How To Overcome Pain & Become Great | 5 Minutes

Good morning, Believe Nation.

Today's message is turn pain into greatness. Over to you, Machine Gun Kelly.

People used to take my raps and crunch them up and throw them on the ground. I used to get made fun of all the time because who believes that the guy sitting next to them in math class is going to blow up and become a superstar? You don't believe that, right? But like, You should've. And it's a bummer, you know what I mean? 'Cause I, yeah, I don't know, man. I mean, take it, take it and make, you know, pain is the best inspiration. So if you're a creative out there and you're getting bullied, take it and make something great out of it.

So what do you think?

I think that's a really important message. When I first started dancing, I was told that I would be a decent dancer at best.

At best.

At best, at best. I wasn't very good and my feet are actually not equipped to dance because I have really flat feet and I used to get a lot of pain in my feet and it would always shake, especially during performances. And I told myself that I'm gonna make myself strong, so I did really, really painful ballet exercises and eventually I became stronger and now I'm able to go on stage and perform and also change the physiology of my foot. I wish I could show you, but I can't right now. But I never had an arch, but I have an arch now. Wow. Yes, and that's a— and I mean, to most people it's not a big deal, but to me it's a huge deal because I was told I couldn't be a dancer because of my feet.

Cool. When I was at my agency, when I first connected with them, they told me that I wasn't good enough to join the agency. They liked my message, but I couldn't speak, which hurt because I'd already done 2 years of public speaking and I felt like I should be a little better than "I can't speak." And most of the people at their agency, they said, could speak, but they didn't have a message. And so they were willing to take a risk on me. And so I worked really really hard. I wanted to take that pain, that rejection, and turn it into something amazing. And so I practiced every single day working on my creation story, and sometimes 3 times a day making videos back and forth and back and forth. And I started getting better. In a couple months, I became the best practice at the agency, and people were saying, you should go look what Evan's doing. Not because I was great— I had the least talent of anybody there— I just worked hard. So I was making 3 videos a day where most people were having a hard time coming up with 1 video a week, come with excuses to say, I don't have time to make 1 video a week. More than that just too much. And so that's why I got better. And so if you have a goal, if somebody's telling you that you can't do it, it's just work. Put in the work, get better at it. Practice, practice, practice. You can become a better speaker, you can change the physiology of your foot, become a great dancer. Whatever your goal is, you can chase it if you put in the work.

So the question of the day today is: What is the pain that you're struggling with right now to overcome?

I love it. Leave it in the comments, we'll join in the discussion. Finally, want to give a quick shout out to Ron. Ron, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really, really, really It means a lot to me and I hope you're enjoying the read. So thank you guys so much for watching. We believe in you. We hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love and we'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.

I wake up every morning, espresso keeps me going.

And one does have to be focused on the short term and money coming in when creating a company because otherwise the company will die. So I think that a lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it's really not that fun. I mean, there are periods of fun, and there are periods where it's just awful. And particularly if you're the CEO of the company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There's no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong. And there are things that are going wrong that other people can't take care of. So you have like the worst— you have a filter for the crappiest problem in the company, the most pernicious and painful problem. So I wouldn't say it's— I think you have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold. And there's a friend of mine— who says starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. And there's some truth to that. The staring into the abyss part is that you're going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company, because most startups fail. It's like 90%, arguably 99% of startups fail. So that's the staring into the abyss part. You're constantly saying, OK, if I don't get this right, the company will die. It can be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you've got to do the problems. You've got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on— problems that you'd really wish you weren't working on. And so that's the eating glass part. And that goes on for a long time.