As an adult, have you ever engaged in one too many “fun but useless in the big scope of things” activities?
I am.
At the moment I’m writing this, I’m in the playoffs in my Fantasy Football league and the destined to be a Hall of Fame quarterback, Peyton Manning, the dude who brung me to the dance (the playoffs), might very well be responsible for me losing the championship coming off his all-time low fantasy score 0f 2 whopping points (averaging around 20 points a game this season) which had the trickle down effect of limiting one more starter on my roster, his receiver Emanuel Sanders (averaging 15-25 points a game) to 8 points, in a winning effort against the 7-6 Buffalo Bills.
A 30-40-50 point opportunity reduced to 10 points.
Fuck.
Just in case you aren’t entirely familiar with what Fantasy Football is, here’s how Wikipedia describes it…
Fantasy football is an interactive online competition in which users compete against each other as general managers of virtual “fantasy” teams built from “drafting” real players. Each of the “drafted” “fantasy” players are professional American football players in the National Football League.
Each week, general managers of their fantasy team are able to perform different actions simulating a real professional football organization. These actions consist of drafting, trading, adding or dropping players, and changing rosters every week.
Due to the growth of the internet, fantasy football has vastly increased in popularity, particularly because fantasy football providers such as ESPN Fantasy Sports, CBS, Yahoo! Fantasy Sports, and the NFL itself are able to keep track of statistics entirely online, eliminating the need to check box scores in newspapers regularly to keep track of players, which is how fantasy football players first had to keep track of stats.
Most leagues have a 13 week season, a small playoff bracket, and a single week championship in week 16 of the NFL season.
The regular season for the NFL runs for 17 weeks and in my Fantasy league, if you make the playoffs and keep winning, you’re in for 16 weeks.
For a hyper competitive guy like me, that’s potentially 16 weeks of investing a lot of your down time in studying Fantasy Football relevant information.
And that’s with me winging it and letting the computer auto pick my team because I was unwillingly to put in the work to study for drafting the team on my own during the four weeks of the NFL preseason.
This is only my second year of playing Fantasy Football, and in my first year I went to the championship and lost and this year I’m in the playoffs and I’m down by a nice chunk of points going into the next round.
I might not be going for the full 16 weeks this year but I’ll have been in for at least 15.
So that’s 29 weeks of my life where a significant amount of my focus was devoted to something that’s making me dumber.
If I’m being realistic about it, that’s what I’d call it – me becoming dumber.
None of the football stats and insights I’m amassing are doing anything to make me smarter in any realm beyond Fantasy Football.
I guess I could take pride in the fact that I’m reinforcing my drive to be the best, to win, and then do the work/studying/research necessary to make that happen, but that feels like a stretch.
Waking Up To Reality – That Loving Bitch With An Ice Pick For A Tongue
What really woke me up to how fantasy football was making me dumber was watching the latest Tim Ferriss Random Show the other day.
For some reason I chose to watch this during some down time instead of studying what the next logical moves would be for my fantasy roster, which is I what I’ve made a habit of doing for the past 14 weeks.
Watching Tim and Kevin talking books, meditation, diet, 30 day challenges, cool apps, etc. had my mind expressing gratitude to me for illuminating it.
It was similar to the feeling of relief that my mouth sends to me when it is parched in the morning and I take my first gulp of water.
And this was kind of weird because it’s not like I’m completely slacking as all the work I do for clients and this site asks me to study material that sharpens my mind.
This is making me think that I’ve babied this mind of mine to the point where it is now officially high maintenance and it has come to expect a heightened level of stimulation.
I’m a learning junkie so I get a mental boner from gaining new distinctions that will help me to make a smart play for Fantasy football, but it’s like a half-boner compared with the raging hard mental boner I was getting while listening to Tim and Kevin and getting turned onto new books or other resources that can genuinely make me a more valuable human being.
Leisure junk food activities are a must but need to be indulged in with moderation in mind.
One of the reasons that I think that my mind is feeling a little extra starved right now is because I’ve gone beyond moderation with my junk food activities as I’m also dedicating time every day to becoming a better Madden 15 football player via practicing on the PlayStation 4.
This is another activity where I’m exercising daily discipline in an effort to improve as I am currently spending more time practicing than I am playing actual games.
With Madden, at least I can point to the benefits of giving myself a mental workout with the hand/eye coordination activity, the pattern recognition exercise that quickly reading offenses and defenses is, and the critical thinking involved with remembering my opponent’s tendencies in an effort to cultivate a strategy that overwhelms them.
And on top of all of that, the benefit of engaging in an activity that I truly enjoy – even the practice. Well, when I win. I’m still working on and am getting better at not being a dick hole when I lose – an incredible life opportunity all on it’s own.
But the overarching benefit that I’m receiving is that of The Challenge.
The masculine thrives on challenge and breaking through limitations and experiencing the freedom and massive relief that comes with overcoming them and winning.
As dumb as it sounds and as meaningless it is in the broader scope of things, this form of challenge is meeting my needs at high levels at this moment.
I understand that it’s nowhere near as noble a challenge as Gandhi challenging the British monarchy in an effort to help them see the error in their ways, nor am I engrossed in a “Fuck Cancer” campaign and seeking funding for methods to cure it.
Perhaps someday I will take my desire to excel at Madden and let it connect with a charitable purpose where I devote all my winnings in tournaments to a cause/person that I am deeply inspired by.
But at this moment, I’m not yet comfortable putting money on the line based on what I can do with the game.
I’ve made into the top 1% of ranked players but I feel there’s more room for improvement. When I feel like I’m a consistent machine and have rooted out my beginner bad habits, only then will this step make sense to me.
But then I look at a guy like Eric “Problem” Wright, the current G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time) Madden player and I wonder where he felt he was in terms of ability when he started competing for money in tournaments.
Did he feel ready, or did he just he drift into it blindly, fuck off a lot of money and eventually figure things out to where he was making more right calls than wrong calls which led him to consistently winning more and more tournaments?
When are you good enough to compete with dollars on the line?
I have an inkling that says my game won’t reach it’s highest potential until I do compete with money on the line because that’s the higher level of challenge.
Playing for money makes you play at an entirely different level than just playing to play. Because when money is on the line, you can’t afford to wing it. At least it would for me because I despise the idea the of gambling with the odds stacked against me.
That’s what I equate playing Madden for money with limited skills to be – gambling against house odds. No fucking bueno.
Winning: Going Beyond Simply Satisfying The Ego And The Bank Balance
The pot in my fantasy league is $100 bucks which is equals me getting paid maybe $1 dollar an hour for all the work I put in if I were to win in the end.
Not a good R.O.I. for my bank balance; only a massive pay off for my ego.
But the thing that sucks about Fantasy is that it is SO random! You never know who is going to show up and perform – read: Peyton Manning Week 14 – 173 yards, 0 touchdowns, 2 interceptions against a team that is currently 7-6 using an old life-long back up quarterback as their starter. What the hell?
Peyton was on a 51 game streak of throwing at least one touchdown in a game and he decides that this is the game that he ends this record-breaking pace. In my playoffs. While I’m facing a guy who had EVERYONE show up for him. Fucking awesome! That’s fucking fantasy football for you!
There was no way to predict that.
Another dose of high octane fantasy randomness for you…
You never know if your stud is going to get injured mid-game and leave you not only with a low score for that game but perhaps sending you on a wild hunt to replace him for the following weeks or, the rest of season if it ends up being a serious enough injury.
Yet another dose of high octane fantasy randomness for you…
You never know if you’re gonna draft Adrian Peterson who gets kicked out for the season for child endangerment or Ray Rice who gets kicked out for spousal abuse and end up shit out of luck in one of the most valuable roster positions for your team.
And we won’t even delve into the possibility of seemingly randomness activity influenced by organized crime that may or may not have its hand in the outcome of certain games.
Fucking. Fantasy. Football. More of a gamble than a science. More like Black Jack than like Poker.
I’ve never been a fan of gambling. I’ve lived in Vegas for two years now and I haven’t gambled one single time. Not even a penny in the slot machine.
And maybe that’s why I’m not so excited about doing fantasy again next year.
A lot work can go into looking at statistical data, betting on history and match ups and potentially being made to look like a fool sitting there with your dick in your hand by randomness which inserts itself – sometimes in your favor, other times to your demise.
Now it’s not like I want to bowl in life with the bumper guards up so that I’m guaranteed I’ll hit the pins. I’m not looking to play Tee Ball. I just want to have the best shot at being rewarded for my hard work.
I’m not afraid of the work that you have to put in to be good. In fact, I’m more afraid of something that asks me to depend on luck than I am of work.
But unlike with fantasy footbal, I realize that the work I need to do to become better at Madden can benefit me beyond Madden.
Here are two MASSIVE ways that it can do so:
#1. Becoming the kind the person who you can’t tell if I’ve just won or lost a game because I’m in the same cool mood whatever the outcome of the game was and…
#2. Feeling incredible pressure and doing the opposite of what everyone else does – calming down
I’m a big believer in the premise of, “How you do anything is how you do everything” so I’m going to trust that my life as a whole will improve when I master these two activities with Madden being the used as the stimulus for this worthy challenge.
The same challenge could apply to Fantasy Football because I stress like a motherfucker when I see other players on the team my players are on vulturing touches and targets. Or when my guys are just melting down and throwing picks or fumbling or just overall being ineffective… while the guy I’m playing has a team that’s kicking ass that day and is steadily racking up the points on me.
That is DEFINITELY a scenario that stresses me the fuck out and I could use that trigger in a proactive way to serve in my practicing being calm, relaxed, and loving in the face of this shitty information that is triggering tension in my body, but I will only get one or two more games to try this out because I’m retiring from fantasy football after this season.
Don’t get me wrong.
I LOVE me some fantasy football. I just don’t love it enough to put myself in a situation where I feel like I’m devoting so much time to it and feel like I’m becoming dumber as the result of it.
Are you guilty of engaging a little too much recreational activity now?
If you’re being honest with yourself, do you feel like you’re becoming dumber because you’re spending so much time “relaxing and having fun”?
If so, I invite you to reexamine what you’re investing your time in.
Is it truly excessive or it are you being too hard on yourself?
For me, I know now that I’ve got bandwidth for just one pure fun hobby that I go balls to the wall with.
I know now that will be Madden.
I do know now that when I do start competing for money, I would want to compete for something bigger than me… a college or a start up fund for my child or something else close to home.
But I also want to demand that this hobby serve in becoming a better person in being a facilitator for me being both a gracious winner and loser and calming down when I’m being challenged by amazing play or shitty breaks (fumbles, tipped passes that get intercepted, passes being dropped on offense or defense, cheaters, etc.).
I don’t think you should or shouldn’t demand growth from your leisure activities. But it is possible. Hell, in this post here I even revealed how to turn your porn watching into an empowering practice.
But I do believe that moment by moment we are given opportunities to express love and thoughtfulness and we can do that, or we can choose to close down and… that some things encourage you to do the former and some things encourage you to do the latter.
You know which do which for you.
So I invite you to involve yourself in as many activities that help you shine in your own unique way.
Just be honest with yourself and don’t overdo it on the ones that are truly making you dumber.
Talk soon,
Lewis LaLanne
PS. If you’re serious about figuring out some rituals that will help you go beyond your bullshit habits and tendencies and stepping into the next bad ass version of yourself you definitely want to check out these notes I took on the Eben Pagan Seeds of Success course <—–
