No one Thinks They are Average

Research shows just about all of us think we are more competent than our coworkers, more ethical than our friends, friendlier than the general public, more intelligent than our peer, more attractive than the average person, less prejudiced than people in our region, younger-looking than people the same age, better drivers than most people we know, better children than our siblings, and that we will live longer than the average lifespan.

(As you just read that list, maybe you said to yourself, “No, I don’t think I’m better than everyone.” So you think you’re more honest with yourself than the average person? You are not so smart.)

No one, it seems, believes he or she is part of the population contributing to the statistics generating averages. You don’t believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. This tendency, which springs from self-serving bias, is called the illusory superiority effect.

In 1999, Justin Kruger at the New York University Stern School of Business showed illusory superiority was more likely to manifest in the minds of subject when they were told ahead of time a certain task was easy. When they rated their abilities after being primed to think the task was considered simple, people said they performed better than average. When he then told people where were about to perform a task that was difficult they rated their performance as being below average even when it wasn’t .

No matter the actual difficulty, just telling people ahead of time how hard the undertaking would be changed how they saw themselves in comparison to an imagined average. To defeat feelings of inadequacy, you first have to imagine a task as being simple and easy. If you can manage to do that, illusory superiority takes over.

David McRaney, You are Not so Smart

Winners are more likely to Cheat

When people succeed in competition against others, it seems to compromise their ethics. It makes them more likely to cheat afterwards," (said Amos Schurr, a professor of psychology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel).

The problem, he says, seems to be a very specific type of success: the kind that involves social comparison, the sort that means doing better than others, instead of just doing well. And he believes it all boils down to a sense of entitlement that beating others in sports, business, politics, or any other form of head-to-head competition seems to foster in victors.

"Dishonesty is a pretty complex phenomenon — there are all sorts of mechanisms behind it," said Schurr. "But people who win competitions feel more entitled, and that feeling of entitlement is what predicts dishonesty."

In other words, when people win against others, they tend to think they're better, or more deserving. And that thinking helps them justify cheating, since, after all, they're the rightful heir to whatever throne is next — "If I'm better than you, I might as well make sure I win, because I deserve to anyway."

Roberto A. Ferdman writing in the Washington Post

The Power of Touch

A study of NBA players found the best teams touch each other a lot, while the losing teams seldom touch each other.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley looked at what happened between teammates during the 2009 season and found the most touch-prone were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, two of the league’s top teams at the time. The mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats were at the bottom of the touch list. The same held true for individual players. The study took into account the possibility of teams high-fiving just because they were winning and adjusted accordingly. Even when the high expectations surrounding the more talented teams were taken into account, the correlation persisted.

A warm touch reduces stress by releasing hormones that promote a sensation of trust. This can free up the part of the brain that regulates emotion so it can engage in problem-solving.

The investigators also tested couples, finding with more touching came greater satisfaction in the relationship. Previous research has suggested students receiving a teacher's supportive touch on the arm or back or arm were much more likely to volunteer in class, and a sympathetic touch from a doctor gives patients the feeling that a visit lasted twice as long as it actually did.

Stephen Goforth

Giving Your Best

Expecting the best means that you put your whole heart (i.e., the central essence of your personality) into what you want to accomplish. People are defeated in life not because of lack of ability, but for lack of wholeheartedness. They do not wholeheartedly expect to succeed. Their heart isn’t in it, which is to say they themselves are not fully given. Results do not yield themselves to the person who refuses to give himself to the desired results.

A major key to success in this life, to attaining that which you deeply desire, is to be completely released and throw all there is of yourself into your job or any project in which you are engaged. In other words, whatever you are doing, give it all you’ve got.

A famous Canadian athletic coach, Ace Percival, says that most people, athletes as well as non-athletes, are “holdouts,” that is to say, they are always keeping something in reserve. They do not invest themselves 100 percent in competition. Because of that fact, they never achieve the highest of which they are capable.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

Sabotaging Yourself

From time to time a project will come along that seems so big and challenging you start to question your ability to succeed. It could be as epic as writing a book or directing major motion picture or it could be something more pedestrian like passing a final exam or delivering an important speech to your corporate boss. Naturally, some doubts will float through your mind when ever failures possible.

Sometimes, when the fear of failure is strong, you use a technique psychologist call self-handicapping to change the course of your future emotional state. Self-handicapping behaviors are investments in a future reality in which you can blame your failure on something other than your ability.

You might wear inappropriate clothes to a job interview, or… or stay up all night drinking before work – you are very resourceful when it comes to setting yourself up to fail. If you succeed, you can say you did so despite terrible odds. If you fall short, you can blame the events leading up to the failure instead of your own incompetence or inadequacy.

When you see your performance in the outside world as an integral part of your personality, you are more likely to self-handicap. Psychologist Phillip Zombardo told the New York Times in 1984, “Some people stake their whole identity on their acts. They take the attitude that ‘if you criticize anything I do, you criticize me.’ Their egocentricity means they can’t risk a failure because it’s a devastating blow to their ego.”

David McRaney, You are Not so Smart

Don't Forget about the Blue Goat

The most popular episode of the 1970s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show was titled Chuckles Bites the Dust. The main character (Mary Richards, played by Mary Tyler Moore) was a news producer for a TV station where one of the shows featured Chuckles the Clown.

Chuckles served as grand marshal of a city parade when a rogue elephant attacked and killed him. Throughout the episode, Mary’s colleagues made jokes at the poor man’s expense. But she took his death seriously and chastised them for the inappropriate behavior. That is, until Chuckle's funeral. That’s when the roles reversed. Her coworkers became solemn and sober, but Mary couldn’t suppress her urge to giggle during the eulogy at the clown’s comedic demise and references to his silly routine for children.  

It was ranked #1 on TV Guide's 1997 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.

Ever tried not to laugh at a wedding, church, or another solemn event? The more you fight it, the stronger the urge becomes to burst out howling. Ever had a crazy thought pop into your head about disrupting a meeting? Have you ever wondered what would happen if you stood up in a restaurant and started yelling? Or start a food fight? Have you had a crazy thought pop into your head about what it would be like if you jumped out of a one-story window to the surprise of your coworkers? 

Suppress that contrarian thought, and it can become an outright urge. Suddenly, you are wondering if you can prevent yourself from doing something completely outrageous and inappropriate. The more you try to avoid the idea, the stronger the desire becomes to do it. Anyone who’s tried to quit smoking or stop drinking alcohol probably knows the feeling. 

A paper in the Journal Science tries to explain the phenomenon. Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner says if you keep ruminating on the idea of something bad happening, it can make it more likely to occur. 

Our brains are busy suppressing impulses all the time. We use a great deal of energy to keep inclinations in check. When we focus intensely on avoiding errors and taboos, the impulse can be strengthened because the brain is locked on the idea. 

Just try not to think of a blue goat.

In sports, players may be told not to swing their bat or golf club a certain way. Soon, the athlete can barely avoid doing it and feels obsessed and distracted, especially under pressure.

Are you not thinking of a blue goat? 

It’s hard to shake until something new shoves the thought out of the way. There’s the solution: Instead of trying to keep down the stray thought, use your energy to focus on something else that can take its place.

Basketball players are more successful when they visualize the ball going through the hoop and the process of getting it there. Rather than focusing on "not missing," they see success through visualizing accomplishment. Even thoughts of depression can sometimes be squeezed out by changing our focus from our own situation to helping someone else.

Just don’t forget about the blue goat.

Stephen Goforth

Gaining new Perspective by unfocusing

Truly successful people don’t come up with great ideas through focus alone. They are successful because they make time to not concentrate and to engage in a broad array of activities like playing golf. As a consequence, they think inventively and are profoundly creative: they develop innovative solutions to problems and connect dots in brilliant ways.

In a time and age when everyone is over-scheduled and over-focused, creativity is more and more prized— it’s the key to your effectiveness and success, in life and in business.

Experts suggest that the key to being idle or to unfocusing is to diversify our activities rather than being constantly focused on a single task. To get a new perspective on something, we actually need to disengage from it. We can diversify in two ways: through mindless tasks or through a broader set of experiences.

Stanford psychologist Emma Seppälä writing in the Washington Post

Doomed by Success

Few firms are good at recognising their own flaws (which helps to explain why only one company from the original Dow Jones Industrial Average of 1896 is still on that list: General Electric).

Henry Ford was so allergic to evidence that America was falling out of love with the Model T that he dismissed sales statistics as fakes and fired an executive who warned him of disaster.

Sears started to build its giant headquarters—the 110-storey Sears tower—at exactly the moment, in 1970, when its fortunes began to go south.

IBM allowed Microsoft to take over the PC operating-software business because it thought that the money was in hardware.  

Nokia allowed a substandard boss, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, to run the company for four years before finally getting rid of him.

In “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School argues that companies are often doomed not by their failures but by their triumphs. They may realise that the world is changing. But they are so good at doing what they have always done—making mainframe computers in IBM’s case—that they make a hash of embracing the new.

Schumpeter writing in The Economist

The classroom of failure

You can learn more from failure than success. (Here's why that's the case).

In failure you're forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts my not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.

Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month

When to Quit

David Epstein (who wrote the book Range) points to research that has shown that quitting something that’s unrewarding or unfulfilling and moving on to something that’s a better fit makes people happier. For example, when the economist and Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt conducted a study online in which participants who were considering a career change could flip a digital coin, heads for quit and tails for stay, he found that six months later, those who flipped heads and changed jobs were substantially happier. And perhaps more important, they had freed themselves up to try other things and find out what fulfilled them more than their current career. So quitting once it’s clear that the “match quality” between the person and the pursuit is bad, Epstein said, should be seen as more of a success than a failure. Seth Godin, the author of a number of career-advice books, has even endorsed making a list at the start of any endeavor of the conditions under which to quit.

Ashley Fetters writing in The Atlantic

Success may be sweeter, but failure is the better

Failure is a better teacher than success. I know of nobody who hasn’t had a string of failures before their success. What kind of people go out and the first thing out of the shoot is a success and they continue on successfully. I never met anyone like that. 

Uninterrupted success is less satisfying than success intertwined with failure.  

A University of Colorado study drew data from satellite launches and space shuttles and concluded that success may be sweeter, but failure is the better teacher. 

There’s a tendency for organizations to ignore failure or to try not to focus on it. There are vital lessons for the future overlooked in the rush to put on a brave face, to cover the disappointment. In the adult world, we are success-crazed. We tolerate diversity better but we don’t tolerate failure. There is a big social stigma attached to failure that causes people who have failed to go into denial. 

Most people have either come up the hard way or had to overcome periods of chronic self-doubt. You’ve heard the life stories: JK Rowlings’ mountain of rejection slips and Churchill was miserable in school. Could any of them have achieved the success they did if their lives had been an effortless progression from triumph to triumph.  

American physician and broadcaster Dean Edel 

The Next Small Victory

In training camps, we don’t focus on the ultimate goal — getting to the Super Bowl. We establish a clear set of goals that are within immediate reach. 

When we start acting in ways that fulfill these goals, I make sure everybody knows it. I accentuate the positive at every possible opportunity, and at the same time I emphasize the next goal that we need to fulfill. 

When you set small, visible goals, and people achieve them, they start to get it into their heads that they can succeed. 

Former NFL coach Bill Parcells in the Harvard Business Review

Earned success

Earned success gives you a sense of accomplishment. Employers who give clear guidance and feedback, reward merit, and encourage their employees to develop new skills are the most likely to give you those feelings. Look for a boss who acts that way—and if you have the opportunity, be that kind of boss. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Why organizations become stale and ineffective

Organizations are created by their founders to serve vibrant, living purposes. but all too often the founding purposes fade and what finally get served are the purposes of institutional self-enhancement. It happens in hospitals to the detriment of patients, in schools to the detriment of students, in businesses to the detriment of shareholders and customers, end in government to the detriment of taxpayers. It is rarely the result of evil intent: it happens because memes triumph over ends, form triumphs over spirit, and the turf syndrome conquers all. 

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Worshiping the pursuit of extreme success

Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. That number is rising by the year.  One solution to this epidemic of disengagement would be to make work less awful. But maybe the better prescription is to make work less central.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

Stop Limping

To utilize the ability you have you must start by getting rid of any loser’s limp you might have. A typical Loser’s Limp is, “I’m not a born salesman, or a born doctor, lawyer, artist, architect, engineer, etc.” In my travels, I have picked up newspapers from the rural villages of Australia, to the bulging metropolises of North American and Europe. I’ve read where women have given birth to boys and girls, but thus far I have never read where a woman has given birth to a salesman, or a doctor, lawyer, artist, engineer, etc. However, I do read where doctors, lawyers, salesman, etc., die. Since they are not “born.” But they do “die,” obviously, somewhere between birth and death, by choice and by training, they become what they wish to become. I’ve never seen where a woman has given birth to a success or to a failure. It’s always either a boy or a girl.

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

Success is..

Knowing my purpose in life.

Growing to my maximum potential.

Adding value to others’ lives.

John Maxwell