Edition #57 | First Things First | Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Most people are waiting for the right time, the right amount of money, the right conditions to begin. They keep putting what they know they are supposed to do on hold, telling themselves they will move when life settles down, when the grief fades, when the circumstances finally line up. But history keeps giving us the same answer. The people who built something that lasted rarely had perfect conditions. They had a reason, desire, and belief big enough to move anyway.

Let's get into it.

MARY KAY ASH

Mary Kay Ash was born May 12, 1918, in Hot Wells, Texas. Her father contracted tuberculosis and came home an invalid from the war. Her mother worked 14 hour days running a café in Houston. That left seven-year-old Mary Kay to run the house and care for her father. She did not complain. She worked.

She carried that into direct sales and became one of the best in the country. First at Stanley Home Products, then at World Gift Company in Dallas. She was good enough that the men she personally trained got promoted over her, earning salaries she would never be offered. It wasn't a one-time oversight. It was the system telling her what it thought she was worth. In 1963, she left.

At 45, with $5,000 in savings, she turned what was supposed to be a memoir into a business plan. One month before the doors were set to open, her husband George died of a heart attack. She opened them anyway on September 13, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

By year two, the company had done nearly $1 million in sales. By the time she died in November 2001, Mary Kay Cosmetics had 800,000 independent consultants in 37 countries and over $1.2 billion in annual sales. Baylor University named her the greatest female entrepreneur in American history and placed alongside Ford, Gates, Carnegie, and Rockefeller.

She ran the whole thing on a priority order she never apologized for…
God first. Family second. Career third. The empire didn't happen despite that order. It happened only because of it.

Strength and dignity are not things you put on after the hard season ends. They are what you choose to wear in the middle of it. The leader who can move forward without knowing exactly how things will turn out is not reckless, they are rooted. When your identity is settled and your purpose is clear, the future stops being a threat and starts being an invitation.

Loss, rejection, and setback will change you. The question is whether they shrink you or sharpen you. The people who build something lasting are rarely the ones who had the cleanest path. They are the ones who refused to let what happened to them become the ceiling on what they could still do. Has something in your life become an excuse to stay still when it was always meant to be the reason you finally moved?

First Things First

The sequence is the strategy. What you put first shapes every decision underneath it and how you treat people when you're tired, what you sacrifice when it gets hard, who you become in the process. Mary Kay did not stumble into her priority order. She built it on purpose, held it under pressure, and built a billion-dollar company on top of it.

Where is the sequence off in your life right now? Where are you giving your best hours to something that shouldn't be first. Are the people or principles that matter most only getting what's left? That gap is worth naming. Not eventually. Now.

Write down your top three priorities today. Not goals, priorities. There may be more that come to mind but please do try to limit priorities to one or three maximum. Because any more than that means everything is a priority. And that doesn’t fare well for anyone looking to get ahead. If anyone knows this I do, I have tried and tried to put to many things on my plate at once, and it’s not that it cannot all be done it’s that it cannot all be done at the same time with Excellence. Look back at your last week honestly and ask if your time matched your list. If it didn't, you have your next assignment.

One last thought. The empire you are capable of building is not built in spite of the right order. It is built because of it. That is First Things First.

Please forward this to a young person, friend, or family member in your life who you know needs this. You never know the impact of what simply sharing a good idea can do. Thank you!