Moderation is fine for every day, but for one-off moments adopt an uncompromising, Steve Jobs approach
Oscar Wilde once said: ‘Everything in moderation. Including moderation.’ Although probably someone else said it first. This column appeared during the London Olympics, of which I’d always been a supporter.
Enthusiasm for the Olympics has its critics. Someone wrote to me last week describing the whole thing as a disappointment, while complaining that there were so many empty seats. This reminded me of Woody Allen’s joke about the two Jewish women and the restaurant. ‘The food here is terrible,’ says one. ‘Yes,’ says the other, ‘and such small portions.’
One argument, however, I feel I have to take seriously. It goes, roughly, like this. It’s fun and all that, but we’ve spent billions of pounds and as many hours so that some people can run around in circles for a fortnight.
I’ve thought a little about how to respond to this and I feel the best way is by telling you about my one sporting triumph. I beat Sebastian Coe in an egg-and-spoon race. Not at school. As adults. He already had his gold medals. And there was none of this stuff he did against Steve Ovett, none of this coming back in his less good race later and being vindicated. He was just beaten and I won, end of.
The thing is, you see, that Seb turned out to run quite fast, faster than me (on the day). But he dropped the egg and I didn’t.
The egg-and-spoon race rewards moderation. If you run too slowly you lose anyway. Run too quickly and there’s a good chance that you will lose the egg. Egg-and-spoon suits both my athletic ability (although in the ten years since my famous victory, I’ve lost a yard or two of pace) and my attitude to life.
I am, in general, conservative with a small c. I am suspicious of big schemes, of people with a glint in their eye and a simple solution, of those with dogmatic obsessions who can’t resist hammering it home. I am all for the spirit of compromise, taking one thing with another, seeing if we can’t fold everyone into the solution. Naturally I suffer from the inevitable human failing of believing myself more reasonable than others think me, but you get the idea.
And the Olympics, the history of it, the conduct of the competitors and, indeed, the very fact of London 2012, is a contradiction of that idea.
At the end of last year, Walter Isaacson published his excellent biography of Steve Jobs. And it turns out that in many ways Jobs was dreadful. He was manipulative, egotistical, ready to trample over people to an extraordinary extent and his head was full of highly eccentric notions, particularly about his health and diet.
He was also simply brilliant. And there was a connection between his impossible personality and the impossible results he achieved. He insisted that his singular vision, his concept, however extreme and impractical it might seem, was delivered exactly as he had conceived it.
He was quite unwilling to compromise with anybody or even with reality. He ignored cost, or even whether the parts he wished to include in his new product existed. He thought anyone who couldn’t see things as he saw them was a fool and should be treated as such. He lied and cheated to get his way. And he succeeded.
This can’t be a rule for everyone’s behaviour. It can’t be countenanced. And even for one person, it can end in disaster, as with Jobs it often did. But the extremism, the insistence on seeing through his idea without challenge, that’s what made it so good. You can’t always be like that, but sometimes you have to be.
To follow the history of the Olympics is to be struck by the unbelievable dogmatism of Avery Brundage, for decades the leading light in the International Olympic Committee. He held to his ideas – that the Olympics should be for amateurs, and that politics should be kept out of it – to the point of madness. In the late 1950s he was still complaining publicly about the ‘well financed’ campaign in the 1930s against the Nazi Olympics of 1936.
Yet at the same time it is hard to avoid the conclusion that without this singular, blinkered, intense commitment – one that it would often have been hard for a reasonable, moderate person to justify – the Olympics would have collapsed long before London 2012.
Brundage’s behaviour was hard to tolerate, but perhaps sportsmen tolerated it because, at some level, they understood his extremism. Bill Furniss, the swimming coach, describes intense sessions with the great champion Rebecca Adlington as ‘sick-bucket sessions’ because they push her to the absolute limit. One of Adlington’s great advantages as a swimmer, her admirers explain, is her willingness to endure pain.
Who does that? And why? It is to achieve a moment, even if only a fleeting one, of uncompromised brilliance. She endures pain because she has a singular vision that brooks no opposition or interference. Not everyone can do it, and she can’t go on doing it for ever, but what it produces is something worth having. And something that can’t be obtained in any other way.
That’s what we’ve done with these Olympics. We achieved something great, something wonderful, because we went all in, because we brooked no compromise, because we stopped at nothing.
We spent millions and millions of pounds on an opening ceremony and then allowed one man’s vision to determine its content. It was, at points, more than slightly bonkers, but for the same reason it was worth watching. It never seemed like it was made by committee.
And then we spent billions on staging the Games themselves. We created Olympic lanes, and told office workers to stay at home, and covered Horse Guards Parade in sand so that women in bikinis could play volleyball on the parade ground. We took a ludicrous amount of trouble. We never said we couldn’t. We never said we wouldn’t. We just did it, whatever it took – to deliver it just right, without a corner being cut and without even common prudence calling a halt.
And what we have got has been worth it, even if it has been a bit mad. The fact that once in a lifetime we got it out of proportion has been the point. We couldn’t have had it any other way.
It isn’t a way to govern, of course. You’d run too fast and drop the egg, you see. I think my moderation is the right way most of the time. But I wonder if we couldn’t do it just occasionally. A new airport perhaps. Some people look at the Olympics and think: ‘Whatever next?’ And I think that’s rather a good question.