Success is a Team Sport

Strength in numbers, what does that mean?

What does that mean for those of us whose resistance tells us we are alone; our ideas are trite and trivial, success is a popularity contest we need to win with our cleverness? It’s up to the individual to try harder, dig deeper, compete. Look at me! Look at me! look at me…..

I believed that narrative. I don’t believe it anymore.

I believe that Success is a Team Sport.

It’s easy to give advice — to ask questions, comment and challenge. It’s an entirely different thing to put yourself in the hands and hearts of your teammates and say “I don’t know what to do” and “I need your help to get over the line”.

The trust required is boundless. But once you’ve found our tribe, you’ve found the place where we become as one, and cross the line like a rugby scrum — not a relay race. Holding each other tight, pushing against the resistance, and crossing the line together.

“A human being is a part of the whole…. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” — Albert Einstein