I was asked to write a book and it’s about what it takes to be the best. What are the principles involved with being the best regardless of the discipline you choose?
So I started thinking about one of the chapters and created this word “re-compete”. I don’t even know if that’s a word but I took the word “compete”, which I see as a missing factor in our society these days, and I put “re-“ on the front of it because we used to know how to compete.
This is what I want you to think about and let me give you some clarity through a story. When my son Axel was 8 or 9 we started this travel basketball team. It was like 5 or 6 kids and we had a great coach so we put this little team together. We weren’t great. We got our butts kicked every weekend, losing by 20 or 30, even 40 points sometimes. We would take a beating. But we got better.
Those 40-point margins decreased to 30, then 20, then 10. This was over months and months of hard work. That same team that was losing by 30 or 40 was now in the hunt and competitive.
The day we started beating those teams that were beating us, I noticed the parents would walk over and say we want to be on your team. So they joined our team. The same thing kept happening over and over. We would go out and beat a team that used to beat us and their best player would want to join us. Three years later, we’re now that team who beats everybody by 30 or 40 points.
What I miss most about that team from three years ago is the struggle—taking it on the chin and seeing what our boys are made of. I miss those days. I think in this day and age parents don’t want their kids to take those lumps. They want to rescue them and make their kids feel like they should win every game by 30 points.
I don’t like winning games by that much because you never get to measure yourself. I like getting my butt kicked so I can see what I’m made of. That’s where I think greatness lives and it’s missing from our world today. That’s why we need to learn to re-compete. And this doesn’t just apply to youth sports. It happens in a bunch of different industries and areas of life.
The first rule of nature—of biology—is competition. You and I wouldn’t be here if our ancestors couldn’t compete for mates, shelter and food. But now we seem to be competing for weird things like entitlement and complaining, instead of competing to measure ourselves up against another person or in a game or competing against ourselves to see how great we can be.
That’s what I want to know from you. Where have you stopped competing?
I want us to reenter the fray of competition. If the world is going to this place where everybody wins and championships don’t even matter, I want to know what you’re made of. Where in your life can you begin to re-compete?
