⚾️ The Business Yips & 51/49

What buckling under pressure has to do with hitting publish

It’s Spring of 1999, and I’m a sophomore in high school, standing at second base.

My right hand is balled into a fist, nervously grinding back-and-forth along the smooth interior of the black leather Wilson glove on my left.

My cleats are light on the infield dirt as I lean my weight into my toes, knees deeply bent, eyes squinting ahead in focus. I sway back and forth in nervous anticipation.

My nerves climb higher as I scan the bases: runners on first and third. Two outs.

I suck in my breath and say to myself, I’ve got this, I’ve got this.

But also: Please don’t hit it to me. Please don’t hit it to me.

The second thought threatens to drown out the first, in spite of what our coach taught us about visualizing every detail of successful contact with the ball.

What athlete asks not to have a chance to make a game-winning play?

This one.

The pitcher starts her wind-up, which culminates with a twisting movement of her entire body, her left glove loudly slapping her thigh as her right arm releases a gnarly underhand pitch toward home plate.

Ball speeds ahead, right down the strike zone.

Batter makes contact.

Ball bounces straight toward me in a tricky-but-grabbable grounder.

Heart pounds out of my chest, adrenaline surges.

I've fielded more erratic balls than this—I used to be a catcher.

This is your moment, get it right. Don’t let the team down.

Easy, peasy: Catch the ball, throw it to first. Celebrate.

Everyone is watching me now, relying on me to make the play.

“This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”
—Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

I had The Yips in high school.

But I didn’t know that, or what they were, until a month ago, when I stumbled upon a June New Yorker profile of baseball player Daniel Bard.

Reading Lousia Thomas’s article whooshed me back in time. The din of the coffee shop where I sat reading it receded into the background as I entered a vortex-like state of fascination, followed by revelation.

Suddenly I was back at second base again, high school softball days rushing back.

Those days on the field were ones I have mostly blocked out.

I always loved the sound of bats cracking and the smell of freshly cut grass. But I started to prefer watching baseball to the nauseating feeling of playing it.

You see, I was full of potential.*

*To be fair, I was full of potential for what was known to be one of the worst teams in our high school district, despite our academic standing as one of the best public schools in the country.

I made the Varsity softball team as the only freshman to do so, and stayed there all four years of high school. In spite of myself.

Even though we had a different coach every year, the coaches always liked what they saw (at first): I was athletic with solid hand-eye coordination and a very strong arm, I showed up to practice on time, had a positive attitude, and helped however I could.

There was just one problem.

I buckled under pressure. Often. So often that it’s embarrassing for me to even tell you about it now—I have never talked to anyone about it before this moment.

Only now do I realize that this is something I kept buried for the last twenty-five years, never resurfacing this issue because I didn’t know there was a name for it, or that anyone experienced it other than me.

Back to those two outs, two runners on base in ‘99.

This is your moment, get it right. Don’t let the team down.

Easy, peasy: Catch the ball, throw it to first. Celebrate.

I field the ball. Check.

I wind back for an easy toss to first base, twenty feet give-or-take, something I’ve done hundreds of times, if not thousands.

I focus in on my teammate’s outstretched arm and glove, back foot glued to first base.

All we need to do is beat the runner. Easy.

Instead, I throw the ball so far over her head that she leaps into the air and still can’t pull it down from the sky. The softball clamors loudly into the other team’s dugout.

I could cry.

The batter jogs through the base, as the winning runner on third claims home.

That run cinches their win. We don’t even need to finish the inning.

I hang my head in disgust. Self-disgust.

The adrenaline curdles into hot shame as humiliation washes over me. I let everyone down. For no good reason, which makes it so much worse.

When push came to shove, when ball needed to hit glove, when bases were loaded, I flubbed. Many times.

While playing catcher in eight grade, during practices I could easily throw from behind home plate into the outfield.

Coaches were delighted by this!

But game time was different.

Sometimes as catcher I would miss the mound altogether on an easy return of the pitch, advancing runners for no good reason.

The pitcher was always perplexed. They were doing the hard work of throwing curves and drops and slides into the narrow window of the strike zone, all while trying not to hit the batter.

All I had to do was simply return the ball, like we did hundreds of times during warm-ups. But every fifth, or tenth, or sometimes fifteenth return, I screwed it up, as if I had never held a softball before.

This must have infuriated everyone, especially because I had so much potential.

Pretty soon, the coaches re-assigned me to low-risk second base.

Even that didn’t help. Too many times to count, I would panic under pressure (owing in part to a surge of excess adrenaline) and field an easy grounder, only to throw it over the baseman’s head as I described above, handing the batter first base on a silver faux-pas platter. I would then tsk-tsk myself while apologizing to my team as I circled back to my station.

Every season, the new coach stopped trusting me, and I stopped trusting myself.

I admired the pitchers, the shortstops, and the all-star left-fielders who didn’t seem to have this problem. When the bases were loaded, when the pressure was on, when there were two strikes and two outs, they rose to the occasion.

Why couldn’t I?

As I share in Chapter 3 of Free Time, in sports, unforced errors are when the player makes a careless mistake because of nerves or lack of skill, not due to their opponent’s skill or efforts.

Later, in the penultimate chapter (26) I share a phenomenon my friend and I call botching the basics:

This company caught a case of botching the basics, failing to deliver the baseline minimum expected customer experience, cementing it as a deal-breaker for us to refer future clients. Their team members are probably not any happier. With many missed documentation opportunities, it is likely they too are struggling with overwhelm, inefficiency, and festering frustration.

Losing a game is one thing. Losing a game because of botching the basics to no one’s fault but your own, is a horrible feeling.

That sense of self-defeat has a bitter taste, paired with pangs of regret for letting others down.

Apparently, I am not the only one who had this problem—it originated in golf, and traces back to the highest levels of sports, as we’ve seen with Simone Biles pulling out of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics because of “The Twisties.” Many athletes don’t advance to professional levels in the first place because they are afflicted with this issue.

Daniel Bard was twenty-four years old, newly in love, and had just been called up to the Major Leagues to play for the Boston Red Sox.

His arm was lightning fast. But he kept botching the basics.

Soon he was demoted to Triple-A, then Double-A, before careening into Single-A, even getting booed at a game as “his once smooth delivery disintegrated.”

That was when Bard Googled "the yips."¹ He had known what was happening for a while—everyone did. But everyone, including him, had avoided saying it out loud.

. . . “Overthinking” is the simple way to put it: the brain's prefrontal cortex trips up the sensory cortex and the motor cortex. In other cases, the mind can essentially go blank. Players usually snap out of it, the way Bard had years before. But the brain can get stuck in certain patterns, and the yips can take over in a way that no one fully understands.

—The New Yorker’s Comebacker

Overthinking!

Reading this was a revelation! Capital R, capital exclamation!

A New York Times article by David Waldstein followed a month-and-a-half later describing the same phenomenon in a profile of Canney Linnehan, a former pitcher now coaching athletes through this issue (emphasis mine):

A standout pitcher at Northwestern in the 2000s, Linnehan had lost the ability to make routine throws to bases. She could fire pinpoint unhittable pitches, and she crafted an illustrious college career, including an appearance in the N.C.A.A. Division I final. But in four years, she never made a single successful overhand throw to a base.

“So many nights I cried myself to sleep,” Linnehan said.

The term yips was popularized by golfer Tommy Armour, a strange phenomenon that made its way further into public consciousness after pro baseball player Steve Blass experienced a “sudden and inexplicable loss of control” in 1972, struggling to throw from second to first base (like me), committing 24 errors in the first half of the season.

Others call it Sasseritis, after a catcher named Mackey Sasser who struggled with simply tossing the ball back to the pitcher—also like me.

🤔 Funny, that the two men whose names became synonymous with this condition in baseball were a catcher and a second baseman, the same positions I struggled with. If only I had known then what I know now.

I always joked that if I had achieved the (now-debunked) mastery rule of thumb by practicing 10,000 hours of something, it would be neurosis.

From a 2014 blog post that I republished on Medium, I noted my strong candidacy for President of the Mental Gymnastics Club:

Aha! I know what I’ve done for 10,000 hours: driven myself crazy.

A sensitive soul, my mind has churned, worried, analyzed, problem-solved, chewed, mulled over, replayed, pined and fantasized for hours upon hours, day after day.

It started when I was a moody 12-year-old in the throes of hormonal misery. Though it has let up at times, this automatic (often unwelcome) fervor for analysis tends to be the underpinning of my imperative to create, learn, solve, and share.

In hindsight, I can see why I have dedicated my life to trying to understand the human condition and its more cheerful cousin, human potential. For me, creative edge and being of service comes from dancing with demons then finding my way back to the light.

Where did Bard’s neurosis come from?

From good intentions that yielded disastrous results.

When pro scouts saw how much potential he had as a high-schooler, they started correcting him on his unconventional pitching technique. Thomas writes:

He took the coaches’ advice eagerly, but it had a negative effect: his velocity dropped; his command disappeared. Thinking about his motion disrupted his muscle memory, and when he made mistakes self-doubt crept in. He thought about the opportunity he was blowing, and about how much money he’d been given.

Anxiety tenses the body—attempting to control a motion can limit the degrees of freedom in a joint. The tightness made Bard pitch worse, which aggravated his anxiety, setting off a negative-feedback loop.

I can’t help but translate this to running a business.

Self-employment promises freedom and autonomy. But the anxiety can eat you alive if you let it.

If you let it.

You have to decide what game you’re playing, and by whose rules.

Any business owner is eventually in the game of making a profit: otherwise, there would be no point, and certainly no business. Heart-Based Business owners also want to make an impact for the greater good, including themselves, their families, their team members, and their clients.

Business-building can be an incredible vehicle for personal growth.

But if you start taking too much advice from too many people, especially ones playing status games that aren’t a fit for your goals (and personality and mental health), you might just come down with The Business Yips.*

*Yes, I just made that up.

The Business (or Creative) Yips are a self-fulfilling doom loop, whereby the stress, burnout, compare-and-despair, and over-thinking compounds until you can no longer stand serving clients or your community, and the only way out is to shutter your business—leaving behind everything that inspired you to start it in the first place.

In any sport, business or otherwise, the yips are not always correlated with skill. Even sports psychologists don’t have a definitive answer on how to fix them.

It seems to be more a matter of pulling back from the overthinking brink.

I’m much better at personalization than precision. I’m not great in competition. As I’ve said before, I don’t do well trying to be the best, so I only strive to express myself best.

Thankfully I have been able to harness my adrenaline effectively when speaking in front of large audiences, though this is something I have worked very deliberately on.

To this day, I’ll often have shaky hands or legs when I step on stage, but I breathe through them or clench my fists a few times. I know now that I need to give my excess adrenaline something to do, so it can work its way through my body, and I can continue with one of the activities I know I was put on this planet to do.

From the New York Times piece (emphasis mine):

For many sufferers, extra practice does not help. For Canney Linnehan and others, the problem never even appeared in practice — only in games.

. . . After speaking with Linnehan, [Wood] came to recognize that playing softball is something she does, not who she is. That eased the pressure.

Running a business is something we do, not who we are.

Thomas closes her New Yorker profile with a poignant reminder (emphasis mine):

“Success isn’t the same thing as dominance. The point has never been to blow guys away with hundred-m.p.h. fastballs, as much fun as that is.
It’s always been to try to win with whatever you’ve got.”

That’s just it.

We don’t all need to be the MVP

Sometimes we need to Ignore the Odds. Sometimes we need to exit The Highway to Winning & Being the Best.

None of my three books have achieved the elusive author goal of “making the list,” itself a precision-based target. None have debuted on the NYT or WSJ or USA Today’s lists of top-ranked sellers, though they have each sold more than 99% of published books over time.

Free Time has experienced relatively modest sales so far compared to my two others, but it cleaned up with six business book awards for content and design.

I was never the Most Valuable Player of the softball team. I scoff at the mere mention of it, given my miserable record of unforced errors.

But I did get the Coach’s Award, every year, all four years, from four different coaches. (Our team was so bad it yielded frequent leadership turnover. Where was Ted Lasso when we needed him?!)

The Coach’s Award offered a way to recognize their right-hand player, the one who showed up early and stayed late, the one helped out eagerly, who put in consistent effort, who sprinted across the field from point A to point B at practices, and who rallied and motivated fellow team members.

It was not for the most talented infielder, the fastest runner, the hitter with the best batting average or on-base percentage, or the most crucial player who single-handedly carried the team to the most wins.

It was a participation trophy of sorts, to recognize the one who showed up.

That’s all I could ever do consistently: show up.

I was never the best, and honestly? I gave up trying long ago.

Now I know why: trying to be the best gives me The Yips.

Welcome to The Awkward Show.™

I joke that even after 18 years of writing online, nine years of podcasting and 500+ episodes, every single one is still a candidate for The Awkward Show.™

I’m awkward with my guests before we hit record. I’m awkward with questions and pauses in the middle. Then, after we hang up, I cycle back through everything I flubbed and could have done better or differently. For days, sometimes weeks.

My friend Jay Acunzo says, “Don’t be the best, be their favorite.”

I have never been the number one show in my category—or any category. I’m lucky when I crack the charts of the top 200 at all.²

But I hit publish anyway.

So far, I have hit publish for the podcasts 542 times.

And that doesn’t include the hundreds of times I have shown up (awkwardly) as a guest, cringing afterward at how I could have expressed myself better, or at how stupid my hair—or my outfit or the background or the lighting—looked on video.³

As I told one of my closest friendtors, Jonathan Fields, in one of the first big reveals of this secret Substack for his wonderful SPARKED podcast, I remind myself often about my 51/49 ratio.

51/49 is my own antidote to inexplicable nerves and overthinking:

• 49% fear and anxiety

• 51% take one small step forward

I just need to tip the scale toward action by two percent. I need to soften my focus around precise measures of success in order to see the surrounding constellation.⁴

51/49.

Easy peasy: Record or write, edit, then schedule. Celebrate.

Worried about what people will think? How I might put my foot into my mouth or disappoint others or myself? Afraid that this post is way longer than it should be and that you won’t even make it this far?

51/49.

That’s the only way I know out of the muck.

I show up.

That’s about what I can do, even with The Yips.

❤️

1. The NYT defines the yips as follows: “In technical terms, the yips is the inability to perform a previously learned movement, often, but not always, because of a mental inhibitor. The problem manifests in embarrassing public fashion that can ruin careers.”

It can start when athletes are young: “Some high school, college, and even younger softball and baseball players and athletes in other sports can also develop the yips, where the easiest, most familiar plays become virtually impossible to execute.”

As for how many are afflicted? “The number of players with the yips is hard to discern because many deal with it at amateur levels and in relative anonymity and silence.”

2. 🌹One wonderful listener (you know who you are, and I am so grateful for you!) let me know that in Spotify’s annual Wrapped animated summary, Free Time showed up as her favorite. As I share in episode 206, in taking a page out of The Little Prince: Your business rose is special because it’s yours, not because it needs to be the best, the biggest, or the most profitable.

3. Excuse me, but WHY ARE SO MANY PODCASTS MOVING TO VIDEO NOW?! They are ruining what is joyful about this medium!!! #PersonalityForPodcasting

4. My dad often reminds me about this phenomenon when stargazing, called averted vision. From Happiness.com’s article on Gazing at the Stars to Replace Anxiety with Wonder:

“Turn off all the lights you can, allow your eyes time to adjust to the darkness, then scan the skies for a particular spot or star to concentrate on. Soften your gaze and look slightly away from your target to see it more clearly (this is called averted vision and works because the cells in the sides of our eyes process low light better than the ones in the centre of your eye).