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In the World Cup, the best footballers in the world, at the top of their game, are intently focused on getting a ball somehow past their opposition and into the net. Put it this way, it seems absolutely ridiculous. However, as they say, it's a beautiful game when it all comes together. The beauty is not in the win or loss. It's in the process, the build-up, the near misses, the key opportunities and the goals. Moreover, the beauty is in the passionate but innocent focus of the moment that is etched on the player's faces as they wince in pain, disappointment and even despair until that one brilliant moment when the ball finds the back of the net.
I never imagined that focused self-absorption could be so beautiful. But that's what the best athletes are all about. It's about being in the zone, so intently focused that they tune out everything around them except for the singular objective of scoring, whether that's shooting the ball into a net, kicking it in between two posts, or swishing it into a basket. Sure, they are performing. And people are paying good money to watch them perform. But it's a performance without regard for the sentiments of the audience. The players only cater to their own competitive spirit, their own need to win. Who cares whom the audience is rooting for? Who cares if the audience isn't happy with the style of play?
There is great beauty in such complete focus, an elegant fluidity. Sports is the one thing where you perform for the audience but have to be completely focused on your own objective. The audience is not the object. It's incidental. It's your tradecraft that's all-consuming.
That's what I was reminded of when watching the World Cup. That the true depth and beauty of performance can only happen in blissful ignorance of the audience. This is all the more important today when performance has become valuable just for its own sake. You don't perform to express something else. You perform just for the sake of performing, as a way of attracting attention and not because you have anything to say or achieve.
Likewise, fame is valuable for just being famous. I mean, isn't that what reality TV is all about? It's the performance art of your everyday life. It's about commoditizing one's own life into bite-sized, sanitized chunks to feed to a hungry audience. It's all about the video snippets and quick banter that caters to the prevailing whims of the audience until the line between the performer and audience is blurred so much that it becomes indiscernible. You are the performer as well as the audience. You are stuck in this tyrannical cycle of constant and continuous production of fleeting moments of manufactured life that you also consume until everything has become just noise, signifying nothing, except for the number of views or likes that you get.
Such unbearable shallowness would be fine if it weren't so tiring. Life itself has become distracting because constant distraction is the point. That's what sells. And it's exhausting. Doomscrolling is such an apt description of what we do to ourselves. We overdose ourselves with distractions until the internal noise becomes an all-consuming cacophony that we can only quiet with medication or sleep.
The only time I can quiet my own internal cacophony is when I interpret. Interpretation requires a full presence for the here and now when all the attention has to be on what's being said and how you have to retell it to the audience. It's all-consuming. After doing simultaneous interpretation for several hours in a row, someone asked me whether I was tired. She looked puzzled when I said that I felt refreshed. I didn't understand it myself then.
But now I realize that I had taken refuge in my own self-absorption. I was able to dampen the internal noise with my focus on the process at hand. Without having the mental space to distract myself, I was reenergized by the quiet beauty of complete focus. I wish I could do that in my everyday life.
I noted that Son Heung-min cried when the Korean National soccer team lost to Ghana during the group stages, then he cried when they won against Portugal to advance past the round of 16, and again when they lost to Brazil in the knock-out round. For a moment, I couldn't help but wonder what those tears meant for someone of Son's world-class abilities and stature. Then I realized that wasn't what was important about his tears. What was critical was that Son didn't care that the world was watching and even judging him for crying. His tears were an expression of his beautiful self-absorption, his all-consuming focus on his trade.
Sure, the wins or losses are important. But it's his focus that makes him stand out. And makes him into a consummate artist.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
