Is it Worth the Effort?

Growing up, I loved basketball. It was my favorite sport, and I spent countless hours practicing in the driveway or playing games with my friends. We had a hoop attached to the roof of our house, and when my parents refused to buy us a second hoop so we could play “full court” in the driveway, my sister and I saved up our own money and bought one ourselves.

I’ll never forget bringing it home.

It was adjustable, which meant we could lower the rim and dunk the basketball. There was something about throwing the ball through the hoop and hearing the spring-loaded rim snap back into place that made you feel like an NBA player.

I could always jump pretty high, but never high enough to dunk on a regulation 10-foot hoop. In high school, I could get a couple fingers over the rim, but even my tennis ball dunk attempts never materialized.

A throwback picture of me trying to dunk when I was in high school

Years later, while still playing pickup basketball in my early thirties, I had a crazy thought: Maybe I should finally dunk a basketball.

Surely if I trained hard enough, strengthened my legs, and committed to it, I could make it happen.

I came across an article about a guy who set a goal to dunk by his 40th birthday and actually accomplished it. But what struck me most wasn’t the dunk itself. It was the dedication required to get there. He trained for over four years. Countless hours in the gym. Strict diet. Endless jumping drills until his legs gave out.

As I thought about where those hours each week would come from, I started questioning how important this goal really was to me.  Pretty quickly, I removed the “spring shoes” from my online shopping cart and abandoned the idea altogether.  It’s not that dunking a basketball isn’t a worthwhile goal. It just wasn’t worth the effort for me at that stage of my life.

And I think leadership is full of decisions like this.

We all have ambitions, goals, and ideas that sound exciting. Start a new business. Write a book. Learn a language. Get in incredible shape. Grow the company faster. But every meaningful pursuit requires something from us: time, energy, focus, sacrifice.

The problem is that many of us commit to goals emotionally without ever honestly evaluating whether we’re truly willing to make the tradeoffs required to achieve them.  Great leaders understand that saying “yes” to one thing often means saying “no” to something else.

There are times in life where the effort is worth it. And there are times where protecting your energy, your family time, your health, or your peace matters more. That’s not quitting.  That’s clarity.

I’ve found that when our priorities align with the amount of effort we’re actually willing to give, we experience far less frustration and much more fulfillment.  Otherwise our goals just sit on the “someday shelf,” cluttering our minds and quietly making us feel like we’re falling short.

So this week, I’ve been reflecting on a simple question:
What in my life is truly worth the effort right now?

Because not every goal deserves your energy.  But the right ones absolutely do.