A few years from now we’ll see who was really on their grind and who was just tweeting, snap chatting & reposting quotes on IG. #@mentality...Walk good. 28all. Eya. *SW, PR*

The Warm-Up: 

“The real flex is how many people’s lives you can positively impact…May your greatest flex be how you inspire others. Not from what you have, but how you raise them to be their highest and best selves; influence is a responsibility…not a flex.” ~Matt Gottesman

The Core: 

“If you are already living the life you want, stay anonymous.” ~Orange Book

“A lot of people spend money on dates that should actually be spent on therapy.” ~Nait Jones

“Dreams are not what you see in your sleep, dreams are things which do not let you sleep.” ~Cristiano Ronaldo

“Humans are creatures, who spent their lives trying to convince themselves, that their existence is not absurd.” ~Albert Camus (@ _nitch)

“We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher.” ~Naval Ravikant

“Even if you hesitated, broke out in a sweat, stumbled over your words, celebrate that you spoke up for yourself. It gets easier.” ~Dr. Thema Bryant

“Finding your passion isn’t just about careers and money. It’s about finding your authentic self. The one you’ve buried beneath other people’s needs.” ~Kristin Hannah

“People tell you the truth by what they say AND what they don’t say. People tell you the truth by how they treat you. Let that truth set you free from waiting and wondering. You already know.” ~Dr. Thema Bryant

“When people dislike you for no reason, know that it’s not always your undesirable energy, it’s theirs. Sometimes it’s insecurity and inferiority. Once you understand how much of it’s projection, you’ll stop taking it as rejection.” ~Vex King

“Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself. You make the job; it doesn’t make you. Your real life is with us, your family. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.” ~Toni Morrison, The Work You Do, the Person You Are

“When you realize ‘it was written’…that you co-created and designed your path before you got here, you’ll realize two very important facts. 1) How smart you are to have designed exactly what you needed. 2) You always had your back. It was always about trusting yourself.” ~Matt Gottesman

“Trees that grow up in their mother’s shade grow slowly, which leads to dense wood and a strong tree. But trees that grow in the open sun, without their mother’s shade, grow very fast which leads to soft wood and makes them susceptible to rot and fungus. Good metaphor for life.” ~David Perell

“I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls...he asks, ‘How are you?’ And instead of ‘Oh, fine...and you?’, I blurt out the truth: ‘Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything...I’ve never felt this way before…’ I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: ‘No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work...not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job.’ I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed... This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” ~Toni Morrison (@ _nitch)

Last Set: 

“Nobody has everyone as their customer, nobody. Maybe the water company but that’s about it. Our goal cannot be to be for everyone. We have to be for someone. The smallest, viable audience not the biggest possible audience. For people who are taking notes in search of a nugget, that’s one that can change how you do your work whether you’re a professor at York University or whether you are trying to do a startup or whether you’re an investor. The whole deal is, the internet is not a mass medium. We haven’t had a new mass medium since television. The internet is a micro medium. It is the best medium ever developed to reach specific people but it is terrible at reaching everyone. There is no homepage. It is impossible to reach 100 million people in one day on the internet, which is something TV used to do every night. What that means is, we have the luxury of saying who this is for and who it’s not for. The mistake that so many people building something make is they get hung up on the feedback of people who it’s not for as opposed to being obsessed with the people who it is for. Can they live without it? Would they miss it if it were gone? Let’s make that. That’s what we should make.” ~Seth Godin: Failing On Our Way To Mastery, The Knowledge Project #105 with Shane Parrish

Food for Thought: 

“Business, or whatever you’re doing, is about relationships. It’s about people and how people work together and influence and power. As a Black person you have to be hyperaware in every moment of how you’re being perceived by the people around you. You have to be hyperaware of how you’re showing up in the world. And not just when you go to work, but when you’re walking down the street and having conversations with people. In order to protect yourself, to stay alive, you have to be hyperaware of how your presence is affecting other people. And not because you’ve done anything wrong, but because history has shown that people’s perceptions of you may not necessarily match the way that you see yourself or the way people who know you experience you.” ~LaTeesha Thomas in Black Magic, by Chad Sanders