More Saturday Mornings Brunch:
The sweetest things become the most bitter by excess.
-- Democritus
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Growing up, I faced pretty severe bullying. Maybe it’s because I was chubbier and had pimples on my face. Maybe I was too nice and let other kids walk over me. At 13, I was diagnosed with clinical depression, and I battled suicidal thoughts.
Luckily, I had a loving home and my parents did everything they could to help me improve my self-esteem. They encouraged me to get involved in athletics. And that’s what started me on the trajectory to professional cage fighting. I’ve loved the sport of wrestling since the moment I stepped onto the mat. It took my focus off my struggles. I didn’t start off as a great wrestler. In fact, I was terrible. But a coach saw something in me and he never gave up. Eventually I became one of the best and won multiple state and national championships.
After graduation, I moved to the Olympic Training Center to pursue my dream of wrestling in the Olympics. In a match with a world champion, I ended up in a bad position. Rather than give him the point, I let him gut-wrench me against the mat, twisting my arm the wrong way. In a freak accident, my arm snapped like a twig...continue here.
-- Justin Wren
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It’s biologically and psychologically proven. I remember learning about it in animal behavior in college: we scan and surround ourselves with what we grew up with and know. We all do it.
You can’t change anything unless you become aware of it, accept it, and then you can take action. One of the biggest gifts of this film for me is that it made me so aware of my own unconscious biases. It was really uncomfortable, but things that make you grow tend not to happen in cozy complacency.
-- Alysia Reiner
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Discomfort is growth. To constantly improve, and to be more resilient and adaptable, whenever there is a fork in the road, choose discomfort over comfort and you will grow.
We're used to choosing comfort. We're used to choosing the easy way. Yet all our success and growth comes from choosing the hardest and least comfortable way.
Choose the hard path. Choose something that makes you uncomfortable. If you do that every single day, you will grow every single day.
We never grow when we're comfortable. Continue here...
-- Tyler Grey
