Competition, pressure and competence

"Good under pressure" vs "buckles under pressure" is a false binary. It is more a factor of the kind of pressures you put on yourself. If you are good at something, pressure makes you do better at it!

Recently I read a rather fascinating post by Ian Leslie (among other things, author of John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs (about the Beatles).

How To Choose Your Nemesis

In this, Leslie writes about some research on what kinds of competitors make you do better versus what make you do worse. The whole piece is great but this paragraph caught my special attention:

High-skilled competitors performed better when a rival was present, but rivalry made low-skilled coders worse. The reason seems to be a difference in attitude. High-skilled coders tend to be confident. Rivalry pumps them up. Low-skilled coders are more focused on preventing a loss. Rivalry makes them overly cautious. They choke. Separately, the researchers found that anyone close to losing status performs worse against a rival, regardless of skill level, because they worry about demotion.

This is based on some recent research done on the TopCoder platform, where programmers face off with each other. Riffing off this, Leslie talks about what kind of rivals (“nemeses”, as in the title) can help you actually up your game. Actually I need to share the next paragraph as well:

So if you’re going to engage in rivalry with someone, it helps if you’re confident in your abilities and not overly anxious about a loss of status. If that holds, your rival will challenge and stretch you rather than petrify you. I can think of another condition for an ideal rivalry, too - that your competitor has something you lack and that you want. I don’t mean a material possession, but a quality or skill. When a rivalry involves some exchange of talents, it becomes non-zero-sum. Both partners gain and so does the world.

Basically - if you want to get into a rivalry, get into a rivalry on something you are good at! If you are not good at something, and have a rival in that, the rivalry will only make you perform worse.

The movies and books have it all wrong - they all play up the underdog for that makes for a good story (“spectacularness bias”, as I call it). However, in reality the underdog seldom wins (that too happens when the “overdog” is afraid of losing status and plays conservatively and loses to an occasionally inspired underdog). You don’t want to be the underdog. Even if you are slightly worse off from your rival (not a bad thing, actually), on an absolute scale you need to be good.

Under Pressure

While this article quoted above is about rivalry, I’m thinking that the same applies to pressure as well.

Normally, you end up forming binaries of people in terms of “works well under pressure” versus “buckles under pressure”. However, I’m not sure how good this binary is. Thinking about myself, there are certain kinds of pressure that I work well under, but certain other kinds of pressure that I easily buckle under.

And thinking in the context of this article on rivalry - the same pattern holds. Put me under pressure in terms of something that I’m inherently good at, and I’ll end up doing fairly well in it. The pressure will surely push me and inspire me to do better. I see the pressure as a challenge, and try to hyperfocus on the thing that needs to be done, and end up doing a fairly good job of it.

On the other hand, if you put me under pressure in something I’m not good at - I find myself buckling. First of all I’m clueless on what to do, and then add the pressure and I end up making some stupid choices, and end up worse off.

Now, I know I’m generalising based on one data point, but I wonder if it works this way for everyone? That pressure has a positive impact iff you are already good at the stuff?

And in terms of whether you work well under pressure or not - it is simply a matter of what kind of pressure you have experienced? If you consistently make choices where you end up under pressure on things you are not good at, you will come to assume that you work poorly under pressure. Similarly with being good under pressure.

A special case?

So I wonder if the premise of Leslie’s blogpost on rivalry is just a special case of pressure? Rivalry creates pressure. And rivalry with a “nemesis” (as he calls it) is just one kind of pressure. And so, if you engage in a rivalry (i.e. put yourself under pressure), it pushes your performance to the extremes - if you were anyway going to do well, you do better; and if you were going to do badly, you do worse.

Putting it mathematically, pressure (and rivalry) pushes your performance average to the extremes.