Most excellent blogger and friend Stuppsy has recently been asking where my running mojo had got to. I’ve looked high, low and even in the pockets of running shorts that have been laundered, but all to no avail. It’s temporarily absent… though I did find this nice clean ten-pound note.
Yesterday found me enjoying the peace of the tea-house and the moderate discomfort of philosopher Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety.
For an example of the discomfort, he quotes from the mid-nineteenth century psychologist William James:
‘With no attempt there can be no failure and with no failure no humiliation. So our self- esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities. Thus
Self Esteem = Success divided by Pretensions.’
Of course, methinks, if you try to mix in Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s
‘Success = Skill plus Luck’, (and ignoring his real point, which is that great success = a little more skill and a lot more luck)
then, aside from the ensuing headache, you get
Self Esteem = the sum of Skill + Luck divided by (what I think of as) your Aspirations.
It strikes me that self-esteem should probably be at least 1 or above for us to be feeling good about ourselves, which means that if we aspire to greater things then we should be prepared to allocate time and effort to enhancing our skills and improving our nascent luck.
Curiously (for your writer really is making this up as he goes along!), another word for self-esteem is… mojo.
Sooooo…. if my running mojo is absent, then it probably = 0. Assuming I still have at least some running skill and that luck remains relatively positive (at least I’ve not fallen over or pulled a muscle… lately), then what is missing is actually aspiration. And as soon as aspiration rises above zero, then my mojo should return.
What all this means, in short, is that I need a new challenge.
Confused? Hmmm… me too!
With half a book of these kinds of thoughts tying my head in knots yesterday, I retreated to the running machine to at least maintain my current skill level.
I continued the 7mph tempo from last week, noting that it was harder work, probably for the lack of a mid-week run. What also didn’t help was the stitch I got from gulping down a Lucozade power-bar moments before I climbed aboard the machine… forcing me to focus on breathing rather than just being.
So 7 miles in one hour and apologies for the delayed posting… my office technology lacked mojo this morning and eventually conspired to stop me working altogether (and posting this). We could choose to see something like this as unlucky, but as Alain de Botton might say (if asked), this is a matter of perspective… not so unlucky from the perspective of my parents, who got a little help in their garden as a result!