30 Days of Genius- Levar Burton

Levar Burton's words are in bold. My comments are in italics.

• "My experience was that life was really linear in nature. But this year, I have experienced that life is actually circular. It is possible to come back to the same place you were on the wheel, but as a different person."
• A theme in Levar's career has been openness to opportunity and diversity of experience. When you think one chapter of your life has been closed for good, you're being short-sighted. Be open to all experiences, and you may return to a familiar place as a different person.
• Levar uses his return to the concept of Roots, 40 years after the show originally aired, as an example. He started the show as a 19 year old doing his first real job. He returns as an Executive Producer with four decades of experience in the professional world as a black man in America that he can apply to the new Roots to align it with the ideas of today's audience. 

• "All of the decisions in my life and my career have been guided by one thing. Passion. Find out that which you are passionate about, and you have a key to what’s going to make you happy."
• Levar emphasizes the point that passion brings more than just happiness- it brings the ability to fight through hard times and work towards a brighter future. Passion for what you do makes longevity in your work possible. 
• "Put in your time, do the work. Become your own advocate. You have to not only be the artist and creator, you have to be the promoter. You have to hustle. One’s hustle is a sign of the degree to which one is really passionate about getting it done. "
• Hustle is passion's offspring, and is the second necessary ingredient to success. Just because you love your writing, your company, your brand, that doesn't mean people will start coming to it. Passion just means you enjoy doing it. To spread the word, you need to hustle.

• "It takes energy as well as presence to change the world. You can’t change the world with an absentee point of view." 
• Levar discusses getting in touch with himself as an individual in the years after Roots went off the air. He needed to understand what he believed to be true. He mentions two strategies to find presence:
• 1. Ask yourself the tough questions. Dig deeper. Are you working as hard as you say you are? Are your actions mirror reflections of your words, or are they the muddled reflection of a puddle?
• 2. Find a group of friends to be critics on your personal life. If you are veering away from the person you want to be, you need friends to will be able to recognize that and tell it to you in a way that you believe. 

• "The world is full of experiences. You just have to expose yourself to enough before you figure out where you land."
• Experiment. Try new things. Get to know yourself. 

• "You can never predict the end of the story in the first chapter."
• Don't make assumptions about the future, they're likely very wrong. You can only connect the dots looking backwards. If you have an end goal, keep working towards it. Though things may seem blight in the beginning, all you can control is your passion and your hustle. With enough of each, you can get to a finished story you're proud of. 

• "Imagination is the superpower of the human being." 
• Look around. Everything you see, in the physical world and the societal, was just an idea in someone's mind. Chairs, bridges, democracy, school, school buildings. It was all just an idea. What ideas do you have?