“It takes years of hard work to become an overnight success.” - Gary Mack, Mind Gym

There is often a big difference between public perception and reality.

We've seen plenty of examples of this play out before:
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Someone, or some team, does something spectacular to land themselves in the national spotlight, much to the surprise of everyone.
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"They came out of nowhere," we hear people say.

Yesterday, no one knew who they were.
Today, nobody can stop talking about them.

The perception is that they are an “overnight success”.
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The reality is that they’ve been grinding.
In the dark.
Away from the spotlight.
​For years.

The overnight success is a myth.
But there’s a lot of truth in hard work.

Mistakes...and failures.

I am half-cringing even as I write those words.

I think I speak for most people when I say that we don't like those words. They make us feel uncomfortable. They make us feel imperfect. They can even make us feel bad about ourselves.

If, and when they do, it's because we have fallen into a trap. Our first misstep was thinking that we were perfect and that there is something wrong with being imperfect or admitting that we're imperfect. ​

Our other foot lands right in the trap and dooms our fate when we attach our self-worth to the outcome of what we're doing. We struggle, we make mistakes, we fail.  And all of a sudden we feel inadequate, we feel worthless and we feel like failures ourselves. We've let ourselves, and everybody else down. The self -talk is brutal, destructive and adds to the downward spiral.

Ughhh...Not a lot of fun. And it's enough to challenge your motivation for attempting to do this thing in the first place. (And if this pain and suffering is greater than your original motivation you may not only have lost this battle but it might also be the end of the war.)

Now let's see if we can re-frame how we look at and feel about those two words; Mistakes...and failures.

If we attempt to do something and we nail it on the first try then that thing hasn't changed us. If we were perfect at it to begin with, then it was already part of us...

It didn't challenge us.
It didn't change us.
We haven't grown because of it.
Net growth = ZERO.

But when we challenge ourselves, when we step outside of our comfort zone and try to stretch our limits into new territory, mistakes will be made. Failures are inevitable. 

As a matter of fact, (and here's the payoff):

Mistakes and failures are PROOF that you've challenged yourself, PROOF that you had the courage to put yourself out there and PROOF that you were brave enough to try something when the outcome was uncertain.

So if you're trying to get better at something, or if you're claiming to be in pursuit of greatness, of something epic, of chasing your dream, then you better have the mistakes and failures to prove it. 

​Thank you for reading,

Whether you are involved in athletics or not, you are most likely part of a team...or group, or company, or tribe or (fill in the blank).

Whatever it is you are a part of and whatever that (fill in the blank)'s mission is, the ability of your team to succeed depends largely on it's strength, it's "strength In numbers".

I believe that this is what most people mean when they use the word but I think that today's definition is missing something.

Let's go back a few hundred years and take a look at the origin of the word.

"To compete", comes from the Latin, competere, which is made up of into two shorter Latin words; com meaning "with, together" and petere meaning "to strive, or seek”.

So when we put those two back together we get the original (Latin) definition of the word compete, which is: “to strive for or seek together (with someone)”.

That is very different than how most people use it today.  While today's definition is very externally focused, ("for position, profit, or a prize"), the origin of the word strikes me far more internally driven.

When we compete, when we "seek together" with an opponent, we are striving to take our game to a higher level, possibly a level which we have never reached before, a level which we most likely could only attain when pushed there by an equally matched adversary.

And that  is why I love to compete.  

Embrace competition.  Use it to seek the best in yourself...​It may be the only way to bring it out of you.

Life is too short to value the wrong things.

Life is too short to not tell the people you love that you love them.

Life is too short to waste time trying to be who they want you to be instead of being yourself.

Life is too short to not know WHO you are, WHAT you stand for, WHERE you want to go and WHY you want to get there.
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