Ray Lewis and His Deck of Cards

RATED - A for All of Y'all.

I'm a huge Ray Lewis fan. I would listen to Ray Lewis talk if he were the automated voice when you called AT&T. Ray-Ray gets me fired up.

In this video, Ray tells the story about his mom getting beaten by her boyfriend. Ray was just a little kid. He asked his mom to buy him a deck of cards, and he would flip a card and do that many pushups. So if he flipped a 5, he did 5 pushups, etc. It's a GREAT speech.

There are two parts of this speech that I want to emphasize;

1) The fire that got Ray started - THE HUNGER - wasn't to be a great athlete. He wanted to get strong enough to protect his mother from getting beat on. Have you ever been HUNGRY? I mean really, really hungry, like your stomach hurt and you were we weak from being so hungry? Ray Lewis was HUNGRY to stop his mom from getting beat on.

2) Ray talks about how bad it hurt doing all those pushups and situps. But he says there are two sides of pain. There is the side we can all relate to, the physical pain we feel from intense exercise. But Ray says there is the other side of pain, the GLORY that comes from the EFFORT you put out. Think about it like this... what if you had to swim across a like, and it was a mile. What if you got 3/4 of the way there, decided it was too hard, and turned back. YOU WERE SO CLOSE! YOU SHOULD HAVE JUST KEPT GOING, IT WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN AS HARD AS QUITTING AND TURNING BACK! So push through it. It's just a little pain. It's just work. You can do it.

The video is below if you want to hear the whole speech. Thanks for reading. Have an awesome day. Make it a win. #JWT