Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing

by Po Bronson

ban on negative thought denies the value of critical thinking about past performance, which is necessary in order to learn from one’s mistakes and alter strategy going forward.

Having a little doubt in the mind leads you to not underestimate your opponents, and it ensures that you truly push yourself.

The problem with all those positive images and fantasies is that you aren’t as motivated to work toward your goal because you’re taking success for granted.

Is there really no place here for positive thinking? Well, there is—but its real benefit is boosting and reviving motivation.

Oettingen believes that a bit of fantasy at the outset can be productive, because it helps you envision all that you could achieve. But it takes thinking about the obstacles in your way to turn those lofty aspirations into a binding goal.

Rather than wishing away any difficulties, overcoming the obstacles is now the goal.

Practice, it seems, doesn’t make perfect. Even “practicing perfect” doesn’t make perfect. To compete at the highest levels requires something more; it requires taking control of the body’s physiology.

researchers have found that—compared with those who are hopeful or fearful—angry people are more likely to seek a compromise.

By tamping down inhibitions, anger thus frees up desire—desire is no longer restrained. It’s often when people are angry that they finally recognize what they want, and the intensity of their desire surges. Anger doesn’t cloud the picture: it clarifies it.

Getting calm is perhaps the more socially acceptable route to peak performance. But if you’re full of anxiety and you can’t calm down, find out what is holding you back. Then try getting angry about it. And channel that anger into doing something productive.

anger is a negative emotion that’s a positive force—motivating people to go farther.

“I like to think of testosterone as intensity, not as aggression,” Booth says, when considering the last twenty years of research into the hormone. “It increases the intensity with which someone approaches an activity—it increases their response to challenge.”

This chemical, originally assumed to make people irrational and primitive, actually helps you be more rational.

When an opponent breaks the rules, high-testosterone people react more strongly. Their sense of right and wrong intensifies into fury.

In fact, often the opposite happens after a contest between friends—the winner’s testosterone goes down.

In the last couple of years, it has been established that women’s testosterone responds just as it does for men. Studies of female tennis players, volleyball players, professional soccer players, and even women’s badminton players have all confirmed this. The key is that they have to be serious competitors and really care about the outcome.

Cortisol is not stress—it is repair. It’s the balancing hormone:

cortisol defuses the competitive desire. It makes you care less about the outcome. Cortisol and testosterone regulate each other; one tries to stop the other and vice versa.

Oxytocin helps a breastfeeding mother bond to her baby, but it also makes her into a mama bear, ready to defend her child. Breastfeeding women are twice as aggressive as bottle-feeding moms.

Some people think that competing is the opposite of nurturing, that fighting is the opposite of loving. But in fact one is at the core of the other, and they are forces in parallel. We compete our hardest to protect our team. We fight hardest for those we love.

The folk wisdom of testosterone is that it makes you selfish—it makes you not care about what others think of you. The truth about testosterone is that it makes you care more that others hold you in high regard.

Whatever it takes to earn the high regard of others, testosterone will increase that behavior.

Testosterone increases motivation, but it’s equally true that motivation increases testosterone. When you care—really care—testosterone responds.

Being on a team is a chance to belong to something greater than yourself.

Mirror processing is one of the ways people on teams unconsciously influence one another through nonverbal cues. Moods and energy levels are contagious, and you can “catch” a sense of urgency from teammates.

everyone can feel when a team is gaining confidence, or when a team is turning indifferent and passive.

In studies of thousands of companies that have implemented teamwork, there’s no firm evidence that, on average, they make any more money, or are even more productive, after instituting a team-based structure. But the CEO still gets a pay raise: to adopt a team-based structure signals to the rest of the world that you are a forward-thinking innovator.

There’s a “halo effect” around teams—when they do well, the whole team is assigned the credit. But when they do poorly, an individual gets the blame.

Successful teams are as small as possible to get the job done.

Successful teams communicate in short, clear sentences, and communication is reciprocal.

On struggling teams, communication is dominated by fewer people, making longer soliloquies.

The egalitarian notion that team members should be equal in status and interchangeable in their roles is erroneous. Teams work best when participants know their roles, but not every role needs to be equal.

The only strategies that consistently deliver results are those that focus on role clarification: who’s going to do what when the pressure gets intense.

the most effective use of role definitions happens at the leadership level, before the team is ever formed. But when teams lose their way, role clarification can help them renew their focus.

A conflict-free team means no one is bringing anything to the table that might engender controversy. The team members aren’t focused on the team’s purpose; instead, they are focused on protecting the group’s relationships. It’s one of the ways teams can be less than the sum of their parts: fear of offending anybody.

In real life, teammates are rarely true equals, and they don’t always get along. Having a hierarchy, with its clear divisions of responsibility, is most often the solution to team performance.

By harvesting tiny bits of ideas from thousands of different altruistic contributors, the result is something far beyond anything that one person could ever have imagined, let alone created.

Collaboration and competition are not at odds; they are the twin stages of idea generation.

Agency is the capacity to act independently, to make one’s own free choices, and to make decisions quickly. Agency is the core inside self-starters, the trait that grows into personal initiative.

Back in the 1960s, Torrance warned of those who ignored the value of competition for kids, especially as it related to nurturing creative psychology. Creative people, he noted, are comfortable with ambiguity and are able to accept conflict and tension between contradicting ideas. They are not afraid of opposition, criticism, or competition, and all these may stimulate their creativity. Competition breeds the creative mindset.

The kids high in agency loved the collage competition and were more creative. The kids low in agency didn’t like being judged or compared, and they became less creative.

We cultivate agency in children by allowing them freedom to make choices, and by encouraging them to trust the decisions they make. We must let them have opinions, feel their needs, and act to satisfy those needs. This also means allowing them the chance to make mistakes.

We also need to build up kids’ sense of agency, so that competition doesn’t threaten them, but rather, challenges them to improve and makes them confident enough to put their work forward.

How you respond to a win is highly predictive of how you will respond to a loss, and vice versa. For example, Fülöp has found that those who respond to a win with narcissistic superiority are likely to be the same ones who, after a loss, aggressively strike back at the winner.

The maladaptive responses are demotivating. The narcissistic competitor doesn’t feel a need to work harder in the next round. Instead, he believes that victories are his entitlement. As such, fairness isn’t important: narcissists are more likely to cheat their way to a victory.

Winners who feel joy or satisfaction at a positive outcome are more likely to accept a loss gracefully. Yes, they are sad: they may be upset. But they channel those emotions into a commitment to work harder the next time.

To compete requires that we embrace uncertainty—that we instinctively recognize that the suspense of an unscripted outcome, even if we lose, is more rewarding than a life preplanned.

Playing to Win requires continuing to take risks; it’s when we stop taking risks that we’re Playing Not to Lose.

Learning how to frame competitions as a challenge, not a threat, can help overcome early timidity.

With experience, people learn that winning and losing are just short-term consequences to the long-term goal: improvement.