The Ordinary Impact

Everything has a beginning.  Everyone has an origin story .  When we understand it, things begin to make sense.  As we reflect, we begin to see (and hopefully understand) why. Why are we here? Why did this thing, event, success, tragedy, obstacle, celebration happen? Why? What happened? (Including the main characters/people involved) What choice was made? (Including my reaction/decision and where it took me.) There are more positive things that happen in life than maybe we realize on a day-to-day basis. Our story is bigger than just us. Much bigger. Even though there are problems that occur in our story, it will eventually turn out okay. The obstacles we encounter help us grow and eventually succeed in the future. The people we encounter (even the negative ones) help us understand how to live life (and how not to live life). Everything we experience helps create a bigger picture and potentially a greater success. Too often we think of the why a...

From a young age, love just seemed like a natural feeling. I felt love for people until, whether implicitly or explicitly, people let me know that love might not need to be as open as I naturally believed it to be.Children love naturally. In fact, they love and trust so naturally that they need to be taught to be cautious about a stranger trying to give them free candy. We don’t teach people how to love because love comes naturally. However, we demonstrate how to love deeply, and we most certainly exemplify how to withhold love. And learning to withhold love is dangerous.  I’ve heard people use hateful words, (racially insensitive words, words that objectify women) and excuse them away because “they were raised in a different time.” Our hearts get trained to hate and to exclude and to accept injustice. On October 1, 1995, Nelson Mandela referenced this idea in a speech on the nature of love and hate: “ No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, ...

In a previous post (July 12, 2018), I wrote about  The Butler Way   which consists of five principles of the  Butler Bulldogs  basketball team. (Note: Brad Stevens, former coach and current coach of the  Boston Celtics , added a sixth principle to the list.) These principles have been credited for Butler achieving above expectations on the basketball court, but they also could have the ability to guide the lives of individuals who desire growth off the basketball court. The second principle from The Butler Way  is passion. Most people define passion as a    strong feeling of enthusiasm or excitement for something or about doing something . Butler defines people who live with passion as individuals who refuse to be lukewarm and who commit themselves to excellence . To be fully invested to an idea or task, while committing to excellence seems more fitting to the word passion then just a strong feeling or excitement for something. A ...