Fellows Book Online Version 2020

24 the world championship, called Anathan Pham, a young lad from Australia. He was 16 at the time, so you’ve got to imagine a 16-year-old boy having to play in front of a stadium with 30,000 people, millions of people watching, $20 million on the line. It’s an insane amount of pressure for him, he has been away from his family for a while because we had to travel the world and practice together. You also must consider, that for e-sport players, most of them have spent a lot of time playing computer games and practicing their potential. I don’t want to generalize, but maybe some of them were not as comfortable with the social pressure that comes from confronting other people and proving them wrong. They need to take a step back and find a shelter. So, for him it’s definitely the profile that he was and was somebody that reacted badly to pressure and could get anxious very quickly. Yet he had to play on the biggest stage, a stage that most people would get terrified having to enter. He had not only to enter but to perform there. What I want to mention is the importance of enabling somebody. So, for him, for instance, the day before the finals, in the morning you have to warm up and you’re about to play a $20 million game. You have worked your entire life for that, you’ve sacrificed everything, your social life, friends. Probably have a hard time getting your personal life in order just for that one day where you’re about to play the International, which is the world championship grand final and it means the world to you. You have to get into the stadium, and you have 1 hour of warming up before you enter the stage, and every click on that stage will define whether you are going to win or lose. And that morning the manager came to him and told him, Ana, you’ve forgot your gear, your mouse keyboard so you’re not going to be able to warm up before the games, are you sure you want to do that? Basically, you are just going to enter the stage, and this is going to be your first click. And his answer was, no I don’t want to warm up, I just want to go into it out of the blue. Of course, we felt pressured and anxious, we read into it being a lack of care, lack of preparation, lack of professionalism. The truth is when you dig into his profile and mentality, he is a guy who has imposter syndrome, feels like he is not worth what people see in him. A guy that reacts badly to pressure. Him warming up or training that day would have highlighted his weaknesses and made him a worse competitor going into the finals. I think a normal system would have been for him to warm up, to make him feel like he is letting the team down by not working as hard as he could have worked going into that finals. But the truth is for that profile and the only reason he was able, and he was actually elected most valuable player of the tournament and regarded as the reason we won the tournament. In the finals he was incredible, his performance was through the roof, because we were able to enable him, enable his personality and just accept the fact that he cannot work as hard as other people because it just doesn’t work for him. So, to me enabling and being an underdog, it comes from understanding your coworkers, your teammates for who they are and accepting who they are and trying your hardest to enable them. Try and break this concept or this assumption that in order to be a fierce competitor you need to have a very tough mind, to be ready to take on anybody and work as hard as you possibly can, everybody’s different. For me, for instance, it works. The harder I work the better I do, the higher my confidence is. But this isn’t true for everyone and associating competition toughness and success to these values, I think narrows and drastically restricts the amount of profiles and potential that you are going to be able to nurture and have the potential to become champions. I am going to go over favorite thing quickly, because, to me, it is more common, and I just want to plant that seed. We were being told a lot going into 2019, where we were defending champions, that we were about to defend our title. I do think for coaches or staff out there, it adds a lot of pressure on your players when you use that wording. I do think that wording is incorrect because defending your title means that you might lose it, you have to defend it in order to keep it. The truth is that title that you acquired is going to be yours forever, nobody can take it away from you, you don’t have to defend it. You acquired it and it is yours. Our 2018 title was ours no matter how we performed in 2019, and that is very important because