Out of all the pictures that I have posted throughout my blogs this might be my favorite one. A man on one side of the highway by himself, while on the other side hundreds of cars are piled up. This contrast between the two sides of the highway immediately brought some thoughts to my mind. One of them being that when I see this picture I think of two roads we can go down when it comes to accomplishing what we want out of life. We can go down the easy road, where there’s no struggle, no sacrifice, and our goals are given to us. Then there’s the road that is the complete opposite. We have to go through adversity, give our blood, sweat, and tears to get what we want. There will be times on this road where we want to quit and its going to be up to us to fight through those thoughts and accomplish what we set out to do.
Which road is which in this picture? Some might say that the road with the man on the horse is the easy road, and the hard road is the one with all the cars on it. I don’t see it like that. The easy road is the one traveled by many, and the hard road is the one traveled by few. There are cars lined up on the easy road because no one wants to sacrifice to get what they want. Millions of people play the lottery every day just to get a shot at being “set for life”. What happens when you win? Now what? You sit back, hang out, spend money, and accomplish what?
“Through suffering comes self knowledge that is hard to attain without it”
You hear the famous line, what are you made of? What’s in your DNA? Usually we find out about ourselves through difficult situations. I wrote in an earlier blog that I coached a team that didn’t win a game the whole season. Every game we lost by at least 40 points. That season made me question myself as a coach, as a motivator, and as a person. This is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and that year I really had to be honest with myself and ask questions. Is this what you want? What are you doing wrong? Why aren’t they (your team)responding to you? What do you need to change? Are you working as hard as you can to make your team better? Those were tough questions for me to handle. Because I had to look in the mirror and say, there’s something I’m not doing and until that gets fixed I will never get better as a coach and we won’t get better as a team.
Some of the same questions can be asked not just in basketball but in life. If you’re not where you want to be in life right now what are you doing wrong? What do you need to change? etc etc The easy road would be not to question anything and make excuses why things aren’t going your way. The team I had that season was not talented by any means and I had other coaches tell me that no one could win a game with the team I had, but that’s not the way I looked at it. I knew we wouldn’t go undefeated or win a lot of games that season but I was trying to figure out what I needed to do to get them better. If I threw my hands in the air and said screw it they suck, I would of taken the easy way out. I would of stopped getting up at 6am to do workouts or staying in the office until 10pm to look over game film and that would of sent a message to them that it’s ok to quit.
When I first started my business I was trying to think of a name for the company. Unbeknownst to me I had no idea that I couldn’t just come up with a name and use it. I had to make sure the name wasn’t used by another company. My first idea was “next level” basketball (taken) then there was “24/7” (taken) As I sat in my car scribbling in my note book I wrote down Crossroads Basketball and under it I wrote “what path will you take”. The name wasn’t taken and the rest is history. I still have that notebook and Im amazed that the fifth or sixth name that I chose was by far the best one in terms of what I believe in. What path will you take means you have a choice. You can pick up a basketball once a week or you can pick it up every day but the choice is yours and you have to live with your results.
As you go through life you start to realize what you want out of it. This epiphany might happen early on in your life (some people have always wanted to be a teacher, policeman etc) or it can happen later (for me it was when basketball came into my life my junior year in high school) No matter when this takes place there are usually different paths to achieve it.
Sometimes the people that don’t get what they want out of life just went down the wrong path. The key is recognizing it and changing the direction you’re going.
“It’s ok to take the easy road just be prepared to sit in a lot of traffic”
