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The kind of motivation you have when you are trying to reach a promotion goal—an achievement or accomplishment—feels like eagerness, an enthusiastic desire to really go for it. Not surprisingly this eagerness is heightened by positive feedback—in other words, the more you seem to be succeeding, the more motivated you become. Increasing confidence heightens your energy and intensity. Negative feedback, on the other hand, dampens your eagerness. Feeling like you might fail saps your motivation. Doubting yourself takes the wind right out of your sails. In pursuit of prevention goals—seeking safety and security—the motivation you have feels like vigilance, a desire to stay clear of danger. Vigilance actually increases in response to negative feedback or doubting yourself. There’s nothing like the looming possibility of failure, the very real likelihood of danger, to get your prevention juices flowing.
Succeed
Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.D. and Carol S. Dweck
Time pressure is external. Focus comes from inside you, where no one else can control it. Time creates distractions. Focus blocks them out. Time tells you to hurry. Focus tells time to STFU. When you’re managing time, all you can see is how long it will take. When you’re managing focus, you don’t care. Time is about others. Focus is all about you.
Tom was always a great part of the team, and he would often run with us in the morning, even when he had been up half the night, if not all of it, recutting sails or redirecting our entire computer-analysis programs. His arsenal was huge. He estimated very early on that we would be taking to Newport 40 genoas, 10 mainsails, and 50 spinnakers, with probably 20 sails on the boat for anyone race. Each sail’s shape, configuration, and driving power were Tom’s responsibility. And he attended to every single detail throughout the campaign. He was not interested in extravagance, only in scientific conclusions. For instance, in the American camp, if a sail is not doing its job, Dennis Conner will just whistle up a half-dozen new sails. In earlier campaigns, we had a tendency to do the same thing. Tom detested this approach. He thought it was crazy because he did not think sail manufacturing was sufficiently accurate. He thought recutting was more progressive, correctly working to a scientific conclusion. Once we had a sail that was good, we just kept recutting it, sometimes to a fraction of an inch, keeping it good, dealing with the stretch instead of starting again with a new one. In that way he was extremely conservative, but he was at the same time extremely potent, because he made sure we always had our fingers on every pulse with great accuracy. Amusingly, after all this heavy concentration on his job, Tom’s hobby is sailboarding. He is, I suppose, totally consumed with the effect of the wind in the intricate science of driving a boat, of whatever weight, forward. Money does not do it for him—nor, apparently, does recognition, for in his own country he is just about unknown, despite his international reputation. Tom’s raison d’être is, I suppose, the pursuit of excellence for the sake of pure excellence. That is an ennobling way of living your life and one of which I very much approve.
Born to Win
John Bertrand
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