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July 15, 2019 • 31 mins
How exactly does someone become a failure? Separate from quitting, becoming a "failure" actually comes from taking shortcuts and taking advantage of others in an effort to benefit the self. Except, sooner or later, your being unqualified is going to bite you in the ass. But I can bet, unbeknownst to a lot of you, if you're working to make your life and the world around you a better place...you're already a success.
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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Straw Hut Media.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Something I often wonder is how does somebody become a failure?
I don't think we consider that very often. We look
at people who we might consider losers or failures, quitters.
We talked about quitters last week. How does somebody become

(00:39):
a failure in your opinion, in the opinion of the world.
It could be defined in a number of ways. You dreamed,
and you always fell short of your dreams. You never
made it, you quit. But something I want everyone to
be aware of is when I look at the world

(00:59):
around me, I wonder what small decisions we make that
are leading us down the path toward failure. Because I
see little things in the world around me all the
time that I wonder about. I've always been a bit
of a boy scout, I have to admit I always
thought rules were in place to be followed. I always

(01:24):
grew up thinking that these things existed. The law mattered
because it kept people safe and it would eventually lead
to justice. Obviously, the older we get, we learned that
that's not always the truth. The law can lead a
lot of people astray. And the truth is is that
if the law is hurting the people, we fix the

(01:47):
law and we help the people. Helping other people should
be our main priority in life. Piggybacking on what I
said last week, don't let it be at your own detriment.
Know when you need to rest, know when you need
to take care of yourself, know when you need to
help yourself. But remember that you're only one in the world.

(02:09):
The whole world doesn't revolve around you. So how does
one of us, as an individual or collectively, as a society,
or as a group of people, how do we become failures?
Because I would argue that more people seem to be
failures than not when you see people taking advantage of
other people and they might not even know that they're

(02:31):
doing it. And it starts from something super small. When
I walk my dog every day, I pass by this
giant sort of trailer type dumpster thing that's meant for
tree branches and grass and all that kind of stuff.

(02:52):
It's meant to be composted eventually, shred it up, taken
off three yardwork. It's big, and they've been chopping down
all the limbs and the trees around the building over
the past couple of weeks because they were overgrown, and
they've been putting them all in this giant trailer hauling
it off, emptying it bringing you back. It's been sitting
on the side of the road now for two weeks,

(03:15):
completely unused. So there's just a giant trailer taking up
multiple parking spot sizes on the side of the road,
full of branches now on the top of it. Every
single time I go outside, there's a new piece of
trash that somebody else has put on top of the branches.

(03:37):
There's a seven to eleven carton from a hot dog.
There's like beer cans, there's countless amount of dog poop bags.
There's trash, other people's garbage being piled on top of
the branches that are meant to go be composted someday.
It's very inconvenient that it's been sitting there for all
these weeks. But I do believe that eventually it's gonna

(04:02):
get carted off. I can't say there forever. The city's
gonna have to take it away, otherwise it's gonna be
a problem regardless. The person who's gonna receive this trailer
full of branches that's gonna have to shred it all
up and deal with it. Has no idea that it's
been sitting there for two weeks, three weeks, causing a
major inconvenience. So what they're gonna have to end up

(04:24):
dealing with is all of the literal shit in bags
on top of it, other people's trash, other people's garbage,
sort through all that, deal with all that gross shit
in order to be able to do the job that
they're supposed to do to process all these branches. I
don't know if I'm using the right words, but you

(04:44):
understand what I'm trying to say. Because people are lazy
over time, and they see something there that makes their
life more convenient, they start to use a shortcut to
make their life more convenient. You're walking your dog, You've
got a poop bag. You want to throw it away,
but there isn't a garbage can anywhere close by. So

(05:05):
what do you do? You chuck it into this trailer.
You've got a hot dog carton, you've got a beer can,
you've got soda cans, you got bottles, plastic, whatever it is.
There's not a recycling can or a trash can nearby,
So what do you do? You just chuck it on
top of this trailer. It sounds stupid, but to me,
the thing that delineates people who are failures versus people

(05:29):
who are successes is that you are conscious and aware
that every little action you take in your life has
an impact on the world around you. And you don't
even necessarily have to be participating in what happens afterward.
You just need to be aware that every single thing
that you do that you put out into the world reverberates.

(05:53):
It might come back to you, but it might reverberate
into somebody else's life. So there are people who someday
will have to sort through all of your garbage because
you were too lazy to find a regular trash can
or recycling bin and dispose of it properly. Now people
are gonna have to dig through shit in order to

(06:16):
do the job that they're supposed to do. And who
put that shit there for them?

Speaker 3 (06:22):
You did.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Because in the moment, you thought that doing this little
thing would make your life more convenient. But what you
didn't realize is that those little actions inconvenience other people,
and that's what starts to make a failure. You start
to take shortcuts because you believe that your time is
more precious than the time of the people who have

(06:46):
to do the work after the thing that you've done,
and you're not even consciously aware of those people. You
just assume that because your life is the most important,
you should be able to do what's most convenient to you.
Because someday this trailer is gonna get card off to
a magic land where everything will be fine, and then
there'll be parking spaces and everything will be great. But
then where are you gonna throw your trash? You can

(07:08):
be responsible and find an actual receptacle, or you're gonna
start throwing it in other place. You're gonna leave it
on the side of the road. You're gonna not pick
it up. I mean, I see this all the time.
The world is heavily polluted because we believe in that
instant that ourselves and the way that we dispose of
our baggage and our trash and our trauma is the

(07:30):
most important thing in our lives at that moment. We're
unaware of how it's going to affect other people. That
starts to build what it means to be a failure
because you don't care about anybody but yourself. You're trying
to make your life more convenient, and thereby inconveniencing the
world around you. It's like telling a lie. Habitual liars.

(07:55):
The more you tell the lie to yourself, the more
you start to believe it. And then one day you're
not even actively aware that you're lying. You are unconsciously
now a liar. The more you cheat and the more
you tell yourself it's okay, the more you tell yourself

(08:16):
it's okay to take shortcuts to convenience me, even though
it will inconvenience other people, the more it will inform
your subconscious and you will just become a cheater and
not even know it. And you think that you're fine,
You think that you're on a path to success because
nobody ever called you on your shit. You've spent all

(08:40):
this time looking for ways to cut corners, to take
advantage of other people so you could get ahead. And
then finally, when someone says, what are you doing? Are
you kidding me? You're a cheater, You're lying. You're caught
red handed, and you fall all the way to the
bottom and you fail as hard as you can possibly fail.

(09:01):
And that's how you become a failure, because you try
to cheat the system and make the world about you,
not how you can make the world a better place
by being in it. That's your opportunity. We forget that
we have an obligation to our brothers and sisters and

(09:21):
to the world around us. And it is our honor
to be alive in this world and to help make
it a better place. That is not only our duty,
it is our honor. What a glorious thing. You have
the opportunity to take goodwill into the world and make
it a better place. God, that's a reward in and

(09:44):
of itself. But life's hard, and it kicks you in
the fucking nuts, and you get pissed off, and you think,
how can I make all take all the shortcuts I
want to take to make life easier for me, because
I'm having a bad day, because life is hard for me,
because things suck, and I'm pissed off, and I deserve
good things, and I don't care what happens to anybody else,

(10:07):
because if I don't think about the people around me,
I can basically convince myself that they don't even exist.
Therefore they can't matter. When you become so consumed in
how you're gonna get ahead at the behest of everybody else,
you start to unconsciously tell yourself that the rest of
the world around you does not matter. When you lie

(10:31):
to yourself long enough and you start to believe it,
you're not only doing a disservice to yourself, but you're
doing damage to yourself, and you could be doing irrevocable
damage to the world around you. You become a failure
without even knowing it, because you think you're on the
path to success, but you've built that path with bricks

(10:53):
of lying and cheating and shortcuts. And then when you
get to the end and it all falls out from
underneath you, you have no skill set for how to get
back to the top, for even how to get back up.
Life will knock you on your ass, and then you
will be sitting there with no idea how to even

(11:15):
stand because you didn't take the time to do it
the right way. You kept trying to cheat because you
wanted to do it the easy way. Life is fucking hard.
It is so insanely hard. You couldn't even imagine some

(11:36):
of the things that people are going through, some of
the paths that people had to take, some of the
dedication and the commitment that people had to give and
will to themselves and promise themselves and follow through on
and put the time in and put the work in
just to get to a place of being happy with themselves.

(11:57):
It's way money can't buy you happiness. I don't mean
to always be harping on money, but it's true who
you are on the inside determines whether or not you
are succeeding. Because if you are trying, and you are
doing things in the world to make the world a
better place along your path, you are succeeding.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
Now.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
You don't have to wake up and have a million dollars.
If you are working towards your dream and you are
putting the time in, and you are consciously aware of
how to take care of yourself and the world around you,
you are winning. If you put your blinders on and

(12:45):
you just barrel through barricades of other people's suffering and
unhappiness as a shortcut to get to the end, you
will hit the wall at sixty five miles an hour
and you will fly out of the windshield and you
will die. That's failure. I always think of it like
a staircase, right or the ladder to success. There's always

(13:07):
a boardroom where there's like, you know, a graphic, and
everyone's like, look at that. This is this is how
we do this. Consider it like a staircase. Everybody has
to climb the staircase to get to the top. Right,
let's say this is the only logical path that you
can take from A to B. From beginning to goal,

(13:29):
B doesn't necessarily have to be the end, C, D, E,
F G. You keep recalibrating and setting new goals. But
if reaching a single goal is a success, then from
getting to A to B you have to climb the stairs.
So how do you do that? You put one foot
in front of the other. If you find a shortcut
that by pushing somebody over, or by stepping on other people,

(13:55):
or by using other people, you can jump up several steps.
Or you can go from A to B without walking
the steps because something bought up a path for you.
You got in the elevator. The elevator is only allowed
for people of privilege. Right, you get to go from
A to B without walking up the steps, without really

(14:19):
struggling and crawling through the shit, without working. That's inherent privilege.
So we have to be aware of that. It's not
to say that everybody who's born into a certain class.
That's exactly what's happening. And everyone's a cheater. No, But
if you've lied to yourself for so long that you
don't realize that you found some secret passageway that takes

(14:39):
you from A to B instantaneously, you're short changing yourself
because when you get to the goal, you're going to
be unqualified to be there. When you get to the top,
you will not have earned it because you didn't put
the time in to do it the right way.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
You cheat it.

Speaker 2 (15:03):
You took shortcuts and took advantage of other people along
the way. And so when you get to the top
and someone says, congratulations, these are now your responsibilities. This
is what success means. It's enlightenment. Prometheus is fire. Once
you get it, that's when the real work begins. Success

(15:26):
is not I reach my goal. I made a million dollars.
Now I'm gonna quit and disappear from the world forever.
Maybe people do that, but most people realize things just
get harder and harder and harder, more money, more problems.
It's the whitest way I could ever say that. But
deal with that. That seem like sound like you're pissed
off dad. There's always more to do along the way,

(15:51):
that it never ends. Success is always evolving and changing.
And so if you get to the top and people say,
congratulate you made it. Now here's everything you're responsible for doing.
Now that you have this privilege of success, Now that
you worked for this, you have to take all this
and do this. You will say I don't know how

(16:12):
to do that, and they'll say, well, how the fuck
did you get up here? And they'll say I took
the elevator and they'll go, oh, oh no, and then
they'll kick you and you'll fall down the stairs and
you won't be able to get back up because you
don't even know. How do you think if you went
into the gym and you had never been to a
gym in your life, or you haven't been to the

(16:34):
gym in six months or a year, and you told
yourself today, I am going to lift two hundred and
fifty pounds and a bench press or a squat. But
you've never been to the gym before. But you just
want it, you know, and nobody ever taught you you
couldn't have it, And without any experience, you loaded two

(16:56):
hundred and fifty pounds onto the bar and unracked it,
what would happen. It would crush.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
You, You would suffocate.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
Someone's gonna have to run over and save your life
so you don't die. Your negligence becomes somebody else's responsibility.
Your negligence becomes somebody else's responsibility because you didn't take
the time to practice, to take the path of hard work,
the path of most resistance. Because you needed to practice,

(17:31):
You needed to train until you were ready for that responsibility,
until you were ready to lift that weight. You thought
that you could just waltz into the gym and rack
up a bunch of weight and lift it, and it
crushed you. That's what failure means. Failure is assuming that

(17:55):
just because you deserve good things, because you think you do,
and you took shortcuts, that you're shocked when it doesn't
work out your way. A person can be unprepared but
still talented, and when they reach their goal catch up.
It happens all the time. Sometimes it's called fake it
till you make it. Fake it till you make it

(18:16):
doesn't mean be a liar, at least in my book.
There is a level to which if you want something
bigger and better, and you believe you've put the time
in and you believe you deserve it, but there are
certain things that you might be unprepared for. You have
to believe that you are intelligent and talented enough and
have practiced and put the time in enough that when
you get there, you will learn to catch up. And

(18:38):
it happens all the time. That's normal. You can't be
ready for absolutely every detail. If you do that, you'll
stay stuck in the same place, and then you're neither
a failure or success. You're just spinning your wheels because
you're too scared because you need to be fully prepared,
and then that never happens, and so then you're just
in limbo. Sometimes you you have to leap before you

(19:01):
look in order to land somewhere you want to be.
You have to trust in the work that you put
in and the time that you put in in order
to make sure that you will succeed. You have to
have trust in yourself. But the only way you can
trust yourself is if you are confident that you trained
for this moment, that you practiced for this moment, that

(19:24):
you deserve this moment, Because if you didn't put the
time in, but you still feel like you deserved it.
You will fail. So you can be unprepared, but you
can't be unqualified. Remember, a person can be talented and
unprepared for things in life. That's how we deal with life.

(19:44):
It comes at us a million miles a minute, and
you're never prepared. But you have a strong backbone and
you know how to stand up when you get knocked down,
and you knew how to fight because you practice and
you taught yourself how to do that. But if you're unqualified,
you're fucked. Remember that's it for you. And if you
lied and cheated and got to the top and everybody

(20:05):
then finally found out because you couldn't keep up with
everybody else because you didn't have the skill set, do
you think it's gonna be easy for you to get
back up there again? Do you think that everyone's gonna go,
let's give them another chance, Let's give her another chance,
let's give them another chance. No, because now you've developed
the character of a failure. To them, you are what

(20:30):
failure looks like because you lied and you cheated, and
you took shortcuts. And every time that they need to
make an example to the next unqualified person who comes
up the stairs, they're gonna say, remember so and so exactly,
that's you. Now, that's you. You're just like that other person.
This is what failure looks like. Bye, there's not enough

(20:53):
space at the top for everybody. So the unqualified person
develops a work ethic that is unsustainable because it's not
well work ethic at all. It's finding ways to convenience
your life and inconvenience everybody else. And you know what's

(21:13):
gonna happen. You're gonna land that big job by cheating,
and then you're gonna be in that boardroom or conference
room or whatever it is, and everyone says, Okay, where's
the work that we needed you to do? And you're
gonna put your hands up like I mean, it's everybody
else's problem, right, it's not mine. I didn't get all
the instructions blah blah blah, and they're gonna fire you.
You can't sustain a job like that with no skill set.

(21:38):
You can't sustain success. If you didn't earn success, you
just become a failure. And then everybody remembers your name
and they remember you as the person who failed. I
believe that most of you listening are not this person,
but sometimes I think it's good to remind ourselves that

(22:00):
the little stones that we throw into ponds of life
or lakes or oceans always make ripples, no matter how
big or how small. And so when you get up
in your day to day and you live your life
putting one foot in front of the other towards your goal,
remember that every single thing that you do has ramifications
in the world around you. You are not without responsibility

(22:25):
for your actions, conscious or unconscious. You are not without responsibility.
Everybody has a responsibility to themselves and to the world
around them, including people, plants, and animals. So why protecting
the environments very important. The notion that we could convince
ourselves that by existing and putting everything into the atmosphere

(22:48):
that we're doing has zero impact on the world is
the most ignorant thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
Because if I shove that person in the chest and
they fall down and I said I didn't do anything,
they'll say, yes, you shoved me and I fell down,
and I said, no, I didn't do that. I mean,

(23:10):
there's no proof that shoving would knock somebody down. You're
just a weak person. If you were stronger, maybe you
wouldn't have gotten knocked down, right, So there's no correlation
between those things. You're just a weak individual and I
shoved you and you fell and that's your fault. But
you know, people get shoved down all the time. It's
just the nature of the cycle of life. People falling down,
getting shoved. It happens. Like doesn't that sound like the stupidest,

(23:31):
dumbest thing you've ever heard in your life. So when
we say, hey, we're doing we're doing damage to the
world around us by our actions, and people say no,
we're not, it's not happening. It's really not. I mean,
everything's fine, it's fine, yeah, I mean, these things happen
cycles in the universe. Heat you know, gets hot or whatever.
Holes theils don't get blown open randomly, solar flare. You know,

(23:53):
it's very complicated, but it's it's all normal. So relax.
That just sounds really fucking stupid. You sound like an
idiot because there's no evidence behind that, and we're saying no, no, no,
we're shoving this and it's falling down and you're telling
us that we're not doing that. When you live your
life from a place of ignorance, that's what happens you

(24:16):
start to believe that your actions have no consequences on
the world around you, and you become so self absorbed
and so narcissistic, and you become unconsciously a cheater and
a liar that you honestly don't know that what you're
doing is hurting not just everybody around you, but yourself.

(24:36):
Because you could be the wealthiest person in the world
and treat everybody like trash, and everyone could be clamoring
to get to your good graces so they get a
piece of your money when you die. Except when you die,
everyone's going to talk about what a monster you were,
and so you leave a legacy of failure. You were

(25:00):
succeeding all the way until the end. But what happens
now is all those people who are clamoring for your money,
who are on the same path of lying and cheating
as you were, is that now they're all fighting and
gnawing and gnashing at each other and killing each other
just to get a piece of what you got by cheating,
and your legacy becomes failure, and everyone will remember what

(25:22):
a failure you were because you had the opportunity to
do it the right way and make the world a
better place, and instead you took to shortcut, and now
all the history books will say that you were a failure.
Be conscious of who you are and what you're doing.
Be conscious of the actions that you take. I do

(25:42):
believe that all most of you. I can't say all.
And if you feel like maybe you're this person, check yourself.
I want to believe that most of you are on
the path to success. Everybody makes mistakes, everybody takes shortcuts.
I do it. I'm not up here to tell you
that I'm I'm up here to tell you that I
learned this about myself and I'm sharing it with you.

(26:04):
That's the difference. I don't come with knowledge because I
got it from God. I got it from failing. And
because I failed, I learned, and now that I've learned,
I'm bringing it to you. That's enlightenment. You don't reach
enlightenment by doing nothing but all the right things. You

(26:24):
reach enlightenment more often than not by making mistakes and
learning the right way to do it, because you have
the consciousness to understand that your actions have consequences. So
what do you want to be? Do you want to
be a success or do you want to be a failure.

(26:45):
Being a success is very, very hard. Doing the right
thing in life is sometimes almost impossible. It is always
easier to do things the wrong way, and it might
feel good in a moment. It's like a drug. It'll
get you high real fast, but that came down will

(27:08):
fuck you up. A promise. If you want to be
a success, you have to do the work. You have
to be committed and dedicated to the practice. You have
to suck it up when life hits you. You have
to know what it means to fail and learn and
grow and be better. You don't get to success by waiting.

(27:32):
You don't get to success by cheating. You don't get
to success by sitting and praying and then doing nothing
about it. God helps those who help themselves. Do you
know how to help yourself? Because we can't help you.
Only you can do that. We can encourage you, We
can open doors. I've said it before. Books don't change

(27:55):
your life. This podcast does not change your life. It
opens doors. It opens when it gives you opportunities. It
might give you glasses, but you are the one who
has to get up and walk through the door, and
then you change your life. So success is reliant only
on you. They say, luck is when opportunity meets preparation,

(28:19):
And I think a lot of people equate the opportunity
with success, the big acting gig, I dream of the
big writing gig, whatever it is that you dream of.
You hope, you pray that tomorrow you'll wake up and
it'll just be right there and you'll get it. But
if you didn't prepare yourself for it, you will miss it.

(28:43):
It'll either slip out of your fingers or you won't
even see it. You won't even know that it's there
because you're not prepared, because you didn't do the work.
Because the truth of success is that every single day
that you take a step towards doing things the right way,
towards doing things to help yourself and help your brothers
and sisters and help the world around you, you are succeeding.

(29:08):
So believe it. Right now, at this very moment, you
are a success. You are a success. But if you cheat,
if you lie, if you take shortcuts, you become a failure.
Don't be a failure. Remember, if you're trying your goddamnness

(29:31):
right now to do everything in your power to succeed,
you're already succeeding.

Speaker 3 (29:35):
Congratulations.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
The Motivation Report is part of the straw Hut media network.
If you need life advice, you want motivation, you need tips, tricks,
style advice. So I'm not very stylish, but I can try.
I can link you to some I don't know, some websites.
Maybe email me at the Motivation Report at gmail dot com.
You can find me on social media at will Sterling Underscore.

(30:10):
There's lots of pictures of my dog. I want you
all to remember that this is a space for growth
and change, not just for you, but for me. So
I am the one who's truly learning as well, and
I'm happy to sort of be a conduit for growth
and let you learn things that I'm learning, and in return,
I learn things from you. Feedback is very important, so

(30:31):
if you have anything you bump up against, I want
to know about it. I listen to a lot of
motivational speakers, and a lot of what they say resonates
with me in different ways. And I have the empathy
to understand that not every angle is right for me,
so I sort we cherrypick right. But as we talked
about last week, one of the biggest disagreements I have
is that you need to learn when to rest. And

(30:53):
I learned that by realizing that what I was trying
to do was live out somebody else's path towards success
I own. And I was judging myself up against what
other people told me I would or should be doing
what other people told me I should be doing. That's
not how it works. You have to make mistakes along

(31:14):
the way to learn how you should be doing it
for you. So I can't stress enough. I don't change
your life. Books don't change your life. They open doors,
but it's up to you to step through those doors.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
We'll see you next time.
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Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal

NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal

Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.

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