I actually understand where he is coming from on the football team vs office job perspective. When I think about my current work, my feeling is sometimes that it doesn’t matter, but if I actually consider what I am doing and the nature of the project, I realize that my efforts do affect the course of the project going forward. Contrasting that to my experience running competitively as a high schooler, I did not matter there at all, I never raced fast enough to score, in the rare event I was in a race where the score mattered. But despite that, I still feel some connection to the team. Whether that is different because of the physical nature of the task, the social elements, the fact that I was young and certainly still developing socially at the time, or that sports coaches have an approach that just hits differently than office bosses, I can’t say. I think I have enough capacity for self reflection to not go chasing the way I felt during that time of my life, but I can understand how someone would come to feel that way and why they might want to generalize that feeling to other parts of their life.