Journal – Maxwell Murray

You Faked Your Pushups

I started playing football at the age of 5.  I have two older half brothers that are 7 and 9 years older than me and I remember going to all of their games growing up. Every other week they would come stay with us and we would play kickoff football from couch to couch in the basement. I was like 4 and so they would both go on their knees, throw the ball to me on the other side and I would have to get past them and score by making it to the other couch.  They used to kill me. There was something called high-low, where Marcus would go for my legs and Myles would go for my head and I would literally just get flipped over and destroyed. I remember falling on my neck and shoulders, being in pain, and crying. But I loved every single moment of it.  Growing up Sunday football was such a big deal for my family. We had this 3 TV setup in the basement where we could watch the Eagles on the big screen, game mix or another game on the left, and redzone on the right. I fucking loved football and I loved the Eagles even more. One Sunday night, Marcus dressed me in his full Silver Spring Saints uniform and pads. I was obsessed with football and was finally old enough to play. My first football game ever was against the Ellicott City Patriots on a gray Saturday morning. The Patriots kicked the ball off and it was finally my time to shine. We ended up losing the game and afterwards I was distraught and crying my eyes out. Not because we lost but because I only played the league minimum, 7 plays.   I got into the car after the game with my parents and was crying and complaining about my lack of playing time. Why wouldn't the coach give me a chance? Why me? Why this, Why that? My dad turned around and looked at me dead in the face and said "You faked your push-ups in practice". That day in the car, instead of coddling me, my dad was on my ass. "How do you expect to play if you are faking your push-ups in practice".   It is so easy to fake your push-ups in practice when the coach can't see you. However, who are you cheating? The coach or yourself? See, I was so busy faking my push-ups because they were hard and they hurt, that I didn't think about why I needed to do them in order to get stronger so I can hit this running back on the jet sweep. If you fake your push-ups that running back is hitting you on that jet sweep.   All of us have crazy dreams that we so desperately want to accomplish. We often think about the end goal or end person that we want to become. However, in order to get there you have to become better and stronger every single day. Especially (I will say it again), Especially when you are all by yourself and nobody is looking. If I go on the street today and ask 100 people if they are working hard to accomplish their goals, all 100 of them are going to say yes. Of course, we want other people to think that we are getting stronger and better everyday.   But, today I want you to think to yourself: Am I really getting stronger? Or am I faking my push-ups?

Journal – Maxwell Murray

Confidence

Are we naturally confident? Or is confidence built? What makes a person confident? Yesterday, I posted a clip on Instagram from my recent podcast episode talking about how basketball is life. I often look to basketball whenever I am navigating through different decisions or self-reflecting. As a basketball player confidence in your ability is everything in order to perform at a high level. One thing I love about basketball is how fast a player can go from being confident to not confident. We hit a 3 from the corner on one possession and the next possession we are eager to shoot the ball again. At the same time if we airballed our last shot, when we get open for another look, maybe we hesitate. A key thing as a basketball player is accepting failure and practicing short term memory loss. If we don't forget about our failures during the game, we can't continue to perform at a high level and help out our team. I don't think that being confident is a thing that we either are or are not. Confidence is a consistent battle that you are going to continue to face no matter what you are pursuing or going through. I believe that there are two types of confidence: Long term confidence and short term confidence. One question that you can ask yourself is what I am confident in? We all want to be successful and it takes a lot of confidence in yourself to be able to a point where you consider yourself successful. But, what does being successful even mean? To me, being successful means waking up and spending your day however you would like. In the long term, I am extremely confident that I am going to be successful because I know that I am in control over my definition of success. To answer my question before, I think that confidence can be a natural thing because everyday I am extremely confident that I will wake up tomorrow. Today, no matter if you make good decisions or bad decisions, your track record for coming out alive is undefeated. Therefore, naturally we have to be confident in the fact that everything happens for a reason and in the long term we are going to be okay. Short term confidence is something that is built. Our actions throughout the day are directly dictating how confident we are. Think about basketball for example, if we made our last shot, we are more confident to take our next shot. I think that you built short term confidence by taking on hard tasks and checking off those boxes. For example, today is Wednesday and I wrote about how hard it is for me to wake up on Wednesdays and have a good day. When my alarm sounded, I could have either gone back to bed or got out of bed and started my day. When I got out of bed, I checked off the first box of the day. Next, I had to decide to either go to the gym or not go to the gym. When I went to the gym and completed my workout, that was another box checked. As the day goes on if I continue to check boxes that are important to me, that is the same as making shots throughout a game. I am more confident in my ability to hit my next shot. However, days where I face those same tasks and do not check those boxes, I am naturally less confident. It is like missing a shot and hesitating on your next attempt. Just like in basketball, short term memory loss is everything and we can't let one failure in the day carry over through the rest of our day. Therefore, if you woke up today and maybe didn't check off that box, well you still have a lot of other boxes you can check off the rest of your day. Therefore, forget about it and move on. Like I said before, made shots= confidence, missed shots = hesitation. The best thing about life is that we are in control over whether or not we shoot in the first place and in life unlike basketball, we are actually in control over whether or not we make or miss the shot. Therefore, today go out there and average 20 and see how you feel. To conclude, long term confidence is a necessity and is something that hopefully we all have naturally. If we aren't naturally confident in the long term, then we have to practice short term confidence by consistently shooting and making shots. The more shots we make, the more confident we will be in our ability, and the more likely we are to be naturally confident in our future.

Journal – Maxwell Murray

Self-Awareness

I watched one of Gary Vee's posts and he talked about pointing your thumb instead of your pointer finger. When you take whatever is going on in the world around you and assess your circumstances, before anything else, point your thumb. I was nominated a team captain for my junior year basketball season. The year before I started on varsity but was really limited in what I could do on the court and as a 15 year old, didn't really have an ability to speak up to my older teammates. My junior year was the first time in high school where it was really my team. I think that one important thing to always know is that you practice how you play. During this season in practice, I was extremely immature. I would talk excessive amounts of trash, slap a teammate after hitting a 3 in his face, and conduct myself in an erratic manner. As a result of that my teammates did the same exact thing. Joked around in practice, left early after practice, and flat out didn't take excellence very seriously. We failed that year as a team and our season actually ended with me sprinting for a late close out and chipping the shooter, sending him to the line for game winning free throws. The next season, I was locked tf in. I set the tone by sacrificing my numbers for the better of the team. Junior year I averaged 9.4ppg and with two new transfers, I knew that I would have to be way more of a facilitator. Each time we ran sprints, I was first or second. I would run next to the big men and force them to keep up. We took every practice seriously and stayed hours after practice to keep shooting and working out. As a leader, I became a lion and our teams culture resembled that. One game we were playing the second worst team in the county. It was kinda far out and none of us were excited to play since we had a huge game later that week. I remember turning up the aux and clapping crazy. Everyone followed, we hit the court and were screaming during warmups. It intimidated the living shit out of the other team. First play we ran a backdoor for a lob and I threw it up and bang! We beat them by 40. My team went 19-2 that year and even though we lost early in the playoffs, I felt like my team resembled my drive and personality. I was willing to die on that. Running a company is a big switch up for me. There isn't practice and there isn't any real games. I felt like for a little while as a team, we were going through the motions. My team has my friends in it and I remember even sipping on a beer during one of our meetings. I am obsessed with FITS and trying to get it off the ground. However, I felt like myself and my team wasn't performing the way I thought we should. Instead of pointing the finger, I pointed the thumb. It made me think about junior year and how I was acting in practice. One thing about me is that I would rather die than fail. In order to get to the next level, I had to show my team that they are lead by a lion and not a sheep. I started waking up at 6am every single day. Making numerous instagram, blog posts, tweets, youtube videos, tik toks. I obsessed over building product and finally took the create idea and made it into a reality. I realized that as the CEO nobody is going to work more than me. Therefore, I have to set the bar so fucking high that people are sprinting and jumping to touch it. Self-awareness is everything. You have got to understand why you didn't perform the way you wanted to. Instead of looking around and waiting for other shit to happen, you have got to set the mf tone every single day. What am I doing wrong? What can I do better? I remember when we first started, everybody wanted to know exactly what their role was. I gave them titles and explained what I wanted out of them. However, I didn't write it down. Therefore, there is way too much room for interpretation. People may be stepping on other people's toes, or might not know what they should do on a daily basis. Instead of blaming them for that, I realized that it was completely my fault. I wrote down full job descriptions with one common goal, list of expectations, metrics, their process, and an example of their daily week. I feel like in order to accomplish anything, it takes you understanding that you came up short. I set out a 3 part strategy for our business. In order to succeed we have to do x,y, and z. However, I can't say that and expect other people to come up and execute. I need to incorporate all aspects of x,y, and z into my life and show how its done. Shane texted me yesterday and said "If I can't believe this is the way 100% then I need to change what I'm doing". Life is about self-awareness and execution. Everything is in your control and in order to get to that next level you have to carry yourself to that standard.