Unwell

I’m going to suggest that conflating your general sense of “nobody wants to work anymore” with some millionaire athletes maybe not performing at their absolute peak at all times is wrong.

Suggesting that Canada has a “waning productivity trend” is just bunk. The truth is, Canada’s GDP has continued to grow over the last 20+ years, just not as fast as that of other countries! But our billionaires aren’t getting as quickly enriched as other countries’ billionaires, so we get spoonfed the lie that our country is doing terrible, to try and get us to sacrifice our time, our lifeblood, for their sake.

For the general population of workers, wage growth has not kept up with productivity growth, meaning workers are getting less of a share of their output, and meaning they’re having a harder time paying rent, buying houses and groceries, saving for retirement, etc. For millionaire athletes, this is not the case.

For workers, one of the easiest motivations is to give them a larger share of the profits made from their labour. For millionaire athletes, that is unlikely to motivate them once the season is in session. So then, yes, it’s going to be difficult for any coach that doesn’t start understanding sports psychology and what their athletes actually need from their leaders.

I took the time to read it, to make sure I understood it. That link shows Canada top-5 out of 16 westernized countries for productivity growth for 2012 (11 years ago!), and it shows Canada’s productivity growing when half the countries actually had a negative productivity growth rate. It then goes off on a tangent about productivity levels (US$ of product produced per worker-hour worked) rather than growth, without delving into any actual possible causes for the productivity levels as they are. So, not exactly a heavy or detailed analysis, that in the end actually shows Canada is turning around the productivity growth trend from the start of the millennium.

As for “nobody wants to work anymore”, that’s the implicit message workers will hear when being told things like
“Canada’s productivity metrics have been trending down for years. There’s isn’t a manager on this board who doesn’t sympathize with Jay’s challenge. Getting everyone pulling on the rope in the same direction is a Herculean effort these days. I’ve got the grey hairs to prove it!”
or
“Getting individuals to sacrifice for a greater good is a massive challenge for all of society now, not just athletes. Everyone has to be sold on “what’s in it for me” now and this messaging has to be continually reinforced and ‘sold’ on an individual basis. Honestly, it’s exhausting.”
or
“There are numerous contributing factors to productivity, cooperation and self-sacrifice being two contributors that I alluded to.”

What is this “greater good” you allude to, and why do workers have to “self-sacrifice” for it? And what exactly do workers have to do that is considered “self-sacrifice”? For workers, the answers seem to be that the “greater good” is to make increasingly large amounts of profit, and the “self-sacrifice” for the workers is to work more hours for less purchasing power (either by working free overtime, or by accepting wage increases below the rate of inflation, thus hollowing out their purchasing power). No wonder workers refuse to be bullied anymore, and instead start asking what’s in it for them.

And all that is completely irrelevant when discussing the motivation of millionaire and multi-millionaire athletes, whose purchasing power _has_ increased over the years, rather than decreased. The only connection, really, is that young workers and young millionaire athletes refuse to be bullied or cowed into compliance anymore. So now it’s up to the leaders (coaches) to learn sports psychology, and learn how to motivate with heart rather than a big stick.