The Will To Win

This is a complex topic, young padawan.

I’m sitting here after a long hard day in the VO pocket. Just had a quick client out of the blue and worked on an app for athletes.

Maybe a little ironic- I had the day off because I got a second opinion on my foot, my foot surgery. The reason I can barely work four days a week as a Grip for TV production. My bane. But also my fire in the belly.

The news was, this doctor doesn’t think the neuroma was causing my back pain, but rather, the opposite. I’m getting an MRI but probably have a herniated disc.

So, I feel a renewed sense of will to Win.

Do you ever feel guilty about winning? Like… maybe somebody else needs it or deserves it more than you do?

Gosh darn it, I do. I don’t know if winning is ugly, per se, but winning isn’t pretty like it is in the movies.

Winning isn’t that perfect bead of sweat running down your cheek while your eyes glisten in the moonlight and the credits roll.

Winning is taking the food out of someone else’s kid’s mouth. Someone who is maybe a nicer person, or a better person, or a more responsible, deserving person, than you are.

Yes, it’s a big pie market out there, and there’s plenty of oxygen for us all to breathe. But …when you’re in that vocal booth- and once you get your basic training, you know how to get a good sound, you know where you know what the client wants, and you know how to move your audience, and you know the fun little flare bits you can deliver that will stand out head and shoulders above the competition- the only thing to really be thinking about or focused on is winning itself. Because there is no pennant, there is no prize for second best.

Here’s where great sportsmanship comes in. You have to find a way to psychologically go beyond yourself and your needs and see the end-user, and the client, and the person who hired you, and the whole little solar system around this project and how it spirals out into the broader market, and you have to want them all to win. You want them all to win so bad that it gets you thrilled to be the one to actually get to perform the action of putting their thing out into the environment… With just your voice. And technical know-how, of course.

The will to win is the willingness to see that brand’s- or buisnesses’- or author’s- impact on their broader environment, and to maximize their impact.

The more subtle distinctions you can perceive in that market, and vibe with, the more winning you bring to the table.

It’s interesting to me how many sports siblings there are; the Manning football brothers, the Williams sisters, Seth and Stephen Curry, and dozens of others. Sure, genetics must play a role; but also, I believe, if you can compete well against your family, you can compete against strangers in the marketplace. Because they’ll bring it out of you.

I had a ‘satori’ (awakening) moment when playing a sport called Pickleball against my uncles. They are very very good. But I realized about halfway through the time playing, that I wasn’t really trying to win. I was trying to play well in their eyes. Once I committed to winning, everything changed. And for me at least, it’s not psychologically easy to flip that switch with people that I love and have complex relationships with.

It’s the whole Oedipal complex come to life, really. They did a study of ‘great men’- not necessarily kind, or gracious, or even necessarily positive for that matter- but who had an outsized impact on the world at large. And the VAST majority had lost one or both parents before they turned fifteen years old It’s because that flips a kind of ‘sink-or-swim’ switch deep inside the DNA that a more comfortable life simply does not necessitate.

For those of us who don’t have that kind of pressure put on us externally, if you want the big result, it’s important to flip that switch.

Give yourself permission to play to win.