STOP Making Excuses: Find Your Power to TRY HARDER

Good morning, Believe Nation! It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe in your potential, and I want to see that great thing that you have inside you explode out into the world and have a big impact. So to help you on your journey, today's message is try your hardest. Over to you, Jordan Belfort.

My son's 14. He's fabulous. And we're having this conversation about when he plays in sports or when he does something about, do you go full out or do you not? And I see sometimes in him that when he's out on the field or doing something, he doesn't play full out. And I'll have an excuse like, my leg hurts or my arm hurts or something happened. The coach was unfair, whatever. You know, the referee was unfair. And what happens with people is we tend to go out into the world and we look for those sort of excuses about why things aren't the way we want them. And when you do that, you lose all your power in life. When you start focusing on the external, on the excuses, you lose your power. Here's the way people really think. I will tell you, I can go out onto stage and bomb. You go out there and you just bomb, right? And people will respect you for going out there and trying your hardest. It's not how you actually perform that earns you the respect of your peers. It's the fact that you went out and actually did it. That's the difference. So if you're out there right now, you're a new salesperson, or you're struggling as a salesperson, there's no embarrassment in struggle. There's just not. The embarrassment is in quitting. The embarrassment is not trying your hardest.

So here's the good thing about trying something new. Usually not too many people are watching you. You know, if you're speaking, nobody's going to really show up to your first event because they don't know who you are. If you're starting a YouTube channel, people aren't really going to pay attention to you at the beginning. Maybe some friends and family, but in general, people don't know who you are, and so you can fail, right? If you want to learn salsa dancing, you know, people are more concerned about themselves usually than worrying about what you're doing. And so at the beginning when you're trying anything new, we have this big fear of judgment and fear of failure, but nobody's really paying that much attention to you at the beginning because you don't know what you're doing yet and everybody is kind of at the same spot. And that's a chance for you to learn, to get better, to grow, to practice, to improve. It's understanding that at the beginning when you learn anything, you're going to suck. And you already know that, and it's a lesson that hopefully you want to pass on to your kids and your grandkids. When you first started learning whatever language, or you want to learn some tussle dancing or snowboarding or, or whatever it is that you want to learn, your first efforts are going to be really slow and you're going to suck at it. And that's okay. The key thing though is that you tried your hardest. The key thing is that you actually made a real attempt to do it. Even if, you know, making your first YouTube video takes you forever. It took me an entire day on my own to make a YouTube video when I was first starting. Just filming. Just again, again, another take, another take, go, go. Like the entire day. And I didn't know what I was doing, and, and the lighting was terrible behind me. I had this big window behind me, and you can barely see my face, and just made so many mistakes. And I spent the whole day doing it, and the end result was still a sucky product, but I tried my hardest. Like, I tried with the skills that I had to do something that I could hopefully have a little bit of pride in, right? Like, the pride is not in the result yet. The pride is in the effort, to know that you actually tried your best. Right? It's not that it was just— it just fell off and it was so easy, right? That's not actually rewarding. If you get some kind of prize or you win, but it wasn't challenging for you, it doesn't really feel like a win. The win is in the struggle. The win is like you had to overcome this mountain and it was really difficult and you made it, right? For something that's easy for you and you win, you know, it doesn't count. If you wanted to run a race against 3-year-olds, you would win. But you wouldn't feel an insane amount of pride in it because it's easy to win against 3-year-olds, right? But the race that you're running, if it's a challenge, if it's hard, if somebody's pushing you and you win, it feels great because you put the work in. And so don't be so attached to that outcome. Be attached to the effort that you put in, to feel like I did my best, and it may not have given me the result that I wanted yet, but if I continue to work at it, I continue to hustle, and I continue to drive, then you'll know that you won't have regrets, right? Because if you don't put everything you've got into it, if you want to start this business and it doesn't work out, and you look back like 5 years, 10 years back now, you're 5 or 10 years older looking back on your life, you know what? I could have done— I could have done better, right? I could have— I wasn't really hustling. I didn't give it my all, and now I'm stuck in this life that I don't like. Where I could have done something, right? Don't be that person. You know, there's moments in time for you to have huge success. You have this window, you have this opportunity to chase. That idea will not be there forever. The opportunity to make that into something amazing won't be there forever. And so you have it, do something with it. And it doesn't mean that it's gonna work out, doesn't guarantee that it's gonna work out. You can work really, really, really hard, it doesn't mean that you're gonna win, but at least you know. In my first business, I didn't know if we'd succeed. I was making $300 a month. It was among the, you know, the worst time in my life, just from an emotional point of view, a self-worth point of view. Felt super low, you know, felt like I wasn't a valuable human being. I kept at it because I needed to know. I could actually deal with the company not working. I could deal with the company failing, knowing that I tried everything. You know, I tried everything that I had and it just didn't work out. That's okay, I could deal with the failure. I couldn't deal with not knowing. I couldn't deal with knowing that I moved on to something else and I still had a little bit left in the tank. I didn't use every last drop. I could have gone a little bit further. Maybe that would have made the difference. That regret will kill you. It'll eat you up for the rest of your life. That's why you gotta work hard. If you're at something, you're committed to something, Put your full force into it until you get to the point where you've lost the passion from it. That's fine. That's the reason to quit. You lost your passion, you lost your drive, this isn't interesting for you anymore. Great, quit. Go do something else. Don't stay in some career, some business, some job that you don't have passion for anymore. You'll never win. But if you still have passion for it, you just haven't figured it out yet, you need to keep trying. You need to try, you need to try, you need to try, you need to keep trying, you need to try your hardest. And eventually, if your passion is strong enough and you try hard enough, you'll break through. But if you don't try hard enough, you'll live the rest of your life wondering what if. And I don't want that regret to eat you up. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what is the thing that you are really trying hard for right now that is consuming you, that you really want to push forward on, that you want to be world-class at? What is that one thing that you want to be amazing at, that you are putting your full effort in? Doesn't mean you're getting results, but you are trying your best. To be a success at? What is that thing? Leave in the comments below. I'm really curious to see what you have to say. I also want to give a quick shout out to Chloe George. Chloe, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. I really appreciate the support and I hope you enjoyed the read. 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, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of inspresso.

You know, look, I was in Johannesburg a little while ago, and I went through the airport, and I went into the men's room or washroom or bathroom, however you want to call it. And so I walked into the men's room, and the first thing I hear is, "Welcome to my office." And this was the janitor at the Johannesburg men's room.

That's funny.

Who janitorized, or I'll make up a word, cleaned the men's, the toilets like Mozart composed music. Now that man has no money. That man probably has very little education. That man is judged by the world as having an unimportant job. Right. And that man is a hero, could be a hero to millions of people. Why? Because he actually saw himself as an ambassador to South Africa. And his passion was palpable, and his visceral commitment to doing work at the highest level was like you don't see even from the CEOs. And all I'm saying is, even the person with the broken heart, the person who's down on their knees, whether they see it or not, they have a choice to rise above their circumstances. And leadership and humanity is a testament to the people who have done it. I mean, you read the great— you look at Mandela, you know, 27 years in imprisonment. When his son died, he wasn't allowed to attend the funeral of his own son. He said that was one of the great pains of his life. And what did he do? The victim looks at something like that torture and says, I am broken. And they give up and they close their heart, they close their mind, they close their creativity, and they blame the rest of their life on what happened to them. But Mandela, what he chose to do was to use it as an opportunity because actually the things that break your heart, if you choose, can open your heart. Fear, the world says fear is bad. Fear is only an opportunity for bravery training. And what he did was he used those 27 years of torture to open himself mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually to the point where when he was released and became the president of South Africa, he invited his jailers to sit in the front row at his inauguration. And he was asked why, and he said, "Because if I don't, I'd still be in prison." And that's a long way of saying, but, you know, we do make excuses because we are very good at self-deception. Because if we actually had to face the responsibility of playing with our bigness in the world, we'd have to let go of our addiction to our excuses and leave what's safe. Am I making sense here? No, totally. No, you're totally making sense. You'd have to leave what's safe. I mean, we are addicted to crisis sometimes. It makes no sense. We are addicted to pain. And we'd have to actually leave the pain to go out to the possibility of pleasure and joy and greatness. And believe it or not, that frightens us. So we make these excuses, and then we blame people. Oh, Joe or Robin, I don't like the way he looks. He speaks differently. But subconsciously, as you're suggesting, those are just our protective mechanisms to avoid owning the responsibility of our brilliance.

I don't believe in excuses. Because the thing about it, when you make an excuse, the thing you have to realize about life, somebody has it 10 times worse than you, and you're making an excuse because you're soft, man. I never cheated myself. Ever since I was 7 years old, in everything that I did, I took pride in what I did. And I firmly believe the harder you work, the harder it is to surrender. You see, a lot of people don't understand, if you go through life and you cheat yourself, there's going to come a time when you hit a certain piece of adversity, and if you're not who you're supposed to be, adversity will always introduce you into who you really are. And if you haven't been working hard, if you haven't been sacrificing, if you haven't been emptying that bucket, if you haven't been going all in, in every aspect of your life, it's gonna crush you. It's gonna make you give up, it's gonna make you stop, it's gonna make you make excuses. But if you work hard, if you got a certain person in you that when you hit adversity and you hit opposition and you wanna make excuses, and that person inside of you say, "Man, you ain't built like that." You know you're better than that. You know you're not like that, man. You deal with it and you keep going and you embrace it, man. That's what life's about. That is how people get stronger. People don't get stronger by you making excuses. People get stronger by when you go through adversity and you go through trial and tribulation and you look at it. When they hit you in the face, you back up a little bit. And they hit you again, you back up a little bit. You step back up and you say, if that's all you got, you in trouble. Let me give you the one word secret to happiness. One word, this is all you need to be happy.

The most important word ever. If you had to think of one word that's most important to you or that sums you up or that would be kind of like a little beacon. Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, Will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.