It was a rainy, miserable day outside today, so other than seeing a show down in Astor Place early in the evening, Chris and I stayed home most of the day, cooking, cleaning, eating, and watching Tony Robbins speak at the Dream Force conference. I never really knew much about Tony Robbins other than the fact that he was a very successful and wealthy motivational speaker, but today while streaming his talk that happened earlier in the week in San Francisco, I realized why he had been so successful at his job. Despite all the setbacks he’s faced in life, the negligent father, the abusive and drunken mother, the health episodes he’s had, he still keeps going and uses all of his life adversities to motivate his next steps in helping the entire world. He doesn’t have any self pity. He doesn’t have a single fear, he said. And based on the way he delivered his talk and the way he’s lived his life, I actually don’t doubt his sincerity at all.

The strongest people will never have self pity or self loathing for a long period of time. They might mourn the loss of a loved one, be frustrated temporarily by losing a job or having some inconvenient life event happen. But the strongest of the strong will see all these “setbacks” as motivators to do better moving forward, and the best will help others with their knowledge and experience. As sad as it was, I thought about my cousin in Brooklyn a little when watching Tony Robbins speak, thinking of his dysfunctional marriage and his young son celebrating his fourth birthday this afternoon. He will never be strong because all he thinks is “poor me” for every possible reason in the universe. People can only be positively affected by someone like Tony Robbins who are open to change and open to leading happier, more productive lives. Tony Robbins said tonight that most of our disappointments in life could be solved by replacing our “expectations with appreciation,” and I realized how true it was. The more we expect of others, the worse we will be and the more upset we will get because no one in the universe will ever meet *all* of our expectations. But when people in our lives end up doing things that we love that make us happy either for ourselves or for them, if we appreciated it and expressed that appreciation and gratitude more, we’d be so much happier and more fulfilled. I never thought about it that way, but it’s so true and resonates through my life and even my own parents’. So many people in my life could benefit from Tony Robbins’s teachings, but they would be deaf to hear him speak.