It’s Never too Late to Chase your Dreams by Steve Mazan (Full Transcript)

The cure is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time. If you don’t know where you’re going you will wind up somewhere else. Just do it.

Some pretty motivational quote from some pretty inspirational people, including Lombardi, Bruce, and the little engine they could. I heard those quotes going up all the time. When I first heard some, I memorized them. Others I wrote down, but not one of them motivated me for more than a day or two.

It was a much less inspirational quote that inspired me, from a much less-famous person, who was a doctor at UCLA. He said “Steve, you’ve got inoperable tumors all over your liver. Worse-case scenario, you have 5 years to live.” OK, maybe not as elegant as Bruce, but pretty effective.

OK, bad news. I had cancer, I was dying. But I got more bad news. You are all dying too. Maybe not from cancer, maybe not as rapidly. But unless someone in here is a highlander, we are all going to die. If you don’t get that reference, I suggest that you spend 2 hours of whatever time it is that you have left watching some awesome Sean Connery movies from the ‘80s.

OK, I am not a doctor at UCLA. I am not even a doctor at DeBry. But I’ve basically just given you all the same diagnosis that I was given. Your time is limited. And that’s a real diagnosis, so what now?

OK, like most people when they are told they are dying, you’re probably going through the 5 stages of grief.

The first stage is denial. I am not dying, I am healthy. I am going to get a second opinion from some other comedian.

Stage 2, is anger. Ugh! As a comedian, at the end of the day, telling me I am dying? Can we get that robot from the first session? To come back up, and tell a few jokes?

Stage 3 is bargaining. OK. We are all dying, maybe there is a mortuary that offers a Groupon!

Stage 4 is depression. Well, it feels like a depression, but trust the Wall Street Journal. It’s really just a mild recession.

Stage 5, the final stage, is acceptance. OK. I am not immortal, maybe my only hope is to live long enough that Willard Scott will announce my name on my birthday. Well we can all hope for that. So what now?

But let me tell you what I did when I was told I might only have 5 years to live. First of all, I got a lot of advice. A lot of friends wanted to help. Friend of my wife told me that maybe this news will give me a whole new perspective. That maybe I should look at cancer as a gift. A Gift? Cancer as a gift? Whoo! She is definitely not the person in the office you want to draw on your name at the secret Santa.

Cancer? What – Judy, was this you? Did you? Did you? No, you shouldn’t have — really you shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have. I know you wanted to get me something that I wouldn’t get myself. But this is crazy, this is enough with the cancer Christmas.

Someone else told me that I should live everyday like it was my last. That seemed like a good idea. So I decide to do that. To move forward living everyday like it was my last one. Two weeks later, I was bankrupt and — 20 pounds heavier, and my family wouldn’t talk to me. That was awful advice.

But what I kept coming back to when I had time by myself and no one was giving me advice was my dreams — dreams that I put aside, the ones that I thought I have plenty of time to reach. But now that I realized I had a finite amount of time, I had to ask myself, what did I want to accomplish? I am not a worse-case scenario guy, but if I really only had 5 years to live, what was it that I want to make sure happen?

For me, as a comedian, it was a dream I had since I was 12 years old. It was to perform my comedy on the Late Show with David Letterman.

So, let me be clear before I move on. I was a comedian already, OK? I was making a living at it. No day job, full-time comedian. Making a good living in comedy clubs, colleges, corporate events around the world. That was a pretty big feat in itself.

But 6 years into my comedy career, I kind of stopped chasing the Letterman dream. I was waiting for it to come to me. I was waiting for some day, not chasing it anymore. That’s very important lesson for all of us mortals here today. Someday isn’t on the calendar. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, it’s on there about 4 times a month. No, Someday.

But when it comes to our dreams, probably the busiest day of the week is Someday. Right? So learning that lesson I decided that I was going to refocus my attention back on the dream. I was going to pull out all the stops and I gave myself a goal of getting on Letterman within 1 year. I was going to make Someday happen.

I started yelling my dream to anyone who would listen. Started calling in every favor I was owed. I found out everyone who worked on the show, and begged them to help me get an audition. I even started asking people at comedy clubs after they’d seen me to email the show and beg Dave, to book me. And guess what? I didn’t make it.

My ironically named deadline came and went. But I was so renewed about my dream and my new found passion for it, I decided to get myself an extension. One more year to get on Letterman. Didn’t happen. And then another. Nope. Sounds like bad news, right? Well it was. I would have loved to get on the show in that first year. But something great happened over there, those years.

Those 3 years weren’t spent dying. They were spent living. Living a dream. And let me tell you – there’s something, if you’ve ever chased a dream, you know that it lights the fire in your heart. And whether you reach it or not, it warms everyone around you and everything around you. So I decided, you know what? I am going to keep going. Because that dream is so important. You can’t wait — you can’t wait for Someday to happen. You need to make things — you need to make things go out.

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we are all inspired, if the world wasn’t full of uninspired people? I know I felt better when I was inspired. Why do people stop chasing their dreams? I don’t think people choose to be uninspired. Ginny, one of the people helping with me, with my TEDx experience actually asked me that. She said, “Steve, why do you think people stop chasing their dreams? Everyone wants to achieve them. Why do people leave them behind?”

It was a tough question to answer. I want to give her an honest answer. Not some cliche response or a motivational line. So I thought about it for a long time. I knew that cancer had motivated me to pick my dream up again. But why did I stop chasing it in the first place? Why did anyone stop? Well, when the answer came to me, it was hard to swallow, let alone spit out and say it loud. But I told her. We are all taught that life is tough. Life is a bitch. Life is hard. But it’s not, it’s pretty easy. Right? It’s pretty easy to skate by and go through life. Right?

We wake up everyday, most of us in the world with a roof over our heads, a big comfy bed under our butts, fridge full of foods. Most of us in the world, especially here in America never have to worry about starvation or homelessness. We have friends and family that will help us out when those things come. Those were are the things that made life dangerous 100 years ago. Now we complain that life isn’t convenient. This isn’t a statement on modern society. This is a statement about motivation. Life is easy. It is easy to skate by. It doesn’t even sound that bad, it’s called skating. Skating is fun! Who doesn’t love skating? I love skating. Who doesn’t love skating? German judges. That’s who doesn’t love skating, but you know what. This time the German judge is right. It is pretty easy to grow up, put your dreams aside, leave your passions behind, take a job that you don’t even really mind, raise some kids that would most likely be inspired to do the exact same thing. Go from point A to point B to point C until you end up at point Z.

When you’re passed away and there is a line of people waiting to get up and tell everyone else who knew you, what a good life you had. Nothing bad about that. Nothing wrong with that. But nothing great about it. Nothing inspiring about that. The awful truth is, is that life is easy. Living — truly living, chasing a dream and truly living is hard. Living is a bitch. Living is tough, especially when you switch it you ask yourself what am I dying to do? What is it that puts that fire in my heart? Answering that question isn’t the end, thought. It’s really just the spark. Because once you get that fire burning you need to feed it. You need to keep reminding yourself, putting new coals in there, remind yourself everyday about that goal. Because we’ve all taken up a hobby or a goal or a workout that we stop for just a couple of days and we never pick them up again.

You need to constantly remind yourself that you are dying. And that you are dying to do something, because the minute you forget, life creeps right back in. And life is easy. I have a friend named Joke. As in tell me a joke. I think as a comedian, we were destined to be friends. She told me a story about her dad, talking to her about love when she was younger. And her dad told her, don’t look at love as an object. It’s not a thing, not something to obtain, not a noun. Look at it as a verb. It’s something to do, something to act on, something to constantly give action to.

I love that story, and I think a dream works exactly the same way. It is easy to look at a dream as something way off in the distance, something that might or might not be accomplished. A thing, an object, a goal. A thought that runs through our mind every now and then. A noun.

A dream is also a verb. It has to be lived, it has to be done. It has to be furthered, it has to be acted upon. It needs to be chased. It’s not just an idea or result. To dream encompasses every step that it takes to get there.

I told you about my dream. I didn’t reach my Letterman dream by my deadline, or my extended deadline. Nope, it took me 5 years. 5 years of living. 5 of years of living for that dream. And I was very lucky. My tumors during that time, they didn’t grow. I stayed healthy. But I had that wake-up call, and I am giving you all the same wake-up call. We are all dying. But if you are not chasing your dream, you are already dead.

One more thing. Two weeks ago, right here at San Jose at the Cinequest Film Festival, they premiered a movie about my journey. It was called “Dying to do Letterman”. Ended up winning the audience award and the jury award for best documentary at the festival. Everyone who saw the movie and came up and talked to me — told me that it inspired them to pick up a dream they had left behind or chase another one harder. To keep that dream alive, we handed out these buttons. These promotional buttons that say I am dying to and then they had a blank on it. And we would personalize them for everyone that came up. We would write their dream in there. What it was they were dying to do.

Today I am wearing one that says I am dying to make people happy, I wasn’t Steve Jobs. So thanks for going along.

My point is one of the sad things about all these buttons when we were handling them out is a lot of people didn’t know what they wanted us to write on the button. They had to think about it. After a couple minutes I would let most of them off the hook and just put some short term dream like I am dying to have a drink. I am dying to eat pizza! I am dying to get more sex! Apparently San Jose has a lot of horny hungry people. But I told those people they had to go home and figure out what it was they were really dying to do.

So I am going to give you all a challenge here. Figure out the answer to that question. What are you dying to do? Don’t skate forward any further in life without answering that question. If you know the answer. Fantastic! See me outside, I will put it on a pin for you. But if you don’t know the answer, don’t go to sleep tonight without answering that question. Don’t wait till Someday to answer that question. There is nothing more important than your life than figuring that out. Because when you do figure it out, then, when you go to sleep, you will sleep like a kid again. Because then, you will be going to sleep, not to dream, but with the dream. And waking up with one.

Thank you. And sweet dreams!

 

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