System of Parallel Trenches

“…increasing specialization has created a “system of parallel trenches” in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happen to resides there.”

-David Epstein, Range

I realized the importance of players being multi-sport athletes after a weekend of my daughter playing basketball and volleyball. I would love to give you a play-by-play of everything that I believe is important, but I won’t. Instead, I will share that on one day the girls fell short in the championship game in basketball because of some poor execution, fatigue, and battling the inner voice of negativity when things did not go their way. The next day at a volleyball tournament these same girls faced the same scenario of falling behind and instead of not completing the deal like in basketball, pulled through, collected themselves, and got a victory, not once, but twice in the championship game.

What I took away from this is that they could bounce back and they could work through the journey. It proved that once again sometimes setback/failure/losses can prove pivotal learning tools. To be more concise, we can learn from experience, but we cannot learn without experience.

It was great to watch them face similar hurdles in a different setting and find solutions. The key now is to transfer this new confidence, insight, and mental toughness back to the game of basketball when facing this situation again.

And if nothing else, we must continue to build up our range of experiences to learn, unlearn, and relearn time and time again to build a more robust internal engine and mindset to face any adversity that comes our way.