Hustleman
From time to time I visit my family in my hometown which is about two and half hours from where I live now. On one particular weekend, my kids and I were visiting my parents as my son just turned 10 years old the week prior. I had a few hours before my brother and his kids arrived to celebrate my son’s birthday so I took my youngest son to the park where I used to play a lot of basketball when I was younger. Basketball had been a big part of my life when I was a teenager but my interest had waned right after high school. However, a few years ago I rediscovered my love for the sport, and have been playing as much as I can ever since.
As we were driving to the park, I could see the courts from a good distance and I explained to my son how I used to scan the courts from a quarter mile down the road to see if anyone was playing. It’s been 17 years since I was a regular on that court and I figured that I would never run into anyone that I knew. When we pulled up to a parking spot I noticed that there was actually one person on the court shooting around by himself. I couldn’t believe it when I realized who it was. I said to my son excitedly, “That’s Hustleman!” Naturally, he said, “who is Hustleman?” I explained to him that if there was one person in the world that I could count on being there on the court, at any given time, it was “Hustleman!” He just looked at me bewildered.
We grabbed our basketballs, got out of the car, and walked up to the courts. Hustleman immediately greeted me with a “how’s it going?” I greeted him back and said, “You probably don’t remember me but I used to play basketball with you here a long time ago.” He responded with, “I don’t know, I run into people all the time that I’ve played with and they say, ‘Hey Hustle, how’s it going?’” I told him my name, and he looked at the ground for a second and looked back up again and he said, “Yeah, I remember you!”
I was shocked that he could remember me after all those years. I didn’t even have a nickname that stuck like he did. He gave me a few details that confirmed he did, in fact, remember me. I apologized to him about not being able to remember what his real name was because I only remembered him as “Hustleman.” (Someone at the park coined the name for him one day and it just stuck.) Even though he really seemed to embrace his moniker from the past, he did tell me his real name. We chatted for about 10 minutes before I joined my son on the other side of the court.
What I realized about Hustleman is that when I used to play basketball with him years ago, he was older than I am now, and let me tell you, he didn’t get his nickname from being lazy on the court! I remember one pick-up game in particular where he dove for the ball “superman style” right onto the blacktop. He was bleeding when he got up but he didn’t care, he kept on playing. It was so inspiring for me to see him playing on that court after all those years. Now he’s in his mid-fifties and he’s still playing basketball on the same court, and he looked like he was in the best shape of his life!
We can all be Hustleman
I’m a firm believer that if you have a passion for something, and you keep working on it, you can, and will be successful. I don’t feel like I’m someone who learns new things easily, but computers have always fascinated me. I believe that gives me the motivation to overcome difficult development challenges or to learn a new functional area of NAV.
Imagine that you’ve been assigned a development task in NAV but you realize that, for some reason or another, you can’t handle the task with C/AL code alone. This might require building code outside of NAV. If you’ve never developed a DLL to call .NET framework members from NAV, you are going to have to roll your sleeves up and learn. You’re gonna have to “hustle” to get the job done. Regardless of what the learning task may be, don’t be afraid to dive in, “superman style.”
You will make mistakes along the way, you might even get a little bloodied (metaphorically speaking), but get up and shake it off. It will pay off in the long run. I can only hope that in 20 years I’m still hustling to grow both my Dynamics NAV and basketball skills!
Visit our resource center for a multitude of blogs, white papers, and other informational pieces that can help you grow your NAV skills. For those basketball skills, well, you’ll just have to get out on the court and play.