During the Olympics, we find ourselves watching sports we haven’t watched for four years, or maybe eight (or…ever?). We’re emotionally moved by strangers we’ve never heard of from places we’ve never been. While this is a visceral experience, there’s a logic behind it—a logic we can apply to our own sport experience and, even more, to our life outside of sports.
Part of this reaction stems from the understanding, at least implicitly, that the particular Olympic athlete in question has devoted countless hours over the better part of his life to this one endeavor. Though it’s not just that he clocked the hours, but that he did it in a certain manner: showing up focused, in the most impressive way, on a daily basis, doing all the little things with great attention to detail, and all the big things as well, such as lifting that extra rep in the weight room, or finishing that final lap with maximal effort following three hours of sprint work.
We have all tried this in some way and fallen short. Many have played a sport and know how hard it is to truly give your entire self to the enterprise. Many have attempted to learn to play an instrument well, tried writing a book (a bestseller?), learn a language, etc. We realize that it’s not so hard to be “pretty good” at something, though even this requires some determination, as the inertia to extricate oneself from the couch is often too much to overcome. But it requires super-human focus to be world-class, as very few of us have been world-class at something, by definition.
Another facet involved in our emotional experience of voyeuristic sporting excellence lies in the fact that we’re watching something simply physically unattainable for us. That this athlete has won some version of the nature/nurture lottery. As Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer wryly comments, “Anyone interested in winning Olympic gold medals must select his or her parents very carefully.” Along with their athletic physique, these athletes maintain a disposition which lets them—makes them?—do all of those things in the above paragraphs and do them with super-human determination.
Eric Heiden knows something about this. In 1980 he set an Olympic record by winning all five of the long track speed skating races, setting four Olympic records in the process. He went on to earn his bachelors degree at Stanford University and then his medical degree there and has served as the U.S. Olympic Speed Skating Team Doctor for the past four Olympics. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview he highlights the importance of the innate motivation needed for such athletic success, commenting that this motivation is necessarily “a very hard thing to teach an athlete.” He continues, suggesting that Olympic-level athletes are, “not so concerned about the outcome…but just want to know they have challenged themselves and performed up to what they consider acceptable.”
From here, we can’t help but examine our own concept of praise. In so doing, it helps to look at praise’s opposite: blame. We often diminish the blame assigned to one’s wrong-doing if their action was caused by factors out of their immediate control. We mitigate the blame of the cult member’s wrongheaded belief-system when we realize she was brainwashed throughout childhood, and we remove some of the blame from the once-upstanding citizen who then acts in a despicable manner because of a brain tumor that interfered with the normal functioning of the brain. Their nurture and nature, respectively, are to blame.1 And it all calls into question just what we mean by claiming that someone deserves a particular judgment.
So, likewise, it’s a wonder that we don’t curtail the praise we assign to Olympic athletes: how it is that they deserve praise. The motivation they maintain—the innate quality that Heiden mentions—is such because their brain fires in the way that it does. If only we had that kind of brain and that type of body then it would be us on the pedestal. (Though, if I had that brain and that body, then I would be some other person: I’d be that Olympian.)
And so after all is said and done, we can still rightly marvel at the virtue Olympians represent. But we should also realize that we too can achieve that same sort of greatness: regardless of outcome, in our own particular chosen endeavors we can know that, to paraphrase Heiden (above), we “challenged [ourselves] and performed up to what [we] consider acceptable.”
These are the sort of fruits one acquires from surrounding oneself with inspired people, from watching inspired people. It’s a way of tweaking our own nurture in the nature/nurture equation and adding just a little more inspiration to the formula.2 By virtue of your reading this piece, I’ve altered your nurture just a bit, hopefully in a positive way, and I realize now, after 15 years of being a writer, this may be yet another reason why I write. You can’t blame me for that.
1It’s worth noting that diminished blame doesn’t necessarily remove the need to punish nor to excuse any illegal, harmful, or immoral behavior.
2In addition, an environment that offers praise likely causes others to seek such approval—as we innately seek it—thus creating a cycle in which praise begets more praiseworthy actions, which begets more praise. I’m grateful to Jacob Olian for his thoughts on this.
