T.D. Jakes Shares This One Secret for Leveling Up Your Communication | Impact Theory

our country's in trouble right now because we're not listening we're talking we're all we're all talking we've got every kind of gadget imaginable to help us to talk but we're not listening so we talk at each other and not to each other it cost you your job cost you your company cost you your marriage cost you your son cost you your daughter that's too expensive this is not just about being a great orator on a stage or doing a ted talk this is the survival techniques that you need to sustain the things you love about your life will only be sustained to what you say out of your mouth [Music] hey everyone this episode is brought to you by our sponsor betterhelp an online counseling company with the mission to make professional counseling accessible affordable and convenient hope you enjoy hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i am here with the extraordinary bishop t d jakes thank you so much for joining me today well tom i'm pleased to be with you and thanks for having me man of course and i'm super excited to talk about the new book don't drop the mic a truly legendary orator stepping up and giving the recipe as you call it for how you do what you do i know you were really apprehensive about writing the book and trying to put sort of scientific language behind it but the book ends up being extraordinarily powerful in that it felt like a sermon if i'm completely honest it was so full of parables and stories and one thing that really stuck out to me is this idea of the power of a man with a microphone talk to me about that and what made you want to write the book you know it started for me as a little boy born in the hills of west virginia on the side of a mountain my mother was a school teacher and my father was a janitor uh my father ended up opening up a business with 52 employees but he started with the mop of the bucket so he was working all the time he was seldom home and when he was home he was generally sleep this particular time he was awake and the six o'clock news was on and dr martin luther king was on and and i kept looking at dr king and what he was doing with the microphone and i kept looking at how my father was looking at him and i don't know what she moved me the most uh the the admiration and gaze of my father or the articulation and the in-depth way in which dr king had that cadence that cadence a way of speaking you know that that mesmerized the country even people who didn't agree with him had to listen at him because he was such a tremendous orator at that point it planted the first seed of the power of a microphone and and and i mean that literally but also figuratively the power of a platform in general and understanding the dynamics of the breadth of that platform and how more things have happened when you think of mahatma gandhi when you think of nelson mandela when you think of people down throughout the ages that have changed the world more things have changed with the mic than have with the gun and i think it's so important for us yeah you know and and while we deliberate about guns and gun rights and what has really changed the world the most was an unrelenting welding of the microphone and if we have one if we have a platform of any kind and and we understand the power of that platform we have the power to change the world and i wanted to start from there and and talk about communication in every aspect not just from comedians to litigators to preachers to exegeting a text to trying to communicate with your wife you know you know we say communication is critical for marriage but nobody tells you how to do it and nobody tells you how to do it understanding the audience and that the rules change as the audience varies and uh and and that the art of being an effective communicator is predicated in part on your ability to translate your thought into the language that your audience understands whether it is in poland or australia or in washington or sitting across the dinner table from your wife or in an interview and so don't drop the mic really started out from that perspective and then grew out from there all right i definitely want to get into um i feel like an alternate title of your book could have been true communication and we will get into that um but we're i want to stick with this idea of the power of a person with a microphone or a platform in today's vernacular um were there i can't get this verified i have heard that there is a chinese curse if you will where they say may you live in interesting times and it is meant to be this unnerving thing that you would wish for somebody um and we're all living through interesting times right now i think that that can be said without a shadow of a doubt and this idea of you creating a book that comes along right at a moment where certainly not in recent memory has there been something has there been a moment so in need of people that know how to wield a platform and know how to um lead people to something extraordinary and i'm going to put words in your mouth you tell me if these are accurate um so i'm not a religious person at all but when i was researching you it's sort of inevitable that i spent many many many hours listening to your sermons and it feels like spiritually exactly the same thing i'm trying to do where you're using god i'm using biology and so i really felt this deep kinship with somebody that it surprised me a little how much i was like getting the chills i'm like oh my god like this guy is really onto something like this is so powerful so how do people get to the point where they have something to say i think that uh we all have something to say the struggle is find figuring out how to say it uh the you have to be emotionally safe in order to add vernacular to feelings and and when we speak out we ventilate the soul the the mind the memories the past and to be able to give verbage to that is very therapeutic if you go to a therapist one of the things you'll have you doing is journaling journaling is getting out of you what's down inside of you and so i think we all have something to offer but we don't always get it out and if you don't get it out it turns and eats you up on the inside and i think we have something to say uh whether it is you can't live life and not gather experiences and out of those experiences come conclusions and to share those conclusions is to create growth the more you give away the more you get back give and it shall be given unto you again and so uh in the cross-pollination of people talking and what to be honest with you that i wrote the book the pandemic hit uh something i'd never imagined in all of my life uh the racial tensions broke out something that was like uh uh reminiscent of the 60s when i was born in 57 so i grew up in the 60s in vietnam war and woodstock and jimi hendrix and all of that error and here we are back there again and everybody's communicating and talking at each other but not to each other the difference however is now we have the ability to to to hunker down into the silos of our choice and only interact with people who think like us dress like us and feel like us and as we become more tribalistic we become more animalistic and the challenge became in the book and don't drop the bike is that we have to keep talking to each other it's very appropriate that you're a person not of faith i'm a person of faith we need to talk to each other because you found out we had more in common than we did apart that's true of everything that's true with a wife that's true with a life that's true uh across races that's true with all of humanity but we allow ourselves to live behind the walls of the labels we put on ourselves and deny ourselves of the great opportunity that comes from cross-pollination and particularly in this country which is becoming increasingly more and more cosmopolitan you can either use that to horrify you and drive you further into seclusion or you can come out of your cave and risk talking to somebody and learning something new or eating something new or tasting something new or wearing something new and become a much more interesting person uh one final thought nature teaches us that no fruit is born without cross-pollination and and and we must think about that as humans that if we don't cross pollinate one with the other uh we won't be as fruitful as we would have been had we had the courage and i do think it takes courage to come out of your bubble and and and talk and listen and learn and not always show up as a teacher but to come into the room as a student yeah that was something that came across loud and clear in your book we were talking about that briefly before we started rolling and i thought it's so smart this idea of if you want to become a great speaker you must first learn to become a great listener what are some of the um tenets of that like how do you become a better listener if you think about it first naturally and then spiritually if you lose your ability to hear eventually it will affect your ability to speak because there is a correlation between what the ear hears and what the mouth articulates on the impetus of that ideology comes this tremendous premise of listening every great orator is a great listener and i think we have lost not our ability to speak not yet but we have lost our ability to listen because the only thing we do is pause while we formulate our next approach to attack okay and and that's not listening uh that's strategizing but if we actually take the time to listen most of us all want the same things most of us want to be loved most of us want to be appreciated most of us want to be accepted flaws at all most of us if we have children want what's best for our children most of us are scared most of us are anxious and i'm worried why can't we be friends why can't we communicate we're better together than we are apart and we don't have to agree about everything but in the process of meeting i found it's hard to hate somebody you understand and in the process of meeting your perspectives broaden sometimes to the point that you are ejected from the tribe because people who are not exposed are intimidated by people who are exposed the people who are exposed it's worth it to lose the sanctity of your citizenship and the tribe of how you describe yourself to enter into the broader world of a human experience before you die i would hate to die in a zip code having never left the neighborhood that i was born in mentally and not experience the world the world france and ethiopia and australia and millennials and boomers and gen xers there's something to be learned and people of faith and people not of faith we need to communicate to survive as a species and i want to drive this point a little bit deeper if you're going to be successful in business today you cannot build your business around people like you you have to build your business in a very broad eclectic way because the world is becoming broad and eclectic and a narrow mind also causes you to be less successful at the end of your career because your niche market marketing an item that could have a broad appeal if you didn't think within the prison of your own experiences wow within the prison of your own experiences that's that is a really eloquent way to say that idea but i want to go back to what you said because i think this is part of what traps people so um i don't know how much you know about my background but i worked in the inner cities a lot and so i've dealt with people um that are so bright smarter than me more entrepreneurial than me i've heard you talk about drug dealers in the same way i do which is they are like entrepreneurs but they don't understand that essentially their product is risk and so they've they've taken this category of good that they're you know selling but they have to deal with employees profit loss i mean it's crazy so anyway i'm dealing with these people some of whom are smarter than me uh have more entrepreneurial experience than me but they're not going anywhere because they don't have the right frame of reference so i go to these guys i'm like look you guys are killing yourselves to help me build this business i'm going to return i will teach you anything you want to know about entrepreneurship anything i'll teach you how to build a competitive company whatever like i want to make sure you're getting as much out of this as i am and so i would go in early stay late whatever trying to build these relationships and i would get them turned on to books and so there was this one kid grew up in the hood his whole life drug dealer and he got in a fist fight over the fact that he was now reading and people were like you've changed and i remember that was so foreign and so bizarre to me that he would have to fist fight with his friends over the fact that he was now reading books and that being ostracized losing your citizenship as you called it that's hard to overcome how do people lean into that courage that you talked about how do they find it within themselves what is the reward that awaits them if they do it in underserved communities we have not marketed being smart as being cool and anything that's not marketed is not going to be purchased that's one thing the other thing is i don't think that inner city kids don't know they don't that some of it is said they don't know but some of it is that they don't have access to capital they have not experienced any world other than their own they feel isolated into the broader community so you develop a subculture and that subculture becomes your reality and hence it becomes your world and out of it was born not only drug dealing hip-hop which went around the world is a prime example of something that was born in the hood so when you start talking about people having something to say if if i can start doing hip-hop in my garage and end up with people in switzerland listening at beats then that proves the fact that everybody has something to offer that crosses culture barriers of all descriptions if we would mentor each other by you being a part of the general populace you become a gateway into a world that he would never have but by the same token if you were taken out of your world and had to go live in his world he would have to teach you how to do it so we need people who mentor us into the next dimension of our lives regardless of our perspectives or our backgrounds and understanding that embracing that and resisting the gravitational pull to condescend to what is acceptable by a few and miss the broader populace of entering into the mainstream of possibilities and die beneath your potential it's a tragedy a mammoth proportion because you're not just burying the person you're bearing the potential and a lot of people black white brown rich poor uh listening at us right now run the risk of dying the death of being normal or average rather than being exceptional and being fruitful to the full extent of your potential wherever that takes you it's not about necessarily being rich it's about being fulfilled or filled full to the fullest of the highest expression of yourself and so i think that that's something important it's frustrating no matter where you park your car and no matter the square footage of your home to pull into the driveway or the carport or or the sidewalk and feel like i never got to be as far as i could see and and i think we need people to stimulate us and i wrote don't drop the bike in part to challenge people to keep wrestling with this and talking about this and doing what you did talking to people out of your circle i tell ceos you can't just build products for people who are like you you have to build products for everybody you have to have everybody on your board because you will innocently offend somebody and spend more money in damage control then it would cost you to hire somebody who would say oh no don't make that t-shirt because in my culture that same word means such a such a thing and in the book i talk about uh i did it myself i inadvertently offended the kenyans and uh i used a term that over here doesn't isn't isn't a negative term but over there i got three days of of being cursed out in swahili you know and i thought i never even meant to do that i had a choice at that point to either withdraw and not talk to them anymore or to say i got that wrong that's not my heart i am so sorry i offended you i absolutely adore you and and and show me a better term and i handled it that way and i'm telling you in these hard conversations we're having in america right now we have to keep talking even though we're uncomfortable and even though we get blow back and even though we get the pool where you're going to be disowned by your fellow citizens don't stop because somebody says you don't belong over there don't drop the mic because destiny is in front of you and history is behind you and why would you live in your history when you can excel in your destiny yeah that's such a powerful idea so you started for 10 years you were preaching to less than 100 people which i think is such a powerful part of your story because people see the after photo now with the mega church and just the you know insane success uh but you said until people learn to honor and invest in the 40 they'll never get to the 40 000. now on that journey i have to imagine that uh people came after you told you you weren't good enough you're not the right person you shouldn't be doing this wrong message whatever how did you stay focused develop the courage to handle the slings and arrows of that kind of climb because i think that people today the temptation of course is to stop when the world slaps you hard enough and says you know we don't want you to succeed uh most people do stop so what is it that you learned that would be useful to other people on the come up oh that's a good question that's a good question kudos uh first of all i found out it is not what they say about you that limits you the most it's that you might believe them and start saying that to yourself and and uh there were many many many people who said that i would never be anything uh i just chose not to be one of them yeah and as long as it's not your mouth that says it you can overcome theirs all day long the the thing that's interesting about me was even as a a man of the cloth and and as a pastor and as a mega church leader most people describe me that way because that's how they met me uh as we speak i've got two films coming out on lifetime uh i've done five movies with sony uh grossing 500 million dollars at the box office through a for for-profit company i've written 40 books 10 of them have been on the new york times bestsellers list don't what i'm getting at i'm not bragging i'm going to make a point don't let people describe you because if they do they will incarcerate you and it's all right to say he's a preacher but if you put a period where i believe god put a comma you limit me down to how you understand me i'm a person and and a person has more than one gift more than one talent more than one pursuit and and and if you've got a great job that's good but there's more in you than what you do and to explore all of the possibilities and all the potential i opened up a foundation i opened up a real estate ventures company we're we're doing community development we're doing uh mixed income community development with some mixed-use uh development in opportunity zones in underserved communities do everything do everything and do it scared because you're gonna be scared every time you get out of your comfort zone it is horrifying but it is also titillating and it is also inspiring and it is also nerve-wracking but you are never more alive than when you're outside of your normal your your your glands secrete different types of hormones when you're outside of your normal your brain starts spinning your blood starts rushing your adrenaline increases most of us are dying of boredom there are people listening at me right now who who drive home and circle the block two or three times before going in the house we're dying of routine [Music] and we were made to be adventurous we don't roar like the lion you know we we don't we don't move like the jackal uh we don't we don't we don't move we don't slither like the snake uh we don't bite like a viper our only weapon that's been given to us is our brain and we're the only species on earth that has developed languages and written languages and spoken languages and read languages and built buildings and built ships and you you don't see ants anywhere driving around in automobiles you know our brain is our weapon and when your brain gets locked down to living within the confinements of other people's expectations it starts to wither it ceases to be uh i i had a therapist tell me one time your body will do everything that it did when it was a baby the reason you can't do it as you get older is that you stop doing it and so when i say don't drop the mic i guess i'm kind of saying don't stop doing it keep keep moving into awkward positions because your if you do if you don't do that your body will freeze to the level of its usage that's true of their brain too that's true of your innovation that's true of your creativity so when i'm talking about don't drop the mic get scared sometime get where you're not the boss get where you're walk into a room where you're not the teacher walk into a place where you don't know the rules because then you become broader and you become more interesting and you become uh more global and more usable in diverse circumstances and situations the way that i talk on sunday morning as you know would not be the way that i talk in an interview would not be the way that i would get uh uh on larry king or whoever it is uh bloomberg report but i would go all those places i spoke for the senate i spoke for the white house i spoke for nine heads of state around the world don't let people limit you to what they think is appropriate for you do everything that you are gifted enough to do now there are some things i will never do i will probably never conduct a symphony you know i won't i made straight a's in music theory and i love music but i probably would never conduct a symphony but whatever is in your inventory is all you can produce and so uh the book is encouraging you to explore yourself explore your world and to articulate to your audience not just understanding your text but also understanding your audience because your audience is different and you cannot be a great communicator if you only understand your material but you don't make it relative to your audience connecting is it's the art of the game communication is about connecting with other people and in order to do that you have to listen learn and understand that your preferences culture ideas and concepts are not the only ones on the planet and if you're going to be effective at reaching more people you have to be broad enough to at least embrace the the notion of how they hear what you are saying hey everybody it's time to talk about all of our favorite subjects mental health is there something holding you back or preventing you from achieving your goals or even just interfering with your happiness do any of you suffer from depression or anxiety as a lot of you guys know i've suffered from anxiety for years and trying to tackle something like that on your own is not always the optimal strategy but a lot of people are super nervous to try out therapy or they don't really know where to start or they're just plain embarrassed but now there's a service called better help that makes therapy more accessible and affordable better help is professional counseling done securely online using your computer tablet or mobile phone through video calls phone calls or text messaging with licensed 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therapeutic help you need even if you have never gone to counseling before it's free to switch therapists it's more affordable than local therapy and they even have financial aid available if you need it betterhelp wants you to start living a happier life today visit betterhelp.com impact and again that's spelled better h-e-l-p and join over 500 000 people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional betterhelp costs just 65 dollars per week and financial aid is available for those who qualify during the sign up process as an impact theory viewer you can get 10 off your first month so visit betterhelp.com impact and get the help you need today alright guys if you need this one please give it a shot take care and be legendary yeah i love that in the book you talk about there's a big difference between what you intend to communicate and what is heard and the only thing that matters is what is heard how do you get better at that i think a great sentence to ask it's after you say something what is to ask the other person trusted person what did you hear out of what i said you'd be shocked the difference between what you said and what they heard and if you don't believe that get married all you got to do is get married three months and you will quickly find out that that you are angry with each other over something that i never intended but what she heard versus what i said were two different things and you struggle to to communicate with this person who thinks differently and after a while the only way the relationship survives is if you learn her language and learn to communicate in a language that she understands which in the book i talk about being bilingual and i'm not just talking about learning other languages i'm talking about learning the language of the hearer so that you're not turned off by somebody who's really crying out for help i had a guy send me a note uh on instagram and i mean he like he let me have it he just cuts me out said all kind of stuff you know and and i'm an easy going guy but there is another person sitting in here so my first instinct was to come right back at him and not curse him out but let him have it you know you don't understand me and some said wait a minute you're not listening he's cursing because that's how he communicates if he were ordering a hamburger he would curse he that's how he communicates he's really asking you for help but you can't hear it and when i heard it that way i realized that he wasn't attacking me he was attacking being stuck where he was and he didn't think i could relate to it and it was really a cry for help and i think our country's in trouble right now because we're not listening we're talking we're all we're all talking we've got every kind of gadget imaginable to help us to talk but we're not listening so we talk at each other and not to each other cost you your job cost you your company cost you your marriage cost you your son cost you your daughter that's too expensive this is not just about being a great orator on a stage or doing a ted talk this is the survival techniques that you need to sustain the things you love about your life will only be sustained through what you say out of your mouth wow you have an uncanny ability to understand other people i saw an interview you did with your daughter which i thought was really powerful and you were going back and forth between you know look guys are like this and women are like this and being able to bridge the two is incredibly important and i thought that the breakdown of the different sort of archetypes and look you're you're very careful to say nobody's monolithic it's not all guys are exactly the same all women are exactly the same races are exactly the same so we'll set that aside but there are certainly archetypes within those that are very powerful to understand and i'm curious to know is it just through the interaction with your congregation over 40 plus years that you've come to have that deep understanding or is there a way that people can learn it without having access to the kind of people and intimacy that you have access to you know i became a great counselor when i became a great listener and uh it's not so much what you do on stage but counseling couples will teach you to be a great translator you know she's not saying that what she's really saying is you know and and i found myself like i was at the united nations translating between two people who live together they live together they sleep together they have sex together they make babies together but they don't talk together and a lot of times they that's why divorce is so painful because sometimes you divorce over what you didn't understand not because you didn't care and it's very it's a slow painful death that takes longer than it does for the ink to dry it's going to go on for a long time because you often walked away from somebody who had what you needed but they didn't know how to give it or didn't understand that you needed it and and i've watched this happen so much that after you bury enough relationships and bury enough people and then you have to realize that i see people when life gets serious when a baby's born uh when somebody's dying of coveid when when somebody's about to get married or somebody's about to get buried and there's something about those types of situations where people get real so i don't meet your pretender your ambassador your representative your facade your camouflage i get to meet you when you're wrong and that helps a lot so you don't have to necessarily go out here and be a preacher to do this but when people are raw don't run most of us when somebody's really hurting or somebody died or or they're going through a divorce we run don't run from them run into them and and and don't come to fix him just to listen because the best thing you can do as a friend is to listen and i guarantee you your words of encouragement will be helpful and whatever you do will be nice but you will leave with more than what you gave because you will learn something about the human experience that you can use over and over again and that will help you with your own pathology and your own issues uh because we're not far removed from each other not nearly as far removed as the press would have us think we live in a polarized society where i didn't come up in that way we had the six o'clock news everybody heard the same news everybody was exposed to the same truth we might have had different opinions about it but we had one centralized feeding station now you can get news in your flavor it's like baskin robbins you know so so you can get news uh you don't like rocky road come on over here get some of this strawberry and then the worst part about it is then you think that that strawberry is absolute and because we have 24 hour news cycles because we build a world that uh technology begins to follow you and through algorithms uh associates you with your interests it starts pushing to you information that further supports whatever you were googling about until after a while this false reality like the whole world thinks this way and then when you get out there and and you're not and the cookies aren't directing certain things to you and you run into the real world you're a gas how could you think that you know look at how many things we have created to divide us and how few things we have created to unite us and communication actually unites us so when i say don't drop the mic if women had dropped the mic they wouldn't have had the right to vote if dr king had dropped the mic we would still uh be living up under jim crow uh if abraham lincoln had brought the mic we would still be in slavery you know look at all the times that somebody saying something changed our reality and our perception of normal now that's so important i want to stick on this theme of translating for people there's you really go into depth about this nuance that i think is important and one of the things that you called out is it may be someone that you know and understand well they think like you but you're in a different season than they are and uh you gave a pretty powerful example of you could be talking to somebody who's as devout as you are and you you don't want to hear about god in that moment because that's not the season that you're in and when you've got two people explain that to us this idea of seasons and how even that can create misunderstandings oh i'm a completely different person from 40 years ago you know uh i'm you you when you're i'm i'm the i have the same dna i have the same fingerprint i have the same voice print but i don't have the same experiences so out of any particular moment it's not can you go with me as can you grow with me and so at any particular moment where we may have shared philosophies the season will change the reality you know right now i'm sitting in dallas and it's 80 degrees outside a month ago it was below zero though i'm in the same place it's different based on the season i'm in and understanding that and this is important i think this is really important especially uh for men but maybe for women too we keep trying to hold on to our last season without discovering the beauty of the season we're in now we we are we we're we're in the gym we're running we're doing everything we can to hold on to 20. as if something were wrong with 40 instead of exploring 40 and and re pivoting is the word pivoting into the beauty of four there's a beauty at 80. if you sit down and talk to a 80 year old man who is happy there are things that he's happy about that a 20 year old man hadn't even touched yet he doesn't even have a clue he he doesn't even know that exists yet and so seasons stages and ages have repercussions on how we get along and so we are constantly in motion we are constantly evolving we are constantly becoming and we must not despise that transition because number one it's inevitable it's gonna happen anyway and number two you will miss the beauty of of of wrinkles of of gray hair of of love to through wrinkled eyes you will botox your way into missing one the beauty that comes to be a grandmother there's a beauty and a charm and a finesse and a wisdom but we are so obsessed with what was and i think that it's something to be said if you are leading and if you're living uh we have to deal with cross-generational realities even though we might all be people of faith or we might all be atheists or agnostics or whatever we are we're at different stages of life putting yourself in fouls where you describe yourself this way or that way is a limiting idea because i'm a person of faith does not mean that i don't have moments of doubt uh because you're a person of doubt does not mean you don't have moments of faith it took faith to sit down in that chair you didn't look up under it to be sure it would hold you up you just plopped yourself down in it believing it would hold you up you cannot exist without faith it's impossible not to have faith you know you don't send somebody out to see if your car will start before you jump in it and so we're not that far removed from from one thing or the other but once we learn a label and we teach what that label means now we're trying to live up to being in that label and you might be at a different stage where your soul opens up to an idea that you never thought you never thought you could listen and a black guy from dallas uh who's twice your size ball-headed gray-haired preaching and get something out of it that's what the book is about keep talking till somebody listens keep singing until somebody claps keep painting until somebody stares you have a gift and don't lock it up inside the convenience of a small group of people all right so let's talk about building those gifts you have an idea that i man when i say it gave me the chills i wrote it down i was like this is amazing and it is everybody is praying for a table but god doesn't make tables he makes trees and the rest is up to us i was like oh my god that's so good so how much you know when you think about people actually making something of their gift doing something in the world living through this interesting time trying to unite people bring them together finding their voice leveraging their voice like what is that i mean maybe responsibility is not the right word but what how do you get people to to build the tables first of all you have to recognize you have a tree and stare at the tree till you look at what it could be it's much like raising a child you look at a child you look what he could be what she could be uh and and then then finding out what your responsibility is to take what you have been given and turn it into something that it was not when it was originally handed it to you you know and to shape that and mold it and sand it and and and nail it and glue it and put it together and work with it that's the work of men but that process sounds hard that process sounds hard it it it isn't hard it's creative it's innovative uh it's mastering something it's it's miraculous it's it's it's it does require an investment and it doesn't require commitment especially when you come up in an age that everything is controlled by a button process sounds hard but the best things in life require process and if you run from the process you alleviate the promise in order to get to the promise you have to go through the process and in the in in the process of going through all of that guess who gets the most it's not the table or the tree it's the person who shaped it because you say oh i could i didn't know i could do that maybe i could make a chair maybe i could make an automobile without what i'm talking about we wouldn't have airplanes you know we we we wouldn't have spaceships we wouldn't have television we wouldn't have we wouldn't be zooming we wouldn't be communicating like we're doing right now through all of the various if somebody hadn't taken what they were given and making something more out of it everybody listening at us right now has been given things that if you can either leave them as trees and sit up under them and drink lemonade or you can say i could make a house out of this our forefathers took trees and built houses and chairs and tables we cannot be the generation that suddenly says that sounds hard and we stopped being innovative and we stop being creative because if we do that we will lose respect for ourselves because we didn't make a difference and we left it as a tree man i wasn't sure where you were going to go with we will lose like where the respect was going to be lost but pointing it at ourselves that that to me rings so true and getting people to understand that look you have two phrases that you use which give me the chills i think they're so powerful get ready and pick up the pace and hearing you repeat those from the stage is so moving to me because look i don't want it to be hard either i i want abundance just to rain from the sky but for whatever reason we have to shape the table we have to build the stuff we have to go through the process we have to put in work to respect ourselves like it's not about anybody else like if you want to be enamored with you you've got to do this stuff such as the nature of the human experience i want to deal with both phrases part of writing don't drop the mic was to say to the next generation you're not next year now the the the fathers and and mothers that built all of that amazing things that this country this world this society are dying you can't run around with your thumb in your mouth saying i don't know what i want to be it could be this it could be that no you it it's not optional you you have to you have to get ready because the time is now and you and i could not have written this book until i got in my 60s uh yeah i couldn't have written it until i got about 60. i i was 40 on monday and i was 60 on tuesday i don't it happened so fast it was frightening and the reason i'm yelling back at you and saying hurry up is because while we're talking your hair is graying while we're talking calcium is gathering in your bones developing arthritis you're going to blink you're going to blink and this precious commodity that all you've ever known is youth is going to be gone and you have to and the comfort of getting old is not wasting your youth and and the the power of being a father is to tell your son friend do it now go for it go after it right now because tomorrow you'll be in another season and you will only eat in that season what you plowed in this season and so when i pass the mic to the next generation i'm telling them this is not a rehearsal this is your recital so when you hit the piano give it hell because everybody's listening right now and i don't think that we always tell the next generation how much it cost and how little time you have and and how important it is that you don't spend your life crying about how you feel and and who wasn't there and who didn't do this or that if you you don't have time to allow that that that pull to pull you back down backwards you have to be looking forward building forward thinking forward going ahead looking at your trees sizing up what kind of table you're going to make is it going to be round or square what tools do you need what relationships do you need the currency of relationships is your greatest resource it's better than any dollar amount in the world you can have all the money in the world you have no relationships you're a poor man if you have all the relationships in the world you don't need any money because everything you need will come through your relationships we have not been taught to value the currency of human resources relationships because everything you're going to be is in is is incubated in the cocoon of who you're around and so being able to have those conversations and interact with them this is my way of doing a legacy book to say who's up to batman you know swing that thing with all you got and run like everybody's chasing you because this counts this matters you will never have this moment again not with your children not with your wife they may be there but not in the same way they are in this season you get it oh yes yeah no i think that's incredibly powerful and to me it ties into this idea that your dad started with a bucket and a mop and ended up with 52 employees but it started with a bucket and a mop right talk to me about work ethic and about you you said i'll paraphrase this isn't the exact quote but you said don't beg anybody for anything go out and create it yourself and i thought oh my god like that's so good like even even in the face of um like there there are people and i don't just mean at a societal level at an individual level that have suffered true injustice abuse being abused i mean just like horrendous horrendous things and my question to them is like that sucks i i am horrified beyond all measure that they've had to go through that but now what like you've got more life you've got light to give you know what i mean and so this is your bucket in a mop moment and what do you tell people at that point your future is never predicated on what you lost it's predicated on what you have left if you spend all your time in the doing inventory on what you lost you will never count up what you have left what you have left is enough to build something greater than where you are and you have all the rich experiences that come through the atrocities you survived you're stronger you're wiser you've proven things to yourself that you couldn't have learned any other way that you could overcome everything that happened to you gives you confidence that you know if you went through all of those things that you said really sucks then you know this interview is not going to kill me so you can walk into that door with confidence and say good morning mr shelton how are you today my name is pauline you you can do it with confidence because this can't be any worse than that so so start looking ahead nobody drives forward looking in the rearview mirror and so understanding that and and surging ahead with what you have been given this gif see the other thing that that that that i didn't share my father was dying and and i was raised by a dying man and and and one of his greatest gifts to me was to appreciate time he had a work ethic that was incredible i have a work ethic that that's that they say is exemplary i mean i can hang with the best of them when it comes to doing what has to be done but i i got it from watching my father well and then sick he kept going he kept moving he kept producing all the way out you know and and i intend to do that too in some way in some capacity and and and it ceases to be work ceases to be work when you start to love it when you love what you do when you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life so you you love it that doesn't mean you don't get tired that doesn't mean you shouldn't take vacations that doesn't mean you shouldn't have self-care all that but self-care you're gonna only have so much after a while you know you get tired of that saying on your back you say okay i gotta i gotta do something because we were made to be productive and creative and resourceful and and i i want to tell every entrepreneur listening at me if at first you don't succeed try try again and if you don't succeed that time try try again and if you don't succeed that time try try again and if you don't succeed that time write a book about what you learn from how you feel you know you there there's always something to do with what you have experienced whoo yes all right so you've written this book it's meant to be a legacy book what exactly do you want your legacy to be you've done so much films entrepreneurship multiple companies you've got non not-for-profit for-profit international relations advising presidents i mean it's crazy crazy what you've accomplished what what is the legacy what do you want people to take away from the fact that you were on this earth my legacy is you my legacy is the people that are listening to me my legacy is pouring whatever i experienced into who's listening that is that is my legacy that's proof that i was here if if if at the end of this interview and the end of reading my book i added something to your life that made you build a table out of a tree then i built it too then whenever anybody asks you about the table you'll tell them about this guy you met and interviewed you know that that's how we have survived for centuries that's how my people withstood slavery and the atrocities of our lives because in the midst of all of the horrendous things we experienced we still clapped our hands and we still sang our songs and we still manage to be creative and we are still here so so don't tell me about trouble through through hangman nooses and rapes and burnings and killings we sang and and my legacy is is that you dance and sing and survive and and do something i'm not saying that you won't have opposition and trouble and tears i don't have to write about that that will find you on its own agony will always find you on its own it's ecstasy that has to be has to have your address on it so i'm sending you the potential to to go beyond agony to the ecstasy of fulfilling everything you were created to be and that's my legacy it's in the people that heard me and read my books and saw my movies and traveled around the world with me uh it's in my children uh when i'm writing i'm actually imagining that i'm having this conversation and my book reads like i'm talking uh like i'm talking to you and you know that from reading it it sounds like we're having a conversation with a friend i'm actually talking to you i'm through the book i didn't drop the mic and don't you drop it either and something of what i said will make it into your book and something of what you said will make it into the book of the person who read it and that's how we have progressed for centuries and eons and millenniums because we passed the mic we didn't drop it woof all right that was good i like that cool well for the person that wants to pick up the mic from you where can they connect with you uh obviously they can go see the church in dallas but what what digital way can they reach you i'm easy to find i'm everywhere you know i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm in the theater i'm i'm on television i'm i'm i'm everywhere they can go to tdjs.org they can find my books in any bookstore around the country amazon barnes and nobles books a million anywhere like that uh as long as if if you can't find me i died because as long as i'm living i am going to make some noise if it's from a bedpan if it's from a nursing home i am going to be fruitful as long as i can move and uh i welcome anybody from any stripe and any walk of life uh i'm on instagram uh at bishop jakes i'm on twitter at bishop jake's you know you you can't miss me i'm everywhere except tick tock i haven't gotten on tick-tock yet i can't figure out what that's about but everything else you know you're doing a little password but anyway uh you know if i figure out something to do with that i'll do that too but i'm on social media i am on every technological device you can imagine and i do at daily christian television shows i'm everywhere whether you're a person of faith or not come check me out follow me you don't have you don't you don't have to agree with me but i bet you you'll get something that will help you i will second that aggressively awesome well bishop thank you so much for joining me today this was really amazing and i thoroughly enjoyed my time researching you and reading the book uh i recommend both highly all right guys speaking of things that i recommend if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care the speaking industry has been hijacked by people who speak to sell and it's it's okay to do that and make money i speak to change lives because somebody spoke and changed my life so this is my passion

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 341,731

Rating: 4.9227753 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, T.D. Jakes, TD Jakes, Don’t Drop the Mic, communication, listen, listening, relationships, potential, possibilities, success, entrepreneurship, entrepreneur, understanding, seasons of life, stages of life, stage, learn, experiences, life, talking, bishop t.d. Jakes, pastor, survival, survive

Id: 0ytRBkE7K0o

Length: 63min 28sec (3808 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021