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Succeeding, In Spite of Yourself
#217 Henriksen was the best long distance runner in my Army Officer School class. I was a sprinter.
The army doesn’t care what you are. The army expects you to be able to move both fast and long, and I was evaluated on both quickness and stamina.
In the 15K terrain run, everyone meets at the starting line. I stayed close to 217 Henriksen.
We were off. Henriksen tried to shake me off by taking the lead. He was solidly built, and superbly conditioned, and he knew exactly what I had in mind.
I followed him like a shadow. Behind a runner, there is a space where the air stream that forms literally pulls you forward. It is the same for bicyclists, and for flying geese. Henriksen was pulling me up to 2nd place, and he did not like it one bit.
There is a point when lactic acid threatens to create such muscle pain that the runner has to slow down, or stop. I knew this well, and realized that I could never have held 2nd place at the 15K had I run by myself. But now the goal was in sight. Adrenaline kicked in. Only 100 yards from the finish line I sprinted past him. Henriksen could beat me on any distance longer than 200 meters, but he could not beat me in a sprint. I won. He was furious. I was very, very tired, but very, very pleased.
The strategy for winning has to draw on comparative advantage. You have to find a way to make use of what you do better than anyone else. If you are only as good as your competitor, say, if you have benchmarked everything he does, you will not win the competition.
Benchmarking is one of those concepts that are designed to make you better, but not the best.
In Europe, it is referred to as “karaoke capitalism” [1] . In a karaoke bar, people go up to a microphone and try to sing an Elvis song. It is often very painful to listen to if you happen to be in the audience.
[1]
Karaoke Capitalism : Management for Mankind, by Jonas Ridderstrale, Kjell A. Nordstrom, Bookhouse Publishers.
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Elvis, I believe, did not benchmark against anyone but himself. Top performers don’t put a ceiling on their performances.
It’s okay to pay homage to Elvis, or to 217 Henriksen, but they were good because they did what they were uniquely gifted at, and if others were not equally as gifted, they could not surpass them.
What I learn from top performers are those aspects that they all have in common: Commitment, discipline, tenacity, spirit, and yes, talent. These are all important in developing what poet Rainer Maria Rilke refers to as “the invisible drawing” inside every human being. That drawing is our unique gift, and our obligation. You don’t really develop this talent – the talent develops you.
This spring, I had lunch with Dr. Robert H. Bruininks, the President of the University of Minnesota. He told me that when he was invited to speak in various parts of Minnesota, people would bring up Lindsay Whalen, a star basketball player for the University of Minnesota women’s basketball team. “Could he bring her with him?” they would ask. I laughed. Just 2 days before this, I had watched the Minnesota women’s basketball team beat Duke, and Lindsay Whalen and Janel McCarville were standouts.
For years I had been arguing for the European view that athletics did not belong in a university setting (“If you take out all of the athletic teams, all you have left is a really good education”). But when Ms. Whalen drove across the length of the basketball court, swirled around 2 defenders and landed a perfect lay-up shot, I was on my feet cheering. Peak performance is an emotional thing, and in Minnesota the people watching her performance had tears in their eyes.
Lindsay Whalen exemplified the virtues of a peak performer. Hard won skills, discipline, talent, commitment, tenacity and spirit. She is a role model for every girl who aspires to be an athlete. And the Minnesota women’s basketball team carried a 3.14 grade point average, so they are scholars as well as athletes.
It is the old ideal of the complete human being. Mind and heart. Body and soul. We are inspired by peak performance whenever and wherever we encounter it. And that is why it is important, and that’s why it belongs everywhere, even at a great university.
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