When you feel like giving up, that’s when you most need to continue. What I want you to remember is on the other side of your greatest fear lies your greatest growth. What I want you to remember is to have the results only 5% of the population to have, you’ve got to have the relentlessness and stick with-it-ness that 95% of the population absolutely don’t have. So I want you to really start thinking about this word relentlessness. Are you one of those people like the mass of the majority, who come up with a great idea. You sequence it into a series of deliverables and goals. You start to share the idea with your team and with your loved ones and with the world. And on the first encounter with criticism, doubt, disbelief, and laughter, you actually retreat. I mean, a lot of people have a great idea that would actually dominate their domain. And then as soon as they share it, perhaps with a loved one and the loved one doesn’t have the interior strength and ambition and vision and self-confidence to say,”You know what? I applaud that. That’s a great idea.”Most people hear a disruptive idea and they laugh at it. And that is born of a deeper fear and insecurity because they’re standing in the safe harbor of their known. And if that idea actually got traction in the culture, they would have to change. And more people would rather die than change. And that’s why 95%, the majority, when they hear a new idea, they laugh at it. They ridicule it, they criticize it, they dismiss it. It’s not because it’s not a brilliant idea. I mean, it’s the disruptive ideas that change the civilization. They laugh at it because you frighten them. Look at any revolutionary idea, whether it was the internet, whether it was flight, whether it’s putting people on Mars, whether it’s printing press, whether it’s Ford’s production line, whether it’sAmazon.com. I don’t know what it is that’s going to most speak to you. The very nature of a good idea…Or I’ll put it this way, you can tell you’ve got a game-changing idea by the number of people who call you crazy. And when people criticize you, it’s not because the idea is not a great idea, it’s because you have actually activated their insecurity. And rather than having the consciousness for them to excavate and investigate and work through their insecurity to their next level of bravery, it’s a lot easier to stay stuck and closed and unconscious and shoot the messenger. And that’s why the very act of changing the world, that’s why the very act of arriving at domain eminence, that’s why the very act of being a visionary in your field or in your society is an act of heroism. You’ve got to fortify your internal confidence and self-faith so that when people throw rocks at you, rather than get knocked down, you get back up. When people throw stones at you, rather than getting deflated and defeated, you actually collect the stones and build them into monuments of mastery that serve your industry and the benefit of humanity.
