Defining Success - Part 1
“No lie, just know I chose my own fate. I drove by the fork in the road and went straight.” ~Jay-Z, Renegade, The Blueprint Album
Imagine a world where everyone has all the connections possible and there’s an abundance of money at your disposal, without consequences (scholarly followers please ignore the economic issues and just use your imagination). In this world you and everyone else could buy whatever you wanted. How would you define success in this world? Would your goals be the same as they are now? What would you aspire to do if there were no obstacles? Think about it.
Now back to reality, where success is money and fame, or more specifically just money. Don’t deny it, its true. Most likely your definition of success differs in the “free world” (pun intended), than it does in reality. Don’t feel bad mine did; but that’s the thing, we often allow outside influences to define success for us.
Success is what you make it, which is why one of the most valuable experiences I’ve learned over the past few years was that I would have to define success for me and only me.
For me Success originally meant doing well in school, having a lot of friends and winning races at track meets. And to be honest winning races trumped. This definition developed when I was two years old, right after my first track meet ever. I remember it clearly. I competed at an annual church track meet against other 2-year-olds in a 50-meter race. I stood bored at the start as my mom walk to the finish with her camcorder (I swear she never left the house without it; modern day cell phone, she was ahead of her time Lol). When the gun went off I nonchalantly did exactly what mom said, “Run to her.” Mom was not as nonchalant as I was, after I reached the finish line first. She screamed the entire race missing out on recording the last few meters. (This wouldn’t be her last time making that mistake).
It was in that moment where I fell in love with the feeling of winning. I loved that feeling so much it was like an addiction. I would race males and females of all ages to the stop sign, the light pole or up and down the block. It didn’t matter who you were to me, if you were in the neighborhood I’d race you. Logically so, my desire to race people is the reason I got started in youth track. The coach from the United Stars spotted me when I was six years old, racing teenage boys at my cousin's football practice, and the rest was history. I like racing because I like to beat people. Period. And as a child that was all the success I needed.
However, my definition of success began to change my sophomore year in college. Right after I made the 2007 World Championship team, I started to develop a financial undertone to success. It bothered me that I couldn't receive a couple thousand dollars for finishing third at USA Nationals because of the NCAA’s amateur rules. I remember thinking; it wasn’t fair that I ran for free. (HA! As if, the race I ran two weeks prior, to win my first NCAA title wasn’t “for free.”) Oh how things changed quickly. I didn’t realize it then, but I was allowing outside sources to define my success.
Later that summer my motivation for running began to shift even more, after I won two bronze medals at the 2007 Pan-American Games. That was my first professional international competition, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (hence #Return2Rio). Another pro-athlete on the team informed me of how much money I could’ve made that summer, if I was not in school (he should’ve said “if I had a contract”). And I couldn’t help but think that maybe I should really consider this pro life.
So after Pan-Ams I was motivated to run well so that I could get a contract that would pay for law school. People told me “you can’t do both,” or they would revamp my plans and suggest I’d go to school once I was done with track. I truly believed I could do both, but after I didn’t make the finals at the World Championships, I thought maybe pro-life required specific focus. So for the 2008 season, I adopted a very strict training regiment and did what everyone else said was necessary for me to be successful for the 2008 Olympic season. I made track my job, my career or better yet my life.
It’s amazing how after 13 years of running just to "beat people," it only took two races within one month for me to add a financial component to why I ran track. At the time I didn’t even realize that my motivation was changing. It seemed logical for me to think that way if I wanted to be successful at the professional level. I had to adopt the pro-athlete attitude to achieve my goal. Not true! There’s no blue print to anything, there are common routes traveled, but it’s not one size fits all. That summer I allowed what I and other humans could conceive as the only logical route to success, to dictate how I would achieve success. Stay tuned to see how I learned the hard way that “pro-life” wasn’t for me….#FaithfullyDriven
…I was at a fork in the road and I choose track.
