Our Personal Best

Did anyone else stay up last night watching the Winter Olympics? I did. I watched the USA play the UK at curling, a sport I have come to enjoy. In case you are interested, the USA won by 1 point. 

The games seem to always carry with them some form of controversy, be that political or humanitarian in nature. And much of it is valid and should be of world concern. But if we only focus on this aspect of the Olympics, we miss the central point of the games. That of international competition, where the only real opponent is yourself. 

Athletes train for years so they can perform to the best of their abilities in a handful of chances, and may or may not be better than the person in the race next to them, or sliding on the ice, as in the case of curling. Yet if we only focus on the final outcome and how we stack up against others, we lessen the value of all that came before, all that preparation and learning. The hours and days of training, perfecting your game, in small incremental steps, each one proving more difficult than the last. Accepting the support from your coaches, teachers, parents, fellow athletes, all in the pursuit of personal improvement. They spend years, edge forward, focused on getting better at things, beating their previous best. Hold on, am I still talking about the Olympics? Are these principals not the foundations of education? 

Children spend years learning each day to be better than we were yesterday. Stepping forward with new skills and transformational knowledge, that leads to a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around us. Then at the end of it all, we take exams, that tell part of our story, but never all of it. Sure, final exams are important, at least for now they are, but is not the journey through school equal, if not more important than the final result? We all want to see how we measure up to others, that’s normal, but it should not be personally defining. Last night, one simple curl of a stone in the wrong direction, cost them the match. But it didn’t take away their personal success.

The drive might be in the big idea of winning the gold, but the real value, the defining sense of success, is in the details of the journey we each take day. One that is personal to us, one that is our personal best.