Go big or go...with one of your other many attractive options
What’s actually at stake, besides my ego?
Last fall, back when things were normal, I joined a singles tennis league.
I had started playing tennis only a couple of months before, but one of the reasons I started playing tennis in the first place was to develop my competitive side. My penchant for seeking win-win solutions had been causing me to back down in situations where it was arguably inappropriate to do so.
I learned a lot from playing these matches. I observed that giving up is a distinct and tempting choice when you’re getting tired or thirsty or bored or too hot or too cold, and I learned how to fight that impulse. I saw that it’s possible to win against someone who is better or more experienced if you push hard enough — or if they are getting tired or thirsty or bored, et cetera.
Physical and mental stamina can be distinctly useful outside of sports. I’m pleased with the growth I’ve experienced in this regard as a result of playing tennis, and I’m grateful for the many lessons I’ve learned from the sport, too numerous to go into here. But even though many of the skills and mindsets of tennis have transferred to other situations, I have also noticed that certain frameworks from sports are wildly inappropriate outside of an explicitly competitive situation. For example, the saying, “Go big or go home.”
Even though I have come to understand that the will to win is a mindset that must be cultivated in order to get through the pain of a particularly difficult moment in a game or match, this attitude can cause problems if we interpret it to mean that our endeavor has no value if we lose. And if we look at a non-game situation — like establishing a new business or trying to draw your favorite manga character or completing an online course — we can set ourselves up to fail if we define “winning” so narrowly that we make it inaccessible.
If “go big or go home” means that you expend all of your energy in one grand attempt to prevail over all others, that makes perfect sense in a tournament. It makes no sense at all when you’re trying to do something creative. It doesn’t fit when you’re trying something new in which you may have to make successive attempts. And it doesn’t fit when you might really benefit from collaboration, especially if that means asking for help. “Go big or go home” is only one tool in the toolkit, and we need to know when to deploy it.
I’ve met a lot of people who claim they are very competitive, but what they actually mean is that if they can’t be the best at something, they quit. Not having learned to channel this trait of competitiveness appropriately, they have made the fatal mistake of believing that the goal is to be “the best” at singing or writing or applying makeup or some other impossible-to-quantify domain.
However, unlike a tennis match, which is finite and has a clear winner and loser, there is no end to the progress you can make in the arts, business, or even athletics. If you fail today, you can succeed tomorrow.
If you set some arbitrary goal, like “read 52 books this year,” have you failed if you read 48? If you set a goal to do yoga 30 days in a row, do you lose if you do yoga 28 out of the 30 days? I would argue that the benefits accrue even if you don’t get all the way to your goal.
Unfortunately, what happens for a lot of people is that they give up after they miss one day or something. They abandon the whole project, even though it was never a win/lose proposition. In effect, failing to go big, they simply go home.
This is a shame. There are so many other possibilities. The online course isn’t a competition. That one sales call you made that didn’t work out — it doesn’t mean you can’t succeed on the next one. And even if your first attempt to knit that sweater was objectively terrible, you can just pull the yarn, unravel it, and start over. Nobody is keeping score.
Ironically, what I learned on the tennis court does translate pretty well to these non-competitive situations. The simple fact is that you’ve got to just hang in there and not quit. If you stick with it, there’s no guarantee that you will win the match, but if you do quit, it’s guaranteed that you won’t.
Outside of tennis, where there’s no match to be won, then you can actually succeed no matter what. In those situations, you don’t have to be better than someone else — wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you just have to keep playing.
When you can enjoy what you’re doing and find intrinsic value in it, there is no “win/lose” dichotomy. Maybe one day you will want to “go big,” whatever that means to you, but that is just one of a wide array of choices. Pick the one that suits you, and keep score in whatever way will be most beneficial in the long run. When you let go of believing you have to be the best, what else could you become?
