Stop Playing the Opponent and Start Playing Your Game - Ep. 6

Welcome to a no trade secrets debrief session. A solo reflection where I unpack the lessons, patterns, and ideas that have stayed with me from recent conversations and from throughout my own journey. Today's reflection came from something pretty simple that I encountered uh in a golf match. So, for those of you who don't know, I've been playing golf now for just over a year, and I'm not very good. Uh but I have a desire to improve and to practice and to get better because this is uh something that I enjoy doing, and it is something that is extremely hard. And so I'm a member of a golf club, and I entered into this bracketed match play that they have running throughout the season, and it's a single elimination winner goes on format. I played, I was matched up in the first round to someone with a similar handicap as me, and I remember the night before this match, which it was a couple of weeks ago, really being excited to go out, be to be able to go out and compete against someone, because it was this was the first time that I really got to go out and compete against another person or team since playing college baseball. And I was really excited for that because it it felt like it was an old friend, that feeling that I hadn't had in quite a few years. And when I went out there to play that match, I noticed my energy shifted from enjoying the game from my process to wanting to beat him. So my focus moved externally on his shots, on his score. And I started abandoning my rhythm, my routine, my process, my composure. I could feel myself tightening both mentally and emotionally as I started doing the math and seeing, well, if I need to, if I have a chance of winning, I have to win the next such and such holes, and I ended up losing pretty bad. This realization came afterwards that I stopped playing golf and I started playing him, so I lost ownership of my own attention. So the core insight here was pressure wasn't the issue. I loved the pressure, I thrive off the pressure, I love that feeling of excitement and pressure. Competition wasn't the issue, but misplaced attention was. So the the moment I started focusing on him instead of playing my game, I lost control of the only thing that actually mattered. And then as I thought about this a little further, I realized that competition can quietly pull you out of yourself as you allow your ego to enter, or a need to prove yourself to others enters. You stop trusting your process, you start chasing outcomes instead of executing, you start trying to force things to happen. And then as I have engulfed so many times seen parallels to business and life, I saw that this happens constantly in business. Founders obsessing over competitors, teams reacting emotionally to like market noise, companies I've seen abandon their core identities to chase trends, leaders comparing themselves or their companies to other companies instead of just executing on who they are and what they do. Examples, watching competitors so closely to see what they're doing all the time, changing strategy emotionally, scaling too quickly or trying to scale too quickly out of this insecurity to be a billion-dollar company or to be the fastest ever to hit some kind of milestone or to you know to be a unicorn, like um you know, you lose operational rhythm. Another example is trying to seek validation. Now, to bring that back to leadership, I think great operators protect their focus. Any elite performer, whether it's an athlete, an entrepreneur, just in life in general, elite performance requires internal stability. When we talk about discipline, a part of that is emotional discipline. Because your attention is one of the most valuable assets you can have in business. Where you focus your attention, you perform your best when your attention belongs to you. And now it is easier said than done, but it is something that we can work on as founders to make sure that we own our own attention. Because my reflection was there there's a difference between competing and becoming consumed by competition. The only person I should be competing against sh should be myself, not someone else. The goal isn't to ignore competition, the goal is to stay rooted in your own game while competition exists around you.