“A new generation of stars, thanks to the rapid evolution of the game and the passage of time, has been allowed to blossom, unfettered by trite comparisons. So Russ Westbrook is just Russ Westbrook, Steph is just Steph, and the quest to reincarnate MJ is mercifully over.”
“You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.” — Michael Jordan
A funny thing happens when we’re presented with an opportunity.
We get scared.
Because we’ve often spent years chasing the opportunity and discover we grew comfortable with that chase. It became part of our daily narrative, of our identity.
Then, suddenly, that opportunity is within our grasp.
And we freak out.
Turns out what it takes to chase an opportunity isn’t the same as what it takes to act on one.
Scared by the potential changes an opportunity may bring with it, we often find ways to avoid acting on it. We self-sabotage, hide, and create excuses why it’s not the right opportunity or the right time.
But that’s just fear and we can move past it if we remind ourselves of five simple things.
I’d never met him, but I used to be him.
He was fresh out of college, had just moved to Los Angeles to chase entertainment industry dreams, and had no idea what to do next.
He was where I had been 20 years ago.
“Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers — in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction — are now staring back through the screen. They are comparison shopping us.”
“Learning across multiple fields provides an information advantage (and therefore an innovation advantage) because most people focus on just one field.”
“At the end of the day, do you want to pick apart something that happened or do you want to create something yourself? You can either sit around and be entertained or you can go out and try to be entertaining.”
“You can also teach Facebook’s algorithm to stop showing things you don’t want to see so that it will show you what you want to see.”
“The goal is not to be good — it’s to be great. The idea is to have the audience leave, and say, ‘You’ve got to see this.’ You have to work backwards from that result.”
“Today, 73 percent of all internet publishing jobs are concentrated in either the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix. The Chicagoland area, a traditional media center, captures 5 percent of the jobs, with a paltry 22 percent going to the rest of the country. And almost all the real growth of internet publishing is happening outside the heartland, in just a few urban counties, all places that voted for Clinton.”