I feel like sport has had a ‘what’s the point?’ kind of week.
I found myself asking the question after spending a financially crippling amount of money to see the British and Irish Lions smash the ANZAC’s in front of a tepid crowd of retirees clad in red in Adelaide. I found myself asking it after watching two footbrawlers sock each other for 16 minutes at a cost of $70. And then I found Scottie Scheffler asking the same question in the UK.
“How long do you celebrate your victories?”
That was an innocuous query posed to golfing world number one Scheffler ahead of the British Open. And it sent the normally dull American spiralling into a fascinating, introspective answer.
“It only lasts a few minutes, that kind of euphoric feeling.”
“This is not a fulfilling life.”
"It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.”
"There's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfil them in life, you get to number one in the world, and they're like, 'What's the point?' I really do believe that, because what is the point?”
This is a bloke who is a notoriously fierce competitor. A workaholic at his chosen pursuit. He has the money and the fame and he is asking ‘what’s the point?’
My first thought was, ‘well, we’re all stuffed, there really IS no point’ and my second was ‘maybe Ben Crowe might explain what’s going on here’.
Crowe is a mindset coach, he’s worked with Ash Barty and Dustin Martin and Steph Gimore. I thought I was being quite clever reaching out to him to dig into this. He explained that about 200 people had already sent him the same video clip.
Ben might have humbled me, but he also gave a great interview for ABC SPORT Daily explaining a few things. Here’s some of what Ben laid out…
”I think Scottie’s wrestling with what the industry obsesses about, external stuff versus the internal stuff, and I thought he did a great job of breaking down to your question, the three intrinsic motivations that not only drive athletes, but drive the rest of us as well.”
What are those? According to Crowe, play, purpose, and potential.
So that’s the internal motivators, what about the reverse?
“If you're obsessed by extrinsic motivations, which is the results, trophies, money, fame, and so forth, typically pressure comes into your life on steroids, and one is outcome pressure.”
“Or, you know, economic pressure. The other one is emotional pressure. Constantly caring what people are thinking about you. ‘I'm comparing myself to other athletes and so forth’. And I think that's probably the biggest distraction today for athletes and all of us, really, is that we've become extrinsically motivated for our definition of success.”
“Whereas if you can be motivated by intrinsic motivations, the process of winning well, they last a lifetime. (They) also go beyond your profession, because you take that into your personal world and your relationships and experiences and memories.”
As you can probably tell, what I’ve quoted above is just the tip. If you want the iceberg, you can listen to our ten-minute episode here:
