Sport is life, concentrated

It's likely you've heard me extolling the virtues of Ultimate Frisbee at some point or another. Very few activities have proved to be such an enduring obsession of mine.

Whilst there are some aspects of Ultimate that make me prefer it to other sports (the flight of the disc, the non-contact nature, the fact that Spirit Of The Game is enshrined in the rules), the most important aspects of its contribution to my life would be served well by almost any sport.

I've come to believe that everyone interested in high performance should find a sport to be obsessed about, because sport is life, concentrated.

The point of sport is to place yourself into situations of manufactured adversity to see if you can succeed. The point of team sport is to place yourself into situations of manufactured adversity that can only be overcome through teamwork, to see if you can succeed.

Sport is most enjoyable when played at the level where you win half the time, and lose half the time. Okay, some people probably prefer to play at a level where you win 75% of the time and lose 25%, but the point is that winning all the time is boring. Success has to be contingent on your own good performance, or your interest quickly wanes.

If you're playing sport at the appropriate level for your abilities, you place yourself on the razor's edge of failure, and that's what makes it so valuable.

Human's are—as Nassim Taleb put it—anti-fragile. We get stronger in the face of failure.

Sport provides an environment in which we can reliably (and safely) fail, regularly and often. Outside of a few extremely stressful work environments, there is almost nowhere you can put yourself in the face of adversity as regularly as you can in sport. It sharpens us, physically, mentally, emotionally, to perform better under stress.

Sport takes everything that is difficult about succeeding in life: problems, challenges, co-operation, teamwork, leadership; and provides us with an opportunity to experiment with them in highly concentrated doses... every week!

I don't actually care if my frisbee team wins or loses. But I play as though my life depends on it, because doing so gives me an opportunity to sharpen myself as a person, and that will show up in every other area of my life as well.