Don’t hate the player, hate the game
— Ice-T.
It’s easy to hate the rules. And it’s even easier to tell everyone what’s wrong with them. What isn’t easy is getting everybody to listen to you. And that’s because it’s so easy to find fault with something. What’s not easy is coming up with solutions or proving that you know what you’re talking about.
Take professional sports. Sometime rules change. And when they do, it’s a long time in the making. And who are a lot of the people making changes to the rules? They’re former players. They’ve proven that they know what they’re talking about, they’ve made a career of it, and they’ve successfully retired to become coaches and managers and commentators, and now they’re f**king experts.
They know what they’re talking about because they’ve been doing it a long time, they’ve done it a lot better than most, and now they make a living showing other how to do it right. So when they talk, people listen.
This is why change doesn’t come over night. It takes time for people to prove that they can play well enough by today’s rules that we should listen to them about changing the rules tomorrow.
The same thing goes for doing what you want with your life. It’s hard to do what you want because you have to pay the bills. You have to listen to the voices in your head and you have to make money. And a lot of the time, what we want to do isn’t always that lucrative — unless, of course, all you want to do is make money.
But if you pay your dues and get really good at doing something that makes money, then you have more free time to do what you want. You can make art or save the world or just stop giving a shit.
That is, of course, if you don’t get caught up in the cycle of making money just to make money. At some point, you need to let go and stop trying to own stuff and just enjoy the ride because, really, that’s what we all want to do — enjoy the ride.
