10 DAYS TO PROVE IT

Zabian Dowdell arrived in Phoenix with 10 days' worth of clothes, two Bibles and a copy of a letter saved on a laptop.  He wrote the original letter to himself a decade ago, by hand in the bedroom where he grew up, 595 words with the title I Will Make It.

He was 16 then, a basketball player in a football town, worried that college recruiters would not notice him in Pahokee, Fla.  "Nothing will stop me from making it to the NBA," Dowdell wrote.  "I am on a mission."

After going undrafted in 2007, Dowdell rode the bench in France, dodged paper airplanes thrown from the stands in Italy and stayed up until 3 a.m. in Spain to watch NBA games on his computer, still seething at the fellow point guards drafted instead of him.  When his mother stumbled across his old letter while cleaning out his room, she typed and e-mailed it to him, sensing he could use his own motivation.  Dowdell recognized the defiant tone of his younger self and saved the e-mail, to read whenever his resolve was tested.

Last October, after the Suns cut him out of training camp for the second year in a row, Dowdell rejected a $750,000 contract in Europe and took $13,000 from the Tulsa 66ers of the NBA Development League because Tulsa offered something Europe did not: the possibility of a mid-season NBA call-up.

Finally, at age 26, after three seasons in Europe and two stints in the D-League, summers spent running on golf courses and shooting jumpers past midnight, Dowdell finally signed an NBA contract... a 10 day contract.  He took those 10 days and played his way into a regular season contract.

What is it that you want to do or want to accomplish?  Are you on a mission?

(Thanks Sports Illustrated)