STOP Settling | You're NOT FINE with Mel Robbins

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's message is be honest with yourself. Over to you, Mel Robbins.

We live in the most amazing moment in time. So that thing that you have up here, whatever it may be, you want to use healthy eating to cure your diabetes, You want to figure out how to take care of the elders and start a new hospice center. You want to move to Africa and build a school.

Guess what?

You could walk into a bookstore right now and buy at least 10 books written by credentialed experts on how the hell you do it. You could Google it, and you could probably find at least, I don't know, 1,000 blogs documenting the step-by-step-by-step transformation that somebody else is already doing? You can find anybody online and cyberstalk them. You can just walk in their footsteps and let the— you know, just use the science of drafting. Follow what everyone else has done, because somebody else is already doing it. So why don't you have what you want when you have all the information that you need? You have the contacts that you need. There are probably free tools online that allow you to start a business or join a group or do whatever the heck you want. It all comes down to one word: shut the front door. You know what I'm talking about? The F-bomb. It's everywhere. You hear it all the time, and I honestly don't understand what the appeal is of the word. I mean, you don't sound smart when you say it. And it's really not expressing how you really feel. It's sort of a cheap shot to take. And of course, you know I'm talking about the word "fine." How you doing? I'm fine.

Oh really?

You are? Dragging around those extra 40 pounds? You're fine? Feeling like roommates with your spouse and you're fine? You haven't had sex in 4 months? You're fine? Really? I don't think so. But see, here's the deal with saying that you're fine. It's actually genius. Because if you're fine, you don't have to do anything about it. But when you think about this word "fine," it just makes me so angry. I mean, here we are at a conference about being alive, and you're going to describe the experience of being alive as "fine"? What a flimsy and feeble word. If you're crappy, say you're crappy. If you're amazing, say you're amazing. Tell the truth. And this not only goes for the social construct— "Oh, I don't want to burden you with the fact that I hate my life," or, you know, "Hey, I'm amazing, but that would make you feel terrible." The bigger issue, the bigger issue with "fine" is that you say it to yourself. That thing that you want, I guarantee you, you've convinced yourself that you're fine not having it. That's why you're not pushing yourself. It's the areas in your life where you've given up, where you've said, "Oh, I'm fine. My mom's never going to change, so I just can't have that conversation." "I'm fine. You know, we've got to wait until the kids graduate before we get divorced, so we'll just sleep in separate bedrooms." "I'm fine. I lost my job. I can barely pay my bills, but whatever. It's hard to get a job." And, you know, one of the reasons why this word "also" just annoys me so much is scientists have calculated— Oh yeah, I'm coming down. Scientists have calculated the odds of you being born.

That's right.

They've crunched the numbers. I see you up there. They have crunched the numbers on you. Yeah, I know, you guys standing up, you want to sit down for this. They've crunched the numbers on you being born. And they took into account all of the wars and the natural disasters and the dinosaurs and everything else. And do you realize that the odds, the odds of you— yeah, right here, put your computer away, stand up for me, Doug. So the odds of Doug here— turn around, say hi to everybody— the odds, yeah, of Doug, Doug being born, at the moment in time he was born, to the parents you were born to, with the DNA structure that you have, 100— or no, 1 in 400 trillion! Isn't that amazing? I'm so lucky. Yes! You're not fine, you're fantastic! You have life-changing ideas for a reason, and it's not to torture yourself.

Thank you.

Thank you, Doug. You know, Christine was right when she said all of you could be on stage, because all of you— we're all in this category, 1 in 400 trillion. All day long you have ideas that could change your life, that could change the world, that could change the way that you feel, and what do you do with them? Nothing. Oh, hopefully I won't moon you.

You didn't pay for that.

To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be allergic to mediocrity. You need to have an allergy to mediocrity. You gotta take something that has been good and has been good and has been good and make it great. Be upset at good. That's the way great progress happens. And the only way you do it is because you have that deep love for what you're doing. You have that deep love for your business. Because otherwise, you're gonna say, that's okay, you know what, that video I made, That was okay. I'm good with it. And you just keep staying on the same treadmill instead of moving forward. I recently got a comment on one of my YouTube videos. I was talking about my book and I'm not super happy with my book cover. I was talking about lessons I had learned in my book launch. And one of the things that I wish I had more time on was my book cover because I wasn't a huge fan of it. And I got a comment and the comment was, it's easily an above average book cover. And I get it. I get the love. I don't want to rip into this comment. I get the love, right? It's, it's what we do. We try to encourage others to do better when, when we have that we are unhappy with something, right, and we're down, what do people tell us? Oh, you're doing a great job, you're doing really well, that's an above-average performance. I don't want to be above average. It drives me nuts. I do not want to be above average. I want you guys to hold me to a higher standard too. I want suggestions and feedback on how to make things better. But when I look at the things that I make, I'm equally happy with them, like I'm proud of what we made with the resources we have, the skills, ability, but at the same time I want it to be better. I want it to be I want it to be more. That's what we do. Progress equals happiness. You want to grow. You want to continue to get better. Otherwise you get bored and your customers get bored. Your audience gets bored. And so I don't think you should ever settle for above average in anything. If you know you can do better, if you're performing at the top of your abilities right now, then that's okay. Then that's great. That's what you want to be doing. But if you know you can do better, you got to go push harder. You know, there's a lot of people who may look up to somebody and say, well, look at what they're doing, and you know you can get there, but you can't— you're not there yet. You want to play this beautiful piece of piano, you know, you know you can get there, and you're just starting off learning a couple keys. You know, maybe right now that's all you can do is a couple keys, but you can work harder to get better and improve, improve, improve, improve, improve. Progress equals happiness. Stop settling for average. And you know what, one thing I would challenge you to do It's always easy to lean in on empathy when you see a friend who's down. It's easy to lean on empathy, but maybe you should push them to do better. Maybe when somebody's down on their luck, or maybe when someone made a video and they sucked at it, maybe telling them, "I feel you. I know you can do a lot better," instead of just saying, "That was really good," when you know that it wasn't even really good, right? We tell ourselves and we tell others the things that something is really good when we know it's not. And you don't have to beat them down, but telling them that you know they can do better, you believe in them, can make all the difference in the world in bringing them back up and then shooting beyond their comfort zone. Stop settling for average. So the question today is, I'm curious, what are you guys right now settling for average in that you want to start pushing harder on? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm curious to see what you guys have to say. I also want to give a quick shout out to Milica. I hope I pronounced that okay. Thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. Really, really, really means a lot to me, 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 again tomorrow morning for another shot of entspresso.

I mean, when I was 22, right after I graduated from Dartmouth, I was so focused on making everyone happy that I almost chose the worst possible career for my personality. It's not a bad career, it just would have been horrendous for me. I was interested in the environment, So I decided, oh, you know, I'll go get a law degree. And then I'll go work in Washington. And I think maybe I'll work on environmental policy. And I'd probably end up in some cube farm. And everyone was thrilled with the plan. Everyone, it turns out, but me. So here I am, I'm driving a U-Haul across country to go to law school and to get a degree in environmental law. And something started to gnaw at me. And with every single mile that I drove, my thoughts were getting louder. And doubts were starting to pour in. My gut was telling me, "Mel, turn the damn U-Haul around." But the problem was that everything was already in place, right? I mean, I'm already in the U-Haul, the thing is already packed, I'm already 10 miles into my drive, the tuition had been paid for the first semester, I had signed a lease. I mean, I could not undo these things. Isn't that why it's so difficult for you to make changes in your life? Because you think that things can't be undone? The fact is, any excuse that you come up with, you can undo. Tuition can be reimbursed, apartments can be leased, Plan B can be invented. So I got up, I repacked that U-Haul, and I drove out of town. I let myself make a U-turn in life. If you ever find your gut battling your head, save yourself the drama. I guarantee you your gut is right. Guarantee you your excuses can be undone. And I guarantee you, you can make a U-turn in your life right now if you want to.

So if it were easy to get what you wanted in life, Google would have already figured out an app. You would just type in, "OK, I'm a student and I want to go from being a student to being successful." And Google would tell you, "Go to college." then you get your master's, then you land this killer job, and then you put in a bunch of face time while you're checking Facebook, then you get promoted to manager, and then you realize managing people kind of stinks, and then you keep climbing the corporate ladder, and then you start to wonder, "Well, how did I end up here?" And then you wonder, "Is this what success looks like?" You're like, "No, I'm going to go to Jay Hilburn. That's what success looks like." Keep this in mind. If there's something that you want, like 7 people or a trip to Africa, or you're going to make it to Mexico— in the pink shirt, I'm looking at you again, sorry. I'm watching you and rooting for you. Keep in mind this. Here you are. This is what you want. I spent a lot of time on lacrosse fields, although they don't really look like this. You tend to think that what you want, you just march right towards it. But if in sports you march right towards the goal, what happens? The defenders come in. And what the defenders are is it's your brain saying, "Ain't gonna happen." So the second you start moving toward that thing you want, be ready. You're gonna tell yourself you don't feel like it, you're gonna have to force yourself. It's happening. There's no way to get around it. So what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna basically get bounced around a lot, all over the place. And there are gonna be a lot of times that you feel like this was a really dumb idea to start this business because it's gonna get hard. And I wanna remind you about something. Unlike a sports field where there's an in and out of bounds, the great thing about life is there actually aren't any. And it's usually in those moments where you feel like you can't do it that you're closer than ever to having everything that you wanted. And I wanted to show you this so that you keep it in mind, because I think a lot of times when you look back, it's the darkest moments where you realize, holy cow, that's what projected me forward.