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normally, i dedicate thursdays to giving some of my personal life axioms…truth that, from my perspective, is self-evident. sometimes practical. sometimes philosophical. sometimes whimsical. but truth, no less.
“sometimes, no matter what you do, it won’t be good enough”
up until i was about 12 or 13, i was a yankee fan. i used to idolize the great mickey mantle and whitey ford and yogi berra. i had their baseball cards (i would be a rich man, if i would have kept all of them). i even got to see a couple of games in the old yankee stadium when i was a kid. it is a surreal memory for this life-long fan of the great game.
somewhere along the timeline of free agency, anti-trust laws, no salary caps and big market revenues, i lost my love of the yankees.
call it sour grapes. call me a whiner. tell me to pull up my “big boy” panties. whatever.
when you have more money than anybody else, you get to buy yourself the best players. a-rod, matsui, derek, tex, c.c., a.j. and on top of that, you have the money for the best facilities, the best travel accommodations, the best training, the best equipment, the best stadium, the biggest marquee, the most fame and attention.
and that’s the point of this axiom.
the yankees won the world series last night. ho hum. they were supposed to win. all of us small-market, small-minded whiner-complainers are never going to be satisfied…and we will never give the yankees their due. to us, we minimize their effort and success by discounting it. we cheapen their lopsided victories by saying, “what do you expect? they’re supposed to win! they bought the best players that money can buy!”
the yankees had a player payroll this year of $201 million. my beloved san diego padres had a payroll of about $43 million. what does that mean? the more money you have, the better stuff you can buy. it’s simple economics. and yeah…i’m bitter.
but here’s the deal. in the end, the 25 players the yankees played with still had to perform. they still had to live up to their billing. they had to hit better, throw better, catch better, run better, think better…than the other 29 teams…through 162 regular season games…two rounds of playoffs…and a best of seven world series. and they did it.
just because you are supposed to be better, doesn’t always mean you are better. this year, the yankees are the best. but for most people, it will never be good enough. if they would have lost, they would have been “under-achievers”. by winning, all they did was what they were supposed to do. for the yankees, it’s a no-win.
sometimes, no matter what we do…no matter how hard we try…no matter the effort, the heart, the motive, the intent…what we do will not be good enough for some people.
they will say we should have tried harder, done more, spent more time, given an extra day or an extra call or an extra dollar. sometimes…for some people…our performance will never meet their expectations. we will let them down. they will blame us for failures that are not ours. they will make us out to be scapegoats. they will see us as over-paid, under-achieving disappointments.
sometimes, no matter what we do, it won’t be good enough.
take a moment right now and thank god that he doesn’t grade our performance the same way people do.
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