JohnA Passaro's Blog, page 49
December 27, 2015
The America I Know
I was in my most vulnerable state – injured, laying in the middle of a dark street, unable to move.
Cars zoomed by me.
Drivers veered around me.
The notion that I needed help either never crossed their minds or they were too calloused to life to care.
Eventually, one old lady cared enough to stop.
She pulled her car next to me, rolled down her window and she asked me, “Son, do you need help?”
“Yes, thank you, I do. I can use a ride home. I just live a mile down the road.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“I was running home and I fell in a pothole. I twisted my ankle pretty bad. I can’t move it.”
“Why were you running at midnight?” she asked, as I could here her tone quickly shift from care, to cynicism, to fear.
I went on to explain to her that my father worked the lobster shift in New York City and each night I would drive the car up to the train station and then run home. This saved me from having to pick him up at 2:00 am each morning.
“How do I know this isn’t a set up?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean how do I know that you’re just not faking an injury in order to get me to stop and help you, so you could rob me?”
I looked at her with disbelief. “Why would I do that?”
She said, “I’ll tell you what – I’m going to go get help. Wait here, and someone will be back for you.”
I laid there for an hour, no one came back to help me.
After hopping home on one leg I remember laying in bed replaying what had just happened in my head.
The funny part was, it wasn’t the ones who passed me by as I was lying in the middle of the road that I was most disappointed in.
I was most disappointed in the one who cared enough to stop, yet did nothing.
The one who allowed fear to make her just a little less of a caring human being.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
This is the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.
These are the words we Americans believe in.
The words that we live by.
Yet, fear is causing us to live contrary to our beliefs.
Fear is turning us into that old lady who cared enough to stop, but too fearful to help.
Fear made her just a little less human.
I attest, the way that you defeat America, is by making us all a little less American.
For a country to live in conflict with its core beliefs is a recipe for mediocrity.
For a country to say one thing, and do another, is a fools game.
To have contradictory forces at odds with one another will produce the status quo at best.
Which is the honest assessment of America’s current status.
For America to be great again our beliefs, our words and our actions all must be in harmony.
I am not naive, I understand there is evil in the world.
I understand evil will exploit the goodness of mankind, as it sees mankind’s humanity as a chink in its armor.
Just to remind me of such, as I am writing this, I am watching an episode of “Elementary”.
In the opening scene a pretty lady falls down outside of a bank.
She seems to have twisted her ankle pretty badly.
The security guard witnesses her fall and leaves the inside of the bank in order to help her.
As soon as he leaves the bank he is shot in the head.
As an ambush of evil was waiting.
With the security guard dead, the robbers then storm in and rob an unprotected bank.
I get it.
Evil is evil.
If America wanted to be the callous drivers who just passed on by, I would have no problem with putting up a new inscription on Lady Liberty that reads:
“We are temporarily suspending taking in your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Please don’t send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, as the light of my lamp beside the golden door no longer glows for thee.”
At least then, America would be in harmony with its current beliefs, words and actions.
That is just not the America I know.
The America I know is the universal symbol of freedom.
There is a often overlooked part of the Statue of Liberty.
The broken shackles at her feet.
The broken shackles which represent the “breaking free from oppression.”
Freedom from oppression, freedom from war, freedom from fear.
We, as Americans, just can’t act in conflict with our core beliefs.
We just can’t be the old lady in the car, who cared enough to stop, but too afraid to help.
Who promised to send help.
And never did.
I understand there are supreme risks involved in taking in Syrian Refugees.
But I also believe that the greatest risk of all to America, is for us to all become a little less American.
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You Must Beat ALL Of Your Opponents
Are you good enough to to beat ALL of your opponents?
Beating the opponent who lines up in front of you requires that you beat the ones that don’t.
You must beat making weight.
There is a difference between “making weight” and arriving at the weight in an optimal fashion in order to compete at your peak performance level.
You must know the difference and execute great weight management, rather than poor weight cutting.
You must beat the Yo-Yo.
You must eat for strength and not for pleasure.
After weigh ins.
And on Sundays.
What you eat after a weigh and on Sundays is a strong indicator whether you are beating this opponent or this opponent will eventually beat you.
Yo-Yo’ing your weight will lead to practices which are about weight loss, which will deplete your love for the sport, rather than being about fine tuning technique which will increase your hunger and preparedness for victory.
Practices which are about weight loss, rather than improving technique lead to losses to inferior opponents.
Guaranteed.
You must beat dehydration.
Withholding water from your body is committing “Peak Performance” suicide.
You must give your body an abundance of water, everyday.
Learn about the benefits of water and you will learn to love water.
You must beat sugar.
Research the difference between simple carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates.
Research sugar and its affects on the human body, then decide whether you want to replace the 3 – 20 oz Gatorades with high Alkaline water.
You must beat the long day, the time between matches and unexpected events.
You must beat the clock, the stall, and the clam up.
Be jealous of every second within the 6 minutes of your match.
Attack and take action quickly and time will always be your ally rather than your opponent.
You must beat the scoring table.
Have you ever kept score for a match or tournament?
If you haven’t I would recommend that you do so. Just to see what you are up against.
Keeping score seems easy, but it is an extremely difficult job.
It requires an extreme amount of focus and attention.
For hours.
It is just not possible for a human being to be attentive and focused for that long.
There will undoubtedly will be lapses of focus and attention by score keepers.
You must be able to beat an inaccurate score.
You must beat bad calls.
For the very large majority of time referee’s do an outstanding job.
But referee’s are human and humans make mistakes.
Sometimes, they make mistakes at a crucial time in a match where you will not have time to overcome their mistake.
Never put yourself in a position where anyone other than yourself can win or lose a match for you.
The first 6 points of your lead are to overcome potential human error.
Count on it happening. Against a great opponent, in the most crucial time.
Train to be able to build a 6 point lead.
Against anybody.
You must beat your opponents coach, the coach sitting in the stands and the one on the internet.
We live in the digital age.
Video is streamed and is available at any time – for free.
Your every move and tendency will be scouted, analyzed and dissected.
A strategy will be formed on what is the best way to beat you.
I guarantee it.
You need to understand your own tendencies and expand your arsenal of weapons.
You must think like an opposing coach. One who is watching your every move, in every match you have ever wrestled.
You must constantly reinvent yourself.
You don’t want to be “figured out.”
Ask yourself the same question your opponents coach is asking himself,
“How do I beat him?”
In your case it will be,
“How would I beat myself – if I had to wrestle myself?”
Always have one more move, one more series, one more “go to” in every situation than your films show.
You must beat being perfect.
Being perfect is knowing that you did everything that you could possibly have done, there wasn’t one more thing that you could have done, in order to prepare yourself for your upcoming match.
When you are approaching the circle, your mind will quickly scan your confidence and your confidence will be in direct correlation of whether you have been perfect.
And you will perform accordingly.
You must beat victory.
You must beat defeat.
Don’t let defeat be victorious.
Don’t let victory defeat you.
Practice will get you ready for your human opponents.
Only experience gets you ready to beat the 99 others.
In order to beat 1 opponent, you must first learn how to beat the 99 others.
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December 26, 2015
Be Incapable of Discouragement
It’s going to take longer than you originally thought.
You are going to need to invest more effort than you ever would have liked to exert.
You are going to have to endure more pain than you planned.
Face more failed attempts than you thought would have been necessary.
Experience more setbacks than you rationally and logically should have ever had to go through.
There’s going to be many times where your effort will not be rewarded, or even acknowledged.
Yes, at times, it’s going to suck.
For now.
You need to get through the suck.
When you have put in more effort than reward received, you have to double down on belief, confidence and enthusiasm.
You have to continue to work yourself to the brink of collapse and tears.
You need to be able to do this indefinitely.
You need to have faith in the process.
For this part of the process is the final filtering system to creating greatness.
Success always lags hard work and effort.
As your reward is not being unjustifiably held from you, it is actually being deferred for you.
Stored up, to be given to you in a lump sum, rather than incrementally.
At this point in the process it is more important what you do not do, rather than what you do.
In order to receive the reward of your hard work.
The reward you deserve.
The reward you have earned –
You need to be incapable of discouragement.
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December 23, 2015
Saving Hope
It is early morning and I am looking out my living room window.
The sun is appearing through the trees for the first time in a day.
There is a light morning dew lifting off of the ground.
The grass, which has recently been dormant, is once again turning green and coming alive.
The weatherman projects today to be 70 degrees and sunny.
Flowers are in full bloom.
It is December.
In New York.
Sometimes life is weird and unexplainable.
The way things happen in life isn’t always the way they have happened before in the past.
Last winter, New York was bombarded with snow.
Record amounts.
Piles of snow were plowed higher than houses.
The ground was white for so long that the color green nearly became extinct.
The thought that winter somehow had become a permanent season dominated conversations.
One year later and the suns warmth has extended well past the point which it normally does, or ever has.
I am currently wearing shorts on the eve of Christmas Eve.
The pendulum swings both ways, I guess.
And that gives me hope.
Sometimes when things are at their absolute worst, you can actually feel the pendulum reach its zenith, stop for a second, and then start to change direction and swing the other way.
The other day, right before the recent winter heat wave, I had that exact feeling.
That the pendulum wasn’t moving anymore.
I felt a stillness and then a shift.
It was followed by a feeling of warmth.
The same feeling one gets on a stormy summer day when the storm clouds decide to disperse and the sun magically reappears.
There was no event that made me feel this way.
My feeling was succinct, but significant; as if there was going to be such an event shortly.
It was the exact opposite feeling that I had in 2006, when I closed my eyes late in December and played the game I had always played before each new year, the “What do you think the upcoming year will bring?” game.
In this game I would close my eyes, sit still in silence, and wait for a feeling to come to me that would define the upcoming year.
Up until 2006, the feelings that came to me were always all good.
“It’s going to be a very good year coming up,” would often be the case.
It wasn’t that I was trying to be an eternal optimist, it was the actual feeling I got by looking into my future through my minds eye.
But in 2006 the feeling that came to me was quite different.
As I looked ahead to 2007 I felt the zenith of the “It’s going to be a great year” pendulum.
I tried to shake the feeling and start the process all over again, but to no avail.
Each time I tried, I got the same result.
So I thought to myself “Ok, a bad year – every now and then you are going to have one,” and I moved on to see what the next year would bring.
When I looked into 2008 in my minds eye, the feeling of darkness overwhelmed me.
I quickly tried to fast forward in my minds eye to 2009, to see what it had in store for me.
“Do not enter.”
I remember getting the feeling “For your own good you are not allowed to go there. You will be better off if you didn’t know.”
What does that mean?
Like someone playing with a ouija board who didn’t get the answer to their question that they wanted, I quickly put a halt to the game.
What could be so bad that it would be best that I didn’t know ahead of time how I would feel?
In time, as a financial advisor, I soon learned the zenith of the pendulum of 2007 and the darkness of 2008 was the looming Financial Crisis.
The worst financial markets since the great depression.
Pillar companies crumbled.
The worlds assets were halved.
Human spirits were shattered.
A near total collapse of the financial markets around the world.
But the world got through it.
In early 2009, in just a few months, the markets rallied nearly 40%.
The world was starting to heal.
At this time, I actually thought the darkness was over.
So for the first time since playing the game in 2006, I once again attempted to go back into my minds eye to play the “What do you think the upcoming year will bring?” game.
“Surely the upcoming year couldn’t get any worse than the one the world just went through with the Financial Crisis,” I thought to myself.
I attempted to feel forward into my minds eye again, thinking that the worst was over.
I was wrong.
“Blocked off. Off limits,” was my answer once again.
“For your own good don’t go there.”
In John Green’s book “the Fault in Our Stars” Hazel Grace tells of a nurse who said that she knew she was a fighter because she called her pain level a 9, when almost all others would have called it a 10. She said that wasn’t quite right, it was just that she was saving her 10 – she new there was more to come.
It was at this time that I realized the Financial Crisis was only my 9.
My 10 was still to come.
And come it did.
On August 21st, 2009 my 10 arrived, as my 19 year old daughter lost oxygen to her brain for 6 minutes.
Calling it a 10 doesn’t due it justice, as it was exponentially so much more than any 9 I had ever experienced.
I went back into my minds eye for answers and how my future would feel. I went through years without getting any feeling back. As I brought each year into my mind, these are the feeling that were transferred to me:
2010 – nothing
2011 – nothing
2012- blank
2013 – blank
2014 – nothing
2015 – nothing
2016 – I felt the warmth of the sun. Growth. Rebirth.
There is nothing more frustrating to someone who is decorating a Christmas tree than to have one light bulb go out on a string of lights.
We all know if one light goes out, they all go out.
You then have to find the bulb, fix it, and they will all go back on.
One can spend hours searching for that one bulb.
I have spent more than six years in search of it.
A brain injury is like having that one bulb go out in your brain.
Find the one connection, fix it and everything goes back on.
Connections in the brain are generated by neurotransmitters.
Neurotransmitters transmit signals across a chemical synapse from one neuron to another.
Neurotransmitters mostly come from Amino Acids.
Amino Acids can be found on the shelf at Vitamin Shoppe.
“Can I help you find something?” a Vitamin Shopppe employee asked me as I was reading every bottle and label on the shelf in the neurotransmitter section.
I hesitated for a few seconds, almost to the point of awkwardness as he knew I was thinking about letting him know why I was reading everything in the neurotransmitter section. I usually would make up a story in this situation, it was just easier, but today I decided to overshare with him what I was doing and why.
“Yes, I am trying to learn everything about neurotransmitters and which products have what neurotransmitters, and what is the highest amounts that they exist.”
“Can I ask why,” he asked me.
“I have a daughter who has been in a non-mobile and non-verbal state and it is my belief that if I provide her with the right neurotransmitter, in the right amount, that it will provide the spark that will travel over the synapses of her brain to allow it to function properly again.”
It was then that I new I made a mistake in oversharing.
I will never forget what happened next.
It almost made me lose any and all hope.
“Sir, I hate to tell you this, but there is nothing on any shelf in this store that will help your daughter recover. I’m sorry.”
I left the store feeling like a moron, with nearly all of my hope lost.
What was I thinking.
Did I really think there was a solution to my daughters condition that was in open sight, sitting on the shelf of a Vitamin Shoppe?
Yesterday I was watching an episode of “Saving Hope”.
It is a show about a female doctor whose fiancee was in a car crash and is currently in a medically induced coma.
The episode I watched yesterday was the episode where the female doctor tried to use sensory stimulation to help her fiancee, Charlie, regain consciousness. She joined him in his hospital bed, got on top of him, took off her shirt and took his hands and placed it on her breast, at the exact time another nurse walked in.
I saw myself in this doctor. She was embarrassed beyond belief and doubted herself to no end.
And her fiancee’, Charlie, moved his finger.
My doubt and embarrassment that stemmed from my Vitamin Shoppe visit disappeared.
My hope returned.
I started researching neurotransmitters once again – this time online.
Life is weird and unexplainable.
Sometimes flowers bloom on Christmas Eve in New York.
It does happen.
Knowing that the pendulum swings both ways gives me hope.
Hope that I will endure everything necessary to find that one bulb.
My minds eye believes that I will.
It is 70 degrees in December for a reason.
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I coach for character…
I am far more interested in how a young man responds to pressure or disappointment than I am in how far that he can hit a baseball.
I coach for character
Auggie Garrido
Head Baseball Coach
Texas University
December 21, 2015
Q&A with JohnA
On May 18th, 2014 I was asked to speak to an 8th grade class from Brentwood school district.
Here is the Q&A portion of my talk.
Appreciation is your 2nd most valuable tool that you own
Everyone is a genius at something
The most important team you will ever be on
The hardest thing in the world is to take 3rd
I wrote my book the way I would want to read a book
How is your daughter doing now?
The Life Lessons I needed to learn I learned through sports
Did wrestling help you in life?
A Good Person is the most valuable thing in life
Why did you feel that you could trust Dr. Leon?
How did you have the strength to get through it all?
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Greatness vs Greatness Arrived
There is always one match a tournament when everyone takes notice.
Matches stop.
Crowds form around the mat.
An electric atmosphere spreads throughout the gym as the everyone wants to know what is going on.
When you see one of these matches, you know it.
You feel it.
It is memorable.
It is the reason you sit through twelve hours of dual meets over two days.
It is the reason you miss the football game on t.v., the reason you carve out two hours in your life to make the trip across the island to be in attendance.
It is what made Elmo dress up for Lauden Swain’s match against Shoot.
It is what the sport is all about.
A collision course between greatness and greatness arriving.
Competition at its best – one which requires both opponents to be at their best.
When “not winning” isn’t “losing” for either competitor.
Mattituck vs. Rocky Point was that one match this weekend at the Center Moriches Duals.
It is a testament to both programs.
As I watched the match a few thoughts came to mind.
Darren Goldstein does a tremendous job surrounding himself with quality coaching talent. On this day Rocky Point had Anthony Volpe and Billy Coggins in their corner. In the past it has been Steve Hrmada or Charlie Griffin. There is no wonder how Rocky Point stays at the top of Section XI for all these years. Hard work combined with very talented coaching.
What impressed me the most about Mattituck was not their wrestling, which was absolutely impressive, but their body language.
After Rocky Point went ahead 30-27 in the heavyweight match, with only 1 match remaining, as Mattituck’s wrestler came back to the bench he wasn’t welcomed back to the bench to teammates looking the other way with their head down, or teammates shrugging their shoulders as if to say “What happened?”, he was welcomed back to the bench to teammates who were applauding his effort.
The same occurred when one of their wrestlers saved a team point by only losing 7-0, instead of 8-0.
Mattituck’s ability to go out and wrestle a strong Brentwood squad right after their 33-27 non-win to RP showed their maturity. There was no let down in what could have been a classic trap match in performance right after an emotional non-win. It would have been very easy for them to come out flat. They did not.
I have seen 14 of Mattituck’s matches this year, there is no doubt in my mind Mattituck will have more than a few state place winners this year and that Jack Bokina will improve on his 4th place finish from last year. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he were to get his hand raised at 6:00 pm on Saturday February 27th, 2016. He looked that good.
Mattituck’s upper weights allow them to compete with any team in Section XI and NYS. I haven’t seen a string of upper weights like these guys in a long time.
James Trezza (SME), Anthony DeVito (RP), Luke Bokina (Matt), Donald Wood (CM), Dan McClure (WHB) were also very impressive this weekend.
I am sure Rocky Point @ Hauppauge – January 20th, 2016 will be another match that will attract crowds and the attendance of Section XI’s faithful.
I will be there.
Because I appreciate the pursuit of excellence.
And the Arrival of excellence.
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December 19, 2015
Have I Done Enough?
Have I done enough?
Have I done enough for me to look back at my life over the past few years and be proud about how far I’ve come?
The concept of enough – doesn’t exist.
You see because if one does enough then one need not do more.
Enough isn’t enough at all.
There is one fundamental truth.
That enough is nothing.
And that arriving at this realization is everything.
Nekabari Goka
December 17, 2015
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