How to Break Free | Empower Your Mind in 10 Powerful Minutes

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 choose your own path. Over to you, Michelle Obama.

I want you all to stay true to the most real, most sincere, most authentic parts of yourselves. I want you to ask those basic questions: Who do you want to be? What inspires you? How do you want to give back? And then I want you to take a deep breath and trust yourselves. To chart your own course and make your mark on the world. Maybe it feels like you're supposed to go to law school, but what you really want to do is teach little kids. Maybe your parents are expecting you to come back home after you graduate, but you're feeling a pull to travel the world. I want you to listen to those thoughts. I want you to act with both your mind, but also your heart. And no matter what path you choose, I want you to make sure it's you choosing it and not someone else.

Everyone around you has a plan for your life. Everybody around you, your parents, your teachers, your friends, your neighbors, your grandparents, everybody has an agenda for your time and an opinion on what you should do with your life, where you should go, And a lot of times it's out of love, it's out of genuine care and wanting to see you be successful, but success looks different to different people. And so a lot of people, what ends up happening is they live their parents' version of their lives, their grandparents' version of their lives. They keep going down this path that is not meant for them. And what happens? You may have some success, but ultimately you're not gonna be happy 'cause you're not doing the thing that's inside of you. And then what happens is people start complaining. Well, I'm stuck on this path because my parents made me, and now I have to go down this job line that I don't want to do. At some point, you have to decide when you're gonna live your version of your life instead of your parents' or somebody else's, right? When you're growing up, you have to listen to your parents, right? When you're 5 years old, you're not gonna leave home and say, I'm gonna go forge my own path, right? You're listening to your parents, and you adopt some of their beliefs and some of their mindsets, and some of those may be limiting. But at some point in time, whether it's at 12 years old or 16 years old or 18 years old or 34 years old, like, at some point you have to start making decisions for yourself and say, you know what, this path that you want for me is not the path that I want for myself. I want to go and do this, and I get that you want me to do something else and that it's all that I love, but I need to go down this path, and even if I fail, I at least need to know. So if you're not happy with where you're at, you're not happy with the job path you're at, you're not happy with the relationship path that you're on, don't default to blaming other people. It's not your parents' fault anymore. It's not your community's fault anymore. You're an adult. Take responsibility. If you are unhappy with where you are at in life, it's on you to fix it. And that sucks at the start. It's so easy to complain and to blame somebody else. It'd be great to point the finger and say it's the president's fault why you're not successful. That's convenient and easy, but it's not the truth. And when you accept that it's on you and you take accountability and responsibility for where you are, then you also recognize that you have the ability and you have the power to change it in a much more positive direction. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what was the moment in your life that you decided that you would go and shape your own path? When was that? Tell me your story. Share it down in the comments below. Super curious to find out. I also want to give a quick shout out to Jane Cassell. Jane, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and posting it on Twitter and LinkedIn. I really, really appreciate the support, and I'm glad that you enjoyed the read. Thank you guys again 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 guys again tomorrow morning for another shot of entspresso. I wake up every morning, espresso keeps me going.

But see, what is the choice? That you walk a path like everyone else dressed in suits, go to work and come back and never have a legacy, or you swim upstream like a trout against norm, and then whatever little you achieve is only yours. It's not like everyone else. And I'd rather have something that is my path paved by me, something that is my legacy, my own self, my own achievement, than being one of the many successful people in the world.

Every pursuit, no matter how glamorous it may seem, no matter how exciting you are— it feels to you, no matter how much you feel like you were born to do it, comes with a shit sandwich. And so the question is not, "What do I love?" The question is, "What do I love so much that I don't mind eating the shit sandwich that comes along with that thing?" So for me in my life, writing is the thing that I love, and the shit sandwich was the 7 years that I was not getting published and that I was coming home from my job as a diner waitress, as a bartender, as an au pair, as somebody who worked in flea markets, as a cook, and I was coming home tired and smelling like other people's French fries and sitting down and doing my real job, which was to write. And then to go to the mailbox the next day and get another rejection letter. And then say, "Do I still wanna do this? 'Cause this shit sandwich sucks." Am I ready to take another bite?

Right.

You know? And I did still wanna do it. And now even as somebody who makes their living as a writer—

Yeah.

There's no end to the shit sandwiches. It's like, "Oh, hello, horrible review in prominent newspaper. That's your shit sandwich today, Liz. You still wanna do this work?" Yep. Yeah, I still do. Still worth it. Like, "Hello, awful comment on social media from somebody who thinks you're a pile of dog shit," you know, and just has, like, chosen every possible way that they can— just cannot get it out of their system fast enough how much disregard they have for your entire life.

Yep.

"Still wanna do this thing?" "Yeah, I still wanna do it." You know? So that's the question because if the first time you encounter the shit sandwich you're like, "Well, this isn't worth it," then that's not the thing you're supposed to be doing. And there are plenty of things in life that I have run into the shit sandwich and I've been like, "So not worth it. So not worth it. Like, this is not— I don't wanna do this. Like, whatever the alleged benefits of this thing might be, no." Not down for this. SoulCycle. No.

You know?

Like, I know it's probably really good for me, but I feel like throwing up right now because this is too hard. Right. I'm out. You'll not be seeing me here again.

You know?

Like, and I love my sisters at SoulCycle. I just don't like feeling like I'm gonna throw up when I exercise. So it's not for me. You know? And so that's the question. So if you go into this thing thinking, if I follow my bliss and I live my dream and I stand in my truth, then everything will be great. It doesn't mean everything will be great. It just means at the end of the day when you check in with yourself and you go, "In the end, on the balance, is this still better than not doing it?" And the answer is still, "Yeah, this thing is still better than not doing it," then you're on the right path.

I got into the Air Force because I was— as it turns out, I was romanticizing that whole idea. You know, we were refighting World War II as I was growing up, so we had all these heroic movies, and I fell in love with the idea of flying. And then when I got into the Air Force, I had this big eye-opener that racism was rampant there also. And that I didn't— I'm not qualified, or suited is a better word, for military life. That kind of unquestioning obedience to a lot of things that I think are stupid didn't quite go over well. Yeah. So when I got out, I was an early discharge. It was almost dishonorable, you know, because I just really didn't fit. But the catalyst actually was I did get to sit in a jet trainer because I had a lot of people behind me to get me into flight school and stuff. But sitting there, it occurred to me that this is absolutely not what I want. It isn't movies. It's for real. These, you know, this little red button on the joystick controls guns with real bullets. And I sat there for quite a while and knew that if I made a strafing run, I needed a camera here and I needed the people to be able to get up and go back to number 1. So, I got out of that plane on the runway at North Island Air Station, a naval air station, and I walked away from that and towards acting. I knew that it was all about the movies. It was all about the movies.