Who Do You Work For?
Like many people I found myself blown away by the gold medal winning performance of Alysa Liu in last month’s Olympics. Much was written of it at the time, but now the news cycle has moved on to far more harrowing things. For a brief moment though, we were all charmed. I’m still thinking about why.
There’s a magnetism to watching a talented performer do what they’re best at, in a moment where the stakes couldn’t be higher, without fear of failing. Even though I know I will likely never be that good at anything, or ever feel so free, I am not discouraged. Just seeing that it’s possible for someone is inspiration enough. The more I learned about Liu’s story, the more impressed I was. Any Olympic sport is enormously competitive, and any Olympian is under intense pressure, but within that, female figure skaters are even more scrutinized and often have a much shorter career. Only two female skaters have won multiple individual golds in Olympic history, and the last time was 1988 (the other happened in 1936). Liu, at 20, is the oldest gold medal winner in her sport since 2006. For most of them, you get one shot that you work most of your childhood to get. After that, then what? Before taking the ice on February 19th, Liu knew the answer to that question. She gave herself the gift of knowing what else life had to offer by quitting the sport before turning 17. Fully. No plan to return. The trajectory of her life at that point was firmly pointed toward continuing - she had won a national title at 13, attended the Beijing Olympics as a 16 year old with still more untapped potential. But she just said I’d rather not, thanks.
If she came back to it, it wouldn’t be at the behest of someone else. It wouldn’t be because of external sources. It was because she thought it would be fun. And through this story - expertly told by the folks at NBC sports - the world was given an excellent example of the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
Almost 100 years before these latest Olympics, Saul Leiter was born. If you’re wondering where this is going, hang on. And if you don’t know who Leiter is, he’s mostly to blame for that. Saul was a photographer who bucked the prevailing black and white trend of the era in which he got his start (1940s and 50s) by taking color photos of everyday life in New York City. He paid the bills with fashion photography, but was more interested in taking photos of rain-streaked windows; blurry, reflective city scenes with partially obscured subjects. His work would not become well known until he was in his 80s, and this was purely by chance. See it for yourself. It’s amazing art. He didn’t make it for anyone but himself. According to Saul:
“In order to build a career and be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music, and paint when I feel like it.”
Taxi, Saul Leiter, 1957
Relatable. Also, I should mention that while the world identifies him as a photographer for his amazing work, he went through most of his life considering himself as a painter first. Photography was more of a hobby that paid the bills for some stretches. Which is surprising and also not. In the current gig economy era, it can be hard to understand how someone could sink so much of their time into an activity without a high ROI. If it’s not making you money, or more popular, why do it? Why do anything? Well, that depends on who you are doing it for, and that’s the more important question to ask.
It is all well and good to strive to be your best; to be determined and ambitious. But the permeation of hustle culture into every second of our lives has shifted the definition of those terms. Our “best” now means “most liked” or “most profitable”, with the former devolving toward “most attention-getting”. Both designations are determined externally. We don’t have much control over how the world sees us, and yet we obsess about it anyway. What matters just as much, if not more, is how we define our best internally. That type of excellence is where passion (overused term) and integrity (underused term) meet. You would hope for talent to also be at this meeting. It doesn’t have to be, but when it is, that’s when you get something magical.
Which brings us back to Alysa Liu. We have more power over how we see the world than over how the world sees us. She took that power by stepping away from the path that was prescribed for her, and saw what the world had to offer, which is plenty. And when she came back to skating on her own terms, she brought some of that world with her in the form of a new hairstyle and a piercing I didn’t know was possible to get. Knowing that an exciting life outside skating was waiting for her made it easier to relax and be herself within that activity; to go out and skate like she loved it, not because she desperately needed to win. Ironically, the carefree attitude that shined through in her routine was the difference maker. She seemed unaffected by gravity when all of her competition were. She danced to her own (choice of) tune. As for Saul, he took photographs of what moved him, not what he thought would move others. People connect with that as authenticity.
Beware the other end of the spectrum in this scenario. I’m not saying intrinsic motivation = good and extrinsic motivation = bad; only that our world is structurally geared toward the latter and the former doesn’t get enough attention. I’m certainly motivated to make a living and provide for my family. And I am under no illusion that I will be discovered as a genius one day. Neither was Leiter. That being said, I think we would do well to remind ourselves not only why we’re doing what we’re doing, but who we’re doing it for. Like Mama Cass sang, “make your own kind of music, even if nobody else sings along” (let’s ignore that she didn’t write this song for the sake of this post)