Once I Was 7 Years Old: It's Just About... Life

“Once I was 7 years old, my momma told me go make yourself some friends or you’ll be lonely. ” –
Lyrics from 7 Years, by Lukas Graham

Lukas Graham’s 7 Years is one of the hottest songs in the country…and apparently his momma gave him plenty of good advice. But Lukas didn’t tell his momma he was gonna win the Daytona 500… not even close… but Denny Hamlin did!

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to get a chill if you saw the picture of the letter Daytona 500 Champion Denny Hamlin wrote when he was – you got it – only 7 years old:

“My wish is to win the Daytona 500. If I won the Daytona 500, I would like it to come true on February 17, 1998. My car would be red, white, blue and gold. Just like Bill Elliott’s car. If I do win the Daytona 500, I could win 1,000,000 dollars. My crew chief would be Gary Barden and my tire changer would be Ernie Elliott. The reason for all of this is because I love racing.”

Hamlin was a little off with the year, the color of his car, and the makeup of his pit crew, but he got the most important part right — he is now a Daytona 500 champion. In a race for the ages, Hamlin edged out Martin Truex Jr. by inches to win the race – a photo finish – and complete the picture Denny Hamlin had in his mind, his vision he put down on paper twenty-eight years earlier.

Patience my friends, pays off. So does having a dream, writing it down and never giving up on achieving it.

So why don’t more of us do it? I don’t know. When most of us are 7-years-old we definitely have dreams, maybe of being an actor, an athlete, a dancer, a singer, a doctor, a lawyer, a fireman, a police officer, the president, and more. But somewhere between then and now we get lost along the way – I guess you could call it the whirlwind of life. But what is that? Life is meant to be lived and we are meant to give back what we have been given, we are meant to shine. Every single one of us.

I’ve learned over the past few years how it works. See it, dream it, feel it, write it down, work to get it and never give up. TV Producer, Reporter, Emmy Winner, Author, Blogger, Speaker, Speech Writer, Leader. All visions I have had, things I have thought about, turned into goals, strategies, reality. And it’s far from over and far from realized in fact the journey never ends, why would you want it to? If you believe you’ve got the talent, if you know you have the passion, you have to pursue it. What else is there? Average? Mediocrity?

I absolutely love the advice Robert Herjavec, one of the hosts of Shark Tank, and an amateur race car driver himself, so eloquently stated in a recent interview:

The world does not reward mediocrity, nor does it reward average, it only rewards exceptional. So you gotta find that one thing that you’re good at and you gotta become great at it.”

Denny Hamlin took this to heart. Lukas Graham turned it into a song. Both were once 7-years-old. We all were. We can all look back to when we were young and think what we dreamed might never happen. Or we can remember that feeling, bring it forward, seize each day, each moment, each second and become champions at what we were born to do.