Life is A Team Sport 🏈

Celebrating Wins 🏆
Life is a Team Sport 🤝🏽
(PAID) Secret Weight-Lifting Tips Pt.2 🏋🏾‍♂️

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Hello Friends! 👋🏾

The gratitude party continues.

This week, we’re celebrating. Celebrating what, you ask? Greatness. Perseverance. Badass attitudes and sheer resilience. Man, I can just smell football season in the air.

Then, we’ll watch a video of an awesome old dude with a wicked Southern accent musing on the importance of species-wide teamwork. You ready to play??

Paid subscribers will learn my latest exercise hack, which involves, yes, a popsicle stick.

See you at the bottom!

Celebrating Wins 🏆

All across the globe, I’m friends with people who are doing things I’m proud of.

Part of being a good friend is networking for them and introducing their accomplishments to others who can learn and be inspired by their stories.

That’s why I’ll be using this platform to celebrate their achievements. Meanwhile, it’s a great opportunity for you readers to get a better idea of who I am by understanding the people most important to my story.

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Malik Fisher, Houston Texans Defensive End 🏈

Malik Fisher is a Brooklyn kid with a heart as giant as his game. I’ll never forget the first day of football camp in 2014 when young Malik, a rising sophomore, joined the varsity squad to much acclaim.

“Kid’s gonna be a beast,” you’d hear from our teammates. “Who’s gonna block him in drills?” They’d worry aloud. The coaching staff could hardly conceal their excited grins.

They saw a sleeping giant – I saw the warm cheerfulness of a prodigy eager to learn from the big kids.

And learn he did. Having played football for several years before high school, Malik was no stranger to crashing pads. But that wouldn’t be enough to earn his place on the team.

At a notoriously rigorous academic gamut like Xavier High School, obsession with detail and excellence was the standard. You needed the brains to get by, the discipline to stay afloat, and the charm to make it look good. The varsity football team demanded a similar mastery of method.

Employing a technique-heavy defense and an elaborate single-wing offense, training under Xavier’s system was an uphill battle for all of us. Since we played the same positions, (Defensive End, Tight End) Malik and I jumped into 100 straight days of action, adversity, and brotherhood.

Malik endured the struggle with an insatiable thirst to keep learning and growing, marked by his signature grin. The kinship of Black boys in a predominantly white school can’t be understated, either. Sharing similar backgrounds further strengthened our bond within the team. Our group was always cracking jokes, observing and making light of the absurd situations we found ourselves in. Others just wouldn’t understand.

Like a runaway train, Malik found his footing and never looked back. He dominated both sides of the ball throughout high school, doing the same at nearby Villanova, where he impressed pro teams enough to secure a spot on the UFL’s Defenders.

Though it wasn’t the NFL dreams he longed for, Malik’s instincts are to make the best of the opportunities he’s presented with.

Whether it was countless hours of training for the season, all while taking graduate classes and co-founding a tech company, slowing down wasn’t an option for Malik. “Whenever I struggled,” he says, “I thought about this quote by Theodore Roosevelt:

“Nothing in the world is worth having. Or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty”

Embodying that spirit, Malik wasted no time making a name for himself in the UFL. During the league’s inaugural season, Malik notched 7 sacks, 33 tackles (18 solo/7 for loss), and forced enough fumbles to get the Houston Texans calling. On the heels of a dominant season, his self-made dream was coming true.

Malik posted this image to his IG story on his signing with Houston. It’s a powerful testament to the stoic resilience he embodies; a mantra to keep going, keep believing, and trust the process. It hits especially hard when you’ve seen the guy go from gangly 15-year-old to an unstoppable force of sheer will.

Throughout Malik’s career, he and I have consistently exchanged words of praise and encouragement. It’s easy to believe in someone who so clearly believes in themselves and ensures it with the proof of hard work. Being the kids from New York that we are, greatness is just how we rock.

As sons of Xavier, we recognize that sacrifice through service is our word, motivated by the promise of greater glory.

Congratulations, Malik. You’ve got a whole city proudly behind you.

Come back again next week for another friendly celebration 🎉

Life Is A Team Sport 🏀

How can’t you love this ‘Unc?

Whenever I come across a wildly popular video online, I’m hesitant.

Too often, it’s something negative or inflammatory. Something I just don’t need to see, or straight-up brain rot. When something appeals to the lowest common denominator, that’s usually a sign that it’s tapping into our ugliest impulses.

Usually.

In other cases, sincerely popular videos often convey messages of hope, triumph, and togetherness. Or, cute animals.

In any event, this video promotes the brand of practical optimism that I love to convey through my newsletter, media content, and general conversation. Yes, come together. Coexist. Sing kumbaya. But there’s something bigger out there than our feelings, and it requires us to take collective action.

100+ years of humanist messaging have pushed these ideals of self-sacrifice for the sake of fellow man, and it hasn’t exactly worked out. We are at a critical inflection point in the species’ history, perhaps more polarized than ever.

It’s a me-first society, making the compassionate alternatives feel like a losing game.

But life is a game, sure. We’re playing on the same team of humanity, competing against misery and loneliness.

The prize is the game itself. Communal love is the motivation. The mission is to make the best of who we have right now, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

It can feel like we’re the only ones anointed for some higher purpose, whereas every piece of the grand puzzle requires us to play our part.

When we realize we’re all on the same team, we can find purpose in our roles, just as those who came before us did. It isn’t golf or tennis we’re playing, it’s football. An all-out war where victory is precisely formulated around the fulfillment of tiny successful executions.

It’s a thought-provoking approach to the “can’t we all get along” plea, prompting us to get in the game while we’re still in it.

Tips For Lifting More Weight Pt.2 🏋🏾‍♂️

Over the years, I’ve compiled a list of various hacks and tricks I’ve found that make my athleticism more intense and efficient. I’ll share these along with the science behind why they work so well, even if I only halfway understand the mechanisms.

WARNING! SERIOUS BRO SCIENCE INBOUND 🚨