Daring Greatly + Loving Synchronicity

Newsletter + On This Day + Video

Yesterday, I stumbled across some new-to-me photos of Teddy Roosevelt, so I made the montage above, featuring them and one of my all-time favorite quotes:

“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 them 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, who comes short again and again... who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

Theodore Roosevelt
Speech at the Sorbonne
Paris, April 23, 1910

As a creative who’s constantly navigating the pulls of creativity and self-doubt, this quote has always meant a lot to me. I love Roosevelt’s image of being “in the arena,” like a bullfighter, marred by dust and sweat, but doing what you do anyway.

For me, the image and the quote are visceral reminders to never give up and never back down. From bulls…or bullies.

I grew up thinking of courage as something grand and noble, larger than life. But I’m finally realizing it’s about life itself—and often a daily battle: doing what needs to be done as best we can, moving forward through small, deliberate actions, and showing up, especially on the hardest days.

Today, I woke up to discover it was Teddy’s birthday. Oh, sweet synchronicity….

Editing the montage took me longer than usual because I wanted every image to capture a part of what it means—to me—to be “in the arena” and to “dare greatly.”

For me, there’s something quietly powerful about slowing down to choose, to create, to care about the details. Moments like these remind me that meaning is everywhere, hiding in the small stuff, waiting for us to pay attention and take notice.

Thanks for reading!
Clint

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ICYMI = NEWSLETTERS

• Sunday = All My Duckies In A Row

• Monday = Hooked On A Feeling?

• Tuesday = (Re)Writing A Love Story

• Wednesday = Lose Yourself + Vote = Win

• Thursday = "Lady Luck" In The Internet Age

• Friday = #FrankensteinFriday

• Saturday = Schisms Between Facts + Isms + Phobias

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NEWS + VIEWS

• H3 Crew: Quit Already (Bad Empanada Live) 📺

• Moist AI Is Out of Control (penguinz0) 📺

• BIG Adobe Fresco Update (Chris Piascik) 📺

• "Eminem dissed Diddy his whole career. You were friends with him"—Internet reacts as Elon Musk claims rapper was a Diddy party participant (SK Pop)

• Hollywood actor Luke Evans: ‘I was bullied for being gay before I even understood what it meant’ (The Guardian)

• US Copyright Office Deals Blow To Video Game Conservationists (PC Mag)

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ON THIS DAY = OCTOBER 27

BIRTHDAYS

• 1858 = Theodore Roosevelt = American colonel, POTUS, and Nobel Prize laureate

• 1914 = Dylan Thomas = Welsh poet and playwright

• 1922 = Ruby Dee = American actress and poet

• 1923 = Roy Lichtenstein = American painter and sculptor

• 1932 = Sylvia Plath = American writer

• 1939 = John Cleese = English actor, comedian, screenwriter and producer

• 1946 = Ivan Reitman = Slovak-Canadian actor, director, and producer

• 1950 = Fran Lebowitz = American author

• 1967 = Scott Weiland = American singer-songwriter

• 1982 = Patrick Fugit = American actor and producer

• 1984 = Kelly Osbourne = English television personality

• 1992 = Matthew Noszka = American model and actor

CELEBRATIONS

• LGBTQ History Month 🌈

• National American Beer Day 🍻

• National Black Cat Day 🐈‍⬛

• National Civics Day 🗳

• Navy Day ⚓️

EVENTS

• 1787 = The Federalist Papers, a collection of 85 articles and essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay under the collective pseudonym "Publius" to promote the ratification of the Constitution of the United States, are published.

• 1955 = Rebel Without A Cause is released in theaters.

• 1960 = Ben E. King records "Spanish Harlem" & "Stand By Me" in NYC.

• 1962 = Major Rudolf Anderson of the United States Air Force becomes the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane is shot down over Cuba by a Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile.

• 1964 = Sonny Bono and Cher get married. Cher wears bell-bottoms.

• 1970 = To protest a September 1970 Harper’s cover story entitled “The Struggle for Sexual Identity,” in which editor Joseph Epstein had lamented homosexuals as “an affront to our rationality” and homosexuality as “anathema,” Columbia graduate student Pete Fisher stages a sit-in at the magazine’s Park Avenue offices with 40 other Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) members. Although the sit-in does not elicit an official response from the magazine, it leads to GAA’s national Television debut and has an enormous impact on future media coverage of lesbian and gay issues.

• 1990 = After 38 years on the books, a federal law prohibiting gay and lesbians foreigners from entering the U.S. is repealed by Congress.

• 1992 = The Federal Court of Canada orders the Canadian military to stop discriminating against gays.

• 1992 = Allen R. Schindler, Jr., an American Radioman Petty Officer Third Class in the United States Navy, is brutally murdered for being gay. He was killed in a public toilet in Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan by shipmate Terry M. Helvey, who acted with the aid of an accomplice, Charles Vins. The ensuing murder case becomes synonymous with the gays in the military debate that had been brewing in the United States culminating in the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” bill.

• 1996 = Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet premieres at Mann's Chinese Theatre.

• 1999 = The Fourth Court of Appeals in San Antonio, Texas rules in Littleton v. Prange a post-operative transgender woman remains legally male and therefore her marriage to a biological male was invalid.

• 1999 = The government of the Canadian province of Ontario changes 67 laws to give same-sex couples the same rights as married couples.

• 2003 = Statistics from the FBI show that 16.7% of hate crimes committed in the country in 2002 were due to bias against the victim’s perceived sexual orientation, the highest rate in the 12 years federal records have been kept. (For 2023, HRC reports, “For the second year in a row, more than 1 in 5 of any type of hate crime is now motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ bias.”)

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PHOTO + QUOTE OF THE DAY

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
Theodore Roosevelt

ON SUBSTACK = NEW + FEATURED

• Once More With Feeling (NSFW)

• Wishin' + Hopin' (NSFW)

• Josh Callahan + Me

• More = NSFW + Select Videos

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ON YOUTUBE = NEW + FEATURED

• The Knowns + The Unknowns #2

• The Knowns + The Unknowns #1

• A Letter From Poet Countee Cullen To “His Very Pal” Harold Jackman

• More = Love Is Love + Popular Videos