Parenting, coaching, management, and politics.
“What world would we have If humanity would be less focused on being right, and more focused on being effective”.
Nobody wants to listen to a basketball coach talk about politics, so I won’t for too long. I’m a centrist anyway, and that’s unpopular to begin with. Empathetic enough to have a humanistic side, helping people to help themselves. Worrying about the wellbeing off people I manage daily. Competitive enough to understand that progress is heavily linked to competing, hierarchies and the human ego.
Like anyone slightly sane I rationally want progress, and emotionally to feel good about it
To progress we need competition, competition produces winners and losers, empathy is needed to have a society that takes care of everybody to feel good, not just the winners. Where is the balance? Usually the center. Therefore, centrist.
How come everywhere around you, you feel like you should be on a side, and you cant be in the middle? At least, that’s what I feel when I listen to my social environment. If I'm not 100 percent with you, apparently that means I’m against you?
Don’t worry, it’s not that bad, most people are still in the center, but since media has a profit to make or politics to defend, it sometimes feels like the whole of society is polarized. There is plenty of wisdom left, and our world is statistically doing well. As good as it ever was to be alive. So what makes it seem its all chaos?
One side puts a monopoly on morality and feeling good, the other on rationality, progress and facts, and why the hell would a basketball coach have any sense to make of it?
Well, you guessed it, sport has many parallels. Many coaches said it before. There is more to basketball than basketball. To me, it is just a reflection of life and the importance of the concept of play. Playing is learning, learning is progress and it’s built into any living being to want to progress towards anything they seem valuable.
And what is the meaning of play in the bigger picture?
Talking about parallels.
There is a big debate in sports about how competitive should it be, and at what age?
do we give participation awards, do we rate 12-year-olds on scouting platforms globally? One side arguing for empathy, space to learn, late bloomers and missing out on talent. The other for progress, life lessons, and being tough.
The problem is that both of them are so vigorously trying to be right, none of it is effective and time is wasted. The one thing you cant waste.
Just like politics, all we do, and all we teach kids as a society is the narrative that if I'm right, you’re wrong. And if you are a winner, I am a loser. I’m good, you are evil.
Social media is great at enhancing this off course. And winners will feed into their ego and talk about how losers just have to toughen up and be less emotional, where losers attack the winners for being cruel or a narcissist.
Sounds familiar?
Where I’m getting with this is the same trap many before us fell in. the whole genesis of this, and for an ineffective, never listening and polarized picture of a society where time is wasted yelling with nobody listening.
We should be judging ourselves in the evening too whom we were that morning.
But boy it’s a lot easier to just compare myself to someone else to feel good about winning or having better virtues.
Join me and teach as a coach or parent about self-reflection, responsibility for your actions and having your own house in order, if you don’t already do so. And just let them play.
Free basketball practice for our politicians?