(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are. It will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me or nobody is going to hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. People say you can't do that. You can do anything. We are God's highest form of creation.
There is nothing on the planet that will equal us. Every bad thing that has ever happened to you is your fault. Now I use the word fault to shake people up that you are never, ever, ever a victim unless you choose to be. Everything in your life will change. You're always in control. And a man. A man provides. If you don't protect what belongs to you, then sooner or later it belongs to someone else. It goes for your land, your wallet, your home, your country, everything.
It is your job as a man to protect it. The story of the whole goddamn world. You don't hate yourself. You don't think you suck. You're not the imposter. You're not insecure. Somebody taught you that. In 2008, we had the third consecutive failure of the Falcon Rocket through SpaceX. Tesla almost went bankrupt. We closed our financing round. 6 p.m. Christmas Eve 2008. It was the last hour of the last day that it was possible. We would have gone bankrupt two days after Christmas.
And I got divorced. That was like rough. If things had just gone a little bit the other way, both companies would be dead. The reason there's going to be a billion motivational views today on YouTube is that people love the feeling of being motivated. They don't like putting in the work to do something about the feeling. For ten years, I heard every person I know making fun of me. I heard every person I know telling me that I was wasting my time. I heard every... I've had it.
I know when I tell them what we're going to do, and by the way, we've done it by now, laugh at me. And I'm sure you guys can relate to that. You know, very few people bet on the underdog. But if you would have, you would have won big. And that happened to be we. Us. We bet on ourself. Work like hell. I mean, you just have to put in, you know, 80 hour, 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. And then the oldest things improve the odds of success.
I found that nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks. Nothing. Nelson Mandela said, there is no passion to be found playing small and settling for a life that's less than the one you're capable of living. Do you think Elon Musk has worked life balance? No. Do you think Steve Jobs, when he was alive, had worked life balance? No. Do you think Bill Gates? No. Henry Ford? No. You're going to have it. Why? Could you deserve it? I don't think so.
You deserve what you get in life by working hard. I'll say this again, but like, sometimes you have to let other people's dreams for your life die for years to live. At the end of the day, only execution matters. So if you have big dreams, if you have goals, something that you're trying to accomplish in your life, you're going to have to execute against that.
If you're willing to pay the price, and you're willing to do the work, and you're willing to take the time, and you're willing to consistently get up when you are knocked down over and over and over again, which is going to happen to you if you're pursuing anything outside of the norm, you can make it here in America. When you have passion around something, that you are squeezing every last bit of the juice out of the orange, right?
To me, hustle is maximizing the energy you're putting into somebody. I'm blown away by people saying that they're hustling, and they want to achieve these great things, and then their actions don't match. It's like saying you really want to lose weight while eating a big back, right? So to me, hustle would be putting all your effort into achieving the goal at hand. And for me, that means making every minute count. I hate any entrepreneur that is like, you know, sad. Like, you know what I mean?
It's always hard. Like, it's always going to be hard. It's hard when it's a bubble because everything's $150,000 for a $40,000 worker, right? It's hard when it blows because there's no money and nobody's buying and nobody's believing. It's always hard. Sometimes you have to let other people's dreams for your life die, for yours to live.
And for me, it was like, when I continue to every day not want to wake up, that was my wake up call, where I was like, either I continue to live this way and not want to be alive. Or I just risked the fact that I will die to everybody else. And I think that that, like, it was the hardest issues in my entire life. By far, all this, all the hard stuff went through, still the hardest decision. Fall forward. This is what I mean.
Reggie Jackson struck out 2,600 times in his career the most in the history of baseball, but you don't hear about the strikeouts. People remember the home runs. Fall forward. Thomas Edison conducted 1,000 failed experiments. Did you know that? I didn't know that. Because the 1,000 in first was the light bulb. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success. My truth and my experience has been I have to jump higher. I have to show up earlier.
I have to be the first person to turn off the light and the last person to turn off the light. I have to make sure that every number is correct and every T is crossed and every die is audit and dotted. The way that I show up is by being consistent, so consistent that people cannot doubt your capacity to succeed. You have to work harder than the average person. And if you accept those terms, you cannot complain about those terms. I have only known success on the back of consistency.
Do I think you could be a success without being consistent? Perhaps if you have other resources and tools that I was never given, but coming from where I am, my perspective has only been. Consistency and the discipline has been everything that I have ever gone on the back of doing it again and again. And again, it is what I teach. It is what I preach. It is what I believe. Play it out. What if you just never do anything? Maybe some people need to stop dreaming.
Maybe they need to accept their current reality and actually enjoy it. Because there are a lot of people in their 70 and 80 and they did not do their dreams. And if they went back, they did not do anything but that whole time they were dissatisfied because they did not try. But what if they were just like, I have a good life? I have a life that loves me. I have some kids. I have a job that I don't mind it, pays the bills.
I mean, if you go back 500 years, there are people like, man, this is my passion. It is like, dude, I am just rowing a boat across a ferry and that is what I do. That is what my dad did and his dad did. This is how we eat. And so we have these idealized versions of purpose that I think Instagram and all this stuff kind of make terrible. But I think there is a lot of honor and work, period. And I think a lot of people fool themselves by thinking that what they do for some reason is not honorable.
And I think a lot of it is like the internal versus external scorecard. I was saying what I was saying earlier about like, I believe these things to be true about the universe or like the world. But a lot of those are like, what do I believe about myself? Which is like, I can choose to do work in this way, which then I can derive joy from.
So like, if I'm just trouble, I can choose to be like, I will be the best of luck because I believe that I will figure out how to do this more efficiently and I will, you know, I will get better and I'll have calluses on my hands and I'll have a better back and whatever. But I will do this well. And I think you can find joy and work if you decide to do it. So on one hand, if you are, if you're a dream causes you so much pain, then you will quit what you're doing and do it.
And if it doesn't cause you enough pain that you're not pursuing it or that you don't feel like you're in a cage right now. Then maybe you're not in a cage and maybe you just need to like the life you have and that's cool too. If you didn't withdraw in fear from everything that life threw at you, who could you become? Thinking all the thinking and one other thing usually you don't go to the positive.
If you make all the right decisions, but you have like, you absolutely think that it's impossible for you, but you still do the right things, you will win. Mediocrity always attacks excellence. It's kind of a rule. No one's attacking a couch potato. But the moment you start to walk toward your dream and you start to break habits, you start to change relationships that no longer serve in that dream, you start to be talked about.
Now many people are afraid of failure, which really means that they're afraid of being ridiculed. But once you become aware that you're going to be ridiculed if you fail and you're going to be talked about if you succeed, then you're going to be able to put that aside. Because you know you're going to be talking about it either way. Or if you go for it and succeed, they'll say, oh, it was luck, you know, whatever they say about you.
So once you get out of your mind or become aware that people are going to talk about you either way, then you go for it. You're alive. Here you are. You've got these problems to contend with. And if it's an impossible task, then how could you be anything but hopeless and desperate? But then you think, well, wait a second, how would things transform if I took this on as a voluntary adventure? You know, regardless of its scope and that scope would include unjust suffering, death and hell.
And that's not just some religious or metaphysical vision. It's like, no, no, you're actually going to have to contend with that in your life. In whatever way those things make themselves manifest to you personally. That's common, man. And so maybe you better get prepared. So you can't say you want to be successful. You can't say there's certain dreams and goals. There are things you want to have and things you want to be if you are still average.
Success and average have absolutely nothing to do to you. That's what I'm telling you. Your boss can't stand average. Your coach can't stand average. Your teacher can't stand average. Your spouse, listen to me. Your mama might put up with it. Your daddy might put up with it. But listen to me very closely. Nobody really likes average. Some people have a problem for every solution. Some people don't believe that they can achieve at a high level.
Some people are okay doing what average people do, doing just enough to get by. But that's not you. You have dreams. You have goals. You have aspirations. You have desires. And you are taking action to make all of your dreams a reality. If you practice fourth right and voluntary exposure to that which terrifies and dismaze you, it transforms you.
Much of the biochemistry of motivation and emotion is transformed when you take a stressor which could be oppressive and paralyze you and cause you to withdraw. And you reverse that and you decide to advance. It's like a different spirit inhabits you. And I mean this physiologically. There's a whole different pattern of being that makes itself manifest in you neurologically and psychophysiologically and pharmacologically. So you take it on as a challenge. Right?
And that transforms you at a cellular level too because one of the things we've discovered in recent years is that if you do something new and complex then that turns on new. That parts of your DNA that haven't produced proteins before will start producing new proteins and reconstruct you from the cellular level up. So it's a deep transformation. We have no idea how deep. And again you could ask yourself if you didn't withdraw in fear from anything that from everything that life threw at you.
Who could you become? The only belief that matters is that if I put energy and effort into getting better I actually will get better. And so you can look at anything and say okay maybe I suck at this right now which was the key realization for my life. I actually am not good. Like my father-in-law wasn't crazy. I really wasn't anywhere useful for his daughter at that time. My mom wasn't crazy. I really was lazy. Like so she was just picking up on the fact that I was tremendously lazy.
She wanted me to be successful. But she was just looking at my behavior. And so I hadn't been misidentified. People just didn't calculate how much I could change. And that I would sew grasp on to the ability to change as an emotional life raft. And so the big switch was that I decided to believe that I could get better. And once I made that decision it aligned my behaviors with skill acquisition. And that's all life is. Acquire skills. Listen to me don't keep calling me.
And telling me you're going to get on the Dean's list. Do me a favor. Don't tell me you're going to be on the honor road. Shut up. Go to work and show me. Show me what you got. Extraordinary mindset. You are determined to make the impossible possible. You are determined to make the unbelievable believable. You are determined to do more each and every day than that average person will do when a whole week. You are determined to do more in a month than an average person does in a whole year.
So if what you're hung up on is you just can't ever fathom that being true. Then saying it may begin to form this like just like it erodes this lack of belief that it's possible. Now my problem is when people think that just saying it out loud is going to make it come true. That for sure isn't true. So your behavior is ultimately all that matters. So if you make all the right decisions but you have like you absolutely think that it's impossible for you but you still do the right things.
You will win. The problem is that if you believe that it's never going to happen for you. You won't take the steps. And so when you look at how hard something is and you get part way down that road and you're like wow this is really hard. It's making me confront my insecurities. This does not feel good. And I don't believe it's possible anyway. Then why would you keep going? And the answer is you wouldn't. And so nobody does.
And so everybody who believes it's impossible and encounters the difficulties that success will demand of everybody they stop 100% of the time. And so by looking at yourself in the mirror and saying I am a millionaire. I'm a genius. Like all this stuff. It may function as some eroding mechanism to those entrenched beliefs that it's never going to happen for you. And so that would not work for me because there is a part of my brain that just screams this is bullshit.
Like you know this is bullshit. So for me I had to align with what do I believe to be true about humans. I needed to accept that I was average. That was a huge moment for me because I tried to believe I was special and either luck of the draw or the fact that I really am average. I've always been around a substantial number of people that are smarter than me. Be the guy who embraces the ugly, the 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. It's a moment in life. The decisions you make on a moment in a moment basis that add up to be the guy or not the guy. Tonight I did something that filled more of a guy. For me who I am, my guy. Make the hard decisions, make the sacrifices, make the unpopular decisions and become comfortable in your own skin.
And if you are not a person that you are comfortable being alone with, that is the one person in this universe that you have full power, full right and full responsibility to change. If you were to create a human, what would you put them through to make them tough? It probably wouldn't be a really chill life. Yeah. What would you put them through to make them patient? We probably wouldn't give them things immediately. And so it's like we want these traits.
But each of the traits has a price tag attached to it. It's just like you want to pay the price tag to get the thing. And so I think if people reframe the period of life that they're going through as the price that they're paying out of their wallet, but the wallet is their time, it's the seconds of life that they're trading for it, then I think more people will be willing to make the trade.
Because at least when I look at myself, like when I'm 80 something years old, I'm looking back when I look at these traits. But in order to have those traits, I know I have to go through these things. And I think for me, that's given me a lot of... Right now in life, your family's looking for that one guy right now. You're looking for that one guy who's strong, who's that pillar for the family, and hard times. Make sure they look around, they look around and find two.
These are the ties right now for you to step up. Be that guy that can take anything. Stay hard. The biggest regret of the dying is never becoming your ideal self. I do believe that we're thrust in a world that we don't fit in. And I believe the journey is that a lot of people sell you a bill of goods along the way. That if you get some awards, you mean something. You go to a certain school, you got it. You're cute. Classical beauty. You got the right man, you got the right zip code.
And you swim through all that filthy swill until you come to the really, really stark conclusion that I want to leave this earth becoming who I know deep within. I am supposed to be... The next time you want to just give in to that desire for comfort, remember that your future self is going to be the one to suffer the consequences.
It's so easy to just put it off and act like it doesn't exist, but that future self that you're passing all these burdens to will one day be yourself of the present, and you'll wish you chose to do otherwise. Everything that you do counts. The biggest mistake that people make is they think that only what they want to count counts. When you read a book, when you listen to an audio program, when you go to a course, when you go to bed early, get up early, work in all accounts.
Never get apologized for being yourself. If people don't like how you act, how you look, how you speak, that just means those aren't your people. Don't change who you are to match your surroundings. Take better surroundings and be yourself. I don't know, most men would understand that when a man cries and he's went by, he's hurting, you know, because I've been there. And it's no shame in crying, gentlemen. Men, it's okay to cry. We can still be a man, but you're also human.
And it does show a little bit of your vulnerability. Do it for your loved ones. Do it for your wife. Do it for your husband. Do it for your children. Do it for generations to come. Come on, after you're dead and gone, what will they say about what you did? Yes, there's so many people depending on you, but it's got to start with you and the man upstairs. Yeah, nothing changes and nothing changes, man. You know, we'll sit around forever wondering, well, what if I...
You know, what if I was a dog catcher? Would I be the best? What if I was a, you know... Every day we change the world, but to change the world in a way that means anything that takes more time than most people have. It never happens all at once. It's slow. It's a methodical. It's exhausting. We don't all have the stomach for it. What if it's a mistake? It's a mistake. Rest assured. What do you know? You're going to stumble around, right? And what's going to happen is this. You're going to move.
You're going to not stay in stasis. You're not going to wander around in circles. And I see people like that. They said, well, I never knew what to do, and now I'm 40. It's like, that's not so good. That's not so good. And you might say, well, and there is a literature, too, that suggests that people are a lot more unhappy when they look back at their lives about the things they didn't do, than they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things. It's how they get you to give up.
They say it's not that simple for you. So what's the truth? That it is. I want people to understand that they're not alone, that there are other people feeling exactly the way they're feeling, that their behavior is not insane, that they have a disease, and it's not their fault. There's a very famous kind of line that people don't change. I happen to know that people do change, and I see that every day. I see people getting better. I see the lights in their eyes come on.
There's a million excuses I could make to rationalize, not getting up early, doing the ice bath and going for a run. There comes a time with all these potential excuses turning to fuel that motivates you to keep going. You've got to get out there. You've got to give it everything you've got, whether it's your time, your talent, your prayers, or your treasures. Because remember this, you will never see a U-hole behind a hearse.
If you want to know something about yourself, sit on your bed one night and say, what's one thing I'm doing wrong, that I know I'm doing wrong, that I could fix, that I would fix? You meditate on that? You'll get an answer, and it won't be one you want, but it'll be the necessary one. It's a whole issue, people. I have a feeling that they can change, but they have no effort. They don't want to get in the game because they feel it's, you know, it's just too much time.
It doesn't work, and I try to. It doesn't work, and then they give up, and then life just goes on. It's seamless. You don't see it. It's just the way you've been living. My older brother, who was 12, got into an electrical accident, and he died in my arms. And really come to terms with that I was the one who got to live. That this life that we live, it's a privilege.
And when I really started to take that in, I felt this tremendous urge to do something with my life, to do something that mattered. At some point, everything's going to go south on you. Everything's going to go south, and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. You can't stop. You can't quit. You can't say, I'm a failure. You're not a failure. You're not. You're a wonderful, strong, talented youngster. Take advantage of that.
Trusting God, trusting yourself. Until you say, yeah, I'm going to, you know what, I'm going to take action. Nothing changes. Nothing changes, man. And I'm not preaching at you. I'm just, I just want to remind you, because you know, 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.
You cannot stand still, because the world moves away from you if you stand still. And there's no stasis. There's only backwards. And so if you're not moving forwards, then you're moving backwards. How much harder will you work in this offseason now to get back to the championship? How much harder will you work I'll push myself to exhaust. Tell me we thank you for your time. I just, I feel like we sort of focus on right ways and wrong ways too much.
And I think it's in a sense sort of scary to just be born and live life. And I understand the idea of kind of grasping onto a particular thought of wanting to kind of feel like you somehow have a handle on the unknown. But you know what, the unknown is the unknown. And all of you watching here, come close to the screen and listen. People don't have to like you. People don't have to love you. They don't even have to respect you. But when you look in the mirror, you better love what you see.
You better love what you see. Be uncomfortable. Get yourself in a situation when you feel a little bit about a challenge. You're feeling something about being challenged. You're understanding that challenges are good for you. Challenges are going to make you better, going to make you stronger, going to push you through any adversity that you may face and life. But nobody's coming to save you. There's no night in shining armor.
And the people that say they will they don't really stick around for long. The reality is this. This whole life thing was never really meant to be about anyone else. You're kind of supposed to be the hero of this story. Even if you feel weak right now, even if you feel alone, you feel down, you feel like you can't do it, you can't. And you will. All you have to do is show them. So. Show up today. You have the power to do more than you can ever begin to imagine. Don't underestimate yourself.
You don't know enough about yourself to become a cynic. And so you've got to challenge yourself to access that power that you have within you. You're more than a conqueror. I'm amazing when you don't think I'm amazing. I love me even if you stop loving me. You can say the nastiest, meanest evil and shit that you could ever conjure up. It will never change the way I feel about myself. It takes faith to jump up in the edge. It takes faith to step into your purpose.
It takes faith to step into your destiny. It takes faith to pull away from everything that is familiar to step into uncharted territory to become the person you were born to be. It takes faith. This is my time. This is my time. I'm bright enough. I'm old enough. I'm old enough. I'm young enough. I'm young enough. I believe in me. If you stop believing in me, I'm not going to believe in myself any less. You know, as crazy as it sounds, one decision can completely change your life.
So what are you waiting for? I wouldn't take what happened. And that's the God's honest truth. That any one of you had a Thanks for watching!