DO NOT FEAR - This Speech Will Change Your Life
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Your life is your life. Don't let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is a light somewhere. It may not be much light, but it beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them. He can't beat death, but he can beat death in life. Sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it,

The more lights there will be. The mind is the matrix in and of itself. Right now, today, in this moment, I promise you, the matrix has you. If you guys know David Foster Wallace's concept of this is water. To a fish, water is so ubiquitous it ceases to exist. Now we all have that same thing and it's playing on us and it's keeping us from becoming who we want to become.

And that thing is our mindset. It's our belief system. It is so ever-present. It is so ingrained into the fabric of who you are and the way that you process data, you don't even notice it. You don't even know that it's real. And this is the thing that impacts your life. It is your inability to see that your mindset controls everything, that it is water in and of itself. Now, when I heard this from Shakespeare, I realized that once you become aware of the water, you can change everything.

Any moment, you can choose to believe something new about yourself. Now, the weird thing about belief is as soon as you change that belief, it becomes true. Why that is, I will never quite understand. What weird quirk of human evolution has left us in a space where simply believing it makes it true? If you think you're dumb, guess what? You're dumb. Truly. And you will act in accordance with that belief and that should scare the shit out of you. Fear. Fear.

is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity. Do not misunderstand me. Danger is very real, but fear is a choice. The impulse to dream

has been slowly beaten out of me through the experience of life. And most people have stopped living their dreams because of the lessons they've learned from life or things they've picked up because we've only been born with two fears. The fear of a loud sound or the fear of falling. All the other fears are fears we learn. Fears we pick up. Whatever you're scared of, your life, the value you brought to the planet, far more important than whatever you're afraid of. You're stronger

So as we begin to look toward the future and look at what will it take for us to break through those fears. One, acknowledging the fear, knowing it's all right. Some fear is healthy. Beginning to know that your dreams, your passions, your drive to achieve whatever it is you want, as it has more power and meaning, it will move you past your fears. As you begin to feel that you deserve it, your passion and goal is so strong, the fears won't matter.

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery over oneself. That's Da Vinci. Da Vinci did amazing things with his life. I wanted to do equally amazing things with mine. And if that's the game that we're playing, if I can construct my belief system, if I can choose at any moment to believe something that's more empowering than I was believing the moment before, and that that will actually find its way into my actions,

Allow me to do things that I couldn't do the moment before then it's like that moment in the matrix where Nia realizes he knows kung fu and that's like as funny as that is that's how I think about life to me the very fundamental purpose of life is to find out how many skills I can acquire that have utility and then put that utility to the test and

in service of something greater than myself. When we understand the sacredness, the beauty, the eternal nature of our own spirit, then we can recognize it in creation and we can recognize it in others. When we don't realize, experience, perceive the sacredness of our own true self,

then our perception is an illusion. But when we understand who we are and understand our harmony and relationship with the world around us and the people around us, then we're actually seeing everything as truth. We're seeing it as a spiritual reality, even in this world. Discovering your why is just the beginning

In order to enjoy all the benefits of having a clearly articulated why, you'll need to have the courage and discipline to use it. Like Thomas Edison said, "Vision without execution is hallucination." There is an ideal order for implementing your why, though sometimes reality does get in the way, and it all starts with you. Our natural tendency is to start with the tangible,

We define our value by what we do. So it takes practice to start with why. Like riding a bicycle, at first we're unsure, unsteady. We're in our heads thinking about all the things we need to do: pedal fast, keep enough speed so we don't fall over. We have to really concentrate. We may even fall over, even scrape our knees. But we get back on the bike and try again. And eventually it becomes natural.

Starting with why is no different. At first, it feels awkward. It may not even work. But with practice, it will become so natural that you won't even be able to imagine a time when you couldn't do it. Just like riding a bicycle. In time, your why will act as a filter for many of the decisions and choices you make. It becomes a tool to help you find a job or seize an opportunity in which you're more likely to succeed. It removes a lot of the guessing. Here's a metaphor to show you what I mean.

It's called the "Celery Test". We're constantly asking people for their advice on what to do or how to do it. It's like going to a dinner party and somebody says, "Do you know what you need? You need M&Ms. We've done so well with M&Ms, you've got to use M&Ms." Somebody else says to us, "Rice milk. In this economy, you have to use rice milk."

Someone else says to us, Kit Kats, you have to use Kit Kats. And somebody else says to you, it's all about celery. We go to the supermarket with all this good advice from all these smart people with brilliant case studies and we buy everything. We buy Kit Kats and M&Ms, celery and rice milk. There's a lot of time we spend at the supermarket and a lot of money we spend at the supermarket. And when we get to the checkout line, we're standing there with all these products in our hands and no one can see what we believe because we bought everything.

But let's imagine we know our why. Let's imagine our why is to always be healthy and only do things that protect the health of our bodies. Now which products do we buy? Given all the same advice from all the same smart people, this time we only buy celery and we only buy rice milk. They're the only two that make sense. We spend less time and less money at the supermarket,

And when we're standing there in line with only celery and only rice milk, now people can see what we believe. Somebody walking past can say, hey, I can see that you're healthy, so am I. You just attracted an opportunity or a referral or a friend simply by saying and doing the things that you believe. And the best part is it's scalable.

As soon as I said the why, you knew exactly which products we were going to buy. This means the more you can articulate your why, the more others will know what you stand for and will be able to help you make the right decisions. From now on, you will work to ensure everything you do is a good fit. If you do too many things that aren't a good fit, you'll feel uncomfortable and people will feel that you're being inauthentic.

On the other hand, when you start with why, your ability to stand out, find support, and work to all your natural strengths will flourish. With practice, you will learn to trust your why. You will eventually start to see your job and the things you do as ways to breathe life into your cause. And the better you get at it, the more you will feel that your life and everything you do has purpose.

The best way to implement your why is to work at it slowly. You don't have to do all the tips we suggest. What is important is that you pick up to three and commit to practicing and using them now. Dopamine is the feeling that you found something you're looking for, but you accomplish something you set out to accomplish. So you know that feeling you get when you cross something off your to-do list?

That's dopamine. It feels awesome. You know when you have a goal to hit and you achieve that goal, you're like, yes! You feel like you've won something, right? That's dopamine. The whole purpose of dopamine is to make sure that we get stuff done, right? The historical reason for dopamine, we would never eat if we only waited until we got hungry because there's no guarantee that we would find food.

So dopamine exists to help us go looking for food. We get dopamine when we eat, which is one of the reasons we like eating. And so when you see something that reminds you of something that feels good, we want to do the behavior that helps us get that feeling, right?

So let's say you're out there going for a walk and you see an apple tree in the distance. You get a small hit of dopamine. And then what it does is it focuses us on our goals. And now we start walking towards the apple tree. And as the apple tree starts to get a little bigger, we feel like we're making progress. You get another little shot of dopamine and another little shot of dopamine until you get to the tree and you're like, yes!

This is why we're told you must write down your goals. Your goals must be tangible. There's a biological reason for that. We're very, very visually oriented animals. You have to be able to see the goal.

for it to biologically stay focused, right? If you don't write down your goals, if you can't see your goals, it's very hard to get motivated, to get inspired. For example, think about corporate visions, right? A corporate vision has to be something we can see, right? That's why it's called a vision. You can see it, right? To be the biggest, most respected, to be the fastest growing are not visions. They're nothing.

Right? What does that even look like? Respected by whom? Your mother? Yourself? Your friends? Your shareholders? Who knows? What's the metric? Dunno. It's amorphous. Doesn't motivate us. Just like I can't tell you, you will get a bonus if you achieve more. You're gonna ask me how much more? I'm gonna say more. Doesn't work. You need a tangible goal. You need a tangible goal, right? Here's a great vision. Martin Luther King, "I have a dream."

That one day, little black children and little white children will play on the playground together and hold hands together. We can imagine that. We can set our sights on that. And every time we achieve a goal and achieve a metric and achieve a milestone that makes us feel like we're making progress to the vision we can see, we keep going and going and going until we achieve something remarkable. You have to be able to see it. Dopamine. Like I said, dopamine is the feeling you get when you set out to find something you're looking for as well. I talked about the to-do list. I came home from...

A trip just a couple days ago and I had a bunch of errands to run and I wrote down a little list of things I had to do and off I went, right? And as I was walking past, I think it was the drag race, I don't remember. I was walking past something. I remembered, oh, I have to do that and I hadn't written it down on my, I hadn't written down on my to-do list. So I went in and finished what I needed to do. And then when I came out, I then wrote it on my to-do list and then crossed it out. Because I wanted the dopamine. Feels good. Dopamine comes with a warning.

Dopamine is highly, highly, highly addictive. Here are some other things that release dopamine: alcohol, nicotine, gambling, your cell phone. Oh, you think I'm joking? Okay, we've all been told that, you know, if you wake up in the morning and you crave a drink, you might be an alcoholic. Well, if you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is check your phone before you even get out of bed.

You might be an addict. If you walk from room to room in your own apartment holding your telephone, you might be an addict. When you're driving into your car and you get a text and your phone goes beep. We hate email, true. We love the beep, the buzz, the ding. Right? You'll be there in 10 minutes and yet you have to look at it right now.

You might be an addict. And even if you read it and it says, are you free for dinner next Thursday? And you have to reply immediately. You can't wait the 10 minutes. You might be an addict. And for all you Gen Ys out there who like to think that you're better at multitasking because you grew up with the technology, then why do you keep crashing your cars when you're texting? You're not better at multitasking. You're better at getting distracted.

In fact, if you look at the statistics, diagnoses of ADD and ADHD have risen 66% in the past 10 years.

Okay, ADD and ADHD is a frontal lobe disorder, right? Are you telling me out of nowhere 66% of our youth has the frontal lobe problem? Where did that come from? No, it's a misdiagnosis, right? What are the symptoms of a dopamine addiction to technology? Distractibility, inability to get things done, easily distracted, you know? Shortness of attention, it's all the same thing, so we misdiagnose things.

It's this. It's the addictive quality of dopamine. We can also get addicted to performance in our companies when all they do is give us numbers to hit, numbers to hit, numbers to hit, and a bonus you get, and a bonus you get, and a bonus you get. All they're doing is feeding us with dopamine and we can't help ourselves. All we do is want more, more, more. It's no surprise that the banks destroyed the economy.

Because one of the things we know about dopamine addict is they will do anything to get another hit, sometimes at the sacrifice of their own resources and their relationships. Ask any alcoholic gambling addict or drug addict. Ask them how their relationships are doing and if they've squandered any of their resources. It's an addiction. Dopamine is dangerous if it is unbalanced. It is hugely helpful when in a comfortable and balanced system, but when unbalanced, it's dangerous and it's destructive.

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