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- The Fortitude Chronicle: A Weekly Digest of Athletic Determination
The Fortitude Chronicle: A Weekly Digest of Athletic Determination
The Story You Tell Yourself Is the Only Life You'll Ever Know
Colin Jonov
November 24, 2025
The Fortitude Chronicle: A Weekly Digest of Athletic Determination
Welcome to The Fortitude Chronicle, a weekly newsletter devoted to helping you enhance mental fortitude and conquer life's challenges.
In this week's edition, I discuss the importance of perspective.
We always invite our readers to share their own unique perspectives. If you're inspired and wish to contribute your own experiences or reflections, we encourage you to reach out. The opportunity to ghost write and bring fresh insights to our community is always open.
The Playbook
Monday Momentum
For the Relentless Mind
The Story You Tell Yourself Is the Only Life You'll Ever Know
You Don’t Experience Life. You Experience the Life You Focus On.
Everyone gets a mix of good and bad. You lose people. You get opportunities. Setbacks show up uninvited. Wins sometimes slip in by accident. The events themselves are indifferent. Reality doesn’t owe you a narrative.
Meaning isn’t in the circumstances—it’s in the story you tell yourself about them.
Most people misunderstand this. They think life is something that happens to them. But you don’t experience reality in raw form. You experience a filtered, interpreted version based on what you notice and what you choose to remember. Your focus determines the perspective of every day.
A delayed flight is a miserable ordeal for one traveler, a rare pocket of downtime for another. A lost job is a disaster for someone who believes it’s the end; for someone else, it’s a forced pivot they would never have chosen but needed desperately.
Events are unbiased. You assign them meaning—usually on autopilot, rarely with intention.
Want to change your reality? Change your focus. Start by noticing the questions you ask yourself when things go sideways. Is this a signal that you’re unlucky, or is it feedback about what isn’t working? Is the world against you, or are you being shown what to let go?
The meaning you extract dictates the quality of your experience—always has, always will. We’re all carrying pain and possibility. Most people drag their pain everywhere and overlook their possibility. High performers reverse the order. They know that what they focus on isn’t just what they see—it’s what becomes real.
You don’t get to choose everything that happens. You do get to choose the story you tell about it. That story becomes your reality, whether you notice or not.
Two Quotes
“Attitude is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Optimism is a choice. Kindness is a choice. Giving is a choice. Respect is a choice. Whatever choice you make makes you. Choose wisely.”— Roy T. Bennett
“I’m not negotiating with myself. I signed that contract with myself, I’m doing it.”— Kobe Bryant
Four Posts
To Building Fortitude.
Best Regards,
Colin Jonov, Founder & CEO Athletic Fortitude
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