You Don’t Have to Stay Poor – Take Action Today with Steve Harvey

I'm a College Dropout I was homeless lived in a car for 3 years I've lost every single thing I had family included I've been written off so many times but today the person that you sitting in front of you is a process I want to talk to you for a moment about the process because see one way to get a person to really follow you is to be the example of what you get of what you're trying to get them to follow you know my daddy used to tell me all the time he say son

best thing you can do for po people is not be one of them cuz you can't help the cause your brain is divided into two halves positive and negative good and evil each half of your brain has millions of factory workers on each side you got a million Factory workers on the positive side you got a million Factory workers on the Nega ative side at the Forefront of each one of those factories in your brain is a forming you got forming positive and you got forming negative you are in charge you're the boss of the

factory so let me show you how this works you got a remote control you go to your house tonight and you press that power button and you press it when you point it at the TV what do you expect to happen you expect TV to come on you press the power button you expect the TV to come on if you want to watch HBO and HBO is channel 300 and you press 3 and then you press select what do you expect to come on that TV and what comes on that TV so now since your

brain is in two halves let me show you how this worked you wake up in the morning and you say man I don't feel myself today I got on the wrong side of the bed I'm not a morning person forming negative her hears that he steps to the front he said what did you say you say I said I woke up on the wrong side of the bed day I'm not myself I'm not a morning person he says you got it right away he said hey the boss just woke up and said he's not a

morning person he's having a bad day today and he ain't feeling itself let's get to work the million Factory workers start producing thoughts to justify what you just said so now guess what man I hate my alarm clock went off this morning I got to get out here in this traffic I'm going drive down here today I don't even like these people on my job I can't stand in this car I'm F to get in this morning sh wish I had a new car but I'm driving this ragged ass car and on and on and

on and your day starts tumbling into what you ordered at the top of the day you could wake up in the morning and you say you know what today is going to be a great day today I expect something really good to happen for me today man thank you Lord for waking me up this morning he said what did you say you say I said I'm having a great day today I expect something good to happen today thank you Lord for waking me up forming positive turns around and goes all right let me have your

attention Steve's having a great day today he's expecting some wonderful things to happen and man let's get it going and they start manufacturing thoughts same brain man I can't wait to go to work today it may not be the job I want but at least I got a job I appreciate the fact that I don't have a car but at least I can walk to the train man this is going to be great today that's how your mind works 247 it never turns off you have got to change the way you think it is the

whole determining factor of where you go in life we are all where we are today because we thought oursel to this position if you don't like the position think yourself out of it change your attitude you change your altitude I'm going to tell you something that every successful person has to do including you believe it or not every successful person in this world has jumped I'm going to tell you what I mean by that you eventually you are going to have to jump you canot just exist in this life you have got to try to

live if if you are waking up thinking that it's got to be more to your life than it is man believe that it is believe in your heart of hearts that it is but to get to that life you going to have to jump you see people in life when you standing on the Cliff of life and you see people soaring by when you see people soaring going to exotic places you hear about them doing wonderful things maybe you look up the street and your neighbor just gets a car every year every two years you

know how is he doing that have you ever thought maybe this person right here has identified their gift and is living in their gift because your Bible says this your Bible says your gift will make room for you your gift not your education you go get education that's nice but if you don't use your gift that education only going to take you so far man I know a lot of people got degrees man then they ain't even using them it's your gift but the only way for you to soar is you got to jump you

got to take that gift that's packed away on your back you got to jump off that cliff and pull that cord that gift opens up and provides the soil if you don't ever use it you going to just go to work and if you getting up going to work on a job every day that you hate going to that ain't living man you just existing at one point in time you ought to see what living's like but the only way to see what living like you got to jump and hit a problem let me just

be real with you when you you first jump let me tell you something your parachute will not open right away I I'm sorry I I wish I could tell you it did but it don't when you jump it's not going to open right away you're going to hit them rocks you're going to get some skin tow off on them Cliffs you're going to get all your clothes tow off you going to get some cuts on you you going to be bleeding pretty bad but eventually eventually the parachute has to open that is a promise of

God here's another thing you can play it safe and deal without the cuts and the tears and you can stand on that Cliff of life forever safe but if you don't jump I got another promise I can make you your parachute will never open you'll never know you never know what God really had for you I was speaking at a school once I was talking to the students the principal was mortified with my message because I was telling the truth I was telling the kids your education is po is important but your education is not

the most important thing in your life I'm sorry it's not your dream is the most important thing in this world principal came up on the stage while I was speaking don't ever say that to my school again well I'm just telling you dog you could save your kids a lot of pain if you ever talk to them about their dreams you got to talk to young people about their dreams if you talk to kids about their dreams your dreams can spur you to get the education but if you never find out what a child is

dreaming about you can't hold their attention it's the dream man you got to dream about something so big that it dwarfs all your fears the way you overcome fear is with your dream you got to make your dream so big that nothing matters except that dream you're willing to do everything that's necessary I was listening to Will Smith the other day Will Smith said the best things in life is on the other side of fear it's on the other side of fear but fear freezes people man the fear of failure freezes people suppose I don't

do it well you might you might not make it but I got news for you if you don't do it you damn sure ain't going to make it faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of Things Not Seen I talk to so many people who get older like some of us are and they've lost the faith well faith is really simple it's the faith is the substance of things hop for all that mean is in the beginning you just hope something pop off you know you just kind of hope something happen

for you I was hoping I would get on TV I wrote it on a piece of paper when I was 10 I want to be on TV the problem I had when I wrote it at 10 was I suffered from a severe stuttering problem I could not talk outside of my house so can you imagine when I wrote on a piece of paper I want to be on TV and turned that in the first thing the little boy next door next to me asked me he 10 well how long is your TV show going to

be cuz you you going to be on TV all day but when I wrote it on the paper it wasn't factual it was just hoping you just got to start with the hope faith is the substance of things that you hope for you just hope something jump then what happened is through grace and favor he give you a couple of them things you hope for and then you supposed to start believing then because now it turns into Faith but if you take this scripture faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of

Things Not Seen Albert Einstein said that imagination is everything it's the preview to Life's Coming Attractions that's what your imagination is your imagination is actually very very real everything you imagine could be a preview to Life's Coming Attraction everything we have today came from somebody's imagination somebody was talking on the phone with that cord on the wall and got sick of it and said you know what man if I could just go outside and talk on the phone pada we got cell phones somebody got tired of driving across the country said man if I could

fly over there boom we got airplanes imagination is everything it's a preview to Life's Coming Attractions everything you've ever imagined is real the problem with most people is you think your imagination is Hocus Pocus it's really not it's a preview of a Coming Attraction if you react to your imagination that's where your real life is it's just God showing you what he has for you it's the problem people have is they tell their imagination to the the wrong people see if you want to kill a big dream tell it to a small-minded person it's dead

how many times man have you had a tremendous idea something you thought was the one and you wouldn't told it to your loved ones and your so-called friends and they shot it down I mean you was convinced that it was just oh man I just came to you and you told the termination shot it down and you thought since they was your loved ones and they friends and they got your best interest at heart you believed them you was wrong they T you let them talk you out of what God got for you as a

kid you know I I didn't know but my my gift is that I found out later on I have the ability to think extremely quick and I can take any piece of information and transpose it into comedy immediately that when you a kid and you don't understand that you get in a lot of trouble I didn't know what it was until I got old that this was a gift that that it it did make room for me that I became a standup comedian which started with a dream of mine and it led to where I

am today it's a lot of stuff that happened in between there but your gift is the thing that you do the absolute best with the least amount of effort that's your god-given gift and everybody has one and God gives it to you at Birth you don't have to go anywhere to discover it it's not in the water it's not on the Mountaintop it ain't hid under a rock your god-given gift is instilled in you at Birth if you pursue that as opposed to your passion there lies your greatest chance for Success the problem with people

is we don't we don't we don't pursue our gift often times we try to go get an education and make it think that's going to get us somewhere if you identify that gift man that gift is the thing that that can make you great we're all participating in this thing called life life has Heaven flows mountaintops it's got valleys it's got It's got thunderstorms in it earthquakes this life it don't you stop expecting it to go smooth cuz it ain't going to go smooth the road to success is always under construction ain't no this is

this life ain't set up to be smooth you you combat negativity and you combat uh discouraging discouragement with gratitude it's the one way to combat discouragement is with gratitude what messes you up is you focus on the thing that's not happening and that causes you to get discouraged so whenever you get discourage you have to change your focus from what's not happening to what has happened and it straightens you out immediately because what causes the the the downslide is if you get wrapped up into what ain't happening it get ugly man and it just snowball

but you have to focus on gratitude people understand how serious gratitude is you know it's it's a serious principle of success it's hard to be miserable and grateful at the same time you have to take chances in life if you don't take chances in life you'll never have the life God has for you life is about risk if you play it safe in life you ain't going to have much of a life if you play it safe you won't have much of a life life is risk it take it take courage to pursue your dream

I just did it it cost me everything but eventually God is very good man when he sees you take a leap of faith he supplies you everything you need now it's going to cost you something but most people most most people are not willing to pay what it costs to go after your dream cuz you're going to have to hurt a little bit and most people don't like being uncomfortable if you don't want to be uncomfortable please do not pursue success because success is a very uncomfortable feeling and I just love learn to be I

learned to be comfortable being uncomfortable see if you think you're too old to make it let me give you a prime example Colonel Sanders Colonel Sanders has been frying chicken his whole life he was telling everybody he had the best chicken in the world ain't nobody believing they turned him down everywhere Colonel Sanders didn't get a franchise till he was in his 60s Kentucky Fried Chicken sell more chicken than anybody in the world today so if you sitting here thinking cuz you got a little gray on you you too late as long as God waking

you up in the morning that's the sign that he ain't through with you so what you tripping for last year I spoke at the salt convention the salt convention is where billionaires from around the world gather they gather in Vegas once a year to talk about how they going to change the world a couple hundred billionaires in this world they all come to Las Vegas once a year to Sal commit I was asked last year to be the keynote speaker and I'm tripping cuz I'm not a billionaire and I asked a guy who asked me

to do it I said I'm I'm not a billionaire you do understand that we said Mr we know we know everything about you we know your net worth and everything I said well what can you all learn from me he said everything he said the reason we want to hear your story is because the majority of us that are billionaires We inherited some money and we grew it couple of us inherited a billion we automatically some of us inherited 300 million and we turn it into a billion you come from nothing what we want to

know is how you got to where you are after coming from nothing how did you live in a car for 3 years and wind up on more TV shows than anybody how did you survive flunking out of school how did you survive all of that we want to know that because in case something happens to us we don't really have the information that you have how to come from the back to the front or how to come from the bottom to the top so I get asked often times to speak and so when I was

telling them how I made it I was telling them about the fortitude that I developed and then I told him about the faith that I had and that was really startling to them now a lot of them are people of Faith but a lot of people who were born with a lot of money ain't really had to have a lot of faith you understand you have an idea of what it feels like you've seen some kids get put in fosty care you've seen Child Protective Services come to somebody's house you've seen kids come to school

with less you might have been one of the kids that went to school with less you have struggled to give your kids a better life than the one you had they they don't hear this but I'm G tell you something right now you can be successful without an education you can be successful without coming from a rich family you can be successful I don't care what color you are what faith you belong to your sexual preference I don't care what's wrong with you you can be successful everybody in your life will have a turn back

moment no matter who you are you're going to have such a period in your life where it seems like it's not working you're going to have doubts you're going to have a lot of trials and tribulations and challenges and everybody has what's called a turn back moment you always have a moment in your life where the direction you're going you will have to make a decision to keep going or you turn back the sad thing is that average person turns back but think about this if you're going somewhere and you turn back you can never

get there if you wake up every day and go get in your car and say I'm going to the store and halfway to the store you turn around and then the next day you go to the store and you turn around you do realize that you'll never get to the store so whatever you needed from the store now is even a greater need because you turn back and every time you turn back it does not change the need so what kept me from going was what kept me going was I re I created I made

turning back giving up never an option and I had really dark moments man where I thought I was going to I just didn't think I was going to make it I mean where I am today I didn't see it clearly at all I had a lot of turn back moments but you know what it was for me man being successful is so hard but I realized that not being successful was hard too the difference between not being successful hard and trying to get successful in hard if you're trying to get successful in it's hard at

least there's some payout there's a payoff if you hang in there there's payoff when you're not successful it's hard it's hard not having money it's hard never knowing how to come up with your mortgage and your and your bond and your rent it's it's hard not knowing that why how you going to feed your children how you going to pay your bills it's hard ain't it so if it's hard that way and it's hard being successful I might as well deal with how hard it is to be successful because at least one day there could

be a payout if if you just stay in the hard part of life of not being successful ain't no payoff [Music] [Music] [Music]