Sportsmanship (E)

0:00Hey, it's Seth, and this is an Akimbo announcement.

0:08I know I've been gone for a while. I've missed you. I've been writing. My new book, This is Strategy, comes out in October 2024, right at the end of the month at a local bookstore near you. Starting in September, we will be back with new episodes based on the audiobook, based on the Udemy strategy course and a special Q &A series where you can volunteer to go over your strategy as part of the show. If you'd like to share your journey, what you're up to, what you're challenged by, visit akimbo.link and press the appropriate button and we will be in touch. Thanks for holding on. Thanks for the work you do.

0:57Keep making a ruckus. We'll see you at the end of September. All Jason Gonzalez wanted to do was pay his way through college. Going to a college in Minnesota, he realized that there was a gap in the market. That gap? The nearest Krispy Kreme was in Iowa, a four-hour drive away. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

1:29You've probably heard this story, which is part of the reason I'm telling it to you. Jason posted on Facebook and within hours had plenty of people raising their hand saying, sure, if you make the drive to Iowa and pick us up dozens and dozens of donuts, we'll buy them from you when you get here. So, upon hearing this news, upon discovering that Jason was paying his way through college by buying Krispy Kreme donuts at retail and then bringing them to people who wanted them. What did Krispy Kreme do? Of course, they shut him down. They had no good moral reason to do it. There was no legal basis for doing it, but they did it anyway.

2:11Now, here's the question. Why have you heard about this? You've heard about it because it offends our sensibility. It feels wrong. But why is it wrong? Isn't Krispy Kreme's job to maximize the profit for their shareholders? And can't they best do that by controlling everything about their brand? Isn't their job to make things exactly like they were yesterday, but a little bit more profitable? So what if they go after some college kid? Well, the outcry made it clear that there is a so what. We don't like it when the big, powerful bully comes after someone, particularly if the other person isn't hurting anyone, and they don't even have a legal basis to do so.

2:58And I think this is a version of sportsmanship. If we think back to thousands of years ago, before they invented the Super Bowl, before they invented the World Cup, before they invented jousting, it seems to me that a lot of the ways we settled grudges, a lot of the ways we burned off extra energy, was by mortally wounding other people. Alexander Hamilton isn't the only person who was involved in a fatal duel. Alexander! Aaron Burr, sir! Can we agree that duels are dumb and immature? And so sports comes along. And maybe sports shows up as a replacement for mortal combat. Maybe it's a way to establish hierarchy.

3:44Maybe it's a way for people, particularly men, to burn off a little bit of their testosterone-based energy, showing who's up and who's down. Now the question. The question is, like Krispy Kreme, isn't your job to go all the way, to do anything you can get away with, within or not within the rules, in order to win? Isn't the point of sports to win? The New York Times reports in November 2019 that a high school football team in Nassau County beat the other team 61-13. Now, you don't have to know a lot about football to know that 61-13 is a fairly lopsided outcome. if you're the coach of the team that's winning and you're up by, I don't know, four touchdowns and a field goal, and there's 15 minutes left in the game, and you know that in the history of high school sports, no team has ever come back from a deficit like that one, and you know that your job is not to win a trophy, but your job using taxpayer money and all those kids' time and energy, is to somehow teach your kids something.

5:00The question is, do you keep your first string in the game and score a few more touchdowns? Nassau County has a rule, and the rule is if you win by more than six touchdowns, you have to come before a board that questions your focus and asks you about sportsmanship and that you might, in fact, get suspended for a game. That's what happened to Coach Shaver. Now, let's say you're Dr. Selena, the superintendent of schools of the Plain Edge Public Schools. Knowing that your coach did this on the taxpayer's dime when he is supposed to be working as an educator, would you publish a two-page letter that includes things like, Coach Shaver was done wrong by this group of self-professed experts on sportsmanship.

5:48Who said they're experts on sportsmanship? who appointed these people to run this kangaroo court, being the judge, jury, and executioners. That's emphasis added by me. And it goes on and on for two pages. What are you teaching children by saying, play fairly, but now you're playing too well. Don't play anymore for the rest of the game. Where is the life lesson? Well, Dr. Selena, I'll tell you where the life lesson is. The life lesson is that each of us has to live in a community. And the question we need to ask about sportsmanship, whether it's Krispy Kreme or your football team, is what's sportsmanship even for?

6:30We know some of the great sportsmanship stories by heart because they make us feel something about possibility and humanity. John Landy, well known for being the second person to run a four-minute mile was also known for the fact that in a race, he stopped when someone named Ron Clark fell just in front of him, and instead of running past him, helped him up, and then got back in the race. That's not what you're supposed to do when you're in a race, is it? Or maybe it is. Or consider what Jack Nicklaus did in 1969 in the Ryder Cup. He was in a hard-fought match with the golfer Tony Jacklin. And on the 18th hole, after Nicholas holed out, instead of standing there putting the pressure on Jacklin to hole his putt, he just gave it to his competitor, ending the match in a tie.

7:25When we see sportsmanship like this, I think what it does is remind us that we are not at war with the opponent, that the purpose of the game, whether the game is business or the game is golf, is to demonstrate that we have sufficiency. That what it means to win by cheating, what it means to win by cutting every corner, what it means to win by humiliating your opponent is a demonstration of your own insufficiency, your own insecurity. Because what we have decided in that moment is that enough cannot possibly be enough. What we need is more. I'll go on for just a little bit longer. Compare these stories, the stories of the softball team that picks up an injured player and helps her around the bases to get her home run.

8:19Compare that to a guy named Nicholas Batum competing in the Olympics in 2012. It's France versus Spain in the men's basketball quarterfinal. Batum reaches around Spain's Juan Carlos Navarro, the guy who has the ball, and punches him in his groin. He's angry because a different player had feigned an injury. He needs to teach him a lesson. The question I'm wondering about is, all of this teaching people a lesson, what exactly does it earn us? The Olympic tradition of amateurism began because the organizers of the Olympics didn't want working men bothering the elites who were going to compete in the Olympics.

9:08The whole idea was you didn't get paid to do your sport, so only a rich person could devote the effort to doing the sport, which made it more likely that the rich person would win. Despite that less than illustrious beginning, the tradition is supposed to be that you have sufficiency, that you understand that tomorrow, somebody else is going to compete and someone else might win. You understand that punching someone in the groin simply because you can get away with it is a metaphor for war, not for a positive ratchet that makes the culture we live in better, not worse. So back to my obsession with high school sports.

9:53Is the purpose of high school sports to get more trophies? does the school have a trophy shortage? Or perhaps the purpose of high school sports is to train vocationally kids to be in the NHL or the NFL or whatever league you want to name. The problem with that is if it's vocational training, it's pretty horrible because perhaps one in a million kids who competes in any given sport is going to go on to have a highly paid successful career in professional sports. Now, I hope we can agree that's not what high school sports are for. And yet, because we're measuring something on just one axis, how many games did you win?

10:35How many points did you win by? We get seduced into believing that there is a connection between the number of victories and the point of the entire exercise. And of course, Milton Friedman put us down this same path when he made up that whole nonsense about the only purpose of a corporation being to enrich the shareholders. Well, that lets the CEO off the hook, doesn't it? Because you can get away with anything as long as you justify it in the name of shareholder value. But what if we make it more complicated? What if we say that the outcome of your effort needs to be something that you are truly proud of regardless of whether you scored a point, regardless of whether the referee saw you, and regardless of what happened to your stock price.

11:27Because the purpose of society is not to enable corporations. The purpose of corporations is to enable society. That what we have is the opportunity to use some of the magic of capitalism, this mysterious force that helps us find and satisfy needs, but we get to do it at the very same time. We can put our name on our work that we get a chance to use leverage, whether that is the leverage of a trainer and a sports team or the leverage of an industrial system that makes stuff to make things better by making better things. So, Dr. Selena, if you're listening today, I hope that on reflection you realize that training the kids at your school to win by the maximum number of points is not doing them a service.

12:23It's not what the sports were for in the first place. It's not what Coach Shaver is supposed to do. And every time we deal with any entity, whether it's a corporation, whether it's a coach, a therapist, or a sports team, we have to measure more than one thing because we are not automatons. We are not people who are simply driven by one and only one metric. That what sportsmanship actually means is that we're not at war, that we're in it together, that tomorrow you might be up, that one side beating the other side is never permanent, and that teaching people a lesson just to teach them a lesson isn't nearly as effective as showing people a model, a model for what could be, a model for what happens when we work together with sufficiency and possibility and connection.

13:21Oh, one more thing. After the whole story about Krispy Kreme went viral, someone at Krispy Kreme took a deep breath and said, whoa, that was really stupid. And they called Jason on the phone and they worked out a way to go forward. Now, the cynics out there can say, yep, they did that to increase their profits. But me, I'm a little bit of an optimist, and I'm hoping they did it because it was the right thing to do. That's my rant. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

14:06Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. As always, I do love hearing from you. I hope you will take a minute to visit akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K and press the appropriate button. We got two juicy questions this week. Here we go. Hi, Seth. This is Chris from Dublin in Ireland. and I just want to ask you a question that's been on my mind for ages and ages. Your latest episode just really brought it to the fore and made me ask you, who are your audience? Who do you think we are, the people like us that you create this stuff for?

14:49I remember you said somewhere once that you started out just sending emails to a few friends who you thought might be interested and they shared with other people and they shared with other people and now you have this huge following of people without ever defining a target group, without ever really sitting and writing down who you think you're serving. Or maybe you did. I'm curious to know, what do you think are the defining characteristics that make us your audience, the people that you're serving? Thanks. Thank you for this, Chris. Here's the deal. Often, organizations focus on demographics.

15:30Demographics are what can we see from the outside? How old is this person? What is their gender or race? What do they own? How much do they make? These are all important if you don't have actual information about who they are, what they believe, what they want, what are their dreams and fears. These are psychographics. And we have left the world of demographics because the internet shows everyone who you are based on your actions. So I'm going to answer your question about psychographics, because it really doesn't matter to me at all about the appearance or demographics of the people who I am seeking to serve.

16:11For me, every morning I wake up and I think about my, in quotes, audience in the following way. First of all, they're not mine. It's not my tribe. It is a group of people who happen to look to me now and then for provocation or narration. But what do they have in common? What they have in common is that they are thirsty. Like me, curious, interested in figuring out what's next, and restless to make a difference. That the people who are engaging with my work would like to lead more than they do. Wonder if this is all there is to work. This itch that needs to be scratched all the time, not for more, but for better?

17:00What a privilege that I've had to be able to talk with these people and, in my own way, teach or lead them. So at the Akimbo workshops, we are finding over and over again that they work because people are enrolled. And they're enrolled because we are going where they are going. And as soon as I shifted, maybe 20 years ago, to the idea of doing things with or for this group instead of to them, not thinking of people as customers, but thinking of them as students, everything got a lot more rational for me, a lot more straightforward. So thank you for being along for this ride. If this is not where you are going, if you are hoping for short-term hype and entertainment, you are on the wrong bus.

17:49But for everybody else, yes, you're in the right place. Thank you. Hey, Seth. My name is Jon Jon. I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Asking a question in regards to your Lego riff, I think the instructions are so important for two reasons. One, once the set is built, creativity can begin in the form of play, how they play with it. But two, I was bothered by the way my son liked to just build sets. In fact, he was obsessed with even looking up instructions on other sets we didn't even own. We would download the PDFs for him. But what I found is he would recognize parts that we had, make sections of sets we didn't even have, and then start applying those to new creations.

18:33The second part of my question is this. Stephen King says, first you imitate, then you create. And I agree with this. So do you agree first off? But secondly, if you agree, where does imitation end in creativity start? My son, if I didn't let him imitate, I didn't let him play with the sets, he wouldn't have learned the craft as much. Thanks for all you do. I love the fact that we're disagreeing about this, but it's mostly about degree. What's happened to Lego with the kids is they have industrialized the idea of following the instructions. And they are plugging in to a culture where parents and institutions push kids to follow the instructions.

19:17Period. And it's the period that you and I agree about. Because your kid, you're so lucky to have him and him you, is going beyond that. They are using the instructions in the Stephen King sense of the word, learning how to follow them so that then they can break them. But I hope we can see that the vast majority of kids are pushed to not do that, to not raise their hand, not ask a question, not download the PDF, ignoring the sticker that says no user serviceable parts inside. that there's a big difference between putting together an electronics kit that shows you step by step and figuring out your own way to make a radio.

20:01For sure, you need to learn to solder. For sure, you need to learn to put the pieces together. I know people who are in the Lego business who for a living have worked their way up. And what I know about them is that they got their start with the basic Lego pieces. that it wasn't, oh, here's something you can check off and then move on to the next thing. So the fundamentals do matter. I completely agree with that. But as a parent, teaching a kid to color outside the lines, encourage them to do it, push them until they get over that hump, that is a contribution we can make to every kid. Because as the world is changing, and it is changing faster than ever, today is the most normal day the world will ever again experience, we need to raise kids who know what to do when there are no instructions.

20:57Thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.