To overcome failure, be a success.

Your story will be one about failure if you insist on defining it that way. Those words sound harsh, and they are. But the reality is that you are what you think you are. Are you a failure? Are you someone who's struggling through failure? Are you someone down on their luck?

Or did you decide to "flip the switch" and decide that the failures do not define you?

If you chose the latter, you made a good choice because the rest of your mind and body will follow. Our concious thoughts shape unconcious and subconcious states and behaviors. You know this. You can absolutely imagine things for yourself - both good and bad. They are as real as you want them to be. You give the meaning and power to those thoughts in a way that can make them into not just a reality, but a way of life.

For better or for worse - that pendulum swings in both directions. Negative thinking shapes negative outcomes and positive thinking shapes positive outcomes. But what if it's not just simply "negative versus positive" and instead, negative behind holding onto the past and positive looking towards the future?

I think that's a better way to frame our thinking and our actions. "Being positive" carries a good bit of baggage. It feels like a chore and an obligation. But instead of saddling yourself with that, why not instead think about working towards the future? What is it that you want to be? It's time to be it - and the rest will follow.

The More Good Days than Bad Days Principle

There are seven days in a week, about 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year. Not all of those can be good days. No one has 7 perfectly good days. Likewise, I've never gone through an entire year without a single bad day. I have two reactions to that: The first reaction is the whole "control what you can control" thing. You can control your effort and your attitude. And that's absolutely true. But sometimes a day is so bad that no amount of effort or attitude will fix it. The second reaction is that, in any given week, if you have 4 good days and 3 bad days, you're still winning. Even if you have a few "meh" days, but the good ones are still outnumbering the rough ones, I think we're in a good place. The same goes for our practices with our little leaguers. We've had some truly rough and awful practices. The coach's didn't show up with patience, the kids didn't show up with their attention spans, a...

When you create something bigger, your failures are given context

The first chunk of my life was dictated for me. I went to school and I was told what to do in school. I got a job and I was told what to do at that job. I went to college and I was told what to do in college. I found a better job and I was told to do in that job. My success in those different contexts was some milestone, goal, or achievement that was given to me by those different contexts. I didn't have to think about what the goal was - it was merely given to me. In some sense, that's great - I appreciate that someone was training me. But the problem is that no one told me that I was merely being trained. Without necessary communication and context, I kept drifting through the days thinking another goal or milestone would magically appear. Well, it didn't. And it took me a few years to figure this out - more than I'd like. What did I learn in the process? That you must set those goals for yourself - even if those ...

Fantasy Baseball: A few weeks in, how do we adjust and adapt?

We are several weeks into the season and, at this point, we can all agree that everything we knew going into the season was thrown out the window as soon as the games started. That said, there is still a lot of baseball yet to play and for us, as fantasy nerds, a lot of in-season management to navigate. As we move forward into summer, here are a few things I either have done or am thinking about doing. Use your FAAB to get the young pitchers and sell them, almost immediately, for impact bats. Put this one in the category of "shiny new toy." Sure, I have preyed on our inattentiveness, but in re-draft settings, I see no issue with snagging these higher-end rookie pitchers and then flipping them. In two different settings, I was able to flip Bibee for Miguel Vargas and then, separately, Mason Miller for Jordan Walker. Will these trades work out for me? Probably not, but I have a lot more faith in Vargas and Walker, particularly, than I do in Bibee and Miller....

inthedougout

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