What Are You Willing to Sacrifice

I’m going to ask you a few questions. And I’m really interested to see if any of what I say in the next minute. Sounds familiar. If you’ve ever been, or remember that state of being as a child, when that question of career, what do you want to be when you grew up, and you’re looking into those big, bold, just enthusiastic eyes, and they tell you, I want to be a football player, and a lawyer and a police officer when I grow up and you look you and then his fullest adulation, and they’re just so serious, you as somebody else, I want to be a comic book artist, and I want to be an actor, and I want to be a veterinarian. And you just nod your head like oh my gosh.

And then something happens. Something happens when they grow up. It gets collapsed into most likely one career. And it’s this pure, innocent, intentional answer that they’re giving, but pedagogically, as we grow older as we move through time something changes, and that something that changes is not necessarily our interest is the way we look at the world. We have to make a decision. And the essence of decision is a Latin term disarray. It’s to it means to cut off options. sys is this decision size means like scissors to cut away. And so now we prune away the knot needed to end up with what we want. And that is the essence of this conversation. I want to have with you today. Part of the maturity and understanding especially in his halftime talks is understanding that if we are to go about achieving a result That is hardly ever achieved.

What? What are you willing to sacrifice? In the deepest religious traditions, sacrifices needed some call it time, some call it charity, some call it whatever they want. But sacrifice is rooted in the word sacred. So to make this journey sacred, what are you willing to offer? What are you willing to let go of, because you can’t bring everything to the party. We’ve all remember that you’re looking, you’re to go back and, and the suitcase, you can’t bring everything. And so some of those things are, you can’t sit in front of TV. Right? When you get home until the moment you go to sleep and expect change to come somewhere on the way home. What are you willing to give up in order to be great, and so you can’t have it all.

It’s nice to say, I’d like to be that firefighter, the police officer, the NFL player, and a movie director. It’s cool. But to take it seriously, to look at it in the eye and understand that something I have to do something that is necessary to be done is an analysis is a pruning away to let this plant fully grow, like the bonsai tree in order for it to stay fully healthy, it has to be continuously pruned in order to see the beauty which is naturally in its nature. The older I’ve gotten, the more I realized this is so true in various areas. So the elite basketball player is away from his family throughout the course of that season. In order to just be a full time working doctor, you have to probably work in the excess of a 60 hour week, when I first heard that 40 hours a week for doctors part time, it blew my mind.

You watch the lawyers and they’re all getting off of work at seven, eight o’clock. And they’re feeling like even in the finance industry, if they’re going home when everybody else does, it doesn’t look good. So these are some of the sacrifices that are required. For the great to be great to do something that has never been done or rarely done by most you can’t follow what most people dues playbook. What are you willing to sacrifice? When are you able to separate yourself from the field? When are you creating the situations and opportunities to gain and acquire the experience necessary to see the game differently? To perform at a higher level? What are you getting those reps in? Are you willing to wake up at five o’clock?

Are you willing to go to sleep at 2am? Are you willing to make that sacrifice? Are you willing to let something go in order to embrace what is next. And so going back to the notion of making something sacred? Our pursuit, like let’s look at these words, vocation, the calling. That’s what it means. Are you patient, what I choose to occupy my time with profession, to profess? to profess means to share something that is so deeply on your heart to the world or an audience in front of you, career, all these different words how we choose to spin our time to make the impact in the world while I’m doing a I can’t conversely, at the same time, be doing B, C, D, E or F and I’ve seen it people sacrifice their family, people sacrifice their relationships.

People sacrifice money, people sacrifice the necessary attention in some other places in order to make the great great so open up your eyes and recognize that you are on a path into becoming something great. Something great is also required from you. It’s not easy. Somebody sacrifices the things that previously you enjoy previously, you fell in love with. You can’t be on the internet 24 hours a day and expect to have the clarity of mind and focus. You can’t watch the news and not be drawn into the emotional fabric that they are exuding. You can’t sit on Instagram all day looking at what everybody else is doing and expect to be doing something yourself. You cannot sit and consume things and call yourself a producer. The two words don’t go hand in hand.

So I ask of you today halftime talks audience, if you are sincere with the direction that you want to take and want to be great, what are you willing to give up? What are you willing to put to the side, even if it’s temporarily to occupy your mind with the thing that you recognize you want to be bowled at? That’s why this is the halftime because the second half, I want you to go in. And I want you to put some of those things that aside, I want you to figure out how to get that extra hour in your day, that extra five hours in your week to devote and are you sincerely sincere about devoting that time into becoming great? Are you going through the motions?

Or are you subscribing your total emotion into this pursuit? Is the difference and guess what guys? I am not all the time myself committed at the level of which I know I need to be and it’s a process. I want to get better each day, each week each month and put weeks together, put days together. And even before that, put hours of great moments together. And that’s what it takes. And I commit to trying to do better. And hopefully, you will, too.