Raw conditioning wins games

The question is not whether you can do the work.

We assume that. Execution is the price of admission. It’s just table stakes at this point.

The real challenge is whether you can cope effectively with the obstructions and distractions that show up along the way. It is your adaptability, resilience and discipline that gives you the most leverage.

I remember my football coaches repeating a mantra for this during practice. Every afternoon every season, they’d always preach, raw conditioning wins games.

Every team wants to win, they would remind us. Every team has players who are fast, strong, smart and tough. But in the end, whichever team doesn’t get worn down, whoever doesn’t run out of steam by the fourth quarter, that’s who gets the victory. The name of the game is grind and stick.

Now, such a philosophy might sound like macho, militant, motivational propaganda. And maybe it is. How else are you supposed to inspire high school boys to run hills wearing ten pounds of pads during two a day practices in the dead of the summer?

Raw conditioning wins games.

But the cheesiness of the principle doesn’t make it wrong. There is a fundamental attribution error when it comes to winning. People tend to over emphasize talent as the driver of success, and under emphasize temperament.

Both are certainly required. The difference is, only one of them is scalable. Talent has a growth celling, but temperament is limitless. There are only so many natural, useful aptitudes that one human being can possess.

But adaptability, resilience and discipline are limitless. There’s no cap on those traits.

Here’s a thought experiment worth conducting.

Would you rather write one bestselling book, or write one hundred books nobody’s ever heard of?

The former almost certainly gives you fame and maybe some fortune. It’s an order of magnitude less work than the alternative. And it makes your mother very proud.

But while writing a bestselling book is a fine goal, it doesn’t suggest that the author has any measure of talent or temperament. Could just be luck or timing.

The other thing is, there’s no guarantee of fulfillment on that path. Just because your name appears on a list doesn’t mean you will be content.

Compare that with the alternative. Writing one hundred books.

Now, there are a few dozen authors in literary history who have managed that feat in their careers. Their prolificacy inspires everyone, but it’s fair to say that such a path is not for most people.

This path is completely process oriented, wildly absurd and essentially masochistic. Because as the author, you know with absolute certainty, not a single one of the eight billion inhabitants on earth will ever read one of your books.

You’re basically showing up to practice every day, but never competition in an external game.

What would you pick?

Personally, I would go with path number two. Since it would force me to cope effectively with the obstructions and distractions that showed up along the way.

Call me crazy, but I like focusing on the work itself, rather than being attached to any outcome. It makes things simpler and freer. The focus is on conditioning.

Edison comes to mind, who was not only the world’s most prolific inventor, but was also an avid fisherman. Thomas viewed fishing as serious business. According to his biography, he was never to be disturbed while he was fishing.

In fact, if you make the pilgrimage his historic estate, a famous stop on the tour is his fishing hole. Edison built the fifteen hundred foot pier himself, which he visited daily.

Funny thing is, he never used bait. Just a hook. He was known to go fishing without any bait so he could be alone with his thoughts. Hours and hours. For years. That’s how processed oriented and detached from outcomes he was. Talk about conditioning. 

Do you welcome every opportunity to build your resilience? How do you buttress your finite talents with limitless temperament?

And to be fair, the examples of writing books for nobody and going fishing for nothing are extremes. They’re not actual goals people aspire to.

But it does make you wonder about the nuances of our own motivational systems.

Are we little more than a reflection of our surroundings? Do most people need input from the outside world to motivate them? Is it really possible someone could do something just to do something?

Frankly, people’s motivations are utterly incomprehensible to me. Until such time, my plan is to keep fishing with baitless hooks. To stay focused on raw conditioning.

I don’t have scientific evidence that it’s better than the alternative, I just find it increases my chances of fulfillment.

Writing a hundred books isn’t something I’m doing for money, although that might happen as a result.

Status? Sure, it will feel terrific to say I’ve accomplished that. But there’s no award I get, no club I belong to, no hall of records in which my name will live in infamy.

All I know is, my life gets better the more books I write. So I figure if I get even close executing that astronomical number, things should be pretty good for me.

Are you focusing on the raw conditioning of temperament rather than the finite gift of talent?