The fleeting feeling of success
18 months ago, the team I was coaching won the 2021 Australian Ultimate Frisbee National Championship.
To say the moment of victory was satisfying would be an understatement. It was a moment of pure joy. It felt like all the hard work we had put in across the entire season (and the years leading up to it) justified itself a thousand times over.
The process of developing a team capable of performing at the elite level of ultimate (or any sport, I’d imagine) isn’t ‘fun’ in the traditional sense. It involves a lot of grinding; physical, mental, and technical.
It involves doing repetitive footwork drills in the pouring rain.
It involves practicing the same throwing technique tens of thousands of times in a season, in multiple sessions a week, every week.
It involves developing and sticking to a mental preparation routine, and habituating that routine every single time you get ready to perform.
It involves finding the motivation to do the work your opponent isn’t willing to do, to find the commitment they can’t find, to endure the pain that they won’t.
It’s not ‘fun’ the way playing hacky sack is fun.
But when you do win ‘the big one’ (which is very rare), the feelings you get are absolutely amazing….
…
For—in my experience—about 30 minutes.
😐
…
Less than an hour after our big win, my brain turned to the next season. What new strategies would we employ? Which players would be retiring? Which young talent might step up in their absence? What innovations might our opponents develop that we’ll need to counter?
I had barely gotten in the car following the medal ceremony before I noticed that my mind had already moved on from the momentous victory that had occurred. Whilst a sense of deep contentment remained, the soaring feelings of success subsided very quickly.
The overwhelming realisation I had in that moment was that the win itself wasn’t the point. The elation of that instant wouldn’t last forever (or even twenty minutes).
The point of winning is not, it turns out, winning.
The point of winning is the process of earning it. It’s the value in being willing to do the work to do something great. It’s the fulfilment that comes with knowing you’ve made more of yourself than you might otherwise have.
There’s a strange paradox at play here.
We use the carrot of victory to motivate us to do the hard work that we might otherwise not choose to do. We may not want, in the moment, to do footwork in the rain, but we do it because we want to earn the right to challenge for victory.
The paradox is, then, that when we finally do emerge victorious, we realise that enjoying footwork sessions in the rain was actually the point all along. We look back at the effort, the pain, the grind with a fondness. We realise that we actually loved it all, and that it was all worth it, and would have been worth it whether we won or not.
We realise that, actually, we can’t wait to go back and do it all again.
Which is why, when we won the National Championship, my thoughts almost immediately turned to the following year, the following the challenge. I realised I was actually looking forward to the grind.
Now, 18 months later, I’ve been appointed Assistant Coach of the Australian Barramundis, our national mixed ultimate team that will compete at the World Championships in 2024. Our first selection camp was this weekend.
I stood in freezing rain as it blew in near-horizontally, struggling to contain my selection notebook in a howling gale as the athletes worked to demonstrate their skills in some of the most torrid conditions Melbourne could muster.
It was horrendous.
And we loved it.
My friend Caelan Huntress (who posted a lovely review of my book Tribe of Learning on LinkedIn) recently taught me how to use Midjourney, an AI image generation tool. She’s known fondly as “Midge” among those that work with her most often. Here’s what she created when handed the prompt “the fleeting feeling of success”:
