Today I need you to embrace what comes hard. Today I need you to accept the challenge. Today I need you to fall in love with the process. There will be plenty of opportunities to get discouraged, to lose your passion and think that it's not meant to be. But if you're going to reach your destiny, you have to have a made-up mind.
If you give up after the first time or the fifth time or the 30th time. What that really means is you didn't want it bad enough. There should be something you're believing for that you are relentless.
You are not moved by how impossible it looks. You're not discouraged by how long it's taken. You don't give up because people told you no.
Your attitude is, if I have to believe my whole life, I am not going to stop believing. I am not going to take no for an answer. I'm not going to settle for mediocrity.
I'm going to keep pursuing what's in my heart. And ask ourselves, what do I really want? What do I really want?
And write it down. Writing causes thinking. Thinking creates an image.
And you get these images going, you're building a vision in your mind. It's the visionaries that change the world. Think of them.
But what keeps that competitive edge, what keeps you on top, is the ability to think and prepare mentally over and over and over again. The body has limitations, the mind does not. We focus so much on what goes on from the neck down. that we forget it all starts from here. Everything starts from there.
If you're not mentally ready, you're never really physically prepared. And that's where the preparation starts. What would your life be like as you look toward the future if you decided, I'm not going to allow my fears to stop me?
And I'm saying to you, whatever you got to do, do it because if you're don't, life is going to whoop you until you surrender. So when you're young and you make mistakes, don't let them eat you up, because everybody that done made it done made them. You got to fail in order to win.
Hey, look, man, to understand how to hit the game winning shot, you got to miss the game winning shot. You know you've got to be tough because the road to success is always under construction. It's never a clear path to success. The people who become successful are the people who have a relentless attitude. And you just got to hang in there through the bad breaks, because the bad breaks is coming, but they usually come right before the big break is about to happen.
You get a series of bad breaks and it stumbles up a lot of people. My life and my success is to say to anyone, you can stumble, you can fall, you can get back up again. No matter what you face, no matter how bad it is going to be, when there is a challenge, and by a challenge I mean anything in life, any challenge, anything that you're facing, the only way to overcome the challenges that you face, Is to start walking Take that step every day no matter what you are facing Get up And start walking I have the ability to see the end before the beginning even begins.
And what that means is I know that to get to the very end, I can see it right now. So before I went to Bud's and I was losing all this weight and s***, I saw myself walking across the f***ing stage. at 191 pounds.
That's what I had to get to, to, to get into the door. I saw myself six months, a year later, wherever it's going to take me to do it. I saw myself walking across that stage, getting that certificate of graduation from Bud's. And I, I was able to be there at 300 pounds. And that feeling that I was nowhere near that feeling.
I was able to put myself there a million times every day. And that feeling of like, my God, that is going to feel amazing. That's what made me suffer. That's what allowed the. Pain to be real and say, this is worth it.
I want to feel for this next 18 months. It took me 18. months to finally become a Navy student, to finally, you know, just get through butts. 18 months, it's six months. It took me 18. That's what woke me up every morning was I'm going to put myself through this much pain and suffering for a few seconds.
That's all it is. A few seconds of joy. And it's so worth it, man.
That's what people don't get. So I'm able to put myself at the finish line. You know, I have no finish line, but at the finish line of an event before I even start the to say, how are you going to feel at the end of this?
Visualizing is my biggest tool of life. That's why I've been able to put myself in cold water, put myself in a hundred mile race millions of times before I've done it. And I've able to go through the race and see, I'm going to feel at mile 50, almost to the, almost to the exact, exact feeling. Right.
So when it comes up, it's no surprise. No surprise. I've already done this a million times. I've lectured.
Guess how many have actually gone and got this little book? Answer, very few. My best guess is 10%.
Such an easy thing to do. This little book number one is easy to find, number two it's easy to buy. The most you can pay for it six seven eight dollars you can borrow that from your kids.
But if it's easy to find and easy to buy and if it's easy to read why wouldn't everybody go get it? We don't. No, I don't know. Nobody knows.
Here's how profound it is. Some do and some don't. Now here's the numbers.
About 10% do. We don't know the mystery of that. And I'm telling you, 10 years from now those numbers will still be the same. The numbers don't change.
Only the faces change. I used to belong to the 90% who couldn't be bothered even if it was easy. How many people have a library card?
Answer, 3%. 97% couldn't be bothered. Guy specializes in happy hour, but he doesn't have a card. And now readily and quickly blames the government, blames his company, and blames the pay scale. Here's my advice to you today.
Walk away from the 97% like they talk. Don't go where they go. Don't act like they act. Don't specialize in what they specialize in. Throw away the blame list they cling to.
You gotta be consciously conscious today because Your environment can hypnotize, mesmerize, and paralyze you. The other thing is, take full responsibility for your life. Oscar Wilde once said, responsibility is what we expect from somebody else.
This is very true. Most people dread accepting responsibility. That's just a fact of life.
And we can see it in operation every day. We can see ourselves getting hot under the collar when the dentist keeps us waiting and we're sitting there reading old magazines when our appointment was 30 minutes ago. And we don't stop to think that we forgot to mail in this month's mortgage payment. We can see ourselves growing angrier and angrier because a business contact is supposed to call at noon and here it is almost two o'clock and the phone still refuses to ring.
But we don't stop. to think about the calls we ourselves have forgotten to return while we've been so busy fuming. We can see ourselves writing an angry letter to the airline because a flight was delayed, but we don't write an angry letter to ourselves when we're late for something, even though that might not be a bad idea at all. Yes, we can see avoidance of responsibility all the time in both our personal and professional lives.
And here's something else we can see just as often. We can see that most people aren't as successful as they wish they were. Do you see there's a connection between these two very common phenomena?
I certainly do. And by the end of this session, I hope you'll agree with me. I hope you'll understand that it's in your best interest to take responsibility for everything you do. But that's only the beginning. I'm also going to suggest that many times it's even best to accept responsibility for the mistakes of others, especially when you're in a managerial or leadership role.
I can hear you saying, what? Accept responsibility for someone else's mess ups? Why would I want to do something like that?
Well, that's a fair enough question. And over the next few minutes, I'll try to answer it. One of my weak points in my personal life is I don't like technical stuff.
So even though I have to be on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, I don't care for that. So guess what? I find somebody who loves to do that. You know, I find somebody who has a strength where I will have a weakness and I partner with them. All you're trying to do is get to the goal.
No one gets there by themselves. Everybody needs help. Now, when you know what you got going for you, Be confident, not cocky.
Managing your strengths, knowing what they are, and don't let nobody talk you out of it. And that gets you fight ready. You get fight ready like that. You got to know you.
Helps you develop your skills. All the while, you're developing your strength. It's not, you just got to keep developing the strength.
Don't let anybody talk you out. At the same time, you must work on improving your weaknesses. So I've had to, in spite of myself, Get on Instagram, get on Twitter, get on Facebook.
I got to do the videos whether I want to or not because the world is moving to social media. If I had as many followers as Kim Kardashian, I probably wouldn't even have to do this TV show. During the years when professional basketball was just beginning to become really popular, Bill Russell, who played center for the Boston Celtics, was one of the greatest players in the pro league.
He was especially known for his rebounding and his defensive skills. But like a lot of very tall centers, Russell was never much of a free throw shooter. His free throw percentage was quite a bit below average in fact.
But this low percentage didn't really give a clear picture of Russell's ability as an athlete. And in one game he gave a very convincing demonstration of this. It was the final game of a championship series between Boston and the Los Angeles Lakers. With about 12 seconds left to play, the Lakers were behind by one point and Boston had the ball.
It was obvious that the Lakers would have to foul one of Boston's players in order to get the ball back. And they chose to foul Bill Russell. This was a perfectly logical choice since statistically Russell was the worst free throw shooter on the court at that moment. If he missed the shot, the Lakers would probably get the ball back, and they'd still have enough time to try to win the game. But if Russell made his first free throw, the Lakers chances would be seriously diminished.
And if he made both shots, the game would essentially be over. Bill Russell had a very peculiar style of shooting free throws. Today, no self-respecting basketball player anywhere in America would attempt it. Aside from the question of whether it's an effective way to shoot a basket, it just looked too ridiculous.
Whenever he had to shoot a free throw, the 6'11 Russell would start off holding the ball in both hands about waist high. Then he'd squat down and as he straightened up, he'd let go of the ball. It looked like he was trying to throw a bucket of dirt Over a wall. But regardless of how he looked, as soon as Bill Russell was fouled, he knew the Celtics were gonna win the game.
He was absolutely certain of it. Because in a situation like this, statistics and percentages mean nothing. There was a much more important factor at work. Something that no one has found a way to express in numbers and decimal points.
Simply put, Bill Russell was a player who wanted to take responsibility for the success or failure of his team. He wanted the weight on his shoulders in a situation like this. No possibility for excuses, no possibility of blaming anyone else if the game was lost, no second guessing.
Bill Russell wanted the ball in his own hands and nobody else's. And like magic, even if he'd missed every free throw he'd ever shot in his life before this, he knew he was going to make this one. And that is exactly what happened. That is what virtually always happens when a man or woman accepts responsibility eagerly and with confidence.