Be Bold
Earlier this month, some of the fam got together for a (much needed) weekend Arizona road trip. About 15 minutes into the trip, I spotted this amazing sight on the freeway:
With incredulity in my voice, I exclaimed, “NO WAY! It’s Chewbacca on a motorcycle!”
And it was.
And yet, I felt like I had seen this somewhere before. Episode 6 anybody?
So, let me get this straight. About 10 days ago, some guy woke up and thought to himself, “Hm. I think I want to go outside, put on a gorrilla suit, put on an ‘I heart Beaver water’ T-shirt and ‘Harley’ bandanna and cruise down the freeway on my motorcycle.” Then he got up and did it.
I want to be like this guy.
Whenever I see stuff like this, I think to myself (after bursting with laughter) that this is what life is all about. We weren’t born to be people who just wander through life stressing and stewing day after day, until one day we die.
No.
We have to be bold. We have to be willing to stand out, to take risks, to make a splash, to be remembered. Otherwise, we’re born, we live, we die, and the world keeps turning as if we were never there.
Perry Romanowski is a joggler. He runs marathons… while juggling.
Why?
This is what he says:
While cleaning out my desk I stumbled across my old high school journals. There was an entry from September 3, 1985 in which I wrote…
“I gotta do something that people will remember…I want everyone to have some sort of opinion of me. Like, ‘there goes Perry, what a nice guy’ or ‘there goes Perry, I really hate him.’ I think not caring is worse than hating.”
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I joggle. As a runner I am not remarkable. Yes, cutting out the juggling, being more dedicated and training as hard as possible might lift me to the ranks of the top 10% runners in the world. But that means there are still hundreds of thousands of faster runners. 1 in 100,000 is no more memorable than 1 in 1,000,000.
As a joggler, you are almost always unique in your race. People remember you. People have an opinion about you. They’ll love you, or they’ll hate you. But you’ll be remembered.
Not being remembered is tragic.
I joggle to be remembered.
Haters are going to hate. Ignore them. Martin Luther King Jr. had haters. Gandhi had haters. Michaelangelo, Mozart, Nelson Mandela, and Abraham Lincoln… all of them had haters, but nobody can deny that they have profoundly influenced the world. These men were bold, and history has rewarded them for their boldness.
Be bold.