Are you an underdog looking to succeed in this brutally competitive world? Do people ignore you, discredit you, think you’re dirt, or even hate you for just being you? Well, welcome aboard!
I’ve been the underdog my entire life. The number of rejections I’ve experienced is too large to count. But you know what? I love it! I want you to love rejections too.
In this post, I’d like to share some underdog success stories. Hopefully, they will motivate you to embrace suboptimal situations and keep on going.
The one constant theme from these stories is that when nobody expects you to amount to anything, you are free. And once you are free, you can soar!
When Nobody Expects You To Win
I bumped into the captain of our club’s 5.0 USTA team (top level) the other day and excitedly told him our 4.5 team had won the San Francisco city championship. We had gone 0-7 in 2021, the bottom of the league standings, and had a miraculous turnaround in 2022. I thought he would have been happy to hear the news.
Instead, without missing a beat, he responded, “Oh yeah? We just got done winning the 5.0 league.”
There were no congratulations from him at all, only oneupmanship. Sigh. But I still gave him props anyway. I liked his unsupportive response to our victory because it reminded me how difficult it is to be happy for someone sometimes.
For well over a decade, the 5.0 captain has prided himself on captaining winning teams. He also disapproved of the club starting a 4.5 team for years because he knew we weren’t very good.
The 5.0 captain is in his 60s, retired, and is very focused on league tennis. So to hear of us winning, where he was not captain, might have made him feel less than. It is strange because we all belong to the same club.