This is the 1st post in a series on the PRESSURE TO FIT IN

The song went up on a Thursday, and it opened with a demand:

“Please, don’t fucking lie to me.”

Ren Gill sat with an acoustic guitar in front of a graffiti-splashed wall, as he listed what people in suits had promised him. Somewhere between that and cursing them with extra venom, he stopped shouting.

“And I’m so low,” Gill shared the very personal price he’d paid in this story. “My head is feeling hammered, a nut without a spanner. I start feeling mean, turning green, Dr Banner.”

The independent musician is known to his millions of fans as simply Ren, and the people in suits are sixteen years behind him.

But it still burns.

He was twenty and busking when a producer stopped to listen, and in 2010 he signed to Sony. He moved to London to make the album with The Label behind him.

They’d signed what they heard on the street and then asked him to be something else, and he went along, because a twenty-year-old with a Sony contract does. Then he got ill, with something that took five years to name, and when he was too sick to finish the record the label dropped him.

He went home to Wales and stayed in bed. For a long time.

Conforming cost young Ren his health, his creativity, and his contract. So what’s it costing you?

Plenty, according to the research.

👉 🧠 👈

Even if you’ve never had a label looming over you, all of us are familiar with this type of pressure in modern life. But it’s not a new phenomenon.

“Worldly wisdom teaches,” John Maynard Keynes described it almost 100 years ago, in a piece on why investors move in herds, “that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

It’s safer to fail as a follower than succeed as yourself.

When the plan on the table is the one everyone expects, but you can see a better one. When the teacher has a standard approach in front of her, but wants to use a less common one she knows suits this student.

If you go with the room and it fails, no problem - you were doing what everyone does. But if you break from the room and it fails?

Everyone remembers who went off script.

So the smart move is to just play it safe right? Not so fast - because study after study shows the tradeoffs we make when we stick with the crowd.

It keeps you out of trouble, but off the top of the charts.

Think about the last time you did the expected thing when you had a better idea. Did you think it’d work better, or that it’d be easier to explain if it didn’t?

A Berkeley economist went through more than 700 NFL games to find when a team was better off going for it on fourth down. On the 1,068 fourth downs where the numbers said go, teams kicked 959 times. His explanation: a coach who breaks from the usual gets punished harder for failing than he’s rewarded for succeeding.

Make the usual call on your own work and it lands lower. Out of nearly 27,000 songs from the Billboard Hot 100, the songs that sounded too much like the rest peaked lower and fell off the chart faster, while the ones that stood a little apart climbed highest.

Ren was signed for songs that stood apart, then asked to change them.

You take the loss better, but you wear yourself out.

Now think about a time you lost doing the usual thing. How long did you think about it, compared with a time you lost doing something different?

Goalkeepers stop 33% of penalties when they stay in the middle and about 13% when they dive, and they dive 94% of the time. Asked to rate how a goal felt, most keepers who scored the two differently said it hurt more after standing still, which the researchers put down to diving being what keepers do.

People who spend the workday showing feelings they don’t have end up worn out. A study of more than 23,000 people found that the more someone put on emotions they didn’t feel at work, the more exhausted they were and the more physical complaints they reported.

Ren’s line for it: “My head is feeling hammered.”

You share the blame, but you still lose.

Think about the last group decision you were part of that went wrong. Who took the blame for it, if anyone?

Two economists modeled why fund managers copy each other even when their own information says otherwise: lose money alone and you look bad at your job, lose alongside everyone else and you look unlucky.

On an NFL field, the safe fourth-down habit still costs a team about 1 win every 3 seasons. Ren did what the label asked, got sick, and they dropped him anyway.

Perhaps it’s time to learn to give the finger to conformity, and make your own moves.

👉 🧠 👈

If you’re sick of playing safe and paying the price, here are the three moves for the next time the people around you want one thing and you can see another.

1. Set Your Sails First.

2. Find a Rebel Ally.

3. Judge the Call, Not the Fall.

Back to Ren, who is the poster boy for the fact this can change, and you can rise above the pressure of conformity (and the costs that come with it).

The next album he made was done in a bedroom - no labels now - and he put it out himself to pay for treatment. The one after that, in 2023, went to number one in the UK, ironically while he was in Canada for treatment and couldn’t play a show to promote it.

Nobody gets fired for going along - but nobody breaks out either.

Is your conformity costing you?

👉 🧠 👈

All this month, Pressure Points is digging into the PRESSURE TO FIT IN - why losing the way everyone loses is forgiven, why failing your own way isn’t, and what that trade costs you.

Here’s where this particular series is going:

✅ Week 1: why the safe call is usually the worse call, and the three moves for breaking from the room when you’re right.

☑️ Week 2: what the room does to what you can see, and why disagreeing out loud costs more than being wrong quietly.

☑️ Week 3: the person who stopped offering ideas because the last unusual one got noticed for the wrong reason, and how to get them back.

☑️ Week 4: what it costs to spend years being the version of you the group accepts, and the opposite move.

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This is the 4th post in a series on the PRESSURE OF EXPOSURE

The man on the boardwalk had about ninety seconds before the next train.

He'd worked that out from the last one. The subway crosses the Manhattan Bridge every few minutes and brings a deafening sound with it, so he had a countdown in his mind like a sign on the subway:

NEXT TRAIN IN 1:30.

He knew because he was trying to get a full 85 second recording done before it hit zero and the decibels hit a hundred. Between attempts, he talked to the camera, and the noise kept coming back over the water.

"Wow, this is tougher than I thought. Fucking train." Then the next take: "I've forgotten the script." The one after that only got as far as the title. "My new book, Pressure Point, my baby, is..."

When a take finally held, the first line of it was the only honest one available. "So I'm under pressure right now, which is ironic because I'm here to announce this."

As you might’ve guessed from the book title matching this blog, that man was me, and the announcement was mine (more on the book soon). This is the reason I'd spent a many months saying nothing online, and the reason a publisher now wants me saying way more than I ever would.

Especially self promotion. Pass the vomit bag, please.

If you’re reading this then you know I did make it through the experience with my life, although it felt like I would die on camera multiple times. I even managed to get all the way to the last second ask:

"Order your copy now on pressurepointbook.com."

Just in time for the next train crossing the bridge.

I didn't say the aim I have for the first-week sales number on the boardwalk, and I won't say it here - the last three posts explain why that would be a terrible idea.

But as I hit post on this substack (and over on IG, and YT, and anywhere else people see me), this much is clear: the word is out. So now what do I do with the five months between here and the day we see the final score?

👉 🧠 👈

I'm assuming - if you're like most of my readers - you haven't found yourself under a bridge, waiting for a train, so you could record a book launch announcement video (if you HAVE, please DM me lol).

But you've definitely had that feeling: this is it, time to share, the post is up, the pitch is sent…

And now there's a gap.

This month on PRESSURE POINTS has been all about the psychology of putting it out there. And although this is the last post of the series, it’s truly the one I need for myself: what to do in the gap, between taking your shot and seeing if it scores.

We can sum the whole thing up in three words: Improve and Move.

Think of it like a hermit crab, who moves from their current shell to another one consistently, never staying too long or trying to make the old one perfect. The move itself is what makes the improvement possible.

Improve and Move.

It’s the phrase I've been using with my team. We can't nitpick, we can't be discouraged, and we can't get obsessed with the score, because the job between now and March is to grow the surface area for luck.

Because luck as a creator is other people finding you, other people sharing your work, other people backing you in.

And luckily for you (and me) dear reader, theres a little known bucket of research that says the more work you put out and the more people who know about it, the more lucky you get.

An entrepreneur and coder called Jason Roberts turned it into a formula in 2010:

Doing, multiplied by telling.

His words for it were that the good fortune in your life "is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated."

But it’s not just his theory.

Over five years, LinkedIn ran experiments on 20 million people, nudging some toward more acquaintances, the people who know you a little, and others toward closer friends. Then they tracked 600,000 job changes, to see who got more out of it.

Short answer: the people given a higher volume of “weak ties” both applied for more jobs and got better jobs more often. Think of a content farm as the digital equivalent, or a lottery syndicate: the more chances you have to strike gold the better.

A lot of small points leads to more luck than a few big ones.

👉 🧠 👈

Simple, but not easy - and for creators specifically, there’s actually three things that get in the way of it.

First: You can't nitpick.

Because polishing doesn’t change the odds as much as the count does.

Most people assume the artists with the most hits have a better hit rate, but it's simpler than that. A psychologist who has spent decades counting the output of creative careers found that the number of hits rises in step with the number of works, and the rate stays flat across a career.

He calls it the Equal-Odds Rule.

A 2015 test of the same rule gave 246 students a creativity task, and the number of ideas they produced predicted how creative the judges found them, with a correlation of 0.73.

More pieces = more hits, and the next piece is where the last one gets better.

Second: You can't be discouraged.

Because you're probably misreading the quiet after you put it out there. Think about the last time you walked out of a conversation and replayed it. How did you think it went for the other person?

After almost any conversation, you guess the other person liked you less than they did. In a bunch of similar studies, people who'd just had a five-minute conversation with a stranger rated how much they liked the other person higher than they guessed the other person liked them at 5.17.

We naturally assume the worst (or at least a little worse).

Among first-year students sharing a dorm suite, the gap was still there in February, five months in. The researchers call it the liking gap.

So it suggests other people liked it more than you think, and you can find out for sure by asking them - which has a secondary, bonus effect. In a study of learners practicing typing in German, the share asking for negative feedback rose from 50% after the first attempt to 82% by the last.

Third: you can't keep score.

Because the score is the wrong thing to aim at. Think about the last goal you set yourself that was a number out of your hands. If you’re like most humans, it probably didn’t work out for you that well.

In fact it’s quite literally a coin flip.

An athlete given a goal about the result on the board ended up ahead of about five in ten, which is a coin toss.

But a goal about what you do beats a goal about what you get, and by a lot. When a 2022 review pooled 27 studies of goal setting in sport, an athlete given goals about the process (the routine, the swing, the reps) ended up ahead of about nine in ten athletes given no goal at all.

And I dunno about you, but I don’t want this to be a coin toss.

👉 🧠 👈

Back to the boardwalk.

Despite knowing it could be better - better noise levels, better script, better control of the runners cutting in front of my shot - what I didn't do was pause. I didn’t wait for a quieter spot, cut the countdown, or hold the announcement until the take was perfect.

The take that we eventually used actually has the train sound in it. And as I said on LinkedIn, that’s arguably the single biggest reason everyone needs a copy of this book: nothing in life is perfect, and pressure can steer us off course at the times we can least afford it.

To help anyone else follow the Improve and Move mantra, here’s three moves, one for each trap:

1. Ship The Thing.

   Make sure your thing goes out on schedule, polished or not. The ones with the most hits are the ones who take the most swings, and their hit rate is no better than anyone else’s. Another hour on this one changes very little - the next one is where this one gets better.

2. Tune One String.

   After each rep, ask one person you trust what’s wrong with it - then make the smallest change that lifts the next one and move on. When a guitar’s off, you simply tune one string; don’t restring the whole thing. The best, most experienced performers only ask for the next thing to fix.

3. Count The Swing.

   The number on the wall is swings taken, efficiency in the making, or growth rate - cues before views. A goal about what you do beats a goal about what you get, so the result gets scored once, in March, by someone else, and the swings get counted by me every night.

To make sure I walk the walk on all the above, here’s my shot, called in public: I’m locked into sharing one piece of new content every day, for the next 6 months.

That’s the doing, and the telling is the part you’re reading.

Improve and move.

You never know your luck.

See you tomorrow (not here tho - this is only a weekly thing, my daily stuff wil be over on Instagram, Youtube, X or Linkedin)

👉 🧠 👈

Over this month, Pressure Points has been digging into PRESSURE OF EXPOSURE - called shots, public promises, and what happens in your body between saying it and doing it.

Where this series went:

✅ Week 1: why calling your shot is half stupid, and how your brain can turn a prize into a loss before the race is even run.

✅ Week 2: how you know the crowd's taken over, and the three tells you can see on anyone who's said a goal out loud

✅ Week 3: what putting your work out there does to you, and what to say to someone else so they do it again.

✅ Week 4: what to do in the gap after you've put it out there, and a shot of my own called in public: one a day, one a week, one a month, until March 30.

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This is the 3rd post in a series on the PRESSURE OF EXPOSURE.

Johnnie Kapua was seconds into his song when two of the four chairs spun around.

But the noise he'd been bracing for never came.

He'd pictured it the way it looks on television: the chair swings, the music swells, the room goes up. In the room there was nothing.

"When you're actually performing and you're there live, he joked, “there's no sound!"

Kelly Clarkson was looking at him, Queen Latifah was looking at him, and he had the rest of the song to get through before the part he hadn't rehearsed at all, which was speaking.

"Oh shoot, I really have not thought this through!"

Off to the side of the stage, his wife Kat, eight months pregnant, stood with their two kids mouthing the words. Technically, this was her fault - she was the one who'd signed him up.

He'd sung in a national competition back in New Zealand, years before the sales job in Utah and the kids, and then music had given way to the rest of life.

"I would say I'm more of an insecure singer," he'd said before the episode aired.

Clarkson was on her feet by the end, gushing that he sang "with such soulfulness, and I really dig it." Then she hit the button that put him straight onto her team, and he had to answer her. And although he didn’t go all the way - three weeks later, Clarkson sent him home in the second round - he still spoke of himself as a winner.

Because he was.

"The goal was for my kids,” he summed up the wild ride, “to be able to see their dad do something that he was very terrified of doing."

He'd been terrified of a hostile room, but that never showed up. The room he got instead gave him a standing ovation. And this is where the lesson begins. You've probably never sung for Kelly Clarkson, but you've put something out, or you've metaphorically stood where Kat stood while someone you know got their spotlight moment.

The bestie sending their manuscript that's sat in a drawer for three years. The analyst presenting her model to the whole floor for the first time. The closet guitarist who finally posts the song. Your kid reading his story at assembly while you sit in the third row.

All these people find out that when their spotlight moment comes, the verdict you brace for is different than what you get - in three very specific ways.

👉 🧠 👈

You overrate the room.

Think about the last time you tripped over a word in a meeting. How long did you think about it afterwards, and how long did anyone else?

Researchers at Cornell sent students into a room of strangers, then asked them how many people in the room could recall a specific detail about their outfit.

They guessed about half. The real answer was about a quarter.

The gap was the same when the thing being noticed was what they’d said in a group discussion. The judgment is overrated too. In a follow-up, people who'd fumbled in front of others guessed how harshly they'd been judged, and the observers were a lot more charitable than the fumblers expected.

The researchers called it the Spotlight Effect.

It feels like weakness, but it looks like courage.

Now think about the last time a friend admitted something they were embarrassed about. Did you think less of them?

Psychologists at the University of Mannheim ran seven studies on that. They gave people situations where you show something unfinished about yourself: confessing feelings to a friend, admitting a mistake, asking for help, and had half imagine themselves in the situation and half imagine someone else.

The people imagining themselves saw weakness, and the people imagining someone else saw strength and courage. Then they made it live. Participants were told they'd either sing made-up songs in front of a jury or sit on the jury, and the ones about to sing called the act weakness and inadequacy while the jury called it strength and courage.

Same act, different seat. The researchers call it the beautiful mess effect: up close you see every flaw in the thing you made, because you're the one who knows where they are.

What those around them say decides whether they do it again.

"She'll smash it," feels like support when it’s said out loud, but a 1985 study found that a public expectation that someone would succeed made them more likely to choke, unless they already believed it privately.

The words that actually help point at who they are rather than what they'll get.

In 2012, researchers at the University of Nevada told one group of throwers they were the kind of people who do well under pressure, told the others nothing, then put everyone under pressure, and the first group threw more accurately.

Then there's the other words, for afterwards.

Seventh graders in a 2014 study got an essay back covered in a teacher's corrections, and half were given random comments so the student would have feedback. The other half of the essays carried one extra sentence:

"I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them."

The kids could revise and hand it in again or leave it - and the numbers were stark: More of the ones who got the sentence did, and among the kids who trusted their teachers least, 64% revised against 27% without it. The revised essays were better too..

👉 🧠 👈

Johnnie Kapua is a great story, but if you’re trying to help someone else it’s his wife Kat that matters more. She showed exactly how to tap into three surprising but simple wrinkles in how our brains behave under the pressure of exposure.

So here are some tips for any of you that are standing where Kat stood - sidestage or backstage or sitting in the crowd - as someone you support gets their spotlight moment.

1. Say You’re Excited.

   People about to sing karaoke in a lab who said "I am excited" out loud scored 80% on the machine, against 69% for "I am calm" and 53% for "I am anxious", and before a speech it made them more persuasive and more competent. The fear's arriving either way, so give it the other name.

2. Imagine a Friendly Judge.

   Ask them to describe the thing or the performance as if a friend had made it: “Someone you know wrote a novel and is sending it out this week. What do you make of them?” That’s the switch from the Mannheim studies, and it turned weakness into courage.

3. Say the Sentence.

   When their work lands in front of you, give them all of the criticism with that one sentence on the front: I’ve got very high expectations of this, and I know you can reach them. High bar and their corner in the same breath, and more of them put the next version out.

Someone near you has a thing in a drawer, a secret talent, or a dream thats still just a first draft. Tell them you're excited, ask them to imagine friendly judges, and when it lands, say the sentence about them.

It’s their time to shine.

Next week it’s my turn - and I’ll be running all three of these on myself.

👉 🧠 👈

All this month, Pressure Points is digging into the PRESSURE OF EXPOSURE - called shots, public promises, and what happens in your body between saying it and doing it.

Where this series is going:

✅ Week 1: why calling your shot is half stupid, and how your brain can turn a prize into a loss before the race is even run.

✅ Week 2: how you know the crowd's taken over, and the three tells you can see on anyone who's said a goal out loud

✅ Week 3: What putting your work out there does to you, and what to say to someone else so they do it again.

☑ Week 4: what to announce, to whom, and when (with a shot of my own called in public).

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This is the 2nd post in a series on the PRESSURE OF EXPOSURE

On the morning after the election, in a hotel in the middle of São Paulo, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil, stood in front of the cameras and said it out loud: “I confess to you that I was convinced I was going to win the election in the first round.”

He’d be going to a runoff against a man he’d promised to beat outright. This was made especially awkward given he made a promise a month earlier:

“We have everything we need to win in the first round.”

Then things started to shift.

First came the hedge. A month later, on television, with nobody asking him to back off it, he said the same thing with the certainty taken out: “I have a slight impression there won’t be a second round.”

Then the dodge. Days before the vote he pulled out of the final televised debate, the one place the promise would’ve been checked live, and did a podcast in the same hour. His reason, the next day: “I think these debates are fruitless, they don’t go anywhere, and then people start clowning around.”

Then finally, the fudge. The polls still had him short of an outright win, and on the day before the vote he marched through São Paulo in front of the biggest crowd of his campaign, by his campaign’s count. His staff made sure to point to THAT figure, rather than the polls which were trending against him.

He’d finished second, missing the mark.

But the political winers and losers is not why we’re sharing this story.

Swap the country for a team, a group chat, or a boss, and you’ve probably seen it up close - when there’s a goal said out loud, with a number or date on it - as people start acting different in the weeks before the finish line.

These little shifts can happen to anyone, with any crowd, when promises start pulling you in different directions. The founder who told her team the funding round closes by Christmas. The dad who posted that he'd run the half marathon under two hours. The manager who told her boss the hire would be signed by Friday.

This is about what that special concoction of conditions does to people’s behavior in the weeks between saying it and finding out - and it essentially boiled down to what side you're answering to: the crowd that cheered the promise, or someone who'll score the result.

Three tells show which one it is, in the order they tend to show up, and other people can usually see all three before you can.

👉 🧠 👈

First comes the Hedge.

When you’re not sure you’ll make it, you soften the promise before anyone asks you to.

Researchers call it sandbagging: telling people you’ll do worse than you expect to. People who score high on that trait predict worse performance for themselves the more the coming test matters, especially to an evaluator who has no record of them.

This little trick does two jobs: it takes pressure off, and it sets a low bar for the result to clear. Think back to Brazil: “We are sure” became “we have the impression” within a month of the first statement, and they hoped no-one noticed.

For anyone interested, the vague hedge is the useless one. Separate work on people who habitually talk their chances down found they perform as well as the optimists when they pair the low expectation with a rehearsal of the specific things that could go wrong, and worse when someone encourages them out of it.

Next comes the Dodge.

When you can’t explain the result, you skip the test or arrange the excuse.

Two psychologists at Princeton gave people a test and told all of them they’d done well. Half had been given solvable problems, so they knew why. The other half had been given problems with no solution, so they’d been praised for a result they couldn’t account for. Before the retest, everyone chose between a drug they were told would help their performance and one they were told would hurt it.

The ones who couldn’t explain their success tended to choose the drug that would hurt them. They’d been handed a reputation they didn’t trust, and with the test coming they arranged a reason the result wouldn’t count. Psychologists call it self-handicapping.

The excuse can be a thing you do or a thing you say, and skipping the debate was the first kind while “these debates are fruitless” was the second.

And finally, the Fudge.

Once people cheer, the cheering starts to stand in for the work - which means you give them more of what they cheered.

Think about the last time you told someone a goal and they lit up. Did you feel closer to it? Psychologists in Germany tested exactly that.

Students committed to becoming lawyers or psychologists wrote down what they intended to do that week to get there. Half of them shared the intention (and were positively reinforced); for the other half it stayed private.

The ones who shared acted on it 1.9 days that week, compared with 2.7 for the private group, working 41 minutes on practice cases compared with 46, and watching 28 minutes of training video compared with 39. Being noticed made them feel they already were the thing they’d announced.

Interestingly, this effect showed up most in the strongly committed - the more they meant it, the less they did once someone knew and acknowledged them.

Which seems to contradict last week, where going public raised your drive.

Both are true, and the difference is who you tell. People who shared a goal with someone senior to them, someone whose opinion they cared about, were more committed and performed better than people who told a peer or told nobody, in the lab and across a semester with 292 students. The author’s summary: “You need to care about the opinion of who you are telling.”

I’d add one more wrinkle: that the opinion needs to depend on the final result, not just the backslapping and storytelling along the way.

👉 🧠 👈

Now to really practice what I preach, I'm calling a shot of my own before this series is out - so you'll get to watch for all three on me. But in the meantime, if and when you spot them on someone else, there's one thing to do for each:

1. Name The Pain.

   When you hear the promise softer than the first time you heard it, skip the reassurance and ask one question: what's the thing most likely to stop you, and what will you do when it shows up? Studies show up to 60% more effort for those who do this than those who don’t. The hedge becomes an attack plan instead of an escape plan.

2. Change The Subject.

   When the reasons to skip the test start arriving, change the subject. Get them talking for ten minutes about something they're good at (it can have nothing to do with the goal). Writing about an unrelated value cut excuse-making in the lab. Reassurance about the thing they're dodging is the doesn’t help; reinforcement that they have value beyond it does.

3. Become A Friendly Judge.

   When the cheering starts and the announcement is doing the work, stop being part of the crowd. Ask for their number, write it down, and tell them you’ll be scoring it on the date. In People work harder when they tell their goal to someone who’s opinion matters to them, so if that’s you, use it, and then spend the weeks after it being a judge instead of a crowd.

Watch any political coverage with the three in your head and you’ll see them arrive in order: promises come out a shade softer, real tests get skipped, rallys get read as a result.

The crowd will cheer every one of them, because cheering is what crowds are for.

But look closer to home. Somebody nearby (or maybe even you) said a goal out loud recently, and the gap between saying it and finding out is still live.

The key is to not let the the crowd pull you, cos the crowd just wants a show.

👉 🧠 👈

All this month, Pressure Points is digging into the PRESSURE OF EXPOSURE - called shots, public promises, and what happens in your body between saying it and doing it.

Where this series is going:

✅ Week 1: why calling your shot is half stupid, and how your brain can turn a prize into a loss before the race is even run.

✅ Week 2: how to spot someone playing to the crowd instead of the game, and the three tells you can see on yourself.

☑ Week 3: how to help someone else say it out loud, and the version that traps them.

☑ Week 4: what to announce, to whom, and when (with a shot of my own called in public).

Subscribe now

Subscribe to get Pressure Points
FREE in your inbox every week…
or Share with a friend or colleague!

Share Pressure Points

This is the 1st post in a series on the PRESSURE OF EXPOSURE

Esther Pfeiffer had tears in her eyes and was in an agitated back-and-forth with the man running beside her.

They were somewhere around kilometer number 14 of Sunday’s Berlin Marathon. Moments later, the two of them stepped off the road.

Their race was over.

The man was her husband and coach, Hendrik, there to pace her. The number they were chasing was 2:19:19, the German record, set on those same streets eighteen years earlier. She'd told the country she would a month before the race.

"If I can pull off my training up to the marathon in Berlin the way I picture it,” she said in the German press, “I'll be running for the German record."

By race week the organizers had built a pace group for a time under 2:20, RTL was showing it live, and at the press conference she went further:

“I’ll set a pace that leads to the German record. That’s my big goal, and the hunt starts on Sunday.”

What made it a startling claim was that it was only the second marathon she'd ever run. The first was Cologne in 2023, in 2:37:00, and since then she'd run a half marathon in 67:25 and ten kilometers in 30:45.

On those numbers, the record was within reach. And through the opening kilometers she’d been on pace to beat it.

But on the Sunday night, the organizers put out a statement from Hendrik:

"Unfortunately the enormous pressure of expectation took its toll today and affected her stomach, amongst other things. Esther set off at record pace, but due to her physical condition she was unable to continue."

“I’m sad and inconsolable,” Esther summed it up in fewer words. “I’d have loved to turn a very strong preparation into a successful result.”

So why didn’t she? Is it a mistake to point to the stars because it works against us?

👉 🧠 👈

I’m assuming as I write this that you probably don’t run for a living on live TV. I’m also assuming somewhere in the past you’ve told somebody a goal of yours. Everyone has, whether it’s in private or public.

The founder who gave her board the quarter's figure before the quarter started. The runner who posted the race date and the target time under a photo of his new shoes. The manager who told the team the exact month the results would finally show up in the numbers.

Chasing a goal is one problem. Say out loud what you're trying to do, and you've got another one: more to lose, and now with witnesses.

Which makes calling your shot a double-edged sword.

It’s been mythologized for almost a century now, a phrase that baseball invented. Legend has it that in the 1932 World Series, Babe Ruth gestured toward the outfield with two strikes against him and hit the next pitch into the bleachers.

It’s the most famous called shot in sport, yet nobody can agree it ever really happened: the film is inconclusive, and Ruth himself gave two versions that contradict the story. But on the radio five days later, Lou Gehrig said he “called his shot and then made it.”

That story (and the phrase) is what stuck. Because like most good legends, only the ones that land get retold for ninety years, and the ones that miss don’t get told at all. So what happens when we stop cherry picking and instead look at both the wins and the losses?

Well, it’s a mixed picture.

Most of the research people point to suggests it only helps raise your drive: you train harder, and you commit more - mostly because the part of your brain that registers a prize coming fires the moment the number is in front of you. The follow-through studies show people who go public with a concrete goal do more of the work, too.

But calling your shot also raises what you can lose (more on that shortly).

Yes, the increased drive arrives with the announcement and can help propel the prep. But at the moment that matters, the prize gets re-categorized by your brain as something you can lose - and so the alarm system inside us fires.

That’s because calling your shot does three things to your brain, and while each one helps in the buildup, together they can cost you on the big day.

👉 🧠 👈

Calling your shot adds eyeballs and judgment.

Think about the last time your hands got sweaty before something (hello, public speaking). Was it the task itself, or the people who'd see how it came out?

Talking is something I think most of my adult readers are capable of. Talking into a microphone in front of a crowd, though? Different story.

Being judged on a result you’re supposed to be able to deliver is what sets off the body’s slow alarm. Two psychologists at UCLA went through 208 laboratory studies that measured cortisol response to being under pressure. Hard tasks done in private barely moved it. Tasks where other people judged the result moved it, and so did tasks the person couldn’t control. The tasks that did both produced the biggest rise in the set and took longest to come back down.

That's the slow alarm from the first post on this Substack, the one that only fires when someone's scoring you.

A marathon time is judged, and the weather, the pace group, and your own body all get a vote. Esther had called her shot to the whole country - judgment en masse.

Once the shot is being judged, the alarm hits your gut first.

When the brain decides there's something to lose, the first thing it does is release a hormone known as CRF (corticotropin-releasing factor - we’ll stick with the acronym!) from a small region near its base called the hypothalamus.

That hormone starts the chain that ends in cortisol, but it doesn't wait for cortisol to arrive to make its presence felt in the body. Through the nerves that run between the brain and gut, it slows the stomach, speeds up the lower gut, and pulls blood away from the digestive system.

A stomach that stops emptying is the most common gut response to a sudden threat, and a 2020 review of gut trouble in endurance athletes traced the nausea and cramping that hit runners in competition back to this chain. That's the word Hendrik used on Sunday night: stomach.

When it matters, the part of you that wanted the shot… well, it stops.

Deep in the middle of the brain there’s a small knot of nerve cells. Dopamine arrives there whenever something good looks likely, so it gets busier the bigger the reward you expect, and it connects out to the strip of brain that sends the commands for every movement you make. Scientists call it the ventral striatum.

In 2012, a team at Caltech put people in a brain scanner, tracked this particular area, and had them play a game of skill for money. Before each go, the prize came up on the screen, anywhere from nothing to $100. Up to a point, the more money on offer, the better people played. But past that point, they got worse, missing more than they had when less was on the line.

The scan showed why - when those subjects started playing for a bigger prize, that reward area went quiet. Meaning we lose the push at the exact moment we need it. While the prize is on the screen (or being talked about in the buildup), your brain treats it as money to win.

Once you start playing for it, your brain treats it as money to lose.

👉 🧠 👈

That was Esther’s brain in the buildup before Berlin. A record was filed away as something to win, driving months of training on a treadmill in an empty flat in Cologne. Then on Sunday, with the cameras on, that same record she’d identified so closely with now became something to lose.

So her stomach dropped first, and her dreams soon followed.

You don’t have to go that way though - here’s three things you can do when you’ve made a call that turns all eyes to you:

1. Announce The Step.

   The game decides whether the result is in your hands, but you decide what you announce - so go public with the part you control. Sixty miles a week is a promise you can keep, but a time of 2:19 needs the weather, the pace group, and your stomach to agree.

2. Rehearse The Crowd.

   Under pressure, those who trained while being watched and judged outperform those who didn’t. So get a judgy set of eyes on your practice: run the pitch to three colleagues who’ll score it, or read the number out at the dinner table before you read it to the board.

3. Pocket It First.

   Players who were told to picture the prize money already in their pocket barely batted an eyelid after that, even on the $100 shot. So put the prize in your pocket (mentally) before you deliver: the board seat, the time, the contract are already yours, and today is now about keeping them.

Calling your shot in life is only half stupid. The smart half drives you through the boring parts, or the pain of six months of training. The stupid half is your own brain turning the prize into a loss, right when it matters most.

So be smart: say the helpful half out loud and shut up about the rest.

👉 🧠 👈

All this month, Pressure Points is digging into the PRESSURE OF EXPOSURE - called shots, public promises, and what happens in your body between saying it and doing it:

✅ Week 1: why calling your shot is half stupid, and how your brain can turn a prize into a loss before the race is even run.

☑️ Week 2: how to spot someone playing to their words / goals / crowd instead of the game.

☑️ Week 3: how to help someone else say it out loud, and the version that traps them.

☑️ Week 4: what to announce, to whom, and when (with a shot of my own called in public).

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This is the 4th post in a series on the PRESSURE OF MOMENTUM

Three months before he broke out, every upload was the same.

He posted the video, waited, refreshed the page, and nothing happened. For a month his YouTube channel, Dekosophy, had twenty-eight subscribers, and some of his videos, he said later, “didn’t even reach 10 for hours.”

By his own admission, written under a video, he’d accidentally developed Stockholm Syndrome with youtube analytics.

All he had at that point was a year of work and his own read on where he was at. He’d started believing some people were just naturally luckier than others, and he couldn’t tell which way it was going for him.

“That’s the phase that messes with people,” he pointed at why he was stuck, “because nothing looks bad enough to quit, but nothing looks good enough to trust either.”

Most people have a number like that. The founder opens her sales dashboard at eleven at night for the fourth time that day. The job hunter checks his inbox before he’s out of bed. The parent is six weeks into a bedtime routine that works one night and fails the next.

The pressure is quiet, but it’s there - in the gap, in the not knowing, and what that might mean for that goal you’ve been working so hard on behind the scenes. Not to mention the identity you’ve been quietly manifesting in your daydreams.

Last week was about interrupting someone else’s spiral. This one is about stopping yourself from resetting, before anything looks like it’s working.

👉 🧠 👈

The paradox about blowing up is that it starts with waiting.

And waiting is harder than knowing. Think about the last time you waited on a test result, or a callback after a final interview. Which was worse, the waiting or the answer?

In 2016 a team of researchers at University College London put numbers on it.

Forty-five volunteers played a computer game: in each round a rock appeared on the screen, the volunteer guessed whether a snake was under it, and every snake meant a painful electric shock to the hand.

But over 320 rounds, the odds kept shifting - so a call that paid off last round could burn you this round through nothing you’d done. All the way through, the researchers tracked the volunteers physical and emotional responses.

Both readings sat low when a shock was guaranteed, and just as low when it was impossible. They peaked in the middle, at the point where it was a 50/50 coin toss.

“It turns out that it’s much worse not knowing,” the lead author put it plainly, “than knowing you definitely will or won’t.”

That study puts a number on Dekosophy’s month. ‘Nothing looks bad enough to quit, but nothing looks good enough to trust either’ is the fifty-fifty mark, and that’s where the poor subjects of that study were at their highest levels of physical and mental discomfort.

Which is why, in the real world, quitting (or at least quitting on your strategy and trying a new way) when there’s no signal starts to look ok - because a definite no to that path would at least end the wait.

But quitting won’t get it done. So most people over-check.

How many times did you look at your own number yesterday?

In a study published in 1997, two economists gave students a bet worth taking. In the rules they set up for their game, the students would lose whatever they bet two times out of every three - but on the third round their stake more than doubled. Meaning, if they played their $200 starting pot steadily over enough rounds, every hundred they staked came back to them as $117.

Then the researchers changed one thing - one group saw the result of every round. The other had to set a stake for three rounds at a time, and saw only how the three came out together.

The group that saw every result staked 50.5% of their money. The group that looked a third as often staked 67.4%. Meaning in the end, the students who checked in batches put a third more behind the same good bet, and the only thing separating them from the others was how often they looked.

That’s because of the way we are wired - you feel a loss more than you feel a win of the same size - and so when you look after every round, you see a loss two times in three. Pool three rounds and look once, and you come out behind less than one time in three.

Same game, less bad news, more money on the table - more chance to win.

And chance is really a key part of the strategy here.

Refresh the page after every upload and you’re in the first group. You’ll see plenty of down days, and you’ll probably respond to each one by putting in a little less (even if you don’t know it).

“You switch too fast,” Dekosophy summed up what that looked like for him in the early days. “You doubt yourself. You leave before anything has time to reveal itself.”

The last thing you want to do is reset.

But more often than not, with nothing to go on, people tend to pivot strategy before you even know whether the last one worked. Which is what stops anything adding up.

Here’s what a restart costs you, and it’s arithmetic rather than psychology.

As you might expect, Venture Capital investors - people who put money into young companies - keep careful records of how it goes. Across more than 21,000 of those investments between 2004 and 2013, 65% failed to return the money put in. Only 4% returned ten times or more.

So let’s use that 4%, and frame it as a 4% shot to have a bonafide hit every time you swing:

• Three swings gets you to about 12%, but twenty-five swings gets your odds all the way up to 64%.

• Fifty swings gets you to 87%.

• And 100 shots gets you a 98% chance of hitting it big.

As the numbers clearly show, the odds to break out get better by having more chances for big hits, not by having fewer small failures. So you need to accumulate reps, increase your surface area for luck to strike.

Because THAT is when you catch fire.

👉 🧠 👈

Think back to Dekosophy, and the month he was at twenty-eight subscribers. Three months later, by his own count, he had more than five thousand, and one of his videos got 120,000 views in 6 days. He went from gaining “maybe 10 to 20 subscribers a day” to thousands per a day. And he was plain about what had happened to his workload:

“The effort barely changed.”

Early on, he recalled, his videos had nothing to do with each other. Then he picked a lane, stayed in it, and fed what he learned from each one into the next. In his words, “each upload was carrying lessons from the previous one.”

What he didn’t do was quit at twenty-eight, or start over somewhere new.

Don’t take his (or my) word for it though: researchers have tracked that pattern at scale. Across about thirty thousand careers in art, film and science, almost everyone had a run of years where their work was far better than their own usual.

This was their hot streak, their launch pad.

What helped them take off in those periods? Well, it wasn’t a set time - it started at a random point. And nobody was working harder during the key period either.

While the results showed you can’t schedule it, and you can’t earn it by effort, they also showed the key factor: you can, heck you MUST, still be there - with enough separate tries behind you to know what might hit when your moment turns up.

So without further ado, here are the three laws that help you take advantage of that pattern, and what to do with them so you catch fire on purpose:

1. The Law of Loops:

   Whatever attention you don’t spend working, you spend on the worry.

   Across 575 people waiting to see where they landed on bar results, job offers and peer ratings, those absorbed in a work-related task worried far less. So instead of being weighted down by the wait, lose your loop - start something that takes your whole head before you start checking.

2. The Law of Checks:

   The more often you look, the smaller you play.

   Given the same favorable odds, students who only saw their numbers every third round put a third more on the table. So chunk your checks - instead of reading every result as it lands, set the size of your next three, six or sixty tries and only read the score once, when all results are in.

3. The Law of Swings:

   With every swing you take, you get closer to a hit.

   Across business specialists given three minutes to name every possible use for a tool, the ones who listed more ideas produced better ones in the end. So stack your swings - instead of pausing when one flops, keep adding to the same count and carry the good things forward each time.

“Luck,” Dekosophy defined it towards the end of his first real breakout video, “is usually just invisible momentum becoming visible all at once.” It’s a nice definition that leaves you a job you can actually do while you wait - and it’s one I’ll use as I build up a big project of my own these next few months.

Lose your loops, chunk your checks, and stack your swings - and you’re better odds to still be at the table when the chips fall your way.

👉 🧠 👈

Over this month, Pressure Points has been digging into MOMENTUM PRESSURE - streaks, spirals, slumps, and why what just happened leans so hard on what happens next.

Where this series went:

✅ Week 1: why your bad days aren’t random, and the Loss Spiral that turns one into four.

✅ Week 2: why winning rewires you to lose, and the winner effect that builds the brain that ends the streak.

✅ Week 3: why “take a break” is bad advice, and what to say to someone mid-spiral.

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This is the 3rd post in a series on the PRESSURE OF MOMENTUM

It was supposed to be a routine surgery.

Elaine Bromiley was put under at 8:35, a healthy 37-year-old mother of two. By 8:37 she’d gone blue and her oxygen saturation was 75%. By 8:39 it was 40%.

Healthy is 95 or better - and the further you are away from that for anything over a couple of minutes, the more trouble you’re in.

Three consultants were taking turns at her airway. A nurse walked out of the room, phoned intensive care, came back and said out loud that there was a bed free. Nobody answered her, and the three of them looked at her like she was overreacting, so she went back to the phone and cancelled the bed she’d just booked.

A second nurse fetched the tracheostomy kit and announced to the room that it was ready. It stayed unopened on the trolley. An ENT surgeon was standing a few feet away, a man who could have cut an airway in under a minute, and he was one of the three taking turns with the tube.

If only they could call time, huddle up and read the manual. A quick pause fixes everything, especially if the answers are obvious… right?

The situation they found themselves in is so common in surgical rooms it has a name - CICO, which stands for “can’t intubate, can’t oxygenate” - and is probably the most feared and critical emergency in anesthesiology and airway management.

Which is why it has published guidelines, and the guidelines say exactly what the two nurses were saying: stop trying to get a tube in and get oxygen into her by any route you can. Standard teaching gives you about three minutes before the damage starts.

Elaine Bromiley had been almost twenty minutes at or below 40%.

Not good.

The nurses’ jobs at this point was to save the patient. But how do we save ourselves from the traps of the pressure that momentum - whether it’s inertia or overconfidence - routinely lures us into?

And perhaps more relevant to this situation and many others in life, how do we save those around us from their own versions of these traps?

👉 🧠 👈

It’s safe to assume that nobody reading this is standing over an airway right now (if you are: PLEASE close the substack app, put your phone down, and get back to the task in front of you!).

However, everybody reading this has stood next to somebody coming apart - while they debate themselves on whether it’s their place to say anything.

Think about the colleague whose work has gone sideways for three weeks and who answers every question with “yeah, all good, bit busy”. The bestie who’s stopped replying to the group chat but is definitely still reading it. The kid with the same homework question open for an hour and a phone lying face down beside it, which fools precisely nobody. The friend two drinks past where they said they’d stop.

Usually when we finally do something, we all reach for the same move - the time-honored timeout.

Coaches stop the play. Exchanges halt trading. Managers say take five, take the afternoon, go get a coffee. Somewhere along the way we decided the pause itself was the medicine.

But we were wrong. Thirty years of data, from two fields with nothing in common, says stopping the clock does almost nothing at all.

Let’s start with how we know it doesn’t work.

It’s may be the most trusted move in coaching. Everyone knows the pattern: the other side rips off eight straight, the coach calls time, and his team steadies. Timeout works, right? Case closed.

Except the data is all over the place, and most of it has the same hole in it: runs will eventually end on their own. A team getting smashed for three minutes will most likely do better over the next three, because that's what extreme stretches do - measuring the same team before and after tells you nothing about the timeout.

So three statisticians took a unique angle to decouple fact from fan-fiction.

They took every run where a coach called timeout and matched it against comparable runs where nobody did. Compared with a minute earlier, sure, the time-out team might look better. But compared with the teams who didn’t stop the clock, they don’t.

Statisticians call the underlying reason “regression to the mean”.

We can just call it evening out - life’s see-saw finding an equilibrium.

They found the same thing in finance: Exchanges halt trading when prices fall far enough fast enough. And yet thirty years on, nobody looking at the numbers can agree it helps.

Think back to the operating theatre. When the medical examiner asked the anaesthetist about it afterwards, he said he'd had no idea how much time had passed. And so the recommendation that followed wasn’t that somebody should have called for a break - it was that one person in the room should have been given the job of tracking what mattered, and saying it out loud, while the action continued.

Ok, so WHY doesn’t the pause work?

Because the thing going wrong isn’t the clock.

A negative momentum spiral is a chemical state, and a pause doesn’t necessarily change that chemistry - in some cases it goes the other way.

Let’s take a look at your classic stress test as the perfect illustration. Researchers put 151 people through a standard lab test, mental arithmetic and a mock interview in front of a panel trained to give them nothing back, while 211 other people simply watched.

Only this wasn’t an experiment designed to test those being tested - the ones the researchers were tracking were those standing outside the lab glass, simply observing the participants.

On average, about a quarter of the watchers had a real cortisol rise of their own, despite not having any of the test being run on them. When the person struggling was their partner, it was 40%.

Turns out we get stressed just by watching others who are under pressure.

Which means by the time you’ve decided to call a time-out or interrupt the slide, chances are you’re in close to the same state as the person you’re trying to help - especially if you care about them.

What if we dont pause, but just butt in?

Research shows most people do speak up and help under pressure - they just do it in a way that lets everybody carry on.

German researchers ran 59 doctors and 18 nurses through a simulated emergency with a senior colleague who’d been secretly instructed to get seven things wrong, including ignoring national guidelines and ordering two drug doses that would have killed the patient.

People noticed, and of the moments where somebody raised something, 35% came out oblique or understated, a hint rather than a challenge. Another 25% named the problem once and then let it drop. Only 40% interjected in a way that led to somebody dealing with the issue at hand.

It also compounds. A review of speaking up in operating theatres found that whether somebody challenges a second time depends on how you answered the first time. Answer one badly and the next person who sees something coming keeps it to themselves, and the one after that never starts.

Aviation solved the first half of this decades ago. Pilots call it the two-challenge rule, and in the military version, you take over their job if the person still doesn’t respond (or responds in an unhelpful way).

Sometimes it may help to think less “time out”, and more “time’s up”!

👉 🧠 👈

Back in that operating room, both nurses read the situation correctly. And both acted within minutes: one phoned intensive care and came back with a bed, the other put a tracheostomy kit on a trolley and said it was there.

But neither of them pointed at time on the clock. Neither spoke a second time. And so by 9:10, the team had given up on the sinus surgery and turned all their energy to waking the patient up. She never did.

Elaine Bromiley died thirteen days later.

Her husband Martin, an airline pilot, asked for an independent review and then published it, so other teams (and yes, even you) could learn from a morning his family will never get back.

Think again of your colleague, your bestie, your kid at the kitchen table. If you’re their sidekick under pressure, you probably saw it minutes / days / weeks before anybody else did. Maybe you asked if they were alright, they said yeah all good, and that was the end of it.

Next time they’re crumbling under the pressure of momentum going the wrong way, instead of a timeout to stop the clock, think of the pause as the capsule around the medicine, and what you DO in the pause as the active ingredients in the treatment.

And to help you know what to put in there, here’s the three things that work inside every pivot point under pressure:

1. Give someone the facts.

   A pause moves the clock and nothing else, so don’t arrive empty-handed. Bring the number, the date, the thing you can see from outside the tunnel that they can’t see from inside it - your main job is to direct their attention to what really matters.

2. Steady yourself before you speak.

   Watching somebody struggle gives you a version of their chemistry, and that’s what shrinks the sentence under pressure - leading to missed markers and lost language. Take the thirty seconds to slow down your breath before you say it, rather than holding your breath after.

3. Say it nice, say it twice.

   The first attempt is almost always too small to act on, so plan the second one before you make the first, and make sure it’s in plain terms that don’t scare off any would be feedback-taker.

And if you’re the other one in the room - the one losing it under pressure, or running full tilt with momentum right behind you - your job is the other half of the rule. How you answer the first person who raises something decides whether anybody ever brings you the next one.

👉 🧠 👈

All this month, Pressure Points is digging into MOMENTUM PRESSURE - streaks, spirals, slumps, and why what just happened leans so hard on what happens next.

Where this series is going:

✅ Week 1: why your bad days aren’t random, and the Loss Spiral that turns one into four.

✅ Week 2: why winning rewires you to lose, and the winner effect that builds the brain that ends the streak.

☑ Week 4: how to start the wheel yourself, the science of small wins and reset routines, and how to build a streak worth protecting out of a flat September.

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This is the 2nd post in a series on the PRESSURE OF MOMENTUM

Arthur Fils missed his second serve on break point, and the game he’d been serving for was gone.

He was a set up and 5-3 in the second on Louis Armstrong Stadium, and on paper he was about as safe a bet as the draw offered: the 10th seed, six wins in a row, a Masters trophy eight days old, and playing a man he’d beaten five times out of five.

But across the net, Stefanos Tsitsipas had stepped inside the baseline and started taking the ball early, and Fils, by his own account afterward, hadn’t noticed. Two sets later it was over, 6-1, 6-4 to a man ranked 53 and unseeded at a US Open for the first time in his life.

“I don’t really know,” Fils, twenty-two and holding the first Masters 1000 trophy a Frenchman had lifted in twelve years, couldn’t explain it. “I don’t have the answer.”

He rejected the title hangover, the long North American swing, and any physical issue. Fils knew something had changed under the surface, but he couldn’t figure out what, or why.

Positive momentum is great.

Until it robs you of what got you there.

“Once the energy went down at the end of the second, I never felt good energy again. Double faults. No panic, but I didn’t understand what was happening.”

You might not be a tennis pro, but everyone has had the week where things are all “coming up Milhouse”, seemingly everything going right - until the last thing goes wrong for no reason you can name. The sales rep three closes deep who skips the discovery questions on the fourth call. The trader who’s up on the week and sizes the Friday position “a bit bigger.” The parent who’s cracked bedtime four nights running and decides tonight’s the night to drop the routine.

So while last week was about what a run of bad days does to you, this week is about the odder problem: what a run of good ones does, why your brain on a winning streak is an unrealized risk, and what it looks like while there’s still time to stop.

👉 🧠 👈

As with most human things, it starts as chemistry.

Last week I shared with you the tales 17 London traders, spitting into tubes for eight days while two Cambridge researchers tracked their cortisol. That same experiment pointed at a second hormone too, and it tells the other half of the story.

On mornings when a trader’s testosterone ran above his own usual level, traders made significantly more money for the rest of the day. One trader, for example, ran a six-day winning streak, averaging about double his normal daily profit, and over those six days his testosterone rose 74%.

Researchers call it the Winner Effect: a successful move primes you for more risk in the next round, and “eventually irrational” risk if the hormone keeps climbing.

The streak is partly real, which is what makes it dangerous: after the third win, the feeling in your body is a dose, and you don’t choose when it wears off. What you can see from the outside is the tempo: faster decisions, a creeping bet size, other people’s caution starting to sound like background noise.

The next step is about another very human thing: your appetite.

When you’re calm and happy, your attention widens. The appetitive kind of happy, the “I want more of THAT” feeling, does the opposite. The more you want the next one, the less of the menu you can see.

Two psychologists showed 32 people either pictures of desserts or pictures of rocks, then asked them to spot either the big shape or the small detail in a large letter built out of small ones. After the desserts, people were slower on the big shape and quicker on the small one.

The more you want, the less you see.

Then they put a finance face on it: analysts who’d beaten the median forecaster for four straight quarters were, in the next quarter, both less accurate and further from the consensus. A short run of being right makes you overconfident, and the overconfident stop checking their number against the room.

The hot player can become TOO focused - on the wrong things. The court shrinks to the ball, the point, the next win, and the periphery goes, like an opponent who’s quietly moved two feet inside the baseline.

The early tell is often so small that even experts like Fils can’t see it: details get less important than before the run, and you stop scanning.

And the last piece is about what’s already in your pocket.

Decades ago, two behavioral economists told a group of people they’d just won $30 and offered them a coin flip for $9 either way. About 70% took it. And yet when they were made the same offer with no prior win sitting in their pocket, , only 43% gambled.

The researchers called it the house money effect, and it’s why the chances of poor decisions rise at exactly the moment your confidence peaks - you’ve got something to lose now.

And it’s not just in lab games: A London research team pulled 565,915 bets placed by 776 online sports gamblers and looked at what happened after streaks.

After six wins in a row, the chance of winning the next bet was 76%, against a base rate of 47%. And yet time and time again, winners who were nervous that the luck would run out picked shorter odds after every win.

So how do we spot when this is creeping in? The tell from is usually a phrase, something like “we’re up anyway,” attached to a risk you wouldn’t have taken if you started cold.

👉 🧠 👈

These three little factoids together add up to “the winner effect” - every time you make the right move, you’re primed for a bigger bet, a narrower view and a looser grip on the money: three ways a streak makes you weaker at the exact moment it makes you feel strong.

Which means the only streaks built to last belong to people who don’t believe in them, or in house money.

Think back to Fils serving at 5-3 - the momentum belonged to a body running on six straight wins and a trophy still sitting in his system (the tennis version of house money).

The man across the net had none of that - he’d spent twelve months without the winner effect on his side, and that turned out to be a usable advantage: the man off the streak was the one who moved two feet forward, while the guy on the streak never registered it.

You may not be baseline at a grand slam this week (props to you if you are), but if you’re on a streak that’s about to end, the sign will be the sentence at the end echoing Fils: I don’t know what happened.

So here are three moves the research points to that can stop you getting to that point, one per mechanism.

1. Set the next bet before you feel the win.

   The dose arrives with the result, so the decision has to arrive before it. Set the stake, scope, or effort of the next move while you’re still neutral, and don’t let the result reopen it. It’s what the winning gamblers did by accident: shorter odds after every win.

2. Ask what moved (and what didn’t).

   You see less when you want more, so widen the picture on purpose. After a win and before the next attempt, one question out loud: what’s changed on the other side since last time? The analysts who’d been right four quarters running drifted from the consensus because they stopped asking.

3. Play it like it’s yours.

   Treat this month’s wins as old money. If you wouldn’t risk it from your savings, don’t risk it from the streak - oh, and never bet longer after a loss to get back to even.

Win enough in a row, and - whether you like it or not - you’ll slowly build the exact mindset that ends the run for you. The trick is to notice it building while it’s still cheap to stop.

👉 🧠 👈

All this month, Pressure Points is digging into MOMENTUM PRESSURE - streaks, spirals, slumps, and why what just happened leans so hard on what happens next.

Where this series is going:

✅ Week 1: why your bad days aren’t random, and the Loss Spiral that turns one into four.

☑️ Week 3: what you can do to stop someone else’s spiral, and the line you don’t cross.

☑️ Week 4: how to start the wheel yourself, the science of small wins and reset routines, and how to build a streak worth protecting out of a flat September.

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This is the 1st post in a new series on the PRESSURE OF MOMENTUM

Chris Cassidy was in danger of drowning in his own breath.

Early into his first ever spacewalk, carbon dioxide levels were rising inside his suit during an otherwise routine EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) outside the International Space Station (ISS).

The rookie astronaut just didn’t know it yet.

While us earthbound folks may think of O₂ as the critical number, NASA knows all too well that the urge to breathe is driven by rising CO₂, not falling oxygen, and letting it build brings headache, then confusion - neither of which you want in a man clipped to the outside of a spacecraft.

Cassidy felt fine - but those back at Mission Control watching his telemetry knew better. Although they couldn’t pinpoint the issue, it seemed like the canister that scrubs carbon dioxide from its sealed air supply was falling behind, from the moment he left the airlock.

It was small signal, but nobody could explain the why - which made it a big deal.

You see, a spacewalk is planned down to the minute. Cassidy and his partner had 6 and a half hours scheduled outside, with a task list drawn up to use every one of them. The second hiccup was small: 2 hours in, after Cassidy wrestled a set of insulation covers, he was gassed.

“That’s like rolling up my freaking bag.”

The former Navy SEAL turned NASA rookie joked. Houston quietly asked his fellow crew members to have him rest a little, and recalculated their oxygen burn rate. The runway was a little shorter now.

Next, as one of the old batteries they were out there to replace was being removed, a bolt refused to move for an extended period. Eventually they moved again.

“Okay might be stuck… oh there we go.. was a pretty good yank.”

And still the CO₂ the number continued to climb, with no explanation. Each check slowed the process, and each pause narrowed the margin for error. And a little past the 5-hour mark, a single call cut across the loop:

“BREAK, BREAK. Hold what you’re doing.”

Down on the ground, it felt like everything was going the wrong, one micro-moment after another. Worse still, the 2 problems were now one loop: Every minute the controllers spent on the mystery put the crew further behind, and the further behind the crew fell, the harder they worked - and the more CO2 they produced. Console by console, everyone in Mission Control watched it build, putting the mission at risk.

“A spacesuit is a very small spacecraft,” the Flight Director would it put it plainly, “there’s just really not much margin for error.” They should know - every path to a decision on this fateful day ran through them, the single point of accountability, in charge of the entire $1.6b mission.

What would you do if you were in their seat? More people than ever before waiting on you, that much money looming in the background, and a unforgiving clock that won’t stop shrinking - plus a critical number that wont go in the direction you want.

You don’t have to be a NASA astronaut or Flight Director to answer the question. You’ve faced it at 3 am, every trick making the baby more awake; or mid-argument, when every apology somehow digs the hole deeper; or doubling the bet to win back the last (hopefully before the next report numbers).

This month is about momentum pressure: when what just happened leans on what happens next, and the knock on effect makes things even worse. We’re going to start starts with the bad type - negative momentum - where one thing after another goes.

Researchers have found that days like that have a pattern behind them.

👉 🧠 👈

The starting point is microscopic: it changes your blood before your mind.

Researchers followed 17 traders in the City of London through 8 straight days, sampling their hormones morning and afternoon. Testosterone ran higher on days traders beat their average - the winning signal. But cortisol, the pressure particle, tracked something less obvious: uncertainty - the swing and volatility of their results.

When outcomes turned choppy, cortisol climbed, sometimes rising 500% between morning and afternoon. The rougher the ride, the more chaotic chemistry - which would be fine if that chemistry helped.

It actually does the opposite: Cambridge researchers later recreated a rough patch chemically: they raised volunteers’ cortisol 69% over 8 days - matching what real traders show in a volatile stretch - and their risk appetite dropped 44%. Sustained bad-run chemistry makes you play scared, meaning the decisions you make deep into a losing streak are often made by a different body than the one that started it.

The next step in the pattern: your eyes narrow exactly when you need them wide.

An airliner circled Miami one night because a cockpit indicator for the nose landing gear wouldn’t light up. All 3 crew members leaned into that one stubborn bulb - and while they worked at it, someone bumped the controls and the autopilot’s altitude hold quietly disengaged.

The plane sank into a slow descent nobody was watching, and 101 people died in the Everglades. The official finding was blunt: preoccupation with the malfunction “distracted the crew’s attention from the instruments and allowed the descent to go unnoticed.”

It reads like carelessness until you meet the hardware underneath. Decades of research show that stress and arousal narrow the scope of attention: the more worked up you are, the fewer cues you sample. Under threat, your vision physically behaves like a spotlight tightening on the problem - so the first thing a bad moment takes from you is the wide-angle lens you’d need to stop a second one.

And the last signal is on the tail end: each loss leaves less fuel to stop the next.

It’s been tracked outside the lab too - a study following 335 employees across 3 waves found work pressure predicted home life getting squeezed, which predicted exhaustion, which predicted more pressure and more squeeze at the next measurement. Effectively a closed circuit, each lap borrowing from the reserves that would have broken the next one.

Stress researchers have a term for the pattern: the Loss Spiral - where every failure leaves you with “fewer resources to offset resource loss at the next iteration.” In other words, every setback spends the exact resources you needed to stop the next one.

Which is why the shit rarely hits the fan just once.

👉 🧠 👈

Stack those 3 findings, and you get the anatomy of the day from hell. A bad result changes your chemistry. The chemistry tightens your attention onto the damage, so you miss the next thing coming. And the whole scramble drains reserves you needed for the next challenge, leaving you even more vulnerable to another bad result.

Which brings back to the room in Houston, that thankfully got it right.

Mission Control for th eISS called it with 2 batteries still waiting and about an hour of plan left: they aborted the walk prematurely - inside the safety limits, still a trend, not an emergency, without waiting to understand what they were beating.

Two days later they budgeted for more than 8 hours of airtime to make up the loss, what would be the second longest spacewalk of all time. The crew had to work a little harder and longer, but no one died, billions weren’t lost, and every abandoned battery went in. Killing the spiral rescheduled the work instead of blowing it and a buddy up.

For you, the Loss Spiral may not be a billion dollar, life or death cascade - but ti still exists. It’s the morning when the toast burns, then the traffic’s bad, then you snap at exactly the wrong person in the meeting. The argument at home that started over a coffee cup and somehow toured every grievance since 2019. The Saturday-morning team that gives up 3 goals in 5 minutes.

It’s worth taking a second to see what mission control didn’t do: wait for symptoms, negotiate with the schedule, or treat 13 people and a half-finished job as reasons to ride the trend. They stopped while stopping was still cheap.

Just like you can.

Here are 3 moves for your next losing streak, one per finding - all borrowed from that fateful frolic ourside the earth’s atmosphere.

1. Call it while it’s still a wrinkle, not a wreck

   The chemistry of a prolonged rough patch degrades the decision-maker: wait too long and a scared version of you makes the call. So pre-decide your abort line while calm - two bad trades, 1 hostile email, 20 minutes of circular arguing - and we stop.

2. Name what must not be dropped

   Your attention will tunnel on the problem - so when something is being debugged, say out loud what still has to keep flying in the meantime, and give it eyes. It’s a sticky note written in the first minute of the crisis - kids at 3:30, deadline Friday, don’t touch the savings - or you’ll forget.

3. Refill before you climb back in.

   The spiral runs on empty reserves, so the first spend after a loss goes to the tank, not the scoreboard - sleep before the rematch, a walk before the reply-all, the friend you call before opening the trading app again. It looks like losing time, but filling a resource back up breaks the chain.

Houston killed the spiral first; the calm and the view came with it - just like it will when you stop the dominoes from going too far.

👉 🧠 👈

All this month, Pressure Points is digging into MOMENTUM PRESSURE - streaks, spirals, slumps, and why what just happened leans so hard on what happens next.

Next week: WHY a streak of wins or losses makes people do unreliable things, and why the cold-streak brain reaches for exactly the moves that extend it.

Week 3: WHAT you can do to stop someone else’s spiral - timeouts, trading halts, and the tough-talks for when somebody else starts sliding.

Week 4: HOW to start the wheel yourself - the science of small wins and reset routines, and how to build a streak worth protecting out of a flat September.

Missed last month? The COMPARISON PRESSURE series ended with the one race you’re allowed to care about:

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This is the 4th and final post in a series on COMPARISON PRESSURE

Think about who you were 5 years ago. You’re better now, right - calmer, sharper, more sorted?

A young printer in Philadelphia once decided to settle the question with a notebook. He announced to himself what he called “the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection” - he figured he knew right from wrong, so how hard could it be to just do one and not the other?

And so it was that he ruled a little book into columns, one page per virtue, one column per day, and marked “by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed” - a daily score against the man he believed he already was.

The book filled with spots.

“I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined,” the now-famous self-improver, Benjamin Franklin, later admitted.

His memory had been telling him one story about himself; the written record told another. But because the record existed, he could watch it move - “I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.”

He kept at it so long he scraped the pages full of holes and moved the system onto ivory tablets. He never reached perfection, “yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been.”

Two and a half centuries later, researchers have confirmed what Franklin’s notebook was protecting him from, over and over again. Time and again, the improvement people report feeling mostly isn’t in the measurements - it’s in your mind.

Present-you usually marks down past-you, so the comparison often comes out more flattering than it objectively should.

Meaning the one race everyone says you should run - the race against yourself - arrives pre-rigged. By your own memory, in your own favor.

Franklin only escaped because he refused to take his own word for it.

Which is a problem, because it’s reset season. Back-to-school week is the year’s second January: new backpacks and sharpened pencils for the kids, and for the adults, the September version of a resolution - the planner, the gym app, the “new chapter” post.

The self-improvement industry sets its watch by it, and the reset instinct is right - it’s just important to look in the right places, and research tells us there’s three key.

👉 🧠 👈

Let’s start in your pocket.

The comparison feed that is your smartphone in some ways may be the biggest culprit. Researchers at Penn took 143 students and had half cap social media at 30 minutes a day - 10 minutes per app, 3 apps, 3 weeks - while the rest scrolled as usual.

The capped group came out measurably less lonely and less depressed, with the biggest gains among those who’d arrived worst off. One detail is worth a pause: simply having to track their usage made everyone - capped or not - less anxious and less afraid of missing out. Just watching the meter changed the behavior.

A later study ran the same idea again with 230 students and a straight 30-minute cap: every outcome they measured improved, anxiety and fear of missing out included.

Here’s the twist: quitting entirely doesn’t carry the same evidence. A pooled analysis of 10 studies where people gave up social media cold - 4,674 participants - found no reliable benefit to mood or life satisfaction.

So you can breathe easy - nobody’s asking you to leave the comparison machine altogether. Just stop marinating in it.

The second stop is in your mind.

Your memory rigs the self-race. Psychologists studying how people appraise their past selves found a consistent pattern: we rate the distant past-us as worse - less capable, less mature - than the present-us, and the gap shows even where tracked measures hadn't budged.

The researchers' own title for the pattern says it all: From Chump to Champ - today's champ is often the same person as yesterday’s chump, with no change.

The mind gets the glow of progress without the inconvenience of progressing. And the further back you look, the more generous the rigging gets - the 25-year-old you remember being exists mainly to make the current you feel like an upgrade.

It’s worth noting however, that it can run the other way too: In people who are low or in depressed individuals, studies find the past self gets rated above the present one. Same cheat, opposite direction: memory scoring the race instead of the record.

Which is why "just compare with yourself" fails either way. The point isn’t whether you’re better or worse. The point is you need receipts - a number written down at the time, by the person you actually were, not the stand-in your memory sends to the starting line.

The third is your eyes - or at least where they’re aimed.

Sport psychology has a name for where an athlete points their scoreboard, and a mountain of data on it: a review pooling 93 studies of 26,387 athletes found that a task orientation - defining success as beating your own last performance - comes complete with intrinsic motivation, enjoyment, and staying in the sport.

It’s why a club runner can finish 4,000th in a marathon and celebrate like a champion: the number on the clock beat the number in the notebook, and the notebook is the only opponent that showed up. Chasing a PB is just a comparison with a timestamp, and nobody else on earth can win or lose it.

And there’s a floor under the whole thing for the weeks when even past-you wins.

In a study of 2,187 people, self-compassion predicted happiness and optimism as well as self-esteem did - but without self-esteem’s need for standing and comparison. Ego only pays out while you’re winning; self-compassion keeps paying through the weeks when you’re not - which is exactly when the race usually gets abandoned.

👉 🧠 👈

You can’t switch the comparing off - that was the core point of article 1 in this series, and it’s still true in week 4. The wiring that made a silver medalist miserable and a fantasy league tattoo its loser doesn’t take September off. What’s yours to choose is the opponent, and the metric.

Every other scoreboard in your life comes with both pre-installed by somebody else - a boss, an algorithm, a list-maker with a magazine to sell. The self-race is the one where you pick the event, you pick the reference point, and the best scoreboard - if you’re honest enough to appoint one - is a notebook.

You know your own version of the rigged race. The planner bought in September and abandoned by the second week. The gym streak that lives more vividly in memory than it ever did in the app. The version of last holidays where you were more patient with the kids than the kids say you were.

None of that is lying, exactly. It’s what a mind does without records - and it’s why the reset that actually sticks starts with writing something down. Here’s three fixes for the faulty scoreboard - one for the incoming comparisons, one for the race itself, one for keeping it running.

1. Cap the scroll at 30 minutes.

   The tested dose is 10 minutes per app, and your phone will enforce it for you - screen-time limits exist for exactly this. Don’t bother with the dramatic quit: the evidence for abstinence is null, and the announcement post is usually one more performance for the crowd you’re claiming to leave. Shrink the window instead.

2. Keep receipts on yesterday’s you.

   The self-race is only fair if it’s on the record. One line a day is enough - what you did, one number you care about, dated. It matters less what you track than that it’s written by the person who was there. In a month you own something no memory can doctor: the actual coordinates of the person you’re trying to beat, set down by that person on the day.

3. Pick one number only YOU you can win.

   Choose a single self-referenced metric for the season - pages drafted, sessions done, mornings out the door - and let that be the scoreboard that counts. The metric mostly needs to be yours, repeatable, and immune to anyone else’s season. Then when a bad week comes (and it will), treat yourself like someone worth coaching rather than someone caught losing.

Nobody hands you a term report at 40 - you have to issue your own.

The kids heading back to school this month all get them, dated and filed - their progress measured against their own last term, on the record. But adults gave that up somewhere along the way (probly cos other people do them!) and started grading themselves on feel.

So this September, take the report card back.

Cap the feed, write the line, chase the one number nobody else can touch. Past-you has been losing a rigged race for years - the least you owe them is a fair rematch.

👉 🧠 👈

Over this month, Pressure Points has been digging into COMPARISON PRESSURE - peer envy, ranked existence, and the scoreboard in your skull that won’t switch off.

✅ Three weeks ago: why second place sucks - the list that changed nothing and moved everyone, and the brain that scores standing, not substance.

✅ Two weeks ago: why people do dumb sh*t when they’re down - what we’ll gamble, hoard, and sabotage to dodge finishing last.

✅ Last week: your kid’s first scoreboard is you - what the research says a parent’s face should do in the 10 seconds after the list goes up.

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This is the 3rd in a 4-part series on COMPARISON PRESSURE

What would you say is the worst place for a kid to open their exam results: In their room? In the kitchen with family? Public transport with strangers?

Liam Scroggie would argue it’s live on TV - and he has the receipts to prove it.

A few years ago, he only needed an A and 2 Bs for his place to study politics at his school of choice. And so, when it was time to find out, he did so on the national breakfast show. With confidence, he opened the envelope with the cameras rolling to learn - along with millions of breakfast tables - he’d failed.

The news filed the moment under “exam reveal car crash.”

This Thursday at 8 am, the same ritual runs nationwide in the UK. Millions of teenagers find out where they stand, all at once - exam boards hold results under strict embargo, no grade released before 08:00. A week later, it all happens again for a different cohort, when the GCSE results land.

America stages its own version next week, albeit a sporting variety: the Little League World Series puts 20 teams of 12-year-olds on national television - kids being judged in front of millions, with some of their parents right there in the stands in Pennsylvania being arguably the most judgy.

Your kid will hopefully never crash out over grade - or fail as a 12 year old baseball prospect - on national TV. But that doesn’t mean they wont be hit with the same set of feelings inside: The same phenomenon can turn up in other ways - a team list pinned to a gym door, or the callback that never comes. Sometimes it’s as subtle as a birthday party your kid watches on someone else’s phone.

Any one of these micro-events can make them feel like they’ve never been more alone.

Wherever the results land, there’s always a half-second when a teenager stops reading their own results, and starts reading a parent’s face instead. Childhood is measured relentlessly - whether it’s by others or quietly to themselves - and they rely on triangulation to make sense of it as they go.

What the comparison comes to mean about who they are and their inherent value in the world is where competition can really bite - but that’s the exactly the pressure point you can put your finger on the scale if you’re a parent.

👉 🧠 👈

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Let’s start with a trial that shouldn’t have worked.

A few years ago, 124 anxious kids were enrolled in a therapy trial at Yale. Half got the gold standard: weekly sessions with a trained child therapist. The other half got nothing at all - no sessions, no workbooks. The therapist never even met them.

The kids who got nothing improved just as much as the kids in therapy. But how can that be?

The secret ingredient actually lived in their houses.

Those “untreated” kids' actually had an intervention, just not directly: they had parents who’d been trained instead to stop the rescue reflex - the hedging, the soothing, the calls to the coach - and replace it with 2 sentences:

“I see this is hard.”

“I know you can handle it.”

That was the entire treatment: a dash of empathy, a pinch of belief, hold the rescue - and it went went down just as well as the gold standard. Often when a child is buckling under a comparison, their parent’s instinct to swoop in and coddle them (dispute the seeding, move the target, manage the pain away) - but that’s part of what keeps the anxiety running.

Whether it’s about a dropped grade or a dropped ball, this finding flips the fix.

The second skill is less about failure, and more about when they win.

Researchers recorded real parents praising real kids at home, as toddlers, and then came back 5 years later. The kids who’d heard mostly effort praise - naming what they did, not what they are - had grown into kids who believed ability is buildable.

That belief matters, because it turns a bad result into information. When the result shows them what to change, they see a road ahead - but careful, because the effect runs the other way, too.

In one survey, 85% of parents believed praising a child’s smarts is necessary. The same research team tested it: kids praised for intelligence fell apart after a failure - less persistence, less enjoyment - while kids praised for effort leaned in.

The third tick is about whose name is on the scoreboard.

When 73 parents reflect on their own unfulfilled ambitions, and the parents who saw their child as an extension of themselves wanted the child to fulfill those ambitions more, not less. Which might explain why, when another research team followed young swimmers for a 32-week season and measured the climate each kid’s parents built, the results became blindingly obvious.

Where parents ran an ego climate - attention on rankings, rivals, and results - self-esteem tracked downward across the season.

But where parents ran a mastery climate - attention on the kid’s own improvement - it tracked upward. Same pools, same stopwatches. The only real difference researchers could find was what the parents kept asking about.

Turns out a kid’s comparison pressure is just their parents’ comparison pressure, inherited.

A simple comparison is perfectly natural and harmless, until the answer reads like a verdict on who you are. At least adults get to argue with the verdict - a kid checks yours first though, and follows the lead. They're watching your face at the gate and listening to your voice in the car. Whatever you celebrate, whatever you go quiet about - that's the raw material they build the verdict from.

👉 🧠 👈

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If you’re a parent, then you’ve probably found yourself on the wrong side of this at some stage (probably after a long day of work and yet another teenage standoff). None of that makes you a bad parent - it just makes you a normal one, standing next to a smaller version of you who’s unconsciously learning to carry your weight, too.

Your only job in these types of situation is catching it before it lands on them.

The studies we just pointed to each suggest a move: anxiety trial shows what to say when they land low, the praise recordings show what to say when they land high, and the swim season shows what to measure all year.

Each one has a right time and place, but it’s worth having all three in your parenting tool belt, so you can reach for them in case of emergency:

1. Say the 2 sentences, then shut up.

   When the result is bad, the rescue reflex fires: email the coach, dispute the mark, spin the story, fix the feeling. The trial that showed trained parents matched the impact of therapy did the opposite - parents cut the rescues and said, in their own words: I see this is hard. I know you can handle it. Empathy first, then confidence… then shut up and resist a rescue attempt.

2. Praise whats in their hands.

   While we may have been taught that positive reinforcement of talent works, pointing at something they did is way more effective. Home recordings suggest the ratio matters more than any single sentence, so no need to be perfect or bat 1.000 - just make effort-based praise the default in your home and feel the pressure fade.

3. Celebrate their race, not their place.

   The swim study’s mastery climate is buildable in any room at home: make the first question after any performance about their own race - what felt better than last time, what they’d try next - and let placings come up second, if at all. And before you post the trophy photo or retell the result at dinner, ask whose win this celebration is for - you? Or them?

Somewhere tomorrow, at 8:01 am London time, an 18-year-old will look up from a screen full of grades and check a face.

That face won’t be able to fix the grades - and it shouldn’t try - but it does get to hint at what the grades mean. A verdict, or just information. Her race, or yours. And whether what walks out of that kitchen is a kid who got measured - or a kid who knows she's loved and can handle it.

That half-second is the whole job of parenting kids through pressure.

Good luck!

👉 🧠 👈

This month, Pressure Points is digging into COMPARISON PRESSURE - peer envy, ranked existence, and the scoreboard in your skull that won’t switch off.

✅ Last week: why second place sucks - the list that changed nothing and moved everyone, and the brain that scores standing, not substance.

✅ Earlier this week: why people do dumb sh*t when they’re down - what we’ll gamble, hoard, and sabotage to dodge finishing last.

☑️ Final week: how to point the scoreboard at the only opponent you can beat honestly - yesterday’s you.

Subscribe now

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This is the 2nd in a 4-part series on COMPARISON PRESSURE

August makes some people sweat more than normal, and for good reason.

Why? Well, it’s Fantasy Draft season, of course.

Roughly 57 million people across the US and Canada play fantasy sports. It’s not just an American peculiarity, either: last season a record 13 million managers, from London to Lagos, played Fantasy Premier League (which is soccer, for those who don’t know).

But it’s not all about winning - a decent chunk of them will be working harder to avoid the bottom than to take top spot. Make the wrong gambles in draft week and you set yourself up for endless embarrassment.

Case in point: In one fantasy football league in Nebraska, the man who finishes last gets a tattoo - permanent, 4 inches by 4 inches, designed by the other 9. Past losers only got to choose where on the body it goes - and some of them now sport forever-inked images of ignominy: a kicking unicorn, a Tebowing Care Bear, the words FANTASY LOSER with the year underneath.

“The whole purpose of this league was to punish the loser,” the league explained itself on national television, “so that everybody played as hard as they can every week.”

And the Tattoo League guys are not entirely outliers in their humiliation rituals. One journalist in Mississippi spent 15 hours in a Waffle House working off a last-place finish, one hour deducted per waffle eaten. In another league of lawyers, the loser retakes the SAT and reports the score - one recent loser got outscored by his opponent’s high-school-junior sister.

So, yes - cue the sweaty palms as most of these leagues will gather to rank athletes into ordered lists, then hope to avoid the pain and punishment that awaits the loser months later.

Behavioral economists have a name for what the entire punishment economy is built on: Last-Place Aversion.

👉 🧠 👈

People can live with being low, but being last is a different animal.

Which is why, for the next 6 months, millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic will wake up each week to see exactly where they stand among their friends, driven by hilarious or humiliating group-chat commentary pumping up the pressure.

And what we’ll do to escape it can teach us about way more than fantasy sports, as it shows up in real-life rooms where no one knows what a Running Back is.

Why, I hear you ask?

Because the further down people get in comparison, the worse their decisions get.

One particularly interesting study isolated what comparative ranking alone does to our decisions: small groups of players, each holding a slightly different amount of money, all shown exactly where everyone ranked.

No skill, no story, no season - just the comparison and some choices. If rank were merely information, the choices shouldn’t change much by slot.

But people’s ranking skewed their decisions. A lot.

Offered a risky lottery, players sitting in last place took it about 13 percentage points more often than players in the top 4 ranks - roughly a quarter more gambling, for no better odds. The logic is clear but grim: a gamble is the only door out of last place, so the bottom slot buys lotto tickets the comfortable middle would never touch.

And before you start talking about the myth of last-minute hail marys, time was never a factor: researchers even hid the clock, so players never knew which round was the last. This is what comparative position alone does, before any deadline joins in.

Turns out the gambler only hurt themselves. What if people were given a chance to help someone else? Could that help distract them from the pain?

Well, that also wasn’t great.

In comparison, helping the person below you is like hurting yourself.

The same researchers ran a second game built on helping: players could simply give money to the person one spot below them, and most did - about 3 times in 4. The exception sat one rung off the bottom: second-to-last players helped the person beneath them far less often than anyone else in the game, because that gift could close the gap and drop them into last.

It’s a pattern shows up outside the lab, in the real world. Support for raising the minimum wage runs high across nearly every group - and dips lowest among workers earning just above the current minimum, the people a raise below them would catch up.

The highest-stakes, real-life version researchers ever tested was by accident, courtesy of California law. A newspaper had built a website listing every state worker’s salary - public record, visited by almost nobody - and researchers randomly emailed University of California employees a link to it.

Funnily enough, use of the site more than doubled, and most of the new visitors did exactly what you’d have done - looked up the people in their own department.

What changed for the workers above the median wage level? Nothing. No glow, no extra loyalty, no spring in the step. But workers who discovered they sat below their unit's median? They dropped in job satisfaction and became about 20% more likely to say they’d look for a new job.

👉 🧠 👈

Who cares, you may say? Well, in case you’re also shrugging as you file this under “losers problems”: these were a university’s own above-average-intelligence staff, and the SAT league we mentioned earlier is all lawyers. Smarts don’t save you.

This sets up a vicious plot twist: if finding out salaries hurts the bottom half, hiding the numbers should protect people, right? That’s been the corporate logic for a century of sealed envelopes - keep the money out of sight, out of mind.

But when American states started forcing salary ranges out in the open and into job postings, the feared collapse never came. In fact it had the opposite effect, on the other side of the negotiating table.

In 2021, when Colorado introduced a new transparency law - every job ad must print the salary range - ten states followed, and economists tracked what happened next. Advertised pay actually went up about 3.6%, and actual pay checks rose too. And the thing everyone feared the comparison might do - make the happiness gap between top and bottom earners even worse - didn't happen.

Showing everyone the comparison actually LIFTED the floor, and closed the gap.

The research is new and still being checked, so treat it as an early reading rather than settled fact. But the logic is easy to see: once every applicant and every rival company can read the number in the ad, lowballing gets hard to hide.

Even if you dont play fantasy sport or compare wages, you’ve felt this in other ways. It’s the runner who stopped posting her times the month she drifted to the back of the group. Or the parent scanning the class chat to work out whose kid made the top reading group - and going quiet when it wasn't theirs. The brother who won't lend the deposit that would let his little brother catch up. The colleague one bad quarter from the bottom of the sales board who suddenly stopped sharing leads.

👉 🧠 👈

Checking where you stand in life costs nothing - until the answer reads like a verdict on who you are.

Near the bottom, the feeling that comparison brings is especially uncomfortable. People in that position stop protecting what they have and start going for it all, hoarding against the person below, or quietly updating the resume.

The tattoo-the-loser league understood this concept perfectly, even if it was accidental: you can use comparison to get what you want. They engineered the threat on purpose - one permanent stain, and a season of maximum effort to dodge it.

Most of the comparisons you live inside have no commissioner at all, and you feel them anyway. And while their may not be a tattoo-level punishment waiting for you if you fail in a part of your life, it can still hurt all the same. So here are 3 moves the research suggests can help you avoid those hidden, bottom-of-the-table traps.

1. Ask what you’d do on a good day.

   People on the bottom of a comparison gamble more - so before any panic discount, desperate application, or crash diet 3 weeks out from the reunion, write the decision down and ask one question: would I still do this on a good day? If yes, it’s fair strategy. If no, that’s the fear talking.

2. Check your number on a day you chose.

   The comparison’s sting hurts more if it arrives by accident, not by design - you can’t un-know a ranking, but you can control when and why you look. Once in a while, on a date you set, check the table - salary ranges, day rates, fantasy rankings - and either act or accept, until next check.

3. Publish the board if you own it.

   Posting the ranges of a comparative measure raises the floor of the entire board by about 3.6% without flattening anyone. So put the bands in the job ad, the selection criteria on the wall, or the step-up in writing - published numbers are something your people can act on instead of dread.

The tattoo league got one thing exactly right: nothing on earth keeps people invested like the threat of losing face. Ten friends in Nebraska turned that into 4 months of maximum effort and a Tebowing Care Bear.

The versions of this in your life - the group chat, the school gate, the running club, the street of renovated houses, the sales board - run on the same physics, with the ink hidden. Notice when you’re deciding from near the bottom, check the numbers on a day you chose - and if anybody’s standings are yours to publish, put them where the whole league can read them.

👉 🧠 👈

This month, Pressure Points is digging into COMPARISON PRESSURE - peer envy, ranked existence, and the scoreboard in your skull that won’t switch off.

✅ Last week: why second place sucks - the list that changed nothing and moved everyone, and the brain that scores standing, not substance.

☑️ Next week: how to move people with a comparison without rigging one - stars, neighbors, and the smiley face that rescued an experiment.

☑️ Final week: how to point the scoreboard at the only opponent you can beat honestly - yesterday’s you.

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This is the first in a 4-part series on the PRESSURE OF COMPARISON

“A proud moment for our entire organization.”

That’s a CEO, in an official press release, marking the achievement of… (checks notes) …moving up a list.

Last summer, a $9-billion services company named Concentrix climbed 73 spots on the Fortune 500 - the annual ranking of the world’s 500 biggest companies - from #499 to #426, and announced it the way other companies announce a breakthrough.

No product had launched that morning, no deal had closed, and no extra money was made. But a magazine had published a table of rankings. So what?

Rankings change nothing - but they do make gaps visible, and the gaps are what your brain actually feeds on.

Coming into this year, Walmart had held #1 for 12 straight years, and 20 times in the past 3 decades. But by June, it was already well known that Amazon had ended Walmart’s 13-year reign on the US company earnings chart, sailing past $700 billion in revenue. Two giants, one podium step, and a known result being treated like a surprise drop.

And on Tuesday, when the surging Amazon officially took the global #1 on a 12% revenue jump, Fortune's editor in chief reached straight for podium language: Amazon, she wrote, had knocked Walmart "off its pedestal."

Zero new information. And still: celebration and lament across the business pages. Celebration for first place and any others who finished higher than expected - and pain (quite literally, for reasons we’ll get to shortly) for Walmart in second place.

So what? I can hear the non finance-or-business types shrugging. Well, we’re all swimming in rankings, every day: an algorithm decided whose post deserved the top of your feed at breakfast, your boss sorted a stack of emails by what they care more about, somebody’s group chat compared weekends.

Your list just never gets a press release.

👉 🧠 👈

Nothing had technically changed on the day the Fortune 500 was published. Walmart already knew its revenue; Amazon knew its own to the cent - and each could read the other’s, because every company on the list must publish its numbers to qualify for it. And yet this big number - 500 - carried more weight than it objectively should.

The books closed months ago, and the ranking runs on fiscal years that had long since passed and been reported - meaning that anyone with patience and a spreadsheet could have assembled the same table before Fortune did.

So why does a number on a list do things to people who already knew every fact underneath it?

Put simply, the human operating system we’re all shipped with from birth comes with a leaderboard column pre-installed.

It started thousands of years ago - back then it helped us know where we stood in the tribe, or the regional pecking order, and ultimately it was the best indicator of whether we were safe. Seven decades ago, a psychologist proposed that humans still carry a built-in drive to evaluate themselves, and that when no objective yardstick exists, we run the evaluation the only way left - against other people.

Take away the ruler, and people will measure themselves with whoever is standing closest. It was a theory about opinions and abilities. It turned out to be a theory about everything with a number on it.

The modern proof is blunter. Researchers put pairs of volunteers side-by-side in brain scanners, and then had them play a simple game for money, with each player able to see what the other earned. In the reward center of the brain, the response tracked the gap between pay, not the actual pay itself. Same task, same accuracy, same dollars - and the signal still rose when your neighbor earned less, and sagged when he earned more.

That’s because the margin is the reward (or the pain). The revenue of the companies on the 500 list was old news; but the margins between neighbors - who’s above whom, by how much, and who just got passed - was CC’d to the world on Tuesday morning.

👉 🧠 👈

How you’re ranked even shows up in your bloodstream. A meta-analysis of 208 laboratory studies found that across the whole dataset, the biggest cortisol responses came from one specific situation: performing while other people could judge you. The response grew worse when the outcome was also out of your hands. A published ranking is precisely that pairing - judged, in public, with no lever to pull. You can’t negotiate with a table.

Knowing that buys you less than you’d hope, though. Even people who contest a list’s inputs still obey its output in the same breath - your reward system doesn’t audit methodology before it fires; it reads the rank and fires up the pleasure or pain regardless.

Which is why second place is the most painful seat in the house.

The cleanest demonstration of what a rank does to a human brain comes from the Olympic podium. Researchers coded broadcast footage of Olympic medalists and had observers rate their faces on a 10-point happiness scale.

Athletes who finished third scored 7.1 in the moments after competing. The ones who finished second - objectively better, one step higher, one color shinier - scored 4.8. On the podium itself, the gap held: 5.7 versus 4.3. Decades later, another team ran automated face-coding across 20 years of podium photos, and the pattern survived.

The why lies in where they’re looking. Silver glances over at gold and sees what they missed. Bronze looks down at fourth and sees what they avoided. Same afternoon, same podium - opposite comparisons, opposite faces.

Which means whoever finished second on Monday’s list is a half-trillion-dollar silver medalist, and every glance in their building now points up at one company instead of down at 498.

👉 🧠 👈

While you probably don’t run one of the Fortune 500, you do live on lists built exactly like this one: the org chart, the agency’s new-business league table, the engagement count under every post, the group chat where someone just bought a house. Old facts, but fresh gaps laid bare for all to see.

Nothing about your reality changed. But a neighbor moved, and the comparison gap moved with them, so your reward system - which never read the business plan - fired up on the difference.

You can’t uninstall the built-in leaderboard - decades of research says it ships with the machine. But the list-makers’ own playbook shows you where the levers are. Here are 3 moves the research points to.

1. Check who built the list.

2. Run the bronze math.

3. Keep one number nobody ranks.

Walmart’s revenue didn’t move on Monday. Neither did Amazon’s. The only thing that moved was a table in a magazine - and with it, press offices, business pages, and a few thousand very senior feelings.

One day a list with your name on it gets published too - and your numbers won’t change that day either. But you will feel the gap; the wiring is older than you are.

What’s yours is the yardstick, the direction of the glance, and one number nobody else gets to rank.

👉 🧠 👈

This month, Pressure Points is digging into COMPARISON PRESSURE - peer envy, ranked existence, and the scoreboard in your skull that won’t switch off.

☑️ Next week: what a visible ranking does to behavior - why the person one rung off the bottom plays the dirtiest, and what your office has in common with a fantasy league.

☑️ Week three: how to move people with a comparison without rigging one - stars, neighbors, and the smiley face that rescued an experiment.

☑️ Week four: how to point the scoreboard at the only opponent you can beat honestly - yesterday’s you.

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This is the 4th and final post in a series on OPPORTUNITY PRESSURE

“I’m ready to go,” was Ryan Fox’s take on his history making day.

With the biggest opportunity of a 39-year-old’s sporting life sitting a few feet away, the fastest player in professional golf walked up and took it at the same pace he’d take a practice round.

Which, for him, is super-duper-fast.

Two days before that fateful putt, Fox had been tied for 52nd place. But he’d opened Saturday with a rush, and a score that put the trophy in reach - a 9-birdie blitz, tying the lowest round in major history. He finished the historic comeback standing over a 50-footer that would have made the record his alone.

“The game plan was to be aggressive,” he said afterward, admitting he'd been a bit nervous over that last putt too, "knowing there was a little bit of history involved."

He missed the last putt on Saturday.

But staying true to his quick style he went into the Sunday unfazed by his last putt mistake. He would keep his calm right to the very last putt, with everything at stake, and without ever wavering from his super-speed routine.

“I’d done all my work reading the putt before it was my turn to actually hit the putt,” Fox would say about his trophy winning putt, days later on the Pat McAfee Show. “I know which way it’s going to go. So my decision’s made. It’s just go up and do my routine - and my routine’s quick.”

He did not miss the putt that mattered on Sunday.

So how did it feel?

“I didn’t feel anything for the putt; everything was shaking that much,” he admitted his body had not gotten the memo about staying the course, when asked about the putt that etched him into the record books the next day.

With everything on the line, his hands shook - but his speed and his focus didn’t.

You might think this race against the clock approach comes form a sports psychologist, but the truth is the source was an 8- year-old trying not to be annoying.

“When I first started playing golf as a kid with my dad,” Fox recounted, “I’m playing with the big boys at the time. I don’t want to annoy anyone, (so I say) ‘Hey, just let me play. I’ll play real quick. I won’t annoy any of you.’ And that’s just kind of stayed the same way, I think, the whole way through.”

Let’s do the opposite of our hero here for a second, and pause on that point.

A kid put a clock on himself so the men wouldn’t regret bringing him along - and 30 years later, that same clock was what helped a shaking man take the winning putt at a major tournament.

That’s what it actually takes to seize any opportunity when one opens in front of you - at work, in life, even at the club champs.

The only problem? Well, the cruel thing about The Big Chance is that it doesn’t schedule itself in your calendar - it shows up mid-round, clears it’s throat, and immediately starts closing. Here’s how you can make the most of your next one.

👉 🧠 👈

Fox is a paragon of pressure, because he takes 3 specific approaches to the window of opportunity when it opens up.

First he set himself up with a COST: his need-for-speed routine wasn’t installed in private - it went up in front of his dad and his dad’s mates, and the cost of slow was specific (annoy the men and the invitations stop coming). The dread of being the nuisance enforced it every round, season after season, all the way through his development.

That’s a commitment with a price, and it works way better than a soft one said to yourself: a painful loss weighs heavier than a comparative gain, and goals said out loud draw more support and more effort than private ones.

Next came the second tool, a CLOCK: “If I take my time, there are way too many things that can pop into my head,” he told Pat McAfee days after his big win. “It’s easier if you go quicker. You just go, ‘I got to hit it there.’ You just don’t let the bad thoughts creep in.”

We previously mapped exactly what he’s defending against: as a window closes, the brain drags a drilled skill back under conscious supervision until an expert swings like a rookie. All of that machinery needs one thing to operate: a gap between the decision and the act. Fox’s self-imposed clock closes the gap, and the unhelpful thoughts just don’t have enough time to clock in. Research on deadlines backs his approach - people who voluntarily set themselves costly deadlines find that it measurably helps, although it’s only as good as the routines that make it repeatable.

Which is why he LOCKs his work in early. Listen to the 18th green quote again: “my decision’s made.” The reading of the putt - the actual deciding - happened before the moment, while someone else putted. What arrived at the moment was pure execution.

Research has a name for this structure: the if-then plan, where you wire a specific cue to a specific action in advance. You might call it an RPRT Plan (Right-Place-Right-Time). A meta-analysis found this type of approach carries a medium-to-large effect on follow-through under pressure - among the most reliable levers in the whole behavior-change literature.

A cost, a clock, and a lock - the three step plan for any opportunity.

“Everything in my head works fast,” Fox explained, describing the end state now that he’s welded his three-point plan together over decades. “I see the shot fast. I make a decision fast. My routine’s fast. I’m glad I kept that same thing, you know, with a chance to win the major. It would have been really easy to get out of that routine - but that’s what I’ve done my whole career.”

The 2026 Open Champion needed no instruction on the 72nd green, because he wasn’t relying on one: he was running an installation, a decision made so long before the moment that the moment never got a vote. It was his drilled system taking over - not willpower or inspiration or calm - when the window was there, nerves and all.

👉 🧠 👈

Your version of the 72nd hole probably isn’t televised, and it may well arrive like Ryan’s did - unannounced, and with only a tiny window to make the most of it.

The senior role that opens when someone quits; the investor who says “send me something this week” on Thursday; the buyer who suddenly wants the call today; the four-footer to win the club champs off your rivals. Our best opportunities are often windows that fate or circumstance opens, with a little help from us.

You don’t get to schedule the best windows for the biggest things in life - you just get to decide if you’ll be ready when opportunity knocks.

“I look back on it now, and it feels really scary and intimidating,” Fox said of that Sunday, “but being in the actual position, I felt in control. It was the best hole I could potentially ever play in golf.”

Fox’s three step plan - the cost, the clock, and the lock - can be broken down into three moves you can install this week, no golf required.

1. Lock the putt before it’s your turn.

   Do the deciding while nothing is at stake - and the wiring matters more than the willpower - if-then plans carry a medium-to-large effect on follow-through precisely because the opportunity arrives to find the decision already made, the way Fox’s putt did.

2. Put a clock on the gap.

   The dangerous territory is the stretch between deciding and doing - that’s where the miss turns into a loss, and the supervisor takes over the swing. So make the gap short and give it a deadline: a self-imposed deadline beats no deadline - just don’t ask it to carry the whole load.

3. Let the big boys watch.

   Put the speed-routine or your deadline where someone you respect can see it miss - a loss weighs heavier in the hand than the same-sized gain, so a forfeit feels like shame does what a private promise can’t. Moving fast enough for a window only happens if it hurts to close.

Fox made his decision before the moment existed, and when the opportunity of his life finally opened, everything was shaking except the clock.

Your opportunity may not be a life changing moment, but at the very least it’s a chance that you want to take advantage of. If you build your RPRT routine now, while nothing’s on the line - well, by the time everything is, it’ll be ready to go.

👉 🧠 👈

Over this month, we’ve been diving into THE PRESSURE OF OPPORTUNITY - noticing and making the most of the window that won’t stay open.

✅ Three weeks ago: what a closing window does to your brain - why the goals come late, the prize gets inflated, and the miss turns into a loss.

✅ Two weeks ago: why clutch isn’t what you think, what makes some of us sprint, and others freeze - and the one thing that decides which side you’re on.

✅ Last week: how to manufacture a choke - putting a closing window to work on someone else, and the line you don’t cross.

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This is the third in a 4-part series on OPPORTUNITY PRESSURE

They were 35 minutes from a first final in 60 years - history beckoned after Anthony Gordon arrived at the back post and put England 1-0 up on the defending champions. The Three Lions had the upper hand.

“When we went ahead the messaging was to go again and get another goal,” captain Harry Kane would say post-match.

Instead, with everything to play for, they stopped playing for it.

The plan visibly shrunk from “win this” to “survive this” - and at the other end, Argentina made the opposite trade. The evidence for the momentum shift started accumulating in the highlights: a cross that forced a brilliant close-range save from Pickford on 68 minutes, Mac Allister rattling the post on 76.

No matter where you tuned in from - your couch, your bar or your seat at the stadium - you could feel how it was going to end.

“Once we went 1-0 up we seemed to just try and hold on which at this level is just not enough. It was wave after wave.” Kane’s words were an admission of a team that had stopped leaving its own defensive area, trying to plug holes in a crumbling wall. Eventually the dam broke, and the wave crashed: Enzo Fernández hammered in the equalizer on 85, and in stoppage time Messi drew 3 defenders toward him, then dropped a cross onto Lautaro Martínez’s head for 2-1.

The winner landed in the 92nd minute, but the losing had started half an hour earlier, when England’s mentality melted down - and once you know how the Psychology of Opportunity works, you’ll see exactly how it worked, from the inside out.

👉 🧠 👈

While the diminutive Messi is arguably the best weapon ever to grace a football field, Argentina’s sharpest weapon in Atlanta was actually a feeling: 30 minutes of accumulating proof that the loss was on its way, a feeling England believed and made it true. The same lever, in friendlier clothes, makes you buy when you don’t need to, sells out tickets, and finally moves fence-sitters.

Let’s start on the pitch first, where we all saw it in real time.

A side holding a 1- 0 lead is holding a sure gain, and people holding a sure gain turn cautious - in soccer, that looks like midfielders dropping into the defensive line (which began immediately after Englands goal at the 55 minute mark, as you can see in the screenshot here). In our everyday world, it looks like people forgetting manners and pushing in line to get the subway, or slinking back into the crowd when an opportunity to speak up beckons.

In contrast, the team in blue pushed the throttle. That’s also expected, because side trailing when the window is closing is staring at a loss, and people staring at a loss flip risk-seeking - bodies forward, questions on the flight home.

What earns the match a place in this article is that Argentina didn’t wait for England’s flip - they induced it, one dial at a time. Their relentless assault on the window of opportunity first just kept it open, then pushed them through at the last minute. “Couldn’t win any balls,” Tuchel confirmed as much afterward, “couldn’t keep the ball.”

The first screw they turned was via the ball itself. Argentina hoarded it, and the players in white started both retreating without the ball and reacting when they had the ball, unable to hold onto any se3nse of control. The rarer England’s touches got, the more each one felt like the last cookie in the jar - too precious to gamble with, clutched instead of used.

The second point of leverage was owning the space - “They kept crossing and crossing so we went to a back five to close the gaps inside,” was Tuchel’s explanation of his own response. By the 76th minute it was done - the barrage induced the coach to shift to a back five - one fewer midfielder to win the ball back, so the touches got rarer still, tightening dial 1.

The last weapon they wielded was the loaded gun: Messi - who’d spent the first half dropping deep just to touch the ball - now set up in the wide-right channel a retreating back five could never quite reach: a standing threat in the exact space England’s new shape had surrendered, advertising the next chance already loading.

Notice the loop: the crouching posture led to further punishment, on and on until the bomb.

No offense to you, dear reader, but I’m guessing you’ll never press a back five into your own box in a World Cup semi. However the outward lever - controlling what the other side feels going scarce - is already happening every week, usually aimed at you. Its commercial name is The Closing Window.

Let’s take a peek where and how it started.

👉 🧠 👈

Fifty years ago, three psychologists ran what might be the cheapest persuasion study on record: people rated the cookies in a glass jar - some jars held 10, others the same cookies but only 2. The cookies from the near-empty jar were rated more desirable and more valuable - identical cookies, and the count alone moved the price in people’s heads. Scarcity arrives as information:

If there are fewer left, other people must know something you don’t, and it wont be long til you’re left with nothing. That’s England with their rare touches, it’s a buyer watching an offer dwindle, or it’s you watching the last spots in a select event get scooped up.

Once a window narrows, time-scarcity cues raise arousal, shrink deliberation, and dull sensitivity to the actual price - a real deadline does the deciding the undecided couldn’t do alone. Which names the ugly thing about your “let me think about it” pile: an offer that’s available forever gets priced, in the brain of a fence-sitter, at exactly what it costs to ignore today. Nothing.

The honest version ran at full scale in London this month.

Two days before a ball was struck at Wimbledon, a 55-year-old named Florence Chan pitched a tent in a southwest London park to be first in line for the right to buy a ticket - and by 8:30 on day one, close to 10,000 people were queued behind her for a £33 grounds pass sold first-come, first-served, gone when they’re gone.

Wimbledon’s other ticket proves the point by contrast: a debenture seat trades from around £2,195 up to £9,495, legally resellable, on the market for anyone with the money, any day they like. Nobody camps in a park for a debenture. The £33 ticket has people sleeping on the grass; the £9,495 ticket generates all the urgency of a parking invoice. The difference is the window, and the window is where all the pull lives.

👉 🧠 👈

Perhaps that’s why the CLOSING window is the thing that gets counterfeited. You’ve seen the fakes - you may have hovered over the button yourself: the countdown timer that resets when you refresh, the “only 3 left” that has read “only 3 left” since March.

Argentina never had to bluff - Pickford’s saves were real, the post really rattled, and that’s exactly why it worked. But the harm is measurable when people fake it: shoppers shown countdown timers and low-stock bars judged the seller less benevolent, with frustration and stress piled on top. So it pays to understand how to wield this weapon.

The playbook for a closing portal is portable - from the pitch to your personal life. Here’s Argentina’s 3 dials, translated one-for-one to everyday examples, with research receipts included.

1. Hoard the ball.

   The near-empty cookie jar creates more pressure than a full one, so give yours a visible bottom - a cohort of 12, a calendar with 3 openings, a print run you can count - then close when you said you would. “When it’s gone, it’s gone” only carries force if people have watched it actually go - ask the 10,000 in Wimbledon Park.

2. Keep the crosses coming.

   Almost every opportunity already has a window, so keep it in view the way Argentina did, and name what waiting costs - because a loss weighs heavier than the same-sized gain: “start in September and the fall launch is gone” beats “this will change your life.” On a pair of auction sites that differed only in how they ended, a hard close set off waves of last-second bidding that a soft, extendable close all but erased.

3. Park Messi in the space.

   Argentina stationed their most decorated threat exactly where England’s new shape couldn’t reach, and every sideways glance reminded England what was coming. Scarcity paints that signal as a threat - if others are circling, they must know something you don’t - so a visible rival makes the closing credible without you saying a word.

England will spend 4 years replaying a half hour in which nothing was yet lost - that’s what the feeling of a closing window does to people, and it’s why the one you show them has to be real.

Point at a true window and you’ve done the undecided a favor: the deciding they couldn’t manage alone. Build one that isn’t there, and all you’ve got is a con with a countdown timer.

👉 🧠 👈

Over the next month, Pressure Points is digging into OPPORTUNITY PRESSURE - the window that won’t stay open.

✅ Two weeks ago: what a closing window does to your brain - why the goals come late, the prize gets inflated, and the miss turns into a loss.

✅ Last week: why clutch isn’t what you think, what makes some of us sprint, and others freeze - and the one thing that decides which side you’re on.

☑️ Next week: how to build a closing window on yourself, for the times the calendar won’t hand you one.

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This is Part 2 in a 4-Part series on the OPPORTUNITY PRESSURE

Max Verstappen was running third when he speared into the gravel at Silverstone and brought out the safety car. By then the race had already come apart for the man who’d taken over the lead: pole-sitter Kimi Antonelli, whose car failed in the closing stint and who would limp home 16th.

Through the wreckage of everyone else’s afternoon came Charles Leclerc - who’d handed away the lead at his pit stop and taken it back when the man ahead of him broke down - to win his first British Grand Prix, crawling home behind that safety car.

It was a dramatic win, and like a lot of dramatic wins it went to the driver who kept his head while everyone else’s race fell apart. It happened the same afternoon on a pit box in Joliet, Illinois, in a series a lot less of the world watches - but I had a closer view than most, because the man who made the call is a client of mine.

Fifty-two laps from the end of NASCAR’s Fourth of July race at Chicagoland, William Byron was leading and Chase Briscoe was glued to his back bumper in second. Then Briscoe’s crew chief, James Small, made the call that won it: bring the No. 19 down pit road a lap early. Byron pitted a lap later and came out behind - “we got jumped by the 19,” he’d admit afterward.

Briscoe held the lead for the final 46 laps and beat his teammate Christopher Bell to the line by 0.276 seconds for his first win of the season. Here’s the part worth sitting with. Byron led a race-high 94 laps and swept both stages. He finished fourth. The driver who was fastest when the track was clean didn’t take the trophy home; the team that changed its plan at the right second did.

We have a word for what both winners pulled off. We call it clutch. But the word often points people in exactly the wrong direction.

The word “clutch” comes from an older word, clyccan, meaning to clench - to bend the fingers, to grip. When automotive engineers borrowed it, they used it for the coupling that grips two spinning parts together so power can pass from one to the other. Baseball borrowed it again for hitting when a huge opportunity is on the line. Every layer means the same thing: hold on, seize, grip.

But what a car’s clutch actually does the instant you change gear is the opposite: instead of gripping harder, it lets go. The disc disengages, opening a gap between the engine’s speed and the gearbox’s so the system can find a new ratio - and only then does it bite down again.

The grip is the last thing that happens. The first thing is the release.

The people we call clutch, the ones who find a gear the rest of us can’t, do something the word would never predict. They let go of the old plan fast enough to catch the new one, and the grip comes after. Under real pressure, they let go of three things before they grip anything at all. Most of us cling to all three.

We’ll get to that shortly - first, let’s look at how this all happens in our brains.

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Your brain has a clutch too, and it’s the part that lets you change your mind at speed. When the road shifts under you - a caution flag, a market turn, a diagnosis, a question that guts your argument mid-sentence - your head is still running the old plan, still spinning at the old speed while the world has moved to a new one.

The gap between those two speeds is where you either shift or stall.

You’ve watched someone do exactly this in a meeting - defending the plan they walked in with while the room quietly fills with reasons it won’t work - and if you’re honest, you’ve been that someone, doubling down on an approach precisely because you’d committed to it out loud.

Your head does the same thing, and we saw the machinery of it in Stoppage-Time Syndrome:

When a moment feels big enough, stress floods the system, the deliberate part of your brain gets shoved aside, and your attention clamps into a tunnel. That’s the person frozen on the pit wall, running numbers for a race that no longer exists.

The move that beats the stall is the one the device is named for, run backward: release, recalibrate, re-engage. Let go, find the new gear, then commit with everything you’ve got. Which makes the only real question, in the moment that decides it, a simple one - what are you gripping too hard to let go of? There are three usual suspects.

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The first is the result. When researchers sat down with elite athletes right after the best pressure performances of their careers and asked what was going through their heads, they found something odd: in the moment, they weren’t thinking about the consequences of failing at all. Not the trophy, not the wipeout. The prize and the disaster both drag your eyes off the one thing you can actually act on, which is the next corner.

Briscoe, hanging on at the end, described it as a cat-and-mouse game, slipping and sliding, heads-down on each lap as it arrived - not “I’m about to win my first race of the year,” just what does this corner need. The founder who freezes in the investor meeting is watching the valuation; the one who lands it is answering the question in front of her.

The second is the plan. The plan feels like the safe thing to hold, and it’s usually the thing that blinds you. The story you walk in with decides what you even see - two people can look at the same situation and read two completely different realities, because they’re running different frames. And the breakthrough, when it comes, rarely arrives as new information; it arrives as an old assumption you didn’t know you were holding, finally reversed.

It’s also why the pros are fast: when researchers studied veteran fire commanders making life-or-death calls, fewer than 1 in 8 decisions involved weighing several options against each other - they read the one workable pattern and moved, often in seconds. Byron gripped his track position to the end, while James Small let his go: pit now, surrender the lead, take the gear the race actually needed.

The third is the hardest, because it’s you. Under pressure, your identity fuses to the plan you picked, until questioning the plan feels like questioning yourself - so you defend it long past its usefulness. The way out is almost insultingly small: change the pronoun. People who talked themselves through a stressful moment using their own name or “you” (“you’ve handled worse”) instead of “I” came out less rattled, were rated calmer and sharper by outside observers, and started reading the pressure as a challenge instead of a threat.

Brain-imaging suggests the switch takes the emotional charge down almost instantly, with no extra mental effort. It pries you off the frame you’re welded to - and once you’re not the plan, you can let the plan go.

You don’t need a pit box for any of this. Your yellow flag is a reorg, a diagnosis, a deal whose terms move at the eleventh hour, a teenager who stops responding to the parenting that worked for a decade. Same engineering problem every time: you built a frame that fit the moment, and then the moment changed.

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You can’t stop the road from changing, and you wouldn’t want to - the shift is where the race is actually won. But you can get better at the release. Here are three ways to work the clutch.

1. Let go of the result.

   The people who come through when it counts keep their eyes on the next corner, not on the win or the wipeout. So drop the scoreboard and ask the only useful question: not “what happens if I blow this,” but “what does this next moment need?” The prize will still be there at the finish line - it just can’t help you steer.

2. Let go of the plan.

   The plan that was right at the green flag isn’t owed your loyalty when the flag turns yellow. The moment the data stops fitting, stop defending it - read the single most workable move in front of you, do something small to test it, and commit if it holds. One good read you can act on beats five perfect options you’ve no time to weigh.

3. Let go of the “I.”

   You can’t drop a plan your ego is bolted to, so unstick yourself first: talk to yourself by name. “[Your name], you’ve done harder things than this.” It sounds ridiculous, and it works in about a second, turning down the alarm and reminding you that you’re the driver, not the strategy. Lose the strategy, keep the driver.

Byron led the most laps at Chicagoland and watched the win drive off without him. James Small gave up the lead on purpose and won. At Silverstone the same afternoon, the trophy went to the coolest head in the chaos as the leader’s car broke down.

The grip everybody celebrates - the trophy, the last-lap hold-off - is the last part to arrive. The letting go comes first.

This one’s a companion to Stoppage-Time Syndrome, on why a closing window makes us seize up. Consider this the other side of the same moment: how the best let go and shift instead of grinding the gears.

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This month, Pressure Points is digging into OPPORTUNITY PRESSURE - what happens when the window won’t stay open.

Last week: what a closing window does to your brain - why the goals come late, the prize gets inflated, and the miss turns into a loss.

Next week: how to put a real closing window to work on other people - and the one line you don’t cross.

Final week: how to build a closing window on yourself, for the times the calendar won’t hand you one.

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The clock hits ninety minutes, scores are tied, and you lean toward the screen - you and a sizable share of the 6 billion people FIFA expects to follow this World Cup, on track to be the most-watched event in human history.

Every one of you is squinting at the same thing: the fourth official walking to the touchline, lifting the board over his or her head. Under the ref’s raised arm sits a deodorant logo, because Rexona paid to own this exact instant - because this is the one stretch of a match that makes everybody sweat.

Six added minutes, it says. Cue the madness.

Stephen Eustáquio caught the ball flush on the volley, and Canada had its first knockout win in World Cup history, 1-0 in the second minute of stoppage time on Sunday. The next day Brazil needed a stoppage-time surprise to break Japan. Then Morocco equalized with minutes to go, and sent the Dutch home after penalties. And German fans will say it happened to the referee, after a video review in extra time went against them. (They then missed three from the spot, and are now on their way home, tournament over.)

It’s a growing trend - big goals and big gut-punches seem to be coming late in the piece. Pull the data from the big European leagues, the South American leagues, the World Cups and the European Championships, and the last 15 minutes of regulation is the single most prolific stretch of the game, the phase where close to a fifth of all goals are scored.

At this particular World Cup, though, it’s been even more pronounced, and the steepest jump of all waits in those final added-on minutes.. One performance scientist ran the numbers on the group stage and posted the chart:

Across the regulation 90, scoring sat at a rate of about 2.1. Once the board went up and stoppage time began, it climbed to 3.2 - the final few minutes running roughly 50% hotter than the 90 that preceded them. The most dangerous phase of a soccer match is the one the broadcast clock insists shouldn’t even exist.

The reflex is to blame tired legs, and that plays a bit part. But if exhaustion were the engine, then extra time - the two periods bolted on when a knockout game is still level after 90 - would be where scoring truly explodes, because the players are more spent than ever. Only it isn’t. So something more specific than fatigue is happening, and it’s happening to the brain rather than the body.

A closing window does two things to anyone standing in front of it: it inflates the prize, and it turns missing the prize into a loss. I call it Stoppage-Time Syndrome - when the final minutes on the clock make the prize feel bigger and the miss feel deadly.

Everything you blame for the late goal at the world cup, or for your own worst last-minute calls at work, flows out of those two distortions. But… Canada’s captain swung free, while Germany’s four-time champions froze. Does that mean it doesn’t impact everyone the same way?

Well, whether it lifts you or wrecks you comes down to where the pressure sends your attention.

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Let’s start with the downside first, because that’s the part that pulls the choke trigger.

For most of a match, and most of a working day, missing a thing is just a missed gain. You weigh it coolly, because there’ll be other chances and the clock is on your side. But as the window narrows, that accounting flips: any miss is filed as a significant loss, and your internal gambling switch trips on its own.

Facing a near-certain loss, people flip from risk-averse to risk-seeking and push into immediate action: offer a guaranteed loss, or a gamble where you’ll probably lose more but might escape clean, and most reach for the gamble - the opposite of how they’d act choosing between two gains. It’s why a “limited time” banner works on people who know exactly what it is: time-scarcity cues raise measurable arousal, shrink the time you spend deliberating, and dull your sensitivity to the actual price.

The striker in the 93rd minute, the bidder in an auction’s final seconds, you at 11:58pm with a full cart that’s on sale - all paying a premium that is set more by the closing window than the prize itself. And the higher that premium climbs, the more reckless the swing it’s worth taking looks.

Your system reads the looming loss as an existential threat and floods the body with cortisol, which jams the system that’s meant to clear other stress hormones. One of those chemicals in particular - norepinephrine (or noradrenaline if you’re using the King’s english - stops being cleared, and the higher it climbs, the more it weakens the prefrontal cortex and hands the wheel to the emotional, reflexive circuits.

Norepinephrine can be thought of as the Emotion Amp - brains sitting with high levels of norepinephrine tend to activate emotional centers more readily.

All of a sudden (without knowing it) you’re putting extra weight on feeling over math, you get quicker to pull the trigger, and your attention narrows to a tunnel around the prize. In the light of the shrinking window, the knock on effects only get worse, because the prize you’re gambling for won’t hold still. A reward doesn’t hold a fixed value in your head; it gets marked up as it gets closer.

Because a guaranteed bad outcome is the single thing we’ll do almost anything to avoid. And a huge body of research shows that if the potential loss poses even a minor threat to your identity, your arousal increases (hello cortisol) and your focus drops onto what’s meant to run by itself: the striker starts steering his own feet, and a skill drilled over ten thousand reps suddenly needs a supervisor it never had, so the expert plays like a rookie.

That’s because the closer a reward sits, the more your valuation system marks it up - the identical prize is worth more to you in the last few seconds than it was an hour ago, even though the prize hasn’t changed. The cleanest demonstration sits in a coffee shop: people in a “buy 10, get 1 free” program buy faster the nearer they get to the free cup, shaving roughly a fifth off the gap between purchases. The goal, quite literally, looms larger and weighs heavier the nearer you get.

On the other hand, if you view it as just the condition you’re operating inside, the pressure dials you in. But herein lies the dilemma - what can be done to land on th right side of opportunity pressure?

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Chances are you’re not a World Cup player (if you are, please get back to focusing on the tournament!).

But even still, your week IS full of stoppage time: The founder at month 23 of a 24-month runway, or the candidate in the final days of a posting about to close. The writer at a submission deadline, the shopper under a countdown timer, the salesperson on the last day of the quarter.

Every one of them has stoppage-time syndrome - a prize the brain has quietly inflated, and a miss it’s reframed as a loss - and the crushing weight or wild swing that follows is a built-in program, not a personal failing.

Which is, in a backwards way, the good news: a distortion you can name is one you can correct for. You can’t unplug the machinery - it’s older than you are, and on the day a real chance is genuinely vanishing you’ll be glad it fires. But you can answer it. Here are three moves the research points to for the moments your window is closing:

1. Remove your identity.

2. Re-price the window.

3. Pre-commit the walk-away.

When the surge comes, treat it as information, not instruction - your nervous system reporting that a window is closing, not telling you what the window is worth.

The net bulges late for a reason, and now the reason has a name: stoppage-time syndrome. Just make sure that when your window closes, the swing you take is the one you chose - and not the one the clock talked you into.

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Over the next month, Pressure Points is digging into OPPORTUNITY PRESSURE - what happens when the window won’t stay open.

✅ This week: what a closing window does to your brain - why the goals come late, the prize gets inflated, and the miss turns into a loss.

☑️ Next week: how that shows up in plain sight - why a closing window makes some of us sprint and some of us freeze, and what decides which.

☑️ Week three: how to put a real closing window to work on other people - and the one line you don’t cross.

☑️ Week four: how to build a closing window on yourself, for the times the calendar won’t hand you one.

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Yesterday marked the exact midpoint of 2026.

Half the year is in the books, half is still in front of you, and half the people who walked into a gym on January 1 are gone.

That’s not a hot take - it’s the retention data the gyms themselves plan around: 50% of new members cancel or go inactive within six months. The same numbers run through every domain where people set a goal on January 1 - the gym is just the cleanest place to see the pattern, because gyms count the bodies alongside the days, sets, and reps.

Maybe the goal in other areas is a number on a scale, maybe a manuscript chapter count, a savings balance, or a relationship ritual you would build. The common assumption in any failure is that the goal dropouts were either lacking in willpower or lacking in humility. That the goal was too hard, the bar was set too high, they were beaten by the math because the probability was always against them.

But the research points to a different driver. What separates the survivors from the dropouts is the relationship they have to the pursuit of perfection, which turns out to be a bigger predictor of dropout than the probability of the goal in the first place.

That pressure to be perfect is climbing, too. A cross-generational meta-analysis covering 41,641 college students across almost 30 years every type of perfectionism is rising:

• socially prescribed perfectionism - the kind you absorb from what you think other people expect of you - rose 33%,

• self-imposed perfectionism rose 10%,

• and other-imposed perfectionism rose 16%.

No matter where it’s coming from, the arrow only points in one direction.

Whatever your goal may be, the bar that’s been set is yours, so any slip-up is yours - but that also means the recovery is yours, and your own internal pressure to be perfect about it is the only thing that sabotages you from re-engaging again. And as we’re about to see, the question that defines whether your goal survives the next twenty-six weeks is less about what’s happened, and more about what ‘s next:

I’m off pace, and I haven’t been perfect about this - what now?

Well, the research on how those Jan-to-July gym survivors actually pulled it off has two streams: 1) how they handle imperfection when it inevitably shows up, and 2) how they design a bar that doesn’t require them to be perfect about it in the first place.

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The moment a self-imposed goal goes from “I’m on it” to “I’m might miss” is a potential pivot point in the entire journey from past you to future you. The internal monologue most of us learned in school is that harshness is what re-motivates the work - but the research shows that the harshness is actually often the first domino in a crushing cascade.

In one of the cleanest experiments in the perfectionism literature, college women on calorie-restricted diets were brought into a lab, made to break their diet with an unhealthy food preload, then split into two groups.

One group got a thirty-second self-compassion prompt:

“Several people told me that they felt bad about eating sweets in this study. I hope you won’t be too hard on yourself. Everyone in the study eats sweets, so there is no need to feel bad.”

The other got nothing. Both were placed in front of bowls of candy framed as a taste test. The self-compassion group ate less. The no-prompt group went on a binge - falling into a classic “what-the-hell” mindset, they ate significantly more.

It was literally thirty seconds, and as simple as holding themselves to a food goal, and the only difference was their relationship to the miss. They lost one moment, then lost their minds.

The same pattern shows up in other, less obvious domains. In a follow-up study at Berkeley, participants took a hard vocabulary test, were told they had performed poorly, and were given as much time as they wanted to study before retaking it.

The participants prompted to write to themselves with a similar self-compassion script spent significantly more time studying for the retake than participants prompted to write about positive things in general, or those who got no prompt at all. Kindness to yourself after a miss produces MORE effort going back at it, not less, because self-criticism reinstates the fear-of-failure cascade that took the goal off pace in the first place.

The same research also maps what happens to the goal itself when the miss lands. The umbrella term is goal adjustment capacity, and meta-analytic evidence finds two distinct capacities predict both wellbeing and attainment: disengagement (letting an impossible or spoiled specific detail go) and reengagement (committing to an alternative pathway toward the same end goal).

Disengagement is what the perfectionist cannot do without ditching the entire goal, and reengagement is what the survivors of January’s cohort do every time they walk back into the gym after a missed week - the PATH to the goal is kept flexible, while the the rigid specifics are let go.

But recovery is one half of the math. The other half is design - how you actually set the bar in the first place so that missing it doesn’t blow up the whole goal.

When you start the clock predicts how much you squeeze out of it. A study out of Wharton tracked Google searches for “diet,” actual gym attendance, and self-set goal commitments against the calendar. All three spiked at temporal landmarks - the start of a week, a month, a year, the day after a birthday, the day after a holiday.

This mechanism is called mental accounting: landmarks demarcate periods, and the new period begins without the failures of the previous one attached to it.

Which means re-anchoring a self-imposed goal (or a renewed one) to a fresh-start moment is not weakness or woo-woo, it is the cleanest free leverage available in the battle for our brains. Yesterday (the mid-year hinge) is one of the strongest landmarks the calendar offers. The only thing stopping you from starting again? Perfectionism.

In other words: Just win the day. Because ultimately, the year you end up with equals what happens on the days you win PLUS the days you don’t quit.

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Two pieces of research on how to handle the miss, and one on how to set the bar in the first place. Each one is the opposite of what perfectionism would have you do, and each one becomes a move you can make this week.

1. Catch yourself before you cascade.

2. Anchor the reset to a landmark.

3. Set the bar in 3D.

We’re halfway through the year right now. The bar you set yourself in January is either on pace, or it isn’t, and the only person who knows which is which is the one reading this sentence.

Either way, the work for the next twenty-six weeks lives in the three moves above - catch yourself with kindness when you slip up, anchor the reset to the calendar moment you are sitting in right there and then, and set the renewed bar in 3D rather than in fantasy. The reset button is there, any day you need it.

Win the day. The year you keep is the days you win - and the days you don’t quit.

This is the Pressure of Expectation, and thanks to the last 4 weeks, you’re now equipped on all four levers: the body, the behavior, the people around you, and finally (in this article) the person in the mirror. The version of expectation that’s hardest to manage is the one you put on yourself, and the research says the only way to keep it alive across the year is to allow yourself to miss without breaking the goal.

Just win the day.

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Over this month, Pressure Points has been digging into THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXPECTATION.

Three weeks ago: we uncovered the neuroscience of why a $56k offer can feel like a 24k loss, and how frustration comes from a violation of expectations:

Two weeks ago: we unpacked a lesson on the science of choking and high stakes from the noisiest night at Madison Square Garden in decades:

Last week: we covered how to use expectation on other people - what every World Cup coach, world-class parent, and world-leading manager already does without naming it:

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Three defenders in red converged on the lone attacker in yellow as he burst into the left side of the penalty area. The ball bobbled awkwardly in front of him, as a teammate arrived in support at the same time as the goalkeeper coming off his line.

The expectation from this exact combination of defenders and field position was a 40% chance of scoring - Nestory Irankunda wasn’t thinking about that though.

His shot went low, past a Turkish goalkeeper who barely moved, and into the near corner of the goal. Australia 1-0.

That was the moment Australia took the lead in a game it had no business being competitive in. Turkey were ranked above the Socceroos, sat as 4/5 favorites with the bookmakers, were anchored by midfielders from Inter Milan and Real Madrid, and had been written into the previews as the next team out of Group D alongside the United States. Australia won 2-0.

That is the third Australian team in the last 5 years I’ve watched do what the expected math said it could not.

Graham Arnold’s Socceroos at Qatar 2022, tipped to lose three and fly home, beat Tunisia and Denmark and reached the round of sixteen, only to fall to Messi and his eventual champion team, Argentina. Tony Gustavsson’s Matildas at the 2023 tournament, eleventh in the world but carrying the host nation weight, won the longest shootout in World Cup history against France and finished fourth.

I was the Performance Director of each of those two campaigns, and the elation in the tunnel is forever seared into my memory. On Saturday I was in the stands - but the pattern was as obvious as ever. Three teams, three coaches, three different expectation environments, and all three overdelivered on the math.

Here’s the part that’s tickled my curiosity for years: While Australia keeps leaving tournaments with more than it brought, the self proclaimed home of football, England, keeps leaving with less. They have a deeper talent pool, the strongest league on earth feeding the national side, and a team the bookmakers (remarkably still) believe in that bows out earlier than they predict, every time.

One country rides the tailwind of expectation. The other battles against it.

Which brings me to the team I keep turning over in my mind this year: The United States is hosting this World Cup, so for the first time in a generation an American men’s side plays a major tournament carrying the full weight of its own crowd. Home advantage is supposed to be an advantage - just ask the Matildas - but a home crowd can also be the loudest, least patient audience a team will ever face.

Wind at their backs, or in their faces?

The science will tell you it depends on how you set the sails.

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In the early 1980s, a researcher walked into an army training base with a list of names and a story. Before the new course began, he told the instructors that a randomly chosen sample of their trainees had been identified as having exceptionally high command potential, based on previous testing. That was a cheeky lie though - they’d been picked at random from the wider cohort, matched on aptitude with the trainees who were not.

The trainees never knew which list they were on, but the effect did not require them to: four objective achievement exams later, the ones named-as-high-potential were outperforming their peers.

The real reason? Expectation bias - in a positive sense.

What the follow-up research has shown is that the instructors, believing the list, started behaving differently toward those trainees - Instructor expectancy explained 73% of the variance in the trainees’ performance. The way their expectations showed towards the trainees tended to improve performance in four specific ways:

1. a warmer training climate,

2. more input on the material,

3. more chances to respond and have their answers shaped, and

4. more specific feedback when they did.

None of that was instructed - all of it spontaneously followed from the belief - and it added up to the receiver experiencing a different version of the same course: a leadership ladder where the demands matched their resources, step by step, rather than being too steep.

That first finding became known as the Pygmalion effect, and it is the cleanest available evidence that the first intervention point on the expectation-wind sits with the person setting the bar.

But the mechanism matters as much as the bar. Set a high expectation without the four behaviours, and you get a receiver carrying a bar above them with no buffer, no warmth, and no support. Their body reads that situation as a threat rather than a challenge, and the cortisol cascade fires on schedule. This inverse of Pygmalion is called the Golem effect, and it produces demonstrably worse performance from people who had no reason to underperform on the math.

The second pressure point of expectations sits with the performer. Decades of research by social psychologists at Harvard and elsewhere have shown that the same stress response - the racing heart, the cortisol pulse, the narrow attention - can be relabelled by the person experiencing it. When subjects are coached to reframe pre-performance arousal as “my body is preparing me to perform” rather than “my body is failing me,” their downstream cardiovascular profile changes, their cognitive performance improves, and their cortisol clearance speeds up. The arousal stays the same, and the change is in the label the brain attaches to it.

The third expectations’ pressure point is on both sides at once. Goal-setting research has split into two streams. It's been proven beyond a doubt that setting a clear target works when success is mostly up to you. But when the outcome also depends on luck, other people, or circumstances you can’t control, focusing only on the result can be frustrating. In those situations, it’s better to focus on doing the right things well and sticking to your values, regardless of how things turn out.

Translation: pressure peaks when you’re aiming at something you don’t control, and the outcome looks shaky. The body works better with a destination to chase - as long as the destination is within reach.

This is the engine under the split we saw in the intro section: Australia’s teams arrive with almost no external expectation, so the only bar that counts is the one the coaches set inside the camp, set as a challenge with the four behaviors behind it. It’s easier to flip an expectation on it’s head when it’s not weighing on your shoulders.

Meanwhile, back at the home of football, England gets the mirror image: a bar set by tabloid front pages and a public that flips at the first bad result, the Golem mechanism at national scale, warmth and patience draining away as the bar climbs. The body reads threat, and players who run automatic motions ten thousand times a year cannot find them with the country watching.

Which makes the United States the live experiment. A home crowd is Pygmalion or Golem at the scale of a stadium, choosing in real time. Believe in the team through a bad forty-five minutes and you wrap the four-step buffer around eighty thousand people, the wind the Matildas rode to fourth on home soil. Turn at the first defeat and you are the English tabloid in a different accent, the same cortisol tidal wave at the end.

The talent is not the question; whether America sets its sails like Australia or braces like England is.

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You may not be playing in front of eighty thousand people this week, but the same wind hits you, albeit with a little less noise.

Your tabloid front page is the offhand line in a performance review. Your home crowd is the team that backs you through a rough quarter or goes quiet the second you miss. Your bouncing ball at a bad angle is the meeting you walked into underprepared, the message you owe someone three rungs up, the morning when something you have done a thousand times feels impossible because the wrong people are watching.

A perfect example was a DM that a reader (and friend!) sent me this week, much more like the one most of us actually live:

“As I move up the leadership ladder I also deal with trying to keep mind clear and calm under high pressure. When I hear ‘oh you should do this or that’ or ‘wow you messed that up’ I feel like that is just someone’s opinion. I want to be better at having my own judgement and conviction, but at the same time knowing which feedback to take in.”

Too much feedback, not enough filter.

Every opinion hits his cortisol pulse before his brain has ruled on whether it has standing, the English problem at the scale of one person. At the same time, he also leads a team that needs the bar set with warmth behind it, the Australian job.

Most of us work both jobs in the same week, and the science hands each one a move to make the most of the winds.

1. Set the bar above someone’s ceiling, then back it.

2. Relabel the opinion before it lands.

3. Anchor on what’s in your hands.

Never forget, expectation is a wind, not a weight. It blows whether you want it to or not, and the work is in setting the angle of the sails: which gusts to ride, which to tack against, and which to ignore.

Australia sets its sails into the wind. England spent years bracing before it learned to tack. The United States is about to show us, live and in front of its own crowd, which of the two it’s decided to be.

And whether you’re facing expectations at home, at work, on a field or a stage, you have that choice to make, too.

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This month, Pressure Points is digging into THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXPECTATION.

Two weeks ago: the neuroscience of why a $56k offer can feel like a 24k loss, and how frustration comes from a violation of expectations:

Last week: a lesson on the science of choking and high stakes from the noisiest night at Madison Square Garden in decades:

Next week: how to use it on the person in the mirror - the difference between the expectations that pull you forward and the ones that crush you.

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Last night I sat 10 seats away from the President of the United States, for Game 3 of the NBA Finals.

That’s not a sentence I ever expected to write - and given it was the first playoff game ever attended by a sitting president, you could say it was a YUGE occasion. Even without Trump and his pals in the bulletproof box next to me, this was already a more momentous Finals night than usual.

The New York Knicks hadn’t played a home Finals game in 27 years, and they hadn’t won a championship in 53. Their fans had spent the previous week saying the same three words out loud - in chalk on Brooklyn sidewalks, in hand-painted signs on Manhattan pizza-place windows, in lockstep across every post or comment section:

KNICKS. IN. FOUR.

Outside Madison Square Garden, the patch of pavement where ticketless fans should have been packed shoulder-to-shoulder for the mother-of-all watchparties - Plaza33 - was eerily silent as it sat empty by order of the Secret Service. Sixth through Eighth Avenues, from 30th all the way up to 35th, had been blocked off for security reasons. Inside the arena, though, the drama and decibels hit levels that normal sporting events don’t get near - and that was just in warm ups. The player intros were even more electric. Then the anthem began.

You could first hear the boos start between “twilight’s last gleaming” and “whose broad stripes,” as they first showed Trump on the iconic big screen hanging from the roof. On the broadcast footage, the President’s salute shadowed his face. But from where I sat, you could see him smiling - almost as if he had expected it.

Then, from the opening tip-off, the Knicks did what no one expected: a 50.1% shooting team across every game of these playoffs opened Q1 at 42% from the field, seemingly blowing up their home court advantage.

They would eventually lose the game, and the fans would go home quietly (for New Yorkers, at least).

You can’t always hear an expectation. Most of them never get said out loud - the final job interview you’ve been picturing for two weeks, the promotion you’ve been promised if you don’t F-up, the relationship you think might be the one - yet they show up in most things you do. The good news is, if you know what to look for you can see it pressing on someone’s nervous system - from the scorers’ table at a basketball game, or from across a board table, or from the other side of a kitchen table - before anyone (including yourself) ever admits it out loud.

I call the mechanism behind it all Expectation Overload - but the first people to spot it (or at least traces of it) called it the “Championship Choke”.

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Forty years ago, two sport psychologists pulled the data on the final games of every NBA Finals and World Series and noticed that home teams, on the verge of winning a championship in front of a supportive crowd, played WORSE. Teams that were only one win away from the championship - who typically won over 60% of their games at home - dropped to a 41% win rate in the deciding games, and 39% in Game 7’s specifically.

The proposed mechanism was that the home crowd’s enthusiasm produced disruptive fantasies of success in the players’ heads, which broke their concentration and tanked their performance. Home-field advantage? No such thing in the games that matter most, they argued - and so the paper became one of the most-cited findings in sport psych.

They would’ve loved watching the #KnicksInFour crowd go home silent last night.

But a decade later, another research team went back to the data with ten more years of championship games attached. The original finding of the championship choke was washed away in a bigger dataset: home teams in decisive championship games were winning at the same rate they won early in the series.

But in a companion lab study, they tested the mechanism underneath the question directly. And what they found was even more powerful that the idea of the championship choke - it was the psychological cascade that kicks in when expectations are overloaded.

Subjects competed against an alleged opponent on a psychomotor task under three audience conditions (alone, supportive same-team audience, hostile opposing-team audience) and two feedback conditions (told their side was ahead, or told their side was behind).

Choking did happen, but it didn’t track with the original mechanism - instead the choking came in two different forms. Low-self-consciousness subjects choked when they were ahead in front of their own supporters, under the threat of letting their side down. High-self-consciousness subjects choked when their team had fallen behind, under the threat of confirming a deficit.

What both patterns had in common was the threat of failing in the eyes of people who mattered. The researchers called this the darker form of choking, and labeled the two key ingredients: Social pressure + Self-doubt.

The neuroscience of how that darker form actually breaks a body has been the work of lab studies ever since. Research on skilled golfers, basketball free-throw shooters, and baseball batters have shown the same pattern: under social-evaluative threat, the slow deliberate brain takes over motions the body normally runs on autopilot, and the shot gets uglier.

And you don’t have to be within 10 feet of someone to notice this - you can see it from the stands: the player who normally fires instinctively is now visibly thinking, with an editor’s red pen running across every frame.

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I’ve spent the better part of two decades watching this same chain fire in athletes, executives, and creatives - in different uniforms, on different stages, under different scoreboards. It runs in three cascading stages, each one starting with something measurable inside the brain and ending with something you can watch outside it.

First: Cortisol drives a dopamine spike in the PFC → the quiet eye collapses. Quiet eye is sport science for sustained visual fixation on the target just before the action. Elite shooters hold it longer than novices, surgeons hold it longer than residents, and under pressure it shortens or vanishes. The mechanism is simple: social-evaluative threat spikes cortisol, cortisol drives an excess release of dopamine, and those neurotransmitters disconnect the prefrontal networks - the system that holds the player’s gaze steady on what counts - and the eyes start to dart.

You’ve watched this happen before: The senior leader scans the back of the room mid-sentence; The friend telling you a difficult truth whose eyes won't stay on yours. The eyes go first, long before the voice cracks or the gesture stiffens.

Second: Error monitoring spikes → kinematics deteriorate. With top-down attention offline, the brain’s error-detection circuitry has to do more work, and it overcompensates. fMRI work has shown that athletes high in sport anxiety run more activity in their error-monitoring regions when their performance is being evaluated. The brain is watching for mistakes while the body is supposed to execute, and the watching itself makes the mechanics worse - the swing gets choppier, the stroke loses smoothness, the dribble looks less fluid.

This shows up in the presenter who grabs at the clicker twice; the parent giving the wedding speech who wavers on the name of their new family member; people who normally run complex skills on autopilot start having to think their way through them.

Third: Conscious system takes over → timing changes. With the automatic system disrupted and the error monitor over-firing, the slow deliberate brain steps in to drive a motion designed to run automatic. The golf-putting research showed the timing change that follows is measurable before the outcome changes - the release time stretches, the pre-shot routine warps, the pass takes a beat, the decision arrives late. The motion looks different before the score does.

Look around the office and you’ll catch it too: the colleague who normally fires off crisp emails takes an extra two days on the one her bonus depends on; the senior leader who normally lands her opening line pauses on the first word.

The tempo gives it away last, but all three show up at some stage whenever expectations are weighing a little extra.

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Regardless of where you first spot it, there are three moves which help buffer the expectation overload in advance, and all of them depend on where our eyes are:

1. Eyes on the exhale

   A longer exhale relative to your inhale dampens the cortisol response - which is the upstream trigger for the whole chain. A 2023 Stanford study found that cyclic sighing - two inhales sharp through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth - produced the largest reduction in physiological arousal. So watch how you breathe.

2. Other eyes on you

   The error-monitoring spike is partly a novelty effect - so make the pressure less novel. A meta-analysis of pressure-training studies found that practicing under simulated evaluation - filmed, watched, graded - reduces choking in the actual moment. Run the slides for a peer who is grading you. Record the keynote rehearsal and watch it back.

3. Eyes on the target

   Monitoring yourself - the voice, the movement, the words you are about to say - puts the conscious system in the driver’s seat. Twenty-five years of research on the constrained-action hypothesis shows external focus keeps the automatic system running. In the hard conversation, in the presentation, in the negotiation - watch what matters.

The same three moves help when you’re called on as the expert mid-meeting, or your boss hints that the budget forecast will favor you, or the comment that turns a casual conversation into a critical one, and it’s all reliant on you.

Your cortisol cascade fires whether or not you saw the trigger conditions brewing - just ask the quietest 19,000 New Yorkers you’ll ever meet.

But remember: the original championship choke findings didn’t survive the bigger dataset, which means Monday night’s meltdown doesn’t have to bleed into Game 4’s final score. If your eyes can see an expectation overload building up - from the stands or across the conference table - you (and the Knicks) can drop its weight before it drops you, one move at a time.

👉 🧠 👈

This month, Pressure Points is digging into THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXPECTATION.

Last week: the neuroscience of why a $56k offer can feel like a 24k loss, and how frustration comes from a violation of expectations:

Next week: how to use expectation to lift or leverage other people - what every world-class coach, effective parent, and great manager already does without naming it.

Final week: how to use it on the person in the mirror - the difference between the expectations that pull you forward and the ones that crush you.

Subscribe to get Pressure Points in your inbox every week.

Subscribe to get Pressure Points
FREE in your inbox every week…
or Share with a friend or colleague!

Share Pressure Points