Baseball. Truly the game of life.
Posted on April 08, 2013 by Ben Dooley, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Did you know that failure is a part of winning? In fact, in sports we celebrate failure all the time.
Baseball season is rapidly coming to an end, and once again we say bye-bye to all those wonderful failures.
What’s that? How could I be so crass?
Sure only one team ends up winning the entire series, and everyone else looses. That’s what sports is all about, winning and losing, right? (I know, I know, it’s really about how you play the game. Well, for this purpose, I’m focusing on neither point. So there.)
Nope, I’m calling attention to each and every single player, no matter how many games they won or lost, regardless of whatever rings, pennants, trophies and salary bonuses they may have. They’re all failures.
I’ll repeat that. Each and every baseball player is a big whopping failure.
“Ben, I’m astonished” I can hear you say. “You, of all people, should be more accepting and supportive. They’re just out there doing their best.”
Exactly. And their best means that they fail on average of 75% of the time.
Take a look at all those statistics that pop up each time a player is up. What do you think a batting average of .275 is? It means that out of 1000 times, he hit the ball 275 times. That means he missed 725 times.
The man has a 25% success rate of hitting the ball, which is what he is paid to do. You can’t get better odds in any other job.
“Sorry boss, I didn’t get the report done completely. I did, however, manage to complete a quarter of it. And I’m only going to come in to work two days this week, and work from 11-2. And please have my check ready when I leave the office today.”
Of course it would be unrealistic to truly expect that they hit the ball 100% of the time. Of course they can do it when they’re in a controlled situation and the balls are thrown at them in a much easier way. There are ways to increase the average of success when the pressure and obstacles (like the other team) are removed.
But when it comes time for the big game, then it’s more likely that they’ll perform differently.
“Ok Phil. Here is a check for $10,000. Now, go out there and make sure you hit one out of every four balls.”
It’s actually part of their contract. They have it built in to the plan. Of course they want to do better. Of course they’re constantly practicing and getting stronger in their skills. But they also know something really critical: failing is part of the game.
If they didn’t know that, they would be throwing tantrums after each strike and sobbing miserably in the locker room with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s after every time they hit a fly ball straight to the center fielder.
Failing is part of the game.
Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a game. It would be a locked in guarantee that each and every player would hit home runs with each and every pitch. And as much as we love Roy Hobbs, having a team full of “perfect players” would quickly get boring.
So if a baseball player can get paid thousands of dollars and have thousands of people cheering for them, even when they fail, what makes you any different?
What if failing were actually part of the game?
What if your “batting” average was something like .275 and sometimes you hit the ball, and sometimes your stuck out?
And what if you kept going to practice in-between each of your games so you could practice and get stronger and better?
And what if you had your own fan base, with T-shirts and hats and bit pointy fingers, that cheered you on and loved you no matter how wonderfully or poorly you played your game?
Because if that’s the case, then the whole game changes.
It’s not about getting it perfect and awesome each and every single time.
It’s about stepping up to the plate, no matter what happened before, no matter what boner play you did last time, each and every time is open to something new.
It’s about honing your focus on the ball, getting your stance just right, concentrating they way you know to do.
It’s about knowing when to let the ball go by, because it’s just not the right ball for you.
It’s about knowing when to swing, because that ball looks right.
And it’s about knowing that sometimes… sometimes you miss, you strike out, you get tagged, your ball is caught. And sometimes you connect the bat to the ball in just the right way that it goes soaring out of the ball park.
And when that happens, then you get to run the bases and go home.
And that’s always something to celebrate.
