- Good morning, Believe Nation.
My name is Evan Carmichael,
my one word is believe and I believe
that entrepreneurs will solve all
of the world's major problems.
So to help you on your journey,
today's message is persevere.
Over to you, Steve Jobs.
(rooster crowing)
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Entspresso keep me going
♫ I wake up every morning
- A lot of people come to me and they say,
well I want to be an entrepreneur,
and I go oh that's
great, what's your idea,
and they go well I don't have one yet.
And I say, well, I think
you should go get a job
as a busboy or something
until you find something
you're really passionate about
because it's a lot of work
and I'm convinced that
about half of what separates
the successful entrepreneurs from
the non-successful ones
is pure perseverance.
It is so hard.
You pour so much of your
life into this thing
and there are such rough moments in time
that most people give up.
I don't blame 'em.
It's really tough.
And it consumes your life.
If you've got a family and
you're in the early days
of a company, it's, I can't
imagine how one could do it.
I'm sure it's been done, but it's rough,
'cause it's pretty much
an 18 hour a day job,
seven days a week for a while,
so unless you have a lot
of passion about this,
you're going to not survive,
you're going to give it up,
so you've got to have an idea or a problem
or a wrong that you want to right
that you're passionate about,
otherwise you're not going to have
the perseverance to stick it through.
And I think that's half
the battle right there.
- I often get asked,
what are the most common rules of success?
I've profiled all of these
people on my channel.
We've done so many top 10 profiles
and mentor me's, and believe lives,
and so much content.
What are the consistent
themes that come back
over and over and over
and over and over again?
And here they are.
I've got three main ones
I want to talk about.
First, people have an idea.
They're doing something that
they're passionate about.
Right?
They have this crazy
idea that they want to do
that they love, that they're attached to,
that they need to see
created in the world.
Second, is they got started.
They did something about it.
They didn't just sit on their idea.
They didn't just hope that one day
something's going to happen.
They didn't just tell themselves
that when this thing happens,
then I'm going to start.
No, they start.
You have an idea, you
do something about it
because if you wait, then that waiting
turns into weeks and months and years
and eventually a lifetime
and you look back
and as Wayne Dyer said,
the song dies within you.
You have to start.
And three, is they persevered.
They kept going.
When it got tough, they kept going.
And this is why it's so important
that you love what you do
because you have to be a little bit crazy.
You have to do it even when
you're not seeing results.
You have to do it even
when you have setbacks
and failures are in front of you.
You have to persevere.
If you look at every
single successful person,
not even just entrepreneur,
person that you look up to.
Look at whoever's at
the top of their game.
They persevered through a
lot of crap to get there.
It's not just this overnight sensation
that takes off and does well
and if you are lucky
enough to have that happen,
it quickly fizzles out because
you don't persevere through.
You got to keep doing the work.
And this is part of why I
started my YouTube channel,
it's part of why I started doing what I do
because when I had my first business,
I expected it to be hard
but not as hard as it was.
When I was reading magazine articles
and webpages and reading
all the success stories,
it made me feel like, you know what,
they could do it, I could do it too.
I got something in me.
I can make this a business.
And I wasn't prepared
for how crushing it was.
It was the most soul crushing
part of my entire life.
Starting my business and
putting in work and work
and work and work and just not
getting any kind of results,
not getting any kind of customers,
not getting any kind of
revenue, making $300 a month,
eating the same cans of beans
every single day for lunch,
celebrating a victory
with McDonald's french fries, it sucked.
And to do that every single day,
you could do it for so
long before it takes
this massive toll on you to
say I'm worth more than this.
And it's the love for what you're doing
that gets you through.
And I even told my
business partner I quit.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs think
about quitting on a regular basis.
I didn't quit.
I came back the next day
and I continued to work,
but it's something that we
don't talk about enough.
We read the articles, we see
these ultra success stories,
these people taking off, and
they always say work hard,
but you don't see all the
struggles and failures
that are part of their path.
And so it's part of why I do what I do.
I wanted to share with the
world, share with you guys,
to give you motivation,
to give you more belief
that you can do it, that
even though it's tough
and you're going to face a ton
of problems, at least for me,
I found that if I modeled
success, by looking at people
who'd been through what
I want to go through,
who've achieved massive
success, who've done the things
that I aspire to do in my
own way, that's helpful.
And just remembering that a lot
of these people you look up to,
they started with less than
what you already have right now.
They had an idea, which you have,
they took action, which
hopefully you're doing,
but they probably had less resources
than you already have right now.
Less at their disposal, less connections,
less opportunities with what we have
with the internet and technology now,
than what you already have right now.
They had less than what you already have
and so the difference
is they stuck with it.
They persevered.
They pushed through.
Pushed through.
When they felt like
giving up, they didn't.
And so feeling like you
want to quit can be normal
because it's insanely hard to do this,
being an entrepreneur.
But you have to persevere through.
If you have a great
idea, if you get started,
but if you don't persevere,
you're going to constantly start
and stop and start and
stop and start and stop
and never build anything truly amazing.
You need to persevere.
So the question of the day today is,
I'm curious, what is the biggest thing
that you had to persevere
through in your business?
What was the biggest
challenge that you faced
or are currently facing that
you had a really hard time
with and you have to go deeper in
and really persevere through?
Let me know, share it down
in the comments below.
I'm really curious to find out.
I also want to give a quick
shout out to Tamera Weeks.
Thank you so much for all your support
and for picking up 10 copies
of my book, Your One Word
and for posting it on your YouTube channel
with that awesome review.
Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
I'm really happy that you enjoyed my book.
So thank you guys so much for watching.
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever your one word is.
Much love and I'll see
you again tomorrow morning
for another shot of Entspresso.
♫ I wake up every morning.
♫ Entspresso keep me going.
- Oh, all the time.
All the time.
And then you push through it.
You push through it 'cause
what's the alternative?
You're going to leave that idea
stuck in your head forever?
That sucks.
The alternative is you go through life
and you had this great
idea and nothing came of it
'cause you got tired and yeah,
sometimes you don't go to the party
that all your friends are at,
because the idea is calling
to you in that moment.
Wait For It's a great example of that.
I was on my way to my
friend's birthday party
when that lyric showed up,
when death doesn't discriminate
showed up in my head.
The idea came on the A down,
I started writing it down on the train,
(speaking foreign
language) of the A train,
break dancers are dancing,
I have my headphones on.
I get out, the whole
chorus comes all at once.
I write it down and I
suddenly see the shape
of the whole song, I was just like,
the chorus is Burr, that's who he is.
I go into my friend's party,
I go hey, what's up man?
Happy birthday, I got to go.
(audience laughter)
I get on the L train and I
write the rest of the song
on the way back home from the L to the A
back up to 207th street.
You have to do that sometimes.
You have to say no to your
friends to say yes to your work.
Because what are you going
to do, like lose that idea?
Because you decided to have
a drink with your friends?
It's not worth it.
Your friend'll be there.
- When I look back at all
my business accomplishments,
CNN was the most exciting
and most challenging
and the most satisfying
when we were successful
because I got proven right.
I was Time Magazine's Person of the Year
for the whole world, I mean that's,
what more could you do than that?
I made the cover of Success Magazine,
I held a copy up to dad and
said, dad is that enough?
I'm on the cover of Success magazine.
And then we had the AOL merger,
so it didn't last very long
and I was down and out again.
One of the worst mistakes that's
ever been made in business.
We went into it half cocked and unprepared
and that's something you don't want to do
on a merger of that consequence.
You know, you want to really be careful
when you're dealing with
billions and billions of dollars
and the careers of literally
thousands of people
that were, their life
savings was wiped out too.
I had some doubts and I voiced them
and I talked to the best people I could
for advice and they felt
like there was no way
I could have stopped it
so I went along with it,
be a good soldier.
And I lost 80% of my money.
I lost my job at CNN
and Turner Broadcasting.
At that same time, Jane
Fonda and I got a divorce
and I lost a grandchild that passed away.
So I was really down
and I had two choices.
Either go down, which I
had plenty of excuses for,
but I didn't want to go down.
I still felt like I had
contributions to make
and I just gritted my teeth
and said I'm going to come out of this.
Do it like Scarlett O'Hara did
at the end of the first half
of Gone With The Wind,
remember she was standing
up on the hill as the camera went back
and she said as God as my witness,
I'll never be hungry again.
That's it, just God as my witness,
I'm going to get through this
and I'm going to make a comeback.
