Ian Brennan

You can't control how smart you are, how funny you are, how good-looking you are. The one thing you can control in your life is how hard you work.

The one way to guarantee you're not going to be successful at something is to give up on it. Really ambitious goals — starting a theater company, running for Congress, opening an art gallery in Prague. These things are hard. But even the hardest goal is not that hard.

Dare to say out loud the thing that you actually want and the hard part is actually over. Because then you'll start to make a plan, and when you have a plan, then you'll start to make that plan real.