Last year, I joined a basketball league with my friends.
We called ourselves the Wonton Ballers and I’d like to think that we were special. We carried the attributes of a great team — passion, teamwork, sportsmanship.
We also averaged 5’9 in height.
In our first game debut, we faced the menacing…
MONSTARS.
They averaged 6’2.
Usually when I tell my friends the story of how the Wontons got absolutely wrecked, I would first ask them to guess how much we lost by. Given their knowledge of my skill level, they would start with a fairly large number, like 20 points.
But then I would smile, shake my head, and ask them to guess again. They would laugh, and make the number bigger.
“35 points?”
I would smile again, and ask them to guess again.
“40 points???”
“50 points?????”
Once the guessing got to somewhere around 70 points, they would stop. At that point it was just ridiculous, and they would tell me to stop messing with them.
So then I would give them the real number.
85 points.
Now here’s an interesting insight into the Wonton’s crushing defeat.
In the first 10 minutes, we weren’t doing terribly. We were down by 15 points. And although this was a considerable lead, I would say we still had a chance. It was only after the 30-minute mark — when we were down by 40 — did we realize the game was over.
So how did we lose by 85 points?
We scored a grand total of 1 point in the last 10 minutes. Once the opposing team sensed that we gave up, the true power of the MONSTARS was activated. And the assholes played even harder.
(who even does that??)
Today when I think back to our first loss, it’s not just an embarrassing story to tell friends.
When you deconstruct our team’s mental game, there’s actually a lot to take away from it. In fact, the psychology behind the Wontons is very similar to way I used to approach my work.
In my early days as GM of the hotel, I had no idea what I was doing. There wasn’t a single day when I wasn’t confused. Eventually, confusion turned into frustration. And then I just stopped trying.
Just like the Wontons in those last 10 minutes, I fell into a psychological state known as “learned helplessness.”
I got the term from the book, Essentialism, and it’s this state of mind where you feel like you can’t control anything. You see yourself as a victim of all of these bad things. You give up and you helplessly take it.
That’s what happened to me, and eventually, I just got lazy.
It seemed more logical to go on Netflix than to figure out why competing hotels were beating us. It made more sense to watch the Lakers lose than to figure out why our reviews were so bad.
The book, Essentialism, provides a solution to this flawed way of thinking. To snap out of this state, we need to remind ourselves that we always have the ability to choose.
Here’s a quote from the book that puts it perfectly.
“When we forget in our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless.”
In the middle of all my frustration, I was programmed to think, “I have to” and “I need to.”
And as a result, I hated going to work every day.
I felt like I had to do things I didn’t want to do.
Now that’s not the worst part.
As I stayed stuck in this state of “learned helplessness,” other people started making my choices for me.
“Tony, you have to hop on this sales call with a vendor.”
“Tony, you need to rush back to the front desk and help out Josh, who (for the 10th time) is forgetting how to use the printer.”
“Tony, you have to listen to this guest yell at you at 4 AM and tell you ‘THIS IS THE WORST HOTEL EVER!!!’”
Today, as I look back to those beginning days, it’s obvious that I didn’t have to do any of those things. I always had power to say no and to dictate how to spend my time.
I always had the ability to choose.
Now don’t get me wrong — having an “ability to choose” won’t suddenly make things easier. You still have to pick out what to do among the millions of different options that are available. You still have to say “no” to people and you have to be smart about what to focus on.
This is incredibly fucking difficult. I myself have not fully figured this out.
And just like any other skill, practicing this ability takes time and practice. The book emphasizes that it requires daily effort.
But eventually it will get easy.
On the cover of the Essentialism, the heading is badass. It says, “The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.” And that’s the book’s call to action — to compel us to cut out all the unnecessary things and to choose the freedom we’ve always desired.
And the rite of passage to getting here —Step #1 to becoming an essentialist — is to consistently remember and even appreciate that we always have the ability to choose.
