How to KEEP GOING | Change Your LIFE in 18 Minutes

Don't stop running toward your dream.

Keep going.

Keep going.

It will keep you going.

Keeping yourself going.

Keep going.

Kept going.

Keep going.

Hello, Believe Nation. Today we're going to talk about how you can keep going.

It's hard changing your life. It was hard when just over 3 years ago in the Penobscot Building in Detroit, Michigan, where I was operating my business, and I fell on some hard times, and I was sleeping in my office. It was hard coming into the lobby, and the security said, 'Excuse me, Mr. Brown, can we see you for a moment?' And I said, 'Yes,' and I walked up to the counter, and he gave me an envelope, and he said, 'Would you mind reading it here?' And I opened the envelope, and the envelope was from management that said, said, "This is an office tower. It's not a hotel. Please do not sleep in your office." And I said, "Excuse me, sir." I said, "I just work long hours in creating my business. I'm an entrepreneur, and right now things are bad for me, but they're not going to be this way always. And I just ask for the opportunity to continue to operate like I'm doing." I'm not trying to make this my home. And it was hard coming through the lobby, and sometimes they would laugh. There's a guy talking about becoming successful, and look at him, he's bathing in the bathroom upstairs on the 21st floor. He sleeps on the floor, him and two other dreamers up there. Look at him. It was hard, ladies and gentlemen, coming to speak to people, and I was facing financial difficulties in my own life. I was behind on my bills and my dreams, and I'm saying to them, you can live your dream. It was hard, ladies and gentlemen. It was very difficult to pick myself up each day believing that I can do it. There were times that I doubted myself. I said, God, why? Why is this happening to me? I'm just trying to take care of my children and my mother. I'm not trying to steal or rob from anybody. Why does this have to happen to me? It was very hard. And here's what I want to say to you, for those of you that have experienced some hardships: don't give up on your dream. No one could have convinced me by holding on, by continuing to push forward, by continuing to run toward my dream, that one day I would have my own talk show. It's a long shot, ladies and gentlemen, from Liberty City, an abandoned building, on a floor, never knowing my mother or father. It's a long shot being here with you today in this dome in Atlanta. It's a long shot. No college training, labeled educable mentally retarded, but I kept running toward my dream. Don't stop. Don't stop. Don't stop running toward your dream.

Now here's an important point. Nothing works the first time. When you try something new, it probably won't work. When you try something new several times, it probably won't work. And the turning point in my life came when I would hear good ideas and I was so eager to be successful in selling, I would run out and try the ideas and they wouldn't work. I'd try a way of getting an appointment or answering an objection or closing a sale, it wouldn't work. And my natural response, ah, and I think just to be disappointed, and then I realized nothing works at least the first few times. So I decided I would try a new idea 5 or 10 times before I passed judgment on it. I would not just try it once and quit like most people do, and that changed my whole life. It was a turning point in my life because I realized from then on, if you've got a good idea and you've got a good goal and you want to double your income and improve the quality of your life, and you have to try new things in order to get new results, it's not going to work the first time. So say, well, that didn't work, try something else and try something else and try something else. Now, if you try, only 2 things can happen. What are they? Succeed or fail. If you succeed, you do more of it. If you fail, you learn from it, get smarter, and try it again. So you cannot lose by taking action. You can only lose by not taking action.

Now, it's of utmost importance. Like, I mean, I was such a die-hard fan, Laker fan, growing up, man. And just my personality, like, it would— for me to ask for a trade or to go play someplace else to try to chase a championship, that's not me, man. That's not being— that's not what my career has been about. That's not who I am, man. You know, I stay with it. You know, stuff that I've been through in my life and been through in my career, if it's taught me anything, it's the fact that you'll have good moments, you'll have bad moments, you'll have great moments, you'll have horrible moments. You just keep going through all of them, and then things work themselves out.

You know, every time you lose at something, you're one step closer to winning the next time. The difference between successful people and not successful people— okay, let's call it that way. Are people give up. People wake up every morning, have doubt, they have fear, they lose in a Ferrari race or they lose in a race, and then they just give up. The hardest thing in life to learn is to lose. Winning's easy. You win, you're happy, you get a high five, your friends are happy. It's your ability to take a loss, get up the next day, dust yourself off, and keep going. I have lost at everything you can imagine. Seriously, we have I have been beat up and put down, and everything that can go wrong has gone wrong for me, but I just kept going.

My only idea, my only focus was to do my one play, and I knew if I could get that to work, everything else would come to pass. There's so many people who go in so many directions.

They—

this week they're doing this, and next week they're doing that, and next week they're doing this, and next week they're going to be in real estate, and the next week they're going to open a salon. Those, those kind of people are all over the place, and I usually try to get them to focus. Focus on one thing, one area. Put all of your energy into watering one area. If you spread the water across many, many seeds, you don't have as much water for one seed. So focus on one thing, make it your priority, and stick with it no matter what. No matter how many people told me no, no matter how many people lied to me, no matter how many times I put the show up and nobody came, I remember when I did my very first show, I worked my butt off and saved $12,000, tax returns from H&R Block money. I saved it, worked hard, saved it myself, rented the 14th Street Playhouse, put that show up, thought that 1,200 people would come over a weekend, and 30 showed up, and I knew every one of them. But I didn't stop. That didn't deter me. That was in 1992. '93, same thing happened. '94, '95, '96, '97, up until 1998, same devastation. Nobody's showing up in the audience. I was doing one show a year, working with different promoters, trying to get the show up, and nobody showed up. But I didn't stop. And my, my, my— what I say to you now, looking at me now here, I am a human being. There's no difference between my humanness and your humanness. The only thing is, if you're trying to get there, you cannot stop believing in any way, no matter what anybody says, no matter what anybody tells you. You have to know it beyond knowing it. And it is a feeling when something is for you. This is how I knew it was for me. When something's for you, there's a feeling that is deep down inside of you that will not allow you to let it go. You have— it will, it will keep you going when you can't even keep yourself going. That's why the mantra here at the Tyler Perry Studios is a place where even dreams believe, because there comes a time in your life where you've worked and you've stressed and you tried to get there and you couldn't on your own, but you have a dream and that dream has to take on the belief for you because you can't do it by yourself. So what I would tell you is this: don't stop. Narrow your focus to one idea, one, and make it work. That will give birth to all the others.

Successful people do the things unsuccessful people don't want to do or have a very difficult time doing, guys, very difficult time, and that is keeping yourself going When nothing's working, when everyone else is saying no, no, no, no, no.

I mean, what made you single-handedly decide to replenish America's bison herd?

Save everything. Remember, I'm supposed to be shooting for something that's impossible to have happen in my lifetime.

And he has done the impossible many times, like the 1979 Fastnet Race off the coast of England. A massive storm whipped up winds and waves that left 15 sailors dead. To this day, it's considered the most dangerous ocean race ever. And Ted didn't just survive, he won. And that's where we started our conversation about his amazing life. Was there ever a moment that you thought you wouldn't make it?

No, but I didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about not making it. I was trying to figure out how to keep going.

Were you afraid?

No.

Did you ever think of not going through with the race? Was it ever—

Dropping out? No way. That would have been like dropping out with CNN. You will fail at some point in your life. Accept it. You will lose. You will embarrass yourself. You will suck at something. There's no doubt about it. And I know that's probably not a traditional message for a graduation ceremony, but hey, I'm telling you, embrace it because it's inevitable. And I should know. In the acting business, you fail all the time. Early on in my career, I auditioned for a part in a Broadway musical. Perfect role for me, I thought, except for the fact that I can't sing. So I'm in the wings, I'm about to go on stage, but the guy in front of me, he's singing like Pavarotti. He's just going on and on and on, and I'm just shrinking. I'm getting smaller and smaller. So they say, oh, thank you very much, thank you very much, and you'll be hearing from us. So I come out with my little music and It was "Just My Imagination" by The Temptations. That's what I came up with. So I hand it to the accompanist, and she looks at it and looks at me and looks out at the director and was like, "All right." So I start, you know, I'm going to sing. I'm like, "It's just my imagination." Once again, and then coming away with me. And they're not saying anything, so I'm thinking I'm getting better. I start getting into it. Running. They said, oh yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you very much, Mr. Washington, thank you. So I assumed I didn't get the job, but the next part of the audition, he called me back. The next part of the audition is the acting part of the audition. Now I'm like, hey, okay, maybe I can't sing, but I know I can act. So they pair me with this guy, and again, I didn't know about musical theater, and musical theater is big, so they can reach everyone all the way in the back of the stadium. And I'm more from a realistic, naturalistic kind of acting where you, you know, you actually talk to the person next to you. So I don't know what my line was. My line was, well, Hand me the cup. And his line was, well, I will hand you the cup, my dear. The cup will be there to be handed to you. I said, okay, well, should I give you the cup back? Oh yes, you should give it back to me because you know that is my cup and it should be given back to me. I didn't get the job. But here's the thing: I didn't quit. I didn't fall back. I walked out of there to prepare for the next audition, and the next audition, and the next audition.

I prayed.

I prayed. And I prayed, but I continued to fail and fail and fail. But it didn't matter because you know what? There's an old saying: you hang around the barbershop long enough, sooner or later you're gonna get a haircut. So you will catch a break, and I did catch a break. Last year I did a play called Fences was on Broadway. Someone talked about it. Won the Tony Award. And I didn't have to sing, by the way. But here's the kicker. It was at the Cort Theatre. It was at the same theater that I failed that first audition 30 years prior. The point is, And I'll pick up the pace. The point is, every graduate here today has the training and the talent to succeed. But do you have the guts to fail?

How did Ann Doerr and Bill Gates find out about you?

I think you must have—

there must have been some agency on your part that resulted in those two people popping up in your story.

Yes, and especially about Bill Gates, about 40 people have taken credit for introducing him to I haven't gotten— I thanked them all. For Ann, it was her daughter was, I believe she was in middle school in Palo Alto at the time, and one of the other mothers had told Ann that my children are really getting a lot out of this Khan Academy thing, you should check it out, and then Ann checked it out and she herself— because it's not just kind of academic math, there's stuff there about the financial crisis, about accounting, about kind of current events. And so she found herself spending like a full day on it. And so that's kind of what kind of inspired her to give the very generous donation that she did. Bill Gates, I mean, regardless of who introduced it, I heard someone at the foundation sent him an email, "Check this out." They knew that he, you know, he's famous for reading a lot and liking online lectures and all of this. And they sent it to him and the account that I heard is that He normally sends things back like, oh, I've already seen it, not a big deal, whatever. He's a really fast information processor. But they didn't hear back from him. They sent him the link. They didn't hear back from him for like a day. And then he emails back. He says, I just spent the last day on Khan Academy. Which is once again a little bit— I still find that a bit of a stressful idea. But yeah, and that's what kind of catalyzed this whole thing. In terms of what I did to make that happen, you know, I'd like— I can't say that I— I mean, what I did is I just kept going. I mean, you know, throughout this thing, most people thought this was a fairly crazy project, and especially because there was nothing really novel about the idea. The idea of recording lectures and even exercises, putting it online, I mean, people were talking about this since radio. Oh, radio's going to be the killer app for education, or TV. Now with VCRs, it's on demand. Even exercise. Steve Jobs famously thought the PC was going to be the treadmill for the mind. So these weren't new ideas. But I think it was just I was satisfied with the small wins. Hey, my cousins find this valuable. And hey, people are emailing me. I'm getting a lot of satisfaction out of this. And I kind of said, oh, one day when I have kids— I have kids now, but one day when I have kids, they could use these videos. How cool is that? And I think that's what kind of gave me the energy to just kind of keep going. And I think you'll hear in a lot of entrepreneurial stories, it's kind of just as long as what you're doing is kind of unkillable, and what I was doing was unkillable. It was a hobby for so long that at some point it finds its moment. And if it's destined to have a moment, and then people discover it and it just kind of hits a hockey stick like that.

Just keep going. Find that thing you love because it's tough work. And my father gave me this advice when I said I wanted to be an actor. He said, have a backup profession like welding. But I think if you can find that thing that really gives you joy, that'll be it. 'Cause for me, it's always been comedy and stand-up and acting too, because of exploring behavior. But it's tough work, but if you can get it, even better.

Good luck.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know which of the clips meant the most to you, had the biggest impact on you. Leave it in the comments below. I'm gonna join the discussion. I'd also love to know What's holding you back from keeping going? What are the problems, the struggles you're facing right now? And hopefully by sharing in the comments, Believe Nation will rise up and help you get to where you need to go. So share those in the comments below. Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Dodie Pucha Artawan. I hope I pronounced that okay. Dodie purchased a copy of my book. Thank you so much for that. For you guys watching, if you want a chance at a shout out in a future video, make sure to get a copy of the book and email in your receipt so we can keep track. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, or whatever your one word is, and I'll see you soon.