Change Your Ways and Your Mind Will Follow

New York Times columnist David Brooks is one of my favorites. Without fail, Brooks’ weekly observations on human behavior transcend his mandate as a political and economics commentator, delivering lessons on leadership, ambition, strategy and failure relevant to anyone — especially company founders. (See my post on Brook’s recent column about behavioral breakdown among high-achievers.)

His “Pitching With Purpose” column from earlier this week has particular value. It’s about prioritizing task-oriented discipline to affect change in your work. The “work” example Brooks uses is Major League pitching, but as he notes, “[I]t’s easiest to change the mind by changing behavior, and that’s probably as true in the office as on the pitching mound.”

Brooks refers to the book “The Mental ABC’s of Pitching” by sports psychologist H.A. Dorfman, who forced behavioral regimens on his clients, including rituals and repetition, to cure pitchers who suffered from “thinking about a thousand and one things up on the mound.” Low and behold, by freeing pitchers of their so-called mental tyranny, Dorfman improved their performance, too.


We all have a success dogma that pays mental homage (or at least lip service) to discipline. But as Brooks, notes:

[Dorfman’s] assumption seems to be that you can’t just urge someone to be disciplined; you have to build a structure of behavior and attitude. Behavior shapes thought. If a player disciplines his behavior, only then he will also discipline his mind.

Happily, there are several tips in Brooks’ essay to help you “free your mind”:

1) Repetition isn’t enough. Sometimes you gotta pretend.

Just as a bike is better balanced when it is going forward, a pitcher’s mind is better balanced when it is unceasingly aggressive. If a pitcher doesn’t actually feel this way when he enters a game, Dorfman asks him to pretend. If your body impersonates an attitude long enough, then the mind begins to adopt it.

2) Re-examine the geography of your workplace.

There are two locales in a pitcher’s universe — on the mound and off the mound. Off the mound is for thinking about the past and future, on the mound is for thinking about the present. When a pitcher is on the pitching rubber, Dorfman writes, he should only think about three things: pitch selection, pitch location and the catcher’s glove, his target. If he finds himself thinking about something else, he should step off the rubber.

3) Focus more on your tasks (which you control), less on how others respond to it (which you don’t).

A pitcher shouldn’t judge himself by how the batters hit his pitches, but instead by whether he threw the pitch he wanted to throw.

4) Focusing on the task at hand will keep you from thinking about how it reflects on you.

A baseball game is a spectacle, with a thousand points of interest. But Dorfman reduces it all to a series of simple tasks. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent isn’t at the center. The task is at the center.

Dorfman’s discipline theory is rooted in his original belief that “it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master any craft — three hours of practice every day for 10 years.” Have you mastered your craft? By his measure, I’m nowhere close to mastering mine, but after reading Brooks’ column, I’m only too eager to “free my mind” and get more disciplined about it.

This post was originally posted on Found/Read; it has been excerpted and modified for GigaOM.

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