I really would have liked an olympic gold but the truth is, I was not prepared to make the sacrifice that I would have had to make in order to get one in some sort of discipline.
When I was a basketball player in my youth, I reached a crossroad where I had a small and outside chance to gain a scholarship to North Carolina (Michael Jordan was there at the time, even though I didn’t realise it).
In order to take that very small and outside chance (in truth there was never really a chance), I would have had to travel to England as a young lad, just for a short period of time to do a summer school and hope to get picked as one of the best players and awarded a scholarship.
Of course, if I’d gone it probably wouldn’t have happened but it’s possible that there might have been a bus crash and all the rest of the players may have been injured, leading to me getting a chance by default or any other set of circumstances which might have seen me selected.
I might have met M.J. when I went to Carolina and he might have liked my Scottish accent and by chance I might have been catapulted forwards to a pick in the draft into the MBA and therefore to a place in the dream team after I’d adopted a USA status and there was my gold medal.
Of course, that’s ridiculous but in fact, the ability to gain awards like this seem ridiculous when they’re looked at in retrospect and when the decisions are evaluated.
Of course (again) the gold is a metaphor for anything you set out to achieve.
If you want to change your circumstances to something different, you’re going to have to do something different.
I watched in awe the olympic games and the people who won gold because I have some small understanding and appreciation of everything they had to sacrifice to get to that in whatever discipline they were competing in.
And that's actually the point isn’t it.
The people we admire, the people we aspire to be, the places we aspire to go, either physically or philosophically come with great sacrifice in some sort of direction.
Sadly now, in the filtered world that we live in, more and more people are not prepared to accept the sacrifice that is required to get to the place they want to go and therefore they become disappointed.
For many, many of the people who won gold at the Olympics, the prize is the process and the gold just the sprinkles on the top of the process that they have invested in.
Probably worth all of us remembering that as we set our goals for the future.
Blog Post Number - 2833
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