Many years ago I read Umberto Eco’s richly complex novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. I still recall a quote that jumped out to me at the time and rings true now more than ever: “What we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t teaching us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
Yesterday morning I stood on the pool deck as I watched my water polo players go through an exceptionally rigorous conditioning drill, one requiring them to perform physiologically taxing exercises on an unforgiving time interval. I noticed quite a few of them taking it easy and “cheating” the drill by using their hands at one point to make it easier instead of fighting through the rigor of the legs-only instructions.
I stopped the drill and chatted with them about my expectations. As I spoke, I was reminded of the scrap of wisdom gifted to me by my father back in high school. It truly is the one scrap that I’ve applied more than any other picked up along the way. It’s the one scrap that I’d attribute to any of the successes I’ve had in any venture, sporting or otherwise.
I thought to myself, “Do I explicitly share this with the boys now or try to disseminate it in an ‘odd moment’ as it was to me?” Because this little morsel of wisdom is something that I want for every one of my student-athletes, I went with it. I broke the “odd moments” rule and shared…
One rainy day during winter break of my sophomore year in high school, I was feeling exceptionally sluggish and low on energy. But it was my scheduled day to lift weights. I’d had hopes to make it to the National Team and, on top of that, I had an outstanding high school coach who was always nudging me to be my best. So I went. I lifted heavy objects up and down, as best I could, and put them back where I found them.
When I arrived home an hour and a half later, my father asked how it went. “Good,” I responded, realizing that it actually had gone well despite my preconceptions. “Surprisingly good. I didn’t want to work out at all before I left the house.”
Here comes the off-the-cuff scrap. I have only my oft-replayed memory of how it went down. I’d pay a good sum of money to see a video of the odd moment. I see the event now in my head as my dad commenting while walking away from me, like he’d been saving this little nugget and knew he couldn’t waste it on a “Son, let me tell you about life” sort of moment. So, as he turned and walked away, he said something to the effect of this:
It’s those times in life when you really don’t feel like putting in a good effort but do so anyway that allow you to achieve excellence.
I recognize this is something many people may already know and most people who achieve excellence realize. I also know it didn’t require the platform of sports to have meaning. But that’s just the thing: youth sports does provide a great catalyst for something like this. Maybe even the ideal catalyst as it’s an institution which, at its base, pushes the participant to find his or her limit and then go beyond it. And when you combine that sort of setting with another factor—fun—you have the perfect balance for true emotional commitment and engagement. As any teacher knows, once you have a young person committed and engaged then the real riches become available. In the philosophy classroom that can take a bit of work, but on the sports field, it’s built into the system.
And so, just as we want from all wisdom-scraps parsed out to young athletes, this tidbit has applied to so much more than just my sporting life. In some futuristic manner, I’d love to know the number of times I thought about this as I contemplated sitting down to write any of my three books. It’s daunting, facing a blank screen with the cursor blinking, awaiting the first words of the next 300 pages, and preparing to sit, alone, for a three-hour stint to slog through ideas and verbiage and sentence structure. And when this author experienced this, he thought back to that moment with his own father. And he started writing.
Here, I need to apologize to the reader as I’ve hit you over the head with my most cherished piece of wisdom. I thought it worth the risk so that you could have it as your own, to use as you see fit. But I also want to remind all those involved in youth sport that we have a uniquely profound opportunity to connect with engaged, committed young people: let us not take that for granted but, instead, seize it, even if it’s difficult at times, because that’s the best time to act.