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There is one thing we can say with certainty, however: At times when they were flooded with negativity, these captains engaged some kind of regulatory mechanism that shut those emotions off before they could have deleterious effects. In other words, they came equipped with a kill switch.
To satisfy our urge for collaboration, we turn to spectator sports. Stadiums are where we go to be pulled out of the narrow confines of our lives and into the guts of a unified body chasing a worthwhile goal.
But when taken as a whole, Abrams found that the studies presented more evidence that playing angry can produce negative returns.
Researchers have spent a lot of time looking at the question of why some people are more aggressive than others. They have suggested that these people have different kinds of brains, suffer from cognitive impairment or immaturity, or possess a “warrior gene” that predisposes them to risky behavior. One psychologist, Michael Apter of Georgetown University, theorized that aggression is driven by the pursuit of a pleasure sensation that comes from seeing a rival’s fortunes reversed.
people have chronically hostile and irritable personalities—they possess a “hostility bias” that makes neutral actions seem threatening and prompts them to react angrily to challenges. People
His comments hadn’t been task-oriented at all.
He lacked a kill switch to regulate his emotions, and he had a penchant for making personal attacks on teammates.
The great mystery of Michael Jordan, the one that made his story so unusual, was why the greatest player basketball has ever seen felt such an overwhelming need to keep proving himself.
Jordan had spent a great deal of time nourishing every narrative in which he’d been dismissed.
“Today’s game is led by core groups of players,” explained Brooks Laich, a veteran center who’d played for the suddenly leaderless Toronto Maple Leafs. “It’s not done by one individual.”
Burns. In his 1978 book, Leadership, Burns used the stories of figures like Moses, Machiavelli, Napoleon, Mao, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to figure out what linked them together.
findings: Leadership = P × M × D.
As a writer, the best analogy I can think of is that captains are like the verb in a sentence.
The verb may not be as memorable as the nouns, as evocative as the adjectives, or as expressive as the punctuation. But it’s the verb that does the yeoman’s work—unifying the disparate parts and creating the forward momentum. In the closed unit of a great sentence, it’s the only essential component.
The truth is that leadership is a ceaseless burden. It’s not something people should do for the self-reflected glory, or even because they have oodles of charisma or surpassing talent. It’s something they should do because they have the humility and fortitude to set aside the credit, and their own gratification and well-being, for the team—not just in pressure-packed moments but in every minute of every day.
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him,” he wrote. “Fail to honor others and they will fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, ‘we did this ourselves.’”
