Along with football and basketball, wrestling was a popular sport in northern Missouri when I was in high school. And we were close enough to the Iowa line to know that it was an absolutely HUGE sport throughout that state. Any real wrestler who had a name had been from Iowa and my hometown was close enough for the influence to spill over significantly.

Although painful and difficult, wrestling was a fun sport because it raised our adrenaline levels so high. We were taught to work through the pain and that “pain was temporary but pride was forever!” I’ll never forget coach Doug Long’s stories of glory or his willingness to run mile after mile with us on country roads until we (sometimes) vomited or had to be dragged along by a teammate, so as not to be forced to run even further. We played Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’ as loud as the stereo system in the wrestling room would play. Each of us were forced to, quite literally, walk on our hands for the sake of balance, and lose pounds of fat as the season went on.

As trite as this might sound for any competitive sport, it is true that some very valuable life lessons are learned from such intense competition. Probably the lesson I remember most from my four years of wrestling was that there is one important factor separate from muscles, training, weight and coaching that you don’t know when you’re staring at the guy across from you on the wrestling mat: Desire. You have no idea how bad his desire to win is, and he also doesn’t know what you have inside you. Chutzpah. Guts. Willpower. Drive. Determination. All mean the same thing and cannot be measured. In short, it’s not just the size of the dog in the fight that matters; the size of the fight within the dog often matters more.

And how true that is in life when we face challenges. And as we get older and (ideally) mature as we age, we also realize which battles to save our energy for and which ones are worth letting go. Most of us have been there at least a few times before and we all will face seemingly insurmountable challenges at some point down the road. And when that important battle comes, the size of the dog in the fight won’t matter nearly as much as the size of the fight within the dog! As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.