Let me preface, I have come to grips that no matter what I do for work, I will always be an entrepreneur. The life style I live now is a reflection of my childhood. I was always the unique one for better or worse. I never did anything by the book and always struggled with conforming to social norms and i never fit in. I still hate those damn social norms.
Tonight is one of those night’s, where I am just having these super vivid flash backs to my childhood. As I write this post, its 3:30 AM in the morning, I am pondering the bigger picture of my life and struggling to find a sense of purpose in some of decisions that I have made in my 29 years of living
To figure out this purpose, I felt it to be imperative to reflect on some of my early short-comings or failures as a kid.
Picture this, it’s 1998 the Yankees won the World Series and everything is frecken awesome. I am 13 years old and it’s my favorite time of year, summer vacation.
If you grew up on the east coast summer means heat, humidity, sunshine, ice cream trucks, and lots of old people making their way back up from Florida.
Summer vacation for me was this monumental great escape . It was an escape from being in an environment where I continually felt misunderstood and lost aka middle school.
Middle school was a terrifying time of life, as you are forced to grow up on the spot and deal with the harsh realities that lay before you. These realities are all bucketed under one umbrella and this umbrella is called “puberty” or emotional recklessness to the tenth degree.
I was a pretty bad student on top of that mainly in middle school because to put it simple, I just I didn’t care. I had a hard time believing that the grades I got in middle school would have any bearing what so ever on my life.
I called out in class, hid out in the bathroom to avoid going to class, stole tater tots from the cafeteria lady and I would get in random fights with people for no apparent reason.
The one place where I felt a weird sense of purpose was at basketball camp, specifically Philadelphia 76ers basketball camp. Sixers camp as it was referred to was based in the Poconos Mountains in Pennsylvania, it was about 2 hours from where I grew up in the jersey shore or my home turf.
When arriving at camp, I was usually gone for 14 days, all I had to worry about for this 14 days was waking up and playing basketball. Life was incredible. Even though, I had jew hops and was about as fast as the ref, I still busted my ass on the courts.
I had been attending Sixers camps since I was 8 , it was almost like what jew camp should have been for me although I neglected to attend it.
Making friends from kids at camp was easy.Most of the campers were inner city youth’s, who liked hip hop music and rebelled against society just like me. I would see the same people continually coming back every year to camp and most of the counselors knew me as the kid who would do dumb shit like jumping in the lake to get to retrieve a basketball, but I had great intentions behind it.
At the end of each week of camp they had these awards that they would give out to campers. For whatever reason these rewards meant a lot to me, mainly because I never won.
They had the obvious awards which were for the kids who won their league championship (we had organized hoops leagues) and they had the non obvious awards which were given to kids who were decent at ball like me. There was one award in particular that I was always after the “Most Valuable Camper” or the MVP award. These awards were objective and voted on by the counselors.
The weird thing is they didn’t actually go to the person who was the best hoops player but it instead went to the person who came back every year and made a relatively positive impression on the camp counselors.
The reward for the most valuable camper was a box of basketball cards. If you didn’t know, as a chunky kid growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, I had a major hard on for basketball cards so essentially I really wanted to win this stupid award. I would have fought for that box of basketball cards.
Some moments you just don’t go away and this was one of them. We are sitting in this barn that was turned into a basketball court, my team had just lost our final game which was the championship and I was bummed out.
All the campers were gathered in the stupid green barn, I had just gotten the inside tip from one of the counselors that I was going to win the MVP award and walk away with the goods. I was ready for this moment and literally about to jump off the ground of the nasty barn when they called my name.
As the camp director Todd got the podium to announce the MVP, I felt proud inside knowing I was in line to get this bullshit certificate and the box of cards. I had never one anything in life and just thought what could I do to celebrate?
He then proceeds to announce the name of some kid from Latvia as the MVP, I was stunned. I wanted a recount or some active measure to go through the numbers.
Lesson from this reflection is that no matter what you do in life, you should never let anybody be the source of your happiness. Goals are great, but you should do as much as possible to control the outcome of the goal.
