How to Stay an Underdog?

I like being underestimated.

My sports fandom tends to strongly favor underdogs, overachieving gritty teams, under-the-radar greatness.  Narratives of quiet, background revolutionaries inspire me.  I always prefer the overlooked-but-making-steak-while-everyone-else-is-talking-about-sizzle position.

This orientation works well, except it gets hard the more you start to succeed.  The underestimated but hard working person will always eventually yield fruit that reveals to the world the previously hidden value.  The world is likely to respond by over-correcting in the other direction, piling on hype, looking for a savior, turning the previously quiet work into a movement.

That’s when it gets weird and difficult.

Embracing the attention is dangerous.  It will always lead you to overestimate your value and position.  After always having more substance than attention, if they level off or the relationship reverses and you embrace the attention, you might forget the substance.  It’s always safer to have more substance than style, but sometimes style runs ahead before substance can catch up.  That’s the danger zone.

What to do in those moments?  Downplay it?  Run from it?  That doesn’t seem to work.  You’ve got to rise to it while at the same time not care about it.  You’ve got to keep your mind above it while your work is firmly grounded.  You’ve got to re-cast your narrative and find a way to stay the hungry, humble, confident hard-worker with a chip on the shoulder.

Personal narrative drives and regulates emotion and psychology.  When big external shifts happen, you’ve got to re-center that narrative so it remains grounding and inspiring while fitting truthfully with the facts.  If your narrative gets pulled by external circumstances, you become a slave to the world.  If your narrative ignores external shifts and pretends nothing has changed, you become trapped in your own delusions.

You’ve got to own the narrative even while you adapt it to things out of your control.