How to Master Your Mindset | Life Lessons from Les Brown

If you're looking for ways to find mentors, be a good storyteller, and find your drive, then this video is for you.

The first time I stood up to speak, I stood up and my mind sat down. I choked. I couldn't remember anything. Who are you? Yeah. What do you have? Why should I care? People do business with people they know, like, and trust. And when you can answer that, Now you're building a rapport and a connection. All of us get in life what we are, not what we want. All of us are self-made, but only the successful will admit it.

Need motivation? Watch a top 10 of Believe Nation! What's up, it's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe in that amazing thing you have inside you that I want to see burst out into the world. So let's get your motivation to a 10 and have you believing in you. Grab a snack and chew on today's lessons from a man who went from being labeled mentally retarded in grade school and having to sleep in his office because he couldn't afford a home, to becoming one of the greatest speakers of all time and speaking to audiences as large as 80,000 people. He's Les Brown, and here's my take on his Top 10 Rules of Success, Volume 3. Enjoy! All right, let's kick things off with rule number 1, don't lose time.

Is there anything that you wish you, uh, didn't do? Yes. I wish I had not waited 14 years. Somebody said, if you wanna lose something, lose money. You can get that back. 8 outta 10 millionaires have been financially bankrupt. Walt Disney filed bankruptcy 7 times and had 2 nervous breakdowns. But don't lose time. There were 14 years I sat on the sideline, 14 years I said, I don't have an investor in me like Tony Robbins, 14 years that said I don't have an MBA or PhD and I can't compete with these guys. I have the complexion of rejection. 14 years I silenced myself. Wow. And so I regret that because there are some people that maybe if they'd heard my voice, They would not have turned to drugs if they'd heard my voice. Their lives would have taken a different direction. And I can't get those 14 years back. That haunts me. And maybe I think that drives me when I speak with such energy. I'm trying to make up for that time, but I can't.

This is the scariest clip of all. I'm just so worried about losing time. I think The idea of losing 14 years is crazy. And not just— and not just getting started, because I've started, and you may have started, but it's not playing full out. It's not realizing your potential. It's not doing the big thing that you could do because you're playing at 70, 75%, and you're getting results, and everybody might be cheering you on and saying, look at how well you're doing, but you know you could do more. That kills me, that constant push to want to do something bigger and not feel like I've wasted 5 years of my life or 14 years of my life doing the wrong thing. Less! It's a great clip to kick us off. I love it. Let's move on to rule number 2: fail your way to greatness.

I think that the people that are on— that are discovering how to unleash their greatness are people who have the mental resiliency and the courage to face failure. That you will fail your way to greatness. That most people allow their fear of failure, 80%, allow their fear of failure to outweigh their desire to succeed. When you're willing to fail again and again and again, when you make up your mind to become unstoppable, when you make up your mind to become a no matter what person, then that will then give birth to a part of yourself that you don't know right now.

This is another common message that keeps coming up in almost every single top 10. You need to fail. This most successful people in the world fail the most. It just continues to happen over and over and over again. And and then you fail and you suck and you fail and you suck. And eventually you fail, you fail a little bit better every single time, and eventually you end up hitting the home run. But you don't just get up to the plate and smack a home run your first time out. You strike out a lot on your way to success. And so just viewing failure differently. Failure is feedback, failure is a way to know not to do the same thing again, to get a little bit smarter and improve for the next time. You fail your way to greatness. Let's get to rule number 3: Tell your story. I think most businesses fail, most brands never make it, most people never reach their greatness because they don't know how to tell their story.

Yes, that's major.

What will you be sharing with the audience?

'Cause look, man, what if you— Well, let me just share with you why the story's important. Yes. Why the story's important is because when you speak, if you're selling, you're an entrepreneur, you got a product, you have an expertise, knowledge is a new currency. People are asking 3 questions. Who are you? What do you have? And why should I care? And so if you don't answer that, because we know people do business with— Who, what, why? Who are you? Yeah. What do you have? And why should I care? People do business with people they know, like, and trust. And when you can answer that, now you're building a rapport and a connection that creates a possibility where you can do business together and help each other go to that next level.

Your story is your chance to stand out as an entrepreneur. It's not about you anymore. Don't think that telling your story is this big ego play. Play and you're building yourself up. It's not about you, it's about your customers, it's about the connection. If they feel like they get the why, if they feel like they get you, they like you, they trust you, they know you, they feel like doing business with you is doing business with someone who actually cares about them instead of working with some big corporation where they're just another number and they don't really have that level of care. That's important, that's how you win, that's how you take on the big competition. Stop cutting your price and just show people that you care through your story. I love that one. Let's keep it going. Rule number 4, find your drive.

The first time I stood up to speak, I stood up and my mind sat down. I choked. I couldn't remember anything. When I spoke in the Georgia Dome, I went to the bathroom 7 times. Did I tell you 7 is my lucky number? They knocked on the door. Brownie! I said, what is it? Come out, man. Dexter Yeager, they, they're pausing now because it's time for you. And I made a mistake. I looked out at the audience and I panicked. I said, "Mike, I don't hear the voices. I'm scared." He said, "Brownie, they came to see you. You didn't come to see them." He said, "Come out. You will hear the voices." I said, "I don't know, Mike. I've been trying. I just don't know. I'm scared." And he said, "Just be scared and do it anyhow." Don't speak. I said, I don't have to speak? He said, no. I said, then what will I do? He said, just tell a story. Tell a story of where you are, about what you're going through, and about the goal and dream for buying your mother a home. My vision of myself, of wanting to buy her a home and be able to provide for her, and I did that. Bought 4 different homes before she passed. That, that drove me. And so I think it's important that people find something that gives their life a sense of meaning and value that drives them, that becomes their magnificent obsession.

This is another great clip because if you are off on some important mission, something big, something that is pushing you, it's going to be scary. You're gonna have a lot of moments where you are afraid and you don't want to get up on stage, you don't want to make that phone call, you don't want to go to that meeting. But the thing that gets you through is not just pretending like the fear isn't there, because that fear is real. It's having the mission, it's having the drive, it's having the purpose that you want to build this better life for yourself. And the only way through it is crossing through that wall of fear. The wall of fear is real, and every great thing that you ever do in your life will come as a result of crossing that wall of fear. Find your drive. Less. I'm loving it so far. Let's move on to rule number 5: fight for what you want.

And one of the things I emphasize, that changing is not easy, but changing your life, changing habits, reinventing yourself, yeah, picking yourself up after life has knocked you flat on your back. I've got to say, when life knocked you down, try and land on your back, because if you can look up, you could get up. Well, that sounds cute, But that's not easy. When I was diagnosed with prostate cancer 17 years ago, that first time that happened, I said, "Hey, I can handle this." Then when it came back a year late, I mean, last year, 17 years later, and this time it metastasized to 7 areas of my body and ate 40% of my T1 vertebrae. Now the stakes are higher. Is this life saying, "Okay, Mr. Motivator," You beat cancer the first time. What you gonna do now? You know, I started laughing. When the doctor told me, he said, why are you laughing? Are you in denial? I says, no. I said, I feel like Mother Teresa. He said, what do you mean? She said, Lord, I know you know how much I can bear. I just wish you didn't have so much confidence in me. I said, so I said, the stakes are higher. So I've got to dig in and got to fight more. Because at the end of the day, Life is a fight for territory. And once you stop fighting for what you want, what you don't want will automatically take over. And so it's a fight, it's a challenge in life every day. And what we have to do is embrace it. What we have to do is see it as a project to be worked on. I read something once that I live by, said, "In life, you will always be faced with a series of God-ordained opportunities brilliantly disguised as problems and challenges. And so I see even cancer as a gift, as a God-ordained opportunity.

I love it. I think most people spend their time complaining, whining, talking to their friends about how they wish something was a certain way, where the most successful people, the most successful entrepreneurs, are the ones who see the opportunity in the problem. Every major business that was started that you look up to, that you love, was started as a result of a problem, of most people complaining around why some things are a certain way. And some bold entrepreneur decided to say, I'm not just gonna complain, I'm gonna find a way to fix that. And boom, a business was born. You gotta fight for what you want. Let's move on to rule number 6: upgrade your relationships.

Things that affect most people that they don't even realize. I did not know that my relationships affected me. My mother Mother said, "Leslie, if you run around with 9 broke people, I guarantee you, you'll become number 10." Okay. Well, come to find out, Mama was right. She only had a 3rd grade education, but studies indicate, MIT, that you earn within $2,000 to $3,000 of your closest friends. So poverty and living a mediocre life is communicated mind to mind, and so your relationships can hold you down or they can lift you up. So I teach people to practice the principle of OQP—only quality people. Dr. Dennis Kimbrough said if you're the smartest one in your group, you need to get a new group. And so it's very important that people upgrade their relationships.

This is a fantastic point, and the way that I've solved it personally is through the videos. Like right now, I'm hanging around with Les Brown. I'm learning, I'm growing, I'm getting better, I'm getting stronger. And so the more you can bring in people, actual people to have face-to-face conversations with, or online to learn from videos and read books and get some of those people's thoughts, belief systems, habits, mindsets to seep into you makes such a huge difference. If you do that on a daily basis, your quality of life, the quality of your business, the quality of everything that you aspire to be and build will just explode. I believe it. I've seen it. I'm excited to have it happen. For you too. Let's go to rule number 7: Don't do it for the money.

When I speak, it's not about me. My prayer is more of thee, less of me. I'm encouraging people who are serious about speaking, don't just do it for the money. You can make a lot of money. I earn more in 1 hour than 90% of the American public earn working for 5 years. But when you find something that you love you will study it, something that you love, it becomes a difference between being in speaking and speaking being in you, that you will become not just confident, but you will become competent on that.

This message is so critical because in order to become Michael Jordan, world-class level talent at anything, you got to put in the work. You got to put in the work. You got to put in the hustle. You got to put in the drive. And the only thing that gets you through all the years of sucking and failing and continue to stay on and research and get better and improve. It's just the passion for the work. You just love it so much. When you find the thing that you love so much you would do even if you weren't getting paid to do it, that's when you spend so much time at it that you get to be Michael Jordan level talent. That's when you start to win. Let's keep it going to rule number 8, find mentors. What do you say to someone who are saying, oh, nobody around me are believing in me.

And that's okay. If you have that, that's great. If you don't have it, yeah, it's okay. I for years read books of people who I didn't know, but I considered them as my personal mentors. I, yeah, I studied Winston Churchill, who said, the truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but at the end, there it is. I studied Earl Nightingale, who said, All of us get in life what we are, not what we want. All of us are self-made, but only the successful will admit it. So I studied these people and they mentored to me. I feel their spirits. I surrounded myself in my bed with their books. In your head, in many days. And their audio, in my imagination and listening to their audio programs, yes. So how much does a library card cost? It's free in the United States. I don't know what in your country. So I suggest, that you spend time working on yourself. Study the high achievers. I did that to find out how did they get there. I studied the life of Frederick Douglass, who said, "We won't get everything that we fight for, but everything we get, it will be a fight." And so as you study these people and imagine yourself in their position, and in your mind's eye, say to yourself, as I did, "If they can do it, I can do it. They put their pants on." one leg at a time. They breathe air just as I do. And so I believe that what you, what you focus on the longest becomes the strongest. What we think about, we bring about. When you train your mind to serve you— yes, by reading a minimum of 20 to 60 pages a day, listening to audio programs, writing goals down, reaching— reading them 3 times a day, you're literally creating a new mental blueprint and imagining and seeing yourself already living from the goal, you begin to do some things that most people look at and see as magical.

So this ties in nicely with rule number 6, which was upgrade your relationships. I love that as he's talking about mentorship, it's not just the face-to-face. You can learn a lot from reading a book, from watching videos. If you are a fan of Les Brown, you've gone to his speeches, you've watched any videos at length, always quoting a bunch of different people, whether it's Earl Nightingale, whether it's Winston Churchill, whether it's whoever. He's always pulling passages and quotes from different people, and by consuming all that different stuff, it helped make him the best version of himself. And so for you, who are the mentors in your life? Who are the people who you aspire to be, aspire to learn from, aspire to be like, right? And, and researching them is why I started this YouTube channel, why I have content 3 times a day, because I want to learn from less 'cause I wanna learn from Steve Jobs, and that helps me be the best version of me. Let's move to rule number 9, be willing to work.

There's no secret to success. There's a system to success. And no matter what organization you become a part of, the system works if you work it. If you don't work it, it won't work. But it works if you work it. And that's one for 4-letter word that most people don't like. They are not willing to work. I have a friend who invited me to her brother's house to help him to get off drugs, to introduce him to a drug program that can help him. And I said, "These people can help you, but you've got to be willing to do the work." And after we finished, he asked us to leave. And I'll never forget what she She said, as we were going down the steps, she said, "Les, I do apologize for wasting your time, but I realize when my brother knew that it would require work for him to get off drugs, that most people won't participate in their own rescue." And there are people who will be presented with an opportunity who know that who know that they could be laid off at any moment, who know that there's no such thing as job security, who know that them keeping their job has nothing to do with how good they are. And yet and still, they'll go to work and have knots in their stomachs hoping when they open up an email that they have not been told, "This is your last day." They'll go to work hoping there's not a security guard standing by their desk with a box and say, "Empty your things in here and take them to the front door and escort them to the parking lot." They go in there hoping it doesn't happen. Why? Because they don't wanna do the work. It's an aversion to most people's spirit.

Guys, hard work is your ticket in. It doesn't guarantee success. There's lots of people who work hard and don't reach their goals, but There's nobody who reaches big goals without working hard. It's just your ticket in. You have to do it. And if you're not working hard enough, I would challenge you to increase the quality of your goals and then change your environment and your habits to support you being productive every single day, doing things like watching Les Brown, these kinds of videos to get you motivated, excited, and feeling the feeling that you want to go off and do something important every single day. Let's finish it off with rule number 10. Be aligned with your purpose.

I mean, look, you and I, I'm sure you do, and I'm transparent, so I talk about this. I know I'm at the, you know, closer to the end of my career than the beginning of it. I don't think so. No, no, because part of delivering this message, when you're in alignment with your purpose, I believe that gives you more time when the universe— let's look at me, that I'm 72 but I don't look it. I don't have a 72-year-old energy, and there's a difference between that, that physiological age and that spiritual age. And I think when you're in alignment and doing what you're supposed to do that pleasures God, yeah, yeah, that it keeps you young. You have the energy of a 20-year-old. Yeah, yeah. And so that allows you to be— but I mean, there's going to be a time when you and I are not live in these bodies on a stage, without any question, and I'm not looking forward to that.

I really like that message, and I think it rounds up really nicely with rule number 1 that was don't lose time, in that I want to be that guy when I'm 72 years old and older, still loving what I do, still feeling aligned with the mission, still believing in people, even on a bigger scale. I don't want— it just scares me so much to be that guy who just has kind of given up and just reliving the past and that the best years are behind me, as opposed to like what I'm what you're doing right now is the most amazing thing ever. So thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know what message did you take away from Les Brown that you are going to immediately apply somehow to your life or to your business. Leave it in the comments below. Really curious to find out. For me, it was rule number 1, don't lose time. I'm terrified of it. I don't want to lose 14 years of my life or 5 years of my life or 1 day of my life. I want every minute to count. And being around Les in this video and other entrepreneurs who preach the same message just continues to reinforce that today matters, that I need to take action, that my big goals I need to continue to shoot for, and I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it. But what was your favorite rule? Let me know and why. Now I made this video because Sahil Basoya asked me to. If there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, check out the link in the description. You can go and cast your vote on the request line. I also want to give a quick quick shout out to Beau Hawkins from 4 Minute Masters. Beau, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, doing the profile on your YouTube channel. I really appreciate the support, man, and I'm so glad you enjoyed the read. Hey guys, today we're gonna be talking about Evan Carmichael's Your One Word: The Powerful Secret to Creating a Business and a Life That Matters. So 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.

I'll see you soon. How people live their lives is a result of the story they believe about themselves. And when you have your program and your guests, and as they share ideas of how they move through the things that affect them, what you do is interrupt their story. I tell speakers, I train speakers how to discover their story, how to tell their story, and how to transform people individually and collectively by creating an experience. When I came into the speaking industry, it was based on based upon the, the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill's book was a good book. They consider that the Bible of the motivational speaking industry. Well, I come to know because of my mentor Mike Williams in Columbus, Ohio. He wrote the book called The Road to Your Best Stuff. He said, Les, if information could change people, everybody would be skinny, rich, and happy, right? Okay, so he said in order to change people, you have to create a significant emotional event that you have to interrupt a person's story that they believe about themselves with your story. And through the delivery of your story strategically, you dismantle their current belief system and inspire them to make new choices. Because at the end of a presentation, if you don't change how a person sees themselves and if you don't expand their vision of themselves beyond their mental conditioning and their circumstances and begin to allow them to get a larger vision of themselves and begin to ignite their spirit. You touch their hearts, and as a result, they leave your presence feeling better about themselves, but making new choices, because when you change how they see themselves, all you have to do after that is to get out of the way. Success to me is doing that which resonates with your heart, that provides some quality of service to others. Others. When you're doing that— in my life, I, I help people to change their lives. And, and when I do that, you know, love, happiness, and inspiration are perfumes you can't sprinkle on others without getting a few drops on yourself. Why are you here? What's your reason for being? Why do you get up in the morning? Most people don't have a clue. Pay the bills, keep a roof over your head. I think we have to reflect on who am I, Why am I here? What drives me? If I died today, what 3 words would I want said about me if I died today? You know, what is it that defines me? You know, and how do I define myself? Most people allow their circumstances to define them, as opposed to defining themselves and how they're going to show up in life. And so my mission is to help people to connect with the power they have within. Their greatness. When you're pursuing your greatness, you don't know what your limits are, so you act like you don't have any. And when you live from that place, you can now be able to make a greater contribution and make a greater impact with your life. Raise your standard. Apple, at the core, its core value is that we I believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me. I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated. Hey, Believe Nation!

If you want to see my all-time favorite top 10 rules of success, I have a very special secret video for you. These are the individual clips that I have personally learned them most from and apply to my life and my business. Check the link in the description for details.