TLDR: Taking pride in what you do is the most underrated form of competition.
No, this is not an “if you build it, they will come” post.
This is about taking pride in your work.
It was June of 2020, I was home visiting my parents, and I had just gone to the baseball field where I grew up competing, bringing back a lot of memories. Most notably the endless determination to win.
After the trip down memory lane, I shared a sentiment with my sales team about how we approached the game back then, our commitment to the team, and how seriously we took our job of winning.
We were right at the most uncertain moments of the pandemic, trying to close out the fiscal year, so it was timely to reflect back on everything we had done to get to that point and how similar it had been to being on a baseball team you were proud of.
(I don’t have that email anymore, so if you were on that team, still have that email, and want to forward it to me, this is your sign)
Most everyone thought our coach was insane.
At least everyone who wasn’t part of the team that is.
From the outside looking in you would see “kids” (air quotes because we weren’t and didn’t feel that way) putting in painstaking efforts to not only win, but to build a program that we would all be proud of.
We raised money to build a batting cage, rolled and dragged the field every day, kept our logo pristinely painted behind home plate, tamped the mound, spray painted the bases, blacked out our shoes, and that was just in the offseason and before practices.
We worked out together in the fall and winter, practiced all year long, and made trips to warmer weather to prepare for the season. We made up handshakes, and ran “poles” endlessly after practice, or in some cases instead of practice if we had screwed something up the day before. We practiced our pregame warmup, built superstitions and rituals into our days, invested our money into a new sound system, and held charity events to purchase a scoreboard.
We painted our dugouts and hung up the mottos we relied on. We practiced trick plays we might never use, took groundballs and batting practice until it was dark, and we did drills until our hands bled and hardened with calluses. We stayed after practices to keep hitting, and got extra coaching wherever we could. We joined the same summer teams so that we could maintain the work ethic and continue what we were building. We wore our team logo everywhere we went, and there was a zero chance of anyone stepping out of line for fear of what someone might think if they associated that kind of behavior with the team represented on the clothing we wore.
We were ruthless with decision making, and we tested each other on our baseball IQ. Nothing we did was ever about feelings, it was always about winning. We held high expectations of ourselves, and of each other. Our uniforms were always cleaned to perfection, but they never left the field that way. Forget taking the field without a belt or the right color undershirt, we wouldn’t even let our “gig line” get off center. We would get injured and our arms would be hanging, but a few Advil later and we would press on against better judgement.
I could go on, but you’re probably starting to get the point.
When you take pride in what you do—and I’m not just talking about being proud—I’m talking about deeply investing in building something to the highest standards possible, amazing things unfold.
Sometimes in sports you hear the adage “they just wanted it more.”
But that’s only part of the story.
You don’t just want something more and it magically happens. You want something more, so you put the work in. You put so much work in that you start to believe you deserve to win. You play with a chip on your shoulder. You pay attention to the game of inches, and you take every single inch you can get because you know they add up.
The same is true in anything you do.
We went on to win three consecutive championships for a school that hadn’t won a title in 18 years, and built a program that continued to win for many years after my class graduated. Records were broken. Players were recognized. And despite many still thinking we were crazy, we didn’t care.
We played to have fun, but the only thing truly fun was winning, so we played to win.
We did more than play, we prepared, we invested, we took pride in our work.
We routinely asked ourselves “how do you want to remember this season ten or twenty years from now?” And here I am, remembering it exactly the way we planned to.
Applied to any part of your life, you can develop a belief that you are good enough, that you do deserve the things you’re working hard toward, and you will come out on top if you refuse to give up.
And as for that sales team, we closed something like $21m dollars on an $8m target. I don’t say this to self-promote, but because there’s a lesson in it. We deserved it. We took pride in our work, we worked our asses off to get there, and we didn’t slow down at the finish line—we took it the distance, until 3am on the last day of the year to get one of our largest deals ever across the line. When you work that hard you have no choice other than to see it through—all the way.
So as we approach the end of the year, ask yourself if you deserve to win. Did you put in everything you had? Did you play the game of inches or did you cut corners and leave yourself wondering why you’re not on top? And if you did do it the right way, are you going to see it all the way through?
As our coach used to say “if it’s to be, it’s up to me.”
See you Monday.