Marisa is an investigative reporter for The Indianapolis Star. She handles investigations relating to social services and welfare issues, including child abuse and neglect, poverty, elder abuse, human trafficking, domestic violence and access to mental health services.

Marisa has earned more than 50 journalism awards throughout her career, including Indiana Journalist of the Year, IRE's Tom Renner Award, a Sigma Delta Chi Award in public service, the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism and the Will Rogers Humanitarian Award.

Prior to The Star, Marisa worked for The Times of Northwest Indiana and media outlets in South Carolina and Michigan. She is past president of the Indiana Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and former vice president of Girls on the Run of Central Indiana.

This is a powerful conversation. The truth isn’t obvious and finding the truth isn’t easy. It takes cold hard work. I am thankful that we have diligent servants in the pursuit of truth like Marisa Kwiatkowski who does that work on our behalf. I try to focus on the culture creators in Indianapolis, but in this case, one cannot simply glance over the subject of Marisa’s work which is powerful. Her diligence to the truth, to her craft, and to self-development is a motivating guide to all of us in the battle for excellence. 

Lessons learned from pursuing truth and media

We owe it to our communities to keep each other accountable. We see it time and time again when we do not hold each other accountable to the extreme. Life slips through the cracks, and those small cracks can create monstrous fractures in our lives and the lives within our community.

Do the work. We all have the same amount of hours in the day, and yet some like Marissa are able to do so much more with their time. Why? They do the work everyday. Time is a valuable resource and we must treat it as such it isn’t something to be taken lightly. I don’t want you to compare yourself to what Marisa has done, but to understand and embody the ethos that she represents which is to try and be the very best version of yourself.

Do not look at your phone first thing in the morning. If you already wake up thinking about work, you don’t need a phone to make you think about work more.

Finding a balance:

“You can tell how bad the topics are that I am working on at work, by how fluffy the books are that I am reading.” We need to be able to do as Marisa calls it, a “Mental Temperature Check” with ourselves and check in with how we are doing. Writing in a journal, like the Daily Stoic, have been extremely helpful to me,

Following through on your commitments:

“I made a commitment to something and I want to follow through on it. It has meant a lot of early mornings and late nights, but I think it has been worth it. “

Media

We have many phenomenal discussions on media. I was really lucky to have the opportunity to discuss some of my theories and concepts with someone so deep in an industry that I can only see from the outside. Marisa had some phenomenal points, and really brought one fundamental reality that she has learned over the course of her career forward and that is that nothing is simple and reality is complex. The word discerning  and how do we help the public become more discerning

Perception and Reality. The value of skepticism, “You are reading something and it fits in with your perception of an individual or how the world works and therefor it must be true because it fits within that perception that you have. A lot of people do that and there has been a lot of money made w...