Читать книгу The Dream Chaser - Gaskins Tony A. - Страница 5

No one is born a failure. You have seeds of success within you no matter where you're born, who your parents are, what race you are, or what religion you are. We accept limitations and we stunt our growth by believing the lies that were told to us about who we are and what we can become. No matter the level you were born at you can always go higher. You don't have to accept the limits the world tries to place on you. Any gift can make you a living. There is a business for everything imaginable and if there isn't, you can create it. Just because it hasn't been done or there hasn't been real success at it doesn't mean that you can't be successful. We see what others have done and we believe we can't go any further than they did. We tell ourselves what's realistic and what's not and we call it being a realist. I've found that everyone has something special about them, but it can be so unique that no one is ready to embrace it. Your gift can be so rare that it scares you and confuses others.

I look at my gifts, and I don't know where they come from. I write 100-page books usually, but I'm hoping this one finishes longer than that. I go away to a beach house and I write my books in two to three days. When I tell someone that, they are blown away, even some authors. I could write my book a thousand times over, and it wouldn't get any better because I write from my heart, not from my mind. What's on my heart won't change today or tomorrow because it's my true thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. So I sit down and I pour my heart out on the paper. I only took one computer class in school, but that class taught me how to type. I type as fast as I think, so my fingers can keep up with my thoughts and I don't have to suffer through writer's block. I'm not a prolific writer, but I can convey my thoughts and get a point across without it taking me weeks or months to do so. I came to realize that it's a small gift that has benefited me greatly. I don't know anyone else in my family who can do it, so I stand alone with my gift. We all have something like that. There is something in you that only you can do really well. There may be other people who can do it, but in your immediate circle you may be the only person who can do it that well. It could literally be anything. No gift is too small to embrace. No gift is too small to build a business around. Anything you are gifted at can be monetized and used in a positive way.

Think back to when you were young. What did you do that came so natural that you didn't have to think about it? What did you do that others talked about or gravitated toward? What did you enjoy? I remember meeting a guy in high school who talked nonstop. That's a gift. If I talked as much as he did, my head would hurt, my jaws would hurt, and I would become physically exhausted. But this guy talked nonstop, and the topics just seemed to fly off the top of his head. He was a freestyle talker. He also liked to write as much as he liked to talk. He also started to rap. Today he has a podcast, and I believe one day his love for talking will make him a living if he harnesses the gift and pursues a career in it. Some people are neat freaks. Well, that can be a cleaning service, an organizing service, a closet-cleaning service, or anything along that line. There are neat freaks that would be organizing and loving every minute of it and earning a living from it, but instead they're on someone's job slaving away and hating it. Don't sleep on your dreams. Don't curse your gifts. There are natural gifts inside of you that could change your life. Maybe you can't see them, but someone else can. Your gift may be tied to your passion, or it may be tied to your purpose. Whichever it's tied to, it can bring you peace and joy. You have to realize your gifts if you want to take control of your life. Your gifts shouldn't have to be your hobby. Your gift can be your job. It may have to be your hobby for a little while to build a business around it, but it can become your full-time job. I love what I do, and it doesn't feel like work. It's not fair either. I hate to see someone miserable while I'm happy. I hate to see someone asking a boss for time off while I'm creating my own schedule. It upsets me. It bothers me. I'm thinking to myself, there are people whose ancestors were slaves, and they started life with every disadvantage. Why are they living the dream and you're living the nightmare? There are people using their gifts and making millions of dollars. If anyone can do it, then I believe everyone can do it. I'm just that optimistic. You'll have what you believe you can have. There are no excuses.

When I was in the fourth grade, we had to write an essay in class. I wrote the essay from my heart. It was based on my life experiences, all nine years of them. I got an A on the essay, and my teacher asked me if she could read the essay to the class. I was shocked that she wanted to read my paper to the entire class. It confused me because there were kids in the class who were way smarter than me. Their parents were smarter and more successful than my parents, so those smarts were passed down to them. They read faster. They worked faster. They got better grades. I was confused, but I let her read the paper to the class. All I remember from the essay was one line, in which I said: “I got a weapon so bad that I could not sit down.” It should have said “whippin'” instead of weapon but the teacher thought I spelled it that way on purpose. She said, “I've never seen whippin' spelled like that, but that's a clever way to spell it.” She thought I did that on purpose, and I took the credit for it. Sometimes your mistakes will look like you did it on purpose when you're operating in your gift. She read the paper, and after that day she wanted to talk to my parents. She told my parents that I was gifted, and she wanted to put me in the gifted class. I felt very special, and I accepted the offer. I went to the gifted class. My parents were surprised and elated. They didn't do anything special with me growing up when it came to academics. My elementary school started to get too hard for them to help me. I would ask for help, but they would teach me their way and that way wasn't the teacher's way; so when I realized that, I stopped asking them for help. They were trying, and they were happy that their son was a gifted student.

I didn't just write essays. I wrote poems later. That gift intrigued my teachers, and I kept hearing the same thing from English teachers all my life. The young girls I wrote poems for told me how much they loved them. My mother started praising my writing and telling me I could write Hallmark cards. I was really embracing this writing thing, and the more I did it the easier it became. I've always had bad grammar though. I never knew the grammar rules. I just knew how to put words together and paint a picture with them. Once, one of my teachers told me that my grammar could use a lot of work but that he couldn't give me less than a B just because of my writing style. Honestly, the only book I read was the Holy Bible growing up. There is a certain writing style in the Bible, and I believe growing up I emulated that style.

Not only was I writing a lot, but also I was teaching and advising. I remember in middle school I would walk to my friends' homes, and I would be teaching them about the Bible on the way home. I would teach them about life, sins, and forgiveness. I was a child. I was a baby. I didn't really know nearly as much as I pretended to know. Then in high school I started doing relationship coaching. I didn't call it that back then, but that's what it's called today, and it's become a substantial stream of income for me. I remember being on three-way calls with these two girls, and they would ask me questions about their boyfriends. I'd tell them why he was behaving the way he was and what they should do in response. Then they would call back with the results, and they would always say, “I did exactly what you said I should do and you were so right!” I never got tired of hearing that. I was operating in my gifts. One of the two girls ended up leaving her boyfriend, and she became my girlfriend. So I'd used my life-coaching gift to get her out of that relationship, then I used my writing gift to win her heart. I say all that because the gifts were evident even as a child, but I had no idea that one day I would earn a living using them.

You see writing and life coaching were gifts, but they were not options on my birth path. So I operated in them, but I didn't know that they could become a career. Had I known those were gifts that I could make a living from, I would have taken them much more seriously and honed them better. While those gifts were there, I was following my birth path and following one of the three options I had. The option I chose first was to be a professional athlete like Tracy McGrady. At that time Tracy McGrady was the only pro athlete I knew personally. I'm from Auburndale, Florida, and we had a population of 5,000 then. Tracy was the one guy who made it out and was making millions in the NBA. I wanted to be the next Tracy McGrady. That was one of the options on my birth path, but it wasn't the one for me. Tracy is 6′8″; I'm 5′10″. I make a much better writer, speaker, and life coach than I do a basketball player. I didn't think about that at the time though. I also played football. I excelled in basketball and football, so they seemed like natural gifts. I could have gone to the pros in either one of them had I put in the work, but again those goals were beyond what we could see in my household. I just wanted to graduate from high school, hopefully get into college, and stay out of prison or the grave. Becoming a pro athlete wasn't really taken seriously by anyone around me. I talked about it, but I didn't really work for it. I was good, so people thought that's what I would become if luck struck at the right time. But no one invested in me. No one took me to five-star camps or put me in a travel league or a real AAU program. I played one year of AAU, and that was with the Boys and Girls Club team. We weren't serious about it nor did anyone take us seriously. We were just going with the flow and hoping that we would get lucky. No one expected to make it out unless they were unusually gifted or uniquely built.

Then my senior year rolled around and that was a big year for me. I had to earn a college scholarship in basketball or football. I didn't know much about academic scholarships, and I didn't think I was smart enough for one of those anyway. I knew my parents couldn't afford to pay for college. They were struggling to pay the high school tuition, and it wasn't very much because I qualified for financial aid; and I had some supporters at the school who really liked me and helped me a lot.

Football came around first, and in the second game I popped something in my leg. I didn't know what exactly happened, but I heard a pop in my leg. It was treated as a high ankle sprain. The next week I tried to play but ended up with two carries and −3 yards due to my ankle. The next week I got a little better but still couldn't play. Then I had to sit out one more week. I missed three games that season, and we only played nine. I played the first game and the last five. I finished with over 1,300 yards in those six games, so I still averaged over 200 yards a game. I think a miscount happened though, because by my count, I had about 1,100 yards – but I went with what the newspaper said I had. Because of that ankle sprain I didn't have the showing I wanted to have, but I still received a lot of letters. The really big schools offered to let me join the team as a preferred walk-on. They just couldn't believe the numbers I put up, so they wanted to see it for themselves. I couldn't blame them. There were running backs that I was better than who went to big schools, so I knew I could cut it if it came down to it. But I was getting ready for basketball, and I wanted to make one last campaign just to see if I could get a scholarship in basketball. However, my dad and my coach got into a disagreement, because my dad wanted me to take two weeks off from sports and my basketball coach wanted me to come right into basketball. My dad told the coach that if he didn't give me two weeks off, then he wouldn't let me play at all. The coach said, “OK, then I guess he won't be playing then.” My dad told me what happened, and I sided with my dad. My coach came and told me that it wasn't personal and that he had no problem with me and that he just wanted me at practice. For some reason I wasn't as excited about basketball anymore when I realized my coach wouldn't let me take a two-week break. I decided not to play, and I was banking on football 100 % then.

The end of the year came, and schools started to come around. My football coach was telling schools that they needed a full scholarship to get me. He was asking for a bit much considering that we played at a small 1A school against virtual nobodies. But, I took the vote of confidence in stride. I realized that the full scholarships weren't coming in, so I started to market myself. I didn't notice then what was another gift of mine – to be a go-getter. I'll talk later about how I got myself on TV. But I looked up all the Florida colleges and I went to their websites and submitted my info on their football pages. Florida Atlantic University called me back first. They invited me to come down and look at the campus. I went down with my parents, and it looked nice. I wanted to play there. The coach asked me if I would come play, and I told him yes. Then when I got back home about a week later, I got a call from a smaller school, West Virginia Wesleyan College. It was a D2 school and somehow the coach had come up with a way to pay my full $28,000/year tuition. Florida Atlantic was only going to be $11,000/year. So I felt flattered that a school was offering me almost triple. We spoke to my AAU basketball coach because he was the only person we knew who went to college on a scholarship. He told us to follow the money, not the opportunity. He said that I could get hurt in training camp and then I would be stuck paying for college at Florida Atlantic, but at the other school even if I got hurt, my school was paid for. So we took that advice, and my mom's friend who coached at Florida State University told her the same thing. He said if you were good enough, the NFL would find you even if you were playing pick-up ball in the middle of the woods. So I packed my bags and I moved to West Virginia. It was one thousand miles away from home.

I was going away and taking all of my gifts with me. My gifts opened doors for me, and they made a way for me to get into college. I believe we all have gifts that can open doors for us, but we have to be willing to use our gifts and then walk through the doors that they open. We don't take ourselves seriously enough most of the time. We sleep on our dreams and we curse our gifts. I was stepping out on faith and taking a chance.

You see, someone else confirmed all of my gifts. We can feel good at something, but if a single soul doesn't believe in us, we won't have a chance. Sometimes we pursue passions instead of gifts. A passion can be different from a gift. My passion was basketball, but I wasn't good enough to get a scholarship in basketball. My gift was football, and I got a scholarship in that. I had to use my gift as a means to a better end. My passion for basketball could have become more of a gift if I had more resources and support in that area, but I didn't, so I had to take what I could get. Every school had a hundred spots on a football team, but a basketball team had only 15. So it was easier for me to make it to college in football. Sometimes we have to walk in our gifts until we can pursue our passions. There are a lot of people pursuing passions but getting nowhere while letting their natural gifts rot.

You may be good in graphic design and website building but not passionate about it, but yet you're passionate about music but not as good in it. Well, if you use graphic design to make money, then you can fund your passion for music. But if you ignore graphic design and just chase your passion for music, you may never get ahead in music because you don't have the resources you need to get really good at it. So take what you're naturally good at and use it to get to a point where you can dive into some of your passions for fun. We have to use what we have, not what we want. Gifts are natural, and they're free. Use them to get ahead in life. Look back over your life or at your life currently and identify whether there are any gifts you're overlooking. Are there any gifts you're ignoring or running from just because it comes so easy that it bores you at times? It bores you because you haven't given it a purpose. I can write without getting writer's block naturally, but if I'm writing about stuff that doesn't matter, then I'd be bored with the gift. I can coach people in their lives, but if I'm coaching them about things that don't matter, then I'd be bored with it. But because I gave my gifts purpose, I'm excited about them and they've come alive in me. Identify your natural gifts and build on them.