Guy Reams (00:02.136)
Day 83, go big or go home. I've been skiing this last few days and as I pass in and out of the ski lodge, I keep seeing this faded old poster with a skier leaping off of a cliff and the phrase, go big or go home. American culture is full of idiomatic expressions like this. It's hard to tell where they come from and sometimes the meaning is hard to track because the phrase gets adopted by different groups of people.
This phrase became popular in the early 90s when extreme sports became mainstream. Since then, you will hear a phrase like this being used constantly. I will hear it every once in while during a business call when the speaker usually asking a question like this, we need to go bigger or go home, right? The meaning of this phrase has a lot to do with the notion that these extreme sports emerged from a subculture that celebrated taking riskier moves that were more complicated and dangerous.
Participants are highly encouraged to commit tricks or stunts fully. If you weren't going to push your limits, you might as well not participate. Was this a celebration of risky behavior? Perhaps. Because each generation of skateboarders, motorsport athletes, snowboarders, surfers were being judged on their ability to come up with an even more daring move. These will sometimes get named after the person who performs them the first time.
But more often than not, they get special names assigned, usually in a sequence. For example, the frontside calibra... I can never say this word. The frontside caballarial kickflip. I heard somebody say that the other day, the caballarial kickflip. I don't even know how to say it. It's a skateboarding move. Or the casper flip rewind. These refer to a sequence of move the person does in the air before landing.
Yesterday while I was following my daughter down a ski run, I noticed a young man deliberately planting a ski into the ground, which caused him to flip around it. It looked like an awkward dance move, but ended up with him back in the original position. I wonder what the name of his move was. Perhaps one day that earned this will earn him the title of going big. After passing this poster for the fifth time today, I finally started to reflect on this phrase in my own life. Am I going big?
Guy Reams (02:26.54)
I certainly was not doing anything of the sort. I was going down the double black diamond mogul run just praying that I would survive without any broken bones. However, this question was a deeper consideration. Was I going big in my commitments? The answer is no. So this New Year's resolution evening, this New Year's evening, that gives me something to ponder. What will I end up committing to? Will I go big or will I go home?