Your path is more difficult because your calling is higher. #mattgottesman. Walk good. 28all. Eya. *MD, DP, JQ*

The Warm-Up: 

“It’s supposed to be hard. Your first attempts aren’t going to work. It’s going to take a lot out of you—but energy is an asset we can always find more of. It’s a renewable resource. Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles. There are options. Settle in for the long haul and then try each and every possibility, and you’ll get there.” ~Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is The Way

The Core: 

“Fools ignore complexity. Geniuses remove it.” ~Alan Perils

“The best marketing: building trust over the years.” ~Orange Book

“ ‘Success’ is getting stuck in the right feedback loop.” ~Jack Butcher

“You can’t legislate good will - that comes through education.” ~Malcolm X

“When a person has a way with words, make sure that those words don’t always get to have their way with you.” ~Tavares Bussey

“Building a personal brand is so high leverage because it increases your personal access to capital and decreases your cost of that capital.” ~Austin Rief

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream.” ~Paulo Coelho

“Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.” ~Martin Luther King Jr.

“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” ~Andy Benoit

“Witness Black people, Indigenous people, so many poor brown people, lying on beds in frigid hospitals, gasping our last breaths with COVID-riddled lungs, rendered flat by undiagnosed underlying conditions, triggered by years of food deserts, stress, and poverty, lives spent snatching sweets so we could eat one delicious morsel, savor some sugar on the tongue, oh Lord, because the flavor of our lives is so often bitter.” ~Jesmyn Ward, On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic

“When you compare your purpose to someone else’s, you walk away from purpose and enter competition. When we’re focused on God’s Will, we’re operating in true purpose. When we’re focused on proving ourselves to others, we get sidetracked from our destiny. It’s a trap! Stay on mission!! If you’re worried about ‘winning’ or appearing more successful than someone else, you’re playing a losing game. You must know the difference between ‘The Completion of God’s Purpose’ and ‘The Competition of Your Pride.” Here’s the thing, both take a lot of effort and hard work but only one brings true fulfillment.” ~Chris Durso

Last Set: 

“I am here for my purpose. I’m not here to make people comfortable or to be liked. My purpose is to know and experience love. This means excavating the unsaid. In the world and in me. Knowing and experiencing love means calling shame, fear, dehumanization, and injustice by their birth name: Lovelessness. It means finding love in beauty, art, music, and nature. It means not turning away from pain or working pain out on other people.” ~Brene Brown, Pressing On with Purpose

Food for Thought: 

“Optimism and pessimism can coexist. If you look hard enough, you’ll see them next to each other in virtually every successful company and successful career. They seem like opposites, but they work together to keep everything in balance. What Gates seems to get is that you can only be an optimist in the long run if you’re pessimistic enough to survive the short run.” ~Morgan Housel, Save Like A Pessimist, Invest Like An Optimist