The GOAT Life

BAM!

The door nearest you implodes. Before you can mouth “Mommy,” they’re on you. Two faceless figures in black tactical gear. No struggle, no mercy. Your cheek slams the cold floor. A third figure kneels beside your head, clicking open a metallic case.

A sharp, clean sting bites into your neck. Then a pneumatic hiss. Your body turns off but your mind stays terrifyingly on. A hair-thin micro-drill whispers to life. There’s no pain—just a clean, high-frequency buzz against your skull. A wafer-thin chip slips inside.

Click.

Blackness.

Then, ZOOM, your life flashes forward at 1 billion speed. You don’t just see it; you feel every beat. Your first kiss, the eulogy at your father’s funeral. The cumulative years of mindlessness, and the lazy Tuesday afternoon you wouldn’t trade for a trip to Tahiti. The joy, tears, terror, regret. And then the Soprano-finale-esque cut to black.

But it doesn’t stop there.

ZOOM. Another life. You’re a CEO, massive heart attack in a sterile penthouse.
ZOOM. Another. You’re a poet in Portugal, looking for answers with your words.
ZOOM. You play it safe until life smacks you with the dangers of doing so.
ZOOM. The gambler who risked it all.

One after another, accelerating relentlessly, 999,999 lives you could live cram into your consciousness until everything blurs into a shimmering mosaic of beginnings and ends.

Click.

Silence. You blink, find yourself seated on soft red velvet.

You turn left. It’s you, laugh lines deepened. You look right. You again, skeletal, haunted eyes. You forget to breathe, then gasp. A sea of your own faces stretches into the horizon of a colossal theatre. One million of you. A collective murmur ripples until a voice booms from invisible speakers:

Which of you was the G.O.A.T.?

The Greatest Of All Timelines.

You Can Be #1 At the Wrong Thing

Scottie Scheffler, this world’s #1 golfer, recently sat in front of cameras and admitted he’s nowhere close to living his greatest-of-all-timelines (GOAT) life:

On hollow achievement: “I worked my entire life… to win that tournament. You celebrate… then it’s like, okay, now what are we going to eat for dinner?”
On purposelessness: “I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers…because what’s the point?”
On dissatisfaction: “…it’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not from… the deepest… places of your heart.”
On dueling priorities: “I’d much rather be a great father than a great golfer.”

Hard not to feel a sneaky pleasure—Scheffler-freude, if you will—watching a guy at the summit admit the view is unsatisfying, right? Because at some point—or many if you’re anything like me—we all have our own Scheffler-esque reality checks, just minus anyone else’s attention and being world class at anything.

You Can’t Spell GOAT Without 3 Cs

Some dismiss Scheffler’s dissatisfaction as ungrateful Rich Guy Problems. Better to be so successful you get bored than so sucky you can’t afford room and board, right? But that misses the point. This isn’t about money. This is about life’s most important, un-buyable currency: energy.

Most of us scatter our energy like sunlight across a tangled thicket full of weeds, withering plants, and prickles. Scheffler managed to focus his sunlight on one impressive trophy tree. Problem is it produces fuzzy peach fruit and blocks out his son’s sapling and faith fern.

Which brings us back to the brain chip scene from the top and what I call The Million Worlds Metric:

In the theatre of one million versions of you who’ve lived different lives, which one of you earns the loudest standing ovation? Which life prompts the other 999,999 to point and say, “Dang. That’s who nailed it. That’s the GOAT”? And where does your life trajectory stand relative to those other 999,999?

The point of this Million Worlds Metric isn’t to make you feel bad (though that can sometimes have motivational benefits). No, it’s to get you thinking about the only competition that truly satisfies and what you can do to suck at it less.

To start finding gaps to close, here’s a standard test you can self-administer, the 3-C Assessment:

Coherent: To what extent is every instrument in your life—your work, your relationships, your principles—playing together to put on one harmonious, resonant 95-year-ish-long performance?
Congruent: On a scale of “lion munching on impala in the savannah with its pride” to “caged lion with circus performer putting his head in your mouth,” how perfectly is your life designed to allow your “inner species” (innate values, strengths, motivations, personality) to thrive?
Contributing: On top of the applause from the other 999,999 yous in the theater, how loud is the applause from people you care about in your corner of the world?

The higher you score in those 3-Cs, the closer get to being #1 at the only thing that matters, the GOAT.

Pull the Devotion Driver Out of the Bag?

What if, instead of chasing the title of “World’s Best Golfer”, to the potential peril of his pursuits of “World’s Best Dad,” and “World’s Best Believer,” Scottie Scheffler tried the 3-Cs on for size?

Maybe he could focus his energy on using his extraordinary calmness, discipline, and humility, to take aim at society’s shallow definition of success. He could think of himself as “The Devotion Driver.” Off with the golf cap and khakhis, on with the inner superhero spandex outfit!

How might this meet the 3-Cs Assessment?

Contributing? Instead of inspiring the next great golfer, his mission is to inspire disciplined devotion to family, faith, and craft. His podiums and press conferences become platforms. Check!

Coherent? Being awesome at golf, fatherhood, and faith are all working symbiotically toward this mission. Check!

Congruent? Sheffler’s leveraging his talents in environments he was put on this planet to thrive in to fulfill his deepest needs. Check!

This is just a hypothetical, of course. But I hope you agree that this Devotion Driver approach might score Scottie higher in the Million Worlds Metric than his current track. Who knows? Maybe this more aligned purpose could make him an even better golfer, too!

As Viktor Frankl said, success and happiness cannot be pursued directly—they only ensue as a side-effect of dedication to something truly greater.

All Your Eyes Are on You

Now please sit your butt back on that red velvet arena seat along with the other 999,999 versions of you. Imagine the spotlight turns to you and your exceedingly familiar face appears on the super-duper-jumbotron.

The loudspeaker again:

Hey you. Yes You. #899,994, What’s your next move?

How can you weave together the threads that matter to you into a coherent narrative that’s congruent with your wiring and contributes to this world in a way that only you (and your 999,999 clones) can?

Every day you delay in trying to answer that question, you fall further behind in the most important metric of all.