Sucker's walk

When I was growing up, a lot of the kids in our neigborhood used to play football in somebody's backyard - we usually tried to play in the largest backyard that was available.  It was always more fun that way.  We generally followed the usual football rules, but given the nature of the game, we occasionally had to make a few exceptions ("five apple rush" and "two completions for a first down" being a couple of the more common ones we used).  Whenever one team scored a touchdown, there would of course be a kick-off.  The other team was always the one that had to walk to the other end of the yard - you could call it the "walk of shame" but we preferred to just call it the "sucker's walk."  Wow, not very sportsmanlike of us, right!?!?  There was always a funny thing about being on the side that had to make the "sucker's walk" to the other end of the yard though.  We would all talk about how we were going to do better on the next series and score.  We would rally together, give each other a pep talk, and get ready to "do some damage" to the other team!  

I guess that I shouldn't be surprised by our response way back then.  If we are resilient, patient, and persistent, failure can do that to us.  We learn.  We move on.  And we try harder next time.  Building upon my last blog post ("I wish you bad luck"), some times when we fail, we ultimately win.  It's a subject I have written a lot about (see, for example, "The agony of defeat", "Sometimes, it rains", "The greatest teacher, failure is" or "Success is a lousy teacher" for a few of my personal favorites), perhaps because I have experienced so many failures myself.  It's like the old adage says, "If at first you don't succeed, try and try again."

Losing is a powerful motivator.  Our aversion to losing (the technical term in psychology is loss aversion) is incredible - some would argue that the "pain" of losing is about twice as powerful as the satisfaction that we get from winning.  Here's proof.  Jonah Berger and Devin Pope, both at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed over 45,000 college and 18,000 professional basketball games.  What they found was stunning.  Teams that were slightly behind (i.e. losing) at halftime win approximately 2% (college) and 6% (professional) more often than expected.  The boost in winning percentage due to the fact that teams were behind at halftime is actually stronger than having a homecourt advantage.  Berger and Pope concluded that "losing can sometimes lead to winning!"

There's more here than just extra motivation though.  As I stated in my last post, a group of scientists from Northwestern University recently published a study that found that young scientists who failed - just barely - when applying for their first research grant were more successful in the long run compared to those scientists who were just barely successful in their first grant application.  Failure is certainly motivation.  But unfortunately, not everyone gets back up after being knocked down.  Ten percent of the scientists who just barely missed the cut for the research grant dropped out and never applied for another grant again.  In other words, learning from failure comes with a price - in order to do so, you have to be persistent, patient, and resilient!  The psychologist Dr. Angela Duckworth calls it grit.  

I honestly remember taking the "sucker's walk" more than a few times.  But we always came back and tried harder to win in the end.  Grit and motivation.  Sometimes, with both, "losing can sometimes lead to winning."