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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, there are now no Girl Scout cookies in my house, and I believe if you are learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a recent story that taught me the importance of focus.
Today’s Fun Fact: Today is March 14th! That means that the NCAA basketball tournament bracket has been announced and March Madness is officially here! Here are some fun March Madness facts courtesy of Foxsports.com.
- The odds of filling out a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.223 quintillion!
- A number 16 seed has never beaten a number 1 seed.
- Three individuals have won an NCAA championship as a player and as a coach: Joe B. Hall as a player and coach of Kentucky, Bob Knight as a player with Ohio State and coach of Indiana, and Dean Smith as a player at Kansas and coach at North Carolina.
- The Connecticut Huskies are the only school to win his-and-her national championships in the same year. They did in 2004 and again in 2014.
- The lowest seed to ever win the NCAA tournament is No. 8 seed Villanova in 1985.
What I Learned Yesterday:
If you’re a long time listener to Stuff I Learned Yesterday then you’ll likely remember that I play guitar and sing each week at my church. As the worship leader, my role is to select the songs we’ll play each week, rehearse with the band, make sure the audio video equipment is loaded with the proper information for each week, welcome the congregation, and keep things flowing smoothly. Of course, there are other tasks like prayer, scripture reading, making announcements, and taking light hearted jabs at the pastor too.
You may recall that I get nervous every week. Some weeks I get more nervous than other times. It’s a mental issue, but it’s still a battle I face each week. Sometimes the smallest thing will set off my nerves. It could be that we’re doing a new song for the first time and I’m nervous about possibly messing up or hoping that the rest of the congregation likes it as much as I do. It could be that a new person is in the congregation and I don’t want to mess up and cause them to never return. It could just be that I’m focusing too much on what I have to do and all that could go wrong.
Once the service starts I’m usually okay. My nerves are gone in no time at all unless we’re going a new song. In those cases, my nerves remain throughout the whole song and go away once I get let out a big sigh of relief when it’s over.
It’s pretty incredible what goes on inside our minds, isn’t it? I mean, when I’m going through a song, I’m singing the words, playing the chords, thinking ahead to what words and chords will come next, thinking about the roadmap of the song and where we are on that map, watching to make sure my kids aren’t acting up, checking the on stage monitor to see if the A/V team is at the same place I am, looking out the front door to see if the people walking by are coming inside, looking around the audience to see if people are engaged with the song, listening to the drummer and bass player to make sure we’re all playing in sync and I haven’t gotten out of rhythm, and monitoring how much I’m tapping or stomping my feet. If I do it too much, I tend to lose my rhythm.
I’m doing all of those things constantly during the time I’m on stage. I don’t notice most of them. But we’re all like that. Our brains are absorbing so much information that’s happening all around us at all times. When we drive or walk down the street, our brain has to process a ton of information in fractions of a second, and we never even think much about it.
Every week I make some sort of mistake. Typically I play a wrong chord. In fact, this morning, I played a wrong chord twice. Those don’t really bother me. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather not play a wrong chord, but I just play through it and keep going. It’s going to happen and I’ve come to accept that. That’s not to say I don’t try to improve. I just know how my brain works and that on any given song that I’ve played hundreds of times, I’ll randomly play a wrong chord. I don’t know why. It just happens and like I said, I’ve come to accept that.
If I play a wrong chord or sing a wrong word, chances are that least half the congregation didn’t even notice. Most of the time my wife doesn’t even notice. That fact has really helped me stop beating myself up and just accept those mistakes.
But sometimes I make a mistake and can’t let it go. That, is a mistake.
A few weeks ago were in our second song, and I made a pretty noticeable mistake. I don’t recall if it was a bad chord or the wrong words. I think it was the wrong words. Whatever it was, it was not a small, “most of the people missed it” kind of mistake. It was obvious, but still relatively minor. It didn’t throw anybody off, it was just a mistake that was very clear.
Of course, no matter what, we have to keep going and play through it. I kept playing, but my mind was racing. My mind went back to rehearsal to check and see if I had played it correctly then. Yes, I had. I then thought about why I made the mistake. What was I thinking? Where did I get confused?
From there my mind just went downhill. I began beating myself up and thinking about how stupid I must have looked and how incompetent I must seem. I wondered if I was being too hard on myself and thought maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought.
And then it happened.
My mind was in a million different places, but none of those places were where it should have been. It should have been on the song at hand. During all my thoughts, we had moved seamlessly onto the third song, but my mind was still adrift. It was not at all focused on the roadmap.
Like a camper without a compass who had been wondering in the forest with his head down, I suddenly snapped into reality, looked up, and had no idea where we were. The song was quickly coming up to a spot that could go to another verse, the chorus, or the bridge. I had no idea which option to take. I chose the bridge.
Wrong.
The correct option was the second verse. The bridge wasn’t supposed to come until after the second verse and the chorus had been sung again. Essentially, I took a left, while the drummer, bass player, A/V team, and congregation took a right.
Since everyone is following me, it’s up to them to figure out where I’m at. Over the next several seconds everyone scrambled to figure out where I was at in the song and get on the same page.
So much for wondering if everyone noticed that earlier mistake. This one was obvious even to the guy sleeping in the back of the room.
Here’s what I learned.
We are all going to make mistakes. In fact, because we all make mistakes, we all pretty much expect others to make them too. We don’t expect perfection out of people. Well, at least we shouldn’t. Let me put it this way. The best single season batting average in Major League Baseball history is .4397 by Hugh Duffy in 1894. That means that he failed 56% of the time, and he’s the best ever!
Of course, except for weathermen, baseball is the only profession where you can fail 56% of the time and still have a job. But the point is that none of us are perfect. We hold ourselves to a higher standard in our minds than we ought to.
Should we strive to be our best. Yes. Always. However, we should also give ourselves room for failure. After all, failure is often where the biggest growth occurs.
But the biggest lesson I learned that day was that my second mistake- the big, obvious, disruptive mistake- occurred because I lost focus. Instead of focusing on my main task, I was focused on a relatively small mistake. My lack of focus caused me to fail again and fail bigger.
Quarterbacks experience this all the time. When they throw an interception, they have to develop the discipline to let it go. They have to put it out of their mind. Why? Because if they don’t, if they continue to dwell on that mistake, bigger mistakes will come.
There is an appropriate time to look at our mistakes and think about what we can do differently next time, but the time for contemplating our mistakes is after the game, after the heat of the moment, after we’re removed from the situation.
So as we go through this week, understand that mistakes will happen. But don’t beat yourself up over them. Don’t let them allow you to lose focus. Don’t let them lead to other mistakes. But do take the time, when it’s appropriate, to learn from them.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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