Raising The Stakes in Sports, Business, & Life

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I've been on a big Rick Rubin kick ever since I read his book, The Creative Act , about a year ago. In the book there's a chapter about rules that's particularly great. Rick, being the pioneering creative muse that he is, makes the argument that the greatest artists are those that ignore the "rules" of their craft or their genre, remaining unconstrained by outside opinion or fan expectations. According to Rick, rule breaking is where truly revolutionary art is created.

As Tim Tollefson has noted in a few places, athletes are not dissimilar from artists. Extreme focus, monotonous daily grinding, public failure, with the rare but miraculous, transcendent breakthrough that changes everything. In our sport, the mountains become the canvas and the most legendary athletes, like the most legendary artists, are those that break the metaphorical rules.

Last week, I listened to an episode of Rick Rubin's podcast, Tetragrammaton , featuring Nate Silver, a statistician who became famous for his highly accurate political predictions derived from synthesizing and interpreting polling data from various sources. Rather than talking about politics though, Rick centers the conversation around one of Nate's other passions - gambling in general and poker in particular.

In the episode, Nate makes what felt to me like a profound observation that has implications far outside the casino. In poker, he says, players have three options to choose from when making betting decisions. They can fold (DNF), call (maintain status-quo), or raise (increase the stakes). Nate's argument is that amateur poker players simply "call" too often - a mistake that experienced poker players exploit. In other words, maintaining the status quo often feels like the right decision when it's actually the opposite. And the great poker players, like the great artists and the great athletes, are those unafraid to raise the stakes.

When Zach Miller won the Lake Sonoma 50 miler in 2014 while living on a cruise ship, it defied all conventional wisdom for what resembled optimal training. Now he's a legend whose training remains an example of existing on the extreme, riskiest fringe of human performance. Zach always finds a way to raise the stakes which is why he's revered by global trail fans. When Jim Walmsley attacked the Western States course on debut in 2016, it was seen as reckless and idiotic. Now he's a four-time champion and his aggressive strategy is viewed as table stakes for winning the race in the modern era. When Courtney Dauwalter smashed Ellie Greenwood's course record at Western States, experts, including myself, said it may never be broken. Instead it inspired Katie Schide to find a new level for herself, coming within 15mins of Courtney's unthinkable mark, proving it's not totally out of reach.

All these athletes are hall-of-fame bound and certainly benefit from innate, uncoachable talent. But they're also unafraid to look just beyond the existing horizon of performance, to a blue ocean of possibility currently unacknowledged by the broader public and by most of their competitors. I think they'd fit Rick Rubin's archetype for rule breakers. As a practical example, when I asked Courtney about future inspiration after Hardrock, her answer was "Finding the things that sound a little too crazy and trying them, and hopefully that bar of crazy just keeps raising." What a great lesson and what joy to witness.

Outside the most gifted athletes, artists, and gamblers, I think this poker observation from Nate Silver applies even to us mere mortals in many aspects of life. May we all have the courage to honestly evaluate ourselves, assessing where we're mistakenly and counter-productively accepting the status quo. And once we've taken inventory, may we all have the wisdom to either fold or raise the stakes!