“It is only when you can admit you may be wrong and are willing to grapple with uncomfortable ideas that you stand to grow.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Courage is simply the commitment to do the right thing even when it is difficult.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Only by making your legacy your aim can you summon the courage to act with conviction in the moment, whatever that moment may bring.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“What if we could live a completely meaningless life full of pleasure and devoid of pain? Would we not be happy? Something deep within tells us no.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Whatever you find yourself doing at any moment is the most important thing in the world to you at that moment.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“An honest life starts with an honest assessment of self. You are neither worthless nor preeminent but somewhere in between.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A lazy man often lacks the motivation to fight the very thing that has sapped him of his motivation.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A man long enough sedated may no longer even realize he’s being sedated, or want to.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Entertainment is often just a cheap way to quench our natural thirst for meaning by encouraging us to exercise passivity when we ought to act with passion.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Meaning is not found in passivity. You must track it down with fervent pursuit and fierce endurance. Meaning must be earned.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“All fame is is being known by people you don’t know, and what’s so great about that?”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“It’s not fair!” is the mantra not of the poor and oppressed but of the rich and spoiled. The poor and oppressed of the world don’t pout, “It’s not fair!”—they know the world too well to dare.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“You have but one life. You could spend it taking stock of what others have and resenting it, or you could spend it taking stock of what you have and doing something with it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A woman in labor never asks, “Why me?” because she knows both the cause of her suffering and its effect, and that sense of reason and purpose gives her the capacity to endure it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Your aim has the power to turn every good into an evil or every evil into a good. Through it you interpret your past, give purpose to your present, and cast a vision for your future.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“My best teachers showed me respect by refusing to share in my low expectations.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A goal is not the same thing as a wish. A goal is something you work toward; a wish is something you hope will happen to you.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Imagine living your life so indelibly that others remember your smile long after they’ve forgotten your name!”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Worthy goals are always hard.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“If my family is the price of my success, then I am grateful to have had so little of it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Entertainment is not necessarily evil, but it is seductive and addictive. It can easily become an end unto itself, an end without end.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Your moments of great risk are not yours alone. The decisions you make in those moments are of great import to a great many people—people of great import to you.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“You are not special, but you are unique.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A teacher casts his work into the wind, knowing not where it will be blown, in hopes that a seed will land somewhere it can take root and outlive the one who cast it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“What right do I have to the blessings I’ve received? None. They are not a right—they are a gift.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“It is the greatest victims who make the greatest villains, and the greatest victims who make the greatest heroes.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Life is a risk. Life is also punctuated by moments of great risk, and your identity and legacy are shaped by how you respond in those critical moments.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Failing to recognize moments of great risk is like dancing in the dark. You may be on solid ground, or you may be twirling at the verge of a precipice—you don’t know.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“You should neither attempt to justify a bad risk because it turned out well nor regret too much a good risk that turned out badly.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Sit around too long thinking about how to begin and you’ll consume all your provisions while your ship rots in the harbor.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Why leave the comfort of the harbor? Because you are a ship captain, and a ship captain sails.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“The best way to respond to a hero is to honor him, and the best way to honor a hero is to become a hero yourself.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A hero helps you resolve the tragedy of your existence in a world that owes you nothing, not by destroying the obstacles you face but by showing you how to take them on with integrity.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Your legacy is not simply a matter of what you do but a matter of who you do it for.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Your identity is formed in part by your past, but only in part, and not the most important part. Your past is merely a starting point.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Your aim is not just what you train your eye on; it is how you train your eye.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Only by making your legacy your aim can you ensure that your essential goals, those that stir from your very essence, remain uncorrupted by a million other, lesser goals that constantly vie for your attention.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“If you wish to leave a legacy, the things you do cannot matter only to you.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A legacy, by definition, must matter to others, because a legacy is something you leave behind—you won’t be here anymore to think it’s important.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“You and I enjoy a measure of freedom few have ever known, and it was not our blood that purchased it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Our freedom is not a right we have won but a privilege conferred on us by those who sacrificed much that we might have it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“The first thing we are given, life itself, is the privilege of all privileges. Whatever else life brings us, having it at all should fill us with humility and gratitude.”
“The alternative to a posture of humble gratitude is one of entitlement, which produces thanklessness toward your own blessings and envy toward the blessings of others.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Goals are, by definition, linked to sacrifices. A goal is a focus, and one cannot have a focus without excluding that which is outside that focus.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Your life is one giant, continuous sacrifice being poured out on the altar of your choosing, moment by moment and day by day.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“You’ve been sacrificing your life for your entire life, and you will continue to do so until you have no more life left to sacrifice. Your only choice is what you sacrifice it to.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“When answering life's big questions, it doesn’t even matter what you say your answers are; what matters is what you do.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“There is never the potential for success without a corresponding potential for failure.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Success and failure are derived not from anything you possess but rather by the things you do. Your successes and failures rest on your actions and your actions alone.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“What discouraged me most from the goals of my youth were not my failures but my successes, that they proved so hollow.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions