I know you said you were doing GREAT — but were you really?

As I was riding the other day I came across two riders — one was almost at a dead stop waiting for the second rider who was out of the saddle pushing his bike. As I approached, I offered some words of encouragement, “You can do it”

As I rode by the response was, “I’m doing great”.

The thing about being in the saddle for a while is you have lots of time to reflect — and reflect I did because my first reaction was no you aren’t.

Maybe he was in fact doing great because his goal was simply to get the bike out of the garage or he had the unusual goal of pushing his bike instead of riding it. For me success was defined by riding the bike but in this situation, the measurement for success could be different. There is an academic discussion to be made about alignment of goals and objectives to ensure measurement of success is properly reflected. In this case, with the context being on a bike trail where people ride bikes, I think to say you are doing great when you are pushing your bike is inaccurate.

Does any of this matter in the scheme of things? Not really, but again I rode for quite a while and had time to think.

Maybe it was an issue with language and how we interpret what is said — language has meaning and like all things, it evolves. It’s possible I missed the memo that says doing great on the trail now means pushing your bike. Like aligning goals and objectives, I think it’s important to align language so everyone’s understanding is the same.

It may also just be the result of being human; we are an overly optimistic bunch after all. We are always overestimating our abilities and how we stack up against each other, as well as the world at large. Sadly, we overestimate our abilities relative to reality, and if we don’t like the results, we adopt the illusion of changing reality with words or artificial action. The hard reality is no matter how much you want to change the standard deviation curve you simply can’t have the whole class in the 95th percentile — not unless you want to pretend.

It probably was simply a misinterpretation of the situation because we all get off the bike once in a while and have to push — although anytime it’s happened to me, it’s never because I’m doing great.

iamgpe