8 Suggestions To Realize Your Potential
Photo by Nick Bondarev from Pexels
There is a legend that for many babies born in the Midwest, before you get a bottle or a rattle, you’re handed a basketball. The love of the game starts early and it goes deep.
Being raised in Indiana, I grew up playing basketball. My friends and I were kings of our own concrete, driveway courts. Everyone had a hoop, so the question wasn't “if we were going to play,” but more so “where?”
In most small towns of Indiana, the High School basketball coach is revered and held in high esteem. He’s the kind of guy men talk about with respect while in the barbershop.
And don’t even get me started on the local high school gymnasium. There are few things better than a packed gym on a Friday night. For many, it’s a mecca, a town hall of sorts.
My high school basketball coach was a solid man. He was firm in his character, steadfast in his pursuit of excellence, and an all-around good leader. While under his tutelage, I learned the ins-and-outs of playing a better version of basketball, but I also learned what it meant to be a better version of myself.
When I was under his leadership, I didn’t always recognize the value of his wisdom and guidance. But looking back, I can clearly see the ways in which he was teaching me and our team to move towards a life of fulfillment and success. Here are 8 of the core things that stand out to me from those days.
Write Down Inspirational Quotes
History is important. There have been many great leaders over time, men and women who have displayed courage, valor, grace, bravery, skill, humility, and so many other good characteristics.
Reading and remembering these paragons of success is one sure-fire way to increase your chances of being fulfilled in your life, both personally and professionally.
Each season, our coach would write down inspiring quotes from past leaders on the top of our notes. He would ask us to copy down those quotes as a form of building discipline but also because he knew that the practice of writing and repeating the quotes would help them stick.
Before every game, he would have another quote or another example of one of the positive characteristics he always tried to speak into our lives.
He knew that while his voice was important, the more that he could leverage other voices to teach and instruct us, the greater the impact of his leadership would be. He showed us that his approach to excellence wasn’t just his own, but it was based on dozens of very successful and very influential leaders over the last generations and centuries.
Do Small Things Consistently
The older I get in life, the more I realize how vital the small things are to the greater and overarching success of the big goals and vision of my life. The small things are the planks that span the bridge taking me where I want to go. You can probably get by with taking away a few planks, but the more you remove, the less likely it becomes that you’ll be able to cross.
Our coach drilled this notion into us. I used to think that he was meticulous. He always had the same set of pens that he liked to use and he had a certain color combination that he stuck with. When we got our scouting reports before each game, they would be marked up with each different color pen.
As a highschooler, his attention to detail was something that many of us laughed off as “excessive” or even “neurotic.” Who writes with the same set of pens like that anyways?
Now that I’m older, I find myself doing similar things. I have specific ways that I like to do things, and I keep track of small details in a consistent fashion. I know now that his attention to detail wasn’t obsessive, but was rather a focus on the small things.
He did the small things with excellence so that the larger goals could come together with cohesion and precision.
Prepare and Pivot
There are few people who would be considered more prepared than my high school basketball coach. He had plans for his plans and answers for his answers. You likely haven’t met someone who was more practiced, more studied, and more intentional.
And yet, he knew that in the end, plans were as useful as they were flexible.
He was purposeful about leaving some wiggle room in each of his plans. He banked on the need to pivot his plans and so when the time came to adjust on the fly, he was at least prepared for the necessity.
He didn’t always get his pivots right and sometimes he stuck a little too strongly to his plans and thoughts, but overall, he knew what President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”
If you want to live a life of fulfillment, it’s essential that you recognize and adopt this maxim. Benjamin Franklin once said, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” So, make a plan, but leave enough room to pivot when the unexpected arises.
Defense Wins Championships
This phrase, “Defense wins championships” was our mantra for all of high school. It was printed on all of our practice gear, written at the top of every report and memo, and was painted in our locker room. We took this phrase very seriously.
While this phrase is generally aimed at basketball and in some ways, sports in general, there is an application to our everyday lives within those words as well.
Saying that defense wins championships is not a reflection that offense isn’t important. It’s not an argument that ambition, leadership, and vision aren’t necessary.
Instead, saying that defense wins championships is a way of noting that the fundamentals will carry you further than any outburst of talent. Defense is a fundamental skill. It’s not sexy. It’s not in the headlines. You don’t read many news articles of peoples saying, “This guy (or this girl) crushed the basics!”
But you will be hard-pressed to find a truly great person who doesn’t play incredible defense.
That’s what it means when we say defense wins championships. If you want to live a life of fulfillment, you have to learn to master the basics along the way.
Build Confidence Wherever You Can
Your level of confidence in who you are and the skills that you have can either carry you to new heights or drag you down to lower depths. It’s that important.
Knowing this, my coach was insistent on building confidence in any and every area you could, whenever you could. He would go out of his way to ensure that we recognized and took advantage of opportunities to build confidence.
If we made a good play in a game or followed through on something he asked of us, he would let us know, loudly. If we did something good in practice or showed visible signs of progress, he would make sure we paused and took a moment to relish in the confidence boost.
He knew that the level of our confidence often impacted the level of our play.
The same is true in our lives. If we want to be fulfilled and satisfied with our lives, we need to look for and highlight areas and opportunities that will increase our self-confidence.
Fulfillment and fear don’t go hand-in-hand.
Old-Fashioned is a Compliment
My coach was old-fashioned. He believed in wearing suit jackets and ties to our road games. He believed in having a good haircut and clean uniforms. He believed in things like effort, hustle, grit, hard work, and being the first one in the gym and the last one out.
We tend to associate the word old-fashioned with words like archaic and out-of-touch. But I believe that in most cases when we call someone old-fashioned, we are internally projecting our insecurity rather than our frustration at the antiquated practices.
Becuase when you really go back and boil down the characteristics of what we typically note as “old-fashioned” as seen above, who wouldn’t want to be those things?
Who wouldn’t want to be respectful, chivalrous, steady and intentional? Who wouldn’t want to be presentable, prepared, hard-working, and kind? I know I want to be all of those things.
So much of looking for a life of fulfillment is focused on parsing through new-age advice and suggestions. While there are helpful tidbits to pick up from examples of modern-day advice, consider looking back on some of the more “old-fashioned” ways of living. Perhaps if you begin to emulate these, you’ll start to see more fulfillment in your present and future living.
Measure What Matters
Our coach was notorious for tracking everything. Seriously, his stat sheets would put titans of organization to shame. He tracked the basics, but he also tracked about a hundred other stats and items that he viewed as essential to success.
At the time, it was easy to shrug off some of the numbers. Who really cared about the number of free-throws the opposing team shot within the final two minutes of each half, tracked over the course of the season? But looking back, I’ve realized that not only were the numbers important, but the practice as a whole was essential.
If you want to live a life of fulfillment, it’s important to measure what matters. I know there are some enneagram 7’s out there who are quivering as they read this sentence, but here’s the deal — there is no such thing as total freedom without some structure.
We are designed as human beings to be moving, either closer to or further away from our desired outcomes in life. Very rarely if ever do you get the opportunity to be stagnant in your growth.
So the tension is less about if you are tracking certain areas in your life and more about what you are committed to tracking.
To our coach, he tracked a lot, but that is mostly because those stats were important to him and he thought they would be important to us. He proved how important they were to him by the ways he tracked the results.
For you, if you want to be fulfilled, you have to pay attention and be willing to measure the thing that truly matters to you. They don’t have to look the same to everyone, but you do have to implement some form of tracking, or else you won’t ever know if you are growing or succeeding at becoming the person you want to be.
Do the Work Anyway
Last but not least, if you want to live a life of fulfillment, you have to do the work anyway.
No one is measuring your investment. At least not really. None of the players on the team kept track of the hours of time that our coach put into his position day in and day out. Coaching basketball was just one of his jobs. He was a teacher at our school as well.
To be fulfilled, you have to show up daily, regardless of whether or not there is pomp and circumstance. You have to be willing to put the work in, even if no one celebrates you or makes a big deal of how hard you worked.
When you’re living the fulfilled life, you don’t work for the reward, you work for the enjoyment of the personal satisfaction that you gave it your all and that you held nothing back.
You work hard for the opportunity to lay your head down at night knowing that you did your best. You cherish that ache in your bones that tells you that you left it all on the court.
When you do this, you’ll feel true satisfaction.
Throughout my time playing high school basketball, we rarely thanked our coach for all of his effort. It wasn’t that we were intentionally holding out our gratitude. We were just high school boys who weren’t fully mature and who didn't think anything of it.
But our coach did the work anyway. He didn’t let the lack of applause keep him from putting in the time. He committed and jumped all the way in, and we are all better off for it today because he did.
Going Forward
There are a lot of ways that people look for or define fulfillment. These 8 suggestions are ways that I have seen demonstrated up close and that have significantly impacted my life over the last decade.
I read a quote recently by Simon Sinek from his latest book, The Infinite Game, which said, “none of us want on our tombstones the last balance in our bank account.”
When it comes to fulfillment, it’s important to focus on the intangibles, the things that truly matter in the long-run, the old-fashioned ideals. I’m grateful for my coach who exemplified these ideals and who set a course for me to continue to learn from and follow.