Brendon Burchard
speaker
787 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 11 May
Brendon Burchard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Three miles from here. I went broke in the mission district. Okay. So this is a true story. I had a good job and I quit it because I want to become a writer like Lewis. I want to write a book. I wrote about the same age too. And I wrote that book. I quickly put it out and I did what most writers do. I went really broke.
You're already not doing great where I was living at the time, but then I went really broke. And there was probably two or three years I was faking being a writer. I was looking in San Francisco, all the famous places the writers went, all the cafes in this town, the big name writers, and I would go there and I'd order a croissant.
And I'd get a green tea, and I'd sit where the famous people sat in those cafes. And I'd look around. Everyone has laptops, and they're all typing and drinking their coffee. And I was like, I'm here. I'm doing it. And then I just kind of ADD myself throughout the day, week after week. I am not motivated. So I'd walk around. I'd go to Fort Mason. I'd go to the Golden Gate.
I'm looking for inspiration. I'm going to find inspiration in San Francisco, and I'm going to write this book. This goes on week after week, month after month. I can no longer afford my rent. So now I go and live on some friend's couches, then on some friend's floors. And then I have to make the decision, do I go back to where I'm from, from Montana? and go live with my parents?
Or do I move in with my then-girlfriend?" And somehow she had so much grace, she let me move in. She was paying for all the groceries. She would go and work so hard every day. And knowing that I was at home writing this book, this great book I'm going to write. I'm going to make it with this book. And you weren't making any money at the time. No money. No money. And I had a laptop that I borrowed.
And I had my mom's fold-out little stool. where I was writing and I was writing next to the bed because the apartment was tiny. She was in the marina. So tinier apartment, but she's doing good. She's in the marina. You know, she's doing much better than I was paying for the groceries. And so I'm writing next to the bed. And all of my journals, my books, my vision boards, my research, my papers.
my bills are on the bed and she'd go to work she'd come home and usually i'd you know get everything organized clean it up and then one day she comes home i was kind of working a line so i'm still typing and we have dinner i come back i'm typing she comes in to go to bed that night and i hadn't cleared off the bed so she goes and goes to crawl under the bed uh this covers and
I was writing and I just happened to look over and she had gone under the covers and section of her bed. And that's where my bills were. And she didn't know I was going into bankruptcy. And I get emotional. I'm thinking it's like miles from here. So I look over and I see the woman I love sleeping under the weight of my bills. Wow. Literally she's sleeping under my bills.
And it was like, it like, you know, it snapped something. None of us want to be the cause of financial insecurity for someone we love. And I've been faking it for several weeks, pretending to write, not getting much done. And that night seeing that it just, it hurts so much. I was like, you know what? I got to get this done. So I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.
And the next day she went to work and I was still writing. The next day I'm writing, I'm writing, I'm writing, I'm writing. 18 days later, boom, book is done. 18 days later, bam, number one on Amazon. Write another, write another, bam, bam. Bam, bam. Six books, number one on every list imaginable.
Millions of copies, you know, build this huge empire of courses and memberships and eight big seminars a year all around the country for 15 years straight. And here's why. You need to find someone to fight for. If you're broke, you're fighting for survival. If you're going to break through, you're fighting for somebody else. You need to find somebody or something to fight for that is beyond you.
And when you find that, when you find that, that's when the breakthrough happens. That's when the real breakthroughs happen. I love his show because he asked that question to everybody, you know, at the end about greatness. And everybody basically says in some way, some type of pursuit of their potential and developing themselves. But in pursuit of that potential,
for others and so at some point you go from I need to just survive to I need to be in service to something bigger that will demand something of me and if you don't like the language of you need something to fight for somebody to fight for then just replace it with love. You need to love somebody or love something beyond yourself, otherwise you'll only be in survival mode.
You should have seen how he looked at me. People continue to laugh at you.
Just stop pretending those are going to go away. Doubt's not the problem. Stopping is. A lot of people have doubt, but they keep going. If doubt becomes a signal to stop, you'll always fail. If doubt is a signal to learn and to try again, now you're in the scientific method and you win. So doubt should be a signal to learn and to try something new.
But even doubt's not the problem, catastrophizing is a problem. What does that mean? Catastrophizing. is where a lot of learned helplessness comes from. It's where you worry about ruin in your life, which is one of the great fears we have as humans. If I do this, I'll be ruined. I'll be ruined. Everything will go away and they'll reject me and I won't be able to handle it.
So I'll be inadequate too. And so here's what, write this down. If you ever want to understand your negative thinking, write this acronym I'm going to give you down. ZAPS. Z-A-P-S. You guys will be having success, and then you'll zap yourself. And when you zap yourself, you'll stop. Zap, Z-A-P-S. The Z stands for zoom in. Problem happens, you zoom in on it. Difficulty, you zoom in on it.
You failed, you zoom in on it. They made fun of you, you zoom in on it. Then the A is you attach self. You attach identity to the problem. You attach identity to the ruin. The failure. Yes, I am the failure. Now it's not just a bad thing happened. I'm impacted by it. I am. You zoom in on what's wrong. You got to stop that. You got to zoom in on what's possible. You got to zoom in on blessings.
You got to zoom in on grace. You got to open up that perspective. You got to open up that aperture. So you zoom in on what's wrong. You attach personality or identity to the problem. Then P is... then you punish yourself. Oh, man. I used to do that all the time. Yeah, you punish yourself. You shut yourself down. You speak terribly to yourself. Procrastination is punishment. Drugs, alcohol.
Drugs, alcohol, abuse. Whatever. Neglect. All of these things you punish yourself, you neglect. And you don't just punish yourself with the bad, you neglect yourself from the good.
Showing 661–680 of 787 · page 34 of 40
← Previous
Next →