How often do you look in the mirror? When you do, what do you see? Do you see the real you? Do you put yourself down? Or do you think too much of yourself?
The great thing about the mirror is that it shows who we are right now or at least it shows us who we think we are. It doesn’t show who we used to be. It doesn’t show us who we will be or who we want to be. The mirror is a reflection of who we are at one moment in time. The cosmetic industry has made billions off of people’s desire to change what they look like in the mirror. For right now, I’m not talking about the superficial things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder right? So let’s get off the surface and dig a little deeper. Who are you as a person, and for the sake of this article and Hoops College, who are you as a player?
And maybe more importantly, are you able to accurately evaluate yourself?
The Past
Are we better than we used to be? Maybe we are worse? Has our past made us better or have we let our past drag us down? To me, the past is good for two things.
1. It teaches us lessons. What could we have done better? What have we excelled at? What do we need to keep doing? What do we need to stop doing? We can make the past about right and wrong, but hindsight is always 20/20. So many of yesterday’s decisions have put us where we are today and put us in a position to have more of an impact now than we could have before. So if we want to have an impact, we just need to learn from the past and use that now.
2. The past also shows us progress. In some cases it shows improvement. In other cases, it shows regression. In any case, it is a good way to determine how we’re doing. The hard part about this is being honest with yourself about where you have been and where you are. Sometimes our evaluation is off.
The Future
Do you have dreams about what you want to accomplish? If you don’t, you should. If you don’t know what you’re shooting for, how do you know when you get there? The goal and the dream can’t be the sole focus. In some cases we limit ourselves and in other cases we get so focused on the goal that we forget to focus on each step that it takes to achieve that goal. There are so many things that can happen in the future. Maybe that goal is big or maybe it’s too small.
The Present
In reality, the only thing that matters is what we do in this moment. Do our actions and decisions in this moment align with what we say we want? Are we doing things that allow us to beat the person that we were yesterday? In order to win today, we have to know who we were yesterday. We have to be able to actually evaluate who we are today. This is really hard to do. Especially if we’re doing it alone. My recommendation is to find people who are honest with you all the time. They don’t tell you what you want to hear. They don’t bring you down to their level and they don’t hype you up above where you need to be. They are just honest with you.
Because you know when someone is lying to you. The problem is that those lies sound good sometimes. If you crave that hype, I’ll tell you this. The hype will get you to a certain level, but then the hype meets reality and reality always wins.
Say no to the hype. Look in the mirror. Know who you are and work relentlessly to be better today than you were yesterday.