Living for those conversations that make me feel alive...Walk good. 28all. Eya. *KO, OI, ED, JW, SC, WG, JS*

The Warm-Up: 

“I heard you were focusing a little more on yourself and worrying a little less about everyone else. That’s beautiful.” ~Anonymous

The Core: 

“Perfect valor is to behave, without witnesses, as one would act were all the world watching.” ~Francois de la Rochefoucauld

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.” ~Hunter S. Thompson

“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” ~Plato

“Be cautious of professionals adamant to remind you of your oppression but fail to mention the steps that led to their own success.” ~Ayishat Akanbi

“A memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom.” ~Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.” ~Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“This, I was coming to realize, was the nature of the Presidency: sometimes your most important work involved the stuff nobody noticed.” ~Barack Obama, A President Looks Back on His Toughest Fight

“People want you to think that everything is always about left vs. right. It’s not. It’s about insiders vs. outsiders. ‘What the insiders fear is not the end of democracy, but the end of their control over it.’~@DavidSacks” ~Chamath Palihapitiya

“Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.” ~Epictetus

“Overall, women own just 32 cents for every dollar a man owns, and Black and Latinx women own just pennies, which includes savings, resources that can be turned into investments like a home or business and resources you can pass onto the next generation.” ~Elizabeth Davis, The Gender Wealth Gap: Why We Need More Women to Invest and to Invest in More Women

“You know that there are no black people in Africa, Africans are not black. They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are. [What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them.] They don’t become black until they go to America or come to the U.K. It is then that they become black.” ~Isabel Wilkerson, Caste

“$500 Client: ‘I just feel as though with this investment I am about to make in you, that we should understand how our lives are about to change and I need results and you need to bring them. I am entrusting you with our livelihood and lives.’… $50k Client: ‘Money sent, thanks.’…All facts. Some invest minimally and expect you to part the seas. Others invest heavily in value and expect to work with you on the areas they cannot address themselves. Know the difference.” ~Matt Gottesman

Last Set: 

“Invention is the root of our success. We’ve done crazy things together, and then made them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more. If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.” ~Jeff Bezos, Email from Jeff Bezos to employees, 2/2/2021

Food for Thought: 

Lord Oki sent me an article on Wed morning. When I first read the title, I thought I had seen it before. I went back to see if I had used a quote from the article in an older MML. While I hadn’t used it, I was besotted with this quote I used on 3/20/2020.

“The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions—entertainers for example —almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary. You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value. This can be a piece of a business, real estate, natural resource, intellectual property, or other similar things. But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly.” ~Sam Altman, How To Be Successful

Nonetheless, I read the article he sent. Then I read it again. It continues to pierce me:

“How to succeed: pick the right thing to do (this is critical and usually ignored), focus, believe in yourself (especially when others tell you it’s not going to work), develop personal connections with people that will help you, learn to identify talented people, and work hard. It’s hard to identify what to work on because original thought is hard.” ~Sam Altman, The days are long, but the decade are short

Open “Letter”:

I didn’t put pen to paper in January like I’d hoped. It’s coming. There were so many things that I read / heard / saw this week that galvanized me to write. One of the tops being a text that I received from a close friend after he listened to a podcast I sent him: Brene with Emmanuel Acho on Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. 

My friend texted me: “Appreciate you sending the Emmanuel Acho interview. Honestly enjoyed it and help frame a lot of things that I think I innately feel but don’t feel comfortable verbalizing. That guy seems like a top 5 human being on earth.”

That alone touched me, opening a true dialogue and enabled a deeper level of friendship. Yet, his next comment rocked me. It stripped away a veil of self-consciousness that we all wear, allowing me to see a different side of him: “[Acho’s] explanation of white privilege made a ton of sense to me. Because ignorantly I knew that I benefitted from it…but I also always took a little offense because I felt like that was me being called privileged and don’t get it twisted—I am very blessed in so many ways—but this shit called life has been HARD for me at times. But it has never had anything to do with or been made harder by the color of my skin which I take for granted.” 

This is the type of friend and relationship that I want to continue pouring into. Kanye wasn’t lying when we sang, “We all self-conscious, I’m just the first to admit it…” I appreciate people who are willing to acknowledge just how broken they are. Just like I am. But don’t worry old sport, none of us make it alive anyway.

P.S. If anyone knows Emmanuel Acho, holla at me. I’m trying to get that man on Breakfast Bites!

More Tings (Click the link to explore further): 
*Chosen Vessels. 01/24/21 | Albert Tate 

*John White: Writing myself into freedom

*Chamath Palihapitiya - The Major Problems Facing The World

*Stanley Druckenmiller, Chairman and CEO of Duquesne Family Office