Get better: Fail spectacularly!

By Lcid Crescent Fernandez

I watched my Lakers go down 0-3 to the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference Playoffs today. This comes after I saw the two other teams I was rooting for in the Warriors and the Suns previously eliminated already. Going into a do-or-die Game 4 on Tuesday, I remember this quote I previously heard in an interview for a similar situation in the NBA:

“If we lose, you better go 0-30, not 0-13.”

I don’t remember who said it, but this passage has taken on a new meaning for me. For those of you who don’t play basketball, going 0-30 in a game means you shot the ball 30 times and made none of them. 0-13 means you made none of the 13 times you shot the ball. For the players in the NBA, it’s meaning is simple: We go down swinging. Give it all you have.

For me, it’s similar but we don’t play in the NBA so we don’t have legacy or year-defining moments like in professional sports. To me, it means that in case we fail in whatever we do in life, we fail with no regard for what we’ll feel. Don’t entertain the thought of what happens after. Just give it everything we have right now.

Thinking about the results and how it’ll affect us sometimes makes us want to protect ourselves, protect our ego. We don’t exercise all our effort because it protects us from the possibility of failure. We can then rationalize that we didn’t give it everything.

“It’s ok. I didn’t give it my 100% anyway.”

Well, why didn’t we?

Here’s why: we’re afraid it’ll cripple us. To know that our peak performance, our ideal selves – the best that we can possibly be is not enough? That will destroy our ego, kill our self-esteem. And in that moment of struggle, our dreams die. We’re not good enough to make it. That realization saps your motivation. Now, we don’t want to work anymore. Perhaps that realization was a traumatic experience for us.

But trauma incites an adverse response from all of us: greatness or despair. We get to choose. They say we learn more in failure than we do in success. So why don’t we maximize our learning opportunity? Let’s fail spectacularly.

Here’s the good news: in that process of realization, in that time of struggle, we’ve grown. The 100% we gave yesterday is  the 95% of today. We don’t notice it but we’re stronger now. The only way we can force our body to stretch further than our max is to stretch it to the max further and further every day. It’s progressive overload. 

Our max is greater now. 

Our strong is stronger. 

Our best is better.

The “all” that we have to give today is much more than the “all” we had a couple months ago. Keep going.

It’s all about mindset; How we talk to and view ourselves in our journey to be better. 

Every monday, we’re going to talk about getting better.