The Power of Endurance
When I was about ten years old, I lived in Warner Robins, Georgia, where my dad was stationed at the big US Air Force base. My parents signed me up for the base soccer team, which was part of a youth soccer league in the town. There was an ongoing rivalry between the base team and the town teams.
I remember showing up for my first day of practice. All we kids wanted to do was scrimmage. That meant simply picking sides and playing soccer. As far as we were concerned, we wanted our whole practice to consist of scrimmaging – that was the fun part for us.
We were all playing around on the field when our coach showed up.
He was a young airman who had volunteered to coach the youth soccer team. Probably all of 23 or 24 years old, he was a trim, athletic, good looking guy. He gathered us all together, all these military kids, as our parents were standing by, and said “I’m your coach.” We all understood he was the authority and we were to do what he said.
Immediately one of the kids piped up, “Coach, are we going to get to scrimmage?”
Our coach responded quickly: “Ah, you’ve just said the magic word; follow me” – and he starts running laps around the field. We followed him for several laps, huffing and puffing. After the laps – drills, drills, and more drills.
After awhile, another kid asked, “Coach, when do we get to scrimmage?” and again, the coach said: “Follow me.” More laps.
Once again, we’re running a couple of laps around the field. Before we know it, we’ve spent practically the entire first practice doing laps around the field. We had three or four weeks of practice before the season started and it was exclusively laps and drills. That’s all we did.
Only in the last practice before our first game, during the last half hour of that practice, did our coach do anything about the game of soccer. During that last half hour, he assigned us positions, we did a little bit of scrimmage and practice, and we talked through some things about game strategy.
Our first game came a few days later.
My team goes out to play and we’re down 2 – 0 at half-time and we’re all feeling kind of dejected. At the half-time huddle, our coach says: “All right guys, now it’s time to scrimmage – to really play!” The way he said it, with a spark in his eye and a big grin, totally energized our team. We went out and won the game! Why? Not because of any particular skill, but because the other team was totally out of gas by the middle of the second half.
Our team went on to be undefeated the whole season. We probably won our first six or seven games on endurance alone – we simply outlasted the other teams. By later in the season, our skill level had increased dramatically and we had really come together as a team. We had become unstoppable.
If you are into anything for the long haul, don’t underestimate the power of endurance.
I often see incredible impatience and urgency to just get to doing things, with little or no appreciation for slowing down and building up the fundamentals.
What would it mean for your business if you worked intensely on endurance – how would that apply in your field?
