Success, and how we get there

By Ty Jones

Ty's Baseball photo back in 1984

When I was about 9 years old, my mom drove me to the first day of little league baseball.  I was on the “Reds”, and I had never met any of my teammates.  I was very nervous and as we arrived at the field (Gibson Jr. High School in Las Vegas), I declared that I had decided I didn’t want to play.  Many of you know my mom as Dee, one of the trainers at CrossFit Initiative.  And you can probably guess that my mom didn’t just say “ok” and turn the car around.  For the next five minutes, she tried to coax me out of the car.  I continued to snivel and whine and absolutely wouldn’t budge.  My mom is one of the most determined people I’ve ever met (picture a 63 year old woman doing “Helen” at 10 o’clock at night in the rain and you’ve pretty much got it).  She was calm as she tried to “talk me down” as it were.  But after five minutes she gave me an ultimatum: “Get out of the car and go meet your team, or I will drag you out there in front of everyone”.  It was at that point that I grabbed my glove and hopped out of the car.  Although I decided a few years later that baseball wasn’t my sport of choice, I enjoyed 3 great seasons of little league.  There are many things you can glean from that little story.  And before you all give me a hard time for being such a sissy when I was a kid (which I was ), let me get to my point.  Throughout our lives, we come upon difficult moments.  Moments that, depending upon how we handle them, shape the people that we are.  Not all of these moments are quite so dramatic as my little league story.  They may be as mundane as deciding whether or not to drop the bar on the last 9 thrusters in “Fran” when you know deep down that you can finish it without stopping.  Or sitting at your computer reading this article and knowing deep down that you need to do something to regain your health.  Regardless, success in life is not a single moment and a single decision.  Success is the sum of all those difficult moments and the choices you make.  The beautiful thing is that although success isn’t a single moment, neither is failure.  Rather, I believe that they are more like Newton’s first law of motion (“An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to stay in motion.”).  Subsitute “failure” for “rest” and substitute “success” for “motion” and we’re getting somewhere… so to speak.  But notice that the word “tends” is used.  Just because you may have repeatedly failed, does not doom you to permanent failure.  The magic ingredient to success is making the right choice when you meet that next difficult situation, and then doing it again, and again…
On the back of our gym’s shirts we have an Aristotle quote: “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”  At CrossFit Initiative, our goal for our members is to help them make excellence their habit.  To help them begin to make the right choices as they encounter those difficult situations, much as my mom did for me 26 years ago.