When you graduate college after years of being an athlete, it can be a scary transition. You apply for whatever jobs you can and when you finally get a job it is exciting. Show up your first day looking sharp as the first day of school but you the feeling quickly fades. Soon, you grow tired of the job and feel like there is no point in you being there, and you want to quit. You feel as if you have no direction in life and you’re just living every day to survive. Being an athlete has a magical way of showing you a different way of living.
The Contrast
When I walked into my first day of high school, I walked in just like I did in the story above but the only difference was that I had something with me that no one else could see. I knew from day 1 of high school in Toronto that I wanted a full scholarship to a D1 NCAA school.
This revelation gave me something that many don’t have in their jobs, and that is the purpose. I was definitive in what I wanted for my lie and what it would look like, and I made sure that every decision I made matched this goal I had set for myself. When you have a purpose, it changes the way you walk because you walk as you have somewhere to go. It changes you to talk because you talk excitedly about what you are doing.
The purpose is different for everyone, but I consider a reason to wake up in the morning. In college, I was willing to get up at 5 Am to get to the weight room because I wanted to be one of the best sprinters in the NCAA at the time. I was willing to put up with all the classes and crap because I wanted to graduate. I knew what I wanted!
Back to the story, I started with; I was doing what Napoleon Hill would call drifting. I had no aim, I just needed money, and I knew I had a degree. So I figured I would jump at the first job that offered to me with some decent pay. Regrettably, that is precisely what I did. I forgot how much purpose had driven my life and I got to see what it felt like for the first time to not have one.
How Sports Save Lives
Sports can save lives because they give so many young minds a purpose. It is hard to believe for some, but not all people feel like school was made for them. Many come to resent school. But when you add sports into the mix, it provides a whole new driving factor. It gives that reason to get up, the goal to strive to become more.
A lot of people miss this fact, but they do not learn from it. If you look at pro sports and college sports. You took sports away from many athletes, it is not that they could not exists without them, but it has given them their reason to have the zest to move through life. When you retire, you suddenly lose this taste, or you have to find another thing to pour it into.
Purpose: The Main Lesson Learned
You need to have a purpose in your life at all times. It needs to be one bigger than making money. A lot of people skirt around having a goal by saying that their purpose is taking care of their family or their purpose is making a lot of money. Those are not purposes those are results of having the goal.
If your purpose were to give away 10 million dollars for example, that would give you a reason to get up and make 10 million dollars. If your goal was to change the new generation and make the world a better place, part of that mission is raising excellent children.
Think Bigger
We have given up on our ability to think big as a society. We have believed the lie of feeling the need to be realistic in all our pursuits. But realism is really in the eye of the beholder. When you say your purpose is just raising children what do you do when your kids move out? All the sudden you have no purpose.
Your purpose should be so grand that it takes the energy of your living days to bring it to life. If you happen to bring it to life before then, you need to find another big vision to bring to life quickly. Just look around in your own life, people who you know with no vision for themselves usually do not get very far.
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KHO Health was acquired by was acquire by 9INE POINT in the summer of 2019 and is now referred to as 9INE POINT Health.
