The URGENT Wake-Up Call That will MOTIVATE You

This pulse, this fear, we're going too fast. We hit it 85 miles, pop up in the car. Bam. I hit my head on the door. What's the purpose if this is it? Did I even matter? Say I'm here. Say I'm here. Shout out, I'm here. Like, it's a blessing. I'm here. Thank you. I'm here. Some of you know, my story began before I was ever on stages or wrote anything. It began in high school. I was a brokenhearted kid. You know, I had fallen in love with my high school sweetheart. We thought we were going to get married. And we were. I mean, we were really in love. And this person who I thought I was in love with, we decided to go to college together. I wasn't even sure if I was going to go to college, but we go to college together, we sign up for classes together. We basically start folks on the same majors together. We live in the same dorm room together, we have the same friends together, similar classes and style. It's like we're trying to match up our lives. And I am that, like, totally. When I'm in a relationship, I'm that. I'm like, so into the relationship. And then halfway through that first semester in college, it found out that she wasn't that way. And one night she discovered beer and other boys and cheated. And when she cheated and that relationship fell apart in that very second, the relationship fell apart, I fell apart. Who's ever been broken hearted, bad? Yeah. At first you're so angry, you hate the person. You can't believe, how could this happen to me? How could you do this to me? You're so angry, like, you're screaming. You're rattling the cage of life. You're like, I can't believe this. So angry, so hurt, so frustrated. But if you endure that alone, that can go a bad place. That's what happened to me. I literally could not get out of bed. Friends who were in classes would come like, hey, come on, let's go to class, man. Get out of bed. And I was like, yeah, I don't want to go. You know, she's there. I didn't want to see her. Let's go out. She's going to be there. Come on, man, get over it. Let's go party. I can't. And only two things saved my life. One was, I've always been a dorky kid. I'm a bookish kid. So I was always reading. And my friends would come in and they'd throw the school newspaper in and so I'd pick up the school newspaper and I'd read it, and that was my lifeline to the world. School newspaper. I would read the school newspaper to get inspired. And then one day, the second thing that changed my life was an ad some of you heard about before. I turned that school newspaper, and there I was, laying in my filth, not going to classes, just so brokenhearted. The truth was, I'd already been planning to take my life. Not thinking about it. I had planned it. I knew how I was going to do it. I was going to put a backpack together, and I was going to go up to the hill near my school. There was a big hill. Everyone hiked, and I was going to go back into the saddleback of the pine trees, and I was going to go there. I was going to set up my tent, and I was going to let the sun go down. And then I was going to cut myself with my knife. And I went up there. I went up there. I went that night, hiked up there, had the knife, had a little nalajena water went up, set up the tent, got in the tent, and I cried and I cried and I cried and I cried. I thought life was so unfair. How could this person do this to me? My future was ruined. Some of the biggest fears we have is, will anyone love me? I didn't think love was in my future. And sometimes when you don't think love is in your future, especially when you're young, you don't realize that you are love yet. It's out there, and one day you'll get it, and you don't think you're gonna get it. You haven't tuned into the divine yet. You haven't learned that you are love. You are capable of loving, you are worthy of love. You are beautiful, you deserve it. And you can exude it, and you can create it any moment that you want. That these relationships that we have in our life are important, but what we bring into them is that love or not, it's how we show up and we tap in and we bring it in. I. I didn't know any of that stuff. So I sat there and I cried. And I was too scared to do it. I fell asleep at some point, crying. And then when I woke up, the tent was shaking, rattling. Shake, tent rattling. I was, like, scared. It was still dark. I was like, what is going on? And I opened up the thing and there was a deer looking in at me. And it looked at me like, like, what are you doing up here? Almost like why are you here in the woods in this stupid tent? And it was, the eyes literally looked like. I mean, it was like a. It was like a New Jersey deer. But it was, I'm telling you, this was not out in the fields. This is. I unzip the thing and it's like in there. I'm like, oh. And it just looked at me like. And I was like, it's like. And it turned and walked away. And I was like, what am I doing in this field? Why am I up here in these trees? What am I? What is going on? So I packed up, went back down, unpacked everything, sat there and I thought, I'll go again tonight. I'll have more guts. And that's when the door opened. My friend threw the newspaper in, got the newspaper up and I opened it and there was that ad I've talked about in my videos before. A big beautiful blue full page ad. White sandy beach, turquoise, perfect water palm tree, big green sprout, perfect blue sky, a little wisp of a cloud. The best headline in the history of marketing for a kid like me at that moment. Escape. Yeah. Summertime jobs for students needed in the Dominican Republic. And I was like, dominican Republic? I didn't even know where that was, but I knew she probably wasn't there. So I take this job, I go down with my friend and you know, we've basically glorified tour guides for an entrepreneur we know who also went down there. And we're going around the island and we're showing people around and taking this entrepreneur around. And one night we hop in the car, my friend jumps in and he's driving, I'm the driver, the passenger side. And we start flying down this road that here in the United States would have, you know, been a nicer road. This was brand newly developed road. And we start going down this road 85 miles an hour. And I'm telling you what, I never will forget the feeling of this car. Because if you've ever gone down the road really fast, a new road and all the windows are down. And on the radio was that song Tom Cochran. Life is a highway. Life is a highway. I want to ride it. Yeah, that thing is played. We are singing it at the top of our lungs. We're having. And I'm feeling, feeling life kind of come back in. And then we came upon a corner that in the US or developing country would have had one of those big yellow shaped sign with a big U turn arrow. Watch out, slow down, sharp corner ahead, no sign. We round the corner 85. Kevin grabs me. Brendan, hold on. Cranks it. And those next moments in that corner became the turning point that brought me to the stage. I grabbed the door and I brace. The car starts sliding and I know we're done, we're going too fast. I just know it. This pulse, this fear shoots through your body. Because you know what the primary fear in life is? That you don't get to have it anymore. You might not always have, you know, a long time to think about that. It might be just like that. You know, some people gone like that. That's why we have to in our conscious hours, ask before we go into those turning points, before we face death story did I live? This is what we've forgotten. This is what we've forgotten these last couple years. It's blame, it's complaining, it's. Everyone's wrong. It's there like this, and I'm like that. And they're on this side of the aisle and I'm on that side of the aisle and look what they did to this. And this is happening. And blame. Blame. No one's living anymore. Living your life, that, that part of you that is just vibrant and present and joyous, it is still there. Don't fool yourself. You live life. Life is your gift. You've been given that and you have that. It's time to express it again and bring it to life. I wasn't living my life that moment. I had been thinking about taking my life, not living it. The car did that weird slow motion thing. If you ever been in an accident, a weird slow motion thing happened, slow motion as we slid off the road and. And we hit this little retainer wall of bricks and boulders they built for sugarcane field irrigation nearby. We hit it 85 miles an hour, popped up in the car. Bam. I hit my head on the door. And I started seeing all these images in life and not like on all the movies where it was this omniscient viewpoint and there was little Brendan, you know, getting moment by moment, bigger and more handsome, hopefully. And, you know, none of that was happening at all. Instead, I just saw these little episodes of life, these little moments when I was surrounded by people that I cared for. It was from my own first view. I could see out my eyes. There was my sixth grade birthday party, my friends around the kitchen table, my mom singing a birthday song. I looked over and there was my sister and I on the backyard swing set just swinging. And I saw her face just smiling, just feeling the rhythm of the swing set, that kind of Ka chunk, ka chung. I really believe at the end, what we do is we see a little reel, a little highlight reel, a little movie of our life. And I just say, if that's true, know that the question of that movie is, did I love? Did I love openly and honestly and completely? That's why you see images of them, because you're going to think about who you're going to miss and who's going to miss you. I didn't want to die. I didn't say anything to anybody. I was a young man who didn't know how to use his emotions and talk with people. I was shut down in my own brain. I built up these big walls to keep out the bad guys. But in doing that, I also kept out the good guys from hugging or expressing or talking or friendships. I just shut down. The car hit the ground, rolled several times. I got knocked out completely. When I came to, Kevin was screaming at the top of his lungs, brendan, get out of the car. Get out of the car. I looked over and his whole head was open. There was blood everywhere, all over him. And his eyes were wild like an animal. Get out. Get out, get out. He crawls outside the driver's side window. I go to get outside mine, but I can't. The car is smashed down on top of me. The only thing I have is, like, what used to be the windshield here. And I push through the windshield to escape. And I stand up onto the crumpled hood of the car. He's screaming. And that shock thing happens where you just go, thud. You feel heavy. You feel like you're dying. And I remember looking down, and then I saw all the blood on me, blood dripping off my face, blood dripping off my shoes, dripping all over the hood of the car. And I remember looking down at this in this almost trance of shock. And Kevin now is screaming at the car, but I can't hear him anymore. And I see all the blood. And I just remember thinking, if this is it, did I even matter? If this is the last moment? Did I even do something with myself? Did I matter? Was there a reason I was here? We all wonder that. What's the purpose? As the blood was going off the hood of the car, I saw a glimmer. It was like a reflection in the blood, a sparkle. And it made me look up, and there was this bright, big, beautiful moon that night that I had never even seen. And as I looked up to this, I felt a connection I'd never felt in my life before. And I felt in that very moment that I Was gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay. You take a breath in and you're like, you're going to be okay. I felt this connection. I felt like in that moment, I later called it life, school and ticket. I felt like God had reached down to me and handed me life's golden ticket, a second chance. On the hood of that car, you can still live. You can still love, you can still matter. But now you know the clock is ticking. And I remember getting that feeling, that ticket, that second chance, and just. And this connection to God and just this gratitude and feeling this blessing. And I just thought, I will earn this. I will earn this. I wanted to earn life. I wanted to earn the blessing of the breath. I wanted to earn the second chance. I wanted to live and love and matter. Because life is really short. I call it mortality motivation. When you realize how brief it is, how short it is, how fast it is, you're like, I gotta get in. I gotta get back in the game. I gotta jump in. I've got to go. I've gotta ask questions. I gotta be there. Because it goes so fast. It's so fast. I knew I wanted to earn it. I don't want to ruin the story, but I lived. I'm all right. I'm still here. My friend Kevin, he survived. We both survived. Lots of blood, broken bones, terrified. Two young kids in another country. We survived. We got back to the U.S. we got back into school. And I remember when I got back into school, I was a different human being. Because when you get a second chance in life, you choose to show up differently. If it's real for you. If it's real. I met a lot of people had accidents, but it didn't change them. When it changes you is when you recognize the real gift of life, but the shortness of it at the same time. Can you recognize you've been given the gift and it's short? And when you do, you show up different. You're like, I'm here. I'm different. Everyone say, I'm here. I'm here. Say, I'm here. I'm here. Shout out, I'm here. Like it's a blessing. I'm here. I'm here. Thank you. I'm here. Thank you, I'm here. Thank you for being here today, ladies and gentlemen.