The Success Delusion

Why our relentless chase for achievement is the very thing holding us back.

“My son needs help. He is falling behind. I want him to succeed so badly. And I know he’ll put in the work. I feel like I’m letting him down.” At least once a month for the past decade of my life, I’ve received emails all prophesying a similar message. You can feel the want, the desire, and the pain in that father’s or mother’s writing. They desperately want what’s best for their child, and they don’t quite know what to do. So, they turn to me.

There’s a problem. These parents aren’t seeking help with their students reading or math skills. It’s not about their child’s mental health, or even a future career. No, these emails are inevitably about how to get their child to run around an oval a step or two quicker. Their child is getting beat, losing to their cross-town rival, or not quite living up to their early promise. They are falling behind, running 4:20 for the mile, while Jimmy down the street who he used to beat in 9^th grade is running 4:15. That is what causes the existential crisis. And by crisis, I absolutely mean that.

Whenever I’ve responded, or sometimes even when I don’t, desperation ensues. Parents tell me they are looking to move towns, dropping 7 figures for a new home that goes to a school with a ‘better’ coach. Other times, they’ll offer me, or elite athletes I work with, hundreds of dollars just to go for a run with their son or daughter. I get it. We all want what’s best for our children. We all want them to succeed, to achieve their potential. Success deludes us. It pushes us to do crazy things. Whether it’s fame, status, notoriety, or prestige, it leads us to act just a bit crazy.

Venture down to your local soccer club, and you’ll see parents dropping thousands of dollars to get their child onto an elite team with professional coaches. Did I mention the child is seven? As Jordan Burroughs, an Olympic Gold medalist and one of the greatest wrestlers in history, once said, “The truth is parents, we’ve tricked ourselves into believing that we push our kids so hard for their own good. When really, it’s for us. I’ve never once heard a kid say ‘Can I spend less time with my family and more time at practice. And by the way, if I lose can you yell at me?’

I don’t fault these parents. They care. And they fell for the same illusion that teenage phenom Steve did, they thought caring more meant doing more. I used to respond with generic advice, ‘let your kid have fun. Don’t stress it. Just support them.’ But that either resulted in a contrite, angry response of me not ‘getting it’, or simply nothing.

Now I tell my story. I ran my fastest when I was 18. I never got better. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I doubled down on caring. Training more, finding coaches who could get me there, resting, and recovering more. I went to bed earlier, gave up sweets, and became more dedicated. The master narrative I held in my head was of ironically, the Nike icon, Steve Prefontaine, “To give anything less than your best, is to sacrifice the gift.” I wasn’t sacrificing my gifts; I was going full bore for their sake. And, none of it worked.

In my early twenties, I briefly met with a sports psychologist who provided the answer I needed to hear. “Have you ever thought about having a hobby?” he asked. For a 21 year old, I was a bit lost, with images of old people doing random activities to fill their day popping into my head. He continued by telling me the story of one of the best athletes on the planet, someone he’d worked with. They were talented but a mess. They couldn’t quite make the jump to world-class performer at the time. And they were obsessed with it. He suggested they join a knitting group. And they did. World class performance soon followed. My images of old people filling time were confirmed. I ignored the advice.

And I never got better. I didn’t get it. The sports psychologist wasn’t saying that the key to performance lied in knitting or stamp collecting. It was that the danger of pursuing anything is that it narrows you, your pursuits, your groups, your entire world. Having something that broadens you out, that allows you to switch off, get out of competitive mode, is vital. He was warning me of the danger of going too narrow. That what I thought was my super power, tapping into a single-minded obsession that allowed me to do enormous amounts of work, would ultimately be my downfall.

I’d forgotten that when I ran my best, yes, I was putting in the work, but it wasn’t the most important part. I ran track in high school not because I loved running initially, but I was drawn to the team. I was training hard, but it was with my best friends, who gave me a place where I could challenge myself, but more importantly, be myself. And regardless of the outcome of the race, we’d still go get pizza, goof off, and behave like idiotic teenagers. It’s why at the high school national championships we showed up with white sleeveless undershirts with sharpie writing designating our names. It’s why I chose to run the relay with my friends instead of saving myself for the individual event that would bring me much more glory than the 4x mile relay run at 8am in the morning with only parents in the stands.

It’s not the hi-jinks of high school that mattered. It wasn’t the goofing off, or even simply just having fun. It’s the diversity of experiences in the real world with real people, the richness of life that it brought with it. I was just a guy, on a team, with his best friends, that all happened to run. I saw the work that led me to reach the top of the high school ranks, and thought that was the answer. That was a byproduct. I was fooled by success, seduced into going narrower and narrower, which transformed my motivation from intrinsic and driven to see how good I could be, to one based on fear and protecting that singular identity I’d built up.

I forgot the same lesson when I was put in a situation where my ethics were tested. When I started coaching at Nike, I’d found the pursuit that would replace my failed running performance and identity. Here I was, at 25, with an opportunity to establish myself as a top notch coach. My world had narrowed, coaching Olympic medalists, the pull of success, making it in my sport, had become the focus. And for those around me, that’s all they cared about. I watched another coach scour running’s most infamous message board for signs and signals of appreciation or condemnation. The ego wants us to be liked, to feel validated. And if we don’t tell it where to get its validation from, it may just find it in anonymous internet trolls. The entire environment was set up around making sure a handful of people ran faster than others around an oval track. That was what mattered. And you were encouraged to obsess over how to do so.

Before I knew it, I was someone acting like a stranger, a person I couldn’t recognize. I’d forgotten that I’d gotten into coaching as a volunteer, helping a rag-tag group of kids who just happened to be at the same park I did my running at. It didn’t matter how fast they were or where they ranked, they were just kids wanting to get better, and I was there to help. The outcomes were secondary, and they took care of themselves, when a few years later they finished 2^nd as a team at state in cross-country.

What I learned is that to move forward, to ironically accomplish your goals, you sometimes have to let go. To stop playing a game that you didn’t sign up for. We think that if we let go, we won’t work hard, that we will lose our ambition. But, that’s just your addicted, and delusional brain talking. The needing to be attached to an identity, a pursuit, or a group, is your fear and protection brain talking. It thinks the world is threatening and dangerous, so it would rather keep you in the known then take on the unknown. Letting go means approaching instead of avoiding. It doesn’t mean you stop caring. It means you free yourself up from a story you didn’t write or even sign up for.

The modern world tells us to chase: outcomes, success, status. The master narrative is to grind, to go all-in, that we shoot for the moon, and accomplish that goal from sheer effort. It’s too simplistic of a story. It leaves us wanting. Like addicts, searching for our next feel good hit. That’s the game that we’re encouraged to play. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in sport, business, or life. But we don’t have to. We get to decide.

We are the authors of our stories. Others may try to take control, to take over. But we get to decide how to write our story, and what’s important in it. It can be tempting to craft a simple narrative. It’s the easiest path towards cohesion, continuity, meaning, and purpose. Resist the temptation. Go for complexity, diversifying your experiences, your sense of self, of where you belong. Yes, it’s more difficult. Yes, it takes more work to integrate everything and find coherence amidst the chaos. But it frees you up to perform, to reach for protection mode only when you truly need it, to not default to candy, but choose to eat your vegetables when you need to. To understand that breadth and depth are needed, that they complement one another. Courage comes from clarity.

-Steve