Being A Sports Fan Made Me An Optimist — Even Though My Teams Always Lose.

Maryland football

I love sports. I love my Washington Capitals and Washington Nationals. I love my Missouri Tigers. I love my Maryland Terrapins.

The only thing is: I happen to root for teams that almost never win the big one.

In my lifetime, my teams have combined for one championship: Maryland’s 2002 national title in basketball.

The rest have a history of coming up a little short. The Caps have been to the Stanley Cup finals only once — but never won a title. The Nats have never won a playoff series in their short history. Missouri basketball is one of the winningest teams to never reach a Final Four. Missouri football has made four conference championships games in the last decade, but lost all four.

For some, watching so many teams come up short might make them pessimists. I’m just the opposite. I’m optimistic because my teams still have yet to raise that big trophy.

Watching those teams has given me such wonderful reminders about the things that make great work happen. To have success, you need great, experienced leaders for your team. You need great team members. And you need to be a little lucky — being in the right place at the right time makes the difference, sometimes.

And I’ve been fascinated by the way my teams handle themselves despite pressure from fans and media. When everyone’s telling them, “No, you can’t,” it’s amazing to watch teams show resilience and unity.

Above all: The championships offer a carrot to keep chasing. There’s is always more work to do. There is always room to get better. There is always time to rewrite your own script.

I don’t know if this year is the year for my teams. But I’m optimistic — as always — that success is within our grasp.

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That photo of the Maryland football team comes via Flickr user dbking and a Creative Commons license.

You Don’t Need Permission To Do The Best Things In Life.

photo-1475869568365-7b6051b1e030

You don’t need permission to call someone you care about just to say hi.

You don’t need permission to send a kind email to a friend.

You don’t need permission to take a long run in the park.

You don’t need permission to learn something new.

You don’t need permission to try a recipe you really want to cook, or to listen to a band you love.

You don’t need permission to share a secret with someone, or a story.

You don’t need permission to do something nice for someone else.

You don’t need permission to stay up all night to write, or to read, or to talk.

You don’t need permission to sing in the shower.

You don’t need permission to treat yourself to that thing you always wanted.

You don’t need permission to go on an adventure, and you don’t need permission to get lost.

Sometimes, you have to remind yourself: You don’t have to wait for the things that matter most to you in life. Those things are always there, waiting for you, whenever you decide to start.

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That photo comes via Unsplash and photographer Saksham Gangwar.

Nobody’s Going To Stop You.

Turner Field

There’s a fantastic story on Deadspin this week titled,  “I Covered The Braves For A Newspaper That Didn’t Exist.” It’s the story of how a real estate broker from Atlanta realized that he could get a press pass to cover his favorite baseball team by inventing a fake newspaper and becoming its one and only “employee.”

What I love most is this realization the author has about getting onto the field during the game. He writes:

“I was a Braves fan, and so I wanted to be in the Braves’ dugout, on the first-base side. Emboldened, I walked around behind the home-plate umpire while the pitcher threw warm-up tosses and simply walked into the home dugout and to the other camera well. As far as strategies go, ‘walk until someone stops you’ remains undefeated.”

And he’s not wrong. From my years covering sports, I can tell you that you can get away with just about anything at a sporting event as long as you:

A) Look like you know what you’re doing, and
B) Nobody stops you.

I’ve watched rain delays from the dugout, and snuck into stadiums when I wasn’t allowed. If no one else is going to stop you, why should you?

And it turns out that the same philosophy applies to pretty much anything you do. Here’s a lesson from work: A few years ago, we started aggressively promoting newsletters at the bottom of most posts on BuzzFeed.com. There wasn’t a meeting where a bunch of higher-ups agreed that this was the right strategy. My team decided that we should try it. We told our boss on the editorial side, and one on the product side, and then… just started doing it. We figured we’d do it until someone stopped us.

That lasted almost two years.

We had so much success with those boxes that other teams at BuzzFeed decided they wanted access to that space at the bottom of the page. Eventually, we made some rules governing that promo space, and my team is happy to play by the new guidelines.

But the minute we see the next opening — a space where we can try something without a lot of restrictions, an opportunity where another team says, “Sure, that’s OK with us!” — we’re going to take advantage. The rule remains the same: Just start moving until somebody says you have to stop.

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That’s a photo I took at Atlanta’s Turner Field back in 2010.