My sophomore year of college, I had a teammate named Steve.



Steve was the son of a basketball coach, and solid in his fundamentals, although not physically gifted or talented. Steve knew all the right things to do and the right places to be on the court, but couldn't quite do much once he got to those spots.


By my sophomore year of college, my talent in basketball was starting to show, but having got a late start, I was a late bloomer. I was just now catching up on the basketball playing experience that people like Steve, who’d grown up in a basketball family, had been getting since they were six or seven years old.



Thus, we ended up teammates at a small college.


Our team was terrible that year. Our coach was fired after the season.


The new coach had a plan of “cleaning house,” getting rid of many players from the previous regime, and replacing them with his own recruits. This is common in college sports, and

that’s exactly what he did.



Long story short, both me and Steve found ourselves out of the basketball program by the middle of the following season.



Here is where our paths diverged.



The day that I knew I would no longer be on the basketball team, my mind immediately went into reconstructive mode.



I started envisioning what I was going to do with the rest of my time in college. I was on track to graduate. And I was planning how I could continue to work on my basketball game and prepare myself for the only remaining level of the game (since college ball was now over for me): Professional basketball.



That’s exactly what I did. I graduated the next year, and went on to play professional basketball.



Steve had a different plan.



Once the new season began with the new coach who had jettisoned all of the incumbent players, a website popped up which got the attention of everyone on campus.



The site, created on the Yahoo GeoCities platform (basically the precursor to blogging), was designed as a place to troll and bash the new basketball coach and the team.


The website listed all of the alleged mistakes the new coach had made, made a case for the players who should have still been on the team (according to the website's author), and took potshots at both current and former basketball team players.



Our campus was small (~3,500 students), so news of the website spread wide and fast.


One interesting fact about the website was that no one knew who was behind it, as the author never revealed his identity. He called himself the “Masked Webmaster.”



Understand that this all happened in 2002. Someone making their own website was a relatively new idea, something that most people didn’t even know how to do, let alone have the idea of doing. Not even me.



The fact that this was all happening anonymously only added to the intrigue.



I did not know it then, but later came to realize: my former teammate, Steve and his friend were behind the website.



In addition to playing basketball, Steve was an honors student, and apparently he or his buddy was a computer geek.



The site caused a lot of commotion for a few months, then quietly went away as the basketball team, to the delight of the Masked Webmaster, faltered under the new coach.



***



We all face things in life.



Disappointments, setbacks, unexpected and unwanted circumstances.


No one is exempt from these.



What separates one person from the next, however, is how we decide to respond to these things.



My former teammate, Steve decided to bash and ridicule the people responsible for his unwanted circumstance.



He TALKED and COMPLAINED about it.



I, on the other hand, figured out a way to go “over the top” of this particular circumstance, and create an outcome that superseded my unwanted experience.



I DID SOMETHING about it.



In episode number 1663 of my master class, I talked about “Your Favorite Flavor Of Shit Sandwich.”


No one is exempt from having to eat shit sandwiches, especially if you have big goals and ambition. The question is not whether or not you will eat the sandwich; the question is, what do you do next?



Whine and complain?



Or, do you take action that renders the shit sandwich irrelevant?



This is your choice any time you face things in life.



You are facing something right now. What are you doing about it?



Bitching and complaining? Allowing the situation to have its way with you?



Or doing something about it, and putting yourself in power over the circumstance?



Your choice.



In Work On Your Game University, I will coach you on developing what we call the Bulletproof Mindset, such that circumstances of life do not throw you off course, rob you of momentum, or cause you to second-guess whether or not you can still reach your goals.



The result: nothing stops your momentum, circumstances and obstacles move out of your way, and getting to your goals are much easier when you have the Bulletproof Mindset.



The mindset you walk around with arrives everywhere you go before you get there, and lays the groundwork for your success.



Get started here: http://www.WorkOnYourGameUniversity.com
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