KEN: I want to go back to another great audio sound bite of Mr. Limbaugh. Here it is.
RUSH: I want to talk to you young people out there. I really do. I have noted on this program on several past occasions, that there’s something about the New Media, explosion in New Media and the effect that it’s having on attitudes among young people. It’s troubling to me. All of the MySpace.com pages, Facebook, all of these things. YouTube.
It seems that what drives all of this is something that these young people have not lived long enough to learn to cherish. What’s driving it is this desire for everybody to know everything about them. The desire to maintain some privacy about one’s self is being cast aside, and that’s not good. You know, all of your life is not everybody’s business.
But what is it that’s driving this? What’s driving this is, in a media world (we clearly live in a media world) there is a desire to be heard, a desire to be known, a desire to be seen! That all boils down to a desire for fame. Now, we’ve always had this in our culture and has been typified by Andy Warhol’s “everybody gets their 15 minutes of fame” at one point. But that was not something said that complimentary way.
He meant everybody is going to make a fool of themselves one of these days and we’re all going to know it. It’s good if it only happens once for 15 minutes (laughing), but when you make your life’s mission to have everybody know everything about you, you are missing the key ingredient of motivation or success. Now, I know what you’re saying, some of you young people: “What about you? What about you? You’re famous.”
Yeah, but that was never my objective. You know, I don’t have any regrets, but I’ll tell you, I would trade it in a minute, but I can’t. But I would gladly get rid of all of this fame. Unfortunately, I can’t for a whole host of reasons. Number one, I’m in the showbiz business. But the fame aspect had nothing to do with getting into this.
The key for genuine happiness is to set high expectations for yourself in terms of work and achievement and then go meet them, and possibly exceed them, and then all these other ancillary things that you think you want will fall in place. They’ll happen, if the achievement part takes place. When I finally got into radio when I was 16, the only thing that drove me was doing it as well as I could, just being the best I could be at it, and that’s what drove me.
It kept me going through getting fired all these seven or eight times, and we’ve all been fired. People that amount to anything have been fired. All of us who have been fired have all been told by some boss who fired us that we’re no good, that we don’t have what it takes. What sustains you through that? Your self-knowledge that you are good!
Self-knowledge that you can do it; self-knowledge that you can excel at it. Not to prove ’em wrong. It’s because of your love for what you do, and you’re not going to let somebody who fires you, who tells you you’re not good or don’t have what it takes, ruin your dream. Now, naturally, you have to have the dream, and you have to have the love.
You have to find out what it is that you love doing, and then go for it — and if you do that, you’ll never work a day in your life. Well, I’ll take that back. There will be drudgery days, but for the most part, doing what you love will never be talked of as work. You’ll say, “Yeah, I gotta go to work today.” You’ll want to! You’ll want to go to work, and you won’t look at it as work.
It’s where you go to be the best you can be. We all have problems at work. We all have coworkers and people that are going to snipe at us when we succeed and get on the success track. They’re going to be jealous. But, hell, that’s part of life. There’s nothing new about that. You learn to deal with all these kind of things.
But you can’t… You can’t set out… Well, you can, and you might even achieve it. If you want fame, and if you want to be heard, noticed, or seen, you might be able to do it and pull it off. But I will guarantee you you’re going to miserable, because then your whole existence is dependent on that kind of feedback.
Because fame and notoriety are the result of things happening to you from others, and they can leave you as quickly as they found you, and then where you are? If you’ve got no foundation or substance that has generated the notice, the achievement, the fame that people claim that they want, then you’ve got nothing to fall back on.
If other people can make you in the sense of providing you notoriety and fame, then they can also destroy you, and you don’t want to give people that kind of power. You don’t want to give people on the one hand love you in the moment and make you famous and so forth, that kind of power. You know how fickle people can be, then down the road, if they don’t care about you, then you’re not famous anymore and you don’t have any notoriety — unless you’ve got a foundation.
So the motivation for anything work-related in life, ought to be, A, finding out what it is you love — be honest about it, and then go do it. And if you can’t find anybody to pay you to do it, find a way to get paid doing it, to pay yourself. I’ve been concerned for people that are young over this quest to just put every aspect of their lives up on various websites on the Internet, because what it does say is, “Notice me! Notice me! Notice me!”
But notice you for what? Notice you for just being who you are? Well, fine and dandy, but there’s no achievement behind it. It’s no achievement to put all your data up on some website and have other people read it, especially when they don’t know you. You can lie about yourself and what a great person you are, all these achievements you’ve had. But who else knows it besides you and the others reading it and who knows whether they believe it?
So it just bothers me in the sense that it’s not a healthy motivation for people to have. But I’ll tell you this. (This goes for any and all of you, not just the young people in this massive audience.) Do not let the never-ending drumbeat of catastrophe, apocalypse, and doom-and-gloom that is on virtually every media outlet, and in way too many movies…
Don’t let that affect you.
You are an American.
You live in the United States of America.
You live in the most prosperous country the human race has ever produced and known. You have no reason to participate in this doom and gloom and apocalypse. Because, for everybody who’s participating in it, take a look out there at all the people who aren’t and ask yourself, “Why aren’t they affected? How come some people are happy here? How come they’re doing well?”
Because they’re doing what they love, because they have confidence, and because they know the opportunities that exist in this country and they’re out there trying to access as many as possible, rather than getting depressed over what a bunch of stupid idiot socialist liberals in the media are doing and saying and trying to make you feel rotten. Don’t give them that kind of power!
KEN: Another great example of why millions celebrate the wisdom and the words of Rush Limbaugh.