Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

A telling tale is the story of Patrick Ewing, who could have been a basketball champion. The year Ewing was a draft pick—by far the most exciting pick of the year—the Knicks won the lottery and to their joy got to select Ewing for their team. They now had “twin towers,” the seven-foot Ewing and the seven-foot Bill Cartwright, their high-scoring center. They had a chance to do it all.

They just needed Ewing to be the power forward. He wasn’t happy with that. Center is the star position. And maybe he wasn’t sure he could hit the outside shots that a power forward has to hit. What if he had really given his all to learn that position? (Alex Rodriguez, the best shortstop in baseball, agreed to play third base when he joined the Yankees. He had to retrain himself and, for a while, he wasn’t all he had been.) Instead, Cartwright was sent to the Bulls, and Ewing’s Knicks never won a championship.

Then there is the tale of the football player Keyshawn Johnson, another immensely talented player who was devoted to validating his own greatness. When asked before a game how he compared to a star player on the opposing team, he replied, “You’re trying to compare a flashlight to a star. Flashlights only last so long. A star is in the sky forever.”

Was he a team player? “I am a team player, but I’m an individual first.… I have to be the No. 1 guy with the football. Not No. 2 or No. 3. If I’m not the No. 1 guy, I’m no good to you. I can’t really help you.” What does that mean? For his definition of team player, Johnson was traded by the Jets, and, after that, deactivated by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

I’ve noticed an interesting thing. When some star players are interviewed after a game, they say we. They are part of the team and they think of themselves that way. When others are interviewedy say I

and they refer to their teammates as something apart from themselves—as people who are privileged to participate in their greatness.

Every Sport Is a Team Sport

You know, just about every sport is in some sense a team sport. No one does it alone. Even in individual sports, like tennis or golf, great athletes have a team—coaches, trainers, caddies, managers, mentors. This really hit me when I read about Diana Nyad, the woman who holds the world’s record for open-water swimming. What could be more of a lone sport than swimming? All right, maybe you need a little rowboat to follow you and make sure you’re okay.

When Nyad hatched her plan, the open-water swimming record for both men and women was sixty miles. She wanted to swim one hundred. After months of arduous training, she was ready. But with her went a team of guides (for measuring the winds and the current, and watching for obstacles), divers (looking for sharks), NASA experts (for guidance on nutrition and endurance—she needed eleven hundred calories per hour and she lost twenty-nine pounds on the trip!), and trainers who talked her through uncontrollable shivers, nausea, hallucinations, and despair. Her new record—102.5 miles—stands to this day. It is her name in the record books, but it took fifty-one other people to do it.

HEARING THE MINDSETS

You can already hear the mindsets in young athletes. Listen for them.

It’s 2004. Iciss Tillis is a college basketball star, a six-foot-five forward for the Duke University women’s basketball team. She has a picture of her father, James “Quick” Tillis, taped to her locker as a motivator. “But the picture is not a tribute,” says sportswriter Viv Bernstein. “It is a reminder of all Tillis hopes she will never be.”

Quick Tillis was a contender in the 1980s. In ’81, he boxed for the world heavyweight title; in ’85, he was in the movie The Color Purple (as a boxer); and in ’86, he was the first boxer to go the distance (ten rounds) with Mike Tyson. But he never made it to the top.

Iciss Tillis, who is a senior, says, “This is the year to win a national championship. I just feel like I’d be such a failure …[I’d] feel like I’m regressing back and I’m going to end up like my dad: a nobody.”

Uh-oh, it’s the somebody–nobody syndrome. If I win, I’ll be somebody; if I lose I’ll be nobody.

Tillis’s anger at her father may be justified—he abandoned her as a child. But this thinking is getting in her way. “Perhaps nobody else has that combination of size, skill, quickness, and vision in the women’s college game,” says Bernstein. “Yet few would rate Tillis ahead of the top two players in the country: Connecticut’s Diana Taurasi and [Duke’s Alana] Beard.” Tillis’s performance often fails to match her ability.