Bring The Hat

02/03/2026

Measure Your Growth in Decades, Not Days.

The modern world is wired for the instant visible metric, likes, overnight success stories, quarterly and yearly earnings.

This breeds a frantic, shallow minded hustle, a desperate scratching at the surface for immediate validation.

But a meaningful life, a legacy, a masterful skill, these are the fruits of the long game.

They grow with lots of patience and consistent effort that may show no visible sprout for years.

Your job is to plant seeds of trees, you may never sit under the shade and find joy in the planting process itself.

When a slow season becomes a necessary lesson for your growth.

The noise of the daily chase and hustle fades, and the true progress which was barely perceptible, becomes clear across the span of years.

In 1970, a young forestry student named Wangari Maathai returned to a Kenya suffering from deforestation.

Rivers were drying, soil was eroding, and poverty was deepening.

The immediate, measurable solution was aid money and quick-fix programs.

Instead, Maathai started something seemingly small and impossibly slow, she encouraged village women to plant trees.

She didn't measure her success in weeks when she founded the Green Belt Movement, facing down government opposition, arrests, and ridicule.

The work was physically hard, the progress almost invisible on a day to day basis.

But tree by tree, year by year, a movement grew.

Four decades later, her movement had planted over 50 million trees.

It had restored watersheds, empowered thousands of women, and sparked a global environmental consciousness.

In 2004, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Her growth metric was the health of the land and her people in a hundred years, not her popularity in a news cycle.

She played a game so long, her critics didn't even understand the rules talk more of winning.

The Bible consistently frames God's work and our faithfulness within the context of seasons and patient expectation.

Galatians 6:9 (ESV)
"And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up."

The promise is not an instant harvest, but a harvest "in due season."

Your faithfulness today is investing in a yield whose full measure you may not see for decades.

Stop checking the stock price of your self-worth every hour. Start acting as the steward of a legacy that lives on after you're long gone.

The man who plants for next season is a farmer.
The man who plants for the next century is a legend.

Be the latter. Let your patience become your most formidable strength.

Remember a river cuts through rock not by its power, but by its persistence over time.

02/01/2026

Build a Sanctuary, Not a Chaotic Arena.

Your mind is a space.

You can design it as a battlefield a place of constant conflict, comparison, and noise where you fight for validation.
Or you can build it as a sanctuary, a place of peace, clarity, and order where you recover, create, and hear the voice of wisdom.

The world will constantly try to turn your mind into its fight arena, projecting its fears, and its endless debates onto your screen with social media and into your thoughts.

Your job is to be the architect who says, "Not here."

A sanctuary is not an escape from reality, it is the control room from which you engage reality from a place of strength, not reactivity.

The man with a mind at war is easily manipulated. The man with a mind at peace is powerfully directed.

During the most violent years of the French Revolution, while the streets of Paris ran with chaos and the guillotine fell incessantly, a composer named Luigi Cherubini did something radical.

He built an internal sanctuary which he was the director of the Paris Conservatory, and though he was pressured to compose revolutionary hymns, his true work happened in the quiet.

He would rise before dawn, light a single candle, and enter his study, a room deliberately kept sparse and orderly.

There, he would compose not for the mob, but for the ages, focusing on sacred music and operas that explored timeless human themes.

The chaos outside was the arena.

His disciplined mind and dedicated space became the sanctuary where beauty was preserved.

His work from that period, like his Requiem in C minor, is noted for its profound clarity and emotional depth, a direct result of the peace he cultivated within, even as the world tore itself apart outside his window.

The Bible provides the blueprint for a mental sanctuary, promising a peace that actively protects your inner world:

Philippians 4:6-7 (ESV)
"Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

This is the divine security system.

Anxiety seeks to turn your mind into an arena of "what-ifs."

The command is to transfer those concerns through prayer to God.

The result is not the removal of problems, but the installation of God's peace as a guard over your heart and mind.

This peace surpasses understanding, because doesn't make logical sense given the external chaos.

It creates an inner sanctuary that circumstances cannot violate.

Stop letting the world's headlines design your mental space.

When your mind is a sanctuary, you don't enter the world's arenas to fight on its terms.

You enter from a place of unshakeable peace, carrying a different spirit entirely.

The loudest man in the room is often the most panicked.

The most peaceful man is often the most powerful.

01/31/2026

Master the Art of Being Dynamic.

A rigid tree breaks in the storm.
The reed bends, survives, and springs back up.

Your plan might fail.
Your assumptions might be wrong.

This is not a sign of your poor planning, absolutely not.
It is just the nature of reality.

The skill that separates the enduring man from the obsolete one is not stubborn adherence to a failing plan, but the agile, clear-eyed ability to pivot to plan B.

To change direction without losing your sense of direction.

Fail fast, learn faster, and redirect force without losing energy.

Pivoting is not quitting.
Quitting is simply a loss of will to forge on.

It the art of redirecting your energy to a new worthy cause.
It is the intelligence to realize the wall in front of you is not an obstacle to be scaled at all costs, but a sign to find a new route to go through

In the late 1990s, a company called Fujifilm faced an existential threat.
Their core product 'photographic film' was being annihilated by the digital revolution.

Their competitors, like Kodak, clung rigidly to the old model and withered.

Fujifilm chose to be dynamic by pivoting.

They looked at their deep, foundational strengths, world-leading expertise in chemistry, optics, and precision manufacturing.

Instead of just selling less film, they used their chemical expertise to create cosmetics (Astalift).

They applied their optical know-how to manufacture medical endoscopes and camera lenses for smartphones.

They leveraged precision manufacturing for high-performance materials.

They didn't abandon their core, they just reapplied it.

Today, Fujifilm is more profitable than it ever was at the height of the film era. They didn't survive the storm by standing still, they did so by dancing with it.

James 1:5 (ESV)
"If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.

Stop treating your plan like scripture. Treat it like a hypothesis.

Stubbornness is often just fear dressed up as strength.

True strength is flexible and dynamism.

The world doesn't have a fixed map to being successful.

There are many ways to get to your destination, only if you tried would you know.

01/30/2026

God has called us to BRING THE HAT!!

01/28/2026

01/26/2026

Focus on one thing at a time.

You see when you're being pulled in a dozen directions, you will never master a single one.

The enemy of excellence is not failure, but distraction.

The scattered man builds a pile of half-started projects.

The focused man builds a monument.

You must ruthlessly identify the single, central task that, if accomplished with excellence, would render all other tasks easier or even irrelevant.

This is your One Thing.

This is not about ignoring all else.

It is about prioritizing with absolute clarity.

Every "yes" to a distraction is a "no" to your destiny.

A man who knows his one hing can say "no" with a clear conscience, because he is not just busy, he is building something worthwhile.

In 2004, a young programmer named David Heinemeier Hansson was working at a web design firm, building a project management tool called Basecamp.

The industry's trend was towards massive, monolithic enterprise software packed with every conceivable feature.

He extracted the core Ruby libraries he'd built to make Basecamp and focused them into a single, elegant framework.

He named it Ruby on Rails.

While others chased complexity, he obsessed over simplicity, convention, and joy in the craft.

He famously preached the doctrine of "Convention over Configuration" by focusing his energy relentlessly on that One Thing, making web development faster and more enjoyable, he didn't just create a tool.

By so doing he ignited a movement.
Ruby on Rails powered the early growth of Twitter, GitHub, Shopify, and Airbnb.

It practically democratized web development.

He became a partner at a billion dollar company (37signals) and a best-selling author, not by doing everything, but by perfecting one single thing that changed everything.

The Bible says in:

Matthew 6:22 (ESV)
"The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light."

The Greek word for "healthy" here is haplous, which means single, focused, generous, without folds. A "single" eye is an undivided eye, a mind fixed on one central purpose, which is the Kingdom of God.

Stop adding. Start subtracting.
Excellence is the result of elimination of noise, while focusing on a single viable signal.

Mastery is not the child of talent, rather it is the orphan of focus.

01/26/2026