This is part three of my series related to the role of luck in athletic success and how manosphere works against us. Links to the first couple of installments are at the bottom of this post.
One concept in The Atlantic article on luck that caught my eye was the notion of a “paradox of skill.”
It goes like this: When everyone trains exhaustively from a young age, when every athlete has access to top coaching and nutrition and recovery protocols, the playing field becomes remarkably level. Everyone’s so good that small differences in talent or effort barely matter anymore.
Which means luck becomes more important in determining who wins.
This isn’t just about sports. You’ll find the pattern all over.
Career advancement, for example. Everyone has the degree, the certifications, the LinkedIn optimization. You do everything right (network, nail the interview, send the perfect follow-up email) and sometimes you still don’t get the job because the hiring manager’s former roommate also applied.
Self-improvement culture has created an army of men grinding. We’re apparently supposed to “track our macros,” optimize our sleep, do cold plunges, etc. We’ve professionalized the pursuit of being better.
All this does is make luck matter more, not less.
It’s a “grind culture” that confuses working hard with being obsessed with controlling outcomes. The grind comes from believing that if you just optimize enough, work hard enough, follow the formula perfectly enough, you can eliminate randomness. You can’t.
What you can do: Show up consistently. Do work you’re proud of. Treat people well. Be someone you’d want to be around. And then accept that outcomes will sometimes break your way and sometimes won’t.
I’ve bene guilty of this. When I adopted time management skills to improve my “personal productivity,” I simultaneously grew anxious about any time that I thought was “wasted.” And I obsessively eliminated things that didn’t help me achieve goals. It made me pretty efficient, but it didn’t make me very fun to be around.
That doesn’t mean I think we should all just throw up our hands and hope or stop trying to achieve goals we value. But grinding is often not a commitment to growth, it’s just anxiety.
You can ease up on the obsessive optimization without giving up on improvement. In fact, you probably should. Because when everyone’s trying equally hard, the difference between success and failure often isn’t about effort. It’s whether you happened to get lucky.
If someone you know could use encouragement to chill out on the grind culture, please share this post and encourage them to subscribe to Warm Current.
The first post in this series is “How My Track Team Got So Huge.“
The second post in this series is “The Myth of Control.“