Treating success and failure the same way

I'm grateful for the new MLB Network channel. They have more time to go in depth on baseball, well beyond the tired 3 minute SportsCenter clips. And watching spring training games in HD is such a nice contrast to the tiny box scores I used to get in the paper as a kid.

Anyway, I feel that most baseball players and managers give better interviews than athletes in other sports. They're more likely to go in depth about their challenges and show a healthy respect for the game. It's such a difficult sport no matter how good you are that an overall sense of humility is usually the rule. And humility typically leads to deeper thought and introspection than you'd see from some blowhard wideout on the Eagles.

Pitchers in particular learn how to be humble and resilient. Over the course of a career in the big leagues every pitcher will have down times and struggle. Which is when you really have to use your mind in a disciplined manner in order to persevere. As a commentator who had recently interviewed a struggling pitcher about his mentality put it:

"You have two choices--You can let it eat at you or you can learn from it. Last year he got caught up in trying to do too much, to control things he couldn't control, and letting things bother him more than they should. You have to start to treat success and failure the same way. You can't get too mentally up or down. Easier said than done."

A lot of this applies to stand up. No comic will have amazing gigs every night their whole career. A lot of it is going to be struggle and half empty rooms and punchlines that don't hit. But I'm trying to learn how to treat success and failure the same way. Do good, do bad, it doesn't matter. Keep getting out there and doing it day in and day out and focus on learning more than success.

In this vein here is a snippet from an interview with author David Shenk:

Question: How do we go about finding the genius in all of us? What steps we can take to unlock latent talent?

David Shenk: Find the thing you love to do, and work and work and work at it. Don't be discouraged by failure; realize that high achievers thrive on failure as a motivating mechanism and as instruction guide on how to get better.