Baseball is a game of individually executed actions supported (we each hope!) by a group of brilliant colleagues.

Soccer, on the other hand, depends entirely on context and efforts of the collective more than the individual. With the exception of the penalty kick, soccer rarely depends on individual virtuoso performances.

David Brooks has written a brilliant piece  in the New York Times in which he argues that this is a metaphor for our lives. I would go further – baseball is played like work usually tends to be, while soccer is an example of how we should play work. This is not to place a qualitative evaluation on either game – they both delight. The more interesting question is, which game are you playing?

In corporate life, as in baseball, we are prone to celebrating the individual and our successes tend to be the result of individuals – celebrities even – excelling at a level that is unmatched by their colleagues. We lionize leaders this way, as well as entrepreneurs and innovators and we focus our energy endlessly, through courses, books and workshops, on raising the bar of individual performance. We achieve a measure of success through these approaches. But greater (and more sustainable) things happen in life and work when we see the integrated wholeness of everything – like the entire flow of action on the whole of the soccer field – the context in which all the pieces are being played, and the relationship this all has to the environment in which we are playing our game. By seeing beyond the separateness of each part, and instead, seeing the oneness of the whole, we are able to bring the total power of every part of the game into full play.

Think about your life (of which work is just a very important part) – are you executing  a series of brilliant individual actions and tactics depending on virtuoso performances from you or others? Or are you seamlessly integrated into the whole picture and executing strategy using everything you have? To experience this is to experience what psychologists call “flow”, and flow generates the euphoric experience of oneness – a delicious experience that we all deserve.