Motivation

I just had a moderately deep conversation with one of my best friends; we'll call him Tom Jones. Anyhow, we just finished playing some of the lamest pick up basketball I've been involved with for a long time. There were a couple of kids there who are a lot younger and faster than us and they were douching out on levels difficult for human comprehension. They weren't even playing ball. Just grab-assing up and down the court like inbred cousins or something. That's kind of besides the point, but a little bit relevant as it led to Tom expressing that he should quit playing basketball. Now, I know this statement from Tom was 70% joking, but there was a look from Mr Jones I hadn't seen before. He really didn't want to be on the court at that moment.

That is a terrible yet magical place to be.

Where you realize you used to have something special that is now slipping away, and unless you make a change, you're gonna lose it completely. This is terrible because it sucks realizing that you, at one point in time, were invincible. The magic is when you use that gut-dropping feeling of shame, remorse, embarrassment or whatever the bad feeling is, to fuel your fire for change.

Tom Jones... I implore you; use the douches to motivate a change. Every time you want to do something that isn't going to propel you closer to where/what you want to be, remember the moment you experienced at basketball tonight. Use it to better yourself.

I've had several Tom Jones moments in my lifetime; some I wasted, some I took advantage of and leveraged change from them.

So I guess the moral of the story is: haters gonna hate... or something.

Since it's a snowboarding blog...