I was not a good basketball player.
I was by no means terrible, but I wasn’t what you would categorize as good.
Which was a shame because when I was a sophomore in high school I perhaps cared about nothing more than playing basketball.
I was the first one to practice and the last to leave. I’d practice free throws in my driveway on Sundays when we didn’t have practice. I would even jog through my neighborhood prior to the start of the season in hopes to get my conditioning up.
I was what you would have called a scrapper. Or a ham and egger. Or a banger.
I dove for every loose ball. I led the team in rebounds. It was rare that a game or practice would end without me bleeding from somewhere.
And even though I had no dribbling ability, my mid-range jumper was inconsistent at best and I was never the first to cross the line in our end-of-practice “suicide” drills, I was named the captain of my high school team.
Which just goes to show you that everyone loves effort.
It’s true in most things in life. You can fuck up regularly but if people really sense that you are trying your best you’ll get a pretty long leash and make it quite far.
Three years ago, that could have been the end of this blog.
Cute childhood story + lesson learned = Dan gets to close his laptop and go bang out 20 sets of biceps curls while listening to Kelly Clarkson before heading home for a nap.
But fortunately(?) we’ve all evolved since then. We need to go deeper. Or shed a tear. Or at least wrap it all up with a last line that evokes some sort of melancholy that sticks with you for the rest of the day.
Today, I’m going to go with option A: go a bit deeper.
I want to discuss something that I have conveniently named The Experience Spectrum.
(If one of you steals this idea and writes a New York Times best seller called “The Experience Spectrum” and you end up on Oprah or Joe Rogan or wherever experts end up these days to promote their projects, at least put me in the Acknowledgements section at the end of the book. That's all I ask for.)
The Experience Spectrum is the process that everyone goes through when they are trying to take on, excel or achieve at any task and it has three distinct phases.
The first is The Dabbling Phase. This is where you think to yourself “oh, I’d like to {play guitar, get in shape, start a business, mountain climb, insert any other desire} let me give it a try!”
And you do try. You buy a guitar. You sign up for the gym. You submit paperwork to form an LLC. You comparison shop flights to Kilimanjaro.
Then you hit your first road block. You can’t get your right hand and left hand to coordinate on the strings. Your muscles are sore from your first leg day. You need to file mountains of paperwork. You look in your bank account and you realize that a flight to Africa is more than you make in a month.
But that doesn’t stop you. You are committed. You are the type of person that faces challenges!
Until the second challenge comes up (callouses on the ends of your fingertips, more soreness, don’t know how to create a website, quickly realize you are deathly afraid of heights) and you see how long the road to success likely is and you say “fuck it” and go back to eating Cheetos on the couch while watching a weeklong marathon of “Ridiculousness” and wonder why you aren’t a guitar-playing, jacked business owner who recreationally climbs giant mountains like you’d hoped you’d be.
And you quit and never go back.
Congratulations. You are a dabbler. At the very least, you probably didn’t waste that much time and you can likely get about 30% of your money back selling that beginner acoustic and climbing ropes on Facebook marketplace.
Don’t feel bad. We’ve all dabbled in some things in life. You can’t fall in love and commit to everything you start.
But let’s say you do get past that early stage. You get beyond the fingertip pain and the quad soreness. Your business has made enough money that you can sign up for a WeWork office and you joined a local climbing club where you hit the boulders every Wednesday and Saturday morning at the crack of dawn.
Congratulations. You’ve just entered the Stressor Stage. Which sounds awful - cause it is - but at least you made it further than most.
By the time you’ve hit the Stressor Stage you’ve been kicked in the teeth enough to know that reaching the level of satisfaction you want to accomplish with your endeavor is way harder than you ever anticipated.
And you’ve been close to having it all crumble - you haven’t been able to get past a certain plateau, you wondered how you were going to make payroll this week - enough times that you can sense those moments coming and you stress the fuck out about them.
You feel a pit in your stomach. Perhaps you shed a tear or have a minor breakdown. You look in the mirror and wonder why other people can do this, why you can’t, if there is something just inherently wrong with you and if you should give this all up, leave your wallet and your cellphone on your nightstand and just walk directly into the ocean.
This stage is the absolute worst and, lucky for all of us, it lasts the longest. Because most people who even get into The Stressor Stage are ambitious enough that the level at which they would feel satisfaction is actually quite high. And, as we discussed, most things are much harder than you first anticipate.
So you toil and research and innovate and fail and stress in a constant pattern in what feels like forever until you reach stage 3. Or what I like to call The Enlightenment Effect.
Now I know what you are thinking. You think stage 3 is where you have it all figured out. Where you become Eddie Van Halen or Arnold Schwarznegger or Jeff Bezos or that guy from “Free Solo” who scales mountains like a fearless chimpanzee.
No, that is mastery which is saved for, as my friend Bernie Sanders would say, the 1% of the 1%. Which is a nice thing to shoot for but - and far be it for me to shoot down all our hopes and dreams - is probably not where any of us are going to end up.
Stage 3 is where the devastating, challenging stressors become so familiar that you simply accept them as you accept that the cold wind will blow in your face on a mid-February day. You may not like it, but you aren’t going to curse God and lie on the ground in your parka and scarf just because you momentarily got a bit more chilly.
In stage 3 it all just feels familiar. You’ve been through it so many times that you not only recognize and accept it, you almost wait for it to come. You look at the board, see the workout and instead of saying “Oh, God, what the fuck did Dan program today. That evil son-of-a-bitch!” you just nod and get to work.
When growth stalls and you hit a sales slump you don’t look at that plateau and wonder why it’s happening. When you are in the middle of a training block for a marathon and your mile splits don’t improve you aren’t flabbergasted or stressed.
That’s because you were waiting for these familiar things to come back around. It’s much like Cher’s career. It doesn’t matter how many times she announces a farewell tour you’ll know she’ll be playing an amphitheater near you next Summer in an even skimpier outfit than before.
And it’s not that it doesn’t suck (the plateau, not Cher) but you’ve seen it enough times that you can take a deep breath, welcome it back like an old familiar friend who tends to talk too much and stay too long at your dinner parties but deep down you truly love.
The longer you can live in The Enlightenment Effect stage the better you get at it and the easier it all becomes. You progress from that wave of nausea that accompanies bad news to that wry, knowing smirk almost instantly as you realize that it’s all going to be okay, because it always ends up okay.
And you're calm and poised and sleep well at night.
At least that’s what I imagine it’s like.
I’ll confirm if I ever get there.