Life Moves Fast

     Life, man, life has a way of making a person's head spin. One day, you're a teenager looking at all the possibilities ahead of you, and the next you're an adult living in an environment almost entirely sculpted by your own decisions. I hope, for your sake, that's a good place to be - but for a lot of us it takes more than one try to start getting things right.

     I bounced around schools a lot as a teenager, but at one of those schools I came across a head football coach that taught me a lesson in a single phrase. I never thought I'd be repeating the phrase as an adult unless I became a football coach myself. But here I've been for several years, hearing it in my head, then repeating it to myself intentionally. "Run it again." It's almost comical that I can still hear exactly how the words sounded. Funny thing is I only played at that high school for one season, but that school was very successful in its conference for several years. 

     Run it again...see, it wasn't said just to tell us that we'd fucked up...which we often did. I remember the team running plays over and over - even after getting it right. It wasn't good enough to get it right once. That's just luck, and luck tonight won't help on game day. You run it right until you don't know how else to run it. Correctly executed practice turns patterns into instinct. 

     I still find myself now, a dad in my thirties halfway through a challenging career path, reminding myself to run something again. To do it intentionally. To make the successful execution of whatever it is - instinct. Whether I'm considering how I'm raising my kids, studying for work, connecting with my fiancé, hitting the gym, or re-engineering my financial future, I'm using the lesson that old vet taught me. 

     That's why I designed the "Run It Again" shirt the way I did. The phrase is repeated to signify the repetition in which I experienced it, and it's designed similarly to the "Thank You" printed on takeout bags to signify my gratitude for teaching me the lesson - kind of a "takeout" lesson since I took off after just one season.

     If you're interested in representing this philosophy, check out our Run It Again 2.0 Sleeveless Muscle Shirt.