Making sports

Making sports is much harder than playing a sports, just as making just the right kind of rules is harder than following rules.

It seems that one could categorize most successful sports using just a few dozen formats. Standing. Walking. Running. Jumping. Kicking. Dancing. Riding. Swimming. Shooting. Object and body. Object and stick. Object and net. Etc. Perhaps it's a limitation brought on the definition of the word sport, but even still, the variations seem conceivable and any new sport is likely to feel derivative.

When was the last time a truly new sport was invented? Conversely, when was the last time a player invented a new way to play a sport? It seems that inventing inside a given set of rules is easier and more accessible than inventing the rules themselves.

Rules give players and onlookers a structure to measure success. Inventing an entirely new sport exposes the maker to unstructured criticism and uncertain comparisons. Furthermore, if the metrics for success are also new, then the players and onlookers will need to internalize them as well. It's no wonder we haven't seen a new sport in a while.

The world's oldest sports, polo, track and field, soccer and wrestling have lasted up to 3000 years following relatively simple rules.

There must be a lesson in here somewhere.

First-timer advantage

Trinity college recently revamped its admission process to better identify promising students. Why did it take a first-generation college student who grew up in a low income environment, Dr. Perez, to come up with the idea of allowing admissions officers to look for a checklist of 13 characteristics -- like curiosity, empathy, openness to change and ability to overcome adversity, comfort in minority of 1, delayed gratification, and risk taking?

One might ask the same question of the hotel industry that was disrupted by two industrial designers when they combined people's softer desires during travel with both a lower price offering and a micro-business opportunity to create AirBnB. As outsiders they were not looking at standard metrics of vacancy and revenue per room, they were looking at optimizing the experience of visiting a new place by putting people in homes of new and hopeful emerging business owners.

Right now it seems as though we are inching along to evaluate what works well to get students into college, just as the hotel industry was looking to do to fill rooms. What Dr. Perez, and AirBnB seem to have discovered is value in a less myopic approach, one that includes the entire ecosystem of a given population, rather than just trying to solve the problem from one side or the other.

Control

Type A people only exit if there is a Type B. More control-oriented people only exist relative to less control-oriented people, or light beer to dark, tall people to short, etc.

In 1950's when the phrase 'type A' was first coined by cardiologists to predict coronary heart disease, (perhaps funded by the tobacco industry in an attempt redirect the spotlight of the ill effects of smoking), it was a breakthrough idea. Basically it codified the obvious fact that some middle-aged men are more stressed about winning and controlling than others, but both enjoy achievement in the long run. Just as light beer to dark, tall people to short, both enjoy achievement in their own way.

What happened to that last line in our discussion of today's success, "both enjoy achievement in their own way." Out of control people in history seem to only get credit when they return to control, and yet much of our civilizations success is rooted in people capable of staying calm even when they were not in complete control.

It's even hard to explain this concept because it too is an idea that seems a bit out of control. Very few people reading this probably remember studying the specific relationship between out-of-control and success, because, for the most part we tend to rush towards studying the more concrete counterpart that is the relationship between to control and success. What we lose in this hurry to study 'control' from one side is the importance of all the people and 'failed' projects on the other side that made side one possible.

Think about B-side tracks.

Is it possible to train Type A people to stress out about not failing enough, and would the effect be the same?

#Sector45 #2040