The art of reset
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december 2019
it’s one of those years and month i will
never forget
i was talking to a bunch of friends and
family they all had the same thing
2020 is going to be their year
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everyone 20 20 20 20. even my mom called
me she said
son jesus christ hallelujah 2020 is
gonna be a great year
i chuckle a little because 20 years
prior to that
my mom had called me 1999. i don’t know
if you guys remember remember y2k
the planes won’t fall off from the sky
well my mom is a devoted christian
she called me she said son december 31st
jesus christ is coming when the clock
strikes 12 he’s taking all his children
with you and i would love for you to
come with me in jesus christ to heaven
we know what happened after that right
so anyway
so i’m thinking about 2020 i’m not
really a social media guy
i go on instagram and i’m seeing
everyone posting
memes and posts about 20 20 20. i don’t
know what it is about 2020. i don’t know
the 2020 vision thing the numbers
i decided i’m not gonna go away
i’m going to stay home i’m going to
atone myself
and take 2020 peacefully
because i never understood this whole
new year’s resolution thing
right how do you just take one day to
change your life
i’m gonna lose my i’m gonna lose a lot
of weight but what happened for the last
12 months
right so anyway i go into 20
december 31st 2020 came in
felt like any other year a couple weeks
into january
i decided to go breakfast one of my
favorite places in la microbiotic please
eat my buckwheat pancakes i get a call
from a friend
he says yo did you hear what happened i
said what he said kobe died
i said kobe who said brian
so i go on instagram i go on google i
don’t see anything
now i don’t know about you guys but you
know how there’s some people you just
believe just won’t ever die right like i
remember
christopher reed superman felt like he
would never die
or morgan stanley i mean i’m 48 years
old i remember watching morgan stanley
when i was three years old sesame street
and he’s live and kicking to this day
you know he’s like god you just don’t
believe
some people would die it’s almost like
they conquer immortality
40 minutes later all the news outlets
reported
kobe tragically had passed away now it
hit a little bit hard for me because
a month prior to that i was with him at
diddy’s 50th
year anniversary and it hit hard now
while that was happening
in the far far far east there was
rumblings and whispers about
something walking to february
these whispers started to get louder
something about a virus
now we as americans in recent memory
we’ve seen a couple viruses
come right saws ebola remember the kid
who got on a plane to come to
america they switched the plane back
quarantined the dude
for like 20 days so we always thought
oh it’s like any other virus
geographically speaking they always seem
to contain it
where these viruses emerge from
but there was a word that they used that
made all of us say whoa
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locked down locked down
i remember thinking to myself what does
that mean
because we never witnessed it there was
no historical reference
to it i mean when you think about it the
turn of the last century
1918 the 1920s spanish flu no lockdown
world war one world war ii no lockdown
great depression no lockdown
cuban missile crisis no lockdown vietnam
war on lockdown
civil rights riots no rock down
70s 80s 90s no lockdown 911 no not
no lockdown the great recession no
lockdown
so what does a lockdown means
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one sunday morning march 15
i fly to new york with a friend of mine
we get to new york
about three o’clock we land i decided to
go take a nap
got up at seven starving it’s this
restaurant i love right down the street
for me
i go to the restaurant the restaurant is
closed
okay i go to bond street that’s closed
i try to go to my jamaican spot that’s
close
i call my assistant kim order me some
noble i’m gonna go pick it
up she calls me back noble 57th
noble downtown is closed oh by the way
your favorite cuban restaurant in
midtown is closed
now i didn’t put two and two together
because you know i’m in my space i’m in
my world
i’m not i don’t know what’s going on so
i’m like i gotta eat something i’m
standing right in front of wendy’s
i don’t like fast food i’m a quinoa type
of guy to be honest with you
so so i said i’m gonna get the best
of the worst there’s a restaurant i know
no matter what’s going on on this planet
it always
stays open i don’t care if there’s an
alien ship hovering around new york city
is going to stay open it might even send
some food to the aliens
i walk 20 blocks i get there
and subway is closed
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i call several other subways and they’re
all closed
i have to tell you ladies and gentlemen
i was sincerely concerned
it was around eight o’clock at night
sunday
about 74 degrees but it was eerily
quiet so i’m like you know what i’m used
to fasting
i go home i deal with it with the next
morning i get up
i have somewhere to go an appointment i
go to my appointment
when i get there everyone was like in
the mayhem
new york city just said they’re going
into a lockdown
i said whoa book me the next flight
back to la because if there is a
lockdown
i think i’m better situated to navigate
in la
so i fly to la as i get to la and i get
home it just dawned upon me
it was like i had an epiphany
what have happened now is the planet
is about to teach us the word
reset reset is one of the most
understated underappreciated
undervalue word it’s a characteristic
that we don’t attribute to us
like courage endurance resilience
when we think of reset we think of
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setting your clock you reset your clock
with your watch
right we don’t think of it like it’s the
natural progression in life
that you need to because what is reset
reset is
you rethink you re-analyze recalibrate
revalue readjust
rebrand redefine all of those are the
subtext of reset
so i get home in la
i didn’t want to do what everyone else i
think was going to do
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stay locked down hope for the best
eat netflix amazon prime
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my partner out of london we got a
startup we decided we’re going to
continuously work
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call strategic partnership fortune 500
companies
because we want to be ready for when
this does open
we was continuously working
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so for the better part of march april
may was home doing our work may i
decided to
start traveling go back to new york
but unfortunately a tragic happened in
may that almost
pinned down the country the killing of
george floyd
we started to see the whole country
protest
more than 40 states we’ve never seen
protests and
unrest like this not even during the
civil war
it wasn’t just here in the states it was
60 other countries
europe africa australia
new zealand south korea
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may june july
protest i witnessed it in l.a
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new york miami
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i get a call from a friend of mine dave
chappelle and all this
say hey prize i’m doing a birthday party
love for you to come and celebrate with
me
i said no problem the timing was kind of
perfect because i was heading to la
anyway
so i said let me stop in columbus he
said by the way you think the fugitives
could come and perform i said come on
dude that’s never gonna happen
so i get to columbus drop my back to the
hotel now dave
he doesn’t want anyone around him until
you first get tested
so he’s actually the first person that i
saw
had a covet testing facility
when he got tested i was clear so i meet
with dave
i said what’s this thing with this party
you know where he’s going at the house
no you know i do shows six days a week
and it’s gonna be my party’s gonna be
part of the show i said what do you mean
show i thought
the country was on lockdown he said no i
spoke to the governor
he allowed me to do shows in a corn
field
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corn field but everybody practice social
distancing so
dave chappelle said man i don’t want to
just sit around home i’m able to just
perform every day and every other week i
invite my
friends to do something special like
last week chris rock was there
so dave chappelle understood he had to
reset so now he readjusted
right bill maher came that week kevin
hart came
we had a great time fly back to l.a with
kevin
we get to la kevin said hey listen man
if you’re around
i’m doing this rehearsal at a hotel for
my next special
can you come down just let me know what
you think you know
i invite about 20 people they don’t know
what’s what’s going on
they just come and i just do my gig and
see
how people feel like oh okay
he readjusted now by that time we’re
going towards the end of august
i think this point we all realize 2020
it’s not the year we thought it was
going to be right it’s pretty much a dud
but we’re going into the fall i think
most of us is like man i just want to
get this year over with we’re hearing
about second wave
third wave let’s try to get out of this
peacefully and
then get to 21.
but there’s an elephant in the room it’s
an election year
doesn’t matter what your political
affiliation is
the company is either going to get back
in
or ex-vice president is going to make
history with a woman vice president
we knew what happened i’m back in
december
2020 now the irony
of a year ago compared to this year
all my friends all the posting all the
means
now one person said 21 is going to be
their year
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so i decided i’m going to do a repeat
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i’m going to go back and tone myself
get prepared for 21. the same thing
happened the year came
in like any other year we had a little
bump in january
but now we’re in real time we’re in may
remember everybody said new york is dead
new york will never come back again i
don’t know about you guys
looks like it’s live right now to me
there’s traffic people walking down the
street
right
we’re new yorkers we’re resilient that’s
what we do
but i’m gonna say this the few of us
that saw what transpired in the last 18
months
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what we understand is this
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to continuously pursue your goals
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to continuously pursue greatness
there’s a couple of things that you have
to know and understand
the main thing is this no matter what
happened moving forward
we know in a couple months from now
country’s gonna be completely open
they said it’s gonna be i think it’s
gonna be one of the greatest summers
in our lives comparing it to the rolling
20s
right but
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you know how we are we tend to forget
things right as
we move on right but the few of us
who understood what happened because
if the planet was
speeding at a thousand miles per hour
and the pandemic made it suddenly stop
it’s like
speeding on the highway going 150 miles
an hour you see a police officer you
pump the brakes right so what happened
with this planet
it happened because for the first time
when it stopped the pacific ocean you
started to see all these dolphins
swimming now because we weren’t
tempering with the ocean
china for the first time the skies were
blue
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even in india they were able to see the
himalayas
because everyone was home i don’t know
we all took advantage
of this reset but the ones who
understood or understand what that meant
it means we just mastered the art
and the philosophy of reset
thank you very much ladies and gentlemen
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you