Alberto Salazar -- Running -- Life

Alberto Salazar won the NYC marathon in 1981, setting a world record. He won the Boston Marathon in 1982, narrowly beating Dick Beardsley. He won the Comrades ultramarathon (South Africa, 90 km) in 1994. He has since made a career developing running talent in Oregon. Salazar knows a little bit about running.

In this recent Track and Field News article, Salazar discusses the disappointment of Alan Webb, the prodigy miler who has been working to maintain his competitive form. Webb had a couple of down races recently and was displeased. Salazar, who coaches Webb, was philosophical. He explained that athletes train for the big races, and the interstitial events are part of the process. So long as you hit the benchmarks, the fact that any one race is not your best possible race is irrelevant.

Nassim Taleb in "Fooled by Randomness" employs tales from securities trading to teach life lessons. One cannot, Taleb argues, invest in the financial markets with any certainty of success. Short-term success is failure that hasn't yet come to pass. The only proven successful strategy is that of maximizing your chances for success while minimizing your chances for failure, and his lesson is that faith in the process is more important than any one observation of the outcome.
Taleb then generalizes. Success in life, he argues, is a question of how it is lived rather than what is achieved. If he is right about investing -- that certain success is an impossible goal -- then even a strategy of maximizing your chances may lead to failure. But he wouldn't define it as that. He would argue it's not failure to do everything right, but for the ball nonetheless to fail to clear the net.

So we set our training schedule, or our life plan, with long term goals and intermediate benchmarks. At each step we strive to be the best we can at that time. That we aren't currently peaking (while others may be) does not suggest we aren't on track.