The Man in the Arena

The greatest speakers can transcend time.

Great orators like Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and so many more, have encouraged those around them to achieve more than they ever thought possible. That is what our greatest leaders do: they inspire us. They help us to see the best parts of ourselves.

We could do with a little more of that, today.

There is one speech that has stuck with me, more than any other. I think about it when times are tough. When every decision seems wrong. When it seems that no matter what I choose, it will fail.

It’s referred to as The Man in the Arena.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote and delivered Citizen in a Republic, of which The Man in the Arena is one part, on April 23, 1910, at the Sorbonne in Paris, as he stepped into the role of ex–president, using Europe as a platform to define democracy, citizenship, and moral responsibility at a time of real global tension.

It was a warning: democracies fail when citizens become passive critics instead of participants, when comfort replaces duty, when responsibility is shirked across all levels of society. His warning was prescient, just a few years before the apocalypse of what we call The Great War. It feels eerily similar today.

While the entire speech is certainly worth reading, The Man in the Arena speaks to me in a way few other works do. Here it is:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

In the Arena with Mother Nature

I have grown and harvested nineteen crops in my life. Not all of them were successful. In truth, in terms of yield and quality (ignoring other factors, like market price and cost of production), I’ve had just as many poor years as good ones. The most difficult ones to handle, though, were the harvest disasters.

In those years, all you can do is stand by and watch a crop get ruined, whether by rain, snow, hail, or all three. In those years, more than any other, every decision you make goes under the microscope. Every choice is open for criticism. And I don’t mean by others—but by yourself.

I know what it’s like to sit and stare off into space, agonizing over this decision or that one, knowing the cost of it to the dollar, consumed by regret. Tearing myself apart over not knowing something I could not possibly have known—the future.

In modern agriculture, the decisions we make on a daily basis are often highly consequential; sometimes, they determine the ability of our farm to generate a profit at all. The weight of these decisions can be heavy. Much depends on them—not just the farm, but our families, too.

The words in The Man in the Arena remind me of the truth: it’s not the critic who counts. The credit belongs to the person doing it. Analyzing and criticizing the result of a decision after it’s been made is, as Annie Duke put it in her excellent book Thinking in Bets, resulting: using the result to determine the quality of the decision, not the thought process and work put in to make the best decision possible.

In farming, this happens all the time; you can get every single decision right in growing a crop from beginning to end, from buying the inputs as cheap as possible, to getting the timing right on every pass in the field, but one bad storm can ruin everything. That’s agriculture. That’s the business.

The truth is that’s life.

In the Arena with Life

I have been a director, and eventually chair, with the SaskWheat Development Commission for eight years. Term limits mean my time is ending with this organization; my life is about to change.

I think about this speech as I reflect on my time with SaskWheat. I think about what I’ve learned, what I’ve gotten wrong, and what we got right. Being apart of an organization like this forced me to understand that you cannot get it all right all the time; nevertheless, being there, being a part of it, helping to make those decisions, made me understand how much effort goes into them to get them right. So often, policy is made by those who show up.

I don’t regret any of it.

Perhaps the greatest example of Roosevelt’s speech is more personal: family.

Being a parent presents daily opportunities to do your best. The most important job each of us have is raising children who can navigate this crazy world. And it’s not easy; they challenge us, daily (hourly!), to keep our cool, to model for them how we hope they’ll someday act. I know I get it wrong, again and again, but the great thing about parenting is I get to try again tomorrow.

Not everything turns out, though. Sometimes terrible things happen.

My mom is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Its progression has been rapid in recent months, after several years of slow, incremental changes. Who she is, now, is not who she was. She was Dad’s partner in the farm when I was a child, doing everything from driving truck, to operating a combine, to bookkeeping, all while looking after three kids. She ate well, exercised, and looked after herself. This disease wasn’t her fault.

Does that mean, though, that looking after her health was a waste? That she should have ignored her health and lived as if there was no tomorrow? Of course not. Things likely would have been much worse.

Some parts of our health we simply can’t control. Some parts of our life will be burdened with suffering, for ourselves or those we love. All we can do is keep going and do our best.

In the Arena with an Unpredictable Future

None of us can predict the future. None of us know what’s coming. Tomorrow, we could be diagnosed with some terrible disease, the world could fall into war, or some natural disaster could strike. So much could happen that could irrevocably change our lives.

What we can do, though, is our best. We can set ourselves up to be successful, to take advantage of luck. No, this doesn’t mean we can prevent uncontrollable disasters, but we can work through them, if we’re prepared. Quiet that little critic in your head. Avoid them in your life.

Go on an adventure; go on the adventure of your life. Whether that’s going farming, starting a business, running for a political position on something as small as municipal council, or as big as federal government, or whether it’s something as personal as getting married, or choosing to be a parent.

After all, it’s not the critic who counts. The credit belongs to you—the person actually in the arena, marred by dust, sweat, and blood, trying your best, getting it wrong, over and over, who may succeed spectacularly or fail miserably. But at least you will have failed while daring greatly.