“Be thankful for the defeat which men call failure, because if you can survive it and keep on trying, it gives you a chance to prove your ability to rise to the heights of achievement.”
– Napoleon Hill, The Law of Success
How many times have you said, or heard someone else say, “I’ve tried every diet out there, and haven’t found anything that works! I’ve tried to lose before, but my body just won’t let me.” Come on, now! If we never tried again because we didn’t succeed the first time – or even the first number of times – we’d never do anything. It takes time and practice to get good at something. Wasn’t there a time when you were terrible at something that you’re great at now? Can you knit? Cook? Play Scrabble? You could do none of these things the first time you tried. You had to keep trying and trying, getting a little better each time.
One day when I was just nine years old and overweight, I was sitting in my grandparents’ kitchen. My grandmother was baking Christmas cookies with the radio on. Suddenly, a song came on that really caught my ear. My grandmother told me it was Elton John’s song “Bennie and the Jets.” I was struck by the piano in the song and immediately decided I had to learn how to play. I had always loved music class in school and sometimes would catch our teacher, who was from the Ukraine, playing rock songs on the piano during his lunch hour. I would go in and sit, entranced.
I found that my parents owned some of Elton John’s music, including a tape that contained the song I’d heard. One afternoon I took it up to my bedroom, put it in my stereo system, lay on my bed with my Casio keyboard in front of me, and listened, and listened, and listened. I didn’t come out of my room for over five hours. At the end of the five hours, I had decoded the opening riff that was so catchy to my ear. I continued to decode more songs and would watch experienced piano players play, often buying videos where I could see Elton John’s or Billy Joel’s hands. I would practice until I sounded just like them. I was obsessed with it, and I wouldn’t stop practicing until I had the sound exactly as it was on the recording. I had no formal training and no one in my family played, but I made it happen. Why? Because I didn’t accept the notion that it had to be done in some certain way. I believed that if I was willing to do whatever it took, I could play just like Elton and Billy. Eventually I got so good that when strangers heard me play they often asked if I played in either Billy Joel’s or Elton John’s bands!
Why do I bring up piano playing in a weight-loss book? Because you must believe that you can achieve whatever goal you have, whether that goal is playing piano or losing weight. It doesn’t matter what’s happened in the past, or if you have a thyroid issue, or if you don’t have the endurance to walk half an hour on a treadmill. If you truly want to succeed and you’re willing to work at it, you will overcome any and all obstacles in your way. What would the outcome have been if I had stopped trying after realizing that I couldn’t just sit down and play like Elton John my first time at the piano? I would never have found such an incredible outlet for my creativity – an outlet that has not only brought me great joy, but has also brought pleasure to countless others who have heard me play.
Think about a baby. When that baby starts trying to move himself, it takes him days or even weeks of constant attempts before he can move even an inch. Does he stop trying because he’s “failing”? How many attempts would you give your child before you give up on him? One, two, ten, a hundred? Of course not – the thought is ridiculous! To help your child achieve, you would do whatever it takes and be as patient as needed. Eventually, that baby learns to crawl, walk, run and speak. Would he accomplish all these things if he stopped trying after his first attempt or two? How about later on, when a young girl is learning to tie her shoes, button her coat and even ride a bike? If you as a parent gave up on her, would she still learn how to do these things? Why are you so willing to give up on yourself but not on others?
You may be thinking right now that I’m crazy for comparing a baby or young child to you and your dieting and exercising. But why is that crazy? Whatever we’re attempting, whether it is learning to walk or talk, learning a new skill such as playing an instrument or a sport, or going after any other accomplishment such as losing weight, we are going to experience times when things are not going so well. In fact, there will be times we want to quit. When we’re young we expect to have to keep trying and therefore we do so. For some reason, as we get older and supposedly more intelligent, we feel we shouldn’t have to try more than once to succeed at something. Isn’t that crazy? Perhaps when we turn 21 and are considered “an adult” we figure, okay – now that I’m all grown up I should just know how to do everything right.
Yet those who succeed are the ones who keep trying. According to research, the average number of times it takes a smoker to finally quit is about 10. What if after the 9th attempt a smoker decides he’s just not going to try anymore? Edison famously said of his light bulb, “I had to succeed; I was running out of ways to fail.” He also said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” and “Many of life’s failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” But you are not one of those failures! You are going to try again, and succeed this time!
So why do people give up, or decide not to try again? They do this because they fear failure. The irony is that when people give up, they guarantee their failure by not trying again. In fact, the only sure way to fail at doing something such as losing weight is to not try. As Shakespeare so elegantly put it, “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft win by fearing to attempt.” But you should try, and try again, because with each successive attempt you get better at succeeding, just like Edison. You learn what does not work for you.
Here’s a typical example: Sarah (not her real name) first started dieting when she was 14. She wasn’t happy with the womanly figure she had developed the previous year. She couldn’t wear her clothes anymore, and for the first time this wasn’t because she had grown taller, but because her pants wouldn’t fit over her newly rounded hips and her tops pulled tightly across her chest. She was miserable, and her father didn’t make things any better when he (no doubt uncomfortable himself about his daughter’s blossoming) made a comment that she was getting a little chubby. Devastated, Sarah started looking into diets. Being an impatient teen, she decided on a “lose 10 pounds in seven days” diet she saw in a women’s weekly magazine.
She went on the diet and did indeed lose 10 pounds in seven days. Most of the weight lost was water, but she didn’t realize that. She also didn’t realize that she’d just turned her metabolism down by putting herself into a state of near starvation. Within days she had gained back those 10 pounds, and after a month of skipping meals and then overeating and other unhealthy practices, she ended up a few pounds heavier than she had been before she’d begun to diet.
FIND AN ACTIVITY YOU ENJOY – YOU’LL BE MORE LIKELY TO STICK WITH IT!
Over the years Sarah went on and off many diets, and by the time she reached the age of 32, she really was overweight. By this time she had been on the low-carb diet, the low-fat diet, the vegan diet, the high-fat diet and many others. Sometimes she stuck to these diets and lost weight, and sometimes she didn’t manage to stick to them for long enough to lose much weight at all. She felt like a failure when it came to losing weight and keeping it off. She read about diets and looked at before and after pictures with envy, but felt it was really not possible to succeed.
But then she sat down with a piece of paper. She tried to remember every diet she’d been on, how easy or difficult it was to follow these diets, why she was able to follow them or not, and what her reaction was after finishing them. She figured out all the things that didn’t work for her and what she might take from each one that could work for her. She made a chart like this:
LOW-FAT DIET Food didn’t taste great. Worked moderately well but I felt hungry all the time. Could maybe cut fat down but not as much as this particular diet says.
LOW-CARB DIET Craved sweets, felt tired all the time, made me obsessed with food … couldn’t stop thinking about bread! Seemed to work well except that I couldn’t follow it for very long. Maybe I could cut out simple carbs and have a moderate amount of complex carbs this time around.
VEGETARIAN DIET Had a hard time not eating any animal products. Found I was not satisfied after meals and so would crave other foods or eat way too much cheese. Could eat some meat-free meals and cut meat servings down but fill up on other proteins like protein shakes, quinoa and beans.
After all was said and done, Sarah ended up finding a program that combined pretty much everything that worked for her, and added the missing link – exercise – into the bargain. What is even more important is that she realized that all these fad diets she’d been following simply did not work. Her “failures” brought her to the understanding that a “diet” had to be a plan she could follow for life rather than something she followed for a short time and then binged her way out of. She also came to the understanding that in always trying to lose weight quickly, she ended up spending year after year getting fatter and fatter. Even if it took her a longer time to lose her excess fat by following a reasonable and moderate eating plan, she could follow it long term and thereby achieve long-term success. So we could look at Sarah’s earlier diet attempts as failures, or we could look at them as steps on her path to success. It’s not whether you’ve won or lost in the past, it’s whether you are willing to do what you have to do to succeed in the future.
For argument’s sake, let’s say you have never tried to lose weight before. You feel, like I did, that you were meant to be large. You’ve always been overweight. Your family is overweight. You could allow yourself to accept that you were destined to be fat, but you shouldn’t. You have to wake up and realize you are not doomed to follow in your family’s footsteps. In fact, one of the reasons I succeeded was that I was determined to prove I didn’t have to end up obese, with diabetes and dying of a heart attack at a young age, just because my family history included all these health problems. You decide your destiny, and your choices move you in whichever direction you have decided on.
What path are you on right now? If you continue to do the things you’re doing now, will you be where you want to be one year from today? You control whether that is your reality or whether you step on that scale a year from now and see the number you want to see. If you adopt the idea that your weight is outside of your control, you’ll never change it. You must realize that the things you initiate, such as your weight gain, are completely within your control to change. You were the cause, and you alone can make the change.
GROWING UP, I SPENT A LOT OF TIME WITH MY GRANDMA ROSE.
“You’ve always been overweight. Your family is overweight. You could allow yourself to accept that you were destined to be fat, but you shouldn’t. You have to wake up and realize you are not doomed to follow in your family’s footsteps.”
You have a gift, and you have power. The question is whether or not you’re ready to tap into either of these things. If you don’t believe you are able to achieve the goals you’ve set, then you won’t tap into any of the dormant potential you have, you won’t go after your goal wholeheartedly and you’ll end up in the same place you started – or more likely worse off than before. If you can transmute your challenges into opportunities, your life will blossom. Ask yourself such questions as, “What type of program will work for me? Is this something I can stick to?” These questions will lead you to useful answers instead of keeping you in this endless loop of self-doubt and pity.
“You can do this. It is math and science. Fewer calories consumed and more calories burned.”
It doesn’t matter what your weight, diet and exercise history are. If you decide to change your life today, you can succeed. Don’t worry that you don’t know exactly how to do it. Don’t worry that you’re breaking new ground. Don’t worry that you’re afraid. Just look in the direction you want to go and start going there. You can do this. It is math and science. Fewer calories consumed and more calories burned. A bit later in the book I outline an exact plan that will tell you more than you want to know about what you need to do – just do it!
In the following chapters, I’ll present the third “R.” I’ll tell you all about what foods to eat (if you want to understand why I suggest what I do) or, if you are overwhelmed by a lot of information, you can just follow the exact plan I’ve given to thousands of people who have experienced extreme weight-loss success. This plan has worked for all those who have chosen to stick to it. The key is being consistent, as we covered in the last chapter. Are you ready to follow it? Are you ready to make this the moment that changes the rest of your life? I am ready to help you. Make this the second that it all clicks for you, and then follow through, creating the life you deserve!
You have to approach this program with the determination to succeed. There will be challenges. There will be times you don’t feel like eating these foods. There will be times you don’t want to go to the gym. There will be times your closest loved ones will try to deter you. There will be times when you are doing everything you’re supposed to and your weight isn’t budging. All these events are likely to occur. Remember it’s not what happens in life, but how you choose to deal with what happens that determines whether you succeed. You need to have never-ending resolve! I expect the best from you, and I hope you expect the best from yourself too. Join me and the thousands of others who’ve made my approach the one that has physically, emotionally and spiritually changed everything about their lives.
SLIP-UPS AND FALLING OFF THE WAGON
Let’s see if this scenario sounds familiar: You start a diet on Monday. You follow it to the letter on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but by Friday you feel like you’ve been dieting forever. Someone brings in a cake for a coworker’s birthday and you say, “Okay, I’ll just have one little bite. That can’t hurt.” But oh, that bite tastes good. And you’re a little hungry. Next thing you know, you’ve eaten the whole piece and scraped the extra icing from the plate and eaten that too. Well, your diet is shot for the day now, right? You give yourself permission to have pizza for dinner that night. After all, you already screwed up anyway. You say to yourself, “I’ll start again tomorrow. I’ll even do a little extra exercise to make up for it.” At dinner that night you have pizza and you might as well have some beer, too. You’re starting your diet again tomorrow, so you should enjoy yourself tonight. This is it – the last time you’ll be eating this stuff. From tomorrow on, you’ll be so strict. You decide not only to have your pizza and a couple of beers, but you also add a few nacho chips. And just one cookie. A large pizza, a six-pack of beer, a bag of nacho chips and box of cookies later, you collapse into bed on the downside of your fat and sugar high. When you wake up in the morning you feel disgusting. You weigh yourself and find that overnight you’ve gained not only the two pounds you had lost the week prior, but another two on top. Feeling so discouraged and depressed after a whole week’s work was ruined in a few hours, you decide that it’s not worth it so you give up altogether.
You may or may not have gone through a scenario like this, but believe me a lot of people have. I can’t count the number of clients who’ve told me a story that matches that example almost to the letter. Now let’s revisit the “model” day I presented and find out how many times you could have salvaged your weight loss:
• After the first bite of cake you could have recognized that you were actually hungry, thrown the rest of it out and had a healthy snack or a protein shake.
• After eating the whole piece along with the icing from the plate you could have said, “Well, that was probably not a good idea but I’m going to make sure I get right back on the plan. One piece of cake can’t derail me! Tonight’s dinner will be exactly what it should be, and next time I’ll be more careful.”
• After eating the pizza you could have said, “Wow, I really made some bad choices today but that’s no reason to completely throw the day away. Time to go to bed.”
• The most important time to make a good decision was the next morning. Sure you felt terrible that you messed up, and maybe gained back all you lost throughout the week and then some (much of the overnight weight gain would be just water retained from all that sodium, along with the weight of the actual food). But one night of bad decisions is definitely no reason to give up altogether. Remember that giving up is the only sure route to failure. As long as you are traveling in the right direction, you’ll eventually get there.
“After the first bite of cake you could have recognized that you were actually hungry, thrown the rest of it out and had a healthy snack or a protein shake.”
You had been on the right path up until making some mistakes on Friday, and by making the decision to get right back on your plan the next day you would bring yourself closer than ever to your eventual goal. Getting right back on your plan means you have made the breakthrough that it’s not all or nothing. You can slip up occasionally, as long as you are doing the right things for the majority of the time. We are a product of what we’ve done consistently, not what we’ve done some of the time. When we’re overweight, we often think very negatively since our life experiences are negative. We beat ourselves up instead of looking at the bigger picture and realizing that our bad choices do not define us. Just because we acted in an immature or even stupid way doesn’t mean that’s who we are. We all make bad choices on occasion. The important thing is to realize your bad choices are not your identity. Often we allow our brains to ignore or delete many of the good things we do. In college, I remember walking out after exams, obsessed about the couple of questions I didn’t know the answers to, worrying myself to death over it and forgetting all about the 90 questions that I did know the answers to! Make a conscious effort to acknowledge and remember your successes.
GOING THE DISTANCE
Let’s say you want to drive to the beach for a vacation. At some point on your journey you read the directions incorrectly and end up heading in the wrong direction. Do you then tell your family something like this: “Sorry kids, I turned the wrong way back there, so the vacation is canceled. I’m driving back home. In fact, since I messed up this time I may never take a vacation again.” What a ridiculous thought! If you take a wrong turn then you figure out where you went wrong and how to get back on the right road so you can reach your destination. You must have first had a desire to go on vacation, then made a decision where you wanted to go, found a map to get you from your starting location to where you wanted to end up, and finally if you found you misread the map, you had to get some help getting back on the correct road. That’s what this book is all about: Defining where you are, helping you see the world that’s truly out there and giving you a very specific map to get there.
“If you’re the type of person who cannot have one serving of certain unhealthy foods without bingeing or otherwise going off your plan, then do not have even a taste of those trigger foods.”
If you do make a wrong turn and eat a piece of cake, or even spend an entire day eating junk food, you still want to reach your destination. Giving up at that point is ridiculous. Instead of giving up, find out where you went wrong (starting to eat the piece of cake when I was hungry). Think about how to get back on the right road (start following the program again even if reaching my goal might take a little bit longer), and learn how better to stay on the right road next time (eat some good food before indulging in a bite of birthday cake so I’m not hungry, and always make sure to have some good choices on hand in case of emergency) and enjoy your vacation (enjoy reaching my goal weight and looking amazing)! You can do this!
During your journey, you have to watch out for trigger foods, which can send you careening out of control into oncoming traffic. If you’re the type of person who cannot have one serving of certain unhealthy foods without bingeing or otherwise going off your plan, then do not have even a taste of those trigger foods. For many people, these emotionally charged foods are the main cause of weight gain. One little bite makes you feel so good at first, but before you know it you’ve been rendered powerless to escape the sugary, fatty, starchy clutches, and you end up lying in a guilty heap on the floor. The best way to manage these triggers is by identifying them and avoiding them altogether. I know it sounds severe, but you need to treat this as an addiction and follow the plan I prescribe later in the book to the letter, without deviation. It’s normal to feel you shouldn’t have to do this, that you should be allowed to have treats or cheat meals, but the reality is that being that strict is the most effective way for you to develop enough momentum to make unbelievable progress. Do not allow yourself even the idea you are allowed to have foods that are off limits. Don’t give yourself an inch to fail!
STEPS TO ENSURING SUCCESS, WHATEVER YOUR PAST HAS BEEN
Remember that the past is a great tool to learn from, but it does not dictate the future. Try to look at past mistakes like Edison did, as learning experiences. Figure out why your former plan didn’t work. It might have been the plan itself, or it might have been the way you were thinking at the time. Find that reason and look at it objectively. Don’t lay blame on yourself or on others, but accept that you are indeed responsible for the current level of health you experience. Figure out what not to do in the future. Logical and accurate thought is essential to long-term success. Ask yourself, “What can I learn from that experience that will help me make Charles’ plan the absolute most effective thing I’ve ever done?”
Remind yourself of your definite goal. Just because you’ve had a setback, it doesn’t mean your goal will disappear. You might get there a little later than expected, but you will get there in time. Learning anything new takes time. I’m asking you to become one of my students. You need to take time to truly “get” what I’m saying. Don’t be discouraged if it takes a couple of reads. Getting a touchdown in a football game is rarely if ever the result of a 100-yard pass or run; it’s the result of a series of short plays, some of which worked and some of which did not. What matters is not how many plays it took to get to the end zone; what matters is that the ball gets there. If the players lost sight of the goal line at the other end, a touchdown would never result. When plays don’t go as anticipated, the team doesn’t disband. They watch tape of the game with their coach, looking for errors, asking why they occurred and figuring out how to avoid those errors next time.
Open yourself to new experiences. The behavior that has brought you to where you are now will not be what gets you to where you want to be. Consider the oft-repeated definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” You will not change the way you are by staying the same or by thinking with the same negative thought patterns. Try new foods or a new diet program. Try my Scary-Easy Plan. It tells you exactly what to eat, when to eat, which exercises to do … everything you need. All you have to do is take consistent action. The fact is, any healthy diet will work if you consistently follow it. If you eat less and burn more you’ll lose weight. The key is having the correct mindset. Don’t like certain foods very much? Try them again. The more often we try a new food, the more we like it. Marketing studies have found that when a person is exposed to a stimulus repeatedly over time his or her liking for it increases exponentially. We humans have survived and thrived for so many millennia with far fewer choices in food than we have today because we are able to adapt to the foods that are around us.
Try new experiences. Never been for a hike? Go on one. Don’t know how to swim? Take lessons. There is a huge world out there full of activities you could never imagine yourself doing. Do them. I understand you may feel out of place initially. I did too. Allow yourself to be a beginner. Find opportunities where everyone is a beginner at first. Challenge yourself by starting to love yourself more.
Be your success. Change your identity internally. You must start to look at yourself in a new way. That new way has to match the lifestyle you want to live. If you think you’re poor, you are going to attract more of that poverty because you don’t seem successful. As I mentioned in Chapter 5, there’s a saying, “Fake it until you make it,” similar to faking confidence until you feel it. That’s what I did and it worked really well for me. As you know, I wasn’t always in shape and successful. My success came when I decided I was not “the fat guy” but rather a fit guy who happened to have extra fat on top of his muscles. When I was 360 pounds I certainly didn’t fit in with the guys with rippling six packs at the gym, but by believing I really was like them on the inside, I was willing to work just as hard as they did, if not harder, and that made me become one of them. In fact, now I’m in even better shape than many of them!
THE FIRST STEP TO SUCCESS IS TO LOOK AT YOURSELF IN A NEW WAY.
If you can shift your belief system about yourself and your capabilities, you will change your life in an unbelievable way. Imagine that the last time you saw a computer was in 1946, when the 30-ton ENIAC (which had the programming capability of a small calculator) was unveiled. Then one day someone puts a 4.8-ounce smartphone in your hand and shows you a streaming webcast of a music festival taking place on the other side of the planet. Your world would change in an instant after seeing what’s possible! That’s part of what this book is meant to do: Open your mind and change your world by showing you what I’ve been able to achieve by simply changing the way I think about food. Allow yourself to become the person you want to be. If you decide you are a lean, healthy person, you will become a lean and healthy person because your habits will fall in line with who you believe you are. Identity is the strongest force in human psychology. We will do all we can to stay true to the definition we have given ourselves. Make sure the definition you have of yourself is that of a person you want to be!
“I wasn’t always in shape and successful. My success came when I decided I was not ‘the fat guy’ but rather a fit guy who happened to have extra fat on top of his muscles.”
Find out where you want to go and keep moving in that direction. Most of us fall off the path now and again. What determines your success is whether you get back on. It only makes sense that to get somewhere you have to keep moving in that direction. Going off course from time to time is inevitable – no road is that straight – but you must make sure to always get your bearings, turn back to the right direction and move toward your destination. Keep your eye on where you want to be, not on where you don’t want to be. So often we get caught up worrying about needless things that become noise and distraction, when if we were to laser our focus in, we would achieve our goals faster than we ever dreamed. Do you drive down the highway looking out the back window? Of course not! Look ahead toward where you want to go and you’ll soon be there.
“Look ahead toward where you want to go and you’ll soon be there.”
I care immensely about you and your success. While you may feel unimportant and unloved, as if perhaps everyone has given up on you, please know that I truly love you and so does God. We haven’t given up on you. He wants you to enjoy your life and be the happiest you can be – and so do I. The rest is up to you. Follow my plan. Be prepared for the challenges that will arise. And, most importantly, don’t give up! There is nothing stronger than you or greater than your ability to achieve. The human spirit is a remarkably resilient thing. Give your heart up to this and to God. We won’t let you down. I promise.
I THINK MY CAMARO MATCHES MY PERSONALITY – TRANSFORMER!
SUCCESS STORY
“Charles helped me realize that this was up to me.”
NAME: Nancy Spewak
AGE: 51
HEIGHT: 5'2"
WEIGHT BEFORE: 148 lbs
WEIGHT AFTER: 108 lbs
WEIGHT LOSS: 40 lbs
NANCY SPEWAK WOULD EAT WHETHER SHE WAS HAPPY, SAD, BORED OR ANGRY. “It didn’t matter if it was a tough day or a great day,” she says. “I believed that I ‘deserved’ it.”
Nancy’s emotional eating brought her to the point where her first thought each day was, “How much do I weigh?” The scale determined her mood and attitude toward food. If her weight was down a bit, she’d eat with abandon, and if it was high she’d eat more lightly. This cycle repeated itself day in and day out.
Nancy was now confronted with a crushing despair each time she opened the closet door. She would make efforts to camouflage the extra weight by wearing basic black and white and then using fancy shoes and jewelry to distract the eye. But then she would catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror and disappointment always followed.
One day Nancy realized she had been trying to lose the same 20 pounds for more than a year. She knew at that moment that she did not want to live the rest of her life ruled by the scale, that it was not about always being on some fad diet, constantly depriving yourself, restricting food groups or buying prepackaged foods. She now saw that those products aren’t real; they aren’t everyday life. It was after this epiphany that she found Charles. Charles taught Nancy that she could eat real food and be healthy.
“Charles just tells it like it is.” She knew he would not pamper her or allow her to make excuses. “He helped me realize that this was up to me. He could tell me what to do, but this would only work if I was willing to commit.” His straightforward approach helped Nancy see she alone was responsible for her choices. If she made wise choices and planned ahead, she would lose the weight. And lose it she did. The pounds fell off as Nancy realized her weight issue had been all about control. Before she met with Charles, she had let her weight control her attitudes and emotions. After following Charles’ plan, she was the one in control.
Now, after dropping 40 pounds, Nancy is back at the weight she was in high school. Losing weight and exercising have completely changed her body, and she feels great about her new appearance. She now wakes up excited every morning, looking forward to getting dressed in her new designer clothes. Her energy level is high, and she has dropped back into a normal blood pressure range. Whenever she starts to lose focus with eating or exercise she thinks about how hard she worked to get to where she is now. She no longer gets upset if the scale goes up a pound or two since she knows that eating responsibly will keep her where she wants to be.
Nancy thanks Charles every day for helping to turn her life around. For anyone considering weight loss, Nancy says, “Charles has the key to lifelong weight maintenance and he will give it to you if you have the courage to commit!”