A Day in the Mind of Rj pt2 - The Vision

Welcome back. Here again to try to turn some regular thoughts from my mind into words. I hope that if you are deciding to read this you can open your mind and read it full and through, and who knows, maybe by the end of it you'll have a different approach to something in your life. So lets get to it.

Lately the most common concepts running through my mind on a regular basis are "big picture" ideas. Beyond my athletic career, beyond my education, beyond my social circle, beyond everything I currently am associated with. I have always had this big picture vision of changing the world, I have always wanted to do something of worth to make the world a better place. Over the past few years I have truly recognized that making a real difference is something I am determined to do. What has thrown me off I realized is that throughout my life, when I told people that I wanted to change the world they have not taken me seriously. Whether it was a friend, family member, teacher, or whoever, people never really registered that I mean it. Over this past year I have learned a lot, enough to help me finally put the big vision into words and the beginning of a plan. It has been a huge step forward for me to finally be able to put some of my ideas from over the years into words.

The first concept I am very passionate about is channels - communication channels to be specific. I believe that communication is one of the most influential components of change. That can be for the better, or the worse. Throughout my life I have recognized this but almost refused to admit it. Because I wanted to make real change but my communication skills were very weak and I never had a voice of enough strength or value to really share my opinion or thoughts on the world. For so many years I felt pretty useless, my head was jam packed with ideas I wanted to share, goals, dreams, and morals I stood for. All due to my weakness in communication. But what I have realized over the past few years is that being strong with communication doesn't necessarily have anything to do with words. We as people have the ability to communicate through channels. For me, that channel is my skiing. When I first really committed to skiing it was purely because I enjoyed it and was curious to see where I could take it, and no matter what, loving sport and being passionate about it will be the core purpose. But over time it has evolved into far more than that. With my racing and training, I want my message to be displayed thought that. I want to take the ideas I want to represent and demonstrate them though my athletic career. I want to be a live demonstration that if there is something that people want to do, that it can be done. Regardless of their current situation or personal ability that if they put the work in they can be great. I want to show the underrated power of passion. To show how by chasing your passion you can change your life and the lives around you in a positive way. I want to make people recognize that they don't have to alongside societies definition of successful to build something great themselves. That you don't have to be the best at something to make that something worthwhile. I want people to see all of this in my work throughout my career, beyond just the physical and material value of sport. When I am out training and racing as hard as I can, this is what I want people to see.
A common expression I have been seeing people throwing around is, "Don't focus on anyone else, work on yourself" or something along the lines of that. This is a concept that I agree with, but I do not think people are delivering it or interpreting it in the correct way. A lot of people have taken the expression and built upon it as only doing things for themselves, only pursuing goals for themselves. I do not believe this is the way this mindset was meant to be interpreted. They idea of this is that if you have a goal or dream to fulfill that you need to take time to invest in yourself to achieve it, but it does not mean you have to do it for yourself. In fact I believe it is important to have others intertwined with your goals. To explain with example ... many people claim they need to only focus on themselves and cut everyone else out because they want to be rich and buy nice things vs. someone needs to focus on themselves and cut people out so they can be wealthy and support their family, peers and the less fortunate in the future. At the end of the day, both people are still rich, but one saw the opportunity in things beyond materialistic values. The clear difference is that yes, if you want to achieve something great you have to invest time in yourself, cut others out, give up certain parts of life - but that does not suggest that the end goal must be for yourself (and a very important point, the goal does not necessarily have to include money whatsoever, just a simple example). The misinterpretation of this mentality is one of the fundamental factors of the unfortunate expression and reality, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." I think it is very crucial that goals, big or small, involve more than just ourselves. Now I am not suggesting that you have to be completely selfless and only work for others, but if we can begin to use improvements within ourselves to help others around us, I really believe that we can make real positive change.
I have become very familiar with this concept as I have thought of my vision more and more. Because as much as my goals are individual, they are not just for me. I have an endless list of goals that I want to see fulfilled, from improving my writing, being more open minded, improving my skiing technique, getting fitter, winning medals, inspiring people, and changing the world as we see it in a positive way. The big difference being that I have goal I want to accomplish IN my ski career and IN my life, and I have thing I want to do WITH my ski career and WITH my life.

Now it is clear that at this point for me skiing is my focus, and I understand that it may be difficult to see how individual sport goals are for far beyond the individual athletes. So allow me to explain. My goals for my ski career are all over the map, super specific to extremely vague. But as soon as you put a label on someone, people around begin to associate you with what they think matches that label. For example every athlete knows the one of the classic questions, "do you want to go to the Olympics?" - of course, who doesn't want to go to the Olympics?! (for those who genuinely do not want to go to the Olympics, apologies, that is totally okay.). But my point is that people immediately label athletes with the Olympics as their goal. And the vast majority of people want to go but that is a heavy pressure on a lot of people who may just want to enjoy sport for what it is for the time being. This "goal labelling" can be applied to anything, say a kid loves to produce and make music and people start comparing them to some famous musicians/producers. Now while that kid may be inspired by those musicians, they may also just want to make music for the sake of making music, because they are passionate about it and the future of it is not relevant to them while they are comfortable in their element. And the people who associate certain labels with goals are not ill intended, they are simply associating things together in which they are familiar with. But this connection is on my list of goals to shift and change. People need to understand how deep the layers of passion are, far beyond any materialistic value.

I think a lot of this quick connecting the dots mentality comes from our education system. When I look at the education system we have made and look at my school experience, I see an extremely flawed process. And I believe it is extremely relevant to the issues I talk about and the other ones we see day to day. For myself, I found myself usually being the quiet kid at the back of the classroom daydreaming about other things in life, or questioning my worth in societies system. I had teachers tell me that with my work ethic that I would not accomplish anything of significance in my life, and whenever I questioned why things were the way they were I got a simple "because that's the way it is". When I got out of high school I thought it would be different, that I would enter a place where teachers and professors have a more opened mind, but throughout my first year of university is when I really realized that the system is so flawed. In my first year psych class we spent an entire lecture discussing how there are countless amounts of different kinds of thinkers between creative and analytic - and with that creative and analytic tests. We discussed in an entire other lecture about how a tiny fraction of creative thinkers can succeed on an analytic test. Discussing how creative thinkers are usually intelligent and analytic thinks are usually intelligent but are not necessarily creative. At the end of the unit the professor explained how the education system is terribly out of balance and how we have created an analytic testing system from elementary to high school to post secondary - and it only accommodates a fraction of students that go through it. And then how we lose an abundance of creativity through the years of schooling and sometimes even turn creative thinkers into straight analytic test thinkers. Then he simply reminded us of our 100 multiple choice test the following week and everyone in the class just walked out like nothing had happened. I was stunned, just trying to comprehend how the prof can literally study this data and then just talk about it and dismiss it as a simple list of facts to memorize. It is beyond me.

From how I see it, I think the largest gap in the system is how young people are taught. There is a huge underemphasis on passion in the education system. We are told to do well in school so we can get to university or college and get a job to work for the rest of our lives until we have a family, retire, and die. It seems like a really negative way to look at it but I believe it is an undeniable fact. And I feel like not a whole lot of people talk about it because most people are okay with it, which scares me. I know many people that are going to university not because they want to or know what they want to become, but because they are either pressured into it by their parents, or they are pressured into it because it is what most people do after high school. And a lot of times people who decide to take a few years off or just decide to not continue with post-secondary, are often given a subtly hard time about not going off to school. When really it takes more courage to veer away from the system than it is to simply go with it. I speak of this with a strong opinion because the more I reflect on my university experience, the biggest thing I learned is how the system is faulty and how lost people are (including myself) even though they are supposably "pursuing an education and a future". The forward progression is how we teach. I believe that teachers are the most powerful people on the planet. Throughout a teachers career they have the opportunity to talk and engage with hundreds of young creative minds, and are literally working with the future of the world. I believe in it enough that I changed my program and intertwined it with my big picture goals beyond skiing. It seems a little ironic to follow the system I don't really like for a few more years to change it down the road .. but that's what you have to do sometimes, it's all about progression. The mission of helping people find their passions and open their eyes to their potential.

As I skim over everything I have written I recognize that it may not make a whole lot of sense, I am still working on the whole making sense of what makes sense in my head... But to summarize the vision I have goes far beyond any individual goal any person can set for themselves. I was hesitant to write about my life vision but what I have realized is that if we don't share what we think we can bring to the world, people settle like they are now, people may have these massive visions but they just don't express or pursue it because everyone around them lays low and follows the stream. The way I see the very core of any dream is simply pure enjoyment for whatever the individuals passion is, whether it is skiing, hockey, basketball, running, biking, painting, playing guitar, singing, writing, exploring, or anything else. The core of my passion for skiing is that I love skiing and have so much fun with it. But simply loving to do something isn't enough to wakeup at 4a.m. to go rollerski in the rain, or to go train for hours in +30 or -30 degree weather. I along with any other serious athlete will tell you that from experience that is not fun or enjoyable. So there must be a bigger reason then purely just loving the sport. My vision is to represent an idea, to represent those who aren't as privileged to have the opportunity that I have, I find myself getting frustrated with my ongoing chronic pain injuries that I have had for the past 2.5 years - and it is frustrating - but there are people who would do anything to simply have a capable body and the support I have from my parents and peer group I have to do what I do. When I look at it like this I understand that there really are no excuses for not at least trying your best. I want to represent these people, the ones who wish they had the opportunity to do what I do, I want to represent the quest kid sitting in the back of the classroom wondering if he/she has a bigger purpose in life. I want to show people how a normal kid, from a normal family, from a normal neighbourhood, with normal kid problems can put in the work and become something phenomenal. I just want to show people that if you just go try your best, awesome things will happen. I don't know how else to explain it other than that I want to show people how much more meaningful life is when you live it with passion.

I think I am going to cut it there. There were a few more things I really wanted to write about but I don't want to get my concepts mixed up and I figure it may be getting slightly lengthy. In fact I think I may have already repeated the same things a few time within this blog - I hope you can make sense of it. Regardless if you made it this far thank you for reading. The fact that my view on the world means enough for you to take part of your day to read is humbling. As I have mentioned before, I am not trying to convert anyone to my ways of thinking, simply writing what comes through my mind and hoping others can keep theirs open to what I have to say. I hope you enjoyed.

Keep it real,
Rj