Conviction and Cleats

May, 2008. In the heart of Tennessee on a 91 degree day.  The sun is so bright the $200 Oakley sunglasses with the special lenses that the idiot salesman talked me into weren’t even enough to prevent me from squinting.  My baseball team is down 3-0 in the 4th inning.  I am in the dugout chewing every ounce of flavor out of 3 pieces of bubble yum and spitting sunflower seeds like it is my job.  I’m not playing in the game because I am pitching in the game the day after.  6th inning roles around and we have tied the game 3-3.  The gum has turned to sand paper and the seeds have my gums so raw it hurts to chew anymore.  We took the lead in the top of the 9th inning 4-3, but ended up losing on a triple in the right center field gap that scored 2 runs.  After the game we go to shake the other teams hands, and my hands are the cleanest in the line because I did not touch the baseball one time.                                                                        

Someone asked me one time, “What made you a good closing pitcher?”  He told me not to answer him, but whatever it was, is the same thing that will make me a success in business, society, and in life.

I have asked myself this question over and over trying to pinpoint the answer.  Maybe it was my mentality, but that is too broad. It could have had something to do with my work ethic, but that is too cliché.  It could have been my God-given talent, but that will only take you so far before it fails you, and the fact that I am 6’ flat and 200 lbs soaking wet, so that couldn’t have been it.  Then I figured it was all of them put together, but I wasn’t happy with any of these answers.  None of them felt like the truth.  The truth was, I was scared.  I was scared to death every time I walked up the mound and put my foot against the pitching rubber.  Being scared is what made me a good closing pitcher.

Now when I say, “I was scared”, I don’t mean I was scared of my opponent.  I wasn’t scared of the pressure situation.  I wasn’t even scared of failing. 

I wanted to face the best opponent.

I wanted to be in the pressure situation.

And, I was more than willing to fail. 

I was scared of being irrelevant. 

No one remembers who got second place.  No one remembers the guy that was pitching for the losing team.  The fact is, you are either remembered or you are forgotten.  There is no gray area.  But, I came to this answer not because I remember when I was on the mound, but because I remember what I felt when I was NOT on the mound.

I was a starting pitcher and started every 4th game.   We played 50 games, so I played about 12 games a year.  Maybe a couple more if we went far in the playoffs.  I was living my biggest fear.  Having the cleanest hands in the handshake line at the end of the game was unacceptable.  I was irrelevant.  It didn’t matter if I was at that game and went through 3 packs of gum and 2 packs of BBQ sunflower seeds or if I stayed behind and watched a full day of Netflix while texting my girlfriend all night.   

…The result would have been the same. 

So…how did I fix this problem of being irrelevant in 75% of the games that we played?

I told the coach I wanted to pitch in more games and I wanted the victory or the loss to rest on my shoulders.  I can take losing if it is because of me, but I don’t want my fate to rest on someone else’s shoulders.  The feeling in my gut of not being able to help my team in any capacity was destroying me inside.  It is such a helpless feeling and difficult to describe. 

Try this:

Imagine that you are handcuffed to a chair and your best friends, people that you have been to hell and back with, are getting beat up right in front of you.  The beating won’t stop; it keeps coming, hit after hit after hit after hit.  Each hit hurting you as much as it is them.  You don’t know if you could make a difference.  All you know is if someone let you out of the handcuffs you would jump in - win or lose.  You would rather lose the fight and lay there beaten with your family rather than sit there and watch them helplessly struggle and lose without you. 

That is how I felt 75% of the time.

“Scared” is probably the incorrect or poor choice of a word.  I REFUSED to be irrelevant.  I refused to feel that way ever again.  Whether it was in sports, with family, at work, or in life; this allowed me to unleash and not hold back at all.  I was willing to fail, and I did a number of times.  I came out on top a lot more though.  I have records at my college for appearances, ERA, innings pitched, and saves.  I was on a billboard, 3X pitcher of the year, 3X all conference, 3X Conference Champion, and made 3 appearances at the National tournament.  But being aware of how I felt, and doing something about it was the best thing I have ever done.  It changed not only my baseball career, but it changed my life. 

I have carried this everywhere throughout my journey, the refusal of being irrelevant.  I was promoted a number of times in a year and half at my first job.  I grew my territory by 45% in 1 year with my second.  I have rental properties and flipped houses before I was 27 years old.  Not because I inherited any money, hit the lottery, or had wealthy family and friends, but because I refuse to be irrelevant.  I have been willing to lose everything to not be forgotten.  I have lived out of my truck, moved into a house without windows or doors (multiple times), brushed my teeth in a Taco Bell bathroom for weeks, and had a stack of bills to the ceiling that were all past due. 

I turned to mentor after mentor on YouTube to help me through every struggle.  I have researched some of the greatest minds and some of the most successful people in history to see if God, a genie in a lamp, or the tooth fairy granted them their stories but they didn’t’.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was listed by Forbes as the #25 on their list of Top 100 most Powerful.  He said, “In 1995 I had $7 to my name.  By 1996 I was wrestling in flea markets for $40 a night….to #25 on Forbes Top 100 most powerful.  Some of you out there might be going through your own “$7 in your pocket” situation…Embrace the grind, lower your shoulder and keep driving through that motherf*cker.”

You can find hundreds of stories of successful people, like “The Rock”, that all have the same theme but different details.  I could have very easily curled up in a ball and given up.  Crouched in a corner and yielded to life.  I could have been the victim of life more times than I can count.  But the constant refusal of being irrelevant has kept me moving forward.  It has put fear in me in one direction and made me run in the correct one – forward.  I have failed a lot, but I always try to fail forward.  I have been knocked down time after time.  But I will always get back up.

Les Brown said, “When you fall down try to land on your back, because if you can look up, you can get up.”

Rocky Balboa said, “It’s not about how hard you hit, but it’s how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.  How much you can take and keep moving forward.  That is how winning is done.”

Thomas Wayne (Billionaire & Father of Batman) – “Why do we fall Bruce?  So we can learn to pick ourselves back up.”

There have been a hundred others that have said the same thing in so many words.  It is a message that goes in one ear and out the other.  I was the biggest culprit of letting great information go in one ear and out the other.  But even though it is an overused saying, and a simple message, it is one of the truest statements there is. 

Everyone has his or her own story.  Everyone has his or her own challenges and hurdles that they have had to find a way through or around.  Try to look back and see if you can find a lesson.  That way, next time you are confronted with a challenge you can ram through it, and if it knocks you down, learn from it and go at it again.  Fail Forward.  Find a reason to put a chip on your shoulder.  Find your reason to put that chip on there.

“Everyone that has been successful, EVERYONE, has had challenges they had to get through.” –Eric Thomas 

Don’t think that you have it worse than everyone else.  And, if you do have it worse than everyone else, you have the quickest way to learn the most.  People that have it rough don’t usually see it that way though.  They feel sorry for themselves and see it as failure after failure instead of lesson after lesson.

“The only reason I was as good as I was, was because all of the times I failed.” – Michael Jordan

Never be afraid to fail, because there is no such thing as a failure.  There are only failed experiments, which lead to a successful one.  But it is up to you to see it that way and live your life the same.  Like “The Rock” said, “Embrace the Grind.” 

If you never had challenges to overcome… What kind of story would that make?

Make your story a GREAT one. 

Zach Brown