Mt Lodestone, Mt McMahon, Mt Crusader, Hoary Head, Mt Campbell (L to R) at sunset at the end of a long day, by me.
Refactor
To refactor software means to restructure existing code so that it is better designed, better organised, easier to read and faster to maintain in the future, but without changing the functionality.
I recently realised I had five or six essays that, between them, were really about the same two subjects. So, it was time for a refactor…
Anything vs. Everything
Firstly, a topic I’ve returned to a lot over the years: How do we choose what to focus on, and have the conviction to say “no” to everything else?
We are all encouraged to believe we can do anything. It’s a powerful and important message. But, many of us mistakenly interpret that to mean we can do everything.
We want to have our cake, get lots of likes when we share a photo of our cake, eat it all, and then still have visible ribs afterwards.
Unfortunately, it’s just not true. We can’t do everything. That’s impossible. There are multiple constraints we all have to live within - time, money, space or opportunity.
These things force us to choose. But how?
It’s not enough to say “we need to focus” or “we need to prioritise”. Those are just intentions. Unfortunately, being focussed or having well defined priorities isn’t something that just happens by accident. It requires constant work.
What are the tools and techniques that help us get there - or at least closer to there?
How We Change the World
Secondly, something old, combined with something borrowed and something new1:
Consider this question:
How can we change the world?
I think it’s interesting, when we each try to answer this for ourselves, how tempting it is to focus on the big part of the question: the world.
There is no doubt. The world is a big aspiration.
But we don’t have to start there. We can, if we choose, start with the small part of the question: the change.
Because, at least to start with, and probably for a long time after that too, any change we can actually make is likely going to be small.
We can completely change the question, just by asking it with a slightly different emphasis:
How can we change the world? How can we change the world?
Perhaps if we start with those two things then we might find some way to actually change the world, rather than just wishing we could.
(I’ve had some interesting mixed feedback on this one from a couple of people who have seen early versions, so I’m especially interested in your thoughts. Especially the section about Eliza McCartney. 70% feedback, please! Hit reply - if you get this via email - or post a message on the Substack Chat)
Inspire
This week the NZ Olympic Committee announced their interest in hosting the 2034 Commonwealth Games in New Zealand. If they (we!) are successful that event will come on the back of the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane. So there will be no shortage of close-to-home opportunities to shine for our elite athletes around that time. Based on the average age of Olympians, the future stars of those games are maybe 17 or 18 years old now - if that’s you (do I have any teenage subscribers?), start planning and dreaming now!
The so-called “pinnacle” events in the sporting calendar, Olympics and World Cups, typically run on four-year cycles.2 There is an ancient precedent for that which we now stick to without giving it too much thought - e.g. the 2000 Sydney Olympics were officially “The Games of the XXVII Olympiad”.
Last year New Zealand hosted the Woman’s Cricket World Cup and Woman’s Rugby World Cup. Later this year we co-host the Woman’s Football World Cup, a much much larger event on the global calendar, and possibly the most significant sporting event ever to be staged in New Zealand. However I suspect the three tournaments that are likely to get the most coverage here will be the Men’s Rugby World Cup (in France), the Men’s Cricket World Cup (in India) and the Netball World Cup (in South Africa).
I’ll leave the debate about whether the Commonwealth Games should qualify as a “pinnacle” event alongside these for another time (tl;dr: it’s hard to make a strong argument for this in the majority of sports that comprise the event). However, with all of these various world championships vying for our attention, television subscriptions and ticketing dollars it begs the question:
Why do they matter? Why do we care?
To help answer that I first need to tell you a story about Australians playing Uno…
Some years ago we were travelling with our kids who were then 10 and 12 years old respectively. We befriended an Australian family who had older kids, I’m going to guess 18 and 20 years old. The exact ages are not important, but just the fact that they were older enough that our kids thought they were pretty cool. We started playing Uno. It turned into an epic battle and got quite competitive, in the way that so-many things in trans-Tasman relations often seem to (“just to tie mind you!”). Finally after what seemed like hours the winning card was played by the older of the Australian kids. He stood up, pointed at our two kids and mockingly taunted them:
“Ha! I beat you. I beat you. I beat you!”
He was only having a laugh, but our kids were a bit stunned. They looked at me unsure how to respond to that. From memory I said something like:
“Don’t worry - it’s just a game kids. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, unless you’re Australian”.
It reminded me of a mock Q&A written by Chris Rattue published in the NZ Herald ahead of the 2007 Rugby World Cup, which included this sarcastic but painfully accurate question and answer:
Q: Why are Australia so confident about their chances?
– Gary, Steelers Country.A: It’s a smokescreen, Gary. Deep down, they are an insecure lot, but they hide it with bravado and by winning a lot of things.
There is no “I” in win
There are two dimensions to sport: participation and competition.
Those of us who care about sport, generally, often get these muddled. They are separate things, clearly, but on the surface at least they also seem quite dependent on each other.
I like to imagine the whole system as a pyramid: the broad base is participation and the pointy tip is elite competition. The broader the base the higher the tip, and vice versa. The large base of participants supports the small number of high performers, who in turn inspire more people to participate. It’s symbiotic!
(I’ve learned that this mental model is a bit flawed, but we’ll come to that…)
The value of participation in sport is significant and, hopefully, obvious: the health benefits of being physically fit and active; the sense of achievement that come from pushing yourself and proving what you are capable of physically and mentally; the life lessons, leadership and camaraderie opportunities we get from being part of a team, right through to the community value of facilities (the sports club in many ways replaced the church as our cultural centre over the last few generations).
SportNZ published an excellent report called The Value of Sport which goes into a lot of these details, if you’re interested.
However, the way we collectively pay for this is complicated. Broadly speaking community sport is funded directly by participants (or more often their parents or care givers) and indirectly by gambling profits - for example, the $95.3m that SportNZ invested in sport and recreation in 2022 was 80% funded by $76.3m from Lotto; many individual sports bodies and clubs also receive significant funding on top of that from Community Trusts which are themselves funded by proceeds from gaming machines - aka pokies; and National Sporting Organisations, like NZ Rugby and Basketball NZ, also receive a cut of all sports bets placed on their sports in New Zealand.
By comparison, competitive sport and elite athletes are funded either by commercial revenues (corporate sponsorship and broadcast fees make up the bulk of that) for sports that are lucky enough to have a large fan base, and by government funding for some of those that don’t (in 2022 that portion amounted to $62.1m).
The reason: We watch!
Competitive sport is great unscripted drama. We’re drawn to it because it’s compelling viewing to see athletes compete and sometimes win. Many of us have wonderful memories of getting woken up in the middle of the night to watch a live game on television. The buzz of being part of a large crowd in a stadium is even more electric - and when we see it live we feel like we’re contributing to the performance (and we’re not wrong - ref: home ground advantage3).
When those we support win it makes us feel good, by association.4
In this way government funding for high performance athletes and teams is really no different to the support provided to other cultural institutions, like the NZ Symphony Orchestra, Royal NZ Ballet, Royal NZ Opera, or Te Matatini.5
Punching above our weight
Of course, one of the challenges for New Zealand (less so Australia) is there are not that many of us, so competing head-to-head with other countries at global events like the Olympics and World Cups is extra challenging.
Our standard response to this is to reframe the equation and talk about our “per capita” performance.
There is nothing that New Zealanders like more than a global comparison calculated on a population basis. Indeed I’m not sure if there is any other country in the world that cares as much about winning on a per capita basis as we do - you might say we are world class at caring about winning on a per capita basis!
It is New Zealand’s version of Godwin’s Law: all discussion of our place in the world eventually devolves to “punching above our weight”.
This is a nonsense and I wish we’d stop.
Next time you see a “per capita” medal table in the media ask yourself why it’s not “per square kilometre”.6
The awkward reality for our team of five million is that a very small group of people make us look great. The rest of us punch well below our weight.
The tip of the pyramid is narrow and sharp - it’s not really a collective performance. Medals and titles are won by individuals or teams, not by populations. Yes, we can support them, and contribute to their achievement, but we shouldn’t try to claim their victories for ourselves. The credit should go to the person actually in the arena.
Despite that, I still think it is appropriate to talk about the inspiration that we can all take from these sporting performances.
But here’s the thing: inspiration by itself isn’t valuable. Inspiration is a first derivative. If we say we are inspired by a performance we haven’t really finished the sentence. We should explain what we are inspired to do differently and then show that we’ve actually done that.
In my opinion, the mistake many sports administrators and funders have made in the past is trying to connect the dots directly (this is the flaw in my pyramid model I referred to earlier). For example, we might say that watching the Black Ferns win the Woman’s Rugby World Cup in 2022 should inspire many more girls to start playing rugby. And maybe it will. In the short term. If it does, that’s great and it would echo the results seen by many other sports over the years - e.g. I think back to the surge in kids my age who were suddenly interested in football after the All Whites qualified for the FIFA World Cup for the first time in 1982, or the increase in interest in tennis each year in the UK around the time of Wimbledon. But data suggests those impacts are not long lasting.7 The more interesting question, in my opinion, is why we limit the impact of such an inspirational performance to just this direct "trickle down" result?
This is similar to the difference between a general education and an apprenticeship. Sometimes the things you learn and the place and way that you can apply those lessons are only loosely connected. But it’s still valuable.
For example,
Watching Hamish Carter win his gold medal in Athens inspired me to get involved in triathlons. I got so many direct benefits from that swimming, cycling and running over the years since. I owe him a lot.
But equally…
Listening to Dean Barker and Jimmy Spithill face each other at post-race press conferences taught me about how to cope with pressure, and how to apply it to others when needed (see: World Class).
Watching Sarah Walker race BMX and later talk about her experience post injury taught me about risk management and the importance of mental skills (see: Scar Tissue).
Learning to swim in the open ocean taught me about efficiency, the importance of staying calm under pressure, and the value of investing in themes (see: Flailing).
Thinking about how rugby teams and rowing squads are selected taught me about the value of diversity (see: Monochrome).
A cycling velodrome gave me the language I needed to describe my approach to software products. And bobsled turned out to be the perfect metaphor for user experience (see: Product Management and The Pit of Success).
Even though fighting sports are not really my jam, understanding the mindset of great boxers has taught me a lot about humility and the importance of doing the hard work even when nobody is watching (because they’ll know eventually!)
Watching elite marathon runners and comparing their split times to my own taught me everything about what it means to be genuinely “world class” (see: How We Change the World).
Observing how rugby clubs in France and Japan prioritise recruiting All Blacks at the end of their career informed my opinions about how we manage immigration in New Zealand (see: People, People, People).
Being in large crowds in stadiums around the country and around the world helps me to visualise the audience of people using the software products I’ve built (see: Visualise an Audience).
Hearing Richie McCaw’s response when he was asked, after achieving so much (more than anybody else) as captain of the All Blacks in two winning World Cup teams, if it was “fun”? “No”, he said, “it’s satisfying” … that really resonates and was (is still!) really inspiring to me (see: Four Types of Fun).
My essays are full of these lessons. In my case most of them were applied to startup businesses, but they are equally applicable in many other areas too.
Inspiration is all around. And we can apply it in an infinite number of ways. Some of those will be completely unrelated to sport. That’s great! We just need to look for it. And then talk about the things we did as a result.
Traverse
Speaking of inspiring sports people, I recently had the opportunity to do an amazing day tramp with multi-sport legend Nathan Fa’avae, from one end of the mountain range I look at every day to the other (basically from right to left in the picture at the top of this post). It was a light training day for him but one of the more challenging things I’ve ever done - especially the pre-lunch climb up the 60° steep side of Mount Crusader - and something I was extremely unlikely to ever do without an expert guide like him to show me the way. If it’s true that we are the average of the people we spend time with, then I feel like he dragged my average up a lot that day!
As luck would have it, I found out the night before we went that my name was picked from the ballot for the 2024 Coast To Coast. So, for his sins, he was a captive audience for nearly 10 hours. It’s hard to think of a better brain to pick on that particular subject. In return he got to ask me all about the capital raise he was closing out for his business, Real Meals. To be honest I appreciated the distraction from sore legs by the end.
So, early next year I’ll be doing a traverse of a different kind, over a couple of hard days. I can’t wait. If I can finish it will be … satisfying.
Who else do I know who is crazy enough to try Coast To Coast?
I’m looking out for some training buddies.
Getting to the top, photo by Nathan Fa’avae
I really should have chosen something blue to include in the mix, in hindsight.
In recent years the ICC has bucked this trend by holding T20 Cricket World Cups and World Test Championships every two years, but they have their own unique commercial reasons so let’s not allow that distract us from the point of this post.
A 1999 meta-study compared four factors (home town crowd, familiarity with local conditions and facilities, travel impact and referee bias) and concluded that home fans made the biggest difference. More recently, COVID lockdowns provided an unexpected experiment - results suggest that home ground advantage was reduced when teams were playing at home but without spectators.
This list makes me wonder why more sporting teams don’t have the “Royal” moniker. The only one I can think of is the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. Perhaps an opportunity for one of our minor sports to make a play for more recognition?
During the 2021 Tokyo Olympics the US media started ordering their medal table by total medals won - whatever it took to rank ahead of China I guess!
There is even some evidence to suggest that it might reduce participation!
Love that C2C news - would love to join you on a trail if we end up in the same place before then