The Hope Initiative Rien MacDonald

“I think that the art came out when it was meant to come out. I feel like the timing with most things, well everything is perfect. Basically what happened with the artwork is I just started painting and I'd sell, when the kids were little, I didn't sell straight away… Also, that's another story. I mean, the power of not giving up is another thing. It's a bit paradoxical, isn't it? It's like saying, ‘trust the universe’ but ‘don't give up’. And I really struggle with that because I'm thinking, okay, so, I'm gonna trust the universe, but I'm not gonna give up. It's almost like the energy behind it though, so you can kind of surrender, but keep doing the work without having that real attachment, that real struggling energy to have something happen.”

Episode #131 of The Hope Initiative with Kirsten Jackson.

“You almost have to be on and really live those values every day…

But I don't know. I guess the thing is whatever you're gonna do in life, it's not gonna be fucking easy. Like if you wanna make some money or you want to, whatever you want to do, nothing's easy. So that goes back to just trying to do as many hard things as possible and yeah, just trying to live your brand and trying to set enough time to do what you need to do. It's not easy, but fuck man. If you keep going, you never know. You never know…”

Episode #130 of The Hope Initiative with Sameet Singh.

“The power of vision, right? It became so clear to me over this two year journey that I've gone through where I've actually seen change occur. I spoke about that before, mental masturbation and then actually applying, two different things and I think to get any change in your life, yes, you need to do the reading, then you need to visualise it, and then you need to apply it. It's the Be, Do, Have.

You need to reverse engineer it, which is the having. So to be able to put that onto a calendar and then work backwards by saying all the things that I'm going to do, here's all the things that I need to do, you can put that onto a calendar and go, all right, well, when I walked into your room, you had the Iron Man in Texas. And then you had all of these steps, like checkpoints of how to get there. I was like, dude, that makes so much sense. Like people need to see this. There's something in that. There's magic in that.

Doing a marathon is not simple, but when you can break it down and you can write about it and you can see it all in front of you. It makes it into bite size chunks. And I guess one of the things these days is that everything's in our phones or it's on their computer, and we talk about, writing down your goals, but when was the last time that you wrote down your goals and you actually looked at them? People rarely write down their goals and print it out and put it on a wall where they're seeing it every day. You need to be in touch with that for you to actually ever achieve it. So to have a calendar, to have a journal, to have something that's a practice that's always in front of you, so it can be top of mind is where you're gonna get those results.”

Episode #129 of The Hope Initiative with Darcy Forrester.

“I just want to create unique style YouTube videos that kind of reflect that. I haven't really told anyone this, and I don't know if I wanna say it on the podcast, but I'm going to anyway. But I think this idea, ‘my life is a movie’ has kind of stuck with me and one of my basketball coaches, Brian Rolfe actually to told me this, that you can write your own script with your life. You don't have to take it from someone else, but you actually have the power to write it and follow through with it and do whatever you want to do.”

Episode #128 of The Hope Initiative with Zac Stevenson.

“I don't think I would've been inspired to leave and to go all in if I didn't have this thing looming over me that I had to take care of, that I had to pay off, which was that student loan debt and when I decided to quit and to go in all in on myself to partner with my dad, that was just one option. The other option was faking my death and moving to South America…

It was definitely a joke, but I spent some late nights thinking about that. I thought about joining the Navy - my dad was in the Navy - taking my degree and joining the officer Commission school, which wouldn't have been a bad option, but it wasn't me.

It wasn't what I wanted to do, you know, I would've just been doing that to pay off debt. I would've been not living my dream. Right?

It was right after my second bike got stolen from my apartment and I was like, screw this. I'm done. I'm tired of getting my bike stolen, living in these big cities and yeah, you know, I want to go home. I called him [my Dad] and I said, “Hey, I wanna come home and partner with you. And, he tried to talk me out of it…”

Episode #127 of The Hope Initiative with Brandon Littrell.

“In order to create, you need a space. So what happens I think is if you don't have space to create, you are in that grind.

There is a period of your life where people wanna skip to the creative part but I think we evolved into that. I think initially it was just hard work, grinding, trying to make money, trying to get space…

For some people, they might create space to enjoy their sport or they might create space to whatever, some people do it to watch tv… For us, I think there was this initial hustle and work ethic that, we really wanted to get outta the financial position we were in. We didn't like being in the neighbourhood we are in. We didn't like having to not be able to afford things and we wanted a better life, you know, and that's not saying that my neighbourhood was a bad neighbourhood, but we wanted a better life.”

Episode #126 of The Hope Initiative with Sean Santoro.