100 Days of 100 Words: Day 7, Get Better or Quit
Get better or quit. Sounds a little harsh, right? But those are the options I was given by my father when I was growing up playing sports. To give you some background, my family is full of competitive people. I’m not sure if that is a purely sociological trait or if there are some biological factors, but it’s a common theme throughout my family (you should see game-time during the holidays. Mostly fun but sometimes . . . YIKES). From an early age we learned in the Herm Edwards school of play, “You play to win the game.” It’s something that was instilled in me, but it wasn’t just about winning.
Get better or quit. I think if my father had left it at that, he would have done me a disservice. But he isn’t that kind of person. There were plenty of lessons along the way. Even though quitting was one of the options, my father encouraged me to never quit. “I understand you want to win all the time because that’s how I feel too but unfortunately you can’t win all the time. Life doesn’t work that way and you’re going to have to learn to deal with disappointment.” My father has always spoken honestly to me. That’s something I didn’t always like but I have grown to greatly appreciate and have done my best to emulate. In those honest conversations when he laid things out the way he did , I remember realizing that he was wasn’t just trying to teach me about sports or school or whatever it was that day. My father was trying to teach me about life. Maybe it wasn’t something he was doing consciously. Maybe it’s just the way he lives his life and that filters down into the little in moments in between, but in those times where I was red faced after a defeat with tears of anger in my eyes, he seized the opportunity to teach. “Things don’t always work out the way you want them to and that’s okay. That’s just the way things go with life and you shouldn’t quit just because something gets difficult. And life will be difficult.” Time would go by, I would cool off, and I would let go of whatever it was that happened, but his words would stick with me. I would turn them over in my head and hear their echoes as I met life’s challenges.
Get better or quit. To this day, I’m still a very competitive person. I don’t think that will ever change. I still struggle with losing. I don’t think that will ever change either. But I’ve learned to pick my battles a little better and I’ve learned to be a little more gracious (most of the time) in defeat. I’m glad to still have honest conversations with my father and I’m glad to still be learning things from him. I’m a work in progress and I will continue to improve because I never want to quit on life. Thanks to my father and all those times he helped my pick myself up, dust myself off, and encouraged me to keep trying, I choose to get better.
