Nobody's Done It, So Nobody Can Tell You It's Impossible

When I decided I wanted to play Division I football, there was no one I could call.

Nobody had done it the way I was going to have to do it.

No blueprint.
No guy a couple years ahead of me who could say here's what worked, skip this part.

Every coach I sat down with was staring at a problem they'd never seen before, and most of them landed on no.

Not a cruel no.

Just the no you give when you have no reason to believe.

The part nobody warns you about isn't the training.

It's doing the training with zero proof it'll work, while everybody around you treats "it's never been done" like it means "it can't be done."

Those aren't the same sentence.

One is about what happened before you got there.

The other is a guess about you.

People say the guess like it's a fact because the past feels like proof, but it isn't.

Everything that got done was never done, right up until it was.

So when someone tells you there's no precedent, they think they're shutting the door.

Really they're telling you the room is empty and nobody's standing in it yet.

The Cost of Going First

I'll be honest about the cost though, because I don't want to sell it as some clean underdog thing.

You carry the doubt by yourself.

When you're following a path somebody already walked, a rough week is just a rough week. You know it can be done, you can picture the end of it.

When you're first, every rough week starts whispering that maybe there's a reason nobody's pulled this off.

You don't get proof.

You keep going on a bet, and you have to keep placing that bet on the mornings it feels dumb.

You also turn into the example before you've done anything to deserve it.

People watch.

If it falls apart, that becomes the story, and the story becomes the reason the next person gets told no.

That's a weird thing to haul around when you're just trying to make a roster.

The Trade-Off

Here's the trade that made it worth it to me anyway.

When there's no precedent, there's also no rulebook for how it's supposed to look.

Nobody could tell me the correct way to be a legally blind long snapper because there wasn't one.

I got to build it around how I actually work instead of how it's done.

The people with a map are stuck with the map.

I got to draw mine, and I drew it to fit me.

That's the thing most people give away without realizing.

They wait for somebody else to go first so it feels safe, and while they're waiting they hand the pen to someone else.

Then they spend years walking a route that was drawn for a different person.

So if there's something you keep circling, and the main reason you haven't moved is that you can't find anyone who's done it, look at that reason again.

It feels like being careful.

Most of the time it's fear dressed up as being careful.

No precedent isn't a warning sign.

It's usually just an open door that stays open until somebody walks through it.

You don't need permission from a path that isn't there yet.

You just have to be the one who makes it.

Talk soon,
Aaron