THE OPPORTUNITIES LIE IN YOUR DECISIONS Let's say we have a young man who decides he's going to join a gang. We can judge him and say that he doesn't have any opportunities. But in reality, he's had opportunities all along. If he had taken the time to finish school, had not quit his job, had not tried out drugs. or had gone to church like his grandmother told him to, he could have had access to a whole other set of opportunities. But let's get real about this thing: If you do what you've always done, your life will not get better You can't fill out a job application when you're gangbanging or selling drugs. And you can't get access to the right opportunities if you get caught and spend the rest of your life behind bars. The key to our opportunities lies in our decisions. In order to get the opportunities you want, you have to make the decision to change. Unfortunately, change is where a lot of people get uncomfortable. All of our actions are intertwined, and they prepare us for the moments to come. We don't know when, where, or how our next big moment is going to show up. I believe this is why God doesn't show us the full picture of our lives. If he did, we'd surely mess it up and quit. If God had shown me that I would be homeless and married twice, I would have said. "Not me. What else you got?" If God had given me a sneak preview and allowed me see that I would lose every single comedy competition that I entered before I eventually made it, I would have said, "You got to be kidding me When I was hosting Showtime at the Apollo, I remember introducing Sean "Puffy" Combs for the first time. He comes walking out onstage with these two fat dudes, who I later learned were Biggie Smalls and Lil' Cease, and I said, "What in the world are these guys going to do? These dudes aren't even singing!" I thought they weren't going to make it, but Sean came back the next time, after he had signed his deal for Bad Boy Records, and then he had a whole army of people with him decked out in Bad Boy baseball jerseys. I look at all the times I've seen people fail and then make it anyway. I look at my own record of how many times I failed. But failure is such a HUGE part of succeeding. If only we understood the necessity of failure. You can't win until you lose. When you look at a great like Michael Jordan, you have to realize that he didn't win six championships by only winning he had to taste defeat many, many times. I no longer look at failure as failure. I now see it as valuable, learned. gained experience. It gives me a chance to see that learning what not to do is just as valuable as knowing what to do. It's a process, but when you can recognize and embrace the process of failure, you get another step closer to yes.