If you go into life defeated there’s not much hope to win the day. I played football for 6 years, 7th 8th grade and all through high school. My high school was pretty big, I had a graduating class of 36 with 160 students in the school. Yeah. Huuge. We actually didn’t even have a cafeteria; we ate in the hallway. Let me tell you though, when your hot lunch program consists of subway, deli chicken, cousins, homemade tacos, and Chinese food, you don’t really care where you eat. With that you can imagine the size of our football team. Actually our average lineman was about 170 pounds. Lucky for me I was 160 so I won the job of running back. Needless to say although I loved it, that job wasn’t always fun. Each year we had about 24 players on the team and usually 10 of those were freshman. Yea, Huuge. We were also in Division 7. I’m sure most of you didn’t even know there were 7 divisions in high school football. Needless to say we weren’t the most intimidating group of guys and we sure never scared a team during warm-ups. But even though we were tiny, we never went into a game without thinking we could win. We were confident in ourselves every time we stepped onto the field. Teams knew we were small, but we never said die. No matter where the game was at we were going to give you everything we had until the clock said 0.
I remember one game in particular we played St. John’s Military Academy. St John’s was an all guys military school where students lived on campus. Their quarterback was Trevon Hughes. Trevon would be the starting point guard for the Wisconsin badgers just 12 months later. He ran a 4.4 sec 40 yard dash and lead the state in rushing yards, yes as a quarterback. We still went into the game confident like we always do. But you know, things don’t always go the way you want them to. Trevon actually set a conference record for total yards in a game that day. He rushed for over 250 yards and passed for over 250 yards. Let’s just say we lost the game.
We played teams every year that were twice as big as we were and favored to beat us by 30 points. But if we ever went into a game thinking we didn’t stand a chance, not only would we lose but odds are we would play the game afraid, and not give our best. Ultimately the overall outcome of the game would be affected by it (we’d have been shalacked!). It’s the exact same way with life. Your view on life has a direct impact on your mood, your attitude, your drive for success, and how you live.
If you go into life defeated you will never be able to win the world. Do you have one of those friends that always looks at the negatives in life? No matter what’s going on he/she is always expecting something to go wrong. Doesn’t that drive you crazy? Listen up! The world is filled with opportunity. And the beauty of it is it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to find it. It only takes a person looking at the bright side of life, the positives in the day, and the potential that they have in life. And opportunity means so much more than finding a job or hitting the right stock on the stock market. Opportunity can mean something as small as making the most out of your day getting your to-do list done or putting a smile on someones face. Create goals and get the most out of today to continue towards your vision so that when your head hits the pillow at the end of the day you can feel accomplished. Win today.
Biggest secret in life is that ANYONE can be ANYTHING that they want to be and do ANYTHING that they want to do.