A Quote:
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Race, a Tycoon and a God:
Over the last few days as I watched the brilliant Netflix documentary “Tour de France: Unchained”, my thoughts kept toggling between the ecstasy of the winner and his journey to the podium, and the agony of the remaining 100+ cyclists who were dealing with their own demons of under-performance or inadequacy in the face of the intense competition around them.
Above: Visma's Wout Van Aert (in the Yellow Jersey) celebrates as he crosses the finish line at the Tour de France in 2022. Below: Other riders as they deal with loss, exhaustion and bad luck over the same race. Photo credit: Christian Hartmann (Reuters); Chris Auld.
Towards the end of his life the world’s richest man in the 1960’s – J Paul Getty was asked to reflect on all this power, wealth and connections and with what achievements did he feel most happy. After a moment’s contemplation he said – ‘Despite all the wealth and accomplishments I have had in my life, I was happiest when I was surfing as a teenager in California.’ That is the world richest man sharing when he was most happy – something for us all to reflect on.
Above Left: J Paul Getty at the peak of his wealth and power. Above Right: Young lads surfing off the cost of California at the turn of the last century.
If you look around you will notice everyone (yes everyone), suffers from feeling like someone is doing better than them. Even Michael Phelps, after winning a measly 23 Olympic golds admitted to feeling anxious and depressed – so much so that he contemplated suicide. If after being the greatest athlete of all time, Phelps had thoughts of wanting to end his life – what hope have we less-than ordinary mortals got.
Magazine covers showing different realities. On the left Phelps in 2016 as a God with his Olympic golds brandished across his bare chest, and on the right – in 2017 – Phelps sharing his battle with Depression.
A few years back as I dealt with my own mid-life crisis of deciding whether to continue to run my own fund, I met with a Monk (who definitely had sold his Ferrari) to seek guidance. As I explained my predicament to the Monk – he said something that was so profound that it almost sounds too simplistic – “The problem with everyone today is they only think of winning. Only 1 person wins. What about the 99 who lose? No one teaches them how to deal with losing. Most of life is losing!” This notion has been running around in the boroughs of my mind ever since.
A Thought
Society has force fed us to believe that if you are not winning – you are a waste of space. That if you don’t ‘want’ to win – you are just excess baggage to everyone else. When you go to a carnival, you don’t want to win, you just want to play. Enjoy the music, ride the roller coasters, and go home with a bag of popcorn and stick of Barbie-pink cotton candy. What if the point was to just be happy with the journey – with not trying to be ‘better’ than anyone?
I want to offer an alternative thought – that it’s ok to be ordinary. Yes – even mediocre. There is something beautiful in being ordinary (versus great). That winning is far from being the ‘only’ thing (apologies Vince Lombardi) in life. The vast multitude of the human condition resides in the state of ‘ordinary’. This is where all of us spend most of our waking lives. And there beauty in that. There is joy in doing what you can, as best as you can do it.
For every winner, be it an exam, a job, or a race, there are hundreds, if not tens of thousands of those so did not win that coveted prize, medal or position. Walk into any bookshop, anywhere in the world, and you will find lines of books on ‘the winning mindset’, biographies of winners in sport or the corporate world, techniques of what it takes to win in war or the corporate boardroom. I can’t remember seeing a book about how to deal with being mediocre or losing? Or watching a movie about coming 19th in the Olympics or the Boston Marathon? Yet – the vast majority of us spend our lives outside the rank of the position of ‘Numero Uno’. Maybe the human experience is one where despite achieving outsized success in any field, we still have to grapple with our inadequacies. That success in one arena of life does not cover the entirety of the human experience. That we are all a mosaic of different emotions and there is no silver bullet to achieve that elusive, all pervading happiness.
So what if someone makes more money than you – do you know the name of the 214th richest guy on the planet? And he is pretty rich – and yet you don’t know who he is. I wanted to be the world’s greatest Hedge fund manager. Who really knows the name of James Simons (outside of a small circle of finance geeks)? So forget about future greatness and all that nonsense the media has been feeding us about being the best. Just be the best one can be. We were born a billion years ago inside an exploding star, and will someday merge back into that fabulous star. We are star dust – ordinary yet so very extra-ordinary. Smile, laugh, sing, dance – nothing we do will ever be more important than that – THAT is winning!
Awesome Anuj
There is a high in achievement and that’s okay too. It’s just that when we lose we need to quickly get over it and move on and not let it subsume us. There is a difference between being complacent and being happy. Complacency is an escape and happiness is a state of mind!