I don’t care how much you practice or prepare in advance the truth is that it will never be the same as when you do it live.  Yes, practice.  Yes, prepare.  But, also understand that going live is a completely different animal.  When you step on that field with thousands of people in the stands, when your opponents are playing for real, and when the game actually counts, everything is different.  Football teams blast stadium speakers to simulate crowd noise.  They play against simulated defenses.  This helps.  However, it’s not the real thing.  Remember that.  We test our product in development and test environments.  We even load tested our systems, trying to simulate production traffic.  Nothing is like the real thing.  When we put our system into live user traffic then that is when the true results show.  That is when it counts.  Our care tool in Crop ‘Til You Drop is just one example.  Every single launch that we ever did at Match showed how different real user traffic at scale is than every other test.

So, on game day, be prepared.  Be confident that you have practiced.  Understand that all of your research, testing and simulations will help.  However, have a healthy respect for the difference of going live versus all this preparation.  It will be different.  More volume.  More variation.  More money on the line.  More pressure.  Some people perform better under the lights on game day.  Some don’t.  The more you experience live action the better you’ll be.  However, preparing mentally for the differences and being ready for unexpected events, not surprised by them, is critical.

In both of the previous examples, I had a plan.  I had data that guided likely outcomes, especially in Crop ‘Til You Drop.  We had a general strategy to our execution.  Yet, when the game started, the course of events took over.  We had to react and adjust in real time.  Things didn’t go perfectly as planned.  They never do.  The difference between reacting in these situations versus freezing is the difference between success and failure.  Understand that unexpected events will happen.  Embrace them.  They don’t mean that you are doing things wrong.  In fact, if everything is going exactly as planned, you should worry.  Ultimately, what will define success is how well you perform on game day.  Once the game starts, don’t look back.  Trust your preparations, your skills and execute looking forward.  Keep your focus on the events that are happening in front of you.  See what is coming.   When the game is over you can look back.  You can have a post-mortem and see how you might be able to prepare better the next time.  Until then, all of your focus needs to be on executing and completing the task at hand.

I’ll make an analogy here to live speeches that I hope will help.  After a few times, I never memorized my speeches because I always found that I would miss a word or sentence from the exact wording when I spoke.  My brain would then wander into the worry that I missed a few words or changed a sentence.  This would then cause me to lose focus on the rest of my speech because I found myself focused on the fact that I veered off.  So, I stopped memorizing speeches because I knew that when I performed them live with an audience, I wouldn’t stick to the exact wording.  I would create bullet points for my speeches.  I would practice them over and over again with mostly the same wording.  However, if I substituted a word for another or changed a sentence, it was no big deal.  I expected that. 

In summary, you can’t memorize your way through life.  There is no script that you can follow ahead of time.  Practice and preparation are required but can only get you so far.  Ultimately, you have to get on the field and play the game.   This is where you must react.  You must make real time decisions.  Put the fear aside.  Handle things as they come.  Make decisions.  Execute.  For competitors, there is nothing like game day.  It’s why we play.  Both Shock and Awe and Crop ‘Til You Drop were successful because of the team’s ability to execute in real time when things mattered most.