 I shot this video for you. If you're someone dealing with the bullshit, discouraging advice of your friends and family and society, people who are afraid to see you change and are afraid to see you be the best you can in your life. If you're tired of being around people who don't want you to do anything different than what you're doing and they want you to stay small, this video is for you because I know that you need it. So five or ten years ago I went to this TED Talk and the TED Talk was back in Stanford Connecticut where I was living at the time and I had listened to all these great TED speakers and at the end of it I walked up to one of the guys that gave a very inspirational talk. You know he wanted to know what I was working on and I said I had all these projects and I'm super ambitious, very hard working, very excited. You know I had nothing to show for my dreams, nothing to show for my goals, but I was very very driven. And what this guy said to me as he looked me in the eye, he kind of gave me a bit of a blasé, kind of just like a whatever kid, like another ambitious dreamer, look. And he said you know most ambitious dreamers like you, they end up just becoming middle managers at some big company and they make good money but they don't usually change the world. And that guy's words were the perfect encapsulation of how most people don't ever want you to see you reach your full potential. They don't want you to exceed them, they don't want you to be someone who changes the world, they don't even want you to change your own damn life because not only is you going after your dream and your goals the perfect mirror for other people to see the fear that has held them back to make them stay the same, most people don't think they have what it takes to do something great. So I used this guy's bullshit advice for fuel, right? I was like all right well let's see maybe that's true and maybe it isn't. And I think that you can use this for pretty much anything at the beginning of your journey to change your life where you don't really have the results yet. So when your friends and family are asking about what do you do in reading those weird self-growth books? What are you doing reading relationship books? What are you doing spending a thousand dollars on a self-growth seminar? You don't have anything to show yet. All you have to show is your hunger. For this guy, even though I never saw him again, I don't even know his name, I don't remember his face, but he was the collective voice of so many people in my life who didn't want me to change, who just wanted me to be the same little kid and stay in the same little town. After I heard that conversation in my head over and over, I used that as fuel. So every night after I came home from my nine to five job, I would go to the gym from five thirty to six thirty, go to my favorite cafe and from seven to ten spend every single night working on my business. Every single night figuring out how I was going to make my dreams happen. In every single part of life and in those next three years, after three years, even though I was making barely any money in my business, I built a successful enough website and blog to quit my job. The year after that, I wrote my first book, Master of the Day, was number one in every health category I put it in. The year after that, I began my YouTube channel and in the first year, went from zero to a hundred thousand subscribers and for several years averaged a hundred thousand subscribers new per year. From that, I ended up getting my doctorate in Chinese medicine and from that, moved to LA. Now I'm on the next phase of this quadrant of life and all of that, all of that in that intervening time, every year I took multiple trips to new countries that I'd always dreamed about because everyone said, you've got to be rich to travel, you're going to have to save for retirement. Who has money to do that? All those places are unsafe, but it was all the same voice. It was that guy's voice, you're never going to amount to much, you're never going to make your dreams happen. Those people are just lucky. So play it safe and get the boring ass middle manager job at the company. Be happy with your 150k salary, doing nothing useful in the universe, and be at peace with it. Because every time I heard someone discourage me, I heard that same guy's voice. Most people just end up here. And what he was really saying is most people never really amount to that much. So let's be real here. No one knows shit about who you can become and that is what I'm trying to say. Nobody can predict that. Nobody knows shit about you because you're a human being, not a friggin slug. You can decide to change your life any day you want. Like today, you can decide to eat a donut or go get a salad. And those decisions, consciously or unconsciously, subconsciously made, are going to determine the trajectory of your life in many different ways. You can decide right now, you've never been ambitious. You're now going to be the hungriest person you know, because you sure as hell don't want the next year or five years looking like the last year or five. You can decide right now that the last year I said I was going to write my book or begin my YouTube channel or ask that pretty girl out that I see I work every day. You can decide now, today, to do that. Today, I'm going to write my book for one hour in a cafe. Today, I'm going to talk to that girl or that guy. Today, I'm going to actually shoot a YouTube video. I don't care if it sucks, I'm going to put it on the internet. You're a friggin human being. You can decide to change whenever you want. Most people will never change, but if you remember that, the voice of that person, that teacher, that family member, that significant other, that friend, the voices of the people that want you to stay the same, that don't want to see you reach your full potential. If you think about those voices every time, that can be the fuel you need to stay hungry every single day of your life to change it. So don't you dare believe for a second the voices of the people around you that want you to stay the same, that don't want you to move out of your small town or take that new job or you're going to get rejected by that person. Don't you dare believe the voices of those people that want you to stay the same. They don't want to see you reach your full potential. That don't want to see you reach every damn goal and dream you've ever dreamed of because that is the majority of humans. And if you let that voice get in your head, it's going to make you stay the same when you need to be the hungriest you've ever been before. The reality is, most people don't change. Those people sure as hell are not going to change their life 10 years from now. They'll be exactly where they are. Just fatter. And they sure as hell won't change the world or make a dent in the universe. You can change anytime you want to become any kind of person you want to be. The question is, will you?