The truly elite have spoken: There is no such thing as "self-made"

This past weekend, the National Baseball Hall of Fame inducted six new members in perhaps the greatest overall class since the first one. What struck me from watching the ceremony and hearing the inductees was not just the lip service to humility that we have come to expect from celebrity award speeches, or the expected thanking of the spouse for taking care of the kids and home front. It was a continued theme that rang through the entire afternoon...

None of them claim they did this alone.

Among all team sports, baseball has the unique quality of existing as a series of individual events. Pitchers and batters deal one on one...then a batted ball must be fielded by an individual who either makes the play or does not. There is positioning of individual players to maximize the chance a team can get a batter out, and certain defensive plays require clean execution by multiple teammates, but on the whole, baseball comes down to these moments of individual activity. That is why baseball statistics and records hold such a place in our national psyche. As Kevin Costner's character in For Love of the Game once quipped, "We count everything in baseball." This is precisely because everything can be counted: Pitches, outs, hits, errors...they all get assigned to a person and totaled up to become the legacy each player leaves behind.

Within this frame of reference, those players who reach the pinnacle of their career, it would be natural to talk about how all of one's own hard work paid off, and they can be proud of their accomplishment. As far as elite achievement goes, they would certainly be justified. Of the over 2 million youths that participate in Little League baseball each year in the US alone (not counting international), only around 800 make the major leagues in any given year. Now consider that of the 18,000 or so players that have officially participated in a major league game, only a little over 200 of whom reach this pinnacle of achievement. That means of the 100 million plus that have played the game over the past century, these players joined the 0.0002%...truly the elite.

And yet, in the 10 to 15 minutes each of them took to talk about their achievement, the entire time talked about others. The teammates, trainers, coaches, mentors who influenced them and helped make them who they are. They spoke of doctors who helped them stay healthy or return from injury. They spoke of the people who handled their finances so they could focus on reaching their potential. They lovingly praised coaches who spent that extra hour with them each week, who saw the promise that maybe even the player did not see, who taught them that skill or lesson that carried them through. In each case, there was no doubt that after all the help, the player had to achieve greatness through their actions on the field. However, without those years and years and hundreds of people supporting them, they all recognized that they would have achieved nothing.

This lesson can carry over into many aspects of our lives. We talk often about success as "individual achievement" for which we are entitled to whatever "we" earn. The national dynamic around issues of business, energy, health all centers around the idea of personal responsibility and personal achievement. If we learn one thing from these truly elite individuals...individuals blessed with the genetics who maximized everything that they were given and who worked tirelessly to reach the pinnacle...it is that no one does anything alone. We are beholden to our genes, our upbringing, our nutrition as infants, the neighborhood we grow up in...a myriad of issues over which we have no control, and even sometimes over which our parents have no control.

Establishing social morays around an idea of individual action that has no basis in reality absolves us of basic human compassion. We absolutely must encourage each person to achieve the most they can, but we have to recognize that we have a social responsibility to provide the culture where everyone can achieve.