Never Give Up-Until You Die

You’ve heard the phrase, “Never Give Up,” multiple times. For many of you, it never stuck in your mind and became your mantra. There are probably a million and one reasons, starting with the negative voice inside your head. You know the one. It’s always there in the background, saying “this will never work and who I am to even try.”

Yes, you recognize that voice don’t you. It may even sound like your mother, father or that teacher that you just couldn’t please. I know, because that was my life for 60 years.

Yes, you read that right, I said 60…60 very long years. I was labeled as stupid and goofy as a child. In fact, the kids on my block had a name for me. “Hey Goober, come here so we can make you eat this frog.” That sentence is way different than Brian Tracy’s awesome book called “Eat That Frog.” As a young person, I had no idea what self-development was. My world was one of being a total loser, quitting school three times and trying any drug I could get my dirty little hands on. Oh yes, and as much booze as I could find to wash those drugs down.

Color me surprised when a girl agreed to marry me after 3 months of dating. Yes, I was totally shocked because girls hated me, but this one must have seen something of herself in me. We spend nine years being losers together.

It was just after we broke up and I was convinced that my one and only shot had come and gone…that PBS saved me. Literally saved me, because the thoughts of suicide that had always plagued me, were running rampant. It was so bad, that when I finished my midnight shifts in security, I would pause and look at the handcuffs I just put in my mail slot. I would stand there dog tired and depressed imagining taking those cuffs home with me.

I was living in a nice apt with my older brother who basically paid for everything. The pool was always deserted at 9 in the morning. I’d go for a swim and look at the ladder that descended into the pool and think to myself, “should have brought those cuffs home. Just snap one on my wrist and loop it through the rung on the ladder. Once you snap the other one shut, boom…it’s all over baby and no more suffering.”

There is no reason I can give you as to why I didn’t do that. I had very few friends, my brother was a walking mess and I could care less about my parents. I only had two sisters and it was hard to stay in touch with them. Perhaps somewhere in the very low storage compartment in one section of my brain library, I might have had a story filed away. A story of despair that turned to gold. Whatever it was, the cuffs stayed at work.

One day, while being a couch potato on my day off, I tuned into a PBS show. I liked the shows on PBS, especially the nature ones. But this one was really different. I ended up on the floor right in front of the television, glued to everything the guy was saying.

Right before my eyes, a man was describing a life, that sounded so much like my own. The year was 1987 and he was writing on a white board. He also drew pictures and what he was saying, I had never heard in my life. There was something called a subconscious mind and it had a guard at the door. That guard was there to keep any positive statements out, while making sure all the garbage in my head couldn’t escape from the room.

Suddenly he explained there was a way to trick that guard. I could play something called, subliminal tapes that were music and positive phrases. The magical part was, the guard couldn’t hear the positive phrases, so they would go right past him and lift that garbage up high and shove it out the door.

The man explained that if I listened to these tapes every day for 30 days, that room would have zero garbage and my mind would be open to the suggestions and that I could be unstoppable at anything I chose to do.

I was hooked. After three weeks of listening to the tapes, people kept telling me how much I had changed. The whole idea of listening to tapes to become a better person, was so out of this world to me, that I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing.

Yes, there were major changes but it wasn’t enough. My issues were deep and on paper I had written that my life had gone from a negative 2 to a positive 5 on a scale of 10. I struggled to raise that number. I got it to 5.5 and met the woman of my dreams. We got married quickly and it’s been an amazing 26 years. But there I was, still trying to get to where I wanted to be and although I struggled, I wouldn’t give up. It took me 13 years to write a children’s book but I wouldn’t give up. It would take me 60 years to be the man I wanted to be but I wouldn’t give up.

I had always written. Reading and writing started for me when I was age 4. I always knew I wanted to write but always managed to self-sabotage. In 2006, I started a martial arts website and had some articles on it. People took notice and started asking me if I would write for them. I did that and then took some expensive course on becoming a copywriter. I started to get great gigs, so I quit my job at the Four Seasons and promptly fell flat on my face. I ended up getting a good paying part time job in security, since that was my field. Over the next years, it was up and down with my freelance copy writing business but I wouldn’t give up.

Depression had always been part of my life as you have probably guessed. There were some really black months as my finances went deeper into the red because I refused to go back to full time security. I kept writing and learning. In those years, it was all health and fitness. Gigs would come and go. I would hire coaches and get very limited results. My last coach loved my writing and wanted me to write for her. In the end, I refused because I found her to be very abusive. With all that I had learned over the years, it was a couple of hard failures at launching products with content and graphics that nearly sank me. I failed badly at putting together sales pages with page creators. Then it struck me.

I need a partner, I told myself. While trying to figure out where to get one, my amazing partner appeared pretty much out of the blue. He’s very successful online and a conversation about him fixing my horrible web pages, turned into him taking me under his wing. His area is self-development.

Not only did the partnership work, it helped me so much mentally. I had to research and research some more, as I worked to write the content we needed. All of a sudden I started using some of the techniques I had learned and my depression disappeared. I started sleeping soundly instead of floundering around in the bed. And when I tried to do some solo stuff on the side and it failed, I just shrugged it off and kept my nose to the computer.

I finally retired when I was 62. The 32 years of security, shift work and stress had come to halt. I was now free to write content and put laser focus on my self-development.

On my desk, I have my goals for the next three months written out. My writing in the PLR area, has given me a name of someone to look to when you want something unique and very high quality.

I could not and would not quit and there was nothing that could break me, including debt that would scare the pants off you. But after selling my house and downsizing, that is gone and I enjoy not only writing but the sales that come in every day.

I will always write, even my fingers stop working, I can always use speech to text. There are so many words out there, that are just waiting for me to put them in a special place.

Whatever you do, DO NOT QUIT! Push and push some more. YouTube is full of videos of people who have excelled at life, although having received a basket full of lemons in life. They mashed those suckers up and made the sweetest lemonade.

And with that, I want to say, R.I.P. Sean Stephenson. You were an inspiration to millions.