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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.
The opposite of shoulder-shrugging would be to get depressed or angry and to hold on to those emotions for the rest of my 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.
It’s easy to complain about your life—how tough it is, how unfair it is, how stressful it is, how everyone else has it much better. But 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.
Because no matter how low you go and how lost you feel, there is always tomorrow. And tomorrow just may be the day when you get lifted up and find your way. There is just one thing that tomorrow demands of you to make this happen: that you never stop believing in your power to create a better day.
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.
It is through our most extreme experiences that the biggest growth happens—if we survive them. That night, I learned how to be vulnerable on stage.
The successful get halfway, then keep going. Both run the same distance, but only one makes it to the finish line.
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.
Once you know the rules of the game, you can play it. If you don’t know the rules, you’ll always lose.
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.
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.
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.
Struggling when you’re going somewhere is exciting. Struggling when you’re not getting anywhere is challenging. But struggling when you’re going backward is hell.
If life is a struggle, then struggle. If you get rejected, get rejected again. If your dreams are smashed, keep dreaming. Just keep your eyes on the prize—and always remember that you have to fail to win.
