Finding My Nemesis

One way to relearn an old lesson

My nemesis is a parking meter.

A meter in Vancouver hoodwinked me, and it only took 15 seconds. I was supposed to be on a mellow vacation, yet it set off an inevitable cascade of events that had me running around one neighborhood of the city like a madman. I bought parking at the same place four separate times in one day, and paid nearly $35 for something I could have gotten either for free, or for $15 at the most.

My nemesis also taught me (or really retaught me) a lesson I sometimes need to relearn: at pivotal moments when the adrenaline is flowing, that’s when you most need to take a real pause and step back from the flow of events before you try to finish. I’ve found a similar principle in organizations. When you’re working on a team project that is 95 percent done, it’s that last 5 percent that can mean the difference between true excellence and the mediocre. If you don’t step back for a minute to figure out the last few things, you’re probably going to end up with the latter.

OK, now let me tell you the full story.

Being Good vs. Getting Better — What the Super Bowl Says About Mindsets

All the discussion about Super Bowl this week has me thinking about a key finding in motivational psychology: If you want to succeed at something, you should focus on getting better rather than on being good. It’s a little counterintuitive. Isn’t everyone's ultimate goal to be good? Or even great? That’s certainly what football players hope they’ll be when they step onto the field. But focusing solely on the end result leads people and organizations to perform worse and quit earlier when faced with extremely challenging tasks than those who focus on the process of improving.

Motivational psychology has
a few lessons for this guy

Focusing solely on the end result is evidence of something Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a "fixed mindset." This is the belief that the reason you are going to succeed is because of your innate talents and abilities. (Think, for example, of a football team that believes it will win because it’s bigger, stronger, and better than the opposition.) But when people with a fixed mindset encounter truly major road blocks, or begin to fail, they don’t know what to do. They often give up altogether. After all, if you think you’re not smart enough or strong enough to do something, there’s no point in continuing to try.

Contrast a fixed mindset with people and organizations that have what Dweck calls a "growth mindset." They believe that talents and abilities are malleable and can be improved over time. When doing work, people with a growth mindset focus more on the process of getting better than on the end result. They are likely to look at each challenge as an opportunity to improve. They are likely to look at each failure as something they can learn from for the next time. Another motivational psychologist, Heidi Grant Halvorson, has conducted experiments showing that people can be taught to have a growth mindset. And those who have it are less likely than their fixed mindset brethren to get stymied by tough tasks. They persevere. Over time, they can learn to be gritty and resilient.

How does this relate to football? Good question. Maybe you can guess where I’m going with this.