Positively Ruthless

Ruthlessness is often perceived as negative, suggesting insensitivity and arrogance. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it is “the quality of not thinking or worrying about any pain caused to others when deciding what you need to do.” It indicates a lack of care and harm to others, and definitely a lack of compassion, but it is not the case for how athletes and others striving for world-class performance perceive ruthlessness.

Olympic rower Katherine Grainger is a great ruthless example. She’s won one gold and four silver Olympic medals and has six World titles. She has been rowing since 1993 and her competitive career extends across three decades and five Olympic games. In her autobiography, she wrote, “Single-minded focus of being an athlete towards achieving a goal” is one of the most important qualities to achieve that goal. She later added in an interview, “As athletes we have just the sole aim. We only worry about our one overriding goal. There is a real purpose to what we do.” This is how athletes perceive ruthlessness: the single-minded goal focuses to work relentlessly towards success. 

In research, Hardy and colleagues (2017) interviewed athletes who won a single event or medal and those with multiple successes across many years. They observed that for elite athletes to keep training at the highest level and winning over and over again, they needed to be selfish and ruthless about their goals. 

The idea that to succeed at the highest possible level, you must remove distractions and make sacrifices is partly accurate. Ruthlessness is about staying focused no matter what and improving without assigning energy to unrelated tasks and efforts. For athletes, it is not about harming others for the greatest cost; it is most often personified by athletes prioritizing sport above all else. They (often) sacrifice their education, social events, relationships, and finances to pursue sporting excellence. Athlete sometimes perceives social events as distractions, so opts not to go to parties because they are ruthless with their goal and understand the importance of self-prescribed sacrifice. Their current goal takes priority.

While most people perceive ruthlessness as stepping on others to win at any cost, that’s not always true. The evidence suggests that a ruthless person is someone willing to make sacrifices and streamline their actions from anything that is not goal-related to achieve continuous success in their field.

For Katherine Grainger, she prioritized well. At other times, she was ruthless in her sport and education (she holds a PhD). Perhaps we can reclaim the notion of ruthlessness, making it a positive attribute as athletes like Grainger have done. If you want to succeed at the highest level, ruthlessness is part of taking control of your life and your goals and prioritizing what’s important now.