Find a Bucket

A few years ago, the Port Washington 12-year-old Little League team did something that hadn’t been done in more than 60 years: they won a state championship. But what caught my attention about this story was what their coach did half-way through the year.

Their coach noticed what so many of us probably notice in our own lives. The kids were physically at practice, but they weren’t always at practice. Between drills, their attention would drift toward their phones. A text. A notification. A quick check of something that had absolutely nothing to do with baseball.

So, the coach put a bucket outside the dugout.  Before practice, every player had to put his phone in the bucket. For the next couple of hours, there was only baseball…and surprise, surprise, something incredible happened.

The kids started talking to each other more. They watched each other hit. They paid attention when the coaches spoke…and they got better!  They encouraged and respected each other. They learned from each other and grew as a team.   They were happier!

Practice became less about simply being there… and more about actually being there.  And eventually, that team became state champions.  And, I’d also add that they got the gift of truly experiencing baseball and the power of team sports. A sport that can teach so much about life.

I love this story.   The lesson isn’t about phones really, it’s about focus. It’s about the importance of being single-minded.   We live in a world that constantly competes for our attention. Emails. Texts. Social media. News. Work. Notifications. We’ve become incredibly good at being partially present in a dozen places and completely present in none.

There is tremendous power in giving one thing your complete attention. When you’re working, work(put your cell phone in seperate room). When you’re running, run! When you’re talking with someone you love, put everything else away and listen. And when you’re chasing something important, have the courage to temporarily ignore everything that isn’t.   That’s how great things are created and accomplished.

We have to be able to keep the main thing the main thing. And that’s getting increasingly more difficult in today’s world.

I believe you can quickly tell the health of a team or organization by how its employees use their phones in meetings.  I don’t think that statement needs any more elaboration. When teammates are on their phone during “team time”, it tells us all that they must have more important things to be doing.

We all deserve a 100% from others, just as we need to give our 100% back to them. 

Once we are in our 40’s, we learn that our growth and spiritual development usually has much more to do with subtraction, that it does as addition. We are cleaning up old habits and old belief’s, we are refining our philosophy and what we believe. We can spend so much time looking for complicated ways to improve our lives, when sometimes the answer is remarkably simple:  Just find a bucket!