Life Lessons from Sports

 

 

Organized sports is a common childhood activity that we parents often prioritize when thinking of what will be good for our kids. We value the values it imparted on us from our own lived experiences, and so we desire for our own children to reap that benefit too. 

I will leave for another day what “youth sports” has metastasized into today, what with the traveling teams and the year-round schedules and the expensive gear. Rather, I just want to reflect on what I see in professional sports that warms my heart, which I draw a direct line to life lessons that we can learn from sports from our earliest ages. In no particular order: 

1. Owning failure. Like life, sports has success and failure. Which may seem obvious, but in our social media saturated society, our kids often only see success, or when they see failure it is something to be mocked and shunned. But we will fail often in life, so we must learn not to avoid it and we must learn how to own it. What a terribly small life that never tries for fear of failing, or that has to meet failure with excuses or anger or seclusion. For all the amazing exploits professional athletes are capable of, the one that amazes me the most is their ability to fail spectacularly and publicly, and yet move on to the next play. Or even worse, when their spectacular and public failure costs their team the game, they meet with the press after and own that they messed up. What a powerful, painful, and yet necessary life lesson. 

2. Having a goal and putting in the work to achieve it. Sport is, by definition, competition, which means a ubiquitous goal is to win. Which means having a plan in place to achieve that goal. Which means putting in the work to come up with, prepare for, and work towards that success. Which, again, sounds obvious. But how many of today’s kids don’t have plans at all, let alone ones that are both inspiring to pursue while realistic enough to achieve? And how unglamorous it is, in a social media age where success is not only everywhere but effortless, to train and get the reps in and do it again and be ready. Yet any professional athlete will tell you that the few seconds of success on the court is built upon thousands of hours of practice. So it is in life. 

3. Be gracious in victory and defeat. We seem to have an aversion for competition today, as if we are afraid of kids experiencing either victory or defeat. Perhaps we are afraid that victory will get to their heads or defeat will crush them, so we game our games so that there is no victory or defeat. But in life we have victories and defeats. Is it not better to prepare our kids for life by helping them to know how to be gracious in victory and defeat? Probably the most heart-warming and tear-inducing videos of professional athletes for me is when they spend the whole game competing their butts off against the other team, and that after the final bell they embrace their competitors and show respect for how hard good competition made them play. In life, there seems to be no middle ground between “there can be no competition” and “the other side is evil, not to be consorted with.” But in life, I would argue it is critically important to understand that we compete all the time, and yet how wonderful it is to respect, compliment, and have great affection for those we compete against. I love seeing professional athletes do this. 

What life lessons did you learn from sports when you were a kid? If you’re a parent, what life lessons do you hope your kids learn from their sports experiences.

Love Is

In our consumeristic society, today is a day for the color red, hearts, chocolates, flowers, romantic getaways, and even luxury cars. And love can certainly be expressed using those things. But love is not those things. 

So what is love? I’m certainly no expert. Perhaps because of that, my most honest answer to that question is that it is things that are harder to capture in a 30-second ad or a Valentine’s Day promotion. What comes to mind is things like: journey, sacrifice, generosity, and grace. 

However you celebrate and whoever you celebrate with, I hope your life is full of love, to receive and to give. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Breakdown of a Working Parent

 

Part of the struggle of “work life balance” is that we who have demanding work and family responsibilities have to constantly compartmentalize different aspects of our lives. It is part of being “professional,” after all, to be able to run the meeting or give the speech even if you up were up late with a sick kid, for example. 

Mercifully, I think our surviving the COVID era has given us all a little more grace for ourselves and others, that sometimes work and family crash into each other and we can laugh about instead of judging or being mortified. But I think we need to lean into even more grace for ourselves and others. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a work setting, sometimes a small group of people I trust deeply and sometimes a large group of people I don’t know well, and either I or someone else just breaks down because we cannot keep up the façade in the moment. And what usually happens when that happens? Not judgment or mortification or awkwardness, but rather an acknowledgement of the person’s bravery, and oftentimes a letting down of our own facades, often with relief as in “oh good, I can’t keep it in either!” 

In smaller settings, it can be cathartic and intimate when everyone lets their guard down, and shallow small talk is replaced with deep sharing and lamenting and support, about special needs or self-care or mom guilt. In larger settings, it can be harder to feel a strong connection with those among you, but it can be no less freeing to find ourselves in a space and among a group where it’s ok to show vulnerability and weakness and despair. 

The fact is, times are hard, especially if you are juggling a hard day job and a hard parenting situation. And, we are human, which means we are finite and we make mistakes and we get overwhelmed. Part of “professional” means figuring out how to make it through, sure. But I hope that part of “professional” in the circles I run with is that we are allowed to not have it all together, and even to have it all fall apart at times, and not only will you not judge me but you will join me.

The Test of Time

 

Let me start by saying that I am not against standardized tests. As a parent, business leader, and former school board member, I can see how math and reading are important enough building blocks for an educational experience to break down into tests, test scores, and evaluations of students and schools based on those test scores. Particularly at scale, this makes sense to me, even if I appreciate the importance of "learning for learning's sake" and whatnot.

However, as is expressed in this recent Chronicle of Education article, one downside of prioritizing standardized tests is that education has become "atomized," meaning that we decide what needs to be learned, break that down into measurable pieces, and then create an infrastructure of teaching and testing to capture each piece. Which is fine for institutionalizing standardized testing into a large school district, but not great for making space for the sort of complex and long-form learning that truly prepares our kids for success in the workforce and as grown-ups.

I particularly love the anecdote in the article along the lines of the students asking the teacher how they will grade their work, and the teacher, quite unsatisfactorily for the students, basically says, "I'll review your work and give you a grade," without being able to specify what is "A" work vs. "C" work. Breaking it all down is what our kids have long been used to; just knowing what is good and what is bad is more like how the world works.

I haven't taught in over five years, but as a parent I'm essentially constantly teaching. And I've lost track of the times I've asked my kids to do something without telling them how to do it, and how often they are both unable to do it and somewhat annoyed that I would give them something to do without telling them how to do it. How dare I! And yet, again, this is how the world works: problems are presented to us, almost always without an instruction manual, and we have to figure out whether and how to solve them.

Time is undefeated, so eventually our kids will go through enough experiences to gain some problem-solving skills, and perhaps more importantly some confidence that they can figure things out when presented with a new problem for which they do not immediately know the steps to overcome it. I appreciate the Chronicle article for sensitizing me to this dynamic, which I will now keep my eye out on both in the classroom, at work, and in the home.

The Value of a College Education

 

We are two years into Jada's undergraduate experience and still waiting to hear where Aaron has gotten accepted. Asher is 8 years away from graduating from high school, and we've been saving for college since we first became parents 19+ years ago. So we're in it for the long haul contemplating the notion of how to pay for college and whether college is worth it at all.

This is a deeply personal question that intersects with parents' financial means and children's career interests. My thoughts are my own, informed by my privileges and limitations as well as my own lived experience. I will say that my read on the future, and my responsibility to do what I can to prepare my kids for happiness in the future, gives me the following reason to want to pay for college:

* Credentialing is way different nowadays but a college degree can still be important for landing a job and moving up

* Even if the piece of paper means nothing, the experience, if approached correctly, yields important life skills that prepare you for the rest of your life

* College is tribal in that you are creating a forever affiliation with a brand and with others who are affiliated with that brand, and those ties will come in handy in lots of different ways over the years

* Even if the mechanics of college are artificial and may change over the generations, they represent a sort of package of rites of passage that mark your progressing into adulthood (e.g. living in a dorm, rooting for the home team, rushing a sorority)

Perhaps it is the height of entitlement to spend well into the six figures to buy these things. I do believe people can find fulfillment in life and career by completing or partially bypassing the college experience (e.g. non-college credentials, community college, military), and this will likely continue or expand in the years to come. But I also had a happy and transformative college experience, and I expect that my kids, while their interests and paths are different than mine, will be glad they got to have one too.

Thinking of My Mom

 

My Mom, who passed away in 2018, would have turned 80 this year. There is scarcely a day that goes by that I don't think about her, about lessons she taught me and love she gave me. 

Among the many kind words people sent my way when I was grieving her loss, I recall someone saying how if we live out the best traits of those who go before us, then they do not die but live on in us. 

I do sense that, as I get older, I am becoming more like my mom, and hopefully the most admirable parts of her. The quiet strength. The enduring love. The servant's heart. It would mean a lot to me that I was successful in honoring her in this way. Love you and miss you, Mom.

Stay the Course

 

Most of what Asher is supposed to do in a given day, which is good for him to do, he does not want to do. Waking up when he'd rather sleep in. Going back to bed if he's woken up too early. Going to school when he'd rather stay home. Doing homework when he'd rather watch TV. Eating sugary cereal instead of fruits and vegetables.

All well and good. We don't know better until we do. None of this makes Asher anything but normal. But, layered about this normality is a temper that is more volcanic than most, and a resolve to see the expression of that temper through that is often longer than his parents can bear.

In my head, and increasingly in practice, I know that the appropriate response is to stay the course. I know what's best, so he needs to listen. And I know that giving in just makes the next battle harder to win. 

Ah, but when the protestations increase in length and volume, and my head is pounding from a particularly long day, it is easy to cave and hard to persevere. It's in these moments I must summon some of my own resolve, to play the long game and follow through on what is best for him. 

Indeed, Jada is still a teenager and yet has increasingly expressed such sentiments as "Dad, I wish you had forced me to take piano when I was little." If she knows at 19 that some of the best things in life are the things we don't want to do, then surely I must at age 52 live that out in my parenting with our youngest.