The 5 lessons in life people learn too late
- What's up, Believe Nations? Greetings from Copenhagen, Denmark. My name is Evan, my one word is believe and I believe in people more than they believe in themselves. And, my hope is that a little bit of that rubs off onto you so you can create something amazing in this world. So, to help you on your journey, today we're going to look at five lessons in life that people often learn too late, and hopefully you can pick it up a lot sooner. Lesson number one is don't sleepwalk through life. - I advise students, as much as possible, look for the job that you would take, if you didn't need a job. I mean, don't sleepwalk through life, and don't says it's all going to be great, you know, I'll do this and I'll do that, you know, I'm just marking time for it to be older. I've told people, that's like saving up sex for your old age. It just is not, it is not a good idea. (laughing and clapping) - What are you urging them to do? - I'll explain just what I'm talking about. You really want to be doing, what you love doing. And, you can't necessarily find it on your first job. But, don't give up before you find it. - Lesson number two, live life without fear. - If there was one concept that I would suggest to people to take a daily confrontation with, is fear. The problem with fear, is that it lies. Right, so, fear tells you, hey, you know, if you say that to that girl, she's going to know she has you. You know. And she'll never really be attracted to you, if she knows how much you attracted to her. (laughing) Don't say that, no, how we get her is when she walks by, ignore her. (laughing) - This little puppet on your shoulder. Fear tells you dumb like that, right? You know, so, for me, the daily confrontation with fear has become a real practice for me since about three years ago, I went skydiving in Dubai. Skydiving is a really interesting confront with fear, right? I got to stand up, I got to stand up, I got to stand up. So, all your friends, what happens is go out, how you, oh sorry, I dropped my thing. So what happens is, you go out the night before, and you take a drink with your friends, and somebody says, yeah, we should go skydiving tomorrow. (laughing) And you go, yeah, we'll go skydiving tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, and you go yeah, and everybody goes yeah, right? And you go home, you by yourself, you like, hmm. (laughing) You like, well, yeah, I mean, they was drunk, too. (laughing) - Right, so, maybe, maybe they not, we don't have to go, we don't have to do it. So then, that night, you're laying in your bed, and you just keep, (startles), (laughing) and you're terrified, you keep imaginin' over and over again jumping out of an airplane, and you can't figure out why you would do that, right? And, you're laying there, you have the worst night's sleep of your life, but you still have the hope that your friends were drunk, right? (laughing) So, you wake up the next day, and you go, you know, down, and you said where you were going to meet, and everybody's there. And you're like, aw, um, all right, all right, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, right? So, you get in the van, and you don't know that your friends had the same night that you had, 'cause they're pretending like they didn't, they're like, yeah man, my uncle's a Navy Seal, and you know, this is going to be great, I been looking forward to this. And, you like, oh my God, oh my God. And your stomach is terrible, you can't eat, and everything but you don't want to be the only punk, who doesn't jump out of this airplane. So, you get there, and then you have this safety brief, and you're standing there and the guys are telling you well, if the chute doesn't open, what's going to happen is you do--well why the hell, what could happen, (laughing) that the chute wouldn't open, right? So you do a thing, and what you do is your first jump, you're attached to a guy, who, you know, he's going to walk you out. So, you go, and you get there and there's an airplane and nobody's stopping. Everybody's still going. So, you get onto the airplane, and you're sitting there, and, you know, it's extra because you're sitting on some dude's lap, some stranger. (laughing) You sitting on his lap, and it's like, you know, you trying to make small talk, yeah man, (laughing) So, the deal, you be jumping with people all the time, huh? (laughing) Right, you know, so, and then you just want to make sure, you got kids, you know, you got people you need to see, right? You just want to make sure he's serious, right? You get in there, so everything is normal, so you fly, you go up, you go up, you go up, you go up to 14,000 feet, and you notice there's a light, it's red and it's yellow and green, right? So, right now, the light's red. So, then you start thinking, at some point the light's going to go green, but you don't know what's going to happen, right? And you wait and it goes yellow, and the light goes green, and somebody opens the door, and in that moment, you realize you've never been in a frickin' airplane with the door open. (laughing) Right, terror, oh sorry, I'm spittin', (spitting) oh, sorry, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, right? So, you go, and then, you know, if you were smart, you sat in the back so you don't go first, right? And then people start going out of the airplane. And you go, and the guy walks you up to the end of the thing and you're standing, and you're toes are on the edge, and you're looking out, down, to death. (laughing) And they say, on three. And they say one, two, and he pushes you on two, because people grab on three, right? (laughing) And you go, (inhaling), and you fall out of the airplane, and in one second, you realize that it's the most blissful experience of your life, you're flying, right? It doesn't feel like falling, right, it's like, you actually are kind of held a little bit, by the wind. And then you start, you start falling, you're falling, there's zero fear. You realize that the point of maximum danger is the point of minimum fear. It's bliss, it's bliss. And you're flying, (nervous laughing) right, and you're doing it, and then, 20 seconds, 25 seconds, 40 seconds, and you have enough time to just kind of be like, aw, that's that building I saw right there, oh, you can see the ocean. (laughing) Right, you start doing all of that and the lesson for me was, why were you scared in your bed the night before? Why did you, what do you need that fear for? Just don't go. Why are you scared in your bed, 16 hours before you jump? Why are you scared in the car? Why could you not enjoy breakfast? What did you need that, the fear is, fear of what? You're nowhere even near the airplane. Everything up to the stepping out, there's actually no reason to be scared. It only just ruins your day. You don't have to jump. And then, in that moment, all of a sudden, when you should be terrified, is the most blissful experience of your life. And, God placed the best things in life, on the other side of terror, on the other side of your maximum fear are all of the best things in life. - Lesson number three, stop complaining. - What if I told you this is the last Monday morning of your life? What if I told you, you die this week? Would you complain about your crap job, or that test you don't want to take? I doubt it. You would go much higher level thinking. Well, that's really what it takes. It takes understanding that if you're not pumped, right now, if you're begrudging what you're about to do, if you're not looking forward to it. Look, I respect practicality. You got to go through school 'cause your parents want to, you got to pay your rent, you got student loans, I get it. But please recognize the world we're living in. We're living in a world where there's so much more opportunity, this internet thing created way more opportunity for all of us. Way more. I mean look, you might not even be alive, like, you're Mom and Dad could have had sex, like three minutes later and you wouldn't even exist. And you're complaining. You could have ended up being a bus, a tree. I just don't get the mentality of being head down sad, on a Monday morning. I'm going to make Monday morning my. I'm going to make you Saturday, Monday morning. That's what I want to do every morning, and that's what I want from you. Please, take a step back and think about how awesome it actually is. And then, recognize that you can attack the world, in a totally different way, 'cause you were lucky enough to be born during this era. - Lesson number four, know your destination. - Imagine we're standing in a big empty room, right? And, we're standing in one corner, and I give you a simple instruction. I want you to go to that corner, in a straight line, right? Off you go, no big deal, right? Without telling you, I slip a chair in front of you. What do you do? You go around the chair. Now, you just disobeyed what I told you to do, I told you to go to that corner straight line. But this is the amazing things about human beings, which is when we're given a clear destination, we use our own creativity and our own sense of innovation and our own problem solving abilities to overcome obstacles to get to the destination. In other words, the destination is more important than the route, right? We are flexible about the route. We are obsessed with the destination, reset. We're standing in the corner together and I give you a simple instruction, go somewhere in this room in a straight line. And you say to me, well where do you want me to go? I'm like I dunno, you're smart, figure it out. Go in a straight line. And so you pick a point and you start walking, and without telling you I put a chair in front of you. And what do you do? You come to a grinding halt. I say, what'd you stop for? Well, you put a chair in front of me. Or, you'll make a sudden turn and go in another direction. And this is the problem, it's the same obstacle. The difference is when you have a clear destination, the obstacles become easy to overcome, when you don't have a clear destination, you keep coming to a grinding halt and what we do in our companies, is we're counting the steps we're taking along the route, but we're never looking at the destination, right? So a company says, made million dollars this year, we we're only planning on making $800,000. It's like, we took ten steps, we were only planning on taking eight. Where you going? No clue, right? (laughing) We count the steps. And, so the point is, is that people want to feel that the effort they're exerting actually are moving somewhere. And so, successful measurement, successful recognition. It's not just for the steps you take. It's not just for the effort, it's that the effort you exerted moved us closer to where we're trying to get to. And that get to should be some crazy ideal. My ideal is to live in a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning, you know, inspired to go to work and fulfilled by the work that they do. And the couple of measurements that I use are if the book is selling, and, by the way, people ask me how many have you sold, I have no clue, I have never asked the publisher because I don't care. I really don't care how many I've sold. What I care about is the Amazon rankings and that those are going steady, or up, and not plummeting, because that means other people, because I don't have a publicist, I don't have a marketing strategy on purpose. I didn't hire one of those companies to sell the book for me and the reason is, is because I'm not interested in book sales. I'm interested in the spreading of an idea. So I just use that as a metric to help me understand am I sort of marching in the, because the more I preach, is it resonating, you know? And so you have a couple of these imperfect measurements that help you understand, are you going along the way. So it's not just great effort, look what you achieved, because that's what we're doing now, right? Our goal is to increase top line revenues by 50 million dollars. For what reason, right? Which is, we have to know the destination, and then we say amazing, you took us that much closer, and if we go to the right, it's because we were overcoming an obstacle. If we hadn't gone to the right, we would have been stuck forever. Thank you, you know, it's not always straight lines. It's not always straight lines, but it's in one direction. She's pulling the cane out. - And lesson number five, enjoy life. - I'm not sure about that in the future, I think I would dictate I would be stupid, that's why I should retire early when I'm young. That is why I have a lot of things that I dream I want to do, I want to do philanthropy, I want to be a teacher, I want to go back to school, I want to do the environment. The world is so wonderful, why should we sea of Ali Baba all the time? I'm coming to this world, not to work, I want to come to this world to enjoy my life. I don't want to die in my office, I want to die on the beaches. (laughing) - Thank you guys so much for watching, I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to learn, what did you learn from this video? What was your favorite lesson? Leave it down in the comments below. Is there a lesson six or seven that you want to add to the list? Put it down in the comments. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you again for watching. Greetings again from Copenhagen, Denmark. 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.
