By: Butch Swank | butch@goodladandswank.com| President, SWFL Business Alliance + Owner, Goodlad & Swank Insurance, LLC
If you’ve ever watched playoff football, you are familiar with close games. The stakes are high, and it will end with pure joy for one side and utter misery for the other. Oftentimes, a three-point field goal, if made, can win the game with little time left to play. Right here is where I think it gets interesting.
Frequently, one of the announcers will say something like: “Toby Macintyre has been on fire lately. He’s made 35 out of 35 kicks and is at the top of his game.” At this point, a sober and rational person thinks that Toby will make it and be the hero. Well, it turns out, many times, this “Toby” completely misses the field goal like it’s his first day on the job.
What the heck just happened? Statistically speaking, this is a very improbable outcome. I have always attributed it to nerves, but let’s be real: kickers at this level are professionals, and while everyone gets the butterflies, these dudes literally play under immense pressure for a living. Pressure is something they’re very, very familiar with. Again, I ask—why did he miss?
Let’s take a break from that for a moment. I recently listened to a fascinating interview with a former NASA and Defense Department physicist, Thomas Campbell, describing his Theory of Everything. In short, he proposes that humans are individual units of consciousness. Yes, it’s weird, but that’s what he says, and he has some real-world experiments that seem to back him up.
He believes consciousness is part of the universe, and it wants more and more organization. Interestingly, he proposes that love is the best way to achieve increased organization. The opposite path, leading to disorganization, is hate and anger. He’s very technical, but it makes sense from a big-picture perspective. It’s hard to deny that living a gratitude-filled and purposeful life is likely the absolute best way to live.
You can fill in the blank on the worst way to live, but we all know some miserable souls whose personal life has always been a disaster. Their apartment/house is a dumpster fire, to boot. Another part I found interesting was his being slightly afraid to bring his theory up to religious people for fear of insulting them. He found their response to be the opposite and was pleasantly surprised because their responses were generally: “Of course, God IS love.”
Ok, the out-there philosophy lesson is over, and now back to the kicker. Imagine yourself watching a game—it’s tied, and there are 5 seconds left on the clock. At that moment, the announcers do what they always do and make millions of conscious individuals think about that kicker missing. Millions then begin fabricating a reality in their minds where the kicker misses.
Then, Boom! He misses. I fully realize that linking a kicker missing a field goal with our individual and collective consciousness is more than a bit odd. Still, it’s undeniably interesting, and the odds are not zero that it’s the correct explanation. I wonder what other examples of this people can come up with.
Now, from purely a practical football perspective, when rooting for your team, you might want to consult with the announcers and convince them not to say a peep about the kicker until after the game is over.
Missing field goals aside, I am fond of taking responsibility for everything that happens in my life. If I screw up and make a mess of things, that’s my fault. If I do something successfully, that’s also “my fault.” This thinking removes all thoughts of victimhood; I believe it’s the most empowering mindset out there.
I mention this because I wonder if adopting this attitude lets you, in effect, craft your own reality a bit. Day after day, purposely crafting here and there, year after year, can lead to some very positive outcomes. I’ve certainly never considered this mindset magical, but I cannot escape relating it to the kicker’s outcome.
In your head, you are the announcer predicting what will happen next. If you think you’re going to succeed, you likely will. If you fail, then your mindset says: “What can we learn from this so the outcome is better next time?”
If you are more victimhood-oriented and try something, thinking you’ll fail, of course, the odds are good you will fail. You will likely also not be inclined to analyze what went wrong. That’s because things always “happen to you” because responsibility is something you’ve chosen to be a part of your vocabulary no longer.
In short, I am proposing that you really can create your very own reality.
Changing gears again, think back to a time you thought about someone you’d not spoken to in years, and they coincidentally called you the next day. Weird, right? Or take Déjà vu (yes, I had to look up how to spell that) as another example.
The definition of Déjà vu is: “It describes the sensation that you have already experienced something that is currently happening, even though you know it is happening for the first time.” It truly is odd to feel confident you’ve been in the precise moment before. How could this happen? Pfft. Your guess is as good as mine.
Here’s another doozy I have a hard time wrapping my head around. It’s called the Mandela Effect.
In 2009, a very perceptive woman named Fiona Broome discovered that many people, including herself, firmly believed that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s when, in reality, he was released in the 1990s and died in 2013. They say they even remember watching news footage of the funeral.
Another example is that people distinctly remember reading “The Berenstein Bears” as kids, but the actual book’s title is “The Berenstain Bears.”
One more for you—I hate to burst your bubble, but Darth Vader really said, “No, I am your father.” While we’re at it, who among us hasn’t put their face near a fan and said, “Luke, I am your Faaaaaather”? (Face close to fan equals cool deep voice sound). I highly recommend it if you haven’t.
To wrap up, this world sure seems very solid and real. Yet, I propose that all the examples above indicate that reality is fuzzier than we’d imagined. I don’t have any big-picture advice to share other than that you genuinely can get control of your life if you’re just willing to take on that responsibility.
The other takeaway is whether millions can really control the outcome of where the pigskin flies. It’s unclear for the moment, but maybe we should all try to live as lovingly and positively as possible, and we just might get more answers down the road.
