Stop Waiting! UNLOCK Your Potential in 14 Minutes

Taking action.

Put some action.

Take action.

Taking action.

Taking action.

Take advantage.

Take action.

Went into pursuing different passions with eyes wide open, meaning knowing because my focus was split, I probably wouldn't be getting very far in any of them. But I made a conscious choice that I just wanted to experience them. I wanted to understand them from the inside out. I spent so much time thinking in my mind is this the right choice for me? Is this the right career for me? Should I try and build a business around this? And I said, that's such a dumb way to go around it. Like, you should just engage and experience and actually get your foot in the industry. That can inform whether or not you should move ahead. What about someone who's stuck or struggling?

What would you tell them?

Stuck or struggling is typically someone who is more engaged in their thoughts than actually taking action. So it's a really interesting, subtle shift. But if you catch yourself complaining like, oh, I'm so stuck and— Stop. Write an email. Make a call. Take a step. The more you actually do that and catch yourself— we actually— sorry, this is me, ADD. My toes are exactly that color.

Awesome.

I love it.

Bing.

But it is. It's really a practice of checking in with yourself. You've got to check yourself before you wreck yourself. Stop complaining. Stop talking to yourself in your head and do something.

Any dominating desire, plan, or purpose which is backed by that state of mind known as faith is taken over by the subconscious section of the mind and acted acted upon immediately. I don't know for sure, ladies and gentlemen, but I suspect that there's a relatively small number of people in the world at any one time who understand the principle of faith, who really understand it and know how to apply it. And even if you do understand it, if you don't back it up with action and make it a part of your habit life, you might just as well not understand it, because faith without deeds is dead. Faith without action is dead. Faith without absolute positive belief is dead. I don't know how you're going to get any results through believing unless you put some action back of that belief. And incidentally, if you tell your mind often enough that you have faith in anything, the time will come when your subconscious mind will accept that. Even if you tell your mind often enough that you have faith in yourself, Had you ever thought what a nice thing it would be if you had such complete faith in yourself that you wouldn't hesitate to undertake anything you wanted to do in life? Had you ever thought what a benefit that would be to you?

I want to talk about risk. As a guiding principle, life shrinks and life expands in direct proportion to your willingness to assume risk. Yeah, I've like, I've made some really stupid decisions in my career. For my entire career. On a broad plane, they've all worked out. Every time I've quit my jobs, which I've done every time I've had a job, people that I trust most, the people that I love, all advised against it. My dad told me not to move to New York City because it was such a risk. And every time I took these bigger risks, the opportunity for a larger payout was always there. Life is like this super temporary, mega fragile thing. You only get like a nugget of time to really pursue the things you care about. And like, I'm 30, 30, and my rule is that the right time is always right now. To put a little meat on these bones, this new company that I don't really talk about, this new company is the biggest risk I've ever taken. I took 5 years of my life to build my advertising career, and I made like a lot of money. I've been doing really great. Look at my YouTube channel, go all the way back, the last branded content thing you'll see was in February of 2014. I ditched it all to pursue something I knew nothing about. This huge risk. And I did it at a time when my wife was pregnant and there was all of this vulnerability and all this scariness in my life. And even now at 33, my dad said, 34, my dad said, Casey, that's crazy. You've got a good thing, don't let it go. But I know that like someday I won't be able to do this. I know that the time is now. The time, the right time is always now. So I had to do it. That's how I feel about risk in general. And that's what the struggle has always been for me is like identifying risk, identifying fear, and then just smashing through it. Because a fear is looking back and wishing that I had done these things. The most dangerous thing you can do in your career The most dangerous thing you can do in life is play it safe.

I read this book because I was in disbelief because people would tell— here's the strategy for success of The Secret, right? Go into your house and into a quiet room and you close the lights, draw the shades, and sit on a couch and visualize a big fat check. $25,000 US, okay, with your name on it. And I want you to imagine that check and just make that check go bigger in your mind and make it real, more real, and just put it out into the ether of the universe and the law of attraction will take hold. Just think about it. Bullshit, right?

Hello?

If that's your strategy for success, the only thing that will show up in your mailbox is not the check, it's a freaking eviction notice from your landlord. They'll be towing away your car, your wife or your husband will be over at the next-door neighbor, and you'll be still saying, where's the check? Where's the check? Okay, the Secret is a load of crap. Okay, do I believe in manifestation? Yeah, damn straight I do. But you got to take action. I'm one of those unfortunate people.

I tried it.

I really did. I tried it because I read the books. Well, let me try, you know. So I sat there and I prayed for the check. Never came. But I went out and started taking action. Guess what? The check came with an extra couple of zeros.

You have to actually show up every day and inch yourself forward toward these dreams. And not only show up every day and once in a while inch yourself, I mean every day you have to actually take an action that moves you forward. Not just research, not just thinking. Look, the power of intention is great, but without any initiative, it's dead, right? A dream is great, but without any movement, it's dead. You have to be moving towards it every day. You can send an email every day, you can make a call every day, You can write something every day, you can create something every day, you can contribute something every day, but it has to be daily, otherwise it will never become actualized. The highest performers in the world didn't get there 'cause they were lucky, they worked at it longer than everyone else. They had a better work ethic, and it's not that they necessarily always worked harder, they worked smarter because they were doing the research, they were taking the time to visualize how they would be distinct, different, how they would survive the tough times. They really kept at it. Keep every single day momentum going. And if you don't do that, there's no chance.

You cannot lose by taking action. You can only lose by not taking action. I think the great majority of people surrounded by the greatest opportunities in the best country in the history of man on Earth who don't succeed are people who are on the island. Always got a reason for not taking action. And if you delay taking action repeatedly over and over again, you develop the habit of never taking action. You get the habit of procrastinating and holding back and so on.

It's never been better to be an entrepreneur. Like right now, right this second, is the greatest. There's massive disruption. I promise you, 'cause I spend a fuckload of time with everybody in corporate America, the big companies are so fucking slow and stupid, it's almost unbearable, right? So that's great for us if we don't have money and we've got time, right? And so that's great. And the cost of entry is easy. There's so many people that are envious of the lucky things that happened to me investing in like Uber and Birchbox and Twitter and all those things that now everybody in their 30s to 60s that has any level of money is chasing any kid in a hoodie with an idea and giving them money to invest in their startup because everybody's looking for their exit, right? So on top of the fact that the internet is hitting maturity and every user's on a smartphone and blah blah blah and we're at scale, on top of that, In parallel, there's a fuckload of dumb money chasing it and looking to give it to anybody they can, which is your opportunity. So we need to take advantage of that shit. And actually, if you think you're ready, you should literally start your company right now because I'm sure it's important to finish this class and whatever, but tomorrow the market can collapse and you'll miss this opportunity. Literally right now, on a fucking half-ass idea, right, with like 2 or 3 connections from like your parents or professors or emailing me and I introduce you to somebody, you can literally raise a million $1 million on your fucking idea. But we need to like, I want everybody to understand that all it takes is something crazy, like a terrorist attack, or some fucking bank full of shit breaking, or all it, like tomorrow, that can go away. And so like, I think it's super important for everybody to understand that if you're itching, I think you should start tomorrow. Because the money's there, and you're gonna need the money. This happens all the time. Like, everybody that looked like you in 2008 and '09, they went and got jobs. Everybody that looked like you in 2002 and '03 after the first bubble, they went and got jobs. So if you're a true entrepreneur, if you're sitting here like, no, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm not just in the class, you need to seriously concentrate on where we are at this exact moment in the market and recognize how fruitful it is for you, how much of an advantage you have, and you may want to seriously consider and take advantage of it. Because it could really go away in a second, and then you've gotta wait a, like, if it collapses tomorrow, if there's a bubble burst, you're gonna have to wait 3 to 5 years to get your shot. When bubbles burst, no fucking kid with an idea gets dick. Got it? That's a good one.

Take action. So many people talk about doing something or say, what if? They don't actually get up and do it. Taking action is really, really important. In 1998, when I was working for another company, I was umming and ahhing of whether to set up my own business. I didn't have a lot of money, but I decided to take action and I decided to do it. But I did it in a very planned way. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve. But the most important thing, I took action. Within 2 or 3 years, I was a millionaire again. Probably the best thing I ever did. So taking action is absolutely vital.

But 20 years ago in the movies, roles were very clearly defined. They provided the security of your stardom in a sense. If you'd been successfully playing an angry young man, you'd pretty much be angry and young for the rest of your life. If you'd been a police inspector in 3 movies, odds were you'd be in the next 33 too. This applied to female actresses also. Wives were wives, seductresses were seductresses, mother-in-laws were mother-in-laws, and so on and so forth. Few actors would have willingly switched from romantic heroes to obsessively violent lovers. I took the leap not because I was particularly brave, but because a very dear director friend of mine sat me down and told me I was extremely ugly. And being ugly necessarily meant— I know, now I know. And being ugly necessarily meant I do bad guy roles. I wasn't the romantic hero type, he said. Actually, he used the words that my face was not chocolatey enough. So I started to eat a lot of chocolate, and while waiting for it to take effect, I jumped into bad guy roles. Dharr means fear in Hindi, and everyone always tells you at speeches like this that you ought to be brave, so I'm not going to bore you with that idea. Instead, let me tell you this. Being brave means being shit-scared all the way to the party. Yeah, I'm sorry if that word is— being very scared all the way to the party. But getting there, but getting there all the same and doing the funky chicken in front of all your teenage kid's friends anyway. Let me just add on behalf of all the fathers of the world who have embarrassed their kids by doing this, it takes a lot of bravery, resolve, and grit to do it. So just do it. Don't let your fears become boxes that enclose you. Open them out, feel them, and turn them into the greatest courage you are capable of. I promise you, nothing will go wrong. But if you live by your fears, everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong, and you won't even have done the funky chicken.

I was on the train from Manchester to London, and it came. It just came. Had something like that ever happened to you before? Yes. Truthfully, I mean, other ideas have just come to me because I think if you're a writer and that's what you spend a huge amount of time doing, you do— ideas do come to you. But nothing had ever come so with such a— I had this— I thought, God, I'd love to write that. And when I got off the train, I went straight home and I started writing.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I'm curious to know what you do to take action. What do you do when you're in a funk? And how do you get yourself out of it? Please share it in the comments below. I think it'll be really helpful to everybody else watching to kind of learn from you as well and your experiences. My personal goal on the YouTube channel is to hit 1 million subscribers, so anything you can do to help me share this video, get it out there, spread the message, I'd really, really, really appreciate it. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.