One of last year’s best Super Bowl commercials was Clint Eastwood’s “It’s Half-Time in America.” When the commercial aired, it was taken in many different ways. Some said it was political a statement; others took it simply as a car commercial. How should we take it? Life is not over yet; we need to get up and do more.
Do you recall Gene Hackman in the movie, The Replacements
, where he coaches a football team of has–been players who never made it in major league football? They were all working various jobs that did not amount to much. Then they were hired to play football as substitute players while the professional players were on strike.
The game that mattered was the last game they played in the movie. It has been announced the strike would end the next day so the sub players had only one more game to play; if they win, the real team gets into the playoffs. The team they are playing is one of the best and it had real players who had crossed the picket line.
Gene Hackman, the coach of the sub team, gives the locker room speech, telling his team they will return to jobs the next day and go back to being nobodies. But they are dangerous people. Why? Because when it comes to that game there was no tomorrow. Think about that: they can play any way they want; there is no tomorrow for them in the sport.
This is the last day of our week on the topic “End of the World as We Know It.” It’s time to think about what you are doing with the time you have been given today. If there were no tomorrows, would you be able to live with the choices you made this day?
In the early ‘90s in Philadelphia, there was a Radio DJ who came back for a one-year contract with one of the top rock radio stations. John DeBella was one-of-a-kind in the radio world. He pushed and pushed in that year to make changes to the radio show he hosted each afternoon. The radio station was WYSP and they had a classic rock format. John was pushing the fact that so many new classics were being born.
The last day of his one-year contract he didn’t end the show in his usual way. He decided to take a moment and talk about the fun he’d had during that year, and how he’d done things the way he felt they should be done. He thanked us, his listeners, and said he hoped that a new contract would be presented to him. But with nothing on the table, he was still doing it his way as he went off the air that day.
The future is not written; the past is gone. You only have one place to work and that is today. So, tomorrow or not, you have today. I hope you are doing what you want. I hope you are spending it with the ones you love. You will not get a chance to come back and relive today.
Take action now in your life; do what you said you were going to do. It is better to try and to fail than to do nothing and sit in regret for years talking about it. I challenge you to take action on something this weekend. Stop waiting until the New Year. Start today.
I’m Tim Gillette, the Rocker Life Coach. It’s time to live your dream, to love what you do and those you share life with. Are you ready to do today what it takes to become the RockStar in your world?
