Today I want to talk with you about a subject that many people have been talking about / for a very long time, / and that subject is called success. // You see, success means different things to different people, / and what success might mean to me / is different than what it may mean to you. // And what it may mean to you / is different than what it means / to a kindergartner / who's just trying to get a star / on his homework assignment. // Or perhaps to a housewife / who's been trying to get her five kids in bed / by 9 o'clock p.m. // Or maybe even a corporate executive / who's been working for his or her corporation / for 20 plus years / and only wants to become / the CEO / of their organization. // As you can tell, we have / so many different definitions / of this word success, / but the greatest definition I can give you today / is this. // Success / is all about / self-expression. // It's about being who you want to be, / doing what you want to do, / going where you want to go, / because when it comes to your life, / you / are the boss, / and you have a choice. // In fact, you are who you are today / because of all the choices that you've made / in your whole entire life. // But you know, as we're growing up, we have a lot of people / who try to tell us how to make these choices. // Our parents, / our teachers, our bosses, our friends, / even our neighbors. // They try to tell us how to live our lives, / what we should do, / where we should go, / how we should walk, / how we should talk. // But my question for you is this. // If you're trying to be / what other people want you to be, / then who / will be you? // So the key to success / is to stop conforming to other people's expectations / and start performing / to your own level of expectations. // It's to believe in yourself. // It's to know that what you want / will eventually come to fruition / as long as you believe it. // You see, you have to have faith, / and faith is knowing / that what you want / will eventually come to fruition / as long as you believe it. // And if you feed your faith, / you'll find oftentimes that your fears / will starve to death. // Because if you believe in yourself, / everyone else in the world / will believe / in you. // Fortunately, / for a long time, I didn't quite / believe in myself. // Actually, I used to be / the kind of person that mothers would often warn their daughters about. // And fathers would tell their sons, / if you keep doing what Daniel Alley's doing, / you're going to end up where Daniel Alley's going. // Now they had some credence to what they were saying, / because as you can imagine, / your reputation really is your best advertisement. // I really didn't have a good reputation, / because I was living so far below my potential / that I was actually living in my mother's basement. // By the age of 21, / I had worked over 40 different jobs. // I got fired from more jobs than more people had. // In high school, / I graduated second to last. // The last guy? / Well, he was in jail. // I was on drugs for eight years, / and I was confused. // I was broke, busted, and disgusted. // And I knew that I wanted to change. // The only problem / was that I didn't know / how.