Why GOATs are so 2024
Making everything a competition and declaring sole winners is not just dumb — it’s is an obstacle to achieving, recognizing and building upon excellence
Watching Simone Biles at the Paris Olympics, the moment that stuck with me was not one of her name-brand gymnastic moves but the image of her holding a goat necklace charm to the camera.
Cute, an animal lover. Then the penny dropped.
Why ‘greatest’ isn’t so great
The absurd acronym seems to have proliferated: GOAT — greatest of all time.
Nor are its variations absent. “The Greatest” blared November Vogue over an image of Billie Eilish with more-90s-than-90s nude makeup and Cobain-tribute hair.
Biles is extraordinary. So is Eilish. My gripe is with this bizarre gluttony for superlatives. Why are adjectives like awesome, brilliant, amazing, talented, genius, etc. insufficient? Why be the greatest or the greatest of all time instead of just great?
Our — and by that I loosely mean Anglo-American — culture is obsessed with competition. Obsessed to the point of collective oblivion to the fact that competition is comparative. A winner in one field, or competitor set, will lose in another.
Competition ipso facto is not quality control.
When a culture gets tied in knots about who’s the greatest, it’s tied in knots about something that can only be measured though imposing reductive, arbitrary measures onto the complexity of human life and achievement.
Few meaningful human pursuits are simple enough to be assessed in a way that will yield an ‘objective’ winner. Running is, superficially, a good candidate but something as simple as a footrace can turn on circumstances beyond individual control: is a world-record marathoner who gets a head cold and cedes a race still the greatest? Should determining greatness come down to an unlucky stumble over a pothole?
Take gymnastics: to create a situation in which Biles could become the GOAT, an arcane, subjective set of rules had to be created and applied, which if applied differently, would have yielded a different outcome.
Greatest of all time really means greatest so far: a less snappy acronym and
an anxiety-producing truth: pedestals are made to fall from.
Outwith athletic pursuits, determining who’s the greatest is a greater fool’s errand. Take Billie Eilish: the greatest at what? Being a child prodigy? Take that up with Judy Garland fans. Streaming figures? Those only enable her to be compared to other digital-era artists. Album sales as a metric gives the advantage to singers who were around when albums existed. Any other conceivable measure of artistic merit, from lyric-writing to vocal stylings, is so subjective as to be moot.
Goats are adorable. But the fixation on GOATs is mendacious. Individual excellence is a side-effect, not a consequence, of competition. And saving our accolades for the greatest obscures achievements, efforts and qualities that defy arbitrary measures.
A better measure
If achievement is to be expressed in an acronym, try GEAR: growth, excellence, attention and resilience.
Growth
Fixating on an outcome obscures what goes into it. Yes, it is thrilling to watch Simone Biles own a vault, or Billie Eilish a stadium, but to celebrate fleeting public triumphs risks undervaluing the unseen hours, days and years of growth they require.
Doing anything well demands an awful lot of non-lime-lit effort. Everyone — even GOATs — spend most of their time in the plodding growth stage. It is precisely during this hard, discouraging, uncertain-of-success process that praise and encouragement are most valuable.
Instead of waiting for students (peers, offspring, colleagues, whomever) to hit the high note, let’s celebrate and support progress in its direction.
Excellence
Not everyone can be the greatest, but everyone can be excellent. Too often, we confuse excellence with exceptionalism. The former deals with quality; the latter with competition.
Working with high-achieving students on their college applications has given me plenty to think about regarding the difference. All the students I coach are excellent; they have the grades, test scores and achievements prove it. But they are not, in each others’ company, exceptional because they are equally excellent.
Ideally, that would be enough. Lamentably, our culture has a freak-show tendency to prefer the exceptional (e.g., the president-elect) to the excellent.
Attention
Competition is a distraction. It teaches us to focus on prizes, not process. In doing so, it drags our attention away from where it belongs — the task itself — and fixes it on external validation. And, although it can be potent, extrinsic motivation is fickle.
In contrast, when we pay attention to what we’re doing for its own sake, whether singing, sprinting or learning sign language, we create a new feedback loop. Instead of chasing approval, we develop our own standards and can become self-satisfied in the healthiest possible way.
Furthermore, the more attention we invest in a craft, and the more excellence we achieve, the greater the likelihood of external rewards finding us eventually.
Resilience
Like growth, resilience is necessary to achievement, but tends to get shadowed by the spotlight. Often, it’s those at the back of the pack (literally or metaphorically) that are working the hardest. To persevere is a triumph in itself, yet one too rarely feted.
The ever-spiky Thoreau put it thus:
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Walden
But, of course, it’s not easy to mind one’s own business — especially in the era of Instagram and TikTok. It takes resilience to get up every day in a culture that routinely declares one person a winner (and thus the rest losers) and keep being oneself: large or small.
We need to celebrate, cherish and cheer on everyone who can and does persist in being who they were made (including, especially, ourselves).
As we face the challenges and opportunities of a new year, let’s do right.
Most us will never be a GOAT, but we can all put good things in GEAR.