Christof

This afternoon I talked with a friend of mine who is a teacher. My friend told me about a student of his named Christof. Christof doesn’t normally participate in class, but this week he’s been noticeably active and leading some of the class discussions in a positive way.

Christof also wrestles. This Friday afternoon, my friend was in the teacher’s lounge and saw a fellow teacher had on a wrestling hoodie. He asked the teacher if he knew Christof and he said he was Christof’s direct coach. My friend went on to say how Christof has had an amazing week in class and wanted to complement the coach. The coach informed my friend that Christof had a terrible few weeks in wrestling having low stanima and “quitting too early in matches”. However, this week, he conditioned particularly hard, won his match, and won the whole tournament.

Let’s go Christof!

This story struck me as an important reminder of high school athletics. I spent a disportitante amount of my time in meaningless, time intensive, energy consuming sports and regretted it for the majority of my college career. The TL:DR is that the don’t provide the right ratio of output leverage for time/energy input. However, Christof’s story reminds me of just how important they are and how they can translate to success.

In particular I think they’re in stark contrast to treating high school like a “day job” as Paul Graham recommends (http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html) . I think startups can teach the things sports get across, but its tough. and I’m not sure where the rub is.