Best Motivational Speech Compilation Ever - 1 Hour of Motivation To Change Forever

you have to practice who you want to be you know you don't wake up one morning and you're suddenly who you think you want to be you have to put some energy into it so if you want to be an honest person you have to be an honest person every day even starting at three and four and five right if you're going to be a hard worker hard work doesn't just appear you have to practice hard work you have to practice effort and i also encourage them try to help them understand that good things don't come easy you know with that effort you know that's where you grow that's where growth some of the best times in my life when i've grown it's when i've done something hard when i've overcome a fear you don't realize that when you're doing it but when you come out on the other side you realize wow i've really stepped up so i push my girls but more importantly i love them a lot and that's what i feel for all of you i want you guys to feel that in your lives so that you can be excellent because other people told me that i might not be able to to do well in school for whatever reason i was always a good student i worked hard but i thought there was some magic that happened that made you really you know i didn't know that it was just plain old hard work so there were periods of doubt for sure i think we all i have doubts today doubts don't go away you just learn how to deal with them you you start knowing yourself and you become more confident the more successes you have the more chances you take you don't let the the failures or the stumbles define you you know everybody falls every now and then some people fall a lot and what i realized is that we have long lives if we're healthy and we do what we're supposed to do i'm 47 years old so think about it whatever mistake i made when i was 13 who cares so think about life as a long trajectory but at the same time you don't want to make huge mistakes because when you're young making big big mistakes can last forever right so you want to choose wisely but the stumbles the lessons learned that's part of life that that makes you grow but i i came to know that i didn't know that when i was your age i thought every every mistake was the end of the world i'll never be able i'll never get into school i'll never be you know of course we all feel that way um but just continue to work put the put the effort in and i think that has been some of what's helped me being first lady first of all is knowing who you are and being confident in yourself because there'll be clarissa what do you say pushing beyond other people's labels of you right that's a big part that's what we do to each other all the time we don't even know each other and we already determined from one glance meeting one line one word one phrase this is who you are so you have to know who you are before that and you and you live that reality and you keep living it out no matter what and if you're a good have good character and and good intentions that that ultimately shines through but in the end it's hard work and i like to work hard and i like to do good things and you practice that now and believe it or not i didn't know it it prepared me to be the first lady of united states i didn't know i guess i'm doing okay but you know what every day we just get up and keep doing what we think is the right thing read write read read if the president were here one of his greatest strengths is reading that's one of the reasons why he's a good communicator why he's such a good writer he's a voracious reader so we're trying to get our girls no matter what to just be to love reading and to challenge themselves with what they read not just read the gossip books but push themselves beyond and do things that maybe they wouldn't do so i would encourage you all to to read read read just keep reading and writing is another skill it's practice it's practice the more you write the better you get drafts our kids are learning the first draft means nothing you're gonna do seven ten drafts that's writing it's not failure it's not not the teacher not liking you because it's all marked up and read when you get to be a good writer you mark your own stuff in red and you rewrite and you rewrite and you rewrite that's what writing is and if you come out with those skills and then you're confident and you can articulate and you can stand up straight and look anybody in the eye and say this is who i am it's a pleasure to meet you that's one of the things we try to do with our mentoring program with young girls my message to them is if you can walk into the white house and meet the first lady and say my name is how are you and look me in the eye then there's nothing you can't do that's why it's important if you guys walked here are sitting here in front of all these people standing tall asking questions using your voice you have to practice that these arenas just show up again and again and then you just get used to it the nerves go away and you start relaxing into your own abilities but it's practice when you are struggling and you start thinking about giving up i want you to remember something that my husband and i have talked about since we first started this journey nearly a decade ago something that has carried us through every moment in this white house in every moment of our lives and that is the power of hope the belief that something better is always possible if you're willing to work for it and fight for it it is our fundamental belief in the power of hope that has allowed us to rise above the voices of doubt and division of anger and fear that we have faced in our own lives and in the life of this country our hope that if we work hard enough and believe in ourselves then we can be whatever we dream regardless of the limitations that others may place on us the hope that when people see us for who we truly are maybe just maybe they too will be inspired to rise to their best possible selves shoot it's the hope of my folks like my dad got up every day do his job at the city water plant the hope that one day his kids would go to college and have opportunities he never dreamed of that's the kind of hope that every single one of us politicians parents preachers all of us need to be providing for our young people because that is what moves this country forward every single day our hope for the future and the hard work that hope inspires i want our young people to know that they matter that they belong so don't be afraid [Music] you hear me young people don't be afraid be focused be determined be hopeful be empowered empower yourselves with a good education then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise lead by example with hope never fear [Music] so i figured something out that i thought i'd tell you about this took me like 30 years to figure out and i figured it out on this tour so there's this old idea you know that you have to rescue your father from the belly of the whale right from some monster that's deep in the abyss you see that pinocchio for example but it's a very common idea and i figured out why that is i think so imagine that we already know from a clinical perspective that you know if you set out a path towards a goal which you want to do because you need a goal and you need a path because that provides you with positive emotion right so you set up something as valuable so that implies a hierarchy you set up something as valuable you decide that you're going to do that instead of other things so that's kind of a sacrifice because you're sacrificing everything else to pursue that and then you experience a fair bit of positive emotion and meaning as you watch yourself move towards the goal and so the implication of that is the the better the goal the the more full and rich your experience is going to be when you pursue it so that's one of the reasons of that's one of the reasons for developing a vision and for fleshing yourself out philosophically because you want to aim at the highest goal that you can manage okay so you do that and then what you'll find is that as you move towards the goal there are certain things that that that you have to accomplish that frighten you you know maybe you have to learn to be a better speaker a better writer a better thinker you have to be better to people around you or you have to learn some new skills and you're afraid of that whatever because it's going to stretch you if you if you pursue a goal and it's and so that'll put you up against challenges okay so all the clinical data indicates well the opposite of safe spaces as jonathan height has been pointing out that what you want to do when you identify something that someone is avoiding that they need to do because they're afraid you have them voluntary con voluntarily confronted and so you break it down what you try to do if you're a behavior therapist is you break down the thing they're avoiding into smaller and smaller pieces until you find a piece that's small enough so they'll do it and it doesn't really matter as long as they start it you know then they can put the next piece on the next piece and what happens is they don't get less afraid exactly they get braver they get they get it's like there's more of them you can and here's why so imagine you do something new and that's informative right there's information in the action and then you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perceptions so there's more to you because you've tried something new so that's one thing the second thing is and there's good biological evidence for this now that if you put yourself in a new situation then new genes code for new proteins and build new neural structures a new nervous system structures same thing happens to some degree when you work out right because your your muscles are responding to the load but your nervous system does that too so you imagine that there's a lot of potential you locked in your genetic code and then if you put yourself in a new situation then then the stress that's the situational stress that's produced by that particular situation unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you so that's very cool because who knows how much there is locked inside of you okay so now here's the idea so let's assume that that scales as you take on heavier and heavier loads that more and more of you you get more and more informed because you're doing more and more difficult things but more and more of you gets unlocked and so then what that would imply is that if you got to the point where you could look at the darkest things so that would be the abyss right that would be the deepest abyss if you could look at the harshest things like the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world and the malevolence of people and society if you could look that look at that straight and and directly that that would turn you on maximally and so that's the idea of rescuing your father because imagine that you're like the potential composite of of all your all the ancestral wisdom that's locked inside of you biologically but that's not going to come out at all unless you stress yourself unless you unless you challenge yourself and the bigger the challenge you take on the more that's going to turn on and so that as you take on a broader and broader range of challenges and you push yourself harder then more and more of what you could be turns on and that's equivalent to transforming yourself into the ancestral father into all because you're you're like the what would you call it you're the consequence of all these living beings that have come before you and that's all part of your biological potentiality and then if you can push yourself then all that clicks on and that turns you into who you could be that's and that's the re-representation of that positive ancestral father the point is your best strategic position is how am i insufficient and how can i rectify that that's what you've got and the thing is you are insufficient and you could rectify it both of those are within your grasp if you aim low enough one of the things why do you see that that's another thing you keep saying aim low enough have a low enough bar why do you why do you mean that well let's say you've got a kid and you want the kid to improve you don't set them a bar that's so high that it's impossible for them to attain it you take a look at the kid and you think okay this kid's got this range of skill here's a challenge we can throw at him or her that exceeds their current level of skill but gives them a reasonable probability of success and so like i'm saying it tongue-in-cheek to some degree you know it's like but if you're but i'm doing it as an aide to humility it's like well i don't know how to start improving my life someone might say that and i would say well you're not aiming low enough there's something you could do that you are regarding as trivial that that you could do that you would do that would result in an actual improvement but it's not a big enough improvement for you so you won't lower yourself enough to take the opportunity incremental steps yes and so this is also what is achieved through exercise it's one of the most important well what do you do when you go and lift weights you don't go in like if you haven't bench pressed before you don't put 400 pounds on the damn bar and drop the and drop the bar through your skull right you know you think look when i started working out when i was a kid i was i was weighed about 130 pounds and i was six foot one was a thin kid and i smoked a lot i wasn't in good shape i wasn't in good physical shape and i went to the gym and it was bloody embarrassing you know people would come over and help me with the goddamn weights here's how you're supposed to use this you know it's humiliating and maybe i was pressing 65 pounds or something at that point you know but what am i going to do i'm going to lift up 150 pounds and injure myself right off the bat no i had to go in there and strip down and put my skinny goddamn self in front of the mirror and think son of a there's all these monsters in the gym who've been lifting weights for 10 years and i'm struggling to get 50 pounds off the bar tough luck for me but i could lift 50 pounds and it wasn't fair very long until i could lift 75 and well you know how it goes but and i never injured myself when i was weightlifting and the reason for that was i never pushed myself past where i knew i could go and i pushed myself a lot you know i gained 35 pounds of muscle in about three years in university i kind of had to quit because i was eating so goddamn much i couldn't stand it it's eating like six meals a day it was just taking up too much time but there's a humility in determining what it is that the wretched creature that you are can actually manage aim low and i don't mean don't aim and i don't mean don't aim up but you have to accept the fact that you can set yourself a goal that you can attain and there's not going to be much glory in it to begin with because if you're not in very good shape the goal that you could could attain tomorrow isn't very glorious but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing and it beats the hell out of bitterness and it's way better than blaming someone else it's way less dangerous and you could do it and what's cool about it there's a statement in the new testament it's called the matthew principle and economists use it to describe how the economy and the world works to those who have everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything will be taken it's like what's very pessimistic in some sense because it means that as you start to fail you fail more and more rapidly but it also means that as you start to succeed you succeed more and more rapidly and so you take an incremental step and well now you can lift 55 pounds instead of 52.5 pounds you think what the hell's that it's like it's one step on a very long journey and so it's it and it starts to compound on you so a small step today means puts you in a position to take a slightly bigger step the next day and then that puts you in a position to take a slightly bigger step the next day you do that for two or three years man you're starting to stride [Music] i found that nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks nothing nelson mandela said there is no passion to be found playing small in settling for a life that's less than the one you're capable of living now i'm sure in your experiences in school and applying to college and picking your major and deciding what you want to do with life i'm sure people have told you to make sure you have something to fall back on make sure you got something to fall back on honey but i never understood that concept having something to fall back on if i'm going to fall i don't want to fall back on anything except my faith i want to fall forward i figure at least this way i'll see what i'm going to hit fall forward this is what i mean reggie jackson struck out 2600 times in his career the most in the history of baseball but you don't hear about the strikeouts people remember the home runs fall forward thomas edison conducted 1 000 failed experiments did you know that i didn't know that because the one thousand and first was the light bulb fall forward every failed experiment is one step closer to success you've got to take risks and i'm sure you've probably heard that before but i want to talk to you about why that's so important first you will fail at some point in your life accept it you will lose you will embarrass yourself you will suck at something there's no doubt about it and i know that's probably not a traditional message for a graduation ceremony but hey i'm telling you embrace it because it's inevitable and i should know in the acting business you fail all the time early on in my career i auditioned for a part in a broadway musical perfect role for me i thought except for the fact that i can't sing so i'm i'm in the wings i'm about to go on stage but the guy in front of me he's singing like like like paparazzi he's just wrong and he's just going on and on and on and i'm just shrinking i'm getting smaller and smaller so they say oh thank you very much thank you very much and you will you'll be hearing from us so i come out with my little sheet music and it was it was uh just my imagination by the temptations that's what i came up with so i hand it to the the the accompanist and uh she looks at it and looks at me and looks out at the director and was like all right so i i start you know that's i'm i'm gonna sing i'm like you know and it's just my imagination once again and then coming and i'm not saying anything so i'm thinking i'm getting better so i can start getting into it [Music] [Applause] running this oh yeah yeah thank you thank you thank you very much mr washington thank you so i assumed i didn't get the job but the next part of the audition he called me back the next part of the audition is the acting part of the audition so i'm like hey okay maybe i can't sing but i know i can act so they pair me with this guy and again i didn't know about musical theater and musical theater is big so they can reach everyone all the way in the back of the stadium and i'm more from a realistic naturalistic kind of acting where you you know you actually talk to the person next to you so i don't know what my line was my line was well hand me the cup and his line was well i will hand you the cup my dear the cup will be there to be handed to you i said okay will should i give you the cup back oh yes you should give it back to me because you know that is my cup and it should be giving back to me i didn't get the job but here's the thing i didn't quit i didn't fall back i walked out of there to prepare for the next audition and the next audition and the next audition i prayed i prayed and i prayed but i continued to fail and fail and fail but it didn't matter because you know what there's an old saying you hang around the barber shop long enough sooner or later you're going to get a haircut so you will catch a break and i did catch a break last year i did a play called fences on broadway [Music] someone talked about it won the tony award and i didn't have to sing by the way but here's the kicker it was at the court theater it was at the same theater that i failed that first audition 30 years prior the point is every graduate here today has the training and the talent to succeed but do you have the guts to fail here's my second point about failure if you don't fail you're not even trying i'll say it again if you don't fail you're not even trying my wife told me this great expression to get something you never had you have to do something you never did les brown's a motivational speaker he made an analogy about this he says imagine you're on your death bed and standing around your deathbed are the ghosts representing your unfulfilled potential the ghost of the ideas you never acted on the ghost of the talents you didn't use and they're standing around your bed angry disappointed and upset they say we we came to you because you could have brought us to life they say and now we have to go to the grave together so i ask you today how many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes you've invested you you've invested a lot in your education and people have invested in you and let me tell you the world needs your talents man does it ever i just got back from africa like two days ago so if i'm rambling on it's cause i'm jet lagged i just got back from south africa it's beautiful country but there are places there with terrible poverty that need help and africa is just the tip of the iceberg the middle east needs your help japan needs your help alabama needs your help tennessee needs your help louisiana needs your help philadelphia needs your help the world needs a lot and we need it from you we really do we need it from you young people i mean i'm not speaking for the rest of us up here but i know i'm getting a little grayer we need it from you the young people because remember this so you got to get out there you got to give it everything you got whether it's your time your your your talent your prayers or your treasures because remember this you will never see a u-haul behind a hearse you can't take it with you the egyptians tried it and all they got was robbed so the question is what are you going to do with what you have i'm not talking about how much you have some of you are business majors some of you are theologians nurses sociologists some of you have money some of you have patience some of you have kindness some of you have loved some of you have the gift of long-suffering whatever it is whatever your gift is what are you going to do with what you have all right now here's my last point about failure sometimes it's the best way to figure out where you're going your life will never be a straight path i began at fordham university as a pre-med student i i i took a course called the cardiac morphos i still can't say it cardiac cardiac morphogenesis i couldn't read it i couldn't say it i sure couldn't pass it so then i decided to go into pre-law then journalism and with no academic focus my grades took off in their own direction [Music] yeah down i was a 1.8 gpa one semester and the university very politely suggested that it might be better to take some time off i was 20 years old i was at my lowest point and then one day and i remember the exact day march 27 1975 i was helping my mother in her beauty shop my mother owned a beauty shop up in mount vernon and there's there was this older woman who was considered one of the elders in the town and i didn't know her personally but i was looking in the mirror and every time i looked in the mirror i could see her behind me and she was staring at me she just kept looking at me every time i looked at her she kept giving me these strange looks so she finally took the dryer off her head and said some she said something i'll never forget first of all she said somebody give me a piece of paper give me a piece of paper she said young boy i have a prophecy a spiritual prophecy she said you are going to travel the world and speak to millions of people now mind you i'm 20 years old i'm flunked out of school in fact like a wise ass i'm thinking to myself maybe she's got something in that crystal ball about me getting back into school next fall [Music] but maybe she was on to something because later that summer while working as a counselor at the ymca camp in connecticut we put on a talent show for the campers and after the show another counselor came up to me and asked have you ever thought about acting you're good at that so when i got back to fordham that fall i got in and i changed my major once again for the last time and in the years that followed just as that woman prophesies i have traveled the world and i have spoken to millions of people through my movies millions who up until this day couldn't see me i who up till this day i couldn't see while i was talking to them and they couldn't see me they could only see the movie they couldn't see the real me but i see you today and i'm encouraged by what i see and i'm strengthened by what i see [Music] and i love what i see [Music] today i want to tell you three stories from my life that's it no big deal just three stories [Music] the first story is about connecting the dots [Music] i dropped out of reed college after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop in for another 18 months or so before i really quit so why'd i drop out it started before i was born my biological mother was a young unwed graduate student and she decided to put me up for adoption she felt very strongly that i should be adopted by college graduates so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife except that when i popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl so my parents who were on a waiting list got a call in the middle of the night asking we've got an unexpected baby boy do you want him they said of course my biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school she refused to sign the final adoption papers she only relented a few months later when my parents promised that i would go to college this was the start in my life and 17 years later i did go to college but i naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as stanford and all of my working class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition after six months i couldn't see the value in it i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out and here i was spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life so i decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay it was pretty scary at the time but looking back it was one of the best decisions i ever made the minute i dropped out i could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting it wasn't all romantic i didn't have a dorm room so i slept on the floor in friends rooms i returned coke bottles for the five cent deposits to buy food with and i would walk the seven miles across town every sunday night to get one good meal a week at the hari krishna temple i loved it and much of what i stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on let me give you one example reed college at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country throughout the campus every poster every label on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed because i had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes i decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this i learned about serif and sans serif typefaces about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations about what makes great typography great it was beautiful historical artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture and i found it fascinating none of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life but 10 years later when we were designing the first macintosh computer it all came back to me and we designed it all into the mac it was the first computer with beautiful typography if i had never dropped in on that single course in college the mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts and since windows just copied the mac it's likely that no personal computer would have them if i had never dropped out i would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when i was in college but it was very very clear looking backwards ten years later again you can't connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future you have to trust in something your gut destiny life karma whatever because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference [Music] my second story is about love and loss i was lucky i found what i loved to do early in life woz and i started apple in my parents garage when i was 20. we worked hard and in 10 years apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a two billion dollar company with over 4 000 employees we just released our finest creation the macintosh a year earlier and i just turned 30 and then i got fired how can you get fired from a company you started [Music] well as apple grew we hired someone who i thought was very talented to run the company with me and for the first year or so things went well but then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out when we did our board of directors sided with him and so at 30 i was out and very publicly out what had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone and it was devastating i really didn't know what to do for a few months i felt that i'd let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down that i had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me i met with david packard and bob noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly i was a very public failure and i even thought about running away from the valley but something slowly began to dawn on me i still loved what i did the turn of events at apple had not changed that one bit i'd been rejected but i was still in love and so i decided to start over i didn't see it then but it turned out that getting fired from apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the likeness of being a beginner again less sure about everything it freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life during the next five years i started a company named next another company named pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film toy story and is now the most successful animation studio in the world in a remarkable turn of events apple bought next and i returned to apple and the technology we developed it next is at the heart of apple's current renaissance and loreen and i have a wonderful family together i'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if i hadn't been fired from apple it was awful tasting medicine but i guess the patient needed it sometime life sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick don't lose faith i'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that i loved what i did you've got to find what you love and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work and the only way to do great work is to love what you do if you haven't found it yet keep looking and don't settle as with all matters of the heart you'll know when you find it and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on so keep looking don't settle my third story is about death when i was 17 i read a quote that went something like if you live each day as if it was your last someday you'll most certainly be right it made an impression on me and since then for the past 33 years i've looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself if today were the last day of my life would i want to do what i am about to do today and whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row i know i need to change something remembering that i'll be dead soon is the most important tool i've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life because almost everything all external expectations all pride all fear of embarrassment or failure these things just fall away in the face of death leaving only what is truly important remembering that you are going to die is the best way i know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose you are already naked there is no reason not to follow your heart no one wants to die even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there and yet death is the destination we all share no one has ever escaped it and that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life it's life's change agent it clears out the old to make way for the new right now the new is you but someday not too long from now you will gradually become the old and be cleared away sorry to be so dramatic but it's quite true your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life don't be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people's thinking don't let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice and most important have the courage to follow your heart and intuition they somehow already know what you truly want to become everything else is secondary stay hungry stay foolish today i want to talk about purpose [Music] but i'm not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose we're millennials we try to do that instinctively instead i'm here to tell you that finding your purpose isn't enough the challenge for our generation is to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose one of my favorite stories is when jfk went to go visit the nasa space center and he saw a janitor holding a broom and he asked him what he was doing and the janitor replied mr president i'm helping put a man on the moon purpose is that feeling that you are a part of something bigger than yourself that you are needed and that you have something better ahead to work for purpose is what creates true happiness and today i want to talk about three ways that we can create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose by taking on big meaningful projects together by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue their purpose and by building community all across the world so first let's take on big meaningful projects our generation is going to have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks but we have the potential to do so much more than that every generation has its defining works more than three hundred thousand people work to put that man on the moon including that janitor millions of volunteers immunize children around the world against polio and millions of more people built the hoover dam and other great projects and now it's our generation's turn to do great things now i know maybe you're thinking i don't know how to build a dam i don't know how to get a million people involved in anything well let me tell you a secret no one does when they begin ideas don't come out fully formed they only become clear as you work on them you just have to get started movies and pop culture just get this all wrong the idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie it makes us feel inadequate because we feel like we haven't had ours yet and it prevents people with seeds of good ideas from ever getting started in the first place [Music] in our society we often don't take on big things because we're so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing the reality is anything we do today is going to have some issues in the future but that can't stop us from getting started so what are we waiting for it is time for our generation defining great works how about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels how about curing all diseases and getting people involved by asking volunteers to share their health data track their health data and share their genomes [Music] these achievements are all within our reach let's do them all in a way that gives everyone in our society a role let's do big things not just to create progress but to create purpose the second is redefining our idea of equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue their purpose now many of our parents had stable jobs throughout their careers but in our generation we're all a little entrepreneurial whether we're starting our own projects or finding our role in another one and you know that's great because our culture of entrepreneurship is how we create so much progress an entrepreneurial culture thrives when it is easy to try lots of new ideas facebook wasn't the first thing i built i also built chat systems and games study tools and music players and i'm not alone jk rowling got rejected 12 times before she finally wrote and published harry potter the greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail now today we have a level of wealth and equality that hurts everyone when you don't have the freedom to take your idea and turn it into a historic enterprise we all lose and right now today our society is way over indexed on rewarding people when they're successful and we don't do nearly enough to make sure that everyone can take lots of different shots now let's face it there is something wrong with our system when i can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can't even afford to pay off their loans let alone start a business i know a lot of entrepreneurs and i don't know a single person who gave up on starting a business because they were worried they might not make enough money but i know too many people who haven't had the chance to pursue their dreams because they didn't have a cushion to fall back on if they failed [Music] every generation expands its definition of equality previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights they had the new deal and great society and now it's time for our generation to define a new social contract we should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like gdp but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful we should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure that everyone has a cushion to try new ideas and we're all going to make mistakes so we need a society that's less focused on locking us up and stigmatizing us when we do and as our technology keeps on evolving we need a society that is more focused on providing continuous education through our lives and yes giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn't going to be free people like me should pay for it and a lot of you are going to do really well and you should too but it's not just about giving money you can also give time and i promise you if you just take an hour to a week that's all it takes to give someone a hand and help them reach their potential now maybe you're thinking that's a lot of time i'm not sure if i have that much time i used to think that we can all make time to give someone a hand let's give everyone the freedom to pursue purpose not just because it's the right thing to do but because when more people can turn their dreams into something great we are all better for it purpose doesn't only come from work the third way we can create a sense of purpose for everyone is by building community and in our generation when we say purpose for everyone we mean everyone in the world in a recent survey of millennials around the world asking what most defines our identity the most popular answer wasn't nationality ethnicity or religion it was citizen of the world that's a big deal every generation expands the circle of people we consider one of us and in our generation that now includes the whole world we understand that the great arc of human history bends towards people coming together in ever greater numbers from tribes to cities to nations to achieve things that we could not on our own we get that our greatest opportunities are now global we can be the generation that ends poverty that ends disease and we get that our greatest challenges need global responses too no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics progress now requires coming together not just as cities or nations but also as a global community [Music] but we live in an unstable time there are people left behind by globalization across the whole world and it's tough to care about people in other places when we don't first feel good about our lives here at home the purpose and stability in our own lives that we can start to open up and care about everyone else too and the best way to do that is to start building local communities right now change starts local even global change starts small with people like us in our generation the struggle of whether we connect more whether we achieve our greatest opportunities comes down to this your ability to build communities and create a world where every single person has a sense of purpose i i try to think what did i say that could actually be helpful or useful to you in the future and uh i thought perhaps uh tell the story of how i sort of came to be here how did some of these things happen and and maybe there's some lessons there um because i often find myself wondering how did this happen so when i was young i i i didn't really know what i was going to do uh when i got older but but then eventually i thought that the idea of inventing things would be would be really cool the reason i thought that was because i i read a quote from author c clock which said that efficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and and that's really true if you think if you go back say 300 years the things that we take for granted today would be you'd be burned at the stake for you know being able to fly that's crazy being able to see over long distances being able to communicate having um effectively with with the internet a group mind of sorts and having access to all the world's information instantly from almost anywhere in the earth this is stuff that that really would be magic it would be considered magic in times past in fact i think it actually goes beyond that because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren't even imagined in times past they weren't even in the realm of magic so that it actually goes goes beyond that so i thought well you know if if i can do some of those things basically if i can advance technology then that's like magic and that would be really cool and i always had sort of a slight existential crisis because i was trying to figure out what does it all mean like what's the purpose of things and i came to the conclusion that if if we can advance the the knowledge of the world if we can do things that expand the scope and and scale of consciousness then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened and and that's really the only way forward so i i studied physics and business because i figured in order to do a lot of these things you need to know how the universe works and you need to know how how the economy works and you also need to be able to bring a lot of people together to work with you to create something because it's very difficult to do something as as an individual if it's if it's a significant technology i originally came out to to california to try to figure out how to improve the energy density of of electric vehicles basically to try to figure out if there was an advanced capacitor that that could serve as an alternative to batteries and um that was in 95 and that's also when the internet started to happen and it i i thought well i can either pursue this tech this technology where success maybe may not be one of the possible outcomes which is always tricky or participate in the internet and and be part of it so i decided to to drop out did some internet stuff what one of which was paypal and and i think maybe it's helpful to say one of the things that was important then in the creation of paypal was uh was kind of how it started because the initial thought was with paypal was to create an agglomeration of financial services so you have one place where all your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and and work smoothly and then we had like a little feature which was to do email payments and whenever we'd show the show the system off to someone uh we'd show the hard part which was the um the agglomeration of financial services which was quite difficult to put together nobody was interested then we'd show people email payments which was actually quite easy and everybody was interested so i think it's important to to take feedback from your environment you know it's it you want to be as closed loop as possible it's so we focus on email payments and really try to make that work and that's what really got things to take off but but if we hadn't if we hadn't responded to what people said then we we probably would not have been successful so it's important to look for things like that and and focus on them when when you when you see them and get correct your prior assumptions going from paypal what what are some of the the other problems that uh are likely to most affect the future of humanity it really wasn't from the perspective of what what's the rancor best way to to make money um which which is which is okay but what i think is going to most affect the future humanity so i think the biggest terrestrial problem we've got is a sustainable energy but the production and consumption of energy in a sustainable manner if we don't solve that this the sensory is the century we're we're in deep trouble and then the the other one being the extension of life beyond earth to make life multi-planetary so that's the basis for the latter is the basis force for spacex and the former is the basis for tesla and solar city and and when i started spacex i it was actually initially i thought that well there's there's no way one could possibly start a rocket company i wasn't that crazy but but then i thought well what is a way to increase nasa's budget that was actually my initial goal so i i thought well if we can do a low-cost mission to mars something called mars oasis which would land seeds with with dehydrate wood with seasoned dehydrated nutrient gel and you hydrate them upon landing and then you'd have this great sort of money shot of green plants on a red background and the public tends to respond to um precedents and superlatives and this would be the first life on mars the furthest that life's ever traveled as far as we know and and i thought well that that would get people really excited and and and therefore increase at nasa's budget so so obviously the financial outcome from such a mission would probably be zero so anything better than that was on the upside so i actually went to i went to russia three times to look at buying a refurbished icbm because that that was the best deal and uh i can tell you it was very weird going there in 2000 late 2001 2002 going to the russian rocket forces and saying i'd like to buy two of your biggest rockets but you can keep the nuke that's a lot more um and that was 10 years ago i guess so they thought i was crazy but but i did have money so that was that was okay after making several trips to to russia i came to the conclusion that that actually uh my initial impression was was wrong about because my initial thought was well that there's not enough will to explore and expand beyond earth and have a mars base and that kind of thing but i can't conclusion that that was wrong um in fact there's plenty of will particularly in the united states because the united states is a nation of explorers of people who came here from from other parts of the world i think the united states really a distillation of the spirit of human exploration but if people think it's impossible then or it's going to completely break the federal budget then they're not going to do it so after my third trip i said okay what we really need to do here is try to solve the space transport problem and uh and started spacex and uh this this was against the advice of pretty much everyone i talked to but one friend made me sit down and watch a bunch of videos of rockets blowing up let me tell you he wasn't far wrong i think it was it was tough going there in the beginning because i'd never built anything physical i mean i built like little model rockets as a kid and that kind of thing but um i never had a company that built anything physical so i'd figure out how to how to do all these things and and bring together the right team of people and so we we did all that and and then failed three times um it it was tough tough going because thing about a rocket is that the the passing grade is a hundred percent and uh you you don't get to actually test the rocket in the real environment that it's going to be in so i think so the best analogy for for rocket engineering is it's like if you want to create a really complicated bit of software you could you can't run the software as an integrated hole and you can't run it on the computer it's intended to run on but the first time you put it all together and write it on that computer it must run with no bugs that's that's basically the essence of it so we missed the mark there that the first launch i was picking up bits of rocket near the the launch site was bizarre and uh but we we learned with with each successive flight and uh and were able to with uh especially with the fourth flight in 2008 uh reached orbit and that was also with the last bit of money that we had thank goodness uh that that happened i think the saying is fourth times the charm so that's we got the falcon one two orbit and then uh began to scale that up to to the falcon 9 which is about an order of magnitude more a thrust it's uh around a million pounds of thrust and we managed to get that to orbit and then uh developed dragon spacecraft which recently was able to dock and return to earth from the space station that was a white knuckled event so yeah it's a huge relief still can't quite believe it actually happened but there's a lot more that that that must happen beyond this in order for humanity to be to become a space faring civilization ultimately a multi-planet species and that's something i think it's it's it's vitally important and and i hope um that that some of you will will participate in in that either at spacex or at other companies because it's just really one of the the most important things for the preservation and extension of consciousness it's worth noting as i'm sure people are aware that the earth has been around for four billion years and civilization at least in terms of having writing has been around for 10 000 years and that's been generous and i think um i'm actually i'm actually fairly optimistic about the future of earth so i don't want to i don't want to sort of people to have the wrong impression that i think we're all about to die i think things will most likely be okay for a lo for a long time on earth but not not for sure but most likely but but even if it's if it's sort of 99 likely one a one percent chance is still it's still worth spending a fair bit of effort to ensure that we have um we've backed up the biosphere you know planetary redundancy if you will and so i think i think it's really really quite important and in order to do that there's a breakthrough that needs to occur which is to create a rapidly and completely reusable um transport system to mars which which is one of those things that's right on the borderline of of impossible um but that that's sort of the the thing that we're we're going to try to achieve there with with with spacex and then on the on the on the tesla front uh the goal with tesla was really to try to show that what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression we had to change people's perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly and had low range and like a golf cart and and so that's why we created the tesla roadster to show that you can be fast attractive and and long range and it's amazing how even though you can show that something works on paper you know and the calculations are very clear until you actually have the physical object and they can they can drive it it doesn't really sink in for people um and so that that i think is is something worth noting if if you're gonna create a company the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype um you know everything everything looks great on powerpoint but if you have if you have an actual demonstration article even if it's in primitive form that's much much more effective for convincing people i i think the the overarching point i want to make is that um you guys are the magicians of the 21st century they're like anything holds you back imagination is is the limit um and go out there and create some magic thank you [Music] you

Channel: Motivation Ark

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Keywords: motivation ark, motivation, motivational, success, inspiration, inspirational, speech, motivational speech, motivational video, best motivational video, success motivation, inspirational video, motivational speeches, motivation for success, eye opening speech, best motivational speech, Michelle Obama, Jordan Peterson, Denzel Washington, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk

Id: UKKPzn-4QA0

Length: 61min 57sec (3717 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021