The NBA All-Star Weekend starts today and it reminds me of why we all do what we do each and every day. You grow up trying new activities all the time as a kid and certain ones become your passions. These are the things that make you the most happy in life and are usually what you spend the majority of your free time doing. It could be Baseball, Football, Hockey, Basketball, Skateboarding, Snowboarding, Biking, Cooking, Reading, Writing, Knitting, whatever. But when you find that hobby that keeps you alive you work at it, and strive to learn as much as possible to be better at it than everyone else.
This happens constantly in the skateboard industry. As a young kid, you get your first skateboard and you start riding it around, then you meet some other dudes that like to ride their skateboards around and you start to learn tricks, now it becomes something that you really love to do and you drop a couple of your other hobbies to make more time for it as this is your passion, then the word passion becomes the word addiction. Now you’ve decided somewhere along the line that you are going to dedicate as much time as possible to skateboarding and go out there and learn and learn and learn. This is now your love.
Any professional sports player works very hard, and has to be fully dedicated to the game they play. All we see is what they show on TV which is just the exciting part, but we don’t see the hours of practise and training that happens behind the scenes. We don’t see the arguments and frustrations that happen constantly from being overworked and always travelling. All we see is the highlights, the end result of what all that hard work has produced.
No matter what your passion is, if you are trying to turn it into a career, at some point you will start to hate it. You will overdo it and begin to wonder if all this was just a waste of your time. And when you realize that you will never be able to make it a full time career, if you allow the frustration to take over, you will eventually quit altogether…
I never understood how people dedicate years of their life to something that they cared so much about and then just completely walk away from it and never do it again, ever.
Where’s the love?
What happened to the passion?
What happened to you?
It’s always the people who actually fell in love with their hobby that stick with it for life. As you get older, your body changes and you can’t always continue to work as hard as you used to, and for all the sports guys, you can’t take the hits anymore. But you can still play, you can still go out and be active and have fun with your friends. Maybe you can’t handle doing it for hours every day anymore, but that doesn’t mean you should quit. That means you should go back to your roots of when you first discovered this passion that was so great it took over whole your life, and just do it for the love again. Quit striving to be the best, and just be a survivor.
For the Love of the Game…