Football, your ability to fall asleep and sex are the three best ways of seeing how your brain is working.
Work hard, make sacrifices, be focused, live it, breathe it, bleed it. Right? What if the answer is…Ye, sometimes.
Now note, this is just my opinion, formed by my personal experience and observations – as always, I may, and probably am wrong. You’re experience might be different.
Most people are told, as kids, that if they just work hard and make the right sacrifices they can do and be whatever they want in life. What if that was true only some of the time? And when I say that, I’m not referring to little Johnny who thinks that if he just works hard and makes the right sacrifices, he’ll be able to breath under water or bring Tupac back from the grave (although I do think Tupac is still alive). No, what I’m referring to is, what about if those positive pro-active mindsets are inversely correlated with success. That is, what if effort, makes you worse? Im not sure how transferable this is to other aspects of life, infact im pretty sure it isn’t (except other artistic endeavours maybe), so let’s just stick to football for now. If I had to put it into one sentence I would put it like this: what if caring will help you play better, but not caring will help you play your best. The heck?
Being who I am, I find myself going through the same 4 stage process with almost everything. 1. I take things that I instinctively feel. 2. I deliberately pay close attention to them so as to notice them more vividly. 3. I inspect and analyse them. And then 4. I write them down with either a lesson to share, a principle to remember, or a question to ask and explore with the hope that that question will eventually lead to a lesson and/or a principle. After all, initial good questions always trump initial good answers. This one, incase you haven’t already noticed, is definitely a question. Because fuck I’m confused.
I remember reading somewhere about Steve Jobs talking about innovation and explaining that it’s like putting an apple (fruit-apple, not Apple waste-your-whole life-on-a-phone Apple) into a supermarket, without a sticker on it. Millions of people every day pick up regular apples, know that the sticker on there is ever so slightly annoying, but nevertheless proceed to take the sticker off, fight with it sticking to one finger and then the other, until finally they find a bin to put it into and can begin eating the apple. All the while, never even really paying attention to it. Until someone comes along who puts an apple in the supermarket that doesn’t have a sticker on it and then everyone suddenly realises how convenient this new apple is and how annoying the other ones were. In the same article he demonstrated this point by using the example of, while other electronic items used to require you to get home and charge them, Apple (waste-your-whole-life-on-a-phone-Apple) decided to make their products “pre-charged” so that a customer could take their purchase out of the box and use it right away with full battery. So, seeing the problems that are right in front of people’s faces, and bringing attention to them with either a solution or at least a good question.
Which brings me to my point, people have noticed this little paradox exists, there are even lines that go something like “you’re trying too hard” but for some reason it’s an unpopular, taboo topic for a lot of people. The fact of the matter is that like most other things, we all instinctively know there’s a flaw in the design but everyone just accepts it and tries to work around it instead of break it open and investigate it at its core.
How do you navigate a terrain where the reason you participate and the reason you don’t tap your full potential, appear to be the exact same thing – Your “love” for it.
Let’s start by exploring the first part, the reason you participate. Why do you play? Why do you want to win? Why do you want to be successful? These question, if asked correctly, or at least if thought through honestly, can get at the deepest part of your personality. It’s an exercise I went through recently and came up with many conclusions, which I then had to dissect further and then further again. Suppose your answer is “because I love it”. That’s a logical answer, but let’s dissect it further. Why do you love it? What exactly does it give you? Maybe you answer “it’s because I’m a purest and I like the artistic expression of the human body in motion” *the crowd raises their right eyebrows and say “huh?”* But let’s be real, that’s not all it is. Maybe it’s because it’s difficult, so you have the feeling of accomplishment. Maybe it’s a way for you to show how good you are, to feed your ego perhaps. Maybe it’s simply for the money. I know I’m being like one of those little kids that’s annoying as hell that just keeps asking “why” after everything you say because he knows that you have to keep finding a new answer, but Ye, it’s very much like that. Ask why, and then why again, and then why again. Until you get right down to the core of it. Then once you’re down there, ask yourself whether that’s a healthy reason. And if it is, great, and if it isn’t, well at least now you know.
Now on to tapping your full potential. I know potential is like a 4 letter word to some people but let’s just ignore that for a second and just embrace the fact that everyone has a spectrum between their best, and their worst. And through life, with whatever we do, we fluctuate between these two extremes. I feel pretty confident in saying that artistic careers, of which I’d say sporting careers are, have perhaps the most volatility in regard to this spectrum. I’m aware that it’s a natural process of human experience, but I highly doubt a GP comes in Monday and feels over the moon like he’s the best doctor in the world, and then on Tuesday cries himself to sleep because for some reason, all day that day he couldn’t even find his patients pulses. In some ways this is an over exaggeration but in some other ways it’s not. Lets not even get started on myself but I have seen players, who are 100% unbelievable athletes, not be able to make a 5 metre pass. Not just once but sometimes for a whole training session. How does this possibly happen? How? Why can’t we always be good? Or play our best? There’s millions of answers that we could come up with for why we played badly on a particular day: the weather wasn’t right, I didn’t sleep enough the night before, I didn’t eat the right foods, I didn’t prepare properly. But all this shit, in my opinion, is maybe 10%…At the very most! The rest, is your head. Everyone knows this, but up until now, with all of our technology advances and our sports science advances, the popularity for the attention on the psychological aspect has had to take a backseat. Slowly, some people are hearing about it, but I don’t think it’s gotten the attention it deserves thus far. I mean how often when someone makes a mistake do you hear someone yell out “focus!” Like what the fuck? There is like a 99% chance that that is not the reason the person has just made that mistake.
Now the next thing I say, i think, is only specific to the sport of football for reasons unbeknownst to me. It is, that yes okay, there are plenty of players that are brilliant athletes that spend every second thinking about how to be great and in turn are great (Cristiano Ronaldo for example), but the crazy part about this whole thing, and I think the reason I’ve noticed this paradox is because the very best players that I’ve played with or against, the ones with that “x factor”, the ones who really have that ability to take your breath away, almost all have had one thing in common. They cared less than everyone else. Not just about the opinions of others, but about everything. Their diets, their sleep, their habits. Everything. And furthermore, for myself and many others who I have spoken to, their best performances have come on the days of least effort. In other sports or careers you probably can’t get away with that kind of an attitude, but in football it seems to be a common symptom of genius.
Shall we digress to some further questions…
Why do we ever go to both extremes? And the most crucial question is, where do you go once you realise that there is something you really want. Do you ignore it and pretend like you don’t care? I feel like this would be the equivalent of trying to hide a chocolate bar from yourself. You obviously know it’s there. And thinking that you’ll somehow be able to trick yourself into forgetting that, is just fundamentally flawed. And that just pushes the irony even further to the point of – the very fact you’re trying to pretend you don’t care is simply because you care so much. Haha ain’t that a brain bender. Or alternatively, do you just hammer along, hard as you possibly can, all the while knowing that this increased attention and effort is essentially leading you to never be able to actually tap your full “potential.”
Okay, big deep inhale, anddddd exhale…. that was a lot of words. This page is a great representation of the ceaseless ramblings which occupy my mind every waking minute. Anyhoo, put your thoughts on the page they say.
I wonder, is it perhaps that it comes down to that crucial question of why you’re doing it in the first place. And if that answer is not a healthy one, then that’s where this unsolvable equation becomes your reality. What about if it’s as impactful as: as soon as the reason for the desire becomes an “unhealthy” one, that is the moment you make a mistake?
When thinking about the best players – perhaps more often than not, their reasons for why they’re doing it are healthier than other people’s? Or is their “not caring” just simply a symptom of someone who is so confident in their ability that they know regardless of what they do they’ll still play well? Bit of a chicken and the egg kind of thing.
I’d love to know your thoughts.
P.s the true irony of this whole thing is that even though this is what I think, I write this while in the middle of a 24 hour fast. Talk about not trying too hard…
P.s.s for the visual people of this world, here is a simple, rough diagram of what I am trying to explain. This could be interpreted as either: a single athletes performances over time and how effort impacts his/her performance, or each individual performance of every athlete on a particular team on one particular day, all who have different levels of effort/performance
What a thing it is, to be at the edge of the earth.
For a long time I’ve been trying to put into words my feelings about this topic so carefully, that I often say only a little or nothing at all. When I actually feel quite strongly about it. This is not at all going to be going in the direction that you probably would assume it to, considering my background or the colour of my skin.
Postcards from my bedroom 