The Privilege of Excellence

We are reluctant these days to speak plainly about winners and losers. But life, in most of its consequential moments, is an auction.

If you want that job, no one else can have it. If you want that grant, every other applicant goes home with nothing. If you want that major gift, it is given once, to one organization, and every other organization that asked receives a gracious letter. If you want the Olympic gold in the hundred meter freestyle, everyone else must finish behind you.

There are many jobs in the world, many grants, many donors, many championships. But in the particular there is only this one. And if you want it, others must not have it. In that regard, life is zero sum.

Which means winning requires overpaying.

I do not mean only money, though money is sometimes the currency. In most circumstances overpaying means working harder and longer than others are willing to work. It means forgoing what your competitors permit themselves. That is the cost of winning. Not the trophy, but the willingness to pay more than anyone else thought the prize was worth.

My first apartment was won at auction, which is to say I paid more than anyone else was willing to pay. In literal terms, I overpaid. No one else believed it was worth what I was prepared to offer. They may have been right. I decided to overpay because it was worth it to me. For two years I worked eighteen hour days and ate peanut butter sandwiches to afford fifteen hundred square feet in a city that gives nothing away. That was the price. I paid it.

Consider Michael Phelps. Twenty three gold medals, the most decorated Olympian in history. He did not win with money. He won with decades of preparation, discipline and sacrifice. He was willing to sustain what no other swimmer in the world was willing to sustain. That is the other currency of overpaying. Extraordinary effort, compounded, over years.

Talent, charm and goodwill are necessary. They are not sufficient. They will not close the distance between where you are and where you intend to be. Until we are willing to overpay, we will be passed over.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

If overpaying is the true cost of winning, then at some point winning will feel disappointing. The cost exceeds the prize. No medal weighs what twenty years beside a pool weigh. Two years of my life were not commensurate with fifteen hundred square feet. Measured strictly as a transaction, winning is almost always a net loss.

Does that mean winning is not worth it?

It does not. But it means the value of winning is not what you receive on the day you win.

The crux.

The true value of winning is what you become in pursuit of it. It is the transformative work of reinventing yourself, or your organization, in order to compete at the level the prize demands. The desire to win recreates us, because in our current state we are not yet capable of winning. That is the real chemistry. That is the durable good.

And notice what follows. The contest is zero sum. What the contest makes of you is not.

The real gold for Michael Phelps was never the metal. It was becoming the most prepared athlete of his generation, and in doing so lifting an entire sport to a height that has inspired millions of people who will never race competitively. No one lost when he did that. I overpaid for that apartment because I had a vision of raising a family in a place of comfort and safety. The dream was the point. The apartment was only its expression.

No one who truly wins does it for the medal. They do it for who they are required to become.

One honest caveat.

If you are not interested in overpaying, that is a legitimate choice and I will think no less of anyone who makes it. But I would recommend releasing the desire to win along with it, because holding both produces only frustration.

I am also not asking anyone in this room to give more than they have. What each of us spends, and on what, has to be chosen. It cannot be issued from my office. Overpaying that is chosen is conviction. Overpaying that is assigned is something else entirely, and I will not run this organization that way.

So the decision is yours. It is the one thing here I have no authority over, and it is the only thing that will determine whether we win.

Come with me. Commit to the privilege of excellence. Be willing to pay more than you thought you would have to. That willingness, that decision, is where winning begins.