Live Life as a Marathon, not as a Sprint

Imagine you are parent of a school going kid, and like all parents, want your kid to do well in life. You wish she can get a head start in life by becoming a doctor, engineer, or MBA, or CA etc. Your heart sinks when you look around and hear the following news:

• This year 5 lakh students who aspire to join the much sought after Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT)  appeared in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), out of which around 10000 candidates qualified for admission. One in 50 students got selected.
• There was even more crowding for Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), where 2 lakh hopeful students took the Common Aptitude Test (CAT) to grab one of the 2800 seats in the prestigious IIMs. One in 70 students got through in this case.
• Things were not any better for students aspiring to become doctor. 70000 students took the entrance for AIIMS that has just 300 seats. One in 300 students tasted success.
• For those trying for Commerce or Economics degree, Shriram College of Commerce (SRCC) in Delhi University required you to have above 97% marks in XII class.

Typical thoughts that would come to your mind are - the competition is getting tougher and tougher every day. My kid has to really get serious about her career right now. She has to put her everything into studies so that she gets good marks. So, you visualize your kid slogging it out and cracking the coveted test, but in reality, you see this young kid behaving in a happy-go-lucky manner. She enjoys her studies and is a bright student, but also takes interest in a lot of other things, ignoring your advice to focus single-mindedly on her studies. As the time passes, you get even more and more worried about your kid's future. You are desparately looking for a way to get this child to work much harder, else she will land up with a result that would be no good, and you refuse to accept such a future for your child. What's wrong here? How do we steer this kid towards the right path?

Well, the answer may surprise you. Before you work on the kid to set her right, work on yourself and your paradigm. I recently came across a book that tried to compare our life with a marathon and a sprint. Before I reveal the conclusion from the book, let us take a look at sprint and marathon.  Sprint is a short race (few hundred meters) that is highly competitive. There is so much focus on speed that Athletes put their everything into it to gain just a fraction of a second advantage on their opponents. Getting a head start in a sprint is vital to winning it, since once you fall behind, you cannot hope to bridge the gap in the short time. It is also run under extreme pressure, you have to be on your toes throughout the race. Needless to say, winning is very important in a sprint - it is no use if you stood 5th, 6th or 10th in a sprint.
(I may go on and on, but are you already getting the feeling, "Yes, yes.. this is how I want my kid to go about her studies and preparation for competition. focus, head start, speed, on her toes, pressure, aim to win.. yes")

Now let us contrast it with marathon. The marathon is usually run as a long road race (42 Km). For the participants in this race, completing the race itself is a great achievement no matter what position you finish at. The focus here is on stamina, not on speed. People who are likely to last the complete run are those who run at an average pace. There is no significance of a head start here, since the early gains get evened out over a longer run. In place of feelings of competition, we see a bonhomie among the participants.

You would agree that it is not possible to try and run a marathon like a sprint. While running the marathon if we give too much emphasis to speed, competition, running under pressure, we may get exhausted very soon and may not be able to complete the race.

Our life is closer to a marathon than a sprint. Head start in life is not as crucial as we imagine. There are numerous example of successful people who did not get a head start. Also, it is not necessary to stay ahead of everyone to be happy in life. And no one can deny that its a long race in which endurance is more important.

But when we try to live life as a sequence of tests that we need to "ace" one after another, we try to reduce it to a chain of sprints. Clearly, this is not going to result in anything but a stressful life. This is the real cause of the problem. Another side effect of the focus on cracking exams is that very often the real learning takes a back seat in the process. Also, we often tend to underrate the achievement of our child just because it is not at the top. Take an example, your child works hard in her class XII exam and secures 96% marks. She wants to take admission in SRCC, but with her result, she is not eligible. Would you see it as a failure of your child? Come on. She should be hailed for her outstanding result and it is not her fault that the cutoff at SRCC is going sky high. Given the chances of getting into these institutes, it is not any better than placing your bet in a horse race or a lottery.

So, the suggestion that I got from this book was - don't run your life as a sprint, if you run really hard, it may help you get ahead in the short run, but you will find it hard to sustain. Instead, try to enjoy it as a run of marathon.

Eager to know the title of the book? It is "Don't Sprint the Marathon"  by V. Raghunathan. I strongly recommend you read this book.

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Clarification: I support strong focus on studies to acquire a good education and trying your best to make it to the good institutes. This post is more about reducing the over emphasis on competition in our mindset, not to avoid competion.