“Nothing is more common then unsuccessful men with talent.”- Calvin Coolidge
There are many things in life that seem to be out of reach; be it a new job you actually love, following a desire to its natural end or even the most elusive of all, love itself.
Through the years I personally have found small amounts of success at the things I do have talent in and although I have yet to actually make enough money to do those things full time or honestly taken them to a point where I am personally satisfied with the results (which at times can mean much more then simple monetary payment), I find myself obsessed with the formula that breeds those positive endings.
Like almost any goal, dream or errant desire, there is only one person to blame if you cannot reach those goals and that is yourself.
Talent is common, be it any talent you could possibly think of, from sports to painting to being everyone’s Mr. Fix-it. What is not common is the ability to find the drive and determination to keep pushing, to persevere and make that raw talent into something greater.
This is of course the hard part, the scenes not shown in movies and documentaries, the parts of substantial success we never really see: that athlete up at four A.M. To jog three miles, the painter up until dawn sketching ideas or your resident handy man struggling over fixing something he has never worked with before.
There has to be a love of the process of the sweat and hard work that go into really achieving our goals whether they are tiny or world shaking when they are completed.
It always makes me somehow think of former NBA player Eddy Curry, maybe because he was from the general area where I grew up near Chicago or maybe it is because deep down we always love the story of a person who had all the breaks and still did not reach that brass ring.
Curry was drafted fourth overall in the 2001 NBA Draft to his hometown Chicago Bulls but despite some on the court milestones and some very weird and heartbreaking off the court incidents, he eventually let himself fall out of shape and out of the NBA.
It is hard to fathom how a man who one season averaged almost twenty points in the best league in the world for his craft could ever fall into the category of a failure.
It came down to the effort, that daily grind, pushing beyond ‘the bare minimum’ that he could get away with doing and taking that talent and skill set and raising it up to another level. Surely in these cases it is the temptation of the amount of money you are currently making or buying into your own hype that make people like Curry think they have arrived, that the work is done.
However the work is never really done, never really over till you yourself are close to leaving, it’s never completed till your story has played out its last scene. It all begins, every single day, with a choice: get up and fight or lie down and lay it all aside.
Does anyone out there have any good examples of times they have had to push and struggle to reach their own goals? I’d love to hear your story.
