Winning

I read a very thoughtful Facebook post by my friend (and son of a long-time and dear friend) Michael, who fondly remembered his elementary school gym teacher and important lessons he learned in that class. As he perceptively wrote, “lessons that you pick up from parents and teachers as a kid often serve larger than life roles.” How true. And as we grow older and those mentors begin to leave this world, the lessons they taught sustain us, influence our decisions, and impact our lives.

The lesson that lay at the crux of Michael’s post was a particular method of finding a solution to a complex problem. But what especially caught my eye was his description of his gym teacher. He “was not one of these ‘everybody is a winner’ teachers,” Michael wrote. “He was fiercely competitive. He kept score in gym class for everything. Who won, who scored, who jumped farthest or ran the fastest…. There were awards and recognitions if you were a winner.” The teacher “played to win. He taught us to be competitive, up our game.”

Michael still applies this viewpoint in his adult life as a venture capitalist. “The world of investment, geopolitics, techno-geopolitics and innovation is competitive. That is just life. There are winners and losers. You always need to be on your game. You … always have your head in the fast-paced [competitive] game.”

There’s no doubt that there are winners and losers both in gym class and in life. But before assigning people to those categories, it’s critical to carefully define what game is being played and what metrics are being applied. (See my earlier column, “Winning the Championship of Life,” for a related discussion and analysis.)

Let’s look at some examples.

In gym class, the winners, on a simple, though often simplistic, level, are those who score the most, jump the farthest, run the fastest. When elementary school kids play punchball (Google it!) and the final score is 10-5, the team scoring 10 is, in Michael’s teacher’s understanding, the winner, and its players get the trophies and recognition; the other team is the loser and its players get neither. The same applies in deciding who the World Series champion is and who won the 2018 Olympic luge race.

But there’s another way of looking at it. Take that 2018 luge race. The luger who came in second lost by 0.026 seconds (that is, twenty-six thousandths of a second). It’s true, of course, that time — even 19 times shorter than the blink of an eye — is the metric by which the Olympics judges determine who gets the gold medal in certain events and who the silver. But there are other aspects to sports beyond sledding the fastest or scoring the most. There’s effort, preparation, knowing how to lose (and win) gracefully; there’s sportsmanship, improvement, grit, and determination. And applying those metrics, the second fastest luge racer in the world, whose years of practice and preparation led him to the top of the Olympics luge track and the silver medal stand, was certainly a winner.  Indeed, that’s true, I believe, for every racer in that event, no matter where they placed. All were winners.

I once saw a video of a distance race where time did not tell the whole story. A runner tripped and fell badly. His competitor one lane over stopped and helped the injured racer up. Then, with their arms around each other, they slowly limped around the track until they crossed the finish line together. By coming in long after the first-place finisher, they were losers using a time metric. In my book, though, they were winners of the gold medal in decency.

Let’s move beyond sports to Michael’s world of investment. Take two investors in start-ups; one in a gambling app and the other in a health care company developing a new artificial heart valve that can save lives around the world. If the first makes a profit of 200 percent and the second 20 percent, the first is the winner according to a metric comparing bank accounts. I would argue, though, that using a values-oriented metric of an investment’s impact on humankind makes the second the greater winner.

You may think that my non-mathematically quantifiable metrics like effort and perseverance are too touchy-feely. So let me call to the stand Thomas Alva Edison, who famously said about the importance of effort, “Genius is two percent inspiration and 98 percent perspiration.” And he put perseverance into practice by testing over 1,600 different materials before he found the right filament for his most famous invention, the electric light bulb. That’s how the world’s greatest inventor won the hearts of the American people.

A maxim often attributed to Malcolm Forbes says “He who dies with the most toys wins.” I prefer to think, in a paraphrase of the Mishna in Avot, that a true winner is same’ach be-chelko — happy with the number of toys she has; true winners are those who come in first in the satisfaction race, though perhaps not the clocked one. Indeed, it’s sometimes, perhaps often, true that the most successful and satisfied achiever is the one who gives of herself or of her assets to others.

To be clear, I like watching sports, and I loudly cheer my favorite athlete or team when they come in first by the usual metrics used in judging such events. And I’ve been an avid follower of baseball stats ever since I started collecting baseball cards in my elementary school years. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that as much fun as those numbers are, there’s much more than that in sports — and in life — that makes playing or watching the former and living the latter more gratifying and meaningful.

I’ll end by looking at the world of law. In my career as a litigator, I competed against adversaries thousands of times in battles to win favorable results from a judge or jury. Sometimes the stakes were small like those in gym class games; sometimes they were as serious as Olympic contests. And like any litigator who is honest about his record, I won and lost many.

But in toting up my record, I often think about the day I opened a manila envelope sent by an adversary addressed to me. As I began to read the enclosure, I quickly realized that it was a memo to his client detailing the strengths and weaknesses of their case; evidently, his secretary accidently mailed it to me rather than to the client.

I stopped reading, closed my door, shut my eyes, and considered what to do. I thought about the fact that I was sitting on a potential gold mine detailing my adversary’s game plan; boy, could that help me plan mine. But I also thought about the lessons in sportsmanship I learned on the playing fields, not of Eton but of HILI and MTA, lessons in fairness learned in my Jewish studies classes, and lessons in honesty learned from simply watching my parents living their everyday lives. And then, realizing that using the memo to help me litigate my case was fool’s gold, I heaved a deeply mixed sigh, called my adversary, explained the situation, and mailed him the memo, unread any further.

I have no recollection if I ultimately won a judgment for my client in that matter. But I was certainly a winner in the battle of deciding how to litigate that case. And that’s the type of lesson we need to teach to our children to help them be winners in the game of life.

Joseph C. Kaplan, a retired lawyer, longtime Teaneck resident, and regular columnist for the Jewish Standard and the New Jersey Jewish News, is the author of “A Passionate Writing Life: From ‘In my Opinion’ to ‘I’ve Been Thinking’” (available at Teaneck’s Judaica House). He and his wife, Sharon, have been blessed with four wonderful daughters and five delicious grandchildren.