Oh, my favorite!  Passion.  I love to feel passionate about things–it makes me feel alive.  I love thinking about Tillie seeing a bike for the first time or Althea Gibson swinging a tennis racket for the first time.  Magic!  Connection.  Your job in life is to contribute and to do that, you should feel passionate about what you do.  If you had to guess, what do you think is my overriding passion right now?

No, it’s not writing books (this was a trick question).

I feel passionate about you.  I feel passionate about helping you find the tools necessary to discover your own passion and pursue it.  When I am going uphill in a headwind I will be thinking about your faces, your questions, your health and well-being.  We all need to feel like we are making a difference.  Whether you are painting a picture for a sick friend or crocheting hats for newborn babies or helping your team win a game or cleaning up trash in the park so little kids don’t get hurt.  Your passion might be to create something, to help people, to invent a cure for cancer.  It doesn’t matter.

Passion is what grabs you.  Pursuing it is what keeps you cycling uphill in a headwind (or in Tillie’s case–working overtime to afford a bike–or in Althea’s case, surviving the grueling pain of hours and hours of practice).  If you say you want to join the track team, but you don’t really feel passionate about it, you may not have the strength to follow through.  So your job is to figure out what makes you so happy, so excited, so right that you are willing to do the hard work to pursue it.

My passion is reaching out to you!

Note: If you’d like to see all the lessons, click on the tab: Making Big Things Happen

I hope by the time I reach your school, you feel like you know me.  Maybe you feel like you know me a little bit already.  Okay, here’s a quiz… am I the type of person who takes things slow and easy?  Or, am I the type of person—like Tillie—who likes things fast and racy, speedy and scorchy?  If you said the second thing, you know me already!  I’m a nut when I get excited about something.  I want to do it right away—all the time, every day.  The problem with that is you can get burned out before the finish line.  You can’t run a marathon like a sprint.

We spent all day yesterday at the 2011 GR Bike Summit and I talked a lot. Jack, our new friend in Grand Haven, who owns Loose Spokes Bike Shop, loaned us a Tillie-era bicycle, and we had a ton of fun pretending I was Tillie and posing with the bike and telling people about the ride.  But I coughed a lot because I still have a cold.  I hate colds, don’t you?  They really get in the way of things.  Anyway, I was planning to take a long ride today, but I decided—because I’m so wise in my old age—to stay home and rest.

It was a good idea.  I’m feeling so much better.  Whenever you are trying to accomplish something big, you have to realize there are many parts and your goal may take longer than you originally thought.  If you don’t pace yourself, you can burn out.  So take care and be nice to yourself.  I took these pictures in my yard of all the beautiful native plants that are blooming.  I hope you enjoy them!

Spring Beauty

Fiddlehead Fern

Trillium Grandiflorum

Red Trillium

Bloodroot

prairie trillium

Note: If you want to read all the lessons, click on the category: Making Big Things Happen

If you read the last entry, you can see that I’m afraid I won’t be a good enough cyclist to make the trip from Grand Rapids to Chicago.  In my experience, fear is a big reason that people don’t try to make things happen.  They stop before they’ve even started.  Let’s go to our examples:

The hopeful baker: What if my cake doesn’t rise?  What if it tastes bad?  What if people are allergic to it?

The aspiring basketball star:  What if I look like a clown?  What if I blow the winning shot?

There are all kinds of fears and since it’s such a big reason why people don’t try to make big things happen, we will talk about it more than once.  But let’s look at my fear on that trip to Holland.

My doctor says that I am strong enough to make this trip.  My long-distance cycling friends tell me I am strong enough to make this trip.  There’s a really good chance that I can successfully make this trip.  But honestly, it’s my fear of not being strong enough that makes me so upset.  This goes back–as I think I’ve told you–to my childhood, when I was born eight weeks early and was very sick as a baby and toddler.  Even though it’s no longer true, it still rules my thoughts.  I am weak.

Another example is Tillie, our German Shepherd.  She is big 80 pound German Shepherd, and you know what she’s afraid of?

Cats.  I’m serious.  She’s really really afraid of cats.  The vet thinks she was maybe swiped by a cat when she was a puppy.  We have a cat.  His name is Fig

Mr. Fig thinks he’s a pretty big deal.  But he’s only 12 pounds!  And guess what?  When we adopted him from the shelter, he didn’t have front claws, either.  Not really a match for a big German shepherd like Tillie.

So, when Tillie encounters Fig, there shouldn’t be any problem at all.  But when she sees Fig, she does this:

That’s because instead of seeing a 12 pound cat with no claws, Tillie is seeing this:





There are fears you can do something about and there are fears you can’t do anything about.  There is no promise that your cake will taste delicious to every person.  There is no guarantee that you will make your move and get beyond your opponent without fail.  But when you can identify what your fear is, then you can do something about it to make yourself better prepared.

After my disaster on the bike ride, I asked experienced cyclists what they do when they ‘hit the wall,’ or get to a point where they want to quit.  Here’s what they said.

“Think about the end and you’ll be motivated.”

“Stop every five or ten miles whether you are feeling tired or not.”

“Stop looking at the time and the odometer.”

“Make sure you eat a little something every five or ten miles.”

“Make sure you are warm enough.”

“You will always have times when you will feel this way.  It’s okay.  Just try to keep pedalling.”

Then I asked my sister, who was a champion swimmer when we were kids.  She said,

“Pay attention to your breathing.  Breathe deeply and get into a rhythm.”

“You have no reason to believe that you can’t make this trip, so begin with the firm belief than you can make this trip.”

And I do feel better.  I feel like I have some good strategies.

So… what are you afraid of?  Be honest.  You can’t work on your fears unless you know what they are.