Nathaniel

Shockey

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September 2, 2009

The Column That Gives 110 Percent. Not!

Reports are that, once the regular season begins, many of the NFL’s players plan to give 110 percent.

I find this statistic disagreeable.

One cannot, under any circumstance, no matter how Herculean the effort, give 110 percent of oneself. It’s mathematically impossible.

In fact, it’s nearly impossible to give even the full hundred.

Growing up, I watched figure skating because my parents occasionally did and I had no idea of the sociological implications. I merely saw a bunch of guys and gals going out on that rink, skating their hearts out, and giving a large percentage of themselves. But I quickly learned that judges were not prone to giving out sixes (usually the top score possible) to anyone but the last skater in the competition. This is because no matter how well one person may skate, the next person can potentially be even better. Who’s to know? And the point of this is that the judges, until the last skater, can’t possibly be ready to give out a full 100 percent of the possible points because they don’t yet know what 100 percent might look like.

In fact, even if someone does earn the perfect score of six, this doesn’t mean he couldn’t have possibly improved on his effort in one tiny way. It may have been a slightly smoother landing on the triple Lutz, a double Salchow, or perhaps a more convincing facial expression when the music turned happy during the latter part of the routine. Effort or performance can almost always be improved.

To attach a percentage to either is already nebulous at best. But to suggest that the performance was representative of the full 100 percent of any individual’s potential is extremely presumptuous.

And yet athletes repeatedly claim that they not only give this 100 percent, they’ll even throw in an extra 10.

I can give you 100 percent of my shirts. I could give you all 100 percent of my DVDs, although you’d probably have to kill me first. And assuming I didn’t misplace them, I could even give you 100 percent of my forms of legal identification. But far be it from me to suggest I’d ever give you 100 percent of my effort. I could try, but I don’t expect I’ll ever succeed.

In hindsight, I can only remember a handful of times I even came close to giving the full hundred. There was that time I was racing my classmates in gym class in fourth grade. I can also recall the first time I danced with a girl in middle school, at which point I gave at least 90 percent of my effort, assuming no more than 10 percent was lost to hormonal distraction. I’m competitive in any sort of contest ever, whether it is a game of Scrabble with my dad or duck-duck-goose with five year olds. I simply prefer to win. And throughout a lifetime littered with organized sports, I am still not sure I ever gave a full 100 percent. However, I can be sure I never gave 110 percent. I know this because I passed third grade math.

The only two times it is ever acceptable to even speak a number greater than one hundred followed by the word percent is if a) you’re ridiculing the practice, or b) you’re speaking about how something increased.

If one sells 10 pairs of shoes one week and proceeds to sell 21 the following week, that means sales just rose 110 percent. However, the salesperson could not possibly have given any more than 100 percent of his effort during the process, no matter how hard he may have tried or how successful his efforts were. In fact, the most likely scenario is that he could have tried harder.

I would encourage a substantially increased level of skepticism toward anyone who ever claims he plans on giving even 101 percent of their effort, much less 110 percent. Their expectations are too high. Or they just suck at math.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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