There’s a trite question that people sometimes ask “what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” It’s a silly question because if you said “I will start a car company that is better than Tesla” or “I will raise an army and conquer Europe”, what does that tell you? If you pursued either of those things, they would likely fail and you will have followed your passion, but in the first example you would be bankrupt and in the second you would be dead or on trial in the Hague.
But what if you inverted the question and asked “What would you do if you knew you would fail?” In other words, what is so important to you or so rewarding that you would do it even if you knew you couldn’t win.
Every year about 30,000 people compete in the Boston Marathon. About 29,000 of them cross the finish line. Outside of 10 people, none of those 30,000 people think that they have any chance of winning. Many of those runners are from out of town and they train all year, buy plane tickets and rent hotels in a very expensive city to compete in an event where they have no chance at all of winning. Why? Because they are runners. And runners run. Competing in a marathon is just a marker, but being a runner is what is rewarding. Even if they never win, by signing up for a marathon and competing in it, they become the type of person who gets up every morning and laces up their sneakers and runs even if it’s snowing or raining.
For every Boston Marathon runner, there are about 20 spectators. What makes them different than the 30,000 people running with no hope of winning is that they don’t lace up their sneakers every morning.