Number one is different from the others. She has a special talent and perfects this talent. She plays in the best team or surrounds herself with the best team. She doesn’t just want to win, she has to win because she can’t take defeat. Or the number one, that also exists, is so relaxed, so at peace with himself that nothing shakes her, let alone occasional defeats.
For about 15 years I wrote about athletes (and then again and again at special competitions). What connected Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Steffi Graf, Pete Sampras; what united Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Dirk Nowitzki; why were Jürgen Klinsmann, Oliver Kahn and Matthias Sammer better than the rest?
They believed in their mission, in themselves, they loved what they did. They were tough, resilient. They adapted to circumstances and coincidences. They worked on mental strength, that is, the ability to concentrate, and before the competition they visualized what could happen, imagined situations and actions, which made them less likely to be shocked.
The best athletes are innovative, learn from others because they want to improve: It is not the past victory that is important, but the next one. They are not fearful, they are not passive, they are not stagnant.
They often act intuitively, but they want to know statistics and data, they want to understand errors, because they know that beautifying reality does not help them. They are emotional too. When he lost his world record, former decathlete Daley Thompson said, “I took it like a man and just cried for ten hours”.
The world of sport is simpler than life, two halves between two goals. However, the clarity of thought, the determination of athletes could sometimes help elsewhere.Ronald Heifetz, founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard, says that we humans have to be able to cope with all the crises of our time because we are genetically advantaged be: We have social skills and are intelligent, “we can invent, reflect and create complex systems that absorb the lessons of the past”.
We’ve learned to dress when it’s cold, we’ve even learned to speed up our learning.
Our societies would negotiate about goals and the ways to get there, also about values and priorities. The fact that we find prosperity more important than the protection of nature and the environment is so obvious that it’s a banal sentence, but according to Heifetz it doesn’t have to be that way. Essential to the survival and success of groups is their ability to adapt.
The professor tells of those Polynesians who once emigrated to Easter Island, experienced their own prosperity there because they could continue to fish and plant trees (which they had learned), but then they became too many. They cut down what few trees they had left, and starving, they built bigger statues for the gods, and then they died.
