Today is September 13 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often are you waiting for external validation of your efforts?”
People who navigate the chaos wait for validation for no one.
They move forward and work towards one goal after another.
Unfortunately, Norbert Schemansky demonstrates someone who never received the external validation he so wanted. Schemansky was recognized as one of the greatest Olympic weight lifters of all time.
He began his Olympic run in 1948 in London, where he won the silver medal in the super heavyweight class. In 1952, in Helsinki, he won the gold in the middle-heavyweight class.
He missed the 1956 Games, in Melbourne, Australia, while recovering from two back operations to repair damaged disks. But the injuries did not deter him. He returned to the Olympics in 1960, in Rome, to win the bronze as a superheavyweight, and then in 1964, in Tokyo, to bring home the bronze again.
Schemansky could be ambivalent about the fame and fortune that never accrued to him in any great measure. “Norb himself is an anomaly, a man of contradiction,” Strength & Health magazine observed in 1973. “He appears to disdain recognition, yet he feels he should have it for what he has done.”
Twenty-three years later, his attitude remained the same. “I always thought something good would come out of it,” he said of his career, in an interview with The Detroit Free Press, “but nothing ever did. I thought it would help me get a better job. When I worked for Stroh’s Brewery, I asked for a salesman’s job. They said, ‘We’re not hiring athletes.’ Then, a couple of months later, I find out they hired a football player. You give up so much. Yeah, sometimes I wonder why I did it.” Schemansky failed to see his Olympic success as something good in and of itself because was looking for external validation and rewards that he never received.
As the old adage notes “What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.”
How often are you waiting for external validation of your efforts?