Imagine that you’re an American football coach that is now only going to coach European football (better known in the U.S.A. as soccer).
And you know absolutely nothing about the sport. So on the pitch of 22 players, the kitman, the assistant coach, you know the least about the sport.
That’s the premise of Ted Lasso, in which the titular character is hired as the head coach and manager of a Premier League football team. [Lots of spoilers ahead!]
One thing that’s remarkable to me is how brutally honest Ted is with his ignorance. He mostly learns the rules on the job, and he is very candid with his near-zero knowledge of the sport. He doesn’t pretend, nor does he try to thrash away and pull all nighters to grind his way to knowing the sport.
The public is pissed that he’s hired, and his team is not performing well. They call him mean names, which he mostly shrugs off.
Ted’s story reminds me of a passage I recently came across in The Courage to Be Disliked, a book that is largely a fictional conversation between a philosopher and a young person. It is a book based on Adlerian psychology. One of Alfred Adler’s premises is that every person has a “life task,” related to two objectives: to be self-reliant and to live in harmony with society.
In order to contribute to your life task, you need courage. In order to gain courage, you need to feel a sense of worth—like you have something worth contributing in the first place. Or as the philosopher says in the book, “If one is able to feel one has worth, then one can accept oneself just as one is and have the courage to face one’s life tasks.”
How can you acquire this sense of worth, if you don’t have it already? “It is when one is able to feel ‘I am beneficial to the community’ that one can have a true sense of one’s worth,” the philosopher says. “That one can act on the community, that is to say, on other people, and that one can feel ‘I am of use to someone.’ Instead of feeling judged by another person as ‘good,’ being able to feel, by way of one’s own subjective viewpoint, that ‘I can make contributions to other people.’”
Even though he’s a fictional television character, Ted’s a great representation of this premise. Almost everyone judges him very vocally, and yet he doesn’t behave like he feels judged. One possibility is because he is very confident in his worth. He doesn’t need to know as much about football as everyone else, because he knows about coaching.
He also knows his life’s task, which is why he became a coach. He describes it, “For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field. And it ain’t always easy… but neither is growing up without someone believing in you.” He knows that’s his contribution. It’s not in helping rich football players win more games, or helping the team owner make more money, or helping himself build a better reputation. It’s helping people become the best versions of themselves.
And about winning and losing—that’s not the point. When Ted’s team wins, he doesn’t judge it as being good. When Ted’s team loses, he doesn’t judge it as being bad. He doesn’t accept other people’s judgments about it either. In The Courage to Be Disliked, the philosopher says, “Being praised essentially means that one is receiving judgment from another person as ‘good.’ And the measure of what is good or bad about that act is that person’s yardstick. If receiving praise is what one is after, one will have no choice but to adapt to that person’s yardstick and put the brakes on one’s own freedom.”
Ted is mindful of hierarchy, however he doesn’t treat his relationships or judge people based on it. He builds what Adler and the fictional philosopher might call horizontal relationships—a relationship between equals who respect each other. He expresses mostly respect, gratitude, and joy. He doesn’t treat his boss, Rebecca, any better than he treats the kitman, Nate.
On the flip side of Ted, Nate is constantly assessing where he fits in terms of status, and he desperately tries to claw his way towards higher status in response to how poorly he was treated. Nate is excellent at coaching football, and that’s his contribution to Ted’s team. While he is glad to contribute in exchange for praise and victory, he quickly grows bitter, threatened, and resentful as a new coach joins the team. Where he felt recognized by Ted—who was the first person to recognize Nate’s talent—he grows to feel neglected and infuriurated, and seeks that recognition and validation from the public and from the owner of a rival team. He loves being praised, he needs the judgment to be “good.” And as a result, he offers his freedom and integrity in exchange for recognition.
For me, here’s the takeaway: if you know your contribution and your life’s task, you need to stick with it. That’s the only way to remember your worth. Other people can judge you—they can insult you, fire you, try to humiliate you—but it’s only when you decide to agree with their judgments that you lose focus. Of course, Ted wants to win the games—and the pressure of his family life and to win affects his mental health, eventually—but it’s never been the point of his work or the TV show. As Bill Walsh titled his book, “The score takes care of itself.”
I’ve written about comparative reading before—reading two books at the same time—however this is probably the best experience I’ve had of “comparative reading” a book and a TV show. The most delightful part is I’m not the first person who has read The Courage to Be Disliked and watched Ted Lasso at the same time. It has been a really healing experience to do this, and I would recommend the combo.