You Should Quit

'You should quit. Quit wasting your time pursuing this dead end. You are never going to accomplish anything significant. All that is going to happen is you will end up years later tired, exhausted and jaded with no significant life progress. Do you think you are special? Do you think that all of this floundering around that you are doing is going to accomplish anything? Do you think you can actually change the world? You are naive and ignorant. You need to buckle down and pay your dues. Follow the rules and do as you are told and work hard and then later you can have nice things.'

I am paraphrasing, summarizing, and taking out of context things that people have told me and my friends over the years and bundling them into one paragraph. It really feels sometimes like people are just putting up roadblocks instead of fixing potholes.

This applies to so many things, running competitively, unemployment, starting a company (if you consider Janzen Gear was ever a company). It seems that every step of the way people just want to be dream crushers. I get it. The world is a hard place. You can only get up after falling down so many times. Eventually it is just easier to stay down. What's the point right?

This comes up in my life for a couple of different reasons. First, please vote in the poll on the right! No one ever votes in my polls. I can not track who votes and who doesn't. I see just what you see. Hopefully it isn't a secret that I would like to attempt Mt. Everest. The thing is, as I ask around most people think that climbing without oxygen is suicide. Just another hurdle to clear.

Second, in a few weeks the 2012 cross country season will formally start. I think back about my running and it has been a long journey thus far. It has been hard. I did not really know what it would take to get to the level I want to get to when I started running. At every step of the way my expectations and commitment have been just slightly elevated. That being said, I want to accelerate the commitment among the team members that I work with this coming school year. One of the ideas I have is to tell the athletes I work with they should quit. It might not be the greatest recruiting strategy, but there is something to it. It is my way of saying, I plan on working very hard to achieve difficult things and if you don't plan to put in a significant effort what are you doing here? We will take you and let you stay around, but if you aren't here to be the best you can be what are you doing?

Extrapolating that to everything else in life, if you aren't putting in the effort to be the best you can be, what are you doing?