To A Greater World
Jon Gilson
11 Comments
We’re bringing personal responsibility back. You can’t do what we do while shirking your load, depending on other people, or otherwise passing the buck. Your WOD time is yours and yours alone. You cannot turn in a fifty-minute “Fran” and then scold your classmates for the result. Blame is not cast in the gym.
Conversely, I can’t count the number to times I’ve seen an athlete turn in an epic time and then thank everyone in the room for making it happen. Adulation is shared.
I view the gym as a microcosm of the moral world, one in which control of success and failure ultimately lies with the individual. There is no fatalism in the gym. Your maximum pull-up number is not preordained by some higher power. It is determined by speed, strength, coordination, accuracy, agility, and mental fortitude, all qualities that are within your domain and solely within your control. Others can give to the effort through correction, encouragement, and support, but they cannot make your chin clear the bar.
For some reason, the extraordinarily clear relationship between effort and success, responsibility and result, fails to make it through the gym doors into the wider world. Fingers are pointed freely, horizontally as well as vertically. Misfortune becomes the byproduct of an unknowable cosmic soup. Accidents are happenstance, determined by coincidence. Crime is not a choice, but the unfortunate result of socio-economic divergence. Individual awareness and control fall by the wayside in favor of widespread blame, the ridicule passed ever higher, until personal responsibility lies with no one.
Success is hoarded like so much gold, rarely shared outside of the occasional Academy Awards speech. Encouragement, support, and contribution are forgotten in favor of glory, fame, and reputation, and suddenly the locus of control returns squarely to the individual.
Imagine the day when my substandard split jerk becomes your fault. After missing out front, I get in your face, screaming about too much load, lack of support, and my astronomically bad childhood. I start in with the if-onlys and why-God-whys, sure that if things had been different, I would have nailed the lockout. Reduced to tears, I put an asterisk in my workout journal next to the repetition, noting that the miss was your fault.
In the gym, the irrationality of my actions would be obvious. Why is it that a similar thought process, applied to my career, significant other, or a simple traffic jam becomes acceptable?
It’s time to take the lessons of the gym outside. Burdens, whether iron or pure metaphor, do not move themselves. Successes are rarely the result of individual action. Looking to the sky for help or harm is an exercise in futility.
Take stock in yourself, and those nearest you. Accept responsibility, and share your triumphs. Ours will become a much greater world.
The sun sets on Santa Cruz. Picture courtesy of Patrick Cummings.
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Reader Comments (11)
Jon, Amen brother. Some of my athletes and I were discussing similar topics just the other day. I'll share this with them. I could not have said it better. Adam Head, CrossFit Athens
Good stuff, Jon.
As always Bro.... right on point and timely as ever!
Great article! Love it!
Nice Jon, interesting perspective...keeping it real.
word...
Really enjoy your articles and musings Jon. Thanks for taking the time to post them.
With you part-way.
Yes, take responsibility. It’s obvious in the gym, and should be obvious outside the gym too. Absolutely agree that gym ethics have a helluva lot of needed transfer into the rest of life. But it’s important to remember that it’s not a level playing field – in the gym, or outside. That’s obvious in the gym, but less so elsewhere.
“Imagine the day my sub-standard split jerk becomes your fault?” OK. I can imagine the day when you come to me for training, and I require a split jerk. You’re a world-class athlete … in wheelchair sports.
A “disabled” athlete excels partly by seeing the limits of their disability clearly, and acting in fields where they can make that disability mostly irrelevant. A coach of a disabled athlete does the same – no mollycoddling, but no expecting paraplegics to do O-lifting either. Together, you pick a sport that works.
Problem is, not every disability is physical. An astronomically gifted friend happened to have an “astronomically bad childhood.” She’s a veteran of 30 years of ineffective Mental Health therapy, and has had multiple suicide attempts. What’s finally helped is understanding that she’s got a disability. Taking responsibility has meant seeing the reality, and boundaries, of her disability … but not pretending it can disappear through willpower.
By now, she’s got a PhD, publications, and huge community respect; but a lifetime's taught that some situations will reduce her to self-harm and suicidal thoughts … Taking responsibility means knowing what those are, and steering clear.
35% of the average physician’s caseload is for mental illness; the number’s growing. As well as being colossally good at avoiding responsibility, we seem to be pretty fair at screwing people up. Probably the two are connected. To me, that says coupling the drive for responsibility and accountability with compassion, not with judgment.
Right on. My inadequacies in and out of the gym are mine and mine alone.
Nice work.
I had a big long string of crap to say. But I won't.
Sounds pretty on target. As for "other" disabilities, I have been through more therapist than most people have had servers at Burger King and they all say the same irrelavent crap. YOU have to decide to move on, You Decide what success is.
Jon's words clicked. He articulated a key reason I enjoy Crossfit so much. I had not understood it so clearly until the excellent essay.