Transcription
[Music]
When you're running, you run for hours. What days! I'm like, I have to ask this guy. I have to understand why he works like that, right? So after the game, I'm like, "Hey, Co, why were you in the gym for so long?" He's like, "Cuz 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."
Rachel, all of this, it's not me, it's inside. I am more. If you believe it, if you really believe that you could be something, if you have that little voice in your head saying, "Hey, you got talent, you could do this," then follow that voice. You know, people get up every day, they do the same thing, tell themselves they're going to change their life one day, and they never do. I'm going to change mine.
Join the 3%. Here's my advice to you today: walk away from the 97%. Don't talk like they talk, don't act like they act, don't go where they go, don't specialize in what they specialize in. Throw away the blameless they cling to. Start a new life. Switch gears, switch language, switch ideas, switch strategy. Start with the simplest of disciplines, and don't be mean to any of these disciplines. The smallest of discipline starts the process of life change.
If you'll invest in this thing called discipline, you can have whatever you wish. It's called the beginning of a miracle. Most men live lives of quiet desperation. It's one of my favorite quotes ever because it's true, and I've been that guy. You're just in this world where you just can't wait to run away.
But the only way I could be this person now is if I took that chance when I was 21, when I was dead broke and had my cars repossessed and all that stuff. That's the only way you ever get where you want to go. You have to take a path. It's dangerous, and most people want to take the safe path. The safe path leaves you stuck in quiet desperation almost every time. It's hell.
So whatever you're doing, you have to do it like your life depends on it. Which would be worse: to live as a monster or to die as a good man? Sometimes I get up and run. I see guys, and I like to hang out. I see people in the car; they party. It came from partying, hanging out. Wow, they're having fun there.
See, got his girl back. They see this guy; they're having fun. I'm running. It's time to stay focused. It's time to decide: clubs, partying, trying to fit in and socialize, rub elbows with everybody so people can stop calling you weird.
"Why are you so antisocial?" Because I'm trying to get it. "Why are you staying on the basketball court so much?" Because I'm trying to get it. "Why are you out there practicing in the hot sun when nobody else is out there?" Because I'm trying to get it. "Why are you not clubbing? Every time I text you and invite you to go do something fun and cool, you're always studying." Because I'm trying to get it.
Remember this: people are time wasters, and the great majority of people have no goals, they have no priorities, they have no plans, they have no concern about becoming successful, and they think that you're the same. They think because their time isn't worth anything that your time isn't worth anything.
Also, remember that if you want to be exceptional, you're going to be different from everyone else. That's what makes you exceptional. You can't fit in and also be exceptional. Both have discomfort. When you fit in, you have internal conflict because you're not being 100% you. When you're exceptional, you have external conflict because everyone sees you as different. Pick one.
When your friends start to say you've changed, remember it's because they don't know how to say you've grown. The S is in the old wall, and saying the first human being to run two hours or under two hours will be in the year 2075. But I have proved them wrong. The first man to run a marathon in under two hours: one final lung-busting stride for Kipchoge, one giant leap for human endeavor.
And you know, Kipchoge was right: no human is limited. Everything is possible in your life when you believe. When you believe, everything is possible. You have a tool. I mean, everything is possible.
And taking whatever we want to do, you want to see if you're a brave person? What they call the 4:00 in the morning courage. Wait. When things go completely to pieces, when things are the worst, when your very best deal falls apart and your rent is late and you're tired and you're sick and everybody's mad at you and your car doesn't work, then it's the person that picks them up and says nothing is going to stop me.
You know, the best quality in the world that you can develop, and I give it to you, is to develop the quality of being unstoppable. Develop the quality of being unstoppable. Say to yourself that no matter what life throws at me, it'll never stop me. No matter how rough it gets, I will never quit, and nothing will ever stop me.
Make the decision that you can be tired, you can be worn out, but nothing is ever going to stop you. That's a wonderful decision because then, no matter what life throws at you, you pick yourself up and you say, "Okay, nothing is going to stop you."
Who are you on those days you don't want to do things? It's easy to conquer when it's good weather, you got good sleep, you feel great, your body's not injured. Those are the easy days to conquer. But who are you on those days when all hell's broke loose, your body is sore, you're depressed?
If you let them, there's a moment when every boy realizes no one's coming to save him, and that's when he becomes a man. Some boys never get there and stay children forever. This is why I say stay hard, because when you weren't given the gifts, the only thing you can do in life is stay hard. This is all you can do.
There's no magic pill or a magic potion. All you can do is outwork the man that God created in you. The biggest key to success in anything you do is you got to have an unlimited supply of you. This drive and passion, and it may come from nothing. Like for me, there was no passion, no drive, no 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, on all those days you don't want to do, you have to be your own motivator, your own coach, your own trainer, your own everything. So to do that, you have to come into work, and work is whatever your work may be.
Ready to go. And what that means is you may have failed miserably yesterday, but you come to work like people are like, "Man, you just lost everything. How the hell are you just damn motivated?" 'Cuz this is what it takes. Reality gets you motivated. Whatever gets you motivated, it's got to be here at the tip of your brain at all times.
'Cause in those dark moments, see, that's powerful. That could be the day that turns your life around. The world has a strange way of stepping aside when somebody says, "I'll do it or die." The man says, "I will climb the mountain." They've told me it's too high, it's too far, it's too rocky, it's too difficult, it's never been done before. But it's my mountain. I will climb it.
Pretty soon, you'll see me waving from the top or dead on the side, 'cause I ain't coming back. When people don't understand you anymore, you're in that spot of obsession and drive where people are like, "What the is wrong with this guy?" I don't want to talk to you, man, 'cause you're not going to get it.
I would like to know when you're in that moment failing, and you have to keep going, what do you say to yourself? A lot of times, I'll be in a 200-mile run or something like that, and I'm all jacked up. Body's broken, mind's broken, spirit's broken. I start to say, "What if I can pull this off?"
When I first walked into the Navy SE 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? What if I can become someone that no one thinks I can be? What if I can be that guy that people who called this and that learn to say, 'You to the world?'"
Every once in a while, you have every right to just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out. Stop it and just do. I'm astounded by how many people want to be spectacular in life but also want to be normal.
By being normal, you are by definition aiming for average. Normal people get normal results. Exceptional people get exceptional results. You literally can't do what everyone else does and expect to not get what everyone else has got. By doing what everyone else does, you guarantee average results.
That's not normal, 'cause you don't want to be normal. Normality is what weak people call living. I call death. We'll break up any type of normality that you might fix in your head or also pass what you currently thought you could do, giving you confidence.
And you know what? I'm selling myself too short. I'm capable of more. I just saw something happen there. I like that taste. I want to see more of that taste. Why not you? You've got the brains, you can make decisions.
Why do you think you keep imagining opening a business? Why do you keep imagining graduating, getting a better job? Why do you keep imagining buying a house? Why do you keep imagining driving a really nice car? Why do you keep imagining getting rich one day?
Why do you keep imagining that? You got to start believing in your imagination. You can study the plan, you can change your life, you can grow immensely in the next few years. You can make your dreams come true. You can build a financial wall around your family. Nothing can get through. You can become healthy. You can become powerful. Why not you?
You know what's crazy? You know you could be the one if you really wanted to, right? You know that, right? See, you keep playing a what-if game. "What if it don't work out this? What if it don't work out that?" What if it do? What if it do work out? Then what? You going to be happy, right?
You can't say you want to win, but then you're scared to lose. What kind of sense does that make? If you put your head down and lock in on the vision, how could you not win? The only thing that's going to cause you to lose is your mentality, but that's between you and you, though.
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. There are 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 extraordinary, and you come up with extraordinary. There's no other way. I'm sorry, but 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.
Everybody says discipline is so important, but they never want to tell you why. I'll tell you why discipline is so important. It's the strongest form of self-love. It's ignoring something you want right now for something better later on. Discipline reveals the commitment you have to your dreams, especially on days where you don't want to.
The future you is depending on the current you to keep the promises you made to yourself yesterday. How bad do you want it? There are two options: to continue forward, pushing upward. And if you do that, the 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 or find that dream again, for it's dead. And in its death is replaced by regret. Right now, it's your choice. Don't complain, don't murmur, don't talk negative. That's how average people talk. Normal average people talk problems. The great talk solutions.
Average people use their time to whine and complain. Average people say it's their boss's fault, it's their mother's fault, it's their average people. I used to be average. I used to say, "When is my daddy coming to get me? When is my biological father going to come in my life?" And while I would talk like that, I ended up getting kicked out of school.
And while I talked like that, I ended up being homeless. And while I talked like that, I was broke. And then one day, I woke up and said, "Eric, nobody's coming to save you." Because they're not like you. You know, they don't have your family, they don't have your temperament, they don't have your troubles, they don't have your abilities. The only person that has those is you.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today. And see, that's a game you can win. Strange, different, that's your source of power, which is similar to occupy your niche. Embrace your strangeness. Identify what makes you different. Fuse those things together and become an anomaly.
There is no one like you. There has never been anyone like you. There shall never be anyone like you. Therefore, know yourself, be yourself. Authenticity is everything. To 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. When you're built different than everybody else and you have this desire for more, and this desire for achievement, and this desire to win, everybody else looks at you like, "What the is wrong with you?" Like, "Why can't you just relax? Why can't you just be comfortable with yourself?"
Regardless of what everybody else around you is doing, you have to be that to be that. They're all crazy. Yeah, everybody's the best at their game. They're all crazy. No matter what you do, I say that madness and genius are next-door neighbors, and they borrow each other's sugar.
You have to be like literally up almost every other. Why do fighters do that? Because I don't want to do it. You have to discipline yourself to do things that you don't want to do. I want to get a four and [Music] run.
Success isn't built in the spotlight; it's built in silence, in the moments no one else will ever know about. What people see is just the tip of the iceberg, but what they don't see is where the real story lies. It's not just about showing up when everyone's watching. It's the grind in the dark, the work, the hours spent mastering the smallest details, and the discipline to keep going even when it feels pointless.
So put in the work when no one's looking, because that's what separates those who want it from those who make it happen. Everything changed for me when I understood this philosophy. You can have more than you've got because you can become more than you are.
Till you lock in your genetic code, and then if you put yourself in a new situation, then the stress, that's the situational stress that's produced by that particular situation, unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you. And so that's very cool, 'cause who knows how much there is locked inside of you?
Doing the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing is discipline, right? You don't need motivation to get yourself up to go and do a thing. Make the promise small. Have it. Never miss two days in a row. Most things that I've learned over time is that almost all truly exceptional and mentally strong people have been through hell.
It's very few that put themselves through hell when life is great. You just got to grind. Yeah, I feel like this next generation that's coming up, and I don't mean to smash all of them, but they seem like a bunch of to me. If you're a savage and you get out there and you grind hard and you want it bad enough, you can run all these guys over, man.
The small group of savages out there can run these kids right over, man. That's it. And that was always my mentality: nobody's ever going to outwork me, so it should be yours. You out there that are listening right now, there's never been more opportunity than there is today.
Do you know what the difference between winners and losers is? One of the differences: winners take the first step. Losers always have an excuse. Winners say, "Okay, I'm going to do it," and they do it. They take the first step. That doesn't mean they jump off a cliff; it just means they take the first step.
And if you take the first step, the second step will appear, and the third step will appear. You want to become best? You want to become champion? And now you want to say, "Like you tied?" Who cares? You tied it or not, nobody cares about you.
You know these guys sort of don't? They all think they have this illusion of choice, like, "I can do whatever I want to do." So they have this illusion that they have all these choices, but the fact of the matter is, if you want to be good, you really don't have a lot of choices. 'Cause it takes what it takes.
You have to do what you have to do to be successful. So you have to make the choices and decisions to have the discipline and the focus to the process of what you need to do to accomplish your goals. Let me tell you something else: the comfort zone is dangerous.
When you're comfortable, you are at most danger. The comfort zone is somewhere you need to, you should never feel comfortable. You should be happy and dissatisfied. Whatever time that you have, you have to attack like you're trying to save the world. You're trying to save your life.
You don't want to drown. That one and a half hours a day that you have to write, goddamn, you better be caffeinated and motivated. You got to go, you got to get after it, and you got to have discipline. That's what most people don't have. Most people don't understand what it's like to really go for something and to know that the consequences of not doing that are horrific.
The hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before. And the moment you decide to make a different choice, you're going to feel uncomfortable 'cause you're stepping from the known into the unknown. The small pitfalls in life, the deaths in families, or a girl breaking up with you, getting fired from a job, losing your money, these are all lessons.
They really are. They're just the present in a way, but it's the perception of how you see that present. Do you allow it to destroy you, or do you allow it to change you? Is it a wake-up call saying, "Hey, got to get off this path," or something else?
You need to wake up and understand that your family, your future wife and kids, their future depends on the decisions that you're making right here and now. And I can't allow you to throw away your whole life and the potential that God gave you. It's time to wake the hell up.
Many, many people have just put their foot down and said, "Enough! I'm going to change my life." And they don't take any excuses, and they feel way, way better. We're men because we face the battle, and we stay in the battle when we feel like we're losing and we feel like we're getting beat up.
But we stay in there, and we keep fighting, and we plant our feet. Give a man a purpose and the ability to achieve it, and he will crawl over broken glass with a smile. I think that feeling capable and powerful and competent and respected and admired is something that will get a man so far.
You give a man those things, and he'll deal with suffering until the ends of the Earth. We're designed to do that. We're designed to suffer. We're designed to deal with that suffering.
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.
But 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.
The mentality of a warrior is very different than normal mentality. You must be that person on that door, getting ready to open it, thinking to yourself, "If I die, so be it." You ever had anybody tell you, "Hey, look, you know what? Just be satisfied with what you got?" Don't believe them. Get them away from you.
That's good. You should never be satisfied with what you got because the attempt to get more makes you into something better all the time. Don't let anybody tell you, "Hey, man, you know, you should just be happy with..." No, you should double your business. Come on, triple it!
You always have to be the person who roots for you before everyone else does. And it's usually a single clap in the auditorium for a very long period of time. It is a slow clap. That's just you rooting for you.
People struggle to do things alone, and 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. Your laziness 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 could very well die tomorrow. And the human animal, the way we're created, is when we feel pressure, we feel the necessity to get things done. We can move mountains, and we have plenty of examples of that in history.
But when that 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. You have to give yourself deadlines.
You have to remind yourself, "I will figure out what the I can do and do that. That would be my new 100%." You must continue to find your new 100%. Whatever life throws at you, you must find what you can do.
Now, if you're in your 20s, do all of that work day and night. Really do as many things, learn as much as you can, fail as often as possible. What about work-life balance in your 20s? Okay, because that's the time to put in the hard work.
I'm sleeping at 4:00 a.m. You're working out. So talk about that. Okay, so if your job is to try to be the best basketball player you can be, right? To do that, you have to practice, you have to train, right? You want to train as much as you can, as often as you can.
So if you get up at 10:00 in the morning, train at 11:00, right? 12:00, say 12:00, train at 12:00, train for 2 hours. You have to let your body recover, so you eat, recover, whatever. You get back out, you train, start training again at 6:00, train from 6:00 to 8:00, right?
And now you go home, you shower, you eat dinner, you go to bed, you wake up, you do it again, right? Those are two sessions. Right now, imagine you wake up at 3:00, you train at 4:00, you go 4:00 to 6:00, come home, breakfast, relax, slow, slow. Now you're back at it again, 9:00 to 11:00, right?
You relax, and now all of a sudden, you're back at it again, 2:00 to 4:00, and now you're back at it again, you know, 7:00 to 9:00. Look how much more training I have done by simply starting at 4:00, right?
And so now you do that, 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 do in the summer, they're never going to catch up 'cause they're five years behind, right?
So it makes sense to get up and start your day early because you can get more work in. Imagine talking to the creator of the universe before birth and picking the person you get to become. You say, "I want to be the most courageous." The creator replies and says, "Well, then I will give you monsters to terrify you so that you can conquer them."
And you say, "Well, I want to be patient." "Well, then I will make you work harder and longer so you can learn to wait." "I want to be wise." And the creator replies, "Then I will give you failures that will crush your spirit so you can learn the value of judgment."
You then say, "Sounds like a rough life. Can you give me a good life?" The creator replies, "Just like we measure the quality of a blacksmith by the strength of his steel, I measure you by what you are at the end, not the fire and the hammer it took to make you."
A good life isn't a life that's easy. A good life is a life that makes you into a good person, and that, my son, is a hard life. The key to everything in life is knowing what you really, truly love, what you were meant to do, why you were born, why you're a different individual.
The way your brain is wired, the way your parents raised you, your early experiences, you are unique. And so that is where your power lies. Connecting to that is the source of everything in this world. So if you connect to it, if you know who you are, you know what you love, you know what you were meant to do, then that persistence will become an actual positive thing in your life.
Because you'll know accepting, you have to first accept it before you can fix it. A lot of people walk around, "Oh man, I'm good, I'm good." No, you're not. You have to accept what you're not. You have to, and people don't want to do that.
That's the only way you can fix it. You have to accept it first before you can go on the journey. A lot of folks never even start the journey, man. They never start the journey because they're living this fake life, who they want to be. They act like they are, but they're not because they haven't fixed all this stuff yet.
You got to fix this first before we can start our journey in life. So that's why I haven't made this list. You fix these problems, now your journey can begin 'cause you no longer care about how people are judging you. When you care more about how someone's judging you, you're going to stay right there.
Don't be afraid to fail big, to dream big. But remember, dreams without goals are just dreams, and they ultimately fuel disappointment. So have dreams, but have goals: life goals, yearly goals, monthly goals, daily goals.
And understand that to achieve these goals, you must apply discipline and consistency. In order to achieve your goals, you must apply discipline, which you have already done, and consistency every day. Not just on Tuesday and miss a few days. You have to work at it every day. You have to plan.
[Music]