Achieving your goals is never an easy task. And it only gets harder the bigger your dreams become – especially if the people around you don’t believe in you.
And, well, it was the same case for Felipe Pena when he first started out.
People in his community didn’t really understand what he was trying to accomplish – so he didn’t feel much support from them.
Pena explained how it all looked like for him back in the day, in a conversation with BJJ Eastern Europe:
I think that the most difficult thing for me was to make people in Brazil believe in me.
To get them to actually believe that I could make a living out of Jiu Jitsu…Being an athlete, especially in Brazil, is very hard. People looked at me with different eyes when I was at the beginning of my career and when I said that all that I wanted to be was to be a Jiu Jitsu athlete.
I needed to overcome that bias.But of course, there are so many other obstacles in front of you as an athlete, and to be successful you need to overcome yourself everyday.
So, he persevered. And succeeded – but not without sacrifice:
It’s just a dream come true.
I did everything and abdicated so many things since I was 15 years old in order to accomplish that!My advice would be: everyone can do it and get there.
But you need to be willing to pay the price and you can’t ever stop believing, no matter what.
Read our full interview with Felipe Pena on the following link.
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