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Nothing in life is free! I am sure we have all heard this expression as well as a hundred more just like it. The point is that if you want something you need to work for it, but there is much more underlining this statement than just hard work. 

In order to achieve anything in life, you need to take risks. When I was a kid, like most energetic boys, I used to love to climb trees. Directly behind my house was a large Maple tree, which was my favorite to climb. Around the base of the tree, my mother has placed a pile of shale stones as decoration. I remember vividly when I was about 8 years old, climbing and swinging on the branches of the big Maple, like i had done a hundred times before, when suddenly the branch I was holding on to snapped. I began to tumble down the tree. I frantically grasped at branches trying to stop the fall, but somehow I flipped upside down and was rushing head-first into the pile of rocks below. Incredibly, on the last branch of the tree my legs caught and I hung, swinging upside down about 3 feet from the rocks.

Of course I simply swung back up and immediately climbed right back up to the spot to see the branch that had snapped and marvel at my ability to catch myself by my legs upside down! My point here is that in order to climb trees, you have to risk a major fall. No one ever makes it to the top without totally risking falling to the very bottom.

Anything you want in life that is worth having requires an equal level of risk. If you want to be rich, then you have to risk going bankrupt. If you want to be a famous actor, then you have risk being a nobody. And if you want to be a champion, then you have to totally risk not achieving that champion level.

True champions never have fear of this risk. They know the risk is there and they understand what it means, but they do not fear it. The reason they do not fear the risk, is because they do not see the risk as a possibility to fail. If a champion starts a business and the business goes bankrupt, a true champion will never say that the business failed. rather, he will say that the business did not achieve success this time, but next time he will succeed. The only way a champion ever feels like a failure is if he quits or if he feels he did not give it everything he had. Since neither of those will ever happen, regardless of the outcome of the risk taken, a champion can never fail.

So, whatever it is you want in your sport or in your life, never hesitate even for a second because of the risk. Everything has risk. And great accomplishments require great risks. But no matter what the result, whether you make it to the top or fall on your head, you can never fail if you think like a champion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.