Train well, Play well!

I have played football since I was a kid. Football taught me a lot of things beyond controlling the ball or hitting it. I learned values that the sport teaches thanks to the labor coaches perform, but also, thanks to things that a team teaches. The first thing that each coach takes care of teaching you is something you always will remember: “You will play in the same way you train”. It is a quote that hides numerous things that can not be seen to the casual eye.

At first sight, we can simply read that If you train badly, you play badly, and If you work harder and pay attention to details in training, you will play in the same way. However, the quote contains many others purposes. That quote hides that the meaning of “play better” is the search for quality and excellence in something. It desires to transmit that quality is not a mere consequence of following a set of behaviors in a particular moment. Quality should be a prerequisite, something that is pretended previously as a self demand.

Quality is, of course, a philosophy, a way of thinking where you can not just say it is important. It is inevitable to believe in; it is a way of life, even it is necessary to breathe it. In any other way, it would be very difficult to force us into each process to pursue every detail mentally.

I would like to specify that this way of thinking and act is not against work methodologies like “Lean” because as wrong is to do things prematurely as after the deadline. It is not against that accept the error either, quite the opposite, errors are essential parts of this process, in the creativity, innovations and other changes. Likewise, I don’t want to say that quality must be your primary value or indispensable to be successful. However, you, my dear reader, will agree that you have more probability of winning matches playing well than playing badly.

Nowadays, it seems to start to establish a micro-culture where a person who pretends a well-done work, a work of quality, or where there are no small and unimportant details, could be controversial or even problematic. We should not permit that this could progress. We should remember those learnings and convert them into a recipe, a method we can export to many other fields in life like education, business, ONGs, public administrations, politics, etc. It can be we have forgotten those lessons. However, we learned when we were kids that, in sports and life, without those lessons wouldn’t reach big things.

I should add that if to be a person who pushes herself, who wants to outdo herself, and who loves what she does is to be someone obsessive; If to be a person who wants to be professional, who pretends and demand quality is to be someone problematic; Then I want obsessive and problematics persons in my teams. I use to use a metaphor to explain this. In music, you won’t find this micro-culture. There is no space for that. A musician never wants to go out of tune. A musician looks for a particular and exact sound, a sound of quality with which she can delight her audience.

If you aspire to a work of quality, you need to prove it day by day, detail by detail. You need to have self-discipline and a love for well-done jobs. You will play in the same way you train because, as you already know, the small details make big differences.