Striving and Achieving and Goals and Purposes

Oh My...

Coaches are endlessly exposed to the age-old dichotomy of process versus outcome and there’s plenty of times and reasons to support either side of the pair. In that sense, process versus outcome is settled. Most coaches know which one they care more about in any given instance. So let’s change the approach to all those comfortable, resolved situations.

In his book, The Score, C. Thi Nguyen gives coaches a different way to approach practice and competition. He writes about striving play and achievement play. It would seem he’s just giving synonyms for process-focused and outcome-focused, but I think there are important differences. For Nguyen, striving is much more than just focusing on how things are done.

Striving play involves a motivational inversion of ordinary, practical life. In normal life, we struggle in order to attain some goal that we really want. In striving play, we adopt a goal in order to have the struggle that we really want. (p. 14)

For context, he’s writing about how the arbitrary rules adopted when playing games provide valuable lessons for living. He includes sports in his framework, using examples like marathons to demonstrate how people make relatively easy things arbitrarily difficult for “enjoyment”. The idea is that you get to choose the rules you adopt, which allows you to choose the challenges you face. Choosing your challenges is where the enjoyment comes from.

Striving play does overlap with being process-focused because choosing your challenges means you’re narrowing how you try to reach a goal. You’re not trying to reach your goal in any way, you’re trying to reach that goal via some specific route. To use a marathon to illustrate, you have to follow the race course rather than taking the shortest path from start to finish. But striving play is much more than process.

While process orientation would be focused on what running feels like, striving is focused on how running makes you feel. The difference is massive. Striving play is about how you believe your chosen challenges will shape you. Striving play helps you become someone during or through your struggles. Your choice of struggles is an expression of who you are and who you want to be while you’re playing the game. Achievement play is an expression of who you are as well.

The achievement player is trying to win because they actually value winning…The achievement player cares about the win itself…The achievement player, we might say, genuinely wants to win. They have a lasting interest in winning; their desire to win exists before, during, and after the game. It is the reason they play; playing games is valuable for them only if they win. (p. 30)

Nguyen isn’t saying that such players only care about winning, but he is saying they value winning more than they value how the win is obtained. Achievement players don’t play games to relish the struggle. They accept the challenges not so they can become, but so they can overcome whatever they must in order to win. In some sense, they’re indifferent to the challenges. If struggles are mostly absent and the win is secured, then they’ve accomplished what they set out to do. That’s an important difference between striving and achieving: in striving play, the struggles matter.

To better understand the relationship between striving and achieving, it’s important to first consider two more terms, goals and purposes. Nguyen quotes his graduate school advisor, Barbara Herman, to separate those terms:

Of course there’s a difference between a goal and a purpose. When you’re playing cards with your friends, your goal is to win, but your purpose is to have fun. (p. 332)

Herman points out why the difference between striving and achieving exists, because players are subject to different values simultaneously. Both your goals and your purposes are expressions of your values. They can carry different weights at different times. They are interconnected and it can be quite difficult to consider them separately. So consider them together. Nguyen is clear about how players are influenced by both goals and purposes.

To understand why so many of us play games, you have to remember the distinction between goal and purpose. For achievement players, the goal and purpose are one: They want to win. But for striving players, goal and purpose are very far apart. The in-game goal is just a disposable tool that they use to approach their real purpose: the experience of that delicious struggle. (p. 39)

It seems pretty clear that achieving players are better suited for competition than for practice. The scoring systems of most sports are set up to reward winning with little regard for how victory is achieved. They allow the goal and the purpose to be the same. But form sports like gymnastics and figure skating are exceptions and they present an important lesson in how striving and achieving can interweave.

In form sports, how skills are performed matters. They have to be challenging to do and look right. Winners are those whose skill performances are more challenging and look better than their competitors. In form sports, there’s a special combination of striving play and achieving play. Players have to pursue difficult things in order to win so the best of these athletes are the ones that combine striving play and achieving play.

But you can find similar cases elsewhere in sports. Many timed sports, like swimming and cycling are similar to form sports. Competitors don’t have to maintain great form in order to win the way gymnasts do. But it really helps. Cyclists who excel at time trial and track disciplines tend to hold more aerodynamic positions for longer, even as they tire. But they can overcome such shortcomings by just putting out more power than their competitors, enough to overcome the loss of aerodynamics. But there’s more to their striving than might be apparent at first.

Swimmers benefit from process orientation, excelling at being hydrodynamic and mastering the strokes. But one of my favorite example of striving play comes from Daniel Chambliss’ ethnography on American swimming¹. While he points out that the best swimmers excel at the form aspects of their sport, he also highlights another aspect of their striving play.

At the higher levels of competitive swimming, something like an inversion of attitude takes place. The very features of the sport which the “C” swimmer finds unpleasant, the top-level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring - swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say - they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. They enjoy hard practices, look forward to difficult competitions, try to set difficult goals. Coming into the 5:30 AM practices at Mission Viejo, many of the swimmers were lively, laughing, talking, enjoying themselves, perhaps appreciating the fact that most people would positively hate doing it. It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it. (Chambliss, 1989)

This is striving play. Winning becomes something ancillary. Important, yes, but also something that is often secondary to striving. The swimmers Chambliss describes don’t come to practice every morning only thinking about winning. They’re thinking about what they have to do in today’s practice. That shift in focus has much in common with being process oriented but there’s a crucial difference. As Chambliss said, they like it.

It’s possible to be process oriented because you are an achieving player. As I said before, you don’t have to like the challenges, they’re just part of the process of winning. You can be indifferent to the challenges when you’re process oriented. But you aren’t indifferent to them in striving play. And that’s where I think coaches can benefit from paying attention to the kinds of play they are supporting in their coaching.

Think of Chambliss’ swimmers. Even though they spend hours in the pool, “swimming back and forth over a black line”, they don’t seem to embody the “grind culture” that is currently so prevalent. Why? Because they are striving. The key for you is to create opportunities for athletes to strive instead of creating conditions that demand only process orientation. To do that, allow winning to be put aside. Support reasons for play that go beyond the score.

Their interest in winning is, however, is only temporary. They may get themselves to want to win pretty intensely during the game, but they throw away their interest in winning once they finish the game. Their real, lasting purpose lies in the struggle. For striving players, winning is a disposable end. (p. 30)

Coaches tend to regularly maintain, or even accentuate, the importance of winning. But you can make winning disposable. You can make it important without making it the most important thing at every moment. Coach athletes to value the mastery of a skill. Coach athletes to value the development of self. Coach athletes to value how they treat teammates and opponents. Most importantly, show them that those values are important in their own right and not important simply because they lead to winning.

Because sports are so tied up in scoring, it becomes easy to coach things that make scores better and marginalize things that make people better. Affirm the purposes of the athletes in your care. Help them explore the purposes that exist within the games you coach.

Striving players may adopt a mechanical scoring system temporarily, but our real purpose is often larger and stranger. What we want is an inner feeling: the elegance in our own body moving, poetry in our mind thinking. What we want is fun, interest, and beauty, emerging from within our own acting selves. (p. 98)

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1. Chambliss, D. F. (1989). The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers. Sociological Theory, 7(1), 70–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/202063