Protect your hope, whatever it is. If you’re launching a new business or growing your empire or doing a movie or growing a family, or this is the year you want to run a marathon or whatever it is, it’s so important that the fire you feel right now and the ambition and the joy and the love for the project, that you protect it not only now when your fire is intense, fire is intense, but as you go out into the world and critics do say things or you feel tired or you encounter your own self-doubt. And so, the term I offer to you, and it’s so very important is do whatever it takes to protect your hope because you’re in this for the long game and getting that project out there is a process.
Trust your magic. I think critics come to you to test you, to see how true your passion and ambition is to bring your magic into the world. So you can blame them or you can say, “What have they come to teach me?” You can almost see them as spiritual friends and they have come to help you trust your magic. Critics come to you to invite you and challenge you sometimes, sometimes in an aggressive way, to trust your magic. Trust your craft. Trust your instinct. Trust the confidence that you have in the book that you
put out or the new product you put out or the new piece of code you put out. They come to help you build confidence in your genius.
The very nature of great art terrifies. When you bring light and when you challenge people to reconnect with their greatness and their internal heroism and their gifts and their talents, in whatever it is you do, you’re going to terrify most people. I remember being in the Born district of Barcelona in the Picasso Museum, and there was a quote on the wall that said, “People were terrified by the genius of Picasso.” When you challenge people to be a hero, to do their best work to display their magic, when you challenge people to let go of their fears and enter the secret order of the virtuosos, they have a choice: Embrace your message or shoot the messenger. And it’s much easier to shoot you and to shoot me because we’re challenging and trying to uplift them. It’s much easier to shoot the messenger than have the bravery and courage to say, “I must let go of the old me and experience a death of sorts to embrace the next level of me and
my luminous, heroic highest nature.”
Critics are dreamers who got scared and never got back up. I want you to really think about that point. I suggest it with my usual deep love and respect. You see, someone who’s doing amazing work in the world, someone who is dominating their domain, someone who is iterating their craft every day, someone who is living their heroic mission, someone who has joy in their hearts because they’re producing magic that honors their creativity as well as serves the world, doesn’t have time to go online
and post a review that is not just negative, but that is attacking.
Joyful people don’t spew toxic words on other human beings. And so critics are dreamers. They did dream. There was a time when they had joy in their hearts and they
were healthy and they were intimate and fluent with their primitive genius, and then something happened where they contracted and shut down. And so, rather than being aware of it and processing through it and releasing it, they just became bitter and they
closed all up. And so now there’s a certain pleasure they get seeing other people
fail because misery loves company. Joyful people don’t hurt other people, they lift other people up and they celebrate other people. And so just remember when people criticize you and when people are really angry with your magic that you’ve released, if you’re activating anger, wow, you’ve really done something amazing because that jealousy
and that toxicity is showing you your greatness when you get really good people challe
nge you because that mastery is activating their disowned genius as well.
Every visionary was initially violently ridiculed before they were passionately revered. Look at all the great artists. Look at Nelson Mandela, the great humanitarians. Look at the great military generals. Look at the great business titans. The real innovators and disruptors were laughed at and attacked before we embraced them. Even the great teachers of love on the planet who were crucified, they were crucified. They were crucified because they believed in love. They were crucified because they believed in a reality and a secret order that I talk a lot about in the 5:00 AM Club and how to get there, but they believed and were intimate with this alternate orbit that only history-makers access. And for the majority, it was such a different reality that rather than embrace the message, they killed the message maker.
And so I want you to think about that and I want you to translate the wounds that you feel into wisdom and the stumbling blocks into stepping stones because I want you to continue at all costs. The world needs your magic. The world needs your gifts and talents. You do. Your family deserves to have an amazing lifestyle because of the empires of creativity, productivity, prosperity, and service to the world that you are going to bring into this new year.