The science of success

12 min readMar 4, 2022

What happens in the brain of high achievers, and how we can get closer to it

Susan and Guthrie are two behavioral science experts behind The Team W, a company focused on teaching how to use brain and behavioral science to dramatically improve the impact of user experiences, products, services, systems, and ethics.

Susan, the chief behavioral scientist, and CEO with a Ph.D. in Psychology, has always had a passion for how people think, from brain science to what drives individuals to do things. Guthrie has dual B.S. degrees in Economics and International Studies from the University of Wisconsin, and he discusses ethics and behavioral economics.

These two bring a unique perspective that differs from some of the other people interviewed. Athletes and business leaders have given the power of the mind great credence from their personal experiences, but Susan and Guthrie can add on the objective science-based point of view on top of their personal experiences.

After her recent battle with cancer, Susan has had a journey of late that allowed her to live in the research she has been conducting for so long. The tools she learned along the way helped her see herself taking all the wrong reactions.

At the beginning of the challenge, one of her friends told her:

“This is going to be very tough, but it does not have to be miserable.”

As someone who continuously practices mindfulness meditation and has a keen understanding of how the stories we tell ourselves affect our outcomes, even she struggled not to make herself miserable through her anxiety and tension. It’s different when it happens to us. It’s different when we face our trials. There is a lot that goes on in our unconscious that we cannot control, but that we should accept. Not only what’s going on, but also our reactions to it. The training up until the point when you are faced with a crisis does help,

“I can only imagine if I hadn’t had training, if I didn’t know about how the mind works, if I hadn’t had training in mindfulness, I’m assuming it would be even worse.”

Being able to consciously consider that she knew the science and how to deal with it was necessary to remind her that she needed to continue trying and maintaining these practices as they became more difficult.

What happens in the brain when we feel pain?

There are two separate places in the brain that react to pain. One is more objective, and it gives you pain signals unconsciously as you move through your life. When there are enough pain signals, it moves through to your conscious mind and alerts you that something is happening that you need to attend to. This is separate from another part of the brain that is making judgments. You can have pain, struggle, or tiredness, all the things that make it hard to deal with whatever is going on. The magic happens in the gap between the actual physical experience and your reaction to that experience. There will be a substantial number of habitual responses to these things that are often useful as we have been programmed to deal with situations, but there are also times when they are not, and it can be important for us to have the ability to change these habitual reactions so that we can respond in a useful manner.

Susan and Guthrie have had a lot to discuss on a universal pursuit of progression that almost all humans strive for, what they call the “desire for mastery.”

But not every human has the same hunger for it. Different levels of desire can be mapped on a spectrum. There are some people that are very heavily disposed towards progress, and if they are not moving forward, it eats at them. The desire for mastery is a much stronger motivation in these elite athletes or successful business leaders than in anyone else. When you look at people like Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan, these people that trained relentlessly towards their goals with all their time, every day, you see that it almost must be this way. There are some biologically innate brain structures that are there in everyone, but they manifest differently in each person. Guthrie believes that the desire for mastery is a powerful and often overlooked motivator.

To some people on the spectrum’s extreme, the desire for mastery is really strong. People usually think that reward is a strong motivator, and it is usually not. The desire for mastery is probably not as strong as social cues for most people, but it’s up there. People put in a ton of time and effort if they feel that desire to improve. This deviation from the idea that reward is the primary motivator for people is exciting and shows just how much there is to learn. A lot happens in our brains when we reach our goals, but it is not the external reward, the trophy, the belt, the medal that brings about this feeling of accomplishment, but rather the internal reward and motivation.

Autonomy, feedback, challenge complexity, and creativity

Those on the far end of the desire for mastery are those that have finely honed the aspects that encourage the drive for mastery. The first is autonomy, which means that you must feel that you have control over what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. You also must be able to feel that you are getting feedback that you are progressing and moving towards that goal. It doesn’t mean specifically that someone is telling you that you’re doing well but that you can see that you’re getting better. There must be lots of feedback, and it needs to be built-in. Finally, there must be a large amount of challenge in the task. If it’s too hard, you’ll give up, and if it’s too easy, you give up. These athletes must master their ability to continue to have goals and training that keep them in between these two barriers. What is just difficult enough today may be bordering on too easy in just a few weeks. Staying in this zone is what allows for us to get constant rewards, and each rung on the ladder will maintain your propulsion forward. Susan puts forward that it is not just mastery but also creativity. Goal setting taps into the creative part of our mind because it involves creating something new and creative problem-solving.

Creative brain networks

Our brains have three creative networks: executive attention, imagination, and salience. If you want to reach a goal, the best thing you can do is work with these brain networks. The first step is to set your intention. You do this consciously. People who reach their goals in athletics or business are particularly good at setting their goals clearly and making them concrete reachable goals. Then you have to let your imagination network go to work. That is unconscious and what it does is run simulations. What happens now is that your imagination network will take all of the information you’ve stored up over your life and will run these simulations. This only works when someone is able to let go of their conscious attention to this thing and forget about it. You need to go and sit it down and start doing other things. And then, out of nowhere, you’ll get an idea when your imagination network is able to bring the best idea to the salience network, and it will pop into your consciousness after this point. Those who successfully achieve their goals can work with these three networks. They set the intention, then let go, and trust that they’ll get the idea, and then they act on the idea when it comes about. Everything else is worthless if the ideas are never acted upon.

Recharging the batteries

When it comes to the brain, while it is not a muscle, it does need to replenish glucose, rest, and recalibrate. Sleep is a vital component of this process. Mental and physical tiredness can also hinder this process. In contrast, having more information on a topic can help the creative processes in your brain find the best solution.

There are times when an athlete will have a perfect run. For me, Demian, I use an example of how I took the lead in the last turn of a race when I was racing go-karts professionally in Brazil. It felt like being one with the car and not thinking consciously about it. I can only remember flashes of what was happening. But that it was a relaxed, natural state.

Flow state

Athletes would say that the experience I had was the A-game state, only reached a couple of times in their careers. Susan explained the experience as the flow state. You enter into a hyper-focused state in your brain and body where everything is focused on the one activity you are doing at that moment. When you are in this state, time feels irrelevant, you feel good in it, and a large amount of muscle memory will take over. It is possible to purposely and intentionally practice taking so many reps that you can trust, relax, and follow your instincts.

Practice for flow

From NBA players to speakers to just about anything, practice makes perfect. Repeat, be there often so that you can “default to what you have mastered,” as Rick Takahashi brought up. It is particularly important to allow for someone to immerse themselves in this thing fully and to put in so much effort beforehand that it is just showing the culmination of all of it when they compete rather than thinking on the spot. Our attention is very easily fragmented, so it is crucial to shut off everything and make time to focus on being present with a singular task. It is incredibly beneficial because it allows you to train your mind to focus on a specific thing that is critical to finding a flow state. Another step is to train and relax to feel comfortable when it is time to act, when it’s GO time. After this, you have done it so many times that you are able to focus rather than letting the stage be too big and distract you from your flow state.

Harmful quick rewards: distractions

Cell phones and the notification system can create a problem with your focus, and the messages they put forward to you have three aspects that make a conditioned response, making it very hard to break out of the dopamine loop it creates. The first aspect is an audio or visual cue, the second is unpredictability, and finally, slight muscle movement. The only way to fix this is to unlearn this intentionally:

“When you’re trying to quit smoking or drinking, don’t hang out with a bunch of smokers or drinkers and make the same habits you did when you were smoking or drinking.”

You need to retrain your attention in the same way so that you can break out of the dopamine reward cycle. A solution to this is to retrain so that you can get dopamine from something else rather than scrolling on social media.

What do you tell yourself?

Research shows that the self-stories we tell ourselves, such as who we are, what’s important to us, and why we do things, are huge drivers of our behaviors. There is a book by Timothy Wilson called Redirect on this topic that has important insights. Surprisingly, these can be changed easily too. Just write out the current situation you’re in. This is usually the sad and troubled position you are actually in. This is not just what you hope you will be but a reinterpretation of where you currently are. Instead of writing it out as a story of how much of a failure you are, that you lost this one time because you’re just a loser that’ll never succeed, you write it out in a way that shows what you learned. This new story is focused on why you failed and all you can gain from it. Describing the same experience in a way that shows that you are growing and progressing and that it is a step along the way rather than the final status is phenomenally important. Outside responses can be an enormous difference maker in how people are able to deal with adversity of the world. Everyone is different as there are people that take on criticism, and it fuels them, and there are people who lose their motivation when faced with negative feedback.

Guthrie puts forward an example of a player with irrational confidence, who is not the best, but genuinely believes he is the best player of all time. They are totally lacking in self-doubt regardless of their performance. These people can unlock potential they wouldn’t be able to if they let fear distract their actions. But instead, they are able to always have unfettered belief. It is risky and not the answer for everyone, but it exemplifies how different we all are.

The science of happiness

Fulfillment and happiness are elusive and difficult things to achieve in life. There are examples of many athletes that reach the pinnacle of their sport only to find out that they have trained their brains to constantly get better and improve. These hyper-motivated people may never truly reach a position of being satisfied. Current WBC Heavyweight Champion of the World Tyson Fury is an example. After becoming the lineal champion of the world, he went into a spiral of depression because he didn’t know how to handle finally reaching the top. Yo-Yo Ma had a similar experience of not knowing what to do next when he played a perfect piece of music, and from that point on, he realized he was at the peak and didn’t know what was next. Research shows that achieving your goals is not always what makes people feel satisfied, and it can be a personal journey to find what exactly it is that truly helps you feel satisfied.

Finding happiness and satisfaction involves experimentation. There are negative aspects to all walks of life, and it can be important to find what truly matters. Susan explains that she realized she has a deep love of learning. It is like chocolate for her. She rearranged part of her schedule to allow for her to have more time composing music and to embark on truly studying it. Our conversation with Mitchie Brusco reinforced that we don’t have a way of understanding what it is that makes us excited by things. We don’t seem to know the things that pique our interest, but happiness may be found in a pursuit of whatever those things are. It genuinely is a special thing to be excited at all.

Seeking fulfillment

Some people share that they find fulfillment not by conquering things, but they get there by helping others. There are unique brain pathways designated for other people. We see faces much faster than other things around us. There are also many brain areas specially designated for our interactions with other people. Guthrie mentioned earlier that social cues might be the only motivation above the desire for mastery. These social interactions run much more profound than anything else.

“Helping others is a deep and accessible way to tap into social elements that are important to release oxytocin in your brain that allows for a deep feeling of connection to others.”

The creative networks in the brain are very insightful tools, and the ability to know and trust them once they are written down and affirmed can be very efficient. It is something anyone could do in pursuit of their goals, and they can spend time learning more about the goal they are trying to achieve to speed up this process. Flow states are the height of top performances, and everyone so far has expressed that it is the practice that builds up to the confidence necessary to trust that you will “default to what you have mastered.”

Taking the time to retrain your attention is another powerful tactic. To stop a harmful habit fed by short rewards, we need to take the time to figure out a new way to create a dopamine cycle that doesn’t use these distractions. Many people need to hear that. Proactively creating new habits to move the reward system somewhere else is very enlightening in the journey of achieving your best. Maintaining one’s state in between goals that are just difficult enough to be challenged rather than so tricky they’re impossible or so easy that they’re boring is the best way to find the road to mastery. Your thoughts and actions must be retooled and recalibrated constantly as you improve. We should continue to fight for optimal growth with balance and focus. All this still leads to a question of happiness, and on this front, we have to experiment on what makes us feel satisfied and fulfilled. It is often most difficult for the high achievers to ever feel satisfied.