Tom Justice & Losing Your Exceptional | The Harsh Realities Of Reinventing Your Self-Value Once The Spark That Made You Special Burns Out

For Tom Justice, nothing could replace the rush of being an Olympic hopeful - being hand-selected to go against the Russians, massaged, getting access to the top-end equipment, and having his bike maintained by experts. Tom was in heaven. Then there was the training itself, racing with the official US Olympic team at California State inside the fabled velodrome. Tom would never get back to that level of thrill - not even close, but he tried.

Tom made a list of jobs he thought would be as exhilarating as cycling for the US. Jobs like a helicopter pilot, a lock-picker, a priest, an EMT. He even interviewed for the DEA and tried to join the French Foreign Legion, but nothing stuck. Nothing could stack up against the adrenaline and the respect of calling oneself an Olympic hopeful. So, when Tom washed out and gave up training, he fell back into old habits. He found his way back into a toxic pastime, one that Tom promised himself he would quit once he made the Olympic team. But now he'd been cut, and old habits are easy to slide into. Tom needed that rush. He needed to feel special again and to be exceptional. To get that rush? Tom walked into the LaSalle Bank in Highland Park wearing a baseball cap and shades and handed the bank teller a 3x5 card. Then Tom put his hands together and lowered his head, a gesture of peace or prayer while he waited. The card said, “This is a robbery. Put all your money in the bag.”

Tom stripped out of his clothes a few minutes later, revealing a spandex racing suit, just like Superman stripping out of his civilian costume. Then Tom clicked his bike shoes into the pedals of his aluminum training bike, buckled his silver bullet helmet on, slung the messenger bag of money over his shoulder, and sped away. He flew past cops in traffic with thousands of dollars as a backpack, giving away the money to the homeless and outsmarting the FBI. This would be Tom's new Olympics. This was how Tom would feel special again - he'd steal his narrative back.

_________________________________________________________________________

There's an old proverb in sports - the athlete dies twice. The death we all experience is a more common death. That's a physical death of old age or tragedy, the death of the body. But before natural causes, the athlete must first experience a more spiritual death – an ego death of sorts when they can't seem to keep up with their sport anymore. It's when the spinner lags behind, when the boxer can't take another punch, or when the skier’s knees just can't handle another slope. This year, everyone watching the Olympics saw that sort of spiritual death in the tragedy of young competitor Kamila Valieva.

The fifteen-year-old skater at the center of the Russian doping scandal broke down crying, and you would be right to assume it was a combination of shame and disappointment. However, between falling during her performance and getting caught on a drug test, there was more to the tears and losing one winter event. Kamila must have realized that the Russia committee never sends athletes to the second Olympic games after they've been publicly shamed. Until now, Kamila had lived her life as an Olympic hopeful who goes around without bothering to mask their secret identity. But what is she now? How does an athlete see their personal narrative without the one thing that makes them special? To find out, we have a few myths to bust about athletes who are forced to give up or about anyone who puts the core of their identity in a single skill that gets stripped away.

Myth One: A 2014 Gallup poll reported that over half of Americans got their identity from their jobs. Has that changed with the Great Resignation in full swing? Can it change?

Joe: Some time ago, early in the inception of the podcast itself, you and I talked about Michael Jordan's Sports Hall of Fame speech. And if I remember correctly, we sided on the idea that his narrative about being an underdog and doing it all himself was bullshit?

Todd: Yeah, and you see this a lot with athletes. They say it was uphill both ways, but they had trainers, parents, coaches, scouts, and teachers all bending over backwards to get them to where they are. And as for Michael Jordan, they make it a thing where he got cut in high school. Well, he didn't. He was in the JV, and then he went right to Varsity. He then went to North Carolina at a huge college and was drafted into the NBA.

Joe: Scouts were after him as early as JV or something like that. It’s like he always had personal coaches and personal mentors.

Todd: Let's face it, he was blessed with the big shoe deal. He was an amazing athlete, but that is what made him a billionaire. So, to play the narrative of and just being born with that kind of physical ability yet no one believed in him is kind of ridiculous.

Joe: I think that is one of the big focuses of today's episode. The reason why we started working on this is because we wanted to focus on the Olympics, especially with what happened during this winter Olympics. But the idea that one would turn around and rewrite their own narrative after they found out that they are basically superhuman.

Todd: You don't have to be Michael Jordan or in the MBA to run a crazy narrative. I want you to try this with someone who has been successful and ask them how they got there. Really listen to their version of the story.

Joe: Yeah, and that is the real take on this episode. I know we're going to talk a lot about the Olympics, but to me, anyone who has one skill in a very niche field, that's the same as these athletes where they get amazing success because they're highly specialized. Then at some point, they have to write a narrative to justify their good fortune, which is usually an underdog narrative. And we are also going to talk about the narrative that happens when that skill isn't being used anymore. You know, what are you when you don't need to do that one thing you're good at anymore?

You don't need to be an Olympic Athlete to relate to this. But the reason we use Olympic athletes for this is because it is the most obvious, and we get to see it play out in real-time. If you're watching the Winter Olympics and you saw the figure skater get shamed out of the Olympics, then we all realize we were watching somebody whose narrative was about to die. I think it is important to note that this topic is for anybody who does a niche job or has one thing that they do in life that they identify with.

Now, when we talk about people who are currently giving up that one skill, the one narrative that makes them a superhero, what happens when we give that up? As Americans, we don't have safety nets financially. So, if we're forced to invest everything, we do it emotionally into our job. Our personal narrative becomes the thing we do really well. But I've been thinking lately about the Great Resignation and this whole movement about people quitting their jobs; it might have changed that up a bit. We used to call it quits, but now that it's a movement with everyone doing it, that's not a moment of weakness. You're marching against tyranny. I'm wondering if it's easier now because of it to break away from that "work in my narrative" value.

I started looking up when we started naming people after the thing they do. If anyone thinks that we're full of it because we are saying that people identify themselves with their job, that goes back to Medieval Times. I found a BBC article, and they talk about names like Miller, Hunter, Smith, and Carpenter are the most common last names here in the US because they are related to a job title. A lot of our names aren't biblical. A lot of our names simply came from Medieval Times, and it's because a father did a profession and trained their kids to do it as well. You are named after the thing you do.

Myth Two: Athletes hold one skill their entire lifetime. If they don't have a backup plan for when they age out, that's just poor planning on their part, right?

There's a Professor of Psychology at the University of Ontario named Annie Wilson, and she talks about the emergence of varied jobs and income tears. So, we start out in Medieval history calling people by what they do, but now we sort of identify people by their title. If you tell me your name is Smith, you’d be a blacksmith and must have money. We do that same thing with surgeons. If somebody introduces themselves as a heart surgeon, you assume they are educated and probably came from a high socio-economic class.

The same Professor, Annie Wilson, talked about a phenomenon called enmeshment. These people let their job consume their identity, and it involves people who invested disproportionate amounts of time and energy into their careers. This is what Annie Wilson calls measurement boundaries between work and personal life. Those lines are blurred, especially for people with jobs that are relatively self-determined where you're not clocking out. Let's talk about the signs of enmeshment because one of them is bringing up your job title for no good reason. Key signs include thinking about work when you're home when you should clearly be disconnected from your job, and if you are lacking hobbies outside work skills. 

With that being said, if our hypothetical dentist, doctor, lawyer or police lose their job, if they lose that one skill that makes them special, what happens? They likely will feel lost and not good enough anymore. It is truly an existential crisis, and you're left with a blank slate like these Olympic athletes. Michael Jordan had to invent an underdog narrative and Tom Justice a new "hobby" to compete with that past version of himself. When you have nothing left, most people just fall into depression. However, Tom Justice invented a heroic bandit narrative for himself. He literally went out looking for a new narrative and landed on bandit.

Myth Three: What does an athlete become when they're no longer a ball donkey machine? What about us? Will we become when the skill we’ve owned becomes automated?

Some time ago, we had an episode talking about how journaling about your values 15 minutes a day can help redirect this way of thinking and create a new (non-criminal) path. I also looked for the number one expert in the world for bringing athletes back into the fold once they leave the track. So, this guy is from the University of Stirling, and his name is David Lavallee. He is the man to see about bringing athletes back Specialists. He's helped organizations understand how athletes can exit their sport and enter work or education programs.

My favorite study of his is, are athletes more employable than non-athletes? I think that they can handle competitiveness, which can work amazingly in the right jobs. And they say athletic-minded people are entrepreneurial self-starters. David Lavallee's study found across the board - The athletes performed better because they would come in with that disciplined attitude and channel that into what they did. They're just changing what they're mastering. In short, everyone is capable of amazing things when the time calls on us. But day-to-day, we're all pretty normal. We're all just checking Twitter, enjoying our lunch, and all like going to the movies.

 I guess what I'm going to pull for the end of this episode is the Buddhist approach, which is that it is okay to think of yourself as normal and not put the pressure of being exceptional on yourself. However, you can also choose a thing to be exceptional at but be sure to separate it from yourself. What is the answer to not becoming like Michael Jordan or Tom Justice and having to rewrite your narrative and face an existential crisis? Just consider yourself skilled at one thing and have set a standard for yourself. But you yourself are fairly normal. It sounds boring but finding your core values and putting what you do out of your internal values, but could be a real personality saver.

Todd: Tom was never greedy. When he went to do the robberies, a lot of them only gave a few thousand at a time. He didn't try to get the voltage and get more. But with all the drinking, drugging, not sleeping, and severe depression, he starts to make mistakes. And the biggest mistake he makes is taking a steelman bike and leaving it behind at one of the robberies. He ditched it. But he knew those bikes were incredibly rare, and even though he didn't buy brand new, he knew that they could eventually trace that back to him. So, the cop started researching, the FBI got involved, and they're very resourceful. They called Steelman, called around the cycling community, and finally got the name. And the name was Tom Justice.

Joe: Nice. Oh, did you happen to read about how he evaded the cops when he ditched his bike? He got off the bike, dove into what he called a drainage, and crawled into a pipe like a rat. It reminded me of the scene in Predator where he crawled into the brambles and up the creek. He then hid in the murky water for hours.

Todd: Once they discovered the bike, it was just a matter of time. He missed his family, and he was tired, so he went back home. And finally, the FBI came and got them. Now, this robbery spree went for four full years in the big city of Chicago, robbed 26 Banks and cleared net $129 thousand dollars.

Joe: Damn, without a gun and without taking anything for himself. That is wild.

Todd: They brought him, and Tom confesses right away. After that, he didn't really have a lot of chips anymore, defense-wise. Based on his crimes and confessing to them, he ultimately faced around 120 years in prison. However, he had a good attorney, and he only got 11 years for it.

Joe: That's awesome.

Final Thoughts

It doesn't matter if you dunk a ball, ride a bike, or assemble computers. It doesn't matter if you perform your tasks for 10 months or 10 years. Your work is not your identity, not even if you appreciate your job title. No amount of hearing ‘doctor’ or ‘president’ before your name will ever take the place of values - values that you've chosen for yourself outside your scope of work.

Gone are the days of naming our children by the job we've trained them for; we're not in the Middle Ages. We don't call the bag boy at the grocery store John Bagman, and we don't call our Uber driver Mary Red Light Runner. If your job is making you miserable, start assessing your values and plan for a new track. Even more, do not stick around because you don't know what you’d be without your position. Want to know what the most important job title in the world is? Mother, Father, Daughter, Friend, Partner. Be one of those first if you can.

By the end of his career, Tom Justice had robbed 26 banks. Most of the time, he was so good at his job that nobody knew the robbery was underway until the cops arrived confused. But that was Tom's fatal flaw - he was exceptional, and he couldn't allow himself to be just a bike enthusiast or just a son or brother. After he was caught, his roommate said it best, “Tom couldn’t be just a bank robber, he had to be a great bank robber. Tom had to be exceptional. His personal narrative wouldn't allow for anything less.”