Don’t Wait for Desperation

Dear athletes, please put down your math homework for a second and read this.

Becoming a great athlete isn’t limited to the skill training you’ll do for your sport or even the physical training you’ll do to make your body faster, stronger, and more resilient. What most young athletes, even at the college level, don’t realize is that becoming a great athlete starts in the mind.

Jim Rohn, who was a powerful motivator, entrepreneur, and author during his lifetime, has left a wealth of wisdom pertaining to “success” that we would all be remiss not to learn from. One of his famous lines is:

“We generally change ourselves for two reasons: inspiration or desperation.”

Sadly, most often I see athletes waiting till something bad happens like developing tendonitis in a joint, getting benched for being too slow or out of shape, not having the courage to talk to their coach, etc., to start doing the work.

If it’s any consolation, the same tends to happen with adults. It’s not until most adults are overweight and unhappy, or their doctor gives them a scary reality check, that they then start to take their health and fitness more seriously.

It’s common. It’s societal. It’s endemic.

Here’s what you need to understand though, being a great athlete is anything but common. You have to be willing to make uncommon sacrifices, and often these are inconvenient and uncomfortable.

“Success has a price tag, and that price tag is called sacrifice.”

While your peers are scrolling or clicking their life away, what are you going to do instead? You now have regained time from social media that can be invested into your future.

Will you use it to read stories of the greatest athletes of all time in the sport you play?

Will you use it to go to the gym and lean into suffering in order to separate yourself athletically from your peers?

Will you ask someone for help when normally you would have tried to carry that burden alone?

The options are endless. Your potential is endless.

“Success is not something you chase, it’s something you become. And becoming requires fundamental changes in how you think, how you act, and most importantly how you spend your time.”

The author of this article is certainly not as wise as the great Jim Rohn, but for context, as an athlete in college, I began to lean into this kind of mindset and it changed my life. It changed my athletic career. It eventually led me to a professional contract where I was paid to play the sport I loved since being 8 years old. To that I can attest, to have achieved these uncommon goals did indeed take uncommon sacrifice.

IT WAS WORTH IT.

What is it worth to you? Comment any thoughts or questions, and also check out this video or one of Jim Rohn’s speeches. You can have it playing in the background, the video itself isn’t necessarily helpful, but the audio is a total gift.