Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us; so be quick to love, make haste to be kind, and go in … - Pete Buttigieg

Yet even now he looked on his days as mayor — not governor or lieutenant governor or baseball team owner or naval aviator — as the best job he'd ever had.

The possibility of highly visible failure has an exceptional power to propel us to want to succeed, and that power can be harnessed to motivate a team or even a community to do something difficult.

As a military officer serving under Don't Ask Don't Tell and as an elected official in the state of Indiana when Mike Pence was governor, at a certain point, when it came to professional setbacks I had to wonder whether just acknowloging who I was was going to be the ultimate, career-ending professional setback. I came back from the deployment and realised that you only get to live one life and I was not interested in not knowing what it was like to be in love any longer. So I just came out. I had no idea what kind of professional setback it would be especially cos, incoveniently, it was an election year in my socially conservative community. What happened was that when I trusted voters to judge me on the job that I did for them, they decided to trust me and re-elected me with 80% of the vote and what I learned was that trust can be reciprocated and that part of how you can win and derserve to win is to know what's worth more to you than winning.