SPARTAN SERIES #208: “WORK SO HARD THAT YOUR IDOLS BECOME YOUR RIVALS!”

Growing up in a moderately sized city in Iowa I had tons of adversaries because I was small. I was constantly fighting from the time I was nine years old until I left high school. I played all the sports I backed down from nobody and sometimes I was just dumb enough to walk right into the line of fire and get myself hurt. The big lesson is this! When you begin to fear other people is when you become a coward. You can’t bring your best game if all you’re thinking about is losing.

As we grow up we have heroes. We program ourselves to think that our heroes are gods. Then one day you’re playing alongside them. You’re carrying your own workload. They respect and admire your efforts. But it took an awful lot of ourselves to get into that position. Earning this position on the football team, on the baseball team, on the track team, is only the beginning for all of us to realize that being equal does not mean that you’ve arrived at the mountaintop.

A good illustration of this from my life was when I got to college and several of the players on the football team were my rivals in high school. They were all great athletes. I had a particular position as a placekicker. I had work overtime to get that job as a placekicker. I was instantly on the same plain as my old rivals.

In bodybuilding I saw guys in divisions above me that looked great. I wanted so much to look like them. Several years later after a lot of training I was on the same stage as some of these guys that I saw earlier. They no longer were just heroes or idols. I now have a unique privilege of competing against them as a rival. In fact it happened over again as I competed. The big payday for me was the respect I gained from people I admire.

The biggest take away from all this is that we have to never see ourselves as “wanna be’s”—The reality is that we just haven’t arrived yet and those ahead of us can be overtaken and this, in and of itself, is the trophy. The new reality for us is that we have become that which we seek….There is no place else to go and there is nothing else to win. You or I have nothing more to prove to anyone.

Bottom Line: Never look back. If you do you will be overtaken. If you look only ahead you will see what you are going to overtake. The vision is to be the same as our heroes!