“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
(Muhammad Ali)
Throughout my book, Turning Inspiration Into Action, I used two literary devices: Lightning Bolts and MBG Life Lessons. Lightning Bolts indicate those moments of sudden inspiration that led to significant transformations of my life, and MBG Life Lessons are the most important things I have learned along the way. I use my own initials—my full name is Matthew Brian Gersper—to highlight the fact that these are my life lessons, and I do not presume that they should apply to you or anyone else.
Today I celebrate our 400th blog post by sharing What I Have Learned (So Far) About The Impossible Dream.
MBG Life Lesson: I’d rather follow my own dreams and fail than succeed by conforming to “what I am supposed to do.”
On the back patio of our home in Walnut Creek, my mom and dad were having an intense discussion with long-time family friends. We had lived next door to them during my early elementary school days. Our families’ bond had grown through the years. The parents had watched each other’s kids grow up. Our friendship had a familial feel to it. We were close. We looked out for each other. We loved each other.
It was love that brought them to our patio to have a very difficult discussion with my parents. They had observed over the years how my mom and dad supported my dream to become a pro football player. They knew my parents “spent money they didn’t have” to support my football camps. They had heard them tell me, a thousand times, I could become anything I wanted, if I “was willing to work long enough and hard enough for it.”
When I was a little boy, my parents’ friends had thought my football dream was cute. I was a junior in high school now. It wasn’t cute anymore. They “knew” that I wasn’t going to become a professional football player and thought my parents had better sit me down and set me straight. And they felt that if my parents didn’t do this, they were setting me up for a big failure.
It took a lot of courage for them to take this stand with my parents. It risked their friendship. They did it because they believed every word they said, and because they loved me and wanted me to have every opportunity for a successful life. They weren’t alone in their opinion, either. My dream to become a pro football player typically received one of two responses from those around me: either it was dismissed as the fanciful dream of a little boy or derided as a wasteful fantasy for a middle-class, educated young man who should become well-rounded and should be pursuing more realistic goals. My parents accepted their advice as well intentioned, but it didn’t change their mind or behavior. Fortunately, the friendship survived.
How many dreams are killed before they even get started? How many inspirations are tamped down because the tampers don’t understand the dreamers? How many great lives are made average by choosing or being forced onto a safer, more realistic path? I didn’t have many assets on my difficult journey to becoming a professional football player, but the two biggest ones I had were heart and belief.
Heart: I wanted it deep down inside me. I was willing to do almost anything.
Belief: I really, truly believed I could do it.
As it turns out, I wasn’t quite able to make it as a professional football player. After high school, I played four more years in college. I kept the dream alive for two more years after college, eventually signing contracts with three different professional football teams (Saskatchewan Roughriders, Los Angeles Raiders, Orlando Renegades) in three different leagues (Canadian Football League, National Football League, United States Football League), only to be released before the season began each time.
My life experience has proven this quote from Ray Dalio’s book Principles: Life and Work:
If you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want.
The ten years I spent as a football player, chasing the ultimate outcome of becoming a pro, taught me to dream big, work hard, and believe nothing is impossible. In my thirty years of life after football, I’ve learned that I never get every outcome I want, but that’s OK. I’ve discovered something much better: the continuous process of choosing work I love, chasing big dreams, and believing anything is possible has enriched my day-to-day life in ways I could never have imagined.
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