When I was maybe 10 or 11, I decided one day that I wanted to be a snowboarder. I had skied a decent amount with my family but snowboarding was a new challenge I wanted to face. I would see the older kids flying down the mountain and I wanted to be them. So I told my dad that next time we went skiing I would be renting a snowboard instead of skis. When we got there, I almost chickened out and got skis. The thought of actually going through with it scared the crap out of me. But I rented the board. And then I spent the ENTIRE DAY ON MY BUTT. My poor family kept having to wait up on me. My dad asked me a few times if I wanted to trade the board back in and get some skis. The offer was enticing, but really I wanted to be able to fly down that mountain like the older dudes.
By the end of the day, I was really tired and sick of slamming my face into the snow. I wasn’t even trying that hard anymore. My dad was helping me up and he told me, “If you want to be successful at this, it’s not going to happen immediately. You have to work hard and practice. You’ll figure it out eventually if you really give it 100%.”
It was a sobering lesson for me that very few things will ever come easy. Life is a tough struggle; you have to really dig your heels in and work hard for what you want. My long term goals are very difficult to reach. The worst thing about my long term goals is that I don’t know the best path to take to reach them. It’s been easy to float along in a bubble of comfort knowing that my job is pretty decent, but it can’t last me forever. My old pal Rich Ramsey used to say “You’ll never become what you aren’t becoming.” I used to just laugh and then punch him in the face, but I’ve since realized that it’s very true. If you want to be something and do something, you have to be active in your steps to get there. I can’t just sit around saying that I’ll worry about it later. The first steps are the hardest, but they put me that much closer to where I want to be. Onward!
