The video opens with Evan Carmichael addressing his "Believe Nation" audience, introducing the central premise that discomfort is a friend and a driver of growth. He hands the floor to a clip of Joe Rogan, who explains that humans instinctively avoid discomfort, yet true progress, achievement, and personal fulfillment are rooted in embracing it. Carmichael expands on this by urging viewers to deliberately seek daily experiences that scare them, describing how such practices build a "fear muscle" that fuels personal and business development. He deconstructs common rationalizations—lack of money, time, or skill—as masks for underlying fear, and stresses the importance of recognizing and confronting these feelings. Carmichael shares several personal anecdotes: delivering a keynote in Paris without slides, jumping onto the stage, and everyday acts like dancing in public or wearing different colored socks, illustrating how small, uncomfortable actions can spark confidence and inspire others. The segment concludes with a call to action, asking viewers to comment on the last thing that scared them. Interspersed are brief clips from Richard Branson, who recounts how frustration with airline bumping led him to start Virgin Airlines, and a nod from Matthew McConaughey, reinforcing the theme that entrepreneurial ideas often arise from discomfort and frustration. The overall tone is motivational, conversational, and enthusiastic, aiming to empower entrepreneurs and creators to view discomfort as a catalyst rather than an obstacle.
Chapters
Good morning, Believe Nation! My name is Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs will solve all of the world's major problems. So to help you on your journey, today's message is discomfort is your friend. Over to you, Joe Rogan.
Our bodies, for whatever reason, most people, their associations are to avoid anything that's uncomfortable. But it's so illogical because when you look at comfort and you look at success and progress and the eventual— the feelings of accomplishment and of getting past certain hurdles in terms of like how you feel about life, a lot of those are connected to discomfort. Like, discomfort is your friend. It really is like discomfort and not being happy and content with certain situations in life or certain feelings in life. They're massive, massive motivators and they're amazing at facilitating change. And yet our instinct is to avoid those and just sit on the couch and watch some fucking reality show about dudes who make moonshine with our jaw open like, "Grrr." It's bizarre.
You can measure your growth in life as a human being by how much discomfort you're regularly experiencing. There's that old expression that you need to scare yourself every day, right? We hear it in songs, we hear it, you know, on the radio, we hear it on TV, we read it in books. You gotta do something that scares you every day. And it's great advice, it's amazing advice. We just don't do it. Like, do you do something that scares you every day? When was the last time you did something that actually scares you? Right, and when you are doing things that scare you, that's when you see insane growth. That's when you see yourself developing, your business developing, and it may not happen right away, but through that process of scaring yourself and getting uncomfortable, that's when you start seeing amazing things happen and you feel great. You feel scared, but you also feel great because we love to grow. Because as humans, we want to grow, we want to get better, we want to learn, we want to develop ourselves. And so what I would encourage you to do is try to develop the habit of You can either consciously say, "I'm trying to do something to scare myself every day," right, which can be a good practice, but also it can be reactive in that when you have an idea or somebody asks you to do something and you get those nerves, right, you get those nerves that, "Ooh, that's scary. I don't want to do that. I might fail," you know, to recognize that and then to build and grow from that, to start building that muscle of fear and breaking through it. I think it's really important. I think most of what we do is subconscious. I think most of the actions you take will be subconscious. You will just naturally play small without even thinking about it. You'll rationalize the fear, right? You'll rationalize the discomfort. You really want to start a YouTube channel, and the real reason is you're afraid to get in front of the camera. You're afraid of people's judgment of you. But instead of recognizing that, you'll say, "Oh, I don't have the money to get a camera. I don't have the time. I have a really busy life. And you know, I've got to get the gear, the lights, the microphone. I don't even know. I didn't go to school for this." And I know all of you rationalize the reason, but deep down it's just fear. You're just afraid. So the first step is just understanding that it's fear, that you're really just afraid of doing this thing. And then when you understand that, practice developing the courage to go and do it. Whenever I feel myself being a little bit afraid, worried about other people's expectations, then I know I have to go up and do it. So a couple examples: I went to Paris not that long ago and was speaking on stage. I had a keynote speech to close out a conference. There's about 2,000 people in the room, and I've done tons of these speeches, right? I've done a lot of speeches. And every time I go, I want to try to do something new, something different. Not just for the audience, because a lot of the audience hadn't seen me before. For myself. I don't want to get up on stage and just do the same speech that I've always done. Every time I go, I want to do something different for myself. And so this time I went up and I didn't use any slides. I had one slide the entire presentation. Usually I had slides that would have pictures that followed along the story of what I was saying. I don't read from slides, I've never done that. Well, maybe probably when I started I read from slides. But this time I thought, you know what, I have a 20-minute presentation, I'm going to get on stage and I'm just going to go. And the initial fears that come back, like, what if I forget what I'm going to say? What if I lose track? Because the pictures at least kept me on track. And what if I miss a point? You know, I shouldn't do it. You know, I've been paid to come here and I need to make sure I'm providing a lot of value and that's maybe not the smartest thing to do. Why this idea? And all of these fears coming like, no, I'm going to do it. I got to do it. I need to push myself for me. And I was so nervous. There was a guy speaking before me and I just couldn't wait for him to finish because all the way through his presentation I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to say this, I'm going to say this, fears, fears, fears, fears. They announced my name. Instead of walking around the stage like everybody else does, I just jumped onto the stage. I was in the front row. Evan Carmichael! I jumped on the stage and the MC had to come and shake my hand up front instead of around the side. I think it's important. I think it's important for yourself that you do the things that make you feel uncomfortable. I told this story before on my channel about even making videos here and worrying about people walking behind me and doing it in a public setting instead of closing the doors or doing it somewhere else. Or wearing different colored socks. Because my son did it, and then I was worried that people would judge me if I tried to do it. Because I was worried about the judgment, I had to go out and do it. Or listening to music when I'm walking down the street and dancing, and then when I get close to a busy intersection, dancing smaller. As soon as you catch it, see, you'll dance smaller just naturally. You'll play smaller naturally. But if you can catch it, that's when you can say, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not impacting these people, I'm not trying to make their life Worse, right? My dancing, my doing whatever I want to do on the street doesn't impact them. If anything, it's giving them something different to look at. It's bringing a little more joy. They might tell their coworker they saw this crazy guy on the street dancing. Maybe they go back to their office and dance a little bit more. Maybe what I'm doing is actually inspiring them. But naturally, it plays small. So if you can catch it, that's when you got to take the action. And so there's that great expression of doing something every day that scares you. But we don't actually do it. So I encourage you, when you feel that discomfort, try to recognize it, try to see it as this is muscle building time, and go out and do it. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what was the last thing that you did that scared you? Leave it down in the comments below, I'm really curious to find out. I also want to give a quick shout out to Priest Willis. Priest, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. I really appreciate the support and I hope you enjoyed my book. So thank you guys so much 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. I wake up every morning, espresso keeps me going.
If I had to rewind the clock 10 years, I would have insisted by people that, close to me that please push me into very unsafe projects, at least every other one. I think it's professionally responsible to not continue to remake the same film over and over again. What's tonight? Turkey TV dinner. Turkey TV dinner.
So it looks like you always go out of your comfort zone, right? Coming onto an island that was completely deserted. No fresh water, you didn't even have the money to buy it, and now you're sleeping on a tent on the beach trying to figure out how to get fresh water here. You do that often. You did it with the airline.
I mean, I was just somebody that experienced the bad experience of traveling on airlines. I was actually trying to get to the BVI, the British Virgin Islands, one day from Puerto Rico, and the same lovely lady was waiting for me, and I'd been away for 3 weeks, and American Airlines bumped the flight. And, um, uh, and so I went to the back of the airport, I hired a plane, um, I hired a blackboard, uh, I wrote, um, Virgin Airlines, uh, one way, $29 to the BVI, went around all the people who'd been bumped, and I filled my first plane. And, and that got me thinking, you know, that airlines do bump people, they don't care about you or me particularly in the air. And so we, um, so I then rang up Boeing and said, do you have any secondhand 747s?
Okay. I mean, it was literally that. You just sat in the airport and said, I'm starting an airline right now because I'm frustrated.
Exactly.
And I think most, most of the best entrepreneurial ideas come out of frustration. I think, you know, if you're, if you're frustrated about something, the best way of sorting it out is get out and do it. And you've got yourself a business.
Starting with Lincoln Lawyer was a time when I said I wanted to recalibrate my relationship with with my career. I remember saying that. I remember thinking, my career, I'm enjoying it. I love what it's given me. I like going to work. I like the things I've been doing. But everything I started reading, I felt like, oh, it's another version of something I've done, or I feel like I could do it next week. And I remember going, well, wait a minute. Before you get mad at thinking you could do something next week, that's a valid feeling. Don't just say no to something because you feel like you can naturally do it. But then I said, OK, fair. I'll shake with you on that, Makana, eh? But let me find something that I that I don't know how, what to do with that next week or the week after. Let me find something that I really like, but I'm going, "Hoo, I'm not sure." That scares me, that shakes my floor. And I was fortunate enough, 'cause that Schedule F check I got in Angels in the Outfield, to know that my rent was paid. I was fortunate enough to know my kids were gonna eat. I was just shepherding my first son into the world. So I had that to take care of my time. And I said, "It's a great time to go into the shadows and be a father and sit back and see if something turns you on from the inside or if something finds you, if you're the target that can draw the air. But let's, we're okay, rent's paid, kids are gonna eat, we can take some time off." I know what he was thinking about, like, "Oh, I'm done." But I didn't know how long the dry spell was gonna go. So I said no to some of the things that were similar to what I had been doing before. And it took a while, I had to sit down with my agent and say, "Hey, I'm really gonna do this and I need your help with my commitment to this because," After 8 months, if the same thing comes in with a big $10 million paycheck, it starts to read better and funnier. I promise you, I mean, the same words. All of a sudden, it's kind of— I think this thing's great. I think I can find an angle. No, I can make it a different experience for me. So I said, I'm going to need your help bunkering down here and and saying no to some things. And so I'm going to need you to be a gatekeeper, one, to keep them from getting to me, two, let's be real clear, I'm looking for some different things to do. He hold up, he handled that. My wife, we said we don't know how long it's going to be dry. Then after they quit sending those, then it did get dry. Then nothing came for about a year. There's nothing. And I didn't have any sleepless nights or, oh my gosh, I was like No, I'll find something, I'll write. I was writing a lot. I was turning myself on creatively and as I said, I had my first son to shepherd into the world. And then the funny thing happened, the beautiful thing happened that somehow the target drew the arrow and I think, my opinion is, I became a new good idea by removing myself. I became, William Friedkin calls for the first time, Steven Soderbergh calls for the first time. Somehow in that 2 years, I became a fresh new idea. That I don't think I was 2, 3 years prior. How that works, I'm not sure because I didn't send a memo out.
