Theme 80: End

y el gran final, de vivir la vida aprendiendo que la vida tiene un final, es algo que no nos enseñan

estan los pequenos finales, el final de un proyecto, el de una pelicula.

O la otra idea , sería olvidarse del final y actuar , pensar como que nunca va acabar este momento

La idea del final, que hacemos cuando sabemos que las cosas se van a acabar ?

What happens if you give a student a text that resonates with their identity, that validates their identity? Well, you're already getting them hooked on something they have an interest in outside of the classroom that you're bringing into the classroom. There's a sense of confidence because they can speak to it on a personal level: I've studied this, I've lived this, I AM this.

So know that while an ending might hurt, while you might cry that something is ending, it is just another part of your journey ... that you are being set up to walk into your destiny.

Your journey is not just for you, and someone right now is waiting on you to be all that you can be so that they can be all that they are destined to be.

Change often doesn't come to your doorstep with warm chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk and endings sometimes will just not feel good.

Once a week, be bored. Go and sit outside somewhere for an hour without your phone. Just sit there. It's tough, but you start to notice your own story and the things that you're telling yourself. And then you start to dream and have ideas again.

That's not what Einstein did. He rode his bike. He was a dreamer. He wondered around and let himself have idle time, and came up with his beautiful concepts. So I try and do that.

Imagine van Gogh getting home with his bunch of flowers and just putting them on the table and picking up his Instagram feed. Or Monet sitting in front of a lake with the water lilies and thinking that's nice but what's on Twitter?

We're on our devices all the time. We don't let ourselves sit idle and get bored and dream enough anymore, especially our children.

The only way we're going to get through this is to encourage more dreaming. More creativity. More imagination.

We've become so reductionist now, with the way we look at the planet. It's like Shakespeare - if you looked at it through a scientific lens, it's just 26 letters on a page rearranged. But why we love Shakespeare is because of the meaning we give it, and the beauty, and the wonder it evokes. We need to do the same with the planet. For too long we've just looked at it as a cold rock floating through galaxy; through a very scientific lens. But as we know, it's much more than that. It's this interconnected, interwoven, rich ecosystem of life that supports us, and that we're a part of. That's the language we've got to talk about if we're going to get through this.

If you go back pre-scientific revolution, we did tell a very different story about our planet. There's a wonderful language that different cultures used to use about the planet. We know that Aboriginals used to use the word 'custodians' of the land. The Egyptian culture and the Native American Indian: 'Mother Earth' and 'Father Sky'. The Chinese referred to themselves as 'reverent guests' of the land. There's a beautiful story that we just don't hear anywhere enough about, about an admiral Zheng who in 1436, sailed the world for 33 years with 27,000 men on 300 ships. Not to conquer, but to share animals, exchange goods, explore the wonders of the world and bring it back to his empire. Columbus did it again 50 years later, with a very different story.

The biggest surprise I learned was the role of educating girls and empowering women on climate change, which is very rarely linked together. Statistics show that if a girl doesn't get to complete her education, shes pulled out of school for a range or reasons - religion or to work - she'll have 5 or more children. But if she gets to complete her education, gets access to reproductive health services, work opportunities, she then gets to choose when and how many children she'll have, and that number comes down to 2. The UN says that's a difference of 1.1 billion people by 2050, which has a profound impact on our resources and climate change. So we should empower girls anyway - that's a great thing to do - but we get this lovely bonus that helps the environment at the same time.

My favourite stat is that you'd have to eat eight oranges a day to get the same level of vitamin A that a single orange had 60 years ago, because of the health of the soil.

What I wanted to do is change that narrative, or at least add to it. We need to acknowledge that things are bad, but a motivator for all of us is hope. Any psychology textbook will tell you that... How important it is as human beings to have the possibility of a better future or a better outcome. That's what moves us forward.

You've got to get involved in the politics. Art is great, but the people who really run shit are in those board meetings and neighborhood meetings. Those are the people who dictate the feel of the neighborhood.

Nobody is more or less valuable based on their job title. People relate to folks who are real.

I'm not going to compromise who I am and what I need to make you feel more comfortable.

If you're getting what you need, you have no right to tell me—and I'm not getting what I need—that getting what I need offends you.

When my wife passed away, I decided to harness my grief and burn it like jet fuel creatively. She is still teaching me to this day.

The only person I want to be is myself, but I want to learn from folks, be challenged, push back, and create a rich legacy.

No one can beat you being you.

It takes somebody who has a similar language to interpret the things you need to learn.

In the barber shop, which we call the black man's country club, that's when my true vision of being an entrepreneur started to emerge.

Creativity unbridled can become chaos.

Creativity is freedom.

¿Qué finales te han hecho tomar rumbos que no querías, pero que al final entendiste que eran lo mejor que podían sucederte?

Games are a huge driver!

VR could be used as a great communication tool and kind of a device to record your motions for the history to analyze them 100 years later.

Creativity is an unending and infinite process, and you have to exist in it. When you do that, you start to recognize, ‘I can be creative all the time, anywhere, wherever I go.’

Expect and accept non-closure.

Being blind is not about being able to see, it's about seeing further than you thought possible.

You don't need sight to have a vision

But something shifted for me that morning and I became obsessed with this idea of failure and dying on stage; and trying to prevent myself from dying on stage again.

My mantra for life is to dream, to plan, and to execute.

In my life, my desire to be free, my creative mind that's kind of all over the place, at some point had to figure out purpose. You can lead with that creativity, but you've got to put some structure around it and have an end goal.

Though we had become successful, we weren't really making a huge impact for anybody other than ourselves.

Four years later, we had a company that had done ten million dollars in sales through this process of being creative, of sticking to it, but then putting those barriers around it to actually give us something that could scale.

The mature version of the entrepreneur started to emerge.

So I figured my way forward creatively and that's been my journey.

I told my friend . . . ' I cannot work for anybody, not in that sense,' and I was 14 years old. And so I started cutting hair in the basement. I started selling t-shirts in the halls of North High. And by the time I was 16, I was making 950.00 a week.

My punishment was I had to get a job.

I remember getting out of juvenile detention on a Sunday. No one gets out of jail on Sunday.

My wife passed away seven months ago . . . and I mean it's tough, you know , . . . but when she passed away I decided that I was going to harness all my grief and burn it like jet fuel creatively, and she is still teaching me to this day.

The only person I want to be is myself. But I want to learn from folks. I want to be challenged. I want to push back. And I want to create a rich legacy.

So I think it's just being able to just say 'no' sometimes. To myself first, because I've got, you know, two business ideas a day.

I am not going to get to my objective if I try to absorb everyone else's stuff.

For me, I'm a businessman. I bring people solutions. This is a solution to a state problem. This is big.

It is important to me to at least set the framework for how we make sure there is improvement, but not displacement.

I'm a creative, but I had to put structure around my creative goals, dreams, and aspirations.

Yes, creativity is freedom plus wealth, but creativity unbridled can become chaos.

My mom said, 'Your gift will make room for you.'

I believe that creativity is freedom and wealth.

You've got to start with the end in mind.

In my life, I've used the idea of where you want to get to as a measure to start.

I am showing the industry a new way, a new example of undertaking, modern undertaking.

These stories are not about ego. These stories are about being human.

Like a way of living, like your grandmother kept living on the farm with the chickens, and the apple trees, and she kept making the apple mousse in her final years--these are the precious memories we cherish.

Small oddities or habits are often the things we love about someone.

What is your story? What will you eventually leave behind?

Everything in this universe is temporary; we kind of are in death denial.

For heaven's sake, it's your funeral, it should be your ultimate portrait and the celebration of your life.

I had golden career prospectives but was actually handcuffed.

When we place labels on ourselves or when we place labels on other people, it draws a line.

My goal is to end a label-based society.

Claim your narrative.

It's okay to not be okay.

When we are going through something and grief it invited to the party. We owe it to ourselves to allow for those conflicting emotions to come up. And have to pay attention to them.

If you are going through something and there is even a small feeling telling you to change the situation. You have every right to do so by advocating for yourself.

I was hiding behind other people's stories and didn't have the courage to speak my own truth.

If we don't stop telling the story that we've been telling ourselves about who we are and how we interact with our planet, then we're not going to save our planet. Our survival actually depends on us telling a new story about how we interact with our environment.

I’ll break down “Hustle like an Immigrant” into five different steps. One is about what’s your ‘why’ – why are you doing what you’re doing? Two is your goal – do you have a goal that has been formed by your why? Three, do you have the discipline to see your goals through? Four – perseverance. Hardship is going to come, obstacles are going to come your way, can you get through those? Five, I call it ‘the blank check.’ Are you a risk taker, are you willing, at any given point, to sacrifice who you are for what you can ultimately become?

We need heroes right now. “The greatest threat to the planet is the belief that someone else will save it”. There’s no one else. I think we’re seeing that with our leadership right now. It’s actually up to us. So I hope for my daughter and all her generation and all the generations to come that you find a new powerful story about what your role is in this. Because the Earth is hiring.

The earth is hiring

Death is a hard thing to deal with, especially in our society where people seem to be so sheltered from it. No one really wants to look at it.

I had to end this idea that I had about myself, unlearn habits and those stories I told myself. It had to happen this way, just like everything else in life.

If you are going through something and there is even a small feeling, a tiny inkling that comes over you to change the situation – you have every right to do so by advocating for yourself.

The stories that we tell ourselves and others about how we're making our way in the world are incredibly important.

You are being setup to walk into your destiny.

When you're reading a book you don't cry at the chapter you just finished because you know another chapter is behind it.

While an ending may hurt and you might cry, it is just another part of your journey.

My ending was simply my beginning to propel me to my destiny — to shape this nation.

There was more that was required of me and I made a choice to say yes.

If you were really told what it was going to take for you to be everything that you are destined to be, would you still say yes?

If an ending for you meant that it's going to cost you [...], would you still say yes?

If you were told that an ending for you to walk into your destiny meant that you would have to lose something, but you would gain everything... would you still say yes?

My influence isn't just for me. It is so that I can make this world a little better because I am in it.

My destiny, calling, and the reason I am on this earth is to speak truth to power and to be unapologetic to anything that I write.

Your journey is not just for you. Someone right now is waiting on you to be all that you can be so that they can be all that they are destined to be.

What I thought was an ending was just a beginning for me to step into my destiny.

I had to own how I had allowed myself to be placed on the back-burner. I had to get up.

Know your worth. Do you know your value?

Change often doesn't come to your door step with warm chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk. Endings sometimes will just not feel good.

Many endings are going to hurt. They are not going to feel good and are going to make you feel uncomfortable. They will not seem fair.

I knew the minute that I performed that poem, that my life had changed.

The weight of knowing that I was not in the right space started to weigh on me.

I felt in my soul and knew it as sure as I knew my name — that I was placed on this earth to write.

Make sure that you make an impact that is filled with love.

The exciting thing about endings is that there is a new beginning.

We need to be able to forgive ourselves when we do make mistakes – when those endings might not go well.

Sometimes regrets help us to take ownership of the mistakes that we made.

"This isn't about me, this is about you.I'm just here to catalyze conversation with you! I want us all talking because that is what is going to make each of us better today for tomorrow."

What does it actually take to create something that feels more magical?

Change is inevitable, change will always happen, but you have to apply direction to change, and that’s when it’s progress.