September 2026.

Hi 🌿

Glennon Doyle is an American author, activist, and founder of Together Rising, a nonprofit that has raised millions for families in crisis. Her memoir Untamed became one of the most talked-about books of the past decade — honest, raw, and written for anyone who has ever felt like they were living a life that didn't quite fit.

She gave us this:

“First the pain, then the waiting, then the rising.”

Nine words. Three stages. An entire map of how hard seasons actually work — not as a promise that it won't hurt, but as a description of the shape of the thing.

We tend to want to skip the middle. The waiting is the hardest part — not the acute pain of something breaking, and not yet the relief of the rising. Just the in-between. The quiet, uncertain stretch where nothing seems to be happening and you're not sure it ever will.

Doyle is naming that stretch. She's saying it's real, it's part of it, and it has a place in the sequence. Not because the waiting is beautiful, but because it comes before something that is.

If you're in the pain — it's the first part. If you're in the waiting — you're in the middle. And the middle always, always precedes the rising.

You don't skip to the rising. You move through what comes before it. And moving through it is how you get there.

This Wednesday — wherever you are in the sequence, you're exactly where you need to be. Keep moving.

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who spent years in Nazi concentration camps — including Auschwitz. In conditions of total powerlessness, he made an observation that would shape his life's work: that while everything external could be taken from a person, the freedom to choose one's response could not.

From Man's Search for Meaning:

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

This is one of the most honest things ever written about the experience of being stuck. Not a motivational promise that things will get better. Not a suggestion that you simply think positively. A clear-eyed acknowledgment that some situations will not yield — and that what remains is the question of who you become inside them.

We spend enormous energy trying to change the things outside of us — the difficult person, the broken system, the circumstance that won't move. And sometimes that effort is right. But there comes a point in many situations where the outer thing simply isn't going to change. At least not now. At least not by force.

Frankl is not saying that's fine. He's saying it's real. And that the challenge — the invitation — is to turn the energy inward. Not in defeat, but in growth.

The situation that won't change might be the one that changes you the most. That's not a consolation. That's the whole point.

This Tuesday — is there something you've been trying to force that might be asking you to grow instead?

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

Winston Churchill led Britain through one of the darkest periods in modern history — years of failure, setback, and uncertainty before any victory was in sight. He understood, more than most, what it meant to keep going when the outcome was far from guaranteed.

He left us this:

“Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”

There's something quietly radical in each half of this sentence. Success is not final — meaning even when things go well, nothing is settled, nothing is secured forever. The work continues. And failure is not fatal — meaning even when things go badly, it is not the end. The story continues.

What Churchill is pointing at is the space between those two poles — the ordinary, unglamorous, repeated act of continuing. Not the breakthrough moment. Not the collapse. The Tuesday morning after the difficult Monday. The decision to show up again when showing up feels uncertain.

Most of us won't face the scale of challenge Churchill did. But we all face our own version of it — the project that stalled, the plan that didn't land, the week that left us wondering what we're doing and why.

The courage to continue isn't dramatic. It's quiet. It looks like opening your laptop on a Monday morning and beginning again.

This Monday — whatever last week looked like, this one is new. Begin again. That's enough.

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton and one of the most widely read nonfiction authors of the past decade. His book Think Again is about the underrated skill of reconsidering — of being willing to update your beliefs, change your mind, and be wrong in service of eventually being right.

This is the line that stopped me:

“The sign of a truly confident and humble person is being wrong more often — because they're willing to try more things.”

We tend to treat being wrong as a failure of thinking. Grant is suggesting it might be evidence of the opposite — that the people who are wrong most often are often the ones thinking most boldly, trying most frequently, and learning most rapidly.

The person who is never wrong is not particularly wise. They are simply not attempting much. They have calibrated their risk so carefully that they only try the things they're already certain about. And certainty, Grant argues, is often the enemy of growth.

True confidence isn't the assurance that you'll be right. It's the security to be wrong without it meaning something terrible about you. It's the ability to hold your beliefs lightly enough that new evidence can actually reach them.

Being wrong more often, in the right spirit, is not a sign of weakness. It's proof you're still in the game.

This weekend — is there something you've been holding onto too tightly? A belief, a plan, a way of seeing something? What might open up if you gave yourself permission to reconsider?

Have a kind weekend.

Hi 🌿

John C. Maxwell is one of the most widely read leadership authors in the world — a writer who has spent decades distilling the principles of action, growth, and intentional living into language anyone can use. His work is direct, practical, and built for people who want to move.

Five words from him that carry more weight than they first appear:

“Dreams don't work unless you do.”

It sounds simple. It is simple. That's exactly what makes it sharp.

There is a version of dreaming that feels like progress — the planning, the visioning, the imagining of how things will look once they're done. And that part matters. A dream without direction is just a wish. But there is also a way to live inside the dream so completely that the doing never quite begins. The perfect plan becomes a substitute for the imperfect start.

Maxwell is drawing a clean line between the two. The dream is the destination. The work is the only vehicle. No amount of clarity about where you're going moves you one inch closer if your feet are still.

This isn't a dismissal of dreaming. It's an invitation to honor the dream enough to actually pursue it.

The dream needs you. Not the version of you that has everything figured out — just the version of you that shows up today.

This Thursday — what's one thing the dream needs from you right now? Not tomorrow. Today.

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

C.S. Lewis was a British writer and scholar best known for The Chronicles of Narnia and his thoughtful writing on faith, grief, and the human condition. He had a rare ability to say profound things in plain language — sentences that feel simple until you realize you've been sitting with them for five minutes.

This is one of those sentences:

“You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

It sounds obvious. Most true things do, once someone has said them clearly.

We carry our beginnings everywhere — the starts we didn't choose, the chapters that didn't go the way we planned, the versions of ourselves we wish we could revise. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from wanting to undo what cannot be undone. From circling back, again and again, to the thing you can't change.

Lewis is offering a release from that loop. Not a dismissal of the past — he's not saying it doesn't matter. He's saying it's finished. It is no longer editable. And that means all your energy, all your attention, all the parts of you that keep looking backward — they are free to turn around.

The beginning is closed. The ending is still being written.

You are not behind. You are not too late. You are exactly where the next part of the story starts.

This Wednesday — what would it feel like to stop trying to fix the beginning and just write the next line instead?

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

Katharine Hepburn was one of the most celebrated actresses of the twentieth century — four Academy Awards, a career spanning six decades, and a reputation for doing things entirely on her own terms. She was famously unbothered by what people thought of her choices, her style, or her opinions.

She said this, and she meant it:

“If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.”

There's a quiet wit in this that opens into something deeper the longer you sit with it. It sounds like permission — and it is. But it's also something more precise: an acknowledgment that trying to please everyone is not only exhausting, it's arithmetically impossible. Someone will always be unpleased. The only variable is whether that someone is you.

Most of us spend enormous energy calculating what others want from us — in our work, our choices, our opinions, the way we show up. We optimize for approval so habitually that we sometimes lose track of what we actually want. What actually interests us. What we would do if we weren't doing the math.

Hepburn is not prescribing selfishness. She's prescribing self-knowledge — and the quiet courage to act on it.

The person most worth pleasing is the one who has to live with every choice you make. That person is you.

This Tuesday — what would you do today if you weren't calculating how it would land? Start there.

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

Og Mandino was an American author whose book The Greatest Salesman in the World has sold over 50 million copies. It is, at its heart, a book about habits — and the simple, difficult discipline of beginning.

He gave us this:

“I will act now. I will act now. I will act now.”

Three times. Deliberate. Not an accident.

Mandino understood something about the human mind that most productivity systems miss: the hardest moment is not the middle of the work. It's the threshold. The moment just before you begin, when every reason to wait presents itself — when the conditions don't feel quite right, when you're not quite ready, when just a few more minutes of preparation seem warranted.

That moment is where most things die. Not from failure. From delay.

The repetition in Mandino's line is the point. You don't say it once and feel it. You say it again. And again. Until the body moves before the doubt can catch up. Until the action is already underway and the threshold is already behind you.

Readiness is a feeling that follows action, not one that precedes it. You don't wait until you're ready. You act, and then you become ready.

This Monday — the thing you've been circling. Not later. Not after one more thing. Now.

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century — a novelist, poet, and essayist whose work spanned science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. She had a rare gift for writing about big ideas — freedom, identity, time, belonging — through stories that felt deeply, quietly human.

From The Left Hand of Darkness:

“It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”

There's a gentleness in how she puts this. She doesn't dismiss the destination — she says it's good to have one. Goals matter. Direction matters. But she's asking us to hold that end point lightly enough that we don't miss what's happening between here and there.

Most of us spend the middle of our journeys somewhere between anticipation and impatience — half-present, waiting for the thing we're moving toward to arrive. Le Guin is suggesting that the middle is not the pause before the life. It is the life.

The conversations along the way. The unexpected turns. The version of yourself that is slowly becoming, in the walking, someone different from the one who set out.

The destination gives you somewhere to go. The journey is where you actually live.

This weekend — wherever you're headed, see if you can be a little more here while you're on your way. The middle is not nothing. The middle is most of it.

Have a kind weekend.

Hi 🌿

Napoleon Hill spent twenty years interviewing some of the most successful people of his era — industrialists, inventors, presidents — trying to understand what separated those who accomplished extraordinary things from those who didn't. The result was Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937 and still one of the most widely read books on achievement ever written.

His core finding, distilled:

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

It's easy to read this as motivational shorthand. But Hill meant something precise by each word. To conceive is to hold a clear picture of what you want — not a vague wish, but a specific vision. To believe is to act as though it's already on its way — not blind hope, but a committed expectation. To achieve is simply what follows when the first two are genuinely in place.

The sequence matters. Most people skip the middle step. They can imagine what they want, and they can work toward it — but somewhere between the vision and the effort, the belief falters. They talk themselves out of it before the work has a chance to speak.

The obstacle is rarely the plan. It's the moment you stop believing the plan can work — usually just before it does.

This Thursday — what have you already conceived but quietly stopped believing? Pick it back up. The work hasn't changed. Only the story has.

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

Pico Iyer is a British-born essayist and travel writer who has spent decades thinking about stillness — not as the absence of movement, but as a practice. His book The Art of Stillness is a quiet argument for the radical act of stopping.

He wrote:

“In an age of speed, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow.”

There's a paradox in this that rewards sitting with. We think of speed as energy, and slowness as its absence. Iyer is flipping that — suggesting that in a world wired for acceleration, choosing to slow down is not passive. It is an act. It takes something.

We are surrounded by systems designed to pull our attention forward — the next message, the next task, the next thing demanding a response. Slowing down means resisting that pull deliberately. It means choosing to be here, in this moment, rather than already halfway to the next one.

And the strange gift of it — the thing Iyer keeps returning to — is that slowness restores something. Not just rest, but clarity. The kind of thinking that only happens when you stop rushing toward the answer.

Speed is the default. Slowness is the choice. And on a Wednesday, in the middle of everything, that choice is available to you right now.

This Wednesday — where can you go a little slower today? Not less — just slower. See what you notice.

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

Joan Didion was one of the most precise writers America produced — an essayist and novelist who spent her career looking directly at things most people preferred to look away from. She opened her landmark essay collection The White Album with a single sentence that has stayed in the culture ever since:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

She meant it as an observation, not a comfort. We are, all of us, narrative creatures. The mind cannot hold raw experience for very long without reaching for a frame — a beginning, a reason, a thread of meaning that connects what happened to what it means and what comes next.

Sometimes the stories we tell are true. Sometimes they're protective myths. Sometimes they're the only thing standing between us and the weight of what we haven't yet made sense of.

Didion wasn't prescribing this. She was simply naming it — clearly, without sentimentality. We do this. All of us. Every day. We narrate our way through life because the alternative — pure, unmediated experience — is more than most of us can sustain for long.

The question isn't whether you're telling yourself a story. It's whether the story you're telling is the one you want to keep living inside of.

This Tuesday — what story are you carrying today? And is it still serving you?

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who spent his life studying how human beings actually become good — not in theory, but in practice. He was less interested in ideals than in the mechanics of character: how it forms, how it holds, and how it fails.

He left us this:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

This is one of the most quietly radical ideas in the history of philosophy. Most of us believe that character is something you have — a fixed quality, either present or absent. Either you're disciplined or you're not. Either you're the kind of person who does that thing or you're not.

Aristotle is saying something different. Character is not what you are. It's what you repeatedly do. The person who is patient is not born patient — they have practiced patience so many times that it has become who they are. The person who does excellent work doesn't produce it occasionally from some inner reserve. They have made excellent work a habit, and the habit has made them.

This Monday is not a test of who you already are. It's a small contribution to who you are becoming.

You don't rise to the level of your intentions. You fall to the level of your habits. Build the right ones, one Monday at a time.

Today — one small thing, done well, repeated. That's the whole idea.

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

bell hooks was an American author, professor, and cultural critic who wrote more than thirty books on love, race, gender, and the possibilities of community. Her writing was always in service of connection — of helping people see each other more clearly and treat each other more honestly.

From All About Love, one of her most widely read works:

“The will to be generous is one of the highest spiritual callings.”

Notice she says will — not the act, not the feeling, not the capacity. The will. The decision, made in advance, to orient yourself toward giving rather than withholding. Toward opening rather than closing. Toward the other person rather than retreating into yourself.

Generosity, in hooks' framing, isn't primarily about money or time, though it includes both. It's an inner posture. It's choosing, when someone needs something you have, to give it freely. It's choosing, when someone is struggling, to meet them where they are rather than where you wish they were.

It is a calling because it isn't easy. The natural pull is often the opposite — to protect, to preserve, to keep what we have. The will to be generous asks us to move against that pull. Deliberately. Repeatedly.

Generosity is not something you feel and then do. It's something you decide, and then feel.

This weekend — who in your life could use something you have? Not necessarily money. Maybe attention. Maybe patience. Maybe simply the words: I see you, and I'm here.

Have a kind weekend.

Hi 🌿

Eleanor Roosevelt was First Lady of the United States for twelve years, and spent much of her life doing things she found genuinely frightening — public speaking, political advocacy, travel to war zones. She was, by her own account, a shy and fearful person who chose, repeatedly, to act anyway.

From that life of deliberate courage, she offered this:

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”

It's easy to read this as a call to grand gestures. But Roosevelt meant something smaller and more sustainable than that. Not one terrifying leap per day — one small thing. The email you've been avoiding. The conversation you keep putting off. The idea you haven't said out loud yet because what if it doesn't land.

The fear doesn't have to be dramatic to be real. And the doing doesn't have to be dramatic to matter.

What Roosevelt understood — from her own experience of being afraid and acting anyway, over and over — is that courage is less a quality you have and more a practice you build. Each small act of doing the slightly scary thing makes the next one fractionally easier. The threshold shifts.

You don't become brave and then do the hard thing. You do the hard thing, and that is what becoming brave looks like.

This Thursday — one thing. Not the biggest one. Just one that has been sitting there waiting. Do it today.

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. She wrote with rare wit and precision — poems that found the profound inside the ordinary, and never took themselves too seriously while doing it.

She said this, and meant every word:

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.”

There's something quietly radical tucked inside this line. She isn't claiming poetry is important, or that art matters, or that the world needs more of what she makes. She's doing something more honest: acknowledging that the whole endeavor is a little absurd — and then choosing it anyway.

Because the alternative — not writing, not making, not trying — is equally absurd. Possibly more so.

This applies far beyond poems. Whatever the thing is that you make, pursue, or care about — the creative project, the practice, the dream you keep returning to despite the odds — there will always be a voice that points out how unlikely it all is. How impractical. How perhaps a bit much.

Szymborska isn't arguing against that voice. She's just noting that silence is its own absurdity.

Between two absurdities, choose the one that feels like living.

This Wednesday — what is the thing you keep almost doing? The absurdity of doing it is no greater than the absurdity of not.

Have a kind morning.

Hi 🌿

May Sarton was an American poet and novelist who spent decades writing about solitude, creativity, and the quiet courage it takes to live as yourself. She kept journals for much of her life — honest, unguarded records of what it costs to choose authenticity over approval.

She left us this:

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”

Notice she doesn't say it will be comfortable. She doesn't promise that being yourself will be met with understanding, or that the self you find will be tidy and presentable.

She says frightening. She says strange.

Most of us spend enormous energy managing how we appear — softening our edges, muting what might unsettle, presenting the version of ourselves most likely to be accepted. It is exhausting work. And it keeps the actual self — the strange, particular, irreplaceable one — perpetually waiting in the wings.

Sarton is not prescribing radical oversharing or performance. She's pointing at something quieter: the private act of stopping the performance. Of letting yourself, in at least some corner of your life, simply be what you actually are.

The self that needs to be managed is never fully at rest. The self that is allowed to be strange is finally home.

This Tuesday — where are you performing? And where might you let yourself just be? Even a little. Even just for now.

Have a kind morning.