Success is about mindset, not facilities
‘Talent tends to get in the way of itself. I often think that people succeed more despite their talent than because of it.’
Won Park, golf coach in the South Korean Gold Mine
My taxi swings through the gates of the University of Technology in Kingston. The light from its left headlight – the only one that works – lights up the road in front of us as we trundle through the desolate university park.
The rumble of the engine and the reggae music emanating from the car’s speakers are the only sounds here – it’s really early, and the first students will not check in to the university for several hours. We come to a standstill in front of a rusty fence that surrounds what looks like a grass field.
‘We’re here,’ says my driver, sticking out his left hand towards me for payment.
Am I really in the right place, I wonder? I hesitate for moment before paying the driver and getting out of the car. I’ve come to visit the world’s most successful athletics club, the MVP Track and Field Club, and I have been told that they train here at the university grounds. But there is no athletics track here. No streetlights either. As I get closer I catch a glimpse of some runners moving in the darkness beyond the fence. Once my eyes have grown accustomed to the gloom I can see about 40 athletes out on the grass.
The famous grass track at MVP
If you started to talk about the world’s most progressive athletics club, most people would imagine a first-class college with cutting-edge facilities. But there is no high-tech test equipment here, no cutting-edge fitness centre – not even an athletics track. Just a pile of cones, a stopwatch, some rusty old weights in a dilapidated fitness shed with no air conditioning and a poor quality 400-metre grass track. Nevertheless, it is here that world record holders, Olympic gold medallists and world champions train.
And Stephen Francis, the founder of the club, has no intention of changing anything: ‘A performance environment should not be designed for comfort but for hard work,’ he tells me. ‘It has to show people that the road to success is long and uncomfortable.’
Stephen Francis and his team at the first training session of the day
A performer must not feel too comfortable
The ethos with which Stephen Francis runs the MVP Track and Field Club seriously challenges the modern Western mindset. We seem to believe groomed fields, top-level technology and comfortable surroundings are necessary prerequisites for success. We would tend to use poor, overcrowded facilities as an excuse for not achieving better results.
Just think of the famous Chelsea FC Football Academy which has spent nigh on £100 million building a state-of-the-art training centre in London’s prosperous commuter belt. The club has scoured Europe for talented kids between the ages of twelve and eighteen and bought them for millions of pounds. At the academy they arrive for training in taxis and are served food prepared by a three-star chef between sessions. When touring abroad they stay in luxury hotels. The results of Chelsea’s talent strategy have so far been about as bleak as a winter day in the Russian wilderness where owner Roman Abramovich grew up. Not a single player from the academy has managed to make his mark in Chelsea’s Premier League team. John Terry, who signed a professional contract in 1997 (six years before Abramovich arrived in London), is the last player to come through the academy and become a first-team regular. In other words, Roman Abramovich could just as well be throwing his £100 million at the roulette wheel of a casino in Moscow.
This over-emphasis on comfort and super modern facilities is, however, not just a talent strategy predominant in the world of sport. In the business world, companies invest fortunes in spectacular office moves, despite the fact that all the research shows that doing so does not improve performance. They just carry the same problems with them. Other companies send their so-called greatest talents to luxurious spa hotels for away days while they tell them how fantastic they are, lulling them into complacency.
Is there any foundation for the assumption that we develop better performance in fancy facilities? Or might it actually be more productive to train in the kind of humble conditions which Stephen Francis insists on. Perhaps luxurious surroundings diminish effort, because they leave people with a feeling that nobody striving for top performance should ever have: that of already having arrived.
As Stephen Francis says: ‘I don’t think they’ve got that message in the United States, Australia, Sweden, England, et cetera. When they build big smart training centres they are trying to make life as comfortable as possible for the athletes. But that’s not right. The athletes must demonstrate that they are so keen to succeed that they will ignore the fact that they could have found better, more comfortable conditions elsewhere.’
This makes the world’s most successful sprint coach sound like a dictatorial drill sergeant, driving his recruits through meaningless physical tests in order to break them down psychologically. However, behind Stephen Francis’s provocative words lie intelligent considerations as to how one can make people reveal what it is that drives them simply through their actions. Francis uses the Spartan conditions to identify factors you cannot read from a certificate, construe from a psychological profile analysis or ask your way to in a job interview. He uses his facilities to penetrate the glossy surface to find out the answer to the critical questions: why are you here, really? How much do you care? What are you prepared to give – and to sacrifice? In other words: who really wants it most?
As he says: ‘By keeping my facilities humble I maintain the focus on what it’s all about, and I automatically separate off athletes who may be good sprinters but who are more driven by smart facilities, fame and comfort than the will to improve themselves.’
The conviction Stephen Francis wants to implant in the subconscience of his sprinters is crystal clear: success is not about facilities, it’s about mindset.
The rusty gym at MVP
The MVP training ground
The wonder child
It is an uncomfortably cold November evening, just a week after my return from Jamaica. I am standing at the edge of an Astroturf pitch in Northern Denmark. I’ve come here to see what most people would categorise as a completely routine reserve team match in the Danish league. Only fifteen spectators have decided to brave the cold, probably because the players are of a relatively low standard – the teams are a mixture of ditched players in serious need of match training, a handful of under-eighteen lads wanting to show off a bit and a couple of players who need to be tested in a match with not too much at stake. One of these is the 22-year-old American Freddy Adu who is being tried out by Randers FC, offering him the chance of an anonymous existence at the bottom of the Danish league. Freddy’s the one I’m here to see. Ten metres away from me, he is jogging to warm up. I wonder what’s on his mind. Is he trying to motivate himself to play in this totally uninspiring setting? Perhaps worrying about why there’s no crowd? Or maybe he’s thinking back to the time when major clubs all over the globe were on their knees trying to get to him to sign with them.
Nine years previously when he was just twelve years old he was the main guest on David Letterman’s Late Show. It must have been overwhelming, but Freddy seemed to enjoy it all, sitting there with a charming grin while the audience clapped and the host presented him as the ‘New Pelé’.
The new Pelé is born
Freddy Adu was born in Ghana on 2 June 1989. He lived with his family in Tema, a busy harbour town on Ghana’s Atlantic coast. It was here that he started to play football, spending hours at a time kicking a ball about barefoot in the streets. When he was eight, Freddy moved to the United States after his family won a green card lottery.
They settled in the Washington D.C. area, but life was not easy. Shortly after their arrival, Freddy’s father abandoned the family. His mum, Emilie, had to take several jobs in order to support her sons. However, it was not long before people began to notice Freddy’s football skills, and at the age of just ten years old he helped his team to win in an under-14s tournament in Italy. He was pronounced the tournament’s best player. This confirmed that he was one to watch, and back home in Washington the telephone began to ring off the hook. Agents, clubs, coaches – all of them wanted a share in the new Pelé. Freddy was that good. So good, in fact, that you could not turn on the American sports channel ESPN without hearing about him.
His play was of such a high standard that one expert even prophesied that he would have a place on the American team at the World Cup in 2006, at which time he would be just seventeen. This was the same age as Pelé when he made his debut in the World Cup finals in 1958. Even the then American A-team coach Bruce Arena was completely bowled over with admiration, saying: ‘Freddy is undoubtedly the most talented player we have ever seen at that age.’
Interest in Freddy even spread across the Atlantic, and major Italian club Inter Milan made an offer of 750,000 dollars for the lad, an offer which Freddy and his mother refused. Sir Alex Ferguson would later reveal that Manchester United had also tried to get their hands on him.
To complete the list of admirers, Nike and Pepsi threw advertising contracts worth millions at the twelve-year-old prodigy. In his first commercial, Freddy faces off with Pelé himself. Towards the end of the advert the legend looks his apprentice straight in the eye and says: ‘Listen here, God has given you the gift to play football.’
Record gobbler
In this light, nobody was surprised when, at the age of fourteen, Freddy Adu became the United States’ youngest ever athlete to sign a professional contract worth $500,000 a year. He had made his debut on the American under-17 team the previous year, just three weeks after becoming an American citizen.
Freddy toppled one record after another. On 3 April 2004 he made his debut as the youngest player ever in Major League Soccer. Two weeks later, on 17 April 2004, he became the youngest goal-scorer in the history of MLS. The world seemed to be witnessing the birth of a new legend. And Freddy himself was caught up in the excitement. As he said: ‘I see myself in a World Cup final playing for the United States against a top team that everyone believes will win. And we’ll just come along and take them completely unawares. One day, when I’m holding the World Cup trophy, somebody will come along and take a picture. It’ll be so cool!’
How could we have been so terribly mistaken?
In the context of such a glittering past it is thought provoking, to say the least, that Freddy Adu is now standing on a wilderness of a football pitch out in the middle of nowhere. Why is he not performing conjuring tricks on the world’s most famous football pitches as everyone predicted? Adu was nowhere to be seen on the American national team at the recent 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
The fact is that Freddy Adu has failed. Big time. Sir Alex Ferguson, Pelé, Nike and the others are all dumbfounded. After two seasons with European clubs like SL Benfica and AS Monaco he had, by and large, not played in the starting line-up. After that he was on loan to a minor club in the Greek second division, followed by a stint at an even less significant club in the second best Turkish league. Even at this level he was found wanting. Randers FC in Denmark was far from impressed, and two months after I witnessed him play, Freddy was sent back to Philadelphia Union in the American Major League where everything began.
But what went wrong? How could Freddy Adu fall from being the wonder kid of the footballing world to a career nobody is likely to remember? It seems astonishing that his development should have come to such a disastrous halt, and that so many experts and coaches were so grossly mistaken about him.
We can find the answers to this conundrum at Stanford University.
She made them liars
Carol Dweck is a 63-year-old psychologist at Stanford who has spent more than 30 years carrying out systematic research into why some people realise their full potential while others get nowhere near it.
In one of her best-known experiments she presented a class of students at the University of Hong Kong with an assignment full of challenging tasks. After the students had completed the assignment, one of the groups was praised for its efforts, while the other group was complimented on its intelligence. In subsequent tests, Carol Dweck observed an interesting pattern.
The children who were praised for their intelligence were distinctly passive and reluctant to carry out the most challenging assignments, and their test results got worse and worse, while the children praised for their effort kept improving. Next she asked the students to write a letter to students at another school, describing their perceptions and experiences of the tests they had undergone.
When she read the letters, she discovered something surprising. Forty per cent of the students who were praised for their intelligence had lied about their results in the tests. They claimed that their test results were better than they actually were. As Carol Dweck put it: ‘We took ordinary students and turned them into liars by praising them for their intelligence.’
In a subsequent experiment, Dweck offered the students an extra course that would improve their language squeals. One would expect most students to show some interest because all classes at the University of Hong Kong are conducted in English, so it is almost impossible to do well without a decent grasp of the language. It transpired, however, that the majority of the students who had been praised for their intelligence preferred to stay at home and abandon the course. As Dweck explained: ‘They care so much about looking smart that they act dumb, for what could be dumber than giving up a chance to learn something that is essential for your own success?’
These students were not normally deceitful; neither were they less intelligent or less self-confident than the other students. This study shows what happens when people end up in an environment that exclusively celebrates their natural talent and not, say, their commitment and application. They begin to define themselves by that talent-description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened, they have difficulty dealing with the consequences, to the point that they would rather lie than be exposed as untalented.
It’s easy to see how this study might cast light on the mystery of Freddy Adu’s failure. Remember what the legendary Pelé said to him when he was twelve years old – ‘Listen here, God has given you the gift to play football.’ Was Freddy being praised for his efforts and his work, or for his natural talent? The parallels with the children in Dweck’s experiments who were praised for their intelligence, are obvious. It seems very possible that Freddy Adu became – and probably still is – hostage to a talent-description that was bestowed upon him when he was ten years old.
The child prodigy problem
Freddy’s story is not the only one of its kind, by any means. This phenomenon is widely known as the child prodigy problem. The whole issue of so-called child prodigies and why they rarely achieve the success everyone expects is familiar in many fields and industries. It’s often not the people who start out the best that end up the best – they seem to hit some kind of wall. As the former American president Calvin Coolidge has said: ‘Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.’
But why should that be? Why don’t prodigies succeed more often? Why don’t kids who are the world’s best at age 15 end up being the world’s best at age 25? Perhaps being good too early can actually be a disadvantage. Perhaps people succeed in the long term more in spite of their early success than because of it.
Essentially, the child prodigy problem is to do with mindset; the difference between one which drives someone to move forward and one which causes them to stand still. Stephen Francis, Carol Dweck and Freddy Adu all have something to teach us here.
Francis consistently rejects athletes – either directly or by means of his less-than-impressive facilities – who are lionised, celebrated and honoured for their God-given talent. If sprinters tell a story of uninterrupted success, he becomes suspicious about their mindset. As he explains: ‘In my experience, it is very difficult to work with people who have been too proficient too early. For one thing, they are not very open to new input, and for another, they have problems maintaining and developing their motivation. They seem to feel entitled to win.’
Child prodigies often experience these motivation problems. They don’t like to work too hard (they generally haven’t had to) and they tend to burn out easily. Think back to Carol Dweck’s experiment: she not only observed deceitfulness among the children who had been praised for their intelligence, but she also noticed how they were drained of motivation. The talent-label made them think: why work hard if I was born with my abilities?
A major Swedish study dating from 1993 entitled ‘The path to the national level in sports in Sweden’ came to similar conclusions. A team of researchers took a closer look at the golden generation of Swedish tennis players, including Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Joakim Nyström, Peter Lundgren and Anders Järryd, who all followed on the heels of the legend Björn Borg. Three of them ranked as number one in the world within a few years and together they harvested nine grand slam titles. However, the study showed that none of them had been among the absolute best youth players in Sweden. They may have been part of the elite, but they were not the very best. The study suggested that because they were never quite the best in their youth, always trying to catch up with those above them, they were more motivated to improve their game. They developed what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset. Here, the driving force is not the need for social confirmation, but the drive to master skills, improve oneself, set new standards and do better today than you did yesterday. As Stephen Francis puts it: ‘It occurs to me that people will last longer if they have not had too much success too early in their careers. I have seen how just a bit of success can cause major motivation problems. At the highest level, there is so little difference between people that if you’re not extremely motivated you don’t have a chance. I only want the ones that are really hungry, and often they don’t have a long history of success behind them.’
It seems paradoxical, but perhaps a little failure is the key to success. Colm O’Connell seems to agree. ‘A winner is a loser who has evaluated himself,’ he says. Apparently there is something about having faced adversity early that helps to propel some people to greater success, and which continues to fuel their desire to improve themselves in spite of their achievement along the way. The hardiest plants survive harsh environments.
The cycle of complacency
The same psychological mechanism that killed Freddy Adu’s promising career and caused the students at the University of Hong Kong to perform more poorly rears its head in business. Here there are countless examples of success leading to complacency, and complacency leading to failure.
We see this, for example, when major monopolies fall into disarray. The power of being in control of a monopoly makes companies become complacent, for why should they change a strategy and philosophy that has proven to be stronger than any other? The company stagnates, doing the same old thing, while competitors are forced to innovate in order to close the gap. When, through their efforts, these competitors suddenly overtake it, the original company finds itself foundering, crippled by a lack of enterprise and by the limits of its self-perception.
The cause of complacency is almost always success, or rather perceived success – it is not hard facts, but subjective perceptions of success that make the difference. As Professor John Kotter of Harvard Business School writes in his thought-provoking book A Sense of Urgency: ‘With success comes a major problem: keeping up the sense of urgency needed to accomplish a bigger goal or to sustain a high level of performance over time.’
When people or organisations achieve some measure of success this naturally pushes them towards stability and contentment: ‘At no time are these natural forces stronger than after people have worked very hard and have been rewarded by a visible, unambiguous win,’ says Kotter.
Any executive who wants to create results and to keep on doing so should ask themselves: how do I avoid this complacency growing in me and the people around me? And how do I maintain urgency when we achieve success?
The typical pattern is simple: urgency leads to success leads to complacency. But this cycle needs to be broken, so that urgency leads to success leads to more urgency.
In his book How the Mighty Fall the American management guru Jim Collins describes how eleven renowned, successful companies have gone from success to failure, and how they learned of their impending demise far too late. Complacency sneaks its way into organisations like a cancer. As Jim Collins puts it: ‘I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages.’
The best way to combat complacency is to identify the symptoms in their infancy so that they are not allowed to develop into insoluble problems.
Here are four of the earliest symptoms of complacency:
1. People act as if they are too big to fail
Complacent people often view their success as ‘deserved’, rather than earned. They lose contact with the reasons for their success and begin to believe that it is their right. They are convinced that success will continue more or less regardless of what they do. They entirely underestimate the role good fortune and random circumstances may have played in their previous success, or perhaps forget that they did initially have to work hard for it. This cocktail of attitudes creates the kind of complacency that poisons potential.
The most typical consequence of this attitude is that people begin to take thoughtless or unwise risks in their quest for success – what Jim Collins calls an ‘unsustainable quest for growth’. Success causes them to believe that they can walk on water; they feel immortal, too big to fail.
2. People look out the window before looking in the mirror
People who become complacent have a tendency to look in the mirror, taking credit themselves when things go well, and to look out of the window to blame other factors when things go wrong – or else go into denial. Jim Collins writes: ‘Leaders discount negative data, amplify positive data, and put a positive spin on ambiguous data. Those in power start to blame external factors for setbacks rather than accept responsibility.’
Think back to Carol Dweck’s study, where students lied about their results to sustain their perceived image of themselves as successful in the outside world. It was more important for them to look good than to improve themselves. That is the way it is with complacent people. They live in their own highly selective reality and often deny the facts. They would rather lie about their results than risk exposure as being devoid of innate talent. But as Carol Dweck writes: ‘Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? And why avoid challenges, instead of looking at them as experiences that will stretch you?’
Any business executive, athlete, musician, singer or student gets confronted with situations in which they have to make the choice: do I want to look good, or do I want to get better?
The decisions we make when faced with such choices are crucial to our long-term success.
3. People are more inside-focused than outside-focused
When people start to pay more attention to what is happening internally than externally this is often symptomatic of a problem. They start to develop a feeling of contentment with the status quo. They sit tight. They focus on themselves and why they are great, and they ignore the hardworking competitors around them.
The same thing that happens to individuals can also occur in businesses. Instead of focusing on their customers, organisations develop a ‘we know best’ culture. They become sidetracked and start holding inconsequential meetings, discussing what colour they ought to paint the walls or whether they should hang more paintings in the canteen; they become hung up on the trappings of success and stop worrying about how to sustain their performance. The shift in attitude is clear: we are rich. We are the best. Let’s relax, maybe grab a spot of lunch. It becomes more important to feel good than to do well.
4. People slip into automatic pilot
When people become complacent they often stop seeking new challenges. Their lack of urgency leads them to run on automatic pilot without considering how they can improve themselves. Two professors at INSEAD Business School in Paris, Luk Van Wassenhove and Kishore Sengupta, have called this phenomenon the ‘Experience Trap’. Comprehensive research in numerous industries has shown that many people never really get better at what they do. People with considerable experience are often no better at their job than people with very little experience. In certain lines of work it’s an even sadder situation – people’s performance actually gets worse, the more experience they have. For instance, it has been shown that experienced doctors achieve lower scores in tests about medical knowledge than less experienced physicians. It also transpires that over time, GPs become less able to diagnose from cardiac sounds and X-ray images, and that accountants become less competent at analytical tasks as they become more experienced.
We find the same thing happening with drivers. Studies have shown that after twenty years’ experience behind the wheel, people check their mirrors less frequently and brake much later than new drivers. Why? Because they are driving on automatic pilot.
The cause of the Experience Trap is almost always complacency and too much comfort. As Mette Nørgaard and Douglas Conant express it in their book Touchpoints: ‘Maybe you have been in your job for a number of years. You are good at what you do, you are respected. You may have a boss who is neither too hard nor too soft, a job that is not too big and not too small, and expectations are not too hard or too soft. That’s great – except that when people get too comfortable, they often become less vigilant. They stop foraging for new learning and lose their edge.’
That’s exactly what complacency does. It mentally pensions people off. The instant you no longer critically evaluate what you do, your experience, however extensive, becomes useless. The moment you start going to work simply in order to work, or go to training simply in order to train, rather than to improve yourself, you invariably become less competent. Be cautious when somebody boasts that they have twenty years of experience – perhaps what they actually have is one year of experience which, because of their complacency, is nineteen years out of date.
Divine dissatisfaction
Preventing or dealing with complacency is difficult, but it can be done. And if you succeed, the rewards will be great. Executives, teachers, coaches, scientists and performers could all benefit from breaking the cycle of complacency and sustaining a constant desire to improve themselves. Carol Dweck calls this the growth mindset, John Kotter calls it urgency, the psychologist Ellen Winner calls it the rage to master and the famous dancer and choreographer Martha Graham once described it as a divine dissatisfaction. All are referring to the same thing – an unrest that will drive you forward and which makes you more alive than others.
It is this force that smoulders beneath the surface in the six Gold Mines. You can’t see it with the naked eye but you can sense it. The excitement that vibrates in the air at a Korean youth golfing tournament. The intensity of a perfectly ordinary tennis training session for little girls in Moscow. The aggressiveness with which the young runners in Bekoji eat up the track every morning at six o’clock, and the determination in the eyes of the Brazilian boys in the São Paulo favela. Hunger to win, to improve; and a willingness to do whatever it takes.
The mercilessly tough competition situations many athletes find themselves in help to sustain urgency. Being the best is very, very hard. There will always be someone better than you. In Iten, for example, more than 800 athletes train three times a day. Competition between them is absurdly tough, forcing each to deliver their very best every single day. Every day you can feel the defiance emanating from your competitors and you know that just a couple of months of complacency can set you way back in the medal queue.
The same applies to an executive who wants to avoid complacency in the workplace. It is a question of dragging harsh reality into the organisation. Staff need to be able to feel the heat from dissatisfied customers, competent competitors and frank, expert analyses.
Constant, immediate feedback
In addition to this the Gold Mines have understood the crucial role of feedback to keep urgency high. One thing in particular surprised me during my visit to Kenya. Everybody trains with a group. Unlike in many places in Europe and the United States, running is not an individual sport there. Three times world champion in the 3,000-metre steeplechase, Moses Kiptanui told me: ‘You will not make international top class if you train alone.’
According to Kiptanui, training in groups has numerous positive effects. If you always train alone you don’t train hard enough. You need the others to put pressure on you when you are tired. On your bad days the group is there to drag you up, on your good days the group helps to force the absolute best out of you. But most of all, the group delivers the vital, performance-boosting feedback that every top performer needs. ‘It’s constant, immediate feedback,’ says Kiptanui. ‘You always know where you stand in relation to the others.’
The Gold Mines have plenty to teach businesses when it comes to effective feedback. Companies often make two classic mistakes when trying to build a feedback-rich culture. The first is not giving feedback often enough. At many companies, it comes in the form of an annual performance review. It’s really hard to get better at something if you are only told how you are doing once a year. Think about Usain Bolt. His job happens to be getting from A to B as fast as possible. Now imagine if Bolt sprinted for an entire season and got feedback on his performance only once a year in a 45-minute meeting with his boss. That would be absurd.
The other mistake is that people tend to surround themselves with people who make them feel good rather than those who will help them improve. But why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-confidence temporarily, instead of ones who will challenge you to grow? If you really want to improve your performance, you must associate with people who you know will tell you the truth. Receiving such feedback can hurt, as many top performers will agree, but it is often one of the best things that can happen to you. Honest feedback is frequently like getting into a very hot bath. It scalds to begin with, but then you get used to it and begin to like it. Eventually you start thriving on it!
Don’t downgrade yet
The conclusion of this chapter is not that companies have to turn down the heating, remove the paintings from their walls and generally downgrade their facilities in order to be the best. Nor am I saying that sports academies should dismantle their ultramodern training centres and train in rusty old sheds and on uneven grass tracks. The suggestion is not that Roger Federer will not be able to win his next grand slam if he stays at a luxury hotel.
But we must understand that creating world-class performance does not necessarily require world-class facilities. The world’s best athletes in the main did not achieve recognition and success through living in comfort and being lauded for their abilities, but through ambitious striving for excellence. Colm O’Connell, who has played a seminal role in more than 25 world records, puts it like this: ‘What lifts you from being a good athlete living well on your sport to one of the very best is no longer simply being motivated by money. Take Wilson Kipketer, the former 800 metres world record holder; he worked like crazy even after he had many wins and had earned lots of money. His driving ambition was to move the 800 metres race to a new level in terms of both performance and style. Another good example is Haile Gebrselassie [Ethiopian former world record holder in the marathon and the runner with the most middle and long distance wins in history]. Athletes like him are driven by a form of performance idealism.’
These words are strikingly similar to what Brigitte Foster-Hylton, the Jamaican world champion in the 100-metre hurdles, told me when I visited the MVP Track and Field Club: ‘There are so many things I can improve. For instance, I am obsessed with making the perfect start, and I intend to set times that nobody can beat in the future. It is striving for perfection that drives me to work so very hard every day.’
The main reason why we choose comfort rather than mastery is quite simply that it is easier and more agreeable in the short term. But too much comfort is the enemy of improvement. Research has shown that the brains of domesticated animals are 15–30 per cent smaller than those of their wild counterparts. In other words: if you want to thrive in a highly competitive environment, you need to stay a little wild.
True, learning can fun, exhilarating and gratifying, but it can also be daunting, exhausting and discouraging. In the words of K. Anders Ericsson, one of the world’s leading researchers on developing expertise: ‘If you are in a world where the status quo is acceptable you will not develop. If you want to get better you have to make a huge effort. Improvement never comes without a cost.’
World-class performers commit to never-ending improvement. In 2001, while at his very best, Tiger Woods took time to break down his swing in order to rebuild it. He could easily have remained hugely successful by continuing exactly as he had been, but he chose to take one step backwards to give himself the opportunity of perhaps taking two steps forward. Despite his enormous success he remained a student of his game.
Making a commitment to mastery is making a commitment to a journey that never ends. In his book Drive, Dan Pink uses an asymptote to explain the nature of mastery. In analytic geometry, an asymptote of a curve is a line where the distance between curve and line approaches zero as they tend to infinity. However, despite coming infinitesimally close, the two never quite touch.
Pink writes: ‘The mastery asymptote is a source of frustration. Why reach for something you can never fully attain? You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really close to it. But you can never touch it. But it’s also a source of allure. Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realisation. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.’
This divine dissatisfaction is what characterises those who manage to avoid complacency and stay at the top of their field for year after year. In the words of Stephen Francis: ‘The art of a successful mindset is to view your victories as a beginning and not as a conclusion.
What you should never forget about
MINDSET
1. Experience is often a weak predictor for performance. In fact, a lot of people tend to perform worse the more experience they get. They develop fixed ideas and only work inside their comfort zone. Sustainable high performance is built on curiosity and the willingness to challenge oneself. The key to improvement is not found inside your comfort zone.
2. Labelling people as super talents often fosters the wrong mindset. They become driven by looking good rather than getting better. They validate themselves from the outside-in and not from inside-out. Success often comes down to one choice: will I choose the path of social approbation, or will I choose the path to true mastery?
3. A performance environment should never be too comfortable. You must nurture a constant feeling of positive discomfort, in particularly the discomfort that comes from being stretched to the limit. If you don’t create discomfort from the inside, I’ll guarantee you that you’ll soon be forced to experience discomfort from the outside – and it’s going to feel much worse.
4. Perceived success makes people feel entitled. As a result they become complacent and lose urgency. Anyone with the ambition to deliver high performance again and again must understand that. Change and renewal shouldn’t happen when it’s necessary. It should happen whenever possible.