Why Vision Comes Before Money (And Why Most People Fail Here) | TD Jakes

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe that you have the ability to create something special that will change the planet. So to help you on your journey, I started the Mentor Me series, and the goal here is to try to hang around people who've done a lot more than us, who've achieved massive success, and hopefully by hanging around them a little bit longer, some of their mindsets, their attitudes, their beliefs, the way they see the world will seep into us to help us become the best version of ourselves. So today we're gonna learn from Bishop T.D. Jakes and how to soar. Mentor me, Bishop Jakes.

Soar, when I sat down to write it, was written solely and exclusively to people who had aspirations for being entrepreneurial. Because I grew up in a home with entrepreneurship, and I'm very passionate about it, and I've expressed it to my children. As I began to write it, I thought this is also true for people who are starting churches. The same mindset was applicable, because an entrepreneur— a person who goes to work goes to work to perform a task, and when the task is over, they go home. An entrepreneur doesn't have hours. That's right. An entrepreneur takes full responsibility for everything. You can't be one-dimensional and be an entrepreneur. Just because you like to bake cookies doesn't mean that you can just think about baking cookies. You got to think about packaging, you got to think about marketing, you got to think about health inspections, you got to think about staff development, you have to think about everything. The buck stops with you, so you have to be a global thinker to be an entrepreneur. We are taught, we are teaching people to be specialists in one dimension. And it was very much like pastoring a church, starting a church. You start a church, you can't just worry about what I'm going to preach this Sunday. There are preachers who come to work for churches who are so organized that they are hired to preach. But if you start a church, you better be hired to clean bathrooms, you better be hired to drive the bus, you better be hired to balance the books. You have to be hired to do a whole lot of stuff. You know, I worked my way out of doing all of this stuff, but I started out, you know, I was the choir director, the head of the deacon board, the cleanup committee, the janitorial service, and the marketing director. I had to be everything. That's an entrepreneurial mindset. As I continued to write the book, I realized that I wasn't talking about a thing, I was talking about a mentality. The mentality says, "I take responsibility for where my life is going." So I wrote the book Soar to say to you, whether you're working a job and need— when you work a job, I tell you what I'll pay you, but what I'm willing to pay you may not be how much you need to make. Yeah. So you might need multiple streams of income in order to get what you are really worth, even though I've determined what I'm going to pay you. You cannot allow my evaluation and assessment of what you are worth to my company stream to be the substratum of what you hope to get for your dream and your purpose. You understand? So whether it is subsidizing your income with multiple streams of income, as I mentioned to you, while I'm sitting here talking to you, we're filming in Pittsburgh. You don't always have to be present to be productive. Okay? I talk in the book about building the team around you. Building, I call it the machine. Building the machine is imperative for you to be functional. The only reason I can sit here right now is that I have a team of staff people who are sending me texts up to the very last minute before I walked out here, telling me what's going on in all the venues, all the time, all the while. What's being shot, what's being handled, all that's going on. You have to build around you an infrastructure. One of the reasons I wrote the book is I watched my father start a business with a mop and a bucket, one mop, one bucket, borrowed a truck, went to clean up a place and turned it into a business with 52 employees and 10 trucks servicing the state of West Virginia doing a janitorial service. And one of the things that stopped it from going nationwide, in my view, is that he wouldn't stop mopping. You understand what I'm saying? My father was such a hustler, in a good sense. He was a good hustler. It was hard to describe what he did, because he did everything to survive. This is 1960. And then when he started working, he was good at work. He took pride in what he did. But in order to really get your hand on things, you have to stop doing and start being. John Maxwell says, "If you know how to do a thing, you will always have a job. But if you know why they're doing it, they will always work for you." You are only limited by how you use the same thing God gave everybody, 24 hours. The differences in income is based on what you did with the time he gave you. Everybody has the same day, but everybody doesn't have the same pay. SORE is about understanding why is it that somebody wakes up in the morning and they come home with 10,000 and I come home with 150 when we had the same 24 hours. And I'm saying it is as much a mindset as it is anything else. As a young boy, I was enthralled by airplanes and the wonder of whether I would ever embark on a flight that would carry me to new exciting adventures and a life of limitless possibilities. I came to know I had the power within me to soar, and that has made all the difference in my life. Flying for the first time is a lot like creating your own business, launching a startup, or establishing a non-for-profit organization. Both require a leap of faith and a willingness to take a journey of unexpected variables. In other words, both require a little bit of crazy and a whole lot of courage. Don't let fear hold you back from doing what you truly love. Commit to your vision and be the CEO of your future. You wouldn't be in this room if you didn't have a vision. You wouldn't be in this room if you didn't have a vision. Worry about the vision more than the provision. I find that the provision comes to the vision. A lot of people ask for provision who have no vision, and money runs from blindness. Money runs from blindness. Yes. Yeah, money runs from blindness. Money— Bishop, you might need to unpack that one. Okay. For some folks. If there is no purpose, there is no provision. And I'm not talking about physical blindness. I'm talking about blindness so far as career and future. Until you figure out— the first thing the bank wants to know is what do you want to do? Anybody who's going to invest in you wants to hear, "What do you see? What do you see?" When Jesus healed the blind man and touched him the first time, he asked him, "What do you see?" Because his response is based on his answer. So the man said, "I see men walking as trees." He said, "I'm going to touch you again. Until I clear up your vision, we can't leave this spot." If you, the first time I went to the bank, it was amazing. They wanted a 7-year projection of our company, and I thought, wow. I didn't know anything about business. I thought, what in the world do they want that for? I could write down anything. What they're really asking you is, have you thought through the future? Right, that's right. They're asking you, can you see? Because if you can see, we will fund what you see, pro-vision. But if there is no vision, how can there be provision? So we, when we want something, ask God for provision. But you need to be asking for vision. Because if you get a clear vision and you're passionate about it, people support people, not ideas. So if you're not excited about it, why should I give to it? So entrepreneurship is not about where we're going to go, it's about who's going to be driving. And I'm saying, why are you letting somebody else drive your economic future and control it by a paycheck being the only way you can make money? You understand what I'm saying? So, so when you start talking about it in those terms, people's brains start ticking. And they start thinking and they approach finances differently. And so I don't even want to sell a book. I don't want to sell out a conference. I want to start a conversation through a conference and through a book that brings forth fruit in your pocketbook. Because if I can get it in your head, you can get it in your pocketbook. You want to start a movement? Yes, I want to start a movement. That's exactly what I'm talking about. I want to start a movement. I want to leave the world better than I found it. I want to let America hear the things that I heard as a child that caused me to be entrepreneurial all of my life. It's, uh, something I'm very passionate about. I come from generations of entrepreneurs, and even though I worked a job, I always had a hustle too. Because I don't believe that anybody has the right to say what I'm worth. You can say what you will pay me, but you cannot say how much I make, because what you pay me may only be one stream that feeds my Garden of Eden. It had four. But you are only limited by your own creativity. If you take back your girlfriend time, your gossiping time, you're arguing with people who aren't going to change time, you can turn all that into capital. It's you who chooses to invest rest in dead places. We all have the same 24-hour day. And so the book is called Soar. Some eagles fly from the mountain and some eagles die in the valley. And the difference is, what did you do with your wings? You get to choose whether you struggle or succeed based on your own creativity. And I can't remember exactly how I said it, but, but it really boils down to, to this whole notion that if you don't have a strategy, you're gonna have a struggle. That's really what it boils down to. And you're a 50-year-old woman, a 60-year-old woman, a 50, 60, 70-year-old person. You can't count on your kids to take care of you if you don't develop— and I could scream this from the rooftop Why do we let age surprise us? It warns us every day it's coming. And if you don't have a strategy that accommodates aging, you're going to have a struggle. You know, your daughter may not have a porch like your grandmother did to keep her mother, so you can't count on your kids to take care of you. And woe be unto you if you waste your strength without a strategy and then get shocked because in your senior years you have a struggle. You will eat the fruit of neglect because you failed to plan for this season in your life. Entrepreneurship says I have a strategy, so I won't have a struggle. You know, when I started writing the book, I thought I was writing to entrepreneurs, but the further I got over to the book, I thought, gosh, if you're starting a church, you need this too. Or if you're starting a family, you need this too. And then suddenly I realized this isn't a job skill. So it's a mindset. And as the book began to develop, 'cause it develops while you're writing it, I began to recognize that this is about taking control of how you want your life to be, its outcome, and designing it in such a way that you are ultimately fulfilled. And so we call it Soar because it's built around the Orville Wright brothers and their whole mission to stand on the ground and see a bird in the air and say, "I belong up there," building something to get you there. That's what it's all about. You, if you think you belong up there and you're down here, you have to build the machine that will take you to your dreams. Hello, this is Bishop T.D. Jakes, and I just wanted to thank Evan Carmichael for making this video and you for watching it. Remember, don't stop at where you are as if it were the destination, when in fact, in reality, it may be the transportation that brings you into that thing you were created to do. I also have a new book coming out in October called Soar that you can preorder now if you check the description below. Thank you so much.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know what did you learn from this video that you're going to immediately apply somehow to your life or your business? What was the single most important lesson that you learned? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really curious to find out. I also want to give a quick shout out to Marta Magdalena. Marta, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and doing that awesome awesome YouTube review on it as well. I really appreciate the support, and I'm so glad you enjoyed the book.

Your one word and the author is Evan Carmichael.

Great book, by the way. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.