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Take the chance.... 28all. Eya. *JS* The Warm-Up: “The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly—we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone’s life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming...” ~Joseph Bruchac The Core: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.” ~Ted Turner “Even the trees embrace loss because they know it’s only a season. Eventually, everything ends in the best-case scenario.” ~@ehimeora “So much writing advice about grammar and punctuation, but the real trick lies in knowing where to find things worth writing about in the first place.” ~David Perell “When you do something beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun, every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.” ~John Lennon A student said to his master: “You teach me fighting, but you talk about peace. How do you reconcile the two?” The master replied: “It is better to be a warrior in a garden than to be a gardener in a war.” “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” ~Leo Buscaglia “Don’t ask how many hours per day you should put into it. Find a goal you truly care about, and regardless of how much time it takes, you will just do it. You don’t need motivation; you need to understand why you do what you do.” ~Orange Book “And we’ll work it out, every time, because that’s the only option we agree to give ourselves…You can keep quitting and getting nowhere every time you feel the slightest bit of pain, or disappointment, or uncertainty, or fear…but don’t expect to know anything about the extraordinary.” ~Rob Hill Sr. “Imitators can’t answer questions at a deeper level. Specific knowledge is earned, not learned, so imitators don’t fully understand the ideas they’re talking about. Their knowledge is shallow. As a result, when you ask about details, or first principles or nonstandard cases, they don’t have good answers.” ~Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking “A gift doesn’t diminish the giver. Sharing creates connection, possibility, and energy. And the magic of gratitude is that it improves everything it touches, especially the person who offered it in the first place. So, what holds us back? Fear. Fear of connection, of change, of seeing what is possible. It might feel safer to focus on scarcity. Generosity and gratitude often go together. They light a path on the way to better.” ~Seth Godin, Generosity and gratitude Last Set: A reporter once asked Muhammad Ali how many sit-ups he does every day. He responded, “I don’t count my sit-ups, I only start counting when it starts hurting, when I feel pain, cause that’s when it really matters.” Food For Thought: “The most powerful thing I am aware of is to spend your time doing what you want to do. I’ve been on a multi-year mission to make as much of my calendar filled with things I actually want to do as possible. This has been SHOCKINGLY hard. I’ve learned there’s actually only one thing that I really love, that I’ll do until I die: spending long periods of time with extraordinarily talented people (usually founders, investors, and teachers--people with really high leverage). I like to learn from them (nothing energizes me like someone doing what they are supposed to be doing with their life), and I like to try and help them by unlocking something productive: a podcast that exposes them to the world’s best audience, an introduction or two that accelerates some part of what they are doing, a distillation of their narrative or core message, maybe even an idea they hadn’t considered before. There are many days now where I have 2-3 long conversations and that’s it. Those are the best days. ‘conversationalist’ isn’t a job you imagine as a kid, and it’s not one that’d ‘make your parents proud.’ The bizarre part is that if you just do what you love, incredible but unpredictable things will happen. I run a private equity/venture capital business and a media company, and both were an unforeseen consequence of being a conversationalist. About every 100 or so conversations, an amazingly interesting investing opportunity spontaneously appears (I’m very rarely explicitly hunting for some specific investment, and I’ve found the best ones come from some strange source). Kevin Kelly has this great idea that you need your own distinct definition of success. For me, success would be cultivating a very specific reputation. I’d like my reputation to be ‘talk to that guy and you’ll leave energized, thinking about something new. Good things will happen, and it’ll generally cost you nothing.’ I sometimes feel guilty that my ‘work’ doesn’t feel like a grind. People think great accomplishment requires ‘grit’ and ‘grinding,’ and I have nothing against those things, and surely tons of the great outcomes were just made possible by extreme grinders...but, I never feel like I’m grinding when I do the thing I like doing. Maybe I’d offer an alternative to ‘grit.’ Great long-term outcomes require an unusual fuel source. Chips on shoulders is one, but I tried that and it almost killed me. The best long term fuel source is some repeated act that energizes you in a way that then lets you become a generative person, who uses the energy to make things for others. A great question is ‘what is your renewable fuel source?’ While it’s not perfect, I think the best answer is ‘do what you want.’ Joseph Campbell wrote ‘the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.’ Being who you are, or doing what you want, sounds selfish, but it’s the opposite. My experience with countless people doing what they want is that they do THE MOST for others. What I’ve learned watching others try to do more of what they want is that the transition from a life of ‘I should’ to ‘I want’ requires extreme conviction, courage, and a leap of faith. It should be telling that while you sometimes see people make this transition, you never see someone transition back the other direction. I sincerely hope more people take this leap. ‘A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation: ‘as you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.’’” ~Patrick O’Shaughnessy Food For Thought II: This was in the MML on Nov 25th, 2016. And it’s so good, I’m running it back… “Was sitting around a table last week when a friend asked, ‘Who’s that guy you use a lot in the MML?’ This is that guy, and this is where all began for me… h/t Brother Carlson.” Shoutout Rob Hill Sr. About Something Real ~Rob Hill, Sr. “Where does the spark and infatuation from the beginning go? It’s crazy how quickly you can go from being excited to talk to someone to feeling like you are forcing the conversation. The quality times turns into ‘I was working’ and the consistent communication becomes ‘I don’t know’. When does ‘I hate to see you leave’ turn into ‘It hurts too much to stay’. Maybe we are all guilty of taking things for granted or letting our fears stop us from taking certain chances. Maybe we think we can make love appear when it’s convenient or maybe we don’t realize the effort to keep a good thing good. Maybe we think happiness is something that just finds us, instead of being something we work for and choose to have. And maybe that’s why we all get it wrong so often. It’s amazing how fast things change...you go from laughing about anything to arguing about everything. You have to go thru the motions, wondering if they are real, if they really care, or if they are going to run when it’s rough. You want to give more of yourself to somebody but it’s hard these days because you just never know if you will get anything back. You think you have it all down. You do the little things, you stay consistent, but somehow it just doesn’t add up. Maybe the problem is we expect the love to be magical before we become magicians. Or could it be that we are all just better breakers than builders. We’d rather have feelings we can throw away and ‘love’ that is disposable. Lord forbid a situation require us to grow, learn more, and actually put work in. Reality is rough. You only want what’s easy and that’s why what you get never lasts. Everybody wants to be fought for but nobody is willing to fight. She loves the butterflies but avoids beginnings because she hates having to start over. He’s tired but he’s so used to the chase that he’s scared to stop running. Makes you wonder…”
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