Gentle reminders for Celi's hardest days

As of this evening, 421 Celi usernames have been reserved.

But here’s the thing, these letters average 1,113 reads.

Which means that 692 of you have yet to reserve your Celi username.

Now…either my math ain’t math-ing, or there are actually 692 of you in here lurking, that don’t yet believe in me and Celi.

If that’s the case, then I owe you an apology.

I haven’t introduced Celi to you well enough for you to understand how transformational of a product it is.

My bad.

Going forward, I’ll be better.

You’re invited to as well:

I’m a collector.

As a kid, it was baseball cards and bar coasters.

As an adult, it’s Latin social dances and quotes.

Quotes, because I’m often in awe of how others are able to assemble words that capture exactly how I feel or what I need to hear, and I want to remember them.

Quotes are useful. Sometimes your cousin needs help writing a rehearsal dinner speech, your manager needs to add a bit of “oomph!” to a press release, or your friend needs a verbal hug, or humbling, or both.

Quotes, because sometimes soft people do hard things and seek comfort that they’re unable to provide themselves.

That’s why I keep a growing list of 450+ quotes and today I’m sharing the ones I’ve leaned on during Celi’s build.

This issue of In Public is special in that it’s also experiential.

Since Celi’s MVP, I’ve spent many afternoons, overwhelmed, on a floor listening to one song.

“Don't you even thinkkkkkk of givin' up,” I’d whisper along to myself.

I’ve organized this collection so that if you begin the song below right now, it will provide you a soundtrack that ends just as you reach the end of the page.

Starting

Believing in yourself is not optional for your success. It’s fundamental. (Sophie Burns)

A year from now, you may wish you had started today. (Karen Lamb)

There is no ritual that enhances creativity more than just starting. (John Hodgman) 

Everything around you that you call life was made by people who were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. (Steve Jobs)

You clearly wanna make some shit, so why not just make it? Worse comes to worse you make it and someone says they don't like it. All right. Will you like it? Then that’s all that matters. (Tyler, the Creator)

If you weren’t ready, you wouldn’t have the opportunity. (Unknown)

Leap and the net will appear. (Julia Cameron) 

Stop being so passive about what you want, who you are, and how you communicate. The universe shows up for you at the level you do. Get clear, be direct, and put in the work. (Devi Brown) 

Your ideas are worth nothing without the will to act on them. (Steve Jobs)

Sometimes not having any idea where we're going works out better than we could possibly have imagined. (Anne Patchett)

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counter, who really touched alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feathered bed. (Terence McKenna)

Don't get stuck in the planning stage. If your intuition knows it is time to do something new, to start unleashing the creative force that dwells within you, then you need to focus on beginning instead of just thinking about how you will begin. (Diego Perez)

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising and gave to it neither power nor time. (Mary Oliver)

Risk is not as risky as it might look. There are so many opportunities to recover from poor decisions. You restrict yourself so much if you don’t take risks and just stay within your comfort zone. If you want a full life, if you want a meaningful life, risk is probably a necessary ingredient. (Dame Stephanie Shirley)

The greatest tragedy is that of a dream deferred. (Ricki Crowley)

Live life as if it were rigged in your favor. (Rumi)

If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life. (Charles Bukowski)

What if it can turn out better than you imagined? (Russ) 

Continuing

You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. (Paul Graham)

I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from non-successful ones is pure perseverance. (Steve Jobs)

Your future self will thank you for not giving up (Naithan Jones)

Half doing something is an expensive way of not doing it (Angela Jiang)

Choose consistency over intensity, because consistency compounds. When you become lazy, it's disrespectful to those who believe in you. (Tobe Nwigwe)

Ask for every inch of your dreams. (Unknown)

You know what doesn’t feel good? Not taking any risks. I'm very in the belief that fear is such a guiding thing in life, because the more you do the things you're afraid of, the more you see that what you're afraid of is all in your head. (Mac Miller)

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. (Franz Kafka)

Never say I can’t do it, say I haven’t done it yet. (Rick Rubin)

Keep making plays. (Deion Sanders)

Curiosity

The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute. The man who does not ask a question is a fool for life. (Confucious)

“I don’t understand, therefore I will explore and learn” is so much more powerful and productive than “I don’t understand, therefore I will openly criticize.” (Ryan Holiday)

Don't fall in love with the idea, fall in love with the problem. This allows you to pivot, stay excited and engaged, and also not be too proud to do so. (Marc Randolph)

The potential upside of asking the question you’re afraid to ask always outweighs the chance that you’ll hear the word ‘no’ in response. (George Berkowski)

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them. (George Bernard Shaw)

Finding peace in the process

Failure is an option. I tell myself that even if Absence of Proof is the biggest failure in the world, the knowledge, skills, connections, and tough skin that I will gain from building it will make me an incredibly valuable asset to any company that would want to hire me afterward. (Elizabeth Gascoigne)

Don't fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail. (Bruce Lee)

You have to be willing to fail if you’re going to do anything worthwhile. (Maura Ball)

Do not take on more than you can effectively handle. Stay within the limitations of your body and soul, and do the best that you can with what you have been given. Maintain a positive attitude, and your grateful heart will be rewarded again and again. (Marsha Burns) 

When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, healthier, safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply being alive, you’re helping others to live more fully. (Phil Knight)

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. (Steve Jobs)

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. (David Epstein)

We are all free, completely free. We can each day do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine. (Jean-Paul Sartre)

You might encounter many defeats but you must never be defeated, ever. In fact, it might even be necessary to confront defeat. It might be necessary to get over it. All the way through it and go on. (Maya Angelou)

I know that if I fail I can start over and over and over and over. I have that skill, and you can take everything from me, but you cannot take that. (Francis Ngannou)

You can only take it one day at a time, that's life. (Naomi Osaka)

What matters is that, in the end, you can tell a story that you’re proud of. That’s the light to hold all of your decisions up to: When you’re old and telling the stories of your life, what will you say? (Brianna Wiest)

And lastly, for those who still haven’t reserved your username:

It breaks my heart that there are people out there who don't believe in us. (DJ Khaled)