The best time to run on a treadmill is while watching the Summer Olympics. The 4×400 meter relay is my favorite. There’s something about the explosive speed of each fresh runner and the grit shown coming down the home stretch. No matter the event or outcome, I witness the heart of a champion at work. And it helps me to run all the faster on my treadmill. I get inspired.
We see somebody do something, and we realize we can do more.
Caitlin Clark, of the Iowa Hawkeyes basketball team, has taken us on a similar ride. By leading her team through the NCAA Tournament and reaching the championship round these past two years, she has inspired us in several ways—how to handle success with humility while traveling through the brackets and how to handle disappointment with grace when losing at the championship level.
She’s the “Man in the Arena.” In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who shows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Clark could have chosen the role of spectator. She could have been the one watching the game in a half-empty arena wondering why there wasn’t more interest in women’s college basketball.
But she wasn’t one to watch. She’s a doer.
She worked at the game of basketball from an early age. She honed her craft.
It’s said that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. Clark began playing basketball when she was five years old. She’s 22 now. The math works out to an average of about 90 minutes each day during the last 17 years. Something tells me she probably hit that.
Through the fruits of her labor, she brought entertainment and joy to many.
She sold out arenas.
There’s a tension in life—watch and enjoy, but also work and reap.
We’re not all destined to be the next Caitlin Clark at whatever activity we enjoy most. There’s more than work ethic at play. Natural talent, attitude, intelligence, support, and in the case of a basketball player—height (Clark is six feet tall.)—all factor in.
But we can all maximize our potential. Whatever your skill set, whatever your interests, whatever your profession—participate in your life more than you watch someone else’s.
Now, more than ever, if this country is to retain its greatness it needs every citizen to reach for their potential. Get in the arena. Find your passion, and then try. Hard.
Passive existence isn’t good for the nation or the individual.
About 35 years before Roosevelt’s speech, Russian author Leo Tolstoy put the idea of “do more and watch less” a little more harshly in his novel, “Anna Karenina.” His fictional character, businessman Alexei Alexandrovich, laments the fascination of the masses with popular horse races of the times. “There are two sides—the performers and the spectators; and the love of such spectacles is the surest sign of low development in the spectators.”
Ouch.
Enjoy life. Seek entertainment. Honor a great basketball player. Or a skilled jockey. Or another athlete, actor, singer, writer, inventor or volunteer.
But then realize that you, too, have something special to offer that can be achieved with determination and effort.
Roosevelt went on to state, “Self-restraint, self-mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution—these are the qualities which mark a masterful people.”
He isn’t speaking about a singular superstar. “Masterful people” reflects a whole nation.
We can be those people. Clark showed the way.
But do we have the courage to be the hero or heroine of our own story?