During one of my early appearances on Bishop T. D. Jakes’s talk show, I made a bold proclamation: “I am the most fearless person you will ever meet.” I don’t know what made me say it, because I had never said something like that before in my life. I figured that the bishop and his team really liked what I had to say because they used that sound bite in the video promos advertising my appearance on the show.
But here’s the real deal: I am afraid a lot. I was afraid to pursue my talk show because I thought it might not work out. I was afraid to do syndicated radio because I didn’t know if I would be accepted in enough markets to be successful. I was afraid to take on the Kings of Comedy tour. When Walter Latham came to us and said, “We are going to be playing in basketball arenas,” I was scared. The largest crowd I had ever performed in front of at that point was five thousand people—and that was on a good night. When I interviewed President Obama, I was terrified because I didn’t want to blow it. Before I did Bishop Jakes’s Mega-Fest, I tossed and turned for three nights in a row.
My biggest moment of fear came when I did my first one-hour HBO special. I had never been more afraid of anything in my entire career. The Bell Auditorium in Augusta, Georgia, was completely sold out, and I was positioned backstage behind a sheer curtain, waiting for the show to start. My heart was beating so hard that I could literally see the pocket square in my suit rising and falling. If you look closely at the footage from that special, you can even see my hands glistening with sweat.
Something went wrong with the timing for opening up the main curtains to begin the show. And I was anxious as I waited behind the curtain for a good six to seven minutes. But even though I was out of the audience’s view, I could just feel their love saying, “Come on, Steve. Do not let us down.”
When the curtain finally rose, the crowd went crazy. I grabbed the mike and just let it swing for a minute in order to collect my cool. When I finally started talking, I heard my voice begin to quiver. I just kept praying, “Lord, please calm me down. Come on, Lord. This is my only HBO special. Please, God.” And guess what? About fifteen minutes into my set, all my nerves disappeared and I was hot as smoke. That set became one of my best specials to date.
What I learned from that moment is that when you face your fears, they aren’t as big as you thought they were. What makes them big is when you don’t turn around to face them head-on. The longer you avoid your fears, the bigger they grow in your mind. As I stood behind that malfunctioning curtain, I kept thinking, Lord Jesus, look at all these people. The longer I stood there, the more I realized that I could keep worrying about the twenty-four hundred people in the room and fail, or I could just go out there . . . and I could actually win. It really just comes down to deciding whether you want to win or lose.
Most people fail because they become paralyzed by their fear. You have to choose: “Am I going to face my fears and go see what my life can really be?” or “Am I going to succumb to my fears and do exactly what I’ve always done”? When you go with the latter, you’ve set yourself up for failure yet again because you didn’t even attempt to win. How many times do we allow ourselves to avoid getting things done in our lives simply because we fear what we think the outcome is going to be?
I have taught myself just to go try something if there is even a remote possibility of something great happening for my life and my career. You have to learn to convince yourself that the possibility is greater than the inevitability of doing nothing. Listen, if you are an entrepreneur who is passionate about your product, but you never ask anyone to buy what you are selling, it will never get sold. Sure, there’s a possibility that you can deliver your best sales pitch in your best Sunday suit and they will still say no. But so what? Do you know how many times I’ve been told no for movie scripts, television shows, and comedy specials? A whole hell of lot more times than I heard yes.
You know how many jokes I’ve written that nobody has laughed at? Thousands. I have a whole cemetery full of dead jokes with tombstones standing above them.
But in all seriousness, I took those bad jokes out of my act and I learned how to get good at my craft. There are many jokes that I wish I had never written, and there are some that I have knocked out the park. But guess what? I now have six comedy specials with eight hours of original, A-list jokes, and in them I never repeated a single one.
You want to hear something shocking? Eighty-five percent of small businesses in this country fail within the first two years. Eight-five percent! That’s a whole lot of failure.
Warren Buffett said that he would not invest in any business where the owner hasn’t failed at least twice. I love that truly wealthy and successful people understand that failure is part of the process.
But far too often when we face the failure of a business venture, we let that failure paralyze us from trying again. The failure could stem from a lack of financial planning, a lack of resources, or the lack of the right team members. But you have to realize that failure is part of the process when you are on the road to success.
The only way to get back on track is to come up with another plan. I’ve failed more times than I can count. But you can’t let the failure freeze you in place and stop you from pursuing your dreams.
When I was doing stand-up comedy full-time, I quickly learned that the hardest night is not your first one; it’s that night when you have to go back out there after you’ve had a really bad one. I had an experience like that during the first night of the original Kings of Comedy tour in Charlotte, North Carolina. My mother had just died, and my mind just wasn’t there. In addition, I had just finished a live comedy special, but I was so messed up that I didn’t even watch it.
Each of us Kings was supposed to do a thirty-minute set, but Ced got up there and did forty-seven minutes. Bernie’s set got so good that he stayed up there for a whole hour! They were ripping the room so much that the arena had to call a mandatory break. Then there was a malfunction with a piece of equipment, and the break ended up lasting forty-five minutes.
So here I come, trying to deliver my set after these people had already sat through almost two hours of comedy between Ced and Bernie plus an unanticipated forty-five-minute break. When I walked out there, it was horrific. I was doing jokes from my comedy special. I didn’t realize that most of the people there had already heard them. People were booing, arguing, and fussing, and I just became discombobulated. All I can say is that it was a rough night.
On the way to the airport the next morning, a Charlotte deejay named A.J. let into me. He said, “Ced and Bernie were hot, but Steve is no King of Comedy.” He predicted that the tour was going to be a complete disaster. I knew this guy personally, and I was miffed that he was playing me so cold. By the time we got to the airport, I ran into a few people who’d seen my performance the night before, and they were trying to be encouraging by saying, “Steve, it’s all right. We love you anyway.” I appreciated their support.
Once we boarded the plane and got settled, I started writing. When we landed in Kansas City later that day, I shut myself up in my hotel room, and I wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more. Before I knew it, I had written a brand-new, forty-five-minute set. I got so lost in writing, revising, and practicing in the mirror that when Bernie came up to my room to grab me for dinner, I said, “Nah, I’m just going to stay here and finish working on this.”
The next night in Kansas City, I had a long talk with Bernie and Ced, and I told them that they had to stick closer to a thirty-minute set. But Ced went out there and did forty minutes, and Bernie followed up with forty-eight. So much for them following the time limit. There was a twenty-minute intermission after Bernie, and I started to get scared, because I had bombed so badly in Charlotte. When I finally got up there, I killed it. I left the stage that night and every night for the next two years with a standing ovation.
Our first two nights in Charlotte and Kansas City helped me to begin looking at failure differently. I learned that failure doesn’t have to be this life-shattering, I’m-never-going-to-do-this-again experience but is in fact an opportunity to gain a valuable learning experience. I knew Kansas City was going to be a hard night to get through at first, but if I hadn’t gone through such an awful night in Charlotte, I would never have written that new forty-five-minute set. My failure in Charlotte gave me the right experience that I needed to rip up the stage the next night in Kansas City.
Many times when people graduate from college, they can barely get a job. Why? Because they don’t have experience. No employer wants to hire someone who has never lost before, who has never failed before, or who has never made a mistake before. Employers want someone who is experienced with failure, has learned from it, and can get the job done. So, you see, failure is not here to defeat you, but to give you the power to gain those life experiences that you can come back to and learn from again and again.
I’ve learned to seek wisdom from people from all walks of life, including men and women in the prison system. Many people look at prisoners as failures. The reality is that they failed to do right and were caught. But the fact that they are incarcerated does not mean they are failures at everything. It depends on their response to their predicament. They may have limitations on their freedom, but I love it when prisoners determine that the prison system can’t own their souls. They have found peace with the actions that landed them behind bars; they’ve asked for forgiveness for their wrongdoings, and some have even apologized to the victims of their crimes. Many of them have committed to improving themselves spiritually, physically, and mentally. Some have even taken youngsters under their wings and said, “Hey, don’t mess up your life like I did. If you get a chance to walk out this door, stay out and don’t come back!”
There is a new day breaking for all of us, and if these incarcerated men and women can find light and hope within the confines of prison walls, how dare those of us who can walk around here freely every day not see the light that shines upon us.
So many of us are incarcerated in the prisons of our own minds by not looking for our own light. We can easily get caught behind the bars of a dead-end job, a lifeless marriage, or a hopeless financial situation. We have to get up every single day and make the choice to focus on the positive. If we choose to focus on the negative, we’re not walking toward our light. If we look at our background, our social status, and every mishap that ever happened to us as tragic, we’re missing out on the light within that situation.
Look, here’s a real light: If you are still waking up every day, it’s because God has a greater plan for you and it’s not yet completed. Every day is an opportunity to see your light as a gift. We all have opportunities that are presented to us on a daily basis. These opportunities show up in the people we meet, the invitations we receive, or the information shared with us. Our response to these choices can determine the quality of our lives.
Let’s say we have a young man who decides he’s going to join a gang. We can judge him and say that he doesn’t have any opportunities. But in reality, he’s had opportunities all along. If he had taken the time to finish school, had not quit his job, had not tried out drugs, or had gone to church like his grandmother told him to, he could have had access to a whole other set of opportunities. But let’s get real about this thing: If you do what you’ve always done, your life will not get better. You can’t fill out a job application when you’re gangbanging or selling drugs. And you can’t get access to the right opportunities if you get caught and spend the rest of your life behind bars. The key to our opportunities lies in our decisions. In order to get the opportunities you want, you have to make the decision to change. Unfortunately, change is where a lot of people get uncomfortable.
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.