Thinking Outside the Bun

Summer is the time for sunny weather, vacations, eating outside, and seeing family & friends.?It's the time for working a little less, having some fun, and maybe doing a little reflecting.?Summertime is the best.?

Did any of you catch this year's Nathan's Famous Hot Dog eating contest?? Every 4th of July for more than 50 years, contestants have gathered outside the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs stand near the Coney Island boardwalk for the largest, and most prestigious, hot dog eating contest in the world.?

Nathan's challenges contestants to eat as many hot dogs as they can in 12 minutes.?This year, the men's winner was Joey Chestnut, who ate 62 hot dogs with buns (!!!). The women's champion was Miki Sudo, who ate 39.5 dogs.?Both Chestnut and Sudo are elite eaters — they are past Nathan's contest champions who have won many times in their careers.?

Do you all know about Joey Chestnut?? He's the Lebron James of hot dog eating — the best hot dog eater the world has ever known.?Chestnut is a 16-time winner of the Nathan's contest, and currently holds the world record of eating 75 hot dogs in 12 minutes.?

Every year when the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog contest rolls around, I'm reminded of someone — and I have a brief moment of serious reflection.?WHY, you may ask?? After all, Nathan's is just a hot dog contest.? An event made purely for summertime fun, and not for deep thinking.? And, honestly, isn't the contest a little sickening?

To explain, let's go back to 2001 and introduce an unlikely hero, Takeru Kobayashi.? If you're interested in learning more about this person, I recommend a great story from Freakonomics radio.

At the time the Nathan's hot dog contest had been held for around 30 years, and the most hot dogs that anyone had ever eaten to win was 25.??My stomach aches even considering eating two hot dogs in a minute — let alone doing it for 12 minutes straight!

That year, Takeru Kobayashi from Japan entered the competition for the first time.?He was 23 years old and weighed only 135 pounds.?

When the contest started, it quickly became apparent that Kobayashi was going to win?— and by a lot.? He ate hot dogs in an entirely new way. Kobayashi took the dog out of its bun, folded it in half, and put it entirely into his mouth.?He next soaked the bun in water, squashed it up into a tight, dense ball, and ate it in the same way.

Kobayashi was faster at eating hot dogs than anyone had ever seen.?

Several contestants stopped their eating mid-contest, to watch and marvel at Kobayashi.?The Nathan's contest officials ran out of pre-made, numbered signs to indicate to the crowd how many he had eaten, never expecting anyone to achieve those numbers of dogs.?They quickly scribbled numbers on pieces of paper and held them up — the contest was bedlam!

When the bell rang ending the event after 12 minutes, Kobayashi had shattered the world record.?He had eaten 50 hot dogs — twice as many as anyone had ever eaten before.

How did he do it?? How was it that Kobayashi was so much better than everyone else???Years later in a radio interview, he gave his perspective. In Kobayashi's telling, his achievement was not eating more hot dogs than everyone else.?Rather, he believes his true accomplishment was taking a new perspective and rethinking the entire approach to a 30-year-old problem of eating lots of hot dogs.

In Kobayashi words, “The thing about human beings is that they make a limit in their mind of what their potential is.?They think: “I’ve been told this, or this is what society tells me,” or they’ve been made to believe something.?If everyone threw away those thoughts … the potential of human beings is really great.”

For hot dog eating, Kobayashi was right in seeing how perceived barriers can hold us back.?Once he showed it was possible to overcome the perceived limit of the 25 hot dog world record, other contestants soon followed his example.?Eaters who had previously only eaten 15 hot dogs in 12 minutes began routinely eating 30 to 40.?Some of them did it by adopting Kobayashi’s new approach; while others simply realized that they were capable of more.?Everyone benefitted from Kobayashi showing them that the old limit wasn’t a limit at all.

I think Kobayashi's lesson about seeing past perceived barriers relates to nearly everything in life.??

And so each summer when I'm watching the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog eating contest, I get reminded that throughout history, humans have had a remarkable track record of achieving "the impossible."

When we give our full attention and creativity to solving challenging problems, we can do unbelievable things.

The beautiful hotdog photo shown here is by Ball Park Brand on unsplash.com