Our fear of what others may think keeps us busy and tired when we could be easeful and effective.
The penalty kick in football is a statistician’s dream. It is an almost completely controlled situation, rare in such a fluid sport. And in the age of statistics and analysis, some of the most straightforward statistics - which analysts have the most confidence in - are about penalties.
And from them, a strange part of human psychology arises.
I can’t imagine anyone hasn’t seen a penalty, but just as a reminder: one attacker has one kick to kick the ball into the goal from 12 yards. Opposing him is a goalkeeper who has to stand on his line until the ball is kicked. No defenders (or other attackers) are within 18 yards of the goal or 10 yards of the kicker. The attackers kick the ball so hard that the goalkeeper really doesn’t have any choice but to move (or not) as the kicker takes it. He or she can’t wait to see where it goes and then move.
The goalkeeper really has three options - dive to his or her left, dive to the right or stay standing in the middle.
Statistically, a very, very good place to put a penalty is straight down the middle. The reason for this is that goalkeepers always dive.
They dive more than they should - they never (almost never) just stand still.
And so knowing this, putting the ball straight down the middle is a very effective penalty strategy.
But (neatly) a similar bias plays into both the attacker and the goalkeeper’s mind: I don’t want to look silly.
If the keeper stands still (gambling on a shot down the middle) and the attacker puts it to the side of him, he looks like an idiot.
Similarly, if the attacker kicks it down the middle and the keeper just stands still and saves it, the attacker looks like a fool.
And so rather than thinking like a computer, the players think like a human.
(Of course there’s also game theory going on here - if the keeper knows that the attacker is too worried of embarrassment to kick it down the middle, she or he or she may be right to dive and vice versa.)
When I was thinking about this this week - the propensity to do something that may be less effective (in the players’ case, less effective at helping their team win) because of how it looks, I thought of how hard it is in our society to separate ‘effort’ from ‘effectiveness’.
When I run a productivity workshop, I often start with this: I share that I always feel a bit of an emposter running a ‘How to Be More Productive’ workshop but then remind myself of all the things I’ve done (four books, two podcasts, successful business, etc and so on, all in four days a week!). And the reason I feel like an imposter is because I have a sense of how being productive should look (hustle, 80 hour weeks, etc etc). And my life mostly isn’t like that.
But even I fall for the story, feeling and being (probably) busier than I need to. That’s because - like most of the stories we tell ourselves - the story kind of makes sense.
If I don’t work super hard and my business fails well… maybe it’s because I didn’t work hard enough.
But what if, like the goalkeeper who refuses to not dive, or the forward who won’t kick it down the middle, we’re robbing ourselves of something.
I've seen it with clients: feeling completely unable to go for a walk in the middle of the day, rest when they need to rest, eat lunch away from their desks. Even though they know it will make them more effective. Because that's not how it's done around here. What will people think?
My coach of years ago, Rich Litvin, used to say his job was to make his clients feel lazier and lazier because that meant they were more and more in their zones of genius.
Catriona Horey told me about a metaphor of marketing that she had been taught: the bee and the butterfly. The bee is the hustle story I have, as above. The butterfly - as she described it to me - felt like a breath of fresh air. An effortless, floaty marketing (and Catriona’s business was exactly where she wanted it to be - so the butterfly marketing worked, too).
Last year I decided to run my business from Love instead of Will, aiming to bring more effortlessness and ease into my life.
And so maybe we have to beware the guilt we have, the fear of what people think if we run our businesses in new ways.
Working less to achieve more.
Inviting the Dreamer in us as well as the Hustler.
Inviting Love as well as Will.
Maybe then we’ll do our job better, and help the team win.
—
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
Subscribe to this blog here
Read the archive here.
Buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.