Erma Bombeck's words strongly resonate in my mind as a way that I would like to conduct my life as a productive adult. My story starts in the past: as many of you know, I played American football when I was in high school. For six years (grades 7-12), I played for teams that enjoyed a wide arrays of results, from one-win seasons to appearances in the PIAA state semifinals. Football was a release back in those days: it helped me to get out any aggressive streaks that I had as a teenager while doing something productive. I was always a big guy, and playing football for me was a way to use the talents and advantages that being naturally big carried. I had two major goals by the time I reached high school: 1) to gain a starting position on the varsity team, and 2) to reach a championship that my high school had never reached.
In the end, I achieved both of them. By sophomore year, I started on the defensive line; and by senior year, my team made it to the PIAA semifinals. The journey was never easy, for sure: we spent afternoon after afternoon in the weight room and on the track after school in the off-season, breaking records and missing targets. I remember at one point, I had to run nearly a mile and a half after training after doing squats and sprints the previous two hours. Waking up in the summer to go to work in the morning took a full breakfast and at least two Advil tablets to dull the aches. With all of the time and energy that I had invested in this sport, there was no way I was going to graduate high school without achieving something significant. Therefore, that final season I made a promise: no matter the outcome, I was going to leave everything out on the field. If I wasn't exhausted after a game, I didn't work hard enough.
Throughout my university and graduate school life, I have tried to push this same tenet on the different activities that I undertake. If I am going to succeed at something, I need to give all of the expertise and diligence that I have now; otherwise, I will leave from that opportunity with regrets. If I know that there was one thing I could have done to help myself get a better grade or gain a leadership position which I now don't have, it's a tough pill to swallow. Life stretches everyone thin, but we must look at demanding times of life more as opportunities to achieve great things, and less as times of great burden.
My advice for today, readers, is this: Take inventory of all the outstanding commitments and promises that you have made to this date. Put them out on the table, on the board, anywhere you feel that you can organize them. Decide for yourself which ones are the most important, and which ones you need to accomplish the soonest. Then go out and seek to finish them, limiting your distractions. If you have to turn off your cell phone for an hour, do so. If you have to give up Facebook for 48 hours, do so. These things are extremely useful, but they carry a key trade-off: they are very useful distractions. We commit ourselves to so many different things in a given day, and even those who exercise good time management skills need to figure out how much energy they must devote to a given task. My personal challenge is to take the example of my high school football career and use it to finish out the work I have to complete for this semester. I have to understand that I embraced all of my goals for a particular reason, and constant reminder of those ideals is what is going to propel me to realize them.
Take the time to watch this speech from the movie Friday Night Lights. In his halftime speech during the Texas AAAAA state championship, Coach Gary Gaines alludes to leaving everything out on the field. At the end of the day, we must be able to look our friends, family, colleagues and clients in the eye and let them know that we gave them everything we possibly could to achieve our goals. If we can give everything we have, then win or lose, we have gained our dignity, and no one can take our pride.
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