Don't Fumble The Bag That's Right In Front Of You

I grew up playing basketball.

And most long weekends, we'd play tournaments.

Group stage first - three to six games over a couple of days.
Top two teams from each group advance.
Then elimination finals to find the winner.

Two, sometimes three games in a single day. Short and intense.

And the moment the draw came out, we'd do the same thing every time.

We'd look at the group and start sorting it.

“We'll win that one. That one's easy.”

“That one's going to be tough. If we lose that, where does that leave us?”

“What do we need from the other results? Who do we meet in the first elimination game?”

All before we'd played a minute of basketball.

And then, almost every time, we'd lose the games we were supposed to win. Not the hard ones - we'd often play well in those, because we knew we had to. We'd drop the easy ones. The ones we'd already mentally ticked off. Then we'd find ourselves fighting to even reach the finals we'd been busy planning for.

Here's the lesson that took me far too long to learn...

The next game is the only game.

It didn't matter whether it was easy, hard, or anything in between. The draw wasn't going to change. The games were coming regardless.

Our job was to put everything into the one in front of us, finish it, and only then turn our attention to the next one.

That's it. That's the whole strategy.

And I see the same thing constantly in business and in life.

You're in a meeting thinking about the one after it.
You're executing this quarter while already planning the next.
You're doing the work in front of you at seventy percent, because thirty percent of you is three steps down the road.

Planning ahead feels productive.
It often just gets in the way of being present.
And it guarantees that you won't be fully committed to what's right here, right now.

Then it costs you in exactly the same way it cost us in the basketball tournaments.

Not on the hard things… you brace for those.

You drop the ones you assumed were handled.

So look at what's actually in front of you today.

Not the quarter. Not the plan. The next thing.

Give it everything, finish it properly, and then look up.

Because you can't win the tournament if you lose the games you are supposed to win.​

If you know someone who would benefit from reading this, please forward it to them. It may change the trajectory of their life for the better, and the catalyst could be you.