Chapter 1 - Wrong Aim
If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time – Zig Zigler
“You ride where your eyes take you, so look where you want to go.” – Mountain Bike Lesson
Let’s play a game. Imagine you are rich. Imagine you have all the money you could ever want. What would you do with that money? Would you book yourself an exclusive European vacation (or if you live in Europe, would you book yourself an exclusive cruise around the Mediterranean?) Do you imagine fancy cars like a Lamborghini or a Ferrari? Or is your sense of luxury a limo with a professional driver? Surely you would upgrade your home, moving to a large plot of land in a magnificent house. Everyone would not only get their own room but their own wing! No one would block your view of the mountains, ocean, city. You would travel to exotic locations where you could have the beach to yourself, eat in private dining rooms, and enjoy experiences no one else can have.
How does that sound? Amazing? Right?
Or does it? If you look back at the scene I described, have you noticed how many words I used to describe “being rich” as being isolationist in nature? Exclusive hides the core word - to exclude. Private - is just that, you and practically no one else. Houses built away from everyone else. Our images of wealth create images of isolation.
Of course wealth does not have to be lonely and isolating, but there is a strange effect that happens when people become successful. Wealth is not distributed along a bell curve like most attributes in an organic world. Wealth is distributed along a power law curve. What does that mean?
Most natural or organic attributes are distributed along a bell curve. If you took 100 people and put them in a room, then brought in the heaviest man or woman in the world - that one single person could not move the average weight of everyone else in the room more than a few percentage points. The average weight might go from 175 pounds to 177, or 180 pounds.
However, if you took the same random population of people and looked at their average income - let’s say it was $75,000 a year. Bring in Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos, or Michael Jordan (who earns $400M a year from his licensing deal with Nike), and the average income of everyone in that room skyrockets. Jordan alone would increase the average wealth of everyone in the room by $4M per year.
Humans mostly evolved to deal with ordinary distributions, ones that look like a bell curve. We are not naturally predisposed to grasp exponential systems. What does this have to do with our feelings of success and loneliness and isolation?
The more money you make, the more you get exposed to people who make exponentially more money than you. Not just a little bit, exponentially more. As a member of the Entrepreneurs Organization, a peer learning organization for founders and owners of their own business, I have seen this firsthand. Your business must generate a minimum of one million dollars a year in revenue. This sounds like a lot to someone earning $50,000. And it is a lot. However, you soon realize that is the minimum, and there are people who earn, much, much more than that. Exponentially more than that in fact. One of the main reasons this group formed was to fight loneliness among business owners. There is a mantra we use. A business owner alone, is a business owner at risk.
Why would we say that?
Because while success is great, loneliness kills.[^1]
Dr. Laurie Santos likened loneliness to a 15 cigarette a day habit. If loneliness were a disease, it would be the number three on the list of deadly health risks up there with heart attack and lung cancer.[^2]
So why is it that we mix success with loneliness and isolation?
The roots of this could be very ancient in nature. The Lord of the Four Quadrants, and The Golden Bough suggest that symbolically humans want distance between authority and themselves. We all know that it is “lonely” at the top. My point here was to draw your attention to something you already know but may not have paid much attention to. The language of success, is steeped in isolating imagery.
We often imagine success like winning the gold medal at the Olympics. Alone at the top of the podium. And that brings me to the second way we aim at things that we think will make us happy, but really don’t.
Let’s talk about the importance of competition and our need to win. Western Culture has a very complicated relationship with competition.
I had an experience with this firsthand when I was coaching little league baseball. I live in Arizona, and we are blessed to be able to play baseball all year round here. In fact, some of the most pleasant months to play are in the fall and the winter. The blistering heat rolls off, the skies are clear, and thanks to Major League Baseball hosting Cactus League here each spring for decades, we are rich with amazing fields to play on. We have access to incredible facilities. Green grass outfields, smooth dirt infields, bases that sparkle like freshly brushed teeth in the sun. There are tournaments at every level, every weekend throughout the fall, winter, and spring in Arizona.
To improve our competitiveness in the Little League All Star tournament, some neighborhood dads and I formed a club team. Our kids worked hard and the coaches matched their effort. We didn’t know if we could win, but we knew if we were prepared we would have our chance. We were a gritty team that fought our way up from AA (lowest level) to AAA - where we won a number of tournaments, and we are on the verge of being invited to play in Majors tournaments.
It was at that time, when we were playing our best baseball, we went to Tucson to play some new competition. It was an “open”, and I didn’t recognize any of the teams. Because most boys our age have similar physical abilities (although not similar baseball skills) I assumed it would be competitive play. I was wrong. But not the way you might think.
We were much better than any of the other teams. In fact, it was hardly fair. We came out of the box, striking out the first 6 batters we faced, 4 of them looking. Our hitters? They were crushing it. I think it’s was 10-0 before I could blink.
Now here’s the funny part. You would think with success like that my team would have been ecstatic. I mean, we were dominating this other team to the point I felt sorry for them. But when I turned to my own dugout, I found…crying boys. I almost couldn’t believe it. I had some (not all) players in my dugout crying with frustration.
It was a little hard to fathom, but once they had realized how much better they were than the other team, they heaped these ridiculous expectations on themselves (I should get a double every time I come up to bat). Or, no one should get on base, or I should not throw a ball only strikes.
There’s a saying that the most miserable person at the Olympics is not the last place finisher, but the silver medalist. This is more than a saying, there is actually some data to back it up.[^3] I mentioned standing alone on top of the podium, but the person right behind them, dying of envy is the runner up. They see the one and only person who prevented them from living their dreams. The happiest? It’s a tie between gold and bronze. You see, the gold obviously won, but the Bronze - they’re not comparing themselves to the two people ahead of them, they’re looking at the dozens of competitors behind them.
Success you see, is a social phenomenon, and in the west, we have made it deeply competitive.
We compete with others, and even ourselves. It wasn’t enough to win, my frustrated players thought that “winning big” meant you were free to execute perfectly, flawlessly, the way you imagine the other team plays when you are on the receiving end of a drubbing. We won - and it wasn’t fair. Lest you think my players were spoiled crybabies - I would like to defend them by sharing something John Wooden said. “I never talk about winning. Because for some people, winning is not enough.”
The Degradation of Competition
My point here is not to vilify success but to begin to ask the bigger question, if success is isolating and winning is not enough - what do we actually need?
I think the problem lies in the root of what we expect winning to do for us. We are asking the wrong thing of competition. We are asking competition to make us happy. And that, may not be its purpose at all.
When you look at our own physiology and biology, we find that competition - systems set up in opposition to each other- are embedded in our physiology, and our psychology. Even all the way down to the cellular level, we are a collection of systems in competition, but these are competitions no side wins.
Competition among cells
In your eyes you have a layer of specialized cells called the retina. This miracle organ allows us to perceive color. But humans cannot see combinations of red and green. Why is that? Because we have special structures made up of cells called Rods and Cones. These come in three flavors, red, green, and blue. The red cones and green cones in particular “compete” with each other. But why?
There is an evolutionary biologist who believes our vision (and much of our brain) evolved to detect ripe fruit.[^4] In order to fulfill that function, our red cones and green cones push on each other - when the fruit reaches a certain tipping point, the apple say moves from green to red - snap, the red cones “win” and we know the fruit is ripe.
But the Red cones do not go on to vanquish the green receptors. In fact, our health depends upon the continued function of our green receptors. We need to know when the fruit is green and therefore not safe to eat.
We have plenty of systems that work this way in the body. Your upper and lower jaw are set in opposition. Our left and right hemisphere do different jobs but they also “compete” with one another to determine how we will process and interpret information. Even within our psyche we have multiple dualities - System 1 - our fast thinking brain and System 2 - our slow thinking brain. Homeostasis in the blood is a collection of competing systems that keep our blood salinity, sugar, and body temperature regulated.
If competition in the natural world is really about stability, what is the function of competition in society?
I like to say when winning is the only thing, we lose a lot. I have come to see that the true function of winning is based in our behavioral evolution. An evolutionary biologist named Jakk Panskep[^5], also known as the rat tickler, found the neural circuitry in the brain for play. We are literally wired for play. Play is not only about fun, play is about discovery, finding the boundaries of physical, and sociological interaction. Panskep found that when two rats of substantially different size are put together, they will engage in rough and tumble play. However, the larger rat has the capacity to always win due to physical dominance. What Panskep observed however was fascinating. It is the subordinate rat that invites the dominant rat to play. If the larger rat always wins, the little rat stops inviting the big rat to play. And both animals suffer. However, if the bigger rate lets the little rat win enough the little rat will keep inviting the bigger rat to play, ad infinitum. Panskep found that percentage to be between 30 and 40 percent of the time.
Let you think humans and rats are very different, I give you this challenge. You can validate this yourself. Please pause reading (or listening) to this book and go check the standings in your favorite sports league. Whether it is baseball, basketball, football, hockey, or some other sport like Lacrosse. Pay special attention to the winning percentage of the worst teams in the league. It is very rare to see winning percentages below 30%, and most teams hover around 40% in the basement. It is extremely hard to win more than 2/3rds (66%) of your games in any professional sport. Teams that win much more than that become legendary.
Believe it or not, rats have a sense of fairness. If you don’t play fair, you don’t get to play. And in well balanced systems, humans also have a sense of fairness. Why? Because the function of competition is to produce better outcomes. Better outcomes for who? The best possible outcomes for all participants.
The function of competition, in particular sports competition is twofold. One to draw out a spectrum of capacity and talent. Hierarchies are how populations identify the most capable of competent of their species to extract maximum benefit from their capabilities. Second, balanced competition trains humans how to perform under pressure.
To paraphrase Coach Wooden, we want to train competitors how to be their best when their best is most needed.
Unfortunately, our obsession with winning, has a perverse impact on participants. Instead of sorting a group against itself to create a spectrum of capability, we focus only on the very top, those who win. This causes most competitors to adopt strategies to minimize psychological harm. If the contest is physical, the small rats - opt out. I have seen this personally in summer camps we ran with our esports league. I called it the tyranny of the ball. The bigger kids would grab the basketball, or football, or what ever it was, and keep it away from the smaller kids. Many of the smaller kids, (gamers) would just stop playing. Not because they are lazy, but rather because they know not to play games they can’t win. It is a waste of resources.
What’s more, “winners” often back away from the challenges that would give them the most growth. When psychologists invited kids to take on word descrambling problems the kids naturally gravitated to the most difficult problems, until the teachers made it a competition by assigning grades. At that moment, instead of challenging themselves, the kindergarteners switches strategies and stuck to the easiest to solve puzzles - to maximize their “wins.”
Competition has the potential to be the greatest tools humanity has ever devised to create a system where we can help each other be our best when our best is most needed. Instead, like our obsession with success, it has become an isolating experience that encourages participants to minimize risk taking to ensure pre-approved outcomes. Development is stifled, social benefit thwarted.
It’s almost as if we have lost our green receptors, and everything looks red to us. We can’t even imagine that there was any green in the world.
In fact, this “pressure” to succeed is so extreme, that by 2020 seventy percent of 11 years olds in the United States had fallen out of team sports [^6]. When I share this statistic with people they are shocked. But here’s another example of where I’m not really going to tell you anything new, I just want to draw your attention to something you already know.
When was the last time we built a new University in the United States? (Answer 2009, University of Merced in California). In 1960, two hundred division one colleges competed for national championships in athletics. In 2023, two hundred and ONE division one schools compete for national championships in athletics. Over the last sixty years we have not added a single new team to any major university. We have added sports, but not teams. Yet we have more than doubled our population and tripled the number of students at our schools.
Our kids access to sports has collapsed under the weight of unbalanced, crushing competition. Our obsession with winning has pushed tens of millions of kids out of team environments, robbing of the opportunity to develop their lessons of learning to work toward common goals, developing the capacity to perform under pressure, and how to communicate with other people working toward the same outcome.
In obsessing about winning, we have lost a lot.
And those children, are now entering your companies as workers. People you expect to “join your team.” The reality is they can’t really join your team because they have no idea what a team really is. They haven’t been on one. And if they have, chances are, it was a cut throat, win at all costs experience - the kind that drove them out of sports in the first place. Their whole attitude toward “teams” may shock you. Far from being a good thing, for many of them, it was a frustrating, humiliating experience they are not in a hurry to repeat. That’s not to say they don’t want to work in environments with other people - however, there is one more barrier to team cooperation that affects all of us. Mediated communications.
Summary
It is not a surprising finding that our minds often lead us astray of what will actually make us happy. However, words shape our thoughts, and our feelings. In this chapter I have tried to make it clear that while there is nothing inherently wrong with ambition, in fact, we will see achievement is as least as important has positive emotion for our well being, the kind of success we imagine is important. Instead of imaging ourselves alone at the top of the pyramid of life’s competition, there are other images we can explore that will not only help us meet our needs financially and physically, as well as emotionally and mentally.
The key to creating these better visions involves our relationships, and relationships rely on communication. Unfortunately, the way we interact today is being changed in profound ways due to the role of technology in our lives. That’s what we’re going to explore in the next chapter.