No disrespect to sports fans, but sports discussions are not known for their wealth of theoretic wisdom. Certainly, sports are great fun, and the pull of professional sports has even the attention of the Wall Street Journal. Articles on sports are full of analysis and postgame hindsight, but rarely philosophical insight.
And so it was to my great surprise that an innocuous conversation about basketball turned up a philosophical gem. A child I was speaking with was expressing his frustrations with his grade-school basketball teammates, in particular how he felt that some of the bigger guys weren’t trying hard enough. The phrase he used was: “Tall guys don’t jump.”
Certainly, the taller guys wanted to get rebounds over the other players. But they weren’t jumping. Flat-footed, they relied on their extra inches to give them the height they needed to get the ball for their team. A decent strategy, perhaps, except that it wasn’t working. The shorter players, perhaps more desperate, with impressive vertical leaps, were retrieving the ball more often than not.
Tall guys don’t jump. Why don’t they? Isn’t it obvious that they are losing their advantage by keeping their feet on the floor? Complacency, perhaps, is at play here, as well as an atrophy of the discipline muscle. Taller basketball athletes can grow complacent as youth, assured that their height will get them what they need. Shorter players know that only hard work and practice will help them compete. By the time the taller players notice that their height no longer offers the advantage it once did, the difference in discipline and dedication is so great that the taller players are at a distinct disadvantage. They are not used to working hard to get what they want.
If necessity is the mother of invention, adversity is the father of hard work and discipline. Most people, it seems, will try to get away with as little effort as possible. This holds true for children as well as adults. Those who grew up with distinct disadvantages had an advantage over those of more privileged youth: they grew up knowing that the way to succeed is to work. Poor children cannot rely on money to get them out of trouble, children with dyslexia cannot rely on conventional learning skills to pass them through school, and smaller or weaker children cannot rely on physical advantages to see them through to adulthood.
By contrast, those with privilege, either external (wealth, social status) or internal (physical strength, intelligence), are truly at a disadvantage. They are not motivated by necessity. Smart children grew up knowing that they can study the night before the test and ace it; physically superior kids found that they could excel at sports without any undue effort.
Often when these children become adults, the positions reverse. Those who by necessity learned to work hard now have the real life tools to succeed; those who learned to get away with less work now find life getting away from them. The latter may have a strong desire to reach their goals, but willingness alone does not get you off the ground.
There are many lessons to be learned from here, but my point now is this: adversity is a gift, a motivator. We don’t seek it out – as human beings we are hard-wired to avoid pain at all costs. But when it comes, we can embrace it and work to grow from the experience. There is always a silver lining, if we only seek it out.
Shimmy Feintuch, LMSW is a licensed social worker practicing in New York City. As a therapist, Shimmy currently works with clients struggling with anxiety, depression, behavior problems, and other issues. A similar version of this article was originally posted on Silver Lining, a collection of blog posts and other writings, which can be found on shimmyfeintuch.com. Shimmy’s weekly blog for Nefesh International, Spiritual Sofa, is at nefeshinternational.org/blogs.