Anytime I’ve met someone new, most find it surprising when I tell them I used to be a slightly more than competent athlete in middle school. Now most athletes will look at this and say that it doesn’t count, and you’re probably right, and the non-athletes are probably surprised like the people I’ve told in the past. Generally I assume people are surprised for one of two reasons, that either one I’m way too unfit to have ever been an athlete or two I don’t seem like the type to have ever taken an interest in sports, and both of these reasons are perfectly valid.
It’s true, there was never really a time when I did sports because I was genuinely interested in what sports had to offer me, but I did end up doing them because it seemed everyone else was doing them and there was no real alternative in terms of an after school activity. As I went on in my track and field career I discovered I was pretty good at discus. I can recall that at conference my sixth grade year I had gotten first place in discus and out threw a majority of the 7th graders as well, which prompted me to take the event more seriously, and motivated me to improve. I can even remember my coach telling me how much I reminded him of his son in that I was a chubby kid bound to stretch out as I grew, sorry coach. I went on to place in the top eight the two following years. The point is that I did something with no genuine reason to do so and I managed to find a reason to invest myself in the activity and eventually participate in earnest despite not being the type to be into sports.
It’s often said that we quit participating in something when we feel that we are performing poorly, and I think doing so really is an injustice. When you choose to stop doing something early on because you couldn’t get a hang of it, your ability in that thing loses its ability to manifest itself. If I had quit doing track because I hated running in practice I would have never found how much I enjoyed throwing and how “good” I was at it.
Malcolm Gladwell, best selling author and in my opinion a brilliant writer, said in his book “Outliers” that it takes 10,000 hours of a person doing something to become elite at that thing. I’m not suggesting that you spend 10,000 hours doing the next thing you decide to try out, but I do encourage you to try that thing for at least a year to see if it’s worth putting 10,000 hours into. When I started as a news writer for the Branding Iron, I hated it, the feeling of putting forth a ton of effort in a news story and knowing that it was going to be terrible, made me hate the job. My editor at one point told me to my face that a story I wrote was too awful to run. He was right, and I seriously considered quitting and doing something else after having worked here for only two months. A year of work later and I can say that my writing has certainly improved or at least my editors have resolved to lie to me about my improvement. Presently I really love writing and I’d continue doing it for the rest of my college years if I had the time for it.
Ironically, this is likely my last semester writing at the BI, but I think that my stance remains. There are so many legitimate reasons to quit doing things, I just think that being bad at those things isn’t one of them. Had I quit writing when I wanted, I would have never discovered how much fun it really is and now being put in a position where quitting is the logical option, I’ll miss it, instead of feeling contempt towards my time here. If you give things an honest chance and work hard, you’ll often find yourself surprised, and if you really find something else is a better fit for you then, by all means that’s what you should pursue. I mean, I ultimately traded my track jersey for a suit and tie, and hung up my football cleats for a camera.
