Resilience through the bad times

My freshman high school football class was highly touted. When our group came in as freshmen, we had a lot of promising players and the varsity coaches immediately took notice. I joined with the rest of the group my freshman year and barely played my freshman year. My body was still developing a 5’4” 135 pound skinny kid is seldom going to find playing time.

It was one of the hardest years and my first introduction to hard work. Practice kicked my ass and I didn’t get to play. We had a good year overall on junior varsity, but it was a struggle and I thought about quitting many times and again after the season ended. Was all this worth it? I ended up sticking around and working hard. I finally hit my growth spurt and I was 5’10” and 160 pounds by the time sophomore year started.

I ended up starting the entire year but it was a horribly disappointing year in terms of performance. A lot of my touted classmates got pulled up to varsity as sophomores. The coaches were first year coaches and really had no business coaching a team. I can’t recall exactly, but I think we won a total of 4 games and lost a lot of close ones.

After the season, I had a lot of doubts once again. Varsity was going to be even tougher with tougher competition and coaches. They were going to demand a lot more out of me and the team. I had a lot of teammates who felt the same and a lot of promising players ended up quitting after sophomore year. My resilience was being tested once again.

I ended up sticking around. My junior year we lost in the championship game, the famous Turkey Day game in San Francisco. We exceeded expectations with a lot of players who graduated the previous year. We fell short of our goals, but it was a magical season that taught me a lot of life skills. My senior year we ended up losing in the playoffs after another amazing season. I ended up making first team all San Francisco and it was probably the biggest accomplishment of my life at that point.

That was over 15 years ago now and I’ve had a lot of time to digest things. The biggest lesson I learned from playing football is that you need to go through the tough times in order to reap the benefits of the good times.

In today’s day and age, employees seem to be flocking to greener pastures as soon as they can. It’s something that bothers me. I understand that work is different than high school sports. You have to take care of yourself and your family financial so it’s not a perfect comparison. But quite often, when I feel down in this tough bear market, I think about what would have happened if I quit after my freshman or sophomore year.

I would not be who I am today. And I would not have reaped the benefits of those 2 amazing years on varsity my junior and senior year. I wouldn’t trade those years for anything.

Hopefully most people who decide to stay loyal to their startups in this tough environment will be rewarded on the back end when things come back up.