The Pygmalion Effect
In social psychology, there’s something called The Pygmalion Effect. It’s named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who expressed so much love and affection for one of his statues that it came to life. Essentially, The Pygmalion Effect is when one’s behavior, performance, and expectations about what they can accomplish is dyed with the colors and pigments of the thoughts, feedback, and expectations of those around them. That’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
There’s Only One David Beckham
In an elimination game at the 1998 World Cup, David Beckham received a red card. England lost and Beckham became “the most hated man in England.” There were death threats, bullets mailed to him, and even an effigy of him hung from a noose outside a London pub. Beckham said, “It was so extreme. The whole country hated me. Hated me…Wherever I went, I got abused, every single day.” When he was out in public, people would spit on him and say things like, “How do you feel about letting your country down? You’re a disgrace.” Beckham’s mental health spiraled, as his wife Victoria explains: “He was depressed, absolutely clinically depressed.” “I wasn’t eating,” Beckham added. “I wasn’t sleeping. I was a mess.” When he returned to the field with Manchester United, whenever Beckham touched the ball—it didn’t matter if it was a home game or an away game—the entire stadium booed. Unsurprisingly, Beckham played some of the worst soccer of his career. The barrage of verbal abuse, the booing, the cloud of negativity that shadowed Beckham everywhere he went colored his poor performance on the field. “He wasn’t playing well at all,” Beckham’s dad explains. “And then, all of sudden…” On March 3, 1999—nine months after the World Cup red card—Beckham’s Manchester United was playing Inter Milan in the Champions League quarterfinal when all of sudden, Beckham’s dad continues, “the crowd just started chanting his name.” 40,000 fans stood on their feet and chanted, One David Beckham! There’s only one David Beckham! One David Beckham! There’s only one David Beckham! Suddenly, like Pygmalion’s statue, Beckham came to life. One commentator said he thought he could “detect more fire” in Beckham. Indeed, just after the chants, Beckham hit a perfect cross to his teammate Dwight Yorke who headed the ball into the goal to put Manchester United up 1-0. A little later, Beckham set up another Yorke goal to win 2-0. The detectable fire in Beckham’s play carried over and fueled one of the great seasons in England soccer history: Manchester United went on to become the first team ever to win the Champions League, the Premier League, and the FA Cup in the same season. Beckham’s play helped him go on to earn the England captain armband in the next World Cup.
Maybe “Saved His Life” Is Too Strong, But…Maybe Not.
In the mid-1980s, the head of Columbia Records, Rick Blackburn, attended a Harvard Business School workshop where he learned the ways in which companies used market research to try to predetermine interest in potential new products. He hired a team to conduct similar research within the music industry. The team went back to Blackburn with a report that showed that “new and contemporary” artists were preferred by potential buyers over “old and contemporary” artists. Among Columbia Records’ “old and contemporary” artists was the legendary country musician, Johnny Cash. Following the report, one of Cash biographers writes, Cash was essentially “exiled” by the label. “It was, like, completely apathy from the record company,” Cash said, “and I guess I got that way too.” In 1986, Columbia Records dropped Cash after a 28-year run. Cash would remain in exile until 1993 when the music producer Rick Rubin, after a string of success working with young artists, wanted to work with someone “great and important, but who wasn’t doing their best work. I wanted to see if I could help them do great work again.” Rubin wanted to bring Cash back to life. When the two went into the studio together, Rubin said, “my first challenge was to rebuild his confidence…to try to get him to go from all these years thinking his best stuff was behind him to thinking we could make his best albums ever.” To get a sense of Cash’s musical tastes, Rubin asked him to play covers of some of his favorite songs. In doing so, they landed on the idea of making an album entirely of solo acoustic covers, which, if it were pretested, may have been considered “old and traditional” and unlikely to generate any interest with an audience. But, Rubin said, “I wasn’t trying to look for songs that would ‘connect’ Johnny to an audience. I was trying to find songs that made sense for him and his voice…I wanted his presence to fill the record.” The two eventually picked thirteen songs for the album, American Recordings. It was a critical and commercial hit. “His years in musical exile were over,” Cash’s biographer writes. Cash’s daughter Rosanne said, “Rick came along at exactly the right time. Before Rick, Dad was depressed, discouraged. It was a powerful thing that happened between them, and Dad was completely revitalized and back to his old enthusiastic self. I think Rick saved his life. Well, maybe ‘saved his life’ is too strong, but…maybe not.”
Sometimes It Takes Another Person’s Belief
When Steven Pressfield first submitted his 800-page manuscript for his now classic epic novel Gates of Fire, his agent told him, “Steve, I can’t sell this. You have to cut three hundred pages.” Three hundred pages? “I was shell-shocked,” Pressfield writes in Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be. How could he possibly cut almost half the book? “I fell into depression and despair.” But then he got a hand-written note in the mail from Tom Guinzburg, then the president of Viking Press, one of New York’s most prestigious publishing houses. Guinzburg had read the Gates of Fire manuscript. “There is a first-rate novel in here,” the note said. “I am confident you will pull this off.” “Sometimes it takes another person to believe in us,” Pressfield writes. “That note changed my life. I taped it to the screen of my [computer] and took courage from it every day of the six months it took me to get three hundred pages out of that manuscript.”
I Feel Like I Could A Did Something
Before Michael Oher won a Super Bowl and before he was a first round NFL draft pick and before he was a unanimous All-American at Ole Miss and before he was the subject of Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side—he was a homeless kid living in a North Memphis housing project known as Hurt Village. In Hurt Village, Oher lived a few doors down from Zachary Bright. Like Oher, in high school, Bright was one of top college football prospects in the country. He had scholarship offers from every major football school. One recruiting analyst wrote, “Zachary Bright has the potential to be a big-time offensive tackle.” But Bright quit playing football before his senior year of high school. Michael Lewis writes in The Blind Side, “Surrounded by friends who told him that he’d be wasting his time to even try college, he quit.” When Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden himself traveled to Hurt Village in search of his prized recruit, Bright hid out until Bowden was gone. Bright would later say, “Guys who were around said, ‘Everyone can’t make it to the NFL.’ Telling me I wasn’t really gonna make it.” He’d shake his head in wonder at all he had thrown away and say that if he were surrounded by people who believed in him, “I feel like I could a did something.”
To Those Who Raise Us Up
In his poem Santa Filomena, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writes,
Honor to those whose words or deeds
Thus help us in our daily needs,
And by their overflow
Raise us from what is low!
To those who raise us up. To those who get us to think our best stuff is still ahead of us. To those who build (or rebuild) our confidence. To those who give us their belief. To those who bring us to (or back to) life.