Pleasure in the Job Puts Perfection in the Work
On Aristotle, Excellence, Diving and Dying
It’s a little ironic to be writing a newsletter called The Pleasure Report while struggling with doubt and angst. I keep waiting for the writing process to get easier. I dream of swimming in the pleasure of words and busting out a dance move while I hit send. Instead, I find myself staring at a blank screen, struggling to choose the right topic. Rather than wandering down rabbit holes of research and coming out the other side with lyrical prose, I find myself with a hundred open tabs and a looming deadline.
This pleasure researcher is in need of a coach. So, I turned to two experts: Aristotle and my friend Ellen Walker.
Aristotle, as you probably know, was a Greek philosopher born more than 2400 years ago and who studied under Plato. His teachings largely make up the intellectual lexicon of the Western world. Ellen, meanwhile, is a woman of the 21st century. She recently retired from a thirty-year career in criminal justice work and, as though that weren’t already a full life, she has become a revered diving coach at Colorado College with a reputation for getting athletes to surpass their expectations with hard work and joy. Ellen has been a friend and a source of inspiration in the decades that I have known her.
Three years ago, Ellen’s husband John was diagnosed with a rapidly advancing cancer. John Walker’s life was devoted to the pursuit of excellence. He coached Olympians to gold medals and taught young swimmers the relationship between effort and outcome. He inscribed all his journals with his values and excellence was always at the top. True to form, he remained positive through all of the treatments and the hospital stays, even joking about how he needed to study for his blood test, which he was failing badly. One day during his treatment, he and Ellen were lying on his hospital bed when she felt a sadness fall over him. He looked at her and said, “I'm not excellent any more.” John was a man who had always found his way to success but without control of his body, his worldview was shaken. He felt like he was failing.
Lying in a hospital bed hooked to a monitor beeping out bad news was nowhere in John’s plans. “Even though it doesn’t feel like it right now,” Ellen would tell him, “You can't tell me that you're not giving your best. Right now, you are fighting to live another day. You can't tell me that you're not inspiring all the people you've inspired your entire life.”
John died in August of 2018, shortly after this conversation. He was 50. Ellen and I have had talked over the past few years about John’s legacy, how his insistence on excellence for himself and others has shaped her ideas about pleasure, effort, and adjustments. I called Ellen to see if she had any thoughts about how to embrace this beautiful struggle we call life, and how I might reclaim some of the joy and ease I felt at the outset of The Pleasure Report. The first thing she told me was that nothing worth doing ever gets easy.
“The easier something is, the more you challenge yourself and push yourself to the next level,” she said. “If you can do a front dive, then you can do a front flip. And then you can do a front one and a half and, even if you don't increase by those integrals, you are trying to do it better every time. We are always looking for more,” she said. “More finesse, more agility, more air sense, and more body awareness.” Or, in Aristotle’s words, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”
And forget perfection, Ellen said. Perfection often relies on someone else’s standard. “I've only ever had one diver get a perfect 10. Take the judge’s score out of the equation,” she says, “because you have no control over what score the judge is going to give you.” Like a job interview, she says, or, in my case, writing. “All you can do is give your best, and then say, “I nailed it. That doesn't mean you're gonna get the job or be perfect. It just means that you gave your best effort, and that is pleasure, right? When all your systems are firing, that's the reward in itself. It feels good to do your best.”
“Sometimes just getting up in the morning is the best you can give,” she told me. And that’s the advice she has given herself these past few years as she has mourned John’s death. There were days when she didn’t leave the house. “You have to look at the little successes,” she said. “Like, I might be having a great day and then all of a sudden, things go to hell. At the end of the day, I think, that was horrible. But then when I look back, I can say, well, the first four hours were actually okay.”
Ellen’s words reminded me of Aristotle’s maxim: “Choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
“Trust your training,” Ellen reminded me. “And just keep putting yourself out there again and again. Even if you fail,” she says, “it’s very likely going to be okay. Get up and try it again and again. Focus on an outcome that you have some control over.”
That day at the hospital, lying in bed, neither John nor Ellen knew how close to the end it was. There weren’t many desirable outcomes for either of them. When Ellen reminded John that he was doing his best, as he always did, and that he still had choices to make about how he lived his remaining days, John started laughing. “I've been trying to define excellence my whole life,” he told her. “And you just nailed it.”
From The Institute for Pleasure Studies
Diving. It’s exhilarating. Watch Olympic medalists throughout history do their thing.
Read: Aristotle’s Way by Edith Hall. Aristotle was the people’s philosopher. He wanted everybody—cobblers, fishermen, and peasant farmers—to become virtue ethicists capable of learning moral reasoning and deliberation. If we all did, the world would be a better place, he believed.
DIY Aristotle: What is excellence to you? What is your definition of pleasure? How do you define success? A practice I learned from my writing teacher, Jackson Taylor, is to write your own definitions of abstract words. Try to be as concrete in your definitions as possible. Do it while you are waiting at the doctor’s office, he always told his students, or on the subway. Fill notebooks with your own maxims. It’s fun and it helps you learn what you know. Start with Pleasure is…… or Excellence is…….