"It's not just a game. Football teaches you about life... <insert points to support this claim>" - this was the typical line of rhetoric I heard from various coaches throughout the entirety of amateur football career which spanned three years of high school five years of college (red-shirt year, included), four head coaches, five positional coaches, three strength coaches, and numerous other folks in authoritative coach or coach like positions. You know what, these men were mostly correct. I have Brian Aldridge and Wayne Jackson, my varsity high school head/position coach respectively to thank for teaching me how not to quit when I wanted to walk away after the first two weeks because it was too hard. That's a lesson that rare few things can teach a human being, and grueling competitive sports is one of them. I most definitely wouldn't be at this point in my life without their help. There are other various and similar lessons I learned as a player that have been pivotal themselves as well.
But there are lessons that just really don't apply to real life the way that coaches would have you believe they would. One must keep in mind that a coach basically has his or her paycheck in the mouths of a bunch of kids running around, so anything that can be said or done in order to demand near complete submissiveness to their goals/visions is necessary. Team sports just happens to one of those rare activities where maintaining such order is paramount to the success of a team. This applies to football even moreso, as cowboy behavior very rarely results in positive results. As a result, football players are trained to do exactly what they are told, to a tee, in a near militaristic format. Any subordination or even questioning is met with physical punishment in the amateur ranks (in the form of extra running, conditioning, etc. etc) and with fines in the professional ranks. So essentially, a collection of football players who perform well as a team and are regarded as good team players, for all of our brawn, strength, and athleticism, are really nothing more than a bunch of subservient sheep. It's necessary for the job...
I personally just happened to be a prototype example. I sucked it up and didn't question anything regardless of whether it made sense to me or not. I was referred to as a "very coach-able athlete". I took it as a compliment then. It is still somewhat of a complement now. But now that I'm out of that business and working as a full time employee in private enterprises, the equivalent statement would label me as a "company man", a "yes man", a "stooge", or even "a very political worker", since I automatically did anything anyone with authority requested of me and agreed with what they said. In other words, the perfectly coachable football player is just a warm bodied replaceable pawn not able to voice constructive criticism and objective thinking in the grand scheme of thing - an absolutely horrible attribute to have.
The fledgling years of my professional career were stifled as a result of this. Granted, I have done quite well given my age and background - way moreso than I would have ever guessed while still in high school/college - but I could have been much, much better and contributed much, much more had I let myself not been the passive receiver of dirty work and random oddball tasks for the longest time only because I was subservient and just happened to be a hard worker and good at what I do.
See, despite the fact that I got the work done, the marketplace doesn't provide even rewards based on how long or how hard someone works on the necessary but relatively lower profile tasks that require moderate to lower skillsets when compared to high level, highly skilled and critical work that knowledge workers today must perform to provide value (nor should it!). Said differently, those performing the menial work can be replaced, just like the labor of the wonderful employees behind the counter at your local <insert franchise here>. Those who are able to develop ideas, organize people, and even do the work when absolutely necessary due to their advanced knowledge/skillsets will always be most valuable because they are the irreplaceable ones.
But how does one develop such skillsets? It's certainly not able to be accomplished when one is mired in menial tasks. But how does one not get bogged down in menial tasks that someone else finds convenient to shuffle off to them? By dissenting! By learning how to constructively refuse to get bogged down in the work and contributing to the creative processes and decision making that has to occur in getting work done instead of just sheepishly accepting the work that one gets assigned by a superordinate. Sure, some amount of work still has to be done - the rubber has to meet the road somewhere, but that should be a shared burden and not to be carried by one person or one set of people who blindly accept it.
It was not until the last year and a half or so until I started to force myself to do this after getting run ragged during a grueling march to finish a software release in early 2008. I was accepting every possible menial task I could because that's how I was wired up to think from all of those years of having subservience beaten in to my brain and I thought this was the best way to contribute to the success of the project. At the end of the day, the launch itself happened, but was full of flaws. This was not my fault. The reality of it was that no matter how hard I worked or how many of me there were, the same result was imminent. It was after this point I started speaking up. I started questioning my managers and my VPs. I spoke my mind. I disagreed with people without the proverbial fear of getting benched or having to run stadiums... and this amazing thing happened - I found myself involved in alternative ways to do things, being asked for my own opinions and designs on how to implement things. I eventually helped make things better at this particular workplace *and* for myself because I started dissenting, sometimes outright refusing to do a few things because they did not make sense.
Fast forward a year later and I've already been promoted twice since the start of that aforementioned project, and I'm not so bogged down in work that I can't spend time sharpening my brain with new things related to my field. Had I kept the the same mentality I had that actually made me a successful football player, I'd probably be laid off, burnt out, or both by this point as just another code/systems monkey that can be replaced later, if needed.
"Think for yourself; question authority", said Timothy Leary. That's one vital life lesson that you will never ever learn from football. In fact, I learned and thought the exact opposite to a fault. Thankfully I was able to unlearn what I had learned...
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