Everyone's A Winner Baby

The idea of "best" is incredibly arbitrary and fleeting. Even in areas where reliable, absolute data is available, results seem to change on a constant basis.

(Before I get started, here's a previous post about what I think of "Best").

In the world of sports, why does the gold medal winner at the Olympics only finish is seventh place at their event's World Cup a few weeks later? Why is it so rare for a particular golfer or race horse and jockey or Nascar driver to win multiple big events in a single season?

If you're the best at something, shouldn't you be winning event after event, show after show, award after award?

The most obvious explanation is that there are an enormous number of variables in every activity. Even the best athlete in the world can have a bad day. Track conditions vary. The whole "butterfly beating its wings" thing comes into play.

This might explain the differences on a particular occasion, but shouldn't things average out over time? A single race or run or game might go badly, but the "best" should bounce back and be on top again soon afterwards. A lot of the time, though, this doesn't seem to be the case -- someone who has been declared the best at some point will typically see results that go up and down for years at a time.

Another explanation is the simple arbitrary nature of the term. What does "best" even mean? In many ways, it's like "quality" -- something I've complained about previously. Even when something can be judged based on absolute, irrefutable data it's still debatable which data is actually the most important, how results should be weighted, when variables should be taken into account, etc.

And a third explanation relates to timeframes. Is consistency over the long-run more important, or is it better to have an absolutely stellar performance once in a while? Again, this is arbitrary, but it's interesting how it relates directly to marketing vs. sales -- marketing is more concerned about consistency in the long run and driving towards lifetime achievement whereas sales is much more about doing really well this time (even if it means doing nothing to improve your chance of success next time).

It's pretty clear that these issues regularly pop up in the business world. A simple example is how Canada's three big cell phone companies have been arguing over claims of "fastest", "most reliable", and even just "reliable" lately.

In the end, if you're truly the "fastest", "best" or whatever, shouldn't it be obvious? Would you really need to constantly prove yourself? Why don't you go out and win a dozen big events in a row if you're so awesome? You probably don't even need to say so; people will just know.