If you get a chance, see this movie on DVD called “The Blind Side.” Watching it recently reminded me of some of the core values and principles we’ve been looking at lately.
It’s a true story about a kid from Memphis who had—to put it mildly—an extremely tough childhood through no fault of his own. But he had two things going for himself. First, he was huge, which made him attractive to high school sports coaches. But also, when most others saw him as unintelligent, a caring teacher identified his greatest aptitude: his instinctive ability to protect others.
He was eventually adopted by a wealthy family who helped him get stabilized and properly educated, but everyone was dying to see what he could do on a football field as on offensive lineman. What better place for a painfully shy kid to show of his greatest ability, right?
Problem was he had never played any organized sports. So he’s out there holding the defensive guys (which is a penalty), picking them up and carrying them down the field (another penalty), anything and everything accept the right way to protect his teammates—if the defense wasn’t simply running around him and smearing his offensive guys.
According to the movie at least, his adopted mom pulled him aside in practice one day and connected his natural protective instinct with the emotion of protecting his team as he would his adopted family, whom he came to love a great deal. Once that connection stuck, he became an unstoppable machine. Heavily recruited, he could’ve gone to virtually any college he wanted. Today he’s a pro football star.
His story illustrates something important that we have to get straight in business and in life: Get in the Game! Have you ever had a good idea about a business or a project or something, but you didn’t feel like you knew enough about it, or you didn’t feel like you were really proficient at it, or that you weren’t ready? What ended up happening? My guess is you said, ‘I’ll wait,’ and you never did it, yes or yes?
It’d be great to get things right the first time, but how often does that actually happen? Whatever it is we’re good at, we can always get better. In fact, we have to if we want to be successful in the long term.
The young man highlighted above, Michael Oher (pronounced oar), could’ve been a high-ranking officer or soldier, a policeman, a social worker, bodyguard to the stars—all sorts of paths could have yielded high success and happiness just by him using his natural protective instinct and physical abilities. And he had just about everything working against him from the day he was born.
But it wasn’t just the material resources of his adopted family that saved him. He could have easily walked into that socially and culturally shocking environment, been offered opportunities most kids in situations like his will never have, and said, “No thanks.” Or he could’ve given up, but he didn’t. He made a choice to get in the game and stay there.
Not every story of success has to be about multi-millionaires. People are overcoming adversity everyday, in ways big or small. Do you know any true stories of people overcoming misfortune and finding success? What’s your story? We want to hear from you!
