Priorities, Motivation, & the ACC Championship
By: william-qualkinbush December 2, 2015

You’re somewhere in the corporate world. It’s a busy time of year, and you’ve got a big presentation coming up soon.

It’s such a big presentation, in fact, that it takes you weeks to prepare. Sure, you’ve had other tasks that come and go along the way, but you handle those. You get them done. You complete those tasks knowing full well that a more important task is coming up soon.

You’re in college. Your final paper for a class is due in a few weeks, and it is a bear. It’s long, it’s tough, and you probably shouldn’t wait until the night before to start.

Every day in class, you have a quiz on your reading from the night before, and sometimes you just don’t put quite the same amount of effort into preparing for that. Sure, you get it done, but it’s a peripheral part of the day.

Presumably, the reason is the final paper, because no one ever procrastinated in college, right?

Both of these scenarios are common occurrences. If you’ve been in the corporate world or in higher education, you know this. I still remember the time one of my graduate school professors told us we would have to prioritize certain things over others, essentially granting us permission to give different levels of effort to different tasks.

That was revolutionary to me. I had always been taught to give your best, no matter what. I lived by that mantra—for better or worse—but this gave me the freedom to prioritize as necessary.

It meant making the final paper more important than the daily quiz, or the presentation more important than those daily tasks, at least in terms of time spent in preparation. We might say such an approach is justifiable because there’s simply no way to complete all of these tasks with an equal amount of gusto knowing how important the most significant project is.

Given this, it bothers me when people act like Clemson has committed a horrible sin by obviously not playing its best against lesser opponents like Syracuse, Wake Forest, and yes, even South Carolina.

Yes, as fans, we want our favorite teams to look like world-beaters every single week. We want to see our team destroy the opposition with ease every game. We want our teams to be feared because of how they demolish inferior opposition and crush the spirits of their peers.

But that perspective doesn’t jive with what we expect of ourselves. Simply showing up and doing my job should be enough, but I’m more motivated to do some stories than others. I’m more motivated to do some shows or game broadcasts than others. That’s just a fact.

Similarly, in your job, you have to reach deeper for motivation to complete your tasks on some occasions. It isn’t enough just to say, “I have to do my best on this,” and have it happen. We aren’t programmed that way, and there isn’t a single person anywhere who can say he or she consistently does everything necessary to perform at the highest level 100 percent of the time.

The fact is that Clemson’s worst days were still wins. 126 FBS teams in the country lost on their worst days. Only two were fortunate enough to avoid that fate—the Tigers and the Iowa Hawkeyes.

No team in the entire nation played with the consistency some folks apparently thought Clemson should have played with this season. In fact, one could make the argument the Tigers have been the most consistent team in the country on both sides of the ball over the entirety of the 12-game season.

Take a look at this statistic I tweeted on Sunday morning:

Crazy, right? While Clemson was allegedly lollygagging through three games to the point that people started getting significantly concerned about the future, the Tigers were solidifying a statistical profile that might be the very best in the country.

They rocked those minor assignments without exerting maximum effort. They aced those daily quizzes without jeopardizing the big picture.

Now, it’s time for Clemson to get ready for that year-end presentation, that final paper. The point of this whole months-long ordeal has arrived.

God Bless!

WQ