Everyone loves winning.
Here’s some of my favorite times that I won:
Yep, winning feels awesome. Shoots all kinds of chemicals through your brain that virtually nothing outside of serious drugs can imitate. It’s powerful.
It’s addictive.
Building our company I became completely obsessed and addicted to winning, sometimes to the detriment of other more important things.
Any sport has this weird dynamic, where there can be only one winner and a ton of losers. Second is as forgettable as 30th place.
I worked at a third place paper company before I worked in esports. There were two big companies who got a large chunk of the work, and we were never going to beat them. We also didn’t expect to. In fact, that was our strategic advantage. We positioned ourselves to get the work they couldn’t handle (overflow) and be more of a small guy. Sometimes we would win work with people who don’t want to work with the giant conglomerate. We didn’t build some small mom and pop business out of this, we’re talking a billion dollar company with over 1400 employees. So being third meant we were a MUCH bigger business than those below us.
This doesn’t really work the same in sports. Sure the second place and down teams still make robust businesses, but their “second place” doesn’t matter much more to their business than anyone else who didn’t win. You can be the 22nd place team and make the most money and you can be the 2nd place team and make the least money.
Take a second and think - do you remember the names of many (if any) second place teams from five years ago in any sport? I can’t, and it’s my job to watch.
Oh wait, I actually can remember a bunch of second place teams. It was every time Splyce didn’t come in first.
If you run the Patriots or the Orioles or the Bulls, a single game shows your success (or lack thereof). You get to ride the high from winning or the low from losing for some period of time until your next match.
If you run Splyce or G2 or Cloud 9, you might literally go from a huge victory in League of Legends, to a smashing defeat in Counterstrike, to a close victory in Rocket League in the course of a few hours. The emotional rollercoaster of owning an esports team is excruciating for someone with high levels of passion. I found myself completely overwhelmed by the ebbs and flows of how our teams performed over a single day. I never had time to sit with a win before a loss in another game would snatch away my joy and blast me with despair.
Now the crazy part of all this is that Splyce as an organization was INCREDIBLY successful competitively overall. We won regional and world championships in a ton of different games. There are many, many organizations that have just a few or zero championships. Yet, every time we weren’t in first place it ate at me inside. I wanted to win so badly. No, it was worse than that - I needed to win. I had begun to tie the success of myself, my identity, who I was as a person to every single victory and failure. It no longer became about whether I could build a thriving business (which we did such a good job at that someone bought our company). All that mattered to me was how we performed on the field of play.
As you can imagine this affected me in so many different ways. I made super poor leadership decisions about where we should spend money. I would over budget for players and under budget for areas of business growth. I would make the staff feel as if losing a single player who signed with another team was the dagger that would kill our company (narrator: it wasn’t) Above all, my mental health was in the dumpster. My anxiety was crippling me. I had tied my self worth to something that wasn’t even the slightest barometer of what I should be measuring my self worth with.
This is a visual representation of how I was driven mad with my obsession. The picture above is the Wall of Champions for the LEC (the European League of Legends professional league). You’ll notice that there are only three teams on there, and all but one title were between just G2 and Fnatic.
Every time I saw this wall - every time they added another plaque with G2 or Fnatic’s logo on it, I saw myself as lesser than. It didn’t matter that we were in the top 4 virtually every season, nor that we actually played vs G2 for one of the titles they won. The only thing that mattered was that we weren’t up there.
This is the second visual representation of my madness. In the Call of Duty League Hall of Champions banners were hung for each team who won a championship. As you can see on the far right of this photo Splyce is up there - we were among the other champions.
This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you how I had finally made it and how satisfied I became. That is unfortunately not how addiction works. This example is the next stage for how deep this went for me. I could see it was attainable to be recognized as “first” or “the best” here, so the fact that we weren’t the team with the most banners (or really all of the banners) drove me even harder to want to win. I got what I wanted and it actually made things worse.
The worst and best thing to happen to me during this obsession came from someone I didn’t get along with when they were treating me at their worst. Sometimes the best lessons come from those moments with people we don’t jive with, as opposed to the wise sagely advice from a close advisor.
I had worked brutal long nights for weeks in a row during the off season of this particular game. I was on the phone with agents in California at 2am and back up at 6am for calls with agents in Europe. I was determined to build this team to the caliber I knew we were capable of.
This was one of the craziest off seasons where lots of players were moving around in this particular game and no one really knew who was going to come out on top. So each time a single player committed to a team the entire landscape would shift. I was evolving on the fly as my staff and I figured out what moves to make.
All of this effort and things weren’t breaking our way. One after another our plans were getting shifted because a player would decide to go with someone else. I knew we were giving it everything we had, and yet sometimes shit just doesn’t go your way. That’s life.
Late one night, I had a phone call with one of the people who I worked closely with at the time on roster related stuff. He ripped into me. I’ll never forget the way he made me feel that night as he shit all over me for the lack of success we’d had in getting players signed. I was on my front lawn in my socks, pacing back and forth as I listened to him berate me for failing to do what he wanted me to do. To listen to him tell it, you would think I specifically went out and chose to have us not succeed.
That was a breaking point for me. I felt at my absolute lowest mentally and emotionally. I knew I was capable but with a lack of victories in the off season over the last few weeks combined with that phone call I didn’t feel any faith in myself. Fortunately, I was already working with a therapist at the time and I was able to get help from them in facing this challenge I’d been avoiding for so long head on - my addiction to winning. I was ready to overcome it.
I spent the following months working through my addiction and coming to terms with how it was driving my self worth. I found ways to reset my values to things that actually mattered to me: how I treated others, how I spent my time, how I cared for my family, what activities I engaged in outside of work. And slowly, methodically, I grew. Like a tree, it took time and nurturing and patience to get there, but eventually I found myself in a really healthy place toward competition and my own self worth.
I’ve recently been listening to this podcast called The Quest, by Justin Kan. If you aren’t familiar with Justin he’s one of the co-founders of Twitch (big tech company that sold to Amazon for a billion dollars in 2015). He’s been documenting his journey dealing with a lot of the same things I did, around this need to win big and show everyone how big he won. He’s used mindfulness practices, such as meditation, gratitude, and exercise, to help him on his path.
One of the questions he often gets from young founders is how to balance mindfulness practice with being successful. There is this idea that you are successful in the startup world because of your obsession, rather than in spite of it. His answer has been refreshing to hear because it’s how I’ve been feeling lately as I look back at my time building Splyce. He says that though his obsession with success and extrinsic motivations were a part of what made Twitch successful he sees that he would have been even better at his job as someone who is more intrinsically driven now. Some people may think this is some hippie bullshit - ten years ago I would have agreed with you. Now that I’ve lived it, I am fully in agreement with Justin. Imagine what I could have done to lead my staff, grow the company and feel more fulfilled if I didn’t have this unhealthy obsession with winning - with proving myself. My business decisions would have been more sound, I would have been more likely to listen to the incredibly smart people around me and we would have had a more stable company that wasn’t so perilously close to bankruptcy on more than one occasion.
I bet we would have still won a lot of games, too. Only I wouldn’t have needed us to win as badly.
Today I have this really interesting relationship to winning. Like any good sports fan I am elated when MAD Lions, Ultra or Defiant win a game and I’m bummed when they lose. The difference is that when the game is over I go about my day, feeling no less or no more worthy than I did before the game started. I no longer feel the jealous rage when a player picks to join Carlos at G2 or Mike at Dallas Empire instead of staying with us. A player making a career decision about what’s best for them isn’t an indication of how much more worthy the other team owner is than I am. It’s just a business transaction that happens in the business world. Nothing more, nothing less.
And I’m ok with that.