Journal – Maxwell Murray

You Faked Your Pushups

I started playing football at the age of 5.  I have two older half brothers that are 7 and 9 years older than me and I remember going to all of their games growing up. Every other week they would come stay with us and we would play kickoff football from couch to couch in the basement. I was like 4 and so they would both go on their knees, throw the ball to me on the other side and I would have to get past them and score by making it to the other couch.  They used to kill me. There was something called high-low, where Marcus would go for my legs and Myles would go for my head and I would literally just get flipped over and destroyed. I remember falling on my neck and shoulders, being in pain, and crying. But I loved every single moment of it.  Growing up Sunday football was such a big deal for my family. We had this 3 TV setup in the basement where we could watch the Eagles on the big screen, game mix or another game on the left, and redzone on the right. I fucking loved football and I loved the Eagles even more. One Sunday night, Marcus dressed me in his full Silver Spring Saints uniform and pads. I was obsessed with football and was finally old enough to play. My first football game ever was against the Ellicott City Patriots on a gray Saturday morning. The Patriots kicked the ball off and it was finally my time to shine. We ended up losing the game and afterwards I was distraught and crying my eyes out. Not because we lost but because I only played the league minimum, 7 plays.   I got into the car after the game with my parents and was crying and complaining about my lack of playing time. Why wouldn't the coach give me a chance? Why me? Why this, Why that? My dad turned around and looked at me dead in the face and said "You faked your push-ups in practice". That day in the car, instead of coddling me, my dad was on my ass. "How do you expect to play if you are faking your push-ups in practice".   It is so easy to fake your push-ups in practice when the coach can't see you. However, who are you cheating? The coach or yourself? See, I was so busy faking my push-ups because they were hard and they hurt, that I didn't think about why I needed to do them in order to get stronger so I can hit this running back on the jet sweep. If you fake your push-ups that running back is hitting you on that jet sweep.   All of us have crazy dreams that we so desperately want to accomplish. We often think about the end goal or end person that we want to become. However, in order to get there you have to become better and stronger every single day. Especially (I will say it again), Especially when you are all by yourself and nobody is looking. If I go on the street today and ask 100 people if they are working hard to accomplish their goals, all 100 of them are going to say yes. Of course, we want other people to think that we are getting stronger and better everyday.   But, today I want you to think to yourself: Am I really getting stronger? Or am I faking my push-ups?

Journal – Maxwell Murray

Confidence

Are we naturally confident? Or is confidence built? What makes a person confident? Yesterday, I posted a clip on Instagram from my recent podcast episode talking about how basketball is life. I often look to basketball whenever I am navigating through different decisions or self-reflecting. As a basketball player confidence in your ability is everything in order to perform at a high level. One thing I love about basketball is how fast a player can go from being confident to not confident. We hit a 3 from the corner on one possession and the next possession we are eager to shoot the ball again. At the same time if we airballed our last shot, when we get open for another look, maybe we hesitate. A key thing as a basketball player is accepting failure and practicing short term memory loss. If we don't forget about our failures during the game, we can't continue to perform at a high level and help out our team. I don't think that being confident is a thing that we either are or are not. Confidence is a consistent battle that you are going to continue to face no matter what you are pursuing or going through. I believe that there are two types of confidence: Long term confidence and short term confidence. One question that you can ask yourself is what I am confident in? We all want to be successful and it takes a lot of confidence in yourself to be able to a point where you consider yourself successful. But, what does being successful even mean? To me, being successful means waking up and spending your day however you would like. In the long term, I am extremely confident that I am going to be successful because I know that I am in control over my definition of success. To answer my question before, I think that confidence can be a natural thing because everyday I am extremely confident that I will wake up tomorrow. Today, no matter if you make good decisions or bad decisions, your track record for coming out alive is undefeated. Therefore, naturally we have to be confident in the fact that everything happens for a reason and in the long term we are going to be okay. Short term confidence is something that is built. Our actions throughout the day are directly dictating how confident we are. Think about basketball for example, if we made our last shot, we are more confident to take our next shot. I think that you built short term confidence by taking on hard tasks and checking off those boxes. For example, today is Wednesday and I wrote about how hard it is for me to wake up on Wednesdays and have a good day. When my alarm sounded, I could have either gone back to bed or got out of bed and started my day. When I got out of bed, I checked off the first box of the day. Next, I had to decide to either go to the gym or not go to the gym. When I went to the gym and completed my workout, that was another box checked. As the day goes on if I continue to check boxes that are important to me, that is the same as making shots throughout a game. I am more confident in my ability to hit my next shot. However, days where I face those same tasks and do not check those boxes, I am naturally less confident. It is like missing a shot and hesitating on your next attempt. Just like in basketball, short term memory loss is everything and we can't let one failure in the day carry over through the rest of our day. Therefore, if you woke up today and maybe didn't check off that box, well you still have a lot of other boxes you can check off the rest of your day. Therefore, forget about it and move on. Like I said before, made shots= confidence, missed shots = hesitation. The best thing about life is that we are in control over whether or not we shoot in the first place and in life unlike basketball, we are actually in control over whether or not we make or miss the shot. Therefore, today go out there and average 20 and see how you feel. To conclude, long term confidence is a necessity and is something that hopefully we all have naturally. If we aren't naturally confident in the long term, then we have to practice short term confidence by consistently shooting and making shots. The more shots we make, the more confident we will be in our ability, and the more likely we are to be naturally confident in our future.

Journal – Maxwell Murray

Happiness

I am sitting here on my rooftop looking at the New York City skyline. I see 57th street with these huge skyscrapers that people live actually live in. I’ve been in a few of those buildings over the last few years and have seen people actually live in these huge boxes in the sky. 3 years ago, I came to New York because growing up my mom and I would watch million dollar listings. When I first got to the city, I would go around and stare at every building. I romanticised my life, living there, and calling a place like that my home base. I wanted to make a lot of money. When I first moved here, I studied finance because of how much they got paid out of school. I would look through salaries from Goldman, JP Morgan, and McKinsey & Co. Wow $150,000 a year after a bonus hits sounds pretty great to me. A few months ago, I was in org comm and we had to pick slips of paper out of a hat and give a speech on whatever it said. My slip of paper said “Why do you do what you do?”. I stood infront of my class, took a deep breath, and said “I am here to do 3 things”. First, I am a public school student. I feel like when I first got here at NYU, I was behind. It felt like people always knew things that I just straight up didn’t. I believe that there are two things inherently wrong with public school. 1) If we are good students, we aren’t prepared for college. 2) If we aren’t good students, we aren’t prepared for life. I think that we sit in this grey area right in between where they tell us that we need college but don’t truly prepare us for college. On the other side, college is a lick and for people that aren’t good at school, they aren’t prepared to take on life right out of high school. We sit in that school for 7 hours a day and it truly feels like a passage of time. Therefore, my first inspiration is to find ways to better educate my community. Second, the racial wealth gap in America is so ridiculous that when I said it to my class, they were in disbelief. The median white family has a household income of about $188,000 and the median black family has a household income of $24,000. This is a result of years of oppression, slavery, Jim Crow, and prevention from education and housing. I am disgusted by this stat and want to find any way to help change this. I am an entrepreneur because I want to build businesses that can uplift my community financially. Business inspires me because companies like uber can connect so many drivers with opportunities to put food on the table for their family. Therefore, the second thing that I am relentlessly pursuing is uplifting the black community financially through business. Third, I look around and don’t see anyone in this class that looks like me.I have a hard time finding inspirations and people that are in positions that give me the confidence that I can do or be that. I want to show the younger kids behind me that their dreams and aspirations are tangible. Someone from their school, city, and state that looks like them, made it. I want to show them what it looks like to create real change by being relentless with a pen and a notebook. I want them to believe that they can accomplish everything that they set their mind too. I think about quitting entrepreneurship sometimes and using this stern diploma to get myself a nice comfy job. But the truth is that’s cap. I don’t. That’s not my path at all. That doesn’t abide by my ambitions and doesn’t relate to the change that I want to create in this world. I started this piece by talking about million dollar listings New York. For the last 3 years, I have been inside too many million dollar cribs. I look at the people that live in them and see how comfortable they look. Then I think about where I live, in the East Village with my two roommates. I look at my bed, desk, chair, and whiteboard. I have a couch, a tv in the living room and I think to myself, I don’t really need much more. Yea, I’d love to live in a nicer spot, a million dollar listing. But I know the people that do. I think to myself are they happier than me just because they live here? Almost every time the answer is no. If they are happier it's for a different reason. So I sit here on my roof right this second, look at billionaires row from a distance, write this blog post, and think that I will be there one day. However, that isn’t going to make me happier then I am right now, it is only going to be a reward for change that I have made in this world. I will be happy when I build a school, have people making upwards of $3,000 a month on FITS Create, and when I am able to show the kids behind me the true power that they have with their two hands. Actually... (I actually wrote that above) I am happy right now, I built the Power Struggle Movement, an online school for creators that teaches Crypto, Entrepreneurship, and Creative Arts. I didn't even know it was a school until I wrote about wanting to build a school. I am building a platform that empowers creators. I feel guilty that my product doesn't help people as much as I want to yet but the people that we are working with give me life and confidence to relentlessly stay on this path. At this point if I quit, I am quitting on them. Finally, I am showing people from back home that you can make it all the way to NYC, go to a big school like NYU, but still say fuck the easy life and take a path that has a huge change of failure and a tiny chance of success. I know this blog post is just heavily about me. However, I hope that you can realize that happiness isn't some tangible thing that comes when you reach a certain point. As long as you are doing something that makes you happy and fulfils your dreams: you are living a great life :) My happiness comes from solving problems.

Journal – Maxwell Murray

Fear

Fear is the number 1 deterrent of success. The best artist, musician, fashion designer, or entrepreneur can be out there right now with amazing ideas in their head, but never live up to it, only because of fear. I am terrified of my dreams. I wish at times, I didn’t obsess over accomplishing my mission and being the person that I want to be. I am scared that I will never live up to the dreams that rotate over and over again in my mind. For the longest time, fear prevented me from accomplishing and impacting the world in the way that I so deeply aspired. For the first 12 months of building FITS, I did it in complete silence. Kept it a secret from the world and was reluctant to tell anyone about my ideas. When I look back at it, I was scared of 1) being embarrassed 2) getting my idea taken. Due to this, I with held my work from the world and tried to wait for the perfect finished product to finally showcase. During this time, I recorded numerous podcast episodes about my journey. Episodes that will never come out (only because we didn’t know about mic covers) but those episodes, I never thought about putting out at the time. I always wanted to submerge myself in the social media game and spread my message to more people but I was scared that my business wasn’t developed enough. How can you make entrepreneurship content without being one of the best entrepreneurs out yet? I would always tell myself that when x happens, I will do y. However, looking back, it was just fear. Fear of judgement. Fear of failure. Fear of myself and my own ambitions. Rob’s tagline is “Fortune Favors The Fearless”. To flip the switch and truly become fearless, you have to make 2 bold decisions. 1) You have to actually acknowledge that you want it 2) You have to be relentless in your pursuit to get it What do you really want? Who do you really aspire to become? The truth about these two questions is the the hardest possible answer. The answer that you can barely even tell someone because they will look at you crazy is normally the right answer. Once you find the answers to those questions, you probably will be looking up at something that you think is completely unattainable. That is when you have to make one of two decisions. Am I going to accept the fact that this is a dream that I want to pursue? Or am I going to fold on this? If the answer is that you want it, the next step is starting. This day in age, we glorify famous people and overnight successes. This is because we open our phones, go on social media, and see people that have a lot of money or a lot of followers on Instagram. We see them living it up and smiling and talking about how you two can accomplish big things if you work hard. If there was a video that could teach you the key to success and everybody in the world can sit there, watch it, and become successful as a result. We would all be mad at words within that video. I sit around and watch motivational videos all the time, thinking that I am going to learn something new or learn some type of secret to success. The reason why we would be mad at these videos is because everyone says the same thing: work hard and be relentless. Being relentless is not fucking easy. I question my entire life and think that everything I am doing is complete ass, at least once a week. I started my business and thought after a few posts it would just blow up and everybody would love the product that I built for them. However, what we fail to realise is that the best things in life are results of the hardest possible journey. What is the most challenging way to get to where I want to go? What are the things that 95% of people do not do? What ideas do I have that seem so hard that it makes me scared to even try? The truth is that we have got to accept the fact that we want something and stop at nothing to get there. Being relentless means being obsessively consistent. It means that no matter how tough things get, no matter how much you fail, you keep going and stay on the path that you set out for yourself. When I decided to truly start building out FITS and start really posting on social media. I told myself that there are people that I want to impact. People that I think could benefit greatly by hearing my message. People that I need to learn from. People out there that together, we could build something that apart wouldn’t be possible. I told myself that I want to be the 50th President of the United States. I can’t believe that I just wrote that. I am scared to tell anyone because I know they would be like yea, ard. But the truth is, that is my number 1 goal. That is the dream in my head that I so deeply want to silence. Truth be told, it just keeps coming up in my mind, so much that I can’t do anything but plot out my next 20 years to be able to make that happen. Dame Dash said “People would traditionally think I was crazy, they all did. Unless you have a dream that people think are crazy then your dream is wack. I dream big bro and everybody around me that dreams big, that I have taught to dream big, you are reading about them in Forbes”. Fear is motherfucker. Fear prevents people from being successful. So decide, am I scared of this dream? Do I actually want it or not? Then be relentless in your pursuit of that dream. You can’t be the top designer out if you only have 1 or 3 collections out. You can’t be the best musician if you only have 4 singles out. You can’t be an entrepreneur if you don’t obsess over your business for the next 10 years. And you will never be the President of the United States, if you don’t try. S/o Rob: Fortune Favors The Fearless