application required

Sure, I enjoy being one of the [Boston accent here] 'smaaat kids' now, but remembering past events such as high school it wasn't always like that. Or was it?

Some say 'with age comes wisdom'. The only thing I've become wiser about is application. I didn't APPLY myself in high school. Wow, just typing that made me feel like a guidance counselor for a second! Furthermore, it was easy to look around and count the kids who apparently WERE applying themselves since their names appeared on prestigious lists like the Honor Roll. I wasn't knocking those students, but admittedly I wondered what they were doing differently. Granted, they were generally in the habit of doing ALL of their homework and even doing extra credit assignments but there had to be more to it than that, right?

Well, not really. As it turns out I could've applied myself and joined my fellow classmates on those glittery lists. I find it terribly intriguing WHAT people apply themselves to and WHAT their motivation is for doing so. Sometimes it is fun to wonder what became of all that application. Are those academic over-achievers now esteemed CEO's and distinguished members of Congress? Are any of those athletic letter-jacket guys playing pro ball somewhere? Are the students that were members of the yearbook committee now publishers or web designers or those people with the really annoying Myspace pages with 889 photos and sparkly backgrounds? Then there are the unsung heroes of application: the geeks, the nerds and those creepy triplet girls. Are they now running the Googles, Microsofts and Apples of tomorrow?

I remember being younger and being jealous of all these people and recently, I ran into one and it simply rocked my world!!

The conversation started very typically when I learned that she attended a prestigious college, drives a nice car, owns a home in an affluent community, is happily married and has two wonderful children. Frankly, given my memory of her in high school, I would've expected no less. She was popular, smart as a whip and was one of the girls you had to muster up enough courage to ask her to sign your yearbook at the end of the year. I was the kid in the marching band. See where this is going?

After viewing a handful of pics on my Facebook page, she said the unthinkable to me, "I wish I would've applied myself like you did." She drew the conclusion that I must've applied myself to drumming at an early age, and boy was she right. To me, I never viewed it that way. I always thought of application as 'using what you've already got' rather than 'working on something you've got a little bit of'. In my eyes, the kids who were ALREADY smart applied themselves and got good grades. The kids who were ALREADY good at sports applied themselves.....and so on. Their results were so measurable. Good grades, winning games, scholarships to college, etc. Being a guy on the drumline was never measurable (nor is it until you sell millions of records, win a Grammy and appear on Saturday Night Live as the musical guest that Jennifer Aniston introduces).

Sure I got a scholarship to college to play drums (very unexpectedly), but it just didn't seem as impressive (to me or anyone else) as an academic scholarship to Princeton or a football scholarship to Notre Dame. Since my college days I've played drums...lots of drums...and I find myself here. I'm in a place where within the last couple years I've developed a voracious appetite for reading books about thinking, marketing, psychology, phenomena, logic, statistics, probability and outliers. I've realized that I can digest and am interested in all kinds of complex information. Basically, I'm the smart kid that convinced myself that I was the dumb kid. I had fooled myself. What a dirty trick! By a chance meeting with an old high school classmate it was as if I had followed the path she figured I would, just as she followed the path I figured SHE would.

What's the point of my blog? Apply yourself. Apply yourself at all times. Apply yourself at all times to something...anything that YOU feel is important. Don't allow anyone to diminish the importance of that which you have chosen to apply yourself to. And above all, don't allow YOURSELF to diminish the importance of that which you have chosen to apply yourself to.

Application required to live the life YOU want to live.