[pərˈspektiv]

Perspective, it’s your attitude towards something. It’s the decision that defines your life. It is the difference between having dreams and living them. Perspective is the viewpoint that the work is never finished. It’s how you attack you every day and how you create your life. 

            Create is the most important word within that last sentence. You are a product of your situations and of your circumstance. You are reflection of the choices that you actively make. No one but you can take credit or take blame for how YOU ended up or the direction that YOUR life is going. I decided a long time ago that life is TOO short for bad days. Growing up I was an angry kid, I’ll admit that. I let the world write my story, and I played the victim for most of it. The blame was never on me, that blame was always on someone else’s shoulders, and that is what I believed.

            To me is seemed like opportunities were few and far in between. The reason this  was because of the bed I made. Instead of waking up, and immediately making my bed so that when I came back to it, it looked like the product that I wanted to see, I left it messy, I left the boxes unchecked. That is how I started every day, with making the choice to leave something unfinished, and to come back to it that way. Instead of making the hard choice, to one to take the extra time, I made the easy choice, to ignore the little details, and wonder why my circumstances never changed.

            It continued like this for years, when that is the way you are hardwired, it’s tough to change the way you think. It was the easy choice. It wasn’t until high school graduation until I realized that I only enemy that I had in this world had been myself. My circumstances didn’t define me, but I had let them be the crutch in my side for far too long. While all of my peers were celebrating the next chapter in their journey, going to college and all the things that came after, I wasn’t embarrassed to admit I would be enrolling in my local community college. Not because of the hand that I was dealt, but because of the decisions I made. 

            I chose not to apply myself. I chose to do the bare minimum because that was all I needed to do to get by. For the first time all of that built up anger I had at the world, turned into disappointment in myself, and finally admitting, for the first time, that I had been laying in the bed that I have never made. At that moment it all clicked. Dreams don’t just happen; circumstances don’t just change in time. Life is a result of how you prepare and how you respond to what it will inevitably throw at you. 

            So I made the choice right there to not just except life for how it was, but to turn my life into what I wanted it to be. From that moment on, I changed my perspective of life. I chose to never let a negative thought in my mind complete itself, because every completed thought is a choice. I knew I could either choose to let it ripple on and waste a day or I could choose to move on, and change my perspective. And that is what I did, I made the commit to myself to get out of my current situation, and prove to myself  and to a University that I was good capable of doing and achieving more. Five years later, I had a degree in hand and had created a future for myself.

            Looking back it’s easy to think about what I could have done differently. These days my focus is not on that but what can I do to maximize my day. How can I take this moment, this opportunity to get 1% better? I have been blessed to be in a position where I can take what I have learned from my life and pass it on to my athletes. There is much for them to learn in the weight room and in competition that they will be able to use and apply to their lives. My hope at the end of the day is that I can change their perspective. My hope is that I can help them realize that maximizing their true potential starts with how they conquer their everyday. I want them to know that in life there are easy choices and hard choices, and most of the time the hard choice is the right choice to make. The hard choice may be more daunting, it may require more time, it may cause you to do some things that you don’t want to do, but it’s all a matter of how you look at things. If you change your perspective, you can change your life.

Until next time….

Work HARD and BE GREAT

-JD O’Brien