On Being World Class

Overview

This is a collection of thoughts on some less-frequently discussed aspects of someone extremely good at what they do, and it’s mostly geared toward athletes and technical subjects. There’s a little on prerequisites, some on the obsession that’s necessary and what that means, and a bit on ambition itself.

Some Prerequisites

Excellence usually requires some combination of natural talent^[1], a lot of hard work, and some luck. Some level of pre-existing disposition is necessary, although the bar is lower than some think in the mental category. Unfortunately, raw talent is not sufficient, as any college sports coach can tell you. Coaches will often categorize their athletes on two axes: talent, and desire.

A school sports team will generally comprise all but the lower left quadrant- low desire and low talent. Coaches will typically have the most players in the top left and lower right- low talent but lots of desire, and high talent but no desire. The latter can be the most frustrating and will often lure the coaches away from other athletes who would benefit from more coaching. The top right is the quadrant of truly great players, and any coach can attest to them being vanishingly rare. I would think there are very few, if any, professional athletes not in this category.

Most things will follow a similar structure and breakdown. The vast majority of adult athletics enjoyers are in the top left quadrant. The athletics category does differ starkly from the mental one in one way, as world record breaking athletes typically have dazzlingly short careers due to overtraining and burnout.^[2] Different sports of course have different career lengths, but most are really “over” by the age of 30.

The line between luck and hard work often blurs, with those on the outside looking in overattributing luck. Louis Pasteur famously said “Chance favors the prepared mind”. As someone who made discovery after discovery, he was likely alluding to how being prepared and knowledgeable can make you more likely to take advantage of opportunities, resulting in more success which then appears to the outsider as luck.

Monomania and Opportunity Cost

It’s rarely named outright, but it’s hard not to notice the monomania involved in most of these people’s lives. I know of no case where the person’s entire life didn’t revolve around their “thing”.^[3] I believe the phrase don’t meet your heroes is repeated because you will find them exceedingly human, and often deficient in many common skills. When your life is dedicated to something, you must give up other things. People give up their health (often in exchange for work or wealth), their family, travel, money (typical in some sports like climbing and in science), and learning common “life skills,” to name a few.

The best athletes I know spend all of their free time doing their sport, recovering from doing their sport, or planning how to do more of their sport. Many don’t have normal jobs so they can maintain this lifestyle, and the ones that do have jobs often still spend 20-40 hours a week doing their thing.

One of the brightest of my math professors told me he was so obsessed with a problem once he paced by his pool for 4 hours until he figured it out (and this was not unusual for him). He spent nights and weekends on his research and with his PhD students.

Leonard Euler^[4] lost his vision late in life, and was reported to have said, “Now I will have fewer distractions.” Indeed, through his use of scribes his output may have increased, and that year he averaged a paper per week.

Fred Beckey spent most of his 94 year life living as a literal hobo^[5] in the pursuit of climbing, and indeed has more first ascent claims in North America than anyone else probably ever will (likely in the thousands). Without hyperbole, you cannot open a rock climbing guidebook in North America without his name being in it, and his single-minded pursuit in the absence of all else earned him a mythical reputation.

Some of the greatest will go out on top, only to re-emerge in another realm. Heath Kirchart was one of the most highly regarded skateboarders of his era (late 90s), and retired while he was at his prime. He disappeared, only to then bike across the country, and apparently continues to pursue difficult adventures.^[6] Mark Twight was likely the most influential alpinist^[7] of his generation and shattered standards that still hold today almost 30 years later. He also retired near the height of his career, only to reinvent himself as a competitive shooter, then a competitive road cyclist.

The flip side of this is how human world-class people can be. In my personal experience, they can lack experience in such things as using a drill, credit cards, job applications, and other “adult” things that people tend to pick up along the way. This isn’t always the case, but something must be sacrificed to put in the hours. Often relationships with family are the first to go.

There’s only so many hours in a day for any of us. The world-class will give up something in order to gain their status or skill. Some sleep less, some are just organized and focused, some will set up unconventional lives to make it work.^[8] Ultimately there is always an opportunity cost involved in the monomania needed to put yourself in the top ranks.

Ambition and Comparison

In “The Alpinist” someone comments that Marc Andre has a fire that burns in him.^[9] Variations of this are often used for athletes but it gets to the heart of a lot of success, and that desire axis we looked at earlier. It’s not universally true, but drive and ambition are often the results of comparison.

Greg Beale said “what people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or for restoration”. Often this reverence is the fuel for ambition; a runner desires to be seen as fast, and a scholar desires to be seen as smart. We naturally compare ourselves to others. The late David Foster Wallace stated that “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship … pretty much anything … you worship will eat you alive.” We find this is true across the board, and many people succumb to the worship of externalities and use this to drive their success.

However there are those that find success and ambition through other stakes. We find those at the top will sometimes single-handedly push the limits with no one even challenging them. A wonderful example is the late Ueli Steck. He first set a speed record on the North Face of the Eiger^[10] in Switzerland in 2007, climbing it in 3 hours and 54 minutes.

He stated afterwards that he knew he could do it better and it wasn’t his full effort, so he spent the next year focusing on training specifically for that record, and the following year in 2008 he broke his own record by a whopping hour and change, climbing it in 2 hours and 47 minutes.

However, there’s nothing quite like competition, as someone broke Ueli’s record in 2011 (coming in at 2h28m), and Ueli couldn’t help but go back one more time to lower the time again to 2 hours and 22 minutes, this time cutting a half hour from his previous record.^[11]

In Mad Men, Trudy Campbell says that “dissatisfaction is a symptom of ambition,” and she’s not wrong. Whether that dissatisfaction comes from your standing against others or yourself, dissatisfaction is an intrinsic property of ambition that cannot be separated. After all, if you’re satisfied with your current position, why would you change it?