created. In my back, I don't care. I believe it. And I was trying to tell them once you become obsessed with something, obsessed, it's okay to be unbalanced for a while. It's okay. Don't be, all this stuff people say, you got to be balanced. To be the best in the world at what you do. It's not going to be the Navy SEAL people. The best in what you do, you have to be unbalanced to find every bit of energy and strength that you have to pull it off. Then you get balanced once you become great. How much harder will you work in this offseason now to get back to the championship? I pushed myself to exhaustion. I became the most obsessed person on the planet Earth. It was basically, I had to invent a guy that didn't exist. I had to invent a guy that can take any pain, any suffering, any kind of judgment, or be called whatever the in the world and be able to stand in the room and say, go yourself. I had to build this callous mind and I built it through suffering. I built it through downright and just crushing myself. If it was raining outside three o'clock in the morning, if it was snowing, the first thing is don't go out there and do shit. My instinct was, we got to go out there. Anything that was horrible in my life that I would normally say no, that was inhumane to most people, I had to go do it. It's easy to give up. It's the easiest thing in the world to do. I'm done. I ain't going. I ain't going to keep going. I don't feel like going to work. It's very easy. It's very easy. But what's hard is going, yo, yesterday I got nothing from working as hard as I could. Nothing happened from that. I'm going to do the same thing again today, but I'm going to try to go harder. That's the hardest thing in the world. To get up every day and give 100% and be in the same position that you were each day, but mentally know that you're trying and trying and trying. That's a real, that's a real grind. Maybe I should just quit and go back to making noodles. Quit. Don't quit. Noodles. Don't noodles. You are too concerned with what works and what will be. This is saying, yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called present. We are so worried about what other people think about us. It's like, oh my gosh, what if they think I'm crazy? What if they think I'm over obsessive or competitive? And what if this is like, you're too much? This is just not healthy for you to be thinking this way, right? Yeah. How did you get your mindset into this alter ego to be comfortable being black mama? Like how did that happen? It's a good separation for me, you know, emotionally, to be able to put myself in a place where at practice or when I'm training or doing games, I switch my mind to something else. I switch my mode into something else. It's go time, right? So that was my mental switch. It was like an actor getting ready for a film. You got to put yourself in that cage. When you're in that cage, you are that character. And then when you leave, there is something completely different. But when I'm in that cage, bro, don't touch me. Don't talk to me. If you want to be great, you want to be a bad motherf*cker. That's motherf*cker ever at which you do. You're going to be misunderstood by everybody because you're going to be so f*cking obsessed and so driven to get there. That's what it takes. It takes every second of your f*cking life. Anybody says balance? Yeah, balance is important for a lot of f*cking people. It is. But if you want to f*cking go to that edge where people do not like you, don't understand you, question everything you f*cking do, you've arrived. When you are misunderstood to the point where f*cking people think you're psycho and you're nuts and you're this and that. Why are you in the f*cking gym at one o'clock in the f*cking morning? You've got to do it during the op for 13, 14 hours after Ranger school, man, at the gym. What's wrong? You will never understand what is wrong with me. And when you get to the point where all you want to do is be successful as bad as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful. And I'm here to tell you, number one, that most of you say you want to be successful, but you don't want it bad. You just kind of want it. You don't want it badder than you want a party. You don't want it as much as you want to be cool. Most of you don't want success as much as you want to sleep. Some of you love sleep. More than you love success. And I'm here to tell you today, if you're going to be successful, you've got to be willing to give up sleep. You've got to be willing to work off for three hours and sleep two hours. If you really want to be successful, some days you will have to stay up three days in a row. Because if you go to sleep, you might miss the opportunity to be successful. That's how bad you've got to want it. You said before about how you build up self-esteem and confidence and stuff. And there's this quote from one of my friends, Alex Homosi, that says, "You don't become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are. Outwork yourself out." I love that phrase, uncommon amongst uncommon men. There's moments where you don't want to do this. Which is why it's so interesting because you do it. You do it without any reservation. You just go through it. But you always talk about it. I don't want to do this, but you always do it. I can't really think of perform without purpose. And so many people, they need to have a 5K, a 10K. I need to have a course in front of me. I need to have something in front of me for me to get my fucking ass up and do some shit. And that used to be me. And nowadays, you know, for past 20-some years, I don't need purpose. We're all looking for this golden purpose. Is it this, is it that, is it making money? Is it my family? What the fuck of the purpose is you? We're not on this stage just because of talent or ability. We're up here because of 4 AM. We're up here because of two a days or five a days. We're up here because we had a dream and let nothing stand in our way. If anything tried to bring us down, we used it to make us stronger. We were never satisfied, never finished. We'll never be retired. My high school English teacher, Mr. Fisk. He had this beautiful quote and he read, "Rest at the end, not in the middle." And I took that to heart. I believe there's time for resting at the end. But for me, that time is not now. My next dream is to be honored one day for inspiring the next generation of athletes to have a dream. Sacrifice for it and never, ever rest in the middle. When you're passionate, everybody cheers you on. They're stoked for you. Oh, you found your passion? Awesome. Follow your passion. Live with passion. Be passionate. Chase your passions. Like passion, passion, passion, passion. Passion's good. Like the world's gonna be like, "Yay, passion!" Right? When you're obsessed, they're like, "Why are you gonna be so crazy? Why can't you be satisfied? Why do you always gotta get things so perfect? Why do you spend so much time here?" When you're obsessed, people think you're nuts. So it's different. And it's like, I always tell you, if no one thinks you're crazy, you're not yet operating to the outer limits of your potential. You're not there yet. Go do something. Do the best thing that you can think of. Put the best plan you have into practice. It's not gonna be perfect and it will change along the way. But it will change partly because you become disciplined pursuing the path. And as you become disciplined, you become wiser. And as you become wiser, you become able to formulate better and better plans. What do you think most people get wrong about motivation? They think it's a permanent fix. They think it's something that is a constant. They think that maybe once I get it, I'm gonna hold on to it. And that's the thing about that I always talk about. It's nothing is permanent. Nothing is permanent. And a lot of times you have to learn to perform without motivation. You have to learn to perform a lot of different things. You have to learn to perform without purpose. You can't be interested and you can't be obsessed. Interested is a hobby. Kobe Bryant was not interested in winning championships. He was obsessed. An obsession comes in the small details that nobody pays attention to. And I have a saying. Interested people watch obsessed people change the world. One of the things I recommend to young people, especially true for people in your 20s, is that you should push yourself beyond your limits of tolerance in your 20s to find out where it is. How much can you work? How disciplined can you become? Like can you work 12 hours a day? Can you work 8 hours a day? Can you work 3 hours a day? Like flat out? Where's your limit? How much work can you do and how much socialization? You should find out. Push yourself past and then back off to that point where it's optimally sustainable. It's good to think about that as a goal. It's like you're trying to discover what your limitations are when you're in your 20s so that you can hit that edge so that you can sustain yourself across the decades. And so, yeah, because you don't want to have too much fun. Too much fun takes you out. You don't want to be the oldest guy at the disco. You know, it's not fun being the 40-year-old at the singles bar, precisely. So, you want to make sure that what you're doing is age-appropriate and you want to push yourself in every direction that you can, but you should be doing that with an aim in mind. It's like you're trying to make yourself into a better and more competent person. And so, some discipline along with the fun is a good idea. It's either you have it or you don't. That sounds like excuses to me. I mean, you got to figure it out, right? If you really have an obsession to figure it out, you will figure it out, right? And every puzzle is constructed differently. All right, AI situation when he came into the league was different in mind. Mike's situation in Chicago was different in mind, right? Everybody has a different puzzle, man. You just got to figure out your own puzzle. It's interesting to think about, like, the sliding doors of, like, if you go to Charlotte, if you stay here, you know what I mean? Hey, man, listen. The better you get, the easier it gets. Right now, the phase you win is called growing pace. And what you don't even realize is that the game is trying to test you right now. So, I'll say how bad you want it. And the game going to reward people who can't handle our ship or diversity? No, that's not how it works. The ground ain't meant to be easy. That's why you're going to appreciate it so much when you get through it. Um, but I remember we were playing against the Lakers, Tom. You know, like, I always tried to outwork people, right? That's just how I made my mark. So, the game was at seven. It's like, you know what? I'm going to come to the Staples Center because we're playing. This is when the Lakers had Kobe in shock. Okay, this is, this is like the championship Lakers. So, you know, I'm going to get there at three o'clock. And I want to make sure I make four hundred and eight shots before I go back into the room. And then I sit in the sauna and I get ready for the game. So, get in the car, get to the gym, get there. And as I'm walking onto the court, who do I see? This is Kobe Bryant. Already working out. I know, it's okay. It's kind of cool. It's Kobe. It's all coming, you know. And, uh, you know, so I put my sneakers on and you ever get lost in what you do where you end up, like, wait, it's been an hour and a half. I'm just, I'm here, I'm in it. So, once I step my foot across that line, I start working out. And so I worked out for a good hour, hour and a half. And when I came off after I was done, I sat down. And, of course, I still heard the ball bouncing. I looked down like this guy's still working out. He was working out. Like, it looks like he was in a dead sweat when I got here. And he's still going. And it's not like his moves are nonchalant, lazy. He's doing, like, game moves, you know. I sit there and I unleash my shoes. I'm like, what is he? How long this goes? I sit out there and watch. Now, 25 days. And he got done. I said, okay. He didn't ever see it enough. Go play, you know. Come back. Get in the sun and get ready for the game. That game, he drops 40 on us. Okay. And after the game is over, I'm like, I have to ask this guy. I have to understand, like, why, why he works like that. So after the game is over, I'm like, hey, Kobe, why were you in the gym for so long? It's like, cause I saw you come in. And I wanted you to know that it doesn't matter how hard you work, that I'm willing to work harder than you. Wow. Consistency, consistency, consistency. That's the name of the game, bro. Don't get much nibblin' into that. If you keep going every single day and don't stop, your competition will fall off, bro. It ain't cut like you, bro. They ain't ready for prime time. They ain't tryin' to really get it right. They take days off. This day off, that day off, they lazy. I'm tired of that. No. Grind every day one foot in front of the other, bro. And I promise you, I'm gonna be lapping these folks, bro. Give it a year. Watch what happens. The bike got easier. I was able to run more. I went from, like, one mile. One mile was a great accomplishment. Two miles. And then from two to three was a big one. I went from three to six. And then, like, they have a warning order that they get people to get ready for butts. And the whole thing was running six miles five days a week. And that was my goal. And so I just kept. I failed. I'd go back to scratch. I'd use some positive motivation. I'd have, like, one day where I'd be like, "F***in' discreet." But I started realizing this is part of the process. This is part of the journey. I had to realize this was part of my process versus just saying, "I got used to. I'm not good enough." If I'm not good enough, we always say that, "I'm not good enough. Let me try something else." I'm gonna make myself good enough. And that became my mentality. I'm gonna make myself good enough. And so I misunderstood a lot. But that's all it came down to. I made myself good enough. And the days I couldn't run that far the next week, I would do two of days. So, on the running, if I ran a quarter a mile, I'd wait a couple hours. It'd haunt me, bother me. I'd try to run a half mile next time. Same day. You can do more than this. If I had to walk, I had to walk. It just became just a process of grinding and grinding. And grinding is not even a good word for it. It's not even a good word for it. And just going further and further. And then when I got through running, I'd go to the bike. I'd go to the pool. If I got tired somewhere, my legs were tired, I'd go to the gym. And I developed this crazy workout where I was doing volume. Like, two, three hundred reps of like very lightweight people. I said, "How come you don't have any loose skin?" My workout routine in the gym became sick. I gave everything. I gave everything to who I am. And that's why I'm, people, I don't believe it. Don't believe it. I gave everything. And when you get everything, you have no regret. People didn't understand me. People didn't understand me now. I don't give up. I know exactly what I was doing. I'm not crazy. I'm not this and that. People try to title me and label me. No. I had something to fucking do. But there's so many people that have the ability and just refuse to get off that couch. Refused to study a few more hours. Refused to go deeper, to go further. And that's where I gained the advantage. It's so easy to be great nowadays, my friend, because most people are weak. No. You're out running on a track, working out. And you start talking to yourself saying, "Man, my knee is really sore right now." Maybe I'm doing too much. Maybe I need to back off. Maybe my lungs are burning. Maybe I can just slow down here. I'll do like an extra two sets tomorrow. It'll be okay. Right? That's all the stuff. That's the dangers. And that's just got to say, "You know what? I'm not negotiating with myself." The deal was already made. Deal was made. When I set out at the beginning of the summer and said, "This is the training plan I'm doing." I signed that contract with myself. I'm doing, you know, throughout that process, you'll start talking to yourself like, "Man, I got it. I think I need to, maybe with weed." No. No. It's not a notion. It's not a notion. You have to learn to train your mind well beyond motivation. If you have motivation, that's great. That's some kindling to the fire. All it takes is a little bit of spark. You can burn the whole forest up. But motivation, you have to learn to exist without it. You have to learn to be your best self when you're least motivated. My philosophy is why I'd be normal when you can be the best. I don't want to be normal. I want to make the difference. So everything I do, I want to make the difference. Because when I make the difference, I'm the best. And that is not arrogance. That is confidence. To get through where I became. To get through where I'm at now. There's nothing but pride I have for myself that I can't really. I can't really show people because I have this face and this face that they see. Are you happy? What's wrong with you? I'm driven. I'm obsessed. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is permanent. And a lot of times you have to learn to perform without motivation. You have to learn to perform without purpose. You have to learn to perform a lot of different things. And that's what people think. They think I need to have this motivation to work out, to study, to be better. So if they don't have it, they just don't do it. Hey, hey, bro. You better get rid of the buckle. Look, this is no easier, bro. What you think the grind gets easier? Come on, bro. You silly, man. This grind's only for the strong ones, bro. And if you we got you, just go ahead and leave. It's tough, but it's true. Be safe. Son, don't stop for nobody, man. Son, don't stop. Son, don't be up in the morning regardless. That son is going to be up in the morning regardless of how I feel. And how depressed I am, the son is going to shine in the morning. And at night time, the moon will be there. And you're going to look up these days, going to keep going by. So do you let the days go by and look up and you don't waste the year doing what? Or do you just pick it up? All right. I figured out, made some mistakes. Life goes on. Let me figure out life from this point. Trying to become best, you want to become champion. And now you want to say like you're tired. Who cares? You're tired or not? Nobody cares about it. He was tired at the personal program family. Nobody cares about it. We're all writing a book. What's your book look like? Mmm. What does your fucking book look like? Like your life is a book. You got a bunch of chapters in your book, but when they close that book, how good was the book? How good was your book? What was the ending to your book? Yeah. What was really your work ethic like and for how long did you stay disciplined? Well, I mean, I mean, every day, I mean, since, you know, for 20 years. It was an everyday process and trying to figure out strengths and weaknesses. For example, jumping ability. Now, my vertical was a 40. It wasn't a 46 or a 45. My hands are big, but they're not massive. So you got to figure out ways to strengthen them. So your hands are strong enough to be able to palm a ball and do the things that you need to do. Quickness, I was quick, but not insanely quick. I was fast, but not ridiculously fast. So I had to rely on skill a lot more. I had to rely on angles a lot more. I had to study the game a lot more. And it just never changed. What I found is that winning doesn't happen on show day. It happens on early mornings, painful workouts, long cardio sessions, and hungry nights. It happens in those moments of fear. We all have one face with a difficult goal, and then more so in what you make of that fear. It happens in every second of every day before you win. If you can take every opportunity you have to bring yourself closer to your goal, win every one of those opportunities, all while becoming more resilient in the process, how can you lose? That's an exciting opportunity. I became obsessed with being the baddest thing that I got ever created. In my bad, I don't care. I believe it. And I was trying to tell him once you become obsessed with something. Obsessed. It's okay to be unbalanced for a while. It's okay. All this stuff, people say, you got to be balanced to be the best in the world at what you do. It's not about being a Navy SEAL, people. The best at what you do, you have to be unbalanced to find every bit of energy and strength that you have to pull it off. How bad do you want it? There's two options to continue forward, pushing upward. And if you do that dream, it's given birth, and forever you will live in the reality of it. If you stop, quit, throw the towel. I promise you there's no distance you can travel far enough to find that dream again. For it is dead, and it is dead. It's replaced by regret. What's the least amount of sleep you play the game on? There's a story where it's like no one knows about what you went and played a game, and it was so insane for whatever reason. No sleep. You played a game with your own sleep. Your own sleep is like, you know, kids, Natalia had a certain health situation and would have you, and you were staying up all night. And then you got to go out and perform, because fans don't know, teammates don't know, nor do they care, nor should they. That you've been up all night. You got to perform. Like I see a lot of players take vacations with other players that are close friends. And they'll just take vacations just to take vacations, or just hang out, just to hang out. Like, I'm not, I never did that. Why didn't you do that? Well, because when I retired, I didn't want to have to say, I wish I would have done more. All week, you was work hard. And all day week, if you don't tired, this is good question. You have to worry about yourself, but this is certainly your sick day. You work so hard. Of course you're going to tired. Tomorrow rest, and Monday we're going to begin one more training. If you don't want to go back to Pakistan and stay with your mom, she's going to give you everyday good breakfast. You don't do nothing. Stay there. But if you come here, don't complain. You want to become best. You want to become champion. And now you want to say like you're tired? Who cares? You're tired, I don't know. Nobody cares about you. He was tired, he had personal problems. Family, nobody cares. A lot of people live their entire lives not fulfilling their purpose. One time in my life, I thought that. What was my purpose? Until you find the center of your being, you will continue to walk, going through the motions. The one companion that's always going to be with you is yourself. Yourself is what you have. And you need to encourage yourself. You need to look around, and you need to be able to say, "Look, I'm not stuck here unless I choose to stay here." If you don't have somebody who's going to do that, become that somebody. Well, something difficult you're going through that people don't often see. I mean, my mind is a storm. I don't think most people would want to be me. They may think they'd want to be me, but they don't. They don't know. They don't understand. There's 24 hours in a day where you're alone in this brain. And your brain is talking to you in all kind of ways. And once the control, you're pulling in these different pockets. You've got to tell your brain where you want to go and how you want to get there. If you can't control your own brain, it's over. Every day when you get out of bed, life's standing right there to kick you in the face, man. Life is going to throw all kinds of crazy shit. And you have to be ready for it, and you've got to deal with it. You can't curl up into a ball, you can't run away from it, you can't hide. You have to take all this head on. Great things happen, and really bad things happen. And you've got to take it all in stride. And you've got to pick yourself up the next day, strap your shoes back on and get out there and go to fucking war again. It's that mentality, it's the mentality, bring it on, motherfucker. I can take it, you can't break this shit. I'm stronger than you think I am. And everything you throw at me, and all the hardships you throw at me, you might knock me down, but I get back up and I'll be strong enough for it. It's that mentality that builds an iconic status that is centuries from now, people still talk about. Nobody cares, you know? At the end of the day, nobody cares. What we're going through, how your body feels, nobody cares. We've got to do our job. And we emphasize that to each other again today, you know? Hey, I got your back, you got mine, nobody cares, man. We've got to go. Is it fair? No. Life is tough sometimes, and it's not fair, and it doesn't care sometimes. But you're going to hold true to what you believe, and you're going to hold true to who you are, and you're going to be that person whether it's easier or it's not. I go to such places in my mind, and I study the darkness. There was no team, it was you. There was no weight loss programmer. Mom and Dad waking you up saying you can do it, you can be better, trying to build belief. You built belief when you had nothing. Rock, bottom. I lived alone for so many years in this misery. I can take myself to such a level of real. Real passion and purpose. I've trained 99% of my life alone. I did all of the work alone. I never ran for anything because I didn't have nobody to go to. I've always had it where I'm going. Home to get me. Ain't nobody there. You know what I'm saying? I've always been in a situation where I'm forced to deal with it myself. You always have to be the person who roots for you before everybody else does. And it's usually a single clap in auditorium for a very long period of time. It is a slow clap that's just you rooting for you. The path of the exceptional person is one of an exception, which means that you are not with other people. The superpower of learning to be alone and enjoying it. These times where you just think about things, just be alone and think about things are so rare these days. During those rare times is when you really get to understand what you actually believe or don't believe. It's a lonely journey. You're isolated. Those who used to keep pace with you will fall off. They'll see what their world ends. And yours begins. Your ability is suffered. Endure. Outwork must be greater. You must be willing to extend yourself to the limit when no guarantee of success. Every day. You must ask yourself. Did I do enough? There's a moment when every boy realizes no one's coming to save him. And that's when he becomes a man. And some boys never get there and stay children forever. No one's a thing coming to save you. No one. No one's coming to push you. No one's coming to tie you to turn the TV off. No one's coming to tie you to get out the door and exercise. Nobody's coming to write the business plan for you. It's up to you. Unless you understand that you've got to push yourself. You're not going to make your dreams come true. Largely everyone needs to go through the same challenges that you're going through. Every single difficult thing that you do is kind of like a massive wall that you need to get over. And you go, "Wow, I'm so glad that I've got over that wall." And think about how many other people are going to fall at that wall. What I've learned is to always keep going. Always. You know, I've come to find out is that, you know, no matter what happens, the storm eventually ends. And when the storm does, and you want to make sure that you're ready. And so I've really learned to put one foot in front of the other. A good pattern different. It's eventually that storm passes. If you don't show up, guys, you know the outcome. You'll never get the job. Never get the part. Never get the girl. If you don't show up. If you show up, you put yourself in a situation to create those opportunities. And when you show up, how hard do you go? That's the faster that actually will come to life for you. It's up to you guys. Small down payment that you're willing to pay every day to the large investment of a greater life. You only got one life, guys. If you work it right, you only need one. I told myself I couldn't quit. I told myself this was going to happen. This is destiny. Whatever is really burning in your heart, you got to really believe in yourself. Even when nobody else won't. You got to believe in yourself and say I'm not stopping. I told myself I died before I stopped. When you feel like giving up, don't. When you thinking about giving up, don't. When it look like you ain't going to make it, keep going. When they tell you you can't, come on, man. Who are they? You got to be relentless. I got to thank a man up top, G-O-D, because I'm nothing without him. Last but not least, I want to thank me. I want to thank me for believing in me. I want to thank me for doing all this hard work. I want to thank me for having no days off. I want to thank me for never quitting. I'm Snoop Dogg, you a bad. Do you be yourself and make sure that you love being yourself? It's going to be roblox. It's going to be tribulations. But always remember, this is a life experience. Accept the experience. Appreciate the experience. Find your journey. Respect your journey. I love it. You're going to realize it one day. That happiness was never about your job or your degree or being in a relationship. It was never about being like the others. That happiness was always about the discovery. The hope. The listening to your heart. And following it wherever it chose to go. Happiness was always about being kinder to yourself. It was always about embracing the person you were becoming. One day you will understand that happiness was always about learning how to live with yourself. That your happiness was never in the hands of others. It was always about you. It was always about you. Just shut up and let me enjoy this pain. I don't want anything to numb it. I don't want anything right now. Those times when you get up early and you work hard, those times when you stay up late and you work hard, those times when you don't feel like working. You're too tired, you don't want to push yourself, but you do it anyway. That is actually the dream. When you saw me in the gym in the pumping iron days, you say, "Why is it that you're working out so hard?" Five hours a day, six hours a day, and you have always a smile on your face. The others are working out just as hard as you do and they look sour in the face. And the told people all the time, I said, "Because to me, I'm shooting for a gore." In front of me is the Mr. Universe title. So every rep that I do gets me closer to accomplishing that gore to make this gore, this vision turn into reality. Every single set that I do, every repetition, every weight of the lift will get me a step closer to turn this gore into reality. So I couldn't wait to do another 500-pound squat. I couldn't wait to do another 500-pound bench press. I couldn't wait to do another 2,000 reps of sit-ups. I couldn't wait for the next exercise. But where do you go to? You wake up on a morning, it's cold, it's wet, it's dark, you've got no cartilage in your knees, you've got shitty shorts, whatever it is that's the issue today. I know every motherfucker ain't going to do what I'm going to do. I know there's a whole bunch of people with that right there. That fires me up. That makes me fucking happy with what you just said. That brings joy to my life right there. Why? Because I know there's so many people that have the ability and just refuse to get off that couch, refuse to study a few more hours, refuse to go deeper, to go further. And that's where I gained the advantage. It's so easy to be great nowadays, my friend, because most people are weak. I get happier about the harder it is because I know that no one else will follow. It's a selection effect. And I think if you can shift from this is hard to no one else will be able to do this, it flips from being this thing that you're like, "Oh, poor me," to "Oh, poor everyone else is going to have to fucking try." Be the guy who embraces the ugly and miserable. Be the guy who embraces hard work, the grind. Don't be afraid of being hurt. Don't be afraid of a sacrifice to some blood. There was probably a hundred days where I didn't want to do anything. I wanted to stay in the pool or stay in my bed and not get out. But those were the days where you have to. You have to get up and do something, because I think that's really what separates the good from the great. The greats do things when they don't always want to do them. Rich people don't sleep eight hours a day. That's a third of your life. I had 130 days in-game, just sitting and looking at a screen playing one character in one game. If you take ordinary school, there ain't no problem. But if you are sitting in this room and you have extraordinary aspirations, then you will have to do extra. Imagine if I could put this kind of focus into something in real life and just make that seem a little bit like a video game. Imagine the results I could get done. You have to decide if you're willing to do the things to put you in that category. You know, when you're kind of addicted to it, you can play at any time. You cannot be asleep eight hours a day. You can't live in LA and wake up at eight o'clock in the morning. It's eleven o'clock on the East Coast. The stock market's been open two hours. They already make a decision about your life and your ass was asleep. And again, so imagine if I could feel like that, but in real life, turn life into a video game. The Bible says he who loves to sleep and the folding of hands, poverty will set upon you like a thief in the night. I have never met anybody who became incredibly successful in any area of their life until they had suffered and sweated and sacrificed and kept their focus and fought through tears and trials and tests. And if you have a dream and you commit to it, it will come to pass. A blade, a blade does not become strong. It does not become tempered until it's been through the fire. Until it's been through the fire. Nobody cares. You know, at the end of the day, nobody cares. What we're going through, how your body feels, nobody cares. We gotta do our job. I am cold, I am emotionless, I am at peace, ready for war. The thing is, man, it's always going to be a party. It's always going to be a time to celebrate and at a time to join friends and for a day. I mean, the bars are always open. It's always open. No matter how old you are, they're always open, you know. What's not always open is the opportunity to check the box in life. You know, to achieve your dreams. That's not always open. Driven human beings are going to always feel like they're behind. They're going to always feel like they're not doing good enough. They're going to always feel like they're not far enough. They're all going to always feel like you're losing. Look, winning, this is how it feels. 90% of the time, you're going to feel like you're getting your balls kicked in. All right? 8% of the time, you're going to be confused and you're frustrated. 2% of the time, you actually win. In those moments, come and go and then you're back in the 90%. And that's the reality of a winner's life. People don't understand that. They think it's all about cruising around in a cool car, having a free and happy and easy and go lucky life. And that's not reality because true winners are built for the fight. They're built for the battle. They don't find peace and joy and happiness in the win. They find what they're looking for in the fight. Hard work brings great rewards. This is a reminder of the hard work and dedication that I've put into everything that I've done. I'm not content because I know where I came from and I don't ever want to go back. If all you guys are going left, it's that one person who says, "You know what? Left's not the right way. I'm going to go right." We didn't follow the crowd, that person was not afraid of doing what they believe is right in their heart and not following someone else because someone else said, "Let's go this way," and they agree with everybody. I don't like yes men or yes women. If you're right, you're right. We're going to follow you. I like people who stand for something. They believe in something. And this is the way I'm going to go, whether you like me or not. Why do you think it says, "Take the opportunity?" It doesn't say, "Receive the opportunity." It doesn't say, "Have the opportunity granted to you." It doesn't say, "Get lucky with the opportunity." It says, "Take the opportunity." You know what that means? That means you have to seize it. That means you have to take it. No one's going to give it to you. You are one decision, one relationship, one thought, one emotion, one meaning away from a completely different life. And unless you believe, first off I'm right about that. It's true. But unless you believe that and then you program your particular activating system in your brain to find those things, you will never have them happen to you. But if you begin to believe, "I'm one meaning away from a different life, I'm one decision away. I'm one podcast away. We're one guy in the United States away from changing my life forever." The outcome that you're trying to create is not guaranteed. It's not easy. It's not, you know, rub free. It's not pain free. Like it's going to be hard and you're going to have to go all in because you're competing against other people who are going all in. So if you think you could compete against other people who are going all in and not having their life with you giving three days and then giving seven, your ego's out of control, bro. That's an arrogant thought. How do you do what you do? And then the day I ask myself one question, "Can I take one more step?" And usually the answer is yes. So if you can answer that question and not take another step, that is real failure. That is real quitting. My coach Smith told me I'll never be nothing. From that day forward, I made a promise that I will give it everything I got. I'm ready to die for what I had to succeed. I have to give it everything I got. That way I'm a winner no matter what. What's your life going to look like if you don't go out and build what you want to build? You have this little vision in your heart and in your mind of what your life should be like. And what are you going to feel like if you don't go do that? You might think that bed's warm. Feels uncomfortable. You come here. You kill it. Give it everything you have. Leave it all here. The warmth do you feel after that? Second to none, man. Second to none. No she can provide that comfort for you. And you give it all here, guys. And you leave it all here. Your weakest state, bottom of the barrel. What's about to happen? Your greatest triumph. You kill yourself on pride in here. Leave nothing spare. What's going to come? The growth of opportunity. This world is so noisy. We all walk around these phones, computers. The world is so fast. We're not able to think the most powerful weapon in the world. We walk around with it. It's our mind. It's our brain. You have to be able to go into a very dark place in your mind and figure who you are. Go back to what you want to do. What's your purpose? We can't figure our purpose out or why we're here or why we're even born or whatever. Because it's so loud in our mind. We don't have any quiet time with ourselves to sit back and say, "What do I really want?" There's so many different dialogues in our head that we can't think. So my biggest thing is you have to be alone in a very dark place in your mind and think about what is important to you. Take ownership. Take extreme ownership. Don't make excuses. Don't blame any other person or any other thing. Get control of your ego. Don't hide your delicate pride from the truth. Take ownership of everything in your world. The good and the bad. Take ownership of your mistakes. Take ownership of your shortfalls. Take ownership of your problems. And then take ownership of the solutions that will get those problems solved. I had two options. To either be that 300 pound guy who's prey for cockroaches that made $1,000 a month and at 24 years old knowing when I'm 50 years old I can reflect on this and think about what guy I never became or I can totally just sack it up and fail and fail and fail and try to succeed. How bad do you want it? There's two options to continue forward. Pushing outward. And if you do, that dream is given birth and forever you will live in the reality of it. If you stop, quit, throw in the towel. I promise you, there's no distance you can travel far enough. Never find that dream again. For it is dead. And it is death. It's replaced by regret. The world needs people like you. It needs people to build. It needs people to create. It needs people to set an example. There's nothing wrong with you for being an ambitious person. The world wouldn't exist as we know it without ambitious people. The world wouldn't exist as we know it without creative people who are willing to pay the price to build what they see in their mind before anyone else sees it. So you are needed. You need to stop thinking that all these morons on the internet have not figured out. Unless you want their life, don't listen to them, dude, and start understanding that if you do listen to them and you're one of these people who was meant to come here and create, you're going to waste your whole life trying to fit in a box with a bunch of people who aren't ever going to accomplish them. What would have happened to have happened in a week for you to look back on that week with pride? Okay, maybe stop breaking promises to yourself. When you say I'm going to wake up tomorrow at 7am and when the option comes to hit the snooze button, don't do it. There's one win that you've got for the day. That's action. The path of the exceptional person is one of an exception, which means that you are not with other people. And rather than fighting that or bemoaning it, see it as an indicator that you're on the right path. Because if everyone else were cheering you on, then it means you're not in the right place because it means you're just like everyone else and that's not where you want to be. You obviously don't want it bad enough because the person that I became obsessed, I became obsessed with being the baddest because I got ever created. And by that, I don't care. I believe it. And I was trying to tell them once you become obsessed with something. Obsessed. It's okay to be unbalanced for a while. It's okay. Don't be. All this. Some people say you've got to be balanced to be the best in the world at what you do. It's not about being a Navy SEAL people. The best at what you do, you have to be unbalanced to find every bit of energy and strength that you have to pull it off. Then you get balanced once you become great. What you did back then was learn the lessons to get you to where you are at this particular moment right here. But what God got for you, do you know, man, that you can actually mess your life completely up? You can jack it all the way up and you can turn around and get it right. Do you understand that? Do you understand that you could have had a baby out of wedlock and still be all right? Do you know that you can be divorced multiple times and still be okay? Do you understand that you cannot have a degree and still be just fine? You don't know how I know because I'm telling you what I know. I lost everything twice. I don't know if you've ever lost everything before, but I've been bottomed out. Twice. I haven't seen rock bottom two times. I've been through some walls up in here, man. I'm just trying to tell you, man. God is really with you. Your journey is not over. I can't fight him. He has all my weapons. I have nothing. When you began your journey, you were determined. Nothing could stop you. And now that you are so close, are you willing to give up so easily? It was easier at the beginning. Beginnings are often easier. But think of all that you have accomplished along your journey. Leave two hours. If you really want to be successful, some days you will have to stay up three days in a row. Because if you go to sleep, you might miss the opportunity to be successful. That's how bad you got to want it. It doesn't matter where you are in life. It really doesn't. Because the great thing about life is it's always your next move. Your next move that counts. No matter where you are, you could be. Look, I was dead broke. My electric bill was being shut off. And there were, obviously, there were people even, like, worse off than I was. It doesn't matter. You could change your life if you want to. It's always your next decision. So it's up to you. I don't want to live in a hole anymore. It makes me feel poor. We are poor, but we're happy. Come see, come stop. Anyway, the views are better above ground. Honey, I'm seven non-flocks years old. Now my father died at seven and a half. I don't want to live in a hole anymore. And I'm going to do something about it. After we face a rejection and a no, or we have a meeting and no one shows up, or somebody say, "You can count on me!" And they don't come through. What if we have that kind of attitude? The cause repossessed? Nobody believes in you. You've lost again and again and again. The lights are cut off. But you're still looking at your dream, reviewing it every day and saying to yourself, "It's not over until I win!" What's the point of fighting my way up the mountain when someone else is just going to come up the easy way? There is always going to be someone who does things the easy way. But that should not stop you from doing things the right way. It is your journey, young warrior. Only you decide when it ends. Look, I'd love to sugarcoat this thing for you. I'd love to tell you, look, you can go out here and get rich, do a couple of things. They ain't happening. You got to get real doggish. You got to get down right focused if you want to make it. Now, like I was telling you before, if you want to be ordinary, you ain't even got to listen to me. Just go on about your business. If you think ordinary is cool, ain't no problem. It's some really, really wonderful ordinary people. But if you are sitting in this room and you have extraordinary aspirations, then you're going to have to do extra. You put extra on top of ordinary and you come up with extraordinary. It's no other way. You have to decide if you're willing to do the things to put you in that category. Rich people don't sleep eight hours a day. That's a third of your life. It ain't been 24 hours in a day. You cannot be sleep eight hours a day. You can't live in LA and wake up at eight o'clock in the morning. It's 11 o'clock on the East Coast. The stock market been open two hours. They already making decisions about your life and you're going to sleep. No matter how much emotion and feeling you may have or how much hurt you may have, life has to go on. Life doesn't stop anybody. So if you don't process that and understand that, you're stuck in whatever time period you got hurt forever. So grudges and anger and negativity, I don't have time for it. Because I'm living to do so much positive things. I can't stand in the past and bathe in what was wrong. And how you get to that point in life where I figured out, it's so noisy right now. This world is so noisy. We all walk around these phones, computers. The world is so fast. We're not able to think the most powerful weapon in the world. We walk around with it. It's our mind, it's our brain. You have to be able to go into a very dark place in your mind and figure who you are. Go back to what you want to do, what's your purpose. We can't figure our purpose out or why we're here or why we've been born or whatever. Because it's so loud in our mind. We don't have any quiet time with ourselves to sit back and say, what do I really want? There's so many different dialogues in our head that we can't think. So my biggest thing is you have to be alone in a very dark place in your mind to think about what is important to you. Confucius had a great saying that every man has two lives and the second starts when he realizes he has just one. Get serious. That's number one. I don't know any substitute for that. What do you want to do economically? Where do you want to go? What do you want to be? What would you like to have? What would you like to share? How much would you like to earn? How far would you like to go? Ten years from now, you will surely become someone. The big question is, who? I would like to know when you're in that moment failing and you have to keep going, what do you say to yourself? What if a lot of times I'll be in a tour of my run or something like that and I'm all jacked up? Body's broken, mind's broken, spirit's broken. I started to say, what if I can pull this off? When I first walked into the Navy City Recruiter's office, he looked at me and said, "There's only been 35 African Americans in 70 years, make it through." You know what I said to myself? What if I can be the 36th? It's the what if I can pull off a miracle? What if I can become someone that no one thinks I can be? And just me talking about that, I have hair going up on my arms because it makes me just like, what if? You are responsible for your life and if you're sitting around waiting on somebody to save you, to fix you, to even help you, you are wasting your time because only you have the power to take responsibility to move your life forward. What matters is now, this moment and your willingness to see this moment for what it is, accept it, forgive the past, take responsibility and move forward. I came to realize that all the time I was praying to God, asking for God to do something, God was waiting on me. If you don't change what you're doing and how you do it, nothing else will change. Your biggest enemy is you. My whole book is about you battling yourself. People don't understand as you against you. The only person that gets in your way is you. Nobody else. It's you. Here's the big challenge of life. You can have more than you've got because you can become more than you are. That's the challenge. And of course, the other side of the coin reads, unless you change how you are, you'll always have what you got. Most people don't want it that badly, which is why they always ask the question, "How do you get to where you are?" You know how to do it. You know exactly how to be you or how to be me. You don't want to do it. So I can't make you do it. In order to have the time or energy to force you into that place that I know you have to be to do it. There's no luck in this game. Maybe a little bit of luck, but the luck happens after you bust your ass and you put yourself in that lucky situation. Luck doesn't happen. You put yourself in that situation where luck might happen. What I'll be able to do it, what I don't know until you say, "Yeah, I'm going to take action. Nothing changes. Nothing changes, man." And I'm not preaching at you. I just want to remind you, because I've spent a lot of time in my life sitting around wanting things to change. And not being able to make them change and not thinking I could. And I wish somebody had told me that earlier sometimes. That in order for something to change, there needs to be change. It's you against you. You against you. And if you misunderstand that, you have a real problem. You have a real problem. I can understand you misunderstand me running on the streets, shirt off. "This, no, yeah, I can get it. I get it." If you misunderstand what I'm saying right now today, the problem is you. And you don't want to fix it. Here's how to get older without getting better. Keep relearning the same lesson. If you keep making the same mistake over and over, the mistake isn't the problem. You are. There was no passion, no driving or nothing. But I had this fire that I'm going to be somebody. And it has to be there because on all those bad days and all those days you don't want to do that, you have to be your own motivator, your own coach, your own trainer, your own everything. And what that means is you may have failed miserably yesterday, but you come to work. You're like, "Man, you just lost everything. How the hell are you just fucking damn motivated? Because this is what it takes." It's not about disuse. It's about knowing where you're going. Not forgetting where you started. It's about having the courage to fail. Not breaking when you're broken. Lacing is something that has to do with you. You're not connected to something deep enough. You don't feel the necessity. You don't feel the devil at your heels. You don't feel the fact that you very will die tomorrow that will impel you to get something done. There's no necessity behind it. And the human animal that we were created is when we feel pressure, we feel the necessity to get things done. We can move mountains. But when that pressure, almost like a barometric pressure, releases and we don't feel the need to get something done, we could become incredibly lazy because there's no necessity. So you have to create necessity in your life. You have to create the need to get things done. Why do that much? Why go that far? Why try to become everything? That's a good question. Why? And you're the only one personally that can answer that question for yourself. One of the big thrust for success is to come up with a strong enough why. And if the why is powerful, the how is easy. If the vision isn't clear, the old profit said without a vision, we die without a vision, we perish without a dream or nothing. Most people, the bottom 80% are lazy. They're looking for an easy way. They're looking for a shortcut to be successful. And there are not, there aren't any. But if you do something repeatedly over and over, you develop a habit. So most people are in the habit of looking for easy ways to get the things they want. It's almost like you have to have the ability to go to the deep end no matter whether or not you'll ever go there. Right. Yes. And some people are like, "Well, I'm never going to go to the deep end, but you should be able to." Yes. What do you want to give up? What do you want to sacrifice? What are you willing to forgo? If you're struggling, if you're frustrated with yourself, if you're at that point where you're so sick of yourself and your excuses, I've been there, Steven's been there, this is a normal part of the human experience. And at some point, either the pain is going to get big enough or you're going to bump into somebody's story somewhere on this planet who has been in the position that you're in right now facing the stuff that you're facing right now. And there is something about their story at this exact moment in time that will ignite something in you that is missing and what is missing in you right now is hope. Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Playing out the fear, Layla says this and I love it, but that fear is a mile wide and it's deep. And so it looks like this ocean that you're going to step into and drown. But as soon as you step into it, you realize it was not that deep at all and you can keep walking through it. And I just love that visual because a lot of times when it's like we have this anxiety around this big decision we have to make, if you actually take the step and realize that it's not death, you're not going to drown immediately. There's plenty of other steps you can take from there, even if you get a little wet. You have to be open minded to the possibilities that I can do this. Once you shut your mind down to the possibility that it can be achieved, is no way can happen? Is there advice you can give to young kids that are living through a situation of any sort, a tough life? Try to find a thing that you really enjoy. Try to find a thing that you're passionate about. Everybody thinks they're a loser. Every young person thinks they're a loser. At least a young person in the situation I was at. I didn't know I wasn't a loser until I started winning, until I started doing martial arts. Martial arts taught me that I could get better at stuff, that I wasn't really a loser. I want to maximize what I can. I want to be the best that I can be. I want to do things well and I don't want to leave stuff on the table. But I don't want to be chasing the end goal so much that I never actually enjoyed the process of getting there because ultimately that's really all that matters. You're going to look back at any destination and realize that it was 99.9% journey and only one day of celebrating achieving the thing. You're lazy? You know exactly what to do? Exactly what to do? Because even me, in my state of "I can't read or write, I knew exactly what to do." It just sucks doing it. Hey Theo, this is Greg from Indiana. I actually just wanted to call and tell you. So I was at work the other day and I just been kind of in this like what? At work? Not a bad job, but I just really want to get out of it. So I'll catch you up on some of your podcasts and you said something like resonated with me. You know, you said nothing changes, nothing changes. I thought about it and I went home and I applied for a job. I'm probably not qualified for, but I was like, "I'll just take a shot." And the next day I get a call from them. I have the interview, it goes well. She said she was going to set me up with an in-person interview. Never even had a thing. Email me a few days later and I got the job. So now I'm going to be doing a job that I think I will appreciate more and enjoy more. And I'll be making double the money that I'm making now. Oh, that's awesome, man. That's really great. Congratulations for trying something new. Yeah, it's crazy to sometimes think like, "What can happen if we decide to let?" I'm going to see what happens when I decide that I am qualified. What happens when I decide for myself that I'm going to do something different? I've made huge, huge, huge developments. While I was staying up until 4 in the morning, 5 in the morning running a nightlife business, you can make huge developments in your personal growth journey while you're doing a 9 to 5. You have this moment where you go, "Well, what if?" What if this is the time sobriety sticks? What if I go to therapy and I actually do change the way that I think? What if I could get out of debt? If that person did, maybe I could do it. And without either hope or that kind of rock bottom moment, I don't think you're going to change. We can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell. One inch at a time. It's you are responsible for your life. And if you're sitting around waiting on somebody to save you, to fix you, to even help you, you are wasting your time because only you have the power to take responsibility to move your life forward. What matters is now this moment and your willingness to see this moment for what it is, accept it, forgive the past, take responsibility and move forward. I came to realize that all the time I was praying to God, asking for God to do something. God was waiting on me. How many times do you have to hear if nothing changes, nothing changes? Right? And yet somehow we expect things to change. You're always afraid to take the first step because all you see is every negative thing 10 miles down the road, but you can do anything you want. You are bound by nothing. And the time come for you to be your own man and take on the world. And you did. But somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you're no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow. I'm gonna have setbacks, I know. But if I'm feeling bad, that doesn't mean I'm doing bad. That doesn't mean I am bad. That doesn't mean that I can't still take some action. Because yeah, nothing changes and nothing changes, man. Because if you're thinking, then you're not taking action. And if you're not taking action, then there's no consequence. And if there's no consequence, then there's nothing to be afraid of. The overthinking can be an excuse for actual fear. It doesn't matter whether I achieve all of my goals or I don't achieve all of the goals. In three generations, I'll be forgotten, and the only people who were nacing against me will also be dead. And so then it's like, just do it for me. You know, we'll sit around forever wondering, well, what if I was a dog catcher? Would I be the best? What if I was a, you know... Respect things to change. You think you're gonna get in better shape. You think you're gonna get more money. You think your relationship is gonna improve. You think you're gonna get promoted. You think you're gonna get a raise. You think the world is going to get better without you doing anything. But it isn't. Nothing is going to change unless you change what you're doing. Change the time that you wake up. Change what you do when you get out of bed. That's what you need to do. You have to change some things or nothing will change. So make changes and start little. Get up a little bit earlier, get a workout done. That's what you need to do. A positive place that you draw mental strength from when life is difficult has to be. I just want to be better and I am trying my best. That's all that there is. You want to be better. That is something to be proud of. You want to leave it all on the field of play. You want to make yourself as good as you can. You want to make the world a better place. You want to have an impact. All of these things are just all positives. What really breaks my heart is how stuck people are and that there are things you can do to change your life for the better. If you don't have hope and you don't have this breakthrough where you have for just a millisecond, this insight where you go, well, what if things did work out? If you don't have that moment, most people stay so stuck in resignation. If you were trying to battle the same boss over and over again and you don't change what you're doing and the boss keeps beating you, then it's not the game's problem. It's your problem. You are the problem. I was not always a strong God. You see, I went through a lot of hard times in my life to get here today. A story I'll tell you with real quick. I tried once to get in the Air Force to be an Air Force pair of rescue men and I quit for fear of the water. I was 175 pounds. I left the Air Force four years later at 300 pounds. I went from 175 to 300 pounds. There's a long story in there on how that came to be. You're going to lose sleep. You'll doubt whether it'll work. You'll stress to make ends meet. You won't finish your to-do list. You'll wonder whether you made the right call and have no way to know for years. This is what hard feels like and that's okay. Everything worth doing is hard and the more worth doing it is, the harder it is, the greater the payoff, the greater the hardship. If it's hard, good. It means no one else will do it. More for you. Why pay the price? Why work this hard? Why go this far? Why try to learn this much? Why try to do it all? Why try to see it all? Why try to have it all? Why do it? Why learn it? Why study? Why put yourself out? Why try to take on this much responsibility? Why develop yourself to the full? Why try to become all that you can possibly become? I define learning by same condition, new behavior. When you go to a video game and you battle through the level and you battle the boss, if you keep doing the same thing to the boss and you keep losing, then you have not learned because you have the same condition and the same behavior. I often say that for anyone who's listening to this podcast, if the goal is to get better and you're like, "Man, I really want to learn something from this podcast." If you list in this podcast and then you're in the same exact conditions as you were before and then you do not change your behavior, you learned nothing. And so using that definition has at least allowed me to change my behavior faster, which then goes into rate of learning, which I define as intelligence. And so a lot of people are like, "Man, he's so smart, but he just doesn't." It's like, "Well then, if he doesn't change his behavior and he's in the same conditions, he's not that smart." The more that you're able to let go and not fear about stuff, the more enjoyable you'll find it. So the thing that is making you better is the thing which is making you feel pain and this is a perennial balance. What would have had to have happened in a week for you to look back on that week with pride? Maybe stop breaking promises to yourself. When you say, "I'm going to wake up tomorrow at 7am" and when the option comes to hit the snooze button, don't do it. There's one win that you've got for the day. That's action. The path of the exceptional person is one of an exception, which means that you are not with other people. And rather than fighting that or bemoaning it, see it as an indicator that you're on the right path. Because if everyone else were cheering you on, then it means you're not in the right place because it means you're just like everyone else and that's not where you want to be. When you were born, you are a phenomenon. You are unique. Your DNA has never occurred in the history of the universe. Going back billions of years, it will never occur in the future. Your life experiences with your parents and everything that you experience in your early years going on up is unique. It's yours. You are one of a kind, right? So that is your source of power. To waste that is just the worst thing you can do in your life. And what the power is, is finding that uniqueness. What makes you, you, and how you can mind that and how you can go deep into it and use that to create a career path. If you can see it here and you have the courage enough to speak it, it will happen. You cannot change your life unless you change something. If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got. You will fail at some point in your life. Accept it. You will lose. You will embarrass yourself. You will suck at something. You can't wait for everything to be perfect to start living your life. Because that's what I've done. My whole life has been like that. Inside of me it has been. As soon as it's all lined up, I'm going to show you myself. As soon as I've got it all looking the way I want, I'm going to show up. Show up for you. I'm never going to get to that where everything's okay. Where everything looks a certain way. And in the meantime, I'm burning the best time I do have available. I'm burning that candle up. I'm burning this candle down and I'm saying as soon as it gets bright enough, or warm enough in here, I'm going to show up. But the candle's getting smaller. It's more socially acceptable to be our own biggest critic than it is to be our own biggest cheerleader. Ten years before I've heard it put into words, if you can be in a bad mood for no reason, you can be in a good mood for no reason. There's a quote that I've fallen in love with. The magic you are looking for is in the work you're avoiding. Dude, the magic you are looking for is in the work you're avoiding. It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great. You need to just keep living. Listen to the pain. It's both history teacher and watch and tell. Pain teaches us who we always. Sometimes it's so bad we feel like we're dying. But we can't really live till we die a little county. You don't get it. There's great joy in the grind. Great joy in the suffering. It totally cleanses your body out, man. If any kind of hate makes you grow up. What I want to invite you to do, what I want you to consider, is that every single time you go and do something hard. That's the story you've told yourself, that it's easier said than done. You know, it's kind of hard to do that. Well, it's supposed to be hard. Look, if growing stronger, if growing stronger and building muscle, we're getting easy. You'd have no reason to go to the gym. You'd have no, there would be no growth if there was no challenge. And I'm answering your questions. Every question I'm answering, I'm with you. In the back of my mind, all I'm thinking about is all the times I could have won those matches that I lost by not bringing my best mindset. You're haunted by all the opportunities that you missed by not bringing your best at that time. When you could have won, but you didn't win because you allowed life to interfere with that one shot. When you're sitting there getting ready to serve for the match and your mind is not thinking about where that ball place needs to be, but thinking about your family this or this at work or that at work, that's greatness. Greatness is your recall on every single shot that you missed throughout a 20-some year career. Every shot, you can go back and say, "I was here." This person was in the red shirt there. Greatness is being so aware of the time of life in the second that went by, and you can recall like it was yesterday. Greatness is being able to go back there, not making that same mistake again, and being haunted by it. There really are only two macro-level motivators that we have in life, and that's pleasure and pain. I want people to understand is, "Okay, so if nature only gave you two things to motivate you, pleasure and pain, why would you eliminate half of them?" And so most people think that life's about avoiding the pain. I'm here to tell you right now, in a very controlled fashion, it is about really experiencing the pain, learning from it, pain plus reflection equals progress. Failure has been achieved. Thank God. Now, the only place to go from failure is to win. You have to achieve failure. You have to take it that far. Nobody wants to go that far. It's too scary. But you know something? I got news for you. That's where winning is. It always has been. The one thing I would tell them is, and I would tell them to get a tattooed on your arm, and it would say, "It's supposed to be fucking hard."