Life’s Monday Morning Game Review

Events in our lives are normally not as good, nor as bad as they first seem.

After the Dallas Cowboys’ opener, a 24-17 win over the defending Super Bowl Champion New York Giants, I meant to go online and book my flights and hotel reservations for New Orleans, the site of this year’s Super Bowl.  But I was busy, like most Mondays, putting out fires and readying myself for the demands of the upcoming workweek.  So I forgot to do it.  And I was lucky, because after my ‘Boys got what many in the media called ‘bullied’ the following Sunday up in Seattle, I was convinced we’d (real fans always say ‘we’ right?) have the first pick in the 2013 College Draft.  So, I readied myself for a Saturday of college football, looking to see which stars might be the missing pieces for a return to the glory days.

But then reality hit, also known as another weekend of football.  Like is normally the case, the Dallas Cowboys proved to be neither as bad as they looked against Seattle nor as good as they looked against New York.  They struggled to a win against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in their home opener and, as is the case more times than not, they were somewhere in between what they revealed the first two weeks.  Actually (and unfortunately), they were much closer to the team that flew up to the Northwest and got their lunch money taken than the one that traveled to the Northeast and ‘shocked the NFL world’, but let’s table that conversation for another week.

I should’ve known better, though.  In all my years of playing football, if there is one thing that I learned, it was this lesson.  It is never as good as you think.  And fortunately, it’s never as bad either.  It bears repeating.  Things are never as bad as they seem, nor as good.  After games when I thought I played extremely well and couldn’t wait to watch the game film on Monday, I inevitably discovered that the plays I made weren’t always as exciting and impressive.  And I always found a few mistakes that needed to be corrected.  But on the Mondays following what I thought was a poor performance, I almost always felt relieved, realizing more times than not that even in the worst performances that there were positive things I could take away.

The application to our personal lives is simple, yet powerful.  Although it is human nature to appreciate our successes, we must always do our best to keep them in proper context and perspective.  Rarely are our achievements without error or misstep.  And even rarer is the performance or impressive act without any room for improvement.  But those people for whom that is a problem—namely, those trying to keep all of their success in life from inflating their egos—are probably not reading this blog.  The rest of us, for whom overcoming challenges and the occasional setback is more the norm than the exception, must heed to the other side of this “Monday Morning Review” coin.  Knowing that the ‘game film’ of life is rarely as bad as it seems gives us some confidence that whatever we face will be bearable.  And more importantly, when we put them under the light, flip them on both sides, and thoroughly examine them, we will leave feeling better, knowing we can turn any situation into a learning, and hopefully growing, experience.