What I Learned About Success from 13 Years of Playing Softball
And how I won MVP (Most Valuable Player).
My most successful year of softball was the last year I played. It was my senior year of high school, and I had been playing since I was a young girl.
I started playing t-ball when I was five years old. In my white baseball pants and baby blue stirrups, I learned the fine art of hitting a ball off a stationary object. That was my best year of hitting.
From there, I spent another nine years playing softball as part of Greenfield Baseball Association — a local ball club in my hometown. I made the All-Star team several summers as I got older and spent long weekends in the blazing sun, playing tournaments with the best players in the league.
I even spent a few years playing travel ball — a club for the best players in town. Basically, my mom spent a lot of money for me to sit on the bench and watch the best players in town, play. They were the greats.
I was good, though. I was good and when it was fun, I loved playing softball. I loved getting dirty, diving for grounders in the infield, or sliding into a base when I got a hit or attempted to steal. I loved being on a team — the energy and camaraderie of team sports always gave me joy.
I loved the bright lights that came on at sunset for night games. I loved the sound of bat hitting ball, and cheers being sung from the dugout. I loved the smell of the snack bar in between games, and the taste of Gatorade when you could stand to drink it instead of water. I loved the feeling of hitting a home-run on the rare occasions it happened.
I’m grateful I was able to play softball all those years. I still get a warm feeling when I think back on that time. I had a lot of fun, made a lot of friends, and learned a heck of a lot about life.
In hindsight, the best lesson softball gave me was about success.
The reason my senior year of high school was the most successful year of my softball career, is two-fold, and maybe a little surprising. I played in every game that year, had minimal errors, and a decent batting average. I also won Most Valuable Player of the team. But those aren’t the reasons it was my most successful year.
I look back on that year and see it as successful because: 1) I went after my truest desires, and 2) I had a lot of fun doing what I loved.
Shortstop was always my favorite position. But because I was known as a utility player — able to play multiple other positions, including pitcher — I rarely got to play shortstop. I spent most of my time either pitching or playing a different infield position.
Pitching was cool, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as other positions, and I was pretty burned out by my final high school years. So at the beginning of my senior year, I did something brave. I went to my coach and told him I didn’t want to pitch that year, I only wanted to play shortstop.
To my delight, he honored my wishes. I didn’t pitch a single game that season, and I got to play shortstop every single game. It was the best season of my life.
To break it down further, I was successful that season because: I identified what I loved most about playing softball (being able to play shortstop) → I went after it, and somebody else helped me get it → I did it, and I did it pretty well → I had a great time doing it.
And then I received the honor of being Most Valuable Player, I believe, as an outpouring of those things. It’s all connected.
Success is a crazy thing.
It seems to me that we can really work ourselves into a frenzy over success. Ideas about what success is and how to be successful are coming at us from everywhere. Personally, I get exhausted by it. It doesn’t have to be like that.
We know success is about accomplishing or achieving a goal or purpose, and things like popularity or money can come with it.
Some definitions specify success as the achievement of a desired goal, which I believe to be a key modification. Desire means the difference between healthy success, and succeeding for the sake of success. Desire makes it personal. It brings relativity to the table, as it should.
What does success look like to YOU?
You can’t be successful until you figure out what being successful means to you. And you have to stop caring about what it means to others.
Think about the symbols often attributed to success: climbing to the top, high heels or suit and tie, a certain number of figures for your annual income, fame. Are any of those things actually important to you?
When I think about “the top”, it seems like it’d be pretty hard to breathe up there. The romance of climbing a tall mountain like Kilimanjaro, for example, fades pretty quickly when you realize how uncomfortable and lonely it is on the actual peak. By the time you reach Stella Point, you don’t even like the peak anymore. You just want to get there as quickly as possible, take a photograph for proof, and then get your ass off the mountain. You most likely can’t even see anything.
It’s the same with fame. I’m not famous so I can’t say for sure, but I’m willing to bet famous people are some of the loneliest people on earth. Someone I respect — a long-time friend with wisdom oozing out of him — recently reminded me that it only gets lonelier the more successful we become. I think of people like Anthony Bourdain and Robin Williams and wonder how they might attest to this. I also wonder what success really looked like to them.
What does success look like to you? That’s your starting point in figuring out how to get it. Going back to my softball example: my success that year came from identifying what I loved most about the sport — playing shortstop — and doing what it took to make sure that’s exactly what I did.
To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone. ~Reba McEntire
So what is it? Is success finding a way to have very few possessions and live off of very little money? Is it restoring broken relationships and deepening the connections you have with loved ones? Is it overcoming an addiction? Is it learning how to transform your pain, instead of transferring it to others?
Or how about learning all the things you’ve ever wanted to learn, like how to play harmonica or how to grow your own vegetables? Maybe your idea of success is to have your very own farm with goats and chickens and rescued dogs. Or maybe it’s to finally write that book you’ve been dreaming of writing.
Figure out what success looks like to you and then be brave enough to go after it, no matter what anybody else thinks or says. And when you achieve it, remember: success is just another part of life, like poop and daisies.
