The Life You Imagine

I am now completely finished with Derek Jeter’s autobiography.  Honestly, it got slightly boring in the last few chapters leading up to the ending, but the very last chapter was great.  Jeter talked again about how his career did not just happen all in one day and how his life is not perfect.  He explained how he is just an ordinary person like everyone else, who leads a not so ordinary life, which is an interesting way of looking at his life.

Jeter also mentions how important it is to think before you act, especially if you are a major league baseball player and people are watching every move you make.  One thing he said or did could ruin his entire baseball career, which is an extremely scary thought.  Jeter tells stories about Darryl Strawberry, one of Jeter’s good friends, and how he ruined his baseball career by doing drugs.  Jeter hated how Strawberry was doing drugs, but Strawberry’s situation also taught Jeter a good lesson about what the consequences were of doing drugs.

At first, I did not really like the way this book was written because it was not exactly in chronological order.  Derek would talk about baseball in the majors, then he would jump to his high school baseball career, and then he would talk about his friends from elementary school.  But in the end, everything ties in together and makes sense, so Derek really did know what he was doing when he wrote this book.

I think that it was such a great idea for Derek Jeter to write his own book about how he became successful.  It shows that baseball players and other sports figures can be well educated too, even though some, like Jeter, did not go to college.  Jeter has always been my favorite player for many reasons.  One, of course, being he is great at what he does.  But I also loved Derek because he has a great attitude, he is fair and would never touch a bad drug, he is smart, and he wants to help people.  By reading his book, that just reinforced how much I truly love Jeter because of all of the great things he has done on and off the field.

Determination is definitely something Jeter and I have in common and determination is such an important word when you really want something.

In the following three chapters of Jeter’s autobiography, Jeter talks about how he has failed many times in his life before he got to where he is today.  I think that is really important to mention when writing a book on how to succeed.  Many people think that people such as Derek Jeter have gotten very far in the blink of an eye and did not need to work to get there, which is completely impossible to do.  Derek Jeter had to work just as hard as any other baseball player to get to the Yankees and he continues to work hard to maintain his spot on the team.  What I really found interesting is that Jeter says that his younger sister, Sharlee, was a lot more of a natural athlete than he was.  She did not have to practice nearly as hard as Jeter, and she was just as good.

Another thing Jeter drills into your mind throughout these chapters is there is always room for improvement.  Even if you are the MVP of the year, you are always going to have some sort of weak area, in which you can work on.  Something I really agree with him on is that you should always take the chance to get better.  For example, a private hitting coach was available to help Jeter, if he wanted, over the off season after the Yankees won the World Series in 1997.  That year, Jeter was named “Rookie of the Year,” had a .327 average, and 10 homeruns.  Now did Jeter absolutely have to take this extra practice while all of his teammates were home with their families?  No.  But did he take this chance?  Yes.

I am now about half way through the book and I am getting more and more interested in some of the things Derek Jeter has to say.  Chapter two, “Dealing with Growing Pains,” is primarily about how Jeter is having trouble leaving his parents when he goes to play minor league baseball when he is eighteen and he talks a great deal about the inspiration his parents gave him.  The following chapter, “Finding Role Models,” amused me very much.  It was probably the longest, but most interesting chapter I have read so far.  I love how Jeter talks about so many personal experiences in great detail.  It really makes me feel like I was there and I can picture what is going on.  In this chapter he has a picture of his report card from the eighth grade, which I also found interesting.  He was definitely a very smart kid who got A’s in every class.

In “Finding Role Models,” Jeter also explains a lot about his childhood and who he looked up to.  He explained that he found new role models everyday.  For example, if he saw someone (even if he does not know the person) and the person did something that Jeter wanted to learn to do, that person became one of his role models, and Jeter would watch the person and try to do what he does.  This got my attention because in the book, Jeter talks so much about his role models, when Derek Jeter himself is such a great role model for other kids and not once has Jeter said anything about him being a good role model, this shows me that when it comes to role models he is very modest.

Finally in the chapter, “The World is Not Always Fair,” Jeter explains what life was like for him being half white and half black.  His mother was white and his father was black, so he is in between and Jeter tells how that was confusing and sometimes difficult for him.  I never in my life thought about it being hard to be half white and half black, I actually thought it was a cool thing.  But when I read this chapter, I realized that maybe it was not so cool for him when he was growing up because he got teased and people would ask him things like “Are you white OR black, because you cannot be both!”  I think that must have been hard, but he said it helped him learn to accept all different kinds of races, which is a good thing when you are a baseball player because you meet people of racial backgrounds you never knew existed.

The independent reading book that I chose for the second marking period is called The Life You Imagine, written by Derek Jeter.  Just as a little background of why I wanted to read this particular book: I have always been in love with the New York Yankees baseball team, probably because of my dad who had been a fan for his entire life as well.  But I just remember watching the games with my dad when I was little, wanting to learn all about the game of baseball.  He definitely taught me everything I need to know and to this day I’m still in love with the sport.  Derek Jeter is one of my role models that I look up to.  I have had this book for a while, just sitting on my shelf at home and I have absolutely no idea why I never picked it up to read it.  When I heard that we needed an autobiography or a biography for this marking period, I went home and found this book that I have never read and I was so excited to start reading.

Although I have only read the introduction and the first chapter, forty-four pages in total, I cannot stop reading this book.  The reason I’m starting to blog after only reading a chapter is because in those forty-four pages I became so knowledgeable of how much Derek Jeter strived to reach his goals.  This book is mainly about Derek Jeter’s goals and how he got there, but he also sends an extremely large message to kids and teens saying you can do anything you want to do in life as long as you set goals and never give up.  Another thing that piqued my interest was how Derek knew other baseball players who set goals so low that when they reached their goals, they stopped trying even when everyone knew they could have kept on going.  I can tell already that this book will inspire me to set my goals high, because I know when I eventually get there and reach my goal I can feel extremely good about it because I tried my best and it paid off.