What is it about sports that is so intoxicating?

There’s the competition aspect that has been known to bring out the best (and worst) in people.

At the same time, comradery and team spirit come into play. Along with something innate in the primal nature of the physical activity.

But there’s something deeper.

Sure, all the things I’ve listed were reasons why I enjoyed playing. But they weren’t the reason.

Honestly, it wasn’t until I finally stopped playing competitively and I was well into college before I truly understand what had drawn me so deeply into my love of sports:

The process of mastering a craft.

When I thought back to my days playing sports, it wasn’t the games that I missed the most. It was the practice.

Which is odd, because I used to think that I hated practicing.

But when I yearn for those high school days, I miss the long days on my driveway learning a new dribbling move, or the early mornings working on my jump shot before weekend practices.

Oddly enough, I think it was this process that kept me so passionate about sports for so long.

So when I stopped playing, I noticed a void. I no longer had reasonable justification for spending hours on end in my driveway with a basketball in my hand, or for putting aside time every day to throw a football. I knew it wouldn’t really lead to anything.

So I started to look elsewhere for this feeling, and fortunately I found some productive ways to fill this void.

In college, I found that I enjoyed the learning process nearly as much as I enjoyed progressing as an athlete. Of course, it was nowhere near as fun, but there was something incredibly satisfying about struggling through a new topic, and then finally seeing that hard work pay off.

At the same time, I found some less-productive outlets that offered a similar experience.

One example was video games.

As I was going through junior high and high school, I used to really enjoy playing video games. Particularly sports ones.

And that continued when I got to college. Obviously I had other priorities, so my video game playing time was limited. But when I did get the opportunity, I found a lot of joy in a certain type of video game experience in which I would create a sports player, and then progress through a college or professional career with that made-up player.

During my senior year, it was a quest through the NBA. I made my player, and not unlike the joy that I used to find working on my own game, I found some pretty deep satisfaction in developing that player.

At first, my player was terrible. He barely saw the court, and when he did play he didn’t do anything significant.

But as I was able to spend more time putting my made-up player through drills, and learning through in-game experiences, that made-up player progressed. And eventually, he became an All-Star, and then a Hall of Famer.

Through that experience, I learned that the athletic arena wasn’t the only area in my life that would offer me the opportunity to develop and master a craft. The video game is an insignificant example in an imaginary world, but the joy and the passion that I felt for improving my made-up player is real.

This experience made me start to wonder whether I could apply the development mindset to other areas of my life as well.

Which brings me to the present.

I’ve written before about my current role in business development. Effectively, I’m tasked with selling the services that my company has to offer, and identifying opportunities to grow our business.

When I started, I was dumbfounded by all of the things I didn’t know. I looked around at my co-workers, and I realized that I had a tremendous amount of personal development to do before I could be effective in my role.

More than anything, I saw numerous skills that I needed to develop. Just to name a few, I knew I would need to learn to:

• Understand the vast range of technically-complex services that my company offers
• Be able to effectively negotiate contract terms
• Work with discipline
• Be willing to risk failure
• Form personal connections with customers
• Communicate effectively via email, phone, and face-to-face conversations
• Fight through rejection
• Think big picture and understand corporate strategy
• …

At first, this list was daunting. But then I realized that it wasn’t really too different from another skillset that I had attacked before.

That one looked closer to:

• Speed
• Agility
• Crossover dribble
• Pull up jump shot
• Free throw
• Box out
• Conditioning
• …

Obviously, this second list captures the skills I had enjoyed developing so much during my quest to become a good basketball player.

So why couldn’t I find that same joy in my career?

Rather than seeing my work as a place to pass time and hope to contribute, I started to think about it as a quest to gather the skills I need to be great in my role.

Instead of thinking about tasks I had to complete and items I had to check off my to-do list, I started thinking about my day to day work as development opportunities.

Looking back at my first few weeks on the new job, I took on the remedial role of typing the content from thousands of business cards into our contact database. On the surface, this seems like an awful task. It’s repetitive, and it’s hard to imagine how this can be related to developing in the sales field.

But I took a different mindset. Rather than just trying to get through the stacks of business cards I had, I made the process into a game.

I broke the cards into chunks, and I timed myself as I entered the material. I tracked my mistakes, and I made a running log of my performance, always striving to do better than I had done the time before.

Before I knew it, I was through the cards.

And the best part?

Some of the skills that I picked up during that exercise now come in handy every single day.

The majority of the communication I do is via email, or through long-format written proposals that I help to generate. So I do a lot of typing every day.

And it just so happened that thousands of business cards had presented a perfect opportunity for me to fine-tune my typing form and improve my typing speed.

Now, rather than struggling through emails and proposal paragraphs, I fly through them.

It’s just like what I’ve gotten out of this blogging experience so far.

There have been many skills that I’ve picked up, but possibly most relevant have come from my experience in generating these blog posts every week, and the speaking engagements that have come from this effort.

Again, communication is a huge part of my role at work. So it happens to be incredibly useful that I’m now able to get my thoughts in order, and craft fairly enticing copy pretty quickly.

At the same time, I make presentations on a weekly basis, and I also happened to recently be asked to speak in front of roughly 400 people at one of my company’s town halls.

Each of these performances benefitted from my new-found experiences speaking in public.

So maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m the only person who can always be looking for development opportunities and who can benefit from thinking about real-life experiences (work, school, sports, etc.) as a video game.

But I wouldn’t put my money on it.

If you’ve ever found joy in improving at a skill – whether it’s a language, sport, instrument, or whatever – try taking that same mindset to a different part of your life.

If you’re working, think about a challenging task as an opportunity to improve. If you’re still in school, fall in love with the idea of constant improvement.

Give it a try. What do you have to lose?

-Brandon