How to Sustain Hope and Stay Persistent in Pursuing Your Dreams

Never lose hope. That you have a single breath within your body right now and that you are alive in this moment is hope. That you can see all these people walking on the street smiling is hope. That all these entrepreneurs are posting their art online every single day now. There is hope there. That there is a single person out in this world whose soul is still burning, alive with love is hope. You know, it's so easy during these days when sometimes there's darkness, when you see all this negative media coverage, or maybe you have a series of bad days or a series of bad weeks, or your lucky break just isn't coming, or you've been fighting for that dream. You just don't sense any of that progress that you just so need to feel still enlivened and engaged and enthusiastic about something. Or somebody breaks up with you, or you lose your job, or something happens with your health. Look, that's part of life, is there's going to be so many struggles and disappointments, challenges, setbacks, dark days. And part of sustaining and making through all of that is maintaining hope. And that hope isn't something that just, you know, some airy fairy concept. It is a psychological need to believe that we can endure. A psychological need to believe that we can not only endure, but we can succeed and we can thrive and we can have our way in the world so that we can accomplish our dreams, so that we can make influence, so we can make our own difference. So have hope. But even as I say that, let me reconfigure that statement and that phrase, because too many people say, well, you have hope or you can lose hope, but hope isn't something actually you have or that you lose. Even though we say that phrase at such a popular level. You know, years ago, a metaphor came into my life that changed my life forever. It changed my attitude and my actions and how I thought about life and frankly, how I felt every single moment of the day. It was something that lifted me to a whole other level of joy and vibrancy in life. And it was this very simple metaphor that the power plant doesn't have energy. It transforms and generates energy. Let me say that again. The power plant doesn't have energy. It transforms and generates energy. At the same level, we don't, quote, unquote, have hope. We transform the energy around us. We generate hope. We don't have happiness. We generate happiness. Similarly, we don't have sadness or fatigue. We don't have those feelings that so many people think are negative, that just land on them, but that we are in our own actions, our own thoughts, our own interpretations, the very thoughts that we are feeding our psyche, those very things, those are generating an emotion. And hope is something that is generated by us. When it feels like it is gone, that becomes a to do list for us to generate it once more. Just like when your phone is dying, you plug it in to charge it up. Well, when your hope is dying, it's time to generate, charge it up again. Same thing with happiness and aliveness and enthusiasm. Those are things when they're going down, you gotta get focused. You gotta plug back in to your passions, to your dreams, to tomorrow, to charge yourself back up again. And it begins with, first and foremost, keeping perspective. You know, a lot of people, quote, unquote, lose hope because their focus goes off. They become very myopic to their own ego, their own, their own emotional reality, their own tiny little world. And they miss the joy, the abundance, the connection, the incredible energy of this buoyant and jubilant world all around them. Even when sometimes the immediate people in their lives or their immediate tribe or their immediate culture is not so good. We have 7 billion people alive today, and somehow we haven't all killed each other. That sustains and, and motivates hope. The reality that so many people are making it, that freedom is starting to perpetuate around the world more, that wealth and abundance is coming to more and more and more and more people, that more and more people are able to dictate their aims and their attitudes and their dreams today because more information is available than ever before. These things give us hope. So as soon as we lose perspective and we just go into our little tiny day and our little tiny moment, it's time to expand your awareness and consciousness to the greater stream of life that is happening all around. Go for a walk in the woods and look at nature and realize how lucky we are to be here. You know, go for a stroll outside and look at people as they smile and realize how lucky you are to be here. Walk into a restaurant and see people, you know, flirting with each other and having fun at dinner and celebrating and you start to get a different sense of life. Sometimes you have to get out of your house to feel hope. So keep perspective and keep perspective on your own life too. If you're down right now and you're struggling right now, don't forget to also pull forth and integrate those successes that you've had before. Those times in your life when things did go well, those times in your life when you surprise yourself with how well you did Something or how kind you were, or how much you cared, or how good of a piece of art you did create. Remember those strength times, those times that. That there was success. Those times that good things that happen pull them and feel them and sense them and bring those things to the moment at hand where things do feel frustrating, challenging, disappointing, or dark. Don't lose perspective. You've had beautiful days before, they'll come again. It's believing in that that sustains our hope. The second thing we have to do is keep a plan. You know, it's easy to lose hope if there's no plan, if there's no vision, the people perish. That's biblical, right? So you have to have a vision for your life. What is it you see out there for yourself? What is your plan to go and get it. And believing your ability to go and be able to make those things come true, even if you're frustrated and challenged right now. Because look, in this moment, you can choose new thoughts. In this moment you can choose new actions. You can choose to go now, learn some new things to get some more better mentors, to get around a more positive group of people to read better books, to watch better programming. You can choose to direct your focus in ways that will support your growth, to have the ability to achieve a plan. So sit down tonight, amidst all this turmoil and all the craziness of the world, if that's what you're feeling, sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and spill out hope onto this page of what you want to do with your life. Spill out hope on this page about what is it that you want to give? What is it you want to accomplish? Achieve, connect, contribute with the world, Create. Write it all down. You know, just start writing it down. Write out reasons to be grateful. Write out reasons to go to achieve things. Write out things you want to make happen and start putting a plan towards that. What would be step one, step two, step three. And as you start marching along to achieve that and you fall or you falter, don't give up on yourself. Know that there's always a new step. If you fail at one step, create a new step to get back up to the next step, right? Don't give up just because it's challenging or it's struggling, because your dreams are worth it. And your dreams don't care how hard it gets. Your dreams don't care if you get frustrated. Your dreams don't care if there's going to be dark days. Your dreams know they are worth it. And it's time for you to believe in them again and start working towards them at full capacity. And that brings up the third thing. To have hope. We have to stay persistent. Persistent, you know, to keep at it no matter what. You know, if we've got our perspective in mind, we've got our plan. We've got to be persistent to keep working towards it. You know, there were so many times that I almost stopped doing these videos. There are so many times that I thought, well, I'm not going to write another book. There's so many times I thought, no one cares about my blog posts, no one cares about my Facebook posts. No one cares about my YouTube show. No one cares about me. Oh, woe is me. Look, we can all sit on the couch, eat a bunch of potato chips, watch stupid television and feel sorry for ourselves. That does not contribute to our liveness. It does not contribute to our connection with those we love and care for. And it does not contribute to the things that we create and ultimately give to the world. So we've got to say, you know what? This is not. What, what are we going to persist at sitting in eating potato chips and watching tv? That's not going to be good. What we have to do is persist towards our dreams. What are the three things you could accomplish if this day, this very day and tomorrow and start moving towards your dreams every day? Wake up with an intention. I'm going to do at least three things to move myself forward to something that matters. At least three things, everybody can do that. Just pick. What are the three things I'm going to do to move my life forward this day? Who would I need to reach out to to be able to move forward? What could I read or study online? To move forward, what could I do? Just one simple request, one simple movement, one simple step to move forward and persist at that over and over and over again. And that's how things change. People look at me now and they're like, wow, you know, you know you got millions and millions of views on YouTube and millions and millions of followers online from, from your Facebook to your email. I mean, number one best selling books, all these things. There are a million times that I could have given up, but I sustained hope that it would ultimately make a difference. That if I just kept persisting at it and I kept working and I kept working, I kept working, one day it would turn out if I stayed on the path of my dreams and I kept removing distractions and I stayed on the path of my dreams. I didn't say yes to everything. I said yes to what moved me towards my dreams. And I worked towards that with such persistence. Now I get to do this and it's true joy. And I couldn't have done it without not only your support, but without the realization that hope was important to sustain. Last piece, Patience. You know, if you're really frustrated and you're just hating it right now, the easiest way for hope to go out the door is to get in a hurry. Yeah. So you get in a big hurry. You're pushing, you're pushing, you're pushing, you're in a big hurry now. You don't sense the win anymore. You don't sense the momentum, the progress anymore. You just more and more, you're in such a big hurry to have more things that sometimes it feels like you have nothing. And the reality you do. But a part of achieving anything is having the patience to work towards it. Having the patience with other people. Sometimes we lose hope in other people. Not really that we lost hope, we just forgot to be patient with them. You know, you need to give a lot of patience to the people in your life if you're going to sustain hope for them and for your relationships with them. Patience is a. Is a critical element. It's not discussed a lot. But you know what, it's so fundamental to having hope to be patient with it. So I hope you'll take those things into mind because I know that the days can get dark. But you deserve to have your dreams. You deserve to keep at them. You deserve to sustain that full power, that full energy that hope can cultivate in you. Because when you have full hope, you're more confident, you're more willing to go for it, you're more willing to try. And you deserve it. Your dreams deserve it. And each day starts to feel a little more bright. Each day starts to feel a little bit more magical. Each day you start to notice the things to have hope for. Each day you notice the things that you've done that make other people hope for. Next thing you know, suddenly you have this incredible life that's full of hope, full of aliveness, full of joy, full of light. And that's what we call the charged light.