Brendon Burchard: How Mortality Motivation Changed My Life Forever

Brendon Burchard - Earn Your Blessing

Motivational speaker Brendon Burchard tells the story of how his brush with death at nineteen changed the course of his life forever and reveals the three questions everyone should judge their life by.

Transcript:

I was a 19-year-old kid, and I was miserable. I was in love with my high school sweetheart. We were that couple that was really annoying. We went to school together. We signed up for classes together. We shared a U-Haul on the way to school together. We lived in the same dorm together. We walked to class. We walk to breakfast morning and walked to class. I mean, we were just joined at the hip. We were completely crazy, infatuated in love.

Halfway through the first year of college, she discovered beer and other boys on the same night, and she cheated. I completely fell apart. I stopped going to class. I barely ate anything, certainly nothing healthy. I stopped studying. I just stopped caring about the world, literally, couldn't get out of bed.One night, my friend Kevin and I, we hopped into a car after dropping of a client. We're going down this road 85 miles an hour in this car. Then, we came upon a corner. We take that corner 85 miles an hour. That corner became the turning point that put my feet on this stage for you today. Kevin grabs the wheel. He goes, "Hold on," and I brace. The car starts sliding sideways. That weird slow motion thing happens. Kevin's gripping the wheel trying to make the corner. All of a sudden, smack. When I came to, I looked over and Kevin is screaming at the top of his lungs, "Get out of the car, Brendon. Get of the car." I look over, and a whole big chunk of his head is open."

One night, my friend Kevin and I, we hopped into a car after dropping of a client. We're going down this road 85 miles an hour in this car. Then, we came upon a corner. We take that corner 85 miles an hour. That corner became the turning point that put my feet on this stage for you today. Kevin grabs the wheel. He goes, "Hold on," and I brace. The car starts sliding sideways. That weird slow motion thing happens. Kevin's gripping the wheel trying to make the corner. All of a sudden, smack. When I came to, I looked over and Kevin is screaming at the top of his lungs, "Get out of the car, Brendon. Get of the car." I look over, and a whole big chunk of his head is open."

I pulled myself out of the windshield this car. He's screaming over here. I stand up, eventually, on the hood of the car. I look, and I notice all this blood on me. I remember just looking down and that slow motion things happening. I just thought, "Did I even matter?" I started seeing all these images of my life when I'm surrounded by people that I care for. There's a cake in front of me. Here's my friends singing, my mom leading them in that goofy song. There's my sister, just swinging and smiling right next to me. It makes you wonder: Did I love? Did I love openly, and honestly, and completely? Or did I hold back because that one time I got hurt?

Just as I was about to pass out, I notice glint, like a sparkle, something shiny, the reflection in the blood going off the hood of the car, and it made me look up. There was this bright, big, beautiful moon that night. I just immediately felt this connection if like I knew I was going to be okay. I felt like the big guy upstairs reached down to me and handed me life's golden ticket. He reached down and said, "Here you go, kid. You're still alive. You can still love and matter, but now you know the clock is ticking."

Mortality motivation I got as a 19-year-old kid. People say, "Why are you so successful?" I'm like, "I got mortality motivation when I was 19. That's a blessing. Most people don't get that til they're 60." But the one thing that I took away from that entire thing was that moment and those questions, because I remembered them, and I thought about them as I was healing. I was like, "What was that about? Why did I feel so unhappy with that moment?" Because I thought, you know, in the last moments of life, there must be this transcendence, and I was not happy. I realized it was because of how I'd been living my life, and I wasn't living to my questions. I knew I got those questions. Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? Soon as I got that those were the questions I'm going to evaluate myself with at the end of the life, it gave me the power of what my late mentor, Wayne Dyer, taught, the power of intention.

That breath you just took, feel it. What a blessing that is you got that life. What a blessing that is you got that breath. That means you still got something inside you got to work for, you got to contribute for, you got to give for, you got to lead for, you got love for because you still have something, not just in you. You're still here for a reason. And now, you just got to earn that blessing.