Turning Hardship and Heartbreak into Happiness
What the 1936 Olympic gold medal crew team can teach us about trusting others
Why is Daniel James Brown’s “The Boys in the Boat” a Beautiful Story?
Joe Rantz had every reason not to trust people.
When Joe was 4, his mother died of throat cancer. And his father, Harry? Well… he fled to Canada to numb the pain of his wife’s death, abandoning Joe to his older brother.
When Joe was 10, his new stepmother issued an ultimatum to his recently returned father: it’s him or me. His dad chose her, and Joe was forced to move in with the local schoolteacher, paying for his room by chopping wood after school.
When Joe was 15, his family—even though they’d just settled in Sequim a few years earlier — would move again. Except this time Joe would not be going with them. For the third time — and what he swore would be the last — the people closest to him abandoned him.
Something inside him had shifted, and
“He would never again let himself depend…on anyone else, for his sense of who he was.”
Years Later, Joe Does Eventually Find His Missing Piece
It was during “the last desperate few hundred meters of the race, in the searing pain and bewildering noise of that final furious sprint” of the Finals of the 1936 Olympics Men’s Eights Rowing that Joe lets himself trust.
“He could finally abandon all doubt, trust absolutely without reservation that he and the boy in front of him and the boys behind him would all do precisely what they needed to do at precisely the instant they needed to do it.”
That night after winning the gold medal, Joe lay awake reflecting in his bed…
“He had had no choice but to throw himself into each stroke as if he were throwing himself off a cliff into a void, with unquestioned faith that the others would be there to save him from catching the whole weight of the shell on his blade.
And he had done it.
Over and over, forty-four times per minute, he had hurled himself blindly into his future, not just believing but knowing that the other boys would be there for him, all of them, moment by precious moment.”
After all was said and done, Joe’s Olympic story concludes as if it were written by Fate itself (which might have maybe made me cry a little).
“Now he felt whole. He was ready to go home.”
There is no ending more fitting for someone who had suffered so much because of others to find fulfillment, happiness, and peace through others.
It gives me faith that although things may not always work out, sometimes they do… and sometimes they do perfectly.
What Does “The Boys in the Boat” Teach Us About Life?
The Tension Between Individual Recognition and Collective Success
Part of the appeal of this story is certainly its beauty: Joe, despite being hurt time and time again, reluctantly took the risk of opening himself up to others and had his vulnerability rewarded with deep, meaningful connection.
To me, though, a more interesting aspect of its appeal is its distillation of an important tension in my life. That tension is rooted in there sometimes existing a difference between what is best for a group and what is best for an individual.
As human beings, we generally recognize that we are limited in what we can do alone. Knowing this, we build teams, companies, and even societies around the desire to accomplish something that will outlive us when we’re gone.
Judging from examples in athletics, military service, and religion, it seems many of us want to lose ourselves — standing side-by-side with our closest comrades — in the collective pursuit of something greater.
In contrast, judging from examples in academia, art, and business, it also seems many of us highly value our individuality and have a strong desire for personal recognition.
When these desires — on the one hand, wanting the group as a whole to succeed, and on the other, wanting to be individually recognized apart from the group — come into conflict, I’ll admit it’s sometimes been a real struggle to know what to do.
The Boys In the Boat Helps Me Think About Resolving that Tension
Early in the 1935-36 season, the rowing world’s wise sage, George Pocock, told Joe that in order to succeed, he must let go of himself and stop thinking as an individual who rows as if his paddle, and his paddle alone, moved the entire boat forward.
At first, hearing this doesn’t really mean anything to Joe. Quite frankly, he seems just as confused after receiving this advice as he was before. However, later on, after a successful practice with a new boat including familiar former boat-mates and roommates,
“[Joe] realized that the transformation wasn’t so much that he was trying to do what Pocock had said as that this was a bunch of boys with whom he could do it. He just trusted them.”
With this insight, The Boys in the Boat lays out a useful framework for thinking about that tension between individual recognition and collective success.
To Joe (and now me), it seems that because prioritizing the group’s well-being over your own inevitably risks you getting hurt, your willingness to do what is good for the group — at the expense of what’s good for yourself — should increase in proportion to your trust in that group.
Put simply, if you can’t be sure that the group will catch you if you fall, then how can you possibly have the confidence to take that leap of risking yourself?
Why do I love this book? (Conclusion)
- It’s insightful… See above.
- It’s thrilling... Somehow, someway, despite us knowing the entire time that Joe and crew will win the Olympic Gold Medal, Daniel James Brown masterfully builds tension. He keeps us on the edge of our seat, eager to find out what will happen next.
- It’s beautiful… Not only is it beautiful in that it’s exciting to read with pretty sentences, but it’s also beautiful in that it’s a touching story about emerging from hardship and heartbreak to find happiness through hard work and group belonging.
Rating
Number of Times Cried: 2
Non-Fiction: 10/10
Overall: 10/10
