hello believe nation it's evan my one word is believe and i believe in people more than they believe in themselves and my sincere hope is that if you believe in yourself as much as i believe in you you'll be able to change the planet so to help you on your journey today i'm doing a video on the 10 skills that are hard to learn but will pay off forever and as always guys as you're watching if you hear something that really resonates with you leave it down the comments below it's much more likely to stick
with yourself and if you leave a comment within the first few hours of the video going live you have a chance to win one of two daily prizes enjoy skill number one is speaking up one of the things you would want to be sure to do uh is whether you like it or not get very comfortable it may take a while with public speaking for example i mean that that's a an asset that will last you 50 or 60 years and it's a liability if you don't like doing it or uncomfortable doing it that also
will last you 50 or 60 years and it's a necessary skill skill number two is being honest with yourself one of the big things that all startups do is they lie to themselves over and over and over mine's faster mine's cheaper mine's better mine's this mine's that no it's not and the reason it's not is because whoever it is you're competing with it's not like they're ignoring you it's not like oh my goodness this guy just started on shopify in the startup competition he's doing a million dollars this year woe is me i might as
well close up the doors what are they doing i'm gonna copy what they're doing and now you've got to stay ahead and so you know you've got to be very careful as an entrepreneur to be brutally honest with yourself um and those are some of the things that you'll hear from me as a mentor that you know know what you know know what you don't know but you've got to know your business better than anybody skill number three is having confidence i don't know if you'd agree with me on this but in many ways one
of the key factors to legendary success isn't your natural ability it's not whether you have the right product it's not whether you're in the right field it's not whether you've had a blessed background it's not whether you have the right iq i want you to really think about and deconstruct and play with maybe later tonight in your journal i want you to deconstruct this idea of confidence and it seems like a very simple word but just think about it in your own life when you have confidence or we could even call it fire when you
have that fire within you that confidence that interior bravery you almost have this power to do whatever it takes to get your brave vision done you see in this world it's not about you know in many ways your strategy in your business or your ability in your life it's about this thing called confidence and we've all had these times in our lives when we are full of confidence and what other people see is a problem we simply do see as an opportunity other people see it as a stumbling block block or a wall and we
see it as a stepping stone or this solution and so confidence is something that you really want to wire in confidence is something you really want to develop confidence is a practice confidence is a muscle and like any muscle the more you focus on it and practice it and train it the stronger your confidence is going to grow and i just have to say it again when you are at a place in your life when there is an ongoing steady state stream of confidence moving through your mindset moving through your heart set you do the
heroic in your business and you achieve the remarkable in your life skill number four is listening nelson mandela is a particularly special case study in the leadership world because he is universally regarded as a great leader you can take other personalities and depending on the nation you go to we have different opinions about other personalities but nelson mandela across the world is universally regarded as a great leader he was actually the son of a tribal chief and he was asked one day how did you learn to be a great leader and he responded that he
would go with his father to tribal meetings and he remembers two things when his father would meet with other elders one they would always sit in a circle and two his father was always the last to speak you will be told your whole life that you need to learn to listen i would say that you need to learn to be the last to speak i see it in boardrooms every day of the week even people who consider themselves good leaders who may actually be decent leaders will walk into a room and say here's the problem
here's what i think but i'm interested in your opinion let's go around the room it's too late the skill to hold your opinions to yourself until everyone has spoken does two things one it gives everybody else the feeling that they have been heard it gives everyone else the ability to feel that they have contributed and two you get the benefit of hearing what everybody else has to think before you render your opinion the skill is really to keep your opinions to yourself if you agree with somebody don't nod yes if you disagree with somebody don't
not know simply sit there take it all in and the only thing you're allowed to do is ask questions so that you can understand what they mean and why they have the opinion that they have you must understand from where they are speaking why they have the opinion they have not just what they are saying and at the end you will get your turn it sounds easy it's not practice being the last to speak that's what nelson mandela did skill number five is managing your time my challenge in our generation is it gradually through entertainment
through television through media through every way possible we are living in a generation of the dumbing down of ideas because we have traded effectiveness for busyness statistics say yeah somebody ought to clap on that we are busier than any other generation we have seen in the last three to four hundred years we are so busy we are we are busier than a wall within a one-armed wallpaper hangar we're just busy you'll get it later don't worry about it it'll hit you in a minute we are just as busy as we can be and we think
because we're busy we're effective but i want you to challenge your schedule for a minute and ask yourself are you are you really being effective or is your life cluttered with all kinds of stuff that demands you and drains you and taxes you and stops you from being your highest and best self and are you substituting busyness and all the chaos that goes along with business from being effective let me tell you a bunch of scientists got together they begin to do some research and they begin to determine that 80 of the things we do
are busy things that we do in an area that is not effective that the average person only spends 20 percent of their time doing the thing that they are really gifted at created at passionate about excited to do and the rest of it is all the dismal dumb stuff that we all have to do in order to survive just crazy stuff that we're doing wonder what would happen if we would go from doing 80 of things that are busy but not effective and 20 of the things that are really effective if we would switch those
numbers around and only give 20 percent of our time to the things that we have to do and 80 of our time to the thing that we were created to do wonder what would happen to your life now think about it a minute i there's a lot of things you could take from me and i could make it you could take my suit i got another one you could take my car i could get another one you could take my house i could get another house but when you take my time you have taken something
from me that is totally irreplaceable we take all kind of classes for money management we we know how to manage our money we know how to repair our houses we're working on our hair and our bodies and all of this kind of stuff we do everything except the most important thing is to value our time it takes time to be creative you were meant to be creative you were created in the likeness and the image of a creator and in that likeness and in that image you have creativity if you had time you would be
creative but in the absence of time and with busyness and clutter and people the following baby y'all got music playing on your phone all kinds of stuff and no matter what kind of song you put on after a while you hate to hear it because every time you hear that sound you know it somebody else wants something else from you that's taking you away from what you are gifted and creative to do skill number six is stop whining so i have this thing that i've been promoting called no whining wednesdays wednesday you cannot whine complain
or criticize and people like well what is whining whatever you think it is don't do it every time you do it you have to put a quarter in a jar if you whine about anything i can't i'm tired of me why don't you what happened every one of them will cost you a quarter or complaining why don't you why do you always how come you i always they never cost you a quarter then last week i had people send me pictures of their jaws or quarters oh my god but what they said to me also
was this was wonderful because i was never ever aware of how much whining and complaining and criticizing i do now i've got mothers doing it with their children so wednesday is no whining wednesday we need to practice that we need to stop whining about what isn't happening what we don't have what we can't do what somebody didn't do we got to get it clean in 2014 no whining no complaining no criticizing skill number seven is staying present in the moment if you're living in the past you're going to be depressed because you are rehashing things
that happen to you that are not going to happen again if you're living in the future you're going to be anxious because you are anticipating what's coming or you're wishing for things that aren't happening yet being in the present is where the gold is being in the present moment is where you will have the greatest control where you will feel the most at ease and where happiness flourishes there's a super tight connection between happiness and the ability to live in the present moment a lot of people believe that happiness is tied to the things that
happened to you not so at all in fact there is a professor of positive psychology he's one of the grandfathers of the movement he teaches at the university of pennsylvania his name is martin segelman and he studied happiness for decades now one of the things that we've talked about a lot is that 40 of your happiness levels are preset by genetics 60 you are in complete control of and one of the things that this professor has has discovered is that it doesn't matter what's happened to you in fact some of the people that have had
the worst things the worst things happened to them like people that have survived the holocaust are actually the happiest and most grateful people in the world happiness comes down to this right up here comes down to your thoughts comes down to your mindset it comes down to your attitude and you are 100 control of what you're thinking you may not be in control of how you feel in the moment but you can always always always always be in control of what you think and that will change how you're feeling one of the most powerful things
that you can do in terms of think and this gets back to strict's question is how do you be present being present is literally nothing more than the skill of having your thoughts be in this moment not in the past not in the future but right here the way that you teach yourself how to do that is that the moment that you catch yourself being distracted the moment you catch yourself starting to worry the moment you catch yourself drifting to the future drifting to the past that's a moment of tremendous power because you basically just
woke up you basically just noticed that you're not here in this particular moment so use that wake up call 54321 and ground yourself in this moment the best way to ground yourself in the moment is to look for something in this particular moment that you can savor now i'm using the word saver on purpose because it's the word that psychologists use to describe what happens when you find something in this moment right now right here right now to focus on and to appreciate it could be literally the questions these are these are printed out questions
from people on social media and if i were to stop and look at these and savor them what i would feel in this moment is a tremendous amount of gratitude because people are taking the time to write and that makes me feel incredibly grateful and it also makes me very happy because it means that that the folks that are writing are taking control of their lives and seeking out the information that they need another form of savoring that we can all relate to is eating as you're eating instead of drifting to the future and thinking
about all the things that you need to do or hanging out in the past and rehashing everything that's happened during the day be in this moment in this meal slow down think about the food that you're eating think about the people that you're sitting with and how you feel about them and if you want to take it up a notch actually acknowledge them hey this food tastes amazing thank you for cooking or i'm so glad to see you and that we get the time to have this meal together those small simple acts of savoring are
how you expand your happiness inside the present moment so how do you be more present simple the moment that you catch yourself in the future in the past worrying whatever refocus yourself right here right now and then find something right here right now that you can savor and when you do that you're not only going to be present you're going to feel more grateful and you're gonna feel a little boost of happiness skill number eight being consistent success is not um it's success not a destination people always think that oh my god this person's so
successful because they've had a successful movie or a successful show but success is a journey you have to consistently always always be successful that's when you're really successful because otherwise you'll be remembered for your last failure and i've had a few but i just have to compensate for um my failure by just getting up and running the more time you take to sort of mourn it you're wasting that much more time in being successful so you just have to you know perk up pick yourself up dust yourself off and just say all right what can
i do there's always a solution you can't expect people always get mistaken that just because because this year has been what it has been it's been because i consistently worked hard for about 10 years so now i know my job enough to be able to be appreciated for it but if i hadn't had the last 10 years i would never have had this year or the year before that so success is not a destination where you or power is not like okay today you're powerful you have to consistently be powerful and consistently be successful and
that is a journey skill number nine is getting enough sleep well first of all i prioritize sleep and that means making that means saying no to things you want to do it's not easy it is hard i think the hardest thing yeah last night um you know cheryl sandberg interviewed me at the san francisco symphony hall and then i had to sign books and i would have loved to go and have dinner with her but i went to bed and you know because if i hadn't got if i had gone out to dinner and hadn't
gotten my at least seven hours sleep that i need and had to get up early to do tv i would not be enjoying being here with you now and i'm really enjoying it and 100 present i'm not tired and i hate being tired more than i hate anything and skill number 10 is having empathy i've thought a lot about the power of empathy in my work it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made-up story it allows me to feel pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain and
my nervous system is sympathetically wired and it conducts that current to you sitting in a movie theater and to the woman sitting next to you and to her friend so that we all feel that it's happening to us at the same time it's a very mysterious and valuable resource of the human species and women i think access it most effortlessly we cry at sad movies we don't feel we lose face or stature or position doing it we see a news story that enrages us and we write letters through tears our hearts pounding i've often i
used to wonder why human beings developed these inconvenient and embarrassing responses this sniffling choking wet obstruction you know the thing that physicians and soldiers and stock traders and journalists and fashion models and politicians and news commentators and venture capitalists all must suppress in order to work most efficiently i thought what possible value function could it serve in the darwinian scheme of you know survival of the fittest and the strongest and the most heavily armed no seriously i thought why and how did we evolve with this weak and useless passion intact within the deep hearts core
and the answer as i've formulated it to myself is that empathy is the engine that powers all the best in us it is what civilizes us it is what connects us thank you guys so much for watching i hope you enjoyed i'd love to know what did you think of this video what did you take from it that you're going to apply immediately somehow to your life or to your business what was your favorite from the 10 and how you're going to apply it leave it on the comments below really curious to find out also
if you think there's a 11 12 13 that you want to add to the list leave it down in the comments i'm super curious to see what you have to say thank you guys again for watching i believe in you i hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is much love see you