When I was a sophomore in high school I won Offensive MVP on my soccer team. I scored quite a few goals as a forward on the team. The thing is that I didn’t really like soccer all that much, I was just kind of good at it. I didn’t put in much work, it just sort of worked out that I was good at it.

In the summer between my sophomore year and my junior year our soccer coach resigned and we got a new coach. The new coach was a former college national champion and had been coaching at the college level for a while. He came in and saw my potential and moved me to a midfield position. This position has even more responsibility, running up to be offensive and back to help on defense.

Well, let me tell you, that was a LOT of work running back and forth! I was a forward. I scored goals. The ball comes to me thank you very much. We got to our first game and coach put me at the midfield position and it was really hard! The coach pulled me aside and asked what was going on. I told him that I normally played forward and that this midfield stuff was just not my thing. He looked at me and said,

“Oh, I see, hey can you just go wait over on the bench for a bit?”.

I am still waiting to get in the game.

That was pretty much the end of my soccer career. He saw some potential in me at the beginning, but quickly realized I was not going to put in the work to be great. I find that same story happens to me all of the time in my adult life. I am pretty good at things naturally. I can figure things out and even win some games and have people cheer. Whether it is doing good creative work or playing music or even playing a sport. I can get by really well. I might even be really good at some of it, but if I want to be great I have to dig in, be disciplined and do the work.

I have been working as a graphic designer since 2000, I have become pretty good at it. Maybe even great, I have scored a bunch of goals and got the crowd cheering, but it came pretty easy to me. About a year and a half ago, I had the honor of being asked to be a creative director on Dave Ramsey’s team. This is me being asked to play midfield again. Some people saw my potential and asked me to do something that has more responsibility, requires more work and can literally change the world. And let me tell you, it is incredibly difficult to change the world. There is a LOT of resistance. Resistance from external sources of course, but the hardest one to keep in check is my own internal resistance.

If we want to be great at this, we have to do the work. I will not be telling the coach that this is not really my thing, I want to stay in the game this time.