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Good times create weak people. Weak people create bad times. Bad times create strong people. Strong people create good times. My whole thing is, leaders anticipate, losers react. If you can anticipate what's coming, you can really take advantage. If you wait till it hits you, you're in trouble.
The biggest problem people have is they think they're not supposed to have any. Problems are the fuel for growth. It's like, if you don't have any problems, you're either a liar, or you might call them challenges. It feels better, I understand that. Anybody who doesn't have problems is either totally asleep at the wheel, or they don't have much of any kind of a life.
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But then there's fulfillment, and fulfillment is living what you're made for. Is that lack of confidence? No, it's a lack of mission.
I like winning. I like being the best at what I do, so I'm not going to settle for less than that. Why would I? Michael Jordan making a thousand shots before you take a break. So you look at Jordan, or you look at, you know, LeBron, or you look at anybody who's the best in the world at what they do, and you go, "Aren't they lucky?" But if you actually study them, you'll see they're doing things, they're practicing in private, things that make them certain in public, and they get rewarded for what they do.
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When you just know you're gonna mess up, it's not gonna be perfect. You're gonna forget that line that you really wanted to say. But just put all the energy on the audience. Everything starts to change. If you stay ready, you don't have to get ready. It's a shift in your identity every single day, six days a week. What matters? A few subjects. Your body, because your energy matters. If that energy is low, everything I just said is worthless to you, because when you're low energy, you don't use your full intelligence or ability.
You need emotion. If you don't know how to master your emotion, emotions start wars. Emotion creates peace. Emotion gets you children. Emotion is what can make that business work or fail. And most people don't know how to direct their own emotions.
Let me be conscious about feeding my brain things that are going to give me not only inspiration, but insight and skill and tools.
68% of the Fortune 1000 were started in either a recession or a depression.
Well, the first skill you've got to master to be great is the ability to recognize patterns. When humanity recognized the pattern of the seasons, the whole world changed. Because we went from hunter-gatherers trying to survive from place to place, where we're exposed to everything, to, "Wait a second, if we plant in the springtime, we protect in the summer, we reap in the fall, and then we hang on to some of that so we can live through the winter," that created communities for the first time, and then eventually cities and states and countries. So that changed the world. What will change a person's life is when you realize there's also a set of seasons in your own life.
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And so, think of it this way: 0 to 21 is springtime. Things are easy to grow in springtime. You don't have to do that much; growing as a kid happens naturally. But overall, life is supporting you, it's sending you, teaching you, sharing with you.
Now, when you get from, you know, 21 to 41, or 22 to 42, whatever range you want to talk about, you now are in the real world. And now you go test what you learned in your springtime. So you start to learn, test, figure out what's real, and it's an important stage of life.
42, 43 to 62, 63 is the power of your life. If you worked hard in the spring, in the summer, and you put yourself out there and you planted, it's a reaping time. It's a time when you really become a leader.
And then, if you're lucky, you go from 63 to 83, and maybe 83 to 103, and you have an extended final season of your life where you could be the mentor. You get to share, you get to make a difference, and maybe towards the end of your life, people look out for you again after you looked out for everybody else. That's kind of the cycle of life.
What if you're born in 1910? War one ends. The world looks like it's a great place: new technology, cars, radio. And then what happens? An explosion of abundance, the Roaring 20s. And so you're a kid, you're 14, 15 years old, and you're like, "I can't wait to get a car to go!"
But what happened when that person hit the next stage of life? 19, 20, 21 years old, as they came of age, it's 1929. And suddenly people are jumping out of buildings, total depression, Dust Bowl, nobody's got jobs. It looks horrific, and it was horrific.
But then did they get a break? No. When they turned 29, it's 1939. It looked like the whole world was going in. Hitler was sweeping across Europe, bombing London. It literally looked like the world as we know it was over.
This is what gives me great optimism for everyone watching here. Winter's not forever. No pandemic lives forever. Everything changes and everything ends. And the good news about winter is, it's always followed by springtime. What follows the night? The daytime. What a cool way to set it up if you were God or the Universe.
The first thing I do every single morning is I go in freezing cold water. And when you jump in, it never feels good to go in, but getting out, you feel incredible. But I do it for a different reason. I do it to train my brain to say, "When I say now, it means now. When I say go, we go." I don't stand there because it's cold and go, "Maybe in a minute when I'm ready." But I always do it because I've trained my brain, "This is how we work." And if you train your brain to do that every single day, then it'll do it on the more difficult and important things in life.
But the essence of it is, I change my body radically, and I do three things to make sure that my brain is primed. And what I mean by primed is, most people think their thoughts are their thoughts, Louis, and you and I know better. Most people just don't understand that you are being primed all the time, and unless you prime yourself, you're going to be primed by the environment. So I want to take control of my brain, so I do three quick things.
One, I take three minutes of those 10 minutes after I've changed my body, and I focus on three different events in my life that I'm grateful for. I usually pick two big ones and one small one. It could be as simple as a smile on my daughter's face, and it changes your biochemistry.
Then, real fast, I do this three-minute process that's kind of like a blessing.
And then three minutes, the last three minutes, are called "Three to Thrive," where I focus on three things I want to accomplish. But instead of thinking, "I want to accomplish," I see, feel, and experience it is done. I feel grateful, I celebrate it, and it trains your brain. So in 10 minutes, I'm done.
Third thing that I'll do: I immediately send a message or a text or an audio message to somebody as a sincere compliment. And I don't go, "Dude, great job," or, "Wow, you're cool." I say, "Listen, I saw you on Tuesday with those kids, and I saw you take that extra 20 minutes no one else did. I just want you to know I saw that. I thought that was incredible." So I'm always very specific so they know it's not just some positive thinking [ __ ] call. It's sincerely doing, and it makes me constantly look for the good in the people I work with.
Fourth thing I do is whatever I don't want to do, the most challenging part of the day.
What's the story we all love? It's the comeback story. It's the comeback, it's the Rocky, it's that music where all of a sudden you step back up and you take control and rock.
Good times create weak people. Weak people create bad times. Bad times create strong people. Strong people create good times.
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