Playing for What You Want

I love the Olympics. I know there’s drama and corruption and cheating, e.g. Canadians touching curling stones like God’s outstretched fingers in Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Cheating is cheating, but I find the curling debacle pretty funny.

I’m not even a sporty person. But there’s something about all these people from all over the world, working doggedly towards a quite unreasonable and equally unlikely goal, and I get to watch them as they round the bend on the final lap of the dreams they’ve turned into reality.

That’s good stuff right there.

And here’s the thing: for reasons that are somewhat strange to me, I’ve met probably more than my fair share of Olympians (again, I’m not a sports-doer, or even a sports-watcher most of the time).

And you know what really strikes me about these incredible athletes? I mean, apart from their incredible fitness and skill and focus and sheer doggedness, and, especially in the Winter Olympics, their propensity to engage in life-threatening activities at insane speeds on unsafely icy and steep hills?

It’s that they’re really playing to win. They’ve chosen their path, even if they have a back-up plan in mind (this is Canadian sports, after all; they’re not funded well compared to many of their competitors), and they actually went for it. They’re not just playing to win, mind you; they’re playing to win at the game they most want to win.

Now if it sounds like I’m splitting hairs, hear me out. Most people, most of the time, play not to lose (not the same as playing to win, btw), and usually only at the game they feel most likely to win, which is generally not the same as the game they really want to play.

Most people turn their back-up plan into the only plan. Plan B is the only plan they really invest in, trying to set up the back-up plan prior to going after Plan A, which they will do once they feel secure and safe and ready.

Nope, these Olympians are not waiting to feel safe or secure, based on what I can see of them hurtling down actual mountains or on rather flimsy sleds on death-defying icy curves (seriously, WHO decides to get into a sport called SKELETON?? The name itself doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in me, other than the certainty that my skeleton is all that would be left of me, should I try it out).

Nor are they waiting until they’re ready. I mean, sure, they’re committed and sacrificing a lot of other things to practice their sport and become literally The Best In The World. But they’re always practicing and improving, and they go out with what they have in that moment.

To top all of this off, I’ve yet to meet an athlete who isn’t playing for gold, especially when it comes to the Olympics. They might even already know where they stand, roughly, given the competitions and championships they’d already had to compete in and win to even gain a spot on their national team.

They might know the statistical odds of making it onto the podium aren’t in their favour, let alone the odds of bringing home a gold medal.

But they’re not playing for eleventh place, fourth place, or even second. They play for gold.

That’s because they are playing for what they want, not what they think they can get.

Maybe read that last line over again.

While it may sound like semantics, it’s not.

Who an elite athlete is being when they play for gold is a different athlete than one who is playing for silver or bronze.

For the record, I’m not talking about the unenviable Silver Medal Syndrome, in which athletes who place second tend to be more disappointed than the third-place athlete clutching their bronze medal (getting so close to the gold medal can leave some athletes feeling robbed or really frustrated with themselves, while the bronze medallist tends to be thrilled to have made it on the podium at all), though this does validate the importance of our mental game on our physical performance.

That’s because playing for what we want and playing for what we think we can get are two different games. And we show up and play differently in each of them.

If you genuinely don’t believe you have a chance of winning the gold medal, you’re not going to go after it. Humans, like all mammals, are wired to conserve energy, after all, so if the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, you’re not going to give it your all. And without giving it your all, you’re not going to find the secret reserves of strength, power, velocity and resilience that hide within all of us, deep down, attached to our secret dreams.

That secret hidden power source can only be tapped once we’ve given all of what we thought we had in the tank. This is where we surprise people, ourselves included, with the capacity we had no idea we had to not only finish our race but also pull ahead and surpass expectations.

And you can’t access that back-up battery unless you’re playing for a seemingly unreasonable and equally unlikely goal. A predictable goal won’t call for unpredictable effort.

Remember, when we play for what we can predictably get, we tend to play predictably, which produces predictable results. We don’t need to show up too differently, because we’re playing games we already know we can win, and those games tend to be smaller and safer, at least to our ego.

Only when we’re willing to play for something that is outside our predictable reality will we need to accept that we don’t know how to get there (yet), and there’s a very real possibility that we might fail. And if we don’t let the fear of failure stop us, and we decide to go for it anyway, this is where the magic can happen.

I don’t know about you, but if it’s predictably realistic that I’ll only get to about eighty percent of what I want, then I want to be going for the full one hundred. I’d rather eighty percent of all of my dream than eighty percent of half of it.

You can spend your whole life following your Plan B, playing for what you think you can get. Or you can try playing for what you really want, and see how close you can get.

After all, if you aim for nothing, you’ll probably hit it, but why not “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”