In amateur wrestling, no matter how much someone practices, there is always a situation or position that is not going to have a black and white step-by-step finish. Those positions of unknown are called scrambles, and success requires working off principles imbedded by heavily drilled moves. Learning to scramble was very hard for me because my comfort level always needed to know what to do 3-steps ahead, yet the very nature of scrambling doesn't allow planning past the immediate situation. In scrambles, I react, my opponent reacts, and we are a completely new situation neither of us has been in before.
Getting into elite levels of anything, be it sports, business, relationships, the best have a mastery of the basics and have learned to win the scrambles. As I got into higher levels of coaching, my instructors would continuously put us into compromising weird positions and start live sparring. We would do it over and over to get comfortable being uncomfortable and break us from the view that we had to have certain circumstances before we could execute our objective. They wanted to instill in us that basics are principles and not circumstances. Hips high. Weight Centered. Drive at an angle. Maintain a position from which I can attack.
One of my first jobs had me read an essay called A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard. It's about getting the job done. The story goes that the President needed a letter delivered to a general in Cuba, and a man named Rowand was given the task with only the instructions being "Give the message to Garcia." Five days later, after a four-day boat journey and journey through the jungle, the message was delivered. The point is Rowand accepted a task and found a way to deliver with no map, no idea where Garcia was, no resources; only the simple instructions "Give the letter to Garcia."
Transitioning scrambling from the wrestling mats to my career hasn't been easy. I one time had a fantastic boss I could vent to, and when he was frustrated at my progress on something, I defeatedly said, "I understand you value people who can find a way but, it's just not part of my DNA. I don't know how, nor do I know how to find out how." It was my version of trying to throw in the towel, but he ignored the towel because he saw something in me I wasn't seeing in myself at that moment.
Something that has helped me with the scrambles of my career is learning to play. Play has no right or wrong, meaning we can explore things that we usually never explore. If we practice and rehearse for 10,000 hours, we will get extraordinarily familiar and efficient at performing our task within the circumstances we are rehearsing. What if I am rehearsing a pitch and the PowerPoint stops working, though? What if I'm always practicing to compete against someone right-handed, and my opponent is a lefty? Play is the sandbox where mess up and failure don't exist. We can create innumerable scenarios and curiously explore what the results might be. Once we find the results we like, then we can practice and rehearse it. A vital aspect of play is it creates the reality that there is always a way, and that abundance mentality is vital for those "find a way/scrambling" moments.
The 'winners' in the work arena can be told a simple task and are left to find a way to get it done. They have been through enough experiences that uncertainty in the circumstances doesn't shake their confidence because they trust themselves and have a sense of what principles need to be applied. The best arena to get your experiences in is play. If you are in training for a sport, try only using one arm on a few training sessions. If you have a sales pitch, try rehearsing it with a fun circumstance like not being able to say the word "the" the entire time and next time, no using the word "but." Play will give a new look at the presentation and build confidence to find a way during unexpected circumstances.
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