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Accomplishing The Impossible

How many times in your life have you told yourself that something was impossible to do, yet you ended up accomplishing it? We all have the ability to make the impossible possible. It comes down to mindset. If you believe you cannot do something, you won’t be able to do it.

If instead, you have an unwavering belief that you will reach your goal, you will.

There is an author that I have admired since I was a little boy. To date, he has sold over 300 million books in many different languages. He was even a favorite of Presidents like Ronald Reagan.

He was never a book critic favorite, but he nevertheless could produce books that people would read. He wrote over 100 novels and 250 short stories in his lifetime, passing away in June of 1988. He never went to college and in fact, he only ever made it to the 10th grade. Times were hard, so he had to quit school and begin working to support himself and his family. He might not have had any formal training after that, but he read as many books as he could get his hands on.

He was a professional boxer at times, a trainer, a merchant seaman, and an officer in World War II. He held so many jobs that I could not even begin to list them all here. He later used this vast experience and the knowledge of the people, landscape, and history to fill his books.

He had no formal training, he just sat down and wrote. The man was Louis Lamour, who today is mostly known for his Western books.

People around him early on urged him to get into a career that would pay so he would have something in life. He believed that he could accomplish what everyone told him could not be done.

Deep down we have to believe that we can do what we set out to do no matter our situation or what others tell us.

You have your own unique ability to do what most people will tell you is impossible.

Throughout my life, I always felt that I could do anything that I worked hard enough towards. I directed my energies in the wrong direction many times, but I did complete what I set out to do.

My main problem was I would take short cuts. I was willing to do whatever it took to get to where I wished to be. This works on the short term, but it has long-term effects and nothing is on solid ground. In a society where there is so much emphasis on the outcome and reward it is easy to fall into that trap.

I decided that I wanted to fight an MMA bout years ago and my coach told me that I would have to fight at 145 lbs, which was much lighter than I walked around. He based it on my height, body type, strength and skill set. I thought he was kidding because even in high school I was never that small. I doubted I could get that low. The good thing was that I was in a good gym and we had many fighters that passed through. One of those was a fighter named Cub Swanson. Cub was getting ready for a fight and he was cutting weight. We all rolled with him and trained hard. Cub was going to fight at 145 lbs at the end of the week and yet he was stronger and bigger than me. Cub made weight and won his fight. After watching Cub make weight, I knew that it was possible for me.

My time came and with the help of two fighters: Tim and Arian, I was able to make weight.

I learned that I could lean out and I learned that I could stay fit and strong while weighing less.

We can never forget that what seems today impossible will only be so until we complete it. If others have done, it so can you. If you have the courage and drive there will never be anything out of your reach.

There was a man who died 1,983 years ago who was only actively teaching for 3.5 years, yet today 2.2 billion people claim to follow his teachings. When he was alive he had 1/1000 of a percent of the Roman population following him. In just a few centuries 56 percent of Romans were believers. That man is Jesus. His story would seem impossible, yet here we are today.

Matthew 19:26 Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Matthew 17:20 For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Job 42:2 “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.

Jeremiah 32:17 ‘Ah, Lord God! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you.

Self-Discipline

Failure

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There is no escape, no way to hide. It will find all of us at one point or another during our lifetimes. It has been said that a book of failures would be a great book to read, so that we could learn from other’s mistakes.

Have you ever noticed that there are never any “failure seminars”? There are plenty of speakers on the topic of success. You can catch a motivational seminar online or in a conference room in a hotel most any weekend.

I have failed at so many things I could not even list them all here. The good news is, I took a valuable lesson away from each one. One of the best thing about pushing yourself hard and ultimately hitting your goals, is that our minds tend to gloss over the periods of heartbreak and failure, focusing instead on our successes.

One day I decided to take up a new hobby: prospecting for gold in the mountains and deserts of California. I really did not know much about it at all, but when my wife and dog and I hiked in the mountains we had seen several people panning for gold in the streams and it got me interested. I started reading everything I could about gold prospecting and the history of the gold bearing regions in California.

The next weekend, instead of heading off on our usual hike, we packed our lunch, a few shovels, and some tools we had picked up for gold panning. We headed to the East Fork of the San Gabriel River. We parked our car and hiked a mile or so up a path along the river. We found a giant boulder and I started digging out buckets of dirt and passing them to my wife who would pan it out in the water. We dug for hours and found nothing, not a trace of that elusive gold. We did have a great time! Our dog fished in the river, we enjoyed the sunshine, cool water, amazing scenery and our hike.

We went back to that river many times. Each time we dug deep holes and found nothing but black sand and tiny gold flakes in our pan. One day, an older prospector came by our hole to chat. He told me where I should dig based on his experience. Later that day we found a small “picker,” which is what you call a tiny gold nugget that is big enough to pick up with your fingers.

We were doing almost exactly what the 49ers did during the gold rush. Instead of iron pans, we used plastic pans, and unlike them, we were not trying to make a living from it.

It turns out that most of the gold is still there, undiscovered. The early miners took the easy gold that they could find near the surface. It is back breaking labor with little payoff to keep digging and looking for the deeper gold. I enjoyed it because it was a challenge and a treasure hunt.

We graduated from panning to setting up a sluice in the water. The next stage was learning how to metal detect in the Mojave desert – which meant getting out there in the early hours before the temperatures rose. Hunting for gold nuggets in the desert with a metal detector is called “nugget shooting.” We joined the Prospector’s Club of Southern California, which gave us access to claims all over the region. Then I graduated to operating a dry washer in the desert.

I learned to love the peace and quiet of the dry, desolate Mojave desert. We started finding “color” almost every time we went out.

I wanted to find a good sized nugget with my metal detector before I left California, but it was not to be. On my last attempt before moving, a solo trip early in the morning, I saw some fellow prospectors find a gold nugget just a few yards away from where I was looking. I guess you could say I failed because I never found that fist-sized nugget I was seeking. Instead, I would say that I gained some useful knowledge and made some great memories.

Prospecting mirrors so much of what we do in life. Each one of us is seeking some kind of treasure. There’s no guarantee you will find that big nugget. Successes and failures: they all come with valuable lessons. I look back on the hours I spent digging dirt holes and wandering the desert not as a failure, but as some of my favorite memories.

My friend Mark and I spoke about the topic of failure this past week. After a successful high school and college wrestling career at Oklahoma State, where he was a two time All-American, Mark began his mixed martial arts career with the WEC (World Extreme Cagefighting). He did well enough to be picked up by the UFC when they bought the WEC.

When I first met Mark, I noticed that he carried himself differently than most of the guys I knew, and he was open about being a Christian. Mark was not pushy with his faith, but he was setting an example by the way he lived and he was always ready to lend a hand to anyone who needed one.

I trained with Mark for his first fight in the UFC, which he lost. It was a bad loss, but he was back to training within a week. Mark Munoz went on to have a long UFC career and while he never won the belt, he always left the ring a winner. He was voted as “the nicest guy in MMA” by the UFC. I learned from Mark that in MMA, a loss does not equal failure. When you keep fighting, improving and moving forward, you are succeeding, regardless of what the outcome of any one fight may be.

Mark told me that if you have a fear of failure you will fall backward. If you embrace it, you will take away a valuable lesson. We all fail. We have to learn from it and keep moving forward.

Resilience, Adversity, and Desire: A real champion in life, whether you are fighting in a cage, prospecting for gold, or trying to get a promotion in your job, is the person that shows resilience even when they fail. Adversity is something to use to make us better, not break us down. We will all face it, but how we view it and push past it will define us. Desire is what will make you get up each day with determination: study harder, work harder, train harder.

Mark also reminded me that what we speak about every day is what we become, so choose your words wisely.

Romans 5:3-5

More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Proverbs 24:16

For the righteous falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble in times of calamity.

Luke 6:45

A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.

What Drives you?

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Recently, when I was taking inventory of my life, I realized that there were several activities that I have always had a passion for in life. The first I wrote about last week: my love for martial arts. Another passion is books. I love all kinds of books, on a broad spectrum of subjects. In the old days, when there were bookstores all over Los Angeles, I would go inside a used bookstore or a chain bookstore and spend hours looking through the shelves, discovering new subjects and new authors.

There is no way to replace the lost environment of a good bookstore. Sure, Amazon will still sell you just about any book. The problem is, you have to know the title or the author ahead of time. Publishers pay for advertising on Amazon, and so you are in their algorithms viewing the books they want you to buy. When I used to frequent book stores I enjoyed the fact that many of the employees were avid readers and they would recommend their favorite authors or set aside books for me. I could browse the aisles and subject matters until I saw a book spine or a title that caught my eye. I would find wonderful obscure books that might lead me to others. I was never big on following the New York Times Bestseller list.

I would find an author I enjoyed and then I would read everything they put out. I’d be sad if it turned out that they had been dead for twenty years and would not put out any new books. I would research their lives, read their interviews, etc. I wanted to find out where they got their ideas from, find out what helped them put words to paper.

Today, researching an author is much easier. Thanks to Youtube I can see many authors speak on many subjects. In all of the available interviews and talks, I found a few things that all authors seemed to have in common. They are passionate story tellers, most never attended special writing programs. They never gave up, they did not listen to the doubters around them.

I wanted to be a writer. The problem I faced was that even after all of my research, I still had no idea what it took to write a book. I never paid much attention to writing or grammar in school.

To begin, I found books on writing and started reading them. This didn’t get me fired up to write. So I tried another approach. I started seeking out authors. Many told me to emulate the writers whose style I liked. I was also told I had to put in the time it would take to learn to write. This is where most people would give up, because the task seems daunting. I had no college education and no background in writing, but what I did have was the desire to write.

I started by writing a blog, which was a relatively new thing at the time. It was bad: lots of typos and technical errors. Yet my content was finding an audience and it became popular. I had a tremendous amount of traffic. I had just as much negative feedback on my blog as I had positive feedback, and I would respond to it all. The blog served two purposes for me: it got me noticed and it helped me gain experience writing stories.

As a result of the blog, I was able to get an agent for my writing and a co-author who was willing to work with me and help me with the storytelling and the editing. Our agent sent the finished manuscript out to over fifty publishers. They all rejected it, most answering with, “Whoever heard of a Japanese mob guy?” It finally found a home by accident, a young woman who was running a publishing house and heard the story mentioned by a friend read the manuscript and wanted it.

Being a published author was an awesome experience. I quickly let go to my head. I started getting contacted by Hollywood producers and directors. Some took me out for meals, others just had me over to hang out. I sold the book rights to Fox Studios and I was soon writing the screenplay with an Oscar winning screenwriter. Through that experience I learned that anything in Hollywood labeled “based on a true story” means that there is only a very vague resemblance to something real.

The end product was not something I was proud of. In fact, I was relieved when Fox passed on it two years later and it didn’t get made into a movie after all. I learned some valuable lessons, but I still wanted to be a screenwriter.

I decided to write something in a different genre. Another screenwriting partner and I wrote a story about a former Confederate Cavalry soldier named Clay Allison who became a successful cattleman in Texas. Clay Allison referred to himself as a “Shootist” because he was a known gunfighter.

We went to History Channel with the script and we sold the idea of the show. We then spent the next year working on it, until they decided to pass on actually taking it to the production stage.

I was pretty devastated at that point. I had been given two bites at the screenwriting apple and failed to have either make it to the screen. I kept thinking about it. Then one day it dawned on me. I had lost my passion for the story. I was writing for money, for the fame and success that would come with the money. I had compromised myself as a writer for the sake of the paycheck. I knew that I needed to return to my passion for writing stories that would connect with the reader, inspire them, the way I had been inspired by so many important authors in my life.

That is the point that I decided to move away from Hollywood. I still pursue writing, but not for the same reasons. If you keep at something and work hard at it, learning the attributes you need to succeed at that endeavor, you will be successful. God will provide opportunities to open up where you never thought they existed. It is easy to quit, to give up when you realize you have hit a dead end in one part of your journey. It is important to keep learning and moving forward after a defeat. Keep in mind that after your worst defeat many times your greatest victory is just ahead.

Matthew 6:21

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Galatians 6:9

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

Seasons

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Fall

I realized this week that our second winter on the farm in Illinois is quickly approaching and I am looking forward to it! Living most of my life in California, I never experienced the changing seasons or the beauty of fall in the countryside. When I lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan I would just get on a plane and head back home to California for a week each month when it got cold.

I never dreamed that I would be living on a farm with chickens, honey bees, ducks, dogs and acres of corn and beans. The chicken breasts I bought in the grocery store always came wrapped in plastic. I’ve learned that they do not start that way.

It has been a period of learning. I have learned about another way of life and I have also learned a lot about myself.

My life has been a series of small changes that have taken place very slowly because I was afraid of change. God wanted to heal my stone heart, but I resisted it along the way. Looking back I have to laugh at myself because all of this could have been much easier.

I took the long way. How many of you resist change? I did for so long because I wanted to hold on to some vague idea I had about myself. I was a slave to ideas and thoughts that kept me in various states of the same place in life.

Today, I want to work on everything in my life that I feel could change for the better. I want to do it all at once, but I know that I have to work on one thing at a time. Trying to move fast or working on too many problems at once will just lead to failure. Do you try to accomplish so much at one time that you end up getting nothing finished?

I think about where I am now in life and I feel this is where I should be at this time. It is another learning stage where I will be until I have grown and am ready for the next stage. Have you ever thought about the stages we go through and what purpose they serve?

Growing up we had a small lawn that took me at most a half an hour to mow. When I was older I just hired a gardener like everyone else. Mowing the grass on the farm takes me four to six hours and at some point it in the seasons it may even need to be done twice a week. There are days that can be so hot that I’m drenched in sweat or it can be so cold that I have to cover every part of my body to stay warm. I enjoy mowing, it gives me time to think about everything. It is a little like hitting a heavy bag with music blaring. The rest of the world does not matter. I am concentrating on a simple task, from start to finish. Do you have anything in your life like that?

Living in Los Angeles I used to wake up at 4am so I could hike with Phoenix (my dog) every morning. It was a perfect time when the city was quiet and dark. I loved being up in the hills of the park when it was dark. Here there are no hills but there is plenty of open space and lots of stars to see. I had to change things up after we adopted Henry (our other dog) so that I had more time in the morning. 3am is my new time to hit the road with the two dogs. I am often asked how I do it at that time. It is easy because it is my regular schedule. I am committed to take out my dogs for a walk every morning no matter what. Do you value your commitments? Will you keep them even when it is hard or the weather is bad?

There is an added benefit with the early walks. I get to see a lot of wildlife that most people never get to see. I have seen coyotes, skunks, a bobcat, lots of raccoons, owls, a bald eagle, and many deer. I get to learn about the land and what it supports. I also add a few miles of cardio to my day.

Our lives are not straight lines to our destinations. Life isn’t one long season, but more like the weather in the midwest, with seasons of growth, harvest and some cold hard winters and other lighter winters. I have enjoyed the beautiful colors of fall this month and I am looking forward to this coming second winter. Then, a new spring where everything comes back alive.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

1 To everything

, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Ezekiel 11:19

19 I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.

Motivation, Inspiration and Change

living lives, bettering selves, health and fitness