⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️

Founder/CEO - Main Street Mentor, teaching you how to build sustainable growth through a vibrant connection with your audience. #TEDxAlum #GothamAlum 4w5 INFJ

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

You don't have to share beliefs to love another human being.

[Dr. Arthur Brooks @arthurbrooks]

I ask the executives I work with when they last made a real friend.

They get quiet. Almost without fail, the names they come up with are people they haven't seen in twenty years — old roommates, or people they knew before the striving started.

That is the warning sign. And I recognize it, because it used to be me. At one point in my life, I was surrounded by people all day. My phone never stopped ringing. My calendar was packed. But I had never been lonelier.

I would not have admitted it at the time. But if something truly hard had happened — the kind of thing you don't put in a meeting agenda — I'm not sure I would have known who to call.

There is a lie strivers tell themselves about friendship, and the lie sounds reasonable: I'm in a sprint right now. There will be time for real friends later. I've heard versions of this from people in their twenties through their fifties. The essence never changes; only the "later" gets pushed further.

But friendship doesn't work the way the striver imagines. The people who become your friends-for-life are the people you accumulate time with — through the moves, the boring Tuesdays, the bad years. You can't fast-forward to them. You can't acquire them at fifty-five the way you acquire a second home.

The reason the names always come from college is that college was the last time friendship was the default mode of their lives. They were thrown together with people in proximity over years, with nothing competing for their attention. They didn't have to choose; the friendship happened on its own.

After college, friendship stopped being free. It started costing time, and the deliberate decision to make somebody a priority. Most strivers stop paying that cost and then, decades later, wonder why the bench is empty.

Friendship compounds, and so does its absence.

Striving is a fine thing — I'm pro-striving. The mistake is treating friendship as something that sits outside the striving, a hobby for the off-hours. By the time the urgent work slows down, the people who would have become your friends-for-life have spent those decades becoming somebody else's.

The friends you'll need at fifty-five are the people you are postponing this week.

Do not wait for friendship to become convenient. Pick up the phone and make the plans now.

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

@Codie_Sanchez SMB

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

So many, from the outside looking in at Christianity, think it’s a fools errand. And when we let media control the narrative we consume, then they’d be right in that assumption. However, watching @BenSasse live our faith out loud speaks a better word.

[Jason Kovacs @jasonkovacs]

This is a must watch interview with @BenSasse and @DouthatNYT

"In Christianity, the need for daily repentance is just a truth. I am broken. I leave undone those things which I ought to have done..."

"I've continued to feel a peace about the fact that death is something that we should hate...yet it's pretty good that you pass through the veil of tears one time and then there will be no more tears, there will be no more cancer..."

[De Christian Life @DeChristianLife]

Wives note: What your husband really neede in marriage.

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

And this is why I started your #MainStreetMentor.

[Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent @SecScottBessent]

For the last four decades, Wall Street has grown wealthier than ever before. And it can continue to grow and do well. But for the next four years, it’s Main Street’s turn.

It’s Main Street’s turn to hire workers. It’s Main Street’s turn to drive investment. And it’s Main Street’s turn to restore the American Dream.

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

GOLD right here!

[Adam Lane Smith | The Attachment Specialist @AdamLaneSmith]

Your attachment style isn’t a label—it’s a roadmap for where you need to heal.

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

Or could it be they serve a different sovereign maker/creator of all things than you do? Worthy of a conversation at least, don’t you think @Codie_Sanchez?

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

Being a CEO is not fun. It means working harder, more, and faster than everyone else. Anyone who says differently has never truly led.

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

Today is a great day to practice gratitude. (Especially for those you think are crazy or make you crazy at least.)

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

Once you realize life isn’t about you, you start to live a life of freedom.

How is this true?

It’s a paradox for sure.

However, wisdom teaches us those who flourish sacrifice for others.

What you do next is your free choice.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

What stops us from speaking truth to power is not a desire for harmony. It’s a climate of fear and futility.

When leaders fail to make it safe and worthwhile to be honest, we bite our tongues.

Weak leaders stifle dissent and leave themselves weaker. Strong leaders welcome dissent and make themselves stronger.

https://t.co/4K01eUCQzY

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

Great 🧵 her by @hey_madni.

#Canva is proving that listening to customers and making simple solutions can scale.

[Madni Aghadi @hey_madni]

🚨 Breaking news:

Canva Create is now over, and it was wild.

The new Canva is going to transform DESIGN forever

16 incredible updates:

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

Yes.

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

Circle: Small
Impact: Wide
Next steps: Quiet
Life: Private
Business: Public
Prayers: Often
Love: Big

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

You’ve got to find your people and then you find yourself.

#Wisdom from @drewholcomb

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

Very inspiring session this morning at #MainStreetNow about the wounds places can carry and how avoidance isn’t the answer.

Grateful to be present with these shepherds and leaders of our most beloved places.

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

@timkellernyc @TweetHunterIO screenshot

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

@thejustinwelsh Paradoxical wisdom at its best!

[David Cassidy @DPCassidyTKC]

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd. - Flannery O'Connor

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

It’s still true.

Let’s love well today, friends.

[⭐️ Josh Collins ⭐️ @sixsteps268]

Briliant!!!

[Billy Oppenheimer @bpoppenheimer]

Early in his pro tennis career, Andre Agassi couldn’t beat a player named Boris Becker.

Agassi particularly struggled with Becker’s serve.

“His serve was something the game had never seen before,” Agassi explained.

Studying film of Becker, “I started to realize,” Agassi said,

“He had this weird tick with his tongue. I’m not kidding. He would go into his rocking motion, and just as he was about to toss the ball, he would stick his tongue out. It would either be right in the middle of his lip or to the left corner of his lip.”

If in the middle of his lip, Becker would serve the ball up the middle. If to the side, he would serve the ball to the side.

After he learned the way Becker revealed himself with a tongue tick, Agassi said,

“The hardest part wasn’t returning his serve. The hardest part was not letting him know that I knew this. I had to resist the temptation of reading his serve for the majority of the match, and instead, choose the moments when I was going to use that information on a given point to execute a shot that would allow me to break the match open.”

Agassi won 9 out of the next 11 matches against Becker.

After Becker retired in 1999, over a beer, Agassi said to Becker,

“By the way, did you know you used to do this with your serve?”

Agassi said, “He about fell off the chair. And then he said, ‘I used to go home all the time and tell my wife, it’s like he reads my mind! Little did I know you were just reading my tongue.’”

Takeaway 1:

In a collection of biographies of prominent Greeks and Romans, the ancient historian Plutarch writes,

“In the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue or vice…Indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes the greatest revelation.”

Similarly, in the Acknowledgments at the end of his book, “The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz,” Erik Larson writes that when he began his research for the book,

“I set out to hunt for the stories that often get left out of the massive biographies of Churchill [because] they seem too frivolous. But it is in frivolity, in the little moments, that Churchill often revealed himself.”

In the frivolity, in the little moments, in a small thing like a phrase, a jest, or a tongue tick—often, much is revealed.

Takeaway 2:

In his book, “Creativity, Inc.,” Pixar co-founder writes about one of the principles that guided him in life and in business:

“When faced with a challenge, get smarter.”

Agassi began to study Becker because, after yet another loss to him in the semifinals of the 1988 Indian Wells Open, Agassi writes, “I promise myself I won’t lose to him the next time we meet.”

To make good on that promise, he knew he didn't need to get better. He needed to get smarter. “Tennis is about problem-solving,” Agassi says after telling the Becker story. “And the more you understand...the more problems you can solve—in life and in business.”

In sports, in business, in life—when faced with a challenge, get smarter.

- - -

“Knowledge [is] like gold—a currency you will transform into something more valuable than you can imagine.” — Robert Greene

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