START!

When my oldest boy Braden turned 10 years old he told me that he wanted to play professional baseball. I think most every young boy dreams of being a professional athlete at one time or another but there was just something different about how he said it to me. We were blessed to have a chunk of land out behind our house that appeared to be flat enough to build a baseball field so I thought I would give it a go. After all, how tough could it be to put grass down on a flat spot and through some bases down and call it good? I guess I never thought about the 50 trees in its way, the fact that the ground was not level, it was actually a glacial dump so it was full of rocks and I had no idea what I was doing. I can guarantee you that if I had taken all the time to plan, budget, measure and really think it through, I would never have built this field. Analysis paralysis would have stopped me dead in my tracks.

After 100 hours on a dozer 200 hours picking up rocks, 100 pallets of retaining wall bricks, 50 loads of top soil, 25 bags of seed a mile of irrigation pipe and a thousand hours of back breaking labor we introduced the finest private little league field in the state! We called it Duncan yards after my dear friend Brad Duncan who had mentored me for over 10 years. Since that opening ceremony we have held concerts, charity benefits, hundreds of games and impacted thousands of lives in our community. There is no doubt that all of these blessings were well worth all of the struggle.

The key to all of this is that we started and never looked back. There were many days that I asked myself “what in the heck am I doing” but I always went back to the dream of kids laughing and running all over this field. This vision carried me through all the hard days and streamed down my face as tears when I saw the first home run hit out of the park by my son.

You don’t have to know everything before you get started. I would admit that a plan is always a good idea but please don’t get so tied up in the planning and details that you don’t do the most important thing and that is get to work! Being in movement educates you. I would get on the web every night and learn more about what I needed to do the next days and weeks. I would stop every day at Home Depot and pick up the supplies for that days project. Day by day, hour-by-hour we chipped away at our dream. I surrounded myself with people that believed in the dream and we encouraged each other when the days got long and hot. Tom Gollatz, Kiley Floor and Glen Uekawa were instrumental in bringing this dream to fruition.

Every day we would learn a few more things. Mistake after mistake we learned our lessons. You see, if you are not in motion you can not collect enough data to learn what works and doesn’t work. We have to be in motion and recognize that there are no failures, there are only lessons. With lessons we can make adjustments and with adjustments and persistence we will always accomplish our goals.

I know that you want to break free so get started, be willing to make mistakes and never give up. I cant wait to see what you are going to do next!! Join me, lets go change the world!