Diving into the life and greatness of Kevin Hart from his book, I Can't Make This Shit Up

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We’re all writing a book. What’s your book look like. Your life is a book. You got a bunch of chapters in your book. But when they close that book, how good was the book? How good was your book? What was the ending to your book?

- Kevin Hart

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Diving into the life and greatness of Cristiano Ronaldo  from Guilleme Balague book, Cristiano Ronaldo 

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"From an early age I wanted to be a professional, and I dreamt of playing in the first division. I had to make many sacrifices. The first was to leave Argentina when I was thirteen years old and start again from zero, make new friends, an a city where I knew no one."

4:00  - Childhood and upbringing

5:00 - A teacher's doubts

8:30 - How Ronaldo's mom gave his dream a chance

Sometimes, I let Ronaldo miss class to play. His teacher told me that I should tell him off for that, but I didn’t punish him. He had to practice a lot to become a great player.

10:25 - Love and obsession to the game

12:10 - Bob Bowman on practice

“When we practice long hours, we’re depositing money into the bank. We need to deposit enough so that when we make a large withdrawal, we have enough funds to withdraw.”

12:50 - Trial with Sporting

15:55 - Leaving his family 

17:50 - Life is about trade-offs

20:15 - Addicted to the game

24:35 - A story of confidence 

27:20 - Overcoming struggles as a pro

30:55 - Keys to Ronaldo's success

40:30 - Keep it simple

42:45 - Find an enemy: Messi vs Ronaldo

50:20 - Lessons/takeaways 

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Diving into the life and greatness of Lionel Messi from Guilleme Balague book, Messi

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"From an early age I wanted to be a professional, and I dreamt of playing in the first division. I had to make many sacrifices. The first was to leave Argentina when I was thirteen years old and start again from zero, make new friends, an a city where I knew no one."

1:50 - A life of football

4:45 - A fierce competitor

8:50 - A turning point of Messi's life

11:50 - Going to Barcelona

16:35 - Leaving his family

18:00 - Struggles in Barcelona

19:55 - Are you set up for success?

22:00 - Chasing dreams are like start-ups

23:40 - Keys to Messi's success

“He had extraordinary passion. I’ve never seen a player with such zeal. He was desperate to train, to run around the field, to do whatever was asked of him."

“I never saw a boy as demanding of himself as he was. Sometimes he would play a fantastic game but would then leave the pitch angry with himself because he thought he could have done better.”

28:55 - A story of belief

30:30 - Professional struggles

34:50 - Talent, genius, or hard work? Factors to Messi's greatness

42:35 - Pep Guardiola and Messi

44:50 - Defeats and triumphs with Argentina

52:50 - Lessons/takeaways 

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Diving into the stories and lessons we can learn from the life of Sam Walton and the rise of Walmart from his autobiography, Made in America 

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When folks would ask Sam Walton how he built Walmart, he responded with the same answer, “Friend, we just got after it and stayed after it.”

1:15 - Lessons from parents and childhood

4:45 - How Sam knew what he was going to do for the rest of his life

7:15 - First store

8:00 - Be a student of your craft

I learned a lesson which has stuck with me all through the years: you can learn from everybody.

12:20 - The worst moment of Sam's life

13:45 - Love your fate

16:35 - Steal and steal often

Most everything I’ve done, I’ve copied from somebody else.

18:10 - The start of Walmart 

18:50 - Find your leverage

22:25 - Increase your embarrassment capacity

“If you wish to improve, be content appearing clueless and stupid.” - Epictetus 

26:35 - Six keys to Walmarts success

34:10 - The ultimate goal

I always wanted to be the best retailer in the world, not necessarily the biggest.

35:15 - Thinking small

37:35 - Sam Walton's Ten Rules 

40:45 - Life is about trade-offs

42:20 - Lessons/takeaways 

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Diving into the works and wisdom of one of the world's great philosophers, Seneca

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The duty of a man is to be useful to his fellow-men; if possible, to be useful to many of them; failing this, to be useful to a few; failing this, to be useful to his neighbours, and, failing them, to himself: for when he helps others, he advances the general interests of mankind. 

- Seneca

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3:30 - The purpose of studying philosophy

 "[Philosophy]  moulds and constructs the soul; it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what we should do and what we should leave undone."

6:50 - The usage of time

It is a small part of life we really live. Indeed, all the rest is not life, but merely of time. People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

11:25- Self-made suffering

20:55- Find a cato

So choose yourself a Cato…Choose someone whose way of life as well as words…have won your approval. Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model. There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves. 

25:10 - On happiness

We have reached the heights if we know what it is that we find joy in and we have not placed our happiness in the control of the externals…Above all, my dear Lucilius, make this your business: learn how to feel joy.

32:50 - On anger

No plague has cost the human race more dear: you will see slaughterings and poisonings, accusations and counter-accusations, sacking of cities, ruin of whole peoples, the persons of princes sold into slavery by auction, torches applied to roofs, and fires not merely confined within city-walls but making whole tracts of country glow with hostile flame.

36:40 -Lessons/takeaways

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If you want to read more of Seneca's works, you can check out some books below

Letter from a Stoic
On the Shortness of Life

Diving into the twenty-five biggest lessons from Greatness in 2024

Enjoy

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1:15 - Pursue excitement 

5:50 - If you can go back, always take the risk

9:30 - First efforts aren't supposed to work 

12:30 - A high pain threshold is a competitive advantage

18:50 - Seek to renew yourself when you’re hitting home runs

23:00 - Life responds to subtraction 

26:20 - Volume wins 

29:40 - The world belongs to thieves

32:35 - Genius/greatness is endurance in disguise

35:30 - Ambition is never satisfied

39:20 - Life doesn't respond to circumstances, it responds to effort

42:30 - You can’t care

44:55 - Use history

46:45 - Be bold

49:10 - Have a philosophy

52:15 - Just start

54:10 - Death is life greatest motivator

57:50 - Happiness lies in doing difficult things

59:50 - Do The Greatest Thing Possible

1:02:25 - Difference-makers don’t have different feelings, they just have a different relationship with certain feelings

1:04:00 - Great ambition requires great sacrifice 

1:06:05 - Great work is deep work

1:08:30 - Be Relentless/Be Obsessed

1:11:30 - You can doubt your way to excellence 

1:14:40 - There is no silver bullet

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Diving into the life and greatness of Jackie Cochran from her autobiography.

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"To live without risk for me would have been tantamount to death."

- Jackie Cochran

4:25 - An upbringing of poverty

Until I was eight years old I had no shoes. My bed was usually a pallet on the floor and sometimes just the floor…Food at best consisted of the barest essentials–sometimes nothing except what I foraged for myself in the woods of the Northern Florida sawmill towns my foster family called home. And we were always a little hungry.

8:50 - Feeling different

10:25 - Stubbornness wins

13:20 - The dream

14:10- The power of hardship

 Because of where I came from and then where I went, I ended up understanding intimately one very sustaining line of life: I could never have so little that I hadn’t had less.

17:30 - Aviation and a reason for living 

20:45 - Signs that you're on the right path

23:20 - Speed with safety

 26:10 - Challenging the norms/ambition

29:35 - Facing fear

 “Do you know what you call that? Guts. Jackie would get in there, in a race, in a contest, in a jet trying to set a new record, and she’d keep pushing, because she had the guts."

36:35 - Breaking the sound barrier

38:00 -Lessons/takeaways

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Diving into the single most important thing we can learn and take from the greatness of Leonardo da Vinci

Check out Walter Isaacson's book, Leonardo da Vinci, for more on Leonardo's life.

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Diving into the life and greatness of Michael Jordan from the books, Michael Jordan: A Life and Playing For Keeps 

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“You have to be uncompromised in your level of commitment to whatever you are doing, or it can disappear as fast as it appeared.”

- Michael Jordan

3:00 - The root of his competitive fire

5:35 - The cut

“Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it, and that usually got me going again.”

9:45 - The MJ trio

13:00- Why he trash talked

 Jordan started talking more and more trash and explaining what he was going to do, not to instill fear into his opponents, but force himself to work harder and deliver on his promises.

16:10 - Michael's greatest skill

“My greatest skill was being teachable. I was like a sponge. Even if I thought my coaches were wrong, I tried to listen and learn something.”

20:40 - Divine discontent 

24:10 - Nike

26:00 - Are you joyous about the work?

27:35 - How to approach your craft

“He came to practice like it was Game 7 of the NBA finals. He would destroy you in practice. That’s what set the tone for our team.”

32:45 - You need some luck

34:00 - Pistons + reinvention 

39:30 - How Michael kept himself motivated

“If you look at why Amazon is so different from almost any other company that started early on the internet, it’s because Jeff approached it from the very beginning with that long-term vision. It was a multi decade project. The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy.”

42:15- Winners vs losers

45:15 - Ambition and work

46:40 - Lessons/takeaways

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Diving into the stories and lessons we can learn from the Jeff Bezos and the rise of Amazon from the Brad Stone's book, The Everything Store, and the writings of Jeff Bezos Invent and Wander

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"I will hazard a prediction. When you are eighty years old and, in a quiet moment of reflection, narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be a series of choices you have made….And when I’m eighty I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have in my life, and most of our regrets are acts of omission, things we didn’t try, the path untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us."

- Jeff Bezos

1:50 - Pursue excitement/Make decisions through your 80-year old self

7:45- Chasing Dreams are like start-ups

9:40 - A duality mindset

"You have to have this duality in your head. On the one hand you're you know what the Baseline statistics say about startup companies and the other hand you have to ignore all of that and just be 100% sure it's going to work and you're doing both things at the same time you're holding that contradiction in your head."

12:00- Doubts about Amazon

14:00 - Amazon's philosophy

“If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this. We are genuinely customer centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent."

15:40 - Experiment relentlessly + be bold

19:05 - Amazon core practices/strategies

22:00 - Lose now, win later

32:20 - How to make decisions

34:50 - Play the long game

“If you look at why Amazon is so different from almost any other company that started early on the internet, it’s because Jeff approached it from the very beginning with that long-term vision. It was a multi decade project. The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy.”

36:05- Advice from Bezos 

39:10 - Lessons/takeaways

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You can check out my book, website, and apparel below:

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Book: Chasing Greatness: Timeless Stories on the Pursuit of Excellence 
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