Two on Tuesday: Lessons from the Underdog.
How the path of progress, hardship, and vulnerability unlock potential in ways that certainty, comfort, and status quo will not. All in a two-minute read.
Third ranked Iowa, hosted #1 Penn State on Friday.
Aside from the NCAA Championships, the match will be college wrestling’s most watched event of 2024.
I hardly follow wrestling. I watch it once a year at best and that’s if I can remember to turn on the NCAA finals. However, I do have a lot of respect for the sport and given the level of competition gathered for Friday's match, I decided to tune in.
In this particular match, both coaches hold Olympic gold and nearly every weight class featured the #1 ranked wrestler vs. a top-five opponent.
As I watched the contenders compete, I realized that despite having no slant toward either team, I badly wanted the underdog to emerge victorious. I flipped back and forth, rooting for Penn St. and then for Iowa and back again depending on which wrestler was most unlikely to win. (Penn St. had five wrestlers ranked #1)
Afterward, I thought a bit about why that is. Why was my inclination not to root for arguably the better guy? The former champion? What is it about underdogs that we're so willing to root for?
It might be connected to our love of potential and our fascination with unlocking it. We're constantly assessing potential, evaluating it, and pressing our loved ones to realize their own. We love stories of progress, defying the odds, upsets, and accomplishing what the numbers say is unlikely. Underdogs represent potential; they represent the idea that perhaps it isn’t all about reaching the highest high, but how far we can travel from one place to another.
So often, those we most admire are not those who achieve the most but those who travel the furthest distance. We love progress.
If this is true, it's critical information to have when navigating life's transitions.
Separating from the #military is no exception.
If we concede that satisfaction professionally might result more from progress, vulnerability and realizing your potential, and less from achievement, than perhaps the question we need to ask is closer to:
What path can I take which will help me develop most as a person, as a professional?
And less
What industry, salary, or title do I want to hold after the military?
According to Adam Grant author of "Hidden Potential," the biggest mistake we make when evaluating our own potential, "is we asses our potential based on where we start, if something is easy for us, if we have a natural talent for it, we assume there is a very high ceiling on our potential and if we struggle early or if we fail, then we determine, this is not for me. What we overlook is that growth is not determined by where you start but by the distance you travel. This can lead to missing out on a great deal of unrecognized possibility."
Travel the distance, be the underdog. We're rooting for you, or at least, I am.
I left the military with nothing lined up. It took a couple of years to figure out that I was not going to make money writing fiction. I looked at PhD programs and decided it wasn't worth the effort to become a professor of National Security Affairs. Then I stumbled into the teaching position anyway, relishing my underdog status in a sea of PhDs. The fact that I did NOT have a PhD gave me the incentive to be better than the career professors. Falling back on my Navy work ethic, I got more done as a "Lecturer" than those who carried higher status.