A week ago, while eating pecan pie, I had a revelation. For it to make sense, however, I’ll have to explain something. You know all the sports that so many people in this country seem so obsessed with? I don’t like them. I find them incredibly boring. I never knew why, exactly. All I knew is that they bored me to tears.
Football, basketball, baseball, sports news, all of it — bores me. I never asked myself why, because I didn’t care. When I was young, I tried watching to see if I would get into them. My father would watch Monday Night Football every week, and just about any other NFL game that was on. Friends talked about watching “the game” all the time, as if I would just know what game that was. I tried watching, but I couldn’t do it. I would just say, “this is lame,” and then do something else or change the channel.
When eating my pecan pie last week, a thought just popped into my head. It’s because it’s a team. I don’t care about the team. I started to think about all the sports I didn’t mind watching, and even find a bit entertaining, and they are all individual sports. I value the goals, efforts, and accomplishments of the individual over that of the team.
I’ve been in large meetings in a large corporation and seen everybody in the room nodding their heads and going along with really bad ideas because it’s “what we’re doing.” If it’s what “the team” does, they did it. I don’t understand that. Well, I do know. Those people probably value the needs of the team more than the needs of the individual.
Which do you value more, the individual or the team? There is nothing wrong with either preference, but if you find that you just don’t fit in anywhere in the corporate world, that might be the reason. If so, you might be better off on your own, working freelance in your chosen profession.
I don’t fit, so now I work for myself. Others might not fit but keep at it because they have a great paycheck. And then there is that large group of people known as “team players,” who seem like such odd creatures to me. I work better on my own. Do you know where you fit?
