Legendary Blog

We interact with life through a set of contexts, a scale of possibilities.  The bar gets set and everything under it becomes achievable.

We become familiar with the scales of our lives telling us what we can or cannot do.  Everything within it, achievable.  Everything beyond it, unknown.

If a 3 mile run is part of a person’s daily workout, they generally accomplish it with little doubt.  They have a resume of successes from all their past runs.  It acts as evidence for their ability - known, definite, and achievable.

Now say this person is asked to go on a 10 mile run.  “Woah, hold on a sec now. That’s far.”

It is far if you’ve been used to 3 mile runs, but if you’re a person training for a marathon, 10 miles is a breeze.

It’s all about the context of the situation and the scales you have built in your life. They tell you what you can do just as much as they tell you what you cannot.

The difference between intention and action is courage.  It gives life to our virtues.  It is the foundation that creates a reality around those beliefs.

The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning heart. In Rollo May’sThe Courage to Create, he explains how courage is the essence that pumps vitality into all our virtues. Without courage, who we are, simply would not exist, and our fidelity would fade into conformism.

The presence of courage does not mean the absence of fear, it is rather the ability to move beyond it. Feel the fear and do it anyway.  It keeps us sharp, on edge, and on point.

Everything your body does when the pressure is on is good for performance.  Bill Russell was one of the greats in the game of basketball winning an NCAA Championship, Olympic Gold Medal, and professional championship all in the same year.  Here’s the kicker, before every single game Russell would throw up. His nerves would keep him on point.  So much so, that in 1963, when didn’t puke before games he had his greatest slump of his career.  He then got to the playoffs, puked, and played one of the best games of the season.

Before you came into this world, you found yourself in a womb of darkness. A paradox of living in known and unknown simultaneously.  Existence is nothing because you do not know what is to exist.

In this dark abyss, a mystical being appears to you.  Fascinated by its presence you listen, poised in intrigue.  The being begins to talk about a world you are about to be born into.

Everything explained is unbelievable, because everything explained you have never experienced.  In this world there are going to be giant people called adults. For them, they will be witnessing the experience of something they call birth, for you, it will be your very first experience.

Just before the mystical being fades away, he asks a question.  “Could you do me a favor? When your out there in the world, can you take this canvas and paint me a masterpiece?”

Excited by everything you have found out thus far, you excitingly nod and the being begins to fade away.

In an effort to better understand perseverance, courage, and following ones dreams I looked to contemporary literature, particularly Ernest Hemingway’s, The Old Man and the Sea.  The story base’s itself around the most unfathomable circumstances - an old man, Santiago, capturing one of the largest fish in the sea.  Remove this story from the context of a novel and the premise seems all the more impossible.  But what was once perceived as not possible has once again found an unexpected way to show that the outcome is completely viable.