Daily Motivations - HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT IN LIFE

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

How To Get What You Want In Life. In this motivational talk, leading thought leaders including Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, Jordan Peterson and Matthew McConaughey share what it takes to get whatever you want and the fundamental principles for achieving success and personal fulfillment.Instagram- Daily_motivationsorgFacebook- @daily_motivationsorgSupport us PayPal

People ask me, like, what is the one common denominator of people that succeed on a massive scale around the world? The one that is absolutely completely accurate is hunger. The hunger to be more, to do more, to give more, to share more. Somebody who has a hunger that doesn't die, not a hunger to make a certain amount of money or a hunger to achieve a swimsuit size, but a hunger that's unquenchable, those are the people that you know their names because they have an impact. And I had one of the greatest lessons I ever learned, and I'm about, to share it with you, this will be worth the price of being here today if you can capture what I'm about to share with you. But what I'm about to share with you changed my whole life. Here's what Mr.

Shoeff said. Set a goal to become a millionaire. And he said, here's why. For what it will make of you to achieve it. And I got one of the greatest classes in one sentence I've ever received in my life. Set a goal it'll make you stretch that far. For what it will make of you to achieve. What a brand new reason for setting goals. What an all-encompassing challenge to have a better vision of the future. And here's why. The greatest value in life is not what you get. The greatest value in life is what you become.

The fastest way to attract what you want in life is to deserve it by doing so much work it becomes unreasonable not to achieve it. Do so much work, it would be unreasonable that you fail. The seat at the table is yours if you want it. Do the hard work, build the skills no one can ignore, adjust your mindset to match where you want to go, then pull up a chair and sit down. You want to work with such relentless obsession that when people see you, they're grateful they don't have to compete against you. The fastest shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts. Do the work.

Let me now give you the two skills that will take what you dream about and make it real. If you want an extraordinary life, life on your terms, there are two master skills. to master these. Skill number one to having life on your terms is you must master, you must absolutely master the science of achievement. The science of achievement means the ability to take whatever you dream about, whatever you envision, and make it real. And all of you have already done this. But you may have lost confidence or may have forgotten how you do it. The first step to achieving anything is focus. How do you create your life? You get hungry for something. don't you? You decided there's something you wanted so bad that you unleashed all your desire.

You became obsessed with it. It's because you didn't just envision it. You brought so much emotion to it that now it's in your life. It was once a dream. It was once a goal and now it's in your life. You started with a concrete vision of what you wanted and you focused on it continuously, didn't you? Wherever focus goes, energy floats. How to get whatever you want. That's the title of the next set of notes. How to get whatever you want. Here's what it says if you're ready. It says ask. That's it. End of notes. Ask. If there's one art in life to learn extremely well, that's got to be one of them. The art of asking. What does ask mean? Ask means. What do you want? And the formula is staggering.

It says ask and what? A guy ought to look into that. See, you've got to be better than a good worker. You've got to be a good asker. Now let me give you three key points on asking and receiving. Number one, asking is the beginning of receiving. Asking starts a unique process, mental and emotional. I don't even know how it works.

All I know is it works. It's like pushing a button and all this machinery starts working. I don't know how it just works there's a lot of things you don't need to know how just work them some people are always studying the roots others are picking the fruit I mean it depends on what end of it you want in on asking is the beginning of receiving so start the process here's number two receiving is not the problem receiving is automatic now if that's true receiving is not the problem what's the problem failure to ask might

be one of your major problems. I don't know. Check it out. The guy says, oh, now I see it. I got up last year and hit it every day, but there's not a scrap of paper with my gold on. Good worker who are asking. So you've got to change that. Here's number three. Receiving is like the ocean. There's plenty. Success is not in short supply. It isn't rationed and you stepped up to the window and it was all gone. No, no, no. It's like an ocean here. Now if that's true, what's the problem?

Well, some people go to the ocean with a teaspoon. Have you got the picture? See, what you want to do in view of the size of the ocean is trade your teaspoon for at least a bucket. Now there's two ways to ask. Here's number one. Ask with intelligence. Don't mumble. You don't get anything by mumbling. Be clear, be specific. Intelligent asking means how wide, how high, how soon. When, what size, what color, how much.

Define what you want and describe what you want. That's powerful. Goals become like a magnet. They pull you that direction and the better you describe them the more they pull. So ask intelligently. Here's number two. Ask with faith. That's the childish part of the equation. Believe you can get what you want like a child. Not an adult. Adults are too skeptical.

So the formula really reads, make plans like an adult and believe in them like a child. And the most incredible things will happen. Just try it for 90 days. Now here's the last qualifying phrase on goal setting, as we promised to qualify everything. And it simply goes like this. Remember, you won't get everything you want.

And we've already studied the reason for that. Simply, sometimes it hails on your crop and rains on your parade. It's that kind of planet. So you won't get everything you want. But if you will work this goal-setting formula, you can get plenty for wealth and happiness. If there's one thing to get excited over, that's it.

Get excited over your ability. to make yourself do the necessary things. What could you make yourself do starting tomorrow that would change it all? No, telling. Now, see, that's exciting. On any given day, you can massively change the direction of your life. Now, here's the best word I know of to go with action. Massive.

See, that'll change everything. Massive action is called the cure-all. If you're going to make calls, make a few thousand. If you're going to make contacts, make a few thousand. If you're going to knock on doors, knock on a few thousand. See, that'll change everything. Here's the language of the poor.

I'll try at a time or two and see what happens. It's the way poor people talk. The guy says, well, I'll give it 30 days. 30 days. You could guess his bank balance. You've got to have a better game plan. The formula really works like this. Pick up a good idea, take heavy action. Take heavy action on a good idea. Don't wait till you've learned two or three thousand things.

Because that way you'll use up all the time. And you could wind up smart and broke. And hey, it's okay to be dumb and broke. But if a guy's smart and broke, that's pitiful. Don't let your learning lead to knowledge. lead to knowledge, you'll become a fool. Let your learning lead to action. You can become wealthy. So here's one of the major things to do starting tomorrow. Take a look at your game plan. If it isn't loaded with massive action, change it.

Tomorrow. Action. So there's all kinds of wealth, but to get a big share coming your way, you've got to have a heavy action game plan. game plan. Don't wish it was easier. Wish you were better. See that triggered my whole life change. Don't wish for less problems. Wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenge. Wish for more wisdom. See that's the difference in how your life works out. It's not what happens. It's what you do. Starting tomorrow, what are you going to do that'll make a change in your life's direction. Good question. What are you going to do starting tomorrow that'll make a difference? Now see if you don't do something starting

tomorrow that'll make a difference guess what? It's gonna be the same. And see that way you can guess what the next five years are going to be like. Look at the last five because the next five are going to be like the last five unless you made your key tomorrow change it all or change a little or change something. or don't change, it's choice time. You can do whatever you want. But it's nice to know any day you wish you can change your whole life. What can you do starting tomorrow that'll make a difference?

Anything. Success is something you attract, not something you pursue. Success is looking for a good place to stay. So instead of going after it, you work on yourself, personal development. See, the major question to ask on the job is, not what are you getting. The major question to ask on the job is, what are you becoming? See, the big question is, not what am I getting paid here? The big question is, what am I becoming here?

Because true happiness is not contained in what you get. Happiness is contained in what you become. When you want a real lasting change, you have to change the driving force. Because we have six human needs. certainty, uncertainty. Because think about this, if you were certain every moment of your life, you know what they're going to say before they're going to say it.

But if you knew what's going to say before they're going to say, you know what's going to happen, what's going to happen every moment of every day? In the beginning, it'd be cool. But after a while, what would you feel? Bored. Out of your mind, bored. So God, in her infinite wisdom, gave us uncertainty. Third need is significance.

They need to feel unique. You need to feel special. They need to feel important. Who do you think has that need? All of us. Everyone. Yeah. Some people do it by earrings.

Some people buy tattoos in certain areas. Some people buy their art. Some people are why they dress. Some people buy their money. Somebody will be more generous. Everyone finds a way. Okay? Anytime you meet a belief, an emotion, or a behavior meets at least three of these six

needs, you will become addicted to that thought, that feeling, or that behavior. It could be a positive one or a negative one, but you will become addicted to it. Fourth need, connection and love. Everybody wants love. Most people settle for connection because they've had love. at one point it was so painful when it ended, they decided to settle for connection. How can you get it? You can get it by going for a run and feeling connected to God of the universe, nature. You can get it by prayer. You can get it by being with some friends. You can get it

by making love. You can get it by getting a dog. There's a million ways to feel connection and love. Some are positive, some are negative. Some people get connected by their problems. They're always comparing problems. You ever seen two people comparing, but I had this. Well, you think that's bad. Let me tell you. Mine, they're arguing over. significance and they're connecting through their problems. The secret to it all of the final two needs. These are the spiritual needs, not religious, but spiritual. And that is, we all must grow. When you grow, you feel alive. And if you don't grow, you start to die inside. But we grow so we have something finally to give, which is where meaning comes in life. If you're missing, growing, contributing,

you will not feel fulfilled. There's the science of achievement. There's the art of fulfillment. There are two different skills. If you want to extraordinary life, you need both. If you look at a great athlete what makes a great athlete there's that sense of not only you practice and you got it in your nervous system you're incredible your strategy in the sport but there's the state you bring to the table so I'm sure you've seen an athlete basketball player in the envy about shoot a free throw a kicker in the NFL and they go jogging out there and you look at him you go they're going to miss it and sure enough they do everyone's had that experience how did they know they saw the lack of certainty in their body right and so when you try to get yourself to do something you've never done before

is that kind of uncertainty. So I always tell people, if you want to break through, I think of it as three things at the most simple level to create a breakthrough. A breakthrough being, maybe there's an area that you've not gotten to where you want to be and you've promised yourself if you're going to do it and then you don't follow through or you fall back and you're frustrated with yourself. Most people have had something like that, but one day they did break through. They did finally say enough of this.

And that day, that moment, they changed their relationship, they quit what they're doing, they started something new. And what I found is there's three parts of that break through. And if you want to break through in any area, these are the things you got to do. But I want to give you a reverse order real fast. Okay. So reverse order is most people they want to get to make something happen. They focus on the strategy.

Now, I'm a strategist. I get paid to be able to show someone how to save a decade because the right strategy and business can save you 10 years, right? But as much as I love strategy, it's not when I start with with people. The reason is because the natural question is I want to achieve this, but how do I do it? There's nothing wrong with answering the question how. It's just the sequence of these that are critical. It's like if I told you this is someone's phone number and you have the right numbers and you dial the wrong order, you're not going to reach them.

Right. If you knew the vault numbers, but you put the wrong order, the vault doesn't open. When it comes to a breakthrough, most people are focused on the strategy, the how to and the problem is when you go to how to do something you've never done before, it brings uncertainty. Yes. And uncertainty creates hesitancy and hesitancy kills momentum. Hesidency kills performance. Hasidency kills, you know, most things that really matter in your life. So it's not a strategy problem.

People think it's a strategy problem. It's not. The real problem is they have a story. So I think it's these three S's. The story is locking them in place. The story is what you said, a belief. But when you stack a set of beliefs together, you build a story. And you tell it to yourself over and over again until you believe it.

So the story is, I've tried everything. Yes. And I'll say to them, really, everything. How many things you tried? I've tried thousands of things. Then I go, okay, name them. And they'll go, uh. I try two things.

Yeah, yeah. These two things that don't work I did over and over again, right? But as long as you believe that, a belief is the feeling of certainty about what can be done or can't be done, right? Who you are or who you're not. So when you go first for Howe, you have uncertainty. I call it the tyranny of Howe. You don't want to get to the How first.

You got to deal with the story before that. If you change the story, you can get a strategy that works. But the order people work on is strategy. You rarely pay attention to the story, but the one before that is where we need to start. It's your state. So that state of certainty, that state of passion, that state of conviction, that stage of absolute determination, right? That state that every great athlete has, any great leader has, any great business person has,

if you have that state, it will change your story and it'll change what you're able to do strategy with. So the most important thing to do is change your state first. That's why most people fail to achieve what they want. They have not become masters in their own mental, emotional state. And you know in our events, that's my number one piece. is without that, you won't get lasting change. You'll get temporary change.

Once I get in a state, I can change the story. That's easy. Once I change the story, if I don't give you the strategy, you'll find a strategy. You'll make it happen. You'll find the way, you'll make the way. You've lived this as an athlete and as a businessman. So I look at this and say, the problem is most people do it in reverse order. When they go in reverse order, they stop the process.

They don't know how. They freak out about the uncertainty. Their story doesn't support them. And now they're in a lousy state. And so they try something, try something for a little while and never follow through. So that's the breakthrough I do it. So it's, it is a belief system,

but I want you to see it's a little more complex than that. It's the state. What am I supposed to do? Your state will determine it. So if you're fearful, you know, it's lost. You're going to justify. If you're more aggressive and there's something you really want, you're going to, you know, it's like,

I've got to make this thing happen, right? It's a different piece. So you pick your beliefs based on your state unconsciously. Each stage has predictable, challenges and opportunities. And the more you can know the pattern in advance, the more you can anticipate, anticipation is power. Reaction puts you in fear. People say now to me, they'll say things like, well, they're coming and all these changes occurring. Like when people lose their jobs, when there's no certainty outside world, how are people going to have certainty? And I go,

let me give you a clue. There was never any external certainty. You've had rented certainty. You've convinced yourself hypnotically that you're certain because you had a job and you had this. None of this, you walk across the street and get hit by a bus, right? There's so much that can happen. So we hate uncertainty so much and we want it so strongly. But if we link it to our job or to an income or to a person responding the way we want to, then you're going to live a very fearful life. If you train yourself to feel that internal certainty, which is what you're dead,

and anticipate as much as possible and you know no matter what, I'll find the way. That is a different identity. Yes. You've gone to a level of not just how to deal with things, but the identity is, I'm the guy that will find the way for my kids and for my family, right? And that is freedom. No one escapes massive, massive stress.

You either use stress or stress uses you. Yes. And the way you use stress is, you know, the whole phrase, they'd say, you know, when you're going through hell, keep going. Yeah. If you keep going, three things happen. Number one, you discover how strong you really are. It's the only way you're going to find it is to push through it.

And then each time you do it, by the way, you get stronger, stronger. Second, you figure out who your real friends are, not your Facebook friends. Because when all hell's breaking loose, no one sticks around except real frowns. And then the third thing, the most important thing is it gives you like almost a little immunity to future stress because it's like a vaccination of it almost.

So there's great value in that process. Now if you make it through those steps, now that internal certainty inside you just builds and builds and builds, you see the patterns you've not seen before. And it frees you. I'm curious, from those who are at the top of their game to those who are struggling,

by day. What is the number one limiting belief that most people have that keeps them from accomplishing what they want? It's different depending upon what level of life you get to, but people usually bump up against I'm not enough. But the idea that maybe I'm not enough for this level when I'm going to, or the level I want to go to in my life, whether it's, it might be great in business, but they're not doing great in their relationship, or they're great in a relationship, but they're not good with their kids. They're good with the kids, but their body's not where they want to be. They got all the money without the body, right? And so I think most people, bump up against that fear that something in me is not enough.

And the deeper fear is that if I'm not enough, I won't be loved. And so it's an unconscious fear. So most people push it aside by focusing on what they're good at and not taking care of those other things till they bite them, the relationship, the body, whatever it is, the kids. Or they come up with a story about, well, I don't need to be good at that, or that's just not my nature. And so I'm often called in to help somebody, you know,

sharpen their skills. But you're right. Usually there is a limiting belief of some sort. to some sort. So I couldn't say there's one, but if I was saying the most dominant one, it's like, I've never done this before, so how the hell am I going to do it? Right? There's uncertainty. Engage in the world. Go find out some new things, learn some new things. Whether that's the physical frontier or the mental frontier. Take more risk there. Start with what do you have an innate ability to? What's in your DNA? You know, I wanted to, play basketball for years.

I wanted to dunk. And it ain't my DNA, bro. I was never going to dunk. No matter how hard I worked at it, I was never going to dunk. That's what I wanted to do. So look at what do you have an innate ability for? And then what then are you willing to pursue an education for,

work for, hustle for that for which you have an innate ability for? And if we're going to talk about making a living, is that which you have an innate ability? for and now I've educated yourself, your talent, to have a talent for, is that and how can that be something that the world demands? Because it's supply and demand. Boy, you can end up doing something you've got

an innate ability for, plus you've become really good at it and you learn the craft and the world demands it and you can supply it, there you go. But some of us have innate ability, but we're not really, we don't work for it. We don't improve our skills, we kind of rely on what we got, and it kind of become middle of field and it, Yeah.

Sometimes, I don't have the ability for it, but I'm going to learn a new craft, and I'm going to hustle at it. And actually, when we get good at something, we kind of can start to go home. I didn't know I loved it. I didn't like this anymore, but I like it now. It starts to feel good to do over and over. I was lost, man. I'm lost. I'm writing 16-page letters to myself, and I'm returning them with a 17-page letter.

About what? Existential, huge existential questions mixed in. with, oh, everything is going, great, trying to talk myself and then keep my head up, you know what I mean? And I said, OK, if I can't do what I want to do, I'm going to quit doing what I've been doing. Cut the shit, McCona, hey?

Quit giving yourself that out, that parachute. Even though you may have it, I need to do strong arm myself. Put my damn hands on the wheel. Look in the mirror and go, it's on you. Because it is. Time to become a man. Walk forward, peripheral vision. Get it.

Own yourself. walk forward with more courage and start becoming the man you want to be instead of acting like it and putting it off work at that hustle hustle hustle I can't I hate and lying for three things that you got in trouble for so what did I learn from don't say can't that unable to do something you can't even if you can't pull it off you can go find help which means you were just having trouble what I learned from getting a butt wopping for and I hate you to my brother? Well, what I was learning is the antonyms to those words. Because saying I can't, lying, and saying I hate you, were bringing me pain.

So the opposite must bring pleasure, right? Tell the truth, love, and believe that you can. That was where the values, how I remember them getting instilled in me. And to this day, I still have them. Trying to transform them to my kids as well in a different way that my parents did. Anything exterior should not give you your identity. Why are you gonna watch someone doing something when you can go out in the world and do it yourself?

Believe is a verb. Life is so difficult and challenging that unless you give it everything you have, the chances are very high that it will embitter you and then you'll be a force for darkness and not good. You know, the fact that life is short and, short and can be brutal, can terrify you into hiding and avoiding. You can flip that on its head and understand that since you're all in anyways, you might as well take the risks that are adventurous.

It's a pain to start at the bottom, but you start at the bottom where you're weak. And if you want to rectify what's weak, you have to accept the fact that you're at the bottom and that the first steps are going to be painful. If you take people, and I've told you this, and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of, you know, that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals,

their self-defined goals. If you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of, they get stronger. And you don't know what the upper limits to that are, because you might ask yourself, like, if for 10 years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do,

what would you be like? Well, you know, there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time, and there are people who do find out over decades-long periods what they could be like if they were who they were, if they spoke their being forward. And they get stronger and stronger and stronger, and we don't know the limits to that. We do not know the limits to that.

And so you could say, well, in part, perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're not everything you could be and you know it. If you're going to rectify your weaknesses, you have to admit your insufficiency to your own shame. Now, if the gap between you and your ideal is so great that it paralyzes you, you shrink that. If you hide and you don't let what's inside of you out, and you don't bring into the world what you could bring, and you become cynical and bitter, you will start doing very dark things. Not only will you not add to the world what you could add, but you'll start being jealous of, people who are competent and doing well and work to destroy them. So that's the pathway to hell,

really. People can have very, very difficult situations, can be in very, very difficult situations. And it's in those difficult situations where the search for gratitude becomes something that is by necessity deeper and more difficult. But that doesn't mean it's not appropriate. No, and there is, there is a very tight association between loving your enemy and being grateful in spite of the terrible things that occur in your life. You are morally required to maintain faith, to aim up and to treat other people the way you would want to be treated, no matter what's happened to you. You aren't necessarily the best judge of what you need. You need something extremely valuable that you can move towards. It's easy to be deluded in what you want.

And that's the sort of delusions that people chase if they chase power. If you decide instead that you're going to just say what you believe to be true, you have to let go of the consequences. And you might think, well, I don't want to let go of the consequences because I want to control what's going on. But what you miss then is adventure, because if you don't control what's going on, you don't know what the hell's going to happen.

The proper comparison group for you is you yesterday. You're the only control group that's appropriate to you because you have a certain set of talents and possibilities and limitations and tragedies that are truly unique to you. And so you might be comparing yourself to someone else on some dimension, but it's not a reasonable comparison because you don't know what talents they were blessed with. And you also don't know what opportunities they had that you didn't, etc. It's just not a reasonable comparison. It's a lot better to think about who you were and then to think, well, could you be some what better in some dimension? And the positive thing about that is the answer is almost always yes. If you're comparing yourself to someone or even to a future self and the gap is so painful that it paralyzes you,

then you've created a dragon that you don't have the tools to master. And so what you have to do is you have to scale the dragon down to size. and you want to scale the dragon down to size until it's a size that you are willing to move toward. However small that is. Now, you know, if you're here and your ideal is here and that gap is unbearable, then you reduce the gap and you reduce the gap.

And you're going to have to do that anyways because you're not going to move from where you are to perfect in one fell swoop, right? There's going to be incremental steps. So you have to fill in that hierarchy of progress, with a high enough resolution representation so that you can start to move forward. Because you want to discover where you're insufficient. Now, it's painful.

You know, it's painful to encounter an impediment in the form of someone else's opinion that might show you where you're blind and ignorant or willfully blind even. But the advantage to that is you can rectify the error. And then as you move forward, you're stronger. You should always ask a stupid question. And that doesn't mean the sort of question that someone who wasn't paying attention would ask. If you're listening to someone and you don't understand what they're saying and you reveal that, you're revealing your ignorance, you know, and maybe you're in a room full of people,

and you think you're the only person stupid enough to not get it, which is very rarely the case, by the way. The thing is, though, if you reveal that ignorance to yourself and to the other person, they can rectify it. And if you do that a thousand times, you're not ignorant anymore. If you ask a thousand dumb questions and you listen to the answer, then you know a thousand things, some of them deep that you didn't know before. That's the advantage to searching your soul for unrequited sins and attempting to atone. That's not a delusion, right?

It's an attempt to set yourself right. One of the things that I think I see people respond to this degree of pressure when they think about what is going to happen a long term, I have discomfort. that is in front of me now, that I need to face, that I need to go through if I'm going to get to something in the future that I think that I'm supposed to do. And one of the solutions that they come up with, which isn't a solution, but it kind of is to them, is I'm not going to do anything. Yeah. You know, that no decision is kind of the same as a neutral choice. One of my friends Alex has got this quote, which I love, and he says, the heaviest things in

life aren't iron and gold, but unmade decisions. The reason you are stressed is, that you have decisions to make and you're not making them. There's no indecision because you age. Like you pay for your indecision. It's a decision. It's a decision to avoid fundamentally. The people who are using fear to garner power point to the various apocalypses that might befall us.

And it's difficult to counter them because the future is always an apocalypse. horizon, like everything can fall apart and and has before and might well again and will, in fact, in your life as you age and die. And so it's very easy to conjure up an apocalypse. Then the question becomes, the question becomes not, is that apocalypse potentially real? Because the answer to that is yes, but what attitude should you have towards that? Naive, that's not good. Cynical, that's better, but it's still not good. It's another form of hell. And it also tends to make the potential apocalypse is more likely. Well, so what do you have when you move beyond cynicism? And what you have when you

move beyond cynicism is wisdom. And that's not naive. It's courageous. Well, one of the really difficult things to learn when you're down and out is how far you're down. Because it's humiliating. You know, I was ill recently. And when I started to recover, I couldn't really, I couldn't really button my shirts. I had to learn to do that again. I did. I had forgotten how to be it. I had forgotten how to put my hands on keyboard. I didn't know where to put my hands. I had to learn to type again. Now, I hadn't lost all the knowledge and it came back quite quickly. But, and the reason I'm saying that is because one of the impediments to people who've really taken a blow in their life is that things have fallen apart around them so badly that where they have to start is humiliating

even to consider the rule. It's a pretty straightforward rule when you want to get back on your feet and the rule is you have to make the task small enough so that you'll do it no matter how small that is you know and that can i've worked with people i mean one of the things i've become well known for is my advice to start by cleaning up your room but i had plenty of clients who couldn't they couldn't go home and clean up the room they hadn't cleaned up their room for like 20 years for all sorts of reasons, maybe because every time they did try to do anything positive in their family, no matter what it was, they were immediately punished and undermined. And so in a situation like that, you cut it down so that maybe the first thing they do is

clean up, like maybe they look inside one drawer and see the mess that's there and just look at it for a minute and think about how they might reorganize it if they were going to. When people are very down and out and they decide to make a move, forward. In some ways, they're facing the whole panoply of problems that confront them in the guise of that single problem, right? It's all lurking behind it, right? It's like, you know, they see the tip of a reptile's tail outside a gigantic closet, let's say, and they look and they think, well, that's just the tip of a tail. What harm can it do me? But it's connected to the whole damn beast. And the advantage to that is that if you make that first step forward, you're actually advancing in the

face of all that opposition. The disadvantage is that the first task seems so small that you literally have to be on your knees to be humble enough to lower yourself to take that first step. You know, God, is that all I can do? I'm so useless. Well, what's humility? What's the opposite of pride? Well, humility is starting where you are. That's what humility is. And it's annoying because, you know, If your life is a mess, then you have to see that you're the person in that mess. Then you have to understand that your first attempt to redress the mess might not be something you're particularly proud of, you know? I mean, I saw this lots in my clinical practice where people would, the first steps they had to take to put things in order were pretty embarrassing. It's like, really, that's all I can do?

Hey, man, uphill is better than downhill. So even if you have to start small, you accrue success exponentially. You accrue defeat exponentially too. That's the abyss that is hell. You start going downhill. You go downhill faster and faster. Start going uphill. You go uphill faster and faster.

So even if you have to start small or even painfully small, which is highly probable, especially if you're trying to tackle something that's really plagued you, doesn't really matter. How small? I would say take the step that you can take that you will take that actually feels like some accomplishment. Imagine you're dealing with the three-year-old kid and you want to encourage him. Okay, you want to set him a task that you don't want him to say, dad, I could do that when I was two, right? But you don't want to set him a task that there's not a chance he'll manage.

You want to set him a task that will stretch him beyond where he is that has a reasonable probability of success. Right? Why? Why stretch him from where he is? Well, because you want to grow. I mean, look, if you love a child, you love the child for who he is and who he could be, and you want to indicate your love for both of those. I think if you're a father, you tilt even more towards love for who the child could be.

You want confidence, okay? More to the point. You want the confidence that's based in confidence. competence. Otherwise, it's narcissistic. Okay, so how do you develop that? Well, you watch yourself exceed your limits. And then you think, oh, look at that. There's something in me that can exceed my limits. That's your true self. That's a good way of thinking about it. And in doing so, you actually realize that limits exist and you imposed one on yourself in the first place. Well, that's one of the things you can realize, certainly. That also you don't exactly know where the

limits are. It's like, oh, I exceeded that. It's like, okay, well, now what? What's the upward arc of exceeding limits? That's Jacob's Ladder. I would say there's no upward limit. There's no limit how bad things can get. No one would deny that who has any sense. I don't know if an adventure is fair. I don't even know if that's what we want. Like, this is something I really came to understand more deeply when writing this book. What are we built for? We're built for maximal challenge. And that isn't the way we view ourselves in the modern world. We view ourselves as built for pleasure, you know, pornography.

We view ourselves as built for consumption or for safety or for maybe for egotistical self-aggrandizement and fame. Look, all of those things are better than their absence, let's say, what are we built for? I think we're built for maximal challenge. You actually have a huge opportunity, which is to go left when everyone's going right. Right. And it goes to what you were saying now.

You were talking about, be careful when you mess with incentives. Like, be careful when you choose the easier road. Be careful of the unintended consequences. And AI is a prime example of an unintended consequence of you taking the easier road today. Look, I still have to be able to. We've got to learn how to take a vacation.

Because, you know, there's sometimes when the winds at our back, and we've earned it. There's some times when it's easy to treat, and it's like, yeah, don't interrupt this, man. This is a sweet-ass song. Trust that the hill's coming. Again, don't be so impressed with this. And don't, what I have to do, it's don't fall into when

things are going really well. I go, ah, there it is. That's the mean. No, it's not. Not with any ambition, it's not. Or not with life happening, it's not. You shoot for an A and make a C, it's better than shooting for C and making an F. So go for perfection.

Reality always comes in under it. But in that moment, when you see the inevitable reality, the outcome, the result, how quickly can we go, okay. hey, but I got so much more out of it. The job, the person, myself, because I went for perfection. Then if I had just gone for, no, dude, just, I mean, you know, just pass class.

And but what can be hard for me sometimes is it can take me too long to come down from when, oh, it didn't hit perfection. And maybe it takes me a week to go, dude, now I did you finally realize that, Of course you weren't going to get perfection, but you got so much more out of it because you went for perfection.

So be pleased with reality, because you got a good grade on it, man. That was good. That piece of art wouldn't have been that true if you wouldn't have been, like I always say this all the time, and I never mean this in a disrespectful way. I've never done a movie or a performance

that lived up to what I, because I'm thinking it can be divine. It comes out, maybe majorly inspiring, may speak to masses, even have some magic to it, but all you think is divine. And I think everything that's ever been built

that's great or creatively brilliant has come from someone who has a big expectation gap. And of course, the very definition of that, you're never going to close it. And actually, probably the reason you then are motivated to move to the next thing and pursue divine again is because it wasn't divine last time.

Maybe there's still something left on the table and that means you never arrive. Right. But if you can find something that can keep you going, something no matter how small, to look forward to and continually have faith in and chase, well, then your life here will be better than it is now, heaven or not. What do I need to understand about your earliest context to understand who you are? the values you have and the perspective that you view the world with.

Earliest on, basic values of respect yourself, respect others. Give a damn about yourself, give a damn about others. Combined with a mother that wherever we went in the world, that we might have been a little nervous to take a risk at, she was like, don't walk in there like, you want to buy the place, walk in like, you own it. So a sort of boosting up of what you could say is massive ego, but also you were not allowed to walk on your proverbial toes in our family. You were brought down.

And if anyone in our family, if anything, I would say going back, I think mom and dad maybe could have been a little more lenient with the successes that we had. And when we did parade, when my brother did win the track meet and walk through the other. the house like this to allow him to do that in in and you weren't allowed to you weren't allowed to do that you were immediately humbled no matter if you were coming right off a victory or a win or a box off as it you weren't allowed to at the same time you were raised up once you were humble that balance we were taught resilience heavy heavy duty resilience baseline gratitude quit asking me for new shoes i'm going to introduce you to the kid with no feet. Well, okay. Like sobering. These were, were these aphorisms from my mother. Yeah, but they were

pounded into us, all right? At the same time, I was spent 36 years thinking I was little Mr. Texas because my mom told me I was. Until 36 years later, I look at the trophy and it says I was runner up. And I go, oh, mom was like overselling us to ourselves at the same time. You better be humble, sleep with sin in my household. Sin, I saw my dad asleep one time in my life. I got up at 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning and looked, and went through the kitchen and peaked and I saw him sleep and I woke up my brothers, like,

do, well, dad, dad's still asleep. He actually died two and a half months later and connected that idea that, oh, if he slept in that late, he must have not been feeling well. If it was daylight, you couldn't be inside. There's a fierce sense of independence. If you're 30 minutes of TB a night, Max. Mom would always say, turn that damn thing off, get outside.

You had to be outside. Get out in the world. Go hustle. Figure it out. Be home a dark. That was just the understood rule. We always knew we were loved. There's never a question that we were loved.

And mom would always keep on to make sure you're loving yourself. I remember breakups, heartbroken. She'd let us mourn. She was a great ear. Very sensitive. to that kind of pains like that, broken hearts. But only for a day. After a day, she'd crank up the ACDC, man,

and go like, now skid up, you're worth it. Her loss. Come on, get out of bed. Uh-uh, come on, uh-uh, quit moping, lift your head up. Come on, come on, buddy, we got this, uh-uh, her loss. Give you the day, no more than that. Our love and the family, It was physical. No grudges, no grounding. You get in trouble, which we did.

One, we were always guilty when we got in trouble. But it was corporal. It was take your licks. Get it up with, take your licks. We're not going to ground you because that'd be taking away your time. And your time is the most valuable thing you got. So take your licks, you're not going to get injured. It's going to hurt.

And don't yell. Because if you yell, one of the licks, you're going to get another one. The love was tough. The love was physical. We hugged more than, the hands soothed much more than they hurt, 99 times out of a thousand. But it was a, we were a physical hugging, loving family. You always went to bed with an I love you and a kiss.

Even if it was ritual, which it was. Like a Sunday service, got to wake up. Even if I'm not listening to the damn preacher, I'm being subconsciously reminded that you should take a day out of the week to be at the most, number two, that you should go get humbled and say thank you to a higher power and thank you for the things that you have in your life and thank you for the people you have in your life and helping those people double down on those great attributes that they have. People come and they, oh my God, I'm so sorry about your childhood. And I never felt like I wasn't loved. And it was

hard love and it was tough love. And my mom and dad's love was passionate love. We knew we were loved. Four major lessons in life to learn. Here they are. Number one, learn how to handle the winters. That's lesson one. They come right after falls with regularity. Some are long and some are short and some are hard and some are easy, but they keep coming. You must learn to handle the nights.

They come right after days. You must learn to handle difficulty. It comes right after opportunity. You must learn to handle recessions. They always follow progressions for the last 6,000. See, it isn't going to change. The lesson you must learn is how to handle it. And there's all kinds of winters, right? The winter when you can't figure it out, the winter when it all go smash, the winter when it turns belly up, the winter when it won't work, when you've run out

of money and you've got a broken heart. See, those are winter times. There's all kinds. Economic winters, social, Winters, personal winters, when your heart is smashed in a thousand pieces and the nights are unusually long, your prayers seem to go no higher than your head. It's winter time. But see the disappointments come. Those are normal. That's part of life. But the question is, how do you handle it? How do you handle the coming winters and the disappointments and the down times? Well, you can't get rid of January by tearing it off the calendar. But here's what you can do.

You can get stronger, you can get wiser, and you can get better. The winters won't change, but you can. And that's how life changes for you. Here's lesson two. Learn how to take advantage of the spring. That's the second one. Spring is called opportunity. See, opportunity always comes.

Days follow nights is an. that terrific. Opportunity follows difficulty. But here's what you must learn to do. Underline these two words in that key phrase. Take advantage. Underline those two. You must learn to take advantage of the spring. See, just because spring rolls around is no sign you're going to look good come fall. You got to do something with it. In fact, you have to get good at one of two things in life, planting in the spring or begging in the fall. Now here's what else you must do. Take advantage of the springs quickly because there's only a few. Just a handful of springs have been handed to each of us. They don't come forever. Life is fairly brief.

So whatever you're going to do with your life, you got to get at it. Don't just let the springs pass, pass, pass. Here's the third major lesson in life to learn. Learn how to protect your crops all summer. You got to take care of what you start. Sure enough, as soon as you've planted, planted your garden in the spring. The busy bugs and the noxious weeds are out to take it. You've got to learn to prevent the intruder from taking all the good you start. It's one of the challenges. All good will be attacked. Every garden will be invaded. Not to think so is naive. All values must be defended. Political

values, social values, community values, family values, marriage values, friendship values, business values, every garden must be tended all summer. Third major lesson. Now here's number four. Learn to reap come harvest time without complaint. Take full responsibility for what happens to you. It's one of the highest forms of human maturity, accepting full responsibility. It's the day you know you've passed from childhood to adult. the day you accept full responsibility. And another note, learn to reap in the fall without apology, without apology if you do well, and without complaint if you don't.

That's maturity. So that's a key phrase. It's not what happens, it's what you do. Anything can happen, right? Everything can happen. I've heard all the stories. I've been one of the stories. Hey, we could all tell stories all night long, right? Happening.

anything can happen. If anything can go wrong, it will. That's one of Murphy's laws. He was not one of the great positive speakers of the day. But anyway, it's still true, though, right? Anything can go wrong, everything can go wrong. For sure. Everything can happen, anything can happen.

But it's not the happenings. It's what you do about it. Everybody's had their share. Disappointments are not special gifts reserved for the pool. Everybody has them. The difference is what you do about.