Although I am not the biggest sports fan in my family, I grew up in the Tampa Bay area and have at least some fondness for the teams of the area where I grew up even if my time in that area was often unpleasant. Today, with my roommates (who also spent many years in the Tampa Bay area), I watched the last part of the first half and the second half of a football game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Seattle Seahawks, the closest team where I now reside (even though I can’t say that I have ever been a huge fan of Seattle teams in general). Occasionally there are unexpected lessons that can be learned from football games, and such was the case today, a sort of lesson that can be a bit painful for some of us, but a necessary lesson as well for those of us who seek to reverse lifelong trends.

When I first watched the football game, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were up 21-0 with about a couple minutes left in the first half, having gotten their scores off of a running back option play and a couple of passing TDs from a rookie quarterback with my slender physique. Their scores had been greatly helped by a couple of turnovers from Seattle and some uncharacteristically poor play from Seattle’s defense. However, for those of us who have masochistic tendencies and have paid attention to Tampa Bay’s play this year knew that when Seattle marched down the field in a two-minute drill and got a touchdown before the end of the first half that the momentum had clearly shifted to Seattle. Nothing that happened in the second half, not even an end-zone interception in the middle of the fourth quarter that merely prevented Seattle from winning the game in regulation, changed the fact that even though the first lead that Seattle had was the OT field goal that gave them the win, Seattle was clearly the team that looked like it was winning and Tampa Bay looked like the team that was losing with blunders in time management, giving up long special teams plays, bad personal fouls, and the like. The final result merely confirmed that one team clearly knew how to win even when it was not playing very well, and one team simply did not.

There is a kind of virtuous and vicious circle in life when it comes to winning. In many endeavors in life, one’s performance is not based strictly on matters of ability but on more subtle areas like confidence and emotional maturity. Those people who are used to victory have a faith in their abilities, a certain confidence in their ability to win, and have the experience of victory to help calm them down and tell them that they know how to win. Those people who are used only to defeat tend to have self-defeating attitudes and their unfamiliarity with success can lead to either premature coasting or continued nervousness and a lack of confidence that leads to errors which are self-defeating in terms of seeking victory. Sometimes a team can dig too big a hole for itself to overcome, but if it is used to winning and trusts what it is doing and commits itself to working on the flaws that are revealed even in victorious efforts, then it can shake off a bad game and move on to the next one. It is someone or a team that is so used to losing that it knows nothing else that will tend to sabotage its long-term success by self-defeating mental talk and poor emotional maturity at handling the inevitable difficulties that come up in sports and life. In that sense, sports can offer major and unexpected life lessons.

One of my friends in the area, whose family are huge fans of the Seattle Seahawks it should be noted, made the following rather insightful comments when it came to knowing how to win: “When you find yourself in the midst of impossible situations; trust your training, take one play (one moment, one task) at a time and live in the moment. Challenges become victories when you break them down to one task at a time. Hard to do when your in an emotional firestorm.” What makes these comments particularly insightful is that they provide a way that someone can learn how to win, how to break the vicious cycle between not knowing how to win and not having the experience of winning to provide the confidence to win. Before one wins on the outside, sometimes one has to win on the inside [1]. We defeat our own fears and anxieties long before we win in public in the sight of anyone else. If we are disciplined people, we can simply look at an impossible situation and break it down into one day at a time, one minute at a time, one task at a time, something that is within our power to make things better little by little, until we have achieved victory. This works whether we are dealing with sports or (more importantly) when we are dealing with the impossible situations of life.

In this particular sort of situation, it is far more important that we be emotionally mature and have some sort of realistic sense of optimism than that we be the most talented people in the world. Talent that is wasted through folly or through a lack of dedication and persistence is extremely common. When one is dealing with competitive endeavors like the National Football League, everyone who is playing is a very talented person, or is a person with sufficient talent and an extreme amount of hard work that it is the mental and emotional aspect of life that often provides the margin between a glorious victory and a shattering defeat. One has to learn how to win before one can experience victory, much less as a habit.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/where-do-we-begin-the-rubble-or-our-sins/