Dave Chappelle's Unforgettable Lesson on Keeping Life's Failures in Perspective

Rise and shine, it's espresso time! Good morning, Believe Nation, it's Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode out into the world. So grab your coffee and sip on today's message: keep things in perspective. Over to you, Dave Chappelle.

When I was maybe 19, I opened for Aretha Franklin at Radio City.

Wow, 19?

Yeah, looking back on it, I'm sure she didn't choose me herself, but, uh, it was great. It was, it was great. I always want to go back as a headliner.

Oh my God, but 19? And, uh, like, when I was 19, I had a paper route. But did—

were—

looking back on it, were you prepared at 19 for that kind of a gig?

I'm— yeah, it was 15 minutes. Uh, I had about 30 minutes then. You know, uh, I was prepared enough.

Yeah.

I mean, was I as good as Aretha Franklin? No.

Well, no.

But my job is just to get people used to looking at the stage. I'm the opening act.

Yeah.

It mattered to me if I did good, but nobody else Nobody really cared.

Is this— now, at a big gig like this, they have a rehearsal? Do they have a walkthrough? They have like sound checks and that kind of thing?

I don't know. Uh, I imagine there'll be a sound check. You know, you can either go or send a guy, right?

Uh, when you were 19, did you go for a sound check?

Well, I skipped it, which was a terrible mistake.

That was a mistake.

It was a terrible mistake. I skipped the sound check. And nobody could hear me for the first 3 minutes.

Mm-hmm.

But you know, you know what it is, Dave? You've been a stand-up for many years, and you know, you probably get that question where people say, "Oh my God, you're a comedian. What happens if you go out there and you tell your jokes and no one laughs?" Mm-hmm. Nothing happens. You get paid the same. You're not gonna die. Nothing bad happens. So I keep it all in perspective.

So I think it's super important for entrepreneurs to be able to keep things in perspective because I think a lot of times at the beginning when you're starting a business, You have unrealistic expectations of what you can do, especially in the short run. I see so many entrepreneurs who realize that getting their business started is just way more difficult than they expected. I see so many people try to get started on YouTube, as an example, and they make one video, they make three videos, they make five videos or ten videos, and they don't get results. They don't get any views, they don't get any comments, and suddenly their life sucks and they need to quit that and go off to something else. This is not going to work for me, I have to go do something else. When was the last time you tried something 5 times and it just instantly worked? Did you pick up a basketball and try 5 times and then suddenly you're Michael Jordan? Like, that's not how skills work. You may know what looks good, and this is a challenge. You know what looks good. You know what a good video looks like. You know what a good jump shot looks like. You know what a good shoe or a good book or a good coffee cup— you know what it looks like. But that doesn't mean you can instantly create it yourself. At the beginning, you're gonna suck at everything, just like you always have for everything you've done, just like everybody else. For me, it's taken 6,000 videos to get to this point. Maybe you can learn it a lot faster than I did, but you're not— chances are you're gonna learn it in 5 or 10. It's gonna take a lot of effort. The quantity leads to the quality. And so just keeping that in perspective, that whatever you start off doing, you're not gonna be very good at. You're not gonna have a lot of results at it. It's gonna take a ton of work for very minimal results. And then slowly, as you get better, as you keep hustling, as you keep grinding, as you keep working on it— this is why passion is so important, because you have to deal with a lot of crap and a lot of tiny results at the beginning to get actually good at something so that you can actually now increase the results. Ultimately, your business success will come from being able to provide value to somebody else. But at the beginning, you can't provide a lot of value because you don't know what you're doing yet, and that's okay. You learn. You get better. You start off doing something for free, and then you start charging a little bit, and then as you get better and better and better, you become hopefully the best in the world at what you do, you start to charge more. You start to build a team. You start to have a bigger impact because you're bringing so much more value. And so just keeping that in perspective at the beginning, that you're going to suck at whatever you do, that's okay. So when you fall, when you suck, when you don't create a great result, that's okay. That's part of your learning process, and I try to take that to every new thing that I'm doing. Having the confidence that if I want to do it, if I want to keep getting better at it, that I can, and I expect to suck at the beginning of everything. The other thing that I like to do— this might be a bit of a mind twist, and see if you guys agree with me or not— I don't mind making mistakes and showing them off and not fixing them, just as a reminder to myself that it's okay to make mistakes, that I'm not perfect, and a reminder to you guys, hopefully, in that lesson that you don't have to be perfect either. So as an example, on my YouTube channel, there was an entire month worth of videos where we had terrible sound. Normally on my sound I have a clip mic, so I've got this one on here, hopefully it's working, fingers crossed. And the camera is actually way across the room. For whatever reason, the mic here wasn't working. We didn't do a sound check, it wasn't working properly. And we did the entire month's worth of videos, a lot of videos, 3 videos a day, off of the microphone from the camera that's way over there. So it sounds like I'm in this huge cave. And some of these videos are super popular. Some of these videos have had millions of minutes of watch time on it and are some of the most popular videos on my channel. And I chose purposely not to re-record them. We found out pretty quickly once Christina got the video, she's like, uh, it sounds like you're in a cave. We found that pretty quickly and I could have reshot them, but I chose not to. I chose to release the imperfectness as a reminder to myself that sometimes that's okay. That I can make mistakes. And yes, I want to strive to be better and shoot for perfection always as a constant battle, but sometimes I make mistakes and that's okay. And I wanted to share that with you guys. And maybe I lost some subscribers, or maybe I didn't grow as quickly as I could have. And if I lost a subscriber because the audio quality wasn't perfect for a month, you know, that happens. But sometimes I just like being able to put up imperfect products. I don't know, maybe that's just an Evan thing. But it's why I kept those videos up. It's why you can watch my entire journey. If you go back on my channel, you can watch some of the first videos I put up and how terrible I was on camera. And people ask, why do you keep putting— like, why do you keep those videos up? You're just so much better as a speaker now. Because I like showing the journey. I like showing the imperfections. I like being able to tell people that I sucked at the beginning and that even now I'll still make mistakes. And that even now, even though we have a million subscribers, I'll still make videos off my cell phone sometimes, and I'll still make videos off my webcam. And that sometimes I have audio issues and sometimes, you know, stuff happens. Even now. Because I know that I'm not perfect. And yes, it's that constant battle, but it's okay when I'm not. And it's okay for you guys not to be too. Much more important than making that one perfect video is the march forward. That tomorrow I'm trying harder to be better, and the next day I'm trying hard to be better, and that I'm seeing that growth for myself personally as well as for the business. And for every goal that I set out to achieve. So maybe that second mind twist is just an Evan thing, maybe it's something other people do as well, but I thought that I would share it with you guys. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what is one thing that you do to help keep things in perspective that maybe you get stressed out in the moment and this one thing you do helps keep things in perspective for you, helps relax yourself a little bit more? What is that one thing? I think by you sharing it, it could help other people from Believe Nation watching this video as well who might need a little bit extra support So share that in the comments below. I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Thank you guys for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.

Do you feel underrated as a rapper? Not as of lately, like, which is crazy. For a long time, man, for years, I was pissed. A song on the album called "Buried Alive" is about that exact thing. You know, it's about like me kind of going, "How come he gets the so-and-so co-sign?" or "How come he gets that?" or "How come they get that?" I can tour the world, I can sell out shows, I got fans, I got this. What the fuck, man? Like being angry. You know, I had a friend tell me, she basically said, "Those same people who have the co-signs and have the this and have the looks are the same people who are going, 'How come I ain't got fans like this then? How come I can't tour on my own? How come I can't this?'" Like, what the fuck? So it kind of put things in perspective for me and let me go, okay, I don't have it yet, but if I keep fighting and I keep working hard and I keep staying on this path, it's gonna happen, you know. And as of late, within the last few months, man, just from, you know, like releasing the singles and the music videos and like this solid body of work, I've truly began to get what I deserve.

I'm an entrepreneur, it's very great, but not all days are great in a company.

So what are your tips and tricks for tough days?

I think there's massive confusion around entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship sucks. I mean, it's lonely, it's high risk. I mean, I can't live without it, but it's like a bad boyfriend, right, or girlfriend, right? Like, there's a ton of bad days being an entrepreneur, not to mention 98% of entrepreneurial ventures are gonna fail, so there's gonna be a really bad fucking day in your future. You know, hopefully not for you. Or any of you. You know, for me, I don't, you know, I think this is a very personal question. I think it's how you're wired. I'm so all-in entrepreneur, I prefer the pain. I think one of the reasons I love the Jets so much is 'cause they bring me so much pain. You know, I love the climb. To me, the setback is exciting. I love when something goes wrong. It's where I shine the most. But that's not for everybody. Right? I mean, it can be very difficult, and when you start affecting your life and your loved ones and all the other things, it can get real nasty. To me, the way I handle things, even the few rare days when I really struggle, I take a real step back and make pretend that somebody called me and told me that my mother or daughter were killed. And I know that's very dark, and I apologize, but it's really what I do. I literally am able to, at my deepest most struggling moment within business, take a step back and remind myself that I could make a trillion dollars tomorrow on Bitcoin, and if something bad happened to the people I love the most, that it would mean nothing, and it very consistently rewires me very quickly. I just put business in perspective. At the end of the day, you know, it's money. For me, it's not really money, it's my legacy, so I get hurt by it a little bit more, But yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I put it in perspective. It's money. And you know what? Up until I had a daughter, even while I was married, up until when I had Misha 4 years ago, I secretly wanted to lose all my money. I had this weird, twisted, dark fantasy of losing everything just to rise again like a phoenix and remind you motherfuckers.

When you have a downtime, like if something didn't work the way you want, what do you do to get back? Back on that positiveness? I talk to the mountain. I have a mountain next to my home that is called Rocher de Ney. It goes up to 2— it's very low— goes up to 2,400 or 2,500 meters. Or I talk to the Dent du Midi, which is 4,000 meters, which is a little bit further away from my home, which I see every morning. I see those two mountains, and I say to these two mountains, mountains, I have a problem, but when I look at you, you are 37 million old. And I'm a little guy here with a little problem. Can you help me? They will say, come on, look what we have already seen in so many years. Your problem is a nano problem. Let me give you the one word secret to happiness.

One word.

This is all you need to be happy.

The most important word.

Ever.

If you had to think of one word that's most important to you, or that sums you up, or that would be kind of like a little beacon. Hey, Believe Nation! If you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, Will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.