Jim VandeHei

You make each one of those decisions, and every one either leads to happiness in feeling better about yourself or sadness in feeling like crap.

Nobody wants to feel like crap.

So how did I get from Oshkosh and my 1.491 to DC and then having some success?

It was studying other people who were smarter than me,

who were better than me, who were more talented than me, who were better read than me, who just knew a lot more than me, who were healthier than me.

And then I tried to copy them.

If they read a book I hadn't read, I read it.

Or if they used a word I'd never heard in Oshkosh, I wrote it down on a piece of paper, and I would work it into my vocabulary.

If they were fitter than I were, I'd try to copy their habits.

I started to take control of what we can control.

You control you.

You control your reactions.

The best advice I ever got was five words.

Do the next right thing.

Do the next right thing.

It's really hard to be a good person.

It's hard to be moral.

It's hard to do all the things right.

It's pretty easy to do the next right thing.

And if you do that, if you do things that would make you proud, your parents proud, your kids proud, your friends proud, you do that and then do it again, suddenly you're a pretty good person.