Collecting Your Passion

Some people love to hunt and are completely obsessed with it, some are the same way with Justin Bieber, and Starbucks coffee. It has taken me quite awhile to discover what I’m completely obsessed with and love, but I’ve now discovered it.  I’m obsessed with the Wizard of Oz, but more importantly, Dorothy. Ever since Black Friday shopping with a friend of mine, Tres Short, and purchasing my first Wizard of Oz memorabilia (a life size Dorothy cut out), the addiction has grown, and grown a lot. I’ve now accumulated two large posters and will be receiving in the mail (thanks to eBay) a 100-piece puzzle, a Tin Man trashcan, and a Dorothy Pillow. Who knows where my collection will go from there.

In life, we have the opportunity to participate in many different activities. We can play on sports teams, join clubs and organizations, or even have an after-school job. If you were like me, you wanted to participate in any and everything. You wanted to run cross-country, go to every Career Development Event and activity the FFA has to offer, and have an after-school job. In college, you wanted to sign up for every campus activity, apply for all the clubs and organizations, and be involved in all the intramurals.

It’s taken me awhile to discover this, but my mom called me up the other night and goes, “Honey, (yes my mom still calls me honey) you are running yourself crazy. You need to just find a few things you really like and focus your time and energy on them.” At that point it just clicked. I don’t need to do everything. I need to find the things I’m truly passionate about and focus on them. Just like my Wizard of Collection, I discovered what I truly cared about and loved and started my collection. I look at it like this, why put my time and energy into collecting Justin Bieber stuff when I really could care less about him. We need to focus on the things in life that we enjoy.

How can we discover what we love and are passionate about? I challenge you all to find that one thing that you are truly passionate about and dedicate your time towards it; whether that be your sports team, FFA Chapter, or after school job. Put your time into it and maybe you’ll find what you really love, just like I did with my Wizard of Oz collection!

“If you want to fly and move on to better things, you have to give up the things that weigh you down – which is not always as obvious and easy as it sounds.” Unknown

“Do what your heart desires, never hold back a thing, and don’t worry so much about what the others think, because at the end of the day, what makes you happy is what really matters the most.” Unknown

Who Would've Thought?

We all know the saying, “Dogs are a man’s best friend,” right? Well that is true, but since I'm at college I can't bring my dog; therefore, I've resulted into purchasing two of the most ornery, wild, and enthusiastic Betta fish in the world, Marty and Martha. They are quite the characters. I purchased Marty and Martha November first at the aquarium here in Manhattan, Kansas and it was one of the best days of my life, but seriously. 

I have surprisingly gained and learned quite a bit from my two fish. I've learned that I can't feed them too much or they'll die (no brainer), they can't be put into the same bowl or they'll try and kill each other (found that out the hard way), and that they prefer clean water rather than month long dirty water (pretty obvious). Besides how fish act and behave, I've gained a couple valuable life lessons. I've gained responsibility and discipline simply from owning two Betta fish. Who would have thought that owning these fish could be so beneficial. 

One thing in the FFA that I think is overlooked sometimes is our Supervised Agricultural Experiences. We can gain so many skills and so much knowledge from working with our programs. I started my Supervised Agricultural Experience my Freshman year in high school and to this day I am still very involved in it. My SAE is Wildlife Production and Management where I help out with my family's hunting operation. I have gained so much from my SAE. I've obtained communication skills, responsibility, and time management. I encourage everyone, in or out of the FFA, to start some sort of program wether it be purchasing your own livestock, helping out with a fruit stand, or even purchasing yourself a couple of fish because in the end you will leave with much more than you put in! 

Peanut Butter and Jelly

“We go to together like peanut butter and jelly”. “We’re like two peas in a pod”. “I’m stuck on you like white on rice”. Okay so maybe you haven’t heard of the last one but the first two phrases, I hope, are pretty familiar. Now these great food analogies are most of the time used when describing friends that are pretty close. Many times these are the friends that are inseparable on the playground, eat lunch together on a daily basis, or regularly make some form of communication to keep in touch. These friends are the lifelong ones that you know, through hell and high water, will be there for you because they care about you. But the real question is are you reciprocating that feeling?

Think about it, we have been blessed with some truly incredible people in our lives that care so much about us! Our best friends, family members, coaches, mentors and so many more are all part of our support team. These are the people that have continued to help us achieve our goals, been there for us when we are down, and helped us to pick ourselves up and keep moving! They are our biggest cheerleaders, best motivators and sometimes our own personal therapists. But do we do the same for them?

I know that I would love to say yes to being there every time for those people I care but I know that there are times in my life that I have not held up my end of the deal when it comes to relationships. Looking back I can pinpoint times in my life when I could have done a better job at being a friend, role model, or teammate and I am sure that there are numerous times when I have not held up my end of the deal and totally didn’t even realize it. Let’s be honest we are all guilty of it, maybe it was forgetting a friends birthday, not taking the time out to give a few pointers to the kid playing on the basketball team we are coaching or not trying to reach a compromise and instead just storming out. The key is to try and remember that we are supposed to hold up our end of the bargain in every relationship and to continue to not just take, take, take but to give in return.

A quote that I have used to help me to keep this in perspective is by Scott Stratten. Scott was in a TED talk that I was advised to watch and had some very interesting and key points that were interesting to think on. The big message he had to share however was this. “Being a big deal, isn’t a big deal, especially if we don’t remember to be a bigger deal to the people we care about.”

Take some time and think on that. If we aren’t a bigger deal to those around us that helped let us become a “big deal” than we aren’t really a big deal. Our accomplishments, our successes all become worth nothing if we don’t take the time to give back to those who took the time and effort to support us and helped us to become successful. These friends, family members, coaches and mentors have helped you achieve the status of “big deal” and because of that they deserve a little pat on the back. So think back to those few people you consider the peanut butter to your jelly, the next pea in your pod; are you showing them the support that they have shown you?

“If you go looking for a friend, you’re going to find they’re very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.”- Zig Ziglar

Wear Your Letters

I know it has been a while since I have written one of these and I am really sorry about that! To all my food fans out there I am sorry as well, the next few paragraphs will have nothing to do with food… I know shocking! No, but seriously I wanted to take this time and talk about something I have forgot lately. This next quote will pretty much sum it all up so here it goes.

“From the moment you say yes to this organization, you are always wearing your letters.”

I saved this quote after a conversation I had with one of my friends in another fraternity here at K-State. To give a little background we had been noticing this picture kept coming up on Facebook for a couple of our “mutual friends” as Facebook calls them. This picture was of a fraternity member holding up a sign that talked about being a part of a fraternity and not a “frat”. Since we study together quite frequently together I brought up the topic of that picture to see what he thought about it. He quickly sent me to a blog post by a man named T.J. Sullivan. Then as any great, frustrating friend would, he would not talk to me anymore until I had read it.

I started to read the blog casually, not entirely too focused and more worried about which song was coming up next on my iTunes, until that quote in bold came up. Now I don’t know about anyone else but when something comes up in bold I normally pay more attention to it. After reading and rereading the quote several times I decided to go back to the beginning of the blog and really pay attention to the words that this man, with obviously much more experience and wisdom than I had, had wrote.

(For those of you who wish to read the blog before going on here is the link) http://tjsullivan.com/you-are-always-wearing-your-letters/

After I finished, I took it all in and then said something to my friend sitting across the table. Since he had a test the next morning at 8:30 and it was already pretty late he didn’t say much back. I was fine with that since I had my own homework assignment to be working on, and the only reason I had even mentioned this was because I had fallen into the time wasting trap of social media… again. So I dropped the topic and after quickly saving the quote and the article on my flash drive I continued to work on my homework.

I still don’t know how or why and am still kinda laughing about how God continues to place things where I need it, when I need it, but I just stumbled across this article in my flash drive again very recently. As I read and re-read the article again I looked back on my past few weeks of my life.

Now I am going to preface this next little part with the fact that I am a normal human being with a normal range of emotion and the rest of my team is a bunch of “soulless robots” when it comes to sad movies such as Marley and Me and Toy Story 3, sad songs such as “This is Your Life” by Switchfoot, and other “emotional” situations. Not really, but I for some reason am the only person on my team that tends to cry, and I don’t hardly ever cry, like at all!

But anyways, I did proceed to have what I like to call an “emotional life pause”. I realized that I being a human being had made some mistakes recently and I had wronged some people. I was not “wearing my letters” as the article had stated and I needed to make some changes.

Now in the article “wearing your letters” referred to the Greek letters that many fraternities use to distinguish themselves from one another. But to me “the letters” were a different set than my fraternity. F-F-A was the three letters that kept coming to mind after reading that powerful statement.

For those of you who haven’t went up to check out the link yet, I would urge you to please do, this saves me quite a bit of writing and Mr. Sullivan does a much more eloquent job of explaining it than I can. But to sum it up how much different would we act if our “letters” were tattooed to our foreheads for everyone to see? How much different would we act if everyone could see which organization we were in all the time? What would we do differently?

I am going to finish this blog post up with a quote that was on my chapter’s FFA T-Shirts my sophomore year of high school. It comes from one of my personal favorite movies “Stomp The Yard” and it is pretty neat if you take some time and think about it.

“The letters do not make you, YOU make the letters”