Two Seconds

Daily Letter · Mindset Operating System · 8:42 PM

FIELD REPORT | Be Where Your Feet Are

Okay — before you roll your eyes. I know exactly how this sounds.

Be where your feet are. Big yoga-retreat energy. The kind of phrase that shows up on a canvas print at a home goods store next to a candle that smells like serenity. You are allowed to think that. Half of me thinks it too.

But strip the poster off the wall and there is something underneath it worth keeping. So let's just talk about it plainly — the way you would talk to your kid, your niece, your dad, whoever in your orbit this actually lands on. Because this letter is not really about lacrosse. It is for whoever is reading this at the kitchen table, in the car line, on the sideline in a folding chair, wherever you are right now.

Quit Feeding The Approval Machine

Here is the honest version. A lot of us are quietly addicted to being liked. Not loved — liked. Approved of. A nod from the coach, a like on the post, a good job from someone whose opinion we have decided matters more than our own. It is exhausting and it is a trap, because the machine never says you are done now. It just wants another rep.

You do not owe anybody a performance of yourself. Show up as who you actually are today — good day or bad day, sharp or tired, patient or short-tempered — and let that be enough for right now. Not because you should not grow. Grow all you want. But growth and performing-for-approval are two different things, and only one of them will wear you out over time.

Yvon Chouinard built Patagonia on a version of this. He wrote in Let My People Go Surfing that if you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent — because the delinquent is saying with his actions, this sucks, I'm going to do my own thing. That is not recklessness. That is the specific refusal to perform a version of yourself that somebody else designed. The delinquent and the entrepreneur are both saying the approval machine is not the point and they are going to build something outside of it regardless of what that costs them in the short term.

That energy belongs on a lacrosse field. It belongs in a business. It belongs at a kitchen table at 10 PM when the easy choice is to coast and the harder choice is to actually show up as yourself.

Smile. Actually Laugh.

This one is simple and people still skip it. Find something funny today and let yourself laugh at it — not the polite exhale-through-the-nose laugh. The real one. Uncles are usually better at this than anybody else in the family, for what it is worth. There is a reason the person cracking jokes on the sideline is often the one everybody wants to be around. Take the game seriously. Take yourself a little less seriously. Both at once. That is the whole move.

Endurance Where You Actually Are

Forget the highlight reel version of toughness for a second. The real test most days is not some huge dramatic moment — it is whether you can stay steady in the body and mind you woke up with today. Tired legs, distracted head, a rough morning before you even got to the field or the office or the kitchen — can you endure that, right where you are, without needing today to be a different day than it is?

That is the whole practice. Not fixing your circumstances. Holding steady inside them.

MINDSET OS | Two Seconds

Here is the part I almost did not write.

I had it. More than once. Right there, close enough to touch — the kind of chance you do not get handed twice — and I watched myself let it go. Not dramatically. Not in one big collapse anybody could point to and say there, that is where it went wrong. Quietly. A step I did not take. A door I let close because closing it was easier than walking through it. If you had asked me in the moment I probably would have told you I wanted it more than anything. Looking back, some part of me was steering the other way the whole time, and I still do not fully know why.

I am not writing this for sympathy. That is not what this is for. You only get so many real chances in one life. I know exactly how many of mine I let slip through my hands and I carry every one.

Here is what actually happens now, most days, coaching. Something on the field — a kid hesitating at the exact spot I used to hesitate, a ball rolling free that nobody is diving for — will yank me straight back into it. All of it hits at once, fast, loud, a full tornado spun up out of nowhere. And then, almost always, right around the two-second mark — it breaks. Not because I found peace with it. Because the storm runs out of places to go, and underneath it there is always just one plain, obvious next step, standing there waiting like it was never actually hiding.

That is the whole trade I have made with it. I do not get to not feel it. I do get to decide how long I let it drive.

I think that is most of what building anything really is — a program, a team, a company, a life you are proud of at the end of it. Not the absence of the tornado. Just getting faster at the two seconds.

Yeah, We Hear You

If some part of you just read all that and thought — shut up, you are not a guru, quit with the positivity — good. Keep that instinct. We are not trying to hand you a mantra. This is a field note, not a sermon. Something to actually use, argue with, put down, pick back up next week. Skepticism is healthy. Just do not let the skepticism talk you out of trying it once.

ON ROTATION | What's Playing

Bruce Springsteen wrote Atlantic City in his bedroom in 1982 on a four-track recorder that cost him $1,050 — a song about desperation and starting over that has only gotten more relevant every decade since. Greensky Bluegrass debuted their cover in 2011 and have played it over 200 times since, because some songs are too honest to put down — and what five musicians from Kalamazoo, Michigan do to it with a mandolin, a dobro, and a banjo is the kind of thing that earns a standing ovation in a parking lot. Put this on for the drive home tonight and let it do what it does.

About the Author

Kyle Smedley is the founder of Harbor Lane Holdings, building at the intersection of sport, people, and capital.

Career stops include Events.com, Tourmaline Builders, Lombardi Contracting Corporation, and DPR Construction. Today he leads Atticus Lacrosse Company, working alongside Mad Dog Lacrosse and Ravenscroft School, and Harbor Lane Company, operating across real estate, private equity, and talent placement.

Field & Fathom goes out every night at 8:42 PM.

Reach out directly: [email protected]

Until tomorrow,

Kyle

Founder · Harbor Lane Holdings · Atticus Lacrosse Company

Field & Fathom · Harbor Lane Holdings · Daily

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