Lost at basketball this evening but I made sure to run a lot and it turned out to be my best game so far. Pushing yourself and getting involved in the action is the only way to improve. The more effort you put in, the more rewards you get, whether that’s receiving more passes because you’re cutting to the basket or deflecting a pass because you’ve got back on defence.
Prior to bball my CoD4 team played in a league match and also lost, although we’ll hopefully be awarded the win due to the other team fielding ineligible players, and unsportsmanlike behaviour. We could have probably skipped the match entirely, but we decided we’d rather stay and play, and we came back from a big first-half deficit to tie up the game at the end of regulation. I had to split for basketball and so my team was one man down for overtime and we narrowly lost, however as I said we should probably be awarded the win. Again, we showed up and put in a solid effort.
Whether there is a win on the scoreboard is inconsequential. What matters is how hard you played. There’s no point claiming you’re a top-level player if you simply cruise through your games. If you’re not putting in enough energy then you’re not getting as much out of the exercise as you should, and you’re not really winning. Winning is about going your hardest regardless of the scoreboard.
Product
I feel like I’m a product sometimes. More specifically I feel like I’m a pawn on a chessboard, or maybe a co-star or bit-player in a film or theatre production. I don’t necessarily feel like I’m the producer, the one making something, but more part of an overall picture or plot where others are in the limelight and I’m just one of the crowd or a witness to their success.
It’s not that I don’t feel that I can achieve greatness, but I think that I lack direction sometimes. The reason for this lack of direction is that there are actually several directions I want to go at once. But then if I expend my energy toward going one way, and then going another, and then a third, I realise that I could have gone a lot further in the first direction (or the others). With regards to the people that are successful, it seems that they do one thing and do it very well. There are some that do several things very well, but for the most part, the stars do one thing.
I’ve prided myself of being a jack-of-all-trades and having a breadth of experience that has allowed me to cross-pollinate ideas from one area into another and make progress. Nowadays I feel like I have too many inputs or possible outputs that it’s hard to pick just one. When I’m doing work for a client it’s easy: there’s a clear path from start to finish. I know where I’m going and what I need to do to get there. When it’s my own creative endeavours I often lose direction because I’m not quite sure of the destination.
It’s not all as bad as it sounds. Life isn’t doom-and-gloom, it’s more a “first-world problem” where I’ve got too much time on my hands and too many resources and too much freedom. The only way that I can make any progress in one particular direction is to just start moving, and try to avoid turning or being distracted by peripheral things. I don’t want to be the customer, and the only product I want to be is the one I’m producing. I guess the best way to get out of this rut is to change up my routine a little. It’s mostly a product of my imagination anyway.