Recently I had the privilege to listen to a lecture on the Science of Success by Albert-László Barabási. According to him “In spite of all the claims to the contrary, success is a collective phenomena: You are only successful because many of us think that you are”.
Barabási took the sport as a starting example to show how performance and success correlate while they differ in other sectors of the society. In sport, things look relatively simple. If you perform well, win medals, beat records, you are successful in the eyes of the society at large. Performance and Success go literally hand in hand. This is surely not the case in other fields of life. The community as such plays a decisive role to determine the extent of success of a performance other than sport. And this community has now different common features, most of them relating to media and technology. And these are the most influential ones.
Given that fingerprints of success are spread around society and leaves detectable, measurable, and predictable traces, scientists – such as Barabási – can now examine “one of the most desirable traits of the human experience.”
The lecture took me to think over the example of sport and get directly to running. While the community plays and ever bigger role both in work and private life, people increasingly tend to turn to an individual discipline which is running/jogging as a sport. I feel sometimes walking down the street that this century will be booked as the century of jogging in the Annales. Is this – beyond the much more obvious reasons (which is simplicity, affordability, time for intensity, prevention etc.) a result of a will to be measured only on the basis of performance? Is this an evasion from the often fake or false assessment of the community where your success mostly depends on factors you are not mastering? Is this a normal and natural counter reaction to the over influencing community? We do run in community, post photos, tracks, paces. We’re social animals after all. But at the end, your results is only yours. Nobody can run instead of you, with your legs, lungs and heart. According to a popular and not less true stereotype, running is a very effective way to deepen and practice self-understanding, an active meditation. Thus turning to running is a recognition of the fact that the community doesn’t help your self-knowledge, or more to say, could rather derail it to the extent that you have to be on your own to clear your eventual dilemmas or even identity issues.
I am not preaching for an anti-community attitude here, just posing questions and see in the spreading of running a certain aspiration for a performance based assessment in a world where Krisztián Berki and Krisztián Berki equal in success score.
The performance oriented approach is even more detectable in long distance running. There you don’t have to win, or beat a course record. It’s “enough” to become a finisher to gain recognition thus success, be it internal or external. Equality is an other feature of running and especially of long distance. There is no doubt that there is no difference at the starting line. The distance is the same for everyone, stopwatch is the same, time passes similarly for a manager, for a bus driver and for the elite runners.
As my first coach told me: in running, we’re all equal. You get measured by time. And what can be more objective than time?
allez zserzseli! 