After reading today's "Quote of the day" I started to think a lot about challenging yourself to do great things.  It also reminded me of two recent events that happened in the past few weeks. The first was reading the comments under a recent post (Don't Take It For Granite) by two very strong women. I encourage you to read the post if you haven't, but it brief it dealt with a close friend of mine recently getting injured and realizing how much having something taken away affected his life. The two women that commented recently had similar events happen in their lives where they were either diagnosed with a disease, or recovering from a major injury. 
                The second event came from a question that somebody recently asked me. I have recently made a career change and am going through the hardships of doing so. The person said to me: "since you are struggling at what you are doing now, and you were doing fine before, why don't you just stop and go back to what you were doing before?"  I thought about it for a minute and financially it made sense (in the short term), but then I thought about how happy I was before (which wasn't very much) and how stopping now would be quitting and settling. (Plus I'm not trying to do "fine" or "ok" I'm trying to do great, but that's off topic.)  I'm sure the women mentioned above could have easily just mailed it in and stopped fighting, but then what position would they be in today? The easiest thing to do when the going gets tough is quit. And I'm not knocking anybody that has done so, because it is in human nature to avoid pain.  But is it ok to just settle in a comfort zone? I'm sure it is for some people but not for me. This goes for anything in life, whether you're sick, coming off an injury, applying for a job, going to school, anything!  I recently read an article that said that only about 33% (if that many) of urban middle school students go on to graduate college.  Reason being? Because it takes a lot of work to do so, and not much work to quit. Now, don't get me wrong I understand that college isn't for everybody, and I have many friends that have either not went or went and discovered it wasn't for them. And that's fine because all of them have some type of plan. However, I'm talking about the people that just don't care at all, and have no reason for not going.  Two main reasons for this are lack of motivation and encouragement. 

                Just as it is important to push yourself, and challenge yourself to get better. It is equally as important to have a good support system. The type of support that will keep you on the right track and encourage you to do what you don't want to do when you're having one of those days.  This is the main reason that the "Team Royalty" Movement was developed. In order to be that support system to anybody that is willing to accept. Not necessarly on a personal level, but more so being an example of a group of people that are in the same boat as you are, fighting the same fight, going through the same struggle. And when people share their stories like the two women did, it just adds and builds on what we're trying to do. 

                So to everybody out there, follow your dreams and make them come true. If you want to be great, don't let anybody tell you that you can't. We all go through struggles and hardships. However only a handful of us fight through them and come back stronger. "Legends aren't admired because of their greatness, their admired because of what they went through to achieve that greatness." - P 


Gary
1/28/2011 10:32:09 am

BEAUTIFUL POST!

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Devon
1/30/2011 07:54:06 am

Akil,

This post hits home in more ways than one! I am a firm believer that being "too comfortable" leds to more hardships than not being comfortable. Too many times in my life I have got "too comfortable" and lost important people and things in my life.

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