Celebrate Your Victories Like A Football Team Celebrates A Goal
There are two very specific things that football teams set out to achieve in a football match:
Score as many goals as possible
Do not let the other team score any goals
This is literally the point in every football match. Yet in every football match that I’ve ever had to sit through, I have witnessed the manager and players go absolutely apeshit when they score a goal. Any goal. Not only the great goals. Literally, any time they get the little white ball to cross the little white line into the back of the net, they go nuts.
These people celebrate as if they are playing the first football match in the history of football and their team has just scored the first-ever goal in the history of the sport. It is something to behold. Football celebrations became so intense that there are now rules about how players can celebrate and players can actually receive a yellow card for celebrating too much. FIFA Law 12 penalizes excessive, time-wasting, and choreographed goal celebrations. Incredible!
While at the gym this morning I caught a glimpse of a very average football match being shown on the screens that are plastered all over the place. The skills on display were average, the players were average, the entire experience was average. Even the fans knew it was all pretty average. But then someone scored a (pretty average) goal and everyone lost their minds. The goalkeeper, the manager, the coaching staff, the players, everyone just lost it, running onto the field, then to the corner flag, then back to the team seating area where the reserve players were sitting. It was the best performance of the game thus far.
As I continued to do my thing on the elliptical machine I found myself berating the team for celebrating so hard. I was actually irritated that they were celebrating when they were clearly a sub-par team.
Then it hit me: We don’t celebrate enough as entrepreneurs and startup founders. We should all celebrate like a football team when they score a goal.
We should be celebrating the small things more consistently. These players are galvanized in their fight to score a goal and prevent the other team from scoring. So when they do actually score a goal, they should celebrate their achievement, no matter how good or bad the goal was. They achieved the one thing they need to do to win the game.
Watching the team that conceded the goal was interesting too. As the celebrations took place, they look dejected and defeated. The celebrations reinforce the goal and the leverage that had been gained. Mentally, one team had the upper hand and the other team needed to fight back to just break even.
Celebrations matter. Ambitious startup founders often only want to celebrate the massive achievements; The billion-dollar exit, the huge fundraising, the insanely profitable annual performance. We should be celebrating when we sign a new client, a new team member joins, a new revenue milestone is reached or a new feature or product goes live.
There is, of course, a limit to how much you should celebrate. For example, I don’t believe that every child should receive a participation trophy at the end of a football match. That’s just crazy, it’s not an achievement to participate, it’s life.
When I sold my first company I didn’t celebrate at all. I was young, the exit was difficult and there was some conflict in the team. When I received the sale agreement, I hunched over my coffee table and signed the agreement, tossed it across the table and lay back on the couch and watched TV. That was it and I regret that moment immensely.
Your team thrives on success and despises failure as much as you do. So when there is something real to celebrate just take a few minutes and celebrate like you all just scored the first goal in the history of football.
