Great Leaders: The Secret That Freud Understood
What was Freud’s vital insight about groups and leaders?
Thrill-Seeking: What Parts of Your Brain Are Involved?
Why do smart people sometimes feel attracted to absurdly dangerous activities? Why do winter Olympic athletes for instance devote their lives to putting their lives in danger? Read More
Doubles Tennis Champions
Doubles tennis requires perfect partnership and mental skills as well as highest level athletic training. How did two strong individual players become world champions? Read More
Some Ways to Practice Are More Perfect Than Others
What separates world-class performers from everyone else is how they practice. Here are the keys to becoming far better at whatever you love doing. Read More
Beware: Thinking Leads to Doing
Sports psychologists teach athletes to visualize making a winning basketball free throw or an effective tennis serve before doing the action. That’s because thinking prepares you for doing. When you think about something, the odds zoom upwards that you will do just what your mind was picturing. The lesson: be careful what you think about! Read More
Lessons from Tebow and Elway
Maybe football is more than “just a game.” Maybe football reminds us about what is best about American culture. Read More
What Tennis Players Can Teach Us About Handling Performance Disappointments
Tennis players need to become masters of managing disappointment. Winning is an addictive upper. Yet by the end of every tournament, all the players but one have lost. Read More
You’re Here to Fulfill My Dreams
When he had been young, Paul easily rose to the top of the world of junior tennis by winning many junior tennis tournaments. Throughout his high school years he ranked at the top not only in his city but in the state, the region and the country. What was the price? Read More
Freud mostly is known for his brilliant insights about subconscious motivations and the individual psyche. My favorite sentence from all of Freud’s writing about various kinds of problems (link is external), however, expresses his wisdom about leadership. Groups, Freud wrote, take on the personality of the leader. Great leaders therefore need to be great people