I would say just continue to push and do what you feel is best for you to do. Find what really makes you excited, find what really makes you driven, do things that you normally wouldn't do. Push yourself to your limit, whatever that limit is, and really go for it. And don't ever think that there's a limitation in how great you can be or what you can be, or how wealthy you can be, and what you can do in life or where you can be in life. Anything and everything is possible. First it comes to your mindset. Make sure you tell yourself this and you believe it. And once you do that, the sky is only the starting point. You can exceed far past it, but you have to have confidence. You have to invest in yourself, take yourself seriously, and anything you want to do, you can do and will do.

I think it's a good idea to have long-term project management because for a lot of things that you want to do long-term, you really need to start now. You never know what's going to happen. When you're ready to buy a house, you never know what the housing market is going to be like. So, you may need to start a little house fund over here on the side. But I think that's a good idea. I think everybody needs a short-term, the action list, but also a long-term list too. I've heard this phrase before where somebody who is up in age wants to go back to school and they're like, oh, by the time I finish school I'll be 55. And they ask, well, how old will you be if you don't go to school? So, put those things in your long-term plan and think about what you want to accomplish. And you can always add, you could change, you can edit depending on what's going on in your life.

I think one of the most important things that I've learned is don't take yourself out of the running. Don't deselect. If you want something and you see something and you think it's interesting to you, pursue it. Even if people tell you that you don't have the background for that, you haven't met the prerequisites, I don't really think that's a good fit for you. But if you believe that's something you can do, let somebody else tell you no, give it a shot. See if you can achieve it and pursue, and you might surprise yourself. Oftentimes through my life, I've learned that people who had more confidence in me than I had in myself were right that they knew that I could do something that even I didn't think I could do, but I knew I wanted to do it.

At some point, life is going to drop you in the deep end of a swimming pool. It is going to happen. And at some point you only have two choices because even Michael Phelps can't tread forever, right? You can't just sit there and tread. You are either going to sink and drown and die, or you're going to swim. That's it. You really only have two choices. So you have to choose to swim. And way too often people think that they can just tread and they can stay here, and we're just going to keep our head above water and we're going to stay status quo. But eventually you will get tired, you will not go anywhere. So you either have to make a decision, that I'm going to give up and I'm not going to try, and in which case I am going to sink and that's going to be it for me, or I'm going to swim.

The biggest lesson, to keep it brief, is life is extremely short and you want to take the time to enjoy as much of it as possible. You want to also take the time to remind yourself to enjoy everything you do and it should be with pleasure. It's not going to be with ease. There's always going to be challenges, but if you find what you love to do in every day, continue to do it. I think when we're younger, we don't have the responsibilities of paying bills or having to make money per se. We just like to wake up and play video games or do sports or hang out with friends or go to the movies or the mall. Those are the simple pleasures of life. As we get older, we now have responsibilities, so we now have to push away some of those pleasures when we're younger. And also those pleasures change as we get older, but in our lives, we should always make sure that whatever we're doing, we enjoy doing it. There's a saying that says, if you enjoy what you do, you never work a day in your life. I didn't know what that meant because I've had many a jobs where I've worked many days in my life, but now that I became an entrepreneur and I am chasing my goals and my dreams to do what I want to do every day when I wake up, I feel like I haven't worked a day and I enjoy it. And some days are tougher than others, but as long as you have pleasure and you really enjoy what you're doing, and you take the notion that life is short and that you have to enjoy the time that you have today because we don't know if we're promised tomorrow, you'll really do the most and have the most fun and enjoy life.

I've had an interesting journey from growing up in Newark, New Jersey, to attending public school and venturing off to Colgate. And the bulk of the success that I've experienced, having journeyed from Newark to Colgate to Newark Venture Partners, et cetera, is just about taking risk and having a fundamental belief in myself. Confidence oftentimes is overrated and often underrated, but it's absolutely necessary to traverse life and take on obstacles as you go through various challenges, whether it was playing football in college, to starting my career at Chubb Insurance Company, to meeting a fellow Newarker and philanthropist in Ray Chambers. That level of confidence, that was probably instilled in me from my parents and then growing up in Newark, et cetera, was probably one of the most single determining factors that has helped me achieve some of the outcomes to date that I'm really proud of. Fortunately, I'm still young and the book is yet to be written, but to date a high level of confidence and conviction around strong beliefs and having a strong belief system has been somewhat of a guiding light for me as I've created some success for myself and for my family.

One of the ways to get to a bigger perspective is by having an open mind. You have to be willing to learn more information. You have to be willing to take in information that you may not even agree with. But just because you don't agree with the information it doesn't mean that it's information that you shouldn't have as part of what's in your toolkit. All of that information is important to be able to move forward, make good decisions, and to have the impact on life that you want to have. To have this big perspective, you have to have a lot of information. You have to be open, you have to be willing to learn, and you have to be willing to allow some of the thoughts and hypotheses that you may have had before be challenged and you find out that maybe it wasn't quite what you thought it was, and it helps you get to a better place.

Intent for me came from finding out what I want in life, which can take a while to realize. I'm almost 35 and I'm still figuring it out, but I think I've gotten closer throughout this journey of life up until this point. I write a lot of things down. I wake up and I say, what do I really want to do with my life? How do I want to live my days? How do I want to live today, tomorrow? And I write that down. That's intention in itself because you're putting it down, you're breathing it into life, and now you have to create it. So, when you do things to meet that aspiration, that's with intent. And so I think the starting point is to figure out what it is that you want to do. Write those things down, continuously look at those things and understand what those things are, and then build upon the intent to get those things achieved. And that's where intention really falls in line for me.