During the Olympics, we find ourselves watching sports we haven’t watched for four years, or maybe eight (or…ever?).  We’re emotionally moved by strangers we’ve never heard of from places we’ve never been.  While this is a visceral experience, there’s a logic behind it—a logic we can apply to our own sport experience and, even more, to our life outside of sports.

Part of this reaction stems from the understanding, at least implicitly, that the particular Olympic athlete in question has devoted countless hours over the better part of their life to this one endeavor.  Though, it’s not just that he clocked the hours, but that he did it in a certain manner: showing up focused, in the most impressive way, on a daily basis, doing all the little things with great attention to detail such as lifting that extra rep in the weight room, or finishing that final lap with maximal effort following three hours of sprint work.

We have all tried this in some way and fallen short.  Many have played a sport and know how hard it is to truly give your entire self to the enterprise.  Many have attempted to learn to play an instrument well, or tried writing a book, learning a language, etc.  We realize it’s not so hard to be “pretty good” at something, though even this requires some determination, as the inertia to extricate oneself from the couch is often too much to overcome.  But it requires super-human focus to be world-class, as very few of us have been world-class at something, by definition.

Another facet involved in our emotional experience of voyeuristic sporting excellence lies in the fact that we’re watching physically feats simply unattainable for the rest of us—that this athlete has won some version of the nature/nurture lottery.  As Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer wryly comments, “Anyone interested in winning Olympic gold medals must select his or her parents very carefully.”  Along with their athletic physique, these athletes maintain a disposition which lets them—makes them?—do all these admirable things and do them with super-human determination.

Eric Heiden knows something about this.  In 1980 he set an Olympic record by winning all five of the long track speed skating races, setting four Olympic records in the process.  He went on to earn his bachelors degree at Stanford University and then his medical degree there and has served as the U.S. Olympic Speed Skating Team Doctor for the past four Olympics.  In a Wall Street Journal interview he highlights the importance of the innatemotivation needed for such athletic success, commenting that this motivation is necessarily “a very hard thing to teach an athlete.”

From here, we can’t help but examine our own concept of praise.  In doing so, it helps to look at praise’s opposite: blame.  We often diminish the blame assigned to one’s malfeasance if their action was caused by factors out of their immediate control.  We mitigate the blame of the cult member’s wrongheaded belief-system when we realize she was brainwashed throughout childhood, and we remove some of the blame from the once-upstanding citizen who then acts in a despicable manner because a brain tumor interfered with the normal functioning of the brain.  Their nurture and nature, respectively, are to blame.  And it all calls into question just what we mean by claiming someone deserves a particular judgment.

So, likewise, it’s a wonder we don’t curtail the praise we assign to Olympic athletes: how it is that they deserve praise.  The motivation they maintain—the innate quality Heiden mentions—is such because their brain fires in the way that it does.  If only we had that kind of brain and that type of body then it would be us on the pedestal.  (Though, if I had that brain and that body, then I would be some other person: I’d be that Olympian.)

And so after all is said and done, we can still rightly marvel at the virtue Olympians represent.  But we should also realize that we too can achieve that same sort of greatness: regardless of the outcome, in our own particular chosen endeavors we can know that, to paraphrase Heiden, we “challenged [ourselves] and performed up to what [we] consider acceptable.”

These are the sorts of fruits one acquires from surrounding oneself with inspired people, from watching inspired people.  It’s a way of tweaking our own nurture in the nature/nurture equation and adding just a little more inspiration to the formula.  An environment that offers praise causes others to seek such approval—by virtue of our natural inclination to do so—thus creating a cycle in which praise begets more praiseworthy actions.  This certainly, is a good thing, and you can’t blame us for that.