The Trap of Old Sayings: Steve Harvey on Why Statistics and Common Wisdom Can Hold You Back

Steve Harvey opens with a confession: he hopes God keeps him in the frame of mind to share and motivate, even when it's not wanted. He's encountered people who seem to benefit from nothing, who sit with him and still refuse to change. His response is to pray for them and hope they "release the chains on their mind." But the real target of this episode is not those people—it's the sayings they've absorbed.

Harvey's central argument is that certain old sayings, passed down through generations, are not designed for people who dream or aspire to be extraordinary. They sound like solid advice, but they set you up for failure. And they are not scripture. "It ain't in the scripture nowhere that statistics say," he says. "It's just some people. And a lot of people who have lost have come up with these things to justify why they keep losing or why they lost."

The Danger of Statistics

The first saying Harvey warns against is "statistics say." He tells a story from his early days as a comedian during the comedy boom of the mid-1980s. A veteran told him that one out of every two thousand comedians ever makes it to the Tonight Show. Someone else claimed there were about six thousand comedians in the country at the time. "He let the air out of everybody in the room," Harvey recalls.