"Can I make it?"

About once a month, I get a message from a poster asking me if I think they can succeed. Generally, these messages tell the story of a guy who has no education, employment, or training, and they invariably end with the same plea:

From where I am at do you all think I can turn it around?

Guess what: it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not your cheerleader. I don't care if you're looking for emotional validation -- "Oh BBS says I can do this!" or if you're preparing your excuses for when you fail -- "oh, BBS said that the odds were against me, so I shouldn't feel bad that my life is the same as always."

The only thing that matters is whether you think you can turn your life around.

And that "turning around" is usually something like this:

I would like to be financially wealthy and powerful one day along with sleeping with many women.

That's nice. I would like to live in France, but I'm not going to because it doesn't sense for my life right now -- and because it's something I would like to do. It's not important to me. It's not a need.

Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTFnmsCnr6g

Here is what my life is like at the moment:

Irrelevant. It doesn't matter where you started from -- no matter how low or how high -- it only matters where you finish.

I cannot even explain to you how many people ask me how they can be successful, what they can do. 95% of people who lose weight put it back on. More than 95% of people die after living uninspired, mediocre lives.

And every one of those people tried, at one point, to "succeed." To be extraordinary. Do you think there's some piece of advice that all of those failures hadn't heard? Some secret I can tell you that will help you beat those odds? No. The only thing separating the winners from the losers is how bad they want it.

I will, however, give you one free piece of advice. It is exponentially more difficult to change when you're in the same environment as always. If you want to make a drastic change in your life, you need to leave your current environments. Your home, your school, your job, the message boards you frequent. If you want to rise like a phoenix, you first need to die in a fire.

Good luck. If you make it, I'll see you on the other side.