To win any game you must control momentum. You must establish and maintain a competitive advantage over your competition. When the most successful executives find their competitive advantage it becomes the motivation to push harder and harder still. The scent of success enhances their competitive instinct and allows them to ignore the warnings signs — their body can’t keep up with their will to win.

For some, success brings a time to slow down and enjoy the good things in life. For the champions, success enhances the aggressive pursuit of a new goal.

Winning is not enough. The sports dynasty’s like the All Blacks don’t just win, they ruthlessly stomp on the throat of their opposition.

Steve Hansen, the All Blacks coach, when describing Saturday nights first test said that “the first 50 minutes was probably as good rugby as you will see…we seized the momentum right from the get-go”

The All Blacks didn’t just ‘get ahead’. One try quickly brought two, three and then four. The scent of success saw an increase the in the aggression and intensity of their attack. The Wallabies were bulldozed. With over 30 minutes left in the test, the All Blacks had recorded the highest-ever score in a test against Australia.

With the game won and nothing left to achieve they let their opposition breathe.

Steve Waugh, while captain of the Australian cricket team, created a culture where letting a beaten team breathe was unacceptable. Waugh’s teammate, David Boon shares, ‘he helped produce a very talented group of players, to take up his own personal attitude, one of relentlessness.”

We idolise the achievements of these sporting dynasties and the way in which they compete. Relentlessness is something that executives take into the business world, but the world of elite sport and business are very different.

The athlete has the luxury of walking off the competitive field at the final bell.

The reality is top-tier athletes have vastly more time to train and prepare than executives. Athletes spend the majority of their time training and comparatively little time competing.

Executives do the opposite. They compete and strive for top performance for 60+ hours per week, which leaves precious little time for training or preparation.

“There is a huge level of expectation on our executives that isn’t necessarily sustainable. Not everybody can cope because not everybody has that level of resilience.”
- Mina Ames, Managing Director, Russell Reynolds Associates
The executive that tastes success early is particularly vulnerable.

The momentum that is created by success motivates the executive to aggressively pursue higher and higher levels of achievement. Sacrifice is what it takes to win. It’s the essence of winning, and winning is not optional.

Like the athlete, the executive must win.

The All Blacks sacrifice self-preservation for the win. Executives don’t just put their bodies on the line; they sacrifice their whole life to get the win.

A champion executive will give everything to the job and can live a life that is — ALL ON at work and ALL OFF at home. They are too tired and in too much pain. Their brain is too fatigued to make any decisions that aren’t related to their work.

So they do nothing. They look for times where they can shut down entirely: a Saturday spent on the couch watching sports, a retreat into an empty room during a family gathering, or an hour in the bedroom (hiding from the kids while they watch TV).

What is depressing is that executives crave these moments, yet they provide so little in return. The respite is only momentary. The retreat from responsibility never seems to have done what you hoped it would.

This is true whether you take an hour off or a week. While the executive envisages coming back recharged and refreshed, the reality is that they never feel energised or rested. More often than not, the onslaught of emails and other demands that greet them the moment they return to the office makes them regret taking the time off at all.

I encourage executives to think about success more broadly. I want executives to use their competitive instincts to win at home and in the boardroom. The energy that they devote to their colleagues they also must devote to their health and their lives outside of work.

What they get in return is more energy, love, and fulfilment.

If a gorilla walked into the room would you see it? Maybe. Two Nobel prize-winning psychologists will say you have a 50% chance of missing it. The Invisible Gorilla is an experiment that shows how you can miss what’s in the food you eat and the declining health of the people you love.

This morning a friend asked me for help. She had just taken up exercise but the results haven’t followed. Grabbing her stomach she tells me that it just won’t budge.

I suggest that exercise is not enough; it will take more than that. My friend declares, “I have been cutting down on carbs” with gusto. But moments later she confesses that yesterday she had three pieces of pizza for lunch by accident.

Optimistically, my friend tells me that today is a new day; she has a nut bar for breakfast. When I sit down at my desk I google the variety of ‘nut bar’ she was holding and find that for every 33g bar it contains 16g of carbs. Her breakfast is 50% carbs.

Over the weekend I was speaking to another friend who asks me if body weight really is as big a problem as I talk about. My friend explains “in my office of 70 people there isn’t one person who is overweight…unless you are being really strict and saying anyone over a BMI of 25.”

The conversation continues and the same friend then tells me that actually, her brother has battled obesity for much of his life.

I tell these stories because I hear them all the time.

The person who says they ‘never’ eat something but that very thing bypasses their eyes into their mouth.
The person who is distracted by the marketing of the product, unknowingly eating something they know isn’t beneficial.
The person who has normalised being overweight.
The person who doesn’t see the problem.
An Uber driver picked me up last week that was easily over 150kg and about to have gastric banding surgery. The majority of our journey was spent talking about how he knows how to control his diet.

I kept my mouth shut.

How could they miss something right before their eyes?

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris won the Ig Nobel Prize for ‘achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think’ for their experiment that inspired the Invisible Gorilla.

You can use the Invisible Gorilla experiment on your friends with this video. Before you press play to instruct them to watch the three people in white shirts and three people in black shirts pass the basketballs around. The aim of the experiment, to count the number of passes made by the people in white shirts.

At a point during the film, a gorilla strolls in the middle of the action, faces the camera, thumps its chest and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen.

Would you see the gorilla?

Yes…of course! Simons and Chabris found in thousands of trials at Harvard University that half the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was invisible.

“This form of invisibility depends not on the limits of the eye, but on the limits of the mind. We consciously see only a small subset of our visual world, and when our attention is focused on one thing, we fail to notice the other, unexpected things around us — including those we might not want to see.”
 — Daniel Simons

That is the point. Sometimes we just don’t want to see what we are eating or how bad the problem really is.

This reveals an important truth: our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see the world and ourselves as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.