A Learning a Day

A group of us play a pickup soccer game together every weekend, with plenty of banter along the way.

Recently, after one game, a casual conversation about the result spiraled into talk of tracking stats: who’s on which team, goals scored, win rates. That escalated further quickly, all the way to using an app for team assignments and stat tracking.

Then the following weekend, we played with all of it in place. Everyone was excited going in. But the game itself was far more competitive than usual. People played tighter, more aggressive, more conscious of every touch.

Which defeats the entire point of a Sunday pickup game: work out, have fun, don’t get hurt.

My takeaway afterward was that the game became a lot more competitive and a lot less joyful the moment people knew they were being tracked.

It is a good reminder that many things in this life are best left un-optimized.

If you play a sport with a lot of dynamic movement, quick starts, stops, direction changes, buy shoes that fit almost perfectly, even if they feel slightly tight in the store.

A looser shoe feels more comfortable walking around the aisle. On the court or field, however, that same looseness costs blisters, chafed skins, and worse.

I’ve learned this one painfully, more than once.

It has a decent analogy for life too. The option that feels more uncomfortable up front can often be the one that serves you best over time.

Sometimes it’s worth sitting with discomfort instead of rushing to resolve it.

It builds tolerance. And it gives your mind time to patiently work through a gnarly problem, instead of grabbing the first simple solve that won’t hold up over time.

Nearly twenty years ago, I listened to one of my first self-improvement audiobooks, called Boundaries by Dr Henry Cloud and Dr John Townsend. I don’t remember much of what’s actually written in it anymore (I did remember not loving the narrator).

But the book left me with one idea that’s stuck ever since. In every relationship, you have to set boundaries. If you don’t, you lose the right to complain about being taken for granted. Setting the line is on you, and in relationships, as in most of life, you get what you tolerate.

That idea has shaped how I operate since, both in setting my own boundaries and in noticing when others don’t set theirs.

Good books tend to leave you at least one idea that changes how you operate. This was that idea from Boundaries.

If you want to take a risk, you have to make peace with the volatility that comes with it. Riskier bets have more volatility with bigger highs and bigger lows.

Safer bets stay flatter, and the returns stay flatter too.

This holds for all kinds of bets – from bets on investments to careers to relationships. There’s no guarantee high risk pays off, but, at the same time, it’s typically the only way to give yourself a shot at a high return.

And that road isn’t for the faint of heart.

When you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other too.

There are stretches when, for a mix of reasons, I notice myself operating from a place of confidence. And there are stretches when I’m walking around with a knot in my stomach, tuned into everything that could go wrong.

Over time I’ve noticed these states are never caused by one thing. It’s always a confluence, some of it in my control, most of it not. An unexpected argument, a couple of customers having a bad week, and suddenly I’m in a more nervous place.

I used to think the useful move was figuring out the cause and trying to shift the state. I don’t think that anymore. What’s actually useful is noticing the state I’m in and using it for what it’s naturally good at.

Confidence is a good window for taking on something new, something that feels a little risky.

Nervousness is a good window for exactly the opposite: running premortems, getting paranoid about the right things, going after the projects that are quietly worrying me.

I can’t always line up my work with the state I’m in. But when I can, it’s worth doing.

I’ve started thinking of these as internal weather. They don’t last as long as real seasons, but the same logic applies. There’s no point complaining about a heat wave, or wishing summer becomes winter. You just do the things that make sense for the season you’re in.

I’ve been slowly working through Rafa, the Netflix documentary on Nadal. As a casual tennis fan, I’ve always admired his fighting spirit, but the documentary brings home just how much he suffered to get there.

He played almost his entire career with Müller-Weiss syndrome, a degenerative condition in his left foot, since being diagnosed in 2005. It’s the kind of chronic injury that would have ended most careers early. He played through it anyway, for two decades, and became one of the greatest players the sport has ever seen.

I’ve written before about how Nadal’s fight makes him a remarkable role model, and this documentary only deepens that view.

But the other learning it left me with is this: cultivating a high threshold for pain, in whatever we do, is a serious and durable competitive advantage.

The simplest way to improve our performance is by improving our attitude.

I came across an interesting study out of Singapore that tracked children’s screen time from age one to eight, then measured their academic performance and working memory years later. Two things stood out:

• Even after adjusting for other factors, screen time at age one, at eighteen months, and at age six was still linked to weaker academic performance years later.
• Total screen time across childhood was consistently tied to lower academic performance, and the earliest exposure, in infancy, showed the strongest effect of all.

This is an observational study (vs. a causal study). And, before we draw definite conclusions, you want many studies pointing the same direction. But directionally, it’s intuitive.

I was at a restaurant recently and watched a family having lunch with their one-year-old, a loud YouTube show blasting the whole time. My first thought was, this is wild. My second was, how does this become acceptable?

My guess is that, in time, we’ll look back on this one the way we look back on smoking on airplanes.

“We become ready only when we have to be.” | Katara, Avatar: The Last Airbender

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