Fight for Your Dreams - Three Olympic Hopefuls

Many people abandon their dreams and their goals at the first hurdle. Worse still, many don't even attempt to pursue them because of something called failure. Yet the irony is that the more we try to run away from what we perceive to be failure the more failure stares us in the face.

One of the reasons why people let failure get in the way of their achieving their goals is because they forget the real objective of goal achievement. Achieving your goals is great but the real success lies in what you become as a result of pursuing your goals.

Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem at the level at which it was created. Similarly, for you to achieve your goals - something greater that you have previously achieved, you have to grow bigger than you were before. And so, even if you don't achieve your ultimate goal you may actually achieve something better even though you may not realise it at the time.

Internet Marketer Russell Brunson is an example of someone who had a dream and felt the agony of his dream slip through his fingers. For a while he felt like a failure but he soon realised that although he didn't achieve his ultimate wrestling goal his years of dedicated training even while on family vacations and years of competing had strengthened him not just physically but also mentally.

So after losing a critical wrestling match he turned his mental toughness, energy and focus to business. He was still in college but that year he generated $250,000 in sales. The year following his graduation he did even better. In fact, he quadrupled his sales generating over $1 million dollars. And his business has gone from strength to strength ever since and he now operates a multi-million dollar business.

But his passion for wrestling still burned in his soul and so he recently made a bold decision to train for the 2012 Olympics. Two key individuals inspired him to make this decision and it's no surprise that they both come from wrestling backgrounds.

The first was Matt Hoover, the winner of Season 2 of the NBC's Biggest Loser. Matt Hoover is also a former wrestler but, following an injury which forced him to stop competing, he experienced eating disorders which resulted in his weight ballooning to over 300 lbs. When he started the Biggest Loser series he weighed in at 339 lbs. He won that series by losing 157 lbs over a period of 9 months.

Matt Hoover is currently training for the 2009 Ford Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii - an event certainly not for the faint-hearted. And he too has decided to return to wrestling and make a bid for Olympic glory. Matt Hoover willl be fighting for his dream.

The second person is World Bronze Medalist Justin Ruiz who had hoped to compete in the 2008 Olympics. When he lost his qualifying match during the Olympic Trials he was devastated.

He took some time out but one night when he happened to view a video of that fateful match on Youtube he knew that he had to try at least one more time. He decided that he would fight for his dream.

It took an adjustment of Russell's mindset to see that he could still pursue his childhood dream of becoming a world-class wrestler. Matt Hoover is several years older than Russell and if he was prepared to go after the ultimate dream of any athlete what was standing in his way?

Ironically, the manner in which he has structured his business and the success of his business is giving him the freedom to fight for his dream and to do so in a manner that would not have been possible when he was still in college. So when Russell lost that match that put a stop to his wrestling career, rather than being a failure it could have been the best thing to happen to Russell.

In Steve Jobs 2005 to the graduates of Stanford University he talks about "connecting the dots" and the fact that we cannot see how our lives will unfold. Therefore, once we truly commit ourselves to achieving our goals we have to trust that whatever happens is the best outcome even though it may not appear so at the time.

If you're courageous and persistent enough to fight for your dreams then you will meet failure many times along the way. And, as Barack Obama said:

"Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere."

To find out more about the big way in which Russell Brunson is pursuing his Olympic Dream visit the URL below. I was inspired when I simply heard that he was going to train for the 2012 Olympics but I was blown away when I saw how he was doing it and the lives he is changing even now at the start of his epic journey:

Fighting for Your Dreams

What dream will you fight for?