Again, you must not play sports. It’s not about abusing yourself physically, nor is it all just a physical exercise. You really don’t see any benefit to hard physical work? You don’t see any benefit to pushing yourself to do something you don’t think you can do? Am I not allowed to feel a sense of personal achievement gained in a sport?
How is the motivation required to push myself to complete a physical task any less of an effort than the motivation required to finish a tough homework assignment? My competitiveness - sharpened through sports - is what got me into an Ivy League school. And clearly you don’t see any benefit to competition. I’m not sure where you work but competition is part of my job. If I don’t do better than my colleagues, I’m not going to get a bigger raise or a promotion. I don’t necessarily seek out competition with others but that’s life and sports (or any other type of competition) teaches people how to deal with winning and losing. It also teaches you that you don’t sit around and cry when you lose or you don’t get an A or you can’t have your grade weighted - it motivates you to try harder. You also learn that maybe you just aren’t as good as everyone else and you should do something else. I would say that is extrinsic benefit.
You have added a biographical fallacy to your post hoc ergo propter hoc. What Ivy did you go to? I admit, if we went to the same school, I will be vaguely embarrassed.
I have posted elsewhere at some length in the past eight years on the boards about my athletic endeavors, which include, among other things, fencing and martial arts. I would even mention traditional archery: though it doesn’t require extraordinary physical conditioning, it is an Olympic event. Your call whether or not it counts.
You are entitled to feel whatever you like in this and in all things. If you derive some sort of ego rent to personal achievement in a sport, well, it’s your life and I honestly wish happiness on everyone. That this is incompatible with my way of thinking is putting it somewhat mildly. I think it is somewhat deluded philosophically and not well-represented empirically.
There are definitely benefits to hard work. I just contend that they are somewhat different than what you think they are.
Most of the time, it’s probably not. That says a lot more about homework than it does about motivation, though.
I work in a very large tower of glass and steel that overlooks the site of the World Trade Center. I am a statistician for a financial services company that pretty much everyone in the world has heard of. Unfortunately, in this environment, I am not even competing for a huge bonus. I am competing to keep my job should we endure yet another round of layoffs. I spend most of my waking hours in a NYC financial rat race.
I believe that it is entirely human to learn to cope with disappointment and rejection. It is very improbable that a non-sage will ever be able to endure life without experiencing it sometime. I further believe that the fetishization of competition in fact retards the ability of individuals to excel in truly meaningful ways and retards their ability to cope with disappointment and disillusionment. There are few things more pitiful than watching a competitive person either win or lose.
I see this every day. We just went through our year end review process for 2008. Morale among many is terrible: they are full of anger, self-recrimination, demotivation, and depersonalization. These are all “competitive” people with histories of achievements and supposedly impressive credentials. Surely when your colleagues don’t get the review and bonus they were expecting, they are motivated more than ever!
Right.
I say this as someone who has had more than my share of public competitive successes which, in retrospect, are completely worthless.
I maintain that all of my success both at my little ivy league school, in my career, and in my life proceed from my retrospective detachment. I practice martial arts not to push my limits, not to succeed, not to rack up personal achievements. I practice them to annihilate my expectations, to destroy my sense of what I feel I am capable of, and to live without my omnipresent (and sadly still massive) ego. Martial arts are a marvelous means to self-mastery. I have a long way to go. But it and other physical labors that involve this much concentration are wonderful means to achieving real happiness, the happiness of freedom from expectations.
It is amazing how the purest form of competition, when someone is trying to hit you either with his body or with a dangerous metal object, is really more of a competition against yourself.
I couldn’t give a shit about my rating, about my bonus, or about my position with respect to my colleagues. All of these things either follow from the quality of my work or they don’t. Neither really matters. The only thing that does matter is the work I tag my name to. What matters is the action, not the results. Fortunately, I read the Bhagavad-Gita in college. So I quote it again, since for me, these are words to live by. Arjuna is confused; he does not want to go to war against his family and is gravely concerned about the consequences. At first he refuses to fight. Krishna convinces him otherwise.
My emphasis. I believe this is one of the wisest and most liberating messages in the history of human thinking. When your own expectations, feelings, sense of limitation, emotional attachment to the results, and all other delusions are abandoned, then you will really achieve something worthwhile. Nirvana, ataraxia, enlightenment, whatever you want to call it. If you can’t achieve that, and I certainly can’t then at least a mind capable of bearing good and bad fortune with equanimity is a good start.
So yeah. This is my point of view, and it has brought me great happiness. It is not for everyone, and I hope that the path you have chosen brings you happiness as well.
This would only be a biographical fallacy had I actually known you participated in sports. This is an assumption based on the fact that you don’t see any value in competitive sports which can only lead me to the conclusion that you don’t participate in competitive sports. I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree here since you don’t see any value in competition and I do.
You keep saying that this is a post hoc ergo propter hoc. You are only saying that, again, because you don’t think that the sports I played earlier in life could have had any effect on my success later in life. Again, we will have to agree to disagree here.
Roar, Lions, roar!
Why does personal achievement mean I am boosting my ego? Is it not possible to have a healthy ego?
It seems that you are confusing a “competitive person” with “competition”. I think a competitve person is one who seeks out competition just for the sake of competition (e.g., let’s see who can sharpen his pencil the fastest or who can chug their hot coffee faster) and enjoys watching someone else lose. What I am talking about here are benefits of competition as a means to cope with disappointment and rejection, just as you have stated. I’m not glamorizing competition for competition’s sake - I’m simply saying that there are lessons that can be learned from competition and that these lessons can help you become a successful person. I define a successful person as someone who can, among other things, cope with disappointment, can recognize when they need to change course and can motivate themselves to get through difficult times.
I know that if I did not reach my goal for a particular year, whether it be a raise or a promotion, I would be motivated to do better. I personally do not wish to humiliate or “beat” my colleagues but I know that my boss compares us all against one another whether we like it or not. If I am working for a company that does not recognize my hard work (which would in turn get me a raise), then I would find somewhere else to work.
I think you are assuming that in a team sport, one cannot compete against herself. I think both levels of competition exist in team sports. I have to do well individually in order to help the larger group do well.
I agree to some extent. But as I said above, this is probably not how your bosses view you. I would bet that they do compare you to your colleagues and it does affect your bonus. I also agree that having pride in your work is a huge source of satisfaction. Unfortunately, most of us have jobs that rely on external forces for success.
That’s great but it’s no reason to relegate the rest of us to a life of pumping gas because we are not all as enlightened as you are.
The reverse, actually. It is a biographical fallacy to induce my participation or non-participation from my argument.
I don’t want to nitpick too much, but this is kind of a big deal. Competitive sports have value if you think theyt are fun. They have value if you would rather spend time playing them than doing something else. Everyone likes to spend his/her time differently, and like I tried to articulate before, people should do whatever they need to do to make them happy.
What I doubt is that participation in competitive sports as a kid has a direct causal relationship with any kind of achievement outcomes later. This is a big difference.
There is actually a lot of empirical research on this topic. The relationship between competitive athletic participation and future achievement is indirect and complicated. One of the biggest problems is that it is subject to massive selection bias. You might just be a highly intelligent, motivated person. This fact drives you both to compete in sports and to achieve elsewhere. Because there is so much self-selection in competitive activities, it is very hard to separate the impact of the activities themselves from the personalities of the people who choose to participate in them.
Well bugger me backwards, we did go to the same school. CC '00. Didn’t you have to take L&R?
I think we agree completely on this. What differs is just the path to get there. I think that separating the action from the results is the way to go, but I definitely recognize this is not for everyone. I will subject my child to this soon enough and we will see how it goes.
We call the allocation of ratings “calibration”. It is a political process that keeps people up at night and stirs up a great deal of bad blood. This year I know I did good work, so I have slept well. Either the ratings follow or they don’t.
That is a bit of a misrepresentation of what I have been saying all along. This isn’t my way or the highway. Nor am I particularly enlightened. I do not believe virtue admits degrees, so I am right here in the rat race with everyone else. I just do what I can to avoid unnecessary pain for myself and for those around me. I just disagree on points of fact where substantial research has in fact been done. Playing sports obviously does not doom one to a career of gas pumping, nor did I imply as much.
Of course but I was just a dumb freshman at that point (oops, I mean "first year). Plus, my recollection of L&R was that it empahsized more R than L. Besides, I was busy practicing for the humiliation I wanted to heap upon Harvard when we kicked their collective ass.
Ha. We had to do plenty of L in that class, too. It was very eye-opening. I had been puffed up over the years by people who thought I was a wonderful writer. We were all wrong: I couldn’t write for shit. I got somewhat better.
As you might expect, I never went to any football games or anything as an undergraduate. But in one of life’s perverse ironies, now I live right across the street from Baker Field. I have heard almost every Lions home game for the past three or four years. Maybe one of these days I will make the effort of crossing the street to go to homecoming. If you’re ever in town to catch a game, I’ll buy you a beer.
I was definintely humbled by L&R. I remember thinking that the assignments were just so off the wall - I think I had to write a paper about why my pencil would be a good president or something like that. I actually didn’t go to many sporting events other than my own - I just didn’t have time. I didn’t hang out with the athletes anyway.
I’ll take you up on that beer if I’m ever back in the city. I’ve only been back once since I moved away but I miss it.