• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
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I don’t know what it is about the human condition (well, I have some ideas), but it seems like we’re all suckers for a good underdog story. There also seems to be a correlation between the number of underdog stories and the external forces that seek to facilitate our demise. From the death defying miracles in Haiti, to the people that overcome-all-odds in the midst of a job loss, family tragedy or empty retirement account, there are those who accept reality and attempt to minimize its consequences. And there are those who confront reality in order to define its consequences.

I heard an interview with Jason Reitman, director of Up in the Air, about the dozens of people in the movie who shared their story of being fired and losing their job. The people were not actors. They were the real deal. You can’t help but sympathize with these people.

Mark Horvath is a story I’ve been a part of telling many times before, mostly because I was the guy who had to let him go when he worked for me over a year ago. How Mark used that moment of defeat is an inspiration that’s been capturing the imagination of many.

Mark would be a great candidate for this forthcoming movie:

How will you choose to work with your reality? Will you say it can’t be done? Or will you take everything you have and make history?

Don Hewitt, the founder of CBS’ 60 Minutes passed away last August. Last night, 60 Minutes dedicated their entire hour-long show to remembering Don’s life and, more specifically, the influence he had on television news.

I’ve been a fan of 60 Minutes for many years. Growing up, I remember my dad watching it every Sunday evening as it was the only official night of the week where everybody had to fend for themselves when it came to dinner. (Dad did all the cooking in our house of eight.)

I realize I’m the odd man out with my generation for liking 60 Minutes, but I think I’m the odd man out for a lot of things. I digress.

Learning about the man behind the show was quite a treat. I also couldn’t stop thinking about Neil Postman’s criticism about why television is killing us. “The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health. 60 Minutes, Eye-Witness News and Sesame Street are.”

Admittedly, 60 Minutes is entertainment first and news second. Hewitt’s goal was to combine the two so that more people would be captivated by the stories.

It seems like everyone is talking about story these days. Don Hewitt was famous for four words that he said all the time. He said it to aspiring interns and he said it to his staff: “Tell me a story.”

Hewitt was also adamant about steering clear of the “issues.” He didn’t want to do stories about issues. He did stories about people. The issues would surface so long as people were the subject.

Tell me a story.

“You should never underestimate the man who overestimates himself.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt

This is part two from some of the lessons I learned while reading Duff McDonald’s, Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase.

Keep Lists
On a single sheet of paper, Dimon kept a number of smaller handwritten lists, including “Things I Owe People” and “Things People Owe Me.” He started this at the beginning of his career and continues to manually manage them today. As for a list of books Dimon recommends for the aspiring CEO, “he would start with Shakespeare, adding Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Only the Paranoid Survive by Intel’s Andy Grove, Warren Buffett’s annual letters, and Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis.” Dimon also had a list for three components of a successful deal: business logic, the ability to execute and price.

Ego is Ugly
The strong working relationship that Dimon and his mentor, Sandy Weill, shared would ultimately dissolve, mostly because Weill wasn’t ready for Dimon to overshadow him. There was a point when Weill should have turned over the reigns of Citigroup to Dimon, but Weill wouldn’t do it.

In the fairy-tale version of Dimon’s career, he succeeds his mentor [Sandy Weill] and leads Citigroup to greater glory. In the fairy tale, Citigroup is not on the verge of extinction 10 years later, while Jamie Dimon is leading one of its only healthy competitors. The future of American banking, in other words, was shaped by this very moment. How much different history might have been had Sandy Weill done what Dimon fully expected him to—assure him that the job would soon be his. But Weill was not yet ready to think past his own career. He was living in the present, and he was sick to death of Dimon’s thinking they were equals. Dimon was his junior partner. And he didn’t need a junior partner on the board…

Put Some Skin Into Your Game
Dimon left Citigroup and spent 18 months figuring out what he wanted to do. He landed at Bank One, a regional bank in Chicago that would eventually go on to become JPMorgan Chase after several years of mergers and acquisitions. Upon his arrival to the top post at Bank One, “Dimon told the board he believed in ‘eating his own cooking’ and rewarded their confidence in him by purchasing 2 million shares of stock at $28.37 a share, for some $57 million, the day before his appointment was announced. The move showed he was all-in and from that day forward, nobody questioned his commitment to the job.”

Disciplined Thought Leads to Disciplined Action
This one is right out of a Jim Collins playbook. “A weak economy creates opportunities for strong companies,” said Dimon. During the crash of 2007-2008, “People expected me to come in and start doing deals,” says Dimon. “But that’s not me. I’m different. You can’t start a war until you have an army, and we couldn’t even run our own business well. I said, ‘No, we’re going to get this thing fixed and from that strength, if something makes sense, we’ll do it.’ You have to earn the right to do a merger.” This thinking “did not endear him to his spoiled colleagues. ‘He’s going down like cod liver oil,” one banker told Business Week magazine.” Someone else told Euroweek, “The news that Jamie is flying in is similar to being told that Ivan the Terrible is coming for tea.”

Consultants Should Not Be Used for Inside Jobs
Dimon doesn’t think too fondly of consultants. He especially dislikes the idea of thinking they can actually accomplish work that should be done from the inside. “We do still use smart people to do consulting for us. But it has to be with a very senior person and there is no phase two. By that, I mean at the end of the project, I have the brain and they have the money. I don’t need anyone to implement anything. That’s a joke. You can’t have outside people implement stuff inside companies. It doesn’t work. And by the way, if that’s going on, what the hell are your own people doing?”

Surround Yourself With People Who Speak Their Mind
Jamie surrounded himself with smart people who were not afraid to speak up. Jamie was the perfect model for this as his relationship with his mentor, Sandy Weill, proved time and again. Jamie was notorious for intense debates and verbal wars when it came to making sure decisions were made in the safety of wise counsel. “When you worked for Jamie Dimon, he expected you to speak your mind. If you didn’t, he’d just as soon replace you. ‘I don’t care if we do the trade or don’t do the trade,’ he told a reporter. ‘I care that we do it right…. If you work in a company where you can’t walk in the room and say what you think, you create an atmosphere where you don’t do the best you can and where people don’t disclose things.’” This environment of honest debate would often energize the team. “When you worked with [Jamie] it was almost impossible to view something as a stopping point. He was always thinking about what things could be.”

Boring Is Not Always Bad
“The International Monetary Fund estimates that stock market bubbles happen about every 13 years, and that housing bubbles occur every two decades.” Although Jamie doesn’t claim he had any corner on understanding the timing of things to come, he was always running the scenarios in his head. What’s the downside? What’s the upside? What is the worst that could happen? After a season of much market criticism for JPMorgan Chase’s consistent and relatively conservative approach to growth, Wall Street finally conceded. “At the start of 2008, Wall Street analysts had completely come around to JPMorgan Chase. Being boring was now a virtue.”

Don’t Use Re-Orgs and Change to Shift Blame
“Wall Street is a pressure cooker, and when the pressure started to get intense in 2007, the more insecure of its chief executives started firing everybody around them to make sure outsiders knew where they should place the blame. Such a strategy does enhance one’s short-term job security, but the problem with it is that when turnover gets too high, no one really knows what’s going on anymore. As proof of the point, before they themselves were dismissed, Bear’s Jimmy Cayne, Citigroup’s Chuck Prince, Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neal, and Lehman’s Dick Fuld had all participated in their own little orgies of firing. Dimon has resisted doing the same thing, and his firm is surely the better for it.”

It’s Okay to Be a Force of Nature
I’ll close with Duff McDonald’s assessment toward the end of the book. “It’s impossible to deny that most people who wander into [Jamie's] orbit come away feeling as if they’ve just encountered a force of nature. At a time when true Wall Street leaders seem in desperately short supply, Jamie Dimon has emerged as a moral and managerial compass for both his industry and the country itself.”

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. —Citation from a speech Theodore Roosevelt made in Paris in 1910

“Buy straw hats in winter.” —Bernard Baruch

Following up my earlier post, here are some lessons I learned while reading Duff McDonald’s, Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase.

Self-Starters Have an Advantage
In college, during his final year at Browning, Dimon’s calculus teacher had a heart attack and the replacement didn’t know calculus. If Dimon and his handful of fellow classmates were going to learn, they’d have to teach themselves. “Three of the students decided to throw in the towel, but Dimon and the remaining two—one of whom was Jeremy Paul—spent a challenging year of self-instruction. ‘As far as working experiences go, that was pretty intense,’ recalls Paul. ‘Each day we’d go into the classroom and there was no teacher, just us. And we’d sit there, trying to work our way through the problems.’”

Mentoring Relationships Are Huge
In 1985, banking giant Sandy Weill left a top job at American Express. A year later, Weill took over a small company named Commercial Credit Corporation, that would eventually become Citigroup (after almost 20 years of mergers and acquisitions). Jamie Dimon was the guy Weill brought on from the beginning. “So began one of the greatest mentor-protégé relationships in the history of American business. Sandy Weill saw Jamie Dimon for what he was: an ambitious young man with an enormous capacity for hard work.” One of the more practical lessons that Weill would impart to Dimon was that “You can’t control income. It varies based on conditions outside of our control. But you can control expenses.” “And,” says Dimon, “he taught me one of the most important things in my career, which is not to rest on your laurels.”

Know What You’re Doing, Make Things Happen
One of the lessons McDonald distills from Dimon is to make sure you actually know what it is you’re doing. A novel concept in the banking industry! “Don’t go chasing the flavor of the month unless you actually know its ingredients. Just because other people are making money in something, don’t be tempted to follow suit unless you understand the complexities involved and how they profit from it.”

“Dimon was widely regarded as the man who made things happen when they needed to happen. If there were costs that had to be cut, Dimon was the man for the job. The company needed higher credit ratings? Dimon figured out how to get them. What he brought to the table was the basic ability to understand the underlying drivers of any business—the two or three things that really mattered—far more quickly than his peers.”

Ethical Leadership Must Be A Value
One day during a class in American history–history is one of Dimon’s favorite subjects–the only African-American student in his class was dismissed after the teacher decided she had had enough of the student’s acting out. “Once the door closed behind him, the teacher turned toward the class and muttered, ‘Six hundred thousand died to free the slaves, and this is the gratitude we get.’ Dimon stood up, grabbed his things, and walked out the door. ‘He blasted me for not going with him,’ recalls Paul. ‘And he was right.’” Decades later, in 2008, Dimon’s job was effectively “to clean up the entire financial system. And in so doing, he proved a point he’s been focused on his entire life: that you can still win while doing the right thing.

Saying ‘No’ Allows You to Say ‘Yes’ Later
“It’s a well-known maxim that one of the hardest things about running a business is to maintain the ability to say no and thereby save limited resources for the best opportunities. Over time, most companies simply lose their discipline.” This discipline to save resources for prime opportunities was what ultimately made Dimon the last man standing on Wall Street during the collapse of 2008. “Don’t do anything stupid. And don’t waste any money. Let everybody else waste money and do stupid things; then we’ll buy them.”

“Know when to be capital rich. Both the economy and Wall Street have cycles, and he who is capital rich when the competition stumbles will see opportunities abound.

“Buy businesses with significant cash flow, preferably at a discount, prune their expenses without sacrificing revenues, and then use that additional cash flow from those cuts to buy more companies until you end up owning Citigroup.”

“We think [the business] should be prepared for adverse times,” Dimon told analysts in a conference call. “In fact, we think if you’re strong in adverse times that that puts you in the position where you actually can do more interesting things, either hire people or buy other companies that are having a tough time.”

I’ll post my final thoughts tomorrow.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been fascinated with the mainstream business world. I’ve been a longtime subscriber to Fortune, Fast Company and BusinessWeek. I thought by now I would have completed my MBA, having applied to a program two years ago. To be perfectly honest, I struggle with understanding exactly where I fit in this world as it relates to a career. Up to now, my life has been primarily invested in nonprofit religious sectors. While business principles apply across industries, there is something very intriguing about working in the mainstream business world (banking, tech, media, etc.). Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—I have this little strength called “belief,” which is always beckoning me to make sure I’m working on things I believe in. Bottom line profit is not something I get really passionate about. Profit, in my opinion, is just one of the ways to keep score.

I digress.

I just finished reading Duff McDonald’s book, Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase. Not only did this book provide a riveting front row seat–albeit with a rear view mirror–to the U.S. financial collapse (and micro successes) over the past several years, it provided what appears to be rare access into the life and mind of Jamie Dimon. Today, Jamie is the top dog at JPMorgan Chase and worked his way there after taking an unlikely path out of Harvard Business School. It’s an incredible story of “clarity, consistency, integrity, and courage.” Says McDonald, “Dimon was quite literally the only chief of a major bank to have properly prepared for the hundred-year storm that had hit Wall Street with such vengeance.” By sticking to his values, “Dimon has unquestionably become the dominant banking executive of his era.”

My plan is to unpack some of the lessons I learned over the next few days on this blog. More to come.

Time magazine’s Nancy Gibbs is one of my favorite writers. I envy how she is able to mix words and metaphors in such a simple and significant way. Her essay in the November 9, 2009 issue of Time is no exception. “The Case for Modesty, in an Age of Arrogance” is an open invitation for this generation–people of all ages–to be a courageous contagion of a virtue that has been absent far too long.

Modesty in private life is attractive, but in public life it is essential, especially now, when those who immodestly claimed to Know It All have Wiped Us Out. The problems we face are too fierce to accommodate arrogance. Humility leaves room for complexity, honors honest dissent, welcomes the outlandish idea that sweeps past ideology and feeds invention. We want to reimagine the health-care system, confront climate change, save our kids from a financial avalanche? The odds are much better if we come to the table assuming we don’t already have all the answers.

Read the full article on Time.com.

“Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.” — Donald Miller

I couldn’t put this book down. Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, should be required reading for anybody wanting to live a meaningful life. I can’t remember the last time I cried while reading a book. This could have more to do with the types of books I read, but A Million Miles moved me. Deeply.

The book is about looking at life—my life—as a story. What makes a good story? What stories do people want to be a part of? What stories do we ignore? What stories are worth living?

My highlights from A Million Miles:

“But nobody really remembers easy stories. Characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That’s what makes a story good. If you think about the stories you like most, they probably have lots of conflict. There is probably death at stake, inner death or actual death, you know. These polar charges, these happy and sad things in life, are like colors God uses to draw the world.”

“When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.”

“If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.”

“A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it is the basic structure of a good story.”

“The point of life is character transformation.”

“The idea that a character is what he does remains the hardest to actually live.”

“A general rule in creating stories is that characters don’t want to change. They must be forced to change.”

“Robert McKee says humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon. A ring has to be purchased. A home has to be sold. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.”

“It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.”

“‘Why would the Incas make people take the long route?’ my friend from Alabama asked. ‘Because the emperor knew,’ Carlos said, ‘the more painful the journey to Machu Picchu, the more the traveler would appreciate the city, once he got there.’”

A story goes to the next level with two key elements, and both of them have to do with the ambition of the character. First, he said, is the thing a character wants must be very difficult to attain. The more difficult, the better the story. The reason the story is better when the ambition is difficult, Steve said, is because there is more risk, and more risk makes the story question more interesting to an audience. The greatest stories, Steve told me, are the ones in which the character’s very life is at stake. There needs to be a question as to whether the character will make it, whether he will defeat the enemy or the enemy will defeat him. The second element that makes a story epic, he said, was the ambition had to be sacrificial. The protagonist has to be going through pain, risking his very life, for the sake of somebody else. “Those stories are gold,” Steve said. “You can ask people to name their favorite movies, and those two elements will be in almost all of them.”

“And if your friends are living boring stories, you probably will too.”

“The truth is, we are all living out the character of the roles we have played in our stories.”

“I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story.”

“’Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person.’ His voice was like thunder now. ‘You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.’”

“But Victor Frankl whispered in my ear all the same. He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.”

“I’ve let go of the idea that this life has a climax.”

“It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.”

“A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armor of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last.” —Joseph Conrad

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve read a book with this many pages, but at the suggestion of Jim Collins, I just finished reading In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam Years, by Jim and Sybil Stockdale.

James Stockdale was a navy pilot shot down in 1965 over Vietnam. For seven years he was tortured and held prisoner in Hoa Lo Prison, before being released in 1973.

In Love and War is a first-person account of the Stockdales story. Every other chapter is written by the other spouse, telling the story and struggle from their side of the world. It’s tender and tenacious, violent and victorious.

I was most impressed with Jim Stockdale’s grounded sense of self. As he recalls “a pilgrimage to [his] birthplace,” Jim says, “I figured it was healthy to be reminded of my upbringing and who I was from time to time; I would take all of those qualities I acquired in my boyhood home with me to the grave.”

It was this prevailing sense of self that led another Jim—Jim Collins—to unpack a bit more in his book Good to Great. Collins writes about a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp. Says Stockdale, “I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

When Collins asked who didn’t make it out, Stockdale replied: “Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Stockdale then added: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Witnessing this philosophy of duality, Collins went on to describe it as the Stockdale Paradox.

In contrast to this paradox, Stockdale said in his book that “chance and continual uncertainty are the ultimate destabilizers.”

Max Chafkin wrote a great cover story for Inc on Paul Graham and his Y Combinator consortium that helps start-ups get from idea to company.

The article is a great lesson on leadership, focus and results. One of the closing paragraphs in the story captures the essence of Graham and Y Combinator quite nicely.

Twenty-seven more companies will join Y Combinator in June, the program’s biggest class yet. Earlier this year, Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm that backed Google, agreed to give Graham $2 million to put to work. Graham hopes to use the money to expand Y Combinator, to fund 60 companies or more every year. I ask Graham why he is so intent on growing. Why does the world need so many little software companies? He looks at me as if I’m insane. “Imagine that instead of starting Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had taken jobs in some research lab,” he says. “They would have written a little piece of an operating system that might not even get used and maybe some boring academic papers. Think of how much more they did for the world as start-up founders.”

It would be great to see Y Combinator-type companies for a variety of different industries, including the nonprofit world.

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” — Dick Clark, former CEO at Merck

Jim Collins initially thought that How the Mighty Fall was a simple magazine article. An opportunity to rest his mind from six years of research working on his next book following Good to Great. I’m glad he didn’t try to fit this interim book into an article! However, if you’re looking for an article excerpt, Business Week did a decent job.

I love the way Jim Collins organizes information. His well-researched principles are so palatable and practical, mostly because he lets the story stay at the steering wheel. How the Mighty Fall is a darker book of sorts, spending the majority of its pages studying the five stages of decline, outlined here.

Stage 1: Hubris born of success
- Success entitlement, arrogance
- Neglect of a primary flywheel
- “What” replaces “why”
- Decline in learning orientation
- Discounting the role of luck

Stage 2: Undisciplined pursuit of more
- Unsustainable quest for growth, confusing big with great
- Undisciplined continuous leaps
- Declining proportion of right people in key seats
- Easy cash erodes cost discipline
- Bureaucracy subverts discipline
- Problematic succession of power
- PErsonal interests placed above organizational interests

Stage 3: Denial of risk and peril
- Amplify the positive, discount the negative
- Big bets and bold goals without empirical validation
- Incurring huge downside risk based on ambiguous data
- Erosion of healthy team dynamics
- Externalizing blame
- Obsessive reorganizations

Stage 4: Grasping for salvation
- A series of silver bullets
- Grasping for a leader-as-savior
- Panic and haste
- Radical change and “revolution” with fanfare
- Hype preceded results
- Initial upswing followed by disappointments

Stage 5: Capitulation to irrelevance or death

Whenever I read Collins’ stuff, I am always drawn to his repeated admonishment to stay true to your core values and principles.

“Discontinuous leaps into arenas for which you have no burning passion is undisciplined. Taking action inconsistent with your core values is undisciplined. Launching headlong into activities that do not fit with your economic or resource engine is undisciplined. To neglect your core business while you leap after exciting new adventures is undisciplined.”

“If you’re struggling with the tension between continuing your commitment to what made you successful and living in fear about what comes next,” says Collins, “ask yourself two questions:”

1. Does your primary flywheel face inevitable demise within the next five to ten years due to forces outside your control—will it become impossible for it to remain best in the world with a robust economic engine?

2. Have you lost passion for your primary flywheel?

“The #1 ingredient for a culture of discipline,” says Collins, “depends first and foremost upon having self-managed and self-motivated people.”

“The best leaders we’ve studied had a peculiar genius for seeing themselves as not all that important, recognizing the need to build an executive team and to craft a culture based on core values that do not depend upon a single heroic leader.”

“Reorganizations and restructurings can create a false sense that you’re actually doing something productive.”

At the conclusion of How the Mighty Fall, Collins channels the spirit of Winston Churchill and his famous “never give in” commencement speech from 1941. “We all need beacons of light as we struggle with the inevitable setbacks of life and work,” says Collins. “For me, that light has often come from studying [Churchill].”

Never give in. Be willing to change tactics, but never give up your core purpose. Be willing to kill failed business ideas, even to shutter big operations you’ve been in for a long time, but never give up on the idea of building a great company. Be willing to evolve into an entirely different portfolio of activities, even to the point of zero overlap with what you do today, but never give up on the principles that define your culture. Be willing to embrace the inevitability of creative destruction, but never give up on the discipline to create your own future. Be willing to embrace loss, to endure pain, to temporarily lose freedoms, but never give up faith in the ability to prevail. Be willing to form alliances with former adversaries, to accept necessary compromise, but never—ever—give up your core values.

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