From Player to Artist
My name is Micah Johnson. For 24 years, I played baseball every day. I reached the highest level of the 1 , playing for major-league teams. Once I got there, I would think, "Okay, I did it." I don't care if it takes 100 years: If it's something that somebody says I can't do, I'm going to 2 everything I can to do it. And when I do it, I think, "Okay, what's the next thing I'm going to do?"
I started painting in 2016, when I was with the Los Angeles Dodgers. When I came home from a game and I was not just going to bed. That's when I would 3 . I was just so crazy about painting. In 2018, my time was done in Major League Baseball. I'd fallen in love with art and creativity. I started painting young black kids as 4 after I heard a young black kid ask if astronauts could be black. I knew painting these pictures was something special.
I wanted to reach more persons with my message. So I 5 a 3D character named Aku. He's a black kid who's brave and confident. He 6 an oversize space helmet（头盔）. This way, it allows him to travel through the Internet. Last year, Aku was on the cover of TIME. Later, I made him into an NFT. NFTs are artworks that are bought and sold online. It means that people can buy and own them. With NFTs, you can search for something on the Internet freely.
I found my passion（酷爱）, so I traded my baseball bat for a 7 . Kids can find a path that's 8 to them by showing up every day, and just going deeper into the things they care about.
In 2021, an NFT of Aku traveled around Earth on board the International Space Station. That's something you can't even 9 ! If you keep working toward something that you're passionate about, 10 that you can't even imagine are going to present themselves.
