Fruit you didn’t know existed is on the other side.
“When you’re younger, you think you have it all figured out.
As you gain a little life mileage, you realize your way isn’t the only way.
Eventually, you come to recognize the abundance of how much you don’t know.
Realizing this is exactly what feeds sustainable personal growth.”
-Ray Zingler on X
My dad, a former college football coach, used to compare everything in my life to football.
It got “annoying” but now as I sit a decade+ removed from most of those lessons (trust me, even in my 30’s I get football/life lessons) I see just how valuable they were.
He used football (what he knew) to feed damn near every area of my life.
I realize I am doing the same thing with many of the things in my life, “training” is just my “football”.
When I first started training athletes, I was 18 years old.
And when I say I knew everything, I knew EVERYTHING. Hundreds of hours of practice. Hundreds of hours of reading. Hundreds of hours of studying and writing programs, I knew it ALL.
And because I “knew it all” I stayed stuck in my ways for a long time. Years.
Obviously, I would see different things and alternative training methods, but I’d often scoff at them because “my ways were better than that bullshit.”
Eventually, after some deep introspection, I invited the question to myself, “What if my ways aren’t the only ways?”
It was the acknowledgement and understanding that my ways weren’t the only ways that began to feed my growth and make me a better coach and business owner.
While it didn’t mean that I was going to jump ship from my philosophies that mind you, were fundamentally sound, it allowed me to upgrade my philosophy.
As the years passed by I noticed I became addicted to not necessarily “proving myself wrong” but searching for ways to gain more knowledge and wisdom so that I could evolve even further.
By the time I got to 30 years old, now a 12-year veteran business owner/strength coach at the time, I was able to look in the mirror excitedly and acknowledge, “Holy shit.. I don’t know anything..”
And the reason I was excited to acknowledge the abundance of what I didn’t/don’t know was because I saw that as an abundance of opportunity to be able to grow even further.
Not knowing hardly anything is precisely what drives my passion for personal growth every day.
Key takeaway:
Challenge your ego and belief systems.
By doing so, you’ll access fruit you didn’t know existed.
