I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons

In life, you can choose to cry about the bullshit that happens to you or you can choose to laugh about it. I choose laughter.

How you handle rejection is very similar to how you’ll handle success. If you’re strong enough to handle rejection without taking it personally, without holding a grudge, and without losing your passion and drive, then you’ll be strong enough to reap the rewards. But if you’re too weak to handle failure and disappointment, then you’re too weak to handle success, which will only end up damaging your life and happiness.

Your life today is the sum total of your choices. So if you're not happy with it, look back at your choices and start making different ones. Even if you are struck by lighting and injured, you made choices that led you to that spot at a particular time - and you get to choose how you feel about it afterward.

Life is a story. It’s full of chapters. And the beauty of life is that not only do you get to choose how you interpret each chapter, but your interpretation writes the next chapter. It determines whether it’s comedy or tragedy, fairy tale or horror story, rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags. You can’t control the events that happen to you, but you can control your interpretation of them. So why not choose the story that serves your life the best?

If you're too weak to handle failure and disappointment, then you're too weak to handle success, which will only end up damaging your life and happiness.

You are somebody. You matter. And no one is allowed to take away your right to your property, your right to your safety, or your right to be yourself. Those are things that should be defended.

Your life today is the sum total of your choices. So if you’re not happy with it, look back at your choices and start making different ones.

My future was out there. It was just waiting for me to find it. And the challenge was not to give up on myself just because it seemed like everyone else was pulling ahead of me—and leaving me further and further behind in the months that followed. That’s the test that each of us faces in life: Can you fail and still be strong? Can you not fit in and still accept yourself? Can you lose everything and still keep searching? Can you be in the dark and still believe in the light?

If someone else is putting out negativity, then maneuver around them like you would a puddle on the ground. If you respond with negativity, you will only get dragged into the mud. It is a talent to stay positive and avoid negativity in the face of a sometimes cruel, unfair, and indifferent world. Cultivate that talent. It's the secret to living a happy life.

It turns out that the things I hated most as a child are the same things that serve me the most as an adult.

If you wait for certainty, you will spend your whole life standing still. And if you grow discouraged and give up when things get rough, you’ll miss out on your best possible destiny. So the secret is to be excited about what is in your power to control, be accepting of what’s not in your power to control, and then move with certainty into an uncertain future.

Many people will tell you to ignore these doubters. Others will tell you to listen and then prove them wrong, which worked for me in those first shows. But I’m going to recommend something better that I learned much later: Don’t invite them into the conversation. You already know what you want to dedicate yourself to, so you don’t need to ask for their approval. There’s no need to seek external approval when you already have internal approval.

You are already in your experience. So you can either resent and resist it, and make it that much less enjoyable, or you can accept it and find something positive in it.

Every experience is a potential life lesson. Even if you don’t appreciate it at the time, each struggle in the present is preparing you for something else in the future.

You need a teacher, because those who can’t do, teach. So if you wanna learn something, go to someone who can’t do it. Dammit, I think I wrote this one wrong.

if you step into the life of someone you envy for just a day, you’ll discover that everyone has their own problems, and they’re usually worse than yours. Because your problems are designed specifically for you, with the specific purpose of helping you grow.

One of the key factors for success—beyond work, talent, timing, relationships, and all the other qualities I’ve mentioned—is the glue that holds all of these together: commitment. What is commitment? Here’s what it means to me: keeping the promises you make to yourself and to others.

She started asking us for cocaine. I explained that drugs weren’t our thing, unless she was looking for Tylenol, in which case we went Extra Strength

People call this the elusive obvious: It’s right there in front of your face, so close that everyone can see it but you.

That’s the biggest difference between the amateur and the professional, between the wannabe and the star, between the dabbler and the expert. The unsuccessful get halfway to the finish line, then turn around. The successful get halfway, then keep going. Both run the same distance, but only one makes it to the finish line. To win the race, then, having talent, speed, and endurance help, but those things are nothing without commitment. To commit successfully, you don’t have to always believe in yourself—because, let’s face it, we all have our doubts at times. But you do have to believe in something higher than yourself: your purpose. If you believe in your purpose, you can survive the most challenging times, because God or destiny or your will—or whatever you prefer to believe in—is on your side. If you know it’s your purpose to win the race, then you’re not going to turn around, because there is no other option but to win.

I'm chasing after that Holy Shit Effect.

But I’ve learned that I’m not the only person in the world who’s making plans. Everyone is reaching for what they believe is a better future, and not all of those futures are in alignment. Some people’s plans conflict directly with the plans of others:

Though people say to live in the moment, each moment leads to other moments. So treat each moment like a seed, and care for it so that something beautiful can grow from it.

As Curtis Mayfield once said, “It may not come when you want it to, but when it does, it’s right on time.

Waiting for other people to make your dreams come true is like waiting for a bus on a corner where there’s no bus stop.

Even if you lose or get beat up, at least you can go to bed at night knowing you’re not the kind of person who tolerates being pushed around.