TL;DR:
- I sucked at hockey.
- It still haunts me.
- Learn from the past instead of letting it keep you awake at night.
If I could do anything right, it was skate. I could masterfully paint grooves into ice or treads into roller surfaces.
With that pertinent information, travel back with me to the end of a critical hockey game, where I’m cutting sharply past a defender, and my teammate passes me the puck, and I’m exiting my team’s zone, so about 60 percent of the rink remains ahead of me.
And there is no goalie. The net is wide open. Nothing between me and glory.
Nothing, except myself.
The Embarrassment
I’m a kid. And as the puck snuggles against my stick blade, the rink stretches away from me, the distance to the net seeming to grow. The building is loud, so very loud. Why is everything so incredibly, impossibly loud?
No one is near me and the puck is on my stick and what do I do? I launch it. Wildly. It glides way off track, clacking into the corner boards.
The game ends. We win. That play was irrelevant to everything.
Except it’s more than 30 years later and I still think about it. What a ridiculous blunder! What an embarrassment! Who cares that I was a child — I should have brought the puck across the rink and flicked it cooly into the net.
Anyone else able to recall embarrassing moments more clearly than any successes? Why do we do this to ourselves? I’m now a vice president of a company with a beautiful family and an abundance of beloved Apple products, I coach my daughter’s basketball team and impress the neighborhood kids with my kickball skills and can pull anyone up a snow-covered hill. Why am I still haunted by a split-second dumb decision made three decades ago?
The Mantra
Next play. That’s what I tell my daughter’s basketball team. That’s what two-time Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagle Brandon Graham tells his teammates in the biggest games of their lives. Next Play. My boss told the kids he coached “flush it and move on.”
I love this advice. I give this advice. But I’ll bet you the Super Bowl ring I don’t have that after Brandon Graham flushes and moves on from a missed tackle in the moment, he thinks about it before bed that night. He famously sacked Tom Brady to help seal the Eagles win in Super Bowl 52, but do any of us for one second think that’s what he sees on the backs of his eyelids when he’s bundled under blankets? No way. He sees the plays he thinks he should’ve made but didn’t. He might even see a blown play from when he was a kid, decades earlier.
The Pledge
Let’s make a pledge to ourselves to stop doing this. I’ll pledge to you now: I promise that I will try really, really hard to stop blaming Past Matt for dumb decisions. I promise to be kinder to him, more forgiving, maybe even to thank him for the mistakes he made that taught me what not to do.
Because that’s the real reason these mistakes haunt us, isn’t it? To teach us what we should do, instead of what we’re disappointed we did or didn’t do.
Therefore, the next time I have a fast break and receive the puck with no one in my way, I won’t nervously fling it nowhere. I’ve learned from that mistake, and I’m a better me for it.
What have you learned from lately?
