Ok, last off-topic post. The last podcast I listened to is called "Middle School". The host interviews a 14-year old middle schooler, and she discusses in her own words why middle school can be so tough and just an awkward stage in life. It was fun to listen to as a former middle schooler because I totally remember feeling that way in middle school! Check it out and reminisce about your awkward middle school phase!
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/449/middle-school

One of the other pod-casts I listened to is called "No coincidence, no story!". It's all dedicated to crazy coincidences experienced by people, and they are so awesome! I personally love hearing about coincidences that are just out of this world, and this pod-cast is dedicated to sharing some! Go check it out http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/489/no-coincidence-no-story

Although it's off-topic, I listened to a few really cool pod casts recently! One of them was called "Getting Away With It" which was originally aired on NPR's This American Life. When seemingly nobody is watching or judging, the people featured in this pod-cast break the rules and make bad choices without fear of consequences. It was really interesting to hear these people explain themselves and why they did what they did, because we've all had that moment when no one is watching! Check it out
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/477/getting-away-with-it

Here comes another seemingly unrelated post. In reality, however, the film "God Grew Tired of Us" which I am about to discuss can relate back to my regular topic in the realm of life lessons we can learn. For those who have never seen the movie, I'll provide a little bit of background. The film details the travels of three of the "Lost Boys of Sudan," who fled their homeland of Sudan a midst war and chaos. They walked hundreds of miles, starving and dehydrated, to Ethiopia to find refuge. They soon had to travel once again to Kenya, where they remained for 10 years until the United States invited the Lost Boys to come live in the United States. There's several lessons that can be learned from these boys, but I admire their resilience and desire more than anything. If I was one of those boys, I would have given up before we were even half way to Ethiopia; but they didn't. They persisted. They were determined to seek out a better life for themselves, and they did everything necessary to achieve it. Sickness, thirst, endless journeys, didn't deter them. They were even separated from  their families. However, they made the journey and made a better life for themselves. We can all learn important life lessons from these boys; I certainly did just from watching this short documentary. With determination and desire, nothing can deter us from where we want to go or who we want to become: the lost boys of Sudan illustrated this principle right before my eyes in the documentary. I highly recommend you watch it, it has inspired me and allowed me to see how blessed I am in facing the negligible challenges that are in my own personal life.

People always talk about the lessons that can be learned from losing; myself included. As I've discussed before in this blog, losing in sports can motivate and bring about some of the greatest successes. However, I think there is another important aspect in losing that is often overlooked: losing with pride. You may not understand what I mean, so I'll give you two examples. My basketball team senior year was playing for the district semifinal against the #3 ranked school in the state. They were bigger than us, stronger than us, and on paper they were straight up better than us. We prepared for weeks for this game. When it was finally game time, we were pumped up and ready to go. We played extremely well: at halftime we were up by 3. The second half was a battle, and we were up by 5 with a little over 2 minutes left in the game. In my opinion, the referees screwed us in those last few minutes, making consecutive horrendous calls that negated some of our baskets and forced us to give up possession multiple times. We ended up losing by 4. We were heartbroken. Tears streamed down all of our faces, for we had come so close. Not a sound was made as we entered the locker room. When coach came in, he stood there silent for a moment as well. Then he told us to pick our heads up. He told us to be proud; we had played a hell of a game. Every second the clock was ticking all five players on the floor were giving 100%. Although we had lost, we all walked out of the locker room, chins high, eyes still filled with tears as we walked to the bus. We may not have won the game, but we left everything we had on the floor, and that meant something. I truly learned that day that sometimes it's not about the final score: what matters is your desire and effort.
There was another game in my high school career where we lost to an awful team, one we hadn't lost to in a number of years. It was truly embarrassing. Once again, our coach entered into a silent locker room after the game. He once again told us to pick our heads up and own that loss. Nobody had gone out there and lost the game for us. We played awful, and we had nobody but ourselves to blame. How shameful it was to keep our chins up and own that despicable loss.
There's two sides to losing with pride: being proud of what you did accomplish when nobody said you would even come close, and accepting when you simply blew it. Personal accountability is a lesson many people go their entire lives without fully understanding. The art of selling yourself short is something people in the real world are notoriously good at doing these days. Through some painful experiences and inspiring experiences in high school sports, I can now recognize in all aspects of life when I give a valiant effort. I am better able to give myself credit in the midst of an apparent loss. On the other hand, I'm also better at taking personal responsibility when I mess up (which I do fairly often). These are skills that I know I'm going to need later in my professional career and even in my personal life, and I'm grateful to have had experience in perfecting these skills through my participation is sports.

A common question asked in job interviews these days is, “Do you work well in a group?” Employers are looking for potential employees who are able to work well with others in a team setting. In the workplace, it's very rare that you’ll be able to work alone on all of your projects and assignments; especially if you work for an engineering industry or for a business firm, where virtually all of your large scale projects will require a team of many working together for weeks at a time. I participated in two team sports in high school, and doing so has provided me with experience in working with a team to reach a common goal. Many people take for granted the challenges associated  with team work, but it truly takes a lot of work and focus to bring together a group of separate individuals and work like a well-oiled machine. For example, my first few years on the basketball team, the upper classmen had a problem with egos and self-interest. Almost every player who received significant playing time on varsity on my freshman year was incredibly talented, and we were ranked 10^th in the state preseason. Any outsider looking at the pure talent and skill level we were able to put on the court that year would have said we had a chance to go deep into the state playoffs. However, they had no idea the level of disharmony and disconnectedness we had as a team. Sure, we were incredibly talented as a bunch of individuals, but our team dynamic was severely lacking. All 5 individuals on the court at one time put their individual stat line and success over what may have been best for the team as a whole, and our performance suffered. We were still the top team in our region, but we were losing some games we had no business losing. When playoffs rolled around, our team was as divided as ever. We coasted through our first two games (since we were a very high seed, we played two of the poorer teams from our district). When the semi-finals in the District playoffs came, we were facing a team we had beaten by 35 points just a few weeks earlier. We came out as we usually do, but our opponents had a new approach. The played an essential zone defense, and took away all of our individual one-on-one options. Any basketball player knows that an effective way to beat a zone defense is good ball movement, which equates to unselfishness and good team work. Our players became frustrated, for they were unable to score and beat the defense as an individual. We lost the game by 10 points, and I attribute this loss to a poor team dynamic. In life, working as a team is inevitable. Being able to work in that setting and promote the best from others in that situation is a crucial skill that employers value very highly. I watched a lack of team work ruin a team, and from that year on the players and I made sure to foster a close relationship with our team mates. We found success in this, and I feel very prepared for when I’m asked in an interview, “Do you work well in a team setting?” 

Discipline is key to success. Without discipline, nothing would get done. It takes discipline to do homework, study for exams, lose weight, gain muscle, and to improve in essentially any aspect of life. One great lesson I learned from my time in sports was how to discipline myself. For example, in high jump, there are many drills that at the time seem pointless and useless. When I was a freshman, all I wanted to do was practice doing full actual jumps over a bar. When my coach would insist on drilling isolated parts of my jump, I couldn't see the end goal he had in mind. They all just seemed like stupid drills. However, after my years of jumping, I discovered that the tiniest technique flaw could be the difference between qualifying for the state meet at a 6'4" clearance and not even meeting the district qualifying standard at a 5'10" clearance. I began to spend more time drilling and drilling isolated parts of my technique. This took an incredible amount of discipline, because even then all I wanted to do was full jumps to receive that instant gratification. I think this concept can be applied to any kind of progression in life. In order to become good at your job, you have to improve bit by bit, piece by piece. The discipline to be able to improve without instant gratification is a life lesson that I have learned through my experiences in sports, and I think anyone else who has learned this lesson early can say that it's been very helpful.

Learning to accept constructive criticism and apply it to ourselves is a tough lesson to learn. No one likes to be told they're imperfect or wrong, especially not in front of their friends. Near the beginning of my first year of high school basketball, I seriously struggled with this concept. My coach was on me every day, seemingly just calling me out for every single thing and proclaiming to the whole team how awful I was. I was convinced he was a jerk and was simply out to get me. After talking to him about this situation in private, my opinion completely changed. He told me that he knew how good I was and can be. He told me that he couldn't accept anything less than what I was capable of. It was then that I realized all the screaming and yelling directed at me was for my own good. If Coach stopped yelling at me and pointing out the things I did wrong, that must mean he doesn't care about my evolution as a player anymore. I began to see his criticisms in a whole new light. This view can be applied to countless areas of every day life. Constructive criticism is for our own benefit, and it should be taken as such. Whether it be a boss, coworker, or husband/wife, criticisms come on a very regular basis. Being able to internalize the criticisms, see what needs fixing or improved, and being motivated to change or fix it is a crucial skill that will give you a headstart in life if you learn it early. I know I learned this lesson through my experiences in high school sports, and others can too if they pursue a competitive sport.

I watched a movie the other night titled "Wasteland." This topic isn't really related to my regular blog topic of sports, but I feel it important to digress and give my opinion on this film. It details the journey of an artist who travels to the world's largest landfill in hopes of creating artwork inspired by the pickers, or people who harvest the landfill of recyclable materials and sell them for profits. Once the artwork was created, all the profits gained from their sale was donated to the pickers organization. When they first showed the landfill I was shocked. That thing is HUGE! So much trash and garbage piled extremely high and spread across miles of land. Vik Muniz, the artist, introduces himself to a few of the pickers. They have a hard life, as the documentary depicts them climbing on hills of trash scavenging for what they consider valuables. They pose for pictures, and some of the pictures are very powerful. Personally, I enjoyed this film because it really opened my eyes to the struggles some people have, and what they have to do to get by and provide for their families. Muniz does a fantastic job capturing the struggles but also the attitudes of the pickers in his images, and the documentary takes you through their entire journey. I would recommend this film to anyone who is even slightly interested in documentaries.

Coping with failure is something most people struggle with at some point in their lives. Of course, it's no fun to fail, and I know I've struggled with the motivation to get back up after failure has knocked me down. However, in my time of playing high school sports, I've gained insight into how to deal with failure. As most people know, competitive sports always end one way; with a winner and a loser. I've had my share of both sweet, hard earned victories and heart wrenching losses. Those tough losses are jam-packed full of teaching opportunities. Did you know that Steve Jobs was originally fired from a head position of the company he owned before he went on to Apple? That’s a failure. But did Jobs quit when things seemed dim and bleak? Obviously he didn't, because he went on to develop the corporate beast that is Apple Inc. My senior season, our basketball team beat a rival who had beaten us for 7 years straight at our home court. It was the greatest night of my life, and after the game our coach told us, through tears of joy, that we were able to accomplish this feat because of what we learned from tough and undeserved losses earlier in the season. There were days were Coach was screaming at us in practice, days we were in the gym for 4 hours running and working to correct our weaknesses. In all honesty, those days were not fun. We endured the brutal days of seeming torture because we knew, although we had failed before, that we would have another shot, and we were willing to do all in our power to ensure that we made the most of that shot. Because of this deep rooted desire to get back up after being knocked down in the sporting world, I am able to redirect this same feeling into my schoolwork and other areas of life. Without the help of competitive sports, where sometimes you have to taste defeat, I’m not sure how well equipped I’d be to deal with the future failures of life that I know are coming.

I love sports. They are incredibly fun, especially with good friends, and they're also a great way to stay fit and active. Nothing did I love more in high school than coming home and playing pick-up basketball or football with my closest buddies. Besides my immense love for the fun and competition of sports, I have a deeper passion for these games because I know they are more than just a fun way to exercise. Had I not played sports competitively in high school, I would not be the person I am today. This is because sports can be a great teacher for those who dedicate themselves to attend it's classes. There are an infinite number of lessons I've learned from my experiences, but to name a few, I've learned patience, dedication, motivation, how to perform under pressure, how to deal with failure and come back stronger, and how to lead by example. These are all characteristics that I will try to impart on my children by involving them in sports at an early age. I have a love for the game, and I will for the rest of my life. I will be forever grateful for the experience I gained through competitive sports that I can already see shaping the man I am and will become.

About Me

My name is Andrew, and I'm a freshman at Brigham Young University. I'm currently majoring in chemical engineering. I am a huge sports fan, mainly basketball, football, baseball, and track and field. In high school, I played baseball and basketball and competed in track and field. I love playing any kind of pick-up sport for fun, but I also enjoy playing the guitar, lifting, and hanging out with friends. That's a simple introduction about me!