Success Articles

Grit

The path to Olympic glory is littered with failure, but research claims life’s disappointments are crucial to success So, imagine you have this choice: if you eat the blue sweetie I’m offering, you will never fail again for the rest of your life.

You’re tempted by the blue sweetie, aren’t you? I mean, who wants to fail? Loser! It’s the insult of our times. A group of eight-year-old girls at a prestigious London girl’s school pondered this question when put to them by their headmistress Heather Hanbury earlier this year. To these Wimbledon High students, it seemed a great deal — nearly all of them said yes, gimme the blue sweetie.

“They can be afraid of things going wrong,” Hanbury said. “Their parents are equally affected; they don’t want their daughters to suffer.”

Of course! Who wants things to go wrong, or to suffer? So think about what you would choose and then read this. It’s a story about grit. Roll that word around in your mouth for a second to feel how scratchy and uncomfortable it is. But it has just been isolated by social scientists as the one character trait that is more predictive than almost any other, including intelligence, for succeeding in life’s most difficult challenges.

So how can we get ourselves some of this grit? Well, that’s the interesting part, the hard part. The secret to success, it turns out, is failure. Grit is the ability to fail repeatedly, fail hard, and keep on sucking it up. If you’re not practised at failing like this then, researchers have found, you’re not going to win at the hardest tasks. There’s a reason “grit” sounds like something a Victorian drill master would shout — it’s a word that comes from a different age, when fortitude and brave Kipling poems were what it was all about.

Now, we reject grit; we’d rather do everything we can to smooth the path. Parents insulate their children from failure. And in doing so, they make sure they are less likely to succeed. The more they want their child to do well, the more they are holding them back.

To find your way out of this modern paradox, let these people be your guide. Each of them, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, was thinking about character-building. Hanbury, the Wimbledon headmistress, we’ll return to at the end. Next is Dominic Randolph, the head of one of the most elite private schools in the world, in Manhattan. Riverdale Country School aims to cream off the best of the best with academic entrance tests, but Randolph found that “some of those who had high test-scores were either imploding or not working to their potential, and vice versa”.

Working at the other end of the economic spectrum but just a few hundred metres away in New York was David Levin, the co-founder of the radical KIPP schools programme, an ambitious new network of American schools that aims to transform ghetto children into graduates. He had set lofty targets for his children: that 75 per cent of them should get degrees. The first children attending KIPP got outstanding results and most went to college. So why did only a third of them graduate? And why was it not the brightest of his students that stayed the course?

Randolph and Levin began to ponder. What was this missing ingredient that really made the difference in how a person fared in life? It led them both, by strange coincidence, to come calling at the office of Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Duckworth herself had spent her twenties teaching in inner-city schools, and had reached the same conclusion as Randolph and Levin.

As she wrote in her PhD application: “After years working in schools I now have a distinctly different view of school reform. The problem is not only the schools but the students themselves. Here’s why: learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying. But it is also often daunting and exhausting ... educators and parents must first recognise that character is at least as important as intellect.”

So which parts of character are as important as smarts? Studies have shown that self-control is a big help to getting things done. It helps kids finish their homework, and adults with more self-control are better at things like dieting, unsurprisingly. But when Duckworth analysed the really successful, often they didn’t have much self-control (you don’t have to look at Oprah to know there are quite a few chubby successful people out there).

“Truly great accomplishment is not just about resisting temptations like TV,” Duckworth told me. “It’s about coping with things that actively make you want to give up. It’s the capacity for sustained effort in the face of setbacks.”

She decided to call this quality “grit” — committing to struggle rather than hoping for an easy win on The X Factor. She devised a simple test, the Grit Scale, of 12 questions that takes a minute to answer. You can rate yourself (see questionnaire at end of story). She tested students entering her university and it proved amazingly effective at predicting which would perform well. She then tested children competing in the National Spelling Bee on IQ and grit, and compared it with who won. IQ helped of course, but not nearly as much as scoring high on grit. In fact, bright kids may be the most fragile, because they are not used to things being hard.

Duckworth took her Grit Scale to the West Point military academy, where the first year is rightly called “Beast Barracks” for its high drop-out rate. The military wished it could predict better who drops out, so it gives each entrant a battery of tests, lasting for hours. At the end of Beast Barracks, the most accurate predictor of which soldiers stayed the course was Duckworth’s one-minute Grit Scale. “Suddenly, a lot of military people and policymakers started calling me,” said Duckworth.

Levin and Randolph were among them. Immediately they moved onto a more important question: could grit be taught? Levin went at it the most aggressively — if his poor students needed grit to survive when the odds were stacked against them, they were damn well going to learn it. As of 2009, teachers in four New York KIPP schools were retrained. The focus shifted: failure was embraced as an opportunity to show how tenaciously you could overcome it. Sport, they realised, was a great subject to teach grit, but talk of character suffused every single class.

“There just is no accomplishment without significant failure,” Levin said. “But these days that lesson has been lost. If a child had a low grade on a test, or didn’t make the team, it’s not permanent. The teacher will remind them of that. Indicate that the important work is to overcome the failure.”

In an even more radical move, Levin introduced the character report card. At the end of every term, the child is rated on seven qualities — chief among them grit and self-control — that scientists have isolated as key to success. This is discussed with parents with the same seriousness as academic grades.

Randolph has adopted the same approach at his elite school. He is the product of the British public school system, before emigrating to America. I tell him the idea of grit would make total sense to the 19th-century British headmasters who considered it their job to toughen up the empire-builders of the future. What are cold showers and cross-country runs other than grit-builders?

“That system was very negative, it was social Darwinism. They did achieve grit, but at too great a cost. They didn’t really care about people,” he said.

“But on the other hand, now we’re so uncomfortable with failure. The grade-inflation means that everyone now gets As or Bs. The feedback children get is that everything is OK about everything they do. It’s not a great learning experience for children. We are making them feel that the only right thing they can do is succeed.

It’s very detrimental to mental health, and detrimental to achievement in the long run.”

Randolph is confident grit can be taught. Most scientists agree that you probably get around a half or two-thirds of your character traits from your parents. The rest is cultivated. For grit, that means dealing with the non-fun stuff our culture — and human nature — naturally resists: rejection, getting badly hurt, rainy camping trips.

How will we tell if their experiment succeeds? For Levin, the proof will be in the college graduations, a decade from now, but he already insists “the difference our emphasis on character makes is transformative”. Duckworth doesn’t yet know how to prove grit can be taught, but like Levin and Randolph she urges parents to let their children fail a bit more. Admire the difficulty of the task undertaken more than the result. Focus on how to turn failure into a setback, rather than that A into an A*. Just the other day, Duckworth resisted her 10-year-old daughter’s pleas to drive her back to school to pick up a forgotten homework project.

“A lot of helicopter parents would have got in the car. Their instinct is to swoop in and save their kid. I said no.” Which brings us back to Wimbledon, and Hanbury, and the blue sweeties. Of course her girls were high-achieving, but did that actually mean they were deprived of a chance to hone their grit? After all, the longer it is before you experience failure, the more crippling it can be. “Character-building” is such a discredited idea it has now become a euphemism for anything ridiculously unpleasant. But Hanbury is unashamed of her belief that failure is “an important way to build character”.

“I think nowadays parents can get too involved in trying to remove all unhappiness from their children’s lives. And ironically, it can make children too anxious about their abilities, if they’re not good at first ... It’s very hard to give soundbite advice, but if your daughter comes home from school in a tizz about something awful that happened, just pause. Resist the temptation to pick up the phone and fix it for them.”

So earlier this year she decided to host “Failure Week” at her school. She asked the blue-sweetie question at the beginning of the sessions. And then came the crash-course in demystifying defeat. At the end of the week, almost every year group had halved the number choosing the blue sweetie. Think about all the failures in your life, all the defeats and embarrassments and sadnesses, high ambitions that fell short, and then ask yourself whether you want to erase them. Blue sweetie?

The grit scale test

Consider the following questions. Score your answers on a scale of Very much like me / Mostly like me / Somewhat like me / Not much like me / Not like me at all. Be honest, there are no right or wrong answers.

1 I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.
2 New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.
3 My interests change from year to year.
4 Setbacks don’t discourage me.
5 I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest.
6 I am a hard worker.

To find out your score, and complete the 12-point Grit Scale in full, go to Duckworth

Winners

Victory isn’t just talent or genetics. Success can be achieved just by changing a few simple things about yourself.

Had Andy Murray slammed that winning ball yesterday, instead of succumbing to Roger Federer’s shots, he would not only have become the first British Wimbledon champion in 76 years — he would also have changed the structure of his brain and body.

Winning a great victory is one of the most potent drugs known to humankind. Academy Award winners live an average of four years longer than Oscar nominees; Nobel Prize winners live an average of one and a half years longer than their nominated peers.

Nothing quite alters us like winning — and these changes are magnified when they happen on home territory. Unfortunately, Murray did not benefit from this elixir, though to have reached the final stages at all was a sort of victory in itself.

But why does winning have such a potent effect on our brains and bodies? Another sporting event will help me to explain.

It is August 19, 1995, and Mike Tyson walks into the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas to the roar of 17,000 fans — this is Tyson’s first appearance since being paroled after serving three years in jail for rape.

His opponent, Peter McNeeley, a Boston-Irishman, waits edgily. The bell rings and McNeeley is out, fists flailing — “a dervish with a death wish” as the sports journalist William McIlvanney described him. In spite of Tyson’s clumsy and ill-timed punches, it takes 89 seconds for him to finish the Irishman. On December 16, 1995, in the CoreStates Spectrum Arena in Philadelphia, Tyson’s second post-jail opponent, Buster Mathis Jr, awaits him — and it is another swift and ruthless dispatch. It is obvious why the boxing promoter Don King would not have wanted Tyson to restart his fighting career with a competition against a reigning champion.

But surely these two matches against “tomato cans” — as such patsies are known in US boxing — were more likely to trigger derision rather than acclaim for the former champion, weakening his self-belief and reducing his chances of being a winner? Far from it, King’s gut instinct knew better, and modern neuroscience has only just caught up with him, since it discovered “The Winner Effect”.

Take two male mice and place them into the equivalent of a boxing ring — but rig the match by slipping a little sedative into one animal’s pre-match food — to turn it into a “tomato can”. Unsurprisingly, the unsedated mouse wins; but when he has a later bout against a really tough opponent he is much more likely to win, having bested the weaker one.

What makes a winner? Winning. Boxing managers know this, which is why, on March 16, 1996, Mike Tyson returned to Las Vegas, to finish off the reigning WBC World Champion Frank Bruno, a Londoner, in three rounds. So how do we explain the winner effect? Let’s go back to Pasadena, California, during the 1994 Soccer World Cup Final between Brazil and Italy. Researchers from Georgia State University took saliva samples from Brazilian and Italian fans before and immediately after the game — which Brazil won on penalties. The Brazilian fans’ average testosterone level increased by 28 per cent, compared with a 27 per cent decrease for the Italians.

\ The winner effect works because it boosts testosterone, making us more aggressive, more competitive and more powerful, which turns us into winners. A victory triggers a release of testosterone and an increased quantity of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is the fuel for the brain’s reward system and it makes people feel good: it makes them feel smarter, more confident and boosts their appetite for many things, including sex, money and risk. This could turn people into spenders, willing to take a punt and damn the consequences.

Everyone knows about the home team advantage. Footballers playing at their own ground have higher testosterone levels than they do when playing away matches.

Much less known is that the home advantage plays out in business and politics as well. In one study at the University of British Columbia, business students carried out a negotiation exercise where they had to get the best price for wholesale coffee for a large hotel chain, either as buyer or seller. Students negotiated either in their “home” office, a neutral space, or in the “away” office of their counterpart. The results were startling: no matter whether they were the buyer or seller, the negotiators on home ground struck better deals than those on neutral or “away” territory.

When it comes to international diplomacy and negotiations, the venue is critical, which is perhaps one reason why the US was willing to shoulder much of the cost of housing the United Nations in New York. It is also the reason why the first President Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met on a Soviet liner off Malta after the Berlin Wall crisis in 1989, rather than a more comfortable spot where a home advantage might have prevailed. The confidence that comes from winning — not necessarily over others, but equally by mastering a challenge or beating one’s own record — is not just mental, it also reshapes the chemistry and connections of our brains.

The testosterone levels of chess players surge before a competition, climbing more if they win and dropping if they lose. Financial traders make higher profits on days when their testosterone levels are high, as John Coates at the University of Cambridge has shown.

If England had won the Euro 2012 football tournament, the brain chemistry of the team and their millions of fans — male and female — would have been reshaped by their victory. But surely winning is not just about whether or not you have won in the past? Could it be related to genetics? Don’t high-achieving parents have successful children?

Not necessarily. Research in Denmark has shown that family-founded businesses lose value when a son or daughter takes over, compared with when an outsider is brought in. And there are many examples of the offspring of high-flying parents disappearing into obscurity in spite of their parents’ success. One reason for this is that successful parents can mentally hobble their children because the neurological effects of success and power on the parents’ brains make some egocentric and even narcissistic. This can make mothers or fathers reluctant to acknowledge the part that luck, hard work and persistence in the face of failure played in their success.

According to Fiona O’Doherty, a clinical psychologist, parents may, subconsciously, “hide the ladder” of hard work and good fortune underlying their own success from their children. This can be psychologically defeating for some individuals, who see their parents’ success as “God-given”.

And once you start to believe that your achievements are special talents that you either have or don’t have, rather than something you can work at, then small failures can become evidence of personal failure rather than setbacks.

This is why children who believe that their intelligence is a “thing” rather than a “process” give up on a problem when they don’t get it right the first time, as Carol Dweck at Stanford University has shown. Such children improve less in mathematics in secondary school, on average, irrespective of their ability, compared with children who see their intelligence as a process.

Also, children who believe that their personality is something they have inherited, rather than a process to be worked on, are more likely to withdraw socially if they are rejected at school, leading to further isolation. High achievement is always part talent, part effort — and a big chunk of luck. High-achieving parents are outliers and it is very hard for their offspring to replicate that cocktail of factors. The fourth ingredient for what makes a winner is motivation — that drive to achieve that burns in many but certainly not all. Winning is relative — it depends on what the goal is that you have set yourself. But, because we tend to use parents as models, the goals that children of high-achieving parents may set themselves can be daunting.

Research shows that winners tend to set intermediate goals for themselves — targets that stretch them but which are not so overly ambitious that they trigger the opposite outcome — a brain chemical-depleting “loser effect”.

The fifth ingredient may seem strange at first and is called the “Ben Franklin effect”, after the 18th-century US politician who cleverly guessed that the best way to bring round an opponent was to ask the enemy to do him a favour. He asked an opponent to lend him a valuable book that he had in his library. This led to his enemy wanting to do more for him, and eventually became a lifelong friend. Salespeople know this technique well — if you get someone to do something for you, no matter how small, they are then more likely to say yes to a subsequent bigger request, a feature of a fundamental mental mechanism called cognitive dissonance, where your mind tries to create consistency between what you do, feel and think.

You could also try wearing red. Russell Hill and Robert Barton, of the University of Durham, found that in Olympic events where red and blue shirts are allocated at random to competitors, such as boxing, red-shirted competitors won 62 per cent of the time, compared with only 38 per cent of the blue-shirted competitors. Something similar happens in football when teams have to wear an alternative to their usual strip colour — “red” teams scored more goals.

To understand this, imagine two men eyeballing each other, squaring up aggressively. One man’s face is very red, while the other man’s face is very white. What should we conclude about the relative mental states of the two men? Most people would assume that the red-faced man is angry and the white-faced one frightened. Our ancestors, who recognised these signals for what they were, could take advantage of them, by beating the adversary they perceived to be frightened, and backing off from the one they saw as being angry.

The final tip for winning is to fake a powerful pose. Cast your mind back to a business meeting you have attended. The most senior person at the table will be the one most likely to stretch back in his chair, clasp his hands behind his head, stick out his elbows or stretch out his legs. Alternatively, and more alarmingly for the juniors in the room, he might hunch forward over the table, head thrust out, hands clasped well out into the neutral no-man’s land of the table. The wary juniors, meanwhile, will be reducing their space as much as possible, tucking in their elbows, maybe hunching their shoulders and bowing their heads a little.

Dana Carney, from Columbia University, showed that simply striking an expansive “power pose” for just one minute at a time — for instance, leaning back on a chair with your feet on the table — boosts testosterone levels and reduces stress levels in both men and women and makes them feel more “in charge” when compared with a hunched “low power” pose.

But winning is not necessarily all about coming first — real winning is about feeling confident in yourself and meeting your own challenges. The struggle to always be the first or the best can become a burden because you can never be first at everything, so the goals should be authentic and meaningful to you personally. Above all, you have to believe that winning is a process that you can influence, not a product of some unchangeable fact about you.

Making Change Happen, on a Deadline

• The PreFabricated Building Parts Production Enterprise in Addis Ababa is a state-owned company that makes concrete walls and other structures, mainly for the Ethiopian government’s low-cost housing program. Public-sector construction companies in the third world are not generally known for energy, flexibility, risk-taking or creative thinking. PreFabricated, in other words, does not seem like the kind of business that would or could do astonishing things in a hurry.
  
  Like many companies in AIDS-wracked Ethiopia, PreFabricated had an AIDS policy, which included extra pay for its H.I.V. positive workers so they could buy more food. In March, 2008, the company decided to do more. It set a goal of persuading 70 percent of its employees — 700 people — to get tested for H.I.V. in 100 days.
  
  This was a startling idea. “Employees do not like to get tested at work because of privacy concerns,” said Seife Mergia, the company’s head of planning and information. Most of the employees did not work at headquarters, but were scattered around various construction sites. They were mostly contract day laborers — a workforce few companies invest in. Yet by day 40 the company had built a clinic. It set up a lab and hired a technician. It gave people credible evidence that their H.I.V. status would be confidential. At the 120-day mark, 900 people had been tested for H.I.V.
  
  Rapid Results team members traveled to a village in Ghana, where they later built a school at half the typical cost and lowered student absenteeism from 49 percent to 16 percent.
  
  PreFabricated surpassed its goal using a strategy called Rapid Results, in which a group of people choose a project and carry it out in 100 days. Companies in Addis that used Rapid Results got their H.I.V. testing rates up to about 75 percent — triple the norm. The same method has been used in Nicaragua to help pig farmers raise fatter pigs and to improve dairy farms’ milk quality. In Rwanda, two villages doubled the number of attended births in less than 100 days, and the Rapid Results team went on to work on other projects to protect mothers’ health. In Madagascar, four districts quintupled the use of family planning services in 50 days, and the Health Ministry then began the program on a national scale. Kenya is using Rapid Results in virtually all its ministries; one campaign in the province of Nyanza circumcised 40,000 men in two months — a crucial achievement for AIDS prevention. Rapid Results has made Kenya by far the leader in Africa in scaling up circumcision. Villages in Ghana, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Eritrea and other countries have used Rapid Results to improve local infrastructure as well — digging wells, constructing bridges and roads, building schools.
  
  Rapid Results is an eccentric idea. Nadim Matta, a management consultant who is president of the Rapid Results Institute in Stamford, Conn., likes to say that what’s missing to turn poor places into rich places isn’t more information, money, technology, workshops, programs, evaluation or any of the other things that development organizations normally provide. What’s missing are motivation and confidence.
  
  At first glance, this seems crazy — can we cheerlead our way into the middle class?
  
  What Matta means is that usually the obstacle to development is not that we don’t have the tools, but that we don’t use the tools we have. People drag their feet. The next step is someone else’s problem. Budget approval takes forever. The money disappears. People won’t try because it never works. The goal is too pie-in-the-sky. The parts aren’t available. The bricks get stolen. The project gets started and then the leadership changes and it sits, abandoned. Every villager fumes: nothing gets done around here.
  
  Women worked in a flour mill in Uganda where Rapid Results helped improve air quality for workers and reduce waste. "The biggest issue is that people don’t actually mobilize," said Matta. "The last mile is where solutions need to come together in specific ways. We think we have part of the answer to the last mile problem."
  
  That list of complaints may sound familiar to anyone who manages a business, and in fact, Rapid Results was designed to help large corporations. It was invented about 40 years ago by Robert Schaffer, a management consultant. Five years ago, Schaffer’s company spun off a group as a nonprofit to train people all around the world to use the same method. Rapid Results has spread, well, rapidly, because it has a champion in the World Bank, which is teaching people to use the method in various countries. So are other groups, such as the African Capacity Building Foundation.
  
  It works like this: A trained facilitator sits down with people in a business, organization or village to decide on what to do. They vote. Now, if we had some money from the government or the World Bank — say, $5,000 or perhaps $30,000 - how could we spend it to accomplish that goal in just 100 days? The village chooses its goal and how to get it done. The facilitator only talks about what other villages have accomplished in 100 days.
  
  To build confidence, before they make decisions the teams play a pass-the-tennis-ball game. The first time through, a team of eight will pass the balls in about 15 seconds. “Then we share with them that we’ve done it hundreds of times with different groups around the world, and every one manages to do it in under three seconds,” said Ronnie Hammad, a World Bank senior operations officer who has been using Rapid Results programs for 10 years. "At first they try to do the same thing faster. Then they begin to question the rules. Inevitably, after seven or eight tries, they get it. It happens with senior managers at the World Bank and with commercial sex workers in Eritrea. Leadership emerges. It unleashes creativity and innovation. It's an experience of what might be possible for them."
  
  At first, the 100 days seems ridiculous. Groups that turn to Rapid Results have usually had the repeated experience of nothing happening in three years. Who can accomplish something significant in three months? But this is exactly the point - it takes a project out of the realm of business as usual.
  
  With the facilitator offering coaching - for example, she will require that by the halfway point in the project, the team have a plan for how to sustain it - the team members meet, often weekly, to talk about how to get around setbacks and what worked elsewhere.
  
  Frannie Léautier, the executive secretary of the African Capacity Building Foundation, wrote in an e-mail that Rapid Results initiatives are a "bite-sized approach to complex problem-solving. Communities will get confidence to tackle problems that may seem insurmountable." The tight deadline "forces a degree of prioritization and focus which leads to results, avoiding white elephant projects which tend to be grandiose but not implementable."
  
  A Rapid Results coach led a team launch session in Sudan. Projects in post-conflict communities there resulted in the construction of schools, health centers and well systems.
  
  The deadline creates an ethos of doing whatever it takes. People aren’t sitting and waiting for the district official to come out. They go buy the materials themselves. Women sleep on the bulk cement bags to make sure no one steals them. A village in Sudan needed bricks for a school, and the contractor wasn’t producing enough. So the Rapid Results team organized a competition in the community to make bricks, and the project stayed on schedule. "You can’t control what happens 10 years down the road," says Mats Karlsson, a senior World Bank official who used Rapid Results in several West African countries when he was country director in Ghana. "But 100 days everyone can control."
  
  Hammad said that when he arrived in Eritrea and surveyed World Bank activity, "there were lots of workshops, lots of ground being prepared - but nothing you could put your hands on to demonstrate real results." With Rapid Results, he said, "you saw the same people, the same resources, the same conditions - and an order of magnitude difference in terms of performance."
  
  While Rapid Results can produce dramatic changes in 100 days, questions remain about day 101. Sustainability has always been the weak point of development work, whose symbol might well be the lonely water pump, abandoned for lack of a $3 part. Even a successful Rapid Results team is going to move on to other priorities after 100 days, and it will always be tempting to cut corners - or whole sides - to make the deadline. Next week, I’ll respond to reader comments and discuss how Rapid Results’ architects are grappling with the challenge of not just achieving results, but making them last.
  
  

Coping With Setbacks

(This is an extract from a LT article after Peter Roebuck, the English cricketer and sports writer, committed suicide)

In some ways, Roebuck’s approach is distinctive of many individuals touched by sporting excellence: if sport is about the quest for perfection, is it not rational to get wound up about one’s own imperfections? Is it not politic to spend as much time as possible figuring out how to solve them? Is it not irresponsible to meet misfortune with equanimity (rather than angst)?...

Jonny Wilkinson, whose recent and excellent autobiography was ghosted by Owen Slot, my colleague, would doubtless sympathise. The England player confesses to spending hours going over mistakes in his mind, fretting about them, being driven half-crazy by them.

He set himself very high standards, and felt that the only way to improve was to devote all one's energies, waking and sleeping, to the treadmill of improvement.

Wilkinson also confessed to depression, and has received long-term counselling. Perhaps his neuroticism contributed to the dark places to which he journeyed, or perhaps the causality moved in the other direction. What is certain is that, rather like Roebuck, his obsessiveness was both a blessing and a curse. Perhaps he would also acknowledge (with a nod to the Somerset player) that "the art is to find other things that matter just as much as rugby".

Denis Healey, the former politician, put the point acutely. In The Time of My Life, perhaps the finest of the many autobiographies of the Wilson and Callaghan era, he talks about the importance of a Hinterland. By this he meant a realm away from politics to which he could escape, a place where the cares and anxieties of top-flight politics could be handled with perspective. For Healey this meant literature and photography and art, but that is almost by the by. The point is that a Hinterland provides a psychological safety valve — and one that is commonly used by top sportsmen, too. Tiger Woods has talked about how fishing enables him to switch off from golf (one wonders whether other forms of recreation were also used as a means of escapism). Dennis Taylor said that he could handle defeat by reflecting upon individuals who suffer severe illness and disability. "Snooker doesn't seem the be-all and end-all," he said. "There are more important things in life."

We often admire this kind of emotional pragmatism. "They have perspective," we say approvingly. Yet we acknowledge rarely the artifice that is often involved. Wilkinson once said to me that there was something dubious about selectively forgetting a bad performance or training session, or pretending that it was unimportant. "If you devote your life to playing to your best, and you fail to do so, you can’t suddenly just pretend it doesn’t matter," he said.

Except that many people can. Pretending that it doesn't matter - whether a job interview that went wrong or a mistake during a kicking session - is the balm provided by a Hinterland. We justify the sacrifice involved in pursuing our deepest ambitions, whatever they may be, by convincing ourselves that they are terribly important. But we often reconcile ourselves to failure (and, for that matter, victory, the other impostor) by telling ourselves different stories, or by reinterpreting our motives.

It is not that individuals with a Hinterland care less deeply about sport, or whatever else; it is that they have the capacity to turn their obsessions on and off.

The trick is to find something else that matters as much as sport, at least while one is winding down, or rationalising defeat. "Sport has to be the most important thing in the world if you are going to be the best," Martina Navratilova once told me. "But it also, at times, has to be the least important thing."

Hume, the great British philosopher, made the same point. As a thinker he reached some dark conclusions about the human condition, but (unlike, say, Beckett or Nietzsche) never allowed them to affect his daily life. Instead he forgot about them.

"I dine, I play a game of backgammon and am merry with my friends; and when, after three or four hours' amusement, I return to my philosophical speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther."

Of course, it is not just sportsmen and philosophers who benefit from this curious form of psychological expediency; it is all of us. We accentuate the positives, suppress the negatives, block out the traumas, create mini-narratives about our lives and loves that, on honest reflection, have little basis in reality; we do this not merely to win, but to cope.

Perhaps we may speculate that Wilkinson and others of his ilk, such as Roebuck, are guilty of little more than a kind of intellectual consistency. They do not let the mistakes go, do not pretend they don’t matter, do not take the easy option of departing to any Hinterland for temporary solace. They live their lives with a rare level of candour, which, while admirable, exerts a tough price in psychological attrition.

"That night I struggled to sleep," Wilkinson wrote after a match. "It's always that way after a disappointing game . . . I lie awake thinking about what I could have done better. It can take hours to process everything. Images float endlessly around my mind."

Obsession or passion? Candour or fanaticism? There is, to use a favourite expression of Roebuck, little more than a fag paper between the two.

Clive Woodward

Successful businesses, like successful sport teams, need to remain open to new ideas and to learn how to perform under pressure, according to Sir Clive Woodward, the 2003 Rugby World Cup-winning coach.

Outlining his theory yesterday, the British Olympic Association’s Director of Sport said that “great teams are made up of great individuals” and that successful team players shared four characteristics: talent, a willingness to learn, an ability to perform under pressure and the mindset of wanting to be a champion. Sir Clive argued that “talent is not enough” because there are “bucketloads” of talented competitors. He said top players, like top businessmen and women, needed to be willing to be taught — to be “sponges” instead of “rocks”.

“I’d fly anywhere in the world if I thought it had the smallest chance of [helping] me becoming a better coach or a better manager,” he said.

“Once you lose that ability, that kind of focus, the chances are you’ve become a rock and you’re not going to be competing with that person in the next room.”

He said one of his first actions on becoming head coach of the England rugby team in 1997 was to give each player a laptop and teach them IT skills.

“The media had a field day [but] I was trying to find out who the sponges were, who the rocks were. Who the guys in the squad saying ‘this guy isn’t going to be here for long, we don’t need to do this’ were.” Sir Clive said that the next key component of a successful team member was an ability to perform under pressure, something that he did not believe was inherited.

“Are you born with this gene to play and perform under pressure? I would say absolutely not ... I think this is coachable,” he said. “What you can do is role-play situations you’re going to get into. If you come across something you’ve never seen before, the chances are you would freeze.”

Finally, according to Sir Clive, to become a champion players must have the right attitude, including an “obsession with detail about what you do to beat the person in the next room”.

Self Talk

Like many people, I’ve been watching the Olympic Games recently. The games always seem to imbue a sense of hope and community. We watch these young adults achieve things that we could have never imagined—setting world records, winning medal after medal, and winning over the hearts of the nation. We see athletes who have overcome adversity—a sprinter with prosthetic legs who now competes with able-bodied athletes, gymnasts whose families struggled to pay the bills but who found a way to get their children to the London games. We see young adults who have given up all of their free time to train for this moment and for a short period of time, we all feel a sense of optimism. If these young athletes can achieve this much and fly this high, perhaps anything is possible.

But what may be different in the athletes than most people—besides their physical strength, perfect physique, and unbelievable athletic skill—is their psychological strength. These athletes grew up on a diet of “I can” when so many of us gave up with the first “I can’t.” Throughout their childhood and adolescence, they believed in their own abilities so much that competition fueled them to work harder and become better rather than leading them to quit.

So perhaps their greatest strength is their self-talk—the internal dialogue that we all have that can impact our mood so greatly. Our self-talk is what we say to ourselves in our heads and the soundtrack of our lives. Our self-talk can be plagued by negativity and self-doubt; as such it is one of the many ways that we can be our own worst enemies. We can tell ourselves “I can’t” time and time again and prevent ourselves form even trying. We can tell ourselves that we aren’t good enough, that we are failures, and that we are unlovable and in time, we lose the ability to see anything to the contrary. Our self-talk can become a self-fulfilling prophecy—we fail because we believe that we will and therefore give up. But our self-talk can also be filled with encouragement and hope, as is likely the case with Olympic athletes. We can believe in our abilities and in our resilience in the face of adversity. We can see the possibilities in challenges—the opportunity for us to rise to the occasion and come out triumphant. Our positive self-talk can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy—we achieve because of our belief in our own abilities and this serves as a motivator to work harder.

Our self-talk is likely influenced by what we hear from others. If others doubt us or say negative things about us, we often internalize it. If others are consistently supportive and encouraging, we are more likely to have positive self-talk. For example, the sprinter with prosthetic legs, Oscar Pistorius, stated in an interview that his mother told him during childhood that he put on his legs each morning just like his brother put on his shoes. This approach stressed the possibilities for the young Pistorius rather than focusing on the disability. Growing up in this environment most likely set the tone of Pistorius’ self-talk and laid the foundation for his resilient approach to life. He sees the glass as half full and the world as full of possibilities, such as competing in the Olympics. Whereas many would have given up on the idea of participating in sports, Pistorius ran full speed ahead…right into the Olympics.

The good thing about self-talk is that it is changeable. Like the Olympics, it takes a lot of training and practice. First you must notice your self-talk and truly listen to what you tell yourself. To do this, it is often necessary to write your thoughts down on paper because as much as we are often poor listeners to others, we are even worse at listening to our own self-talk. The next step is to determine the accuracy of your thoughts. If you believe that you are stupid, what supports this and what refutes this? This is often the most difficult part of the process because it requires us to look for information that is not consistent with our beliefs. Through practice and hard work, though, you may start to see some evidence in contrast to your negative beliefs slipping in. Through practice, you will notice the inaccuracy of your negative thoughts and start to see the possibilities.

As a parent, the most important thing is to instill in your child a belief in his/her own capabilities. This means supporting your child when your child makes mistakes. It requires continuing to believe in your child even when things go wrong and telling your child that anything is possible. It requires finding a silver lining in struggles and framing struggles to your child as opportunities for your child to show strength. It may be difficult for a parent to do—to stalwartly believe in your child and instill this belief in your child, but if you can do it, it may be the best gift that you can give your child and set your child up for greatness.

The Price of Success

She's fast. Ye Shiwen, the 16-year-old Chinese girl who seems to be causing quite a fuss, is very, very, very, very fast. She's so fast that she managed to swim 400 metres on Saturday, winning a gold medal, and breaking a world record, five seconds faster than she's ever swum it before. If you think five seconds isn't very much, you probably haven't fought your way through crowds to see Olympic cyclists going through central London, and found that the whole thing was over in about three.

She's so fast that in the last 50 metres she swam faster than the fastest man. She's so fast that some people don't believe it. They do believe she did it in the time she did it, because there were lots of people to see it, and it was filmed, and it was probably filmed by most of the spectators, or at least the ones who bothered to turn up. But what they don't believe is that she swam so fast without the help of drugs.

She looked, said the top US swimming coach, "like Superwoman". When he said that, he didn't mean that Ye Shiwen, who has very big shoulders, and very big thighs, and might look a little bit unusual in the kind of uniform beach volleyball players think they have to wear, looked really good. He meant that she didn't swim like a normal (but very, very fit) human being.

And she didn't. It isn't normal to suddenly swim that much faster than you've ever swum before. It's the kind of swim that would make you think that the person who did it had taken drugs. Ye Shiwen says she hasn't, and her tests have been clear. But whether she has or not, there's one other thing that's clear. And that's that nothing in Ye Shiwen's short life has been what anyone else would call normal.

She was seven when she was picked out at school by one of eight million teachers ordered to spot sporting talent. If you got spotted, you were sent to one of about 8,000 specially built "training camps", but these weren't the kind of camps where you lit fires, and sang songs. These were the kind of camps where you had to train all day long. They were the kind of camps where you often cried with pain.

They sound like the kind of training schools they used to have in the Soviet Union. They sound, in fact, like the kind of school Petra Schneider, who won five gold medals for East Germany, did go to. And where she was fed like a battery-farm chicken, and forced to swim in a machine that sucked out air. And where she was known by a number, not a name.

Children were sent to these training schools, not because someone thought it would make them happy. They were sent to them because the people in charge thought it was more important for their countries to win medals than for their people to be free. They didn't just think that winning medals was something that might make your country proud. They thought that not winning medals was something that might make your country ashamed.

When the top American swimming coach said that Ye Shiwen's performance was "unbelievable", he sounded pretty fed up. You would be fed up if you thought your country might be beaten by a country that was cheating. But you might also be fed up if you were beaten by a country that wasn't. You might be particularly fed up if you were from a country that always used to win the Olympics, but which didn't last time, and might not again. And if you were from a country that was used to being the richest and most powerful country in the world, but wouldn't be for much longer.

You might well think that the training schools that were like factories for medals sounded very much like the real factories in the country that was going to overtake you, and which made the smart-phones and gadgets you now felt you couldn't live without. You might remember things you'd read about the people who worked in them, and how they slept in massive dormitories, and had to handle dangerous chemicals, and worked very long hours for $150 a month. You might remember the suicide nets that were put up on those factories to stop people from leaping to their deaths.

You might, in fact, think about the things we call "success". You might think that winning a medal if you'd taken drugs definitely didn't count as success, but that you weren't at all sure that winning a medal if you'd lived your life as a kind of prisoner did. You might think that annual economic growth of nearly 8 per cent sounded great, until you found out about the chemicals, and the nets. You might, in other words, think that sometimes the price of success was too high.

And if you were a citizen of a country that used to be a leading world power, and was now only the sixth biggest economy in the world, and which happened to be hosting the Olympics, you might be pleased. You might think that the opening ceremony, which was funny and charming and a little bit mad, told the world that we had a lot to be proud of, but that the most important thing about our country wasn't our pride. You might think about the young men who won a medal that hadn't been won for 100 years, and who practised because they wanted to, and entered the Olympics because they wanted to. And you might well think that there were times when bronze was worth an awful lot more than gold.

Elite Performers

MOST of us would love to be elite performers — top of the class, really talented. But to be elite at anything takes a huge amount of effort, training and determination.

It’s often easier to describe elite performers than understand how they became so good. They seem to read situations faster; they seem to have a bigger repertoire of options; they seem more confident and in control. It all looks so effortless. But that is not the case.

Studies of elite performers in the arts, sport and sciences have thrown up some interesting findings. First, there is the 10-year rule. As a rule of thumb, it takes 10 years of intensive, focused training and practice to make it. Study the lives of top athletes, academics and musicians and you will see how true that is.

Second, elite performers seem to know how to maximise practice. They may do as little as four to five hours a day but they break this into hour-long sessions and often have little naps in between. It’s what the creativity researchers call “incubation”. Work hard but rest; let it all seep in.

Third, these people challenge themselves. They make it difficult for themselves. They try new ways of doing things. As a result, in practice — but in practice only — they often look less skilled and polished than performers who aren’t as talented. They experiment and they set themselves tough, but attainable, targets.

Thus, by these calculations, to deliver a final performance of an hour, an elite athlete or musician puts in 20,000 hours of practice. That is a serious investment. That is the real commitment involved.

How people practise skill and knowledge acquisition is crucial. One has to make a serious investment in time and this inevitably means eschewing other, often attractive activities. In this sense, some, but by no means all, elite performers seem a little narrow, even a little naive. When others go partying, on holiday or to leisure events, the aspirant elites practise. They must have iron discipline and an intense desire to “win” to get there.

And most know there is a window in their lives where things are possible. It may have to do with physical fitness, energy or even financial constraints. Life, they know, is not a dress rehearsal.

But is that all? What about talent, ability and genes? Training unlocks the genes; practice helps biology become destiny. Many people with prodigious talent seem to ignore it, downplay it or simply fail to exploit it. They happily adopt that oh-so British self-deprecation that both disarms and perplexes foreigners — though this is never understood by many contestants on those ubiquitous talent shows.

The training required to be an elite performer in any field is exceptionally demanding. It looks all very easy — it is patently not.

So elite performers need a good start in life in two ways: their genetics and their parents, which are closely linked. They also need the sheer drive to succeed. This drive is their investment in the training. It is the practice that is key. It is how, for how long and for what end performers practise that really unlocks the genetic endowment and background advantages.

In looking at talented and elite performers, we forget:
■ How much they practise;
■ What they have sacrificed for their skill;
■ How they set their own targets;
■ How driven they have had to be, and
■ How little they believe in chance, luck and personal gifts.

This is clearly not the message one gets from self-help or management books, or from the movies. They make it all rather simple, almost effortless. And that is seriously misleading, as can be found from the most honest autobiographies.

There is also the issue of dealing with setbacks. One has, in any competitive area, to learn how to deal with a range of problems: stage fright, physical injury, being beaten by brilliant opponents. These experiences toughen up the elite performer but break the less well adjusted. There is nothing like adversity to focus drive and determination.

Students of the magical MBA or the part-time degree know the sacrifice that is involved. If there are 24 hours in a day and you sleep for a third of this, how much of the rest do you give to your friends, family and work?

The mastery of any skill comes easier to the talented but all skills take practice. This includes all those skills one goes on training courses to achieve: presentational, negotiation, counselling and selling skills.

Remember the riposte to the question: how do you get to the Olympic stadium? The answer is not geographical, it is “practice, practice, practice”.

Seth Godin and River Pilots

The river guide and the rapids

It's probably not an accident that rapid (as in rapid change) shares a root with rapids (as in Lava Falls in the Grand Canyon).

The river guide, piloting his wooden dory, has but one strategy. Get the boat to the end of the river, safely. And he has countless tactics, an understanding of how water and rocks work, and, if you're lucky, experience on this particular river.

The thing is, the captain changes his tactics constantly. He never whines. He doesn't stop the boat and say, "wait, no fair, yesterday this rock wasn't like this!" No, the practice of being great at shooting the rapids is a softness in choosing the right tactic, the ability to hold the tiller with confidence but not locking into it. If your pilot keeps demanding that the rapids cooperate, it's probably time to find a new pilot.

Domain knowledge underlies all of it. Give me an experienced captain over a new one any day--the ones that got this far for a reason. Yes, the reckless pilot might get lucky, but the experienced pilot brings domain knowledge to her job. It takes guts to go onto the river, but once you're there, the one who can see--see what's coming and see what matters--is the one you want piloting your boat.

( more good ideas from Seth Godin)

Luck

One of the first letters I ever received from a reader of The Times came after an article I had written about Roger Federer. The piece had eulogised the Swiss player, his grace and touch.

But the reader would have none of it. “How can you celebrate a sportsman when his success is a consequence of luck?” he wrote. “He was born to hit a tennis ball. He won the genetic lottery. Giving him credit is as silly as praising the winner of the National Lottery.”

I found the argument so jarring that I kept the letter. Even if luck had played a part in Federer’s success, why should that stop us celebrating his artistry? And what of the years of hard work and dedication? What of his resolve under pressure? When Federer came from behind to defeat Andy Roddick in that unforgettable Wimbledon final of 2009, was that a consequence purely of luck?

I was fascinated, then, when a subtler version of the reader’s argument was resurrected by Ben Bernanke this week. The chairman of the Federal Reserve used a speech to students at Princeton to question the very idea of meritocracy. In a section that received rave reviews on the American left he implied that there is no such thing as “deserved success”.

“A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities ... these are the folks who reap the largest rewards,” he said.

In some respects, Mr Bernanke is right. There is an entire infrastructure of covert advantages that gives certain people a head start. Private schools, well-connected parents and other things too subtle to mention all shape success. Few would disagree that the State has a role to play in dismantling some of these advantages to create a more level playing field.

But Mr Bernanke’s wider point is deeply flawed, not just in philosophical terms, but in its psychological consequences. If we believe that another person’s success is solely a matter of social and genetic good fortune, are we not likely to resent it? And if our own failure has nothing to do with us — it’s the useless genes endowed by our parents and the hopeless school we attended — doesn’t that give us an excuse to sit and fester?

The very idea that successful people are by definition undeserving has created an entire industry devoted to resentment. Just look at the comments under articles about anybody who has done something noteworthy and you will discern a shrill bitterness. Look at the carping that surrounds, say, Victoria Beckham, who has shown drive and commitment to create a fashion label, but who is smeared as someone who was handed it on a plate.

There is, of course, something comforting about saying to oneself: “Well, I didn’t make it because I didn’t inherit the right genes or social connections.” But there is something insidious, too. It robs us of the motivation to work hard, to better ourselves and to create opportunities.

Carole Dweck, a Stanford psychology professor, has demonstrated that those who believe that success is a matter of luck (genetic and social) are not just more apathetic, but dramatically less resilient. Her methodology was straightforward. She probed people’s beliefs with a simple questionnaire. Those who attributed success to, say, luck and genetic inheritance rather than commitment and drive tended to give up more easily and were quick to blame external factors for their failure.

The other problem with Mr Bernanke’s argument is that, while social advantage is indeed involved in success, the role of genes has been wildly overstated. The likes of Federer and David Beckham may look like naturals, but that is because we haven’t witnessed the thousands of hours of practice that have gone into their mastery. The characteristic most associated with high performers is hard work, passion and perseverance.

Genes are not irrelevant, but our obsession with talent (or our lack of it) distracts us from the potential that exists within all of us and how to unlock it.

Ultimately, we are in the difficult position of facing both ways. We are right to feel angry about unfairness and, in that sense, the recent focus on nepotism is a progressive step. But we should not take it too far.

Berating James Caan for employing his daughter is fair enough, given that he had done the same to other parents. But should we berate parents who read to their children, who buy them books, who try to give them every possible advantage? These could also be described as acts of nepotism, given that they boost the success of their offspring at the expense of children from bookless homes. But should we ban parents from doing this? Of course not. If we tried to level the playing field we would destroy the instincts that drive human progress.

Mr Bernanke finished his speech by calling on the successful to use their luck to contribute to the betterment of the world. Amen to that. But unless we recognise the role of merit, as well as luck, in success, the world will end up a worse place, not a better one. (Matthew Syed)

Your Inner Chimp

The central idea now familiar to most British Olympians, the stars of Liverpool Football Club and Ronnie O’Sullivan, the mercurial snooker player, is that there is a chimp in your brain. The chimp is not exactly you. It is your primitive self. It has emotions, reacts quickly and impulsively, and is not logical in its thinking. It jumps to conclusions and makes assumptions.

The key to success — in life as well as in sport — is to be able to recognise the behaviour of this chimp and to manage it with the logical part of the brain. As Dr Steve Peters, the psychiatrist who invented the model and has written a bestselling book on the subject, puts it: “You have to put the chimp back in its box.”

Peters is a very likeable Northerner. Within moments of meeting him at Google HQ in London, I can see why he has built such a strong rapport with Sir Chris Hoy, Craig Bellamy and the like. He has a bright face, a commonsense style and a way of making you think you are, for the time he is with you, at the centre of his universe.

Peters is also in demand. His chimp framework has made him one of the most influential people in sport. Peters is a psychiatrist — he trained as a doctor before taking up various hospital posts — but his principal work today is in the psychology of success. He wants people to maximise their potential and thinks that he can help them to do just that. “Ronnie O’Sullivan has been very open about his work with me,” Peters says. “When he came to see me, the problem was that his chimp would try to sabotage him with anxious thoughts. This is what the chimp does. It frets about losing, or about not being able to pot the ball, and about how awful it would be not to win.

“But I explained to Ronnie that these thoughts were not coming from him. They were coming from his chimp. The key was for him to box his chimp. The rational part of his brain was perfectly able to recognise that losing doesn’t define him. “Snooker is not the be-all and end-all. Once he recognised this, and talked the chimp down, he could play without the negative emotional baggage.”

Peters’s methods have had strong results. O’Sullivan has won the World Championship twice since starting to work with him in 2011. Peters has also been central to the success of the Great Britain track cycling team, Team Sky and other Olympic sports, such as taekwondo and canoeing. He has been working with Liverpool since 2012.

“The key is to understand that everyone is an individual,” Peters says. “We all have individual personalities and individual chimps. The way to box the chimp will vary from person to person, and from situation to situation. Sometimes a chimp needs to be reasoned with; sometimes it needs to be confronted. My job is to train people in the most effective method to use.” Peters does not only help athletes with particular problems; he also helps athletes to use their psychological tools more effectively. “Some people are already very robust emotionally when they come to see me,” he says. “Chris Hoy, for example, was never unstable. There was a report in the press about him having panic attacks. I can tell you that never happened. He has never been on Valium in his life.

“What he did when he came to me was to say, ‘I am in a great place mentally and physically, but I can get an advantage in physical terms by working with a specialist in strength and conditioning. And I believe I can get an advantage in emotional terms by working with someone who can help me understand how my mind works.’ There was no dysfunction that I had to sort out; I was just adding to what he already had.”

Much of Peters’s work is to help athletes to gain a sense of perspective. The danger when walking out into an Olympic final is that an athlete will become overwhelmed with fear, or panic, or the yearning to run away. It is sometimes called the fight, flight, freeze response. The key to unlocking peak performance is to banish this “chimp-like” reaction by introducing rationality.

As Peters puts it: “It is vital to remember that sport is just sport. You won’t die if you lose. You will still be you. Victoria Pendleton once said to me, ‘All I do is go round and round in a circle.’ That is a great perspective to have because once you realise that sport is nonsense, you can give it everything without fear. I am not promoting being laid-back; I’m promoting perspective.”

Are there any downsides of perspective, I wonder. It may be very useful when one is about to go into competition and might otherwise be seized by panic, but what about at the beginning of an Olympic cycle? Why would someone want to commit to four years of professional sport when she has just convinced herself that it is “nonsense”?

“It is possible to want to win the medal, to commit to winning the medal, while still recognising that the sport is, in a sense, trivial,” Peters says. “Some people may find that a difficult balance to strike, but others do it very well. It is all about the individual.”

Occasionally, Peters has worked with athletes who just do not want to commit. The problem is not a reluctant chimp, keen to stay in a warm bed rather than do an early-morning run, but something more profound. You might call it a rational decision to say: “Sport isn’t worth it.”

“I have worked with two athletes who said, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ ” Peters says. “They were both great athletes who could have medalled. But they walked away, and I agreed with their decision. One wrote to me two years later and said, ‘Thank you for giving me my life back. I don’t want the medal and I don’t want the lifestyle. I have made no error of judgment.’ To me, that is fantastic. I don’t want to force people to do something they don’t want to.”

Talent

One of the great things about science is that it has taught us to be sceptical about surface appearances. The world seems flat, but it is, in fact, round. Tiger Woods looks like he was born to play golf — but was he really? The idea that Woods was genetically predisposed to hit balls seems, on the surface, self-evident. You only have to look at the way he swings a club to realise that genius was encoded in his DNA. A similar analysis might be applied to the free-kick taking of David Beckham or the tennis playing of Roger Federer.

In Bounce, my 2010 book, I challenged this view, following in the steps of authors such as Malcolm Gladwell. Much of the intellectual ballast for the book was provided by the work of Herbert Simon, a cognitive scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1978, and Anders Ericsson, of Florida State University. According to this approach, what looks like talent is, in fact, the consequence of years of practice. Hence, the idea that 10,000 hours is what it takes to attain expertise.

Woods, for example, started playing golf at the age of 1, played his first pitch-and-putt round at 2, and had practised many thousands of hours by the age of 10. When he became the youngest winner of the Masters in 1997 and was acclaimed by pundits as having been born with a “gift”, Woods laughed. “It looks like a gift, but that is because you haven’t seen the years of dedication that went into the performance,” a colleague said. This is the danger of surface appearance.

Recently, the debate on nature versus nurture has ignited again. The Sports Gene, a book by David Epstein, has sought to elevate the role of genetics in the analysis of success. It is well written, and many of the examples about running, jumping and other “simple” sports are uncontroversial. There is little doubt that it helps to have fast-twitch muscle fibres if you want to be a sprinter. Similarly, a long Achilles tendon is helpful if you aspire to be a high jumper. The anatomical advantages enjoyed by many top athletes in simple sports are often caused by genetic differences.

But the 10,000-hour notion was supposed to apply only to complex areas of sport, and life. Take the case of reaction speed in sport. For a long time, it was thought that those, such as Federer, who could react to a serve delivered at more than 150mph, were blessed with superior genes. The idea was that Federer was born with instincts that gave him the capacity to react to a fast-moving ball, where most people would see a blur.

Federer’s speed is, according to this analysis, a bit like Usain Bolt’s fast-twitch fibres: encoded in DNA.

This turned out to be quite wrong. On standard tests of reaction, top tennis players are no faster on average than the rest of us. What they possess is not superior reactions but superior anticipation. They are able to “read” the movement of their opponent (the torso, the lower part of the arm, the orientation of the shoulders) and thus move into position earlier than non-elite players. In fact, they are able to infer where the ball is going a full tenth of a second before it has been hit. This is a complex skill encoded in the brain through years of practice; not an inherited trait.

One of the reasons why practice is so important is because it transforms the neural architecture of the brain. To take one simple example, the area of the brain involved in spatial navigation — the posterior hippocampus — is much bigger in London black cab drivers than the rest of us. But, crucially, they were not born with this; it grew in direct proportion to years on the job.

Proponents of talent tend to respond by saying: “Are you seriously saying that talent counts for nothing?” Well, that depends on what is meant by talent. The problem is that different notions are used interchangeably. What does it mean to say that Jonny is more talented than Jamie at, say, tennis? Does it mean that Jonny is better at the moment? Or that Jonny is improving faster? What if Jamie starts to improve faster than Jonny? Is Jamie now more talented than Jonny? In many fields, it has been found that those who start off below average (who might be said to lack talent) improve, over time, faster than average. In others, those who start out learning faster continue to accelerate. In one study of American pianists, those who would go on to achieve greatness were not standing out from their peers even when they had been studying intensively for six years.

At what point do we decide who is talented? After a week, a month, ten years? The answer may be different depending on the time-span chosen, not to mention the level of motivation and the quality of coaching brought to each hour of practice. In the studies cited by Epstein, these variables are rarely taken into account. What this shows, I think, is that a simple notion of talent (which still rules much of the world) is misleading. Complex skills are not hardwired like height, and neither is the disposition to learn.

\ Many of the differences in the world today when it comes to sporting prowess are determined not by genetic differences, but by differences in the quality of practice. Brazil once had the top team in football because of highly efficient training techniques. Instead of learning from them, English coaches, obsessed with talent, said: “Brazilians are born with superlative skill; our players could never do that”.

The consequence was that we didn’t teach technical competence to our youngsters. Our 11-year-olds continued to play on full-size pitches, hoofing the ball up to the front man, and touching the ball infrequently. No wonder we went backwards. Spain superseded Brazil because they found a way of accelerating skill-acquisition beyond their competitors.

I would have no problem with the notion of talent if it was amended to incorporate the complexity in human performance. The problem with the simplistic notion prevalent today is that it can destroy resilience, as many studies have shown. After all, if you are struggling with an activity, doesn’t that mean you lack talent? Shouldn’t you give up and try something else?

It is worth remembering that SF, a famous volunteer from memory literature, went from below average to world-class level in memory skill with two years of training. Was he talented? Ultimately, it depends on how you conceive of talent. What is clear is that the present notion is deeply misleading. The power of practice, on the other hand, remains vastly underrated.

Strategy

Our word “strategy” entered the lexicon in the 18th century, and soon gained currency by reflecting a promise that the systematic application of reason could yield success in war.

“Tell me,” the elderly and sceptical Prince Bolkonsky asks his son Andrei in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, “how the Germans have trained you to defeat Napoleon by this new science you call strategy.”

Before long, the idea of strategy gravitated from the military to the civilian sphere, from battles between armies to those between political parties, large corporations or sporting teams, from the war room to the boardroom, to almost all human affairs. Decisions of “strategic” significance are presumed to be more important than those that are more routine or “tactical”.

No greater accusation can be thrown at a government than that it lacks a strategy to see a way through complex issues, as the missing ingredient that could give direction to an otherwise inchoate set of acts.

Yet though the idea that it is necessary to have a strategy is well established, there is less agreement on what strategy entails. It is often assumed, for example, that a strategy is synonymous with a plan. A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows one to move with confidence from one state of affairs to another.

The point about a strategy, however, is that its implementation depends on others with different and possibly opposing interests and concerns.

Thus the great Prussian field marshal von Moltke observed: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” I prefer the boxer Mike Tyson’s more pithy observation: “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”

So a key feature of strategy is that it is about interdependent decision-making. Success depends on expectations about how others might act, which in turn depend on their expectations about how you might act. This is why it is about much more than how to choose means to achieve desired ends. The process may well lead to quite different outcomes from those originally envisaged or desired, especially when it involves complex situations with multiple participants.

For the powerful, strategy may not be challenging. Working with the odds requires no great strategic aptitude. Ecclesiastes observes: “The race is not always won by the swiftest, the battle is not always won by the strongest.” “But”, as the American humorist Damon Runyon noted, “that’s the way to bet.” The real strategic challenge is to beat the odds. The strategic problems faced by underdogs are far more interesting than those of the powerful.

This is why the most intense strategic debates often occur among radicals and revolutionaries, for whom the gap between available resources and grand ambitions is painfully large.

We approach all encounters with a pot of power, whether made up of material wealth, physical strength, a keen intelligence or a fine reputation. Good strategy adds to the pot and bad strategy subtracts from it.

In any conflict, whether friendly rivalry, competition for market share, an election or all-out war, the influence of strategy might be expressed as the difference between anticipated and actual outcomes. In this respect strategy is the art of creating power.

The German historian Hans Delbrück distinguished between strategies of annihilation, eliminating the enemy’s army in a decisive battle, and those of exhaustion, which wore the enemy down. For the underdog the decisive battle can appear a much better bet, for over the course of a long drawn-out conflict, underlying weakness will make itself felt. When the German Schlieffen plan failed in 1914, the consequence was prolonged and painful attrition.

By contrast, Israel’s pre-emptive strike in June 1967 allowed it to complete its war against three Arab countries in six days. The powerful, of course, also prefer to avoid long wars that eat up resources and cause many casualties, but in the end attrition is the natural default strategy for those with the greatest reserves. They can afford to take fewer risks.

A quick, decisive victory requires catching the opponent by surprise. This is why underdogs so often have to resort to deception and look for a cunning plan. The idea of compensating for weaknesses by outsmarting opponents, posing a superior intelligence against the boring, ponderous, muscle-bound approach of the reliably strong, was the approach Homer celebrated in Odysseus. His wit and deft resort to ruses were contrasted with the brute strength of Achilles. It was also the approach adopted by David against the Philistine giant Goliath, in the iconic account of how an underdog can use surprise to gain a decisive victory.

Malcolm Gladwell has recently published a dubious, revisionist version of this encounter, which suggests the two were more equal than supposed, largely because of Goliath’s double vision. The evidence for this is Goliath mocking David coming to him with “sticks”, when we know there was only one stick. Gladwell does not explain why Goliath did not also see two Davids. At any rate it is clear that in the biblical encounter David was meant to be the underdog. It required his faith in God for him to be successful.

Otherwise David would have been taking extraordinary risks. Suppose his stone had pinged off Goliath’s helmet or the giant came to his senses before David had a chance to cut off his head. Then there would have been no second chance. Most seriously, David would not be able to repeat the trick on a future enemy. The next opponent would know what to expect.

A more reliable approach for the underdog is to find partners. To illustrate the point, consider our cousins the chimpanzees. At one level they clearly understand brute force. Dominant males intimidate subordinate apes and then receive respect through submissive greeting or grooming.

But we know from the work of the primatologist Frans de Waal that hierarchies can change not because a more ferocious chimp comes along but because one has joined another to displace the dominant male. Other studies show that chimps calculate when they resort to violence, avoiding combat when facing superior numbers. The priority is survival until they have the numbers to overwhelm opponents.

It might seem quite a leap from chimps to Churchill, yet his strategy when he became prime minister in spring 1940 with the Nazis sweeping through Europe was one of short-term survival and then long-term coalition.

This meant rejecting the option of a negotiated outcome, not because one was inconceivable but because the act of exploring a settlement would immediately signal weakness, and the country was not yet beaten. Even before Dunkirk the armed forces felt they could organise strong resistance to an invasion. The strategic issue in May 1940 was not how to win but how not to lose.

Germany had surprised its opponents and seized the initiative but without being able to stabilise Europe in a form that suited Hitler. The German offensive against the Soviet Union also failed to produce a knockout. This became a war of exhaustion not annihilation.

Churchill always understood that victory required getting the Americans into the war on Britain’s side. After Pearl Harbor, Churchill rejoiced. “So we had won after all! . . . How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care . . . We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end.”

Of course strategists can succeed on occasion by outsmarting opponents while it may not always be possible to put together a winning coalition. The point about good strategy is not that it follows a formula but that it draws on a shrewd understanding of the possibilities inherent in the circumstances of the moment and how they might be realised.

Talent? Practice? It's A Lot More Complicated

In 1993, K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues asked musicians to estimate the amount of deliberate practice– full engagement in structured training activities designed to improve a particular aspect of performance– every week for each year of their careers. They found that on average, the most accomplished musicians estimated much higher amounts of deliberate practice than the less accomplished musicians. At age 20, the average estimated hours for the most accomplished violinists was more than 10,000 hours, whereas the average estimated hours for the least accomplished violinists was about 4,600 hours. They concluded that “individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice.”

This paper, which has been cited more than 4,200 times, set off a flurry of research on the development of expert performance, and has been featured in best-selling books such as Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers and David Shenk’s “The Genius in All of Us“. Gladwell drew on Ericsson’s findings to coin the phrase “10,000 Hour Rule” and referred to 10,000 hours as the “magic number for true expertise”.

In the first ever actual test of Ericsson’s initial claim, Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick, and Frederick Oswald recently reviewed a large number of studies conducted since that 1993 paper. They found that sheer amount of deliberate practice does not, in fact, explain most of the differences in expert performance. Additionally, there were huge differences between fields, with effects for education and professions much smaller than for games, music and sports:

Further analysis revealed that the effects of deliberate practice were stronger for highly predictable activities (e.g., running) compared to less predictable activities (e.g., handling an aviation emergency). Deliberate practice also had a larger effect for for studies that relied on retrospective reports (in which people estimated their hours of deliberate practice) than logging methods (in which people logged their hours on an ongoing basis). In fact, for studies using the logging method (presumably a more valid estimate of hours of deliberate practice), deliberate practice only accounted for 5% of the differences in expert performance.

The researchers conclude:

“Regardless of domain, a large amount of variance in performance is not explained by deliberate practice and is potentially explainable by other factors. Amount of deliberate practice– although unquestionably important as a predictor of individual differences in performance from both a statistical and a practice perspective– is not as important as Ericsson and his colleagues have argued.”

While this study makes an important contribution to the scientific literature, it’s easy to misrepresent the findings. For instance, a recent article in the New York Times did a nice summary of the analysis, but titled the piece “How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Talent“. But the study had nothing to do with talent!


See those pie charts above? The lighter grey regions represent amount of differences in each domain accounted for by deliberate practice, whereas the darker grey regions represent amount of differences in each domain accounted for by other factors. This could include a million other things, such as physical features, personality, cognitive ability, imagination, creativity, motivation, passion, inspiration, opportunities, encouragement, support, and just plain luck. The missing piece of the pie also undoubtedly includes other forms of engagement that don’t feel as effortful as deliberate practice, such as play and flow.

Note I said other factors, not talent. This is not a pie chart of talent vs. practice. All traits, including the ability to deliberately practice, involve a mix of nature and nurture. In fact, there is no such thing as innate talent. That’s a myth that is constantly perpetuated, despite the fact that most psychologists recognize that all skills require practice and support for their development– even though there are certainly genetic influences (which influence our attention and even our passions).

This consensus was evident in a recent book I edited entitled “The Complexity of Greatness: Beyond Talent or Practice“. A variety of perspectives were represented in the volume, including behavioral genetics, individual differences, and expert performance. The clearest conclusion from the volume was that the development of high achievement involves a complex interaction of many personal and environmental variables that feed off each other in non-linear, mutually reinforcing, and nuanced ways, and that the most complete understanding of the development of elite performance can only be arrived through an integration of perspectives.

The pie chart above also has nothing to say about the importance of practice for you as an individual attempting to reach greatness. The study is about explaining differences between people, not explaining the development of expertise within a single person. The person who has dreams of reaching expertise in a particular domain would be well-advised to find a supportive mentor, and should be willing to put in many years of deliberate practice and engagement in the domain to develop their skills. At the end of the day, what people really want to know is how they can capitalize on who they currently are to become who they want to be. That information is not provided in those pie charts.

To be honest, I’m not even sure what the debate is anymore.

Even Ericsson has changed his views over the years. In a recent paper, Ericsson acknowledged both that “there is nothing magical about exactly 10,000 hours” of deliberate practice, and that “we can at most realize a significant correlation between our measures of training history and final adult performance”. Not even Ericsson still argues that deliberate practice explains all of the differences in expert performance!

Where psychologists differ is in their emphasis on those “other factors”. What explains the variance in performance that deliberate practice does not explain? Ericsson focuses on age of onset of deliberate practice, whereas researchers such as Zach Hambrick have investigated cognitive factors, such as working memory.

They are both right.

There are so many ways people differ from each other (including age and personality), and there are various stages on the road to excellence when these differences matter. While Ericsson is correct that individual differences at any single moment of time don’t necessarily constrain ultimate levels of performance (as he frequently points out in his articles), individual differences may still influence the development of expertise.

One way that individual differences can matter is by influencing the efficiency of expertise acquisition, therefore speeding up the rate of acquisition. In his recent paper, Ericsson acknowledges that the 10,000 hours of practice he found among elite violinists at age 20 was just an average, with substantial variation around the mean. People differ drastically in how long it takes them to reach the same level of expertise. For instance, triathlete Chrissie Wellington didn’t compete professionally until the age of 30, but won her first world championship less than a year later. In fact, Simonton found across the arts, sciences, and leadership, that those with the greatest lifetime productivity and highest levels of eminence required the least amount of time to acquire the requisite expertise (Simonton, 1991a,b, 1992, 1997, 1999).

What sort of factors can help speed up the development of expertise? Well, there are a bunch of possibilities, including prior knowledge, IQ, working memory, intellectual curiosity, and physical stamina. Note that none of these factors are “inborn”– like all other traits, they develop through a complex interaction of nature and nurture.

Another way individual differences matter is by sustaining the motivation to practice over an extended period of time. While deliberate practice is important (no one denies that), it’s no easy feat to sustain that practice over the long haul and just keep showing up. In their 1993 paper, Ericsson and colleagues acknowledged that:

“It is quite plausible, however, that heritable individual differences might influence processes related to motivation and the original enjoyment of the activities in the domain and, even more important, affect the inevitable differences in the capacity to engage in hard work (deliberate practice).”

I believe an overlooked characteristic that influences the motivation to engage in deliberate practice is inspiration. When people become inspired, they usually are inspired to realize some future image of themselves. It is the clarity of this vision, and the belief that the vision is attainable, that can propel a person from apathy to engagement, and sustain the energy to engage in deliberate practice over the long haul, despite obstacles and setbacks. As the legendary creativity researcher E. Paul Torrance once noted, “One of the most powerful wellsprings of creative energy, outstanding accomplishment, and self-fulfillment seems to be falling in love with something— your dream, your image of the future.”

Indeed, Todd Thrash, Andrew Elliot, and colleagues have conducted multiple studies showing that inspiration (measured both as a trait and a motivational state) is associated with an approach motivation, positive emotions, and an increase in creative productivity. In fact, in one of their studies, inspiration not only predicted the creativity of writing samples in science and poetry, but also increased the efficiency of the writing samples (e.g., a larger number of typed words that were retained in the final product, and less time pausing and more time writing). This raises the intriguing idea that motivational characteristics may cause an increase in cognitive efficiency, which would ultimately increase the rate of expertise acquisition. I believe this is a promising area for future research.

These are just two ways in which individual differences can influence the development of expertise. Nevertheless, these are the sorts of questions I believe are scientifically tractable, and are much more productive than continuing to debate the relative importance of talent vs. practice.

The Cost of Success

Everybody loves a winner, right? No, unfortunately, not always. In my coaching practice, many executives and entrepreneurs vent their frustrations with the unexpected negative consequences of their success — such as their anxiety over being able to maintain their winning streak, the fear that they will be set up to fail, and the envy others feel toward them for their good fortune. Turns out that, according to recent research, these kinds of worries aren’t just in their heads — they’re very real. Here’s a summary of that research, along with suggestions for overcoming these traps.

Don’t do victory laps: A recent study shows that people judge expressive winners as arrogant compared to inexpressive winners and are less likely to want to befriend them. Being judged negatively for your success is justifiably an implicit fear. As a result, success can heighten ambivalence, even unconsciously, about winning. What can you do about this? Learn to moderate when and where you express happiness about your success. Share the good news with other successful people. And focus your conversation on other things you are developing when you are succeeding so as not to annoy people. Striking a balance between authentically admitting your happiness and pretending to “not care” is important. We should enjoy the motivation that comes from being successful, rather than sabotaging ourselves when we are inauthentic. For example, Ray, a current client, often smiles in a pleased way when he announces good news to his company or the public, but always focuses on the unconquered path ahead. He avoids fist pumps and overt signs of victory even when he is overjoyed, and reserves this for conversations with select people in his life.

Focus on the value you bring, not on winning per se: Another study found that when people are similar but superior to us in their achievements, our brain’s conflict center is activated leading to envy. In addition, when these people fail, our brain’s reward center is activated leading to feelings of schadenfreude (pleasure when someone else falls from grace). When we win, we assume that others will feel similarly, as we project our own feelings onto them. This fear may be unconscious or conscious and may disrupt our confidence, causing anxiety about the effect of our success on other people. To counteract this fear of someone else wishing we would fall, focus instead on the value that you bring to the world rather than winning per se. This will help boost your confidence despite this fear. For example, Cathy, a CEO whose meteoric rise to the top left other people gasping, “distracted” people from their shock by focusing on the value that the company brought to the world.

Stay in the “here and now”: When we anticipate future reactions from others, this may actually prevent us from achieving or maintaining success, and if we think too much about these reactions, they may prevent us from subsequently adequately controlling our emotions. To manage this consequence of success, stop overthinking the success. Focus on the “here and now.” Let go of worrying about the future and rationalizing the past. Obsession with the past can be distracting and is not always helpful. Also, it will prevent you from clearing your mind. The study above shows that when we integrate what we are anticipating into the here-and-now, we are more likely to manage our emotions more effectively. This means enjoying, accepting, and motivating ourselves with our successes. Joe, an entrepreneur, always “recalibrates” after each round of funding by setting new goals and focuses on what he has to execute on now, rather than obsessively trying to “psychologize” his prior victories. He chooses a time to let go and moves on.

Reach higher: Finally, when we are at the summit of our careers, we may become bored to the point that we slow down too much and become disoriented. This is called “the summit syndrome.” To prevent boredom, you have to always be looking for stimulating ways to apply your mastery. When you have mastered something, ask yourself: How you can innovate around this? Watch out for your own boredom as it can lead you to sabotage yourself, and also watch out for reactive lateral shifts in job hierarchy simply to escape your boredom of mastery. Huang, a fund manager, sticks to his investment process within his company and after a streak of major wins, he raises the bar even more for himself and engages in this “reaching.”

People often prepare for failure, but rarely prepare for what they will do when they succeed. Even when we consciously want to be successful, enjoying that success can be a challenge. By following the suggestions above, you can create a framework for managing success so that you can more reliably sustain your success when it occurs. If you are conscious about these factors, you will create far more opportunities to sustain your success over time. More importantly though, as a society, we are likely to have more sustained wins if we manage our feelings of envy and schadenfreude. If we do this, we, and those whom we care about, will fully enjoy and savor those winning streaks.

The Problem With Perfectionists

Perfectionism is a trait many of us cop to coyly, maybe even a little proudly. (“I’m a perfectionist” being the classic response you say in a job interview when asked to name your biggest flaw — one that you think isn’t really a flaw — for example.) But real perfectionism can be devastatingly destructive, leading to crippling anxiety or depression, and it may even be an overlooked risk factor for suicide, argues a new paper in Review of General Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association.

The most agreed-upon definition of perfectionist is simply the need to be perfect, or to at least appear that way. We tend to see the Martha Stewarts and Steve Jobs and Tracy Flicks of the world as high-functioning, high-achieving people, even if they are a little intense, said lead author Gordon Flett, a psychologist at York University who has spent decades researching the potentially ruinous psychological impact of perfectionism. “Other than those people who have suffered greatly because of their perfectionism or the perfectionism of a loved one, the average person has very little understanding or awareness of how destructive perfectionism can be,” Flett said in an email. But for many perfectionists, that “together” image is just an emotionally draining mask and underneath “they feel like imposters,” he said.

And, eventually, that façade may collapse. In one 2007 study, researchers conducted interviews with the friends and family members of people who had recently killed themselves. Without prompting, more than half of the deceased were described as “perfectionists” by their loved ones. Similarly, in a British study of students who committed suicide, 11 out of the 20 students who’d died were described by those who knew them as being afraid of failure. In another study, published last year, more than 70 percent of 33 boys and young men who had killed themselves were said by their parents to have placed “exceedingly high” demands and expectations on themselves — traits associated with perfectionism.

It doesn’t take much imagination to explain what might drive a perfectionist to self-harm. The all-or-nothing, impossibly high standards perfectionists set for themselves often mean that they’re not happy even when they’ve achieved success. And research has suggested that anxiety over making mistakes may ultimately be holding some perfectionists back from ever achieving success in the first place. “Wouldn't it be good if your surgeon, or your lawyer or financial advisor, is a perfectionist?” said Thomas S. Greenspon, a psychologist and author of a recent paper on an “antidote to perfectionism,” published in Psychology in the Schools. “Actually, no. Research confirms that the most successful people in any given field are less likely to be perfectionistic, because the anxiety about making mistakes gets in your way,” he continued. “Waiting for the surgeon to be absolutely sure the correct decision is being made could allow me to bleed to death.”

But the dangers of perfectionism, and particularly the link to suicide, have been overlooked at least partially because perfectionists are very skilled at hiding their pain. Admitting to suicidal thoughts or depression wouldn’t exactly fit in with the image they’re trying to project. Perfectionism might not only be driving suicidal impulses, it could also be simultaneously masking them.

Still, there’s a distinction between perfectionism and the pursuit of excellence, Greenspon said. Perfectionism is more than pushing yourself to do your best to achieve a goal; it’s a reflection of an inner self mired in anxiety. “Perfectionistic people typically believe that they can never be good enough, that mistakes are signs of personal flaws, and that the only route to acceptability as a person is to be perfect,” he said. Because the one thing these people are decidedly not-perfect at, research shows, is self-compassion.

If you have perfectionistic tendencies, Flett advises aiming the trait outside yourself. “There is much to be said for feeling better about yourself by volunteering and making a difference in the lives of others,” he said. If you’re a perfectionist who also happens to be a parent, it’s even more important to get your inner Tracy Flick under control, because research suggests that perfectionism is a trait that you can pass down to your kids. One simple way to help your kids, he suggests, is storytelling. “Kids love to hear a parent or teacher talk about mistakes they have made or failures that have had to overcome,” he said. “This can reinforce the ‘nobody is perfect and you don't have to be either’ theme.”

It’s important to address as early as possible, because the link between perfectionism and suicide attempts is a particularly dangerous one. In a sad twist of irony, once a perfectionist has made up his mind to end his own life, his conscientious nature may make him more likely to succeed. Perfectionists act deliberately, not impulsively, and this means their plans for taking their own lives tend to be very well thought-out and researched, Flett and colleagues write. To drive the point home, they quote the wife of a Wyoming man who died via suicide in 2006, who told the Jackson Hole News & Guide, “He was very deliberate. He was a perfectionist. I have been learning that perfectionism plus depression is a loaded gun.”

.... Yet

Simply adding the word yet to the statements you make about yourself may be enough to change your beliefs about yourself and your abilities, as the Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck explains.

Dweck gives a brief overview of the research she's done on the idea of a fixed mind-set versus a growth mind-set: Having a fixed mind-set about yourself and your abilities means you think you are the way you are, and that's pretty much that. A growth mind-set, on the other hand, means you believe your skills are not static, and you have the ability to change and learn.

She explains this in the context of a student-teacher relationship, and how the word yet can improve students' motivation:

We've found that putting in certain phrases like not yet or yet can really boost students' motivation. So if a student says, "I'm not a math person — yet" "I can't do this — yet." And it means that with your guidance they will continue on their learning trajectory and get there eventually. It puts their fixed mindset statement into a growth mindset context of learning over time.

And there's no reason you can't use this same tactic when talking to yourself, Dweck says on her website. Yet is a little word with potentially big powers of motivation.

Seth Godin on Selections

One in five applicants to Harvard and Stanford are completely qualified to attend—perhaps 20% of those that send in their applications have the smarts, guts and work ethic to thrive at these schools and to become respected alumni.

These schools further filter this 20% by admitting only 5% of their applicants, or about one in four of those qualified. And they spend a huge amount of time sorting and ranking and evaluating to get to the final list.

They do this even though there is zero correlation between the students they like the most and any measurable outcomes. The person they let in off the waiting list is just as likely to be a superstar in life as they one they chose first.

Worth saying again: In admissions, just as in casting or most other forced selection processes, once you get past the selection of people who are good enough, there are few selectors who have a track record of super-sorting successfully. False metrics combined with plenty of posturing leading to lots of drama.

It's all a hoax. A fable we're eager to believe, both as the pickers and the picked (and the rejected).

What would happen if we spent more time on carefully assembling the pool of 'good enough' and then randomly picking the 5%? And of course, putting in the time to make sure that the assortment of people works well together...

[For football fans: Tom Brady and Russell Wilson (late picks who win big games) are as likely outcomes as Peyton Manning (super-selected). Super Bowl quarterbacks, as high-revenue a selection choice as one can make, come as often in late rounds as they do in the first one.]

[For baseball fans: As we saw in Moneyball, the traditional scouting process was essentially random, and replacing it by actually correlated signals changed everything.]

What would happen if rejection letters said, "you were good enough, totally good enough to be part of this class, but we randomly chose 25% of the good enough, and alas, you didn't get lucky"? Because, in fact, that's what's actually happening.

What would happen if casting directors and football scouts didn't agonize about their final choice, but instead spent all that time and effort widening the pool to get the right group to randomly choose from instead? (And in fact, the most talented casting directors are in the business of casting wide nets and signing up the good ones, not in agonizing over false differences appearing real--perhaps that's where the word 'casting' comes from).

It's difficult for the picked, for the pickers and for the institutions to admit, but if you don't have proof that picking actually works, then let's announce the randomness and spend our time (and self-esteem) on something worthwhile instead.

( more good ideas from Seth Godin)

Of course it's difficult...

Students choose to attend expensive colleges but don't major in engineering because the courses are killer.

Doing more than the customary amount of customer service is expensive, time-consuming and hard to sustain.

Raising money for short-term urgent projects is easier than finding support for the long, difficult work of changing the culture and the infrastructure.

Finding a new path up the mountain is far more difficult than hiring a sherpa and following the tried and true path. Of course it is. That's precisely why it's scarce and valuable.

The word economy comes from the Greek word for scarcity. The only things that are scarce in the world of connection and services and the net are the things that are difficult, and the only things that are valuable are the things that are scarce. When we intentionally seek out the difficult tasks, we're much more likely to actually create value.

(also Seth Godin)

Dealing With Failure (Britain)

Ed Wray, a co-founder of Betfair and now an angel investor, likes to confound entrepreneurs seeking his backing by asking them about the biggest mistake they’ve made. Few have a prepared answer, so he gets to see how they think on their feet — and he gets to see how they deal with failure.

“I’m absolutely convinced you learn an awful lot more when you get things wrong than when you get things right,” he says. “When you get things right, you don’t know whether you’ve got them completely right. When you get things wrong, you know where the line is.”

Asked about his own worst failure, Mr Wray laughs. “My first business [Betfair] worked, but there were lots of times when it nearly didn’t, right back to the beginning when we failed to raise any money for it. That felt like a catastrophic failure.”

Then there was the share price that bombed after its initial public offering, punters’ bets that went unplaced and the theft of millions of customers’ payment card details. “There are all kinds of steps forward and steps back. At the time they felt like gamechanging failures.”

With a £222 million estimated fortune, it may be easy for Mr Wray to discuss his mistakes now, but he says that there are still moments that haunt him. “I can think back to some of the times when the business very nearly went under and, yes, even now it makes me feel queasy.”

He has dreams about running out of money and a moment in the early days when Betfair nearly made a deal that would have bankrupted the business. “I took great solace in the fact that I thought all our competitors have probably got to overcome something similar and that it was complicated for us, so it’s probably going to be complicated for them, too.”

Received wisdom has it that Britain is said to be squeamish about business failure, compared with the United States, where it is almost encouraged as a formative experience. According to Mr Wray: “What we are very bad at is castigating failure. We jump on it and look at it in isolation. One of the frustrating things is the media, social media, people love to focus on mistakes rather than successes.” This instils a fear of failure, he says, which can throttle innovation. “If you’re scared to fail, you will find it hard to make decisions; you will slow down and you won’t push yourself.” In other words, if you are not failing at all, you may not be trying hard enough.

There is, however, a danger of slipping into overconfidence. A study published in the Harvard Business Review showed that instead of learning from mistakes, serial entrepreneurs are just as likely to be overoptimistic after failure as before, making them a greater risk for investors.

Luke Johnson, chairman of the private equity firm Risk Capital Partners and a former chairman of Channel 4, PizzaExpress and a string of other companies, says that is not true of his career. “In a bizarre way, I have become more cautious, which is the opposite of what it should be. You’ve got less to lose as you get older, the rational thing to do is to be more speculative. But most of us become more conservative about our business choices. I think that can only be through bitter experience of having setbacks along the way.”

His advice? “Only go into business with people you trust, do your homework, do not go into businesses that are in obvious structural decline that seems irreversible.”

The Stress of Rags to Riches

Striving to go from rags to riches takes its toll on the health of poor children, according to a study.

Researchers found that children from families with low incomes who exhibited high levels of self-control — and were therefore more likely to achieve their goals — had immune cells that were biologically much older than their actual age. They said that the cells’ rapid ageing, which other studies have linked to earlier death, could be down to long-term high levels of stress hormones.

The researchers, from Northwestern University in the United States, wrote: “To achieve upward mobility, these youth must overcome multiple obstacles and often do so with limited support from their schools, peers, and families. Even if they succeed, these youth may go on to experience alienation in university and workplace settings and discrimination if they are African-American.

“Collectively, these experiences seem likely to cause persistent activation of stress response systems.”

Greg Miller, the lead author and professor of psychology in Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, said: “For low-income youth, self-control may act as a double-edged sword, facilitating academic success and psychosocial adjustment, while at the same time undermining physical health.”

The research focused on a group of about 300 rural African-American teenagers. Those best able to focus on long-term goals over more immediate ones fared better on a variety of psychological measures as young adults. “They are less depressed, use substances less frequently and are less aggressive,” Professor Miller said. “That’s true across the board, regardless of gender, family income and education.”

Those from lower-income backgrounds also appeared to have immune cells that were old compared with their real age. Professor Miller said: “In other words, there seems to be an underlying biological cost to the self-control and the success it enables. This is most evident in the youth from the lowest-income families.” Previous studies had suggested that poorer children with better self-control were also at greater risk of heart problems, based on their obesity status, blood pressure and levels of stress hormones in their blood.

The researchers wrote: “These patterns suggest that for [low income] youth, resilience is a ‘skin-deep’ phenomenon, wherein outward indicators of success can mask emerging problems with health.” They said that providers of “character-building” programmes for disadvantaged youth should also include some health education.

“This approach could mitigate health problems that prevent upwardly mobile youth from realising their full potential. More broadly, these findings challenge our view of what it means to be resilient,” the researchers said. “Current thinking suggests that if [low income] youth do well in school and stay out of trouble, they have overcome disadvantage. As we show, that is only partially accurate.”

Write Down Your Goals

Having dreams is one thing; actually accomplishing them is quite another, especially given the fact that relentless fantasizing may actually reduce one's odds of achieving goals. So it's no surprise that motivation researchers are interested in how to best bridge this gap. New research suggests a surprisingly simple, powerful method, at least for students: Simply write down your goals.

Over at NPR, education reporter Anya Kamenetz details the results of new research from University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who recorded what happened when 700 students did a short writing exercise over the course of two years. Specifically, Peterson asked the students to think about their lives, especially pivotal moments from the past that helped shape who they are. Then, they were to use these memories to help design a path toward achieving their future goals, something Peterson calls "self-authoring."

Because these were students, a prerequisite to achieving many of their larger goals involved staying in school and completing their coursework. And in the end, the students who did the self-authoring exercise completed more course credit and were more likely to have stayed in school than the students in the control group, who had not done the writing assignment. Even more important, Kamenetz notes, "after two years, ethnic and gender-group differences in performance among the students had all but disappeared." In other words, the achievement gap between the minority and white students narrowed.

Here's what might help explain these results:

Peterson believes that formal goal-setting can especially help minority students overcome what's often called "stereotype threat," or, in other words, to reject the damaging belief that generalizations about ethnic-group academic performance will apply to them personally. ... Writing down their internal motivations and connecting daily efforts to blue-sky goals may have helped these young people solidify their identifies as students.

One big fat caveat here: Peterson's got a personal, financial investment in this self-authoring idea, as he's selling the curriculum online; so far, Kamenetz reports, some universities in the Netherlands are showing interest. But the idea behind self-authoring is sound, as it taps into what researchers call a growth mind-set, the idea that adopting the mind-set that your strengths and abilities are not fixed, but can improve over time and with effort, can have self-fulfilling results. And on a purely practical level, the writing exercise might have forced the students to consider the potential obstacles they might face and to connect the drudgery of everyday undergraduate life with their longer-term goals. The simple act of writing, as Peterson notes to NPR, "is more powerful than people think."

Glass Floor

THE middle classes have created a “glass floor” to protect their less able children from falling down the social ladder, according to the government’s social mobility adviser.

This means that low attainers from an affluent background — epitomised by television’s Tim Nice-But-Dim — are 35% more likely to become higher earners when they grow up than bright children from poor backgrounds. A girl who performs poorly at intelligence tests at the age of five doubles her prospects of earning a high wage if she goes to a private school rather than a comprehensive.

Alan Milburn, chairman of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, said the findings showed that a glass floor held back social mobility as much as the “glass ceiling”. He added: “No one should criticise parents for doing their best for their children. But Britain is a long way from being a meritocratic society when the less able can do better in life than the more able.”

The report, Downward Mobility, Opportunity Hoarding and the “Glass Floor”, out this week, warns that while it is politically more palatable to make the case for improving the chances of the disadvantaged, social mobility will improve only if politicians accept that the better off will inevitably lose out. It concludes: “In a world where ‘room at the top’ is increasing only slowly, it is simply not possible to increase any form of upward mobility without a commensurate rise in downward mobility.”

THE comedian Harry Enfield played the 1990s television character Tim Nice-But-Dim as an amiable buffoon, unable to understand that he was being ripped off even as he murmured: “What a bloody nice bloke.”

In reality, however, Tim and his fellow well-bred, but not so bright former public-school boys, have had the last laugh. This weekend the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (SMCPC) unveiled research showing that he and his ilk were blocking social mobility by hanging on to well-paid jobs that they do not merit. It declared: “In a world where ‘room at the top’ is increasing only slowly it is simply not possible to increase any form of upward mobility without a commensurate rise in downward mobility.” The study found that less bright children from an affluent background were 35% more likely to become higher earners by the age of 42 than bright children from poorer backgrounds.

Nick Newman, co-creator with Ian Hislop of the television character, and a cartoonist for The Sunday Times, confirmed this weekend that Tim was inspired by fellow pupils at Ardingly College, Sussex, who always seemed to land on their feet: “They all ended up going to the City to do jobs they didn’t understand, yet ended up making oodles of money.”

Enfield played him again in a comeback tour in the spring, with Tim popping up at No 10, where he had been working for his brother, Dave Nice-But-Dumb-Downing-Street for the past five years.

How effective are the strategies of the professional middle classes determined to give their offspring the best start in life?

The numbers show private school and a degree are reliable pathways to career success. A privately educated boy with a low score in cognitive tests at age five is 18% more likely to be in the top fifth of earners at the age of 42 than a boy who got a high score but went to a comprehensive.

For girls the effect is stronger, with a 29% better chance for the low attainer who goes to private school. If a better-off boy who scores poorly at age five gains a degree, he is 111% more likely to earn a high wage than his counterpart who got a high score at five but left school with no qualifications. The gap for girls is 156%. It also helps to have a parent with a degree. For higher attainers, it boosts boys’ earning prospects by 12% and girls’ by 17%, while for low attainers, it boosts boys’ prospects by 69% and girls’ by 100%. There is even a correlation between the social background of a child’s grandfather and their career prospects.

Abigail McKnight, the author of the study, a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics, examined the cognitive test scores of a cohort of 17,000 born in 1970 and assessed how they had performed in their careers by the age of 42. Those in the top two-fifths were graded high attainers, while those in the bottom two were low attainers. The figures show children from richer families perform a lot better at the age of five than those from lower socioeconomic groups. McKnight said that by the age of five, children from more privileged backgrounds had already benefited from better nurturing, which boosted their scores.

Alan Milburn, the SMCPC chairman and a former Labour cabinet minister, wants the disadvantaged to get a helping hand with the “support, advice and development opportunities” that better-off middleclass families take for granted.

But he also wants to kick away some of the props the better-off use for what the study calls “opportunity hoarding”. He urged employers to ensure that “internships aren’t reserved for those with the right social contacts. It’s a social scandal that all too often demography is destiny in Britain.”

Post Mortems

The cruel beauty of sport is that it throws up, with unerring regularity, epic defeats. Defeats that are not just reversals of fortune, but ones that reach deep into the soul of the vanquished.

One thinks of Rory McIlroy’s capitulation at the Masters in 2011, the Northern Irishman hitting his drive at the 10th to the left, then dropping six strokes in three holes. From being in prime position to win his first major championship, he morphed into a little boy lost. Pundits speculated if the emotional scar tissue would ever heal.

One thinks of Andy Murray failing in his first Wimbledon final in 2012, his ferocious will broken by the superlative form of Roger Federer and the weight of national expectation. The Scot wept in the aftermath and his future wife covered her eyes. This was sport reaching into the innermost vulnerabilities of an athlete. Many wondered if he would ever win a grand-slam tournament.

This brings me to perhaps the most ignominious British sporting reverse of all, involving a team rather than an individual: the 2015 Rugby World Cup. Six years of build-up after winning the bid, and with expectations higher than the sunlit flight of Icarus, England embarked on a journey that they believed would culminate in a second world title.

Then they faced Wales and Australia. As the clock ticked down at Twickenham on Saturday, the England team realised that it was over. The body language changed. The belief that had inspired an intense first half evaporated. It was as if they had been stripped of their manhood. The last Australia try was a formality. In The Black Swan, his seminal book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the philosopher, writes of a turkey being fattened by a farmer. For 363 days, the turkey receives food and pampering, building up the belief that he is on to a good thing. Only on the 364th day, as the farmer arrives with his hatchet, does the turkey realise what is really going on. And he experiences what Taleb rather neatly calls a “revision of belief”.

Doesn’t that phrase perfectly capture England’s predicament? Their implosion was not a typical black swan event (the phrase refers to random events with big consequences), but it has psychological parallels. The team believed that they could win the Webb Ellis Cup. Stuart Lancaster harboured hopes of being a World Cup-winning head coach. The RFU talked about a renaissance. But in those dying moments their world view was pulled from underneath them. Lancaster’s face, in particular, betrayed a sense of discombobulation. He experienced a “revision of belief”. He realised that the most basic assumptions in his coaching philosophy had been found wanting. The Aussies had taken a hatchet to the throat of England rugby.

So where now? One of the most noteworthy attributes of world-class teams and performers is the intellectual clarity that they bring to their most brutal disappointments. McIlroy, although young, spent the week after his Augusta humiliation scrutinising a video of his final round. He noticed that he was barely talking to his caddie between shots. His body language was strained.

So he learnt precious lessons. He created a new approach of chatting to his caddie between shots (about movies and football) until 20 seconds before addressing the ball. This freed him up, liberated his swing and enabled him to rediscover the joy of golf. He won the next major title by eight strokes. “It was about turning disappointment into motivation,” he would later say. So much for emotional scar tissue.

Murray learnt too. Twelve months after weeping on Centre Court, he defeated Novak Djokovic to lift the Wimbledon trophy. What happened in the interim? Murray was specific, saying moments after his triumph that the defeat by Federer had turned him into a champion. He developed new ways to cope with expectation and make sure that he was ready for the scrutiny of Wimbledon.

This is also true of team sport. After Team Sky lost the Tour de France in 2014, Sir Dave Brailsford had the intellectual honesty to realise that the operation had lost its edge. He wasn’t interested in defending his reputation, or clinging on to cherished ideas and assumptions. He wanted to listen as acutely as possible to the eloquent lessons of defeat.

So, even as the team were travelling to the final stage in Paris, they started to reimagine their strategy. A new dietician was hired. Simon Jones, a coach, was brought in to question almost every aspect of design and technology. The team realised that motivation had dropped off, so they responded with the so-called “hunger index”. They created a winning behaviours app to improve team culture. With every weakness, they responded with meaningful change. As Brailsford put it: “Defeat isn’t easy, but unless you learn, you will just keep losing.”

The problem with most inquests, sporting or otherwise, is that they are designed not to learn, but to protect. They are about defending vested interests, political masters and reputations.

This happens to be particularly true of healthcare. When Scott Morrish lost his son through medical error, the investigation revealed almost nothing. “Most of what we know now did not come to light through the investigative work of the NHS: it came despite the NHS,” he would later say. The reason is simple: the investigation was set up not to learn the lessons, but to avoid financial liability.

This is typical of the limp inquests that are carried out in the aftermath of sporting debacles, too. They tell us very little because they have been hijacked by vested interests. One thinks of the politically motivated reports seen in football, where the conclusions could have been guessed in advance by knowing the identity of the body that commissioned it. Intellectual honesty, the hallmark of world-class institutions, is conspicuous by its absence.

Trial and Error

Iterative innovation. It is the idea that technological change typically happens not through detonations of creative insight, but through a long process of trial and error.

Take James Dyson’s vacuum cleaner. The product is marvellously engineered, so it’s tempting to assume that it must have popped fully formed into his head. In fact, Dyson worked through 5,126 failed prototypes before coming up with the design.

Or take Pixar’s movies, such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, which, again, are marvellously constructed. They prompt the thought that they must have emerged from a presiding, imaginative genius. In fact, Pixar is a master of iteration, testing and learning as it hones every plotline via 125,000 storyboards for a 90-minute feature. My argument, really, was that we need to think about creativity in a new way. When we think of it as a journey of trial and error, we are far more likely to be resilient to the failures that are an inevitable aspect of innovation, and to be emboldened to take risks of experimentation.

The Problem With Goals

The Problem With Goals

You wouldn’t know it from browsing the self-help aisle of your local bookstore, but scientists are beginning to question whether focusing too much on goals runs counter to long-term performance and general well-being. In a Harvard Business School report titled “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting,” a team of researchers from Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of Pennsylvania set out to explore the potential downfalls of goal-setting. They found that overemphasizing goals — and especially those that are based on measurable outcomes — often leads to reduced intrinsic motivation, irrational risk-taking, and unethical behavior.

Don’t Underestimate the Simple Power of Writing Down Your Goals

We see this unfold in the real world all the time: Someone becomes overly fixated on achieving a goal and loses sight of his inner reasons for setting out to accomplish it in the first place. He becomes driven by the external rewards and recognition that he hopes accomplishing his goal will bring, and, in the worst cases, he’ll go to any extreme to achieve it. This comes in many forms, including taking harmful diet pills (need to lose that weight); plagiarizing (have to publish that book); using banned performance-enhancing drugs (must make the Olympic team); or partaking in fraudulent behavior in the workplace (gotta get that promotion). According to the authors of the Harvard Business School report, these are “predictable side effects” of overemphasizing goals, and reasons that “goal setting should be prescribed selectively and presented with a warning label.”

Another problem with goals, especially those that New York Times best-selling author Jim Collins calls “big hairy audacious goals” (or “BHAGs”), is that they can seem overwhelming and amorphous. For example, a goal of finishing an Ironman triathlon is motivating until you realize how hard it is to do and that you have no idea where to start. And even if you do figure out where to start, you quickly grasp how far you have to go — both figuratively and literally. Any acute progress seems trivial. Ironically, focusing on such a goal can demoralize, demotivate, and, ultimately, detach you from the steps you need to take today to accomplish it.

Still, let’s say you persist and accomplish your big, hairy, and audacious goal. If that’s all that you were focusing on, what happens next? Some people feel a void in their life, becoming saddened and even depressed — what marathon runners often experience as the “post-race blues.” Others, meanwhile, fall victim to what author Gretchen Rubin calls the “danger of the finish line”: Once you accomplish your goal, you drop the good habits that got you there. (A common example of this is yo-yo dieting.) Both of these outcomes are related to a goalcentric approach — and neither is desirable.

But perhaps the biggest potential pitfall of concentrating too much on goals is this: It often ties your self-worth to things that you cannot control. Imagine that unprecedented weather conditions strike on race day, preventing you from finishing your Ironman triathlon. Or that the boss who was going to promote you becomes ill and retires. Or that you write what you believe to be the perfect manuscript, but the publishing house feels differently. Do these events make you a failure? If you judge yourself based on whether or not you accomplished your goal, then, unfortunately, the answer is yes. Becoming a slave to the achievement of a specific goal creates a volatile and fragile sense of self.

This isn’t to say that you should completely disregard goals. Goal setting can serve as an effective steering mechanism, a north star to shoot for. But after you set a goal, it’s best to shift your focus from the goal itself to the process that gives you the best chance of achieving it; and to judge yourself based on how well you execute that process.

Focus on the Process Instead

Focusing on the process means breaking down a goal into its component parts and concentrating on those parts. It’s an incredible focusing mechanism that keeps you in the here and now, even during the pursuit of distant goals. For Martinez, this meant not worrying about her bad luck in the 800m, but rather ensuring she got in the right nutrition, bodywork, sleep, and workouts to give herself the best chance of running a good race in the 1500m. Again: She wasn’t focused on making the Olympics. She was focused on the process of making the Olympics.

This mind-set can be applied to any goal — from qualifying for the Olympics, to earning a promotion in the workplace, to improving a relationship: First, set a goal. Next, figure out the steps to achieving that goal that are within your control. Then — (mostly) forget about the goal, and focus on nailing the steps instead.

A process mind-set creates daily opportunities for little victories, which help sustain the motivation required to accomplish long-term goals. A handful of studies, including one in the prestigious journal Nature, provide insight into why this is the case. Researchers have found that when mice accomplish micro objectives on the path to distant goals (e.g., making a correct turn in a maze), their bodies release dopamine, the neurochemical associated with motivation and drive. Without hits of dopamine, the mice become apathetic and give up. Although these studies cannot be safely replicated in humans, scientists speculate we operate the same way. Process promotes progress, and progress, on a neurochemical level, primes us to persist.

Even more important than what it does for our motivation, focusing on the process cultivates what University of Quebec psychology professor Robert J. Vallerand calls “harmonious passion.” Harmonious passion is characterized by a deep intrinsic motivation, a love for doing the work involved in achieving a goal. It’s the opposite of what Vallerand refers to as “obsessive passion,” or being motivated by and attached to the external recognition that achieving a goal might bring. Harmonious passion is embracing and relishing in the process of getting better at a given pursuit. Obsessive passion is becoming a slave to the achievement of goals for achievement’s sake. Vallerand has shown that while the latter is linked to burnout, anxiety, dissatisfaction, and depression, the former is linked to long-term performance, well-being, and fulfillment.

Perhaps the reason for this difference is that focusing on the process ensures that one’s self-worth does not hinge on the kind of uncontrollable events mentioned earlier, such as getting tripped in an Olympic qualifying event. Knowing you put in the work, that you gave something your all, breeds a special kind of confidence, fullness, and contentment that no one can take away from you. In her book Presence, New York Times–best-selling author and Harvard Business School psychology professor Amy Cuddy writes that focusing on the process “leaves you with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, regardless of the measureable outcome.”

Cuddy says that this mind-set lends itself to presence, which she defines as the ability to be in the moment, confident but not arrogant. When it comes to achieving your goals, perhaps it is this kind of presence, fostered through process, and embodied by Brenda Martinez, that is the most critical asset of all.

During a recent interview with the New Yorker to mark his directorial debut with the film “Unfrosted,” Jerry Seinfeld was asked why, given his great financial success, he still works so much. His answer was glorious:

“Because the only thing in life that’s really worth having is good skill,” he said. “Good skill is the greatest possession. The things that money buys are fine. They’re good. I like them. But having a skill [is the most important thing].”

This, he said, he learned long ago from reading an issue of Esquire magazine on “mastery.” “Pursue mastery that will fulfill your life,” Seinfeld continued. “You will feel good. … I work because if you don’t in standup comedy — if you don’t do it a lot — you stink.”

This sent me looking for the issue of Esquire that had made such a difference for him, and I’m pretty sure I found it. In May 1987, two years before “Seinfeld” premiered on NBC, Esquire published an issue titled “Mastery: The Secret of Ultimate Fitness.”

It does indeed offer provocative lessons in how to excel at any undertaking, lessons that stand up today and deserve to be resurfaced from 37-year-old magazine pages.

In recent decades, notable books have addressed this same topic, including Robert Greene’s “Mastery” (2012) and Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” (2008), which popularized the “10,000-hour rule” specifying how much practice it takes to master a skill.

But the Esquire issue is older than those books, and it contains gem insights all its own. (In fact, the magazine issue was so popular that it inspired George Leonard — who edited and compiled that issue — to write a book on the topic.)

Here are the six notable takeaways:

1. Anyone can pursue mastery — if they can first locate the path

In the issue’s main article, “Playing For Keeps: The Art of Mastery in Sports and Life,” Leonard explains: “The modern world can be viewed as a prodigious conspiracy against mastery. We are bombarded with promises of fast, temporary relief, immediate gratification, and instant success, all of which lead in exactly the wrong direction.”

This is, if anything, truer today than it was back then. TV, a growing distraction in the mid-1980s, was nothing compared with the smartphones in our pockets now.

2. Maintain a child’s mind-set

Starting on the path of mastery requires qualities more commonly found in children than in adults: curiosity, being present and lack of ego — specifically, not caring if you fail.

Many adults are unable to learn new skills, Leonard says, because they are “impatient for significant results” and unwilling to make mistakes.

3. Develop muscle memory

The best athletes in a sport usually make it look effortless — think of Roger Federer in tennis or Steph Curry in basketball. It looks effortless because the athlete has put in countless hours of practice. The physical movements become “muscle memory” and the actions are on “autopilot.”

There has been significantly more research on this topic since the mid-1980s, but it’s interesting to read what was understood almost four decades ago. Karl Priban, then a neuroscientist at Stanford University, explains to Leonard that humans possess a subconscious “habitual behavior system,” which involves a “reflex circuit in the spinal cord” connected to various parts of the brain.

“It makes it possible for you to do things — jump over a hurdle or return a scorching tennis serve — without worrying just how you do them,” Leonard says about Priban’s research. In the beginning, you have to learn new ways of moving and sensing, but once you reprogram the habitual system, you no longer have to stop and think about where to place your feet to leap over a hurdle or how to grip your racket.

4. Mastery is plateaus and brief spurts of progress Leonard describes his own experience learning to play tennis. He wants instant results, but his instructor wants him to be patient. Leonard is told to avoid even playing against an opponent for six months. Instead, he should spend his training time perfecting his grip on the racket. The instructor is trying to impart two main lessons:

“Learning something new involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher than what preceded it.” and “You must be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.”

Learning to tolerate plateaus is essential, because they are “where the deepest, most lasting learning takes place,” Leonard says. In time, he learns that every plateau leads eventually to a satisfying new spurt of progress.

Those who fail to appreciate this truth wind up as non-masters, of which there are three kinds. The first is the “dabbler,” the zealous beginner who “announces proudly to everyone he knows that he is going to take up tennis, golf, martial arts, bodybuilding, running, swimming, whatever. He loves the shiny new equipment [and] the spiffy training suits.” He has a spurt of progress, demonstrates his skill to family and friends, and can’t wait for the next lesson. But when the inevitable plateau arrives, he loses enthusiasm, starts missing lessons, and rationalizes that the sport was really never for him. He starts into something else, and the cycle continues.

The second type is the “obsessive,” who wants to get every skill down right off the bat. “He stays after class talking to the instructor. He asks what books and tapes he can buy to help him make progress faster. He leans toward the listener when he talks.” And he makes robust progress at first. But when he reaches the plateau, he can’t stand it. He tries harder, pushing himself until he quits, often with an injury.

The third kind of non-master is the “hacker,” the person who, after reaching the plateau, is willing to stay there. “If it is golf, he gets locked into an eccentric but adequate swing and is satisfied with it. If it is tennis, he develops a solid forehand and figures he can make do with his backhand. If it’s martial arts, he likes the power but not the endless discipline. … He’s a good guy to have around but he’s not on the journey of mastery.”

5. Mastery is a lifelong endeavor

As you get older, it is totally fine to “dabble” and “hack” (especially to avoid injury), but there should be at least one pursuit that you take seriously. As everything changes — work, family, social networks, locations — a lifelong pursuit grounds you in something constant.

“If you stay on it long enough, you’ll discover that the path is a vivid place, with its ups and downs, its challenges, comforts, its surprises, its disappointments, and unconditional joys,” Leonard writes. “You’ll take your share of bumps and bruises while travelling it — bruises of the body and of the ego. … It will give you plenty of exercise, a well-toned body, a feeling of self-confidence and an added charge of energy for your career and your good work. Eventually, it might well make you a winner in your chosen sport, if that’s what you’re looking for, and then people will refer to you as a master. But that’s not really the point: What is mastery? At the heart of it, mastery is staying on the path.”

6. Practitioners of mastery share four traits

The Esquire issue concludes with four commonalities among people who pursue mastery:

Enthusiasm: “It works both ways,” says Leonard. “Having a great deal of experience at something worthwhile makes you enjoy working at it. Enjoying what you work at results in your wanting to get more experience.”

Generosity: Noting that the word “generous” comes from the same root as “genius,” Leonard says. “Some of those known as geniuses might be selfish, vulgar, cruel, and generally obnoxious in other aspects of their life (witness the lives of some of our musical geniuses), but insofar as their own particular calling is concerned, they have a remarkable ability to give everything and hold nothing back.”

Zonshin: This is a Japanese word meaning “unbroken concentration.” Leonard cites an example from the world of golf: “It was said of the legendary Ben Hogan that other golf pros learned a lot about the game just by studying the way he moved down the fairway between shots.”

Whatever you think of Seinfeld’s comedy, his pursuit of the art offers a master class in mastery. By the time he read that issue of Esquire, he already understood the value of practice. To prepare for his first appearance on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” in 1981, he rehearsed his six-minute set about 100 times.

But because comedy has been, for him, a lifelong pursuit, the highs and lows wash away. He controls what he can control and trusts that putting in the work every day will yield results. And at age 70, he is still performing and trying to perfect the craft.

Other Resources

• Books About Success
• Anecdotes About Success
• Quotations About Success