Finding Your Passion and Loving the Daily Grind
The First One There, the Last One to Leave
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Confucius
When NBA legend Kobe Bryant announced his retirement in 2015, he didn't follow the standard convention of posting a message to his fans on social media or holding a big press conference.
No, Kobe felt compelled to write a poem to his lifelong passion, the game of basketball.
I fell in love with you.
A love so deep I gave you my all —
From my mind & body
To my spirit & soul.
But success on the court wasn’t immediate for Kobe.
Believe it or not, when he was 12, Kobe played a 25-game season without scoring a single point.
Even though he loved the game, Kobe knew he couldn't snap his fingers and magically catch those other boys overnight. So, at that young age, Kobe adopted a long-term view and started working every day to get a little better than he was the day before.
This approach would eventually become Kobe's famous "Mamba Mentality" personal philosophy - 4 AM workouts, taking a thousand specific shots daily, watching film of every game to pore over minute details that could help him and his teammates improve.
The fruits of his labor of love? Five world championships with the Los Angeles Lakers, two Olympic gold medals with Team USA, 18 all-star selections, and 33,643 points (fourth all-time, one spot ahead of his idol Michael Jordan).
Because that's the trick, right? To find that activity you love so much that you lose all sense of time when doing it. The one that inspires you to push through every obstacle to grow and improve.
You Can Lead a Horse to Water...
When I was a kid growing up in Iowa, my dad offered to store one of our school's old wrestling mats in our basement. He bought a set of weights from Sears and set up a bench where my brothers and I could lift.
I would go downstairs to wrestle and lift occasionally. But I remember using that room more to jack around playing Nerf football and baseball with my brothers and our friends than practicing my wrestling.
While some wrestlers participated in summer freestyle competitions to prepare for the upcoming season, I had no interest, choosing to play baseball instead.
I liked wrestling and did pretty well, to the point where I had the opportunity to do it in college. But I never made the Iowa state tournament, and I’m fortunate to be old enough that my college record was never documented on the Internet.
My True Passion
My true love arrived when I started computer programming in fifth grade.
My parents delivered the key piece by buying me a Commodore 64 for Christmas that year. Otherwise, I was pretty limited in computer resources while growing up on a farm in the early 1980s.
I bought a $1 book about the BASIC programming language through the Weekly Reader flyer at school.
I saw Matthew Broderick dial a modem in WarGames and had to have one. But that dream quickly died when we discovered that the nearest bulletin board systems (BBS) required long-distance calls to Des Moines and Omaha, the closest cities with even a trace of a BBS community in those early days of home computers.
My high school teacher was a woman whose primary duty was teaching home economics. She was a nice lady but was way over her head regarding computers. Most of what I learned in class was through experimentation after blazing through the day's assignment.
I remember a time in high school when I wanted to convert the wrestling game I created on our school's Apple IIe computer to run on my Commodore so I could work on it from home. There was a stretch when our small TV hooked up to my home computer wasn't working for some reason. But I didn’t want to lose any time, so I typed blindly into my Commodore for several weeks without a screen to enter as many lines of code as possible while my TV was getting fixed. Once I got my TV back in place, I could then see the screen again and go back and fix my typos and errors.
This intense love for programming carried me through a tough time in college when I was lagging behind other students smarter than me, kids who likely came from high schools with stronger computer science classes. I survived my ego and pushed through that period, sticking with computer science as my major.
And it was my combined enthusiasm for computers and sports that led me to create a popular college basketball website between the first and second semester of my senior year.
Thanks to this website, I secured my first full-time job combining technology and sports in Chicago. One year later, that position became a stepping stone to an even better fit - joining an incredible family-owned Internet company where I've proudly spent the last three decades of my career.
How Much Do You Love It?
Last summer, my 10-year-old son Eric's travel baseball team split at the end of the season. Roughly half of the boys and their dads were unhappy and thought they should be playing more or playing different positions. These families wanted to break off and create their own team. It’s common.
One of our coaches called to ask me what Eric and I wanted to do for the next season. He explained that six new boys would be coming onto the team and that these kids were better than the players leaving our team. That meant Eric might not get to play as much at shortstop or pitcher as he had the previous season.
My mind raced as I heard the choice in front of me. The boys/families staying on the team were the ones we had the closest bond with, the ones most similar to our values. But I also didn't want Eric to get pushed out of positions he loved to play.
At the time, we happened to be back at my mom’s farm in Iowa for the 4th of July. It hit me as I walked around my boyhood yard on my cell phone, staring at the surrounding corn fields where I grew up.
Without hesitation, I said, "Eric will stay on the team. We've had a blast these last two seasons. We want to be with you and this group of boys and their families. And, if Eric wants to play certain positions bad enough, he will make it happen. Looking back, I worked hard at sports as a kid, but I know that I could have worked harder at wrestling or baseball if I had really wanted it. It's always up to the individual." Our coach agreed with my assessment, echoing the same sentiment about himself.
Like my dad, I created a sweet setup for Eric in our basement where he can hit off a tee and into a net. I even bought him a Pocket Radar speed gun where he can measure his exit velocity off the tee. I put wrestling mats down and surrounded the walls with posters of his Yankee favorites like Derek Jeter and Aaron Judge. I purchased a nine-hole net that he can use to improve his pitching accuracy. We have a nice workout room upstairs with a treadmill and weights. There are numerous baseball instructional videos available on YouTube.
What will Eric do with all of this? I know he still loves baseball, no matter what he does. But it's ultimately up to him how far he takes it.
While I don't have any aspirations of Eric becoming a major league baseball player, I am constantly on the lookout for that activity that will spark a passion that will last a lifetime. I want to provide him the opportunity to help foster that love the way my parents did when they bought me a Commodore 64 when I was ten.
Links:
“Dear Basketball” - Kobe Bryant’s retirement poem, later turned into an Oscar-winning short film (5-minute video)
Kobe Bryant interview at USC (1-hour video)
Kobe Bryant interview with Lewis Howes (45-minute video)
Dolphin Tale (2011) - Terrific movie, amazing true story about a kid finding his passion
October Sky (1999) - Another great movie about this subject, a true story about Homer Hickam, a West Virginia coal miner’s son who grew up to become a NASA engineer
Image credit: Alamy
Sharing Midwestern values through the stories of a hard-working single dad, all for the glory of God.