Moving Forward by Cody Boone

As I sit here and collect my thoughts and ideas about this blog and how to start, one thing sticks out. The game of baseball itself. Baseball is a very complex game that shares a lot of characteristics with the game of Chess; both very strategic and complex and if you get caught up in the past and what move you should’ve made or shouldn’t have made, you have no chance of being successful. Baseball is all about learning from the past and moving forward. 

While it is extremely frustrating and difficult to fail, that is how we grow as an athlete and a person. It is going to be difficult and there’s no hiding that. Losing a game to a walk-off home run is called a heartbreaker for a reason: but if we take what we learned about the game and carry it with us, aka move on, it will help us for the next time we are put in that situation. 

In my opinion, playing college is the best preparation for the real world that a young man can get. Baseball forces you to learn and move on because if you ignore the lessons that the game teaches you along the way it’s impossible to succeed. 

If you look at the most successful people in life, they have the most failures. Take Bill Gates for example. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and was a co-owner of a failed business venture. Those are some pretty significant failures. However, he learned. He took what he learned from Harvard and paired it with the lessons he learned from the failed business start venture to create what today is one of the world’s largest and most successful software companies, Microsoft. It could’ve been easy for him to dwell in the fact that he dropped out of college, or even had a business venture miserably fail. Bill Gates moved on and never looked back.

Another icon that had failures beyond belief is Albert Einstein. While most people only know Albert Einstein who developed the theory of General Relativity, there is a whole different side of him that people didn’t see. When Einstein was a child in school, his teachers questioned his mental capacity. Einstein couldn’t speak fluently until he was 9 years old. That didn’t stop his learning, however. He was a rebellious child as well, which led to his being expelled from school and lack of admittance to school for higher education. Still, it didn’t stop him. Einstein is one of the most well-known scientists of all time and he easily could’ve quit. He took his failures, moved on and made a name for himself. 

At the end of the day, what do you want to be known for? Having some failures in life and wallowing in them, and letting them get the best of you and hold you down from succeeding? To be successful in life, be the person that says, “Just because something didn’t the way I want them to, I’m going to make the best of it and move on.”