3 Success Lessons From My Terrible Year in Little League

The people who know me well know that I am not a fan of baseball. I only watch baseball during the World Series. When the Philadelphia Phillies are in it. During the second half of the game. If it’s not too late at night. If I remember. Otherwise, I care less about baseball than Kanye West cares about decorum.

I could go on and on about things I don’t like about the sport, but since I don’t want all my readers to hate me, I won’t. Instead, I’ll share a revelation that may explain why I don’t like baseball. Or at least explain why I never got into it as much as all my friends…

When I was in third grade, me and all my friends went to Little league tryouts. There were two ways the tryouts could go: if you were good enough, you got into Little League. If not, you got to play in the Minor League. Since this was the first year we were eligible to tryout, chances were kind of slim we would make it to Little League.

A few days after the tryout I got a notice that I made Little League! Whoo-hoo! This should have been an awesome thing for me. Sadly, it as not.

I called up my friends to find out if we made the same team. As it turns out, not only did we not make the same team, but we weren’t even in the same league! That’s right, I was the only one of my friends to make Little League that year. This gave me a momentary ego boost, which died immediately after my first practice.

Holy cow! I hated it! I had no friends on the team (they were all in the Minor League). I was the youngest guy by far, so I didn’t connect with anyone on the team. I was also the smallest by far, so I was terrible! The pitches came in fast, the balls were hit hard, and I didn’t know what the heck I was doing.

It was a miserable experience, and at the end of the first year, I gave up. Not only did I stop playing baseball, but I lost interest in the sport altogether.

Looking back on that experience, I realize that there were a few reasons I quit, and I think we can all learn a few lessons for our adult lives from those reasons…

It Was No Fun

All of my friends were in the other league. How did this happen? I have no idea. I was by no means the most athletic one amongst my friends. Maybe there was a weird “Indian Affirmative Action” program going on that I didn’t know about and I was just filling a quota. Who knows? That’ll be one of life’s little mysteries, like why Hollywood keeps green lighting the Friedberg/Seltzer crop of spoof movies (Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, and the upcoming Vampires Suck. Seriously. These are quite possibly the worst movies ever made by man. Or any other creature. But they keep getting made. I don’t get it. Maybe they’ll make “Baseball Movie” next and two banes of my existence can fuse into a congealed mess of awfulness. But I digress…)

Being in a league without my friends made baseball waaaaay less fun for me. Not only were none of my friends on my team, but everybody was a lot older than me too, so it’s not like I made lots of friends.

To top it off, since I wasn’t so great, playing baseball at practice and games was not all that much fun either. Ergo, I did not enjoy baseball. At all.

I’m all for perseverance and stick-to-it-iveness, but at that age, when I just wanted to play baseball for fun, I didn’t care about sticking it out. I quit after a year, and haven’t ever really been into baseball since.

Lesson: Make sure you have some fun! As adults, we often have to do things that we don’t enjoy. But if you never enjoy what you’re doing, it’s time to do something else.

I Sucked

I don’t think I sucked absolutely, but it’s safe to say that comparatively, I was awful. I was the smallest, worst hitting, worst fielding guy on the team. I needed to rely on a bad pitcher and a small strike zone to get on base. I never took the field until the 6th inning, and I’m guessing that’s when the opposing team thought, “yes! now we can win this game.”

It’s not my fault! I was years younger than most others! Let me tell you, there is a huge difference between a 12 year old athlete and a 8 year old athlete (yes, I accept the egotistical ridiculousness of describing my 8-year old self as an athlete).

It’s hard to go back day after day, week after week, to participate in activities that you are awful at. I realize now that if I had stuck it out, by the time I became 12 years old I may very well have become awesome. But at the time, it just wasn’t worth it.

Being bad at something is not a great excuse to quit, if you are building towards something you truly want. In fact, you have to be willing to be bad, to stretch yourself, and to feel awful at times in order to work through the process of improvement that will eventually make you great.

However, make sure you are making progress, and celebrate the little victories along the way. Doing something over and over and never making any progress and never seeing any results is a quick way to burn out.

Lesson: Celebrate Your Small Progress Victories! – The road to real success is usually a long one. Set yourself small progress goals, and celebrate as you achieve them. If you never make progress, or never acknowledge the progress you are making, you may very well give up on a worthwhile goal long before you should.

I Didn’t Care

One of the main reasons I gave up on Little League (and baseball entirely) is that I just didn’t care enough. I was looking for a fun organized sport to partake in, not a chance to be the pee-wee loser in the land of baseball giants.

Some kids love what they do enough (or have crazy enough parents that force them to do it) that they get up at 4AM everyday to practice before school (I’m looking at you, ice skaters…). I didn’t care about baseball nearly that much. As a result, I didn’t have any drive to stick it out and put in the work to get better.

Lesson: Ask Yourself, “Do I Care?” – Sometimes we have goals that we really don’t care about. They may have been set for us by other people (like our parents), or they may be what we feel society expects us to do, or they may just be goals we set years ago that we no longer care about. Life is too short to plug away at something you have no passion for. Revisit your goals and life choices and ask yourself, “do I really care about this?” If not, it’s time for a change.

The overall lesson here is about setting the appropriate challenge level for yourself. If a task is too easy, you get bored. If the challenge is too great (like my Little League experience), you get frustrated and give up. If the challenge is just right, you stay motivated, push through obstacles, and have fun even when things aren’t going quite right.

When you set your long term and short term goals, play around with the size until you hit that sweet spot. Many “motivational speakers” will just tell you to “dream big.” Nothing wrong with that, but if you are not up for the challenge you are just setting yourself to give up. Scale the challenge back a bit, and you are much more likely to achieve your goal and so much more.

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