I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons by Kevin Hart (With Neil Strauss)

Notes:
– Always get the audiobook when it comes to Kevin Hart or you’ll miss his ramblings and talking style! Below are some of his life lessons.
– You can’t choose your story but you can choose how you interpret it.
– No matter what you may think, education is important and you need it and you can’t succeed without it – unless you’re talented and intelligent and figure out another path.
– People with calluses work hard, but some people with soft hands work even harder because they got themselves to a level where they can take care of their hand.
– You need a teacher, because those you can’t do, teach. So if you wanna learn something, go to someone who can’t do it. Dammit, I think I wrote this one wrong.
– Without a grind, there is no reward. Think about it: What kind of sex have you ever had that hasn’t started with a nice grind? I’ll wait.
– The toughest transition is the transition to understand that being yourself is all you need to be.
– Sometimes you got to take three steps back to know that there’s a lot more steps you can still take backward.
– If you experience loss, it doesn’t mean you lost. It means you’ve been blessed with an opportunity to take a moment, realise how special someone or something has been to you, and go through new doors that were closed to you before. No jokes here. Just wisdom.
– I know I just said you gotta do thinks alone, but make sure you do things alone with a team. That may not seem like it makes sense, but it makes total sense once you’ve read this section. And if it still doesn’t make sense, I suggest you get a team to help you understand it.
– One day you won’t be here, but your legacy will. Even if the earth is gone, you contributed to that. If you’d done something different, maybe the planet would have survived another minute, another year, another millennium. Everything you do matters. So treat it like it matters.

Contents:
Dedication
Epigraph
Mandatory introduction.

Life Lessons: From Dad
1. Birth of a sex symbol
2. Blessed life of a genius
3. Four years gone
4. All about my amazing shoulders
5. The selfless love of a father

Life Lessons: From Mom
6. Thug life
7. The legend of freeball
8. Mama’s boy
9. Snapping f****** peas
10. Confessions of a ladies’ man
11. Hot stuff
12. Horseface and Jammin’ Joe

Life Lessons: From School
13. Secrets of an international playboy
14. Packing the meat
15. Time travelling
16. Becoming elite
17. Getting hard
18. My powers of observation amaze even me
19. Truth, justice, and the Hart way
20. Freaky tales
21. A Hart Family reunion
22. Inside the mind of a super-genius

Life Lessons: From Work
23. The greatest attender of all time
24. Another day in the life of a hero
25. Crossing the desert, or is it the dessert? I’ll just put both in here, so I’m safe
26. Warning: This chapter contains a twelve-letter word, so you may also need to be a genius to understand it
27. All hail General Hart
28. I was gonna call this one “My genius finally gets recognised,” but the chapter before last had the word “Genius” in it and there are only so many chapters you can name “Genius” in a book. That’s one of the many burdens of being a genius
29. Rise of the bastard

Life Lessons: From Passion
30. There’s a first time for everything except the things you’ll never do
31. What perfect people do
32. K Hart quits his day job and never looks back. (Actually, he kind of goes back, but that’s in chapter 98.)
33. A license to kill
34. Oiling up
35. Salvation

Life Lessons: From Apprenticeship
36. I’m running out of chapter titles. How many more of these are there?
37. Five chapter titles ago, I referred to myself in the third person, Does that make me seem egotistical?
38. Or is it more egotistical, that five chapters later, I’m still worrying about how it made me look?
39. Staying true to my fan base
40. Lil’ Kev vs. Big Kev
41. Not afraid to be afraid
42. Life of a baller
43. A well-respected man

Life Lessons: From the Grind
44. Why you should never lend me anything that breaks when it hits a highway median
45. What happens here doesn’t normally happen to winners, which in a sense means I won
46. The struggle is even more real when people are laughing at you
47. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. (Which makes me wonder whether tough people should leave or stay when things get hard. I did both, so either way, I’m tough)
48. When opportunity knocks, open the door, hear it out, then slam the door in its face if you don’t like what it has to say

Life Lessons: From Transition
49. In which I discovered that I’m not actually as good as I thought, which then puts me on a path to becoming as good as I thought
50. You can skip this one
51. The day I became a comedian
52. Snap-your-fingers famous
53. Squeak crunch smack
54. The greatest pilot that no one’s seen
55. How I became an international superstar (In Canada, for one week, and not actually all of Canada, and not really a superstar, but they did mention me in the papers so that’s gotta count for something)
56. Oh my god, I’m f****** rich

Life Lessons: From Opportunities
57. Remember how I said I was rich in the last chapter … well, now I wasn’t
58. If I think I’m too good for you, but you reject me, then who’s too good for who now?
59. Liars get lied to too
60. My nuclear family

Life Lessons: From Obstacles
61. Making television history
62. The nose smoker
63. Keeping up with the Joneses
64. Yes, I refer to myself in the third person again. But that’s only because it feels like I’ve lived three lives

Life Lessons: From Loss
65. There are two kinds of hustlers, and both are working for me
66. Chapter 8 + Chapter 58 = Chapter 66
67. Using my goddamn brain
68. The many faces of Kevin Hart (All of which are looking at each other, confused)
69. My eighteenth lucky break
70. There are no words to summarise this one

Life Lessons: From Independence
71. When life hands you shit sandwiches, keep your mouth shut
72. Remember when I said I had two hustlers working for me? That was a bad idea. I got hustled. What did I expect, really?
73. One of those moments when everything comes full circle, even though I’m continuing to move forward, which I think is geometrically impossible unless I just went around the world, never mind, I think it’s actually possible

Life Lessons: From Team Building
74. I’m thinking that I should get an honorary degree for all the college shows I’ve done. Call me if you can make this happen (Note: Would prefer a doctorate.)
75. What Napoleon and I have in common (and it’s not height, because he had to inches on me)
76. I think that last chapter title was the only height joke in this book so far
77. You’ve heard it before, now hear it without jokes
78. It took me half a damn hour to come up with a way to explain why it’s important to communicate well, so I hope I communicated it well, otherwise it would be kind of ironic
79. Sometimes you have to say yes to the things you want to say no to so you can raise yourself to a place where you get to say no to more things
80. I deserve everything that happens to me in this chapter and more
81. I consider myself a smart person, I even called myself a genius in the second chapter title. So why have I been so stupid about this one thing? Even you, who are not as smart as me, knew I should have done this like a hundred pages ago

Life Lessons: From Breakthrough
82. I got nothing, name this one yourself
83. Think I shoulda just done chapter numbers without titles
84.
85. No, I’m going back to titles. Let’s call this one: Some more growing up
86. That one time I got caught cheating without actually cheating
87. If you never talked to strangers, you’d never talk to anyone, since everyone is a stranger before you talk to them
88. Keeping my guardian angel busy
89. This chapter still gets me excited, people

Life Lessons: From Success
90. Hello, I’m back
91. Keith, I’m in New York and doing the garden, so who’s the dummy now?
92. Still having trouble with this particular life lesson
93. Alcohol
94. From the Hart
95. In which I learn that there’s a giant gap between what you imagine yourself doing and what you’re capable of doing, and it hurts pretty bad when you fall into that gap
96. Can’t stop won’t stop can’t stop won’t stop can’t stop won’t stop can’t stop won’t stop can’t stop won’t stop can’t stop won’t stop can’t stop won’t stop can’t stop won’t stop can’t stop won’t stop can’t stop won’t stop can’t stop won’t stop okay I’m stopping now

Life Lessons: From Legacy Building
97. Building newer, better models
98. There’s always more
99. The blueprint

Acknowledgements
About the author
Photo credits
Copyright

#ads