Look before you leap
I have observed that whether intentional or not the greatest athletes practice the lessons laid out by the Stoics of two thousand years ago. One of these lessons comes from chapter twenty nine of Epictetus’ Enchiridion entitled “Look before you leap.” Epictetus talks about the importance of thinking things through. Thinking about where we are and where we want to be is very easy. How many times have we imagined winning a race? It’s good to dream and it feels good too. It can motivate us to get out there full speed today.
It is much different to imagine the middle part because it usually has hardships, difficulties, and setbacks. Maybe work changes and you have to get up early in the morning to train. Maybe you get injured. The weather does not cooperate. You have a bad race result. These things are not fun and they don’t feel good.
When we do not think the entire process through, beginning, end, and middle, we will hit difficulty, lose our motivation, feel badly, and maybe even give up. When we truly think things through we will understand that the setbacks will inevitably come. I challenge you to find one example of someone achieving great success without difficulty. You can’t. If you are not experiencing hardship then the process is not in motion and you are not getting closer to your goal. When we realize this we can start to welcome setbacks.
This is not just about sport. Everyone is capable of patience, perseverance, courage, humility, and kindness. These virtues, among others, are what we have an opportunity to practice during hardship. These are the tools we have to get us past setbacks. They are also what will get us to what I think our ultimate goal should be: to become a better human being.
This is how some people actually start to welcome difficulty, struggle, hardship, and setbacks. It is what helped me recover from my pulmonary embolism. It is possible to truly love your fate, win or lose. Amor fati.
More and more I admire Denver Nuggets NBA champion Nikola Jokic. Here is one thing he had to say about this topic.
“If you want to be successful, you need a couple years. You need to be bad, then you need to be good. Then when you’re good, you need to fail. Then when you fail, you’re going to figure it out. Experience isn’t about what happened to you, it’s about what you’re going to do about what happened to you. Yes, Jamal [Murray] was injured. Yes, we lose in the first round or second round (in previous years) … but there is a process …there’s steps you need to fulfill. There is no shortcuts, it’s a journey and I’m glad I’m part of the journey.”
It is the “and I’m glad I’m part of the journey” for me. It sounds like he has read chapter twenty nine.
You can read it here and/or listen for two minutes below.
