Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero - I Must Control My Mind To Change My Life | Best Motivational Speeches

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

In this episode, Eddie dives into the idea that real transformation begins in the mind. The stories we tell ourselves, the focus we choose, and the meaning we assign to our challenges all determine the direction of our lives. You can’t change your world until you learn to direct your thoughts, silence the noise, and choose perspective over panic. Control your mind, and the rest will follow.More from Eddie Pinero:Wear the Mindset: www.agns.lifestyleMonday Motivation Newsletter: https://www.eddiepinero.com/newsletterYour World Within Podcast: https://yourworldwithin.libsyn.com/Stream these tracks on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2BLf6pBInstagram - @your_world_within and @IamEddiePineroTikTok - your_world_withinFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/YourworldwithinTwitter - https://www.twitter.com/IamEddiePineroBusiness Inquiries - http://www.yourworldwithin.com/contact#liveinspired #yourworldwithin #motivation

There's an old saying, if you're already in pain, if you've already walked through hell, you might as well get something out of it. Because pain on its own is just suffering. But pain with purpose, well, that's transformation. Quick story that I think will help kind of paint this picture. And this is really the light bulb moment for me. Like, wow, this is something that it's going to stick with me for a while. And I'd love to pass it along to my audience here.

So a few days ago, I was in the gym training with Eric, my friend and trainer, and we're doing intervals, kind of like basically lifting weights followed by some exercise that's fast-paced endurance. So your heart rate's always up. I was doing dumbbell bench press straight into pushups. You kind of repeat that cycle, you know, five or six times. And towards the end of that, I'm just completely exhausted. So I pressed the weights, set them down, and then I moved into push-up position, you know, one, two, three, and by, I don't know, six or seven, my arms were screaming to the point where I'm like, okay, I've reached failure. You know the ship's about to sink, right? And so towards the end, maybe rep eight or nine, I just collapsed.

Hit the floor. Figured I'd take five seconds, you know, shake it out and come back and finish the push-ups. But Eric was standing right over me. And he looks at me and he says, never do that. And I kind of looked at him confused, like, what? Because it's not like I'm dogging the workout, right? I'm going as hard as I can here. He just says, never just fall.

That's quitting, right? You don't quit. Why would you do that? Never just quit. And it took me a second to understand. I'm like, what do you mean? I gave everything. But then he explained, just think very practically, Eddie.

Think about how much blood you've forced into those muscles, how much energy you've already spent, how hard you've worked to get to this point of failure, this beautiful precipice. When you know you're failing, you fight all the way down. You fight until you physically cannot move and your chest hits the floor. Because that's the moment where growth is born.

That's the place where strength is forged. Never give that up. That's the goal. That's what's precious. And, you know, I got to be honest, like, hearing that, it made sense right away, but I'd never thought of it before. And, like, my ego was bruised. I felt embarrassed.

Like, how has this never crossed my mind? You know, and I thought I was going all out. I thought that was just the way you do it. You drop, you reset, and you come back. That's why coaches are so valuable. That's why you need mentors. That's why we need people who see things we don't. Because what I thought was the end was really just a missed opportunity.

And so now that I've sort of painted this picture in the gym, let's pull it up a level and make it practical. Let's find the bigger picture. That five-second window doesn't just, live in the gym, it lives in my life and your life. It shows up when you hit the wall in your career, when the relationship cracks, when the dream feels too far away, we think collapse, right? It's natural. We think, I'll reset, I'll try again later. But what if that's the moment to fight? What if the fall itself is the rep, or at least the most important one, right? What if the breakdown is what

forges the breakthrough. See, every setback carries within it the raw material for your comeback. Every loss carries the seed of wisdom. But, and here's the kicker, only if you choose to grasp it, to take advantage, to fight all the way down. Only if you refuse to drop and walk away. The growth is not just in the success. It's in the struggle.

It's in the awkward moments when you're not polished or composed, when your voice shakes, when your hands trumbled. That's the iron being sharpened. That's you becoming who you were meant to be. So if you're listening to this right now and you feel like life just handed you an L, you know, given the context, fill in the blank. Maybe you failed an exam, lost a job, maybe someone you trusted let you down. Don't just collapse. Don't let yourself, because of the tension, try. drop and move on to something else.

Don't dismiss it as wasted time. Squeeze everything you can out of it. Extract the lesson and capture the wisdom. Let the circumstance break you down because in that breaking down is the blueprint for building back stronger. Muscles grow when they tear. Souls grow when they're tested.

Lives expand when they are stretched to the brain. And here's the truth. If you're already in pain, if you've already walked through that hell, why would you leave empty-handed? Why wouldn't you capture the most precious finale? Why would you walk away without the treasure that the suffering contains?

Fight when your lungs are screaming. Fight when your body. fighting, fight when your mind says you have nothing left because the way down the messy, brutal descent to the floor is the foundation of your resurrection. One day you'll look back and realize the moments that defined you were not the easy victories. They never are. They were the times you chose not to simply fall, but to fight every inch of the way. So don't waste the pain.

waste the hell you've endured or walked through. You're already in it. Make something of it. Let the fall become your greatest rep and fight all the way down. If is about duality. It's about being grateful for the road behind you, but also excited and hungry for what's ahead. That balance is where growth lives. It's why we created AGNS. Always grateful. never satisfied. More than just an apparel company, it's a reminder that there's always another hill to climb. And if you go to agns.

organdest and you sign up for the email list, you'll get daily inspiration right to your inbox, latest updates on all the new merch drops, as well as a 20% off discount code. Hope to see you there. One year, after a quadruple bypass, He was sitting right next to me, lacing up his shoes, getting ready to run an ultramarathon in the South Florida Sun. Didn't tell a soul, by the way, that he had a stent put in less than two weeks ago.

No, not Tom. It was funny echoes of him a few years back saying, Eddie, you're not a doctor. So what do I get out of complaining about my pain to you? rang through my head. There was sun, humidity, recovering body, and all. 68 years of life's trials and tribulations under his belt, all of it there with us at the starting line as we took off.

When all was sudden done, he completed 50 miles, which is a feat that, I don't know, I'd ventured against 99% of healthy men in their 20s, couldn't just pick up and do tomorrow. He was impressive. But amidst the run, I forget how many miles in, this moment really stood out to me. We were standing on this walkway that kind of diverged from the overpass, leaning against a rail.

And just watching the water pushed through the bridge underneath us and empty out into the Atlantic, he needed a breather. because his reconfigured heart was throwing a quick temper tantrum. You know, I made a joke about how it wasn't quite lunacy, but he was flirting with it. And he goes, you want to hear a good story? Me, of course, yes, I'm a story guy. And he said, okay, and he was off. He starts this story about a married man.

And this man is living in a hut. with his wife in a little village. And the man's in-laws lived in a hut one village over. One day he woke up to the news that his in-laws hut had totally burned down. So what would happen next? You guessed it. The in-laws packed up what remained of their belongings and headed over to live with the man and his wife.

So now he had the in-laws living with him in his hut. How bad could it be? Well, a few weeks go by and he realized it can be that bad. He just couldn't stand, you know, the living situation, constant nagging, judging, lack of personal space, all the things, right? He says, I need help.

So he goes to a village elder. We'll call her the sage. He goes to the sage. He says, look, you're incredibly wise. I need some help. My in-laws moved in, and it's hell. My life is terrible. I can't stand this.

please help me. And the sage thinks for a second, says, okay, let me ask you something, do you have any chickens? He says, chickens? Yeah, I have chickens. Why? The sage says, well, go get them and bring them into your hut.

Let the chickens live with you as well. The man, somewhat confused, he thanks to sage. He goes home, brings all his chickens into his hut. Then another week goes by, as you'd expect things are just absolutely chaos. Chickens running around, feathers everywhere, things are dirty, a nightmare.

So he goes back to the sage, and he says, look, I don't know what the idea was here or what the intent was, but somehow my life is worse. Can you please help me make it better? And the sage says, I think I can. Do you have any pigs? He says, yeah, pigs? Sage says, perfect. Invite the pigs into the hut to live with you.

Again, he looks at her confused. Invite the pigs to live with me into the hut too? Yes, she says. So he leaves, brings all the pigs in. After about a week, he looks around and just a dystopian situation. Disaster. And he's furious. And he goes back to the sage.

He says, Look, you have made my life somehow way worse. Do you know how disgusting pigs are? This place is just out of a horror movie. The sage says, I see. He says, you see, are you going to help me or not? Right. Please give me some guidance to make my life better.

So the sage sits there, silence for a few seconds. Finally, she says, okay, listen to me careful. If you want to make your life better, here's what you do. go home and remove the chickens and pigs from your hut. You're welcome. It's a message about perspective. It's gratitude for the things that in the moment we might not see or appreciate.

I'll never forget the quote, a healthy person wants a million things. A sick person wants only one. It emphasizes how much we take for granted. We don't appreciate the day-to-day or our normalcy, our reality, until it's pulled from us. We have to be reminded, hey, there's a lot to be thankful for here. And I inject this because this is, you know, this is personal experience. It's anecdotal.

But it was really a big deal for me. Like I used to think of gratitude as woo-woo, right? The way it's used, it's like, okay, go around saying you're grateful, that's nice. I didn't understand the tool that it was. And that it shines a mirror on all those things that we don't see. The things we get to do, the people in our lives, the communities we live in, our ability to go out and, you know, work out if we want to. Entertain ourselves if we want to, right?

Like you fill in the blank. All of these things we just take for granted. But they matter. And what Tom was saying that day on that bridge overlooking the water was that putting himself through that manufactured hell made everything else feel like bliss in comparison. You know, mile 30 and 40 and 50, especially after heart surgeries, right,

was the metaphorical chicken and pig. It was inviting chaos and discomfort. into his life so that when he reached the finish line, he could remove all that pain and look at his world with a new lens, a new appreciation for baseline. You know, when I look at the wrong things, when I focus on the wrong stuff,

which I do from time to time, fall out of alignment completely, right? I feel frustrated and I feel small. I get overwhelmed. And when the dust settles, it's obvious to me that it's because I'm not, no longer seeing the power in what's around me. When you take away the extra, right,

and you focus on the things that matter that are meaningful to you, there exists enough to move mountains. The tools exist to change your life. It's just that sometimes they get buried under the wrong things, things you don't need, and that could be an infinite list as well. We put ourselves into chaos intentionally so that when we remove the chaos,

we are reminded how strong we are. We get how small and manageable the obstacles that we often allow to consume us. Create that perspective for yourself. Push your limits. See how far you can go. Let life know that. nothing is too much for you to manage. Nothing is bigger than you.

Remind yourself how much of a blessing it is to wake up in the morning and take in the day. Feel the sun on your face. The challenges are a gift. The obstacles are beautiful. The uncertainty is magic. So make sure you can see that. Help yourself understand it. Visualize it.

appreciate it for no other reason than the practicality of the exercise you don't want to let life slip by and realize you didn't treat time like the precious commodity that it is i see time from this view the sun is rising perfect just like the first like the day before it. I see people coming and going, making their way into the world. I see the steam rising up from my coffee cup, disappearing into a sky much bigger than me. I see ticking clocks. I hear times' impatient song. An orchestra of chirping birds and crashing waves, I hear people comparing and contrasting as they make their way into the world. I hear the sound of my computer turning on.

Each key, a tiny rocket ship, making my thoughts tangible and taking them to galaxies undiscovered, I hear ticking clocks. I feel times tough love. The coolness of the breeze against my skin. I feel people's uncertainty and their hope as they make their way into the world. I feel the paper between my fingers as I turn the page. Converting stories to weapons tucked away for a future battle, I feel ticking clocks.

If life is war, time is a mercenary. working for you when properly compensated or against you when neglected. And the way I see it, there are two approaches to any predicament. Add your solution or subtract your problem. Univigorated soul has withdrawn. Detached from all that does not empower. Walked away from everyone's standards and expectations but their own. See, ticking clocks are in.

individualized symphonies. They blend into the background and become the cadence to your triumphant march. When you have immersed yourself and that what you love, time is your heart beat. And when you have not, it's a subtle warning sign. Whispering of roads untravelled and gifts unopened, singing reminders that you must realign that time can't be stockpiled or saved. It's loyal to no one. person when you find yourself fighting to remember how precious the moment or beautiful the day,

it's not a lack of time, but a lack of direction. You're fighting an enemy that would become an ally for the small price of passion and clarity. That's the North Star to be followed. Because beauty, beauty is seeing ticking clocks, not as a dwindling resource, but as a flowing river. And happiness is hearing ticking clocks. Not as a finite melody, but as the breeze that you are back as you float downstream. And perfection is feeling ticking clocks. Not as an obligation or imposition, but as a once and a lifetime journey.

A metronome for you to compose your masterpiece. Give a pulse to that which hides away in your soul waiting to emerge. It is anything and everything seeking your direction one second one thought One breath at a time Some build others tear down some take risks Others critique the risk takers Some pursue the infinite others settle for a life of limitation

Some make change Others complain that things are no longer the same. Some help people grow, others think that your loss is their gain. Some learn from misfortune, others become held down by it. Some turn fear and opportunity, others avoid the unknown. Some never stop learning. Others think they have all the answers. Some do others talk.

Some give others take. Some live, others wish. Some see an opportunity. Others see an obligation. Some work toward the possibility of excellence. Others run from the possibility of defeat. Some fall and get back up. Others stay where they are

so that they never have to work. worry about leaving their feet. Some embrace the elements, others take shelter, some search, seek and discover, others wait to be. Some perform, others watch. Some persist, others stop. Some make the most of every single day. And others watch those very same days go by.

So which one are you? What will you create with the pieces presented to you? Not tomorrow or the next day, but right now and every second moving forward. Will you build or tear down, take the easy road or the road less travel? When all is said and done and you've come to the end of your story, what will it say? You know, one of the hardest things to do is to walk away from a situation. that's just okay. That's fine.

It's doable, livable. There's an idea that the enemy of great isn't its inverse. The enemy of great is not average or insignificant or, I don't know, throw in any similar word. No, the enemy of grape is good. Why? Because it's incredibly easy to rationalize good. It's incredibly easy to sit back. and tell yourself, hey, things aren't currently broken, so why touch them, leave it alone.

It's why it's a dangerous place to be. Comfort doesn't, on its own, initiate action or evolution. There has to be some sort of stressor to ignite the flame. And I'll get a response, you know, every now and then, truly in good faith, asking, well, what's wrong with average? Why can't I just be? Not everyone can be LeBron James or Adele or Denzel Washington. Eddie, this convo sends people down a path of false hope.

Well, hear me out. Because I'm certainly not saying everyone can be LeBron James, but they can most definitely be LeBron James in their own world. And instead are settling for some sort of bench roll. I'm not saying if you're not a movie star making 20 minutes, million dollars of film you've lost. I'm merely pointing out that perhaps you haven't even found the courage to star in your own movie, the one that is your life.

And I can't speak for every human being on the planet here, but I most certainly can speak for myself. The easiest thing for me, the temptation I always find myself grappling with, is the temptation to stay where I am. accept things as they are, pass change off as something that's just a little bit out of my control. That's what my lizard brain always seems to want. It's really nice to not have to feel the burden of knowing I can change things around me, right? That prospect of creating my own friction, my own chaos so that I can in a sense tame it and elevate myself, that can be overwhelming. That's stressful. But you know what it is at the end of the day?

It's thrilling. It's meaningful. And it may have taken me years to understand, but I'd trade a safe life for a meaningful one any day. It was my coming to understand that statistically, we should not be here. The odds are so small that you're alive listening to this, that the word improbability doesn't do it justice. It's a miracle in every sense.

of the word and so what do we do about that? How do you explain a feeling? How do you explain the cost of not going, of fewer sunrises, less laughter, untapped creativity? Unwalked paths, journeys never started. You can't. Which is why you have to go. Good is not detrimental because it's insufficient. It's detrimental because it gives you just enough to make stepping up.

make stepping out into the world feel illogical. It's a warm blanket, keeping you comfortable enough to forfeit that feeling you truly crave. And I hope it's clear. My take in this is not that we aren't enough. It's that we have to be reminded that our biological compass points towards survival. And survival is a game of stagnation. Our souls, on the other hand, they need to run. To seek out the magnificence of life. And the more times we can be tapped on the shoulder and reminded of this, the better. See, I don't dream of new horizons because I'm ungrateful.

I've learned to chase them down because I'm so grateful that I refuse to forfeit the gift. To leave my curiosity packaged and confined, I want to bask in life's abundance before my time here is up. And that's just it. That's the whole point. The friction between the knowing and the doing. Making that happen, physically bringing yourself there. It's not an easy thing. Certainly not as easy as putting your feet up and rationalizing the status quo.

It's why I listen to voices that inspire me, read stories that teach me, I talk to people who lift me up. Going is harder than staying, but meaning resides in the going. So no, it's not about being LeBron James. It's about getting off the bench and at least shooting a shot. Whatever a shot means to you, wherever you are. because if you don't, you'll never experience the thrill of having made one, of having felt that success. It's not about what you're doing. It's about what you're leaving on the table.

Is average terrible? I don't know. Is a Ferrari never taken out of its garage terrible? Not really, it's still a Ferrari, but it won't experience the very thing that Ferrari was designed to experience. Again, how do you quantify that? You can't. Not until you go. So here's the stepping out of whatever the present definition of normalcy is in your world.

Maybe not frantically changing the world around you, but certainly questioning the good, questioning yourself, questioning the rogeron. Has the routine overshadowed the reason you put the routine into place? Has the way things are come to outweigh the way you'd like them to be? Has good become a distraction, misdirecting you away from both life's brilliance and your own? Little hinges swing big doors. It's a quote by W. Clement Stone, and essentially means that the small things we do

open the door to the big things in life. Mountains are made of single rocks. Oceans are single waves. Symphonies are individual notes. Conversations are individual words. Progress is nothing more than the ability to break big things down into small things. That's it.

And those manageable pieces day in and day out, they become the roadmap to accomplish whatever it is you set out to accomplish. And I love the metaphor of a door, right? The simplicity. Just a door. But without that little hinge, it doesn't function the same. It'd be impossible to open and close. It would be far less useful, all because of this little hinge. This trivial little thing. It's an act. afterthought, it's a small detail hidden behind the main attraction, which is one of life's greatest. You know, we see and we celebrate the obvious things, the big things, the mountain tops. We do so to the extent that we forget the extraordinary is just a product of the tiny, uncool, unsexy, unremarkable actions and decisions.

We forget what swings the door open. So why is this valuable? Well, when you personally can identify and control the little things in your life, it becomes greatly apparent that nothing is truly out of reach. All options are open, and it's not because of destiny or magic or the fact that anyone deserves anything. No, it's simply realizing that every great accomplishment occurs one step at a time, and that's all. Anyone can take a single step. anyone can write a single word.

And when you break down the greats, that's what they say, right? Kobe talks about breaking his day into consistent, measurable sessions at the gym. Schwarzenegger talks about building his body one rep at a time. Will Smith talks about the methodical practice, the preparation he takes, one line at a time. These are hinges. They happen to open the door to NBA records. They open the door to becoming the world's strongest men.

They open the door to Hollywood success. And let's take it even deeper. Personally, I can identify smaller things off the top of my head that have a 10x multiplier on my day. For me, there's a direct correlation between waking up early and being successful, a successful, productive, happy day. Because I jump out of bed, I feel good, and it carries through. It's a very simple equation.

When I get up early, my day is better. Small thing, huge impact. or having good healthy food in my fridge it makes me feel good. It means I don't rush out to get food somewhere at the last minute. I can plan and I eat well and I feel better. Being around productive, high energy,

positive people makes me perform well, period. Causes me to level up. When I remove the negativity, when I surround myself with success, I grow. When I do the opposite, I rationalize mediocrity. It's that simple. You know, these simple things have exponential impact on my journey.

They are, you could say, the smallest of hinges, and they've played and continued to play a role in opening some of the largest doors I've walked through. The challenge is that, you know, it's easy to brush them off as insignificant or trivial because they are so small. You know, that's always been the obstacle, illuminating and quantifying their value.

But when you do, when that light bulb sort of goes off, it's a remarkable transition. Right? The differentiator, for me, between waking up at 5.30 and 8, it's not two and a half hours. That's not the value. The value is the momentum. It's getting my first win before the world wakes up and embodying that success. At the end of the day, it's mediocrity versus growth. That's just how I am. That's how I feel. That is my tiny hinge. That is my advantage. Now, obviously, those are going to vary, right? Not everyone needs to wake up

early. But I would advocate finding what makes you tick, finding that little hinge, paying attention, seeking out simple steps that have tremendous impact. Whether it's consistency who you spend your time with, the courage to take a single step, try something new, these are seeds that often become the difference. You don't get substantial results without mastering the pieces that create the foundation. And when you remember what actually makes that door open, you put yourself in a position to walk through it.