Success

Yesterday, I watched an interview with Valerie Adams, the New Zealand shot putter who was reigning Olympic champion, and expected to get the gold again. She didn’t, missing out to her Belarusian competitor. 

As she was interviewed, she was fighting back tears. A silver medal…and she was devastated. 

In the first few days of the Olympics, the New Zealand equestrian eventing team, which included 56-year-old Mark Todd, won bronze. In a post-match interview, Todd shared his medal with the reporter before joyously lifting her into his arms. A bit of a contrast to Valerie. 

So, who was more successful? What does success even depend on? Who or what determines whether we are successful or not? Is it about status? Gold medals? Money? Power?

That's a lot of questions. But I think it's something we need to ask ourselves a lot of questions about, because I think it's easy to just assume that the world's view of success is our view of success.

But if it is about status and money and power, what happens when we know we can't achieve those things? When we know we're never going to be as rich as Bill Gates, never going to win as many Grand Slams as Roger Federer, never going to sell as many books as J.K. Rowling...

I love Martin Luther King Jr,'s quote:

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

Maybe that is success - doing what we do, what we're called to do, but doing it to the best of our ability, whatever the outcome of that.

I guess in my job, maybe I would be seen as successful when I get the job as the All Blacks or Irish rugby physio. But what if that was my only goal? I think there are much more important goals for me. I think I am successful when I take away some of my 82-year-old patient's back pain. I think I am successful when I strap an ankle well to prevent one of my Under 20's rugby boys from spraining it. I think I am successful when a patient leaves their appointment feeling like someone has listened to them and believed them about how sore they are. I'm not saying that I'm always successful in these things, but I want to try. I want to do my job well, because I think that sometimes, it's the process rather than the result that makes us more successful people. 

I guess the process usually involves a lot of failure too. Great successes won't come before there has been failure. Michael Jordan is probably one of the most successful basketball players in the world. This is one of his famous quotes:

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

Maybe achieving success is not what we've always thought it was.