Everyone who knows me knows one thing: I care deeply about rowing.
The water, the athletes, the strange magic of eight people moving as one. Rowing is, and has always been, the anchor that grounds me. It is honest. It is repetitive. It is technical. It is teamwork with nowhere to hide. And it has a way of reducing big ideas down to one simple truth.
The clock does not care.
That is why a phrase like “sustained 3% growth” landed with me when I listened to the U.S. Chamber’s State of American Business address. Not because I’m captivated by an economic slogan, but because rowing has trained my brain to take pace seriously. In rowing, small differences compound fast. And the outcome is usually decided by a margin that looks ridiculous on paper.
At the Tokyo Olympics, the men’s eight final was a perfect example. New Zealand won gold in 5:24.64. Germany took silver in 5:25.60. That’s 0.96 seconds separating first and second in a race that lasts more than five minutes.
That is rowing in a nutshell. Tiny margins, massive meaning.
Now take that lens and point it at the country. Three percent is not a sliver. Three percent is a tempo. Three percent is a pace you can build a strategy around. It is the difference between feeling like the future is expanding and feeling like you are stuck protecting what you already have. In rowing terms, it is the difference between moving with momentum and rowing in place.
That is what I heard in the Chamber’s framing. A belief that growth is not just a statistic, it is the mechanism that raises living standards and expands opportunity over time. And I know “growth” can sound clinical, or self-serving, or like something that only matters on Wall Street. But rowing has made me allergic to fake narratives. You cannot “manifest” speed in a boat. You earn it. And when you earn it, it changes what is possible for everyone in the boat.
Reaching and sustaining 3% growth is the fastest, surest way to raise living standards for Americans. And that is a goal we all share. Making pro-growth policy choices will begin to alleviate the pressures and frustrations people are feeling today and ensure future generations of Americans enjoy security, mobility and opportunity.
– Chamber President and CEO Suzanne P. Clark
That’s the part I want to pull back to Oklahoma.
Because in Oklahoma, we are not having an academic argument about whether work matters, or whether business matters. We live it. Our communities are full of employers who want to expand, who want to modernize, who want to hire. The constraint is often not ambition. It’s capacity. It’s workforce. It’s whether we are building the talent pipeline that makes growth real on the ground.
This is why the work we are doing through Oklahoma Competes matters so much right now.
Oklahoma Competes is a long-term, data-driven framework to strengthen the state’s competitiveness, built around four fundamentals: economic climate, education and workforce, infrastructure, and innovation and entrepreneurship. That matters because it creates a common baseline. It helps us see, in plain terms, what is working and what is not, and it keeps the discussion from turning into competing anecdotes. It also makes it easier to build agreement around the practical steps that strengthen opportunity for Oklahomans and competitiveness for employers.
When you talk to business leaders across this state, you hear a consistent theme. They are not asking for miracles. They are asking for a pipeline that works.
A pipeline that starts early, because it is hard to talk about “workforce” if a child cannot read confidently.
When you talk to business leaders across this state, you hear a consistent theme. They are not asking for miracles. They are asking for a pipeline that works. A pipeline that starts early, because it is hard to talk about “workforce” if a child cannot read confidently.
– Luke Reynolds, Public Affairs Director at The State Chamber of Oklahoma
A pipeline that respects all paths, including career tech, apprenticeships, credentials, community colleges, and four-year degrees.
A pipeline that makes it easier for people to see a future here, build a life here, and stay here.
That is not abstract, and it is not partisan. It is basic competitiveness. Oklahoma Competes gives us a way to organize that work and keep after it, year after year.
And from a rowing perspective, it’s also common sense. If you are serious about winning, you do not just hype the race. You build the program. You recruit. You develop. You train. You make the fundamentals repeatable. You do the boring work that creates the exciting outcomes.
Workforce is the same. A strong economy needs people. It needs skilled people. It needs people who can get trained without navigating a maze. It needs employers who can partner with education and training providers without reinventing the wheel every time. It needs a state that treats talent like infrastructure.
That brings me back to another theme from the Chamber’s address that I think deserves more attention than any single policy line.
Fear.
Not fear as an emotion we shame people for, but fear as a force that shapes decisions. Fear makes people reach for control. Fear makes leaders promise protection instead of opportunity. Fear turns the future into something to manage, instead of something to build.
Rowing has a version of this. You can feel it when a crew starts rowing tight. People shorten up. They rush. They chase. They try to “make something happen” instead of trusting the rhythm. And once that shows up, it is hard to win, because the boat stops moving freely.
The antidote is not bravado. It’s confidence, earned through preparation. It’s optimism, backed by work.
That is where I think the Chamber was trying to land. Businesspeople are not optimistic because they are detached from reality. They are optimistic because they make payroll. They take risks. They build things. They are trained, by experience, to believe tomorrow can be better, because they are the ones doing the work to make it so.
I see that same spirit in Oklahoma when employers invest in training, when they partner with schools, when they take a chance on someone new to the workforce, when they expand a plant, when they open a second location, when they sponsor a program that builds skills locally. It is not flashy. It is faithful.
Oklahoma Competes is, in many ways, an attempt to put structure around that faith. To turn optimism into a strategy. To make our talent pipeline stronger, our infrastructure more reliable, our business climate more competitive, and our innovation economy more attractive.
That is how you build sustainable pace.
Rowing is a funny sport to build a metaphor around because you spend the whole time facing the wrong direction. You are sitting backward, moving forward. You cannot see the finish line. You rely on rhythm, on trust, on the person calling the race, and on the discipline to keep pulling even when you would rather stop.
It is not a bad way to think about this moment.
We do not have to pretend the challenges are small. Inflation has been real. Housing is tight. Employers are still hunting for workers. Technology is changing faster than most institutions can keep up. Those are not imaginary problems.
But we also do not have to let fear set the pace.
If we are serious about growth, if we are serious about opportunity, if we are serious about keeping Oklahoma competitive, we build the fundamentals. We strengthen the talent pipeline. We measure what matters.
We do the work that makes the boat move.
Luke Reynolds is the managing editor of Oklahoma Business Voice and Public Affairs Director at The State Chamber of Oklahoma. He can be reached at luke@okstatechamber.com.
