As a child and in my pre-teen years I've not been good at sports. I was also a little chubby until around the age of 12. I did some swimming, but I sucked at it so much that I eventually just quit. I also tried judo, then since the class was free on a condition that the students represent the class in competitions I had to compete in one. Had been beaten in a ridiculously simple way by my opponent in the first 10 seconds of the match-up. Then my opponent was also beaten by someone else, so I was out of the competition pool.

Towards the end of my second year of college I signed up for ballroom dancing class. College is about ten years too late to start a career in most sports, ballroom dancing is no exception. However, I persisted. The reasons were complex and it wasn't really the "character strength" or anything like that... until about four years in when me and my partner were representing the senior (yeah, in ballroom you are a senior once you are 18+) division of our dancing club we were competing in the regional yearly contest.

We ended up being in the 3'rd place out of 16 couples. But that doesn't even begin to describe what it was like to get there. For months, hell or high water we'd rehearse 2-6 hours a day. We'd sewn our own outfits. My partner cooked me lunches sometimes because she knew I skipped eating to get to the rehearsal. One day she sprained her ankle and I carried her downstairs and to the cab.

But it wasn't just "hardship". Two other couples from our club who were close with us would often go to a local pub after rehearsals. We'd dance in the pub, mostly to get free drinks, but really, to show off. We'd spend weekend nights at other (older) couple's place re-watching VHS tapes of Donnie Burns countless times. We shared small victories of getting a gig of teaching dancing in a local school, or mourned defeats when the leading dancer from our junior division broke up with her partner and they didn't go the the country contest.

Until that moment when we won the 3'rd place I had no idea what it really feels like to try to be the best. The brief moment when during the dance you look at the audience, and you see moms who came to root for their kids at the side of the dancing hall screaming at the top of their lungs "number seven is the best!", and you realize that you are the "number seven". Your coach getting overly emotional and then running to the dressing room to prep you for the next round. Partners younger sister spending an hour on powdering and painting your partner's face and then crying being overcome with emotion seeing her sister on the dance floor.

Never in my life had I felt so acutely the joy from doing something and being good at it. It's just a feeling that you'd never come across if you never compete against a lot of other dedicated opponents and with a good chance of winning. It's in the moments like this that you feel that your efforts were rewarded, hardship justified, that you accomplished something. I'm in my mid 40's, and those moments etched into my memories, they are as fresh as they were the day after. It's what in large part made my life worth living. I cannot imagine how someone could choose mediocrity to be their life goal when they could have attempted to be the best.