The Penalty Box: Life Will Never Be Fair
February 12, 2025 at 8:00 a.m.
I hope one of the common themes you get from my weekly offerings is the concept that sports and everyday life are connected in almost every way.
You’ll find that the lessons that we learn from sports, both in team sports and in individual sports, are lessons that we have to learn to navigate our adult lives.
But there are some lessons that are more important to learn and have a more lasting impact than the others.
One of those is that sports, and life, are not fair.
Coaches know this all too well.
A coach can devise the perfect game plan to get a base runner in, to stop the other team’s running game, to force the other team’s lesser offensive players to have beat you, only to have something go wrong.
Maybe it’s an injury.
Maybe it’s a bad call.
Maybe it’s poor execution.
Maybe it’s a bad bounce of the ball.
Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, things just don’t work out.
Coaches wake up every day with the reality that they can spend every free minute formulating a plan that ultimately doesn’t work through no fault of their own.
You can understand why they are edgy a lot, right?
Sometimes a team with high expectations suffers a season-ending injury that negatively affects their hopes for a special season.
Sometimes someone has a bad night at the worst possible time.
Sometimes the best team doesn’t win, because they didn’t play their best.
Life is not fair…it just isn’t.
That being true, the real question is this: What do you do about it?
One of my favorite authors and speakers is Chuck Swindoll. I highly recommend him to you.
Dr. Swindoll says “life is 10-percent what happens to you and 90-percent how you react to it.”
Wiser words have never been spoken.
Let me be clear: I have not mastered this life skill. Not many people have.
It is an essential tool to have your life’s toolbox. If you can harness the unforeseen negatives and at least turn them into neutral moments, you will not only be better off but you will be a magnet to other people who see how you are handling the same things they are going through.
Because it’s hard to do, people will be wondering how you do it, and can they do it that way, too?
We see this is football all the time.
A team throws an interception that is returned, for the sake of our example, to the 15-yard line.
The defense runs on to the field with a very simple goal—to hold the opposition to a field goal.
Sure, they would love to stop them completely, without allowing any points. But in our scenario the other team is already within field goal range, so three points are almost guaranteed.
When the defensive team makes a play and holds the other team to three points, the fact that they lost ground on the scoreboard becomes less of a negative and actually becomes a potential momentum starter for them.
With all of the sickness going around, what happens if you worked really hard on a team presentation at work and the leader of the project gets so sick that they can’t come to work to deliver it?
Someone who knows the project well is going to have to stand up and make it happen.
What happens when your child is sick all week and your daycare says, “sorry, we can’t take him or her back until they are feeling better.”
You must stay home with them, but you still have to complete all your tasks and nail all of your responsibilities for work as well—even though you will be working remotely.
These situations do require some physical effort. You may have to stay up later. You may have to battle against not feeling the best yourself.
But most of the challenges are emotional and mental road blocks you will need to work through and around.
When life hands you a “life’s not fair” moment, the question to ask yourself is “what am I going to do about it?”
It doesn’t mean you will be successful every time—I certainly am not. But if you take the right approach and you look life square in the eye, you have a much better chance of not only surviving but thriving in that.
These things happen to all of us: no matter what our financial status is, no matter what stage in life we are in.
When they happen to you, how do you respond?
I hope one of the common themes you get from my weekly offerings is the concept that sports and everyday life are connected in almost every way.
You’ll find that the lessons that we learn from sports, both in team sports and in individual sports, are lessons that we have to learn to navigate our adult lives.
But there are some lessons that are more important to learn and have a more lasting impact than the others.
One of those is that sports, and life, are not fair.
Coaches know this all too well.
A coach can devise the perfect game plan to get a base runner in, to stop the other team’s running game, to force the other team’s lesser offensive players to have beat you, only to have something go wrong.
Maybe it’s an injury.
Maybe it’s a bad call.
Maybe it’s poor execution.
Maybe it’s a bad bounce of the ball.
Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, things just don’t work out.
Coaches wake up every day with the reality that they can spend every free minute formulating a plan that ultimately doesn’t work through no fault of their own.
You can understand why they are edgy a lot, right?
Sometimes a team with high expectations suffers a season-ending injury that negatively affects their hopes for a special season.
Sometimes someone has a bad night at the worst possible time.
Sometimes the best team doesn’t win, because they didn’t play their best.
Life is not fair…it just isn’t.
That being true, the real question is this: What do you do about it?
One of my favorite authors and speakers is Chuck Swindoll. I highly recommend him to you.
Dr. Swindoll says “life is 10-percent what happens to you and 90-percent how you react to it.”
Wiser words have never been spoken.
Let me be clear: I have not mastered this life skill. Not many people have.
It is an essential tool to have your life’s toolbox. If you can harness the unforeseen negatives and at least turn them into neutral moments, you will not only be better off but you will be a magnet to other people who see how you are handling the same things they are going through.
Because it’s hard to do, people will be wondering how you do it, and can they do it that way, too?
We see this is football all the time.
A team throws an interception that is returned, for the sake of our example, to the 15-yard line.
The defense runs on to the field with a very simple goal—to hold the opposition to a field goal.
Sure, they would love to stop them completely, without allowing any points. But in our scenario the other team is already within field goal range, so three points are almost guaranteed.
When the defensive team makes a play and holds the other team to three points, the fact that they lost ground on the scoreboard becomes less of a negative and actually becomes a potential momentum starter for them.
With all of the sickness going around, what happens if you worked really hard on a team presentation at work and the leader of the project gets so sick that they can’t come to work to deliver it?
Someone who knows the project well is going to have to stand up and make it happen.
What happens when your child is sick all week and your daycare says, “sorry, we can’t take him or her back until they are feeling better.”
You must stay home with them, but you still have to complete all your tasks and nail all of your responsibilities for work as well—even though you will be working remotely.
These situations do require some physical effort. You may have to stay up later. You may have to battle against not feeling the best yourself.
But most of the challenges are emotional and mental road blocks you will need to work through and around.
When life hands you a “life’s not fair” moment, the question to ask yourself is “what am I going to do about it?”
It doesn’t mean you will be successful every time—I certainly am not. But if you take the right approach and you look life square in the eye, you have a much better chance of not only surviving but thriving in that.
These things happen to all of us: no matter what our financial status is, no matter what stage in life we are in.
When they happen to you, how do you respond?