Fight For It Or Forget About It

If you don't like your life or some aspect of it, why don't you change it? Like, why don't people change their life? Why. Why do people do something that they clearly hate doing and then decide, well, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life? It to me, that does not make sense. I remember the first job I got when I was in college, and I needed a job bad because I didn't have enough. My car was broken down. I had this apartment. I had to pay rent. I'm, like, on my own. I'm 900 miles from my parents, and I'm like, what am I gonna do? I need a job. So my friend got me a job. And my friend was way bigger than me. He was probably £225 then and 6:2 and strong as an ox. And he got a job here. So he said, I'm gonna see if I can get my earning a job here. Because he was like. Like, literally my best friend. And so he got me a job pulling sorghum on a sorghum farm in Lowell, Indiana, in July.

I literally thought I was gonna. Five minutes in, I knew it was a bad idea. This is not good. This is not good. You are not gonna live through this day, bro. Like, it's hot. There's, like, eternal sorghum in this field. You're never gonna pull it all. And I pulled sorghum for eight hours, and I prayed and prayed and prayed. Dear God, just let me live through this day, and I promise I will not tempt you by coming back here tomorrow.

And I went to the boss when I got back to the barn, and I said, thank you for this job. I really appreciate it. But I want you to know, even if you have to keep my money, I will not be back here tomorrow. Now, some people think would say, that's crazy, but you needed a job. You didn't have any money. You probably didn't have much food in your refrigerator. Your car was broken down. Why would you quit the only job you had? Because I knew it was not what I was meant to do. God did not put me on this earth to be a farmer, and I didn't want to waste another day pulling sorghum.

And I could have just said, well, this is the only job I can find. I could have said, you know, $8 an hour in 1980 is good money. I could have said, you know, all I got to do is show up and walk down these aisles and pull the sorghum and lay it on the ground.

But when something isn't working.

Sometimes quitting is the best option. And I know, I know people say quitters never win and winners never quit. That's what I call a truism. That isn't true. The reality is all winners quit. That's why they're winners. They quit doing stuff that don't add to their winning. They quit doing stuff that doesn't make them more of a winner. And I am here to tell you, unless you start figuring out what in your life doesn't fit in your purpose and let go of some of it, you are going to be miserable your whole life. And you don't have to be. I want to encourage all of you watching me on YouTube right now, all of you in this room right now, you can change your life. And as I said earlier, not on this video, but in this room today.

If.

Like, the part that's missing in your life, getting better is not God's part. If God. God's already done his part. If you do your part, your life's going to get better. He made you for your life to get better. The very first thing he ever said to man was, be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth, subdue it, and have dominion. That means human beings, God commanded them when he talked to them the first time, which means this is one of the most important things he's ever going to say to a human being. The first thing he said was, your life is supposed to be progressively productive. Your life is supposed to be producing more tomorrow than it did yesterday, next week, than it did last week, next month, than it did last month. Our lives, we were created to be becoming better. Why? Because we are made of flesh and blood. And our spirit lives in this flesh suit. And the flesh and blood part of us is not. It's not perfect. It's not even. Not that it's not perfect. It's not infinite in its ability, which means it always has potential to grow. Spirit is complete. Now, if you're separated from God because you don't know Jesus, then your spirit is not complete. Okay? So I want to make sure we understand.

You may disagree with me. You're entitled to do that. But when you make your video, say it how you say it. Okay? So, so, so, so. But the spirit part of you is the big part of you. The flesh part of you is the little part of you. The spirit part of you is the capable part of you. It's the part with all the potential. It's the part. It's the part that has not Potential capacity, maximum capacity, which means that.

The physical part of you will never max out the spiritual part of you. Like there's always growth to be had regardless of how much you've already grown. And so I used to be a part of a financial services company when I first got started in financial services back in 1985. And Art Williams was the guy who started this company, Al Williams, and one of the things he used to say said, life will give you what you'll fight for. Life will give you what you'll accept. I'm thinking, what is he talking about? Is it going to give you what you fight for? Is it going to give you what you accept? And the answer is yes, it's going to give you what you fight for or it's going to give you what you accept. And see, if you're unwilling to fight for it, that means you're willing to accept it. And if you're unwilling to accept it, that means you're willing to fight for it. And see, some people don't like the word fight. Now I'm a very peace loving person. I love people, I love peace. I'm not violent at all. I lamented, I did it and I. It's all I could think of to do because I was in a hurry and I was late and YouTube, forgive me.

But I thought there was a bug in my bedroom last night and I attempted to kill it because I don't want it in my bedroom. And then I couldn't find it. I'm like, okay, well it's gone. Whatever it was, it's gone. But this morning I picked up my shoe and this little lizard runs out. It wasn't a bug, it was a lizard. Like we got, only in Florida do you have lizards in your bedroom. I don't even want to think about the ramifications of that. I don't want to think about what else could have been in my bedroom that's also reptilian.

Right? And so I'm thinking to myself, I'm thinking to myself.

I don't want to kill this lizard, but I can't leave it in my bedroom because if I leave in my bedroom, when my wife gets back in town, I'm gonna have a lizard in my bedroom. And if she sees it, like, I mean, she's not gonna freak out, but she's gonna want me to find it. And I mean, you gotta find and I can't. I'm not gonna pick up a lizard. I used to pick him up, but I'm not picking up a Lizard. I know some of y' all are thinking, why not? Because that brother man don't pick up lizards.

So I'm like.

I was so sad, but I gotta kill this lizard. Otherwise it's gonna be here haunting me. I'm gonna be haunted by a little lizard. And I was sad that I had to kill it. I killed it. I did. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. All the lizard lovers in the world, I didn't want to kill it. But, like, this lizard gotta go, and I don't have time to chase it around and try to catch it and get it at.

Anyway.

Life will give you what you'll fight except. Or life will give you what you'll fight for. And that lizard was probably not the best illustration of that, but I remember.

I know it seems like I don't really feel badly about killing lizard, but I really do because I don't want to kill anything. I don't want to kill anything, but I don't like to fight. But I don't mind, right? And.

Like, I don't ever want to get in a fight with you, with anybody. But if I do, be prepared.

That's all I'm gonna say. Like, be prepared. It's not gonna be fun. It's not gonna be fun for either one of us, but it's really not gonna be fun for you. Why? Because my parents told us, do not run from a fight. My mom and my dad, I can remember both of them quoting. I don't know if you remember this or not, Rob, but I can remember this coming out of their mouth more times than once. I ain't raising no punk. Now, some of y' all may not like that language, but when my mom, who was like 55 or 54 or 5 2, I don't know, she was shorter than me when she said, I ain't raising no punk. She wasn't shorter than me when she said that. But, like, you get a whooping out there, you're gonna get another one. You come home. Now, I wouldn't parent like that. Do you boo and let your child turn out like they turn out? But we turned out not to run from, not to hide from, not to back down from a fight. Now, I ain't going to start a fight. I will finish one. And so what's going to happen in your life when the circumstances of your life are the opposing enemy.

And they are threatening.

The experiential nature of you and your family? Are you going to capitulate and hide? Well, are you going to stand up and fight tooth and nail to produce the outcome you desire. Because whichever one of those you decide to do, that's which one you're going to get. Because life will give you what you accept or life will give you what you fight for. How is it that somebody like Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery, do you understand? When you were born a slave in the United States of America, your chances of survival were slim to none. Your chances of freedom were not much better, and your chances of, like, turning your life around seemed almost impossible. But this man was born a slave.

And his master's wife was teaching him how to read. And his master caught his master's wife teaching him how to read, and he flipped out. He said, woman, what are you doing? You can't teach these slaves to read. If you teach them to read, they will discover books and they will find out that the world is so much bigger than the world they live in now, they will never be content to be a slave again.

And he said, whatever you do, don't ever let a slave read the Bible.

I'm like, that's fascinating. Now, this was. Frederick Douglass was about 6 years old when this happened about. Because he didn't really know how old he was, because you didn't have birthdays and birth certificates, and when you're a slave, you just existed.

And this man, this boy at 6 years old, decided with his new awareness, if the person who owns me and treats me like an animal and could sell me away from my mother or my mother away from me, if he's that dead set against me learning how to read, it is absolutely the most important thing I must learn how to do. And Frederick Douglass worked in the big house, and he would take the leftovers from the big house and he would give them to the poor white children in the neighborhood in exchange for them teaching him how to decipher letters. And every time he found a piece of paper on the. Or a book or a piece of a newspaper, he would take it back to his room at night and by candlelight in his slave quarters, practice his reading. The man became such an articulate orator and author. When I read his autobiography when I was in my 20s, I had to look up words that I didn't know what they meant. This is a person who had a hopeless life and a life that was. There was nobody coming for him. There's nobody coming to rescue him. And yet he said, this is not what I was made for.

Like, I get it. Your circumstances are not ideal. My circumstances were not ideal. I Get that? But that's not the end of the story. That's just the part of the story.

Do you realize.

That if you didn't have haters, you couldn't have elevators and you couldn't have celebrators?

Think about it.

The reason we call it a championship is because you have a formidable foe. The reason we call it a championship is because you have somebody opposing you and opposing your objectives that's equally or more equipped than you are. They're equally equipped to stop you from achieving that objective.

Do you realize if Jesus didn't have haters, he would have never been crucified?

The pit and Potiphar's house and the prison are the things that prepared Joseph to become the prime minister.

And see, we want to get to the top without the crawling through the glass at the bottom.

But the difficulty at the bottom is the thing that makes us strong enough to stay there when we get there to the top. And some of us, we're lamenting our lamentations and we're cursing our curses, and we're so cursing our curses and we're so burdened by our burdens that what we don't do is we don't gain strength from them and realize that, hey, I've got to make my life better. This is the catalyst. This is the fuel. This is the inspiration. This is the motivation. This is the thing that's letting me know I can't stay here for the rest of my life.

So why don't people change it like Frederick Douglass changed? He didn't go from being a slave to being free. He went from being a slave. He bought his freedom, had it stolen from him, bought it again, had it stolen from him, bought it again. He had to buy his freedom three times.

He became an emancipator. He went around giving speeches and was instrumental in ending antebellum slavery in the United States of America. He gained an audience with the Queen of England and the President of the United States. This is a kid who was born a slave. And then we think we have an excuse. Well, maybe we don't have an excuse, but the actual reason is we don't take reading as seriously as Frederick Douglass did.

Because maybe the very same reading dynamic that gave Frederick Douglass the awareness to make a decision and set an intention to change his life, maybe he found it in the pages of something he read.

Myron, what are you saying? The book you don't read can't help you.

If you read it, it might not help you, but if you don't read it, it ain't gonna help you. And so why is it. Why is it that some people, their lives change? Because some people care enough to change their lives. Some people are like, okay, life, put up your dukes. I gotta wrestle it from you. Let's wrestle what we got. We gotta put on boxing gloves. Let's put on the gloves. Like, whatever we've gotta do, it's worth it. Like, when I look in the faces of my children, I could not look at them and tell them, you can do anything you wan and you can be anything you want to be. While they watch me do nothing and be nothing.

I'm not going to know. That's not going to be how this story plays out. I'm going to demonstrate to them that the words that I come out of my mouth are not, do what I do. Not as I say, do what I do, but even more so, do what I. I mean, do what I say, but even more so, do what I do. Like the apostle Paul said, the things that you've both heard and seen in me do. Oh, Paul set the example. So Frederick Douglass changed. Like Oprah Winfrey. They said she was unfit for television, but now she owns her own network. Why? Because she was unwilling to accept that, so she was willing to fight for it. So why don't people change their lives? That's the question. Why don't they? Why don't, like, why haven't I changed my life more? Why haven't you changed your life more? Why haven't we changed our lives more? Well, I think one reason people don't change their lives is because they don't think they can. They bought into the lie of the lie identity. What's the lie of the lie identity? All of us have had people in our lives, at some point in our lives in the past tell us that we are not enough. Something enough, not tall enough, not short enough, not pretty enough. Don't sing good enough, don't dance good enough, not smart enough, not strong enough, not coordinated enough. You are not enough. We've all heard it.

If you buy that lie, it'll cost you too much. Because that has never been the message that God has given you. In fact, you are enough for the assignment for which he created you. And that's all that matters. It doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. And so if you buy into the lie identity, it could literally cost you everything. Okay, cool. So you've got people think they can't change their lives. That's one reason they don't change. Number Two, they don't know how.

And I get it. Because I always believed I could change my life. There was. I can't think of a time. I mean, I could think of a time when I was so discouraged that I felt like it wasn't working.

And that was after it had already worked, right? That was after it had already worked. But I can't think of a time when I believed. Like I've ever believed, oh, this is not. My life is not going to get better. I've always believed it, but for a long time I believed it and I didn't know how to do it. So guess what? My belief in the fact that I could do it caused me to keep looking for answers to how to do it. See, if you don't believe you can do it, you don't have a reason to look. So people who don't believe they can do it are not going to look for the answers to how they can do it. So they never change their lives. They just keep one living. Groundhog Day. Every day is just like yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before. And they put their days on rinse and repeat until they die. So most people really never live. They just exist their way through life. And people say, what do you do for a living? That's a really lame question. What do you do for a living? Let me ask you a more valuable question, if I may. What do you do while you're living?

What do you do while you're living? Because most people do something for a living and do nothing while they're living.

But I believe that the quality of a person's life is not measured by the number of years of experience a person has doing a thing, but by the number of experiences we put in those years. How many experiences? Like, I want. I want to max out all of my experiences of all my days every day. And I'm freakishly obsessive about this. I'm just keeping it real. Freakishly obsessive. Say, Myron, what does that mean if I go to a restaurant? Because I love food.

And food, to me, is an experience. Like, I appreciate the fact that God didn't make us. Like a car that can't taste its fuel, right? A car doesn't get excited about going to the gas station. It doesn't care. But, man, when I'm fueling up, oh, it's about to be on. We about to have a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Some of this over here, some of that. We gonna add Some salt and pepper to it. You know, add a little spice, a little flavor, a little kick. Yeah.

So when I'm eating, for me, like.

It'S so crazy. I'll be outside playing golf.

And I have, like, two or three cups of ice water at all times. I'm like.

You'Ve never seen anybody get so excited about drinking water.

Like, I'll drink a glass of water. And I'm like, this water is so good. It's so wet. I love the wetness of water, right? And people probably look at me like, this dude is out of his mind. But I'm just. I'm savoring the experience of drinking water. I'm savoring the experience of eating a meal, which is why when I go to a restaurant and the service starts out bad, I leave. It's not going to get better. So I leave. Unless it's, like, one of my favorite restaurants and they give me a server that I don't like. I'll just ask them to change the server, you see? You don't like service. Yeah, I don't. I don't like servers who don't serve. Who want me to serve them because they think they're. That's what. Like, no. Anyway.

They don't think they can. They don't know how. So because I believed I could, I looked everywhere. I'm still looking everywhere. My life is fairly good, okay? It's better than fairly good. It's really good. But as good as it is, it could become exponentially better. And if it could, why wouldn't I want it to? And so I'm always reading. I'm always learning. I'm always looking for the answers. I don't know. I'm not satisfied with the answers. I know. I'm not satisfied with the abilities I have. I'm thankful for them. I'm grateful for them. But they are not enough. Why? Because I was commanded by God to be progressively productive, which means I'm supposed to be getting better every day, okay? So they don't know. They. They don't know how. They don't believe they can. Sad but true.

They're afraid to leave the familiar behind.

They're afraid that if I change and nobody changes with me, I'll be all by myself. That's real talk. If I change and my kids don't change now my kids are going to be alienated. If I change and my friends don't change now, my friends are going to think I think I'm better than they do. If I change and my brothers and my siblings and my parents and my family doesn't change. Now I'm going to be by myself in the world.

If that's the price you have to pay to be progressively productive, I'm telling you, pay the price.

I'm not saying leave people behind, invite them to come along, but leave that decision to them.

Because if you got to drag them in, you got to drag them around, and that's exhausting.

I am like.

If I could give you a gift, and I can't, but if I could, I would give you the gift to believe in your ability to change your life.

Because I know you can. And I don't know you can. Based on theory, based on a book that I read that was written by a guru. I know you can. Because I've seen it happen over and over in my own life and in the lives of other people that I've served and served with. And I'm telling you, your life can get better. Don't stop believing. Don't stop growing. Don't stop reading. Life will give you what you'll accept, or life will give you what you'll fight for. Don't accept that enough is enough. Always fight for more. That's my encouraging word for you today. I hope it blesses you beyond measure. And in the meantime, in between time, we'll see you on the next video. Bye for now.