Are you a pessimist? Perhaps your football team is to blame

West Ham United finds itself bottom of the Premier League again, which is perhaps no more than to be expected given the Kelsey Effect I mentioned in the earlier blog on luck. Of course, in that blog I dismissed the Kelsey Effect, or any other series of misfortunes that are banded together to create a sense of luck or (more likely) otherwise as no more than our reticular activating system (RAS) – the part of the brain responsible for arousal. Assume bad luck and our RAS will find examples of it everywhere – reaching as far as the performance of our favourite football team if necessary. Assume good luck and the plight of West Ham will be ignored unless, of course, they find themselves at the top of the league table and can thus be recruited as confirmation (admittedly, this is unlikely).

So do we make choices regarding such things as which football team to follow based on our view of the world? Certainly it can appear so. Most followers of West Ham I know all seem to have a pessimistic outlook. And West Ham fans are hardly alone in this respect. What about Manchester City fans – one even calling his Fever Pitch style fan-biography Manchester United Ruined my Life suggesting that, had he chosen the other “Manchester” team, his life would have been far from ruined? And then there are the Evertonians. Like City fans they have seen many false dawns regarding their club’s attempts to match the status of their near and more famous neighbours.

West Ham, City and Everton all have the distinction of being the smaller teams in cities containing some of the world’s most famous footballing brands (fans of Espanyol, Atlético, Torino and 1860 can no doubt sympathise). So why choose to support them? In modern cities geography or logistics can hardly be a major factor. And as Simon Kuper contends in his excellent book Why England Lose (an Undercover Economist for football fans called Soccernomics outside of the UK) football operates in a free market, meaning that we are free to choose our colours. Surely then, we choose teams that – in some way or other – reflect our personalities, hence my pessimistic choice of the only London team with 30,000-plus attendances that finds itself regularly fighting, and sometimes losing, relegation battles?

Of course, the above is no more than a writer’s Aunt Sally, to be knocked down by the obvious contention that it is the other way around. Most genuine football fans (those that take their passion beyond the playground or office) are not free to choose at all. Usually, family ties weigh heavily – as they did with me when my earlier attempts to support the Tottenham Hotspur of Martin Chivers and Pat Jennings were, to put it mildly, discouraged. So, if our team does reflect our personality, it must therefore not be based on our “choice” of football-team but on the impact that football team’s performance has on our young minds.

This is not a frivolous point. For instance, my five-year old’s reaction to England’s humiliating exit from the World Cup was little short of traumatic. He’d become excited by the sense of festival surrounding the tournament and, despite my warnings, saw Wayne Rooney and the like as unconquerable heroes along Ben 10 or Transformer lines. To see them soundly beaten rocked his world and, I have no doubt, made a negative impression on him that will take time to forget.

And the science backs this up. In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman states that such high-drama moments can cause the amygdale – which Goleman describes as the key component of the limbic system in the brain dealing with anxiety, distress and fear – to signal other brain regions to strengthen their memory of the incident. This creates a bigger imprint within the memory, which generates a new neural “setpoint” in the brain – potentially causing a lifelong resetting of our emotional responses to even tangentially-similar situations. And while I’m not dismissing the notion that, as incidents of stress go, this is a mild one, it can nonetheless have an impact – especially if the setpoint is triggered on a near-weekly basis between August and May.

Football teams are important to most young boys in the UK as well as many young girls. And one constantly beaten by its rivals – especially near rivals supported by peers, therefore engendering playground taunting – is unlikely to encourage a sense of optimism at a crucial stage in that child’s mental development. No ardent fan (and there is no other way to describe the depth of enthusiasm experienced at that age) can remain immune to the impact of so many defeats on their overall psyche.

So is the answer to encourage them towards the more successful rival team? While many dads would rather burn in hell – and I realise the risk I’m taking here in stating this – that’s exactly what I’m encouraging with my sons. They go to school in Islington where the obvious choice is Arsenal – a team with a much happier outlook (Chelsea and Tottenham being beyond the pale for a Hammers fan). Yet my wife disagrees with this course: not because she is a West Ham fan (she isn’t) or because she wants them to follow more aspirational sports (such as rugby) or even no sport (though she fancies one of them as a chorister). She disagrees with this because she thinks pessimism is an innate condition in football fandom, as is optimism. As far as my wife is concerned, it is realism that football fans lack.

This is well observed in my opinion. Fans have little or no concept of relativity. They tend to bank any advance and then look further upwards, complaining bitterly of a “lack of ambition” when clubs “stagnate” in mid-table or even slip back a few places. No sooner has a small club – for example Fulham – found its way into the higher divisions than its fans want more: silverware, European competition, Champions League etc etc. Fans adjust their pessimist/optimist thermostat accordingly, converting anything other than continual glory into a crisis – usually heaped upon players, managers and even the owners who may justifiably feel they have got a particular club to out-perform its potential.

As in football, so in life. Humans bank their advances and continue to look upwards. The concept of relativity means nothing – making glory no more than an ephemeral gain. And this is especially true for those with a high fear of failure. High-FFs (as I call those with high fear of failure in my forthcoming book: What’s Stopping You?) are prone to dismiss their progress – meaning their current status, potentially gained through years of hard work and study, means nothing because the ladder stretches above them and, as we are only looking up, results in the same frustrating feelings of under achievement we felt when lower down.

And while such frustrations seem inevitable, they can weigh-down and even destroy the well-being of the High-FF. “Someday” is the goal of the permanently unhappy, says Anthony Robbins, who suggests, no matter where we are on the ladder, we appreciate our advantages and accomplishments. Certainly I would agree with this. Any step forward must be appreciated as a step in the right direction. As something to build upon. Dismiss our accomplishments – no matter how small – as nothing and that’s what they’ll become.

This even works in football. West Ham has survived the rigours of the premiership that have done for “larger clubs” such as Forest, Wednesday and Leeds. The club has expanded its ground and has even come through their own bubble/crunch in the form of a brief but crazy flirtation with the excesses of Icelandic ownership. Even if they go down, they remain a top flight club – with the most pessimistic of supporters confident of a quick if not instant return.

Given this, perhaps my boys can follow the Hammers after all – it’ll teach them how to keep going despite the setbacks.

Luck: The Winner's Curse

A repost from the old blog of posts I like.

My wife calls it the “Kelsey Effect” – the idea that as soon as I alight upon something they or it become subject to a series of unexpected mishaps. Cars break down, houses crumble, companies collapse, even whole industry sectors go into crisis. Horses, football teams, charities, even previous girlfriends have all suffered misfortune once they have won my attention. And my wife also likes to joke about the “Kelsey Cloud" that follow us on holiday, pointing out that we even had rain on our trip to the Sahara Desert.

Certainly, from a young age I have considered myself unlucky. Always in the wrong place, at the wrong time – too far from the action or ill-prepared for the events unfolding disastrously in front of me. But I don’t anymore. Not because my luck has changed, although I’m most definitely in a more fortunate place than I’ve ever been. The reason I no longer feel unlucky is because I no longer believe in the concept of luck.

In Make Your Own Luck (2005), Eileen C. Shapiro and Howard H. Stevenson focus on the idea that no one ever has enough time or facts to know they are making the right judgement calls. Indeed, nearly all decisions – including life-changing ones such as what career to pursue and who, or whether, to marry – are based on incomplete information. So when someone is noted for being lucky – i.e. that the outcomes of these decisions are usually positive – people are actually admiring what Shapiro and Stevenson call that person’s sense of “predictive intelligence”.

“The higher your predictive intelligence, the more you will be able to make your own luck,” they state.

This leads to some obvious questions, such as what is predictive intelligence and how can I get hold of some? They claim there are 12 steps to gaining predictive intelligence – what they call the “gambler’s dozen”. Indeed, their main focus is on betting (although they broaden the concept), which may well make their steps for acquiring predictive intelligence not the only 12-steps programme required by those applying their recommendations too eagerly.

And this brings me to my main point. That I now view luck as the winner’s curse. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it is in fact no more than rational thinking. For a start, in the vast majority of cases the word “luck” can be replaced with “focus” (a notion supported by Shapiro and Stevenson).

Certainly, I noticed that my luck seemed to change once I became fully focused on a particular goal, at least with respect to that goal. Opportunities would appear at the right moment and obstacles disappear – I’d come across the right person or piece of information just as I needed them or it. Yet this wasn’t luck at all. It was intense concentration. In fact it was my Reticular Activating System (RAS) – the area of the brain responsible for regulating arousal.

We all have this, although may not recognise it as such. I used to call it my “antennae” – the element of my consciousness that seems to notice the things that currently interest me. Usually this is frivolous. If I was thinking of buying a particular car, for instance, my RAS would start noticing that model whether it was parked in a side street or flashing by on the opposite motorway carriage. Or if I was wearing a particular brand of scarf, I’d notice people wearing that scarf when I’d previously ignored them. Yet even with respect to business opportunities or – more recently – ideas for blogs or additional thoughts for the book, options would present themselves and events conspire in my favour, when previously they had gone ignored or conspired against me: all thanks to my RAS.

Of course, the RAS alone cannot help us. We need to programme it correctly – most obviously by adding strong long-term objectives with calculated short and medium-term milestones. Indeed, most “unlucky” people can also blame their RAS – as can many that blame their poor fortune on innate ineptitude or even prejudice against them. Programme your RAS accordingly and it will deliver what you seek – including confirmation of inabilities or bias, and certainly including misfortunes to confirm jinx-style qualities of the “Kelsey Effect” type. Programme it positively, however, and your RAS will help turn the fortunes of even the unluckiest of people.

And that, of course, brings us to that famous quote, attributed to Gary Player, Arnold Palmer, Samuel Goldwyn and God knows who else: “Of course I believe in luck. And the harder I practice the luckier I get”, although perhaps our own version should conclude: “And the more I focus on my long term objectives, the harder my RAS works in my favour”.

Finally, it is worth noting that there are also positives to being unlucky. For me, my poor luck has meant an adulthood hating gambling, in all its forms (including that “tax on the stupid” known as the National Lottery), which I now view as an enormous blessing. Certainly, I consider those “lucky” gamblers cursed – their arrogance making them over-estimate purely mathematical probabilities. More-often-than-not gambling results in the most rapid levelling of the “lucky” and the “unlucky” known to man, a fate that I’ve joyfully avoided thanks to my “poor luck”.

Poor luck has also led me towards a hatred of “winging it” in meetings and presentations. I am consistently the best briefed and prepped, precisely because I assumed I had to make amends for my poor luck – a weakness that, over the years, has increasingly worked in my favour. In fact this adds a last consideration on luck – that of age. As a young person the cocky assurance of “the lucky” is certainly a plus when it comes to winning the girl/boy or convincing employers to give them that first break. But life is a marathon, not a sprint, and luck will inevitably go against those relying on that most ephemeral of attributes. Meanwhile, I have assumed poor luck from the start, which has prepared me well for the inevitable puddles along the way, many of which I now deftly sidestep – including those on our summer holiday.