What if people keep telling you your dreams are impossible, that people you know and trust keep telling you over and over again to not even bother with your dreams, that these dreams aren't realistic, that what you want to do is against the natural order of things?
I feel like though life, people are constantly telling you what you can't do. Even when people say that you can do something, they don't really mean it - in their eyes, they feel like you can't.
Everything good that's happened to me in my life came from holding my dreams close, not allowing other people to define for me what my dreams are, can, and can not be.
It will not be a news flash to say that Lehigh will be prohibitive underdogs when No. 12 Fordham comes to town this weekend.
After all, the numbers say so.
You can look them up if you'd like - how Fordham has scored a lot of points and amassed a lot of yards.
But this team would be well served to not listen to the folks that would crush their dreams.
For the great thing about football is that they still play the game.
When the ball is kicked off, there are no statistics. Nobody cares, when the ball is kicked off, what happened last game, last year, last century. It's 11-on-11. Who is better on that day.
Most people don't write as much as I do. But there are a lot of people out there who don't write as much as I do that would like to tell me what to write, and how to write it.
Being generally an open-minded person, I do try to consider what people are saying.
But rapidly, when people are telling me what to write, and how to write it, it devolves, somehow, into what I can't do, what dreams I cannot achieve.
I don't know if this is perception or reality, but in my reality, nobody believes in me. Nobody believes that I can make all this content involving Lehigh, write a book, engage my family, have a job.
It's my job every day to prove these (real? imagined?) people wrong. To do my utmost to make all of this happen, even if it's sometimes a bit later than I'd like.
I see everything around me - people, internet handles, statistics - as entities that don't believe in me.
In a way, in this statistics-built society we live in now, statistics become a weight telling us what we cannot do.
A challenger is "behind in the polls", journalists say, so there's no reason to go to the effort to try to unset the popular, corrupt senator.
Most businesses fail in the first year, so we are told, so there's no reason to try to start your own business.
Most book writers fail to ever release their books, so I'm told, so I shouldn't even try.
But everything great in this world came about when people kept their dreams close, didn't let anybody crush their dreams, whether purposely or inadvertently, worked hard for it, and then - simply won, when everyone else was proven wrong.
This can be the case this weekend.
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