Be the Best you can be
You may have seen on a previous post where I was encouraging my kids or myself to be the best they could be. It seems like this has been something I’ve been saying all of my life. You hear it so much that you forget what it can really mean. It’s a life-long process of continued development that you never know the full measure of until you take your last breath. I’ve heard people say that they wish they’d taken this chance, or made that move, and I don’t want to be filled with regrets. There are a few things I wish I’d had the chance to do over again, raising my children a little differently or not being quite so hard in my younger years.
I used to run all the time; I’ve recently started getting back into it. I’d try to beat the younger guy; I’d try to beat the older guy. But you always know you pushed yourself when you got that almost sick feeling of your endorphins dumping into your gut. I’d try to do a hundred more of one activity, I’d try to do a minute faster at this distance—there was always something worth striving to achieve. You didn’t always make it, sometimes you’d go a few days and maybe you made it in ten minutes on a Monday but you were coming in at eleven and twelve on a Tuesday and Thursday. Well, you have to look at it compared to where you were—at thirteen or fourteen minutes the previous week. Life is a lot like that, it has its ups and downs and you can’t always control when they happen. What matters is that you recognize the victories when they happen and never stop pushing through those barriers. You have to have the wins and the losses, to recognize the victories when they come. Life beats you down, and it may take the course of years to recover.
Almost a year ago a friend came to me and we got talking about how, after nearly ten years, I finally got most of my confidence back. He says, “Well of course Larry, you’ve got a degree of PTSD.” I don’t mean that in the returned-from-war way. I mean that in how I was so battered from almost going bankrupt and getting a barrage of calls from people I owed money and the feeling of utter failure. It was such a great victory to finally pay everyone back—to have our business back on strong footing. These blog posts are helping; I get to see the full measure of where we’ve come from and how we’ve turned things around to where I regained some of my confidence. Though my confidence has improved greatly, I still have a long way to go. I’m not talking about arrogance, but a sense of firm footing in my business and social interactions.
When I started running again it brought back all of the memories of years ago when I was training. Running all of these marathons, and running a mile in 5:30, but it isn’t about putting in the minutes; it’s about putting in the effort. Today, I’m happy when I run a ten-minute mile (at age 54). It’s about finding your limits and exceeding them. Our thresholds won’t be the same, maybe I can do more push-ups but you can run much faster. We’ll never know until we make those efforts to surpass those limits. This thinking applies to everything; it’s about pushing yourself in every facet of your personal and professional life--mentally, physically, and nutritionally. It’s about pushing your limits not just for yourself, but for your family, as well. You don’t have to be rich to dress with confidence, as long as you do the best that you can. It’s not going around acting like you’re all that in a hat—it’s pushing yourself to do what you believe is the right thing. Whatever those things are, it’s important to never give up, and look at where you’ve been to get the confidence you need to reach where you’re going.
