keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rub-
ber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls—fam-
ily, health, friends and spirit—are made of glass. If you drop one of these,
they will become irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even
shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and
strive for balance in your life.Controlling stress
Of course, all human beings are prone to failure under pressure.
Racing drivers make inexplicable decisions, sports people of all
kinds suddenly lose a match they have seemed to be winning, chief
executives suddenly start making odd decisions, and talented peo-
ple of all kinds fail when they are doing things at which they have
always excelled in the past.
Malcolm Gladwell has explored two particularly useful con-
cepts here, the ideas of choking and panicking. You have already
seen how, under conditions of extreme stress, the higher-order func-
tions of the brain simply stop functioning properly. A rhino is charg-
ing at you and all thoughts of philosophy or business economics, not
surprisingly, desert you as you seek to survive.
Nevertheless, in everyday life it may be helpful to divide
these experiences into two different categories, the moment when
you “choke” and the moment when you panic. Choking is possibly
the more common of the two experiences.
Gladwell’s example of choking is of Jana Novotna’s 1993
Wimbledon tennis final against Steffi Graf. At one moment on the
point of winning the match, Novotna suddenly and inexplicably
lost her touch and let Graf overtake her and win the tournament.
Novotna, in short, choked. Perhaps because of the enormity of the
event or the presence of the crowd, she simply started to think too
much about what she was doing. Consequently, her play became
labored and too self-conscious. She lost the easy familiarity of her
strokes and became increasingly agitated.
On page 79 you explored the idea of conscious and uncon-
scious competence. The example given was of an experienced car226 Power Up Your Mind