Fear of Falling and the Bane of High Expectations

Fear of Falling and the Bane of High Expectations

You’re at the base of a great cliff: alongside you, the competition is preparing to ascend. You check your equipment in the final moments before the race to the top starts. You’re nervous, but confident. With a loud crack, the race is on. Moments later, you look up and everyone is already halfway up, debris from their scramble raining into your face and the ground around you. You clamber up with everything you’ve got and manage to close the gap, but still trail in last place. Expectations are low, but you frenzy onward.

5th place, 4th, 3rd, ...

Unbelievably, you find yourself in second place with a short stretch of cliff looming ahead and your competition just above you. Now is when your work gets most difficult, for interesting reasons. When your expectations were low, you took risks with unfettered abandon. The higher you climb, the greater the expectations, the farther you risk falling if you fail. This can cause a negative feedback loop into your performance if you focus on the wrong things. Focusing purely on the relative position of your competitors is a distraction from the game plan that got you where you are. Overtaking someone in first place often entails pressuring them with pure performance long enough to get them to make a mistake. 

Loss Aversion

Is it true that the better we get as a team, the higher we achieve, the harder things seem to get? This is a very real problem of perception. A common experience of highly functioning groups is a fear of falling back, losing their hard-fought ground, and a dread of failure that could lead to lower performance. This was first described by  Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1979 in studies of prospect theory. The two became interested in what is known as loss aversion in economics in order to explain the endowment effect. The endowment effect basically states that once you own something, you value it more than if you didn’t own it. Loss aversion essentially describes that losing something hurts more than winning feels good.

Die With Your Boots On

Not surprisingly, what applies in economics also applies in other realms of human performance. As I can state from first hand experience, taking 1st place in a ping pong or Jiu-Jitsu competition didn’t feel nearly as good as losing 1st place felt crappy: that’s the endowment effect. Loss aversion is a bit different, but related. Have you ever noticed how conservatively some people play a game when they begin winning? This is loss aversion, and it negatively impacts performance. Play with all the aggression and unleashed energy of someone with nothing to lose. Friends have heard me yell at people clinging to a boring lead in a match: “Die with your boots on!” Attack on the final point, in the final seconds, in the same way you did on your first point. Once you’re on the field of battle, you fight to the end. Fight and win with passion and the hunger of someone with nothing to lose.

We have high expectations of our team mates, our products, and our company. These expectations are high because of the ground we have won and because of our emerging leadership in our industry. I expect us to win, but I want us to win with the passion and unrestrained force of a team that is fighting forward from last place.