If you plan to watch Super Bowl LIX today, you’re in for quite a spectacle. The players on the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles will make all the moves expected in a football game. They’ll be running, passing, catching, kicking, blocking and tackling.
Ah, but in between those plays you’ll see altogether different actions unfolding. The athletes will be congratulating each other — and often even themselves — in an orgy of antics, some qualifying as in your face and over the top.
No sooner, for example, will a player intercept a pass, block a field goal attempt or score a touchdown than he might well dunk the ball over the goalpost, leap into the stands to take a selfie with a fan or pull out a cell phone stashed in the end zone to call his mother.
Hey, I get the underlying point of this behavior. It gives audiences not only the all-out “look-at-me” treatment, but also boosts TV ratings, fattens endorsement deals, sends social media off the charts and scores astronomical long-term contracts come the next season.
But why should athletes have all the fun? Why should they get to corner the market on flamboyantly theatrical celebration? I believe they have valuable lessons to teach the rest of us. So I propose we all get in on the action ourselves at home and office alike.
By so doing — by mimicking these activities — we can benefit both personally and professionally. We, too, would get to better express ourselves with our family and friends as well as colleagues and clients.
What would stop us, for example from performing the equivalent of a baseball player nonchalantly flipping his bat 10 feet into the air after belting a home run or a basketball player slamming a dunk and hanging on the rim to crank out some pull-ups?
Nothing, that’s what.
So here’s a starter playbook. Let’s say you just got married. You could do a windmill high five with your rabbi or priest. Or you landed a tax refund. You could do a leaping chest bump with your unsuspecting CPA. Or you got a fat raise. You could go into the next staff meeting pumping your fist and do a backflip yelling “Ka-ching!”
Listen, it could enrich your existence.
The philosophy behind such displays of exultation is classic. It’s never enough merely to succeed. Everyone must know you have.
Granted, this behavior comes with a catch. Your innate sense of civility might interfere. So might your lifelong habit of trying always to act with a dash of modesty and humility, not to mention respect for others.
You may also believe actions should speak for themselves. But that attitude is outdated. Actions should never be allowed to speak for themselves. If we’ve learned anything in recent years, it’s that excellence alone no longer has a place in our society. Nor do restraint and self-control.
So please forget about trying to wear your success lightly anymore and kick it old school. Nobody should be too classy to ham it up. What are you, some kind of Boy Scout? Keep in mind a single all-important mantra. It’s all about the branding, baby!
So study how the players congratulate themselves and each other during the game. Notice how today’s professional athletes are often much too savvy about the nuances of marketing and merchandising ever to flirt with anything as toxic as personal dignity.
Follow that lead and apply it to how you live and work. Take a page from poet Walt “I celebrate myself” Whitman and give this trickle-down strategy a go. Practice your moves at home and get crazy creative.
The next time your wife says she loves you, for instance, flaunt your success. Strut and shimmy into the den in front of your kids, pound your chest and break into an exuberant chant of “I’m No. 1!,” wagging your index finger high enough for all to see.
Or, if you sign a new account or negotiate a billion-dollar acquisition at your job, feel free to swagger into the conference room singing “Hallelujah” at the top of your lungs in the presence of your gobsmacked colleagues and execute a triple somersault into a vat of Gatorade.
Let’s face it: only then will you truly get to live the dream. Your every day from then on will feel like Super Bowl Sunday.
Brody, a consultant and essayist in Italy, is a former New Yorker and author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”
