54 Things I Learned In My 54th Year: #52 The Climb

I’ve spent my life chasing results, impatiently anticipating that one, final, magical achievement that would give me the admiration and confidence and validation and respect I believed would follow.

Until this year, I had no idea how results-driven I was or how exhausting and impossible this way of thinking and living is.

This constant pursuit of results only creates a hamster wheel of… a constant pursuit of results.

You become attached to your results.

And sometimes you become your results altogether.

When you are relying on your results to feel good about yourself you are only setting yourself up for disappointment.

The high of impressive results only lasts so long. A couple months or weeks or days or heck, maybe even hours after you’ve achieved success, that accompanying feeling of euphoria wears off.

Then it’s time to set your eye on a new pursuit. Back onto the hamster wheel.

Every time you reach your goal you’re taking another hit from the (metaphorical) bong of success.

You get a rush of self-confidence, enough to give you a fix and temporarily satiate your need for success in order to feel good about yourself.

Then back onto the hamster wheel in pursuit of more results.

But you don’t always succeed.

And what happens then? What happens when you don’t hit the goal? What happens when you fail?

If you are a success when you succeed, well… then following that logic, you are a failure when you fail. At least when you believe that your importance and value as a human being is directly connected to your results.

Being involved in sports as an athlete and a coach and a parent has helped me to understand this, but it was really only in my 54th year on the planet that I really, finally got it. 

It’s easy to become obssessed with results when you are involved in sports.

I mean, the ultimate goal is to win.

When you win you’re a winner and when you lose, you’re a loser.

When you win you are better than the other team and when you lose, you are worse than the other team.

When your team wins, you played better than the other team.

But that doesn’t mean you are better people than the other team.

Being a superior football player doesn’t make you a superior human being.

Standing in the number one spot on the podium doesn’t make you the number one person in the building.

I’ve seen what the effects of focusing on results can do to my own kids.

It can create tremendous anxiety.

We want our kids to be successful and we want our kids to win because we think that’s what will make them feel good about themselves.

We want to save them from disappointment. We want them to experience that feeling of being the best or of getting that qualifying time or standing on that podium because we think that’s what makes them feel good about themselves.

But what we are really doing is sending our kids the message that their results are what make them special. We teach them that what we care most about is what place they come in.

We don’t mean to send this message. But we do.

Over and over and over again.

When we coach our kids in the car after a game and tell them what they can do better next time so they can win, we are telling them that their results are more important than the fact that they tried something new. Or that they had fun. Or that they did something scary. Or that they are learning and growing.

This starts a mental cycle of obssessively worrying about performance.

The mental obssession creates stress.

Stress, whether you are aware of it or not, creates physical tension and exhausts your body.

Worrying all day long depletes your body of energy and it wears your brain out.

And you can’t do anything to the best of your ability when you are tense and exhausted.

I mean try making a muscle with your arm – flex your bicep – and hold that as long as you can.

It doesn’t take too long before you have to take a break.

When you are focusing on results and stressing yourself out and worrying all day long about your performance or things you can’t control (like how fast the person next to you is going to swim) you are basically flexing your entire body every waking moment.

You’re exhausting yourself. And you’re not relaxed.

You’re making it exponentially more difficult to achieve the results you’ve been working toward, and the chances of “failure” are significantly increased.

And now the thing that you originally started doing because it was fun and you loved it has become a source of stress. It’s not fun anymore.

It’s torture.

And then you quit.

Quitting often leads to regret and regret often leads to more anxiety, depression, shame, and remorse.

I started coaching a girls and boys high school swim team this past year. The program has a lot of challenges and obstacles that other teams in our division and league aren’t faced with, and they haven’t had consistent coaching for several years.

We are literally out of our league as far as being competitive. We cannot compete with the other teams.

Not yet anyway. Give me a couple years.

We don’t have enough swimmers to enter a full lineup. We can’t fill all of our lanes. Less than a third of the team can swim all four strokes legally.

We have no chance of winning any of our meets this season.

We have no chance of winning any events at any of our meets this season.

In fact, we have almost no chance of beating any of the swimmers from any of the other teams in any event at all.

At all nine of our meets in every single event the other team will most likely place 1st, 2nd and 3rd, and we will most likely finish 4th, 5th and 6th.

If our results are the most important part of our season and the biggest focus for our team, we are screwed.

I’ve shared the quote It’s the journey, not the destination more times than I can count.

But it was my experience last year coaching these two struggling high school teams who get blown out of the water by every team they swim against that truly helped me completely understand it.

99.9999% of us are never going to be the best at anything.

Most swimmers or gymnasts or triathletes or marathon runners or cyclists or speed skaters or [insert any sport] will never stand on a podium.

And if most of us will never be the best, if we’re never going to get that coveted result, if most of us won’t win an academy award or be the valedictorian or set a school record or win the World Series or the Stanley Cup or Wimbledon or the Daytona 500 or the Nobel Peace Prize or a Grammy, then why does anyone do anything at all?

Because it’s not about winning.

Sports, theater, music, dance, writing, crocheting or whatever it is we want to try… these are all just different avenues that can potentially lead us into a pilgrimage of self discovery and growth.

And that is where the magic happens. You don’t develop grit and determination and perseverance and self awareness and stamina and wisdom once you cross the finish line.

You develop all that stuff – all the important stuff – along the way.

It really is all about the climb.