I have a friend that I made in another continent.
He'll know who he is; he reads this quite regularly, I think.
We've not been friends so long, but we talk regularly, share thoughts and ideas, and he spoke to me recently; he'd entered a competition, something that would tell him that he was brilliant at what he did, something that he felt he had to win.
He travelled to another part of the world with his wife for the final of the competition and didn't win.
I get it.
It's hard to lose, especially when you thought that you might win, especially if even you expected you deserved to win.
And so, we spoke to each other on the telephone about it.
He had been pretty upset about it and beautifully counselled by his wife on the importance of these things.
But it was an opportunity for me to play the wise old man to the young Padoan and to try to explain the concept of the Quest.
It's never about winning; never in our game is it ever about winning; there is no winning.
Even if he had won the prize on that day, the competition would have started again immediately the day after the satisfaction of what he achieved would have disappeared like a fart in the wind.
For all of us, it's never about winning; it's about the Quest heading towards that.
The competition only gives us the motivation and the focus to continue on the Quest.
My friend Simon, who used to coach me in triathlon, sent me a brilliant article recently from the platform training peaks about the post-event dip; I think he thought I was feeling a bit sad after my adventure in Mallorca (I'm honestly not too bad) but it beautifully referenced Tal Ben-Shahar's book Happier and his experience of 'winning' and the Quest.
All we're trying to do is to navigate life on a day-to-day basis. We don't really get any other opportunity to do otherwise.
We can set goals and targets for the future, but really, all they're designed to do is give us something to think about today.
We can spend a couple of days with our feet up eating rubbish and watching Netflix, but we always return back to wanting to quest to somewhere else, to wanting to achieve something, to wanting to be recognised or understood, but it's never about getting to the end, it's always about travelling towards the end because when we reach one small finish line, all that happens is the race starts again.
Blog Post Number - 3974
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