Sport and Competition

As a psychology professor and college basketball coach, I get a unique opportunity to observe motivation in the classroom and on the court. I have also directed my own basketball camps for the past fifteen years. During that time, I have had the opportunity to work with thousands of young athletes.

At one BBC party, as I was trying to shove as many shrimp as possible into my cheeks in order to get some kind of protein into my system, a producer asked me to appear on a TV show that was a sort-of grown-up version of College Bowl.

The show was called "Mastermind" and was very popular in Britain at the time.

You sat under a spotlight on a stage and an announcer fired questions at you concerning a special subject and what was vaguely titled "general knowledge." Read More

In any sport, there are athletes who never live up to their potential. Sometimes it's because of injuries. Sometimes, people just aren't really motivated. They're going through the motions, but not really putting in the training, practice, or hard emotional and physical work of preparing themselves for peak performance. Read More

Encouraging successful athletes to think highly of themselves and their bona fide achievements is one thing but to allow or even encourage youngsters of limited ability who haven't accomplished anything to adopt a swaggering mindset is troubling because their perspective is not based in quantifiable reality. Read More

Many young women are still instructed to imagine themselves only in mid-level careers because if they aim higher, they might not reach their goal.

Okay...and so what happens if you don't reach your first goal? You try something else. You redirect your ambitions.

Let me tell you a secret: the "misery of failure" is a story circulated by those in power in order to keep others out of it.

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 The Speaker of the House has been on the news for days now. Coming from a position of power, Nancy Pelosi now faces the embarrassing challenge of undoing what she created in a word-war with the media. Read More

 Is invasive parenting here to stay? Read More

 The Many Woes of the High-T Male

As the literature on high-T males attests, dominant individuals tend to be extremely competitive, and are frequently "endowed" with what's commonly known as the "killer instinct." In sports, such a trait can often be quite useful. In the world of work also, it can, pragmatically, be advantageous--in cutthroat businesses, perhaps even essential. But as regards getting along well in not so narrowly defined contexts, it's almost always a liability. . . . Read More

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

  - Bertrand Russell, British author, mathematician, & philosopher (1872 - 1970)
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