Kelsey Higginson shares three lessons from playing sports: you don't need motivation to show up, chasing above-average goals isolates you from peers, and hard work pays off even when it looks different than you planned. Her Division-1 basketball dream didn't happen, but the discipline stuck with her.
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Here are 3 lessons that I learned from playing sports as a teenager. Lesson number 1, you don't have to have motivation in order to do the thing. I hear a lot of athletes and people say, I just don't have motivation. I'm not motivated. I need to, I need to find motivation. No, you don't. I can't tell you how many times that I woke up in the morning not wanting to go put up shots or go to the gym. I didn't feel motivated to do it, but I learned that you don't have to feel the motivation to go and do it anyway. Lesson number 2, don't be surprised if it's lonely. Any person or athlete who is seeking above-average goals is having to do above-average things. Average means in the middle. That means a normal person. So if your teammates and other people have average goals and are kind of just doing normal actions, you're not going to quite fit in with them when you're doing above-average actions to achieve above-average goals. So don't feel surprised if it feels a little bit lonely sometimes. Lesson number 3 that I learned is that hard work will always pay off, even if it's not in the way that we think. I wanted to play college basketball. I went and played college basketball, not at the level that I was hoping for. After I was done playing college basketball, I still kind of felt that my hard work didn't pay off as much. I wanted to go to this Division 1 college. It didn't end up going the way I wanted it to. I had a good time. good experience at the lower level, but there was always that voice in the back of my head saying, my hard work didn't pay off, I didn't hit the goal. However, now I look back on that and understand that I'm using the lessons that I learned back in high school and in college in my daily life now. My hard work from then is paying off now in my life in all sorts of different ways. Please, if you feel like your hard work isn't paying off, join the club, and I promise you that it will.