YOU CAN'T GIVE UP

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It always seems impossible until it's done.

Spoken by:

Rick Warren
twitter.com/rickwarren

Eric Thomas
instagram.com/etthehiphoppreacher

Les Brown
instagram.com/thelesbrown

Trent Shelton
instagram.com/TrentShelton

Music:

Cezame Trailers - Oblivion

Cezame Trailers
apmmusic.com/libraries/cezame-trailers-cet

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Most people today
give up
too soon.
They haven’t learned
steadfastness.
They haven’t learned
perseverance.
They haven’t learned
endurance,
the ability
to handle pressure.
The ability to keep
hanging on
and hanging in there

(00:22):
when things go bad.
And every day just looks the same and feels the same.
Now I get the feeling like this is endless.
Now I get the feeling like
maybe these chains are never going to break.
This storm is never going to cease.
"Why did I take this job?"
"Why did I make this move?"
You start second guessing yourself.
You start doubting yourself.
You start filling yourself with

(00:43):
feelings of failure, like,
I can’t do this.
You lose your confidence.
You start feeling like you’re a failure
because of the frustration and fatigue.
How do you handle failure?
How do you react
when your plans
collapse?
How do you react when
it’s taken longer than you thought,
it’s more complicated than you thought,

(01:03):
and you start doubting,
do I even have the ability to do this?
You want to give up.
You want to fall down.
You want to turn around and run
with everybody else.
You’re going to question yourself.
You’re going to say,
is this really making much sense?
All of that
will create you into a certain kind of person.
Experience the rejection.
Experience the hard times.

(01:23):
That’s how you grow.
That’s how you develop yourself.
That’s how you begin to appreciate
what you get.
When you’re working on a dream,
at some point in time,
a transition takes place.
And the transition is
what you’re becoming in pursuit of the dream.
Because even if you don’t get the dream,
you become such a strong and powerful person

(01:45):
because you’ve now developed yourself
in such confidence
and such competence in how to deal in the arena of life
that you can move into another area
and not miss a beat.
Once you begin to discover who you are,
then you really realize
how you have been given authority and dominion
over everything on the face of the earth.
But you can only do that through the struggle of life.
I don’t care who you are.

(02:05):
I don’t care how many defeats that you’ve suffered.
"What if you don’t get there?"
If I don’t get there,
I have enjoyed the journey.
It’s okay.
But you’ve got to make up your mind
that whatever it takes,
I’m going to do it,
that you deserve it,
that you want it
and won’t do without it.
Sometimes it takes losing your everything
just to show that it was nothing that you ever needed
in the first place.
Sometimes it takes losing

(02:26):
everything that you think you need
just to show that there’s something better for your life.
Your greatest setbacks will set you up
for that major comeback.
Sometimes you have to lose certain things
to gain better things.
Sometimes the best way to add to your life
is to subtract from it.
When you’re facing those rejections day in and day out,
don’t say,
I had a bad day today.
Say I had a character building day.

(02:47):
What did you learn?
What did you get out of that day?
You can’t spend your time worrying about the failures,
worrying about the mistakes.
If you sit there worrying about the mistakes all day,
you take away time,
you take away energy
from doing what you’re supposed to do.
You’re not going where you’re supposed to be going.
And what you gotta do
is learn to play through
the haters.
Play through it.
As if it doesn’t exist.

(03:08):
Unless you attempt to do something beyond that
which you’ve already mastered,
you will never grow.
So you’ve got to put something out here
that you can’t reach easily,
that has got to make you stretch,
got to make you jump for it,
got to make you
get back a little bit and dig in
so that you can take a leap for it.
And maybe you jump up there and you miss it
and you skin your knees
and you come back again
and you bust your lip next time.

(03:28):
But you keep on and through that process
you learn how to leap higher.
You start challenging yourself
to dig deeper
and then you discover some things about you
that you don’t know right now.
Some talents that you have in you
that you didn’t know that you can do.
I don’t know everything.
I have not accomplished everything.
I’m not where I want to be.
I’m still learning.
I’m still growing.
I’m still trying to get better.

(03:49):
You’ve got to position yourself and stop pouting.
Stop crying.
Stop looking at what other people are getting
and look at what they’re doing.
And if you start doing it,
you start getting it.
You don’t get out of life what you want.
You get out of life what you earn.
If it’s not working,
it doesn’t mean
that it doesn’t work.
All it means is that your approach isn’t working.
And so now you’ve got to become more creative.

(04:10):
Now you’ve got to go back to the drawing board.
Now you need some more coaching.
Now you need some more direction
of what you need to do.
To take some corrective action
to get you on the path.
How do you know it can happen?
You know
because others have done it,
so it’s possible that you can do it.
And what is necessary is
that you work the system.
That you take the coaching.
Take the directions.

(04:30):
Look at the people that are doing it that are successful,
and emulate them.
And it’ll work.
Even if you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel,
even if you have no evidence to support that position,
even if no one else believes that you can do it,
even if the odds are stacked against you,
even if your chances of survival are slim to none,

(04:52):
say to yourself,
no matter how bad it is
or how bad it gets,
I’m going to make it.