Motivation, Part 1
The Problem With Winning
Why do we play sports? Vince Lombardi said that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” That’s the easy answer, and a ready one given by athletes, coaches, and fans. It is increasingly true the higher you go; as you climb through the levels of sport, winning more and more often takes center stage. It’s a motivator and a goal; it brings in fans and money and attention. It produces and, through its absence, loses jobs. Winning feels great; winning big feels like nothing else in the world. It is also really hard, so when we achieve it we often experience a release of emotion, some combination of satisfaction, accomplishment, joy, unity, a sense of completion, validation, and relief.
Winning is also sometimes called the “great equalizer,” but it’s more accurate to call it the “great distractor.” Winning can obscure – or even justify, if you’re a cynic – organizational dysfunction, poor relationships, instability, abusive coaching, financial impropriety, and conflict between and within athletes and/or coaches. If all that is present and a team or organization still manages to win, the talent level has to be really remarkable – and although it does happen, usually even then it’s not enough. Winning is hard; winning a lot is RARE, and most athletes and teams lose a lot more than they win. Still, championships are a powerful reward, and some say that “rings” are all that matters. After all, pain is temporary; glory is forever.
In the interest of time, can we all agree that we like to win, and then move on?
You hear it said by athletes and coaches and the parents of kids who play sports that winning is equal to happiness. This is an incomplete truth at best, and a dangerous (occasionally catastrophic) precedent at worst; let me explain.
While winning does produce happiness, both winning and happiness are temporary. The process of putting oneself or one’s team in a position to win takes time and relentless effort, talent and intention, a lot of practice and some luck, and if that all leads to winning it produces a sensation of happiness…and then both the win and the happiness come to an end. Happiness is the high that you get from the “winning drug,” and like actual drugs, the high doesn’t last. When it wears off, you are left back at square one emotionally – or sometimes, as with many drugs, lower than when you started before you can get back to neutral. This is the built-in human mechanism of hedonic adaptation, which serves to bring us back to an even keel (or emotional baseline) when we get too high or low.
Adaptation
Hedonic adaptation is a survival mechanism that works to bring us out of the distraction of emotion – whether from surviving a mortal threat or something as simple as an argument with a friend – so that we can maintain awareness of (and avoid) threats in our environment and continue to perpetuate our species. This system also works with extremely positive emotional experiences: It’s why your exciting new car is, after a little while, usually just a means of getting from Point A to Point B (and sometimes needs replacing, not because of the car but because you’re chasing that feeling of new and exciting and pleasurable. This is called hedonism). In the case of a really extreme emotional experience, like winning a championship - or the aforementioned mortal threat – there is a rubber band effect that takes us from very high (or low), through neutral, to very low (or high, even manic), before we can get back to baseline.
This also holds for groups of people, which is what creates the “championship hangover” that you see after a big win. The loss to an inferior team after the upset over your big rival often comes for coaches and teams that lack the internal stability – process focus, strong relationships, unity of purpose, the benefits of experience, a growth mindset, and humility – or the coaching skills to keep everyone grounded in and motivated by the opportunity of the present moment. Sometimes these teams really get up for the one game, only to be left unable to reproduce the motivation and focus the next time around; the high of winning obscures the process that put them in a position to win that big game in the first place.
Other times, the ego boost of the big win works to subvert collective work ethic on an unconscious level. In all these cases, what motivated them before – playing their best, working hard together, executing the fundamentals, handling the noise, beating their rival – is obscured by their newfound and intoxicating desire to WIN MORE and by all the ego-driven fantasy stories that grow out of that extreme high. The fantasy distracts them from the path, from the work, from the process, and then they lose a game they should have won. This is a valuable growth experience that all athletes and coaches will hopefully go through and learn from, with a couple of particularly poignant and helpful lessons.
Losing is Your Professor, So Do Your Homework
The first is that winning is not entirely within your control. You can train, prepare, give effort, feel and be ready, play your best, do everything “right”…and still lose. Does that mean that all the work you put in and all the things you learned and all the progress and improvements you made and the relationships you formed are meaningless? Does your dedication to improvement and your love of the sport depend entirely on wins and losses? Will you only prepare if you know you’re going to win? “Winning is all that matters” is much too narrow a viewpoint because it entices us to ignore all the good, hard, meaningful, and satisfying accomplishments – milestones achieved, challenges overcome, tangible improvements – that happen during the process. By making it only about winning, you’re missing out on countless opportunities to experience success, drive your process forward, and accomplish the stepwise growth that leads to sustained success, fulfillment, and consistent performance.
Additionally, winning is an unstable motivator on its own; your sense of accomplishment and worth are entirely based on something fleeting and outside of your control, which means that you are staking your motivation on unstable external factors – the weather, your opponent, whether the floor of the gym has been polished, who the refs are today – that affect your ability to win but about which you can do precisely nothing. When you’re winning, things are great and motivation is often right there for the taking, put within reach by the desire to experience more of that feeling. And, while it’s important to have that reference, when things aren’t going well there is nothing else to pull you forward. This leaves you without the small – but repeatable, cumulative, consistent – sense of progress required for stable and intrinsic motivation, which can suddenly seem out of reach.
Look, losing sucks, ok? But when winning is the only definition of success, the other side of that coin is that losing is literally the opposite: Abject failure. This is the ultimate example of a fixed mindset, the mindset of extremes with no access to the middle…which is where literally everything else in sports exists. Believing that losing is equal to abject failure doesn’t leave me with a lot of options for reclaiming motivation, regaining momentum, improving at my craft, finding consistency in my process, or continuing to move forward. No one is trying to argue that it’s fun, but losing IS important; it is a great teacher if we can learn to get past the emotionality of it.
I’m mostly talking about high-level sports so far, but this misapplication of motivation and the commitment to a fixed mindset around winning starts at the youth level and is perpetuated by coaches, parents, the media, fans, and athletes themselves. This obsession with achievement creates a culture of unnecessary pressure, mental health issues, comparison, violence, declining sport participation and educational engagement, and in some extreme cases – more common every year – tragedy.
Finding Stability
Rather than rail against the problem – which would be easy, and which I do sometimes – I want to talk about solutions. This begins with asking the question: What are athletes (or kids in general, or people in general) really looking for? How do we foster motivation in players, teams, kids, employees, students – people – that is both stable and flexible, and resilient in the face of uncontrollable external factors? How can we help them find an overall sense of fulfillment, rather than leaving them captive to the volatility of the emotions that surround narrow achievement? I believe that answers lie in the study of self-determination.