You NEED THIS Mindset for Entrepreneurial SUCCESS | 10 Mins

Good morning, Believe Nation! My name is Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs are going to solve all of the world's major problems. So to help you on your journey today, we're going to learn how to brace yourself for struggle. Over to you, Lecrae.

I would tell myself, man, to brace yourself for real struggle, for real pain, for death, for loss, for, you know, hurt. And then as an artist, I would tell myself, you know, what I say, and I put it on the back of the book too, if you live for people's acceptance, you'll die from their rejection. And that's what I would tell people because, tell myself, 'cause I was so worried about being accepted. These people to accept me, these people to accept me. And when they don't, you die. And you crumble inside, you devastated. But if you already know who you are, like I feel like I'm made in God's image, my worth and value cannot be tainted. You know, you can't add to my worth, you can't take away from it. I was born with it. And so I don't have to fight for your approval or your acceptance. And I would want my younger self to know that, be confident in who God made me to be and be the best me I could be.

So starting a business is one of the hardest things you will ever do in your life. People think it's gonna be easy, but it's one of the hardest things you will ever do in your life. No matter how hard you think it's gonna be, No matter how many videos you watch of people telling you it's difficult, it's still way harder and way worse than what you thought it was going to be. It just is. That's life as an entrepreneur. People will judge you, people will criticize you, people will hate on you. You run out of cash faster than you thought you would. Customers aren't going to come through the door like you thought they would. The media is not going to cover you like you thought they would. Your social media campaigns aren't going to take off like you thought they would. If you take whatever idea you had and you have a best case, realistic case, worst case scenario, it's always way worse than your worst case scenario. That's just life as an entrepreneur. And I want to be realistic and share that because I really struggled at the beginning and I wasn't prepared for it. I read magazine articles and, you know, I saw documentaries of people who had success as an entrepreneur. I thought, I can do this, I can be an entrepreneur too. And I was prepared to do the work. I didn't think it would just be handed to me, but I wasn't prepared for how low I would feel about myself when I was making $300 a month and I was working and working and working and not getting any results and not getting any callbacks, not getting any people buying, and seeing so little traction that I felt at that point the lowest I've ever felt in my life. Because I knew that anything else that I worked on, I could get some results with at school school or athletics, whatever I worked on, it would improve. And here I was working and I wasn't getting any results. And I just felt so low. I felt worthless. I felt like I had no value. And I actually told my business partner that I quit at one point because I just felt like I needed to do something where I could feel like I'm contributing something because this just sucked. And I was too embarrassed and too ashamed to tell other people about it. You know, my friends would ask me to come out to birthday parties or beer nights or anything like that, and I couldn't. I always had to say no because I couldn't afford it. I couldn't, you know, $20 was too expensive for me. And so I had to pick one thing a month that I could go to, but I would never tell my friends what was happening. I would always say that I'm living the entrepreneur lifestyle, you know, I'm just hustling hard on my business. I was too embarrassed to let them know what the truth was. And so I think part of what I wanted to share in this channel is showing the struggles that people go through to make it. That it often doesn't happen in the first year or two years or three years. You have to have a deep passion for what you're doing and just keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it. And you do it because you enjoy the work. Because making YouTube videos is fun for me. I enjoy being able to reach you guys. Whether I end up hitting my million subscriber goal or other big goals that I have or not, I enjoy doing the work. And so I think if you really have a deep passion for what you're doing, and expect to struggle, then you let yourself off the hook a little bit, just from an emotional point of view, that when you don't hit the results immediately, you don't beat yourself up and feel worthless about it, and you use that as motivation to go off and do better. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what was the biggest surprise that you had as an entrepreneur, something that you weren't expecting but then that happened to you that you had to deal with and struggle through? Really curious to find out. Share your story in the comments below. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Kelvin Schoon. Kelvin, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really, really, really means a lot to me, man, and I hope you're enjoying the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of inspresso. I wake up every morning, that's bread, so keep me going.

The depth of anybody's struggle will determine the height of their success. And I believe that everything that I've gone through in my whole life, you know, people ask me, what would you change? I wouldn't change a thing because everything that I've gone through has made me who I am today. You know, so I'm sitting here very strong and very confident. You know, and it got a lot of love for a lot, a lot of people. You know, Jesus struggled and went through things. You know, everybody went through their own thing. And people slandered him. I mean, I feel like if Jesus can go what he went through, who am I? I'm nobody. I'm just a guy from the hood, man, that just do this music, you know. But I'm just such a real person. I don't consider myself a celebrity at all. I'm just so real and I love people that You know, man, I just flow through this thing, you know, and I let my music, I let God guide me where he got me to go. But God ain't gonna just guide you straight to success, not God. He gonna guide you through a lot of mess first so that when you get the success, you'll know how to appreciate it, you'll know how to stay with it and know how to take care of it. And that's called longevity.

The biggest challenge of this year actually was convincing members of my own team that this was a good call. I'd get kind of called in front of a group of people who have known me and worked with me for years who would sit down and say, are you sure you wanna call the album 1989? We think it's a weird title. Are you sure that you wanna put an album cover out that has less than half of your face on it? Are you positive that you wanna take a genre that you have, that cemented yourself in and completely switch to a new one that you are a newcomer to? And answering all those questions with yes, I'm sure, that was I think something that really frustrated me at the time, like, guys, don't you understand? I promise this is, this is what I'm dying to do. The biggest kind of struggle turned into the biggest triumph when it worked out.

When I was 7 and a half, I was raped. I won't say severely raped. All rape is severe. The rapist was a person very well known to my family. I was hospitalized. The rapist was let out of jail and was found dead. That night, and the police suggested that the rapist had been kicked to death. I was 7 and a half. I thought that I had caused the man's death because I had spoken his name. That was my 7 and a half year old logic. So I stopped talking for 5 years. Now, to show you again how out of evil there can come good, in those 5 years I read every book in the Black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. I memorized Shakespeare, whole plays, 50 sonnets. I memorized Edgar Allan Poe, all the poetry. Never having heard it, I memorized it. I had Longfellow. I had Guy de Maupassant. I had Balzac. Ah, Rudyard Kipling. I mean, it was Catholic kind of reading and Catholic kind of story. When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say and many ways in which to say what I had to say. I listened to the black minister. I listened to the melody of the preachers. And I could tell when they would start up on that kind of thing, when we know they mean to take our souls straight to heaven, or whether they meant to dash us straight to hell. I understood it. So out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism. And there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case, I was saved in that muteness. You see? In the surata, I was saved. And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself.