The Winner Effect
The Science of Success and How to Use It
A book by: IAN ROBERTSON
“The more you win, the more likely you are to keep winning”
We see this in rich people who get richer and richer, become more confident, attract more people to work with them, and find it easier to make more money. The same thing happens with sportsmen and women and with people who have successful relationships, who stay single for a short time because they quickly find other people.
But the opposite is also true: if things aren’t going well for a person, they feel insecure, they feel unmotivated, they feel trapped, which makes their life more difficult, which means they don’t do as well in their tasks and goals and they start to lose, and if they start to lose, they’re more likely to keep losing.
So we’re either in a positive upward spiral or a negative downward spiral.
When we’re in a negative spiral, we tend to devalue all our victories so far and exaggerate all our failures. We look at our victories and think “it was nothing special…”, “it was luck…”, “that’s what everyone does…”, “I haven’t achieved anything in life…”… On the other hand, we exaggerate our defeats “today I was reprimanded at work, I’m going to get fired for sure…”, “I’m the unluckiest person in the world…”, “I’m terrible, I don’t deserve to be where I am…”.
To get out of this negative spiral and start a positive one, there are 5 things we can do:
1) Acknowledge and count your wins
At the end of each day, start by writing down some of the positive things that happened to you that day. Why do this? Because this trains your brain to focus on the positive things and take the focus off the negative thoughts you usually have.
2) Reward efforts, not outcomes
You must learn to value your efforts and not the results you get from your efforts. If you’ve managed to be disciplined enough to do something, you should celebrate your discipline and not the fact that you have or haven’t achieved what you wanted. For example, you managed to study for weeks for an exam, you put in hours, you made sacrifices to study and you were very disciplined, yet the exam was much harder than you expected and you ended up failing.
One of the most basic rules of Stoicism teaches us to realize what we can and cannot control. What you can control is how much you study for an exam, but you can’t control the difficulty of the exam. If you did your best in what you could control, you should celebrate it and feel proud of yourself. Of course, you should also learn lessons from your failure, so that you can correct what you’re doing wrong and succeed in the next attempt.
The most important thing is that you shouldn’t become demoralized, but rather think that the second time you try, you won’t be starting from scratch, you’ll be further ahead because when you fail, you learn. And this applies to exams as it does to everything in life.
3) Easy wins first, then stack
As I said, victories beget victories. If you have several tasks, some more difficult than others, start with the easier ones, they’ll give you more confidence, and when you get to the more difficult ones you’ll be motivated to work harder.
If you’re in the habit of comparing yourself to others, remember that if life seems to be going well for them, it’s because they’ve managed to have several victories in a row in the past and have built on that, perhaps by luck or not. That doesn’t mean they’re better than you, they just started their positive spiral longer ago, and you can start yours now.
4) Manage expectations
We all make mistakes, and that’s normal. Are you starting a new job and have you made your first mistake? It’s normal, you’re learning, and your bosses made a lot of mistakes too. Are you dating and say something that makes your partner very upset? It’s normal, nobody is perfect 100 percent of the time, no matter how many years you’ve been in a relationship, you’re always going to make mistakes, just like your partner will make mistakes with you.
What’s more, we often tend to simplify difficult things, “Everyone says meditation is very important but I can’t do it”, that’s because meditation is actually difficult and takes time to learn. “I can’t pass this exam,” perhaps because the subject is actually quite difficult. Don’t stop trying, but adjust your expectations, maybe you’re not failing, you’re just doing something that’s actually difficult.
5) Visualisation
Many millionaires, successful sportsmen, and world-famous actors all talk about how important it is to visualize yourself living your dream.
Your brain doesn’t know the difference between your imagination and reality. So visualize yourself living your goal, but also visualize yourself doing the process you need to achieve your goal so that when you’re actually doing the process, it’s easier for you.
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