The Illusion of Winning
How our targets become hollow and demotivating
I didn't realise what I had done.
I walked off the course, cross-checked and signed my scorecard with my playing partner and asked, "right, who's got time for a beer?"
At no point did I think about winning the day's competition. I knew I played okay, which for me is a round of golf where I lose balls or make an accumulation of silly and irritating mistakes.
But, on this lovely early-autumn morning last weekend, I posted a score that would eventually win me the club's Monthly Cup. The first time I had done so, and in a field of over 160 golfers! It put a big smile on my face for the rest of the weekend and I took great pleasure in sharing the news in my various group chats on Whatsapp (literal bragging rights 😉).
Yet, the winning never seems to feel like you think it would.
Golf is a funny game (in many many ways), but in competition it is a sport where in which players win rarely. No matter what level you play, you lose almost all the time. When you finally win, the image of euphoria and champagne spraying come to mind. But, the look in your peer's eye doesn't change all that much. People are happy for you and you get the occasional congratulations, but it is low key at best and subtle in general.
In sport, and in business I have found winning to be such a disappointment. Professional Sporting coaches get the sack when things go badly, yet they all feel the same thing after winning a championship - a sense of relief. In business we may win a bonus, or string enough wins together to gain a promotion. These are all good things, but what follows can be jarring, daunting, and even irrelevance.
Winning takes luck (I can't take the credit)
I missed a short putt on the 5th (bad luck). I hooked my 6 iron on the 14th into a tree and it bounced back onto the fairway (good luck). My drive on the 18th snuck between two bunkers (good luck). The sheer volume of good luck and bad luck in my winning round was a catalogue of fortune. And, that is before you start thinking about the good and bad breaks other golfers had. I feel for poor Shaun Cedelland (lost to me on a count back) and all the near misses he probably had - if only that one putt went in, or he had a better lie on the fairway... it all would have been very different.
I am left reflecting on what it was that worked so well for me on the day. Was it the fact that I didn't eat meat the night before? Was it because I had a shorter warm up than usual before play? Was it because I used a new glove? Or, because I had a good-but-not-too-good sleep? Then I think about all the thousands and thousands of such machinations for the other 160 golfers - all of it completely and unequivocally out of my control.
The randomness of competition is beyond our comprehension. And, this is the same for any sports person. Any professional. Any business.
Image Source: MiScore
Top of the tree! The leaderboard from my competition win makes for nice reading.
The reason why clients say 'yes' or 'no' can often have very little to do with us. Thousands of people in a government department can have their whole career trajectories effected because a minister got caught up in a sexting scandal. A new competitor can come out of nowhere and kill off our chances of success like Uber did to cabs, Ikea did to furniture retail, and I just did on the golf course. My beloved Liverpool Football Club (LFC) achieved 97 Premier League points in the 2017-18 season. The fourth highest points tally in the history of the league, and the highest LFC had ever achieved. But, that year Manchester City secured 98 points. Even when you break records, another competitor can take the win.
Anything can happen, and often it is out of our control
Whenever we do win there are so many factors outside of our control it tends to diminish how much it means, or says about us. Hitting a target or winning a deal can in itself be a flimsy marker of success. This is why traditional markers of success (sales made, salary, size of business, number of staff, number of clients) is such a flimsy correlation to identity. Luck is always a bedfellow in our achievements and failures.
Winning brings heaviness (I get demotivated)
I spent over a decade in sales functions. It is an unrelenting experience where every day there is pressure to hit a dollar number. On top of this, anywhere between three to five Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) in relation to the dollar number need to also be achieved. I was fortunate enough to never work in a boiler room type environment, but I worked in small businesses where the goals needed to be hit to keep the lights on. Or, in large privately owned businesses where the need to be competitive kept people in their jobs (including yourself). And, I worked in multinational corporate brands where the layers of pressure flow through the ranks in the name of Quarterly Share Price numbers.
A friend once described sales to me as having a boulder at the bottom of a hill and needing to push it to the top every month only for it to go back to the bottom to do it all again, and again, and again. So, the best we can hope for in this situation is:
You do well and the expectations increase (the hill gets bigger and/or the boulder gets bigger)
You do well, so you earn the right to have more responsibility (you need to help others push their boulders)
You do well, so you need to be some kind of oracle of success/role model/mentor/leader (you need to have all the answers on how everyone can get their boulder to the top)
It is punishing. And, the repetition can feel meaningless and dispiriting. Focusing purely on results in isolation is a great way to exhaust and demotivate ourselves and others. There has to be more to performance than just WINNING.
Winning is transient (The world moves on, quickly!)
One of my favourite openings to a movie are the scenes and sounds of glory for Micky Rouke's character in The Wrestler. The movie follows the story of the main character as a washed up and penniless retired wrestler living in a caravan. Yet, he was once a famous world wrestling icon with fame and spoils. We have seen this story many times before. The rise and fall of our hero is a part of human anthropology - from cave paintings, to Shakespeare, to our own lives. We have all experienced those highs. But, like my Monthly Cup win, it is followed by another competition the next week. It is forgotten quickly and becomes history immediately.
Celebrating and recognising wins is important. But, it becomes old news quicker than we realise. Winning a match or a deal or a job can make a big difference in the now. It is functionally important to achieve milestones along our journey, but how much do they really matter? Honestly, how impressed are you when a football team wins a championship? Or, a friend wins a business award? Or a new job? Its nice and positive, and we generally feel happy for them or inspired, but in five years time will we be talking about it? Will we build a statue for it? Will it really change our lives that much?
In most cases, the world won't really care much. It will move on quicker than we like to admit.
Winning at all costs
Recently, we have seen world cricket blemished by South African's, the English, and (most famously) Australia being caught cheating trying to gain an advantage through ball tampering in the name of 'winning at all costs'. I have been a part of corporate teams using under-handed and unethical practices in the name of getting 'boulders to the top'. And, the stories I hear every day of the pressure people are under to perform is driving people to all sorts of desperate and deeply disturbing behaviour (ie. toxic cultures).
All in the name of winning. Something I have come to realise isn't all its cracked up to be.
Instead, the ability to see the wider context and to piece together an integrated way to move or shift a situation/community is much more interesting. I liberally use the term 'a project', to describe the body of work a professional leads to create meaningful change. There will be gateways/milestones/KPI's along the way, and they will be celebrated. But, the hollowness and demotivation of winning can be circumvented with strategic thinking and a reframe around what we are really trying to achieve.
For me, I'll enjoy the feeling of a win but keep my eye on the wider reason why I play golf - fitness, social and community connection, and a pursuit separate to work and family. It is an endless project exceedingly satisfying compared to any comp win.
