Name: Liz Murray Homeless to Harvard
Uploaded: 2025-12-10T03:05:23.000Z
Duration: 3 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

But I want to share with you what transforms a life.

Past simple

And it would not be in where I got my food.

The imperative

This is where really the breakthrough was.

And if ever there's something in your life that you want that hasn't turned out and you kind of can't identify why, I promise you, you can hear it in this.

Sometimes I would sleep in friends homes, and

there'd be 15 people sleeping across the floor in a flop house.

I had an hour subway ride to get to my school in Manhattan, and

I would step around my friends when the sun was coming up.

And I remember getting to the door early in the morning and my friends were all passed out.

And I would put my hand on the doorknob, ready for the day.

Early class, regular class, after school class, all that ahead of me.

And I would be tempted at that moment, touching that doorknob, to go back to sleep.

And do you know that feeling when the alarm clock goes off and you go, you got to be kidding me.

Or, you know, maybe you're in the buffet line and it's vegetables or bacon, or, you know, you're at a moment and you're just saying to yourself, there's the empowering choice or there's a disempowered choice.

There's the empowering choice or the disempowered choice.

Here's what holds us back from having what we want to have.

I stood at that doorknob and faced with the choice of the empowerment or the disempowerment, that's the moment I wanted to feel sorry for myself.

Isn't it interesting how all the other times of the day when I was doing just fine, I didn't want to think about the sad stuff.

But just at the moment, I had to come through with my commitment.

See, when you're faced with a choice and it gets a little tough, you want to let yourself off the hook by reminding yourself how hard your life is.

I would stand there and think, life's tough, you know, or, look what happened to me when I was five.

Or, you know, I would really summon all the tragedy and try to give myself an excuse to be in the disempowered conversation and give up.

And I knew that I really could make this choice, but I so wanted to give up.

And I could have woken up one of my friends, hey, guys, life sucks.

They go, yeah, and they would agree with me.

You want to be careful where you get your agreement in life.

Don't you have that friend that says, sure, you're off the hook?

A disempowered conversation will do a couple of things.

It will look for blame and it's concerned with the past.

That's what a disempowered conversation will do.

An empowered conversation is unconcerned with blame.

And it steps forward with a willingness to be responsible for what happens next.

That's the difference between empowered and disempowered conversation.

And I stood at that doorway and I knew nothing in my history took away from the fact that I still had a choice.

What transforms a life, One empowered choice after the next, over time,