Kid in high school, Padres were the things that all my friends and I cared most about San Diego Padres.

We were all huge baseball fans.

I grew up a huge baseball fan playing in the major leagues was something that I thought was my only path to being able to a job after high school and college.

That's just all I could imagine myself doing.

And I remember in high school, my friends and I, we would drive down to games, get the cheapest tickets we could, and we would get there early because we didn't want to pay $5 or $10 for our parking.

So we would instead circle the stadium for what felt like 30 minutes, find a parking spot a mile away, really far away, and then end up walking again.

So that was our experience of how can we

get to as many Padres games as possible for as cheap as possible because we just didn't have money,

but we loved the Padres growing up. Fast forward to now, and I just had the awesome privilege

and opportunity to start the first pitch for a Padres game.

Or you came down, your family came down, we got to celebrate with a whole bunch of friends and family.

And it was just an incredible experience that never even registered in my mind that that was something that you could do.

You know, you see people doing it. You see people obviously throughout the first pitch, but never thought anything of it until one day I get a call from Ari and Ari calls me and says, hey, James, you like the Padres. Yeah, I was like, yeah, of course. You know, I like the Padres. And he says, well, are you free September 2nd? And I looked at my calendar,

I said, yeah, I'm free for September 2nd. And he says, well, good, you're throwing out the

first pitch for the San Diego Padres. And I just laughed because I thought only Ari is,

who else in the world is going to call with that type of a message of just something so

totally random, totally bizarre in some ways,

but also the more I thought of it, just totally awesome and perfectly in alignment with the

message that we preach here of how do you live your life, not in manual mode, not in this rut,

not in this, okay, wake up, work, go to bed, repeat type

situation, but actually live life on purpose, live life in this intentional way of almost

like, I don't know how you would say it already, but you don't follow the rules.

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