This past April, we found out that Jarren Duran, MVP of the 2024 MLB All-Star game, attempted suicide in 2022 while feeling the pressure to perform in the big leagues. Around that same day, we saw the NCAA basketball championship come down to one shot...that was never taken. These are the headlines we see every day in sport and in the world around us.
What we don’t see are all the hours of hard work that players like Jarren Duran put into their career, even while making errors and failing at the big league level. We don’t see how much sacrifice it takes to play college athletics, regardless of the sport, division, or win-loss record. We keep imploring kids younger and younger “if you hit, you don’t sit” in favor of a “more productive” player; an acceptable practice for high school, college and beyond, but not at the developmental levels.
We nod our heads when we talk about how playing sports “teaches life lessons.” We like and share posts that tell stories about someone miraculously overcoming odds with their resilience, grit, toughness, determination.
If you want to live a mentally healthy life, if you want to coach a program that teaches young athletes (or older ones) how to build character, if you want to lead a business team to excellent results, you must embrace and reinforce the life lessons in losing.
But don’t confuse this message. This isn’t “it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.” This is whether you win or lose and how you play the game!
You have to compete. You have to give everything you have to win. And after you’ve worked out, practiced, studied the film and data, taken care of your body, grounded yourself with your routine and played for the name on the front of the jersey, you’ve developed the ability to be proud of yourself and your teammates, and at peace with whatever the outcome is.
You did your best, but so—most likely—did your opponent as well. Your best doesn’t always result in a hit, the game-winning shot, or a save. That is what you learn from it. That is what you live with and put into your next day’s practice and your next year’s goal. When you do that over and over again for as long as your talent allows, you leave your sport and you take those lessons learned with you into something else.
You get to have these indelible memories with people you won’t see for years, but the bonds you build while working for this common goal are unbreakable, even with time.
That is the message we need to focus on. I’m sad for Emanuel Sharp that he didn’t get a shot off in the final seconds of the game. I’m happy for Walter Clayton, Jr. for an incredible tournament. I’m proud of Jarren Duran for having the courage to tell his story. I wish I could tell every athlete who is doing everything they can and only finding frustration in their play that it’s going to be okay, win or lose. Whatever errors you make, or shots you miss or get the chance to take, you are eventually going to look back on all of it with fondness and great memories. And you can use it all to propel yourself and to make new memories and to win the next time you compete, regardless of whether or not that happens to be in a sporting event.
And all it takes to do that is to do everything you can to win and then simply be okay with knowing you did your best when it’s over.
Geoff Miller has spent the better part of two decades working in Major League Baseball for multiple organizations. His mental skills training series and commentary are available through Optimize Mind Performance, an app that links athletes with some of the most renowned mental skills coaches from around the world. For more information, visit www.optimizemindperformance.com.