Video transcript:
Why do you play the game? Why did you begin playing the game? Every athlete that I’ve asked these questions to, whether it be baseball, softball, golf, you name it, has said something along the lines of: It’s the complexity of it. Or it’s the beauty of it. Or it’s just the fact that you’re taking a very difficult and nuanced activity and doing it really well. If you’ve been playing your sport since you were a kid you might not even completely understand why you’ve always loved it. You just knew it was really fun and you showed up and balled out every time.
But the answer I’ve never heard was winning or awards or anything related to status. But something shifts when we decide that we want to play the game at the highest level that we possibly can and we start creating all these rules for ourselves like: In order to achieve this we have to do this by this certain time. Or we have to have these certain stats in order to play at this school. And we begin comparing ourselves to literally everyone else to see how we stack up and we begin either playing for the approval of others or the approval of the ridiculously high expectations that we hold for ourselves. And it’s fine and normal to care about all these things, but the moment we’ve allowed them too much space in our minds is the moment that we’ve lost sight of why we set out to play the game in the first place.
So when you’re competing, go be that kid who is so invested in the game that they didn’t have the mental capacity to worry about anything else. Go compete with reckless abandonment regardless of who’s watching, regardless of the outcomes, regardless of your own expectations. You will find that enjoyment and surprise, surprise, you might just perform better.