Newsletter Archives
Apr 9, 2026 — Stealing Moments and The Magic of the Space Between
Most people treat waiting as wasted time.
But what if the moments in between—the sideline, the pause, the quiet gaps in your day—are where everything that matters is actually happening?
From an unexpected scene during an NFL playoff game to a forgotten book that took 16 years to be discovered, this issue explores a powerful truth: the way you use the in-between moments shapes everything that follows.
Take Two
No one should settle for a half-lived life.
WORDS TO WONDER
"You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."
— Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher (121–180 AD)
PERSPECTIVES TO PONDER
During an NFL playoff game in January 2025, cameras caught something no one expected.
Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown was on the sidelines—and he was reading a book.
Not scrolling. Not pacing. Not hyping himself up.
Reading.
The commentators were stunned. As the camera zoomed in, the title came into focus: Inner Excellence—a book about mastering your mindset.
A.J. Brown reading Inner Excellence on the sideline
In the middle of one of the highest-pressure environments in professional sports.
It would be easy to dismiss as strange.
But look closer, and it reveals something worth thinking about.
When A.J. Brown stepped onto the field, he competed fully. But when he stepped off it, he didn't switch off—he simply shifted. From performing to preparing. From output to input.
He understood something Marcus Aurelius understood two thousand years ago:
The outer game is always downstream of the inner one.
You can't control the defense. You can't control the crowd, the calls, or the moment the ball comes your way. But you can control what's happening in your mind—how you think, what you focus on, how you respond.
That's not a small thing. That is the thing.
This hit close to home for me.
I'm a fast-paced person. Waiting has never been a strong suit. Doctors' offices, the DMV—the wait was torture. I'd feel frustration building with every passing minute, as if the time were being stolen from me.
Then someone offered a simple suggestion: bring a book everywhere you go.
It changed everything.
Suddenly, the wait wasn't wasted time. It was reading time. The places I dreaded became the places I actually looked forward to—because I knew I'd get uninterrupted pages. With the Kindle app on my phone, I now carry an entire library in my pocket. What used to feel like time being taken from me became time I was quietly grateful for.
A.J. Brown figured out the same thing—just on a bigger stage.
The sideline wasn't downtime. It was an opportunity. The in-between moment was the preparation.
Most of us treat the gaps in our day as interruptions. The commute. The wait. The quiet Tuesday afternoon. But those gaps are always something—the only question is whether we choose what they become.
Marcus Aurelius didn't write his Meditations for publication. He wrote them for himself—daily mental training in the margins of running an empire. No cameras. No crowd. Just a man, doing the inner work, in the in-between moments.
The sideline is never just the sideline. The wait is never just the wait. The in-between is where it happens—if you choose to show up for it.
The next time life makes you wait—don't kill time. Steal it.
ONE QUESTION WORTH SITTING WITH
Are you someone who kills time—or someone who captures it?
MORE TO THE STORY
Jim Murphy spent years writing a book about mastering your mindset.
He poured his experience as a mental performance coach into every page—working with elite athletes, studying what separated the good from the truly great, distilling it into something practical and transferable.
Inner Excellence was published in 2008.
It didn't make a big splash. No bestseller lists. No viral moment. No major press. For sixteen years, it sold quietly—appreciated by those who found it, largely unknown to everyone else.
Then, on a January afternoon in 2025, a camera happened to zoom in on an NFL sideline.
And everything changed.
Within days of A.J. Brown being spotted reading it during a playoff game, Inner Excellence shot to #1 on Amazon. It became a nationwide bestseller. Sales increased by—and this number is not a typo—53,000,000%.
Sixteen years of near-silence. Then one unexpected moment, and the world finally caught up to the work.
Jim Murphy didn't do anything differently. He had simply done the work—carefully, honestly, over a decade prior—and trusted that it had value.
He was right. The world just needed time to find out.
This is worth sitting with.
Because most of us measure the impact of our work in real time. We write the article and watch the clicks. We launch the project and check the response. We put something into the world and wait—impatiently—for the world to confirm it mattered.
But impact doesn't always announce itself on your schedule.
Sometimes your work is quietly sitting on a shelf somewhere, waiting for the right person to pick it up at the right moment—and set off a chain reaction you never could have predicted.
You may never know who reads what you write. Who is shaped by how you lead. Who carries forward something you said in a conversation you've long since forgotten.
Influence doesn't always earn applause.
Sometimes it's just a camera zooming in at exactly the right moment—sixteen years later.
So keep doing the work. Do it well. Do it with intention.
Your moment of recognition may simply be running on a different timeline than you expected.
BEFORE YOU GO
The waiting room. The sideline. The space between what just happened and what comes next.
These aren't gaps in your life.
They're part of it.
You don't need more hours in the day. You might just need a different relationship with the ones you're already standing in.
Just steal the moments.
The in-between isn't empty.
It's available.
Stay inspired by the life you're living.
Kevin