How To Turn Your Negatives Into Positives: Rebuilding Your Life with Determination
Discover how Tai Lopez, renowned entrepreneur and self-improvement expert, reveals his secrets for turning adversity into opportunity.
Learn powerful strategies and mindset shifts to transform negatives into positives, unlocking your full potential for success and personal growth.
Explore Tai Lopez’s proven methods and start harnessing the power of positivity today.
Let’s get started.
Calm down to read this (looks somehow long). But it is worth is if you are really ready to turn your negatives into positives in every aspect of your life.
Enjoy!
Out of the ashes you will rise…
I can say that if you feel sad, lost, depressed; if your health is suffering – finances are in the gutter; social life, you’re lonely – can’t find it, can’t find people that you want to spend time around.
Depression: if you’re in a fog all day, can’t find that happiness that everybody seeks. Out of the ashes, you will rise, and that’s it. That’s at the end of the day, the quickest summary.
You can look through and read books. I’ve read books by philosophers and historians trying to find the purpose of life.
Well, as far as I can tell, no one knows exactly the purpose of life, but what we do know is that you will be tested and you can rise above the tests. The ashes represent the nothingness, everything that you thought you had burnt down and then you rebuild, and you rebuild better. That’s the faint hope that you must have.
If you look through history, the greatest people in the world, whether it’s Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela
– think about Nelson Mandela…
He spent 25 years in a prison unjustly, comes out of it, and everything is burnt to the ground, all of his hopes and dreams, career, lost 25 years of his life, but out of it, he rebuilds out of the ashes something better.
He gets rid of apartheid, leads the fight to get rid of apartheid in South Africa, wins a Nobel Peace Prize, changes the world.
Now, you and I, I don’t know if we’ll get in the history books, but maybe we get in somebody’s history book.
Maybe it’s a friend, child, a neighbor, someone we don’t know.
Like I said, I can’t tell you.
There’s tremendous philosophies that have been put forward as to what the purpose of life is.
Some people are nihilistic.
They say there’s no purpose to life.
Well, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a businessman.
If you start a business and then decide there’s no purpose to it, it will fail. ‘
The self-fulfilling prophecy will happen – the downward spiral will be created.
If you say, “I won’t rise above the ashes, that the fact that I’m sad, lost and depressed now has doomed me for the future,” well, then you’ve done what you’ve done.
They say faith is the belief in something you haven’t yet seen.
This is what all those great people had.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have a dream.” Black children and white children, holding hands, going to school together.
That happens right now, but it didn’t happen then in the ’60s.
He saw ahead; he saw what other people couldn’t see.
He had the faith to see what could be built out of the ashes of an unjust society at that time.
What’s wrong in your life?
Each of us has our cross to bear.
Health, wealth, love, happiness, each of these four goals;
these four obstacles, for many, stand before us the day you’re born.
Health:
Can you stay alive?
Can you stay healthy?
80% of people in America are overweight, losing the battle against that.
Things being burnt to the ashes, people not rising above, people giving up.
As Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What’s called resignation is confirmed desperation.”
People give up there.
Wealth & Finance:
You have to be able to provide for yourself and your family financially.
The average person, when they’re 16,
they got big plans,
how much money they’re going to make,
how they’re going to have financial independence and be able to travel and have fun and enjoy the things that they need and not have to worry about the bills every month,
but we live in a world where,
I read, India has 40 million kids still starving.
40 million. That’s a lot.
That’s New York City and L.A. and more.
Out of the ashes, how do we rebuild that? It can be rebuilt.
Love, social life, emotions, family, connections to friends, family, romance.
Many of us, you might feel lonely, burnt down to the ashes.
Somebody you dated, married, somebody you wanted to date or marry, friends that you thought were friends that betrayed you.
Boom, burns down to the ground.
Business partner betrays you.
Someone steals from you.
A family member that you thought had your best interests at heart turns out to have been not such a good player in your life – has taken advantage of you.
That third pillar, social, might be burnt to the ground right now while you’re reading this.
The last pillar, the ultimate pillar,
health, wealth, love, happiness.
You wake up with a fog of depression and darkness over your mind;
can’t find clarity;
can’t find peace within yourself.
Maybe it’s something you’ve done.
Maybe you failed and maybe your brain recognizes that and so it punishes you; maybe you missed an opportunity;
maybe you’re the one who messed up the social life and now you regret it;
you regret losing someone; betraying someone;
breaking up with someone;
divorcing someone.
That fog has burnt down your happiness;
down to the ashes – down to the ground,
and you feel you have nothing.
You can rise above – people do it every day.
Some people don’t.
What separates the people who do from the people who don’t?
Well, I think it’s a few things.
I’m no absolute expert on finding your purpose,
but I’ve spent a good bit of my life trying to figure out my purpose, studying mentors who understood at some level their purpose.
You know what they told me?
One of the best things someone ever told me was my second mentor.
His name’s Allan Nation. He said, “Tai, you know what the definition of an entrepreneur is?“
He said to me, “Tai, the definition of an entrepreneur is somebody who remakes the world in their own image.”
I was like, “What do you mean?“
He said, “Well, most people give up.“
Most people, society pushes on them their version of life.
You see it in careers.
People have a job they don’t like, but somebody somewhere at that company is making money.
That’s why that company exists.
So there’s people working in mindless jobs in a cubicle in a job that they hate, in a dead-end job.
Why do they do it?
Because they’re fulfilling somebody else’s dreams.
Somebody has mind control over them.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to work for other people – not everybody has to be an entrepreneur, but you have to feel like you have a purpose in your job or what’s the point?
Mind control – bop! you see that?
Now, what he was saying to me, the message he was trying to convey to me, is that some people remake the world in their own image.
What did he mean?
Allan Nation said, “Well, it’s the image you have in your head of how things should be.“ Then it clicked.
What he was saying is, you must be a creator.
Now, if you’re religious, I’m not talking about taking the place of God, but you have to create the life that you want out of the ashes.
The one beauty of the ashes, there’s one beautiful thing about the ashes:
When everything’s burnt to the ground, when you’re sad, lost and depressed and everything’s at rock bottom, you get to rebuild from scratch, meaning you get to rebuild the exact and precise way you want the damn thing rebuilt.
Let’s say it’s a house.
You don’t really like the house.
You live in the house, it’s kind of good, kind of not good.
Well, it’s a bitch to remodel an existing house because the structure’s all built one way.
If you want to change it the other way, sometimes people just knock the whole thing down.
If you’re sad, lost and depressed, it’s been knocked down for you.
So you could see it as a favor to you.
The world’s done you a favor.
I know that sounds like a stretch but it’s not a stretch.
You hate your job, you’re sad, lost and depressed, in the second pillar of the good life, health, wealth, your wealth – your finance.
Well, now’s your chance:
go knock it out of the park;
go work at a place that you want to work at;
go start a business that you want.
If you’re already making zero dollars, or you’re making zero dollars in a way that you like, you can’t go below zero.
Guess you can go in debt, but I’m counting debt as zero – can’t get much worse.
Take a month…try something; start a little side business, rebuild out of the ashes. (CHECK THIS ALSO: How to make $100+ Daily copying and pasting)
You’ve been dumped, you broke up with somebody – you’re sad.
I’ll bet that relationship wasn’t perfect.
So now you’ve been granted an opportunity.
The opportunity is to look back at the past relationships, the past people you dated or married, and go, “What did I like? What did I not like? Now I will recreate a new relationship in the image of what I liked, and I’ll leave the rest. Keep the best, leave the rest.“
If you had a business partner who stole money from you, well, that business partnership is over.
Now for the rest of your days, the rest of the days you have on planet Earth, you have an edge over everybody else.
You already know what doesn’t work, so you now go, “I will write down,“ and I highly recommend you do it a little methodically, a little scientifically.
It doesn’t have to be complicated.
Take a pen and paper, draw a list:
put a line, pros and cons of that.
The pros was blankety blank.
The cons was they stole money from me.
They had this personality trait that I could see it coming.
They were a little greedy – they were a little selfish.
You start writing that out.
Then as you rebuild relationships, whether it be business or dating, in the future, you rebuild in that image that you want.
I had a bouncer – I used to own nightclubs in North Carolina.
The most in-shape guy, the older he got, the better shape he got.
It was Franco. I once said, “Franco, how do you stay in such good shape?”
Because we had a club and there was food there, a restaurant. He would never eat anything unhealthy.
He wouldn’t eat after 9:00. So where do you get this discipline?
He said, “When I was young, Tai, people laughed at me because I was fat.“
See, he was at the bottom.
Everybody laughing at his bottom.
So he said, “After that one event happened to me, Tai, I swore to myself that never, ever, ever, again would someone laugh at my body.”
He said, “I decided to rebuild in my own image, the image that I had for my body.“
He wanted to become a big strong guy, and he was.
I’ll tell you what.
Had he not been in that place of the ashes, had he been born with a great body, he would have probably stayed pretty average.
He wouldn’t have that motivation, that impetus to rebuild something in his own image.
I see that time and time again, with people who have things come easy to them.
They’re lazy.
You have an advantage if you’re lost, sad, depressed in any area: your career, your body, your social life, your love life, your depression.
You now have a chance to build in the most precise way, and I emphasize, build this bad boy with precision, now that you got a chance.
You have a chance not everybody has.
I have friends that got married very young.
They have a great relationship, and sometimes I look at it and go, “Wow.“
You know, I’m a more logical person.
Love and emotions come a little bit trickier to me.
My grandma always said I was a man’s man, a little too macho for my own good.
Well, that has its disadvantages in some ways.
That’s burnt to the ground, some of what I thought.
I thought I’d be married at 20, 21, whatever, like that, but I see my friends that are, and I see some pros and I see some cons.
The advantage I have is I have that knowledge and experience of what I really like in a woman.
So now I can look with precision without compromising, with a real understanding of who’s good for me.
By doing that, I recreate a lot of pros, of course there’s a few cons, that my friends don’t have, but it balances out.
That’s why I said, get excited.
One of the sayings that changed my life (people always ask me what changed my life) – one of the turning points, and one of the crossroads – and maybe this writeup is going to be a crossroads event for you, but one of the crossroads events in my life was sleeping on a couch, not here – this is Beverly Hills.
I was in a mobile home, Clayton, North Carolina, and I remember just everything was in ashes.
No college degree, I had $47 in my bank account.
I didn’t have a car.
I’d lost touch with all my friends.
I literally, in the sense of the word, had nothing.
I read a book, and it said, “When you succeed, you party, but when you fail, you ponder, and all greatness comes out of pondering.“
How true those words were, man.
How true that was.
Out of those ashes of my life, I rebuilt and I was able to move out of a mobile home, not be in a crappy place anymore.
I was able to go from a junky car to some cool cars, maybe you’ve seen some of them.
I was able to go from loneliness to an awesome social life, all those things.
All those things.
But in the moment, it just felt like ashes.
That’s what you might feel like right now.
You just might feel like all you have is actual ashes.
That’s where the faith comes in.
You have to see your future before anyone else, because trust me, you are the only one who’s really going to see it.
Other people, even your friends, family, they love themselves more than they love you, and that’s how it’s supposed to be, at the end of the day, really.
You can’t really blame people for that.
So don’t get mad.
Don’t get mad.
They got to build the world in their image.
They have their own task to do.
You can’t blame them, right?
You focus on yourself.
You love yourself.
There’s an old saying, “If I don’t love me, who will?“ Meaning, if you don’t take care of you, nobody will.
Health, wealth, love, happiness.
Rebuild from the ashes with precision. That’s all I can say.
With precision. What’s the purpose of life?
You make one up.
I hope you build one that’s a little bit common sense.
Don’t put something stupid.
It can be, to be wealthy – that’s okay.
Not everybody should do that.
It’s not healthy for the whole world to seek after wealth, but it’s okay for some people to do it.
To be super healthy:
The gift of fitness is a gift that not everybody gets in proportion to others.
To be a lover, to find true love and bring love into the world, whether it’s through marriage or charity – that’s a gift, a purpose.
Happiness:
To be so happy that every person that comes in contact with you is left with this feeling that they never felt before – that could be a purpose.
Or maybe you combine, maybe you’re lucky, you can pull off all four.
God help you, if you can get all four, man. Be my mentor. Be my mentor.
I’ve seen people get all four. My first mentor, Joel Salatin – he got all four: health, wealth, love, happiness.
He’s like in his 60’s,
healthy; he’s a multimillionaire, love, friends, family; he’s married to his high school sweetheart. He told me, he said, “Tai, my vision for my life is to have my children and my grandchildren all on my farm with my grandchildren playing around at my feet every day asking me questions.”
He pulled it off!
He told me that before he had grandchildren; he told me that when his son was only 12, or 13 years old. Now, his son gave him three grandchildren.
Happy: he’s a happy guy, laughs louder and harder than almost anybody I know – he’s a special dude. Not all of us quite pull that off, just like not all of us can be Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi or whatever.
You know, you start acting with precision, you’ll be surprised how much people underestimate what you can do – you’ll be surprised.
I get people who hate on me. Sometimes you act with precision. Those people end up …
There’s a saying I have: “Hustle till your haters ask if you’re hiring.“
Those people will become your biggest fans. You had the last laugh, you know?
Out of the ashes, you will rebuild.
Rebuild; rebuild each area.
Sit down.
Here in my bedroom, this is like an area right here;
these couches, these little couches here, is where I can think.
You got to think.
Like I said, I’m more of a thinker than a feeler.
You might be more of a feeler, and I respect that, but you can do both.
I have to learn to feel a little more, be a little more emotional.
You might have to learn to be a little more logical.
That logical approach is powerful, especially when it’s combined with emotional.
You take those two, you have the two levers that can lift any obstacle, emotion, logic.
Logic is the tool – emotion is the motivation.
Logic is the tool. Emotion gives you the courage and the heart to do it; gives you the passion to, pow!
Lift that thing up.
I’ll tell you, life and the ashes in society will rob you.
It’ll usually give you one and not both.
If you’re emotional, it’ll let you have that emotion, but if you’re too emotional, combine it with a little logic, people will start to drag you down.
I don’t know why.
If you’re logical, vice versa.
You got to get both going with precision.
Precision’s the logic, emotion brings the passion.
Passionate precision, what can’t you do?
What can’t you do?
I think it’s Elon Musk, the billionaire who started PayPal and Tesla and putting humans on Mars now … actually, it wasn’t him, sorry.
It was Steve Jobs – Apple.
Steve Jobs said in one of his final speeches before he died of cancer, he said, “As you grow older you will discover this whole world was built by people not really smarter than you.”
A few things: nuclear fission, fusion or power – maybe those people are smarter, but for the most part, it’s just people who had the passion and had the precision to rebuild out of the ashes.
So, I hope today if you felt lost;
if you felt bad;
if you felt depressed,
you’ll remember that quote that got me off my couch:
“When you fail, you ponder and all greatness comes out of ponder.“
All reinvention; all creation; all rebuilding, comes out of the ashes – the failure.
Now, I don’t suggest you fail on purpose.
In fact, resolve to fail less.
Make this, today, that big crossroads event where it’s like boom, can’t get worse than this.
It might not be in all four areas.
You might be doing well in one, two, or three – I promise you, there’s one that’s weak.
Almost everybody I meet, unless you’re like my first mentor, which I don’t meet people like that for a decade.
I would guess you’re like me and we have our one weakness area.
Maybe it’s your health, your body – you just can’t keep in shape. Make that your mission to fix…. make that your mission to fix.
You must use your force of will to fix your weakest part.
Now, you don’t necessarily want to build your career on your weakest part.
You want to build your career, like Peter Drucker says, on your strengths, but I’m talking about to round out and get rid of feeling lost, sad, and depressed.
That usually comes, because your brain recognizes, and you can’t fix this, that something’s wrong.
That’s what depression is for the most part; there’s different versions, but for most of us that don’t suffer with severe depression, gloominess, cloudy brain and lack of happiness, comes from your brain going, “Something’s not right.”
You look in the mirror; you feel a little sad and depressed; your body’s telling you.
We have what’s called a DNA imperative. Our DNA from tens of thousands of years ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago – the memories and the whispers of your parents and your grandparents and your great, great, great, great grandparents, passed on to you through the DNA – child to child to child to child; parent to child to parent to child; on and on and on and on.
The cycle goes, and it whispers into our ear and it says,
“You got to fix this. You can’t be so alone. You can’t be so broke. You can’t be so out of shape. You can’t be so sad and depressed… Fix it. Fix it. Fix it!“
That’s what you have to hear.
That’s the voice you hear.
When you hear that voice, “Fix it. Fix it. Fix it.”
Then you do, and do it with precision and passion.
Precision is the tool:
you read books;
you get mentors;
you go to conferences;
you invest;
you go to seminars or attend Webinars;
you begin to ask the wisest people;
you watch YouTube videos of smart people;
you surround yourself with people that have 10-20 years more knowledge than you have.
That creates the precision, the skill, but at the same time, you never forget, that’s where the passion comes from.
The wealthiest people I know, they can point to a time when they were broke and they never forget that.
They go, “I ain’t never going back there.”
That passion is the fuel – it’s the motivation that keeps them doing the precision and the logic stuff.
It’s the emotion that fuels the logic.
Man, just trust me.
Power comes…P – here’s a formula for you: Power = precision x passion.
Another word for precision is logic.
Another word for passion is emotion.
Logic times emotion – that’s your power;
that’s your power to rebuild;
that’s your power to get what you want.
If you see my TEDx talk, 5-6 million watched it: Everybody wants, but not everybody gets.
Some people stay in the ashes.
They can never quite get it together, but you’re different.
You’ve heard now, you’ve heard this and you now understand, I hope, that it’s a good thing that the ashes are there, because now you rebuild, like Allan Nation said, “in the image that you have for yourself.”
Maybe that image is an image where you work for yourself.
You travel the world.
Maybe it’s an image where you have a big family, 5-10 kids.
I lived with the Amish for two and a half years – that was their vision;
maybe you have a vision where you become a professional athlete – fitness at the highest level;
maybe you find one where you run a charity and you focus on fixing people – situations that are horrible.
You do social work, charitable work; you are a happiness ambassador to the world.
Maybe you combine two; maybe you’re focused on kids, parenting.
I do recommend you find one for yourself, even if it’s kids; even if it’s charity.
Find some vision and purpose and precise power that’s emanating deep from within you.
Like I said, kids are good, helping others are good, but you need … It’s like a power station, you know?
You need that power inside and it radiates out that heat. Others can tap into that.
You’ve got to have it burning within you. I know it’s not easy. Trust me.
Process of reinvention, something I had to do a few times – It’s never fun in the moment.
Faith is seeing what others can’t see yet.
See your future before anyone else does.
By the way, don’t procrastinate on it.
Pull out a notebook right now and write out a few things:
what your world would look like if you could rebuild it exactly in your dream, in your dream image.
What would your life look like?
What would your health, wealth, love and happiness look like?
Pin it to a board.
You don’t have to let anybody else see it if you don’t want. You can share it if you want, but make sure you write it down for yourself.
Talk to you later.
Stay Strong,
Tai Lopez
Tai Lopez is an investor, partner, consultant, or advisor to over 20 multi-million dollar businesses. Through his popular book club and podcasts, Tai shares advice on how to achieve health, wealth, love, and happiness with 1.4 million people in 40 countries. Tai started what is now one of the world’s largest book clubs that reaches 1.4 million people in 40 countries with his “Book-Of-The-Day” free email newsletter.
Tailopez.com
