Dreaming Big: How To Realize Your Full Potential
The world is at your fingertips
Everyone loves to tell young people:
“Chase your dreams!”
But nobody prepares you for what that actually takes.
It takes a lot of courage.
Whatever it is you are dreaming of doing or becoming, it’s probably something very difficult to attain or do. If not, you wouldn’t be dreaming about it, you would have already done it.
To fulfill this ‘dream’ of yours and make it reality, it’s going to cost you.
You will miss out on opportunities to do other things.
You are going to have periods of struggle, of great difficulty, of doubt.
You will be judged by others. Maybe even those close to you. Some might think your dream too risky, too uncertain, strange, or just not worthwhile.
And worst of all, you have to risk failing, sometimes publicly.
The only way to deal with all these things is to double down and go all in on whatever it is you want to pursue with this one, short, life you are given. When it gets hard, don’t even give yourself the option to look back.
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
— William Faulkner
Are you willing to set sail out into the open ocean, not knowing what you might find?
Most people are not.
Most will keep waiting for something to happen to them. For the opportunity fall into their lap. Until one day they wake up and realize the opportunity never comes.
The easiest way to fulfill your potential in today’s world is to have agency. We live in the information age, where you have access to unprecedented levels of knowledge and expertise about literally anything. And yet most of your competition spends a third of their day doomscrolling on their phone and lets the TikTok algorithm dictate their interests and opinions.
If this fires you up, good, it should.
If I’m calling you out, thats probably also good.
You can literally out-focus your competition. There is so much noise all around us all the time. If you can drown it out and just fixate on what you need to do to achieve your goals, you will be leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else.
A good way to understand the importance of focus in realizing your potential is through water.
The water in a steam generator has no more potential than the water in our shower. But the water in a steam generator, energized and focused, has the power to generate electricity that is the backbone of the modern world. The water in the shower, no energy, no focus, just washes away down the drain. Wastewater.
The opportunities are endless yet life is limited. What a pity it must be to go through life never unlocking your potential. Never feeling energized, or focused.
If you’ve never felt that feeling before, odds are you have been chasing the wrong things. Or maybe you haven’t chased anything at all.
“I have led a toothless life. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
A couple days ago my Mom sent me a picture of a short essay I wrote in middle school. It was the classic ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ question. Of course I wrote that I wanted to be an MLB player. Here I am 12 years later with a chance of a lifetime to fulfill that dream.
But I’m not going to sit here and act like my journey to this point was just some fun, whimsical adventure. It was not. There were periods of success, periods of failure, periods of uncertainty, of doubt. I have missed out on ‘normal’ career opportunities in pursuit of this dream.
And it’s all on display for the world to see. That’s the nature of being an athlete. If I succeed, people will act like they saw the potential all along. If I fail, people will say, “I knew an undrafted free agent like him wouldn’t last long.”
I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I love it this way. I love the thrill of uncertainty. The excitement that comes with a new opportunity.
I love trying to achieve something that people may think isn’t possible. Answering the call to adventure. Trying to be great at something. Taking on a great challenge despite the risk of failure.
I am confident in everything I do because I have failed and gotten up again. I know what it’s like to chase something that people will say isn’t possible.
Most of the people I know that are really thriving right now and love what they do had to go through some period of struggle or uncertainty. They had to enter the arena and be willing to fall flat on their face.
“How did he become so successful?”
“How did he pull that off?”
“How does someone even get into that line of work?”
These people were just willing to take the road less traveled and take risks when others weren’t. There’s some survivorship bias, I’m sure, but at the same time it’s very unlikely that those who ‘didn’t make it’ completely crashed and burned.
The beauty of fully applying yourself to some insane vision is that you completely evolve along the way. You unlock more potential within yourself. You learn how to focus.
Through these trials, through the adversity, they become successful. They aren’t necessarily always smarter or more capable to start. They are just more willing to act in the face of uncertainty and potential failure.
This sounds so cliche but it’s so true. You’re life is so short. Once your childhood is over it really starts to fly. Do not go through life wondering what you could have been.
Do a deep dive into what YOU really want out of this life. What do you want to be known for? Strive towards excellence in whatever that may be. Find something that makes you excited to get up out of bed every day. Stay Focused.
If you read this all the way to the end, thank you, I appreciate your support. I have felt a calling to inspire others to try to live their lives to the fullest, so I figured I would do so through writing. Consider subscribing for more content like this. Some content will be behind the scenes through my own personal journey through professional baseball and life in general. Other content will be geared towards more broad topics like this.
Wishing you the best this 2026