FOCUS ON YOU EVERY DAY – Improve Concentration and Eliminate Distractions
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Summer

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With a Venmo debit card, you can Venmo more than just your friends. You can use your balance in so many ways. You can Venmo everything. Need gas? You can Venmo this. How about snacks? You can Venmo that. Your favorite band's merch? You can Venmo this. Or their next show? You can Venmo that. Visit venmo.me slash debit to learn more. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, and a pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated card may be used everywhere MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply.

Many of you are going through storms. Maybe a storm on your job, storm in your marriage. Storm with your kids, storm with your parents. Storm with your physical being, storm with your finances. Storms that we don't invite. Storms that come from people we think that love us. Storms that come from seemingly nowhere, but there they are. You have no say-so in what happens to you, but you have a say-so in what you do about it. You have a determining voice

into where your life can go. See, life is 10% what happens to you. It's 90% what you do about it. You get a setback. You get thrown off court. You lost your mama. That's dirt. But show me something that has grown into something beautiful that didn't have no dirt on it. Why are you here? And where are you going? You look at your life. You look at what you produce.

Is it giving you what you want? Are you living on purpose? Are you living your dream? Are you acting on your ideas? Are you doing all you can do? Have you gotten comfortable? Are you procrastinating? Are you invading your own greatness? Are you surrounding yourself with people that can nourish you? Are you challenging yourself? Are you experimenting? Are you learning something different? You will not pause. You will progress. You will not expire.

you will evolve. You will not crumble in the midst of crisis. You may be neck deep in what seems to be a catastrophic storm of chaos, but I pray that in this moment you will find the calm, the peace, the hope, the faith, the courage, the expectancy you need to live and not die, to move up

and not stay where you are. You get what you see. Let those challenges raise you up. Let them elevate you. Let their demands and their trials make you stronger. Let the adversity you face today turn you into a better person tomorrow. Make no mistake about it, Blake.

The first noble truth of Buddhism, life is suffering. This is true. And it's worse than that because it's suffering contaminated by malevolence. That's the baseline. But the optimistic part is that you are so damn tough you can actually not only deal with that, you can improve it.

Sometimes we have to stand up inside ourselves. Sometimes we have to fight ourselves. Sometimes you have a dream and goal that you want to achieve and you say, oh, I can't do that. You got to tell yourself to shut up. Don't tell me I can't do that. Sometimes you got to talk to yourself. Oh, I can do this. Oh, I will do it. I have got to do this. What you think about your dream? And I want you to increase your dream.

I said you have something special. You have greatness in you. You have the ability to do more than you can ever begin to imagine. Greatness, it's a choice. Show your character. Show me what you are made of. Prevail. Even when no one believes you can. Even when you have no right to believe, things will turn around. Trust. Things will turn around.

I am weak in all those ways that I listed. I am weak, but I don't accept that. I don't accept that I am what I am and that that is what I'm doomed to be. No, I don't accept that. I'm fighting. I'm always fighting. I'm struggling and I'm scrapping.

I'm kicking and clawing at those weaknesses to change them, stop them. See, there's a book being written about your life, isn't there? Someone somewhere is taking inventory of your life. Don't compare your chapter one to someone's chapter 10. You write your own book. And at any moment in your life, you can decide that you want to make this the new chapter. Literally, in your life, you can turn the page.

And those previous chapters are your old book. It's like Old Testament, New Testament. Old story, new story. They're connected, they're related, but you can flip the page and you can have a whole new story. If you decided right now, I am literally turning, my breakthrough is I turn the page and in this second, I start to write the best chapters of my life. You could decide to do that.

You're never, ever, ever, ever going to feel like doing the things you need to do in order to have what you want. You're always going to need to push yourself. You're always going to need to parent yourself. So what is the net advice on this? What is the bottom line? The bottom line is no one's coming. No one. No one's coming to push you. No one's coming to tell you to turn the TV off.

No one's coming to tell you to get out the door and exercise. Nobody's coming to tell you to apply for that job that you've always dreamt about. Nobody's coming to write the business plan for you. It's up to you. And because you're only ever going to do the things that you feel like doing right now or that feel good right now, unless you understand that you've got to parent yourself, you've got to push yourself, you're not going to make your dreams come true. You're just not.

We're not wired that way. You weren't born that way. You weren't that way when you were growing up and you're certainly not that way as an adult. And there's a tremendous amount of liberation that comes when you accept the fact that you're always going to need to give yourself a push. You know, because when I first started making money and it was, you know, my salary or my earnings were published all over the place. I mean, the first year I was like, really, did I make that much money? Oh, my God.

It was very difficult for me to figure out where my boundaries were because I'd grown up poor and didn't have anything. So it's easy when you don't have anything and people ask you for money. They say, "I need $500." You say, "I don't have it because I'm just trying to get my rent paid." It's harder when your multi-billion dollar salary is now in the paper and you get a lot of friends and cousins you didn't have before.

So how do you set boundaries for yourself? I was having trouble setting boundaries myself, for myself, for even strangers. People would just show up at my door in Chicago and say, "Obra, I left my husband, please help me." And I would because she knows I have it. So don't try that now though, okay? Don't try that now, I figured it out! So what I learned was is that

Oh, the reason why people keep showing up is because my intention is to make them think that I'm such a nice person, that you can ask me for anything, you can get me to do anything. I'm going to say yes, I'm going to say yes. So when Stevie called me this time, I thought I'd try out my first no on Stevie. Let's start big. He wanted me to donate some money to a charity, and I didn't want to donate to the charity.

because I have my own charities and I care about a lot of people but the problem is when you have money everybody thinks you just want to give to everything so every letter I ever get starts with "We know you love the children" Yes I do love the children but somebody else is going to have to help the children So I said to Stevie, I said to Stevie "No" and

As a person who has that disease to please, I was waiting for him then to say, "I will never speak to you again. I will never call you. I will never sing a song for you." And he didn't. He just said, "Okay." "Okay? Okay, it's okay?" He said, "Okay, check you later." And what I learned from that is many times you will have angst and worry about things and

Put yourself in a state, like someone said this morning because their phone went off, they were mortified over a phone, I said, really? You will put yourself in a state when the other person really isn't even thinking about you. So learning that I could specifically determine for myself what the boundaries were for me, what I wanted to do,

give my money, give my time, give of my service to who I wanted to give it to when I did, that I get to make that decision. And just because you get 100 requests a week doesn't mean you have to try to fulfill all of that. Just because you have all of these demands on your time and on you doesn't mean that you have to say yes. You get to decide because you're the master of your fate.

the captain of your soul, as William Ernest Henley said in Invictus. And understanding that really changed the meaning of my life in that I was not no longer driven by what other people wanted me to do, but took charge of my own destiny, making choices based upon what do I feel is the next right move for me.

Not only is it possible for you to have your dream, but it's necessary that you go for what is yours in the universe. And once you learn by falling on your face, that's how you learn. You learn by trying to create a light bulb over and over and over again. Recognize the excuses are not valid. They're conjured up, they're fabricated, they're lies. The moment you start feeling whole,

Your feeling begins and when you love yourself and you love all of life, you'll create an equal and now you're causing it. But you can see how much time is available if you organize your day. So you got to work hard. There was not one single minute that I wasted. And this is why I'm standing here today. If you don't know exactly what you want or you let yourself get beyond that into something general, you're not going to achieve it. So confidence is something I've taught myself over the years.

I started becoming okay with who I am. I became the best version of me. I've seen plenty of talents that got pulled. I've seen plenty of talents that got hit in the mouth and they didn't want it. I've seen plenty of talents that got punched in the face and they go back to the sidelines. They stand with that, they coach, and they don't want it no more. How many skills can I acquire that have utility, put that utility to the test in service of something greater than myself? That is for me the purpose of life. Now, I don't actually want to know Kung Fu.

That is not the mission that I'm here to live. But I knew that I had to identify my mission. So what was going to be my mission? - Successful people fail a lot. They fail a whole lot more than they succeed. - You need to learn to think because thinking makes you act effectively in the world. Thinking makes you win the battles you undertake. And those could be battles for good things. - Failure isn't permanent. Falling isn't permanent.

You get right back up and keep going and this time you're gonna be stronger wiser and you'll be more driven than ever and for every 10 failures you'll land one success Self-discipline as the very term implies comes from the self it comes from you it comes from when you make a decision and he told me this these are the exact words he said he said this solo

Living means doing what you love to do. And if I have to fall here and there to do what I want to do in life, then so be it. This Father's Day helped dad be all he can be with a gift from the Home Depot because he's not just dad. He's the handyman of the house, the plumber in a pinch, and the emergency mechanic.

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