Take ACTION NOW! – #OneRule

(whooshing)

– Initiate the action.

– Take action.

– Taking action.

– Taking action.

– Do the action.

– Act Now!

– Took action.

– Hello Believe Vision, 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 in your journey today,

we’re going to learn how to take action.

And also guys, if you’re watching,

if you hear something that really resonates with you

please leave it down in the comments below,

put quotes around it, you might win a prize.

But also when you write it down,

it’s much more likely to stick with yourself as well.

Enjoy.

(upbeat music)

– You speak to businesses and companies

and leadership teams and employees and stuff.

Without mentioning names,

I don’t want to put you on the spot but

have you gone and talked to a company that’s been in trouble

and then spoken to their team and then checked in on them

after you’ve spoken to their leadership team

and what did that look like,

did you notice a noticeable change?

Did they come to you and tell you that this has helped

our organization out and our culture

is much improved because of it?

– You mean does my (bleep) work?

(audience laughing)

I mean.

(audience laughing)

Sure.

Here’s the problem with my stuff, you got to do it.

And I am not anybody’s like

you know, mom or dad.

I’m not going to do it for you.

And I have a very laissez-faire approach.

I once had a client,

this is a bunch of years ago

that said, what guarantee do I have

that you’re stuff will work?

To which my answer was,

none.

Like, I’m giving you a tool.

You can, it’s like a hammer,

you can use it broadly or narrowly.

You can build a table, you can build a house.

It’s the same tool.

You can use it for marketing.

You can use it to completely revitalize your entire culture.

And even though I’m going to sale you

the most beautiful hammer,

I’m not going to guarantee

the structural integrity of the house.

Right?

It’s your business.

You want to ignore all my stuff.

Ignore it, I don’t care.

And if your business collapses, you know what happens to me?

Nothing.

Like, I don’t mean to be cold about it.

Like of course, I want the people I work with to do well

but it’s not mine.

It’s theirs and I take no emotional responsibility

for the decisions they make.

So yes, there are many people that I have had the pleasure

of working with.

Some who worked for dysfunctional organizations

that went on the hard journey

of completely changing the way they lead

and completely revitalizing their culture

and it has great success.

It’s not because of me, it’s because of them, right.

At the same time, there are many people who came in

and they’re like, what an amazing speech and did nothing.

You know, thanks that was great, you know.

And I don’t, of course, it’s going to fail, you know.

So, I think that we have too much,

especially in the consulting world,

or the design world,

everybody’s so paternalistic about it.

And designers are famous for this right.

They get so personally offended when the client

chooses the wrong thing.

Uh, such idiots!

Don’t they know we’re trying to help them?

(audience laughing)

Or who cares?

Like it’s their freaking business, right.

That’s what you find, I’ve had that.

Instead of arguing with somebody

for them to make the right choice,

’cause we genuinely want to help them.

What I have found is,

if you push the accountability on them,

’cause when we argue, we’re taking accountability.

This is better, this will help you.

We’re taking responsibility, accountability.

But if we say look,

we’ve been doing this a bunch of years.

We know more about design than you do.

I’m telling you, for every reason that I can outline for you

why this will help you more.

But if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine.

It’s your business, do what you want.

The minute you switch the accountability

and put it all on them.

Amazingly, they’re much more open to your opinion.

(audience laughing)

Because now they’re responsible.

– One night, Chris has gone to bed.

I’d been struggling, struggling, struggling.

We still had all the same problems.

We struggled on the house,

still facing bankruptcy, still fighting like crazy.

I was still unemployed.

They still hadn’t figured out like the solution yet

for the business.

And I was about to turn off the TV

and there on the TV

there was this rocket launching

and I thought oh my gosh.

That is it!

I am going to launch myself out of bed

like a rocket ship, like NASA!

Right here and launch me out of that bed.

And I’m going to move so fast

that I don’t think. – Hm.

– I’m going to beat my brain.

Now, here’s a really interesting point.

I talk a lot about your instincts and inner wisdom.

And we can get get into this a little bit later

but a lot of us talk about the fact

that you have a gut feeling.

But what all this research that I’ve done for the book

and all the speaking that I do,

what I’ve discovered that’s fascinating

is actually when you set goals, when you have an intention

on something that you want to change about your life,

your brain helps you.

What it does it is opens up a checklist

and then your brain goes to work

trying to remind you. – Yeah.

– Of that intention that you set.

And it’s really important to develop the skill

and I say that word purposefully.

The skill of knowing how to hear that inner wisdom

and that intention kicking in.

And leaning into it quickly.

So for me, my brain saying that’s it.

Right there.

Move as fast as a rocket, Mel.

I wanted to change to my life.

And I think most people that are miserable

or that are really like dying to be great

and dying to have more,

we want to change.

We want to live a better life.

We want to create more for our families.

We want to be happier.

The desire is there.

Again it’s about how do you go from knowledge to action

so the first thing in this story that’s important

is realizing that the answer was in me.

And my mind was telling me, pay attention.

Could have also been the bourbon.

(laughing)

I had a couple of Manhattan’s that night.

Anyway, the next morning, the alarm goes off and

I pretended NASA was there.

It’s the stupidest story.

I literally went five, four, three, two, one.

I counted out loud and then I stood up.

And I’ll never forget standing there

in my bedroom.

It was dark, it was cold.

It was winter in Boston.

And for the first time in three months,

I had beaten my habit of hitting the snooze button.

I couldn’t believe it.

And I thought, wait a minute.

Counting backwards,

that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard

in my entire life.

Well the next morning, I used it again it worked.

The next morning I used it again and it worked.

The next morning I used it again and it worked.

And then I started to notice something really interesting.

There were moments all day long.

All day long.

Just like that five second moment in bed.

Where I knew knowledge,

what I should do.

And if I didn’t move within five seconds,

my brain would step in and talk me out of it.

Every human being has a five second window.

Might even be shorter for you.

You have about a five second window

in which you can move from idea to action

before your brain kicks into full gear

and sabotages any change in behavior.

‘Cause remember your brain is wired to stop you

from doing things that are comfortable

or uncertain or scary.

It’s your job to learn how to move from those ideas

that could change everything

into acting on them.

– People want to know how to stop the laziness

and they want to know how to stop the procrastination and

they have some idea in their head, you know,

some kind of a vision

of what they want to do.

But they don’t know where to start.

They don’t know where to start it, you know.

They don’t know where to start.

And to this day, hey,

where do I start and when’s the best time to start.

And I have a very simple answer for that.

Here.

And now.

That’s it.

You want to improve?

You want to get better?

You want to get on a workout program or a clean diet?

You want to start a business?

You want to write a book or make a movie

or build a house or a computer

or put together some mobile application?

Where do you start?

You start right here.

And when do you start, you start right now.

You initiate the action aggressively.

You go.

‘Cause the idea isn’t going to execute itself.

And the book isn’t going to write itself.

And the weights out in the gym,

they’re not going to move themselves.

You have to do it and you have to do it now.

And that means, you got to stop thinking about it

and stop dreaming about it.

And stop researching every aspect of it.

And reading all about it.

And debating the pros and cons of it.

Just start doing it.

Take that first step.

And make it happen.

Get after it.

And get after it here and now.

– Take action.

Whatever you want to do you.

Whatever you’re thinking about.

You will not get it until you get take action.

Make that move.

Make it a small step.

If you want a house, go get a rug, you know what I mean?

If you want a new car, go get some car freshener.

Take action.

Make this thing happen for you and it will happen.

Action, action, action.

You know one thing that

I can really attribute to every failure

in my life.

Whether it be personal, financial,

in any kind of way, business, whatever.

It’s because of a lack

of my attempt to take action.

I did not take action.

And it kind of changed, once I got the fact that

action is the key

it changed my life in many, many ways.

– I think stress,

you can be, I think one of the things

that’s very important to note about stress,

is that stress primarily comes from not taking action

over something that you can have some control over.

So, if I find that some particular thing

is causing me to have stress,

that’s a warning flag for me.

What it means is,

there’s something that I haven’t completely identified

perhaps in my conscious mind

that is bothering me and I haven’t

yet taken any action on it.

I find as soon as I identify it

and make the first phone call

or send off the first email message

or whatever it is that we’re going to do

to start to address that situation, even if it’s not solved,

the mere fact that we’re addressing it,

dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it.

So stress comes from ignoring things

that you shouldn’t be ignoring, I think in a large part.

So, stress doesn’t come.

People get stress wrong all the time, in my opinion.

Stress doesn’t come from hard work, for example.

You know, you can be working incredibly hard

and loving it.

And likewise, you can be out of work

and incredibly stressed over that.

So, and likewise if you kind of use that as an analogy

for what I was just talking about.

If you’re out of work,

but you’re going though, you know

a disciplined approach of you know,

a series of job interviews and so on

and working to remedy that situation,

you’re going to be a lot less stressed

than if you’re just worrying about it

and doing nothing.

– One of the functions of belief is taking action.

We did a survey of about two thousand

top entrepreneurs and we noticed that one of the things

that people who win in that world have is a bias for action.

If they have an inspiration, they act on it.

I mean how many of you have ever had a great idea,

talked about it, thought about it,

didn’t do it.

And then someone else did it and was successful

and you went, darn I should have done that.

Maybe it was buy that piece of property.

We all have that piece of property we wished we bought.

You know. (audience murmuring)

Anyway, so we’re going to be looking at

the idea that taking action is part of law of attraction.

See a lot of people think you can just sit in your room

meditate, visualize having the perfect car,

the perfect house, the perfect relationship.

Then it’ll kind of just come to you.

And I always say unless you live at the bottom of a hill,

(audience laughing)

where there’s a road,

there’s probably not going to be a Cadillac

show up in your living room, right.

(audience laughing)

So, think about this, the last six letters

of the word attraction spell what?

(audience murmuring)

A-C-T-I-O-N, action.

Now there’s two kinds of action that are critical.

There’s obvious action.

If you want a certain kind of car,

you should go down and test drive it.

You should find out how much it costs.

You should see what it costs to maintain it.

You should go, you know, spend,

I like to test drive a car, three or four times.

Go down to the dealer, take a camera.

Stick my head out the window, say a picture of me.

I’ll be back to buy it, you know.

(audience laughing)

Put it up on my refrigerator.

Look at it very day.

Eventually, you know, those kinds of things

produce a car, right.

Saving for it, so forth.

But there are also things called inspired actions.

All of a sudden, you get an inspiration to do something

and you didn’t know what it was.

You don’t have the sense of like,

how is this rationally going to make sense

for me to move forward in my life.

I’ll give you an example.

A friend of mine, Dr. Ignatius Piazza,

graduates chiropractic school.

He wants to move Monterey near Pebble Beach

where the golf course is.

And he gets there and he says

to the local Chiropractic Association,

I’d like to join you.

I’d like you to help me get my practice started.

And they said, we don’t need any more chiropractics.

We have one chiropractic for ever eight people in this area.

It’s too many.

Now he could have say, okay,

let the external reality control his internal experience

but he didn’t do that.

He said, I’m going to think about this

and visualize it and believe in it.

And something will come that I will do.

And what came to him to do,

was to take six months before he opened his office

and put a pin where he wanted his office

and then concentric circles,

knock on every door in every neighborhood

saying hi, I’m a new doctor in town.

Can I ask you a few questions?

You know I’m starting this practice.

Should I open from five til nine in the morning

or should I be open from five until nine at night

for people who have nine to five jobs.

Which would be better?

Should I advertise in this paper or that paper?

Should I call it Ignatius Piazza Chiropractic

or Chiropractic West?

Then his last question was if I have an open house,

would you like to receive an invitation?

If they said yes, he wrote it down.

Now over six months, he knocked on 12,500 doors.

Talked to 6,500 people and gathered over 4000 names

of people who said yes, I’d like an invitation

to your open house.

Now when he opened his office six months later

in a town that did not need another chiropractor

according to the professionals,

his first month in practice he netted $72,000.

(audience murmuring)

In his first year in practice,

his gross income was over a million dollars.

I was giving a talk and mentioned this story

just about five years ago

and this happened about 25 years ago.

Someone said, he knocked on my door.

(audience laughing)

And he left his card.

And two years later, I needed a chiropractor

and I called him.

Because we work with people we know,

we’ve had an experience with right?

So he trusted his intuition.

He took action on it.

Other people would say, oop, guess I can’t have what I want.

You got to be willing to take the action.

– You can’t just wait for inspiration, to act.

That’s the biggest mistake people make.

Don’t wait to be inspired to do the action.

You have to do the action first and then you’ll be inspired.

So what I would do is I would sit there and draw

the comic and I would come up with it.

But some days I come home from school, sit down and go

I’m just going to wait for the inspiration to hit me.

I’m going to wait for the idea to come fully formed.

And when I got a joke,

then I’ll go draw it.

And I would sit there for maybe three or four hours

(laughing) and then go, alright screw it,

I got to get up, I got to do the process.

I got to sit there and just start drawing.

I don’t even know why or how I’m going to get there

and then two things would come together

and then it would be oh, there’s an idea

oh there’s the first para,

the second para.

And then it would come together.

Always, it would not take very long.

I would fight that process so much

because what was I doing.

I was waiting for inspiration before I acted.

It’s always the other way around.

Act first, then the inspiration will come.

Draw first.

Then the inspiration will come.

Just start shooting, then the inspiration will come.

Just start moving, then the inspiration will come.

Don’t wait.

So many people wait

or tell you they’re going to write this novel

or they’re going to do this or their going to make this film,

they never do it.

Because they’re waiting for all this stuff to come to them.

It comes through doing it.

– Don’t wait.

Go.

Do it.

Act.

Now.

And really accepting, we need you, we need you, we need you.

You are the one percent,

you’re the percent that says

I’m going to wake up.

You’re the light workers.

You are the ones that have accepted this call

in this lifetime, at this time.

You have decided to wake up and chosen to say

yes, I’m here to be of greater service

than just to feed myself, right.

I’m here to feed the world.

I’m here to give love.

I’m here to be an expression of that truth.

Don’t hold that back.

Don’t play small.

We can’t, we need you.

And so really if you or anyone in this room

who has been sitting on that book idea

waiting a little bit longer

before you start that t-shirt training,

or doing ten more teacher trainings

before you actually teach.

(audience laughing)

If that’s you guys,

start and the pressure will be off.

I can’t begin to tell you, I could cry just saying this,

the day I taught Ego Eradicator

I was two weeks into my teaching training

and I said F it, let’s go!

And I just went and I felt so much pressure off.

I felt so much lift.

Because I just knew I felt this technology must be shared.

I can’t hold it.

I can’t keep it from myself.

I can’t just sit in my apartment by myself like this

(sniffing)

I got to give this. (audience laughing)

And sharing it, the pressure, it just lifted.

It was like, aw, thank you.

Thank you, thank you.

And I wasn’t the perfect teacher.

And I look back and I was teaching Ego Eradicator wrong.

Everyone’s arms were like this.

Everyone was breathing backwards.

It was a mess but I did it.

And I started.

And in those moments when we just get to go,

just go.

The pressure is off

and then we clear the path and we are guided

to the next right action.

And that is the most magnificent thing you can do right now.

– I find it quite inspiring.

You were in film publicity, originally.

And then at a certain point,

you decided that you wanted to direct.

Can you tell us how you got from there to here?

– Well I was one of those ladies standing on the side.

You know, and they work hard.

And no one ever really gives them the shout out.

I thank you all, the publicist in the corner, you know.

(audience clapping)

And as a person who loved film and wanted to make film,

you’re standing there supporting film makers,

telling their stories and it’s something that I love doing.

But for me there was always a

little bit of, I don’t know, not jealousy,

but just like wow, that’s great what they’re doing.

And so at the moment, when I actually

started to write and tried to direct my own stuff,

I was still doing publicity for other people’s films.

I was trying to make my own films.

I was asking for permission, pitching people,

trying to get contacts and network

and do all the things that don’t matter.

Because the only thing that matters is your work.

And so, when I finally realized that

and started to make small things and try

to move them around festivals

and just you know, just share my work,

the energy behind that positive intention

started the ball rolling.

And I’ve only been making films for five years.

And I only quit my job full-time three years ago.

Because I was still holding on to publicity

as a security blanket.

And so yeah,

you know, I look at

each year that’s passed

and all I’ve tried to do is continue

to make work whether I have the money

to make a film, a narrative, a doc,

a commercial, a TV show,

directed an episode of Scandal,

(audience clapping)

a documentary about Venus Williams,

whatever I, a story I want to tell through whatever medium,

short medium, TV medium,

commercial medium, full-length, documentary,

feature, that’s something that I really learned from Spike.

Lee, not Jones, I’m sure Jones is nice but.

(audience laughing)

I was talking to a lady, she was like Spike Jones is a.

No lady, Spike Lee.

(audience laughing)

But you know, remember he did commercials with Jordan.

He’s done almost as many docs as he’s done narratives.

He’s made a film every year for the past 20 years.

I mean, he’s really the blue print of

just not even a black film maker,

a film maker who has just continued to make work.

And so that’s how we’re here now.

– Your book is titled, Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain.

What does that title mean to you?

– You know it’s a mindset.

So, it’s a mindset that I had

when I was on the streets,

and when I lived in boys homes

and when I was in juvenile hall.

And the essence is, when you have nothing to lose,

you either are backed into a corner or,

and you cower and you submit

or you fight your way out

and so, I’ve been backed into a corner a few times

both when I was a kid but then also

in my professional career

when I decided to become an entreprenuer.

When the recession hit, you know,

I had to apply that same mindset.

– Now as your mantra, why do you think

so many people don’t live with that mindset today?

I mean, there’s a lot of fear out there.

Fear of the unknown.

– Yeah, you know what, fear is a trap.

And people are domesticated so to speak.

So, you know, they’re comfortable.

And if they just realize that they have nothing to lose,

you know, these middle class folks that are,

you know, they think they have something to lose.

They think that they’re reputation with their neighbors

or their credit or their Louis Vuitton luggage,

or whatever it is

is worth holding on to.

If they just ventured out there,

started a business, took action,

they’d realize there’s a better life.

– Thank you guys so much for watching.

I hope you enjoy.

I love to know what did you take from this video

that you’re going to immediately apply somehow

to your life or to your business.

Leave it down in the comments below.

I’m really excited to see what you have to say.

So 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.

I’ll see you soon.

(whooshing)