A weekly letter to warm your soul

I really did not expect to get life inspiration from a TV show about football, but wow, Ted Lasso on Apple TV surprised me on so many levels. If you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend it. It’s a wholesome, feel-good show about an American football coach, Ted Lasso, who gets recruited to coach a Premier League football team in England, despite having no experience at all.

I watched the show, and months later, I still think about it. I think about how I want to be more like Ted Lasso.

It’s not just that he’s this happy-go-lucky guy with an awesome moustache. It’s that he’s so comfortable with who he is, even when the rest of the world doesn’t quite get him. He’s the most harmless guy you could think of and a lot of people think he’s a bit of an idiot, but he’s not stupid. He knows what people think of him, but he uses that as his advantage.

There’s one scene that really stood out to me. Ted runs into Rupert, the conniving ex-owner of the football club, at the pub and Rupert makes things pretty uncomfortable. Ted decides to challenge Rupert to a game of darts, telling Rupert that he can have control of the team’s starting lineup if he wins. Rupert is completely smug, and just as it looks like he’s about to win, Ted tells Rupert that he’s been underestimated his whole life. It used to bother him, until one day, he drove his son to school and saw a Walt Whitman quote on a wall which changed his entire perspective: “Be curious, not judgmental”.

Ted tells Rupert that amongst the many people who dismissed him throughout his life, not a single one was curious.

“They thought they had everything figured out, so they judged everything and everyone. If they were curious, they would have asked questions, like ‘Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?’ To which I would have answered, ‘Yes, sir’.” 

Ted then goes on to win the game.

This scene has sat with me for such a long time. I’ve never seen myself as egoistical, I actually think I can be pretty insecure, but part of that insecurity is that I want to be better than average at things. I want to feel like I’m intelligent, likeable and successful, and when I’m around people who are more accomplished than me, sometimes I feel inadequate- this is my ego friends.

Ted Lasso has really made me rethink things. Now I realise that, even if I was the smartest or the best in the room, it would actually hold me back. When you’re the smartest person in the room, you not only risk judging others, you also become the only person in the room incapable of learning anything and funnily enough, you miss things as you stay in your bubble of smugness.

It’s better to be the most curious person in the room instead. You’ll not only learn more and take the pressure off yourself to prove something, but showing interest in others instantly makes you more likeable, and Ted Lasso is seriously one of the most likeable TV characters I’ve ever come across. I’ll definitely be bringing more Ted Lasso vibes into my life. 

Love,

Akta

Words Of The Week

“You say freak, I say unique.” 

― Christian Baloga

Video Of The Week

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