How - Dov Seidman [57]
The pressure is always there to perform and to be a certain way, and we fail every day. You always come up short of your expectations. Even in a round of 61, you kind of look back and say, “Well, why didn’t I shoot 59?” But it ends up becoming ingrained in you. “Hey, this is the way I live my life. This is what I need to be like 24/7. I need to do right by my family and friends and by the people that support me.”
If your real personality is one thing and your on-the-golf-course, on-camera personality is something totally different, then you’d always be looking over your shoulder. For me, it’s the same, so it’s really not that hard.2
People like David Toms, people who operate day in and day out at the top of their games, who win major championships, who are consistently ranked in the top 10 of their chosen occupation, and who sit at the top of the money list every year, know how to keep their mind in the game. In the preceding two chapters, we’ve looked at what the mind does well as a biological machine and how language exerts a powerful influence on the way we conceptualize events, both freeing and constricting our thinking, creativity, and success. In this chapter, we look at another thing the mind does well: get in the way. At the end, we’ll return to this remarkable conversation with David Toms to see how these ideas all come together.
DISTRACTION
Though most of us are not schizophrenics, we all have voices in our heads. Each represents a part of our personality or experience—like integrity, insecurity, resistance or comfort with authority, or compassion—and at different times each voice exerts primacy or influence over our actions. Our boss asks us in a dismissive tone to do something fairly simple, but because it reminds us in some vague way of the way our sixth grade teacher used to speak to us, we grumble and fuss to ourselves far out of proportion to the severity of the slight, despite the fact that we are adults and know better. We have a noisy conversation with the voice inside that still resents that teacher.
Some of these voices speak consistently louder than others, and some are quiet by their nature or because we do not yet trust the guidance they offer. Often, they cooperate with each other, and when they do all is calm in our heads and our thoughts seem like a well-ordered conversation among friends: Our focus is keen, our concentration sharp, and we operate at our best. But at other times, for most of us, one or another voice will try to shout down its competition. Then they sound more like siblings arguing at the dinner table: They distract us, hinder our progress and efficiency, and ruin the casserole our mom spent an hour preparing. This distraction is all part of the normal everyday experience of being human.
Distraction comes from within, but it also comes from without, in equal measures throughout the day. Often, we don’t even realize when it is at work. As an experiment to demonstrate this, let me give you a little test. As you read, try not to cheat by looking ahead for the answer.
Can you guess the most searched term on Google in 2005?
It was a newsworthy year. Hurricane Katrina crippled New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast. A tsunami decimated the lives of millions in Asia. A beloved Pope died and a new one was chosen. Terrorists attacked London’s Underground. There was a lot on our minds and much important work to be done, but none of these subjects topped the list.
Here’s a hint: Can you remember who played in the 2004 NFL Super Bowl? It was one of the most exciting, closely