Chapter 1 - The Wrong Aim
Zig Ziglar famously said, “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” And a lesson from mountain biking echoes that sentiment: “You ride where your eyes take you, so look where you want to go.”
Let’s play a thought game. Picture yourself ridiculously wealthy. You have more money than you could spend in a lifetime. What’s on your agenda? An exclusive European getaway? A Ferrari parked in your driveway? Perhaps you fancy the idea of a chauffeured limousine. You might dream of a sprawling estate, with everyone getting their own palatial wing, unobstructed views all around. Imagine jetting off to secluded beaches, savoring meals in hidden-gem restaurants, and indulging in experiences that are off-limits to the average Joe.
Sounds delightful, doesn’t it?
Or does it?
Rewind through that plush scene I’ve just painted. Notice how the language I used to portray affluence is laced with undertones of separation? “Exclusive” essentially means to exclude. “Private” translates to you, nearly alone. Estates built at a distance from others. Our visions of wealth are inadvertently visions of solitude.
Wealth needn’t be a one-way ticket to isolation. Yet, there’s a peculiar trend: as people climb the financial ladder, they often find themselves in thinner and thinner air. Unlike most natural phenomena, which spread in a bell curve, wealth follows a power law distribution. Let me explain.
In a bell curve scenario, imagine adding the world’s heaviest person to a room of one hundred average individuals. The group’s average weight shifts only slightly. Now, if you were to introduce a billionaire to that same group, the average wealth would skyrocket. Picture Michael Jordan walking in, and suddenly, everyone’s average net worth balloons by millions—because of just one person’s earnings.
We humans are wired to understand bell curves, not these exponential wealth scenarios. And that’s where our concepts of success, loneliness, and isolation intersect.
The richer you become, the more you mingle with folks who make not just more, but exponentially more than you do. As a member of the Entrepreneurs Organization, which mandates a million-dollar annual revenue for membership, I’ve seen this firsthand. To a person making $50,000, a million is a fortune. But in this circle, a million is merely the entry fee.
This organization was born partly to combat the solitude of entrepreneurship. We abide by a mantra: “A business owner alone is a business owner at risk.”
Why?
Because success is sweet, but loneliness is lethal.
Dr. Laurie Santos likens the impact of loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If loneliness were a disease, it would be a top killer, rivaling heart disease and cancer.
But why do we equate success with loneliness?
The answer may be deeply rooted in history. Literature like “The Lord of the Four Quadrants” and “The Golden Bough” indicates that humans instinctively maintain a distance from those in power. Hence the phrase, “It’s lonely at the top.” This discussion aims to spotlight something intuitively known but often overlooked: our language around success is steeped in the imagery of isolation.
We liken success to standing solo on the Olympic podium. Yet, often the one on the second step, simmering with envy, is just as successful but feels second best. Research suggests that often the bronze medalist is as happy as the gold medalist—they’re not fixated on the two ahead, but grateful to be ahead of the many behind them.
Success is a social construct, and in the Western world, we’ve tangled it up with competition.
This brings me to my own brush with the complex nature of competition. As a Little League coach in Arizona, where the weather blesses us with year-round baseball, I experienced it firsthand. Our club team, formed to sharpen our competitive edge, climbed from AA to AAA. But during a tournament in Tucson, our superiority was so pronounced, it became unfair. Despite our dominance, I turned to find not jubilation, but tears of frustration in my dugout.
Why? The boys had set themselves unreasonably high expectations. This wasn’t just about winning; it was about an unattainable perfection. This wasn’t joy; it was self-inflicted pressure.
Remember, the most despondent Olympic athlete isn’t usually the one who finishes last, but the silver medalist. It’s a phenomenon backed by research. The fixation on being “the best” robs us of the joy found in simply doing our best.
Legendary coach John Wooden once said, “I never talk about winning. Because for some people, winning is not enough.” That’s a powerful lesson about success and its unintended shadow —loneliness.
Our goal should not be simply to climb to the top; We probably want to understand what we’re climbing towards.
The Degradation of Competition
Let’s get one thing straight—I’m not here to demonize success. But it’s high time we grapple with a larger question: if success leaves us lonely, and winning feels empty, then what’s truly essential?
Here’s the crux of it: we’re barking up the wrong tree when it comes to competition. We’re pleading with it to bring us joy. But perhaps that’s not its role.
Dive into our own biology, and you’ll see that systems in opposition—competition—are stitched into our very fabric, both physiologically and psychologically. Down to our cells, we’re a jumble of competing systems, where no one truly wins.
Competition Among Cells
Take the retina in your eyes—a wizard of an organ allowing us to see colors. Evolutionary biologists suggest our vision evolved to spot ripe fruit. This adaptation forced our brains to evolve to support high resolution color vision. Yet human’s can not see a mixtures of red and green. Why not? Because the red and green cones are in competition with each other. As fruit tips from green to red, a winner emerges. The red cones win. Yet, the green cones don’t bow out. Not permanently. The next time we see a fruit, they are back at it, helping giving us the ability to distinguish between unripe, and safe food. Our color perception competes to produce better outcomes.
Our bodies are loaded with similarly beneficial competitive systems. Consider the delicate dance between our brain’s hemispheres, or the push-pull of System 1 and System 2 thinking. Homeostasis is a not a battleground but a cooperative-competitive landscape that keeps our blood’s makeup in check. We have another word for this kind of competition; balanced.
This brings up an interesting question. If competition in nature seeks stability, what role should competition play in society?
I often say when the only thing is winning, we stand to lose a lot. Winning’s true function? It’s rooted in our behavioral evolution. Jakk Panskepp, affectionately known as the ‘rat tickler,’ uncovered the brain’s play circuits. Play isn’t just fun—it’s about discovery and testing limits. Panskepp noticed something astonishing with rats in play: the subordinate rat often invites the dominant rat to play, and if the bigger rat wins too much, the little rat quits inviting the bigger rat to play. If the larger rat lets the smaller win just enough—around 30-40% of the time—they’ll play indefinitely.
Think humans and rats are worlds apart? Try this: check the win rates of the worst teams in any sports league. Rarely do they fall below 30%. Legendary teams are those that win over two-thirds of their games.
Rats, it turns out, have a sense of fairness, and so do we. Because competition’s real job is to foster the best outcomes for everyone involved.
In sports, competition serves a dual purpose: it reveals a range of talents and abilities, and it trains us to excel under pressure. To quote Coach Wooden, we’re teaching competitors to “be their best when their best is most needed.”
Yet, our win-at-all-costs mentality warps the true essence of competition. Instead of recognizing a spectrum of capabilities, we fixate on the top tier, forcing the rest to shield themselves from psychological harm. The ‘smaller rats’ often withdraw, knowing better than to play a losing game. And the ‘winners’ shy away from growth-filled challenges, as demonstrated by children choosing simpler puzzles over complex ones once grades enter the picture.
Competition could be humanity’s finest tool to help each other excel when it matters most. Instead, we’ve let it morph into an isolating ordeal that curtails risk-taking and stifles growth.
It’s like losing our ability to see green—all we perceive is red.
By 2020, the pressure to win was so intense that seventy percent of 11-year-olds in the U.S. had quit team sports. It’s a shocking stat that points to a broader issue: the decline of team environments that teach cooperation, performance under pressure, and communication.
Our children, now entering the workforce, are expected to ‘join the team’ without truly understanding what that means. For many, ‘team’ brings back memories of cutthroat competition—not an experience they’re eager to revisit.
Then there’s the final hurdle: mediated communications.
Summary
Our minds have a talent for misleading us from what makes us genuinely happy. Words shape our thoughts and feelings. Ambition isn’t inherently bad—in fact, achievement is crucial for well-being—but the brand of success we idolize matters. It’s not about standing alone at the life’s summit; there are healthier, more fulfilling visions to chase.
The linchpin? Our relationships, which hinge on communication. Yet, the way we interact is being radically transformed by technology. And that’s the conversation we’ll delve into next.