I watched this video and it made me think of a couple different arguments that I take part in quite frequently. The first one has to do with Work Ethic vs. Genetics, and I just had a conversation about this yesterday. I have always been the athlete that had to work harder than everyone else if I wanted to be successful. I was never the guy who could jump out of the gym or had an amazing athletic make-up that gave me an edge in whatever it was I was doing at the time. The question we were discussing was whether I would rather be the guy who had to out work everyone else or the guy that was so athletically gifted that things came easy to me. I came to the conclusion that surprisingly I would rather be the guy who had to outwork everyone else. I thought that because the adversity I have been faced with, I would end up being much hungrier than the guy next to me when it came time to “eat”. There are many times that I am frustrated with my performance and I blame genetics but that is just a copout. When I lose or I fail, it is directly related to something that I did or did not do. The argument is a fun one and can be played from either side with a successful outcome either way. However, the reality is that 99% of us are like me, not overly gifted with innate athletic ability which means that we have a choice. Every day we wake up, we get to choose how it goes down.
The other thing that this video made me think about was the copout of using genetics as an excuse. There have been times when I get beat that I say to myself, “he was built for doing that”. The truth is that behind any successful athlete, there is a work ethic that rarely gets noticed by people. We see the flash and we see the results of what years of work produce. It is easy to look at Ray Lewis and say that he is the baddest Defensive Player on the planet. We say, he is just too fast and too strong to compete with. How did he get like that? The answer is probably years and years of training and having the mental toughness to outwork anyone and everyone. Attitude is something that can't be taught, it is something inside of each of us, whether we use it to our advanatage or not is up to us. We can let that voice in our head talk us out of doing something or we can use it to motivate us to be great. My favorite part of this video is when he says, “You have to want to succeed more than you want to breathe”. I have always said that “I HATE to lose more than I LOVE to win”. This is the same to me, and I think it is a great way to put things in perspective. As much as I love winning, it isn't even comparable to how much I hate losing.
