Winning

I was hiding behind a barracade while bikers were zooming in front of me. The crowd was appluading, the banners were up flying and the loud speakers were echoing the Chicago suburban streets. It was the Grand Prix of a cycling event in my town. The bikers had an interesting pattern – three of them were leading the pack and were ahead of a big “herd” of bikers by nearly twenty seconds. I was amazed by how the top three bikers had left everyone behind, and now were working extra hard to make an extra inch of lead. The story of the herd – fifty or so bikers – was a little different. The herd leader was putting the most effort, rest of them were almost cruising along. The tail ender had even slowed down sometimes as it had no way of overtaking anyone. Soon enough, the thirty laps were over and the yellow jersey biker raised his hands to beat the other top two bikers. The winner took it by less than a second margin.

As the crowd congratuled the winner and consoled the runners up, I started walking towards my home. I felt the race had a interesting parallel to how the world works – in any game, there are top performers, average performers, and non performers.

Take American population for an example. If we consider monetary wealth as a yardstick, the american population have super rich, middle class, and poor people. As per one statistic, super rich (top 1%) control more than 34% of total private wealth. And as our top three bikers, they are working really hard to maintain their top position, and enjoy a huge gap between themselves and the herd – the middle class. To be fair, the middle class works hard too, but they see a huge gap between themselves (more than twenty seconds in the bike race) and the top three. A gap that is so big, that the herd only compete within the group. Sure, there are upper middle class, middle middle class, and lower middle class, but they stay together in a big mass. Finally, there are non-performers. In the bike race, I did not see any, and for a good reason. Perhaps, they exited the race already and had stopped in between and were not visible anymore. In my analogy, poor people belong to this category.

I could probably think of few more examples, but my point is already made. In any race that you are in – think about which of these three categories do you belong to. Non performers have a good view – they can observe the herd and the top performers, so they see the big picture. But hopefully, you don’t want that view by being a non-performer. Top performers too know they are leading. It’s the middle pack that may be obscured from the big picture view – they see so many bikers around them that they feel content about their position.

Talking about positions, did I mention that I only remembered the guy in yellow jersey who actually made it to the top? The second and third were umm….you get the point!