Essay: "As Long As You Have A Why"

One of my favourite quotes was said by either Nietzche or Dostoevksy, I forget which, but I first read it in Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - man can bear any 'how' as long as he has a 'why.'  It was one of those things I'd always known without realizing it. Imagine your boss tells you to work late. Does it make a difference to you if you really need to be staying late? Would it make a difference to you if you were staying late for no good reason? Of course it would. Staying late is a bad thing, but it can be bearable if there's a reason for it.

Now let's make an abrupt change of subject. Billy Beane was a tremendously talented baseball player in high school. He could run fast and throw hard and when he hit the ball it went a long way. He was an all-around athlete who also played football.  Most of all, he just looked like a talented athlete.  He was tall and strong and just looked the part.  The only reason he slipped to 23rd overall in the 1980 Major League Baseball draft was because the teams were afraid he'd go to Stanford instead of signing in the big leagues.

Billy Beane did not make the transition to pro ball. In the words of Wikipeida: "unaccustomed to failure, he was unable to make the adjustments that were necessary when playing tougher competition." He spent six years as a backup outfielder, ironically winning two World Series, and bounced back and forth between the minors and the majors.

Let's think about how hard it must have been for Billy. You have been a dominant athlete all your life. You have tremendous physical talent.  You have, in fact, more physical talent than others who are out-performing you. Your failures are mercilessly public. Every night when you go to bed, perhaps after a day of riding the bus from one tiny depressing town to another, you are acutely conscious that you are not where you are supposed to be. And there is no excuse for it, no bad knee or rare disease or anything like that. You just have to face up to the cruel fact that your whole life has failed to meet what seemed to be wholly reasonable expectations.

Billy Beane quit playing baseball ten years after he was drafted and joined the Oakland Athletics as an advance scout. In three years he was an assistant general manager, five years after that he took over the top job. What followed were eight years of the purest overachievement in the history of professional sports, where a team with a tiny budget consistently out-performed wealthier rivals.

Beane's secret for identifying talent, as document in the excellent book Moneyball, was that he applied advanced baseball statistics (some of which, such as on-base percentage, were not really advanced at all) in order to find under-valued baseball players.  In other words, he exploited market inefficiencies.  While other general managers looked to see whether a baseball player could run fast and throw hard and whether he hit the ball it went a long way, while they, in other words, looked for a baseball player who looked like a baseball player, Beane relentlessly focused on statistics, particularly ones which were under-appreciated by traditional baseball folks, and didn't worry whether people were short or fat or if they looked funny when they ran or anything like that.

And now, I hope, you are starting to see where I am going with this. Billy Beane's agonizing ten years of failure had taught him a valuable lesson. They had taught him that a person who is tall and strong and so on won't necessarily become good baseball player. No one on earth learned that lesson as thoroughly and as painfully as Billy Beane. And so, one day, when he was in a position to evaluate talent, no one was more likely to apply it.

In other words, all of those years spent crawling between mid-western towns in a rented Greyhound bus were not wasted at all. They had a purpose. That purpose was to teach Billy Beane a hard but important truth. And all those nights when Billy Beane had lain awake thinking he was a failure, he was just evaluating himself according to the wrong standard. Contrary to what everyone thought, he was never supposed to be a baseball player. He did not, and had never, possessed that nameless ineffable quality that would make someone into a successful professional athlete. He was supposed to be something else, and he was becoming it every day, in spite of his desperate attempts to move his destiny in a different direction.

Other examples of late-bloomers abound in history. One of my favorites is Winston Churchill, who only became Prime Minister at the age of 66. He had been the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the twenties but by the thirties he was politically isolated and considered a washed-up crank whose best days were behind him.  Like Beane, his isolation and failures were preparing him for a different role than anyone could have ever imagined.

I'm generally disgusted by the Panglossian platitude that everything happens for a reason. Everything does not happen for a reason. We do not live in the best of all possible worlds, and for every Billy Beane, who finds his "true purpose in life" through failure, there are a thousand first round flops who turn into wife-beating drunks. An after-the-fact rationalization of how everything always turns out for the best is not evidence of the benign nature of the universe; it's cognitive dissonance.

But please do keep in mind that it is an established fact that you can bear any how as long as you have a why. If you are miserable, and you are not this moment being swept away in a massive tsunami, diagnosed with a flesh-eating disease or dragged underwater by a crocodile while you dig your fingers into the muddy riverbank and scream for help, there is a good chance that your misery is just the universe talking to you about who you are and what you are supposed to be. It does not always speak clearly and it may take you many years for you to understand, but if you make it to the average life expectancy of a developed country, you should have plenty of time to figure it out.

In other words, very little misery is pointless.  It has a reason. It has a why.  And that why (in combination with your ability to define your own why, as opposed to letting others do it for you) should be able to help you out with any how.