[NUT] Some thoughts on motivation...

From: RF

To: [NUT]

Date: Tue, Mar 5th, 2013 at 7:30 PM

Subject: Some thoughts on motivation...

Hey NUT,

I have been thinking a lot lately about the direction of the team and why we sacrifice in order to work and improve. I've had a great fucking time this year pushing with my brothers on this team and I think it would be beneficial to run you guys through how I approach each and every practice, tournament, gym session, film session, etc.

Every day I motivate myself to be the best I can be through two main concepts:

1.  Plateaus-

“If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” –Bruce Lee

To me, the true essence of intensity and discipline can be summed up by the concept of plateaus. In all facets of the game (and in life), we reach what we believe to be impenetrable limits, both on an individual and on a team level. For the past two years, I, among many on NUT, have tacitly presumed college regionals to be the limit of our potential. Within this mental barrier, my thoughts over the past two years have been limited by irrational doubts. I convinced myself that teams like Illinois and Michigan were simply too good; they had a larger pool of athletes to draw from, they were more experienced, they had tasted victory before and were hungrier than I was. The problem here lies not in the content of these thoughts and doubts, but rather in their mere existence. There will always be moments, both mental and physical, in which we try to set limits on what we can do. This cannot happen. As a team, it is essential that we understand the concept of working through plateaus and constantly reaching for more. I am always fucking hungry for more. If we are truly hungry, we can take down big, athletic teams. It just takes one hell of a disciplined and concerted effort to reach a higher plateau of ultimate play. 

In every aspect of the game, you need to evaluate what plateau you are at and ask yourself: how can I improve? What can I do in order to challenge myself and my teammates? During practice, this is crucial. How can I stop more break throws? How do I position myself in specific defensive situations? When I am on the sidelines, how do I effectively communicate with my teammates who are on the field? If you want to truly succeed at ultimate, then you must be brutally honest with yourself each and every day. You must take humility to the max and understand that you are an essential member of a continuous unit that succeeds only when you push it to. This unit demands you realize that when your rate of improvement has stalled, it is time to work harder and level up. Most importantly, you must remain disciplined in this approach. It is not enough to purely push yourself completely day in and day out with no strategic direction. 

As a team, we are going somewhere and we fucking know it. When we play an opponent, we don't care what that opponent has or has not accomplished. Our opponent will play hard and will play honest, but we will fight our hardest to win and grow because we have pushed through plateaus and have learned from our past failures.

2. Failure- 

At last week’s practice, Ian called me out on having written the words, “Failure is not an option” on my hand. While this is a cute saying to think about when doing homework or masturbating, this phrase is simply not true. Failure is always an option. In fact, it is an option that, more often than not, dominates and corrodes our mentality late in a match. When we are down in a game, when the other team is in better shape or seems to want it more than we do, failure fights against our mental toughness. Failure creeps into our physical and mental faculties until it convinces us that it is OK to rest and stop pushing, that it is OK to accept defeat. In these situations, failure is no longer merely an option but rather it is the only option. As we struggle and get down on ourselves and our teammates, we begin to accept failure as inevitable. We begin to make excuses aimed at explaining why we are losing because it’s comfortable to accept failure as the only option. It’s easy to sulk after a lost point and blame the circumstances of the game as the core contributors to our defeat.

How I see it and what I think we all must understand is that failure is always a choice. We either choose to succeed or we choose to fail, it is that fucking simple. From being down in a hard-fought game to questioning whether or not you want to give it your all at practice on a cold, wintry night, you will always have a simple (but not easy) choice. You can either choose to be comfortable, or you can choose to fight until complete exhaustion. We will all fail on this team. You will play points where you let yourself and your teammates down. This is OK. As a collective unit of brothers we can never see failure as the only option and we especially cannot see it as defeat. It is opportunity. We must continually pound away at the gym, at practice, and at tournaments so that we can constantly refine our skill at success. Even if we have fought hard and convinced ourselves that we have finally found the elusive path to success, there will be times when we will still fall down. Again, this is OK. We must learn from this and grow from it. Following every practice and tournament we need to evaluate how to move forward and progress. Why did Kenyan beat us last weekend and how do we fix it? Why does our energy falter late in the game and what can we do to counter this? 

I’ll grant that our belief muscle is small and weak. An atrophied muscle cannot move large objects. But if we push this muscle 110% at every practice and at every tournament; if we dream about victory late at night when we toss and turn in beds littered with black, rubber field pellets; if we regularly imagine seducing this fully-formed belief muscle back to our bedroom after a long night on the Keg dance floor; it will steadily grow. It will gain on other teams who do not constantly push themselves to believe. Eventually, it will even surpass the strength and finesse of Holterman's glutes. If we choose success and everything that it entails, if we push our belief muscle as hard as we possibly can, then we will move forward and obtain progress. If we instead choose to fail from the start, then we will never know what strength is possible. 

We must accept that failure is always an option. But we must choose the path of success and exhaustion because it is the only path that will take us where we need to go. Failure can either stop us or fuel us. 

In the end, emotional intensity is a double-edged sword. I understand that at times I can let my emotions get the best of me and this is not OK. Too much emotion can let failure take over the mind and, consequently, corrode my discipline and humility. I know this and I will work on it. My motivation to pursue higher levels of intensity, discipline, and humility is defined through the parameters of failure and plateau. They may seem too simple or corny to be taken seriously, but to me they define the world of ultimate that I inhabit each and every day. I fuel myself with these ideas and I constantly create more for myself to be hungry for. I feast off of these values each and every day and look towards others to help me in this endeavor. I remind myself of what is at stake and I fear not being the best player I can possibly be. I fear someday being afraid of failure. I hope that you will understand how these two concepts come to define my efforts to work at practice and at the gym. 

It is not about the end goal, it is about the process, NUT. We must invest ourselves completely in this process if we are ever going to achieve what we desire. 

Let’s pound some Cunth tonight and see what exhaustion really feels like. Its time to get hungry. 

-Johnny "crushing it since '92" Frisbee