I was my most creative self when I was playing soccer.
Soccer is a unique environment because no matter how much you train and work on possible scenarios before the game, those exact scenarios will almost never actually present themselves in a match. There are too many changing factors. This means that in the 90 minutes, every player has to make a constant series of decisions, and the team that collectively makes the most “right” decisions wins. This pressure to make a decision and then immediately make another one and another one… forced me to come up with so many different ways of doing things. These are things that, if given an open-ended amount of time, I probably would’ve never chosen because they were too risky, flagrant, flashy, unnecessary, etc., but in the end, were the right decision because they set up a goal or even won us the game.
A good example of this was in a tournament game against a good aggressive opponent. It was a pretty evenly matched game with lots of trash-talking and kicking going on. With a few minutes left, a teammate of mine drew a foul right on the edge of the box. We both lined up over the ball, as we always did, but he got fouled, so he was going to take it. There was no doubt in my mind that the ball was going somewhere toward the net. But when he ran up to actually shoot it, he just lightly tapped the ball toward me. I didn’t see this coming whatsoever. He had never done that before, and he didn’t tell me he was going to this time. So I’m on my heels, totally unprepared, with the ball at my feet. And in that split second I had before those defenders got to me, I decided I was going to curl it in the bottom corner with my left foot, and it worked… We scored and won the game. But had he told me he was going to tap me the ball, I would have NEVER chosen to kick it with my left foot. I was not confident on it. I still don’t know why I chose to do it. But if I would’ve known what he was going to do, and I would’ve taken it with my right, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have gone in.
So the surprise of his decision, mixed with the extremely small time-constraint forced me to react in a way that I never would have, otherwise, and resulted in a big win for myself and the team. It didn’t always happen like that, though. Whether it was trying a pass that was too tight or taking a shot that I didn’t have the angle for, I made plenty of decisions that went wrong every game. The good part about it was that there was no time to dwell. I just had to go and try to make more good decisions so that people forgot about the bad ones.
My dad and I used to always laugh over games where I played poorly but scored a goal or two. Everyone would always come up to me after the game and tell me I did a good job and all that, and my dad would joke and say, “No you didn’t. You were shit.” And my response was always, “It doesn’t matter how poorly you play, as long as you score the goal.” And it’s true, not only in soccer but in any sort of creative field. People only see the final draft of your story or your design or whatever. They don’t see that you had 50 other versions that were terrible and that you just came up with this one last night.
But without the dense timeframe of a soccer game, where I don’t have time to dwell on mistakes and overthink my decisions, I struggle to not do those things. It’s hard for me to turn off the rational side of my brain that says, “you probably shouldn’t try to curl this left-footed because you’re shit on your left foot, and you’re going to look like an idiot when you miss.” Instead, I settle for the same right-footed shot that, even if it does go in, isn’t nearly exciting or as memorable.
I was most creative when playing soccer because I wasn’t afraid of making a mistake.
