Sports are Easy. Life is Hard
Phil Knight says it best. This world is made up of crazy ideas and who is to say your ideas are any less valid than someone else’s? Gary Vaynerchuk would tell you to let the ‘marketplace’ decide.
In our digital age, we live in a time when we can avoid the gatekeepers and access our audiences directly. If your idea is crazy, but people buy into it, is it still crazy? Or maybe you just have crazy fans?
With this freedom to exchange information and to play in a global marketplace, we can sometimes be crippled by too much opportunity.
This where I believe that athletes have one of the easiest paths. Not easy in terms of less physical or mental work, but easy in terms of the clearest path possible.
In sports, work ethic almost directly correlates to success. If you work hard enough, success is likely to follow. Now if you aren’t talented, that is a entire separate conversation, but sports don’t discriminate. A short basketball player can still make the NBA if they work hard enough — see Muggsy Bogues, the shortest basketball player to ever play in the NBA, who had a 14-season career. Yes he was good, but he also worked hard.
And that is the point. The idea behind training for a sport is relatively simple. You know exactly what you should do. If you can’t hit a curve ball, practice hitting a curve ball until you can. If you can’t dribble, then practice dribbling until you can do it with your eyes are closed.
Progress is fairly linear. Sure there are setbacks and plateaus, but the path is still much more clear.
Other endeavors are much harder.
If you want to be an author, the advice is to write a lot and read a lot. Fine advice, but how do you gauge progress? It isn’t like you’re watching the ball go through a hoop or over a fence. Writing a lot of the same poor quality will do nothing to make you a better writer. So the advice of write a lot isn’t that helpful. Reading a lot gets closer to the answer because we can gleam from already successful authors how they write and mimic their style. But then, at a certain point, we still don’t have the necessary feedback to know if we are getting better.
Ryan Holiday says that creating a lasting work of art, whether it be a book, a painting, or a business, is an isolating endeavor, but if you don’t share it with the world it can’t last. There is where the root of ‘life is hard’ stems from. We can perform the greatest masterpieces in the world, but we can’t do it alone.
Even inside the sports world, athletes can only get so far by themselves. They need a team, and even if they play tennis — one of the only sports in the world where you are entirely by yourself, they need a coach.
Jack Schwager, in his book The New Market Wizards, interviews Bill Lipschutz, who is known as the ‘Sultan of Currencies,’ a highly successful currency trader. One of the quotes that Schwager got from Bill was this: “When I talk about working hard, I mean commitment and focus; it has nothing to do with how many hours you spend in the office.”
I think this quote is at the foundation of progress. It isn’t about working harder or smarter, both are certainly helpful, but it is about focusing on what will bring you closer to your end goal. Gary Vaynerchuk, the CEO of Vaynermedia, is going to buy the Jets. He says that himself with the utmost confidence. And so his focus is on making every decision align with that goal. He passes on the short term gains for the long term move that brings him closer to the jets.
I think we need to do the same thing. It isn’t about spending the most hours in the gym, like it is for basketball, where you can simply out work your opponent. Being successful in business, art, relationships, or life, revolves around having the patience to focus on what you want in the end, and then working as hard as you can to get there.
I still haven’t found out how to accomplish that. I still get dizzy with existential angst. I doubt myself. I start things and never finish them. I don’t have the answers to this question, but by learning from the people who are doing it, we can get closer.
Or this entire thought process is an excuse and we're just too lazy to put in the work.
Originally published at www.nicholasbmills.com.
