I agree that win-first and chill-first personalities often clash, but there are two (implicit?) points that I… I wouldn’t say I disagree with them, but I am unsure of them, or maybe bearish about them.
1) That win-first and chill-first personalities can’t mesh.
I think that they can. For example, imagine if Jimmy Butler was the “keep my head down and work hard” type instead of the “in your face work hard” type. The later can be thought of as a type A personality, and the former a type B personality. I think the lesson here is a more general one of type A personalities clashing, not specific to win-first vs. chill-first.
Another lesson might be that when working in groups, it’s important to be adaptable. Ask yourself, “What mindset would best help my group achieve it’s task (my team win a championship)?” Maybe the answer to that is to get all Michael Jordan in-your-face-intense. But it’s also possible that the answer is to chill and fit in.
2) That win-first is optimal (in the NBA and similar situations).
They certainly make for a great narrative, but there are also counter-examples (sort of).
If you look at players who’s careers took a sharp downward turn and never panned out, burnout, stress and anxiety are themes that keep coming up. To use an extreme example, Andrei Kirilenko ended up getting addicted to WoW. Kevin Love talked about how anxiety and expectations affected his game (and more recently Paul George). Then there’s a bunch of examples of careers being killed by drugs. I suspect that the win-first pedal-to-the-floor mindset contributes to all of this and that putting your pedal to the floor a) can only be taken so far and b) requires a certain psychological skillset as a prerequisite (something I’ve personally screwed up, have been meaning to write about, and is one of the first things I’d tell my past self).
Sports and exercise science have been showing us more and more how important rest and recovery are. This isn’t necessarily incompatible with win-first, but in practice I think a lot of win-first types tend to wave their hands at it. Same story in the intellectual world.
Greg Popovich, one of the best coaches of all time, is famous for his team dinners. He knows when to focus on basketball, and when to take his foot off the pedal. “‘Hey, we’re together’ Popovich tells his troops after the 103-81 loss. ‘Let’s eat. That’s basketball. … We’ll get back to work tomorrow.’ The Spurs close out the series in the next game.” I could imagine a win-first type insisting that “chilling” over dinner like this is wrong and instead calling everyone to the gym.
I guess my point isn’t against win-first — to be a world class performer I think you do have to hit that gear sometimes — it’s just that there are caveats and that it has to be executed properly.
I agree that win-first and chill-first personalities often clash
I suspect it’s not right to call them personalities: personally I know that I can be either win-first or chill-first, depending on what the situation is and what my priorities are.
I’d expect any non-seriously-depressed person to be win-first with regard to some issue that matters a lot to them, and conversely, being win-first on something forces you to be chill-first on something else, since you can’t put 100% effort into everything you do.
[Epistemic status: anecdata and perspective generation]
I think it’s not right in the general case, but it may be more right than not as an approximation here, since what’s described might be indicative of defaults regarding intensity. In my experience, default intensities do feel roughly bimodal among my peers, and in fact one of my current life strategy issues is to figure out how not to fall too far into line with the less-intense subset that currently dominate my social graph.
Another read on that might be that even when the resultant intensities differ widely between activities and situations and may overlap or cross over between a “win-first” individual and a “chill-first” individual, there’s still an underlying difference in something like focus, salience, or differential habituation to up-regulation versus down-regulation of intensity.
I agree that win-first and chill-first personalities often clash, but there are two (implicit?) points that I… I wouldn’t say I disagree with them, but I am unsure of them, or maybe bearish about them.
1) That win-first and chill-first personalities can’t mesh.
I think that they can. For example, imagine if Jimmy Butler was the “keep my head down and work hard” type instead of the “in your face work hard” type. The later can be thought of as a type A personality, and the former a type B personality. I think the lesson here is a more general one of type A personalities clashing, not specific to win-first vs. chill-first.
Another lesson might be that when working in groups, it’s important to be adaptable. Ask yourself, “What mindset would best help my group achieve it’s task (my team win a championship)?” Maybe the answer to that is to get all Michael Jordan in-your-face-intense. But it’s also possible that the answer is to chill and fit in.
2) That win-first is optimal (in the NBA and similar situations).
They certainly make for a great narrative, but there are also counter-examples (sort of).
If you look at players who’s careers took a sharp downward turn and never panned out, burnout, stress and anxiety are themes that keep coming up. To use an extreme example, Andrei Kirilenko ended up getting addicted to WoW. Kevin Love talked about how anxiety and expectations affected his game (and more recently Paul George). Then there’s a bunch of examples of careers being killed by drugs. I suspect that the win-first pedal-to-the-floor mindset contributes to all of this and that putting your pedal to the floor a) can only be taken so far and b) requires a certain psychological skillset as a prerequisite (something I’ve personally screwed up, have been meaning to write about, and is one of the first things I’d tell my past self).
Sports and exercise science have been showing us more and more how important rest and recovery are. This isn’t necessarily incompatible with win-first, but in practice I think a lot of win-first types tend to wave their hands at it. Same story in the intellectual world.
Greg Popovich, one of the best coaches of all time, is famous for his team dinners. He knows when to focus on basketball, and when to take his foot off the pedal. “‘Hey, we’re together’ Popovich tells his troops after the 103-81 loss. ‘Let’s eat. That’s basketball. … We’ll get back to work tomorrow.’ The Spurs close out the series in the next game.” I could imagine a win-first type insisting that “chilling” over dinner like this is wrong and instead calling everyone to the gym.
I guess my point isn’t against win-first — to be a world class performer I think you do have to hit that gear sometimes — it’s just that there are caveats and that it has to be executed properly.
I suspect it’s not right to call them personalities: personally I know that I can be either win-first or chill-first, depending on what the situation is and what my priorities are.
I’d expect any non-seriously-depressed person to be win-first with regard to some issue that matters a lot to them, and conversely, being win-first on something forces you to be chill-first on something else, since you can’t put 100% effort into everything you do.
[Epistemic status: anecdata and perspective generation]
I think it’s not right in the general case, but it may be more right than not as an approximation here, since what’s described might be indicative of defaults regarding intensity. In my experience, default intensities do feel roughly bimodal among my peers, and in fact one of my current life strategy issues is to figure out how not to fall too far into line with the less-intense subset that currently dominate my social graph.
Another read on that might be that even when the resultant intensities differ widely between activities and situations and may overlap or cross over between a “win-first” individual and a “chill-first” individual, there’s still an underlying difference in something like focus, salience, or differential habituation to up-regulation versus down-regulation of intensity.