“Each time we face our fear, we gain strength, courage, and confidence in the doing.” — Theodore Roosevelt
A mentor who’s counseled me for 20 years recently issued a directive I imagine most people would do well to heed: Have more fun. Yesterday, my mind fixed firmly on accomplishing my new mission, I liberated the basketball that had been confined to the trunk of my car since the day I bought it, inflated it to its proper dimensions, and jaunted to the park. As soon as I arrived, a group of guys called out: “You wanna play 3-on-3?”
I hadn’t played a game of pickup basketball since 2003. I’d played maybe all of five games of H-O-R-S-E in the intervening 15 years. I was in running shoes. My legs were already partly dead from a strenuous hike that morning. So of course I said yes.
Today, I’m stiff in places I’d forgotten existed; my lower back feels like it was tenderized with a pipe wrench; there’s at least a 60% chance my right big toe will fall off before I have a chance to get it professionally amputated; and I feel awesome.
This elation can be attributed partly to relief that, by the grace of the basketball gods, I managed not to (utterly) humiliate myself on the court. But it mostly has to do with making it onto the court in the first place. Those of you familiar with pickup basketball know that it can be a little more intimidating than it sounds. You never know whether the game you’re joining will be a sensible one moderated by sportsmanship or a brutish one rife with dirty fouls and macho trash talk. You might run into That Guy, the one who elbows you in the face, whines when you call a foul, then calls a foul himself when you graze his finger. You might run into That Other Guy, the one who huffs and puffs when you don’t get him the ball exactly when and where he wants it but feels no obligation to play anything that might resemble defense. And if you’re on the taller side, like me, there’s a non-zero chance you’ll be matched up against a guy who played shooting guard in junior college.
The simple act of walking onto an unfamiliar basketball court, then, is not something that came naturally to me, but a skill I had to learn. And I learned this skill by unlearning something I had been told when I was a child and continued to believe into young adulthood: that I was terrible at sports. When I was a kid, I had a series of jarring, confidence-killing experiences with coaches. At five or six years old, I had a tennis coach who would do his best John McEnroe impression each time I made what he must have considered an irredeemable mistake, stamping and screaming until all in the world I wanted was to become invisible. At seven or eight years old, I had a soccer coach so hot-headed that every utterly meaningless game — half the kids were in it for the orange slices — felt like the final match of an alternate-universe World Cup in which the reward for second place was a gory, protracted death. Each time I failed to make the correct play, I felt as though I’d committed an unforgivably heinous crime.
Things have changed quite a bit since the 80s, but I still meet children who have been put to shame by adults who clearly should know better. A few weeks ago, I began working with an 8th grader who had been told by her math teacher — in front of her peers, no less — that she had no natural aptitude for the subject. Last week, I started working with another 8th grader whose father has pooh-poohed his goals of playing college baseball and ultimately becoming a Naval Special Warfare Officer.
When you’re told you’ll never be any good at something, why bother trying? If your dreams are dismissed out of hand, why bother dreaming? And if you don’t dare to try things that challenge you, to pursue dreams that inspire you — if you’ve been cowed into making all your decisions through the lens of timidity masquerading as realism — why even bother living at all?
The sweetest nectar of life is found in adventure, not at the center of your comfort zone (or someone else’s). Adventure requires the willingness to take risks. And the willingness to take risks requires confidence. When we do damage to a child’s confidence, we make their world smaller and bleaker. We make it far less likely that they’ll realize their full potential. And that is an unforgivably heinous crime.