And kids lose out on building the most important qualities because of it.
“Far more important than trying to make young kids elite at specific sports, is teaching them how to build work ethic.
You don’t do this by forcing them into doing hard things.
You gamely ‘hard’ and strategically increase rigor over time.
It’s how you develop real life mental toughness.”
-Ray Zingler on X
You always hear about the short game and the long game.
The rational mind will tell you that the long game is the far more important one, but when emotions get involved, most tend to throw rationale out the window.
And when this happens, people tend to focus on the short game.
The here.
The now.
While there is nothing wrong with focusing on the present and living in the now, it’s always important to understand the bigger picture of things and have a bigger picture blueprint.
Especially when we know once emotions get involved in our decision making, we may not always make the best decisions.
Can your bigger picture roadmap evolve over time?
Of course, this is how you generate a philosophy for anything in life, but you must start and stick to something.
One of the many problems with youth sports today, is that most just don’t understand how it works.
They don’t understand development.
They don’t understand what is best for kids physically, mentally, or emotionally (in the realm of sport).
They just fall in line with A) What they think they know <which usually isn’t a lot> or B) What everybody else is doing. Good ‘ol groupthink.
That’s literally it.
And the reason it’s like this, despite many knowing, deep down, it’s bullshit, is because financially motivated people have a stronghold on our biggest emotional levers, our kids.
Once they confirm your perceptions (despite being wrong) and get a bunch of “too busy” people to submit and follow the crowd, boom, it’s on. They simply leverage the average consumers FOMO to keep themselves paid and our kids burnt out.
But here is the deal.
Far more important than the short game that is coming to a screaming end faster than you know it, is the long game.
It’s teaching them values.
Most importantly, it’s about teaching them about work ethic.
It’s not about “becoming a child prodigy”.
It’s about utilizing the first 18 years of their life to strategically, progressively, dose ‘hard’, so they can develop a work ethic (real mental toughness development) so that the quality can serve them for the next 60+ years.
Play the short game with the goal of winning the long one.
