Why Winners Win at…
The new science of triumph in sports, business, and life.
As a quickly rising new star in professional tennis, Andre Agassi had undergone bitter failure by the early 1990’s,losing s again and again. Things have changed since he hired the coach, Brad Gilbert. Gilbert criticized him for trying to play with perfection. Instead of risking a killer shot on every point, why not keep the ball in play and give the other guy a chance to lose Gilbert told Agassi "It’s all about your head. With your talent, if you’re fifty percent -wise, but ninety-five percent head-wise, you’re going to win." Since that, Agassi began to pull out wins in matches that the old Agassi would have lost and got No.1 ranking at last. Because he had learned how to win.
What is it that separates winners from losers The proper answer is that, in sports at least, winners simply have certain things that mortals don’t, such as better physical conditions. But fitness doesn’t tell the full story." There are more players that have the talent to be the best in the world than there are winners," says Timothy Gallwey, the author of several books about the mental side of tennis, golf, and other pursuits. "One way of looking at it is that winners get in their own way less. They interfere with the raw expression of talent less. And to do that, first they win the war against fear, against doubt, against insecurity-which are no minor victories. "
Defined that way, winning becomes translatable into areas beyond the physical: chess, spelling bees, the corporate world, even combat. The breadth of our definition for winning means that there is no single gene for victory across all fields. But neuroscientists(神经科学家) ,psychologists, and other researchers are beginning to better understand the highly interdisciplinary concept of winning, finding surprising links between brain chemistry, social theory, and even economics, which together give new insight into why some people come out on top again and again.
One area relating to winning is being disrupted. Scientists have long thought that dominance is largely determined by testosterone(睾丸激素); the more you have, the more likely you are to prevail. and not just on the playing field.
Last August, though, researchers at the University of Texas and Columbia found that testosterone is helpful only when regulated by small amounts of another hormone called cortisol(皮质醇).
Across Columbia’s campus, professors at the business school are putting this dominance science into practice, collecting saliva (唾液) samples from M. B. A. students to measure both hormones. Each subject is then given a prescription to get the two steroids(类固醇)into ideal balance. The ideal leader, says Prof. Paul Ingram, is "calm, but with an urge towards dominance." It’s true for both men and women, and in theory it all adds up to winning a contract, winning a promotion, winning the quarter.
New science like this illuminates winners of the past. It’s a glance inside the blood stream of perhaps the most thrilling competitor to ever’ destroy his opponents at a task: Bobby Fischer, the chess champion." For Fischer, there was a cruel desire to beat his opponent," says Liz Garbus, the director of the new documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World."Bobby took delight in how he made his opponent ill. " Before his legendary final match with the Russian player Boris Spassky in Iceland in 1972,which would determine the world’s No.1 player, Fischer underwent extensive weight and endurance training; he told a strength coach that he wanted to physically break Spassky’s hand the first time they shook. As the match approached, Fischer hesitated and would not show up, issuing increasingly bizarre demands and irritating his foe before play had even begun.
With the world watching, he did ually arrive in Reykjavik (雷克雅未克=冰岛首都),and with the match tied 2 to 2,Fischer changed the move that he always opened with, which was the only structure Spassky had prepared for, and in this unfamiliar territory the Russian was helpless. Fischer followed with further aggression, Spassky never recovered. He managed just one win in the next 15 s, and Fischer and his mind and the testosterone-cortisol cocktail within were No.1 in the world.
What’s better than winning’ Doing it while someone else loses. An economist at the University of Bonn has shown that test subjects who receive a given reward for a task enjoy it significantly more if other subjects fail or do worse-a finding that overthrew traditional economic theories that absolute reward is a person’s central motivation.
Neuroeconomic studies often involve the dopamine(多巴胺)system, a part of the brain that is highly involved with rewards and reward anticipation. Dopamine receptors seem to track possibilities and how expected or unexpected they are. For fans, it helps to explain why a win by a No.1 seed over an unranked challenger is no big deal, while weak-side winners like the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team are so exciting.
A similar kind of expectation management occurs in the minds of athletes themselves, says Scott Huettel, the director of Duke University’s Center for Neuroeconomic Studies. If you ranked an Olympic ’s three medalists by happiness, the athlete winning gold obviously comes first. What’s fascinating, Huettel says, is that the bronze medalist is second-most delighted, and the silver finisher is most frustrated. "People’s brains are constantly comparing what happened with what could have happened," he says." A bronze medalist might say, ‘Wow, I almost didn’t get a medal. It’s great to be on the stand!” And the silver medalist is just thinking about all the mistakes he made that pred him from winning gold."
All countries love winning, of course. But America, a nation born through victory on the battlefield, has a special relationship with the practice. "When you here, every one of you, were kids, you all admired the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big-league ballplayers, and the All-American football players." General George S. Patton once told a gathering of U.S. Army troops in England." Americans love a winner," Patton said loudly. "Americans will not tolerate a loser." The next day was June 6,1944,D-Day,and these were the men who would invade Normandy. We know where that one goes in the win-loss column.
But why do we admire winners-and put so much of our own happiness at risk when watching them compete At some level of the brain, we think we are the guys in the competition. On Nov. 4.2008,the night of the most recent presidential election, neuroscientists at Duke and the University of Michigan gave a group of voters some chewing gum. They collected samples at 8 p.m. ,as the polls closed, and again at 11:30,as Barack Obama was announced the winner. Testosterone levels normally drop around that time of night, but not among Obama supporters-while testosterone declined in gum taken from the men who had voted for John McCain.
Vicarious(感同身受的) participation, the scientists concluded， mirrors what happens to the principal competitors themselves; the same thing happens in men who watch football and basketball--and, it follows, any other fiercely fought contest, from Andre Agassi’s greatest matches to Bobby Fischer’s run at the Russians. Why do Americans love a winner Because it lets us love ourselves.
Why Winners Win at…The new science of triumph in sports, business, and life.What do the players need to do first in order not to hinder their raw expression of talent