TALENT, STEROIDS AND CHARACTER
With Barry Bonds’ perjury trial relating to his use of steroids at the front and center of this week’s news, I figured it would be a good time to wade into this problem. Successes that are earned through your own personal effort nourish your soul forever. While successes that are achieved through cheating or short-cuts may feel good initially, but they eventually eat you up inside.
Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens were probably all on their way to the baseball Hall of Fame before their alleged use of steroids. Marion Jones was already on top of the track & field world prior to her admitted use of steroids before the 2000 Sydney Olympics. So why would people so successful without steroids, and who had so much too lose, risk their legacies?
A few things were probably at play in these instances. It would be hard to imagine that greed and their ego did not play a leading role in their decisions. As I discussed in a previous blog entry, when we allow our ego’s to go unchecked they act like blinders and get in the way of our judgment. We are all susceptible to our impulses of greed, but when you combine that impulse with an inflated sense of invulnerability, it makes disaster all the more likely.
Another factor that was likely present was a fixation on their reputation and the desire to grow their fame. Too many people confuse their reputation with their character. Your reputation is what people think you are, but your character is what you know you are and you can never escape that truth. People who go for easy quick fixes to their problems, like using steroids, are only concerned with their reputation. As John Wooden, widely considered the greatest coach of all-time, was fond of saying, “Winning takes talent. To repeat takes character.”
If you want long term success and the chance to do extraordinary things, you won’t go for the quick fix or result oriented methods. Although it takes more effort than popping a pill or getting and injection, learning to use your mind to get a mental edge can be more potent than any performance-enhancing drug. Numerous medical studies have shown that the reason patients suffering from physical afflictions have gotten better when given placebo’s (pills with no medicine in them) is the power of the mind.
A mental edge is also longer lasting than performance-enhancing drugs, and the only side effect tends to be better coping skills for dealing with everything in your life.
