The FAST Way to Build Self-Worth | Les Brown’s Motivation

Hello, Believe Nation! I started the Mentor Me series with the aim to learn from people who've done a lot more than us and hope some of their wisdom seeps into our brain the more we hang around them. So today we're going to learn from Les Brown about motivation. This is the full-length version. I want you to look at something right now. Think of some major goal you want, or maybe it's one you're already working on, and you have experienced a lot of setbacks, a lot of defeats. You've experienced a lot of disappointment. Maybe you've already given up, and maybe you just need a little fire, a little encouragement to get back in the game again. Here's what I want you to look at. There are winners, there are losers, and there are people who have not discovered how to win. And all they need is some coaching. All they need is some help and assistance, just a little support. All they need is some insight or different strategy, a plan of action to make some adjustments. That will open up the key to a whole new future for them, that will give them access to the unlimited power that they have within themselves. That's all that they need. So what I want you to do is think about something you want for you, that's real for you, that's important for you, that will give your life some special meaning and power. And I don't even want you to say, "I can do that." I don't want you to assume that. See, 5 years ago when I started out in this area, I would not have been able to make the mental leap that I would be up to where I am right now. I don't want you to begin to just psych yourself out. No, no. I want you to be able to say something to yourself that will enable you to maintain a level of integrity with yourself. That when you say this, even when you face tremendous setbacks, it will be a benchmark to keep you in the game, to keep you moving forward and experimenting and readjusting your strategy and your plan of action continuously, looking for ways to win. So what is that something? When you got an idea, you want to move on. You might not have the money, you might not have the education, you might not have the support or the resources you need. What is that something that can keep us going, that will enable us to act on our dream? What's one of those keys that will begin to help us to discover the secrets to our dream. Here's what I want you to repeat after me, please, with power and conviction. Say, "It's possible." It's possible. That's all I want you to do when you look at your dream. Just say to yourself every day, "It's possible." Just say that every day to yourself, "It's possible." Because what does that do? See, it begins to change your belief system. See, the way in which we operate, ladies and gentlemen, it's a manifestation of what we believe, what's possible for us. Whatever you've done up to this point, all that it really is, is a duplication, it's a reproduction of what you believe subconsciously that you deserve and what's possible for your life. Most people operate out of their personal history, out of their memory, things they have done, things they have experienced, things they have seen. Things that they have observed. What I'm suggesting that you operate out of a larger vision of yourself. I want you to see yourself doing what you want to do, experiencing what you want to experience, having what you want to have, doing what is that gives your life some meaning and value. Operate out of your imagination, not your memory, because whenever you look at where you want to go, I'm wanting to warn you, you will have some conversation back here after you go through the data that you've experienced in life It's saying you can't do it. And so what you want to begin to do is ignore that inner conversation. Well, most people, ladies and gentlemen, when something happens to them, what they do is they begin to believe that that's the way it is, that's the way it's always been, and they can't see the possibility of it being any different. Example: before April 1954, The common belief, the universal belief, because it had been tried again and again and again and people had failed, the belief was that man was not physically capable of breaking the 4-minute barrier, that he could not run a mile in less than 4 minutes. That was the belief on the planet. It had never been done. But here's what happened, ladies and gentlemen. Roger Bannister came along and he broke the 4-minute barrier. Now here's what's significant about that. Since that time up to this day, over 20,000 people have done it, including high school kids. What changed? 20,000 people, what changed? Here's what happened when they got on the track. They knew it had been done. And because they knew it had been done, there was a new belief about this barrier, about this goal that was unreachable. And those 20,000 people got in the race believing, knowing in their heart that someone had done it, that it's possible that they could do it. And I'm saying that if you know anybody that had some goal, some dream, something they wanted to do, And they did it, then I'm saying that you know in your heart that if someone has done it, then you can do it. It's possible. And that if someone can make their dream become a reality, that it's, it's possible that you can make your dream become reality. And so as you begin to look at where you want to go, beginning to embrace that it's possible I'm blessed and highly favored. I've got a lot going for me. I got some good stuff in me. And it's possible that I can bring my greatness out here in the universe, that I can do what I want to do. It's possible I can write my own book. I can have my own business. I, I can take the trip and travel around the world. It's possible I can bounce back from adversity and reinvent my life. It's possible. Regardless of where I am, the things can get better for me. It's possible. I'm thinking about two men right here in Chicago who are fairly successful, similar background, educated. They worked for a corporation for many years, and they were among many people that were laid off. Two guys who were very good friends. One went out looking for a job for several weeks. Along with the other one, and they faced disappointment and rejection again and again and again. They couldn't find any work, which is the story of many people across this country. One guy stopped. He became discouraged. He stopped going. He stayed home looking at television, became very argumentative and toxic with his wife, drinking beer, getting on the phone, talking to his other negative unemployed friends, and he just gave up. The other guy kept looking for a job everywhere he could go, every time he could get an opportunity, kept asking people, networking, checking the newspapers every day, kept going everywhere he could trying to find a job. You have too much education, you overqualified, you won't be here long enough. He kept going, he kept going. He went to a place and said, 'Look here, I tell you what, if you can't hire me and I know you can use my talents, abilities, and skills, I don't want to sit home and do nothing. Just let me do some volunteer work. You don't have to give me anything, all right? I just want to work. I want to be busy.' Guy said, 'Okay, it's on you now, but don't expect me to give you anything. It's okay.' This guy came in and worked. He was the first one there, the last one to leave, was the best employee there. By 4 weeks later, one of the top managers quit. They were looking for a replacement. Guess who they selected? This other guy. This guy who was volunteering his time. He got the job. What was the difference between the two men? Eyesight and mindsight. Eyesight is judging on what you see. Judging according to appearances. But mindsight is how you interpret what you see. One guy said, "It's not possible, it's over, I'm finished, I can't do it, I can't make it." He surrendered. "I've faced rejection again and again, I'm not going anymore. There are no jobs out there." But this other guy, he felt that in spite of the nos and rejections, in spite of how bad the economy is, 'In spite of what the newspapers are saying, that it's possible that somebody somewhere will give me a job.' He just kept going, thinking it was possible. And guess what, ladies and gentlemen? That's what we have to do with our dreams. Because things happen to you in life that you can never ever anticipate. And many times when those things happen, you want to give up. I remember when I was in broadcasting, when I was a disc jockey, I became very controversial, not only being a disc jockey, but I felt that radio was something that you not only entertain people with, but you also empower them, you educate them. And I got fired. I didn't just leave, they fired me. That was a shock. I said, wait a minute. They took my microphone. I thought that was who I was. No, no, ladies and gentlemen, it wasn't. I had to do something else, and I didn't know what else I could do. See, here's what I'm looking at: what are the uses for your life right now that you haven't even reached for yet? See, I believe that when you don't have enough encouragement to act on your dreams or ideas, or you're not enlightened enough, that life will act on you. See, life had moved on me and said, "Les Brown, you have outgrown this. It's time for you to do something else." Well, I wasn't enlightened enough. I organized some disc jockeys and got my job back. So they had to fire me again. I got fired twice. Here's what I did. I had to think of something else. And so a guy suggested said to me, he said, "Les, why don't you run for office?" I said, "Man, I never run for office. I've never known anything about how to operate in the political arena. I've heard, encouraged people to register to vote and get out to vote, but I don't know anything about politics." He said, "Neither do the people who run for office all the time." So I ran. Now here's what I'm suggesting. I ran. You got to do what you can, where you are, with what you have. I didn't have any money. I didn't know anything about the political process. I didn't even have any support. But here's what the guy told me: "It's possible you could win." That's all I had. I was running against an endorsed candidate. He was an incumbent. He had the newspaper support, all of the leadership in the community. And I was challenging this guy. So I had a saying when I was on radio: stand up for what you believe in because you can fall for anything. And I would go door-to-door. I have my kids on one side of the street, I would be on the other, and I'd knock on doors. Hello, my name is Les Brown. Tell everybody I'm still standing. They get on the phone, child, Les Brown was to my house today. You know the boy on the radio with the big mouth? Yeah, they fired him. How do you say he's still standing? See, I'm saying just, just keep moving. Don't start feeling sorry for yourself. Don't spend time blaming and talking about what happened to you. See, whatever you talk about, that's what you multiply and expand in your life experience. So don't talk about stuff unless you wanted to keep on happening to you, all right? So I got in that kind of action. As I continue to do that, Had my children with me, we're going door to door, didn't have enough money. Eventually we got close to the election and something happened that really surprised me. Guys who I thought were going to either support me or stay out of it, various powerful community leaders, they became involved in it and they endorsed my opponent. I felt devastated. Now that's going to happen to you when you're working on your dream. Things are going to happen that's going to catch you on the blind side. That was shocking to me. They didn't have to do that. All they had to do was just stay out of it. But here they go, come up in there messing with me. Now that's gonna happen to you. There's some people who believe it's their personal business to stop you from living your dream, alright? But I didn't deal with that. You want to make your dream come true, you got to stay focused. Some people rather get even than get ahead. Stay focused on where you want to go. I just kept on doing what I was supposed to do. And so I was driving to the radio station. My opponent had over $20,000. I had less than $800. As I was in the radio station, the guy said, "You're going to make a commercial?" I said, "Yes." He said, "It better be a good one because that money can't go pretty far here." And I sat there in the middle control room and I was thinking. And here's what happens when you get still. Stuff will start coming. Something said, "Call your mama. You used to talk about your mother on the air all the time. Ask her to say a few words for you. That'll be a different kind of political spot." So I called my mama, and I had a gospel record playing in the background, and then I had my mother say, "Hello, this is Mrs. Mamie Brown. When I raised my sons, I raised them to be good children. When they got out of hand, I beat their behind and made them go right. Please vote for my son. He's a good boy." Usually in a state representative race, maybe 3,000 or 4,000 people will come out to vote in a primary. In that primary race, over 27,000 people came out and voted, said, "I'm voting for Les Brown 'cause his mama say he's a good boy." I won, ladies and gentlemen. I won. So you've got to be willing to stay focused, to be creative, to be relentless. Because things are going to happen to you when you're working on your dream, when you get on track. I remember when I first got involved in speaking, one of the main things that speakers like to do is speak to a certain association that they have over 10,000 of their sales reps that come to this convention. And I was relentless. I kept saying, "It's possible, it's possible." See, what I want to let you know and set you up for, because you say it's possible don't mean that You're not gonna have any problems. That Murphy's Law ain't gonna come and slap you side the head. Oh, Murphy gonna come visit you. He's waiting for some of y'all out in the parking lot. Oh, you say it's possible? Okay, it's possible. You better get up. Well, I was working. I kept saying it's possible. They got other speakers on this program. I can be on that program too. I kept selling myself. I got all fired up and I was calling them every day, every day. And the lady finally said, "Mr. Brown, I tell you what, we want you to come in and talk to our sales executives. You got the kind of fire and guts that they want that will motivate them. And let me tell you something else, we want you to bring your motivational tapes. You're gonna need at least $50,000 worth of tapes." I said, "Is that right?" "Yes, because they want to keep that drive alive." I said, "All right." I called the guy who duplicates my tapes. I said, "Don, how you doing?" This is I said, "Less, let me tell you, I got a major speaking engagement." Said, "Man, it's a speaker's dream. I need over $50,000 worth of product." He said, "Less, you don't have that kind of credit." I said, "I know, but darn, I can sell that. Just right after the speaking engagement, I'll give you your money in 4 days." He said, "Are you sure, Less?" I said, "Yes, man, I got a major speaking engagement and they told me to do it." He said, "Man, that's a big order. Let me talk with the lady with you." I said, "Hold on just a minute, man." Call the lady back. Hello, Evelyn, how you doing? This is Les Brown. I got Don on the phone. What did you say? Do I have the speaking engagement? Yes, you do. And what else do you suggest? Les, our people, they buy a lot of tapes. Your tapes are very popular among them. I'm saying bring at least $50,000 worth of tapes, Les. You'll sell everything you got and more. I said, did you hear that, Don? He said, yes. I said, now, if anybody else has to make a decision, are you the final person? She said, I'm the final person. I will send you the contract. I want you. I said, you hear that, Donnie? He said, yes. I said, oh ye of little faith. I said, duplicate the tapes, man. Hung the phone up. Well, he duplicate the tapes. One week came by. I'm checking the mail every day. No contract. I said, come on, Murphy, don't start nothing, man. Come on, man, give me a break. Come on, you know, this ain't fair. Come on, man, give your boy a break. Come on. I talked to myself, you know. I didn't want to call him right then. 2 weeks passed by. Murphy said, don't you think you ought to call him? I said, okay. I call, I say, hello, um, "Hello, this is Les Brown calling." "How you doing, Les?" I said, "Fine." I said, "Evelyn hasn't sent my contract out yet. Any additional information you need?" "So, Les, you haven't heard?" I said, "No." He said, "Evelyn died." I said, "She died?" I said, "Did she say anything about me?" I was so wiped out, and Murphy was in the house waiting on me. Murphy said, "Is it possible you want to listen to some of your tapes?" But ladies and gentlemen, here's what I had to do. I had to begin to focus on what was the solution. That this was not the only place that I'll be able to sell those products. And as I begin to challenge myself and got some help and support and some other input, I eventually did it. Took longer, but it was challenging. I was riding with a friend the other day, and I know this friend of mine who has been working on a job where she's been miserable for a long time. She was telling me about how she was miserable on the job and how, how she was so unhappy. So I said, if this— if it's that stressful and, and if it's causing you that much pain, I say, why don't you just quit and do something else? And she said something that really put her in the chorus line with a lot of other people. She said, I would, but— and then I started thinking about that. So let me take a poll. So I started talking to other people and I would ask them what they were doing and I said, "But is that your passion?" And they would say, "No." I said, "Then what's your real passion?" And they would tell me what their real passion was. Then I say, "Well then, why aren't you doing what you really want to do?" "Oh, I can do it, but..." And they would continue on. So this word, you know, "but" just kept on coming up. And then it also has some friends like "woulda" and "coulda" and "shoulda." And one day I'm gonna have my own business. Those people who talk about one day I'm gonna— some of y'all know some of those one day I'm gonna people, raise your hand. Some of you get up in the morning, look in the mirror at that person. I just tease it, I just tease it, all right. So how is it that many times we block ourselves and we use these words almost like we're in a trance, like we're sleepwalking through life? That we find ways to cancel out our dreams. That I think that 'but' is a dream killer. That a lot of things that we want to do, a lot of places we would like to go, a lot of things we would like to experience, and we just stop at 'but' and we build a case. In fact, I was reading something the other day that, that talked about 'but.' It says 'but' is an argument for our limitations. And when we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them. See, but will cause you to procrastinate, but will cause you to hide out behind fear, but will cause you to come up with all type of excuses that you can validate your inaction and not acting on your dream. And right now, more than ever, people need to look for ways to live their dream. People need to look for ways to make it on their own. There is no such thing as job security. There's no such thing as a stormproof or tragic-proof life. There are no guarantees today, ladies and gentlemen. The illusion is gone. There was a time when we graduated from high school, you're told, "Go to college and get out, and you go and work for a corporation for 30 or 40 years, give your gold watch, and you'll retire." Special announcement: that day is gone. That day is gone, never to return again. So instead of people living in fear, feeling stressed out, feeling powerless, feeling like victims, I think it should be a time that we need to begin to look at ways that we can become an active force in our own lives. Look at ways when we can decide to take charge of our own destiny. Look at ways when we can decide to design a life of substance and begin to truly live our dreams. And it's time for people to decide, I'm ready to get on with my life. Shake somebody's hand on your right and left. A guy named Bob May said this, say, don't let nobody turn you around. Do that right quick. Now, you know, a lot of people say, I'm going to live my life one day when things get right, when I get all my bills paid. When I get my feet on the ground, I say, what have you been walking on? See, there are no problem-free moments. Guy named Dimples had a record one time called "If It Ain't One Thing, It's Another." And I say, if it ain't one thing, it's 12 others. Always something there to build a case on why you can't move on, why you can't grow to the next level, why you can't begin to manifest your greatness. Greatness. Why you can't begin to live life on your terms. Always something there to block you, to keep you where you are, and keep you from beginning to develop your true greatness. Always some fear. How do we handle it? And I'm saying that if you've been hiding out behind but— if you've been using the fact that you don't have enough money or you don't have the education, take it head on. Go get the education. I was saying to a guy the other day, who was saying— I said, "How old are you?" He says, "47 years old." I said, "Your sister tell me that you can't read." He said, "That's right." I said, "Why?" "Well, you know, I didn't go to school." Excuse me, how old are you? "I'm 47." 47? Yes. And you can't read or write? Yes. Have you ever heard of adult school, adult education? Have you decided that You should learn how to read to begin to expand your world. Why are you using that as a racket? Why don't you decide now that you're going to expand your world? That if other people can learn, you could learn too. Well, it's hard for me. How do you— have you been and sit in a class yet? Have you signed up yet? No, I haven't. See, a lot of people say no, ladies and gentlemen, to things, and they don't even know what they're saying no to. He hasn't even challenged himself. He hasn't even gone to sit into a class and say, teach me how to read. Instead, it's been easier for him to go through life, he thinks, trying to play a whole con game pretending he knows how to do something that he doesn't know how to do. And you know what? Most of us go through life like that. Most of us go through life pretending, pretending that we're satisfied where we are, pretending that everything is okay, pretending that that we don't have any special goals or ambitions or desires, when really deep down inside we do really want more. But if you look at our behavior, if you judge based upon what we do, that really will tell you some true stories about people, because you have to judge a tree by the fruit it bears, not the fruit that it talks about. See, a lot of people pretend that they want more out of life, but all you have to do is watch their actions. That will tell you something. So I used to pretend that I wanted to lose weight, but how could you tell I was pretending? Watch me when I have a piece of sweet potato pie. Let me get within walking distance of some peanuts, some potato chips. See, I was pretending that I really wanted to lose weight. No, you just watch what I eat. I tell you what I'm seriously— committed to. People tell you, oh yeah, one day I want to have a restaurant. See, they're pretending they want to go into business for themselves. They're not serious. How can you tell? Let's watch their actions. Watch what they're doing. The proof is in the pudding. So if you want to do something, if you thought about something you want to do, take it head on. Decide that you're going to start looking at it, start doing research on it, start tackling it, start becoming involved in whatever and wherever it might lead you to begin to explore the possibilities in that particular thing that you're seeking so that you can begin to learn all you can about it. Decide that you're going to face it, that whatever shortcomings you have, that you're going to strengthen yourself there. Whatever training that's required, that you're going to go get that training, that you're going to get started right now. George Washington Carver would say, do what you can, where you are, with what you have, and never be satisfied. S.B. Fuller used to say, and you heard Joe Dudley talk about, always strive to be more than that which you are. Yeah, don't get satisfied with yourself. Always know that wherever you are, you can enjoy more, that you deserve more. But most people, you know what they do? Most people go through life quietly and safely, tiptoeing to an early grave. Find out what it is you want and go after it as if your life depends on it. Why? Because it does. People that have found their passion, people that found the things that they love, people that have found the things that they can pour their lives into, those people live longer. I was in New York and I had to do a seminar at a special church, and a guy by the name of Reverend Johnny Youngblood— and I said, how is it that you were able to build this big housing facility and got all of the various community and religious groups together to, to have this dwelling for 2,000 residents that were were once homeless. How were you able to take on this responsibility? Wasn't it overwhelming? He said, "The kind of work I do," he said, "it's in me. I've got to live what's in me." And I think that's everybody's desire in life. You've got to live what's in you. Life is just too short and unpredictable. But what do we say? But there'll always be tomorrow? Oh no. There are no guarantees you're going to show up tomorrow. There are a lot of people who were here yesterday that they're not here today. There are a lot of opportunities that were around yesterday, they're not here today. Oh, you can wait, but you know what Abraham Lincoln said? Well, good things might come to those who wait, but only the things that have been left over by those who hustle. You don't want to go through life picking up leftovers. You deserve much more than that. The leftovers that somebody has left you. So take it head on, begin to explore. Here's something else. Decide to do it now. Decide whatever you want to do, that you are now going to become actively involved right now exploring the possibilities for you. That you're going to look at it and do just a little bit of it right now. When I decided to become a speaker, I didn't just quit my job and just ran out and say, I'm a motivational speaker. No. What I did was I decided to start looking at other people that were involved in the speaking profession. I volunteered to work with some speakers so that I could learn. Whatever you want to do, get your feet wet. Gain some experience doing some volunteer work in the area and find out whether or not this thing you want to do will fit for you. A friend of mine told me he wanted to have a restaurant. I said, "Have you ever operated a restaurant before?" He said, "No." I said, "Well, really, you don't even know if you want one." I said, "What's your expertise? What do you bring to the table?" He said, "I can cook real good." I said, "Well, what about the management side?" What about the business part of the restaurant? You're not going to be cooking all the time. Somebody's got to receive the money. Who's going to manage the personnel? He said, you got it right, you got a point there. So this guy got a job in a restaurant in the evening time on a part-time basis. After doing that for a while, he said, you know what, I think I just want to be a chef. He said after working there, people didn't show up to work. He said it's hard to find the help. People weren't responsible. The headaches, the guests were just giving him problems day in and day out. They weren't ever satisfied. He said, no, I just think I'll stick to cooking. See, you got to find out what fits for you, because you might decide after you go up in there and examine it and experience it and, and get some experience under your belt on it, well, you say, this is really not what I want, this does not fit for me. So decide that you're going to do that. Now, John H. Johnson said something that's very important. He said, there is no defense against an excellence that meets a pressing public need. See, whatever you decide to do, look at it and find out what is it that I have that I could bring to the table that can begin to enable me to ensure that I could be successful in this. Where is the opening for you? There's room for you out here, out here in the arena called life. There's room for you to come out and live your dream. Don't allow 'but' to keep you in the corner or keep you up in the bleachers looking at life, being a spectator, not being a participant making a difference in life. I believe that all of us came here with something. All of us showed up to give something, and that nobody— but nobody's going to give that service that you have to give. No one's going to produce your product. No one's going to write your book. No one's gonna open your academy. No one's gonna begin to create your daycare with a special curriculum to help to cultivate the high self-esteem in our children. That's your idea. And if you don't bring your idea out here, when you die, all of us will suffer because we've been deprived of your genius because you allowed but to keep you in the bleachers and not pursuing your greatness. You take it to your grave with you. And that's what most people do. I think that's why the guy said that many people die at age 21. And don't get buried until they're 65. They're walking dead. You can tell them by the way they walk, how they look in the face, when they speak to you. I was giving a speech at this high school and a lady came after school. She said, "Mr. Brown, I want to talk to you about my son." I said, "What is it?" She said, He's not motivated. I said, I wonder why. You gotta have energy, ladies and gentlemen. You got to have life. If you excited about what you're doing, even in the area of selling, you know people don't buy because of logical reasoning. People buy because of your way of feeling. People don't like to be around dead people. No, no, let the dead bury the dead. No, no, keep them away from me before they grab you and want to hold on to you. So the fact that, that whatever you do, you want to be excited about it. You want to have the kind of excitement that is so contagious that people want to be around you. Because whatever you're doing, whatever you talk to people about, this particular idea that you have, They're looking at you and they want to know, do you believe it? And are you the kind of person they want to be in business with? And if you're not positive, if you're not energetic, if you're not fired up about it, how can you expect anybody else to be fired up about your idea? Am I right? All right, repeat after me, please. I'm going to be fired up about my dream. I'm gonna go at it with everything I got. Shake somebody's hand on your right and left and say, you got what it takes. There are a lot of people who say, "But I tried once or twice and it didn't work out." And so they use that as an excuse not to ever come out again. Guy said, um, "If at first you don't succeed, you're running about average." So, so if you have come out here with an idea and it didn't work out 2 or 3 times, well, that's all right. You're running about average. You know, I heard something, a jarring question. It says, why is it that people prefer known hells to unknown heavens? You know why? Because it's comfortable, ladies and gentlemen. I remember I was in a service once, and I heard Dr. Joni Coleman give this example. She talked about a man who had been captured behind the enemy lines in a war and was sentenced to, to be killed. Or another option, the captain said to the guy, listen, he said, tomorrow morning at 6 o'clock you can face the firing squad, or you can go out "this door over here." And the guy said, "What's out the door?" He said, "No one knows. All we can tell you, just unknown horrors." He thought, and the next morning he selected the firing squad. After the shots rang out, the captain's secretary said, "What's beyond that door?" And he said, "Freedom." but very few people would select to do it because it's unknown. See, a lot of people never live their dreams. A lot of people never do the things they want to do. A lot of people stay on jobs where they're miserable. I read an article called "Is Your Job Making You Sick?" A lot of people— some of y'all know about that already here. Go on and say amen, it's all right. That one lady told me, she said, "Les, when I used to go to work," she said, "when I stepped in the door, felt like a refrigerator dropped on my shoulders." How many of y'all understand that kind of feeling? They were miserable, just hated to go after 60 minutes on Sunday afternoon, or come Monday morning, "My head used to throb, I just couldn't take it." Didn't want to go. Sometimes just for the heck of it, I just drive on by. Woo! I used to hate to go to work. Many of us choose an active living death. Many of us are walking dead. The walking dead. That we're not doing what we want to do. Many of us stay in relationships where we're dying together rather than growing and expanding and living together. We're miserable, but because we don't have the courage to see ourselves beyond that relationship that has turned toxic, we go through life living dead people. And you can always tell couples that have been together for a little while. Go in a restaurant, the ones sitting side by side giggling and talking to each other, feeding each other with their fork and spoon, they just got together for for one week. You see 'em in the car, they sitting all up each other hugging as fuck. Oh, they've been together about 3 days, all right. But if you see people sitting in a restaurant, 2 people, you know, see a couple and they're sitting in front of each other. Takes so long for this food, I wonder when they gonna hurry up. Those are the married ones. Oh, but what if I know people been married for years living in two separate rooms, sleeping in two separate beds? Well, it's cheaper to keep 'em. Not necessarily. It's according to the price you want to pay. See, the price of peace of mind, the price of living the truth, of being honest with yourself and say, wait a minute, it's got to be more than this. So you've got to decide, wait, wait. Even if I— things don't work out, even if I experience defeat or failure, that does not make me a failure. It's a difference between failing and being a failure. If you— if things don't work out, if you don't produce the results you want, that's all. But don't confuse who you are with the results that you produce. I used to be a state legislator in Columbus, Ohio, and I remember once I was going to introduce some legislation on the floor, and after getting that legislation passed, a guy came up behind me and he had some legislation that I opposed him on that. And I was about to stand up to debate this guy, and the guy next to me said, "Excuse me, don't debate that guy." "Why?" "Do you know who that is?" I said, "No." "That's Wilkonski from Toledo. That's a bad dude. He's a lawyer, Les. That man can debate." I don't care, I'm Les Brown, maybe Brownsboro. So I raised my hand. "Mr. Speaker?" He said, "The gentleman from the 29th House District?" I said, "Yes, sir, to tell the gentleman I'd like to take him on. Challenge him on this legislation." He said, "Well, cause he said, 'I would more than like to, Mr. Speaker.'" Everybody say, "Whoa!" I asked him some questions, he responded. I say, "I wonder why I asked that man that question." Wilkowski wore me out. I mean, I was so embarrassed, I was just limping back to my room with my "yes, I can" attitude. However, here's what I learned. When you win— see, if I win a debate, I win because of what I know. When I lose, I lose because what I don't know. So I had to check out what is it that I did not know. I wasn't prepared. I did not do enough research. I did not do my homework. So he handled me like he wanted to. So I came back again. I waited on some other legislation, did my homework, but he was more than able to take me out again. But pretty soon, each time it would take him, it would become a little bit more difficult and a little bit more difficult. And the older guy said, would you argue on behalf of this legislation for me? I said, sure. I started volunteering to do work in the legislative committees for the older guys. I said, absolutely. And the more I did it, the better I became, and then people began to start respecting me. When I would ask and say, "Mr. Speaker, I'd like to speak on that bill," some guys' lips start trembling and stuff, like Jimmy, you know. Wait a minute, is there anything wrong? Do we have a problem here? But if I wasn't willing to be humiliated, if I wasn't If I wasn't willing to allow myself to be embarrassed, if I wasn't willing to be debated and defeated, if I wasn't willing to look at it and say, "Well, I'm just not good as I'm going to be." You know what that lady said? "Lord, I ain't what I wanna be, ain't what I'm gonna be, but thank God I sure ain't what I was." You can either live your dreams or live your fears. And I think the majority of people actually are not living their dreams. But are living their fears. So I want to ask you a question: what are your fears? What are you afraid of? What are you scared of? Because we all have fears, don't we? We all have something that's blocking us, that's holding us back. And as we begin to look at life What we realize is that the reason that most people are not living out their true potential, are not doing all of the things that they would really like to do, is because of fear. Some people call fear false evidence or expectations appearing real. I'm reminded of a story of, um, a guy that was living in an area where he had some new neighbors, and these neighbors had a bulldog. And when he came home every day, this bulldog used to chase him about half a block from his house every day. He would have to streak home. I mean, he would just run. This bulldog be right on his heels. And so he just got tired of that because he would go home, and about half a block away from home, he would look around for this bulldog, and he would see him. And he would go walking casually along, and this bulldog come out of nowhere, "Woo-hoo-hoo!" And start chasing him, and he'd run home. So this one day, he just got tired. And so when the bulldog was running after him, he started running, he saw a rock, and he stopped to pick it up to throw at the bulldog. And when the bulldog got up on him, he started barking, he realized the bulldog didn't have any teeth in his mouth. Then he started chasing the bulldog, "If you don't get on away from me!" 'Cause the most the bulldog could have done is gummy, you know, "Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow." And so, you know what? Most people go through life running scared. Running scared from things that have no teeth in them because they're false expectations appearing real. But see, we are brilliant enough to scare ourselves to death. You realize that? There are some people actually who get a kick out of scaring themselves scared to death. I remember the last frightening movie I saw. It was The Exorcist. I will never forget. I was so frightened when I came home. I'll never forget. I drove in the driveway, and I had already called my former wife and said, "Listen, turn the lights on." I was coming in the driveway, and I was getting out of the car, and all of a sudden, I couldn't get out. I started blowing my horn. I said, "Madeline, they got me! They got me!" She came to the kitchen window and said, "Take your seatbelt loose, fool." I said, "Oh, okay, okay, okay." I was frightened out of my wits. But there are a lot of people who, they get off on that. They love it. I'm a person, my brother is a paratrooper. My twin brother, he's in the military, career man. I would love to jump out of an airplane in a parachute. I'm scared though. I mean, I really admire my brother. Together for that. I would really love to be macho man like that. What are the things that you fear that's been keeping you from living your dream, that's been keeping you from doing some things that you would like to do? Just think about those things. And how do we begin to handle that? Abraham Maslow said that the life is about growth, and he said you can either go back to your comfort zone and there you won't find any growth, or You must willing— be willing to go forward and face your fears again and again and again, because you're never going to have a fear-free existence. I mean, some fear is acceptable and legitimate. There are some things that you, you really should be afraid of. Now, you shouldn't allow it to immobilize you. You acknowledge it, you take it into account, and you carry yourself accordingly. There are times that we should proceed with caution, but it's the difference between being stopped by fear. It's the difference between having a fear and the fear having you. So what do we do? One, acknowledge it, and knowing that it's okay. Don't condemn yourself for being afraid. It's perfectly fine to have some fears. You acknowledge your fears, you embrace those fears, and then you move on. You act on whatever it is that you fear, because once you embrace it— see, what you resist will persist. What you resist will persist. So one of the most important things is, is to begin to embrace your fear. The fear of bodily harm, that's legitimate. When I was a disc jockey in Columbus, Ohio You know, I was young, about 22, 23, thought I was tough. And I was on the air, and Al Green, who was a great performer at that time and still is now, now singing gospel music, had a record. His first hit record was "Back Up Train." So a guy came in the town and was impersonating Al Green. I happened to know Al Green because I'd already booked him. And so when I found out this guy was impersonating Al Green, I came on the air and did an editorial about it, and I exposed him. He was rather a big fellow, and so he had the word out that when I see this guy Les Brown, the disc jockey, I'm gonna knock him in mouth for having a big mouth. So I was driving down Main Street in Columbus, Ohio, had my son in the car, and I always had this little saying, hey, if anybody ever put a threat out on me, I'm gonna make them honor it. So I saw this guy in the street, so I Pull around. I say, "Excuse me, I'll be right back." Got out of the car. I said, "Hey man, I heard you said that you were looking for me. I'm Les Brown." He said, "You are?" I said, "Yeah." I said, "What is it? I'm the one that said that you are an imposter." I said, "I want to know what you're going to do about it." He opened his coat and he had a gun there. I say, "But whatever I said to hurt your feelings, I want you to know it's all right." Acknowledge your fears. Just carry yourself accordingly and do what makes sense for you. Well, one major fear I've always had is a fear of the dentist. And this fear had me. I didn't have that fear. And what really reinforced it— you got to watch things that can feed your fear. I saw a movie that most people would not remember. This movie was starring Dustin Hoffman. It's called The Marathon Man with Laurence Olivier. When he's trying to get a confession out of him and he took this drill out, let me tell you something. When he went in Dustin Hoffman's mouth with that drill, I had a dollar worth of popcorn. That popcorn went everywhere. Oh, do you know I could not go to the dentist for 5 years? I had left broadcasting went to the Ohio legislature, had an impacted wisdom tooth. Now that hurts. And I would call, and as soon as the people would answer the phone, I would hang up. That's how frightened I was. Dr. Hamler's office. Boom. I'd hang up. Then I got to the point where I could just ask for an appointment. Hello? And I wouldn't give my real name because I knew I wasn't going to keep it. I'd give anybody's name, Joe Jiggly Jim, it didn't matter. And pretty soon I got to the point where I could give my name. It was about 4 years after that, you know? I said, my name is Les Brown. Then I would call back and say, look here, due to my legislative agenda, I won't be able to make it. So the lady finally said on the phone, she said, you're scared, aren't you? I said, no, I'm not. She said, then why don't you come in? I said, that's none of your business. She said, "You're not coming in because you're scared. I wish you just would not waste our time." And she hung up. I said, "You have no right to do that to people like me, you know." So finally, to make a long and short of it, I was hurting so bad, I said, "Wait a minute, I've got to do something." And I said, "What am I afraid of? Go there and handle it." I said, "Man," I said, "Dr. Hamill, I just can't hear this drill. I mean, if you can do whatever, I just don't— I don't need to hear this drill. This drill, that sound, you know, that's what gets me, that drill. Don't pull that drill out on me." He said, "Just calm down, calm down." and it wasn't really bad as I thought it was. One of the things you find out, that when you face your fears, it's not as bad as you think it is. And when people tell you, I just can't do it, I can't handle it, I mean, really, really, really, I can't handle it, what they're envisioning is that they're not going to be— they're going to clock out like you're going to die. And guess what? We all had occasions when we confronted our fears, we had to do something we felt uncomfortable with, we didn't want to do it, and we did not die. They didn't come take us and put us in a box somewhere. Am I right? So what we've got to begin to do— how do we handle that? What's the process? Because it's all up in here. One, I think, is imagine the worst-case scenario. I just imagine that he went in my mouth and with this drill, and that I just croaked out. Then I imagine— that's the worst case scenario. Then I had another technique I used: visualize yourself being more than able and capable of handling it. And I used to have a tremendous inferiority complex about speaking before people that I felt who had more going for them than I did, because I'm not college trained. I used to feel that college people were the most intelligent people on the planet, and there was nothing I had to say for them. And what would I— what will they listen to me for? That's the way I felt. And so I had to, to visualize myself speaking before them, speaking before various audiences that had more going for them than I did, and realize and appreciate my own value and that I was a worthwhile person even though I didn't have all going for me. I didn't have the money, I didn't have the education that they had. So part of the process is seeing yourself being worthy being capable, having what you need to make you a worthwhile person, and that you're more than able, and that you deserve to be listened to, or you deserve to have that dream and that passion, or whatever it is that you see and envision there. You've got to see it in your mind's eye and know that you've got what it takes. Repeat after me, please. I must see— I must see— in my mind's eye— in my mind's eye— see myself— see myself— confronting my fears— I'm more than able. Shake somebody's hand on your right and left and say, you got the right stuff. So deciding, as you look at your life, as you look into the future and say, what fears am I holding on to? What fears that I'm allowing to imprison me, that's keeping me from breaking out, that's keeping me from living up to my true potential, that's keeping me from really being happy, that's keeping me from having a sense of adventure and excitement in my life? What's, what's keeping me from controlling my destiny? What fears? That I'm giving that permission to. Notice what I said, that we must give our permission to fear to immobilize us. Because whatever discomfort you experience, whatever challenges or difficulty that it is, you got to handle it. You got to go up in there and wrestle with it. Will it be easy? No. Will it be challenging? Yes. A friend of mine who's going into recovery, he's been addicted to crack cocaine for years and alcohol. He was talking about how challenging it was and why he was dreading going on— going into cold turkey. I said, what do you want me to tell you, that it's going to be a picnic? No, it's not. It's going to kick your butt? Yes, it is. Are you going to want to die? Yes, yes, that's a part of it. But that's just what you must go through in order to get where you want to go. And guess what? You are strong enough to do it. You're strong enough, and your life is worth whatever you have to go through to get past this addiction, whatever you have to do. This dream you got, whatever you want to do, will it be easy to just run out there and do it? No. Will it happen overnight? No. Will it be a struggle? Yes. Will there be times when you can't make ends meet? Yes, that's a part of it. Will there be times you won't know what to do? Yes, that's a part of it. Will you have some opposition? Will things go wrong sometimes? You will have many visits from Murphy. Now if you say, well, who's Murphy? Don't worry. Somebody must have told us someplace along the line, I don't know where, but somebody must have told people, "Oh, life is gonna be real easy." No! If they told you that, I've got a special announcement. They lied! I'll never forget, I had a special piece of legislation I wanted to get passed. And I said to a guy, I said, "Look here, can I count on your vote?" He said, "Yes." And look here, if I can't count on it, let me know. There's another guy that owes me a chip and I can call on that and I won't need your vote, but I do need it if you say you're going to do it, do it. He said, "You can count on it." Legislation came up, he voted against my bill. My bill passed. I went back to him and said, "Hey, I told you I needed the vote, but if you couldn't give it up, let me know. I would get somebody else." I said, "Why did you tell me that?" He said, "I lied." I was in shock. How many of you that life just wore you out? That you didn't expect that? You thought you'd go to school, get good grades, get a job, and you came out here and you'd be able to get a job and live happily ever after? And you say, "They lied." Yes, they did. They never told me, you know, that song say, "Mama told me there'll be days like this." They didn't even tell us that. Isn't that something about life? It's challenging. I mean, it's some stuff you get out here, you didn't read it in a book nowhere. Didn't nobody warn you that it was going to come down on you like this. That's called life. There are all kinds of challenges like that. So what's the next piece is that you accept yourself, then you accept the fear as a fact and not a force. See, when you accept yourself and you accept fear as a fact, that means that it's something that happens, it's something that you're going to experience, but it is not a force to hold you back. It doesn't have any special power other than that, that you give it. So you accept the fact that you are afraid, and then you move on anyhow. You move on past it and you do whatever you've got to do. I was at a big motivational rally for a gentleman by the name of Dexter Yeager down in the Carolinas. I was standing backstage and I had to go out. I was the last speaker on the program. It's the first time I'd been in a stadium of this size, over 10,000 people. You couldn't see the people because the lights are just blaring in your eyes. Called Free Enterprise Day. I was afraid. My heart was beating fast. I was just pacing back and forth. And Dexter said, are you all right? I said, Yeah, yeah, I'm all right. So I said, wait a bit, just calm down, calm yourself. Hold on, hold on. It's all right, Les, it's all right. All right, just be as scared as you can be. See, that's why I say embrace that fear. Just try and see how scared you can really get. And start breathing deep. So the guy came back, he said, are you about to die or something? I said, no, I'm fine. But after I started embracing it and trying to make myself as afraid as I can get and imagine what's the worst thing that I can go out there and do? My mind go blank and I faint on stage? That's the longest they gave me my check. But once I started laughing at myself, I started talking to myself. I said, you know you scared today? And I said, I just calmed myself down and I went out there and I cooked. And that's what you got to do. I had another experience where I was at a major corporation and I was, it was one of my first major presentations I was going to do for this corporation. And I had 4 other presenters that had large firms. And one of the things that you've got to do is you've got to watch your inner conversation and discipline your thinking and your imagination because because if you don't, your mind will take you on a wild trip. So my mind said, "Hey, Les." I said, "What?" "These guys are gonna wipe you out. You can't compete with them." Because I heard these guys sitting over across from me, and they were talking about all that they had going for them. And so I started doubting myself, and I became afraid, and I was thinking, "Well, maybe I shouldn't go in there." And so I knew then, and this is what I suggest to you, Sometimes you got to talk to yourself. Talking to yourself, you know, could be a good exercise. Might be the only intelligent conversation you ever get. So I got up and I went in the bathroom. I started talking to myself. I said, "Les Brown, let me tell you something. What do you care about these guys and their firms and all their money? You got 6 children you've got to feed. You got a mama you got to take care of at home. You ain't got nothing to lose." I went in that room and looked at those people. I said, "Don't you do nothing till you hear from me." And I got that contract too. You gotta do it. So when you have your lower self talking to you, telling you what you can't do, part of what you've gotta do is be your own motivator. You can't talk casually to yourself. You can't say, "Rasheedah, you must calm down now." No, that subconscious mind won't hear that. You've got to have a good conversation to yourself. Hey, and answer yourself too. Don't pay these people any attention. You answer yourself. Hey, what you gonna do? I'm going there and get off. All right, very good. Go in there and take care of business. You've got to talk to yourself and you build yourself up and you'll feel your energy level coming up and people will feel that around you. See, now if you go through life being afraid, people can sense that. They can pick up that fear. So that's why you've got to stand up inside yourself. I'm reminded of the little boy that was on a bus and some bigger fellows were picking at him, you know. And so he wanted to move from by them. They were thumping him on the head. And so he stood up just to get from by them and they would push him back down. And he would stand up again and they'd push him back down. And he stood up again and they pushed him down, held him down. He said, "You might hold me down, but I'm standing up inside myself." And that's what you gotta do in life. See, when you are not filling your life with the things that you are capable of doing— see, we all have some stuff that we've been given, and I don't think that it's optional for us to sit on what we have. See, if you're sitting on what you have, what you've been given— I think everybody's been given something to bring to the planet that only you can do, that only you can perform, that only you can initiate that activity. And if you don't do that, if you're not filling in your life with your life work or your mission, then there are gaps in your life. And what we do when we're not living out our true identity We begin to fill the gaps, we fill the holes with garbage, alcohol, drugs, worry, self-destructive behavior. So when you begin to look at your life and you know that, that you're not doing what you can do because you have allowed yourself to be held captive by your fears. Now, when you don't have a true appreciation in acceptance for who you are, and you allow yourself to be immobilized by fear, what happens in the process is that you begin to abuse yourself. You begin to sabotage your life. You begin to sabotage your dreams. You begin to unconsciously work against yourself. You become your own worst enemy. So what do you do about that? Well, you, you begin to realize that your dream and your gifts have so much meaning and so much value for you, till your hunger for them will begin to push you past the fear. Your hunger to have them will give you a special drive as you work on yourself, as you begin to acknowledge your true identity, the true power that you have, the true capacity you have to bring about change. The miracle-working power that you have within yourself to do the things that you want to do when you take them on. I'm reminded of a man who— this gentleman was doing a special study of a special tribe in Africa, headhunters, and he had difficulty in developing a relationship with these tribesmen because of the fact that he had fear. He had a fear they were going to take his head. I tell you, all fears aren't bad. That was a legitimate fear. That was a good fear to give you a headache. So he worked there for a long time with no effort, no progress in developing relationship and rapport and being able to achieve a level of trust. So finally one night while he was in bed, He was thinking about it. I said, "What is it that you came here to do? What is your life work as a missionary?" He said, "I want to study these tribesmen." I said, "What's the worst thing that they can do to you? Kill you." And he just decided, "Hey, this is what I came here to do. I know that there's some risk involved, and I'm going to do it come what may." He said, "I'm not going to be afraid anymore." He went back the next day and he started doing the work and trying to talk to and interview many of the members of this tribe, and they began to respond to him. They threw out the welcome mat to him. And years later, when people came to see what his progress was, they asked him, "How were you able to do this? How did you convert the relationship from being hostile to that of being positive?" And he said something I think has value for all of us. He said, when life can no longer threaten you with death, he said, what else is there? What else is there? And the majority of the fears that we have are not life or death fears. They're not those kind of fears. But through our imagination, We blow them out of proportion and we give them more power than they actually have or deserve, and we permit them to govern our lives. We permit them to determine how far we can stretch out on our dreams and discovering our stuff. And as we begin to look at ourselves and, and begin to— wait a minute, Just getting to the point as you assess yourself and begin to prove yourself and just say, wait, hold a minute, hold a minute, I've been sweating this out. What can— what's the worst thing that can happen to me on this? Will it kill me? Will I die? Why am I going through all of these changes over this? How much power does this really have? And am I the one that's feeding the power into it? See, a lot of times we, we allow ourselves to be fed and to be programmed into being afraid. I mean, you watch the news and read the newspaper, you'll be scared to come out the house. Am I right? You'd be afraid. So what kinds of things, what kinds of thoughts are you feeding your consciousness? What kind of things are you putting in your mind that will enable you to either move forward or to justify why you're staying where you are. Another piece that I look at, that when I finally decided that I was going to go to the dentist, the pain was so great I couldn't hold out any longer. All of a sudden, the fear didn't matter. I can't wait. Take me. Now, some people need fear, you know. I have a friend that, that we told him, hey man, you You know, you need to lose some weight. You're getting overweight and out of shape, and at our age, we need to have a regular program. And Bud said, man, I've been fat since I was a little boy. I'm, you know, I'm big-boned. I've never seen a fat skeleton though, you know. Well, Bud became ill. How many of you ever seen a fat skeleton right here? I know, all right. Bud became ill, passed out, and, um, I was there and the doctor was talking to him. And Bud, I think, was going to go right back to same old eating habits and doing everything. You know, he said, look here, um, you are a diabetic. He said, now here's some of the side effects. You know, you could go blind, you can become an amputee. None of that touched him. He said, you can become impotent. He said, what did you say? Bud has lost weight, he exercises every day, he's in a body sculpturing. 48 years young, he looks great. I can't believe it, but just that one statement made all the difference in the world. Bud is a new man today. So what is it that has to happen to you? Some people don't take corrective measures to improve their health until they get a pronouncement that they're about to die. Then they start, okay, all right, I'm ready to do whatever you want me to do. But they won't do that. They can see people dropping off like flies around them. Well, that's them. You got to go from something. We go through life really blocking ourselves constantly, and fear is one of the greatest instruments that we could use to stifle our true potential. When you begin to, to look at your life, you can decide to, to use fear as a blocker, or you can decide to use it as building blocks. That you decide, hey, look here, I'm going to move in this direction. I'm not going to allow anything to stop me from doing what I want to do. Shake somebody's hand on your right and left and say, I'm unstoppable. See, when you begin to understand and acknowledge your fear and you go forth anyhow, you go forth in a spirit and a knowing that there's a way that you can begin to handle this. There's a way out here somewhere. There's a solution. What it is that you're seeking, that you have the capacity to whatever comes up, to handle it, to face it. And rather than feeling powerless, you begin to feel powerful. See, when all the major downsizings that are taking place around this country, there are a lot of people who are biting their fingers in fear that they might lose their jobs, but there are few people who have decided within themselves I'm going to make it. Some people aren't waiting to be cut. Some people are moving on their own because they feel within themselves, I've got what it takes to make it. They're not afraid about tomorrow because of how they see themselves, because of what they feel that they deserve, because of what they feel that they can create for themselves. Because these people have decided, as they look at the future, as they look at themselves, there's a way. Where there's a will, there's a way for me to begin to create a way out of no way. And when you have that kind of consciousness, when you have that kind of spirit, nothing can stop you. Nothing. What would your life be like As you look toward the future, if you decided, "I'm not going to allow my fears to stop me," what would your life be like? What would your future be like if you decided to, to want that which you desire so strongly that it prepares you past your fears, that you experience the fear, as one book says, feel the fear and do it anyway, what would your life be like? And I'm saying to you that all of us who have been entombed by fear have the capacity to resurrect ourselves and to resurrect our dreams. All of us have a capacity to do that. And you have— is it easy? No, it's not easy. Can I do it? Yes. What's one of the ways to get started? Some of us need somebody to hold our hands. Sometimes we need somebody to help us out. Be willing to say I don't know. Be willing to reach out. Be willing to get some assistance to take you to the next level. What great athlete, you never expect boxers to make profound statements. I think it was Joe Frazier who said this one. He says, all of us are like the blind man at some point in our lives standing on the corner waiting for somebody to lead us across. So all of us at some point in our lives need some help, need someone to reach out to us, to throw out the lifeline, to help us go across some treacherous waters that we couldn't navigate by ourselves. None of us do it by ourselves. All of us at some point of our lives, we need that kind of help. We need that kind of assistance because we grow from the people we have in our lives that can enrich our lives personally, professionally, spiritually, and all the dimensions of our lives. We don't grow in a vacuum. So as you look at yourself, whatever fears you have that maybe you need some help in strengthening yourself in that area, as you assess your strengths and your weaknesses as you begin to prove yourself and your passions and your dreams and your goals and the things that you want, if you decide to experience all of your true potential, as you decide to manifest all of your greatness, as you decide, wait a minute, what, what else is available to me out here? If I decided to experience the fear of rejection, the fear of no, the fear of failure, the fear of standing by myself, what else is available of taking a chance, a fear of losing it all. What else is available to me that will bring some extra meaning and value? The fear of people not liking me. You know how many people do things they don't want to do because they want everybody to like them? Everybody's not going to like you. Excuse me, special announcement: everybody's not going to like you. No, that's— it's just not that kind of world. What? But you know, there are a lot of people who won't take positions on issues, who won't take a stand for things they believe in, who won't speak up for themselves because they don't want to make anybody mad. Oh, it was Bill Cosby. He said, I don't know what the secret of success is, he said, but here's what I know what the secret of failure is, he said, trying to please You can't please everybody. But there are people who have the fear of rocking the boat, so they just go along in life. Just go along. Well, how do you feel? Well, I don't really want to say. How many of you know people like that? Raise your hand. These people aren't living life. They're not truly experiencing life. What do you really want to do? Well, I don't like this, but I guess I'll go ahead on and do No, the life is too short for that. Too short and unpredictable. Moseying through, not trying to disturb anything, not trying to shake anything up, not trying to make any waves. You see, there are some people who, who come through the universe, and their level of contribution and the level of energy they manifest is so small, so inconspicuous that when they go, you won't even know they left. I mean, there are people who die on jobs, and, and you say, hey, where's John? Oh, John been dead 6 months. You're kidding. No. Is that right? Yeah. I didn't know. Why didn't somebody say— well, I guess we didn't miss him. But there's some people, because of their personality, because of their contribution, because of their— the investment of their time and their energy and the impact they have there, that when they go, everybody will miss them. See, when Mother Teresa checks out, everybody will know. When Rosa Parks, everybody will know. Nelson Mandela, everybody will know. Why? Because of their contribution. See, but there's some people, because their contribution is so small No one will care. So I'm saying, before you are boxed and buried, decide that you're gonna box and bury your fears. Decide that you're going to begin to live life on a new level, seeking out new horizons, that you're gonna find more love and more joy and more ways to give more to life. Guy said something I love. This, he says, Everything a man does for himself, guess what, he takes with him. But everything he does for others, he leaves behind. So when you begin to say, what is it that I want to leave? What contribution that I want to begin to make? What difference do I want to make in life? What is it that I want to do with the rest of the life that I have left? What, what chances I need to take? What risks do I need to begin to embrace? What fears do I need to step on? What areas of my life am I dead right now? What dream? You can either live your dreams or live your fears. You have got to get to a point where you say, I'm sick and tired of living like this. There's got to be more. That's— see, that's when people go out and strike out on their dreams. That's when people get out of relationships where they're dying together rather than growing together. That's where they leave jobs. So where you going? Away from here. I don't know. Do you have another job? No, I don't. How you going to make it? I don't know, but I will. See, you will when you put yourself in that kind of situation. I'm reminded of two frogs that, that were hopping down the road and they fell into a bottle of milk. And one was hopping up and down for a while and he drowned. He just gave up. But this other frog just kept on kicking. He wouldn't give up. He just kept on kicking. And pretty soon he churned that milk into butter and he walked on out. So I'm saying when when life catches you by the neck and blind slap you, whap, knock you down, I said just keep on kicking, you know, and you can kick on out of those circumstances, whatever they are, not be intimidated by them. Most people are not accumulating wealth. Most people are living in poverty. Most people are living far below their potential, not because they don't have the capacity, not because they have not been given authority and dominion over everything on on the face of the earth. But most people are living like they're living because of the fact that they don't believe they can have any more than what they now have. In the book called "A Miseducation of the Negro," Dr. Carter G. Woodson said, "If you can determine what a man shall think, you never have to concern yourself with what he will do. If you can make a man feel inferior, you never have to compel him to seek an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. And if you can make a man feel justly an outcast, you never have to order him to go to the back door." door, he'll go without being told. And if there's no door, his very nature will demand one. That's why scripture reminds us, be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. So every day you have to sell yourself and get out of your mind those old thoughts, that old belief system. Every day you've got to sell yourself on that it's possible But you got to put a new mind in you. You got to get out of your mind. You got to begin to restructure your thinking every day. You've got to begin to recondition your mind. See, many of us go through life making choices thinking it's our choices, and it's not. What do you mean by that? I'm reminded of the great anthropologist Margaret Mead. She was in a restaurant in Europe, and a waiter saw her and said, oh, 'Oh, how are you? I'm so glad to see you.' He said, 'There are several other Americans here tonight.' And she said, 'Is that right?' He said, 'Yes.' She said, 'When you serve them dessert, let me know and I'll tell you exactly how many are here.' He said, 'That's not possible.' She said, 'Let me know after you serve dessert.' When he served dessert, he came back and he told her. She got up, she walked and she looked and she observed and she said, "You have exactly 65 Americans here." He checked the guest list and he was amazed. He said, "How did you know that?" She said, "Because in Europe when you eat a slice of pie or cake, you eat it from the back toward the tip. In America when we eat a slice of slice of pie or cake, we eat it from the tip toward the back. How many of you, when you eat a slice of pie or cake, you eat it from the tip toward the back? Raise your hands, please. Good. Now, what else is in your mind? What else are you doing unconsciously that you don't even know? I'm going to say something, and I want you to answer it after it. I want you to end it for me. Winston tastes good like what? How many of you don't even smoke Who took Winston-Benoit? Raise your hands, please. Now, that commercial been off the air for 30 years. 30 years. See, let me share something with you. The easiest thing I've ever done was to earn a million dollars. The most difficult thing I've ever done was to believe it could happen to me. That was the most difficult part, to believe that given my circumstances, if my birth parents came down this aisle right now, I would not know either one. If my daddy came up here or my mother came up here, given the fact that I was born in an abandoned building on a floor, being labeled educable mentally retarded, not having any college training, I used to feel all my life that people who had college degrees were more intelligent than me. I remember going to see the late Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the author of the book The Power of Positive Thinking, and I used to look at him up on stage and I said, I could do that. I would love to talk to people. I love to talk to people. And I said, I could do that. But then when I started going back to my car, my mental conditioning activated itself and it said, Les Brown, you can't do that. You don't have a college education. Les Brown, you can't do that. You don't have the training. You've never worked for a major corporation. You can't do that. What makes you think you can earn $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 $100,000 in an hour. You don't earn that now working for 2 or 3 months. What makes you think that you can speak for AT&T, Procter Gamble, McDonald's Corporation, General Electric? These are clients I have now. You've never even worked for them. How many of you ever thought about something you wanted to do and you talk yourself out of it? Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. That inner conversation is what's gonna haunt you after standing here and saying, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." After saying that again and again, "We are more than conquerors," that inner conversation will cause you, when you leave here, to go back leading a life of mediocrity, leading a life of unproductivity, leading a life of poverty. So I'm going to share with you how to break out of that. I want to share with you how to reach your goals. I think the Bible is the greatest motivational book ever been written. Now I want you to repeat after me, please. We got to recondition our minds first. Let us say together, "Good things are supposed to happen to me." Yeah, write that down. I want you to say that to yourself every day. See, we live in a world where we believe that bad things are supposed to happen to us. I remember at a point in my life, Bishop, when things are going good for me, and I said, "This is too good to be true. Something is bound to happen." Guess what? It did. Thou shalt decree a thing, it shall be established unto you, and shall accomplish that whereunto to it has been sent. Watch your words. Watch what you say about yourself, about your affairs. Be conscious of that on a daily basis. Why? Because your words are powerful. In the beginning was the Word. Life and death is in the tongue. Watch what you say. Never say, "I'm broke." Say, "I'm overcoming a cash flow problem." Claim what you want, not what you don't want. So affirm. Good things are supposed to happen to me, and begin to believe that. Begin to expect that. Now, I was talking to my oldest son, Calvin. We were going for a walk, and I said, Calvin, do you want to be successful? He said, yes, sir, Dad. I said, okay. We kept on walking. No. Then I stopped and I looked him in the eyes. This is my namesake, my junior. I said, Calvin, we're looking at each other eye to eye now. Do you expect to be successful? Given the fact that you are a single parent of two kids, given the fact that you decided not to go to college to further your education, Given the fact that you are very talented, but you're behind on your dreams and your bills, do you expect, based upon your performance, based upon what you produce at this point in time in your life, do you expect to be successful? And Calvin got quiet. Because see, if you ask most people at the Manpower Conference, do you want to be successful? Do you want to live a life of productivity? Do you want Do you want to live a life of contribution? Do you want to be a better father? Do you want to have your own business? Are there dreams you want? Everybody will say yes. But see, want shows up in conversation. Expectation shows up in behavior. See, I can tell what you expect by what you do. That's why the Bible says, judge a tree by the fruit it bears, not the fruit that it wants. not the fruit that it talks about, not the fruit that it claims, but by what you are doing. See, what you do when you leave here, when the music stops, when the shouting dies down, your behavior, how you conduct yourself, writing your goals down, deciding to enroll in school to get a GED, deciding to sit in the class with children young enough to be your grandchildren, decide to find some product, some idea, some service that you can provide so that you can begin to create some value for yourself, so you can create wealth. And let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, it's very important that we begin to learn how to create wealth. I'm not talking about loving money. See, I believe the lack of money is the root of all evil. People steal for money, people are killed for money, people go to jail for money. Every time the unemployment goes up, in those areas where the unemployment is high, that's where you have the highest incidence of crime and violence. Whenever the unemployment goes up 1% in our community, 10,000 children and women are battered. Money makes a difference in your life. I never wanted to be rich. All I've ever wanted to do was to be comfortable. How many of you ever wanted to be comfortable? Raise your hands. Then I realized in order to be comfortable, you gotta be rich. An old friend of mine, Zig Ziglar, said, "People say money won't make you happy, but everybody want to find out for themselves. Rita Davenport said money ain't important, but it's right up there with oxygen. And let me tell you something, fellas, even if you as homeless as I am, if you got some money, women will find something cute on you. He got inloved like Denzel, honey. Money makes a difference. I used to be so broke when creditors would call the house, my children would answer the phone and say, "My daddy say he ain't home." I was so broke at one time in my life, I walked by a bank and tripped the alarm. I tell you, poverty sucks. You hear me? Repeat after me, please. I'll never be broke again. Yes, write that down. Write that down. I affirm that I'll never be broke again. Never, never will I ever be broke again. Let me tell you what money does. Number 1, it gives you control over your life. Write that down. Number 2, it gives you options. 3, it It allows you to live a life of contribution, to contribute to things that you feel strongly about, like this ministry and the work of Project 2000 will be doing to change the lives of young people. Bishop Jake's vision is if we can have little league football teams and baseball teams and basketball teams, then we can have little league dermatologists and cardiologists and endocrinologists. So he is now establishing an institution, Project 2000, 2000, to give our young people the methods, the techniques to reinvent themselves as we go into the next millennium and this era that Peter Drucker calls the era of the 3 C's: accelerated change, overwhelming complexity, and tremendous competition. So here's the first step to accumulating wealth if you expect to do it. Write this down: you must be willing to do the things today others won't do in order to have the things tomorrow tomorrow others won't have. That's why the Book of Life said the road to life is straight and narrow and few there be that find it, because few there be that are willing to do the things today others won't do in order to have the things tomorrow others won't have. What are the things that others won't do? Number 1, make discipline a major force in your life. How many of you know if you'd have been more disciplined, you'd be further along to reach your goals right now? Socrates said the undisciplined life is an insane life. The road to life is straight and narrow because few there be that are willing to discipline themselves. Here's something else that most people won't do: make it okay to fail. A lot of people, 85% of people, allow their fear of failure to outweigh their desire to succeed. Repeat after me, please. Anything that's worth doing is worth doing badly. Yeah, see, anything is worth doing is worth doing right, as we have been taught, if you know how to do it. But if you don't know how to do it, it's worth doing badly until you get it right. I bet you, and I wasn't there, I bet you that when Bishop T.D. Jakes first stood up to preach, when he gave his trial sermon, he did not have the command, he did not have the mastery, he did not have the confidence, he did not have the depth, he did not have the capacity to translate and milk scripture like he did last night when he first started out. Now write this down: you don't have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great. The first time I stood up It was my turn to speak. I stood up, and my mind sat down. I looked at the audience, and I panicked. I had to introduce a play at school. We about to start. Ran off. Mr. Washington said, "Mr. Brown, where are you going?" Mr. Washington, I can't think, sir. I don't know. Did you rehearse? Yes, sir, I did. Well, what's wrong? Why didn't you say your lines? I don't know, sir. I just got up there and I looked at him and everything left me. Let me do it another day, please, sir. No, go back out there, Mr. Brown. Mr. Washington, I'll mess up. Please, sir, don't send me out there now. I'll mess up. Mr. Brown, if you run now, you will always be running. Anything that's worth doing is worth doing badly until you get it right. Why are you moving like that? I gotta go to the bathroom. "Go back out there." "Yes, sir." We have a— a startup called 12 Angry Men directed by Mr. Leroy Washington. And I ran off. The next day, "Hey, Alpha Alpha! Hey, Les Brown, how are you?" They dogged me out. They talked about me so bad. The next time another event came up, Mr. Washington said, "Mr. Brown, you're up." I said, "No, Mr. Washington." Everybody says, "No, not him." I said, "They're right, Mr. Washington, not me." He said, "Mr. Brown, you are up." Yes, sir. And I went out and pretty soon, when people laughed at me, it didn't bother me. They would throw paper and I could I can catch it without losing my concentration. And then one day I came out and a hush went across the audience because there must have been something about me that indicated that I had come to myself. And Mr. Washington had been practicing with me to give a presentation, and I looked at the audience and I said, I choose not to be a common man. It's my right to be uncommon if I can. I seek opportunity, not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dull by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed. I refuse to live from hand to mouth. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence, the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia. I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat. It's my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid, to face the world boldly solely and say, "This I have done." Girls, stand up and say, "That's my boyfriend, honey! I like me some Les Brown, baby!" But I didn't start off like that. You have something special. You have talents and abilities in you that you don't even know. So how do we begin to create wealth? Let me give you some ideas. Number one, Number 1, write this down, knowledge. What knowledge that you have in this economy, part of what we need, that people are willing to pay you for that. Next is talent. What talent? Dion's talent is playing football. I didn't have that as a talent. My talent is talking. To me, he said, my definition of success Success is doing what you love to do and find somebody to pay you to do it. So I find people to pay me to talk. I talk. I brought a game to this country called beard whiz that I invented. And that's how I talk. I shoot pool. I signify. I make you tear up your cards, break your cue stick, because I talk a lot of trash. I'll throw you off. You've never been to Boston? I'll take you there. So I learned how to signify and talk trash. All right? So I make a living talking trash to AT&T. I make more in one hour than 90% of the American public earn working for a whole year doing what I love to do. That— I've developed my talent. You want to master your talent. Find out what it is that you love to do. I love to talk. Scripture is another key that says to us what we need to do to begin to develop ourselves. Luke 12:34, where your treasure is, there will your your heart be also. So what do you love to do? And then explore ways in which you can earn a living doing that— cooking, writing, painting, working with numbers, working with people. The other thing is, not only must you have knowledge, talent, some skill, but the other thing that's important— faith to act on whatever your dream is. See, if you don't believe in yourself— how many people you know that have a lot of talent, a lot of abilities, but they don't believe in themselves? Raise your hands. See, that faith is very important. So the faith to act on those dreams, those desires— here's scripture that I, that I like very much. Proverbs 16, 16th chapter, 3rd verse: Commit thy works unto the Lord. And thy thoughts shall be established. Commit means to carry into action deliberately. Commit means to make it happen no matter what. Commitment. The difference between next time you have bacon and eggs, the chicken was involved, the pig was committed. He had to give it all up. That's going to take a minute to sink in tonight. All right, see, when you make a commitment, I'm going to become wealthy, when you make it important when you decide, "I'm gonna do it no matter what," life changes for you. See, most people don't keep their commitments to their commitments. That's why they lead lives of poverty, lives of misery, lives of unhappiness. Socrates said, "The uncommitted life isn't worth living." So part of what you must do, whatever commitment, whatever covenant you make with God while you're here, to go back to be a better father, to go back to make a difference in the community, to go back to change your life, to decide not to ever use use drugs or alcohol again, to decide to bet that you're going to begin to recreate yourself, that you're going to be reborn to a new state of consciousness. Whatever commitment that you make, keep your commitment to your commitment no matter what. If it's hard, then do it hard, but keep your commitment to your commitment. One of the things I have realized, and many of us have that if you want something out of life, if you want to change yourself, if you want to acquire something, if there's some goal that you want to reach, that is really not easy as some people will make us feel. That living your dream, changing your behaviors, overcoming negative habits, it's challenging, it's hard. That living alone is just very difficult. And once we begin to come to grips with the fact that living is difficult, life is very challenging. I heard a song once by a guy named Dipples called "If It Ain't One Thing It's Another." I say to you, if it ain't one thing, it's 12 others. Always something. You will never ever have a problem-free moment in life. Somebody said, and I like this, that you either in a problem, or just left one, or headed toward one. Anybody found that to be so? Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. I mean, there's always something. So how do we begin to nurture that hunger? What are the characteristics or the qualities of people that are hungry? What will it take for me to get some of the things that I want? And being hungry for those things, Number 1, you've got to work on yourself. It's very important that you engage in an ongoing process to develop you. Spend more time on yourself than what you've been spending. It's very important. You owe that to yourself. I was reading a book by Aug Mandino called The University of Success. Read one line, gave me a chill. I didn't have to read anything else in the book. He said many of us never realize our greatness because we become We become sidetracked by secondary activity. We spread ourselves too thin, don't know how to say no, and we find ourselves doing all kinds of things and never ever have time to do those things that we need to do to work on ourselves. And then there goes a second, there goes another second, there goes another second, and we can't stop and hold time. And before you know it, you wake up one day and you're behind on your dreams and your bills. So decide that you're going to take some time to work on you, that you deserve that from yourself, that your life deserves some prime time because you are creating your own production. As Michael Todd would say, you are the star of your show. You are the director. You're writing the script, and you will determine whether your life is a smash office hit or flop. You determine that. Working on yourself, talking to yourself, that's so very important. Overcoming the negative conversation, that inner dialogue that's going on all the time, all the time, even when you don't want it to be there. You can't stop yourself right now from thinking. You can't do it. It's going on. And so learning how to empower yourself, part of doing that is standing up to yourself. You got to stand up inside yourself sometimes and say, shut up. You've got to do this. I was going to give a presentation and this voice inside of me saying, you can't do this. You don't have everything it takes. I shut up. I'm behind on my bills and you telling me what I can't do. I have got to do it. You'll get scared sometimes. Your mind will go blank on you. Some people you will allow to unnerve you, and you wonder, what's wrong with me? I'm not crazy. That's why you've got to learn to make a conscious, deliberate, determined effort to stand up inside yourself. Working on yourself, watching that inner dialogue, it will determine the quality of your life. I don't believe this. I know this. I've had a challenge of losing Wait. I'm walking through the airport. This boy say, "Why don't you have some M&M peanuts?" No! Well, just one. Then after you eat that, you might as well have a Snickers now, you sucker. I mean, it's challenging. My mother fixed the kind of sweet potato pie you can't eat with your shoes on. Have to take your shoes off so you can wiggle your toes. It sticks on my fingers. It says, "Eat it. One little bite won't hurt." That voice constantly. Little demons from Colonel Sanders driving my car in there. I had to say, no, no, no, no. I'll diet tomorrow. I saw Skinny Man get You know, he was hit by a truck. Had he had a little bit more weight, he might have lived. Some of you know what I'm talking about. Raise your hand if you know that. That voice is awesome. So you have got to stand up to that voice. When you're working on something you want to achieve, You have got to stand up to that voice. You've got to sell yourself every day on your abilities, on what you're doing, on the goal that you want to reach. You've got to sell yourself every day, every day, every day. According to your level of belief, it will manifest itself in what you're doing. Whatever we have right now, whatever we're demonstrating in our lives is a result sort of what we believe subconsciously that we deserve. And part of increasing that belief level is that you have got to convince yourself every day. You've got to sell yourself. I do a lot of training for many corporations, and I conduct sales seminars, and I've heard all kind of guys doing techniques and training people techniques of how to close sales and how to work with and begin to control the sale and how to ask for the close. Let me share something with you. You can learn all the techniques in the world. If you don't believe in yourself, it won't happen for you. I learned all of it. So that's why I do a training called Focus on the Seller. You've got to focus on you. And as you convince you, as you sell yourself every day, every day, every day, you will begin to see a difference in the things that you're doing. Selling yourself on your ability to perform a job, to achieve a certain objective, telling yourself every day, "Here I go again, and I got what it takes. This is my day, and nothing out here is going to stop me." And when you go out there, life say, "Come over here." Say it again. "Well, I'll be back tomorrow." That brings me to the next thing. It takes courage to act. Part of being hungry, when you've been defeated, it takes courage to start over again. I used to do door-to-door sales, and I was working with another friend of mine. And door-to-door sales, I mean, it's punishing. It's cruel and unusual punishment. And I was a little boy knocking on the door, "Hello, would you like to buy a nice working television set, no money down?" "No!" Bam! They slammed the door in your face. And a friend of mine that was working with me, they slammed the door in his face, and I looked back and he was going to the car. He said, "I can't do this." And he sat down in the car, and he said, "You go ahead. I'll be here when you get back." Now, he had a mother and father to take care of him. My mother was ill. I am adopted. I was hungry. I had to go on. I learned something about myself, that when you step into your fears— somebody said, it was Winston Churchill, he said that courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. When you step into your you face your fears and continue to push yourself to go on, something happens for you. It will enable you to transcend yourself. I went to the next store. You'd like to buy a nice workin' teller? No! Bam! Went to the next one. No! Bam! After a while, I no longer took it personal. And I began to play a game. I said, "Well, I know there's a yes out here somewhere, and I'm going to keep on until I find it, and I'm not going home until I do." And I continued to knock on doors, and then somebody eventually would say, "Yes," and I said, "Are you sure?" And I would go in there and I would get the sale. When you have something you want to do, if you don't develop the courage to do that which has been given you to do, and you spend a lot of time going around trying to convince other people or trying to get their approval, what will happen is that you will lose your nerve, and other people will convince you that what you are doing doesn't have any value, and you'll give up on your dream. It's an interesting thing about life I've also found, that if you don't have the courage to act, Sometimes, and particularly if you have something special to do, life will move on you. I'd— if it were not for life, I would still be a disc jockey. I didn't just leave voluntarily to go to the state legislature. I was fired. I was working on a job, and I came home one day. I was married at the time, and I told my former wife, I said, "That guy Byrd I work for is stupid." She said, "If he's so stupid, why does he sign your paycheck?" Now you see why I divorced her, right? I couldn't stand her. That night, I could not sleep well. Here was a one guy that was controlling my life. I was going through all kind of changes because this man controlled my paycheck. And it was Carlyle who said, "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again." Winston Churchill said, "The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but at the end, there it is." And we know scripture that says, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall will set you free. And the truth that I had to come to grips with, that I wasn't in charge of my destiny. The truth was that I wasn't giving all that I had. The truth was that there are some things that I wanted to do, but I didn't have the courage to act on those things. And the truth was that Burchells was a blessing to me. He made life so miserable for me, I had to I started looking at my life differently. I started going to work earlier. I started being the last one to leave there. I started working harder than anybody else. The other guys couldn't— "Why would you work so hard, Les?" I said, "I'm not working for them. I have been cheating Bert," I thought. "I've been cheating myself and my family." Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, do it with everything that you have. Develop the habit. Of giving more than what you're paid for. Develop the habit of setting standards that others will be measured by. Someone said, "Do not go where the path may lead, but go where there is no path and leave a trail." All right? It is easy to be negative today. It is easy to have low morale today. I was at a corporation and and they're going through downsizing and going to lay off some 1,500 people over the next few weeks. It's very depressing there. And those people that stay there, 9 times out of 10, they're just going to do just enough to keep from getting fired. Anybody can do that. But if you can begin to harness yourself and say that, "Where I am, I'm going to do the best I can with what I got," because that is an expression of who I am. If you get into the habit of just being mediocre, it will become a part of your consciousness. If you get in the habit of giving less than what you have within you to give, it will begin to reflect itself in your personality. It will begin to damage you psychologically. And you don't want to be a part of that kind of self-destructive behavior. And so you want to set some high standards for yourself. The next thing, part of what feeds that hunger, you've got to develop a sense of urgency. Aurelia said, "Stop living your life like you have a thousand years to live." In life, you're either here today and you're gone today. If there's something that you want to do and you can't do it all at one time, do just a little bit of it. I like what Robert Schuller says. He He said, "By the yard it's hard, but inch by inch anything is ascension." Do just a little bit of it. A friend of mine, Bobby Kerr, used to be a roommate. Bobby wanted to go into the area of public relations. He loved working with the public. Young lady he wanted to marry named Clarice. Bobby was a great procrastinator. Pretty soon the job where Bobby worked, they transferred him to another location. He went out to celebrate with the people on that new job site, and Bobby suffered a massive heart attack and died. Bobby didn't drink and didn't smoke, was under 40, and he died. Ask you a question: how much time do you have left? How much time do you have left? When you start thinking about that, we don't know. We don't know. Bobby took all the greatness and all of he took all the talent and all of his abilities to his grave with him. One of the things he could have put in parenthesis under his name, he didn't use all his stuff. And most of us do that. Most of us don't use the stuff that we have brought into the universe. And we want to make a conscious, deliberate, determined effort to start living life with a sense of urgency and using what we've got. Using ourselves up, sharing what we brought into the universe to share, because if we don't, nobody else will. Stop wasting valuable time, knowing that if we begin to live our lives as if each day were our last, our lives will take on a whole new meaning. It take on a whole new meaning. A whole new expression, valuing each moment that we are blessed with. The next thing that begins to nurture that hunger, honor yourself as your word. Don't give your word out lightly. When you throw your word out there and you don't honor it, it makes a statement about you. If you decide to maintain a sense of integrity with yourself, that if I speak it, I'm going to live it. It's who I am. And I'm going to be very cautious in how I give my word to others, and most of all with the commitments that I make to myself, because I want my life to reflect my words. And honoring who I am and what I express. Another challenging area in terms of nurturing and developing that hunger in yourself is learning the art of becoming single-minded, learning how to concentrate, learning how to focus in. And you'll be surprised of the things that you're able to do. When you learn how to block things out, when you learn how to keep thine eyes single, you'll be surprised of the ideas that will come to you, of the people that you'll be able to attract, of the opportunities that you'll be able to see. You'll begin to see things that have been standing there looking you in the face, say, "I can't believe this has been here all this time." Here's a habit that I do. Maybe it might be of some value to I get up in the morning and I start writing what great ideas that I can think of today that can improve me and that will enable me to reach my goal. And I just let my mind flow. Sometimes I write 15, 20 ideas. Some days it's more difficult than others. One idea can change your life. One idea can turn your life around. Deciding that you're going to focus to develop your skills. A guy was the new owner of a team, a team, a baseball team that was in the basement of the league when he took it over. He went to the pitcher and he said, "What is your best throw?" He said, "Well, I got a good curveball and I've got a good fastball." And he went on talking about his different throws. He said, "But tell me this, 'What is your best throw?' He thought for a moment. He said, 'I've got a good fastball.' He said, 'That's all I want you to work on. Nothing else. Just develop your fastball.' The next year, they went to the World Series. Most people don't know where their fastball is. Most people go through life never discovering what their talents are. Most people never develop their talents. They have skills and abilities, but if you don't nurture them, if you don't develop them, they will never serve you. Your gifts can take you many places if you develop your gifts. Most of us don't like to do those things that come easy to us. I've always loved to talk to people. I decided, taking this advice, to develop my skills as a speaker, and my gift has has developed and it developed and has taken me many places. You have something that you brought to the universe, and that if you decide that my life deserves my developing this, what I do well, and becoming the best at it, and mastering myself, and seeing what I have within me— if you decide to drop your buckets where you are and develop your gift I grant you, you'll never ever be without. I grant you that your gifts will take you places that will literally amaze you. I grant you that if you begin to work to develop your gifts, you'll develop a strong sense of happiness. You'll get a larger vision of yourself, because part of beginning to get a larger vision of yourself— all of us need some area of our lives where we can have a feeling of competence. That people know when they think about this area, that's something you do. That you eat and sleep that. And that you do that. You do that. And people know it. And you know it. And you know that you know that you know this. If you don't know anything else, you know this. Can you tell I know I know what I'm doing? Oh, hello. You know this. So you've got to work on it. When other folk are having a good time, you've got to have the strength of character to concentrate, to read, to digest information. If you decide in any particular area that you're concerned about to make a conscious, deliberate, determined effort to read one book a month in that area, and in 5 years you'll be among the top 5% experts in the world. I read a minimum of 2 books a week. The average American reads only 1 book a year. If you decide that area that you love, that you are going to master that particular area, in this era of accelerated change, overwhelming complexity, and tremendous competition, As you begin to develop and expand your skills and your talents and your vision of yourself, you will always be in control of your destiny. How many of you ever decided not to do something based upon an assumption? Raise your hands, please. And so that's why it's important for us to be strategic and experiential and, and being able to tell the story to distract them from their current story Distract, dispute, break down the limited belief system, and inspire them to say yes to a new opportunity in their lives. And so as a result, I didn't do what I'm doing now because I had such a tremendous inferiority complex because of my lack of college education. I stopped myself. There's an African proverb that says, "If there's no enemy within, the enemy outside." side can do us no harm. And so as you look at yourself, as you look at your goals, look at your dreams, it's very important that you take time every day and write this down to retrain your thinking. Gotta retrain your thinking because how we live our lives is result of the story that we bought into. I had to retrain my thinking because of what I saw. Studies indicating that the decisions we make in life is directly related to the things that we saw, the things that we experienced, the conversations we've been exposed to between age 0 and 5. And so as a result of that, my experience, I had to begin to engage in a process of retraining my mindset, and I didn't even know what I was doing. But this man, Mr. Sodorsky, I'll never forget. "Leslie, come in here." "Yes, sir." "Look at my shoes. You can shine them better than this." "I do apologize, sir. I'll do a better job." And his wife said, "Please don't yell at him like that. That's not nice. He's just a kid. He's only 10 years old." "He should do a better job than that. He can." I said, "It's okay, Mr. Sodorsky." And he should have yelled at me. He was a very rude, arrogant guy, but he was a kind guy too. What I loved about him, every day he had a routine. It was his time in the morning he spent working on his mind. And I wanted to be in the office as he was shining his shoes, listening to Earl Nightingale, "All of us are self-made, but only the successful will admit it." Listening to Dr. Dennis Waitley Peale, People form habits and habits create futures. Listening to Zig Ziglar, if you give enough people what they want, they will give you what you want. Listening to Jim Rohn, when the end comes for you, let it find you conquering a new mountain, not sliding down an old one. Listening and reading the words of Winston Churchill, the truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but at the end There it is, reading from my favorite book, be not conformed to this world, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Listening to these words helped to create a different vision for myself. Some of you are already doing it right now. I'm saying this is the time more than ever that you want to begin to inoculate yourself with positive words. Coming to convention showing up on meetings, being on the calls to make yourself unstoppable, to get out of your mind the polluting negative thoughts that's causing most people to go through life being stuck because they're volunteer victims. Somebody said that many people die at age 25 and don't get buried until they're 65 because they got so much garbage in their minds. You are here because you've got You got a clear vision of what you want and where you're going. Give yourselves a round of applause. Come on, bring energy level up. Yes. Yes. You want more. You want more. You're different. You're different than everybody else. Don't worry if they don't get Get it. Don't try and convince people to do this business. A person convinced against their will is of the same opinion still. You are not like everybody else. You can walk outside and find pigeons, but if you're looking for eagles, it's going to take you a minute. You are different. It's lonely at the top. How many of you know it's lonely at the top? Raise your hands. It's lonely at the top, but you eat better. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about. You're different. One great entrepreneur said, I choose not to be a common man. It's my right to be uncommon if I can. I seek opportunity, not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed. I refuse to live from hand to mouth. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence The thrill of fulfillment to the still calm of utopia. I will never cower before a master nor bend to any threat. It's my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid, to face the world boldly and say, this I have done. You showed up because you're building a business that you can stand and say, I did this, I did this, this is my dream. Give yourselves Give him a round of applause. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! There's something in you that wouldn't allow you to stop. Dr. Howard Thurman. He said, there's something in each and every one of you that waits and listens to the voice of the genuine in yourself. It will be perhaps the only guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, all of your life, your days will be spent on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls. And I say to you, the reason you showed up, even though you couldn't afford to be here, the reason you drove hundreds of miles, flew around the world, there's something in you, in your heart of hearts that said, I'm not going to let anybody pull my strings. It said, I'm going to control that said, I'm going to control my own personal economy. That said, I've got a dream I want to achieve. I want my children to have a choice of the kind of education that they want. That said, I am the captain of my ship. That said, I'm going to control my destiny, and whatever it takes, I'm willing to do the work. Give yourselves a round of applause. In 1961, 1961, President John F. Kennedy had a decision to make. The decision was whether or not to call a news conference and tell the world the United States was going to go to the moon. And I submit to you that the decision to do that was very risky. And what governed his thinking is what governed your thinking when you decided, "I'm gonna do this." See, the technology did not exist. The answer of what will it take did not exist. No one had ever done it before. But he made a decision. He looked at Wernher von Braun, the most brilliant scientist of that day, and he said, "Wernher, what will it take for us to go to the moon?" And he spoke 5 words, and those 5 words I think is what governs most entrepreneurs. Those Those 5 words, I think, is what give people like you the courage to pursue their dreams. Those 5 words is what I think people who are pioneers, people who are breaking new ground, make decisions on. He said, "What will it take for us to go to the moon?" And the response was, "The will." will to do it. As you look at yourself, as you look at your business, as we look into 2015 and beyond, what will it take for you to increase your business? The will to do it. What will it take for you to become more powerful in your presentation skills and be able to increase the number of people to quadruple your business? The will to do it. What will it take for you when others are quitting because of the rejections, when others are stopping because they just become so discouraged and they have creditors breathing down their neck and they have family members and friends telling them they're a fool? What is it that will allow you to have the mental resilience The resiliency to keep on keeping on, to keep your commitment to your commitment. The will to do it. Every time I say it and ask you a question, I want you to say, "The will to do it." What will it take for you to build your business? The will to do it. What will it take for you to increase your recruiting? The will to do it. What will it take for you to bring out the greatness in you and to make your mark? The will to do it. What will it take for you to become a high achiever and to bring out the billionaire in you? Will! Shake someone's hand on your right and left and say, I've got the will. I've got the will. Mr. Washington, this man man who taught me. He said, Mr. Brown, you want to make it in life? He said, number one, develop your mind. You don't get in life what you want, you get in life what you are. Number two, develop your communication skills. Once you open your mouth, you tell the world who you are. Three, practice the principle of OQP—only quality people. Let us say together, only quality people. As you think about your goals and dreams, this is not for everybody. You want to build an organization with only quality people. Not people who need more, but people who want more. You want to surround yourself with people that are hungry hungry. People that are hungry are willing to do the things today others won't do in order to have the things tomorrow others won't have. People that are hungry do what they know, not what they feel. See, I didn't do this for years because I knew it would be hard. And Mr. Washington said something to me. Mike Williams, my mentor— you want to go online and find his book, The Road to Your Best Stuff. He said something that grabbed me, and I want you to put this someplace where you can see it. See, you build this business through persistence. You got to affirm, I will persist until I succeed. You build it through patience. It takes time to grow orchids. It's faster to grow roses, but orchids, that takes time. You have to have Persistence, you have to have patience and perseverance. It takes courage to come back again and again and again. Because in order to build the business, it's hard work. It's H-A-R-D and H-E-A-R-T. Are you with me there? Write this down. If you do what is easy, your life will be hard. But if you do what is hard, your life will be easy. If you do what is easy— point out all this is some pyramid scheme. Oh, I've been talking to I talked to people and they said no. Oh, I've done that before. Come up with excuses. If you do what is easy, always looking for a way to give yourself a pass, to let yourself off the hook, to do what everybody else is doing, a job, the journey of the broke. If you do what is easy, your life will be hard. People working on jobs that they hate, that they hate. The heart attack rate on Monday morning between 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock increases by 35%. People going to jobs that they hate. If you do what is easy, your life will be hard. Working 2 and 3 jobs to one paycheck and no job security. But there's something in you that says, you know, I'm making some good money, but you know what? I can't do this. I can't do this anymore. A friend of mine, she's here, I'm so honored to be in her presence, Kim Wee. She went to do a presentation, drove from Los 'Los Angeles to San Francisco.' And 20 people in the room, and they said, 'Yes, she's an electrifying speaker, great presenter. Yes.' And when she left, the dream busters took the floor. And when the dream busters finished with those people who had goals and dreams of a new life, they sabotaged Kim. And they called her before she could get home and say, "No, we're not gonna do it." And at that moment, she could have quit. Write this down, your private voice. Every entrepreneur, you have two things going for you. You have an energy signature, and some of you will be working with, and you have a private voice. 8 to 9 decisions out of 10 that you make make are governed by that private voice. When they called and said no, her private voice said, "You're wasting your time. You don't need to do this. Your husband is a doctor. You don't need to do this. You're a mother. You need to spend more time with your child. Get this crazy idea out of your mind." But rather than do that, she started talking to herself. Rather than do that, She started listening to motivational messages that will build herself up from the inside. And as a result of her saying, yes, I can do this, as a result of ignoring the dream busters, now she's one of the top 10 producers in the world in multi-level marketing. Give her a round of applause. Kim Wee, stand up, give her a round of applause. Yes, yes. And the world. And that's why you are here. There's a voice in you that has said, I can do this. I know others have failed. I can do this. I know others have said that I can't do it. I've had setbacks in life. How many of you had some failures? Raise your hands, please. How many of you had some nos in your life? Raise your hands, please. Shake someone's hand on your right and left and say, make no your vitamin. Ladies and gentlemen, if you want to make it in life, you got to make no your vitamin. You've got to know every no brings you a step closer to a yes. Anybody can stop because someone said no, but there's something in you, in your heart of hearts, is saying, I'm not a quitter. There's something in you that says, I've got the will to do it. There's something in you that says, He says, "I'm going to find a way." Mr. Brown, what do you want to do with your life, young man? Sir, I'd like to become a disc jockey. Why, sir? Because I want to buy my mother a home. He said, great, listen to Paul Harvey. Here are my car keys, go in the car, 12 noon he comes on every day. Why? Because if you want to be successful, study the people that are doing what you want to do. He's the best in the world when it comes to communication. I suggest to you, as you look at what you want to achieve, look at the top achievers. Understand and know they are only an example. They are not an exception. They're an example of what you can do because success leaves clues. Follow the system, watch the leaders, and study them. I did that. And he said, Mr. Brown, detoxify your life. Let all the negative people in your life go. "Can I change him?" "No, it's a full-time job changing yourself." He's right. He's right. You can't change people. It's hard changing yourself. And there's some people so negative, they can walk into a dark room and begin to develop. He said, practice OQP, only only quality people. He said, I want you to see yourself as a disc jockey. You want to be a disc jockey? Visualize yourself being on radio. You want to be a top performer? Visualize yourself building the business. Visualize yourself coming across the stage accepting an award for your recognition of your hard work. See it in your mind's eye. He said, I'll give you all your eyes can see. And I had to see myself on stage as I'm presenting right now. I've been here many times before I showed up in my mind. All your goals are achieved twice. First in the mind, then and without. And then finally he said, Mr. Brown. I said, yes, sir. You want to be a disc jockey? Yes, sir. He said, you got to be hungry. I said, why you keep saying that? He said, people that are hungry are relentless. People that are hungry, unstoppable. People that are hungry No excuse is acceptable. I said, "Sir, I'm hungry to take care of my mother. All my life, people have always compared me to my brother because I'm not smart like him. It takes me longer to get things than most people. I have to hear it again and again, but once I got it, sir. I got it. You're the only person that never called me stupid or dumb." You never call me DT, the dumb twin. You look at me like I'm somebody. I've never had a father, and I watch you, and I want to be able to talk like you. I get choked up sometimes because I can't get my thoughts out, sir. I, I want to do what you do, and I want to make my mama proud. He said, you can do it, Mr. Brown. I've given you all you can get from me. Now it's on you. If you want to be a disc jockey, go out into the marketplace. I went to apply for a job on Miami Beach. Milton Butterball Smith was the program director. Hello, Mr. Butterball, how are you, sir? My name is Les Brown, sir. I like to be a disc jockey. Young man, you have Having journalism in your background? No, sir, I don't. Having experience in broadcasting? No, sir, but let me audition for you, sir. Let me show you how good I am. All I want, sir, is a shot. Just let me audition. He said no. How many have been rejected? Raise your hands, please. I was devastated with rejection. I said, Mr. Washington, they said no. He said, don't take it personally. Most people are so negative, they have to say no 7 'before they say yes.' He said, 'You gotta be hungry. Go back again.' I went back again. 'Hello, Mr. Butterball, how are you, sir?' 'My name is Les Brown, sir. I'd like to be a dish jock.' He said, 'I know what your name is. Weren't you here yesterday?' I said, 'Yes, sir, I was.' 'Didn't I tell you no yesterday?' I said, 'Yes, sir, you did.' He said, 'Then why are you back today?' I said, 'Well, sir, I didn't know whether or not somebody was laid off or somebody was fired.' No, sir. He said, no one was laid off or fired. Now get on outta here. I came back the next day. Hello, Mr. Butterball, how are you, sir? My name is Les Brown, sir. I'd like to be a disc jockey. He said, I know what your name is. Weren't you here the last 2 days? I said, yes, sir. Didn't I tell you no the last 2 days? I said, yes, sir. He said, then why are you back today? I said, sir, I didn't know whether or not someone got sick or someone died. No one got sick or died. No one was laid off or fired. Now, don't you come back here again. I came back the next day talking loud, looking happy, like I was singing for the first time. I said, hello, Mr. Waterwall, how are you? He looked at me with rage. He says, go get me some coffee. I said, yes, sir. As you think about your goals and dreams, you've got to make know your vitamin. I became the errand boy for the disc jockeys. I'd go get their lunch and their dinner And I stand in the control room watching them move their hands, knowing my time will come. Let us say together, I expect to live my dream. I began to serve them. My favorite book says the greatest among you will be your servant. Learn how to be a good server. And so pretty soon I was— write this down. Building a relationship. People build relationships with people they know, like, and trust, and have proven themselves. And he said, look here, young boy, who cleaned my car today? I did, sir. How much do I owe you? Nothing, sir. You cleaned it inside and out. You waxed it. Yes. I don't owe you anything? No, sir. I just wanted to help out. Well, write this down, give before you ask. I was giving service. I was giving service first. He said, whoa, Donna Ross and the Supremes are coming to town, the Four Tops and the Temptations. Here are my car keys, pick them up and take them to the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach. I said, be my pleasure to serve you, sir. I would drive these entertainers all over Miami Beach and the disc jockeys, big on Cadillacs. I didn't have my driver's license, but I was driving like a handsome. Then one day, it was a Saturday afternoon, a disc jockey by the name of Rockin' Roger was drinking while he was on the air. He began to slur his words. He got so drunk he was about to fall off the chair. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was the only one there. Looking at him through the control room window, walking back and forth, young, ready, and hungry. I was saying, "Drank, Rock Drake. Big Rock, I'd have gone and get him some more if he'd asked me to. Then pretty soon the phone rang, it was the general manager and I answered the phone. I said, hello? He said, young boy, this is Mr. Klein. I said, I know. He said, Rock can't finish the show. I said, I know. He said, will you call one of the other DJs in? I said, yes sir. I hung the phone up. I said, now he must be thinking I'm crazy. I called my mama and my girlfriend Cassandra, said, y'all come out on the front porch and turn on the radio. I'm about to come on the air. I waited for about 20 minutes and I called him back and said, Mr. Klein, I can't find nobody. He said, young boy, you know how to work You go over to controls? I said, yes, sir. He said, go in there and segue the record. Don't you say nothing here. I said, yes, sir. I couldn't wait to get old Rock out of the way. I put on a fast record. I said, look out, this is me, L.B. Triple P. Les Brown, your platter playing papa. There were none before me and there will be none after me. Therefore, that makes me the one and only young and single and love to mingle, certified, bona fide, indubitably qualified to bring you satisfaction and a whole lot of action. Look out, baby, I'm your love man. I was hungry. I was hungry. I was hungry. I was hungry. Shake someone's hand and say, you gotta be hungry. Shake someone's hand and say, you gotta be hungry. You gotta be hungry. So I'd like to leave this with you. I don't know what you want to do, but I believe that Zig was right. If you give enough people what they want, they will give you what you want. I believe Jim Rohn was right. When the end comes to you, let it find you conquering a new mountain, not sliding down an I believe Earl Nightingale was right. All of us are self-made, but only the successful will admit it. I believe that Dr. Peele was right. Always strive to get on top in life because the bottom is overcrowded. I believe Mike Williams is right. If you do what is easy, your life will be hard. But if you do what is hard, your life will be easy. So I dedicate this to you, you, to the dreamer in you. Something my mother used to love to hear me say, Leslie. Yes, ma'am, Mama. Say that thing for me, boy, that makes me feel good. I dedicate this to you because it's one thing to be in the business, but there's something else when the business is in you. You are here because It's in you. It's in your heart. And it says simply this: if you want a thing bad enough to go out and fight for it, to work day and night for it, to give up your time, your peace, and your sleep for it, if all that you dream and scheme is about it and life seems useless and worthless without it, and if you gladly sweat for it and fret for it and plan for it and lose all your terror of the opposition for it. And if you simply go after that thing that you want with all of your capacity, strength and sagacity, faith, hope, and confidence, and stern pertinacity, if neither cold, poverty, famish, or gout, sickness or pain of body and brain can keep you away from the thing that you want, if dogged and grim you besiege and beset it, with the help of God, you'll get it. Dr. Howard Thurman, one of the mentors of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Albert Schweitzer and Mahatma Gandhi. He was a very brilliant writer. He wrote some things that really grabbed me. He, he wrote, "Deep is the hunger, the voice of the genuine, the centering moment." During the time after receiving 238 radiation seed implants, I was reflecting on his words, and, and these words kept me up that night. He said the ideal situation for a man or woman to die is to have family members praying with them as they cross over. He said, but imagine, if you will, being on your deathbed and standing around your bed the ghost of the dreams, the ideas, the abilities, the talents given to you by life, and that you, for whatever reason, You never went after that dream. You never acted on those ideas. You never used those talents. You never used those gifts. And there they are standing around your bed looking at you with large angry eyes saying, "We came to you and only you could have given us life, and now we must die with you forever." And the question is, if you die today, what dreams, what ideas, what talents, what books, what music, what leadership, what voice will die with you? Miles Monroe, great orator and speaker, said the wealthiest place on the planet— it's not in the Far East where there's oil in the ground, it's not in South Africa where the diamond mines— he said the wealthiest place on the planet is the cemetery, because there you'll find greatness that we've never seen. There you'll find talent and genius and potential never actualized. Perhaps that's why Henry David Thoreau wrote the words, 'Oh God, to reach the point of death only to realize that you've never lived.' Maybe that's why some unknown writer wrote the words, 'What if you live your whole life only to discover that it was wrong, that it was wrong, that you were chosen to do something else and you didn't do it. Repeat after me, please. Live full, die empty. I want you to take some notes in of things, and I want you to think about your goals and dreams in the 3 categories that I mentioned: personal, professional, and your social contribution. How many of you serious about your goals and dreams? Raise your hands, please. Thank you very much. How many of you don't want to take your dreams to your grave with you? Raise your hands, please. Very good. Shake someone's hand on your right and left. Look them in the eyes and say, get out of your head and step into your greatness. Do that right now, please. Say, get out of your head and step into your greatness. I want you to write this down. Let us say together, as you think about your goals and dreams, let us say together, it's possible. Together, please. Yes, write that down. See, ladies and gentlemen, as an entrepreneur— I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. It's my 21st year. I could have been speaking and training for 34 years. But for 14 years I was living in my head. For 14 years I stopped myself. For 14 years I used to go see Zig Ziglar, that I consider the number one motivational speaker on the planet. Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins, they're the best on the planet. Bob Proctor, they are the best on the planet. Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, T. Harv Eker. I would go and see them and then I would leave in my conversation with myself was my heart would say, I can do that, and then my mind would ask, how? How would you do that, Les Brown? See, when I was in the 5th grade, I was identified as EMR, labeled educable mentally retarded, put back from the 5th grade to the 4th grade. I failed again when I was in the 8th grade. I have no college training, and a man changed my life, and I'll never forget his name, Mr. Leroy Washington. He's in his 80s he's blind from glaucoma, but he gave me a different vision of myself. I was in his class waiting on another student. He came in and said, "Young man, go to the board and work this problem out for me." I said, "Oh, sir, I can't do that." He said, "Why not?" I said, "I'm not one of your students." He said, "Look at me. Yes, sir. Go to the board and work the problem out anyhow." I said, "Sir, I can't do that." He said, "Why?" I said, "Sir, because I'm educable mentally retarded, sir. I'm in special education." And the students started laughing. They said, "That's Leslie. That's not Wesley. He's DT. Wesley is the smart twin." He said, "What does DT stand for?" I said, "Um, I'm the dumb twin, sir." And as the students laughed at me, he came from behind his desk, he looked at me, and he said, "Don't you ever say that again. Someone's opinion of you does not have to become your reality." On one hand, I was humiliated, but on the other hand, I was liberated because he looked at me with the eyes of Goethe, who said, look at a man the way that he is, he only becomes worse, but look at him as if he were what he could be, then he becomes what he should be. And so we developed a relationship, and one of the things that I can just tell you as you think about your goals and dreams All of us can say in a spirit of integrity that it's possible, that if anybody at any point in time lived their dream, then it's possible that I can live mine. And what I did was I made a mistake. I looked at my goals and dreams and my mind said, "How will you do that?" I went from my heart to my mind and I stayed up there for 14 years. 14 years. I kept You can't bring those 14 years back. Those years are gone. And I've made a mission in my life to help people to stop putting it off and procrastinating. How many ever thought about something you wanted to do and you procrastinated, you talked yourself out of it? Raise your hand, please. There's a proverb that says, "If there's no enemy within, the enemy outside can do us no harm." And so, as you look at your goals and dreams, every day we must convince ourselves, we must sell ourselves on that it's possible. Every seminar, every workshop, every book that I've ever read, every speaker that I've ever heard, it interrupted what I was believing about myself. Everything that you do, everything matters. As you go through each day, I know now as I look back at age 63, looking at my life, everything matters. T. Harv Eker is right. How you do anything is how you do everything. And I realized that the choices I was making was based upon how I saw myself. Let us say together, it's necessary. Write that down. It's necessary. As you look at your goals and your dreams, it's necessary that you have a strategy and a game plan to change the story that you believe about about yourself. And that's an ongoing process. I discovered, and many people have, that what we do, what we accomplish, what we produce is a result of the story we believe about ourselves. My favorite book says, "Be ye not conformed to this world, be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." And so as I began to work on myself, I realized that I'm getting out of one story and stepping into another story. As I become aware of some things, there's still some things I'm not aware of. So I still, I'm still growing, I'm still developing. I'm like the lady who said, "Lord, I ain't what I wanna be, ain't what I'm gonna be, but thank God I sure ain't what I was." But I realized that, that you have to work on yourself on a regular basis. And write this down: for mental mindset, for mental mindset and stamina, of, because things are going to happen to you. I don't believe— I believe that the reason that most people go to their graves with their talents and abilities and skills in them is because of the fact, number one, many are like me. They didn't know that they didn't know and thought they knew. I thought I knew myself, and I really didn't know myself as well as I thought. I've discovered that sometimes people can take you to a place within yourself that you can't go by yourself. The other reason is is I was afraid. I never worked for a major corporation. I wanted to speak for corporations. I was afraid I would, I would be exposed because I don't have a college education. I felt inferior because of the fact that I don't have a college education. I allowed that level of fear of failure to stop me, and because I never had any experience in it, I assumed that I could not do it. I was paralyzing myself by believing and assuming the limited part of myself as opposed to believing that I had something special. You have something special. There's something you want to do. Because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean that you can't learn. I, I like something that I heard: you don't have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great. Repeat after me, please. Leap and grow your wings on the way down. See, the people that will live their dreams, the 2% that will do that, these are— and write this down— become a risk taker. They're risk takers. They don't mind failing. They don't mind making mistakes. They're willing to take life on, take life in the collar. Viscount 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. She said, life is short and unpredictable. Eat the dessert first. I don't care how good you are, I don't care how talented you are, I don't care how much you work on yourself. There are some times when things aren't going to go right. They just are not going to go right. There are times when anything that can happen will happen. Murphy's Law will be knocking at your door. Why? I don't know why. That's called life, and you have to deal with it. Sometimes your life will be in a slump, just like sports. Some of the best shooters can't hit baskets different times in games. They get in a slump. Do they sit on the sideline and say, "You know, I just didn't hit a basket today?" No. They continue to execute. I suggest to you that if you are facing a challenge, don't stop. Stay busy. Work your plan. Continue to do those things that you know that work for you after you have evaluated yourself in the situation. Continue to move. Stay busy. Stay busy. Stay busy. Repeat after me. Help somebody. Help somebody. And help yourself. And help yourself. Because what you give— Because what you give— Is what you get. Is what you get. Find somebody that you can help so you can forget about you for a moment. See, sometimes the best thing to do is to be. Sometimes you have to just back up and go within yourself. A bow and arrow, you can't take a bow and just push it out an arrow. You just can't push the arrow out. You have to pull it back and then release it. Sometimes you have to back up and go within and pray and meditate and recharge your batteries Go away, clear your head, and then come back and look at it from a different vantage point. Don't operate while you are under the spell of the effect of what's going on. Next thing is that you've got to activate the thinker in you. Don't allow your emotions to control you. We are emotional, but you want to begin to discipline your emotion. If you don't discipline and contain your emotion, they will use you. Your mind goes on automatic, just like a guard. You know, I love reading the book called "As a Man Thinketh" by James Allen. He uses the analogy of the mind being like a garden. You know, weeds don't have to have any encouragement to grow. You don't have to water them. They don't have to get sunshine. They don't have to have fertile ground. They will grow through the cracks of a sidewalk. Am I right? [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] But if you want to grow orchids or roses or any kind of exotic flowers, there are special processes and procedures you must go through. Well, by the same token, you don't have to force yourself or motivate yourself to think negatively, to be depressed, to hate somebody, to want revenge, to want to get back at somebody, to beat yourself up over the head to feel loaded with guilt. You don't have to make any effort to do that. Your mind is on automatic. It will do that by itself. But if you want to begin to move into your own personal greatness, if you want to begin to really enjoy a happy, successful, healthy life, you've got to be willing to go against the tide. You've got to be willing to harness your will and say, in spite of this, I'm in control here. I'm not gonna let this get me down. I'm not gonna let this destroy me. I'm coming back, and I'll be stronger and better because of it. You have got to make a declaration that this is what you stand for. You're standing up for your dreams. You're standing up for peace of mind. You're standing up for health. You want it. You want it, and you're going to go all out to have it. It's not going to be easy when you want to change. It's not easy. If it were in fact easy, everybody would do it. But if you're serious, you'll go all out to— yes, I'm going to turn this situation around. I'm not going to sit back and moan and cry over what happened and what went wrong and who did what. I'm going to do something about this situation. The next thing that is important is that expect things to get better for you, because they are. See, life is cyclic. You're not— what is— whatever experience you're having right now, it has not come to stay. It has come to pass. Not to stay, just to pass. It's just going through. The biggest challenge is, is to know what's happening and this is a part of this thing we call life. This too shall pass. And maintaining perspective, putting it in perspective. I was doing a training at a college, and it was a 2-day training during orientation. And in the training that I provide— I'm a motivational speaker, but I conduct processes in personal dynamics where people begin to go through changes that stimulate the right and left hemisphere of the brain. Enable them to see themselves differently. I conducted this particular simulation with these young kids, 17 and 18 years of age, so that they would begin to see how they make decisions, how they would survive in this particular simulation process we gave them. We had them to do it individually and then collectively. Over 30% of them wrote down as their first option, in order to survive, they would commit suicide. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] First thing they wrote down, suicide among young people has increased 300%. Over 5,000 will successfully take their lives this year. Why? Why did they do that? They def— I said, I was so shocked. I said, what do you mean? Well, at least we would not suffer. And then they had the nerve to write down all of the other things they were going to do after they committed suicide. I said, listen, Kadumbo. No, when you come up with a permanent solution for a temporary problem, that's it. Game's over. That's it. You're not going to do anything. Anybody wrote suicide at the top, you can put your pencil down. See, a lot of us, because of our limited vision of ourselves, a lot of us who begin to focus on problems and enable them to overwhelm us, we begin to think that we have no options. We begin to believe that there's no way out. Repeat after me: There's always a way. Where there's a will, there's a way. Shake somebody's hand on your right and left and say, "I'm unstoppable." You've got to make You make those kind of declarations to yourself. I'm unstoppable. This will not get me down. And if I get knocked down, I'm going to be like Leo Pascaglia said, you're going to have some low moments in life, but when you do, you will have high lows when you work on yourself. What are some of those things that you can do during this period of time? Go for walks. Do some things for you. Just go for a stroll so you can engage in some reflective thinking on life, on yourself, looking and enjoying the universe, smelling the roses along the way. Listen to upbeat music, music that inspire you. I have only but goodies. I have strategies that I engage in to recharge my batteries. I'm preparing for that because I know things are going to happen that I cannot anticipate. Very good friend of mine died the other day. I had a program for myself. I have books that I read that inspire me, tapes that I listen to that fire me up, because you're going to have sometimes low moments when you won't want to get out of bed. You just want to stay there. At times you won't want to come out the house. At times you'll be feeling bad and don't know why. What's wrong? I don't know. Just leave me alone. Why did that happen? I don't know. No, it's called life. The other thing is take full responsibility for your life. Accept where you are and the responsibility that you're going to take yourself where you want to go. Someone said we have two primary choices in life. We can either accept conditions as they exist or we can take the responsibility to change them. See, a lot of people want to exempt themselves from taking responsibility. All they want to do is talk about the problem. Every time you see them, they'll tell you their story over and over and over and over again. No, no. You want to take responsibility for your life. I got me here, I can get me out of this. And I'm getting out I'm not going to be a volunteer victim. George Bernard Shaw said there are two kinds of people in life. You know, he said, those that make things happen, those that watch things happen, and those that don't know what happened. And he said the people that get along in this life look around for the circumstances that they want, and if they can't find them, they make them, they create them. So part of beginning to get unstuck You've got to decide that the behavior pattern that you have adopted doesn't work for you. You've got to change your strategies, and changing your strategy means reinventing your life, recreating you. And you have the power to do that. You can decide that you're going to change, that you're not going to be a wimp. You can decide that you're going to stand up to life. You can decide that I'm going to live each day as if it were my last. You can— you have the power to make that decision. You can decide I'm going to work on myself and develop myself. I'm going to empower me, and all of these things that are happening to me right now, they're just temporary inconveniences. They're not stronger than I am. I'm in charge here. Yeah, see, one of the things about life, you're going to get hurt, you're going to make some mistakes. You're gonna fail your way to success. But you gotta be willing to experiment. You gotta be willing to push yourself. You gotta be willing to challenge yourself by putting yourself in a perpetual state of discomfort. And so, but things happen in life. When you have goals and dreams, things happen. Had no idea midway of my third term, my mother became ill. She was diagnosed with breast cancer. My brothers and sisters called me and said they're We're going to put her in a nursing home. And I said, no! They said, we thought you would say that. We've interviewed the best nursing homes in Dade County. I said, I said no! See, I had a problem. How can one woman raise 7 children who couldn't take care of themselves, but 7 grown people couldn't take care of one woman? I had a problem with that. And I said no! So I resigned from the Ohio legislature and I came back to Miami to take care of Mama and took care of her until '89. And there are things as you have your goals, things are going to happen to you that you can't anticipate. Some of you in the eye of the storm now, things are going to happen. And don't say, "Why does this have to happen to me? Why not you? Who would you suggest? You want to give us some names or email addresses?" That's really what I said the second time I got cancer. They had told me the cancer had metastasized to 7 areas of my body. I started laughing. He said, "Why are you laughing? Are you in denial?" I said, "No, I feel like Mother Teresa." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Lord, I know you know how much I can bear. I just wish you didn't have so much confidence in me." There's times in your life when things are going to happen that you've got to begin to put your dream on hold, and you might have to reinvent yourself. How many have already gone through that? Raise your hands, please. It's called life. And don't tell everybody about it. 80% don't care and 20% glad is you. You have to suck it up and handle it. That's what it called being in business, being an entrepreneur, being a risk taker, walking by faith and not by sight. Stuff happens to you. It's hard changing your life. It was hard when just over 3 years ago in the Penobscot Building in Detroit, Michigan, where I was operating my business. And I fell on some hard times, and I was sleeping in my office. It was hard coming into the lobby, and the security said, "Excuse me, Mr. Brown, can we see you for a moment?" And I said, "Yes." And I walked up to the counter, and he gave me an envelope, and he said, "Would you mind reading it here?" and I opened the envelope, and the envelope was from management that said, "This is an office tower. It's not a hotel. Please do not sleep in your office." And I said, "Excuse me, sir." I said, "I just work long hours in creating my business. I'm an entrepreneur, and right now things are bad for me, but they're not going to be this way always." And I just asked for the opportunity to continue to operate like I'm doing. I'm not trying to make this my home. And it was hard coming through the lobby, and sometimes they would laugh, "There's a guy talking about becoming successful, and look at him, he's bathing in the bathroom upstairs on the 21st floor. He sleeps on the floor, him and two other dreamers up there. Look at him." out of. It was hard, ladies and gentlemen, coming to speak to people, and I was facing financial difficulties in my own life. I was behind on my bills and my dreams, and I'm saying to them, you can live your dream. It was hard, ladies and gentlemen. It was very difficult to pick myself up each day believing that I could do it. There were times that I doubted myself. I said, God, why? Why is this happening Why is this happening to me? I'm just trying to take care of my children and my mother. I'm not trying to steal or rob from anybody. Why did this have to happen to me? It was very hard. And here's what I want to say to you. For those of you that have experienced some hardships, don't give up on your dream. No one could have convinced me by holding on By continuing to push forward, by continuing to run toward my dream that one day I would have my own talk show. It's a long shot, ladies and gentlemen, from Liberty City, an abandoned building, on a floor, never knowing my mother or father. It's a long shot being here with you today in this dome in Atlanta. It's a long shot. No college training, labeled educable mentally retarded. But I kept running toward my dream. Don't stop. Don't stop. Don't stop running toward your dream. It's very important as you hold on to that dream, there are moments when you're going to doubt yourself. There are rough times are going to come, but they have not come to stay. They have come to pass. It's very important It's important for you to know that. Don't say, "I'm having a bad day." Say, "I'm having a character-building day." It's very important for you to believe that you are the one to make this happen. I remember this high school teacher, Mr. Leroy Washington. At the end of school one June, it was just a few days before we were supposed to leave, and I just got my report card, and it indicated that I'd failed history and I'd failed English, and I would have to go to summer school. And I was feeling within myself that I was a failure, that I, I'm slower than most people in getting paperwork and I was feeling down on myself and very negative. And Mr. Washington was giving a speech to the graduating seniors, and I was in 11th grade. And even though I wasn't supposed to be in there, I went in there because the speech he was giving, that speech was for me. And as he talked, my heart began to beat fast. Tears began to run down my eyes. And I was in the back just listening to him because he said— and he was a very dramatic man. I still talk to him to this day. He said, as graduating seniors of Booker T. Washington High School, I want you to know that you are blessed and highly favored, and that as you go toward the future, begin to know that you have greatness within you. And if just one of you here Begin to envision yourselves as being blessed and highly favored to reach your goals. If just one of you capture the essence of what that means, that you have greatness within you and a responsibility to manifest that greatness, that you can make your parents proud, you can make your school proud, you can touch millions of people's lives, and the world will never be the same again. Because you came this way. And the students gave him a rousing standing ovation. And as he left the auditorium, I ran down the steps and I caught him in the parking lot. I said, Mr. Washington? He said, yes? I said, do you remember me, sir? He said, no. I said, my name is Leslie Brown. My mother, she works in the cafeteria here. I'm one of the twins, Leslie and Wesley. I said, Mr. Washington, but you know, you know, I got these big dreams, you know, I like I like talking to people. I love people. I said, I want to work with people, and I got this dream of buying my mama a home. Could I do that, Mr. Washington? He said, it's possible, Mr. Brown. And as he walked away, I called him again. I said, Mr. Washington? He said, what do you want now? I said, I'm the one, sir. I said, "I'm the one. You remember me, sir. I'm Miss Mamie Brown's boy. I'm the one. I'm the one." And you must feel that, that that's why you're here, because you are the one. And I remember when PBS first played one of my specials called "You Deserve" one Sunday afternoon in Miami, Florida. I had some friends call him to tell him to tune in, and he watched the program. He called me in Detroit, and I answered the phone. I said, "Hello?" He said, said, "May I speak to Les Brown, please?" I said, "Who's calling?" He said, "You know who this is." I said, "Oh, Mr. Washington, it's you." He said, "You were the one, weren't you?" I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "And you were so crazy." I said, "I know, but I'm rich now." Ladies and gentlemen, it's not going to be easy. It was hard laying on the floor of the Penobscot Building looking out of the window daydreaming, saying, "Les, can you do this? Can you make this happen?" I used to listen to tapes day in and day out about See You at the Top. My great friend Zig and Dennis Waitley and different other motivational speakers and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and Dexter saying, "Don't let nobody steal your dream." I used to ask myself, "Can I do this?" And something said within me, "You're the one. You're the one." And let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, while you're here and before you go back home to your respective cities, and communities. Write down at least 5 reasons on why you deserve your dream, on why you won't give up, what's going to make you unstoppable, why you must be unreasonable. Because logical, practical thinking says you can't do it today. But if you want to produce unreasonable results in your life, like living your dream and taking charge of your destiny, you've got to be an unreasonable person. You've got to be an uncommon person. So write down the reasons of why you're here. My first major goal was to buy my mother a home. And let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, what, what will reasons do less? Nietzsche said, if you know the why for doing, you can endure almost anyhow. What do you mean by that? If you know why you're doing something, I'll tell you something, when the hard times come, and they're gonna come, when the disappointments and the rejections come, and they're gonna come by the truckloads, your reasons will be your rod and staff to comfort you, to pick you up once again. I got a saying on one of my tapes, "If life knocks you down, try and land on your back, because if you can look up, you can get up." Let your reasons get you back up. I remember when I bought the home for my mother and she came out of the car. When I opened the door, I said, "Mom, I think I know these people in this house." That was my first major goal. And then I couldn't conceal it anymore. I said, "Mom, I got this for you." And as she went from room to room looking at the house and saying, "Thank you, Jesus," Jesus. Thank you, Lord. No one ever could have convinced me that this could have happened to me. And she looked at me, she said, Leslie, and you cost me so much problems as a boy, you were always into stuff. She said, no one could have convinced me that day when I walked in that house and this lady was holding you and your brother. And she said, ma'am, I want you to promise me two things. And she said, what is Why is it? She says, Juan, promise me that you won't separate them. She said, I want them raised together. I want them to know each other. I got pregnant while my husband was away in the war and I can't keep them. Promise me that you won't separate them. She said, I promise I won't. I've never had children. I promise I won't separate them. And she said, promise me that you'll never tell them about who I am "Because if my husband ever found out, he would kill me," she said, "I promise." And she said that she gave them to us and she kind of cried and she was walking out the door and she looked at my adoptive mother, she said, "Remember, don't you separate them." She said, "I swear to God, I won't. I won't separate them, I'll keep them together." And she said, "As I held y'all in my arms, I never had any children of my own." on. I didn't know how I was gonna do it, but I knew with the help of God, I will do it. And ladies and gentlemen, my mother had a dream of having children and raising us. She didn't know how she's gonna do it. You're gonna be just like that, and some of you are already there. Well, you don't know how you're gonna make this happen, but you just feel within telling yourself some way, somehow, with the help of God, I'm going to make it happen. Repeat after me, please. No matter how bad it is or how bad it gets, I'm going to make it. I'm going to make it. Shake somebody's hand on your right and left and say, you got the right stuff. So yes, it's possible for you to live your dream. It's necessary that you associate with winners, that you work your system, that you are relentless, that you never give up. It's you. You've got to take personal responsibility. You've got to make it your your personal business to make it happen. And you've got to resolve within yourself that I can do this, that it's hard, but you've got to say, I'm the one, I'm the one to make this happen, I'm the one to become successful in this business. As you work to help other people to become successful, that feeds your success. But you know it's going to be hard, but find out What will make it worth it for you? Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know what you think of this video. Longer than what we typically do, so I'm super curious to see what your experience was. Leave it in the comments below what you thought. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.