There’s a lot of advice out there on how to succeed in life. Most of it boils down to a variation on having a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA). The concept of PMA can be traced back to Napoleon Hill’s 1937 self-help “classic” Think and Grow Rich, although the phrase itself only appeared in a book he co-wrote many years later with W. Clement Stone, Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude (1960).
It’s easy to mock PMA, as Steve Coogan did brilliantly in his Dearth of a Salesman. But even as someone who finds boosterism of all kinds embarrassing, I have to admit there is something to it, as I am often reminded when playing tennis.
In sport I have never had the self-belief of a winner. In part, that’s for good reason: I don’t have a great natural aptitude for any sport and despite being an enthusiastic player, I always seemed to end up finding my level at quite-good-for-people-not-good-enough-for-the-team. Still, I have noticed that whatever level you play at, you never reach peak performance if you go out expecting to lose, which I too often do. Self-belief appears to be an important factor in success, as numerous sportspeople in post-match interviews testify. (“We always back ourselves to win,” “You’ve just got to get out there and be positive,” and other clichés.) You can also see how loss of confidence can be disastrous for form.
It also seems to make a difference that you really do want to win. I used to have a squash partner who was intensely competitive, and even though we only played for fun he would look up YouTube tutorials between matches to get a competitive advantage and on court his determination made him indomitable. We went from being well-matched to him beating me regularly.
“Belief + desire = success” looks like a simple formula. But it’s not as straightforward as that. As Aristotle would no doubt have observed, it’s not about having as much belief and desire as possible as the right amount and the right kind. Too much is as bad as too little. Those with excessive self-belief become over-confident. Desire also has to be highly controlled.
There are also other variables to play with. You also have to have aptitude, which is beyond your control to concur up. Focus needs to be added as a fourth element in the formula. One perennial piece of advice for any sportsperson is not to think about the score and just concentrate on playing as well as possible. At the same time, you need to want to win, without worrying about the result, which is a tricky psychological balance to maintain. No doubt there are countless other ingredients required for victory.
Successful sportspeople are in high demand as motivational speakers, and coaches as management gurus. The assumption seems to be that what helps to win on the pitch can also help you to win off it. I suspect the truth is more complicated. The right way to think, act and feel is very context-dependent. Alex Ferguson was one of the best football managers ever, but I suspect his famous, furious “hairdryer” half-time talks would be counterproductive in many workplaces. Top players may well perform best when they go out and “express themselves”, but commercial airline pilots are probably better off calmly sticking to protocols.
We’re back to Aristotle again. He argued that virtues always need to be tailored to circumstances. One of his most famous lines – worth putting on posters everywhere – is “Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” The same goes for having belief, desire and focus.
Forgive me for talking myself as an example, but I can’t speak for anyone else. When it comes to belief, I think it’s vitally important that a writer and thinker is riven with self-doubt. As a philosopher, I can’t afford to believe that I have got all my reasoning right. As a writer, too much self-belief could lead me to think I don’t have to work on getting better, which would be fatal. The right kind and degree of belief is, I think, that I am good enough to be in with a chance of writing things worth reading, if I try my best. Anything more would be over-confidence.
With desire, it has to be of the right kind: to want to get things right and to communicate them as best as possible. If a writer or thinker’s dominating desires are to have a bestseller and gain recognition, their eye is not on the ball.
As for focus, that is a constant battle. But although I fall short more in deficiency than excess, it is possible to become too focused in the wrong way, so that our vision becomes narrow. For elite sportspeople, this tunnel vision is probably essential. But if your job is to think about things in ways that join the dots, you have to give your eyes and mind freedom to wander.
So “Belief + Desire + Focus + Talent” isn’t so much a formula for a success as a set of variables that need to be carefully calibrated to fit whatever it is you are looking for success in. And it also makes a difference what kind of success you are looking for. I think some of the writers who are more successful than me in terms of sales and profile have more self-belief, along with the desire for and focus on becoming as well-known as possible. But I don’t think many, if any, are more successful in terms of the quality and integrity of what they produce. Of course, there are people who are more successful than me in creative and intellectual terms, but that is not because they are driven by a desire for acclaim. (I also think there are people who are both intensely focused on producing the best work they can and desperate to get recognition for it. I take my hat off to them for managing to be so dedicated to both goals.)
Whatever you make of these thoughts about the winning mindset, I think there is broader point that it brings out. We want to know “what works” but don’t pay enough attention to the fact that general prescriptions are of limited value because what works in one context can fail in another.
Philosophers should be particularly cognisant of this. They tend to think they are experts in thinking but why assume that how to think about philosophy is any kind of model for how to think about physics, business, politics, love, creativity, or anything else for that matter? We can learn from philosophers, just as we can from sportspeople. But learning from is never a simple matter of copying. There is no one winning mindset, even if all the various winning mindsets have some things common.
News
My latest Philosopher-at-large column for Prospect asks “Are markets amoral?” You know the obvious short answer, but as is often the case, the interest is in the unpacking of the detail.
I believe in being a generous reviewer but not so generous that it risks misleading the reader about just how major a book’s failings are. So I’m afraid my TLS review of Svend Brinkmann’s My Year with God is quite scathing.
I wrote a valedictory reflection for Management Today on my time as Academic Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in which I argued that leaders ought to be harder on themselves about how they fall short, and gave some philosophical reasons why this is so hard.
For the Mana platform, I wrote a long essay on “Fauxthenticity”: what I see as a cultural desire for authenticity that has the effect of creating less of it. “Our problem is not that we have too much individuality but we have the wrong kind, an ersatz version that leaves us closer to the dystopia of uniformity than we dare to believe.”
My Guardian piece on the return of the thriftitarian was a depressing reminder that too many don’t or can’t read. Lots of people read it as though it was an attack on anyone who’s trying to cut down on their heating bills even though they can afford them. I defy you to point out where I even suggested that. My target was “haves posing as have nots”, not well-intentioned people trying to save the planet by burning fewer fossil fuels.
I was also Greg LaBlanc’s guest on the unSILOed podcast, talking about “Upholding the Tradition of Hume for the 21st Century”.
Finally, supporters have been given the chance to see the The Illustrated A–Z of Modern Life, a project I worked on way back in 2006 with the illustrator Felix Bennett. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a publisher, in part because the colour illustrations would have made it a bit investment for them. I’ve sharing this for the first time.
On my radar
I haven’t yet read Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker essay “Did the Oscar-Winning Director Asghar Farhadi Steal Ideas?” (New Yorker articles are always so long! Who has the time?) I heard about these claims a while ago and am very interested to find out more. Farhadi’s films are brilliant explorations of moral ambiguity and complexity and it would be extremely disappointing to discover that someone which such ethical acuity had behaved really badly. At the same time, I’ve long ceased to be surprised at how common it is for there to be a mismatch between what people understand intellectually and how they act.
The late Josh Parson’s guest post for Daily Nous on “Dirty Tricks for Seminars and Talks” is a nice piece of sociological insight into the strange world of academic philosophy.
I haven’t fawned over Adam Curtis’s previous supposedly brilliant documentaries, which I find play too much to the intellectual left’s prejudices. But his Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, comprised entirely of archived and mostly previously unused BBC footage, is an incredible insight into just what a disaster the Soviet Union ended up being, and how that disaster was compounded by how it fell apart. It doesn’t in any way justify Putin’s nationalist paranoia, but it does help explain it.
Many of us have been so keen to defend the importance of expertise against the gut-thinking of extremists that we need reminding not to trust experts too much. Read Merope Mills’s heartbreaking account of how her child died when challenging doctors could have saved her.
That’s it for now. Remember that if you buy books online, you can avoid the tax-dodging giant and buy through my affiliate shop which gives 10% to independent bookshops and 10% to me.
Until next time, if nothing prevents, thanks for your interest.