I have been skiing these last few days, and as I pass in and out of the ski lodge, I keep seeing this faded old poster with a skier leaping off a cliff and the phrase, “Go big or go home.”
American culture is full of idiomatic expressions like this. It is hard to tell where they come from, and sometimes the meaning is hard to track because the phrase gets adopted by different groups of people. This phrase became popular in the early 90s when extreme sports became mainstream. Since then, you will hear a phrase like this being used constantly. I will hear it every once in a while during a business call with the speaker, usually asking a question like this, “we need to go big or go home, right?”
The meaning of this phrase has a lot to do with the notion that these extreme sports emerged from a subculture that celebrated taking riskier moves that were more complicated and dangerous. Participants are highly encouraged to commit to tricks or stunts fully. If you weren’t going to push your limits, you might as well not participate. Was this a celebration of risky behavior? Perhaps, because each generation of skateboarders, motorsport athletes, snowboarders, surfers were being judged on their ability to come up with an even more daring move.
These will sometimes get named after the person who performs this at first, but more often than not, they get special names assigned, usually in sequence. For example, the Frontside Caballerial Kickflip or the Casper Flip Rewind refers to a sequence of moves the person does in the air before landing. Yesterday, while I was following my daughter down a ski run, I noticed a young man deliberately plant his ski into the ground, which caused him to flip around, It looked like an awkward dance move but ended up with him back in the original position. I wonder what the name of this move was, and perhaps one day that earned him the title of “going big.”
After passing this poster for the fifth time, I finally started to reflect on this phrase in my own life. Am I going big? I certainly was not doing anything of the sort. I was going down the double black diamond mogul run, just praying that I would survive without any broken bones. However, this question was a deeper consideration. Was I going big in my commitments?
The answer is no. So this New Year’s evening, that gives me something to ponder. What will I end up committing to? Will I go big, or will I go home?
