Jody Avergan
speaker
536 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2025
last heard 2 Aug
Jody Avergan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You can win your matchup during a game, even if your team is probably going to lose.
A coach I've worked with talks about the reindeer games that happen on her favorite teams.
Players are constantly competing, playing cards, playing video games.
Maybe you're a soccer team, but you play a little flag football during warmups.
All of that creates a texture, a low-level hum of competition, a bunch of smaller challenges that help you keep your edge.
Ian told me a story about Sonia O'Sullivan, a middle distance runner from Ireland.
She was the favorite heading into the Atlanta Olympics in the 5,000 meter event.
This makes sense to me.
If you create smaller goals for yourself, then you avoid feeling inadequate or like a total failure just because you didn't hit that one big target.
You get to celebrate more success along the way and you get back in touch with that feeling of winning.
Ian says this is because of something called the winner effect.
He wrote a whole book about it.
The idea of the winner effect dates back to the 1950s, and it comes from outside the world of sports.
Researchers were trying to figure out how different animals established dominance, which in nature comes down to how often they would win confrontations with other animals.
One mathematician found an answer in chickens.
The chief chicken, I'm not sure if that's a scientific term, but I'm going to go with it.
The chief chicken would come to rule a flock by pecking other chickens into submission.
That's where we get the term pecking order.
This scientist wanted to figure out what traits landed some chickens higher on the pecking order.
You know how it is.
Showing 101–120 of 536 · page 6 of 27
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