In this motivational montage, host Evan Carmichael opens with a challenge to the audience: stop living in the past. He strings together commentary from several high‑profile guests—actor Anthony Hopkins, historian Yuval Noah Harari, entrepreneur Dan Lok, and self‑help author Brian Tracy—each reinforcing the central thesis that clinging to past achievements, regrets, or identities stalls personal growth. Hopkins reflects on aging, describing people who dwell on old memories as "zombies" and urging listeners to "go or grow" because life is a continuous session, not a rehearsal. Carmichael expands the idea with a practical brain‑rewiring exercise: visualizing negative thoughts as shrinking objects and positive memories as expanding, thereby deliberately shifting emotional states. He also shares his personal habit of ignoring milestone dates, focusing instead on present impact and future goals. Dan Lok and a repeated monologue criticize the "glory‑day" mindset, using vivid language about former high‑school stars who become stagnant, and stresses that daily work—like Kobe Bryant’s 3 a.m. practice—is the only path to lasting success. Brian Tracy introduces the "Someday Island" metaphor, warning that most people postpone action indefinitely; his rule is to "vote yourself off the island" and start immediately. Harari adds a macro perspective, noting that societies are anchored by historical narratives, which makes large‑scale catalysts necessary for collective change. The conversation circles back to the question: are you living in the past or embracing the present? Carmichael ends with a call to comment, a shout‑out to a supporter, and a promise of more daily motivation. Overall, the video blends personal anecdotes, psychological techniques, and vivid metaphors to persuade viewers to abandon past‑fixation, rewire their mindset, and commit to present‑focused action.
Chapters
Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is: Don't live in the past. Over to you, Anthony Hopkins.
I wake up every morning.
Espresso keeps me going. I wake up every morning. Your approach to life, has it changed through your acting experience?
Yes. Well, you just get older and you live long enough, you change. If you don't, you may as well die. You know, 'Go or grow.' You have to change. And I've realized over the years that I've gone through many changes in my life. Many changes because that's the nature of life. And if you don't go with it, you may as well die, really. You may as well be dead. I know people who live in the past. They just live there all the time, talking about something that happened to them 30 years ago. They're like zombies. And I can't hang out with those people. I know them, but I can't spend more than 5 minutes with them because I feel like suicide at the end of it because I feel so guilty about being happy when they're so miserable. Because it's a— you know, life's in session. For many years I thought life was a big rehearsal for the big event. And somebody in Los Angeles said, "Tony, this is the big event. Life is in session." Do you know we spend so much time thinking it's a rehearsal for the big event, the big red carpet in the sky, and it's not.
So this is an interesting one for me. First off, I think too many people live in the past. I think too many people are living off of their past glory or are living through other people, right? Like they didn't have a lot of success, so they're living through their kids, and the only value they get is when their kids go off and do something. I think that is just fundamentally broken. Yes, you love your kids. Yes, you love the people around you, but it's your life. You gotta do the thing that you want to go out and do and stop just telling stories of what happened before. Stop reliving what happened 5, 10, 20 years ago and now is the time to go up and do something amazing. This may seem really bad but I was reading a book this morning and one of the exercises in it was around rewiring your brain. And so the concept here is whether you're feeling down or whether you're feeling happy, you can rewire your brain to feel the opposite if you want to. If you're feeling down, you can take that negative thought you have and you picture it and you see it as this big overwhelming huge thing in your life, and then you mentally look at it and it's getting smaller and further off in the distance and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until it kind of fades off into the sun. You wake up, you open your eyes, you feel happier. You can do it the other way to feel happier by looking at positive things. Take one really positive memory that you have and just make it big, make it bigger in your life and brighter and more in your face and feel the happiness that comes from it. And so it's an interesting exercise to test. And when I first read about it, I had a hard time thinking about one defining happy moment, which sounds really sad, but it wasn't sad for me because I don't live in the past. I don't remember how old I am. You know, when I get asked in those forms, "How old are you?" I have to think about what year is it, when was I born, and make the calculation. When people ask me, when did I start my YouTube channel? How long have I been in the YouTube world? I don't know. Who cares? Like, I don't care when I started. I care what I'm doing right now. I care what— where we're going. I care about the impact that I want to have, not what I did years ago. I don't— I legitimately don't remember unless it's part of the story and the narrative of like lessons that I've learned that I don't want to forget, or there could be teachable moments for you guys. I don't remember that stuff. All the milestones that we hit, I don't know. When did we hit 100,000? I have no idea. How long did it take me to get 1,000, 10,000, 100,000? Even now, half a million subscribers, I don't know how long it took. Who cares? Why is that? Why does that matter? How is that relevant? I want to be happy with what I'm doing right now and make something great going forward. And so I had trouble thinking of one defining moment of happiness as like the one happy moment in my life, because I want today to be happy. I want today to be the happiest day. I want tomorrow to be the happiest day. And maybe I'm just a weird bird that way, because I know a lot of people, that's what they live off of. It's like, it took me this long to get here, and they know, they remember all the dates and all the milestones. I don't know. Let's turn that into the question of the day. Am I the weird bird, or do you guys feel the same way? Are you living in the past? Do you remember every detail, every moment, and you're not happy now? Or you focused on being happy with what you're doing today and going forward? Or maybe you find a creative way to embrace the genius at the end and do both. Let me know what you think. Are you living in the past or not? Leave it in the comments below. Super curious to find out. I also want to give a quick shout out to Tim Murphy from cleverrestaurantconsulting.com. Tim, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really means a lot to me, man. I appreciate it. 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 again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.
I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.
Hey, Believe Nation, for those of you who want a little bit more context and value around not living in the past, here are a few more bonus clips that I think you'll enjoy.
Most people have good, great goals. I want to increase my income and lose weight and get out of debt and be thin and happy and healthy and have a wonderful family. But then, then they decide, but before I start, I'm going to take a vacation to a beautiful place called Someday Isle. And in my estimation, 80% of the population lives on Someday Isle. Someday I'll lose some weight, and someday I'll read that book and listen to that program and join the, the, the Yes Network. And someday I'll get out of debt. Someday I'll I'll increase my income. But it's always someday I'll— if you want to be a great success, there's one simple rule: is vote yourself off the island for life. If you decide you're going to do something, do it. You know, they've done dozens and dozens of studies over the years. They find that there's one major difference between successful people and unsuccessful people. As successful people launch, they start, they get on with it, they just do it. Unsuccessful people get the same ideas and the same information, but they've always got an excuse for not starting.
So many people in life, we all know these guys, right? They peaked in high school, they were prom king, they were quarterback of the fucking team, and they go through life and you see them 10 years later and they're sitting at the bar on a Tuesday with their fucking male pattern baldness and they're like, uh, bro, back in the day I was the fucking man, and they can't pay their fucking bills, they're driving a hunk of and they turn into a basically a complete, uh, accelerated version of themselves, which is a douchebag, uh, and they haven't done anything with their lives, right? And we see these people all the time, and the reason these people don't progress is because they, they focus on the glory days, they focus on the things they have achieved in the past, and they don't let themselves work towards a better future. And guys, You have to be able to look at yourself and be honest with yourself on this. If this is you, you have to stop this behavior, okay? When you focus on what you did last year, or what you did 2 years ago, or what you did last month, or the award I won at the company function, or the, uh, the sales numbers that I hit and beat everybody on this, on the squad, or whatever When you focus on this shit, guys, that is energy that you could be putting into actually improving and focusing on the task at hand, which is today. Okay, champions don't sulk in— you know, Kobe Bryant doesn't sit there and talk about how many MVPs he's won or how many championships he's won. No, the motherfucker's up at 3 o'clock in the morning practicing every day. Why do you think he is so great? He's not great because he's great. He's great because he puts the fucking work in on a daily basis and he wins every fucking day.
Our past is very determinant. When you think about Europe or the Western hemisphere in general, we are stuck by issues of the past. It is the past that holds back, you know. And if you said that you were, as I've done in the past, you said, let me 'burn everything,' 'let me get rid of everything in the past,' you, you're free to start thinking about the future. But if you're still collecting the past and looking to the past as a solution, having history as a very strong anchor, you're unable to move forward because there are historical reasons why our tribe of humanity is such a slow changer, because change is very, very scary, and human beings don't do scary things on their own. It takes something much bigger to force them into change.
What kind of big thing could that be?
For every human being, individual, it's the heart attack, the car accident, the something that happened which was much bigger than you, which suddenly you wake up and say, oh my God, I've been spending all my life inside a box just working for someone else. Oh, isn't there a better way? For humanity in general, it is this, that suddenly it stops raining, suddenly everything goes crazy and you can't control the climate. So that's big enough. If the world were hit by a meteorite, it would be enough. It takes enormous things like that. So we are a bit dinosaurs in that sense, that we will roam around and do our thing until we're hit by something much bigger than us. And that's true even for the individual who needs a heart attack to wake up to find out that they've been working too much.
