Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Given no context, I’m 99.9% sure you would choose an easy victory over a tough loss.  However, let me provide a bit more context and see if your choice remains the same.

The tough loss provides you invaluable experience.  The tough loss grows your skills immensely. The tough loss humbles you and teaches you what you need to work on to get better.

The easy victory provides you with very little experience.  The easy victory doesn’t help you improve your skills.  The easy victory teaches you nothing about what you can work on to get better.

What’s more, this particular competition is not a championship or playoff type situation and there is no money on the line.

Which one would you choose now?

Do you value winning over learning? Do you value gaining confidence over gaining experience? Do you value racking up stats over racking up skills?

Obviously, there is no right or wrong answer.  However, if you’re honest about your answers, your choices will tell you the type competitive culture and mindset you’re comfortable with.

Today I watched a viral video titled “The Time You have (In Jellybeans)” for the first time.  This video has over 3.4 million YouTube views, so there’s a chance that someone has already shared this with you.

Just in case this is new to you like it was for me today, here’s the skinny.

It’s a 2 minute 45 second video that provides a visual depiction of how we use each day in our life.  It does this with various displays of vibrant jellybean art. A few of the surprising stats revealed by the narrator and displayed with jellybeans are that most people spend:

• 1635 days eating, drinking and preparing food
• 3202 days working
• 1099 days commuting and traveling
• 2676 days watching television
• 564 days caring for others

This video is very well done and worth watching.  Please check it out below.  I hope you get as inspired as I did to get more out of each jellybean:

The choice to live a hard life vs. an easy life is a luxury I failed to acknowledge in my response to my wife’s statement about waiting for the easy life. There is a much larger percentage of society who live a hard life by default.  We all know this, but many (myself included) often fail to account for this population as we pontificate our 1st world problems.

While I do subscribe to the pull yourself up by the bootstrap way of thinking, I’m not naive to the fact that you first need bootstraps before you can pull yourself up by them.  Unlike many in my community, I was fortunate enough to start life ahead of the game.

I am a third generation college graduate on my mom’s side and a second generation college graduate on my dad’s side.  Both my father and mother poured everything they had into me to help me grow into a productive member of society.  My wife also has a similar story.

This upbringing sometimes clouds my view of the world.  I sometimes catch myself criticizing those who struggle in life .  I criticize  because I judge them based on what I perceive as bad decision making. I criticize because I perceive them as lazy. I criticize because I think they can change their circumstances by simply working harder.

Yet and still, I cannot let myself fall into this trap.  The trap of thinking that I’m better than others because of the sacrifices of my parents and grandparents.  I have no idea how I would respond to the adversity of being born into a hard life. I never had a silver spoon by any means, but I sure didn’t have a wooden one either. I have no right to judge anyone’s struggle.