I also have to say, success is the best revenge, isn’t it? Remember all those people who used to tease my mom and dad about their gigantic family? Who’d make fun of them for having so many kids? How many of those people would dream about having so much love around them in the later years of their lives? As the years went by, and my parents entered those years when a lot of older people start to feel lonely and neglected, they were surrounded by love. They would eventually have more than seventy grandchildren! All of them loved and adored them from the start, because they got to know them in the happiest phase of their lives. They saw only the best of them, because they were living their dream to its fullest.
If that didn’t inspire me to keep going, to keep aiming high to fulfill my own dreams in life, no matter my age, I don’t know what would.
I was so glad to have played a part in fulfilling a couple of their individual dreams too. Of course for my dad, seeing one of his sons play football for Notre Dame was an unimaginable high, and I did that way back in the ’70s. My mom’s dream was something else entirely, though: a dream that she expressed every day as she ironed our clothes.
About a year after Rudy’s release, when my speaking career was really on fire, I missed three speeches because of bad weather. I realized living in South Bend wasn’t going to work for me anymore, and I sought out a place with an airport that rarely closed. My search led me to someplace that offered much more. A land where big dreamers come to play: Las Vegas. I wasn’t a gambler, never had been. But after speaking at a conference at the Rio Hotel, I fell in love with the place. Where else on earth (besides Los Angeles, which I didn’t like) had men and women proven that anything’s possible, that dreams can be real in such a massive way as they had in Las Vegas? A city built from absolutely nothing in the middle of the desert! It was awesome.
Of course, Vegas is also one of the entertainment capitals of the world, and it was in that town where I was finally able to help fulfill my mom’s old dream: I hooked her up with some professional musicians and producers and put her into a recording studio to record two CDs full of her favorite old songs. She sounded great! She was so happy, so thrilled to get into that studio environment and do the very thing she had admired so much in all of those old crooners she loved to listen to. We still have copies of those CDs around, and we play them for the grandkids whenever we get a chance. Knowing that grandma recorded a couple of albums is an inspiration in and of itself, which opens doors for the more musical members of our family and lets them know that they can accomplish that dream too. The same way my success, and Francis’ success, has inspired some of those grandkids to go on to professional sports careers themselves. When you think about it, the cycle of inspiration never ends. One dream leads to another. I marvel at that every day.
Allowing one dream to lead to another was what finally opened up a window in my personal life as well. In all those years of struggling to make ends meet while pursuing my film, I found it difficult to make room for lasting relationships. Now? With a dream fulfilled and my life busier than ever, I somehow had room. I fell in love. I got married. And before long I was starting a family of my own. It all just seemed to fall into place. After all those years.
The way I see it, there are three cycles in life.
During the first cycle, you’re a child. You dream. But all of a sudden, your parents and society and schools are telling you how things work, and how they’re going to be, and you get confused by it all and the complexities of figuring out what you think you should be in life.
During the second cycle, it’s all about what you do. You learn how to unravel all of that confusion as you go through struggles and eventually become the person you really want to be. This is the time when you wind up doing what you have to do, not necessarily what you want to do. It’s when you take a job as an insurance salesman, or a construction worker, or waitress, and hopefully develop enough to see the path you really want to be on for the rest of your life and take the necessary steps to get there.
The third cycle is when you’ve gone through all of that and gathered the wisdom of that entire journey, from all of your experiences (good, bad, and indifferent), and you realize that it’s time to help other people learn how to get through those first two cycles on their own. It’s all about giving back.
That third cycle is what my speaking career has been about from the beginning. It’s not about telling people what to do. I’m not a “motivational speaker” in that way. I can’t stand the idea that someone tells you to take ten steps to success. Well, what happens if I mess up step number nine? Does that mean I can’t achieve that dream? That kind of thinking can mess with people. Instead, what I want to do is inspire people by sharing my story, sharing my experiences, opening up their eyes through the story of my own struggles and successes so they can go out and find their own paths to whatever sort of success they’re seeking in life. There isn’t just one way to accomplish a goal. There wasn’t just one path to get into Notre Dame. You have to find your way to get to whatever dreams you have!
People get sidetracked by “self-help” ideas at times. Lots of books tell you to write down your goals and get organized about them. Well, what if that just slows you down? What if you’re not someone who responds to that whole idea? I didn’t write down any of my goals, and I accomplished them and exceeded them. I tell kids, “Just do it.” I know Nike likes to think they have a monopoly on that phrase from their famous advertising campaigns, but it’s a universal truth. Just do it! Go get it done, whatever it is you need to do. To me, that makes more sense. If part of what you need to do is to write down your goals, then write down your goals. Figure it out for yourself. That’s the message. I don’t have the answers—you do! The answers are inside you. The answers are in those gut feelings, that little voice that God gives you to know right from wrong, and you have to respond to that gut, to those messages.
“Where’s the Rudy in you?” is a phrase I use a lot. Remember, Rudy was a nickname for all of my brothers. Rudy, to me, isn’t an individual thing. It’s a symbolic name. Ever since the movie came out, the name “Rudy” symbolizes a certain drive, a certain “never give up” attitude. I’m not about pumping up my own ego when I refer to Rudy in a third-person way like that. It’s about using that recognition, using the power of the Rudy name and what it symbolizes, to inspire people. Where’s the Rudy in you? It’s in there somewhere. Let’s bring it out. I’m not saying I have all the answers. But you do—and you’re gonna have to do the work and do what you need to do to get to those answers. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. Just do it.
I’m no self-help guru. I’m certainly not going to dictate how you go about your life, or tell you any changes you should or shouldn’t make. I simply want to be a mentor. If you’ve seen the movie, if you’ve heard me speak, if you’ve listened to the message, you’ll see that it’s all up to you now. That’s the message that comes through in my conversations with crowds of all shapes and sizes, from ten kids in a classroom to ten thousand people in a stadium.
What is remarkable to me, what has kept me going from airport to airport, speech to speech, day after day, week after week, for all these years is the fact that my message gets through. The Rudy message has changed people’s lives. I see it, hear it, live it, breathe it, and have the amazing good fortune to experience it firsthand every day.
I couldn’t possibly count the number of speeches I’ve given and appearances I’ve made after which an audience member, sometimes many audience members, approached me in tears. Sometimes they’ve been moved by my words. Sometimes they want to share a personal story about how they’ve been moved or changed by the movie. And every time, I’m humbled and motivated to keep going.
After a speech in Iowa a few years back, an autistic child and his father approached me, and the kid handed me a copy of Rudy to sign. The cover of the DVD was all worn out. “It’s the only movie he watches,” his father said to me, and then he started to cry. “For years, I couldn’
t talk to my son. He wouldn’t communicate with his mom and me at all. But for some reason, when he watches Rudy, we can talk to him. And he talks to us. It’s changed our lives. I can’t thank you enough.”
It’s hard not to tear up myself when I hear something like that. How do you even respond? I don’t understand it. How is it possible that the act of pursuing my dream could lead to the making of a movie that would allow that father and son to connect as never before? It’s astounding. It’s a miracle. There’s no way to plan for it or predict it. Over time, I heard of more autistic kids opening up because of the movie too. Was it the story? The cinematography? That beautiful music? Who knows? But none of it would have happened if I hadn’t gone after my dream of Notre Dame in the very beginning. How wild is that? How amazing is it that God could put me on a path that would lead to that sort of conclusion? It’s unimaginable!
I remember meeting a pilot who wanted to fly for Federal Express. He kept applying, and they kept turning him down. He watched the movie over and over, and simply kept reapplying after every viewing until he got the job. That message of perseverance was what he needed to succeed.
I met a woman who always wanted to be a nurse, but life got in the way; she never went to school. She saw the movie and decided to go for it—at the age of thirty-eight. She was forty-eight when I met her, and celebrating ten years in the career of her dreams, happier than ever.
I met a young woman at an appearance who had attended one of my speeches a couple of months earlier. She was visibly pregnant, and she told me that she was planning to get an abortion until she heard me speak that first time. My speech had changed her mind and changed her life, and the tears streamed down her face as she described how happy she was because of it.
There have been a number of little kids who were fighting leukemia who watched Rudy as a way to help them stay motivated to keep up the fight as they went through chemo.
Ethan Zohn, the soccer player who won the TV reality show Survivor and who has publicly battled Hodgkin’s disease, has given lots of credit to Rudy for helping him gather the strength he needed to get through multiple grueling sets of chemo and two stem-cell transplants on his way to becoming a “survivor” in real life. The stories are just endless!
I don’t talk about abortion or the sanctity of life in my speeches. I don’t give instructions for becoming a pilot or a nurse. I never imagined that a movie could help anyone in their battle against cancer. All I do is share my experience in the hopes of unlocking the potential that every one of those listeners has inside of them. There’s magic in that. I’m so privileged to experience that. It’s a gift.
The thing is, every one of us has stories to tell of our successes and achievements. Every one of us can give back in that third cycle of life. You don’t need a stage and a sound system and a giant audience. You certainly don’t need a movie to be made about your life. I encourage everyone I know to share his or her success stories with anyone who’ll listen. Not just to share the end result—bragging won’t help anyone—but to share the process. That’s the key: tell them how you did it. Tell them how you achieved your success. Show them that wherever there’s a will, there’s a way. Open their eyes to the possibilities in their own lives. You never know whose life you’ll change.
One of the most surprising stories for me took place over an eighteen-year span. Something I said eighteen years earlier had created an entire movement, and I wasn’t even aware until I got a call asking me to go give a speech at an alternative school for inner-city high school kids.
The principal of the school had heard me deliver a speech shortly after the film’s release, way back in 1993 or early 1994. He was eighteen years old at the time. He was thirty-six now, and he was actively fulfilling his dream to teach some of the toughest kids imaginable that they could be anybody they want to be.
That principal picked me up at the airport, and as we drove up to his school I looked at him and said, “You want me to speak in there? It looks like a prison! I can’t go in there.” I saw all of these tough-looking kids headed in through the front door, wearing their jeans down below their underwear, with head wraps and all kinds of gang-banger gear. “That’s a losing situation,” I said. “Those kids won’t listen to me.”
“Oh yes they will,” he said.
“Why? Why would they listen to me?”
“Rudy, I’m not going to tell you. I want you to find out for yourself. As we walk through that door, they’re gonna transform.”
It didn’t make sense to me, and I think I was more nervous heading into that school than I’ve been walking into any situation in my life. Yet as soon as we walked inside, I saw what he was talking about. Each and every kid was handed a uniform: A pair of khaki pants and a T-Shirt. The shirts had a phrase on them: “Rudy’s Lessons.” Every one of those kids had read a copy of a little paperback I wrote in 1999 called Rudy’s Insights. The school had been using Rudy and my inspirational topics as a basis for their entire curriculum.
As soon as I walked into that auditorium, they started chanting, “Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy!” It was awesome. I fed off of that energy and gave one of the best speeches of my life. It was so powerful to see my message getting out there and reaching kids in even some of the toughest neighborhoods in America. Gang life had nearly swallowed their whole community. If it weren’t for this school, these kids would have been walking the streets with guns in their pockets. Yet here they were, embracing a message of hope, a message of inspiration. Embracing me! An old, stocky guy from the Midwest! I was really floored. I couldn’t thank that principal enough, even as he went out of his way to thank me for inspiring him eighteen years earlier.
I had been hoping that the Rudy message was getting through to kids for years. In 1997, my wife and I founded the Rudy Foundation, a nonprofit specifically aimed at supporting and recognizing folks who live in the spirit of Rudy. As part of that foundation, we also set up the Rudy Awards, aimed at high school and college kids who make an exceptional effort to do their personal best, overcome obstacles, stay on track to reach their dreams, and build the qualities of character, courage, contribution, and commitment in their everyday lives. The whole idea was to recognize the future Rudys of the world and to give them a boost. The awards are given out at schools all across the country now, and in recent years more than a million people have voted to select the winners. I’m as proud of that as anything else I’ve done in my career. I know those awards touch lives. More than that, I know the ripple effect of spotlighting these kids in their communities inspires others to follow the same set of principles. We all see so many of the super-talented individuals, the gifted athletes and academics, getting awarded over and over again all through our school years. When we stand up and recognize the little guys, the less-talented guys and gals with big hearts and big dreams, that sends a message. A message of hope.
And boy oh boy, do we need a message of hope more than ever in America today.
20
Life Lessons
Fame. Celebrity. Success. None of it makes a man immune to the highs and lows of life.
How many politicians have we seen fall from grace? How many star athletes and celebrities have we seen collapse right off of their pedestals? Life lessons keep coming at you no matter how successful or powerful you might be. Challenges, obstacles, roadblocks keep coming, no matter how old you are and how many obstacles you’ve already overcome to get to wherever you happened to have arrived in your life.
That I know firsthand.
The thing I also know—and this is part of the wisdom and clarity that comes with age and experience—is that it’s all a part of God’s plan. All of it. Every bit.
It’s all about the journey. And that journey is ongoing, no matter how much you fool yourself into thinking that you’ve finally “made it.”
God will make sure of that. Every time.
Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that America was slapped with a major wake-up call in the late 2000s? After years
and years of running up debts we simply couldn’t repay, after building an illusion of prosperity on a sandbox rather than a solid foundation, all of our markets came crashing down: the stock market, the housing market, the job market, the Main Street markets, the retirement market, the health-care market, the political market, the social market, the American Spirit market, the personal bank account market, even our personal self-esteem market. Almost everything that seemed to be going right in America suddenly went “poof,” just like that, by the end of 2008.
How did that happen? How did we let that happen?
I think the simple answer is we, as a society and as a government, took our eyes off the ball. In America, we have always stood for something, but for far too many years, we’ve simply stood for the wrong things. We stood for expansion at any cost. We stood for the false notion of “bigger is better,” at any cost. We stood for the false riches of brands and status, rather than real prosperity and happiness. We set up a system of what I like to call “funny money,” where everyone was getting loans based on nothing to build things that didn’t really need building, until suddenly the funny money ran out, and there was nothing left, and no one could repay those debts, and then no one could pay their bills. The Wall Street guys, the big banks, the perpetrators of much of the funny money disaster—they all got bailed out. They, in a sense, got rewarded for their bad behavior. And they continued to play like high rollers with America’s future, while the little guy continued to struggle and fail.
People call it the Great Recession. I think a more accurate term is the Great Reset.
The thing is, hitting the reset button in life can be incredibly positive. How many times did I fail and hit the reset button in my own life during my journey to Notre Dame and beyond? Many! But my life improved after every failure. My attitude improved. My focus improved. And that’s a lesson that America, as a whole, needs to remember. We’ve been through world wars. We’ve been through the Great Depression. We’ve always come back stronger, and I believe we’ll come back stronger again. But we’ve got to get focused in order to do that. We have to honor our great soldiers of inspiration and empowerment. They gave us the ability to do and think and be, and to have and to use our freedom of speech. Are we mad? Are we angry? Of course! But it’s time now to churn that anger into positive things instead of being destructive and tearing people down. We must focus on what we really want to stand up for.
Rudy Page 28