On a Scale from Swimming to Soccer
It’s not a new observation, but something our CEO Brent and I were talking about recently was agency and how much control one can have over outcomes. Because in messy games like business and investing, this is really the most fundamental question.
Like a lot of our conversations, this one took a turn toward sports, and I told him that on a related note, I vacillate between lamenting the quantitative, sole-contributor nature of my son’s swimming and admiring it vis-a-vis the nature of my daughter’s soccer experience, which is almost the exact opposite (qualitative with lots of cooks in the kitchen).
See, heading into a swim meet, everybody knows everybody else’s times. And while there are occasionally better and worse results, the person who swims the best time wins – and that person is often the one who came in with the best time. It doesn’t matter what they look like, where they’re from, whether or not they greeted the official, got a call they didn’t deserve or a lucky bounce, or how their teammates did.
In other words, when it comes to swimming, my son’s outcomes are almost always what he has earned (though there was that time his goggles came off). And something about that is energizing.
Soccer, on the other hand, is different. Because if you’re victimized by a bad call or something flukey happens – I kid you not, our excellent u14 goalie once tripped over her own shoelace going to pick up a slow-moving ball and it bounced in over her for the other team’s winning goal – it doesn’t matter how much work you’ve put in or how much better you might typically be.
While that’s dissatisfying, it’s also what makes sports on the soccer end of the scale magical. Because on any given day, you can end up on the right or wrong side of one of the biggest upsets in history.
And something about that is energizing.
That’s when Brent revealed that when it comes to sports, he tries to split the difference by only playing singles tennis. Because it’s fair enough that effort and accountability mostly matter, but with enough left to chance for something magical (or not) to happen.
That feels like business, too.
– Tim
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