2 Questions

By the time the article was finished last week, two questions came up. What are three words that you never want attributed to you and then of course, what are three words that you do want attributed to you. I feel like to answer these questions, I must go way back in time. I’ve talked before about my love for baseball. My love for baseball also included a love for baseball cards. I have so many baseball cards all over the place, it’s crazy. I remember going to baseball card shops when I was younger and I would buy packs of cards, sometimes even boxes of cards. For Christmas and birthdays, people would just buy me tons of packs of cards. I would open them, separate them out, and then do it all over again. I had a subscription to Becket Baseball Card Monthly and I would always be looking up the prices of my best cards. So, what does this have to do with a word that I love or hate? Every year there would be a card of an awesome young player that everyone wanted. If you could pull this card, one day you would be rich. Plenty of times before the season started, I would get one of these cards. Then I would watch as the player had a horrible year, never to be heard from again. In the end that card would go unlisted, or what some would say, five cents. All those players had potential, but they never could meet that potential. That is where my first word comes in.  I never want people to think about me and think about all of my unmet-potential. I don’t want to end my career or even my day or week and have people disappointed because they just thought I was going to be more. Everyone has bad days, but I don’t want to be associated with never meeting my potential.

         That is probably why I love helping people so much. I want everyone to be able to accomplish way more than they ever thought they could do. I want them to wake up every morning and know that today has the potential for something amazing to happen. I want people to know that I am in their corner.  I want people to think of me as an encourager. When you are having a bad day and you see you me walk by, I want you to know that I am thinking something positive about you.

In order for people to feel a certain way around you, a few things have to be true. First, you have to make sure that you continue to encourage people for a very long time. You can’t do it for a day or a week. The other thing is that people must have confidence in you. I think too often people think they need to be superman in order for things to get done. I don’t want people to think that I am superman, I just don’t want people to think that I am weak. If something needs to be done or said, I want them to know that I’m not afraid to do it or say it. If something comes up and someone needs to stand for something, I want them to know that I will stand next to them.

I’ve probably talked about this before, but I remember someone pointing out to someone that if you went to a prestigious school years ago, that degree is now worthless. Think of everyone who has a college degree from before the internet, or even before smartphones. Every single piece of information that was acquired is now out of date. Their point was that if you do nothing else in life after getting a degree, people will always be passing you up. They said that reading books or going to conferences or taking a class, even if those things aren’t required, are the only ways to keep up with all the new information that comes out on almost a daily basis. I want people to think of me as someone who is always trying to learn.

My last two words are very simple. When it’s all said and done, I love people. I love talking to people and listening to everything that they have to say. We live in an impatient world; the art of people is slowly dying. The worst part is that right now, that is what we need more than ever. People feel ignored, people feel like no one cares. So, my final two words are these. I don’t want people to think that I am a jerk and I want people to know that I love them. The older I get the easier it is to tell someone that you love them. You don’t want people to walk away and question if they are cared for.

So, in the end, my three words that I do not want to be attributed to me are:

Weak

Unmet-Potential  (not really one word, so I made up the hyphen)

Jerk

My three words that I want to attributed to me are:

Encourager

Learner

Love (I also love the word compassion here)