"If I'm Going to FALL... I'm Going to Fall FORWARD!" - Denzel Washington - #Entspresso

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 fall forward. Over to you, Denzel Washington.

I found that nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks. Nothing. Nelson Mandela said, "There is no passion to be found playing small and settling for a life that's less than the one you're capable of living." Now, I'm sure in your experiences in school and applying to college and picking your major and deciding what you want to do with life, I'm sure people have told you to make sure you have something to fall back on. Make sure you got something to fall back on, honey. But I never understood that concept, having something to fall back on. If I'm going to fall, I don't want to fall back on anything except my faith. I want to fall forward. I figure at least this way I'll see what I'm going to hit. Fall forward. This is what I mean. Reggie Jackson struck out 2,600 times in his career, the most in the history of baseball, but you don't hear about the strikeouts. People remember the home runs. Fall forward. Thomas Edison conducted 1,000 failed experiments. Did you know that? I didn't know that. Because the 1,001st was the light bulb. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success.

So I love the concept of falling forward and seeing failures not as true failures but as opportunities to learn and grow and get better. I think it also applies to how we see ourselves in our daily lives and the decisions we make and how hard we are on ourselves. I believe that you need to kick yourself forward instead of kicking yourself down. I once got asked in an interview by the reporter who was saying, "How hard should you be on yourself? Can you be too hard on yourself?" And at first I was confused by the question, like, "Too hard on yourself? How can you be too hard on yourself? No, you can't be too hard on yourself." And after going home and thinking about it, I was actually frustrated with my answer because I'm so in on the hard on myself forward and kicking myself forward But the part that I miss is most people kick themselves down. Most people are so hard on themselves that then they don't take any action, that they tell themselves they can't do something, that they suck and they'll never amount to anything and they have no value and they should quit and go off and do something else. Most people just kick themselves down, where what you want is the ability to kick yourself forward, to say, this sucked, I know I can do better, what I just created is not my best work, Here are the 20 areas that I need to improve on, and I'm going to go and work on that right now. To see the failure and the negativity and the holes in what you're making and use that as motivation to go off and do better. That's how I default to. I think it's how most entrepreneurs will default to. You kind of have to. If you just live in negativity land of how much you suck and how you're never going to get anywhere, you're just kicking yourself down, it's really hard to build a successful business. If you are that hard on yourself and you never take any action, you're never going to get anywhere. But entrepreneurs who are hard on themselves, they kick themselves forward. They can be harder on themselves than anybody else around them, but in a positive way that pushes them to action. Those are the people who win. So I encourage you to think about you being hard on yourself. Is it helping you? Are you just beating yourself up, or are you using it as motivation and fuel to do a better job? So I'm gonna make that the question of the day. Question of the day: do you kick yourself down or do you kick yourself forward? Super curious, leave in the comments below. I also want to give a quick shout out to Jean from Third Eye Brand. Jean, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and posting that picture on Instagram. I really, really, really appreciate it, and I hope you're enjoying 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 Enespresso.

And as you begin to challenge yourself, you'll discover some things about yourself that you don't know right now. The other thing is you begin to look at yourself, look at your dreams, and begin to experiment and stepping into your greatness. One of the things that's very important, whatever goals and dreams that you have, repeat after me, please. Make your move before you're ready. You have Price Pritchett, who's a great, great motivator and trainer. He said, make your move before you're ready. We're instructed in life to walk by faith and not by sight. See, you want to really begin to stretch yourself. You want to become a risk taker. You want to raise the bar. Own yourself. Most people won't do that. See, most people engage in low-life living, low-risk living. This God said if you're not willing to risk, you cannot grow. And if you cannot grow, you cannot become your best. And if you cannot become your best, you can't be happy. And if you can't be happy, then what else is there? I like what Helen Keller said: Life is short and unpredictable. Eat the dessert first. And so you want to begin to take some chances. You want to begin to challenge yourself and make it okay to fail and learn from your failures. Don't allow fear of failure and the, the, the allure, the attractiveness of playing it safe in life to draw you in. You can't get out of life alive. You got to die to leave here.

The movies that I made while I was making The Fresh Prince— so it was The Fresh Prince during the winter, and then the summers were Bad Boys, Independence Day, Men in Black. You know, so it was like it really captured a time. So it's very difficult. I wouldn't have it any other way. I love being able to make people smile and cheer, you know, over that. But I also am going to boldly go to new creation. You know, even something like the decision, you know, I had the 2 screenplays in front of me for the Independence Day 2 and for Suicide Squad. So I had to choose between the 2 of those. And even the choice of going to Suicide Squad, nothing about the qualities of the movie, but the choice of trying to go forward versus clinging and clawing backwards, you know. So I do want to aggressively go forward and do new things and create and hopefully be able to stumble upon a new heyday.

Failure is a part of the learning process, right? What's the risk of failure? What, you'll be embarrassed? Or risk of failure— how do you distinguish failure from learning in your whole life? You know, failure implies that it's stopped, that the game stops, right? If it's part of a— you're failing and then you learn then that learning is part of the moving forward, right? So that is what the process is like. Fail, learn, move forward, and constantly do that because you're cutting edge. You're going where people haven't been before in inventiveness. That's exciting.