MyklK

I love a good series.  Back and forth.  I didn’t grow up a basketball fan.  In fact, I was resentful when a coach sought me out and asked me to try out for a team.  “You only want me to play because I’m tall.”  I was young and foolish – being tall’s a real advantage on the court.

But in the finals of ’93 with the Suns vs. the Bulls I finally developed an appreciation for the game.  Granted, I’m a fair weather fan and only get interested towards the end of the season.  I used to complain that it seemed like all the action happened in the last 3 minutes of the game.  Why not just skip to that and just play an intense 3 minute game.  You could play two or three a day!  Much more exciting…

I then realized something.  You had to attain a certain level, you had to persevere to a certain point to be “in the hunt” for those final three minutes to matter.  When two teams qualified to battle it out for those last 3 minutes – then it finally became the game within the game.  But you had to be worthy to make it to that place.

We have to qualify, we have to do the work, we have to take the action to be able to be there for those final seconds where so much drama and so much potential for victory or defeat are put before us.  Do the small things that will get you there,  I’ll endeavor to do the same – and in the end we can leave it all on the court and be satisfied with that.

This year we lost, but you can’t say we didn’t fight hard.

It seems like one of the biggest excuses, at least in my circles, is being too busy.  Busy or not, we all have the same amount of time in our day.  We get to choose to fill it up with busy activities or to relax, or to just be a bump on a log.  But we choose busy because we think busy gets us where we want to be.  Most of us don’t know where that is.  So as I have heard said before, “I don’t know where I’m headed – but I’m making good time.”

Activity isn’t achievement.  We have to put some thought into where it is we want to be in order to have our busyness count for something.  For it to be effective in moving us in that direction.

Some of this busyness we bring on ourselves, but some of it is just a fact of life in our modern world.  I guess I’m saying you may be able to reduce it, but I am skeptical that, short of heading off to live in the woods, you won’t be able to eliminate it.

So the key will be to reduce where you can and rise above where you can’t.  Accept that you will have some measure of busyness and you still need to do something to move in the right direction.

A post a day for 5,000 days. That’s an achievement. I can’t even keep up with a weekly post. The problem is looking over his posts – they are short and sweet.  This 5,000th post was back on June 5th.  Here is a link to Seth Godin’s 5,000th post.

And here is my takeaway quote from that little post:

Showing up daily isn’t my challenge–it’s learning to live with the fact that I can’t say everything I want in a single post, that the trade-off of reaching people easily is that you can also lose people easily.

I would like to take up that challenge, because writing too much – too many words for the thought I want to convey is a problem of mine.  Pithy I’m not.  But a challenge like that brings up in me fears of not being able to succeed like few things I’m currently aware of.  More than public speaking.  And the excuses start pouring out, “Which blog would I put it on?”  I have about 8 dead blogs to choose from.  😀

Well, I put this one here.  That’s enough inspiration for now.