The Winner’s Effect
The Amplified Impact Podcast
December 27th, 2023
If you’re tuning in on YouTube, you might notice a change in scenery.
I’m coming at you from the Invictus headquarters today, giving you this episode from our studio.
So, the day after Christmas, I stumbled upon a study that shook things up a bit.
It involved mice in a rather peculiar experiment…I’ll spare the ethical debate but share how the outcome relates to success in surprising ways.
You know how they say the ‘rich keep getting richer’?
Well, it turns out there’s something called the ‘winner’s effect,’ where those who win tend to keep winning.
But winning isn’t always about major leaps… sometimes it’s about those peewee league victories too.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“I think the compounding interest of 1% gains every single day, I think that’s the more likely path that will lead you to your desired result.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Yo, what’s up, guys? Welcome back to the podcast. If you’re watching on the YouTube channel, you’ll notice I am in a slightly different environment today. This is actually, I’m in the Invictus headquarters. I’m recording in the podcast studio that we use to record our real estate podcast called multifamily investing, made simple. So if you’ve never watched that podcast, you’ve never seen me in this room. You might be like, where is Anthony? Where in the world is Waldo now? But that’s where I am is in the Invictus headquarters shooting this for you guys. It’s the day after Christmas, and I wanted to share something with you, which I found really interesting. I stumbled on a study that kind of blew my mind a little bit, honestly.
So, researchers are weird, and they like to do weird things with mice. And this is one of the weirder things that I have seen researchers do with mice. And what they did was they put two mice, two mouses, two nieces, into a cage, and they drugged one, and then they had the two mice fight. So they somehow instigated a fight between them. And so the mouse that was drugged was drugged so that he would really have no chance of winning. Like, they were severely handicapping him so that he would just get his little. His little mouse took us beat down, and sure enough, the other mouse kicked his ass. Now, this is a really weird study, if you really stop and think about it.
I’m not even sure from an animal rights cruelty perspective, like, how this ever kind of passed any kind of muster. This is up there with, like, cock fighting. I don’t know why we’re okay with mice fighting each other, but I digress. Ethical concerns aside, the results of the study are interesting. Not so much that the drugged mouse got his butt kicked, but the next day, they had the mice fight again, and this time, they didn’t drug any mice. It was now a level playing field. And the interesting result is that the mouse that was drugged that lost the day before continued to lose. That is the other mouse, the mouse that had his confidence up because he kicked the ass out of this other mouse.
He just continued to win and continued to dominate, regardless of the fact that now they were both equal playing fields. And you would expect from a statistical anomalies perspective that you would have the second mouse occasionally winning in some trials. But over and over and over again, that first mouse, the one that was not drugged, the winner, continued to win. And it’s a really interesting effect that’s called the winner’s effect. And we observe it in all different domains of life, where people who are succeeding, they tend to continue to succeed. So, like, the guys who win the championship, they go on to win the next championship and the next one after that. And we have a phrase for this, which is the rich keep getting richer. And you might look at that, you might think, oh, that’s because the rich are rigging the game and all that.
And there might be some truth to that of, like, crony capitalism, for sure. But underlying that idea of the rich get richer or that the winners keep winning is something that’s just deeply ingrained in human psychology, which is that when you win, when you start stacking wins, you gain confidence. And the confidence then becomes this precursor to more success, because when you feel confident, you perform differently, you perform better, which then increases your likelihood of achieving the desired result, which, again, creates this virtuous cycle, because if you win, it increases your confidence, which makes you more likely to win, which then increases your confidence. And it’s this virtuous cycle that keeps feeding into itself, whereas the reverse is also true. There is also a negative feedback loop where you lose, and then you lose confidence, which then affects how you perform the next time, which makes it more likely that you lose, which only reinforces the fact that you shouldn’t be confident. Right? And you can get into these negative spirals as well. And so, understanding just how important that momentum is on our path to success, I think, can make it so that we can design our lives so that we have the highest likelihood of achieving success, not by the magnitude of the activities we’re performing, but just the quantity. What I mean by this is that it’s better to stack 100 small wins than go for the one massive win.
And you hear people talk all the time about, like, ten x and massive action and all that stuff. I don’t think that’s the way to find success in life. I think the compounding interest of 1% gains every single day, I think that’s the more likely path that will lead you to your desired result. And so we need to think about our lives in terms of what are the small victories that I can start stacking to prove that I am a winner, that you can start reinforcing that confidence in yourself and create positive inertia in the direction that you’re trying to go. And so I like to define what winning my day looks like and set the bar really low and make it so that it’s very easy for me to achieve victory. Now, you might look at that and be like, well that’s lame. You’re winning in the peewee leagues. But I’m a fan of winning in the peewees rather than getting my butt smashed in the professional leagues where now I’m just on a downward cycle and I feel terrible about myself.
So I think you need to create a structure in your life for your day to say this is what winning looks like and all sorts of things can be wins. Like if you get out of bed when you said you would, that’s a win. If you worked out for 30 minutes, that was a win. If you went for a walk like you said you would, that can be a win. So like, stacking evidence that you are a winner will pay massive dividends. So wanted to share that with you guys. Hopefully that brings you a little bit of value. And as always, thank you so much for being here.
I’ll catch you in the next episode, but until then, stay happy. Focus my friend.
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