We sometimes lose sight of what is significant, and what is important.

For those who have seen the movie Field of Dreams – if you’re a baseball fan, or even if you are not a baseball fan, but just a fan of living life, you can find something relevant in that movie. If you haven’t watched it in a while – it came out in 1989 – there is a scene where Ray Kinsella, who is the protagonist in the movie, is talking to a former major league player. Ray has somehow gone back in time to 1972 and is talking to a doctor in Chisholm, Minn. named Dr. Archibald Graham. Dr. Graham had played for the New York Giants 50 years before, in 1922, and he has significance in Major League Baseball because he played in one game, one-half inning, and did not come to bat.

Ray Kinsella is told to go visit Dr. Graham and when Ray, played by Kevin Costner, asks him what it was like to have played just that one-half inning in a major league game, Dr. Graham says, “It was like coming this close to your dream, and watching it brush past you like a stranger in the crowd. At the time, you don’t think much of it. We just don’t recognize life’s most significant moments while they’re happening. Back then I thought, ‘Well, there’ll be other days.’ I didn’t realize that that was the only day.”

And then he says, “I want to ask you a question: What is so interesting about a half-an-inning that would make you come all the way from Iowa to come talk to me 50 years after it happened?”

You have a man who is a doctor in a small town in Minnesota who has influenced thousands of lives for the better. He looked back at something that happened 50 years ago as a little bit of an inflection point. If he had gotten a chance to play, or get a base hit, what would his outcome have been? He might have stayed in Major League Baseball or played for the rest of his life. But Dr. Graham looks at Ray and says, “If I had only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy.”

The inflection point for him was whether he was going to stick with his dream of playing baseball, or move on. Ultimately, the impact that he made on the lives of many in the small town he lived in, far outweighed the impact that he would have had as a professional baseball player.

It’s up to all of us to realize on a day-to-day basis what are you doing, or what is significant in your life, that you might be missing or looking past that might be significant to you and others.

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The Competitor’s Brain, a podcast hosted by Loren Foxx, takes years of experience in sports psychology, including working with greats in the business like Ken Ravizza, Brian Cain, and Dr. Rob Gilbert, and assembles the highlights into an easy-to-digest three minute daily podcast.