GainingThe Mind-Set Of A Winner: Management
Dimitri Keramitas tackles “Management Lessons from An Olympic Swimmer” and shows you how you can come up on top
Viewpoint by Dimitri Keramitas, WCW Columnist
For a trenchant insight into the mind-set of an ultra-determined winner, one could do worse than to follow the triumphs and defeats of the protagonist of Swimming. Novelist Nicola Keegan, herself a former competitive swimmer, brings not only her own experience to bear but also an enormous amount of research to recreate the world of Olympic swimming. She masterfully brings to life Philomena Ash, a young woman from Kansas who takes to water from an early age.
Actually, it’s her parents who take her. The nature vs. nurture debate is evoked in a fascinating way that makes us realize the importance of early exposure to a discipline, whatever that may be. At the same time, Keegan describes in harrowing detail the dysfunctional nature of Philomena’s family. One sister will die of Hodgkin’s disease, another slide into drug addiction, yet another get religion of a dubious nature. The mother is in a permanent state of nervous breakdown, while the father is otherworldly, moodily involved in the study of bats and his passion for flying.
We know that many achievers are persons who have been deprived of a father—Barack Obama is the most celebrated recent example. But we might doubt whether the depths of dysfunction portrayed in the novel would really have the same results. The protagonist-narrator’s theory is that it takes a near-drowning experience to produce not just normal determination, but a fierce survival reflex to swim to the surface. Much of the novel vividly portrays the heroine’s long swim to her own spiritual surface.
Sport as metaphor for success
Swimming is constructed out of short chapters which make for a swift, entertaining read, and also reproduce the forward momentum of the swimmer. Similarly, the dense, muscular style demands the reader to move his mental faculties the same way a swimmer moves his limbs. And so we progress through the swimming pool of life. Getting a top-rate coach is essential to Philomena’s success, as well as being surrounded by top-notch trainers, including exercisers and nutritionists.
Being with other talented swimmers is also crucial to Philomena’s efforts to surpass herself. The East German swimming champions (most of the novel takes place in the 1980s, before the end of the Cold War), with their suspiciously masculine attributes and robotic attitudes shaped by a totalitarian regime, provide focus and motivation—a sort of negative bench-marking. They are to Philomena what Bill Gates is to open-source programmers.
The Role of Spirituality
There is also a curious, ambivalent emphasis on the spiritual side of success. Philomena and her family are seriously practicing, if not piously devout, Catholics. Philomena’s faith provides strength at the family’s tragic moments, and guidance about keeping her head on straight when others are getting their bathing caps into a twist. She chafes under the suffocating strictures and atmosphere of the church, but ironically this provides a motivating irritant (would Solzhenitsyn or Havel I have written what they wrote living in Switzerland?). Philomena also enthusiastically tries various New Age practices, while not taking them too seriously. All these keep her in her a state of self-transcendence, and help her to stay focused.
The Importance of Focus
The most important element in Philomena’s success is keeping her eye on the prize. As we know from the careers of great swimmers from Spitz to Phelps, there is no greater motivator than a packet of gold medals. Most of us don’t have the same single, precisely delineated carrot dangling in front of us. Our goals tend to be more amorphous: “success”, “climbing the corporate ladder”, “improving sales and profits”. Not to mention good health and general happiness. The prize is Philomena’s greatest friend and her mantra is “Eight” (as in eight gold medals). Her enemy is just as precise, and bound to disconcert some readers: emotional relationships.
In the old days, the cliché held that physical intimacy was to be avoided before the match. In Swimming, romantic relationships invariably spell the end of Olympic careers. Philomena gets involved with a Russian-American swimmer whom she keeps at arm’s length, mentally if not physically, referring to him simply as “the Russian Guy”. The fact that he’s a creepy homme fatale one moment, a traditionalist who wants her to retire the next, helps Philomena to the ultimate sloughing-off of her only meaningful affair.
Philomena’s glorious career must eventually come to an end. She suffers an injury even before the ultimate riptide of age, and has to retire. Most of us don’t have to face the trauma of retirement until an advanced age (not to mention those of us who may not have the luxury of such trauma at all). This is a great difference of kind between athletes and entertainers and the rest of us. Still, we all face limits, adversity, changes—often having to do with structural changes in the economy rather than the structure of our muscles.
When Philomena goes half-mad with grief over the end of her career, her solution is two-fold: move to Paris for a spell and see a therapist. I like the first idea better than the second. There’s no better way to jog your self out of a rut than a change of scenery—the French say changer les idées. Philomena’s therapist at least helps her to see things in proportion, and to face the ghosts of her past. Ultimately it’s a question of letting go: not swimming, not aimlessly floating either, but gliding with the flow of life.
“Learn to appreciate the fundamentals and the long term”, says Warren Buffet. If you have several thousand in dollars, pounds or Euros to spare, buy Berkshire Hathaway stock. If your discretionary spending budget is currently more modest, invest in a powerful book instead.
You might just change some of your ideas.
For Further Information
Dimitri Keramitas writes the weekly column, “A Cinematic World” for the Weekend Edition of WCW inSIGHT. He is also one of the founders and partners of Temple, a leading European translation company based in Paris.
