Despite being tiny at 5’6″ and 185 pounds, Daniel Ruettiger aspired to play for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team.
He toiled away for years to win a spot on the squad, and in his final year of eligibility, the coach decided to include him in the team’s final home game, albeit for only three plays. He rushed the quarterback and tackled him to the ground on the game’s last play, becoming one of only two players in Notre Dame history to be carried off the field by his teammates.
Ruettiger’s (a.k.a. “Rudy”) narrative is so inspiring that it was adapted into a film starring Sean Astin and Jon Favreau.
Maybe you don’t like for sports movies or football, but we can all connect to someone who has a dream and pursues it with grit and persistence, even on terrible days. Rudy gets a firm talking to from one of his fans at a particularly low period when he was ready to leave, as presented in the movie in dramatic fashion:
“You’re 5 feet, 100 pounds, and you haven’t got a bit of athletic skill. And you hung in there for two years with the top college football players in the country. And you’ll graduate from the University of Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone except yourself in this life. And after everything you’ve been through, if you haven’t done it yet, it ain’t going to happen any time soon. Now turn around and return.”
It isn’t your standard sports story about a boy who is cut from his high school team and then goes on to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time, winning six NBA championships in the process (Michael Jordan). He’s simply an ordinary Joe pursuing his lifelong ambition of playing collegiate football.
You, like Rudy, have a fantasy. It is something that everyone does. We all want to be lifted onto other people’s shoulders and taken off the field. Alternatively, we could have our own 15 minutes of fame, whatever that entails.
Even while a life coach can assist you in pursuing your dreams, keep you accountable, and motivate you when you feel like quitting, it’s difficult to justify the cost when, like Rudy, you have a well paying job, a roof over your head, and a loving family. It makes you wonder if life coaching is nothing more than a massive con to solve first-world concerns. Is it only because you have plenty of food and shelter that you can think of pursuing a frivolous desire, such as risking everything to play a foolish football game?
Dreams are suffocated by convincing yourself that your life is good enough in general. It’s as though they’re being stuffed into a drawer of complacency. It’s preventing you from hiring a coach who will hold you accountable to your dream, even if it’s terrifying.
Consider what might have happened if Rudy had given up. You wouldn’t be reading these words today, seconds away from pursuing your own goal, if this blog post didn’t exist.
Hire a coach and go for it. What are the chances? Maybe they’ll make a movie about you one day.
