The Resilient Mind - Every Successful Person Has Done This One Thing - Steve Harvey

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Broderick Stephen Harvey, Sr. is an American television host, actor, writer, producer, and comedian. He hosts The Steve Harvey Morning Show, Family Feud, Celebrity Family Feud, the Miss Universe competition, Family Feud Africa, and the arbitration-based court comedy Judge Steve Harvey.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Every Successful Person Has Done This One Thing with Steve Harvey. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. I'm a college dropout. I was homeless, lived in a car for three years. I've lost every single thing I had, family included.

I've been written off so many times. But today, the person that you're sitting in front of you is a process. I want to talk to you for a moment about the process. Because, see, one way to get a person to really follow you is to be the example of what you're trying to get them to follow. You know, my daddy used to tell me all the turn, he said, son, best thing you can do for people to not be one of them because you can't help the cause.

Your brain is divided into two halves. positive and negative, good and evil. Each half of your brain has millions of factory workers on each side. You got a million factory workers on the positive side, you got a million factory workers on the negative side. At the forefront of each one of those factories in your brain is a forming.

You got forming positive and you got forming negative. You are in charge. You're the boss of the founties. of the factory. So let me show you how this works. You got a remote control. You go to your house tonight and you press that power button and you press it.

When you point it at the TV, what do you expect to happen? You expect TV to come on. You press the power button. You expect the TV to come on. If you wanna watch HBO, and HBO is channel 300, and you press 300 and then you press 3.0,

and then you press select, What do you expect to come on that TV and what comes on that TV? So now, since your brain is in two halves, let me show you how this works. You wake up in the morning and you say, man, I don't feel myself today. I got up on the wrong side of the bed. I'm not a morning person. Forming negative. He hears that.

He steps to the front. He said, what did you say? You said, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed day. I'm not myself. I'm not a morning person. He says, you got it right away. He said, hey, the boss just woke up and said he's not a morning person. He's having a bad day today, and he ain't feeling himself.

Let's get to work. The million factory workers start producing thoughts to justify what you just said. So now guess what? Man, I hate my alarm clock went off this morning. I got to get out here in this traffic. I'm going to drive down here to there. I don't even like these people on my job. I can't stand this car.

I'm fin to get in this morning. I shall wish I had a new car, but I'm driving this ragged-ass car, and on and on and on. And your day starts tumbling into what you ordered at the top of the day. You can wake up in the morning, and you say, you know what? Today is going to be a great day today. I expect something really good to happen for me today. Man, thank you, Lord, for waking me up this morning.

He said, what did you say? You said, I'm having a great day today. I expect something good to happen today. Thank you, Lord, for waking me up. Forming positive turns around and goes, all right, let me have your attention. Steve's having a great day today. He's expecting some wonderful things to happen, and, man, let's get it going, and let's start manufacturing thoughts.

Same brain. Man, I can't wait to go to work today. It may not be the job I won't, but at least I got a job. I appreciate the fact that I don't have a car, but at least I can walk to the train. Man, this is going to be great today. That's how your mind works 24-7. It never turns off. You have got to change the way you think.

It is the whole determining factor of where you go in life. We are all where we are today because we thought ourselves to this position. If you don't like the position, think yourself out of it. Change your attitude, you change your altitude. I'm going to tell you something that every successful person has to do. including you, believe it or not, every successful person in this world has jumped. I'm going to tell you what I mean by that.

Eventually, you are going to have to jump. You cannot just exist in this life. You have got to try to live. If you are waking up thinking that it's got to be more to your life than it is, man, believe that it is. Believe in your heart or hearts that it is. But to get to that life, you're going to have to jump. See people in life when you're standing on the cliff of life and you see people soaring by,

when you see people soaring, going to exotic places, you hear about them doing wonderful things. Maybe you look up the street and your neighbor just gets a car every year and every two years. How is he doing that? Have you ever thought? Maybe this person right here has identified their gift and is living in their gift. because your Bible says, this is your Bible, says your gift will make room for you. Your gift, not your education.

You're going to get education, that's nice. But if you don't use your gift, that education only going to take you so far. I know a lot of people got degrees, man. They ain't even using them. It's your gift. But the only way for you to soar is you got to jump. You got to take that gift that's packed away on your back.

You got to jump off that cliff and pull that cord. that gift opens up and provides the saw. If you don't ever use it, you're going to just go to work. And if you're getting up going to work on a job every day that you hate going to, that ain't living, man. You just exist. At one point in time, you ought to see what living's like. But the only way to see what living like, you got to jump.

And here's a problem. Let me just be real with you. When you first jump, let me tell you something, your parachute will not open right away. I'm sorry. I wish I could tell you it did, but it don't. When you jump, it's not going to open right away. You're going to hit them rocks. You're going to get some skin tow off on them cliffs.

You're going to get all your clothes tore off. You're going to get some cuts on you. You're going to be bleeding pretty bad. But eventually, eventually the parachute has to open. That is a promise of God. Here's another thing. You can play it safe. and deal without the cuts and the tars.

And you can stand on that cliff of life forever safe. But if you don't jump, I got another promise I can make you. Your parachute will never know. You'll never know what God really have for you. I was speaking at a school once. I was talking to the students. The principal was mortified with my message because I was telling the truth.

I was telling the kids, your education is important. But your education is not the most important thing in your life. I'm sorry, it's not. Your dream is the most important thing in this world. Principal came up on the stage while I was speaking. Don't ever say that to my school again. Well, I'm just telling you, dog.

You could save your kids a lot of pain if you ever talk to them about their dreams. You gotta talk to young people about their dreams. If you talk to kids about their dreams, your dreams can spur you to get the education. But if you never find out what a child is dreaming about, you can't hold their attention. It's the dream, man.

You gotta dream about something so bad, that it dwarfs all your fears. The way you overcome fear is with your dream. You gotta make your dream so big that nothing matters except that dream. You're willing to do everything that's necessary. I was listening to Will Smith the other day. Will Smith said, the best things in life

is on the other side of fear. It's on the other side of fear. But fear freezes people, man. The fear of failure freezes people. Suppose I don't do it. Well, you might not make it. But I got news for you. If you don't do it, you damn shall.

ain't going to make it. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. I talk to so many people who get older, like some of us are, and they've lost to faith. Well, faith is really simple. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. All that mean is, in the beginning,

you just hope something pop off. You know, you just kind of hope something happened for you. I was hoping I would get on TV. I wrote it on a piece of paper when I was 10, I want to be on TV. The problem I had when I wrote it at 10 was I suffered from a severe stuttering problem. I could not talk outside of my house.

So can you imagine when I wrote on a piece of paper, I want to be on TV and turn daddy in? The first thing the little boy next to me asked me, he said, well, how long is your TV show going to be? Because you're going to be on TV all day. But when I wrote it on the paper, it wasn't factual. I was just hoping. You just got to start with the hope.

Faith is the substance of things that you hope for. You just hope something, Joe. Then what happened in through grace and favor, he'd give you a couple of them things you hope for, and then you're supposed to start believing then. Because now it turns into faith. But if you take this scripture, faith is the substance of things hoped for

and the evidence of things not seen. Albert Einstein said that imagination is everything. It's the preview to life's coming attract. That's what your imagination is. Your imagination is actually very, very real. Everything you imagine could be a preview to life's coming attraction. Everything we have today came from somebody's imagination. Somebody was talking on the phone with their cord on the wall

and got sick of it and said, you know what, man, if I could just go outside and talk on the phone, we got cell phones. Somebody got tired of driving across the country and said, man, if I could fly over there, boom, we got airplanes. airplanes. Imagination is everything. It's a preview to life's coming attractions. Everything you've ever imagined is real. The problem with most people is you think your imagination is hocus pocus. It's really not. It's a preview of a coming attraction. If you react to your imagination,

that's where your real life is. It's just God showing you what he has for you. The problem people have is they tell their imagination to the wrong people. See, if you want to kill a big dream tell it to a small-minded person. It's dead. How many times, man, have you had a tremendous idea? Something you thought was the one. And you wouldn't told it to your loved ones and your so-called friends. And they shot it down.

I mean, you was convinced that it was just, oh, man, I just came to you. And you told it to them and they shot it down. And you thought since they was your loved ones and they'd and they got your best interest at heart, you believed them. You was wrong. You let them talk you out of what God got for you. As a kid, you know, I didn't know, but my gift is that I found out later on, I have the ability to think extremely quick, and I can take any piece of information

and transpose it into comedy immediately. Now, when you were a kid and you don't understand that, you get in a lot of trouble. I didn't know what it was until I got older, that this was a gift that, that it did make room for me that I became a stand-up comedian which started with a dream of mine and it led to where I am today. It's a lot of stuff that happened in between that.

But your gift is the thing that you do the absolute best with the least amount of effort. That's your God-given gift and everybody has one and God gives it to you at birth. You don't have to go anywhere to discover it. It's not in the water.

It's not on the mountain top. It ain't hid under a rock. Your God-given gift is instilled in you at birth. If you pursue that as opposed to your passion, there lies your greatest chance for success. The problem with people is we don't pursue our gift oftentimes. We try to go get an education and make it think that's going to get us somewhere. If you identify that gift, man, that gift is the thing that can make you great.

We're all participating in this thing called life. Life has Evan Flows. mountaintops, it's got valleys, it's got thunderstorms in it, earthquakes. This life, you stop expecting it to go smooth, because it ain't fin to go smooth. The road to success is always under construction. Ain't no, this life ain't set up to be smooth. You combat negativity and you combat discouragement with gratitude. It's the one way to combat discouragement is with gratitude.

What messes you up is you focus on the thing that's not happening. And that causes you to get discouraged. So whenever you get discouraged, you have to change your focus from what's not happening to what has happened. And it straightens you out immediately. Because what causes the downslide is if you get wrapped up into what ain't happening, it'd get ugly, man,

and it just snowballed. But you have to focus on gratitude. People understand how serious gratitude is. You know, it's a serious principle of success. It's hard to be miserable and grateful at the same time. You have to take chances in life. If you don't take chances in life, you'll never have the life God has for you.

Life is about risk. If you play it safe in life, you ain't going to have much of a life. If you play it safe, you won't have much of a life. Life is risk. It takes courage to pursue your dream. I just did it.

It cost me everything, but eventually God is very good, man, when he sees you take a leap of faith. He supplies you everything you need. Now, it's going to cost you something. But most people, most people are not willing to pay what it costs to go after your dream because you're going to have to hurt a little bit.

And most people don't like being uncomfortable. If you don't want to be uncomfortable, please do not pursue success because success is a very uncomfortable feeling. And I just learned to be uncomfortable. I learned to be comfortable, being uncomfortable. See, if you think you're too old to make it, let me give you a prime example.

Colonel Sanders. Colonel Sanders has been frying chicken his whole life. He was telling everybody he had the best chicken in the world. Ain't nobody believing. They turned him down everywhere. Colonel Sanders didn't get a franchise till he was in his 60s. Kentucky fried chicken

sell more chicken than anybody in the world today. So if you're sitting there thinking, because you've got a little gray on you, you're too late, as long as God waking you up in the morning, that's the sign that he ain't through with you. So what you're tripping for?

Last year I spoke at the Salt Convention. The Salt Convention is where billionaires from around the world gather. They gather in Vegas once a year to talk about how they're going to change the world. There's a couple hundred billionaires in this world. They all come to Las Vegas once a year to Salt Commission. I was asked last year to be the keynote speaker,

and I'm tripping because I'm not a billionaire. And I asked a guy who asked me to do it. I said, I'm not a billionaire. You do understand that. We said, Mr. Hav, we know everything about you. We know your net worth and everything. I said, well, what can you all learn from me? He said, everything.

He said, the reason we want to hear your story because the majority of us that are billionaires, we inherited some money and we grew it. A couple of us inherited a billion. We automatically, some of us inherited 300 million and we turned it into a billion. You come from nothing.

What we want to know is how you got to where you are after coming from nothing. How did you live in a car for three years and wind up on my life? more TV shows than anybody. How did you survive flunking out of school? How did you survive all of that? We want to know that.

Because in case something happens to us, we don't really have the information that you have, or how to come from the back to the front, or how to come from the bottom to the top. So I get asked oftentimes to speak. And so when I was telling them how I made it, I was telling them about the fortitude that I developed. And then I told them about the faith that I had.

And that was really startling to them. Now, a lot of them are people of faith. But a lot of people who were born with a lot of money ain't really had to have a lot of faith. You understand? You have an idea of what it feels like. You've seen some kids get put in foster care. You've seen child protective services come to somebody's house.

You've seen kids come to school. with less. You might have been one of the kids that went to school with less. You have struggled to give your kids a better life than the one you had. They don't hear this. But I will tell you something right now. You can be successful without an education. You can be successful without coming from a rich family. You can be successful. I don't care what color you are, what faith you belong to, your sexual preference. I don't care what's wrong with you. You can be successful. Everybody in your life will have a turn back moment. No matter who you are, you're going to have such a period in your life where it seems like it's not working. You're going to have doubts,

you're going to have a lot of trials and tribulations and challenges, and everybody has what's called a turn back moment. You always have a moment in your life where the direction you're going, you will have to make a decision to keep going or you turn back. The sad thing is, the average person turns back. But think about this. If you're going somewhere and you turn back, you can never get that. If you wake up every day and go get in your car,

say, I'm going to the store, and halfway to the store, you turn around, and then the next day you go to the store and you turn around, you do realize that you'll never get to the store. So whatever you need it from the store, now is even a greater need because you turn back. Every time you turn back,

it does not change the need. So what kept me from going was, what kept me going was, I created, I made turning back, giving up, never an option. And I had really dark moments, man, where I thought I was going to, I just didn't think I was going to make it.

I mean, why I am today, I didn't see it clearly at all. I had a lot of turn back moments. But you know what it was for me, man? being successful is so hard, but I realized that not being successful was hard too. The difference between not being successful hard and trying to get successful and hard, if you're trying to get successful, then it's hard.

At least there's some payout. There's a payoff. If you hang in there, there's payoff. When you're not successful, it's hard. It's hard not having money. It's hard never knowing how to come up with your mortgage and your bond and your rent. It's hard not knowing that.

How are you going to feed your children? How are you going to pay your bills? It's hard, ain't it? So if it's hard that way and it's hard being successful, I might as well deal with how hard it is to be successful because at least one day, that could be a payout. If you just stay in the hard part of life of not being successful, ain't no payoffs.

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