What a baseball to the face taught me about being successful

A baseball hit me in the face and broke my nose while I was trying to catch a pop fly trying out for the team when I was in the 7th grade.

Today, I found a baseball lying on the ground and the smell of the leather, the feel of the laces under my fingers, the firmness of the ball all reminded me of how bad I used to be at sports.

The baseball-to-face fiasco was a bloody affair. It was also one of the most embarrassing moments of my life — not the actual ball hitting me in the face, but the having to relive the story of my incompetence in athletic ability for a month while my nose was in a clamp to keep it straight. If you remember junior high school at all, you’ll remember that 7th graders can be mean and relentless when you expect them to be that way, and I certainly expected it.

Now why would I attract something like a broken nose into my life? Back then, I didn’t know about the Law of Attraction — that everything is a mirror to my own vibration — but that does not mean it was not in full effect. Why would I put myself through something like that?

The answer to that question I believe stems from the answer to this question: Why was I so bad at baseball? My brother was an incredible baseball player, so was I just playing the Danny Devito character from the movie Twins to his Schwarzenegger in our sibling rivalry?

My personal belief is that natural ability helps us take the first step, but ideology — our system of beliefs about something — takes us the rest of the way. However, it is that first step that usually defines the ideology we hold about any given subject. So, when my brother tries out for tee-ball and happens to knock the ball right off the tee and get on base, his first step, paired with the reinforcement of the ecstatic adults around him, creates an ideology around baseball that says he can succeed. It encourages him and gives him a mindset that he can grow his natural ability to be even greater. And he did — my brother was a great baseball player when he was young.

My tryouts never went so well, though. There were a lot of strikeouts. A lot of missed catches, which led to teasing from other kids. And so the ideology I held around the subject of baseball was that I just wasn’t any good. It is much easier to start off with an early win and convince ourselves that we have a talent that can be nurtured and grown. I lacked early wins in the world of sports.

But what about when we don’t have any natural talent and our first steps showcase that we might not have what it takes? For 7 years from tee-ball to junior high, I played baseball. I embarrassed myself over and over again, but never got much better. Why?

Because I could not imagine the trajectory from where I was to where I wanted to be. And because of this, my heart just wasn’t in it. There was not a system of beliefs within me that said I would ever get any better. I had never seen anyone else that was terrible at baseball like I was go on to become great at baseball. And so, mentally, I had already thrown in the towel.

Had the internet existed back then, I probably would have just Googled, “how to get better at baseball,” and even now, as I browse articles on the subject, I feel confident that I could step on the field better than I was back when I was practicing every single day. Why? Because now I can see the trajectory (quite literally the trajectory of the baseball coming at me AND of getting from where I am to where I want to be). I can read online about other kids who weren’t any good, but got better, and in knowing that, I would have realized that I could do the same thing as them.

And that’s important to know. The physical practice isn’t nearly as important as the mental ownership of the trajectory. An understanding that there is a path that will get you where you want to go. It’s this idea of modeling someone else who has already achieved what you want that becomes very powerful because all of a sudden you can imagine the trajectory that you might take to get the same thing.

But what if you want to do it differently? What if you can’t find someone who did it the way you want to do it? What if you want to develop your own framework of thought around a particular subject? Then you have to invent an imaginary mentor that you can model. And this is why the imagination is the most important mental tool you can master. When you can learn to trust your imagination to intuitively show you the trajectory of how to get from where you are to where you want to be, then you don’t need to follow in someone else’s footsteps, and so you can carve your own path.

Your imagination is the ticket to wherever you want to go. Because once you can see something in your mind’s eye, it is possible for you. You cannot imagine something that is not possible on some plane of existence. The key is creating the trajectory in your imagination and then lining up with the imagined model. And it doesn’t mean you draw a straight line from Point A to Point B, sometimes the trajectory is something more esoteric like, “I know that my body is intuitively connected and has a 30,000 foot view of things. I will use my emotions as a guidance system to show me the trajectory not of the entire journey, but of the immediate next step. Then I will reassess, feel into my body, and take another step. In this way I will get wherever I want to be.”

What faith provides us — not in the religious sense, but in the psychological sense that you believe something to be possible — is a trajectory that guides us to anything, anyone, and any place we want to be. What intuition provides us is the means to listen for the answers that our faith poses.

Would I be a better baseball player now than I was in 7th grade? Absolutely. Just in watching a few YouTube videos, I have a much better understanding of the sheer physics of the game. But more importantly, I have such a strong faith that I can learn and find the trajectory to anywhere I want to be, that that faith alone would make me a better baseball player, if that’s what I desired to be.

So why did I attract the baseball to the face?

1. Believing myself incapable of getting better at the sport created a self-fulfilling prophesy.

2. I was unable to find a trajectory to take me from where I was to where I wanted to be, and this made me more susceptible to creating events that would force me to learn certain things about myself that would ultimately help me shed limiting beliefs.

3. It’s possible that I attracted that bloody baseball incident to me so that I could have this epiphany of thought, right now. It also taught me how to laugh at myself, persevere, even when others were pointing and laughing, and forced me to discover a sense of humor that had been dormant up until that point.

4. Finally, it has also reminded me time and time again that complete and utter failure isn’t that big a deal. I made it out of junior high. I still had friends. I survived.

I’m appreciative of the philosophical chatter finding this baseball inspired within me. But, all that aside — Man, did it feel good to finally sign and take home the game ball. Something I’ve always envisioned in my mind.

Dreams do come true.