The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, September 20th. It is the tenth of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On September 11th, and the Generation It Didn’t Change
The fall of my senior year of high school, I often watched Friday Night Lights. Not the TV show, or even the full movie (and I had yet to read the book), but the climactic halftime speech from the film—the speech Gary Gaines gives about perfection.
…Now, you all have known me for a while, and for a long time now you’ve been hearin’ me talk about being perfect. Well, I want you to understand somethin’. To me, being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It’s not about winning. It’s about you and your relationship to yourself and your family and your friends.
Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn’t let them down, because you told ‘em the truth. And that truth is, is that you did everything that you could. There wasn’t one more thing that you could’ve done. Can you live in that moment, as best you can, with clear eyes and love in your heart? With joy in your heart? If you can do that, gentlemen, then you’re perfect…
I’d watch it on Friday nights, after the pasta dinners before cross country meets. Our team wasn’t as good as the prior year, when we’d finished fifth at the 2A state meet (there are three classes of school sizes in Illinois high school cross country). We were competitive, though—we’d finish tenth at state—which meant my results would make a difference, and without any actual experience of turning in one of those transcendent races in which everything clicks, part of my preparation consisted of trying to will my seventeen-year-old self into a mental space where I really would give everything I could. For myself. For my teammates. For a state championship. I never got to that plane, but it was always the goal, which left me spending those last few minutes every Friday night thinking about being perfect.
They’re a special thing, high school sports. In public schools like mine, you don’t really get to pick your teammates. Sure, you can pick which sports to play—I chose to run cross country in part because of the program’s culture—but it’s not like other areas of life, where you get so much say into who is on your team. In high school, you get who you get, and on competitive teams, like mine, that creates a familial bond. Because another thing about high school sports is that, on competitive teams, you’re allowed to care a whole lot about the entire team’s success, something that isn’t always encouraged over the rest of your life.
“Work-life balance” was something I heard pitched often by my first post-college employer. It was a big reason why I took the job. I wanted some freedom to pursue pursuits outside of my daily work, and I didn’t want to hide those pursuits. The job delivered on that promise. It was fun. It was carefree. It was an easy way of life. But along the way, things got frustrating.
Because I began to care.
Now, my employer had no explicit rules against caring about your work, and to be fair, people were encouraged—in my little corner of the business—to care about things about work. But with a poorly-built incentive structure that encouraged vanity projects and networking while discouraging taking on difficult challenges, and with an out-of-touch manager who’d fallen deeply in over his head, the thing I was encouraged to care about was not the business, or the customer, or my coworkers. I was encouraged to care about getting myself promoted. Preferably in a way that would get my manager promoted. I didn’t want a job like this. I wanted to care. It turned out there were only so many millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of customer experiences I was willing to see pissed away before I quit. So, I quit.
I don’t know if this piece of the culture was pervasive throughout the business. My employer was, and remains, a large employer, and I’d imagine the culture differs across the company. I also don’t know what exact challenges my manager was working through. But the treatment of work as a parasitic game, rather than the symbiotic relationship I perceived it to be between employer and employee and consumer, was dejecting. And sobering. Because I realized this balance between work-life balance and caring was going to be a hard one to find. And as the years have gone on since then, I’ve learned that starting one’s own business (or two) and trying to build that environment—my attempt to create the thing I was lacking—is not something that comes easy.
Cross country wasn’t my only sport in high school. I played baseball. I played basketball for a year. But of these three, cross country lent itself most readily to symbiosis. Part of this was the workload: Yes, basketball conditioning was hard now and then. Yes, baseball could be miserable psychologically. But cross country required running somewhere around a thousand miles over a five-month stretch, seeing your teammates every morning as the sun came up, spending hours either pushing your physical limits or embarking on small odysseys around town, and saying goodbye as the sun began to dip low in the sky. It was thankless, especially for those of us—the majority of us—who were not competing for scholarships at high-level collegiate programs. There were no crowds. There were few writeups in the local paper. There were few parents throwing grenades into their kids’ heads about playing time, whether through a lucky draw or simply due to the raw objectivity of a sport in which everyone competes in the same competition, the results of which are measured plainly in minutes and seconds. It was very much just us—just the team, with major incentives to commit oneself fully to that team. Since it ended, I’ve missed it.
Before I started that post-college job, after I drove around the country, I spent a few months at home as an assistant coach in the cross country program for which I once ran. We still didn’t get a trophy at state (finished fifth again, like junior year). I didn’t get to have teammates again. But I got to be around it. I got to drive the lonely roads of downstate Illinois in school buses and rental vans. And when we turned off of Wallace into the parking lot that last night, it ended again. Just as it had four years earlier. And again, I was left missing it, and not knowing if that environment would ever return to my life.
It isn’t exactly something we encourage—symbiosis. Education in this culture has turned into a brutal, zero-sum sport. Politics is only growing more partisan, more parasitic, and more zero-sum itself in its tribal warfare. Even within individual businesses, where the reward stream flows in the same entrance for both employees and employers, struggles between labor and management—even subtle, passive-aggressive ones—are common. This is sad. Because the symbiosis is there. And it doesn’t require sacrificing yourself.
That was the blessing of those cross country teams: The sacrifices—physical pain, a bit of time—weren’t really “sacrifices.” They were investments. And when incentives are structured that way—when what’s best for the individual and the team is the exact same—there arises a sense of purpose. A sense of togetherness. And, as Gary Gaines would put it, a chance at perfection.
Next week’s essay: On the Long Game
