Let me tell you a story about John. Through what he did yesterday, from talking with one of my friends about it, and from watching the video I have posted below, he has defined what an S.O.B. (Shortness of Breath) person is.
John plays JV basketball at the school I coach at. He was invited to his first varsity practice yesterday as a reward for being exactly what we look for in a player. During a competitive drill, his team, the green team, lost and was forced to run a set of eight (sprinting from sideline-to-sideline eight times). In his first varsity practice, John beat every varsity player on the green team that ran with him.
Questioning how a JV player would beat half of the varsity team, how a JV player would outwork varsity players, coach put the remaining players, the white team, who did not run on the line. Along with John (remember, he just finished sprinting). John beat four out of the seven players on the white team. Coach quickly put the green team back on the line. Along with John. This time every member of the green team beat him (remember, he just finished sprinting two sets of eight). Coach put the members of the white team who lost to John in the sprint back on the line. Along with John. This time they beat him (remember, he just sprinted three sets of eight with no rest).
When John finished, he was experiencing a severe asthma attack. He was going through the shortness of breath that Eric Thomas talks about in the video clip (around 2:20). After he recovered from his attack, my friend talked to John about the sprints. John said that he didn’t care if it was his fist time with the varsity, he was going to beat everybody. He ended up not being able to breathe. He wanted to succeed more than he wanted to breathe. After the four sprints, he had worked to the point where he only remembered running the first two. He worked to the point where he experienced shortness of breath, and then he kept working. He exceeded his expectations by this. (S.O.B. person)
“When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, that’s when you’ll be successful.” -Eric Thomas
In order to maximize our potential, we have to be willing to work though uncomfortable situations. We have to be committed enough to do things that we do not want to do and go beyond our comfort zone. If we stay in our comfort zone, we will never get to the point of shortness of breath. When we get outside our comfort level and work beyond what anyone that we were capable of, we become S.O.B. people. Don’t stop working when you’re only waist deep. To reach your potential, you have to get your head under water.
