It’s impossible not to admire the discipline, focus, ability to perform under pressure under pressure shown by our Olympic champions this week. Even so, there’s something about the relentless focus on winning, that leaves me feeling deeply uneasy.
You can’t help but feel the heartbreak when an Olympic athlete falls just short of winning. But does falling a tiny bit short make these athletes any less worthy of admiration? Are the winners of these competitions different from them in any meaningful way?
Let’s start with the limitations for the winners themselves. The pursuit of any challenging goal is usually long and difficult, but the pleasure of the victory tends to be short. As most people know there is more pain in losing than there is pleasure in winning.
Just consider a winner such as Michael Phelps, who decided to move on from swimming after winning his 8 gold medals in Beijing four years ago. Very quickly, he found himself in a depression that lasted until he got back in the water and started training again, presumably hoping to recapture the feeling of satisfaction he’d lost. Whatever happens in these Olympics, Phelps must face the same question again once his races are over.
The real issue is that we’ve defined winning in a way that promises far more than it can deliver. We push children who show a small amount of talent to focus in one sport, before they’re teenagers, so that they might become champions. We tell teenagers that the key to success is getting into a top university, even though there are hundreds of colleges at which it’s possible to get a great education. When they graduate, society tells them that a key measure of achievement is financial success, and too often they pursue it believing that more and more money will eventually translate into happiness.
Even if any of this was true the way we’ve defined winning makes it achieveable only for a tiny percentage of people, and even then demands a kind of single-minded focus that can create a narrow and limited life.
How can we redefine winning so there are more ways to do it, and it’s more satisfying? A few suggestions:
- Winners are people who consistently invest effort, persevere, and keep getting better at whatever it is they do — regardless of whether they win anything.
- Winners have goals, which provide direction and motivation, but recognise that the ongoing satisfaction comes from the everyday experience of moving towards any given goal. In other words it is enjoying the journey
- Winners use their skills not just to build their own value, but also to add value in the world
- What winners know above all, is that the ultimate goal is never to beat an opponent or prove something to others, but rather to fully realise their own potential, whatever that may be.
