I interviewed Arsène Wenger only once, in 2009, and his obsessiveness was as unmistakable as the Gallic accent I had heard so often on television. His eyes didn’t waver in their intensity, piercing and unsentimental, as he talked about his 5am starts, his manic devotion to the details of training and nutrition and the countless hours he spent watching matches from around the world, keen to sign another diamond in the rough.
A few years later I was invited to London Colney — the training ground secured by Arsenal in 1999, which sits just inside the northern perimeter of the M25 — to give a couple of talks to the first team.
On both occasions Wenger sat in the front row, just to my left, gazing intently. Afterwards I tried to engage him in small talk, but he was uncomfortable, restless, and silence descended like a curtain between us.
“His mind is on Saturday,” one of his medical staff told me as we sat down to lunch and noticed Wenger scribbling notes down. “He never stops thinking about the next game.” Sport and obsession, you may think, go hand in hand, particularly when reading Wenger’s autobiography, which was published this month.
How can one be successful in these invented games except through a willingness to work harder than the competition: to outthink them, outwit them, outlast them? Wenger rode this philosophy during his 22 years at Arsenal, friends and family coming a distant second.
In this sense, Wenger was psychologically similar to his great rival Sir Alex Ferguson, who was the first into the training ground every morning and the last to leave, and José Mourinho, whose attention to detail is the stuff of legend.
Athletes, too, have become famous for their willingness to sacrifice all in pursuit of greatness. I remember talking to Victoria Pendleton, who spoke about a “fixation” with being the best she could be, to Steve Redgrave, who “punished” himself every day as he set his sights on the four-year horizon of an Olympic cycle; to Novak Djokovic, who, after winning an early US Open, allowed one square of chocolate to melt on his tongue, but no further celebration: “I had to teach myself discipline if I wanted to beat [Rafael] Nadal and [Roger] Federer, not just once but in the long term.”…
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The narrative power of the Rocky films (in addition to the love story between the inarticulate pugilist and his beloved Adrian) is contained — above all else — in the “no pain, no gain” build-up to the climactic fights. Rocky wakes early to pound the streets, to skip rope, to spring up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, punching the air at the top. How many of us have played the theme tune of that film to inspire us on an early morning run or late-night gym session?
Isn’t this what drives many of us in our jobs, too? Max Weber wrote about the Protestant work ethic, arguing that it propelled the rise of Western Europe after 1500, built upon the sweat of people who found virtue in exertion. This mindset was the engine of the professional guilds and perhaps even the industrial revolution itself, the likes of Thomas Newcomen and James Watt obsessively improving the productivity of their engines, changing history in the process.
One may infer from this that obsessiveness is a necessary condition for success, a building block in the construction of greatness. But this is where I have doubts. You only have to watch Federer on the practice courts of Wimbledon to see that his genius is constructed in a different way. Not for him, the relentless pummelling of the ball that you see from Nadal, but someone who joshes with practice partners, who feathers the ball, who sometimes stops after a few minutes, preferring to relax.
This isn’t to say that Federer is not ambitious and devoted, but to suggest that he is not monomaniacal. Like many creative people, he needs to switch off, to wind down, to take breaks, to free his mind from tennis, to throw himself into other things, to have a giggle and even, in the hours before the most important match of the season, to mess around on the practice court, aware that human inspiration can be straightjacketed by too obsessive an approach. Freeing one’s mind is, sometimes, more important than focusing it.
Andrew Flintoff is another who learnt, through sometimes painful experience, that he performed better when his mind was on other things, a point that also applies to Ian Botham. Indeed, Mike Brearley once told me that a pep talk that would work for, say, Bob Willis would have the opposite effect on his mercurial all-rounder, someone who — and this is noteworthy — struggled to function when handed the captaincy. It was almost as if the additional responsibility forced Botham to think too much about cricket, crushing his spontaneity.
One error, then — and I have been guilty of this at times — is to suppose that there is a formula for success, a universal method of excelling. What strikes me as I get older is that we are all different, each with our own idiosyncrasies. That is why perhaps the most conspicuous pattern of success, beyond the obvious factors such as luck and opportunity, is self-knowledge.
As a manager Wenger thrived on obsessiveness, something he knew was core to his being. One could say the same for Margaret Thatcher, who worked 16-hour days and whose relentlessness was central to her efficacy as a politician.
Yet this approach would have been destructive for Federer and, for that matter, Harold Macmillan, who loved nothing more than to switch off from politics and find solace in his beloved Trollope. As the novelist Stephen Vizinczey put it, “Macmillan’s reading helped him to understand far more how life works than position papers.”
The problem, of course, is that it is far from easy to penetrate one’s self, to understand the motivations, drives and neuroses that sit deep within each of us, a point (like so many) first articulated by the Ancient Greeks. This is why the phrase nosce te ipsum may serve as a useful motto for ambitious people of all kinds. The translation? Know thyself.
The secret of success in life and sport Mathew Syed | The Times Wednesday 21 October 2020
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