It’s Only Failure When You Decide to Stop Playing Football

You’re still on your journey to reach your dream in your football career. If you lose a game, that doesn’t mean your team is bad. If you make a huge mistake that causes your team to lose, it doesn’t mean you are a bad player. If you’re not where you want to be right now, it doesn’t mean that you failed in your attempt to succeed.

When the journey gets tough, you lose your motivation, get lazy, and you tell yourself that you have failed… that’s all in your head. You want to be successful in your first attempt, effort, and chance. If that’s the case then everyone is already living their dreams by now.

If you think that you will achieve your dreams sooner or later without giving any real effort and be resilient & persistent, you’re being naïve. With this mindset, you will struggle to deal with the real work that will be difficult, unpredictable, and full of uncertainty. Then what if I can find someone / something that can guarantee my success? Well, you’re most likely not going to find it because you can’t control external circumstances.

What you can do is control what you can control, like yourself. Your actions, thoughts, decisions, and so on. Improve on yourself, get better at dealing with difficult situation that you can’t control by trying to find a better solution. Keep trying again and again until you know more and get more skillful.

This is the real work that you can do instead of imagining the perfect situations or scenarios in your head. Because not everything is perfect. So if you would rather stop working because you’re a perfectionist, that’s just another excuse of not doing the real work.

To reach your dreams, you can start by trying to do the real work. If you’re not in your team’s starting 11 or you’re not getting the minutes you want, start training more to be a better player. If you have great skill but still fail to get scouted by higher level teams or the national team, you can try to be a key player for your team and make a big impact. Keep on trying to do better instead of quitting because you think that you’re a failure.

Author: Zaya Mardika
Editor: Michelle Vinita