In 1994, I was a freshman in college and discovering who I was as a person. Although I enjoyed that time, it was not without its potholes. After a week of being on campus for soccer’s preseason, I started hanging out with a junior from the women’s team pretty regularly. In my mind I was en route to my first college relationship. After going out to see the movie “Forrest Gump” together, I finally got up the courage to ask the question that I had in my head. “So what’s going on between us?” Her response was something that I did not anticipate, “Nothing, I have a boyfriend.” At the time I was confused and a little hurt but now I realize that I was just collateral damage.
Each of us is making it through our own life as best we can. Life is not a spectator sport, it is battled out in the trenches. At times during that struggle, we will all hurt someone without any intention. That is life’s collateral damage. However because we view our lives in the first person, we tend to think that the world is happening to us. Therefore all damage is personal because it means more to us. The question is not whether or not you will be collateral damage. It is whether you will be a victim or survivor.
Victims have the distinguishing factor that they were targeted. It does not particularly matter if that targeting is real or imagined. The victim feels it as if it were real. The teacher, boss, girlfriend, boyfriend, town, society or world is against them and they know it. Even worse, they think they deserve it. The mindset of being a victim is a choice.
Survivors often have scars but they are a sign of life, not betrayal. The survivor can move past the damage because it wasn’t particularly about them. The focus is also on the future rather than the past. Each moment is another opportunity for the survivor to get stronger.
There is no completely safe passage through life. At some point, you are bound to be hurt by someone or something. Are you a victim or a survivor? The choice is yours!
Mike – “This is Trent. We call him Double Down.”
The other night I had dinner with a former student/player of mine. We ran into each other a few months back. Our common love of books and podcasts started the conversation. He’s freshly out of college and we’ve been talking about life and career lately. This dinner was a eye opening conversation for me and I’m hoping that this post will help someone who may be in the same spot as my friend.
Seinfeld is one of my favorite TV shows of all time. It has so many memorable episodes and characters. Despite my love for the series, I’m not a huge fan of the early episodes. Many of the episodes, I just don’t find funny at all or they feel forced. This is not surprising in the slightest. It took those early episodes in order to get to the later ones. Early failures lead to better episodes later. A few of the story-lines were even repeated with better effect the second time around. The early episodes of Seinfeld were not a good indication of where the series was going.
Despite all of the examples of enduring early hardship, there is still a pervasive desire for instantaneous results. People want to be hit right away, if not sooner. The perception of overnight success is usually due to the glossing over of the hard work done before the big break. Sylvester Stallone was a breakout start with Rocky! After he was a starving actor who had to deny a big pay day in order to star in his own movie. J.K. Rowling had the blockbuster Harry Potter book series followed by movies. After she was on welfare and had her book rejected by many publishers. Most of us are looking for the triumph without the trials. It seems that it doesn’t usually work that way.
About a year ago, I was having a discussion with a friend and she said she had hit “bock-rottom”. It was a moment of mental dyslexia. I really liked the word but wasn’t sure what it should mean. This morning on my run it became obvious what bock-rottom was. Rock-bottom is the place lowest point that a person can hit. “Hitting bock-rottom” is the act of hitting your lowest point, bouncing up and hitting the lowest point again. It is so disorienting that it mixes up the letters.
It’s a longstanding phrase in advertising, “Sex Sells!” It sells things that have nothing to do with it whatsoever. Sex or the perception of sex has been used to advertise cigarettes, alcohol, deodorant, shampoo and so much more. The reason is that it works. If someone is able to link your desire for sex to their product, they’ve increased their chances of making a sale exponentially. So with this all in mind, I’m going to try to sell you on your best life in sexual terms. This sales pitch will start with the less desirable and move up from there.
The shoehorn*, crowbar and bulldozer; all use a combination of an inclined plan and a lever. While they all have the same base components, almost no one would ever use one as a replacement for the other. Using a bulldozer to get your shoes on could get messy really quickly! It’s overkill and everyone can see that.
At one point in my life, ketchup was not a condiment, it was an ingredient. Ketchup sandwiches were a staple of my diet. Any undesirable food such as broccoli could be made digestible with an ample serving of ketchup. Obviously this is not an ideal system for a balanced diet. It was more of a survival tactic for an extremely picky eater rather than a conscious decision about eating good food. Eventually I learned that ketchup was not the answer to all of my food issues. It wasn’t versatile enough to be an everyday ingredient.
Despite the extremely broad reach that the internet gives us, people seem to feel as though they are at the effect of their circumstances. If circumstances were what made people, then a frail asthmatic doesn’t become a president revered for his adventures. A stutterer doesn’t become one of the most recognizable voices of his era. And an actor with a partially paralyzed face doesn’t become the face of multiple film series. The truth is that we all know that circumstances are only part of the recipe. It is just easier to use poor circumstances as an excuse for poor results. Or a lack of resources as a reason for no results. You may not have everything you need to make today great but you have the most important thing and that is you. You’re the ingredient that you’ve been waiting for! If you’ll step up to the challenge and be what today needs.
To a certain extent, I feel like I’m in therapy or at an AA meeting about to admit one of my biggest weaknesses but here it goes: I like a lot of Keanu Reeves’ movies. It really shouldn’t be that embarrassing because the man’s movies have made millions (maybe billions) over the years. Unfortunately he gets a bad rap because he’s pretty goofy and doesn’t have a lot of range. The interesting thing is that for the most part, this anti-Keanu sentiment comes from people who have never acted before and have paid to see his movies. So is it really that he is THAT bad? Or do people simply have a need to pick apart a mediocre swan because it’s easier than looking in the water to see an ugly duckling reflected back?
Huryk Unlimited 