Personal Narrative: My First Day Of Baseball

There is an old proverb, it goes “ Treat your work as though you will reap a harvest from your labors”. I had never heard of said proverb before my first day of baseball, and even if I had, I would not be able to relate in the slightest. Growing up, I learned that my natural abilities in athletics and school made it so things just came to me, I thought I was a natural born winner. This gave me the mindset that hard work was for people who actually needed it, I (obviously) not being one of those people. This mindset would be crushed on my first day of baseball practice, where I was put in my place and forced to re-evaluate what it truly means to be a successful person. Baseball has taught me that no amount of inborn genius can or should

I had come up against something that I wasn’t good at, and it angered me. Everyday after practice for the next week or two was no different. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting better and what the point of all this suffering was. One night after an especially hard workout I had a talk with my dad, who was an exceptional baseball player in his day. I asked him what I need to do to get better. His response was simple but set the tone for my new mindset for the rest of my baseball career. He told me that all I had to do to get better at baseball was “work hard”. With this new thought in my head I went to practice with one goal in my head, to “work hard”. At times during those that first month of practice, I started to lose sight of this new vision my dad had given me, but was refreshed fully when I started to notice changes in my baseball skills. I started to pick up the pace more and more everyday. This was not due to natural ability or god given talent, it was due to the fact that I showed up to practice everyday and gave it my all. The term “ hard work” was given new value in my