Make every day game day
On live events, showing up, and why startup life doesn't have an off season.
I watch webinars at 2X speed. I skip intros. I skim articles. I am, in most contexts, aggressively opposed to wasting time.
And then I go to a live event, and none of that matters.
There’s something that happens when you’re in a room with other people, watching something unfold in real time, that you cannot get anywhere else. The moment is only available in that moment. You cannot scrub forward. You cannot pause and come back later. Whatever is happening right now, in front of you, is exactly what there is.
I love cheering for the Columbus River Dragons when they’re down in the third period. I love the seventh inning stretch at the Columbus Clingstones. I love mouthing the words along to a musical at the Springer Opera House or a Broadway-on-tour production at the RiverCenter. I was enamored listening to the Columbus Symphony Orchestra play Jaws over Valentine’s Day. Even bad standup comedy at The Loft is still live comedy — but it doesn’t matter, because the experience of being there, in that room, when something is happening live, is just completely different from watching it anywhere else.
Part of what makes live different is the adrenaline. Game day energy. The players are leaving it all on the ice tonight, in a way they simply cannot if there’s no crowd, no stakes, no one moment that counts. You feel it from your seat. The cold air off the rink carries it to you.
If you miss a River Dragons game, you can check the recap. You’ll know the final score, who scored, whether they pulled it off. But you won’t know that the arena went completely silent right before the puck dropped in overtime — just the sound of skates cutting ice and a few hundred people holding their breath — and then erupted when the goal light turned red and the horn blew so loud you felt it in your chest. You won’t know what it felt like to be in those specific seats, with those specific strangers, in that specific moment that will never happen again exactly that way.
The recap is the content. Being there was the experience.
The same thing happens at work.
Startup culture has built an entire infrastructure around the assumption that presence is optional. Record the all-hands. Loom the demo. Watch the launch debrief async.
And most of the time, that’s fine. Async works. It scales.
I use it constantly.
But here’s the thing about startups: every day is game day.
There’s no offseason. There’s no “we’ll get them next quarter” that actually buys you time. The customer call you’re on right now is the performance. The sprint review where the team ships something genuinely hard is the performance. The moment a teammate says something real in a 1:1 and you are actually there to hear it — that’s the performance. And like any live event, it only happens once.
Those moments have a recap too. The feature shipped. The customer renewed. The team left the sprint feeling good. But if you only read the recap, you missed it.
And if every day is game day, that means every day is also practice. You don’t get to coast between seasons. The customer call you nailed today makes you sharper for the one tomorrow. The hard conversation you avoided last week shows up again, slightly worse.
Wins compound. Losses do too.
The scoreboard is always running.
I think this is why I keep going to live events — even to the games with the bad teams, even to the performances I’m not sure I’ll enjoy. You cannot optimize your way into having been there. It either happened or it didn’t.
Be the kind of person who shows up.
The specifics of what I’m showing up for matter less than I ever expected. A Thursday night River Dragons game where they’re three points out of a playoff spot is still a Thursday night River Dragons game. A customer call you could have skipped is still a customer call. Someone will say something that changes how you see the problem. The crowd will make noise. There will be a moment where you look around and think: this is only happening right now, and I am here for it.
Most things in life, you can watch later. You can catch the highlights. You can read the recap. You can ask someone how it went.
Some things are live events. You’re there or you’re not. And if you’re not, you don’t get to rewind.
The same instinct that makes you skip to the good part of a webinar will make you miss the moments that actually build a company. Not every meeting is a live event. But some of them are. The skill is knowing which ones — and then actually showing up for them.
A recording gives you the content. The live event gives you the experience of being a person, in a moment, that no one else will ever have quite the way you had it.
That’s not something you can watch at 2X speed.
Put in the work. Practice like your play. Play like every day is game day. And most importantly: Show up.
If you’re looking for a virtual event to attend live… I have an upcoming workshop OpenClaw for Working Parents: 3 Tasks to Fully Delegate coming up on Monday, April 6 at 12 ET for 30 minutes. It’s completely free, and by the end of the session you’ll have set up a workflow using OpenClaw that will make household management easier.