An Inner Scorecard

Jim Loehr talks about Goldman’s dillemma. Starting in the 1970s, Robert Goldman ran a long-term study in which he asked elite athletes the following hypothetical question: “Let’s say I had a magic drug that was so fantastic that if you took it once you would win every competition you would enter from that point on, with the one drawback that it would cause you to die after five years. It is cheating, but I would guarantee that you wouldn’t be caught. Would you take the drug?” Without fail, from the very beginning until he stopped the study in 1995, more than half of respondents answered “Yes, I would take the drug.”

As Jim Loehr was speaking, I expected him to finish the story “without fail, from the very beginning until he stopped the study, the top performers answered ‘no’.” The actual ending caught me off guard.

Why the surprise? What caught me off guard?

If chasing a dream really really matters, if we’re willing to put our whole heart and soul into the pursuit, then we’re relentless. We do whatever it takes. In a whatever-it-takes way the story would make sense. “Whatever it takes” means you take the drug. Maybe the language or framing we use traps us in the perspective we take and ultimately the answer we give.

At the same time,  I saw myself myself caught in a similar trap. I’m so used to prioritizing pursuit, to listening to researchers and coaches for hints and clues for higher performance, that had I was waiting with baited breath for Jim Loehr to finish his anecdote with a golden performance-differenciating nugget. Maybe the perspective I take limits the answers I’m ready to hear.

Maybe the gap in expectation I experienced was precisely Loehr’s point: that we’re totally caught up in a dominant culture that could be fairly described as “blind to what it was for in the first place: building character and serving your community.”

We might not always be able to see or articulate it, but we’re never more than one click or thought away from putting the proverbial cart radically before the horse. Putting profit radically before value. Putting results radically before impact. Putting stress (or recovery) radically over development. Etc. Etc.

This isn’t even a moralistic chiding, it’s just a straight description of what's been called scarcity culture. Loehr describes how in sport, in school, in business, in hustle, in drive, in winningness — insofar as pursuit is primarily of "more," it is exactly a race to nowhere.

Loehr asks: can you take character-building as seriously as results pursuit? Could you imagine yourself as a coach, as your own coach, dedicated with the same dogged intensity that we imagine in the greatest coach in his greatest season? Researching, tweaking, optimizing, consulting, creating, augmenting, obsessively working on whatever aspects of the game could make the difference?

Loehr answers: Yes, it is possible to coach ourselves on an inner, character-based scorecard instead of an external results or process-oriented one. The kicker is that we already do. We aren’t immune to the impact and/or lapse of our own character; we’re just habitually blind to it.

A great character scorecard does meaningfully drive (or sabotage) performance. But to jump back to the prioritization of external results is to miss the point. You don’t engage in character work to drive results. You work on the character that can drive results because capacity of character is what matters first and last. For as long as we propagate a culture that doesn’t even know that, even and especially in our own mind/voice/body, we do ourselves and those around us an immense disservice.