“Am I saying this because I want to prove how smart I am or am I saying this because it needs to be said?”

Our first idea is a grand opening, a big launch, a press release, or major media coverage. We default to thinking we need an advertising budget. Our delusion is that we should be Transformers and not The Blair Witch Project.

I run 5 miles every night. It’s where I go to digest my day, hash out the multitude of information that’s been poured into me in the last wild six months or so, and to try and condense it down to some sort of cohesive strategy to live my life by.

True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition.

To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We’ve got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens.

There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.

The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.

Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.

Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.

It’s okay to be discouraged. It’s not okay to quit. To know you want to quit but to plant your feet and keep inching closer until you take the impenetrable fortress you’ve decided to lay siege to in your own life – that’s persistence.

We decide what we will make of each and every situation. We decide whether we’ll break or whether we’ll resist.

What is known can’t jerk us around unwittingly. Before anything can be resolved, the implicit must be made into the explicit.

Failure shows us the way – by showing us what isn’t the way.

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great individuals, like great companies, find a way to transform weakness into strength.

Ordinary people shy away form negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are their best in these situations. They turn personal tragedy or misfortune – really anything, everything – to their advantage.

No one will argue that writing is an easy profession. Getting someone to pay you for your words isn’t easy. But there are strategies you can use to simplify the process and transform what you can produce.

Problems are rarely as bad as we think-or rather, they are precisely as bad as we think.