What would you say is the the biggest obstacle to your success right now? A lack of time? Maybe a lack of capital? Or maybe a lack of good employees?

Nope. All wrong.

The biggest obstacle to success is a lack of optimism.

I’ll back up.

The fact that people go straight to any other answer is the problem in itself. Money and time are, of course, difficulties. When I started WineLibrary, I had time but we didn’t necessarily have the money. So it took more time. Today, I have the money, but boy do I not have the time. Fact is, though, that neither should ever be an excuse. They weren’t for me, and they shouldn’t be for you.

This is something I really need everyone to understand. No one should ever point to time or money as an obstacle. They are firmly in the excuses column, and I have no patience for that. I will never make an excuse. Everything that is a problem with me, everything I don’t achieve and everything wrong with VaynerMedia is my fault. I succumb to that, I respect that, and that’s how I think it should be. No excuses. Even more so, you shouldn’t let yourself have patience for excuses either. Train yourself to believe this, and you will see amazing results. No joke. There will always be problems, and you need to get out of the mindset that they are obstacles because you should already assume they will be there. They’re just part of the path, my friend.

Because guess what? There are about a million other things that could stop success in it’s tracks. The health and well being of your family. The world is changing. The media, bad coverage of you. I’m a human being, and I always wonder what would happen if I say the wrong thing. Any of these things could happen, but they are the same thing: excuses.

There are a million reasons why not, but there is one good reason why, which is this: you just have to persevere.

No matter what happens, it’s the way it is, and you have to keep going. And that is where the optimism lives. If you truly believe that you can do it no matter what, you’ve got this. The only reason you might bring up any of the previous excuses we talked about is because you DON’T believe, right? Do not let that kind of thinking ever get in the way.

So. You can pick time. You can pick money. Pick any one or two things that you think stop you from winning your game. But the truth is there are a million reasons. Get thicker skin. Build up your self esteem. To be able to get through, you need to have optimism. Every day is hard, and all you have to fight it in the end is yourself.

The music for this video is a song from the motion picture "Inception" titled "Time" ALL Music rights belong to Hans Zimmer and the studio behind the creation of this song.