Obsessed With Obsession

About nearly every great man two things can be said: he achieved great things in his life and he barely participated in the raising of his children.

About many great athletes, hagiographic observers have cooed, "he's the first to practice and the last to leave." A variation on this notes how the day after he won or lost the championship he could be found on the playing surface practicing a part of his game repeatedly.

We have an obsession with obsession, particularly at the highest level of sports. "He lives, eats and breathes (his sport)" is considered a compliment of the highest order. Pete Rose bragged that he'd never read a book cover-to-cover, and we admired how he had one of his best seasons the year his marriage dissolved.

What we fail to realize is that our sports heroes (and indeed, many of our business pioneers) tend to be one-dimensional demigods whose entire lives revolve around winning championships on the field but not on the homefront. That's another way of saying the home front revolves around them and their narcissistic endeavors.

Conversely, the way to dismiss a professional athlete is to say he doesn't love his game. He doesn't burn to win. Those tend to be the most interesting athletes, at least as human beings; they're the ones who have other interests besides competing every minute of every day to be the best at one thing.

I'm not the first person to arrive at my workplace in the morning or the last to leave, and I like it that way. I have a second job that feeds another part of my soul. I have an active social life and I volunteer like crazy, every Saturday for one organization. I read books. You might have noticed that I write a blog. If I haven't spent any quality time with my wife in a few days, I try to get directly home after work so that she's more than a roommate, or a planet orbiting my life.

Maybe I have an obsession with balance, with a multifaceted life, with a world of ideas in varied realms. Maybe that point of view is for those who lack ambition, people who will never invent the iPad, hit .300 lifetime or build Facebook. We also won't leave the nation littered with kids who never really knew their dads because they were singularly focused on winning.

When Michael Jordan left basketball, universally heralded as the greatest of all time, he had the opportunity to live the cliche of spending more time with his family in Chicago. But that transition would have come with a price. "The Greatest" would have to trade in his mantle for merely "dad." The world that revolved around him would have to reorient itself around his children and their mother. Freedom would have to give way to awesome responsiblity.

Instead he fled to the front office in Washington, D.C., and predictably his wife divorced him. He may be the best basketball player who ever lived, but it feels like he could have used some balance in his life. Keep that in mind the next time you consider a person who gave everything they had to a single endeavor.