Usain Bolt and the Obscured Ceiling

How is a procrastinator like Usain Bolt--in a bad way?

After I wrote this post about Usain Bolt on my sports blog last week, Grinnell alum Hung Pham initiated a conversation about the post in which Pham used the idea of obscuring the ceiling to describe what I was commenting on in Bolt's pre-finish line celebration in the 100-meter dash.

Obscuring the ceiling is what I think Bolt successfully did in his race: I argued that by celebrating before the finish line, Bolt let everyone imagine how much faster he might have run--and those imaginings have, in fact, credited him with being even faster than he is. If obscuring the ceiling can make perhaps the fastest human who has ever lived seem faster, it is a powerful tool indeed.

Pham's phrasing helped me articulate something that had nagged at me since I praised the power of Bolt's maneuver: I've seen this before. And after a few days, I got it. Obscuring the ceiling is what a lot of my students do--and a number of people I know in other ways, but I think of this phenomenon primarily through my teaching.

To the best of my memory, when I started teaching about 15 years ago, I thought of student motivation like this: every student is more or less self-motivated, and every student has positive and negative external forces that affect performance. That is, I imagined intrinsic factors to be neutral or positive--at worst, the absence of positive motivation. What surprised me, therefore (and I've seen it surprise other new teachers), is the extent to which students will actively sabotage themselves in all manner of small and large ways: doing work well but handing it in late, making flamboyantly bad choices about time management, and so forth. I slowly came to realize that many of my students were choosing to incur penalties consistently so that I never got a chance to judge their best work in a straightforward way. That was the point. If you never try your hardest, nobody can ever find your limits. Like Usain Bolt, you have obscured your ceiling.

When I started articulating this idea, Molly Backes, an alumna of Grinnell's education program, pointed out the similarity of my thinking to Martin Covington's failure quadrant, which, as she put it, goes something like this:

* if you try really hard and still fail, you feel the worst
* if you try really hard and fail -- but you have an excuse, like
your grandmother just died -- you feel less bad
* if you don't try at all and fail, you feel better
* if you don't try at all and you have an excuse, you feel best

Another alumna pointed me to Homer Simpson's more concise formulation: "trying is the first step toward failure."

I had brought up this subject through the words of Malcolm Gladwell, who put the point yet another way in an interview with Bill Simmons, discussing sports:

Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

I return to the subject now because the exaggerated glorification of Bolt's run has reminded me of the profound effectiveness of obscuring the ceiling. If the fastest runner in history can make most people think he is even faster by obscuring his ceiling, how tempting must it be for the rest of us to use the same method when we can protect our self-image?

We are starting to understand how to avoid the temptations of obscuring the ceiling: valuing the produce of work rather than the aura of talent, seeking the lessons of failure instead of making excuses, trying to improve even upon apparent successes.

I have only begun to recognize and struggle with the means of obscuring ceilings within myself, and I feel I have even farther to go in understanding how to help my students find, reveal, and shatter their own ceilings

Comments are most welcome. Especially critical ones!

(This post is crossposted at Underlying Logic.)

Usain Bolt and the Peacock's Tail

Jason Kottke brought to my attention this interesting analysis of how fast Usain Bolt could have run the Olympic 100-meter dash if he had not celebrated before the finish line.

This has made me think about the effects of Bolt's celebration: even though he would have run slightly faster without it, is there any doubt that he increased the percepation (and marketability) of his athletic prowess? The perception that you can win a gold medal and break a world record while devoting a little time to expressing your joy strikes me as much more valuable than the possession of a slightly better world record. (The less scientific estimates I've heard from casual viewers tend drastically to overestimate the impact of the celebration. In other words, many people now think Bolt is even faster than he actually is.) I think it's a peacock's tail phenomenon: even if a big tail is a first-order disadvantage, surviving in spite of it shows that you are one bad peacock.

But as DeSean Jackson has learned and learned again, flashing the tail is only impressive when it doesn't get you eaten.

Knocking Miss Austen down a peg

Big, big news about the origins of baseball: the first British mention of "base ball" has been pushed back more than half a century, to 1755.

What this article doesn't mention--but a lot of book-types will recognize--is that the first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary belongs to Jane Austen, from Northanger Abbey.

I'm surprised that the new reference pushes the date back so far, but finding previous usages must have been nearly inevitable. Thanks to digitization, scholars can now routinely discover usages that predate OED coinages--I found a couple myself researching my first book--and lots of people would be keenly aware of the importance of any reference to baseball. The most notable thing about the Austen usage--"it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books"--is that Austen seems to assume that every English reader will understand the term without effort.

Not to take anything away from this discover, of course--what a find!