NOTHING CHANGES IF NOTHING CHANGES 2.0 - Best Hopecore Motivational Speeches
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Listen up, corporate types. It's me, Billy Idol. You might use Workday's responsible AI to future-proof your business. That doesn't make you rock stars. When have rock stars ever been responsible? Be a finance and HR rock star with Workday. Nothing changes if nothing changes, man. In order for something to change, there needs to be change. They'd say, well, I'm afraid to make a change. And I'd say, that's okay.

That's understandable. How afraid are you of not making a change? Let's make a little vision of that. You're 35. You hate your job. What's the consequence? You're not motivated. You don't want to get out of bed in the morning. You're starting to get depressed. You're getting bitter. You're getting resentful. You're getting cynical. You're amotivated at work. You're not doing a very good job. And you're starting to shrink. Now play that out for 10 years. You don't change it. You don't fix it. And what happens?

You're going to be in the same situation, but 10 years older. And if you can't get out of that situation now, what the hell makes you think you're going to get out of it in 10 years? You're only seeing what's in front of you. You're not seeing what's above you. I can't change the beginning, but could I change the middle? Could I change, can I edit that story, rewrite that story and change my entire life? Everybody's so crippled by decisions.

But you never know how the other thing worked out. Let me give you an example. Let's say you don't go to college and you start this business and you were 100% right and it's huge and you're doing so great but because you did that, you had to fly to America for a big meeting and your plane crashed and you died. That would be a bad idea.

Or you think you're gonna go to college because it's a good experience and you'll meet people? You can meet people in a business. You're not gonna know. I think people overthink decisions. You'll never know what the alternative would have been. So just pick one and do it. Change is inevitable. And you are either changing for the worse or changing for the better.

You decide. I hope I do not believe in you more than you believe in yourself. Now listen to me guys, the transition is going to be hard. I'm not gonna lie to you. Go from being on the block, going to be a high school dropout, to getting a GED, it's not, the transition is not easy. So what happens? In order for you to go from one level to the next level, in order for any man to transit, listen to me,

In order for any woman to transition, for any man to transition, the thing that they want must be greater than the thing they currently have. Listen to me very closely. I didn't come in here to tell you you're going to finish school. I came to ask you what's next. I came to ask you what's next. For me, it's the Nobel Prize. I always think about other people that's going through a tougher life than I am. What if I had to change places? Would I trade places?

You know, there's something I would always say to people from time to time. If I could take out a piece of paper and write down my problems, and you could take out a piece of paper and write down your problem, and we exchange those papers, and I'm thinking I got such a tough, tough life, and you may have a tough life, but I pick up your paper, the one you may have written on, and I'm looking like, wow, I thought I had it bad. And then the other person say, hey, you got it a lot better than I do.

You know what I would do? I would say, give me my paper back. I'll take my problems back. The point that I'm saying is this. I didn't put myself in such a pity party position to where I felt, why me? Why not me? Why shouldn't I go through this? See, you have to know, and I believe this even more, there can never be anything good unless there's some bad along the way. There has to be a challenge. There has to be a struggle.

There has to be some setbacks. You cannot think in your mind that that's all you're good for is the good things. How good are you when you're at your weakest point in your life? Where are you when you're at the down low of your life? Then what do you do? You are either going to evolve

How am I a different person than I was this morning when I woke up? The initial reaction would be, "I'm not. It's only been like 12 hours. How could I be different?" But if I really think about it, what do I now know that I didn't know before?

What, you know, what experiences have I had that my prior self hadn't had when I had just woken up? And if I actually think about it, just like gratitude, I'm creating the frame of my past. I actually can and do see that I am different than my past self, even 12, 13 hours ago or the night before. And by appreciating that, I now acknowledge that I've changed, which increases my psychological flexibility.

It allows me to see that I am not the same person, that I am growing, that I am evolving, which is really useful for then thinking of your future self as a different person. You don't know. Like, there is no time machine. There's no future machine. We're all over analyzing everything. Like, how do you know? You don't. Like, this is why I keep trying to push people. The only thing that I know seems practical is, are you happy?

Are you happy today? He goes like, it's the right thing. Are you like, this is important. You can't analyze. Like, I didn't know that starting a YouTube show for my wine business was going to be the reason that I was going to have a huge investing career. I couldn't see that. This 30 seconds is your life passing you by, an opportunity to change. It's your prerogative. You want to go down the path you have right now of your life and where it's going.

Where do you see an altering path that's not flatlined, but climbing up an extra line of remembrance, a possibility where dreams exist, legacy exists, the possibility of change. So within your grasp of these hands, within the grasp of 30 seconds, it's within you. You had the will. You're here. I know you had the will. You have the intestinal fortitude. You have the want of change. You only live once, so do what you feel passionate about. Take chances.

Don't be afraid to fail. How do you know true strength? When you never tasted the roots. When you never was down on your luck. When you were at the bottom. I had to ask you something. And I realized, you gotta go through this hell, man. This is it. Because as long as you're living...

You gotta keep moving. It all starts with a thought. But changing your thoughts is easy, it's free, can be instant. What's the point of making it complicated? How does that help anyone who says, "Well, I'm messed up and so hard to change and people can't change." It's like, "Well, that's not correct. Who taught you that? From the minute you're born, you're changing."

Oh, you know, it's long and arduous to recover. No, it isn't. Some people recover like that. Some people don't. But you could be one of the ones that changes your thoughts, changes your feelings, changes your actions after all. When do you experience the positive emotion that's associated with happiness? The answer is not when you've attained a goal, but when you're pursuing one.

Don't you realize excuses will kill you? It will destroy your well-being? And the more excuses you make, the less effort you're gonna give. There's a million things I've done wrong. It's because I didn't do something that would have sent me somewhere else. But I have no idea. You don't know. You don't. If you do not apply what you hear and it goes over your head, you will miss your moment. Nothing changes if nothing changes, man. Why are you so antisocial?

Because I'm trying to get it. I don't want to live in a hole anymore, and I'm gonna do something I became obsessed with being the baddest motherfucker that God ever created. I got my MTV out I'm a savage! I'm not gonna stay fucking lying down. I'm not I can't do it man You kept going you pushed through you kept your head held high Why was you working so hard because you were trying to get it

How big would you dream if you knew you couldn't fail? The only thing stopping us is ourselves. Come on! Get it! 17! They don't know me, son! Get it! 18! They don't know me, son! Get it! 19! They don't know me, son! Yeah! That's not all you got. You thought you were empty, but you got a half tank left. And that's all you need to get where you're going. You can fill up later. Keep going, keep going, keep going.

Sometimes you gotta sit with the pain until the pain passes. Sometimes pain will immobilize you, but as long as you can feel it, you can push it. Without pain, without sacrifice, we have nothing. Without pain, without sacrifice, we have nothing.

I'm not saying you shouldn't have goals, but you should be grinding for grinding sake. You know, you should grind because that's what you do. You're passionate about what you do, you know, and so you're waking up every day with this concept of, I have 24 hours and they're mine. This 24 hours belongs to me. And whatever I do in this 24 hours will determine where I'll be tomorrow and the next day. And I think that's what people need to focus on. Give me all that work. Give me all that work, my friend, because I need it.

I needed to make me stronger. I needed to make me powerful. I needed to make me better, my friend. So give me all that work. Give me all that work, my friend. And he texted me. He's like, "Well, Cole, what that means is that your grandparents, from living in a stone house with stone walls and a dirt floor, and then us going into the construction industry, barely making it by just so we could do 50% better than our parents,

to you now living in a million dollar home impacting thousands and thousands of lives, earning seven figures. You've taken our name from sleeping on the dirt to million dollar mansions in the course of three generations and our ancestors would be proud of you. Like that is why I work so hard. Like that, I literally got goosebumps right now. Like that is why I f***ing grind. I'm not about this complaining bulls***. People complain about their situation and then do nothing about it and it makes no f***ing sense to me. Please, don't give up.

Remember, this is the grind. Find a way to push through the suffering and discomfort. And I promise you there is something great waiting for you on the other side. Just keep grinding. Don't give up. This is not the time. - You don't live it like I do. Like I lived it and I'm still living it. Like do you know where I'm gonna end up? - Right. - The tippy fucking top. You know where I'm now? Upper middle.

So I'm patient, I'm grinding, I'm here, I'm hustling down there. I'm fucking hustling, patient for where my final stop is gonna be. You're just not patient. Like if you're feeling any angst, it's 'cause you don't love the process more than the results. You're thinking about $10,000 a month in AdSense instead of loving the fucking dirt and loving this grind moment. And the second you fall in love with the grind, for real, 19 years of it,

not a month, when you fucking really fall in love with the grind and sit here and then your talent is gonna take you where it's gonna take you. - Listen.

Can't nobody grind harder than his sister. If you grind even with me, let's do it. But like Will Smith said when he was being interviewed once, you know what I'm talking about. I'm about to die on the treadmill. I'm going to die on the treadmill. I'm going to die on the treadmill. So I had no wonder. There's no more time anybody can give. I was opening the doors and shutting the doors. I would turn the light on in the morning. I would turn it out at night. I promise you. It wasn't that. It was that.

I know that I can touch more of me for me, not for anybody else. I had no guilt if I left this planet and I had only done what I did. I'm cool. I played full out for you, but I didn't play full out. When you are committed, you give everything you have.

Every single week, every single day, every single hour, every single minute, 720 hours a month, you are beating on your craft. Even when you're at work, you're dreaming, you're thinking, you're vision casting, you're writing it down, making it play, communicating to your destiny connections so that it can become a reality. If you can see it in your head, you can hold it in your hands. But the question I want to ask you is...

Are you committed? My truth in my experience has been, I have to jump higher. I have to show up earlier. I have to be the first person to turn off the light and the last person to turn off the light. I have to make sure that every number is correct and every T is crossed and every die is dotted. The way that I show up is by being consistent, so consistent that people cannot doubt your capacity to succeed. You have to work harder than the average person and

If you accept those terms, you cannot complain about those terms. I have only known success on the back of consistency. Do I think you could be a success without being consistent? Perhaps if you have other resources and tools that I was never given, but coming from where I am, my perspective has only been consistency and the discipline has been everything

that I have ever gotten on the back of doing it again and again and again. It is what I teach. It is what I preach. It is what I believe. You've got to want to grind. You've got to learn to love that. You've got to learn to love to put in the work, to be proud of yourself that you showed up and put in the work, to be proud of yourself that you taught yourself how to suffer, to be proud of yourself that you're developing a mindset where you believe I can do anything I set my mind to. And by the way, once you believe...

That you can do anything you set your mind to without limitation. How you spend your time becomes a spiritual consideration. Know more about what you're doing than anyone else in the world and grind baby grind. It's time to wake up. Stop making excuses. Stop justifying your laziness. Stop choosing mediocrity. Wake! Be better than who you used to be. Be better than who you are right now.

Everybody else puts off everything until tomorrow, but not you. You are going to choose to be better today. You are going to push through the struggles and hardships that come up this year. You are going to grind until you are exhausted, until you feel like you have nothing more, and then grind harder. When you get to where you want to go in life, when you finally get there, you finally reach that point, and you're there, and you're happy as hell, realize this, you're not there yet.

When you get that feeling that you arrived, be afraid, be truly afraid because now you start to do this slowly die. The only way you're ever going to get to the other side of this journey is you have got to suffer to grow, to grow. You must suffer and

Some people will get it and some people won't, but they have to see what their journey is to start their journey. Several people live to be a hundred years old and they have great lives, but somewhere in their life, there was a point where they had a decision to make. They can go left or right on this path. Left was the easy route. Right was the hard route. A lot of people take the easy route and they had a good life that way, but the better life was going to the right side.

And you may have 20 years of pain and suffering to get past it, but a lot of us die never truly starting our journey. Be the guy who embraces the ugly, the miserable. Be the guy who embraces hard work, the grind. Don't be afraid of being hurt. Don't be afraid of sacrificing some blood. Imagine if...

You can use pain as a fuel. Imagine if you could use the pain as a passport. Imagine if you could use the pain to push you, to condition you, to prepare you for the stages and the rooms you've got to walk into and the tables you've got to sit at and the stages you have to stand on. What if the pain could make you better? What if the pain could build muscle? What if the pain could cause you to reach higher, to leap farther, to run faster? What if the pain could help you

What if all pain isn't hurt, but it's help? We're built to walk uphill. And when you reach the pinnacle of the hill, you want to stop and appreciate the vision. But the next thing you want is a higher hill in the distance because it's from the uphill climb that we derive our value. And I mean this technically. So almost all the positive emotion we feel, that's experienced in relationship to a goal. And so in some sense, you want a goal that you can never attain.

Right? So you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it. You think, well, that's frustrating. It's like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill. But it's not because as you pursue that goal, you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant. We're running from the truth, man. So the only way I became successful was going towards the truth. As painful and as brutal as it is, it changed me.

It allowed me to become in my own right who I am today. All the pain and suffering that they put on top of me in Hell Week, I will reverse that pain and suffering and I will take your soul. So every instructor that put me through BUDS, my job, what drove me was I wanted you to go home that night after you beat the living shit out of me and I smiled in your face. I wanted you to feel worse than I did and you were going home to a nice warm bed and

with your wife or your kids and a nice meal and I was still out there in the grip suffering for another hundred hours. I want you to think about me knowing that I'm comfortable being very un-fucking-comfortable. The thing about transformation is you have to do it. You've got to put in the work when nobody cares.

You know, nobody cared if I practiced. Nobody cared if I worked out. I didn't have parents who were like, "Hey, you know, Dan, you gotta go to the gym." "Oh, hey, Dan, you know, go out and run some sprints." Nobody cared. If you want to transform, you have to do the work if nobody cares. There's only one person who has to care, and that's you. You've got to care. You've got to want it. And the reason

I think is different for everybody to want. Some comes out of pain. Some comes out of, you know, I want to prove somebody wrong. And then I think some people just have that switch inside. Let them all talk shit. Let them all make their noise because at the end of the day,

You are the only one who has the guts, we have the guts to go to work and show up every single fucking day, day in and day out, putting in the work. You fight through the noise, you fight through the fatigue, you fight through it all, you stay extremely intensely focused on the goal. And once you fight through that fatigue, you fight through the noise, on the other side of that is your goals. On the other side of that is the accomplishment. On the other side of that is your greatness.

If you have a sufficiently noble purpose, the suffering will justify itself. And I think that's empirically testable. And I do believe it's the case, because I've watched people do very difficult things. And what that shows is that if you...

Turn around and you confront the suffering voluntarily you find out that you are way tougher than you think it's not that life is better than you think Life is as harsh as you think it might even be worse But you are way tougher than you think if you turn around and confront it and so then what you discover is that there's a spirit within you that you

that can pursue something meaningful, that has the resilience and the strength to contend properly with the catastrophe of existence without becoming bitter. If you're feeling pain, keep going. If your lungs are working, keep going. You hurt, you grow, you go. And from the bottom of my heart, keep it moving and conduct your business. My biggest fear in life is if there is a final resting place in this world.

And there's a final judgment. And you talk to something much bigger than you. I don't want to sit down and have a conversation with someone with something that says, you're in heaven. This is what you should have been on earth. And are you really in heaven now or are you in hell? A lot of us speak in hollow words. I used to speak in hollow words. I don't do it anymore. Everything that comes out of my mouth has substance. It's real. And we all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds, in our souls. I act on mine.

A lot of us who are afraid of something, we allow our minds to choose the path that leads to resistance so we go a different route. I'm afraid of something that's telling me you must conquer that. You must do that. You have to go that way. And most of us don't understand that mentality. We go left and we wonder why we haven't fulfilled something in our lives. You've just gone through a breakup and it's the worst thing you've ever been through.

Because you haven't had the time and the experience yet to develop worse and to turn around and look at that in relation to the realities of a long life well lived. And one day you're gonna try and look back and you're gonna say that really wasn't such a disaster. And in fact, that was probably the best thing ever happened to me. I get it. The pain is unbearable. You keep playing it back in your head. The situation is on repeat.

Over and over and over you keep trying to see where you went wrong. You feel like you can't take the pain anymore. What you gonna do? Are you gonna prove them right? Or are you gonna prove them wrong? Are you gonna show them that failure doesn't define who you are? Are you gonna show them that failure is a necessary lesson on the path to success? Are you gonna show them that you're a beast in this game? You gotta get hungry. You gotta get ready. Get up!

It's time to get to work and show them all. It is the battles that you face today that prepare you for tomorrow's wars. You're gonna find peace from going to war with yourself. We all got shit. The celebration was I can start the war now. It wasn't that I won the war. I can start my war. That's what made me, that's what I've been celebrating since I'm always in that battle.

Nobody believes in you. You've lost again and again and again. The lights are cut off, but you're still looking at your dream, reviewing it every day and say to yourself, it's not over until I win. Come on. Congratulations. You achieved failure. Now, the only place to go from failure is to win. You have to achieve failure. You have to take it that far. Nobody wants to go that far. It's too scary.

But you know something? I got news for you. That's where winning is. It always has been. Nothing's changed since the 70s. Nothing! There comes a day where being average, being mediocre, is just sickening to you. It's just sickening. It makes you want to throw up. There comes a fucking day where push comes to shove. Where being mediocre, being like average and shit just fucking burns and sucks so much.

You can't deal with it one more day and you get off your fucking ass and you create something that's always been there. I know what that feels like to be left for dead after you gave everything you had. I know what it feels like.

I know you're tired. I know you're weary. I know you've been brought to tears. All the blood, all the sweat, all the sacrifice, all of the suffering. I know you want to quit right now, but this is not the time to let go. This is not the time to doubt. This is not the time to quit. Keep going. My dreams don't live down there. That's what my granddad used to tell me.

When I used to walk in those projects, I'd look down and see pipes. I'd see bullets. I'd see bloodstains. But when I looked in the sky, I saw my dreams. I saw my opportunities.

Like you try to argue yourself out of pain and see how far you get. You might think, well, that's not the sort of meaning I meant. It's like, you know, a negative meaning is a place to start, right? Because if something's negative and it's real, it does imply that there's something positive that's real. It might be harder to get a hold of. At least it's not pain. I would gladly relive everything I have been through provided I had this outcome. Because who I am now and what I offer the world, I wouldn't want to give that up.

to avoid going through those dark days of the pain I went through. I think it was all worth it. It turned me into who I am now. I was in absolute excruciating pain. But what motivated me through that whole process was the fact that this kid came from that. I'm in the hardest training in the world, in the worst shape of my entire life. What if I can graduate amongst these studs? Wow. The pain, it won't stop. The suffering.

It won't cease. And it's hard to see. It's hard to see a better outcome for yourself, my friend. I understand. But look, if you just believe, my friend, and you keep believing and you hold on to that belief, brighter days are coming. Weather through the storm, my friend. Weather through the pain. And I promise you, you will come out victorious. You just have to keep believing, my friend. You know, can I get to that level?

I don't know, but let's find out. On the other side of your fear is a fulfilled destiny. How bad do you want it? Whatever your giant may be, name the giant. You will defy me no more. You will defy me no more. You will defy me no more! And people don't understand that. And worse than that, they're intimidated by that.

And even worse, they try to discredit that because they do not have the level of passion and obsessiveness to get to that level. So they figure the best thing to do is to tear that level down. That's fucked up. What a warrior is, is this. A person that's willing to die for an ideal.

You know, and for me, it's freedom, right? It's compassion. It's humility. It's humanity. I'm willing to fight for all these things. David ran toward the Philistine. David ran towards the army. Goliath must fall. There's a lot of internal battles.

And let me tell you, the worst type of battles are not a battle with anybody else outside. The worst, most painful, frustrating battles I've ever faced in my life is me against me. Biggest. It's never been against anybody else. It's been me against me. It's been Pat versus Pat. It's been the biggest battles of my life. It's Pat versus Pat. Be brave. Be strong. Come for the head of your giant. However big, however tall, however strong.

It will no longer defy you. You will not cower in darkness. At the end of it all, if you can sit back and wait, if you can wait 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 years, and you get to that point when you finish, that's the feeling for 12 years. It's not the same way for 12 years to get there. That's what keeps you going is you got to feel, I'm doing it for one second. Years of pain. For one second. One second. Think about it.

I put the work into this like every day, all day. And then when I'm done with it, guess what I do? I dream about it. I visualize it. I see myself being successful. I see myself hitting those shots with no time on the clock, with a little time on the clock. And then I'll do it again and say, hey, what if we're down two? Then I'll do it again and say, what if we're down three?

You know, it's a never-ending game. Everything worth having in life needs to be earned. You gotta go out there with a relentless mindset and put 120% effort in every single fucking day. No matter what, no matter how you feel, no matter the circumstance, you gotta show the fuck up and earn it. And if you don't attack every day with that mindset, number one, you will never achieve it. And number two, you don't fucking deserve to in the first place. We must put on that suit of armor!

and prepare ourselves for battle yes every battle cannot be won but the winning attitude to not give up is more than enough to carry on these battles that we face each and every day of our lives they will continue to come and you will not win in every battle and the battles that you face will help you to get stronger because even if you lose a battle and you're still breathing

and you're still walking, and you're still able to make moves, then you still have enough fight left to carry on. Hey, corporate types, Billy Idol here. Just because you use Workday to drive long-term success, it doesn't make you a rock star. Rock stars drive fast cars, not business operations. Be a finance and HR rock star with Workday. We all have dreams. Dream home renovations. Dream vacations. Dream vacations.

We're sending our kids to their dream colleges, but finding straightforward ways to turn those dreams into realistic goals, that's where things get tricky. Merrill understands that. That's why, with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. And having the bull at your back helps your whole financial life move with you.

So when your plans change, Merrill is with you every step of the way. Go to ml.com slash bullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, registered broker-dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC.