January 2025 Newsletter

A new year, a fresh and optimistic perspective, and a year full of terrific opportunities - Happy 2025!!!?

Welcome to our first newsletter of 2025. I am so excited to share with you this year, valuable insights, exciting updates, and a glimpse into our future plans.? If you want to continue to receive the monthly newsletter, please subscribe below. After this month, that is where you can find it!

Each year at a gathering of great friends on January 1st, I share with them my motivational words for the year that I use to sharpen my focus on my goals and aspirations for the upcoming year. This year's words were:?

?CLARITY, COURAGE, and COMMITMENT: DRIVE TO THRIVE IN '25?

I elaborate on these words in my YouTube link further below.

The Magic Is in the Work

Over the holidays, I had the great fortune to see an interview with Jalen Brunson's (NY Knicks) mom, Sandra Brunson. ?She told the story of how one of Jalen's former coaches used to say to his team, “The Magic is in the work” and that they then adopted that as a family mantra. Those words stuck with me.?

As I pondered a few personal, big audacious goals for 2025, I kept thinking over and over, “the magic is in the work.” The more I said it, the more excited I became about jumping in and getting started! None of us arrive at a place of professional or personal victory without real, dedicated, focused, sometimes hard work. In order to achieve any goal, you need: the goal itself, concrete achievable plans for how to achieve it, the appropriate people, financial, and technical resources to achieve, and a steadfast commitment to keep working until you get there. The work is what creates the magic of the achievement.?

Let's consider great basketball players and leaders like Jalen Brunson. The playbook for his consistent triumphs on the court is transparent: a dedicated, dogmatic investment in practice and refining his skills and strengthening his relationships with his teammates to create a “mutual success” eco-system. No one does it alone; you will need someone else's intellect, experience, or network to succeed at any career endeavor. You will need to invest in learning the concepts and procedures that you need in order to succeed, but you will also have to work to build relationships that are mutually beneficial in your environment. As an early career professional, there were many concepts and processes that were new to me, but I diligently took notes throughout the week, highlighting the concepts that were new or that I didn't understand and every Saturday morning, I would head into the office and work on the things that I didn't understand or needed to practice to become more efficient. While adding those early Saturday mornings to 60-hour weeks were tough, as I look back, they were pivotal building blocks for my later successes.?

In addition, I was methodical about connecting with my peers during the week and even on the weekends. I would often catch a movie with one of my colleagues or have dinner or brunch with one or two of my peers at a time. My relationships with them led to other introductions (often senior people, as they had better relationships than I had in the beginning) and other valuable relationships that helped me as I was building my career. While I would readily admit that my journey was far from “magical”, the results certainly were!?

YOU are worthy of your investment of time and engagement with others. Invest in yourself to learn what you need for this buyer (employer) and other prospective buyers. Every time that you invest in yourself, your intellect, your experiences, and your relationships, you set yourself up for success and outsized returns on that investment. You can't get to the MAGIC without the work.?

Get excited and Go get 'em!!!

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