Act Like a Success, Think Like a Success: Discovering Your Gift and the Way to Life's Riches (4 page)

All of our actions are intertwined, and they prepare us for the moments to come. We don't know when, where, or how our next big moment is going to show up. I believe this is why God doesn't show us the full picture of our lives. If he did, we'd surely mess it up and quit. If God had shown me that I would be homeless and married twice, I would have said, “Not me. What else you got?” If God had given me a sneak preview and allowed me see that I would lose every single comedy competition that I entered before I eventually made it, I would have said, “You got to be kidding me.”

When I was hosting
Showtime at the Apollo
, I remember introducing Sean “Puffy” Combs for the first time. He comes walking out onstage with these two fat dudes, who I later learned were Biggie Smalls and Lil' Cease, and I said, “What in the world are these guys going to do? These dudes aren't even singing!” I thought they weren't going to make it, but Sean came back the next time, after he had signed his deal for Bad Boy Records, and then he had a whole army of people with him decked out in Bad Boy baseball jerseys.

I look at all the times I've seen people fail and then make it anyway. I look at my own record of how many times I failed. But failure is such a HUGE part of succeeding. If only we understood the necessity of failure. You can't win until you lose. When you look at a great like Michael Jordan, you have to realize that he didn't win six championships by only winning—he had to taste defeat many, many times.

I no longer look at failure as failure. I now see it as valuable, learned, gained experience. It gives me a chance to see that learning
what not to do
is just as valuable as knowing
what to do
. It's a process, but when you can recognize and embrace the process of failure, you get another step closer to yes.

I
n moving toward your dream, it's necessary to take the lid off the jar. Far too many of us let our age, race, sex, or economic background hold us down and restrict us from dreaming big. But you can't allow yourself to be held down by what your parents did or the limitations in your immediate environment. You have to take the lid off of your expectations and dream big.

Have you ever looked at what happens to a flea when you put it in a jar? The flea jumps only high enough so that its head no longer hits the lid. If those fleas in the jar have baby fleas, the baby fleas are born with the same vertical ability to jump two hundred times their size. However, because they are in an environment where they only see other fleas jumping so as not to hit their heads, they begin to duplicate the behavior in their environment. You can't concern yourself or try to duplicate the action of others around you. You were clearly created and destined to climb, jump, and soar two hundred times your size and even greater.

How often do we allow the impressions of others to affect our direction, our altitude, or our ability? Far too many times we have stunted our own growth, and we have impeded our leap because of the opinions of others. How often do we stop our own progress because we looked to the left or to the right, and based our actions on someone else's ability? Don't get caught in that trap of comparing yourself to someone else. Release yourself from excuses and limitations.

Just like a flea, we are all born with the ability to take huge, vertical leaps. Yet slowly but surely, we let the neighborhood we grew up in or our family's social or economic background affect how high we jump. We become just like those fleas in a jar, and we let our surroundings stop us from reaching our maximum potential. Some of us have been so conditioned to being in the jar of our limitations that, when the lid is finally taken off, we don't know how to dream big. We can't imagine that we deserve anything better than what we already have. But you know what? We were created to live beyond our current jar, regardless of our age, sex, race, or ability. We were designed to jump so high and so hard that we can literally break the lid off wherever we are.

I remember the first time I had a lid put on my limitations. I was in sixth grade, and my teacher asked everyone in the class to write on a piece of paper what they wanted to be when they grew up. Everybody started writing, and I got excited. I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I got older—I wanted to be on TV. I wrote that down on my paper and turned it in. The teacher started calling our names and reading aloud what we wrote. I couldn't wait for her to call me.

When the teacher finally got to my name, she said, “Little Stevie, stand up and come to the front of the room.” As I started walking to the front of the class, I just knew I had written something so deep and powerful that she wanted me to share it with everybody. I was a poor kid with hand-me-down clothes and a stuttering problem. This was my chance to show them all what Little Stevie was made of.

When I finally got to the front, she asked me, “Little Stevie, what did you write on your paper?” I stuck out my little chest and responded with the pride of an Olympic Gold Medal winner, “I want to be on TV.” But then she confused me when she followed up with “Why did you write that on your paper?” I'm thinking, Well, isn't that what you asked me do? but I respectfully said, “I thought that's what you wanted us to do, so I wrote down that I want to be on TV.” My confusion turned into horror when she asked, “Do you know anybody on TV?”

“No, ma'am,” I replied.

“Has anybody in your family been on TV?”

I said again, “No, ma'am.”

She delivered her final blow when she said, “Stevie, you can't be on TV. You take this paper home and write something more realistic and then bring it back tomorrow.”

I was angry. I didn't understand what was going on. She asked me what I wanted to be, not what my parents did or what I saw other people do. I told her what I wanted, and she killed my dream right in front of the class. The teacher called my house before I got home, and as soon as I walked in the door, my mother asked me, “What did you do up at that school today?” I told her what happened and she said, “Boy, why didn't you just write something that that teacher wanted on the paper?” I stood in that kitchen and couldn't understand why my mother was so upset.

In sixth grade, I was still a little flea, dreaming and jumping at two hundred times my size. I wanted to be on TV because of Bill Cosby. When
I Spy
came on, the whole block would clear out just to run home and watch him. After I saw Bill Cosby, I knew I didn't want to be an electrician, a doctor, or a lawyer. I wanted to be funny on TV, just like him. That's all I knew.

When my father came home, my mother told him what happened, and he said, “Well, what's wrong with that? If that boy wants to be on TV, why can't he write that on his paper?” My mom said, “She wants him to write something more believable.” To which he replied, “If that's what he wants to be, then she better start believing it.” My father told me to go to my room and wait for him there.

When he finally came in, we talked about what the teacher wanted. He told me to get a new piece of paper. We agreed to write the word “policeman” on the new sheet and give it to her the next day. And then he told me to do something that changed my life forever. He said, “Steve, take out that first paper you wrote, put it in your top drawer, and every morning before you go to school and every night before you go to sleep, you read that paper and you believe that one day you will be on TV.”

Now when you turn on your TV, seven days a week, Little Stevie is on TV. I didn't allow one lady in the sixth grade with her limited expectations to affect me. I admit it was damaging to me for some time, but I learned how to keep the dream alive.

In one day, someone tried to put the lid on my dreams, and hours later my father blew the lid off for good. At the time, I didn't realize just what my daddy did for me. Parents can be some of the biggest lid droppers by placing limitations on their children. But you have to take the lid off—no matter who put it on or how long it has been there.

Here are some ways you can tell if the lid is still on in your life:

         
•
     
If you're not excited about waking up in the morning

         
•
     
If you're sitting around every day bored out of your mind

         
•
     
If you have time to do everything that anyone asks you to do

         
•
     
If you have time to watch all of your scheduled TV programs every week and not miss an episode

         
•
     
If you're getting plenty of sleep

         
•
     
If your dreams make sense to everyone around you

         
•
     
If you can achieve your dreams by yourself

If you recognized any of these behaviors in yourself, or said yes as you read the list, you have to take the lid off your life and start living your dream.

P
roverbs 29:18 reads, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Perishing is the dangerous state of living in a mundane existence without even realizing it. There you are, living your comfortable life, going to the same job—day in and day out—doing the same things. You know your routine so well that you can probably do it without thinking. There are no dreams or aspirations in front of you, and if you were fired tomorrow, you wouldn't know how to pursue a better life.

It would be a sad state of affairs to wake up one morning and realize that you have spent years wandering aimlessly in circles, unclear about your purpose, wasting your gift, and destroying your promise. What kind of life is that? You can't afford to go another day without a clear direction and focus for your life. I'm not coming at this from a high-and-mighty place. I'm sharing this with you because I've been in that state of perishing, and I had no idea of how to get out until I created a new vision for my life and committed myself to living that new promise.

When I think back to my earlier days, it's painful to remember how much of my life was disconnected from a real vision. I would take any job just to pay the rent and put gas in my car. I would date anyone who helped me pass the time. When I wasn't working, I was hanging out with people who didn't push me any closer to where I needed to be. I was dying slowly, and had I not created a new vision for my life, I would probably still be in Cleveland working job to job and making people laugh on the weekends.

Perishing is not always about some overdramatic emotional outpour or losing all of your possessions at once. Most often, perishing is a slow, painful process, and if you aren't paying attention, it will trick you into thinking that this is the way things are supposed to be. By failing to have a vision, you are stripping yourself of every possible blessing, relationship, and opportunity. When you sit by and just let your life perish without a vision, it is the most painful kind of death.

How do you know if you are perishing or not? Let's get honest about it. You can't expect to create a new life and a new vision for yourself if laziness is part of your routine. Procrastination will not get the job done. Doing things halfway, improperly, or not at all won't get the job done. Lack of enthusiasm will not get the job done. Unreliability will not get the job done. Being untrustworthy will not get the job done. Any negative trait that derails you from your dreams will not get the job done. Negativity can never be the fuel that drives your gift.

You can also tell if you are perishing if you are the smartest person in your group. If you are the smartest person in the group, you need to get a new group. You cannot be a person who knows it all and can't be told anything, because it will stifle your creativity as well as the creativity of the people around you.

Another way to put your state of perishing into perspective is to realize that one day your life will come to an end. Whether you want to believe it or not, there will be a casket and a hole in the ground with your name on it. The next home-going service at your church could be yours. And the most important thing on that day won't be the amount of flowers that surround your casket or how well the choir sings your favorite hymn. The only thing that will matter is how well you use that dash between the day you were born and the day you die.

I don't want you to spend your days preoccupied with thoughts of death, but I do want you to live your life thinking about how your dash will make a difference in this world. If you've still got breath in your lungs and blood running through your veins, you've got another day to make your dash count. If you're still blessed to wake up and see another day, God has a purpose, a plan, and a destiny for your dash.

The best way to start moving from perishing into your promise is to make what I call Dash Deposits. These are simply efforts you make on a daily basis to reach your destiny and add to your legacy. Reading a book that helps you master your gift is a Dash Deposit. The work you put in to completing a project that was due today is a Dash Deposit. Talking with your family members during dinner instead of watching TV is a Dash Deposit. Any small or large activity or action that adds to the quality of your life and your family's is a Dash Deposit.

How you use your dash is completely up to you. Let today be the day that you make your dash meaningful as it moves you closer to your destiny.