As another washed-up former athlete (one of my old teammates will be playing in PyeongChang any day now), what resonated most with me was how the author grappled with her self-identity after quitting. It is easy to define yourself when you have a concrete goal and can pour all your time, energy, heart and soul into it. And it is devastating when you lose it.
It's even harder to redefine yourself when you used to be good at whatever it was you lost, because you know just how much time and effort it took to get there. It can seem impossible to achieve the same level of mastery of anything else.
It's been almost 5 years since I quit and, while I've picked up new hobbies that I enjoy, I still haven't found anything that inspires the passion I used to have for my sport.
I spent a good 10 years of my life in a legitimate attempt to become an NFL player. If you saw me, you would have said it was a long shot - of course it was - but I didn't let any of this get to me and I worked extremely hard to get to that goal. But I failed. I started for 3 years on my D3 college football team but at the end of my senior season I was still laughably far from NFL caliber. When I put my pads away for the last time it was devastatingly clear that I had completely wasted on average 20-30 hours every week for the past 10 years of my life, hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person.
You know what I did? I moved on, fast. And that is the solution to failure - move on quickly. And I did move on, and have found success after.
I consider you lucky, you had a big goal and you went all out to try and get there. There has to be some satisfaction in having put it all out on the line. Most people live fairly mundane lives, directionless and sans ambition.
I wish I had that kind of singular focus on something when I was 10. Considering where I was born, I had little opportunity to pursue sports/music/whatever at a young age, my society pushes kids to become bookworms. I feel I greatly missed out.
> hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person.
It's overrated, and you can have normality when you're old.
"Normality" is really very overrated indeed. I learnt rather late that one had to come to terms with his particularities and that "normal" was not that good of a thing to be; realisations before which I was suffering in agony because I wasn't "normal". Conforming to the society without compromising oneself is okay, trying to fix defects one's own personality is okay, but all these are possible without becoming "normal", which implies mediocrity, ordinariness.
> ...it was devastatingly clear that I had completely wasted on average 20-30 hours every week for the past 10 years of my life, hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person.
Beyond the "making friends and/or becoming a normal person" issues, don't you think that training for 10 years on a single goal gives you an idea of complexity that you can apply to other fields? I was (90%) healthy obsessed by developing software in my youth and that gave me an edge on how far, now, I can help others to solve software development problems.
Indeed, I love all this subject about high competition analysis, but, to see how you can apply it at a humble level.
If you're interested in changing how you process failure, consider "The Practicing Mind" by Thomas Sterner.
A significant personal struggle of mine which I had from a very young age, was a difficulty accepting my own failures and shortcomings. My parents always taught my to shoot for the moon, but never built a mental framework for me of how to process and understand crash landings.
This book along with some light additional study of the concept of "The Beginners Mind" has given me such a framework. I no longer struggle with failure. Even past failures which I would carry around with regret and anger, I've been able to re-cast into a different light and move on.
Anyways, it's a mental model that worked for me. YMMV.
I still wonder whether it is better to quit cold turkey or to struggle on in the same field (senior competitions, coaching etc).
As a chess master I am blessed and cursed with something that I can play at a reasonably high level until old age while watching my skills slowly yet surely decline.
At age 40+ you realize that you will not be really good at anything you start learning from ground zero.
Whatever seeds you planted at an early age are the ones you have to grow.
So the only answer to improving at an older age is MU. Just set aside your competitiveness and enjoy the occasional break from mediocrity.
Achilles willingly left Greece, knowing he would die in Troy, so that he could be known as the greatest warrior in history. Alexander the Great supposedly broke down and cried when he felt he had nobody left to overcome. Julius Caesar in turn, after subduing all of Gaul, wept at the feet of Alexander's statue some 200 years later, lamenting that at the age of 38, he had accomplished nothing compared to Alexander. And there are plenty of such examples in non-Western societies where the losers didn't just get a silver medal; but were killed. This story is as old as humanity itself and just as ubiquitous. I think the fashionable, progressive approach to blaming society is wrong in this case. Seeking greatness over peaceful mediocrity may simply be a character 'flaw' in mankind. As such, failure has become one of our signature moves.
People like this are usually driven by something missing within. Alexander understood this when he met Diogenes, and went to conquer the earth rather than deal with that.
There’s a reason pride is a sin in the Christian tradition. There’s a lesson to be reflect upon in the story of Alexander and Caesar... Ceasar’s conquest of Gaul was complete and epic. He slaughtered and enslaved a statistically significant proportion of the human race. He became rich beyond comprehension and built a legacy admired millennia later. Yet he died stabbed in the back by his friend, still unsatisfied.
Was this kind of behaviour you mention common for the regular people at the time ? My guess is no, at the time, most people we're born into their role, big dreams had little role to play, and competition was on a much smaller scale, so it was easier to be good at something. And it didn't matter as much anyway, because the end result was decided by the gods/fate anyway, not you.
And all those charesteristics describe the hunter-gatherer era, the era that supposedly shaped human psychology.
But if you look at what happens today, western society is organized around the exact opposites of those things. So it would be weird if we didn't raise questions about that.
===
Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, "Is it not worthy of tears," he said, "that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?"
===
As to Caesar, Plutarch relates the story of being assigned governor of Iberia at the age of 35. He and his assistants set out to reach the capitol of Iberia. One night, during their journey, they stop in the mountains and make a camp fire. To entertain them, the musician sings a song about Alexander, at which point Caesar begins to cry. His men ask him, why do you cry, my lord? And he answers, how can I ever match a man who did so much, so young, when I myself are already grown so old?
>> Because who I'd be was just another ordinary, mediocre 12-year old girl. I rubbed at the calluses on my hands, sat in front of the TV and felt terrified that I'd never again be good at something. Nothing is scarier than that.
To some extent, this is common in th west. But why is this so important to not be ordinary ? Why isn't it good enough to be good at something at your friends group, family, etc ?
Can't speak for everyone, but in my case it's because I don't have an ordinary upbringing. I grew up in a highly educated household in one of the richest areas of the United States, had educational opportunities that simply don't exist in the majority of the country. And it seems I'm naturally wired to like engineering, stemming from childhood/the toys I liked/TV shows I enjoyed/etc. All the career placement tests my high school gave me (which were extensive, multi-hour behavioral questionnaires) had engineering in the top 2 best options for me.
Knowing all this, how could I throw it all away? I have no delusions of being the next Elon Musk, but I have the opportunity to work myself into the top 10% of what I do. Never mind my own internal drive (I honestly love building things, in general), but to be handed all of that opportunity and just throw it out for a mediocre career doing mediocre things would be a tacit insult to everyone who has less than me; and might do more than me given the same opportunities. Put succinctly, it would be lazy and ungrateful of me to just "settle down".
Granted I started off closer to the top than most, but I imagine many people have a similar ideal relative to their starting point. Just look at immigrant families who arrived with nothing, re-use disposable plastic bags and wear the same t-shirts for years to save for their kids' college, and said kids go on to get get high-paying jobs. Accepting the "ordinary" in that context means the family remains poor.
Not to be condescending, but I really feel sorry for you. There is nothing wrong with ambition, but when it becomes a prison of obligation where you feel the need to pay back the expectation of others then I feel it is misplaced.
May I ask, who do you feel obligated to? Your parents or society? Is there really an obligation on you, or are you just taking on the obligation as a way of feeling special? Do you feel that if you don't achieve your "best" that society will suffer?
If I were an ambitious person that I would be begging you to pursue a mediocre career. The fewer "privileged" people at the top, the more room there is for those who have not had such privilege.
I'd say society by definition suffers when people don't do their best. ("Best" being a function of starting point, capabilities, natural inclinations, support, etc) Do you want mediocre firemen? Mediocre janitors? Mediocre cops? Mediocre teachers? Mediocre Doctors? Of course not.
What you call a "prison of obligation", I call civic duty, and I happily embrace it. Responsibility is what gives life meaning. It's what serves as a barometer for whether you wasted a day or not. Granted one has to be careful not to take on an inhuman amount of responsibility, that just leads to burnout and health consequences, but it's hardly a "prison". I've always felt good after a week of hard, productive work and empty after a week of Netflix, beer and video games. I can enjoy the latter for a day or two, maybe three, but past that I'm going to look for something more meaningful.
In my case that responsibility, as far as my career is concerned, comes from my family's background. I'm fortunate enough to live in a society, however flawed, where my dad the son of an enlisted Coast Guardsman (although grandpa eventually worked his way up to Warrant Officer 3 over 20 Years) and a stay-at-home mom could work his way into the upper-middle class and provide me with everything he did. Society doesn't do this out of altruism, Western society and Capitalism in general on average reward smart people who work hard precisely so they'll contribute more to society. Granted the system is far from perfect, there's some corruption and society rewards some areas more than others, and the system is having more trouble in recent years than it's had in the past, but the general principle holds true. Conscientious people with high (but not too high) IQs are the most successful demographic: http://www.businessinsider.com/conscientiousness-predicts-su... (some good sources in the article)
To whom much is given much is expected. Imagine our political system gave some people 1 vote and some people 1000 votes. Now 1000 votes typically won't swing a national election, but wouldn't those lucky few with 1000 votes have a greater moral obligation to use them wisely?
So I run on a hybrid of internal passion and external responsibility. Passion comes and goes in waves, often my impetus for starting something, and responsibility fills in the gaps and makes sure I follow through. It's worked pretty well so far.
Also it's hardly a zero-sum game at the top, particularly in engineering. You need look no further than any daily news source to see society crying out for competent individuals from all walks of life.
I'm not talking about throwing things away. You like engineering, you're good at it, the advantages of such career are good - those combine to create concrete benefits. Ambition isn't bad.
But ambition for the sake of "being good at something"? Especially when good is compared to other people? as if there's something wrong with being average? That's different.
The thing I've always found fascinating is that this cultural ethos is in direct tension with social organization.
Despite this narrative arc of the primacy of individuality we still (quite predictably) shun people who manage to actually achieve it and generally celebrate homogeny among our cohort.
I couldn't enumerate the negative effects this inherent contradiction may have produced, but it seems unlikely to be a list of zero length.
Common in the east too. I would imagine this is common to all human(living?) beings.
I had 2 of my classmates commit suicide because they didn't achieve success at engineering entrance exam.
Its one of the most vivid memories I have from my teens. I walked into our hostel and there he was lying in his bed with half eaten apple in his mouth. I think he tried to eat something sweet after downing chemical pesticide.
I live below the poverty line in the United States and my life is great. My health insurance is 100% free and probably the best in the world. I get financial aid from different government sources that give me a comfortable simple life.
The people who feel they need to own cars or houses and have children struggle to meet their personal expectations. Their struggle and wealth subsidies my lifestyle.
I don't consider wealthy people my enemy or "rich fools." Instead I see them as people who psychologically for one reason or another have certain expectations about what life is supposed to be. They wouldn't want my life for free and I wouldn't want their life at a cost. Does my lifestyle carry a social stigma? Of course. But do I really care what someone else thinks when I'm basically allowed to live in a first world country for free? Not even a little bit.
To me this is as fair as you can probably get in an economic system.
You're absolutely right. People should be free to choose to have kids if they want. On the other hand those same people should not project their expectations on others. We all come to our values through a complex combination of nature and nurture.
I mean the following without snark even though it can easily be read that way:
I contribute to society by making the choices I want and not imposing my expectations of contribution on to others.
The best thing you can do for society is take care of yourself first, because that's what you have the most control over. How justified is much of the debt, guilt and obligation that we feel? I guess most of us believe that if we shirked these things then babies would be abandoned in the streets and all sorts of lawlessness would occur.
Is my lifestyle naive and selfish? Maybe. But I know who I am and I don't have to justify my choices to anyone else. I am not going to make a list of my good deeds to make sure people respect me. What if instead of trying to save the world so you can be happy you chose to be happy and that led to you saving the world? Why do we assume the former is more true than the latter?
It's really hard to talk about these things without coming off as being "holier than thou" but I think they're questions worth asking. They're questions I still ask myself all the time, I don't believe that I've reached some higher plane of enlightenment with all the answers.
People should be allowed to suffer and sacrifice their happiness but they have to want to it can't be imposed on them (consciously or not).
Do you value you that? Then live your life in accordance with achieving that goal. There are lots of ways to see the world, from being a vagrant to a CEO who travels business class to the finest hotels.
I don't value travel enough to change my lifestyle so I wont work toward that end but if you do then you should. I say this with zero judgment or passive aggressive intention.
Really? Many people don't want to do that, just like I don't want to play the guitar or go fishing. Many find it to be down right unethical due to the high carbon footprint required for world travel.
Nonsense, but you may have been brainwashed into believing it.
An enormous disservice to American school kids for the past forty years has been the ad nauseum repetition that you either graduate college or you’re a failure who’s a complete drain on society. This is bollocks. After training a few years, work in some skilled trades pays six figures. Others are easily making upwards of $70k. If you can’t survive on that, tighten your belt or move to a lower cost-of-living area.
Just like everyone you went to college with wasn’t a fit for med school, not everyone you went to high school is cut out for college. Learning a trade in vocational training may be exactly what they’re looking for and is definitely a path to good jobs. Earning a decent, respectable living is fine and in no way a comment on the person’s character or value or intelligence, but by painting it as “alternative school” with the connotation of a one-way track to Loserville, axe grinders have made the situation far worse.
Now, it’s true that being a fry jockey — or any other job where anyone can walk in off the street and do the same task with little training — is not economically survivable, but a career that peaks at unskilled labor is far worse than ordinary.
The vast majority of people in the US with decent health insurance are not "exceptional overachiever[s]." Heck, I know more than a dozen people who literally sit around and watch TV 16 hours a day and have decent health insurance, including my own father who hasn't been employed in almost 40 years. To do that you just (usually) gotta be married.
It's human nature to strive for something greater than ourselves. Look at all the ancient hero myths throughout history. They have very similar themes: an "ordinary" person is called to do something "extraordinary", at first they are hesitant, they struggle, they face suffering and set backs, but eventually they "slay the dragon" and come back to the village with gold. It's inspiring to strive for something better.
It's not a rule. It's 100% subjective and what's good enough for you is completely different than someone else. Being good at something though usually is built on some kind of goals and purpose which tends to lead to more satisfaction and fulfillment.
TL;DR is the author spent years and years of dedicated effort as a gymnast and quit and did not make it to the Olympics. Describes herself as a failure as a gymnast instead of having failed (noun vs verb). And ends the piece with the suggestion that maybe we should all just settle with the knowledge that we will not achieve our dreams.
Wow. Granted I read it quickly and maybe missed something. I take a different view. While the goal/dream is admirable, it is the journey that counts. I've been successful in areas, failures in some more, and somewhere in between on others. I've learned and I've grown in each. I've learned more in my failures than in my successes and they helped shape me into who I am. I feel that if you make the best choice you can given the information you have, you've nothing to regret. Strive to be better. Be grateful for what you have. Learn from mistakes. Sometime you'll lose so hard that it is earth shattering. The goal is to be able to pick up the pieces, and keep moving. The most important step you can take is not the first, but the next.
Success in sports is very different than success in programming. There are very specific events that people have a limited time to train their bodies for so that they peak at the right moments. If you don't do it within that time frame, the opportunity is lost. A programmer doesn't have a comparable definable event and there's no limit to the amount of times you can peak with creating a business outside of dying. All athletes must ultimately redefine themselves, whether as a trainer/coach or move to a completely different industry. When that transition happens they have to live with the result of the investment they made in their athletic careers. A coder can program from childhood to death and never has to redefine themselves outside of learning more languages, frameworks, platforms and that applies to their entire life.
Mostly true, though I've known a few people who realized, after several years, that they were "not cut out" to be programmers. They then had to redefine themselves in that way.
But you're right that athletics is unique in that there are a small number of years in which your body and brain are in the right stage of development to achieve peak performance. If you don't achieve your goals in that time, the only consolation you can hope to take away is that you made the effort, and hopefully reached the limits of your capability.
what GP means is not that you are granted success if you keep trying. he/she is saying that the fun is in pursuing something beyond your abilities, knowing there is a good chance you will fail in the end.
> I feel that if you make the best choice you can given the information you have, you've nothing to regret.
You did miss something. Trying to be a gymnast wasn't her choice, her mom made that choice for her when she was 3 years old. This is the story of a failure to be elite in the sports world, and coming to terms with a dream that was externally foisted onto her at a formative age that didn't get realized.
I don't think this situation applies to the scenarios most HN readers deal with. Your advice is a lot better for this crowd.
This is a big problem in youth sports. Forcing kids to specialize at a very early age. A far better approach is to expose your kids to a variety of sports and let them figure out which ones they like. I do think kids should do sports, the activity is good both physically and mentally, they learn that effort produces results and they learn how to win and lose and move on. And it opens them up to social situations that they will otherwise be completely cut out of.
But unless your kid is one of the rare ones who is really athletically gifted, setting up dreams of scholarships and professional careers is just setting them up for failure. You should not even be thinking about that until about middle school age, and only on advice of people who will give you an unbiased evaluation. Johnny may be the best football player on the team and still be absolutely unremarkable for scholarship or professional consideration. Most parents, unless they were elite themselves, don't know enough to judge and certainly are not objective.
"...not even be thinking about that until about middle school age..."
your kids will never be professional football, baseball, basketball (or soccer, probably) players, or Olympic gymnasts, or classical musicians because they will be competing against people who have been practising since they were three. No matter how much natural gift they have.
Disagree. Professional athletes cannot be made by practice alone. The natural gift, coordination, balance, athletic ability, competitive drive, and other inborn traits are what matters most. There are professional athletes who didn't even seriously play their pro sport until high school, and uncounted thousands of kids who were pushed into something in preschool and never earned a dime from it.
So, certainly the 'gift' is necessary to compete at a high level... but so is practice. You need both. In fact, my understanding is that one of the major 'gifts' that most elite athletes have is that they recover faster than the rest of us, so they can productively practice things that require muscle growth more than you or I could. That "gift" becomes largely worthless if they don't practice.
In a field you might understand better, I have a reasonably high IQ, which helps a lot when it comes to tests like the GRE and the MAT. I scored in the 95th percentile on the GRE verbal reasoning test, and the 45th percentile on the GRE math test (at age 37, with no college experience) because I have not practiced math. I mean, I'm practicing now,[1] and getting better, but I'm never going to be as good at math as I would have been if I had taken it seriously from a young age. This is especially stark for me, because I work in the computer industry and am surrounded by people who studied math from an early age, for whom it's simple and natural. Nearly everyone I work with did calculus in high school, and found it easy.
For that matter, I think I could bring up my verbal reasoning with practice, as well; I read a lot, and my intuition for what feels right in a sentence is usually right, but I fail grammar tests that require me to name the error.
[1]I'm on Khan academy now, and I'm super amused at the badges I get. I'm doing it in a linear way, rather than skipping ahead, so I'm 60% through "the world of math" challenge. The badges I got this week were all from programs created by what I think are prestigious schools... at the 8th grade level.
You know what? That's good to know. The lesson is that any competition that requires people to train since they were 3 has too many competitors and should be spurned. This is a market signal to find something else to do.
One of the reasons we have lots of ways of competing is so that there are more (incomparable) ways to be good at something.
Specifically, this article tells us that you don't want your daughter to try to become an Olympic gymnast.
To the best of my knowledge, research is indicating that early specialization in sports only contributes to a very modest gain in skill later in life at the cost of much higher dropout rates, decreased measured enjoyment, and increased injury rates among participants.
My personal experience as a near-Olympic class athlete (swimming) backs this up - the people that were on club teams at age 9 were not the same people that were later swimming at a level where they could qualify for Olympic Trials.
Certainly, they don't let you play football much until you're 6-9 and then not seriously until you're 12-14. Likewise, basketball and baseball. But very few professionals or top amateurs (for those sports where that is the top) started much later than the earliest they could.
Well in some cultures kids ( male kids especially) are pushed to become lawyers, doctors or programmers even if the have no aptitude or interest which is a similar thing.
Well, it that if one is to make the journey worthwhile, one needs to structure the process of an activity so it has value. Learning and enjoying along the way could be a happy accident but I suspect this happy accident was far likely before our society reached the point that it could structure every waking moment of a given person's life with the purpose of reaching a single goal (a description that could apply to 14 year old gymnast, the 20-something entrepreneur or the aging Amazon warehouse worker).
There are obvious steps that can be taken here.
* Work hard but not so hard you're squeezing the life out of yourself.
* Take time to evaluate your success and failure and how much you've progressed
* Work on a project that involves other people so you can experience camaraderie in the result.
* Think about the "next step" for everyone or a large portion, of those involved.
College and graduate have a lot of these qualities, though they seem to be fading over time. Work in a large organization can sometimes have this quality depending on the quality of the organization. Work in startup or as an entrepreneur seems to demand the person or organization can create the qualities themselves. Work for uber or in low-level retail can have none of these qualities and the individuals for it.
And in society as a whole, we're suffering for the lack of these things.
"...spent years and years of dedicated effort as a gymnast and quit and did not make it to the Olympics."
IIUC, the author quit because she was reaching puberty and her abilities were in decline, so she would never get any farther---that was why her coach changed her routine, leading to her quitting.
That is why she describes herself as a failure---she had a goal, put a great deal of effort into it, and then realized she would never be able to achieve it.
It's a part of growing up, realizing that you won't be able to realize some of your goals, either because of factors within you or factors outside your control. And it's probably worse for those like these gymnasts who have invested so much into the attempt. "It is the journey that counts" is a fine response, but it doesn't really help the initial pain.
> Within a millisecond we hear “hey, none of that. We’ve asked you to be respectful.”
Absolutely this.
Failure is an opportunity to re-evaluate a project, approach, or other categorizable area of effort. It should not be feared. It certainly shouldn't be used to define the character of your life -- as you state, noun versus verb.
When failing is a verb, you get a chance to reorganize. To make better. To build opportunity. It's an absolutely exciting time, if you let it be.
You raise a really interesting perspective. I look at this as optimist versus pessimist perspective. Not achieving something can be considered a failure to one person and a learning less to another, glass half empty or full.
I have personally struggled with this and it makes me wonder if there is a particular way a child grows up that places them on one side or the other. Is it parenting that creates this perspective or is it life experience as a child such as not getting picked for a team or not being first chair in band.
After 30 years of life and achieving what I consider career success I wasn't sure I was capable of I have identified my pessimistic attitude as a fallacy in my personality. Constantly I am trying to change it but it can be really tough to not focus on failure and identify the positive's of events that don't turn out as planned.
I also think that the rewards for success are much more concentrated at the top for professional sports versus other fields. there is a wide spectrum of talent in professional domains, and a wide spectrum of jobs such that even mediocre talent can often get reasonably good jobs. And in many fields, you have decades to build your career and many ways to succeed (versus a short physical prime and one very narrowly defined way to succeed: winning an Olympic medal)
I think most elite athletes training for and even competing in the olympics can't sustain themselves financially with their sport. As they get closer to the top they probably get more financial support / prestige, but if you aren't on the medal stand I'm sure much of that comes to a screeching halt
I've been failing my entire life. Anytime I'm successful, I move the bar to restart the process of my next failure.
I'm very satisfied with my life as I've achieved 10x what I ever thought possible. I'm future failing startup #8 at the moment. It's been dragging out a few years but I'll get there, or fail again!
I always looked at failure as a learning process, not a function of who you are. Hell, if you won all the time, it would get boring. So instead of picking easy things so you can always be a winner, I pick things that are beyond my reach (in my estimation) and attempt to achieve those goals.
Life is what you make of it, it can be like a rollercoaster at times and a lazy day on the beach at others. My biggest issue in my mid 40s is the "been there done that" attitude.
Success isn't a destination IMO, it's a temporary culmination of prior good choices. And it can go away at anytime with as few as one bad decision.
Yea, society is obsessed with the glorification that you get rich quick and achieve success on your first try. Everyone doesn't even talk about how many things they tried to be successful. Or when they were lucky and things just worked out.
On the other hand the playing field is not even at all and the luck of being born in a place that is beneficial or to people that have benefits that others don't have is not to be discounted either.
Agreed. My father owns his own business. My grandfather helped him after it failed 2-3x. My father however, "did it all by himself". Bootstraps and whatnot.
He was lamenting to my brother a few years ago that he has no legacy. Well, you fucked over everyone in your family, including your kids to get yourself ahead. So yeah, you'll die rich and unloved. Surprise outcome!
Could be worse...you could be General Ulysses Grant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant) who was very successful at doing one thing that was vitally important, but only in a limited time and place, and pretty much a failure at everything else he tried.
I competed in two different Olympic sports and although I attended the Junior Olympics for one of the (big whoop, right?) and didn't place, I never once thought I was a loser--you just look at the competition and how a mere few seconds determines the winner versus going home with nothing. People have peak days, others are just a tiny bit off. What I realized is that greatness has a component of luck to it. I figured I was lucky to be able to compete there at all. There are letdowns for sure, but you're not competing with others as much as you are competing with yourself.
ETA--Having attended the Olympic Training Center around age 16, I can't tell you how depressing it was to see 20 and 30-something athletes living in the dorms there, striving for their moment of glory while everyone else was out having fun, working, starting families, etc. I look back at that as the moment I made a very conscious choice to focus on having a career. Olympic sports aren't pro sports, you aren't getting endorsement deals unless you're in one of the "popular" sports like swimming or downhill skiing.
>I can't tell you how depressing it was to see 20 and 30-something athletes living in the dorms there, striving for their moment of glory while everyone else was out having fun, working, starting families, etc.
It might be depressing to YOU because it's not what you'd like for yourself but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's depressing for the people living it, after all, it's what they have chosen. Not everyone is exactly like you and wants the same things in life. I see people living their lives in all sorts of ways I would consider absolutely awful and depressing, but I don't project my values and goals on them.
>ETA--Having attended the Olympic Training Center around age 16, I can't tell you how depressing it was to see 20 and 30-something athletes living in the dorms there, striving for their moment of glory while everyone else was out having fun, working, starting families, etc. I look back at that as the moment I made a very conscious choice to focus on having a career. Olympic sports aren't pro sports, you aren't getting endorsement deals unless you're in one of the "popular" sports like swimming or downhill skiing.
I dunno. the unpopular sports always seemed more interesting to me. I'm imagining a bunch of 'sports nerds' hanging out together, People who aren't best in the world, but within the top 100 within their sport. All hanging out with other people who are just as obsessed with the same obscure sport, doing their thing without the constant public intrusion that would come with being that good at, say, baseball.
It sounds kinda neat, really. Although a lot of that, I imagine, is just that it would be pretty great to be in that kind of physical condition. I mean, I imagine everyone there was in the top ten thousand humans if you ordered us by physical fitness. You probably have a much better idea of what it is to be that fit than I do, and maybe it's not actually all that great... but from where I stand here in my late '30s, teetering on the edge of obesity, it sounds pretty great.
I thought this post contributed to the discussion here so I vouched for it.
Yes one of the things you hopefully learn in sports is not just teamwork but that you are ultimately trying to be a little bit better every practice, every competition. And that is all on you, and success is measured individually.
It's one of the things I like about sports like running, you can always compare your performance with your previous time. Setting a new PR ("personal record") is what you are mostly striving for.
“For most of us, our dreams exceed our limitations, and our ambitions lie far beyond our capabilities“
Not from my experience, no. Most people I know - the vast majority - don’t even try chasing the dreams they have. They are not failing because they’re not even in the game. Most of them do not have ambitions beyond those one degree apart from biological sustenance; they just are.
I could tell you a story about someone who had dreams and goals and plans.
And then he discovered that the world is not a kind place; it puts down immovable barriers against those plans. He has a friend who says, "anything good that happened was because I beat my head against a stone wall until I succeeded;" not this guy---anything good that happens seems basically pure luck, head banging or no head banging.
He discovered that those goals he did work for and achieve suddenly tasted like sand. And then one day he realized that the reason he would never achieve any of those great dreams was because the will to work for them had been beaten out.
That's a misquote, unless the article has been edited since your comment. The correct quote is:
"For many of us – most of us who have devoted ourselves to the pursuit of any kind of excellence – our dreams already exceed our limitations; our ambitions lie far beyond our capabilities. So necessarily, most of us are doomed to fail."
The author is not talking about all people. She is talking about people who have devoted their lives to perusing their dreams.
What you are referring to is buried a third of the way or so into the article. I’m talking about the editorial headline. I expect many more people will stop at that than continue to read through until this quote is given context.
They probably can't afford the risks of a major commitment. And a major commitment may be required to succeed. Some things you can't pursue part-time or self-taught, and there may also be a critical time window to start if you want to succeed.
This is smart, because pursing some dreams could ruin you financially if it ultimately doesn't result in a paycheck. Your starting place in life has a big influence on how far your efforts will get you.
So I'm glad they don't recklessly try, because trying to accomplish a dream and failing doesn't keep you fed or warm or dry.
A key element in this conundrum is to dream well. When I was on General Allen's staff, he encouraged us to "Cultivate a 5000 year old mind. You're all leaders. Your proven leadership is why you were selected to be on my staff. Now your job is to understand your place in history. I need you to understand that because when critical moments arrive, you must recognize them, and act decisively, rightly, without further guidance."
There is a difference between not having ambitions and not working towards them. I believe that the latter is the case. Almost everyone wants status, money, and stability, but when someone doesn't believe they are achievable, they won't fight for it.
Status -- those to whom we accord the highest status seem to be people who genuinely don't care about status;
Money -- companies which aim only for profit become incapable of change. Presumably something similar applies to individual fat cats;
Stability -- societies which aim for stability get wiped out by the next invasion or natural disaster.
...which is perhaps why most people don't work so hard! So what are good things to want?
>Status -- those to whom we accord the highest status seem to be people who genuinely don't care about status;
I think you are confusing people who don't care with people who don't seem fearful of losing status. As far as I can see, all "Leaders" are hyperaware of status and spend a lot of time managing their own status and the status of their peers and underlings.
As far as I can tell, the further up the chain you go, the more aware you are supposed to be of status, and the more complex the status rituals go, but even at my level (and right now, I'm IT support for an organization of very advanced electrical engineers... so I'm fairly low status, compared to those I work around and compared to other positions I've had) - there are rituals and norms that need to be respected.
That said, as far as I can tell, acting fearful (especially acting fearful of losing status) is one of the quickest ways to lose status, so I suppose that could contribute to them looking like they don't care... but from what I've seen, balancing status is a lot of what managers do... maybe most of what they do. And it's a difficult job (and it's super interesting watching someone who used to be technical who get promoted to management try to manage status; they are often a lot more explicit about it than managers who grew up in management, for whom the whole thing looks natural)
Totally agree that executives and so on are hyper-vigilant about status. However it's possible to be aware of status without aiming to increase it. Those whom I had in mind are religious leaders like Jesus or the Buddha. They apparently saw no difference between people in their essence.
Engineers work with objective reality and so they are humble at least with respect to knowledge. This will be evident from their behaviour in most cases but there will be some who are appear arrogant yet competent. I would conclude that they are humble in private.
>That said, as far as I can tell, acting fearful (especially acting fearful of losing status) is one of the quickest ways to lose status
>Totally agree that executives and so on are hyper-vigilant about status. However it's possible to be aware of status without aiming to increase it. Those whom I had in mind are religious leaders like Jesus or the Buddha. They apparently saw no difference between people in their essence.
I think "leaders" and "prophets" or "people who inspire" are very different animals. Leaders talk about inspiring, but... I really think leadership is about convincing, not about inspiring.
>Engineers work with objective reality and so they are humble at least with respect to knowledge. This will be evident from their behaviour in most cases but there will be some who are appear arrogant yet competent. I would conclude that they are humble in private.
many of our arguments have testable answers, yes, or to put it another way, our theories are usually more easily testable than those of management, but... status still plays into it, really in similar ways too, I think, management; You gain status as an engineer at least in part by being technically right; you gain status as a manager at least in part by convincing people of things. Do you see the similarity? People who are good at a job generally value other practitioners in how good they are at that job; it's engineering's job to be technically correct; it's management's job to convince people.
You are of course right, but usually it’s a very weak “want” that doesn’t translate into a process of methodologically driving towards those goals and paying the price they exact.
This is so true. Most people's dreams are idling around in their heads for most of their lives. And then another half of those end up failing simply because they won't even put in the required effort or commit that is minimally required to have a chance at success.
People who start their own companies and get a solid start should, at the very least, pat themselves on the back, no matter what happens. Then it obviously takes more a lot on top of that to actually make it actually succeed.
It is a very tough moment in one's life - in a relation or in a project or any hobby - to admit to yourself - this has f*(#ing fallen apart. What I/we've built is not working. I'm not the best and I've hit my peak at this. I have to wind this down, give up, move on - or if I persist, am I psychotic or will it pay off eventually? What now? How do you want a newspaper article or a wikipedia page about you to read?
Or - find a nice career path, go to work, hope you find a nice girl, maybe get a promotion, have a family and a lot of friends. Life!
I think being successful quickly is important, because the more quickly you achieve what you set out to do, the sooner you have the opportunity to realize that it doesn’t matter.
I’ve done well in my niche of the professional world. It isn’t a source of joy. On a given day, i’d prefer to build legos with my son or have him read a little kid book to my wife and I.
My girlfriend met my dad over thanksgiving. He's now in his mid 70s, grew up extremely poor, son of immigrants, but ended up making mid six figures through brains and hard work and raised 4 children very well. A few of his siblings did better than that. She grew up rough and is very street smart. She said to me after "he has this look in his eyes that something is unfinished". I mentioned it to him a week later and somehow he responded "I always wanted to be king". I think your second line is a bit unfair of a statement to make - most people may reach your own conclusion, but that doesn't mean it's "correct". Caesar chose to cross his rubicon instead of bowing out of the game - he simply made that decision.
There are so many domains where you can achieve success or mastery so I just don’t buy the central message here. I think most people can be very successful in multiple domains, it’s just a matter of finding them and working hard enough. Gymnastics is an unfortunate thing to fail at since it’s a big commitment. Maybe that’s why the author was rendered cynical/defeated.
Pick any given field these days and you'll immediately be competing with millions of other talented people. Some of them have been doing it since they were children.
There aren't many careers that you can change into and succeed. It's very rare nowadays and it's getter rarer because capital is becoming increasingly concentrated and knowledge is becoming increasingly specialised. The playing field is global now. Even if you want to do something as mundane as open a local retail outlet, now you have to compete with giants like Amazon who use profits from their monopolies in other industries to bleed you dry.
The most important financial decision you can make in life is having the right parents. Second is marrying the right person.
What you call cynicism is actually realism. You're the optimist. The fact that you have this world view suggests that either you were born into a well-off family or you got very lucky at some point in your life.
In the same way that one wrong move can kill you in a second, it only takes a single stroke of luck to set you on a lifelong winning streak... Unfortunately, bad luck is the norm for most people.
While it's true that the harder you work, the luckier you get, when your luck starts in the negatives, it can take a lifetime just to bring it to 0.
> No one wants to fail in hunting, farming, business or anything else.
The supporters of the football (soccer, for the Americans in here) club that I used to root for ever since I was 9 (I'm now in my late-30s) used to have this wonderful saying: "It's better to hit the post with a beautiful shot than to score an ugly goal". That saying was one of the many reasons why I loved that club, which didn't have that many trophies under its belt. For what is worth, the club has now been dead for 2 years (it was founded in 1923) for financial reasons, so there's also that (it sucks to be a football club nowadays in Eastern Europe). I'm also a Mets supporter, so I guess there's just a cohort of sports fans like me who get attracted to clubs for reasons other than the "obsession to win".
Some societies seem to focus more on individual success than community survival.
I want to live in a society that is obsessed with creating a future where every member can thrive. Canada seems to be working a little harder at this than the United States, but both countries still have frontier culture heavily baked in.
This seems a bit simplistic, or I'm not understanding your comment. It is trivial to prove that you have to sometimes deprioritize an individual's success in order to ensure group success.
For example, it is beneficial to tax rich individuals to ensure the community has access to a social security safety net. Technically this penalizes a rich individual's success, however it is a critical factor in the success of the group.
ive always based success on quality of life. For example, I once took the RHCE and failed by just four points. Looking at the cost of the exam at around $400, I decided to forego a retake as a hundred dollars per point seemed silly. What did it mean to me, and my definition of success, to be able to regurgitate old Apache ACL's on command? Not much, seeing as Nginx is of a higher priority to me.
In the end I relegated the experience to that of a rat race. Being told you've failed the RHCE hurts but in no way does it mean you should settle with never achieving your dreams. Sometimes you've got to understand who sets the terms and definitions, and make adjustments as necessary. Letting others decide the objectives of success is tacitly hoping their outcomes and objectives for that often very personal success are as altruistic and self serving as yours. At some point, everything from Body Spray to luxury sedans set this bar in a predatory manner. Theres no reason to think the Olympics and private corporations in general wont at some point do this as well.
In some cases, the certifications associated with some score on a test do matter. It's one thing to pursue a certification, whether some IT certificate or passing the bar, for the learning experience and personal satisfaction. In those cases, it may well indeed make sense to conclude that you came close enough and move onto the next thing.
But if you've spent 3 years in law school and really want to become a lawyer, it may well make sense to study harder and try to pass the bar the next time--especially if you didn't fail by much. (Don't actually know how much feedback if you get if you fail.)
From the article, you get the clear impression that she had a complicated relationship with the sport: she was passionate about it, but afraid of it as well.
I can't help but wonder if she would have gotten closer to her goals if she had been able to see things in a less scary light -- by being taught and supported in a more positive way, or something like that. I guess it's down to who you are as a person, but attitudes can be developed in different ways.
I wonder if there is a distinction between top performers and mere mortals here -- that the top performers manage to find the love for what they are doing even under intense pressure? And, in that case, which way the causality goes...
Competition is designed to have roles succeed, not people. In business or sport, we want the best to succeed. In that sense competition is a success as long as it's fair. The people or businesses in the competition are essentially replaceable.
> In business or sport, we want the best to succeed.
This is inaccurate, or at least overly generalized. In both business and sport, many want those who contribute to the health of the field to succeed. Competition is good and drives innovation, whether that's technology or how to hit a baseball consistently.
i thought the best part of the article was towards the end, where she talks about all the different ways that gymnasts have of redefining success.
i think it may be healthy to avoid doing that. like, don't say "well, my company failed, but the important thing is I tried unlike all those losers stuck in 9-5 jobs". or "i didn't get a tenure-track job but really, this job in industry is great and the important thing is my transferable research skills".
you still failed, and it's much more dignified to live with it.
this is a very fluffy peace. First what is success? In what measure? Second "How do we come to terms with failure?" What failure? Whose failure? Everyone has their own, failure isn't a problem that haunts everyone, failure is however someone defines it. My failure isn't your failure.
I don't ever want to come to terms with failure. I just want to turn away from it and be so busy that I don't have time to sort it out. Acceptance of failure feels like a form of surrender.
"Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and they're always endlessly disappointing” -Peter Thiel
..., an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, philanthropist, political activist, and author. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 315 on the Forbes 400 in 2017, with a net worth of $2.6 billion. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel)
"There are many different ways to think of failure, most of which seem designed to soften the sting of it. In Courage to Soar, Ms. Biles unpacks her own thoughts on the matter. This memoir, "written" by a 19 year-old and published three months into her explosive post-Olympic popularity, is a pretty blatant cash-grab. Still, the book's purpose, beyond racking up sales, seems to be to inspire younger readers, young girls in particular. But why do we look for advice from the most talented in society? What do they know of our struggles to rise up, dripping and stinking, from the swamp of mediocrity? Here, for example, is Ms. Biles describing how, after some initial struggles, she finally managed to nail a tricky skill – a release move on the uneven bars called a Tkatchev in which you let go of the bar on the upswing and fly backward, usually straddled, over the bar before catching it. "And then, just before practice ended, I said to myself, I'm going to do it this time. And you know what? I actually did!" Must be nice."
Didn't he just use his status and prestige to buy his way into New Zealand citizenship? (This is a rhetorical question, the answer is "It would seem so.")
While Thiel definitely charmed his way into a NZ Citizenship (amazing piece here by the way: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/indepth/national/how-peter-thiel-g...), I always read his comment more as advice to avoid the traditional Management Consulting / Finance / Law career paths that a lot of Ivy League / Stanford / elite school students end up taking, where they work 70+ hours every week, generally competing for a 5% chance to become a partner 15 years down the track. The payoff isn't great. But the prestige of working at McKinsey / Goldman / Cravath is.
You look at the statistics and basically you're largely already born wealthy or you are in poverty especially in California. If you look at social mobility in California it's almost as bad as medieval Europe. The system that enabled hard work to be rewarded is gone. The creative professions that used to be a vehicle for persona wealth are gone. We are living in an era of corporate feudalism where you're either born on top or born to fail but the only question that is relevant today is "who's your daddy?"
On the contrary, it's got a great deal to do with success and failure, and defines the only reason why such an article is important.
If we can't disrupt success… 'move fast and break' success… we're very close to societal collapse.
I turned a ten-year software business into a Patreon that gives away free software and is beginning to make it open source, and I feel I'm doing some tangible things to disrupt 'success'. Our sense of value has to be founded on different ground.
It's even harder to redefine yourself when you used to be good at whatever it was you lost, because you know just how much time and effort it took to get there. It can seem impossible to achieve the same level of mastery of anything else.
It's been almost 5 years since I quit and, while I've picked up new hobbies that I enjoy, I still haven't found anything that inspires the passion I used to have for my sport.