One true thing about me is that I will make my dreams a reality. My dream is to be a US Army Ranger. I have been committed to working every day towards this goal since September 2025.
The road to finding my dream was not a simple task. Earlier in the summer of 2025, I had quit football. I had played football for 11 years, but it was time to let it go. It never made me happy, and I hated going to practice, dreading the entire football season. As someone of the Catholic faith, I prayed over and over about whether it was the right decision for me. All God did was reaffirm my belief in letting it go.
Much of my summer was spent trying to find my new goal. I tried powerlifting out for a while, but it didn’t give me the dream that I was looking for. I had considered joining the military for a while, but I thought that maybe being a strength coach was my calling, so I didn’t pursue it.
One day in July, I saw a video about the Navy SEALs. It was very inspiring, and I started to wonder if a kid like me could accomplish such a feat. At first, I thought, no way, those guys are just born different, with a different mentality than the rest of us normal people. Then I started to think about my brother, who was an Army Ranger. I started to look at who he was as a kid, and before he joined the military. Conversations with him made me realize that the difference between these guys and normal people was the self-confidence and perseverance they worked to get. The nights when no one believed in them, and they kept going. The days that they felt they had nothing left to give, and they found a way to give more. The I would rather die than quit mentality that they developed. They weren’t born with this mentality. They instilled it in themselves. They worked so hard that they couldn’t quit. That was the day I started to put in the work. The day I decided that I would not be average and that I would succeed. I will not quit, no matter what obstacle gets in my way. I will not give up even if it takes me multiple attempts. Quitting is just not on the table.
