100,000 Butterflies to Win the Olympics
Olympian Torri Huske shocked the swimming world early in the Paris Olympic Games when she won the 100m butterfly over her teammate and World Record Holder Gretchen Walsh.
Those stories happen all the time. But what doesn’t happen all the time is watching an athlete go from being 0.01 seconds off of the medal podium in one Olympics to winning by 0.04 seconds the next. That is awesome.
When asked about whether her loss in Tokyo ultimately helped her win in Paris, Huske said,
“I’m not going to lie — that was devastating… But I think that really fueled me. I think that did make me better.” (Full Washington Post story here.)
What strikes me is Huske’s use of the term “I think.”
Having myself missed a podium by mere tenths of a second, I know there’s nothing quite like a soul-destroying loss to make you better. Missing out on your dream by the narrowest of margins provides (if harnessed appropriately) a deep-seated, nuclear power source for an appreciation of every little detail. It can also be a crucial learning opportunity.
Losses are often obvious sources of “fuel” for the win. But what really helps someone win big is often less obvious. The rarest of achievements don’t come with clear formulas. If they did, they wouldn’t be rare. Rather, the path to accomplishing the world’s most challenging feats is more like a cauldron of complex, unknowable ingredients rather than a simple Rx.
Accomplishing the really big stuff in life requires us to both follow a recipe of knowable, controllable factors, and strive to influence the less-certain stuff, seemingly benign things that just might play a teeny tiny role in our success.
In other words, we have to harness the butterfly effect.
The Butterfly Effect
Derived from chaos theory, the Butterfly Effect refers to sensitive dependencies within a deterministic nonlinear system… in other words, it suggests small actions and events can have significant and far-reaching consequences beyond those you might expect.
If you’ve ever heard the expression, “a butterfly flaps its wings in Nigeria and a hurricane hits Florida,” then you’ve heard of the Butterfly Effect.
Most people aren’t concerned with the Butterfly Effect, because it isn’t relevant to pursuing 99% of goals. You don’t have to worry about whether a butterfly flapping its wings could cost you your next promotion, interfere with your ability to learn guitar, or prevent you from participating in next season’s 5k road race. Those goals might be challenging, but apply hard work, determination, and follow the right set of steps, and they’re achievable.
The situation is different when striving for something I like to call “Rare Achievements”. These are the goals that are very, very unlikely to achieve. You’re striving for a Rare Achievement when the goal isn’t to get the promotion but rather exit your startup for a billion dollars; to not just play the guitar but get so big that you can sell out a stadium tour; to not just win the local road race but win the Olympic Games.
That’s when the Butterfly Effect comes into play.
When you’re after a singular, extraordinarily unlikely goal you have to give it all you’ve got. There is no Plan B, because you need to put everything into Plan A. And that means you don’t want to leave anything to chance.
When I was training, I truly believed that if I didn’t get to bed at the right time, eat the right meals, take the right supplements every single day for ten years, one of those misses might be the difference in winning, or not, the Olympics.
I looked at every single thing in my life as a potential influencing factor, no matter how crazy it might seem. (Just ask my girlfriend at the time who carried around my digestive enzymes for me in her purse every time we went out. Could I skip my enzymes for just one little meal? No way. What if that was THE thing that cost me?)
If I believed something could have THE effect on my goal, then you better believe I tried to control it.
Of course, I couldn’t say for certain exactly what factors genuinely contributed to winning Gold — not during training, and not in retrospect. It would be very difficult to prove either way.
But the greats understand that. They understand that you do not know when one of these events or actions will produce a Butterfly Effect for you. And so, the solution is to act like everything could.
This, I’ve learned, is part of the secret-sauce of truly remarkable people.
Ultra high-performers choose to treat as many actions and events as they possibly can as if those actions may be the thing that will enable them to reach their Rare Achievement.
Those who are able to push this idea to the very brink of their own physical and mental capacity is what makes the Olympic Champions, the Founders, the Nobel Prize Winners, and so on.
If they do 10-20 things a day that they believe to be the right actions, then any of those actions may produce the desired effect.
That means throughout a twenty-year-long career in sport, over 100,000 actions are produced that provide the potential to create a hurricane in Paris this week.
Of course, this approach can look obsessive, even downright maniacal. Because it is.
Pursuing the rarest of accomplishments — Olympic Gold, a billion-dollar-exit, or rock and roll glory — are goals so rare that they often must be pursued with such reckless abandon that the ability to prioritize other goals during the pursuit becomes nearly impossible.
People who achieve these Rare Achievements rarely walk away undamaged or unscathed.
Rare Achievement inevitably takes a toll on your physical health, mental health, relationship health, and just about any other kind of “health” or wellbeing you can think of. Collateral damage isn’t necessary but it often does go hand-in-hand. You find me someone who’s attained a Rare Achievement, and I’ll give you 90%+ odds there is some physical and psychological damage that will need to be addressed before they can be content human beings.
That doesn’t mean Rare Achievements aren’t worth fighting for. Far from it.
To constantly choose that our actions might matter and thus fill our days, for years on end, with the things we think might matter — that is a wonderful gift.
Take one of this week’s viral online sensations, Team USA’s Stephen Nedoroscik - better known as “The Pommel-Horse Guy.” He was brought to the Paris Olympics to compete in one event, which took place at the end of the Team Event of Men’s Gymnastics. He was quoted as saying he visualized his routine on the pommel horse 100 times while his teammates were competing.
“I do it all the time,” Nedoroscik said of visualization. “Sometimes I think I do it too much, but what else am I to do with those empty spaces?”
A near-perfect routine that secured his team the Bronze Medal is a near-perfect example of Stephen making the choice to fill his free time with a little thing - visualizing his routine - over and over because, why not?
The achievers, and those watching them, are reminded that if our daily choices might have an impact, we’d do well to choose wisely.
I, for one, am grateful for having had the opportunity to learn this lesson, and to have experienced my own Rare Achievement.
And I, for one, took over a decade to recover from it.
Someone might not be able to pursue a Rare Achievement without some of this collateral damage, but with more awareness, intention and deliberate action, it is possible to not only achieve but also recover much quicker.
So to Torri (and Stephen) and the approximately 905 humans who will be awarded Olympic Gold Medals in Paris these next two weeks across 329 events — welcome to rarified air.
You have reached something that is the single most recognized “great accomplishment of the human experience” available. There is practically nowhere on earth that you can go that your accomplishment will not be recognized and respected.
And for us all watching at home — we can let the Olympics provide a vivid reminder of what is possible when we allow for the accumulation of tiny efforts that are in our control.
Those small little efforts might not make a difference in helping you achieve your wildest hopes and dreams. But then again… they might.
- Steve
