The fall is my favourite time of year. The weather is awesome… especially, on a comparative basis, this fall of 2009. The world is back to work, back to school, back to business. My Steelers are back. Or so their uniforms say. Hockey is upon us.
And I get to coach my high school football team as a volunteer.
You’ve probably heard the story before, about my superhero quarterback, Simon. Well in 2007, when Simon first came to play for me he was a 5’8”, 247-pound wanna be QB, who I played at centre. I kid you not; two-hundred and forty-seven pounds spread over 68 inches. Not a pretty sight.
Especially for him.
Yesterday at practice, as I was chatting with Simon in warm-ups, the weighty topic arose again. In two years this young man has transformed himself into a 5’9”, 181 pound quarterback. One if the best in the city. But skip back a sentence. One hundred and eighty one pounds? Did this kid really lose sixty-six pounds? Wow! How?
Well there may not be an I in team, but there is in WIN. And Simon wanted to win. He wanted to win the starting quarterback spot that I dangled in front of him. He wanted his team to transform from an 0-5 squad, which we were in 2007, to a 2-2-1 squad like we were in 2008. He wanted his best friends to catch touchdowns and enjoy the game.
This was a classic case where the motivation overcame the obstacles. Simon doesn’t starve himself, he makes his own food (pretty heady at 18), and works out constantly, and doesn’t chug 2-litre cream sodas in class in anymore. Which he literally used to do. He would actually sit in class (why the teachers let him I don’t know), hugging a giant bottle of cream soda.
And work out he does. One day when he was still in the “200+” camp, Simon decided to run 10k. He hit a local school track and started the laps, staggering in circles ready to faint. But he told himself, I am running 10k today or I am going to die. Cause if I can run this 10k, I will be convinced I can get under two hundred pounds.
When I go to my office and hear from some staff that they can’t write this deck, or solve this problem, or develop this idea, it makes me wonder… could they lose sixty-six pounds? Are they not motivated by this task at hand? What separates the person who blames society for this difficult project or this excess weight on their hips. But I realize now that motivation has to come from within.
No one could tell Simon to lose 66 pounds. But he wanted to win.
