Daily Motivations - Who you wanna be

Episode Date: September 3, 2022

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.” Kindly follow us on Instagram - @daily_motivationsorg       Facebook- @daily_motivationsorg  Please Kindly support this show by clicking the link below Grab your Ultimate Female Body Fitness Guide Ebook  copy now at an exclusive 50% off discount  https://selar.co/42zb40?currency=USD Kindly Support Us Below to sustain future episodes. Support the Show.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BidMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. You have to practice who you want to be. You know, you don't wake up one morning and you're suddenly who you think you want to be. You have to put some energy into it. So if you want to be an honest person, you have to be an honest person every day, even starting at three and four and five, right? If you're going to be a hard worker,

hard work doesn't just appear. You have to practice hard work. You have to practice effort. And I also encourage them, try to help them understand that good things don't come easy with that effort. You know, that's where you grow. That's where growth is. Some of the best times in my life when I've grown, it's when I've done something hard, when I've overcome a fear. You don't realize that when you're doing it, but when you come out on the other side, you realize, wow, I've really stepped up. So I push my girls, but more importantly, I love them a lot.

And that's what I feel for all of you. I want you guys to feel that in your lives so that you can be excellent. Because other people told me that I might not be able to do well in school for whatever reason. I was always a good student. I worked hard, but I thought there was some magic that happened that made you really, you know, I didn't know that it was just plain old hard work. So there were periods of doubt for sure. I think we all, I have doubts today. Doubts don't go away. You just learn how to deal with them. You start knowing yourself and you become more confident. The more successes you have, the more chances you take, you don't let the

failures or the stumbles define you. Everybody falls every now and then. Some people fall a lot. And what I realized is that we have long lives if we're healthy and we do what we're supposed to do. I'm 47 years old. So think about it. Whatever mistake I made when I was 13, who cares? So think about life as a long trajectory. But at the same time, you don't want to make huge mistakes. Because when you're young, making big, big mistakes can last forever, right? Welcome to Daily Motivation, where you get motivated and inspired. So you want to choose wisely. But the stumbles, the lessons learned, that's part of life that that makes you

grow but i i came to know that i didn't know that when i was your age i thought every every mistake was the end of the world i'll never be able i'll never get into school i'll never be you know of course we all feel that way um but just continue to work put the put the effort in and i think that has been some of what's helped me being first lady first of all is knowing who you are and being confident in yourself because they'll be clarissa what do you say pushing beyond other people's labels of you all right that's a big part that's what we do to each other all the time. We don't even know each other, and we already determined from one glance, meeting, one line, one word, one phrase, this is who you are. So you have to know who you are before that. And you live that reality, and you keep living it out no matter what. And if you have good character

and good intentions, that that ultimately shines through. But in the end, it's hard work. And I like to work hard. And I like to do good things. And you practice that now. And believe it or not, I didn't know it. It prepared me to be the first lady of the United States. I didn't know. I guess I'm doing okay. But you know what? Every day we just get up and keep doing what we think is the right thing. Read.

Write. Read. Read. If the president were here, one of his greatest strengths is reading. That's one of the reasons why he's a good communicator, why he's such a good writer. He's a voracious reader. So we're trying to get our girls, no matter what, to just be, to love reading and to challenge themselves with what they read. Not just read the gossip books, but push themselves beyond and do things that maybe they wouldn't do.

So I would encourage you all to read, read, read, just keep reading. And writing is another skill. It's practice. It's practice. The more you write, the better you get drafts. Our kids are learning. The first draft means nothing. You're going to do seven, ten drafts.

That's writing. It's not failure. It's not the teacher not liking you because it's all marked up in red. When you get to be a good writer, you mark your own stuff in red and you rewrite and you rewrite and you rewrite. That's what writing is. And if you come out with those skills and then you're confident and you can articulate and you can stand up straight and look anybody in the eye and say, this is who I am. It's a pleasure to meet you. That's one of the things we try to do with our mentoring program with young girls. My message to them is if you can walk into the White House and meet the first lady and say, my name is, how are you? And look me in the eye,

then there's nothing you can't do. That's why it's important. If you guys walked here, are sitting here in front of all these people, standing tall, asking questions, using your voice, you have to practice that. These arenas just show up again and again, and then you just get used to it.

The nerves go away and you start relaxing into your own abilities but it's practice. When you are struggling and you start thinking about giving up, I want you to remember something that my husband and I have talked about since we first started this journey nearly a decade ago. Something that has carried us through every moment in this White House, in every moment of our lives. And that is the power of hope. The belief that something better is always possible if you're willing to work for it and fight for it. It is our fundamental belief in the power of hope that has allowed us to rise above the voices of doubt and division,

of anger and fear that we have faced in our own lives and in the life of this country. Our hope that if we work hard enough and believe in ourselves, then we can be whatever we dream, regardless of the limitations that others may place on us. The hope that when people see us for who we truly are, maybe, just maybe, they too will be inspired to rise to their best possible selves. Shoot, it's the hope of my folks like my dad. Got up every day, do his job at the city water plant.

The hope that one day his kids would go to college and have opportunities he never dreamed of. That's the kind of hope that every single one of us, politicians, parents, preachers, all of us, need to be providing for our young people. Because that is what moves this country forward every single day. Our hope for the future and the hard work that hope inspires. I want our young people to know that they matter, that they belong. So don't be afraid. You hear me? Young people, don't be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered. Empower yourselves with a good education.

Then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise. Lead by example with hope. Never fear. So I figured something out that I thought I'd tell you about. This took me like 30 years to figure out, and I figured it out on this tour. So there's this old idea, you know, that you have to rescue your father from the belly of the whale, right? From some monster that's deep in the abyss. You see that in Pinocchio, for example. But it's a very common idea.

And I figured out why that is, I think. So imagine that we already know from a clinical perspective that, you know, if you set out a path towards a goal, which you want to do because you need a goal and you need a path, because that provides you with positive emotion, right? So you set up something as valuable. So that implies a hierarchy. You set up something as valuable. You decide that you're going to do that instead of other things. So that's kind of a sacrifice because you're sacrificing everything else to pursue that. And then you experience a fair bit of positive emotion and meaning as you watch yourself move towards the goal.

And so the implication of that is the better the goal, the more full and rich your experience is going to be when you pursue it. So that's one of the reasons for developing a vision and for fleshing yourself out philosophically, because you want to aim at the highest goal that you can manage. Okay, so you do that, and then what you'll find is that as you move towards the goal, there are certain things that you have to accomplish that frighten you. You know, maybe you have to learn to be a better speaker, a better writer, a better thinker. You have to be better to people around you or you have to learn some new skills

and you're afraid of that. Whatever, because it's going to stretch you if you pursue a goal. And so that'll put you up against challenges. Okay, so all the clinical data indicates the opposite of safe spaces, as Jonathan Haidt has been pointing out, that what you want to do

when you identify something that someone is avoiding what you want to do when you identify something that someone is avoiding, that they need to do, because they're afraid, you have them voluntarily confronted. And so you break it down. What you try to do, if you're a behavior therapist, is you break down the thing they're avoiding into smaller and smaller pieces, until you find a piece that's small enough so they'll do it. And it doesn't really matter, as long as they start it.

You know, then they can put the next piece on and the next piece. And what happens is they don't get less afraid exactly. They get braver. It's like there's more of them. And here's why. So imagine you do something new and that's informative, right? There's information in the action. And then you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perceptions.

So there's more to you because you've tried something new. So that's one thing. The second thing is, and there's good biological evidence for this now, that if you put yourself in a new situation, then new genes code for new proteins and build new neural structures and new nervous system structures. Same thing happens to some degree when you work out, right? Because your muscles are responding to the load, but your nervous system does that too. So you imagine that there's a lot of potential you locked 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, because who knows how much there is locked inside of you.

Okay, so now here's the idea. So let's assume that that scales as you take on heavier and heavier loads that more and more of you you get more and more informed because you're doing more and more difficult things but more and more of you gets unlocked and so then what that would imply is that if you got to the point where you could look at the darkest thing so that would be the abyss right that would be the deepest abyss if you could look at the harshest things like the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world and the malevolence of people and society, if you could look at that straight and directly, that that would turn you on maximally. And so that's the idea of rescuing your father, because imagine that you're like the potential composite of all the ancestral wisdom that's locked inside of you biologically.

But that's not going to come out at all unless you stress yourself, unless you challenge yourself. And the bigger the challenge you take on, the more that's going to turn on. And so that as you take on a broader and broader range of challenges, and you push yourself harder, then more and more of what you could be turns on, and that's equivalent to transforming yourself into the ancestral father, because you're like the, what would you call it, you're the consequence of all these living beings that have come before you,

and that's all part of your biological potentiality, and then if you can push yourself, then all of that clicks on, and that turns you into who you could be. And that's the re-representation of that positive ancestral father. The point is, your best strategic position is, how am I insufficient and how can I rectify that? That's what you've got. And the thing is, you are insufficient.

And you could rectify it. Both of those are within your grasp. If you aim low enough. One of the things you do... Why do you see that? That's another thing you keep saying. Aim low enough. Have a low enough bar. Why do you mean that?

Well, let's say you've got a kid and you want the kid to improve. You don't set them a bar that's so high that it's impossible for them to attain it. You take a look at the kid and you think, Okay, this kid's got this range of skill. Here's a challenge we can throw at him or her that exceeds their current level of skill, but gives them a reasonable probability of success. And so like I'm saying it tongue in cheek to some degree, you know, it's like, but if you're, but I'm doing it as an aid to humility. It's like, well, I don't know how to start improving my life. Someone might say that.

And I would say. Well you're not aiming low enough. There's something you could do. That you are regarding as trivial. That you could do. That you would do. That would result in an actual improvement. But it's not a big enough improvement for you.

So you won't lower yourself enough to take the opportunity. Incremental steps. Yes. So this is also what is achieved through exercise. It's one of the most important. Well, what do you do when you go and lift weights? You don't go and, like, if you haven't bench pressed before, you don't put 400 pounds on the damn bar and drop the bar through your skull.

You know, you think, look, when I started working out when I was a kid, I weighed about 130 pounds and I was 6'1". I was a thin kid and I smoked a lot. I wasn't in good shape. I wasn't in good physical shape. And I went to the gym and it was bloody embarrassing, you know, and people would come over and help me with the goddamn weights. Here's how you're supposed to use this. You know, it was humiliating. And maybe I was pressing 65 pounds or something at that point, you know, but what am I going to do? I'm going to lift up 150 pounds and injure myself right off the bat?

No, I had to go in there and strip down and put my skinny goddamn self in front of the mirror and think, son of a bitch, there's all these monsters in the gym who've been lifting weights for 10 years, and I'm struggling to get 50 pounds off the bar. Tough luck for me. But I could lift 50 pounds. And it wasn't very long until I could lift 75. Well, you know how it goes. And I never injured myself when I was weightlifting.

And the reason for that was I never pushed myself past where I knew I could go. And I pushed myself a lot. I gained 35 pounds of muscle in about three years in university. I kind of had to quit because I was eating so goddamn much I couldn't stand it. I was eating like six meals a day. It was just taking up too much time. But there's a humility in determining what it is that the wretched creature that you are can actually manage.

Aim low. And I don't mean don't aim. And I don't mean don't aim up. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hey there, fellow listeners. If you're passionate about fitness and wellness, then you're in for a treat with our latest ebook, The Ultimate Female Body Fitness Guide.

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and there's not going to be much glory in it to begin with. Because if you're not in very good shape, the goal that you could attain tomorrow isn't very glorious. But it's a hell of a lot better than nothing, and it beats the hell out of bitterness, and it's way better than blaming someone else. It's way less dangerous. And you could do it.

And what's cool about it, there's a statement in the New Testament. It's called the Matthew Principle, and economists use it to describe how the economy in the world works. To those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, everything will be taken. It's like what's very pessimistic in some sense, because it means that as you start to fail,

you fail more and more rapidly. But it also means that as you start to succeed, you succeed more and more rapidly. And so you take an incremental step and well, now you can lift 55 pounds instead of 52.5 pounds. You think, well, what the hell is that? It's like, it's one step on a very long journey. And so it's, and it starts to compound on you. So a small step today means, puts you in a position to take a slightly bigger step the next day. And then that puts you in a position to take a slightly bigger step the next day. And then that puts you in a position to take a slightly bigger step the next day.

And you do that for two or three years, man, you're starting to stride. 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. Now, I'm sure in your experiences in school and applying to college and picking your major and deciding what you want to do with life.

I'm sure people have told you to make sure you have something to fall back on. Make sure you got something to fall back on, honey. But I never understood that concept. Having something to fall back on. If I'm going to fall, I don't want to fall back on anything. Except my faith. I want to fall I don't want to fall back on anything except my faith I want to fall forward I figure at least this way I'll see what I'm going to hit 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 1,001st was the light bulb. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success. You've got to take risks. And I'm sure you've probably heard that before. But I want to talk to you about why that's so important. First, you will fail at some point in your life. Accept it.

You will lose. You will embarrass yourself. You will suck at something. There's no doubt about it. And I know that's probably not a traditional message for a part in a broadway musical perfect role for me i thought except for the fact that i can't sing so i'm i'm in the wings i'm about to go on stage but the guy in front of me he's singing like like like paparazzi he's just he's just going on and on and on and i'm just shrinking i'm getting smaller and smaller so they say oh thank you very much thank you very much and you will you'll be hearing from us so i come out with my little sheet music and it was it was uh just my imagination by the temptations. That's what I came up with. So I hand it to the accompanist,

and she looks at it and looks at me and looks out at the director and is like... So I start, you know, I'm going to sing. I'm like... It's just my imagination. Once again. And then coming away with me. And I'm not saying anything.

So I'm thinking I'm getting better. I start getting into it. It was just my imagination. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Washington. Thank you. So I assumed Thank you very much, Mr. Washington. Thank you. So I assumed I didn't get the job.

But the next part of the audition, he called me back. The next part of the audition is the acting part of the audition. So I'm like, hey, OK, maybe I can't sing, but I know I can act. So they pair me with this guy. And again, I didn't know about musical theater. And musical theater is big so they can reach everyone all the way in the back of the stadium and I'm more from a realistic naturalistic kind of acting where you you know you actually talk to the person next to you so I don't know what my line was my line was will hand me the cup and his line was well. I will hand you the cup my dear The cup will be there to be handed to you

I said, okay Well, should I give you the cup back? Oh, yes You should give it back to me because you know that is my cup and it should be given back to me. I didn't get the job. But here's the thing. I didn't quit. I didn't fall back. I walked out of there to prepare for the next audition and the next audition and the next audition I prayed I prayed and I prayed

but I continued to fail and fail and fail but it didn't matter because you know what there's an old saying you hang around the barbershop long enough sooner or later you're gonna get a haircut so you will catch a break and I did catch a break last year I did a play called fences on Broadway someone talked about it won Won the Tony Award. And I didn't have to sing, by the way.

But here's the kicker. It was at the Court Theater. It was at the same theater that I failed that first audition 30 years prior. The point is, every graduate here today has the training and the talent to succeed But do you have the guts to fail? Here's my second point about failure If you don't fail, you're not even trying I'll say it again If you don't fail, you're not even trying

My wife told me this great expression To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did. Les Brown's a motivational speaker. He made an analogy about this. He says, imagine you're on your deathbed and standing around your deathbed are the ghosts representing your unfulfilled potential. The ghost of the ideas you never acted on, the ghost of the talents you didn't use. And they're standing around your bed angry, disappointed, and upset. They say, we came to you because you could have brought us to life, they say.

And now we have to go to the grave together. So I ask you today, how many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes you've invested a lot in your education and people have invested in you and let me tell you the world needs your talents and does it ever I just got back from Africa like two days ago so if I'm rambling on it's because I'm jet lagged I just got back from South Africa it's beautiful country but there are places there with terrible poverty that need help. And Africa is just the tip of the iceberg. The Middle East needs your help. Japan needs your help. Alabama needs your help. Tennessee needs your help. Louisiana needs your help. Philadelphia needs your help. the world needs a lot and we need it from you we really do we need it from you young people i mean

i'm not speaking for the rest of us up here but i know i'm getting a little grayer we need it from you the young people because remember this so you got to get out there you got to give it everything you got whether it's your time your your talent, your prayers, or your treasures. Because remember this. You will never see a U-Haul behind a hearse. You can't take it with you. The Egyptians tried it. And all they got was robbed.

So the question is, what are you going to do with what you have? I'm not talking about how much you have. Some of you are business majors. Some of you are theologians, nurses, sociologists. Some of you have money. Some of you have patience. Some of you have kindness.

Some of you have love. Some of you have the gift of long-suff of long suffering whatever it is whatever your gift is what are you going to do with what you have all right now here's my last point about failure sometimes it's the best way to figure out where you're going your life will never be a straight path. I began at Fordham University as a pre-med student. I took a course called cardiac morphogenesis. I couldn't read it, I couldn't say it, I sure couldn't pass it. So then I decided to go into pre-law, then journalism, and with no academic

focus, my grades took off in their own direction. Yeah, down. I was a 1.8 GPA one semester, and the university very politely suggested that it might be better to take some time off. I was 20 years old. I was at my lowest point and then one day and I remember the exact day March 27th 1975 I was helping my mother in her beauty shop. My mother owned a beauty shop up in Mount Vernon and there was this older woman who was considered one of the elders in the town. And I didn't know her personally, but I was looking in the mirror. And every time I looked at the mirror, I could see her behind me. And she was staring at me.

She just kept looking at me. Every time I looked at her, she kept giving me these strange looks. So she finally took the dryer off her head and said something I'll never forget. First of all, she said, somebody give me a piece of paper. Give me a piece of paper. She said, young boy, I'll never forget. First of all, she said, somebody give me a piece of paper. Give me a piece of paper. She said, young boy, I have a prophecy. A spiritual prophecy. She said, you are going to travel the world and speak to millions of people.

Now, mind you, I'm 20 years old. I'm flunked out of school. In fact, like a wise ass, I'm thinking to myself, maybe she's got something in that crystal ball about me getting back into school next fall. But maybe she was on to something because later that summer, while working as a counselor at a YMCA camp in Connecticut, we put on a talent show for the campers. And after the show, another counselor came up to me and asked, have you thought about acting you're good at that so when i got back to fordham that fall i got in i changed my major once again for the last time and in the years that followed just as that woman prophesied i have traveled the world and i have spoken to millions of people through my movies millions who up till this day couldn't see me i

who up till this day i couldn't see while I was talking to them. And they couldn't see me. They could only see the movie. They couldn't see the real me. But I see you today. And I'm encouraged by what I see. And I'm strengthened by what I see. And I love what I see.

Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.

So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, we've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him? They said, of course. My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life. And 17 years later, I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that

was almost as expensive as Stanford. And all of my working class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting. It wasn't all romantic.

I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't

connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever, because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I love to do early in life. Waz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a two

billion dollar company with over 4,000 employees. We just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me. And for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him. And so at 30, I was out and very

publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did did the turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit I'd been rejected but I was still in love and so I decided

to start over I didn't see it then but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named Next, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought Next, and I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at Next is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.

And Lorene and I have a wonderful family together. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for

work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking, don't settle. My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like, if you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me. And since then, for the past 33 years, I've looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself,

if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride pride all fear of embarrassment or failure these things just fall away in the face of death leaving only what is truly important remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose you are already naked there is no reason not to follow your heart no one wants to die even

people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there and yet death is the destination we all share no one has ever escaped it and that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Today, I want to talk about purpose. But I'm not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose. We're millennials. We try to do that instinctively. Instead, I'm here to tell you that finding your purpose isn't enough. The challenge for our generation is to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose. One of my favorite stories is when JFK went to go visit the NASA Space Center and he saw a janitor holding a broom and he asked him what he was doing and the janitor replied,

Mr. President, I'm helping put a man on the moon. Purpose is that feeling that you are a part of something bigger than yourself, that you are needed, and that you have something better ahead to work for. Purpose is what creates true happiness. And today, I want to talk about three ways that we can create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose. By taking on big big meaningful projects together. By

redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue their purpose. And by building community all across the world. So first let's take on big meaningful projects. Our generation is gonna have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more than that. Every generation has its defining works. More than 300,000 people worked to put that man on the moon, including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio.

And millions of more people built the Hoover Dam and other great projects. And now it's our generation's turn to do great things. Now I know, maybe you're thinking, I don't know how to build a dam. I don't know how to get a million people involved in anything. Well, let me tell you a secret. No one does when they begin. Ideas don't come out fully formed.

They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started. Movies and pop culture just get this all wrong. The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate because we feel like we haven't had ours yet. And it prevents people with seeds of good ideas from ever getting started in the first place. In our society, we often don't take on big things because we're so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing.

The reality is, anything we do today is going to have some issues in the future. But that can't stop us from getting started. So what are we waiting for? It is time for our generation defining great works. How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? How about curing all diseases and getting people involved by asking volunteers to share their health data, track their health data, and share their genomes.

These achievements are all within our reach. Let's do them all in a way that gives everyone in our society a role. Let's do big things, not just to create progress, but to create purpose. The second is redefining our idea of equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue their purpose. Now, many of our parents had stable jobs throughout their careers, but in our generation, we're all a little entrepreneurial, whether we're starting our own project or finding our role in another one. And, you know, that's great because our culture of entrepreneurship is how we create so much progress. An entrepreneurial culture thrives when it is easy to try lots of new ideas. Facebook wasn't the first thing I built. I also built chat systems and games, study tools and music players, and I'm not alone. J.K. Rowling got rejected 12 times before she finally wrote and published Harry Potter.

The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail. Now, today, we have a level of wealth and equality that hurts everyone. When you don't have the freedom to take your idea and turn it into a historic enterprise, we all lose. And right now today our society is way over indexed on rewarding people when they're successful and we don't do nearly enough to make sure that everyone can take lots of different shots. Now let's face it, there is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can't even afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a

business. I know a lot of entrepreneurs and I don't know a single person who gave up on starting a business because they were worried they might not make enough money. But I know too many people who haven't had the chance to pursue their dreams because they didn't have a cushion to fall back on if they failed. Every generation expands its definition of equality. Previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society. And now it's time for our generation to define a new social contract. We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us

have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure that everyone has a cushion to try new ideas. And we're all going to make mistakes. So we need a society that's less focused on locking us up and stigmatizing us when we do. And as our technology keeps on evolving, we need a society that is more focused on providing continuous education through our lives. And yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn't going to be free. People like me should pay for it. And a lot of you are going to do really well, and you should too. But it's not just about giving money.

You can also give time. And I promise you, if you just take an hour or two a week, that's all it takes to give someone a hand and help them reach their potential. Now, maybe you're thinking, that's a lot of time. I'm not sure if I have that much time. I used to think that. We can all make time to give someone a hand. Let's give everyone the freedom to pursue purpose, not just because it's the right thing to do,

but because when more people can turn their dreams into something great, we are all better for it. Purpose doesn't only come from work. The third way we can create a sense of purpose for everyone is by building community. And in our generation, when we say purpose for everyone, we mean everyone in the world. In a recent survey of millennials around the world, asking what most defines our identity, the most popular answer wasn't nationality, ethnicity, or religion. It was citizen of the world.

That's a big deal. Every generation expands the circle of people we consider one of us. And in our generation, that now includes the whole world. We understand that the great arc of human history bends towards people coming together in ever greater numbers, from tribes to cities to nations, to achieve things that we could not on our own. We get that our greatest opportunities are now global.

We can be the generation that ends poverty, that ends disease. And we get that our greatest challenges need global responses too. No country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics. Progress now requires coming together, not just as cities or nations but also as a global community. But we live in an unstable time. There are people left behind by globalization across the whole world and it's tough to care about people in other places when we don't first feel good about our lives here at home. The purpose and stability in our own lives

that we can start to open up and care about everyone else too. And the best way to do that is to start building local communities right now. Change starts local. Even global change starts small with people like us. In our generation, the struggle of whether we connect more, whether we achieve our greatest opportunities, comes down to this. Your ability to build communities and create a world where every single person has a sense of purpose. I was trying to think, what did I say that could actually be helpful or useful to you in the future? And I thought I'd perhaps tell the story of how I sort of came to be here, how some of these things happen.

And maybe there's some lessons there, because I often find myself wondering, how did this happen? So when I was young, I didn't really know what I was going to do when I got older. But then eventually I thought that the idea of inventing things

would be really cool. The reason I thought that was because I read a quote from Arthur C Clarke which said that a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and and that's really true. If you think if you go back say 300 years the things that we take for granted today would be you'd be burned at the stake for you know know, being able to fly. That's crazy. Being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate,

having effectively, with the internet, a group mind of sorts, and having access to all the world's information instantly from almost anywhere on the earth. This is stuff that really would be magic, that would be considered magic in times past. In fact, I think it actually goes beyond that because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren't even imagined in times past. They weren't even in the realm of magic. So it actually goes beyond that.

So I thought, well, if I can do some of those things, basically, if I can advance technology, then that's like magic and that would be really cool. And I always had sort of a slight existential crisis because I was trying to figure out what does it all mean? Like, what's the purpose of things? And I came to the conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can do things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened. And that's really the only way forward.

So I studied physics and business because I figured in order to do a lot of these things, you need to know how the universe works and you need to know how the universe works and you need to know how the economy works and you also need to be able to bring a lot of people together to work with you to create something because it's very difficult to do something as an individual

if it's a significant technology. I originally came out to California to try to figure out how to improve the energy density of electric vehicles, basically to try to figure out how to improve the energy density of electric vehicles, basically to try to figure out if there was an advanced capacitor that could serve as an alternative to batteries.

And that was in 1995, and that's also when the Internet started to happen. And I thought, well, I can either pursue this technology where success may not be one of the possible outcomes, which is always tricky, or participate in the Internet and be part of it. So I decided to drop out, did some Internet stuff, one of which was PayPal. And I think maybe it's helpful to say one of the things that was important then in the creation of PayPal was kind of how it started. Because the initial thought with PayPal was to create an agglomeration of financial services. So if you have one place where all your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly. And then we had like a little feature, which was to

do email payments. And whenever we'd show the system off to someone, we'd show the hard part, which was the agglomeration of financial services, which was quite difficult to put together. Nobody was interested. Then we'd show people email payments, which was actually quite easy, and everybody was interested. So I think it's important to take feedback from your environment. You know, you want to be as closed loop as possible. So we focus on email payments and really try to make that work.

And that's what really got things to take off. But if we hadn't responded to what people said, then we probably would not have been successful. So it's important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them and correct your prior assumptions. Going from PayPal, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity? It really wasn't from the perspective of what's the rank ordered best way to make money, which is OK.

But what I think is going to most affect the future of humanity. So I think the biggest terrestrial problem we've got is sustainable energy, but the production and consumption of energy in a sustainable manner. If we don't solve that this century, we're in deep trouble. And then the other one being the extension of life beyond Earth to make life multi-planetary. So that's the basis for, the latter is the basis for SpaceX, and the former is the basis for Tesla and SolarCity. And when I started SpaceX, it actually, initially I thought that, well, there's no way one could possibly start a rocket company. I wasn't that crazy.

But then I thought, well, what is a way to increase NASA's budget? That was actually my initial goal. So I thought, well, if we can do a low-cost mission to Mars, something called Mars Oasis, which would land seeds with dehydrated nutrient gel, and you hydrate them upon landing, and then you'd have this great sort of money shot of green plants on a red background.

And the public tends to respond to precedents and superlatives. And this would be the first life on Mars, the furthest that life's ever traveled, as far as we know. And I thought, well, that would get people really excited and therefore increase NASA's budget. So obviously the financial outcome from such a mission would probably be zero. So anything better than that was on the upside. So I actually went to Russia three times to look at buying a refurbished ICBM because that was the best deal. And I can tell you it was very weird going there in late 2001, 2002,

going to the Russian rocket forces and saying, I'd like to buy two of your biggest rockets, but you can keep the nuke. That's a lot more. And that was 10 years ago, I guess, so they thought I was crazy. But I did have money, so that was okay. After making several trips to Russia, I came to the conclusion that actually my initial impression was wrong. Because my initial thought was, well, that there's not enough will to explore and expand beyond Earth and have a Mars base and that kind of thing.

But I can't conclude that that was wrong. In fact, there's plenty of will, particularly in the United States, because the United States is a nation of explorers, of people who came here from other parts of the world. I think the United States is really a distillation of the spirit of human exploration. But if people think it's impossible, or it's going to completely break the federal budget, then they're not going to do it. So after my third trip, I said,

OK, what we really need to do here is try to solve the space transport problem, and started SpaceX. And this was against the advice of pretty much everyone I talked to. But one friend made me sit down and watch a bunch of videos of rockets blowing up. Let me tell you, he wasn't far wrong. It was tough going there in the beginning because I'd never built anything physical. I mean, I'd built like little model rockets as a kid and that kind of thing, but I'd never had a company that built anything physical so i had to figure out how to how to do all these things and and bring together the right team of people and so we we did all that and and then failed three times um it it was tough

tough going because the thing about a rocket is that the the passing grade is 100 percent and uh you don't get to actually test the rocket in the real environment that it's going to be in. So I think the best analogy for rocket engineering is if you want to create a really complicated bit of software, you can't run the software as an integrated whole, and you can't run it on the computer it's intended to run on. But the first time you put it all together and run it on that computer it must run with no bugs

that's that's basically the essence of it so so we missed the mark there that the first launch i was picking up bits of rocket near the launch site it was a bit sad and uh but we we learned with with each successive flight and uh and we're able to with uh eventually with each successive flight and were able to, eventually with the fourth flight in 2008, reach orbit. And that was also with the last bit of money that we had. Thank goodness that that happened. I think the saying is, fourth time's the charm. So we got the Falcon 1 to orbit and then began to scale that up to the Falcon 9, which is about an order of magnitude more a thrust. It's around a million pounds of thrust. And we managed to get that to orbit

and then developed Dragon spacecraft, which recently was able to dock and return to Earth from the space station. That was a white-knuckled event. So, yeah, it's a huge relief. I still can't quite believe it actually happened. But there's a lot more that must happen beyond this in order for humanity to become a space-faring civilization, ultimately a multi-planet species. And that's something I think is vitally important,

and I hope that some of you will participate in that either at SpaceX or at other companies because it's just really one of the most important things for the preservation and extension of consciousness. It's worth noting as I'm sure people are aware that the earth has been around for four billion years and civilization at least in terms of having writing has been around for 10 000 years and that's being generous and i think um i'm actually i'm actually fairly optimistic about the future of earth so i don't want to i don't want to sort of people to have

the wrong impression that i think we're all about to die i think things will most likely be okay for a long time on earth but not not for sure, but most likely. But even if it's sort of 99% likely, a 1% chance is still worth spending a fair bit of effort to ensure that we have, we've backed up the biosphere, planetary redundancy, if you will.

So I think it's really quite important. And in order to do that, there's a breakthrough that needs to occur, which is to create a rapidly and completely reusable transport system to Mars, which is one of those things that's right on the borderline of impossible. But that's sort of the thing that we're going to try to achieve there with SpaceX. And then on the Tesla front, the goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do, because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people's perception of an electric vehicle, because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly and had low range, kind of like a golf cart. And so that's why we created the Tesla Roadster to show that you can be fast,

attractive and long range. And it's amazing how even though you can show that something works on paper and the calculations are very clear, until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn't really sink in for people. And so that I think is something worth noting. If you're going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint, but if you have an actual demonstration article, even if it's in primitive form, that's much, much more effective for convincing people. I think the overarching point I want to make is that you guys are the magicians of the 21st century. I don't like anything to hold you back.

Imagination is the limit. And go out there and create some magic. Thank you. Thanks for listening. Kindly support the movement of this podcast by supporting us or subscribing to our premium content for more exclusive stuff. When you do so, you also get a shout out in our next episode. Thank you.